The Loudoun County School Board voted 6-3 to shield the report from the public, with board members Jeff Morse, Atoosa Reaser, Erika Ogedegbe, Ian Serotkin, Brenda Sheridan, and Harris Mahedavi opposing its release. Disgraced former county superintendent Scott Ziegler and former public information officer Wayde Byard were indicted in December over their handling of the sexual assaults perpetrated by a student who identified as "gender-fluid."

"This is about justice, integrity, and service," board member Tiffany Polifko, who supported the release, told her fellow members before casting her vote, according to the Washington Post. "You can't have justice without truth."

The sex assault cases catalyzed frustration over the state of public schools in Virginia, helping Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R.) to win his election in November 2021 on a platform to restore parents' rights in education. Ziegler was fired following a special investigation commissioned by Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) that showed "administrators pursued their own interest instead of that of their students."

Ziegler faces three misdemeanor charges for false publication, prohibited conduct, and penalizing an employee for a court appearance. Byard faces a felony charge for perjury. An email released in October 2021 by Loudoun schools revealed Ziegler knew about the rape case that took place in a high school bathroom, even though he had said weeks before there had been no reports of sexual assaults.

The six members who opposed the report's release cited concerns over student and faculty privacy. One said Ziegler's departure precluded the need to release the report. Only Polifko and fellow board members Denise Corbo and John Beatty pushed for it to become public.

Scott Smith, the Loudoun County father whose daughter was the victim of the sexual assaults, lambasted the board following the vote Tuesday night.

"How can you send a child to school tomorrow with this school board in charge of your child's safety?" he said, according to WJLA. "How can you do that? How can a parent with any intelligence send your child to school tomorrow? Mine won't be in school tomorrow. Absolutely not."

The post Virginia's Embattled Loudoun County Votes Against Release of Sex Assault Report appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Valerie Cole, a prosecutor for Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón (D.), warned last year in an internal memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that their office was fielding "more than twice as many" such cases than normal with a dwindling number of staff. Cole warns that the district attorney’s office will continue to suffer a "loss of reputation" if cases involving such victims are not handled carefully.

The contents of the memo, which the Free Beacon is the first to report, did not leak during last summer's recall campaign against Gascón. But Cole's warnings have resonated among frustrated staffers, according to prosecutors in the office who say Gascón has yet to heed the memo’s warning—or acknowledge how his policies enabled the rise in crimes.

"What started as isolated shortages due to mismanagement and a slew of additional responsibilities that stem from new laws and policies has spread to negatively impact most of our operations," said John McKinney, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney. "There is a culture of chaos among Gascón’s upper management starting with Gascón himself and trickling down to infect what used to be a highly efficient operation."

The same could be said of many reform-minded prosecutors boosted by the liberal billionaire George Soros, including embattled Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.) and Chicago state’s attorney Kim Foxx (D.). All received millions in donations from Soros while pledging to end "mass incarceration" through sentencing reductions. The result has often led to soaring violent crime rates and higher rates of recidivism.

Some of Gascón’s prosecutors say those very reforms are contributing to the increase in cases. Once-routine charges involving firearms and juvenile crimes are no longer left to the discretion of deputies and now require more paperwork and multiple requests for approval by superiors. Moreover, staff who don’t comply may face professional repercussions.

Career prosecutors like McKinney and John Lewin claim Gascón demoted them after they publicly disagreed with his policy guidelines that reduced sentences for rapists and murderers, the Daily Mail reported. A senior sex crimes prosecutor, Jodi Link, also said she was demoted after she spoke out. At least seven lawsuits were filed in 2022 against Gascón over his retaliatory behavior toward prosecutors.

One prosecutor who spoke with the Free Beacon on the condition of anonymity said Gascón told county defense attorneys to inform his office whenever prosecutors are not following his policies. "Even if we’re following the law" while ignoring the policies, the prosecutor said, Gascón wants to "know so that the administration can take action against us."

More than 120 prosecutors have left since Gascón took office, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The mass exodus followed a number of botched prosecutions. Gascón landed in hot water in May 2022 after he went easy on a transgender pedophile who molested a 10-year-old girl in a restaurant bathroom. He slapped the offender, "Hannah" Tubbs, who was 17 years old at the time of the assault, with two years of probation. Tubbs was charged just months later with an unrelated murder and is currently being held on $1 million bail.

The decision not to try Tubbs as an adult is one of many "reforms" Gascón has imposed after taking office. Gascón last year reversed course on his policy to not try any juvenile criminals as adults but still forces all juvenile criminal charges to be approved first by committees. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The memo obtained by the Free Beacon showed a sharp decrease in staffing at "almost every" one of the units designated to handle "crimes against elders, child physical and sexual abuse, hate crimes, sexual assaults, stalking, and intimate partner violence." The staffing crisis at the so-called Victim Impact Program posed an "unacceptable risk to public safety," Cole said.

Gascón’s opponents are still engaged in a court battle with the prosecutor after a recall campaign petition failed last summer. The recall organizers sued the Los Angeles County Registrar's Office in October for discarding what they said were enough valid signatures to trigger a special election. In December, a Los Angeles judge granted the group access to the signature-verification process, the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

The post ‘Unacceptable’: Los Angeles Progressive Prosecutor Is Ignoring a Sex Crime Crisis, According to Internal Memo  appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Anthony McRae was charged in June 2019 with illegally carrying a concealed handgun without a permit, but later had those charges dismissed by the office of Ingham County prosecutor Carol Siemon (D.). Her office instead let McRae plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor gun charge, and he served a little more than a year on probation, which ended May 2021. He initially faced up to five years in prison for the felony charge, the Detroit News reported.

Siemon retired from the prosecutor’s office at the start of this year after facing criticism from judges and law enforcement officials for her soft-on-crime policies. The same year that McRae was released, ​​Ingham County sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth pushed East Lansing’s city council "to reconsider her internal felony firearm charging policy," which he said "does not hold people properly criminally accountable, and increases the likelihood of additional gun violence."

Siemon made it her office’s official policy in August 2021 to drop mandatory prison sentences for felony firearms charges. She said the sentencing enhancement led to "dramatic racial inequity" and was "not in any way linked to the goal that we share of keeping the public safe."

Siemon is part of George Soros’s vast public safety network. She has participated in international criminal justice reform junkets with other "reform-minded" prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner (D.), Chicago’s Kim Foxx (D.), and Los Angeles’s George Gascón. She also backed radical San Francisco prosecutor Chesa Boudin (D.) ahead of a recall campaign that eventually ousted him from office last year.

The Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement that McRae’s 2019 offense would not have received "the legal maximum" prison sentence, even if they had pursued it.

"Even if he were convicted by a jury of the original charge, Anthony McRae would not have been recommended for a jail or prison sentence," the office said. "The sentencing guideline score would have been the same if he had been convicted of either the original charge (Carrying a Concealed Weapon) or the offense for which he was convicted (carrying a firearm in a vehicle)."

McRae was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

According to Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, "progressive prosecutors such as Ms. Siemon continue to value reducing the incarcerated population over their duty to protect the public by enforcing the law."

