Data suggests ‘economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly’
America’s recessionary drumbeat just got louder as a key economic gauge from the Conference Board dropped for the fifth month in a row, weighed down by a slowing job market, weak manufacturing new orders, and deep consumer pessimism.
The Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States, which is a forward-looking gauge designed to predict business cycle shifts including recessions, fell by 0.4 percent in July, following a 0.7 percent drop in June, the Conference Board said on Aug. 18.
“The U.S. LEI declined for the fifth consecutive month in July, suggesting recession risks are rising in the near term,” Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director for economics at the Conference Board, said in a statement.
While the U.S. economy met the common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession when gross domestic product (GDP) printed negative for two quarters in a row earlier this year, recessions are formally called by a panel of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They use a broader definition than the two-quarter rule, relying on a wide range of indicators, including the labor market, which has remained on a relatively solid footing.
The Biden administration has seized on the NBER’s criteria for declaring a downturn, insisting that the economy isn’t in a recession, with White House officials often citing labor market strength—though there are signs that it’s cooling.
Even though unemployment is at 3.5 percent and the latest non-farm payrolls report showed U.S. employers adding a forecast-beating 528,000 in July, a growing number of U.S. corporations have announced hiring freezes or layoffs, while the number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance has been slowly trending up.
Mild or Severe Recession?
The slowing labor market was one of the factors singled out by Ozyildirim in his comments on the LEI’s fifth consecutive monthly slump.
“Consumer pessimism and equity market volatility as well as slowing labor markets, housing construction, and manufacturing new orders suggest that economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly throughout the US economy,” he said, adding that the Conference Board projects that the U.S. economy won’t grow in the third quarter and “could tip into a short but mild recession by the end of the year or early 2023.”
While the view that America’s recession will be short and mild has its advocates, economist Nouriel Roubini, who got the nickname “Dr. Doom” after correctly predicting the 2007–08 financial crisis, calls that view “delusional.”
Roubini said in a recent interview on Bloomberg TV that he believes persistently high inflation will force the Fed to keep monetary settings tight, which will tip the U.S. economy into a “severe recession and a severe debt and financial crisis” that will be long-lasting.
Similarly, former President Donald Trump recently warned that, unless the country changes course in key areas—including energy policy—he believes something worse than a recession is on the horizon.
“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona at the end of July. “We’ll have a depression.”
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a key figure in a December 2020 White House meeting seeking to encourage then President Donald Trump to investigate allegations of election fraud, has filed a motion in the Department of Justice’s investigation of Trump, calling for the release of the key document justifying the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Agents on Aug. 8 seized more than two dozen boxes of records from Trump’s Florida resort, which contained 11 sets of documents with classified markings, according to an FBI property receipt made public on Aug. 12.
Trump has said that he had declassified all the confiscated records before leaving office and demanded the immediate release of unredacted affidavit behind the FBI warrant.
Byrne, who recently testified before the House Jan. 6 Committee, argued in his Aug. 18 motion that Trump had such powers to declassify as president, citing a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020 where he said the former president twice exercised the same presidential authority.
The affidavit should be unsealed along with other records shedding light on the raid to promote transparency and accountability in government, Byrne argued in the court filing.
“Trump’s position was that … if this was not just some police state raid but there was a good reason for this raid, then, let’s see it,” Byrne told The Epoch Times.
“If Trump was telling the truth” and he in fact declassified all the documents, and the FBI submitted an affidavit accusing Trump of mishandling classified documents, “that means they were lying to the court,” he said.
“Trump was only mishandling classified documents if those documents were in fact, classified, but if he declassified then he was not mishandling classified documents.”
Byrne during the closed door meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, urged the former president to launch a probe into the election fraud allegations.
Frustrated with the suggestion of having former Trump attorney Sidney Powell appointed special counsel to spearhead a limited investigation into alleged fraud, then White House Counsel Pat Cipollone allegedly told Trump: “Hey if you want to do this you don’t need my permission. You don’t even need a pen or a piece of paper. You can just say, ‘I hire Sidney Powell as White House Special Counsel,’ and it’s done,” Byrne wrote in the filing.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne is surrounded by private security as he arrives at the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. House Office Building to be interviewed by the House select committee investigating the events on January 6, on July 15, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Later, responding to questions about Powell’s lack of a security clearance, General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was present at the meeting, allegedly told Trump that he could “ do the same thing with a clearance.”
“You can grant any clearance you want, on the spot, verbally,” according to a sworn affidavit by Byrne filed with the court.
According to him, Trump acted on the suggestions, verbally appointing Powell a White House special counsel and granting her top secret security clearance. He says after that the White House attorneys angrily left the room but didn’t dispute Trump’s actions.
Trump ultimately rescinded the decision upon the persuasion of his then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, according to Byrne.
“He doesn’t have to sign anything, if he gives an order, that makes it legally effective,” Byrne told the court, describing it as “the Trump White House standard operating procedure.”
Backing Trump’s Claims
Mike Davis, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, has also backed Trump’s claims.
Trump “has the constitutional authority to declassify anything he wants,” he told NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times, in a recent interview. “And so, when he sent boxes out of the White House, he declassified them.”
Davis said the Justice Department should have released the affidavit but would likely try to “hide it as much as they can.”
A federal judge on Friday signaled a willingness to release a redacted version of the affidavit despite opposition from the government lawyers, who argued that doing so could undermine ongoing investigations and imperil the safety of witnesses involved.
Secret Service personnel in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Aug. 8, 2022. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
Byrne saw the judge’s move as a “judicious decision.”
“The FBI should not have to reveal whoever was their sources, they should protect their sources,” he said. “But beyond that, they shouldn’t be able to keep this affidavit a secret.
“I think the country needs to know what the FBI is saying that caused the attorney general to sign off on this extraordinary application. Unprecedented.”
Because of the raid and activities of the kind, the FBI has become “so delegitimized now in the eyes of so much of the public,” Byrne said. “It’s creating a terrible fear and oppression in the minds of the American public.”
“I talked to a lot of non-Republicans and they’re all starting to sound like Republicans. They see this as police state tactics.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray has come out in defense of his agency, saying agents have received “deplorable and dangerous” online threats in the wake of the raid.
“I like Christopher Wray,” said Byrne. “But I think he’s got a very narrow window to save his organization. And I hope he does.”
For a damning picture of the modern left, it doesn’t get much clearer than this.
The Democratic Party, which spent the 2020 presidential election year trashing the police and cheering on rioting mobs wreaking havoc on American cities is now desperately trying to rebrand itself for the midterm election year as the party of loyalty to federal law enforcement agencies hellbent on pursuing former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
But as a Twitter post published Wednesday by a member of the previous Democratic administration shows, all it’s really proving is basic ignorance, or utter contempt, for the foundations the country was built on.
The post was published by Tommy Vietor, now a co-host of the blasphemously liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” but a man who rose to public attention as one of the more abrasively juvenile members of the Obama administration.
The tweet included a link to a CNN report (of course) about the surveillance footage that was taken of last week’s FBI raid on Trump’s home in South Florida’s Mar-a-Lago Club, and a comment from Vietor that probably said more about the mindset of the modern left than Tommy ever intended.
The staff at the Trump household had refused an FBI request to turn off surveillance cameras in the home, which would have left the agents free to do anything they chose without fear of exposure.
“Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information,” Vietor wrote.
Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information. https://t.co/J6l1gtMpMc
He’s “very confused” about an American household disobeying an order from the FBI? And a “direct order” at that?
It’s a good bet he wasn’t at all confused by the George Floyd rioters failing to follow the orders of local police as they set about looting and torching businesses in the name of “social justice” in the summer of 2020.
For many Democrats, anarchy in the streets, theft and destruction of property, even outright murder are completely acceptable (just ask the gangsters who benefited from the bail organization Vice President Kamala Harris supported).
But failing to fall into lockstep obedience with the feds when they show up armed with a search warrant and plenty of weaponry? That passes Vietor’s comprehension.
Naturally, being a blue-checked liberal, Vietor has plenty of simpering sympathizers in the social media world (even the Twitter bots Elon Musk talks about have more brains than that herd), but fortunately for the future of the republic, there were more than a few responses to set Vietor straight:
You say, “No thank you, I prefer to film my home during your official duties.” The official duties of the officer are not private, and first amendment permits filming officers.
Now, it’s easy to dislike Vietor and the rest of the coterie of sophomoric arrogance that surrounded the Obama White House. (The State Department’s Marie Harf was another, along with Harf’s old boss Jen Psaki.)
With Obama administration posts that included membership in the National Security Council and special assistant to the president, Vietor helped saddle the country with the bogus Iran nuclear deal that even Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to the Obama White House, admitted had been sold in an “echo chamber” of mainstream media ignorance. (And to New York Times Magazine, no less.)
But he’s worth paying attention to, if only to see where the leftists of the Obama years are leading their party and — regrettably — the country today.
His podcast is an influential voice in leftist politics — the DigitalTrends website ranked it as the third-best political podcast for 2022. (No. 1 was NPR’s “The NPR Politics Podcast,” which says everything that needs to be said about DigitalTrends’ political preferences.)
To his marginal credit, Vietor appeared to learn something from his Twitter post, as one respondent explained a search warrant does not give law enforcement — even the big, bad FBI — powers to do more than search the premises involved.
“A search warrant authorizes…a search, per 4th Amd. It does not create other powers or cancel out civil liberties,” the user wrote.
“I remember when people used to be skeptical of the police, *especially* when they were dealing with someone we thought was a criminal.”
Vietor seemed to get the message — or maybe he’d just finally realized how cringingly submissive his initial tweet came off and remembered that he’s supposed to be a man.
“Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this ‘order’ because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous,” he wrote.
Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this “order” because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous.
“A little ridiculous” should have been a first reaction to the blatantly political operation. “Outrageous!” “Infuriating!” “Totalitarian BS!” would have been even better.
But for the leftist mindset of 2022, steeped in the openly anti-American tradition birthed by the disastrous Obama years, the initial reaction is not to defend American freedoms but to question why Americans can refuse a “direct order.”
This is a man who served in the Obama White House, remember, where the abuse of power at federal agencies — such as the IRS, with the likes of Lois Lerner; the FBI with the “leadership” of James Comey; and the Justice Department under political grifters like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch — had to have been considered almost commonplace.
It’s a basic distortion of the country’s foundation of law and order, pervasive among leftists in the mainstream media, in popular culture and in the Democratic Party from local governments through the House, the Senate and the White House:
They have nothing but contempt for the law; they worship orders.
There are many sorry countries, with many sorry histories, where that attitude is the norm. The United States isn’t one of them.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reacting to the recording-breaking number of illegal immigrants walking through the southern border.
The world’s richest person was replying to reporting from Fox News’s Bill Melugin, who posted on Twitter drone footage of a group of hundreds of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border at Eagle Pass, Texas, into the United States.
In his post, Melugin cited Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics showing border agents to have encountered 400,000 illegal immigrants so far in the Del Rio sector in fiscal year 2022 (since October 2021), a number that’s already more than double the total number of encounters in fiscal year 2021. This number doesn’t include “gotaways”—illegal crossers who evaded apprehension.
Strange that this receives very little attention in the media
“Strange that this receives very little attention in the media,” Musk wrote in response to Melugin on Aug. 14.
Musk, a self-portrayed political moderate and a design engineer by trade, has shared his perspective with his 100 million-plus followers on a wide range of issues beyond cars and rockets.
The billionaire’s comments on the border crisis, for example, were the latest in his series of criticism of the current administration and the Democratic Party in general; others include his comments on the influence of labor unions on the Democratic party, the Spygate collusion scandal involving Clinton-affiliated Democrats, and the Biden White House’s alleged sidelining of Tesla’s role in the electric vehicle market.
The Bigger Picture
The backstory to the exchange between Musk and Melugin features an ever-increasing surge in illegal immigration, overextended Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) resources, and an administration that actively strives to undo Trump-era “America First” immigration policies.
Eagle Pass is only one of the regions along the southwest border where hundreds of illegal immigrants pour into the United States. From the beginning of fiscal year 2022 on Oct. 1, 2021, to early August this year, border patrol agents apprehended 1.8 million illegal crossers. That’s more than the population of Phoenix, Arizona, the fifth-most populous city in the country, and about 40 percent higher than the total number of apprehensions in the previous fiscal year.
BORDER: Border Patrol agents organize hundreds of illegal immigrants who have streamed across the border from Mexico near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20. pic.twitter.com/ftZyyhfTc0
— Charlotte Cuthbertson (@charlottecuthbo) May 21, 2022
The head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), meanwhile, insists that the border is secure, while the Biden administration is kept busy by legal disputes with border states about key Trump migration policies.
One of the policies that the Biden administration began pulling back—following a Supreme Court decision that ruled in its favor—was the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required non-Mexican migrants seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico for processing.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration will continue to enforce the Trump-era immigration and public health policy known as Title 42, a policy instated as a COVID-19 countermeasure that allowed the United States to quickly expel migrants who unlawfully entered the United States and bypassed health screening in the process. A judge blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to lift Title 42 in May.
A Border Patrol agent organizes a large group of illegal immigrants near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Another legal battle that will be consequential to border security will play out in the Supreme Court in the fourth quarter of this year, when the highest court will hear a case on whether Biden’s immigration enforcement guidelines constitute executive agency overreach. In July, the Supreme Court allowed a federal judge in Texas to block the Biden administration’s immigration guidelines that, according to the border states’ prosecutors, limit the ability of border agents to detain and deport illegal aliens.
“The Biden Admin’s border record is an absolute failure,” Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary in the Trump administration, wrote on Twitter on Aug. 17, following reports of anonymous CBP sources saying that a record-setting 2 million illegal crossers were apprehended since the beginning of fiscal year 2022.
“I encourage Republicans next year to enact strong oversight in this area – specifically how DHS leadership executed an intentional plan to endanger migrants and American communities by refusing to enforce the law,” Wolf wrote.
Emails reveal how Hunter got Obama to officially recognize partnership
The Biden administration last month warned of a Chinese Communist Party front group that seeks to “co-opt” state leaders as part of Beijing’s sprawling foreign influence operation. Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show the first son and his business partners helped the organization gain a foothold in the United States while his father was vice president.
In 2015, Biden’s partners lobbied the State Department to publicly approve a partnership between the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and State Legislative Leaders Foundation, a nonprofit group that hosts forums for state legislators and corporate leaders. Hunter’s team portrayed the initiative as a boon for U.S.-Chinese relations.
But emails show they hoped the U.S. government’s recognition of the partnership would help the foundation establish an office in Beijing. It is not clear why the partnership—or the Obama administration’s blessing of it—would have helped Hunter Biden’s business prospects. What is clear is that he and his colleagues believed it would: Biden associate James Bulger wrote in a July 17, 2015, email that the Beijing office would be “a great business driver” for a joint venture they sought with Harvest Fund Management, a Chinese investment firm led by Henry Zhao, a businessman and reported member of the Chinese Communist Party.
The lobbying campaign proved wildly successful on all fronts. After a September 2015 meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, President Barack Obama endorsed the partnership between State Legislative Leaders Foundation and the Chinese group. Months later, Hunter Biden’s company finalized its multimillion-dollar deal with Harvest Management.
Biden’s emails, which have not been previously reported, show how the younger Biden helped a Chinese Communist Party influence outfit that his father’s administration now views as a national security threat. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said last month that the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries seeks “to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote the PRC’s global agenda.”
On April 28, 2015, Bulger told Hunter Biden that State Legislative Leaders Foundation president Stephen Lakis wanted to meet to discuss a path forward to setting up a SLLF office in China and creating a partnership between his organization and the Chinese organization.
“Whatever you need on this just let me know and I’ll make it work,” Biden replied.
Between April and July 2015, Biden’s longtime friend and business partner Eric Schwerin arranged meetings between the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and State Department officials to help advance the partnership with the Chinese group. Schwerin, who had dozens of White House meetings with members of then-vice president Joe Biden’s office, was “instrumental” in arranging the State Department sessions, according to an email from Bulger.
The Biden group’s primary goal was to have Obama reference the collaboration between the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and the Chinese group in his upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping. On May 11, 2015, a foundation adviser wrote Evan Ryan, who then served as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, that a reference by Obama would help them gain “top level approval” from Chinese officials to set up a foundation office in Beijing.
Ryan, who now serves as White House cabinet secretary and is married to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appears to have played a major role in midwifing the partnership. Schwerin noted in an email to Biden that Ryan had “helped with” the effort to officially acknowledge the foundation’s work with the Chinese group. Other emails show Biden and Schwerin in frequent correspondence with Ryan on other matters.
The U.S. intelligence community has increasingly warned that Beijing uses American businessmen and nonprofit groups—often through “deceptive and coercive” means—to promote China’s political agenda in the West. Republicans have said Hunter Biden would have been a prime target for such an influence operation, given his extensive dealings in China and his access to policymakers in Washington. Biden, who is under federal investigation over his taxes and foreign business dealings, earned millions of dollars from a deal with CEFC China Energy, whose chairman was suspected of having ties to Chinese military intelligence. Biden also provided legal services to a CEFC executive whom he referred to as “the fucking spy chief of China” and who was convicted for trying to bribe African officials for oil rights.
The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and State Legislative Leaders Foundation have hosted five “Cooperation Forums” in Honolulu, Las Vegas, Wuhan, and Shijiazhuang since 2015, providing the Chinese influence group access to dozens of state legislative leaders and American business executives. While the U.S. government has not publicly scrutinized the forums, the State Department in 2020 pulled out of a forum between the Chinese group and the National Governors Association due to the former’s efforts to “spread Beijing’s malign influence in the United States.”
Biden’s associates began lobbying the U.S. government as a ploy to land a lucrative investment from Harvest Fund Management, one of China’s largest asset managers. Biden allegedly touted his family’s political connections in seeking a $5 million investment from Harvest founder Henry Zhao, the Washington Free Beaconreported. Zhao is believed to be a Chinese Communist Party official, according to the New York Post.
The Biden team had worked with the State Legislative Leaders Foundation before. The foundation helped Biden and his associates at the private equity firm BHR Partners in 2015, when Hunter’s team helped the Aviation Industry Corporation of China purchase Michigan auto parts maker Henniges Automotive, the Free Beaconreported earlier this year.
The Biden emails provide a detailed roadmap of how the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, the Biden team, and Zhao sought to use an official blessing from the U.S. government to advance their business interests. In a September 2014 email, Lakis, the foundation president, told Zhao he was a “shareholder” in Bulger’s company. He urged Zhao to consider an investment in the Biden joint venture, saying he had “every confidence that such a partnership will be beneficial to all parties.”
Back in China, Zhao was “working with the Chinese Governments [sic] counterparts in Beijing” to have the foundation’s efforts mentioned during the Obama-Xi summit in September 2015, Bulger told Biden in a July 17, 2015, email. Having the initiative mentioned in an official document for the summit “would be a huge boost to [Zhao’s] effort in China.” That in turn “would be a great business driver for Burnham/Harvest,” referring to their joint venture, said Bulger. Bulger, a relative of mobster Whitey Bulger, also wrote that Zhao wanted Biden’s “help with this matter.”
The emails do not detail what steps Biden took to help the initiative, but he cheered the partnership between the foundation and the Chinese group in a November 2015 email to Zhao. Biden wrote he was “very happy to hear that the State Legislative Leaders Foundation matter was worked out and was highlighted during President Xi’s State Visit in September.”
Burnham and Harvest finalized the joint venture in March 2016, according to emails Biden sent to Zhao.
“This is an exciting milestone and I look forward to helping building [sic] a cross border institution that helps investors in our respective countries across the globe,” Biden wrote Zhao on March 18, 2016.
While Biden had high hopes for the partnership with Zhao—he said his company had “no greater partner” than the Chinese businessman—the joint venture went south in May 2016 after another Biden partner, Devon Archer, was indicted on fraud charges.
It is unclear whether Biden was aware of his son’s activities, though Hunter has kept his father in the loop on several of his other business ventures. Joe Biden met in 2017 with Michael Lin, a longtime Hunter business partner who advised the State Legislative Leaders Foundation on its first foray into China, the Free Beaconreported in May 2021.
None of Biden’s associates—Schwerin, Lakis, or Bulger—have registered with Congress as lobbyists, despite their outreach to the State Department. None returned requests for comment. Biden’s attorney and the White House also did not respond to requests for comment.
White HouseCOVID-19 czar Ashish Jha on Tuesday admitted that the six-foot social distancing rule that was implemented in early 2020 isn’t actually effective.
Over the past several years, “a lot of time” was spent “talking about six feet of distance, 15 minutes of being together. We realize that’s actually not the right way to think about this,” he said during a White House briefing on COVID-19.
“That’s not the most accurate way to think about this,” Jha said, adding that it is about “the quality of air you’re breathing around you.”
In a crowded indoor area with poor ventilation, people can “get infected” with COVID-19 “in minutes,” Jha said, adding that being outdoors you can be “outside for long periods of time” and not get infected.
Jha made those comments in regards to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) having relaxed guidelines around COVID-19. That included dropping the six-foot social distancing rule.
The agency last week rescinded a number of rules and made key updates to its recommendations, now stating that unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals should essentially be treated the same, while explicitly saying that those with a prior infection have protection against severe illness.
Starting in early 2020, federal health agencies issued a recommendation that people keep at least six feet of distance away from one another. Health departments, businesses, corporations, and schools across the United States then adopted the rule, leading to restrictions such as capacity limits and lockdowns.
‘Nobody Knows’
A former administration for the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, revealed in late 2021 that the six-foot rule was made up.
“Nobody knows where it came from,” Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member, told CBS News. “Most people assume that the six feet of distance, the recommendation for keeping six feet apart, comes out of some old studies related to flu, where droplets don’t travel more than six feet.”
Rectangles are painted on the ground to encourage homeless people to keep social distancing at a city-sanctioned homeless encampment across from City Hall in San Francisco, California, on May 22, 2020, amid the COVID pandemic. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
The CDC, he said, initially recommended a 10-foot rule, and the six-foot rule was a compromise between the federal health agency and Trump administration officials.
“So the compromise was around six feet. Now imagine if that detail had leaked out. Everyone would have said, ‘This is the White House politically interfering with the CDC’s judgment.’ The CDC said 10 feet, it should be 10 feet, but 10 feet was no more right than six feet and ultimately became three feet,” Gottlieb remarked.
The CDC also said in its update that it’s no longer recommending unvaccinated people to quarantine after exposure. Unvaccinated people who have been in close contact with an infected person aren’t advised to go through a five-day quarantine period if they haven’t tested positive or shown symptoms, according to the revised guidelines.
