Questions are what about the unmasking and who did she blind copy in the email? What were Obama’s ultimate requests and demands for cover-ups? Okay…read on.
Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion
D-Senator Warner Texting with Waldman to Deripaska to Steele
Day by day as more evidence and documents bubble to the surface, we still cannot draw any conclusion with regard to who was plotting with Russian power-brokers. We are not even close at this point. While there are several congressional investigations the Mueller team is still at work and there are clues we do have some democrats in the mix now.
This will be hard to follow but as a primer here is a new development.
Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch had a historical relationship with Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager. Deripaska belongs to the Putin inner circle. Deripaska was seeking a channel to congressional intelligence committees and those panels in both the House and the Senate turned him down. Deripaska is classified by the State Department as a threat of various conditions including fraud, money laundering and organized crime. The State Department even suspended his visa. Except now we have an channel established and with several people in the middle. D-Senator Mark Warner ultimately to Christopher Steele had to pass through a few people in the middle as text messages read that the Senate committee has had since last year.
Senator Mark Warner was communicating with Adam Waldman, to Deripaska to Christopher Steele. Adam Waldman founded The Endeavor Group. Business Insider has this summary:
Vladimir Putin has a network of lobbyists and lawyers working for him here in America. These executives can be identified through disclosure forms required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which mandates people who work “as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity” document these relationships with the Department of Justice. Business Insider went through these records and identified the American executives who are working with Putin’s regime.
Adam Waldman
Adam Waldman is the founder, chairman, and president of the Endeavor Group, a D.C. consultancy based about two blocks from the White House. In May 2009, Waldman filed paperwork with the DOJ indicating he would be working with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska to provide “legal advice on issues involving his U.S. visa as well as commercial transactions.”
Deripaska had his U.S. visa revoked in 2006 due to longstanding concerns about his links to organized crime and because the State Department was concerned he lied to American investigators who were looking into his business. However, in August and October 2009, shortly after he began working with Waldman, Deripaska was allowed to make two visits to the U.S. During those trips, Deripaska met with FBI agents about an unspecified criminal probe and with top executives at American companies. The Wall Street Journal reported Deripaska’s 2009 trip included meetings with Morgan Stanley, General Motors, and Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
In his initial FARA paperwork, Waldman indicated Endeavor would receive “a monthly retainer of $40,000” for his work with Deripaska. Waldman also said Deripaska was not being “supervised” or “directed” by any foreign government. However, in October 2010, Waldman made another filing indicating he would be working with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, “gathering information and providing advice and analysis as it relates to the U.S. policy towards the visa status of Oleg Deripaska.”
As part of its work with Lavrov, Waldman said Endeavor would “engage in correspondence and meetings with U.S. policymakers” about Deripaska’s visa. Waldman indicated he had no “formal written contract” with Lavrov and did not specify how much he was being paid. However, Waldman included a letter Lavrov wrote to him Sept. 15, 2010 describing the assignment.
“Mr. Deripaska is one of our country’s prominent business leaders who controls or directly manages a significant number of enterprises, which employ hundreds of thousands of people in Russia. … Yet over the past several years, there has been certain ambiguity upon his visa status in the United States. A persistent state of limbo regarding Mr. Deripaska’s ability to travel freely between our two countries has become an impediment to the promotion of mutually advantageous contacts between the business communities of the two countries,” Lavrov wrote to Waldman. “The Russian side has raised this issue with various U.S. officials on numerous occasions, including in the course of bilateral discussion with both the White House and the State Department at different levels. I believe the involvement of your firm will contribute to the ongoing efforts aimed at achieving a successful resolution of this problem.”
Business Insider contacted the State Department to inquire about Deripaska’s visa status Tuesday. Citing the confidentiality of visa records, a State Department spokesman declined to comment. Waldman has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Business Insider about his work with Deripaska and Lavrov. Based on the information in his 2009 FARA filing, Waldman has received at least $2.36 million working to help Deripaska with his visa. More here.
PS, Deripaska did travel however to the United States on a diplomatic visa according to court documents and an affidavit provided to the Manhattan court for a lawsuit over financial disputes.
Anyhow, these text messages of Senator Warner to Adam Waldman demanded complete secrecy and no…NO paper trail.
“We have so much to discuss u need to be careful but we can help our country,” Warner texted the lobbyist, Adam Waldman, on March 22, 2017.
