Ukrainian Prosecutor Reopens Corruption Case Involving Biden

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The chief prosecutor in Ukraine recently revealed that he’s reopening a corruption probe into Ukraine’s largest private gas company that could have profound implications for the presidential aspirations of former Vice President Joe Biden.

The company, Burisma Holdings, appointed Biden’s son, Hunter, to its board of directors in 2014, and reportedly paid him more than $3 million during a 14-month period to head its legal team.

Burisma was then facing a state investigation over allegations that company Chairman Nikolai Zlochevskiy had used his official position as Minister of Environment in the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych to award the company lucrative oil and gas permits.

While the probe was underway, then-Vice President Biden made more than a dozen trips to Ukraine, ostensibly to support the new government of Petro Poroshenko. But during one of those trips in 2016, the vice president threatened to withdraw U.S. aid if Poroshenko didn’t fire the prosecutor general in charge of the Burisma probe.

Biden boasted of his success in getting Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018, a year after leaving office.

“And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee,” Biden said. When Poroshenko refused to fire the prosecutor, Biden said he had authority from President Barack Obama to pull the loan guarantee.

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ … He got fired.”

Current Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told The Hill’s John Solomon that he was reopening the investigation his office had closed after Biden succeeded in convincing the Ukrainian president to remove his predecessor, Viktor Shokin.

Shokin himself confirmed in written answers to questions from Solomon that before he was fired, he was planning to conduct “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the [Burisma] executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

Biden’s staff and, indeed, the Democratic National Committee leadership should have seen this coming. It’s not as if Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board was a secret, nor the fact that he got paid large sums of money for his services, at the same time that his powerful father was intervening in the company’s favor with the president of Ukraine.

This is no skeleton in Uncle Joe’s closet. It’s a raw cadaver, and it stinks to high heaven, despite the mounds of dirt piled on top of it by the national media.

The Wall Street Journal first announced Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board in May 2014 in a Page 4 item; one columnist in The Washington Post called Hunter Biden’s behavior “nefarious.”

But when asked by a reporter around the time of the appointment to comment, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney said the White House saw no problem with the younger Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

“Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice president or president,” Carney said.

Following that White House comment, the media obediently buried Joe Biden’s gross conflict of interest until 2018, when Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, detailed the allegations in a book titled “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

“The bottom line is, Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point-person on policy towards Ukraine,” Schweizer said on April 2. “He steered $1.8 billion in aid to that government, and while he was doing so, his son got a sweetheart deal with this energy company—that we’ve been able to trace over just a 14-month period—paid $3.1 million into an account where Hunter Biden was getting paid.”

Schweizer supported his allegation that the payments amounted to a sweetheart deal by noting that Hunter Biden had “no background in Ukraine” and “no background in energy policy.”

“There’s really no legitimate explanation as to why he got this deal with the energy company, other than the fact his father was responsible for doling out money in Ukraine itself,” Schweizer said.

The Ukrainian prosecutor general promises to turn over investigative files to the U.S. Department of Justice, so Joe Biden’s Ukraine scandal could just be getting started.

A source close to the prosecutor said last week that he was also investigating a corrupt intervention by Ukrainian authorities in the 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton, when they leaked the so-called “black ledger” of the pro-Russian Party of Regions to U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yavonovitch, an Obama appointee who remains on the job today.

They also leaked the ledger to The New York Times, which ran a front-page story alleging that the ledger included $12.7 million in payments to then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, leading candidate Trump to fire Manafort from the campaign.

Joe Biden might soon be looking back on the inappropriate touching allegations with regret. Not regret for his actions, but regret that public attention so quickly drifted off to other, more damaging scandals.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Epoch Times and is republished with permission.

VIDEO: Saving Kids from the Jaws of Terror

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Lisa Miara is doing amazing work with children who’ve been to hell and back – saving them from the jaws of terror.

The founder of Springs of Hope, Miara left her family behind to work with Yazidi child victims of Islamic State – those both brutalized and radicalized.

She tells nightmare stories and explains what we can learn in the West:

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Hoaxes, Scams, and Your Medical Care

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Preview:

  • Hoaxes and scams have been dominating the news lately. We have a marginally known actor faking a hate crime supposedly to raise his Hollywood profile.
  • The scandal about Hollywood and other elites buying their children’s way into top-rated universities really hit home.
  • Now we continue to have a slew of healthcare hoaxes: corporate stakeholders, legislators, and government agencies promise everything and have no accountability for their failure to keep their promises.
  • The opioid crisis is an example of the unintended consequences of intervention by oversight agencies not directly involved in patient care.
  • Central control is not a good idea. Period. Do not believe the hoax perpetrated by the ruling class who will never have to live by their own rules. It is highly unlikely that Venezuela’s President Maduro is starving along with his people.

Hoaxes and scams have been dominating the news lately. We have a marginally known actor faking a hate crime supposedly to raise his Hollywood profile. His attempt to claw his way to the middle could have resulted in race riots, injury, and death. His punishment? All charges dropped.

The scandal about Hollywood and other elites buying their children’s way into top-rated universities really hit home. I remember when I had tutored some recent Vietnamese immigrants for a debate contest to win a scholarship for college. I could only hope that their hard work was rewarded and not wiped away by special favors bestowed on the “haves.”

Now we continue to have a slew of healthcare hoaxes: corporate stakeholders, legislators, and government agencies promise everything and have no accountability for their failure to keep their promises.

Take the large health systems’ claim that hospital consolidation and buying up physician practices would benefit consumers with cheaper prices from coordinated services and other unspecified savings. A major study of California hospital mergers found just the opposite. The analysis showed that the price of an average hospital admission went up as much as 54 percent. When the large hospital systems bought doctors’ groups, the prices rose even more. There was as much as a 70 percent increase in prices of medical services in geographic areas with minimal competition. This finding seems obvious to any of us who has the choice of shopping at Walmart or Target or Costco.

Logic aside, some legislators believe that having the government take over medical care would solve our access and cost problems. Single payer means no competition whatsoever. The single payer plans (H.R. 1384 and S. 1804) that abolish private insurance leave patients with an empty choice. Patients can contract with a physician to pay cash for government medical services covered by the government. But if the physician contracts for such services he cannot be part of the government program for any patient for 2 years. Realistically, these single payer bills make it financially unfeasible for physicians to privately contract with patients. Thus, only well-heeled patients, along with independently wealthy doctors, can buy their way out of the system.

There are variations on the theme of government involvement that allow buy-ins to Medicare, Medicaid, or iterations of the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. All of these all have the same defect: expanding the government healthcare monopoly.

The opioid crisis is an example of the unintended consequences of intervention by oversight agencies not directly involved in patient care. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), now the Joint Commission, a nonprofit organization that accredits more than 20,000 healthcare organizations and programs in the U.S, is for all practical purposes a government surrogate. In 2001, JCAHO declared that pain was the “5th vital sign” that had to be addressed or face consequences. The Federation of American Medical Boards told physicians that “in the course of treatment,” large doses of opioids were just fine. Moreover, Medicare has a hospital payment formula that relies on patient satisfaction surveys. If the patients are satisfied, including being so zoned out on opiates that they can’t taste the bad food, the hospital is paid more. The hospital is penalized for a bad rating.

And now to deal with the opiate issue, the government has issued guidelines that have been found to be harmful to some patients. One-size-fits-all restrictions have caused physicians to fear being flagged as over-prescribers by the medical board. Consequently, some physicians are tapering patients off opioids more quickly than they would ideally like. And in the public eye patients have been transformed from objects of compassion to criminal drug addicts.

