For the second time in two weeks, Kentucky lawmakers have rejected a bill that would make it illegal for adults to marry young children. Currently, it is legal to do so.
The post Lawmakers Guarantee Old Men Can Marry Little Girls, Reject Bill to Ban “Legalized Rape of Children” appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Authored by Thomas Lifson of American Thinker,
The full evil of the anti-cop hysteria pushed by left wing groups like #BlackLivesMatter will take many years to be understood, in no small part because of political and media support for the notion that racism on the part of cops is the sole cause for disproportionate numbers of black perpetrators in our crime statistics.
But every now and then, a statistic appears that cannot be easily dismissed. Jared Sichel of The Daily Signal brings one such figure to our attention.
Murders in the U.S. rose nearly 9% last year, and one-third of that increase came from just a few neighborhoods in Chicago, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the FBI’s annual 2016 publication, Crime in the United States.
While violent crime (homicide, rape, assault, and robbery) also rose nationwide from 2015 to 2016 — over 4% — the data show the increase was not uniform, but rather concentrated in cities like Chicago and Baltimore.
(Chart per HeyJackAss!)
Other big cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, DC, saw meaningful declines in violence. So there is no broad trend, but rather local factors that must be accounted for. For instance:
Interestingly, the paper’s neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis claimed that areas where homicides spiked had a “lighter street presence by police following officers’ high-profile killings of young black men.” (snip)
In Baltimore, violent crime rates were going down until 2015, when police officers “pulled back from a more proactive approach” following widespread city riots after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a severe spinal injury while being transported in a police van on April 1, 2015, and died one week later.
But for the real statistical weight affecting overall crime stats, one has to look at Chicago, where the police have been under severe restrictions and where gang activity is out of control:
In Chicago last year, homicides jumped to 771, 58% higher than in 2015, and more than the number of murders in Los Angeles and New York combined. Half of that increase, the analysis showed, came from just five neighborhoods, and is largely attributable to gang warfare. In a “roughly four-mile radius of West Garfield Park,” for example, there are at least 30 gangs. (snip)
In Chicago, as in Baltimore, police became less proactive following protests against the fatal 2014 shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, who has been charged with first-degree murder.
A FiveThirtyEight analysis found that in Chicago and other cities with high-profile deaths of black men involving police officers, a “pullback in policing was accompanied by a sharp increase in gun violence.”
All the anti-cop self-righteousness in the world won’t save one victim from gang violence. The BLM protestors, along the with hands up-don’t shoot crowd have been enablers of horrific violence that mostly is claiming black lives. Progressive politics often involves sacrificing the powerless for the purported greater good, even as the poseurs claim to be their righteous protectors.
Authored by Dan Backer via Investors.com,
In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of my client, Alabama engineer Shaun McCutcheon, in his challenge to the Federal Election Commission"s (FEC) outdated "aggregate limits," which effectively limited how many candidates any one donor could support.
Anti-speech liberals railed against McCutcheon"s win, arguing it would create supersized "Joint Fundraising Committees" (JFCs). In court, they claimed these JFCs would allow a single donor to cut a multimillion-dollar check, and the JFC would then route funds through dozens of participating state parties, who would then funnel it back to the final recipient.
Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer claimed the Supreme Court"s McCutcheon v. FEC ruling would lead to "the system of legalized bribery recreated that existed prior to Watergate." The Supreme Court, in ruling for us, flatly stated such a scheme would still be illegal.
The Democrats" response? Hold my beer.
The Committee to Defend the President has filed an FEC complaint against Hillary Clinton"s campaign, Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic state parties and Democratic mega-donors.
As Fox News reported, we documented the Democratic establishment "us[ing] state chapters as straw men to circumvent campaign donation limits and launder(ing) the money back to her campaign." The 101-page complaint focused on the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) — the $500 million joint fundraising committee between the Clinton campaign, DNC, and dozens of state parties — which did exactly that the Supreme Court declared would still be illegal.
HVF solicited six-figure donations from major donors, including Calvin Klein and "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, and routed them through state parties en route to the Clinton campaign. Roughly $84 million may have been laundered in what might be the single largest campaign finance scandal in U.S. history.
Here"s what we know. Campaign finance law is incredibly complex and infamous for its lack of clarity. As I"ve explained before, its complexity is a feature, not a bug. Major political players with the resources to hire the very few attorneys who practice campaign finance law benefit from the complexity that keeps others out. Perhaps HVF"s architects thought so too, and assumed that if no one understands what"s happening, no one would complain.
Here"s what you can do, legally. Per election, an individual donor can contribute $2,700 to any candidate, $10,000 to any state party committee, and (during the 2016 cycle) $33,400 to a national party"s main account. These groups can all get together and take a single check from a donor for the sum of those contribution limits — it"s legal because the donor cannot exceed the base limit for any one recipient. And state parties can make unlimited transfers to their national party.
Here"s what you can"t do, which the Clinton machine appeared to do anyway. As the Supreme Court made clear in McCutcheon v. FEC, the JFC may not solicit or accept contributions to circumvent base limits, through "earmarks" and "straw men" that are ultimately excessive — there are five separate prohibitions here.
On top of that, six-figure donations either never actually passed through state party accounts or were never actually under state party control, which adds false FEC reporting by HVF, state parties, and the DNC to the laundry list.
Finally, as Donna Brazile and others admitted, the DNC placed the funds under the Clinton campaign"s direct control, a massive breach of campaign finance law that ties the conspiracy together.
Democratic donors, knowing the funds would end up with Clinton"s campaign, wrote six-figure checks to influence the election — 100 times larger than allowed.
HVF bundled these megagifts and, on a single day, reported transferring money to all participating state parties, some of which would then show up on FEC reports filed by the DNC as transferring the exact same dollar amount on the exact same day to the DNC. Yet not all the state parties reported either receiving or transferring those sums.
Did any of these transfers actually happen? Or were they just paper entries to mask direct transfers to the DNC?
For perspective, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D"Souza was prosecuted and convicted in 2012 for giving a handful of associates money they then contributed to a candidate of his preference — in other words, straw man contributions. He was sentenced to eight months in a community confinement center and five years of probation. How much money was involved? Only $20,000. HVF weighs in at $84 million — more than 4,000 times larger!
