#COVID Fraud Enforcement Task Force

[nationallawreview]

Acting U.S. Attorney Levy Forecasts False Claims Act COVID Cases Targeting Private Lenders Of CARES Act Loans That Failed In Their Obligation To Safeguard Government Funds

Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy discussed the enforcement priorities for the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) during a Q&A session on May 29, 2024, and made clear that the historical focus of the office remains the top priority: detecting and combating health care fraud, waste, and abuse. In particular, both Levy and Chief of the USAO’s Civil Division, Abraham George, have recently…

[darkmaga-returns]

In April 2024, the Justice Department’s COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force (CFETF) released a report outlining the blatant and widespread fraud involving many COVID-19 relief programs. In all, 3,500 people were charged and over $2 billion in stolen COVID funds were seized.

Lots of people exploited the government’s relief efforts for personal gain, and none of them will surprise you.

In the first example, the taxpayer-funded pandemic relief program called the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) was established to help performance venues and arts organizations pay the bills. Trump signed it into law in 2020. A Business Insider report showed that artists like Lil Wayne and Chris Brown received millions in grant money, using it for private jets, designer clothing and $80,000 birthday parties.

In the second example is the story of the glamorous Napa Valley 5-star hotel, Auberge du Soleil which costs $2000 a night. Still, the hotel wasn’t the investment two of its investors hoped it would be. They lost money for years, but that changed in 2020/2021 when the hotel received $9 million in COVID-19 relief. Keep in mind these relief funds were Congressionally authorized.

Who are the investors, you ask?

[mystlnewsonline]

Puerto Rico - 4 Men Charged with Conspiracy to Launder Funds

Four Men Charged in a Superseding Indictment with Conspiring to Launder Funds from Various Fraud Schemes - Oluwasegun Baiyewu, Oluswaeun Adelekan, Temitope Omotayo, and Temitope Suliman. Puerto Rico (STL.News) A federal grand jury in Puerto Rico returned a superseding indictment charging four men with one count of conspiracy to launder funds from wire, mail, and access device fraud schemes.  One defendant, Oluwasegun Baiyewu, was previously charged on October 21, 2021. According to court documents, Oluwaseun Adelekan, 40, and Temitope Omotayo, 40, both of Staten Island, New York; Ifeoluwa Dudubo, 37, of Austin, Texas; and Temitope Suleiman, 37, and Oluwasegun Baiyewu, 37, of Richmond, Texas, conspired to launder funds from different international organized fraud schemes, including romance, pandemic relief unemployment insurance fraud, and business email compromise scams.  These fraud schemes disproportionately impacted elderly or otherwise vulnerable Americans. “Fraud that targets seniors is reprehensible, and money laundering networks like the one alleged in this case allow fraudsters to profit from their unlawful schemes,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.  “The department is committed to pursuing investigations and prosecutions of those who victimize the elderly and other vulnerable members of our community.” “These charges reflect the Department’s ongoing commitment to work with our law enforcement partners to identify and hold criminals accountable, especially those who prey on vulnerable victims,” said U.S. Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow for the District of Puerto Rico.  “We remain steadfast in our resolve to prosecute individuals who target seniors who have been victimized for far too long by individuals who hide in the shadows and in foreign nations to commit their crimes.” “Cases like this demonstrate the FBI’s commitment to protecting the American people and defending them against financial fraud schemes,” said Executive Assistant Director Tim Langan of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch.  “The FBI will continue to hold anyone accountable who seeks to exploit vulnerable Americans, including the elderly.” The superseding indictment alleges that in 2020 and 2021, the defendants worked together to profit from efforts to “clean” money from scams involving victims, many of whom were older adults, in California, Illinois, Washington, and Nevada, and business email compromise schemes affecting victim companies in Puerto Rico and Missouri.  After receiving the proceeds, the defendants or their co-conspirators conducted hundreds of transactions with the funds, including obtaining cashier’s checks and money orders and then using the cashier’s checks and money orders to purchase used cars that were shipped overseas to Nigeria. Adelekan, Baiyewu, Dudubo, Omotayo, and Suleiman are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering.  If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.  A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, U.S. Department of Labor Office of Inspector General, and FBI San Juan Cyber Task Force are investigating this case, with assistance from the National Unemployment Insurance Fraud Task Force supporting the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Strike Force teams. Trial Attorneys Emily C. Powers and Brandon Robers of the Justice Department’s Consumer Protection Branch and Assistant U.S. Attorney Edwin G. Mercado for the District of Puerto Rico are prosecuting the case. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Justice Read the full article

[afriupdatenews]

Two Nigerian relatives indicted for fraud, COVID-19-related scam in US

Two Nigerian relatives indicted for fraud, COVID-19-related scam in US

Two Nigerian nationals have been indicted in connection with their roles in expansive online fraud schemes targeting individuals in the United States, including romance scams and pandemic unemployment assistance fraud, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement. Osakpamwan Henry Omoruyi, 36, and Osaretin Godspower Omoruyi, 34, were each indicted on one count of conspiracy…

[keshetchai]

I’m going to throw this under a cut, it’s mostly just personal stuff and idk. I don’t care who reads it particularly but also I think it’s nice to put rambles under the jump cut. 

I recognize I SHOULD reach out to my rabbi (not today, not right before shabbat, but in general just to talk because I need to talk) and I SHOULD find a therapist to talk to and I SHOULD do a lot of things but actually my brain is just a merry-go-round of “I’m okay, but I’m not? Things are okay, but they are bad actually?” i should be journaling in my real deal journal! but i’m not? 

I didn’t have my adderall refilled for a month and now i’m back on it again and am a little jumpy (this will usually settle away after a day or two). the med tech asked how i was doing with my anxiety and depression and it’s surreal to be like “oh my normal baseline clinical anxiety and depression are fine, it’s the situational part that is out of control” and try to have that...be understandable lol. 

I keep telling myself I, personally, am okay. I am secure in ways I wasn’t before b’’h. I am doing better. a LOT better. i recognize this. I feel like I have been...not able to engage as Jewishly as I really want which is upsetting to me. I’m not sure what to re-focus on doing so that I am engaged again. 

but also simultaneously, while I the individual am okay, there is a lot that is not okay that makes me...less okay? not just the world in general, but my little brother (19 yo) has been lying to family for months about various things (and usually gets caught out) for MONTHS. 

last fall he was supposed to be starting community college, he had a full time(!) job and I was so so proud. But then it began to unravel. He quit his job (partly because they fired his friend, and partly because they were disorganized and had no one to train him to do his job apparently?). Then without telling anyone right before the pandemic hit, he dropped out of school. (not even online classes, just dropped out totally. and lied.) 

then he started claiming he was dating this girl he met online (which is not bad PER SE) but she is maybe 16?? too young!!! at some point he took himself to the hospital psych ward, which is fine, he’s allowed to do that and get help if he needs. and then after midnight on my mother’s birthday in april he asked if he could just “Get out of the house” for the night and rent a hotel room “nearby”. my mom said okay, and let him borrow her truck. there’s many details missing here like our cousin M found out about his real plan and tried to stop him, told her dad, who tried to warn my mom i guess, who knows. well, come to find out that his “nearbye” was not in the same STATE even. He ended up flipping her truck in NEW MEXICO. he was fine, but he totaled her truck. 

mom gets new truck per insurance payout. brother is fine. except last weekend(?) my mom texts me asking if I heard from my brother, the answer was no. apparently he stole $4,500 from my grandparents by going to the atm with my nana’s debit card. when she called the bank to report fraud, she had to keep calling back for DAYS. she cried. my brother said nothing. she of course, filed a police report because an atm withdrawal doesn’t look like a fraud case, it looks like spending your own money. but once the police report is on file, the bank pulled the atm video records. and they have my brother on tape. 

so he committed a felony on tape (thinking I guess, that the bank would obviously just pay it back to my grandparents, all this money they saved and saved to replace furniture and make home repairs, they are broke, literally bankrupt.) and then I had to spend the weekend convincing my mother that davka even people caught red handed should demand to speak with legal counsel. (she was very “he is taking responsibility for this!!!” oh sure, but he still needs a lawyer.) 

anyways my grandparents kicked him out (rightfully so they fed and housed him for most of his life and he steals nearly 5,000??? apparently he is claiming he owed the money to drug dealers (if true, he’s an absolute radish brain. his mother works for the local courts, his grandfather used to be a prison guard, his uncle worked gang/drugs task force for the local police, like...i’m the first one who didn’t even ATTEMPT ROTC or law enforcement at some point)

the last updates i have are: 1.) the local PD isn’t jailing anyone for non-violent crime right now due to COVID, as long as my brother turned himself in which is why i told my mother he needs a lawyer 2.) he’ll probably be able to vote again in our state after time served or like...parole or who knows what but still, of course he gets likely charged with a felony before his first election, bc my grandparents will probably need to pursue this to get any money back 3.) my mom is staying with him in a hotel, and they’re hoping to get him into a shelter bc ofc he QUIT HIS JOB and my grandparents RIGHTFULLY kicked him out for theft. and he has nowhere to go. even if i wasn’t across the country, I can’t take a literal bank theft/fraud criminal in my home because I work for a Bank. My uncle can’t take him, he’s a cop. our other uncle lives in the side-house at my grandparent’s. Our dad is in Mexico, and you can’t leave the country if you don’t have a passport, which my brother doesn’t. 

I’m furious at him and furious at my mother who honestly, was enabling some of his behavior in ways I would’ve never EVER been allowed to do as a kid. 

I want to scream. uuuuughhhhhhh. I told my mother MONTHS ago he was out of line and I wouldn’t have gotten as far as XYZ but no, grand theft auto of her truck wasn’t enough she waits until he commits theft related to drugs. he is NINETEEN. 

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Editor’s note: This story includes a historical quote that uses a racial slur.