Regardless of vaccination status, according to the CDC, “you should isolate from others when you have COVID-19” or are “sick and suspect that you have COVID-19 but do not yet have test results.” Previously, the CDC said fully vaccinated people who were exposed could skip the quarantine period.
Former President Donald Trump suggested that the Jan. 6 committee should be dissolved, following the defeat of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) in a GOP primary on Aug. 16, calling the vote a “referendum” and that “the people have spoken.”
“Congratulations to Harriet Hageman on her great and very decisive WIN in Wyoming. This is a wonderful result for America, and a complete rebuke of the Unselect Committee of political Hacks and Thugs,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Aug. 16.
“Liz Cheney should be ashamed of herself, the way she acted, and her spiteful, sanctimonious words and actions towards others,” Trump continued. “Now she can finally disappear into the depths of political oblivion where, I am sure, she will be much happier than she is right now.”
“Thank you WYOMING!” Trump added.
Wyoming Republican congressional candidate Harriet Hageman waves as she takes a picture with children during a primary election night party in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on Aug. 16, 2022. (Michael Smith/Getty Images)
Cheney was defeated by Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman, a natural resources attorney from Fort Laramie. As of early Wednesday morning, the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office reported (pdf) that Hageman garnered 113,025 votes, compared to Cheney’s 49,316.
The result was not unexpected, considering that nearly 70 percent of Wyoming residents voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Cheney is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump and serves as the co-chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
“I assume that with the very big Liz Cheney loss, far bigger than had ever been anticipated, the January 6th Committee of political Hacks and Thugs will quickly begin the beautiful process of DISSOLUTION?” Trump wrote in another Truth Social post on Tuesday.
“This was a referendum on the never ending Witch Hunt. The people have spoken!” Trump added.
During her concession speech on Tuesday, Cheney called out Trump directly.
“I will do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office and I mean it. I love my country more,” she said. “This primary election is over. But now the real work begins.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) speaks to supporters at a primary night event in Jackson, Wyoming, on Aug. 16, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said Cheney’s speech was “uninspiring.”
“Liz Cheney’s uninspiring concession speech, in front of a ‘tiny’ crowd in the Great State of Wyoming, focused on her belief that the 2020 Presidential Election was not, despite massive and conclusive evidence to the contrary, Rigged & Stolen,” Trump wrote. “It was, and that’s not even counting the fact that many election changes, in numerous States, were not approved by State Legislatures, an absolute must.”
Hageman will now face Democratic nominee Lynnette Grey Bull in the Nov. 8 general election, in the fight for Wyoming’s lone seat in the House of Representatives.
Several GOP lawmakers have welcomed Hageman’s victory on Tuesday.
“Congratulations to Harriet Hageman on her massive Republican primary victory in Wyoming over Nancy Pelosi’s puppet Liz Cheney. I was proud to join President Trump and Leader Kevin McCarthy in endorsing Harriet,” House GOP Conference Chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said in a statement.
“Harriet is a true America First patriot who will restore the people of Wyoming’s voice, which Liz Cheney had long forgotten,” Stefanik continued. “I cannot wait for Harriet to join Republicans in Congress so that we can stay laser-focused on our work to save America. ”
Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, echoed Trump’s comment about the Jan. 6 committee.
“Tonight was not just a defeat for Liz Cheney, but a massive rejection of the sham ‘Jan 6’ witch hunt Committee and the authoritarian politics of the DC establishment,” Miller wrote on Twitter. “Congrats to my friend Harriet Hageman, President Trump & the MAGA movement!”
Joe Biden is set to cancel $3.9 billion in student loans, announcing that the federal government will discharge all remaining federal student loans for students who attended the ITT Technical Institute.
The student loan borrowers who attended the now-defunct institute will receive a discharge through “borrower defense to repayment” according to Forbes and do not need to apply to have their loans canceled.
“It is time for student borrowers to stop shouldering the burden from ITT’s years of lies and false promises. The evidence shows that for years, ITT’s leaders intentionally misled students about the quality of their programs in order to profit off federal student loan programs, with no regard for the hardship this would cause,” Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona said.
“The Biden-Harris Administration will continue to stand up for borrowers who’ve been cheated by their colleges while working to strengthen oversight and enforcement to protect today’s students from similar deception and abuse.”
The ITT Technical Institute was a well-known private technical institute based in Indiana with approximately 140 satellite campuses all over the United States. The institute operated until announcing on Sept. 6, 2016, that it would “discontinue academic operations at all of its ITT Technical Institutes permanently”.
Since taking the White House in 2021 Biden has canceled almost $32 billion in student loans, essentially subsidizing the educational expenses of a combined 1.8 million borrowers spread across “borrower defense to student loan repayment and school closures,” “public service loan forgiveness” and “total or permanent disability”.
Democrats continue to call for Biden to “#CancelStudentDebt“, a move that conservatives believe would obfuscate the transfer of debt from the individual borrowers to the American taxpayer.
Democratic Rep. Pramila Jaypal of Washington urged Biden to cancel all student debt.
Student loan payments are set to resume in 16 days. With the stroke of a pen, @POTUS can bring relief to millions of people across the country. Let’s get it done.
Representative Cori Bush of Missouri also joined the refrain.
Right now, millions of people are living in limbo, unsure if student loan payments will resume in 16 days. Canceling student debt would provide immense relief to numerous borrowers.@POTUS, now is the time. #CancelStudentDebt
Conversely, Republicans have heavily criticized student loan forgiveness.
“Expansive student loan forgiveness does nothing to solve the problems in higher education and exacerbates the economic disaster fueled by the President’s lack of fiscal responsibility,” Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina said according to Forbes.
“Time and again, Biden operates as if he can issue any decree he wants on student loan forgiveness, even if it means exercising authority that he does not have.”
In an Op-Ed for Fox News, Foxx and Sen. Richard Burr, also of North Carolina, wrote, “By caving to progressives, Biden is breaking his promise to over 100 million taxpayers without student debt who are subsidizing this boondoggle.”
They pointed the finger squarely at their Democrat colleagues in Congress, “Yet, when in the position to actually legislate, House and Senate Democrats are (un)surprisingly quiet on student loan debt. Rather than do their jobs, top Democrats are asking the president to do their dirty work for them, calling for an additional extension through the end of the year and debt forgiveness by executive fiat.”
The GOP legislators also voiced concerns that the proposed student loan cancelation would “easily push inflation above 9 percent” back in April when the piece was written.
Inflation hit 9.1 percent in June before pulling back slightly to 8.5 percent in July, according to Trading Economics.
John Bridgeland worked on Obama White House council, cheered Biden victory
On the campaign trail, Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) touts the endorsement of a man named John Bridgeland as evidence of his cross-party appeal.
There are just a few details the congressman leaves out, at least when he’s trying to win over voters in his increasingly red state: Bridgeland worked in the Obama administration, celebrated Joe Biden’s election, and cofounded a nonprofit dedicated to remaking policing.
The founder of “Republicans for Tim Ryan,” Bridgeland has worked on left-wing policy initiatives for years. Former president Barack Obama in 2010 appointed Bridgeland to the White House Council for Community Solutions. Bridgeland also cofounded a firm, COVID Collaborative, that works with the Biden administration on vaccine messaging. In December 2020, Bridgeland wrote an op-ed for the website of Maria Shriver, a Democratic activist and member of the Kennedy family, about how he was “so encouraged” by Biden’s win.
Democrats touting endorsements from nominal Republicans who routinely attack the Republican Party is a familiar strategy. Lawmakers who have been rubber stamps for Biden’s agenda, such as Ryan, are hoping that voters forget their records. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who is running in a competitive race this cycle, recently released a list of endorsements from Republicans, several of whom work for the the Lincoln Project, an activist group dedicated to electing Democrats but helmed by individuals who once considered themselves Republicans.
Bridgeland’s endorsement comes as Ryan seeks to separate himself from the president. Biden’s approval rating is 23 points underwater in Ohio—a state that former president Donald Trump won twice. When Biden traveled to Ohio for a speech last month, Ryan scheduled campaign stops hundreds of miles away.
Ryan shared Bridgeland’s endorsement on Twitter and wrote he was “proud” to have Bridgeland on his “team.”
“Republicans for Ryan is a platform for Republicans to sign up to help Tim Ryan. I am a registered Republican and vote in Republican primaries and in general elections,” Bridgeland told the Free Beacon. “I believe in limited, effective government, … civil society and the nonprofit and private sectors, and respecting both individual rights and responsibilities.”
Bridgeland worked from the mid-1990s to 2003 as a senior official in then-representative Rob Portman’s (R., Ohio) office and in former president George W. Bush’s administration. In an op-ed for a local Ohio newspaper, Bridgeland wrote that he supports Ryan’s “love of our democracy” and “many of his policies.”
Bridgeland attacked Ryan’s Republican Senate challenger, J.D. Vance, as “lacking the energy of the U.S. senator he is trying to replace—Rob Portman.” Portman endorsed Vance immediately after Vance in May won the Republican nomination.
Bridgeland’s endorsement of Ryan was leaked to Politico days prior as part of a story about the Ryan campaign’s strategy of appealing to Republican voters. That story also featured Bridgeland speaking favorably about Ryan and how Ryan could make inroads with Republican voters in Ohio. Missing from Politico‘s story was any mention of Bridgeland’s work since he left the Bush administration in 2003.
Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.
Other than Bridgeland, no appointees with experience in Republican politics were appointed to Obama’s White House community solutions council. There, Bridgeland worked alongside the likes of Laurene Powell Jobs and Jon Bon Jovi to provide advice to the president on “innovative community solutions and civic participation by all Americans.”
Bridgeland later cofounded ACT NOW, a nonprofit that works “to reimagine ‘public safety’ … and eliminate the root causes of systemic racism.” ACT NOW’s staff includes Ray C. Kelly, who in 2018 received an award from George Soros’s Open Society Institute-Baltimore.
According to internal voter data obtained by the Free Beacon, Bridgeland voted in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. A June column he wrote for the Cincinnati Enquirer called for new gun control measures. The column also touted his work with a group called the People’s Filibuster for Gun Safety. That group, according to its website, partners with left-wing nonprofits such as the Anti-Defamation League and March for Our Lives to pass gun-control legislation.
Bridgeland’s cheerleading for Biden appears out of step with Republican voters. Following Biden’s State of the Union address in March, Bridgeland celebrated the speech as passionate and “articulating values and ideas that transcend our divisions.” A Reuters poll released Aug. 9 found 86 percent of self-identified Republicans disapprove of Biden.
Ryan will face Vance in November. There is little high-quality polling of the race available, although most political analysts believe Vance is the favorite. Portman’s seat has been held by a Republican since 1999.
Elite Afghan forces bring U.S. training to Tehran, according to whistleblower interviews
Elite Afghan soldiers trained by the United States fled to Iran with weapons and specialized combat training following the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal from the country that let the Taliban regain power, according to a report by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee based on interviews with whistleblowers and internal State Department documents.
“A ‘significant’ number of Afghan special forces and about 3,000 Afghan security forces, including high ranking officers, crossed the border into Iran,” according to the report, which was released on Monday to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the deadly U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. “Some brought military equipment and vehicles with them. We believe this happened because they were not evacuated by the U.S. or our allies, and therefore had no other option.”
These forces were trained in combat by U.S. special operators, in some cases within the United States, and “could be a serious national security threat to the United States if they are captured or turn,” according to the report. They “know not only our tactics but who these elite [U.S.] military officials are.”
The findings detail months of chaos following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and indicate that the tumult in the country has provided an opportunity for regional enemies like Iran to regain a foothold in the war-torn country. Details of Iran’s ties to these U.S. trained fighters comes as new threats from Iran are making headlines across America, with the arrest of an Iranian national who’d put a bounty on former White House national security adviser John Bolton’s head, as well as the attempted murder last week of the novelist Salman Rushdie, who has long faced threats from Iran’s clerical regime.
“The recruitment of former Afghan military and intelligence personnel poses a major national security risk due to the fact these Afghan personnel know the U.S. military and intelligence community’s tactics, techniques, and procedures,” the report concludes.
In addition to the weapons and military equipment these special forces brought with them to Iran, they have an intimate knowledge of the U.S. military and its tactics in the region, know-how that is highly sought after by Iran’s terrorist proxy groups and other jihadi militants.
“These commandos are trained, highly trained, on how we do signals intelligence, how we do human intelligence, how we operate,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R., Fla.), a combat veteran, said in the report. “We know that the Taliban are hunting them down. They are seeking to force them through coercion to hand over that information so that they can use it and they can understand how we operate.”
Beyond Iran, Russia and China are also looking to recruit these forces for their inside knowledge about American military tactics.
“It is possible these former Afghan military and other intelligence personnel could be recruited or coerced into working for one of America’s adversaries that maintains a presence in Afghanistan, including Russia, [and] China,” in addition to Iran, according to the report.
The State Department said in October 2021 that it is aware of the threat posed by Afghan soldiers trained by the United States, though it has done little since then to find them and get them to safety.
“Afghans who possess the knowledge specific to security operations, intelligence collection, other aspects of security and defense forces that if it were to fall into terrorists’ hands would pose a national security risk to the United States, those people will have a special category, I think there is just no way around it,” a senior State Department official quoted in the report told Congress.
The Pentagon was to create a list detailing “critical Afghan personnel that would warrant prioritization in being evacuated.” But, as of February 2022, “the Pentagon list had still not been shared with the State Department Task Force, meaning several months of inactivity with regards to evacuation,” the report disclosed.
Afghan military personnel also do not qualify for the U.S. Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program that has brought in scores of vulnerable Afghans, the report says. The administration is still only evacuating remaining Americans, green card holders, and pre-approved SIV applicants.
It also has not been made clear if Afghan military members would qualify for refugee status, and, if they did, they would be responsible for getting themselves out of the country without American assistance, according to the report.
The number of Americans stranded in Afghanistan after the evacuation also is far higher than the Biden administration admits. While U.S. officials repeatedly said “about 100” Americans were left in the country after the military left, the State Department is known to have evacuated more than 800 American citizens since Aug. 31, 2021—a number that does not include the scores of Americans evacuated by outside groups.
Heritage Foundation Oversight Project Director Mike Howell is demanding copies of all communications between the White House, Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, and former President Donald Trump’s staff about the Aug. 8 FBI raid on the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
To that end, Howell—who is a veteran of major congressional oversight projects and a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which is the federal government’s central custodian of official documents, and each of the relevant agencies.
“The Biden Department of Justice has crossed the Rubicon. This raid showed that the administration is unafraid to weaponize the power of the deep state against its political enemies—even a former sitting president,” Howell said in a statement issued shortly after Attorney General Merrick Garland declined to answer any questions about the raid during a brief appearance in the DOJ media conference room on Aug. 11.
“We are filing this request because the American people deserve the answers Joe Biden and Merrick Garland will not give them. There is no reason NARA cannot fulfill our request for these documents, as they should have nothing to do with any ongoing investigation,” Howell continued.
Mike Howell, Senior Adviser for Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation. (Courtesy of Mike Howell)
“Ultimately, it looks like the Biden administration raided President Trump’s home over a document dispute—let’s see if they comply with our legal document demand, or if they’re complete hypocrites. Rest assured, we will fight to get the truth about this unprecedented act,” he added.
The Heritage Oversight Project requested that federal officials process the FOIAs on an expedited basis, which would allow 10 days before the agencies must either affirm or deny the requests, or face litigation.
The request to NARA was signed by Heritage’s Senior Investigative Counsel, Roman Jankowski, who is also a contributing writer for the conservative nonprofit’s Daily Signal.
“This raid, and what transpired before and after it, has affected American public confidence. As per the Trafalgar Group poll conducted after the Trump raid, 53.9 percent of likely general election voters believe Trump’s political enemies are behind the FBI raid on President Trump’s private home, and only 35.3 percent of likely general election voters believe it is due to an impartial justice system,” Jankowski said in the request.
Howell signed the lengthy, eight-page request to DOJ, which seeks all of the communications mentioning Trump since Jan. 20, 2021, between and among DOJ’s Office of the Attorney General, Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Office of the Associate Attorney General, Office of the Solicitor General, Office of Legal Counsel, Office of Legal Policy, Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and U.S. Marshals Service.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts issued a separate statement regarding the Mar-a-Lago raid in which he observed that it “represents yet another example of the federal government weaponizing law enforcement to punish political enemies, silence critics, and send a message to those whom it views as enemies. The Biden administration and the D.C. swamp are making it very clear that they will use all the power of the state to intimidate anyone who stands in their way.”
Roberts added that “the timing is suspect at best, given the upcoming elections and the Senate’s passage of a bill that would authorize the hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents, who will be unleashed to target working and middle-class Americans in order to fund the left’s radical agenda.”
Roberts’ comment may have been a product of the fact the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks were subjected to multiple time-consuming and costly IRS audits during the Clinton administration, none of which ever turned up any wrongdoing.
In a related development, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, similarly demanded in an Aug. 10 letter that NARA turn over all communications and documents concerning the raid. Comer was joined on the letter by the panel’s other 19 Republican members.
“Law enforcement raiding a former president’s residence is unprecedented. Committee Republicans are concerned that NARA would utilize the FBI to gather documents that the president, by the very nature of his constitutional role, could declassify himself, if this was indeed the case as media has reported. The Biden administration is continuing to weaponize the FBI against political rivals,” the Comer letter told NARA.
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said in an interview with CNN on Aug. 11 that he never witnessed “intentional destruction of important papers” during his time in office.
Mulvaney, who served the Trump administration for 15 months and has been a critic of former President Donald Trump since, told CNN’s “New Day” host Brianna Keilar, “I never saw the intentional destruction of documents for the purpose of keeping anything from the National Archives or the public in the future.”
According to Mulvaney, all White House staff were well aware of how to comply with paper destruction regulations.
“We knew the rules, we taped them back together, and we made copies. As long as copies are preserved, you can pretty much do whatever you want to with the other documents,” he said.
Grilled by Keilar if he had ever seen Trump rip documents, Mulvaney said he had, but asserted that documents were all handled “in the ordinary course of business.”
“The flushing,” the host said, referring to claims made by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. “You never heard about him flushing documents?”
“Not a single time,” he said.
Denied Report
Mulvaney’s account contradicts Haberman’s report claiming, “White House staffers regularly found ripped-up printing paper in the toilet of the presidential residence during Trump’s term in office.”
The statement came with a pair of photos from an anonymous source purporting to show notes written by Trump in a toilet allegedly at the White House.
Trump swiftly denied her account, calling it “another fake story” when it first emerged back in February.
“Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” Trump said in an emailed statement to the New York Post.
Haberman doubled down on her claim in an interview with CNN on Aug. 8, the same day that the FBI conducted a search at Trump Mar a Lago residence and just ahead of the October publication of her book on Trump, “Confidence Man.”
Her account this time was again dismissed by a spokesman for the former president.
“You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan,” Taylor Budowich told Axios, referring to Haberman, adding that there are “enough people willing to fabricate stories like this in order to impress the media class—a media class who is willing to run with anything, as long as it’s anti-Trump.”
Top House Democrats asked intelligence officials to review alleged national security damage from former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of government documents, a day after the release of the search warrant used by the FBI on its Mar-a-Lago raid.
The federal agents executed a search warrant of Trump’s Florida estate last Monday, before an inventory accompanying the search warrant was made public on Aug. 12. A property receipt obtained by The Epoch Times shows the FBI removed approximately 20 boxes, including one set of materials labeled as “various classified/TS/SCI documents,” referencing top secret or sensitive compartmented information.
“Former President Trump’s conduct has potentially put our national security at grave risk. This issue demands a full review, in addition to the ongoing law enforcement inquiry,” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote on Aug. 13 to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines.
Despite Trump declaring the documents taken by federal agents were “all declassified,” the three-page letter (pdf) seeks a classified briefing on the review “as soon as possible.” The two lawmakers specifically asked for the DNI’s office to initiate a damage assessment, in a bid to evaluate any damage to national security related to Trump’s handling of official records.
The latest action is the first major move by House committees following the Aug. 8 raid of Trump’s Florida resort.
The Saturday letter also cited previous reports by legacy media claiming that FBI agents were searching for highly classified documents on “nuclear weapons” at Mar-a-Lago, a claim that has been slammed by the former commander-in-chief, who called it a “hoax.”
The Democrat-led House Oversight Committee stepped up in February an investigation into Trump’s alleged violation of federal records laws by removing White House records—something Trump denied.
While federal law bars the removal of classified documents to unauthorized locations, Trump could argue that as president, he was the ultimate declassification authority.
Prior to Trump, his lawyers have said that the former president used his authority as president to declassify the material before he departed office in early 2021.
“They didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything,” the former president said in a statement on Friday afternoon. “They could have had [the documents] at anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago.”
NO ONE IN THE BIG PHARMA-SPONSORED MEDIA SEEMS TO HAVE PICKED UP ON THIS. STRANGE, HUH?
Former White House coronavirus task force spokesman Ambassador Deborah Birx has effectively laid blame for thousands of deaths at the door of big pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna, claiming their refusal to pursue a “compassionate use authorization” for the COVID-19 vaccines led to a delay which directly impacted nursing home residents, The National Pulse can reveal.
The details come in the final parts of Birx’s little read book – Silent Invasion – wherein she details how she used “subterfuge” to get around the will of the Trump administration, as well as naming Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence as her “go to” people in the government.
In Chapter 19, entitled “Winter Is Here,” Birx turns her guns on the same pharmaceutical companies she and her colleague Anthony Fauci promoted and protected during the COVID-19 outbreak. Specifically, she points out the corporates who were shielded by government from liability failed to get vital doses of their vaccines into the arms of those who needed it earliest: the elderly:
“Getting as many people inoculated as quickly and equitably as possible remained one of my priorities. In addition to “emergency use authorization,” or EUA, the FDA also has the authority to allow the use of therapeutics and vaccines (and the use of experimental drugs to people outside clinical trials) under what’s called “compassionate use authorization,” or CUA. Lacking the holy grail of emergency use authorization (which was pending), I continued to try to find a way to get the highest-risk group immunized as quickly as possible. In early November, I asked Tony and Steve to approach Moderna and Pfizer and urge them to apply for CUA while their vaccines’ efficacy was still being determined but safety was fairly clear. With a CUA in hand, we could inoculate any nursing home residents who wished to be. Whether they volunteered for the jabs or not, at least they’d have the option.”
But as many continued to die, her wishes were not carried through, she explains:
“We had a narrow window, and it was closing. Fifteen hundred nursing home residents died in the first week of October. The vaccine manufacturers, I learned, had already stockpiled three million doses. If we could draw from that supply through CUA, thousands of lives could be saved.
