Here come all the excuses
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When the rich and influential get pardoned by T because of their friendly relationship with Trump, and what that does to the prosecutors who worked tirelessly to get them jailed, creates the belief that the rich can do anything they want.
It was New Year’s Eve, and dance music was pulsating from the backyard of a multimillion-dollar home here co-owned by Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who orchestrated one of the biggest Medicare frauds in United States history.
Just days after being granted clemency by President Donald J. Trump and released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Mr. Esformes was under a disco ball celebrating his daughter’s wedding.
Not far away, in Hialeah, Fla., Judith Negron, 49, who had been convicted in a separate scheme to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent Medicare payments, was also at home for the holidays instead of in federal prison. Thanks to a commutation by Mr. Trump, she had been released after serving eight years of a 35-year sentence and was relieved of any remaining obligation to pay her share of $87 million in court-ordered restitution.
This was hardly the outcome that Paul E. Pelletier expected when he and a team of other top Justice Department prosecutors and federal investigators set out to expose what Mr. Esformes and Ms. Negron had done.
After years of painstaking work and millions of dollars spent to investigate and prosecute the cases, the remainders of the sentences being served by the two convicted felons — participants in a type of fraud that costs taxpayers billions of dollars — had been wiped away by the stroke of a presidentia
In explaining his decisions, Mr. Trump said that Ms. Negron was a “wife and mother” and had dedicated her time in prison to “improving her life and the lives of her fellow inmates.” Mr. Esformes, he said, spent his time in prison “devoted to prayer and repentance and is in declining health,” and others had raised claims of misconduct by prosecutors in his case.
The presidential rationales did not hold much weight with those who had sought to hold Mr. Esformes and Ms. Negron accountable.
“It is an incredible kick in the teeth to the agents and prosecutors who toil away every day under very difficult circumstances to achieve justice and some restitution to the taxpayers from the billions of dollars that has literally been stolen from them,” Mr. Pelletier said.
His frustration is shared by many current and former Justice Department officials who spent years working on these cases, considered two of the most important taken up in the nationwide effort to combat widespread Medicare fraud.
“It is disheartening, demoralizing,” said Wifredo A. Ferrer, a former United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida, speaking generally about presidential commutations in Medicare fraud cases. “We are doing these cases to control health care costs and save lives and make sure legitimate health care centers don’t have to compete with the crooks.”
The wave of pardons and commutations issued by Mr. Trump in his final months in office has drawn criticism from prosecutors and federal agents involved in other types of cases as well. Most notably, his decision to pardon four Blackwater guards convicted in the killing of Iraqi civilians infuriated many involved in those complex, long-running and contentious prosecutions.
But Mr. Trump’s willingness to grant clemency in a string of Medicare cases has elicited particular outrage in Florida, a hotbed of this type of case and a focus of Justice Department efforts to combat fraud.
Mr. Trump added to the anger on Tuesday, when he commuted what was left of the prison sentence for Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, 66, who ran clinics in Florida that fraudulently diagnosed Medicare patients with eye diseases and then performed medically unnecessary tests and procedures, falsely billing the federal government at least $42 million, according to prosecutors.
He was sentenced in 2018 to 17 years in prison and was not scheduled to be released from prison until 2031, according to Bureau of Prisons records.
Roger H. Stefin, the lead prosecutor on the Melgen case, said that he considered it to be the most important conviction of his nearly 32-year career at the Justice Department — and that he was outraged at what Mr. Trump did.
It is an insult and slap in the face to everybody,” said Mr. Stefin, 67, who retired last month, including “the patients who are getting needles stuck in their eyes and lasers blasting their retinas for treatments they did not even need.”
He remains baffled at why Mr. Trump acted in this case. “Why do these rich and well-connected people — really bad people — get this special treatment?” he said. “Why do they deserve it when other people are languishing in the jails?”
Ms. Negron, and lawyers for Dr. Melgen and Mr. Esformes, 52, argue that the commutations were justified. They said the Justice Department was overzealous in its prosecutions, either by using unethical practices during the investigation or by pushing for excessively long prison sentences and unrealistic restitution orders.
