Category Archives: FRAUDS

FBI CONTINUES ITS FRAUD ON THE PEOPLE, CAUGHT AT IT AGAIN!

Watchdog group says FBI undercounts incidents in which armed civilians stop active shooters

The CPRC review uncovered 561 incidents during the same period, with armed citizens stopping 202 of them, or 36%. CPRC saod the percentage jumped to 52.5% when excluding shootings that occurred in “gun-free zones.”

A new analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) found that the FBI has understated the number of times armed civilians have stopped active shooter incidents in the United States.

According to the FBI, civilians stopped just 14 out of 374 active shooter cases between 2014 and 2024, which is a rate of 3.7%.

But the CPRC, a nonprofit data watchdog on crime issues, said it uncovered 561 incidents during the same period, with armed citizens stopping 202 of them, or 36%. CPRC said the percentage jumped to 52.5% when excluding shootings that occurred in “gun-free zones.”

According to the CPRC, the FBI’s data is off, in part, because in some cases civilians who intervened were listed as “security guards,” even when they were private citizens. The group also found that armed bystanders who thwarted attacks were not counted if the suspects fled.

The FBI had classified the 2019 church shooting in White Settlement, Texas, involving a parishioner who shot and killed the gunman as being thwarted by a security guard, even though the man was not a security professional.

The CPRC also noted that the FBI excluded some cases it labels “domestic disputes” or “retaliation murders” from its data about civilians stopping active shooters.

You can read the full report here.

FILE_4924.pdf

CPRC President John Lott said the group’s data shows that armed civilians stopping shootings is more common than mainstream media coverage shows.

During the 2022 mall shooting in Greenwood, Ind., Elisjsha Dicken, 22, stopped a gunman who killed three people.

Reuters and CNN were among the news outlets that referred to the situation as “uncommon.”

“Of course, law-abiding citizens stopping these attacks are not rare. What is rare is not citizens stopping these attacks—it’s the national news covering it,” Lott wrote.

The FBI has said that its reports on this issue are “not intended to explore all active shooting incidents” but they provide a “baseline understanding.”

Some argue that the FBI’s data compilation practices can skew public opinion.

“The cascading effect is incredibly deleterious,” Theo Wold, a former U.S. Justice Department official, said. “When the Bureau gets it so systematically wrong, it shapes the entire national debate.”

Still, many Americans believe armed citizens are more effective at stopping active shooters.

According to a 2022 Trafalgar Group poll, 42% of voters said that armed citizens were the best defense against mass shootings, while 25% said it was local police.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication

PUBLIC BROADCASTING EXORBITANT SALARIES, EXPOSED AND NOW SHUTTING DOWN, FINALLY!

CEO’s Salary At Defunded Corporation For Public Broadcasting Could Fund A Radio Station For Years

If the CPB board cared about keeping rural broadcasting viable, it would not have spent $19.3 million on CPB salaries and benefits in 2022.

You would cry too, if you were losing a compensation package bigger than the salary of the president of the United States. In 2022, CPB CEO Patricia Harrison’s compensation was $524,000, according to the CPB’ most recently available 990 tax exempt form.

CPB is a nonprofit created by Congress in 1967 to administer funding for Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).

Each year, Congress gives CPB loads of federal taxpayer money, and CPB decides the amount to give to 1,581 public radio and television stations. But the Big Beautiful Bill trimmed CPB out of appropriations, meaning it gets zero money instead of the $1.07 billion it expected for 2026 and 2027.

During its meeting, the board spent 30 self-indulgent minutes extolling the importance of public broadcasting and warning that life without it could harm rural communities. Diane Kaplin used Radio Station KSDP in Sand Point, Alaska as an example, saying without it, “There would be no information” about the recent earthquake and tsunami warning.

But that is a lie. Sand Point and everywhere else in the United States gets Wireless Emergency Alerts — instant emergency information delivered to cell phones to keep the public informed, not just the ones who think to turn on the radio.

In 2022, CPB gave KSDP $211,000. The radio station’s total revenue was $265,000. The CPB portion could have been paid by Harrison’s salary alone for two years. The folks at KSDP might be angry to learn that their annual budget for the compensation packages for all employees combined that year, ($141,067), was slightly less than Harrison’s 2022 bonus ($144,645). At least one person on the KSDP staff has a second job.

If the CPB board really cared about keeping broadcasting viable in small towns like Sand Point, it would not have a huge, overpaid staff in Washington, D.C.

