Karen Hudes - World Bank Whistleblower (?)

[Jeffrey]

I think this character deserves a thread and some digging. Hudes apparently hit it big this year on the conspiracy theory circuit, her most popular video has about 400,000 views on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hgA9j-4dB0

Her claims are wild and fantastical and varied.

• Comet ISON is Nibiru
  The IRS sends your taxes to the Vatican
  There are secret collateral accounts with trillions of dollars in them
  Certain banks secretly have hundreds of thousands of tons of gold in reserve
  Said gold and accounts may or may not be owned by Queen Victorias secret twin brother who was also Hitlers father (?)

It's damn hard to find factual information on her, someone's done some extensive Google optimization to make it look like she really is who she claims. IE if you search her it links to a fake Forbes profile page and and NSNBC clearly designed to look like MSNBC and thus legitimate. There are hints of some sort of arrest this year for trespassing, it doesn't appear like she really did work at the World Bank but as one person pointed out the WB employs about 9,000 people so she might have been a janitor for all we know.

One video has her saying there was going to be a nuclear bomb detonation in South Carolina:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt9lq3uf8iE

[fortinbras]

Karen Hudes was a real World Bank lawyer, and made a fuss a few years back about some very real hankypanky involving the National Bank of the Phillipines. The rest of what she says makes me think that maybe her adversaries spiked her coffee with LSD (which actually was, maybe still is, a CIA trick for dealing with internal troublemakers).

[Fmotlgroupie]

Just a theory, but if Karen Hudes is a real whistle-blower then perhaps our eccentric lady just found it a convenient identity to assume: you come with a backstory on credible news sites as a whistle-blower (oooh!) at the World Bank (OOOOH!), but since TV audiences don't care about the nitty gritty of development loans they'll all be text and you can make yourself her face.

Or the CIA LSD theory. I like that one too.

[davids]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5h1i-7qt88

I know very little about this person, or what it is that she is supposedly so wonderful to conspiracy theorists for. She's like a free-range gerald celente meets alex jones, wrapped up in a post-middle aged female persona. She does what in the legal field we call conclusory pleading - a lot of hyperbole, a lot of conclusions, claims of vast connections at high places (vs. alternative of delusions of grandeur), at least in discussing things in this video. Granted, it's not a legal document or purporting to be, but if you're trained to listen for substance, it gets really easy to spot the fantastic, unsupported statements...most people aren't so trained in that however, and she may fool many people. But I'm a skeptic.

She's articulate, has decent vocabulary, fairly intelligent, but I am left thinking she is a much more intelligent version of the kinds of folks who file baseless lawsuits: you never do get to hear the meat, never get to see it, never get it proven to you, no matter how much time you waste. I bet she's single. With cat(s).

[Jeffrey]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELVe5Cq8sZo

Has to be seen to be believed.

[Hilfskreuzer Möwe]

Oh lordie...

Where does one start?

History Channel? YOU are at fault. Maybe not entirely, but it's YOU and your pseudoscientific crap that promotes idiocy of this kind. YOU give it legitimacy - YOU put this into mainstream discourse.

SMS Möwe

[davids]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSF8mCR6M0

More Act of 1871 hypothesizing. How can a trained lawyer fall for this stuff?

[Jeffrey]

I had to stop listening at minute 1 when she claimed the entire US Federal government is funded by selling Opium from poppy fields in Afghanistan.

[notorial dissent]

The three things that keep coming to mind when ever I come across this woman; are was she that bed bug crazy to start out with, did she have a complete mental break at some point after working for World Bank, or has she come up with some semi-novel leg pull to get out of whatever she got herself in to.

She obviously was/is a very intelligent erudite person, she made it through what I assume must have been a very good law school, she went to work for World Bank, who really aren’t known for hiring third stingers. So she must have had some level of ability or she wouldn’t have been where she was.

So that just leaves the Bank of the Philippines and her dismissal/departure from the bank, and subsequent wild stories.

I’m no closer to an answer now than when I started.

I will give her this, whichever it is, she comes up with some real doozies for stories/delusions. I do think she's got some of the current herd beat out for level of crazy.

[davids]

I too have a tough time understanding this woman. I have seen references to her having a Law Office in some of the videos about her, but given her beliefs one has to imagine it would be very hard for her to effectively practice law. If she really thinks that all courts are secret military courts and that there is a second constitution, etc., etc., ad nauseum, she walks into court with her brain too scrambled to litigate.

Her followers are a little easier to understand. They believe there must be corruption and because she says there is, even if she attributes it to space aliens and underpants gnomes, they'll believe she is a hero!

