Category Archives: FRAUDS

WALL STREET LEGEND AND HIS SEX DUNGEON…

A Wall Street Legend and His Penthouse Sex Dungeon

Howard Rubin rose, fell and rose again as a star trader in the 1980s. He’s now landed in charges that he trafficked and abused women. ‘I don’t care if she screams.’

Collage of a smiling man, a woman in sunglasses and a baseball cap, an indictment, and elements of a cityscape.

NEW YORK—The penthouse atop the Metropolitan Tower on West 57th Street offers proximity to Central Park and has two bedrooms.

In the summer of 2012, prosecutors say, one of those bedrooms was soundproofed.

It was painted red and outfitted with an inventory of ropes, whips and sex toys labeled A to Z. A “St. Andrew’s cross,” an X-shaped contraption named for the martyred apostle, was equipped with four cuffs—two for the ankles, and two for the wrists.

The equipment was assembled for Wall Street legend Howard Rubin, the discreet renter of the penthouse—and for years, prosecutors allege, he lured women into what he called his sex “dungeon,” where he abused and tortured them high above the Manhattan skyline.

“I want to hurt her,” Rubin texted about a woman who would be joining him at the penthouse, according to court documents. “I don’t care if she screams.”

He then added an emoji of a laughing face.

For much of his life, and for much of his day, Rubin was a mythic figure of business, famous and infamous for rising, falling and rising again as a star trader on 1980s Wall Street. In a career that began at Salomon Brothers and ended with George Soros, he embodied the excessive wealth and excessive risk of a gunslinger era in finance, most notably when he was blamed by Merrill Lynch for an unauthorized trade that cost the firm some $250 million in 1987.

“Howie,” as he was called by colleagues, was a former card-counter who brought the risk tolerance of Las Vegas to the financial world. He maintained the trappings of a New York success story: the five-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, the Hamptons estate, the charity galas, a wife and three kids.

According to legal filings, archival materials and interviews with associates from several chapters of his life, Rubin was also a Wall Street titan who rose to the upper echelons of the finance industry despite a history of not following the rules.

Since being arrested for sex trafficking and other crimes in September, today the 70-year-old Rubin lives in a Brooklyn jail cell. He has pleaded not guilty. His attorneys, allies and even his estranged wife say he is a retiree living a quiet life, whose most important job is shuttling his granddaughter to dance classes.

In previous cases and in an unsuccessful application for bail, Rubin’s lawyers have argued that the women were aware of what the encounters involved and were willing participants.

“The alleged conduct involves private activity between adults that concluded more than six years ago,” his attorneys wrote in the application.

Rubin once seemed ripped from the pages of Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities”—and was himself a character in Michael Lewis’s “Liar’s Poker”—but in the government’s telling appears to be more like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Prosecutors have outlined an operation of recruitment and sexual torture against 10 victims, with alleged sourcing methods and coercion reminiscent of the approach taken by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Rubin allegedly worked with a former romantic partner to recruit women, often approaching former Playboy playmates who thought they were agreeing to sex-for-hire and light fetish play. The evenings often ended up including NDAs, beatings and advice on treating the bruises, court records show.

After beating and raping a woman one November evening, he offered her a drink and thanked her for a “pleasurable experience,” according to a separate civil suit filed against Rubin. He then told her she had to leave the apartment. He was going to meet his wife and kids for dinner.

If convicted, Rubin could receive a sentence of life imprisonment.

‘meet/greet/beat’

Much of the government’s criminal case against Rubin appears to be derived from two civil suits filed against him in 2017 and 2018.

Rubin was found liable and ordered to pay $3.8 million to six women as part of the primary civil case in April 2022. The second case also ended with a settlement.

In filings and subsequent testimony, several women told similar stories of what happened between 2009 and 2019. They were contacted over Instagram by a representative of Rubin’s about spending an evening with him. The women would be brought to New York and could receive $2,000 for a night—or up to $5,000 if he had a particularly good time. One woman said she was assured he was a “great guy.”

The evening might begin at the Russian Tea Room, located next door to the Metropolitan Tower, a skyscraper built in 1987 that one observer likened to a “glass-and-steel Godzilla looming ravenously” over the more elegant buildings nearby.

Inside Rubin’s penthouse was a safe that held a stack of blank nondisclosure agreements.

Some of the women said they were inebriated when they signed the form, which noted that the women had agreed, for payment, to engage in sexual acts “including Sadomasochistic (SM) activity that can be hazardous and on occasion cause injury,” read a form quoted by defense attorneys who argued it left little uncertainty about what the night might entail.

Breaking the contract would require paying $500,000 to Rubin.

The Russian Tea Room in Midtown Manhattan; a bear insignia above the restaurant’s entrance. Timothy Mulcare for WSJ

The women say a depraved side of Rubin emerged inside the dungeon, one that went far beyond the limits of BDSM (or bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) role-play and aggression. It included electric shocks and severe beating.

