#bribery allegations in elections

[townpostin]

Jamshedpur Businessman Acquitted in 2012 RS Election Case

RK Agarwal cleared of horse-trading charges after 12-year legal battle CBI special court finds insufficient evidence in the 2012 Jharkhand Rajya Sabha election bribery case. RANCHI – A CBI special court has acquitted Jamshedpur businessman RK Agarwal of horse-trading charges related to the 2012 Jharkhand Rajya Sabha elections. The case against Agarwal, an independent candidate in the 2012…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at Think Big Picture:

For years, critics of Vladimir Putin have been warning that the Russians have taken over parts of the Republican Party. They raised the alarm as Republicans defended the Russian leader, parroted clear Kremlin talking points, and became mules for disinformation campaigns. In recent weeks, that criticism has shifted to include not just Republicans who have left the party, including former representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but current GOP members. Recently, two powerful Republican chairs of the House Intelligence Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee warned openly about how Russian propaganda has seeped into their party and even made its way into speeches on the House floor. Other members are now even openly questioning whether some of their fellow officials have been compromised and are being extorted. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) suggested in a recent interview that the Russian spies may possess compromising tapes of some of his colleagues. It’s unclear where he’s getting his information or how accurate it is.

And then there’s this: According to a report by Politico, a number of European politicians were recently paid by Moscow to interfere in the upcoming EU elections by Russians pretending to be a “media” outlet called “Voice of Europe.” The Kremlin-backed operation used money to influence officials to take pro-Russian stances. Authorities have conducted some money seizures and launched an investigation into which members of the European Parliament may have accepted cash bribes. This in turn raises an important question for our own politics: Are the Russians doing the same with U.S. politicians, directly or indirectly? This piece walks through the three types of compromise—disinformation, extortion, and bribery—to give a sense of what we know and what we don’t really know, and, importantly, where we should be on our guard. As this summary will show, from the 2016 election till now, there’s enough Russian smoke now to assume there is a fire, one that compromises not only the integrity of our own system of elections, but the safety and security of the free world. Duped.

Over the past year, we have witnessed two distinct kinds of Russian propaganda in action. Both use our own elected officials and intelligence processes to amplify and even weaponize disinformation. The first kind originates online through Russian-backed internet channels. Information operatives begin spreading false rumors, for example about Ukraine, that then get repeated within right-wing silos before reaching willing purveyors of it within the halls of Congress. A chief culprit in Congress is Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Among the Russian-originated false narratives she has uplifted is the patently false claim that Ukraine is waging a war against Christianity while Russia is protecting it. On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Greene even claimed, without evidence, that Ukraine is “executing priests.”

Where would Greene have gotten this wild, concocted notion? We don’t have to look far. Russian talking points have included this gaslighting narrative for some time. The twist, of course, is that, according to the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, it is the Russian army that has been torturing and executing priests and other religious figures, including 30 Ukrainian clergy killed and 26 held captive by Russian forces. The Russians have also targeted Baptists, whom they see as U.S. propagandists, according to an in-depth Time magazine piece on the violence and death directed toward evangelicals. The Congressional propaganda mouthpieces for Russia aren’t limited to the U.S. House. Over in the Senate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance was also recently accused of spreading Kremlin-backed disinformation about Ukraine, this time over spurious allegations that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy siphoned U.S. aid to purchase himself two luxury yachts.

[...]

The accusation that Russians are presently extorting and blackmailing U.S. politicians into supporting Russia’s agenda has some broad appeal. It would help explain some mysteries, including why people like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suddenly is no longer as supportive of Ukraine as before and constantly kisses the ring of Donald Trump these days—after presciently saying in 2016 that the GOP would destroy itself if it nominated him. 

The problem has been that these accusations aren’t supported by much evidence. That means that political extortion by the Russians is either not a very prevalent practice, or it’s so effective that no one dares expose it. Either way, we’re left without much to go on. The Russian word kompromat came into common parlance around the time that Buzzfeed published a salacious story about another intelligence report back in early 2017. In that instance, the author, a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, was concerned Russia had compromising data on the soon-to-be president, Donald Trump.

