Posted on 02/15/2021 4:40:08 AM PST by Kaslin
In the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, the Obama administration decided someone must be punished. But instead of taking on the powerful financial institutions at the core of the scandal — which were given bailouts instead — they went after the easy targets like small real estate brokers. Tony Viola was one. Prosecutors sent him to prison for supposedly tricking banks into offering mortgages with no money down. But in reality, the banks were knowingly offering those loans. The prosecution withheld this evidence from him. The wrongdoing was so blatant that from prison, and without an attorney, Viola was able to establish his innocence during a second trial.
Now it’s come out that there may have been even more wrongdoing by prosecutors. Viola, who served eight and a half years in prison and was released in May 2020 as a result of the new evidence, recently discovered that the married prosecutor in his case was allegedly having an affair with one of the government’s witnesses, who was also married. Ohio Assistant County Prosecutor Dan Kasaris presented Kathryn Clover as a fact witness when in reality she was a paralegal for the prosecutors and allegedly in a romantic relationship with him. They reportedly shared the same attorney, Jaye Schlachet, who Kasaris hired for his separation from his wife and Clover’s divorce.
Clover allegedly lied about Viola during the initial trial. But she felt so bad about it afterward that she asked Schlachet to be put back on the stand. The prosecutors refused, apparently, because they needed her false testimony in order to convict Viola. She was not able to recant her testimony until the second trial in state court. Then she took the Fifth Amendment, likely afraid of being prosecuted for perjury. However, Viola believes prosecutors continued using her in other grand jury proceedings and criminal cases — even though they knew she committed perjury — because she'd say whatever they needed.
Viola allegedly obtained thousands of emails exchanged between Kasaris and Clover from Kasaris’s Yahoo email account, where Kasaris affixed his official signature as a prosecutor. Several witnesses submitted affidavits regarding their knowledge of the affair between the couple. Kelly Patrick, a former sister-in-law of Kasaris, says she has “over 100 pages of Facebook Messenger messages with his wife Susan about this sexual relationship that went on for many years."
Patrick believes Kasaris had bad motives for prosecuting Viola. She thinks he was jealous of him. Kasaris and his wife also bought and sold houses with no money down and cash back, and Patrick believes Kasaris saw Viola as a competitor. Kasaris is a Democrat. Patrick observed, “Around me he was an atheist; he disliked minorities, Republicans, and Catholicism.” Viola is Catholic and Republican.
Kasaris at first denied the existence of the Yahoo emails but later admitted he used the account for emails regarding criminal prosecution. He claimed he fixed the problem by deleting the emails. Apparently, because Hillary Clinton got away with using a private email account to conduct confidential government business and deleted her emails, Kasaris thinks it’s fine for him as well.
Other wrongdoing by the prosecution in Viola’s case has still gone unpunished. For a decade, the FBI claimed it was unaware of almost 10,000 pages of records in its own records system on Viola’s case that would have exonerated him. FBI Agent David M. Hardy twice made materially false statements asserting that the prosecution had turned over all the documents and evidence to Viola. The FBI finally admitted lying about those records. The DOJ withdrew Hardy’s statements, and in a letter to the judge, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Colville said he “regrets those inaccuracies and the resulting inconvenience.” He asked the judge to vacate her previous rulings in their favor.
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Bennett falsely stated there was no “FBI 302” interview summary with a banker who’d said the bank offered the same no money down mortgage loans that Viola supposedly duped them into making. Kasaris also made false statements under oath about the existence of the same voice recordings and the FBI 302.
Bennett later admitted in writing that Clover had lied, but didn’t bother retracting the testimony. He also lied about the existence of voice recordings made by the prosecutors’ office manager Dawn Pasela, who recorded her conversations with Viola so prosecutors could obtain confidential defense trial strategy information. Pasela felt so horrible later on that she disclosed evidence the prosecution had been hiding and gave it to Viola.
Viola filed a complaint requesting that prosecutors follow the regulations and report misconduct, but so far it has fallen on deaf ears. Despite knowingly using Clover's perjured testimony to win a conviction, Bennett received an award in 2015 for prosecuting Viola and others. Nothing has happened to Kasaris. In fact, he appears to be raising money to run for office.
Viola filed a request to search Kasaris’s Yahoo email account, but strangely, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has fought those efforts. This is odd considering Yost wrote in the introduction to the 2020 Edition of the Ohio Sunshine Manual (which lays out how public records laws are to be enforced), “I fully support government transparency and your right to know what goes on behind the scenes.” Emails by government employees are considered public records, and while certain confidential information regarding cases may be redacted, the emails must still be released. Even many of Hillary Clinton’s emails were eventually released by the State Department.
There are numerous blatant ethical violations in this case. If Donald Trump’s election attorneys had been caught engaging in this type of behavior, they would have been disbarred. But because the deep state is involved and the legal system is dominated by the left, no one wants to turn on the corrupt people involved who used Viola as a scapegoat to further their political agenda.
Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie
Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis.He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded “kickbacks” to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans.
Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.
Village Voice, 2/5/2008
Probably deserves its own post...
You could probably poke any Democrat Prosecutor with a stick and a hornet’s nest of corruption and scandal would be released.
FIFY
Barney Frank fought against investigation into their books while Bush was President.
There is a photo of old chickenhawk Barney with his hand cupping the buttocks (clothed) of a young male VP from one of these companies. Implication is he was given a boy toy for his defensive efforts.
Then she took the Fifth Amendment, likely afraid of being prosecuted for perjury.
...................................................
Eight years after she committed the perjury? No statute of limitations for perjury?
In China, people like Kasaris are executed. And they should be.
Aaaaand once again the FBI proves itself to be corrupt.
2004 Congressional hearing, where Democrats opposed oversight over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, implying that any attempt to control their lending practices was racist.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yga7TlsA-1A
There are strong economic warning signs coming from several directions right now.
1) Remember how one of the major causes of the Great Depression was stock purchases using marginal amounts of their price? This created huge amounts of “marginal debt” that no one could repay. After that disaster, marginal stock purchases were forbidden for a long time, and carefully controlled.
But the rest of the market was not prohibited were marginal purchases on other things. For example “sub-prime mortgages”. Government basically created a gigantic housing bubble out of thin air, and eventually had to bail out the banks “who were only following orders”. Of course, only the “Too Big To Fail” banks and mortgage lenders.
Otherwise today, *right now*, America has the largest amount of “margin debt” it ever has had. Across many sectors. Each of which amounts to an economic bubble ready to pop.
2) Germany, after WWI was saddled with so much debt that they were forced to go on a money printing spree. This resulted in hyperinflation. At about the same time, prior to the Great Depression, the United States had a money shortage to the point where the value of goods and services dropped like a rock. Deflation.
Farmers would lose money transporting produce to markets for sale. And nobody had any money to buy it with.
“You could buy a pound of hamburger for a nickle, but nobody had any nickles!”
However, in 2003, an economist came up with a term that meant hyperinflation and deflation *at the same time*.
It is called “Biflation”.
In practice, it is described as “Hyperinflation of things you *need*; while at the same time Deflation of durable goods you might *want*.” A $1000 potato and a $10 used television.
After reading Sydney Powell’s book, “Licensed to Lie”, I lost most of my respect for the DoJ. Then Barr’s treacherous lies. And now this. The DoJ is a totalitarian’s dream department.
Apologies to all, I bolloxed the link...
https://www.villagevoice.com/2008/08/05/andrew-cuomo-and-fannie-and-freddie
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