Micah Morrison

On August 19, 2017, 22-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Graywind disappeared in Fargo, North Dakota. The upstairs neighbor immediately was a suspect: she had been acting strangely and texted LaFontaine-Graywind earlier that day. Savanna was eight months pregnant, with swollen feet. Her car was in the parking lot, her wallet was at home: wherever she went, she wasn’t planning to go far.

Eight days later, her body was found in the Red River. Her baby had been cut from her womb.

Two months earlier, Ashley HeavyRunner Loring vanished from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana. A witness later reported seeing Ashley running from a vehicle on Highway 89.

The two cases are part of storm of domestic abuse and murder hitting Native American and Alaska Native women. Statistical surveys are thin, but the numbers out there indicate that Native American women are murdered at a rate 10 times the national average.

In Montana alone, more than twenty-four Native Americans–most of them women–went missing in 2018, Senator John Tester said at a Senate Indian Affairs hearing last month. “We have an epidemic on our hands.”

The law enforcement response often is tepid.

“Law enforcement did not take Ashley’s case seriously, as well as other girls that have gone missing and been murdered in Indian country,” Ashley’s sister, Kimberly Loring, told Congress.

Days after Savanna’s disappearance in Fargo, a deputy sheriff told a local news outlet that there was “nothing to suggest criminal activity.”

“Where’s the problem? Is it with [the Bureau of Indian Affairs], is it with the FBI, is it with tribal law enforcement?” Tester said at the December hearing. “Why are we not finding these people? We would have a different reaction if this was a non-native.”

Tester, a Montana Democrat, and his Republican counterpart Steve Daines, are pressing Congress to come up with a solution. “Savanna’s Act” would create standardized procedures for responding to cases of missing and murdered Native American and Alaska Native women and sharpen cooperation between federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement. Inter-agency cooperation is often a big problem. The act would also upgrade Justice Department intake of information related to crimes against Native Americans and Alaska Natives. The bill unanimously passed the Senate last year but stalled in the House. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has vowed to reintroduce it.

That’s too late for Savanna LaFontaine-Graywind. The depraved upstairs neighbor murdered her and took her baby. And it’s probably too late for Ashley HeavyRunner Loring. Her family searched the remote countryside in the heat, the cold, the rain and snow more than 120 times and came up empty. Last month, human remains were found on the Blackfeet Reservation. They have been sent to the FBI laboratory for analysis.

The discovery came one day after Ashley’s sister testified to Congress. “We are going missing,” Kimberly Loring said. “We are being murdered. We are not being taken seriously.”

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 Micah Morrison is chief investigative reporter for Judicial Watch. Follow him on Twitter @micah_morrison. Tips: mmorrison@judicialwatch.org

Investigative Bulletin is published by Judicial Watch. Reprints and media inquiries: jfarrell@judicialwatch.org

The Christmas season in New York City truly is a wonderful time. Everyone seems caught up in the spirit of giving, even the crooks. This year, Christmas brought a special gift: the denouement of the long-running saga of the mayor, the rat, and the NYPD.

Once, in an only-in-New-York moment, the rat and a key co-conspirator, both Orthodox Jews, dressed as Santa’s elves and delivered pricey gifts to police officials at the center of a corruption scheme. Then there was the time they flew an NYPD deputy inspector and a detective to Vegas in a private jet with a hooker for Super Bowl weekend. And the time the rat shoved $60,000 in a Ferragamo handbag to pay off a union boss. They showered cash on public officials. They bought their police friends jewelry, cigars, and meals at pricey restaurants. They paid for trips to Rome and Israel and the Dominican Republic.

In return, the NYPD did favors for the rat, Jona Rechnitz, and co-conspirator Jeremy Reichberg. In a midtown office, the New York Times reported, Rechnitz and Reichberg met with “people seeking help with police matters.” The men would later “split the profits” after the problems were resolved. Tickets were fixed, jury duty was avoided, problems with business rivals and city officials went away. Reichberg got a license to carry a gun. Rechnitz was provided with high-speed police escorts to the airport. Police closed a lane in the Lincoln Tunnel to whisk a Rechnitz business associate into Manhattan.

Cash was bestowed on Bill de Blasio’s political campaigns–a lot of it. “Love you brother,” wrote de Blasio in an email to Rechnitz the day after his 2014 inauguration as mayor. And why not? Rechnitz himself had been showing de Blasio a lot of love, bundling more than $41,000 for the mayor’s campaign. And there was a lot more to come. The New York Post reports that Rechnitz and his allies raised upward of $250,000 for entities linked to de Blasio.

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And so 2018 passes into the history books. It’s been an alarming year in many ways, including for the Jewish people.

Pressure is mounting on the Jews from without and within, warns Adam Milstein in the Jerusalem Post. The Pittsburgh massacre was just the latest in a series of attacks coming “not only from the radical right but also from the radical left, and from radical Muslims.” Some of these attacks have come from within the Jewish community itself, Milstein notes.

What is to be done? Well, to start, sunlight is a good disinfectant.

And silence is not an option.

