Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS OCT 24

The MSM will not cover this- well, would you if you were an enabler? It this isn’t election interference than the activity does not exist. No one is able the law, and DEMS are beginning to get a taste of that. Too bad Republicans on the ballot do not seem to have the savvy or intelligence to make ads that highlight these things… mrossol

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY🇺🇸🌍

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The polling industry is either shattering apart or a long-hidden problem is being exposed. We aren’t sure yet. Though corporate media knows all about it —even the New York Times scrambled this week to repair its polling systems— readers were hard-pressed to find much coverage. But exceptions appeared. On Thursday, local ABC-13 Asheville reported, “Polling firm disappears amid media questioning surveys, employees.” A new one.

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that we want polling companies to be transparent, unbiased, and, whenever we need backup data from them, to immediately disappear in a puff of smoke.

Before we talk about fake polls again, let’s make one thing clear: the stakes. By now, we all know that the worst crime ever to appear in the dark catalog of human malfeasance is election interference. Worst of all, this crime is so easy. You can practically do it without even knowing.

Believe it or not, a single fake Instagram can threaten to overthrow the foundations of democracy, even if only three people see it and two of them were high. Just ask the Russians, whom Democrats have basically convicted of election interference for nothing beyond some TikToks and Facebook posts.

In 2019, former president Jimmy Carter (probably intoxicated from peanut oil fumes) even called Trump an illegitimate president because of Russian social media posts. Headline from CNN:

But what about polls? Polls are far more influential than TikToks. They thunder through corporate media’s echo chamber. Polls grow charts on television like weeds sprouting in a garden. Polls cause donors to give more generously or to withdraw their support. Polls create or erode momentum. Polls increase or suppress turnout.

Polls are intended to persuade voters.

If a fake poll reported by the New York Times actually makes a leading candidate drop out of a Senate primary— isn’t that the worst kind of election interference? If not, then what is?

So you would think fake polls should alarm corporate media, since they represent a clear and present danger to democracy, a threat of the first order and the most immediate and dangerous kind of election interferenceimaginable?

But nah.

📈 On Thursday, polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne —the same outfit that torpedoed Wedgewood Polls earlier this week— announced it had received an anonymous tip raising questions about another sketchy polling provider— this one called SoCal Strategies. After FiftyPlusOne’s suspicions were aroused, it emailed SoCal a few basic questions.

SoCal went dark.

Twenty-four hours later, SoCal’s website was taken down, its X account closed, and its email accounts went offline. Bye, suckers!

When FiftyPlusOne, trying to figure out how to contact the owner, pulled up SoCal’s Florida business registration, the investigation found that SoCal had told the State of Florida it was out of business in May— even though it kept producing polls through October. They also noticed a bizarre note on SoCal’s Division of Corporations entry, which sounded less like a business status and more like a hostage note:

Normally, when business owners tell the State of Florida they are closing a company, one of the prompts is “describe the occurrence that resulted in the limited liability company’s dissolution.” Whoever closed SoCal wrote (in all caps), “ITS TIME FOR THIS TO END AND FOR US TO MOVE ON. I JUST WANT TO PUT THIS ALL BEHIND.”

Yikes.

But even though it dissolved itself in May, SoCal mysteriously kept submitting polls to newspapers and aggregators— well past “TIME TO END.” Now, suddenly, it is just as mysteriously gone, flown by night. As regular readers will recall, this makes two polling implosions in one week, and three in the last two months.

On Wednesday, the Times reported the Wedgewood story: “Discovery of New Fake Polls Puts a Spotlight on Trust in Surveys.” You don’t say. (It has not yet reported the SoCal story.) This provided the President of the United States a chance to chime in, and he took the obvious jab at the Times.

📉 Corporate media is flummoxed. It has no idea what to make of all this. One laughable entry appeared in yesterday’s USA Today, which reported, “Fake polls: Should America be worried about survey integrity?” (What do I always tell you about headlines that pose questions? Don’t hold your breath for an answer.)

