This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Crime

  • Opal Charles; skims from charity

    MySanAntonio reports that 66-year-old Opal Charles skimmed thousands of dollars from charities that donated to the Warrior Transition Brigade at San Antonio Military Medical Center since 2004 for which she worked;

    According to a complaint filed by Army investigators, she used the money to pay personal living expenses, accessing much of it from an ATM at the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass.

    Gary Barber, director of the San Antonio chapter of the Air Warrior Courage Foundation, said he personally delivered checks to wounded soldiers for years, but began approving emailed requests for financial assistance a few years ago.

    Investigators said at least some of those emails came from Charles’ work email account. Charles has worked for the Warrior Transition Brigade at San Antonio Military Medical Center since 2004, according to the complaint.

    The Army probe found 127 foundation checks totaling more than $100,300 were deposited into Charles’ bank account from April through October of this year. The account had 25 withdrawals totaling more than $105,800 in the same period, the complaint said.

  • Pizza-gate conspiracy

    Pizza-gate conspiracy

    Edgar M. Welch

    I’m just finding out about this story today, mostly because stories about fake news don’t interest me. I spend too much time tracking down real news. But apparently, there a conspiracy theory going around about Washington DC pizzeria Comet Ping Pong which was, according to the conspiracy adherents, the home base of a child abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief, John D. Podesta.

    Yesterday, Edgar M. Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N.C. went to investigate the conspiracy for himself. By investigate, he meant fire a few rounds into the floor of the Comet Ping Pong according to the New York Times.

    The gunfire sharply escalated what had already been a tense period for the restaurant, its employees and the quiet neighborhood since the fake stories began spreading. Dozens of threats against employees had been made via email and social media.

    People inside the restaurant fled, and the police locked down the area, ordering patrons of a nearby bookstore and cafe called Politics and Prose to remain locked inside. Officers with rifles and protective gear surrounded the restaurant and apprehended Mr. Welch. Two additional firearms were found, one on Mr. Welch and the other in his vehicle, the police said.

    The police closed down a normally busy Connecticut Avenue, which runs in front of the restaurant, for several hours Sunday as they searched the area for other potential threats.

    Comet Ping Pong’s owner, James Alefantis, reports that he and his employees have been the victims of threats that result from this particular fake news story. We all survived this one, thankfully – but the fake news story thing isn’t new. There were the stories about George W Bush being a coke head and that he was AWOL from the National Guard. There’s that crack-pot who claims that he was Obama’s crack dealer and homosexual lover.

    Apparently this pizza-gate story was manufactured from Podesta and the pizzeria-owner’s email in which they planned a fund-raiser for Hillary. That morphed into a child exploitation story. Folks are going to believe what they’re going to believe. Be careful, it’s a jungle out there.

  • William E. Grobes IV; $4.5 Million GI Bill Fraud

    William E. Grobes IV; $4.5 Million GI Bill Fraud

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    Pat sends us a link to the story of William E. Grobes IV of Chesapeake, VA who pleaded guilty to defrauding the Veterans’ Affairs Department. According to the Justice Department, Grobes ran a barbering and cosmetology school, College of Beauty and Barber Culture (CBBC), for veterans that only required that students sign in every day.

    College of Beauty and Barber Culture (CBBC) was purportedly a barber and cosmetology school approved by the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide education and training to military veterans, including veterans who received tuition assistance under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Grobes represented to the VA that CBBC provided full-time schooling to hundreds of veteran students beginning in October 2011. In reality, the school was a sham. Most veterans enrolled in CBBC courses received few, if any, hours of instruction from CBBC employees, and there were no tests, exams, or practical exercises given. Rather, students were directed to simply sign in and out of the school each day so that Grobes could report to the VA that they were enrolled and attending. In exchange, CBBC received Post-9/11 GI Bill tuition payments for each veteran from the VA. Based on Grobes’ provision of false information to the VA concerning the number of hours of instruction and the manner and quality of the instruction provided to veteran students, CBBC received over $4.5 million in Post-9/11 GI Bill tuition payments between October 2011 and September 2016.

    He faces sentencing in March and a maximum penalty of twenty years locked up.

  • Meet Clintoon’s Other, “Private” Admin Assistant

    While FBI Director Comey was readying his bucket of whitewash yesterday, some additional information was being reported about Ms. Clintoon’s handling of sensitive materials while SECSTATE.  Thanks to that additional reporting we now know who often helped her out with the administrative and practical details of doing sensitive State Department business – e.g., sensitive faxes, printing out emails and attachments, and the like.

