RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-bannon-indictment/

If there are convictions, the potential penalties are severe.

NR’s Zachary Evans has reported on the Justice Department’s indictment of former Trump campaign manager and White House adviser Steve Bannon, along with three codefendants — Brian Kolfage, an Air Force vet who became a triple-amputee serving in the Iraq War; Andrew Badolato, a longtime Bannon associate; and Timothy Shea, who helped Kolfage establish “We Build the Wall,” the campaign said to be at the center of the alleged fraud scheme.

The indictment unsealed today elucidates that a great deal of investigative scutwork went into this case, chiefly by the U.S. postal inspectors and prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Indeed, the investigation was plainly in gear last autumn: The indictment says that in October 2019, the defendants were tipped off by a financial institution that they were under investigation. The wire-fraud and money-laundering charges were a long time coming, and the postal inspectors appear to have meticulously traced the proceeds through numerous bank accounts, real-estate parcels, and at least one vehicle. These are itemized in the indictment’s forfeiture allegations, which are in addition to the significant imprisonment and staggering fines that could result in the event of convictions.

Our 40-page report details how tens of billions of taxpayer dollars went out the door in the last 30-days of the 2019 fiscal year.
Inside our oversight report, you’ll find:

$457 million spent on furniture (even though, today, 75-percent of the federal workforce is telecommuting and not in the office)
$456 million spent on public relations (PR), despite the 5,000 PR officers employed within government agencies
$50 million on seafood, like $40 million on catfish and mahi mahi and $4.6 million on lobster and crab
$3.7 million on games, toys, and musical instruments including pianos, flutes, and French horns

You’ll also find spending on guns and ammunition at the following agencies: Education, Veterans Affairs, and Human & Human Services. 

OpenTheBooks auditors even found $100,000 spent on desserts, like donuts ($43,000), cake mix ($36,000) and pecan pie ($10,000). 

All of the details can be found in our report here.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/19/portland-businesses-fleeing-downtown-ov

Large companies are fleeing offices in downtown Portland — because nightly Black Lives Matter riots are making the heart of the Oregon city a no-go area, according to a report.

“Businesses are leaving,” Andrew Hoan, president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance (PBA), told KATU.

“The financial consequences to the downtown corridor are a running calculation that is almost impossible to wrap your mind around,” he said — with one company already saying the riots have cost $20 million in damage and lost business.

“You have blocks and blocks of plywood. You have graffiti. You have an accumulation of damages that are unrepaired, an ongoing perception that coming downtown is not a safe place,” Hoan said.

“We need to start to turn the corner now, so that this sort of irreparable damage does not last,” the business leader said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/chicago-descends-anarchy-jason-d-hill/

Last week in Chicago saw the most major of American cities in the Midwest descend into chaos and mayhem as looters and rioters took to the city’s downtown streets and unleashed a reign of destruction and nihilistic terror. Acting under the pretenses of social justice, and outrage at police brutality against blacks, anarchists and Black Lives Matter supporters reveal a desire not to peacefully protest whatever reasonable grievances they think they might have, but rather to destroy principles of civility, property rights and the First Amendment. And, of course, they also clearly wish to unload their absolute unfiltered hatred of law enforcement.

More than 100 people were arrested between Sunday night and Monday morning after an overnight spate of violence that seems to have begun with a 20-year-old man who, unprovoked, opened fire at police officers. Thirteen officers were injured in displays of violence around the city. Police Superintendent David Brown on Monday described the incident not as peaceful protests, but as incidents of pure criminality.

On Monday evening, the looters, rioters and anarchists again struck the wealthy section of downtown Chicago’s Gold Coast region, looting and destroying designer stores including Ralph Lauren, Jimmy Choo, and Geneva Seal. U-Haul trucks were seen waiting on the sides of roads to deposit the burglarized property from the city’s prime real estate area. 

A Black Lives Matter Chicago organizer said Monday that the mobs who vandalized and looted downtown businesses the night before did nothing wrong, calling it “reparations” for Black suffering.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-white-house-prepared-for-a-pandemic-11597792593

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched the Democrats’ broadside against the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response. “Our current federal government is dysfunctional and incompetent,” he told virtual conventioneers Monday in a recorded speech. “It couldn’t fight off the virus. In fact, it didn’t even see it coming.”

The report was produced by the Council of Economic Advisers at the behest of the National Security Council’s biodefense team. It detailed the large health and economic losses that could happen from flu pandemic in the U.S. The report discussed how the lack of private market incentives had led to underinvestment in developing and using innovative technologies that can quickly produce vaccines for a new virus.

