Ex-PIMCO CEO Gets 9 Months In Prison For Role In College Admissions Scandal

The former CEO of bond giant PIMCO, Douglas Hodge, has been sentenced to 9 months in prison for his role in the college admissions scandal that rocked the nation - and the wealthy - last year, according to Bloomberg.

"I have made serious mistakes in judgment, and, in the process I have violated the law. For these actions, I take full responsibility and I am truly sorry," Hodge had written in a letter to the judge, according to the WSJ.

Feds had previously alleged that Hodge "agreed to use bribery to facilitate the admission of two of his children to USC as purported athletic recruits” and "sought to enlist the support of a cooperating witness to help a third child gain college admission." During his guilty plea, he later admitted to being in talks to help a fourth and fifth child.

Prosecutors had been asking for two years in prison, three years of supervised release, a $200,000 fine and 300 hours of community service. Hodge's lawyers had been asking for a prison sentence between zero and six months, with the ability for Hodge to be able to fulfill some of his time with supervised release and community service.

In April 2019, we reported that Hodge was suiting up to muster an aggressive legal defense alongside of TV star Lori Loughlin. In retrospect, it did not work.

Meanwhile, as we follow up earlier this month, Loughlin faces up to 45 years in prison if convicted on all charges - though the chances of this actually happening fall somewhere between slim and none based on the short sentences handed out to other offenders in the scandal. Loughlin had faced two years under a plea deal she declined, according to TMZ.

In October 2019, the LA Times had reported Hodge planned to plead guilty.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/ex-pimco-ceo-gets-9-months-prison-role-college-admissions-scandal

Court Dismisses Emoluments Lawsuit Filed by Over 200 Democrat Lawmakers Against Trump

It has been a victorious week for President Trump.

The Democrat Iowa caucuses Monday night were a complete debacle and the train wreck lasted all week.

Trump delivered a historic State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.

Then the senate acquitted him of all charges in the sham impeachment trial on Wednesday.

Now this…

A court dismissed the emoluments lawsuit filed by 215 Democrats in Congress against President Trump, ruling that the appellees lacked standing.

The emoluments clause is a provision that bars US presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without permission from Congress first.

The 2017 emoluments lawsuit against Trump was led by Stolen Valor fraud Senator Richard “Da Nang Dick” Blumenthal (D-CT).

Da Nang Dick and the 200+ Dems took another loss today!

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/02/breaking-court-dismisses-emoluments-lawsuit-filed-by-over-200-democrat-lawmakers-against-trump/

‘Never in a million years would Twitter take down posts from an NYT reporter’ – Project Veritas founder O'Keefe to RT

James O’Keefe, who had his account locked down after tweeting about Bernie Sanders’s staffers, told RT the reason he was hit so hard by Twitter’s online minders is that he doesn’t come from an established, corporate publisher.

O’Keefe, a conservative activist and founder of investigative outlet Project Veritas, was targeted by social media censors earlier this month, when he sent a tweet to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, asking him to remove a “factually inaccurate bit of reporting” on Sanders staffers Kyle Jurek and Martin Weissgerber.

The two were called “volunteers” in the Post article which covered Project Veritas’s #Expose2020 Sanders campaign. The designation didn’t sit well with O’Keefe, who insisted that both Jurek and Weissgerber “are still paid employees of Bernie Sanders’ campaign.”

The offending Project Veritas tweet included a screenshot of a page found on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website showing that Jurek, at least, had received a salary from the campaign as recently as August 2019. As O’Keefe told RT, the page included “publicly available … documents” revealing Jurek's address and the amount of money paid to him by the Sanders campaign.

Shortly thereafter, Twitter locked his account until he deleted the tweet disclosing the staffer’s details.

“As a matter of ethics, this is a publicly available government website. The Federal Election Commission publishes the fact that Kyle Jurek was a paid employee. I don’t want to delete the tweet, I think that it would be unethical for me to delete information like that,” O’Keefe explained.