Election Day 1981 was ugly in some largely Black and Hispanic districts of Trenton, New Jersey. Ominous signs hung outside several polling places:

WARNING

THIS AREA IS BEING PATROLLED BY THE NATIONAL BALLOT SECURITY TASK FORCE.

IT IS A CRIME TO FALSIFY A BALLOT OR TO VIOLATE ELECTION LAWS.

That National Ballot Security Task Force was made up of county deputy sheriffs and local police who patrolled the polling sites with guns in full view. A court complaint later lodged by the Democratic Party described the members of the task force “harassing poll workers, stopping and questioning prospective voters … and forcibly restraining poll workers from assisting, as permitted by state law, voters to cast their ballots.”

The National Ballot Security Task Force was not some rogue enterprise, or an ill-conceived product of a few extremist thinkers. It was funded by the Republican Party.

While the group’s goals were ostensibly to prevent illegal voting, it was difficult to take that at face value — it looked a lot more like a coordinated intimidation effort. Republicans hadn’t been afraid to say publicly that they didn’t want certain people to vote, after all. Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said in a speech in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote. … our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

It wasn’t just Weyrich, either. During the 1971 Supreme Court confirmation hearing of future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, civil rights activists testified that he had run “ballot security” operations in Arizona and had personally administered literacy tests to Black and Hispanic voters at Phoenix polling places. Nor are these sentiments just a relic of a bygone era: In March of this year, President Donald Trump dismissed out of hand Democratic-backed measures that called for vote-by-mail and same-day registration to help ensure people could vote amid the COVID-19 pandemic: “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The political wisdom is ingrained at this point: Black and brown people don’t vote for Republicans.

From that principle flows all manner of Republican strategy. Sometimes the efforts are less legalistic and more shock jock — in 2016, the Trump campaign described “suppression efforts” aimed at Black voters, which included placing ads on radio stations popular with African Americans that played up Hillary Clinton’s 1996 comments about “superpredators.” More often, though, these moves by Republicans involve accusations of widespread voter fraud, battles over voter registration, and court challenges to laws meant to protect the franchise of America’s minorities. Talk of “election integrity” by the Grand Old Party is inextricably intertwined with its modern history of pandering to racist elements of American life; any attempt to disentangle these stories and tell them separately is disingenuous, even if it angers partisans.

Voting in person during the COVID-19 pandemic has raised safety concerns and intensified the push for vote-by-mail, a measure President Trump has derided.

JESSICA KOURKOUNIS / GETTY IMAGES

Efforts to tamp down the number of minority voters will likely continue this election. Following the abuses in Trenton in 1981, the Republican National Committee entered into a court-enforced consent agreement that it would not engage in voter intimidation efforts like the ones seen in Trenton — efforts the court deemed racially motivated. In 2018, the RNC was released from that consent agreement, and in May 2020, the RNC and the Trump campaign announced that they would spend $20 million to litigate initiatives like vote-by-mail and that they would recruit 50,000 poll watchers across 15 states. ”The RNC does not want to see any voter disenfranchised. We do not. We want every voter who is legally able to vote to be able to vote,” said RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel on a call with members of the press in May. “But a national vote-by-mail system would open the door to a new set of problems such as potential election fraud.” All this effort despite little conclusive evidence that voting by mail benefits one party over the other.

But it wasn’t always the case that the GOP looked to suppress the franchise, and with it minority-voter turnout. In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter introduced a package of electoral reforms, the chair of the RNC supported it and called universal, same-day registration “a Republican concept.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower won nearly 40 percent of the Black vote in 1956, and President George W. Bush secured about the same share of Hispanic votes in 2004.

Yet in 2016, Trump won just 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 8 percent of the Black vote.

The GOP’s whitewashed political reality is no accident — the party has repeatedly chosen to pursue white voters at the cost of others decade after decade. Since the mid-20th century, the Republican Party has flirted with both the morality of greater racial inclusion and its strategic benefits. But time and again, the party’s appeals to white voters have overridden voices calling for a more racially diverse coalition, and Republicans’ relative indifference to the interests of voters of color evolved into outright antagonism.

When I asked Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief strategist, how he thought the current GOP could go about appealing to minority groups, he declined to take the bait. “Thanks for trying to get me into the here and now, but I’m not going to get in there.”

I tried again. Bypassing Trump, did a Republican Party eight or 10 years into the future have a chance with minority voters?

“They’d better wake up to the necessity of doing it,” Rove said. “It’s a lost opportunity if we don’t.”

It’s not the first time Republicans have heard that sort of thing. But apparently it’s hard advice to take.

Michigan Gov. George Romney, a moderate Republican, lost out on the 1968 GOP presidential nomination but warned of the divisions that the “Southern strategy” would create in the party.

PICTORIAL PARADE / ARCHIVE PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES

1968 The moderates’ last stand

Conservative Barry Goldwater’s decisive presidential loss in 1964 led to a bevy of Republican primary candidates in 1968. Everyone wanted to save the party from ruin. Michigan Gov. George Romney emerged as the golden boy — the media golden boy — of the group, a successful Republican in a Democratic state who championed civil rights for Black Americans and opposed the war in Vietnam. Talking about the latter quickly got him into trouble, though, as he was a foreign policy neophyte and almost-debilitatingly earnest. While explaining his former support for the war during a 1967 interview, Romney said: “When I came back from Vietnam [in 1965], I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.”

Claiming the American military and diplomatic establishment brainwashed you wasn’t a particularly welcome thing to say back then. (Or now.) Historians mark this blunder as the beginning of the end of Romney’s chance to become the Republican candidate in 1968. And looking back, it was the beginning of the end of any liberal Republican standing a chance at winning the party’s nomination. (When Romney’s son Mitt ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, he called himself “severely conservative.” In the general election, he got 6 percent of the Black vote and 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.)

Romney fell from great heights. In 1966, Time magazine put him on its cover under the tagline “Republican Resurgence,” along with Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the country’s first Black senator since the Reconstruction Era, California Gov. Ronald Reagan and three other rising stars. Running on a strategy of courting the South, Goldwater had been flattened by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 general election, and more moderate candidates like Romney and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller were seen as the plausible Republican future. The promising candidates were, by and large, Time wrote, “moderates with immoderate ambitions.” But Romney was the man who got the most early attention. In a 1966 Harris Poll that asked who voters wanted to see as the Republican nominee in 1968, Romney beat out former Vice President Richard Nixon by 6 percentage points, Reagan by 14 and fellow moderate (and eventual vice president under a President Nixon) Rockefeller by 13.

Romney had pushed for the adoption of a civil rights plank to the 1964 Republican platform, but his efforts failed miserably. Instead, Goldwater’s nomination marked a full embrace of a strategy that sought to win the votes of white Southern Democrats disillusioned by their party’s embrace of reforms aimed at racial equity. Today’s GOP is still informed by this “Southern strategy.”

In her book, “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” Harvard professor Leah Wright Rigueur describes the treatment of the few Black delegates at the 1964 convention, several of whom were detained by security for talking to the press about their anti-Goldwater sentiments. One man’s suit was set on fire, and another “ran sobbing from the convention floor, crying that he was sick of being abused by Goldwater supporters. ‘They call you “nigger,” push you and step on your feet,’ he muttered to reporters, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘I had to leave to keep my self-respect.’”

Gov. Romney’s embrace of the civil rights movement would eventually put him at odds with Richard Nixon-era Republicans.

ARCHIVE PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES

Romney, for his part, was disgusted by the nominee and his stance on race. His moral high ground was notorious — years later, when his son Mitt ran for president, a former aide to George Romney told New York magazine that the elder Romney was “messianic,” adding “This guy was John Brown.”

Black voters might have been more circumspect. When violence broke out in a Black area of Detroit in 1967, Romney and Johnson each had a role to play, with Romney as governor and Johnson as president. They circled each other as they considered the response. “Neither wanted to take responsibility for installing martial law in an American city,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in his book “Nixonland.” And Detroit was a heavily Black city, no less. Romney lost the game of chicken and eventually sent in the National Guard. Later in the campaign he toured the Watts neighborhood of Detroit and asked his driver what the word was that everyone kept calling him. “Motherfucker, sir,” he was told.

Romney, despite his best intentions, was part of a political party that had been slowly losing Black support for decades. While African Americans had long felt a sense of comity with the party of Lincoln, Republicans had been trying their patience for much of the 20th century. In 1940, Black party identification was split evenly at 42 percent. Eisenhower received a large share of the Black vote, in part because of voters’ disillusionment with Southern Democrats’ anti-civil rights beliefs.

But even those inside Eisenhower’s administration knew something was off about the GOP’s relationship with Black voters. His adviser E. Frederick Morrow, the first African American to serve in an executive staff position at the White House, was frustrated with the GOP’s often-indifferent efforts to court Black constituencies. In 1959 he gave a speech that decried the party’s apathy toward Black voters: “Republicans could not expect Negroes to be extremely grateful for what Lincoln did, since in effect he had merely returned to them their God-given rights of freedom and personal dignity.”

In 1962, Nixon told Ebony magazine that he owed his 1960 loss of the presidency to this kind of complacency: “I needed only five per cent more votes in the Negro areas. I could have gotten them if I had campaigned harder.” The African American vote was still a bloc that Republicans saw as gettable — Martin Luther King Jr.’s father was going to vote for Nixon until his opponent, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy, called King while he was detained in an Atlanta jail.