So who should be worried? Everyone involved — from the donors themselves to Democratic fundraisers to party officials who filed false reports and, ultimately, to Clinton campaign and HVF officials looking at significant legal jeopardy.
Don"t take my word for it. Our complaint is built entirely on the FEC reports filed by Democrats, memos authored by Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook, and public statements from Donna Brazile and others.
The only question that matters: Was the law broken? If the answer is yes, then the corrupt Clinton machine should be held accountable.
After a team of forensic experts ruled in September that the 2015 shooting death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was, indeed, murder – not suicide as the authorities had initially ruled – a federal judge has validated those findings in a lengthy ruling that seems to point the finger at former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
The ruling is the latest blow to Fernandez, who won her bid for a senate seat in October. Though Fernandez has publicly said her decision to run is part of a political comeback, others have speculated that she ran for her senate seat to help insulate herself from accusations of money laundering and corruption, as well as her suspected work to cover up Iran’s role in financing the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires - a bombing that killed 85 people.
Alberto Nisman
Years later, Nisman was assigned to investigate a possible cover-up of Iranian officials’ role in the bombing. But he was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in January 2015, hours before he was due to testify against former President Fernandez The ruling comes after a prosecutor recommended last year that the case be investigated as a murder.
In another stunning decision, Tuesday’s ruling by the Argentine judge also charged that Diego Lagomarsino, a former employee of Nisman’s, was an accessory to his murder, after a gun owned by Lagomarsino was found near Nisman’s body, as Reuters reported.
In a 656-page ruling, judge Julian Ercolini said there was sufficient proof to conclude that the shot to the head that killed Nisman in January 2015 was not self-inflicted. That marked the first time any judge has said the case was a murder.
Fernandez and others had suggested the death was a suicide, but a prosecutor investigating the case last year recommended it be pursued as a murder probe.
“Nisman’s death could not have been a suicide,” Ercolini wrote in Tuesday’s ruling, which also charged Diego Lagomarsino, a former employee of Nisman‘s, with accessory to murder.
Lagomarsino has acknowledged lending Nisman the gun that killed him the day before he was to appear before Congress to detail his allegation against Fernandez. But he has said Nisman asked him for the gun to protect himself and his family.
Earlier this month, Fernandez was formally charged with treason by a federal judge, and a federal judge called for her arrest. But before her arrest, Congress would have to vote to strip Fernandez of her immunity.
Meanwhile, her former Foreign Minister, Hector Timerman, was placed under arrest and confined to his home, where he wrote this New York Times op-ed professing his innocence and claiming to be a political prisoner.
In an unrelated case, Fernandez and her two children were indicted back in April on corruption charges related to deals involving a family owned real-estate company.
After leaving office in December 2015 following eight years in power – a period where Argentina’s economy experienced continued decline.
Her successor, the center-right former Mayor of Buenos Aires Mauricio Macri, has swiftly implemented pro-growth economic reforms like abolishing the country’s capital controls and reaching a settlement with a group of US hedge funds led by Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corporation.
Now, the possibility that Fernandez will be held accountable for her actions is looking increasingly likely.
Several Seattle employees of both Google and Amazon were busted after using their corporate accounts to send emails to local brothels and pimps looking to purchase services from sex workers trafficked from Asia, according to emails obtained by Newsweek.
"[E]mails obtained by Newsweek reveal another sordid corner of the tech sector’s treatment of women: a horny nest of prostitution “hobbyists” at tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and other firms in Seattle’s high tech alley."
Many of the emails were swept up in a 2015 sting operation which targeted online chat rooms and message boards in which customers rate sex workers - resulting in the arrest of 18 of these "prostitution hobbyists," including several high level Amazon and Microsoft directors - two of which are currently scheduled for trial in March.
Seattle brothels had been catering to Microsoft employees through several "backpage.com" ads located nearby the company"s Redmond, WA headquarters, in what is becoming a booming business.
A study commissioned by the Department of Justice found that Seattle has the fastest-growing sex industry in the United States, more than doubling in size between 2005 and 2012. That boom correlates neatly with the boom of the tech sector there. It also correlates to the surge in high-paying jobs, since this “hobby” (the word johns use online to describe buying sex) can be expensive: some of these men spent $30,000 to $50,000 a year, according to authorities.
The tech sector has not only employed a significant number of men who pay for sex with trafficked women, it has also enabled traffickers to more easily reach customers and to hide their business from cops by taking it off the streets and into computers and ultimately, hotel rooms, motels or apartments. In one 24-hour-period in Seattle, an estimated 6,487 people solicited sex on just one of the more than 100 websites that connect buyers with sellers, according to a 2014 study.
Of note, Backpage.com shut down its adult sections in January, citing government pressure following a 2016 Senate report on commercial sex services fingered the website as a hotbed for criminal activity, and stating that "Backpage officials have publicly acknowledged that criminals use the website for sex trafficking, including trafficking of minors."
Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer (Texas AG)
In October, 2016, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer was arrested in Houston and the company"s Dallas headquarters searched. NPR reported at the time that Ferrer, 55, was charged with pimping a minor, pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping. Two controlling shareholders of Backpage — Michael Lacey and James Larkin — also are charged with conspiracy to commit pimping."
The prostitutes trafficked from Asia typically don"t speak much English, relying on translation apps to offer services such as "girlfriend" experiences and "Nuru" (nude massage). Many of the women are working their way out of debt bondage, and feared for their lives or those of their families - according to one pimp interviewed during the 2015 sting.
A spokesman for Microsoft said of the emails "Microsoft has a long history of cooperating with law enforcement and other agencies on combating sex trafficking and related topics, and we have employees who volunteer their time and money specifically to combat this issue as well. The personal conduct of a tiny fraction of our 125,000 employees does not in any way represent our culture. No organization is immune to the unfortunate situation when employees act unethically or illegally. When that happens, we look into the conduct and take appropriate action. Microsoft makes it clear to our employees they have a responsibility to act with integrity and conduct themselves in a legal and ethical manner at all times. If they don’t, they risk losing their jobs."
Amazon told Newsweek it"s investigating the matter, and that "It is against Amazon"s policy for any employee or Contingent Worker to engage in any sex buying activities of any kind in Amazon"s workplace or in any work-related setting outside of the workplace, such as during business trips, business meetings or business-related social events." When Amazon suspects that an employee has used company funds or resources to engage in criminal conduct, the company will immediately investigate and take appropriate action up to and including termination. The company may also refer the matter to law enforcement."