Individualized medical care must not be reserved for the chosen few. Patients need physicians who are empathetic, thorough, and not married to a medical cookbook written by disinterested third parties. Perhaps this is why Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones chose to have his heart surgery in the U.S. and not with his British homeland’s National Health Service.

Central control is not a good idea. Period. Do not believe the hoax perpetrated by the ruling class who will never have to live by their own rules. It is highly unlikely that Venezuela’s President Maduro is starving along with his people.

Man Claims NYC Officials are Abetting Neighbor’s Theft of His Property

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A man’s home is supposed to be his castle. But this is no longer the case in New York City, according to a Brooklyn man who says that Big Apple officials are aiding and abetting a next-door neighbor’s attempt to steal his property.

It has been a long ordeal for John Hockenjos, 62, and his wife Irina, one whose twists and turns include a false arrest by the NYPD. The problems started in 2009, they say, when the couple Argo and Elen Paumere “purchased the home next to them with plans for an ambitious overhaul. According to the Hockenjoses, red flags flew fast when they were approached to sign documents turning over a two-foot easement to their new neighbor,” as Bklyner reported in 2013.

I spoke to the Hockenjos recently on the phone, and Irina told me their suspicions were borne out. After refusing to sign the documents, the Hockenjoses say that Argo Paumere “went and created a fraudulent land survey that marked a chunk of the driveway as theirs,” as Bklyner put it. The kicker?

The city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) approved it, the Hockenjoses report — and they’ve been battling the Paumeres and City Hall ever since.

It’s a battle that has cost the Hockenjoses their jobs, their health and more than $150,000 in legal fees, they say. But the real shock came in February 2012 when John, a former Metropolitan Transit Authority engineer, was falsely arrested by 61st Precinct police.

That dark day was Feb. 5 of that year. The police arrived at the Hockenjoses’ property, in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay section, after being called by Paumere, according to NY’s Daily News. The incident culminated in John’s arrest and felony charges being brought after he was accused of driving at a “high rate of speed, causing an officer “to jump out of the way,” the News reports. But the police had a problem.

No such thing ever happened.

John had video surveillance footage to prove it, too, which showed “the Brooklyn man slowly pulling into his driveway and the cop not even flinching,” to quote the News again.

In fact, so egregious was the police frame-up that Officer Diego Palacios, who was involved in the arrest, resigned from the NYPD and was indicted by a grand jury “on five kinds of illegal lying, one of them a felony,” reported The New York Times in 2012.

Palacios pled guilty in exchange for a sentence of just four days in prison — just one day longer than John spent in jail after his arrest — but ended up serving only one night. Call it Kim Foxx justice.

Oh, had Palacios’ frame-up been successful, John would have faced seven years behind bars.

As for the land dispute, the Hockenjoses told me they know of other NYC residents in their shoes, people who face what’s essentially the theft of their property due to DOB corruption or incompetence. If this sounds fanciful, consider the comments of former Queens-based state senator Tony Avella, who was a staunch critic of the DOB.

“It’s something that’s a bottom line issue with the DOB where an applicant just presents an application and they never really check it to see if the size of the property is correct, or whether they own the property or not,” he told Sheepshead Bites (now part of Bklyner) in 2013.”

“The builder says they own part of the property that’s actually the neighbor’s, and the DOB approves it,” he continued. “It’s a very serious issue. Anyone can submit a false application, fraudulent documents and fraudulent land surveys, and no one checks it.”

And once this happens…well, go fight City Hall. As Bklyner also tells us, “According to both Avella and the Hockenjoses, the DOB’s modus operandi when they receive complaints about fraudulent documents is to wash its hands of the problem and declare it a property dispute to be handled in civil court.”

“That comes with its own set of problems,” Bklyner further informs. “The Hockenjoses have gone through lawyer after lawyer, some of which [sic] they say took their money and never did any work. Others have refused to take the case because it appears to exist in a sort of legal no-man’s-land.”

“‘They’re saying I’m not going to take this case because it’s not a real estate case, it’s not a property dispute case, it’s a criminal case,’” Irina told Bklyner (this echoes what she related to me). “‘And we go to criminal attorneys and they tell us we need to go to prosecutors. And the prosecutors say it’s a civil case.’”

The bottom line is that the Hockenjoses have spent a good part of the last decade in court, all due, they say, to a neighbor who’s quite a malevolent character. In fact, Irina told me that shortly after the Paumeres moved in, Argo Paumere said bluntly, “I’m going to take your property from you.” After being informed that it wasn’t for sale, he made known that this didn’t matter, Irina states.

And aside from the false arrest, the Hockenjoses say that the Paumeres have continually made false charges against them, resulting in actions by city inspectors that the couple has had to fight. The stress has been overwhelming, they state.

The Hockenjoses also believe that more than just garden-variety bureaucratic incompetence is at work: They suspect that Argo Paumere has connections with city officials. The false arrest certainly lends this theory credence, of course. Whatever the case, it’s a very strange story — and one many Americans wouldn’t expect to hear in these United States.

It’s a continuing story, too, as the Hockenjoses fight on. Hopefully, they’ll get the help they deserve, somewhere, and justice will finally be done.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

Documents Detailing Google’s ‘News Blacklist’ Show Manual Manipulation Of Special Search Result

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Google does manipulate its search results manually, contrary to the company’s official denials, documents obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller indicate.

Two official policies dubbed the “misrepresentation policy” and the “good neighbor policy” inform the company’s “XPA news blacklist,” which is maintained by Google’s Trust & Safety team. “T&S will be in charge of updating the blacklist as when there is a demand,” reads one of the documents shared with The Daily Caller.

“The deceptive_news domain blacklist is going to be used by many search features to filter problematic sites that violate the good neighbor and misrepresentation policies,” the policy document says.

That document reads that it was, “approved by gomes@, nayak@, haahr@ as of 8/13/2018.” Ben Gomes is Google’s head of search, who reports directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. Pandu Nayak is a Google Fellow, and Paul Haahr is a software engineer, whose bio on Google’s internal network Moma indicates that he is also involved in, “fringe ranking: not showing fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial unless we’re sure that’s what the user wants.”

“The purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product. It will not cause a demotion in the organic search results or de-index them altogether,” reads the policy document obtained by The Daily Caller. What that means is that targeted sites will not be removed from the “ten blue links” portion of search results, but the blacklist applies to most of the other search features, like “top news,” “videos” or the various sidebars that are returned as search results.

In a section of the memo entitled “Eligibility for GNP [Good Neighbor Policy] enforcement,” the types of search results impacted by the policy are described:

“If your product shows any of the following, Misrep and GNP would apply to your PA.

  • Shows content from users and news publishers (percieved 3P voice). Ex: UGC, News corpus, etc.
  • Outputs single answers (perceived to come from the open web). Ex: Web answers, Video answers, etc.
  • Shows content owned, licensed, or edited by Google (perceived to come directly from Google). Ex: Knowledge panels, News summaries, Oneboxes, Munin carousels, etc.”

The “ten blue links” may not be impacted by the blacklist, but virtually every other kind of Google search result is. While hard numbers are not available for how much traffic is directed through the ten links versus the other search blocks, since the latter appear so high on the results page, the impact could be significant.

“Focus on the user,” said a source at Google who described the program to The Daily Caller. “Users need to trust any content that Google shows them, whether it’s the ten blue links or other special search results.”

Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee on December 11 of last year. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) asked why a search for the term “idiot” returned a photo of President Trump. In response, Pichai said “This is working at scale, we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.”

