Watchdog Calls for Another Ethics Investigation into Democrat Susie Lee’s Stock Transactions
A non-partisan ethics watchdog organization demanded another investigation into Democrat Rep. Susie Lee’s (D-NV) stock transactions on Thursday for allegedly failing to properly disclose up to $155,000 in stock trades after previously failing to report up to $3.3 million in transitions on time.
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), asking them to start another investigation into Lee. FACT explained that Lee disclosed eight stock trades from January to September 2o21, valued at up to $155,000, on August 13.
The stock trades were disclosed ten to eighteen months late, and the companies she traded were subject to congressional legislation. Some of those stocks were Ally Financial Inc., Dollar Tree Inc., and Synchrony Financial.
As Breitbart News reported on August 18:
Lee and her husband traded eight stocks during 2021 — which her filing showed occurred between January and September 2021 — and notes their worth was up to $155,000. Some of those stocks were Ally Financial Inc., Dollar Tree Inc., and Synchrony Financial. Insider acknowledged that the disclosure report was filed on August 13 — the same day as Gottheimer’s — which was also months past the deadline.
The congresswoman’s office told Insider that her financial advisor “noted an inaccuracy in the list of trades” when preparing the annual disclosure report and filed a periodic transaction report once she realized it. The office claimed she does not make any trades herself and has a third-party money manager. They added that she’s been in contact with the House Committee on Ethics.
The congresswoman, like every other lawmaker, is required to submit a periodic transaction report with the clerk in the House of Representatives within 30 to 45 days of stock transactions over $1,000 made on behalf of themselves or their spouses under the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012. Lawmakers are also subject to a $200 fine for filing late.
The complaint explained it is “extremely important” for the laws to be “strictly enforced to determine whether a Member has used nonpublic information for profit or whether their personal investments influenced any official action” since members of Congress vote on bills that could affect the very same companies in which they hold equity.
FACT wrote in the complaint that the congresswoman’s office’s “response is irrelevant” because “It does not matter whether Lee or someone on her behalf makes the trade—she is responsible for following the law and her holdings can present a conflict of interest regardless of who executes the trades.”
Noting that the Nevada Democrat was claiming to be “in contact” with the House Committee on Ethics also raised questions about Lee paying a $200 fine because “a fine does not remedy the breach of the ethics rules for a Member consistently not following the law.”
“Lee has repeatedly failed to make disclosures as required by law—there are numerous other known instances where she disclosed stock transactions months or years late,” the complaint also noted.
Breitbart News wrote that Lee received a similar ethics complaint in October 2021 after failing to timely disclose in a timely manner more than 200 stock transactions valued up to $3.3 million. She disclosed the transitions late across multiple filings. In September 2021, Breitbart reported:
Lee, a member in a battleground district, did not correctly disclose over 200 of her personal stock trades since early last year, according to Business Insider who reviewed her congressional records. The transactions are estimated to be worth as little as $267,000 with a maximum of $3.3 million.
The report noted that the congresswoman and her husband — in seven filings between February and May of last year — did not disclose trades where they either bought or sold stocks in companies such as Planet Fitness Inc., Wayfair Inc., Marriott International, Carnival Corp., Williams-Sonoma Inc., and US Foods Holding Corp.
FACT’s Executive Director, Kendra Arnold, slammed the congresswoman in a statement:
There is no excuse for violating this law even one time, but this is an egregious case. This was not an inadvertent error or omission, but rather Rep. Lee’s knowledge of the law and her numerous and repeated failure to comply with it demonstrates knowing and willful violations. At this point she is clearly disregarding an important law that is crucial for identifying conflicts of interest,” said Kendra Arnold, Executive Director of FACT.
The STOCK Act was a bipartisan bill that banned insider trading by members of Congress and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on April 4, 2012. The legislation received overwhelming support from both parties.
In 2011, Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer rocked official Washington with his investigative revelations of insider trading by members of Congress. Left-leaning Slate hailed Schweizer’s blockbuster book on the topic, Throw Them All Out, as “the book that started the STOCK Act stampede.”
One of the leading figures featured in Schweizer’s Throw Them All Out was then-chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Spencer Bachus (R-AL), who announced he would not seek reelection after the book’s reporting.
Indeed, Bachus was the only elected official the late Andrew Breitbart ever called on to resign. CBS’s 60 Minutes did an investigative report on Schweizer’s revelations that won them the Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based journalism.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.
Disgraced Florida Pol Andrew Gillum’s Top Aides Behind Multimillion-Dollar Weed Initiative
With Gillum facing federal corruption charges, campaign aides join new group with its own ties to corrupt leaders
Collin Anderson • September 1, 2022 5:00 amFollowing former Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum's arrest on federal corruption charges, the scandal-plagued Democrat's top aides moved on to a new campaign—a recreational weed initiative spearheaded by a company with its own ties to the city's corrupt actors.
