A whole lot more Biden Recession hits the economy—unexpectedly! The poor go hungry, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor confirms Biden corruption, people keep flocking to Texas and Florida, McConell’s brain blows up (again), and a whole lot of Texas laws take effect. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Poor people are buying less food because they can’t afford it. “Among households using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s boosted pandemic benefits, 42% skipped meals in August and 55% ate less because they couldn’t afford food, more than double last year’s share, according to a Wednesday report from Propel Inc., a benefits software developer.”(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
Victor Shokin, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Biden family corruption (that Donald Trump was impeached for asking about) has spoken out for the first time since 2019 – and says the Bidens did it.
To review – Shokin had an active and ongoing investigation into Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, according to a 2020 US Senate Committee report.
Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter Biden to sit on his board, granted his own company (Burisma) permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Shokin stated in a 2019 deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister.
Now, Shokin tells Fox News that be believes the Bidens were taking bribes.
“I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told the outlet. “The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asks in another clip.
“Young High Income Earners Are Flocking To Florida And Texas, New Study Shows…”To the surprise of likely no one, Florida and Texas are once again No. 1 and No. 2. Florida gained a total of 2,175 high earners aged 26 to 35 after accounting for both inflows and outflows, while Texas gained a net 1,909. Despite the losses, New York (-5,062) and California (-4,495) still have the highest count of young high earners of any state by a wide margin.
Katy ISD rejects the radical social justice agenda. “The agenda item included policy updates in regard to requiring sex-specific spaces to be ‘safeguarded,’ which include bathrooms and locker rooms. Policies were also updated on pronoun usage as teachers and staff will not be required to use student “preferred pronouns” and content prohibiting ‘gender fluidity’ instruction.”
Texas laws that take effect today, including a ban on child sexual mutilation (AKA “gender affirming care”), banning men from college women’s athletics, and banning DEI from public universities.
Relations between the coup junta in Niger (which observers want you to know is pronounced knee–J) and France gets spicier. The junta is trying to expel the French ambassador and he’s not going. The tiff might very well turn kinetic, and I doubt the Wagner Group mercs are up to taking on French regulars.
Also, investors are suing them over “Alleged Chapek Era “Cost-Shifting Scheme” to Hide Streaming Losses.” Maybe everyone lost the streaming wars. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Hunter Biden’s lawyers played heavy with the Department of Justice, effectively threatening to force President Joe Biden to testify in any criminal trial against the First Son if a plea agreement wasn’t reached over his multiple alleged crimes.
“President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial,” wrote Hunter Biden attorney Chris Clark in a 32-page letter last fall, Politico reports, calling the news that there was enough evidence to charge Hunter an “illegal” leak.
That letter, along with more than 300 pages of previously unreported emails and documents exchanged between Hunter Biden’s legal team and prosecutors, sheds new light on the fraught negotiations that nearly produced a broad plea deal. That deal would have resolved Biden’s most pressing legal issues — the gun purchase and his failure to pay taxes for several years — and it also could have helped insulate Biden from future prosecution by a Republican-led Justice Department.
The documents show how the deal collapsed — a sudden turnabout that occurred after Republicans bashed it and a judge raised questions about it. The collapse renewed the prospect that Biden will head to trial as his father ramps up his 2024 reelection bid.
The number of people unaccounted for has stubbornly remained at about 1,000, suggesting that the death toll will almost undoubtedly increase.
As the staggering toll continues to be tallied, it is becoming apparent that the Maui wildfires may reasonably be classified as the first “woke-caused” disaster.
To begin with, the rush to eliminate carbon emissions may have killed the implementation of effective fire prevention policies.
Legal Insurrection readers recall my recent reports that downed power lines were being blamed as the initiating case of the fire. At the end of 2019, Hawaiian Electric issued a press release about wildfire risks assessed after hurricane-based winds contributed to a 2018 blaze.
The Wall Street Journal notes that Hawaiian Electric was well aware of the potential for this situation, but diverted resources away from fire safety support in order to meet state-required green energy mandates.
In 2015, lawmakers passed legislation mandating that the state derive 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045, the first such requirement in the U.S.
The company dove into reaching the goals, stating in 2017 that it would reach the benchmark five years ahead of schedule.
