On July 1, 1862, with the Civil War still raging across America, US President Abraham Lincoln signed the “Pacific Railroad Act” into law to establish the nation’s first transcontinental railroad.
Lincoln felt that the massive infrastructure project would be critical to support the war effort and stabilize the US economy. But he also viewed it as a symbolic way to unify a fractured nation.
Construction began after the war ended, and the federal government provided substantial land grants and funding to make it happen; they also chartered multiple railroad companies, including Union Pacific, which operated as quasi-government entities.
All that big government money proved too lucrative to resist. So early Union Pacific executives created elaborate structures to defraud taxpayers and bilk the government out of $40+ million (worth billions of dollars today).
They used shell companies to inflate costs— often charging more than double their actual expenses— and then funneled the excess cash into their own pockets.
They also took care of their political friends, routinely bribing members of Congress with stock grants and huge dividend checks.
Everything was obviously disguised to look legitimate; on the surface, it appeared that all these politicians and bureaucrats were just really talented investors. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that they all became super-wealthy from their Union Pacific investments.
But eventually the scandal broke; the New York Sun managed to find company records proving the bribes and corruption, and America was in an uproar.
Congress held hearings, and the Department of Justice opened an investigation. Dozens of politicians and powerful bureaucrats were implicated.
But in the end, not a single person was charged. The whole thing was swept under the rug… and, one of the key players— James Garfield— even went on to become President.
The lesson for politicians and top bureaucrats was clear: it was OK to defraud taxpayers as long as enough people were in on the scam, i.e. the fraud was ‘too big to take down’.
Modern politicians have heeded this lesson well.
Fast forward to early 2024— waaaay before Elon got involved in politics. ‘DOGE’ was still a meme coin. And last April, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a little-noticed report estimating that up to $500 BILLION of taxpayers funds are wasted each year on fraud.
Again, this was still during the Biden administration. So it was hardly a politically-charged analysis.
Today it seems the GAO may have been too optimistic. After the corrupt boondoggle at USAID was exposed, followed by discoveries of wasteful woke spending at the Department of Education, Elon Musk now says that there are millions of Social Security recipients older than any human has ever lived!
The level of Fraud, Waste, and Abuse is beyond rampant.
Yet despite being confronted by such obvious examples, the legacy media has opted to gaslight Americans once again.
For example, the New York Times says they ‘fact checked’ various reports and concluded that there is “no evidence” for widespread government fraud.
I guess the Government Accountability Office report doesn’t count as evidence?
Oh, and neither does the New York Times’ own article published days earlier about a woman who fraudulently claimed $100 million in Covid tax credits, even noting, “more than $200 billion—or at least 17 percent of the pandemic loans that the agency distributed—was awarded to ‘potentially fraudulent actors.’ ”
So, one article from the newspaper says there is rampant fraud. Another says there is “no evidence” of rampant fraud. You can’t make this stuff up.
Luckily, America largely tunes out legacy media these days, and the last election proved this point: despite their 24/7 propaganda, the media’s election manipulation efforts could not swing the results.
This loss of power is sending the left into a frenzy. And that’s probably why Washington DC has been the epicenter of some interesting Google search results lately…
After a couple small news outlets initially reported what I’m about to show you, I decided to investigate myself with Google’s ‘trends’ tool.
And it’s true: Google searches for “criminal defense lawyer” spiked in Washington DC starting on January 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. Talk about waiting until the last minute.
And over the last month, these searches have remained about 50% higher than the previous two months.
Still, I thought, maybe this is an odd anomaly. Perhaps searches for criminal lawyers are surging across the country.
Well, that’s actually not the case. The following graph shows searches in DC, compared to searches in Los Angeles in red, over the same time frame.
It was the same story when I compared the results to New York City.
Apart from a few of Diddy’s friends, a massive uptick in searches for “criminal defense lawyer” is specific only to Washington DC. Something seems to be spooking people in the nation’s capital.
And it’s not just criminal defense they are interested in.
Searches have spiked in DC for terms including ‘wire money,’ and ‘offshore bank,’ as well.
Gee. One might conclude based on these search trends that there are people in government who have been illegally siphoning off taxpayer money. Perhaps they’ve been enjoying this scam for years. And now that the game is up, they’re looking to protect themselves and stash their money away.
Of course, the legacy media once again cites ‘experts’ who insist that there is “zero evidence that these searches are even coming from DC insiders.”
Sure. It’s just another wild coincidence.
