Turns out at least one city employee involved in the contract was all but handing the money to himself.
All the evidence indicates this is was almost certainly an inside job.
It certainly appears that at least one City of Austin employee colluded or communicated with friends and business associates to secure lucrative seven figure contracts.
Despite being grossly unqualified and totally inexperienced for the job.
It also seems like ICCS Academy is lying about a bunch of stuff on their bid submission.
Snip.
Believe it or not, the ICCS Academy bidding process raises even more red flags than P Squared Services.
There are two City of Austin employees listed as “authorized contacts” for Item 23.
Sandra Wirtanen
John Wesley Smith
This screenshot shows John Wesley Smith is the “Small Minority Business Resources” contact for this proposal.
Guess where John Wesley Smith used to work as the ‘Compliance Director’ before he started working for Austin city government?
ICCS Academy!
Can you imagine a bigger conflict of interest?
Maybe that’s why ICCS Academy yanked their website yesterday (link).
However, this snippet on DuckDuckGo still appears when you search for ‘John Wesley Smith ICCS Academy’
John Wesley Smith was the Compliance Director for ICCS Academy.
His bio states he also works as a “Small Business Counselor with the City of Austin”.
Snip.
QUESTION: Shouldn’t John Wesley Smith have immediately recused himself from the bidding and contract negotiation process for Item 23, due to his massive conflict of interest as the current / former Compliance Director for ICCS Academy?
Massive Conflict of Interest
Gee, I wonder how the other eight companies who submitted bid proposals for Item 23 feel about the former Compliance director of ICCS Academy overseeing the bidding process, and awarding a $7 million contract to his former colleagues?
John Wesley Smith was definitely the Compliance Director for ICCS Academy at one point in time.
Whether that was two weeks, two months or two years ago – it doesn’t matter.
John Wesley Smith should have removed himself from this project due to the awful optics and huge conflict of interest.
John Wesley Smith’s LinkedIn profile shows his current role with Austin city government is “Business Development Coordinator II”.
John Wesley Smith says he’s in charge of “negotiating contractual agreements for the City of Austin” and is “responsible for various minority/women procurements.”
Huh.
For the record, ICCS Academy is currently a registered vendor with the city of Austin.
However, all of their ‘certified commodities’ are in education, training and consulting.
So a training vendor gets picked to do homeless site cleanup despite no experience in the field because a (former?) employee works for the city and just happens to be able to throw business their way.
How convenient.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that the entire reimagining police lunacy was all about social justice warriors saying time and time again “take money from the police and give it to us.” There’s an entire industry of social justice grifters (both in homelessness and every other social justice cause) whose entire existence is dedicated to making life for average citizens worse while sucking as much money as possible from taxpayers. You can bet that this is far from the first time such self-dealing has occurred, and I bet forensic audits of both city contracts and the “nonprofit” entities that receive them would reveal numerous example of quid pro quo kickbacks.
Again, kudos to Teddy Brosevelt (whoever he may be) for peeling back the lid of Austin’s social justice warrior corruption problem.
Remember Austin’s scheme to hand millions to the homeless industrial complex to clean up the mess they created, and the shady, recently-created “P Squared Services, LLC” they picked to give $1.7 million to?
That attracted so much attention that that particular piece of graft is now off the table:
Kudos to blogger Teddy Brosevelt (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that’s a pseudonym) and Austin City Council member Mackenzie Kelly for killing this giant bucket of graft.
It’s good to be a member of the Austin Homeless Industrial Complex. Not only do you get to rake off graft for luring drug-addicted transients to town, you also get to rake off graft to clean up the resulting mess.
Item #23 on this week’s Austin City Council agenda allocates another $20 million to the Homeless Industrial-Complex to clean up dozens of dangerous homeless encampments around the city.
Item 23 (link) says it’s critical for these camps to get cleaned up, since they pose “a great degree of health, safety, and fire risks.”
Austin Water also needs cleanup services on “environmentally sensitive areas of the wildlands” due to toxic waste and debris contaminating the watershed.
Snip.
One of the three companies who won this big fat $20 million contract – P Squared Services, LLC – is the most suspicious, sketchy and (almost certainly) fraudulent company I’ve encountered during my three years of reading through these absurd Austin City Council agenda items.
Just look at the 11 bids and financial docs for Item 23 (link).
You will shake your head in anger and disbelief, asking yourself:
How could Austin Finance be so incompetent, lazy and irresponsible?
Is something more sinister going on?
Is this a case of internal corruption or criminal behavior?
No sane person would make these decisions.
Nah. Austin City Council. Corrupt and incompetent is the default setting.
Meet P Squared Services, LLC
Major red flags pop up across the galaxy when you investigate this highly suspicious, brand new company called P Squared Services.
P Squared Services has:
No internet presence
No website
No clients
No experience
There’s overwhelming evidence that P Squared Services, LLC is almost certainly up to something nefarious and possibly illegal.
The major question is whether it’s an inside job and who made the final decision to funnel money to these frauds.
P Squared Services is a Texas Domestic Limited-Liability Company that was formed in Smithville on November 4, 2022.
The business address for P Squared Services is an exact match for the residential address of the two married co-owners:
Brandon Keith Pietsch
Kristina Dawn Pietsch
So the married co-owners of P Squared Services are running this mysterious business out of their HOUSE.
And this “business address” is actually a residential, single family home with zero visible equipment, tools or supplies for cleaning up industrial waste.
P Squared Services, LLC
607 Ash Street
Smithville, TX 78957
Let’s look at the google street view photos of their business headquarters / house.
See if you can notice:
Empty beer cans on front lawn
Tipped-over cooler by porch
Unfinished projects like doors and window screens that were never installed.
So they’re hiring someone to clean up a homeless camp whose house looks like a homeless camp.
The conclusion: “I’m almost positive that P Squared Services LLC is a fake, phony, money laundering scam.”
Indeed.
That seems to be the driving purpose behind all Austin homeless policies…
The decline of California under one-party Democrat rule has been one of the long-running themes of this blog. Today Victor Davis Hanson discusses how California’s wealthy destroyed the middle class with policies whose baleful effects they knew wouldn’t fall on them.