In 2019, under pressure to replace the output of two conventional power plants set to retire, the company sought to contract for 900 megawatts of renewable energy, the most it had pursued at any one time.
“You have to look at the scope and scale of the transformation within [Hawaiian Electric] that was occurring throughout the system,” said Mina Morita, who chaired the state utilities commission from 2011 to 2015. “While there was concern for wildfire risk, politically the focus was on electricity generation.”
When you have limited capital, choices have to be made. However, Hawaiian Electric may have made different choices if woke legislators adhering to climate change theology didn’t mandate the drive to renewables.
Equity considerations are apparently another contributing factor in this disaster. A state water official delayed the release of water that landowners wanted to help protect their property from fires, because water is to be revered and not used.
“Charlotte Pride now says no one will be awarded the 2023 Harvey Milk award for exceptional “LGBT+” advocacy after the announced winner’s past as a convicted child sex offender came to light.” What are the odds? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese Files for Bankruptcy amid Hundreds of Outstanding Sexual-Assault Lawsuits.” Huh, if only there were some reason the San Francisco Archdiocese might have more pedophiles than other archdioceses…
The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood that, depending on the ruling, could reportedly have “devastating consequences” for the abortion-providing organization.
The case, which was heard on August 15 by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, could determine whether Planned Parenthood will have to pay back upwards of $1.8 billion to the state/federal government.
If Kacsmaryk rules in favor of the OAG, the large sum that would need to be paid out is, according to Vox, “more than enough to bankrupt Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”
The Texas OAG filed the lawsuit in 2022 on behalf of Alex Doe, an anonymous realtor, who is alleging that despite the organization being removed from Texas Medicaid it has continued to receive payments from the program.
Amarillo City Council: Hey voters, want to pass this bond to help us rebuild a civic center? Voters: Nah. Amarillo City Council: Well, we’re just going to do it anyway. Judge: REJECTED! AGAIN!.
Three of Andy Ngo’s attackers must pay him $100,000 each. “Defendants Corbyn “Katherine” Belyea, Madison “Denny” Lee Allen, and Sammich Overkill Schott-Deputy were found liable by Judge Sinaplasai for assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Transients from homeless camp break into local businesses. Austin Police clear out camp in February. Homeless creep back in.
Small businesses in South Austin are trying to recover after having their windows smashed. This isn’t the first time the owners have dealt with homeless-related crimes in the area.
The employees in the area said a church nearby feeds the homeless, so they flock there every day, but they also linger and cause destruction at night.
Video shows multiple people walked up to the Headspace Salon in South Austin and threw rocks into the front glass.
In the last probably two months, we’ve had, easily, well over $10-15,000 worth of damages,” Headspace Salon and Co-op Owner Laura North said.
She said, as a small business, it hits hard.
“They’re just coming there and smashing things with rocks and just walking off and not understanding for small business owners that is a huge, huge financial hit for us, and it’s just not sustainable,” North said.
Oh they understand, it’s just not relevant to their need to get high and stay high, so they don’t care.
Other businesses nearby have been dealing with similar issues.
“The guy came around and that’s when we had the rocks, we saw him on camera, we got him right over here. He threw it on the second floor window and busted out the window in the hallway, and then he busted out the window around this corner, and he busted out that window,” said Jason Dawkins, an estimator who works in a building that was vandalized.
“We see a lot of drug use, a lot of open sexual behavior, a lot of defecation and urinating in public areas and a lot of that stuff, and I will say it seems like some of that has gotten better, but it seems like definitely the vandalism and the kind of destruction, especially later in the evening has gotten significantly worse,” North said.
Drug-addicted transients shitting in public: Your number one sign of social justice “compassion” for the homeless.
“‘The city will step in kind of help very briefly, and it does not last long, and then it just goes right back to how it was before,’ North said.”
Why it’s almost like the Social Justice allies of the Austin City Council make money off the homeless and don’t care what you think…
The City of Austin will again be on the search for someone to head its police department after Chief Joseph Chacon announced his intention to retire next month.
Chacon had been in charge of the Austin Police Department (APD) since September 2021, when he was appointed as the permanent chief after serving on an interim basis following Brian Manley’s retirement earlier that year.
“Working at APD has been the privilege of my life,” said Chacon. “Being the Chief of Police is something that I never thought would have been possible, and it has been the pinnacle of my career.”