“This didn’t happen. Pfizer and Moderna declined to pursue compassionate use authorization. They believed the process would be a distraction. Their eyes were fixed on the EUA, another complicated process; taking on both simply wasn’t possible.
“I believed it was—it just wasn’t part of the plan these manufacturers had envisioned.”
Birx then goes on to detail the number of people that were affected by the major corporations’ refusal to pursue a faster route to market. At the time, many suspected they were refusing to do so because such speed would give President Trump an ostensible boost right before the U.S. presidential election.
“Take a moment to imagine that they did apply for compassionate use. And imagine that 1.5 million of the 3 million stockpiled doses went to nursing homes in November, and another 1.5 million at the end of November, for a second dose. If this had happened, the nursing home residents would have been fully protected in December, at the start of the surge, and not, as it turned out, as late as February, after the surge. An additional six-thousand-plus nursing home residents died in mid-December. They all could have been fully immunized and protected before this happened and we could have saved thousands of lives. If this had been done, literally thousands of lives could have been saved. Great good could have been done, and at low risk to these vulnerable people. In a pandemic, you need to innovate on the fly in response to the reality of the moment and not be locked into a rigid plan.”
Birx’s theory rests on the efficacy of the vaccines, however. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines were altered this past week to remove the distinctions between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Regardless of the “science” today, the United States continues to restrict foreign travelers into the country who are not vaccinated, unless they come in illegally through America’s porous southern border.
Former White House official Kash Patel on Sunday revealed former President Donald Trump has been involved in a battle with the federal government to declassify documents before last week’s FBI raid.
Patel, who was a top official in the Department of Defense, said Trump declassified numerous documents.
“President Trump made me his representative a month ago, and we’ve been in a bureaucratic battle,” he told Fox News on Sunday morning. “We found whole sets of documents we got out to the American public … about 60 percent.”
Patel, who hosts “Kash’s Corner” for Epoch TV, added that Trump “made it his mission to declassify and be transparent.”
“In October 2020, he issued a sweeping declassification order for every single Russiagate document and every single [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton document,” Patel said, adding that “whole sets of documents” were declassified under his watch.
“And this is a key fact … President Trump, as a sitting president, is a unilateral authority for declassification,” he continued. “He can literally stand over a set of documents and say ‘these are now declassified,’ and that is done with definitive action immediately.”
Patel further noted that due to the Department of Justice’s latest actions and the FBI’s ongoing investigation, Americans “will never be allowed to see the Russiagate docs or any other docs that President Trump lawfully declassified, and they will hide it from the public.”
Other Details
Late last week, a U.S. magistrate judge ordered the release of the FBI warrant and property record used to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. The documents showed the FBI seized alleged classified documents and said the former president may be under investigation for possibly violating the 1917 Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, although neither the Justice Department nor FBI have released the affidavit in the case.
In late 2020, Trump issued a declassification memo that referred to materials connected to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which has been the subject of intense controversy and scrutiny. Republicans and Trump have long asserted the investigation used fabricated information and anonymous leaks to the press to denigrate the former president.
“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy,” then-President Trump wrote on Dec. 30, 2020, or just three weeks before Joe Biden was sworn in as president.
After the warrant and property receipt were unsealed, Trump posted to his Truth Social page that the materials the FBI allegedly took were “all declassified.”
“They didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request,” he wrote on the website on Aug. 12.
On Sunday, the former president wrote that among other items that were taken by agents, attorney-client material and executive privileged material were removed from Mar-a-Lago.
“By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!” Trump wrote.
More than a third of Americans have drawn on their savings accounts to handle rising prices, taking out hundreds of dollars on average, according to a recent survey by New York Life Insurance Company.
Since January, 36 percent of Americans have drawn an average of $617 from their savings to pay their bills, the company found. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed expressed anxiety that a recession is approaching, and roughly a third reported being “uncertain” or “anxious” about their personal finances. Respondents cited monthly bills, health care costs, grocery prices, and gas prices as their areas of greatest financial concern.
Voters overwhelmingly blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy. Sixty-four percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Democrats, believe the president’s policy decisions are to blame for soaring costs. While White House officials boasted this week about slowing inflation, prices are still up 8.5 percent from last year, with that number even higher in several key swing states.
Americans are not replenishing their savings accounts as they drain them. The personal savings rate, or the proportion of income people don’t spend or lose to taxes, more than halved between July 2021 and June 2022, falling from 10.5 percent to 5.1 percent.
To make up for tightening purse strings, Americans are increasingly turning to debt. Americans’ collective credit card debt jumped to $890 billion last quarter, marking the largest yearly increase in two decades. The number of credit cards also hit an all-time high in the second quarter, with more than 500 million in circulation.
Former President Donald Trump on Friday said that the allegedly classified materials the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sought in the agency’s raid of his Mar-a-Lago resort were “all declassified.”
“Number one, it was all declassified,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday, shortly before the court unsealed the search warrant the FBI used for its Aug. 8 raid of his Florida resort.
Trump’s comments directly contradict legacy media news reports following the raid that the documents were top-secret, with The Washington Post citing anonymous sources who claimed that the documents contained information about nuclear weapons. Trump panned the claim, calling it a “Hoax.”
“Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a Hoax, two Impeachments were a Hoax, the Mueller investigation was a Hoax, and much more,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning.
The nature of the document is important, for it determines whether the FBI’s raid is justified by a cause heavy enough to outweigh the political ramifications of such an action conducted in the home of a former U.S. president.
The Search Warrant
Trump’s comments came shortly before Bruce Reinhard, the magistrate judge who approved the search warrant, unsealed the search warrant following requests from both the Department of Justice and Trump.
While the warrant did not pinpoint what probable cause the FBI established to conduct the raid, it showed the items that federal agents took from the former president’s resort, which included “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” binders of photos, a “Grant of Clemency” to Roger Stone, a “Confidential Document,” “Miscellaneous Secret Documents,” and “Miscellaneous Top Secret Documents.”
The question becomes whether Trump, by simply possessing any of these documents, would have violated any federal codes listed in the search warrant, which the federal agents pursued:
18 USC 2071: Concealment, removal, or mutilation (of public records)
18 USC 793: Gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information
18 USC 1519: Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy
Presidential Declassification Powers
According to Mike Davis, President of the Article III Project and a former law clerk under Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, the president of the United States can declassify records by simply leaving the White House with them.
“The President of the United States has both the constitutional (and statutory) power to declassify anything he wants,” Davis wrote on Twitter on Aug. 11. “If President Trump left the White House with classified records, they are declassified by his actions.”
“As discussed, the Office of Former President Trump—like every other former president’s federal office—is equipped and secure enough to handle these declassified records,” Davis added. “This is a routine dispute with bureaucrats at the National Archives whether these are presidential records.”
Davis cited Department of Navy v. Egan (ruling), a 1988 Supreme Court decision that Davis says shows the president possesses the constitutional power to “classify and declassify” records “regardless of any statute passed by Congress.”
“The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,’” The Supreme Court ruled at the time. “His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security and to determine whether an individual is sufficiently trustworthy to occupy a position in the Executive Branch that will give that person access to such information flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”
“When President Trump had the records sent to Mar-a-Lago, they were declassified,” Davis explained. “Former presidents don’t have this power. But Trump did this as the president.”
Trump: It’s a Political ‘Witch Hunt’
Trump and his allies have characterized the raid as a “witch hunt” driven by political motives, especially considering no former presidents had been prosecuted for the reason that the FBI allegedly told sources close to Trump that motivated the raid; namely, Trump was nominally required by the Presidential Records Act to return the materials to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) upon the conclusion of his term, but allegedly didn’t.
“NARA’s singling out of President Trump’s handling of official records stands starkly in contrast to the way NARA has treated far clearer violations committed by politicians and officials who are not Republicans,” 20 Republicans, including numerous Committee ranking members, wrote in an Aug. 10 letter addressed to U.S. Acting Archivist Debra Wall, first published by Politico. The lawmakers cited reports that point to recent U.S. administrations’ violations of the Presidential Records Act, listing Bill Clinton as an example.
“The seeming weaponization of the federal government against [Joe] Biden’s political rivals cannot go unchecked, and if NARA is working to further these efforts, it will be only the latest agency to lose its credibility in the eyes of the American people under the Biden Administration,” the Republican lawmakers wrote.
Meanwhile, Trump revealed earlier this week that the FBI had recently been given a tour of where the records were stored, with the FBI only suggesting that Trump further secure the storage space.
“In early June, the DOJ and FBI asked my legal representatives to put an extra lock on the door leading to the place where boxes were stored in Mar-a-Lago – We agreed,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Aug. 10.
“They were shown the secured area, and the boxes themselves,” Trump added. “Then on Monday, without notification or warning, an army of agents broke into Mar-a-Lago, went to the same storage area, and ripped open the lock that they had asked to be installed. A surprise attack, POLITICS, and all the while our Country is going to HELL!”
Judicial Watch is suing the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court to release records ordered declassified and released by President Trump the day before he left office.
Despite Trump’s order, Justice Department officials are not releasing the records.
The ordered-declassified records relate to “Crossfire Hurricane,” a Justice Department operation against President Trump, his 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates that falsely accused the Trump campaign of “colluding” with Russian government agents to influence the results of the 2016 presidential election. (RELATED: Leading Republicans Reveal What Durham’s Up Against)
“The Obama-Biden Administration and Deep State spying on Trump and his associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an absolute right to see!”
JW notes a “Just the News report details that the documents include ‘transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.’”
The lawsuit was filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a February 17, 2022, FOIA request for:
All records regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that were provided to the White House by the Department of Justice on or about December 30, 2020. For purposes of clarification, the records sought are those described in a January 19, 2021 Presidential Memorandum (see https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/ ).
All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and any official or employee of any other branch, department, agency, or office of the federal government regarding the declassification and release of the records described in part one of this request.
Trump’s memo authorized the declassification and release of the records:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:
Section 1. Declassification and Release. At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.
I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure. I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.
I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.
My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Aug. 11 said he personally approved the FBI’s raid earlier this week of the personal Mar-a-Lago residence of former President Donald Trump.
The FBI usually seeks approval from the top before conducting a raid on a political target. Garland’s confirmation was the first public statement from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI on the unprecedented search.
Garland told reporters that his agency filed a motion on Aug. 11 to unseal the court-approved search warrant that was executed at a home “belonging to the former president,” after Trump confirmed the raid, “as is his right.”
“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter. … The Department does not take such a decision lightly,” Garland said.
He said copies of the warrant were provided to Trump’s lawyers on Aug. 8 by FBI agents.
The attorney general claimed that FBI agents are “patriotic” and “dedicated” public servants who protect Americans against violent crime and terrorism. “I am honored to work alongside them,” he said.
So far, the Justice Department and FBI have remained mostly quiet about the purpose and probable cause behind the raid and have repeatedly declined to publicly comment to The Epoch Times and other news outlets. Only alleged anonymous sources within the FBI and Justice Department have sporadically provided details about the incident to legacy media since Aug. 8.
A day before Garland’s statement, FBI Director Christopher Wray declined to speak about the FBI search, saying that it is “not something I can talk about, and I’d refer you to the department.”
The White House, meanwhile, said it wasn’t aware of the FBI raid. On Aug. 9, when asked by reporters about what Garland told him, President Joe Biden didn’t answer.
The judge who reportedly signed off on the warrant in the case, Bruce Reinhart, ordered the Justice Department on Aug. 10 to file a response before Aug. 15 after Judicial Watch and others asked the court to unseal the warrant.
Republicans in Congress have repeatedly called on the Justice Department to release documents and other information about the raid, with some arguing that it appears to be politically motivated. Even some Democrats, including former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, asserted that the agencies need to provide answers about the raid.
Because of the extraordinary targeting of a former U.S. president, many have speculated that officials at the highest levels of the Biden administration, including Garland and Wray, would have signed off on it. Meanwhile, news of the incident has triggered a political firestorm with just 90 days to go before the 2022 midterms and a possible announcement that Trump might run for president in 2024.
What Comes Next
It was Trump on Aug. 8 who confirmed the FBI raid at his Palm Beach home. The former president reportedly wasn’t there when it happened, and his lawyers said they weren’t able to observe the agents.
“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.
Members of Trump’s family and his lawyers said in multiple media interviews that agents went into several rooms in Mar-a-Lago, including Trump’s bedroom and office. The agents, his son Eric Trump said, didn’t provide lawyers with a copy of the warrant before the search and wouldn’t answer questions.
When speaking on Fox News about the search, Eric Trump said it was done because the “National Archives wanted to … corroborate whether or not Donald Trump had any documents in his possession.” Trump was referring to the National Archives having confirmed in February that classified documents were allegedly among several boxes that Trump took to his Florida residence last year.
As for Garland, some Republican lawmakers warned that he could be investigated or even impeached over the Aug. 8 raid if the GOP takes the House in 2022. The party of the president tends to lose seats in midterm elections, and Democrats currently hold slim majorities in both chambers of Congress.
“I’ve seen enough. The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a statement. “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”
In the Senate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) suggested that if it’s found that Garland engaged in anything improper, he could face impeachment.
“Now, this is really something that’s going to require an investigation,” Paul said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if the investigation leads to abuse of power that this could even lead to an impeachment of the attorney general.”
A person close to the Trump family suggested the FBI may have planted “listening devices” during a raid targeting former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence earlier this week.
Lawyers for the former president previously said that FBI agents would not allow Trump’s team to observe or supervise their search of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. One lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, told Fox News on Thursday that agents are believed to have searched Trump’s bedroom, office, and a storage room.
Because the FBI allegedly “didn’t allow anybody to supervise what they were doing, and they specifically requested to turn off the security cameras,” Kimbery Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée and an advisor to the former president’s 2020 campaign, told Newsmax. “Why? Because they didn’t want to be caught with what they were doing. How do you know there weren’t listening devices planted or evidence planted there?
“It’s something that has to be investigated and checked out, and we want to see the affidavit and what was their probable cause to be able to go in there and break into the president’s home,” she added. For her claim, Guilfoyle did not provide evidence.
Trump’s son Eric Trump told the Daily Mail on Wednesday that security cameras remained on when the agents carried out their search, accusing the agents of refusing to hand over a warrant and kicking lawyers off the premises. Agents, he said, told Trump’s team to turn off the cameras but they remained on, and those agents went to places “they shouldn’t have been.”
No Response
The FBI and Department of Justice have not responded to requests for comment. The judge who approved the FBI warrant, Bruce Reinhart, ordered the Justice Department on Wednesday to respond to requests to unseal the warrant in the case.
The White House said Joe Biden was not aware of the FBI search before it was announced earlier this week. Top Republicans have called on the Department of Justice to release documents pertaining to the raid or to have Attorney General Merrick Garland speak about the matter.
Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray have remained silent on the Mar-a-Lago search. But on Wednesday, Wray complained to reporters in a press conference about alleged violent threats levied against federal law enforcement agents in the wake of the raid.
The former president on Wednesday took to his Truth Social app and speculated on whether the FBI planted evidence. Members of Trump’s team said he wasn’t there while the raid occurred.
“The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.’”
The Justice Department has to respond to motions to unseal a warrant that triggered the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search.
“On or before 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 15, 2022, the Government shall file a Response to the Motion to Unseal,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Wednesday afternoon, referring to the Department of Justice.
“The response may be filed ex parte and under seal as necessary to avoid disclosing matters already under seal. In that event, the Government shall file a redacted Response in the public record. If it chooses, the Government may file a consolidated Response to all Motions to Seal,” he wrote.
Neither the FBI nor Justice Department has issued public comments about the raid, which was first confirmed by Trump on Monday evening.
The FBI declined to comment when contacted by The Epoch Times, and the Justice Department has not responded to several requests for comment.
As for the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden was not aware of the raid before Trump’s announcement. Her claim was refuted by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.”
Requests
On Wednesday, the Times Union’s managing editor, Brendan J. Lyons, wrote to Reinhart to ask for the warrant to be unsealed.
“Given that the search warrant(s) have been executed, and the target of that search has full knowledge of what occurred, there is no impediment to any ongoing investigation from the disclosure of the search warrant order or the returns. As such, these records should be unsealed,” the letter to the Florida judge reads.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-A-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Judicial Watch asked for the warrant as part of an investigation into “the potential politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice and whether the FBI and the Justice Department are abusing their law enforcement powers to harass a likely future political opponent of President [Joe] Biden.”
“If the Court were to unseal the materials, Judicial Watch would obtain the materials, analyze them, and make them available to the public,” the letter said. “Unsealing the records therefore would further Judicial Watch’s mission of educating the public.”
It comes as Eric Trump, a son of the former president, told the Daily Mail that a Trump attorney at Mar-a-Lago, Christina Bobb, asked FBI agents Monday about seeing a warrant.
“They would not give her the search warrant,” he told the outlet, referring to Bobb. “So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”
Top Republicans, meanwhile, demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms. Some have said the Justice Department immediately needs to release documents pertaining to the raid.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said there needs be a “thorough and immediate explanation” of how the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was approved. Legal historians have said that such a raid against a former president is unprecedented.
“Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately,” McConnel added.
Trump on Monday said that federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago despite him having cooperated with federal officials for months to return documents that he allegedly took from the White House after leaving office last year.
Reinhart came under fire Tuesday amid reports from several news outlets that found he had a connection to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Reinhart left his job as an assistant United States in early 2008 before he began representing some of Epstein’s workers.
According to a 2018 Miami Herald report, two of Epstein’s accusers alleged Reinhart left his prosecutor job to give Epstein inside information. Reinhart denied those allegations.
As his connection to the Epstein case went viral on Tuesday, it appeared the U.S. Southern District of Florida removed the judge’s page from its website, according to archived versions of the website.
“Access denied,” Reinhart’s page reads. “You are not authorized to access this page.”
Former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany laid out a common pattern the Justice Department has followed in dealing with those associated with former President Donald Trump.
The Fox News host argued on Tuesday’s “Outnumbered” that the DOJ now appears to be employing the same tactic against Trump himself in light of the FBI’s raid on his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, the previous day.
“This is very personal for somebody the FBI was, you could argue, looking at for six years,” McEnany said.
“We know about the [Steele] dossier. We know the way it was peddled. We know that there was an insurance policy, if you read Peter Strzok’s texts. So all the things President Trump was saying, this just pours fuel on that fire,” she recounted.
In August 2016, then FBI agent Strzok texted his lover then-FBI attorney Lisa Page that the bureau needed to have an “insurance policy” in case Trump got elected.
“I will say I think you can’t look at this in isolation,” McEnany said of the raid on Trump’s home, reportedly to obtain classified documents he allegedly has not turned over to the National Archives.
“I think you have to look at this in light of other Trump-related prosecutions. What I mean by that is in this case it’s the Presidential Records Act,” she argued.
McEnany cited George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley to point out the Presidential Records Act of 1978 has rarely been used for criminal prosecution.
GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley: Biden FBI’s raid was “heavy-handed” and “unprecedented” pic.twitter.com/44eBN2xUpI
“You look at Paul Manafort who was the [2016] campaign manager for Donald Trump. It was a [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violation they pursued. FARA has been used seven times in 50 years, but it’s brought out against Paul Manafort, this despite there being rampant FARA violations: 62 percent of people admitting they report late,” McEnany, a Harvard Law School graduate, said.
The DOJ Office of Inspector General released a report in September 2016 finding that “62 percent of initial registrations were untimely.”
“And then the Logan Act, used against Michael Flynn,” McEnany said. “This is a 1799 statute that has never in the history of this country been used to successfully prosecute anyone, but it’s used as a pretext to go in and look at Michael Flynn.”
“Why are never before used statutes or rarely used statutes in those contexts being used in this manner?” she asked.
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued in a Tuesday opinion piece in The Hill that if the DOJ wanted documents from Trump, prosecutors should have made the case to a grand jury to obtain a subpoena specifying the materials to be seized.
“Instead, the FBI apparently seized everything in view and will sort the documents and other material without a court’s deciding which ones are appropriately subject to Justice Department seizure,” Dershowitz wrote.
.@alandersh: “I don’t think you use search warrants and prosecutions to go after political enemies”
“Defenders of the raid argue that the search warrant was issued by a judge,” he added. “Yet every criminal defense lawyer knows that search warrants are issued routinely and less critically than candy is distributed on Halloween; judges rarely exercise real discretion or real supervision. It may be different when a president’s home is the object of the search, but only time will tell whether that was the case here.”
Dershowitz pointed out no such raids were conducted on Hillary Clinton’s or former Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger’s homes, when they were accused of mishandling classified documents.
“It is true that a president or former president is not above the law — but neither should he or she be below the law. Precedents established in relation to Democrats must be equally applied to Republicans. On the face of it, this standard has not been met here,” he wrote.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News Tuesday, “In my view, this is a raid that will go down in infamy. The Biden administration has crossed the Rubicon in terms of attacking President Trump and their political opponents by misusing law enforcement.”
“I tell you the FBI and the Justice Department can’t be trusted and should be thoroughly reformed, and frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think they’re redeemable at this point.”
Dark Brandon’ is the Biden White House’s cringetastic effort to win back the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme that haunted the perennially COVID-hit President through late 2021 and early 2022. The efforts, shared by taxpayer-funded White House staff, combines an almost year-late rebuttal to the Brandon memes with the Byronic aethestic of the well established “Dark MAGA” movement.
One more problem: it’s extremely ‘Third Reich‘ in nature.
But there’s more to this story than the White House using the Reichsadler or Parteiadler in its memes.
THE REICH EAGLE SUPERIMPOSED BEHIND BIDEN IN HIS WHITE HOUSE STAFFER’S MEME.
The first thing to note is that this “Dark Brandon” stuff is actually being promoted by corporate media outlets. Check out Slate’s take, which concludes: “If he can muster a smidge of momentum from the al-Zawahiri assassination by pulling up the cowl of Dark Brandon, then that is surely better than whatever he’s got going right now. After all, Joe Biden’s approval rating is already cresting back toward 40 percent. Dark Brandon strikes again!”
Sycophantic though Slate may be, the author isn’t wrong. Rasmussen polling has consistently noted that when Biden is away in his basement, hiding from COVID-19, his approval numbers go up. No wonder the White House would rather use cartoon images of him on social media. The left’s pro-Nazi memes are literally more popular than the real Joe Biden.
Mel Magazine – which appears to be some kind of soy-sponsored blog site for, uh, funboys – offers, “Okay, I pledge my soul to Dark Brandon. What’s the worst that could happen? Not like Regular Brandon was doing such a bang-up job. Trust the process. We’re finally winning.”