Romney’s disastrous “brainwashing” quote exposed the weakness of his campaign, and Nixon acted swiftly to shiv Romney’s underbelly of naivete. Nixon had long understood that the racist forces in the Republican Party that brought Goldwater the nomination remained a center of power despite Goldwater’s defeat. Nixon acted quickly to play to them, tying Romney to the violence in Detroit — he was governor after all. Nixon went further, arguing that “the primary civil right” in America was “to be protected from domestic violence.” White voters’ fears of Black Americans’ demands for civil rights made them uncomfortable with politicians who might support those rights — politicians like Romney. As Time had pointed out in 1966, the Democratic Party’s FDR-era coalition was fragmenting: “Negro militancy has siphoned off much support from urban Italians, Irish and Slavs.” Nixon, who would famously run as a “law and order” candidate, wanted those white votes.

Delegates at the 1968 Republican National Convention show their support for Nixon, who went on to secure the party’s nomination with the help of avowed segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES

Nixon got the nomination after a contentious convention, one fought over how tightly the party should be tied to its Southern base. Reagan led a last-minute push for the nomination that was quashed only when South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond stepped in on Nixon’s behalf, while moderate delegates tried to make Romney, not the South-approved Spiro Agnew, vice president. Reflecting on the party’s turmoil, Romney deployed a graphic metaphor for the GOP, warning that, “to prevent this abscess from re-forming [Nixon and Agnew] must make the party leaders from the states that must win the election for them at least as important as Mr. Nixon made the leaders of the South and Southwest in winning the nomination.”

More than half a century later, the abscess is still there. Over and over again, Republicans have faced the choice between a big-tent strategy and specific appeals to white voters — appeals that over time have become tantamount to bigotry.

And it wasn’t as if people weren’t pleading for Republican racial attitudes to change.

THE LATE 1970s “The Republican Party needs 
black people”

In 1978, Republican party chairman Bill Brock invited Jesse Jackson to talk to party notables in Washington, D.C. An intimate of King’s, Jackson was a political whirlwind who had proved to be a dynamic civil rights organizer. “He is one of the few militant blacks who is preaching racial reconciliation,” New York Times reporter John Herbers had written of Jackson in 1969. His address trafficked in the language of incremental advantage so beloved by electorally avaricious political strategists. Seven million unregistered Black voters were waiting to be wooed by the GOP, Jackson said. “The Republican Party needs black people if it is to ever compete for national office — or, in fact, to keep it from becoming an extinct party.” The New York Times wrote that “Jackson’s proposition seems realistic enough” given that “thirty percent of Northern and 20 percent of Southern blacks already consider themselves independents.”

Jackson got a standing ovation from the crowd, and the good feelings of the day prompted Brock to say that the “right” 1980 presidential candidate “could hope for anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the Black vote.”

Reagan would go on to win only 14 percent.

For a fleeting political moment in the wreckage of Watergate, the GOP seemed to be open (once again) to the idea that their future could lie with voters of color. The conventional wisdom of that brief period, Perlstein told me in an email, “was that the Republicans would go the way of the Whigs unless they recouped their appeal to blacks.” (Perlstein has a forthcoming book that covers this period. Called “Reaganland,” it’s the latest volume in his multipart history of modern American conservatism.)

Jesse Jackson, in the Oval Office with President Jimmy Carter, ran for president as a Democrat in 1988 but worried for years that the party took the Black vote for granted.

AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS / GADO / GETTY IMAGES

In the late 1970s, Jackson made the argument that Black voters should want the two parties to compete for their votes to attain greater political leverage. He worried that the Democratic Party would come to take Black voters for granted. (More than 40 years later, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would tell a Black radio host, “I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”) Jackson’s own personal conservatism could be seen as emblematic of that of Black Americans, ones who could be potentially courted by the GOP. A 1979 profile of Jackson by the journalist Paul Cowan described him at an anti-abortion rally: “[He] denounced abortion as ‘murder,’ he insisted that ‘when prayers leave the schools the guns come in’ … he suggested that, while he supported women’s liberation, his wife at least should stay in her place — his home.”

But the good vibes after Jackson’s speech in 1978 did not last long. Republican bureaucrats in the Reagan era coalesced around the idea that minority voters were unwinnable.

A few months before Jackson’s speech in Washington, President Carter had introduced electoral reforms — an end to the Electoral College and same-day universal voter registration — that were met with praise from Brock, the RNC chair. But an essay that soon appeared in the conservative publication Human Events expressed an opposing view in the party. Writer Kevin Phillips said that Carter’s proposal “could blow the Republican Party sky-high” given that most of the new voters in a higher-turnout election would be Democratic.

Phillips, who worked for Nixon’s 1968 campaign, was the author of the 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” which articulated a road map for the GOP to sweep up white voters. Or as a 1970 New York Times profile of the Bronx native with “a visage that looked half scholar and half black-Irishman” put it: “Political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices, a circumstance which at last favors the Republicans.”

Phillips was one of many loud, young voices on the “New Right” that saw Reagan as the Republican future. Reagan said the Carter proposal might as well be called “The Universal Voter Fraud Bill,” and pressured Brock into reneging on his support for it, which he did. (Google NGram mentions of the term “voter fraud” spike starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s.)

“The Republican Party needs black people,” Jackson said in 1978. Two years later, Ronald Reagan would go on to win only 14 percent of their votes.

BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES

Brock’s flip-flop embodies a contradiction inherent in many of the internal GOP struggles of the past few decades, and ones that continue today: Should the party invest in appeals to new voters or pluck racism’s low-hanging electoral fruit? Brock availed himself of the latter in his 1970 Tennessee Senate race. His “victory could be credited almost entirely to his sophisticated attempts to play on Tennessean’s [sic] racial fears and animosities,” according to the Almanac of American Politics. Often, the party has attempted to play both strategies, though the racial one usually seems to blot out the more ecumenical approach.

By the time Reagan appeared at a 1980 campaign stop at the National Urban League, the prominent civil rights organization, his appearance wasn’t to win over Black voters so much as to “show moderates and liberals that Reagan wasn’t anti-black,” one aide later said.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush ran for president as a “compassionate conservative,” and reached out to constituencies beyond those traditional to the Republican Party.

MATT CAMPBELL / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

THE 2000s Double-talk

In 2005, RNC chair Ken Mehlman appeared at the NAACP national convention to formally apologize for the GOP’s Southern strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

It seemed an act befitting a party whose sitting president, George W. Bush, had run for office as a “compassionate conservative.” The branding was no accident. In 2018, Bush articulated why he felt the need to convey a more explicitly empathetic message. “I felt compelled to phrase it this way, because people hear ‘conservative’ and they think heartless. And my belief then and now is that the right conservative philosophies are compassionate and help people.” Rove put it a bit more bluntly when he explained that “compassionate conservatism” helped Bush “indicate that he was different from the previous Republicans.”

It was an extension of Bush’s past success with people outside the party’s usual base. When he was governor of Texas, he won more than 50 percent of the Mexican American vote. “He was comfortable with Hispanic culture. His kids went to a large public high school in Austin that was very Hispanic,” former adviser Stuart Stevens said. “Much of his appeal among Hispanics in Texas was attributed to his personal charm and charisma,” Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University, writes of Bush in his book, “The Hispanic Republican.” “He spoke Spanish, ate Mexican sweetbreads in border cities, and for Christmas he made enchiladas and tamales that he, unlike President Ford, shucked before eating.” Rove said the Hispanic population in Texas was “highly entrepreneurial,” signed up for the military at high rates, and was religious, “so they tend to have socially traditional values,” particularly on the abortion issue. “What’s not to like about that profile if you’re a Republican?”

Bush’s focus on reforming education and immigration was key to his “compassionate conservative” appeal.

BROOKS KRAFT LLC / CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Bush’s platform aimed to be inclusive. Stevens pointed to the potential of No Child Left Behind as one example, an education program that increased funds for low-income schools, many of them home to Black and Hispanic students. Bush signed the program into law with the support of liberal icon Ted Kennedy — there’s a picture of Kennedy standing behind Bush as he puts pen to paper. Two Black children stand directly behind the president. “This is the kind of thing that the current Republican Party would present at a war crimes trial,” Stevens said of the show of bipartisanship. These days Stevens, who also served as Mitt Romney’s chief strategist during the 2012 presidential campaign, is disillusioned with the Republican Party and has a book (his eighth) all about it, “It Was All a Lie,” due out in August.

Progress with new, diverse coalitions could have been possible, Stevens said, but “you need to have changed the substance.”

But for many in the Black community, the substance boiled down to what Kanye West said during a live 2005 telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Despite the compassionate conservatism rhetoric, the GOP of the Bush era continued to pursue policies hostile to Americans of color. The party deployed a warm and fuzzy message that belied the actions it took on voting rights. It tried to turn out Hispanic voters while tapping into efficient ways to shut down minority voting under the “voter fraud” umbrella. The abscess that George Romney had warned about not only had re-formed, it had grown.

“The first stirrings of a new movement to restrict voting came after the 2000 Florida election fiasco, which taught the unfortunate lesson that even small manipulations of election procedures could affect outcomes in close races,” Wendy Weiser, head of the Democracy Program at the left-leaning advocacy group the Brennan Center, wrote in 2014. As Carol Anderson of Emory University writes in “One Person, No Vote,” during the Bush years and beyond, Republicans who were “respectable members of society leveled the charges [of voter fraud] — U.S. senators, attorneys with law degrees from the Ivy League.”

The 2000 election, which brought Bush to office, marked a new era of focus on ballot rules.

ROBERT KING / NEWSMAKERS

John Ashcroft led a Department of Justice that took up a full-throated rallying cry against voter fraud. He had some of his own skin in the game — Ashcroft lost a 2000 Senate election in Missouri in which Republicans alleged mass voter fraud in Black precincts of St. Louis. A newspaper investigation later found the claims to be all but nonexistent. The Bush-era Civil Rights Division had the distinction of filing the first voting-discrimination suit on behalf of white voters in the history of the Voting Rights Act.