Call it the holiday"s token bizarro incident: according to Florida Today, a 23-year-old man who told police he punched a Wells Fargo ATM because it gave him too much cash, was arrested after bank officials said the attack caused at least $5,000 in damages, which elevated the inexplicable and idiotic temper tantrum into a felony crime.
Michael Oleksik, 23, 5"11", 155lbs, of Rockledge, FL; charges: Criminal mischief >$1000.
Cocoa police charged Michael Joseph Oleksik, of Merritt Island, on Friday with criminal mischief nearly a month into the investigation of a disturbance at the Wells Fargo bank branch at 834 N. Cocoa Boulevard, in Cocoa. According to authorities, Oleksik could be seen on surveillance video standing at the ATM, pummeling the electronic teller’s touch screen on Nov. 29.
A short time later, an apologetic Oleksik called the bank and told a manager that he punched the ATM because he was "angry the ATM was giving him too much money and he did not know what to do," Florida Today reported. Oleksik then explained that he was in a hurry for work and apologized for the damage to the bank"s ATM.
While Oleksik"s behavior may appear irrational at first glance, a quick look at his arrest record, which reveals not only domestic violence charges, but also disorderly drug intoxication and resisting and intimidating a police officer, and suddenly his vendetta with the ATM makes sense.
Wells Fargo - clearly distraught at the treatment one of its ATM machines was subjected to - contacted the Cocoa Police Department and asked to press charges. Oleksik was arrested Friday and booked into the Brevard County Jail Complex in Sharpes.
An elderly couple from Clearlake Oaks, California were busted by Nebraska sheriff"s deputies with 60 pounds of marijuana, edibles and marijuana concentrates while on a 3,000 mile cross-country Christmas trip to Vermont, police said.
Patrick Jiron, 83 and his wife Barbara, 70, were planning to give the pot to family as Christmas presents when Nebraska police smelled a strong odor of marijuana coming from their Toyota Tacoma during a traffic stop for going over the center line and failing to signal, said the York County Sheriff"s Office. The smell was confirmed by their drug dog, Dundee.
When they initiated the traffic stop, deputies could immediately smell the strong odor of raw marijuana. Dundee, the county’s drug dog, alerted to the presence of a controlled substance and a search was conducted.
The Jirons acknowledged that the marijuana was in the back of the pickup, under a topper, and deputies found 60 pounds of marijuana inside boxes. Because the marijuana was such high grade, the street value was equally high. -York News Times
The marijuana was found in boxes stowed underneath the pickup topper.
Patrick Jiron
Patrick Jiron was booked into York County Jail on felony charges of possession of marijuana with the intent to deliver and having no drug tax stamp, however Barbara was only cited "due to some medical issues" according to York County Sherriff"s Lt. Paul Vrbka. Mr. Jiron posted 10% of his $100,000 bond and has been released.
The Jirons told Nebraska deputies that they didn"t know it was illegal to transport marijuana in Nebraska.
Once again this year, the Brennan Center for Justice has analyzed violent crime stats from the 30 largest cities in America to provide some insight on national trends. Not surprisingly, this year"s report has is full of more bad news for the residents of cities like Baltimore and Chicago that have experienced devastating spikes in homicides over the past two years.
Looking at homicides per capita in 2017, Baltimore is clearly the most dangerous large city in the U.S. with a murder rate that is more than 4x the average of other large cities and some 40% higher than the second most dangerous city of Detroit. To put things in perspective, the murder rate in Baltimore is now exactly tied with Venezuela at 57.2 murders per 100,000 residents.
Of course, as our readers are undoubtedly aware, high violent crime rates in cities like Baltimore and Chicago are hardly a new phenomenon. Therefore, we decided to take a look at year-over-year changes in murder rates by city and made some interesting discoveries. While Charlotte saw the biggest YoY spike, cities like San Francisco and Seattle, both of which are experiencing tech-induced economic booms, were also at the top of the list.
Finally, and not surprisingly, in terms of total homicides, the city of Chicago is still the big "winner" in 2017 with nearly double the number of murders of Baltimore.
Of course, as the Brennan Center notes, it"s not all bad news as aggregate crime in the nation"s top 30 cities declined 2.7%...
The overall crime rate in the 30 largest cities in 2017 is estimated to decline slightly from the previous year, falling by 2.7 percent. If this trend holds, crime rates will remain near historic lows.
The violent crime rate will also decrease slightly, by 1.1 percent, essentially remaining stable. Violent crime remains near the bottom of the nation’s 30-year downward trend.
The 2017 murder rate in the 30 largest cities is estimated to decline by 5.6 percent. Large decreases this year in Chicago and Detroit, as well as small decreases in other cities, contributed to this decline. The murder rate in Chicago — which increased significantly in 2015 and 2016 — is projected to decline by 11.9 percent in 2017. It remains 62.4 percent above 2014 levels. The murder rate in Detroit is estimated to fall by 9.8 percent. New York City’s murder rate will also decline again, to 3.3 killings per 100,000 people.
Conclusion: "What the hell is going on in Chicago"...and Baltimore and Detroit and Memphis and San Francisco and Seattle and....
Trump on crime in Chicago: "What the hell is going on in Chicago? What the hell is happening there?" pic.twitter.com/HMTANkGYSz
— Axios (@axios) December 15, 2017
Here is the full report from the Brennan Center for Justice:
The technical term is pseudocide - a fancy word that means, essentially, “faking your own death."
Hundreds of thousands of Americans - some struggling with seemingly insurmountable debt burdens or are being hounded by the IRS after stiffing the tax man - have probably fantasized about faking their own deaths. But few understand just how easy it is to - um - execute such an ambitious, if legally precarious, plan.
That’s where purveyors of so-called “death kits” come in. Few westerners are aware of its existence, but there’s actually a thriving cottage industry based in the Philippines, where investors can purchase all the tools they need to fake their own deaths for the surprisingly low price of about 350 pounds (about $500).
Of course, the scheme has several macabre elements. The process involves buying an unclaimed corpse from one of the many morgues in the Philippines where the bodies of John and Jane Does are stored.