In a letter to the department, Chacon said he first began considering retirement a few months ago and ultimately decided his 25-year run at APD was nearing its end.
APD Chief of Staff Robin Henderson will be named interim police chief once Chacon’s retirement becomes effective in the first week of September.
Then comes the more interesting part: The stalemate between police who want to do their jobs and the Austin victimhood identity politics establishment who want to prevent them from doing that continues:
During Chacon’s tenure, APD has been marked by staffing hemorrhage; a labor contract dispute with the city council; and a thorny relationship with Travis County District Attorney José Garza, who’s taken an active approach in prosecuting officers for alleged misconduct.
Garza’s uncle, Jesús Garza, is the interim city manager.
As of March APD has seen 89 officer departures, leaving the department 300 positions down from its 2019 staffing level. In 2020, the city council’s $150 million APD budget cut and redirection removed authorization for 150 patrol positions.
Austin’s police and elected officials have spent much of the last 12 months in a prolonged standoff over a new labor contract.
The Austin City Council, led by Mayor Kirk Watson, rejected a four-year agreement with the Austin Police Association in favor of a one-year extension of the now-expired deal. That leaves APD employment to be governed by Chapter 143 of the Local Government Code.
The impasse came largely over how much authority to vest in the Office of Police Oversight (OPO).
The city’s “reimagine policing” activists wanted to make the OPO significantly stronger, including enabling it to conduct investigations into alleged officer misconduct rather than its current role of simply fielding complaints and observing the process.
You remember the “Reimagining Police” initiative, don’t you? If not, this should refresh your memory.
In 2021, the OPO and its former head Farah Muscadin were found by an arbitrator to have violated the police labor agreement — just the latest chapter in a string of actions by the OPO that’s strained a contentious relationship.
The two sides remain at an impasse, and APA has no intention of giving in to the progressive activists’ demands.
Good.
Kirk Watson was elected mayor in large measure due to his promises to get crime under control and cut back on the radical Social Justice agenda driving the city. So far he hasn’t done much to deliver on those promises.
Austin apartment complex gets repeatedly hit by thieves breaking into apartments and cars night after night. Last year they had repeated transient break-ins through a hole in the fence, and this year two individuals seem to be the same ones breaking into cars over and over again.
So a woman gathered video evidence of the twp suspects. Austin police response? “This is not a high priority case.” And they wouldn’t look at her videos.
The apartments appear to be those off Riata Trace Blvd., which is about a mile from my house.
Years of understaffing, coddling crime in the name of “social justice” and luring more drug-addicted transients to Austin have put APD in a bind, as they don’t have enough manpower to protect life, liberty and property.
That won’t change because the Austin City Council doesn’t want it to change.
San Diego tries enforcing the law, a sampler of the lies Obama told about his life, Blade-Runners take on Big Brother’s cameras, a nuke rises in Texas, and a Cthuloid horror swims the chilly waters of Antarctica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
San Diego tries “this one weird trick” to deal with homeless problem: Enforcing the law.
Police began enforcing San Diego’s controversial new camping ban Monday, and although officials said they’ve so far focused only on Balboa Park, the new ordinance combined with other enforcement of laws long on the books has already made notable changes in the encampment landscape.
The “Unsafe Camping Ordinance” allows officers to force people off public land if they’re sleeping within two blocks of a school, shelter, trolley station, waterway or park “where a substantial public health and safety risk is determined.”
Capt. Shawn Takeuchi, head of the city’s neighborhood policing division, said his five-member team did arrest several homeless people Monday by Balboa Park, but only for existing warrants.
Others were given a warning, he said. If any of the same people are found illegally camping a day later, they’ll get a ticket even if they’ve moved locations.
Nobody in Balboa Park accepted offers for shelter Monday, the captain added. Enforcement will continue to focus on schools and parks in the near future, and officials declined to say where the team might move next.
Do you think Austin’s government might start enforcing the city’s camping ban? Of course not. Then how are they supposed to rake off the graft? (Hat tip: Instapundit, who offers some takeaways worth highlighting:
1. The homeless respond to policy and incentives like anyone else. The mere announcement of a future camping ban (plus some enforcement of other existing rules) rapidly cleared out major problem areas.
2. The provision of shelter or housing is neither necessary nor sufficient to accomplish these clear-outs. Of the people asked to leave Balboa Park on the first day of enforcement (issuance of warnings), none accepted offers of shelter.