Perhaps no figure from the Bush Civil Rights Division emerged who was more controversial and long-lasting than Hans von Spakovsky. He promoted voter ID laws in his home state of Georgia starting in the 1990s, and gained infamy once he landed at the Justice Department for pseudonymously writing a law review paper under the name “Publius,” which promoted voter ID laws. Later, his identity revealed, he refused to recuse himself from a controversial case involving voter ID in Georgia. The case, which was handled under the auspices of the Voting Rights Act, led career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division to resign and, as journalist Ari Berman writes, “VRA enforcement came to a standstill. From 2001 to 2005 the DOJ objected to only forty-eight changes out of eighty-one thousand submitted, ten times fewer than during the first four years of the Reagan administration.”

Von Spakovsky has proved a durable advocate for his cause. Now the head of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation, he served on Trump’s now-disbanded Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission was created to investigate whether Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because of widespread voter fraud. No evidence for the claim has yet to be produced.

When I spoke with von Spakovsky, I asked him if it disturbed him that so-called voter fraud protection efforts disproportionately affect minorities — academic studies in various states have shown this, as has a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. He told me my assumption was wrong, and said there were studies on voter ID and election turnout that found ID requirements had had no adverse effect. He also pointed to the greater number of VRA cases brought by the Bush administration compared with the number undertaken during the administration of Barack Obama.

But Democrats don’t see it as quite that simple. “Counting up the number of cases isn’t really meaningful,” Justin Levitt, who worked in the Civil Rights Division during Obama’s presidency, wrote in an email when I asked him about von Spakovsky’s claim. “It’s a little bit like counting up the number of reps in a workout at the gym to try to figure out who’s more physically fit, without asking which exercises, which weights, which degree of difficulty. Or counting up the number of words in a piece to try to figure out which is the best reporting.”

The movement to require an ID at the ballot box began in earnest during the Bush administration. Voting rights activists have long called the laws racially biased and unnecessary.

JOHN FITZHUGH / BILOXI SUN HERALD / TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Testing claims about the effect that voter ID laws have on election turnout is tricky. Findings about their effect have varied from state to state, which likely has to do with the nature of state laws and their voting populations. But a measure like turnout also doesn’t take into account how the laws push some people to go through greater effort to cast a ballot successfully.

Levitt, who is now a constitutional law scholar at Loyola Marymount University, did an investigation into cases of election fraud that could have been stopped by the use of voter ID, and found, out of about a billion ballots cast, only 31 instances from the period of 2000 to 2014. The analysis and its results prompt an obvious question: If fraud is so rare, what’s the actual purpose of ID laws?

Attacks on voter franchise are more broad than voter ID laws, of course. Voter roll purges have moved front and center in recent years thanks to events like the controversial 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. And last year, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis found that the closure of polling places across the state had made it more difficult for Black voters to cast their ballots.

In 2005, after Mehlman’s mea culpa to the NAACP, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that he found the RNC chair’s remarks disingenuous: “My guess is that Mr. Mehlman’s apology was less about starting a stampede of blacks into the G.O.P. than about softening the party’s image in the eyes of moderate white voters.” For all of Bush’s campaign rhetoric about compassionate conservatism and his focus on Hispanic outreach, his Republican Party had remained as devoted as ever to the cause of suppressing the franchise of people of color.

“If the apology was serious, it would mean the Southern strategy was kaput,” Herbert wrote. “And we know that’s not true.”

Donald Trump’s election came only three years after an RNC-commissioned report called for a new, more welcoming approach to immigration from the party.

ADRIA MALCOLM / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

THE 2010s Self-reflection

The loss of the 2012 election prompted a crisis of confidence among GOP leadership.

“I was close to RNC chairman Reince Priebus. He came to me right after the election and was like, ‘We need to do some soul-searching,’” Henry Barbour, a Mississippi political strategist, told me recently. Along with four others, he would go on to author what became glibly known as the 2012 Republican autopsy report — officially the “Growth and Opportunity Project” — that placed the GOP’s institutional problems in stark terms: “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

Yet three years after the report’s publication, the GOP nominated Donald Trump, an anti-immigrant, race-baiting candidate. “How did people abandon deeply held beliefs in four years? I think the only conclusion is they don’t. They didn’t deeply hold them. They were just marketing slogans,” Stuart Stevens said. “I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who thought we were beating the market.”

Priebus, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, did not respond to my requests to talk about the report he commissioned, and what has happened in the party since.

What has happened is a circling of the wagons around Trump and his race-baiting rhetoric and policies. Gone are the days of articulated philosophies like “compassionate conservatism.” Now, the GOP relies on contrarianism to distinguish itself and stoke good feelings among its core members. Just look at the ease with which ideologically driven leaders like former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney have been cast aside. Romney called Russia “our number-one geopolitical foe,” yet the party is now led by a president who repeatedly heaps praise on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

The one thing that the party has stayed true to is its reliance on the politics of race and racism. While membership in the party wanes and America grows more diverse, the GOP has become practiced at speaking to its core members’ desire to maintain a white-centric American society. Trump’s appeal relies heavily on attacks against the media and “PC culture,” the medium and mode of expression, respectively, of a diversifying country.

Republicans know the bargain they’ve made. A 2007 Vanity Fair profile of Arizona Sen. John McCain during his presidential run speaks to an acute awareness that the short-term strategy of placating a white base would be damaging to the GOP’s long-term demographic expansion. In the story, McCain is asked about the political ramifications of the immigration debate: “‘In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base,’ he said. ‘In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you’ll pay a heavy price.’ Then he added, unable to help himself, ‘By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.’”

During his 2010 Senate reelection campaign at the height of the Tea Party movement, McCain cut a TV spot meant to annihilate any ambiguity over immigration that he might have expressed during his presidential run. In the ad, McCain strolls along the U.S.-Mexico border, saying “Complete the dang fence,” to which a white sheriff responds, “Senator, you’re one of us.” It is perhaps the least subtle advertisement involving a politician since Bob Dole and Britney Spears appeared in that 2001 Pepsi commercial.

The post-2012 election report urged Republicans to return to what sounded a lot like Bush-era immigration stances and semantics: “We are not a policy committee, but … we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”

The strategist types I spoke with all seemed in agreement on the wisdom of this: “You grow a party with addition,” Barbour told me. “Politics is ultimately about addition, not subtraction,” Stevens said. “It’s completely dumb and destructive for their interests every time you say you’re going to target a smaller and smaller pool of voters to win,” was former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd’s take. Both he and Rove seemed irritated at what they thought was a popular misrepresentation of their infamous “base strategy” that used issues like same-sex marriage to generate the high turnout of core Republican constituencies, like evangelical voters. “You win an election by having enthusiastic turnout in your base, by swiping people from the opposition and doing well among the independents,” Rove said. To suggest otherwise was “ridiculous.”

So, had other Republicans misinterpreted that strategy as an excuse not to go after voters outside the traditional GOP core? “Oh, yeah, absolutely.” Rove answered. “Look, we lost the popular vote in 2000. What were we going to do, win again that way?” Trump had, I pointed out. “Yeah, well, and look, it’s happened five times in American history,” Rove said, reeling off the dates from memory. I asked whether he was saying it’s a fluke of history. “Oh, yeah,” he replied. So, Trump would need to win the popular vote in order to win this time around, I asked, knowing I’d pushed a little too close to the present day.

“Look, stop it, stop it, stop it,” Rove said. The conversation ended soon afterward.

In the midst of racial unrest following the police killing of George Floyd, Trump has called protesters “thugs” and provoked rebukes from a small number of Republicans.

JOSE LUIS MAGANA / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Republicans with more immigrant-friendly views remain on the outs in an era when the party has focused on things like a family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are reports that Bush won’t vote for Trump in the fall. It feels as if a breaking point has been reached, given the pandemic and the paroxysms of protests and violence following the police killing of George Floyd. Trump’s leadership has been called into question, especially on race: 58 percent of Americans in a recent poll said they disapproved of how Trump was handling race relations in the country. The number is remarkable, if only for the fact that these days it’s difficult to get 58 percent of Americans to agree on anything except perhaps distaste for airline travel and love of Dolly Parton.

As the booming economy crumbled in the midst of the pandemic, so did many more moderate Republicans’ support for the president. As Trump tweeted about “thugs” and dispersed peaceful protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the move wasn’t reflective of “the America that I know,” while Bush issued a rare public statement sympathizing with the plight of Black Americans: “Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions.”

The country has taken note, and Trump’s poll numbers — for the time being — remain consistently below Biden’s, sometimes showing the Democrat with a double-digit lead. But there’s no sure thing in American politics these days. The election itself could be a chaotic, unpredictable enterprise.

The unprecedented circumstances of November’s election have prompted widespread concern that millions of Americans could be disenfranchised. Long lines at voting sites during primary voting in some states only exacerbated those fears.

SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES

2020 Crisis

The potential for disenfranchisement is very real in the upcoming presidential vote. The pandemic has given experts real concern that a poorly administered election could see thousands who want to vote essentially denied the right to do so. With that, seeds of distrust will be sown in the outcome. Just this week, Trump tweeted: “RIGGED ELECTION 2020: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”

“I am most worried in places that have had the lowest levels of mail voting, where the election officials are least prepared, where they don’t have the resources and where the rules are also hotly contested. So, states like Wisconsin, states like Georgia, where the political culture has been voting in person, there have been a lot of fights over voting access, where the rules need a lot of adjustment in order to have fair access to mail voting,” Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center told me.

Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in legal battles in various states over the rules that will govern November’s election, which could largely take place by mail. It is a fractured process and the types of cases litigated cover mail ballot deadlines, early voting access, ballot collection, prepaid postage and a host of other issues. So many separate litigations are underway that each side has their own website with clickable maps showing what fight is happening in each state. “Across the country we’ve seen Democrats under the guise of [the] COVID-19 crisis in a wholesale way try to change the election to fit their election agenda items that have existed long before this crisis,” RNC Chair McDaniel said. “We believe that many of the lawsuits they have initiated would destroy the integrity of our elections, so we’re fighting back.”

