Fifth, in 2010 in the midst of the Haitian earthquake, Ed Rendell worked overtime with top Obama administration officials to pull off a hasty and illegal airlift of 54 Haitian children.

From a little over a month after the airlift, in a February 2010 New York Times article - [archived here]:

But for 12 of the children, last month’s airlift transported them from one uncertain predicament to another. As it turns out, those children — between 11 months and 10 years old — were not in the process of being adopted, might not all even be orphans and are living in a juvenile care center here while the authorities determine whether they have relatives in Haiti who are able to take care of them.

The details of the children’s departure — and what that could mean for relations between the United States and the Haitian government, which later detained 10 Americans for trying to take children out of the country without authorization — remain unclear.

Ambassador Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s envoy to the United States, said he refused to approve Governor Rendell’s request to remove children from the country who were not already in the adoption pipeline. But an aide to Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the Haitian government accepted assurances from Mr. Rendell and American officials that the children would be well cared for in the United States. The adviser, Alice Blanchet, said of the governor, “I have no reason to second guess his intentions.”

This whole situation sounds awfully familiar to those of us familiar with the Laura Silsby case. I believe the 10 arrested Americans referenced in this article include Silsby.

Senior Obama administration officials acknowledged in interviews that the lines of authority were fuzzy in Haiti on the day of the rescue mission, Jan. 18. And they said that American officials concerned about the well-being of the children had allowed Mr. Rendell to remove them from Haiti even though they had not received clear authorization to travel by the Haitian government and were not in the process of being adopted by American families, as required by a United States humanitarian parole policy announced the day Mr. Rendell landed in Haiti.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” said one senior State Department official, who like others asked not to be identified in order to speak candidly about the episode. “But it’s not as if it was a normal day in Haiti, either.”

When asked what he had done to persuade the administration to grant an exception for the 12 children, Mr. Rendell said in a phone interview, “I don’t know how it happened, but I didn’t ask a lot of questions, and if you had seen the faces of those children as we loaded them onto the airplane, you wouldn’t have asked a lot of questions, either.”

[. . .]

[Rendell] and Representative Jason Altmire, another Democrat who was also participating in the mission, began contacting everyone they thought could help back in Washington, including Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, Huma M. Abedin, a senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Pennsylvania’s two senators, Arlen Specter and Bob Casey, both Democrats.

Fourth, back to Ed Rendell and further down this rabbit hole: a January 2016 alternative media article entitled "Is Pennsylvania the Center of the Pedophile Mafia?" (Intrepid Report - [archived here].

PA Attorney General (recently impeached) Kathleen Kane, pushed out of office by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers implicated in "Porngate," a PA scandal in which dozens of state government officials were found (by Kane) to have exchanged lewd emails and files on their government computers/email accounts, some allegedly "highly suggestive of pedophile content." Kane then began publicizing the emails, against the law, to share with the public the disturbing nature of the content. From the article:

It was Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman who brought criminal charges against Kane in an attempt to have her removed from office.

[. . .] Risa Ferman appears to have “advocacy washed” her resume by championing the battle against the exploitation of children on the Internet. Ironically, Ferman sought to prosecute Kane for trying to rid the state government of officials who trafficked in sexually-explicit images of children while they also blocked an aggressive investigation of Sandusky and his wider pedophile network. Ferman is adept at receiving awards for her alleged work against child abuse but Kane has actually sought to get to the root of the problem in Pennsylvania: Ferman’s pals among the wealthy elite in the state who abet or participate in child molestation. Ferman is also a blogger for the George Soros-influenced Huffington Post.

One such member of the Philly elite who was convicted of child abuse was “Uncle Eddie” Savitz, who was also known as “Big Eddie,” “Fat Eddie,” and “Dr. Feel Good.” Savitz was vice president and actuary of the Savitz Organization, a major Philadelphia insurance brokerage company where Savitz’s brother, Samuel, served as president.

