Corruption is as American as apple pie ...
Head of Kamala Harris’ favorite fund that bails out criminals arrested for possession of fentanyl
Records from the Bloomington, Minnesota Police Department show that they booked a lady named Valentina Dianne McKenzie for fentanyl possession on Aug. 31st.
McKenzie happens to be the chair of the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a far-left organization that lobbies on behalf of criminals by paying their bail.
“The Minnesota Freedom Fund can confirm that MFF board chair Valentina McKenzie was arrested on Thursday, August 31st, in Bloomington,” the fund’s communications director, Noble Frank, confirmed in a statement to Alpha News.
Dovetailing back to Harris, she openly promoted the MFF on Twitter during the violent, deadly Black Lives Matter race riots of 2020:
The fact that the fund’s chair is apparently into consuming or selling fentanyl — one of the most deadly drugs in America — isn’t even the worst part of the story.
Back in 2020, the fund bailed out Christopher Boswell, a twice-convicted rapist who at the time had been charged with kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault in two separate cases. One of the sexual assault cases reportedly involved a child.
Two years later in 2022, Boswell was charged again — this time with stalking, second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon and being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm — after he reportedly beat up his girlfriend and threatened to kill her.
“According to the criminal complaint, Brooklyn Park police at around 3 p.m. on July 22 got a call to do a welfare check on a woman. The woman’s mother told police at 5 a.m. that day, she got a call from her daughter’s boyfriend — later identified as Boswell — who said he went on for about 45 minutes, rambling about her daughter,” Minneapolis station KMSP reported at the time.
“The mother said Boswell was angry at her daughter and said numerous times he was going to kill her, and that he knows people who would kill her. During the call, the mother could hear her daughter crying and whimpering in the background. The mother told police Boswell is violent and had assaulted her daughter multiple times in the past, charges state,” the station added.
But it gets worse.
That same year, the fund bailed out St. Paul resident Shawn Michael Tillman after he committed indecent exposure. Three weeks later, he allegedly outright killed someone.
(similar case below)
“Shawn Michael Tillman, 33, faces one count of second-degree murder in connection with the shooting of a 37-year-old man who police have yet to identify. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted,” station KSTP reported.
“A criminal complaint states police responded to a shooting around 4:15 a.m. at the Green Line station near Fifth and Minnesota streets. Officers found the victim lying on the light rail platform with several gunshot wounds to the head and torso. Medics pronounced him dead minutes later,” according to the station.
What did the fund have to say for itself? Nothing but nonsense.
“When determining whether to provide bail support, Minnesota Freedom Fund evaluates several factors including bail amount and a defendant’s appearance history, and we prioritize people at risk of losing housing and employment or who are facing challenges like homelessness, mental illness, and chemical dependency. Mr. Tillman’s bail was $2,000 – a small amount compared to our average bail request of more than $58,000 and well under our daily bail cap. After paying Mr. Tillman’s bail, our Post-Release Team attempted to contact him, as they do all our clients upon release, to offer resources and support,” they said.
“In all our bail decisions, we strive to balance pre-trial justice with community safety. As a community, we are struggling to navigate and solve violence in our neighborhoods. We all want and deserve to be safe. But it is neither just nor effective to respond to violence by denying bail and pre-emptively punishing people who are disproportionately poor, [b]lack, brown, and [i]ndigenous. As Minnesota Freedom Fund continues to evaluate and refine our internal processes, we urge our leaders to confront gun violence in our communities with solutions that are proven to work: stable housing, mental healthcare, treatment for chemical dependency, youth programming, and more,” they added.
Given all this, you’d think the media would be interested in covering the fund’s ties to Harris, who is now the vice president of the United States. But you’d be wrong. Every single one of these crimes that resulted after the MFF bailed someone out has been buried. So has the vice president’s connection to these bailouts.
There is a reason why so many US officials get away with apparent bribery and graft, perhaps in our founding documents are the very seeds of its corruption, while not specifically stated in context … its is the context not Altruism!
“Preamble” of the Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
On September 22, influential United States Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on corruption charges along with his wife, Nadine. It is the second time Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has faced such charges.
THE GOLDEN RULE … the man with the gold rules!