But there’s one more part of the Dark Brandon saga. The cherry on the cake. And that is the aesthetic origin of the entire thing.
“You have this very exaggerated image of a very ‘evil Biden,’ but also, his ability to mobilize these public intellectual zombies in an image is also kind of funny because it has long been China’s accusation of the U.S. government, that the U.S. is using folks like public intellectuals and scholars within China to carry out ‘peaceful evolution,’” Victor Shih, associate professor at UC San Diego, told POLITICO.
That’s right – it comes from China. Specifically, by an artist named Yang Quan, who sought to portray Biden in a negative light in early 2022.
Yes, the pro-Biden memes being disseminated from the hallowed halls of the White House are both Third Reich in nature, and hail from the Chinese Communist Party’s fellow travelers.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday updated its monkeypox advice to suggest people most at risk, namely men who have sex with men, “take a temporary break” from those behaviors to help “contain … the outbreak.”
Among the updates are suggestions that people “take a temporary break” from sexual activity until considered vaccinated; limit their number of sexual partners; avoid “spaces” for anonymous sex with multiple partners; use condoms; and wear gloves during particular sexual activities.
These five suggestions to reduce the chance of spread were added to the seven that appeared on the webpage when it was updated on July 12. In that previous update, the CDC offered suggestions for sexual activities for people who have (or think they have) “monkeypox and … decide to have sex.”
Friday’s update contains stronger messaging, with the CDC now saying “the best way to protect yourself and others is to avoid sex of any kind … while you are sick.” People should especially “avoid touching any rash.”
Public Health Emergency
The updates come a day after the Biden administration declared a public health emergency for monkeypox in a bid to unlock funding and more powers to deal with the virus. Some states, including New York, California, and Indiana, have declared their own public health emergencies for similar reasons.
The stages of Monkeypox. (UK Health Security Agency)
The updated advice appears on the CDC’s “Safer Sex, Social Gatherings, and Monkeypox” webpage which contains detailed and specific information tailored to lowering the risk of transmission during particular sexual activities.
“While CDC works to contain the current monkeypox outbreak and learn more about the virus, this information can help you make informed choices when you are in situations or places where monkeypox could be spread,” reads a statement on the webpage which wasn’t there in July.
“Monkeypox is not considered a sexually transmitted disease, but it is often transmitted through close, sustained physical contact, which can include sexual contact.”
The CDC has also advised people to consider the chances of skin-to-skin contact when attending festivals or raves.
“Festivals, events, and concerts where attendees are fully clothed and unlikely to share skin-to-skin contact are safer. However, attendees should be mindful of activities (like kissing) that might spread monkeypox,” the CDC webpage reads.
“A rave, party, or club where there is minimal clothing and where there is direct, personal, often skin-to-skin contact has some risk. Avoid any rash you see on others and consider minimizing skin-to-skin contact.”
The CDC especially noted the increased risk of spread at these events in “enclosed spaces” where people go for “intimate, often anonymous sexual contact with multiple partners.”
The White House has identified a vital need for education about monkeypox and outreach to the LGBT community, which is most affected by the outbreak, in order to combat the virus.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that there is a need to make sure the LGBT community and public health officials “know exactly what to look for and what the treatment is.”
The CDC’s updated suggestions come three days after President Joe Biden picked Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who runs the CDC’s HIV prevention division, as one of two officials to lead the nation’s response to the monkeypox outbreak.
Daskalakis, who will be deputy to FEMA’s Robert Fenton, has expertise with issues that impact the LGBT community, making him an appropriate pick, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis speaks at the press conference for New York City Pride on June 27, 2021. (John Lamparski/Getty Images)
The 2022 monkeypox outbreak has so far primarily spread via the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men, a major study has found. The virus can also spread through contaminated bedding, clothing, towels, according to the CDC and World Health Organization.
After the United States’ fifth pediatric monkeypox case was reported in Long Beach on Thursday, a Californian health department has also said transmission can occur via household items such as cups and utensils.
The CDC’s updated webpage for safer sex amid the monkeypox outbreak noted that vaccines will be “an important tool in preventing the spread of monkeypox.”
“But given the current limited supply of vaccine, consider temporarily changing some behaviors that may increase your risk of being exposed,” the webpage reads. “These temporary changes will help slow the spread of monkeypox until vaccine supply is adequate.”
China’s ruling communist regime announced Friday that it would cancel or suspend dialogue on several issues with the United States ranging from military communications to climate change initiatives.
A statement from the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign ministry said that the regime would cancel all direct communications between military theater leaders, working meetings between defense departments, and maritime security dialogues with the United States.
Additionally, the CCP would suspend all cooperation with the United States related to illegal immigrant repatriation, criminal justice assistance, climate talks, transnational crime, and anti-drug programs.
The announcement is part of a suite of retaliatory measures by China against the United States and its partners following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier in the week.
Moreover, the canceling of communications between military commanders in the Indo-Pacific is likely to be seen as a major escalation by the international community, as such contact is often a key tool in helping militaries avoid miscommunication or harmful accidents.
The CCP statement follows a barrage of explosive rhetoric and hostile actions from Beijing this week.
On Thursday, the CCP launched 11 ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan, some of which passed over the island and into the exclusive economic zone of Japan. The regime has also seemingly launched a sustained series of cyberattacks on Taiwanese infrastructure, and has implemented import bans on more than 2,000 items from Taiwan. The Chinese military’s encirclement of Taiwan has also formed a sort of blockade, forcing international air and sea traffic to back up as it attempts to wrap around the most dangerous areas.
International forums including the G7 and ASEAN have called on the CCP to end its provocations and pursue a peaceful solution to ongoing tensions.
The White House, meanwhile, summoned the Chinese ambassador for a reprimand over the unprecedented escalations.
The U.S. leadership said that it would not give in to China’s erratic and dangerous behavior and that, in spite of CCP threats to regional stability, it would pursue deescalatory measures including postponing one of its own missile tests.
“As China engages in destabilizing military exercises around Taiwan, the United States is demonstrating instead the behavior of a responsible nuclear power by reducing the risks of miscalculation and misperception,” said White House National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby during an Aug. 4 press conference.
“This is how we’re going to defend America’s national security interests and our values.”
The CCP maintains a so-called One China principle, which states that Taiwan is a breakaway province that must be reunited with the mainland. The regime has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this goal. Taiwan has been self-governing since 1949 and has never been controlled by the CCP, however. And Taiwan maintains a democratic government and thriving market economy.
U.S. relations with Taiwan and China are governed by a series of treaties and diplomatic cables stretching back to the 1970s. Notably, the United States adheres to a One China policy, which provides an acknowledgment, but not endorsement, of the CCP’s One China principle. The policy also mandates extensive unofficial ties with Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 further mandates that the United States will provide the arms to Taiwan necessary for its self-defense.
At the heart of the ongoing tensions between the CCP and the United States is their long-standing agreement that neither side will attempt to unilaterally change this status quo through force or coercion.
CCP authorities maintain that Pelosi’s visit was intended to unilaterally change that status quo. U.S. officials say the same of China’s increased military and economic aggression in the region, and have accused the CCP of manufacturing a crisis to justify military expansion around Taiwan.
“Beijing’s provocative actions are a significant escalation in its long-standing attempt to change the status quo,” Kirby said.
“We’re not going to accept a new status quo. And it’s not just the United States, but the world as well.”
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.
A group of Republican lawmakers put forth a proposal on Thursday that it says would relieve student debt crisis without using taxpayer dollars to fund a massive debt forgiveness program.
The Responsible Education Assistance Act would limit the amount of interest borrowers could accumulate on federal student loans to help them more effectively pay back their loans. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), who co-sponsored the bill with Reps. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.), said the bill will help in-need Americans without shifting debt onto taxpayers.
The plan serves as an alternative to plans championed by prominent Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to forgive all outstanding student debt. The Biden administration has already mobilized so that it is prepared to implement forgiveness to millions of Americans in debt once the White House announces its plan, according to Politico. The mass forgiveness proposals would cost the federal government at least $197 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Foxx told the Free Beacon it’s “grossly unfair” to force Americans to bear the burden of other people’s loans, especially those who already paid back loans of their own.
“Under the Biden administration’s blanket student loan forgiveness agenda, taxpayers bear the burden of paying back other people’s loans,” Foxx told the Washington Free Beacon. “This is grossly unfair to the two-thirds of Americans who never went to college or those who already paid back their loans.”
Experts say the Democratic proposals to forgive student loan debt fail to address the underlying issues that led to the current situation. If Joe Biden instituted his loan forgiveness plans, Americans would hold the same amount in three years as today, the Free Beacon reported in July.
The Republican bill takes a different route: the proposal would cap interest on federal student loans after 10 years, in order to help borrowers pay down their principal. It would also cap the amount of money students could borrow from the federal government and block the secretary of education from imposing costly student loan forgiveness plans without congressional approval.
It is highly unlikely the bill will advance to the House floor as long as Democrats remain in control of the House of Representatives. The legislation, however, serves as an example of the type of legislation Republicans would put forward should they win the majority back in November.
Unqualified diversity hire Xavier Becerra is really bad at his job
Glad to see someone else use the “Affirmative Inaction” phrase [US Patriot]
Joe Biden still hasn’t fired Xavier Becerra, the unqualified health and human services secretary whose failed leadership has exacerbated the administration’s botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the ongoing monkeypox outbreak.
Alas, Becerra probably won’t be fired for the same reason he was hired. Because of his race and the so-called diversity he brings to the administration.
The White House has been fed up with Becerra’s job performance for months and has “openly mused” about replacing him, according to a Washington Post report published in January. Health experts inside and outside the administration complained about his “low profile” and “passive” approach to complex problems. “He hasn’t shown up,” one COVID-19 analyst told the Post. “[He’s been] like a ghost.”
Nevertheless, administration officials were “loath” to give Becerra the axe because doing so “would likely draw the ire of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other grass-roots groups that pressed Biden to appoint more Latinos to his Cabinet.”
New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns recounted this racially charged pressure campaign in their recently published book, This Will Not Pass. Biden’s search for a health secretary, they wrote, was a “fraught” process characterized by “hurt feelings and [racial] grievance.”
While attempting to assemble “the most diverse cabinet in history,” Biden’s team “panicked” in response to criticism from Hispanic lawmakers who wanted more Hispanics nominated for cabinet-level positions. They “scrambled” to offer Becerra the job—a “hasty choice” explicitly intended to “calm the situation.”
So much for Biden’s campaign pledge to “follow the science” and “shut down” COVID-19 by putting the experts back in charge of the government’s pandemic response. Becerra, a former congressman, was woefully unqualified for the position of health secretary. His most relevant experience involved a lawsuit he filed as California attorney general to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide birth control to employees. More than 620,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 on his watch.
Some Democrats complained about the “harried selection process” and viewed Becerra as a “baffling” nominee. They were ignored. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was especially annoyed because she “had worked closely with Becerra in the House and viewed him as untrustworthy.” Meanwhile, Biden chief of staff Ron Klain grew “weary” of the Democratic coalition’s insistence on “treating the cabinet as an identity-politics Rubik’s Cube.”
Becerra’s inability to helm the nation’s health department was glaringly obvious in January, when the Post reported on White House “frustrations” with his leadership. In recent months, the federal government’s response to monkeypox has further vindicated Becerra’s critics who contend the health secretary has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.
The New York Times on Wednesday published a damning report on Becerra’s botched handling of the monkeypox outbreak, which has been hobbled by a vaccine shortage “caused in part” by his department’s failure “to ask that bulk stocks of the vaccine it already owned be bottled for distribution.” The release of the vaccine doses was also delayed because the Food and Drug Administration, under Becerra’s purview, took months to inspect and approve the Danish factory producing the vaccine.
Lawrence Gostin, a renowned public health expert from Georgetown Law who has consulted with the White House on monkeypox, said the government’s response to the outbreak has been “deeply frustrating.” Federal health agencies have been “kind of asleep at the wheel on this,” and continue to struggle with “the same kinds of bureaucratic delays and forgetfulness and dropping the ball that we did during the COVID pandemic,” he told the Times.
The article includes a familiar critique of Becerra’s leadership. Detractors fault his “hands-off approach to an increasingly serious situation,” but weren’t willing to speak on the record. Biden is reportedly “upset” by the vaccine shortage and “stung by criticism that a lack of foresight and management has left gay men—the prime risk group for monkeypox—unprotected.”
Josh Barro, a pro-Biden journalist, observed that the Times article “really makes Xavier Becerra sound incompetent and out to lunch. How did he get the HHS Secretary job anyway? He doesn’t have relevant qualifications.”
A Co-Chair of Joe Biden’s forthcoming White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health has appeared in documentaries produced by Chinese Communist Party-run outlets; lauding the regime’s agriculture and food policy as an approach that should be “learned by the whole world.”
Ertharin Cousin, one of five individuals selected by Biden to lead the conference, has also repeatedly praised the Chinese Communist Party’s agricultural policies, with her quotes frequently appearing on regime-run media.
Set to take place in September, the White House’s conference is slated to address nutrition and health in addition to food security and agriculture. It comes as inflation and food shortages plague the economy, dovetailing with efforts by left-wing activists and billionaires to eliminate meat from Western diets to supposedly combat climate change.
Cousin, who was a former executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, appeared on an episode of China Global Television Network’s (CGTN) show Full Frame titled “The Hunger Paradox.”
Cousin is the sole interviewee in the 20-minute program aired by CGTN, which is entirely owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party. It has been described by the Freedom House think tank as “a long-standing weapon in Beijing’s arsenal of repression” whose “mission is to attack designated enemies of the Communist Party.”
DURING HER UN TENURE, COUSIN VISITED CHINA’S U.S. EMBASSY.
The episode peddles Chinese Communist Party talking points surrounding the success of its agriculture methods despite the regime’s notoriety for famine and food rationing during the Cultural Revolution.
“In China, agricultural reforms ensured most rural farmers had land to grow on, allowing them to be food self-sufficient. China’s poverty reduction efforts have contributed to 70 percent of the world-wide poverty reduction since the 1980’s,” asserts the host, who makes no mention of China’s history of famine.
“One of the things I’ve heard you say, which I think is fascinating and true, is that policies do make a difference and you point to China. So many people lifted out of poverty, so many people hungry that now have meals, so policies do make a difference don’t they,” he continues.
“Yes they do,” responds Cousin, adding “You would often hear me use China as an example of a country that the world said would never feed itself. That it would always depend upon assistance from the global community because 50 years ago, China was WFP’s largest recipient, and that all evolved to the point where President Xi now says that he will eradicate poverty by the end of 2020.”
“I’m looking forward to that,” Cousin exclaims.
Cousin proceeds to explicitly praise the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, praising the regime for its “commitment”:
“It did take commitment from government to developing the programs, investing in the activities that were necessary to ensure the agricultural system was one that could provide access to food, but also ensuring that people who could not afford food had access to food. And that made a difference in the evolution of China, and there are many other factors involved there but the reality of it is is it began with a commitment by leadership to ensure that they were self-sustained in food access.”
Cousin, who served in the Obama administration as the Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, has made similar comments throughout her public service tenure.
“China has made enormous progress in dealing with hunger and its experience can be learned by the whole world,” Cousin said during a visit to China in 2013, which was hyped in an article by state-run media outlet China Daily.
In 2016, speaking with another state-run media outlet Xinhua, she claimed that “China has created significant lessons for the world and established a true benchmark for what the world can achieve.”
As recently as July 2021, while delivering a keynote address at a conference, Cousin again praised the Chinese Communist Party for “despite the fact that some 60 years ago, the world said China would never be able to feed itself, not only does it feed itself today, but it is also a donor country, supporting food access across the globe for developing countries.”
In addition to Cousin’s praise for China potentially complicating her leadership role for the upcoming White Conference, she has also served on the Advisory board of pharmaceutical giant Bayer since 2019.
Five ballistic missiles launched by China landed in the waters of Japan’s exclusive economic zone on Aug. 4, prompting an international outcry against the communist regime.
The missiles were launched as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) retaliatory military exercises against Taiwan, which have cut off several international air and sea paths to the island in a sort of blockade.
“To have five Chinese missiles fall within Japan’s EEZ like this is a first,” Japanese defense minister Nobuo Kishi said.
“We have protested strongly through diplomatic channels.”
Shortly before the launches, CCP authorities canceled a previously planned meeting between China and Japan’s foreign ministers, citing displeasure with Japan’s signing of a joint statement by the G-7 that called on China to resolve its tensions with Taiwan peacefully.
“We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means,” the document said.
Taiwan Warns CCP Could ‘Invade’ Local Waters
The military exercises are the largest ever conducted by the CCP across the Taiwan Strait. They include joint naval, air, and missile forces, operating in six areas surrounding Taiwan.
Notably, some of the exercise areas, which the CCP has declared “prohibited” to international travel, occur within 10 miles of Taiwan’s coastline. A nation’s sovereign waters end 12 miles from the coastline, according to international law.
Such maneuvers would constitute an invasion of Taiwan’s territorial waters if Chinese forces were to travel the full breadth of the exercise areas, Taiwan lawmaker Wang Ting-yu told Axios.
“If they send in their fighters or their warships to enter our territorial sea, that means China invaded our territory and we will have our standard operation procedure to respond to that,” Wang said.
“We don’t want to provoke any conflict here, but whoever dares to invade our country, our home, we have our obligation to defend our home.”
CCP authorities claim that Taiwan is a rogue province of China that must be united with the mainland at any cost. As such, China’s state-owned propaganda organs have issued articles claiming that Taiwan’s territorial waters are actually China’s territorial waters.
Despite China’s claims, Taiwan has been self-governed since 1949, has never been controlled by the CCP, and boasts a democratic government and thriving market economy.
The White House said that China was positioning itself to take further aggressive actions against Taiwan following the announcement of the exercises, which have effectively blockaded many important international trade routes to the island.
“China has positioned itself to take further steps, and we expect that they will continue to react over a longer-term horizon,” said White House National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby during an Aug. 2 press briefing. “The United States will not seek and does not want a crisis. [But] we are prepared to manage what Beijing chooses to do.”
“What we’ve seen thus far is consistent with the playbook that we expected them to run.”
US, China at Loggerheads Over Status Quo
The CCP’s escalations in the region follow a highly publicized visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which the CCP leadership loudly protested. Both China and the United States have used the ensuing tensions to accuse one another of unilaterally attempting to change the status quo regarding Taiwan.
The United States maintains a “One China” policy, which acknowledges but doesn’t endorse the CCP’s principle that there is one inalienable China of which Taiwan is a part. It’s also bound by treaty to supply Taiwan with the arms necessary for Taiwan to defend its de facto independence. Further, the documents that form the basis of China and the United States’ agreement on the Taiwan issue demand that neither side seek to unilaterally change the current status quo through force or coercion.
To that end, the CCP has said it would “start a war no matter the cost” in order to prevent Taiwan’s independence from being recognized on the international stage.
Likewise, however, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that the language of the United States’ agreements with China indicated that the nation would be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan from a CCP invasion.
“Going back 50 years, our views on this issue [have] been clear in that regard, that this would be a matter of ‘grave concern,’ which is often diplomatic language that we would be willing to go to war over this,” Esper said during a speech last month.
“It’s China that is undermining the “One China” policy as all sides have understood it now for 50 years, and it’s China changing the status quo through force. Those are just the facts of the matter.”
Despite the CCP’s claims that Pelosi’s visit constituted a “secessionist” push away from the status quo, the White House was quick to note that congressional delegations visit Taiwan with some frequency, including multiple times this year which received relatively little or no attention from the CCP.
Taiwan’s political and military leadership have also defended the visit, and have vowed to defend Taiwan’s territory and democratic way of life from CCP aggression.
“We are not eager for a fight, nor will we shy away from one,” Taiwan’s defense ministry stated in a video released on social media. “We have the capacity and the will to uphold our valued liberty and democracy, and maintain our region’s stability.”
Two doctors and a former Harvard Medical School professor have signed onto the lawsuit that alleges the U.S. government and Big Tech colluded to censor dissenting voices.
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who was fired for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine, also joined the legal action.
All three say they have been affected by Big Tech censorship, and believe the punitive measures have been influenced or directed by government officials.
In April 2021, for instance, Google-owned YouTube deleted a video of Bhattacharya and Kulldorff questioning whether masks were effective in stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.
Kulldorff, a former Harvard Medical School professor who now works at the Brownstone Institute, was also suspended by Twitter for several weeks after positing that masks give people a false sense of security, which makes them more likely to expose themselves to the illness. That’s the same theory put forth by top U.S. officials until they pivoted to endorsing widespread mask-wearing months after the pandemic started.
Kheriaty also says he was censored by Twitter.
“I have always shared peer-reviewed research findings as well as my own opinions and perspectives on Twitter and LinkedIn. It was not until I began posting information about COVID and our COVID response policies, however, that I encountered censorship on the Twitter platform,” he wrote in a declaration filed in the new case.
Multiple platforms, meanwhile, took action against the declaration, which called for focused protection of the elderly while letting the rest of society live their lives normally and was vociferously opposed by top U.S. health officials, including then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.
Search results on Google initially placed the declaration’s website near the top but soon ranked it lower than articles that were critical of the document, according to declarations from Bhattacharya and Kulldorff. Reddit removed links to the declaration and Facebook removed a page dedicated to the document, though it later restored it.
Stanford University professor of medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a founding fellow of Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom, at the Hillsdale College Kirby Center in Washington on March 17, 2022. (Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times)
‘Self-Censor’
The scientists say they’ve had to “self-censor” in order to try to remain on the platforms.
That has sometimes meant not posting at all, and other times posting by using “imaginative phrasing,” Kulldorff said.
They also say the timing of the censorship decisions support the assertion that the moves were induced by the government, including how censorship of the declaration happened soon after Collins called for a “quick and devastating … take-down” of the document in private and disparaged it in public.
“These are clear indications to me that government is in collaboration with Big Tech to suppress scientific dissent,” Bhattacharya told The Epoch Times.
Government officials such as former White House press secretary Jen Psaki have openly admitted to flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook and raising issues with posts on Twitter, the complaint notes, while some of the platforms have acknowledged consulting with government officials on content moderation.
“The government’s sweeping campaign to suppress the perspectives of the plaintiffs, and others like them, represents the most severe abrogation of the First Amendment in modern times, and we look forward to seeing this constitutional atrocity rectified in a court of law,” Jenin Younes, a lawyer for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is representing the new plaintiffs, said in a statement.
The revised effort drops one defendant, Psaki, who is no longer with the federal government, and adds a number of others.