“The irony is that, as we created more wealth and more leisure, because of the very success of the middle class citizen, the middle class citizen and his central role in western government was forgotten.”
“California in the 1960s had the largest middle class in the United States. California had the finest educational system. California invented the idea of a modern freeway and a modern airport.”
“California had a state where two-thirds of the people lived with one-third of the precipitation, and yet they built the greatest transference of water with reservoirs and aqueducts the world had ever seen.”
“California had the most successful oil, timber and mineral industries in the world. They had some of the finest universities…Again this was a product of, both democratic governors and Republican governors.”
“However, today when we look at California, it’s got the highest number of homeless people in the United States. Half of all of America’s homeless live in California.”
“One-third of all the welfare recipients in the United States live in California. One-fifth of all Californians live below the poverty line.”
“California yet has the highest taxes in the country in the aggregate, the highest property taxes because of the enormous assessed evaluations…highest sales tax at over 10 to 11%, highest income tax at up to 13.2%.”
“The result of all of that that is is the middle class finds itself unable to pay and be competitive with other businesses in other states.”
“They look at all of these higher taxes, and they say themselves ‘I’m willing to pay it if I’m economically viable,’ but the regulations that the state creates fall heavily on the small farmer, the hardware store owner, the tire [store?] owner, but not necessarily on the Silicon Valley corporation that has an array of lawyers, or legal teams, or analysts, or economists, that find ways not to pay it.
“And so the middle class leaves, they vote with their feet they go to places where it’s more conducive for middle class livelihoods. We’ve lost somewhere between 8 and 12 million people of the middle class.”
At the same time, America has allowed in 20 million illegal aliens, half of which have ended up in California.
“We have not built an aqueduct in California in about 40 years. The schools that were rated in the top 10 percent of comparative state rankings are now in the bottom 10 percent. The airports are decrepit.”
“That the more taxes I pay, the worse schools I get.”
“In this period, there was about five trillion dollars in market capitalization that grew out of Silicon Valley alone. And we created sort of a medieval caste, a wealthy caste of Barons and Lords that were not subject to the consequences of their own ideology. So they had so much wealth they felt they were exempt from worries about taxation.”
“We created a very, very wealthy elite that was not subject to the consequences of their own ideology.”
Whether out of virtue signaling and guilt, or whether out of contrived political necessity, they made a political alliance with the very poor of California. And the poor said “Give us more entitlements, tax the middle class, transfer that money to us we need it.” And the wealthy said “Yes, we will open the borders. We’ll transfer money, but you have to vote for issues that we’re in favor of. And we’re in favor of them precisely because they don’t affect us.”
And of course, the left’s disdain for the middle class shows up in their language: They’re the “bitter clingers,” the “deplorables,” the “chumps and dregs of society.”
“Muscular labor was no longer essential to the American experiment. In other words, you could make have things made overseas in China or southeast Asia or Mexico. And the great middle class territory of the middle west of the United States—Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana—started to become hollowed out.”
“We’ve taken the middle class, the backbone of citizenship, and we’ve eroded it and destroyed it.”
Remember Democratic County Judge and de-facto Queen of Harris County Lina Hidalgo, she of the numerous staff corruption charges? There have been a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests coming her way over all the alleged crooked dealings, so she went to her legal counsel to thwart transparency.
With the state’s largest county already facing at least one lawsuit over refusal to comply with public records requests, a leaked memo from Harris County officials appears to outline a strategy for avoiding the release of documents related to County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s travel and taxpayer-funded expenses.
Investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino reported this week on a leaked chain of emails that began with a January 25, 2023 open records request from Houston Chronicle reporter Jen Rice seeking travel records for Hidalgo and “her entourage” between January 2019 and January 2023.
After requesting clarification, Hidalgo’s legal counsel Kathryn Kase forwarded the request and instructions for handling it to several Hidalgo staffers and Glenn Smith of Affinity Dynamics. The county auditor’s office lists payments totaling $35,000 to Smith’s company in 2020, but none this year.
“The law does not require us to create documents in response to this PIA request and I ask that you not create such documents,” wrote Kase. “For example, if we do not have a list of the Judge’s trips outside Harris County that the County paid for in whole or part between 1/1/ 2019 and 1/25/2023, then the law does not require us to create such a list, nor do I want you to create one.”
Kase also stated that staffers do not have to ask other departments for documents responsive to the request.
“If, for example, the Auditor or the Treasurer have copies of reimbursements to Judge Hidalgo, do not ask the Auditor or the Treasurer to provide them to you.”
Rice’s request likely stems from reports of Hidalgo taking private security, paid for by Harris County taxpayers, on her personal vacations to Mexico, Columbia, and according to sources familiar with the matter, Thailand, earlier this year.
Until last April, the Precinct 1 constable’s office provided security for Hidalgo, but in a 3 to 2 vote the commissioners court approved a no-bid contract to private security company XMi Protection at a price of $121,524 for three months. The commissioners later approved a budget of up to $500,000 for XMi, although reportedly Hidalgo’s security is now provided by the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office while XMi continues to cover other employees.
Remember that Queen Lina’s previous legal troubles stemmed from handing out contracts to connected Democrat firms and not wanting public scrutiny for that either.
As far as I can tell, XMi Protection seems to employee exactly one person: Cortez Emilio Richardson. (Maybe he hires temps to round out his team?) Also strange: The listed address for XMi protection is 9900 Spectrum Drive, Austin, TX, 78717, which is the address of Integreon, a “global outsourcing partner” that doesn’t list “executive protection” among its services, as well as LegalZoom, which seems to be a “one stop set-up-your-business” shop. (Maybe he set up his LLC through them?) However, Richardson’s LinkedIn profile says that he’s in Houston, and XMi Protection is based in nearby Spring. Two other LinkedIn accounts that show XMi Protection entries are a Paquita Bailey who lives in Detroit and is evidently working four different jobs at the same time (lot of sidehustle they’ve got going on there), and the following private listing:
Which is for a pharmacy technician from Anna, Texas (which is north of Dallas), both of whom would seem to be deeply unlikely to be working a protection detail in Houston.
