(Republicaninformer.com)- Among the thousands of earmarks included in the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill was $1 million secured by Democrat Congresswoman Susan Wild to renovate KidsPeace, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that Wild represented in a 2005 lawsuit brought by a former patient who was anally raped by a counselor.
Wild, who had initially requested the $1 million in congressional spending for KidsPeace earlier in the year, had argued in the 2005 suit that the nonprofit should not be responsible for a settlement payout because the rape was a “medical incident” which should be covered by the group’s insurance plan.
At the time, Wild argued that KidsPeace didn’t have a “crystal ball” to prevent the counselor’s “malfeasance,” despite the counselor having been charged in the suffocation death of a 12-year-old patient years earlier.
In total, the 4,150-page $1.7 trillion spending bill that passed last week includes over 7,200 earmarks totaling over $15 billion.
Other outlandish earmarks include $477,000 to Equity Labs for “antiracism virtual labs” and $3.6 million for the Michelle Obama Trail in Georgia, as well money for a “Ukraine Independence Park” in Washington D.C. as well as a “Speaker Pelosi Federal Building” in San Francisco.
Wild, who currently chairs the House Ethics Committee, selected KidsPeace from a pool of hundreds of applications submitted to her office for congressional spending. In a request to the House Appropriations Committee on behalf of KidsPeace earlier this year, Wild claimed that she did not have a financial relationship with the nonprofit and she failed to disclose her previous legal work for the group.
Since she has been in the House, Wild has maintained close ties with KidsPeace.
In 2019, she toured the Orchard Hills KidsPeace facility with its lobbyist Caren Chaffee.
She also praised KidsPeace for housing over 100 unaccompanied illegal alien children from Central America.