Carol Crawford with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the U.S. Census Bureau; Jennifer Shopkorn, a senior adviser for the bureau; the Department of Commerce; Robert Silvers and Samantha Vinograd, Department of Homeland Security officials; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; Jen Easterly, director of the agency; and Gina McCarthy, a White House national climate adviser were named as defendants.
None were named in the original filing.
Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas were among the defendants named in both complaints.
The messages show Crawford and colleagues met with and discussed taking action against alleged COVID-19 misinformation.
The Census Bureau was involved in the coordination, according to the missives.
The messages, the amended filing states, “confirm the allegations of collusion between [government] officials and social-media platforms to censor disfavored speech, speakers, and viewpoints, as alleged herein.”
Writing in her book Silent Invasion, former White House COVID task force member Ambassador Deborah Birx admits that her “go to” connections to push pro-lockdown policies in the White House were none other than Vice President Mike Pence, and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The National Pulse has previously reported from Birx’s book how she admitted to “subterfuge” in the White House, going so far as to implement changes in policy without authorization, and contrary to the Trump White House’s instructions.
Chapter 10 of her book further explains:
Just as I knew that in a pandemic getting people to change their behavior was very hard, that was true of those shaping the pandemic response as well. Better to leverage those who could help me impact the response than those who resisted me. There was Jared and there was the vice president, and those two men would be my go-to people in the White House, then and for the next nine months, to move the pandemic response forward.
Throughout the book Birx explains how she was pro-lockdown to the extreme, even refusing to attend meetings with those who opposed her perspective. In Chapter 13, Birx admits to her petulance:
Somehow, I had to cut [Dr. Scott] Atlas off from any degree of influence he might try to exert on anyone short of the president, whether during my absence or while I was still there. Individually, I contacted Marc Short, Mark Meadows, and Jared Kushner. I communicated clearly to everyone: “I won’t be in any meetings any longer if Scott Atlas is present at them. If that means a meeting in the Oval Office[,] it doesn’t matter. If it’s at the task force, it doesn’t matter. If it’s at the Covid Huddle, I don’t want him there.”
The news comes as the former Vice President increasingly attempts to carve out a role for himself in the conservative movement, with many speculating he intends to challenge President Trump for the Republican nomination for 2024.
Earlier in the book, Birx admitted to “devis[ing] a work-around for the governor’s reports,” where she claims she would “reinsert what [the White House] had objected to, but place it in… different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit. Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected.”
Ambassador Birx says she was recruited into her role by National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, and was championed for the position by New Hampshire congressional hopeful Matt Mowers.
Joe Biden touted the killing of al-Quaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri as a win for his administration on Monday, but experts said he was ignoring some major facts.
“On Saturday, on my direction, the United States successfully concluded an air strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed the emir of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri,” Biden said on Monday.
“You know, Zawahiri was [Osama] bin Laden’s leader. He was with him all the…whole time. He was his number two man, his deputy, at the time of the terrorist attack on 9/11. He was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11.”
The United States has killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda and one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, who oversaw the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, alongside the group’s founder, Osama bin Laden, announced Biden. pic.twitter.com/lfX0yY5wDs
Biden went on to tout the killing as the fulfillment of a promise he made to Americans when pulling out of Afghanistan nearly a year ago.
“I made a promise to the American people that we’d continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond,” Biden said. “We’ve done just that.”
“I made a promise to the American people that we’d continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan…We’ve done just that,” Biden says on the killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri nearly one year after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/61fUv6ahZY
While eliminating this terrorist is undoubtedly a positive development for the country, the fact that he was even in Afghanistan highlighted Biden’s previous failures.
In trying to justify his hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan on Aug. 20, 2021, Biden declared al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan.
“Look, let’s put this thing in perspective here,” Biden said according to a White House transcript. “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al-Qaeda gone?
“We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as — as well as getting Osama bin Laden. And we did.”
Of course, Biden’s botched withdrawal ultimately led to the Taliban gaining control in Afghanistan and cost the lives of 13 American soldiers.
Given that the leader al-Quaeda leader was in Afghanistan on Saturday, it seems the group is in the country at this point. This means one of two things, neither of which are good for Biden.
Either Biden was lying when he said al-Quaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan last year, or the group has re-entered the country since Biden’s botched withdrawal. In both scenarios, Biden failed to achieve the stated goal of “getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.”
As Biden celebrated the killing of Zawahiri, some terrorism experts pointed out this inconvenient fact.
“The killing of Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri will be sold as a counterterrorism success,” Long War Journal terrorism analyst Bill Roggio wrote on Twitter. “But that narrative masks the undeniable truth that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a safe have for Al Qaeda.”
1) The killing of Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri will be sold as a counterterrorism success. But that narrative masks the undeniable truth that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a safe have for Al Qaeda. https://t.co/CGc5Fs8oMw
In another tweet from the same thread, Roggio explained the implications of Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul.
“Zawahiri could not operate in Afghanistan — particularly in Kabul — without the consent of the Taliban,” Roggio wrote. “He wasn’t in the remote mountains of Kunar, Nuristan, or Nangarhar, or distant provinces of Ghazni, Helmand, or Kandahar. He was in the Taliban’s capital.”
4) Zawahiri could not operate in Afghanistan – particularly in Kabul – without the consent of the Taliban. He wasn’t in the remote mountains of Kunar, Nuristan, or Nangarhar, or distant provinces of Ghazni, Helmand, or Kandahar. He was in the Taliban’s capital.
International security professor Max Abrahms made a similar point in a tweet of his own.
“Taking out #Zawahiri isn’t the categorical win Biden says,” he wrote. “The Taliban was supposed to prevent Al Qaeda leaders from hiding out there for goodness sake.”
Taking out #Zawahiri isn’t the categorical win Biden says. The Taliban was supposed to prevent Al Qaeda leaders from hiding out there for goodness sake.
Once again, Biden is attempting to take credit for taking steps to solve a problem he created, at least in part. While Zawahiri’s death is a good thing, it is not the end of terrorism problems in Afghanistan, and we have Biden himself to thank for that.
Two Maine organizations slated to receive funding from a controversial Biden administration grant program for groups that support a “harm reduction” approach to drug treatment are actively distributing crack pipes to addicts, the Free Beacon learned at visits to these sites.
The Church of Safe Injection, which bills itself as a “nonprofit that fights for the health, rights, and dignity of people who use drugs (PWUD),” will receive funding through a $1.2 million grant the Biden administration awarded to a coalition of Maine groups. A Free Beacon reporter last week picked up a crack pipe and meth pipe at its Lewiston, Maine, office. The organization did not provide a smoking kit, which often includes a mouthpiece, copper wool, and alcohol wipes along with the pipe.
Maine Access Points, another organization set to receive funding through the grant, provided a Free Beacon reporter a bag of a dozen crack pipes in Sanford, Maine, along with foil and a smoking kit that contained a mouthpiece, copper scrubber, lip balm, and instructions on how to smoke crack cocaine. The organization also handed out three meth pipes, a snorting kit, naloxone, fentanyl test strips, and a condom. Maine Access Points has a phone number for each of its five harm reduction facilities in the state. When a Free Beacon reporter texted to ask if the Sanford location distributed crack pipes, an employee responded, “Yes💯😊🥰.”
The explanation emerging from the organizations—which cop to distributing crack pipes and receiving taxpayer funding, but insist they are not using taxpayer funds to purchase the crack pipes—paints a far messier picture than the Biden administration’s haughty dismissal of initial reports on the grant program as “misinformation.”
When the Free Beaconreported in February that the Biden administration was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes through a harm-reduction program intended to advance “racial equity,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra—facing blowback—said that “no federal funding will be used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to put pipes in safe smoking kits.” Likewise, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that crack pipes were “never a part of the kit” and that “we don’t support federal funding, indirect or direct, for pipes.”
The two Maine groups that provided the Free Beacon crack pipes did so separately from their smoking kits. This distinguished the groups from the five harm reduction locations along the East Coast that provided the Free Beacon with crack pipes within their smoking kits.
A spokeswoman for the Church of Safe Injection, Zoe Brokos, told the Free Beacon that the organization has yet to receive the federal funds it was awarded, and plans to use them to purchase “wound care kit supplies such as alcohol pads, gauze pads, and bandages.” Brokos added that her organization will continue to distribute crack pipes and meth pipes but will not use federal grants to fund them.
Maine Access Points did not respond to a request for comment.
Church of Safe Injection and Maine Access Points—in collaboration with MaineHealth, the state’s largest health system, and Amistad, a peer support group for drug addicts—are using the taxpayer-funded grants to facilitate the distribution of drug paraphernalia in each of Maine’s 16 counties, with a focus on LGBT and homeless drug users, according to HHS grant information. The grant is set to be renewed annually through 2023.
Although Church of Safe Injection and Maine Access Points help oversee the HHS grant award funds, the department omitted the two harm reduction groups from the grant recipient announcement, listing only MaineHealth. A local CBS affiliate reported in June that both harm reduction groups are grant recipients, and the groups celebrated the award funding in separate Facebook posts. The government’s omission raises questions as to why the groups were left off the Biden administration’s list of grant recipients. Neither HHS nor the White House responded to requests for comment.
“So bittersweet to share the news that we received this grant in collaboration with Maine Access Points, Amistad, and MaineHealth,” the Church of Safe Injection posted on Facebook in May with a link to the HHS grant announcement. “Bittersweet because so few harm reductionists were chosen throughout the country even though we know that the services provided by syringe service programs and naloxone distribution orgs save lives and make a HUGE difference.”
MaineHealth did not respond to a request for comment.
The Church of Safe Injection launched in 2018 and operated without legal approval from the state before it was certified through Maine’s syringe exchange program in February. The group hosts a “trans harm reduction group” twice a month for “trans and non-gender conforming people who use drugs.” Its founder, Jesse Harvey, died of an overdose in 2020. Kari Morissette, who took over as executive director of the group after the death of Harvey, died in May.
Despite the Biden administration’s assurances that taxpayer funds would not underwrite the distribution of crack pipes, Congress passed bipartisan bills in June and July that bar the administration from funding it.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has been killed in a CIA drone strike in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday, the biggest blow to the militant group since its founder Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.
One of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a drone strike was carried out by the CIA in the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday.
In a statement, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed that a strike took place and strongly condemned it, calling it a violation of “international principles.”
Joe Biden will deliver remarks on Monday at 7:30 p.m. (2330 GMT) on what the White House described as a “successful counter-terrorism operation.”
(Reporting by Idrees Ali. Editing by Leslie Adler and Grant McCool.)
New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman insists the United States is not in a recession, that the term is essentially meaningless, and current efforts to apply the label to the U.S. economy amount to “vitriolic” partisanship.
Krugman made the remarks in an interview on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program that aired on July 31, days after the U.S. economy met the rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, with GDP coming in negative for two quarters in a row.
Host Brian Stelter kicked off the segment by asking Krugman whether the United States is in a recession and whether the term “recession” even matters.
“No, we aren’t, and no, it doesn’t,” Krugman replied.
“None of the usual criteria that real experts use says we’re in a recession right now,” Krugman continued.
“What does matter? The state of the economy is what it is. Jobs are abundant, although maybe the job market is weakening. Inflation is high, though maybe inflation is coming down. What does it matter whether you use the ‘r-word’ or not?” the economist added.
Recession?
Debate has swirled around whether the U.S. economy has fallen into a recession after a 0.9 percent contraction in the second-quarter GDP, which followed a 1.6 percent decline in the first quarter.
Two negative back-to-back quarterly GDP prints are a common practical definition for a recession, according to numerous experts and economists.
Formally, however, recessions in the United States are declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), who use a broader definition than the two-quarter rule that considers a range of indicators—including employment—which has continued to grow.
The Biden administration has seized on the NBER’s criteria for declaring a downturn, insisting the economy isn’t in a recession.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen speaks during a news conference in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, on July 14, 2022. (Made Nagi/Pool via Reuters)
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said recently that that “most economists and most Americans” define a recession as a “broad-based weakening” of the U.S. economy that includes businesses shuttering in significant numbers and mass layoffs.
“That is not what we’re seeing right now when you look at the economy. Job creation is continuing, household finances remain strong, consumers are spending, and businesses are growing,” Yellen said.
A number of experts and economists disagree with the White House view.
‘We’re in a Recession. Full Stop’
Asked whether he accepts the Biden administration’s insistence that the country hasn’t yet slipped into a recession, Jim Bianco, founder of Bianco Research, told the Real Vision Finance program in a recent interview that, while it may be “shallow,” it’s a recession.
“Let me try and be clear here. Yes, we’re in a recession. Full stop, question over—a recession,” Bianco said.
Bianco said it may be reasonable to call the recession “shallow,” though he warned that the downturn could soon get ugly.
“Sure, alright, it’s a shallow recession. Check back Jan. 1 and let’s see if it’s still a shallow recession,” he added, while arguing that what the White House is doing with its messaging on the economic slowdown is nothing new.
Bianco spoke of White House pushback during the Carter administration in the late 1970s against economists warning that soaring inflation could lead to a depression. Out of that controversy, the word “recession” was born as a softer way to refer to an economic slump, Bianco said, adding that current administration efforts to deny that the economy is in a recession amount to more of the same.
“We used to call them depressions. In the 1930s, the Hoover administration went crazy because we used to call them ‘panics,’” Bianco said.
“Don’t call it a ‘panic,’ what we’re seeing, so they invented the word depression. So we went from ‘panic’ … the White House didn’t like that word, so we invented the word ‘depression.’ Then in 1978 they didn’t like the word ‘depression’ so we invented the word ‘recession.’”
“It seems like we’re now in the process of finding a new word to mean exactly the same thing,” Bianco said. “This is not new. We’ve done this now for 90 years between White Houses and recessions. So yes, it’s a recession.”
‘Especially Vitriolic’
In the CNN interview with Krugman, Stelter suggested that the debate between whether the economy is in a recession or not basically amounts to the White House following a time-worn strategy to downplay bad economic data while the administration’s political opponents do the opposite.
Replying, Krugman said that efforts to call the current slowdown a recession fall into a different category than standard debates.
“I would say that this is especially vitriolic,” Krugman asserted.
“I’ve been in this business for a couple of decades, and I get lots of hate mail and see stuff. I’ve never seen anything as bad as this. The determination of a lot of people to say it’s a recession is above and beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” he continued.
Asked what he thinks is driving this, Krugman chalked it up to partisan divisions.
“It’s partisanship. People want it. It’s the ‘Biden recession.’ They want their Biden recession. They’re going to have it, never mind the fact that … it’s not a recession in any technical sense,” he added.
Krugman’s remarks were met with a critical response by some prominent voices on Twitter.
Piers Morgan attends the 2019 British Academy Britannia Awards presented by American Airlines and Jaguar Land Rover at The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Oct. 25, 2019. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for BAFTA LA)
‘Deja Vu’
British broadcaster Piers Morgan posted a message on Twitter saying that “[i]f Trump was still President, Krugman would definitely be saying it’s a recession,” suggesting that partisan spin around economic performance cuts both ways.
Cameron Winklevoss, founder of Winklevoss Capital Management, said in a post on Twitter: “I’m having deja vu watching Mr. ‘I was wrong about inflation’ dismiss the recession. Krugman is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest ‘real expert’ out there. Of course corporate media continues to give him a platform to spread misinformation.”
Krugman, who earlier predicted that the current inflationary wave would be a short-lived “transitory” phenomenon, admitted in the interview on CNN that he was “wrong about inflation,” which has remained stubbornly high in the United States and in June hit a 40-plus year high of 9.1 percent.
Still, the economist doesn’t believe he’s making another mistake by insisting the U.S. economy isn’t in a recession. Krugman took to Twitter to defend the view that the U.S. economy isn’t contracting, citing data on Gross Domestic Income (GDI) that suggests the U.S. economy has been growing continuously since the end of 2021, and other “inconsistencies” in the data.
“The inconsistencies have been especially large lately: GDP falling but GDI, which should be exactly the same, rising along with employment; industrial production up when the economy is supposedly down,” Krugman said in one of the posts.
“This kind of noise in the data explains why the NBER doesn’t rush to make recession calls, and relies on multiple indicators, not just GDP,” he continued.
“There’s a pretty good chance that we’ll eventually conclude that the economy, while slowing, actually grew” in the first half of 2022, Krugman argued.
‘Inflationary Depression’
By contrast, economist and investor Peter Schiff, founder of Euro Pacific Capital, told The Epoch Times in an earlier interview that he believes the United States is slumping into an “inflationary depression.”
“I think that the economic weakness is going to be so pronounced and over such a long period of time that it would not even do it justice to call a recession,” he said. “I think depression is going to be a more accurate description of what we’re going to go through.”
Schiff argued that the United States will spend most of this decade in a state of depression while, at the same time, “prices are going to rise much more in this decade than they did in the 1970s.”
Former President Donald Trump recently predicted that, under Joe Biden’s watch, the U.S. economy is heading for not just a recession, but a full-blown depression.
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.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. economy contracted again in the second quarter amid aggressive monetary policy tightening from the Federal Reserve to combat high inflation, which could fan financial market fears that the economy was already in recession.
Gross domestic product fell at a 0.9% annualized rate last quarter, the Commerce Department said in its advance estimate of GDP on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast GDP rebounding at a 0.5% rate.
Estimates ranged from as low as a 2.1% rate of contraction to as high as a 2.0% growth pace. The economy contracted at a 1.6% pace in the first quarter.
The second straight quarterly decline in GDP meets the standard definition of a recession.
But the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of recessions in the United States, defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators.”
Job growth averaged 456,700 per month in the first half of the year, which is generating strong wage gains. Still, the risks of a downturn have increased. Homebuilding and house sales have weakened while business and consumer sentiment have softened in recent months.
The White House is vigorously pushing back against the recession chatter as it seeks to calm voters ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections that will decide whether resident Joe Biden’s Democratic Party retains control of the U.S. Congress.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is scheduled to hold a news conference on Thursday to “discuss the state of the U.S. economy.” While labor market remains tight, there are signs it is losing steam.
A separate report from the Labor Department on Thursday showed initial claims for state unemployment benefits decreased 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 256,000 for the week ended July 23. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 253,000 applications for the latest week.
Jobless claims remain below the 270,000-350,000 range that economists say would signal an increase in the unemployment rate. Slowing economic growth could, however, encourage the Fed to step back from hefty interest rate increases, though much would depend on the path of inflation, which is way above the U.S. central bank’s 2% target.
The Fed on Wednesday raised its policy rate by another three-quarters of a percentage point, bringing the total interest rate hikes since March to 225 basis points. Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the softening economic activity as a result of tighter monetary policy.
(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani. Editing by Chizu Nomiyama.)
The ‘harm reduction’ clinics allow addicts to use illicit drugs under supervision
The Biden administration is considering federal support for legalized injection sites, according to a report.
Dr. Rahul Gupta, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the White House is “enthusiastically waiting” for the Department of Justice to rule on the legality of clinics that allow people to use illicit drugs with supervision. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Gupta’s “eyes lit up” when asked about injection sites, which are illegal under federal law. The comments came in response to questions about a 2019 Justice Department ruling that shut down a Philadelphia injection site.
Gupta’s reported openness to legalized injection sites is emblematic of the White House’s focus on “harm reduction,” an ideology that aims to make drug use safer for addicts, rather than prevent consumption. The Washington Free Beacon in February reported that the Biden administration was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes through its $30 million harm reduction program. The Times later reported that the Free Beacon story “derailed” the Biden administration’s drug policy in response to public backlash.
New York City in November opened the country’s first injection sites, which the Biden administration allowed to operate. The privately run centers supervise drug users to prevent and treat overdoses. The Justice Department’s forthcoming decision on the Philadelphia injection site could lead to a boost in sites around the country and allow federal funding.
Gupta spoke to the Times in Manchester, N.H., a city that has pushed back against privately run needle exchange programs. Elected city officials criticized the New Hampshire Harm Reduction Coalition for a lack of coordination with its government. The city council last year banned needle exchanges in parks by a 12-1 vote.
Paul Lessard, 58, grew up in Manchester and worked for the New Hampshire Department of Transportation before he retired and later found himself homeless last year. Lessard said he has seen drug addicts on several occasions rush to grab used needles out of the exchange boxes that are intended to be discarded. The city’s drug addicts, he said, have become increasingly violent.
“I was in the alleyway the other day and some girl stripped down totally naked and she was freaking out and going through the motions,” Lessard told the Free Beacon. “I walked by her and said, ‘Please don’t touch me.’ She was fucked up on something.”
Federal support for injection sites would likely face backlash in Congress. Although the Biden administration continues to claim crack pipes are not funded through its harm reduction programs, Congress advanced two bipartisan bills this year that ban federal funding for crack pipes. The Daily Caller in July obtained crack pipes at a harm reduction center in New York City that received funding through the Biden administration’s $30 million harm reduction grant program that launched in May. A Caller journalist was reportedly asked to smoke crack in a supervised room in the New York Harm Reduction Educators center.
Before he joined the Biden administration, Gupta expressed skepticism about harm reduction sites. As West Virginia’s public health commissioner, Gupta supported the decertification of a harm reduction program in Charleston described by the city’s mayor as a “needle mill” that increased crime.
Resident Joe Biden held a phone call with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping on July 28. The call was the fifth of its kind between Biden and Xi and lasted more than two hours.
The call comes amid a myriad of tensions that have caused Sino–U.S. relations to fall to their lowest point in decades. Despite a decreasing willingness by the CCP to negotiate on most issues, the White House stated that it was important to keep the lines of communication open between the two powers.
“The President wants to make sure that the lines of communication with President Xi remain open, because they need to,” said White House national security spokesperson John Kirby. “There’s issues where we can cooperate with China on, and then there’s issues where, obviously, there’s friction and tension.
“This is one of the most consequential bilateral relationships in the world today, with ramifications well beyond both individual countries. The president clearly understands that, and we’re going to continue to work on that relationship.”
Resident Joe Biden holds virtual talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping from the Situation Room at the White House in Washington, on March 18, 2022. (The White House via AP)
Chinese state-owned media outlets stated that the exchange was “candid and in-depth” and that the two leaders promised to stay in communication.
Xi reportedly told Biden that it was the duty of “the two major powers” to manage global security and urged Biden to not view the CCP through the lens of “strategic competition.”
Biden is currently contending with the need to adequately address China’s status as a rising power while simultaneously mitigating the regime’s increasingly hostile behavior.
To that end, Xi’s conversation with Biden focused heavily on Taiwan.
“Playing with fire will set you on fire,” Xi told Biden. “I hope the U.S. can see this clearly.”