That report never wound up being substantiated, and its sources and funding came into question as well. But intelligence agencies are in general agreement that obtaining kompromat is standard practice by Russia, and someone like Trump could have been an easy mark considering the company that he kept (e.g. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell) and the projects he was involved with (e.g. the Miss Universe contest). Lately, the notion of kompromat emerged once again, this time not from Democratic-paid outfits but from within the GOP itself. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) is one of the more “colorful” characters within the GOP, primarily known lately for being one of the eight members who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and even for getting into public jostling and shouting matches with McCarthy.

The Republican Party (or at least its pro-MAGA faction) is compromised by Russian kompromat.

[ghoul-haunted]

felix and (lucullus) run for Gov/Vice Gov a second time, but cethegus (seth, I've decided) decides to drop out and crasso ends up getting elected to the treasury position, which is annoying for felix and extremely fucking funny to (lucullus)

crasso's character arc finally has the bite I was looking for. we got the mild mannered trajectory to 'this hole you put me in wasn't deep enough and I'm crawling out of it RIGHT NOW,' I trying to get in the first draft YE HAW

[mariacallous]

A former F.B.I. informant accused of making false bribery claims about President Biden and his son Hunter — which were widely publicized by Republicans — claimed to have been fed information by Russian intelligence, according to a court filing on Tuesday.

In the memo, prosecutors portrayed the former informant, Alexander Smirnov, 43, as a serial liar incapable of telling the truth about even the most basic details of his own life. But Mr. Smirnov told federal investigators that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.

Those disclosures, including Mr. Smirnov’s unverifiable claim that he met with Russian intelligence officials as recently as three months ago, made him a flight risk and endangered national security, Justice Department officials said. Mr. Smirnov had been held in custody in Las Vegas, where he has lived since 2022, since his arrest last week.

He was released from custody on Tuesday on a personal recognizance bond after a detention hearing, said his lawyers, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld.

Prosecutors did not specify which story Russian intelligence is said to have been fed to Mr. Smirnov, an Israeli citizen. But they suggested they could not believe anything he said. And they had many tales to choose from.

The memo describes Mr. Smirnov as a human hall of mirrors: He fed the F.B.I. bogus information about the Bidens and misled prosecutors about his wealth, estimated at $6 million, while telling them he worked in the security business, even though the government could find no proof that was true.

“The misinformation he is spreading is not confined” to his false claims about the Bidens, wrote prosecutors working for David C. Weiss, the special counsel investigating Hunter Biden on tax and gun charges.

“He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November,” they added.

That appeared to refer to Mr. Smirnov’s claim, made in late 2023 to the F.B.I., that he had spoken to the head of a Russian intelligence unit who said he had intercepted phone calls made by guests at a hotel overseas. Those included “several calls placed by prominent U.S. persons the Russian government may use as ‘kompromat’ in the 2024 election,” according to prosecutors.

Mr. Smirnov also told his F.B.I. handler that he was involved in meetings to help resolve the war in Ukraine, and that he had knowledge of assassination squads operating in “a third-party country.”

Last week, Mr. Weiss charged Mr. Smirnov with fabricating claims that President Biden and his son each sought $5 million bribes from a Ukrainian energy giant, Burisma, demanding the money to protect the company from an investigation by the country’s prosecutor general.

Those allegations, which prosecutors now say were brazen fabrications motivated by Mr. Smirnov’s animosity toward the president, were widely promoted by congressional Republicans who cited it as a justification for their now-stalled effort to impeach Mr. Biden.

Mr. Smirnov was taken into custody last week as he walked off an international flight from what prosecutors described as “a monthslong, multicountry foreign trip.” During that trip, he claimed to have had contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies and had planned to embark on a similar trip days later, according to the memo.

What makes the Smirnov case so unusual, aside from its political significance, is the willingness of the F.B.I. to publicly burn a confidential informant who had been on the bureau’s payroll as recently as last year. The filing contained excerpts from his source reporting documents, raw notes from interviews between handlers and informants that are considered some of the most sensitive federal law enforcement documents.

Also on Tuesday, Hunter Biden’s legal team filed motions in federal court arguing that the arrest of Mr. Smirnov — while unrelated to the charges Mr. Biden faces — has tainted the public’s perception of their client, making fair trials impossible.

“It now seems clear that the Smirnov allegations infected this case,” said Abbe Lowell, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, who accused Mr. Weiss of following “Mr. Smirnov down his rabbit hole of lies.”

