BREAKING🚨 Democrats just launched an investigation into whether Trump's pardons were "pay-to-play" — after he wiped away nearly $2 BILLION in restitution owed to fraud victims. Senate and House Democrats are investigating whether pardons and commutations issued by Trump were driven by financial contributions, according to letters obtained by CBS News. Representatives Dave Min, Raul Ruiz, and Senator Peter Welch sent letters to over a dozen pardon recipients, demanding records showing how much money they paid to lawyers, lobbyists, social media influencers, and others who advocated on their behalf to Trump. The lawmakers are asking for contracts, communications with federal officials, donations to Trump or groups affiliated with him, and other documents related to clemency efforts. Among the pardons being probed: cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to money laundering; nursing home operator Joseph Schwartz, convicted of tax crimes; and entrepreneur Trevor Milton, sentenced to four years for lying to investors. In March 2025, Trump pardoned Milton and wiped away roughly $680 million in restitution to shareholders. Democrats are also investigating clemency granted to former healthcare executive Lawrence Duran — convicted of Medicare fraud — whose commutation eliminated $87 million in owed restitution. And former private equity executive David Gentile, convicted of running a $1.6 billion Ponzi scheme, had his $15.5 million in restitution wiped away when Trump commuted his sentence. According to an analysis from California Governor Gavin Newsom's office, Trump's pardons and clemency nullified almost $2 billion in recovered money from Medicare fraud, tax fraud, and victim repayment. Senate Democrats said Gentile's commutation "represents a betrayal of more than 17,000 innocent Americans from all walks of the political spectrum that lost over $1 billion in life savings because of his crimes." The investigation is examining whether pardon recipients received clemency "through intermediaries, financial contributions, or other forms of influence." The pardons went to cryptocurrency billionaires, Ponzi schemers, and Medicare fraudsters.
A gay man was pushed by his church to marry a woman to 'cure' himself. Another was told to swear off men forever. Now both of their stories are inside an official Vatican document. The Vatican released the report on 5 May. It's the first time an official church document has included detailed gay testimony about the harm caused by conversion therapy. The American man had been sent to Courage, a Catholic group that instructs gay people to remain celibate for life. The Vatican now calls Courage "problematic." The man from Portugal described the "devastating effects" of being pushed toward heterosexuality - a program that left him, in the Vatican's own words, with "profound suffering," "personal lacerations," and a "double life." The report concludes that sin lies not in a same-sex relationship, but in "a lack of faith in a God who desires our fulfillment." Rev. James Martin, who leads the LGBTQ+ Catholic ministry Outreach, called it the first Vatican publication ever to include detailed testimony from gay Catholics. A lesbian lay minister in Los Angeles called it "historic." The Vatican still hasn't fully condemned conversion therapy. But it's now official - on the record, in their own words.
.png)
1951, Holmesburg Prison. Philadelphia. Dr. Albert Kligman was 35 years old and a scuzhole and sleazebag. A dermatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The prison had asked him to come help with an athlete's foot outbreak. He showed up. Looked around. Saw 3,000 inmates. Almost 9 out of 10 of them were Black. Most of the rest were Puerto Rican. He said later: "All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time." He decided to use them as test subjects. For the next 23 years, he ran experiments on the prisoners. Tested skin creams. Shampoos. Perfumes. Deodorants. Mostly normal stuff at first. Then bigger companies started paying him. Johnson & Johnson. Dow Chemical. The US Army. The CIA. The experiments got worse. He injected men with herpes. With wart virus. With staph infection. He poured chemicals on their backs to see what would burn the skin. He yanked out their fingernails to test how nails grew back. He put boots full of fungus on their feet for a week to study foot infections. He gave them experimental drugs without telling them what was in the drugs. He put radioactive material on their skin to study how it absorbed. He gave them LSD and other mind-altering drugs as part of the CIA's MK Ultra program. He injected them with asbestos. To compare it with talc powder. Johnson & Johnson paid for that one. They wanted to know if their baby powder might cause cancer. The men didn't know what was being done to them. The forms they signed didn't list the chemicals. Most of the prisoners couldn't read anyway. Many were illiterate. The prison paid them a dollar a day. Sometimes a dollar