The CCP maintains that Taiwan is a breakaway province of China. Xi has vowed to unite the island with the mainland and hasn’t ruled out the use of force to do so. For its part, Taiwan has been self-governed since 1949, has never been under CCP control, and boasts a thriving democracy and market economy.
The United States doesn’t have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan but is bound by a treaty to provide it with the arms necessary for its self-defense. The government also maintains a doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” in which it will neither confirm nor deny whether it would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.
A view shows naval vessels on water as part of Taiwan’s main annual “Han Kuang” exercises, as 20 naval vessels including frigates and destroyers fired shells to simulate intercepting and attacking an invading force, off Taiwan’s northeastern coast, in Yilan, Taiwan, July 26, 2022. (REUTERS/Ann Wang)
The issue came to the fore over the past week as rumors emerged that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was planning a personal visit to Taiwan.
The CCP subsequently threatened “forceful measures” against the United States and Taiwan should the trip take place.
Following the remarks from the CCP, Biden publicly said such a trip was “not a good idea” and suggested that the military was against it.
Biden’s statements raised eyebrows from legislators and experts alike, who believed that they overstepped the bounds of both the president and the military in attempting to control the personal travel of a sitting member of Congress.
Pelosi said the administration may have believed that China would shoot down her plane if she visited Taiwan.
The back and forth was just one incident in a growing line of bellicose and, at times, hostile rhetoric emanating from the highest echelons of the CCP.
In May, China’s defense minister said the CCP would “not hesitate to start a war no matter the cost” to prevent Taiwan’s de facto independence from being recognized internationally.
The White House hadn’t released a readout of the call by press time.
The Biden administration has sold nearly 6 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to an entity tied to the Chinese Communist Party, records show.
From September 2021 to July, the Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded three crude oil contracts with a combined value of roughly $464 million to Unipec America, the U.S. trading arm of Chinese state-owned oil company Sinopec, according to a review by The Epoch Times of the DOE documents. A Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden had invested in the national oil giant.
The sale would tap 5.9 million barrels in total from the strategic reserve (SPR) to export to the Chinese firm. The latest contract, revealed on July 10, was for 950,000 barrels sold for around $113.5 million.
The two most recent sales to Unipec came out of an emergency drawdown of the U.S. oil stockpile, initiated under resident Joe Biden on March 31 in what he said would offset the loss of Russian oil in global markets and tame rising fuel costs at home.
The Unipec contracts have been subject to heavy criticism in recent weeks, especially because of the firm’s connections to the president’s son. With Americans nationwide still reeling from elevated gas prices, the selling of oil reserves to foreign adversaries such as China is at odds with U.S. energy and security needs, Republican lawmakers and analysts have said.
“Biden is draining our strategic reserves at an unprecedented rate. This is an abuse of the SPR, far beyond its intended purpose. Sending U.S. petroleum reserves to foreign adversaries is wrong, and it undermines our national security,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) told The Epoch Times.
What the United States should do, he says, is to “unleash American energy production and ensure that our strategic reserves are stocked and able to meet the demands of a national emergency.”
Cars line up to fill up with fuel at a Sinopec service station in Beijing on July 8, 2015. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
Unipec’s Bids
The oil auction is price-competitive, meaning contracts are awarded to the highest bidder. Unipec, a consistent participant in previous U.S. crude oil sales, secured 1.9 million barrels over the past three months through two contracts it won on April 21 and July 10.
The DOE also sold 4 million barrels to Unipec last fall during a congressionally mandated sale.
Sales to Unipec appear to fall in the lower price range among the successful buyers, a review of DOE contracts by The Epoch Times shows. For the 2021 contract, Unipec paid about $63 for each barrel, about $7 lower than the trading price at the time, and more than $2 short of the highest price from other buyers in the sale.
The April and July purchases cost Unipec $103.30 and $119.50 per barrel, respectively. The highest prices offered, by comparison, were $111.25 and $125.10.
Unprecedented Drawdown
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil, with four storage sites in Texas and Louisiana designed to alleviate significant oil supply shortages in times of major geopolitical events or natural disasters.
The amount of oil in the SPR has seen a steep decline over the past year, more notably since Biden, blaming Russia’s Ukraine war for the “price hike at the pump,” in March ordered a withdrawal at a rate of 1 million barrels per day for six months to curb gas prices. The planned sale of about 180 million barrels marked the biggest drawdown in the reserve’s more-than-four-decade history and is set to cut the U.S. backup oil supply by about a third.
A maze of crude oil pipes and valves is pictured during a tour by the Department of Energy at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Freeport, Texas, on June 9, 2016. (Richard Carson/Reuters)
The inventory stood at 474.5 million barrels as of July 22, marking a 34 percent drop from its peak of 726.6 million, and some 90 million lower than the level in late March.
The DOE on May 5 announced a “long-term buyback plan” to repurchase 60 million barrels in fall through “a competitive, fixed-price bid process.” The delivery date, the DOE said, will take place “in future years when prices are anticipated to be significantly lower,” likely after fiscal year 2023. More buybacks would follow after this first tranche of purchases, it added.
But releasing oil reserves at this magnitude carries risks, according to Abhi Rajendran and Robert Johnston, two research scholars on global energy policy at Columbia University. For one, there’s no guarantee that oil prices will fall when the government moves to refill the stock. Further, the diminution of oil supply may cause the market to price in a greater premium for wars and other supply shocks, resulting in higher prices for longer, they said in a Q&A on April 1.
Scrutiny
On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers have been watching the oil sales with growing alarm. A total of 206 House Republicans voted on July 20 in support of a legislative amendment aimed at preventing the Biden administration from exporting petroleum to entities with Chinese Communist Party ties.
“It does not make sense that we are using our already depleted energy supplies to help China build up their own strategic reserves,” Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) said in a speech rallying support for the proposal.
China is the world’s largest importer of oil. As the West turns away from Russian oil due to the Ukraine war, China has been quietly snapping up Russian resources at steep discounts. From March through June, it spent more than $25 billion on Russian oil, gas, and coal, nearly doubling the amount from the year-earlier period, the latest customs data show. The sales volume propelled Russia to become China’s top oil supplier for two straight months from May, displacing Saudi Arabia.
The same day, 20 Republican members on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote (pdf) to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm requesting an immediate briefing and all documents related to the administration’s decision to sell U.S. oil reserves. They noted that Sinopec, the parent organization of Unipec, has been linked to the president’s son Hunter Biden, through the state-backed Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners, which became a stakeholder of Sinopec in 2014.
Hunter Biden attends a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony honoring 17 recipients, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, on July 7, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hunter served as a founding board member of BHR from 2013 through April 2020. His firm Skaneateles also held a 10 percent stake in BHR, which his lawyer said has been divested as of November 2021. On BHR’s 2021 annual report released in June, however, Skaneateles was still listed as a shareholder.
Hunter’s lawyer hasn’t responded to The Epoch Times’ questions regarding Skaneateles.
“As if Biden couldn’t have bundled this energy crisis anymore, this latest development of sending our strategic petroleum reserves to a Chinese oil firm connected to Hunter Biden reaches a new low,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who signed on the letter, told The Epoch Times.
“For one, this administration should have never tapped into these reserves. Second, these reserves should have never left U.S. shores, and third, the U.S. shouldn’t be doing deals with firms connected to the president’s son,” he said, adding that the Biden family’s “continued compromising actions require strict oversight from Congress.”
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking GOP member of the House Oversight Committee who spearheaded the letter, noted that previous inquiries by Republicans to the DOE about the oil sale had gone unanswered.
“Under no circumstances should the Department of Energy be making decisions which financially benefit Hunter Biden or any of the Biden family’s business partners,” he told The Epoch Times.
“If Administration officials continue to ignore meaningful oversight,” Republicans will “use the gavel to get answers in January,” Comer said, in reference to the expected swing to a Republican majority in the House in the November midterm elections, which would hand GOP lawmakers subpoena power as chairpersons of the chamber’s various committees.
“The American people need answers to determine if this is another attempt by the Biden family to peddle access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who also backed the Oversight Committee request, said the sale demonstrates the current administration’s “rank incompetence.”
“The Biden White House obviously didn’t see a problem with loading millions of barrels from our strategic reserves onto tankers bound for foreign countries, which likely explains why they don’t see a problem selling our emergency crude oil to a Chinese gas company with ties to Hunter Biden’s investment firm,” he told The Epoch Times.
White House Pushes Back
Ian Sams, a special assistant to Biden and spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, responded to the Republican claims on July 22, calling them “ridiculous and false.”
The DOE is “required by law to sell it ‘in a competitive auction to the highest bidder,’ regardless of whether that bidder is a foreign company,” he told Fox News, noting that the Trump administration, in 2017, also sold a half-million barrels of crude oil from the reserve to China’s state-run PetroChina International through the same “competitive bidding process.”
U.S. resident Joe Biden announces the release of 1 million barrels of oil per day for the next six months from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as part of administration efforts to lower gasoline prices, during remarks at the White House on March 31, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Sams also stressed that Biden “had no personal involvement in this process whatsoever.”
But Sams’s statement may not have presented the full picture, according to Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of Power the Future, a nonprofit group advocating for energy workers.
“The White House has pushed back as saying we have sold in the past to the communist Chinese. And that is true. We sold when our SPR was nearly full and oil was not at record highest and the world was at relative peace,” he told The Epoch Times. “Times change, and thanks to this president, they have not just changed but become worse, and our policies must change with them.”
DOE officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times about its buyback plan and Republican lawmakers’ concerns.
The Biden administration is being slammed for attempting to change the definition of an economic recession, just ahead of the upcoming second-quarter GDP data that are expected to show contraction.
An economy is usually considered to be in a recession if it registers two consecutive quarters of GDP declines. A July 21 White House statement insisted that this “is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.” In an interview with Fox News, Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, called out the White House attempt to change the definition of a recession as “ridiculous.”
“They have to say ridiculous things like that, even have an argument with a dictionary… Sitting around the table with Biden are all the interest groups in the modern Democratic Party,” Norquist said, pointing to “big city political machines,” labor unions, and environmental activists as the “interest groups.”
He also blamed progressive ideologues for having policy agendas that are “disassociated from reality.”
The White House statement argues that recession is to be defined based on a “holistic look” at the data, including such factors as incomes, business spending, consumer spending, and the labor market. Based on these data, “it is unlikely” that a second-quarter economic contraction following the first-quarter decline indicates a recession, the White House said.
U.S. GDP already contracted in the first quarter, with the Atlanta Fed expecting second-quarter GDP to contract once more. The second-quarter GDP data are due on July 28.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House.
Norquist also raised concerns about the plan by 15 states to hand out inflation relief checks to citizens as a way to combat the financial pressure of rising prices.
Pointing to 10 states run by Republican governors that are aiming to phase their income taxes to zero, he said that sending a check is “just spending” and “not a tax cut.”
US Recession
A Reuters poll of economists, conducted between July 14 and 20, found that median predictions point to a 40 percent probability of a recession in the United States in the coming year, with a 50 percent chance of it happening within two years.
This is a big jump from the 25 percent probability this year and 40 percent within two years as reported in June. More than 90 percent said that any recession would be mild or very mild. Four respondents expect the recession to be severe.
In a July 22 tweet, Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, warned that the American economy is contracting at a rate “not seen since the global financial crisis in 2009.”
It is not just the United States that is at risk of recession but the entire global economy. In an interview with Reuters, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said that the agency will soon downgrade its 2022 global economic growth forecast for the third time this year.
“The outlook since our last update in April has darkened significantly,” she said. “We are in very choppy waters … The risk [of recession] has gone up. So, we cannot rule it out … It’s going to be a tough ’22, but maybe even a tougher 2023.”
Jill Biden’s longtime press secretary Michael LaRosa is leaving the White House, he confirmed Tuesday.
“For a kid from Easton, Pennsylvania, who only ever dreamed of stepping foot into this history-rich residence for a tour, working for First Lady Jill Biden in the White House has been the proudest and most rewarding experience of my life,” LaRosa said in a statement to The Washington Post about his departure. His last day is Friday.
LaRosa, a former MSNBC producer, joined Joe Biden’s campaign in 2019 as Jill Biden’s spokesman before he was named press secretary to the first lady in January of last year.
“I am forever grateful to her for taking a chance on me nearly three years ago, bringing me on this journey with her around the country, and the privilege of being a small part of the history,” he added to the paper.
Reports say LaRosa is planning to join Hamilton Place Strategies, a Washington-based public affairs company. It’s not clear who will be named to replace him as the first lady’s spokesperson.
“For nearly three years, from the campaign to the White House, Michael has brought an encyclopedic knowledge of politics and media to my team as my spokesperson and adviser,” Jill Biden told CNN. “On a small team, loyalty and friendship are lifelong—we will miss Michael. However, we are excited for him to begin a new chapter in his career.”
Other Departures
In recent months, the White House has seen a number of top communications officials leave. Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki left earlier this year before she was replaced by current press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s chief spokesperson Symone Sanders left her position in late 2021. And later, top Harris aides Tina Flournoy, Ashley Etienne, and Vincent Evans quickly followed Sanders.
Earlier in July, it was confirmed that White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield would be stepping down from her position. In confirming her exit, White House chief of staff Ron Klan said that Bedingfield “played a huge role” at the White House but will now “spend more time with her husband and young children.”
Before that, Cedric Richmond, a former congressman from Louisiana, had led Biden’s Office of Public Engagement but recently departed to work with the Democratic National Committee. Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms replaced him in the administration.
LaRosa’s departure comes several weeks after Jill Biden drew controversy for comparing Hispanic voters to breakfast tacos and mispronouncing the word bodega at an event in San Antonio, Texas. LaRosa later apologized on her behalf.
“The First Lady apologizes that her words conveyed anything but pure admiration and love for the Latino community,” he wrote on Twitter on July 12.
As more voters across the country turn toward the Republican Party, retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc is closing the margin of an expected Democratic victory in the New Hampshire Senate race.
In the 2020 Republican Senate primary, Bolduc carried almost 60,000 votes as the runner-up. According to a poll taken in April, only one point separated incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Bolduc, one of 11 candidates for the Republican primary scheduled for Sept. 13.
Bolduc says he’s very concerned about the future of the United States.
“Currently, there is a plan for top-down governance and the abandonment of America’s values and principles,” he told The Epoch Times, describing it as a plan to “undermine” the United States.
Bolduc said “America is weak” at the moment, and there are a variety of issues it must continue to confront if the nation ever wants to recover its strength. These include, but aren’t limited to, abortion, gun control, the southern border, and the economy.
Abortion Violence
On the issue of abortion in the United States, Bolduc said, “The Supreme Court made the right decision by sending it back to the states.”
Regardless of which side of the issue women find themselves on, he said that “[they] have more control at the state level than they would ever have at the federal level.”
As a pro-life candidate, he considers the narrative that many on the left are pushing to be “very dangerous.”
While resident Joe Biden calls upon “pro-choice senators and a pro-choice House to codify Roe as federal law,” Hassan and colleagues are urging the president to “defend Americans’ rights to abortion” by executive order. In a recent 30-second television ad, she also said she would “fight and never back down” to protect the “personal freedoms” of women seeking an abortion.
Bolduc said the position of Biden and Hassan not only devalues life but has also created a climate for violence by claiming the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional. To that end, Heidi Matzke, executive director of the Alternatives Pregnancy Center in Sacramento, shared at a Senate hearing on July 12 that “pregnancy care centers from coast to coast are being targeted for violent assaults of vandalism and hateful attacks online and in the media.”
For example, “fund abortion; abort God” was recently spray-painted on the Pathways Pregnancy Care Center in Littleton, New Hampshire. Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.
According to Bolduc, violent assaults and vandalism are “just indicative of the divisiveness and the disunity promoted by the left.” These issues are “at the heart of why we have the problems that we have here in this country.”
Gun Control Confusion
Bolduc said the number of shootings across the country is also an indicator of an increasingly disgruntled and violent society.
“That’s not a problem with guns,” he said.
For example, Illinois has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, yet Chicago is one of the deadliest U.S. cities.
“It’s less about gun laws, and more about securing vulnerable areas, allowing police to do their jobs and have a good response, and being able to go after people who are the threat,” Bolduc said.
According to Bolduc, the culture of violence can be attributed to the U.S. justice system, which increasingly releases violent criminals back onto the streets while hamstringing and defunding the police. Support for police and community involvement are important to ensuring crime stays low, according to Bolduc. Rather than allowing divisiveness to creep in, people need to be brought together to solve the problem, he said.
The Southern Border
The ability to provide safer communities across the nation extends beyond the local community, Bolduc said. The southern border of the United States is out of control, as the country is currently failing to control the flow of drugs—particularly opioids such as fentanyl—and illegal weapons across the border.
“The southern border is now the most dangerous border in the world, and it’s essentially wide open under the Biden administration—it’s hurting America,” he said.
Bolduc said it has to be ensured that border patrol has what it needs to protect the country, such as adequate personnel, air and technology assets, a border wall, the enforcement of immigration laws, and more. Without these things, “America has vulnerabilities.”
“No country in the world would mimic what the United States is doing right now on its southern border,” he said, calling the Biden administration’s border policies “a disaster.”
“The sheer insecurity of America is frightening.”
The Economy Crunch
In addition to the security issues of the country, Bolduc said, “We are witnessing the worst economy in our nation’s history in terms of inflation, in terms of energy dependence, in terms of how it’s hurting Americans.”
Inflation has caused Americans to spend an extra $5,000 per year, as the cost of fuel, food, and other basic essentials climb to historic levels, he said.
“And while government spending is out of control,” many Americans “are cutting into their medical costs, cutting into their groceries, and just simply trying to make ends meet,” Bolduc said.
“It’s a dangerous place to be, and it has to change.”
Hassan has referred to her Republican challengers as “a group of really extreme opponents.” She didn’t respond to multiple inquiries from The Epoch Times to share her views on the issues facing the country. White House officials also didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Republican senators balk at $250 billion CHIPS Act over China concerns
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) removed an anti-China security measure from a bill that invests billions of dollars in the U.S. technology sector, a move Republicans say would allow China to benefit from the spending bill and could kneecap the legislation.
At issue are provisions written by Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) that bar U.S. companies from manufacturing products in China, such as semiconductors, that were developed using federally funded research. Myriad government and private investigations conclude that the Chinese government routinely steals trade secrets from U.S. companies, government agencies, and universities.
Schumer earlier this month removed Portman’s provisions from the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act, throwing a wrench into the vote for Republicans who were under the impression it would be included and planned to vote for the bill, according to multiple interviews and internal documents viewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The reason Schumer removed Portman’s anti-China provision is unclear. Some say he caved to lobbying efforts from various interest groups and the White House. The Senate last year passed a version of Portman’s measure with bipartisan support, but the House never put it up for a vote.
The removal puts a bipartisan bill that appeared to be headed toward approval in jeopardy. Opponents of the CHIPS Act now include several Republican senators who initially supported the funding for the domestic production of semiconductors. Even if it passes, the lack of meaningful guardrails against the Chinese raise grave questions about whether a bill initially meant to counter China may backfire.
Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.
The CHIPS Act puts a staggering $250 billion for domestic science investment and education, making it the largest domestic industrial investment scheme in U.S. history. But Republicans say the act, prompted by concerns that the United States is losing its technological edge to China on such critical goods as semiconductors, could end up benefiting adversaries.
Senior staffers from six Republican offices in the Senate and House spoke to the Free Beacon on the condition of anonymity to criticize Schumer’s decision. In interviews, several expressed bewilderment at the modification while others said they were misled by Senate leadership.
“Legislators are talking about pouring hundreds of billions into industry subsidies and federal R&D, ostensibly to strengthen American competitiveness and to compete with China,” one Senate staffer told the Free Beacon. “Spending that level of taxpayer dollars without meaningful safeguards to ensure they don’t end up in Beijing’s hands—either through Chinese Communist Party espionage, corporate malfeasance, or inept bureaucrats—would be a colossal mistake.”
Exactly why Portman’s measure was removed is a matter of ongoing debate on Capitol Hill. One office blamed Rep. Frank Lucas (R., Okla.), the ranking member on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Two Republican offices pointed the finger at Senate Republican staff tasked with whipping support for the CHIPS Act for failing to communicate that the provision was removed ahead of a procedural vote earlier this month. Another office said the decision to remove the guardrail provision was entirely Schumer’s and couldn’t be stopped by Republicans.
Guardrail provisions such as the ones in Portman’s bill are unpopular with universities with large research departments, as well as some corporations. Universities object for ideological reasons, namely the belief that their research should be enjoyed by everyone around the world. Universities in the last several weeks have been lobbying Republican members including Lucas particularly hard, Republican sources told the Free Beacon.
“Lucas has been turned by the lefty universities,” the individual said. “Disappointing that he’s going soft on China for them.”
One House Republican source called the idea that a single member in the minority party could tank the provision preposterous, and that the negotiations took place entirely in the Senate. A staffer for Lucas on the House Committee on Science and Technology concurred with that characterization.
“The House was shut out of any negotiations after the Senate ended four-corner discussions and then picked up this legislation on their own,” said Heather Vaughan, communications director for the House Committee on Science and Technology. “If the Senate can’t read their own legislative language ahead of a vote or negotiate effectively with each other, that’s simply not within our control.”
No matter the explanation, the lack of guardrails means several Senate offices that were potential “Yes” votes on the CHIPS Act are working behind the scenes to tank it. Other senators, such as Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), are pushing for new guardrail provisions.
Rubio on July 22 filed legislation that would, among other things, establish a counterintelligence screening process to “certify that anyone receiving funds under the bill has sufficient protections against government threats.” Such guardrails are missing from the CHIPS Act, he said.
“America needs to make things again, especially critical chips and other tech, but we need to do it in a way that benefits our country and our workers,” Rubio said. “Unless we add meaningful safeguards in this package, we should call this for what it is: the China Investment Bill.”
The Senate is expected to hold a final vote this week on the CHIPS Act. Original supporters of domestic semiconductor funding, including Rubio, are expected to vote against it.
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.
Advocacy group Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleging that the agency is slow-rolling a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to turn over records tied to resident Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Judicial Watch filed the FOIA suit against DHS on July 17 at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asking the court to force the agency to turn over all non-exempt records concerning government-provided security services to Hunter Biden or companions on any international trips from 2010 to 2013.
The advocacy group said in a July 20 statement that the Secret Service, which is part of DHS, had “failed to respond adequately” to three FOIA requests in March and April demanding records of security services—and related use of taxpayer funds—provided to Hunter Biden and companions.
“The Secret Service is violating FOIA law by slow-rolling and hiding Hunter Biden records,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in the statement. “What is the Secret Service trying to hide about Hunter Biden?”
