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More charges for Donald Trump. The news bulletin ricocheted yesterday afternoon (late or early, depending on your time zone) out into a world that has already contended with such news in the past and expected more to come. Was this the highly anticipated indictment from the special counsel on Trump’s alleged crimes around attempting to overturn a lawful election and spur a violent insurrection? Or was this the investigation out of Georgia into related crimes around the same perfidy? We soon learned it was neither, but rather more charges to an indictment already issued in the case of the boxes of highly classified documents Trump allegedly took and then hid at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere. This included his alleged efforts to conceal the presence of the documents and obstruct their return to the United States government, to which they belong. It’s a lot to keep straight. At this point we need a version of air traffic control to make sense of the jumbo jets of legal jeopardy swirling around the former president. But with each set of charges we get more colorful details and more peril for Trump. Yesterday we found out we could add a subplot that seemed ripped from a mob film to add to the pictures of boxes hidden in ridiculously ornamented bathrooms. The setting was an “audio closet” at the Trump property in Florida and a furtive meeting where one accomplice allegedly tries to lure another with the line “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted.” (Meaning surveillance equipment.) One could imagine striking screenwriters in Hollywood blushing at such ham-fisted dialogue, unless it was in service to a comedy where boneheaded characters hatch schemes of comic ineptitude. Except this isn’t funny in the least. And it isn’t fiction, as much as we wish it were. At first we wondered whether the news merited another newsletter to all of you. What more is there to say about the toxic swamp of alleged crimes in which the previous president of the United States continues to sink? We expect more charges will come, and with them more insight into the lead-up to January 6 and the horrific events of that day. There certainly will be a lot to parse at that time. But we figured it is important that we keep reminding ourselves just how surreal all this is, and how outrageous. Almost any adjective one reaches for to bring context to the actions of the former president seems woefully inadequate. Unprecedented? Of course, but we have been living that word for years. Infuriating? Sad? Dangerous? Bananas? All of the above and whatever synonyms to those words you can summon as well. To think of the pathetic actions that have been alleged in the charges already issued and the ones that we expect to come, to think of the character of the man, his distorted sense of right and wrong, his untethered approach to the American values he was sworn to uphold, his unrestrained use of power in service to self, is to boggle the mind. And then to consider that he is still the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. It is a reality that is a strain to comprehend. Each new outrageous detail requires a reckoning. History will issue its indictment of our time no matter what happens in the courts. No American has ever lived through anything like this before and hopefully none ever will again, even as we recognize that the danger he poses is far from vanquished. And yet despite all of this, Trump still must be considered innocent until proven guilty of the charges already filed and those that may yet come. The evidence seems strong, but it will need to be proven. With this in mind, you may have noticed that we used the word “alleged” a lot in this column, and it may seem excessive to some, especially considering the specificity of charges and what we already know about the character of the defendant. Yet it is essential that we hold true to our national values ensuring due process and the rule of law even if we did have a president who eagerly trampled them in service to his injudicious exercise of power and the whims of his preference. On this last point, we can safely say, there is nothing just “alleged.” His unfitness for office already has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. |
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By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 31, 2023 ~
The chart above compares the stock price performance of the kidney dialysis company, DaVita (ticker DVA), with the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index since 1996. Right away, something looks very wrong. Why should a healthcare company delivering dialysis treatment to people with kidney failure make the kind of profits that would generate this outsized stock price return?
Investigative reporter and author, Tom Mueller, has dedicated his latest book to pulling back the curtain on the dirty underbelly of this industry. The book, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine, will be available for sale in bookstores tomorrow. If you have a loved one receiving kidney dialysis at centers run by either DaVita or Fresenius, we urge you to stop what you’re doing, buy this book, and read it from cover to cover. The book presents nothing short of an indictment of rabid capitalism run amok, effectively turning what should be a life-saving branch of medicine into a criminal enterprise.
DaVita and Fresenius are a duopoly, controlling about 80 percent of the 6,900 dialysis centers across America, writes Mueller. According to an economist, Ryan McDevitt, who has extensively researched the results of this consolidation and spoke on the record with Mueller, this is what happens when an independent dialysis center is acquired by the duopoly:
“When DaVita and Fresenius acquire independent facilities, they start implementing their best practices, at least from their viewpoint, which means maximizing profits. So they’re pumping patients full of drugs. They’re cutting back staffing ratios. All the things that make a business really profitable and productive, they’re doing. Unfortunately, we find this has severe consequences for patients. Death rates go up, hospitalization rates go up, transplant rates fall, and so on. Any measure that could get worse pretty much got worse, after the big chains acquired independent facilities.”