fifty. That was good money in prison. Most prisoners only earned a quarter a day pushing a broom. So they signed up. Many were waiting for trial. Couldn't afford bail. Saw the experiments as their only way to earn money. They got patches stuck on their backs. Pills given to them. Shots in their arms. Things they couldn't pronounce dripped onto their skin. A former prison worker said you could walk through Holmesburg and see hundreds of inmates with patches on their backs and arms. Some were healing. Some were oozing. Some had open wounds that had been there for months. The men called themselves "guinea pigs." Most went along with it. They had no choice. The money helped their families. They had no idea what was being put into their bodies. The worst experiments were yet to come. In 1965, Dow Chemical Company paid Kligman $10,000 to test dioxin. Dioxin is the poisonous part of Agent Orange. The chemical the US Army was spraying on Vietnam. It causes cancer. Skin disease. Liver damage. Birth defects in children. Dow wanted to know how dangerous it was for skin contact. Kligman painted dioxin onto the backs of 70 prisoners. The dose he used was 468 times stronger than what Dow had originally asked for. The men got severe acne all over their skin. Open sores. Pus. Some lasted for months. Some lasted for years. Many of them developed cancer years later. The forms the men signed never said the word "dioxin." They were told it was just a "skin test." Around the same time, the US Army paid Kligman to test mind-control drugs. Trying to find chemicals that could be used in war. Or against enemies. Kligman gave the prisoners hallucinogens. Drugs that made them see things that weren't there. Hear voices. Lose their grip on reality. Some of the men never recovered. The Army also wanted Kligman to test "skin hardeners" that might protect soldiers from chemical weapons. Kligman painted experimental chemicals onto the prisoners. Many got severe burns. Inflammation that lasted weeks. Some men begged him to stop. Kligman wrote in his notes that the men "complained bitterly." He kept going. While all of this was happening, Kligman was also doing skin care research that would make him famous. He invented Retin-A. The acne medicine. Then the anti-aging cream that made him rich. He developed it from experiments on prisoners. He patented it in 1969. Made millions of dollars from it. It's still sold today. One of the most successful skin care products in history. Here's how he got away with it. In the 1950s and 1960s, prison experiments were normal in America. Drug companies needed humans to test new products. Prisoners were convenient. They couldn't say no easily. They needed money. The University of Pennsylvania backed Kligman. Made money from his research. Looked the other way. The city of Philadelphia knew what was happening. Allowed it. Government agencies funded his work. The Army. The CIA. The Atomic Energy Commission. Major companies paid him. Johnson & Johnson. Dow Chemical. Pharmaceutical companies. There were no rules about getting informed consent. The forms were a joke. Nobody checked. It only stopped because of a scandal. In 1973, US Senator Edward Kennedy held hearings about prison experiments. Said they were unethical. Said prisoners couldn't really consent because they were trapped. In 1974, the federal government banned medical experiments on prisoners. Kligman had to shut down his program at Holmesburg. By then, he had experimented on hundreds of men. Some sources say more than 1,500. Holmesburg Prison itself closed in 1995. Bad conditions. Riots. Deaths in custody. Here's what happened after. Most of the prisoners suffered for the rest of their lives. Some had cancer. Some had skin diseases that never healed. Some had mental health problems from the drugs. Some had organ damage they didn't know about. Many died young. In 2000, 298 of the surviving men sued the city, the university, and Kligman. They wanted free medical care. They wanted answers about what had been put in their bodies. The court threw out the lawsuit. The judge said too much time had passed. The statute of limitations had run out. The men got nothing. Some men got small private settlements later. Most got nothing. Albert Kligman never apologized. Never expressed regret. Never admitted he had done anything wrong. In 2006, four years before he died, he told the New York Times: "My view is that shutting the prison experiments down was a big mistake. I still don't see there having been anything wrong with what we were doing." He died in 2010. Age 93. Wealthy. Honored. Famous. The University of Pennsylvania kept his name on awards. Lecture series. Research funds. For decades, dermatologists called him the "father of modern dermatology." Forgot the prisoners. In 2021, after the George Floyd protests, the University of Pennsylvania finally apologized. Removed Kligman's name from awards. In 2022, the city of Philadelphia apologized. In 2023, the Philadelphia College of Physicians apologized. All