An Anonymous Comment on this blog about High-Speed Rail

Whatever comments are posted on this blog, I do read them, but I'm not looking for conversations.   However, one comment came in on April 19th that I have re-visited several times that I want to reproduce here.

The anonymous author raises a powerful and fundamental issue about fraud.  He asks, is the High-Speed Rail Authority guilty of "breach of contract fiduciary duty?"  The answer to that question can officially come from one of two sources.  

The first source is the Government Accounting Office in Washington. Now that the rail authority has already spend federal dollars, that triggers federal involvement in the legitimacy of those expenditures. The GAO will be conducting their examination until early next spring at which time they will release their findings.

The other organization is the Congressional Committee headed by Darrell Issa, Republican Congressman from California. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has assumed reponsibility to review the California project and has already ordered the California High-Speed Rail Authority to refrain from destroying or deleting any records, paper or electronic, in anticipation of their review.

This rail project has given off strong scents of illegalities, waste, fraud and abuse and possible corruption.  Tragically, there has been no responsible oversight or accountability.  The rail authority has the absolute and unquestioning support of the Governor and the Democratic majority in both the Senate and the Assembly are uniformly supportive of this project.  It is the possible source of six billion dollars or more from both federal and state sources and the Democrats are single-mindedly determined to process those funds.

We have taken considerable pains to list the various deceits of which we believe the rail authority to be guilty. Indeed there are over 1,100 entries to this blog that seek to identify those untruths. Perhaps the most important of all is that the voters were defrauded when they were asked to vote on a project that the rail authority had not intention to build. It was, at that time (2008) "merely a concept" as Board member Rod Diridon said at the time.

What we are being presented with today is nothing like what the authorizing language of the legislation presented on the ballot.  If that isn't fraud upon the voters, I don't know what is. 

Here is that comment, and I agree that the implementation of the suggestion of justice department investigation and prosecution is highly unlikely within this current Administration. And that's too bad. Truth, honor and justice are obviously not the highest government priority.

"When a group of people actively plan to violate laws it is called a conspiracy. When they knowingly plan to violate federal and state laws it might well be a violation of the Federal RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influences) act. The RICO statues are very clear that any group of persons who conspire to commit fraud are violating RICO. RICO has been used in the past to prosecute local and state officials. As long as Eric Holder is Attorney General there will never be a Federal RICO prosecution of CHSRA directors and others who knowingly conspired to defraud the state and federal government. 

But what happens if Obama loses in the fall and newly installed US attorneys decide that the blatant, knowing disregard of Prop 1A constitutes fraud? US attorneys have a long history of launching political careers by prosecuting high PR value cases that generate public outrage.