What is going on here is not a deep secret from the U.S. Department of Justice. Mueller explains that “Between 2014 and 2018 alone, DaVita and its subsidiaries paid out more than $1.5 billion in legal settlements and damages. DaVita’s founder, Kent Thiry, who ran a bizarre, cult-like atmosphere at the company – which is brilliantly depicted by Mueller in ghastly detail – stepped down in 2019 and was indicted two years later by a federal grand jury in Colorado. The Big Law firm, WilmerHale, brags on its website as to how it got both Thiry and DaVita acquitted at trial, writing:
“A WilmerHale team led by Partner John Walsh and former Counsel Daniel Crump, working closely with lawyers from Morgan Lewis Bockius, achieved a landmark, precedent-setting trial victory for our client DaVita, Inc in the first-ever trial of a criminal labor market allocation case brought by the US Department of Justice.
“On April 15, 2022, after a two-week trial and two days of deliberation, a federal jury in Denver acquitted both the company and its former chief executive officer Kent Thiry on all charges — three counts of criminal conspiracy to violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
“The stakes were extremely high. DaVita faced fines of up to $100 million per count while Thiry faced a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine per count.”
Morgan Lewis Bockius, the law firm mentioned above that worked with WilmerHale to achieve this acquittal, currently has its former partner, Kenneth Polite, sitting at the helm of the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice – despite a financial disclosure form that suggests he was never seriously vetted for the job.
WilmerHale is the 1,000-attorney firm that is currently defending JPMorgan Chase in federal court (a serially charged bank that has racked up five felony counts on other matters since 2014) over very credible claims that it “actively engaged” in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls for more than a decade.
One of the most shocking revelations that Mueller shines a light on is that both Fresenius and DaVita provide “shorter and higher-speed dialysis, which enables them to process more patients per day.” Tragically, that speed comes at a cost to patient health. Mueller writes that “In clinics where dialysis is slower and gentler – in high-quality, nonprofit centers in the United States, for example, and in many parts of Europe – patients live better and survive longer…For good medical reasons, in fact, nephrologists [kidney doctors] in other developed countries typically avoid the kind of treatment [endured by patients] in clinics throughout America. Many condemn it as dangerous….”
The death statistics also speak volumes. Mueller writes:
“ ‘The survival rate in the United States, where around 22 percent of patients die every year, is the lowest in the industrialized world,’ says Leonard Stern [a nephrologist]. ‘The mortality in Japan is only 5 to 6 percent per year, and in Western Europe it’s in the range of 9 to 12 percent per year….’ ”
In Mueller’s last book in 2019, Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, he made the formidable case that the United States has become a dystopian society where almost every government entity that a citizen would typically turn to for redress over a lawless act has been corrupted by greed, pay to play, revolving doors, political bribes, or self-dealing.
The fact that a new U.S. President took office in January of 2021 and yet he nominated, and the U.S. Senate confirmed, a former partner of a Big Law firm that defended against some of the worst criminal activities of corporate America, who is now sitting at the helm of the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice – should tell you that the corruption crisis in America is metastasizing at an unprecedented rate and urgently requires a truly independent National Crime Taskforce.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/07/the-stock-of-kidney-dialysis-firm-davita-has-soared-2500-percent-since-1996-a-new-book-reveals-the-dangerous-cult-behind-the-rise/
Save America has spent over $20 million on legal fees this year as the former president battles a string of criminal indictments
Save America money trouble isn’t surprising. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the PAC would report it spent $40 million this year on legal fees amid Trump’s two criminal indictments, with more charges likely headed down the pike. On Monday, the New York Times added that Save America requested a $60 million refund of money it had ferried to another group supporting Trump’s candidacy, a sign that the legal fees are plunging the PAC into dire financial straits.
The filings on Monday only showed about $20 million in legal expenditures, about half of what had been reported, but it’s still plenty compared to the $16 million the PAC spent on fees across 2021 and 2022 combined. The most jarring comparison, however, is the $105 million Save America had in the bank at the start of last year, compared to the $3.6 million it has on hand at the moment. Yikes.