A memo about the deceptive news blacklist was also obtained by the Daily Caller, showing its last edit as December 3, 2018, a week before Pichai’s congressional testimony This document, which describes the process by which a site can be blacklisted for deceptive news, clearly shows that there is a manual component:

“The beginning of the workflow starts when a website is placed on a watchlist which is used for monitoring of sites to determine if they violate the Good Neighbor Policy. This watchlist is maintained and stored by Ares with access restricted to policy & enforcement specialists working on the Good Neighbor Policy. Access to the listing can also be shared at the discretion of pcounsel and legal investigations on a need to know basis to enforce or enrich the policy violations. The investigation of the watchlist is done in the tool Athena, the Ares manual review tool, and intakes signals from Search, Webspan, and Ares in order to complete reviews. … Once a domain is determined to be violating the misrepresentation policy or the Good Neighbor Policy, such patterns are then added to deceptive_news_blacklist_domains.txt by the Trust & Safety team.”

The document indicates that there is, among other things, a “manual review tool” involved in maintaining the blacklist.

On the blacklist are a number of conservative sites, including Gateway Pundit, Matt Walsh’s blog, Gary North’s blog “teapartyeconomist.com,” Caroline Glick’s website, Conservative Tribune, a property of The Western Journal, and the website of the American Spectator.

“You can’t trust the human judgment of Google’s Trust and Safety team,” said the source at Google with knowledge of their practices.

Requests for comment from Google’s press team have gone unreturned as of publication time.

COLUMN BY

J. Arthur Bloom

Deputy Editor of The Daily Caller. Follow J. Arthur Bloom on Twitter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission.

State Department Sued for Obama Ambassador Nuland’s Communications Related to the Anti-Trump Dossier

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Ambassador Nuland reportedly initially connected the author of the anti-Trump dossier, Christopher Steele, to the FBI.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State for communications between Obama Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Ambassador Victoria Nuland and employees of Fusion GPS, as well as top ranking Department of Justice, FBI, and State Department officials.

Nuland served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from September 2013 until January 2017.

Judicial Watch filed the suit after the State Department failed to respond to a November 1, 2018, FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:19-cv-00574)). Judicial Watch seeks:

Any and all records of communication between Ambassador Victoria Nuland and any of the following individuals between January 1, 2016 and January 25, 2017:

Professor Joseph Mifsud

Mr. Christopher Steele

Mr. Glenn Simpson

Mrs. Nellie Ohr

Former CIA Director John Brennan

Former Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein

Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates

Former Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General George Toscas

Former DOJ Official David Laufman

Former Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco

Former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr

Former FBI Director James Comey

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe

Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok

FBI Attorney Lisa Page

FBI Attorney James Baker

Former FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki

FBI Assistant Director Edward William Priestap

Former FBI Agent John Giacalone

Former FBI Agent Michael Steinbach

Former FBI Agent Josh Campbell

The author of the anti-Trump dossier, Christopher Steele, reportedly had developed long-standing relationships with senior State Department officials including Ambassador Victoria Nuland, “Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than a hundred reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the State Department and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the U.S. response to the Ukraine crisis.”

On February 4, 2018, in an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation, Nuland stated that she had been given details of the anti-Trump dossier directly from Christopher Steele, which she then referred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation:

[Steele] passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding. And our immediate reaction to that was, this is not in our purview. This needs to go to the FBI if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That’s something for the FBI to investigate. And that was our reaction when we saw this. It’s not our – our – we can’t evaluate this.

Nuland reportedly “green lit” the initial meeting about the anti-Trump dossier between Christopher Steele and FBI agent Michael Gaeta. Quoting from David Corn and Michael Isikoff’s book Russian Roulette, “The FBI checked with Victoria Nuland’s office at the State Department: Do you support this meeting? Nuland, having found Steele’s reports on Ukraine to have been generally credible, gave the green light.”

“We intend to find out how far the Deep State was willing to go in their effort to discredit then-candidate Donald Trump,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It seems the Obama administration engaged in a no-holds-barred attempt to clear the path for Hillary Clinton. Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuits have already shown the Obama State Department was corruptly targeting President Trump.”

Judicial Watch earlier released 42 pages of heavily redacted State Department documents containing classified information that was provided to Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and outspoken critic of President Donald Trump. The documents show Russian political interference in elections and politics in countries across Europe.

Judicial Watch also released two sets of heavily redacted State Department documents, 38 pages and 48 pages, showing classified information was disseminated to multiple U.S. Senators by the Obama administration immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN).

On the Southern Poverty Law Center, Too Late for Tina, Send in the IRS

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The question isn’t what went wrong at the SPLC; it is why it took so long for the rest of the country to learn what local reporters already knew.” – (Jim Tharpe, former managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser)

The problems at the Southern Poverty Law Center could be bigger than discomfort by staff about racism and sexism in the internal office culture says the former managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser who penned an op-ed in the Washington Post last week entitled,

Something strange is going on at this civil rights institution. It must be investigated.

Editor:  It is important that all of you, all fair-minded people! especially those who have been targets of the SPLC’s infamous hate lists, keep all of the unfolding news about the SPLC ‘s frauds in the public eye.  Tina is Tina Tchen Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff brought in by the board to help clean up the mess. She will be working to downplay information like this!

Author Jim Tharpe, a retired journalist who lives in Atlanta and was a former managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, says federal investigators need to investigate the finances of this massive ‘non-profit’ group.

Here is some of Tharpe’s thesis at the Washington Post,

(Emphasis is mine.)

There’s something strange afoot at the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the nation’s richest civil and human rights charities. In March, the center abruptly fired legendary co-founder Morris Dees. Dees’s biography was quickly scrubbed from the center’s website, and the SPLC announced this week that Karen Baynes-Dunning would serve as interim president and CEO, giving the civil rights organization its first black female leader.

In confirming Dees’s departure, then-President Richard Cohen emphasized the center’s values of “truth, justice, equity, and inclusion,” and said vaguely, “When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.”

Subsequent news reports pointed to allegations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment inside an organization that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars from donors to fight just that type of injustice.

Dees has said little about why he was shown the door after 48 years at the organization he had come to define. But to those of us familiar with the SPLC and its inner workings, the allegations swirling around the latest drama were familiar. The question isn’t what went wrong at the SPLC; it is why it took so long for the rest of the country to learn what local reporters already knew. It will probably take a federal investigation to fully unravel this deep-South mystery and provide a credible, long-term fix.

Twenty five years ago an investigation first revealed the problems at the SPLC and nothing was ever done about it.

In February 1994, after three years of research, the Advertiserpublished an eight-part series titled “Rising Fortunes: Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center” that found a litany of problems and questionable practices at the SPLC, including a deeply troubled history with its relatively few black employees, some of whom reported hearing the use of racial slurs by the organization’s staff and others who “likened the center to a plantation”; misleading donors with aggressive direct-mail tactics; exaggerating its accomplishments; spending most of its money not on programs but on raising more money; and paying its top staffers (including Dees and Cohen) lavish salaries.

Dees and Cohen vigorously denied its findings. And the SPLC mounted an aggressive campaign against the series when it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize — it was a 1995 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism.

Too late for Tina, says Tharpe. Bring in the IRS and the Civil Rights Division at DOJ!

Cohen, before he announced his own departure, said the center would bring in well-regarded lawyer Tina Tchen to conduct an investigation. It’s too late for that.

The Internal Revenue Service, which grants the SPLC tax-exempt status, and the civil rights division of the Justice Department would be the best bets to really figure out what’s up at the center.

