THE IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE: FRAUD...AND THE TRAIL OF EVIDENCE THAT PROVES FRAUD !

[Whirlaway]

If he were a CEO in the private sector, he’d be prosecuted for such deception.

‘If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” How serious was this lie, repeated by Barack Obama with such beguiling regularity? Well, how would the Justice Department be dealing with it if it had been uttered by, say, the president of an insurance company rather than the president of the United States?

Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime. In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer.

Justice Department guidelines, set forth in the U.S. Attorneys Manual, recommend prosecution for fraud in situations involving “any scheme which in its nature is directed to defrauding a class of persons, or the general public, with a substantial pattern of conduct.” So, for example, if a schemer were intentionally to deceive all Americans, or a class of Americans (e.g., people who had health insurance purchased on the individual market), by repeating numerous times — over the airwaves, in mailings, and in electronic announcements — an assertion the schemer knew to be false and misleading, that would constitute an actionable fraud — particularly if the statements induced the victims to take action to their detriment, or lulled the victims into a false sense of security.

For a fraud prosecution to be valid, the fraudulent scheme need not have been successful. Nor is there any requirement that the schemer enrich himself personally. The prosecution must simply prove that some harm to the victim was contemplated by the schemer. If the victim actually was harmed, that is usually the best evidence that harm was what the schemer intended.

To be more illustrative, let’s say our schemer is the president of a health-insurance company, and that it was clearly foreseeable to him that his company’s clients would lose their current insurance plans if the company adopted his proposal of a complex new health-insurance framework. In fact, let’s assume that the schemer not only had analyses showing that clients would lose their plans but that he also had a history of openly favoring a “single-payer” insurance system — i.e., an unconcealed desire to move everyone from private to government-managed insurance arrangements.

Now, suppose the schemer nevertheless vowed to the company’s clients, to whom he bore fiduciary obligations, that they needn’t fear his proposed new insurance framework; under it, he promised time after time after time, if they liked their current plans, they would be able to keep those plans. And let’s say that, on the basis of that repeated vow, the clients supported the schemer’s reappointment as president and his proposed new framework. On these facts, the clients’ subsequent loss of their current insurance plans helps prove the schemer’s fraudulent intent. The schemer has committed not just a fraud but a carefully thought-out, fully successful fraud, replete with suffering victims.

The concept of fraudulent deception, like the concept of perjury and other forms of actionable false statement, often entails not only affirmative lies — e.g., the general manager who tells a baseball player, “I will not trade you if you sign the contract,” and then proceeds to trade the player after he signs; the concept also commonly involves the omission of material facts (what’s called “material omission”) — e.g., the general manager who tells the player, “I will not trade you if you sign the contract,” under circumstances where, unbeknownst to the player, the general manager has already made arrangements to trade him.

A material omission is the intentional failure to state any fact the communication of which would be necessary to ensure that statements already made are not misleading. The concept of material omission is a staple of fraud prosecutions. A good example is the Obama Justice Department’s ongoing and transparently political effort to portray financial institutions — as opposed to government policies — as the proximate cause of the mortgage-industry collapse that resulted in our national economic meltdown.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s minions have recently sued Bank of America and UBS. The complaints filed in court by prosecutors allege that these financial institutions defrauded investors in the sale of mortgage-backed securities by failing to disclose important facts about the underlying mortgages. Indeed, prosecutors asserted that financial institutions’ statements about these securities were both lies and, even where arguably true, material omissions. That’s because the statements withheld from investors the fact that the institutions well knew, based on internal analyses, that many of the mortgages backing the securities would go into default.

Recall that President Obama knew three years ago, based on internal analyses, that because of his administration’s own regulation-writing, millions of Americans would lose the health plans he nonetheless continued to promise they could keep. The president hid the data . . . just as did those financial institutions that his trusty attorney general has sued. Comparatively speaking, though, the financial institutions defrauded significantly fewer victims. Thus it is noteworthy that Holder is now demanding that the institutions pay hundreds of millions of dollars for their fraudulent misrepresentations.

