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Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) nearly doubled her income in 2010 from consulting fees she received from a nonprofit she co-founded, and Bass’s re-election campaign donated nearly $100,000 to that nonprofit between 2008 and 2011, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Bass, a vice presidential contender on Democratic presumptive nominee Joe Biden’s VP shortlist, co-founded a South Los Angeles-based nonprofit called the Community Coalition in 1990. Her community organizing with the Coalition laid the groundwork for her successful run for the California State Assembly in 2004, where she would eventually rise to the position of Speaker in 2008.

A Los Angeles Times review of Bass’s financial disclosures found that her State Assembly campaign committees paid the Community Coalition nearly $100,000 between 2008 and 2011. And in 2010, the Community Coalition paid Bass a total of $70,500 in consulting fees, an amount that nearly doubled her State Assembly salary that year.

Financial disclosures show that Bass’s campaign made two major donations to the nonprofit organization that she co-founded.

The first was for $47,000 given between late 2008 (the year Bass became Speaker of the California Assembly) and 2009.

The second donation was for $50,000 in late 2011 when Bass was closing out her Assembly campaign chest after she got elected to Congress.

Bass acknowledged to the Times that her fundraising ability flourished in 2008 after she became Speaker of the Assembly – which coincided with her campaign’s first major donation to the Community Coalition:

Bass said her donations grew considerably after she became speaker, a position that enabled her to raise more money. After she was elected to Congress, she wanted to give away what was left in her Assembly campaign accounts, she said.

However, the picture becomes a bit more complicated when you factor in the money the nonprofit paid Bass as a “consultant.”

“In 2010, the Community Coalition paid her $70,500 in consulting fees directly and through one of its contractors, according to interviews and public records,” the Times reports.

The $70,500 breaks down into two separate payments from 2010, according to the Times:

The Community Coalition directly paid Bass $26,500 to help it do research and appear in a short video to mark its 20th anniversary. Bass collected an additional $44,000 through a Community Coalition contract with Jemmott Rollins Group, a nonprofit consulting firm, to help devise fundraising strategies for community groups devastated by the Great Recession, according to a House filing and to Frances Jemmott, chief executive of Jemmott Rollins.

These consulting fees nearly doubled Bass’s reported salary in 2010 and are the only consulting income she received between 2003 and 2018 (a period which spans her political career), the Times reports:

Other than the $70,500, Bass reported no consulting income between 2003 and 2018, according to financial disclosure forms. Those payments nearly doubled her reported $94,000 salary in 2010 as a member of the Assembly. The year before, she was paid $139,000 as speaker, a position she gave up in early 2010 as she was facing term limits on her Assembly seat and preparing to run for Congress.

Bass claims that her campaign’s donations to the nonprofit she co-founded were unrelated to the consulting income the nonprofit paid her. She says the money the Community Coalition paid her came from outside grants it received from foundations like the California Endowment.

“I had no reason in the world to give them a contribution and ask for it back,” Bass told the Times.

Still, the arrangement “creates the appearance of a conflict of interest,” according to Kirk O. Hanson, senior fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

“It’s not a good idea to receive substantial income from organizations that are supported by contributions from your campaign fund,” Hanson told the Times. “It creates an appearance of a conflict of interest, that you have converted campaign funds into personal income.”

These latest revelations add to other concerns about Bass brought to light by the increased scrutiny of the VP vetting process.

She has come under criticism for her decades-long association with communists, her membership in a communist front group run by Cuba’s communist regime, her praise of Fidel Castro, and her public praise for her communist mentor and communist influencers.

Biden is expected to announce his vice presidential pick next week.

Rebecca Mansour is a Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.

President Donald Trump in Ohio Thursday criticized former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden for abandoning American workers.

“American factory workers received nothing but broken promises and brazen sellouts and lost jobs. The last administration tied America up in one globalist debacle after another,” Trump said.

The president visited a Whirlpool plant in Ohio on Thursday to celebrate the 2018 tariff he leveled on imports of foreign washing machines, accusing other countries of “dumping” cheap appliances into the American market.

“Your cries for help fell on deaf ears. you didn’t see any action,” Trump recalled of the Obama administration. “They didn’t act, they didn’t care, and they never will.”

The president repeatedly criticized the previous administration, now that Biden is running for president. Trump said that the Obama administration was never respected by countries like China, who took advantage of their complacency on trade.