“I was sentenced based on numbers that were not relevant to me,” Ms. Negron said this month in an interview, referring to her 35-year sentence and multimillion-dollar restitution requirement. She argued that her earnings from the scheme were not more than her salary of about $250,000 a year. Prosecutors said during the trial that much of the stolen money was still missing.
Dr. Melgen’s case had become particularly high-profile because of his friendship with Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who was accused of bribery and corruption for accepting gifts from Dr. Melgen while intervening in his case with federal officials. Mr. Menendez’s trial ended with a deadlocked jury; a judge subsequently dismissed some of the charges and the Justice Department decided not to retry him.
“Throughout this ordeal, I have come to realize the very deep flaws in our justice system and how people are at the complete mercy of prosecutors and judges,” Dr. Melgen said in a statement issued by his lawyer.
…
The cases involving Mr. Esformes and Ms. Negron were investigated by a special unit created in Miami in 2007 and led by Mr. Pelletier that targeted Medicare fraud.
Mr. Pelletier and his colleagues said they were amazed at the depth of corruption they found.
“We were ground zero for Medicare fraud,” Mr. Ferrer said.
There were so many schemes unfolding in South Florida that prosecutors set up an office with two football fields’ worth of space to store documents seized during raids and house the dozens of prosecutors, F.B.I. agents, and personnel from the inspector general’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services assigned to the team.
The team also included a nurse who could help them reverse-engineer falsified billing codes and data experts who could examine billing trends to help them identify surges in reimbursements that might merit further investigation.
The program was eventually expanded to 14 other cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Houston and Chicago.
In Ms. Negron’s case, investigators found that the network of mental-health clinics she helped run, known as American Therapeutic Corporation, paid bribes and kickbacks to owners of nursing homes and halfway houses and to so-called patient brokers to deliver clients to their clinics. In many cases, those clients were not eligible for the services that the company then billed Medicare to supposedly provide.
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Why McConnell Dumped Trump | The New Yorker
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Another level of shocking abuse of power from the Republican Rep Scott Perry of the Freedom Caucus who wanted to help with the throwing of the election. He helped secure the lawyer Clark who was compliant with all the underhanded schemes. See all the offenses that are being discovered prior to the Impeachment trial. PLENTY!
WASHINGTON — When Representative Scott Perry joined his colleagues in a monthslong campaign to undermine the results of the presidential election, promoting “Stop the Steal” events and supporting an attempt to overturn millions of legally cast votes, he often took a back seat to higher-profile loyalists in President Donald J. Trump’s orbit.
But Mr. Perry, an outspoken Pennsylvania Republican, played a significant role in the crisis that played out at the top of the Justice Department this month, when Mr. Trump considered firing the acting attorney general and backed down only after top department officials threatened to resign en masse.
It was Mr. Perry, a member of the hard-line Freedom Caucus, who first made Mr. Trump aware that a relatively obscure Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, the acting chief of the civil division, was sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s view that the election had been stolen, according to former administration officials who spoke with Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Perry introduced the president to Mr. Clark, whose openness to conspiracy theories about election fraud presented Mr. Trump with a welcome change from the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who stood by the results of the election and had repeatedly resisted the president’s efforts to undo them.
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Man who tweeted about assassinating Ocasio-Cortez faces charges in Capitol riot
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This is a very big deal - having Facebook’s Oversght Board decide on bringing back Trump into the fold. Huge consequences for Facebook…but they’ve been superfriendly with the Alt Rights and the controversial conspiracists.
They meet mostly on Zoom, but I prefer to picture the members of this court, or council, or whatever it is, wearing reflective suits and hovering via hologram around a glowing table. The members include two people who were reportedly on presidential shortlists for the U.S. Supreme Court, along with a Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a British Pulitzer winner, Colombia’s leading human rights lawyer and a former prime minister of Denmark. The 20 of them come, in all, from 18 countries on six continents, and speak 27 languages among them.
This is the Oversight Board, a hitherto obscure body that will, over the next 87 days, rule on one of the most important questions in the world: Should Donald J. Trump be permitted to return to Facebook and reconnect with his millions of followers?
