Biden’s Americore Under FBI Investigation

Posted on March 10, 2020March 10, 2020 by Denise Simon

Biden, Inc., or James Biden in deep legal trouble.

Joe Biden’s Brother Accused of Defrauding Rural Healthcare ...

FBI got a search warrant and raided the office….

The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided a health care business linked to Joe Biden’s brother in late January, seizing boxes of documents.

The raid of an Americore Health hospital represented a deepening of the legal morass surrounding James Biden’s recent venture into health care investing at a time when questions about the business dealings of Joe Biden’s relatives, and their alleged connection to the former vice president’s public service, continue to dog his presidential campaign.

In the weeks since the raid, two small medical firms that did business with James Biden have claimed in civil court proceedings to have obtained evidence that he may have fraudulently transferred funds from Americore “outside of the ordinary course of business,” and a former Americore executive has told POLITICO that James Biden had more than half a million dollars transferred to him from the firm as a personal loan that has not yet been repaid.

The purpose of the Jan. 30 raid of an Ellwood City, Pa., hospitalremains unclear, and there is no indication it was related to the actions of Biden’s younger brother, who has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing. Its owner, Americore, has faced legal problems and allegations of mismanagement that are unrelated to James Biden.

But recent filings in ongoing legal proceedings, along with new accounts provided to POLITICO by former executives of Americore and others, point to potential pitfalls for the former vice president, painting the fullest picture to date of James Biden’s health care dealings and the ways in which they allegedly related to his older brother. In 2017 and 2018, James Biden was embarking on a foray into health care investing, telling potential partners, including at Americore, that his last name could open doors and that Joe Biden was excited about the public policy implications of their business models, according to court filings and interviews with James’ former business contacts.

Tom Pritchard, a former Americore executive familiar with the business’ finances, told POLITICO that James Biden’s arrival exacerbated Americore’s financial problems. Holding out the promise of a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections, James Biden introduced Americore’s founder to his older brother and helped land a bridge loan to Americore from a hedge fund, Pritchard said. But then, Pritchard said, James Biden received a six-figure personal loan out of Americore’s coffers while encouraging the firm to take on greater financial liabilities. The cash infusion from the Middle East never arrived, and, Pritchard says, James Biden has not paid back the loan, the terms of which are unknown.

“It was all smoke and mirrors,” Pritchard said.

Meanwhile, Americore found itself increasingly hamstrung by high-interest loans and unable to pay employees and vendors, a situation that disrupted the operations of the rural hospitals it owns.

Now, the business is in bankruptcy court, and federal authorities are circling.

David Randolph Smith, an attorney for James Biden, declined to comment.

A Biden campaign official said that Joe Biden never discussed Americore with his brother or expressed support for the business. The official said that Americore’s founder, Grant White, purchased a ticket to a September 2017 fundraiser for the Beau Biden Foundation, an event attended by Joe Biden. “If the two interacted in any way, it would have been a handshake and nothing more,” the official said.

The messy politics surrounding the business dealings of Biden’s relatives, and President Donald Trump’s efforts to exploit them, have loomed over the presidential contest for several months, damaging both camps. Trump’s failed attempts to pressure Ukraine’s government to announce an investigation of Biden and his son, Hunter, led to Trump’s impeachment. Though Trump was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate, polls showed that a plurality of Americans consistently supported the impeachment, which highlighted evidence that Trump abused his power for partisan political ends. At the same time, a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that 57 percent of voters believe Hunter Biden’s well-compensated position on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm amounted to a scandal, compared to 19 percent who do not.

Over the course of Biden’s run, reports have trickled out about James, a sometimes business partner of Hunter’s, who has received financial support from people with an interest in influencing Joe and been repeatedly accused of trading on Joe’s clout to advance his business ventures.

Biden has defended his son Hunter and said that his relatives’ business dealings have had no connection to his official duties. But the recent developments related to James Biden’s health care ventures demonstrate that as long as Biden remains in the campaign, the issue of his relatives’ financial dealings is likely to remain as well.

Even before the development surrounding Americore, James Biden’s venture into health care investing has been surrounded by legal allegations and claims that he invoked his brother’s clout.