Any investigation should take a close look at the SPLC’s finances. It should look at what the center has told donors in its mail solicitations over the years. And it should take a close look at how that donor money has been spent.

Investigators should also look at how SPLC staffers have been treated over the years. Where was the center’s board when this mistreatment was going on? And why did no one step up sooner?

[….]

The feds owe that to the young progressives who work at the SPLC. And they certainly owe that to the donors who have put their own first-class stamps on the checks they mailed to Montgomery.

More here. (I know it may be behind a paywall, I was able to read it on my first visit.)

Follow the money!

I don’t know that the feds owe anything to “young progressives” who naively work at the SPLC, but investigating a politically motivated ‘non-profit’ group for possible financial wrong-doing sure is a good idea.

And, to answer Tharpe’s question about why it took so long for the rest of the country to learn the truth about the SPLC, it is because the mainstream media protected and coddled the SPLC because the mainstream media wanted to believe that America was filled with hatersbeing exposed by the good and pure-minded staffers struggling for the little guy!  (And, I include Fox News in that bunch of protectors!)

It doesn’t take a genius to know that Fox stopped bringing on certain guests after calls from the SPLC!

Your job is to continue to post news like this about the SPLC to your social networks! Do not let Tina and Karen sweep the dirt under a rug!

I’ve got another post if I get to it today about malfeasance with non-profit groups — many are run by frauds and crooks (with do-nothing boards of directors).

EDITORS NOTE: This Frauds, Crooks and Criminals is republished with permission.

Pelosi Is Hijacking the Civil Rights Movement to Force LGBT Ideology on Kids

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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Those aren’t just hollow words. Those words birthed a nation unlike any other and inspired its leaders and soldiers to give their very lives in the most sacred of blood oaths to uphold truth.

Those words sustained a country during its deepest sin and gave us the framework to begin anew. Those words are just as true today as they were when the great American experiment began.

Our nation has a rich history of fighting for equal rights for all.

One of the most intense examples of this is the story of racial desegregation in schools—because the pursuit of equal rights for all affected every family and every child. Even kindergartners experienced firsthand the rocky road to equality, and their parents were along for the ride whether they liked it or not.

Ultimately, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public elementary and secondary schools was unconstitutional, violating equal rights. And the Civil Rights Act in 1964 added the full weight of the federal government to the process of desegregating schools—including federal funding and even military intervention in K-12 schools.

But the fight didn’t start with the famous Brown case. There were many cases centered in higher education leading up to Brown, but four in particular from 1938 to 1950 that laid the groundwork.

Along the way to full desegregation, civil rights leaders carefully constructed their legal strategy to prove first that black students needed to be offered the same educational opportunities as white students, even if in separate schools and programs.

Next, they were able to prove that it is very difficult for separate schools to be considered equal if black students do not get to interact and share ideas with white students, especially when the white students would be the majority of the population in their future career fields.

Finally, they proved that even when black students were admitted to the same schools, doctoral programs, and classrooms as white students—yet still subject to segregation—there was in fact no equality.

At the University of Oklahoma in 1950, for instance, black students attended the doctoral education program with white students, but they were forced to sit in designated rows in class or designated tables in the cafeteria.

Declaring that this treatment could never be equal, the Supreme Court stated that “[t]here is a vast difference—a constitutional difference—between restrictions imposed by the state which prohibit the intellectual commingling of students, and the refusal of individuals to commingle where the state presents no such bar. The removal of the state restrictions will not necessarily abate individual and group predilections, prejudices, and choices. But at the very least, the state will not be depriving appellant of the opportunity to secure acceptance by his fellow students on his own merits.”

In other words, the state cannot stop people from separating into their own groups, but neither can it require them to be separate.

This case was a critical turning point for black civil rights, and four years later, Brown turned the tide for K-12 schools—and the country.

Hijacking the Civil Rights Legacy

Flash forward several decades to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Top 5 priority bill, H.R. 5—the so-called Equality Act. Now, the left, with Pelosi at the helm in the House, wants to use the blueprint that helped our nation desegregate schools to manipulate schoolchildren to carry water for the LGBT political agenda—whether their parents like it or not.

Their argument is that just as black children were literally and forcefully segregated from white children, so are LGBT children segregated from all other children in schools—creating an oppressed, unequal class of American children.

There are two obvious problems for these activists.

First, they claim to be advancing civil rights for LGBT-identifying individuals—who constantly change their own personal identities, with new categories constantly being added to the group as a whole. This makes it extremely difficult to advance civil rights, as the public can’t accurately identify the group that is receiving protection, and what type of protection is needed on a given day.

Second, unlike the days of racial segregation, LGBT-identifying children are not in fact being forced by the government to attend segregated schools or sit in separate sections of class.

LGBT activists are ignoring the first problem, and they attempt to fix the second problem by claiming something oddly similar to the 1950 University of Oklahoma case.

They claim that LGBT-identifying students are treated unequally in schools not because they are forced to sit in different areas, but because the nation as a whole does not permit transgender students to use the restrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex, does not require featuring LGBT people and ideas in school, and doesn’t teach children about the social and experimental medical ways to “transition” to another sex.

In other words, they believe the state is complicit in “separating” LGBT students from the student body by not reinforcing their ideology in the classroom.

The racial desegregation of America’s schools was about upholding the truth: that all men are created equal and deserve to be treated equally.

H.R. 5 by its very nature is not about achieving equal educational opportunities for all. It’s about forcing every administrator, teacher, child, and parent involved in schools to give any person who identifies as LGBT a platform in our schools, and special rights above and beyond everyone else.

In short, H.R. 5 isn’t about actual equality. It picks “equality” winners and losers.

Serious Consequences

So if Pelosi succeeded in getting H.R. 5 through Congress (which recently held a hearing on the bill), and if the president were somehow to sign it, what would be the practical implications for public schools?

For starters, major changes in your child’s curriculum. Pelosi and the LGBT activists who fund her campaign want to ensure “equality” by requiring “LGBTQ sexual experiences” to be included in schools. Sex education class can’t truly be equal unless all types of sexual experiences are taught, so leftist groups say.

Colorado already requires that children as young as 9 years old learn about “LGBTQ sexual experiences.” And California sex ed guidelines even require teaching children about having multiple sexual partners, and warning children about “religion abuse” that would include “forcing others to adhere to rigid gender roles [or n]ot allowing a partner to do things they enjoy.”

Both of these states’ curricula came from policies requiring LGBT inclusion in sexual education.

Sex ed class used to be for the purpose of helping students understand human biology and reproduction, which by nature includes everyone. H.R. 5 elevates LGBT sexuality and gives it special emphasis in the classroom.

And the “equality losers”? Parents and teachers who don’t believe the material is appropriate for their children for health, moral, religious, or other reasons.

All-Pervasive Indoctrination

But the changes envisioned in H.R. 5 don’t stop at sex ed class. The idea is to weave LGBT-centric themes throughoutthe school’s entire curriculum.

Take, for example, New Jersey’s new “LGBT curriculum” policy. Imagine a literature or history class where students are not just taught the historic contributions of literary giants like Emily Dickinson or former U.S. presidents, but the curriculum also questions the sexual preferences of our historic figures.

One textbook example ponders the fact that President James Buchanan “never married and had a very good friend who was living with him. He may have been gay.” A former American president is reduced to the sort of suspect commentary found in newspaper tabloids and gossip magazines.

What’s worse, parents really would have no opportunity to opt-out their children from exposure to this type of teaching or the topic of gender transition, since it is woven into every aspect of the curriculum.

The “equality losers” are, once again, teachers and parents who object—but especially children whose precious academic time will be consumed by nonsense speculation over what kind of sexual exploits any given historical figure was having.