Savitz, the son of a Philadelphia arcade owner (where else to prey on kids?), lived in the luxurious Wanamaker House on Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square where he became known as the “go to guy” for young teenage boys eager to receive quick cash or concert and sporting event tickets. The young boys merely exchanged their soiled underwear or such acts as oral/anal sex, vomiting or defecating into Uncle Eddie’s mouth, engaging in penis “sword fights” with Savitz, or urinating on Savitz. Savitz stored the feces of the underage males in pizza boxes in his apartment. Although Savitz was a grotesque pervert, his first arrest in 1978 for indecent assault was suspended in lieu of a rehabilitation program. His criminal record was then expunged. The District Attorney of Philadelphia who cut the sweetheart deal for Savitz was Ed Rendell, the future mayor of Philadelphia[. . .]. In 1990, Savitz again eluded justice when he was found not guilty of purchasing a boy’s soiled underpants.

Not until 1992 was Savitz arrested in a sting operation after a court-ordered camera and wiretap was installed in his Rittenhouse Square home. When Savitz offered to pay two 15-year old boys for oral sex, detectives broke in and arrested Savitz. The police discovered 5,000 pornographic photos of young boys and 312 bags of boys’ soiled underpants. Savitz was also found to be HIV-positive. Common Pleas Judge Howland Abramson cut Savitz’s bail from $20 million to a more affordable $4 million.

Unbelievably, after slashing Savitz’s bail, Abramson said from the bench that he feared that Savitz would not only flee Philadelphia if he came up with the $4 million but would engage in the very same sordid activity. Had Savitz come up with the bail money, Abramson ruled that he would have had to check himself into the locked unit of the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital in West Philadelphia and submit to electronic monitoring. The deal is similar to that given to pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in West Palm Beach, Florida, where his prison sentence consisted of mere night time stays at a country club jail with the right to travel out of state. It was clear that in Pennsylvania someone was pulling Abramson’s judicial robe but in pedophile-friendly Pennsylvania, this should have come as no shock. Ed Rendell, the D.A. who cut the sweetheart deal with Savitz when he was first arrested and who, like Savitz, was also known as “Fast Eddie,” was sworn in as mayor of Philadelphia a few months before Savitz’s third arrest in March 1992.

And:

Sources in Philadelphia believe that Savitz’s operations were connected to those of Sandusky at Penn State and that both commercially trafficked in the type of pedophile filth found in Savitz’s home in Philadelphia. Greg Bucceroni, a former child prostitute and Savitz victim claimed that in 1979 and 1980 Savitz brought him to a fundraiser for Sandusky’s Second Mile Foundation near Harrisburg. Richard Thornburgh, a future U.S. attorney general, was governor at the time.

Pennsylvania’s pederast elite has, according to WMR’s sources, run rampant in state government at least since the governorship of Milton Shapp in the 1970s and continuing to the present governor, Democrat Tom Wolf. Other governors who tolerated pederasty in state government included Republican Richard Thornburgh, Tom Ridge, and Mark Schweiker, Democrats Bob Casey, Sr. and Ed Rendell, and Wolf’s predecessor, Republican Tom Corbett. Corbett also failed to carry out an adequate investigation of Sandusky and his non-profit foundation, the Second Mile Foundation, which was accused of pimping out young boys in return for donations, while serving as the commonwealth’s attorney general.

Former PA governors Ed Rendell (D) and Tom Corbett (R) both provided cover for Sandusky and The Second Mile. Ed Rendell had a long, mutually beneficial relationship with convicted child abuser Ed Savitz. An attorney general who entered office as a rising star of the Democratic Party determined to wipe out state corruption was recently brought down by the corrupt PA elite she took aim at.

Further, victim crime advocate and activist Greg Bucceroni has spoken out [archive here] over the past five years about having been sexually abused and/or exploited by Ed Savitz during the 1970s and 80s, when Bucceroni was a troubled youth who was taken under the wing of Savitz. From the article:

"This is a complicated onion with many layers," Bucceroni, 48, explained by phone Tuesday from a Los Angeles hotel room, saying he was gazing up at the Hollywood sign on Mount Lee. "But the truth is never easy."