[allthegeopolitics]

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with accepting bribes and soliciting illegal foreign donations to his election campaign, according to a federal indictment that was unsealed on Thursday. He is the first sitting New York mayor in modern history to face criminal charges. The 57-page indictment is the culmination of a long-running investigation into Adams’s 2021 election campaign and his alleged ties to Turkish government officials. It has included weeks of searches by federal agents, has led to the resignation of high-ranking officials and has thrown the city’s government into crisis.

Continue Reading.

[collapsedsquid]

Prosecutors have the gold bars Menendez supposedly received as a corrupt payment, a cooperating witness, and text messages that, they say, showed the senator promising to take votes and other official actions in exchange for bribes. But the prosecution is being complicated by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause—or at least by the trial judge’s expansive reading of it. This provision aims to allow lawmakers to avoid legal liability for things they say or do in Congress. The idea is to protect elected representatives from being sued or prosecuted for performing their constitutional duties. You might assume that this clause—while sensibly protecting lawmakers from things like libel suits or criminal charges over controversial floor speeches—would have a carveout for public corruption cases. It, in fact, does not. Read literally, it appears quite broad. “For any speech or debate in either House, [members of Congress] shall not be questioned in any other place,” it says. The feds had argued they could sidestep this provision by avoiding evidence concerning officials acts Menendez took. Instead, they planned to focus on text messages related to his alleged promises to take corrupt actions. But last week, after the trial was well underway, US District Judge Sidney Stein said he would bar prosecutors from introducing text messages that, they allege, showed the people who bribed Menendez discussing “getting their money’s worth” from the senator.

You see you can argue Trump isn't being politically prosecuted but it's hard when it's impossible to prosecute congressmen even for the most flagrant corruption possible.

[kick-a-long]

DC councilmember known for pushing antisemitic conspiracy theories is arrested on bribery charge

White has served on the D.C. council since 2017.

A District of Columbia councilmember known for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories has been arrested on charges that he accepted over $150,000 in bribes in exchange for using his elected position to help companies with city contracts, according to court records unsealed on Monday.

Trayon White Sr., a Democrat who ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 2022, was arrested on a federal bribery charge by the FBI on Sunday. He is expected to make his initial court appearance on Monday.

White’s chief of staff and spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

An FBI agent’s affidavit says White agreed in June to accept roughly $156,000 in kickbacks and cash payments in exchange for pressuring government agency employees to extend two companies’ contracts for violence intervention services. The contacts were worth over $5 million.

White, 40, also accepted a $20,000 bribe payment to help resolve a contract dispute for one of the companies by pressuring high-level district officials, the affidavit alleges.

An FBI informant who agreed to plead guilty to fraud and bribery charges reported giving White gifts including travel to the Dominican Republic and Las Vegas along with paying him bribes, the FBI said.

White, who has served on the D.C. council since 2017, represents a predominantly Black ward where the poverty rate is nearly twice as high as the overall district. He is running for re-election in November against a Republican challenger.

White was one of two D.C. council members whom Mayor Muriel Bower defeated two years ago in the Democratic primary. White, a former grassroots community activist, was a protégé of former Mayor Marion Barry, who also represented the same ward as White on the council.

In March 2018, White posted a video on his Facebook page claiming that an unexpected snowfall was because of “the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters.” The Rothschilds, a Jewish family that was prominent in the banking industry, are a frequent subject of conspiracy theories.

At the time, White said he was unaware that the weather-related conspiracy theory is antisemitic. A video later surfaced of White pushing a similar conspiracy theory during a meeting of top city officials. He posed a question based on the stereotypical premise that the Rothschilds controlled the World Bank and the federal government.

Associated Press writer Ashraf Khalil contributed to this report.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Iam not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.

According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.

Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits.

Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.

Trump’s own former staffers are part of the Heritage Foundation’s team planning to implement Project 25 if he wins, which would finish off our system of government with yet another coup. “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said the foundation’s president the other day. This alarms me. So does the behavior of the US mainstream media, which seems more concerned with sabotaging the only thing standing between us and this third coup.

“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media knows how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the republic. So for the most part they don’t.

Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict).