Even that is not good enough for some prominent Democrats. Senator Carl Levin, for example, blasted the Justice Department for not pursuing a criminal fraud case against Goldman Sachs. Goldman had not made false statements in marketing the securities in dispute; but it did fail to disclose that it had shorted the same securities — i.e., it was quietly betting against the same securities it was selling. (I wrote sympathetically toward Goldman here, and Nicole Gelinas posted a characteristically smart rebuttal here.) Senator Levin railed at Holder’s decision not to file criminal charges, portraying it as an abdication in the face of behavior that was “deceptive and immoral.” Of course, if you want to talk about “deceptive and immoral,” Obama was snowing ordinary Americans, not savvy investors; and he was not just betting against the insurance plans he was promising to preserve; he was personally working to wipe them out.

The Justice Department is notoriously aggressive when it comes to material omissions by public corporations. Any public statement — not just in a required SEC filing but in any public context — may be deemed actionable if its purpose is to deceive the general public about a company’s condition. For example, as I’ve noted before, the Justice Department indicted Martha Stewart for fraud over press statements that did not disclose damaging information about her company.

Ms. Stewart, naturally, was fearful that truthful statements would send the stock price plummeting. Obama, by comparison, was not lying merely to prevent a company from losing value. His fraud was, first, to induce passage of a plan designed gradually to destroy the private health-insurance market — a plan that barely passed and never would have been enacted if he’d been honest. And later, his fraud was to procure his reelection and the guaranteed implementation of Obamacare; had he been honest, he would have been defeated and Obamacare forestalled.

Barack Obama is guilty of fraud — serial fraud — that is orders of magnitude more serious than frauds the Justice Department routinely prosecutes, and that courts punish harshly. The victims will be out billions of dollars, quite apart from other anxiety and disruption that will befall them.

The president will not be prosecuted, of course, but that is immaterial. As discussed here before, the remedy for profound presidential corruption is political, not legal. It is impeachment and removal. “High crimes and misdemeanors” — the Constitution’s predicate for impeachment — need not be indictable offenses under the criminal code. “They relate chiefly,” Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 65, “to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” They involve scandalous breaches of the public trust by officials in whom solemn fiduciary duties are reposed — like a president who looks Americans in the eye and declares, repeatedly, that they can keep their health insurance plans . . . even as he studiously orchestrates the regulatory termination of those plans; even as he shifts blame to the insurance companies for his malfeasance — just as he shifted blame to a hapless video producer for his shocking dereliction of duty during the Benghazi massacre.

It is highly unlikely that Barack Obama will ever be impeached. It is certain that he will never again be trusted. Republicans and sensible Democrats take heed: The nation may not have the stomach to remove a charlatan, but the nation knows he is a charlatan. The American people will not think twice about taking out their frustration and mounting anger on those who collaborate in his schemes.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...arthy/page/0/1

[Whirlaway]

Last Thursday, President Obama purported to undo the “Affordable” Care Act (ACA) mandates that he and congressional Democrats quite intentionally designed to force Americans off their health-insurance policies . . . notwithstanding the president’s promise, repeated over and over again since 2009, that Americans would be able to keep their health-insurance policies. In my weekend column, I argued that Obama’s latest unilateral diktat is lawless and transparently political. With each passing day, however, what becomes more breathtaking is the depth of systematic, calculated lying that went into the extensive — the criminal — Obamacare fraud.

Let’s quickly recap the lawlessness and cynical politics behind Thursday’s pathetic press conference. Obama, who poses as a constitutional-law expert, knows full well that a president has no legal authority to waive statutory mandates. Even if he had such power, moreover, he knows that there is no practical possibility of undoing — within the next few weeks, as the ACA would require — the new arrangements that insurance companies and state regulators spent the last three years structuring to comply with Obamacare mandates. In sum, Obama is well aware that his proposed “fix” is frivolous. His hope is that the country overwhelmingly consists of dolts who are too uninformed to realize that this is the case, and who, with a little help from his media courtiers, can be convinced to blame the insurance companies, rather than the president, for the fact that millions of Americans are losing their coverage under his “reform.”

