DC Spends $270k to Repaint ‘Black Lives Matter’ Sign
|
Joe Biden Email Shows Hunter Was Copied on
Ukraine President Information
We received five
pages of records from the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) that show then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son
Hunter received a May 26, 2016, email detailing a scheduled “8:45 am prep
for a 9 am phone call with Pres Poroshenko,” who was the president of
Ukraine.
This is another smoking gun. It blows out of the water the notion that
there was any distance between Joe and Hunter Biden on the Burisma
influence-peddling scandal.
In this email Joe Biden’s address is the alias [email protected]
and Hunter Biden’s email account is disclosed as
[email protected]. (Hunter was on the board of the controversial
Ukrainian firm Burisma at the time.)
The email
has the subject line “Friday Schedule Cards” and was sent by John S.
Flynn, who was Joe Biden’s assistant:
Boss--8:45am prep for 9am phone call with Pres Poroshenko. Then we're
off to Rhode Island for infrastructure event and then Wilmington for UDel
commencement. Nate will have your draft remarks delivered later tonight or
with your press clips in the morning.
Respectfully,
John
The email also contains information on U.S. military troops under the
heading “Daily US Troops Update:”
# US Troops Died in Iraq/Afghanistan: 6,745
# US Troops Wounded in Iraq/Afghanistan: 52,392
US Troop Levels:
Afghanistan (Security Assistance, Advisory
and CT): 10,000
Iraq (Security Assistance):
4,000
The email was obtained as a result of our lawsuit
against the National Archives for Biden family records and communications
regarding travel and finance transactions, as well as communications
between the Bidens and several known business associates (Judicial
Watch, Inc. v. National Archives (No. 1:23-cv-01432).
In August 2023, James Comer (R-KY), chairman of the House Oversight
Committee called
on the National Archives to provide then-Vice President Joe
Biden’s records regarding his duties that overlapped with his son’s
activities in Ukraine. Chairman Comer is pursuing communications in which
Joe Biden used a pseudonym, as well as those in which Hunter Biden, Eric
Schwerin, or Devon Archer are copied.
We have nearly a dozen FOIA lawsuits regarding records concerning Biden
corruption issues, including:
In March 2023, the Archives had
released only 1,276
pages of over 8,000 records about
the unprecedented document dispute and raid on the home of former President
Trump.
In October 2022, we sued
the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for all communications between
the Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding the
search warrant which precipitated the raid on former President Donald
Trump’s Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022.
Also in October, we sued
the Barack Obama Presidential Library for Obama White House records about
the 2016 “Russia Collusion Hoax.” The records, which by law were
not available under FOIA until five years after President Obama left
office, are held at the Library, which is part of the National Archives
system.
DC Spends $270,000 To Repaint ‘Black Lives Matter’ on Street Near
White House
Crime in Washington, DC, is out of control but local leaders are spending
$270,000 in tax money to promote the Black Lives Matter movement that is
racist, anti-police, anti-American, and often violent – and doing so in
the heart of our nation’s capital.
We received 25
pages of records in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request
from the Washington, DC, Department of Transportation that show the cost to
taxpayers to repaint the Black Lives Matter slogan on a street in the
nation’s capital was over $270,000.
The repainting seems to have taken place shortly before Black Lives Matter
groups began defending Hamas terrorist murders of Jews in Israel.
On June 5, 2020, after days of protests and riots in DC led by the Black
Lives Matter movement, a team of artists, residents, District employees,
and demonstrators painted “Black Lives Matter” in 50-foot-tall yellow
capital letters and the District’s crest, which resembles three stars
above an “equals” sign, on 16th Street NW near the White House. The
following day demonstrators painted “Defund the Police,” a key demand
of the Black Lives Matter movement, alongside the “Black Lives Matter”
message.
The total price tag of $271,231 for the repainting includes $53,551 for
paint and supplies, and $217,680 for labor.
In a purchase
order dated September 15, 2023, with the description “Black
Lives Matter Plaza Redo,” a vendor charged DC-based Equus Striping a
total of $53,551.20 for supplies for “BLMRedo2023.” These supplies
included “StreetBond 250 Yellow-BLM (MMA),” “StreetBond 250
Catalyst,” and “StreetBond Primer,” plus shipping.