In 2021, the Vera Institute for Justice, a think tank funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations, also praised Siemon and other reform prosecutors who pledged to reduce racial disparities in prosecution. Siemon boasted about the changes she made in her office when she announced her retirement in November.

"I believe we have made substantial progress to reform the justice system and provide for a proportionate response to criminal charges," she said. "We have changed the prosecutors’ office’s charging and sentencing practices, to provide a greater range of options to hold people accountable for the harm they cause while reducing incarceration, and continuing to serve victims and to expand their services and support."

But a Michigan circuit court judge called her out weeks earlier for making Lansing less safe with her policies. "She is not a legislator, she is not a judge, and she is making our community unsafe," Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said.

Siemon’s successor, John Dewane, has already set about toughening up charges for repeat offenders, according to an interview he did with WKAR.

"My number one goal, and I put out some policies with regard to this issue, is the increase in gun violence in our community, specifically the Lansing area," he said.

Dewane told the Free Beacon after publication that "McRae would not have been able to legally purchase, own, or possess a firearm" if he had "been convicted of carrying a concealed weapon." Reports show neighbors had called the police on McRae last summer after hearing him fire his gun in the backyard of his father's home in Lansing.

Update 2/15 11:45 a.m.: This piece has been updated with additional information.

The post Michigan State Shooter Had Prior Felony Gun Charge Dismissed By Progressive Prosecutor appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The academics, not all of whom are Jewish or Zionist, say the university should not force "Jewish and Israeli students to take a course" with psychology professor Lara Sheehi. Her online remarks are "rife with profanity and hateful rhetoric against Zionism and Israelis," according to the group of mental health clinicians and university professors. 

The letter comes after Sheehi's Jewish students alleged in a federal civil rights complaint that the professor discriminated against them in a mandatory diversity course and then retaliated when they confronted her about her anti-Semitic comments. In their letter, the academics said the Jewish students' allegations are "quite plausible" in light of Sheehi's public remarks.

"Imagine the scandal that would erupt if a group of students from another background—Black students, Muslim students, or LGBT students—alleged that their professor excluded and shamed them based on their religion, ethnicity, national origin, or sexual orientation in a required course on diversity," the academics wrote in an open letter to the university last week. "The calls for such a professor's resignation or removal would be swift and severe."

George Washington University tapped a "third party" to investigate the allegations against Sheehi shortly after the federal complaint was filed. A spokeswoman for the university did not respond to a request for comment.

Sheehi deleted her Twitter account following a Washington Free Beacon report on the complaint, as well as other comments she has made, including accusing Zionists of having a mental illness and that Jewish people can inflict "violence" by their mere presence. She published her own response last week to the accusations, alleging a vast "right-wing" campaign by the Free Beacon and others to defame professors like her "who critically engage settler-colonialism, white supremacy, anti-blackness, gender (especially trans issues), sexuality, disability, reproductive rights." She also attacked the anti-Semitism watchdog StandWithUs, which helped file the complaint, calling its claims against her "baseless."

"I have been targeted specifically because I am an Arab woman whose scholarship and activism advocates for Palestinians and, in the process, critiques Israeli settler-colonial Apartheid," Sheehi said. She did not respond to a request for comment.

But the academics disagree in their letter, saying Sheehi's "classroom conduct" is under scrutiny, not her "political and academic views." If administrators condone such conduct, they argue, it will "fuel a dangerous turn in the mental health field where activism is entering the consulting room, where 'anti-discrimination' efforts covertly condone discrimination, and where frankly unprofessional and unethical behavior masquerades under the guise of academic freedom."

While they denounced efforts to "doxx" or threaten her, the academics asked for Sheehi to be relieved of teaching any required courses until her complaint is fully adjudicated. If the allegations are corroborated, they add, it will "cast doubt upon her suitability to train psychotherapists in general."

In her response, Sheehi also defended her decision to invite a radical speaker to campus who once praised a Palestinian teenager who had attempted to stab two Israelis to death in 2015. That speaker, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, denounced "white Israeli racism" and called for violence against Jews during her visit.

Sheehi said attendance at the event was "not mandatory" and that she devoted the next class period "to discussing issues raised by a few Jewish students," which ended up "replacing the scheduled class lesson on troubling the 'micro' in microaggressions related to Asian erasure and fatphobia." She implied that her Jewish students surreptitiously recorded that class "without consent" and then used it for their discrimination complaint. Their actions, she said, follow "a long tradition of fomenting racially motivated hate against Arab scholars (especially Arab women scholars) who are engaged in Palestine solidarity work." She further blames her university for not responding to "two formal DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] bias incident complaints that were filed on my behalf."

Sheehi did not deny in her response that she excluded readings on anti-Semitism from her mandatory diversity course—an allegation contained in her students' complaint. Nor did she reject any anti-Semitic comments she has made on social media. Instead, she labeled her critics "sexist" and "misogynist," alleging that they are merely attempting to "stabilize patriarchy and whiteness" and "disciplining BIPOC women’s bodies and minds."

"My anger, in those tweets, and in what fuels my liberatory fire, is justified," she said. "It is a political anger."

Though she maintains critics are on the verge of silencing her "scholarship," that has not stopped Sheehi from any number of professional engagements. On Saturday, she is slated to be the keynote speaker at a virtual conference discussing the topic of "disrupting settler colonial violence in the clinic."

The post Hundreds of Academics Urge George Washington University To Suspend Anti-Semitic Professor appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Milford councilman Russell Heller, who also works as a supervisor at a utility company, was gunned down in a parking lot outside his office on Wednesday by a former employee. Last Wednesday, Sayreville councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour was killed by an unidentified gunman outside her home, in what police called a targeted attack. Heller’s killer was later found dead from a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The pair of killings come as Democrats have sought to blame their enemies for fomenting "political violence" against their party members. In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden attributed the brutal assault of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D., Calif.) husband, Paul Pelosi, to the actions of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Heller was killed less than 15 miles from where Dwumfour was found dead in her SUV with multiple gunshot wounds. Her killer is still at large. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy (D.) attributed both deaths to "gun violence."

Heller, a father of one, has served as a councilman in Hunterdon County since 2017.

Rep. Tom Kean (R.), who represents New Jersey’s Seventh Congressional District, said Wednesday night that he was "shocked and saddened by the tragic murder."

"Russell was an outstanding public servant who proudly represented the river town he loved," he said on Twitter. "My prayers are with his family and the Milford community."

The post Second Republican New Jersey Lawmaker Shot Dead Within a Week appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Trevor Bickford was charged with more than 10 crimes related to the assault, six of which include terrorism enhancements, the office of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg (D.) announced on Wednesday. The 19-year-old wounded three officers the night of Dec. 31, 2022, with his machete, fracturing the skull of one, before he was shot by another officer. He was indicted for attempted first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, attempted first-degree murder, and a string of assaults that included terrorism enhancements, among other charges.

Bragg said in a press release that the charges "demonstrate just how seriously we are treating this incident."

Bickford, a recent convert to Islam who had intended to carry out a jihad, faces multiple life sentences in prison without parole if convicted on all counts. At an arraignment hearing in January, he told prosecutors he carried out the attack because of the United States’ support for Israel.

