Victims and whistleblowers central to a major human rights scandal at the U.S. Justice Department will be among the speakers at the 10th Annual Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival this week in Washington, DC.

A panel on July 26 organized by the Justice Integrity Project is scheduled to include former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, right, and HealthSouth founder and former CEO Richard Scrushy, each of whom served more than six years in prison on what many observers have long regarded as trumped-up corruption charges.

The Justice Department, then controlled by political enemies of Siegelman, manufactured the charges more than 15 years ago in cooperation with Alabama Republicans. The purpose?  To end Siegelman’s political career in disgrace and imprisonment -- and also oust Scrushy from leadership of the multi-billion-dollar company he had founded and to profit from his ouster, critics say.

Participating also on the panel “Righting the Wrongs of a ‘Shadow Government’” in the week-long conference will be Tami Todd, the former top Justice Department paralegal for the prosecution. She was fired after raising concerns internally with the Justice Department about the gross irregularities that she had witnessed implicating high-level lawyers leading the prosecution.

Another panelist is Thomas T. Gallion, III, right, a prominent attorney for many years in Alabama. He has described the prosecution as part of a scandalous hidden history of corrupt prosecutions extending back decades that he believes occur without accountability from ostensibly reputable employees of the Justice Department and their allies.

The Tuesday session is at 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the second day of the conference, and is available for free remote viewing for registrants visiting this site.

The Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival

This week's event features panels, films, awards and co-located events by other whistleblower groups. The Summit event ends on July 30 with a Tribute to Dick Gregory providing comedy, plus an awards presentation that features celebrity host Marsha Warfield at the Busboys & Poets Restaurant in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood in the nation’s capital.

The Summit and Film Festival has been managed for years by Michael McCray and Marcel Reid, two former national board members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), who joined the whistleblowing community by protesting corruption within ACORN, as recounted in the McCray's memoir, Race, Power & Politics (2009), right, written with Reid.

The event is normally based primarily on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. But it relies heavily this year on Zoom and other remote viewing because of the region’s recent upsurge of coronavirus cases. The program began on Monday, July 25, with a series of panel discussions underscoring the importance of whistleblowing in fostering a healthy civic life in the United States.

Regarding the Justice Integrity Project panel on July 26, it will be moderated by this editor, Andrew Kreig, who has written extensively about the Alabama scandals, including a comprehensive investigative story front-paged for days by the Huffington Post in 2009:

Huffington Post, Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge’s ‘Grudge’, Evidence Shows….$300 Million in Bush Military Contracts Awarded to Judge’s Private Company. The Alabama federal judge who presided over the 2006 corruption trial of the state's former governor holds a grudge against the defendant for helping to expose the judge's own alleged corruption six years ago.

Former Gov. Don Siegelman therefore deserves a new trial with an unbiased judge ─ not one whose privately owned company, Doss Aviation, has been enriched by the Bush administration's award of $300 million in contracts since 2006, making the judge millions in non-judicial income.

Panelists will describe their experiences and share their thoughts on how best to reform the justice system, a continuing issue involving many controversial situations nationally these days involving the Justice Department, whose personnel are usually praised instinctively by mainstream journalists whose work encourages them to rely on authorities for information.

Alabama Injustice, With National Implications

As for specifics of the 2006 convictions of the Democrat Siegelman and the Republican Scrushy in Alabama’s state capital of Montgomery on highly dubious corruption charges:

The irregularities in the case before Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller of the Alabama Middle District prompted massive, unsuccessful and rare -- if not unprecedented -- protests by former prosecutors, law professors and grassroots protesters, with a few journalists breaking the tradition of accepting prosecution allegations with scant criticism.

Some 113 former state attorneys general, the chief law enforcers from more than forty states, wrote an unsuccessful friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing unsuccessfully that no crime had been committed when Scrushy’s company contributed to a non-profit that Siegelman had founded to advocate for better funding for Alabama’s schools. Similarly, more than 40 law professors filed similar arguments in seeking Supreme Court review of the convictions by a jury that rejected the most serious charges against the defendants but compromised to find some guilty verdicts under pressure from the presiding judge.

Our Justice Integrity Project, which published dozens of investigative articles about irregularities in the case, has estimated that well over 200,000 complaints via letters, phone calls and emails from the public about the verdict were received by the Justice Department and White House as part of what became a human rights scandal of global notoriety.