The labor
for the repainting was provided by a subcontractor called Dewberry and
totaled $217,680.
A memorandum
of negotiations for the project dated April 13, 2023 indicates that the
project required a foreman, operator, laborer, carpenter, and mason.
Equipment included a backhoe/loader, portable air compressor, Bobcat, dump
truck, pick-up truck, and service truck.
The memorandum also indicates that the hourly rates submitted by the
contractor on March 9, 2023, were rejected. After negotiation, the
contractor submitted lower hourly rates and were accepted on April 13,
2023. The negotiated pricing was signed off on by DC Department of
Transportation officials Dr. Eloka Kingsley Achebe (deputy program
manager), Jaswant Matharu (project manager-local paving), and Gaiyath
Naanou (resident engineer-local paving).
We obtained the records in a November 6, 2023, FOIA request for:
- All budget records, invoices, work
orders, authorizations, agreements and contracts involved in repainting the
Black Lives Matter logo on Black Lives Matter Plaza in November 2023.
- All emails sent to and from the
following DC Department of Transportation officials: Interim Director
Sharon Kershbaum, General Counsel Frank Seales Jr, Chief of Staff Matthew
Marcou, Chief of External Affairs Olivia Dedner, Chief Project Delivery
Officer Sandra Marks, Interim Chief Operating Officer Neelima Ghanta, Chief
Information Officer Khaled Falah, Chief Performance Officer John Thomas and
Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer Nana Bailey-Thomas identified using the
following search queries:
- BLM+Hamas
- BLM+terrorism
- BLM+Palestinian
- BLM+Palestinians
- All emails sent between any of the
officials identified in Bullet 2 and any representative and/or employee of
Black Lives Grassroots organization and/or with an email account ending in
the domain @blmgrassroots.org.
Here is the history of this story.
On July 1, 2020, we filed a civil rights lawsuit
against Mayor Bowser and other officials for First Amendment violations
over their refusal to allow us to paint the message “Because No One Is
Above the Law!” on a DC street.
In August 2020, we filed a FOIA lawsuit
against Bowser, the District of Columbia Department of Transportation and
the District of Columbia Department of Public Works for records about the
painting of “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police” on a DC
street in front of the White House.
In September 2020, we filed a FOIA lawsuit
against the U.S. Department of Transportation for records of communication
between the Federal Highway Administration and the District of Columbia’s
Department of Transportation about the painting Black Lives Matter on
16th Street NW near the White House.
Congress Inches Forward on Biden Corruption Inquiries
We’ve been probing the suspicious activities of Hunter and Joe Biden in
Ukraine and China for years, and Congressional investigators have been at
it as well. Our chief investigative reporter Micah Morrison updates
us in Investigative Bulletin on what senators and representatives
are learning.
Congress is fitfully inching forward with investigations that could
result in the impeachment of President Joseph R. Biden.
In the House impeachment inquiry, Oversight
Committee Chairman James Comer has subpoenaed
Hunter Biden, presidential brother James Biden, and key business
associates. “The House Oversight Committee has followed the money and
built a record of evidence revealing how Joe Biden knew, was involved, and
benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes,” Comer said.
“Now, the House Oversight Committee is going to bring in members of the
Biden family and their associates to question them on this record of
evidence.” The committee already has produced a remarkable array of witnesses, testimony, and documents showing that Biden family
members raked in over $24 million from foreign nationals and hid the
profits in shell companies.
In the Senate, Charles Grassley’s
interrogation of Justice Department conduct and the Bidens grinds on. In
October, Grassley released a letter with the bombshell claim that the FBI “maintained over 40
confidential human sources” with “criminal information” on the
Bidens. Grassley’s letter includes a sweeping request for Justice
Department documents related to “Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden,
and the Biden family,” as well as records of actions taken (and not
taken) by Justice Department and FBI officials in matters related to the
Bidens. He also indicates he plans to interview “25 DOJ and FBI
personnel” involved in the Biden cases.