“I’m in,” Waldman, whose firm has ties to Hillary Clinton, texted back to Warner.
Throughout the text exchanges, Warner seemed particularly intent on connecting directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop — at least initially. In one text to the lobbyist, Warner wrote that he would “rather not have a paper trail” of his messages. Waldman is best known for signing a $40,000 monthly retainer in 2009 and 2010 to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of controversial Russian billionaire Oleg V. Deripaska. Deripraska had his visa revoked by the State Department in 2006 because of charges, which he has denied, that he has organized crime ties.
The conversation about Steele started on March 16, 2017, when Waldman texted, “Chris Steele asked me to call you.”
Warner responded, “Will call tomorrow be careful.”
The records show Warner and Waldman had trouble connecting by phone. On March 20, Warner pressed Waldman by text to get him access to Steele.
“Can you talk tomorrow want to get with ur English friend,” Warner texted.
“I spoke to him yesterday,” Waldman texted.
“We have so much to discuss u need to be careful but we can help our country”
The two men appear to have finally connected about Steele by phone on March 22, according to the records.
“Hey just tried u again gotta give a speech but really want to finish our talk,” Warner texted.
Waldman, at one point, texted back that Steele really wanted a bi-partisan letter requesting his testimony first. He added that Steele was concerned about word leaking to the media that they were talking. Read more here for timeline, context and more details.
Guilty Pleas, Human Smuggling Network Ft. Hood
Primer:
Former Fort Hood, Texas, soldier pleads guilty to alien smuggling
BROWNSVILLE, Texas — A solider based in Fort Hood, Texas, pleaded guilty Jan. 29 for his role in a conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens, and illegally re-entering the United States after having been deported.
This guilty plea was announced U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick, Southern District of Texas. This case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) with assistance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP).
Victoriano Zamora-Jasso aka “Tata,” 51, from Mexico living in Houston made an appearance Jan. 29 in federal court on the eve of jury selection.
According to court records, in early 2014 Zamora-Jasso began supplying illegal aliens to Arnold Gracia, 47, from Harlingen, Texas. Gracia then made arrangements with others to transport the illegal aliens through the immigration checkpoint in Sarita, Texas. Gracia recruited the following then active-duty soldiers stationed at Ft. Hood to transport and deliver the illegal aliens further north: Brandon Troy Robbins, 23, from San Antonio; Eric Alexander Rodriguez, 24, from Odem, Texas; Christopher David Wix, 23, from Abilene, Texas; and Yashira Perez-Morales, 27, from Watertown, New York.
The conspiracy continued from about March through September 2014. The soldiers concealed the illegal aliens under their military gear in which they made many successful trips during the course of the conspiracy.
Zamora-Jasso was indicted in 2016 and arrested after a traffic stop in Conroe, Texas, in July 2017. In court, he admitted his involvement in the conspiracy. He also admitted that he is a previously convicted illegal alien who illegally re-entered the United States after having been deported in 2013.
Gracia and all the soldiers were previously sentenced in 2015 and 2016 with Gracia receiving a 73-month sentence; Robbins, Rodriguez, Wix and Perez-Morales received sentences of 20, 12 months, 12 months and a day, and five years’ probation to include an $8,000 fine.
Judge Rolando Olvera has scheduled Zamora-Jasso’s sentencing for May 9. At that time, he faces up to 10 years imprisonment and a possible $250,000 maximum fine. He remains in custody pending sentencing.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Oscar Ponce and Angel Castro, Southern District of Texas, are prosecuting this case.
Swell, $800 Million Unaccounted for Defense Department
Ah, an audit finally? Missing documentation but not the assets? What did the ledger show?
The Defense Logistics Agency is the Department of Defense’s logistics combat support agency, providing worldwide logistics support in both peacetime and wartime to the military services as well as several civilian agencies and foreign countries.DLA employs about 25,000 employees. The agency’s headquarters is at Fort Belvoir, in Northern Virginia.
Exclusive: Massive Pentagon agency lost track of hundreds of millions of dollars
A damning outside review finds that the Defense Logistics Agency has lost track of where it spent the money.
One of the Pentagon’s largest agencies can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending, a leading accounting firm says in an internal audit obtained by POLITICO that arrives just as President Donald Trump is proposing a boost in the military budget.