One complication of mail-in ballots could arise during their validation, which often requires a signature. Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center told me that young and Black voters tend to experience higher rates of ballot rejection based on that requirement. “Young people and minorities are less likely to have a signature on file with the state,” he said. Plus, young people might have not developed a good cursive signature, and there might be an implicit bias on the part of poll workers if an African American or Hispanic name is less familiar to them. Marc Elias, who got his start as a recount lawyer and is now directing the Democrats’ broad expanse of election-related litigation, told me that differential rejection rates on ballot signatures “has always been the silent epidemic of American voting.” The COVID-19 pandemic just helped make more people aware of it.

Von Spakovsky, for his part, told me that concerns for voting in person were overblown this year. “I think you can safely hold an election under these circumstances,” he said, pointing to the precautions taken in places like grocery stores, as well as for a recent election in South Korea.

But not all Republicans share that sentiment. “I think our messaging is all wrong, frankly,” Barbour said. There are legitimate concerns being expressed by Republicans over a largely vote-by-mail election, he said. But in the midst of a pandemic, people’s fears of infection should be taken into account. “Forget the political angle, eligible voters must be able to vote.”

Some Republicans do try to intimidate people at the voting booth, Barbour said. He recounted his own experience in the 2014 primary race between Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel.

“There was this runoff — we knew we were probably going to lose if we didn’t treat it like a general election,” he said of the Cochran campaign. They courted all voters, Black, white, and Democratic. “People were furious. ‘How dare y’all?’” Barbour said of the reaction to the strategy. “All these people came out from Georgia, saying, ‘We’re going to be at these polling places, and if you show up, you’re not going to be able to vote.’ I will say, as a Republican, I was embarrassed.”

“I kind of got a taste of what it’s like to be on the other side, seeing that happen, and I found it offensive and clearly wrong.”

[democracyin-news]

Feds charge 21 people with Covid-related fraud

Feds charge 21 people with Covid-related fraud

The charges brought in nine separate federal court cases are part of a broader effort by a Justice Department task force aimed at what Kenneth Polite, assistant attorney general for the criminal division, said is “rooting out schemes that have exploited the pandemic.” Investigators used data analytics programs and tips to identify patterns that could point to fraud, law enforcement officials said…

[latinbossboy9]

FRAUD SECTION ENFORCEMENT RELATED TO THE CARES ACT

May 17, 2021 DOJ Press Release

On May 17, 2021, the Attorney General established the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to marshal the resources of the Department of Justice in partnership with agencies across government to enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud. The Task Force bolsters efforts to investigate and prosecute the most culpable domestic and international criminal actors and assists agencies tasked with administering relief programs to prevent fraud by, among other methods, augmenting and incorporating existing coordination mechanisms, identifying resources and techniques to uncover fraudulent actors and their schemes, and sharing and harnessing information and insights gained from prior enforcement efforts.

Mar. 26, 2021 DOJ Press Release

The Fraud Section leads investigations and prosecutions of fraud, false statements, and money laundering related to the CARES Act passed by Congress in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working alongside law enforcement partners and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, the Fraud Section has charged over a hundred defendants with fraud connected to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL). These efforts have helped to protect the integrity of Small Business Administration programs and deter wrongdoing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Please note:  This page will be updated as content becomes available.

Remarks:

March 26, 2021 Statement from Acting AAG Nick McQuaid

Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Rabbitt Delivers Remarks at the PPP Criminal Fraud Enforcement Action Press Conference

Graphics and Images:



Court Documents (Cases Publicly Charged up to December 6, 2021)

Please note the court documents below have all been unsealed.

District of Arizona

U.S. v Sam Fiedler

Information

 

U.S. v Austin VanScoyk

Information

 

U.S. v Jonathan VanScoyk

Complaint

 

Central District of California

U.S. v. Robert Benlevi

Indictment

 

U.S. v Oumar Sissoko

Indictment

 

U.S. v. Richard Ayvazyan et al

Complaint

Indictment

Trial Press Release

Sentencing Press Release

 

U.S. v Hassan Kanyike

Complaint

 

U.S. v. William Sadleir

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Andrew Marnell

Indictment

Press Release (Complaint)

Press Release (Plea)

 

Northern District of California

U.S. v. Lebnitz Tran

Indictment

 

District of Colorado

U.S. v. Francis Joseph

Indictment

 

District of Columbia

U.S. v. Oludamilare Olugbuyi

Complaint

Press Release

 

Southern District of Florida

U.S. v. Christopher Licata

Press Release

 

U.S. v Leonel Rivero

Information

Press Release (Sentencing)

 

U.S. v Leonel Rivero

Information

Press Release (Sentencing)

 

U.S. v Cindi Denton

Complaint

 

U.S. v Devonte Thames

Complaint

 

U.S. v Ioannis Kralievits

Information

 

U.S. v Justin Etwaru

Information

 

U.S. v Jerrica Rosado

Complaint

 

U.S. v Luke Pierre

Information

 

U.S. v Shanrika Duhart

Complaint

 

U.S. v Yashica Bain

Complaint

 

U.S. v Dennes Garcia

Complaint

 

U.S. v Jonathan Markovich et al

Complaint

Indictment

 

U.S. v Tonye Johnson

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v Diamond Blue Smith

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Carlos Belone

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. David Hines

Complaint

Sentencing Press Release

 

U.S. v. Dennis Nobbe

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Keyaira Bostic

Complaint

Indictment

Press Release (Complaint)

Press Release (Trial)

Press Release (Sentencing)

 

U.S. v. Damion Mckenzie

Complaint

Indictment

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Andre Clark

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Latoya Stanley, et al.

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Tiara Walker

Complaint

 

U.S. v. Joshua Bellamy

Complaint

Press Release (Indictment)

Press Release (Sentencing)

 

Northern District of Georgia

U.S. v. Dixon, et al.

Indictment

 

U.S. v. Charmaine Redding

Information

 

U.S. v. Denesseria Slaton

Information

 

U.S. v. Teldrin Foster

Information

 

U.S. v. Wook Chung

Information

 

U.S. v. Yun Jae Moon

Information

 

U.S. v. Rodericque Jarmaine Thompson et al

Information

Indictment

 

U.S. v Hunter VanPelt

Complaint

Information

Press Release (Sentencing)

 

U.S. v. Darrell Thomas, et al.

Indictment

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Kenneth L. Wright, Jr.

Information

 

U.S. v. Chandra Norton

Information

 

U.S. v. Stanley Dorceus

Information

 

U.S. v. Mark A. Stewart

Information

 

U.S. v. Timothy Williams

Information

 

U.S. v. Antonio D. Hosey

Information

District of Hawaii

U.S. v. Martin Kao

Press Release

Complaint

Indictment

 

Northern District of Illinois

U.S. v. Rahul Shah

Complaint

Press Release (Complaint)

 

Middle District of Louisiana

U.S. v Brian Criss

Information

 

Western District of Louisiana

U.S. v Michael Tolliver

Indictment

 

Eastern District of Maryland

U.S. v. Brandon Fitzgerald-Holley

Indictment

 

District of Massachusetts

U.S. v. Elijah Majak Buoi

Indictment

Press Release

 

Eastern District of Michigan

U.S. v Amina Abbas

Press Release

 

U.S. v George et al.

Press Release

 

U.S. v Michael Bischoff

Information

 

U.S. v. Antonio George

Complaint

Press Release

 

District of Minnesota

U.S. v. Kyle William Brenizer

Indictment

Press Release

 

District of Montana

U.S. v. Matthew Jason Welch

Indictment

 

District of Nevada

U.S. v. Jorge Abramovs

Complaint

Indictment

 

U.S. v. Karen Chapon

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Brandon Casutt

Complaint

Indictment

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Bryan Robinson

Complaint

 

District of New Jersey

U.S. v Gregory Blotnick

Complaint

Press Release (Plea)

 

U.S. v Rocco Malanga

Complaint

 

U.S. v. Jae H. Choi

Complaint

Indictment

Press Release

 

Eastern District of New York

U.S. v. Hashm Campbell.

Information

U.S. v. Okeke et al. .

Press Release

Western District of New York

U.S. v. Arena, et al.

Complaint

U.S. v. Christian Johnson

Complaint

 

U.S. v. Larry D. Jordan II, et al.

Complaint

Press Release

 

Eastern District of North Carolina

U.S. v Tristan Pan

Indictment

 

Middle District of North Carolina

U.S. v Brandon Lewis

Information

 

U.S. v. David Christopher Redfern

Complaint

Superseding Indictment

Indictment

Press Release

 

Western District of North Carolina

U.S. v Izzat Freitekh

Indictment

Press Release

 

Northern District of Ohio

U.S. v. James Richard Stote, et al.

Complaint

Press Release (Indictment)

Press Release (Plea)

 

U.S. v. Ross Charno

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Phillip Augustin

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Wyleia Nashon Williams

Complaint

Press Release

 

Northern District of Oklahoma

U.S. v. Benjamin Hayford

Complaint

Press Release

 

District of South Carolina

U.S. v. Roosevelt Roshelle Hunt

Information

 

U.S. v. Lauren Marcel Duhart, et al.

