Why? Because one of the above headlines is unlike the others. The first two stories reveal the nature of the Iranian regime—a gang of criminal theocrats that since 1979 has spread chaos and murder throughout the world. The third headline reveals the gullibility of Western politicians and diplomats who, despite never-ending reminders of the Islamic Republic’s aims and capacities, persist in trying to appease it.
Negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal have been taking place in Vienna since April 2021. They have gone nowhere. Yet the Biden administration insists on playing a starring role in this diplomatic farce. Nothing that happens in the outside world penetrates the bubble where the diplomats reside.
Some history:
• Iran refused to speak to the United States directly. We obliged. The talks are indirect—a sign of American weakness.
• Ali Khamenei ensured that his potential successor, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric sanctioned by the United States, was “elected” president last summer. Not only did we continue negotiations. We are also now debating whether to provide Raisi an entry visa so he can spout regime propaganda at the U.N. General Assembly next month.
• America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, one year old this week, seriously undermined our credibility and our security. It weakened our influence in the Greater Middle East. Yet Biden didn’t change his foreign policy. He doubled down on his Iran gambit.
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February was a hinge of history—a moment when, we have been told, “everything” changed. Everything but the Iran negotiations. Russia, despite its outlaw status on the international stage, continues to serve as Iran’s intermediary. Maybe we should take the hint?
All this happened in the months before the Bolton assassination plot and the attack on Rushdie. And those violations of U.S. sovereignty and rule of law are related to Iranian malfeasance. The Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for attempting to hire a hit man who would target the former U.S. national security adviser. Rushdie’s assailant may have been in contact with the IRGC, as well, and was unquestionably inspired by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s first Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Khomenei, who called for the British-American novelist’s death in 1989.
And what, you ask, does Iran continue to demand of the United States as a condition for reentry into the nuclear deal? In a piece for CNBC headlined, “A renewed Iran nuclear deal appears closer than ever. Here are the final sticking points,” Natasha Turak writes, “Iran wants the Biden administration to remove its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its [i.e., America’s] designated terrorist list, which so far Washington seems unwilling to do.”
Imagine that.
Biden would be committing political seppuku if he removes the IRGC from the terror list. Even he can see the danger there. He’d be handing the beleaguered Republicans an issue in the final months before the midterms. It has the potential to taint media coverage of his supposed diplomatic triumph.
The IRGC “sticking point” is politically troubling. Another sticking point is impossible. Iran wants the United States to guarantee that future presidents will abide by the deal. However, the only constitutional way to do this would be to submit the nuclear agreement to the Senate for treaty confirmation. Of course, Biden can’t do that, because the treaty would fail. Leaving Biden at an impasse.
One he refuses to acknowledge. Perhaps the Biden team is now so full of themselves after a string of legislative victories at home that they are ready to make additional concessions to get what they mistakenly believe will be a victory abroad. The press will love this narrative, of Biden going from strength to strength and win to win, no matter the costs to U.S. security and stability in the Persian Gulf and Shiite Crescent.
Another scenario is that, while neither Iran nor America agrees to this latest proposal, the talks continue intermittently because they serve each party’s goals. Iran is using this time to build its nuclear infrastructure. America doesn’t want to face the hard choices that follow from a recognition that diplomacy has failed.
That is why all peace processes or arms control negotiations continue despite the evidence that they achieve nothing. The process itself becomes an end for the West. Meanwhile, the process serves as cover for the West’s enemies.
“We have a miserable, bipartisan track record of not responding to Iranian aggression and terrorism,” Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies observed the other day. Biden has an opportunity to correct the record by demonstrating American strength in response to Iranian outrages. It’s an opportunity he won’t take.
Former secretary of state joins advocates, Republican lawmakers in pressure campaign to block Raisi visit
Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is calling on the Biden administration to deny Iran’s president a visa to enter the United States and attend U.N. ceremonies next month, citing Tehran’s active plots to assassinate him and other top U.S. officials.
Pompeo, one of the main targets of Iran’s assassination campaign, told the Washington Free Beacon in his first public comments on the matter that the Biden administration is setting a dangerous precedent by permitting Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi into America just weeks after the hardline regime threatened to “turn New York into ruins and hell” with an intercontinental ballistic missile strike.
“We worked for four years to deny Iranian terrorists the freedom to put Americans at risk,” Pompeo told the Washington Free Beacon. “This administration is allowing them to come to New York City while actively engaged in efforts to kill Americans on U.S. soil. The Iranians just recently sponsored an attack that was almost successful in killing an American in that very city. We can do better.”
Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon the U.N. is providing a megaphone to the leader’s of the world’s top sponsor of terror
“This shows just how corrupt and broken the U.N. is,” said Haley, who has publicly called for Raisi to be denied a visa. “Even when Iranian terrorists try to assassinate our officials, on our soil, the U.N. welcomes them with open arms and lets them give a speech.”
“Under no circumstances should the Biden administration allow Raisi to set foot in our country,” Haley said. “He should not be allowed to stain American soil.”
The Biden administration is poised to grant Raisi entrance to America even as his hardline regime actively plots to kill Pompeo and other top U.S. officials, including former national security adviser John Bolton, who was recently the target of a murder-for-hire plot orchestrated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). An IRGC member was arrested by federal authorities and charged in the plot, according to documents unsealed last week by the Justice Department. Iran is also suspected to have played a role in the brutal attack on author Salman Rushdie, who was nearly killed last week when he was stabbed 10 times during a public appearance. Each of these plots has increased calls for the Biden administration to deny Raisi’s visa and end all negotiations with Iran aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord.
Pompeo and Haley joined a growing list of advocacy groups and Republican lawmakers who are pressuring the Biden administration to block Raisi from attending U.N. ceremonies in September. On Tuesday, a coalition of human-rights, Jewish advocacy, and Iranian-American groups wrote to the White House demanding that Joe Biden deny Raisi a visa due to “the risks posed by Iran’s efforts to murder or kidnap American officials and others,” according to a copy of that letter provided to the Free Beacon.
“Iranian diplomats have repeatedly abused their diplomatic status to mastermind or further terror plots,” the organizations wrote, adding that Raisi and his delegation of Iranian officials could help advance domestic plots to kill U.S. officials like Pompeo and Bolton.
“The risk of furthering Iranian assassination plots against U.S. leaders, citizens, and guests is unacceptable, and warrants denying visas to Raisi and his delegation,” according to the letter, which is backed by the Zionist Organization of America, Iranian Americans for Liberty, StopAntisemitism.org, and the Republican Jewish Coalition, among others. “In addition, granting visas to Ayatollah Raisi and his entourage would endanger national security by undermining your administration’s stated commitment to prioritize human rights, and would send a message that a mass murderer may be tolerated.”
The State Department maintains it is bound by its agreements with the United Nations to grant visas to Raisi and his Iranian delegation.
The United States is “generally obligated under the United Nations Headquarters Agreement to facilitate travel,” a State Department spokesman told Jewish News Service. “We take our obligations under the U.N. Headquarters Agreement seriously. At the same time, the Biden administration has not and will not waver in protecting and defending all Americans against threats of violence and terrorism.”
The United States is permitted under its agreement with the United Nations, however, to deny visas based on a “security reservation,” the advocacy groups note in their letter.
“Nothing in the [U.N. Headquarters] agreement shall be construed as in any way diminishing, abridging, or weakening the right of the United States to safeguard its own security and completely to control the entrance of aliens into any territory of the United States other than the headquarters district and its immediate vicinity,” states the agreement between the United States and the United Nations.
The State Department would not respond to additional questions from the Free Beacon about the assassination plots and precautions it may be taking with regards to the Iranian diplomatic delegation.
Republican senators have also pressed the Biden administration to deny Raisi a visa due to the threat posed to U.S. officials like Pompeo and Bolton.
“Allowing Raisi to travel to the United States—while his agents actively work to assassinate senior American officials on U.S. soil—would gravely endanger our national security, given the likely presence of IRGC agents in the Iranian delegation,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R. Ark.), wrote in a letter also signed by Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), among others.
Raisi’s involvement in mass human-rights abuses also constitutes grounds to deny Raisi’s visa, the senators wrote.
“Raisi’s involvement in mass murder and the Iranian regime’s campaign to assassinate U.S. officials on American soil make allowing Raisi and his henchmen to enter our country an inexcusable threat to national security,” the letter states.
Update 5:14 p.m.: This post has been updated with comment from Nikki Haley.
Salman Rushdie, the award-winning author whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses earned him a fatwa from Iran, was attacked on stage Friday just before beginning a lecture in New York.
Rushdie was apparently stabbed in the neck by a man who rushed the stage as the author took the podium at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, the Associated Press reports. The man stabbed Rushdie 10 to 15 times before he was detained. Rushdie fell to the ground and was airlifted to a hospital, where his condition is uknown.
The attack comes more than 30 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on “all brave Muslims of the world” to kill Rushdie, as well as his authors and publishers, “without delay.” Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, slammed The Satanic Verses as “against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qu’ran,” and noted that Rushdie’s assassination was necessary to ensure “no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth.”
Khomeini’s fatwa claims “whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.” Rushdie’s head also carries a $3 million bounty in Iran.
The Satanic Verses is a sprawling work that consists in part of a fictionalized narrative of the founding of Islam by the Prophet Mohammad. In the book, Rushdie refers to Mohammad as “Mahound,” reportedly a derogatory term for the prophet used by Medieval Christians. The book’s title comes from a scene in which Mahound rejects his earlier revelation permitting polytheistic worship as the work of the Devil.
Some Muslims objected to The Satanic Verses before Khomeini’s fatwa. Several countries banned the book, and critics held book burnings around the world.
Rushdie was defiant when asked about the backlash to The Satanic Verses in a 1989 television interview.
“Frankly I wish I had written a more critical book,” the author said, adding that “religious leaders who are able to behave like this, and then say this is a religion which must be above any kind of whisper of criticism, that doesn’t add up.”
Khomeini’s February 1989 fatwa led to a barrage of death threats and drove Rushdie into hiding under British government protection. The author reentered public life nine years later, and went on to marry model and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi.
WARNING: Disturbing content. Viewer discretion is advised.
The Oxford English dictionary defines meme as “a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users.” Depending on how rotten your brain is from prolonged exposure to social media, you may or may not be aware that we are in the midst of a “meme war” that will ultimately determine the fate of American democracy.
One of the most significant new developments in this raging conflict is the emergence of the “Dark Brandon” meme, which portrays Joe Biden as a laser-eyed Machiavellian overlord skilled in the art of four-dimensional political chess. It also seeks to expropriate the “Brandon” moniker from Biden’s critics, who embraced the phrase “Let’s Go, Brandon!” in 2021 after a filthy NASCAR journalist falsely claimed that fans at Talladega were chanting in support of winning driver Brandon Brown. (Fact Check: They were chanting, “F— Joe Biden!”)
In any event, the Washington Free Beacon has exclusively obtained a number of avant-garde “Dark Brandon” memes created with the help of cutting edge artificial intelligence technology. Bear in mind: The mainstream media does not want you, the American people, to see these humorous images. Enjoy!
Glasser portrays Milley as a dedicated military officer with a strong set of values who loathed his unstable and temperamental boss. But despite his commander in chief’s “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms” and “abrupt dismissals,” Milley was determined not to resign for the good of his country. So altruistic.
There was that one time, however, when Milley was so utterly humiliated by Trump that he spent days in his Pentagon office, writing and rewriting a letter of resignation.
The occasion came during the June 2020 George Floyd riots. Members of Black Lives Matter had tried, but fortunately failed, to burn down St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. Trump, accompanied by several advisers and Cabinet members, famously walked to the church and was photographed as he held up a Bible. Milley was among that group.
The legacy media claimed that a crowd of BLM protesters had been “violently” cleared from Lafayette Square by the U.S. Park Police for the sole purpose of this photo-op. One year later, the inspector general of the Interior Department released a report stating that the USPP had cleared the park to allow fencing to be installed “in response to destruction of property and injury to officers.”
In her new book, of course, Glasser tells readers, “Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.”
Anyway, because members of the military are expected to remain apolitical and he had participated in a “political event,” Milley was filled with remorse.
During a pre-recorded commencement address to the graduating class of the National Defense University, Milley apologized. He said, “I should never have been there.”
“As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune, as many of you saw the result of that photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week,” he told the graduates.
“I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned, uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Upon additional reflection, Milley penned his letter of resignation, which is included in Glasser’s excerpt.
It is a boastful, four-paragraph letter written by a disgruntled subordinate with little sense of self-awareness. He tells the president he’s done some “deep soul-searching” and “can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders.”
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” he begins. “I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.”
Milley continues, “You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.
“The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.”
“I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal,” Milley writes. He expands upon his own acceptance of all people no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation, then moves on to his patriotism. The implication is, of course, that Trump is racist, bigoted and doesn’t love America.
“Lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships.
“That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order.
“You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.”
Is he calling Trump a fascist? A Nazi? Sounds like it. If Milley thinks Trump damaged America’s reputation, we have to wonder how he feels about Biden’s blunders.
Unfortunately, he never submitted the letter to Trump.
Glasser writes, “Milley had finally come to a decision. He would not quit. ‘F*** that s***,’ he told his staff. ‘I’ll just fight him.’ The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage.”
Trump would have been better off if this coward had resigned. Among other allegations, Milley reportedly told his Chinese counterpart he would alert him if Trump were to plan any surprise attacks.
“Gen. Milley needs to be called in TODAY and asked under polygraph what he said to China.”
I would remind Milley of a certain oath he took a long time ago. He solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
The BLM riots in the summer of 2020 were not peaceful. They were responsible for over $1 billion in property damage. They caused injury and even deaths. It’s one thing to oppose racism and quite another to excuse crime in our cities.
Either you’re for the rule of law and against terrorism, or you’re not.
Standing up for the rule of law and against terrorism isn’t politics, Gen. Milley. It’s your job.
Former President Donald Trump released a dramatic political video, hours after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, in which he laments the “declining” state of America and says it’s “time to start talking about greatness for our country again.”
“We are a nation in decline … We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump over the ominous sounds of thunder and rain in the nearly four-minute video in which he lists the apparent failures of the Biden administration, before promising, “Soon we will have greatness again.”
Trump, who is expected to announce that he will run again for president in 2024, released the video on his Truth Social platform late Tuesday.
In the video, he says that America has the “highest inflation in over 40 years” and “highest energy cost in its history.” He adds that in the two years since Joe Biden took office, America has lost its energy independence and dominance.
“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil,” Trump says. “We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers and American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world.”
Trump accuses the Biden administration of allowing “Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands,” and suggests that “it will only get worse.”
‘Weaponization of the Justice System’
“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before. We’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump says in his video.
Late on Monday, Trump announced that the FBI was raiding his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, calling it evidence of “prosecutorial misconduct” and a “weaponization of the Justice System.”
A member of the Secret Service in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
The former president said the raid wasn’t announced and that it was motivated because Democrats do not want him to run again for president in 2024.
“They detest Donald Trump, not just on the Democrat side but the general establishment, because he’s not one of them. Because he doesn’t play their game,” his daughter-in-law Lara Trump told Fox News on Tuesday.
“They are terrified he’s going to announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024. And this is a very convenient way to just throw a little more mud on Donald Trump.”
America ‘No Longer Respected’
In his video, Trump also cites the legacy media as contributing to what he says is a nation in decline, saying America “no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.”
Traditionally, the media acts as a guardian of the public interest and a watchdog on government activities. But Trump has in the past accused legacy outlets of being partisan and colluding with “radical left Democrats … to hide the real facts.”
“We are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars it’s taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own,” Trump says in the video.
U.S. Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, load people being evacuated from Afghanistan onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 24, 2021. (Master Sgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP)
“We are a nation that over the past years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world. We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith.
“We are a nation whose economy is floundering, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming, and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of every list,” he says.
“We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump. “But soon we will have greatness again.”
‘Soon We Will Have Greatness Again’
Trump’s political video starts in black and white with only the sounds of rain and thunder underscoring it. This sequence features video representative of the Biden administration’s apparent failures, including oil fields, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, the last third of the video becomes colorized and the musical score uplifting as Trump shifts to speak about his promise of America having “greatness again.”
“It was hard-working patriots like you who built this country. And it is hard-working patriots like you who are going to save our country,” Trumps says in his video.
“There is no mountain we cannot climb. There is no summit we cannot reach. There is no challenge we cannot meet. There is no victory we cannot have.
“We will not bend. We will not break. We will not yield ever, ever, ever. We will never give in, we will never give up, and we will never ever back down. We will never let you down.
“As long as we are confident and united the tyrants we’re fighting do not stand even a little chance. Because we are Americans and Americans kneel to God and God alone. And it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again,” he says.
The video ends on a black screen with the words, “The best is yet to come.”
Former President Donald Trump has warned Americans to brace for something “a lot worse than a recession” while blaming the Biden administration’s poor stewardship of the economy for soaring inflation and denouncing the tax hikes in the latest Democrat spending bill.
Trump made the remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, where the former president raised the alarm on the state of the union.
“Our country is being shot. It’s being destroyed,” Trump told attendees, while touting his administration’s record on the economy and national security.
Trump spoke of “creating the most secure border in American history, record tax and regulation cuts, $1.87 gasoline, no inflation, low interest rates, record growth in real wages, record growth in our economy.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on August 6, 2022. (Bobby Sanchez for The Epoch Times)
Soaring Inflation, Recession
During Trump’s tenure, the highest the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.
Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.
In his speech, Trump drew a contrast with the economy under Joe Biden, blaming the president for the highest inflation in decades that Trump estimates is costing American families as much as $7,000 a year.
“After the pandemic, we handed the radical Democrats the fastest economic recovery ever recorded, the history of our country, ever recorded,” Trump continued. “They’ve turned that into two straight quarters of negative economic growth, also known, despite their protestation to the contrary, as a recession.”
Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.
Despite a number of economists arguing that the United States is in a recession based on the two-consecutive-quarters rule, the Biden administration insists that the economy isn’t in a recession, citing NBER’s consideration of a broader range of indicators.
A key argument against recession made by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others in the Biden administration is that the U.S. labor market remains tight, with unemployment at 3.5 percent and, at 10.7 million, the number of job openings remaining well above the 6 million or so people classified as unemployed.
Joe Biden gives remarks during a meeting on the economy with CEOs and members of his Cabinet in the South Court Auditorium of the White House on July 28, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Worse Than Recession
In his CPAC speech, Trump then issued an ominous warning that, absent a course correction, the recession could spiral into something even worse.
“Just hope that the recession doesn’t turn into a depression, because the way they’re doing things, it could be a lot worse than a recession,” Trump said, echoing similar remarks he made at a rally in Arizona at the end of July, where he warned that “we’re going to have a serious problem” unless political change takes place.
“We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona, warning that “we’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression.”
During his appearance at CPAC, Trump issued a call for urgent action at the polls in the upcoming midterms.
“The future of our country is at stake. We don’t have time to wait years and years. We won’t have a country left. What I used to say about Venezuela is true. We have to save the economy, defeat the Biden, Pelosi, Schumer tax hike, which is happening right now tonight,” Trump continued, referring to the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” that cleared the Senate not long after his speech.
Senators passed the sweeping bill, estimated at $740 billion, in a 51–50 vote on Aug. 7, with the package next going to the House for consideration.
During the deliberations, Senate Democrats rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that sought to ban any of the $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from being used to target Americans making less than $400,000 per year.
“My colleagues claim this massive funding boost will allow the IRS to go after millionaires, billionaires and so-called rich ‘tax cheats,’ but the reality is a significant portion raised from their IRS funding bloat would come from taxpayers with income below $400,000,” Crapo said in a statement.
Crapo’s amendment was rejected on a party-line vote, with the Democrat bill including softer language that features a non-binding statement of intention not to squeeze more revenue from America’s middle class.
Tax Hikes
According to an analysis by Americans for Tax Reform, a U.S. advocacy group, the spending bill includes a number of tax hikes on American households and businesses.
This includes a $6.5 billion natural gas tax that ATR says will increase household energy bills, a $12 billion crude oil tax that will end up being passed on to drivers in the form of higher gas prices, and a $52 billion income tax hike on mid-sized and family businesses.
In a separate analysis, ATR said that the Democrat bill’s changes to the book tax threaten small businesses.
Elaborating on that theme, economist and author Antonio Graceffo wrote in an op-ed for The Epoch Times that the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” would drive up prices for American households.
“Nearly half of these new taxes will be paid by manufacturers, creating disincentives to produce. Diminished industrial output will drive up the cost of goods and reduce the variety and quantity of goods available on store shelves,” Graceffo wrote.
“Beyond the manufacturing sector, the act increases taxes on businesses in general, which, combined with higher interest rates will decrease new investment and hamper job creation. Ultimately, these increased costs will be passed on to customers,” he added.
‘We Have to Win’
During his CPAC speech, Trump revealed what he sees as the key to bringing the country and its economy back on track.
“We have to win an earth-shattering victory in 2022. We have to do it, coming up in November,” Trump said.
“This election needs to be a national referendum on the horrendous catastrophes the radical Democrats have inflicted on our country,” he continued.
“The Republican party needs to campaign on a clear pledge that, if they are given power, they’re going to fight with everything they have to shut down the border, stop the crime wave, beat inflation, and hold the Biden administration accountable. They have to hold it accountable. Job number one for the next Congress,” Trump said.
The national midterm election takes place on Nov. 8, with 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats up for grabs.
Revisionist powers, nations whose leaders seek to undermine American leadership in the world, seem to be on the march.
Russia persists with its heavy bombardments in Ukraine. Its army holds on, at least for now, not only in eastern Ukraine but also on the Black Sea coast, shutting off Ukraine from supplies and trade with the rest of the world.
China is threatening retaliation for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. The regime of President Xi Jinping may be mollified for the moment by the Biden White House’s hints that it wasn’t their idea, or deterred by the staging of U.S. naval forces nearby. But there’s no doubt that China has much more military capacity to attack Taiwan and inflict damage on U.S. forces than when Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan in 1997.
Iran, meanwhile, is showing little interest in Biden administration efforts to reinstate the JCPOA, the nuclear pact signed by the Obama administration in 2015 and from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018. The mullah regime seems unblushingly intent on achieving nuclear weapons capability.
In reflecting on these threats, I am struck by how much longer the leaders of each of these revisionist polities have been in power, how secure their hold on it has been, how short the tenure has been and how weak the hold of elected leaders here in the United States and among our allies.
Consider Vladimir Putin. When he took power in the last hours of 1999, he was unknown beyond Moscow and not expected to be around a generation later. Yet he’s still there 22 years and eight months later, longer than the reign of Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) and not that many years less than the 29 years of Joseph Stalin (1924-1953). There’s speculation that the 69-year-old Putin’s hold on power has been endangered by the failure of his apparent plan to absorb Ukraine, but last year, he signed a law that would allow him to serve until 2036.
Speaking of changing term limits, China abolished its limit of two five-year terms in 2018. Xi is expected to be granted another 10 years in power this fall. Those term limits were established by Deng Xiaoping, a close observer and sometime victim of the violent lurches in the nearly 27-year rule of Mao Zedong (1949-1976).
Now Xi, at age 69, is positioned to challenge that record, though not that of the 18th-century Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796). But Xi may want to stick around for the 100th anniversary of the Communist takeover in 2049, at which point the regime hopes to become the world’s dominant power, according to Michael Pillsbury’s “The Hundred-Year Marathon.”
The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, is already a record-setter. He has held that position since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989, 33 years ago. That’s nearly as long as the 37-year reign of the Shah Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979).
There’s an obvious contrast here with Western leaders. The two most recent American presidents won a majority of electoral votes by margins of 77,000 and 42,000 popular votes in three states. Though there’s some continuity in their administrations’ policies, they’re not on speaking terms. Oh, and they’re also currently 76 and 79 years old.
Other Western countries are in similar flux. Britain awaits a vote of some 160,000 Conservative Party members that will determine who becomes prime minister next month. France’s Emmanuel Macron lost his parliamentary majority last month. Germany’s Olaf Scholz, in office since December, leads an unwieldy coalition. Japan’s prime minister lacks the counsel of his long-lasting predecessor Shinzo Abe, assassinated July 8.
Successive Western leaders have supposed that they can change the behavior of revisionist leaders. American China policy since Henry Kissinger assumed that China could be prodded to be more open, more democratic, less aggressive. It didn’t work much before Xi, and under Xi, China has been moving in the opposite direction.
The first three presidents this century sought some kind of reset with Russia, and Donald Trump had some positive words for Putin (but the charge he colluded with Russia was always a hoax). But these approaches never worked out better than Hillary Clinton’s mislabeled reset button. As for Iran, presidents including Reagan, Obama and now Biden have reached out for better relations — and have gotten nothing for their concessions.
Putin and Xi are both 69, and Khamenei, the only one older than Biden and Trump, is 83. None will last forever. But deaths are hard to forecast and regime change even harder. There are underlying geopolitical forces behind Russia’s and China’s challenge to American leadership, and a religious motivation behind Iran’s.
The downside risk is that revisionist leaders, or Western mistakes, may plunge much of the world into destructive war. That has happened in Ukraine, although the violence is minuscule next to the carnage of the 20th century’s two world wars. The negative potential in Taiwan could be worse, and the reverberations of communist conquest more profound, as defense analyst Elbridge Colby argues. But those are subjects for another column.
In the meantime, let’s hope recent events have made the West’s wobbly buttressed leaders skeptical of the possibilities of enticing the revisionist leaders to see things our way. They’ve played this game before.
The Deep State Cabal inside the DOJ and FBI went out of their way to hinder the investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 Presidential election. By blocking the disastrous news, it kept America in the dark and aided Biden’s so-called victory.
When America was being distracted with COVID, mandates, lockdowns, and BLM riots, our freedom was being taken away without most people noticing because our government was conspiring against us.
How can we trust our so-called “top law-enforcement” agency to do their job when they actively hid Hunter’s investigation in a RESTRICTED SUBFOLDER on their network?
Now Biden’s handpicked Attorney General has no problem turning a blind eye to the actions of the Biden family. This isn’t just refusing to investigate Hunter’s laptop, this is ACTIVELY HIDING EVIDENCE so no one else would investigate.
That’s why you and I must continue to stand up to them.
We need to let these Deep State hooligans know that we’re going to do the job they were supposed to do. I’m opening up a congressional investigation into the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and exposing the criminality of Hunter and the Big Guy. I told you my blood is boiling, right?
If the DOJ didn’t cover up Hunter’s crimes and the intelligence officials didn’t peddle the lie that Hunter’s Laptop was “Russian Disinformation,”Donald Trump might still be President.
The 18-month-long nightmare we all have been living under Biden’s illegitimate reign would not have happened.
No hyper-inflation. No borrowing trillions of dollars to pay for Marxist social programs. No baby formula shortages or selling of oil reserves to Hunter’s friends in China.
That’s what the DOJ took away from us when they covered for the Biden family’s criminal enterprise.
Here’s the problem. The Swamp knows I’m a woman of my word. They know that I will not rest until Congress finally investigates Hunter and impeaches Joe Biden.
That’s why they have been working overtime to make sure I’m not in Congress after November. From filing lawsuits to kick me off the ballot to donating millions to my Democrat opponent, I’m having everything AND the kitchen sink thrown at me.
Do you really think Nancy Pelosi has ignored the behavior from AOC and the Jihad Squad by mistake?
Do you think the Democrats accidentally forgot to sanction their own member who gave the middle finger on National TV to GOP Members of Congress at the Congressional Baseball game the other day?
Somehow no one is being held accountable for their actions… except me. Because in Washington, some people do as they’re told while I’m fighting to do what Americans expect from their duly elected Representatives—SERVE THE PEOPLE!
That’s why we can’t let Hunter and Brandon get away with it simply because I wasn’t there to lead the charge in Congress. Help me win so I can investigate Hunter and impeach Joe Biden! Please donate today.
Thank you. God Bless America. Marjorie Taylor Greene Congresswoman (R-GA)
A social media channel affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced that the hardline regime is “one step away” from constructing a nuclear weapon that can “turn New York into ruins and hell.”
