New Flynn Transcripts Confirm Mueller Team Lied to the Court and the Country

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office deceived the country and a federal court about former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s late-December 2016 conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Now, more than three years later, Americans are only first learning about that deception thanks to the release of recently declassified transcripts of the calls.

Newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Friday shared with congressional oversight committees the summaries and transcripts of intercepted communications between Flynn and Kislyak. The move followed former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell’s decision to declassify nearly all portions of the Flynn-Kislyak telephone conversations from late 2016 and early 2017.

The transcripts prove a treasure trove of evidence of the Deep State’s plot to frame Flynn, who pleaded guilty Dec. 1, 2017, to making false statements to FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka during a Jan. 24, 2017 interview of Flynn. In a “Statement of Offense” filed that same day with the D.C. District Court, federal prosecutor and Mueller team member Brandon Van Grack “stipulate[d] and agree[d]” that the facts detailed in the Statement of Offense were “true and accurate.”

Van Grack then attested in the Statement of Offense that Flynn knew that “on or about December 28, 2016, then-President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13757, which was to take effect the following day. The executive order announced sanctions against Russia in response to that government’s action intended to interfere with the 2016 presidential election (‘U.S. Sanctions’).” . . .

According to the Statement of Offense, during questioning by the FBI agents, “FLYNN falsely stated that he did not ask Russia’s Ambassador to the United States (‘Russian Ambassador’) to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia,” and “also falsely stated that he did not remember a follow-up conversation in which the Russian Ambassador stated that Russia had chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of FLYNN’S request.” (Read more from “New Flynn Transcripts Confirm Mueller Team Lied to the Court and the Country” HERE)

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President Trump to Designate Antifa as a Terrorist Organization

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President Donald Trump declared on Sunday that Antifa would be designated as a terrorist organization. . .

On Saturday, Attorney General Bill Barr said that the riots across the U.S. have been “hijacked by violent radical elements,” notably “far-left extremist groups.”

“Groups of outside radicals and agitators are exploiting the situation to pursue their own separate and violent agenda,” Barr said in a statement. “In many places, it appears the violence is planned, organized, and driven by anarchistic and far-left extremists, using Antifa-like tactics, many of whom travel from out of state to promote the violence.” (Read more from “President Trump to Designate Antifa as a Terrorist Organization” HERE)

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Antibody Testing Proves the Remarkably Low Fatality Rate for Coronavirus

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Now that the media is fixated on fanning the flames of racial tensions, watch for them to completely drop all news about the virus. But the evidence against lockdowns continues to mount, whether the media discusses it or not.

On May 22, I publicized groundbreaking data from the CDC’s website suggesting that the bottom-line infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is just 0.26%, even assuming a likely low estimate that 35% of all infections are asymptomatic. What was viewed by the political and scientific “experts” as hearsay from right-wingers was confirmed by their own gold standard agency. Now we have corroborating evidence from a very large sample size in the state of Colorado.

Until now some have criticized other serology tests as having too small a sample and perhaps inaccurate. But nearly all of them converged on an infection fatality rate (IFR) of roughly 0.2%. Now, Colorado has published the results of ongoing antibody tests with a massive sample size of 56,000. The study found, as of Thursday, that 7.75% of the entire state has been infected. That means that an estimated 489,500 Coloradoans have already had the virus. If you divide Colorado’s 1,135 deaths by the number of infections, you get a 0.23% IFR – almost exactly what the CDC pegged as the IFR nationwide!

As has been the case across the nation, the larger urban counties seemed to have a higher prevalence of positive tests. Denver was 11.9%, Arapahoe County was 15.9%, and Adams County was 16.2%. Most of the rural counties, with some exceptions, were well below the 7.8% state average.

The CDC, for its nationwide projection, assumed a 10.5 percent infection rate nationwide because most states are more urban than Colorado.

If you further divide the Colorado numbers by age group, you get a 0.03% IFR for everyone (sick and healthy together) under the age of 60. Even if you include all those under 70, the IFR comes out to 0.07%.

This is why it’s utterly insane for the media and politicians to continue to use the discovery of more infections as a pretext to continue lockdowns. If anything, it shows that this is more widespread and less deadly that the baseline premise they used to justify the lockdowns. Take a look at these charts showing an inverse relationship between the growth of confirmed cases and the number of hospitalizations and deaths in Colorado, as presented by one local commentator.