The indictment is a far cry from Bragg’s handling of another attack that took place in May 2021, when a mob of anti-Israel assailants chased down and beat a yarmulke-wearing Jewish man, giving him a concussion. One of those assailants, Waseem Awawdeh, was offered a cushy plea deal by Bragg last month, confining him to just six months in prison.

"If I could do it again, I would do it again," Awawdeh said, according to the New York Sun. "I have no problem doing it again." He initially faced seven years in prison.

Bickford told prosecutors he planned to attack the NYPD officers because all state officials "cannot be proper Muslims because the United States government supports Israel." Bragg’s office requested he be held without bail afterward, arguing that he posed "a significant flight risk."

The Wells, Maine, native left his family’s home in December, later telling prosecutors he had plans to travel to the Middle East by way of Miami before he "decided to come to New York first in order to kill people and carry out jihad."

In a diary he kept that was recovered by his family after the attack, Bickford referred to law enforcement, as well as his brother who serves in the U.S. military, as the "enemy." He also begged his family members to "repent to Allah" and "accept Islam."

Bickford’s indictment comes just days after acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie announced he was on the mend after recovering from a brutal knifing by an Islamic extremist in upstate New York.

The post Machete-Wielding Times Square Attacker Hit With Terrorism Charges appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

1. Cashiers at Burger Joints Need To Sign Non-Competes

Biden took credit for banning burger joints like McDonald’s from forcing employees to sign non-compete agreements. "So a cashier at a burger place can’t cross the street to take the same job at another burger place to make a couple bucks more," he said. Republicans balked.

"They just changed it because we exposed it," Biden retorted. "That was part of the deal guys, look it up."

The president is apparently referring to his July 2021 Executive Order, which encouraged the Federal Trade Commission "to ban or limit non-compete agreements."

Most fast-food chains have never made any such requirement of their workers, though some did prevent them from working at nearby franchise locations. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden made frequent use of this talking point, even earning the rebuke of left-leaning fact checkers.

"Get your facts straight, Jack!"

2. Paul Pelosi Was Attacked Because of Election Deniers

Biden tied the brutal assault of 82-year-old Bay Area resident Paul Pelosi to the rhetoric of election deniers. "Just a few months ago, unhinged by the Big Lie, an assailant unleashed political violence in the home of the then-speaker of this House of Representatives, using the very same language that insurrectionists who stalked these halls chanted on January 6th," he said.

David DePape, a deranged 42-year-old who reportedly lived inside a school bus, attacked Pelosi with a hammer inside his San Francisco home just days before the 2022 midterms. He has presented conflicting reasons for the attack since his arrest, including government corruption and the reduction of individual liberties. While legacy media tried to paint DePape as a right-wing extremist, his son told the Daily Mail that his father was a "progressive" and "hardly a right-wing conservative."

3. COVID Shut Down Businesses and Closed Schools

 Biden in his prepared remarks blamed an airborne virus for having "shut down our businesses" and "closed our schools," when referring to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In reality, politicians chose to initiate lockdowns and stay-at-home orders to "slow the spread" of the coronavirus beginning in March 2020. While some Republican governors like Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) reversed course within months, Democratic governors and lawmakers kept lockdown orders and mask mandates in place for years, damaging many small businesses and harming children’s educations.

Biden has still not lifted the federal emergency declaration for COVID-19, which is set to expire on May 11.

4. Republicans Want To Get Rid of Social Security

"Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share," Biden said, "some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset."

The president was referring to an ongoing debt ceiling fight with Republican lawmakers, in which the Republican Party has floated various spending cuts to avoid a default. But House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) has said that cuts to both Medicare and Social Security are "off the table." Many Republicans also stood and applauded when Biden pledged to not cut either program.

5. Jill Biden, Ed.D., Came Up With an Obama-Era Education Slogan

Biden credited his wife, "Dr." Jill Biden, with having coined the expression: "Any nation that out-educates us will out-compete us."

She did not come up with it. The expression has been used before by Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama. During his first year in office, the former president remarked, "In a world where countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow, the future belongs to the nation that best educates its people."

Cameras caught Biden’s wife cheating with more than her words at the beginning of the speech last night, when the first lady stole a kiss from second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

6. Biden Takes Credit for Changing the Conversation on China

"Before I came to office," Biden noted in his address, "the story was about how the People’s Republic of China was increasing its power and America was failing in the world. Not anymore."

Former president Donald Trump has often been credited with changing U.S. policy toward China. Under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his administration cracked down on Chinese espionage campaigns and moved to ban TikTok.

Biden made no mention that a Chinese spy balloon traversed the United States just days before his State of the Union.

7. Biden Talks Up Smoking Trees

In apparently off-the-cuff remarks about climate change, Biden said that "more timber has been burned [due to wildfires] that I have observed from helicopters than in the entire state of Missouri." He also blamed global warming for "floods and droughts."

Biden: "More timber has been burned that I have observed from helicopters and the entire state of Missouroh." pic.twitter.com/rtrmUEKIvE

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 8, 2023

Leaving aside for the moment whether the president has indeed observed wildfires from a helicopter, Biden may just have been mixing up his words, as he’s been prone to do. His administration last July greenlit more than 200 helicopters to respond to wildfire incidents, according to the White House.

The claims follow a long tradition of liberals using debatable scientific results to push their agenda. Biden’s prepared remarks, for instance, touted his administration’s green energy initiatives as a response to the wildfires.

"We’re building 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations installed across the country," he said. "And helping families save more than $1,000 a year with tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances."

8. America Needs Oil for ‘At Least Another Decade’

As part of a reelection campaign preview, Biden floated the idea that America might "need oil for at least another decade."

Biden: "When I talked to a couple of [oil companies], they say, 'we are afraid you are going to shut down all the oil refineries anyway, so why should we invest in them?' I said, we are going to need oil for at least another decade."

All the Republicans start laughing pic.twitter.com/AYLBI5g7pw

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 8, 2023

The apparent olive branch to the oil and gas industry is far from reassuring, given the vast economic and social repercussions of abandoning fossil fuels in just 10 years' time. The shift would threaten jobs, food supply chains, and the entire global economy. Most progressives are pushing for the United States to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the earliest.

Early in the pandemic, lefties loved to suggest that a government-forced reduction in travel by fossil fuels could transition to a permanent change. If they stay in power, that idea could go up like a Chinese spy balloon over the continental United States.

9. Nobody Wants to Be Xi

In another unscripted remark, Biden said, "Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger. Name me a world leader who changed places with Xi Jinping. NAME ME ONE! NAME ME ONE!"

Biden: "Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger. Name me a world leader who changed places with Xi Jinping. NAME ME ONE! NAME ME ONE!" pic.twitter.com/MxYUpWGZVY

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 8, 2023

The attempt to ape his predecessor’s tough talk on malign foreign powers left more than a few pundits scratching their heads. The reference apparently reaffirmed Biden’s commitment to protecting the fate of democracy amid the rise of authoritarian powers—namely, China, which last week flew unimpeded over the nation to gather intelligence on U.S. military bases.

