{"id":175421,"date":"2025-10-20T07:00:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=175421"},"modified":"2025-10-19T22:42:33","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T02:42:33","slug":"monday-updates-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=175421","title":{"rendered":"Monday Updates"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

George Santos, the first openly gay Republican freshman Congressman, was sentenced to 7 years for a litany of offenses.<\/p>\n

\n

Santos pleaded guilty in August 2024 and admitted to claiming relatives had made contributions to his campaign when, in fact, they had not. Santos conceded he was trying to meet the fundraising threshold to qualify for financial help from the National Republican Congressional Committee.<\/p>\n

He also stipulated that he committed other fraud, including charging donor credit cards without authorization and convincing donors to give money by falsely stating the money would be used for TV ads. He also stipulated he stole public money by applying for and receiving unemployment benefits during the pandemic to which he was not entitled.ABC News<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We wrote about him here a couple of times.\u00a0 \u00a0TAH<\/a> tells how he stole funds for a disabled vet’s service dog.\u00a0TAH II <\/a>goes into more details on the 13 charges of which he was accused. The ABC article tells of the 7 year sentence he received… and that after serving less than 3 months President Trump PARDONED him, saying ol’ George was a “a bit of a rogue.”Santos claims he will still pay back the $600,0000 restitution the judge mandated. Any bets on how fast that goes away?<\/p>\n

According to the clemency grant, a\u00a0photo\u00a0of which was posted on X by U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, Trump granted Santos an “immediate commutation of his entire sentence to time served with no further fines, restitution, probation, supervised release, or other conditions.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Right – that settles THAT question.\u00a0 Well, we had the ‘Epstein files’ which went from Bondi’s desk to vanished, and now a comfortable bit of cronyism. That Mideast truce looks nice for Trump, true, but for someone who always claimed he was a businessman and not a politician, he sure imitates a politician – in the worst sense of the word – with monotonous regularity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Might remember a while back in ’24 when we lost two SEALs out in the Arabian Sea Gulf trying to covertly board and inspect a ship suspected of running weapons for the Houthi? The ship was eventually stopped and searched, and lo and behold, a significant number of weapons\/parts were found. Muhammad Pahlawan, who initially denied being the captain, was arrested and tried this summer.<\/p>\n

The ship was found to be transporting ballistic and anti-ship missile parts, as well as a warhead.<\/p>\n

American forces apprehended 14 people from the boat and transported them onto the expeditionary sea base ship USS Lewis B. Puller.<\/p>\n

Stars and Stripes first reported Pahlawan\u2019s sentencing. He worked with two Iranian brothers in the scheme \u2014 which went back to at least 2023 \u2014 to get resources to the Houthis, according to court records. He was convicted in June.<\/p>\n

Pahlawan was sentenced for multiple crimes, including aiding and abetting weapons of mass destruction threats to the United States, conspiring to commit violence against maritime transports and witness tampering.\u00a0\u00a0Task & Purpose<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Pahlawan got 40 years , hopefully in PMITA federal prison. (The crew testified that they were unaware of what cargo they carried, and that their families had been threatened by Pahlawan if the crew talked.)<\/p>\n

\n

The trip was “part of a larger operation” funded and co-ordinated by two Iranian brothers, Yunus and Shahab Mir’kazei, said the then-US Department of Defense (now known as the Department of War) in a statement in June.<\/p>\n

The Mir’kazei brothers are allegedly affiliated, it added, with Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) – the most powerful armed force in Iran. The IRGC is designated as a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.<\/p>\n

William Freer, from the UK think tank Council on Geostrategy, told BBC News that while most of the Houthi attacks have involved smaller weapons, the components found on Pahlawan’s ship are “a lot more complicated and can pack a lot more punch”.BBC<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  George Santos, the first openly gay Republican freshman Congressman, was sentenced to 7 years for … Monday Updates<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":668,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[185,308],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-iran"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=175421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=175421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=175421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=175421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}