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The Mystery of the Bakersfield 3: Two friends disappeared, a third died in a drive-by shooting. Their families suspected the crimes were linked. How did Baylee Despot, Micah Holsonbake, and James Kulstad end up in the middle of an arms trafficking and murder plot in their California city?
Over the course of 34 days in the spring of 2018, three unsettling crimes played out in the city of Bakersfield, California. The families of the three victims realized their children all knew each other and ran in the same circles, and they began to suspect that all three crimes were connected. But what began as a crusade for justice among grieving parents took a shocking turn when investigators discovered that the so-called Bakersfield 3 were embroiled in a criminal underworld of black-market weapons smuggling, the Hells Angels, unspecified ties to drug cartels, torture and kidnapping, and a convicted felon nicknamed “The Boogeyman of Bakersfield.” This is a genuinely bizarre case, and while I’ve never written up a case for this sub before, I’ve been following this story closely for the past couple years. The last time it was mentioned on here over a year ago, but there have been some huge recent developments in the last year that I thought deserved as comprehensive a telling as possible. And despite all that, it's nowhere near resolved. So without further ado... Part 1: Missing On March 23,2018, Micah Holsonbake, 34, went missing in East Bakersfield near the intersection of Flower Street and Mount Vernon Avenue. Micah was a clean-cut dad who worked in finance, a former high school debater who loved karaoke despite not being any good at it. He was presumed endangered missing until August 22, 2018, when teenagers swimming near a local park found an arm in the Kern River that was identified as his. The rest of his body has never been found. On April 18, 2018, James Kulstad, 38, was murdered on a quiet block in Southwest Bakersfield. A father of two daughters, James was a serial entrepreneur described as the type of man who “could sell a dollar bill on the side of the road for a million dollars if he could just get 5 minutes with you.” His brother Ryan heard the gunshots from the next street over, but didn’t see the shooter, and he claims he held James as he died in his arms. On April 25, 2018, Baylee Parrent-Despot, 20, disappeared from Rosedale, the upper-middle-class neighborhood in Northwest Bakersfield where she’d grown up. Baylee described herself as a “flower child” who had been born in the wrong generation. After facing a number of serious challenges, she was struggling to get her life back on track, and was said to be pregnant and trying to leave her boyfriend when she went missing. She has never been heard from again. Local media christened Micah, James, and Baylee the “Bakersfield 3” after the victims’ families discovered that all three victims knew one another. In the wake of the links between all three disappearances coming to light, Micah’s father told a local news reporter, “Just to be blunt, something happened to Micah… and a month later something happened to Baylee, and I think it’s because she knew what happened to Micah.” And in between them, there was James Kulstad, who ran in the same drug-fueled circles as Baylee and had helped Micah move just weeks before they both were killed. Bakersfield is a city of half a million people, but on a social level, it can feel as insular as any small town — you’re rarely more than one or two degrees removed from anyone you meet — and even in a city where everyone seems to know everyone, it’s hard to buy three friends all going missing within the space of a month by sheer coincidence. But as time went on with few official developments in the investigation, it seemed like people largely lost interest in the case by late 2019. Then, in 2020, the Kern County District Attorney’s office charged three people with a total of 34 different charges, ranging from first degree murder, torture, kidnapping, assault with a firearm, and illegal manufacturing of assault weapons. Two of the defendants were already in custody — and the third may not even be alive. Part 2: Some Local Context By every metric, Bakersfield is just a flat-out terrible place to live. It’s my hometown, I left for a reason, and the reason is that it sucks. Kern County suffers from a slew of serious socioeconomic and public health problems, the largest of which is probably related to economic and income inequality. A fifth of the population is under the poverty line, and crime rates are sky-high, especially drug-related ones. Opioid abuse is rampant, though it still falls second to methamphetamine, the most widespread drug in the area. There’s a significant issue with white supremacist gang violence. When I was 16, my 70-year-old next-door neighbor got stabbed in a biker gang fight at a tattoo parlor by a Hells Angel called “Delano Mike.” A high school chemistry teacher was literally arrested for trying to make meth in his classroom three months before Breaking Bad even premiered. This is a region with a lot of serious problems that go deeper than any one symptom, but suffice it to say, there’s a reason I moved away as soon as I tuned 18. The other thing you need to know is that despite being one of the most conservative cities in California, there’s a widespread distrust of law enforcement outside of the police and courts themselves — and, frankly, for good reason. Corruption in the justice system is widespread, and basically a local tradition dating back to the tenure of longtime district attorney Ed Jagels, perhaps best known for ramming through 36 false convictions of ritual child abuse at the height of the satanic panic. (34 were eventually overtured, and the other two people convicted died in prison and never saw justice.) Jagels’ history of prosecutorial misconduct is also the subject of Mean Justice, a 600-page doorstopper by Pulitzer-winning author Edward Humes about the wrongful conviction of Pat Dunn, who is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife despite a wealth of evidence that would suggest his innocence. In 2002, Jagels’ protege, an assistant district attorney named Steve Tauzer, was murdered by a former Bakersfield police deputy, Chris Hillis, after Hillis allegedly learned that Tauzer had a sexual relationship with Hillis’ 22-year-old son, an addict in recovery; facing first-degree murder charges, he pled out to manslaughter and received a 12-year prison sentence. In 2015, The Guardian published an in-depth exposé about how widespread corruption within the local law enforcement community led to Kern County having the highest rate of police killings in the country: the deadliest cops per capita. And over the past several years, the Kern County law enforcement community has been mired in a police corruption scandal in which members of the BPD abused asset forfeiture laws to illegally seize guns, drugs, and money from suspects, which they in turn trafficked for personal gain. All this is to say that Bakersfield cops and prosecutors have not engendered much public trust outside of their own communities. In a city with high rates of violent crime, law enforcement has consistently put its own interests above public safety, justice, or victims’ rights. That's just something to keep in mind while reading. Part 3: Down the Rabbit Hole Micah In the weeks and months prior to Micah Holsonbake’s disappearance, his family could tell that something was troubling him. Lance and Cheryl Holsonbake both recalled their son behaving erratically in the days before he vanished. But none of it seemed to make any sense coming from someone like Micah, whose family described him as intelligent and hard-working. He had a comfortable upbringing in Rosedale and worked his way into a lucrative career as a financial advisor despite only one year of college. In the photo his family circulated following his disappearance, he wore the suit and tie and placid smile of someone posing for a corporate headshot. But Micah was going through a dark time following a rocky separation from his wife and family, and had been struggling with a painkiller addiction for the past two years. The year before, he’d been laid off from his job after going on disability leave due to depression. According to court documents, Micah owed drug-related debts to members of the Hells Angels as well as “the cartel.” One friend of Micah’s told police his life seemed to be headed in a downward spiral after he lost the ability to see his son, and often got in fights with others at bars. In one witness statement, an unidentified woman told police of a prior incident when she and Holsonbake were kidnapped at gunpoint and driven to an orchard in west Bakersfield. Holsonbake bolted from the vehicle as it was moving, she told police. That account was corroborated by a friend of Holsonbake's who told police that he said he had been kidnapped at gunpoint. He told his parents that he feared for his life, frequently thought he was being followed in his car, and rambled about various people he believed were out to get him, but they mostly wrote it off. James Micah had been hanging around with James Kulstad for some time before he disappeared. It’s not clear when they first met, but it appears they become friendly through the drug scene. Like Micah, James first became addicted to prescription painkillers after being hit by a car, before progressing to fentanyl patches and eventually heroin. He’d been a single father to his daughters Camryn and August. His obituary characterized him as a free-wheeling surfer who held a patent for an action sports product and earned the nickname “Joe Vegas” for his love of gambling and table games. Camryn, now 19, says she and James had an especially close relationship after her mother died when Camryn was an infant, and James often warned her against getting involved with drugs and partying in a clear-headed way, which made it even harder to watch him spiral downward in the years before his death. “I felt like I lost him before I even lost him, but I worked so hard,” she told a reporter. “I was working so hard on everything I could do to make him get better… I was hanging onto hope and whoever killed him took that away from me. I don’t have that anymore, I don’t have hope.” In the wake of her father’s death, Camryn says that a number of stories and rumors about his life surfaced, further complicating her grief. “Some of the stories I’ve heard is that he was a really bad person these last 3 years,” she said in 2019. On the night of his murder, James reportedly drove to an acquaintance’s home in Southwest Bakersfield where his brother Ryan Kulstad was hanging out. Ryan claims that the homeowner allegedly owed money to James and told Ryan that if James came over to his house, he’d “call his boys and they’d come over there strapped,” which Ryan says he didn’t interpret as a serious threat. Ryan and James reportedly argued about this on the phone, and James showed up at the house a couple hours later. Ryan says he had just returned from driving someone else home and noticed a driver in a silver sedan behaving suspiciously as he returned to the house. Moments later, Ryan and his unidentified male passenger heard gunshots on the next block: an unknown gunman opened fire on James from another car, causing him to crash into a parked trailer. The same silver sedan was seen speeding away from the scene. The owner of the home where this all took place was Dr. Sukhjeet Bajwa, who at the time was a chiropractor with a local practice. Bajwa lived in a quiet subdivision in Southwest Bakersfield. It was an unlikely setting for a drive-by, and according to initial news reports, police were at a loss for the motive behind the killing, or what James was even doing in the neighborhood at all. Then things began to unravel: Bajwa, it turned out, had been arrested twice in 2016 and 2017 after driving while impaired, and in addition to liquid heroin, Xanax, and hydrocodone, police also found two unregistered, loaded guns in his car, an AR-15 and a .22LR semi-automatic rifle with a fake silencer attached. All of this was detailed in a disciplinary complaint filed by the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners, and after Bajwa’s name began repeatedly surfacing in connection with the shooting, a rumor began to circulate about a black-market gun and drug trafficking ring in which Bajwa was supposedly a central figure. It was the type of conspiracy theory most people instinctively write off as too bizarre to be credible. But it must have rung a bell to Lance Holsonbake. Before Micah’s disappearance, he told his father that he was “putting together guns for people,” according to a 2019 interview. Lance said he reacted in disbelief to this confession, because the idea that Micah would risk his career by getting involved in illegal gun manufacturing just didn’t make sense. “If you’re this afraid, just stop,” Lance recalls telling him. “And he’d say, ‘I can’t do that I can’t do that.’ He was afraid he did that they would hurt his family.” He wrote it off as paranoia exaggerated by his son’s drug use, and didn’t know how much of it was real and how much was in Micah’s mind. According to Lance, Bakersfield police initially suggested that Micah had left town of his own volition after getting mixed up in criminal activity and, from what I can tell, didn’t make much of an effort to investigate. Though the family says he was last seen on March 23, 2018, Bakersfield police claimed he wasn’t reported missing until April 4, and it appears they waited until April 13, when he’d been missing for almost a month, before BPD made its first public statement regarding his disappearance. After James was murdered a few days later, the Holsonbake and Kulstad families grew increasingly frustrated with the apparent lack of interest in investigating either case, and told the media later that as they began digging into the circumstances surrounding both cases, one name kept coming up with everyone they talked to: Baylee Despot. And within a week, Baylee Despot had also gone missing in Bakersfield. Baylee Baylee Parrent-Despot was 20 years old when she was reported missing in April 2018, and the families say that it was her disappearance that finally motivated the police and local news to start investigating the links between all three cases, for reasons that seem obvious to anyone who has ever seen the media react to a pretty white 20-year-old going missing. Her sister, Katelyn Parrent, describes her as “a girl that’s grown up in a good neighborhood, raised by good parents, had a good childhood, could’ve had everything she ever wanted,” much like James and Micah. And beneath the surface, she was as troubled as either of the men: after graduating high school, she’d run off to Vegas to marry her boyfriend, but their rocky relationship turned into an abusive marriage that ended just a year later in 2017. In the aftermath, she wrecked her car, lost her job, and in her mother’s words, “Her life just spiraled out of control.” In July 2017, Baylee was arrested for disorderly conduct in front of her friend Micah Holsonbake’s house. This came as a surprise to her sister, who had at one point been friendly with Micah herself — she didn’t realize he and Baylee even knew each other. But even though he was 14 years Baylee’s senior, Katelyn remembered him as a clean-cut guy who worked at a bank, and their mother, Jane Parrent, says Micah helped her get a restraining order against an abusive ex-boyfriend. They didn’t see any cause for concern. Still, Baylee’s life continued to spiral out of control. The following month, she was drugged and gang-raped at an acquaintance’s apartment complex. She disappeared for days at a time and resurfaced with “horrible stories” or pleading phone calls begging to be picked up. On one occasion, Katelyn remembers, “She had none of her belongings, no shoes… A couple nights after that there were two vehicles that came to pick her up and we could tell by the look on her face that she didn’t want to go, but if she didn’t go, we didn’t know what would happen.” Matthew Not long after that incident, Baylee had a new boyfriend. Matthew Queen was 43 years old, a convicted felon, and an all-around bad dude. Not much is known about his background, with one major exception: in the early 2000s, he plead guilty to one count of making a false statement to a federal firearms dealer after he used a false address, but his real name, to purchase $11,000 in guns from dealers in Indiana. Many of those guns were later recovered at crime scenes in Detroit and Chicago. If you want an idea of what type of criminal mastermind we’re dealing with here, I recommend reading just the final ruling on that case from the 7th Circuit court of appeals:
“We reject Queen's argument that gun buyers may lie about a street address so long as they live within the state where the gun is sold . . . Queen in fact had once lived in an apartment at 2072 Egret Court, but he did not live at this address when he completed the forms and bought the guns because he was evicted on December 18, 2000, for nonpayment of rent."