$40,000 a month is an awful lot of cheddar for one guy.
Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and Dolcefino have also filed a lawsuit against the county, seeking access to public election records that the county has refused to release on the grounds that they are related to litigation and a criminal investigation of Tatum and the elections department.
In response to multiple complaints over delay and evasion tactics employed by government agencies across the state, Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) has pushed legislation that would punish those using the appeals process to delay compliance. His Senate Bill 1579 has been approved in committee, but it has not yet been scheduled for a vote on the Senate floor.
According to attorney Bill Aleshire, public information requests must be carefully tailored so as not to offer any loopholes. Aleshire opined that instead of asking for a “list,” Rice should have requested specific documents and included multiple departments in her original demand.
“Having said that, a public office devoted to transparency would not quibble with a requestor seeking travel records; it would just provide the records they’ve got, in good faith,” Aleshire told The Texan.
Snip.
In another leaked internal Harris County memo, legal fees approved by the Harris County Commissioners Court last March totaling $671,383 are described as covering legal costs for Kase, [County Commissioner Rodney] Ellis, and other county employees related to the investigation of a since-canceled $11 million COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract and allegations that Ellis had stored an African art collection at taxpayer expense.
The memo also includes “talking points” from “GS” that former Justice Administration Director Jim Bethke and other county officials, including Tatum, have been harassed by District Attorney Kim Ogg.
Payments for legal expenses appear to have been approved for McClees Law Firm, PLLC; Rusty Hardin and Associates, LLP; and Khalil Law PLLC. In addition to Ellis, Hidalgo, and other employees, the memo notes expenses were also covered for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2).
Something stinks in Harris County government, and there are a whole lot of questions about how Lina Hidalgo is spreading around taxpayer money that she really doesn’t want to answer…
Rep. Gary Gates (R-Richmond) took to the back microphone this week to make the case for greater regulation of a controversial state program offering millions in tax exemptions to developers for affordable housing.
One of several lawmakers to propose reforms to the Public Facility Corporation (PFC) program, Gates had introduced a reform bill with tough standards, but allegedly former Speaker Dennis Bonnen repeatedly pressured him to drop his proposals.
Gates told The Texan he was urged by Bonnen to sign on to arguably weaker reforms authored by Rep. Jacy Jetton (R-Richmond) — House Bill (HB) 2071 — and warned that although his own legislation had been approved by the House Committee on Urban Affairs, it would be killed in the powerful Calendars Committee.
Instead, Gates successfully tacked on multiple amendments to HB 2071 during Tuesday’s floor session.
“I’m pleased with these amendments, but I still have my own PFC reform bill, HB 3568, which I hope to get to the floor in short order. It has 69 authors and co-authors, while HB 2071 had only 10.”
Under the PFC program, local government officials may offer a 100 percent tax exemption to developers who build or purchase multifamily housing, as long as some rental units are set aside for “affordable” reduced rent. But both Jetton and Gates acknowledged there have been abuses of the system; in some cases, PFCs have been authorized with only 10 percent of units designated for low-income families.
On the House floor, Gates queried Jetton about whether his reforms set new minimum standards and noted that the current system took tax revenue from public school districts without their approval. He also pointed out that in some cases developers were already charging below-market rents before transitioning to PFC status and were therefore not obligated to demonstrate a public benefit.
“This is hurting our schools, this is hurting our counties and our cities,” said Gates. “This [tax revenue] is being taken from our fire departments, our police departments, our neighborhood schools. They are getting their taxes wiped out and we can’t determine if there’s any public benefit.”
In response to Gates’ questions, Jetton acknowledged that other taxpayers or the state’s general funds would have to make up the loss in revenue to school districts.
Gates’ first proposed amendment, opposed by Jetton, mandates that 60 percent of the developer’s tax savings must be dedicated to reducing rents. It was approved in a bipartisan vote of 87 to 54, with two members registered as “present, not voting.”
Under the formula, 12 percent of units must be set aside for those earning 50 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI), 12 percent for those at 60 percent AMI, and 12 percent at 80 percent AMI.
After the House voted for a second Gates amendment requiring approval from counties and school districts for any new PFCs, Jetton gave up his opposition and accepted four more revisions as friendly amendments.
Noting that some PFCs had been granted 100 percent sales and property tax exemptions for up to 99 years, Gates also questioned Jetton about HB 2071’s language setting a minimum tax exemption period of 10 years while removing even the 99-year limit.
Among revisions accepted by Jetton, the tax-exempt status will be limited to 12 years for new construction and 10 years for the conversion of existing properties.
So one cheer for Gary Gates for getting rid of a tax kickback.
Ideally, government should get entirely out of the business of giving different types of tax breaks for different rental housing. Get out of regulating any but the most essential safety and business standards and let the free market come up with solutions. The main obstacles to building actual affordable housing are too many regulations, not too few.
But we shouldn’t disdain even baby steps of reform in the right direction.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has laid out the devastating results of runaway government spending on the middle class and why it’s so important to claw back lost ground for the average American, who has “received a pay cut for 24 consecutive months … as inflation has persisted.”
He also noted the average American family has lost the equivalent of more than $7,000 in annual income.
There is a direct link between spending, borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, and these disastrous results for Americans.
President Biden has spent trillions of dollars the nation didn’t have.
These unchecked costs drove the deficit to record highs and pushed the debt over $31 trillion.
A former Connecticut Planned Parenthood honcho took his own life days after police failed to arrest him on child pornography charges — botching the raid by knocking down the door of the suspect’s New Haven neighbor.
Tim Yergeau, 36, the former director of strategic communications at the Southern New England branch of Planned Parenthood, died by suicide on Tuesday amid a child pornography investigation in Connecticut last week.
The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a proposal that would prohibit schools from instituting policies that “categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.” The policy would allow schools to implement certain limitations in the interest of fairness or safety, however.