According to the Telegraph, many customers who choose this route are desperate Wall Street bankers seeking to escape debt, and men having affairs who want to leave their families.
The Philippines has long been cited in official statistics as the foreign location with the highest number of American tourist deaths. But many of these fatalities are actually fraudulent, the result of desperate westerners faking their own deaths.
Take Elizabeth Greenwood, who “died” as a tourist in the Philippines in 2013. Multiple spectators witnessed her crash her rental car into another vehicle on a busy road in Manila, and doctors at the local hospital pronounced Greenwood dead on arrival - or so her death certificate would have you believe...
Greenwood, who was inspired to fake her own death by her ballooning student debt, is now working as a journalist in New York City after deciding at the last minute that she didn’t want to go through with the scheme.
She first stumbled upon the idea during lunch with a friend who joked about it after she finished ranting about the colossal size of her student debt. But the joke got her thinking. So she started Googling.
“I began poking around online and discovered that death fraud truly is an industry with a whole host of experts and consultants to help you go through with it, and that there are far more people than you might imagine who had done it themselves, with varying degrees of success,” Greenwood explains.
She eventually stumbled on a Wall Street Journal article from the 1980s that referenced “a southeast Asian country” where morgues pick up the bodies of derelicts and freeze them to help customers commit death fraud for insurance purposes.
Greenwood then discovered two elite private investigators, Steven Rambam and Richard Marquez, who consult for life insurance companies seeking to stamp out death fraud.
“Again and again, they named the Philippines as a hotbed for the kind of theatrical death fraud that involves false corpses,” she adds. “They sniff out life insurance fraud all over the globe - it is attempted everywhere - but they told me some memorable stories about cases they’d worked on in the Philippines, so I wanted to check it out myself."
The cost of death fraud can vary widely. A fake death certificate from the Philippines generally costs anywhere in the region of £100 to £350. Some will pay upwards of £20,000 to hire a professional fixer who will help them scratch their trail as they move forward with a new identity.
During a week-long stay in the Philippines, Greenwood found a pair of locals there who obtained a fake death certificate for her from a mole working inside a government agency. All the witness accounts were fake, and there was never a fatal traffic accident as outlined on the papers.
She never crossed the line and actually filed the documents with the US embassy.
“My death certificate sits encased in a plastic sheath at the bottom of my filing cabinet,” Greenwood states.
The difficulty of feigning one’s death depends on the purpose of the fraud. If one is trying to cash in a life insurance policy, then the fraud will require a body and an accomplice, since, without a body, most insurers will wait seven years before paying out a claim. This is why the cottage industry of fake morgues has sprung up.
Some fraudsters might go to the lengths of staging a funeral for their dummy corpse and filming it to submit to the insurance company, she adds, but in most cases, this is an unnecessary flourish.
If insurance fraud isn’t your ultimate aim, then the process of faking your death will be exponentially easier.
“If you’re not committing life insurance fraud, you needn’t go to all the extra trouble,” Greenwood told the Telegraph. “Staging a more open-ended, elegant escape, like disappearing while on a hike, usually looks more believable to investigators."
While insurance companies typically hire private investigators to sniff out death fraud, few cases are ever prosecuted, particularly if they were committed on foreign soil. Often, the only punishment for death fraudsters is their insurance claim being denied.
Greenwood cites one example of a German woman who faked her death and whose fraud remained undiscovered for two decades.
When German authorities discovered she was alive in 2015, after being presumed dead since 1985, the only penalty she shouldered was the trouble of filling out the paperwork necessary to declare herself still alive.
Death fraud happens “constantly”, Greenwood said adding that she detected a spike in cases around the financial crisis.
But while faking one’s death on foreign soil is easier than many believe, the reasons people get caught are also simpler than many might assume.
Particularly if an accomplice is battling it out with an insurance company, fraudsters are typically caught when they try to reach out to loved ones or their parents.
As it turns out, even if they’re dead on paper, many people just can’t cut the ties to their old lives.
After Eight Hours Of Testimony And More Scheduled For Thursday, Congressional investigators tell Fox News that Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe dodged questions on the "Trump-Russia" dossier, and his testimony "contained numerous conflicts with the testimony of previous witnesses" so much that the House Intelligence Committee is planning to issue new subpoenas next week to Justice Department and FBI Personnel.
While HPSCI staff would not confirm who will be summoned for testimony, all indications point to demoted DOJ official Bruce G. Ohr and FBI General Counsel James A. Baker, who accompanied McCabe, along with other lawyers, to Tuesday’s HPSCI session. -Fox News
“It’s hard to know who’s telling us the truth,” said one House investigator after McCabe’s questioning - which was reportedly spearheaded by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC).
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
Individuals thought to be on the new subpoena list include demoted DOJ official Bruce Orr and FBI General Counsel James A. Baker. Notably absent, however, is Peter Strzok - the veteran counterintelligence agent in charge of both the Hillary Clinton email "matter" and the early Trump-Russia investigation who sent anti-Trump text messages to his mistress.
McCabe was described as a "friendly witness" to Democrats in the room, who tried to enlist McCabe in building a case against President Trump for obstruction of justice. "If he could have, he would have" said one witness in the closed door session.
When asked about how hard the FBI worked to verify the anti-Trump "dossier," McCabe stood by its credibility - despite the FBI"s unwillingness to pay former MI6 spy Christopher Steele an agreed upon $50,000 if he could verify the claims in the document which relied on senior Kremlin officials.
Per the New York Times
The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $50,000 for his efforts, according to two people familiar with the offer.
Ultimately, he was not paid.
When asked about funding for the dossier, McCabe claimed he could not recall whether or not the Clinton campaign and the DNC funded the report - despite the alleged existence of documents which McCabe signed establishing his knowledge of its financing and provenance.
Curiously, ahead of McCabe"s Thursday appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee for a "transcribed interview," the DOJ has announced that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe "will not be in a position to discuss matters that are within the scope of the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III."
Dep FBI Dir McCabe to appear before Hse Judiciary Cmte Thursday in classified setting for a "transcribed interview." DoJ tells cmte "McCabe will not be in a position to discuss matters that are within the scope of the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III.”
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) December 20, 2017
The news comes a week after McCabe canceled a previously scheduled testimony after a Fox News report that the wife of Senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr worked for Fusion GPS, the company which created the Trump-Russia dossier.