Indictment

Press Release

 

Eastern District of Texas

U.S. v. Shashank Shekhar Rai

Complaint

Press Release

Press Release (Sentencing)

 

U.S. v. Samuel Morgan Yates

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Fahad H. Shah

Indictment

Press Release (Indictment)

Press Release (Sentencing)

 

Northern District of Texas

U.S. v Dinesh Sah

Complaint

Indictment

Sentencing Press Release

 

Southern District of Texas

U.S. v Scott Jackson Davis

Press Release (Arrest)

 

U.S. v Raheel Malik

Information

 

U.S. v Lola Shalewa Barbara Kasali

Complaint

Press Release

Press Release

 

U.S. v Amir Aqeel et al

Indictment

Press Release (Indictment)

Press Release (Superseding Indictment)

Press Release (Plea)

 

U.S. v. Jase DePaul Gautreaux

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Joshua Thomas Argires

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Lee Price III

Complaint

Press Release (Complaint)

Press Release (Sentencing)

 

Western District of Washington

U.S. v Austin Hsu

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Baoke Zhang

Complaint

Press Release

 

U.S. v. Eric Shibley

Complaint

Indictment

Press Release (Complaint)

Press Release (Trial)

 

U.S. v. Makund Mohan

Complaint

Press Release

 

Eastern District of Wisconsin

U.S. v Thomas Smith

Indictment

 

U.S. v Tarone de La Woods

Information

 

4/6/2022

U.S. v Deon Petty

Information

 

U.S. v Marvin Fitzgerald

Information

Updated February 9, 2022

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[briefnewschannel]

COVID-19 Aid Fraud Tops $8 Billion

COVID-19 Aid Fraud Tops $8 Billion

By TCR Staff | 9 hours ago The Department of Justice (DOJ) has uncovered a vast array of alleged fraudulent and criminal activities tied to more than $8 billion in federal COVID-19 aid, appointing Kevin Chambers as a new director tasked specifically with Coronavirus anti-fraud enforcement, reports The Hill. Chambers’ top priority will be to establish strike force teams, which the White House…

[96thdayofrage]

Florida man scammed $2.1million in pandemic loans to buy Lamborghini Huracán EVO, Rolex and Hublot watches and designer clothes from Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel

Federal prosecutors have accused a 27-year-old Haitian immigrant of fraud after he used ill-gotten COVID relief money to buy millions in luxury items such as a Lamborghini Huracán EVO, designer suits and watches from Rolex and Hublot.

Valesky Barosy, 27, sought out more than $4.2 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans, falsifying his prior-year expenses, net profit, payroll and IRS tax forms in each application, according to the Department of Justice.

He was paid out approximately $2.1 million.

On December 29, Barosy made his first appearance in federal magistrate court to face five counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, and one count of aggravated identity theft.

If he is convicted, he could face a prison sentence of up to 132 years.

On social media, Barosy draped himself in Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel, branding himself as a success story with captions like 'from homeless to high-rise sky-high view,' and 'you don’t have to be great to get started, get started to be great.'

He claimed that when he moved to the U.S. four years ago, he couldn't afford shirts from Walmart, where he was employed as a stocker.  

He became the president of a company known as VBarosySolutions Inc., or VBS, according to the federal indictment, which he said helped its customers fix poor credit scores.    

'4 years ago I was broke, busted and disgusted,' he wrote in one post. 'I couldn't even afford to put gas in my car or even buy dollar menu at McDonald's.'

'I remember getting cursed by a cashier at McDonalds just because I didn't have the extra 50 cents for a sweet and sour sauce. And today, because of hard work and determination, we are featured on top publications like ABC, FOX etc.'

His nebulous online biographies tout the fraudster as a '7 Figure Entrepreneur,' an 'NFT Creator' and an expert in 'marketing and e-commerce.'  

One of the 'press release' he produced was entitled 'How This Haitian Entrepreneur Went From Walmart To Disrupting The Multi-Million Dollar Credit Repair Industry.'

Barosy boasted about being involved with Financial Education Services Inc., a company that Georgia's attorney general described as an 'illegal credit repair business' that uses 'unlawful and deceptive practices in their multi-level marketing structure,' according to the Miami Herald.

That company paid a $1.75 million fine to the state of Georgia for its practices before changing its name to United Wealth Education.

Since the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act was enacted on March 29, 2020, a slurry of fraudsters abused the financial assistance provided by the PPP.

Nearly $100 billion has been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs set up to help businesses and people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, the US Secret Service said, based on data from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration.

South Florida, the nation's leading fraud capital, led the financial crime wave, the Miami Herald reported.

Those deceptions included a businessman buying a $318,000 Lamborghini with PPP money, a nurse who lied about their business to buy a Mercedes-Benz lease and child support with his $474,000 payout and a North Miami couple who claimed to be farmers to filch $1 million in benefits.    

The COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force was established on May 17, 2021 in an attempt to reel in relief-fund fraud.  

[nikejackson121]

A Look Into White-Collar Crimes

White-collar crime meaning

The Madoff Ponzi Scheme:  Get in-depth knowledge of non-violent crimes- the white-collar crimes and know the laws involved in them.

White-collar crimes have been registered a lot in the past years across the world. White-collar crimes are generally non-violent and include the wrong exploitation of public or private resources. Some of the most significant white-collar crimes in history that criminals have committed are in the United States of America.

Such as the Enron corporation, Charles Ponzi schemes, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Madoff are considered to have pulled off the most significant Ponzi white-collar crimes in the history of the United States of America.

What is a White-Collar Crime meaning? And What Are Their Variants?

White-collar crime definition involves government-motivated or financial fraud by individuals, business people, or corporations. An elementary example of white-collar crime is crimes such as money laundering.

These crimes are based on duplicity or violation of trust and are not physically harmful. White-collar crimes are also known as intelligence crimes committed against a structured system of one country. 

The most significant contributing factor to white-collar crimes is the internet, and advanced technology, one of the major crimes through technology is phishing.

 In this interwind, web face people fall into the trap of the scheme and compromise the personal bank credentials meant to be private and lose the x amount or sometimes the entire amount of money. The phishing scam is also considered an email marketing scam.

A Glance Into Different Types of White-Collar Crimes

The types of White-collar crimes involve the investigation of intelligence with its investigation of criminal activities such as:

Money laundering.

Financial intuition fraud

Bank fraud.

Fraud against the government.

Securities and commodities fraud.

Forex fraud. 

Corporate fraud.

Financial institution fraud.

Antitrust violations.

Bankruptcy.

Financial institution fraud.

Healthcare fraud and many more

Small people in business can execute white-collar crimes to the corporate levels. However, either of them can cause a million in money to the victims.

Let's get into some more of these types of white-collar crimes.

Insider Trading

Insider trading is trading on any company's stock based on the company's information officially made public. This illegal trading is called insider trading.

For example employee, company A provides a piece of insider information to the employee of company B.

The information could represent any business activity, such as acquiring another company or selling equities. Employee B purchases or sells company A stocks; relying on that information is called insider trading. 

Frauds

Fraud is a straightforward term. Most frauds are financial and related to investment. Fraud is a bubble scheme that demands money from retail and investors, promises to facilitate high returns on those investments, and fails to leave their schemes.

Not only that, but it also puts the investor's money at a high stake. Generally, the fraudster gets the money he has demanded but never sends out the money promised.

Money Laundering

Money laundering is converting money earned from an illegal source and making it legal. It is one of the most common examples of white-collar crimes.

Broadly the money is laundered into legitimate businesses or investments, so they are no longer commissioned as illegal money. Mostly the money laundered is always in a big chunk of capital.

Healthcare frauds

One can identify healthcare frauds in two variants, one financially and another medically. Financially the scam is carried through default media claims by dummy companies that do not exist on paper. 

And medically through providing degraded or poor quality medicines. Likes of which have been seen a lot in this covid phase.

Ponzi Scheme

The Ponzi scheme named after Charles Ponzi is an investment scam. The inventing company investors a very high amount of returns on a comparably meager amount of investment.

 It pays the returns to old investors through the money of newly deposited investors. 

There comes a time where the company gets saturated and no longer gets the investors to invest money, and some investors face a considerable loss.

Counterfeiting

Counterfeiting is shaming the same currency. Our money has become more colorful and detailed to combat counterfeiting. In today's day and age, technology has facilitated this even in a faster and easier way. 

Embezzlement

Embezzlement is a crime of theft against the company. Embezzlement takes a few dollars out of the cash drawer unofficially to a complex scheme and transfers the said amount to the embezzler's account. 

Common examples of embezzlement are illegal exchanges of equities and securities and unauthorized trading/fund transfer activities. 

Commodities fraud

Commodities fraud is illegal to purchase or sell commodities, raw materials, or semi-finished goods which are relative, such as (gold, silver, steel, coffee, tea). They make transactions just on paper.

Whereas on the natural side, they never invest. Two common types of commodities fraud primarily include investment in foreign currency exchange or commodities like (gold and silver).

Market manipulation

Market manipulation One of the major variants of white-collar crimes. People usually exercise this activity in stock markets through big private institutions, HNIs (high net worth individuals), or cooperative investors.

These big operators manipulate the prices of the stocks through their big chunks of capital. One of the famous schemes is the "pump and dump scheme," where the investors target a stock price of one particular stock in one direction. 

Pump refers to raising the stock price in a hit of capital, and dump refers to hammering down the stock price in one hit. Once one achieves the target price, operators change the flow of the stock price in opposite directions.

In this manipulation, retail investors who have been investing with a minor or somewhat limited source of capital suffer big hits of losses.

FBI forces operate task forces and regulate the financial law, and track the loopholes of the system. FBI coordinates with various regulatory groups such as the financial fraud enforcement task force, U.S attorneys office, commodities future trading commission. 

These groups participate closely with the efforts of the Department of justice at all levels to dismantle and disrupt extensive criminal activities and criminal organizations. To know more about white-collar crime, visit getlegal.com.

Categorizing White-Collar Crimes in Detail

Individual crimes

Individual crimes are mostly financial crimes committed by individuals. An example of individual white-collar crimes is the Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernie Madoff. Other personal crimes included identity theft, cyber crimes, phishing, hacking.

White-collar crimes are generally busted slowly in nature. It takes a longer timespan to disintegrate crime. Advance technology also somehow facilitates the employment of such white-collar crimes.

