The Plain Truth Is: HUD Director Goes on $336,000 Shopping Spree with ...

The Plain Truth Is: HUD Director Goes on $336,000 Shopping Spree with ...: A high-ranking public housing official charged with providing government-subsidized homes to the poor stole hundreds of thousands o...

HUD Director Goes on $336,000 Shopping Spree with Low-Income Housing Funds!

A high-ranking public housing official charged with providing government-subsidized homes to the poor stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from the agency and used it to buy furniture, alcohol, clothes, makeup and other personal items. The crooked public official scammed the government for years undetected which may seem unbelievable though not when it comes to the agency she worked for, a bastion of corruption known as Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
This is an agency that’s been embroiled in a multitude of serious scandals—under both Democrat and Republican administrations—over the years. One veteran employee at a state branch stealing a few hundred thousand bucks to go on a marathon shopping spree is no biggie. Problems go back to the Ronald Reagan administration, when an influence-peddling scandal led to the conviction of 16 people, including top aides to then HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce. Bill Clinton’s housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about payments to his former mistress. George W. Bush’s HUD secretary, Alphonso Jackson, was ousted after the feds launched an investigation into his plots to enrich himself and his friends by giving them lucrative government contracts. Barack Obama’s second HUD secretary, Julian Castro, misspent  the agency’s federal funds as mayor of San Antonio.
Fraud and corruption has also been pervasive among HUD employees and field directors. A few years ago, an employee got busted for racking up nearly $12,000 on his agency credit card by charging personal items such as groceries, lodging, television cable, transportation and even prescription medications. A federal audit determined that the agency knew about the spending spree but didn’t bother taking action, reprimanding the employee or reporting the wrongdoing. HUD’s inspector general has also testified before Congress about the severe mismanagement at offshoots functioning independently—yet federally funded—in states across the country that have fleeced taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars. He testified that his office discovered more than $200 million in questionable spending at local public housing agencies (PHAs) since 2012. PHAs are created by states, operate at the city or county level and administer the federal program known as Section 8 to provide low-income people with affordable housing. Many of these local public housing agencies are run by people with “troubled backgrounds” that somehow manage to remain in high-ranking positions at the agencies, the watchdog told lawmakers back in 2014.
Years later, an executive director at one of those branches in Michigan gets busted for embezzling $336,000. Her name is Lorena Loren and for years she served as the executive director of the St. Clair Housing Commission, which administers a local Section 8 housing program in southeast Michigan. Section 8 is the federal government’s major program for assisting very low-income families, the elderly and the disabled to afford decent, safe and sanitary housing in the private market. The program is administered locally by Public Housing Agencies (PHA) like the St. Clair Housing Commission so the cash comes from the feds though there appears to be no oversight. The idea is to subsidize housing costs, via vouchers, so the poor can live in privately owned, single-family homes, townhouses or apartments they otherwise couldn’t afford.
For eight years Loren used government credit cards as her personal piggy bank, buying items for herself and relatives, according to a federal charging document obtained by a Detroit, Michigan newspaper. She racked up around $135,000 in purchases from online retailer Amazon, $14,364 at big-box store Sam’s Club and $16,460 at various Walmart stores. The purchases included food, medicine, appliances, furniture, clothing and booze. The disgraced housing director also used $24,600 in agency funds to pay for her son’s rental unit, falsified documents—including lease agreements to use housing voucher cash to rent a home for her son—and deposited federal rental subsidy funds into family members’ bank accounts. Loren has been charged with conspiracy to commit federal program fraud and faces up to five years in prison.
Clearly, this is part of a much broader epidemic at HUD. A Michigan-area newspaper editorial blasts the agency for failing to protect taxpayer dollars and low-income families that need help. The piece cites other recent cases in which public employees stole from HUD’s Section 8 program, including a 52-person ring in Ohio and schemes in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Colorado and Massachusetts. “It should be more difficult for housing commission directors to write checks to themselves,” the editorial states. “And the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development should be keeping closer watch over its Section 8 voucher program.” Hopefully President Trump’s new HUD secretary, Ben Carson, will clean some house at the fraud-infested agency. We don’t’ need a newspaper editorial to tell us that “HUD clearly has a gap in its fiduciary responsibility.”