In 2022, CPB spent $19.3 million on salaries and benefits. At least 14 CPB employees that year had compensation packages worth more than $260,000. Of those, five employees were paid over $470,000. Not bad for government work. It is obscene to the point of corruption.

The Aleutian Islands are not a typical U.S. community and there KSDP radio may actually be a treasure to the 6,000 residents in its listening area, but in 2022 it only took in $1,650 in contributions; zero in membership drives; and just over $18,000 in “underwriting,” which is tax-free advertising. The station is almost fully subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. That is how it works at most public broadcast outlets.

Is there Bias? Sure.’

The funding cut was sparked by President Donald Trump’s May 1 executive order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” A rescission proposal explains why CPB was targeted for defunding, saying, “These funds would be used to subsidize a public media system that is politically biased and an unnecessary expense to the taxpayer. Enacting the rescission would eliminate Federal funding for CPB.”

Public broadcasting’s far left bias is well known, and the Federalist has reported on it often.

“Is there bias? Sure, we’re not perfect, but we were working on that. It’s not a legitimate reason to shut down everything,” Harrison, 86 said during the board meeting. It was a flippant response to an existential threat.

A 2023 Pew Research Center report shows public radio and television has suffered from a declining audience since 2017.

“The American people, many of whom have not followed this, will wonder what happened. Somebody’s going to have to tell them what happened,” board Chair Ruby Calvert said during the meeting.

Wait — with access to 1,581 radio and television stations CPB didn’t tell their audience what was happening? No, they did. But CPB could not generate enough public interest. The truth is, most Americans don’t care if public broadcasting continues. There are many more media options competing for the public’s attention than in 1967, and when you routinely deal in bias, you lose audience. It’s a reality all broadcasters must face.

During the most pretentious part of the board meeting, Harrison compared employees at CPB to English King Henry V’s “ragtag army” that was “outnumbered by the French at the Battle of Agincourt, but won despite those odds.” Harrison then quoted (imprecisely) William Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V.

“And those now against us shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their honor cheap when any speaks that walk with us upon St. Crispin’s Day,” she said before her voice faltered, and she began to cry. But Harrison was interrupted by Tom Rothman, who added to the quote, “We few, we happy few…” and went on to quote a movie he produced, comparing Harrison to an inspiring moment in the film. His voice halted and cracked, nearly crying, and for 10 seconds, Rothman turned off his microphone to gain his composure.

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

The public should expect lots of news stories about Trump killing Sesame Street in the coming months. CPB is going to use all its political clout to fight the defunding.

“We’re pursuing two parallel strategies as we continue to do everything possible to secure annual appropriations for [fiscal year] 26,” Harrison said during the board meeting. “And we’re actively preparing for the possibility of close out, or transition funding, should Congress not reverse course. So it’s very difficult. Hope on the one side and sort of acceptance on the other.”

As I reported in July, Rothman, Kaplin and Laura Ross were members of the CPB board until Trump removed them “effective immediately” on April 28. The next day they went to court to prevent Trump from removing them, but they lost the case. But they continued to show up for board meetings, and the other board members allowed them to participate. They even changed the bylaws (again, after they were removed and had no authority) saying a president could not remove them. The Trump administration had to go back to court and ask it to make the board members pay back money they earned while remaining on the board and to rescind any decisions they made while acting as board members.

The board’s website still shows Kaplin as a board member and now lists Ross and Rothman as former board members. Hopefully the rest of the CPB staff will not do the same thing and refuse to leave on Sept. 30 — the date the board has targeted for employees to end their time at CPB as it closes out operations.

MILLIONS DOUBLE ENROLLED ON MEDICAID, BILLIONS WASTED ON THIS FRAUD!

Administration Finds Millions of Individuals Double Enrolled in Taxpayer-Funded Coverage

The existence of duplicate payments demonstrates the left’s desire to make all Americans dependent upon government.

A new investigation increased both the number of enrollees with duplicate forms of taxpayer-funded coverage and the amount taxpayers are paying for such unnecessary double-dipping. It provides an example — one of many — to rebut leftist claims that the recently passed budget reconciliation bill will somehow destroy the safety net.

Explosion of Wasteful Spending

The Journal analysis of Medicaid data from 2019 to 2021 found taxpayers spent $4.3 billion over three years, providing duplicate coverage to an average of 660,000 people per year. The Trump administration recently examined what happened after four years of Biden administration policies, designed to promote enrollment in taxpayer-funded coverage at all costs.