The video, posted Saturday on a Telegram channel affiliated with the IRGC, details preparations underway at Iran’s Fordow nuclear site—which housed the country’s atomic weapons program and is a key cog in its program—to construct a bomb.
Nuclear work being performed at Fordow has “brought Iran one step away from having a nuclear deterrent and entry into the group of nuclear-armed states,” according to the video, which was posted on Twitter by regional observers who track the online regime’s rhetoric. Iran can turn its nuclear program “into a nuclear weapons program in an instant” and target Israel and America with missiles, according to the video.
THREAD
1)#Iran IRGC’s Telegram channel posted a video saying regime is now able to quickly build nuclear weapons & its ICBMs can “turn New York into ruins & hell!”
The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Eslami, on Monday appeared to confirm many of the details included in the video, saying that Iran already has the “technical ability to build an atomic bomb” but has not yet made the political decision to do so, according to the BBC.
“Iran has the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb but there has been no decision by Iran to build one,” senior Iranian adviser Kamal Kharrazi said last month in an interview, one of several in recent weeks that Iranian officials have participated in that suggest Iran is on the threshold of a bomb.
The threats come amid talks between Iran and the Biden administration surrounding a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord. The talks have long been stalled due to Iranian demands, including that the IRGC be removed from the U.S. terror list. While Iran’s latest claims may be exaggerated for propaganda purposes, the United States says the country’s nuclear program is just weeks away from producing enough fissile material to fuel an atomic bomb.
“The start of uranium enrichment at a secret facility deep in the deserts of Fordow has frightened the West and the Zionist regime,” a narrator said in the video. “Iran has obtained enough material for building a nuclear bomb.”
“If the United States or Zionist regime resorts to any stupidity, the Islamic Republic of Iran will begin producing atomic bombs as soon as possible,” a caption accompanying the video states.
Saeed Ghasseminejad, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Free Beacon that Iran’s supreme leader may be inching closer to giving the green light on the construction of a nuclear bomb.
Iranian leader Ali Khamenei “sees two options in front of him. Option one is what Biden is offering him: JCPOA 2 which basically says you accept some limited and temporary restrictions on your nuclear program and in exchange we allow you to have more than one trillion dollars by 2030 and a patient pathway to nuclear bomb,” Ghasseminejad said. “Option two is for Khamenei to go nuclear while Biden is president, then negotiate and force the world to accept a nuclear Islamic Republic. I think option two is looking more and more appealing to Khamenei because he perceives the Biden administration as a weak adversary.”
Bryan Leib, executive director of Iranian-Americans for Liberty, an advocacy group, said Tehran’s threats should be a sign to the Biden administration that it is time to end its talks with the country.
“This latest threat of an attack by the IRGC on U.S. soil should serve as the straw that breaks the camel’s back regarding Biden’s diplomacy and appeasement strategy with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” Leib said. “I am beyond disgusted with the Biden administration that instead of responding to this provocation with strength, they will likely ignore it all together. Shame on this administration for emboldening Tehran.”
The video also states that the most sensitive portions of Iran’s nuclear program are kept in a bunker dug into the side of a mountain. This site can withstand an attack from either the United States or Israel, it claims.
Along with Iran’s ballistic missile program—which is not being addressed as part of ongoing negotiations with the West—the video claims the country has “the capability to turn New York into ruins and hell.”
Tehran slated to sell China $27 billion in oil this year
Iran’s illegal oil trade has boomed under the Biden administration, with the hardline regime selling more than $44 billion worth of its heavily sanctioned oil to malign regimes like China, Syria, and Venezuela, according to figures published by a watchdog group.
From January 2021, when Joe Biden took office, to June 2022, Iran sold around $44.7 billion in oil primarily to China. The regime’s export revenues between March 2021 and March 2022 from oil, gas, and related products “totaled $39 billion, compared [with] $22 billion for the previous year—a rise of 77 percent and an extra $17 billion,” according to United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), a watchdog group that tracks Iran’s network of illegal oil tankers.
“This drastic increase in revenue is not surprising when you look at the increase in oil exports that have occurred under the Biden administration,” UANI chief of staff Claire Jungman told the Washington Free Beacon. “This is the result of terminally lax sanctions enforcement.”
In addition to looser sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to enforcement as it seeks to ink a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal. These moves are meant to appease Iran and cajole it into signing a deal that will remove virtually all sanctions on the hardline regime, including its oil trade. China is the primary beneficiary of this policy, with Iranian oil imports quadrupling to the country in 2021 to $23.1 billion. The China-Iran oil pipeline is on pace to hit around $27 billion in 2022, according to UANI’s figures.
If sanctions on Iran are lifted as part of a new nuclear deal, Iran-China trade could reach around $60 billion per year, according to one former U.S. official.
“China made a mockery of the credibility of our sanctions programs and emboldened rogue actors across the world to follow suit,” Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon.
Iran’s foreign currency reserves— which were nearly drained under the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign—will have “increased nearly tenfold by the end of this year,” according to Noronha.
“The United States refused to enforce its sanctions even while Iran was continuing to advance its nuclear program and its regional terror attacks,” Noronha said. “The result was that Iran’s economy revived itself.”
This financial relief gave Iran a cushion and lessened pressure that could have forced it into accepting a more stringent nuclear deal.
“The Iranian leadership does not feel pressure to finalize the nuclear deal because they’ve already enjoyed the benefits of effective sanctions relief,” Noronha said. “The fact that the Biden administration can’t even manage a return to the notoriously weak [nuclear deal] is evidence of the sheer diplomatic malpractice carried out by the Biden administration, particularly Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. envoy for Iran Rob Malley.”
As Iran and China boost their oil alliance, the U.S. emergency crude stockpiles dropped to their lowest levels in 37 years. This comes after the Biden administration agreed to sell China several million barrels from the U.S. stores, sparking a congressional investigation.
In July, Iran sold 746,915 barrels of oil per day to China, according to UANI.
Under pressure from watchdog groups like UANI, the Biden administration is beginning to issue new sanctions on Iran’s oil trade.
The State Department announced on Monday that it is “designating six entities” for their role in “facilitating illicit transactions related to Iranian petroleum.”
The administration says it is committed to reviving the nuclear deal, but will issue sanctions until the agreement is signed.
“The United States has been sincere in pursuing a path of meaningful diplomacy to achieve a mutual return to full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” the State Department said, referring to the 2015 deal by its official name. “Until Iran is ready to return to full implementation of the JCPOA, we will continue to use our sanctions authorities to target exports of petroleum, petroleum products, and petrochemical products from Iran.”
UANI’s Jungman said the new sanctions are a good first step, but that “there are many gaps that need to be filled.” The administration still has not designated several oil tankers known to be ferrying illicit Iranian oil.
“Without designation on the vessels, the tankers will just register under new companies and continue to assist Iran in exporting its oil,” she said.
Noronha says these sanctions have come too late.
“China took advantage of the Biden administration’s weak posture and blatantly flouted our sanctions on Iran for over 16 months before the United States made any attempt to stop the trade,” he said.
The State Department says that it continues to engage China diplomatically as part of its efforts to crack down on its oil partnership with Tehran.
President Donald Trump has warned that America’s economy is on track for a bigger disaster than a recession, with his remarks coming shortly before government statistics showed GDP printing negative for the second consecutive quarter, which is a rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.
“Where we’re going now could be a very bad place,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona last week. “We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem.”
The former president singled out the collapse in Americans’ real wages, a historically depressed labor force participation rate, and the Democrat push for the Green New Deal that he said would crush economic growth.
“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression,” the former president said.
Trump’s remarks came several days before the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released data showing that real U.S. GDP fell by an annualized 0.9 percent in the second quarter after contracting 1.6 percent in the first quarter.
Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.
Vance Ginn, Chief Economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD in an interview that, while officially it’s NBER that calls recessions, the two-quarter rule is “usually how it’s done by a rule of thumb.”
“I think this is definitely recession that we’re in now from these bad policies,” Ginn added, blaming a series of “progressive policies” coming out of the White House and the Democrat-controlled House.
President Donald Trump gestures at a rally in Prescott Valley, Ariz., on July 22, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Stagflationary Winds Blowing
In his remarks, Trump also took aim at resident Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, blaming him for soaring inflation.
“Biden created the worst inflation in 47 years. We’re at 9.1 percent, but the actual number is much, much higher than that,” Trump said.
While the former president didn’t provide his own estimate for the true rate of inflation, an alternative CPI inflation gauge developed by economist John Williams, calculated according to the same methodology used by the U.S. government in the 1980s, puts the figure at 17.3 percent, a 75-year high.
Trump also said that persistently high inflation combined with an economic slowdown has put the country “on the verge of a devastating” spell of stagflation, which is a combination of accelerating prices and slowing economic growth.
Inflation is “going higher and higher all the time,” Trump said, adding that it’s “costing families nearly $6,000 a year, bigger than any tax increase ever proposed other than the tax increase that they want to propose right now.”
In Trump’s first full month in office in February 2017, the headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at 2.8 percent in annual terms. While the CPI measure fluctuated during his tenure, the highest it ever reached was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.
Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.
Joe Biden waves as he walks to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on July 20, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
‘War on American Energy’
Soaring energy prices have been one of the key contributing factors to inflation, accounting for around half of the headline inflation figure, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In his criticism of Biden’s policies, Trump singled out what he called “Biden’s war on American energy” and blamed it for pushing up gasoline prices.
Since taking office, Biden has taken a number of executive actions targeting the oil industry, including rescinding the Keystone XL pipeline permit, halting new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands and waters, and ending fossil fuel subsidies by some agencies.
The price of gasoline is around double what it was when Biden took office, with the president blaming various factors, including a lack of refining capacity, the war in Ukraine, and corporate greed.
In a bid to lower prices at the pump, Biden ordered the release of oil reserves from the national strategic reserve, called on U.S. refineries to boost output, and pushed OPEC to pump more crude.
In his speech, Trump said this amounted to “begging” other countries to pump more oil instead of trying to ramp up domestic production.
“We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country in the world. We are a nation that is consumed by the radical left’s Green New Deal, yet everyone knows that the Green New Deal will lead to our destruction.”
“Just two years ago, we were energy-independent. We were even energy-dominant. The United States is now a beggar for energy
With an expected GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives following November’s midterm elections, Republicans in the chamber are poised to launch a slew of investigations aimed at dialing up the pressure on the Biden administration over a range of issues—from border security to Hunter Biden to the origins of the pandemic.
Domestic concerns faced by everyday Americans—most notably a historic inflation rate—will be key priorities, according to Chair of the House Republican Conference Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
House Republicans will take the administration to task on alleged “policy failures that have created an inflation crisis, energy crisis, border crisis, and crime crisis impacting every American family,” Stefanik told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices will also be scrutinized, she added.
On the foreign policy front, the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the United States and abroad, and U.S. strategy toward Iran are set to come under focus.
Republicans are already laying the groundwork to take on “an aggressive oversight role” next year by issuing preservation notices and document requests so a potential GOP majority “will be ready to hold the Biden administration accountable from day one,” a House GOP leadership aide told The Epoch Times in an email.
House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) (C) speaks at a press conference, was joined by House Republican Whip Steve Scailse (R-LA) (L) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), following a Republican caucus meeting, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 8, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Oversight Committee
Many of the inquiries are expected to be spearheaded by the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the chamber’s main investigative panel that has broad authority to scrutinize various facets of the administration.
The committee’s ranking member James Comer (R-Ky.), who is poised to take the chair should the Republicans flip the House, foreshadowed an ambitious agenda by a GOP-led panel.
“[W]e will return the House Oversight and Reform Committee to its core mission of rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government and holding the Executive Branch accountable,” Comer told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
Another committee member Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) had a clear message for the Biden administration via email to The Epoch Times: “Their days of corruption, fraud, and abuse will no longer be met with blind eyes.”
Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, attends the ceremony honoring 17 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, on July 7, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hunter Biden
Chief among a GOP-led House Oversight Committee’s priorities is an investigation into Hunter Biden and his foreign business dealings.
For more than two years, the president’s son has been at the center of growing controversy over his overseas business activities, including in Ukraine, Russia, and China, conducted while Biden was vice president in the Obama administration.
Hunter is currently the subject of a federal investigation being run out of Delaware and, according to a recent CNN report citing unnamed sources, it is “nearing a critical juncture.”
Hunter has previously denied wrongdoing, and the elder Biden has maintained that he has never discussed Hunter’s business activities with his son.
The president’s son’s extensive financial dealings with foreign individuals and businesses, raise concerns about conflicts of interests, illegal lobbying, and whether his ties influenced U.S. foreign policy during the Obama administration, critics say.
Republicans have honed in on Hunter’s work for Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, while his father was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine, and Hunter’s dealings with several Chinese companies and businessmen with links to the Chinese Communist Party.
“We will continue to conduct oversight of Hunter Biden and the Biden Family’s pattern of peddling access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves,” Comer said.
“They have racked up over 150 suspicious activity reports for their foreign business deals, which is a national security threat,” the lawmaker said, referring to a CBS report saying that U.S. banks had flagged more than 150 financial transactions involving Hunter or the president’s brother, James, for further review by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Some of the transactions involved large wire transfers, the report said.
“We need to know if resident Biden benefited financially from these deals and if he is beholden to the interests of foreign adversaries,” Comer said.
An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China’s central Hubei Province on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
COVID-19 Origins
The ranking member highlighted that the committee would continue to investigate the origins of COVID-19, focusing on the possibility that the pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
“Growing evidence shows COVID-19 likely originated from the Wuhan Lab and the Communist Party of China covered it up,” Comer said.
An array of circumstantial evidence has prompted some officials and scientists to point to the WIV as the most likely source of the pandemic. These include the WIV’s gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, reports that staff members became sick with symptoms consistent with both seasonal flu and COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, before the Chinese regime acknowledged the outbreak, and that a WIV public database of 22,000 samples and viral sequences was taken offline in September 2019 before the onset of the pandemic.
The Chinese regime’s persistent refusal to allow outside access to the lab and its data has made it nearly impossible to fully investigate the lab leak theory.
Domestically, the potential role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in aiding WIV’s activities has been viewed with particular alarm by Republicans, who are looking to intensify the inquiry. The NIH has previously funded WIV via New York-based health nonprofit EcoHealth, including one grant that amounted to what experts have described as gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
“We will seek to hold U.S. government officials accountable for any wrongdoing, and ensure Americans’ tax dollars aren’t being used on risky research at unsecure labs,” Comer said.
Border Patrol agents apprehend a large group of illegal immigrants near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Other Key Priorities
The ongoing struggle by the administration to control the flow of illegal immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border is set to become another focal point for Republicans serving on the House Oversight Committee, and other panels.
“We will also continue our oversight of Biden’s border crisis that has led to historic illegal immigration, a surge of deadly drugs pouring across the border, and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars,” Comer said.
With a GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee, Biden’s energy policies amid a deepening global squeeze on oil and gas are expected to come under close scrutiny.
“We will build on our robust oversight over how the administration is censoring conservative speech, shutting down American energy and increasing gas prices, abusing its public health emergency powers, [and] colluding with political allies like teacher’s unions,” a spokesperson for Energy and Commerce Republicans told The Epoch Times in an email.
Meanwhile, a Republican-led House Financial Services Committee would focus on probing regulatory agencies’ alleged efforts to impose a “far-left agenda” on the U.S. financial system, as well as the Biden administration’s implementation of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan, said Laura Peavey, communications director for the House Financial Services GOP, in an email to The Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
Deputy National Cyber Director Camille Stewart has called for a race-focused defense agenda
Solving “perceived” systematic racism by implementing systematic racism. Sounds like a democrat. Stop looking for hand-outs and start lending a hand. [US Patriot]
Resident Joe Biden’s incoming cyber defense deputy has claimed that “systemic racism” is one of the greatest threats to U.S. cybersecurity.
Camille Stewart, a former Google strategist whom Biden reportedly tapped for White House deputy national cyber director, has argued that “our #NatSec apparatus must be a part of dismantling systemic racism,” and “pursuing anti-racist and anti-hate policy outcomes” should be a chief national security focus for the administration.
Biden’s new hire is likely to stoke concerns from Republican legislators that his administration has been more focused on pushing a race-focused ideological agenda than on traditional national defense issues—such as the increasing risk of cyberattacks from Russia, Iran, and China. The Department of Justice said in June it is bracing for more cyberwarfare from adversarial countries. Last month, the FBI revealed it intercepted an Iranian-backed cyberattack against Boston Children’s Hospital, and Russian hackers targeted an American satellite company in Ukraine earlier this year.
Stewart, who served as policy adviser for the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, has criticized the United States as an intrinsically racist society in her writing and on social media.
She claimed that the U.S. economy “lost $16 trillion b/c of Racism against Black Americans,” and warned in 2020 that “SYSTEMIC RACISM WILL RUIN THIS DEMOCRACY,” arguing that systemic racism was a part of “every institution not just the criminal justice system.”
“[Solutions] to cybersecurity challenges will never reach their full potential until systemic racism is addressed and diverse voices are reflected among our ranks at all levels,” Stewart wrote in a 2020 column for the Council on Foreign Relations titled “Systemic Racism Is a National Security Threat.”
She added that “communities of color are disproportionately affected by cyberattacks that target critical infrastructure.”
In a 2020 column for the Hill, Stewart said the Biden administration’s efforts to combat systemic racism “must be woven into leadership priorities, processes, structures, and domestic and international strategy.”
Stewart proposed that U.S. foreign policy leaders be encouraged to “talk about systemic racism in the U.S on a global stage” and acknowledge the “detrimental effects of racism at home and in U.S. foreign policy towards regions of the world.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A White House press release on Monday said Stewart was “regarded as not only an expert but also as an inspiration, especially to women and underrepresented minorities.”
Republican lawmakers have objected to other recent hires by the Biden administration, including U.S. special representative for racial equity and justice appointee Desirée Cormier Smith, who claimed white diplomats lack empathy and humility.
Congressional Republicans launched a formal investigation into the Biden administration on Friday following its decision to sell a Chinese state-controlled company nearly one million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, according to a copy of the probe obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.
The probe comes on the heels of a Free Beacon report detailing how the Biden administration sold China oil from the U.S. reserves amid a crippling energy crisis that has sent consumer prices skyrocketing. Rep. Pat Fallon (R., Texas), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, is spearheading the investigation along with six of his GOP colleagues, including Reps. Ronny Jackson (Texas) and Ralph Norman (S.C.).
Fallon and his colleagues are demanding the White House turn over a trove of documents detailing the behind-the-scenes decision-making about these sales, as well as others potentially made to “foreign adversaries.”
The Biden administration came under intense criticism earlier this month after it was disclosed that it sold Chinese state-controlled energy firm Unipec 950,000 oil barrels from the U.S. reserves, which historically are tapped in response to emergencies. The White House claimed the sale would “address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump” and “help lower energy costs.” But critics say the administration is exploiting the reserves to appease foreign countries while it cuts production domestically to appease the Democratic Party’s far left flank.
“Your policies are harming American energy independence and benefiting our adversaries,” the lawmakers write. “Draining the [U.S. reserves] to historic lows for the sake of political expediency … threatens the national security of our nation, and contemplates no long-term strategy to ensure the energy independence of the United States.”
Information included in the Republican probe shows that the White House sold China 2.5 million barrels in October and another 1.5 million in November. Millions more were sold to other foreign countries during this time period. Amid these sales, the U.S. reserves dipped below 500 million barrels—the lowest level since 1986. China, on the other hand, has around 926 million barrels stored as it continues to import illicit Russian and Iranian oil to offset the rising price of crude. Current projections show the U.S. reserves “will be drained to approximately 130 million barrels by 2031,” according to figures included in the probe.
“The American people can’t afford to put gas in their tanks and our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level in decades, yet Joe Biden is wasting our money and resources by sending oil that’s intended for emergencies to the Chinese Communist Party,” Jackson told the Free Beacon. “Helping our adversaries and setting America up for failure in the event of a major disaster or national security threat is no way for an American president to govern. Taxpayers deserve better.”
The lawmakers say the “depletion of emergency supplies is troubling to the American public and puts the United States at a disadvantage should there be a real disaster or a national security threat.”
As China drains the American reserves, it also is “benefitting from loopholes in current sanctions against Russia and from your lack of sanctions enforcement,” the lawmakers write. “It is troubling that the United States is exporting [reserved] crude to China as China continues to align itself with our adversaries.”
While China has said that it would stop importing Russian oil amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, it has not made good on these promises. It also is importing illegal Iranian crude oil at record amounts, behavior that has been enabled by the Biden administration’s decision to loosen sanctions on Tehran as part of an effort to cajole it into signing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord.
“Biden has taken these inappropriate steps as China continues to build their own reserve capabilities with cheap Russian and Iranian oil,” Fallon told the Free Beacon. “Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created to address national or weather emergencies, not for political expediency and personal profit.”
The Republican lawmakers instructed the White House to provide them with internal documents related to the sell-off of America’s strategic oil reserves. This includes “all documents and communications, from January 20, 2021, to present” that relates to U.S. crude “being shipped to foreign adversaries—specifically, the People’s Republic of China.” The White House must also furnish in-depth information about China’s own oil reserves, as well as any draft plans to potentially replenish America’s stockpile.
“Our strategic reserves are for national security, not to satisfy global oil markets, and certainly not to cover for resident Biden’s failed energy policies,” Norman told the Free Beacon. “This administration owes our nation immediate answers to these questions.”
Ohio Democrats attacked Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance’s trip to Israel, where he pledged to be a strong advocate for the Jewish state.
Vance’s Wednesday address at a gathering in Tel Aviv was met with mockery from Vance’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan. Ryan’s communications director Izzi Levy falsely stated that Vance campaigned in Israel before holding a single event in Ohio. Michael Beyer, the communications director for the Ohio Democratic Party, said Vance would rather be in Israel than his home state.
Both comments mirror the anti-Semitic trope that American politicians are more loyal to Israel than to the United States, and highlight how the Jewish state’s security has transformed into a partisan issue. While Ryan previously said he supports Israel’s right to self-defense, he voted in 2021 against funding for the Iron Dome and supported the Obama administration’s Iran Deal.
In Israel, Vance pledged to be “as strong an advocate for the U.S.-Israel relationship as anyone.” He called the Iran Deal “a disaster” and applauded former president Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
Brad Kastan, chairman of JewishColumbus’s Community Relations Council, said Democrats “should strongly encourage, not discourage, our leaders to visit the Jewish state.”
”Israel is our strongest and most important ally in the Middle East. All Americans and particularly the citizens of Ohio benefit from the strong strategic and economic ties, not to mention shared values, we enjoy with Israel,” Kastan said. “Ohio Democrats, or anyone who appreciates the role our U.S. senators must play in foreign policy, should strongly encourage, not discourage, our leaders to visit the Jewish state.”
Ryan himself visited the Jewish state in 2016 during his House reelection campaign. It is unclear whether Ryan at the time would rather be overseas than in Ohio.
The attacks from Ryan’s campaign and allies come as the race between the longtime House member and Vance heats up. Vance won May’s Republican primary on the back of an endorsement by former president Donald Trump and is viewed as the favorite to win in November given the current political climate.
Congressional Republicans want to mandate that any immigrant who applies for a U.S. visa disclose ties they might have to Iran and its terror affiliates, according to legislation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Those seeking entrance into the United States are not currently asked on immigration forms if they have ties to the hardline Iranian government and its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force responsible for orchestrating terror attacks on Americans.
The bill, led by Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) and a coalition of 14 lawmakers affiliated with the House Republican Study Committee (RSC), comes on the heels of a Free Beacon report detailing the Biden administration’s decision to loosen immigration laws so that individuals with known ties to designated terror groups can more easily enter the country. The amended law permits foreigners who provided “insignificant material support” to designated terror groups to receive “immigration benefits or other status.”
“Opening the border to members of a hostile terrorist army violates the Biden administration’s constitutional obligation to protect states from invasion,” Banks said. “Unfortunately, House Democrats have prioritized appeasing Iran above all else.”
Banks and his colleagues say the administration is opening “the floodgate for supporters of IRGC terrorism to enter the United States,” according to an RSC-authored memo circulating among Republican offices on Capitol Hill and obtained by the Free Beacon.
The Republican legislation, called the “Protecting America from IRGC Terrorists Act,” seeks to close these loopholes by mandating that every foreigner applying for a U.S. visa or citizenship disclose any ties to Iran and the IRGC on relevant immigration forms. The Republican coalition says the legislation is particularly important as Iran and its terror proxies actively plot to assassinate current and former U.S. government officials.
“I am shocked that disclosing Iranian and IRGC affiliations was not already a requirement for U.S. visa applications,” Rep. Lisa McClain (R., Mich.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee and one of 15 Republican cosponsors of the bill, told the Free Beacon. “Iran has shown us time and time again that they are no friend of the United States.”
The legislation, which is likely to garner widespread Republican support but stall in the Democrat-controlled House, would force the State and Homeland Security Departments to “ask about an alien’s affiliation with the Iranian state and the IRGC on visa, permanent residency, and naturalization application forms,” according to a full copy of the bill.
“By requiring these carefully crafted questions in our immigration vetting process, the bill aims to strengthen immigration accountability and transparency and provide more data for the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security to better evaluate potential US national security threats,” the RSC wrote in its internal policy brief on the legislation.
The Biden administration made several changes to federal immigration laws late last month that allow individuals who provided “humanitarian assistance” or “routine commercial transactions” to designated terror groups to obtain residence in the United States.
A State Department spokesman told the Free Beacon at the time that the changes were made to facilitate the immigration of vulnerable Afghans who may have been forced to work alongside terror groups operating in the country.
Former U.S. officials and experts, however, pointed out that the policies do not mention Afghanistan and apply specifically to designated terror groups. The Taliban, for instance, is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The broad nature of the changes drew accusations that the special immigration benefits could apply to IRGC members—though the State Department disputes that charge.
The changes “are an effort to address issues related to Afghanistan,” a State Department spokesman told the Free Beacon in July, when the policy change was first announced. “The circumstances between Afghanistan and Iran are very different.”
Republican House lawmakers, led by Banks, launched a formal probe into the policy change earlier this month, as the Free Beacon first reported.
The order was “released just weeks before negotiations with Iran over restoring the nuclear deal recommenced,” Banks and three of his colleagues wrote in a letter to the White House demanding in-depth information about its justification for amending immigration law. “Your administration may be trying to entice Iran back to the nuclear deal by using broad executive authorities to weaken the penalties connected to the [foreign terrorist organization] designation without requiring the IRGC and other Iran-supported terrorist organizations to verifiably cease their terrorist activities.”
Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), a cosponsor of the bill and member of the Armed Services Committee, said the legislation “will help ensure these terrorist supporters are barred from our homeland.”
“Over the last two decades, the IRGC is responsible for the killing of over 600 U.S. servicemembers and continue to threaten U.S. public officials who dared challenge their terrorism,” Waltz said. “Allowing any individuals into our country who may have assisted these terrorists would be a direct national security threat to our citizens.”
White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed that after about five decades in the federal government, he’s planning on leaving his position by the end of resident Joe Biden’s current term.
“We’re in a pattern now. If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have COVID anymore,’ then I will be 105. I think we’re going to be living with this,” Fauci, 81, told Politico in an interview published on July 18 that he plans to retire by the end of Biden’s current term, which ends in January 2025.
Fauci has been the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he became a household name as the face of the federal government’s response, often generating criticism from Republicans and conservatives about his generally dire predictions about the pandemic.
Of his relationship with former President Donald Trump, Fauci said that “we developed an interesting relationship … two guys from New York, different in their opinions and their ideology, but still, two guys who grew up in the same environments of this city. I think that we are related to each other in that regard.”
And if Republicans win back either the House or Senate in 2022, Fauci noted that he will likely be investigated by GOP lawmakers. But he claimed that regarding those investigations, “I don’t make that a consideration in my career decision.”
In the Politico interview, Fauci continued to defend his public recommendations, including school closures, mask-wearing, vaccination regimes, and lockdowns.
“My telling somebody that it’s important to follow fundamental good public health practices … what are you going to investigate about that?” he asked.