Defense attorneys in the civil case argued that Rubin was clear with the women about the kind of evening that lay ahead, and noted that several met with Rubin many times, and even referred friends and associates to sessions in the dungeon.

One woman who sued Rubin alleged he gave her a safe word that would bring everything to a halt: “pineapples.” He then tied her wrists with ropes and lightly slapped her across the face.

She said he tightened the ropes and smacked her again—this time much harder.

“PINEAPPLES!” she yelled.

When she again asked him to stop, she said he only grew angrier, punching and smacking her as she remained restrained by ropes hanging from the ceiling. The assault continued and he raped her, she said.

Other times, women said, he gagged them so tightly they couldn’t speak the safe word when they tried.

Another woman alleged Rubin had beaten her chest so violently that one of her breast implants had flipped. After he ignored her use of a safe word, the abuse stopped when she had removed enough of the gag to bite him on the finger. (This was the same woman about whom Rubin said, “I don’t care if she screams,” according to court filings.)

Rubin paid for the implant to be repaired, according to the civil suit, which also references the incident. The woman said in the suit that Rubin requested she replace her saline implants with silicone, since that was a sturdier material.

Rubin’s attorneys in one of the civil trials submitted several dozen text messages that they argued showed an understanding among all parties of the BDSM practices expected inside the dungeon.

In a representative text message sent to one of the women in June 2014, Rubin said, “this is a real beating ur going to get.”

Several days before a session with two women in August 2016, Rubin texted them: “Its total BDSM. Most girls love it and come back for more, but I just like to be upfront about everything.”

The day before the women came to the Metropolitan Tower, Rubin texted again:

“Ladies, can’t wait to meet/greet/beat you tomorrow.”

“Sounds good to me,” one of the women replied.

Looking up at multiple towering buildings against a clear sky, with the dark 146 W 57th Street building in the center.

The Metropolitan Tower on West 57th Street, where Rubin rented the penthouse. Timothy Mulcare for WSJ

Managing the logistics and soothing the distraught women, prosecutors allege, was Jennifer Powers, 45, a former model for Hawaiian Tropic and substitute teacher who was arrested along with Rubin.

“It got very rough jenn, we need to be VERY VERY VERY nice….” Rubin wrote to her after the encounter that injured the woman’s implant, according to court records.

“OK. I am being nice. I just hope you know what you’re doing,” she wrote back.

Powers has pleaded not guilty. She was also named in one of the civil suits against Rubin, but the claims against her were dismissed. Her attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Powers became Rubin’s full-time deputy in the trafficking operation in 2011, according to a government letter arguing against Rubin’s bail.

The following year, she married a professional DJ at the former Miami Beach mansion of fashion designer Gianni Versace, who was shot dead on its front steps in 1997. A photo from the event shows Rubin smiling in the crowd.

Powers filled many roles for her boss, prosecutors allege.

She was his logistics coordinator: booking flights to New York and letting Tower doormen know who was allowed up to the penthouse.

She was his good cop: telling the women that arnica cream might help soothe their bruises.

She was his accountant: paying the women in small disbursements that wouldn’t trip up bank rules.

She was his defender: explaining after the fact that the women shouldn’t have allowed Rubin to get drunk.

And she was his encourager: “I can only imagine what you did to her on that cross!!!” she wrote in a January 2015 text message included in court filings.

Rubin paid millions of dollars for her work, first in monthly wages and then by covering nearly all her expenses, including mortgage payments and private-school tuition. Rubin paid off annual credit-card expenses from Powers and her husband that exceeded $500,000 from 2018 to 2023—including after the two had been subject to the civil suits.

Jennifer Powers exits Brooklyn Federal Court.

Jennifer Powers exited Brooklyn federal court after a hearing in October. Jeenah Moon/Reuters

It has been nearly a decade since details of their “enterprise,” as prosecutors have called it, began to spread in late 2016, after police were called to the penthouse. An argument had broken out between two women there over Rubin’s abuse. Rubin wasn’t there, and Powers told the women not to tell the police who leased the apartment.

She later warned Rubin the investigation could turn up other details: “drugs, sex, etcccc,” according to court documents.

One of the women began telling attorneys about the abuse. More women came forward, filing a civil case just as the #MeToo movement began to instigate a global reckoning over sexual abuse.

The women who formed the civil suits included freelance models and cocktail waitresses, many caring for younger siblings and kids of their own, and prosecutors say Rubin exploited that economic disparity.

In June 2014, shortly before he’d retire from Soros’s firm, Rubin contacted an associate, known only as Co-Conspirator-1, about a woman’s financial straits.

“She’s brokke and says she‘’ l l do anything!” he wrote in a text message, according to court documents in the criminal case.

“She hates it, but she’s soooo desperate! We’ve got to make her cry!!!” he added.

When the woman got in touch to say she was ready to meet, Rubin corrected her.

“Ur not, bbut ur desperate and thts good.”

