Messy business as Miliband and refugee agency embroiled in fraud and sexual harassment charges involving DR Congo

Two days ago I wondered why the International Rescue Committee*** statement on Trump’s budget cuts did not feature newshound David Miliband (IRC CEO) making the comments against the President.
Look at this!
Headline from the UK Daily Mail yesterday. I guess he had bigger problems bubbling up than Trump’s budget this week:

Charity fronted by former Labour foreign secretary David Miliband ‘hushed up 37 allegations of fraud, sex abuse and bribery’

 

Government ministers froze funding to a charity led by David Miliband after it silenced 37 sex abuse, fraud and bribery allegations, it has been claimed.

The International Rescue Committee, which is headed by the former Labour foreign secretary, was given millions in taxpayers’ cash before the allegations were made.

hillary-and-miliband (1)
He said he loves Hillary’s smile. She called him cute.  https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/03/31/david-miliband-loves-hillarys-smile/

A team from the IRC was sent to probe claims of wrongdoing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. [Readers should know that refugees from the DR Congo are among the top numbers arriving in the US right now.—-ed]

This is the first time I learned that the IRC, besides getting nearly a half a billion US dollars in less than five years from US taxpayers, is also feeding off UK taxpayers.

Yet a leaked report from the Department of International Development (Dfid) shows the funding to the charity was cut after ‘direct reporting of sexual harassment and fraud’.

A Dfid spokesman told The Sun: ‘DFID became aware of serious allegations relating to this programme in August 2016.

‘The Department acted swiftly to ensure the reported misconduct was fully and comprehensively addressed by the IRC and relevant authorities.’

Mr Miliband left politics and joined the IRC in 2013 shortly after losing the Labour leadership election to his brother Ed [Ed’s nickname is ‘Red Ed’—ed]. He remains in the post today.

miliband and soros 2
Here Miliband is awarding George Soros the IRC’s highest honor—Freedom Award—in 2013.  Soros’ son Jonathan is on the left.

He is mentioned by name in the report, although there is no suggestion he is involved in any alleged wrongdoing.

More here.
Doing well by doing good!
The Daily Mail mentions Miliband’s huge salary (in the last reported tax year it was $671,749)!

Any real investigative reporters out there?

We have a very large archive on the life and times of Moneybags Miliband as head of the IRC in Manhattan, click here.
Do not miss this post: Miliband: We must embrace political Islamism.
And here he was the first contractor in 2015 to call for the US to resettle 65,000 Syrians (vast majority are Muslims).

The ol’ gang is breaking up, is Miliband next to depart?

***The International Rescue Committee is the largest (financially) of the nine contractors that resettle refugees in the US.
Recently, we reported that two of the nine have lost their CEO’s under questionable circumstances, see USCRI (Lavinia Limon) here and then just yesterday we learned that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service CEO Linda Hartke is out.

Vermont machete attacker was the son of a Somali refugee (chain migration!)

That is what the Daily Caller has learned from the Dept. of Homeland Security, but I still have questions.
See my previous posts here and here about the violent attack on a Vermont woman at a hotel for the homeless.
 

machete
Photo:  http://www.wcax.com/content/news/Police-respond-to-Shelburne-standoff–468162783.html

 
But, first, in every community where a person commits a crime, all of you should be demanding that your local authorities and local media answer this question:   

What is the immigration status of the alleged perp? 

Citizens have a right to know if a violent “man” like this one is here legally or illegally, and, if legally, through which legal program he slipped in.  As I enter my 11th year of writing about the refugee program, it is getting better and we are learning when the alleged criminal is a refugee, but it still is mostly a guessing game.
Here are a few snips about what reporters at the Daily Caller have learned about Abukar Ibrahim:

A man accused of violently assaulting an elderly volunteer worker with a machete outside a homeless shelter in Vermont earlier this month is the son of a Somali refugee, the Department of Homeland Security told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Abukar Ibrahim, a 32-year-old immigrant, assaulted 73-year-old Meals on Wheels volunteer Johanne LaGrange with a machete outside Harbor Place in Burlington, Vt., in early January after vandalizing vehicles and threatening other individuals nearby. Ibrahim “willfully, deliberately and with premeditation, and with intent to kill” assaulted his victim, Shelburne News reported, citing charges detailed in the court records.

He then barricaded himself in a room for hours, reportedly threatening to slit the throats of the responding police officers. Ibrahim, who ultimately surrendered to authorities, has pleaded not guilty to the charge of attempted first-degree murder, which carries a life sentence. A local court judge has ordered that Ibrahim’s sanity be evaluated.

The violent incident in Vermont was widely reported by many different media outlets, but the attacker’s country of origin and immigration status were not included in the initial reports. Working with DHS, TheDCNF was able to obtain this information.

“DHS can confirm that Abukar Ibrahim is a foreign-born naturalized United States citizen who initially entered the United States as the derivative child of a Somali refugee,” a DHS spokesperson told TheDCNF….

The DHS spokesperson goes on to say this is why we need better screening. Mental health screening too we presume!
Continue reading for more details on Ibrahim’s rampage that day and mentions of Ibrahim’s previous run-in with law enforcement.
And, inquiring minds want to know if he shouted Allahu Akbar when he was shouting at police during the stand-off.
Here are my additional questions and comments:
If he came as a “derivative” child then he would have been under 21 (and has been here a minimum of 11 years), so tell me why he still needs a costly court interpreter which we learned in previous reports?