Great. Sounds like a great guy. Lest you assume Matthew Queen might have hypothetically seen the error of his ways and cleaned up his act after this early foray into gunrunning, he absolutely did not. In December 2017, just a couple weeks into Matthew and Baylee’s relationship, they were arrested after police found four unmarked, unregistered, loaded assault rifles in Matthew’s car during a traffic stop. Neither he or Baylee said a word to the police, but while Matthew (who, as a convicted felon, was prohibited from carrying any guns or ammunition at all) was charged with several felonies, while Baylee pled no contest to a lesser misdemeanor and received three years probation. Later that month, she moved in with Matthew, his mother, and his estranged wife. Baylee’s family saw and heard even less from her. And in April, a month after Micah’s disappearance and just one day after she and Matthew attended a court date for the weapons charges, Baylee went missing. Her mother believed she was pregnant with Matthew’s child and was trying to leave him at the time. Matthew told police that she had connections through her father's side of the family with a Mexican drug cartel and believed they had something to do with her disappearance. Local interest in the case reached an even greater frenzy after Micah’s severed arm was found in the Kern River in Hart Park on the east side of town, not far from from where he was last seen. It was positively identified in late December 2018. By this point, the family of the Bakersfield 3's investigation had amassed around 10,000 followers on Facebook and another 5,000 in a private group, and the story was a fixture on local news. Another curveball came around this time too, when a former friend of Baylee’s named Sara Wedemeyer, 21, filed a restraining order against Baylee’s mother, Jane Parrent. As it was reported, Sara had moved in with Matthew mere weeks after Baylee disappeared, and she was four months pregnant with his child when she attempted to take out legal action against Mrs. Parrent, whom she claimed was harassing her and her “fiancé” by hanging up missing person fliers in their neighborhood. The restraining order wasn't granted, but Queen allegedly began making disturbing social media posts about Baylee, Micah, and the Parrent family, with Mrs. Parrent as the primary target. And in mid-2019, the investigation seemed to grind to a halt. Part 4: New Developments On May 27, 2020, roughly two years after the first developments in the Bakersfield 3 case, the Kern County District Attorney held at a press conference to announce they believe Baylee Despot and Matthew Queen “deliberately and with premeditation" murdered Micah Holsonbake. Despot and Queen, along with a third man, Matthew Vandecasteele, were charged with the alleged kidnapping, torture, and first degree murder, as well as unlawful manufacturing of assault weapons, conspiracy relating to the murder and torture plot, and a slew of other assault and gun charges (34 in total). Queen and Vandacasteele were both in custody at the time the charges against them were filed, but even though Baylee still has not been seen or heard from since 2018, the DA’s office issued a warrant for her arrest, leading some to speculate she may still be alive. According to court records, Matthew Queen allegedly believed that Micah Holsonbake had stolen a .44-caliber revolver from him. He and Baylee Despot kidnapped Micah, zip-tied him to a chair in Matthew Vandecasteele’s garage, and attempted to torture him in order to extract information from him. A blood stain in the garage matched Holsonbake’s DNA. Vandecasteele told police that he didn’t see or hear Micah on the night he was killed, but knew that the other two had brought him there to question him. After several hours, Baylee allegedly returned to the apartment seeming “flustered” and changed her clothes in a back bedroom. Before they left, “Queen told Vandecasteele that he had cleaned everything up and it was OK to go inside the garage.” The next day, Queen returned to Vandecasteele’s apartment and said he “needed help disposing of something” in a large black storage container in the trunk of his car. Vandecasteele claims he refused to help with disposing of the body, but according police reports, his Google history during that period of time included searches for “lye chemical formula,” “lye for sale” and “how long does it take to dissolve a human body,” as well as browsing for lye on the Home Depot and Lowe’s websites. Queen, Despot, and Vandacasteele allegedly manufactured and sold AR-15s from gun build kits. Other witness testimony released by the courts described various kidnappings that witnesses allege Queen, known as “the boogeyman of Bakersfield,” committed. In one incident, Queen allegedly handcuffed one victim to a chair and put an electric dog collar around his neck because he believed the man had stolen a gun part from him. Another witness said that Queen and Vandacasteele showed up armed at his hotel room after the witness told Baylee where he was staying, and that he believed they intended to kill him because he’d been arrested “with a large quantity of narcotics that he was fronted or given without paying for them and the people who had gave him the narcotics could have been upset.” (According to the police report, surveillance footage from the hotel corroborates this account.) It’s also believed that he made anonymous calls to the police tip line to misdirect the investigation away from himself: one such caller referred to Baylee as a “sugar momma,” a phrase which Queen reportedly used to describe her when he spoke to investigators in August 2019, and he also used the same pseudonym on the tip line that he did on social media. When police questioned him around this time, he denied being part of a criminal enterprise and claimed he could barely pay his bills. Then, while out on bail for unrelated gun charges in January 2019, Queen allegedly kidnapped another man at gunpoint and forced him to walk into the Kern River while Queen accused him of snitching to the cops. He’s been in custody since July of 2019 due to this kidnapping. Part 5: No Body, No Crime So where is Baylee Despot? According to official statements from law enforcement, no one knows. After the warrant was issued for her arrest, a wave of speculation followed that she had faked her own death or fled to Mexico with the help of unspecified “cartel connections.” That story seems less and less likely as more details have emerged from court documents. Vandecasteele told the police that Despot was “falling apart mentally” after murdering Micah. He and Queen both suspected that she was cooperating with police on an investigation relating to the illegal weapons charges, called her a “snitch” in one interview, and told investigators he believed Queen “made her disappear.” In one interview, a female witness said Queen kidnapped her at gunpoint, took her to an orchard, and held an AR-15 to her head while he questioned her about whether Baylee was faithful to him. When police questioned him about Baylee’s disappearance in July 2019, he said was depressed and off her medications, and she had said she wanted to die. When the investigator told Queen there had been allegations of domestic violence involving him and Baylee, some of which resulted in bruises, Queen said he never laid a hand on anyone. He told the detective she was clumsy. Despite all of this, Jane Parrent says that police have told her that they don’t consider Matthew Queen a person of interest in Baylee’s disappearance, and that there is "no known physical evidence that definitively confirms her possible death." She is now offering her own personally-funded $1000 reward for information about her daughter’s location. The rest of Micah Holsonbake’s body has not been recovered, though according to court documents, investigators believe Queen may have buried him in the hills near Taft, a rural area about 45 minutes west of Bakersfield. There have been no developments in the investigation of James Kulstad’s murder since 2018. Anyone with information is urged to contact the Bakersfield Police Department at (661) 327-7111, or the Kern Secret Witness program at (661) 322-4040. A reward of up to $10,000 is being offered for information leading to an arrest in this case. Ultimately, what really frustrates me about this case is that even after this avalanche of charges, so many questions remain unresolved, and not just what happened and who did it, but why. If the investigation concluded that James Kulstad’s death was unrelated to the disappearances of Baylee and Micah, who ordered his murder, and what was the reason? To what extent was the chiropractor involved with Queen and Vandecasteele’s trafficking racket? Was Sara Wedemeyer involved with Baylee’s disappearance, and if not, how’d she end up living with Matthew and expecting his child just two months after her “friend” went missing? Why did Sara and Matthew harass Baylee’s mother for months after the disappearance? More than anything, I’m still lost as to Baylee Despot’s motivation for any of this. Did she just find herself in too deep with no way out? Did she actively make the choice to become a gunrunner? Did Matthew, looking to settle a grudge against Micah, seek out a relationship with Baylee with the intention of using her to get to him? Did he kill her because she was cooperating with the cops, because she attempted to leave him, or because he was just a sociopath who felt she was no longer useful? Or is there a chance that law enforcement knows more than they’ve let on? When investigators told Mrs. Parrent that Matthew isn’t a suspect in her disappearance, was that an indication that she may, in fact, be alive? Probably not. But at this point, anything is possible. Sources:
“‘Bakersfield 3’ member Micah Holsonbake was afraid of murder suspect Matthew Queen, became increasingly paranoid before he disappeared, documents say,” 6/17/20
(Repost because I posted this really late and I was hoping to get some more discussion on the ideas.) TLDR: Cincinnati seems like an interesting location for a future Fallout game and I break down my reasoning and then give an idea for a story. Maybe Cincinnati, Ohio isn’t as popular as other American cities, but I think it still deserves a shot. So this post is taking some older ideas in some Reddit posts for a Fallout game and adding some additional ideas for it. I believe that a Fallout game set in and around Cincinnati, Ohio could potentially be a good fit for the Fallout franchise. I’m gonna break down the reasons why I think it could fit the theme/work as a map and then some story ideas for what could work in the area. I’d also like to state that my ideas are based off of information from the Fallout Wiki and Wikipedia. If anything doesn’t add up, I apologize. MY REASONING FOR CINCINNATI AND WHY IT CAN FIT THE FALLOUT LORE: -So Cincinnati might not seem like a city as grandiose as somewhere like NYC, Philadelphia, Detroit, New Orleans, etc. To an extent, I totally agree with that sentiment. It’d be really cool to see those cities that were mentioned above as future Fallout locations. However, I believe that those world ideas are also so full of interesting locations that a game trying to capture it all would struggle to get all the significant locations with current technology. Cincinnati is a smaller city that is still rich with culture and history that could be captured more accurately than bigger projects. -A decent amount of the skyscrapers and more significant places of Cincinnati and the surrounding cities are somewhat older. There is enough buildings in Cincinnati that were built before or close enough to the divergence point that the skyline and city layout could be decently recognizable. -Cincinnati had a decently sized manufacturing and industrial sector before the IRL Midwest De-Industrialization and Formation of the Rust Belt in the 40s and 50s. Considering that Fallout is themed around the ‘Pax Americana 1950s & Early 60s’ culture, the idea of showing off a Midwest city that continued to boom in those sectors could be an interesting focus for a Fallout game. -Cincinnati has a large, mostly unused subway system that was never finished. In game, we could see areas of underground activity like the Fallout 3 subway system. The IRL subway eventually had a section that was also reworked to be a nuclear shelter, so a Vault being under the city wouldn’t be far-fetched. -The Underground Railroad considered Cincinnati to be an important stop along the way, as it was a large destination for runaway slaves. The city was seen as a large region to hide amongst and find work that was just north of the Ohio River, where Slavery was mostly illegal (still not that great for runaways, but better than the South). Any concepts of slaves coming to Cincinnati for newfound freedoms or a system/faction of abolitionists and runaways would make a lot of sense for the themes. -The Ohio River would be an important location that could go right through the middle of the map. Based off of how irradiated