Judicial Watch presses on with its own
investigations. In June, we filed a Freedom of Information Act petition for
FBI documents tied to a Biden Ukraine corruption probe. And this
isn’t our first rodeo. From as far back as 2020, we’ve been uncovering
details of Ukraine corruption tied to the Bidens. You can read more about
JW’s investigations here.
In his latest moves, Comer appears to be
zeroing in on the flow of funds between James Biden and Joseph Biden,
including a personal check from James Biden to his brother for $200,000. The White House has
denied any impropriety involving the check, but it’s clear that James
Biden is emerging as a major target of the House probe.
The biggest paydays for James and Hunter
Biden came from China—specifically from the energy conglomerate CEFC China. The
total amount, flowing to Biden-connected entities, notes the Comer
Committee, is “over $8 million.”
In one gigantic payout, in August 2017, soon
after Joe Biden left the vice presidency, CEFC wired $5 million to a new
shell company formed by Hunter Biden. The new company would
pursue energy and infrastructure deals. Hunter Biden would receive a
$500,000 retainer and a $100,000 monthly payment. James Biden would be paid
$65,000 per month. Hunter quickly got busy in Washington setting up a new
office for himself and his CEFC partners. “Please have keys made
available for new office mates,” he emailed building management. “Joe
Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden, [and CEFC emissary] Gongwen
Dong.”
Was part of the plan also to pay Joe Biden?
In an email sent to
Hunter Biden and others about percentages of profit-sharing from the CEFC
deal, a key Biden business associate asks, in what appears to be a
reference to a ten percent share for Joe Biden: “10 held by H for the big
guy?”
An IRS agent who worked on the Hunter Biden
case was pressed about that email in July testimony before Congress. He
told the House Oversight Committee that “all I can do is speak to the
evidence there” and “that email, ‘ten held by H for the big guy’
and from what I understand that to be is his dad, President
Biden.”
With Comer focusing on possible crimes, over
in the Senate, Chuck Grassley is pursuing evidence of the cover-up. In his
latest letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director
Christopher Wray, Grassley writes that “years of investigation…indicate
there is—and has been—an effort among certain Justice Department and
FBI officials to improperly delay and stop full and complete investigative
activity into the Biden family.”
Grassley added: “I’ve been made aware
that at one point in time the FBI maintained over 40 Confidential Human
Sources that provided criminal information related to Joe Biden, James
Biden, and Hunter Biden. An essential question that must be answered is
this: did the FBI investigate the information or shut it down?”
One key figure on Grassley’s radar is
Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, head of the controversial energy
company, Burisma. Zlochevsky is also a focus of the House impeachment
inquiry. But while Comer is following the money, Grassley wants to know
what the FBI did about stunning allegations from the embattled
oligarch.
Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma in
May 2014 at a salary of $1 million per year. By the end of the year,
according to a detailed Comer Committee timeline,
Zlochevsky was complaining about U.S. “government pressure” and urged
Biden to contact his father, the vice president. According to an interview with
a Biden business partner released by the committee, Hunter Biden did
“call DC” after being pressured by Zlochevsky and his
associates.
Earlier this year, Grassley released
a bombshell FBI informant report of a 2016 meeting with Zlochevsky. In the report,
Zlochevsky claimed he had been coerced into paying a $10 million bribe to
Hunter and Joe Biden. It “cost 5 [million] to pay one Biden, and 5
[million] to another Biden,” the FBI informant reported Zlochevsky
saying.
Grassley now wants to know if the FBI buried
that report and related documents. In his new letter, Grassley notes that
in December 2019 the FBI’s Washington field office “closed” a case
into “Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of Burisma, which was opened in January
2016 by a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act [FBI] squad.”
How serious is the Grassley probe? “Based
on the information provided to my office over a period of years by multiple
credible whistleblowers,” the senator writes to Garland and Wray,
“there appears to be an effort within the Justice Department and FBI to
shut down investigative activity relating to the Biden family. Such
decisions point to significant political bias infecting the decision-making
of not only the Attorney General and FBI Director, but also line agents and
prosecutors. Our Republic cannot survive such a political infection and you
have an obligation to this country to clear the air.”