Masters of the universe

Rubin grew up the middle son of three boys raised in the Boston suburbs. After his mother died when he was 13, “Howie” became a surrogate parent and role model to his younger sibling, his brother wrote in a letter of support for Rubin’s bail application.

He was the boy made good, having begun his professional life as a chemical engineer in New Jersey. But he eventually grew so bored that he moved to Las Vegas, where his card-counting skills made him fast money—and soon required him to wear disguises to slip past casino security.

He went on to Harvard Business School, and professionalized his knack for assessing risk and knowing when to bet. At Harvard, Rubin met Mary Henry, whom he would marry two days after Valentine’s Day 1985.

They were a Wall Street couple: She went to work at Merrill Lynch, while he started at Salomon Brothers alongside another new recruit, Michael Lewis, who would detail those heady years in his 1989 bestselling memoir, “Liar’s Poker.”

“You couldn’t always put your finger on losers, but you knew talent when you saw it,” Lewis wrote. “Howie Rubin had it.”

Mary Henry exits Brooklyn Federal Court.

Mary Henry, Rubin’s estranged wife, leaving Brooklyn federal court after a hearing in October. jeenah moon/Reuters

Working together in 1980s Wall Street, Lewis and Rubin were crew mates on a rocket ship. The capital held by Wall Street’s securities firms would more than triple in Rubin’s first five years of employment. And the young bankers powering it all were the “masters of the universe,” so labeled by Tom Wolfe in his 1987 bestseller “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” a novel that he researched by spending a day on the Salomon Brothers trading floor.

Rubin’s skills, former colleagues say, included an encyclopedic recall, the ability to explain his bets in plain English and a high threshold for risk. After Merrill Lynch recruited him as a securities trader in 1986—with a guaranteed annual salary of $1 million—some of his new colleagues began to worry about just how risky he got.

Merrill was known as “the Thundering Herd,” but Rubin did not appear ready to run with the pack.

That became apparent on April 17, 1987—Good Friday—when Rubin called an executive at Merrill Lynch and admitted his reporting on recent mortgage trades hadn’t been accurate.

Rubin had been buying a significant amount of mortgage securities, hoping to take advantage of a market for mortgages that had risen 260% in 1986 alone.

But he hadn’t told the firm about the massive holding he’d accumulated, which meant other traders hadn’t hedged it and invested in securities that would rise in value if those mortgage securities fell.

When the rebound in mortgages never came, Rubin’s losses compounded to more than $250 million. At the time, it was believed to be the single-greatest loss in Wall Street history tied to one trader.

Merrill announced the loss and fired Rubin. The SEC launched an investigation, and Rubin ultimately settled charges that he had failed to keep accurate records, neither admitting nor denying guilt. He agreed to a nine-month suspension from the securities industry.

Rubin’s contemporaries from Wall Street today remember the $250 million loss as an ominous foreshadowing. Six months later, the Black Monday crash registered the largest one-day drop in the Dow’s history, wiping an estimated $1.7 trillion off the global market.

A tearsheet of an article titled "Merrill Lynch Posts $250 Million Of Mortgage-Issue Trading Losses".

An April 30, 1987, article about Merrill Lynch’s losses. The Wall Street Journal

‘Superstar’

But Rubin was soon back to work. A month after Black Monday, he started at Bear Stearns.

“You hire good people when they become available,” Managing Director John Sites said at the time.

If Salomon Brothers had exemplified early ’80s excess, Bear Stearns embodied the conservatism that followed. The boss told employees to reuse paper clips and ordered Rubin to weekly “cold-sweat” meetings with the risk committee. By 1992, Rubin was collecting an annual bonus of $7 million, and oversaw an operation that generated $150 million in trading profit the following year.

“He’s a superstar,” Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne told The Wall Street Journal in 1993.

Employees were shocked when Rubin announced in 1999 that he was taking an early retirement at age 44 to spend more time with his wife and their three young children. The couple even converted their dining room into a kid’s gym, outfitted with mats and a mini-trampoline.

Rubin went back to work in 2008, this time as an investment adviser for billionaire George Soros’s Soros Fund Management.

He retired in 2015, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office indictment detailed criminal acts against Jane Does #1 through #10 that covered some of that time, from 2009 through 2019.

On the surface, Rubin’s life resembled the boom times. He posed for photos with Henry at galas raising money for child development and cancer research. In a 2018 deposition during the civil trial, Rubin estimated his net worth to be $50 million.

Colleagues and fellow parents at his kids’ private school say Rubin seemed like an ordinary guy who happened to be really, really smart. Once news broke of the lawsuits in 2017, though, Rubin disappeared from that social circuit.

Details of his depositions spread. His safe word became a recurring punchline among Rubin’s acquaintances at the time, appropriated by jokesters to mean “no.”

As in:

“Are you going to that dinner tonight?”

“Pineapple.”

The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, NY.

The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Rubin awaits trial. Timothy Mulcare for WSJ

Under arrest

When Rubin was arrested in September, he was living a quiet life in Connecticut. Powers was raising her family in Southlake, Texas. (Among other charges, they are accused of lying on a mortgage application that Rubin cosigned for her home.)