[Jeffrey]

If someone has the time and resources, I'd recommend that absolutely everything about her that can be verified should be double checked.

Says she went to an Ivy League school and law school, has a BAR license, let's check that. Says she worked for a bunch of places including the World Bank, there must be a way to verify that and I still haven't seen her produce a paystub from "World Bank" verifying the employment.

I don't buy any of this sh*t, including the "Bank of Philipines" thing fortinbras mentions. I've gone over hours of her stuff, I still haven't seen any "whistle blowing", she just goes on and on about vague "corruption" at the World Bank but never mentions WHAT corruption was going on.

[davids]

A quick googling shows she claims to have an office address in Maryland. I was not able to reference a state bar record for her in Maryland, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The search mechanism was a bit wonky on the website. I'll assume she is who she says she is, has the education she says she has, but whose initial efforts at disclosing actual corruption resulted in her being found attractive to the conspiracy-minded world or some of its elements. I'll even venture to guess that if one worked at the world bank long enough one could probably find some corruption. But she's gone well past that and now seems to be just pulling crap off the internet and trying to frame it into a banking issue.

[Jeffrey]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt4VV9602FM

There really are no words.

[davids]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt4VV9602FM

There really are no words.

As usual, Ms. Hudes when making what seem like preposterous statements, in her matter-of-fact voice, refers us generally to "the internet." Hey Karen, why not make it easy us on us poor schleps, and just have a FAQ video with pdf attachments, which you link to? There, you can explain we should believe there is a whole crapload of gold that no one knows about, whether this trust you're referring to exists and has any of that gold in it, why the world banking powers would be dealing with a sole practitioner in setting up a new worldwide currency system, and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, her ability to discuss what appears to be complete fantasy as if it were fact with a straight face tells me she actually may be a lawyer.

[davids]

so, this somewhat crazy person who is not on my friends list on fb, had Karen Hudes on his friends list on facebook. I checked out her page. While initially it claimed she had too many friends and I couldn't add her, it subscribed me to her posts. So, I've been getting updates. Those include a link to an email she sent where she signed it "Acting General Counsel for International Bank for Reconstruction and Development."

https://s3.amazonaws.com/khudes/Twitter8.1.14.pdf

Now there is actually such a "Bank" that is a part of the World Bank. One can find it on the World Bank website. But wait a minute, wasn't she suing the World Bank for wrongful termination?

A google search of Karen Hudges along with the name of the bank turns up conspiracy sites and post-it yourself journalism sites which are merely repeating her title from something Hudes wrote. But wouldn't the real IBRD have something to say about that? And if she is a practicing lawyer, wouldn't the bar have something to say about it, if it were false?

Very odd.

[Jeffrey]

In the last video of hers I watched, she claims she was re-hired or something and is now sending out letters using World Bank letterhead.

[notorial dissent]

I seriously doubt she has been rehired, since her ramblings of the past year would pretty well preclude her having any credibility anywhere.

Again, I still don't know if this is just a massive leg pull, or if she is just full on crazy, but I really don't believe she is working for anyone at this point, or has been for quite a while, and I suspect that World Bank would like to know that she is pretending to be working for them and sending things out on their letterhead.

[LPC]

What is verifiable:

1. Yale Law School has an on-line alumni directory, but it is apparently accessible only to other Yale Law School alumni.

2. The website of the World Bank does not list legal counsel.

3. The DC Bar (http://www.dcbar.org) does list Karen Hudes as a member, admitted July 13, 1979, with no disciplinary history.

4. There is a published US District Court opinion (which was affirmed on appeal) of a lawsuit by Karen Hudes against the World Bank, KPMG, Aetna Life Insurance Co., and Mark Schreiber (?). It was apparently undisputed that Hudes worked for the World Bank for 20 years in its legal department, or that her employment was terminated. The court characterized the suit as one for "wrongful termination" and dismissed the suit (with prejudice as to all federal claims) for failure to state a claim for which relief could be granted. Hudes v. Aetna Life Insurance Co., 806 F.Supp.2d 180 (D.C. 2011), aff'd No. 11-7109 (D.C. Cir. 2012).

My verdict: Originally a real lawyer, with credentials, but gone whacko. (See this collection of her correspondence with various state regulatory bodies.)

[davids]

http://mainerepublicemailalert.com/2014 ... ren-hudes/

[JamesVincent]

http://mainerepublicemailalert.com/2014 ... ren-hudes/

Fixed the link for ya. Sounds like two morons arguing over who can be dumber.