On Aug. 8, Smart & Safe Florida—a political action committee working to legalize recreational weed—filed its organizing documents with the state, which listed former Gillum campaign attorney Glenn Burhans and former Gillum fundraising PAC head Andrew Gay as the group's registered agent and treasurer, respectively. The move came six weeks after Gillum was arrested on federal corruption charges, which stemmed from a years-long probe into political corruption in Tallahassee, the city Gillum led from 2014 to 2018.
The company behind the recreational weed push, Trulieve, is no stranger to that probe. Tallahassee real estate mogul J.T. Burnette—who is married to Trulieve's CEO, Kim Rivers—was sentenced in November 2021 to three years in federal prison as part of the investigation. Text messages from the case showed Burnette coordinating with a city commissioner to implement a temporary ban on new medical weed dispensaries, which benefited Trulieve. Burnette also bragged to undercover FBI agents that he worked with a then-state lawmaker to insert "little tweaks" into a bill that outlined which companies could apply for medical marijuana licenses in Florida—tweaks that made it impossible for some of Trulieve's competitors to obtain licenses. The company gave Smart & Safe Florida $5 million in August.
Burhans and Gay's work for the Trulieve-led weed initiative gives the pair of former Gillum aides a new political project following the disgraced Democrat's rapid fall from grace. In March 2020, Gillum—who lost Florida's 2018 gubernatorial election to Republican Ron DeSantis by just 0.4 percent—was found unconscious along with two men in a drug-filled hotel room, which contained crystal meth, Xanax, and a drug commonly injected into the penis by men suffering from erectile dysfunction. One of the two men who accompanied Gillum was a gay male escort who suffered a drug overdose.
While Gillum withdrew from politics after the ordeal, Gay continued to serve as treasurer of the Democrat's fundraising PAC, Forward Florida, until his resignation in August 2020. Roughly two years later, federal agents arrested Gillum on 21 counts of conspiracy, fraud, and making false statements. When the Florida Republican Party ran ads in 2018 tying Gillum to the federal investigation into Tallahassee corruption, Burhans himself demanded TV stations take the ad down, calling the spot "demonstrably false in numerous respects."
Smart & Safe Florida did not return a request for comment.
Prior to its push to legalize recreational weed in Florida, Trulieve worked to dominate the state's medicinal weed market after DeSantis signed a bill in 2019 legalizing smokable medical marijuana. The company operates a quarter of Florida's dispensaries and controls more than half of the state's medicinal marijuana market, helping it bring in more than $320 million in second-quarter revenue this year. Many marijuana advocates in Florida, however, are not fans of Trulieve's initiative, which they argue would give the company a monopoly by allowing only existing medical marijuana dispensaries to sell weed for recreational use.
Trulieve is tied to prominent Florida Democrats beyond Gillum. Florida agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried held six figures' worth of stock in a rival cannabis dispensary, Harvest Health and Recreation, that was acquired by Trulieve in October 2021. After the Washington Free Beacon reported on that stock holding, Fried—who during her failed gubernatorial campaign this year promised to legalize recreational weed—said she would liquidate her Trulieve shares, which are worth roughly $183,000.
Fried on Aug. 23 lost Florida's Democratic gubernatorial primary to Charlie Crist by 24 points. Tallahassee attorney Sean Pittman, who is a registered Trulieve lobbyist, has called both Fried and Crist his "friends."
SUCKING THE BRIBES LIKE A PARASITE LAWYER
A POLITICAL LIFE OF LIES!
BIDEN'S CONFESSION:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Mk5gm_iENNg
With no moral code, no center, nothing matters. You just read what’s in the teleprompter and hit the sack by 7:00 while your degenerate son collects piles of cash for the family until you’re free to do it on your own. All you have to do is what you’re told, your handlers and the media will take care of the rest.
DEREK HUNTER
Biden lied about his undergraduate degree and his majors, lied about his rank in law school, lied aboutscholarships and educational aid he had received, lied about his stance toward the Vietnam war while in college, lied about his plagiarism of other politician's writings and speeches, lied about the circumstances around his first wife's fatal accident, lied about how he met his second and current wife, and lied about the affair they were having when they were both married. MARK CHRISTIAN
Peter Schweizer: Americans Have Gone to Jail for Doing Far Less Than What Hunter Biden Has Done
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/08/protecting-biden-crime-family-gamer.html
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation and the Obama book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption.
Elon Musk Exposed: How Joe Biden Made His Millions!
Joe Biden Has Earned Your Disgust
Joe and Jill are bad people - and worse parents.