Possible Investigations
However, Fauci has faced public questions from Republicans in Congress about his agency having given funding to third-party groups to carry out research in China. COVID-19, caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, emerged in Wuhan, China, and a significant number of U.S. intelligence officials last year released a report suggesting the virus may be linked to the top-level Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Last month, amid questions from Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Fauci conceded that he isn’t able to halt federal funding from being doled out to researchers in China.
“The NIH [National Institutes of Health] is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020,” Marshall said. “In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars.”
Later, he asked Fauci, “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”
Federal health agencies, Fauci said in response, “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”
“We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he said.
NIAID officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
The State Department says it is not considering a redesignation of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels as a terrorist group, even after a delegation of human rights activists launched a pressure campaign against the Biden administration.
A redesignation of the Houthis is not a top priority, according to the State Department. “We are currently focused on securing, extending, and building on the [United Nations] truce in Yemen, which is having a tangible impact on millions of Yemenis and provides a credible opportunity for peace in Yemen,” a spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon.
The statement comes on the heels of a visit last week by Yemeni human rights activists, who were in Washington, D.C., to press the Biden administration and Congress to consider redesignating the Houthi rebels in Yemen as terrorists. The designation was first approved by the Trump administration during its push to isolate Iranian-backed terror fronts but reversed by resident Joe Biden when he took office last year.
Biden administration officials who met with the activists said they view a redesignation of the Houthis as an obstacle to securing a permanent ceasefire between the Iran-armed militants and Yemeni government, according to sources familiar with the meetings. The activist pressure campaign was launched to coincide with Biden’s first trip to the Middle East last week, in which he met with Saudi Arabian leaders to discuss Houthi attacks on the country, among other issues.
The D.C. visit by the Yemeni human rights advocates was accompanied by a letter to the White House criticizing its decision to delist the Houthis and warning about the dire humanitarian crisis in Yemen that has developed. The July 11 letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Free Beacon, was signed by 35 organizations advocating for Yemeni human rights. The Biden administration removed the group from the terror list as part of a bid to help bolster U.S.-backed peace talks between the Iranian-armed rebels and the Yemeni government. Though a tenuous cease-fire is in place and expected to be renewed in August with U.S.-backing, the human rights leaders maintain the Houthis must be held accountable for their attacks on civilians.
“Unfortunately, the administration seems more focused on renewing a failed truce than on actually resolving the conflict and aiding the Yemeni people,” Dr. Wesam Basindawa, a human rights activist who participated in the meetings, told the Free Beacon. Basindawa’s delegation was organized by the Yemeni Coalition of Independent Women, a human rights organization that seeks to draw attention to Houthi atrocities and their repeated violation of the cease-fire agreement. The activists met with officials representing the U.S. special envoy for Yemen, as well as a bipartisan group of lawmakers.
Asked about the situation, a State Department spokesman indicated to the Free Beacon that a redesignation of the Houthis is not being considered.
“Humanitarian considerations continue to be an important factor in any decision regarding a Foreign Terrorist Designation of Ansarallah,” the official name of the rebel group, according to a State Department official.
Human rights activists disagree. They say the Houthis continue to conduct terror attacks and violate the cease fire agreement.
“In the year and a half since that action was taken, the Houthis have not moderated their actions or engaged in a productive dialogue,” the activists wrote in their letter to the White House. “Furthermore, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen has not been relieved.”
Since the Biden administration delisted the terror group, “the number of Houthi militia violations against Yemeni people and attacks against civilian targets in Saudi Arabia had doubled,” the group notes. “In the past period, the Houthis conducted … drone or missile attacks on Saudi airports and airfields.”
At home in Yemen, “the violence of the Houthi group increased after it was removed from the list of terrorist organizations,” committing crimes that include the “siege of cities, bombing civilians, booby trapp[ed] roads and schools, sniping civilians, child recruitment, displacement of civilians from their homes, humanitarian aid theft,” and other atrocities. “Nearly half of these incidents affected women and children,” the group says.
“The Houthis have responded to your administration’s offer of compassion and conciliation with disdain. They have refused to take advantage of the opportunity that your administration provided and allow for the alleviation of the pain and suffering of the Yemeni people,” they write. “It is therefore time to reconsider the Houthi designation as a” foreign terrorist organization.
The Biden administration is poised to give Iran “more than a hundred billion dollars” in cash windfalls if it signs a new nuclear deal, according to former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who also hinted to a group of pro-Israel activists on Monday that she will run for president in 2024.
With negotiations over a revamped nuclear deal ongoing, Haley warned an audience of pro-Israel activists that the Biden administration is preparing to unload billions of dollars to Tehran—money that “will fund terrorist attacks on Israel and America.”
Biden has “made clear that he’ll do almost anything to get the ayatollahs to sign on the dotted line,” Haley said in a speech before the Christians United for Israel organization during its annual gathering in Washington, D.C. “And do you know who Biden allowed our lead negotiator on the Iran deal to be? Russia.” An advanced transcript of her remarks was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Haley said that with Moscow’s help, the Biden administration is laying the groundwork for Iran to obtain “missiles and nukes to destroy both Israel and America.”
Haley’s speech, which focused heavily on Israel and the threats posed by both Iran and Russia, comes amid speculation that she will throw her hat into the ring for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination—rumors that she appeared to confirm in her speech. It also laid the groundwork for a foreign policy approach that would refocus America on countering Iran and its growing alliance with Russia.
“Anything Joe Biden signs [with Iran] will all but guarantee that Iran gets the bomb. No deal is better than a bad deal,” she said. “And if this president signs any sort of deal, I’ll make you a promise. … The next president will shred it—on her first day in office.”
In addition to advocating for increased U.S. military aid to Israel to help it confront Iran, Haley discussed the war in Ukraine and blamed the Biden administration’s failures in Afghanistan for fueling Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
“If America hadn’t failed so miserably in Afghanistan, there never would have been a war in Ukraine,” she said. “Putin saw the strongest country in history leave Bagram Air Force Base in the middle of the night—without even telling our allies who stood shoulder to shoulder with us for decades.”
The bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is why “Putin made his move. It’s the price we pay for American weakness. And now countless Ukrainians are paying for our mistake with their lives,” Haley said.
Other world dictators learned a similar lesson when the United States ran out of Afghanistan, according to Haley.
“Putin wasn’t the only one who saw a green light in Afghanistan. So did Kim Jong Un in North Korea. So did Xi Jinping in Communist China,” she said. “And last but not least, our surrender in Afghanistan was the gift that keeps on giving for Iran. When Kabul fell, the ayatollahs celebrated.”
Haley also criticized Biden’s recent trip to the Middle East, including Israel, where he announced a $300 million cash infusion to the Palestinian government. The Free Beacon exclusively reported last week that a large portion of this cash is funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, which has a history of inciting violence against Jews.
“The money has no conditions, no strings, nothing. The Palestinians can keep stoking hatred of Israel,” Haley said of the renewed funding. “They can keep paying the families of terrorists, which encourages more suicide bombings. Basically, the Palestinians can use America’s money to attack America’s ally. It’s a disgrace.”
The financial services firm facing accusations that it promotes Israel boycotts relies on research produced by “a leader” in the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) and other anti-Israel sources, according to an analyst tracking the situation.
The research arm of Morningstar Inc., a firm that advises investors, relies on research produced by a pro-BDS organization called Who Profits, which is known to push Israel boycotts, according to Richard Goldberg, a former U.S. national security official and Middle East expert who recently published an independent analysis on the matter for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.
Morningstar is already fighting charges that its research arm, Sustainalytics, downgrades companies that help Israel combat terrorism, thereby bolstering the BDS movement’s drive to economically damage the Jewish state. Sustainalytics employees who were interviewed as part of an investigation into anti-Israel bias at the firm indicated they have a close relationship with and rely on research produced by Who Profits, which has been cited by a watchdog organization as one of the leading pro-BDS nonprofit groups. The findings related to Who Profits raise new questions about how deeply Sustainalytics relies on organizations with direct ties to the BDS movement.
“Morningstar’s ratings system uniquely relies on a group that’s at the forefront of the BDS movement to blacklist Israel-connected companies,” said Goldberg.
Who Profits “maintains a public database of businesses that are often targeted in international BDS campaigns,” according to NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that monitors pro-BDS outfits. The reliance on Who Profits and other anti-Israel groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, is raising questions about Morningstar’s commitment to rooting out anti-Israel bias in its ratings products, Goldberg said.
Who Profits “is a leader in BDS efforts against Israeli and foreign companies,” according to NGO Monitor, and was founded “in response to the Palestinian call for boycott[s]” against Israel. The organization is dedicated to “exposing the commercial involvement of Israeli and international corporations in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian lands,” according to information published on its own website.
Goldberg analyzed evidence presented in a 134-page review of Morningstar’s methods conducted by the law firm White & Case that cleared Morningstar of any wrongdoing.
Sustainalytics employees interviewed as part of the White & Case report indicated that Who Profits “was used primarily for background information, and was consistently balanced against other sources.” Others said the relationship is deeper, with Sustainalytics “research analysts often rely[ing] upon Who Profits for what they view as unique, boots on-the-ground research regarding corporate involvement in the region, in part because Who Profits is one of the few organizations that actually operates on the ground in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict areas.”
The White & Case report also found that “communications between Sustainalytics employees and representatives of Who Profits suggest that the relationship between the entities is close, relative to Sustainalytics’ relationships with other organizations.”
Sustainalytics ratings products also rely on information produced by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have faced accusations of anti-Israel bias and of unfairly labeling Israel as an apartheid state.
The Washington Free Beaconpreviously reported on concerns that Sustainalytics may place a company on its investment “watchlist” for the “supply of arms” to Israel or other nations involved in conflicts. By downgrading companies that supply the Israel Defense Forces, for instance, Sustainalytics could be relying on metrics that negatively impact Israel more than others.
Gerald Steinberg, NGO Monitor’s founder, said the BDS movement is increasingly trying to manipulate firms that conduct corporate responsibility ratings, known in the industry as CSR ratings.
“As the NGOs leading the BDS movement increasingly try to manipulate CSR firms into advancing their agenda, these firms must be vigilant in vetting these sources,” Steinberg said. “Corporate due diligence is vital to ensure that ratings under the facade of human rights are not based on false claims by ideological activists and organizations.”
A Morningstar spokesman would not address questions related to Sustainalytics’s reliance on Who Profits, but said the company does not in any way endorse or support the BDS movement. Morningstar also said in recent months that it is discontinuing certain services that were found to unfairly target Israel and adjusting others to remove instances of anti-Israel bias.
As Morningstar attempts to distance itself from the BDS movement, a group of leading Jewish organizations raised concerns the reforms do not go far enough. The Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella organization that represents top Jewish groups across the country, says Sustainalytics’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings unfairly target Israel. ESG ratings examine a company based on its social values and tend to unfairly target Israel as a result of its conflict with the Palestinians.
The White & Case report “makes clear that built-in bias against Israel infects Sustainalytics’ methodology and sources, and thus, its other ESG ratings products,” the Jewish group wrote in a letter sent to Morningstar’s top executives. “This bias is not only unfair and harmful to Israeli companies and those doing business in and with Israel, but such bias also threatens to tarnish the ESG ratings framework itself.”
“Morningstar should take the opportunity to cleanse its products of all anti-Israel bias and set an example of fairness and reliability for all companies providing ESG ratings, which represent one-third of dollars managed globally,” the organization said, echoing concerns from others in the pro-Israel advocacy world.
FDD’s Goldberg maintains that the biased metrics employed by Sustainalytics could amount to support for the BDS movement and trigger state and federal anti-BDS laws.
“We now have a mountain of evidence that Morningstar’s ESG subsidiary is engaged in a boycott of Israel through its sources and methods,” Goldberg said. “It’s time for states and Congress to intervene.”
Measures to make regime pay US terror victims shot down
Congressional Democrats killed a handful of measures that would have stopped the Biden administration from providing U.S. taxpayer funds to the hardline Iranian regime and increased economic sanctions on the country.
Democrats running the House Rules Committee last week shot down seven Republican-led measures targeting Iran. Republican foreign policy leaders were pushing for the measures to be included in the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the sprawling annual funding bill for national security priorities.
Congressional sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon said House Democrats rejected the measures to help the Biden administration in its push to secure a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord. Those negotiations are ongoing, and the White House is pushing its allies in Congress to avoid passing any measures that may upset the hardline regime and erode progress in talks.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) “opposed the original JCPOA, and I hoped congressional Democrats might come to their senses and oppose Biden’s disastrous Iran reboot,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) told the Free Beacon, referring to the nuclear deal by its official acronym.
Banks said he expected at least some Democrats who have been critical of the Iran nuclear deal to back measures that would stop the Biden administration from awarding Tehran with taxpayer funds.
“But Democrats’ foreign policy is even weaker now than it was during the Obama years,” Banks said. “House Democrats voted to pave the way towards a JCPOA 2.0 that will enrich terrorists and bring Iran even closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon. It’s not just Joe Biden—the whole party is to blame.”
Banks and his Republican colleagues attempted to pass what they described as a common-sense measure to block the Pentagon from sending any taxpayer dollars to the Iranian regime. The measure would have stopped any funds allocated in the fiscal year 2023 NDAA from going to “the government of Iran,” “any person owned or controlled by the government of Iran,” and “any person identified on the list of specially designated nationals,” according to a copy of the rejected amendment.
Another measure the Republicans expected to receive Democratic support would have terminated the president’s authority to waive sanctions on Russians who work on Iran’s contested nuclear program. Even with a bipartisan opposition to Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine, Democrats rejected this provision.
Other measures would have sanctioned the Iranian supreme leader’s office for human rights abuses and required the Biden administration to submit a report to Congress on Iranians who could be targeted with additional sanctions.
Democrats also rejected a measure that expressed support for forcing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans, to pay compensation to its victims. The resolution also expressed support for keeping the IRGC on the U.S. terrorist lists. The Biden administration was rumored to be considering dropping the designation as part of a concessions package to Tehran in nuclear talks. Biden during his first visit to the Middle East last week said dropping the designation is no longer under consideration.
One measure that was killed would have stopped funds from being allocated to any effort aimed at removing Iran from terrorist financing watchlists, and another would have mandated congressional reports on Iran’s illicit oil trade, which has skyrocketed since the Biden administration relaxed sanctions.
Meanwhile, Iranian leaders announced over the weekend that the country officially has the technical know-how to produce an atomic bomb, a disclosure that has increased calls for the Biden administration to cease diplomacy and begin sanctioning Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.
Patrick Byrne met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, to urge him to investigate allegations of election fraud. Byrne, the founder and former CEO of online retailer Overstock, is set to testify before the Jan. 6 House Select Committee on July 15.
In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times, Byrne recounted his meeting with Trump, which included former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, former attorney to Trump’s campaign and former federal prosecutor, along with a number of White House officials.
The roughly 4.5-hour meeting was “nothing like it has been reported,” Byrne said in an interview with EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” program on July 14.
Byrne said he used a prior invitation from a White House staffer for a tour of the building as a way to gain entry with Flynn and Powell, with the hope of getting to talk to the president about his plan to investigate the widespread allegations of voter fraud.
“We were always after the most minimal on that range of options, which was to do a quick investigation that we said could be done in a few days,” Byrne said of the plan.
‘Perfectly Reasonable Conversation’
Byrne describes a chance encounter with the president as he walked by that enabled the group to meet in the Oval Office. The trio presented to Trump two executive orders—one signed by former President Barack Obama in 2015 and one by Trump in 2018—which, they said, gave Trump the authority to launch an investigation in the event of foreign interference in the election.
President Donald Trump looks on during a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Dec. 7, 2020. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“It has nothing to do with the theories of vote flipping from space. It has nothing to do with the alleged South Korean jets, or Germany this, or Italy that, or any of that,” Byrne said.
Instead, Byrne said, “the argument that was made to the president was that under two executive orders … that say if a foreign nation interferes in one of our elections, disrupts an election, the president really gets a range of options.”
According to Byrne, these options ranged from “something very light-handed, like, ‘let’s have a quick investigation’ to something more substantial, like, ‘let’s have a serious investigation.’”
Much of the conversation prior to the arrival of White House attorneys in the room, according to Byrne, centered on the question of whether multiple government documents constituted enough justification to launch an investigation based on the authority given in the executive orders.
The documents included an Oct. 30, 2020, pre-election warning by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that Iranian state actors were targeting U.S. state websites to obtain voter registration data, as well as an Oct. 22 warning; an updated notice on Nov. 3 that said the foreign actor was successful in at least one state; and an FBI, CISA, and DNI statement on the SolarWinds Orion vulnerability.
“That was a perfectly reasonable conversation to have,” Byrne said. “Everybody was acutely aware that every word we were saying was historic, could be judged by history, should be judged by history.”
Byrne, who said he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and hadn’t ever voted Republican, said he was impressed at “how smart he [Trump] is,” which never came across “from the way he was portrayed in the media.”
President Donald Trump lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks to media while flanked by Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis (R) at a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington on Nov. 19, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
‘No Uniforms’
Trump studied the documents in silence as he received them and then made precise comments, Byrne said.
“So what is it you folks are asking me to do?” Trump eventually asked, leaning back, according to Byrne.
Byrne said he laid out several choices that Trump could make to pursue a “very quick and dirty investigation.”
“That’s why I think that if there’s any charges for them, they should come after me” rather than Trump.
The first option Byrne laid out was to investigate “the obvious six counties where the voting record was stopped,” he said.
Or, a more “heavy-handed option,” he added, would be to target 31 counties previously selected by a political scientist.
“He [Trump] said immediately: ‘just go with the six.’”
Byrne then suggested a cyber team could make copies of hard drives to conduct forensic analysis. Alternatively, investigators could travel to the counties and remain on site for several days to count the ballots and livestream the forensic checks.
To lead the investigation, Byrne proposed a joint team composed of cyber analysts from the United States Marshals Service under the Justice Department and the National Guard.
Former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.) speaks at the “Let the Church ROAR” National Prayer Rally on the National Mall in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
At that point, Pat Cipollone, then-White House counsel—who had joined the meeting at some point and was sitting behind Byrne—stepped forward to raise objections, according to Byrne.
“Mr. President, the nation will go nuts if they see even one uniform around this,” he said, according to Byrne’s recollection. Others, including Flynn, also opposed the idea.
“The DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has teams that are perfectly adequate for this,” Bryne recalled Flynn saying after a second or two of silence.
Byrne made his case again.
“Sir, just to be clear, obviously, it’s your choice, not my choice,” he said. “I think that we’re in this national crisis because we’ve had a complete breakdown of trust, and I’m not sure that doesn’t extend to the FBI and the DHS.”
“If this is all about reinvigorating the system of trust, the U.S. courts are very trusted and the military is very trusted,” and the National Guard, while in uniform, consists of citizen soldiers, making their presence more acceptable, he said he argued.
Trump let him finish “that whole spiel” before voting him down.
“He said, ‘Pat, no uniforms.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’” Byrne recalled.
Byrne insists that he’s the only one who ever put the idea of “uniforms” on the table. “It was not Donald Trump, not anyone else.”
“It was on the table for about 28 seconds. And everybody in the room said no. And Donald Trump said no,” he said. “It was robustly put down.”
‘Obstructionists’
Byrne said Trump that evening hinted at least twice that the idea of leaving the White House held an appeal.
“I’ll never spend a night in this town again. I’ve got my golf courses, I’ve got my friends. Trust me Pat, my life’s going to get a lot better,” he said, according to Byrne. “But how can I do that? If I think that this election was stolen and there might be a foreign element involved, how can I really do that?”
Outgoing President Donald Trump waves as he boards Marine One at the White House on Jan. 20, 2021. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
“He was anything but some crazed tyrant clutching to power,” Byrne said.
What also became clear, he said, was that Trump “was being completely undermined by everyone around him.”
Trump, at one moment, turned to Cipollone to express his disappointment that he hadn’t been alerted to the executive powers.
“Why didn’t you even tell me about these orders, Pat? … Why did I have to hear it from them? At least they want to fight for me.”
“Mr. President, I’m not your campaign lawyer. I’m your White House lawyer,” Cipollone answered, according to Byrne.
“This man [Cipollone] has been telling staffers systematically … that we have to get you out of here, [that] we have to get the president in the transition mode, just get him to concede,” Byrne said he told Trump, adding that he could get White House staffers to back up his statements within half an hour.
Pat Cipollone, former President Trumps White House counsel, exits a conference room during a break in his interview at the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. House Office Building on July 8, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Cipollone’s response according to Byrne was: “Mr. President, you know how hard I’ve been working for you?” according to Byrne, who then watched as Cipollone and several other officials “stormed out.”
“They stormed out three different times,” he said. “I was shocked at how they treated the president. I didn’t even vote for the guy. I didn’t even really like him until this meeting, frankly.”
“They were just so clearly being obstructionists,” Byrne said. “I was hearing that they were being told, if you get the president out the door, there’ll be a million dollar job for you in such-and-such lobbying firm. But if you don’t, your kids aren’t getting into Yale and your kids are getting thrown out of the school they’re in.
“This was going on up and down the DOJ and up and down the administration.”
According to Byrne, one of the White House lawyers told Trump that he had the authority to appoint Powell as special counsel if he chose to do so.
“Finally the lawyer said, ‘Mr. President, you don’t have to fight with us. You can just make Sidney Powell that special counsel just by saying it. You don’t have to sign anything,’” Byrne recalled.
About 30 minutes later, Trump was so fed up with his White House attorneys, Byrne said that’s what he did.
“I’m saying it, Sidney Powell is now a special counsel,” Byrne recalled the president saying.
Sidney Powell in Washington on May 30, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
“Another lawyer spoke up and said, ‘you can’t do that, she needs security clearance. It is going to take months to get a security clearance,’” Byrne said. He then said Flynn told the president he had the same authority to grant her a top secret clearance verbally, which he said the president gave.
“It was left sort of with a rough understanding this was going to happen,” Byrne said. The three—Byrne, Powell, and Flynn—left somewhere past midnight with a sense of excitement that they were “clearing up the mystery.”
Over the weekend, though, when Powell tried to get a White House ID and desk, they discovered the arrangement “had all fallen through.”
Byrne said he was later told that lawyer and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had convinced the president to back out of the plan.
Giuliani on his radio program on July 14 recalled the events at the White House during the meeting.
He said he was called over to the White House by the president and reviewed the documents “purporting to show foreign involvement in the election.”
“I read through them carefully, I came back, and I said it’s clear to me that there’s not enough here,” Giuliani said.
He said the president “didn’t disagree at all” with him and Giuliani thought “it was his sense anyway.”
“Well, then that’s it,” Giuliani said the president said. He added that “at some point, the president made it very clear he wanted them out of the White House, and they were escorted out of the White House, one of them by me.”
Questioning election results and calling for an investigation hadn’t been viewed as controversial until that November, Byrne said.
“I didn’t see that as a huge deal between being in a constitutional crisis that could end the nation—which I knew where we’d be if we tried to choke down the election that nobody had any real confidence in—or getting an answer like that.”
But “it’s different being an entrepreneur than lawyer,” he noted. “I’m just thinking, gee, our country is going to enter this nebulous, awful space or we can in seven days, whatever, we’ll have a total answer to this. That’s how an entrepreneur thinks.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Trump, Powell, Flynn, Cipollone, and Giuliani for comments.
Resident Joe Biden is losing support from some of his biggest backers.
Bill Kristol, who founded and edited the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, became a fierce critic of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and led the NeverTrump movement.
In 2018, Kristol co-founded The Bulwark, whose coverage is largely centered around criticism of Trump.
Two years later, he endorsed Biden in the Democratic primary, calling it a “simple choice,” and in the general election.
On Wednesday, however, Kristol argued that Biden should announce he won’t run for re-election.
He said on Twitter that a retirement announcement by Biden would bolster the Democrats’ chances in the 2022 midterm elections and lead to a Democratic victory in the 2024 presidential race.
Straightforward from here:
1. Biden announces not running again.
2. 2022 focus turns to R extremism, Ds do well in Nov.
3. Inflation subsides, Ukraine defeats Russia, Biden is successful 1-term president.
4. Younger moderate D defeats Trump or Trumpist in ’24.
As the president’s popularity drops further and further amid historic inflation and other crises, even liberals are increasingly giving him the cold shoulder.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll indicated that 64 percent of Democratic voters want someone else than the incumbent as their nominee for president in 2024.
Biden snapped at a reporter who asked him about the poll at a White House event Tuesday.
“Read the polls, jack! You guys are all the same,” he said.
“What’s your message to Democrats who don’t want you to run again?”
At the now-defunct Weekly Standard, the neoconservative ideologue became a crucial proponent of President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The invasion has since become regarded as one of the worst foreign policy disasters in U.S. history.
Kristol reinvented himself by aligning with progressive Democrats as a Trump critic after the 2016 GOP primary, establishing himself as a mainstay on liberal cable channels such as CNN and MSNBC.
So Biden uses climate change lies to kill US oil industry- thus raising prices through roof- and then has our country buy oil from our enemies at a hyper-inflated cost. I’m sure the Russia-Ukraine war was part of the plan. Enemy #1 of the state, just like Barack Hussein Obama [US Patriot]
OPEC expects to increase oil output in 2023 by nearly 1 million barrels per day due to rising global demand.
“In 2023, expectations for healthy global economic growth amidst improvements in geopolitical developments, combined with expected improvements in the containment of COVID-19 in China, are expected to boost consumption of oil,” the organization said in its monthly report released on July 12.
Year over year, world oil demand is anticipated to rise by 2.7 million barrels per day (bpd), and overall demand is projected to reach 103 million bpd, OPEC said in its report.
Non-OPEC supply is expected to increase by 1.76 million bpd in 2023, with OPEC having to chip in an additional 940,000 barrels daily. In total, OPEC production is expected to be at 30.1 million barrels per day in 2023, up from 29.2 million barrels in 2022.
For 2022, total global oil demand is estimated to increase by 3.36 million bpd, with OPEC having to release an extra 1.1 million barrels of oil each day.
In the first quarter of 2022, OPEC was supposed to release 28.63 million bpd but could only produce 28.36 million bpd, a shortfall of 270,000 barrels. Things improved in the second quarter after OPEC produced 610,000 bpd more than expected.
In June, OPEC oil output rose by 234,000 bpd, driven by production increases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Iran, and Angola.
With regard to the United States, OPEC expects total oil output to rise by 700,000 bpd in 2023, a slower growth when compared to the 880,000 bdp increase estimated for 2022.
Increasing Oil Output
Resident Joe Biden is scheduled to meet with Persian Gulf leaders in Saudi Arabia this week to discuss raising oil output to ease gasoline prices. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan stated on July 11 that OPEC members have the capacity to boost oil production.
However, some experts do not agree with such a view.
“I think that a surge in Saudi production seems unlikely. I expect some anodyne statements from Saudi Arabia about helping to balance the global oil market, meet global demand, support economic growth and stability among the import countries,” Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters.
On the sidelines of the G–7 summit in June, French President Emmanuel Macron was heard telling Biden about a call he had with UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan regarding the difficulty in raising output, according to Reuters.
The UAE leader told Macron that his country was at “maximum” oil production capacity and that the Saudis are also struggling.
Scholars at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft cut bait
A few years ago, the Koch brothers and George Soros had a dream. What if the anti-war left joined forces with the isolationist right and worked together to bring U.S. foreign policy back to the 1930s?
From this unholy alliance sprung the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The mission: make America neutral again. Finally appeasers in Washington had a safe space to apologize for Russian oligarchs, Iranian terrorists, and Chinese communists.
Well, all good things must come to an end.
An all-star in the Koch-Soros foreign policy alliance, Joseph Cirincione, announced on Thursday his resignation from the Quincy Institute: “They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies,” he toldPolitico.
Cirincione is not just some disgruntled scholar. He is the former president of Ploughshares, a grant-making organization that was not just a recipient of the Soros organization’s politicized philanthropy, but a gatekeeper and driver of it—deciding which pinkos would prosper and which would starve. Mother Jones reports that Cirincione helped connect Quincy to major donors in its early days.