US State Department (2008) closes all family reunification for Somalis!

But more importantly, I want to know if he was among the 20,000-30,000 ‘family reunification’ Somalis who got in to the US when they lied on admission applications for this form of chain migration.
Longtime readers may remember that stunningly in 2008, the US State Department shut down all family reunification for Somalis when they did some random DNA testing and found that literally tens of thousands of Somalis, both here and abroad were lying about their family connections.  The program was subsequently closed for years.
And, I remember very well hearing from an anonymous State Department employee who told me how stunned they were to find the fraud so widespread.
Here is one of many reports at RRW about the family reunification fraud involving Somalis. The program was closed for 4 years and reopened with DNA testing.  In 2010 the Open Borders Left opposed DNA testing.
As far as I know, none of the tens of thousands of liars were rounded up and removed when the fraud was discovered.

Makes me wonder:  Where is the ‘Dad’ or ‘Mom’ who helped the machete attacker get in? Maybe a little DNA testing is now in order!

After all, last November we learned that the Dept. of Justice was planning to deport some other Somali liars, see here.  More cases to follow???

Denver Post: donors thought they were helping refugees in the Middle East

A non-profit group called Humanwire based in Boulder, Colorado was allegedly the piggybank for the group’s founder—Andrew Baron.

How many more ‘non-profits’ have been set up to take advantage of gullible donors responding to the refugee ‘crisis’ around the world?

Here is the story from The Denver Post:

Boulder police on Thursday arrested Andrew Baron on felony charges of charity fraud and theft in excess of $100,000 from Humanwire, a nonprofit he said he established to help Syrian refugees.

The arrest follows an investigative report in The Denver Post on the practices of the Boulder-based charity, which managed refugee campaigns in Greece, Turkey and Lebanon.

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Watch Baron in September trying to explain-away the Denver Post story including bashing his whistleblower employee. He takes a whack at Trump too! This is incredible!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwPB7e7KVz0

Humanwire advertises on its website that pledges from donors go directly to needy refugees with “0 percent” going to operating costs. It offers itself up on its website as a one-to-one connection between donors and volunteers, promising to remove the “charity from the middle.”

But The Post revealed in September that amid delays in promised aid for refugees, the nonprofit’s bank records showed a steady stream of withdrawals from Humanwire’s accounts by Baron. Amid those withdrawals, more than 100 refugees who had been promised aid from Humanwire faced evictions and other deprivations, according to interviews with former Humanwire volunteers, workers and donors.

“Between October 2015 to present, Andrew Baron’s bank accounts have received all the donations for the Humanwire campaigns,” states an affidavit filed Thursday by Boulder Police Detective Traci Cravitz. “Despite stating that 100 percent of these donations would go to the intended families, at least $130,000 was used by Baron for his own personal expenses.”

Go here to read the remainder of the gory details that came to light when employees blew the whistle.  As of this writing, Humanwire’s website is still up.

Speaking of employees blowing the whistle, any more brave souls out there like the “source” of the news from Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service we told you about here?

Message to readers:  Feeling the desire to help those with less than you have?

Find a needy local family and support them and know exactly where your money is going!  Thanksgiving is right around the corner after all.

New GAO study on refugee screening and fraud risks

No time to read it, but thought you should know this new General Accountability Office (GAO) study came out yesterday in Washington.  Let me know if you see anything useful!

My experience with past GAO studies on the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) is that, other than media like RRW which could use their findings to confirm a point we have made, they result in not much change in the actual operation of the the program.

Maybe I will be surprised this time.

Click here:  https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-706  (there will be a place to click for the full report).

 

https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/686310.pdf

 

By the way, if you have never looked at it, I have a whole category entitled: ‘where to find information.’ This post is archived there.

For refugee program, we need something more than Inspector General Hotlines!

Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (PRNewsFoto/Office of Inspector General Department of Health and Human Services)
From time to time I hear from people who have some waste, fraud, or abuse they want to report involving the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program (RAP).
You do know that both the US State Department and the Dept. of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement, have Inspector General Offices.
Those offices have hotlines where you can report something you think is illegal/wasteful or flat out a fraud.  I am told by people in government that those OIGs are decent watchdogs and shouldn’t be feared.

But, we need something more!

Someone (maybe the new Trump Administration) could create a hotline that would address many other concerns, for reporting things like the following:

~For reports of waste, fraud or abuse of taxpayer dollars relating to the RAP witnessed in local communities when it is not clear if it is federal or state/local funds being potentially misused.

~For whistleblowers who work, or have worked, for a resettlement agency (public or private) and have witnessed something that they feel must be reported, but fear for their jobs.

~For unhappy refugees who might want to go home.

Just a thought!
In the meantime, if you have unearthed something potentially fraudulent as you investigate your local refugee program, try the following Inspector General Office hotlines:
US Dept. of State is here (the DOS does the initial work of hiring the contractors and distributing the refugees).
And, HHS fraud hotline, is here (the Office of Refugee Resettlement distributes millions in grants to non-profits which pay for much of their office/staff etc.).
Endnote:  I had to make a new tag, I had all sorts of frauds (food stamps, immigration etc), but needed a general ‘fraud’ tag.