the rivers were in Fallout 3: The Pitt, I think it’d be safe to assume that the Ohio River in Cincinnati would also be unsafe to travel across. This creates something like the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings in Fallout: New Vegas where players can follow a normal path to get to the main city. This also means that it could create fun and challenging ways to get across the river. -Fallout’s 1950s styled America is still in love with baseball. If you’re looking for a major city with a rich baseball history/culture, Cincinnati’s your place. Cincinnati is the city where the first professional baseball team was created, the Red Stockings. It could be host to a baseball themed faction, a settlement like Diamond City, or maybe even a quest line to reform a pro baseball team. -The Cincinnati Zoo is a long standing and prestigious zoo that could be an interesting point in this hypothetical game. Since the zoo is home to various creatures that aren’t native to most of America, we could see interesting enemy mobs like mutated gorillas and irradiated hippos. -IRL Cincinnati is home to major companies like Kroger, Procter&Gamble, and GE Aviation. Fallout companies like Super Duper Mart and Abraxodyne Chemical could be stand-ins for Kroger and P&G. It’d be a cool bit of story building for some of the pre-war companies that have products littering the Fallout wastelands. -While New Orleans is probably more famous for this point, Cincinnati was also historically home to a developed steamboat industry that made it an important location in the history of American exploration/expansion into the river basins of Midwest America. Fallout 4’s museums based around Massachusetts’ involvement in the American War of Independence show off the cultural significance of the region in American history. Cincinnati could have a museum dedicated to it’s prominent position as a gateway to the west, showing off it’s contributions to expansionist American culture. -One of the cities in the Cincinnati region is a town south of the Ohio River known as Newport, Kentucky. Historically, before Las Vegas became Sin City, Newport, KY was a huge contender for that role. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Newport was a city filled with criminal bosses and corrupt public officials. Casinos, brothels, and other illegal enterprises made up a good chunk of everyday life for this town. If fans want to recapture the spirit of New Vegas with the focus on moral degradation and a city of ‘Sex, Drugs, and Rock’n’Roll,’ then look no further than Newport. -Cincinnati was one of the major US cities that had Nike anti-air missile bases around the Greater Cincinnati area. I don’t think it’d be too far of a stretch to assume that after world tensions got worse in the 21st century, that the government would repurpose some of these launch sites into nuclear silos. Maybe we could see another Megaton situation. -Cincinnati is also home to 3 facilities in the area that were dedicated to nuclear research and enrichment (until these plants were closed due radiation leaking out). These would be some great areas to explore and mess around with nuclear enrichment. WHEN WOULD THIS TAKE PLACE & WHO WOULD BE INVOLVED: So I feel like this game could work if it was set between the ending of Fallout 2 and the beginning of Fallout 3. IMO, the ideal starting date would be between 2248 and 2252 due to the ideas I have for the factions that could be used in this game. I don’t have all the details for all the different factions, but I have 4 ideas for 4 major factions. Two new ones and two old ones that could fit the area. RETURNING FACTIONS: -The Brotherhood (Chicago Faction) So the Brotherhood of Chicago is an ill defined group that exists only in references. Fallout: Tactics set up a group known as the Midwest Brotherhood, however, Tactics is no longer recognized as a canon game since Bethesda acquired the Fallout series. According to Fallout 3 & 4 though, there is still a group of the Brotherhood that still exists in the Chicago area. Like Tactics, the Chicago group of the Brotherhood arrived in Chicago due to an airship crashing into the area. Beyond this, there isn’t much lore about the Chicago chapter so this is where I’d like to add my ideas. After the crash, feeling disconnected from the rest of the Brotherhood (and their dedicated supplies and supply lines), the Chicago chapter turns more towards the religious aspects of the Brotherhood. Having a lot of connections to the airship that decided their fate, as well as possibly being based out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, the Chicago Brotherhood turns towards the sky. They begin a process of turning into an Aviation cult, a society that worships and encourages air travel. Like the old Brotherhood, they would hoard technologies, just more focused on air travel and air defenses. Over time, they begin to expand around the Great Lakes region, eventually coming to a manpower crisis. At this point, the Chicago chapter would either loosen it’s recruiting standards to allow in wastelanders who would join due to their acceptance of their new faith system, or the Chicago chapter would create a Spartan styled theocratic dictatorship with the airship survivors acting as foreign rulers over Chicagoans. Either or would have interesting story choices, but I can’t chose which I like more. Anyhow, the Chicago chapter eventually comes across tales of ‘Prophet Wright and Prophet Patterson,’ the founders of flight (and possibly the sky if the chapter is naive/delusional enough). The Chicago Brotherhood learns of a ‘Holy City’ where flight was birthed and worshiped at a ‘Holy Air Base.’ The Chapter would take it’s proudest forces and equipment to claim their perceived Holy Land, the city of Dayton, OH and Wright-Patterson Air Base. Upon arrival, the Chicago chapter realized that the city was already claimed by other forces. Believing that their God (or Gods) was on their side, the Chicago Brotherhood launched an attack for Dayton. Time would pass, and no gains were made by the Brotherhood, revealing a dirty truth that this chapter was not as dominant and guided by God(s) as they thought they were. They also had to accept that an enemy force with Wright-Patterson could challenge their tactical and spiritual hold on the sky. Upon tactical reevaluation, the Chicago chapter noticed that the enemy forces were sending extra soldier South of the battle. The chapter correctly guessed that their enemies were moving to encircle them and stop their Midwestern gains. In response, the Brotherhood would send it’s own forces South to try to counter-encircle the enemy. Both forces, evenly matched and evenly stretching their lines would finally hit the Ohio River. Both sides were stuck countering the influence of the other, eventually both would settle in to starve the other one out around Cincinnati. The Chicago Brotherhood had their work cut out for them, for they would be facing off against..... -The Enclave After the events of Fallout 2, the Enclave would need to rebuild. Bases of theirs lying in ruins, groups deserting them, Enclave members being hunted down for justice, profit, and fun. The situation looked dire for most. That was until a Mr. John Henry Eden gave orders to regroup and rebuild in the Capitol wasteland. Most Enclave members saw the writing on the wall, and decided that the move East would be better than death. This is where I believe that a certain group of the Enclave would be moving east, eventually stumbling upon Dayton & Wright-Patterson. This group of the Enclave didn’t feel like moving on past this treasure trove would be a smart idea, so the group settled there. Now I was thinking that the leader of this Enclave chapter would eventually get all high and mighty, thus proclaiming that the Dayton Enclave was the true enclave, that their leader was the rightful President, and that Eden and his Capitol Wasteland Enclave was not legitimate. The Dayton Enclave President swore an oath of duty to reunite the Enclave under him, and to invade and conquer the Capitol for their own state. While the older and higher up ranks supported the grand plan, younger officers and cadets had an uneasy feeling over these plans. Some would even go as far to talk about open rebellion and, even possibly, a return to democratic institutions and rules. (I would love to see a quest line where you can influence the Enclave and chose between a status-quo Enclave or a democratic Enclave. However, just because a bad guy says that they’re good now, it does not mean that they will be seen by the people as a good guy now). All of this would have to wait though, as a new enemy has arrived on this Enclave chapter’s borders. In less than an hour after their arrival, the enemy began a siege on the Enclave’s Wright-Patterson base. The Enclave was caught completely off guard, as none of the higher ups believed that ‘No savages of this region could possibly learn how to fly and professionally fight.’ After the initial chaos, the Enclave was able to get their air force up and defending their positions. Amid the siege and dogfights, the Enclave would learn of the name of their ‘new’ enemy: The Brotherhood. The Enclave officers had been both right and wrong. The Brotherhood was not a savage of this region, as they had fought against them in California. They were still in this region though, and they were able to put up an actual fight. Realizing the direness of getting stuck in a constant siege, the Enclave came up with a plan to hopefully solve all their problems. If the Enclave forces could just encircle the Brotherhood forces, then they could possibly cut their supply lines while also conquering lands to keep the Brotherhood from moving any further into Ohio, as well as a start on the Dayton Enclave’s Eastern March to take DC. Their forces moved south, only for the Brotherhood to match their moves to the south. The Enclave tried again, only to meet the same results. This began a race south to try to get under the other army. Evenly they moved along, until both forces hit the Ohio River. While some war-hawks within the Enclave ranks wanted to move into Cincinnati to try to gain the upper hand, the Dayton Chapter President refused, wishing to focus on the Brotherhood and the eventual Eastern March. Unfortunately, the Enclave and the Brotherhood had moved their battlegrounds too close to Cincinnati, and soon, a new force would join the fight..... NEW FACTIONS: -The Republic of the Ohio Cincinnati was not spared from the horrors of nuclear hellfire. Being a city with a large amount of manufacturing, commerce, transportation, and nuclear refinement will tend to put you on list for enemy nuclear destruction. As such, Cincinnati has seen better days. It is not 2077 anymore though, and the city has learned to heal. Emerging from vaults long after Nuclear War, but long before the time of this game, a new generation of citizens of Cincinnati began the process of rebuilding. In the beginning, many factions arose, with no central authority. Chaos and violence ruled the scorched streets. Eventually, due to raiders and instability, multiple governing groups formed trade pacts and alliances. These districts would eventually merge due to the economic ties to create the city of Cincinnati once more. While not all districts complied willingly, Cincinnati would continue to grow through a combination of economic ties and small military missions. With trade being such a central idea to the culture of the city, Cincinnati began to work out deals with even more areas that weren’t even part of the Cincinnati Districts. Around this time, the wealth inequality within the city began to grow faster and faster. More individuals were gearing up to meet more locals to enact more trade, of which some profits would go to line the pockets of these traders. Soon, the very well off individuals were producing shipping vessels on the Ohio River. While this meant that Cincinnati could spread it’s wings further, it also meant that more and more land on the river was being gobbled by those who already owned the majority. Nevertheless, the city would continue to work with the ultra rich to expand. By this point, many districts were starting to look worse compared to how they were doing before the city united. Since the city had been set up loosely, it had become a confederation in principle. As such, many districts were on the cusp of declaring their freedom once more. To quell any chance of District independence, the then Mayor of Cincinnati declared the ‘Republic of the Ohio.’ On one side of things, the new government better reflected the new growth on the Ohio River by recognizing new lands as different territories instead of new additions to the city. On the other side, the Republic was formed as a new government level to force territories looking for freedom back into the greater system. While the Districts could still leave the city of Cincinnati, they would still be stuck inside the Republic of the Ohio. The Republic was based off of the government of the pre-war USA, in which succession was illegal and punishable. Not everyone listened, and soon, the poorer districts declared a counter-government to recognize the ‘forgotten man.’ The Republic did not tolerate this, and swept through the districts, taking out any opposition that could be found. It was after this point, very early on in the new republic, that the government tightened the rules until the Republic was only a republic in name. Yes, the freedoms of speech and religion and the right to vote would still exist. But if you did not worship and speak of the Republic in the ‘correct way,’ you might have just found yourself stuck in social shaming and potential revenge. And while you could vote, it mattered not as everyone knew who the ‘winners’ would be. As the Republic embraced a darker side, it began to feel the drawbacks of it’s actions. Social services and protections offered by the state declined more and more, as politicians were more focused on the pay and helping their families. It was very clear that the rich of the republic had it all, while the poor never recovered from the District disassembly and forced reintegration. The Elite cared little though, as the republic grew it’s trading operations further up and down the River. Life was good enough. Or so it seemed until the scouts of the Republic brought news one day. Advanced groups with flying weaponry were moving south, towards the Republic itself. The President of the Ohio makes the call to send all forces to defend the northern walls. Little did they know that they had weakened another front, and a force moving from the South East to meet that weakened border. Known only in the region as a rumor, they are..... -The Kanawha Coalition Nuclear War came a little bit later for the land of West Virginia, but when it came, it left it’s mark. West Virginia was spared from the worse in 2077, leaving behind a land with great potential. While violence and death was nothing foreign to the WV Wastelanders, it was comparatively tame versus the surrounding states. Eventually, a vault filled with Dwellers opened up. These pioneers would bring about change to the region, leading to more factions showing interest in the region. The population boomed, and it looked as if the region could sustain a form of civilization. Then the bombs came again, and again, and again. The new people of WV were not all as valorous and good-hearted as it seemed they would be. West Virginia was home to a series of active nuclear missile silos. Taking advantage of the chaos that comes with societal formation, certain individuals made their way to these silo sites to bring about new nuclear devastation. So quickly was the flame of law, order, and civilization sniffed out by nuclear destruction. Many would die, possibly even more than the amount of West Virginians killed in the actual war. Many more would just up and leave the lands, hoping to find a better home outside of WV. What was left after the first round of deaths and departures was a network of abandoned communities and other forgotten homesteads. The structures left behind would decay and fall apart, bits flying away along the wind. The locals that stayed were also forced to increase their mineral stripping and scavenging to build better homes, able to stand up to the toxicity of the region. Most of these were in vain, however, as the other survivors of the region were usually the ones still launching the weapons. Many years would pass with this pattern still going the same, only the Earth around them changing. While WV had been polluted even before the war, the leftover junk combined with the constant nuclear war brought the region to a new low. But at it’s lowest, WV would find a solution. Slowly, the psychopathic souls who had fired the weapons became bored of tormenting the region. The nukes were becoming a thing of the past, now the region could focus on the other problems that plagued everyday life. Those issues that had been put to the side were finally in full view. And that view was of a homeland soured by nuclear fires and other pollutants. The people had enough of their rotting home, so they elected to meet and discuss a solution. The meeting brought together a handful of tribes that had somehow survived. Many attending the meeting were no longer human, as the radiation had ghoulified a vast amount of the populace. While most regions struggled with the ostracism of ghouls, many humans within West Virginia had either accepted them or had learnt to tolerate them enough to not cause too much damage. While some grudges still seep into social arrangements, the ghoul-human relations are comparatively better to most other societies. The tribes of ghouls and humans came together to unify, creating a coalition of the West Virginian tribes. The elders of each tribe created a council to organize and direct new objectives for the willing locals. It was decided that the tribes would forgo the technologies that brought about the conditions that they lived in. They would focus their efforts on peace and harmony with the lands that had been ruined, with the eventual goal of creating an ecologically sustainable homeland. In an effort to rebrand the region and connect with a people who focused on the Earth, the coalition would begin to refer to the lands of West Virginia as Kanawha. Consequently, the coalition would eventually come to be known as the Kanawha Coalition. Time would pass and Mother Earth would heal... somewhat. After a long period of partial success, the council would meet and make a drastic choice. No longer would they toil to make a broken land heal, a new, better land would be searched out. The tribes packed up and began a long march towards a new home. A rumored land of a city that continued to kill Mother Earth with no punishments. Now, it was time to punish the wrongdoers and take their lands triumphantly. WHY SET IT BETWEEN 2248 AND 2252: The main reason I feel like this time period would work is due to the events between FO2&3. According to the DC Brotherhood in 3, the Chicago Brotherhood had gone silent by the time of their eastern journey. It also fits due to the Enclave moving East as well. As such, 2248-52 seems late enough for the Enclave to get out East, while being early enough for the Chicago Brotherhood to disappear by 54/55. THANK YOU FOR READING THIS, I’M SORRY IF I MISTYPED ANYTHING OR SOMETHING DIDN’T MAKE SENSE.
Lost in the Sauce: Fox News launders unverified Russian intel on Trump's behalf
Welcome to Lost in the Sauce, keeping you caught up on political and legal news that often gets buried in distractions and theater… or a global health crisis. Housekeeping:
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Trump’s Russian laundromat
The Trump administration has been using conservative outlets like Fox News to launder unverified Russian intelligence intended to denigrate Democratic officials and candidates. In the latest instance last week, DNI John Ratcliffe declassified handwritten notes from 2016 by then-CIA Director John Brennan stating that he had briefed President Obama on Russian activities, including a reference to Hillary Clinton’s campaign attempting to “vilify Donald Trump.” Fox News was the first to publish the notes. Brennan accused Ratcliffe of selectively declassifying documents in order to "advance the political interests" of Trump ahead of the election:
"These were my notes from the 2016 period when I briefed President Obama and the rest of the national security council team about what the Russians were up to and I was giving examples of the type of access that the US intelligence community had to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging," he added.
Ratcliffe has approved the release of even more information meant to assist Trump, including “a large binder full of documents” he gave to the Justice Department. "At my direction, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has provided almost 1,000 pages of materials to the Department of Justice in response to Mr. Durham's document request,” Ratcliffe confirmed. There is nothing illegal about the actions allegedly taken by the Clinton campaign, as detailed in the released documents. As Lawfare explains, the declassified memo originated from the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center:
Importantly, it is not a crimes report. Rather, as the name suggests, the purpose of a CIOL is to pass operational leads to the FBI for counterintelligence purposes. In this case, the CIA had information indicating that a hostile foreign intelligence service may have spied on a U.S. presidential campaign. Even if the intelligence was questionable, it still presented a significant counterintelligence risk—which is why, as Ratcliffe’s letter says, it was reported to the FBI...
Meanwhile, Trump tweeted that he has authorized the release of every document related to the “Russian Hoax” and the “Hillary Clinton Email Scandal.Tweet. He then added:
All Russia Hoax Scandal information was Declassified by me long ago. Unfortunately for our Country, people have acted very slowly, especially since it is perhaps the biggest political crime in the history of our Country. Act!!!
In an interview on Fox News a couple of days later, Trump expressed displeasure that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not yet released the emails deleted from Clinton's private server: "She said she had 33,000 e-mails...They're in the State Department, but Mike Pompeo has been unable to get them out, which is very sad actually. I'm -- I'm not happy about him for that, that reason. He was unable to get -- I don't know why. You're running the State Department and you get them out.” (clip)
The very next day, Pompeo appeared on Fox News to assert: "We've got the emails, we're getting them out." Asked if they would be released before the election, he said, "I certainly think there'll be more to see before the election." (clip)
Buzzfeed News took Trump’s tweets to a judge to gain the release of the entire unredacted Mueller report before Election Day. US District Judge Reggie Walton directed the Justice Department to “confer with the White House” and report back to the court the “official position regarding the declassification and release to the public of information related to the Russia investigation.”
Durham probe
For the second straight week, the media is reporting the Durham investigation will not produce a report prior to the election. Last week, AG Bill Barr reportedly told top Republicans that they should not expect any further indictments or a comprehensive report before Nov. 3. Trump publicly attacked Barr for what he sees as the slow progress of the Durham probe. “I think it’s a terrible thing. And I’ll say it to [Barr’s] face...See, this is what I mean with the Republicans. They don’t play the tough game,” Trump told Rush Limbaugh on Friday.
Earlier in the week, Trump sent an all-caps tweet calling for the arrests of his political rivals: “DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN - GOT CAUGHT!!!” Trump tweeted.
Court cases
A three-judge Appellate Court panel ruled that Manhattan D.A. Vance can enforce a subpoena seeking President Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns. The panel was made up of two Clinton-appointees and an Obama-appointee. Trump’s attorneys are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.
They concluded that the president did not show that Mr. Vance had been driven by politics. “None of the president’s allegations, taken together or separately, are sufficient to raise a plausible inference that the subpoena was issued out of malice or an intent to harass,” they wrote.
Prominent Trump and GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy was charged with conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Prosecutors say Broidy accepted $6 million from a foreign client to lobby administration officials to end a federal investigation related to the looting of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund, known as 1MDB. The court filing also accuses Mr. Broidy of seeking the extradition of a Chinese citizen from the United States.
Note that Barr received a waiver to participate in the investigation of 1MDB despite his former law firm’s involvement in the case. Steve Bannon was arrested earlier this year on a yacht belonging to one of the individuals tied up in the case, as well.
Trump appeals order to continue Census count to the Supreme Court. A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit upheld a lower court order allowing the 2020 count to continue through October. The administration has asked SCOTUS to put an immediate hold on the injunction while it appeals. The Supreme Court punted a decision on access to abortion, keeping open the option of revisiting the case at a later date. The Trump administration asked the high court to require women seeking the drugs for medication abortions to visit a doctor’s office or clinic. The order was unsigned but Justices Alito and Thomas declared their approval of the administration’s request in a separate filing.