Trump is still a fundraising powerhouse. Save America and the former president’s campaign combined to bring in nearly $54 million in the first half of the year, far more than any of his competitors. They reported spending $57 million, though, which isn’t a great sign. Trump may figure he can keep raising money as he keeps getting indicted, using new criminal charges to spur donations from supporters he’s convinced he’s being persecuted, but as FEC whiz Rob Pyers points out on Twitter, there may be some diminishing returns here.
Trump’s PAC may be in financial trouble, but his campaign is thriving. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday found he’s leading the floundering Ron DeSantis by a whopping 37 percentage points. Trump will need to make it through more than just the Republican field if he wants to get back into the White House and use the power of the presidency to make his legal troubles go away, and another New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday shows Trump just about even with President Biden. However, the poll was conducted before Trump called Biden a “dumb son of a bitch” at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday.
https://www.rsn.org/001/trumps-pac-is-just-about-broke.html
The Trump election interference case raises unique questions about the role of a free press in preserving democracy.
I’m at Buteco, a bar in East Atlanta. I don’t drink anymore. I’m thinking about it.
It’s the second time I’ve been asked to testify. A year ago, I sat in front of a grand jury on the third floor of the courthouse — which is now buttressed with orange barricades in anticipation of incipient madness — to describe barging into a semi-clandestine meeting of Republicans pretending to be Georgia’s official electors in December 2020.
For more than two years, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been probing whether Trump and his allies broke the law when they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. The prosecutor has said that she will announce charging decisions by the end of August.
I went to Georgia’s state Capitol on December 14, 2020, to watch the solemn and usually forgettable ritual casting of electoral votes. As Stacey Abrams led the Democratic delegation upstairs, Republicans sat in a reserved room on the Capitol’s second floor to prepare a competing — and potentially illegal — slate of their own.
The Republicans threw me out of the room moments after I entered, camera phone in hand, going live on Facebook. When I asked what kind of gathering they were having, they told me it was an “education meeting.” As it turns out, Donald Trump’s election team had sent an email the previous night, instructing the group to maintain “complete secrecy.”
Election madness wasn’t incipient in 2020; it was happening all around us. And I get thrown out of a lot of places. So I didn’t think much about it beyond tweeting a still from the Facebook Live, asking my friends to identify the people in the picture.
But because I was lied to and thrown out, it confirmed that the legislators were acting in secret, that they didn’t want the press or public to know what they were doing. That specific bit of information has apparently been important enough to ask me to convey it to a grand jury — again.
Security at the Fulton County Courthouse is tight on a normal day. The ghosts of Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Sgt. Hoyt Teasley and Special Agent David G. Wilhelm — the four victims of Brian Nichols’s murder spree in 2005 — still haunt the space and inform its defenses.
As Willis prepares a possible case against Trump, she’s taken even more serious precautions. The district attorney asked judges to reschedule hearings and other work for the next two weeks. Her office staff is working off-site for the moment.
Willis has empaneled two grand juries for the coming month, and I have a subpoena for both of them. This process gives plausible deniability to the members of the grand jury reviewing election interference — and protection from public harassment. It also means I can’t tell which of the panels I’ve been called before is the one probing Trump — or if it’s both of them — until after I’m called. (I have no intention of disclosing those details, regardless.)
Journalists should not be testifying in front of grand juries. We are not agents of the government, gathering intelligence to be used in prosecutions. Our role should be adversarial, and my role as a journalist in Atlanta has regularly been just that with regard to Fulton County government, law enforcement, and even the operation of its courts. The county jail is in shambles, the courts are backed up, and prosecutors’ increased emphasis on gang cases raises questions about criminal justice reform in this city.
Grand jury proceedings are secret, and for ethically defensible reasons. If a grand jury chooses not to indict someone, open proceedings would leave a stain of suspicion on people without the detergent of sunlight and a public trial. But the secrecy also means that a journalist who is called to testify cannot generally assure their sources that they didn’t tell the government secrets they had promised to keep. It is for this reason that journalists who work on sensitive material usually fight such subpoenas.
I am reviewing my legal options with retained counsel. But I expect to testify, as before, after receiving assurances that I will not be compelled to offer information outside of the narrow issue of election interference and my observations on December 14, 2020.
The Trump election interference case raises unique questions about the role of a free press in preserving democracy. I ignore my obligations to that not just at my own peril, but also that of every journalist.