DHS didn’t respond by press time to an Epoch Times request for comment on the lawsuit.
The Homeland Security Department headquarters in Washington. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo)
‘Questions Have Been Raised’
The backdrop for the lawsuit is Secret Service records obtained by Judicial Watch in 2020 showing hundreds of international trips taken by Hunter Biden during the first several years of the presidency of Barack Obama while receiving Secret Service protection.
“While it is typical for the families of the president and vice president to travel with them, questions have been raised about whether Hunter Biden used the government trip to further his business interests,” Judicial Watch stated.
Missing from the records the advocacy group obtained in 2020 was information on whether Hunter Biden’s travel was on Air Force One, Air Force Two, or other government aircraft or whether other family members were present.
Judicial Watch’s complaint indicates that the Secret Service had acknowledged the group’s FOIA request and by April 19 had “located potentially responsive records, was processing the records, and would send them” to Judicial Watch “upon completion of the processing.”
But those records haven’t been handed over to Judicial Watch, nor has DHS explained why it hasn’t yet transmitted the documents, the complaint alleges.
Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, attends an event at the White House on April 18, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Other Hunter Probe
Besides Judicial Watch, Republicans in Congress have also sought Secret Service records tied to Hunter Biden’s travels while his father was vice president.
While the Secret Service turned over 259 pages of records (pdf) to Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the pair of senators objected to what they said were “extensive” and “improper” redactions that impede their ability to “understand the full scope of the interactions between Hunter Biden, his associates,” and the Secret Service.
Grassley and Johnson have been probing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. The senators released a report in 2020 (pdf) that said Hunter Biden’s job with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma created a “potential conflict of interest” for his father, who was heavily involved in U.S. policy toward Ukraine.
In 2019, Hunter Biden sat for an interview with ABC News, in which he insisted he hadn’t done anything “improper” in his business dealings, although he acknowledged “poor judgment.”
Hunter Biden told the media outlet that he “did nothing wrong at all,” but conceded that it was “poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is … a swamp … in many ways.”
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.”
Former First Lady Melania Trump said Thursday that she was not aware of the events taking place during the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021.
“On January 6, 2021, I was fulfilling one of my duties as First Lady of the United States of America, and accordingly, I was unaware of what was simultaneously transpiring at the U.S. Capitol Building,” Trump told Fox News.
She added that “it was my obligation to record the contents of the White House’s historic rooms, including taking archival photographs of all the renovations.”
“Several months in advance, I organized a qualified team of photographers, archivists, and designers to work with me in the White House to ensure perfect execution,” she continued. “As required, we scheduled January 6, 2021, to complete the work on behalf of our Nation.”
Trump also cast doubt on claims made by her former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, who has often criticized former President Donald Trump and the former first lady after they left office.
“Ms. Grisham was not in the White House on January 6, and her behavior in her role as Chief of Staff ultimately amounts to dereliction of duty,” Trump said, while adding that normally, the first lady’s chief of staff “provides detailed briefings surrounding our Nation’s important issues.”
“In fact, Ms. Grisham failed to provide insight and information into the events surrounding January 6 as she had abandoned her post in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “Shamefully, this behavior has only partially become public knowledge; yet was consistent for Ms. Grisham.”
Trump added: “It is evident that Grisham’s recent betrayals are a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate her ruined career and reputation.”
Text Message
Grisham responded to Trump’s statement Thursday with a cryptic Twitter message that read: “Lol. That’s truly all I’ve got.” The Epoch Times has contacted her for comment.
Stephanie Grisham, press secretary for First Lady Melania Trump, attends the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, June 21, 2019. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Last month, she posted on Twitter a screenshot of a conversation she allegedly had with Trump on Jan. 6.
“Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness & violence?” Grisham allegedly texted Trump, who was listed as “MT,” with the response in the conversation being simply “No.”
The screenshot text message that was posted by Grisham, who also served as the White House press secretary, has not been confirmed by Trump or an official source.
Grisham also issued a response Thursday speculation she doctored the screenshot, writing: “I’m actually not smart enough to do that.”
Adding to Fox News, Trump said that if she was “fully informed of all the details … I would have immediately denounced the violence that occurred at the Capitol Building.”
“And while Ms. Grisham’s behavior is disappointing, it is not surprising or an isolated incident,” she continued.
Her statement comes as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 incident is continuing to hold public hearings on the Jan. 6 breach. Some Republicans and former President Trump say the panel is an attempt to distract Americans from more pressing issues such as the economy, inflation, gas prices, and illegal immigration.
On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland weighed in the Jan. 6 hearing, saying that “no person is above the law.” That comment came in response to a question about a memo the Justice Department reportedly sent out noting a longstanding agency practice of not making politically contentious prosecutions in the lead-up to federal elections.
“I can’t say it any more clearly than that. There is nothing in the principles of prosecution, in any other factors, which prevent us from investigating anyone who is criminally responsible for an attempt to undo a democratic election,” Garland told reporters at the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington.
In the latest Democrat acknowledgment of America’s cost-of-living squeeze, House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told Fox News that red-hot inflation is a “huge problem” for households.
Hoyer made the remarks in an interview on Fox News’ “Your World” program that aired on July 20.
“Inflation is a huge problem. It’s a huge problem for Americans. Supply shortages—particularly in grocery stores—a huge problem for Americans. We need to deal with that,” the Democrat leader said.
The remarks follow a recent admission by White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein that inflation in the United States is “unacceptably high,” although there’s some improvement in areas like gas prices, which Bernstein said were “moving in the right direction.”
After hitting a record-high of more than $5 a gallon last month, gasoline prices have trended downward, with the automotive association AAA reporting that, on July 21, the national average was $4.44 per gallon.
Hoyer insisted that the Biden administration was working to tame soaring inflation, touting such measures as the recently passed Lower Food and Fuel Costs Act, which Washington-based think tank R Street Institute panned as exacerbating “the very problems it claims to solve,” while also adding $700 million of public debt.
Rural Households Hit Harder by Inflation
The latest inflation print came in at a multi-decade high of 9.1 percent in annual terms, with food up 10.4 percent and energy a whopping 41.6 percent.
While price inflation affects all American consumers, recent studies from Iowa State University and the New York Federal Reserve Bank showed that different spending patterns among different demographics means that the inflationary wave has had a disproportionate impact.
Rural households, for example, have been hit harder by soaring inflation, with the Iowa State University study showing that rural discretionary incomes have plunged by 50 percent since 2020, with most of those losses taking place in the past 12 months.
The discretionary incomes of urban households, by contrast, saw a far more modest drop of 13 percent over the same period.
Black and Hispanic households tend to spend more of their income on transportation, with the New York Fed estimating that blacks faced an inflation rate 0.6 percentage points higher than the headline rate, while for Hispanics this was 0.6 percentage points higher.
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Inflation for Asian American households was 0.5 percentage points lower, while the rate faced by whites was about the same as the headline 9.1 percent figure.
Inflation Keeping Gen Z Living With Parents
The inflationary squeeze also has hampered the ability of the Gen Z cohort to move out and live independently.
A recent survey conducted by Qualtrics on behalf of Credit Karma showed that 29 percent of Gen Z respondents in the 18–25 age range were living with their parents or other relatives and viewed the arrangement as more or less permanent.
Soaring housing costs are likely a major factor behind the high proportion of young Americans continuing to live with their parents.
The rent index in June’s inflation figure rose 0.8 percent over the month, the largest monthly increase since April 1986.
President also announces Gulf of Mexico opened to offshore wind farms that could power 3 million homes
Resident Joe Biden on July 20 stated that “climate change is an emergency,” leaving open the possibility of additional executive actions aimed at mitigating climate-related issues after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) ended negotiations on climate and energy programs advocated by other Democrats.
“Climate change is an emergency and, in the coming weeks, I’m going to use the power I have as president to turn these words into formal official government actions through the appropriate proclamations, executive orders, and regulatory power that the president possesses,” Biden said during a brief speech that he delivered at Brayton Point Power Station, a former coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts.
The president announced the opening of offshore areas in the Gulf of Mexico to wind power.
“These areas cover 700,000 acres and have the potential to power over 3 million homes,” an accompanying White House fact sheet read.
In addition, Biden noted that he would allocate $2.3 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, for what he described as infrastructure to withstand “extreme heat, drought, flooding, hurricanes, [and] tornadoes.”
He also drew attention to $385 million in spending for the Department of Health and Human Services, largely for community cooling centers and air conditioners.
Biden spoke after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ruled out an immediate emergency declaration during a July 19 press conference.
“I would not plan an announcement this week on [a] national climate emergency. Everything’s on the table. It’s just not going to be this week on that decision,” she said.
“Taking action is something he will do if Congress won’t.”
Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and others also released a letter concurrent with Biden’s speech, asking the president to declare a climate emergency.
Talk of a climate emergency has met with pushback from Republicans and other skeptics of expanded government power through climate-inspired mandates.
“Biden is using climate change as another excuse for the government to insert more control into your lives,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) wrote in a July 20 post on Twitter.
“The Atlantic [magazine] freaked out in 2019 over what Trump could do if he declared a national emergency: Martial law, control internet traffic, freeze financial assets,” commentator Glenn Beck wrote on Twitter, also on July 20.
“Weird how the media is now silent about what Biden could do to ‘climate deniers’ under a climate emergency.”
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump declared a national emergency in an effort to secure additional funding for a wall along the southern border. Biden formally ended that emergency in 2021 after issuing a proclamation describing the wall as a “waste of money.”
“By declaring a national climate emergency, Biden can unlock emergency executive powers already granted by Congress to aggressively combat the crisis,” the Center for Biological Diversity wrote in a 2022 document, “The Climate President’s Emergency Powers.”
Environmentalist Bill McKibben, who advocates a climate emergency declaration, complained on his Substack on July 19 that Biden’s “ability to postpone decisions has become the stuff of Washington legend.”
McKibben claimed that Hillary Clinton would have declared a climate emergency if she had been elected president, meaning “resident Joe Biden should do it now.”
“As president, I have a responsibility to act with urgency and resolve when our nation faces clear and present danger. And that’s what climate change is about. It is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger,” Biden said during his July 20 speech.
He cited “more powerful and destructive hurricanes and tornadoes” as evidence of a climate crisis gripping the country.
Experts have refuted previous claims from Biden that tornadoes can be linked to man-made climate change.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has likewise pointed out that little evidence supports a significant rise in the number of Atlantic hurricanes or other tropical storms due to greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet, they concluded that “it is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”
The former Brayton Point power plant where Biden spoke has been acquired by energy giant Avangrid, which intends to convert it to a facility for manufacturing offshore transmission cables for wind turbines.
Biden noted that the CEO of a company involved in the project, Vineyard Wind, had “joined [him] at the White House this month.”
It’s the kind of vision Trump supporters will savor, but should give Democrats nightmares.
With Democrats already spending the summer scheming to avoid the disaster of the Biden presidency in the November mid-terms, one key observer of American politics is already looking ahead to the fall of 2024.
And what he’s seeing should have the wokest liberals losing sleep for the next two years.
Dick Morris, an architect of Bill Clinton’s presidential runs in 1992 and 1996 and an adviser who helped the Clinton White House weather the scandal that led to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998-99, has since become one of the country’s most respected conservative commentators.
But he still brings that knowledge of both the Clintons and Democratic Party politics to bear. He’s forecasting a return of Hillary Clinton to the American political stage for the 2024 presidential campaign — and facing off against former President Donald Trump in a rematch of the 2016 fight.
And he said a case coming before the Supreme Court next term will help seal a Trump victory.
While Trump has made no announcement regarding his 2024 intentions yet, Morris has no doubt the 45th president intends to become the 47th president. And he appears equally sure that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic standard-bearer running against him.
That’s more likely than another round of the doddering Joe Biden, he said, or Democrats taking a gamble on Vice President Kamala Harris (a woman who can’t even get her own staff to stay on board.)
“Already, the Democrats are pressuring Biden not to run because they see what a disaster he would be. And Harris is no better. The line of possible alternatives is queuing up,” Morris told Newsmax on “National Report.” (The full show can been seen at this link. The Morris interview segment starts about the 2:40 mark)
“You have Gavin Newsom, governor of California, [Jared Polis] the governor of Colorado, Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary.
“But, ultimately, the left is going to have their candidates, and they’ll probably run Sanders or maybe AOC, and that will trigger Hillary into the race in order to save the Democratic Party from the left rerunning the Hillary Sanders race of ’16. And I think Hillary will win that contest. I think she and Trump will face it off, and I think Trump is going to win handily.”
(To be clear, it’s a topic Morris said he explores at length in his new book: “The Return: Trump’s Big 2024 Comeback,” so there’s undeniably a bit of salesmanship here.)
While a new Trump would obviously galvanize Democrats, progressives and their Janissaries in the mainstream media, there are plenty of reasons to think he might succeed.
Simply comparing the record of the Trump years on foreign police, the economy and energy independence against the current 1970’s malaise redux of Biden’s incompetent administration would go a long way toward getting sane Americans voting Republican.
In the fall, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case of Moore v. Harper, an election law dispute out of North Carolina that would invest state legislatures with greater power over how elections are conducted.
As Politico reported, the case mainly involves the issue of gerrymandering legislative districts, but Morris sees broader implications, such as changes to election laws that would improve the integrity of the vote.
“In the five key swing states, Republicans control the legislature, but the Democrats control the governor,” he said. “So [Republicans] passed all these great bills, prohibiting drop boxes, voter ID, no ballot harvesting, and the Democratic governors have vetoed them.
“But when the court rules in this case, which they will next term, it will completely cut the governors out of the process, and those bills will be veto proof and take effect.”
Morris didn’t identify the swing states he had in mind, but North Carolina — where the Moore case originated and Democrat Roy Cooper is in the governor’s office with a GOP-controlled legislature — is obviously one. Other swing states with Republican-controlled legislatures and Democratic governors are Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
If Trump had secured the combined 46 Electoral College votes of those three states in 2020, he’d be president today.
And to Morris, that means he’s going to be president come 2025.
Obviously, this isn’t graven in stone. Morris gives short shrift to any potential challenger to Trump for the nomination — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and predicting events two years away is always a dicey proposition in human affairs (particularly septuagenarian human affairs). But it’s a valid argument.
And no honest American who watched how the 2020 election unfolded in a pandemic year, where elections officials and courts seemed to make up rules as they went along, can dispute that the vote could easily have gone Trump’s way in crucial states decided by razor-thin margins (like Arizona’s 10,457 out of more than 3 million cast).
If Morris is right, those conditions won’t be around for a 2024 rematch between Trump and Hillary. And if that doesn’t keep Democrats awake at night, nothing will.
The Biden administration dramatically reduced migrant prosecutions by nearly 80 percent in the 2021 fiscal year, even as illegal crossings skyrocketed.
Just 2,896 migrants apprehended on the southwest border were transferred into U.S. Marshals Service custody in the 2021 fiscal year, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. In the 2020 fiscal year, 13,213 migrants were transferred to federal authorities for prosecution.
Internal DHS memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon
The precipitous drop in migrant prosecutions illustrates resident Joe Biden’s break from prior administrations’ policies toward illegal immigration. Refraining from bringing criminal charges against the vast majority of individuals entering the country illegally also provides evidence for critics who say the White House is exacerbating the migration crisis on the southern border.
The decline in prosecutions for illegal border crossings also happened amid the worst border crisis in U.S. history. Migrant encounters on the southern border exceeded two million in 2021.
Under federal law, it is a misdemeanor crime to illegally cross the border. A second arrest for illegally crossing the border can be prosecuted as a felony. According to federal law, those found guilty of an illegal border crossing face fines and up to two years in prison.
“The lack of accountability from this administration encourages the worst people flooding our borders, criminals, to keep violating our laws until they finally commit a crime so egregious that the Department of Justice is forced to prosecute,” a senior DHS official told the Free Beacon.
In the 2019 fiscal year, 20,604 migrants were transferred to Marshals Service custody for prosecution. The previous year, former president Donald Trump halted prosecutions of parents who crossed into the country illegally with children.
Defenders of the White House will likely say the drop in prosecutions can be almost entirely attributed to Title 42—a public health regulation that allows authorities to rapidly expel migrants who enter the country. With Title 42 in effect, law enforcement does not need to process migrants in a typical manner and instead works to expel them as quickly as possible.
But Trump instituted Title 42 in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and still prosecuted far more migrants than in Biden’s first year of his presidency. Moreover, illegal border crossings in 2020 were much lower than in 2021, which saw the most migrant apprehensions in U.S. history.
Biden ordered an end to Title 42 in April, although legal challenges from Republicans have temporarily kept it in place. The Biden administration has not yet released border crossing prosecution data for the 2022 fiscal year.
Beyond attempting to eliminate Title 42, the Biden administration has worked to undo immigration policies from the Trump administration. Last month, the Supreme Court authorized Biden to terminate the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces many migrants to wait in Mexico before their asylum court hearing in the United States.
The Free Beacon in December reported on deportations plummeting to the lowest number in decades under Biden. The White House has also stonewalled congressional investigations into where DHS is placing illegal immigrants after they are released into the U.S. interior.
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.
JUST AS WASHINGTON BEGINS TO TAKE THE TIKTOK THREAT SERIOUSLY, THE DEMOCRATS JOIN THE PLATFORM.
The Democratic National Committee has officially joined TikTok, a controversial social media platform with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party, despite advising their own campaigns against joining the Chinese-owned app during the 2020 election cycle.
“We continue to advise campaign staff to refrain from using TikTok on personal devices. If you are using TikTok for campaign work, we recommend using a separate phone and account,” the DNC security team instructed its candidates two years ago.
Despite the warning, the Democratic Party has completed an about-face on the platform, at the same time Washington, D.C. begins to take seriously the threat of spying through the app.
The DNC’s stark reversal comes amidst evidence revealing that the TikTok parent company employs former Chinese Communist Party officials, including individuals with military ties, to executive roles and even grants party members preferential treatment in hiring processes.
The app’s founder also pledged to use ByteDance to “promote socialist core values” and devotion to the Chinese Communist Party in 2018.
TikTok’s threat to national security and data privacy – previously acknowledged by the DNC – prompted the Trump administration to attempt to ban the platform from operating in the U.S. – an effort recently quashed by the Biden White House.
The committee maintains it is employing security precautions such as dedicating individual devices that are isolated from “other DNC assets/processes/businesses as a mitigation to the privacy risk.” The DNC attributed its decision to an effort to reach more voters, particularly younger generations.
The move comes amidst a massive lobbying campaign mounted by TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. Many of the lobbyists and firms hired by the company have ties to Democratic politics and leaders such as Nancy Pelosi.
Internally, TikTok has also hired several Democratic Party alumni, including Obama administration National Security Council members to run its Trust and Safety operations.
TikTok also funds several fact-checking organizations used by other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, which frequently exercise their censorship capabilities against conservative users and storiescritical of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) still does not have an account on the platform.
“We do not have any plans to give the Chinese Communist Party our data, nor do we plan to use their spyware,” said RNC spokesperson Nathan Brand.
THE NEWS RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ENDORSEMENT OF BIRX BY NH-1 CANDIDATE MATT MOWERS.
Dr. Deborah Birx – who often appeared in front of COVID-19 task force briefings on behalf of the Trump administration – has admitted to doctoring data associated with the government’s response, as well as quietly altering the Centers for Disease Control advice without authorization, according to her own book.
Birx – who was brought into the White House task force following recommendations from Republican Party figures such as Matt Mowers (now running for Congress in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District) – writes in her underperforming book ‘Silent Invasion‘:
“I devised a work-around for the governor’s reports I was then writing. Instead of including those recommendations in the common bulleted list, I’d include them in the pandemic summary and state-specific recommendations in the governor’s reports, where they wouldn’t be so obvious. These weekly reports couldn’t go out on Monday without administration approval. Week by week Marc’s office began providing line-by-line edits. After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit. Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected.”
Birx’s appointment was welcomed by her former Chief of Staff in the State Department, Mowers, who tweeted:
I served as Chief of Staff to Ambassador Birx and I have the utmost confidence that she will ensure America is prepared to confront the Coronavirus outbreak. Her passion and commitment to ensuring our nation’s health and safety are second to none.
Indeed, press reports indicate that Birx’s ability to operate in such a manner was specifically due to Mowers’s influence:
Though Birx was not personally close to the President, she was able to develop a close relationship with this White House in part because Trump campaign official Matt Mowers served as her chief of staff for nearly two years, according to a source familiar with her situation.
Within weeks, however, Birx was thwarting the will of President Trump and his team, in order to prioritize the demands of pharmaceutical lobbyists and Chinese Communist Party sympathisers like Anthony Fauci. She further revealed:
This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield. He confirmed my suspicions: he had disagreed with the guidance, but had felt pressured by HHS and the White House to post it. Also, many on his staff in Atlanta were still comfortable prioritizing symptomatic individuals. Even at this late point, eight months into the pandemic, many at both the White House and the CDC still refused to see that silent spread played a prominent role in viral spread and that it started with social gatherings, especially among the younger adults. We had to find a way around them. Recognizing the damage to public health the Scott Atlas–driven testing guidance could do and was doing with testing rates dropping across the country, Bob and I agreed to quietly rewrite the guidance and post it to the CDC website. We would not seek approval. Because we were both quite busy, it might take a week or two, but we were committed to subverting the dangerous message that limiting testing was the right thing to do.
As this was going on, Republican figures like Mowers were running cover for the scarfed bureaucrat:
Worse still, Birx claimed to offer little contrition over her outright insubordination, when challenged on the matter by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:
“On September 18, I was still on the road—in Arizona again, for a meeting with those conducting proactive testing at the University of Arizona—when Mark Meadows’s name and number flashed across my White House–issued smartphone.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You rewrote and posted the CDC testing stuff.”
“Yes, I did, but—” “There’s no ‘buts’ here. You went over my head.”
I explained why I had done it. We’d already seen the drop in testing numbers resulting from Scott Atlas’s dangerous guidelines. Those few pages we’d rewritten would change how states could test, and we’d prevent even more community spread going into the dangerous winter ahead. Mark Meadows took this in and then, biting off each of his words, said, “You went over everyone else on the task force’s heads. You went around the whole approval process. You do not make unilateral decisions. It’s that simple. Period. End of sentence. Understood? Don’t ever do this again.”
“Understood. I did what I needed to do.”
“Don’t do that again without talking with me first.”
The news will raise questions about the work of Birx and those around her in the White House, and whether or not she acted illegally during her employment. The developments could also cost Mowers – whose lead in the New Hampshire 1 Congressional race has narrowed in recent months.