Social Security Overpays Billions Under Leadership of Racial Equity
Activist
Your Social Security Administration is doling out your tax dollars like
they are free money and it’s overpaying people billions of dollars. Our
Corruption Chronicles blog has the details.
Under the leadership of a noted racial equity
activist the Social Security Administration (SSA) has mistakenly overpaid
beneficiaries tens of billions of dollars, including a 65% spike in
overpayments in one year. In 2023 the agency with a stated mission of
ensuring equity and accessibility by addressing systemic barriers to
participation and a commitment to providing services to underserved
communities made a whopping $23 billion in overpayments, according to its
latest Agency
Financial Report. The figure is a marked increase over the already
stunning $11.1 billion in overpayments that SSA erroneously made in
2022.
SSA’s dreadful habit of overpaying
billions in benefits goes back years as American taxpayers get stuck with
the hefty price because most of the money is never recovered. In the last
few years, the agency has doled out between $6 billion and $7 billion in
new overpayments annually, the new report reveals. It shows that most of
the 2022 overpayments, around $6.5 billion, occurred within the Old-Age
Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) programs which provide monthly
benefits to qualified retired and disabled workers and their dependents and
to survivors of insured workers. Eligibility and benefit amounts are
determined by the worker’s contributions to Social Security. In prior
years the problem was mainly in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
program which helps low-income elderly and disabled adults as well as
children. In 2022 SSI distributed north of $4.6 billion in
overpayments.
At a congressional hearing earlier this year
SSA Commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi told federal lawmakers that her agency is
trying to recover the money by sending out millions of “overpayment notices” to those who erroneously got extra cash. Kijakazi said 1,028,389
people got the notices in 2022 and 986,912 in fiscal 2023, which ended in
September. Kijakazi is a renowned racial equity proponent with a storied career of researching—and tackling—structural
racism and the racial wealth gap in both government and high-profile
nonprofits. She has served as co-chair of the National Advisory Council on
Eliminating the Black-White Wealth Gap at the leftist Center for American
Progress and on the Washington, D.C. Equitable Recovery Advisory Group. In
mid-2021 President Joe Biden named Kijakazi acting SSA Commissioner after
previously appointing her to a lower-level position of deputy commissioner
for retirement and disability policy.
In the new agency financial report Kijakazi
reveals that in 2023 she began to rebuild the SSA workforce by adding
nearly 4,000 employees, yet problems persist. “We made progress toward
eliminating our hearings backlog,” the commissioner writes in the
report’s opening message, adding that “we ended FY 2023 with 321,819
cases pending, the lowest level since 2000.” The commissioner proceeds to
highlight all the great things her agency has accomplished, including
working to eliminate a backlog, reducing wait times for claims and
improving organizational efficiency. “As good stewards of our programs,
we strive to reduce improper payments and combat waste, fraud and abuse
through our quality reviews, cost-effective program integrity work, and
payment accuracy efforts.” Kijakazi ends her opening message by writing
that there are “no material weaknesses in our internal
controls.”
Nevertheless, buried deep in the exhaustive
216-page report the agency discloses the billions it has overpaid in the
last few years despite establishing a special Improper Payment Prevention
Team in 2019 tasked with developing strategies to determine the underlying
cause of payment errors and developing corrective action plans. SSA issues
over $1 trillion in benefit payments annually and preventing overpayments
can be as simple as providing employees with a “comprehensive tool”
when calculating benefits manually. In fact, SSA found that it could have
avoided approximately 73,000 overpayments totaling more than $368 million
in 2022 if it had furnished a “comprehensive tool” for employees to do
their job correctly. “Preventing improper payments is more advantageous
than recovering them after they are made because SSA does not have to
expend additional resources to recover the overpayments …” the report
states.
Soros-Tied Facebook Censors Consider Suppressing Anti-Immigration
Speech
You may enjoy chatting with friends and looking at pictures of the
grandkids on Facebook without realizing that the “news” you see is
being controlled by left-leaning censors. Our Corruption Chronicles
blog reports.