What the Colorado data suggests is what we’ve been seeing everywhere all along – that this virus has been around longer than we thought, is more widespread than we thought, is therefore less fatal than we thought for all but the most vulnerable people, and that no degree of human intervention seems to work. When the virus is rampaging for those several weeks of the peak curve, no lockdowns work to tame it, and when the peak is over, a reopening doesn’t spike hospitalizations and deaths. Focusing on testing rates at this late stage is therefore ridiculous.

It’s also very likely that because some people who get the infection don’t need antibodies to ward off the virus, we are missing a large number of people who were really infected but tested negative for antibodies. This would drive down the infection fatality rate even lower.

Scientists at Rockefeller University conducted an immunological study of blood plasma samples from 149 people who have recovered from COVID-19. After attacking those cells with a sample of the virus, they found that in 33 percent of donor samples, “the neutralizing activity of plasma was below detectable levels.” They concluded from this observation, “It’s possible that for many in this group, their immune system’s first line of defense had resolved the infection quickly, before the antibody-producing cells were called in.”

If this is true, the number of people who already have the virus could be up to one-third greater, thereby dropping the lethality of this virus even further. Furthermore, a large percent of the rest of the population might already have immunity from previous coronaviruses, as a recent study from Singapore suggests.

Defenders of lockdowns can move the goal posts all they want, but had they been truthful about the IFR from day one, nobody would ever have gone along with the lockdowns, even if they could somehow work. The failure of government to be honest about the true likelihood of dying from the virus also caused many people to panic and not get treated for life-threatening illnesses.

Shockingly, even though Stanford and other international institutions showed early on how low the fatality rate is, our government continued – and still continues – to drive panic that is killing more people. From day one of the lockdowns in mid-March, the University of Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine pegged the IFR at somewhere between 0.1% and 0.36%. How many of you heard of the Imperial College of London as opposed to Oxford before this crisis? Still, our government chose to go with the Imperial College model, which led it to needlessly free up hospital space by sending sick patients into nursing homes. This caused the majority of deaths from the virus.

Yet our own National Institutes of Health just announced that it will not finish its study of the fatality rate until early 2022! We need the proper information to tailor our strategy so that those who are truly vulnerable are shielded. As one article from a British epidemiologist recently published in the British Journal of Medicine presciently observed, “Such targeted approaches would, however, require a shift away from the notion that we are all seriously threatened by the disease, which has led to levels of personal fear being strikingly mismatched to objective risk of death. Instead, the aim should be to communicate realistic levels of risk as they apply to different groups, not to reassure or frighten but to allow informed personal decisions in a setting of necessary uncertainty.” (For more from the author of “Antibody Testing Proves the Remarkably Low Fatality Rate for Coronavirus” please click HERE)

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Why Facebook’s Oversight Appointment Is Dangerous

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Following years of political and public pressure to maintain a safe and open platform for the free expression of ideas, Facebook has developed a controversial response to content review on its site: a 20-person oversight committee. . .

While Facebook had attempted to police its own content, after facing repeated inquiries by the US government and increased public scrutiny over allegedly hypocritical decisions, the company decided to separate itself from this responsibility with a content committee.

On the surface, it seems like a reasonable option, but in reality, an oversight board that is accountable to no authority other than itself becomes a contradiction. Therein lies the problem, especially when companies as influential as Facebook appoint political and religious zealots to such powerful positions.

Such is the case with Tawakkol Karman, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for political activism in her home country of Yemen even though her affiliations with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood have been repeatedly exposed. Her Brotherhood connections make her a particularly divisive figure, and many in her homeland have denounced her appointment to Facebook’s committee. The Yemeni Association for Human Rights and Immigration labeled her a “warmonger and not a peace messenger.”

An analysis by Cornerstone Global, a political risk and advisory firm, found that this oversight committee is neither impartial nor unbiased as Facebook initially intended. In fact, according to Cornerstone’s findings, nine of the 20 board members are politically left, with another two being Islamist, and one is openly conservative. This is not a cross-section of the real world, but represents a dangerously small cross-section of society and cannot possibly be considered impartial. (Read more from “Why Facebook’s Oversight Appointment Is Dangerous” HERE)

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Pompeo’s Hong Kong Declaration Shows U.S. Will Hold Chinese Communist Party Accountable

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has told Congress that Hong Kong is no longer sufficiently autonomous from the People’s Republic of China, which may mean it will no longer receive different legal treatment from the United States.