Powers was released on an $850,000 bail secured with the help of her parents. News of her arrest spread quickly through the wealthy Dallas suburb where she lives, especially since she has worked as a substitute teacher in a local school district.

Rubin has mounted a full campaign to also be granted bail, submitting letters of support from several people, including his niece, his business-school roommate and his granddaughter’s dance teacher. They largely portrayed Rubin as a retiree who dresses up as characters from “Frozen” to make his grandchildren laugh.

He has offered the court a $70 million bond cosigned by his wife and Annalee Rubin, his daughter.

“I am willing to risk losing a majority of my assets,” wrote Henry, who is in the process of divorcing Rubin.

It was a surprising show of support from a woman who is invoked by prosecutors to illustrate the extent of Rubin’s deceit.

In late 2014, he emailed Powers that he needed to tell his wife he was out of town, since there was a long night ahead of “rockettes, dinner and dungeon.”

Soon after, he told Powers he could probably see five women in one week—“Except the 16th is holiday and my anniversary!”

In her letter to the judge, Henry wrote that she understood “far too well the serious charges before the Court,” but added, “They do not represent the Howie Rubin I saw.”

In an email sent on January 17, Annalee Rubin defended her father, saying he “should be out on bail and home with his family. It is heartbreaking to not have my father by my family’s side.”

The government argued against bail, saying Rubin had behaved in suspicious ways that made him seem a flight risk. During his arrest, he said he didn’t know where his passport was, and was found to have eight cellphones and BlackBerry devices.

Rubin’s attorneys said many of those phones were old devices and that Rubin had merely forgotten where his passport was.

Details came up in the bail hearing that, in the judge’s view, undercut Rubin’s promise not to interfere in the criminal trial.

In 2019, he had sent a letter to another woman he learned was considering suing him, according to court filings. In that letter, he said he would characterize her as a “professional prostitute” if she continued the case.

The judge has now denied bail three times, leaving Rubin to await trial in the Brooklyn jail also housing ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He is next due in court on Jan. 27.

Before his arrest, Rubin had lived in a rented home in Fairfield, Conn., close to his daughter’s house. In a letter to the court, Rubin’s landlord said she lives across the street, and observes him babysitting his grandchildren, watching TV and reading the newspaper.

Through the house’s 20 windows, she noted, all she ever saw was “a man who is living a quiet, harmless, simple and respectful life.”

STUDENTS FROM INDIA ABUSE THE STUDENT VISA PROGRAM AND NOBODY NOTICED!

India media just blew up the student visa scam–now everything changes…

For years now, the H-1B debate has been sold to us as a tech-company issue or a skills argument. But what doesn’t get talked about is how much of the H-1B pipeline starts long before the lottery or the job offers and way before the actual paperwork gets filled out.A recent piece from the Times of India just admitted the ugly truth out loud. For many Indian families, an American student visa has zero to do with education. It’s quietly understood that the student stuff is a progression that starts with admission and a visa and moves through internships and graduation and ends with work authorization long enough to recover their costs and secure a foothold in the US job market. The degree isn’t the reason; it’s just their foot in the door.

This matters because the entire legal structure of a student visa is about “intent.” F-1 visas are for studying, not labor. Yet now, what’s being openly described by the Times of India is a system where the “student” status is actually a way to weasel into the US job market.

And now that this little sneaky truth has been made public, the entire conversation should change. Because the US has allowed a “temporary education” visa to mutate into a backdoor work program, and that can’t stand.

India’s media spells out how the system has been used and abused, how Optional Practical Training became the bridge to US jobs, and why Washington’s sudden turn against it could blow up the entire game, especially for those Indians who are using this path to cheat the system.

Times of India:

For Indian families, the US degree has rarely been just a degree. It is a sequence you pay for and plan around: Admission, visa, internship, graduation, and then a post-study runway long enough to recover costs, build a résumé, and attempt the H-1B lottery without falling off a bureaucratic cliff. That runway is Optional Practical Training (OPT).Now the runway is being described in Washington as a loophole, not a ladder. In 2025, the US debate has moved beyond generic immigration noise into something more targeted: A political and legal narrative that frames OPT as unauthorised, unfair to American graduates, and ripe for abuse. This is followed by proposals that would either terminate the programme, tax away its advantage, or convert student status from a compliance-based continuum into a clock with expiry dates. What is significant here is that OPT is being attacked simultaneously in Congress, agency memos, and in the regulatory agenda—three levers that rarely align.

India sits closest to the blast radius because they have become the most invested in the OPT logic. The story, then, is not “Will America stop Indians from studying?” It is more precise, and more destabilising: Will America continue to attach a credible work pathway to the education it markets to the world?

Now, this is where the “misuse” argument collapses and the “scam” argument starts to hold some serious water.