Last year, two medical services firms jointly sued James Biden and his business partners in federal court in Tennessee, alleging James and his partners promised to provide a large investment from the Middle East, then pushed the firms to make expensive acquisitions, as part of a scheme to drive them out of business and steal their business models. As previously reported, those firms alleged that James Biden cited his family’s political connections and promised his older brother would promote their health care model as part of his 2020 presidential campaign.

Another health care firm sued Platinum Global Partners — a Florida corporation that lists James and his wife Sara as managers — in Palm Beach County in June. The firm, which makes an oral rinse with applications for cancer patients, alleged that Platinum reneged on an agreement to invest in it and requested that Platinum turn over documents related to the Biden Cancer Initiative, a nonprofit founded by Joe Biden to fund medical research. An executive involved in litigation against James Biden previously told POLITICO that, on a call, James said he could get the Biden Cancer Initiative to promote the oral rinse.

The Tennessee case is ongoing. The Palm Beach County case was dismissed without prejudice in November.

James Biden and his partners have denied the central allegations in both cases.

But, in interviews, former executives of Americore offered additional, similar accounts of James Biden invoking his brother’s influence and the promise of investment funds from the Middle East that never materialized in order to push their firm to grow quickly, taking on new financial liabilities.

Unlike those other firms, Americore is now in the sights of the Justice Department.

The precise nature of James Biden’s relationship to the firm — founded by White, a Canadian investment banker, in 2017— is contested.

The plaintiffs in the Tennessee case described him as a principal of Americore and entered a business card identifying him as such into evidence. James Biden has disputed that he is a principal of the firm in court proceedings, though he has not detailed the precise nature of his ties to Americore,which owns hospitals in Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Missouri.

Pritchard and the other former Americore executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, each said James Biden was actively involved in the company during their tenures there. “Jim was operating as a principal or Jim was portraying that,” Pritchard said. “Whether on paper he had any ownership, I’m not 100 percent sure.”

Pritchard said James Biden first became involved with Americore in 2017, offering to use his political contacts to help the firm land business and investments. “He could get us in front of the unions. He could get us in front of certain people in government. He could get us in front of the right people,” recalled Pritchard, who said he was skeptical of plans to involve James Biden in the firm.

A former employee at Pineville Community Hospital in southeastern Kentucky, which was acquired by Americore in 2017, said she got the impression that James Biden was in a top leadership role at Americore when he visited the facility and introduced himself in early 2018.

The other former Americore executive — who left the firm after less than a year over concerns about its business practices that were unrelated to James Biden — recalled that James spoke regularly of the ways in which Joe Biden’s presidential aspirations could benefit the firm, and vice versa. “His brother was very interested in rural health care and very interested in veterans’ health care, and it was something he really wanted to get behind,” the former executive recalled James Biden saying. “This would help his brother get elected if it were to take off and go.”

Both former executives recalled James Biden said he would help facilitate a multimillion-dollar investment from the Middle East.

Pritchard said the exact source of the funds was never made clear to him. “That linkage was supposed to come via Jim Biden via whatever influence he had through his brother in the Middle East,” said the other former executive, who worked for Americore in 2018.

The plaintiffs in the Tennessee case allege James Biden and his partners aimed to solicit investments from the state-owned Qatar Investment Authority and met in West Palm Beach with representatives of the Turkish conglomerate Dogan Holding. James Biden and his co-defendants denied the allegation about the Qatar Investment Authority and acknowledged meeting with Dogan.

The former executives also said that James Biden began to set up an office on the second floor of Americore’s headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It was like a little shrine to him and his brother and [former President Barack] Obama,” recalled Pritchard, who said he clashed with James Biden over James’ requests to be reimbursed for pricey furniture for the office.

The other former executive said that when he saw the office, several framed photos of the Biden brothers and foreign dignitaries sat on the floor, ready to be hung on the walls.

The former executives also described James Biden’s role in soliciting financing for Americore.

Pritchard said James Biden arranged a bridge loan to Americore via his business partner Michael Lewitt’s hedge fund, the Third Friday Total Return Fund.

But Pritchard said he learned that after Americore received the bridge loan, it made a six-figure loan to James Biden for his personal use.

