Fraud

More from today’s funtime White House presser. Jake Tapper of ABC asked Robert Gibbs about the Afghanistan election:
TAPPER:  President Obama last month in Pittsburgh said, of the Afghan elections and the aftermath, “What’s most important is that there’s a sense of legitimacy in Afghanistan among the Afghan people for their government.”  Is there a sense [...]

Bonner & Associates says that while they may be responsible for the 13 other forged letters to Congress, they’re not to blame for fake letter No. 14 that was revealed yesterday. The letter claims to be from a Virginia American Legion post, to Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), but was actually sent by Bonner & Associates [...]

John Gorman, the former ArmorGroup Kabul project manager turned whistleblower whose allegations against the company I wrote about yesterday, met with aides to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in 2007 to share with the Government Affairs Committee chairman his account of widespread fraud with the company State chose to protect its Kabul embassy.
CBS News confirms that [...]

For nearly one year, a mysterious “graphics expert” who goes by the name “Dr. Ron Polarik” has claimed to have proven that the certificate of live birth provided by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is forged. “Polarik’s” lengthy analysis, posted at his Townhall.com blog, became the basis for people like Jerome Corsi to say that Obama’s [...]

In February, TWI’s Daphne Eviatar called attention to the weak protections in the federal economic stimulus bill for whistleblowers who expose contracting fraud. At the time, Daphne wrote:
[T]he stimulus bill fails to adequately protect employees of government contractors, who are in the best position to blow the whistle on fraud and abuse of taxpayer money. [...]

Representatives Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) have just asked FBI Director Robert Mueller to investigate whether the CIA misled Congress, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has charged.
Suggesting that such claims, if proven false, would “harm national security” undermining morale at the CIA, King cited a federal law that criminalizes fraud and false [...]

I talked briefly with Rick Scott, the chairman (and major funder) of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, after he gave a short talk at the Heritage Foundation about his group’s efforts to create a grassroots movement against nationalized health care. After asking him about the reception he was getting for Republicans, I wanted to know whether [...]

Thomas Frank has a terrific op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, praising President Obama’s recent presidential memorandum declaring the end of an era of unrestrained government outsourcing.
The president “meant to put the kibosh on the GOP’s favorite method for spreading the wealth around,” Frank writes, noting the astronomical growth of federal spending under former [...]

Amid the Democrats’ boostering and the Republicans’ assaults on the final stimulus package, almost no one is focusing on a key part of the bill that will be critical to making it work: accountability for how that $787 billion is spent. In fact, a look at the final bill reveals that to a large extent, [...]

That’s the question Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism asks about Bernie Madoff’s huge Ponzi scheme. He also raises another good point: Why didn’t Madoff make a run for it?