“While COVID-19 has provided the ground for restrictions on First Amendment rights, the District Court saw the pandemic as a ground for expanding the abortion right recognized in Roe v. Wade,” wrote Alito and Thomas.
Other court cases to note:
Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll asked a judge to block the DOJ from intervening to represent Trump in her defamation lawsuit against the president. Her lawyers say the law in question, the Federal Tort Claims Act, does not apply to Trump — or to any other president. They also said that Trump, in any case, was not acting in his official role when he denied Carroll’s claims. Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for Oct. 21.
The DOJ admitted to “inadvertently” producing altered versions of notes from former FBI officials McCabe and Strzok that were turned over to Michael Flynn’s defense team and filed to the court as potentially exculpatory evidence. As Marcy Wheeler explains, this explanation doesn’t match all the evidence.
Court-appointed adviser John Gleeson, a retired judge, urged District Judge Emmet Sullivan to take the president’s comments about the case into account when making a decision about whether or not to grant the Flynn-DOJ joint effort to permanently end the prosecution. Gleeson notes that Trump’s tweets provide evidence of political pressure to drop the case against Flynn: Trump successfully pressured the DOJ to “create a new set of rules that only apply to Michael Flynn and will never apply to anyone else.”
A federal judge in California has ordered that Twitter reveal the identity of an anonymous user who allegedly fabricated an FBI document to spread a conspiracy theory about the killing of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who died in 2016.
Administration
Voice of America: Five suspended officials at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) are suing the agency, its new CEO and several of his most senior aides, alleging they are breaking the law — routinely — in pursuing a pro-Trump agenda for the Voice of America news service.
David Kligerman, who has been suspended from his position as general counsel of the agency by Pack, told NPR that the case was necessary to get the courts to enforce the firewall. (He is not a party to the case, though he is cited in it as a whistleblower harmed by Pack's actions.) Kligerman and the five plaintiffs jointly filed a whistleblower complaint late last month, alleging Pack sought to oust them under a pretext of "security concerns" because they challenged his intrusion into journalistic decision-making.
Reminder: CEO Michael Pack, an ally of Steve Bannon, started his tenure by firing the heads of four organizations under USAGM. He then refused to renew the U.S. visas of more than 70 foreign journalists who work for VOA, vaguely accusing some of them of being spies. Pack tried to fire the board of the Open Technology Fund, an organization that supports Internet freedom initiatives, but a court blocked the terminations. Nevertheless, Pack succeeded in cutting off a large portion of its funding, forcing the non-profit to suspend over 80% of its projects. Finally, Pack ordered two political operatives he installed as his aides to investigate Steve Herman, the VOA White House bureau chief who reported on Pence’s disregard for masks, for anti-Trump bias.
Bureau of Land Management: William Perry Pendley, head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), is refusing to leave his position after a judge ruled he is illegally serving as chief. “I have the support of the president,” he told the Wyoming Powell Tribune. “I have the support of the secretary of the interior and my job is to get out and get things done to accomplish what the president wants to do.” CIA appointment: Bert Mizusawa, a retired major general who served as an advisor to Trump’s 2016 campaign, was quietly installed in a senior advisory role at the CIA earlier this year. The move is spurring discussion among some former agency officials, who say the arrangement is highly unusual.
“An outsider with no internal sponsorship?” said one of the former officials. “That never happens.” ...Trump allies outside the administration have signaled frustration with Haspel in recent weeks, accusing the CIA chief of blocking the declassification of documents relevant to the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia that they view as exculpatory.
Trump has appointed Justin Peterson to the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, sparking conflict of interest allegations. Peterson previously represented hedge fund bondholders pushing the board to pay them billions of dollars. Rep. Nydia Valazquez (D-NY): “As a member of the Board, Peterson would have a critical say in how to restructure the Island’s debt, but his coziness with bondholders is a serious red flag and a clear conflict of interest.” A hate group employee is now leading diversity & inclusion efforts in the Department of Education. Weeks ago, Sarah Parshall Perry was defending J.K. Rowling on the Family Research Council podcasts. Now, Betsy Devos has bought Perry aboard to oversee inclusivity within the DOE.
Trump money
NYT revealed that Trump “engineered a sudden windfall” in 2016, moving over $21 million from a Vegas hotel Trump owns with billionaire Phil Ruffin, through other Trump companies, to his campaign.
“If Trump took out a bank loan in the LLC’s name for the purpose of financing his election, then the Trump campaign violated its legal reporting requirements by failing to disclose the loan, and failing to disclose that Trump’s Vegas property was used as collateral.” The Times also reported that the LLC in question–Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing–claimed a deduction on the payment made to Trump in 2016. If the $30 million loan was, in fact, used to finance the president’s then-money-starved campaign, the potential criminality would be amplified.
In an apparent quid pro quo, Ruffin asked Trump for a favor after his inauguration: revive the high speed train project to bring gamblers from California to the Vegas strip. The Obama administration considered but turned down a $5.5 billion loan for the train. This past March, the Trump administration approved the project.
Among the train’s chief beneficiaries will be Mr. Ruffin and the other grandees of gambling who became a vital font of political money for Mr. Trump when he needed it most. And, of course, Donald Trump himself.
Another NYT report showed that Trump “reinvented” the swamp after he took office, setting up an extensive quid pro quo network with private businesses and special interests. Over 200 companies, special-interest groups, and foreign governments patronized Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration.
Just 60 customers with interests at stake before the administration brought the Trump Organization nearly $12 million during the first two years of Mr. Trump’s presidency, The Times found. Almost all saw their interests advanced, in some fashion, by the president or his government. ...During Mr. Trump’s campaign and the months leading up to his inauguration, the in-house magazine at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida announced nearly 100 new members, a number of whom had significant business interests in Washington. The tax records show that in 2016 alone, the club’s initiation fees delivered close to $6 million in revenue. ...More than 70 advocacy groups, businesses and foreign governments threw events at the properties that had previously been held elsewhere, or created new events that drove dollars into Mr. Trump’s business. Donors also paid for the privilege of giving money to his campaign and super PAC. Mr. Trump attended 34 fund-raisers held at his hotels and resorts, events that brought them another $3 million in revenue. Sometimes, he lined up his donors to ask what they needed from the government.
Trump claimed a $21 million tax break for leaving the woodland surrounding his New York mansion undeveloped, a figure inflated by what appears to be a fraudulent appraisal. The value of the 212-acre estate was based on the premise that Trump could build and sell 24 manions on the land. However, building anything on that property was impossible, due largely to objections by neighbors. Trump was paid by the government not to build mansions that he never could have built, in other words.
In addition to the conservation easement tax break, Trump in 2014 also classified Seven Springs as an investment property, rather than a personal residence, and wrote off $2.2 million in property taxes as a business expense, the New York Times recently reported. Trump’s family members have described the home as a family retreat in the past, and the Trump Organization’s website still characterizes Seven Springs that way. “Today, Seven Springs is used as a retreat for the Trump family,” the website says.
Trump’s adult children have brough at least $238,000 of taxpayer money into the Trump Organization by traveling to their family properties with Secret Service. “The president’s company billed the U.S. government hundreds, or thousands, of dollars for rooms agents used on each trip, as the agency sometimes booked multiple rooms or a multiroom rental cottage on the property,” WaPo reports.
The records also show about $29,000 in federal payments to Trump properties that related to travel by Donald Trump Jr. Trump Jr. stayed repeatedly at the Trump hotel in Washington — just blocks from his father’s residence at the White House... In the records obtained by The Post, travel by Ivanka Trump and her family accounted for more than $42,000 in federal payments to Trump properties. Much of that total came this spring, after Ivanka Trump had urged other Americans not to travel.
US taxpayers picked up the tab for billionaire US ambassador's stay at Donald Trump’s Scottish resort. The billionaire US ambassador to the UK, Woody Johnson, ran up a bill to US taxpayers totalling more than £1,000 in a single day while staying at Donald Trump’s flagship Scottish hotel and golf resort.
American Oversight, a non-partisan, non-profit ethics watchdog: “That Donald Trump uses his office and American tax dollars to prop up his failing businesses is widely known and shameful. That the US ambassador to the UK would use taxpayer money to play golf is simply embarrassing.”
Immigration
Border wall: The Ninth Circuit on Friday ruled that President Donald Trump’s allocation of military funds for construction of his border wall was illegal. In a 2-1 ruling, the three-judge panel lifted a stay on a lower court order, thus putting an immediate stop to all border wall construction. The one dissenting judge was Daniel Collins, a Trump appointee. Family separation 1.0: Former AG Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein led the push to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents.
[Rosenstein told] the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.
Family separation 2.0: Customs and Border Protection touted agents’ “rescue” of a Honduran woman who just gave birth. What border officials didn’t mention was that, hours after their purported rescue, they separated the Honduran immigrant from her newborn and detained her pending possible removal.
“They told her she was going to be sent back to Mexico without her baby,” said Amy Maldonado, who is legally representing the mother.
Detention: Inside the US Marshals’ Secretive, Deadly Detention Empire: Due in large part to Trump’s aggressive immigration policies, the Marshals population is approaching historic highs. About two-thirds of all prosecutions between October 2018 and April 2019 were related to immigration crimes. Deportation: ICE officials have started to implement a policy that allows officers to arrest and rapidly deport undocumented immigrants who have been in the US for less than two years - all without a hearing in front of a judge.
Further reading
Eric Trump has canceled a Michigan based campaign event scheduled to take place Tuesday at Huron Valley Guns in New Hudson after one of its former employees was linked to the domestic terror plot against the state's governor. The Justice Department has suspended all diversity and inclusion training in every division, including for immigration judges that regularly hear cases of persecution based on religion, LGBT status, and gender. Wisconsin Judge Upholds Statewide Mask Mandate Michigan High Court Strikes Down Governor’s Covid Emergency Orders A U.S. government watchdog agency is faulting the Trump administration’s handling of a COVID-19 relief effort that awarded energy companies breaks on payments for oil and gas extracted from public lands in Western states in more than 500 cases2 The California Secretary of State and Department of Justice have sent a cease and desist order to the California Republican Party to remove unofficial ballot drop boxes placed in at least three counties. In a ruling issued late Monday night, a federal appeals court upheld Gov. Greg Abbott’s order that limited counties to one mail-in ballot drop-off location. All three judges on the 5th Circuit panel were appointed by Trump.
Lost in the Sauce: DHS hides intelligence that reveals Trump using Russia's playbook, again
Welcome to Lost in the Sauce, keeping you caught up on political and legal news that often gets buried in distractions and theater… or a global health crisis. Housekeeping:
HOW TO SUPPORT: I know we are all facing unprecedented financial hardships right now. If you are in the position to support my work, I have a patreon, venmo, and a paypal set up. No pressure though, I will keep posting these pieces publicly no matter what - paywalls suck.
NOTIFICATIONS: You can signup to receive notifications when these posts are done.