In fact, tyrants from Kim Jong-un to Vladimir Putin and Kamala Harris would probably kill to have Xi’s absolute power and cult of personality.

At least one person seemed to get what Biden was saying: Lincoln Project alum Tom Nichols, who said Biden’s geopolitical ad lib "was great" for "wonks" like himself.

"I guess I just got it on an intuitive level: 'Who'd want to be riding that tiger.' We spend so much time embiggening China when in fact their leaders have to sweat out every damn day and pray for enough growth to keep them in power."

Whatever that means.

The post 9 Most Ridiculous Claims Biden Made During State of the Union Address appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said she expects Biden "will refuse to mention … how his policies have failed students." 

"Rather than focusing on protecting the rights of workers, job creators, students, and parents, the president will talk out of both sides of his mouth, showcasing his administration's hypocrisy front and center for every American to see," she said in a statement.

Last year, Foxx and Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), who chairs the Oversight Committee, sent letters to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona requesting documentation on more than $120 billion from Biden's American Rescue Plan in pandemic relief for public schools. The White House promised the funds would help hire additional tutors and provide more learning opportunities for students whose reading and math scores fell during the pandemic. Only 20 percent of those funds must "address learning loss," according to the Department of Education.

Foxx and Comer have since revealed that some districts used the money to push for "antiracist" and "implicit bias" training, instead of increased instructional hours. Other reports found that school boards purchased electric school buses—another Biden administration priority. Cardona never responded to the lawmakers.

The stimulus abuse could be a stumbling block for Biden, who on Friday attacked "extreme MAGA Republicans in the House" for their alleged fiscal irresponsibility.

"Jobs are up, wages are up, inflation is down, and COVID no longer controls our lives," Biden told attendees at a Democratic National Committee reception in Washington, D.C. "But now, the extreme MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives have made it clear they intend to put it all at risk. They intend to destroy it."

The Education Department directed the Washington Free Beacon to its online portal showing COVID relief data, but declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The Department of Education reported in September that school closures caused students' test scores to fall dramatically between 2020 and 2022. The learning loss disproportionately affected poor, black, and Latino students, according to a 2022 Harvard study. COVID school closures caused "the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation," according to one of the study's authors.

Those findings cut against Biden's pledge to "advance equity in K-12 education" and could put pressure on the president amid an ongoing debt ceiling fight. Republican lawmakers have recently floated spending cuts for K-12 education, among other options, according to the Washington Post.

Freshman Rep. Byron Donalds (R., Fla.), who sits on the Oversight Committee, told the Free Beacon that if Democrats had been serious about redressing learning loss, they would have "put hard ties on the spending."

"They're not serious about the things that America is focused on—definitely not pandemic learning loss because if they were they would've got kids back in classrooms," he said. "Democrats don't want to actually put hard ties on the spending. They love it going to pet projects in these school districts."

Biden's pandemic relief is projected to fund the recruitment of 250,000 school officials, not all of whom have to be academic instructors.

"We spent billions of dollars on COVID relief," said Rep. Lisa McClain (R., Mich.), who sits on the Oversight and Education Committees. "And they forget about the duty they have to the American taxpayer. … Let's focus on some noncontroversial issues—perhaps math, perhaps reading—and see what we can do to be better."

The attacks from the right come as Biden faces dissent within his own party, including concerns about whether he could even mount a successful reelection campaign. Just 37 percent of Democrats want Biden to run for a second term, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

The conflict also underscores how the party has moved leftward in recent years. Donalds said he has tried to bargain with some of his Democratic colleagues, suggesting a compromise around trading housing voucher allotments for school choice vouchers. But they haven't been receptive.

"They're not serious about anything," he added, "except electric school buses—the vice president likes those a lot."

The post Ahead of State of the Union, House Republicans Slam Biden for Ignoring Learning Loss appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Former House speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and former Reps. Howard McKeon (R., Calif.) and John Kline (R., Minn.) said Biden is using the 2003 HEROES Act, which allows the Education Department to offer waivers to student financial aid recipients during a "national emergency," as a "pretext" to cancel $500 billion in loans, according to an amicus brief filed Friday at the Supreme Court. Both Republicans and Democrats, they say, acknowledged the law was not meant to "absolve borrowers who haven’t suffered hardship from the responsibilities they took on as borrowers." Instead, it was meant to aid service members in paying off student loans during the Iraq war.

"Public service, almost by definition, involves sacrifice," they wrote. "But as lawmakers, [we] wanted to repay the brave Americans who endure great personal hardship in service to their country with a modest protection against the distractions of administrative obligations arising from their student loans."

In January, Biden’s Justice Department petitioned the Court, saying the law gave Education Secretary Miguel Cardona "clear authorization" to cancel the student debt. The administration argues the coronavirus pandemic constitutes a "national emergency"—an argument which the authors of the HEROES bill reject, saying the phrase referred directly to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Neither the White House nor the Department of Education responded to a request for comment.

The cancellation could cost as much as $1 trillion over 10 years, the Penn Wharton Budget Model predicts. Former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman has called the plan "indefensible" and "reckless."

The Justice Department appealed after a series of lower courts’ rulings rejected the debt cancellation move, arguing "economically vulnerable borrowers" had been left in "limbo." Biden pledged the debt forgiveness as part of his 2020 presidential campaign.

The former lawmakers filed the amicus brief with Pacific Legal Foundation for Biden v. Nebraska and Dept. of Education v. Brown, two cases before the Court that concern the debt cancellation. The group noted in a press release that Biden’s Education Department did not follow typical rulemaking guidelines for federal agencies before moving to cancel the debt.

"The Biden administration’s use of the HEROES Act as a legal pretext for its debt cancellation has always been a farce," said Caleb Kruckenberg, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. "The authors of the law confirm that fact."

Republican-led states and other conservative legal groups also sued the Biden administration over its student debt gambit. The Court will hear oral arguments for both cases on Feb. 28.

The post Biden Claims Veterans Law Lets Him Forgive Billions in Student Debt. The Law’s Authors Say Otherwise. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Court records show Isaiah Trotman was charged with assault and battery in November 2021, only to have those charges dismissed six months later by Albemarle County, Va., prosecutor Jim Hingeley, who won election in 2019 with the help of six-figure contributions from liberal megadonors, including George Soros. Police arrested Trotman on Wednesday and charged him with first-degree murder.

Homicides have surged to their highest level in decades in many Soros prosecutors’ jurisdictions, with more than 200 murders recorded in D.C. in 2022. So-called progressive prosecutors often dismiss low-level offenders and seek alternatives to incarceration. Hingeley received $114,000 from the Democratic megadonor Sonjia Smith during his 2019 campaign. Soros donated $5,000 to him.

The D.C. Council recently voted to downgrade penalties for many offenses in the district’s criminal code, including reducing sentences for carjackings, robberies, and gun-related felonies.

Hingeley told the Washington Free Beacon that the assault charge was dismissed based on an agreement reached between Trotman and the victim. He added that Trotman would only have served a maximum sentence of one year for the offense, and more likely would have been just six months since it was a misdemeanor.