You’ll love this— USA Today, an integral cog in the most pessimistic media machine in human history, found a silver lining. It repeated those words three times in the story, including in a section header. Here’s the quote from its optimistic expert:

You have to admire this heroic effort to find the bright side. “Paradoxically” —terrific!— “the more fraud is prevalent, the more people are realizing the value of the scientific method.” Haha! It was like saying that, paradoxically, the more useless counterfeit $100s the ATM spits out, the more people realize the value of the banking system.

When it comes to the economy, Iran, Trump, germs, AI —you name it— the media is more consistently pessimistic than that depressed donkey who followed Winnie the Pooh around. But when it comes to undeniable proof of widespread fake news spread around by corporate media like toxic peanut butter, poisonous fake polls undermining elections and democracy itself— well, look at the silver lining! Paradoxically!

They’re still doing it! On Thursday, MS NOW reported a +11 point “blue wave” for Democrats based on a New York Times poll:

There’s a compelling theory floating around that all these fake pollsters are winking out right before it’s time to pay the piper, when the midterm results once again fail to show the Democrats’ blue wave and a bunch of disappointed Polymarket bettors are looking for someone to blame. I can’t say one way or the other, but it sure makes you think, doesn’t it?

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Yesterday I promised more October arrest stories, and I intend to deliver. We’ll shift to arrests of mostly (but not all) Democrats who, unlike yesterday’s crop, are not elected officials. We’ll start with what was arguably the best news: the deep staters. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Former FBI officials charged with lying to Congress about Hunter Biden laptop inquiry.”

Yesterday, the DOJ “charged two former FBI officials with making false statements to Congress,” WaPo reported, “that allegedly hindered a House committee as it was investigating President Biden’s son Hunter.” The pair aren’t just any old random FBI officials. Nikki Floris led the intelligence division in the FBI’s Washington field office. Bradley Benavides was the deputy assistant director for counterintelligence.

Deep state termites.

Floris and Benavides were released on Friday morning after self-surrendering in lieu of arrest and making their initial appearance before a federal magistrate. They each face up to five years for lying to Congress.

The DOJ has been doing a lot of work, a surprising new development that many of us believed was only possible when tracking down January 6th tourists. It filed a 27-page statement of facts against the two former FBI officials. It was damning. It carefully listed statements from their sworn congressional testimony right next to source documents where they said the exact opposite.

For instance, Floris told House investigators in 2023 she’d never seen a Grassley-Johnson report about Hunter’s laptop. But over two years earlier, she’d emailed that report to Benavides under the subject “Ukraine report,” with the note “Just dropped this am.” She also attached a summary of the alleged $7 million Burisma bribe she later said she knew nothing about.

In a separate declassified September 2020 chat, Floris wrote, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.” Around then, she helped kill an FBI Albany report about China making fake driver’s licenses for Biden mail-in votes. Her reason for squashing the report: it “will contradict Director Wray’s testimony.” Ruh roh.

In 2023, Benavides told House investigators that the first time he’d heard about the laptop was two days earlier when preparing to testify, from Wikipedia. But on October 22, 2020, Benavides sent a calendar invite titled “To Discuss Laptop” to the Justice Department’s Hunter Biden point man, and then met him in person at FBI headquarters.

His FBI successor, Laura Dehmlow, said she “would certainly say that Brad Benavides was aware” the laptop was real. His Clintonesque 2023 reply: “I don’t know what ‘real’ means.”

Both were promoted after Biden’s election. Benavides became deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, and later left for a “Senior Risk Manager” job at Amazon.

Prosecutors had until 2028, so charging them 10 days before the midterms was obviously a choice. I would call it a good choice, for the sake of irony if for no other reason. Corporate media headlines framed the pair as victims of retaliation. NBC called them “frequent targets of Trump allies.” The AP called the charges the latest “splashy and politically charged” actions. Politico’s lede swerved into the 2020 election, “which Trump has falsely claimed was stolen.”

If you’ve been trying to follow the RussiaGate scandal, both Floris and Benavides were front and center in the FBI’s scandalous skunkworks. Floris and Benavides, for example, were among the eight officials who approved the “Round River” report that collected informant reports on Hunter Biden and labeled them Russian disinformation. Round River was the FBI operation that compiled a giant spreadsheet of Republicans it labeled “conduits of disinformation.”