The proposed rule, which would impact any school or college that receives federal funding, would expand Title IX protections to include gender identity. Under the proposal, a “one-size-fits-all” ban on transgender athletes playing on teams that match their stated gender identity would be a violation of Title IX. The rule, which is likely to face challenges, will face a lengthy approval process.
This is, in fact, the exact opposite of the text of Title IX, which provides special protection for biological women, not men pretending to be women.
Under the radar, a package of bills is ramming through sweeping changes that will reorient our public schools around a new paradigm — subordinating academic basics to an obsessive, politicized preoccupation with race and social justice activism.
“Critical Social Justice” ideology (CSJ) — the vehicle for manipulating our young people into adopting this worldview — is laced strategically through a variety of bills, including “ethnic studies” (HF 1502), “Teachers of Color” (HF 320) and now the House and Senate omnibus education bills (HF 2497/SF 2684).
Taken together, this legislation will inject reductive, racialized thinking into every classroom in Minnesota’s approximately 500 school districts and charter schools; change the fundamental mechanics of education in our state; and give the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) broad new powers that amount to an end-run around our state’s hallowed tradition of local control.
Here’s a story I missed earlier: “Kazakhstan Impounds Property of Roscosmos Subsidiary.” That’s the Russian company that’s the main operator of Baikonur spaceport. Haven’t seen any resolution to this, mainly because Russia is so broke thanks to mismanagement, sanctions, and an illegal war of territorial aggression.
Jay Leno drives the 1,025 horsepower 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. I have an irrational desire to own something with a Hellcat engine, which I need like I need a hole in my head. Plus I like the look of the Shelby GT-500 Mustang better, and I’m not buying one of those either.
“Disney has proudly employed sex predators for years, and this act of aggression by DeSantis will force thousands of our proud pedo-American workers to leave the park to stay outside the 1,000-foot radius required by law,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger. “This is tyranny!”
Here’s a video where Ex-LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva discusses how the Homeless Industrial Complex racket works there.
Five people a day die on the streets of LA in the gutter like a dog. Five a day. Like, five on drugs from overdosing overdosing on drugs, from illnesses that are treatable. But if you’re not being treated, like, for example, you’re insulin dependent type one [diabetes]. Without insulin you die. That’s what happens, because these are people are not in a state of mind to actually accept and seek medical care for a problem, so it goes untreated they die, or they overdose and they die, or they do both and they die. I think in 2020-2021, they registered, I think, over 1,800 deaths of that type on the street, which is mind-boggling, but it’s consistent.
“If you don’t pay attention, people are going to die. So the people, the activists, they want to get in the way. ‘Don’t touch them, you’re criminalizing poverty!’ or this or that. Yet they have no answer. And their solution is just to let people die on the street. That’s not a solution.”
“The [homeless] count is getting bigger, not smaller.”
“There’s a perception in the entire nation that, if you’re homeless and you like to use drugs, go to LA. Until that train stops, it doesn’t matter what you do locally in LA. You can’t defeat 49 other states sending all their homeless their derelicts their drug addicts to LA.” I don’t know, a lot still seem to be going to San Francisco. And we need to do more to spread the word to Austin’s drug addicted transients in hopes they move there.
When he started trying to clean things up, he got immediate pushback from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. They had “no desire whatsoever” to work with him.
“They’re not doing anything about it because the homeless industrial complex is alive and well. Look at the career arc of Holly Mitchell, supervisor. Karen Bass, mayor. Community organizers. Now they’re running non-profits. Now they’re receiving contracts from the county, from the city. Now they’re in public office. Those two in particular prime example of it, and that’s the wave of the future.”
“You’ve got a whole community of people that are in the 501c3s, the non-profits, and uh Boards of Directors, CEOs. The amount of money is pouring into the nonprofits is just incredible. There’s no governance, there’s no oversigh, there’s no accountability on the results. They just keep shoveling money at them, and the problem keeps getting worse and worse.”
“This has become a system for people to to get in and get involved, and actually build a career and build a path to politics. The top 10 CEOs of non-profits eight hundred thousand dollar a year. They were making more than twice what I was making as sheriff, and the size of my operation dwarfed all of them probably combined. But that tells you the influence the money involved.”
“From 2011 to 2021, L.A. County spent 6.5 billion dollars on homeless initiatives. The homeless count went from 39,000 to over 80,000. it doubled in size.”
“It’s engulfing every corner of life in L.A County.”
One quarter of the year gone! Career criminals coddled by Soros Stooges, crazy woman who thinks she’s a man murders children, lots of Flu Manchu fraud, and Botox makes you crazy(er). It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Everyone and their dog is covering the ham sandwich Trump indictment, so I’ll leave that to others. I will note that Alan Dershowitz is not impressed. “Based on what we know about this case, it may be one of the weakest cases in my six years of experience.”
On the morning of Election Day last November, William French went to his local polling place in Freeland, Pennsylvania, to cast his vote. But the qualified and registered voter wasn’t allowed to. The disabled U.S. Army veteran was told that the precinct had run out of paper for ballots and he had to come back later in the afternoon.
So that’s what he did, returning at 3:30 p.m. But the precinct still didn’t have ballots. Election workers told him to return yet again. But by nightfall, it was too difficult. French has endured 17 surgeries on his destroyed leg and uses a cane to walk. But the sidewalks are a mess, and he was worried about the risk of falling and further injury.
That same morning, Melynda Reese and her husband went to their polling location in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. But only Reese’s husband was allowed to vote, and for the same reason: The precinct had run out of paper. They came back at 4:00 p.m. and were told there would be a lengthy wait.
Reese is a corrections officer and her husband’s primary caregiver. He had recently suffered two cardiac arrests and a stroke. He required regular medication and attention and couldn’t be left alone. Long waits were also too much to bear. The couple returned at 6:30 p.m., and saw a line that stretched so long that they knew they couldn’t wait. Around 9:15 p.m., an election official called Reese and told her that ballots were finally available and she could vote. But her husband had just taken his sleeping pills and she couldn’t leave him unattended.