Ernst & Young found that the Defense Logistics Agency failed to properly document more than $800 million in construction projects, just one of a series of examples where it lacks a paper trail for millions of dollars in property and equipment. Across the board, its financial management is so weak that its leaders and oversight bodies have no reliable way to track the huge sums it’s responsible for, the firm warned in its initial audit of the massive Pentagon purchasing agent.
The audit raises new questions about whether the Defense Department can responsibly manage its $700 billion annual budget — let alone the additional billions that Trump plans to propose this month. The department has never undergone a full audit despite a congressional mandate — and to some lawmakers, the messy state of the Defense Logistics Agency’s books indicates one may never even be possible.
“If you can’t follow the money, you aren’t going to be able to do an audit,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and senior member of the Budget and Finance committees, who has pushed successive administrations to clean up the Pentagon’s notoriously wasteful and disorganized accounting system.
The $40 billion-a-year logistics agency is a test case in how unachievable that task may be. The DLA serves as the Walmart of the military, with 25,000 employees who process roughly 100,000 orders a day on behalf of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and a host of other federal agencies — for everything from poultry to pharmaceuticals, precious metals and aircraft parts.
But as the auditors found, the agency often has little solid evidence for where much of that money is going. That bodes ill for ever getting a handle on spending at the Defense Department as a whole, which has a combined $2.2 trillion in assets.
In one part of the audit, completed in mid-December, Ernst & Young found that misstatements in the agency’s books totaled at least $465 million for construction projects it financed for the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies. For construction projects designated as still “in progress,” meanwhile, it didn’t have sufficient documentation — or any documentation at all — for another $384 million worth of spending.
The agency also couldn’t produce supporting evidence for many items that are documented in some form — including records for $100 million worth of assets in the computer systems that conduct the agency’s day-to-day business.
“The documentation, such as the evidence demonstrating that the asset was tested and accepted, is not retained or available,” it said.
The report, which covers the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2016, also found that $46 million in computer assets were “inappropriately recorded” as belonging to the Defense Logistics Agency. It also warned that the agency cannot reconcile balances from its general ledger with the Treasury Department.
The agency maintains it will overcome its many hurdles to ultimately get a clean audit.
“The initial audit has provided us with a valuable independent view of our current financial operations,” Army Lt. Gen. Darrell Williams, the agency’s director, wrote in response to Ernst & Young’s findings. “We are committed to resolving the material weaknesses and strengthening internal controls around DLA’s operations.”
In a statement to POLITICO, the agency also maintained it was not surprised by the conclusions.
“DLA is the first of its size and complexity in the Department of Defense to undergo an audit so we did not anticipate achieving a ‘clean’ audit opinion in the initial cycles,” it explained. “The key is to use auditor feedback to focus our remediation efforts and corrective action plans, and maximize the value from the audits. That’s what we’re doing now.”
Indeed, the Trump administration insists it can accomplish what previous ones could not.
“Beginning in 2018, our audits will occur annually, with reports issued Nov. 15,” the Pentagon’s top budget official, David Norquist, told Congress last month.
That Pentagon-wide effort, which will require an army of about 1,200 auditors across the department, will also be expensive — to the tune of nearly $1 billion.
Norquist said it will cost an estimated $367 million to carry out the audits — including the cost of hiring independent accounting firms like Ernst & Young — and an additional $551 million to go back and fix broken accounting systems that are crucial to better financial management.
“It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DoD’s management of every taxpayer dollar,” Norquist said.
But there is little evidence the logistics arm of the military will be able to account for what it has spent anytime soon.
“Ernst & Young could not obtain sufficient, competent evidential matter to support the reported amounts within the DLA financial statements,” the Pentagon’s inspector general, the internal watchdog that ordered the outside review, concluded in issuing the report to DLA.
The accounting firm itself went further, asserting that the gaping holes uncovered in bookkeeping procedures and oversight strongly suggest there are more.
“We cannot determine the effect of the lack of sufficient appropriate audit evidence on DLA’s financial statements as a whole,” its report concludes.
A spokeswoman for Ernst & Young declined to respond to questions, referring POLITICO to the Pentagon.
Grassley — who was fiercely critical when a clean audit opinion of the Marine Corps had to be pulled in 2015 for “bogus conclusions” — has repeatedly charged that “keeping track of the people’s money may not be in the Pentagon’s DNA.”
He remains deeply doubtful about the prospects going forward given what is being uncovered.
“I think the odds of a successful DoD audit down the road are zero,” Grassley said in an interview. “The feeder systems can’t provide data. They are doomed to failure before they ever get started.”