Now, having covered Thursday’s con job, let’s get back to the overarching Obamacare scheme perpetrated by the president for more than four years — a fraud that, I contend, the Justice Department would not hesitate to prosecute had it been committed by a private-sector executive. I’ve related the standards for criminal and civil enforcement that would militate in favor of prosecution in a case involving the dimension of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty we find here. In addition, NRO’s Andrew Stiles had a superb report on Friday showing the sundry ways the administration’s dysfunctional Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, runs afoul of various consumer-protection laws. Again, when such infractions are committed by private businesses, the government punishes them quite severely.


We now discover even more evidence of how brazen Obama’s lies have been.
The president claims he truly believed that people would be able to keep plans they liked because Obamacare provides for those plans to be “grandfathered” — exempted from termination. Thus, he insists, he was acting in good faith when he made the promises that people could keep those plans, though he concedes the promises “ended up being inaccurate.”

This is yet another calculated deception, a willful continuation of the fraudulent scheme. The president well knew that, in implementing the “grandfathering” provision, his administration wrote regulations so narrow that tens of millions of existing plans would be eliminated. Congressional Democrats knew this, too: When Republicans endeavored in 2010 to enact legislation that would have broadened the regulation into a meaningful safe harbor, Democrats closed ranks and voted down the proposal – including Democrats such as Senator Mary Landrieu, who now pretends to be a crusader in the cause of letting Americans keep their insurance.

Unable to deny that millions of Americans have lost the coverage he vowed they could keep, Obama and other Democrats are now peddling what we might call the “5 percent” con job. The president asserts that these victims, whom he feels so terribly about, nevertheless constitute a tiny, insignificant minority in the greater scheme of things (“scheme” is used advisedly). They are limited, he maintains, to consumers in the individual health-insurance market, as opposed to the vastly greater number of Americans who get insurance through their employers. According to Obama, these individual-market consumers whose policies are being canceled make up only 5 percent of all health-insurance consumers.

Even this 5 percent figure is a deception. As Avik Roy points out, the individual market actually accounts for 8 percent of health-insurance consumers. Obama can’t help himself: He even minimizes his minimizations. So, if Obama were telling the truth in rationalizing that his broken promises affect only consumers in the individual-insurance market, we’d still be talking about up to 25 million Americans. While the president shrugs these victims off, 25 million exceeds the number of Americans who do not have health insurance because of poverty or preexisting conditions (as opposed to those who could, but choose not to, purchase insurance). Of course, far from cavalierly shrugging off that smaller number of people, Obama and Democrats used them to justify nationalizing a sixth of the U.S. economy.

But that’s not the half of it. Obama’s claim that unwelcome cancellations are confined to the individual-insurance market is another brazen lie. In the weekend column, I link to the excellent work of Powerline’s John Hinderaker, who has demonstrated that, for over three years, the Obama administration’s internal estimates have shown that most Americans who are covered by “employer plans” will also lose their coverage under Obamacare. Mind you, 156 million Americans get health coverage through their jobs.

John cites the Federal Register, dated June 17, 2010, beginning at page 34,552 (Vol. 75, No. 116). It includes a chart that outlines the Obama administration’s projections. The chart indicates that somewhere between 39 and 69 percent of employer plans would lose their “grandfather” protection by 2013. In fact, for small-business employers, the high-end estimate is a staggering 80 percent (and even on the low end, it’s just a shade under half — 49 percent).

That is to say: During all these years, while Obama was repeatedly assuring Americans, “If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan,” he actually expected as many as seven out of every ten Americans covered by employer plans to lose their coverage. For small business, he expected at least one out of every two Americans, or as many as four out of every five, to lose their coverage.
Avik’s eagle eye also catches that, even as Obama was spinning on Thursday about how his broken promise affects only the teeny-weeny individual-insurance market, his administration was telling a much different story to state insurance commissioners. In a letter about Obama’s proposed “fix,” the head of the relevant consumer-information office referred to “all individuals and small businesses that received a cancellation or termination notice with respect to coverage” (emphasis added). This, Avik observes, “contradicts assertions from the administration that only people in the individual market — people who shop for coverage on their own — are affected by the wave of Obamacare-related cancellations.”