[. . .] He now claims to be at the center of a conspiracy and "political coverup" involving Sandusky, the Second Mile, Philly police brass, murdered cop Daniel Faulkner, the state Attorney General's Office, Ed Rendell, the Union League, the Mafia, Savitz, Abraham, a deceased Brooklyn high school football coach, former Penn professor Scott Ward and former Daily News sports columnist Bill Conlin.

[. . .] Bucceroni, whose father was a Philly cop, has been quoted in dozens of local news stories over the years.

But, until recently, he never spoke of being part of a "tri-state pedophile ring" between 1977 and 1980. He now says that Savitz took him to have sex with Sandusky at Second Mile events but that "due to time constraints" Sandusky was not able to have sex with him. So Phil Foglietta, the late coach at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, paid $200 to have sex with him in Philadelphia.

And:

Bucceroni claims that Sandusky, Savitz and others would swap photos of naked children "like baseball cards." He also claims that Ward, the former Wharton professor now in prison for transporting child pornography, raped him twice in 1978.

Conlin retired last year amid allegations that he molested four children in the 1970s. His attorney, George Bochetto, did not return a message seeking comment on Bucceroni's claims. Conlin has never been charged with a crime.

[. . .] Bucceroni says he told Rendell about Savitz's abuse when Rendell was D.A. in the late '70s or early '80s. Rendell said Bucceroni is lying.

"That guy is completely crazy. I don't know anything about what he's talking about, and none of it's true," Rendell said. "The guy is just crackers."

Bucceroni says that he contacted senior Deputy Attorney General Joseph McGettigan, who prosecuted the Sandusky case, in July and that McGettigan was "rude and obnoxious" and tried to talk him into giving false testimony.

"That's an absolute lie," McGettigan said. He said he doesn't know Bucceroni and doesn't recall ever speaking with him.

Third, in a widely publicized 2011 case unveiling the decades-long cover-up of child sex abuse by Penn State official Jerry Sandusky, the public learned that Sandusky had groomed and sexually abused dozens of at-risk boys from his "The Second Mile" nonprofit under the willful cover-up by Penn State head coach Joe Paterno. [[As an aside, I was just reading the Sandusky and Second Mile Wikipedia articles. Both articles source a since-deleted ABC News article that details George H.W. Bush having praised the charity in a 1990 letter as a "shining example" of charity work and one of that president's much-promoted "Thousand points of light" encouragements to volunteer community organizations. I finally found a 2011 archive of 2/3 pages of the sourced ABC News article [archived here]]]

Though the 2011 charges against Sandusky had followed two years of Grand Jury investigation into the allegations, this was not the first time Sandusky's activities had been investigated in Centre County, PA. In 2005, then-Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar--a well-respected man months away from retirement who had a strong history of prosecuting violent crimes using circumstantial evidence archived here--vanished.

From the deleted ABC News article:

But prosecutors said that running the charity gave Sandusky "access to hundreds of boys, many of whom were vulnerable due to their social situations."

He invited youngsters for overnight sleepovers at his home and took them to restaurants and bowl games. He wrestled in the swimming pool with kids who craved the attention. And he gave them gifts: golf clubs, sneakers, dress clothes, a computer and money, according to the indictment from the Pennsylvania attorney general.

And:

The grand jury said that Penn State officials in 2002 told Jack Raykovitz, executive director of The Second Mile, that there had been an issue with Sandusky and a minor. But the charity took no action against Sandusky because, it said this week, Penn State did not find any wrongdoing.

And in 1998, Sandusky was investigated after he was accused of "behaving in a sexually inappropriate manner" with a boy in a shower at the football team's facilities, the grand jury said. The report said an attorney for Second Mile who was also university counsel, Wendell Courtney, was aware of the allegations.

From an April 2015 Penn Live article - [archived here]:

"Everybody knew him and everybody has a theory," an employee at an ice cream parlor across from the courthouse said recently between scoops. He offers his own, that Gricar entered the witness-protection program and will reemerge at the end of a very-long-lived investigation into the mob. Which mob, exactly? "Who knows?"

[. . .] There was no activity on Gricar's email, bank accounts or credit cards. But it soon became clear that Ray's laptop, which he was seen with on Thursday, was missing.