We are deciding whether this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

Few seem to remember that Biden’s age and his verbal gaffes were an issue in the 2020 campaign. Biden is a lifelong stutterer, and the effort to keep his words on track means that he operates under an extra burden with every unscripted answer he gives, particularly under pressure (though he had a long, easygoing conversation with Howard Stern a couple of months ago, in which he discusses his stuttering at about the 1:13 mark).

Some speech pathologists have suggested he may (not does, just may) have a disorder that sometimes accompanies stuttering, called cluttering, which is not an intellectual deficiency but a sometimes hectic and disorderly translation of thoughts into words. In recent months, actual gerontologists have said in print that Biden appears to have normal signs of aging, not signs of dementia. Nevertheless, the amateur armchair diagnosticians have been out in packs, and their confidence in their ability to diagnose from watching TV is itself an alarming delusion. I am not giving Biden a clean bill of health; I’m saying that I don’t have a basis to render a verdict (and neither do the august editors of large publications).

Few seem to remember that Biden’s age and his verbal gaffes were an issue in the 2020 campaign

Although the Biden administration seems to have run extremely well for three and a half years, with a strong cabinet, few scandals and little turnover, a thriving economy and some major legislative accomplishments, the narrative the punditocracy has created suggest we should ignore this record and decide on the basis of the 90-minute debate and reference to newly surfaced swarms of anonymous sources that Biden is incompetent. Quite a lot of them have been running magical-realism fantasy-football scenarios in which it is fun and easy to swap in your favorite substitute candidate. The reality is that it is hard and quite likely to be a terrible mess. Nevertheless, this pretense is supposed to mean that telling a presidential candidate in mid-campaign to get lost is fine.

The main argument against Biden is not that he can’t govern – that would be hard to make given that he seems to have done so for the past years – but that he can’t win the election. But candidates do not win elections by themselves. Elections are won, to state the obvious, by how the electorate turns out and votes. The electorate votes based on how they understand the situation and evaluate the candidates. That is, of course, in large part shaped by the media, as Hannah-Jones points out, and the media is right now campaigning hard for a Democratic party loss. The other term for that is a Republican victory. Few things have terrified and horrified me the way this does.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

[darkmaga-returns]

Feds Target Prominent SW Florida Conservative Businessman and Activist Alfie Oakes

Dr. Joseph Sansone

Nov 07, 2024

Apparent rogue federal agencies raided the home and farm of Alfie Oakes a SW Florida conservative activist. Reportedly, federal agents used a battering ram to enter Alfie Oakes home while his wife and daughter were home.

NBC Local News

Law enforcement, including federal officials, were seen going in and out of the home of Alfie Oakes on Santa Cruz Court in the Villages of Monterey community in North Naples and an agricultural packing plant in Immokalee. Federal agents from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service were seen at the packing plant. The DCIS investigates cases of fraud, bribery, and corruption, including cyber crimes and computer intrusions.

WINK News

Several law enforcement departments were also seen at Oakes Farm packing house, including the Secret Service, the IRS and the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Inspector General on the scene.

Alfie Oakes gained notoriety by refusing to engage in Nuremberg Crimes and force face masks on his employees or customers during the COVID madness. The product of a vertical marketing business model, Oakes’s Seed to Table grocery store is a destination with an on site restaurant and often features conservative speakers. Alfie Oakes has been interviewed by Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson and is a prominent local businessman and Collier County Republican State Committeeman.

The purpose of the alleged investigation is a mystery. It appears that Alfie Oakes is being targeted for being a Trump supporter and being outspoken about the fraudulent 2020 presidential election as well as openly resisting COVID tyranny.

In a tyranny, truth is treason….

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A District of Columbia councilmember known for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories accepted over $150,000 in bribes in exchange for pressuring D.C. employees to extend city contracts for violence intervention services, authorities alleged in court records unsealed Monday.

Trayon White Sr., a Democrat who ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 2022, was arrested Sunday on a federal bribery charge and released from custody after a brief court appearance Monday. His attorney declined to comment on the allegations against him.

White agreed in June to accept roughly $156,000 in kickbacks and cash payments in exchange for pressuring government agency employees to extend two companies' contracts worth over $5 million, prosecutors said.

Authorities say they have secretly recorded conversations between White and an FBI informant who gave White $35,000 in cash on four occasions between June and August. A photo included in court papers shows White stuffing what the FBI says is an envelope filled with $15,000 in cash in his jacket pocket.