The Plain Truth Is: U.S. Pays $50 Mil for Luxury Cars, Weapons, Booze ...

The Plain Truth Is: U.S. Pays $50 Mil for Luxury Cars, Weapons, Booze ...: A foreign company hired by the U.S. government to mentor and train Afghan intelligence officers billed Uncle Sam for more than $50 ...

U.S. Pays $50 Mil for Luxury Cars, Weapons, Booze to Mentor Afghan Intel Officers!

A foreign company hired by the U.S. government to mentor and train Afghan intelligence officers billed Uncle Sam for more than $50 million in luxury cars — including Porsches, an Aston Martin, and a Bentley — and the lucrative salaries of executives and their spouses (who didn’t do any work). The firm also spent $1,500 on alcohol and $42,000 on automatic weapons prohibited under the terms of the contract, according to figures provided by a U.S. Senator from a federal audit that has not been released to the public. It marks the latest of many scandals involving the free-flow of American dollars to controversial causes in Afghanistan, where fraud and corruption are rampant in all sectors.
In this latest case, the Department of Defense (DOD) hired a British firm called New Century Consulting (NCC) to operate a program called “Legacy East” that was supposed to provide counterinsurgency intelligence experts to mentor and train Afghan National Security Forces. Instead, NCC billed the Pentagon millions of dollars in questionable or unallowable expenses, including seven luxury cars and exorbitant $400,000 average salaries for the “significant others” of corporate officers to serve as “executive assistants.” Other prohibited expenses include severance payments, rent, unnecessary licensing fees, extensive austerity pay, and the cost of personal air travel. The outrageous figures became public when the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Claire McCaskill, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis demanding answers. As a federal lawmaker McCaskill had access to the information after viewing a report from the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), which provides financial oversight of government contracts for the Pentagon and operates under the Secretary of Defense.
McCaskill discloses that the British firm continued receiving lucrative DOD contracts despite having “many previous problems,” involving billing and performance practices. The senator also questions why the Pentagon kept pouring money into a “troubled” program that a separate federal audit had determined was likely ineffective. That assessment, made by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), came after investigators found that a lack of performance metrics makes it nearly impossible to assess whether the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the mentoring and training programs for Afghan intel personnel are effective. “Despite all of the listed issues with NCC’s performance and billing practices, the Army continued to engage in contracting with NCC for sensitive work in Afghanistan,” McCaskill states in her letter to Mattis.
Afghanistan reconstruction has been a huge debacle that continues fleecing American taxpayers to the tune of billions and Judicial Watch has reported extensively on it over the years. Many of the details are regularly disclosed in provoking reports published on the SIGAR website. Highlights include the mysterious disappearance of nearly half a billion dollars in oil destined for the Afghan National Army, a $335 million Afghan power plant that’s seldom used and an $18.5 million renovation for a prison that remains unfinished and unused years after the U.S.-funded work began. Among the more outrageous expenditures are U.S. Army contracts with dozens of companies tied to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The reconstruction watchdog recommended that the Army immediately cut business ties to the terrorists but the deals continued. Another big waste reported by Judicial Watch a few years ago, involves a $65 million initiative to help Afghan women escape repression. The government admits that, because there’s no accountability, record-keeping or follow-up, it has no clue if the program was effective.
Back in 2013 Judicial Watch reported that, despite multiple warnings of fraud and corruption inside the Afghan Ministry of Public Health, the U.S. keeps sending hundreds of millions of dollars to support the Islamic republic’s scandal-plagued healthcare system. In that infuriating case, the money—$236 million over nine years—flowed through the scandal-plagued U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is charged with providing economic, development and humanitarian assistance worldwide. It was supposed to fund prenatal care for women, hospitals, physicians’ salaries and other medical costs. Instead, a federal audit found pervasive, waste, fraud and abuse that warranted an immediate cutoff of U.S. assistance. In a scathing report SIGAR called it a reckless disregard toward the management of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The Plain Truth Is: Licenses, ID Cards Sold to Illegal Aliens by Corru...