Trump’s playbook is Russia’s playbook
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in July withheld an intelligence bulletin warning of a Russian plot to spread misinformation regarding Joe Biden's mental health. The bulletin, titled “Russia Likely to Denigrate Health of U.S. Candidates to Influence 2020 Election,” was blocked by the office of acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf on July 9.
The bulletin states that analysts had “high confidence” in their conclusion. However, a DHS spokesperson tried to defend the “delay” in issuing the document by saying it did not meet the agency’s standards. This is curious because just a week later, on July 16, DHS circulated a bulletin on anarchists in Portland that officers admitted they had “low confidence” in. Why was the Russia memo held back but the Portland one released?
Trump has been pushing the same line of attack against Biden for months - yet another instance of Russia and Trump operating from the same playbook. For instance, in March Trump said there was “something going on” with Biden; in June Trump ran selectively edited ads asserting that Biden is “unfit to serve as Commander in Chief”; last month Trump ran a digital ad portraying Biden as perpetually confused and mentally unstable. Most recently, Trump said questions about his own health are only in the news because “they want to try and get me to be on Biden's physical level."
DHS is just the latest agency in the Trump administration to erode election security, following actions by the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) last month. DNI John Ratcliffe announced he was ending in-person congressional briefings on election security ahead of November and AG Bill Barr removed a leading career official at the Justice Department’s national security division, replacing him with an inexperienced political appointee. The ODNI’s decision to halt congressional election briefs may have been influenced by top White House officials. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among others, have repeatedly discussed in meetings with staff and with Trump “how to restrict and control the flow of information on such sensitive topics to Capitol Hill.”
One White House official told The Daily Beast that Meadows has for months been wary of the type of briefings on Capitol Hill that Democratic sources can potentially use to try to make Trump look bad through surreptitious leaks to media outlets.
Meanwhile, interim Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Marco Rubio (R-FL) said last week that his committee will be granted an exception to the ODNI’s new policy and continue to receive in-person briefings from top U.S. intelligence officials about election-security issues. This essentially means that only Democrat-led committees have been cut out of the process ensuring election security. House Democrats wrote to Ratcliffe insinuating if his office does not provide the previously scheduled briefings this month they will issue subpoenas and/or defund the ODNI in the appropriations bill due by the end of the month. Read the letter here. In addition to attacks on Biden’s health, DHS has determined that Russia is seeking to “amplify” concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will lead to widespread fraud. Intelligence analysts say this strategy has been underway since at least March, coinciding with Trump’s own assaults on mail-in voting.
For instance, in March Trump said if he agreed to funding vote-by-mail expansions in the first coronavirus stimulus bill, the U.S. would see “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again” (clip). Fact check: Neither party has historically benefited. On April 7, at the White House press briefing, Trump claimed: "Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they're cheaters… They're fraudulent in many cases" (clip). Fact check: There is no evidence that mail ballots are dangerous or fraudulent.
At a White House press briefing on Friday, Trump denied there is any proof that Russia poisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Instead of backing the German government's analysis of Nalvany's illness, Trump then redirected the criticism from Russia to China (clip).
"I don't know exactly what happened. I think it's tragic. It's terrible; it shouldn't happen. We haven't had any proof yet, but I will take a look. It is interesting that everybody is always mentioning Russia - and I don't mind you mentioning Russia - but I think probably China, at this point, is a nation that you should be talking about much more so than Russia. Because the things that China's doing are far worse.”
Trump then went on to say he’s “taken stronger action against Russia than any other country in the world,” but added “I do get along with President Putin” (clip).
RELATED: Leaked notes obtained by the Telegraph say that when Theresa May asked for Trump to take a strong stand after Russia poisoned Sergei Skripal, Trump replied “I’d rather follow than lead.” He pushed May to “put together a coalition” first.
The Trump administration plans to deport a Russian national living in America, a move experts say is in response to a politically motivated request by Russia. Gregory Duralev was persecuted by the Russian state for exposing corruption. He fled to America and applied for asylum in 2015. While waiting for a decision on his application, he was arrested by ICE and jailed for nearly 18 months. His case is now in court.
“DHS has acted no better than the Russian authorities,” Duralev said. “They simply fabricated charges against me for violations I never committed — and if DHS can trump up charges against immigrants with impunity, nobody can guarantee they won’t start doing it” to regular Americans. “So that’s the main message I now hope to send.”
Michael Cohen & Peter Strzok
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok has a book coming out called “Compromised.” In it, he alleges that FBI investigators came to believe it was “conceivable, if unlikely” that Russia was secretly controlling President Trump after he took office:
“We certainly had evidence that this was the case: that Trump, while gleefully wreaking havoc on America’s political institutions and norms, was pulling his punches when it came to our historic adversary, Russia,” Strzok writes. “Given what we knew or had cause to suspect about Trump’s compromising behavior in the weeks, months, and years leading up to the election, moreover, it also seemed conceivable, if unlikely, that Moscow had indeed pulled off the most stunning intelligence achievement in human history: secretly controlling the president of the United States — a Manchurian candidate elected.”
He now says he doesn’t believe that Trump is literally a Russian spy: “I don’t think that Trump, when he meets with Putin, receives a task list for the next quarter,” Strzok said, referencing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “But I do think the president is compromised, that he is unable to put the interests of our nation first, that he acts from hidden motives, because there is leverage over him, held specifically by the Russians but potentially others as well.” In an interview with Politico, Strzok confirms that he and then-deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, opened a counterintelligence case on the president, but that it likely was never pursued. Two weeks ago, NYT reported that Rosenstein secretly closed it. As if there weren’t enough political books coming out this summefall, Michael Cohen is releasing his, called “Disloyal: A Memoir.” The following a couple of quick takeaways: Cohen says that he, Trump, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, and others, watched a strip show in Las Vegas where one performer simulated peeing on another performer, who pretended to drink it. Trump reportedly reacted with “delight.” Aras Agalarov, a Russian real estate mogul, is a trusted associate of Putin and reportedly served as a liaison between Trump and the Russian president during Trump’s trip to Moscow. WaPo:
On Russia, Cohen writes that the cause behind Trump’s admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin is simpler than many of his critics assume. Above all, he writes, Trump loves money — and he wrongly identified Putin as “the richest man in the world by a multiple.” Trump loved Putin, Cohen wrote, because the Russian leader had the ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company — like the Trump Organization, in fact.” ...According to Cohen, Trump’s sycophantic praise of the Russian leader during the 2016 campaign began as a way to suck up and ensure access to the oligarch’s money after he lost the election. But he claims Trump came to understand that Putin’s hatred of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, dating to her support for the 2011 protest movement in Russia, could also help Trump amass more power in the United States.
USPS & mail voting
According to a Washington Post report yesterday, Postmaster Louis DeJoy engaged in campaign money laundering, also called a straw-donor scheme, at his former logistics business. Five of his former employees told WaPo that they were “urged” to donate to politicians in North Carolina and would be paid back through bonuses from DeJoy. Such a plan would allow DeJoy to illegally circumvent campaign donation limits.
“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” said David Young, DeJoy’s longtime director of human resources, who had access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired. “He would ask employees to make contributions at the same time that he would say, ‘I’ll get it back to you down the road,’ ” said [another] former employee. ...A Washington Post analysis of federal and state campaign finance records found a pattern of extensive donations by New Breed employees to Republican candidates, with the same amount often given by multiple people on the same day. Between 2000 and 2014, 124 individuals who worked for the company together gave more than $1 million to federal and state GOP candidates. Many had not previously made political donations, and have not made any since leaving the company, public records show.
More than one million mail-in ballots were sent late to voters during the 2020 primary elections, an audit by the USPS IG’s office determined. Most of the ballots were late, the USPS says, because local election boards sent the ballots to voters at the last minute. Official press release.
[The audit] found the problems during primaries had been most pronounced in Kentucky and New York, where a combined 628,000 ballots were sent out late. In 17 states, the audit found, more than 589,000 ballots were sent from election boards to voters after the state’s ballot mailing deadline. In 11 states, more than 44,000 ballots were sent from election boards to voters the day of or the day before the state’s primary election. One particularly troubling situation, auditors found, unfolded in Pennsylvania, where 500 ballots were sent to voters the day after the election.
Furthermore, only 13% of the ballots were mailed with the recommended bar code tracking technology. Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) was blocked from attending two scheduled tours of USPS facilities last week. Local Postal Service officials informed her and union leaders waiting to accompany her into the building that national USPS leadership had directed them to bar the group from the building. A Postal Service spokeswoman said they simply needed more notice for a tour. Many states, including important battleground states, are not legally permitted to process mail-in/absentee ballots until Election Day, leading to concern that results will be delayed by days or weeks. For instance, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan election officials cannot even begin processing ballots until Election Day. Processing involves opening envelopes, flattening ballots to run through the scanning machine, and prepping for the scanning.
"When voters have to wait so long for results, it erodes trust in the process and leaves room for partisan bad actors to dispute the will of the people," said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, a nonprofit organization.
AG Bill Barr made three stunning false claims about mail voting during an interview with Wolf Blitzer last week. First, Barr wouldn’t even acknowledge that voting twice is a crime - because just hours earlier, Trump encouraged his North Carolina supporters to vote twice to “test” the state’s mail-in voting system (clip).
BLITZER: It sounds like he’s encouraging people to break the law and try to vote twice. BARR: It seems to me what he’s saying is, he’s trying to make the point that the ability to monitor this system is not good. And it was so good, if you tried to vote a second time you would be caught if you voted in person. BLITZER: That would be illegal if they did that. If somebody mailed in a ballot and then actually showed up to vote in person, that would be illegal. BARR: "I don't know what the law in the particular state says.” BLITZER: You can’t vote twice. BARR: "I don't know what the law in the particular state says.”
Then, Barr tried to assert that foreign countries could fake ballots, but when challenged he admitted he had no evidence (clip).
BLITZER: You’ve said you were worried that a foreign country could send thousands of fake ballots, thousands of fake ballots to people that it might be impossible to detect. What are you basing that on? BARR: I’m basing — as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m basing that on logic. BLITZER: Pardon? BARR: Logic.
Finally, Barr cited a supposed incident of mail-in voting fraud in Texas. Too bad it doesn’t exist.
The payroll
Charles Rettig, the Trump-appointed IRS Commissioner who has refused to release President Trump’s tax returns, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars renting out Trump properties while in office. Rettig makes $100,000 - $200,000 a year from two units at Trump International Waikiki. When first nominated, Rettig failed to disclose his financial ties to Trump Waikiki. When questioned by Congress, he did not directly answer concerns about the properties.
CREW: With Trump’s name removed from some buildings as it began to hurt property values, we can only imagine how toxic it would become if a bombshell in his tax returns were released. Which means the IRS Commissioner has a vested interest in the success of the Trump brand—and of preventing anything that could damage it.
Voice of America staffers say Trump appointee Michael Pack is threatening to wash away legal protections intended to insulate their news reports from political meddling. Since arriving, Pack has fired the network's leaders, pushed out agency executives, refused to approve allotted budgets, and refused to renew visas for foreign employees.
Further reading: “Deleted Biden video sets off a crisis at Voice of America,” Politico.