3. The NGOs that have colonized the homeless problem have neither the incentive nor the knowledge to solve it. The head of one shelter was confused by the magical disappearance of his potential clients. “Where did they go?”
There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.
Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
Snip.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America—a hope that ended with the election of Donald Trump, or perhaps midway through Obama’s second term, as the president focused on the Iran deal while failing to address the concerns about rampant income inequality, racial inequality, and the growth of a monopoly tech complex that happened on his watch.
The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself. Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.
Snip.
Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.
It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.
Read the whole thing to see all those facts about Obama that the media ignored…including his fantasies about having sex with men.
Members of the IPCC, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned, created and/or worked for businesses — such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry — that would directly profit from the report’s conclusions.
In fact, the IPCC panel members’ companies were positioned to earn millions of dollars from the report. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the “global warming” and “carbon offset” bandwagons.
Solar energy portal Ecotopia reported that members of the IPCC “…had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees… [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such ‘offset’ projects.”
According to accounts of four people with knowledge of the situation, M. Kaleo Manuel, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and DLNR’s deputy director for water resource management, initially refused West Maui Land Co.’s requests for additional water to help prevent fires from spreading to properties managed by the company. Manuel eventually released water but not until after the fire had run its course.
His office has not yet commented on the delay of water resources.
How much damage could have been prevented with the extra water is not yet known. However, the question of “Why?” needs to be addressed in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history. Though bureaucratic red tape might be the most obvious suggestion, a recent interview with M. Kaleo Manual offers some interesting and disturbing insight. Manuel waxes philosophical on “water equity” (“equity” being a pervasive woke buzzword) and an ancient “reverence” of water as god-like. He uses these beliefs to support his rationale for keeping tight controls over Hawaiian water supplies; not as a resource to be used, but as a holistic privilege offered by the government.
Economist who named BRICS says the idea of a common BRICS currency is “embarrassing.”
“It’s just ridiculous,” [Lord Jim O’Neill] told the Financial Times in an interview on Monday. “They’re going to create a BRICS central bank? How would you do that? It’s embarrassing almost.”
The economist spoke ahead of the 15th BRICS summit next week, where the nations will meet to decide whether to expand membership to other countries and may also float the idea of the common currency.
The following story was related to me by a former Governor of Minnesota, who was of Norwegian descent. A number of years ago, a Norwegian dignitary (the Prime Minister, I think) visited Minnesota. Talking to our governor, the Prime Minister tut-tutted about Minnesota’s crime rate, saying that there was much less crime in Norway. Minnesota’s governor replied, “We don’t have a crime problem with our Norwegians, either.”
That anecdote came to mind when I read, in the London Times, “Sweden’s slide from peaceful welfare state to Europe’s gun-killings capital.”
Today, Sweden is Europe’s capital of gun homicide. Last year, according to the Swedish national council for crime prevention, 63 people were shot and killed: more than double the European average and, per capita, multitudes higher than London or Paris.
… The effect on Swedish society has been striking. As well as the lives lost, the violence has brought down a government, changed laws and policies, and become the biggest talking point in a country that once prided itself on its reputation as a peaceful welfare state.
Violent crime will do that, although, to be fair, Sweden’s homicide rate is considerably lower than ours. But it is now significantly higher than homicide rates in quite a few other European countries, including Norway. Why is that? Have Swedes suddenly started getting violent? No.
It has also kicked the hornet’s nest of integration. Today, one fifth of all people living in Sweden were born outside the country.
Dow Chemical is planning to build a small nuclear reactor to power their plant in Calhoun County. Good for them. The TRISO-X fuel they’re using sounds like it will be a pebble bed reactor design.
“Target Sales Dipped in Last Quarter Due to Pride Backlash.”
A massive manhunt is underway for two suspects in relation to a shooting of a Harris County sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop Wednesday night. Both men were free on bond for other charges and had a history of not complying with the conditions of their release.
According to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, the deputy went on patrol at about 7:40 p.m., but within minutes emergency dispatch received calls about an officer down on Homestead Road just inside Houston’s Beltway 8 and the Eastex Freeway.
Law enforcement agencies have issued a Blue Alert for Terran Green, 34, and James Green, 37. Although Gonzalez announced the suspects’ vehicle had been found overnight, the two men remain at large.