Among those journalists first raising serious questions about the prosecution were investigative reports in 2007 by Harper’s legal columnist Scott Horton, independent bloggers Roger Shuler, Wayne Madsen and Glynn Wilson, and investigative commentary by a few journalists at the New York Times, Time Magazine, CBS News and NBC News.

CBS “60 Minutes,” for example, broadcast a 2008 investigative report led by correspondent Scott Pelley featuring Republican attorneys, including then-McCain for President co-chair Grant Woods, right, a former Arizona attorney general. Woods argued that the prosecution by fellow Republicans in the Bush Administration and Alabama state government was based on politics, not a sound reading of relevant law.

The CBS report also quoted Alabama attorney Dana Jill Simpson, who stated that she had been a Republican operative for years and knew that fellow Republicans, including then Senior Bush White House Advisor Karl Rove, had targeted Siegelman to prevent him from winning re-election in 2006 after he was narrowly defeated in 2002 following his 1999-2003 term.

As one conflict that Todd (then using the last name Grimes) had separately highlighted, Middle District U.S. Attorney Leura Canary was married to longtime Rove ally William Canary, the campaign manager for Siegelman’s Republican gubernatorial opponent in 2006, Gov. Bob Riley, left.

As part of the congressional inquiries into the so-called "U.S. Attorney Firing Scandal" of 2006 whereby the Bush administration fired presidentially appointed U.S. attorneys unwilling to bring dubious cases against Democrats, Simpson gave testimony before House Judiciary Committee staff in 2007. She stated that the Siegelman/Scrushy presiding judge, Fuller, a Republican, “hated” Siegelman because of previous political controversies and that Rove led an effort to use the Justice Department to imprison Siegelman to help Republicans win elections in Alabama, with parallel efforts elsewhere.

The courtroom irregularities and the pattern of nationwide abuses attracted also brave but seemingly fruitless interventions by numerous whistleblowers trying to reverse the apparent frame-up of two of Alabama’s most prominent citizens and the destruction of their life’s work, Siegelman and Scrushy.

The central allegation by prosecutors to win their corruption convictions was that Siegelman reappointed Scrushy, a Republican shown at left early in his career, to an Alabama state health board. This was in the same general time frame that  Scrushy’s corporate entities made substantial donations to help retire the debt for a Siegelman-led non-profit that had advocated in a 1998 referendum for more state funding for public schools via creation of a state lottery that might undercut income for private casinos that opposed the lottery.

Siegelman and Scrushy have both denied that there was any “quid pro quo” between the donation and reappointment, with Scrushy saying he did not even want to be on the regulatory board since he was a CEO running a multi-billion-dollar company. Scrushy has said also that he routinely authorized major charitable and political donations for Alabama causes as part of normal operations for a large company, with generous contributions to Republican governors before Siegelman's term.

But prosecutors presented at trial a witness, former Siegelman aide, Nick Bailey, who was facing serious prison time for separate offenses, who suggested a relationship between the donations and the reappointment.

Since then experts have repeatedly challenged Bailey’s credibility and focused on many legal irregularities. These include up to 70 secret government pre-trial interrogations of Bailey at an Air Force base, in effect coaching sessions, led by a prosecutor who was a colonel in the Air Force reserves and also without required disclosure to defense counsel of the prosecutors' actions. Such disclosures to the defense to enable it to prepare are ordinarily required under Supreme Court precedent.

Among post-conviction developments: Scrushy was stripped of his leadership of HealthSouth and incurred a $500 million civil fraud judgment while he was imprisoned in the Siegelman scase and unable to defend himself adequately in court. He later published a powerful memoir, It Should Not Happen in America: From Selma to Wall Street, a Journey of Fire and Faith. 

So did Siegelman in his Stealing Our Democracy: How the Political Assassination of a Governor Threatens Our Nation, shown at left.

Panelists will describe their experiences and share their thoughts on how best to reform the system.

Separately, Gallion, published a memoir Shadow Government: Southern Style – A Saga of Political Corruption rom DC to Dixie, describing the years of injustice he has witnessed as a prominent Alabama attorney active in the Republican Party and based in the state capitol.

He decries the injustice of the Siegelman and Scrushy prosecutions, as well as numerous other cases dating back seven decades to a time when his late father was state attorney general.

His treatment blows the whistle on several of his well-connected Republican friends, including the trial judge in the case.