of them said sorry. None of them paid the survivors. The men who lived through it are mostly dead now. The few who are still alive are old. Many are sick. Most never told their families what had been done to them. Some only learned recently what they had been exposed to. After authors and journalists started digging through old records. A man named Leodus Jones spent decades trying to get justice for the survivors. He died in 2018. His daughter Adrianne continues his work. A man named Edward Anthony was on the dioxin tests. Spent his life with skin diseases. Died still waiting for an apology that arrived too late. Here's what makes this story so painful. The men were not criminals being punished. Many were just waiting for trial. Hadn't been found guilty of anything. They were trapped. They were poor. They were Black or Puerto Rican. A wealthy white doctor saw them as raw material. "Acres of skin." He used them. Made millions of dollars. Got famous. Died rich. They died poor. Sick. Forgotten. Most of them never knew their bodies had been used to develop products that made other people billions. Retin-A is sold in millions of pharmacies today. Anti-aging creams that come from it are advertised in magazines. Almost nobody knows where the science came from. It came from a prison full of Black men in Philadelphia. From dioxin painted on their backs. From asbestos shot into their skin. From drugs forced into their bodies without their knowledge. From a doctor who looked at them and saw a field to harvest. The Holmesburg prisoners. Used as guinea pigs for 23 years. By a doctor who never apologized. Who died honored. By a system that protected him. By a country that turned away. #Holmesburg #MedicalRacism #AcresOfSkin #ForgottenStories ~Forgotten Stories
San Francisco, 1896. A woman named Sarah Winchester — widow of William Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle fortune — is one of the richest women in the world. She inherited $20 million in 1881 — about $600 million today. She could buy anything. She could go anywhere. She chose to stay in one room. Sarah believed she was cursed. The Winchester rifles had killed thousands of people. Sarah believed the ghosts of the dead were haunting her. A medium told her: "Buy a house. Build it night and day. Never stop building. As long as you build, you will live. The day you stop, you will die." Sarah bought a farmhouse in San Jose — 30 miles south of San Francisco. She spent the next 30 years building. She built 24 hours a day — 3 shifts of carpenters, working around the clock. She built 160 rooms. 40 staircases that lead to ceilings. 2,000 doors that open into walls. 10,000 windows. She built mazes. She built secrets. She built a house that made no sense — because the point was not to make sense. The point was to confuse the ghosts. Sarah never left the house. She never left her room — a small bedroom on the second floor, with a single window looking out over the gardens. She ate in her room. She slept in her room. She worked in her room — designing the next addition, drawing plans, writing instructions. She saw no one except her servants and her carpenters. On the night of September 4, 1922, Sarah died in her sleep. She was 83 years old. She had built for 30 years. She stopped building. She died. The medium was right. Sarah's will was shocking. She left everything to her servants. Nothing to her relatives. She said: "They visited me twice in 30 years. My servants lived with me every day. They were my family. My relatives were strangers." After Sarah's death, the house was sold. It became a tourist attraction — the Winchester Mystery House. Visitors come from all over the world to walk the staircases that lead nowhere. To open doors that open into walls. To feel the presence of a woman who built a prison to protect herself from ghosts. But here is the secret that the tour guides do not tell. In 1988 — 66 years after Sarah's death — a worker was renovating Sarah's bedroom. He pulled up the floorboards. Under the floorboards, he found a small metal box. Inside the box was a diary. Sarah's diary. The diary was not about ghosts. It was about grief. Sarah's only child had died as an infant. Her husband had died of tuberculosis. She was alone. She was rich. She was empty. The house was not for ghosts. The house was for her. She built it to keep herself busy. To keep herself from thinking. To keep herself from dying of loneliness. The last entry in the diary, written the night before she died, said: "I built 160 rooms. I am still alone. I built 2,000 doors. Not one of them leads to happiness. I built 10,000 windows. Not one of them looks out on love. I am a fool. A rich fool. A fool who built a house instead of a life." The question that Sarah wrote on the first page of her diary — the page that was hidden for 66 years — is: "If I had stopped building and started living, would I have been happier? Or would I have just died sooner? Is a long life in a cage better than a short life in the sun?"