Pompeo’s statement was simply a reflection of reality. The People’s Republic of China is taking away the territory’s autonomy.

The Chinese Communist Party’s equivocation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now China’s announcement last week that it is about to pass a national security law that will allow it to rule Hong Kong without the niceties of the rule of law, were the last straw.

In a briefing with members of the foreign policy community, Pompeo fulminated, “This is a pattern and the Chinese Communist Party will have to be held accountable for the things they have done to endanger the security of the American people.”

Pompeo’s initial statement was issued in response to requirements in the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act and the 2019 Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The die was cast when the act was passed: If Hong Kong is not sufficiently autonomous, it will not retain its special status.

It is not yet clear what it will look like to roll back Hong Kong’s special treatment. President Donald Trump is expected to make a statement further explaining the consequences of decertification, which will provide a clearer picture of what this move means for Hong Kong’s future and the future of U.S.-China relations.

But what is clear is that the State Department has crossed some sort of Rubicon with China’s communist leaders.

The Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping did not need to make the former British colony a less free place. A financial center of 8 million people without an army, air force, or navy represents no threat to a country of 1.4 billion people with the second-largest defense budget in the world.

But it was galling to the Chinese Communist Party and Xi that anybody under their control would have freedoms such as the right to free expression, freedom of conscience, the right to property, and the right to gather peacefully.

Having to explain daily to the 1.4 billion inside mainland China that Hong Kongers wanted to retain these freedoms only reminded them that they themselves lacked them in the first place.

The idea of freedom was the threat. After years of eroding these freedoms, China’s national security law announcement forced Pompeo’s hand. In a statement Wednesday, he said, in part:

The State Department is required by the Hong Kong Policy Act to assess the autonomy of the territory from China. After careful study of developments over the reporting period, I certified to Congress today that Hong Kong does not continue to warrant treatment under United States laws in the same manner as U.S. laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1997. No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground.

Pompeo said that China’s “intention to unilaterally and arbitrarily impose national security legislation on Hong Kong” was a “disastrous decision.” It was “only the latest in a series of actions that fundamentally undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms and China’s own promises to the Hong Kong people under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a U.N.-filed international treaty.”

We at The Heritage Foundation know well Hong Kong’s value as an outpost that demonstrated, every day, and for decades, the superiority of the free market system. Its low regulatory environment, rule of law, strong anti-corruption stance, and flat tax rate gave it a GDP per capita of $62,726. Mainland China, lacking all these attributes, clocks in at $15,376.

For all these reasons, Hong Kong sat atop our Index of Economic Freedom since we started it in 1995. It dropped from its position as the world’s freest economy only this year in part because of its increasingly close integration with the mainland.

Hong Kong has always been an anomaly. Britain pried the tiny island away from China in 1842 as booty from the first Opium War, making the barely populated place a permanent colony. Britain then took a 99-year lease on the adjacent Kowloon Peninsula in 1898.

In the next century Hong Kong became a powerhouse, scrambling up the value-added ladder, first making toys and textiles, then computer equipment and eventually high-end banking.

Britain did not introduce direct elections for a portion of the Legislative Council until the 1990s, but because Hong Kongers were ruled by a free and democratic colonial power, their liberal freedoms were respected.

With the lease’s end coming up, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher saw no choice but to agree to hand the entire territory to China during negotiation with China’s then-leader Deng Xiaoping in 1984, but not before Deng gave China’s word that Hong Kong “will enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defense affairs.”

That document, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, is an international treaty entered into the United Nations.

China now has broken its word, and for breaking it there will be severe diplomatic consequences. Pompeo’s determination will have implications for U.S.-China relations. It will also affect the business community and the global economy.

But there can be no doubt that the Hong Kong people will bear the brunt.

As Pompeo said in his telephone briefing Wednesday: “Any harm that should befall the Hong Kong people is a consequence of the Chinese Communist Party’s actions.”

