Tally In Illinois Grant-Fraud Probe So Far: 13 Charged, $16M Embezzled
” The U.S. attorney’s office in Springfield has been busy the past few years investigating a variety of fraud schemes involving state grants. Thirteen people have been charged so far, six who have pleaded guilty.
Two of them have ties to President Barack Obama. One is the daughter of his controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Another was chief of staff to Obama’s longtime friend Eric E. Whitaker when Whitaker was Illinois’ public health chief.
In all, prosecutors are alleging a total of $16 million in fraud involving state health or commerce department grants and contracts.
Here’s a brief look at each of the criminal cases that have been filed, which prosecutors built with help from the Chicago offices of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Internal Revenue Service, as well as from the Illinois Secretary of State’s Office’s inspector general:
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Tag Archive: Jeremiah Wright
Bryan Preston
“The Wright controversy built for another month in the spring of 2008. In April, after Wright let free another series of incendiary racial statements, Obama was forced to denounce not just Wright’s statements as he had done in March, but the man himself. Obama said: “What became clear to me is that he was presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for. And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that I am about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality in all people.”
As president, Obama would betray the last part of that statement in October 2010, when he exhorted Hispanic voters to “punish their enemies” by voting for Democrats.
As we now know thanks to a 2007 video unearthed by the Daily Caller, then Sen. Obama said quite a bit more about his relationship with Rev. Wright. In that speech, Obama called Wright “my pastor, the guy who puts up with me, counsels me, listens to my wife complain about me. He’s a friend and a great leader. Not just in Chicago, but all across the country.”
Obama delivered that address before an audience that knew both men. Those words do not describe someone whom Barack Obama barely knew.”
“In a video obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama tells an audience of black ministers, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism.
“The people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!” Obama shouts in the video, which was shot in June of 2007 at Hampton University in Virginia. By contrast, survivors of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Andrew received generous amounts of aid, Obama explains. The reason? Unlike residents of majority-black New Orleans, the federal government considers those victims “part of the American family.”
The racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s carefully-crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.
I must say he is highly evolved at this point .
“Election: Remember how candidate Barack Obama complained in 2008 that any discussion not involving the economy was a “distraction”?
This time, his entire campaign is built on distracting voters from the economy.
During his 2008 campaign, one of Obama’s favorite words was “distraction.” He constantly plugged it into his speeches and interviews to dismiss any controversy that might have
erupted, or an issue he didn’t particularly want to talk about.
Questions about how Obama could have sat in the pews and listened to Rev. Wright’s anti-American, race-baiting screeds for years? Distraction. Questions about his relationship with radical Bill Ayers? Distraction. Questions about his qualifications to be president?
Distraction. “
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