Last Call For It's A Harding Knock Life, Con't

Remember former Florida GOP state lawmaker Joe Harding, who wrote GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's wildly unconstitutional "Don't Say Gay" bill, when the feds dropped the hammer on him for $150,000 in COVID loan fraud for his construction company back in December?

Turns out ol' Joe here is now a felon, pleading guilty to the charges and is facing up to 35 years in federal prison. 

 

Former Rep. Joe Harding has pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements after facing charges related to obtaining COVID-19 relief funds.

The Ocala Republican changed his plea months after federal prosecutors indicted him. U.S. Attorney Jason Coody announced the plea change.

The former politician now awaits sentencing, with a hearing scheduled for July 25 at the federal courthouse in Gainesville. U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor will make the sentence. Harding faces up to 20 years for the wire fraud charge, 10 years for money laundering and five years for making false statements to authorities.

Harding in December resigned his House District 24 seat, a day after prosecutors issued the indictment.

Court documents revealed details of the scheme that led to Harding’s fall. Prosecutors allege Harding lied to the Small Business Administration (SBA) in order to obtain a loan intended for companies impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. He later similarly filed a fraudulent application for a Economic Injury Disaster Loan in the name of a dormant business he previously owned.

Ultimately, Harding obtained $150,000 in federal assistance to which he was not entitled, prosecutors allege.

He used some of that money for personal reasons, transferring more than $10,000 to his personal checking account, another $10,000-plus for a credit card payment, and then sent another payment of more than $10,000 to a third-party business entity.

He was caught after a joint criminal investigation by the FBI, IRS, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and SBA.

The indictment came in December, after Harding had just won election to a second term in the House without opposition. The conservative lawmaker had developed a national reputation as the author of a parental rights bill derided by critics as the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, which is now being emulated in other state Legislatures.

 

So we'll see how much hard time Harding gets, but the bigger problem is his Republican primary replacement Ryan Chamberlin is also running unopposed, as Florida Dems failed to find anyone to run in Harding's Ocala state district.

 

This should have been a slam dunk, but nobody cared enough even to try.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Expect a lot more of this in the days and weeks ahead as stochastic white supremacist domestic terrorism on behalf of Donald Trump will continue for a long time to come.

 

A bomb threat was called into a lower Manhattan court on Tuesday just before a judge was set to hear a $250 million lawsuit against former President Trump.

The threat was investigated by police and the courthouse was closed and searched, with authorities finding that the threat was unfounded, according to court spokesman Lucian Chalfen, who confirmed the news to Bloomberg.

The civil lawsuit, brought against Trump by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), alleges that Trump, his company and family inflated the value of their real estate assets. The suit was filed in September.

The Hill reached out to the court for comment.

Trump publicly attacked James on social media on Tuesday following the news of the bomb threat, saying Congress should investigate the New York attorney general and blasting the lawsuit as “completely bogus.”Is Blockbuster coming back?Georgia attorney convicted on Jan. 6 charges

“While Congress is at it, they should look at the Corrupt Attorney General of New York State, Letitia James, who got elected solely on a “I WILL GET TRUMP” platform, without knowing anything about me,” Trump said on his social media site Truth Social. He went on to call the lawsuit “completely bogus.”

 

At no point did Trump address the "completely bogus" bomb threat as wrong, all he did was make it clear that the state's AG, who happens to be a Black woman, needs to be targeted too. 

One of these times, the threat of violence is going to be real, and prosecutors, cops, court officials and judges are going to get hurt or killed.

 

Intelligence sources told CBS News that there's been a "significant increase" in threats and violent rhetoric online from domestic violent extremists as former President Donald Trump claimed he will be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury.

But the sources said they have not identified any credible or direct threats to a person or property and they are continuing to monitor for credible specific threats.

Domestic violent extremists in online postings have warned that prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office would cross a red line if Trump is indicted and it would be met with more violence than the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the sources said. There have also been postings calling for civil war.

Sources said the threats are mostly aimed at law enforcement, judges and government officials in New York and elsewhere that domestic violent extremists perceive as participants in what they see as a political persecution of Trump.

 

And the second anyone does get hurt, the pressure from Republicans to drop the investigations into Trump will be overwhelming.

Count on it.

The White House Goes Viral, Con't

President Biden has signed bipartisan legislation directing DNI Avril Haines to declassify "as much intelligence as possible" on the origins of COVID-19.

President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill Monday that directs the federal government to declassify as much intelligence as possible about the origins of Covid-19 more than three years after the start of the pandemic.

The legislation, which passed both the House and Senate without dissent, directs the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify intelligence related to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. It cites “potential links” between the research that was done there and the outbreak of Covid-19, which the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The law allows for redactions to protect sensitive sources and methods.


U.S. intelligence agencies are divided over whether a lab leak or a spillover from animals is the likely source of the deadly virus. Experts say the true origin of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 1.1 million in the U.S. and millions more around the globe, may not be known for many years — if ever.

So what does this mean? Both everything and nothing. 

The declassified information must be released within 90 days of the bill being signed into law, although the language in the bill does not establish a mechanism for enforcement. Among other details, the information would include the names, symptoms and roles of any researchers who fell ill at the Wuhan institute in fall 2019, according to the text of the bill.

The theory that the coronavirus, which causes covid-19, may have escaped from the Wuhan institute has been a subject of debate since early in the pandemic.

Biden noted that he had directed the intelligence community in 2021, shortly after he took office, to “use every tool at its disposal” to investigate the origin of the coronavirus and that the work is ongoing.

In a rare show of bipartisanship this month, the House voted 419-0 in favor of the bill, which had already passed the Senate by unanimous consent.

“This is strong on symbolic value,” Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said then, adding that the measure does allow Biden “wide discretion” to withhold information to protect sources and keep methods secret.

The information Americans would see would not be the raw transcripts of intercepted phone calls, Himes said, but rather the finished intelligence reports.

“There are clearly thousands of pages of raw intelligence,” Himes said, but as far as the actual information that would be declassified, “I think we’re probably talking hundreds of pages.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) told Fox News last week that he hoped the rare show of overwhelming bipartisanship would convince Biden to sign the bill into law.

“We’ve seen the intelligence,” Turner said. “The American public deserves to. There’s more information the government knows, and the American public and certainly the world needs to know.”

So we'll see what the White House and DNI Haines believe we should see, and basically all of Congress understands this, so don't expect any smoking guns.

Fox and friends will treat anything as such, but yeah, we'll see.