Tag Archives: Houston Chronicle

When Those Who Are Supposed To Enforce The Law Break The Law

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On February 21, The Houston Chronicle reported the following:

A Houston college student prosecuted for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection was one of people robbed by a Houston-based FBI agent, according to newly released court records.

Alexander Fan’s complaint about missing cash and silver helped lead to the January indictment of FBI agent Nicholas Anthony Williams, according to court records.

Fan, 27, was sentenced to 12 months probation in connection to the riot. Fan was found guilty of entering and remaining a room in the Capitol building. He was accused of climbing into an office through a broken window after his entry was blocked by a closed door.

The article continues:

Fan’s home was searched on the day he was arrested and the next day he reported to the FBI that items, including $2,500 and silvers bars, were missing from his bedroom. The items were not seized as part of the warrant served on his home, according to court records.

Months later, the FBI announced that one of its own agents, Nicholas Anthony Williams, had been indicted on theft charges, over accusations he stole money and property while executing search warrants between March 2022 and July 2023.

One of the three charges related to thefts is over the missing items at Fan’s home.

Remember when the FBI was the gold standard of law enforcement agencies? Evidently their recruiting standards are not what they used to be.

While We Were Sleeping

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Yesterday The Houston Chronicle reported that the Justice Department charged eight people — including a prominent political donor to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and a Lebanese-American businessman who was a witness in Robert Mueller’s investigation — with conspiring to conceal the source of more than $3.5 million in donations to Clinton.

The article reports:

The 53-count indictment unsealed in federal court in Washington detailed efforts by Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja and George Nader to conceal the true source of the millions of dollars in campaign contributions, which prosecutors allege were made to gain influence with high-level political figures, including Clinton.

Khawaja, who lives in Los Angeles and is the owner of the online processing company Allied Wallet, is accused of making the donations in his name, his wife’s name and his company’s name, even though they were actually funded by another businessman, Nader.

As they arranged the payments, Nader was in touch with an official from a foreign government about his efforts to gain influence with the prominent politicians, prosecutors charge. The government is not identified in court documents.

A 2018 investigation by The Associated Press detailed that Khawaja, Allied Wallet and top executives contributed at least $6 million to Democratic and Republican candidates and groups. The donations earned Khawaja access to Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign and a post-election Oval Office visit with Trump.

Clinton is not identified by name in the court documents made public Tuesday, but there are repeated references in the indictment identifying the candidate as a woman. Federal donor records show Khawaja gave millions of dollars to Democratic candidates, including the main political action committee supporting Clinton’s campaign. He also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Nader is already in federal custody on unrelated charges accusing him of transporting a dozen images of child pornography and bestiality. He had provided grand jury testimony in the special counsel’s Russia investigation about his efforts to connect a Russian banker to members of Trump’s transition team. He had also worked to advance Saudi Arabia’s agenda to the Trump administration.

This may be only the beginning of draining the Washington swamp. Hopefully there is more to come.

Undermining Elections One State At A Time

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I think most people understand that the Democrats look at people entering America illegally as future Democrat voters. However, it seems as if some of those expected votes are not happening in the future–they are happening now.

On Friday, Hot Air reported that the Texas Secretary of State has reported that as many as 58,000 non-citizens voted in elections in Texas between 1996 and 2018.

The Houston Chronicle reported that there has been some pushback on this statement:

“There is no credible data that indicates illegal voting is happening in any significant numbers, and the Secretary’s statement does not change that fact,” said Beth Stevens, Voting Rights Legal Director with the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Stevens said she is concerned about how the state is identifying the suspected non-citizen voters.

The Secretary of State’s office insists the data is accurate and relies on documents that the voters themselves submitted to DPS when they were trying to obtain drivers licenses. Non-citizens are eligible to get a Texas drivers license, but they are not allowed to register to vote.

“It is important to note that we are not using information self-reported by the person regarding citizenship status; rather, we are using documents provided by the person to show they are lawfully present in the United States,” the state’s director of elections, Keith Ingram, wrote in a notice to registrars in all 254 counties in Texas.