French and Reese are just two of the thousands of voters affected by poor election administration in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The two just sued Luzerne County, its Board of Elections and Registration, and its Bureau of Elections in federal court for violations of their constitutional right to vote.
“Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote. William French and Melynda Reese are two of those voters. They bring suit to vindicate the denial of their sacred right to vote, to make sure voters are not disenfranchised in the future, and to bring integrity back to elections in Luzerne County,” said Wally Zimolong, lawyer for French and Reese.
The House Oversight Committee is investigating the explosive claims by Dr. Gal Luft, a former Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonel with deep intelligence ties in Washington and Beijing, who says he was arrested to stop him from revealing what he knows about the Biden family and FBI corruption — details he told the Department of Justice in 2019, which he says it ignored.
Luft, 56, first made the claims on Feb. 18 on Twitter, after being detained at a Cyprus airport as he prepared to board a plane to Israel.
“I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S. The U.S., claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer.
“DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden.
“Shall I name names?”
Luft remains in jail awaiting extradition to the US over what he says are trumped-up charges of arms trafficking to China and Libya, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Luft claimed that he tried to reach out to the DOJ about the Chinese energy company CEFC paying Hunter $100,000 and James Biden, Joe’s brother, $65,000 “in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.”
James O’Keefe has not allowed his forced exit from Project Veritas to stop him. His new journalism outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), just released a video uncovering evidence of what O’Keefe calls a possible “money-laundering scheme” for the Democrats. Some individuals reportedly appear to have donated thousands of times over a relatively short period to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ActBlue and Biden for President, based on Federal Election Commission records.
“FEC data shows that some senior citizens across the U.S. have been donating thousands of times per year,” O’Keefe began. “Some of these individuals’ names and addresses are attached to over $200,000 in contributions. We went and knocked on a few of their doors to corroborate the data that we received from a group of citizen journalists called Election Watch in Maryland.” The video then showed O’Keefe visiting someone who is listed as donating over $217,000, through 12,000 separate contributions. This money was earmarked for various entities through leftist platform ActBlue over three years’ time. Some of the donations were made with variations of the person’s name and address, O’Keefe stated.
The data he obtained was state and FEC data, O’Keefe said. “We’re wondering if these donors are victims of what appears to be a money-laundering scheme, or [if] these residents actually participated in the scheme. We’re making phone calls, we’re knocking on doors, these are things that you can do, we hope you do that.” There are “bizarre amounts of data” on homes and individuals making many thousands of dollars of donations, O’Keefe said, urging others to help him investigate.
The first person shown opening the door to O’Keefe, a Marylander listed as donating $32,000 in 3,000 different contributions, said he was unaware of the donations but advised O’Keefe as a solution to hit Donald Trump “with a bat.” The man added, “I want to see a scar on his f**king head. Now stop f**king with me,” and slammed the door.
Another donor, Cindy, according to O’Keefe, supposedly donated over $18,000 in 1,000+ donations to ActBlue in 2022, which would necessitate donating “three times a day, every day, for the whole year.” When asked if she’d donated over $18,000, Cindy responded with a quick laugh, “I doubt that. No, I don’t think so… I wish I could have donated $18,000 to Biden’s presidency.”
Meanwhile Carolyn Lenz, in Tucson, Ariz., told OMG that she “absolutely [did] not” donate over 18,000 times for $170,000+ to ActBlue. She looked at the data showing “she” donated multiple times a day, often in $5 to $15 increments, and insisted that the donations were not hers. “They must be” fraudulent, Lenz said.
After rejecting her in 2018, the voters of Alameda County, California selected Pamela Price as their new District Attorney last year. Price had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from George Soros for her two campaigns. That probably tells you most of what you need to know, since Soros only funds candidates who are soft on crime and willing to empty the jails as much as possible. Price quickly proved herself no exception, seeking to cut a plea deal with a killer who had been arrested for one triple murder for hire, was accused in the murder of a court witness, and several other violent crimes. Rather than the 75 years to life sentence that Delonzo Logwood was eligible for, Price wanted to cut him loose after fifteen years. Thankfully, a County District Judge stepped in and rejected the deal out of hand. (Free Beacon)
A California judge this week blocked a newly-elected progressive prosecutor’s effort to slash a triple murderer’s sentence.
Alameda County district judge Mark McCannon rejected District Attorney Pamela Price’s plea deal for a 31-year-old man jailed for a 2008 triple murder-for-hire, among other crimes. Price, who took office in November and has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the progressive billionaire George Soros, attempted to sentence Delonzo Logwood to just 15 years in prison, though he was eligible for a sentence of 75 years to life.
You can’t keep a bad man down. Keith Chastain, 38, is a one-thug crime spree.
Chastain racked up an impressive array of arrests in Fresno County, California, (of course). Between Feb. 19 and March 21, he was arrested 10 times for a menagerie of crimes encompassing 15 misdemeanors and 18 felonies, including:
six stolen cars
fraud
DUI (duh)
drugs (duh)
vandalism
Chastain was hit with three additional charges — DUI, trespassing, and auto theft — but those were dropped when cops failed to file the charges in time.
Snip.
“Unfortunately, this is not as unique of a situation as it seems,” Tony Botti, spokesman for the Fresno County Sherriff’s office, stated. “California has watered down the laws so much over the years for property criminals and repeat offenders that they are not held accountable like they should be. Sadly, it is our community members who suffer due to these soft-on-crime policies.”
According to court documents, Edwin Maldonado spent many months thumbing his nose at what he was ordered by the court to do.
His punishment for that is more like a prize.
“You’ve got someone who was rewarded for being a failure, and this guy was a failure over 1,000 and some odd times,” said Andy Kahan with Crime Stoppers.
First, Maldonado gets a felony charge for drug possession. A few weeks later, he’s charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. He makes his $30,000 bond and walks out of jail.
“I’ve certainly had clients hauled back into court on violations, maybe two or three times that have been alleged,” said criminal defense attorney Emily Detoto.