"I seriously doubt that a hypothetical six-month active jail sentence, costing taxpayers thousands of dollars, and ending in June 2022, would have prevented the tragic killing and woundings in D.C. seven months after Mr. Trotman's release from a hypothetical sentence in Albemarle County," he said.

Trotman brandished a firearm while on a bus before entering the Potomac Avenue Metro Station in Southeast D.C. and opening fire at random. He shot two bystanders in the leg and then proceeded to the platform where he threatened a woman. He then shot and killed a 64-year-old Metro employee who tried to stop him.

Passengers subdued and disarmed Trotman shortly after. He was also charged with kidnapping while armed and assault with a dangerous weapon.

Trotman had other prior arrests last year in Pennsylvania for public intoxication and drug-related charges, according to DCist. He pleaded guilty to the latter charge but was released before his sentencing two months from now. When he was arrested in April 2022, police apparently recovered 12 bags of meth, marijuana, and drug paraphernalia from his car.

Following a summer of anti-police riots in 2020, the D.C. Council slashed the district’s law enforcement budget. Over the next two years, the D.C. police department lost around 280 officers, the Washington Post reported. The flight has left the department short-staffed and ill-equipped to respond to emergencies.

Assistant Chief of Police Ashan Benedict said on Wednesday he wished officers would have arrived sooner to the scene. "The fact that our citizens have to intervene with an armed gunman is disturbing to me," he told reporters.

Update 2/6 10:33 a.m.: This piece has been updated.

The post DC Metro Shooter Had Prior Assault Dismissed by Progressive DA appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The first time, an administrator dismissed the report, telling a concerned teacher the student couldn't be carrying a weapon because he had "little pockets." The second time, an administrator waved away threats made to another student. And the third, an administrator said to "wait the situation out because the school day was almost over," according to an attorney now representing Abigail Zwerner, the 25-year-old teacher who was later shot by her student.

The administrators—including Principal Briana Foster Newton and Assistant Principal Ebony Parker, who both left the school in the wake of the shooting—were obligated to take each of these threats seriously and report them to local law enforcement. But they never did.

Their inaction may have its roots in an Obama-era policy fostered in Virginia by former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe. In 2014, the Obama Education Department threatened to launch civil rights investigations into districts that disproportionately disciplined black or disabled students, pressuring public schools to adopt many policies that reduced disciplinary measures.

According to Max Eden, an education research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the move meant that schools were deemed "successful" to the degree their administrators kept disciplinary levels down.

"It should be shocking that they would ignore those warnings," he said of the Richneck Elementary administrators. "But after a certain point, when you are judged on the basis of warnings like that not being recorded, not abiding by a measure that would lead to it being recorded actually makes perfect sense."

In Virginia, McAuliffe made it a "high priority" of his administration "to reduce student referrals to law enforcement, reduce suspensions and expulsions, [and] address the disparate impact these practices have on African Americans and students with disabilities," as part of his "Classrooms not Courtrooms" initiative.

He found support in groups like the Legal Aid Justice Center, which has unsuccessfully tried to remove police from schools in Virginia. The group also pushed state Democrats to reduce all racial disparities in school discipline, authoring many reports on the subject.  It did not respond to a request for comment.

From 2015 to 2020, Virginia Democrats wrote and passed a number of bills discouraging schools from disciplining students, which were signed into law by McAuliffe and his successor, former governor Ralph Northam (D.). These bills directed the Virginia Board of Education to find "alternatives to suspension and expulsion" and made it illegal to charge students with disorderly conduct. In 2020, Northam removed a requirement for education officials to inform law enforcement of all misdemeanor offenses that occurred on school grounds.

Sometime between 2019 and 2021, Newport News Public Schools added a provision to the "Mandatory Reporting" section of its handbook. Rather than alert law enforcement about "the illegal carrying of a firearm or a weapon onto school property," principals are now directed to refer threats up to a districtwide disciplinary office, which then has to "confirm that the incident rises to the standard outlined in state law prior to contacting law enforcement."

Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R.) has since signed bills into law that partially roll back the Democrats' school safety bills, and the Trump administration rescinded Obama's changes to school discipline. But under President Joe Biden, the Education Department is trying to bring these policies back.

As part of the president's "equity" agenda, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in July 2022 sent a letter that threatened to launch further civil rights investigations if school districts discriminate in their discipline of black and disabled students.

According to Eden, the Obama-era policies that Biden and Cardona want to resurrect were what enabled Parkland, Fla., school shooter Nikolas Cruz. School officials were aware of the danger Cruz posed years before the shooting. He threatened his classmates and was suspended once for an assault while attending Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Police were not notified of the assault, and more minor incidents were often not reported.

Former Broward County Schools superintendent Robert Runcie was indicted in 2021 for lying to a grand jury about details surrounding the Parkland shooting and is now being investigated over whether his district underreported incidents of student misbehavior. A close ally of former secretary of education Arne Duncan, Runcie helped shape the Obama-era school discipline rules.

Newport News superintendent George Parker does not seem poised to reevaluate his disciplinary philosophy in light of the shooting. In a letter posted a little more than a week after the incident, Parker boasted that disciplinary infractions were down across the district in the 2021-22 school year. He highlighted "a 3.6 percent reduction in the referral rate for Black or African-American students and a 1.3 percent reduction for students with a disability."

A spokeswoman for Newport News Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.

A review of the Richneck principal's social media presence shows that she too supported the movement to decrease racial disciplinary disparities. Newton, who has since been relieved of duty but not fired, retweeted a post on the importance of being "antiracist educators" and spoke about how "systemic racism" affects "our society at every level."

Not everyone shares these educators' affinity for equity. At a school board meeting weeks after the shooting, a teacher at an elementary school just minutes from Richneck blamed the district's focus on accreditation and funding over safety for enabling the violence.

"Ask any teacher in this school division why discipline incidents declined. Infraction numbers are down because incidents aren't always officially reported," she said. "It was just a matter of time before something like this happened."

The post How the Left's 'Equity' Obsession Enabled a Virginia School Shooting appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Nearly 40 nonprofits, legal organizations, and trade associations with financial and personnel ties to Google have formally submitted amicus briefs before the Court in Gonzalez v. Google, accounting for a third of the briefs submitted for the case. The case centers around Section 230, a federal law that shields online platforms from legal liability over content posted by third parties. Section 230 is often the only thing preventing tech firms from financial ruin. If the Court rules against Google, which through platforms such as YouTube hosts a massive trove of content, it would open the company to an endless stream of civil suits.

The Supreme Court requires corporations that submit amicus briefs to disclose their parent companies and list any other publicly held companies that own 10 percent or more of its stock. Nonprofit organizations have no such requirement, which allows the groups shilling for Google to omit their financial ties.

The sheer number of interest groups with ties to Google that have filed amicus briefs on the company's behalf offers a window into how tech companies work to influence policy through a series of nonprofits and academics. Though designed to appear as outside entities, many of these groups work extensively to further the interests of their donors.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Last year, Google disclosed a list of entities that received the "most substantial contributions" from its lobbying efforts. One of those groups that received cash from the tech giant, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), also has on its board Mark Isakowitz, Google's vice president of government affairs. Neither Isakowitz's status as the tech company's top lobbyist nor Google's funding of the group were disclosed in the CCIA's brief.

