Srinagar, Jan 25: The government on Wednesday ordered creation of 20 posts for establishment of Terror Monitoring Group (TMG) in Jammu and Kashmir Police.
According to an order, a copy of which lies with the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), the sanction has been made with reference to Administrative Council decision taken on January 22 this year.
“Sanction is hereby accorded to the creation of following 20 posts in different categories for establishment of Terror Monitoring Group (TMG) in J&K Police,” reads the order.
As per the order the sanction has given for creation of one post of Senior Superintendent of Police, 6 posts each of Deputy Superintendent of Police, Inspector and Head Constable and one Follower post—(KNO)
The spokesperson added that Wagner “is becoming a rival power center to the Russian military and other Russian ministries,” with an estimated 50,000 personnel deployed to Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts.
Kirby also revealed new imagery of Russian railcars traveling to North Korea and back, in what the U.S. believes was North Korea providing arms and ammunition to the Wagner Group. The arms transfer is in direct violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions, Kirby said, and the U.S. on Friday shared information on these violations with the council’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea sanctions committee.
“With these actions, and there will be more to come, our message to any company that is considering providing support to Wagner is simply this: Wagner is a criminal organization that is committing widespread atrocities and human rights abuses, and we will work relentlessly to identify, disrupt, expose and target those who are assisting Wagner,” Kirby said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
And as scrutiny of Santos has intensified, he’s reached out to others at the club.
The club’s president, Gavin Wax, who, per FEC records, gave $500 to Santos’ joint fundraising committee in September, told POLITICO that the congressman called him last weekend. “He didn’t say much beyond how stressed he is and asking me how I’ve been,” Wax said. “I think he just wanted to speak to someone.”
But like others in conservative circles, even The New York Young Republican Club is distancing itself from Santos amid revelations that he fabricated numerous parts of his résumé, including false claims that he attended New York University and worked for Goldman Sachs. Santos has admitted that he has embellished his biography, but he has argued that others in politics have done the same.
Wax said the club won’t endorse Santos if he runs again in 2024, though unlike a number of New York House Republicans, it is not calling for his resignation. He described Santos’ relationship with the club as one of “self-interest” because of its influence in the district. He questioned whether the freshman congressman had fixed beliefs, saying he was “trying to play all sides” but aligned himself with the far right because that’s the coalition he thought would be most useful. He said that members suspected Santos was exaggerating his biography but that they kept him in the loop because he “was able to back it up with money.”
“The thing that made him good at being a con man was that he could align himself with whatever group he was addressing,” Wax said. As for that money he gave, he added, “I wish I got it back.”
A spokesperson for Santos, who is under investigation over his finances amid questions about how he was wealthy enough to lend his campaign $700,000, did not return a message seeking comment.
The relationship that has developed over time between Santos and The New York Young Republican Club is a microcosm of the odd place the congressman has found himself within the larger conservative firmament. Hoping to stay afloat politically, Santos has sought to forge alliances with some of the movement’s more extreme institutions and members. But it’s not entirely clear if they’re all that interested in having him in their ranks.
The degree to which Santos agrees ideologically with those extreme elements of The New York Young Republican Club is difficult to know. He embraced the group’s endorsement of his fledgling campaign in 2021, with the press release citing his commitment to fighting socialism — and a promise to not take a salary in Congress.
One New York Republican leader granted anonymity to speak freely about party tensions said Santos, who is gay, at times clashed with other members of the club over “values.”
“There were some individuals in that group that don’t support gay marriage, there was a little bit of contention there. George was offended because he didn’t feel like anybody stepped up,” the leader said.
And while some members of the New York Young Republican Club have chronicled meetings with far-right European leaders on social media, Santos largely avoided that issue in public. When Hungary’s autocratic leader, Viktor Orbán, spoke at CPAC in August, Santos joked about him on Twitter — with “no disrespect,” he wrote in the tweet.
But within the city’s GOP circles, it is believed that the group served as a springboard to help the congressman pull off the win in his congressional race this past November. A New York Republican leader, granted anonymity to talk freely about intraparty tensions, said Wax in particular has proved to be a steady ally to Santos through the tumult.
“George’s inner circle has changed at least two or three times since [the summer],” said the Republican leader. “The consistent people have been Gavin and Vish [Burra].”
Despite its innocuous sounding name, the New York Young Republican Club is known for its support of far-right figures. The group recently endorsed Orbán, and Wax spoke at a December gathering that featured white nationalists from the U.S. and Europe, including members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has faced scrutiny in its own country for extremist ties. Santos also attended, along with a newly elected Florida House member, Cory Mills.
Domestically, it has closely aligned itself with former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon and “Pizzagate” conspiracist Jack Posobiec. Burra, who is working for Santos in Washington, is a former producer of Bannon’s podcast who touts a role in exposing “the Hunter Biden ‘laptop from hell.’”
In the process, the club has gained political clout on the right. Within the past few years, Wax grew the group from a political backwater with a small membership to a robust kind of Junior League for Manhattan Republicans who flock to events like “Wine Wednesday” and gather at a midtown clubhouse with exposed brick walls and a vintage tin ceiling.