Corporate crimes

Some white-collar crimes may occur at the corporate level. Such as insider trading or the one which is likely to be dealt with money laundering. These tradings may be considered a crime as it requires a big chunk of capital.

What consequences does one need to suffer if there is a violation of the statutory law?

Statutory laws are the laws written by the legislature and must be obeyed and stood by the citizens.

 Statutory law keeps amending and changing; statutory laws vary from state to state. A bill is passed down in the legislature or agency and voted upon to form any statutory law.

There are strict repercussions for the violation of the statutory law. Violation of statutory law could be a given respondent who has intentionally disobeyed a law, and generally, such laws are commonly known.

There are plenty of statutory laws in the business and stock market, which leads to a white-collar crime if opposed.

A common example of a violation of statutory law could be disobeying a red light, driving at high speed, or manipulating the market. 

What Laws Abide in White-Collar Crimes? And What Are the Variants?

The white-collar crime law varies from country to country. Each government has imposed a different variant of laws respecting their country's habitat.

Laws of white-collar crimes in the United States include confinement, fines, imprisonment, home detention, country detention, community confinement, paying the cost of prosecution, forfeitures, reimbursement of the amount due. 

Generally, all white-collar crimes fall under federal crime—especially bank, healthcare, and trust violation frauds. 

What History Of White Collar Crimes?

The term white-collar was coined in the year 1930s by the great sociologist and criminologist Edwin Sutherland. He used this phrase to represent the crimes commonly committed by high-status individuals and entities. 

Let us dive a bit deep into this and have a moment of glance at the most significant white-collar crime of all time in history so far.

The Madoff Ponzi scheme was the biggest in American history, estimated at nearly 65 billion. His arrest took place in 2008. 

Bernard Lawrence "Bernie" Madoff was an American financier who executed the largest Ponzi scheme in history. He was pled guilty to 11 counts of securities fraud and money laundering. He had to face charges of 150 years in prison during his sentencing. Orders were made for Madoff to reimburse the investors. The money amount summed up to 150 billion dollars. 

Many such reports of white-collar crime have taken place in history, such as

Martha Stewart's insider trading 

Worldcom

Enron

Healthsouth

Marcus Schernkar

Why Are White-Collar Crimes Committed?

Generally, people commit white-collar crimes out of sheer greed for money. Sometimes it could be committed to getting ahead of the competition illegally or getting wealthy through the wrong sources.

These crimes are motivated to acquire money, property, status, or not lose the company acquisition.

Edwin Sutherland’s prospects on white-collar crimes:

Edwin Sutherland has published a book on white-collar crime. (White-collar criminality). Sutherland white-collar crime defines white-collar crimes profoundly. 

Edwin Sutherlands, one of the definitions of white-collar crimes, is white-collar crime is “a crime committed  by a person of high social status responsibility in the course of his occupation.”

Sutherland’s white-collar crimes perspective is unique and precise and is understandable for a layperson. 

To Conclude

There are specific vital provisions to prevent persecution from White-collar crimes.

To prevent getting victimized through these white-collar crimes, one must be aware of the standard technologies and make themselves wise regarding the basic financial policies in their respective countries. 

It is the responsibility of countries' education systems to tutor students and make them aware of what white-collar crimes are, types of white-collar crimes, laws prospecting on white-collar crimes.

Screen and monitor employees pro

https://www.getlegal.com/legal-info-center/criminal-law/white-collar-crime/

[minmaneth]

“ In May 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland launched a COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force. “

[skyanfeeds]

COVID Vaccine Updates: Justice Department creates COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force  WABC-TV

[orbemnews]

Republican state lawmakers look to empower partisan poll watchers, setting off alarms about potential voter intimidation Bills in several states would grant new authority to poll watchers — who work on behalf of candidates and political parties — to observe voters and election workers. Critics say it could lead to conflict and chaos at polling places and an improper targeting of voters of color. In Texas, a measure under consideration by the Republican-controlled legislature would grant partisan poll watchers the right to videotape voters as they receive assistance casting their ballots. Meanwhile, in Georgia, the state’s controversial new voting law makes it explicit that any Georgian can challenge the qualifications of an unlimited number of their fellow voters. The new law comes after a Texas group, True the Vote, teamed up with Georgia activists last year to question the qualifications of more than 360,000 voters ahead of two Senate runoff elections. Most counties dismissed True the Vote’s challenges, but Georgia’s new statute requires local election administrators to consider these challenges, threatening them with state sanctions if they don’t. “If you believe that these challenges aren’t going to be racially targeted, then you are crazy,” said Marc Elias, a leading Democratic election lawyer who has sued on behalf of voting rights groups to stop the Georgia law from taking effect. “This is going to become a tool of voter suppression by Republicans in the state of Georgia.” The moves to empower partisan actors come after record numbers of voters turned out in 2020. States relaxed election rules to allow more voting by mail and the use of drop boxes to avoid spreading Covid-19. That turnout surge in states such as Georgia helped Democrats seize the White House and the majority in the US Senate. As part of their failed efforts to overturn the election results, former President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly argued fraud could have occurred because Trump-aligned poll watchers lacked sufficient access to the voting and counting process in several states. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Around the country, Republican legislators have responded with measures that grant more authority to poll watchers. A new analysis by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice found that, as of April 15, lawmakers in 20 states had introduced at least 40 bills to expand poll watchers’ powers. New powers proposed in Texas Poll watchers are partisan volunteers who, as their name implies, “watch” or observe what’s happening at polling places. Their primary function is to help ensure their party or candidate has a fair shot of winning the election. Both political parties deploy them. Federal law prohibits harassment of voters, and most state laws prevent poll watchers from interfering with the voting process. In Texas, bills moving through the state legislature would give them new authority. One Texas provision gives a poll watcher the right to record images and sounds at a polling place — including at the voting station if the poll voter is receiving help “the watcher reasonably believes to be unlawful.” A separate measure bars election judges — the poll workers who preside over each precinct — from removing poll watchers unless the watcher “knowingly or intentionally” tries to “influence the independent exercise of the voter of another in the presence of the ballot or during the voting process.” It also threatens election workers with misdemeanors for knowingly preventing poll watchers from observing the process. “It’s a surveillance role,” Sarah Labowitz, policy director of the ACLU of Texas, said of the way the proposed laws treat poll watchers. “It really empowers the poll watchers over the voter and the election judges.” In a recent interview on CNN, the bill’s sponsor, GOP state Sen. Bryan Hughes, said the videotaping provision will “make sure voters are casting their ballots — not being influenced by someone else.” He described the taping as akin to a police body camera that will help resolve disputes between poll watchers and election officials. The law provides for the tape to be sent to the Secretary of State. Floor action on sweeping election bills in the Texas House could happen as early as next week. In Florida, the observation requirement during signature-matching raised concerns among election supervisors. In an interview Saturday on CNN’s “New Day,” Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, said the law will allow observers to see the ballots via video feeds — after election officials worried about poll watchers crowding secure areas. “But many counties don’t have the technology or the money to make that happen or even the space to make that happen, so there’s still concerns going forward with that,” he said. Fraught history Poll watching and citizen challenges have been fraught issues. State laws in the 19th century made it difficult for African Americans to vote and to prove their qualifications — even after the 15th Amendment granted Black men the right to cast ballots. In Florida, for example, a challenged voter needed to produce two witnesses to vouch for him. But the law said election officials needed to know each of the witnesses — which a Brennan Center study on the history of voter challenges described as an enormous hurdle for Black voters. Polling places in segregated Florida were staffed by White residents who were unlikely to know African American witnesses. Last year’s election was the first presidential contest since 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could conduct its own poll watching operations. A federal consent decree had barred the RNC from the practice for more than three decades after the national party targeted Black and Latino voters in New Jersey. The operation, carried out during a 1981 gubernatorial election, involved posting armed, off-duty law enforcements officers at polling places in heavily minority communities. It also included erecting posters warning the area was being patrolled the “national ballot security task force” and offering a $1,000 reward for reports of violations of state election laws. The consent decree ended in 2018. Carol Anderson, an historian and professor of African American Studies at Emory University, said the new proposals build on a history of voter intimidation that long has targeted people of color. “What’s built into this is the inequality of the system itself,” she said. “You know that somebody who is Black or Hispanic will not be able to go up into an all-White precinct and start challenging those voters without having a massive law-enforcement response.” She called the wave of new laws “infuriating.” “It’s infuriating because we’ve done this dance before,” Anderson said. “We know what a Jim Crow democracy looks like and the damage it does to the United States of America and to its people.” Georgia challenges One provision of Georgia’s controversial new election law requires that watchers can observe procedures at ballot tabulation centers. But the measure that could have a far greater impact sets out new requirements for handling challenges to voters’ qualifications. In the run-up to the US Senate runoffs, True the Vote teamed up with Georgia residents to challenge the qualifications of more than 364,000 voters whose names it says appeared on databases from the US Postal Service and commercial sources as having changed their addresses. Voting rights advocates counter that the change-of-address information is not a reliable way to determine eligibility and could unfairly target students, military personnel and others who temporarily change where the receive mail but remain eligible to vote in Georgia. Most Georgia counties opted against taking up the challenges. But under the new law, local election boards must set a hearing on a challenge within 10 business days of notifying the voter of the challenge. “Failure to comply with the provisions of this Code section by the board of registrars shall subject such board to sanctions by the State Election Board,” the law adds. Elias said it will be impossible for election officials to comply with requirements to hold a hearing on each voter challenge when outside groups mount tens of thousands of such challenges. “It’s going to require these counties to drop everything and adjudicate these hearings before the election,” he said. “How the hell is a county supposed to do that?” That failure to do so, he said, could give state officials grounds to sanction local election officials and invoke other provisions of the new law that allow the state elections board to replace local superintendents. Voter challenges could lead to long lines and chaos at the polls on Election Day, he added. Rep. Barry Fleming, the Republican architect of Georgia’s new law, did not respond to several interview requests from CNN. Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, cast her effort as a push to clean up Georgia voter rolls as election officials prepared to send out absentee ballots in the runoffs. Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock prevailed in those races, giving their party control of the US Senate. In that election, Georgia relied on signature matching in absentee voting. The new law now requires voter identification to cast absentee ballots. Engelbrecht, who rose in conservative politics as a Tea Party activist in Texas, has aggressively pursued claims of voter fraud, including in the 2020 election. In an interview with CNN, Engelbrecht said the challenges she supported in Georgia involved so many voters because she took a broad brush — examining the voting rolls in every one of state’s 159 counties — to avoid targeting any particular group of voters. “We, as a country, should agree that accuracy in voting matters,” Engelbrecht said. “There has to be some standard of we’re going to make sure when people move away that we don’t send a live ballot that doesn’t require any standard or identification or no way of tracking it once it’s opened and voted. That just begs for controversy.” This story has been updated with additional information. CNN’s Kelly Mena contributed to this report. Source link Orbem News #Alarms #empower #intimidation #lawmakers #Partisan #Politics #Poll #Potential #Republican #Republicanstatelawmakersaregivingpartisanpollwatchersnewpowers #setting #settingoffalarmsaboutpotentialvoterintimidation.-CNNPolitics #state #Voter #watchers