What follows is sworn testimony that describes how a program meant to supplement education turned into one of the biggest work-authorization pipelines in the country. Honestly, calling it a “student visa” program is more marketing than reality. The Times of India piece goes on:

In June 2025, Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), appeared before the House Judiciary Subcommittee with a blunt charge: OPT, she argued, has effectively become the largest unregulated guest-worker scheme in the United States. Drawing on internal datasets she said were provided by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, Vaughan told lawmakers that more than 540,000 work authorisations were granted under OPT and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) in FY2023 alone. In her framing, this was not administrative flexibility; it was regulatory drift at scale. OPT, she said, had fuelled an ecosystem of diploma mills, fake schools, bogus training programmes, and illegal employment—a parallel market built less around learning than around visa preservation and labour substitution—while the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) remained too under-resourced to vet the volume and complexity of the pipeline.

Her sharpest point was legal-constitutional in tone: OPT is not explicitly authorised by Congress, having been created through executive rulemaking—formalised under the Bush administration and expanded under Obama—without an up-or-down vote to permit hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates to work in the US.Where her testimony lands politically is in how it converts a sprawling, messy system into a single prosecutable story: Scale plus abuse equals illegitimacy. Once OPT is narrated primarily as a work programme rather than an education-to-employment bridge, the policy debate shifts from ‘how to regulate’ to ‘whether it should exist at all’. And even if one contests her characterisation, the effect is the same: it gives restrictionists a numbers-and-oversight argument that is easier to sell than a purely ideological one.

Our student visa program is functioning as a mass employment agency.

Now, US senators are saying that the government is issuing massive numbers of work permits through a student visa system that was never meant to function that way and calling on DHS to shut it down.

The Times of India piece continues:

On September 23, 2025, Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to Kristi Noem, Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, urging her to end Optional Practical Training (OPT)-style work authorisations for student visa holders. Grassley argued DHS is issuing ‘hundreds of thousands’ of such work permits “in direct violation of the law” and criticised the practice of allowing foreign graduates to remain in the US on student visas “for years after graduation” to work. He said this undercuts young Americans’ job prospects and claimed the authorisations are incompatible with the Immigration and Nationality Act, which he says limits student visas to education, not employment.

On November 14, 2025, Senator Eric S. Schmitt (Republican, United States Senator for Missouri) wrote to Kristi Noem, Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, and Joseph B. Edlow, Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, urging them to move toward ‘reforming or ending’ Optional Practical Training (OPT). He calls OPT ‘one of the most abused’ immigration programmes and argues it operates as a cheap-labour pipeline and a ‘backdoor’ into the job market, hurting young American workers. Schmitt also stresses the programme’s tax advantage—citing payroll tax exemptions and claiming this encourages employers to hire OPT workers over US graduates. He asks DHS to conduct a ‘thorough review’ as the first step toward shutting OPT down or reshaping it.

What Grassley and Schmitt are both saying is that the student visa program has been allowed to function like a work visa.

Now, let’s hope that this is where all the talk turns into action. These proposals show how lawmakers are trying to unwind the student-to-work scam, either by totally eliminating OPT or taking away the backdoor access into the US job pool.

The Times of India piece shares more:

If the narrative is the pressure, the proposals are the machinery. They range from a guillotine to a slow squeeze to a procedural clock.The American Tech Workforce Act of 2025: A termination proposalThe American Tech Workforce Act of 2025, introduced in the US Senate in September and referred to the Judiciary Committee, tries to rewire the entire student-to-work pipeline:

Tighten H-1B through a tougher, higher-wage logic, and then cut off the quiet bridge that feeds it—OPT. The Bill treats Optional Practical Training not as an education policy tool but as a structural loophole that Congress never explicitly authorised and now seeks to close.

The language of the Bill is deliberately spare. In its Section 3—Termination of Optional Practical Training Program; employment authorization to terminate after completion of course of studies—the proposal is not to narrow eligibility or toughen oversight, but to erase the programme itself. OPT, and any successor scheme by another name, would be barred in law. Employment authorisation would end the moment an F-1 student completes their degree, collapsing the post-graduation runway to zero. Even pending OPT applications would be denied at enactment, with fees returned.

The message is unmistakable here: Study may still be welcomed, but work after graduation would no longer be part of the offer.The Dignity Act of 2025: A quiet rewrite of OPT economicsThe Dignity Act of 2025, a bipartisan immigration reform Bill introduced in the US House of Representatives, proposes a broad reset of immigration rules—mixing tougher enforcement tools with new legal-status pathways and system-wide adjustments. It is not law; it remains a legislative proposal moving through the committee process, not a measure that has cleared both chambers and been signed.For international students, its most consequential move is not a headline attack on OPT, but a quiet change to its economics.

The Bill proposes to end the payroll tax exemption on OPT wages by bringing those earnings under FICA—the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes that most US workers pay through automatic deductions. Under the current framework, many F-1 students on OPT who are treated as nonresident aliens for tax purposes are generally exempt from FICA withholding; the proposal would remove that carve-out.