Harris County records indicated that Terran’s criminal history dates to at least 2007 and includes five felony convictions and three separate stints in state prison. In May 2022, he was sentenced to two years for Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon.
Democrats love to talk about “gun crime,” but deep blue Democratic Party prosecutors seem loath to actually prosecute the criminals who commit crimes with guns.
Terran was charged in March 2023 with Felon in Possession of a Firearm and Aggravated Assault of a Family Member, for which the Harris County District Attorney’s Office requested no bond, but Judge DaSean Jones of the 180th District Criminal Court approved bonds of $55,000. Terran was released on April 1, but after failure to appear in court his bonds were forfeited. He has been a wanted fugitive since May 30.
James also has a criminal history, dating back to 2011. He was given personal recognizance (PR) bonds requiring no payment for Carrying a Handgun in a Motor Vehicle in 2020 and 2022 and possession of one to four grams of cocaine on June 7, 2022. He was rearrested on August 7 after bond forfeiture but released on a $5,000 surety bond just last Saturday.
A self-proclaimed socialist, Jones has often drawn media attention for awarding bond release to violent, repeat offenders. In 2021 he reduced bond for a suspect facing felony charges of human trafficking, assault, sexual assault of a child, and compelling prostitution of a child.
Sexual predators of children seem very near and dear to the hearts of the Democratic Party’s cadres of social justice activists.
Harris County began shifting release policies in 2019, when local judges adopted new bail guidelines and a federal judge approved a consent decree in the ODonnell v. Harris County lawsuit over misdemeanor bail. The decree has formally governed misdemeanor bail policy and mandated county spending on pretrial services for defendants, but a ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in a similar lawsuit against Dallas County earlier this year overturned ODonnell, leaving the future of the consent decree uncertain.
Crime Stoppers of Houston’s Andy Kahan has tracked the number of persons murdered in Harris County by suspects out on multiple bonds and PR bonds since 2018, noting there have been at least 197 such victims.
Big Medicare fraud ring busted in Houston. How big? $142 million big.
The Office of the Attorney General’s (OAG) Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) has made a series of arrests and seized assets related to a fraud case in Houston.
Lily Tran Daniel, Kenneth Reynolds, and Lillian Thai were all arrested on suspicion of their “involvement in a major healthcare fraud scheme” associated with ApolloMDx, a genetic testing company.
According to a release from the OAG, AplloMDx had involvement in a $142 million healthcare fraud scheme where they would offer illegal kickbacks in order to purchase recipient information form marketers and orders for genetic testing from doctors.
The statement from the OAG details how ApolloMDx would make alterations on the dates of service on testing orders, making it appear that they collected multiple DNA samples on different dates, so they could bill for multiple dates of service to increase their Medicare reimbursement on genetic testing claims.
Since the inception of the national Medicare Fraud Strike Force to crack down on Medicare fraud in 2007, Texas has been at the center of many investigations, including what was at the time the country’s largest-ever Medicare fraud takedown in Dallas.
Medicare and Medicaid are two U.S. government programs that were created in the 1960s to provide low-income citizens with a rudimentary form of health insurance coverage. While Medicare covers persons age 65 and older, Medicaid was established for persons under 65 years and those over that age who had exhausted their Medicare benefits. It is also funded jointly by the federal and state governments.
The Texas MFCU worked in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Inspector General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the ApolloMDx case. The prosecution will be carried out by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Health Care Fraud Strike Force. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas is assisting with forfeiture.
In addition to uncovering the fraud scheme, the MFCU seized sports cars, a sailboat, and three properties for a total of $7.1 million, funded by the illegal proceeds accrued from the ApolloMDx operation.
Texas and the federal government jointly finance and administer Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which comes to a total of over $40 billion.
The more money that flows through public welfare systems, the more susceptible to fraud they are. And it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that all the additional money flooding the system has made it that much easier for people to commit fraud.
As far as I can tell, that’s because the trial hasn’t happened yet, despite the original raid happening in January of 2019. The most recent activity was the judge refusing to dismiss the charges, and another court limiting the mere presence of Goines in a case as a possible cause for appeal to a ten year stretch starting in 2008.