As such, it is imperative that U.S. policymakers do all that they can to stand with the Hong Kong people and preserve what is left of their liberty and prosperity while simultaneously seeking to hold China accountable for breaking its word. (For more from the author of “Pompeo’s Hong Kong Declaration Shows U.S. Will Hold Chinese Communist Party Accountable” please click HERE)

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Twitter Uses Fact-Checking as a Weapon Against Trump

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Fact-checking sounds innocuous enough. After all, as the late Senate Democrat Patrick Moynihan reportedly once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

But Twitter just showed that fact-checking can also be weaponized, used in a way that promotes one side’s ideology over another.

The tech giant, which has been under pressure from the left for years to censor or delete President Donald Trump’s tweets, did a “fact check” Tuesday on two of Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots.

Conveniently for liberals, the fact check, which cited media outlets like The Washington Post and CNN as its only named sources, found that Trump’s facts were wrong. Notably, it was also the first time Twitter—which hosts politicians across the ideological spectrum—fact-checked a tweet.

Unsurprisingly, Trump was furious, threatening in a tweet Wednesday to “strongly regulate, or close them down” in reference to social media companies. He also said: “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives [sic] voices.”

Neither Trump nor Twitter is in the right here. As a private company, Twitter should be legally free to do what it wants on its own platform. Trump is free to suggest that Americans who value serious debate and free expression, regardless of their ideologies, boycott Twitter. But this is no case for government intervention in a private business.

However, unless the goal was to be seen as a left-leaning company, Twitter was irresponsible and foolish with its “fact check”—which I’m putting in scare quotes because it’s not even an accurate fact check.

Here are the two Trump tweets that got slapped with the fact-checking label from Twitter:

Twitter posted below Trump’s tweet: “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” When you click on that, it takes you to this message:

Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud

On Tuesday, President Trump made a series of claims about potential voter fraud after California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an effort to expand mail-in voting in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.

First of all, it’s simply not true that “mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” or that Trump’s claim was “unsubstantiated.”

The Daily Signal’s national affairs correspondent, Fred Lucas, reported last month on “15 instances in which courts threw out an election result based in whole or in part on absentee voting fraud,” citing The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database and other sources.

Then there’s Twitter’s telling attribution: “These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others.”

Ah, yes, CNN, whose White House correspondent Jim Acosta basically has been engaged for years in verbal sparring with Trump. And the Post, which has its own reputation as a liberal outlet, is hardly a completely objective source, either.

So who are these “others”? Did Twitter consult with anyone, researcher or journalist or scholar, at a less liberal publication or institution? Did Twitter make any good faith attempt to consult with a variety of experts of differing ideological leanings, so that it could see the full context and data before making a ruling?

Because if Twitter is only relying on liberals for its fact-checking, it won’t be surprising if the supposedly unbiased fact-checking becomes quite ideological.

Unfortunately, conservatives have reason for concern here. The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Peter Hasson reports:

The Twitter official [Yoel Roth] overseeing the tech company’s efforts to combat misinformation is a left-wing partisan who in the past has derided President Donald Trump as a ‘wretched orange man’ and said he donated to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Of course, ultimately, Twitter is a private company and it can choose its own standards and practices. But consumers are also free to decide whether to remain on a platform that seems to be on the cusp of implementing a double standard when it comes to fact-checking.

It will be extremely telling what Twitter chooses to do in the days ahead.

Will the social media company fact-check liberals, too—or will Trump alone bear the stigma of a fact check? Will fact checks rely only on liberal sources, or will they involve conservative sources as well? Will Twitter modify its fact check of Trump’s tweet, acknowledging that instances of voter fraud are tied to absentee ballots?

No doubt, Twitter has been under unusually high pressure from the left in recent days.

A widower wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey this month, distraught that Trump was tweeting conspiracy theories that the man’s late wife, a staffer for then-Rep. Joe Scarborough, had been murdered.

While Trump’s tweets on this matter are shameful—if he wants to fight with Scarborough, now an MSNBC host, he can do so without bringing up an unrelated person’s death—the answer is not for Twitter to take action on Trump’s tweets.

As we’ve been saying more and more over the past decade and change, America is a divided nation, with heated opinions on both sides on a host of topics. Selective fact-checking, aimed at the right and only looking to the left for the truth, will only increase that division.