Lewitt declined to comment, but referred to a letter he sent the Ellwood City Ledger blaming White’s alleged use of high-interest loans for Americore’s problems and vowing to restore the firm’s finances and operations.

Several Americore entities are currently in the midst of federal bankruptcy proceedings, providing a glimpse into their finances.In February, one of those entities, Americore Health LLC, filed a schedule of assets that included $650,000 due to accounts receivable. Pritchard said that figure referred to the loan repayment owed by James Biden.

Pritchard said that after James Biden received his loan payment from Americore, James reduced his involvement with the firm as its financial difficulties mounted.

“Jim needed to lay low because his brother was possibly running for president, and he didn’t need any bad press,” Pritchard recalled, saying that after James stepped back, Lewitt asked to review Americore corporate documents to ensure they did not bear James’ name.

The other former executive said that not long after he first saw the office being set up for James Biden in mid-2018, the office was emptied out.

Meanwhile, Americore’s problems have increasingly spilled into public view.

Details of Bernie Sanders and Yaroslavl, the Sister City

Posted on March 6, 2020March 6, 2020 by Denise Simon

One has to travel to Russia and visit the archives in Yaroslavl to see the full details of the trip then Mayor of Burlington, Vermont Bernie Sanders took for his honeymoon.

WaPo

IN part from the NYT’s: Many of the details of Mr. Sanders’s Cold War diplomacy before and after that visit — and the Soviet effort to exploit Mr. Sanders’s antiwar agenda for their own propaganda purposes — have largely remained out of sight.

The New York Times examined 89 pages of letters, telegrams and internal Soviet government documents revealing in far greater detail the extent of Mr. Sanders’s personal effort to establish ties between his city and a country many Americans then still considered an enemy despite the reforms being initiated at the time under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary.

They also show how the Kremlin viewed these sister city relationships as vehicles to sway American public opinion about the Soviet Union.The Sanders campaign didn’t dispute the documents’ authenticity; the English-language documents were shared with the campaign and the relevant Russian documents were described. At the time of Mr. Sanders’s announcement in 1987 that Burlington would seek a Soviet sister city, several dozen other American cities already had such a relationship or had applied for one.

The documents, available at the Yaroslavskaya Region State Archive in Yaroslavl, are included in a file titled “documents about the development of friendly relations of the city of Yaroslavl with the city of Burlington in 1988.”

Mr. Sanders’s involvement in the Cold War debate grew in the 1980s as he forcefully opposed the Reagan administration’s plans to have Burlington and other American cities make evacuation plans for a potential nuclear war.

Instead, Mr. Sanders reached out to the Soviet Union via an organization based in Virginia, requesting a sister-city partnership with the Cold War adversary in an effort to end the threat of nuclear annihilation. In December 1987, the records show, Mr. Sanders spoke by phone with Yuri Menshikov, the secretary of the Soviet sister-city organization in Moscow. In a follow-up letter later that month, Mr. Sanders said he had received word that Yaroslavl would be an ideal partner. He proposed leading a Burlington delegation to Yaroslavl to lay the foundation for a sister-city relationship.

He suggested arriving on May 9 — the day that the Soviet Union celebrated its victory over Nazi Germany — and said he was especially interested in discussing economic development, the police, winter street cleaning, libraries, and plumbing and sewer systems. “People there seemed reasonably happy and content,” Mr. Sanders told reporters in Burlington about Yaroslavl, a city of about 600,000. “I didn’t notice much deprivation.”

Two days after returning to Vermont, Mr. Sanders wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, asking for help in setting up the sister-city program.

“It is my strong belief that if our planet is going to survive, and if we are going to be able to convert the hundreds of billions of dollars that both the United States and the Soviet Union are now wasting on weapons of destruction into areas of productive human development, there is going to have to be a significant increase in citizen-to-citizen contact,” Mr. Sanders wrote. The sister city program was something of a capstone to nearly a decade’s worth of foreign policy activism in Burlington City Hall. As mayor, Mr. Sanders championed a range of international causes that often aligned him with left-wing movements and leaders in other countries, and against the Reagan administration, which he described as pursuing a strategy of military escalation that risked setting off a nuclear war.