Gallion also links the prosecution to a desire by Alabama Republicans to profit from legalized gambling interests while maintaining a veneer of anti-gambling moralisms.

Gallion repeatedly refers to what he calls "The Cabal" running Alabama, which he describes as primarily Republicans but with important hidden relationships with powerful Democrats that he names. The identities are beyond the scope of this article but are readily found via his public comments as a whistleblower drawing on both research and personal observation.

In 2009, this editor profiled Todd and her heroic whistleblowing for a "Sue," nationwide magazine for paralegals in an article entitled, From Justice Dream Job to Nightmare…Why This Whistleblower Was Dissed & Dismissed. The magazine editor, Chere Estrin, told me it was the most important article they had ever published because it illustrated the pitfalls that paralegals can encounter even when they have every reason to think they are on the side of justice in a case.

Todd, who formerly used the last name "Grimes," has since become an attorney and is working on a memoir of her own that will address the lessons to be learned from the injustices she witnessed and the whistleblowing she undertook at the cost of her job at the Justice Department. She says she draws inspiration from, among other places, her small town upbringing, training in the law and the powerful best-seller Just Mercy (2014), authored by Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.

Accountability?

Authorities from both major parties have always resisted detailed answers to questions about the irregularities in the case aside from legal filings that for the most part sidestepped issues, with affirmation by pro-prosecution judges who failed to deal in any detail with allegations of mind-boggling prosecution irregularities.

Eric Holder, left, the attorney general in the Democratic administration of President Obama, told this editor in an improptu interview after a speech that he was a unfamiliar with the Siegelman case, a highly dubious assertion.

Among the reasons: Holder's wife is an Alabama native, Holder personally fired Todd in 2009, and his Justice Department ardently and successfully fought the Siegelman and Scrushy petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court for review that included the unprecedented friend-of-court arguments by the 113 former state attorneys general arguing that Siegelman and Scrushy had not committed any crime because of the donations to the non-profit Alabama Education Foundation.

Federal and state officials did pressure Fuller publicly and privately to resign from his lifetime appointment to the federal bench in 2015 after he was arrested the previous year for beating his wife, his former court clerk in the Siegelman-Scrushy case, in an Atlanta hotel room.

But that matter was separate from the many other scandals regarding the Siegelman/Scrushy cases and similar abuses that have remained unresolved and in many ways uninvestigated in any thorough manner.

Editor's Note: The following guest column was written by Dan Rather, right, following revelations on Tuesday, July 12, 2022 about former President Donald Trump during the seventh of the House Jan. 6 Committee hearings.

This was first published in Rather's near-daily column "Steady," which he named to urge readers to stay balanced during our troubled times. This editor is a subscriber to the columns, published in collaboration with  Elliot Kirschner and benefiting from Rather's experience and blunt, colorful style. Rather, age 90 and currently based in his native Texas, is the iconic author and journalist who worked for many years as the CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor.

-- Andrew Kreig

President Donald Trump speaks to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House on January 6, 2021 (Photo by Brendan Smialowski for Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Perfidy Personified: The more we learn, the worse it gets.

By Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner

Anger and concern well up. Anger and concern that are fueled by love for a country that has been violently transgressed. By a president of the United States no less. And with stunning complicity from those who actively participated in an attempted coup, and those who stood by and did nothing while their country teetered on the edge of chaos. Unbelievable. But believe it we must. Because true it is.

We struggle to keep the mantra: steady, steady, steady. But in doing so may we follow the lead of the January 6 committee whose methodical, steady — admirably steady — pursuit of the facts has brought into the light a perfidy perhaps unmatched in the modern history of this nation.

When one must reach for comparisons to the Civil War to bring context to our current moment, it is to acknowledge the gravity of what we are learning.

Another day of hearings, and yet more details in a tableau of rampant law breaking. It is at a scale that is beyond what anyone could have imagined. Those who screamed into the void about what this man did and what he was capable of were often dismissed as histrionic. But even the most outrageous of suppositions have turned out to have been too restrained. The truth now has far outpaced the speculation. And the probability is that we have more to learn.

Take the news that ended today’s hearing, that there is new evidence raising questions about witnesses and a Trump telephone call. Did the president of the United States directly engage in witness tampering? It is impossible to be shocked anymore, yet it remains shocking to even have to ask the question. I’ve said something of this nature many times before; it only becomes more accurate with each new revelation.