Pack suggested the staff he fired and foreign journalists he essentially kicked out may have been foreign spies, without offering any evidence to support his claim. A group of 14 senior VOA journalists are openly disputing his explanation:
“Mr. Pack has made a thin excuse that his actions are meant to protect national security, but just as was the case with the McCarthy ‘Red Scare,’ which targeted VOA and other government organizations in the mid-1950s, there has not been a single demonstrable case of any individual working for VOA — as the USAGM CEO puts it — ‘posing as a spy,’ ” they wrote.
The White House is searching for a replacement for Federal Trade Commission Chair Joe Simons, a Republican who has publicly resisted President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on social media companies. Simons, a veteran antitrust lawyer, cannot legally be removed by the president except in cases of gross negligence. But the White House has already interviewed at least one candidate for the post.
RELATED: The Justice Department plans to bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month, after Attorney General William P. Barr overruled career lawyers who said they needed more time to build a strong case.
Richard Grenell, formerly the highest-ranking out gay official in the Trump administration, has joined a law firm founded by Pat Robertson that has a history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights. Grenell also recently joined the Republican National Committee to do outreach to LGBTQ+ voters. The Trump administration has quietly named a new acting State Department inspector general. Matthew Klimow, the U.S. ambassador to Turkmenistan since mid-2019, is the third acting IG since Trump and Pompeo ousted Senate-confirmed IG Steve Linick in May. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s current special envoy to Northern Ireland, former Chief of Staff, and former acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is starting a hedge fund focused on financial services regulation. Ethics experts say Mulvaney explicitly using his knowledge of CFPB to place bets for and against companies gives him an unfair and perhaps illegal advantage.
Court and DOJ matters
Court cases The Trump administration must, for now, stop winding down in-person counting efforts for the 2020 census, a federal judge in California ordered. The three-judge panel hearing a challenge to Trump’s new anti-immigrant census policy seemed hostile to the government’s arguments in a hearing last week. A federal judge has stopped the Trump administration from enforcing a rule change that would let health care providers deny medical services to LGBTQ patients on the grounds of religion. Justice Department Federal prosecutors are preparing to charge longtime GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy in connection with efforts to influence the U.S. government on behalf of foreign interests. Broidy helped raise millions for Donald Trump’s election and the Republican Party. Barr ordered another round of changes to FISA rules, tightening the use of government surveillance on political candidates or their staffers — a move conservatives will likely cheer, as they have long criticized how the FBI investigated the Trump campaign in 2016.
Before conducting physical searches or wiretaps of a federal election official, members of the official's staff, candidates for federal office, or their staff or advisers, the FBI must now consider giving them a "defensive briefing," to tell them that they could be the target of foreign influence.
Hello! Welcome or welcome back to Capy's Survivor! We are once again playing the game of outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting your fellow castaways, whether that be by flirtatious behavior, backstabbing your opponents, or making plenty of allies. This is Capy's Survivor: One World! I will not be doing write-ups with the posts because I don't have time. I will instead work on them while I can, and post a post with some of them once I'm done. Meet the Castaways: Manono Tribe:
Harley has always been distant from his family and never really talks to/about them. He enjoys working with birds and has had his job for about 12 years. He often gets mistaken as creepy or intimidating mainly based on his serious demeanor.
Shawn Kooser, 27, Screenwriter (made by u/SilverOwl24)
Shawn likes to describe himself as an "Athletic Geek". He works as a screenwriter for an animated show, but when he's not writing or watching cartoons/anime, he's working out and playing sports with his friends. He's ready to show survivor how a geek truly wins Survivor.
Michael Krumptone, 47, Band Director (made by u/swoldow)
Michael had dreams of being a musician since he was a kid, and had the drive to learn his craft to the best of his ability.... however the eighties weren't really the most popular time period for french horn players, so he could never get that big break he always thought he'd have, despite getting a music degree. As a result, he grew old and bitter, resenting modern genres of music like rock and rap, as they are what took his career away from him. He does marching band at a few high schools and basically treats it like it's prison camp due to how bitter he is, and he eventually grew to love his job; torturing kids like him into giving up on their dreams. However, he still hates his wife, as he recently had to pick up another school to teach to pay for his ungrateful wife's netflix, so he needs money somehow.
Robert 'R2' Reyes, 25, Medical Student (made by u/Gemini_B)
R2 was raised by Chinese immigrants. They always had the highest expectations for him, and encouraged him to enter the medical field. His life is very stressful though, as he always worries about not being good enough for his parents dreams. In the recent years, his parents have been struggling financially, but refuse to use any money reserved for R2's education. Winning survivor will allow him to continue his schooling and take care of his aging parents.
Karl has always loved the outdoors. He's a very outdoorsy kind of guy, loving adventures of all kind. As a kid, Karl was always a bit of an oddball and an off-beat. Despite it, however, he always managed to surround himself with a good, close group of friends. Karl is an only child, and his mom sadly passed away a short while after he was born. Ever since a young age he had to work in order to help his dad with paying their bills and taking care of their house, which made him quite responsible, surprisingly.
Brett Herman, 28, Poker Player (made by u/Twig7665)
Brett was born into wealth on a mansion in Texas, and lived through most of his childhood in that wealth, until his father was caught up in a huge scandal that left him without money, so at age seventeen Brett ran away to Las Vegas where he could begin a new life. He started playing poker in the streets, and when he was old enough to gamble, he went to a casino, and stunned his opponents by winning the first time he played for money. Soon, people began to realize his talent, and he played in his first professional poker game at the age of 22. Once again, he won, and he became one of the most successful professional poker players in history. This fame caused him to grow arrogant and become a huge jerk, even to his manager. Now rich again, he isn't playing the game for money, he's playing the game to try something new and to gain another title.
Carter was always the baby, even though he was born two minutes before his twin, Matt. This has caused him to be a little immature, leading to him being bullied at school. He later started keeping a diary, which was later found by his girlfriend, Carmen. She understood his life, and the incident brought them closer. She suggested that he become an author and Carter agreed. He has now been married to her and they are planning to have a child soon.
Zed was a famously arrogant pimp and strategist who had a lot of money-making deals with the mob and their women. However, the police arrested him for illegal business and drug dealing. Zed went to jail for several years, until he was finally released, but he had to start from scratch. Now Zed works as a janitor who at least wins some money. Zed learned what he did in the past, but he is still arrogant without going to extremes, and he knows how to control his smile and his brain perfectly.
Angel can be classified as a California Girl, but she also has a "no shit taking" attitude. If she feels that someone is pulling your chain, she'll take action. In this case on Survivor, she'll do what she can to vote your ass out.
Josie was raised with the illusion he had a perfect wife. Her father, Capy's Survivor player Xangetti DeFranco ran a successful real estate business, and her mother was kind and nurturing to both her, and her identical twin sister, but all of that changed when their father mysteriously disappeared from their penthouse, and their mother became distraught, telling Josie her dad got arrested for numerous forms of scamming, and has been hiding from everyone that he has been a loan shark. This of course made Josie very depressed, but her opinions on her parents began to shift further. In that time, her mother became a huge helecoptor mom, not wanting either sibling to do anything bad in fear that they'll lie to her like her husband did, and spread numerous lies to her children about him. However, unlike her twin, Josie has seen through her mom's manipulation tactics, and has been spending every waking moment of her life trying to contact her dad. Trying to get connections to find him, she works as a bartender while lying to her mom about working nights at a library. Her philosophy is that everyone deserves a second chance in life, and she hopes the million will get her financially independent enough where she can live on her own.
Katrina MacQuoid, 58, Prosthodontist (made by u/Gemini_B)
Katrina’s parents we’re performers in Kentucky. They lived and breathed theater and expected their daughter to be the same. Though Katrina loved being the center of attention, and still does, she never loved the stage the way her parents did. Her parents wanted her to continue to pursue something arts related, and she became an advertising adjective, but never felt satisfied. When she learned that Kentucky was looking for jobs in the dental field, she felt it would be a perfect field to enter. She always found teeth interesting, I mean, are they bones? But they fall out? So weird. She returned to school at age 35 and became a Prosthodontist at age 43. She’s worked as a Prosthodontist since then and (While not at the level of Peter) has a firm understanding of the most important hole in the human body, the mouth. While she’s liked by many people because of her fun personality, she has trouble forming 1 on 1 bonds and has never found the special one. As a child she often got in trouble for anger issues with her parents, so she began to hold in her anger and let it out in huge, uncontrollable fits when her parents weren't around. This holding in of anger until she can’t contain it is a habit she continues to have, blaming her rages on “Hurricane Katrina” as a sort of justification of her actions. She’s never left Kentucky and while she’s very book smart, she can often be very ignorant on other subjects.
Tori Kane, 27, Music Producer (made by u/TDSwaggyBoy)
Tori always had a passion for music and natural talent, and by the time she turned 14 she had already known how to play on almost 9 different instruments. She always wanted to become either a singer, a member of a band or just do something in the music industry. And lo and behold, she became a music producer for some of the bigger known artist. And she's only 27! Tori's already high up in the sky! And now, she wants to take on a brand new challenge. She always manages to overcome EVERYTHING, so this should be a piece of cake to her!
Lela Walker, 36, School Psychologist (made by u/dramaking_22)
When Lela was 11, she had to deal with a very stressful and traumatic decision, and when her parent's fighting turned physical, she called the police on her own father. Since then, her and her mother had to be strong together, without him. That's when she knew she wanted to help people. When she first told her mom she wanted to be a school psychologist, she didn't really like it, but eventually she decided to follow her dreams and major in psychology. After having a successful career in psychology, Lela's mom still wasn't convinced she was making enough money... so she went on to survive to prove it!
Dixie O'Brien, 28, Fashion Designer (made by u/dramaking_22)
Dixie has grown up with a lot of opinions, and she doesn't hold back on any of them. Growing up in the South, her parents always expected her to eventually take over their small farm. But when Dixie announced to the whole table one night that she wanted to be a fashion designer, her parents were mortified. Dixie was not changing her mind, whether her parents wanted her to or not, and eventually they supported her decision. After she got done college, Dixie has made several successful clothing pieces, under the clothing line "Dixie Chicks". She hopes to win Survivor to promote her company and make her family proud.