Associate Judge Tiffany Hill presided over a bond revocation hearing for Maldonado.
“For obvious reasons, you are not abiding by your rules and conditions period, and God knows what he was doing when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be,” Kahan said.
According to court documents, Maldonado failed to comply with any of his bond conditions for eight months.
According to his GPS monitor, he left his curfew zone 847 times, was called 453 times about his whereabouts, and had more than 1,000 GPS monitor violations.
A suspect arrested and charged in a recent brutal “jugging” robbery in Houston that left a woman paralyzed was out on a $100 bond for a weapons-related charge.
On the morning of February 13, Nung Truong, 44, withdrew money from a bank ATM but was followed for approximately 24 miles by two suspects. Surveillance video released by the Houston Police Department shows a black male bumping into Truong and causing her to drop her belongings. The suspect initially fled with an envelope but returned seconds later to body-slam Truong to the ground before taking $4,300 in cash.
A mother to three children aged 13, 15, and 20, Truong is now paralyzed and unable to walk or care for herself.
Last Friday, Houston Police arrested Joseph Harrell, 17, and Zy’Nika Ayesha Woods, 19, for the attack and charged both suspects with Aggravated Robbery with Serious Bodily Injury.
According to court records, on January 26, 2023, Harrell had been granted a General Order bond of $100 for Unlawful Possession of a Weapon. He also faces charges of Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon related to an incident in February in which he threatened another victim with a gun. Harrell is currently being held in the Harris County jail on bonds totaling $240,000.
Snip.
Although Harrell’s Unlawful Possession of a Weapon charge was assigned to Harris County Court 2 under Judge Paula Goodhart, his bond was signed by Judge David Singer.
Elected to Harris County Criminal Court 14 in 2018, Singer lost in the March 2022 Democratic primary election and his term ended December 31, 2022. As a one-term judge, Singer is not eligible under state code to serve as a visiting judge.
The 11th Administrative Judicial Region confirmed to The Texan that Singer is not listed as a visiting judge.
The Harris County Office of Court Management emailed the following statements to The Texan:
“David Singer was appointed as associate judge pursuant to Section 54A.002 of the Texas Government Code and the Local Rules for Harris County Criminal Courts at Law. His start date was Jan. 1, 2023.”
Finland gets the green light to join NATO, with Turkey and Hungary approving their membership. Sweden’s application is still under negotiation. As I noted previously, tangling with the Finns has not been a source of happiness for Russia.
Poor priorities. “European Ammo Maker’s Growth Stymied By TikTok Data Center Sucking Up Electricity.”
LA City Council member Mark Ridley-Thomas convicted of taking bribes. “He was convicted of one count of bribery, one of conspiracy, one count of honest services mail fraud, and four counts of honest services wire fraud. The jury acquitted him on 12 other counts.”
Veterans Affairs assistant secretary Kurt DelBene is married to Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.), chairwoman of the DCCC. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Federal prosecutors announced a 58-year-old Plainview man is facing 102 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $4 million in federal relief funds passed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Friday, Andrew Johnson pleaded guilty in the Northern District of Texas to three counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, according to a news release published by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Johnson swindled millions from the Paycheck Protection Program passed in the early weeks of the pandemic to help stave off the economic effects of business closures, government restrictions, and shelter-in-place mandates. As part of the fraud, Johnson applied for and received forgiveness for 27 bogus loans.
He spent more than $3.5 million of the stolen funds on “home renovations, vacations, clothing, cosmetic surgery, college tuition, cars, wedding expenses, and equipment for an unrelated business venture,” according to the DOJ.
After an investigation that took longer than a year, the Office of the City Auditor in Austin said it found Central Texas Allied Health Institute (CTAHI), a nonprofit City of Austin contractor, committed fraud against Austin Public Health and falsified health records.
According to the investigative report, CTAHI misrepresented over $1.1 million in financial transactions across three contracts with Austin Public Health and was incorrectly paid roughly $417,000 between December 2020 and September 2021 because of fraudulent contract claims. The report also claimed CTAHI falsified its COVID-19 vaccine contract performance by overstating vaccination totals and fabricating patient data.
“This is up there with some of the biggest cases we’ve investigated on my team,” said Brian Molloy, chief of investigations at the Chief of the City Auditor.
CTAHI, President Todd Hamilton, and Dr. Jereka Thomas-Hockaday — both of whom were named in the report — denied the claims made in the report in a statement Thursday.
Snip.
CTAHI’s three contracts with Austin Public Health were for COVID-19 testing, workforce development, and COVID-19 vaccines, according to the city. Between December 2020 and September 2021, the city said CTAHI submitted 23 claims for reimbursement to APH under the workforce development and COVID-19 vaccine contracts.
Flu Manchu is the fraud fount that just keeps giving… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
NHL might stop pushing gay pride after backlash from players and fans. “Philadelphia Flyer’s player Ivan Provorov didn’t want to participate in a ‘Pride’ event during warmups…Soon, other players also refused to participate after Povorov showed it could be done, and some entire team organizations dropped their planned LGBT pride events. And thanks to this one man’s stand, the NHL is considering dropping the whole ‘Pride’ push.”
Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel and coiner of Moore’s Law, is dead at age 94. Semiconductors have radically changed just about every facet of the world.
For several weeks, I’ve been running out of time to post every link I’ve gathered, so I’ve been bumping some links (generally ones that seemed less time-sensitive or required more commentary than others) to the next week’s LinkSwarm, whereupon I may use one or two, but otherwise the process repeats.
Well, I’m just going to post all those today to clear the decks.
California’s leftwing Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is using his position as governor subsidize his wife’s own leftwing business empire.
In the summer of 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom convinced the state legislature to provide $4.7 billion for K-12 mental health services, which, among other things, funded 10,000 new school counselors.
Gavin Newsom convinced the legislature because Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of the governor, convinced him. The biggest advocate for mental health funding within the K-12 California public schools in the Newsom administration was Mrs. Newsom, according to published accounts.