His change of heart on Quincy is surely a weathervane for other elements of the Soros network. Indeed, Soros himself has been signaling in the last year that he favors a much tougher policy on China than the one offered up by the Quincy crowd, which released a major study in June that found the Chinese military build up was nothing to worry about and has warned of the perils of “threat inflation” when it comes to China’s military expansion.
Soros, by contrast, came very close to endorsing regime change. “It is to be hoped that Xi Jinping may be replaced by someone less repressive at home and more peaceful abroad,” he told an audience at the Hoover Institution in January, calling Xi “the greatest threat that open societies face today.”
Trita Parsi, a co-founder and executive vice president of Quincy, as well as somebody who could be confused for an Iranian agent—at least according to a federal judge—told Mother Jones he’s bewildered that Cirincione would suggest the think tank was avoiding criticism of Russia. But he acknowledges that Quincy is “not going along with the idea that it’s a good thing to change the objectives in Ukraine towards weakening Russia, because we believe that could lead to endless war.”
As the Quincy Institute demonstrated so spectacularly in Afghanistan, one sure fire way to end endless war is to lose the war quickly and all at once.
As for the interpersonal drama that we assume is engulfing the Quincy Institute, and the enmity growing between teams Koch and Soros—may that war truly be endless.
Trade between Russia and Iran has topped $4.5 billion as the two regimes integrate their economies to create a network capable of evading U.S. and international sanctions.
Russia is making major investments in Iran’s ports, nuclear infrastructure, energy sector, and military machine. Iran’s deputy roads and urban development minister, Shahriar Afandizadeh, this week valued this trade at $4.5 billion.
Tehran and Moscow also recently inked an economic deal to carry some 10 million tons of goods from Russia into Iran through a land corridor. This deal “puts emphasis on transit in addition to imports and exports,” according to a summary of Afandizadeh’s comments published Wednesday in the country’s state-controlled press. This relationship helps to keep Moscow afloat as international sanctions cripple Russia’s economy as a result of its war in Ukraine.
Members of Congress and regional experts have warned for some time that Iran and Russia are ratcheting up relations to combat Western sanctions and boost each other’s militaries. With the Biden administration’s diplomacy aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord, warnings have swirled on Capitol Hill that a new deal will create a “sanctions evasion hub for Vladimir Putin based in Iran,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. Iran, Russia, and China also are slated to hold a series of major war drills in Latin America next month, highlighting the emphasis these countries place on combatting the United States in its own backyard.
Iran also recently announced that it will boost exports to Russia, including “construction materials,” with an estimated worth of $3 billion.
The total amount of trade between Iran and Russia last year totaled around $2.5 billion, signaling that in the year since, trade between the countries has increased significantly.
Russian companies also stand to cash in on a new nuclear deal with Iran. Several of Russia’s top state-controlled nuclear companies would receive billions of dollars in revenue once sanctions are waived as part of a new agreement.
Iran has reportedly already paid Russia more than $500 million for its work building out Iran’s nuclear plants. If a nuclear deal is inked, Iran and Russia will be free to continue building nuclear sites.
Sanctioned Russia ships also have been caught in recent months ferrying illicit Iranian oil, providing both regimes with financial lifelines. At least two Russian tankers sanctioned as part of U.S. efforts to isolate Russian businesses were seen carrying illicit Iranian oil from various ports. This type of sanctions-busting scheme is also employed between Iran and China.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said that Russia is learning sanctions evasion techniques from its ally Iran.
“Russia, which is now under increasing sanctions due to its invasion of Ukraine, stands to learn a lot from the Islamic Republic in the sanctions busting space,” he said. “Therefore, the value of Russo-Iranian collaboration will not just be quantitative as represented by the volume or value of trade, but qualitative, namely the industries as well as what contacts are made and experiences gained.”
“The longer Russia’s invasion and war against Ukraine continues, the deeper its embrace of actors like the Islamic Republic, who are used to operating outside or abusing formal financial networks, will be,” Ben Taleblu said.
‘We’re playing this for my brother Louis and his brothers.’
A British boy band recently dedicated its live performance of a terrible song to one of the most virulent anti-Semites in American history, a Washington Free Beacon analysis has determined.
“We’re playing this for my brother Louis and his brothers,” Coldplay frontman Chris Martin said while introducing the song “A Sky Full of Stars” during the band’s May 29 concert at Soldier Field in Chicago. “There’s so many people in here today who help other people, and so we’re playing this for them.”
Martin is the ex-husband of vagina-centric pseudoscience entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow, who starred in numerous films distributed by Harvey Weinstein’s production company. He is also a hippie liberal with a tendency to spout political nonsense such as, “No one is wrong. It is just a question of when people engage. Like with the climate crisis.”
There is ample evidence that indicates the “brother Louis” Martin referenced at his Chicago concert is Louis Farrakhan, the notorious Nation of Islam leader who has described Jews as “termites” and Adolf Hitler as a “very great man.”
• Martin does not have a biological brother named Louis.
• The Nation of Islam is headquartered in Chicago, where Farrakhan owns a $1.1 million home.
• Martin and Farrakhan appear to have posed for a photo together before Coldplay’s concert in Chicago on August 17, 2017.
• Farrakhan recently recounted the time when Martin visited his home “with some Jewish friends” because “he wanted to hear me play the violin.”
The Nation of Islam leader discussed his meeting with Martin during a March 2020 speech, according to the anti-Semite watchdog MEMRI. “Do you know the musicians called Coldplay?” Farrakhan asked his followers. “The leader of Coldplay is Chris Martin. He came to my home, wanted to hear me play the violin. You don’t come to my home and I’m entertaining you. When you come into my home it’s like coming to God in a mosque. You come to be taught.”
The crowd gathered at the Mosque Maryam in Chicago applauded vigorously upon hearing Farrakhan’s assessment of what it is like to visit him at his home. The anti-Semite continued his story about the Coldplay frontman, which did not appear to have a salient point beyond noting the fact that Martin has a private jet and hangs out with Jews. It may have something to do with how a young Farrakhan was taught to “become God enough to challenge Satan and defeat him.” In any event, he does not appear to hold a very high opinion of the singer, and probably would not consider him as a brother.
“Look, Chris Martin flew on his own jet, or he had his own plane, and he brought a few Jewish friends of his,” Farrakhan said. “Now they’re going to scope me out. Sitting in my living room, asking me questions. See when you ask me a question, I immediately consult the God. Wait, wait, wait. You asked me a question. I’m listening, by the time you finish your question, God has given me the answer. But He’s also let me know your motive for asking the question.”
Farrakhan’s long history of anti-Semitism has not dissuaded liberal politicians and activists from associating with the notorious bigot. The left-wing Women’s March organization was embroiled in scandal after a number of its leaders were found to have ties to Farrakhan. Minnesota attorney general and former congressman Keith Ellison was a Nation of Islam member and met with Farrakhan several times while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. His former colleague, Rep. Danny Davis (D., Ill.), has described Farrakhan as an “outstanding human being.”
The Nation of Islam leader, who once led chants of “Death to America” during a rally in Iran, has attacked Jewish leaders in the United States for representing the “synagogue of Satan” and “[wrapping their] tentacles around the U.S. government and … deceiving and sending this nation to hell.”
Iran, Russia, and China are gearing up to run a series of major war drills in Latin America in a show of force meant to signal how these militaries can reach the United States.
The war games, known as the Sniper Frontier competition, show that these malign regime from across the globe are uniting and “getting ready to make a loud statement that the region is ready to embrace the multipolar force,” according to the think-tank report, which focuses on Latin America’s embrace of authoritarian regimes. A key portion of Russia’s “military is prepping to bring, for the first time, some of these military games to the Western Hemisphere”—even as Moscow is bogged down with war in Ukraine.
The war drills are one of the starkest signs to date that Latin America’s coalition of anti-U.S. regimes is working to boost relations with Russia, China, and Iran. Maduro recently wrapped up a diplomatic tour of the Middle East in which he inked a 20-year strategic deal with Iran that laid the groundwork for an Iranian oil tanker to dock in Venezuela and offload Tehran’s illicit crude. “The strategic deal between Iran and Venezuela is meant to mirror similar strategic agreements that the Islamic Republic signed with China and Russia in recent years,” according to the think-tank report. Latin American regimes also are inking military pacts with Russia.
“Russia and its allies Iran and China are about to make a major show of force with the army games competition in August in Venezuela. But it’s important to understand that this force is molded by cyber-enabled, digital disinformation that is at the heart of how this kind of joint military exercise is used to legitimize authoritarian states and delegitimize democracies in the Western Hemisphere,” Joseph Humire, a national security analyst and executive director of the think tank, told the Washington Free Beacon. “By normalizing military movements of U.S. adversaries in the Caribbean, we run the risk of weakening the moral legitimacy of democracies in Latin America.”
There are also signs that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force, is boosting its presence in Latin America.
In early June, a Venezuela cargo plane flying in the region “was discovered to have members of the Qods Force, the elite unit of Iran’s revolutionary guards, on board,” according to the think-tank report. “Gholamreza Ghasemi, a known weapons trafficker for the IRGC and manager of Qeshm Fars Air, was piloting the Boeing 747-300M that returned to Buenos Aires along with 4 other Iranian nationals and 14 Venezuelans.”
After the plane was grounded, “documents, personnel effects, and electronics were seized by Argentine authorities who discovered images of tanks, missiles, and other pro-IRGC paraphernalia on one of the mobile devices,” hinting at a larger Iranian-backed plot unfolding in the region.
Ghasemi reportedly made at least 13 trips from Iran to Venezuela in the past year and a half, raising red flags with the FBI and the Israeli government.
As Iran and Venezuela increase their military and economic ties, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega—an ally of Venezuela’s Maduro—renewed a military pact with Russia “authorizing Russian troops, planes, and ships to patrol the Central American country’s borders and conduct joint military training exercises,” according to the report. The military agreement was signed amid Russia’s war with Ukraine, indicating that a presence in Latin America remains a priority for Moscow even as it faces pressure on its own borders.
Russia has been waging covert espionage operations in Latin America. An accused Russian GRU military intelligence agent was recently caught trying to obtain an internship at the International Criminal Court. The spy “had been cultivating his cover as a Brazilian national for years and may not have been working alone,” according to the think-tank report.
China also has been active in the region, though these efforts have received little media attention.
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi last month inked several economic deals in Latin America, making calls to Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a program to increase the Chinese Communist Party’s global footprint, has made its way into Argentina, where it is working to build infrastructure projects.
“As Russia attempts to delegitimize the international financial system,” the think tank noted, “China has signed an agreement with a Switzerland-based bank to establish a reserve of yuan currency together with Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Chile to counter the U.S. dollar.”
Lawmakers, former officials say change will let Iranian terrorists come to US
The Biden administration altered federal law to make it easier for individuals who have worked with designated terrorist groups to legally enter the United States.
The State and Homeland Security Departments last week amended federal immigration laws to allow foreigners who provided “insignificant material support” to designated terror groups to receive “immigration benefits or other status,” according to the policy published in the Federal Register. Examples of individuals who would fall into the new category, according to the announcement, include individuals who provided “humanitarian assistance” or “routine commercial transactions” to terror groups.
The policy shift is fueling concerns that the Biden administration wants to make it easier for individuals who work with or for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans, to enter the country. Notice of the change came several days before the Biden administration and hardline Iranian government resumed talks aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal.
A State Department spokesman said the law was amended to help vulnerable Afghans, who might have inadvertently worked with terror groups, gain refuge in the United States following the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal that left the Taliban in power. Lawmakers and former U.S. officials, however, say the new regulations are so broadly written that they would apply to organizations like al Qaeda and the IRGC. The policy change is also raising red flags as U.S. officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, face credible death threats from Iran.
The rule does not specifically mention Afghanistan but is written to cover all U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as the IRGC and al Qaeda, experts told the Free Beacon. The Taliban is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization, leaving lawmakers and former U.S. officials concerned the changes extend far beyond vulnerable Afghans and cover those tied to some of the globe’s most violent terror groups.
Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, said that “the Biden administration is claiming this regulation is all about Afghanistan, but they didn’t even mention Afghanistan once in their action, and have made no serious attempt to limit the scope to the situation there.”
“Instead,” said Noronha, who is a fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America think tank, “this looks like a massive watering down of our immigration restrictions against members of terrorist organizations.”
The State Department says the changes are limited to Afghanistan, but would not say why the country is not mentioned once in the new order.
The changes “are an effort to address issues related to Afghanistan,” a State Department spokesman, speaking only on background, told the Free Beacon. “The circumstances between Afghanistan and Iran are very different.” The new rules “are not applicable to people who have received military-type training from [foreign terrorist organizations], including IRGC conscripts.” Rather, the administration is trying to make it easier for those tangentially tied to terrorism to legally enter the country, the official maintained.
When the Free Beacon requested additional information and an explanation as to why the IRGC or similar groups would not be covered by the changes, the State Department declined to answer, saying, “We have no further information or comments to share.” This lack of clarity is fueling concerns about the policy change.
Noronha and others who spoke to the Free Beacon say the broad reference to “foreign terrorist organizations” leaves open the possibility that groups like the IRGC and al Qaeda would benefit from the relaxed immigration guidelines. The revamped guidelines do not specifically include restrictions on either of these groups. “At best this is a horribly written regulation. At worst, it’s an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of Congress and the American people and make it easier for terrorists to come to America,” Noronha said.
Richard Goldberg, who under Trump served on the White House National Security Council as the director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction, said that any effort to loosen restrictions on terror-tied individuals is worrying amid Iran’s threats to kill U.S. leaders.
“Given Iran is actively plotting to kill former American officials, the administration should carefully explain if and how this [rule] might apply to a potential affiliate of the IRGC, and provide a high-level commitment to take all necessary steps to bar any potential IRGC associate from admission to the United States,” Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, told the Free Beacon.
Republican lawmakers agree with this assessment. Five Republican foreign policy leaders who spoke to the Free Beacon expressed concerns the administration is trying to quietly grant concessions to Iran as it reenters nuclear talks.
“It’s outrageous that the Biden administration is lifting the blanket ban on individuals who have provided support to terrorists from entering the United States,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Free Beacon. “The timing raises concerns coming just a few days before the latest round of Iran talks. Resident Biden should end these failed negotiations once and for all and return to a policy of maximum pressure, rather than continuing to make concessions to the terrorist regime in Iran.”
Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he and his colleagues worry the Biden administration is attempting to grant concessions to Iran via backdoor changes to American laws.
“What do Americans gain by letting members of Iran’s terrorist army cross our borders?” Banks asked.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), a combat veteran and also a member of the Armed Services Committee, said the change is purely about “appeasing terrorist groups—whether it’s the IRGC, Houthis, or Taliban.”
Reps. Lisa McClain (R., Mich.) and Pat Fallon (R., Texas), both Armed Services Committee members, expressed shock at how broadly written the new regulations are.
“In what world is it an acceptable decision to allow terrorists into our country?” Fallon asked the Free Beacon. “Instead of ending the nuclear talks with Iran all together, Joe Biden has decided to bend over backwards to the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. Before it is too late, I urge them to immediately reconsider this foolish decision.”
Update June 29, 3:31 p.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the Biden administration made no formal announcement of the policy change.
MSNBC’s Neal Katyal: In wake of Roe overturn, GOP legislatures could ban Tylenol
Left-wing lawyer and #Resistance hero Neal Katyal, who once represented al Qaeda terrorists, said on Monday that Republican states could soon ban over-the-counter pain medication such as Tylenol.
“It wouldn’t shock me if the legislature of Alabama started being opposed to Tylenol or something like that,” Katyal told MSNBC in comments about abortion pill access in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Katyal, who warned that the High Court is “really out of step with the mainstream of American society,” is best known as the face of the “al Qaeda 7,” a controversial group of lawyers who represented al Qaeda terrorists before joining the Obama Justice Department.
The former acting solicitor general also faced criticism in 2020 when he appeared before the Supreme Court to defend his corporate clients, Nestlé and Cargill, against charges of abetting child slavery in Africa.
Katyal has in recent years championed several left-wing legal causes, leading challenges against former president Donald Trump’s travel ban and border separation policy.
New York billionaire and refiner John Catsimatidis, who owns hundreds of gas stations, blasted resident Joe Biden’s pinning the blame on high prices at the pump on gas station owners, arguing there’s only one solution for inflation—boosting production of crude.
Catsimatidis made the remarks in an interview on Fox News on June 24, after being asked to comment on Biden’s call to gas station owners to “bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you are paying for the product.”
“Do it now. Do it today. Your customers, the American people, they need relief now,” Biden said at a White House press conference on June 23, in which the president called for a federal gas tax holiday, urged oil companies to use their profits to boost refining capacity, and leaned on gas station owners to pass along lower crude oil prices by lowering prices at the pump.
‘Ridiculous to Put It on Us’
Catsimatidis reacted to Biden’s remarks by defending gas station owners, arguing that they’ve been “making the same margin that we’ve been making forever” as they have to cover payroll and pay rent, electricity bills, and other operating expenses.
While the margin gas station owners make fluctuates several cents one way or the other, Catsimatidis said it’s “ridiculous to put it on us. We’re not the ones that created the problem.”
The price of gasoline has nearly doubled since Biden took office, with the president variously blaming oil industry greed, a lack of refining capacity, global supply shortfalls set against a sharp post-pandemic rebound in demand, and the war in Ukraine.
Some experts and industry insiders have argued that the Biden administration’s anti-fossil fuel policies have discouraged companies from investing in refining capacity.
“It’s not the war in Ukraine. It’s really domestically caused constraint on the supply side,” said Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario and expert on energy and environmental policy, in a recent interview with The Epoch Times.
“Nobody’s willing to invest in expanding refinery capacity because the outlook from everything that the government has said is you won’t get the approvals,” he added.
McKitrick’s view was echoed by Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, who said in a recent interview that he does not believe another oil refinery will be built again in the United States, arguing that government policies are the key factor.
“We’ve seen refineries closed. We’ve seen units come down. We’ve seen refineries being repurposed to become bio refineries. And we live in a world where the policy, the stated policy of the U.S. government is to reduce demand for the products that refiners produce,” Wirth said.
Still, American drivers facing pain at the pump could see some relief from economic headwinds and reduced demand, if not from gas station owners squeezing their margins or refiners finding ways to process more crude.
‘No Denying Biden Has Some Blame’
Oil prices have retreated over the past two weeks amid broad market concern over an economic slowdown as soaring inflation has pushed central banks to tighten financial conditions by hiking rates.
The drop in crude prices has led gas stations to reduce prices at the pump, with the national average for a gallon of gas landing at $4.897 on June 27, according to AAA.
Several weeks ago, that figure stood at over $5 a gallon, while a year ago, the national average for a gallon of gas was $3.095.
Some gasoline market experts, like GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan, predict further drops.
“We’re down to $4.88/gal with #gasprices down for the second straight week. A third is possible, with prices by July 4 falling to $4.75-$4.80/gal,” De Haan wrote in a recent tweet.
What’s De Haan’s take on Biden’s role in high prices at the pump?
“There’s no denying Biden has some blame for rising #gasprices, but it is far far from 100%,” he said in a tweet, while agreeing “100 percent” with a comment that pinned the blame on a massive demand disruption related to COVID-19 combined with a sluggish domestic production response driven by the desire to use profits to repair damaged balance sheets when oil prices crashed at the beginning of the pandemic.
‘Open Up the Spigots’
For his part, Catsimatidis said in the interview on Fox that there’s only one fix for the current inflationary spike—a big part of which is due to soaring energy costs.
“We have 100 years’ worth of oil,” he said. “Open up the spigots.”
“If we open up the spigots and flooded the market with oil, with crude oil, American crude oil, we bring the price of oil back” and “inflation goes away,” Catsimatidis said.
The Western world’s “total failure of deterrence” is largely to blame for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in a foreign policy speech Wednesday in London.
The West’s decades-long failure to confront Putin and other malign regimes like China and Iran should serve as a warning that prompts a “fundamental shift in how the West approaches our enemies,” Haley said, according to an early transcript of her remarks obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. She said it is time for the Western world to cut economic ties with Russia and China to send a message to these regimes that their subversion of the international order will no longer be tolerated.
Haley, who is positioning herself as a Republican prospect for the 2024 presidential election, previewed how a future Republican administration would handle the globe’s most pressing foreign policy matters. She harshly criticized the Biden administration’s appeasement of countries like Iran but also said Europe shares blame for the world’s instability—criticism that is usually expressed behind closed doors when a foreign leader travels abroad.
“It was Western weakness that convinced Putin he could get away with attempting to swallow Ukraine,” Haley said. “He saw America as too internally divided and distracted, and Europe as too bureaucratic and soft to stop him. And sadly, I have to say he wasn’t wrong.”
Decades of appeasement—and fears about directly confronting the Russia-China-Iran axis—led to the worst European war in nearly 80 years.
“We should have made crystal clear to Putin the full implications of his actions ahead of time. We didn’t,” Haley said. “And now we have the worst war in Europe since the Second World War. This dereliction of duty was years in the making. For too long, the West wrongly feared provoking Putin, instead of taking the steps needed to prevent him from starting a war in the first place.”
The Biden administration’s recent foreign policy blunders, primarily the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, provided the fuel that sparked Putin’s war machine, Haley said.
“It pains me to say it, but if there had been no Afghanistan disaster, there would likely have been no Ukraine invasion,” she said. “Putin saw our lack of resolve in Kabul and assumed nothing meaningful would happen once his tanks rolled into Kyiv.”
But the conditions that led to Putin’s war weren’t created overnight. The United States and Europe spent decades trying to integrate Russia and China into the global economy while ignoring their totalitarian tendencies and mass military buildup.
“The West’s foolishness was boundless,” Haley said. “Whenever Russia tested us, the West shrugged off the necessary strong response, fearing it would do more harm than good.”
“It is critical that we all understand this central point: Appeasement never satisfies the appetites of tyrants. It only makes them want more,” Haley said. “Trying to be ‘inoffensive’ only emboldens our enemies. It leads to wars—like the one we are now witnessing right now in Ukraine.”
Russia is not the world’s most present threat, however, according to Haley. That distinction goes to China.
There can be “no doubt that China is the biggest national security threat the world faces,” she said.
There is only one solution to reassert Western dominance, Haley said. “We must economically detach from our enemies and rely more heavily on ourselves and our friends.”
“That means breaking the Western addiction to Russian energy,” Haley said. “It means securing strategic supply chains completely free of Chinese control or leverage. It means expecting our businesses to do their part to uphold our interests rather than those of our enemies.”
The belief that “economic interdependence with hostile regimes” would dampen their worst tendencies has been “painfully disproven,” according to Haley. If the West does not abandon these foolish ambitions, “our pain and vulnerability will only increase.”
The Western world stands at an “inflection point,” facing a “set of powerful and fanatical dictators with dreams of conquest. Imperial Russia, Communist China, and Jihadist Iran pose existential threats to us and to free peoples all over the world,” Haley said. “The Western way of life depends on deterring these threats.”
A stalemate, she said, “is not good enough. Victory is required.”
An Arkansas law that bars state contractors from engaging in Israel boycotts was upheld Wednesday by a U.S. appeals court, dealing a major setback to supporters of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Arkansas’s anti-BDS law—which bars state contractors from waging economic warfare on Israel—”does not violate the First Amendment,” the court concluded, rejecting arguments from activists that banning state contractors from engaging in Israel boycotts violates their free speech rights.
BDS supporters across America have tried to frame the debate as a free speech issue. The Arkansas decision sets a precedent that these arguments are bunk because economic boycotts are not speech and provides legal standing to other states that have also passed anti-BDS measures into law. Israel’s enemies will now have a much harder time fighting against this type of state legislation.
The Arkansas law, like many others across the nation, prohibits any entity that contracts with the state from engaging in Israel boycotts. The state was first sued over the law in 2017 by the Arkansas Times, which claimed the statute is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment by restricting protected speech.
“The district court dismissed the suit, holding that economic boycotts do not implicate the First Amendment because they are neither speech nor expressive conduct,” according to the ruling. The appeals court affirmed the district court’s finding.
Pro-Israel organizations and legal advocates who worked to ensure the anti-BDS law was upheld praised the court’s decision.
“Progressive groups have used bogus constitutional arguments as prerexts to protect the discriminatory treatment of primarily Jewish groups. Embarrassed to publicly defend BDS itself, they have claimed to oppose such laws out of legal scruple. Today that pretext has been removed, and Congress can move forward with confidence to pass federal anti-BDS legislation,” said Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who has helped draft many state anti-BDS laws and participated in the 8th Circuit litigation.
“The court’s conclusion should put to bed any arguments put forth by bigots who won’t simply settle for demonizing and boycotting Israel but want the state to aid and abet that appalling endeavor,” added Sandra Parker, an attorney and chair of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) action fund.
BDS activists across the nation have begun using the courts to try to shoot down state laws that bar Israel boycotts. Legal challenges in Georgia, Arizona, Kansas, and Texas have been working their way through the court system.
Resident Joe Biden officially endorsed a suspension of federal and state taxes on gasoline and diesel Wednesday.
Speaking at the White House, Biden urged Congress to temporarily lift the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal tax on gasoline and 24.4-cent-per-gallon levy on diesel for three months, effective until the end of September.
He also pushed states to adopt equivalent relief for motorists. State taxes on fuel are higher than the federal level. Several states, including Connecticut and New York, have paused state fuel taxes. Other jurisdictions, like California, have discussed direct relief and consumer rebates.
“We can bring down the price of gas and give families just a little bit of relief,” the president said in his prepared address.
“I fully understand that a gas tax holiday alone is not going to fix the problem, but it will provide families some immediate relief, just a little bit of breathing room as we continue working to bring down prices for the long haul.”
Biden rejected Republicans’ assertions that it is his administration’s fault for soaring energy prices. Instead, the president blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for surging oil and gas costs, referring to it again as “Putin’s price hike.”
“I said at the time, during the most serious aggression in Europe, to defend freedom was not going to go without cost for the American people,” he stated. “And we’re going to have to pay a price as well.”
The president listed the actions his administration has taken this year, including tapping into domestic reserves and encouraging nations around the world to release supplies. At a time when companies are enjoying record profits, Biden also urged the energy industry to pass on any savings to consumers.
“I’m doing my part. I want the Congress, the states, and the industry to do their part as well,” Biden said. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump.”
A gas pump displays the price of fuel at a gas station in McLean, Va., on June 10, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
When all of these actions are combined, the White House projects that prices at the pump could decline by more than $1 per gallon. This figure was calculated by considering the 18-cent federal gas tax, potential state relief that could average about 30 cents, retailers lowering prices by 25 cents, and nudging refiners to deploy their record profits to cut prices and expand capacity, which could result in about 66 cents in savings, according to a senior administration official.
“Gas prices are up almost $2 per gallon since Putin accelerated his military buildup,” the official told reporters in a conference call on Tuesday. “[T]he president promised and remains committed to doing everything he can to reduce the impact of the price hike on the American people.”
With the summer driving season getting started and the exceptional costs that families and motorists are facing right now, the suspension is meant to address this “unique moment” in America, according to the White House.
A customer prepares to pump gas into her car at a Chevron gas station in San Rafael, Calif., on May 20, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Meaningful Relief?
The announcement comes as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is scheduled to meet with seven of the nation’s top refiners this week to determine if there are near-term solutions that can be outlined to reduce sky-high energy prices.
Several policymakers have been concerned that imposing a federal gas tax holiday would eat into the Highway Trust Fund.
“Suspending the federal gas tax will not provide meaningful relief at the pump for American families, but it will blow a multi-billion-dollar hole in the highway trust fund,” said House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) in a statement Tuesday.
In a letter last week, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) urged Biden to avoid a federal gas tax holiday, warning about the “severe unintended consequences” for infrastructure.
“While there is undoubtedly a need to provide American consumers relief from spiking costs, there is no guarantee a gas tax suspension would reduce prices at the pump or stem the broader inflation affecting the global economy, and it may only increase oil companies’ bottom lines,” Blumenauer wrote.
Gas prices displayed in San Clemente, Calif., on June 7, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
The White House dismissed these arguments, telling reporters that the president’s $1.6 trillion reduction in the federal deficit means the federal government can afford to tap into the fund and potentially rely on other revenue sources to fill the hole. Biden has also previously contended that funding from last year’s infrastructure law, which included $550 billion in total new funding, could be used to plug the gap.
