90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, December 15, 2022

Mother of Child Rape Victim Sues Virginia Soros Prosecutor in Federal Court

Steve Descano's office had to offer a plea deal after failing to share evidence on time

The mother of an 11-year-old rape victim is suing a George-Soros backed prosecutor in Virginia who let the boy’s rapist walk free, alleging the prosecutor’s actions violated the minor’s civil rights and made him fear for his physical safety.

Amber Reel in November filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of her son after Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) let the rapist walk. Court filings show Descano was months late in sharing necessary evidence before a September trial, dooming the case and forcing his office to enter into a lesser plea deal with the rapist the same month. Ronnie Reel, who was released on time served, had faced life in prison for forcibly sodomizing the minor. Reel is the victim’s uncle.

This is the second high-profile case in the last month where the Soros prosecutor freed a dangerous offender. In December, Descano struck a plea deal that would clear the record of a man who fired his gun into a crowded Virginia bar. Soros donated more than half a million dollars to Descano’s 2019 campaign.

A grand jury had already indicted Reel in February for sodomy and aggravated sexual battery, and the case was set for trial in September. But Descano’s office didn’t share evidence with the public defender before trial, bungling Reel’s prosecution with its "woefully, woefully missed" deadlines. The case’s presiding judge said Descano’s office did a "disservice to the victim" and was "very concerning to the court."

Because he dodged a felony sex crime conviction, Reel won’t have to register as a sex offender and won’t be barred from holding jobs in schools or other places that would put him near children. The victim and his mother in their suit say Descano’s "deliberate indifference represents egregious conduct that is shocking to the conscience."

"We have to deal with feeling like we’re in danger," Amber Reel told Fox 5, which first reported the lawsuit. "There’s other kids out there. He’s going to move into a neighborhood. What if there’s a school down the road?"

A spokesman for Descano did not respond to a request for comment.

The victim also claims Descano lied by saying it was the first time his office had failed to submit evidence for a case. The prosecutor missed deadlines for evidence in January on a case involving a man who solicited a minor online for sex. The case was dismissed in July due to Descano’s failure.

Fairfax County circuit court chief judge Penney Azcarate confirmed in court that Reel’s case was "not the first time" she saw a failure by Descano’s office lead to charges being dismissed, according to a September court transcript. By failing to provide evidence, Azcarate added, the office had broken the law.

Nor was it the first time Descano lied over the course of the Reel case. According to the federal lawsuit, the prosecutor said he would keep the victim and his mother abreast of any plea negotiations in accordance with Virginia law but then failed to do so, adding "insult to injury," they say.

Even Reel’s defense attorney piled on after the case was dismissed, telling Fox 5 that Descano’s office tried "to make excuses for their failure to do their job."

Last week, a group of crime victims asked Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) and Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) to investigate Descano "for possible neglect of duty, misuse of office, incompetence, and violations of the civil rights of crime victims." One of those victims was the owner of the Virginia bar threatened by a gunman Descano let off easy this month.

"Steve Descano’s office has shown more concern for those who commit crimes than those who...

The hatred of the accomplished Musk and the worship of the hollow man Bankman-Fried are sad commentaries on how liberalism has descended into progressivism and ultimately into Stalinism.

Before the midterm November elections, Sam Bankman-Fried was a left-wing billionaire heartthrob.

He properly grew up on the Stanford campus, where his parents were well-known left-wing activist law professors. He went to a tony prep school and on to MIT.

Bankman-Fried mocked society’s bourgeois capitalist conventions by dressing and looking like a slob in cut-offs and T-shirts.

Indeed, he bested the nose-ring, Charles Manson-esque appearance of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. He outdid the all-black, Steve Jobs copy-cat get-up of another fallen leftist icon, the now-convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy.

The Left canonized Bankman-Fried for the hundreds of millions of dollars he created out of thin air and channeled to left-wing congressional and state candidates, Joe Biden, and a host of “progressive” causes under the cool slogan “effective altruism.”

