Julie Kelly: Meet New #Resistance Hero Denise Cheung

The latest DOJ official to resign is Denise Cheung. She resigned instead of following orders and investigating -- just investigating -- whether Biden's $20 billion giveaway of taxpayer funds to leftwing "non-profits" and Democrat cronies like Stacey Abrams was legal.

She decided, without any investigation, that it was legal. She also refused to follow orders and demand that the banks holding this money freeze the funds. She defied orders and instead "recommended" they do so, leaving them free to give away the money before we could take a look at these issues.

She was told to do her job or resign. She resigned.

And immediately became the media's latest #Resistance HER-o.

In what has become the latest trend in #Resistance fashion, another government lawyer made a splashy exit from the Department of Justice this week. Denise Cheung, chief of the criminal division for the U.S. Attorney's office in Washington, sent a three-page letter to her boss explaining why she would have to quit rather than follow orders to pursue an investigation into potential wrongdoing tied to the Biden administration.

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The so-called Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund first got attention when Lee Zeldin, the new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, laid out details of the jaw-dropping arrangement in a video posted last week. "Roughly twenty billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA," Zeldin said on February 12. "This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all the money in a rush job with reduced oversight."

Zeldin noted that the money, now understood to be "parked" at Citibank, was awarded to eight climate nonprofits who then "doled out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion with far less transparency." He referred the matter to both the DOJ and EPA inspector general:

There is no question about the political origins of the fund; the Biden White House touted the program with great fanfare months before the 2024 election. During a campaign stop last April, Kamala Harris announced the eight chosen winners of the $20 billion climate lottery. Harris also noted the unique nature of the arrangement, boasting that "for the first time in history, we are providing tens of billions of dollars directly to community lenders to finance local climate projects. This is a novel approach, it is actually the first time we have taken this approach."

There are no limits on how they money can be spent or for what purposes -- it's a literal slush-fund give-away to leftwing groups to use the money as they choose.

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The unusual nature of the arrangement alone--a major bank rather than Congress handling a big chunk of tax dollars with no known oversight mechanism established just a few months before the election--should raise the Spidey senses of any federal prosecutor, especially one with a stellar DOJ resume that stretches back more than two decades.

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Bove additionally sought a letter to Citibank ordering a "freeze" of funds related to the unidentified grant recipient. Cheung then contacted the famously corrupt Washington FBI field office for more guidance; she then concluded that enough evidence supported potential conspiracy and wire fraud charges.

But the letter from the FBI only "recommended" a freeze of the funds.

Is Cheung a Straight Arrow?

Hardly:

Cheung's sanctimony and sudden devotion to careful prosecutorial scrutiny is hard to swallow given her history. After years of helping the DOJ pursue clearly politically motivated investigations against Republicans, Cheung suddenly suffered an alleged attack of conscience when it came to investigating Democrats?

This is, after all, the same Denise Cheung who was part of the DOJ team that initiated the dubious investigation into Donald Trump over Jan 6; brought federal charges against Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for defying an illicit congressional committee; and helped manage the largest criminal prosecution in Justice Department history resulting in the arrest of nearly 1,600 Americans for the events of Jan 6.

Cheung's "moral, ethical, and legal obligations," as she bragged in her resignation letter, never got in the way of her office's unlawful use of a post-Enron obstruction statute to turn hundreds of J6 protesters into lifelong felons. Or when her office applied federal misdemeanors such as "parading" in the Capitol for the first time against political protesters. Or when her office added terror enhancements to sentencing recommendations in order to throw nonviolent J6ers in federal prison for years. Or when her office sent women in their 70s to jail for protesting outside of abortion clinics.

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Now Ed Martin -- who fired Cheung -- sends letters to Charles Schumer and Robert Garcia that he is investigating them for making threats against the President and the President's staffers.

posted by Ace at 05:30 PM

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