Others within the president’s own party have been skeptical of the policy, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), saying in April that while it is “good PR, there’s no guarantee that the saving, the reduction in the federal tax, that would be passed on to the consumer.”
Soaring Prices
Over the last year, the national average for a gallon of gasoline has soared roughly 61 percent, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). A gallon of diesel has spiked about 80 percent since last year.
According to an analysis from Kiplinger, state gas tax holidays could have a greater impact since they are higher than the federal levy in 49 states. The financial news publisher does not anticipate much savings for the average person, while the overall tax revenue loss would be greater.
“[A] person who drives 12,000 miles a year in a car that averages 25 miles per gallon would only save $7.36 per month if the federal gas tax was suspended,” the analysis stated. “But on the other hand, the overall loss of tax revenue in the federal Highway Trust Fund would be high—estimated by the White House to be about $10 billion. That’s money that wouldn’t be available for road repairs and other needed infrastructure projects.”
In recent months, Biden has employed several measures to help curb oil and gas prices.
His administration tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPRs) to release one million barrels per day over the next six months. He has also encouraged members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), including Saudi Arabia, to boost production. Biden also issued a waiver on an ethanol ban, temporarily authorizing the sale of gasoline with large ethanol content during the summer months to combat rising gas prices.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices have eased over the last week, sliding about 10 percent to around $106 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Crude prices have taken a substantial hit on growing recession fears as investors are worried that a global economic downturn amid inflation and rising interest rates could reduce consumer and industrial demand.
According to Phil Flynn, an energy market analyst at The Price Futures Group, the tax relief won’t assist in resolving the fundamental issues in the U.S. petroleum market.
“The problem in the gasoline market is not the gasoline tax but the fact that refining capacity can’t keep up with demand,” he wrote in a report. “If you lower the gasoline tax, that’s a great thing but it’s only going to cause demand to go higher as refiners are already producing gasoline at maximum capacity.”
In a stirring and spot-on campaign email, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis declares war on the Far Left calling it a “Radical Vigilante Woke Mob.”
While I’ve seen my share of them over the years and sent out a few myself, campaign fundraising emails are notorious for appealing to the hard-core base of both parties.
So, most of them are taken with a grain of salt by political observers.
However, the email I just received from the DeSantis re-election campaign really hit home. It accurately defined and summarized the aggressive domestic threat posed by the extreme Left to our nation’s very core:
Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.
This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.
A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.
Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.
We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.
We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”
DeSantis omitted the LGBTQ brainwashing of our young children and the collusion of major woke companies like Disney in doing so, but he has been at the forefront of battling both these evils in Florida.
The DeSantis campaign continues, noting something that impacted me directly on the huge social media platform LinkedIn: “We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.”
And of course, the last piece of the massive leftist effort: “We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.”
Referring to himself as the “Governor of the Free State of Florida,” DeSantis then goes on to make his pitch for how he will fight this grave threat to America, at least in Florida, with “faith, with reason, and with freedom.”
And of course, he asks for our financial support.
In my view, this email accurately and effectively summarizes the threat we face from the extreme Left in America today. DeSantis is on the front lines of this battle in Florida, but he also seems to be preparing to take the fight nationally as well.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Columnist Naomi Wolf, author of “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” asserts that after two years of pandemic policies, people in free societies are behaving more like those in authoritarian societies.
Wolf maintains that America is now less free, and becoming almost unrecognizable.
“A handful of bad actors” including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Big Tech, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) used the pandemic to “exploit the crisis in such a way as to reengineer our free democratic open societies, especially in the West, especially in the United States, into a post-free society, a post-humane society,” said Wolf during a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
The Biden administration in April extended the 2-year-old coronavirus public health emergency for another 90 days.
Wolf said, based on history, the ongoing lockdowns and extension of the public health emergency indicate society is in the last phase of a tyrannical takeover, because with emergency powers, laws protecting liberty can be suspended.
According to Wolf, there are 10 steps every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10, said Wolf. Some of the other steps include demonizing whistleblowers and critics, calling dissent “treason,” “espionage,” or “subversion,” and controlling the media narrative.
During the last two years of lockdowns and mandates, Big Tech and the elites have profited while the average Americans have seen the American Dream slowly “closing” on them, she said.
“And so often, when a democracy is dying, or a regime is turning the screws on freedoms to create an established new form of tyranny, it happens intentionally in a very incremental way,” said Wolf. “And you really see this from 1930 to 1933 in Germany.”
She said humanity is witnessing the formation of a two-tier society of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, in which people who would never discriminate against others based on categories of race and sex are now discriminating against the unvaccinated.
“Suddenly, they’re happily embracing a discrimination society in which some people are cast as clean and valuable members of society and other people are ostracized and marginalized and ‘othered’ and described as sort of dirty and causing infection to others,” said Wolf.
She argues that big tech companies had an active role in creating these perceptions and in “shaping legislation and certainly in presenting the drama of COVID and lockdowns to us, and then the vaccine rollout, in such a way as to change human behavior and to change human society,” said Wolf.
Wolf cited the emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing Facebook’s role in getting the right public health “messages out” during the lockdowns.
Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images; Greg Nash/Getty Images)
People had no choice but to rely on tech platforms while they were locked down, and Big Tech used that to manipulate the public, said Wolf.
“What I do trace in the book is how there was a vast profit that tech companies made by suppressing human assembly, by helping to message that it was unsafe or unlawful to gather in person,” she said. “And when you understand that big tech companies are competing with human beings gathering in human spaces, you understand why there was a vested interest in suppressing human assembly.”
Wolf thinks big tech companies will not stop at just harvesting data on the computer, but that they want to dominate peoples’ bodily autonomy with vaccine passports.
“What these companies want more than anything is to leave the parameters of your computer and to colonize other currently non-colonized spaces, notably the human body,” said Wolf.
This would give these companies and governments the ability to switch off peoples’ access to commerce, travel, and other goods and services if they did not comply with a particular mandate, Wolf added.
Some forms of digital tracking and surveilling are already here in the United States, she said.
“You’re now expected to swipe these QR codes just to see the menu, or just to get in. And the QR code uploads your data to a central database,” she said, adding that she’s seen the software “that maps the relationships of everyone sitting at that table, and then builds databases and networks of relationships.”
This illustration photo shows a person looking at the app for the New York State Excelsior Pass, which provides digital proof of a Covid-19 vaccination, in Los Angeles on April 6, 2021 (Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images)
Wolf said that on a scale of one to 10 on the Chinese social credit system, the United States is currently at a three.
“There’s a change that’s happened in American cities in the last two years,” she said.
Because most people around the world, particularly in U.S. cities, use digital apps to travel, do banking, and shop, a digital social credit system similar to China’s is imminent, she said.
Our data is being harvested and used by the “global technocratic elite” to control human behavior, said Wolf.
“We’ve assumed that the worst it can be is data are harvested from us with everything that we choose to do using our free will as human beings,” said Wolf.
“But what I’ve seen is that digital technology has its own logic, and it isn’t restricted by what human beings want to do. So once digital platforms and their oligarchical masters can figure out how to change people’s behavior to suit technology, there’s nothing, moral or ethical, that will keep them from changing people’s behavior to suit their technology, and to suit their business plans,” she added.
The pandemic has revealed how this type of digital control is playing out, because humans, before the prevalence of digital technology, did not choose to “socially distance” to fight pandemics, said Wolf.
“The dream of our digital overlords is for technology to tell humans what to do, and that’s exactly where we’re at,” said Wolf.
While some people might label her a conspiracy theorist, her opinions are based on a long career as a journalist, political consultant, and now tech CEO, Wolf said. Furthermore, she has witnessed firsthand the powerful elites making historical decisions under the radar, she said.
Wolf was well acquainted with this group of powerful people until recently when she was ejected from their circles for writing oppositional pieces on lockdowns.
“But it’s really true that the global technocratic elite have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow Germans or Americans or Russians or Chinese, and they now are able to align above the level of nation-states,” she said.
The panel ‘Leaders for Europe’s Digital Decade’ at the 2022 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on May 25, 2022. The yearly meeting takes place from May 22 to 26 with heads of governments and economic leaders. (Eric Lalmand/AFP via Getty Images)
For example, one of the WEF’s goals is to make nation-level decision-making less and less important, and the World Health Organization’s goal is to make public health decisions on a global scale, bypassing countries’ own authorities via the pandemic treaty, said Wolf.
“These technocratic elites really do believe that they can order the world better than you and I and that they have the right to,” she said. “That’s really scary.”
Little by little, humanity’s tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism has grown.
“The war wasn’t just on us as a political entity, the war was on American culture, and is on American culture,” she said. “And they’ve succeeded largely, unless we wake up, because we were a kind, decent, inclusive culture that respected other people’s boundaries and freedoms. … And now a CCP-style cruelty is something that we tolerate.”
What people believe is largely determined by the news they consume, said Wolf, and many people only watch news outlets that give a skewed picture of pandemic treatments and policies, largely funded by wealthy people like Bill Gates.
“I do trace in ‘The Bodies of Others’ how millions of dollars flowed and are flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the BBC and the Guardian and NPR and other formerly very credible, objective news outlets.”
Because most people get slanted news coverage, the country is more divided and many people on the left refuse to consider any other narrative or look at primary source documents, because they believe only government sources are giving them “scientific” information, said Wolf.
This skewed messaging has been able to convince people that the mandates and lockdowns are more American and important than liberty or critical thinking.
Wolf said the most brilliant aspect of the pandemic messaging was that it was framed altruistically.
“You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child,’” said Wolf. “This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”
Now that those in power have effectively conditioned people to be fearful and submissive, they can keep reinstituting emergency powers, she argued.
“That’s what emergency law means,” she said. “They can do whatever they want, basically. It’s a weaponization of boards of health, it’s a weaponization of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the [Department of Health and Human Services].”
Wolf said although the situation is dire, people can do something to push back against this tyranny by being informed about what is really going on in the country, assembling in groups, and getting involved politically on the local level.
As it stands now, “I will say that each side is being fed narratives and stereotypes about the other that would persuade each side that the other is absolutely insane and dangerous, dangerously insane,” said Wolf.
“I get that conservatives think, ‘liberals don’t know what a woman is.’ That is not actually literally true, and liberals think ‘conservatives all want to torch our democratic processes, storm the Capitol, and are misogynist, racist thugs who are trigger happy,” said Wolf.
The last two years have conditioned people to fear each other and so the conversations that would have normally occurred when people gathered are not happening and keeping the country divided, said Wolf. She said she will gladly talk to people on the right.
Communist Party cadres hang a placard on the neck of a Chinese man during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The words on the placard state the man’s name and accuse him of being a member of the “black class.” (Public Domain)
“People I love think I’m doing something wrong in even talking to conservatives and libertarians. That’s very dangerous. The left, especially, has decided that you’re morally complicit if you have a conversation across the aisle,” Wolf said. “That is censorship, that is cancel culture, that’s un-American, that is an importation from Communism.”
She urges people to remember what makes America unique and a beacon to other nations: to remember we are the great experiment where neighbors talked to each other, listened, and didn’t “rat” each other out if they did not agree with each other, Wolf said.
In the United States, the right to worship freely is often called America’s first freedom. It is a necessary component of U.S. foreign policy and our commitment to creating a more peaceful world.
History has shown that governments and societies that champion religious freedom are safer, more prosperous, and secure. Our commitment to protect this fundamental human right is both a moral necessity and a national security imperative.
On June 2, the U.S. Department of State released the 2021 International Religious Freedom Report. The more than 2,000-page report is a comprehensive, fact-based account of nearly 200 countries and territories around the world that is made publicly available for use by all guardians of religious freedom, including governments, religious communities, and activists.
For more than two decades, the International Religious Freedom Report has been an essential tool for the United States to advance and defend the universal right to worship freely.
Under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the State Department is required to submit an annual report to Congress detailing the status of religious freedom in countries, government policies violating religious beliefs and practices, and U.S. policies that promote religious freedom.
As former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo previously said of the report, “Its very existence is evidence of our strong resolve to defend human dignity.”
First, discriminatory laws and policies are used by foreign governments to abuse their own people. For example, excessive prison sentences and home raids target people of faith in Russia, the Taliban and ISIS-K threaten and attack religious minorities in Afghanistan, and the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities.
Second, the report found that the rise of intolerance and hatred in societies fuels violence and conflict. According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, record-high levels of antisemitic incidents took place in Germany and the United Kingdom in 2020. In a separate report, the Commission stated that 82 percent of Jews in Sweden, 85 percent in Poland, 86 percent in Belgium, and 95 percent in France said that antisemitism is a “very big” problem.
Lastly, the partnership and collaboration among members of civil society, governments, and multilateral partners have been important to making progress in advancing and defending religious freedom.
Using the findings of the report, the president is also required to designate any nation that has “engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom,” as a “Country of Particular Concern.” Nations that are severe violators of religious freedom but don’t meet all of the CPC criteria are designated as “Special Watch List Countries.”
On Nov. 15, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken designated Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan as Countries of Particular Concern.
The Special Watch List designations included Algeria, Comoros, Cuba, and Nicaragua. As I previously wrote, the administration removed Nigeria, but in the wake of the ongoing violence, it should be redesignated as one of the world’s most serious violators of religious freedom.
The Biden administration’s updates to these designations, which have yet to be released, will be watched closely by religious liberty advocates and perpetrators of persecution alike.
Tragically, as evidenced by the latest International Religious Freedom Report, religious oppression is a daily reality for millions of people of faith around the world.
The United States plays a consequential role in exposing these atrocities so that violators of religious freedom can be held accountable. America will not sit back as people are targeted, punished, and persecuted for their faith.
A U.S. senator Friday spoke out against the “woke” policies implemented by the military, which has become especially apparent during LGBT Pride Month of June.
“The United States military should be focused on one objective – creating the most lethal fighting force on planet Earth,” Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told The TennesseeStar. “Instead, Joe Biden’s military leaders are secretly attempting to turn our brave warfighters into social justice warriors. Communist China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do not care how woke our military is or what our soldiers’ pronouns are.“
She echoed a similar sentiment on Twitter.
“The Biden Defense Department should focus energy on combatting our adversaries — not wokeism,” she said.
Communist China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do not care what our soldiers’ pronouns are.
The U.S. Air Force celebrated Pride Month with a message of its own on Twitter.
“Pride in all who serve,” the military branch said, attaching a photo of its members running alongside a pride flag.
Many Twitter users were quick to criticize the Air Force for the post, noting that there is not an American flag in the photo.
The Department of Defense’s Inspector General’s [DOGIG] office celebrated Pride Month on Friday, too.
“The [DODIG] recognizes June 2022 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month. During Pride Month, we commemorate the achievements and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community, to include service in defense of our Nation,” that office said.
The @DoD_IG recognizes June 2022 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month. During Pride Month, we commemorate the achievements and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community, to include service in defense of our Nation. pic.twitter.com/K69xtRi6EM— DoD Inspector General (@DoD_IG) June 17, 2022
The Department of Defense (DOD) itself, the parent organization of America’s military branches, sent out a June 7 press release officially recognizing Pride Month.
“DOD is committed to ensuring and promoting an atmosphere of dignity and respect for all civilian and military personnel,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks said. “We strive to make the Department of Defense a workplace of choice for all Americans willing and qualified to serve. In doing so, we set a bedrock foundation where all personnel are valued and given an equal opportunity to succeed.”
‘China is the drug he just can’t quit’: GOP Senator slams NIAD head’s remarks
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was unable to commit to stop federal funding from going to Chinese scientific research, despite the U.S. intelligence community assessing the regime as America’s top adversary.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), made the remarks while appearing virtually at the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearing on June 16, during an exchange with Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).
“The NIH is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020. In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars,” said the senator during the hearing. “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”
Since 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a total of $8.3 million in grants to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its division National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, along with five top public universities in mainland China and Hong Kong, according to the NIH website.
Although this amount doesn’t capture dollars later funneled to a Chinese institution through a U.S.-based organization, such as New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which had partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform coronavirus-related experiments that some experts said fit the definition of gain-of-function research, that is, experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a virus.
Fauci, in response to Marshall’s question, said that the U.S. federal agencies “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”
“So I don’t think I’d be able to tell you that we are going to stop funding Chinese,” Fauci said.
“We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he continued, adding that “grants that go to foreign countries, including China, have State Department clearance.”
“Dr. Fauci’s remarks prove that China is the drug he just can’t quit,” Marshall later told The Epoch Times about the NIAID head’s response.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) questions Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a Senate panel on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
“Dr. Fauci told the truth for once after years of repeated dishonesty that has eroded Americans’ trust in our public health institutions. In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, our government should know it’s dangerous and wrong to continue funding research projects supported by the Chinese Communist Party.”
The senator, at the hearing, followed up by asking Fauci if he agrees that the American public lacks records and studies from EcoHealth Alliance’s research.
Fauci’s answer was evasive.
“We have access to an extraordinary amount of information that has gone there,” he said, arguing that the publicly available information in the scientific journals is sufficient.
“Obviously none of us know everything that’s going on in China but if the question at hand is the rather small … peer-reviewed high-priority grant that was given from Eco[Health] to China in a sub-award we have a lot of good information that’s in the publishing.”
The NIH gave a total of $3.1 million grant to EcoHealth over the five years from 2014 to 2019. A fifth of that, $599,000, went to the Wuhan lab, in part for identifying and altering bat coronaviruses deemed likely to infect humans, documents obtained by The Intercept show.
Fauci earlier this week tested positive for COVID-19 and joined the Thursday Senate hearing remotely. His response to Marshall omitted reference EcoHealth’s lack of disclosure over some of its research activities, which would have prompted an NIH review over biosafety measures.
In this image from video, Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies to a Senate panel via remotelink on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
In one experiment at the Wuhan facility, funded by NIH via EcoHealth, mice infected with a modified version of the original bat coronavirus “became sicker than those infected” with the original version, an “unexpected result” that was not “something that the researchers set out to do,” Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director at the NIH, told lawmakers last October.
He said EcoHealth had violated grant terms by failing to promptly notify the NIH about the finding.
Fauci, at the Thursday hearing, also told Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) that he believes the outbreak of the virus “is very, very likely a jump in species from an animal host,” and less likely to be the result of a lab leak.
“I believe it’s essential to have cooperation and collaboration with the Chinese,” he said when Braun asked him whether he thinks Beijing will cooperate with him to “get to the thorough bottom of” COVID-19 origins.
Chevron this week released a statement addressing resident Joe Biden’s letter to oil companies that suggested he may take executive action amid record-high gas prices.
“We understand the significant concerns around higher fuel prices currently faced by consumers around the country, and the world. We share these concerns, and expect the Administration’s approach to energy policy will start to better reflect the importance of addressing them,” Chevron said in a statement to Biden.
The president sent letters Wednesday to Marathon Petroleum Corp., Valero Energy Corp., ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, Chevron, BP, and Shell to demand action on lowering gas prices. He asked why oil companies are not refining more and claimed they are reaping windfall profits.
“At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Biden wrote, according to the letter. This weak, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated that oil producers have a “patriotic duty” to increase refining capacity, although she told a reporter Thursday that the United States doesn’t need to be drilling more to deal with the record prices at the pump.
Chevron further said that since Biden took office in January 2021, his administration has signaled that it will “impose obstacles to our industry delivering energy resources the world needs.”
While the firm did not elaborate, it may have been referring to a flurry of executive orders targeting the oil industry such as killing the Keystone XL pipeline, suspending new oil drilling leases on federal lands, and ending fossil fuel subsidies used by certain agencies, among other measures.
Chevron also stated it will increase its Permian Basin production by 15 percent in 2022, while other oil firms have said they’ve already increased capacity in light of the gas prices.
“Our refineries are running full out,” Bruce Niemeyer, corporate vice president of strategy and sustainability at Chevron, told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Shell told the news outlet that it is “producing at capacity” and looking at options to increase oil production.
ExxonMobil also issued a response to Biden’s letter and provided what it described as short-term and long-term solutions.
“In the short term, the U.S. government could enact measures often used in emergencies following hurricanes or other supply disruptions—such as waivers of Jones Act provisions and some fuel specifications to increase supplies,” the energy company said in a news release Wednesday.
In the longer term, the federal government “can promote investment through clear and consistent policy that supports U.S. resource development, such as regular and predictable lease sales, as well as streamlined regulatory approval and support for infrastructure such as pipelines,” according to ExxonMobil.
Congressional Republicans want to slash funding to the United Nations, Lebanon, and Iraq, and cut off funds that allow the Biden administration to implement a new nuclear deal with Iran.
The Republican Study Committee, Congress’s largest conservative caucus, unveiled on Thursday its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, a portion of which was exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The Republican budget proposal’s national security section includes landmark provisions that would significantly reshape U.S. foreign policy by nixing millions of dollars in spending in the region.
In addition to cutting foreign aid projects that Republican lawmakers say benefit Iranian-controlled militants such as Hezbollah, the RSC is moving to codify legislation that would bar the Biden administration from spending taxpayer dollars to implement a new nuclear deal with Tehran—effectively killing the deal the moment it is signed. At the same time, the budget would increase U.S. funding to Israel so that it can counter Iran and its regional terrorist proxies.
While Democrats are likely to oppose a majority of the proposals, the budget is meant to send a message to the White House that if they take a majority after the November elections, Republicans will work to undermine the administration’s foreign policy agenda.
“After two years of Joe Biden, the world is more chaotic and dangerous than ever before,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), RSC chair and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “But one thing hasn’t changed since Trump was in the White House: a strong America will always make the world safer. RSC’s budget provides a blueprint for taking on Iran’s terrorist regime, Putin’s aggression, and the new threat of jihadist terrorists in Afghanistan.”
The RSC wants to slash U.S. aid to “Iranian puppet regimes in the Middle East,” particularly Lebanon, which is controlled by Iran’s terror proxy, Hezbollah. The United States has long propped-up the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), despite overwhelming evidence they are loyal to Hezbollah.
The Biden administration announced earlier this year it is repurposing some $67 million in aid to the LAF and giving another $16.5 to the country’s Internal Security Forces. Republicans say this tranche of cash serves as “a slush fund in a country where Hezbollah’s economic presence is endemic.”
“In countering Iran, it is vital that we prohibit U.S. aid from going to Iranian puppet regimes in the Middle East,” the budget states. “Lebanon’s government has come fully under Hezbollah’s control as the terrorist group has a monopoly on the use of force in the country. Accordingly, the RSC Budget supports cutting off aid for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).”
American aid to Iraq also is on the line in the Republican proposal.
The RSC wants to cut taxpayer aid to Iraq’s Ministry of Interior and its Ministry of Defense, which both work closely with militant groups tied to Iran. These are the same groups that have claimed responsibility for attacks on U.S. forces and outposts in the country, including the 2019 strike on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
“Iran and Iran-aligned militias continue to have strong ties to some elements of Iraq’s traditional security forces,” the Pentagon disclosed in February as part of an inspector general report that is fueling the Republican bid to stop funding these entities.
American aid to the United Nations is also on the chopping block. Republicans want to cut funding for U.N.-operated programs in areas of Syria that are controlled by dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“Even former Obama administration ambassador to Syria Robert Ford has admitted this aid has been diverted to directly fund the brutal Assad regime, Iran’s main ally in the region,” the RSC writes in its budget.
The budget proposal also includes a package of Iran sanctions that lawmakers are touting as the toughest in history. These provisions are meant to send a signal to both the Biden administration and Iran that any sanctions relief granted as part of a nuclear deal will not survive a Republican Congress.
Israel would receive a boost in U.S. funding under the RSC budget—an effort that pro-Israel Democrats are likely to support.
In order to counter Iranian terrorist groups and other Jew-hating militants, Congress would allocate increased assistance to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, which destroys incoming rockets before they touch land.
“Israel continues to face threats to its existence from an emboldened Iran that continues to support Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists on its doorstep,” the RSC states in the budget.
Column: Biden must abandon his quest for a nuclear deal
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about: This week Iran escalated its war against the West.
On June 8 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution calling on Iran to explain traces of uranium that it found at three undisclosed sites of nuclear activity. Hours before the IAEA vote, Iran disconnected security cameras from one of its declared nuclear sites. Then Iran began taking down IAEA cameras throughout its territory. The world’s nuclear watchdog is flying blind. “When we lose this,” IAEA director Rafael Mariano Grossi told reporters, “then it’s anybody’s guess” what Iran is doing.
But we know what Iran is doing. Iran is playing hardball. For over a year now, the Biden administration and its European partners have attempted to lure Iran back into the 2015 nuclear deal, a.k.a. the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Those negotiations have failed. Iran keeps upping the ante. It wants Biden to drop sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its terrorist army, and to guarantee that future presidents won’t back out of the deal. The first demand is harmful to national security and a political hot potato. The second is impossible. Result: deadlock.
Deadlock that favors Iran. The mullahs have used the months of jaw-jaw to prepare for war-war. Ayatollah Khamenei has placed radicals in top positions, including the presidency. His proxy forces have spread violence in Iraq, Yemen, and throughout the Greater Middle East. He has plotted to assassinate U.S. officials. He has evaded sanctions. And he has built up his stockpile of nuclear fuel.
Iran has enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. Last week, David Albright and Sarah Burkhard of the Institute for Science and International Security (the good ISIS) wrote that “Iran’s breakout timeline is now at zero.”
Swell. How does resident Biden respond? He says there is still time to make a deal that even his lead negotiator, State Department official Robert Malley, admits is “tenuous at best.”
The complacency is maddening. The other day, when a reporter asked National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan for his thoughts on Iran’s dispute with the IAEA, Sullivan said, “From our perspective, we have to view these on separate tracks, and that’s how we’re going to proceed.” Translation: We won’t let Iran’s hostile behavior get in the way of appeasement.
On June 9, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Iran’s moves against the IAEA are “counterproductive and further complicate our efforts to return to full implementation of the JCPOA.” Also, the sky is blue. What’s Blinken going to do about it? “We continue to press Iran to choose diplomacy and de-escalation instead,” he said.
This is willful blindness. Iran made its choice. It rejected diplomacy and de-escalation. It opted for confrontation and resistance.
Yet America is too preoccupied, too distracted, too overwhelmed to act accordingly. Inflation, crime, the border, guns, abortion, and Ukraine command the public’s attention. The growing danger from Iran does not. Meanwhile, the secretary of defense is a background player. The secretary of state and the national security adviser are staffers, not independent leaders. The president is 79 years old and not good at his job. This moment demands confidence, willfulness, boldness, imagination, and risk. What we get are odd ramblings from Biden on Kimmel.
Things must change. Iran policy is a good—and urgent—place to start. Step one is to face reality. Close the open hand that the ayatollah has spat upon. Demand enactment of snap-back sanctions. Adopt the bipartisan Senate bill that would integrate air and missile defenses in the Greater Middle East. Call for a massive defense buildup. Ease restrictions, limits, and delays on lend-lease to Ukraine, then take the same approach to arming Israel and our Gulf partners (as well as Taiwan). Recognize the importance of the Abraham Accords as the foundation for regional stability. And revive the military option to demonstrate our seriousness.
The drift toward global disorder began after former president Obama decided not to enforce his red line against chemical weapons in Syria. That was almost a decade ago. One way to repair the jagged breach in American credibility and American deterrence would be to make good on our longstanding promise that Iran won’t obtain the world’s most terrible weapon.
The current path leads to a world where America is ignored, where Israel’s existence is threatened, and where the risk of nuclear war is greater than it is even today. We’ve been telling ourselves for a while that such a world would be unacceptable. Let’s act like it.
Retail giant facilitates sale of computer hardware to subsidiary of Iranian government, documents show
Retail giant Amazon is reportedly busting U.S. sanctions on Iran by facilitating the sale of computer hardware to a foreign subsidiary controlled by the Iranian government and tied to the country’s terrorism enterprise, according to documents posted this week by WikiIran.
Amazon allowed a Turkish subsidiary of Iran’s Petrochemical Commercial Company, which is sanctioned by the United States, to purchase materials from an American supplier, according to leaked Iranian government documents. The United States has since 2010 sanctioned that company, which provides services to Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force, a designated foreign terrorist organization.