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By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 2, 2023 ~
On July 24th and 25th, the Attorney General’s Office for the U.S. Virgin Islands filed dozens of documents in the court case it has launched against the largest federally-insured bank in the United States – JPMorgan Chase – in a U.S. district court in Manhattan. A quick glance at the giant blur of filings indicated that the vast majority had been filed under seal. (See a partial screen shot here.) The U.S. Virgin Islands is credibly alleging in its lawsuit that JPMorgan Chase “actively participated in Epstein’s sex trafficking venture” where dozens of underage girls were sexually assaulted by Epstein or his rich pals.
Wall Street On Parade has learned over the years to deeply scrutinize anything that is happening in the federal district court in the Southern District of New York, where Wall Street has kept critical information about its serial crimes against the American people hidden behind a dark curtain of protective orders, sealed documents, and non-transcribed conferences with the judge – exactly what is happening in this case.
As we scrutinized the dozens of sealed documents entered on July 24th and 25th, we noticed that a few here and there were not sealed. We opened those documents and were stunned to see that one was an expert report written by a former FBI agent of 23 years, Shaun O’Neill, who had made a finding that JPMorgan Chase had “impeded” the federal criminal investigation of Epstein. Ostensibly, this expert report is going to be entered into evidence in the jury trial currently scheduled in the matter for October 23.
The document had a heading at the top of each page that read: “Highly Confidential – Subject to Protective Order.” However, the notation on the docket was that it was now being presented as a “redacted” document. We called the court deputy to be certain that the media was allowed to quote from the unredacted parts of the document. We were assured that we could.
A major revelation in the document is that former FBI agent O’Neill had been allowed to read the deposition given in the case by William Langford, an anti-money-laundering (AML) executive at JPMorgan Chase who had previously worked for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) – the very agency where Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are supposed to be filed by banks like JPMorgan Chase when they handle massive cash withdrawals for people like Jeffrey Epstein.
According to O’Neill, Langford indicates in his deposition that Epstein became a JPMorgan client in 1985, not in 1998, the date that most major news media has heretofore reported and JPMorgan has not publicly corrected.
Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, testified in his deposition that Epstein “was no longer a client after 2013….” That assertion now looks increasingly suspect. An Epstein financial statement from J.P. Morgan Securities, the brokerage and trading division of JPMorgan Chase, dated March 31, 2014, shows Epstein sold over $667,000 in securities at the firm in 2014. That statement has been entered on the docket as an exhibit.
In addition, on Monday of this week, Linda Singer, a lawyer at law firm MotleyRice, which is representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, revealed in a letter to the presiding judge, Jed Rakoff, that “JPMorgan handled more than $1.1 million in payments from Epstein to girls or women—many with Eastern European surnames—after Epstein was terminated by JPMorgan, including over $320,000 in payments to numerous individuals for whom JPMorgan had not previously identified payments.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the bank could not have made payments from Epstein to anyone, unless he still had an account with money in it at some part of the bank. And, if Epstein had an account at any part of the bank, he was still a customer. He might have been flagged as a high-risk customer; he might have had his trading or transactions restricted; but he was still a customer.
Also throwing doubt on the veracity of JPMorgan firing Epstein in 2013 is a supplemental response to interrogatories that JPMorgan itself made with the court. It revealed that Justin Nelson, a banker at JPMorgan, had visited Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan, sometimes with colleagues, from 2012 through 2017. The filing stated:
“Justin Nelson met with Epstein at his Manhattan townhouse on November 20, 2012; January 15, 2013; April 4, 2013 with Thomas McGraw; on April 24, 2013 with David Frame and Paul Barrett; June 6, 2013 with Chris French; May 8, 2014; December 3, 2014; May 4, 2015; September 29, 2015; November 19, 2015; December 14, 2015 with Carolyn Reers; February 14, 2017. In January 2016 he went to the Zorro Ranch…”
Zorro Ranch was the name of the expansive residence that Epstein maintained in New Mexico, which was also involved in his sex-trafficking ring according to Epstein’s victims.
In addition to JPMorgan Chase making transfers of hundreds of millions of dollars from Epstein’s accounts to his victims, accomplices and recruiters of young girls, the U.S. Virgin Islands has stated in a court filing that “Between September 2003 and November 2013, or approximately ten years, JPMorgan handled more than $5 million in outgoing cash transactions for Epstein.”
