"$100,000 Bought Me The Mayor": Shocking Testimony Of De Blasio Donor Revealed

You don"t have to look around too hard to realize that the "political swamp" in America stretches from sea to shining sea and from the highest offices in Washington D.C. to the lowliest of city halls on Main Streets all across the country. 

The latest evidence of such comes to us from New York City where a Mayor Bill de Blasio donor-turned-felon testified in extraordinary detail yesterday that he and his businessman pals wrote the book on city corruption — buying off the Mayor’s Office and the Police Department using brazen pay-to-play tactics.  As the New York Post details today, 34-year-old Jona Rechnitz went into staggering detail in his testimony about political favors he received from City Hall for a small $100,000 donation.

“We’re going to become significant contributors, but we want access,” Jona Rechnitz, 34, testified telling de Blasio fundraiser Ross Offinger after Hizzoner clinched the Democratic nod for mayor in 2013.

 

De Blasio soon paid Rechnitz a visit in his office, the disgraced businessman told jurors in Manhattan federal court.

 

De Blasio — who last year called his relationship with Rechnitz “not a particularly close’’ one — handed the wheeler-dealer his private cellphone number and email address, the witness said.

 

The pair then began chatting “at least” once a week about “different issues in the city” — as Rechnitz funneled about $160,000 to de Blasio’s campaign and pet political projects, said the government witness.

Rechnitz appeared as the star witness in the bribery trial of former city corrections union chief Norman Seabrook. He is accused of bribing Seabrook to get him to invest $20 million in union pension money in a pal’s ailing hedge fund.  But testimony quickly veered toward de Blasio, as Rechnitz was questioned about his ties to the ­administration.

Rechnitz said he had high hopes for the kinds of favors he could potentially receive.

“My mind was limitless,” he said.

 

Business pal “Jeremy [Reichberg] had told me in the days of Giuliani, people made a fortune.

 

“I was focused on making money, getting my name out there, becoming a big player in town. So I figured maybe I’ll buy an office building, and I’ll get the city as a tenant. Maybe I’ll need to get special permits to make residential developments.”

 

Rechnitz and Borough Park businessman Reichberg initially targeted the NYPD in their pay-to-play scheme, doling out gifts and cash to cops in return for favors. Then they set their sights on City Hall, Rechnitz said. “We had the police going for us — and now it was time to get into politics,’’ he testified.

 

Rechnitz started calling Offinger every time he needed a favor — including one involving a friend’s massive water bill and violations Rechnitz faced for a tenant subletting a residence on Airbnb.

Rechnitz even admitted to using "straw donors" to circumvent caps on individual political contributions, a scam which he says De Blasio"s fundraisers were privy to.

In 2014, Rechnitz donated another $102,300 toward a failed effort led by de Blasio to help Democrats wrest control of the state Senate.

 

Rechnitz said some of the dough was from straw donors, which is illegal.

 

“A couple of people in my office, I had them write checks, because I wasn’t allowed to give more than $4,950. And I reimbursed them for those donations,’’ Rechnitz said.

 

Rechnitz said he promised Offinger to hit target donations — and the fundraiser would stop by his office to check on the fundraising.
“I had a lot of pressure from him to bring that amount in,” Rechnitz said of the pledged amount.

But it wasn"t just De Blasio"s office where Rechnitz attempted to buy political favors as he admitted that his pay-to-play scams stretched north to the affluent suburbs of Westchester County and involved County Executive Rob Astorino. 

During his hourlong testimony, Rechnitz said the corruption even extended beyond the Big Apple.

 

Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino gave him and Reich­berg positions as police chaplains in exchange for their ­financial contributions — even though neither of them is a rabbi or a priest, Rechnitz said.

 

“It meant that I got my parking placard,” said Rechnitz, whose firm JSR Capital donated $15,000 to ­Astorino’s campaign in June 2013.

 

He said Astorino once approached him with a picture of a Rolex watch and asked for help in procuring it.

 

“I told him I’m happy to give it to him; he doesn’t have to buy it,” Rechnitz testified.

 

“He told me that he couldn’t take it as a gift. He had to pay something because that wouldn’t be allowed. It was a $7,000 to $10,000 watch, if I remember correctly.”

 

In the end, Astorino agreed to pay $1,000 to $2,000 — and Rechnitz covered the rest, he said.

Not surprisingly, De Blasio"s office dismissed Rechnitz" testimony saying "the administration has never and will never make government decisions based on campaign contributions"...clearly just more attempts to "criminalize behavior that is normal."

San Diego's Deadly Hepatitis A Outbreak Turns "Statewide Epidemic" As "Outbreak Could Last Years"

A few weeks ago we highlighted the staggering outbreak of Hepatitis A in San Diego that had infected 400 people and killed more than a dozen.  The outbreak was first identified in early March, according to the county, and declared a public health emergency in September.