This is not the first time Amazon has been caught violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. The online retail giant paid the U.S. government $134,523 in 2020 as part of a settlement for violating sanctions on Iran, Syria, and Crimea. Amazon said in government filings it may be civilly liable “for apparent violations of multiple [U.S.] sanctions programs” administered by the Treasury Department. This included providing “goods and services” to sanctioned Iranian entities. The sanctions violations were of particular interest to the U.S. foreign policy community due to Amazon’s standing as a government contractor that performs work worth tens of billions of dollars.
The latest information on Amazon’s potential sanctions violations was posted by WikiIran, a web portal that leaks internal Iranian government documents. The “original confidential documents” published by the site purport to show “how major Iranian petrochemical companies circumvent sanctions in order to fund Iran’s Ministry of Defense [and the] IRGC’s Quds Force.”
The government documents center on Iran’s Petrochemical Commercial Company and an alleged network of shell firms that help it evade U.S. and international sanctions. The trade facilitated by Amazon is disclosed in one of the documents obtained by the site. The WashingtonFree Beacon could not independently verify the authenticity of the government documents.
The information indicates that Amazon facilitated purchases, primarily of computer hardware, from an American company that ultimately went to the petrochemical company via a Turkish subsidiary controlled by Tehran.
United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a watchdog group that tracks violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran, said the government documents corroborate its own research about “the ease with which Amazon is used to evade U.S. sanctions.” The organization has documented how Amazon is “complicit in allowing products available for sale on its marketplace to flow into Iran for years.”
In 2020, for instance, UANI informed Amazon officials that several Iranian websites were promoting their ability to get Amazon goods into Iran by having them first delivered to an address in the United States. “One of the more egregious perpetrators, Iranicard, features the Amazon logo prominently and extensively on its website, including the landing page,” UANI reported at the time.
Amazon has not responded to the organization’s alerts about these potential sanctions violations. Amazon also did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment.
Daniel Roth, UANI’s research director, said Amazon has the ability to police these sales but has turned “a blind eye.”
“Amazon undoubtedly has the capability and resources to ensure its platform is protected from being hijacked by bad actors attempting to subvert sanctions, and it has a clear responsibility to do so,” Roth said in a statement. “By turning a blind eye and allowing these transactions to occur, they are helping to strengthen sanctioned Iranian entities to the detriment of the U.S. government’s efforts to hold Iran accountable, all while profiting from the illicit sales. Amazon can and should take responsibility and control of its platform to ensure these activities by Iranian firms do not continue.”
New York billionaire and refiner John Catsimatidis warned that rising interest rates could produce ill effects on the U.S. economy.
The White House’s “obsession” against “turning on North American oil spigots” has triggered a significant hike in energy costs and inflation, Catsimatidis told Fox Business on Tuesday. He noted that the Biden administration asked Saudi Arabia and other nations for more crude oil production rather than boosting domestic output.
“We have 100 years’ worth of oil [in the U.S.]. Let [the government] open up the spigots and the price of crude oil will come back down to $55, $60, maybe $65—half,’” said Catsimatidis, the head of the United Refining Company and also the Gristedes Supermarkets retailer.
He added that the Federal Reserve’s choice to hike interest rates amid high inflation and soaring energy costs could trigger a recession. Other high-profile business leaders have issued similar warnings in recent weeks. Federal data for April indicated the inflation rate has risen 8.3 percent, while AAA data suggests the average price for a gallon of regular gas is nearing $5.
“Somebody’s on the path to destruct America, and somebody’s got to say ‘guys, enough is enough,’” he told Fox. “You know what the cost has been to the American people because of the rising gas prices—the cost of the rising food prices—it’s going to go even higher with $120 oil,” Catsimatidis said.
White House officials this week suggested that there is little the administration can do to alleviate high costs at the pump. They’ve primarily cast the blame on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, along with oil companies.
“You know, this is, in large part, caused by [Russian aggression],” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo alleged in a recent interview with CNN. “Gas prices have gone up over $1.40 a gallon” since Russian troops moved closer to Ukraine’s border earlier this year, “and the president is asking for Congress and others for potential ideas,” she said.
Republicans have said Biden’s executive orders—including a flurry of rules that were authorized after President Biden took office in January 2021—have driven up the public and private costs of oil drilling in the United States by halting drilling on public lands and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to the interior U.S.
But Raimondo told CNN that the prices will not go down until the conflict ends, again pinning the blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“But again, especially what we need to do is get [Moscow] to end this war. And that is also something that we are working as hard as we can to do. … The President is thinking about this every day and pushing his team and Congress to come up with any idea possible because we’re deeply aware of how this is hurting American families,” Raimondo said.
Over the last month, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices have surged nearly 20 percent to around $120 per barrel. Despite soaring energy prices, U.S. output is still below pre-pandemic levels, with analysts pointing to Washington and cash discipline as the causes.
WTI and Brent, the international benchmark for oil prices, have rallied in recent sessions on China’s economic reopening and Saudi state-owned oil producer Saudi Aramco having raised the price of Arabia light crude for Asian customers by $2.10 per barrel. The European Union’s plan to reduce its imports of Russian energy by 90 percent at the end of 2022 has also contributed to the latest gains.
But the U.S. oil and gas industry’s lack of significant activity continues to play a major role in the commodity’s gains.
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), domestic production totaled 11.9 million barrels per day (bpd) in the week ending May 27. This is unchanged from the same time in the previous month, and it remains under the peak of 13.1 million bpd in February 2020.
Industry activity has quieted down in recent weeks. The Baker Hughes oil rig count stood at 574 for the second consecutive week.
This could exacerbate the sector’s fragile situation, particularly after the United States has seen three straight weeks of notable supply drawdowns, totaling nearly 10 million barrels. Moreover, inventories at the Cushing, Oklahoma storage facility recently recorded a small build of 256,000 barrels following three consecutive weeks of withdrawals totaling close to 4 million barrels.
Crude oil storage tanks are seen from above at the Cushing oil hub in Cushing, Okla., on March 24, 2016. (Nick Oxford/Reuters)
A first-quarter Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Quarterly Energy Survey revealed that public firms have been “practicing capital discipline in 2021” to satisfy investors’ requirements. Globally, collective exploration and development (E&D) expenditures rose by a tepid 1 percent last year, the EIA noted in a recent report.
This cash discipline has been the new normal for domestic onshore shale firms, says Campbell Faulkner, the senior vice president and chief data analyst at OTC Global Holdings, the world’s largest independent institutional broker of commodities.
“Additionally, there has not been a flood of cash via private equity into new entities to begin drilling across the U.S.,” Faulkner told The Epoch Times. “Inflation and labor shortages have also greatly crimped the ability for shale firms to even modestly expand their capital expenditures (CapEx) while experiencing robust cash flows.”
Moreover, with the financial sector focusing on ESG, it has become challenging for the fossil fuel industry to attract new investment. Some of the world’s largest banks have been divesting from or applying restrictions on the fossil fuel industry and certain projects, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The report noted that banks like Citigroup would not invest in Arctic drilling, while MetLife is restricting investment in the oil sands.
But U.S. production could enjoy revived growth over the next couple of years, says Rystad Energy.
Permian crude production growth is forecast to outpace Iraq this year. The Permian Basin, which is a vast shale basin situated in west Texas, is projected to expand by approximately 1 million bpd to 5.6 million bpd this year and then climb to as much as 6.5 million bpd in 2023.
The Middle Eastern nation produces roughly 4.4 million bpd.
“The Permian has become the hot spot for U.S. oil production thanks to significant resources, low breakeven costs, and high oil content. This trend is only likely to continue as global oil markets struggle with supply constraints and the demand for oil shows little sign of easing,” wrote Espen Erlingsen, head of upstream research at Rystad Energy, in a research note.
Quinn Kiley, Managing Director and Energy Portfolio Manager at Tortoise, also reported in a recent QuickTake Podcast that Kinder Morgan increased its 2022 capital budget guidance by $300 million.
“The market had been punishing companies for increased spending, but Kinder traded well last week,” Kiley said. “The shift may be an acknowledgment by the market that new infrastructure is needed to reduce long-term inflation due to higher commodity prices. Or it may be a signal that spending on natural gas infrastructure and CO2 sequestration is what the market wants as it looks to a realistic energy transition strategy.”
Still, Faulkner contends that greater activity can only become ubiquitous throughout the industry if the “Biden administration ceases its predatory stance against domestic oil and gas production.”
Bob Bilbruck, the CEO at Captjur, a technology and strategic services firm, echoed this sentiment, telling The Epoch Times that the White House has made “it very hard to drill for oil.”
“It’s a cute little political game they are playing with the oil industry to make it appear that they are pro-drilling but when the rubber hits the road they are making it very hard on these companies to get new drilling leases and operations under way,” Bilbruck stated.
Last month, the Biden administration pulled three offshore oil lease sales in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Critics warn that replacements for these leases will not happen overnight since it is a rigorous regulatory process that consists of environmental analysis, public consultation, and government reviews.
President Joe Biden suspended new oil and gas leasing on federal land and waters last year, but the directive was halted by a Louisiana judge, forcing the administration to continue leasing.
Despite the rhetoric emanating from Washington, ESG and climate-related risks will start taking a backseat in the short-term due to the plethora of challenges the global economy is facing, according to Jarand Rystad, the CEO of Rystad Energy.
“As companies continue to consider how they can ease the supply crisis in the face of the new geopolitical situation, while investors review their portfolios in a new light as supply chain issues persist, we are likely to see new commercial models emerge as energy security, inflation, and interest risk in the short-term trump ESG and climate related risks,” he stated in a note. “In the longer term, however, the Russian invasion has triggered an acceleration of renewable energy initiatives, especially in Europe.”
Will Prices Come Down Soon?
For the global energy market to rebalance, crude prices need to average $135 a barrel in the 12 months beginning in July, Goldman Sachs analysts predicted in a new note. Prices are expected to surge to $140 this summer amid a drop in Russian output, recovering Chinese demand, and the busy U.S. driving season.
“The negative global growth impulse remains insufficient to rebalance inventories at current prices,” analysts Damien Courvalin and Jeffrey Currie wrote. “Oil prices need to rally further to normalize the unsustainably low levels of global oil inventories, as well as OPEC and refining spare capacities.
Motorists will feel like crude oil is closer to $160 a barrel because of the refining shortage, the investment bank warned. Over the last year, there have been intense bottlenecks at refineries, resulting in soaring gasoline prices. Gasoline stocks have also fallen 11 of the last 12 weeks.
According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), the national average price for a gallon of gasoline is $4.92, up more than 61 percent year-over-year.
The price hikes will not end anytime soon, writes Phil Flynn, a market analyst and author of The Energy Report, citing the futures market. This, he says, will harm economic growth, consumers, and businesses.
July RBOB gasoline futures have risen more than 17 percent over the last month on the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to their year-to-date gain of 86 percent.
But should inflation continue to be stubbornly high and the economy slips into a recession, oil prices could fall back to around $100, purports Faulkner.
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HOMELAND SECURITY
GOOD OR BAD IDEA? Senator wants to ‘mobilize’ military veterans to guard schools. In the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is calling to “mobilize” military veterans to serve as security officers at schools around the country.
Beyond weapons: Time for a new US strategy on Taiwan. Enlarging Taipei’s military cooperation throughout the Indo-Pacific is today potentially the most effective way to break Beijing’s heavy-handed efforts to quarantine Taiwan politically. Deciding what military assets America should provide Taiwan is crucial, but the bigger picture is to interweave Taiwan into the emerging alliances and coalitions forming to deal with the Chinese threat.
ESCALATION OR MORE OF THE SAME? – Putin threatens new targets if Ukraine gets longer-range rockets; missiles hit Kyiv. In a television interview with state media that was recorded Friday and aired Sunday, Putin said he considered the medium-range missiles Biden promised last month to be replacements for similar artillery that Ukraine has lost in the fighting. But should longer-range systems arrive, Putin said, his military would begin hitting targets it has so far avoided. He offered no specifics.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 103. A Russian state media journalist reported Moscow’s Major General Roman Kutuzov was killed in eastern Ukraine, adding to the string of high-ranking military casualties sustained by Moscow. Ukraine has reversed a Russian advance in Severodonetsk and recaptured about 20 percent of the strategic eastern city, meaning Ukraine now controls half, the governor of Luhansk said.
LET THE NORDIC GAMES BEGIN – Major Baltic Sea exercise kicks off as Swedish, Finnish NATO bids wait on Turkey. The NATO exercise BALTOPS – to be held on the Baltic Sea next week – is the latest showing of unity and military strength as Sweden and Finland trade neutrality for NATO’s embrace in the wake of Russia’s three-month-old invasion of Ukraine.
OVERDUE – US, S Korean navies end key exercise amid N Korea tension. The three-day exercise that began Thursday in international waters off Okinawa was apparently the allies’ first joint drill involving a U.S. aircraft carrier since November 2017.
YES, NORTH KOREA – WE HAVE MISSILES TOO – US and South Korea respond to North Korean launch with 8 missiles of their own. U.S. Forces Korea and the South Korean military fired one U.S. missile and seven South Korean missiles eastward into the sea to demonstrate the countries’ ability to “respond quickly to crisis events,” the U.S. military said Monday.
US excludes Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua from Americas summit. The decision, which followed weeks of intense deliberations, risks an embarrassing boycott of the U.S.-hosted gathering this week in Los Angeles if Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and some other leaders choose not to show up.
GUARDIANS ALERT – How the US Space Force plans to police outer space. Outer space is getting crowded, with both commercial endeavors and secretive military projects. And it’s going to be up to the newest United States military branch, the Space Force, to protect American interests there.
REAL ISSUE – OR EASY FIX? Military families not having enough food is a national security issue, report says. The key factors that make up military life were found to be significant contributors to food insecurity for military families and could hinder the ability of the armed forces to recruit and retain troops if it isn’t addressed, according to two reports released this week.
Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas created a Muslim community outreach position after meeting with an Arab-American activist who has cheered violence against Israel and praised the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas.
Mayorkas met on March 18 with Arab American News publisher Osama Siblani, who has called Hamas and Hezbollah “freedom fighters,” and other activists in Dearborn, Mich., over their concerns with racial profiling by the Department of Homeland Security. Siblani, who urged Arabs last month to fight Israel with “stones” and “guns,” has lobbied DHS for years to appoint a liaison between the agency and Michigan’s robust Arab community. He praised Mayorkas after he announced the position on March 30.
“We were told to keep complaining,” Siblani told his newspaper. “Mayorkas told us this time ‘we will do something about it’ and he did.”
The meeting emerges as Mayorkas faces scrutiny for a series of policy blunders. Republicans have called for Mayorkas’s impeachment over his handling of a historic surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border. Republicans have also blasted him for forming a Disinformation Governance Board led by a Democratic activist who pushed disinformation about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment about Mayokas’s meeting with Siblani and the other Arab-American leaders. Siblani’s inflammatory remarks were well documented before his sessions with Mayorkas.
The Anti-Defamation League has noted Siblani’s praise for Hamas and Hezbollah as “freedom fighters.” He cheered when the the Iran-backed Hezbollah “delivered on its threat” to bomb Israel in September 2019. He reportedly praised Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as the most “honorable man in the world.”
Siblani has referred to Israel as “occupied Palestine” and claimed the “pro-Israeli lobby” owns Washington, D.C. Last year, he urged a boycott of a restaurant whose owner posted “Long Live Israel” on Facebook. His anti-Israel remarks last month were at a rally alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), the Washington Free Beaconreported. Siblani praised the fedayeen, or Islamic militants, fighting against Israel.
Siblani’s anti-Israel, pro-terrorist views have not curtailed his access to the Biden administration and Democratic lawmakers. The Biden White House invited Siblani to take part in a virtual meeting last year to discuss Middle East tensions. Siblani later bragged at a rally in Dearborn that he refused during the White House event “to apologize for Hamas firing rockets at Israel.”
Siblani met with Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (D.) last month at Arab American News offices in Dearborn. The publisher praised her for appointing several Arab-American community leaders to government posts, but criticized her for visiting Israel in 2019. Siblani claimed Whitmer accepted his invitation to visit Lebanon in exchange.
Siblani has an especially close relationship with Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Peters organized the community meeting with Mayorkas in March, and another event for Siblani and federal officials in Washington, D.C., in 2019. Peters, who leads the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, spoke at the Arab American News offices on Sept. 18, 2020, at an event for the Arab American Political Action Committee. The participants quizzed Peters over his views on the Middle East and issues like terror watchlists before ultimately endorsing him for reelection. Siblani gave $250 to Peters’s campaign on Oct. 31, 2020. The Arab American Political Action Committee, which Siblani founded, gave $2,000 to Peters on Oct. 4, 2020.
On Nov. 18, 2020, Peters called on the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the Transportation Security Administration had engaged in racial discrimination at airports and checkpoints.
Peters’s office did not respond to comment requests.
Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.
This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.
A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.
Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.
We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.
We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”
We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.
We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.
Well, friend, the time for listening and watching from the sidelines is over.
This enemy has taken over media, educational institutions, corporate boards, professional sports, foundations, and professional institutions. They have left no corner of our lives untouched. But all hope is not lost.
We The People still have a say. We know the truth, you and I, about America and the country she is and can be. We must fight to defeat these false pretenses and predetermined narratives.
I am choosing to counter this enemy with faith, with reason, and with freedom. As Governor of the Free State of Florida, I have chosen to lead with a vision that builds America up rather than tears it down.
Together we can ensure that our children are raised to know they live in the greatest state in the nation, the greatest country in the world and that they have an opportunity to continue making them even greater.
A top Republican said on Friday that President Joe Biden is raising gas prices on purpose.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made the remarks when he was asked on Fox Business’s “Wall Street with Maria Bartiromo” to respond to Biden’s recent comments where he said raising gas prices is part of “an incredible transition.”
“I think that’s the main takeaway from his statement, that he is telling the American people they’re doing this to you on purpose, that the transition period is being imposed by policies coming from the Biden administration,” he said.
“This is a conscious effort by the Biden administration to destroy fossil fuel production in the United States, to get away from fossil fuels, and you’re living this experience. This is an irresponsible shutting down of oil and gas production in America, making us more dependent on oil and gas from bad actors, and it’s destroying the American economy,” he continued.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) speaks to reporters in Washington on March 2, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Biden characterized the soaring cost of gasoline in the United States as an “incredible transition” on Monday while taking questions from reporters during his trip to Japan.
“When it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” he said alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
The comment came as the national average cost of a gallon of gas sat at a record-high $4.596, with several states paying more than $6.00.
Biden went on to take credit for gas prices not being “even worse.”
“What I’ve been able to do to keep it from getting even worse—and it’s bad,” he said.
His comments were widely denounced by Republicans.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) criticized Biden for being “completely out of touch with everyday Americans.”
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel released a statement the following day blaming the Biden administration for the continually elevated cost of gas.
“Another day, another new record high gas price in Biden’s America,” the statement reads. “Joe Biden doesn’t care about the historic inflation and skyrocketing gas prices families are facing every day as a result of his failed agenda. The pain is the point for Biden and Democrats, and Americans will continue to suffer as long as Biden is in charge.”
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel speaks during a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington on Nov. 9, 2020. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Biden and other senior administration officials have continually blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the inflated gas prices. In response to the invasion on Feb. 24, the United States and many of its Western allies put a halt to all imports of Russian oil and gas.
While the cost of gas did spike dramatically after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it had already been rising steadily throughout Biden’s first year in office. After the sanctions, the price leveled off before increasing to new record highs in recent weeks.
The mullahs in Tehran are now only weeks away from producing weapons grade uranium as Iran’s proxies menace our Middle Eastern allies.
A hearing with the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, shed light this week on how we’ve arrived here. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Malley’s exchanges with lawmakers made clear that while the Treasury Department has sanctioned individuals and entities for a variety of bad behavior, it has not enforced so-called secondary sanctions—which remain in force—against China, the largest purchaser of Iranian oil, allowing money to continue to flow into the mullahs’ coffers.
Iran can survive without access to the U.S. economy, but China would never take that risk: A U.S. crackdown would compel swift compliance by the Chinese. The Trump administration weighed this get-out-of-jail free card for China and decided against it. The Biden administration has taken a different tack: That’s why, in April, as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez pointed out, Iran sold on average 650,000 barrels of oil to China per day. The result, he said, has been “a flood of cash for the regime—tens of millions of dollars a day.”
But Malley is passing the buck. He would like Congress to believe that Iran’s predations are the result of the Trump’s administration and its policy of “maximum pressure.”
“Rather than compelling Iran to make concessions, the prior administration’s maximum-pressure campaign resulted in Iran’s maximum non-nuclear violations,” Malley said this week, referring to the spike in Iranian-orchestrated attacks on oil tankers, Saudi infrastructure, and U.S. bases that began a year after Trump withdrew the United States from Obama’s nuclear deal.
What he left out is that those operations largely stopped after Trump ordered the killing of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020, and that Iran only began the process of producing the highly enriched uranium suitable for a weapon after Biden assumed office in 2021. The mullahs also withdrew from an agreement with the United Nations’ atomic watchdog to allow full access for the agency’s inspectors to its program, fired ballistic missiles dangerously close to the U.S. consulate in northern Iraq, and dropped a drone on a U.S. outpost in Syria.
Meanwhile, as Malley and company desperately try to revive the Obama administration’s failed nuclear deal, it’s no mystery why the Iranians refuse even to meet the American delegation. Why would they? Biden won’t enforce the sanctions meant to pressure them to comply with the 2015 agreement.
Call it minimum pressure. The only silver lining is that, as Malley told the Senate panel, he is “not particularly optimistic” that the Biden administration can salvage the deal.
That’s no surprise, given that the Biden administration stopped enforcing the most crippling sanctions before the negotiations even started, and should Israel fail to halt Iran’s march to a nuclear bomb, Malley’s fingerprints—and Joe Biden’s—will be on the fuse.
Senior Obama administration officials engaged in a secret meeting with Iran in 2018 as part of an effort to undermine the Trump administration’s diplomatic push to isolate the hardline regime, according to an internal State Department document.
As the Trump administration worked to increase economic pressure on Iran in 2018, a delegation of “U.S. former ambassadors held a secret, “off-the-record” meeting with former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at his residence in New York City, according to a State Department memo unearthed this week as part of a lawsuit brought to compel the release of this information. The meeting took place around the same time John Kerry was reported to be working behind-the-scenes with Iranian officials to salvage the 2015 nuclear accord.
The internal memo, which is marked unclassified, details how these former U.S. ambassadors conducted shadow diplomacy with Iran’s top envoy surrounding “nuclear weapons, potential prisoner swaps, [the] Afghanistan withdrawal, and negotiations with the Taliban,” according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a legal advocacy group that sued the State Department to obtain the internal memo.
The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts to keep negotiations with Iran alive, even as former president Donald Trump and his administration worked to isolate the regime, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo told the Free Beacon in exclusive remarks. Pompeo, who was not aware of these meetings while leading the State Department, said the memo corroborates reports from the time about Kerry’s efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal through back-channel powwows with Iranian officials.
“This memo reflects even more than we already knew about former State Department officials continuing on as if they were still in office,” said Pompeo, who is now senior counsel for global affairs at the ACLJ. “Trying, at every turn, to work with the foreign minister for a terrorist regime, Iran, to undermine the very sanctions put in place by America. It’s worse than not knowing when to get off stage. Actively seeking to protect the terrible deal they struck, these former officials—two years after Obama left office—were signaling that Iran should stand firm against America.”
Pompeo said it is startling to learn that members of a former U.S. administration attempted to handicap a sitting president’s policies, describing the disclosure as “bad stuff, dangerous stuff, un-American stuff.” These former officials, he said, “should be ashamed of themselves. Working against their own nation’s policies alongside such a brutal regime.”
The seven-page memo was assembled during the meeting with Zarif, which came just days after reports emerged that Kerry was seeking to salvage the Iran nuclear agreement after Trump nixed it earlier that year. The document was produced after the ACLJ sued the State Department for records about any secret meetings between Zarif, Kerry, current U.S. Iran-Envoy Robert Malley, and former Obama secretary of energy Ernest Moniz.
During the meeting, Zarif claimed that Trump’s policies have fomented anti-U.S. fervor in Iran and pointed to the popularity of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) leader Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump two years later in a drone strike.
“I was as popular as Soleimani, but now I am at 47 percent and his is up,” Zarif said, according to the memo. “He is closer to 80 percent. People of Iran once preferred engagement, now opted for resistance as the only reality. That is what the polls are telling us now and it is the reality of the region.”
Zarif also said his government would never give up its missile program or stop enriching uranium, the key component in a nuclear weapon and one of the conditions Trump placed on a potential new deal with Iran that never materialized.
“The U.S. says no peace deal and the U.S. will reimpose sanctions, but the condition is zero missiles, zero nuclear enrichment. This what [John] Bolton wants,” Zarif said, referring to Trump’s national security adviser. “I know Bolton and negotiated with him years ago. His views are so radical, that we could not reach an agreement. Absolute impossibility to reach an agreement with John Bolton unless you ask him to sit down and read at dictation speed what he wants and then you sign it. He is incapable of compromise.”
Zarif also discussed his views on Iraq, potential prisoner swaps with the United States, and Iranian support for terror groups like Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
As part of the ACLJ’s effort to force the release of further information on these back-channel talks with Iran, it received a series of internal State Department emails showing that after Kerry left office, he used State Department staffers to send correspondence to Zarif.
Ben Sisney, ACLJ’s senior litigation counsel, said the organization’s legal efforts prove that “there were even more secret meetings happening behind the Trump administration’s back than had been previously reported.”
But Sisney said it also raises further questions: “How did this memo of ‘former’ U.S. officials meeting with Zarif get into the State Department’s hands? Was someone at the State Department there? Did the State Department send an informal liaison?”
Update 7:35 p.m.: This piece has been updated to clarify Kerry’s role in the diplomacy with Iran.
Column: The president’s budget doesn’t match U.S. commitments
War was in the background of President Biden’s trip to Asia last week. He redeployed U.S. forces to Somalia before he left. He signed into law $40 billion in financial and military assistance to Ukraine during his visit to South Korea. Then, in Japan, a reporter asked Biden if he was prepared to “get involved militarily to defend Taiwan.” Biden’s answer was succinct. “Yes,” he said.
Forget the clumsy White House reaction to Biden’s moment of lucidity. Leave aside the question of whether the United States should move from a policy of strategic ambiguity, where our response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is left undefined, to a policy of strategic clarity where we let China know the direct consequences of such an attack.
Consider instead the following: Does the Pentagon have the resources to defend democracies from autocrats in two hemispheres?
Afraid not. The Pentagon ditched the “two-front” war preparedness strategy under Barack Obama. Meanwhile U.S. defense spending as a percentage of the economy has been in decline for decades. Biden has shown little interest in changing its downward course. Indeed, the one place where he’s been reluctant to spend money is national defense.
Biden’s fiscal year 2022 request of $715 billion was too small even for the Democratic Congress. It ended up authorizing $728.5 billion. Biden’s fiscal year 2023 request is for $773 billion. Maybe that seems like a hefty sum. It’s not. Biden’s defense budget is meager compared with the tasks the president has set out.
Why? Part of the reason is inflation. The Biden budget request paints a rosy—and inaccurate—scenario. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Mackenzie Eaglen has run the numbers. She begins with the $773 billion marked for the Pentagon. “Using a more honest 7.46 percent CPI [Consumer Price Index] estimate (the FY22 average so far) for military personnel raises the topline to $794.5 billion needed next year,” she writes.
That still isn’t enough, however. “$846 billion in FY 2023 is a more realistic down payment on matching defense investments against national security threats,” Eaglen concludes, “and should be the starting point as Congress builds a more accurate defense budget.” In other words, Eaglen recommends a 9 percent increase in the Biden administration’s topline before Congress and its appropriators become involved. Her proposal makes sense. It’s necessary. And it won’t happen.