In fact, Gavin Newsom created The Office of First Partner so his wife could promote her policy agenda using taxpayer money. Since 2019, Siebel Newsom’s been armed with nearly $5 million and nine staffers within her subdivision of the governor’s office.
Snip.
Siebel Newsom spent years laying the ideological groundwork and political infrastructure to support her policy ambitions.
In 2012, Siebel Newsom founded a nonprofit, The Representation Project, that licenses “gender justice” films and curricula to 5,000 schools in all 50 states. The year Gavin Newsom became governor, the California Board of Education adopted guidance that recommended her films and curriculum be licensed and used in classrooms.
Policy making in California isn’t magic. Turns out, it’s a carefully thought through process to maximize political power and personal return from public investments.
Last week, we investigated the sophisticated scheme through which Siebel Newsom’s film and curricula “gender justice” nonprofit, The Representation Project, leverages taxpayer dollars to promote radical ideologies, personally profit, and push the political ambitions of her husband. She brags that 2.6 million students have seen the films nationwide.
The Representation Project contracts with her for-profit film-production company, Girls Club Entertainment. Since 2012, Siebel Newsom received $1.5 million in salary from the nonprofit. Furthermore, since 2012, the Siebel’s nonprofit paid her for-profit Girls Club $1.6 million to produce films.
Last month, our investigation broke the story that The Representation Project was not in compliance with the California Charitable Solicitation Act. The organization was not permitted to operate or solicit donations in California most of 2022 – yet spent all last year in operation and fundraising.
Now, we dig deeper, investigating the $4.8 million “Office of the First Partner” Gavin Newsom established for his wife’s policy work, and how Jennifer Siebel Newsom used her position to impact social and political processes, cashing checks along the way.
n 2019, Gov. Newsom created an office for his wife as a division within the governor’s executive team. According to a press release “the First Partner and her team will focus on lifting up women and their families, breaking down barriers for our youth, and furthering the cause of gender equity in California.”
Since inception, Siebel Newsom’s office has received nearly $4.8 million in directed taxpayer funding. The Office of First Partner has grown from seven employees with a budget of $791,000, to nine employees with a budget of $1,166,000 proposed for 2023-2024.
Snip.
Parents have complained about the pornographic content in Newsom’s films shown to 11-year-olds (such as an animated, upside-down stripper with tape over breasts) and 15-year-olds (nearly naked women being slapped, handcuffed, and brutalized in images taken from porn sites) — to view images, viewer discretion is advised.
Editorials have criticized the activities in Newsom’s film The Great American Lie as “emotionally abusive.” The activities ask students to publicly reveal personal information and force commentary on their relative “privilege” and “oppression.”
So Jennifer Siebel Newsom is using California taxpayer money to propagandize children for radical social justice and transexism.
An Australian comedian, YouTuber and Journalist, made videos making fun of Australian politicians and covering their oppressive Flu Manchu lockdown policies. That’s when they started trying to use the state machinery to shut him up. Then they firebombed him.
Jordan Shanks is an Australian comedian, also know as freindlyjordies, who fell in to doing YouTube videos about Australian politicians and powerful companies over the past few years. Along the way he became a journalist, the only journalist covering some of the things being done by the government and the corporations. Then in November of 2022 his house was firebombed. It was only by chance that he wasn’t in the house at the time.
And hey, if that sounds too dry, well you kids like Knives Out or whatever. Stick around. It’s a pretty interesting whodunit.
Most of the Australian press is even more in the bag for the powers-that-be than the US national media is for the Democrats. There were numerous stories, all but ignored by the mainstream. One example, the Premiere of New South Wales was under investigation. That was all but ignored by the press until she resigned. Then there were the antics of her Deputy Premiere, John Barilaro.
That is the most entertaining — or damaging to powers that be — story friendlyjordies covered.
As a result of that coverage, the Australian anti-terrorism machinery was directed at Shanks and his employees. Of course that turned out to be a group of Keystone cops, which got their own exposure on freindlyjordies. Along the way he exposed the abuse of the anti-terrorism squad, the relationship between some of the politicians and large corporations and perhaps organized crime. Then in November of the last year, after the lawsuits failed, the anti-terrorism actions failed, and the intimidation failed, someone moved to direct action, and tried to kill him.
On all key technical measures, the Next Generation Squad Weapons program is imploding before Army’s very eyes. The program is on mechanical life support, with its progenitors at the Joint Chiefs obstinately now ramming the program through despite spectacularly failing multiple civilian-sector peer reviews almost immediately upon commercial release.
Indeed the rifle seems cursed from birth. Even the naming has failed. Army recently allowed a third-party company to scare it off the military designation M5. The re-naming will certainly also help scupper bad public relations growing around ‘XM-5′ search results.
Civilian testing problems have, or should have, sunk the program already. The XM-5/7 as it turns out fails a single round into a mud test. Given the platform is a piston-driven rifle it now lacks gas, as the M-16 was originally designed, to blow away debris from the eject port. Possibly aiming to avoid long-term health and safety issues associated with rifle gas, Army has selected an operating system less hardy in battlefield environments. A choice understandable in certain respects, however, in the larger scheme the decision presents potentially war-losing cost/benefit analysis.
Civilian testing, testing Army either never did or is hiding, also only recently demonstrated that the rifle seemingly fails, at point-blank ranges, to meet its base criteria of penetrating Level 4 body armor (unassisted). True, the Army never explicitly set this goal, but it has nonetheless insinuated at every level, from media to Congress, that the rifle will penetrate said armor unassisted. Indeed, that was the entire point of the program. Of course, the rounds can penetrate body armor with Armor Piercing rounds, but so can 7.62x51mm NATO, even 5.56x45mm NATO.
The fundamental problem with the program is there remains not enough tungsten available from China, as Army knows, to make the goal of making every round armor piercing even remotely feasible. The plan also assumes that the world’s by far largest supplier will have zero problems selling tungsten to America only for it to be shot back at its troops during World War III. Even making steel core penetrators would be exceedingly difficult when the time came, adding layers of complexity and time to the most time-contingent of human endeavors. In any case, most large bullet manufacturers and even Army pre-program have moved to tungsten penetrators for a reason, despite the fact it increases the cost by an order of magnitude and supply seems troubled. Perhaps Army has a solution, perhaps.