Google was also one of the top donors to the left-leaning Center for Democracy and Technology, contributing millions to the group over the past decade. The center disclosed a former distinguished engineer at Google as part of its amicus brief, but not any of the company's financial donations.

If the Court rules against Google in Gonzalez, the internet giant could be forced to pay damages to the family of a woman who died in the November 2015 Paris terror attacks. One of the terrorists was radicalized after watching ISIS recruiting videos on YouTube. The woman's family argues that the video platform recommended increasingly radical content to that terrorist, which led him to carry out the attack.

Other suits could follow, potentially drying up funds for Google's affiliated nonprofits. Mike Davis, president and founder of the Internet Accountability Project, told the Washington Free Beacon it's "not surprising" to see that the same groups submitting amicus briefs are "on Google's payroll."

"These Big Tech shills are bought and paid for and should be in no way considered independent," he said. "The key to Big Tech's strategy to fend off legislation, regulation, and damaging court rulings is their willingness to reach into their deep pockets and buy off critics."

Among the other groups petitioning the court is Public Knowledge, which has a former general counsel for Google, Daphne Keller, on its board. The left-wing tech advocacy group coordinated with Google and Twitter during the coronavirus pandemic to track alleged "misinformation" on the platforms. Keller's past employment at Google was not mentioned in the group's brief.

Keller filed a separate brief in which she acknowledged her stint at Google but said she "has no ongoing employment or consulting relationship with the company." Public Knowledge took $50,000 from Google between 2020 and 2021, according to its website. The group was founded in 2001 by Gigi Sohn, President Joe Biden's nominee to serve on the Federal Communications Commission.

The Chamber of Progress, which also takes Google's money and was founded in 2020 as a left-wing response to the business-friendly Chamber of Commerce, rushed to the company's defense as well. Led by a former Google lobbyist, the Chamber of Progress said in its amicus brief that an unfavorable ruling against Google would "strangle continued growth and innovation in the most vital element of our modern economy."

Google's influence even extends to sitting members of Congress. Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.)  joined former California congressman Christopher Cox (R.) in submitting a brief supporting Google. Cox sits on the board of the Google-funded nonprofit Net Choice. Cox and Wyden are also the original authors of Section 230.

The High Court will hear oral arguments for Gonzalez on Feb. 21. Justice Clarence Thomas has in recent years expressed a willingness to reconsider the total immunity granted to social media companies under Section 230.

The post Groups on Google Payroll Flood Supreme Court With Briefs Defending Google appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Colinford Mattis's sentence was the second of its kind delivered by U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan of the Eastern District of New York after Urooj Rahman, a public interest lawyer who joined Mattis in the firebombing, was sentenced in November to 15 months. In a pre-sentencing memo, prosecutors said they viewed "Mattis's conduct here as equally culpable to Rahman's conduct" and recommended a sentence of 18 to 24 months—well beneath the initial guideline of 10 years. Mattis's attorney, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.

Mattis and Rahman leveraged their prestigious degrees, left-wing legal advocacy, and personal connections—including with one former Obama administration official who posted Rahman's $250,000 bail—to curry favor with the Justice Department. Liberal media outlets like NPR and New York magazine produced fawning coverage of the two after their arrest.

Trump administration prosecutors had sought a 10-year sentence with a domestic terrorism enhancement for the pair, which was dropped after President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland took office. Mattis and Rahman in June scored a sweetheart deal with Department of Justice prosecutors, pleading guilty to lesser arson and explosives charges that warranted a mere five-year sentence. New York State announced before Rahman's sentencing that both she and Mattis had been disbarred.

James Trusty, a former federal prosecutor, told the Washington Free Beacon in November that the DOJ's treatment of the two was "extraordinarily unusual." Both Mattis's and Rahman's attorneys requested sentence commutations before they appeared in court, pushing for each to be released on time served.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

On May 29, 2020, hours after Minneapolis's Third Precinct was set ablaze by rioters, Mattis and Rahman began sharing plans to build Molotov cocktails and firebomb NYPD targets.

"Bring it to their neck," Mattis, a graduate of Princeton and New York University's law school, texted on the night of protests in New York City. "Molotovs rollin'," Rahman, a Fordham law school graduate, responded.

The two also "encouraged others to engage in violence" and "mocked reportedly injured police officers," according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors said it was "troubling" for a licensed attorney to break the law "with little apparent thought for the severe consequences of that decision." They said it was worse that Mattis's "crime involved targeting a law enforcement agency charged with enforcing the same law that, as an attorney, he had sworn to uphold."

Court filings show Mattis bought two six-packs of Bud Light, toilet paper, and a red gas can before driving with Rahman to the NYPD's 88th precinct in Brooklyn. Rahman took one of the Molotov cocktails and tossed it through the window of a parked cruiser and then ran back to Mattis's minivan, which peeled off "at a high rate of speed" from the scene of the crime. The two were arrested almost immediately afterward.

Both have agreed to pay restitution for the cost of the bombed-out car, which was valued at $30,137.

Update 1/27 at 10:09 a.m.: This piece has been updated with additional comment.

The post Ivy League Lawyer Who Firebombed Cop Car Will Spend a Year and a Day in Prison appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Who said it: Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.), the so-called centrist Democrat who has voted 91 percent of the time with President Joe Biden’s agenda and opposed the confirmation of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Why it matters: Tester made the superlative claim on Monday as he introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the 2010 Citizens United decision, which he credits with having destroyed "democracy" by shielding "big money" corporate donors from scrutiny.

Context: The Supreme Court has handed down far worse decisions in its history. Citizens United is not even in the top five.

In the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Court upheld the legal basis for chattel slavery in the United States, ruling that an enslaved black man who had traveled to free territories had to be kept in bondage. The case catalyzed support for the abolition of slavery, eventually leading to the outbreak of the Civil War.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) affirmed racial segregation laws under the "separate but equal" doctrine, leading to the shameful era of Jim Crow laws in the South.

The High Court’s 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell permitted the forced sterilization of the mentally infirm "for the protection and health of the state," according to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who infamously declared that "three generations of imbeciles are enough."

In 1944, the Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (D.) internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was justified to protect the nation against foreign espionage efforts.

And in 1973, the Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the Constitution protected a right to abortion. Both liberal and conservative legal scholars have long considered its reasoning to be shaky, and it fomented decades of acrimonious Court decisions around social issues until being overturned last year.

Analysis: Tester was aware that he was making a sweeping claim, noting in a Twitter video that the Supreme Court had its fair share of bad rulings. Even the president of End Citizens United, Tiffany Muller, made a more qualified statement Monday, calling the Court’s opinion "one of the worst decisions in modern history."

Tester is also not immune to the allure of taking money from corporate interests. An Associated Press fact check found Tester received more cash from lobbying groups than any other U.S. senator during the 2018 election, including from big corporate banks like Goldman Sachs.