[opedguy]

Trump Has No Prayer in the Courts

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Nov. 5, 2020.--When Pennsylvania flips for 77-year-old former Vice President Joe Biden sometime today, all will be lost for 74-year-old President Donald Trump’s bid for a second term.  No court will touch Trump recounting arguments with 10-foot poll, largely because of Covid-19, where state election officials knew they would need extra time to count mail-in ballots, the most collected at any time in U.S. history.  Trump’s argument that counting must be stopped Nov. 3, Election Day, would disenfranchise millions of voters whose ballots were left uncounted.  Whatever happened in 2000 with Bush v. Gorge with “hanging chads,” there’s no comparison today because state election officials anticipated taking longer time to count the votes in 2020.  There’s simply no legal argument Trump can make without showing proof that Democrat election officials committed outright fraud with ballots.     

        Since there’s no proof of fraud, all Trump can do know is wait until Pennsylvania flips, as expected, in the next few hours, dashing his hopes for a second term.  No court, especially the Supreme Court, wants to get into the messy job of counting ballots or determining which ballots are valid and which are not.  With the polls showing Biden way ahead, Trump knew he had to thread a needle, no margin for any error.  Certainly losing Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan ended Trump’s chances of a second term.  With over 160 million casting votes, about 100 million by mail, many of the new voters leaned Democrat.  What’s astonishing is how competitive a race Trump ran, bouncing back from Covid-19 two weeks ago to make a go of it.  Trump campaigned his heart out, sometimes five rallies a day, but, in the end, the sheer volume of new voters gave Biden the advantage.       

      Exit poll analysis has already shown that Trump made inroads into the black and Lation communities, attesting to his message on borders and law and order.  Whether Democrats admit it or not, the country’s has spoken loudly that it don’t want violent protesting and anarchy in American streets, steering large numbers of voters away from the Democrat Party.  Biden and his running mate 56-year-old Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) have not condemned violent street protests backed by groups like Black Lives Matter, fueling unrest around the country.  Trump’s strong backing of U.S. law enforcement won him the support of practically every police department in the country, leaving Biden and Harris only making excuses.  When all is said an done, Trump was the victim of Covid-19, something Democrats exploited as the number one issue driving votes to Biden and Harris.     

        Ousting Trump from office accomplishes a power shift but it offers no guarantee about that anything more can be done to end the worst infectious disease crisis since the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic.  Biden and Harris laid all the blame on Trump for all U.S. cases and deaths, something so preposterous, so outrageous, so unreasonable but it worked with voters.  Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force did everything possible short of shutting down the country for a second time.  If Trump didn’t always wear a mask himself, he never opposed mask requirements advocated by public health officials.  Yet Biden spent much of his time wearing masks and staying away from crowds, showing his conformity with public health guidelines.  But as far as a new plan for Covid-19, there isn’t one other than a possible national mask mandate.  Getting rid of Trump was a mission accomplished.         

    Trump lawyers can’t save Trump when Pennsylvania flips sometime today, putting Biden over the 270 magic number of Electoral votes. “He wanted the vote counting stopped because he was losing the election,” said Bob Bauer, Biden advisor.  “He is now trying to claw his way back from defeat.  This is the end of the road for these claims for Donald Trump,” Bauer, said, showing the highly partisan nature to the race.  Instead of impugning Trump, Bauer would be better off saying that all bets are off once Pennsylvania flips, handing the election to Joe.  Then all the TV networks can declare Biden president-elect, starting the transition process.   It’s beyond ironic that Covid-19 wrecked Trump’s chances of reelection and gave Biden an unprecedented advantage with maiil-in voting.  Like using Amazon, it’s a whole lot easier for people to vote when they can drop in the mail.       

      Trump performed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, making the race competitive for Biden and Harris.  If there’s any message to the 2020 election, it’s that Democrats do not have a national mandate to implement a liberal agenda, including radical steps at climate change, national health care, open borders, abortion-on-demand, or, more importantly, loading the economy up with burdensome regulations.  Unlike his liberal backers, Biden’s said he wants to be president for everyone, not just his left leaning base.  Once Pennsylvania delivers the goods for Biden, the 2020 race unofficially ends because it’s mathematically impossible for Trump to win.  Forcing costly recounts won’t change the vote enough to change the results.  “You need a legal violation to go to court,” said former White House Counsel Donald McGahn, not seeing how Trump can escape the inevitable

. About the Author 

 John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news.  He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.  Reply  Reply All  Forward

[khalilhumam]

COVID-19 pandemic shows the need to strengthen digital safety nets for women

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/covid-19-pandemic-shows-the-need-to-strengthen-digital-safety-nets-for-women/

COVID-19 pandemic shows the need to strengthen digital safety nets for women

By Leora Klapper The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to wipe out hard-won gains in global development and gender equality. The World Bank reports that the world faces its first increase in extreme poverty since 1998, with between 71 million and 100 million people set to fall into destitution depending on the pandemic’s course, and the crisis affecting women more negatively than men. Governments are scrambling to contain the economic damage. As of June 12, World Bank data indicates that 195 countries have planned, introduced or adapted more than a thousand safety net payments and other social protection measures for the most vulnerable populations. There’s a strong case to be made that these payments should be offered digitally. Compared to cash, digital safety net transfers can cut costs and avoid leakage. And digital transfers can help beneficiaries—especially women—strengthen their household decisionmaking power and bolster their labor force participation. But rapid digitization could create challenges for traditionally marginalized groups like women unless products are well-designed and a robust digital infrastructure is in place. A new report, “Advancing Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion,” prepared for the G-20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion by the World Bank, the Better Than Cash Alliance, and Women’s World Banking, examines how government payments can be structured in a way that serves women. The full report highlights 10 policy options to advance women’s digital financial inclusion—including ways governments can make transfer payments safer for women.

Strengthening consumer protections is a key starting point.

Digital government payments offer greater efficiency—but they might expose women to financial services they are unprepared to use. Financial consumer protections reduce the risks from digital finance by making it easier to identify whether a given product or service is fit for its intended use, appropriate for the particular consumer’s needs, fairly priced, and secure, as well as to compare options, seek redress, and ensure women’s financial privacy and safety. Consumer safeguards are also important for building public trust in the financial system. Clear and easy-to-understand product terms may be especially important for low-income women, given their relatively limited financial experience and capability. A mystery shopper audit of 1,000 microfinance firms in Uganda found that information on cost was inconsistent, inexperienced borrowers received less information than experienced borrowers, and printed materials with product specifications were often missing or in violation of guidelines. Governments should support comprehensive consumer protections, including requirements to disclose product prices and terms in clear language. Lab experiments in Mexico and Peru found that presenting participants with simplified statements of key facts about credit and savings products was strongly correlated with good financial behavior. By contrast, financial literacy had a much weaker impact on good financial behavior. Clear and easy-to-understand product terms may be especially important for low-income women, given their relatively limited financial experience and capability. It is especially important to ensure that women have control over any money borrowed in their own name. Effective consumer protection and enforcement on disclosure/transparency of product pricing can also address the risk of fraud. These findings call into question the emphasis by some consumer protection agencies in emerging markets on expensive financial education programs for women, and make the case for shifting resources toward developing and enforcing effective disclosure and pricing transparency regimes instead.

Governments should develop strategies to promote digital skills and financial capability for women.

The evidence for traditional classroom-based financial education is underwhelming. Interventions to enhance financial capability should leverage teachable moments, such as when women are receiving government payments or acquiring financial products and services. Technology—like text messages—can provide information cheaply and improve financial behavior. For example, U.S. consumers participating in debt management programs were more likely to meet their monthly payments when they received low-frequency, task-oriented text messages prompting them to take action. Governments could subsidize entertainment that links emotions and information. In Colombia, rural recipients of conditional cash transfers, who were mostly women, were loaned tablets loaded with entertaining content to boost their financial capability; positive outcomes in financial health were still observable two years later. Evidence suggests that financial training is more fruitful when provided during moments when women have a specific reason for learning financial skills. For example, researchers who provided financial training to migrants and their families found that the training had positive impacts on financial knowledge and behavior such as savings. Using defaults can improve financial behavior as well. In India, when researchers gave people identical weekly payments in cash or into a savings account, the group with accounts dramatically increased savings through a default effect. Evidence also suggests that default effects can improve retirement savings. By enacting consumer protections and investing in appropriate financial education, governments can help bring relief to women suffering from the coronavirus recession—and create the basis for higher financial inclusion for women in the future.