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Washington Free Beacon editor in chief calls Trump-Barr the new Trump-Russia conspiracy

The Washington Free Beacon editor in chief defended Attorney General William Barr’s handling of the Mueller report and accused Democrats of creating another conspiracy.

“I mean we've gone from a Trump-Russia conspiracy, which seems to have been disproven by Mueller's investigation, to Trump-Barr conspiracy, which has been quickly adopted by the Democrats as the new political play,” Matthew Continetti said Tuesday on “Special Report.”

Continetti described Barr as the antithesis of former FBI director James Comey.

BARR SETS DEADLINE FOR SENDING MUELLER REPORT TO CONGRESS

Barr, the editor told Baier as a member of the panel, has "done everything by the book." This, in contrast to Comey, who he said "went ahead and inserted himself into the public sphere with his announcements about the investigations."

“He has done exactly what one would expect from someone who follows the book.”

Barr testified before a congressional panel on Capitol Hill on Tuesday in his first appearance since releasing a four-page summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. Despite the Democratic criticism, he said his office is hard at work preparing to release the report (with redactions) “within a week.”

House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., accused Barr of seeming to "cherry pick" from the report to "draw the most favorable conclusion possible for the president" during her opening statement.

WOW: CHELSEA HANDLER SAYS SHE HAS 'FEELINGS' FOR ROBERT MUELLER

Other Democrats made similar comments as Barr appeared before the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee for a hearing originally meant to address Barr’s fiscal 2020 spending request for the Justice Department.

Barr maintained that he is working "diligently to make as much information as possible available to Congress."

Fox News’ Brooke Singman, Gregg Re, Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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What if Turkey squeezed the London lira market to death?

FILE PHOTO: A merchant counts Turkish lira banknotes at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul
FILE PHOTO: A merchant counts Turkish lira banknotes at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2019. REUTERS/Murad Sezer/File Photo

April 9, 2019

By Marc Jones and Karin Strohecker

LONDON (Reuters) – Turkey’s authorities have shown over the past month they are capable of squeezing the life out of the $35 billion-a-day London lira market – but the cost of killing it off completely would be high for country itself.

The lira’s 2018 plunge triggered a deep recession, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government may see the attraction of suffocating an offshore market it believes to be a hotbed of destabilizing speculation.

Ankara knows that market greases the wheels of the $14 billion a year of foreign direct investment Turkey sucks in on average — nearly 60,000 companies had foreign capital there last year — not to mention helping to cover its $160 billion external funding gap.

Nevertheless, Erdogan frequently blames foreign “speculators” for sending the lira sprawling. That in turn squeezes payments and the refinancing of Turkish companies’ hard currency debts, sends household savings scurrying to dollars, ramps up inflation and interest rates and slams the brakes on the economy.

So pressuring local banks late last month to stop lending lira to overseas counterparts looked like a deliberate ploy and one that had a striking resemblance to a capital control.

The cost of offshore borrowing in the Turkish currency surged by more than 1,000 percent overnight, leading to pain for short sellers but a frozen market.

Some life returned last week, but Societe Generale’s head of emerging market strategy, Jason Daw, thinks the episode shows Ankara would like to nail it shut if only it could without completely choking investment.

“That seems to be the message, considering they squeezed the international positions so much,” he said, adding it was relentless volatility that irked Ankara.

However, the offshore market has existed comfortably for years. Investors like it because it can be easier to get credit lines with a JP Morgan, Barclays or Citi than a smaller Turkish bank in Istanbul or Ankara.

Bank of England analysis shows $35.8 billion worth of daily offshore lira trading was going on late last year. It was even bigger, at $56 billion a day, in April before the lira crashed 40 percent.

Offshore currency and swap markets are typically freer of heavy central bank influence than domestic markets, but they are still vulnerable to the ebb and flow of local currency liquidity. And this — as illustrated last month — is where authorities do retain an element of control.

Simply by shutting off its funding auctions for a while and maybe a bit of behind-the-scenes leaning on the local lenders, the central bank could spike the swap rates and briefly seize the market.

“The lira only stabilized once offshore interest rates rose significantly above onshore rates,” analysts at Goldman Sachs observed a few days afterwards as the recovery began.