And let us note with emphasis the new revelation that the president indicated that he wanted the U.S. military to seize voting machines as a means of keeping him in power past an election which he had clearly lost.

Perhaps if the reality of what took place was less abhorrent we might be able to process it more easily, and thus be less stunned.

Can this really be happening? Did all of this really occur?

Above all, one question looms for which we must demand answers:

"How is all of this only coming out now?" It's THE question for all who could have made a difference. At any step along the way.

There must be soul searching at all levels.

The cowardice of those who saw this unfold in real time and said nothing is a permanent stain on their characters. Those who would explain it away, or who sought to sabotage this investigation — and that includes almost every elected Republican in Congress — have put their narrow party’s unquenched thirst for power ahead of the country.

We must ask: What was happening at the Department of Justice? And what is happening there now?

It brings me no joy to include the press as an institution in this tally of systemic breakdown. How could this story have been so widely missed? And is the full scale of it being given enough prominence? A story of this scale and far-ranging nature is bigger than just the White House press corps. Everyone should have been asking questions. It is not too late to dig into it with more investigative journalism. And while doing so, false equivalence should be banished from every newsroom.

With trial completed and ending in acquittal for one of the most politically explosive federal prosecutions in years, U.S. Justice Department Special Counsel John H. Durham’s record reveals legal error that undercuts his image as straight-shooting seeker of justice.

In a 2008 ruling that has never been reported by a major news outlet, a New York federal appeals court vacated bribery, wire fraud and racketeering convictions because a team led by Durham, left, then the Deputy U.S. Attorney in Connecticut (and Acting U.S. attorney for supervising the prosecution), illegally withheld evidence that could have helped federal defendant Charles Spadoni defend himself in a corruption case.

In another case, a Connecticut federal judge overturned a conviction in 2003 because of what she ruled in a 57-page decision was Durham's repeated prosecutorial misconduct at trial, a sanction that authorities stated is extremely rare in the federal system.

Past performance is relevant now because Durham's three-year probe of alleged illegality pertaining to the 2016 U.S. presidential election is reaching a pivotal and controversial juncture with the trial this month of the prominent cyberlaw attorney Michael Sussmann, right, on a claim that Sussmann falsely denied that he was representing the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton when he sought to alert FBI general counsel James Baker in the fall of 2016 to suspicions of Russian interference in the campaign and operations of the Democratic National Committee..

Sussmann, his attorneys and some independent commentators have denied wrongdoing and claimed that the prosecution is exceptionally weak and also tainted by political partisanship by Durham, a career prosecutor who was also nominated by President Trump for Durham's political post of U.S. attorney for Connecticut.

The trial began on May 16 and lasted two weeks before U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper in Washington’s federal court.

Breaking News May 31: 

• Washington Post, Michael Sussmann, who offered allegations about Trump in 2016, acquitted of lying to FBI
• National Public Radio, Special Counsel Durham fails first courtroom test in his three-year probe
• New York Magazine, Intelligencer: John Durham Tried to Prove Trump’s Russiagate Theory. Instead He Debunked It, Jonathan Chait
• Fox News, Michael Sussmann found not guilty of charge brought by Special Prosecutor John Durham

Durham’s case against Sussmann, a former partner at the DC office of law firm Perkins Coie, has generated substantial interest in the national press, particularly in pro-Trump circles where some Trump supporters regard it as their last best hope to vindicate Trump’s 2016 election victory as a purely American popular effort, thereby debunking claims that Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election to hurt Clinton and other Democratic candidates.

Sussmann and his defenders, on the other hand, have defended his actions as both non-criminal and reasonable, particularly in view of what they see as confirmed threats to the elections process posed by Russians, Trump and their allies. Sussmann’s defense lawyers accused Durham, for example, of promoting a “baseless narrative that the Clinton campaign conspired with others to trick the federal government into investigating ties between President Trump and Russia.”

Sussmann’s attorneys also have pointed to evidentiary problems in Durham’s case, including the lack of contemporary notes by the key FBI witness, James Baker, to support the Durham prosecution team's allegation that Sussmann criminally deceived Baker regarding his relevant clients.

The case, in other words, has come to be regarded in some quarters as either a rigorous and fearless application of the law by Durham and his team -- or, conversely, as an example of over-zealous overreach by an unaccountable prosecutor suspected of bringing a baseless prosecution to favor pro-Trump politics.