The decision has major consequences not just for American politics, but also for the way in which social media is regulated, and for the possible emergence of a new kind of transnational corporate power at a moment when almost no power seems legitimate.
The board will seriously examine the Trump question, guided by Facebook’s own rules as well as international human rights law. If Facebook accepts its rulings, as it has pledged to do, as well as the board’s broader guidance, the company will endow this obscure panel with a new kind of legitimacy.
But the board has been handling pretty humdrum stuff so far. It has spent a lot of time, two people involved told me, discussing nipples, and how artificial intelligence can identify different nipples in different contexts. Board members have also begun pushing to have more power over the crucial question of how Facebook amplifies content, rather than just deciding on taking posts down and putting them up, those people said. In October, it took on a half-dozen cases, about posts by random users, not world leaders: Can Facebook users in Brazil post images of women’s nipples to educate their followers about breast cancer? Should the platform allow users to repost a Muslim leader’s angry tweet about France? It is expected to finally issue rulings at the end of this week, after what participants described as a long training followed by slow and intense deliberations.
And it has faced questions about whether it would ever be more than a public relations gesture, including from critics who started an alternate “Real Facebook Oversight Board” to call for a sweeping crackdown on the platform. So when Facebook suspended Mr. Trump’s account indefinitely after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the Oversight Board’s leaders didn’t disguise their eagerness to take on a big and meaty question.
“This is the kind of case the oversight board is for,” said one of the board’s co-chairs, Jamal Greene, a former Supreme Court clerk and Kamala Harris aide who is the Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School and a prominent legal scholar. Another board co-chairman, the conservative former federal judge and Stanford law professor Michael McConnell, told me before Facebook finally referred the case that it was “quite appropriate for the board to hear” the questions raised by the Trump ban.
It’s hard to imagine a more consequential case. The decisions by Twitter and Facebook to bar Mr. Trump immediately reshaped the American political landscape. In the course of a few hours after the Capitol riots, they simply vaporized the most important figure in the history of social media.
The board took up the case Thursday, and will appoint a panel of five randomly selected board members, at least one of them American, to decide what is to be done with Mr. Trump’s account. The full, 20-person board will review the decision, and could reinstate Mr. Trump’s direct connection to millions of supporters, or sever it for good.
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My question is how would they handle someone not named trump & not a former president.
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FB certainly gets no points for even pretending to create a fairness agenda.
What do you think they’d do?
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Not a lot of love out there for Zuckerberg and FB.
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Discussion on how the Dems let the R’s lead them around.
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Looks like more evidence that protection for the rioters was being given before the riots, even if The DC authorities normally would go in an instant to help protect people caught in a riot.
The commander of the D.C. National Guard said the Pentagon restricted his authority ahead of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, requiring higher level sign-off to respond that cost time as the events that day spiraled out of control.
Local commanders typically have the power to take military action on their own to save lives or prevent significant property damage in an urgent situation when there isn’t enough time to obtain approval from headquarters.
But Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, said the Pentagon essentially took that power and other authorities away from him ahead of a pro-Trump protest on Jan. 6. That meant he couldn’t immediately roll out troops when he received a panicked phone call from the Capitol Police chief warning that rioters were about to enter the U.S. Capitol.
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Thanks Sen Rand Paul…
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Qanon Congresswoman Greene calls for violence towards Pelosi on FB.
Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress - CNNPolitics
(CNN)Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress, a CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and comments from Greene’s Facebook page shows.
Greene, who represents Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, frequently posted far-right extremist and debunked conspiracy theories on her page, including the baseless QAnon conspiracy which casts former President Donald Trump in an imagined battle against a sinister cabal of Democrats and celebrities who abuse children.
In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the “deep state” working against Trump.
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Google today joined the long list of companies who will not support the Congress members who would not certify the vote.
Major corporations say they will stop donating to members of Congress who tried to overturn the election - Popular Information
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Unclear what it really means, withhold donations until when?
Also, seems most said they would “withhold donations to both”.
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If they are still contributing to PACs then it’s just symbolic…
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So this guy was a professional narc for the police. Wow.
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