For a graphic on Turkish lira in offshore markets, see – https://tmsnrt.rs/2I5F2ya

Interactive graphic on offshore lira trading: https://tmsnrt.rs/2I7ceFq

SHORT MEMORIES

The squeeze may have relented for now, but many countries, both emerging and developed, have periodically tried switching off speculation in offshore currency markets when battling currency runs in decades past. Thailand, Malaysia Argentina and Iceland are just a few examples.

The all tend to boil down to where households and companies are losing confidence in their country’s currency, but authorities don’t have the foreign-exchange reserves to fight the run.

Not only does Turkey need foreign investors to buy its debt and provide FDI, but FX reserves are looking thin, especially as Turks are now stashing away record amounts of dollars.

Aberdeen Standard Investments’ Kieran Curtis says that this hoarding means Turkey’s banks effectively have a surplus of dollars on their books but a shortage of lira.

He thinks for that reason Ankara won’t want to mess too much with the offshore market — it is crucial for balancing the mismatch. By spooking the market, bank transaction costs could easily rise. “It is not a sustainable business model,” he said.

Having a London lira market was also a symbol of “great importance” for Turkey’s free market credentials, said İbrahim Turhan, a former deputy governor of the Turkish central bank.

“The fight against speculative attacks will be made with rational policies and good governance, not bans,” he said.

Ankara would also need to make major improvements to bring more lira trading onshore. Authorities there have opened a local currency swap market under Borsa Istanbul which Turkish banks have started to use. But without foreign investors, traders say, the volumes won’t achieve the necessary scale.

It has backed away from offering non-deliverable forwards and there is no domestic interest rate swap market as there is not only in major markets but also in other emerging markets, such as Russia, Poland and Hungary.

So for now at least it looks like the international market will continue to recover, albeit with nagging worries about what happens next time the lira really lurches.

“It’s too early to say if people that got burned will come back,” said one senior FX trader in London. “But people tend to have very short memories. I am always surprised at how quickly people come back into the market.”

For a graphic on Forex held by Turkish local individuals hits record high, see – https://tmsnrt.rs/2CIv4OS

(Additional reporting by Nevzat Devranoglu in Istanbul and Tommy Wilkes in London; editing by Larry King)

Source: OANN

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Miner Vale quashed efforts to validate dam safety before disaster: prosecutor

Members of a rescue team search for victims after a tailings dam owned by Brazilian mining company Vale SA collapsed, in Brumadinho
FILE PHOTO: Members of a rescue team search for victims after a tailings dam owned by Brazilian mining company Vale SA collapsed, in Brumadinho, Brazil January 28, 2019. REUTERS/Adriano Machado

March 20, 2019

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Executives at Vale SA, the world’s largest iron ore miner, quashed efforts by Brazilian authorities to audit one of its mining dams months before it collapsed and killed over 300 people, a state prosecutor said, according to the news website, G1.

William Garcia, a prosecutor in Minas Gerais where the January disaster occurred, told G1 his office had filed subpoenas with Vale last June to review safety documents regarding Vale’s dam.

But Vale’s lawyers responded in November and did not provide those documents, arguing they had received positive reviews by an auditor the firm had hired, the German firm Tuv Sud, he said.

Tuv Sud “was used to make it more difficult for prosecutors to investigate and hide from public view the state of that dam, which was so critical that less than two months later it broke,” Garcia said at an anti-corruption event in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais.

Investigators have been scrutinizing the relationship between Vale and Tuv Sud, which had certified the dam as safe, including allegations the auditor was hired after another firm declined to certify the structures as safe.

Tuv Sud and Vale declined to comment. Garcia did not respond to a request for comment.

The tailings dam at Vale’s Corrego do Feijao iron ore mine burst on Jan. 25, releasing a torrent of mining waste that buried workers and local residents in the nearby town of Brumadinho.

In the wake of the latest incident, Vale set up a three-person committee to carry out its own investigation into what caused the dam to break.

On Wednesday, the company said it had appointed Manuel Martins, a consultant, to the committee to replace Jean-Pierre Remy, who was previously a consultant to prosecutors who investigated an earlier collapse of a Vale dam in 2015.

(Reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Source: OANN

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Meghan McCain: My Father Was Trump's 'Kryptonite'

Late Sen. John McCain was President Donald Trump's "kryptonite in life" and he's still his "kryptonite in death," Meghan McCain said Monday while pushing back against the president after he attacked her father on Twitter over the weekend.