That’s not equal rights. That’s ideology masquerading under the guise of rights.

That’s not equal rights. That’s ideology masquerading under the guise of rights. It is special rights for some at the expense of many others.

The Death of Equality

H.R. 5 is vying for a spot in our nation’s Equality Hall of Fame, comparing a sexualized political agenda to the brave students who endured segregation and then crossed town, under great hardship, to achieve racial desegregation.

If “all men are created equal” now means ensuring young children are informed that “little boys can become little girls,” then the centuries of power contained in those words ends with H.R. 5.
COMMENTARY BY

Autumn Leva

Autumn Leva is vice president of strategy for the Family Policy Alliance. Twitter: .

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Why? Because they are determined more than ever to give the government more control over your lives. Restoring your liberty and embracing freedom is the best thing for you and the country.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission.

Shock! Fraud and Corruption Rampant in UN Refugee Resettlement Program

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And, an even bigger shock is that NBC is featuring this lengthy investigation into charges of corruption, fraud and bribery in the agency that selects refugees for your American towns and cities.

Featured in what is billed as a first installment of a seven-month-long investigation is Africa and specifically Somali resettlement from the huge camp, Dadaab, run by the UNHCR, that I mentioned in a post here recently.

It is a huge story both in impact and in its length, so I’ve snipped a bit here for you to get the gist of it.

Money, and lots of money, helps ‘refugees’ move to the head of the line and in this opening segment we learn that a likely crook is living in Minnesota (I know don’t laugh!).

By the way, the focus in stories like this is geared to play on your heartstrings about those left behind (who don’t have the money to bribe a UN official), but NEVER does anyone ask where does a poor refugee living in a UN camp even get $20,000 to pay-off someone?

Aren’t we told they are all dirt-poor!

And, where is the sympathy for us, regular Americans, who have to live with the crooks!

From NBC,

Asylum for sale: Refugees say some U.N. workers demand bribes for resettlement

This is the first story in a three-part series about alleged corruption in refugee resettlement.

DADAAB, Kenya — Hamdi Abdullahi stands outside the United Nations compound in this dusty, sprawling camp — home to more than 200,000 Somali refugees — and throws stones at its barbed wire fence and heavy gates.

Though the U.N.’s refugee agency, UNHCR, is known everywhere as the chief protector and spokesman for most of the globe’s 25 million refugees, Abdullahi shouts as she hurls the stones, accusing the agency of stealing her children.

She has been protesting outside the compound off and on for years.

The Somali refugee’s four children are now 8,000 miles away in Minnesota, with her former husband and his new wife. She last saw them in 2014.They were among the less than 1 percent of refugees in the entire world chosen to be resettled in a new country and given a chance to start their lives again.

Abdullahi said that while her family’s need to resettle was genuine, she was left behind because of false information fed to the U.S. government by a UNHCR resettlement officer, David Momanyi, to whom her ex-husband paid a hefty bribe.“I always remember his face,” Abdullahi said.

[….]

Her account is corroborated by a former U.N. contractor, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, who said he personally collected tens of thousands of dollars from refugees while acting as a middleman for Momanyi — and other UNHCR staffers — over several years. He said Abdullahi’s ex-husband paid almost $20,000 in multiple installments.

In separate interviews, more than a dozen other refugees said Momanyi was known for taking bribes. One described the Kenyan as “the architect of corruption and refugee resettlement problems.”

[….]

Reached by phone, Abdullahi’s ex-husband confirmed he had been resettled in Minnesota, but said any allegations of corruption were “false information.”

[….]

The allegations of corruption at the UNHCR are not limited to one man or one place. A seven-month investigation across five countries with significant refugee populations has found widespread reports of the UNHCR’s staff members exploiting refugees,while victims and staff members who report wrongdoing say the agency fails to act against corruption, leaving them vulnerable to intimidation and retaliation.

In interviews, more than 50 refugees registered with the UNHCR in Kenya, Uganda, Yemen, Ethiopia and Libya have described corruption and exploitation involving the agency’s staff and personnel from other aid agencies, following similar claims by refugees in Sudan last year.

So how many other Somali families who are in the US now paid off someone in Africa to falsify or advance their resettlement documents?

In the Dadaab refugee camp, whose residents are almost all Somalis, 19 refugees said it used to cost as much as $50,000 to resettle a large family, or roughly $3,000 per person, before the Trump administration effectively stopped resettlement of Somalis in the U.S.

[….]

Most of those interviewed for this investigation do not know one another. They are separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles, but their accounts follow starkly similar patterns involving large amounts of money and middlemen — often other members of the refugee community.

Claims that the UNHCR turned a blind eye to allegations of fraud….

Three former UNHCR staff members said their employment contracts were unexpectedly terminated after they spoke out about fraud and exploitation or took steps to stop it.Instead, corrupt staffers in positions of power replaced them with others more willing to tolerate bribery or other misconduct, they allege. Alternatively, staff suspected of misconduct may receive good references so they are promoted and moved to other locations, current and former staff said.

 

[….]

UNHCR spokesperson Cecile Pouilly said the agency strongly denies the allegations of widespread corruption within the organization.

[….]

“I’m not surprised, because wherever you’ve got refugee camps you’ve got the potential of this sort of thing going on,” Montil [Frank Montil, a former senior UNHCR investigator and narcotics detective] said. “The demand side of resettlement is enormous and the supply side is small.UNHCR refuses to look at the context in which it operates.”

Like several other former U.N. investigators and insiders who spoke to this reporter, Montil compared the UNHCR to the Roman Catholic Church, in how he says it repeatedly tries to avoid admitting or tackling wrongdoing by staff, and will not allow skilled independent investigators to get involved.

There is much, much more.  Go here to read the whole sorry tale.

When the President joked yesterday about the fraud in asylum claims at our southern border, he is onto something and he should be pointing out the fraud in this story.  It would be a winning political argument to say that his administration is attempting to stop fake refugees and is weeding-out frauds and crooks in our whole immigration system.

EDITORS NOTE: This Frauds, Crooks and Criminals column is republished with permission.

Facebook’s Community Standards: Anti-Semitic, Anti-NRA, Pro-Abortion, Pro-Shariah Law and Pro-Democrats? You Decide.

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I woke up this morning to find that my Facebook page was blocked because I had violated their “community standards.” When I finally was able to open my account I found seven recent posts with the following notice posted by Facebook below each:

This post goes against our Community Standards, so no one else can see it.

This has been known as “shadow banning.” Or perhaps Facebook has taken the next step and is actually openly banning freedom of expression to interact with like minded Facebook friends in certain areas? You be the judge.

Here are the seven posts that go against FB’s community standards:

The first was a One America News Network article titled “Pres. Trump To Deliver Remarks At Republican Jewish Coalition In Vegas.” Blocking reporting on a Jewish Republican event smacks of anti-Semitism?

The second violation of FB’s community standards was an article titled “Breaking News: President Trump to speak at NRA-ILA Leadership Forum in Indianapolis.” This FB community standards ban appears to be anti-Second Amendment and specifically anti-NRA.

The third was blocking a quote made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The AOC quote published on BraineyQuote.com is, “Capitalism has not always existed in the world and will not always exist in the world.”

This community standards violation prevents restating what a politician has been quoted as saying. This community standard has a chilling effect by denying freedom of expression and free speech under the First Amendment. What possible community standard blocks anyone’s ability to quote any politician from any party (or from just one party)?