A consistent theme in the news accounts exploring the Durham investigation is that prosecutor and his team, including Nora R. Dannehy, a former Acting U.S. Attorney in Connecticut and longtime Durham colleague, bring to their work outstanding reputations as career prosecutors long entrusted to fulfill their responsibilities with the highest standards of professional expertise and justice-seeking.

And this is why the 2008 federal court decision, invalidating Durham’s prosecution of Spadoni for prosecutorial misconduct, remains especially relevant today in Durham’s prosecution of Sussmann.

• CNN, Who's who in the Michael Sussmann trial, Marshall Cohen (see below for details)
• New York Times, Clashing Views of Cybersecurity Lawyer as Trial in Special Counsel’s Case Opens, Charlie Savage

Here’s the story: New Questions Raised About Prosecutor Who Cleared Bush Officials in U.S. Attorney Firings, which we at the Justice Integrity Project originally reported in 2010 in Nieman Watchdog, a niche website published by Harvard University and edited by Barry Sussman, left, the former Watergate editor of the Washington Post who supervised its coverage of that scandal. Sussman is also the author of the recently released fifth edition of The Great Cover-up, a widely praised account of the Watergate probe.

The Nieman Watchdog story focused primarily on the appointment of Durham and Dannehy as special counsel investigating allegations of CIA and Justice Department misconduct. The story began this way:

"Four days before Nora Dannehy was appointed to investigate the Bush administration’s U.S. attorney firing scandal, a team of lawyers she led was found to have illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case.....[T]his previously unreported fact calls her entire investigation into question as well as that of a similar investigation by her colleague John Durham of DOJ and CIA decision-making involving torture."

The New York-based U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that Durham’s team should have known that the Spadoni defense was entitled to an FBI's agent's notes, which could have been used by Spadoni to argue that his conduct was legal.

The three-judge court ruled unanimously in vacating the major convictions against Spadoni, right. Judges held that the evidence unconstitutionally withheld might have helped Spadoni's defense against prosecution claims that he and his employer, Triumph Capital, Inc., illegally conspired to hire a political consultant in hopes of winning a major contract from the State of Connecticut.

U.S. District Judge John Gleeson, left, a former federal prosecutor, authored the opinion, which is available here. It did not name the federal prosecutors at fault but the case caption and relevant filings were signed by Durham and Dannehy as the most senior attorneys.

Follow up correspondence to the courts in 2010 provides a sense of the high stakes and continued rancor. A memo signed by Durham and assistant, William J. Nardini, now a federal judge, urged the courts to sentence Spadoni without delay.

Spadoni's attorney, William M. Sullivan, Jr.., responded this way:

In his Memorandum (“Mem.”), Charles Spadoni presents overwhelming evidence of the government’s continued misconduct in this case—misconduct which the Second Circuit  previously recognized when it sternly rebuked the government. Instead of being chastened by the Second Circuit’s opinion, however, the government complains of Mr. Spadoni’s “tone” and of the delay which has taken place in this case—even though responsibility for both lies in its
hands.

Widespread Praise

Durham and Dannehy have achieved widespread praise and career advancement as special prosecutors entrusted with reviewing several of the most sensitive Justice Department controversies of recent years. These include investigations of suppression of evidence, partisan prosecutions or other alleged serious wrongdoing by Justice Department and CIA personnel in major proceedings of historic stature.

That pattern continued after May 2019, when the Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr named Durham, later assisted by Dannehy, to investigate the Trump team’s claims that the FBI and other Justice Department concocted phony claims of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election along with Democratic operatives associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Tabloids, pro-Trump media outlets and some leftist critics of the Democratic Party have labeled the claims of Russian interference "RussiaGate" in many news stories and commentaries that suggest that Russian "interference" is colossal fraud on par with the Nixon-era scandal of the 1972 break-in by GOP and CIA operatives of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC.

Typical of such coverage are editorials by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, including a headline in February, Eyes turn to Hillary Clinton, not Trump in the Russiagate scandal. A headline last fall was The real ‘collusion’ was the creation of ‘RussiaGate’ out of absolutely nothing. Fox News, pro-Trump Republican officers and many bloggers have similarly advanced arguments that Trump and Russians have been falsely accused.

We at the Justice Integrity Project present another guest column on a timely topic by Dr. Steven Jonas, right, MD, MPH, MS, a professor emeritus of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook Medicine (NY) and author / co-author / editor / co-editor of over 35 books. He has been published also on many current affairs news sites. His own political website,stevenjonaspolitics.com, will eventually archive the close to 1,000 political columns he has published since 2004.