Read Milstein here:

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Are-we-going-to-allow-the-Jewish-people-to-be-divided-and-conquered-from-within-575518

Best wishes for the new year,

Micah

Last week, we looked at federal efforts to combat money laundering by changing “beneficial owner” laws for various types of legal shell companies, including limited liability companies, LLCs. New York LLCs have the same transparency problems as other states–the true owners, the “beneficial owners,” are hidden behind corporate curtains.

But New York’s campaign-finance laws put a different spin on the LLC shell game, enabling millions in masked donations to pour into state races. The chief beneficiary of LLC donations? New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Irony is a stranger to the governor. He has repeatedly called on the state legislature to close the LLC loophole, but has taken in more than $17 million in LLC donations since becoming governor.

Cuomo has relied on New York’s Republican-controlled Senate to block any real reform. But that changed in November, when Democrats seized control of both houses of the state legislature.

With corruption a rising concern for New York voters, Albany’s LLC loophole is getting renewed attention. Will Cuomo keep his word and close it? Or will the prospect of giving up all that money cause lawmakers’ hearts to grow faint?

Here’s how it works: in New York, an LLC is treated as a person, not a corporation. Corporate political donations are capped at $5,000 per year. But a person can donate up to $65,000 per year to every candidate for statewide office.

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New York City has three important ballot measures before the voters tomorrow. Flip your ballot over: the proposals are on the back. Essentially, the three proposals are all about the same thing: the fight against corruption through further democratization of the system. Here are my recommendations. (These are my personal endorsements and have no relation to my employer, Judicial Watch.)

Ballot Proposal 1: Vote Yes.

These revisions to New York’s campaign finance system would weaken the power of large donors and special interests and help deter corrupt practices. The proposal boosts the power of small donors, increases matching funds, and creates better chances for a more diverse slate of candidates. For more information: https://flipyourballot.nyc/ballot-proposals/#prop1

Ballot Proposal 2: Vote No

The proposed Civic Engagement Commission would give City Hall more influence over discretionary funds and community organizations, cutting into the influence of the City Council. It’s a naked power grab by the mayor and should be rejected. More information: https://flipyourballot.nyc/ballot-proposals/#prop2

Ballot Proposal 3: Vote Yes

The proposal would impose term limits on community board members. Members would be limited to four consecutive two-year terms. This important measure further democratizes New York’s community boards, which often are dominated by members beholden to local power brokers. As de Tocqueville noted, the spirit of association is the mother science of American democracy. Proposal 3 breathes new life into community associations. More information: https://flipyourballot.nyc/ballot-proposals/#prop3

Judicial Watch & the Fight Against Corruption in New York

On October 4, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Queens Village Republican Club about Judicial Watch’s fight against corruption in New York. We’ve been fielding requests for copies of the speech ever since, so we’re reprinting an edited version here:

Judicial Watch takes a lot of heat in the public arena, but in fact we are not a partisan group. Our mission is public education. We educate through investigations, litigation, journalism and public outreach. Increasingly, our public education efforts include the rapidly expanding world of social media.

We use national and state transparency laws to fight corruption and malfeasance in public office. Our weapon of choice is the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. We lead the nation—including all the major news organizations—in filing and litigating freedom of information actions. These are powerful tools for holding public officials accountable.

New York is the financial and media capital of the world and deserves special attention in the fight against corruption. New Yorkers take corruption seriously. Poll after poll shows that corruption ranks among the top concerns of New Yorkers.

For instance, in a July 2018 Zogby poll, New Yorkers ranked corruption concerns second, after high taxes.

That same month, a Quinnipiac poll showed that 45% percent of New Yorkers ranked corruption as a “very serious” concern.

In 2015, in a Sienna College poll, 92% of New Yorkers ranked corruption as a “serious issue.”

Corruption has a long history in New York. It includes the notorious Tammany Hall, a corrupt political machine that dominated city politics for more than a century. Judicial Watch has raised questions about whether the city has entered an era of a new, more sophisticated Tammany Hall, with sketchy financing from international players, power brokers in Albany ruling with an iron fist, and influential non-profit entities like the Clinton Foundation making an end run around the law.

With a new generation of corrupt enterprises, new challengers have begun to emerge as well.

But who are the corruption fighters of tomorrow and how will they do?

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It’s September and New York City’s 1.1 million school kids are back to class and Randy Jurgensen is back to worrying about them getting killed.

A Korean War veteran and former New York City homicide detective, Jurgensen has seen a lot of shooting deaths. He investigated over 200 murders during his twenty years as a detective, including the killings of children, police officers and civilians. After that, he was a consultant to national and international police organizations. Jurgensen is a famous figure in law-enforcement. Investigative Bulletin has written about his pursuit of justice in the murder of NYPD Patrolman Phillip Cardillo—the so-called “Harlem Mosque Incident.”

A grandfather many times over, Jurgensen is obsessed with school shootings. He says that experience has taught him that “two things matter most in preventing shootings: training and information.”

He’s had a plan to make schools safer. In the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School cataclysm, he wrote Vice President Joe Biden with the plan. Biden had been appointed by the president to lead a gun-violence task force. Jurgensen pointed out that across the country, dozens of law-enforcement personnel retire every day. These highly-trained professionals have been vetted their entire careers, retire with pensions and health insurance, and are licensed to carry firearms. He recommended that retired law-enforcement professionals be hired to help protect school kids.

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