The informant — who operated businesses that contracted with the D.C. government — also reported giving White gifts including travel to the Dominican Republic and Las Vegas along with paying him bribes, the FBI said. The informant agreed to cooperate with the FBI as part of an agreement to plead guilty to fraud and bribery charges .

In one secretly recorded meeting detailed in court papers, authorities say the informant gave White $5,000 in cash and told the councilmember that the money was in exchange for reaching out to two government employees. White responded: “I am on top of all of that. ... Once you and I lock eyes and gets to an understanding, I gets to work. I can start making some (expletive) happen.”

The informant told authorities that White, 40, also accepted a $20,000 bribe payment to help resolve a contract dispute for one of the companies by pressuring high-level district officials, the affidavit alleges,

White’s chief of staff and spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

White put his hand to his heart as he entered the courtroom and acknowledged his supporters who attended the hearing. One supporter held her hand to her mouth and sobbed from the gallery. The magistrate judge warned White he could be jailed before trial if he violates any conditions of his release.

White didn’t stop to speak to reporters as he left the courthouse and headed to a waiting vehicle. His supporters shouted, “We love you, Trayon!” and “Ward 8!” as he departed.

White, who has served on the D.C. council since 2017, represents a predominantly Black ward where the poverty rate is nearly twice as high as the overall district. He is running for re-election in November against a Republican challenger.

White was one of two D.C. council members whom Mayor Muriel Bower defeated two years ago in the Democratic primary. White, a former grassroots community activist, was a protégé of former Mayor Marion Barry, who also represented the same ward as White on the council.

In March 2018, White posted a video on his Facebook page claiming that an unexpected snowfall was because of “the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters.” The Rothschilds, a Jewish family that was prominent in the banking industry, are a frequent subject of conspiracy theories.

At the time, White said he was unaware that the weather-related conspiracy theory is antisemitic. A video later surfaced of White pushing a similar conspiracy theory during a meeting of top city officials. He posed a question based on the stereotypical premise that the Rothschilds controlled the World Bank and the federal government.

[tomorrowusa]

What Russia can't win on the battlefield it will try to accomplish with disinformation, propaganda, and plain old bribery.

A Russian cabal operated a propaganda site masquerading as a news site called the Voice of Europe. In addition to publishing items designed to undermine confidence in various European governments, it outright made payoffs to various EU politicians.

Investigators claimed it used the popular Voice of Europe website as a vehicle to pay politicians. The Czech Republic and Poland said the network aimed to influence European politics. Voice of Europe did not respond to the BBC's request for comment. Czech media, citing intelligence sources, reported that politicians from Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary were paid by Voice of Europe in order to influence upcoming elections for the European Parliament. The German newspaper Der Spiegel said the money was either handed over in cash in covert meetings in Prague or through cryptocurrency exchanges. Pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk is alleged by the Czech Republic to be behind the network. Mr Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion, but later transferred to Russia with about 50 prisoners of war in exchange for 215 Ukrainians. ' Czech authorities also named Artyom Marchevsky, alleging he managed the day-to-day business of the website. Both men were sanctioned by Czech authorities. Poland's intelligence agency said it had conducted searches in the Warsaw and Tychy regions and seized €48,500 (£41,500) and $36,000 (£28,500).

"Money from Moscow has been used to pay some political actors who spread Russian propaganda," BIS said in a statement. It added that the sums amounted to "millions" of Czech crowns (tens of thousands of pounds).

I went looking for the Voice of Europe site but it is now missing (Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site). So I held my nose and visited their Twitter account and nothing new has been posted since the scandal broke.

We need to be careful when looking at news online. Recently a series of fake sites pretending to be legit US news sources was uncovered.

Russia-Backed ‘Fake News Organizations’ Revealed Across the U.S. in Bombshell New York Times Report

The fake news sites have names that sound like they are legit but aren't. Examples: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle, and the Miami Chronicle. There is a legit New York Daily News – note the different word order from the fake. There once was a newspaper called the Chicago Chronicle but it folded during the Theodore Roosevelt administration.

Google News searches spew a lot of crap. In a lot of cases the "news" sources on Google are just the proverbial guy in his underwear in his mom's basement posting bullshit. They may not be Russian but they are often dubious.

