Right Wing rumor mill funded by Shark Poaching Ring?

The past several months have been quite a season for scandals on the American right, and now a new one might even top the Haggard debacle, in significance if not in tawdry splashiness. For years, hundreds of millions of dollars, at least, in Unification Church money has bought influence among American politicians and journalists, and top leaders of the Christian right [ click on image for video of George Bush Sr. and Barbara Bush attending Moon's wife's birthday party ] and Unification Church owned media has spread lies, rumors, and slant.

Sources feeding the church's apparently endless coffers have been murky and dubious to say the least and one, apparently, has been a mammoth west coast illegal baby leopard shark poaching ring. In the yearlong criminal proceedings against the ringleader, as Robert Gammon from the East Bay News writes "previously undisclosed evidence [ video of a sermon posted on a Unification Church website ] suggests that the conservative newspaper publisher and church supreme leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon both knew of and encouraged Thompson's illegal operation... Torres and Assistant US Attorney Maureen Bessette, the lead prosecutor in the case, have been tight-lipped about the investigation. But according to a source familiar with the audio, both have been sent copies of the sermon that implicates Moon."