The fourth block was a column titled “Filing Income Taxes? Remember, TurboTax Funds Planned Parenthood.” This violation of FB’s community standards appears to be pro-abortion/infanticide and pro-Planned Parenthood.

The fifth block was a column titled “VIDEO: Muslim sociologist demonstrates proper Islamic way to beat one’s wife.” This violation of FB’s community standards indicates their adherence to Islamic Shariah Law and suppression of anything said that may offend the Muslim community (a.k.a. anything FB deems Islamophobic).

The sixth block was a meme that showed a serving of Chick-Fil-A waffle fries with the words under it “Come And Take It.” Chick-Fil-A is under attack by various Democratic controlled cities to ban it opening stores in airports. Chick-Fil-A is known for its pro-traditional marriage and pro-Christian stances, including its policy not to open on Sundays, as this is a day best spent worshiping. Are FB’s community standards anti-Christian?

The seventh block is of an April 2019 a cartoon by Michael P. Ramirez titled “Democratic Field.” FB’s community standards appear not to allow political satire, especially when it targets Democratic Party candidates for president.

Each of the above posts has a “Request Review” option. When you click on “Request Review” the words “Delete this post” appear. The only option offered by Facebook is to delete the post that violates their “community standards.” No appeal no review. Just delete.

Are you seeing any pattern in these violations of Facebook’s community standards?

If you or a friend have experienced something similar please leave a comment about it below.

RELATED ARTICLE: House Democrats Want ‘Oversight Over Fox News’ Editorial Decisions

RELATED VIDEO: The Myth of the Unbiased Search Engine – Forbidden Knowledge TV

Filing Income Taxes? Remember, TurboTax Funds Planned Parenthood

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As income tax season enters its final week, there are many options for filing your returns. Fortunately, software programs and online platforms have reduced the paperwork needed for many taxpayers. However, not all tax filing services are created equal—some of the companies selling these services may be using a portion of your fees to fund organizations that you would not normally support on your own.

For example, Intuit (1.7 – Liberal), the maker of popular tax filing software TurboTax, is a direct supporter of abortion giant Planned Parenthood. According to the most recent available information, the company contributed $32,350 to various Planned Parenthood affiliates in 2016 through The Intuit Foundation, the company’s charitable giving arm. The TurboTax brand’s self-described “most popular” Deluxe edition costs $59.99—meaning the fees collected from at least 539 customers go directly to Planned Parenthood’s abortion business.

Our research has also found Intuit supports several more liberal organization such as the anti-2nd Amendment Brady Center, the pro-“cap-and-trade” Sierra Club, and the pro-sanctuary city ACLU and has also scored 100 on the Human Rights Campaign‘s anti-religious liberty index.

At Intuit’s annual meeting earlier this year, shareholder activists from the National Center for Public Policy Research challenged CEO Sasan Goodarzi over his company’s support for left-leaning organizations, particularly Planned Parenthood. Goodarzi seemed to dodge the National Center’s questions saying:

We deeply believe in our mission of empowering prosperity around the world… which means we care deeply and measure deeply around how inclusive we are. We think about diversity, and we think about that not only because it’s important internally — but those are the customers that we serve… We believe in doing what’s right and we always will adjust if we feel we’re not doing something right.

While we do hope adjustments will be made, Intuit has not signaled any change of heart since the exchange. Therefore, conservatives will want to look to tax filing options that better match their values and refrain from using their fees to fund organizations like Planned Parenthood.

However, conservatives should remember to pay close attention to Intuit’s competitors when it comes to selecting an alternative platform or service provider. H&R Block (1.4 – Liberal), for example, has funded the liberal Center for American Progress, a think tank founded by former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Fortunately for conservative taxpayers, our research has found Jackson-Hewitt (3 – Neutral) remains neutral on all the issues 2ndVote scores.

Filing tax returns is never pleasant, especially for conservatives who abhor the annual reminder of how much the federal government takes out of your paycheck. But, when you choose a better option to Intuit, and H&R Block for that matter, you can get a head start enjoying spring knowing you have taken action to defund Planned Parenthood, CAP, and other liberal activists.

Help us continue providing resources like this and educating conservative shoppers by becoming a 2ndVote Member today!

EDITORS NOTE: This 2ndVote column is republished with permission.

VIDEO: We Told Ya So — After Knife Ban in UK, Fatal Stabbings Are Through the Roof

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Knife bans go into effect in England, and can you guess what happened? Yeah, fatal stabbings skyrocketed because it has nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with the perpetrator.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Anti-Gunners Call Constitutional Carry “a Step Backwards”

CA Anti-Gunner Claims Pro-2A Ruling Is “Not Normal”

Brian Gosch: North Dakota Outlaws Tax-Supported Gun Buyback Programs

EDITORS NOTE: This NRA-ILA video is republished with permission.

VIDEO: Opus Dei Overshadowed By Recent Sex Abuse Scandals

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NEW YORK (ChurchMilitant.com) by Christine Niles, M.St. (Oxon.), J.D. – Recent sex abuse scandals involving Opus Dei have placed the order under closer scrutiny. Known for its orthodoxy and promotion of sanctity among laity in the workplace and family life, the order has also been surrounded by controversy, its critics claiming it engages in aggressive recruiting tactics, targets the wealthy and professionally successful, is overly secretive in its operations and exercises too much control over its members.

Opus Dei has rebuffed each of these charges, insisting it functions in a transparent manner and does not single out wealthy elites for recruitment, nor does it engage in aggressive recruiting tactics. Even so, 1981 guidelines issued by Cdl. Basil Hume of Westminster — published in response to concerns expressed about the order — prohibited the group from recruiting minors; required that Opus Dei ensure that young people wishing to join first discuss the decision with their parents; cautioned against “undue pressure being exerted” on members to remain in the group and insisted that the “freedom of the individual be respected”; and ordered that any of Opus Dei’s activities in the diocese have “a clear indication of their sponsorship and management.”

Patrizio Astorquiza

The Associated Press reported in February that Fr. Patricio Astorquiza, an Opus Dei priest serving in Chile, is being investigated for alleged sex abuse of two male minors. The allegations involve harassment “with possible sexual connotation.”

Astorquiza is currently forbidden from publicly offering the sacraments. Once the investigation is complete, results will be sent to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

Jose Maria Martinez Sanz and the Gaztuleuta School

Another recent case, this time in Spain, resulted in an 11-year prison sentence for a member of Opus Dei. Jose Maria Martinez Sanz, who taught at the Opus Dei-run Gaztelueta School in Leioa, was convicted in November of raping a male student repeatedly between the years 2008-2010, when the student was 11–13 years of age.

The allegation first came to light in 2010, but an internal investigation by the school resulted in clearing Martinez’ name. The CDF also conducted its own investigation, closing the case in 2015 after the allegations could not be proven. The victim’s family claims, however, that they had never been notified of the Vatican investigation, nor were they given a chance to present evidence on the victim’s behalf.

The victim sought justice in the secular courts, receiving vindication on Nov. 15, 2018, when the Provincial Court of Bizkaia handed down its sentence of 11 years’ prison time for Martinez. Martinez is appealing his verdict before Spain’s Supreme Court, and in late March the prosecutor issued a strongly worded denunciation against the professor in a petition to uphold the verdict and sentence.

In an interview from October, Juan Cuatrecasas Asua, father of the victim, expressed regret over his decision to place his son in the Gaztelueta School.

“We have been humiliated, mistreated and harassed by Opus Dei officials and have suffered from their inhuman treatment of my son and our family,” Cuatrecasas said. “Unlike the traditional wooden Catholic crucifix, Opus Dei reminds me of a pure crystal cross without a corpus. It is hard and brittle. It has no heart. It shows no mercy.”