It won’t happen for several reasons. The first is inertia. None of the threats we encountered or fear we might encounter in the post-Cold War world have provoked the people’s representatives to increase defense spending to Reagan-era levels. The political willpower doesn’t exist. Entitlements and interest on the debt act as additional constraints. We’ve muddled through for 30 years, this thinking goes. No need to stop now.
The second brake on defense spending is the Progressive bias against hard power. By the 2024 election, America will have been governed by presidents skeptical of defense spending and the military for 12 of the past 16 years. Such leadership has an effect not only on materiel but also on the culture of the national security establishment. Progressives under Obama and Biden see the Pentagon more as a vehicle for social policy and geopolitical featherbedding than as an instrument of deterrence and the national interest. Left-wing taboos against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, oil and gas, and the warrior mindset take precedent over military readiness and lethality. The president overrules the secretary of defense and joint chiefs. America grows weaker even as its leader calls for greater global activism.
Noninterventionism and restraint on the foreign policy right creates a bipartisan reluctance to spend more on defense. President Trump increased defense spending, but not by enough. His administration was filled with skeptics of American engagement and foreign intervention who wanted to reduce not only the Pentagon’s budget but also its influence throughout the world. Republican voices in Congress promote an “America First” foreign policy that would constrict U.S. deployments, aid, and partnerships.
About a quarter of the House GOP and a fifth of the Senate GOP, for example, voted against the latest aid package to Ukraine. Granted, this batch of aid seemed designed to split conservatives, who have a longstanding aversion to unconditional economic assistance. The vote stands as a warning for both liberal and conservative internationalists, nonetheless. The bipartisan consensus over Ukraine may not survive a prolonged war of attrition.
You correct a mismatch between resources and commitments by increasing resources or decreasing commitments. President Biden resists increasing resources for national defense, while powerful elements of both left and right work to reduce American commitments. Neither strategy makes America safer. Someone needs to make the case for a major U.S. defense buildup in response to the challenges of China, Russia, and Iran. And they need to do it soon.
Joe Biden appeared to try to put a positive spin on skyrocketing gas prices Monday while taking questions from reporters during his trip to Japan.
When asked about the economy, inflation, and the record prices Americans continue to pay at the pump, Biden characterized the increased cost of gasoline as an “incredible transition.”
“When it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” Biden said alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishid.
The comment came as the national average cost of a gallon of gas sat at a record-high $4.596, with several states paying more than $6.00.
Biden went on to take credit for gas prices not being “even worse.”
“What I’ve been able to do to keep it from getting even worse—and it’s bad,” he said.
Speaking to broader concerns about food shortages, inflation, and other poor economic indicators both domestically and abroad, Biden suggested the problems will likely persist when he said, “This is going to be a haul.”
But when asked if he thought the United States would soon be entering a recession, the president responded “no.”
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel released a statement the following day blaming the Biden administration for the continually elevated cost of gas.
“Another day, another new record high gas price in Biden’s America,” the statement reads. “Joe Biden doesn’t care about the historic inflation and skyrocketing gas prices families are facing everyday as a result of his failed agenda. The pain is the point for Biden and Democrats, and Americans will continue to suffer as long as Biden is in charge.”
Biden and other senior administration officials have continually blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the inflated gas prices. In response to the invasion on Feb. 24, the United States and many of its Western allies put a halt to all imports of Russian oil and gas.
While the cost of gas did spike dramatically after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it had already been rising steadily throughout Biden’s first year in office. After the sanctions, the price leveled off before increasing to new record highs in recent weeks.
In an apparent attempt to rein in the cost of gas back in March, Biden announced the release of an unprecedented 180 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
“It’s helped, but it’s not been enough,” Biden said Monday.
Former First Lady Melania Trump gave her first interview since leaving the White House, providing a hint that her husband may be seeking another term in office and saying “it’s sad to see” the state of the country under the current administration.
“I think we achieved a lot in four years of the Trump administration,” Melania told Fox News in a Sunday interview, adding that “never say never” when asked about whether she could be again living inside the White House.
“I like Washington, D.C. I know it operates completely different than any other city, but I really like it there. And I enjoyed living in the White House. To be first lady of the United States was my greatest honor. I think we achieved a lot in the four years of Trump administration. I enjoyed taking care of the White House. It was my home for a while. I understood it is people’s house. And it was, it was a privilege to live there,” she continued to say.
When asked by Fox host Pete Hegseth about former first ladies Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton appearing on the cover of Vogue, Melania, a former model, criticized the magazine. Melania appeared on the cover of Vogue in 2005 when she was photographed alongside former President Donald Trump in her wedding dress.
“They’re biased and they have likes and dislikes, and it’s so obvious. And I think American people and everyone sees it. It was their decision, and I have much more important things to do—and I did in the White House—than being on the cover of Vogue,” Melania told the broadcaster.
The former first lady, a native of Slovenia, weighed in on the state of the United States under the Biden administration.
“I think it’s sad to see what’s going on, if you really look deeply into it,” Melania said, adding: “I think a lot of people are struggling and suffering and what is going on around the world as well. So it’s very sad to see and I hope it changes fast,” Melania added.
Donald Trump has not definitively said whether he will run for reelection, although he has suggested in interviews that he might.
Last month, Trump, 75, told the Washington Post that his health could play a role in whether he decides to run or not. In 2024, Trump will turn 78, and should he run—and win—the presidency, he’ll be 82 when he departs. President Joe Biden is slated to turn 80 this November.
“You always have to talk about health. You look like you’re in good health, but tomorrow, you get a letter from a doctor saying come see me again,” he told the outlet in April. ‘That’s not good when they use the word ‘again,’” Trump added, saying he is currently in good health.
Voice of America (VOA), the taxpayer-funded government media network, is obstructing a congressional investigation into “waste, fraud, and abuse,” including partisan advocacy in favor of President Joe Biden and misuse of a visa program to “onboard foreign nationals,” according to a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees VOA and other government media outlets, has obstructed several congressional investigations into its misallocation of taxpayer funds and slanted coverage, including suppressing stories about the Iranian regime’s mass human rights abuses. A government watchdog has also cited USAGM for failing to properly vet 40 percent of its workforce, which includes those with security clearances and many foreign nationals, including Iranians.
Rep. Scott Perry (R., Pa.), a Foreign Affairs Committee member, in March called on VOA and USAGM to turn over reams of information that he said would shed a light on the broadcasting giant’s abuse of taxpayer funds. The agency has failed to do so, fueling accusations it is trying to hide this information.
Perry is pressing the Foreign Affairs Committee’s chairman and ranking member to haul USAGM’s leaders before Congress for a hearing on the agency’s malfeasance. The lawmaker, who says USAGM “has become a microcosm of what is wrong with the federal government,” wants the hearing to take place no later than July 14.
“The last time the House Foreign Affairs Committee held an oversight hearing on USAGM was September, 24, 2020, to satiate the petty vendettas of self-aggrandizing agency officials who considered themselves above such ‘antiquated and irrelevant’ concepts as Congressional oversight,” Perry wrote this week to his colleagues, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “Instead of using the hearing opportunity to meaningfully address the egregious security lapses at the Agency, this Committee effectively allowed Taxpayer resources to be expended on a glorified group therapy session for ineffective and/or corrupt government personnel.”
USAGM, and VOA in particular, have been dogged by accusations that they favor Democrats in their coverage and use government resources to advance this agenda, in violation of their charter. While the Trump administration attempted to root out corruption at USAGM, especially VOA Persia, these efforts stopped when the Biden administration took office. In addition to reporting censorship of stories critical of the Iranian regime, whistleblowers have described being harassed and targeted for attempting to expose corruption at the agency.
USAGM’s Persian News Network is at the heart of Perry’s congressional probe due to its 2015 efforts to solicit negative comments about then-candidate Donald Trump. In 2020, VOA’s Urdu Service published “what was effectively a campaign video on behalf of then-candidate Joe Biden,” according to Perry, who maintains these partisan efforts constitute a violation of the organization’s government charter.
VOA Persia also has been under a microscope from Republican lawmakers, agency whistleblowers, and activists in the Iranian-American community for its pro-Iran coverage and documented efforts to suppress efforts by agency reformers. Perry is one of several Republican lawmakers leading a charge to force USAGM into publicly accounting for these accusations, which has plagued it for years.
Setareh Derakhshesh Sieg, VOA Persia’s leader, was rehired by the Biden administration after former president Trump fired her for misappropriating nearly $1 million in funds and misrepresenting her academic credentials. Republicans say Sieg is also responsible for turning VOA Persia into a propaganda outlet for the Iranian regime. For example, she has been accused of banning Iranian regime critics from the network and creating an in-house “black list” of voices who should be censored. Under Sieg’s tenure, VOA Persia has also suppressed stories on the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses, according to Iranian dissidents who track the agency, and published pieces that amplify regime propaganda, particularly about the 2015 nuclear accord.
“There are numerous documented examples of this rogue agency’s formal cooperation in waste, fraud, and abuse, and it’s long past time its leaders answer for it,” Perry told the Free Beacon.
At least 40 percent of USAGM’s workforce was “not properly vetted before being hired,” according to an assessment from the Office of Personnel Management and disclosed by Perry in his letter to committee leaders. This finding is particularly troubling to congressional oversight officials because VOA employs scores of foreign nationals through a U.S. visa program that is under scrutiny. Additionally, USAGM has issued top-secret security clearances to “dozens of individuals,” raising questions about whether those who received clearances were fit to hold them.
USAGM also refuses to provide Congress with a 2021 internal assessment on the agency’s operations. That report, which was completed just before Biden took office, outlined operational failures, according to Perry, who disclosed portions of it after USAGM rebuffed his oversight efforts.
Bryan Leib, executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, an anti-regime advocacy group that has been critical of VOA’s coverage, said the global media outlet “has operated for years without being accountable to the very body that is responsible for their oversight.”
A public hearing, Leib said, “is long overdue and shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
Alaskans dispute Biden admin claim that industry was not interested
As gas prices continue to break records, the Biden administration’s cancellation of two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one lease sale in Alaska’s Cook Inlet has drawn clashing responses, including an accusation that the administration is “blatantly lying.”
One political figure who weighed in was Donald Trump Jr., who recently campaigned with successful Republican Senate primary candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio.
“Looks like Joe is doing a great job of making inflation his top priority,” he wrote in a tweet.
The Cook Inlet oil and gas lease would have covered 1.09 million acres in the Cook Inlet, a body of water connecting Anchorage with the Gulf of Alaska.
A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told The Epoch Times the Cook Inlet sale was canceled due to a “lack of industry interest in the area.”
“I’m not sure that’s completely accurate,” Kara Moriarty, president and CEO of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), told The Epoch Times.
“A lot of times, companies don’t want to tip their hand about participating in lease sales. The only time you really know if there’s interest or not is when you have the lease sale.”
“As the former Natural Resources Commissioner for Alaska, I know there is no way they could have confirmed ‘no interest’ until they held the lease sale,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who said the Biden administration was “blatantly lying to the American people.”
Both he and Moriarty referenced correspondence on the Cook Inlet sale from AOGA, which represents more than a dozen oil and gas producers in Alaska, as evidence of industry interest.
“The nature by which this announcement came to news—from the White House’s ultra-left climate czar Gina McCarthy, just down the hall from the president, [and] not the Department of Interior—raises further questions over who is crafting these disastrous energy policies,” Sullivan said, referencing the accidental email to a CBS reporter from a Biden administration official that first revealed the Cook Inlet lease’s cancellation.
Moriarty told The Epoch Times that “baffling is the nicest word I can come up with” for the cancellation.
Some local environmentalists, by contrast, expressed strong support for the decision.
“I’m very excited that we aren’t going to see an oil and gas lease sale that would really hurt our local economy,” Liz Mering told The Epoch Times.
Mering is advocacy director and inletkeeper of Cook InletKeeper, an Alaskan group opposed to oil and gas leasing in the region. Its website states that it seeks to “accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to an equitable, renewable energy future.”
The Interior spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the two Gulf of Mexico leases were canceled because of “delays due to factors including conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales.”
In June 2021, Louisiana federal Judge James Cain, a Trump appointee, struck down the Biden administration’s pause on oil and gas leases. That pause had commenced with Executive Order 14008.
Yet in January, District of Columbia federal Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, ruled that the November 2021 federal offshore oil and gas sale, the largest in history, was invalid. He argued it violated the National Environmental Policy Act because it didn’t take greenhouse gas emissions into account. The Biden administration didn’t appeal the ruling.
The administration announced its plans to resume lease sales in March after an appeals court ruled it could incorporate a raised “social cost of carbon” factor when assessing permits.
When he was a presidential candidate, Biden’s promises included “banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.”
The latest lease cancellations come as inflation and high gas prices wrack the nation.
AAA reported that regular gas on May 12 averaged $4.418 a gallon, the highest average price it has ever recorded.
Diesel is also at the highest price point ever recorded by AAA, averaging $5.557 a gallon.
“Prices for gasoline, diesel, and other products are high and climbing. Further, those high prices are raising the cost of other goods and services, and here we are with extraordinarily high rates of inflation at both the consumer and producer levels. The actions of this administration suggest little relief anytime soon,” energy economist Karr Ingham told The Epoch Times.
He said Biden hasn’t yet provided the next legally mandated five-year offshore leasing plan. The current plan ends in June.
“At this late hour, were they to set this new plan in motion today, it would be a year or so before it is in place. That means a significant gap in the time period during which companies may be able to reasonably make plans and allocate capital to drill new projects in these areas. So, in many respects, these canceled leases were the ‘last hurrah’ before that plan expires.”
Lawmakers in Impacted States React
Senators and representatives from Louisiana and Alaska, two states affected by the cancellations, have voiced anger and disgust.
“Pres. Biden has killed more energy lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. He’s killing jobs, has killed America’s energy independence, and is fueling inflation that is killing Louisiana families. And he’s doing it on purpose,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) wrote in a May 12 tweet.
Kennedy’s senior colleague, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), voiced his concerns in similar language.
“President Biden’s administration is actively making high gas prices worse,” Cassidy said. “When we need to unleash American energy production, the Biden administration kills opportunities at every turn.”
“Rather than using American energy sources to help solve the problem and lower prices, the Biden administration continues to carry out policies that only benefit Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and other apparent allies of this White House. It is past time for the administration to put Americans first,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), who serves on the House Natural Resources committee.
Sullivan said: “The timing and nature of this decision display a disturbing disregard for the pain American families continue to feel at the pump, for the hard-working Americans whose livelihoods and communities depend on the American energy industry, and for the grave consequences, these policies have on America’s energy and national security. As Gina McCarthy celebrates this decision from the White House, rest assured Vladimir Putin is popping corks in the Kremlin.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) hasn’t yet commented on the decision.
The Epoch Times has also reached out to the only Democrat representing Louisiana, Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.).
Different Views From Environmental Activists and Industry
Some environmentalists in and around the Cook Inlet celebrated the cancellation.
“There’s a lot of tourism industry that would be really harmed by this lease sale,” Mering said.
She said locals have fought oil and gas activity in the area since the 1970s when Cook Inlet’s Kachemak Bay was protected from drilling enabled by state leases. Commercial fishermen helped lead that pushback.
“There has to be more and more pushback as climate change hits Alaska.”
Moriarty noted that the Cook Inlet has been producing oil and gas for six decades. It generated 293,000 barrels of oil in March. All the oil produced in Cook Inlet is refined at the nearby Nikiski refinery.
“There’s no evidence that production from Cook Inlet has hampered our ability to coexist with commercial and sport fishing interests,” Moriarty said, arguing that oil and gas had helped diversify the Kenai Peninsula’s economy beyond the norm in Alaska.
Referencing the fight over oil in the 1970s, she said that “trying to pick out one incident negates the longstanding tradition we have of coexisting in Cook Inlet.”
Yet environmental activists present a contrasting narrative.
“This news means that the waters of lower Cook Inlet, which nourish the Gulf of Alaska as well as a watershed the size of Virginia, will continue the essential ecological function they’ve served since the last ice age. The people of this region who fought this lease sale will also continue their role in the ecology of placemaking, honoring our collective dependence on clean water,” said environmental activist Marissa Wilson of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council.
Josh Wisniewski, a fisherman in the Lower Cook Inlet, also praised the decision.
“Our fisheries, our quality of life, and regional economy depend on the health of this wild landscape we are privileged to live in. We now have the chance to build on this moment and seek a permanent withdrawal of this region from all future oil and gas lease sales to protect our home waters for future generations.”
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Wisniewski conceded that oil and gas are currently valuable to the larger state but argued that it “doesn’t make sense in this particular context.”
“We’ve got existing oil and gas infrastructure in different places.”
Yet AOGA’s Moriarty argued that Cook Inlet’s production is particularly critical for use within Alaska, including for jet fuel at Ted Stevens International Airport.
“We should be thinking about, ‘How do we get our next barrels of oil from the United States?’” Moriarty said, arguing that greater energy independence was vital to national security.
“The U.S. supplies the cleanest barrels of any major producer on the globe. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have been declining steadily for more than two decades now and continue to do so,” said energy economist Ingham.
“Constricting U.S. production in no way means those barrels will not be consumed—it just means those barrels will come from somewhere else, and that somewhere else will not produce that oil nearly as cleanly as the United States.”
He speculated about the motives of Earthjustice, which praised the cancellations as “good for the climate” in CBS coverage.
“Is Earthjustice in favor of acquiring America’s energy needs from countries and regions who produce dirtier barrels than the United States? Or are they simply anti-U.S. oil and gas, and ultimately, anti U.S.-consumer?”
The Epoch Times has also reached out to the Environmental Defense Fund, often seen as a left-wing environmental group, and to the Property and Environmental Research Center, a free-market environmental group.
Congress is probing the Biden administration over its decision to grant a U.S. visa to an Iranian national tied to Iran’s terrorist fighting force and its former leader, Qassem Soleimani.
Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is asking the Biden administration to explain why it granted a visa to Iranian actor Parviz Parastui, according to a copy of the investigation letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The lawmaker says Parastui has an “overt connection” to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the U.S.-designated terror organization responsible for killing scores of Americans.
Parastui was permitted to attend a film screening event in Los Angeles late last month that was organized by the far-left anti-Israel group Code Pink. While attending the event, Parastui was caught on camera assaulting an Iranian dissident who challenged him on the regime’s human rights abuses. Parastui’s ties to the hardline regime and support for Soleimani—which includes signing a 2020 letter by Iranian leaders condemning the Trump administration’s assassination of the terrorist leader, who they referred to as a “martyr”—should disqualify him from entering the United States, according to Banks and former top U.S. officials who spoke to the Free Beacon about the situation.
Parastui’s visit comes amid active threats by Iran and the IRGC to assassinate U.S. officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. It also comes as the Biden administration mulls lifting the IRGC’s terror designation as part of a package of concessions to Iran meant to entice it into signing a new version of the 2015 nuclear accord.
“Parastui has been directly involved in IRGC-funded propaganda projects, promoting a hardliner ideology that seeks to shape Iran’s culture to the agenda of the Iranian regime,” Banks wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “He played roles in numerous pro-regime and pro-IRGC films. Parastui also never shies away from expressing his affinity with the IRGC in public.”
In a statement to the Free Beacon regarding Parastui’s entry into the United States, the State Department said, “Visa records are confidential under U.S. law; therefore, we cannot discuss the details of individual visa cases.”
Parastui vocally supported Soleimani, praising him in television interviews, and is seen in photos meeting with the terror leader and other senior IRGC figures, highlighting “just how close he is to key figures in the terrorist organization,” according to Banks.
Banks maintains that the State Department’s decision to grant Parastui a visa undermines U.S. efforts to isolate the hardline Iranian government, the IRGC terror group, and the country’s jihadist proxy organizations, which continue to conduct attacks on American outposts in the region. It also could help Iran trigger terrorist cells based in America, according to Banks.
“Your departments have allowed notorious, high-profile affiliates of the IRGC into our country even before the [IRGC] is delisted,” Banks wrote. “I can only imagine how members of the IRGC could rush to the United States legally to exploit our market and financial system and carry out terrorist activities against the United States, if the IRGC is indeed delisted.”
The lawmaker asked the State Department and DHS to respond no later than May 20 and explain the process that led to Parastui and his entourage obtaining visas. This includes the name or names of those involved in approving the visas.
“What vetting procedure do you have in place to ensure that supporters or defenders of Iranian terrorism will not be admitted into the United States?” Banks asked.
Banks also wants to know if the State Department reviews social media posts from visa applicants “to evaluate their potential ties to the IRGC and other Iranian terrorist groups.”
“Is IRGC affiliation a criterion in evaluating whether an alien can be granted U.S. permanent resident status?” Banks asked in the letter. “What steps are you taking to ensure that Iranian agents—particularly those seeking to assassinate US officials—are not masquerading as ordinary Iranians requesting tourist visas?”
Banks also asked the State Department to provide detailed information on its efforts to counter Iranian disinformation and propaganda. Iran was cited as one of several adversarial regimes, including Russia, that attempted to sway the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, questioned the decision to grant Parastui a visa.
“It’s deeply concerning that the State Department is granting visas to Soleimani sympathizers while the regime has repeatedly proclaimed it is trying to kill U.S. officials in revenge for Qassem Soleimani,” Noronha told the Free Beacon. “If they can’t do basic vetting now, it’ll get far worse if they lift visa sanctions on the hundreds of thousands of IRGC members. They don’t seem to have any plan to prevent even worse terrorists from coming into our country.”
Ellie Cohanim, who served as the State Department’s deputy special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism during the Trump administration, warned that Iran’s hardline allies could stir up trouble once inside the United States.
“At a time when Secretary Blinken testified to Congress that the Iranian regime is posing ‘an ongoing threat against American officials, both present and past,’ it is unconscionable that the Biden State Department issued a visa to an IRGC associate like Parviz Parastui,” Cohanim said. “Parastui is here ostensibly on a film tour but is there any way to know whether he is here to activate a sleeper cell? Or pass on messages to Iranian nationals who reside in the U.S.? Why at a time when U.S. government officials are under threat would the Biden administration allow onto U.S. soil an Iranian regime apparatchik like Parastui?”
Conspiracy; Unauthorized Access to a Computer; Knowingly Damaging Protected Computer; Voter Intimidation; Interstate Threats
Reward:
The Rewards For Justice Program, United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information on or about the activities of Seyyed Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazemi and Sajjad Kashian.
Details:
On October 20, 2021, a grand jury in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York indicted SEYYED MOHAMMAD HOSEIN MUSA KAZEMI, also known as “Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazem”, and “Hosein Zamani”, and SAJJAD KASHIAN, also known as “Kiarash Nabavi”, for, among other things, computer intrusion, voter intimidation, and interstate threat offenses, for their alleged participation in a multi-faceted campaign aimed at influencing and interfering with the United States 2020 Presidential Election. In connection with this campaign, the defendants allegedly obtained United States voter information from at least one state election website, sent threatening voter email messages to intimidate voters, crafted and disseminated disinformation pertaining to the election and election security, and accessed, and attempted to access, without authorization, the computer systems of several online United States media entities and states. This occurred from at least in or about August of 2020, to at least in or about November of 2020.
Kazemi is described as an Iranian male born on June 18, 1997. He is between 5’5″ and 6’0″ tall, 180 to 185 pounds, with dark brown hair and brown eyes.
Kashian is described as an Iranian male born on September 17, 1994. He is between 5’5″ and 6’0″ tall, 130 to 140 pounds, with dark brown hair and brown eyes.
THESE INDIVIDUALS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED AN INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT RISK
President Joe Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, a critical federal official charged with overseeing large banks, declared war on the fossil fuel industry: “We want them to go bankrupt,” said Saule Omarova.
Omarova isn’t alone in her desire for financial institutions to discriminate against the energy producers that make their existence possible. Progressive activists and Wall Street financiers are teaming up to promote environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing practices that place political whims on a pedestal—at the expense of our lives and livelihoods.
The Biden administration’s endorsement of this brazen anti-energy movement threatens Americans’ money and future—and could have unsettling ripple effects throughout our economy.
Here’s how it works: Pension funds invest the money of retirees and future retirees. Fund managers should make the smartest investments they can in order to ensure retirees have enough money to live on. But under ESG, they’re not making the smartest investments, they’re making investments that align with their political ideology. If that’s not bad enough, they’ll vote with a small but vocal minority of activist shareholders to adopt resolutions or replace board members—often against the best interests of the majority of shareholders.
Take ExxonMobil, for example. An activist hedge fund called Engine No. 1, which owns just 0.02 percent of Exxon’s shares, forced a takeover and replaced three board members with climate alarmists who will advocate for expensive and ineffective greenhouse gas reduction programs instead of working for the good of Exxon and all its shareholders.
Energy discrimination through ESG investing threatens to withhold capital and discourage investing in companies deemed politically unpalatable by progressives. This, of course, primarily means energy producers—regardless of the fact that America provides fuel for the world using the best pollution control technology available, not to mention fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Discrimination against the businesses powering America has advanced primarily through activists’ public shaming campaigns and big corporations’ virtue-signaling PR angles, but the elite class wants to force American businesses to march in lockstep on climate change. Pushing ESG from the federal level is an arbitrary and indefensible restriction on free speech and a threat to the men and women depending on their investments and pensions for retirement—that’s the vast majority of us.
Activists claim that ESG funds—those branded as having a better social impact, though there are no universal standards that define ESG—perform better financially than traditional investments. However, studies supporting this claim are riddled with methodological errors, and this trend is simply too new to understand long-term effects.
Selecting investments based on political preferences, no matter how seemingly virtuous, goes against decades of investing wisdom. Diversified investments are almost universally agreed to be the strongest investments long-term, which means that limiting investment opportunities for retirement funds and pensions will also limit the return on investment for retirees.
One well-constructed study reveals this by analyzing higher education investments. Professor Daniel R. Fischel finds (pdf) that the cost of complying with energy discrimination campaigns is significant enough to prevent universities from reaching their investment goals. Higher fees, limited diversification, and compliance costs add up—and likely don’t influence the public’s behavior or opinions.
Worse yet, recent legal analysis suggests ESG investing may actually rise to the level of illegal collusion that violates longstanding consumer protection laws. When all the major players are conspiring to follow the same political practices, to the extent that law-abiding businesses can’t access financial services, the free market is no longer truly free.
But do these principles help stop climate change? The answer is categorically no. According to climate data models used globally, even enacting each and every tenet of the Green New Deal wouldn’t produce any meaningful temperature change. Eliminating all fossil fuels and all man-made carbon dioxide emissions would result in less than two-tenths of a degree temperature difference. So even the biggest and loudest campaigns to force divestment from fossil fuels would have a microscopic impact—if any at all.
The only real effect of this energy discrimination movement would be worse poverty, a higher cost of living for everyone, and—ironically—more pollution. That’s because denying capital or investments to American energy companies won’t eliminate our need for fossil fuels, our only significant source of the affordable, reliable energy we need. It will just transfer energy purchases to overseas producers.
It makes little sense, if the environment is really the progressive wing’s top priority, to give power, influence, and money to countries that pollute with abandon and maintain poor human rights records. Instead, we should continue to produce energy here in the United States, taking advantage of our environmentally conscious and efficient energy industry—while also producing energy cheaply and maintaining our national security and international negotiating power.
Biden campaigned on equity and fighting poverty. Unfortunately, his administration’s fixation on climate alarmism and micromanaging investors will create more poverty by making energy—and everything we buy—more expensive.
The Biden administration should reject discrimination of all forms, including energy discrimination.
There is, understandably, bi-partisan concern about the decision. It allows foreign nationals to fund signature collecting, qualify measures and financially support campaigns to amend or create statutory law. (And in some states, even amend its Constitution.) Imagine foreign nationals in China, Russia, or even Iran legally funding multiple ballot measures in battleground States in 2022 or 2024. And why? For their own financial gain and political agenda.
I’ve spent my career running ballot measures in almost every state and several abroad. As someone who sees a lot of them – Indian and non-Indian gaming, tax increases, energy, healthcare reform, and more – an equally concerning threat is the impact on voter turnout.
Anything that motivates turnout – even at the margins of an already historically active electorate – can have a massive impact on election results. It is a statistical fact that ballot initiatives and referenda, particularly controversial measures, can increase voter turnout by five to 10 percent.