These proposals are about dismantling a work pipeline that’s clearly screwing over American workers… because a student visa that functions like a work visa is a total backdoor scam. And once it’s admitted out loud, everything is on the table, and changes better be made.

ELITE UNIVERSITIES CLAIM THAT 38% OF THEIR STUDENTS ARE CLAIMING(lying about) A DISABILITY TO GET MORE FOR TESTS!

Cheaters Faking Disabilities Are Dragging Colleges Into Crisis

Having ‘ADHD’ does not make you disabled.

The campus of Stanford University (Robert Gareth/Unsplash)

A large proportion of college students, law students, and medical students are willfully cheating and lying to get better grades. Nowhere is this happening more than at elite universities, where there is exponential growth in the number of students claiming disabilities in order to get the “accommodation” of time and a half on their exams.

Nationwide, 20 percent of college students now claim to have a disability. That number has quintupled over the past decade. Of course, there is no plausible scenario in which the number of disabilities among young people would actually increase fivefold (unless a city were carpet-bombed), so this must be a trend with a purpose. Plus, the more elite the school, the higher the rate of “disability,” even though one would think debilitating cognitive and learning disabilities would make attendance at such schools less likely. At Stanford University, for instance, 38 percent of undergrads are officially registered as being disabled. Certain populations also have extremely high rates of diagnosed disability. For example, 54 percent of nonbinary students at American colleges today are registered as having a disability. (RELATED: The Outrageous Scandal That Should Be Rocking Higher Education)

[M]ost of these “disabled” students are liars and cheaters who know they have no actual impediment that prevents them from taking an exam within an allotted timeframe.

Many assessments in the mainstream media on the surge of “accommodations” speak in gentle tones about whether additional safeguards are needed and whether the system has become “unfair.” But make no mistake about it, most of these “disabled” students are liars and cheaters who know they have no actual impediment that prevents them from taking an exam within an allotted timeframe. (RELATED: America’s Universities: A Multi-Generational Perspective)

Their decision to take extra time on their exams — which has been shown by several studies to significantly increase the likelihood of a better grade — is a purposeful act to hurt their classmates in favor of advantaging themselves. It is wrong. Even if they have genuinely fallen for the claim that anxiety and “ADHD” entitle elite college, law, or medical students to 150 percent time on exams, they’re guilty because they know that they are perfectly capable of reading the exam and giving an answer, and that a lower score is the result of low effort and/or low intelligence. After all, half of these students had no disability until after they showed up at their university.

The time and a half given to students with “disabilities” is certainly not leveling the playing field. Several studies have found that giving students extra time has about the same effect on increasing scores for students with and without disabilities. Those benefits to students with “disabilities” can be seen in the rise in LSAT scores in recent years, which can be attributed to the increased rates of test-takers receiving time and a half. Conveniently, these “disabled” test-takers who get time and a half on the LSAT do, on average, better than their non-disabled peers.

These “disabled” students do serious harm to students who are actually disabled. College students who are blind, paralyzed, missing limbs, have cerebral palsy, have severe dyslexia, are recovering from surgery, etc., etc. actually need accommodations. Students with fake disabilities who monopolize the resources of accommodations testing offices for the purpose of cheating steal resources from students who genuinely need them. Plus, they cast suspicion on the students who need accommodations by means of promoting widespread resentment toward accommodations.

This month, the Atlantic published an essay on this growing phenomenon. The author, Rose Horowitch, argued that the explosion of accommodations in higher education “has put the entire idea of fairness at risk.” She traced the origin of this explosion in accommodation grants back to a 2008 amendment from the Association on Higher Education and Disability that called for colleges to give significant consideration to students’ own assessment of their disability and not to rely only on medical diagnoses. The organization claimed that “(r)equiring extensive medical and scientific evidence” actually “perpetuates a deviance model of disability.” In addition, the American Psychiatric Association in 2013 expanded the definition of ADHD — the “disability” that 17 percent of college students claim to have — to the amorphous standard that a person’s symptoms need only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of academic functioning.

Horowitch doesn’t say this, but ADHD is a diagnosis that is made to account for totally disparate behaviors in people. For example, one person with “ADHD” could be a 21-year-old woman who gets distracted by TikTok when she’s supposed to be studying, and another person with “ADHD” could be a 11-year-old boy who has intense anger and is willfully disobedient toward all adults. In other words, ADHD can be applied to people who aren’t the best at staying focused (a difficult task for almost everyone, it turns out), and it can describe people with a range of other serious mental disorders. Brain scans of those with an “ADHD” diagnosis have found nothing in common among those with the condition that is distinct from the rest of the population. Brain scans have also found nothing consistently deficient in the brains of people with ADHD. Therefore, a diagnosis of ADHD means and describes practically nothing coherent. And yet, there are many ADHD activists who claim that there is something wrong with the brain chemistry of people who have ADHD, and that this can only be solved by stimulants that are controlled substances. (These activists still haven’t shown what is wrong with the brain chemistry of people with ADHD, or demonstrated that the stimulants have positive effects in the long term.)

