Last Call For Rand's Way

As President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law today, understand that while this is a huge win for us Black folk, as we've been fighting for centuries in otrder to get lynching classified as a federal crime, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul is also claiming victory by limiting the bill's additions to federal hate crimes to just lynching, as Paul has blocked the legislation like this for his entire Senate career until now. Earlier this month, Morgan Watkins at the Louisville Courier-Journal explained why.

Nearly two years after he received intense criticism for pumping the brakes on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, Sen. Rand Paul is co-sponsoring a new version of that legislation and told The Courier Journal he expects the Senate will unanimously pass it.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., introduced the bipartisan legislation this week. Paul, R-Ky., said he’ll be cosponsoring it, too.

The bill would classify lynching as a federal hate crime and is named in honor of Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 and whose horrific death catalyzed the civil rights movement.

"I think it's great to have the legislation, you know, to remember Emmett Till but also to remember a terrible time in our history and to know that we're a better place and a better people now," Paul told The Courier Journal in an exclusive interview Monday.

After a year or so of impasse over the legislation, Paul said staff from his office and Booker's started negotiating closely a couple of weeks ago about how to get a compromise done. He also said he was pleased to have worked with both Booker and Scott on strengthening this proposal.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed its own updated version of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, sponsored by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois, Monday night. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., was one of just three lawmakers who voted against it.

Massie, who also voted against the original Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2020, tweeted Monday about his reasons for doing so again, including concerns about expanding federal hate crime laws.

"A crime is a crime, and all victims deserve equal justice. Adding enhanced penalties for “hate” tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech," Massie said.

Paul noted he got a lot of grief in the summer of 2020 for his handling of the initial anti-lynching bill, as racial justice protests emerged across the nation after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.

"It wasn't a popular stand to slow this bill down, but I wanted to do it because, you know, I thought it was the right thing to do," he told The Courier Journal. "And in the end, I think the compromise language will hopefully keep us from incarcerating somebody for some kind of crime that's not lynching.

"We just wanted to make sure that the punishment was proportional to the crime, and I guess it's just good news that it finally worked out," he added.

The new bill would add lynching to the federal hate crimes statute and would subject someone to up to 30 years in prison if their actions result in the death or serious bodily harm of another person or result in the attempted or actual kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse or killing of another person because of that individual's race or another protected characteristic.

The 2020 version of the bill also would have classified lynching as a federal hate crime, but it would have included certain crimes under that classification that involved defacing religious property or preventing someone from exercising their religious beliefs or engaging in other federally protected activities, such as voting.

 

And that's the thing that Paul objected to: causing grievous bodily harm to somebody for being Black is a hate crime (and even that took years to talk him into) but defacing a Black church or stopping someone Black from engaging in voting for being Black is too much and we can't punish that as a hate crime.

Better than Thomas Massie, who wants hate crimes done away with completely because it's free speech to shoot a ni-CLANG.

NKY is the most racist area in the country at times, I swear.

Orange Meltdown, Mind The Gap Edition

Hey, it worked for Nixon, right?

 

Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump’s phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.

The 11 pages of records, which consist of the president’s official daily diary and the White House switchboard call logs, were turned over by the National Archives earlier this year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

The records show that Trump was active on the phone for part of the day, documenting conversations that he had with at least eight people in the morning and 11 people that evening. The seven-hour gap also stands in stark contrast to the extensive public reporting about phone conversations he had with allies during the attack, such as a call Trump made to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) — seeking to talk to Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) — and a phone conversation he had with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

The House panel is now investigating whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, known as “burner phones,” according to two people with knowledge of the probe, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. The committee is also scrutinizing whether it received the full logs from that day.

One lawmaker on the panel said the committee is investigating a “possible coverup” of the official White House record from that day. Another person close to the committee said the large gap in the records is of “intense interest” to some lawmakers on the committee, many of whom have reviewed copies of the documents. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal committee deliberations.

The records show that former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon – who said on his Jan. 5 podcast that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow” – spoke with Trump twice on Jan. 6. In a call that morning, Bannon urged Trump to continue to pressure Pence to block congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, according to people familiar with the exchange.

Trump was known for using different phones when he was in the White House, according to people familiar with his activities. Occasionally, when he made outbound calls, the number would show up as the White House switchboard’s number, according to a former Trump Cabinet official. Other times, he would call from different numbers – or no number would appear on the recipient’s phone, the official said.

A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.

In a statement Monday night, Trump said, "I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term."

A Trump spokeswoman said that Trump had nothing to do with the records and had assumed any and all of his phone calls were recorded and preserved.

 

We have now officially reached the "cover-up" part of "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up" although the crime is, you know, seditious conspiracy.  Trump has been dodging presidential record keeping since the beginning of his term, and now it's caught up with him.

 

Look, I'm betting that there's several phone calls missing from the Trump WH record, and that the January 6th committee already has some of those records from the other side. If they don't have them all from mobile carriers themselves, they soon will. 

It also explains why House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy was threatening mobile carriers back in September over cooperating with the January 6th Committee.