It gets worse. My friends at the American Freedom Law Center (on whose advisory board I sit) are representing Priests for Life, a group aggrieved by Obamacare’s denial of religious liberty — specifically, the ACA’s mandate that believers, despite their faith-based objections, provide their employees with coverage for the use of abortifacients and contraceptives. On October 17, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services, represented by the Obama Justice Department, submitted a brief to the federal district court in Washington, opposing Priests for Life’s summary judgment motion. On page 27 of its brief, the Justice Department makes the following remarkable assertion:

The [ACA’s] grandfathering provision’s incremental transition does not undermine the government’s interests in a significant way. [Citing, among other sources, the Federal Register.] Even under the grandfathering provision, it is projected that more group health plans will transition to the requirements under the regulations as time goes on. Defendants have estimated that a majority of group health plans will have lost their grandfather status by the end of 2013.

HHS and the Justice Department cite the same section of the Federal Register referred to by John Hinderaker, as well as an annual survey on “Employer Health Benefits” compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2012.

So, while the president has been telling us that, under the vaunted grandfathering provision, all Americans who like their health-insurance plans will be able to keep them, “period,” his administration has been representing in federal court that most health plans would lose their “grandfather status” by the end of this year. Not just the “5 percent” of individual-market consumers, but close to all consumers — including well over 100 million American workers who get coverage through their jobs — have been expected by the president swiftly to “transition to the requirements under the [Obamacare] regulations.” That is, their health-insurance plans would be eliminated. They would be forced into Obamacare-compliant plans, with all the prohibitive price hikes and coercive mandates that “transition” portends.

Obamacare is a massive fraudulent scheme. A criminal investigation should be opened. Obviously, the Obama Justice Department will not do that, but the House of Representatives should commence hearings into the offenses that have been committed in the president’s deception of the American people.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...arthy/page/0/1

[i'va biggen]

Actually if he was a CEO, he would get a good stock option a golden parachute and affordable medical insurance.

[JD Barleycorn]

That is just the act itself. The ACA is a Congress originating law. That means that the White House has no more power to change, adjust, add on to, or alter the act unless as the Congress saw fit to provide. They did not see fit to provide an escape route for unions or special interest groups (exemptions) or the mandated times when things MUST be implemented can't be changed (no delays), or a temporary reversal was not in the original law. For Obama to try to do any of this is a breaking of the law. That is why the Constitution set it up that ALL laws come from the Congress and as chief executive the president can either agree or disagree with what the Congress writes. There is no power to change. There is also no choice about enforcement. The president must enforce the law as written just like DOMA and our immigration laws. Obama has already committed impeachable offenses.

[timpage]

If politicians saying things that turn out not to be true is a crime, we better start making room in the local jails for an influx of new inmates.

You know, you've got a good issue here....at least for a few more weeks. Why do you insist on fucking it up with stupid shit like this? It just makes you look dumber than you already appear to be....which is a difficult task in both of your cases but you have managed it.

[JD Barleycorn]

I guess Timmie really expects the system to get fixed.... by Santa Claus no doubt.

[timpage]

Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn

I guess Timmie really expects the system to get fixed.... by Santa Claus no doubt.

I do expect that. And, it will happen....sans Santa Claus. This shit is a bump in the road....well, maybe a big pothole. But, at the end of the day, you are living in a dream world if you think the Affordable Care Act is going away anytime soon because of this ridiculously bungled roll-out. It's the beginning of the single-payer system that every other sophisticated Western democracy in the world utilizes....because it's the fair and right thing to do.

[CuteOldGuy]

Originally Posted by timpage

If politicians saying things that turn out not to be true is a crime, we better start making room in the local jails for an influx of new inmates.

Good idea!

[Doove]

About the only thing to learn from this is that Andrew McCarthy has way too much time on his hands.

Sort of like COG.