New York mother, son arrested in theft of Pelosi's laptop
Source: Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A New York mother and son have been charged with theft in aiding the disappearance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop during the Jan. 6 insurrection after the FBI initially raided a home 4,500 miles away in Alaska, looking for the computer.
The FBI on Friday arrested Maryann Mooney-Rondon, 55, and her son, Rafael Rondon, 23, of Watertown, New York, in connection with the stolen laptop, according to court documents. Both also face other charges related to the riot at the Capitol.
Rafael Rondon also faces possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun charge
Both appeared in federal court Friday in Syracuse, New York, and released pending further proceedings, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/new-york-mother-son-arrested-in-theft-of-pelosis-laptop/2021/10/04/543f6dd6-2556-11ec-8739-5cb6aba30a30_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Dad was pastor of an evangelical church, and Sonny Boy was assistant pastor or something of that sort.
I'm trying to remember what state they were from, but that particular memory is refusing to be retrieved at the moment. It'll probably surface about 20 minutes after I post this. 
especially since they focused on the PA thief. From what was originally reported was that a conference room laptop had been taken (and I'm going to assume all it had was probably basic Powerpoint software on it plus anything needed to network it like some telecon software like WebEx or Adobe Connect, Zoom, etc).
The Pelosi laptop theft is new to me. They showed pics of that guy with his feet up on the desk in the Speaker's office with a computer monitor and keyboard and then I think there was a pic of him holding up a piece of her mail both inside and outside of the Capitol.
I know they have other offices in there and I think CSPAN even did a ditty on how they work it in the Capitol (vs those Congressional Office buildings) and I expect Pelosi has a different office where her staff might be vs the Speaker's Office. So it would be interesting to confirm where this other laptop actually was - the Speaker's Office or Pelosi's own regular office.
(I used to have to take some DOD courses where they had people login with PIV or CAC in fact, my agency used DFAS for payroll too)
I think you've mentioned before, but what agency were you with?
I can imagine with the COVID-19 stuff. DOD is so logistics-oriented that the contract process is pretty expansive and dwarfs that in the civilian agencies.
I know that when HHS still had a bunch of agencies in Parklawn, the whole "3rd floor Conference level" hallway had a wall mural/display of the history of the 1918 pandemic. I guess one of these days, something like that will be replaced with the history of this current pandemic.
And his love of jet charters for business travel is in today's edition. Infuriating. He flew from Dulles to Philly....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/10/06/tom-price-hhs-charter-jets/
By Dan Diamond and Carol D. Leonnig
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT
In April 2017, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services grappled with an urgent request: how to get Tom Price from D.C. to a conference at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Laguna Niguel, Calif., after bad weather delayed the secretary’s planned flight aboard Delta Air Lines.
“Secretary needs to go to LA today, and leave by 3 p.m.,” one travel specialist wrote in an April 6, 2017, email obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request. The travel aide was seeking a colleague with access to a government purchasing card. “Do you have someone who can PCard a charter aircraft on short notice?”
Officials quickly secured a $29,000 charter flight — which also had to be scuttled, as tornadoes plagued the D.C. region. But the day’s events left a scar on Price’s top aides, who vowed that the Trump Cabinet official would never again wait on a commercial airline’s schedule, and foreshadowed a five-month travel sprint in which the health department spent $456,000 in taxpayer money on Price’s charter flights across the United States.
(you'll see most of my LBN OPs are from there or from the NYT)
I'll have to read that. I remember hearing all the news reports when that was happening with Price, prompting his departure (I had retired 2 weeks after the 2017 inauguration before he came in ).
But you might also recall what happened with Ben Carson and "furniture-gate" - https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/03/01/did-hud-really-need-spend-31-000-taxpayer-money-dining-furniture-ben-carson/384204002/
In our office, the procurement folks who ordered furniture had specific dollar limits and catalogs for a few GSA-approved places to get it from (often Staples ). Even with that, I know I had an old modular desk/bookcase unit and had to make due with it because there was never any money to replace it. I was just glad that the drawers weren't broken and at least had keys, and the mechanism for the sash that pulled down over the bookcase still worked.
I know every year we had to take "Ethics" training and the fear of every deity under the sun was put on us about procurements, "gifts", use of government credit cards and GOVs, and anything that could be considered "unethical", with all sorts of 5CFR citations to underscore it.
The previous administration truly believed that the federal government was nothing more than a "private business" and they acted as if it were one... and sadly in many cases, got away with it.