The analysis by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) of 2024 enrollment data concluded that, last year, “an average of 1.2 million Americans each month were enrolled” in Medicaid in multiple states — nearly double the level of duplicate enrollment cited by the Journal in the opening years of the Biden presidency. Moreover, CMS also noted that another “1.6 million Americans each month were enrolled in both Medicaid” and taxpayer-subsidized coverage on the insurance Exchange plans.

According to CMS, the total cost of all this unnecessary spending on a total of 2.8 million duplicate enrollments is $14 billion per year — more than three times the $4.3 billion figure the Journal reported earlier this year. CMS didn’t specify if that $14 billion figure represented total Medicaid costs (i.e., including the share of Medicaid costs that states pay themselves), or only the potential costs to the federal government.

Regardless, it represents a large amount. For purposes of comparison, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that, during the last fiscal year, the federal government would spend $607 billion on Medicaid. Simply eliminating the duplicate payments would reduce federal Medicaid spending by roughly 2.3 percent — without doing anything to harm beneficiaries, who would still have taxpayer-funded coverage, just not in multiple places at once.

Phony Coverage Losses?

The CMS data highlights two important points regarding Medicaid and taxpayer-funded insurance programs. First, the discussion about the number of individuals who will “lose” coverage seems overstated.

CBO has yet to release detailed coverage estimates regarding the final version of the bill, enacted into law. But the case described above demonstrates the absurdity of this type of exercise. The left might scream about 2.8 million people “losing” coverage — even though they “lost” coverage only on paper and are still insured elsewhere (and at taxpayer expense) in the system.

Many of the other supposed “losses” from the legislation fall into similar buckets: individuals who choose not to comply with the new work requirements, undocumented migrants denied taxpayer-funded coverage for public policy reasons, and so forth.

A good percentage of Americans would have few qualms about lawmakers making these types of reasonable policy judgments. And yet the left hopes to overwhelm such rational behavior with screaming headlines talking about Trump taking away health care from 15 million Americans.

Welfare-Industrial Complex

More fundamentally, the fact that these types of duplicate payments can exist, have existed for many years, and grew substantially under the last administration demonstrates the left’s desire to make all Americans dependent upon government.

The Biden administration self-evidently had little interest in controlling spending on individuals obtaining taxpayer-funded coverage from multiple sources. Even if it wasted taxpayer funds — and even if the multiple payments fattened the coffers of insurance companies, who got paid to provide coverage that beneficiaries never used — Biden’s CMS simply wanted to juice the enrollment numbers by any means necessary.

With this kind of attitude, it seems little wonder that our federal government faces $36 trillion in debt and counting. Ending the nonsense of people enrolled in duplicate coverage won’t solve the debt problem on its own, but recent actions by CMS — not to mention Congress in the reconciliation bill — to expose this madness and stop it provide a welcome dose of common sense for a change.

OBAMA, HILLARY CLINTON, THE FBI AND CIA HID THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSSIAGATE!

Five Crucial Facts From the House Intel Report on 2016 Russian Interference

by American Greatness

(American Greatness via Zero Hedge)—Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard did an excellent service to our nation this week when she released a declassified version of a critical September 2020 House Intelligence Committee staff report on a major January 2017 intelligence report, known as an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.”

Gabbard’s decision came after a years-long tug-of-war over the release of this report between Republican members of Congress who believe it provides critical information about the Russia collusion hoax and the involvement of Obama officials and the U.S. Intelligence Community versus Democratic congressmen and deep state intelligence officials who have desperately tried to hide this report from the American public.

Press accounts have reported most of the essential details of the House report, such as how it was rushed out on President Obama’s orders to be published just before Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017. Media stories have also detailed how substandard intelligence was used to justify the ICA’s finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win and that this bad intelligence was included on the orders of CIA Director John Brennan over the objections of senior CIA analysts. The media has also reported the House Intelligence report’s finding that a hand-picked group of five analysts wrote the ICA and that it was not adequately vetted by U.S. intelligence agencies and analysts. It is also clear in the House report that, despite numerous statements by Brennan denying it, the fraudulent Steele dossier was heavily used in the ICA.

I am very familiar with the House Intelligence Committee report. I was permitted to read a classified version of the report when I served as Chief of Staff of the National Security Council in August 2018. I also discussed efforts by the White House to pressure the CIA to release the report a month before the 2020 presidential election with the late Lou Dobbs. This reportedly included President Trump visiting the CIA to retrieve the report personally.