In addition to Santos, the group counts New York GOP Reps. Elise Stefanik, Claudia Tenney and Marc Molinaro among its members, as well as the newly elected Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), a reflection of the group’s integration with the Republican Party. The club’s board members include Tyler Bowyer, who was among the Trump allies who signed fraudulent electoral vote certificates sent to Congress as part of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. There’s also Michelle Malkin, a longtime conservative pundit who has appeared at events with white nationalists including a former Ku Klux Klan lawyer.
Wax doesn’t hide from these associations — he touts them as evidence of political cachet. He said the club rejects the “premise and narrative” that endorsements of Orbán and others “are beyond the pale and outside of polite society.”
“If you believe the Trump wing is racist, then there’s nothing we can do,” he said. “They’re big names in the conservative right wing of the party. If that’s the new level of controversy then, sure, we’re controversial.” Of the December event with European officials from parties with authoritarian influences, Wax said: “We reject the premise and narrative that these parties are beyond the pale and outside of polite society.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
But just three days after POLITICO’s inquiries, the BH Fund closed down, according to documents filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission.
Adam Kennedy, a spokesperson for the firm now known as CRC Advisors, which had performed extensive consulting work for Leo in 2017 and is now led by him, said the BH Fund has been dormant since the end of 2021. He confirmed it was dissolved in October “as other organizations made it obsolete.”
Indeed, Leo now controls more than $1.6 billion in conservative donor funds, and he is erecting a new architecture of dark-money groups to administer it. Critics have long maintained that understanding how Leo has distributed his trove of anonymous funds is critical to understanding how the conservative legal movement claimed a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Nothing screams ‘efforts to conceal’ quite like folding up an organization just as you start getting questions about it,” said Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit founded by a Republican former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission.
Currently, a Senate committee is reviewing a new complaint requesting an investigation into whether federal ethics rules or criminal laws were broken in Conway’s sale of her business, Senate aides confirmed.
Since POLITICO first contacted Leo and CRC last fall, they have not disputed BH Fund’s involvement in the transaction. In 2019, when asked about BH Fund for a Washington Post documentary, Leo said: “um, BH Fund is a charitable organization. You can look it up.” He continued: “I don’t waste my time on stories that involve money in politics because what I care about is ideas.”
Under the current tax code, nonprofits like BH Fund can spend unlimited amounts of money on political activities without disclosing their donors — as long as they are deemed “social welfare” activities that do not primarily promote a political candidate. Legislative attempts to close loopholes allowing dark money in U.S. elections have repeatedly failed over the past decade.
Leo’s apparent role in the sale of Conway’s business underscores why “influence of dark money is doubly problematic once someone is in office because they’re [potentially] able to influence outcomes,” said Ghosh.
In its complaint addressed to Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chair Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the Campaign for Accountability, a liberal watchdog group, cited a law barring executive branch employees from participating “personally and substantially” in any government matter affecting her or his own financial interests.
“There are clear indications based on the facts at hand that Ms. Conway participated personally and substantially in advising President Trump to nominate Justices to the Supreme Court, and that her personal financial interests were affected,” the complaint submitted to the Senate said.
Conway responded to the complaint in a text message to POLITICO: “That’s what outside groups ‘fighting for law and justice’ do to get attention. Use reporters,” she said.
CRC spokesperson Kennedy said “liberal watchdog groups” who filed the complaint should instead urge hearings on a company that ran administration and management for a liberal dark money network that fought Trump’s judicial nominations and spent millions around the 2020 election.
At the time of its purchase of Conway’s polling firm, CRC was also bringing in millions of dollars from Leo’s network of dark money nonprofits to promote his preferred court candidates, including at least $400,000 from BH Fund for “consulting.”
In 2020, Leo officially joined a newly rebranded CRC Advisors as a chair.
In an Oct. 21 email, POLITICO first approached CRC Advisors with a series of questions about the lien statements. Three days later, on Oct. 24, Jonathan Bunch, CRC Advisors president, signed articles of dissolution for BH Fund, according to documents filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. One day after the Dec. 20 story, an unsigned amendment terminating BH Fund’s 2017 lien was also filed with the commission.
Leo’s network of outside groups built successful advocacy campaigns around the nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. BH Fund operated alongside two other Leo-linked entities to promote Trump’s nominees.
A flurry of House investigations into the Biden administration and the president’s son, Hunter, is expected to take center stage in the new Congress.
Yet Democrats still control the Senate and its oversight committees. And concerns about the role of dark money in shaping the court’s new conservative majority are growing louder after the new conservative majority overturned the 50-year precedent of a federal right to abortion.
The Conway transaction “is further evidence of the troubling role that Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society played in driving Donald Trump’s judicial selection process,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on Dec. 20 following POLITICO’s report.
The complaint sent to Sen. Peters, which stresses the importance of a quick response, also put the issue on the radar of law enforcement as it cc’d Department of Justice Public Integrity Section Chief Corey Amundson.
“It is all the more urgent that [the committee] investigate this matter because it is possible criminal charges against Ms. Conway may be precluded by the general five-year statute of limitations governing most federal crimes,” said the complaint.
Regardless, the matter should not be ignored, said Michelle Kuppersmith, the liberal watchdog group’s executive director.
“We want the Senate to make it clear you don’t operate like this” as a government official, she said in an interview. “Just like firefighters go in when they see smoke, it’s the Senate’s duty to investigate – for all the reasons we outlined in our complaint – to make it clear to government officials everywhere that potential wrongdoing will be investigated.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