Although Cuatrecasas remains a Catholic, his view of the Church has changed.

“[G]iven the Catholic Church’s poor track record with regard to helping victims of sexual abuse and its failure to bring the perpetrators of these horrific crimes to justice,” he said, “I simply no longer see the Church with the same eyes I once did. I do not think there is any room for cowardice, infamy, and lies in the Church that Christ Himself established.”

Fr. C. John McCloskey

Opus Dei’s most high-profile case involved celebrity priest Fr. C. John McCloskey, accused of sexual misconduct with a woman he was counseling. Recent news revealed Opus Dei had paid nearly $1 million to settle his case in 2005, quietly ordering the priest to withdraw from public life. His disappearance caused a number of people to wonder what had happened to the popular priest.

McCloskey was a well-known figure among Washington elites, the priest responsible for the conversion of famous conservatives like Newt Gingrich, Sam Brownback and Larry Kudlow, among others. His accuser claims he sexually groped her during spiritual counseling sessions, at a time when she was struggling with depression as she was going through a divorce.

“I love Opus Dei but I was caught up in this cover-up,” the woman said. “I went to confession, thinking I did something to tempt this holy man to cross boundaries.”

Opus Dei is investigating two other allegations of misconduct against McCloskey, one of them potentially “serious,” according to Brian Finnerty, an Opus Dei spokesman.

After the settlement, Opus Dei had ordered McCloskey to lead a more private life, and he was sent to England, Chicago and California, working at various assignments with Opus Dei. He was prohibited from offering spiritual direction to women except in the confessional, where there was a barrier.

McCloskey’s case is reportedly the only settlement paid by Opus Dei in the United States for a claim of sexual misconduct.

Bishop Rogelio Livieres Plano and Fr. Carlos Urrutigoity

Five years ago, Pope Francis abruptly removed an Opus Dei bishop, the late Rogelio Livieres Plano, from his see in Ciudad del Este in Paraguay. Critics claim the removal was unjust and that Livieres was targeted for his orthodoxy. He had often clashed with his more liberal brother bishops, and his supporters claim that, although he had enjoyed the support of Pope Benedict, once Francis came to power he was arbitrarily removed.

But others claim the removal had much to do with scandal surrounding his vicar general, Fr. Carlos Urrutigoity, tainted with sex abuse allegations from the United States and Argentina. The priest had been kicked out of the diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania in 2004 over multiple accusations that he had fondled male teens at St. Gregory Academy, a school run by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter.

Bishop Joseph Martino, former head of Scranton, had called the priest a “serious threat to young people,” while Urrutigoity, a priest who offered the Traditional Latin Mass, proclaimed his innocence. The Scranton diocese settled a lawsuit against the visiting Argentine priest for $400,000, and he was prohibited from exercising priestly ministry. Urrutigoity left Scranton for South America, where Livieres welcomed him into his diocese and eventually made him vicar general.

Livieres did not believe the allegations, calling them “slander.”

“Just as I have not hesitated to convict the guilty, neither will I punish a innocent victim of slander,” Livieres said in 2008, after public outcry over Urrutigoity’s appointment as vicar general.

Opus Dei, the only personal prelature in the Catholic Church, is among the wealthiest faith-based communities in the world, with a value estimated at $2.8 billion. In addition to donations, much of its wealth comes from Opus Dei members, called numeraries and supernumeraries, who pledge to give all or a portion of their salary to Opus Dei. According to its website, there are approximately 85,000 members of Opus Dei worldwide.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column is republished with permission.

The “Green” Whitehouse Agenda: The Enemies List

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The “Green Whitehouse” Agenda (full series)
The Enemies List | Green Pays | Sheldon’s Endgame

Summary: Americans are accustomed to politicians saying one thing and doing another. But arguments about the funding behind think tanks and advocacy organizations are perhaps the most one-sided of the recurring debates on Capitol Hill. Few are as outspoken on the issue as Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. The wrinkle? Senator Whitehouse has a prolific portfolio of stocks that oddly aligns with industries he oversees.

Dealing with Our Political Enemies

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is a supporter of socialist New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND). A radical environmental/economic fantasy that proposes to tear up and rebuild the U.S. economy over a ten-year period, the GND price tag, according to a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, will check in at between $51 trillion and $93 trillion. The high-side estimate roughly equals the combined annual economic output of . . . Earth.

Sen. Whitehouse disputes the characterization that this is a “radical” proposal, telling Salon in February that the true radicals are the “misbehaving” Republicans deluded by their “fossil fuel funding.”

This is one of many examples where there’s an ironic (less charitably, we might say “hypocritical”) twist in the character of one of the nation’s most influential left-wing politicians. Whether he’s trying to turn a climate policy disagreement into a federal racketeering lawsuit, or sheepishly dodging responsibility when his money and his mouth seem to be running in different directions, Whitehouse can be relied upon to replace accountability with accusations, and to wield his power and privilege in the service of gaining more of both.

Whitehouse has been berating the energy industry since 2007 and is arguably the Senate’s most accomplished practitioner of climate panic. In a 2008 news release, he denounced the oil industry for its “obscene” profits and doing “little to invest in the alternative energy technologies that will help end our dependence on fossil fuels.” In an October 2009 floor speech pitching a “clean energy” proposal he warned his colleagues not to “sit idle” and be “beguiled by the money and spin of polluting industries.”

But as he was talking, Whitehouse owned between $250,000 and $800,000 in ten different oil and gas industry stocks. This is according to his 2008 financial disclosure forms, as reported by the Center for Responsive Politics (the forms record a range of value for each investment, not a specific value). Giant oil and gas exploration and servicing firms, such as Devon Energy and Schlumberger Ltd, were two of his largest energy industry holdings.

For 2009, CRP reported his energy industry stock holdings at between $145,000 and $475,000.

So, while denouncing the energy company profits and preaching to the Senate about avoiding the beguiling money of the so-called “polluting industries,” his personal financial stake in “beguiling pollution” reportedly fell somewhere between “more than the value of most people’s homes” and “more than the total net worth of most Americans.”

This state of affairs seemed to hold until at least 2014, when he reported selling his stake in Schlumberger. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the same year GoLocalProv, a news service in Providence, Rhode Island, began looking into whether Whitehouse’s investments squared with this ideology. In December 2014 they posted a report showing Whitehouse owned between $15,000 and $50,000 in Duke Energy (a large, coal-burning electric utility) as recently as the end of 2012.

Noting Whitehouse had (at that point) delivered “80 floor speeches about the adverse impact of global warming,” GoLocalProv speculated about the “conflict” between the politician’s “economic interests” and his “environmental pronouncements.”

Whitehouse usually escapes such media scrutiny. His complicated history with energy investments wasn’t mentioned in a March 2019 report in Roll Call, which gave critical examination to three Republican U.S. House members on a newly-formed “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis” because of their “personal investment in fossil fuel companies.” One of the three, Congressman Gary Palmer (R—Alabama), was questioned by the reporter due to his owning just $1,000 to $15,000 in each of three energy firms. This means Palmer’s total “personal investment” could be as small as the price of a cheap used car ($3,000) – hardly enough to motivate the congressman to become a cartoonish climate villain.

A Whitehouse staffer wouldn’t fess up to the specific details regarding what the boss owned and when, but tried to explain that it had been taken care of, saying “the Senator divested his investments from fossil fuels during the past couple of years” and “feels strongly about his work on environmental issues.”

Maybe critics should go easy on him: His heart’s in the right place, even if his wallet is still trying to catch up.