Perhaps McCabe revealed too much to the House Intelligence Committee - because it appears the Judiciary Committee won"t be able to ask McCabe questions such as whether or not the FBI launched their Russia investigation based on the unverified Fusion GPS "Trump-Russia" dossier, which was funded in part by Hillary Clinton and the DNC and was created with the cooperation of high level Kremlin officials.
Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr
If McCabe can"t talk about the genesis of the Trump-Russia investigation, it likely also means there will be no discussion of the anti-Trump text messages sent by the lead FBI investigator on both the Clinton email probe and the Trump-Russia investigation to his mistress - which includes the infamous "Insurance Policy" text.
Does this also mean the Clinton email investigation is off limits due to Peter Strzok"s involvement?
Was McCabe allowed to discuss his potential hatch act violation?
Perhaps little birds in the House Judiciary Committee will relay the details of tomorrow"s testimony to Fox News and we"ll be all the wiser.
Authored by Jim Jatras via TheDuran.com,
When do we realize we’re already living in a police state?
Maybe one clue is when our betters make a point of assuring us that we aren’t. Here’s Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testifying before a House Judiciary Committee inquiry into political bias in the Robert Mueller “Russia-gate” investigation:
Department of Justice employees are united by a shared understanding that our mission is to pursue justice, protect public safety, preserve government property, defend civil rights, and promote the rule of law.
Rosenstein’s contempt for his interlocutors’ intelligence was unconcealed. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
Rod’s on the job! Americans can certainly sleep peacefully tonight.
Or maybe not. Besides cracking down on states’ playing fast and loose with federal marijuana laws, one of the first enforcement actions ordered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R-Recused) was to step up use of civil forfeiture, which is a fancy way of saying “taking the property of people who have not been convicted of anything, or even accused of anything, with little recourse.”
But no sweat, there are “safeguards” to assure that property seizures only impact drug kingpins and gangsters – right?
Sessions’s order . . . resuscitates a practice known as “federal adoption,” which allows police and prosecutors to circumvent state restrictions on asset seizures by collaborating with federal authorities. Through this partnership, state and local authorities turn their seizures over to federal colleagues, who “adopt” them for prosecution—ultimately returning up to eighty per cent of the assets to the originating cops or prosecutors to keep. One result, often unaddressed in critiques of forfeiture, is the tacit encouragement of racial profiling and targeting of property owners of color, who remain prime targets of the practice in much of the country.
A seventy-three-year-old Amtrak retiree named Elizabeth Young understands what’s at stake in Sessions’s civil-forfeiture endorsement. In 2009, she was resting in her West Philadelphia home, recovering from a hospitalization for two blood clots in her lungs, when suddenly she felt her house begin to shake. “I really thought we’d had one of those landslides, like they have in California,” Young told me recently. “I said, ‘What in the world is happening?’ ” She poked her head out into the hallway from her second-floor bedroom, and that’s when she saw them: “a bunch of cops in fatigues,” storming her stairs in a swat-style raid; down below, they were ransacking rooms. The Narcotics North Division was tearing up the house in pursuit of Young’s son, whom they later alleged had sold some hundred and forty dollars’ worth of pot from the residence and from his mom’s 1997 Chevrolet. Nearly a year after the raid, Ms. Young got another round of alarming news: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had filed a petition to seize her house and car, by way of civil forfeiture. [ . . . ]
Sessions sees a different picture. “Four out of five administrative civil-asset forfeitures filed by federal law enforcement agencies were never challenged in court,” he said recently, implying that a lack of legal challenge is proof of guilt. But if hiring a lawyer to fight your civil-forfeiture case costs more than your property is worth, the math prevails. Unlike a criminal defendant, Young’s 1997 Chevrolet had no right to a public defender.
Or consider the global move toward what is euphemistically called international financial “transparency.” I mean, who can be opposed to a certified doubleplusgood concept like transparency?
But it depends on who’s being transparent about what. Take Ken Silverstein’s examination of the International Consortium of Independent (sic) Journalists: why do hardly any Americans get transparency-ed in the Panama Papers but so many folks with connections with Russia do? Why so little transparency about who’s lavishly paying the ICIJ piper and for what purpose? Why does a law like FATCA (“Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act”) catch so few actual “fat cat” tax cheats and recover so little revenue, but pours tons of private financial data of innocent middle class people into the maw of the intelligence agencies?
Why? For the same reason James Clapper perjured himself telling Senator Rand Paul that the NSA doesn’t collect our cell phone metadata:
Inquiring minds want to know.
If you have nothing to hide, why would you object.
Big Brother Is Watching You (and listening, and compiling your data, etc)…
…but it’s all for your own protection.
This is literally the opposite of genuine transparency: “It is a practice of good government for institutions to be transparent and open to the people. It is a practice of tyranny for individuals to be made transparent to the government.”
Police state? We hardly need mention the feds’ zeal to protect our virgin eyes and ears from “Russian propaganda” or any American media that betrays its disloyalty by carrying any news or opinion that allegedly resembles it.
Or take the guilty pleas of former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and peripheral Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for the non-crime of “lying to the FBI.” Both detractors and defenders of the Trump administration have gleefully piled on the hapless Flynn and Papadopoulos. They lied! They lied! They lied!
But did they lie? Are we that naïve about how our diligent organs of state security work? Take the case of Flynn:
Russia-gate enthusiasts are thrilled over the guilty plea of President Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI about pre-inauguration conversations with the Russian ambassador, but the case should alarm true civil libertarians.
What is arguably most disturbing about this case is that then-National Security Adviser Flynn was pushed into a perjury trap by Obama administration holdovers at the Justice Department who concocted an unorthodox legal rationale for subjecting Flynn to an FBI interrogation four days after he took office, testing Flynn’s recollection of the conversations while the FBI agents had transcripts of the calls intercepted by the National Security Agency.
In other words, the Justice Department wasn’t seeking information about what Flynn said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – the intelligence agencies already had that information. Instead, Flynn was being quizzed on his precise recollection of the conversations and nailed for lying when his recollections deviated from the transcripts.