For decades hence—or so Bankman-Fried promised—his cryptocurrency company FTX would churn out billions. Its politically correct gifting won exemptions from the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Democratic-controlled congressional oversight committees.

The loud-talking, left-wing slob promised billions of dollars more in gifts to come. He was knighted as the successor to the kindred financial market manipulator and progressive “philanthropist” George Soros.

SBF may have been a sloppy, immature fool, but he was no dummy.

He had learned early on that loud leftist talk, big promises of philanthropy, and huge cash infusions to the media and leftist candidates—all under the veneer of “effective altruism”— ensured de facto immunity for his Ponzi schemes from both bad press and government investigation.

Then, suddenly, the midterms were over. Powerful financial interests were screaming their millions had vanished at the hands of SBF.

The Republicans took the House. They promised embarrassing hearings, with Bankman-Fried the loose-talking star villain. And so—presto!—he was finally indicted by the Biden Department of Justice.

Bankman-Fried, in desperation one last time, had turned to his old props of raggedy dress, nerd talk, and contrived naivete.

His schtick no longer worked. Too many leftists were embarrassed that they got too much money from him. Too many exposed “regulators” had known what this wannabe Madoff character was up to before the midterms.

The now albatross Bankman-Fried was loud and everywhere, then suddenly not—and won’t be again.

In contrast, consider how the Left now despises Elon Musk as much as it once worshiped Sam Bankman-Fried.

Musk once mixed vaguely liberal politics with a David-versus-Goliath self-confidence, as he took on Big Auto and Big Space—and won.

But then he turned to Twitter and Big Tech. Or, rather, Musk realized Silicon Valley was no longer the irreverent embryo of boy geniuses he remembers from his youth, which outsmarted and preempted the...

Visage à trois #654

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #833

8 Times Our Federal Government Ran A Protect-Biden Racket

Apparently, the only thing as strong as the get-Trump attitude of the deep state is the protect-Biden stance of the federal government.

For years, our federal government has quietly operated a protect-Biden racket. The public, however, has only recently — and haphazardly — learned of the lengths federal law enforcement officials and government employees have gone to safeguard the Biden family secrets. Here are eight times our government squelched scandals.

1. Censoring the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

The most recent and most well-known example of the feds protecting the Biden family stems from efforts by intelligence agencies to squelch news coverage of the New York Post’s reporting that Hunter Biden “introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.” The Post discovered that detail, and many more implicating Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, in a cache of emails and text messages recovered from a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store.

Before the New York Post broke the story on Oct. 14, 2022, about Joe Biden’s knowledge of and potential involvement in his son’s business dealings, the FBI warned Facebook that it “should be on high alert.” “[W]e thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,” the FBI said, adding that “we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that so just be vigilant.”

Based on that warning, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg explained that “when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020, Facebook treated the story as potentially misinformation, important misinformation for five to seven days while the tech giant’s team could determine whether it was false.”

Federal law enforcement agencies likewise warned Twitter in the lead-up to the 2020 general election “that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.” Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, further acknowledged that in meetings with federal law enforcement agencies, he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” According to a letter Twitter’s lawyer sent to the Federal Election Commission, the tech giant explained it was “the prior warnings of a hack-and-leak operation and doubts about the provenance of the materials republished in the N.Y. Post articles,” that led its Site Integrity Team to preliminarily determine “the materials could have been obtained through hacking.”

Of course, the Hunter Biden laptop was not part of a “hack-and-leak operation,” and it wasn’t “Russian propaganda” or “important misinformation” — and the FBI knew that fact because it had seized the laptop from the computer repair store nearly a year earlier, in December of 2019. But the FBI nonetheless deceived the tech giants to induce them to censor the pay-to-play scandal that likely would have cost Joe Biden the election.

2. Quietly Seizing Hunter’s Laptop from Repair Shop

While it was the FBI’s lies that prompted the tech giants to censor the New York Post’s coverage of the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, the bureau’s efforts to protect the Biden family from the damning material contained on the laptop may have also included the FBI’s seizure of the laptop from the repair store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac. Had Mac Isaac not made a copy of the hard drive before the FBI seized Hunter’s laptop in December 2019, the FBI could have kept the entire story quiet. One can’t help but wonder if the bureau’s true motivation in seizing the laptop was to protect the Biden family.