As per the indictment from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Menendez and his wife received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from three New Jersey businessmen in the form of gold, cash, a luxury vehicle and assorted other goodies. (who supplies the gold?) In exchange, the Democrat from New Jersey allegedly used his position of power to benefit the three businessmen as well as the government of Egypt, the home country of one of the men in question.
As the old saying goes, power tends to corrupt.
According to US mythology, of course, corruption is entirely the business of other, less civilised nations – particularly enemies of the US – that lack the proper commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and all that nice and noble stuff.
But here’s a news flash for those sectors of the domestic audience scandalised by the Menendez revelations: Corruption is about as American as apple pie. (And a related newsflash: Menendez or no Menendez, the US has spent decades flinging billions of dollars at Egypt’s repressive apparatus – which should constitute a scandal in itself.)
LEFT, RIGHT, AND CENTER … HUMAN NATURE & BIRDS OF A FEATHER!
To be sure, Menendez is hardly the only bad apple in this pie. Take Clarence Thomas, the US Supreme Court justice whose being prosecuted in the mainstream media his corrupt exploits have been investigated by the New York-based "nonprofit ProPublica". One recent ProPublica report notes that, “like clockwork (orange), Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence”.
- NOTE: In a 2018 reader survey, 74% of ProPublica readers indentified as liberal, 1% identified as conservative, and 19% indentiffied as moderate. When asked about their perception of ProPublica's political leaning, 33% of respondents said they considered it to be liberal, 27% said they considered it to be moderate, 40% said they considered it to be non-ideological, and less than !% said they considered it to be conservative.
The report goes on to report Thomas's said “leisure activities”, which have included at least 38 vacations, 26 private jet flights, eight helicopter flights, and various excursions to luxury resorts, sporting events and so on. Billionaire real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, an enthusiastic collector of Nazi paraphernalia, is but one of the filthy rich right-wing contributors to Thomas’s seemingly eternal “leisure”. Crow has also funded numerous other favours, such as paying for Thomas’s grandnephew to attend an exclusive private boarding school.
In September, ProPublica revealed that Thomas had secretly participated in donor summits for the Koch network, founded by the billionaire Koch brothers and devoted to driving US policy ever more to the right. And what do you know? The Koch strategy includes bringing cases before the very court on which Thomas sits to impact US law.
So much for that silly old concept of “conflict of interest” or even "recusing" oneself as a Judge or Prosector.
At the end of the day or any day, though, Thomas’s antics are merely of a piece with US capitalism, which is predicated on maintaining a tyranny of the elite under the guise of democracy. In other words, it’s about as corrupt a system as you can get, or perhaps a system that promotes "RAW human nature" or "what's in it for me" thinking!
A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC IS NOT A DEMOCRACY ...
That anyone can still apply the term “democracy” to the US with a straight face is, meanwhile, a testament to the corruption of language itself. After all, you can’t very well have 'ruled by the "people” ' in a country where the Supreme Court reverses campaign finance restrictions and political influence is transparently up for sale.
The list of offenders goes on LEFT RIGHT AND CENTER. There’s Samuel Alito, another Supreme Court justice who this year was exposed as having also accepted undisclosed gifts from billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican Party mega-donor Paul Singer. After being treated by Singer to a luxury fishing trip in Alaska in 2008, Alito ruled in favour of Singer’s hedge fund in a case before the Supreme Court.
And then there’s Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general acquitted of corruption charges on September 16 in a historic impeachment trial, in which he was accused of bribery, obstruction of justice, abuse of public trust and other misdeeds. As the metaphor goes, "a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich"!
Allegations ranged from shady dealings with a real estate developer in Texas and misuse of power to retaliate against whistleblowers.
An ally of former US President Donald Trump and an accomplice in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, Paxton remains under FBI investigation on separate corruption charges and faces trial on allegations of felony securities fraud. After the Texas Senate acquitted the state’s top law enforcement official, Trump took to his social media platform to celebrate with typical eloquence: “The Ken Paxton Victory is sooo BIG. WOW!!!”
BUT WAIT THAT'S NOT ALL … BUSH, CLINTON, OBAMA, AND BIDEN … EACH HAVE THEIR FINGER PRINTS ON SIMILAR BEHAVIOR … time for an indictment of the swamp.