It's best to create a bookmark folder of known legit news sources. There are still numerous good sources not behind paywalls. And many countries have public broadcasters who post news in English. Just a few: NPR, BBC, DW, CBC, ABC (Australia), RFI, YLE, Radio Sweden | Sveriges Radio, NHK-World, and even EER in Estonia.

When running across a news story which sounds peculiar, check to see if it's being reported in known legit media before posting or sharing it.

There are national elections this year in a number of countries including India, the US, and (probably) the UK. Don't inadvertently assist Putin's effort to spread disinformation and sow chaos.

[azspot]

Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.

Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?n

[justinspoliticalcorner]

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump. They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment. Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits. Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference. [...] Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict). We are deciding whether this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian on why the pundit class is calling for Joe Biden to suspend his campaign but not Donald Trump to also do the same (07.06.2024).

Rebecca Solnit's opinion column at The Guardian regarding the pundit class's demands for Joe Biden to end his campaign over a bad debate performance but not for Donald Trump to do the same over his 34 felonies is a masterclass.

[connectingconstellations]

Meanwhile, in 1803

James: Have you heard the latest news from the Supreme Court?

Sarah: The Supreme Court? Surely they shan't destroy the very fabric of democracy we have fought so hard to gain.

James: Alas, they have determined that it was illegal for Secretary of State James Madison to withhold the writ of mandamus from William Marbury.

Sarah: So Marbury shall commence his appointment in the federal government?

James: No, the Supreme Court also decided that they get to determine when laws are unconstitutional, and they decided that the law saying that the new administration is required to give Marbury his commission is unconstitutional.

Sarah: So, it's a judicial power grab.

James: But Sarah, what could possibly go wrong in a system where 9 unelected men with lifetime appointments get to determine which laws congress can or cannot write?

Sarah: ...

James: Okay, yeah, I heard that.

Sarah: Well, but surely there would be some mechanism for appointing these justices that did not involve them predicting ahead of time whether or not they are likely to die or want to retire during an administration that agrees or disagrees with their political views.

James: And surely even if a President appointed a nominee, congress would vote on that nominee and not blatantly commit a power grab to keep the seat open until a President with opposing views was elected so they could steal that Supreme Court seat.

Sarah: Yes, and surely if a nominee to the court were credibly accused of sexual harassment the Senate would not confirm them to avoid the specter of impropriety? And surely if a different nominee were accused of sexual assault and then threw a temper tantrum about it the Senate would not confirm them, either? I mean, this is giving these people a massive amount of power and surely the President could nominate someone who was not an alleged criminal?

James: And surely these would be men of great wisdom, whose lifetime appointments would prevent them from partisan sway? Surely they would not be beholden to bribery?

Sarah: Yes, and surely if there were to be the appearance of impropriety -- for example, if their wives had advocated for overturning the results of an election or flew flags demonstrating their support for said coup (or just had generally bizarre flag-related opinions) -- they would do the honorable thing and recuse themselves from cases involving the former President who had tried to overthrow the government, right?

James: Yes, and surely they would respect that this country was founded upon the principle that no man is above the law, and therefore Presidents do not have blanket immunity for using their official powers to commit crimes, right? Otherwise, a President could command the military to assassinate his political opponents or attempt a coup d'etat and not face any consequences, and every reasonable person understands that that's an absolutely bonkers way to interpret the constitution, right?

Sarah: Yes, and surely this Marbury v. Madison decision will not allow extremist Supreme Court justices to go about each June blatantly destroying hard-won civil rights and snatching more power for the federal judiciary, right?

James: Of course not. We have a system of checks and balances, so there must be some sort of check on the Supreme Court's power.

Sarah: ...

James: Oh, did they forget that part?

Sarah: It's alright. Surely, 221 years from now, the Supreme Court Justices will recognize that the men who wrote the constitution were just, like, regular people and not demigods.

James: Yes, surely they will not rely on some flimsy premise that we must always and only do things written in the Constitution, and that society and laws can never change.

Sarah: I mean, half of the framers think they can own other people. Surely no one would rely on them as the absolute arbiters of how our nation's laws should work.

James: ...

Sarah: Oh God, we're so totally fucked.