Even though ADHD means so little and has such a low standard for diagnosis, many psychiatrists have been known to diagnose patients with it even when the basic standards are not met. In a survey, nearly half of psychologists said the purpose of a psychoeducational assessment was to secure accommodations for a student rather than to discover if the student is in need of them. Others advertise that they will provide a diagnosis for accommodations. One assessment company, for instance, publicly bragged that it had a “95 percent success rate in getting learning disability accommodations.” The company’s owner even said in a YouTube video that he wasn’t aware of a case in which a client had been denied accommodations. A different cognitive testing company had a banner on its website that said “Get ACT Extra Time.”

Thus, it’s become easy for parents to essentially buy their kid a diagnosis that will unlock time and a half on his or her exams. Another piece of evidence for this is the fact that disability accommodations are given more frequently at schools with students from wealthier families.

But really, parents don’t even need to buy their kids a diagnosis. In a recent study in Canada, 23 universities approved a (fictional) student’s request for extra time on her exams because of ADHD. Here’s the twist: The official neuropsychological battery, which was given to the universities, stated that she was within normal range for everything. All she had to do to get accommodations was state that she felt she had ADHD. The researcher, Allyson G. Harrison, reported that she was inspired to do the study by a similar study that was conducted in the U.S. that also “found almost perfect compliance” with the student’s request. The researcher refused to publish that study, she said, because he feared institutional backlash.

Increasingly, diagnoses of anxiety and/or depression are accounting for a greater proportion of students who receive extra time on their exams. At Ohio State, students with these mental health difficulties constitute 36 percent of those receiving accommodations. These students also tend to receive leniencies, such as being able to skip class or turn in assignments late.

Of course, it seems quite clear that teenagers with anxiety and depression would be better off being held to the same standard as their peers instead of being coddled into feelings of helplessness and insufficiency. Having depression and anxiety might mean you need help and therapy, but it certainly doesn’t make you too stupid to take your exam in the normal amount of time.

Also, about this time and a half for exams. There’s no scientific rationale for it. Harrison explained to the Chronicle on Higher Education that there’s no significant research on what extra time might be appropriate for certain disabilities. “It’s just throwing darts,” she said. Students in Australia with disabilities, for instance, only receive 115 percent time for exams.

In recent years, many employers have reported that college graduates are unprepared for the workforce. Of course, getting concessions and easier exams for claiming to have the “disability” of “ADHD” at a time when rigor in higher education is falling each year is hardly the best preparation for the workplace. After all, you don’t get time and a half to do your job.

In 2023, Brett Seaton, then a student at the University of Pennsylvania who was diagnosed with ADHD but refused to accept accommodations, wrote about what exactly is supposed to happen when these coddled students show up at their place of work post-graduation and aren’t given concessions. He said:

Employers trust Penn to educate students and to prepare them to enter the workforce. Imagine how surprised they will be when they find out that in time-sensitive situations, accommodated students function at half of the processing speeds of non-accommodated students. Accommodated students will feel slow and behind, while employers will be frustrated and more likely to fire them for their slow rate of creating value.

What will be much worse is when doctors who received time and a half on their exams start treating patients. Unfortunately, doctors with “ADHD” will also not receive time and a half to help a patient in a medical emergency.

By choosing to give so many students such unwarranted benefits, universities are putting their reputations at serious risk. Students are graduating from their schools entitled and unprepared. Genuine merit is overshadowed by those who game the system. And, as most college courses are graded on a curve, either officially or unofficially, each student who is not cheating is being robbed of the grades he or she deserves. Universities’ entire system of academic integrity has collapsed, and the value of their degrees has fallen.

Surely, these schools are terrified of getting sued by students who claim their disabilities were not accommodated. But there is no reason that time and a half on an exam should be a “reasonable” accommodation for ADHD, depression, or anxiety. Universities need to fight back against the liars and the cheaters.

FRAUD, FRAUD AND CONTINUED MASSIVE FRAUD IN OBAMACARE SUBSIDIES

Fake People and Phony SSNs Had 100% Success in Getting Obamacare Subsidy, Fraud Investigation Finds

—A scathing new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report identified rampant fraud and systemic failures in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace just as Congress is battling over the future of Obamacare’s enhanced premium subsidies.

The report, released Wednesday, revealed that fictitious identities, invalid Social Security numbers, and even deceased individuals were easily approved for taxpayer-funded subsidies. Every single application investigators submitted using fabricated or invalid Social Security numbers in 2024 was approved for coverage.

“Republicans have sounded the alarm on the flawed structural integrity of Obamacare and how Democrats’ failed policies to temporarily prop up the program have exacerbated fraud, hurt patients, increased the burden on American taxpayers,” Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee and one of the members who requested the GAO investigation, said in a statement.

“The concerning findings from GAO’s report further confirm that Republican efforts to strengthen, secure, and sustain our federal health programs are critical and necessary to ensure access to quality health care at prices Americans can afford,” Guthrie added.