Twitter has opened a real Pandora’s box here. Let’s hope the tech giant realizes its mistake, takes down the fact check of Trump’s accurate tweet, and returns to being a company that merely hosts, not criticizes, viewpoints. (For more from the author of “Twitter Uses Fact-Checking as a Weapon Against Trump” please click HERE)

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Conflicting WHO, CDC Mask Guidance Creates Confusion

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An April 6 World Health Organization guidance advised that there is limited evidence that masks for healthy people are beneficial.

Studies of influenza, influenza-like illness, and human coronaviruses provide evidence that the use of a medical mask can prevent the spread of infectious droplets from an infected person to someone else and potential contamination of the environment by these droplets. 13 There is limited evidence that wearing a medical mask by healthy individuals in the households or among contacts of a sick patient, or among attendees of mass gatherings may be beneficial as a preventive measure. 14-23 However, there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.

The CDC refuses to acknowledge facts

Despite these well-known medical facts, our CDC and leaders are still telling everyone to wear masks even when healthy.

CDC is additionally advising the use of simple cloth face coverings to slow the spread of the virus and help people who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to others. Cloth face coverings fashioned from household items or made at home from common materials at low cost can be used as an additional, voluntary public health measure. The cloth face coverings recommended are not surgical masks or N-95 respirators. Those are critical supplies that must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and other medical first responders, as recommended by current CDC guidance.

(Read more from “Conflicting WHO, CDC Mask Guidance Creates Confusion” HERE)

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Report: Secret Service Rushed President Trump to Underground Bunker

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Secret Service agents moved President Donald Trump to the underground bunker in the White House on Friday, according to a report from the New York Times.

The Times cited “a person with firsthand knowledge” as a source for the report and an official said that the president was never in any real danger.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the White House on Friday night, hurling fireworks, debris, and bottles at Secret Service as they stood on Pennsylvania Ave, blocking them from approaching the 13-foot fence at the White House. (Read more from “Report: Secret Service Rushed President Trump to Underground Bunker” HERE)

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COVID-19 Losing Potency

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The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday.

“In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion.

“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television.

Italy has the third highest death toll in the world from COVID-19, with 33,415 people dying since the outbreak came to light on Feb. 21. It has the sixth highest global tally of cases at 233,019.

However new infections and fatalities have fallen steadily in May and the country is unwinding some of the most rigid lockdown restrictions introduced anywhere on the continent. (Read more from “COVID-19 Losing Potency” HERE)

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George Floyd, Fired Officer Overlapped Security Shifts; Ex-Police Officer Charged With Murder

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By ABC 5 News. A former club owner in south Minneapolis says the now-fired police officer and the black man who died in his custody this week both worked security for her club up to the end of last year.

George Floyd and now-former Officer Derek Chauvin both worked security at the El Nuevo Rodeo club on Lake Street, according to Maya Santamaria. Santamaria owned the building for nearly two decades, but sold the venue within the last few months.

“Chauvin was our off-duty police for almost the entirety of the 17 years that we were open,” Santamaria said. “They were working together at the same time, it’s just that Chauvin worked outside and the security guards were inside.” . . .

Although the two overlapped working security on popular music nights within the last year, Santamaria can not say for certain they knew each other because there were often a couple dozen security guards, including off-duty officers.

Santamaria says she did not recognize either one of her security guards in the video showing Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck not far from where they used to work. (Read more from “George Floyd, Fired Officer Overlapped Security Shifts” HERE)

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Ex-Police Officer Derek Chauvin Charged With Murder, Manslaughter in George Floyd Death

By Star Tribune. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman on Friday announced murder and manslaughter charges that accuse a fired Minneapolis police officer of killing George Floyd — an act caught on video and seen around the world, sparking days of violent demonstrations across the Twin Cities.

Derek Chauvin, 44, was arrested late Friday morning and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter four days after he pinned his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes Monday at the intersection of E. 38th Street and Chicago Avenue as the unarmed and handcuffed man told him he couldn’t breathe.

Chauvin is being held in the Ramsey County jail on $500,000 bail. The agency that led the investigation resulting in the charges, the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, late Friday explained why he wasn’t jailed in the county where he was charged. (Read more from “Ex-Police Officer Derek Chauvin Charged With Murder, Manslaughter in George Floyd Death” HERE)

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