She had bitten through the medical alert bracelet at 3:02 a.m. Paramedics later said that if she had delayed just five more minutes, he would not have survived. A Maine Coon named Atlas lived with a man in his late fifties in a rural part of northern Vermont. The man had lived with Type 1 diabetes for thirty-two years and managed it carefully with a continuous glucose monitor, an insulin pump, and a medical alert bracelet. He lived alone by choice and had never experienced major complications. Atlas had been with him for seven years. A calm, independent cat who usually slept at the foot of the bed and behaved like any typical house pet. Everything changed on the night of March 9th. The man went to sleep around 10:30 p.m. His blood sugar was normal, his insulin pump was working properly, and his routine was unchanged. At 3:02 a.m., his phone rang. It was 911 dispatch. A neighbor had contacted emergency services after hearing what sounded like “screaming and signs of an attack” coming from the house next door. The dispatcher stayed on the line with the neighbor while police were already en route, about three minutes away. What the neighbor actually heard was Atlas—howling intensely, a sound so loud it carried through walls and across the yard, enough to wake someone from sleep. When officers arrived, the front door was locked. The screaming continued inside. They forced entry. They found the man unconscious on the bedroom floor. Atlas was on top of him, still vocalizing in a way officers later described as “more like a siren than an animal.” Paramedics arrived about ninety seconds later. The man’s blood sugar had dropped to 31 mg/dL—severe hypoglycemia. He was unresponsive and seizing. Then something unusual stopped them in their tracks: the man’s medical alert bracelet, a stainless steel band he had worn for fifteen years, was lying on the floor beside him—bitten clean through, with visible puncture and bending marks from teeth. Atlas had removed it. At first, paramedics assumed it was accidental. But closer inspection showed the damage was too deliberate. The cat had targeted the clasp—the weakest point of the bracelet. It wasn’t random chewing; it looked intentional. The bracelet also contained engraved emergency contact details, including a neighbor’s phone number. Emergency glucagon was administered, and the man regained consciousness after about four minutes—confused and disoriented, but alive. At the hospital, doctors reviewed the case. His insulin pump had malfunctioned and delivered a significant overdose around 2:30 a.m., causing him to slip into severe hypoglycemia while asleep. Without intervention, he likely would not have survived thirty minutes. Atlas had apparently recognized that something was wrong and acted in an extraordinary way to get help. First, he tried to wake the man. When that failed, he removed the medical alert bracelet—possibly linking it to emergency help or simply targeting anything that seemed important. Then he began vocalizing continuously, not at the man, but outward—toward walls and windows—loud enough to alert someone outside. A veterinary behaviorist who examined the case said there was no known precedent for a cat removing a medical device and then actively signaling for outside assistance. The behavior suggested a level of problem-solving and cause-and-effect understanding beyond typical feline behavior. But Atlas had done exactly that—and at the perfect time. Paramedics later said that if the neighbor had waited just five more minutes to call, the outcome would likely have been irreversible coma or cardiac arrest. The photo the man kept came from police body camera footage—a single frame from the scene. It shows Atlas sitting on the man’s chest while he remains unconscious. The man is on his back, motionless. Atlas is centered on his sternum, staring directly toward the officer entering the room. His mouth is open mid-yowl, eyes wide with fully dilated pupils despite the flashlight. The damaged medical bracelet is visible on the floor near the man’s arm. The room is chaotic—blankets pulled off, objects scattered from the nightstand. The timestamp reads 03:06 a.m. Even so, Atlas remains there, refusing to leave, still vocalizing, still trying. The responding officer later said the cat looked like he simply would not accept that the person beneath him was dying.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)