[. . .] In 2011, the news broke that Gricar declined to prosecute an alleged case of sexual assault of a minor against Jerry Sandusky. The 1998 decision put Gricar's name back in the national spotlight as it came amid news of an indictment against the former Penn State assistant football coach. It also spurred a wave of speculation that Gricar's disappearance was connected to the disgraced coach or the cover-up.

Buehner believes Gricar was killed, but doubts it had any Sandusky connection.

"Who in the Sandusky case would have the motive to do any harm to Ray Gricar?" he said. "Gricar might have been the best witness [for Sandusky] had he been alive . . . and any victim probably wasn't old enough, I don't think, to be abducting the DA and making him disappear."

So who in the Sandusky would have the motive to do any harm to Ray Gricar? Perhaps the people above Sandusky in the trafficking ring--powerful people whose involvement in child trafficking they would prefer to keep a secret.

Gricar's laptop was discovered under the Route 45 bridge in Lewisburg in July 2005, with its hard drive physically ejected. The hard drive was found about two months later in the shallows further upstream.

Investigators also learned that Gricar had purchased software to wipe the laptop; they would later find Internet searches from his home computer included phrases like "how to wreck a hard drive."

And also from the Penn Live article:

Nearly a decade ago, Beswick, an attorney, represented one of the witnesses who saw Gricar here. She and Hollywood joined in the search along the park's muddy riverbank that spring.

"Anybody who lives down here thinks about it," she said. "It's weird because they could come up with no explanation."

Beswick, like even casual observers, has her own theory: Gricar was silenced after he threatened to expose a conspiracy to cover up the Sandusky molestation case.

And from this 2011 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article [archived here] describing then-Centre-County-DA Ray Gricar in 1998 squashing any investigation into allegations made against Sandusky:

Retired University Park Detective Ronald Schreffler believed he had enough evidence in 1998 to charge then-Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky with something after the man admitted to a boy's mother to showering naked with her son.

"At the very minimum, there was enough evidence for some charges, like corruption of minors," Mr. Schreffler said on Wednesday, the day after Mr. Sandusky chose to waive his preliminary hearing on 52 counts that accuse him of molesting 10 boys over the last several years. Instead, then-Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar told Mr. Schreffler he could not file charges. The detective said Mr. Gricar gave no explanation.

"You don't question Ray," Mr. Schreffler said, calling him the best prosecutor he'd ever worked with. "Ray was not a person to be intimidated. If he didn't feel the elements were there ..."

At the time, Mr. Gricar spoke to Mr. Schreffler's police chief, Tom Harmon, and that was it.

[. . .] Mr. Schreffler speculates that the district attorney declined to press charges because the state Department of Public Welfare didn't indicate a charge of abuse, which would have made the prosecution's case even more difficult.

"It'd be a little hard for them to prosecute, when you have the state saying there wasn't any abuse."

Also from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article:

Mr. Schreffler speculates that the district attorney declined to press charges because the state Department of Public Welfare didn't indicate a charge of abuse, which would have made the prosecution's case even more difficult.

"It'd be a little hard for them to prosecute, when you have the state saying there wasn't any abuse."

[. . .] In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, [PA State Department of Public Welfare child abuse investigator] Mr. Lauro said he closed the case because he lacked substantial evidence that there was abuse.

"It didn't meet the criteria," Mr. Lauro said. "If I really thought there were any child abuse ... I definitely would have indicated it."

[. . .] Michael Madeira, who took over the district attorney's office in January 2006 and left last year, said there were no records explaining the declination of prosecution -- nor would he expect there to be.

So it seems like Ray Gricar knew the scale of this went far broader and deeper than just Sandusky. In 1998, he was telling local law enforcement to stop looking into Sandusky. Maybe in 2005 he decided he was going to stop playing along with the cover-up, and he was murdered because of it. The PA State Department of Public Welfare (as well as the Centre County Department of Children and Youth Services) both looked into Sandusky abuse allegations in the late nineties, and both agencies found nothing worth further investigation/prosecution. This lends some support to the theory that government child protection agencies are involved in the trafficking.