One of the group’s planning emails suggested using the Hunter informants “to send information of our choosing back upstream.” It’s not disinformation when we do it. Floris enthusiastically replied, “Looking forward to the conversation!”

I’ll bet she’s not looking forward to these conversations. The hunters have become the hunted.

🔥 Just in October, DOJ arrested or charged around a half-dozen more government employees and insiders. Here’s what I found:

🔥 DOJ did an even wider sweep from just October —roughly three weeks— of healthcare and covid fraudsters. This is where a few Republican donors popped up, a fact I note for perfect fairness, and which eliminates the media’s “revenge” narrative. These, by the way, are only a sample. The DOJ said it charged over 40 in its SNAP sweep, and 15 in its Southern California healthcare roundup.

I suspect that most of the “unknown” party affiliations were Democrats, but I lacked time to run them all down. For fairness, I left them ambiguous.

🔥 But the biggest group of DOJ (and state) charges and arrests were of illegal alien voters and election fraudsters. According to NPR, DOJ charged 113 noncitizens this month. Here’s the partial table:

To give you an idea, here are the six names charged on Thursday in Ocala, Florida, which is a short drive south on I-75 from where I live. All are green-card holders:

• Jamie Sosa Sardina, Cuba
• Luis Manuel Perez, Cuba
• Martha Haydee Desantis, 81, Ecuador (no relation to the governor)
• Lise Marie Johnson, Canada
• Diane Curley, Canada
• Pedro Franco, Brazil

A few of the names from yesterday’s charges in Pennsylvania:

• Artur Kopacz, Poland
• Osmal Loy, Cuba
• Yehuda Peer, Israel
• Alfredo Santiesteban, Cuba
• Joyce Donovan, Kenya
• Inna Henry, Russia
• Nourten Kuruju, Greece
• Nina Nyawara, 21, Kenya
• Joyce Pitts, 80, Netherlands

🔥 The Massachusetts case earned a little more description. On Thursday, the Times of India reported, “$38,000 to $40,000 per fake marriage: Massive fraud ring for facilitating Green Card busted in Massachusetts. US citizen was selling ‘American Dream’ and investing money in Dominican Republic.”

In Fall River, Massachusetts, romance never died. It was just billed by the half-hour. Federal prosecutors said 43-year-old Jennifer Gonzalez ran a matrimonial assembly line for more than a decade, cranking out 18 to 20 sham marriages a year at about $40,000 a pop, for a total of more than $6 million.

Call it a destination wedding. Brides and grooms who had never met walked into a Massachusetts courthouse as strangers and walked out with a fast lane to a green card. (Ms. Gonzalez kept the gift registry.) On October 21st, as part of a nationwide marriage-fraud sting, the DOJ charged six people and arrested five. (The sixth, Jaylin Hill, was easy to find, since he’s already in state prison on an unrelated gun charge.)

Since her multi-million romantic hustle wasn’t quite good enough, prosecutors said Gonzalez also collected more than $120,000 in food stamps. Isn’t our American charitable impulse nice? She invested all the money into real estate in the Dominican Republic, which the DOJ’s press release called “her country,” even though the Times of India called her a “US citizen.” I’ll leave that discrepancy up to you.

The best part was the FBI’s wiretapped recording, in which Gonzalez explained her business model better than any economist could. She said she “stopped doing weddings at the end of 2024… that’s when Trump was becoming a president.” Whoops!

So for ten years the fraud ran as smoothly as a Dominican cigar factory. Then one man won an election, and the industry temporarily closed for renovations. What can I tell you? Elections have consequences.

When an FBI informant offered that “Massachusetts is the best place,” Ms. Gonzalez agreed, explaining, “this state is a sanctuary, you get health insurance, you get a lot of help as an immigrant here.” Thanks, suckers! I mean taxpayers!

“Trump doesn’t like this state,” she added, unnecessarily.

Democrats have spent decades insisting that border enforcement doesn’t deter anybody. It turns out they never asked the people being deterred, and one of them just explained the whole scheme to the FBI on a wiretap.

So what do you think? Yesterday I said the “where are the arrests” black pillers owed the class an apology. Or at least a statement of regret. Well? We’re still waiting.

Have a wonderful weekend! C&C shall return on Monday morning with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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