"Listen, he spends his weekend obsessing over great men because he knows it, and I know it, and all of you know it: he will never be a great man," McCain, a co-host of ABC's "The View," said during the program, while commenting that rather than spending time with his family and friends, the president spends it on waging attacks.  

"All of us have love and families, and when my father was alive, up until adulthood, we would spend our time together cooking, hiking, fishing, really celebrating life, and I think it's because he almost died," McCain said. "And I just thought, 'your life is spent on the weekend not with your family, not with your friends, but you're obsessing, obsessing over great men you could never live up to.' That tells you everything you need to know about his pathetic life right now."

McCain died in 2018 after a year-long battle with brain cancer. Over the weekend, Trump attacked him for his ties to a dossier linking the president with Russia, and about his vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act. He also said that McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five years, was "last in his class" at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Meghan McCain over the weekend tweeted to Trump that "no one will ever love you the way they loved my father."

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Media Matters President Under Fire for Racist Blog Posts

The president of Media Matters is under fire after old blog posts he wrote containing racial slurs and other forms of hate resurfaced this week.

The Daily Caller published portions of the posts written by Angelo Carusone. In them, he made several anti-Semitic comments, referred to Japanese people with a racial slur, and made fun of Bangladeshis.

Carusone also appeared to make fun of cross-dressers and said the late Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, was one of his favorite public figures.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson criticized Carusone and Media Matters on his show Tuesday and Wednesday night. The organization took aim at Carlson over the weekend by publishing derogatory comments he made on a radio show between 2006 and 2011.

According to Fortune, Carlson has already lost a handful of sponsors because of his past remarks that were made public on Sunday. Media Matters claims Carlson has lost a total of 34 sponsors in recent months because of comments he has made.

In one of Carusone's posts, he commented on a news story about a women's basketball coach in Japan who was accused of sexually and physically abusing his players.

"Lighten up j*ps," Carusone wrote.

Carusone also referred to his boyfriend as "jewry," adding in another post that his boyfriend had "several bags of Jewish gold."

Source: NewsMax America

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Lou Dobbs: It Was A ‘Political Decision’ To Rule Out Arson In Notre Dame Blaze

Veteran broadcaster Lou Dobbs noted Tuesday that the decision to dismiss any notion that the Notre Dame fire could have been a deliberate act was based on politics, rather than any investigation of the facts.

“One thing authorities are ruling out, however, within just a matter of hours, arson,” Dobbs stated.

“That was a decision made within hours. It sounds like a different kind of decision,”Dobbs added.

“Perhaps a political decision rather than one based on careful investigation of the facts.” he further told viewers.

Dobbs cited the enormous amount of attacks on Catholic churches in France last year alone as a reason why it is entirely valid for anyone to wonder if the Notre Dame fire was set deliberately.

“Perhaps overlooked since yesterday is 875 Catholic churches in France were vandalized in 2018 — 875! In a single week last month, 12 churches were vandalized, including a fire deliberately set at a church also located in Paris.” Dobbs urged.

“This is context, this is not speculation, this is the situation right now in France and the recent history of what has happened to Catholic churches throughout the nation.” he added.

“Ignored too often by some covering the tragedy, some who have ruled out ‘speculation’ about the cause of the Notre Dame fire as they speculate — taking it as gospel that arson was not the cause.” Dobbs noted.

While many actually celebrated the fire, news networks declared it was a made up conspiracy theory that anyone was happy Notre Dame was burning.

Networks, including Fox News, actively shut down anyone who dared even suggest that arson should be looked into.

Source: InfoWars

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Climate Change Hearing Adjourned After Dems Don't Show

House Democrats have made climate change one of their principal focuses since taking control of the lower chamber in November, but three party lawmakers failed to show for a hearing on the topic at a House Natural Resources Committee subpanel Tuesday, leading to its adjournment only minutes after it began, The Hill reports.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, argued the topics did not fall under the panel's scope before requesting a roll call vote. Republicans prevailed, 4-2.

Oversight and Investigations subcommittee Chairman TJ Cox, D-Calif., later criticized the GOP members for refusing to listen to witnesses on climate denial.

The hearing, titled The Denial Playbook – How Industries Manipulate Science and Policy from Climate Change to Public Health – was to speak to the "tactics used by various industries to mislead the public about health and environmental risks and explain how to recognize the signs of a denialist misinformation campaign in any field."

Gohmert in an opening statement said the topic falls outside of the jurisdiction of the committee.