    Who might that be, you ask?  Wouldn’t that be her protégé, one each Huma Abedin – the Weiner wifey?

    Well, I’d guess Abedin did help her out at times with those kinds of things; Clintoon is reportedly manifestly incompetent when it comes to electronic devices.  But apparently someone else did as well.

    Reportedly, that someone else would be her housekeeper in DC – Marina Santos.  She’s an immigrant from the Philippines.

    Ms. Santos has no security clearance.

    And yet, Ms. Santos apparently was forwarded and often printed out emails and document attachments sent to Ms. Clintoon while she was SECSTATE.  Some of the documents were sensitive – and, on at least one occasion, documents sent to her to be printed appear to have been classified

    Ms. Santos also appears to have had access to the SCIF installed by the State Department in Clintoon’s DC residence.  She reportedly sometimes collected documents sent to Ms. Clintoon via the secure fax in that SCIF.

    Per the FBI, one of the items sent via secure fax to Clintoon on occasion was the Presidential Daily Brief.  Needless to say, that document is typically rather highly classified.

    Ms. Santos has apparently never been interviewed by the FBI during the Clintoon email investigation.  Additionally, her iMac – which Santos apparently used to receive and print documents and emails for Clintoon – apparently has never been turned over to or examined by the FBI.

    It’s also believed that Santos may know the whereabouts of a thumb drive containing a large archive of Clintoon emails – as well as the whereabouts of a MacBook formerly used by another close Clintoon crony, Monica Hanley.  Sometime in 2013 Ms. Hanley reportedly used the MacBook in question to download Clintoon’s emails from her private server, then to copy them to a thumbdrive.  Neither of those devices so far have been turned over to or examined by the FBI, either.

    The NY Post and Empty Lighthouse Magazine today each have articles worth reading.  The Post article discusses the matter described above in some detail, while the Empty Lighthouse article gives additional background on Ms. Santos.

    Too bad we didn’t know all of this some time before Comey      tried to sweep everything under the rug      erroneously and prematurely closed the FBI’s very obviously incomplete investigation some months ago – and then did the same again yesterday.  As I noted above:  Ms. Santos still apparently hasn’t been interviewed by the FBI, and her computer hardware hasn’t been examined.  So there’s no way in hell this so-called “investigation” was legitimately completed.

    Yes, you or I would be in freaking jail by now – deservedly so.  But Clintoon isn’t.

    I guess that’s what happens when you have a political hack as FBI director instead of a LEO that takes his responsibilities seriously.

  • “Only the ‘little people’ follow ethics rules.”

    Well, it appears as if the Clintoon Foundation – and its namesakes – are in the news again.  And not in a good way, either.

    When Clintoon became SECSTATE in 2009, she and her husband – the famous cigar lover – did not divest themselves of their interests in their Clintoon Foundation.  However, Ms. Clintoon did enter into a written ethics agreement with the State Department regarding the financial operations of that foundation.

    Specifically, she agreed that she would “notify the State Department’s ethics official if a new foreign government wished to donate or if a current foreign donor wished to ‘increase materially’ its contributions.”

    In 2011, the government of Qatar gave a $1 million donation to the Clintoon foundation.  Ostensibly, the purpose was to honor Cigarman’s 65th birthday.

    I don’t know about you, but I’d consider a $1 million “donation” to be a “material increase” in anyone’s contributions.  That’s especially true since the Clintoon Foundation itself says that they’ve received donations of “between $1 million and $5 million” from the Qatari government.  That means that the $1 million in question is at least 20% of the Qatari total – and maybe most or all of it.  That damn well seems significant to me.

    But maybe that’s just me.

    In any case:  neither Ms. Clintoon nor the Clintoon Foundation ever notified the proper State Department ethics official of the donation.  And the following April, Qatari government officials sought to meet with Mr. Clintoon personally.

    Hmm.  For some reason the term “pay for play” comes to mind.  Yet again.

    Fox today has a decent article on the matter; Reuters had a similar one a couple of days ago .  IMO they’re both worthwhile reading.

    Apparently Ms. Clintoon has decided to follow the lead of another “paragon of virtue”, Leona Helmsley.  Ms. Helmsley famously once remarked that, “Only the little people pay taxes.”   It certainly seems to me that Ms. Clintoon – and likely Mr. Clintoon as well – feels the same regarding following Federal laws and regulations.