But, as the LA Times points out, the hepatitis A outbreak that started in San Diego is now on the verge of reaching statewide epidemic status, as cases have spread through homeless tent cities all the way north to Sacramento.

California’s outbreak of hepatitis A, already the nation’s second largest in the last 20 years, could continue for many months, even years, health officials said Thursday.

At least 569 people have been infected and 17 have died of the virus since November in San Diego, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles counties, where local outbreaks have been declared.

Dr. Monique Foster, a medical epidemiologist with the Division of Viral Hepatitis at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Thursday that California’s outbreak could linger even with the right prevention efforts.

“It’s not unusual for them to last quite some time — usually over a year, one to two years,” Foster said.

Hepatitis A is commonly transmitted through contaminated food. The only outbreak in the last 20 years bigger than California’s occurred in Pennsylvania in 2003, when more than 900 people were infected after eating contaminated green onions at a restaurant.

California’s outbreak, however, is spreading from person to person, mostly among the homeless community.

The virus is transmitted from feces to mouth, so unsanitary conditions make it more likely to spread. The city of San Diego has installed dozens of handwashing stations and begun cleaning streets with bleach-spiked water in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, the outbreak has made its way to Santa Cruz and L.A. counties, where 70 and 12 people have already been diagnosed, respectively, as public health officials warn that the worst is likely far from over.

San Diego County declared a public health emergency in September because of its hepatitis A outbreak.

Since November, 481 people there have fallen ill, including 17 who died, according to Dr. Eric McDonald with the county’s health department. An additional 57 cases are under investigation, he said.

Officials from both counties say they’ve vaccinated thousands of homeless people and will continue to do so.

New cases linked to the outbreak might not appear for weeks, because it can take up to 50 days for an infected person to show symptoms, said Santa Cruz public health manager Jessica Randolph.

“I don’t think the worst is over,” Randolph said.

Of course, as we pointed out earlier this year (see: Shocking Video Footage Of Sprawling California Tent City), sprawling tent cities have been popping up all over California for years and are called home by 1,000s of residents in even the most posh cities from Newport to Santa Cruz.  All of which has prompted a wave of vaccinations and a "review of sanitation protocols for homeless encampments"...which we"re sure will be followed very rigorously by residents.

In Orange County, which has had two hepatitis A cases linked to the outbreak, public health workers have given out 492 vaccines, mostly to homeless people, officials said. County nurses have also been visiting shelters and parks to vaccinate people.

Some officials, including in Riverside and Sacramento counties, also said they were reviewing their sanitation protocols for homeless encampments. An L.A. councilman recently called for more toilets in neighborhoods such as skid row and Venice in light of the local hepatitis cases.

In Oakland, city workers, represented by SEIU Local 1021, sent a letter to City Hall last month saying they feared a hepatitis A outbreak in the region’s homeless community. So far, there haven’t been any cases in Oakland or the rest of Alameda County, but city safety steward Brian Clay said he believed the city has allowed unsanitary conditions in homeless encampments.

“There’s syringes, there’s human feces, there are dead animals, rats alive, and dead rats … pee bottles, five-gallon buckets used as toilets,” Clay said. “We’re definitely concerned about this added threat of hepatitis A.”

As Breitbart points out, California"s tent cities are the direct result of "proactive" legislation that forbids police from dispersing homeless people living in tent cities between the hours of 9pm and 5:30am.

California homeless advocates have been successful across the state in forcing cities to accept the homeless living in large tent communities on public property. The advocates refer to anti-homeless ordinances as the modern-day equivalent to post-slavery Jim Crow and Depression era anti-Okie laws that allowed police to disperse people deemed “undesirable” after dark.

The City of San Diego was forced to sign the Spencer Settlement in 2006, which forbids its Police Department from enforcing the city’s “Illegal Lodging Enforcement Guidelines” between the hours of 9 pm to 5:30 am.

California, with 115,738 homeless, now accounts for about 21 percent of America’s total homeless population. Due to legal settlements against vagrancy laws, about 72.3 percent of California’s homeless are unsheltered, usually living in tent cities.

If you like your socialist utopia, you can keep your socialist utopia.

"March On Google" Protest Postponed Due To "Credible Terrorist Threat"

A protest march planned for Saturday at Google in Mountain View has been postponed, according to a blog post by its organizers, who said they had received "credible" terrorist threats.

As the Mercury News reports, the “Peaceful March on Google” has been postponed “due to credible Alt Left terrorist threats for the safety of our citizen participants,” the group wrote in a blog post. The group is protesting against the recent termination of engineer James Damore over a memo claiming which slammed the search giant for its "anti-conservative" bias and claimed a biological basis for the gender gap in tech.