"When it comes to matters of climate change, the House rules explicitly references several topics — topics include such as conservation of energy resources, almost anything that has to do with renewable energy, energy policy, environmental research, scientific research, the National Science Foundation, and even the National Weather Service," he said.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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FILE PHOTO: Cases of Pepsi are shown for sale at a store in Carlsbad
FILE PHOTO: Cases of Pepsi are shown for sale at a store in Carlsbad, California, U.S., April 22, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Amit Dave and Mayank Bhardwaj

AHMEDABAD/NEW DELHI (Reuters) – PepsiCo Inc has sued four Indian farmers for cultivating a potato variety that the snack food and drinks maker claims infringes its patent, the company and the growers said on Friday.

Pepsi has sued the farmers for cultivating the FC5 potato variety, exclusively grown for its popular Lay’s potato chips. The FC5 variety has a lower moisture content required to make snacks such as potato chips.

PepsiCo is seeking more than 10 million rupees ($142,840.82) each for alleged patent infringement.

The farmers grow potatoes in the western state of Gujarat, a leading producer of India’s most consumed vegetable.

“We have been growing potatoes for a long time and we didn’t face this problem ever, as we’ve mostly been using the seeds saved from one harvest to plant the next year’s crop,” said Bipin Patel, one of the four farmers sued by Pepsi.

Patel did not say how he came by the PepsiCo variety.

A court in Ahmedabad, the business hub of Gujarat, on Friday agreed to hear the case on June 12, said Anand Yagnik, the lawyer for the farmers.

“In this instance, we took judicial recourse against people who were illegally dealing in our registered variety,” A PepsiCo India spokesman said. “This was done to protect our rights and safeguard the larger interest of farmers that are engaged with us and who are using and benefiting from seeds of our registered variety.”

PepsiCo, which set up its first potato chips plant in India in 1989, supplies the FC5 potato variety to a group of farmers who in turn sell their produce to the company at a fixed price.

The All India Kisan Sabha, or All India Farmers’ Forum, has asked the Indian government to protect the farmers.

The farmers’ forum has also called for a boycott of PepsiCo’s Lay’s chips and the company’s other products.

The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

PepsiCo is the second major U.S. company in India to face issues over patent infringement.

Stung by a long-standing intellectual property dispute, seed maker Monsanto, which is now owned by German drugmaker Bayer AG, withdrew from some businesses in India over a cotton-seed dispute with farmers, Reuters reported in 2017. (reut.rs/2ncBknn)

(Reporting by Amit Dave in AHMEDABAD and Mayank Bhardwaj in NEW DELHI; Editing by Martin Howell and Louise Heavens)

Source: OANN

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FILE PHOTO: The Archer Daniels Midland Co (ADM) logo is displayed on a screen on the floor of the NYSE in New York
FILE PHOTO: The Archer Daniels Midland Co (ADM) logo is displayed on a screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., May 3, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By P.J. Huffstutter and Shradha Singh

CHICAGO/BENGALURU (Reuters) – Archer Daniels Midland Co said on Friday it was considering spinning off its ethanol business after slim biofuel margins and Midwestern floods slammed the U.S. grains merchant’s profit, which tumbled 41 percent in the first quarter.

ADM said it was creating an ethanol subsidiary, which will include dry mills in Columbus, Nebraska; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Peoria, Illinois.

The ethanol subsidiary will report as an independent segment, the company said, allowing options “which may include, but are not limited to, a potential spin-off of the business to existing ADM shareholders.”

Results were hit by the “bomb cyclone” blizzards that devastated the Midwest and Great Plains this year, causing massive flooding across Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, washing out rail lines and wreaking havoc in the moving and processing of corn, soybeans and wheat. One-sixth of U.S. ethanol production was halted.

In March, ADM warned Wall Street that flooding and severe winter weather in the U.S. Midwest would reduce its first-quarter operating profit by $50 million to $60 million.

“The first quarter proved more challenging than initially expected,” said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Juan Luciano, with earnings down in its starches, sweeteners and bioproducts unit. Luciano said impacts of the severe weather ultimately “were on the high side of our initial estimates”.

Ongoing problems in the ethanol industry added to the problems and “limited margins and opportunities” for ADM, Luciano said.

The ethanol industry has been in the midst of a historic downswing due to the U.S.-China trade war, excess domestic supply and weak margins.