I know that Flu Manchu lockdowns delayed a lot of trials all around the country, but four and a half years is an inordinately long time for a murder trial to be pending, as you start to run into due process concerns. Four years was around the time that all the charges in the Waco biker shootout case were dismissed. And that was a much more complex case with hundred of defendants and mountains of prosecutorial pigheadedness.
The Democrats running Houston’s criminal justice system today claim to care deeply about stopping police misconduct, but don’t seem capable of dispensing justice in anything like a timely manner to the one glaring redball of police misconduct they already have in their laps.
Your various CSI-type shows display modern police forensic labs as clean, gleaming, orderly high-tech cathedrals to science. The reality is seldom as glamorous, with cramped offices and significant backlogs being the norm. Around the country, various forensic labs have gotten so far behind that serious criminal cases have been dismissed due to lack of evidence.
Houston previously had a problem with it’s forensics department, so the Houston Forensic Science Center was created in 2012. And now they’re having big problems too.
Houston Police Officers’ Union President Douglas Griffith called for the resignation of the head of the city’s forensic science center this week over a significant backlog in testing evidence that has led to dismissal of criminal cases for a lack of probable cause.
“It’s either gross mismanagement or incompetence,” Griffith said during a press conference Wednesday.
Sharing photos of suspected marijuana seized by police at Houston’s Hobby Airport, Griffith said that 38 potential drug smuggling cases, involving 40 to 70 pounds of marijuana each, were dismissed on lack of probable cause because the city’s lab had not returned confirmatory tests.
Created by the city in 2012 after a scandal-ridden inhouse facility lost accreditation, the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC) is independent from the police department but funded by the city and governed by a board appointed by Mayor Sylvester Turner. Peter Stout, who holds a PhD in toxicology, has served as head since 2015.
Griffith explained to The Texan that according to HFSC’s own website, it takes 306 days to process a sexual assault kit and 215 days to process firearms or ballistics testing.
“But in an email sent by Dr. Stout to me, as well as city council, the district attorney, and defense attorney Murray Newman, he said if we want a rush case done today, it would not be done until 2025,” said Griffith. “So, there’s a discrepancy between what’s on the website and what’s in the email.”
In an email sent on July 17 to city, police, and criminal justice officials, Stout wrote, “It will be a really rude awakening to ask for a priority on July 31st for a trial on August 15th and find that your spot in line will be March 2025 behind the 66 other homicide cases already on the list.”
“That’s a year and nine months to test a weapon used in a homicide,” warned Griffith.
Stout’s email also warns recipients that “a priority request is just that, a request not a guarantee,” and that his office may reject or accept requests.
The city has set the HFSC 2024 budget at $28.5 million but added additional funds of nearly $5 million over the past year. Despite the extra funding, HFSC limits the number of DNA testing samples to 10 per case at a time, so investigators or prosecutors must wait for the first 10 samples to be returned before submitting a separate set.
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg told The Texan that delays in toxicology testing are leading to dismissal of gun crimes.
Ogg’s name should be familiar to readers as being a Soros-backed DA.
“Drugs are the first things we find and serve as the reason for the search that then locates a gun,” said Ogg. “But we are losing gun cases when judges dismiss a case for lack of probable cause because we don’t have those toxicology reports back.”
Noting that firearms testing results had recently increased from a 14 month wait to 20 months, Ogg also expressed concern about delayed evidence in relation to a new Texas law authored by Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) prioritizing violent cases.
“The emphasis now will be on prosecuting child sexual assaults, which require lab testing, and gun violence and homicide cases. I am just very concerned that as the cases are being called to trial the labs will not have completed their work and the evidence will not have been disclosed,” said Ogg. “Then those cases will stand at risk, possibly allowing a dangerous suspect to be released to the streets.”
Harris County has been plagued by a criminal case backlog since Hurricane Harvey flooded courtrooms in 2017. The situation only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic that brought the court system to a grinding halt.
With additional funding and extra court judges managing an emergency docket, earlier this year Ogg announced the case backlog had been reduced by 21 percent but that there were still about 114,000 backlogged cases.
That the crime lab is still having unacceptable backlog problems a decade after the last crime lab had similar problems is hardly a credit to the Democrats who have controlled Houston’s government since 1982.
Given what I know of how the how the defund the police racket tried to work in Austin, I have to wonder if funding for essential services (like a competent [police crime lab) have been siphoned off to “social justice” causes in Houston as well…