He was also a career triathlete (36 seasons, 256 multi-sport races), who is now retired from the sport.

His latest book is Ending the ‘Drug War’; Solving the Drug Problem: The Public Health Approach, Punto Press Publishing, (Brewster, NY, 2016). It is available on Kindle from Amazon, and also in hardcover from Amazon. In 1996, he published a ‘future history’ of the United States entitled The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel (Third Edition published by Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, and also available on Amazon.

By Dr. Steven Jonas

The political (and it is primarily political) controversy over vaccination continues apace in this country. Of course, it is led primarily by the Republo-fascist Party because, in my view, they want to make things as bad as they can for the Biden Administration. There is also a small (but noisy) anti-vaxx cadre on the Left which cadre is sure that the vaccines which have been produced in this country will produce major harms down the road (that is WAY down the road -- 15 years [easily tested-for, of course]). Further, like the much noisier ones on the Right they confuse the word "mandate" with the concept of forced vaccination (which NO one is proposing).

An Introductory Historical Note

Not too many people, other than students of Nazism, know that there was a "left-wing" of the Nazi Party. It was headed by the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor. As the beginning of the Wikipedia entry on them says:

"Strasserism (German: Strasserismus or Straßerismus) is a strand of Nazism that calls for a more radical, mass-action and worker-based form of Nazism hostile to Jews not from a racial, cultural or religious perspective, but from an anti-capitalist basis to achieve a national rebirth. It derives its name from Gregor and Otto Strasser, two brothers initially associated with this position." This is a subject to which I shall return at the end of the column.

Some Comments on Vaccination, its Effectiveness, and Side-effectsDoes vaccination work to prevent acquisition of this highly infectious disease, transmitted through the air? Yes, most of the time. And when it doesn't prevent infection of a specific individual, in most of those cases it diminishes the severity of the resulting illness.

Does vaccination have side-effects? Yes, it does. In most cases, beyond short-duration tenderness and redness at the injection site, are they primarily annoying rather incapacitating? Yes. As an example, I had the "tireds" for about two weeks after I received my second shot last spring. I had them again for a shorter period of time after I received my booster at the beginning of October. (Oh yes. I received the Pfizer vaccine.)

Have a significant number of people died after receiving the vaccine? The anti-vaxxers say "yes," but don't seem to be able to provide any data supporting their position (at least I haven't seen any, and I am on a couple of left-wing anti-vaxx listservs, so presumably if there were any, it would have been sent around).... . But one wonders, in this country why would the CDC not respond as vigorously to that situation as they have to the pandemic? Oh, I know. Because each and every employee at CDC is part of the "plandemic" plot and they really want to kill people beyond those who the virus has killed (at least according to cause-of-death reports, which are "obviously" false).

Might there be some very long-term side effect[s], resulting from this vaccine which is based on an entirely new and different mode of vaccine production? Yes, we are told by the anti-vaxxers, 15 years down the road there is going to be some significant damage, of some (unknown) kind, to the human population who took the vaccine. But of course, we do not know that to be true. It is indeed speculation. And if that speculation (which has no scientific basis, it's only speculation) proved to be entirely incorrect, then possibly hundreds of millions of persons would have died unnecessarily. Hmm.

The TRC (www.americantruthnow.org) mission is to help Americans confront the truth of the assassinations, all of which changed the course of American and world history and adversely affect us to this day. The subsequent cover-ups and failures to disclose critical case files have added to the public’s distrust of both the government and the media, a situation that has helped create the dysfunction in our current political environment.

Written by respected journalists and researchers, this report (available in its entirety via RFK: The Real Story) relies on documented evidence to refute the official government story of this assassination. As with other Truth and Reconciliation movements, our goal is not to punish the perpetrators but to set the historical record straight and thereby help bring about a new era of understanding for current and future generations.

The Justice Integrity Project has been active as a co-founding board member in supporting the committee's work to advance public understanding of evidence that has been ignored or under-reported by the mainstream media. This editor also has been a consulting attorney for the Sirhan's defense team, which was revitalized in 2007 by Dr. William F. Pepper of New York, with California attorney Angela Berry spearheading advocacy for a parole.

Today's report (with photo selection and captions by our project, not the TRC and with footnotes omitted but available on TRC version on its website) answers the key questions about the tragic event in Los Angeles in 1968. As in the death of RFK's brother John five years previously, the main questions are "Who Killed RFK? Why Does It Matter Now?"