Keep in mind that when these “interviews” take place –
…the federal agent is typically well-informed about the facts of the case, but plays dumb in order to instill a false sense of confidence in the interview subject. And, unlike you, the agent has had time to examine all relevant documents. (It also bears noting that the FBI will usually not tape record the interview and that the only official interview report will be an FBI 302, which is the agent’s own dictated version of the conversation. Agents usually work in pairs as well, so in any later dispute over what was said in the interview, guess whose version is likely to prevail? Yours, or the two FBI agents who dictated the 302?)
Good grief! You’re better off not saying anything at all. Except that’s not an option either:
If you are not in custody, your total silence, especially in the face of an accusation, can very possibly be used against you as an adoptive admission under the Federal Rules of Evidence.
This means you are subjected to questioning on a matter where you have done nothing wrong, your responses are being compared (without your knowledge) to detailed records (which you haven’t consulted) and to the agent’s subjective notes (to which you are not privy). Even though you’re not under oath every discrepancy of date, time, name, sequence, or other detail becomes a separate felony charge, each one of which is punishable by years in prison: Alright, Mr. or Ms. X. We’re prepared to charge you with 14 felony counts, which will put you in prison for the rest of your life. Or you can plead guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, with a light or possibly suspended sentence. Which will it be?
Your other option is to go to trial before a jury of sheep your peers, where the feds have a 90 percent-plus conviction rate. Or you can try to fight the charges until you’ve utterly bankrupted yourself, you’ve gone into debt you can never pay back, and your marriage has broken up – they can afford to wait — and still be in the same pickle. The mystery is that everyone doesn’t take the plea offer right away.
In short, if they want to nail you, they can. Like the boychiks used to say in the good ol’ NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs; ???????? ??????????? ?????????? ???): “Give Us the Man, and We Will Make the Case.” (I guess nowadays, we should say “person.”)
Oh come on! What hyperbole! We don’t torture or shoot people like the NKVD did! We don’t work people to death in concentration camps!
That’s right, we – or rather, they – don’t have to resort to that kind of thing. In fact, during the late Soviet period they hardly shot anyone and didn’t even lock that many people up. For most, it was enough to know that they could lock you up.
That’s more than sufficient for the sort of weaklings today’s Americans are.
There you have it. Your property can be seized at any time. Your “private” information, isn’t. We are told what media to believe and what not. You can be put in jail if someone decides you need to be put in jail.
Net Neutrality is gone. Good riddance.
Lost in all of the theoretical debate about how evil ISPs will create a have/have-not divide in Internet access, is the reality that it already exists along with massive subsidies to the biggest bandwidth pigs on the planet – Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix and the porn industry.
Under Net Neutrality these platforms flourished along with the rise of the mobile internet, which is now arguably more important than the ‘desktop’ one in your home and office.
Google and Apple control the on-ramps to the mobile web in a way that Net Neutrality proponents can only dream the bandwidth providers like Comcast and AT&T could.
Because, in truth, they can’t. Consumers are ultimately the ones who decide how much bandwidth costs, not the ISPs. We decide how much we can afford these creature comforts like streaming Netflix while riding the bus or doing self-indulgent Instagram videos of our standing in line at the movies (if that’s even a thing anymore).
Net Neutrality took pricing of bandwidth out of the hands of consumers. It handed the profits from it to Google, Facebook and all the crappy advertisers spamming video ads, malware, scams, and the like everywhere.
By mandating ‘equal access’ and equal fee structures the advertisers behind Google and Facebook would spend their budgets without much thought or care. Google and Facebook ad revenue soared under Net Neutrality because advertisers’ needs are not aligned with Google’s bottom line, but with consumers’.
And, because of that, the price paid to deliver the ad, i.e. Google’s cost of goods sold (COGS), thanks to Net Neutrality, was held artificially low. And Google, Facebook and the Porn Industry pocketed the difference.
They grew uncontrollably. In the case of Google and Facebook, uncontrollably powerful.
That difference was never passed onto the ISP who could then, in turn, pass it on to the consumer.
All thanks to Net Neutrality.
With the rise of the mobile web bandwidth should have been getting cheaper and easier to acquire at a much faster rate than it has. But, it couldn’t because of Net Neutrality. It kept rates of return on new bandwidth projects and new technology suppressed.
Money the ISP’s should have been spending laying more fiber, putting up more cell towers, building better radios went to Google to fritter away on endless projects that never see the light of day.
The ISP’s actually suffered under Net Neutrality and so did the consumers.
And therefore, Net Neutrality guaranteed that the infrastructure for new high-speed bandwidth would grow at the slowest possible rate, still governed by the maximum the consumer was willing to pay for bandwidth, rather than what the consumer actually demanded.
And, once obtained that power was then used to punish anyone who held different opinions from the leadership in Silicon Valley.
Think it through, Net Neutrality not only subsidized intrusive advertising, phishing scams and on-demand porn but also the very censorship these powerful companies now feel is their sacred duty to enforce because the government is now controlled by the bad guys.
Getting rid of Net Neutrality will put the costs of delivering all of this worthless content back onto the people serving it. YouTube will become more expensive for Google and all of the other content delivery networks. Facebook video will eat into its bottom line.
The ISP’s can and should throttle them until they ‘pay their fair share,’ which they plainly have not been.
The Net effect of Net Neutrality is that your ISP may charge you more in the short run for Netflix or Hulu. Or, more appropriately, Netflix and Hulu will have to charge you more and we’ll find out what the real cost of delivering 4k streaming content to your iPhone actually costs.
But, those costs will then go to the ISP’s such that they can respond to demand for more bandwidth. Will they try and overcharge us? Of course. AT&T is just as bad as Google and/or Facebook.
But, we have the right to say no. To stop using the services the way Net Neutrality encouraged us to through mispricing of service. If the ISP’s want more customers then they’ll have to bring wire out to the hinterlands.
Net Neutrality proponents kept telling us this was the way to help keep the internet available to the poor and the rural. Nonsense. It kept the internet from expanding properly into the hinterlands.
I live just over the county line in rural North Florida. To the south is a town with cable and DSL. Between cable franchise monopolies retarding expansion across county lines and Net Neutrality keeping margins thin, my home was 10 years behind everyone else getting decent bandwidth to keep up with the needs of the modern Internet.
Bandwidth needs artificially inflated, I might add, by the misaligned cost structure engendered by Net Neutrality in the first place.
It took forever for my phone provider to upgrade the bandwidth across the county line. I begged them for a second line for internet service, they wouldn’t even talk to me. Why? The return on that new line wasn’t high enough for them.