A few years after Facebook (now Meta) launched a censorship board to
decide which posts get blocked an update on the panel, which is currently
inviting
public opinion on whether to suppress anti-immigration speech, is in
order. The original board—as well as new members—is stacked with
leftists, including a close friend of leftwing billionaire George Soros who
served on the board of directors of his Open Society Foundations (OSF).
This is important because the oversight
board, as it is officially known, determines which posts get blocked
from the world’s most popular social networking website which has an
estimated 3 billion users.
In a recent example, the Meta censorship
board is considering whether ant-immigration posts fall under its hate
speech policy which removes what the tech giant describes as direct attacks
against people on the basis of protected characteristics such as race,
ethnicity, national origin and religious affiliation. Refugees, migrants,
immigrants and asylum seekers are protected against “the most severe
attacks,” according to the oversight board, though “commentary and
criticism of immigration policies” are reportedly allowed. Now the panel
wants public comments involving how Meta should distinguish commentary and
criticism of immigration policies from direct attacks on people based on
protected characteristics, especially during elections. Board members will
deliberate the case over the next few weeks, according to a statement
posted on the Meta oversight website.
Judicial Watch has gathered some important
background on the characters who will ultimately issue the ruling. For
starters the group of 22 is overwhelmingly leftist and likely to restrict
conservative views. Nearly half of the members have ties to Soros, the
wealthy philanthropist who dedicates huge sums to spreading a radical left
agenda that includes targeting conservative politicians, erasing national
borders and identities, financing civil unrest and orchestrating refugee
crises for political gain. Some on the oversight board have made political
contributions to top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and
Elizabeth Warren and others have publicly expressed their disdain for
former President Donald Trump. Among the panel’s standouts is András
Sajó, the founding Dean of Legal Studies at Soros’ Central European
University. Sajó was a judge at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)
for nearly a decade. He also served on the board of directors of OSF’s
Justice Initiative.
Many on the board are connected to leftist
groups tied to Soros that have benefitted from his generous donations,
according to Judicial Watch’s research. Alan Rusbridger, a former British
newspaper editor and principal at Oxford University, serves on the board of
directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has received at
least $750,000 from OSF. Rusbridger also served as a governor at a global
think tank, Ditchley Foundation, that co-hosted a conference with OSF on
change in the Middle East and North Africa and understanding political
Islam. Afia Asantewaa Sariyev, a human rights attorney, is the program
manager at Soros’ Open Society Initiative for West Africa. Sudhir
Krishnaswamy, an Indian lawyer and civil society activist, runs a nonprofit
called Centre for Law and Policy Research that focuses on transgender
rights, gender equality and public health. The group is a grantee of a
justice foundation that pocketed $1.4 million from OSF.
The list of Meta judges connected to Soros
and the organized left continues. Julie Owono is the executive director of
a Paris-based nonprofit that advocates for privacy and freedom of
expression online. The group is part of the Global Network Initiative, an
internet oversight and policy consortium handsomely funded by Soros. Nighat
Dad is a Pakistani attorney and the founder of the Digital Rights
Foundation, a nonprofit based in Pakistan that has received $114,000 in
grants from OSF. Civil rights activist Tawakkol Karman sits on the advisory
board of Transparency International, which gets significant OSF funding.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark’s former prime minister, is on the board
of the European Council of Foreign Relations, which has received millions
from OSF. She is also a trustee at the International Crisis Group which has
collected over $8.2 million from OSF and includes George and Alexander
Soros on its board. Catalina Botero-Marino is the dean of a Colombian law
school called Universidad de Los Andes that got over $1.3 million from OSF.
Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University, serves on the board
of directors of the Brennan Center for Justice, which took in hundreds of
thousands of dollars from OSF in 2021. Suzanne Nossel, an Obama
administration official, is on the advisory board of the leftwing think
tank Foreign Policy for America, which has received over $1.5 million from
Soros in the last few years. Khaled Mansour, an Egyptian academic, is a
director at the nonprofit Crisis Action, which has accepted $2.4 million
from OSF since 2017.
Until next week,
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|