Breaking: The San Francisco Chronicle has published the following column by the late senator's eldest son, the lawyer, professor and best-selling author Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arguing why he and two of his siblings believe that Sirhan should be freed.

Sirhan Sirhan at his parole hearing in August. He was convicted for the 1968 murder of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (Photo by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation).

San Francisco Chronicle, Opinion: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill my father. Gov. Newsom should set him free, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (shown below at right in a Gage Skidmore photo), Dec. 9, 2021 (print ed.). Gov. Gavin Newsom will soon decide the fate of Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of killing my father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968. Gov. Newsom has stated he reveres my father and will consider the wishes of my family members. My family, however, is divided; I and two of my nine surviving siblings feel strongly that Sirhan’s release best reflects my father’s legacy.

After more than 50 years in prison, the state’s own psychiatrists and the parole board deem that Sirhan poses no threat to society. During a three-hour meeting with him in 2018, I was impressed with the genuineness of Sirhan’s remorse for his role in my father’s shooting, even though he has always claimed to have no memory of those moments. Sirhan wept, clenched my hands and asked for forgiveness from me, from my siblings and from my mother for his part in the tragedy. At 77, he seems gentle, humble, kindhearted, frail and harmless.

Excerpt continued below.

-- Andrew Kreig, Justice Integrity Project editor

The special report below is presented by the Truth & Reconciliation Committee, whose founding members include members of the Kennedy and King families, Robert Kennedy's associates Paul Schrade and Adam Walinsky, forensics expert Dr. Cyril Wecht, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, civil rights leader Reverend James Lawson, Jr., activist actors and di­rectors Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, Oliver Stone and many others.

The assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy appeared to be a cut-and-dried case, with Sirhan Sirhan, who undeniably fired a handgun towards Senator Kennedy, being convicted of murder and remaining in prison ever since. Over the decades, however, overwhelming evidence that RFK's murder was actually committed by a different gunman has emerged.

The facts of the case need to be exposed, especially since Sirhan Sirhan is currently being considered for parole by the California Parole Board and Governor Gavin Newsom.

KEY REVELATIONS

The official autopsy by the respected coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi confirmed that RFK was killed by a shot fired at point blank range from behind, whereas all of the eyewitnesses placed Sirhan several feet in front of Kennedy and the gun in his outstretched hand no closer than l.5 to 5 feet away while firing.

Kennedy was shot four times. Three bullets hit him and one went through his jacket, and five other victims were struck by bullets for a total of nine confirmed shots. Sirhan's gun only held 8 bullets. Other evidence that at least 13 shots were fired was found by the FBI and Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in door frames and ceiling panels. An audiotape later analyzed by an expert sound engineer confirmed at least 13 shots, with five coming from the opposite direction of Sirhan's. Further, multiple witnesses confirmed hearing at least 12 shots but their statements were ignored by police.

The police ignored three eyewitnesses who stated they saw a security guard, who was standing right behind Kennedy, pull his gun. One witness saw him fire it. His gun was never checked by the police or FBI and subse­quent revelations show him lying about owning a .22, the same caliber gun that Sirhan used.

Sirhan's gun was never forensically matched to the fatal bullet. The LAPD criminalist lied when he testified that bullets test fired from Sirhan's gun matched the fatal bullet. The test bullets he matched were from an entirely different gun taken from an LAPD evidence locker unrelated to the Kennedy killing. Over time, many more details about a cover-up by the LAPD have surfaced.

These and other revelations, which most of the Kennedy family, the public and media seem unaware of, indicate a different assassin than Sirhan Sirhan as RFK's killer. We encourage you to read this primer and decide for yourself.

The TRC (www.americantruthnow.org) was formed by members of the Kennedy and King families, Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, David Crosby, Reverend James Lawson Jr., Oliver Stone, Adam Walinsky, James Galbraith, David Talbot, and other public figures. It states:

The TRC is dedicated to helping America confront the truth of the assassinations, all of which changed the course of American and world history and adversely affect us to this day. The subsequent cover-ups and failures to disclose critical case files have added to the public’s distrust of both the government and the media, a situation that has helped create the dysfunction in our current political environment.