The month-long government shutdown that ended just before Thanksgiving stemmed largely from Democrats’ refusal to budge on the expiring Obamacare premium subsidies, which they passed without a single Republican vote in 2021 and set to expire at the end of 2025.

Those subsidies were originally limited to households earning between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level. However, Democrats removed the upper-income cap and increased the subsidy amounts, and in some cases reduced premiums to zero.

Fraud is especially widespread among enrollees reporting incomes between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level, who qualify for zero-premium plans. Critics say zero-premium plans create opportunities for bad actors to sign up unsuspecting victims without their knowledge.

In nine states, the number of sign-ups at that income level exceeded the number of eligible residents, according to a joint report from the Foundation for Government Accountability and the Paragon Health Institute.

GAO’s undercover investigation found that 100% of the fictitious applications it submitted were approved in late 2024, and 18 out of 20 fake applicants were still receiving subsidized coverage for 2025. ACA marketplaces approved coverage even when no documents were requested, or fake documents were submitted, including those related to the applicants’ citizenship status.

The government watchdog also uncovered 66,000 Social Security numbers with more than a year’s worth of subsidized coverage in 2024, including one number used for the equivalent of 71 years of coverage — in a single plan year.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which manages the ACA marketplace, does not block new applications using the same Social Security number, according to the report.

Additionally, 58,000 SSNs receiving benefits in 2023 matched Social Security death data, resulting in $94 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies being sent to health insurers on behalf of deceased individuals.

“For years, we were told we could keep our plan, keep our doctor, and premiums would go down. None of it happened,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said in a statement. “This new report confirms what we already knew: under Obamacare, hardworking Americans saw their premiums skyrocket and their healthcare choices shrink, all while fraud benefited insurance companies.”

Democrats, meanwhile, warn that without extending the expanded subsidies, millions of Americans will face steep premium hikes and loss of coverage.

ACA premiums are projected to rise by 20% on average in 2026, but Paragon’s earlier analysis found that the expiring subsidy would account for just 3.3% of those premiums. The group also found that Obamacare plan premiums have grown nearly twice as fast as employer-sponsored plans since the ACA took effect.

AI BEAUTIFUL ACTRESSES WILL REPLACE THE SPOILED CRY BABIES OF HOLLYWOOD FAME…FINALLY! GOODBYE TO POINTLESS MILLION DOLLAR SALARIES AND UNION MEMBERSHIP AND STRIKES!

Hollywood hits back as AI actress is hailed as ‘the next Scarlett Johannson’ BTW….”SCARLETT IS REALLY NOT PLEASANT LOOKING OR PRETTY AT ALL!”

Tilly Norwood (Picture: Tilly Norwood/Facebook) — This is not a real woman (Picture: Tilly Norwood/Facebook)

The woman you see above might look as real as any other human, but she’s not.

She’s actually an artificial intelligence-generated actress named Tilly Norwood who, after a short time on the scene, has sparked interest among talent agents who are keen to hire her.

As such, she’s been hailed as ‘the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman’, sparking outrage from big names in Hollywood, who are branding it ‘gross’ and expressing rage towards the agencies who wish to sign her.

This has led to the creator of Tilly firing back, insisting that the digital actress is not a ‘replacement’ for a human being.

Taking to Instagram, comedian and technologist Eline Van der Velden wrote: ‘To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work – a piece of art.

‘Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity.’

Tilly Norwood Instagram 22 July 2025 tillynorwood Sat outside pretending I?m in a French film and not just avoiding my to-do list. What?s your ultimate coffee shop comfort order? #CafeCornerThoughts — Tilly Norwood is an AI-generated actress who’s already causing a stir in Hollywood (Picture: Tilly Norwood/Instagram)

Van der Velden added: ‘I see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a new tool, a new paintbrush. Just as animation, puppetry, or CGI opened fresh possibilities without taking away from live acting, AI offers another way to imagine and build stories.

‘I’m an actor myself, and nothing – certainly not an AI character – can take away the craft or joy of human performance.’

She said that ‘creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftsmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role, or shaping a performance’.

‘It takes time, skill, and iteration to bring such a character to life,’ Van der Velden argued. ‘She represents experimentation, not substitution.

‘Much of my work has always been about holding up a mirror to society through satire, and this is no different.’

Tilly Norwood Actor | London | Particle6 Productions https://www.tillynorwood.com/ — The creator has insisted she is not meant to replace humans (Picture: Tilly Norwood)

She also believes that ‘AI characters should be judged as part of their own genre, on their own merits’, not compared directly to human beings.

‘Each form of art has its place, and each can be valued for what it uniquely brings,’ she wrote.

Concluding on an optimistic note, the creator shared her hopes that ‘we can welcome AI as part of the wider artistic family’ and simply as ‘one more way to express ourselves, alongside theatre, film, painting, music, and countless others’.

‘When we celebrate all forms of creativity, we open doors to new voices, new stories, and new ways of connecting with each other.’

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.”