This is just bad, bad criming in 2022. Everything's data now, and it will be found.

This does explain why the Justice Department wants to start gearing up with scores of new prosecutors for January 6th cases. 

The Justice Department wants to hire 131 additional lawyers to help with the hundreds of prosecutions stemming from the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, according to the Biden administration's budget request for the upcoming fiscal year.

Rolling out the Justice Department's portion of that request Monday, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco emphasized the scope of the January 6 investigation, which law enforcement officials have repeatedly described as unprecedented.

In the nearly 15 months since a pro-mob stormed the Capitol, the Justice Department has brought more than 770 prosecutions, including cases charging members of far-right groups with seditious conspiracy.

"The January 6 investigation is among the most wide-ranging and most complex that this department has ever undertaken. It reaches nearly every US attorney's office, nearly every FBI field office," Monaco said.

You don't do that when you're winding down, you do that when you're getting ready to go hunting big game.

Big, orange, stupid game.

All Aboard The Trump Fraud Train

Donald Trump's Republicans wrote the COVID-19 relief package legislation and told Democrats to take them or else, so they did in order to help the economy. The reality is that the Trump COVID packages ended up being hundreds of billions for fraudsters across the board, fraud that the Republican party took advantage of time and time again. Now a new report finds that the total fraud among all the Trump COVID-19 bills could be more than a half-trillion dollars. 

They bought Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys.

And Teslas, of course. Lots of Teslas.

Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in American history—the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the pandemic — couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.

They came into their riches by participating in what experts say is the theft of as much as $80 billion — or about 10 percent — of the $800 billion handed out in a Covid relief plan known as the Paycheck Protection Program. That’s on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the $900 billion Covid unemployment relief program — at least half taken by international fraudsters — as NBC News reported last year. And another $80 billion potentially pilfered from a separate Covid disaster relief program.

The prevalence of Covid relief fraud has been known for some time, but the enormous scope and its disturbing implications are only now becoming clear.

Even if the highest estimates are inflated, the total fraud on all Covid relief funds amounts to a mind-boggling sum of taxpayer money that could rival the $579 billion in federal funds included in President Joe Biden’s massive, 10-year infrastructure spending plan, according to prosecutors, government watchdogs and private experts who are trying to plug the leaks.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” said Matthew Schneider, a former U.S. attorney from Michigan now with Honigman LLP. “It is the biggest fraud in a generation.”

Most of the losses are considered unrecoverable, but there is still a chance to stanch the bleeding, because federal officials say $600 billion is still waiting to go out the door. The Biden administration imposed new verification rules in 2021 that administration officials say appear to have made a difference in curbing fraud. But they acknowledge that programs in 2020 sacrificed security for speed, needlessly.

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who oversees Covid relief spending, told "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt in an exclusive interview that Covid relief programs were structured in ways that made them ripe for plunder.

“The Small Business Administration, in sending that money out, basically said to people, ‘Apply, and sign, and tell us that you're really entitled to the money,’” said Horowitz, who chairs the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. “And, of course, for fraudsters, that's an invitation…what didn't happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time.”

The criminal methodology varied, depending on the program. The epic swindle of Covid unemployment relief has been carried out by individual criminals or organized crime groups using stolen identities to claim jobless benefits from state workforce agencies disbursing federal funds. Each identity could be worth up to $30,000 in benefits, according to Horowitz.

The looting of the Paycheck Protection Program worked differently — and could be far more lucrative. That program authorized banks and other financial institutions to make government-backed loans to businesses — loans that were to be forgiven if the companies spent the money on business expenses. Nearly 10 million of these loans have already been forgiven. Many of these loans-turned-grants were for millions of dollars, public records show.

Experts say millions of borrowers inflated the number of employees or created companies out of whole cloth. For much of 2020, lenders did little to verify the applications, prosecutors and experts say, in part because Congress required the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), which ran the program, to issue explicit guidance that in the interest of getting the money out fast, lenders “will be held harmless for borrowers’ failure to comply with program criteria.” The Government Accountability Office warned of fraud risk, but the program continued under that rule.

“The government spent approximately $800 billion and provided 21 million loans to individuals,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO of Lexis Nexis, which works with the government to verify identities.

No one is sure exactly how much was stolen. An academic paper released last year estimated at least $76 billion in potential fraud, and the authors said that was conservative.

The SBA’s Inspector General has identified $78.1 billion in potentially fraudulent Economic Injury Disaster Loans, another Covid relief program for businesses. The Secret Service has its own estimate: $100 billion.

The basic scheme, Talcove said, was “really simple.” People went on state websites and took the names of existing businesses or registered new, fake ones.

“There's absolutely no security on there. There's no validation of any information,” Talcove said. “And voila, you have company ABC with 40 employees and a payroll of $10 million. And you go and apply for a PPP loan. It was a piece of cake.”

 

And just like that, thousands of fake companies looted billions of dollars. Rich Republican lawmakers made sure that their businesses got huge cash payout, the loans free of charge. It was a pinata stuffed with billions, and everyone got a piece.

 

You and me, well, we all got screwed, didn't we?