Democrats frequently accuse Republicans of seeking to divide the American people with exaggerated, extremist rhetoric. A careful Washington Free Beacon review of the facts shows that Tester was doing exactly that.

The post FACT CHECK: Jon Tester Says Citizens United Is the ‘Worst Decision the Supreme Court Has Ever Made’ appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Ingrid Gant, who led the Arlington Education Association for six years, was charged with four counts of embezzlement following a six-month investigation, the Fairfax County Police Department announced in a press release. An independent auditor who worked with police found that Gant awarded herself many bonuses and improperly made charges to her organization's debit cards.

Gant is the second teachers' union head to face charges for abuse of funds just this month. In a strikingly similar case, a former teachers' union treasurer in Reading, Pa., was charged on Jan. 6 for embezzling more than $400,000 since 2016, the Reading Eagle reported. The treasurer resigned in September when confronted with the improper expenditures.

June Prakash, the president of the Arlington Education Association, declined to comment. Her organization says it "is pursuing all legal channels to recoup any lost funds and hold those responsible accountable."

Gant was released on an unsecured bond Monday night.

Arlington Parents for Education told the Washington Free Beacon it was "disappointed" to hear about Gant's embezzlement charges.

"Arlington's hardworking teachers and staff who placed their trust in Ms. Gant deserve transparency and accountability as this process moves forward," the group said in a statement.

The Arlington Education Association's board fired Gant in March 2022 after she declined to hand over financial reports or file tax returns. Calibre CPA Group began an audit of the teachers' union in September 2022, later revealing that the 54-year-old embezzled $410,782.10 since 2016.

Months before she was let go, Gant sent a letter urging the Arlington Public Schools superintendent to delay a return to classrooms in January 2022. She demanded further COVID-mitigation measures, claiming teachers would face "super-spreader" events in school due to the Omicron variant, the New York Post reported.

The letter was full of spelling errors and basic grammatical mistakes. It went viral on Twitter after a parent shared a version she had copy-edited.

The Arlington Education Association is a local chapter of the Virginia Education Association, which in fall 2020 pushed to keep schools closed. The Virginia Education Association is also an affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA)—the nation's largest labor union. The Virginia Education Association did not respond to a request for comment.

Teachers' unions have thrown their weight into a host of political campaigns in recent years, spending more than $63 million on Democratic candidates in 2022, according to Open Secrets. Groups like the American Federation of Teachers and the NEA also lobbied hard to keep schools closed more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Department of Education found last year that school closures caused students' math and reading scores to fall dramatically. Learning data compiled by Arlington Parents for Education show that the Virginia school district in particular was slow to address the issue, leading to an increase in fourth- and fifth-grade students who needed specialized reading instruction for the 2021-22 school year.

Update 3:15 p.m.: This piece has been updated with an additional comment.

The post Former Teachers' Union President Arrested in Virginia for Embezzlement appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Democratic House minority whip Katherine Clark (Mass.)—whose child was arrested for assaulting a police officer last weekend—has deleted a press release from her House webpage that gave glowing coverage to the "defund the police" movement.

On June 14, 2020, Clark wrote on her official website that the country needed to reallocate "resources to move police from being a culture of being warriors to being guardians." The press release linked to a Boston Globe article that favorably featured pro-defund activists and quoted the Massachusetts Democrat on anti-police legislation being pushed in the House. As recently as November, that post was still up, according to an archived version of the webpage.

Authorities on Monday charged Clark’s nonbinary child, Jared "Riley" Dowell, with several crimes including assaulting a police officer last weekend at an anti-cop protest. Dowell was released Monday night after pleading not guilty to all charges and paying a $500 cash bail. A spokeswoman for Clark did not respond to a request for comment on the deleted post.

The Globe pointed out in its article that other Democratic leaders including then-House majority leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) and President Joe Biden did not support defunding police. Others, like former House majority whip Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.) and former president Barack Obama, distanced from the movement and disparaged it as a "slogan" following a summer of riots.

In a statement issued amid those riots, Clark called for Democrats to pass their George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, saying "policing laws and practices have traumatized Black communities and shielded law enforcement from accountability."

"We must change the policies at the root of these racial inequities so that every mom and spouse has the same assumption of safety for their family that I have for mine," she told the Boston Herald in June 2020.

The removal of the defund the police post does not appear to be part of a wide-scale deletion. Clark shared the Herald piece on her website on June 8, 2020, a week before posting the since-deleted press release. Unlike the latter post, the Herald article notes that Democrats’ legislation "does not go so far as to ‘defund the police.’" The Herald post is live on Clark’s website as of this writing.

In December 2020, Clark also spurred Democrats to do "everything we can" to pass major policing legislation.

"What we can’t do is get derailed by a disagreement over any particular message," she told the Massachusetts outlet Commonwealth Magazine when asked about opposition to defunding the police. "It is a time in our country’s history where we have to look at racism unblinkingly. We have to do everything we can."

Clark was one of three Democrats—along with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) and caucus chairman Pete Aguilar (D., Calif.)—who ascended to leadership positions in November after their party lost its House majority.

The post Dem Lawmaker Whose Child Assaulted Cop Deletes ‘Defund the Police’ Post appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Jared Dowell, who goes by the name "Riley," was let out after an arraignment hearing during which the 23-year-old pleaded not guilty to assault and battery on a police officer, resisting arrest, tagging property, and vandalism of a historical marker. Dowell has been ordered to stay away from Boston Common, where the assault occurred.

Dowell was among a group of 20 protesters Saturday night who graffitied Boston Common with phrases like "No Cop City" and "ACAB," which stands for "All Cops Are Bastards." When the officers approached to make arrests, they say Dowell struck one of them in the mouth. Police later found a spray paint can in Dowell’s backpack.

Clark is one of three Democrats who assumed House leadership positions in this Congress. All have expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

"Until we take action against racism and police brutality," Clark said in August 2020 during the height of anti-police protests, "tragedies will continue."

When asked by the Boston Herald on Monday whether she condemned violence against police, Clark said, "I condemn violence against everyone, whether that is against police or against community members as a result of any person or government entity."

Clark was also among a group of performative Democratic representatives including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) who pretended to be arrested during pro-abortion protests outside the Supreme Court last year. She issued two press releases to mark the occasion.

The post Dem Lawmaker’s Child Released on $500 Bail After Assaulting Cop appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In a turn of events that captures the epidemic of lawlessness affecting the city, a Los Angeles teenager who hit a mother and baby with his car was shot and killed just weeks after completing his time in a diversionary program.

Kristopher Baca, who pleaded guilty in June 2022 to mowing down the mother walking her child in a stroller in August 2021, was shot to death on Wednesday in Palmdale, Calif., the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced Friday. The mother, who says she voted for Gascón but later left Los Angeles over his "soft-on-crime" approach, told Fox 11 that the "universe delivered the justice we weren't given in court, but a much harsher punishment than he'd have been dealt in a court of law."

The sequence of events shows how crime can compound in many "reform-minded" prosecutors' districts, as their offices pursue lighter sentences and alternatives to incarceration that keep dangerous offenders on the street. Los Angeles's murder rate reached a 15-year high in 2021.