The slight increase in ballistic coefficiency between the 6.8x51mm and 7.62x51mm cartridges neither justified the money pumped into the program nor does the slight increase in kinetic energy dumped on target. Itself a simple function of case pressurization within the bastardized 7.62mm case. Thus the net mechanical results of the program design-wise is a rifle still chambered in a 7.62×51 mm NATO base case (as the M-14), enjoying now two ways to charge the weapon and a folding stock. This is the limit of the touted generational design ‘leap’ under the program. And while the increased case pressure technology is very welcome the problem is, in terms of ballistics, the round is in no way a leap ahead compared to existing off-the-shelf options as those Army nearly went with under the now disavowed Interim Combat Service Rifle program, or it in fact did purchase schizophrenically just before the NGSW program began with the HK M110A1.
I can’t tell you whether the criticisms are true or not unless Sig Saur sends me a example to shoot. While that would be cool, I suspect it’s pretty unlikely, and I fear many test ranges have picayune policies against using military grade automatic weapons…
For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations.
The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.
Just before I entered Georgetown Law in August 2019, I watched The Paper Chase, a 1973 film about a first-year Harvard Law student and his experiences with a demanding professor, Charles Kingsfield.
The movie has the standard themes of law school: teaching students how to think, challenging the premises of an argument, differentiating fact patterns to support precedent. Kingsfield’s demands represent the difficulty of law school, and the most important skill is articulate, logic-based communication. “Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself,” he scolds one student.
“Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself.”
Two years later, I realized that Georgetown Law had inverted that script. The school fired a professor for commenting on differences in achievement between racial groups, slandered faculty members for deviating from university group-think, and threatened to destroy dissidents. Students banished cabinet officials from campus and demanded censorship of a tenured professor for her work defending women’s rights in Muslim-majority countries.
Unaware of the paradigm shift, I thought it was proper to ask questions about Georgetown’s Covid policies.
In August 2021, Georgetown Law returned to in-person learning after 17 months of virtual learning. The school announced a series of new policies for the school year: there was a vaccine requirement (later to be supplemented with booster mandates), students were required to wear masks on campus, and drinking water was banned in the classroom.
Dean Bill Treanor announced a new anonymous hotline called “Law Compliance” for community members to report dissidents who dared to quench their thirst or free their vaccinated nostrils.
Meanwhile, faculty members were exempt from the requirement, though the school never explained what factors caused their heightened powers of immunity.
Shortly thereafter, I received a notification from “Law Compliance” that I had been “identified as non-compliant” for “letting the mask fall beneath [my] nose.” I had a meeting with Dean of Students Mitch Bailin to discuss my insubordination, and I tried to voice my concerns about the irrationality of the school’s policies.
He had no answers to my simple questions but assured me that he “understood my frustration.” Then, he encouraged me to “get involved in the conversation,” telling me there was a Student Bar Association meeting set to take place the following Wednesday.
I arrived at the meeting with curiosity. I had no interest in banging my fists and causing a commotion; I just wanted to know the reasoning – the “rational basis” that law schools so often discuss – behind our school’s policies. There were four simple questions:
What was the goal of the school’s Covid policy? (Zero Covid? Flatten the curve?)
What was the limiting principle to that goal? (What were the tradeoffs?)
What metrics would the community need to reach for the school to remove its mask mandate?
How can you explain the contradictions in your policies? For example, how could the virus be so dangerous that we could not take a sip of water but safe enough that we were required to be present? Why are faculty exempt from masking requirements?
I feared there were simple answers to my questions that I had overlooked: these administrators made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, surely they must have had some reasoning behind their draconian measures. Right? The contradictions appeared obvious to me. The data seemed to be clear, but maybe there was an explanation.
I delivered the brief speech without a mask, standing fifteen feet away from the nearest person. I awaited a response to my questions, but I realized this wasn’t about facts or data, premises or conclusions. This was about power and image.
Arbitrary. Irrational. Capricious. Students learn in their first days of their legal education to invoke these words to challenge unfavored laws and policies. I figured that I was doing the same, and I thought the school would welcome a calm, albeit defiant, student asking the questions rather than loud and angry crowds.
But this assumption turned out to be an incorrect premise. Nobody cared about my points regarding rationality – they cared that I had been reading from the wrong script. Even worse, not wearing a mask had been a more objectionable wardrobe malfunction than Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance.
Moscow’s ability to develop its own resource-based economy, expand the Northern Sea Route, cement ties with China and support Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to project power into the Arctic depends on the development of land-based infrastructure in the northern regions of the Russian Federation…
Yet, that ability has now been called into question, as the Russian government has canceled, despite Putin’s repeated orders to the contrary, a program to complete the broad-gauge Northern Broad-Gauge Railway. The route was intended to link settlements that support the Northern Sea Route, military bases and the locations of key sources of raw materials across the Russian North with the rest of the country…
Snip.
What appears to be this project’s death knell, at least for the time being, is instructive in its own right. It occurred not with some dramatic single action by the Kremlin but in a rolling fashion as has often been the case with the backtracking of decisions under Putin. In April 2021, to much acclaim, the Russian president called for construction of the Northern Broad-Gauge Railway to begin, with the goal of completing the project in the next few years. Yet, despite Putin’s words, nothing happened, at least in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased spending for his war against Ukraine and the impact of Western sanctions. Then, in 2022, Putin issued a new order for the project to go ahead. Again, nothing happened. Instead, less than a month later, Marat Khusnullin, a Russian deputy prime minister, quietly stopped all work on the project without giving anyone reason to think it would be resumed. Indeed, many Russian experts and commentators concerned with infrastructure issues believe that this railway plan has come to the end of its line, and one has even suggested that the cancellation of this project puts “a cross on the future of Russia.
Russia was broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against the Ukraine. Now it’s even more broke.