Ximena grew up poor and therefore had to start earning money at an early age by delivering stock. On one of her trips, she was kidnapped and abducted by a group of men that worked for a wanted druglord and rapist. She along with her 3 fellow captives were beaten, abused, and raped for 4 years missing and undetected. After years of mistreatment, Ximena and the other captives were finally found and released. Although it was reliving to be free again, she was deeply traumatized by everything her captor did to her and had an extremely tough time trying to adapt to the real world again. She decided to seek help and was sent to a rehab facility where she got help relieve her trauma. One of the things she picked up was the martial arts which eventually developed into an interest in fencing. Despite it being a male dominated sport, Ximena was adamant on showing young girls they can accomplish anything no matter the hardships they’ve gone through. After her time in rehab,she managed to recover and now spends her time competing in championships all around the world. She came to be a voice for domestic abuse victims
Season:Capy's Survivor: One World 18th - The Manono tribe quickly became a world divided (ironic) as R2, Forrest, and Michael decided to form a Final 3 pact. The others heard of this, and Brett, Carter, Harley, Karl, and Shawn formed another alliance to counter it. Zed decided to stay on the outside, as he didn’t feel comfortable aligning with anyone this early. Since they had majority, the 5-person alliance decided to try to take the easy way out, and vote for the leader of the opposing alliance, R2. Little did they know, R2 had an idol, sending Karl packing in a 5*-4 vote. Eliminated: Karl 17th - Much like their fellow tribe, Salani also became a war between 2 alliances, those being Angel-Tori-Toni and ChadBane-Josie-Katrina. Knowing flippers are dangerous, ChadBane-Josie-Katrine decided to vote out one of the swing votes, Lela. Angel-Tori-Toni decided on Katrina, seeing her as a goat to the opposite side, which they did not want moving ahead, they obviously managed to get Lela’s vote. But, ChadBane, Katrine, and Josie managed to convince the other 2, Dixie and Ximena, to flip to their side. Sending Lela packing 5-4. Eliminated: Lela 16th - Manono was back to tribal council. It was a tribe divided between Brett-Carter-Harley-Shawn and Forrest-Michael-R2, alongside swing vote Zed. Zed decided to stick with the 3, because the other 4 were being bullies among the tribe, and just seen as threats. Both sides decided to vote the opposing sides leader-figure, being R2 and Brett. It was a 4-4, but Shawn realized he was only hurting his game by staying loyal to the alliance, so he decided to flip. Sending Brett home on a 4-4; 4-2 vote. Eliminated: Brett. 15th - Salani was back at tribal. The alliances were still going strong. With Ximena and Dixie still in the middle. But, Ximena was trying to be a villainous switch, and the 2 alliances said they only needed 1 swing vote to gain a majority, and that Ximena was being untrustworthy, and they can’t keep someone like that until the merge, because she just had a clashing personality with the rest of the tribe, and it wasn’t sitting well. But, little did they know, Ximena had an idol. So she decided that Toni was her biggest adversary currently in the game, and personally. So she sent her home 7*-1. Eliminated: Toni. 14th - A tribe swap occurs, putting Angel, Dixie, Josie, Katrina, Michael, Tori and Zed onto Manono. With Carter, ChadBane, Forrest, Harley, R2, Shawn, and Ximena on Salani. Salani wins the first post-swap immunity, sending Manono to Tribal Council. Ximena manages to find the Salani idol, meaning Forrest (who found the original Manono idol) and Ximena have idols. At the Manono camp, Tori is already making bad first impressions on Michael and Zed, when they approach the other woman, they agree that they need to take her out. But this is secretly just because the other woman just don’t get along well with Tori, and they don’t want her putting the woman at a disadvantage in the future. So by a unanimous vote of 6-1, Tori is sent packing. Eliminated: Tori. 13th - Salani wins another immunity challenge, sending Manono back to the tribal council. Where Zed and Angel have a fight, and the rest of the tribe has had enough of their little rivalry. But, wanting to be in the good with the men coming into the merge, Josie, Dixie, and Katrine decide it will be the best to vote Angel out, even if it does give them a slight disadvantage. Angel goes out in a 4-2. Eliminated: Angel 12th - The merge occurs, which means Carter, ChadBane, Dixie, Forrest, Harley, Josie, Katrina, Michael, R2, Shawn, Ximena, and Zed made the merge. Katrina wins the first immunity challenge. Back at camp, being very divided during the swap, the alliance of Josie, Michael, Zed, Katrina, and Dixie quickly dissolves. Everyone is targeting Ximena, not knowing she has another idol. But Zed wants to try and help a fellow former swing vote. So he tries to rally the girls in an attempt to boot a guy, but they don’t listen. It was a 10-2 for Ximena, but she uses her idol. Blindsiding Carter. Eliminated: Carter. 11th - ChadBane wins the immunity challenge. Knowing there is no hope anymore for Ximena, Zed decides to try to decrease the target on his back by flipping back over to the other side of the vote, as he knows there is no way he will get votes. Ximena goes out in a 10-1 vote. Eliminated: Ximena 10th - ChadBane wins their second immunity in a row. Back at camp, in an attempt to improve his social game, Zed goes and talks to Josie, and they end up bonding a lot. The girls decide that they need to stop trying to vote out their own, as they are down 6-4 in numbers. Luckily for them, R2, Forrest, and Michael decide it will be for the best to vote out Shawn, as he is doing good in the challenges and has a natural charm. They manage to get Zed on board, as he feels like he is on the outside. The women feel like this is a perfect opportunity to take. Shawn is blindsided 8-2. Eliminated: Shawn. 9th - ChadBane wins their third immunity in a row. Seeing him as a major social and strategic threat on the other side, the girls decide that R2 is their biggest adversary. R2 is also targeting Dixie with all the guys because she is seen as a goat to some of the girls, and she can’t make it to the end. Zed ends up flipping in favor of the girls, as he sees R2’s threat level, and is still trying to seal cracks from defending Ximena. But, R2 knows that the girls being quiet towards his is probably not a good sign, and plays his new-found idol just in case. Blindsiding Dixie 5*-4. Eliminated: Dixie. 8th - R2 manages to win immunity, foiling Zed and the girl’s plans of attempting to flip someone in a tie. The girls decide to target R2’s right hand man, Harley. While the guys decide that challenge beat, ChadBane is their biggest target. Zed, the swing vote, is thinking. now with the girls being in a minority instead of a tied majority, and him seeing ChadBane as a bigger threat, he decides to flip back with the guys. Yet another blindside, with ChadBane going out 5-3. Eliminated: ChadBane. 7th - R2 snags another immunity win. Zed is attempting to reconcile his relationship and alliance with Michael. It works, and he manages to convince Michael that they are not priority, that they are not the priority with the guys, and they will take them out whenever they have a chance. They decide that going with the girls target of Forrest would be good. R2, Forrest, and Harley figure that this is happening, as Michael has been strangely quiet towards them. R2 decides that they are too smart to go for the same target twice in a row, and he tells Forrest to play his idol on himself. He does, blocking 5 votes, and blindsiding Josie. Eliminated: Josie. 6th - Katrina wins her second immunity, pitting the guys against each other. Both alliances approach Katrina, with Zed-Michael targeting R2, and R2-Forrest-Harley targeting Michael. Katrina decides that taking the risky move, and forcing a tie with R2 and Michael is the best bet, as someone might flip to their side, seeing as R2 is a major threat. It does tie, Zed and Katrina know that flipping to Michael is very stupid. Forrest and Harley decide that, even though he is a threat, they will make it farther in the game with R2, and having an 100% chance of losing an ally is better than a 50% chance, it ties again. Forrest, Harley, and Zed draw rocks. Forrest draws the black rock, and is promptly eliminated. Eliminated: Forrest. 5th - R2 wins his third immunity. But, he is also panicking, as he just lost one of his intended goats, and might not be able to save his other, Harley. He gathers Zed, Michael, and Harley and tell them that they need to stick with their original alliance. Michael and Zed find this plan good, as it guarantees them a spot. But, they didn’t expect that R2 does not trust them, and he knows Michael is well spoken, and a jury threat. So he decides last-minute to round up Katrina and Harley to blindside him. Michael joins the many people blindsided this season, going out in a 3-2. Eliminated: Michael. 4th - R2 manages to win Final Immunity, which means he won 4 immunities in all. Wanting his game-long enemy, Zed, out R2 decides that even though bringing Katrina will lose him a few votes, he should take Zed out just in case. Zed is the last one to go home by a 3-1 vote. Eliminated: Zed. Final Tribal Council - R2 manages to win by a vote of 7-2-0, for his well-rounded game, winning 4 immunities, being one of the better strategists this season, orchestrating many blindsides, and playing a great social game. Katrina manages to gather 2 because of her challenge wins and because Dixie and ChadBane were bitter about how they went out. Harley did…. pretty much nothing, so he didn’t get any votes. My thoughts - One of the better seasons in a while. Dominant winner, but also well-rounded. Definitely deserved it. The sheer amount of blindsides and people getting idoled out was overwhelming at times, but also fun to watch. With being on the bottom of the totem pole the whole game, Zed really managed to work it out, I would’ve liked to see a Katrina-Zed-R2 Final 3. I would like to see how that would work out. All-in-all, a good season. I give it a 6.5/10. Potential Returnees: R2, Katrina, Zed, Forrest, Josie, ChadBane, Ximena Leave your thoughts down below!
is it illegal to gamble at home in california video
Penal Code 330 PC is the California statute that makes it a crime for a person to gamble in a “banking” or “percentage” game. A conviction is a misdemeanor that carries a penalty of up to 6 months in jail and a fine of up to $1000.00.A banking game is one where there is a “house” or “bank” that participates in the game and If you do not know this and unwittingly participated in a gambling scheme that turned out to be illegal, you can still be charged with a gambling crime and may be slapped with significant penalties that may result in some serious repercussions. In these kinds of scenarios, knowing your rights and the gambling laws of your state can spell the difference between a safe trip home and a one-way California online gambling is not yet legalized and regulated within state borders. However, there are real money gambling sites available in CA. They’re just based elsewhere. So if you’re wondering you can gamble online for real money in California, the simple answer is yes. We go into more detail in this guide to CA online gambling, which also includes our recommendations for the best California gambling sites currently available. California gambling laws are a mess of state regulations and town-level laws, but in most cases participating in an illegal game of chance would be considered a misdemeanor. Nevertheless, the California code does not mention online gambling specifically and the state doesn’t really have all that many broad regulations that could be applied to online gambling. Consequently, most experts agree that Californians are free to enjoy their favorite iGaming sites, as there’s no law that would Sports betting in California is sadly still not legal. However, daily fantasy sports and horse racing sites operate legally in the state. Given its size and love of pro sports, California is one of the most eagerly-anticipated sports betting markets in the United States. And with the recent Supreme Court decision that opened the door to regulated sports gambling, it’s only a matter of time until California passes sports betting legislation. Keeping your home game legal and safe is fairly simple, but it's surprising how many people make mistakes that put their game at risk from both cops and robbers. You will still need to do a little research into your local laws to make sure you're compliant with them, but these simple rules will go a long way toward ensuring your game is both legal and safe. The websites Last Updated: March 29, 2019 References For the most part, gambling is regulated by state law, so whether a particular instance of gambling activity is illegal depends on the law in your state. However, online gambling is illegal throughout the country under federal law. You can report online gambling to the FBI. A $10 bet that you with your buddy while watching a football game at your home would constitute a social wager. On the other end of the spectrum, running books and creating a large-scale operation crosses into standard gambling territory, which is illegal and punishable by law. California Gambling Control Resource Book 2020, pdf The following regulations have recently been approved by the Office of Administrative Law. The regulations below are not included in the most recent version of the California Gambling Law and Regulations. NIGC – MICS Some states define certain activities as illegal because of the use of the internet while others will consider amateur gambling at home as illegal. What Is Legal Gambling? The definition of legal gambling usually requires a specific state’s reference. In Nevada, most forms of gambling are legal where all other states may consider the activity illegal. Most legal gambling throughout the
CALIFORNIA FINALLY WAKING UP: THIS IS WHY 59% OF ...
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