It was the bank’s failure to report that hard cash flowing out of Epstein’s accounts to law enforcement that helped FBI agent O’Neill reach his conclusion that JPMorgan Chase had impeded a federal criminal investigation. Epstein was, after 2008, a registered sex offender with a documented history of sex trafficking in Palm Beach County. After giving Epstein a sweetheart deal in 2008, the Department of Justice indicted Epstein in July 2019 for sex trafficking. He died in his jail cell in Manhattan just over a month later while awaiting trial. His death was ruled a suicide by the New York City Medical Examiner.
JPMorgan’s awareness of Epstein’s history has been overwhelmingly documented with a vast array of internal emails produced in discovery by the bank. O’Neill wrote the following in his report:
“Epstein was able to withdraw large amounts of cash from his JPMC accounts for years [Redacted]. In the year 2003, Epstein was able to withdraw highly suspicious amounts of cash totaling $175,311. In 2004, he withdrew $840,000. In 2005, he withdrew $904,337. In 2006, he withdrew $938,625. In 2007, he withdrew $526,000. In 2008, he withdrew $469,000. In 2009, he withdrew $165,011. In 2010, he withdrew $253,397. In 2011, he withdrew $260,000. In 2012, he withdrew $290,000. In 2013, he withdrew $197,152.”
The bank knew, or should have known, that dozens of Epstein’s young victims had come forward with the same set of facts: that he paid them cash in the amounts of $200 to $1,000 for a “massage” that quickly became a sex assault.
O’Neill writes further:
“Human trafficking under U.S. law was transformed with the enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (the TVPA) in 2000. The TVPA equipped law enforcement, prosecutors and victim advocates with new tools and resources to mount a comprehensive and coordinated strategy to combat modern forms of slavery both domestically and internationally…
“In reference to sex trafficking of a minor with great relevance to the numerous victims at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, minors need not demonstrate force, fraud, or coercion were used against them to induce them to engage in a commercial sex act. Rather, U.S. law has firmly established that minors cannot consent to commercial sex. Additionally, there is recognition that many forms of human trafficking do not involve force but rather occur through psychological manipulation against victims.”
O’Neill also indicated that “Based on the review of the 17 victim statements contained within the July 25, 2006 Palm Beach Police Department Incident Report, more than ten victims were under the age of 18. The elements of child sex trafficking were present as the allegations referenced a commercial sex act involving a minor and there is no such thing as a ‘child prostitute.’ The allegations reflected a textbook definition of human trafficking.”
O’Neill directly lays the blame for the expansion of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring at the feet of JPMorgan Chase, writing:
“Had JPMC cooperated with federal law enforcement and [Redacted]….Epstein would have been federally charged at a much earlier date. He likely would not have received the Florida Non-Prosecution Agreement, and he would have been imprisoned for the sex trafficking and money laundering crimes that he committed at an earlier time, thereby shrinking his overall list of victims.”
This is a devastating assessment of a bank that in 2014 was charged with two criminal felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice for looking the other way at money laundering in the business account the bank maintained for Bernard Madoff. Madoff’s account at the bank was used for decades in the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. The bank told U.K. authorities that it suspected Madoff of running a Ponzi scheme. It kept that information away from U.S. regulators and failed to file the legally mandated Suspicious Activity Reports with FinCEN.
Jamie Dimon was the Chairman and CEO at JPMorgan Chase at the time the Justice Department brought the Madoff charges. The bank has been charged with an additional three felony counts by the Justice Department since then. The bank has admitted to all five felony counts. The Board of Directors of the bank has kept Dimon at the helm despite this unprecedented crime spree.
The nagging question for all Americans is why is this case against JPMorgan Chase being brought as a civil lawsuit by the U.S. Virgin Islands instead of as a criminal case against JPMorgan Chase by the U.S. Department of Justice. After the DOJ and the Florida State Attorney’s Office destroyed their reputations by allowing Epstein to get a non-prosecution agreement and a cozy work release deal in Palm Beach County in 2008, where Epstein’s limo driver took him to his office each day for the majority of his 13 months of “incarceration,” why is the DOJ standing down now on filing charges against the bank that functioned as the central cash conduit for this international sex trafficking ring?
ELON MUSK TOLD MAGA DIM WITS TO CUT CHILD CANCER REEARCH FUNDING! WHAT HAS ELON MUSK EVER DONE FOR ANYONE? THIS IS ABOUT CUTTING SOCIAL S...