“The Obama-Biden administration was laughed at, they were a joke, and they were perfectly happy to let China win, your jobs disappear, and your factory to close,” Trump said.

He criticized the Obama administration’s march toward globalization, promising to continue fighting for fairer trade policies and American manufacturing.

“Globalization has made the financial elites who donate to politicians very wealthy, but it’s left millions and millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache,” he said.

The president said that if he was elected for another four more years, he would continue to fight the coronavirus pandemic and bring more essential manufacturing back from China.

“As we’ve seen in this pandemic, the United States must produce essential equipment, supplies, and pharmaceuticals for ourselves,” he said. “We cannot rely on China and nations across the globe.”

The president also signed an executive order requiring federal government agencies to purchase essential medicines and equipment made in the United States.

He said he would continue to use tariffs to force foreign countries to make better trade deals.

“To be a strong, America must be a strong manufacturing nation and not be led by a bunch of fools,” he said.

The president said during his speech that he had approved reimposing a ten percent aluminum tariff on Canada.

“Canada was taking advantage of us, as usual,“ he said.

Trump recalled his 2016 campaign promises to American workers, including his decision to cancel the Obama/Biden Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal when he first took office and to renegotiate NAFTA.

“I kept every single one of them,” he said about his promises. “The fake news media back there, they hate to report this. They hate it. Why do they hate it? Because they’re fake.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) suggested Thursday during an exclusive interview with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily that Google’s suppression of political news critical of Joe Biden and Democrats on its search engine is election interference.

Asked by host Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow if he believed Google’s suppression amounted to “election interference,” Cotton responded:

Why else would Google be suppressing a conservative news site or suppressing news about Joe Biden? I mean they’re not suppressing news about the Chicago Bears. They’re not suppressing news about the weather. They’re suppressing political news that’s critical of the Democrats. What else do you think it is?

He also said there appears to be a “systematic effort” to remove or at least rank substantially lower Breitbart News’s coverage of Joe Biden, and called it “especially troubling”in the leadup to an election:

All this is troubling under any circumstances, it’s especially troubling as we lead up to an election season to see one of the huge monopoly search engines in this country manipulate search results by all appearances to favor the Democratic Party. I’ve asked the Justice Department to look into this, to expand their anti-trust probe into it, and I hope they do just that.

Cotton revealed last week to Breitbart News that he has written to Attorney General Bill Barr and Google CEO Sundar Pichai about Google’s censoring of Breitbart News and other conservative outlets.

His letter came after Breitbart News’s Allum Bokhari exclusively reported data showing Google has suppressed Breitbart News articles from its search engine results since 2016 by 99.7 percent.

“I think the censoring of Breitbart and other conservative news sites by Google is very alarming. That’s why I’ve written to Sundai Pichar about it. I’ve also asked the Attorney General to look into it and expand their anti-trust probe into Google,” Cotton said.

“Google has the monopoly of power in the search market. Google cannot use that monopoly power to then try to get a monopoly to harm competitors in other markets as well, like say the digital advertising market. That is almost a per se violation of our anti-trust laws,” he said.

“That’s why the Department of Justice has begun this probe and some state attorneys general are following on. I would encourage them to expand or look into this issue, too,” he said.

Cotton said that it seemed that Big Tech’s censorship — even if allegedly accidental — is always of conservatives.

When was the last time you heard Talking Points Memo or DailyKos or MSNBC having a story or an article or video censored? ‘Oh we’re sorry,’ they say at Google. ‘We’re sorry,’ they say at YouTube, ‘That was just an inadvertent mistake. Our algorithm screwed up. We didn’t mean to censor Rachel Maddow, we’ll put it back up.’

It never happens. It never happens. It always seems to happen that their accidents and their slip-ups are designed to censor conservatives.

He said that while legislation could be a long-term answer, only the Justice Department has the power to act quickly before the election.

“That’s why I’ve asked them to promptly expand their anti-trust probe to look into exactly what Google is doing and to ensure that this is an issue that is front and center for the American people,” he said.

“Not just that they know that the news that they’re seeing on Google may be skewed, but also so they appreciate the danger of giving some of these giant tech companies the power to determine what we read and what we see.”

Listen to the full interview here:

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. EST.

Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook.

Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell called for an end to the almost nightly violent protests in the city during a news conference on Wednesday.

“We continue to have some nightly violent criminal activity that’s taking place in our city. This has been problematic for us. It’s a drain on resources and we have people who, they’re dedicated to provoking a police response,” he told reporters.

Lovell continued:

That response is taking away from our ability to go out and give people the service that they expect from the police bureau. People expect to get their calls for service answered, they expect us to be able to answer their calls for service, respond to the shootings that we’ve been having and things of that nature. So we’re really calling on people to come out and just really say that that activity needs to stop.

We’re pushing almost 70 straight days of protests here in Portland. Officers are tired, and they keep coming back every night because they love this city. They’re working hard to keep the city safe, protect people, and give people the right to exercise their free speech but also protect property from those who are committed to try to destroy it and to try to do things that are disruptive to the functioning of our beautiful city.

The chief said Portlanders, including business owners, faith leaders, and elected officials, needed to “send the strong message that enough is enough.”

“This is not forwarding the goals of things that are going to lead to better outcomes for people of color. This movement’s very powerful and I feel like the violence has taken away from it in a really, kind of concerning way,” Lovell noted.

The riots continued this week after federal law enforcement officials withdrew from the area, according to Breitbart News.

Although more than 400 people have been arrested since the protests began, Lovell explained that “This is not a situation where you can arrest your way out of it,” adding that despite the arrests, the violence had not stopped.

“To me that’s just an attempt to either lash out against government or the establishment in general, or to provoke a response from the police,” Lovell concluded.

Former Vice President Joe Biden remarked in an interview released Thursday that “unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community.”

Biden was addressing the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) Joint Virtual Convention. Portions of the interview were aired Wednesday, and the full video was streamed Thursday.

National Public Radio’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Biden about whether he would stop the deportation of Cubans.

“I’m going to look at every single country in the world … this guy [President Donald Trump] is sending them back,” Biden  said, promising to extend the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program on his first day in office — one of several such first-day promises Biden has made.

Garcia-Navarro followed up, asking whether Biden would attempt to restore the Obama-Biden administration’s policy of improving relations with communist Cuba.

“Yes,” he said.

Biden then went on to add:

“And by the way, w hat you all know, but most people don’t know, unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly different attitudes about different things … it’s a very diverse community.”

Biden attempted to explain that point by arguing that Latinos in Florida and Arizona had different views on immigration.

Garcia-Navarro did not ask Biden why he thought the black community was not diverse. She moved on to a different topic.

Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the president’s reelection campaign, tweeted an outraged response:

Coincidentally, the Biden campaign released an ad Thursday aimed at black voters that likened President Trump to the “violent racists” of the Jim Crow past.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

 

California prison officials said almost 18,000 inmates in state prisons are being released because of the coronavirus — an increase of 70 percent from earlier release estimates.

And details are surfacing about who these prisoners are, including a report issued by KTLA in Los Angeles:

Among those released last week was Terebea Williams, who served 19 years of an 84 years-to-life sentence for first-degree murder, carjacking and kidnapping.

She was deemed at high medical risk for the virus, though officials couldn’t say what put her in that category.

The Associated Press reported on concerns from police, probation officers, and others involved in the re-entry of prisoners into society that it could include “dangerous criminals who should stay locked up.”

The AP spoke to the sister of the man Williams killed.

“Why is an inmate’s rights more important than a victim’s?” Dena Love said to AP.

AP also spoke to other stakeholders:

The earlier releases also are causing consternation as probation officers and community organizations scramble to provide housing, transportation and other services for inmates who may pose a public health risk because several hundred have been paroled while still contagious.

“It has just been a total madhouse, quite frankly, and we’re doing this in the midst of a pandemic,” Karen McDaniel, the statewide transportation and services liaison between community groups and corrections officials, told the AP.

California Police Chiefs Association president Eric Nuñez acknowledged the dire situation in the state’s prisons, but said he is distressed that some inmates are being released “without a consideration for the larger impact on public safety.” He told AP that the chiefs want to work with prison officials on improving the decision-making process.

Officials said that some 8,000 inmates have been sickened by the virus and 51 have died. Almost 2,000 prison employees have been infected and eight have died, according to AP.

Follow Penny Starr on Twitter