A comment by one of the agents who seized the computer suggests just such a motive. When Mac Isaac joked with the agents who seized the laptop that he’d remember to change their names when he wrote a book about the incident, according to the repair store owner, one of the agents rejoined: “It is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”

3. Seizing and Returning Hunter’s Second Laptop

Another Biden-clean-up mission may have taken place two months later when, in February 2020, the Drug Enforcement Administration raided the office of Hunter Biden’s former psychiatrist, Keith Ablow. In executing the search warrant, the DEA seized from Ablow’s safe a second laptop that belonged to Hunter. Even though Hunter was under investigation at the time, the government returned the laptop to his lawyer.

At the time of the DEA search, no mention was made of the Hunter Biden laptop. Instead, the limited public coverage of the raid consisted of reports that the DEA claimed the execution of the search warrant was part of an “ongoing investigation” and references to Ablow’s medical license being recovered in May of 2019 for alleged “inappropriate sexual activity with patients and illegally giving prescriptions to employees.”

That the DEA waited nine months before searching Ablow’s office for evidence and that the government never charged Ablow for any crimes seems rather suspect, especially given the raid only followed the FBI’s seizure of Hunter Biden’s first laptop. But even if there were nothing nefarious about the raid, returning the laptop, while Hunter Biden remained under federal investigation, fits the pattern of the feds protecting the Biden family.

4. Downplaying or Ignoring Intelligence Threats to Provide Plausible Deniability

The Delaware laptop contained hordes of compromising information on both Hunter Biden and his father. Beyond that scandalous material, the laptop also included another significant revelation: that Hunter Biden believed the Russians had stolen another laptop that contained material ripe for blackmailing the Biden family.

As The Federalist reported exclusively in August of 2021, a lawyer for Mac Isaac confirmed the laptop Hunter had abandoned at the Delaware repair shop contained a video in which the Biden son recounted the story of his stolen laptop. In the video, Hunter spoke of how he almost overdosed during the summer of 2018 while partying in Las Vegas with his drug dealer and two other guys. Also present “was this Russian 35-year-old, really nice, pure brunette,” Hunter explained. Soon after coming to, Hunter discovered his laptop was missing.

“I think he’s the one that stole my computer,” Hunter is heard on the tape explaining. “I think the three of them, the three guys that were like a little group. The dealer and his two guys, I took them everywhere,” Hunter explained. “They have videos of me doing this. They have videos of me doing crazy f-cking sex, f-cking, you know,” Hunter added. “My computer, I had taken tons of like, just left like that cam on,” Hunter continued, “and somebody stole it during that period of time.”

When asked whether he worried the Russian thieves would try to “blackmail” him, Hunter said, “Yeah, in some way, yeah,” noting his father is “running for president,” and that “I talk about it all the time.”

It is difficult to overstate the national security risk that would exist if the Russians had possession of a laptop filled with not just personal information about Hunter Biden, but communications implicating his father in a pay-to-play scandal. And the FBI, had it properly processed the laptop upon subpoenaing it from Mac Isaac, would have known of that risk and, at a minimum, provided Joe Biden a defensive briefing.

However, according to whistleblowers, under the auspices of not interfering with the 2020 election, FBI leaders told employees, “You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop.” The whistleblowers further claimed that “the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election.”

If true, to protect Joe Biden from any fallout flowing from the laptop, the FBI failed to properly assess the national security risks posed by the details on the laptop.

The FBI’s see-nothing approach also provided Joe Biden plausible deniability, such that he could claim the laptop represented Russian disinformation. In fact, at his last presidential debate, when President Donald Trump said, so the “laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” Biden responded: “That’s exactly what [I] was told.”

While the intelligence community should have been providing Biden a defensive briefing on the laptop, it instead appears to have opted to protect the Democrat candidate by ignoring the national security risk.

5. Running Sham Investigations and...