That’s what happened in Arizona last year.
In 2020, Arizona’s proposition 207 to legalize the recreational use of marijuana drove more voter participation than Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as you see in the chart below.
A closer look shows that Arizona flipped in favor of Biden on the coattails of recreational marijuana. If Prop. 207 was a “Presidential candidate” in Arizona it would have won by over 200,000 votes. The post-election analysis shows proposition 207 drove hundreds of thousands of young, Democratic voters who also cast votes for Joe Biden.
Another concerning aspect is money – ballot measure committees can accept an unlimited amount.
Individuals, committees, associations and businesses are allowed to contribute as much as they want to support or oppose a ballot measure, as long as it’s disclosed on the campaign contribution/expenditure report, which most states require.
Thankfully, given the FEC ruling only applies to federal issues on individual state’s ballots, the states retain some authority and autonomy to help backstop the FEC’s decisions and mitigate the potential for Election Day manipulation by foreign actors.
Each state sets its own rules for ballot measures. That includes the process for qualifying a measure, the number of signatures required, what can and cannot be a subject on the ballot, the level of financing disclosures or transparency and more.
States must take a thoughtful look at this new FEC policy and how it might impact wider results on Election Day, particularly in Presidential election years.
In all their various forms, ballot measures are an essential part of the direct democracy process. History has shown that direct democracy – although not perfect – has resulted in dramatic social and economic changes that legislative bodies didn’t have the courage to do themselves. But it is reserved for state and local citizens and not foreign nationals.
President Joe Biden’s latest some $2 trillion social spending plan will add trillions to the national debt, make inflation worse, and hurt traditional energy businesses. These were the contentions of a group of Heritage Foundation policy scholars.
During a press briefing on Nov. 12, they reviewed the president’s Build Back Better policies.
The original Build Back Better proposal called for $4 trillion in spending. Some progressives said it was not big enough. But opposition from Senator Manchin (D-W.Va.) required the proposal’s price tag come down.
Heritage Foundation experts lambasted both the recently passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the latest $1.75+ trillion social and environmental spending proposal. The latter is pending in Congress.
“The White House’s newly released framework,” the Heritage Foundation said in a statement, “returns to a tried-and-true way to obscure the true cost of the legislation: the budget gimmick. Progressives claim the bill is a compromise when in reality, it is a profoundly radical document that would massively expand federal power, promote a variety of left-wing causes, kneecap the economic recovery, and waste a tremendous amount of taxpayer money.”
The White House Press Office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
At the same time, a high Biden administration was recently predicting the latest package would pass Congress, which might take up the issue next week. Still, Heritage Foundation officials said it would be toxic.
Katie Tubb, an energy analyst, warned that spending billions of dollars proposed for alternative energy companies would repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration, which spent billions of taxpayer dollars on loan guarantees for the Solyndra solar energy company. The company later defaulted.
“I’m not sure why we are expecting this to be any different this time around,” she said.
Tubb contended much of the economic growth over the last few years has come from traditional energy sources. This Biden plan, she added, would punish those industries.
“Why is that important? Because Americans get 80 percent of their energy from traditional sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas,” she said.
Tubb argued, “these are legal industries in the United States that contribute to the wellbeing of the United States, yet you wouldn’t know this by the way this administration talks.”
Tubb warns Build Back Better policies conflict with most of the president’s constituents “because, as you increase energy prices, you increase the cost of almost every product and service.”
She also said Build Back Better would hurt right to work states, states in which workers can’t be required to join unions.
This Biden’s original social spending proposal included $555 billion for environmental programs and $400 billion to pay for universal pre-school and cap child care costs at seven percent of income for most families and $200 billion to expand the child tax credit for families that earn up to $150,000 from $2,000 to $3,000 per child or $3,600 for those under age 6.
Several Heritage Foundation officials also complained that the five infrastructure/stimulus plans that have been passed since the outbreak of COVID last year are too much. And while one or two of these packages may have been justified, they are now excessive, they said. They are adding too much to the debt and will hurt efforts of some private sector firms to recover, especially in the energy sector, they noted.
David Ditch, a Heritage Foundation federal budget policy analyst, said the latest Biden plan is part of a number of spending plans since the start of the pandemic that have “already added $5 trillion to the national debt.”
It would also be the “greatest expansion” of government welfare programs in history, according to Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation analyst.
“The deficit spending has consequences because we have massive structural consequences that will keep growing,” Ditch contended.
“There’s also no way to escape the fact that Build Back Better would increase deficits in the first five years. It’s really important to understand that every important economic headwind we face now would be worsened by Build Back Better,” according to Ditch.
Rachel Greszler, another Heritage Foundation analyst, said most of the Biden child care programs discourage the use of religious, or faith-based, child-care programs.
“To qualify, they would have to take most of the faith out of their programs. None of them are going to do that because the reason they set them up was to be in line with their faith.”
She also said the proposal will primarily benefit urban “high income families” at the “expense of more rural low-income areas.”
Still, a Biden administration official on Nov. 11 said the $2 trillion proposal is in good shape. Vice President Kamala Harris, in a speech in France, predicted the package “is poised to pass soon.”
“Just before I traveled here,” Harris added, “our Congress passed a landmark piece of legislation to make a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure. Another bill that will support our nation’s working families and help us meet our climate commitment is poised to pass soon.”
High oil prices are a symptom of economic and monetary imbalances, not a consequence of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decisions.
Throughout history, we have seen how OPEC cuts have done little to elevate prices when diversification and technology added to rising efficiency. Likewise, OPEC output increases don’t necessarily mean lower prices, let alone reasonable ones. OPEC helps but doesn’t solve price issues, even if they would probably like to.
The problem in the oil market has been created by years of massive capital misallocation and underinvestment in energy—the result of extremely loose monetary policies directed by governments that have penalized capital expenditure on fossil fuels for ideological reasons.
Misguided activism and political nudging in the middle of monetary injections have created bottlenecks and underinvestment that hinder both security of supply and a technically feasible competitive energy transition.
Massive injections of liquidity have caused a double side effect: rising malinvestment in non-productive activities and, now, a large inflow of capital into so-called “value” areas—more money directed to relatively scarce assets. Energy has gone from a consensus underweight stock rating to a large overweight, exacerbating the price increase. The marginal barrel of oil has risen almost 60 percent in a year, despite supply rising in tandem with demand.
According to JP Morgan, the required capital expenditure in energy required to meet demand is $600 billion for the period 2021–2030. This “cumulative missing capex” is part of the problem.
The other important problem is artificial demand created by chains of stimulus plans. As I explained in this column, adding enormous energy-intensive infrastructure plans to a re-opening economy where some supply bottlenecks have been worsened generates the same effect on energy prices as a huge speculative bubble.
Political intervention has also created an important impact on the price of a marginal barrel of oil. Threatening to ban domestic development of energy resources in the United States or announcing the prohibition of fossil fuel investment in some European summits makes the net present value of the long-term marginal barrel higher, not lower. Why? Because those threats aren’t made with sound technical analysis and robust supply and demand estimates, but with political agendas. Any serious engineer that understands the importance of security and supply and technology development understands that a successful energy transition to a greener economy requires solid and realistic targets and policies that avoid an energy crisis. Those have been forgotten.
OPEC is benefitting from high oil prices, but not as much as one would think. The OPEC Reference Basket average is $68.33 per barrel year-to-date, a large 68.4 percent increase over the same period last year, but still massively below the elevated levels prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, OPEC and non-OPEC supply has risen in tandem with demand. Global oil supply in October increased by 1.74 million barrels per day to average 97.56 million barrels per day compared with the previous month. The U.S. liquids production growth forecast for 2021 has been revised up by 19,000 barrels per day and expected to be 17.57 million barrels per day in 2021. Imagine where oil and gas prices would be if the political threats to ban or severely penalize domestic production had been enforced.
Let’s not forget that OPEC has also revised down the estimates of global oil demand to 96.4 million barrels a day in 2021. Supply remains ample, and the U.S. administration should see that Russia and the United States are expected to be the main drivers of next year’s supply growth. Without Russia and the United States, production prices would soar no matter what OPEC partners or Saudi Arabia alone do.
We’re suffering the combination of misguided energy policies, excessive money creation, and ill-timed giant construction plans. OPEC and its partner Russia may alleviate this, but not change it dramatically. Furthermore, as time passes and underinvestment becomes more severe, OPEC’s ability to curb prices weakens. We can’t forget that OPEC and Russia account for less than half of the total world supply. They matter, but putting two more million barrels a day of supply into the market doesn’t solve the long-term price problem.
Energy prices will decline with more technology, investment, and diversification, not empty political threats.
Writing for RealClearPolitics, Professor Andrew E. Busch of Claremont McKenna College finds that “one reason for Americans’ increasing political discomfort—the feeling that politics has become a blood sport in which traditional protections and safety nets are no longer present—is that the nonpartisan insulation protecting the rule of law and consent of the governed has frayed. There is a broad pattern of offices that require political neutrality being converted into offices that are genuinely partisan in their operation.”
What, I wonder, was his first clue?
Understandably, Busch concentrates on the most recent examples of this creeping partisanship in places that are supposed to be non-partisan, since the Biden administration represents a quantum leap in the politicization of everything, but especially of the law.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, he writes, “has already used the Justice Department to advance his own party’s version of the stolen-election story by suing to stop state legislative efforts to enhance ballot security, then threatening to sic the FBI on parents who complain to their local school boards about left-wing political indoctrination in the classroom.”
By contrast, Busch praises the non-partisan spirit of former Attorney General William Barr for resigning rather than supporting President Trump’s demand for a thorough investigation of election irregularities.
But then he can’t help noticing the concerted legal efforts by Democratic Attorneys General in swing states last year to change voting laws in order to create those irregularities—and, with them, the opportunities for cheating.
You can see why Busch wants to be even-handed and pretend that the partisan takeover of supposedly non-partisan institutions is coming from both sides, but he can’t quite obscure the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of these efforts have been made—and successfully made, thanks to the compliant media—on behalf of Democrats.
There is nothing like a Republican equivalent, for example, of the partisan takeover of the FBI under James Comey. “The course of the Russia investigation,” writes Busch, “complete with the obvious biases of Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, implied that the bureau had picked sides.”
Implied? Can there be any doubt about which side these and others in the bureau were on? Or which side Robert Mueller and his team were on? If there were any doubt about it, it must have been dispelled by the recent revelations, and indictments, coming out of the John Durham investigation.
Busch might also have mentioned the disparity in federal law-enforcement’s treatment of the Capitol rioters of Jan. 6 as constituting an “insurrection” and its almost complete lack of interest in the hundreds of riots, the billions of dollars in property damage and the many deaths that took place around the country last summer.
You don’t have to be particularly good at spotting “implied” biases to tell that the difference between the two was that the first was in support of Donald Trump, the others opposed to him. And, violently, opposed to the police. But why would we expect the federal police, ostensibly there to uphold the rule of law, to care about that?
Also, as I pointed out last summer in these pages, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the nation’s armed forces, traditionally our number one non-partisan institution, along with the judiciary, testified before Congress on behalf of the Democratic talking point by asserting on the basis of zero evidence that the Capitol riot was motivated by “white rage.”
Milley is also charged with weeding out of the services those identified by the extreme left as members of the “extremist right.”
But the perspicacious could have picked up hints of the erosion of the “nonpartisan insulation” of key institutions long before 2016.
The politicization of the judiciary, I would argue, began at least as far back as 1987 when a certain Joseph R. Biden, newly appointed chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put the kibosh on President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court for transparently political reasons.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who once said of his fellow judges that “we don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” has gone to heroic lengths to keep up the pretense of non-partisanship in the judiciary, but then he is also the man who, apparently without irony, once called the U.S. Senate “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
The politicization of the armed services began even earlier. As the late Colin Powell cheerfully put it in 2007, presumably with reference to his own military career, which started in the Vietnam era, “Anybody who becomes a senior officer had better have some political instincts or you’re going to get ground up. We are a political nation. It is not a dirty word.”
What he meant to say, perhaps, was that it is only a dirty word when applied to constitutionally non-political institutions. Like the military.
I understand that he was talking about the internal politics that are inevitable in any large organization, but in the military, whose most senior officers are appointed by civilian (and political) authority, those politics are always bound up with the other kind.
Under President George W. Bush we learned, at least if we were paying attention, of the politicization of the CIA, which regularly briefed the media (anonymously, of course) against their ostensible commander-in-chief.
Under President Barack Obama we learned, even if we weren’t paying much attention, of the politicization of the Department of Justice and the IRS.
And, as everyone now knows, under President Donald Trump we learned of the politicization not only of the FBI and (again) the Justice Department but also of the State Department. All three, while ostensibly serving the President, were actually undermining him.
It should not be necessary to point out that all of these encroachments of the political onto officially non-political territory have been in one direction and one direction only—leftwards. It’s as if there were some law of political inertia analogous to Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
Maybe this is what the progressives mean by saying that they are “on the right side of history,” If so, it means that the rest of us, who still treasure what we think is our right to be non-political, must be on the wrong side of history.
President Joe Biden’s appeasement is getting its usual payback.
An Iranian-backed militant group the Biden administration removed from a designated list of foreign terrorist organizations right after assuming power has stormed the shuttered U.S. Embassy in Yemen, making hostages of Yemenis who worked at the facility, The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday.
And making fools, once again, of the Biden administration and its foreign policy.
BREAKING: Iran-Backed Militants Storm US Embassy in Yemen, Seize Hostages and Equipment — State Dept tells me it is ‘concerned about the breach of the compound,’ demands release of hostages & equipment https://t.co/vA8sQc35mt
According to the Free Beacon, the Houthi rebels, who’ve been fighting a proxy war on Iran’s behalf against the government on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, took over the compound in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on Wednesday, leaving it to Biden’s beleaguered State Department to try to negotiate for the release of the employees.
“The United States has been unceasing in its diplomatic efforts to secure their release,” a State Department spokesman said, according to the Free Beacon. “The majority of the detained have been released, but the Houthis continue to detain additional Yemeni employees of the embassy.”
To be clear, the embassy has been closed since 2015, when the Obama administration and the State Department under then-Secretary of State John Kerry decided the situation amid the violence was untenable, as Fox News reported at the time. No Americans are among the Yemeni hostages.
Still, Yemen has remained a simmering cauldron on the world stage, breaking into the news periodically with reports of yet more Houthi savagery, the involvement of the Iranian government in that savagery, or the Democratic congressional effort to end U.S. support for the government fighting to defeat that savagery. (For nearly half a century, or roughly the entirety of Joe Biden’s political career, his party has been on exactly the wrong side when it came to fighting Islamic fascism. That’s probably not a coincidence.)
But there’s no way to safely ignore the role of Iran in the unrest.
Is the possibility of war greater with Joe Biden in the White House than it was with Donald Trump as president?
The world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism, where “Death to America” is practically the national motto, just proved once again that it has zero respect for a Biden administration that has projected nothing but weakness on the international stage since coming to power.
To Americans of a certain age, this all might sound familiar: Abroad, chaos with Iran playing a starring role, the storming of a U.S. embassy; at home, a weak Democrat in the White House and raging inflation, among other problems.
Welcome to the 1970s — an abysmal decade that isn’t looking any better with time.
As a National Review article pointed out, the raid on the embassy comes 10 months after the Biden administration, hoping to curry favor with the Iranian mullahs, overturned a decision made in the final days of the Trump administration to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization.
At the time, according to ABC News, Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the decision was “a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen.”
It was also, according to the Free Beacon, “seen as a goodwill gesture” toward the murderous mullahs of Tehran, in hopes of restarting talks on the Iran nuclear deal.
Well, it’s a good bet that Yemen’s “dire humanitarian situation” is no better now than it was back in February. And it’s an obvious conclusion that the “goodwill gesture” toward Tehran has paid off in the usual way such gestures do when dealing with the Islamist dictatorship: more aggression, more provocation, more terrorism.
In short, it’s an utter failure – one more humiliation for the United States to add to the Biden humiliation in Afghanistan, and one more sign that the Biden White House can’t truly be trusted by anyone except the country’s bitterest enemies — and then, only to do exactly the wrong thing.
In Yemen, even now, Yemeni nationals are in the hands of the Islamist terrorist group that, among other things, has staged missile attacks against Saudi Arabia, a country that, whatever its obvious faults, is a U.S. ally in the region.
And it’s one more example of how far the United States’ image has fallen since President Donald Trump left the White House.
Where Trump walked away from the Obama-era nuclear deal because it amounted to a blank check for the mullahs to obtain a nuclear weapon in the future, Team Biden is abasing itself and the country to try to get Iran back to the table.
Where Trump met Iranian provocation and intransigence with strength (see Soleimani, Qassim: Death of), his successor has established a record of weakness that gives confidence to the country’s enemies and anxiety to its friends.
And most importantly, where the Trump administration fostered peace or the potential for peace between Israel and its Arab foes in the region through a series of deals, Biden brings chaos and the potential for ever more war, with the deaths of innocents that inevitably come with it.
It’s appeasement that’s getting its usual payback.
Unfortunately, the country is likely to see a lot more of it in the next three years.
How much longer can this go on? As we head into the second year of the President Joe Biden “administration,” with the country in a shambles and heading no place good but full speed ahead, it’s time for all real Americans to take stock of our situation and formulate an emergency plan, with no time to spare.
Back in March, I wrote in these pages: “Biden’s Presidency Seems Ready to End.” In fact, Biden’s sham presidency never really began and whatever there was to it is now long over.
But then Brandon—excuse me! Biden!—isn’t really the president, simply the President in Name Only. Sure, he dutifully signs whatever executive order—increasingly authoritarian and blatantly unconstitutional—is put under his nose, which, at least until the next election, has the force of law until a federal court says otherwise. Even should a court block its implementation, as happened over the weekend with the illegal vaccine mandate being imposed on private industries by the Nixon-era excrescence of OSHA, the White House’s advice is to ignore it.
Biden also makes pro forma appearances on the international stage, including a mysteriously long audience with the former Cardinal Bergoglio (who’s every bit as much a pope as Biden is a president) that instantly gave rise to embarrassing rumors. And from time to time he even makes the short walk from West Wing to the Old Executive Office Building in order to stage something for the cameras in a studio-set version of the Oval Office.
But everybody in Washington knows the puppet presidency has no agency of its own, but is instead controlled from Kalorama by Barack Obama and his minions, including Ron Klain, who now serves as Biden’s chief of staff.
Meanwhile, the country he ostensibly leads is going to hell. We’ve gone from energy independence to passing the gasoline begging bowl, even as the forces behind Biden are busy choking off the domestic energy industry. Perhaps you’ve noticed the effects of this malicious policy at the gas pump.
Our long-neglected infrastructure, which is properly defined as roads, bridges, and buildings, remains a national disgrace, and the recent passage of a pork-laden $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill—with turncoat Republican help—not only won’t help a bit but will be paid for with imaginary money.
Overseas, right in Biden’s vaunted “foreign policy” wheelhouse, the Chinese are testing advanced missiles and expanding their fleet of aircraft carriers while what’s left of our Defense Department celebrates awarding four stars to a man in a skirt and hailing him as a “historic” female admiral.
A Navy sub’s trio of commanders was recently cashiered when the USS Connecticut struck an underseas mountain its crack officer corps somehow didn’t notice, while in San Diego the amphibious assault ship, Bonhomme Richard, was destroyed by an arsonist and a crew too incompetent to put out the blaze.
Oh yes, and the Marines recently got their tails kicked by the British in a desert-warfare exercise at their base at Twenty-Nine Palms in southern California. (The woke Marine Corps, of course, denies it.)
But the void in the White House is really the least of our problems, most of which we have brought upon ourselves. You get what you vote for and the American people, in rejecting Donald Trump, have voted for anarchy. As former New York City mayor Ed Koch said after being defeated for re-election in 1989, “the people have spoken, and they must be punished.”
Punishment is coming from every angle, principally from the criminal organization masquerading as a political party known as the Democrats. We now know that the vindictive but cunning loser Hillary Clinton set in motion the entire “Russian collusion”—in part with the collaboration of the Russophile leftist think tank, the Brookings Institution, and in part through the medium of a British spy channeling deliberate Soviet-style disinformation.
From the jump, it was obvious that the “Steele dossier” was a farrago of standard ex-KGB dirty tricks—in Russia and in Eastern Europe I’d seen this movie a dozen times—and I said so publicly at the time, practically from the day Buzzfeed published the “dossier.”
The American media deliberately weaponized this disinformation—which they knew at the time was false—against the lawfully elected president of the United States and crippled his presidency over it. And then they awarded themselves Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” of something that never happened.
Par for the course for the American version of Pravda. If you don’t think the New York Times hasn’t been in love with its Russian socialist confreres—and often actually been in bed with the KGB, its forebears, and its descendants—for the bulk of the 20th century, you need to wake up. Until the power of the Times is broken, the American Republic-as-founded will never have a moment’s peace.
But the weaponization didn’t and doesn’t stop there. “Former” members of the intelligence community now lie brazenly and openly on some of the “news channels,” such as CNN: the spooks are out of the shadows and in your living room.
The FBI is now investigating the alleged theft of Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary—a document that if genuine offers even more repellent insights into this stunningly dysfunctional family. How this is a federal matter is beyond me, unless the FBI has now become the Biden family’s private police force with a mandate to suppress bad news about the family. And if you don’t believe me, ask Hunter Biden.
Americans, quite properly, sense there’s something “off” about Biden and his crew, which is why his approval ratings continue to crater. But as long as the radical Left holds the media high ground, it’s hard for most people not obsessed by politics to grasp just how malignant these people are. For decades, they’ve made no bones about their desire to replace the United States of the founding with something “progressive.”
They’ve overtly collaborated with the Soviets, infiltrated the civil-rights movement, absorbed the legacy media, corrupted the lawmakers, overpowered academe, seized hold of the education of our children and now, in their moment of triumph, are forcing us to live in a fantasy world of their own psycho-sexual device, while their pet shrinks tell us that we’re the crazy bigots, via the media.
The Trump admin nearly broke Tehran. Biden’s soft stance on sanctions helped the regime get back on track.
Iran’s stockpile of hard currency has skyrocketed during the Biden administration, rising from just $4 billion at the end of 2020 when sanctions were at their height, to more than $31 billion by the end of 2021, according to projections by the International Monetary Fund.
The Biden administration’s decision to pursue diplomacy with Iran and unwind the Trump administration’s sanctions has helped the country recover from its cash shortage, according to the IMF’s projections. The group says Iran’s cash reserves will top $31 billion by the end of the year and increase up to $42.9 billion by the end of 2022. This number could be even higher if the United States reenters the 2015 nuclear deal and removes all sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. Iran had $122 billion in cash reserves in 2018, when the Trump administration began to tighten the economic noose on Iran. That number dropped to $4 billion by the end of 2020, during the height of the former administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign.
Iran’s access to cash has been bolstered by the Biden administration’s lax enforcement of sanctions on the country’s illicit oil trade, which has increased to record levels amid a buying spree from China, the number-one importer of illegal Iranian crude oil. While Tehran’s oil sector is still sanctioned by the United States, experts told the Washington Free Beacon last week that the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to Tehran’s exports, enabling countries such as China, Russia, and Syria to provide the hardline regime a financial lifeline.
The IMF’s projections are the clearest sign to date that the Biden administration is serious about helping Iran’s hardline regime claw back from the brink of economic collapse. Republican leaders in Congress, who are widely critical of the Biden administration’s approach to diplomacy with Iran, maintain that the further removal of sanctions will embolden the ruling regime and help it fund terrorist groups across the Middle East, including those responsible for conducting a drone strike late last month on a U.S. military outpost in Syria.
Gabriel Noronha, a former State Department special adviser for Iran under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the Biden administration gave up U.S. leverage on Iran by unwinding sanctions before it extracted assurances from Tehran that Iran will stop its nuclear buildup and end its support for terrorism.
“At the end of the Maximum Pressure Campaign in January 2021, Iran was facing a simultaneous debt, inflation, unemployment, and balance of payments crisis caused by massive U.S. economic pressure,” Noronha, the executive director of the Forum for American Leadership, a national security think tank, told the Free Beacon. “Now the regime is making tens of billions in unsanctioned oil sales with China while Biden’s Treasury Department looks the other way and even supported the IMF giving Iran a $5 billion currency bailout.”
“Instead of getting a better deal or depriving the regime of funds for its nuclear program and terrorism,” Noronha said, “the Biden administration has obtained zero concessions from the regime in its 10 months of appeasement.
Data from Iran’s budget and planning offices showed the country’s debt would increase more than 2,000 percent by 2027, from $68 billion to $1.39 trillion, if U.S. sanctions remained in place. If sanctions are unwound, however, Iran will only be around $561 billion in debt by 2027. It was also projected that the Iranian rial—which is already almost worth nothing—would devalue by 10 times the current amount by 2027 if sanctions are not removed.
This is primarily why Iran is pressuring the Biden administration to unwind sanctions before it agrees to a revamped version of the nuclear deal. It remains unclear, however, how long any sanctions relief will remain in place. Republicans in Congress have vowed to immediately trash any deal that is reached between the United States and Iran once Democrats are out of office.
Iran appears to be aware of this possible outcome. Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, a ruling body that holds power over the country’s policies, said last week that “the U.S. president has no authority [and] is not willing to provide any guarantees [the United States will not leave the nuclear deal again],” according to comments cited in the country’s state-controlled press.
Coalition of GOP leaders say Biden admin’s singular focus on nuke deal endangers American troops
Republicans in Congress are renewing pressure on the Biden administration to abandon its diplomacy with Iran following Tehran’s recent drone strike on a U.S. military outpost in Syria, according to a letter sent Thursday to the White House.
Seventeen Republican members of Congress, led by Rep. Bryan Steil (Wis.), accused the Biden administration of ignoring Iran’s increasingly aggressive attacks on the United States and its allies in the Middle East to secure a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord. As negotiations between Iran and U.S. diplomats stall amid Tehran’s demands for full-scale relief from economic sanctions, the Islamic Republic has stepped up its regional terrorist enterprise.
“During a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East, it sends a dangerous message to our friends and adversaries that we continue to lift sanctions and negotiate with the largest state sponsor of terrorism as they attack us,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “This attack is yet another reminder that your administration is setting the wrong priorities by working to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal. If Iran is willing to engage in this kind of behavior while negotiations are still ongoing, imagine the respect they will have for any agreement once the ink is dry.”
U.S. military officials say Iran was behind a “complex, coordinated and deliberate attack” late last month on an American military outpost in Syria, where U.S. troops are stationed. Several drones carrying explosives struck the military site, though no casualties were reported. Iran has been behind a string of drone strikes on American, Israeli, and other allied positions in the region.
The Biden administration did not publicly respond to the strike or announce any operations aimed at countering Iranian aggression. The administration’s decision to avoid agitating Iran in the wake of the strike has prompted accusations that the United States is looking the other way as it scrambles to ink a nuclear deal with Tehran. As Biden’s diplomats promise to waive crippling economic sanctions on the country—including those that target Iran’s support for terrorist proxy groups—Republicans are increasingly concerned the Islamic Republic will become more emboldened.
In addition to Steil, the letter was signed by Republican representatives Dan Crenshaw (Texas), Randy Weber (Texas), Brian Babin (Texas), Doug Lamborn (Colo.), Tracey Mann (Kan.), and Vicky Hartzler (Mo.), among others.
The drone strike came just weeks before Iran sent several drones toward a U.S. naval vessel that was operating in the Persian Gulf. Iran says it prevented the United States from interfering in its seizure of an oil tanker.
“We have continued to watch Iran attack U.S. troops and our allies in the Middle East, while increasing its nuclear activities,” the lawmakers wrote. “These threats are ongoing, and your administration continues to weaken our ability to combat the Iranian regime by lifting U.S. sanctions.”
Steil, speaking to the Free Beacon about the letter, said the Biden administration’s singular focus on its diplomacy with Iran sets “the wrong priorities” for America.
“This administration is weakening our ability to combat the regime, and is increasing already heightened tensions in the Middle East,” Steil said. “We must hold Iran accountable, and ensure we are protecting Americans, our troops, and civilians in the region.”