Mr. Sanders pressed the city government to take positions against American intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and against the invasion of Grenada. In 1985, he visited Managua for the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution and met with its leader, Daniel Ortega. To read the full article from the NYT’s, click here.

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Just a lil more from Politico:

Bruce Seifer, a top economic development aide to Sanders when he was mayor, said that 100 residents from Yaroslavl immigrated to Burlington after the trip and others visited.

“Over time, it had a positive impact on to the economy,” he said. “Businesses started doing exchanges between Burlington and Yaroslavl.”

Davitian, who lived in Burlington at the time, said progressives were thrilled by Sanders’ trip to the Soviet Union, while everyday residents didn’t mind. “As long as the streets were getting paved, there wasn’t opposition to him as an activist mayor,” she said.

When Sanders’ delegation returned to Burlington, CCTV captured the group on film in a hopeful mood, applauding the Soviet Union’s after-school programs, low rent costs and hospitality.

At the same time, they admit the poor choices of available food. Sanders says he was impressed by the beauty of the city and Soviet officials’ willingness “to acknowledge many of the problems that they had.”

“They’re proud of the fact that their health care system is free,” he says, but concede that the medical technology is far behind that of the United States.

Later that year, the relationship was officially established. Since then, “exchanges between the two cities have involved mayors, business people, firefighters, jazz musicians, youth orchestras, mural painters, high school students, medical students, nurses, librarians, and the Yaroslavl Torpedoes ice hockey team,” according to Burlington’s city government. A delegation traveled there as recently as 2016.

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One last thing from National Review to consider:

Sanders made further globe-trotting expeditions to socialist countries. He visited Cuba, scoring a meeting with Havana’s mayor. In 1985 he attended the celebrations marking the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. “In a letter addressed to the people of Nicaragua, penned in conjunction with that trip, Sanders denounced the activities of the Reagan administration, which he said was under the influence of large corporations,” the Guardian notes. “In the long run, I am certain that you will win,” Sanders wrote, “and that your heroic revolution against the Somoza dictatorship will be maintained and strengthened.” (The Sandinistas were ousted by Nicaragua’s voters in 1990).

Sanders isn’t the only radical U.S. politician to have a weakness for Communist dictatorships. In 2013, Bill de Blasio was caught off guard during his campaign for New York mayor when a Cuban-American radio host challenged him about Castro’s regime.

Ino Gómez, who fled Cuba in 1970, asked de Blasio in an interview about what he was thinking when he chose to violate U.S. law and spend his honeymoon in Cuba in 1991.

“What did you see in Cuba? What is your impression going on a honeymoon in a country that hasn’t had free elections in the last 50 years? What did you get from that trip?” Gómez asked.

A defensive de Blasio sputtered: “I didn’t go on a trip to study the country. I don’t pretend to have full perspective of the country.” He then acknowledged Cuba is undemocratic but praised “some good things that happened — for example, in health care.”

Gomez was having none of it. “I just had to send my aunt in Cuba some, you know, the thread to have stitches, because they don’t have in Cuba the thread,” he told the future mayor of Gotham.

De Blasio chose not to reply and the host moved on to other topics, giving him a pass on his 1988 trip to Nicaragua in support of the Sandinistas.

In closing, remember that New York Mayor de Blasio is campaigning for Sanders…gotta wonder if all this is well known to the gigantic grass-roots operation Sanders has built for his presidential campaign.

Armed Guard of Concentration Camp from Tennessee Ordered Deported

Posted on March 5, 2020March 5, 2020 by Denise Simon

WASHINGTON – A U.S. Immigration Judge in Memphis, Tennessee has issued a removal order against a German citizen and Tennessee resident, based on his service in Nazi Germany in 1945 as an armed guard of concentration camp prisoners in the Neuengamme Concentration Camp system (Neuengamme).

After a two-day trial, U.S. Immigration Judge Rebecca L. Holt issued her opinion finding Friedrich Karl Berger removable under the Immigration and Nationality Act because his “willing service as an armed guard of prisoners at a concentration camp where persecution took place” constituted assistance in Nazi-sponsored persecution. The court found that Berger served at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, and that the prisoners there included “Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians, and political opponents” of the Nazis.