From the blog:

Despite our clear and straightforward statements denouncing bigotry and hatred, CNN and other mainstream media made malicious and false statements that our peaceful march was being organized by Nazi sympathizers. Following the articles, credible threats from known Alt Left terrorist groups have been reported to and relevant authorities have been notified.

In one instance, an Alt Left threat was made to use an automobile to drive into our peaceful march.

The blog also notes that in addition to the Mountain View campus, there were protests planned at Google offices in eight other cities, including New York City, Washington D.C., Boston, Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. The group hopes to hold its protest in a few weeks.

Complicating scheduling, the original protest was announced before violence erupted over the weekend in Virginia episode. That violence has now led to a counterprotest scheduled for the same time this Saturday, about three miles away from Google’s headquarters. On Tuesday, Mountain View police released a public statement saying the a planned protest was scheduled “for two hours Saturday afternoon at Charleston Park known as the March on Google”, the Mercury News reported.

“The organizers of this protest are not connected to the participants or to the events that led to the tragedy in Virginia last weekend,” police said in a release. “The Police Department has a responsibility to uphold everyone’s Constitutional right to free speech, and we want you to know that we are working with both Google and with the event planners to ensure the protest is a peaceful one.”

Elsewhere, the counterprotestors chose Mountain View’s Civic Center Plaza for the 1 p.m. event because it’s far enough away from the “March on Google” to prevent overlapping events and reduce the chance of confrontations, said organizer Lenny Siegel, the city’s vice-mayor, adding that this counterprotest is not an official city event.

"Go Back To Your Own Country" Washington Sikh Told Before Being Shot; Shooter At Large

The Police Department in Kent, Washington is investigating a Friday night shooting that left a man wounded as a possible hate crime. A Sikh man was shot in Washington state by an attacker who approached him in his driveway and yelled, "go back to your own country" according to police reports. The victim was wearing a turban at the time of the shooting.

The Friday night shooting which took place city of Kent about 15 miles (24 km) south of Seattle, has followed a number of other attacks on Sikhs in the United States over a period of more than a decade. Authorities say around 8 p.m., an armed individual walked up to a man working on his car in a driveway at a house off 108th Avenue SE. According to Reuters, hate crime-tracking groups say assailants have occasionally mistaken Sikhs for Muslims, who have also been victimized in religiously motivated crimes. The good news: the victim  was released from hospital with no permanent injury, the Seattle Times reported.

The Sikh man was working on his car in the driveway of his home when he was shot in the arm, according to Seattle television station KIRO 7, which spoke to a woman who knows the victim and saw him after he was struck by the bullet. "Some comments were made to the effect of "get out of our country, go back to where you"re from," and our victim was then shot," Kent Police Chief Ken Thomas said at a news conference. "To think that this could happen in our community was very surprising and extremely disappointing," Thomas said. “This is the first incident of this magnitude that I am aware of in the city of Kent" the police chief added.

#breaking Kent Police speaks out on shooting of Sikh man @KIRO7Seattle @PatranyaKIRO7 @LizRocca pic.twitter.com/WRrHY91HF0

— Bill Skok (@billskiro7) March 4, 2017

Sikh community members, who are pushing authorities including the FBI to investigate the shooting as a hate crime, stood behind Thomas as he described the shooting. One man says a lot of people are scared and couldn’t believe something like this could happen here. “All they see is a person with a turban, so it could have easily been me.”

On Sunday morning, the Police were still seeking the gunman who remained at large.

India"s foreign minister said on Twitter early Sunday that the victim is identified Deep Rai and he told police he was working in his driveway on Friday when the unidentified man approached him. "I am sorry to know about the attack on Deep Rai, a U.S. national of Indian origin," Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said. He added that he had spoken to the father of the victim.

Rai told police in the Seattle suburb of Kent that the shooter is 6-foot-tall, white and has a stocky build. He said the man was wearing a mask covering the lower half of his face.

Recently, South Asians have been on edge after a deadly shooting in a suburban Kansas City bar that the FBI is investigating as a hate crime. Authorities said witnesses to the shooting, which left an Indian man dead and another wounded, said the suspect yelled "get out of my country" before he opened fire.

Police told KIRO7 that the agency has contacted the FBI and other law enforcement agencies about the case. "We"re early on in our investigation," Kent Police Chief Ken Thomas said Saturday. "We are treating this as a very serious incident."

The good news: Rai has been released from the hospital. "He is just very shaken up, both him and his family," said Jasmit Singh, a leader of the Sikh community in the nearby suburb of Renton. "We"re all kind of at a loss in terms of what"s going on right now, this is just bringing it home."