DWeck

🚨Meet Noora Shalash, Director of Government Affairs for CAIR-Kentucky. She really let the mask slip that this is a harmless civil rights organization when she yells “I demand Jihad, I want ISIS to kill all of you.” Great job @jewhatedb 💪

Kash Patel took the 5th before agreeing to testify before a grand jury. Now he doesn’t want to share his testimony about Trump's unlawful retention of classified documents. @SenBooker, @SenWhitehouse, and I sent a letter demanding that he disclose what he said. It is essential.

Rubio claims that @USAID lifesaving assistance for health and humanitarian needs will continue. But his team just communicated that the entire agency will be imminently reduced from 14,000 to 294 people. Just 12 in Africa.

Why Hasn’t the Republican Signature Forger Seen a Jury? Attorney General Dana Nessel is sitting on a criminal referral that could implicate her wife By Charlie LeDuff (@Charlieleduff) It’s going on two years since Attorney General Dana Nessel charged Shawn Wilmoth—owner of First Choice LLC—with a raft of felonies that left the 2022 governor’s race in shambles. Five Republican candidates paid Wilmoth hundreds of thousands of dollars to collect ballot signatures. In return, Wilmoth’s signature company cranked out tens of thousands of phony signatures. The candidates were kicked off the ballot, including frontrunner James Craig. Two years later, Wilmoth still hasn’t seen a jury. What gives? The answer may lay in a long-forgotten criminal complaint that molders on Nessel’s desk. Way before the governor debacle, back in January 2020, a group named Fair and Equal Michigan cranked up a campaign to get a gay rights initiative on the ballot. The co-chair of that campaign was Nessel’s wife, Alanna Maguire. That’s when a charity calling itself Bipartisan Solutions started funneling piles of money into the account of Fair and Equal. Charities are not required to expose the identities of their donors, making it a perfect way to disguise the origins of political money. One of the biggest donors to the Bipartisan Solutions was Michigan Energy First, a dark money group linked to DTE, which donated $275,000 to Bipartisan Solutions. Bipartisan Solutions, in turn, donated $782,000 to Fair and Equal during the 2020 political cycle, according to tax filings. (It should be noted that Nessel likes to make a show of haranguing DTE for its ubiquitous power outages and outrageous utility rates. Nessel badgers, but precious little ever changes.) The gay rights initiative chaired by Nessel’s wife never made the ballot, however, because the secretary of state ruled on Oct. 13, 2021 that nearly 200,000 signatures were bogus. And who “collected” those bogus signatures? Yep. Wilmoth again. His firm was paid more than $1 million for its efforts. Strangely, it appears the firm was never investigated in this case. Two days after the signatures—and the ballot proposal—were tossed, Bipartisan Solutions was dissolved. Jump to July 6, 2022, when a complaint was filed by the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a nonpartisan watchdog group headquartered in Washington D.C. The group alleged that the Bipartisan Solutions was not really a charity at all, but rather a beard for Fair and Equal to funnel money into the initiative while shielding the identity of its donors. As soon as money poured into Fair and Equal coffers from Bipartisan Solutions, a nearly identical amount would be paid out by Fair and Equal to its vendors, according to the complaint. For instance: Bipartisan Solutions contributed $76,000 to Fair and Equal on Sept. 10, 2020. The very next day Fair and Equal cut a check to First Choice Contractors, the company owned by Wilmoth, for $76,000. The secretary of state’s office agreed with the watchdog group. “(I)t is clear that Bipartisan Solutions coordinated to some extent with Fair and Equal Michigan,” auditors wrote. “Any rationale to the contrary strains credulity.” The secretary of state’s office sent criminal referral directly to Dana Nessel on April 18, 2023. So whatever happened to that referral? Potential fines could total into the millions of dollars. According to state filings: the president, secretary and treasurer of Bipartisan Strategies were all the same person—Richard Czuba, a noted pollster often quoted by Michigan political media. Czuba did not return request for comment. Nor did Nessel. Nor did Maguire. As for Wilmoth, when I attempted to speak with the corpulent calligrapher last week at his pretrial hearing, the ex-con gave me the finger. There are many questions that need answering in this sordid affair. Not the least of which is why the attorney general has not stepped aside in a case with such obvious personal and professional conflicts.

The House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump on December 18, 2019, after a White House whistleblower went public with evidence that Trump abused his powers by withholding military aid to Ukraine in order to dig up dirt on his rival, Joe Biden. In the complaint, the whistleblower claimed to have heard from White House staff that Trump had, on a phone call, directed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. The whistleblower who triggered the impeachment was a CIA analyst who was first brought into the White House by the Obama administration. Reporting by Drop Site News last year revealed that the CIA analyst relied on reporting by a supposedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which appears to have effectively operated as an arm of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which President Trump has just shut down. The CIA whistleblower complaint cited a long report by OCCRP four times. The OCCRP report alleged that two Soviet-born Florida businessmen were “key hidden actors behind a plan” by Trump to investigate the Bidens. According to the story, those two businessmen connected Giuliani to two former Ukrainian prosecutors. The OCCRP story was crucial to the House Democrats’ impeachment claim, which is that Trump dispatched Giuliani as part of a coordinated effort to pressure a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, which is why the whistleblower cited it four times. In a 2024 documentary that German television broadcaster NDR made about OCCRP’s dependence on the US government, a USAID official confirmed that USAID approves OCCRP’s “annual work plan” and approves new hires of “key personnel.” NDR initiated and carried out the investigation with French investigative news organization Mediapart, Italian new group Il Fatto Quotidiano, Reporters United in Greece, and Drop Site News in the United States. However, according to a Mediapart story published the same day as the Drop Site News article, NDR censored the broadcast “after US journalist Drew Sullivan, the co-founder and head of the OCCRP, placed pressure on the NDR management and made false accusations against the broadcaster’s journalists involved in the project.” On December 16, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim posted a link on X to the 26-minute-long documentary. “NDR, Germany’s public broadcaster, is facing a censorship scandal and has defended itself by saying it never killed a news report about OCCRP and its State Department funding — b/c no report was ever produced to kill,” said Grim. “That was absurd — and dozens, maybe hundreds, of journalists knew it to be false, and now of course, someone has leaked it.” The journalistic collaboration revealed that OCCRP’s original funding came from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of the State Department, and quotes a USAID official who says, “Drew’s just nervous about being linked with law enforcement,” referring to Sullivan. “If people who are going to give you information think you’re just a cop, maybe it’s a problem.” OCCRP does not operate like a normal investigative journalism organization in that its goals appear to include interfering in foreign political matters, including elections, aimed at regime change. Sullivan told NDR that his organization had “probably been responsible for five or six countries changing over from one government to another government… and getting prime ministers indicted or thrown out.” As such, it appears that CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad. The difference is that it is highly illegal and even treasonous for CIA, USAID, and its contractors and intermediaries, known as “cut-outs,” to interfere in US politics this way. OCCRP threatened to file a lawsuit against Public in response to questions we sent. “The premise of your article is factually false and defamatory,” wrote Miranda Patrucic, the Editor in Chief of OCCRP, over email. “The claim by Dropsite News and partner media that USAID has control over editorial appointments has been disproven and we suggest you read our response to that.” But neither OCCRP nor anyone else disproved Drop Site’s allegations and Drop Site stands by them. And the evidence does not support OCCRP’s claim of journalistic independence.... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative reporting, to read the rest of the article, and to watch the rest of the video! x.com/shellenberger/…