If Google was passing some of the profits from Adwords onto the ISPs I’d have multiple choices for high-speed internet versus just one DSL provider.
As always, whenever the political left tries to protect the poor they wind up making things worse for them.
The news is good for a variety of reasons. With Net Neutrality gone a major barrier to entry for content delivery networks is gone.
Blockchain companies are building systems which cut the middle man out completely, allowing content creators to be directly tipped for their work versus being supported by advertising no one watches, wants or is swayed by.
Services like Steemit and the distributed application already built and to be built on it point the way to social media cost models which are sustainable and align the incentives properly between producers of content and consumers.
Steem internalizes the bandwidth costs of using the network and pays itself a part of its token reward pool to cover those costs. So, all that’s left is content producer and their fans. Advertisers are simply not needed to maintain the network.
Net Neutrality was a trojan horse designed to replicate the old shout-based advertising model of the golden age of print and TV advertising. It was a way to control the megaphone and promote a particular point of view.
Look no further than the main proponents of it. George Soros and the Ford Foundation are two of the biggest lobbyists for Net Neutrality. Only the political left and its Marxian fantasies of evil middle men creating monopolies fell for the lies, as they were supposed to.
The rest of us were like, “Really? This is not a problem.” And it wasn’t until you looked under the hood and realized all they stood to gain by it.
Now, with Net Neutrality gone the underlying problem can be addressed; franchise monopolies of cable and phone companies in geographic areas. These laws are still in effect. They still hang like a spectre over the entire industry. Like Net Neutrality, these laws concentrate capital into the hands of the few providers big enough to keep out the competition.
So, instead of championing the end of franchise monopolies, which county governments love because they get a sizable cut of the revenue to fund non-essential programs, the Left made things worse by championing Net Neutrality.
That also needs to end. Even if you believe that franchise monopolies were, at one point, necessary. They are not now. IP-based communication is now fundamentally different than copper wire for discrete services like phone and cable. Let people run all the copper and fiber they want. There’s plenty of room in the conduit running under our sidewalks and streets.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, as the great Lew Rockwell once told me.
Then and only then will the Internet be free.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been blamed for a lot of nefarious actions lately.
From swaying the US election in Donald Trump’s favor to orchestrating the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, paranoid Democrats have apparently convinced themselves that there’s no geopolitical disaster that Putin didn’t have a hand in.
And now, one deranged Bakersfield, Calif. man is blaming “Russian Mind Control” for driving him to murder his own mother.
That’s right: We can add matricide to the list of misdeeds that have been attributed to the Russian leader.
Suspected murderer Matthew Jensen reportedly tried to kill himself with a small pocket knife after being stopped by police on Oct. 24.
Here’s the local ABC affiliate with more details about the grisly act:
Court documents detail the moments before, during and after a man allegedly stabbed his own mother to death in Tehachapi in October.
Documents detail Matthew Jensen"s mental state, the number of times he stabbed his mother Barbara Jensen Teague, his claims as to his possible reasoning and that he had been released from a hospital for mental evaluation the day before her death.
On October 24, Jensen was pulled over in Kingman, Arizona. At the time he was pulled over, documents show that Jensen attempted to kill himself using a small pocket knife. Jensen apparently slit both his wrists and stabbed himself in the chest. He was taken to Kingman Regional Medical Center where he was treated for non-life threatening injuries.
It was during that stop that the welfare of Jensen"s mother became a priority for law enforcement.
Kern County Sheriff"s officials went to the home in Tehachapi where the two lived together. After not getting an answer at the door, officials made their way into the home. That"s where they found the body of Barbara Jensen Teague, covered in blood.
According to the coroner’s report, Teague was stabbed 42 times: "17 to her right flank, 13 to the right side of her trunk, five to the back of her right arm, three to her right thigh, two to her back, one behind her right ear, and one inside of her left thumb. As a result of those stab wounds had three stab wounds to her right lung, five stab wounds to her liver, and multiple sta wounds to her small and large bowels."
Documents showed that Jensen said he was "incredibly happy" while living with Teague. He claims to have entered her room while she was sleeping where he found her in the fetal position, and began stabbing her with a small knife.
Documents show that Jensen said his mom "thrashed and struggled" and cried "stop, stop" as he stabbed her repeatedly.
Twenty minutes later, while his mother lay bleeding in her bed, Jensen loaded his dog into his mother’s car and started driving east.
According to ABC, Jensen said "the pain and the guilt of killing his mother caused him to cut both of his wrists with a Leatherman style tool, located in the car. Jensen said he also stabbed himself twice in the chest in attempt to commit suicide."
But it wasn’t until he had been transported to a holding cell and interrogated that he professed his motive for the attack.
While being interviewed, Jensen said he was "under Russian mind control" and that he was hearing voices. He said "the voices had told him to kill his mother. ... "I did what they told me, I killed my own mother"".
After allegedly killing his mom, documents state that Jensen didn"t remember anything. He said he remembered feeling compelled to kill himself, but instead killed her.
Jensen said he remembered looking "in her bedroom and she been stabbed to death. He stated "Oh my God", no one could have done that but me".
Court documents also show that Jensen had been taken to Adventist Health hospital in Tehachapi on October 23, the day before his mother was found dead.
His mom had said he was acting strangely the days leading to his being evaluated for a 5150 mental health evaluation.
According to ABC, police said Jensen "was calm and polite".
The police report recommendation stated, "No further action needed, based on my interviews with (redacted) and (redacted) it appeared Jensen did suffer from some type of unknown mental health disorder. Jensen, however, at this time did not appear to be a danger to himself or others, nor did he appear to be gravely disabled to the point he could not care for himself, thus a 5150 mental health hold was not placed on him."
Jensen was initially being held in Mohave, Arizona before he was extradited to Kern County.
He"s since pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. His next court date is Jan. 17.
Last November, one week after Trump"s election and just as the "Russian collusion" narrative in the US was getting warmed up, we reported a bizarre incident in the top echelons, one in which Russia"s Economy Minister Alexey Ulyukayev was arrested on suspicion of taking a $2 million bribe in return for his ministry’s support of a positive assessment that would allow state oil company Rosneft to complete a deal to purchase the government"s stake in another Russian oil major, Bashneft, after he was monitored and his cell phone was bugged by the FSB for more than a year. The bribe in question involved the sale of Rosneft"s 50% stake in Bashneft.