[mariacallous]

NEW YORK — An unindicted co-conspirator, an accused sexual harasser and a high-ranking cop alleged to have beaten a female subordinate were among Mayor Eric Adams’ most questionable appointees, until this week.

The forced resignation of New York City’s police commissioner, following a federal raid of his home, has intensified concerns about the mayor’s staffing decisions.

NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban’s departure — the first high-profile one since the feds seized phones from members of Adams’ inner circle last week — is the latest chapter in a saga that dates back even before January 2022 when Adams, freshly off his election victory, began filling his administration with people whose checkered pasts were almost certain to invite scrutiny.

When assembling his administration, Adams named Phil Banks deputy mayor of public safety, even though the former NYPD chief was caught a decade ago accepting gifts from people ultimately convicted of bribery.

Adams placed his old police boss and personal friend Tim Pearson in a powerful, nebulous adviser role and gave him control over a small new municipal office with unchecked power. Pearson is now facing four sexual harassment lawsuits, and one of his accusers alleged in court papers his behavior had been common knowledge for years.

The city “knew about” Pearson’s “long history of sexual misconduct … but ignored his history and hired him anyway,” one of the complaints reads. Pearson’s lawyer has denied all the allegations.

Now both Banks and Pearson have also had their phones seized by federal agents, alongside Caban.

The probes have raised new questions about the mayor’s judgment, and whether his loyalty to troubled aides has become an insurmountable political liability. Nearly every Democrat challenging him in his reelection primary next year is zeroing in on his perceived ethical lapses.

“Far be it for me to tell Eric Adams who to hire and fire. But it’s clear to me that he didn’t understand the most important part of being mayor,” Scott Stringer, the former city comptroller who is expected to run against Adams next year, said in an interview with POLITICO. “He made poor choices, and it’s come back to hurt him.”

The list goes on.

Jeffrey Maddrey, whom the mayor named chief of the NYPD, was accused of punching a fellow cop he’d coerced into a sexual relationship. A judge threw out the case, but he was docked 45 vacation days in an internal trial.

Adams’ former chief of staff is entangled in litigation over past business interests and his ex-buildings commissioner resigned amid an investigation that led to an indictment on bribery charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

In his personal life, Adams is close friends with twin brothers who pleaded guilty a decade ago to financial crimes. A pastor who has described Adams as a mentor was recently sentenced to nine years in jail for stealing a parishoner’s mother’s retirement savings.

Adams appointed an anti-gay Bronx clergyman as a faith adviser, over protests from LGBTQ+ groups. And one of his community liaisons is under federal investigation involving a visit to China she made with Adams.

Many of Adams’ picks to help lead the city’s sprawling government have been unimpeachable. But the list of Adams associates enmeshed in scandal continues to grow.

“It just raises questions to me as to why our mayor feels so incredibly comfortable surrounding himself with a myriad of unsavory characters,” said Christina Greer, a close watcher of city politics as a Fordham University political science professor and co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast.

“You’ve got people accused of punching people in the face, of sexual inappropriateness,” she added. “The list of grievances is long and getting longer, so why would you invite that into your inner circle?”

Adams prides himself on giving people second chances, and says his door is open to anybody. That comes from his own nontraditional political rise — from a dyslexic Black kid from Queens who got arrested and beaten by cops, to a police officer who courted controversy, to an elected official who would eventually mayor.

“Yes, I’m going to talk with people who have stumbled and fell,” Adams said in 2022. “Because I’m perfectly imperfect, and this is a city made up of perfectly imperfect people.”

The people Adams surrounds himself with — both personally and professionally — have earned him criticism going back three decades, to the dawn of his political career.

Adams’ first run for office, a 1994 challenge to a congressional incumbent, was doomed in part by his alliance with Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic Nation of Islam leader. Soon after, Adams was investigated as a cop for working security for boxer Mike Tyson, who was fresh out of prison after a rape conviction.

After winning a seat in the state Senate, Adams became a friend and the top defender of the so-called four amigos, Democrats who caused chaos in the chamber by defecting from their party. Three of the amigos have since served prison time, for unrelated crimes. The fourth, Rubén Díaz Sr., has become a fierce ally of former President Donald Trump.