I’m a big believer in giving back to people what they give to others. Think of it as a twist on the Golden Rule: if someone is a bad person to others, even if it isn’t you, treat them accordingly. Someone who is a bad person to people who aren’t you will eventually get around to you because it’s who they are at their core. That’s how I see Democrats, particularly Joe Biden. Jill too, but she’s such a non-entity without him she barely deserves a mention. If you are not with them, not one of them, they hate you, they really do. Return the favor.
I’m not above this, I despise Joe Biden. I have no interest in working with him and, in all honesty, if he pulled a complete 180 and did something that wasn’t destructive to the United States I still wouldn’t be interested in patting him on the back if he were coughing on some food. I do not wish him anything close to good.
This old pervert (read what his own daughter wrote about him in a diary she never thought the world would see) has always been dumb, but now he’s also senile. That makes it difficult to assign blame for his evil to one or the other, though it’s usually a combination of both.
Whatever the reason, I don’t care. When he can go to a Democrat campaign rally in Maryland (populated by union members paid to be there, just look at the shirts in the crowd) and accuse anyone who refuses to fall in line behind him of trying to destroy the country, he can go to hell.
Joe told the partisan crowd of union goons, “The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security, they’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace – embrace – political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.” I’m now team Corn Pop.
Is Joe unaware of the riots in 2020? The BLM/ANTIFA wing of his party, his enforcers, beating and murdering people who dared to stand up to them?
Of course he’s aware; his Vice President raised bail money for them while he refused to even criticize them. They’re his brownshirts, and the left loves political violence. They give tenure to terrorist, they wear t-shirts of murderers. If Biden himself weren’t pervert known for his love of flashing his genitals to the female members of his Secret Service detail, he’d probably wear James Hodgkinson Underoos.
I don’t want anything to do with the man. I don’t want anything to do with anyone who wants anything to do with the man. When a person raises a gaggle of degenerate kids, it is more than just a coincidence, it’s a reflection of the character of the parents. Joe and Jill raised crack smoking, hooker banging Hunter. Ashley is her own kind of degenerate. Was Beau? Doesn’t seem to be, but you never know.
Somewhere in Delaware there are police officers with stories to tell, you just know there are. How many times as kids do you think the Biden children had run-ins with law enforcement, only to have a call come from the bosses to let them go? Given most people don’t turn into bad people late in life, but through a continuation of their upbringing, I’d bet a lot. You don’t really think Hunter decided in his 40s to give crack a try, do you? Ashley didn’t just choose late in life to indulge in hedonism in her 30s, right? No, they were raised this way.
Joe and Jill are bad people and worse parents. Be thankful you weren’t raised around their children, who knows what substances you’d have forced into your body. Hunter doesn’t strike anyone as a person who would take no for an answer.
I know it’s a weird position to be in. It’s one thing to disagree with a President, it’s another completely to despise them because they spend an inordinate amount of time publicly declaring their hatred for you.
Just a couple of years ago, Democrats pretended to be upset over mean tweets because Donald Trump was “upsetting long standing norms.” Now, their President, their Speaker of the House, their Senate Majority Leader, their media do nothing but demonize anyone who refuses to obey them. Whatever happened to “norms”? They all hate you. Turnabout is the fairest of plays, hate them right back.
The FBI: A Campaign Arm of the Democrat Party
“Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity” is the FBI motto. According to the FBI website, this motto, “Succinctly describes the motivating force behind the men and women of the FBI.”
The motto may have been accurate in the 1965-1974 TV series, “The FBI”, where Efrem Zimbalist Jr epitomized those words every Sunday night on prime-time television. But today the FBI has morphed into a campaign arm of the Democrat Party, attempting to influence elections in favor of their preferred candidates, acting more like the East German Stasi or Soviet KGB rather than the premier law enforcement agency in the world.
Perhaps a new motto of “Funny Business Incorporated” or “Friendly to Biden Interests” would be more appropriate to their apparent new mission. When did the FBI, the largest and most heavily armed law enforcement agency in America, now inserting itself unconstitutionally into American politics, pivot from fidelity and integrity to partisanship and dishonesty?
Start with the 2016 presidential election. Many are already familiar with Spygate. According to Jeff Carlson:
Efforts by high-ranking officials in the CIA, FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and State Department to portray President Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.
The weaponization of the intelligence community and other government agencies created an environment that allowed for obstruction in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the relentless pursuit of a manufactured collusion narrative against Trump.
A willing and complicit media spread unsubstantiated leaks as facts in an effort to promote the Russia-collusion narrative.
The Spygate scandal also raises a bigger question: Was the 2016 election a one-time aberration, or was it symptomatic of decades of institutional political corruption?
The FBI was in the middle of this true insurrection, meant to derail a presidential campaign, election, transition, and administration with fabricated claims of collusion, lying to Congress and the American people, and then attempting to cover everything up via the Muller/Weissman investigation, including a recent raid on Mar-a-Lago to possibly confiscate incriminating Spygate documents in President Trump’s possession.