The Plain Truth Is: Licenses, ID Cards Sold to Illegal Aliens by Corru...: A year after Judicial Watch reported a rise in illegal aliens using fake Puerto Rican birth certificates to obtain authentic U.S. passpo...

Licenses, ID Cards Sold to Illegal Aliens by Corrupt State Workers Used for Voter Fraud!

A year after Judicial Watch reported a rise in illegal aliens using fake Puerto Rican birth certificates to obtain authentic U.S. passports and drivers’ licenses, the feds have busted a Massachusetts operation run by corrupt state workers. The state employees sold drivers’ licenses and state identification cards to illegal immigrants who bought Puerto Rican documents on the black market, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). The operation perpetuated voter fraud because some of the false identities and addresses were used to vote in Boston, the state’s capital and largest city.
The case is the latest of many illustrating that there’s an epidemic of voter fraud in the U.S. that’s seldom reported in the mainstream media. It’s not clear how many false identities and addresses were used to fraudulently register to vote in Boston, but the feds indicate that it occurred in multiple cases and Judicial Watch is investigating the matter as part of a five-year-old Election Integrity Project. The scheme was operated by four taxpayer-funded employees at the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) along with two outside accomplices who sold Puerto Rican documents to illegal aliens. All six were recently arrested and charged with aggravated identity theft. They probably never would have been caught if not for an anonymous tip received by the Massachusetts State Police nearly two years ago and there’s no telling how long the illicit scheme operated.
The anonymous letter said that a corrupt RMV employee was providing stolen identifications and drivers’ licenses to individuals seeking false IDs, the DOJ announcement states. An investigation ensued and authorities discovered that the four clerks were working with a document vendor and document dealer to provide the licenses and official state ID cards to illegal immigrants in exchange for cash. “The scheme involved several steps,” the DOJ says. First, the document dealer sold a Puerto Rican birth certificate and U.S. Social Security card to the document vendor for approximately $900. The vendor would then sell the stolen identities for more than $2,000 to illegal aliens—some with criminal records—seeking legitimate identities in Massachusetts. After the first layer of illicit transactions occurred, the counterfeit documents and false identities and addresses were used to fraudulently register clients to vote in Boston.
Illegal aliens would then bring the stolen identities to the RMV where the corrupt clerks worked and they would accept cash to illegally issue authentic documents, including drivers’ licenses and ID cards. “The clerks also accepted cash to use the RMV’s system to run queries, including Social Security number audits, to confirm that the identities the clients were stealing actually belonged to verifiable individuals,” the DOJ announcement states. The unscrupulous state workers face up to two years in prison, according to the feds, who won’t reveal the magnitude of the operation and how many authentic state documents were issued fraudulently to illegal aliens.
Last year Judicial Watch published a story about the increasing number of illegal aliens using fake Puerto Rican birth certificates to obtain authentic American documents. Located about 1,000 miles southeast of Florida, Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory about two decades after the Caribbean island was acquired from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American war. Puerto Ricans are American citizens at birth though they don’t have the right to vote in federal elections and the island has only one non-voting representative in Congress. In recent years a record number of Puerto Ricans have left their troubled island for the U.S. and a big chunk has settled on Florida. A recent study found that the island’s ongoing economic recession has led to a mass exodus not seen in more than five decades. The U.S. government and its various agencies accept Puerto Rican birth certificates blindly even though fraud involving the easily forged documents has been pervasive for years.

The Plain Truth Is: Dem Fla. Senator Helps Pass Bill to Give Her Chari...

The Plain Truth Is: Dem Fla. Senator Helps Pass Bill to Give Her Chari...: A Democrat Florida state lawmaker helped pass a bill that allocated $1.5 million to a nonprofit that she founded and pays her a six...