Written by respected journalists and researchers, this report (available in its entirety in JFK: The Real Story) relies on documented evidence to refute the official government story of these assassinations. As with other Truth and Reconciliation movements, our goal is not to punish the perpetrators but to set the historical record straight and thereby help bring about a new era of understanding for current and future generations.

The Justice Integrity Project, which has been active as a co-founding board member in supporting the committee's work, republished the first part of the report here (JFK's Assassination Part 1) to advance public understanding of evidence that has been ignored or under-reported by the mainstream media.

Today's second and final part (with photo selection and captions by our project, not the TRC) answers the key questions about the tragic event in Dallas in 1963: "Who Killed JFK? Why Does It Matter Now?"

-- Andrew Kreig, Justice Integrity Project editor

In 1963, hate mongers prepared for President Kennedy's assassination by distributing the handbill above in Dallas on the day he was murdered, Nov. 22, 1963.

Who Killed JFK?

Soon after President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, President Johnson, above center, appointed the Warren Commission (arrayed around him as they delivered their report in 1964) ostensibly to get to the bottom of who killed Kennedy and why. But the Commission appeared more interested in putting the public’s mind at ease than in finding the truth. Over time, researchers who analyzed the report were stunned by the inaccuracies, important evidence that was ignored, and testimony that was changed.

Named for its chairperson, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, left, the panel could just as easily been called the Dulles Commission after its most active member, former CIA director and Kennedy enemy, Allen Dulles. Kennedy and Dulles, right, had intractable differences, and Kennedy had actually fired him after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

The Warren Report, issued in September 1964, asserted that President Kennedy had been shot by an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone assassin who fired three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. But that claim was patently false for many reasons. At that point, Kennedy’s limousine was already more than 150 feet past the building—and still moving away. Also, there were several oak trees and a large road sign in the line of fire.

Any lone assassin in that position would certainly have taken the much easier shot as the limousine approached to within 50 feet on Houston Street.

More than 40 witnesses stated that shots were fired from the grassy knoll in front of the President’s motorcade (shown at left on the photo below), but all of them were either ignored or  pressured to change their testimony by the FBI or Warren Commission attorneys. Such was also the case with eyewitnesses Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, close friends and associates of Kennedy, who had been riding in the limousine behind the President’s.

To protect the lone-assassin narrative, the overriding requirement of which was that only three bullets had been fired, all from behind the President, Warren Commission attorney Arlen Spector made a bizarre claim. He posited that one of these bullets, later dismissively called the “the magic bullet,” somehow passed through Kennedy’s body and zigzagged up and down, and left and right, and ultimately struck Texas Governor John Connally, who was sitting in the front seat. Spector said that the shot caused seven wounds. One problem was that this alleged “magic bullet” was later found on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital in pristine condition. Even Connally insisted until his death that he was struck by a different bullet than any of those that hit JFK. Also, the Warren Commission ignored physical evidence of additional bullet holes observed in the limousine and on the adjacent roadside.

The Commission’s conclusion was an absurd ballistic fairytale that was visually shattered by the famous Zapruder film (by onlooker Abraham Zapruder), which clearly shows the President being shot from his front right. Shots were also fired from behind. But as Kennedy’s right temple explodes, he is violently thrown back and to his left, indicating he was killed by the shot from the front, not a shot from behind at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD, shown at left center behind trees in the adjoining photo). This clear video evidence alone is ample proof of a conspiracy.

Apparently, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy also believed this. Shown (at left) climbing onto the trunk of the car to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull, she later told friends she believed that her husband had been ambushed by multiple conspirators.

In presentations before Congressional committees, renowned forensic coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht, right, further demolished the Warren Report’s insistence that it was three bullets from the TSBD behind the President that killed him.

There was also confirmation of the conspiracy from two of the Parkland Hospital emergency room surgeons, Dr. Charles Crenshaw and Dr. Robert McLelland, shown below at right lecturing on the issue. Silenced for years by official pressure, these (Dallas) doctors eventually revealed that they had seen with their own eyes that President Kennedy had been shot from the front as well as the rear. Over the years, numerous other Parkland and Bethesda doctors have come forth and told of having seen multiple frontal wounds.

Particularly telling is the fact that no Oswald fingerprints were found on the alleged assassin’s rifle; nor was there any gunpowder residue on his cheek when Oswald was tested by Dallas police. And there is strong exculpatory evidence that Oswald had nothing to do with the killing of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit—he was shot nearby, 45 minutes after the assassination—for which Oswald was also charged.