Influenza vaccines have primarily been manufactured in chicken eggs for the past 70 years. The process is too slow to produce a new vaccine for a novel, unexpected virus and impairs the vaccines’ efficacy against the flu. Public-private partnerships created under a 2006 statute led to the development of newer, faster manufacturing techniques. But these vaccines are more expensive and haven’t been widely adopted.

The main issue is that vaccine developers aren’t rewarded for innovation. Their research-and-development and investment costs for improved vaccines are recovered only through sales that occur in the unlikely event that a pandemic occurs—there have only been four flu pandemics the past 100 years—even though vaccine innovation provides benefits from risk-reduction before any pandemic. Vaccines have insurance value today that provides protection against possible future damage, regardless of whether a pandemic occurs. That means the social return from innovative vaccines is greater than their private return to developers.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/more-than-200-charged-with-federal-crimes-under-operation-legend-doj_3466551.html

More than 200 people have been charged with federal crimes among the nearly 1,500 people arrested as part of an initiative aimed to stem violent crime in major inner cities, the Justice Department (DOJ) stated on Aug. 19.

The figures represent the latest numbers of law enforcement actions taken since the start of Operation Legend in early July, which has since been expanded to numerous cities around the country, Attorney General William Barr said.

As part of the operation, about 217 people were charged with federal crimes and nearly 400 firearms have been seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), Barr said. The nearly 1,500 people arrested were mostly arrested for violent state crimes, which include more than 90 homicides.

Numbers from Indianapolis, which was added to the program just last week, aren’t included, the DOJ stated.

Over the past few weeks, the DOJ announced several moves to show its commitment to cracking down on violent crime across the country. That led to Operation Legend, a law enforcement program in which federal resources are surged to inner U.S. cities to assist local and state law enforcement officials to tackle violent crime and restore public safety.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ex-fbi-lawyer-kevin-clinesmith-pleads-guilty-in-durham-investigation

The former FBI lawyer charged in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation of the investigators pleaded guilty Wednesday to a false statements charge for fraudulently altering a CIA email to obtain surveillance against a former Trump campaign associate.

Clinesmith, who worked on the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server as well as on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane inquiry and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team during the Trump-Russia inquiry, admitted that he falsified a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority to wiretap Carter Page, who had been a foreign policy adviser to now-President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Judge James Boasberg, the presiding judge in the criminal case against Clinesmith (and also the presiding judge for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), accepted the plea during the hearing conducted by phone before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Clinesmith, 38, claimed in early 2017 that Page was “not a source” for the CIA when the CIA had actually told the bureau on multiple occasions that Page was indeed an operational contact for them. Durham submitted a five-page filing to the federal court on Friday, noting Clinesmith was being charged under 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(3) for “False Statements.”

Anthony Scarpelli, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a Durham team member, appeared for the Justice Department. Clinesmith’s lawyer, Justin Shur, was representing him on the call.

The judge asked Clinesmith if he agreed everything outlined in Durham’s criminal information court filed Friday against Clinesmith was true, and he replied, “Yes, your honor.”

https://www.wbez.org/stories/winning-has-come-through-revolts-a-black-lives-matter-activist-on-why-she-supports-looting/398d0f3f-73d0-4f2e-ae32-04cceba0d322

The Sunday afternoon shooting by police of Latrell Allen, 20, in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood led to a standoff in that community between residents and officers. By evening the tension had eased, but overnight and into the early morning hours Monday, looters hit Chicago’s wealthiest shopping district on North Michigan Avenue.

Looting earlier this summer grew out of large protest marches downtown. This most recent looting was different, and it’s exact genesis remains unclear. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said,“This is not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech. … This was straight-up felony, criminal conduct,” but some activists disagree. WBEZ talked with Black Lives Matter organizer Ariel Atkins on why she supports people looting and looting as protest.

What’s your take on the police shooting in Englewood and the subsequent looting downtown?

Ariel Atkins: A lot of people are really attacking our pages. They’re like, ‘Oh, you support the looters.’ And yeah, we do, 100%. That’s reparations. And like however people choose to protest, especially if it was definitely in line with what happened with the shooting, which would be powerful to see people reacting … without organizers just being like, ‘We’re angry and this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna take the power back.’

I feel like these stores, these Macy’s, these Guccis, the PNC Banks, they’re not here for us. The city puts way more money and investment into spending time and protecting their spaces and making sure that they exist. And yet our people are constantly being pushed out of the city. … Unemployment is incredibly high, like we are in an incredible situation, and the fact that anybody gives a s*** about these businesses over what is happening in this city right now and the pain that people are in and the suffering that is taking place, I don’t care. I will support the looters ‘till the end of the day. If that’s what they need to do in order to eat, then that’s what you’ve got to do to eat.