Gascón is one of several so-called progressive prosecutors boosted into office by liberal billionaire George Soros. Elected on a platform to reduce "mass incarceration," the embattled district attorney has faced two potential recall elections over his policies.

After winning office, Gascón announced he would no longer try juvenile criminals as adults, but was forced to reverse course in 2022 after facing backlash. Soros donated $2 million to Gascón's 2020 campaign.

Gascón's office did not respond to a request for comment.

Gascón's office told Fox News in June 2022 that a five to seven months' sentence at a "youth camp" was an "appropriate resolution" in Baca's case. "Fortunately, the baby was uninjured, and the mother received a laceration to her elbow," the office said. Baca had also admitted in court that he had a prior felony conviction from 2019 for poisoning a girl at his high school who later had to be hospitalized.

Prosecutors in Gascón’s office described the youth diversion camp as "less than a military school and a little bit tougher than a summer camp." They promised Baca would "be held accountable for his actions and receive the needed services to foster positive development to keep him from committing future offenses."

A receptionist at Camp Glenn Rockey, where Baca served his sentence, told the Washington Free Beacon that it could not disclose when the juvenile offender had been released. The Los Angeles Times reported that Baca was last seen at the camp in October, four months after he pleaded guilty to the hit-and-run.

Baca's attempted murder of the mother and her baby kickstarted a recall campaign last year against Gascón, which the prosecutor narrowly dodged after signatures for its petition were rejected at a "shockingly" high rate, according to its organizers. The mother, who on the recall group's website chooses to go by her first name, Rachel, said she turned on Gascón over his handling of her case.

"The criminal who tried to kill me and my baby was only sentenced to five months in a juvenile camp," she says in a video featured on the Recall DA George Gascón website. "What he's doing is pro-criminal and anti-victim."

"I was also told that his record would be wiped clean when he turns 18," the mother also told Fox. "How on earth can that be? He tried to murder two innocent pedestrians. Murder. And we have video evidence. My child would be dead if I hadn't been there to protect him."

The recall campaigners sued the Los Angeles County Registrar's Office in October for discarding what they claimed were enough valid signatures to trigger a recall.

The post Street Justice: Los Angeles Has Become Wild West Under Soft-on-Crime Prosecutor appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The office of Cook County state's attorney Kim Foxx (D.) dropped murder and attempted murder charges against Juan Ferba, who in December fired at least 14 rounds on a South Side street corner, according to CWBChicago. Prosecutors said at a bail hearing that Ferba was in a heated dispute with a man and both pulled out their guns. Ferba shot the man three times in the head and struck a woman on a nearby bus in the hand.

Chicago police last week arrested Ferba and charged him with murder and attempted murder. But prosecutors tossed the charges out and instead slapped the gunman with illegally possessing a firearm, which they say he had used "for self-defense."

Ferba has served prison time for one prior violent felony conviction, court records show. A pre-trial public safety assessment also gave him a four in six chance of committing another crime. He remains in custody after failing to pay $1,000 bail.

Foxx is among a group of so-called criminal justice reform prosecutors boosted into office by George Soros. The left-wing billionaire donated $2 million to Foxx's 2020 campaign. Like Soros-backed Philadelphia prosecutor Larry Krasner (D.), Foxx has overseen a decades-high murder rate, with more than 800 homicides recorded in Chicago in 2021.

A spokeswoman for Foxx said the office is "unable to comment on pending litigation."

Jason Johnson, the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told the Washington Free Beacon that Foxx "drops felony cases, especially those involving violence and gun offenses, at an alarming rate."

"While it's appalling, it's unsurprising that a radical D.A. like Kim Foxx would give leniency to a convicted felon committing violence with an illegal gun because she's done it over and over again," Johnson said, pointing to at least two other cases. Both involved girls as young as seven and eight years old killed in shootouts.

"She only folded after the police and mayor publicly excoriated her," he said of the first case. "And just last year, the police themselves had to file charges against an admitted killer after Foxx plain refused."

A 2022 Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund report found that Soros's philanthropy network has spent more than $40 million in the last decade to elect 75 liberal prosecutors, including Foxx, in half of America's largest jurisdictions. Under Foxx's leadership, Cook County has seen a 27 percent decrease in convictions and a 54 percent increase in dismissed cases, another Legal Defense Fund report shows.

Veteran prosecutors have fled Foxx's office in recent years, saying her approach is contributing to a citywide crime spike, the Daily Mail reported.

A judge ordered Ferba to pay $1,000 bail and submit to electronic monitoring. Foxx's office said the gunman is expected in court again on Feb. 1.

The post Chicago's 'Reform-Minded' DA Lets Gunman Off Easy After Killing a Man and Wounding a Bystander appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Howard Dixon Slingerland, who raised nearly $750,000 for both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, illegally took federal grant money to pay off more than $600,000 of his organization’s payroll and credit card debts, which included personal expenses. The $1.5 million grant was meant to provide career advancement for young adults who had been through the criminal justice system, court filings show.

Slingerland also admitted to underreporting around $450,000 in income and owing nearly $150,000 in back taxes. He also admitted to embezzling tens of thousands of dollars from his nonprofit to pay his property taxes and fund personal tutors for his children and an expensive dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Slingerland pleaded guilty to one count of misapplication of funds and one count of lying on his tax returns. He faces a maximum sentence of 13 years in federal prison.

The disgraced nonprofit leader is no stranger to abuse of funds charges. In 2014, Slingerland’s nonprofit, the Youth Policy Institute, failed to disclose $140,000 it spent lobbying Obama’s White House and federal agencies for grant funding—potentially violating federal lobbying laws.

An attorney for Slingerland said he "takes responsibility for the mistakes he made," citing his misapplication of funds and failures to report personal income.

From 2015 to 2019, Slingerland used more than $14,000 from his nonprofit to pay down property taxes, more than $10,000 on tutoring his children, more than $6,000 for an upscale family dinner at Momofuku Ko in New York City, and nearly $2,000 on a new personal computer.

In addition to raiding his nonprofit to fund personal expenses, including his wife’s pension and lavish home decor, Slingerland helped line the pockets of Democratic candidates like former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti (D.). He hosted multiple fundraisers for Garcetti’s 2013 campaign and contributed $5,000 to Democrats in the 2018 midterms, Fox News reported.

Slingerland ran his Los Angeles-based nonprofit from 1996 until 2019, when he was accused of misusing funds and fired. A bankruptcy filing alleged the former CEO had misspent $1.7 million in company money. Slingerland called the filing "extremely misleading" and said only "a handful of expenditures were mistakenly made," the Associated Press reported.

The Youth Policy Institute was founded to fight poverty and empower poor youth through education and job training initiatives, according to court filings. Slingerland pocketed as much as $400,000 annually during his final years at the nonprofit.

Before his sentencing hearing, Slingerland must complete a financial disclosure form and pay back at least $821,958.56 in restitution to the federal government.

The post Top Obama Fundraiser Confesses To Misusing $600,000 in Federal Grants Meant for Poor Youth appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.