"The circumstances of the crime are connected with Alexey Ulyukayev, who occupies a public post in the Russian Federation, receiving $2 million on November 14 for the positive assessment provided by the Economic Development Ministry that allowed Rosneft to complete the deal on purchasing the government"s 50 percent stake in Bashneft," said Svetlana Petrenko, deputy head of the Investigative Committee.
Fast forward 13 months when on Friday, the former Russian economy minister was found guilty on the charge of taking a $2 million bribe and sentenced to eight years in prison. He is now the highest-ranking Russian official to have been convicted on corruption charges. The charges were based on the testimony of Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, as well as a on the evidence of a sting operation, in which Sechin personally handed a bag containing $2 million in cash to Ulyukayev, the then-economy minister.
The proceeding caused controversy in Russia, as Sechin delivered his testimony in written form, rather than in person. According to RT, he refused four times to testify in court, citing scheduling differences due to the taxing nature of his job.
The defense argued that he was dodging a personal appearance and violating due process, while critics accused him of being arrogant and considering his position to be above the law. The issue was raised at this week’s Q&A session with President Vladimir Putin, who refrained from criticizing Sechin for his conduct.
According to the court ruling, Ulyukayev extorted the bribe from Sechin, and in so-doing abused his position as member of the Russian cabinet. In his remarks, the presiding judge said “Ulyukayev acted under a preconceived plan, motivated by personal gain and with full understanding that the process of the privatization of Bashneft depended on his decisions.”
The court sentenced him to an eight-year prison term and a fine of over $2.2 million. He was arrested in the courtroom before the sentence hearing proceeded. Prosecutors asked for a sentence of ten years in a penal colony for Ulyukayev.
The former minister pleaded not guilty at the start of the trial and continued to maintain his innocence up until the verdict announcement on Friday. In his last address, he said a ‘not guilty’ verdict would be the only just outcome for his case. After hearing the sentence, Ulyukayev said he considered it unjust. His defense team confirmed that they would appeal the ruling.
Ulyukayev‘s defense argued that the money did change hands between Sechin and Ulyukayev, but that it was an entrapment on the part of the Rosneft head. The then-economy minister was not aware of the cash being inside the bag, his lawyers told the court. In his final plea, the ex-minister reiterated his position. “The case contains no proof of my complicity in bribe-taking whatsoever. Moreover, it testifies that I am a victim of a monstrous provocation,” Ulyukayev said in court earlier this month.
“I am guilty of a different thing. I have served Russian citizens for many years, and I have managed to achieve something, but not enough. Only when I myself got into trouble I started to understand how hard people’s lives are. People, forgive me for this. I am guilty before you,” he added.
After his arrest in mid-November last year, Ulyukayev spent around two days in a pre-trial detention facility before being placed under house arrest at his apartment, located in an elite housing complex in Moscow.
Ulyukayev is the first, and highest-ranked, government minister in Russia’s modern history to be found guilty of corruption by a court.
The ongoing legal drama of former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli and his one-time lawyer (and alleged co-conspirator) just keeps getting weirder.
On Thursday, CNBC reported that the trial of Evan Greebel, a lawyer accused of helping Shkreli loot his pharmaceutical company Retrophin, has been temporarily put on hold after “potentially career-ending allegations” about a government official involved in both Shkreli’s and Greebel’s prosecution reportedly were raised by Greebel’s attorneys.
The allegations, first reported by the online legal publication Law 360, were raised Wednesday in Brooklyn, New York, federal court, where Greebel is on trial. Shkreli was convicted of three out of eight fraud counts in a separate trial over the summer.
Law 360 reported that Greebel"s trial "came to a screeching halt" Wednesday during testimony by Steven Rosenfeld, an investor in both Retrophin and one of Shkreli"s hedge funds and one of the people who was purportedly offered a fraudulent consulting agreement as a form of compensation for his losses in Shkreli’s hedge fund.
It’s unclear exactly what Rosenfeld said. Here’s how events unfolded, according to CNBC.
Law 360 reported that Greebel"s trial "came to a screeching halt" Wednesday during testimony by Steven Rosenfeld, an investor in both Retrophin and one of Shkreli"s hedge funds.
Rosenfeld, a non-practicing doctor called to the witness stand by Greebel"s lawyer, was reportedly being asked about what happened in 2015 when FBI agents visited his home to ask about a consulting agreement he had with Retrophin.
Shkreli and Greebel were accused of using bogus consulting agreements by Retrophin with investors in Shkreli"s hedge fund to repay them for their losses — but Rosenfeld claims he did actual work under the agreement.
According to Law 360, Rosenfeld testified he asked the FBI if he could call his attorney. A prosecutor then objected to that line of questioning.
That objection led to a lengthy discussion with prosecutors, defense lawyers and Judge Kiyo Matsumoto out of the earshot of jurors and observers in the courtroom.
Another long sidebar conference followed after Greebel"s lawyer Randy Mastro asked Rosenfeld who had attended a subsequent meeting he had with government officials, Law 360 reported.
Matsumoto reportedly sent jurors home for the day early. She then ordered prosecutors and defense lawyers to file sealed legal briefs "on what she described as "potentially career-ending allegations" made by the defense," according to Law 360.
Matsumoto said the briefs should address the question of whether statements made by federal prosecutors outside a courtroom are admissible as evidence in a case.
Assistant US Attorney David Pitluck, one of the prosecutors in Greebel"s case, said in court that the allegations raised by the defense are "very serious,” but there still haven’t been any clues as to exactly what those allegations are.
Greebel"s lawyers, in a letter to the judge filed Wednesday, wrote that statements made to Rosenfeld by government officials should be allowed into evidence "to show why Dr. Rosenfeld would have felt motivated to cooperate with the government and to provide context for what he knew in subsequent meetings."
Shkreli, who was found guilty over the summer, is awaiting sentencing at a federal jail in Brooklyn that is also home to Mexican drug lord El Chapo. His bail was revoked – while his $2 million bail was withheld – following a Facebook post offering a reward for a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair that prosecutors successfully argued was essentially a threat. It’s unclear whether these allegations could also help Shkreli secure his freedom. He is to be sentenced in January.