Based on my understanding of this issue, here are five key points about the House Intelligence Committee report that most Americans may not be aware of.

1. The House Intelligence Committee report is a credible and carefully drafted paper.

Although the House report was written by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican staff, its fairness and balance are a credit to its authors and then-Chairman Devin Nunes.

The report says on page 1 that committee investigators spent over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports and interviewed 20 intelligence and FBI officers. Its conclusions reflect objectivity and would not be found in a biased, partisan report. For example, the House report concedes at the beginning that the ICA’s finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and to weaken an inevitable Clinton presidency used proper intelligence tradecraft. However, the House report took issue with the ICA’s distortions of intelligence tradecraft standards to assess that Putin had a clear preference for Trump to win and “aspired to help his chances of victory.”

The House Intelligence report also includes strong, nonpartisan recommendations, including a call for political appointees of outgoing administrations to recuse themselves from any involvement in intelligence reports drafted in the future under similar circumstances.

I spoke with the two principal authors of the House report after I read it in August 2018. I found them to be professional and knowledgeable. They answered all my questions and provided me with additional information that was not in the report. A CIA official told me earlier this month that one of the authors had been retained by the Agency to prepare the report for release.

2. The Republican House report is more credible than a similar bipartisan Senate report.

The authors of the House Intelligence Committee report told me they believed their report, written by the committee’s Republican staff, was more credible than a bipartisan report would be because many of the CIA officers they interviewed would not have spoken to a bipartisan investigation team. The reason was that Democratic staff and members of a bipartisan investigation might inform agency management about which agency officers had spoken to committee investigators, potentially leading to retaliation. I agree and believe this is why recent attempts by liberal reporters and Democratic congressmembers to use a similar bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee issued in April 2020 to discredit the House Intelligence Committee report are not credible.

3. The ICA omitted intelligence that Putin may have wanted Clinton to win the 2016 election.

Many press reports about the House Intelligence Committee report focused on how weak and fragmentary intelligence was used to support the ICA’s assessment that Russia wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. However, the House report also notes that the ICA ignored two significant alternative hypotheses suggested by the intelligence and Russian behavior: that Putin either did not care who won the 2016 election or wanted Hillary Clinton to win.

The House report said some of the omitted intelligence analysis indicated that Putin did not have a preference in the election outcome because both Trump and Clinton would be bad for Russia and unlikely to improve relations.

Also notable was the omitted analysis that Putin may have wanted Clinton to win the 2016 election because she would be a more vulnerable president than Trump and Russia had a reserve of compromising materials to use against Clinton but not Trump. Similarly, the House report also noted that the ICA did not address that Moscow viewed Clinton as a weaker candidate due to Russian intelligence reporting on her psychological health. In addition, the House report said the timing and content of Russian operational orders “indicated that Moscow assumed they had unique leverage over Secretary Clinton that would be more useful if she won the election.”

On the other hand, the House report said some senior Russian officials worried that a Trump administration would have a hardline national security team hostile to Russia. The report also quoted a redacted Russian source who “cautioned about the risks to Russia of a Republican administration, noting that ‘those who would hold positions in a Trump administration should he win will likely adhere to conservative anti-Russia positions.’”

4. The House Intelligence Committee report was stuck for years in the “turducken safe” at the CIA for political reasons and due to CIA Director Gina Haspel’s inept and partisan leadership.

Although the House report was completed by the summer of 2018 and considered an important and damning indictment of the Obama administration and U.S. intelligence agencies for politicizing intelligence to promote the Russia collusion hoax, House Republicans and the Trump White House were unable to convince CIA Director Gina Haspel to declassify and clear the report for release to the public.

Then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes sent the report to the CIA for clearance in the summer of 2018. The CIA dragged its feet in clearing the report and failed to do so before Nunes lost the committee chairmanship in January 2019, due to the Democrats winning control of the House in the 2018 election. After Congressman Adam Schiff succeeded Nunes as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the CIA refused to clear the report because Nunes was no longer the chairman and Schiff would not sign off on Nunes’s release request.

Because of the confusing politics and competing jurisdictions over the House report, it was kept at the CIA in a safe within a safe, leading the New York Times to call this the “turducken safe”—a gun box-like container controlled by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican members and located inside a CIA vault. The House Intelligence Committee’s Republican members refused to grant Democratic committee members access to their safe or allow them to review the report.