Judge Holt found that Meppen prisoners were held during the winter of 1945 in “atrocious” conditions and were exploited for outdoor forced labor, working “to the point of exhaustion and death.” The court further found, and Berger admitted, that he guarded prisoners to prevent them from escaping during their dawn-to-dusk workday, and on their way to and from the worksites. At the end of March 1945, with the advance of British and Canadian forces, the Nazis abandoned Meppen. The court found that Berger helped guard the prisoners during their forcible evacuation to the Neuengamme main camp – a nearly two-week trip under inhumane conditions which claimed the lives of some 70 prisoners.

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Built in December 1938 by one hundred inmates transferred from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Neuengamme concentration camp was established around an empty brickworks in Hamburg-Neuengamme. The bricks produced there were to be used for the “Fuehrer buildings”, part of the National Socialists’ redevelopment plans for the river Elbe in Hamburg.

1943

Until June 4th, 1940, Neuengamme was a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen. At this date Neuengamme became an independent concentration camp, under the direct control of the overseer of concentration camps. The prisoners worked on the construction of the camp and the brickworks, regulating the flow of the Dove-Elbe river and the building of a branch canal, as well as on the mining of clay. The number of inmates increased dramatically in only a few months: in 1940, the population of the camp was 2,000 prisoners (with a proportion of 80% German inmates among them), Between 1940 and 1945, more than 95,000 prisoners were incarcerated in Neuengamme. On April 10th, 1945, the number of prisoners in the camp itself was 13,500. More than 2,000 men and 10,300 women were working in the different sub-camps depending on Neuengamme SS administration.

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“Berger was part of the SS machinery of oppression that kept concentration camp prisoners in atrocious conditions of confinement,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. “This ruling shows the Department’s continued commitment to obtaining a measure of justice, however late, for the victims of wartime Nazi persecution.”

The investigation was initiated by DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section (HRSP) and was conducted in partnership with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center and HSI’s Nashville Special Agent in Charge office.

“The investigation of human rights violations and those who engage in these heinous acts, continues to be a focus for Homeland Security Investigations and this successful outcome is an example of those efforts” stated Jerry C. Templet Jr, Special Agent in Charge, HSI Nashville.

The removal case was jointly tried by attorneys in ICE New Orleans Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (Memphis), and attorneys from DOJ’s HRSP, with the assistance of the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center.

Established in 2009, ICE’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center furthers ICE’s efforts to identify, locate and prosecute human rights abusers in the United States, including those who are known or suspected to have participated in persecution, war crimes, genocide, torture, extrajudicial killings, female genital mutilation and the use or recruitment of child soldiers. The HRVWCC leverages the expertise of a select group of agents, lawyers, intelligence and research specialists, historians and analysts who direct the agency’s broader enforcement efforts against these offenders.

Since 2003, ICE has arrested more than 450 individuals for human rights-related violations of the law under various criminal and/or immigration statutes. During that same period, ICE obtained deportation orders against and physically removed 1034 known or suspected human rights violators from the United States. Additionally, ICE has facilitated the departure of an additional 160 such individuals from the United States.

Currently, HSI has more than 180 active investigations into suspected human rights violators and is pursuing more than 1,640 leads and removal cases involving suspected human rights violators from 95 different countries. Since 2003, The HRVWCC has issued more than 76,000 lookouts for individuals from more than 110 countries and stopped over 315 human rights violators and war crimes suspects from entering the U.S.

DOD Contractor at Pentagon Charged with Espionage

Posted on March 5, 2020March 5, 2020 by Denise Simon

(WASHINGTON) — A linguist working for the U.S. military who kept a list of secret informants hidden under her mattress was charged with sharing the names with a romantic interest linked to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, appeared in Washington’s federal court on Wednesday to face charges in an espionage case that investigators said put at risk the lives of American military members and confidential sources and represented a significant breach of classified information.

The criminal case accuses Thompson, a contract translator, of giving to the unidentified Lebanese man the names of U.S. government sources and the information they provided. That effort, according to the government, accelerated during a six-week period from the end of December, when U.S. airstrikes targeted Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and exacerbated relations between the two countries, through the middle of last month.

