Quote: Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, may be the current world-class champ of presidential-family shady dealings, but not for long.
 
If Kamala Harris wins the White House, her brother-in-law, Tony West, who is married to her sister Maya, is poised to claim the crooked crown.
Like Hunter, West learned his craft in the Obama years.
 
Then head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, he invented a new form of what 19[sup]th[/sup]-early 20[sup]th[/sup] centuries Tammany boss George Washington Plunkett famously called “Honest Graft.”
 
It was simple.
 
Until 1977, Congress had to approve any settlement of a civil suit against the Federal government over $100,000.

This preserved the Constitutional requirement that Congress control the government’s purse.

 
But in that year, seeking relief from the burgeoning volume of suits to review, Congress removed the cap, handing the Justice Department a permanent blank check to pay settlements unilaterally, in any amount, out of an account known as the Judgment Fund.
 
Run by the Treasury Department, the Judgment Fund’s secrecy is so complete that our often-penetrated CIA might study it for lessons.
 
The limited data released omits recipients, the facts underlying the case, and often the lawyers involved.
 
By statute, attorneys’ fees awarded need not be disclosed.
 
A Government Accountability Office study concluded that “no one knows the number of claims processed by the federal government each year.”
Still, for three decades, the integrity of Justice’s officials sufficed to prevent abuse.

Quote: 
For example, in late 2010, after a Supreme Court victory, DOJ lawyers were on the cusp of winning a decade-long fight against discrimination claims by 91 Hispanic and female farmers.
 
That’s when West intervened and, as The New York Times put it, “engineered a stunning turnabout.”
 
DOJ agreed to a $1.33 billion settlement which included thousands of farmers who had never claimed bias.
 
The deal was made over the “vehement objections” of the department’s career lawyers.
 
The Times’s investigative report described West’s settlement as a “runaway train, driven by racial politics . . . and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.”
 
The projected settlement size ballooned to over $4.4 billion as additional plaintiffs were added, including Native American farmers.

The government’s statistical expert was appalled: “‘If they had gone to trial, the government would have prevailed . . . It was just a joke. . . . I was so disgusted. It was simply buying the support of the Native Americans.’”

(08-24-2024, 08:00 AM)Trillium Wrote: This is not A.I.
No one was *paid* to be here.
No one was bussed in from out-of-town.
And there was no twerking

(08-21-2024, 08:20 PM)Trillium Wrote: Buckle Up
 
Army Special Forces veteran Congressman Mike Waltz, on Congressional task force investigating Trump assassination attempt, reveals evidence leads him to conclude killer Thomas Crooks did not act alone…
 
https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1826351415729512691

Buckle up, buttercups - it's about to get bumpy!