Other Obama administration agencies and officials were also involved but the FBI was in the thick of it, with Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Other familiar names include Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok and his girlfriend FBI attorney Lisa Page.
Don’t forget another FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith who knowingly lied on a FISA warrant application about Carter Page’s work for the CIA. Despite pleading guilty to a felony false statement charge, Clinesmith is once again free to practice law. Are any of the January 6 detainees recipients of such judicial largess?
There has been little or no reckoning for these Spygate players and rather than being punished for their criminal and seditious activity, they have been rewarded with university teaching gigs, book deals, and frequent appearances on left-wing cable news shows. Perhaps Special Counsel John Durham will eventually hold the FBI bad actors to account, but Spygate is now six years in the past and it is looking increasingly likely that the FBI will skate.
Jeff Carlson raised the interesting question of whether Spygate was a one-off event or part of a larger and more systemic corruption of the FBI and other three-letter agencies. Despite not derailing candidate or President Donald Trump in 2016, they certainly tried again in 2020, this time succeeding. And they are already working on 2024, before a single candidate has announced his or her candidacy.
The FBI obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop in December 2019, a full year before the presidential election. Rather than investigating and reporting on what they found, they slow rolled the laptop as it revealed knowledge of and involvement in foreign business deals with candidate Joe “Big Guy” Biden and his son Hunter, in a manner that could be construed as a quid pro quo of selling the office of the president to foreign interests.
A letter from Senator Ron Johnson to Justice Department Inspector Michael Horowitz spelled out the FBI’s role in again “campaigning” for the Democrat candidate. Senator Johnson asserted the following,
Whistleblowers have come forward to Congress alleging that FBI officials intentionally undermined efforts to investigate Hunter Biden.
After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, DE computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, “You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop” and that the FBI is “not going to change the outcome of the election again.” Further, these whistleblowers allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election -- potentially a year after the FBI obtained the laptop in December 2019.
And influence an election they did. Media Research Center conducted a poll of 1,750 voters in seven swing states and learned that, “One of every six Biden voters (17%) said they would not have voted for him had they known the facts about several of the news stories the national media refused to investigate thoroughly because they might have hurt his candidacy.”
Jesse Watters noted that the 2020 presidential election was decided by 44,000 votes in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona. The FBI suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story would have been more than enough to account for this margin if the above survey was reflective of voter sentiment, demonstrating how the FBI interfered with and likely altered the outcome the election.
Not only did the FBI interfere directly, they also urged social media to do the same, the government suppressing the right to free speech by proxy. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained to Joe Rogan recently,
Speaking on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg explained, "The FBI, I think, basically came to us -- some folks on our team -- and was like, 'Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert… We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there's about to be some kind of dump of that's similar to that. So just be vigilant.’"
Zuckerberg acknowledged that "the distribution on Facebook was decreased" of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden's laptop, noting, "fewer people saw it than would've otherwise."
The FBI had the laptop for almost a year and right before the election conveniently declared it Russian propaganda, a falsehood parroted by “51 former intelligence officials.” The FBI, and Big Tech under FBI encouragement, fabricated and spread Russian propaganda in 2016 when it could hurt the Republican candidate and suppressed and censored a real story in 2020 it when it could hurt the Democrat candidate. That certainly sounds like election interference.
The Mar-a-Lago raid is a shot across the bow for any GOP presidential candidates for 2024, Trump being the presumptive nominee at this point. Will the FBI ask the DoJ to indict Trump on nonsensical declassification accusations? While they gave candidate Hillary Clinton a pass despite her using an unsecured server and personal email account to traffic highly classified emails? The FBI is delivering a warning to Trump. Will Governor Ron DeSantis be the next one to have his home raided by the FBI?
We expect this type of behavior from the corporate media, academia, Hollywood, big finance, big pharma, big tech, and other Democrat party constituent groups, but not the FBI and other government agencies.
This is a true insurrection, not the nonsense “soon to be former” representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are bloviating over. And where are congressional Republicans? Most are voicing support for the FBI, ignoring this blatant subversion of democracy and the Constitution.
Perhaps most Republicans support the new FBI mission -- stopping Donald Trump at all costs, ignoring the weaponization of the federal government against political enemies. Will voters reward milquetoast Republicans, most of whom are no better than their Democrat colleagues across the aisle, or will many say “why vote Republican,” throwing up their hands on election day, not wasting time on meaningless elections? Such a strategy may not lead to an expected red wave.
Is a weaponized national police force something the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution? Or just another example of America sliding from a representative republic into a totalitarian state?
Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer.
Follow me on Twitter @retinaldoctor
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LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph
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