Assistant Attorney General John Demers, the Justice Department’s top national security official, called the alleged conduct “a disgrace, especially for someone serving as a contractor with the United States military. This betrayal of country and colleagues will be punished.”

Thompson’s court appearance, on charges that could carry life in prison, was brief and ended with her being detained until a hearing next Wednesday. Her attorney did not return a phone message afterward.

Thompson was arrested last week at the military facility in Erbil, Iraq, where prosecutors say she worked as a contract linguist. The Defense Department said it was aware of the arrest and was cooperating with the investigation.

After the arrest, prosecutors say, Thompson acknowledged that she passed secret information to a man she was romantically interested in, but said she did not know that he had any affiliation with Hezbollah. She instead said she thought he might have been tied to the Amal political party in Lebanon, though she later said she considered the groups to be the same.

“No, I don’t know about Hizbollah. I hate Hizbollah,” Thompson told an agent, according to an affidavit unsealed Wednesday. She described members of the group, which the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization, as “terrorists” and “like the octopus. They can reach anybody.”

Thompson also told the agent that she passed along classified information by memorizing it, writing it down and transmitting it via the video feature of a secure messaging application on her cellphone. One screenshot of a video chat the FBI says it obtained showed Thompson displaying to the Lebanese man an Arabic note describing the technique an informant had used to collect information, according to the affidavit.

The 12 page affidavit is found here.

DOJ New Unit to Strip US Citizenship of Criminals and Terrorists

Posted on February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 by Denise Simon

Hoorah…it is a great start.

new unit staffed with an estimated 30 lawyers will review cases that point to those that fraudulently obtained citizenship by failing to disclose past convictions for serious crimes — including terrorism and war crimes.

The section, which will be within the DOJ’s Office of Immigration Litigation, will be dedicated to denaturalizing those who had failed to disclose they had been involved in criminal activity on their N-400 form for naturalization. It requires the government to show that citizenship was obtained illegally or “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”

That form includes questions asking whether an applicant has been involved in genocide and torture among other serious crimes, if they have ever been part of a terrorist or totalitarian organization, if they had been associated with the Nazi government in Germany, and if they have been charged or convicted with a crime or served prison time. Targets for denaturalization are those who have made material breaches of those questions.

“When a terrorist or sex offender becomes a U.S. citizen under false pretenses, it is an affront to our system — and it is especially offensive to those who fall victim to these criminals,” Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt said. “The new Denaturalization Section will further the Department’s efforts to pursue those who unlawfully obtained citizenship status and ensure that they are held accountable for their fraudulent conduct.”

The department has seen an increase in such cases both because of an increased effort by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to root out fraud, as well as Operation Janus — an operation which began during the Obama administration and that identified hundreds of thousands of cases where paper fingerprint data was not entered into the centralized fingerprint database.

Officials have pointed to recent cases whereby the DOJ has secured the denaturalization of terrorists, war criminals and sex offenders. They include:

An individual convicted of terrorism in Egypt who admitted recruiting for Al Qaeda in the U.S. He was denaturalized while in Egypt and had his passport taken away from him.

An individual who received military training in an Afghan jihadist camp and coordinated with 9/11 mastermind Usama Bin Laden. He “self-deported” to Somaliland.

An individual who was convicted in Bosnia of executing eight unarmed civilians and prisoners of war during the Balkans conflict. He was denaturalized while serving a sentence in Bosnia.

One individual who engaged in sexual contact with a 7-year-old family member and another who sexually abused a minor for multiple years.

The department has filed 228 civil denaturalization cases since 2008, and 94 since 2017. Officials say it has increased its filing rate by 200 percent in the past three years and has seen an increase in referrals by over 600 percent.

Such denaturalization proceedings are not targeted at people who commit crimes after they become citizens, only those who have made fraudulent citizenship applications and left out crimes they committed on that form. A number of cases involve those who were initially denied entry to the U.S. or removed from the country, only to re-enter under a false identity.

Citizens cannot be deported, but those who have been stripped of citizenship revert back to permanent residency status, which allows deportation or barring of entry from the U.S. in the case of serious criminal offenses. Source