But where Whitehouse has been very generously willing to excuse his own complicity, while literally being an owner of the fossil fuel industry, he thinks the industry itself needs a knock on the door from the FBI.

Writing in the Washington Post in 2015, he proposed using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against energy companies that disagree with his climate policy agenda. A year later, during a March 2016 hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, he asked then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch what the Department of Justice thought of this.

The stunning reply from President Obama’s top cop: “This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on.”

Richard Nixon analogies should be used sparingly but are sometimes too on-point to ignore. An infamous 1971 White House memo, titled “Dealing with our Political Enemies,” summarized what became known as Nixon’s “enemies list”—a plot to inflict IRS audits and other federal harassments on people whose only offense was disagreeing with a powerful politician.

“This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration,” wrote Nixon Administration lawyer John Dean. “Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

Almost five decades later, Sheldon Whitehouse seems to be using the Nixon White House as a role model. And the next time he gets friendly climate cultists in the White House willing to listen to him, he won’t just be coming after the companies who keep the economy humming with low-cost energy, but anyone who speaks up to defend the good work they’re doing.

He’s tried it already.

In July 2016, just a few months after Lynch assured him the FBI was taking him seriously, Whitehouse and 18 other Democratic senators (including former and current minority leaders Harry Reid of Nevada and Chuck Schumer of New York) spent two days on the floor of the Senate denouncing dozens of free enterprise policy organizations that disagree with Whitehouse’s environmental extremism. Special times were reserved for verbal lashings directed at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and many others Whitehouse has elsewhere referred to as part of a “corrupt monster.”

Few relevant friends of the free market were excluded from this attack. In a joint letter responding to the assault, some of the think tanks denounced the creation of the “enemies list” by Whitehouse and the others, calling the Senators “tyrants” who were using their offices to “to bully and single out groups to blame rather than ideas to debate.”

In the next installment of The “Green” Whitehouse Agenda, learn how deep-pocketed environmentalist groups help support their man in the Senate.

COLUMN BY

Ken Braun

Ken Braun is CRC’s senior investigative researcher and authors profiles for InfluenceWatch.org and the Capital Research magazine. He previously worked for several free market policy organizations, spent six… + MORE BY KEN BRAUN.

EDITORS NOTE: This Capital Research Center column is republished with permission.

VIDEO: The Vortex — RICO — Bring It On!

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TRANSCRIPT

There is no doubt about one thing when it comes to the non-stop news of cover-up bishops and their malfeasance — faithful Catholics, the politically conservative ones — want the full weight of the federal government brought to bear to ferret out this evil from the Church.

Look at these numbers from a Church Militant poll we conducted over the last seven days. Going on 7,000 people responded to the online poll, and the results are flat-out overwhelming.

A whopping 92 percent of Catholics want the U.S. Department of Justice to initiate RICO charges against the U.S. bishops. That is a staggering percentage.

But even more telling is this number: 98 percent of those saying “lower the boom” are self-identified, orthodox, believing Catholics. No matter how you slice and dice these numbers, they are bad news for the USCCB and a green light for the feds from faithful American Catholics.

It’s important, politically speaking, to make the crucial distinction between faithful Catholics and mediocre, lukewarm, social justice Catholics. The latter bunch didn’t vote for Trump and probably never would. They are essentially Democrats with a crucifix on the wall in their house somewhere — maybe; think Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy.

What that crowd thinks, one way or the other, is meaningless when it comes to President Trump and his Justice Department making a decision whether to pursue RICO charges against the bishops.

They wouldn’t vote for Trump in 100 years, so, frankly, the president shouldn’t even weigh that in his calculus — nor should Attorney General William Barr.

And in case you’re wondering why there is so much political talk surrounding this, it’s because a decision in a case like this is rife with political considerations.

Right or wrong, that’s just the way it is — just like in the Jussie Smollett case. There is the case itself, and then, there is all the politics of it, as was evidenced earlier this week this competing rallies for and against Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and her dropping of the charges.

Any high profile case always has a political dynamic to it, and the optics of the federal government going after the U.S. Catholic Church as though it is an organized crime syndicate would certainly be potentially explosive. All that said, this has got to happen.

Day after day, prosecutors and investigators all around the country are saying, publicly and privately, too many of the bishops are corrupt, are not cooperating with their investigations, not capable of policing themselves, have too much to cover up and are more sinister than dealing with mob bosses.

That is why there is a growing groundswell within the ranks of law enforcement for RICO to be activated.

When the former Cardinal McCarrick was finally outed for decades of sexually assaulting teenagers and seminarians, not a single prelate in the Church stepped forward and admitted that they knew about it, helped covered it up, profited, sometimes enormously, for their silence.

Dozens and dozens of bishops, and men who would become bishops, saw their ecclesiastical careers accelerated for their willingness to turn a blind eye his evil.

And McCarrick, although a big one, is still just one case. Not every seminarian sexually assaulted was assaulted by McCarrick, not by a long shot.

Hundreds if not thousands of seminarians over the decades, including recently, as well as thousands and thousands of teenage boys, are the victims of these negligent men who still to this day have gotten away with it.

Sure, they had to approve collectively $4 billion in payouts, but that didn’t come out of their personal wallets. It was money from the faithful.

The bishops themselves still live financially well-off lives. They get their pay, their health insurance, their extensive travel, their staffs, all the perks. They are in fact pretty much immune from the negative consequences of their malice.

And when they retire, material life will still be good and all provided for. For those who have profited off the system of cover-up and lies and deception, this isn’t right.

Look at LA Cardinal Roger Mahony, who actually shipped priests out of the country to hide them from the law; or D.C. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who participated in the cover-up and lied about what he knew of McCarrick and then lied about lying.

Men like this should face at least some measure of justice in this life, for their own good as well as the good of the faithful, and also to begin the much-needed restoration of the Church.

These men have sat atop what has essentially been a politically liberal machine for decades, taking billions and billions in government money and distributing large chunks of it to anti-Catholic groups who happen to also be get-out-the-vote Democratic non-profits.

Government money has been funneled by these same men into so-called “social justice” organizations which have registered huge numbers of Democratic voters in order to advance socialism as the ruling coalition in the United States.

The entire social justice arm of the Church was established in fact in cooperation with community organizer atheist Saul Alinsky, which even provided the training ground for Barack Obama back in 1980s Chicago.

As Church Militant has been revealing and reporting for years now, not to mention earning the hatred of the USCCB, the entire bishops’ national headquarters is modeled after Saul Alinsky’s worldview, which is why they have been referred to frequently as the Democratic Party at prayer — talk about a swamp in need of draining.

They have betrayed the American Dream. They have betrayed the Catholic Church. They go to great lengths to slam many of Trump’s initiatives, falsely labeling or suggesting they are un-Catholic.

No, Your Excellencies, what is un-Catholic is covering up sexual assault by the thousands — of teenagers, 80 percent of whom are physically mature boys. Many of them have led corrupt lives, and all of this must be brought to a screeching halt.

In truth, many of them deserve to be behind bars but have skillfully managed to avoid that by shredding documents, stonewalling investigations, calling in favors from Democratic politicians — you name it.

There is nothing they have not engaged in, including the cover-up of thousands of sexual assaults.

This is the driving force behind the desire on the part of an overwhelming number of faithful Catholics wanting to see Donald Trump approve a RICO investigation by his Justice Department. If there was ever a cause of justice, criminally, politically and theologically, this would be it.

As the bevy of investigations continue to unfold, the reality of this will undoubtedly be coming into much sharper focus.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column with video is republished with permission.