The article at Hot Air concludes:

Also, it’s not as if the Texas Secretary of State makes this announcement and suddenly the names on his list are removed. The Secretary of State in Texas doesn’t have the power to remove anyone from the voter rolls, so that will be done by county-level registrars. Those officials will check the names and give each identified person 30 days to demonstrate proof of citizenship. Only if they fail to do that or don’t respond at all will they be removed from the rolls.

It seems to me what’s really at stake here is the presumption that large-scale voter fraud doesn’t happen. If Texas can substantiate even a fraction of this list it would change the dynamic of future conversations about non-citizen voting. We’ll have to wait and see if that happens.

We need to remember that every vote by a non-citizen cancels out the legal vote of a citizen. For those claiming that cleaning up the voter rolls disenfranchises people, what about the citizens disenfranchised by non-citizen votes?

 

In The World Of The Internet, A Candidate Needs To Get Their Biography Straight

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Today’s Houston Chronicle posted a story about Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. Ms. Davis seems to have forgotten some of the details of her life story. The problem with that is that in the age of the internet fact-checking is very easy for anyone who takes the time to do it.

When she did her filibuster for abortion, Ms. Davis claimed to have been a struggling divorced teenage mother poverty-stricken and living in a trailer. Actually, she was 21 when she divorced and lived in a trailer only for a few months. She remarried and her husband paid for her education. Curiously enough, they were divorced shortly after the final bill for her law degree was paid.

The article reports:

“My language should be tighter,” she told the Morning News. “I’m learning about using broader, looser language. I need to be more focused on the detail.”

In a statement released to the media Monday, Davis said that “the truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce.” She also clarified that she didn’t officially file for divorce until age 20 and that it wasn’t finalized until the following year.

Does it matter? I am sure no one cares exactly how old she was when she got her first divorce or about the details of her personal life, but were the facts altered in order to create a specific image? I understand that politics is about image and that the truth is often stretched. However, this is not simply a stretch–this is misleading.

In the end, the voters will make the decision, and since Texas is historically a red state, even without this deception exposed, Ms. Davis is not the favored candidate. But hopefully, her experience should remind candidates that it pays to get the facts right–especially about your own biography.

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Why All Patriotic Americans Should Immediately Move To Texas

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Common sense has long since departed from our political discussions, but every now and then it shows up. Lately it seems as if it shows up a lot in Texas. Today’s Houston Chronicle is reporting that the Texas Department of Transportation will take over the funding for the thirteen small air traffic control towers that the federal government has stopped funding.

The article reports:

The decision must be approved by the Texas Transportation Commission, which is scheduled to meet Thursday in an emergency session.

…TxDOT will get the money from existing state aviation funds, said spokesman Mark Cross.

The estimated cost of paying the air traffic controllers is $7 million a year, Cross said.

The initiative for the funding came from Gov. Rick Perry‘s office, he said.

The sequester cuts are all for show. The government will still spend more money this year and next year than it did the year before. The idea that we are being harmed by the sequester is political garbage (that’s not the world I really wanted to use, but this blog is rated “G”).

Thank you, Governor Perry, for exposing the sequester spending cuts sham for what it is.

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Our Changing Culture

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The traditional family has always been considered the foundational building block of society. What does it mean when the traditional family is disappearing?

The Houston Chronicle reported on recently released statistics from the Pew Research Center which stated that the marriage rate in 2010 was 51 percent, compared with 72 percent in 1960.

The article posted the following chart:

The article further reported:

The 20-something demographic shows the steepest marriage rate declines, and this is also the generation that’s less likely to attend church regularly or identify with a specific religious tradition.

Pair that with earlier Census analysis by GetReligion showing that “Religious people are most likely to be married and unlikely to cohabitate while nonreligious people are as likely to be single as to be married,” and this might also be a factor contributing to the lowest marriage rates in recent history.

The article also stated that the marriage rate for 18 to 29-year-olds has declined to 20 percent–one third of what it was in 1960.

Quite frankly, I am not sure what this means for our culture and society. Marriage and the family are a vehicle for personal growth–ideally, family members learn to share and to care for each other. My fear is that less marriage will mean less sharing and more selfishness.

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