Haspel and NSA Director Paul Nakasone also objected to releasing the report, claiming it would reveal sensitive intelligence. In addition, Haspel and Nakasone reportedly opposed releasing the House report because they asserted it contained unverified information and “cherry-picked” intelligence. Democratic congressmembers also strongly opposed the release of the House Republican report. In opposing the report’s release in late 2020, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff charged that the report sought to whitewash Russia’s election interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Regardless of how ardently Haspel and Nakasone held their positions opposing the release of the House report, because the president is ultimately in charge of all U.S. intelligence and classification decisions, their refusal to cooperate with White House orders to release the report was, in my opinion, insubordination to a U.S. president. Moreover, DNI Gabbard’s action this week proved there were no valid national security reasons not to release a declassified version of this report.

5. President Trump and his senior White House staff regarded the House intelligence report as so crucial that Trump reportedly considered going to the CIA before the 2020 election to retrieve and release the report himself.

According to my sources at the White House and the House Intelligence Committee, the White House believed in the fall of 2020 that it was crucial for the American people to read this House report before the November 2020 presidential election.

The White House ordered CIA Director Haspel to release the report before the election. She refused.

I received a phone call about this matter in late October 2020 from Lou Dobbs, the host of the Fox Business Network show “Lou Dobbs Tonight” and a close friend of President Trump. I often appeared on Dobbs’ show as a former CIA analyst. He called to consult with me about a possible trip by President Trump to CIA headquarters to retrieve the House Intelligence Committee report so he could release it. I told Dobbs that I feared this would not work because CIA Director Haspel would learn about the president’s visit in advance and hide the inner safe containing the report before he arrived. Dobbs agreed with me and said he would convey this to President Trump. Trump’s alleged visit to the CIA to seize the House report never took place.

I would like to again thank Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for finally releasing the House Intelligence Committee’s critical report on how President Obama, senior Obama officials, and intelligence officials were responsible for issuing a rigged and politicized intelligence assessment just before Donald Trump’s first inauguration to destroy his presidency. This fraudulent intelligence report hounded Trump throughout his first term and contributed to his first sham impeachment in 2019. This perversion of U.S. intelligence also did grave damage to the objectivity and trustworthiness of America’s intelligence agencies, from which they still have not recovered.

It is my sincere hope that the declassified House Intelligence Committee report and other documents on the Russia collusion hoax released by DNI Gabbard and CIA Director Ratcliffe will lead to prosecutions of those involved and congressional hearings that ensure accountability and to send a strong message to future administration officials and intelligence officers that if they participate in another scheme to weaponize American intelligence to meddle in U.S. politics or to destroy a presidency, there will be severe consequences.

$350 MILLION RIPOFF WITH FAKE ITEMS OVER 20 YEARS, SUICIDE BY THE DEALER

Infamous Sports Memorabilia Dealer Found Dead After Shocking $350 Million Counterfeit Confession

Brett Lemieux, a seasoned sports memorabilia dealer, was found dead by authorities during the execution of a search warrant at his business, which was under investigation for alleged fraudulent activities, the New York Post reports.

Lemieux, founder of the sports memorabilia website MisterManCave, claimed in a striking Facebook post on the “Autographs 101” group Wednesday morning that he had sold over four million counterfeit items, amassing more than $350 million in sales, authorities said. Shortly after Lemieux posted the 1,200-word message, which has since been removed, Westfield, Indiana, police reported that he died by suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Lemieux claimed in a Facebook post that he orchestrated a large-scale counterfeit scheme, forging holograms and authentication stickers for sports collectibles that imitated products from major companies like Fanatics and Panini.

Lemieux claimed he flooded the market with 80,000 pieces of counterfeit memorabilia following the death of Kobe Bryant in 2020.

The sports memorabilia industry is reeling from Brett Lemieux’s suicide and his confession of orchestrating a large-scale counterfeit scheme, though some industry insiders expressed little surprise at the revelations.

“People have known about this guy. They’ve known his work. They know what he’s been up to,” said Steve Grad, an industry expert. “He has been at it for years and years. And he’s driven down the price of things. You know, you look at a Tom Brady autograph and Tom Brady’s value is affected drastically by this individual.”

Others expressed concern that Lemieux’s actions will cast a long shadow over the industry. “He did professional framing services for us probably four or five years ago — never had direct interaction with the memorabilia piece of it,” said Andy Albert, owner of Indy Card Exchange. “Thank God. Ninety-nine percent of the people in this industry do things the right way. And that one bad apple ruins the entire apple cart. It just infuriates me. Unfortunately, that’s going to have shockwaves for years to come.”