But he said he supports the continuing effort even if a full, clean audit of the Pentagon can never be done. It is widely viewed as only way to improve the management of such huge sums of taxpayer dollars.
“Each audit report will help DLA build a better financial reporting foundation and provide a stepping stone towards a clean audit opinion of our financial statements,” the agency maintains. “The findings also improve our internal controls, which helps to improve the quality of cost and logistics data used for decision-making.”
3 Corporations Take on Obamacare, Pelosi Mute
Maybe between Amazon, a tech company, JP Morgan, an investment company and Berkshire Hathaway, a financial think tank and provider could solve the corruption within government healthcare first…Just last year:
The Justice Department charged more than 400 people across the country in a major crackdown on health care fraud, officials said Thursday. The accused individuals cost the federal government $1.3 billion in false Medicare and Medicaid billings, according to authorities
The investigation focused on opioid-related crimes as the government continues to try to address the public health crisis that has been sweeping the country. Many of the health care providers charged had billed Medicaid and Medicare for drugs that were never purchased, while others took advantage of addicts by giving out unnecessary opioid prescriptions for cash or charging for false treatments, according to the Justice Department. More here.
It is pathetic that the FBI has an exclusive division to investigate and prosecute healthcare/government fraud.
The FBI is the primary agency for exposing and investigating health care fraud, with jurisdiction over both federal and private insurance programs. Health care fraud investigations are considered a high priority within the Complex Financial Crime Program, and each of the FBI’s 56 field offices has personnel assigned specifically to investigate health care fraud matters. Our field offices proactively target fraud through coordinated initiatives, task forces and strike teams, and undercover operations.
The Bureau seeks to identify and pursue investigations against the most egregious offenders involved in health care fraud through investigative partnerships with other federal agencies, such as Health and Human Services-Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), Office of Personnel Management-Office of Inspector General (OPM-OIG), and Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), along with various state Medicaid Fraud Control Units and other state and local agencies. On the private side, the FBI is actively involved in the Healthcare Fraud Prevention Partnership, an effort to exchange facts and information between the public and private sectors in order to reduce the prevalence of health care fraud. The Bureau also maintains significant liaison with private insurance national groups, such as the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, and private insurance investigative units. More here.
Another pathetic item is during 2017, when the House repealed Obamacare and the Senate failed to do so….no one spoke to the whole fraud component which is in fact costing the taxpayers billions…..BILLIONS.
BBC
So, will these companies come to the rescue for their own employees or perhaps lay the groundwork for total repeal?
“The ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Berkshire Hathaway (brk-b) chairman and CEO Warren Buffett said in a statement. “Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable.”
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and J.P. Morgan Chase are forming a not-for-profit health care venture to lower health care costs for their U.S. employees, the companies announced Tuesday morning, sparking a slide in the shares of a host of health care-related companies. The initial focus of the independent company will be on technology that will provide their U.S. employees and their families with simplified and high-quality health care at accessible costs, the companies said.
Drug distributors Cardinal Health(cah, -2.80%), AmerisourceBergen(abc, -2.73%) and McKesson(mck, -1.64%) were all down nearly 3%. Health insurers also fell, with the 6.2% drop in UnitedHealth(unh, +0.06%) the steepest.
The move comes amid growing speculation that Amazon is likely to enter the prescription drug business and that has sent tremors through the pharmaceutical supply chain.
“The health care system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon (amzn, +0.69%) founder and CEO, said in the statement. “Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation.”
The effort is in its early planning stages, the companies said, and the initial formation of the company would be led by Todd Combs, an investment officer of Berkshire Hathaway; Marvelle Sullivan Berchtold, a managing director of J.P. Morgan Chase; and Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon.
“Our people want transparency, knowledge and control when it comes to managing their health care,” said Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase(jpm, +0.48%). “The three of our companies have extraordinary resources, and our goal is to create solutions that benefit our U.S. employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans.”
“The ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Berkshire Hathaway (brk-b) chairman and CEO Warren Buffett said in a statement. “Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable.” Drugstore operators CVS Health(cvs, -1.85%) and Walgreen Boots Alliance (wba, -1.10%) as well as pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts Holding(esrx, -0.13%) dropped between 4.5% to 6% in premarket trading. Hat-tip Forbes.
Maybe Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats should have consulted with Watson…
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Is IBM part of the problem or the solution?
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