ADM, which had been an ethanol pioneer, signaled to Wall Street in 2016 that it was hunting for options and considering sales of its U.S. dry ethanol mills. Luciano told Reuters this year that offers ADM had received for the mills were too low.

In addition, ADM said it planned to repurpose its corn wet mill in Marshall, Minnesota, to produce higher volumes of food and industrial-grade starches.

Other major traders are alsy trying to distance themselves from struggling ethanol businesses. Louis Dreyfus Company BV spun off its Brazilian sugar and ethanol business Biosev in 2013. Rival Bunge sold its sugar book and has sought a buyer for its Brazilian mills since 2013.

ADM, which makes money trading, processing and transporting crops, such as corn, soybeans and wheat, has been looking to strengthen its core business. Last month it said it would seek voluntary early retirements of some North American employees and cut jobs as part of a restructuring effort.

The company expects to lower 2019 capital spending by 10 percent to between $800 million and $900 million.

Net earnings attributable to the company fell to $233 million, or 41 cents per share, in the three months ended March 31, from $393 million, or 70 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue fell to $15.30 billion from $15.53 billion. On an adjusted basis, the company earned 46 cents per share, while analysts on average had estimated 60 cents, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

(Reporting by Shradha Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta, Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio)

Source: OANN

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The Slack app logo is seen on a smartphone in this illustration
FILE PHOTO: The Slack app logo is seen on a smartphone in this picture illustration taken September 15, 2017. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

April 26, 2019

(Reuters) – Slack Technologies Inc, operator of the popular workplace instant-messaging app, reported a loss of $140.7 million in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2019, the company said on Friday in a regulatory filing ahead of its planned public market debut.

The company said its daily active users exceeded 10 million in the three months ended Jan. 31, 2019.

Slack expects to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “SK”, it said.

The San Francisco-based company is seeking to go public via a direct listing, making it the second big technology company after Spotify Technology SA to bypass the traditional route of listing shares through an initial public offering.

A direct listing is a cheaper way of becoming a public company as the process requires fewer investment banks and therefore lower fees.

In a direct listing, however, a company does not sell any new shares to raise money. Instead, it gives existing shareholders the opportunity to cash out.

Slack is the latest in a string of high-profile technology companies looking to go public this year. Lyft Inc, Pinterest and Zoom Video Communications have completed IPOs so far in 2019.

The company is hoping for a valuation of more than $10 billion in the listing, Reuters had previously reported. Some early investors and employees have been selling the stock at around $28, valuing the company close to $17 billion, Kelly Rodriques, CEO of Forge, a brokerage company, told CNBC on Thursday.

Slack set a placeholder amount of $100 million to indicate the size of the IPO. The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filings is used to calculate registration fees. The final size of the IPO could be different.

Its competitors include Microsoft Teams, a free chat add-on for Microsoft’s Office365 users.

(Reporting By Aparajita Saxena and Joshua Franklin in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and Anil D’Silva)

Source: OANN

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FILE PHOTO: Candidate Zelenskiy reacts following the announcement of an exit poll in Ukraine's presidential election in Kiev
FILE PHOTO: Ukrainian presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy reacts following the announcement of the first exit poll in a presidential election at his campaign headquarters in Kiev, Ukraine April 21, 2019. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Matthias Williams

KIEV (Reuters) – Russia’s decision to make it easier for residents of rebel-controlled eastern Ukraine to obtain a Russian passport is meant to test Ukraine’s new leader and the West should not recognize the documents, Lithuania’s foreign minister said on Friday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the order on facilitating passports on Wednesday, three days after comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a political novice, won a landslide victory in Ukraine’s presidential election.

Linas Linkevicius, whose own country also has strained relations with Moscow, told Reuters in an interview that the West should consider imposing new sanctions on Russia.

“This is a blatant violation of international law. And basically also a kind of test to the new (Ukrainian) leadership, which is also a usual game,” Linkevicius said.

“The least we can do (is) we shouldn’t recognize these passports. How to do that technically, it’s another issue to discuss. Also (we need) to look at additional sanctions,” said Linkevicius, whose small Baltic nation is a member of NATO and the European Union.

Western nations imposed sanctions on Russia over its 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and its support for armed separatists battling Kiev’s forces in eastern Ukraine. Some 13,000 people have been killed in that conflict despite a notional ceasefire signed in Minsk in 2015.

Linkevicius, who in Kiev on Friday became the first minister of an EU country since Ukraine’s election to meet President-elect Zelenskiy, said they had discussed the passport issue.