    Hopefully they’ll eventually get the same comeuppance as did Ms. Helmsley.

  • Christopher Owens; surgeon at vets center jailed

    Christopher Owens; surgeon at vets center jailed

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    Christopher Owens, a surgeon affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs has been arrested by UCSF police for prescribing and selling opioids to his patients according to SFGate;

    On Friday, Owens was in jail in San Francisco after being booked on suspicion of charges including the illegal sale or transfer of narcotics. His bail was set at $1.98 million. Details of the specific accusations against him were not immediately available.

    In a statement, UCSF said its police force had been working with the San Francisco district attorney’s office in connection with the investigation. City prosecutors have not filed formal charges.

    “UCSF takes this incident very seriously,” a statement from university officials said, “and urges its entire clinical staff, including physicians, nurses and other care providers, to be alert for signs of opioid misuse by any member of the clinical team and to report any such suspicions confidentially.”

    According to KTVU, his girlfriend also turned up dead;

    Just two days before that, Owen’s girlfriend 35 year old Danielle Pattillo turned up dead in the Sutro Heights home that the two shared together.

    The University has scrubbed their website of his biographical information, but SFGate got to it first;

    Owens’ profile on the university website said he is a 1998 graduate of Indiana University’s school of medicine and listed nine research grants and 70 published studies under his name. Another site listed him as a specialist in vascular surgery, aneurysms, deep vein thrombosis and diseases of the carotid artery.

    I guess there wasn’t enough money in vascular surgery. SFGate also says that overdoses of opioids killed more than 28,000 people in 2014. Maybe there should be laws to control that stuff.

  • “Follow the Money.”

    We’ve all heard about the latest Clintoon email revelations.  Everyone’s probably also heard by now that the FBI has reopened their Clintoon email investigation due to a Weiner-related discovery.  (smile)

    But for Clintoon, that’s likely not her only potential major legal issue.  You see, it seems that the FBI has also been quietly pursuing its investigation of the Clintoon Foundation’s finances over the past year also – even though there appears to have been substantial pressure from the Department of Justice to either “slow-roll” or squash it.

    Indeed, the FBI’s investigation of the Clintoon Foundation is reportedly now “high priority”.  One media outlet has gone so far to cite FBI internal sources as saying that a pay-for-pay indictment regarding the Clintoon Foundation is now “likely”, “barring obstruction in some way” by the Justice Department.

    The FBI apparently isn’t the only agency investigating the Clintoon Foundation, either.  Turns out the IRS also is investigating the Clintoon Foundation – with focus on its tax status.

    Follow the money, indeed.

    Oh, and FBI sources also say with high confidence that Clintoon’s email server appears to have been hacked by at least five (!) Foreign Intelligence Services.  So it’s a virtual certainty that anything that was stored on that server is now in the possession of multiple foreign nations.  Nice.

    And while we’re discussing Clintoon email issues: it also seems as if both Justice Department and State Department officials were in contact with Clintoon campaign officials concerning the matter. State department officials appear to have coordinated with the Clintoon campaign concerning the department’s position on her use of “private” email before the matter was revealed to the public.

    Specifically, it appears as if the Clintoon campaign was provided an advance copy of a State department statement or press release on the matter – and both requested and got at least one change to the draft release before it was made public. It also appears that at least one senior Justice department official later tipped John Podesta, her campaign manager, that another senior Justice department official would be testifying before Congress shortly and was “(l)ikely to get questions on State Department emails.”

    Stay tuned.  The next few days – along with the weeks afterwards – could end up being one helluva bumpy ride.

  • “No Significant Voter Fraud”, Eh?

    Well, riddle me this,      Socialists      Progressives       Leftists      my liberal “brethren” – what would you call this little “escapade”?  (Emphasis added)

    Jerry Mosna was gardening outside his San Pedro, Calif., home Saturday when he noticed something odd: Two stacks of 2016 ballots on his mailbox.

    The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.

    “I think this is spooky,” Mosna said. “All the different names, none we recognize, all at one address.”

    To add insult to injury:  Mosna and his wife initially got the “run around” when they tried to report the matter to proper authorities.  They first contacted the LAPD, who referred them to the Post Office – who in turn referred them to the LA County Registrar’s office.  To their credit, the LA County Registrar’s office apparently took the matter seriously.

    Fox News has a story on the matter.  It’s worth reading.

    “No significant voter fraud” in America?  Yeah, right.  “No significant voter fraud” my ass.

    We seriously need positive voter ID laws nationwide.