Project Veritas, he opined, has only been subject to the lockdown because it’s not part of the established mainstream media cohort. “We’re not the CNN, we’re not the New York Times, they would never do this, by the way, to a New York Times reporter,” O’Keefe argued.

Never in a million years would Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, take down a tweet from a New York Times reporter linking an FEC [page].

Project Veritas recently released a video – shot by an undercover reporter – in which Jurek ranted about burning cities and imprisoning dissidents. He also said that “if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC convention, f**king Milwaukee will burn.”

A subsequent video exposed Weissgerber, who floated sending Republicans to “reeducation camps” and Sanders dissolving the Senate and House of Representatives should he become president. However, little of the hidden-camera footage of the apparent gulag enthusiasts appears to have been shot at Sanders’s campaign headquarters. Project Veritas’s detractors have long accused the outlet of deceptively editing and misrepresenting footage.

https://www.rt.com/usa/480335-project-veritas-bernie-sanders/

Carter Page Reveals John Durham Has NOT Interviewed Him About FISA Abuses

Former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page revealed in a podcast interview with John Solomon that John Durham, the US Attorney from Connecticut tapped by AG Barr to investigate the origins of Spygate, has not contacted him for an interview.

Recall, Obama’s corrupt and criminal FBI/DOJ obtained 4 FISA warrants on Carter Page beginning in October 2016 through June of 2017 in order to spy on Trump.

Last month the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] admitted in a secret order that at least two of the spy warrants against Carter Page were not lawfully authorized.

Presiding FISA judge James Boasberg wrote in a January 7 order that the last two FISA warrants on Carter Page dated April 7, 2017 and June 29, 2017 were not valid.

The June 2017 FISA warrant was signed by former DAG Rod Rosenstein and Former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe.

Rosenstein signed the June 2017 FISA warrant a month after he wrote the memo authorizing the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller — and 20 pages of this FISA application are STILL REDACTED.

Carter Page slammed the FBI in his interview with Mr. Solomon, “It’s just a matter of people covering up for their fellow comrades.”

JOHN SOLOMON: Carter Page says John Durham team hasn’t interviewed him about the FISA abuses he suffered and slams FBI for failing to impose real accountability. “It’s just a matter of people covering up for their fellow comrades”.

AG Barr tapped Durham to investigate the origins of Spygate last May so why hasn’t his team contacted Carter Page for an interview?

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/02/new-carter-page-reveals-john-durham-has-not-interviewed-him-about-fisa-abuses/

Video Surfaces Of Harvey Weinstein Cracking Sex Joke, Thanking Bloomberg For Helping Movie Company

Michael Bloomberg, as New York City mayor, honored Harvey Weinstein at a 2013 ceremony where the now-disgraced movie producer cracked sex jokes and praised the current 2020 presidential candidate for helping his movie production company after it fell on tough times, according to video that surfaced Friday.

“The reason Bob and I became fond of independent foreign films is because when we were 14-year-old boys and our hormones were raging, we saw an ad for the Mayfair movie theater…and it said ‘the 400 blows,’ and we thought it was something else,” Weinstein said at the June 10, 2013 event, which was held at Gracie Mansion.

Bloomberg was honoring Weinstein and his brother Bob as part of a “Made in New York” campaign led by the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

Twitter personality Comfortably Smug published a snippet of the video on Friday in which Weinstein made the sex joke. The 67-year-old producer was charged on May 25, 2018 with raping two women in New York years earlier. He was charged on Jan. 7 with sexually assaulting an actress in Los Angeles on Feb. 17, 2013. He is currently on trial in New York.

While allegations against Weinstein did not become public until 2017, rumors reportedly floated around celebrity and political circles about his misconduct with women.

The full version of the Bloomberg event, which has been on YouTube since 2013, also shows Weinstein thanking the 2020 presidential candidate for helping his movie company.

Weinstein expressed gratitude that Bloomberg “dropped a lot of things” in order to help his company after it fell on difficult financial times during the recession that began in 2009.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/07/michael-bloomberg-harvey-weinstein-ties/