Zelenskiy also raised the possibility of resetting the Minsk ceasefire agreement without giving any concessions to Russia, Linkevicius said.

“DANGEROUS CANCER” OF GRAFT

The minister urged Zelenskiy to deliver on his electoral promise of tackling corruption, which he described as the “most dangerous cancer” facing Ukraine, which hopes one day to join the EU.

Last month, Lithuania’s own relations with Russia came under renewed strain after a Vilnius court found former Soviet defense minister Dmitry Yazov, in absentia, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in a 1991 crackdown against Lithuania’s pro-independence movement.

Russia branded the verdict “extremely unfriendly and essentially provocative” and opened a probe into the judges involved.

Linkevicius accused Russia of seeking to politicize the judicial process by trying to take revenge on the judges, adding: “This is lamentable.”

(Editing by Gareth Jones)

Source: OANN

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A Cook County judge recently called out embattled State Attorney Kim Foxx for upholding a double standard by prosecuting a woman for filing a false police report — but dropping similar charges against embattled “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett.

Foxx has faced intense criticism over her office’s decision to drop a 16-count indictment against Smollett, just weeks after bringing the charges against the high-profile TV star. Foxx’s deal with Smollett, which did not require him to admit guilt, drew ire from the public, the city’s top cop and the former mayor who called it a “whitewash of justice.”

JUSSIE SMOLLETT CHICAGO PROSECUTOR KIM FOXX CHIDED BY NATIONAL ATTORNEYS GROUPS AFTER JUSSIE SMOLLETT CHARGES DROPPED 

Cook County Judge Marc Martin, who was presiding over an unrelated case, chastised Foxx and her office for creating a situation where anyone charged with filing a false report would expect the same leniency her office afforded Smollett.

Candace Clark, 21, is facing one felony count of making a false report. Prosecutors accused her of giving a friend access to her bank account and then telling authorities the money had been stolen. She denies the charges and claims she’s the victim of Foxx’s double standard — something the judge weighed in on.

“Well, Ms. Clark is not a movie star, she doesn’t have a high-price lawyer, although, her lawyer’s very good. And this smells, big time,” Martin said to prosecutors during a recent hearing, Fox 32 reported. “I didn’t create this mess, your office created this mess. And your explanation is unsatisfactory to this court. She’s being treated differently.”

The judge continued, “There’s no publicity on this case. She doesn’t have Mark Geragos as her lawyer or Ron Safer or Judge Brown. It’s not right. And (if) I proceed in this matter, you’re just digging yourselves further in a hole. (If the) press gets a hold of this, it’ll be in a newspaper. Why is Ms. Clark being treated differently than Mr. Smollett?”

Foxx recused herself from the Smollett case in February but continued to oversee the investigation through text messages with her assistant Joseph Magats.

The text messages revealed Foxx called Smollett a “washed up celeb who lied to cops.” They also show she cautioned Magats about throwing the book at Smollett.

“Sooo……I’m recused, but when people accuse us of overcharging cases…16 counts on a class 4 becomes exhibit A,” Foxx wrote to Magats on March 8.

“Pedophile with 4 victims 10 counts. Washed up celeb who lied to cops, 16. On a case eligible for deferred prosecution I think it’s indicative of something we should be looking at generally. Just because we can charge something doesn’t mean we should,” she added, referring to the case of R&B singer R. Kelly, who was indicted on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in connection with four women, three of whom were underage.

KIM FOXX’S CHIEF ETHICS OFFICER RESIGNS FOLLOWING SMOLLETT CONTROVERSY

President Trump said last month he asked for a federal review of Foxx’s decision to drop the charges against Smollett. He also called the actor “an absolute embarrassment to our country.”

The Smollett case garnered national attention and threatened to tear Chicago apart. It pit the police department and mayor against prosecutors and underscored the idea that wealthy people are somehow above the law.

Smollett told police he was attacked on Jan. 29 around 2 a.m. as he was returning home from a sandwich shop in Chicago. He said two masked men shouted racial and anti-gay slurs, poured bleach on him, beat him and tied a rope around his neck. He claimed they shouted, “This is MAGA country” — a reference to President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

CLICK HERE FOF THE FOX NEWS APP

After an intense investigation, police said Smollett staged the entire incident to drum up publicity for his career.

Smollett has strongly denied the accusations.

Source: Fox News National

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