Later, Adams got involved in the bidding process for a slot machine contract with fellow state Sens. John Sampson and Malcolm Smith. The arrangement fell apart, and Adams got dinged for “exceedingly poor judgment” in an ethics report. Sampson and Smith both later went to prison for unrelated crimes.

As mayor, Adams’ plan to appoint his own brother Bernard to a well-paid NYPD gig leading his security team raised eyebrows. Adams only asked for ethics guidance after the fact, an internal watchdog reduced his title, and dropped Bernard’s salary to $1. He left after a year.

Adams also tapped nonprofit executive Sheena Wright to be a deputy mayor, a decade after she’d been arrested twice in a day over a domestic dispute. Her friend David Banks called his brother, NYPD bigwig Phil Banks to intervene, and Wright was let out and the charges were dropped.

Wright and David Banks, Adams’ schools chancellor, now live together. They were both among the top appointees who had their phones seized by federal investigators last week — maybe the latest example of Adams’ appointment decisions coming back to bite him.

Adams’ loyalty does have its limits. He cut ties with the pastor he mentored, kept his distance as one of the four amigo state senators, Hiram Monserrate, has attempted political comebacks, and now, pushed out Caban.

“There comes a time when we have to look and see: Is our loyalty to the detriment of the people of New York? And if that point is reached, then you need to make hard judgment calls,” said state Sen. James Sanders, a southeast Queens Democrat who endorsed Adams for mayor in 2021.

“I think that when the mayor comes out of this situation,” Sanders added on the latest raids, “he will have learned many valuable lessons.”

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Republicans are decrying the plea deal reached between Hunter Biden and the Department of Justice (DOJ) as a "sweetheart deal" and proof of a double standard in federal prosecutors' treatment of former President Donald Trump—but Trump himself appointed the United States attorney who signed off on the agreement.

The DOJ on Tuesday charged Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, with failure to pay federal income tax and illegally possessing a weapon. His legal team reached a deal with federal prosecutors that allows him to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses, and he is expected to reach a deal with prosecutors on the felony charge of illegally possessing a firearm as a drug user, the Associated Press reported Tuesday morning.

The deal has sparked criticism from many Republicans, who view the agreement as a slap on the wrist for Hunter Biden while the DOJ has thrown more severe charges at Trump, who pleaded not guilty to 37 charges in the case surrounding whether he improperly stored classified documents, including at least one related to the U.S. military, at his Mar-a-Lago residence. Republicans have claimed the Justice Department has been weaponized against Trump under the Biden administration.

"People are going wild over the Hunter Biden Scam with the DOJ!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

However, U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who offered the agreement to Hunter Biden, was appointed to that position by Trump.

Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware, launched the Hunter Biden probe in 2018 after being appointed to the role by Trump in 2017. The U.S. Senate confirmed his appointment by voice vote in February 2018.

Newly-elected Presidents typically request their predecessors' U.S. attorneys step down when they come into office, but Biden has refrained from removing Weiss over the Hunter Biden investigation, as doing so would likely draw criticism and allegations of trying to interfere in the investigation.

Former U.S. Attorney Gene Rossi told Newsweek in a phone interview that while parts of the deal may be generous to the younger Biden, the fact that a Republican-appointed attorney made the call likely indicates that "politics did not sway the deal either way."

"The decision by Republican U.S. attorney seems to in fact throw cold water on their major argument that this was a sweetheart deal and that they did it to help President Biden's reelection chances," he said.

Still, Rossi said he has never seen a defendant receive only a misdemeanor charge for failing to report taxes worth $3 million but would need to see if Hunter Biden took "any specific acts that he took to either hide, conceal or divert attention" from that $3 million to determine if the deal was "overly generous."

Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign for comment via email.

Christopher Clark, an attorney for Hunter Biden, told the Associated Press: "I know Hunter believes it is important to take responsibility for these mistakes he made during a period of turmoil and addiction in his life. He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward."

Karoline Leavitt, the spokesperson for the Trump-aligned Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC, slammed the deal in a statement posted to Twitter.

"As President Trump predicted, Biden's Justice Department is cutting a sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden in order to make their bogus case to 'Get Trump' appear fair," Leavitt tweeted. "Meanwhile, Biden's DOJ continues to turn a blind eye to the Biden family's extensive corruption and bribery scheme. The American people need President Trump back in office to appoint a truly independent special prosecutor that will finally bring justice."