His main opponent – former Trump admin official Karoline Leavitt – has experienced a bumper fundraising quarter as well as garnering endorsements from key Trump-world figures such as Steve Cortes:
Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has declined a plea offer to plead guilty to a contempt of Congress charge, the lead federal prosecutor in the case told a judge on Friday.
Navarro had pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress on June 17 after he refused to cooperate with the House January 6 committee’s probe into the breach of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.
He cited executive privilege due to his former position at the White House under the Trump administration. But Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, rejected his claims of executive privilege, and the committee voted in late March to advance criminal charges against Navarro.
A grand jury indicted Navarro on June 3 on two counts: one for his refusal to produce the documents the committee requested, and the other for his refusal to comply with the committee’s subpoena to show up and testify. Each count carries a maximum of one-year imprisonment.
At a status hearing on July 15, federal prosecutor Elizabeth Aloi told U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that the Justice Department had offered to let Navarro plead guilty to a single count instead of the two he was indicted with.
Prosecutors also said the deal would mean they would not have sought more than the minimum 30-day jail time.
But the deal would have required Navarro to “comply with the January 6 committee subpoena to the satisfaction of the Justice Department,” Aloi said.
Navarro attended the hearing with two defense attorneys. He had been representing himself before he was indicted on the criminal charges.
“It’s a complicated constitutional case involving separation of powers,” John Irving, one of the defense attorneys, told reporters outside the courthouse after the hearing.
“It involves not only the President of the United States asserting his executive privilege, but [also] over 50 years of DOJ opinions that make it clear that top presidential aides are able to assert absolute immunity and not testify before Congress. Not only that, but also the Justice Department has longstanding policies about not prosecuting someone criminally for this kind of situation,” he added. “So I wonder what changed.”
John Rowley, another defense attorney, told reporters: “This is the first time in our nation’s 250-year history that a senior adviser to a president has been criminally charged for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena.
“In essence, this is a dispute between the Office of the President and Congress, and Mr. Navarro was placed on the horn of the dilemma—either to follow the executive direction or risk prosecution.”
Trump’s attorneys have previously argued that former White House officials shouldn’t comply with congressional subpoenas because the requested information is protected by Trump’s executive privilege.
Navarro’s trial is set for Nov. 17.
Judge Expresses Concern Over Treatment of Navarro
Mehta, an Obama appointee, said at the hearing that he was concerned about how Navarro was treated by the government.
Navarro was arrested on June 3 at Reagan National Airport by the FBI as he prepared to board a flight to Nashville, and was hand-cuffed even though he had been in touch with the FBI previously and lives across the street from the FBI’s office in Washington, D.C. He was later taken into custody by agents from the U.S. Marshals service.
At the time, Navarro said that he was denied a call to a lawyer, which prosecutors have denied. The former White House adviser also said he wasn’t informed that he needed to turn himself in before he was arrested.
“It is curious to me, at a minimum, why the government treated Mr. Navarro’s arrest the way it did,” Mehta said on July 15. “It is a federal crime, but it is not a violent crime.”
“It’s surprising that self-surrender was not offered as an opportunity,” he added.
Navarro is the second former Trump adviser charged for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee. The first was Steve Bannon, who faces a similar set of two contempt charges. Bannon’s case goes to trial on July 18.
Navarro in December 2020 released a report that alleged widespread election irregularities. At the time, he said the findings of the report suggest there was “a coordinated strategy” to “strategically game the election process” against Trump. Navarro released the report in his capacity as a private citizen, and had called on journalists and U.S. politicians to acknowledge the irregularities in the 2020 election and carry out investigations. Trump later praised the report.
Thompson had cited the report among other references in announcing in February the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoena to Navarro.
“Mr. Navarro appears to have information directly relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation into the causes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol,” Thompson said at the time, alleging that Navarro “hasn’t been shy about his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has even discussed the former President’s support for those plans.”
Joseph Lord and Reuters contributed to this report.
Who’s the better boy: Hunter Biden or Mohammed bin Salman?
Resident Joe Biden visited oil-rich Saudi Arabia on Friday to grovel before its authoritarian leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), in a desperate attempt to stem the soaring price of gasoline in the United States. The president fist-bumped MBS upon arriving in Jeddah, which was an embarrassing moment. Not quite as embarrassing, however, as Barack H. Obama’s servile bow before the late King Abdullah during his 2009 apology tour.
The trip revealed that Biden’s campaign pledge to make Saudi Arabia “pay the price” for human rights abuses—including the 2018 murder and bone-saw dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi—and “make them in fact the pariah that they are” was a blatant lie. (Yes, a lie. The Washington Free Beacon is using that word in contravention of longstanding journalistic norms in an effort to highlight the president’s dangerous dishonesty.)
Above all, Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia provides an opportunity to discuss a topic the American mainstream media too often neglect: fatherhood. One of the reasons why the president’s meeting with MBS is so significant is that the crown prince is merely the country’s de facto leader after gently seizing control from his 86-year-old father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud.
Shortly after Biden took office in 2021, the White House insisted that King Salman—not the 36-year-old MBS—was “the president’s counterpart” in Saudi Arabia. Friday’s fist-bump suggests otherwise. Nevertheless, Biden and King Salman have a lot in common. As of Nov. 20, they will both be octogenarians. More importantly, they both understand what it’s like to be the famous father of an infamous son.
Speaking of which, Hunter Biden and MBS have a fair amount in common as well. They are both fans of prostitutes and cocaine. Hunter’s exploits are legendary, of course, but almost certainly pale in comparison with the debauchery of the crown prince. New York Times reporter Ben Hubbard noted in his 2020 book, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman, that MBS once rented out an entire resort in the Maldives and “hosted a string of blowout parties.” Shakira and Pitbull reportedly performed at the gatherings, which also featured “an abundance of prostitutes and cocaine.”
Both sons would presumably have amounted to nothing if not for their powerful dads, who helped finance their lavish and degenerate lifestyles. Just as MBS tapped the royal bank account to pay for his drug-fueled island orgies, Hunter persuaded Joe to keep wiring him money to help cover his $30,000 escort bill. It is safe to say that Hunter is more likely than MBS to film himself having threesomes with crack-addled hookers, but who’s to judge?
Hunter and MBS both have five children, although King Salman probably recognizes all of them, unlike Joe, who continues to deny the existence of the baby girl Hunter sired with a stripper named “Dallas.” To be fair, it is not publicly known how many children MBS has fathered with strippers and prostitutes who may not enjoy the protections granted by the U.S. justice system.
Unlike his Saudi counterpart, the Biden heir has not yet been credibly accused of murdering and dismembering a journalist. Yet Hunter does enjoy some of the same benefits afforded to Saudi royalty. For example, U.S. mainstream media outlets and tech companies actively suppressed negative stories about Hunter during his father’s 2020 presidential campaign. The revelations once denounced as “fake news” have since been largely corroborated.
It is difficult to say, given the facts, which famous father has raised the better boy. Perhaps the most notable difference between Joe Biden and King Salman is that the elderly and infirm Saudi royal knew when it was time to call it quits and hand power to a younger generation. Biden does not appear to share this outlook. This is not to suggest that he should anoint Hunter as his heir apparent, although there’s no question the whore-loving crackhead scion would get more votes than Kamala Harris.
Resident Joe Biden on Friday warned that he may take executive actions targeting the climate and health care if Congress doesn’t pass a bill that’s suitable for his agenda.
“So let me be clear: if the Senate will not move to tackle the climate crisis and strengthen our domestic clean energy industry, I will take strong executive action to meet this moment,” he said in a statement released by the White House on Friday. “My actions will create jobs, improve our energy security, bolster domestic manufacturing and supply chains, protect us from oil and gas price hikes in the future, and address climate change.”
Biden also wrote that “health care is critical” and suggested he would issue an executive order to “lower drug prices and to prevent an increase in health insurance premiums for millions of families.”
In the statement, Biden did not elaborate on what steps he would take to address health care or the climate in his executive orders.
The statement came after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) reportedly told top Democrats, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), on Thursday that he will not support new spending on climate-related measures or tax hikes
“I said, ‘Chuck until we see the July inflation figures, until we see the July, basically Federal Reserve rates, interest rates, then let’s wait till that comes out so we know that we’re going down a path that won’t be inflammatory, to add more to inflation,’” Manchin said on Friday morning during a radio interview.
“He says, ‘Are you telling me you won’t do the other right now?’” Manchin recalled. “I said, ‘Chuck, it’s wrong, it’s not prudent to do the other right now.’”
Democrats Make Demands
Following the development, Democrats expressed disappointment and demanded that Biden take executive action targeting the climate.
“With legislative climate options now closed, it’s now time for executive Beast Mode,” Sen. Shelton Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wrote on Twitter. “Free at last. Let’s roll. Do it all and start it now.”
Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) issued a statement in reference to Manchin’s decision, saying that “this is our last chance” to pass climate-related measures.
But a spokesperson for Manchin told reporters this week that the senator has serious concerns about soaring inflation. A report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this week revealed that inflation spiked to 9.1 percent year-over-year in June.
“Political headlines are of no value to the millions of Americans struggling to afford groceries and gas as inflation soars to 9.1 percent,” Manchin spokeswoman Sam Runyon told Bloomberg. “Senator Manchin believes it’s time for leaders to put political agendas aside, reevaluate and adjust to the economic realities the country faces to avoid taking steps that add fuel to the inflation fire.”
Republicans say the spiking inflation and elevated gas prices are largely due to Biden’s policies. The president promoted the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan in early 2021 and also targeted the oil industry in a series of executive orders after he took office last year.
The White House released Biden’s statement threatening executive action while the president was visiting with the Saudi royal family on a several-day visit to the Middle East.
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.
After White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra issued warnings about a new COVID-19 subvariant, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said they are not providing key facts about the latest strain.
“How come the flu vaccine changes every year and they’re not willing to change this vaccine?” Paul told Fox News on Tuesday. “Now, you might have me with an argument. I’ll listen to you if you tell me, ‘We’ve got a new vaccine that actually has something to do with the current virus,’” he said.
It came after Fauci, who has given hundreds of media interviews since the start of the pandemic, told CNN this week that the Omicron subvariant BA.5 is concerning due to its high transmissibility. People infected in the first COVID-19 waves “really don’t have a lot of good protection” against the latest subvariant, Fauci also said at a White House briefing several days ago.
But Paul, himself a doctor, told Fox that Omicron “was about 90 percent less likely to put you in the hospital than the first variant,” saying that Americans should “discount” what both Fauci and Becerra are saying about the latest subvariant.
“So if no one’s telling you any information, how can you make any judgment other than the emotionalism and the sensationalism of the government?” he asked.
Fauci himself was infected with COVID-19 several weeks ago and confirmed he took Pfizer drug Paxlovid before his symptoms recurred, although he’s received two booster shots.
In a recent interview, Fauci conceded that most COVID-19 vaccines don’t protect “overly well” against the latest variant. However, he used that statement to claim that they are effective at limiting the most severe symptoms.
“At my age, being vaccinated and boosted, even though it didn’t protect me against infection, I feel confident that it made a major role in protecting me from progressing to severe disease,” said Fauci, who is 81 and has worked in various capacities in the federal government since the late 1960s.
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Fauci suggested that Americans ages 5 to 50 should be allowed to get a second booster shot.
The federal government, he argued, “need[s] to allow people who are under 50 to get their second booster shot, since it may have been months since many of them got their first booster.”
“If I got my third shot [in 2021], it is very likely the immunity is waning,” Fauci proclaimed.
The Epoch Times has contacted the National Institutes of Health for comment.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) predicted on July 13 that inflation will soon hit double-digit figures if resident Joe Biden and congressional Democrats move forward with their plans to boost taxes on most Americans.
“We just got the numbers this morning for Ohio—$8,300 bucks a year in additional spending on energy, on food, on utility bills generally, and on clothing.” Portman’s $8,300 figure is based on data from January through June and projected to the end of the year.
“This is something that unfortunately is going to get worse, not better, unless we change policies,” he said. Extrapolating the current inflation figure to the rest of the year produces an annual rate of 16.1 percent, he said.
“That’s just unimaginable—even higher than the Carter years.”
Portman isn’t alone in fearing double-digit inflation later in the year, however, as in a related development on July 13, an economic analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank made a similar prediction.
“An inflation rate at 9.1 percent is devastating enough, but the official rate doesn’t even fully capture just how bad the situation is. Lower-income families and working Americans are being especially hard-hit by skyrocketing prices on items like food, gas, and housing,” economic policy studies research fellow Joel Griffith said in a statement.
“This administration is tone-deaf to the economic realities and the problems that they have created. Biden’s war on affordable energy production is the main culprit for both the high gas prices and skyrocketing food prices,” Griffith said.
“Things are only going to get worse, one way or another, as Biden’s economic policies are a double-edged sword. This is quite possibly the last month of lingering economic factors keeping inflation in the 8 percent range, which means the official (consumer price index) CPI number could be in the 10 percent range by the fall.”
Portman’s comments came during a July 13 news conference in which Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the top GOP member of the Senate Finance Committee, was joined by half a dozen colleagues from that panel in denouncing the Biden administration’s economic policies, which they contend are causing the spiraling inflation rate that hit 9.1 percent in June, according to the government.
“We all saw the news this morning that we’ve hit yet another record, 9.1 percent inflation,” Crapo told reporters in the Senate Press Gallery.
“Today’s new data shows the consumer price index remaining at a painful 40-year high, jumping to 9.1 percent for June from 8.6 percent in May, which was a record in May. When resident Biden took office, the inflation rate was 1.7 percent and for the four years previous to that it was in that zone,” Crapo said.
“Look where it’s gone now and the president continues to try to give reasons for this, using Russia, but the Russian invasion [of Ukraine] took place at around 7 or 8 percent inflation and it’s been going up since.”
“Economic conditions for Americans generally have deteriorated significantly. Inflation-adjusted wages for workers are falling, consumer and business confidence has cratered, nest eggs for retirees are eroding from the double whammy of inflation and lower account values, and the odds of recession have been rising, with stagflation an imminent threat,” he said.
“Nonetheless, in the face of all this, the Democrats want to raise taxes, including on the middle class and on taxpayers earning far less than $400,000. The Biden administration proposed $2.5 trillion in tax hikes in its Green Book.
“Last year’s House-passed Build Back Better bill was more than $1.5 trillion of new taxes. Now, my Senate Democratic colleagues are talking about a so-called slimmed-down package with tax hikes in the realm of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. There is nothing slim about these tax hikes,” he said.
More tax increases will further depress the supply side of the economy and produce more inflation, not less, and depress investment and productivity growth throughout the economy. Consumers are having to pay an estimated $5,200 or more for basic necessities like food, rent, and energy, Crapo claimed.
Crapo said one of the tax increases in the House-passed Build Back Better bill that’s now being considered in the Senate would be especially harmful to small businesses, which account for most of the new jobs in a normal economy.
“The expanded Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT), the tax on flow-through businesses, which are businesses whose owners income flows through to their personal tax forms,” Crapo noted.
“Small business groups estimate that millions of small and family-owned businesses would be at risk of having their tax rates increased under this policy, which will negatively impact their growth,” he said. He said the revised NIIT is projected to cost small businesses more than $252 billion in new levies.
Joining Crapo, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said, “The biggest concern that I am hearing is the increased costs of energy, groceries, and—particularly from farmers—how the energy programs of the Biden administration are raising farming costs.”
Grassley said his constituents in largely rural Iowa are now paying more than $600 every month for basic necessities than they were prior to the Biden administration.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said: “You would think the Biden administration would understand the basic laws of supply and demand. The one reason prices are high is that demand is high. But when demand is high, if you want to lower prices, you increase the supply.
“Unfortunately, because of the ideologically driven energy agenda by this White House, rather than have domestic producers in places like Texas and elsewhere produce more oil and gas here in America, President Biden is doing, really, the unthinkable—he’s going to talk to [Saudi Arabian leader] Mohammed Bin Salman about Saudi Arabia increasing its energy production.”
“Obviously, this is upside down,” Cornyn added.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) told reporters that he was rummaging through boxes of memorabilia of his mother at his home recently and found a newspaper from the 1970s with a story about President Jimmy Carter meeting with Saudi Arabia’s leaders to appeal to them to increase oil production.
“As I read that story, all I could think was history is repeating itself,” Lankford said.
Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) said the $5,200 increase in costs due to inflation “is a lot of money for the average American household. I know back home in Indiana, $5,200 can make or break an administration, it can make or break a presidency.”
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.
White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci conceded Wednesday morning that COVID-19 vaccines don’t protect “overly well” against the virus.
Speaking during a Fox News interview, Fauci told host Neil Cavuto that “one of the things that’s clear from the data [is] that … vaccines—because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus—don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection.”
But Fauci said later that the vaccines “protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death” before he made note of his recent COVID-19 diagnosis.
“At my age, being vaccinated and boosted, even though it didn’t protect me against infection, I feel confident that it made a major role in protecting me from progressing to severe disease,” said Fauci, who is 81 and has worked in various capacities in the federal government since the late 1960s. He’s also headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since the Reagan administration.
Fauci then said it’s because of the vaccination that it is “very likely why I had a relatively mild course.”
Natural Immunity
The official’s comments come just days after a bombshell study revealed that natural immunity, or the immunity conferred via a previous COVID-19 infection, provides superior protection against the virus when compared with vaccines.
Researchers in Qatar said that individuals who survived a COVID-19 infection and weren’t vaccinated had very high protection against severe or fatal disease.
“Effectiveness of primary infection against severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19 reinfection was 97.3 percent … irrespective of the variant of primary infection or reinfection, and with no evidence for waning. Similar results were found in sub-group analyses for those ≥50 years of age,” Dr. Laith Abu-Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar wrote.
But the researchers noted that both natural and artificial immunity conferred via vaccines waned over time. People who were previously infected with COVID-19 and were not vaccinated had half the risks of reinfection as compared to those that were vaccinated with two doses but not infected.
During an interview with the Washington Post this week, Fauci suggested that Americans aged 5 to 50 should be allowed to get a second booster shot.
The federal government, he argued, “need[s] to allow people who are under 50 to get their second booster shot, since it may have been months since many of them got their first booster.”
“If I got my third shot [in 2021], it is very likely the immunity is waning,” Fauci proclaimed.
Surging costs of fuel, housing, and food were major contributors to high inflation last month
The U.S. annual inflation rate climbed to 9.1 percent in June, reaching its highest level since November 1981 and topping the market estimate of 8.8 percent and May’s annual rate of 8.6 percent.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the consumer price index (CPI) rose by 1.3 percent month-over-month. The monthly inflation also was higher than economists’ expectations of 1.1 percent.
While the core inflation rate, which removes the volatile food and energy sectors, eased to 5.9 percent, that was higher than the forecast of 5.7 percent. On a monthly basis, core inflation rose at a higher-than-expected pace of 0.7 percent.
Food prices soared by 10.4 percent, while the energy index advanced by 41.6 percent.
Nearly every food item, except uncooked beef steak, was more expensive last month. Pork surged by 9 percent, chicken soared by 18.6 percent, and ham increased by 9.6 percent. Eggs spiked by 33.1 percent, milk rose by 16.4 percent, fruits and vegetables jumped by 8.1 percent, and coffee swelled by 15.8 percent.
On the energy front, fuel oil increased by 98.5 percent. Gasoline surged by 59.9 percent, electricity costs picked up by 13.7 percent, and propane and kerosene jumped by 26.1 percent.
New vehicles surged by 11.4 percent, used cars and trucks jumped by 7.1 percent, apparel increased by 5.2 percent, and shelter climbed by 5.6 percent.
Shelter costs, which make up about one-third of the CPI, increased by 0.6 percent in June from May. This was mainly driven by a 0.8 percent rise in rent of primary residence, the greatest rent increase since 1986.
“Today’s shockingly high consumer price inflation number does not bode well for our country’s economic outlook,” Desmond Lachman, economist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email.
It makes it likely that the Fed will keep raising interest rates and decreasing its “bloated balance sheet” aggressively, he said.
“The Fed will likely do so despite the growing signs of economic and financial market weakness both at home and abroad,” Lachman said. “That has to raise the risk of a hard economic landing before yearend and further turmoil in the equity and bond markets.”
The S&P 500 ended 0.4 percent lower, its fourth consecutive drop, after tumbling as much as 1.6 percent earlier. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.7 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite ended down 0.2 percent, erasing nearly all of an early 2.1 percent loss.
The U.S. Dollar Index (DXY), which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, spiked with the news before ending the day lower by 0.13 percent to 108.02. The index has been on a tear in 2022, rallying about 13 percent year-to-date.
A fake CPI report circulated online on July 12 and attempted to emulate the formatting of the May inflation data, using different dates and figures. It claimed that the annual inflation rate was 10.2 percent in June. Despite being a forgery, it caught the attention of investors, sending stocks slightly lower in the afternoon session on Wall Street.
The White House braced the American people on July 12 for an elevated headline reading, noting in a memo that the June CPI report was out of date since it didn’t contain the dramatic decline in food and energy prices. U.S. officials are ostensibly looking ahead to the July inflation numbers to show that their efforts are succeeding.
Peak Inflation?
Over the past month, crude oil and gasoline prices have fallen by notable levels amid growing recession fears and weaker demand outlooks.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude has slumped by about 17 percent to below $100 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange since the middle of July. The national average for a gallon of gasoline has tumbled by roughly 7 percent to about $4.65, according to AAA.
Agricultural commodities have also plummeted, with corn, wheat, and soybeans down by approximately 20 percent in the past month.
“The softening food, energy, and commodity prices, the improved supply chains, the easing shipping costs, and lower purchasing manager indices hint that U.S. inflation may have hit a peak last month, or will hit one soon,” Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst at Swissquote Bank, wrote in a research note.
Even if inflation has peaked, market experts believe prices for many goods and services in the marketplace will remain elevated, such as rent and airline fares. Core CPI could moderate, too, because of weaker used car prices.
The headline inflation reading prompted the interest-rate futures market to revise its expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise rates by 100 basis points at this month’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policy meeting. Most of the market had anticipated a three-quarter-point increase at the upcoming rate-setting committee meeting, with small odds of a full point hike, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.
Price stability has become the central bank’s primary objective, even if it triggers a recession and extends the selloff in the financial markets. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has stated that it’s possible to navigate a soft landing, but noted that it isn’t a guarantee.
Bryce Doty, senior vice president and senior portfolio manager at Sit Investment Associates, says the Fed’s actions will exacerbate problems in the economy.
“The Fed’s clear mistake of destroying demand by aggressively raising rates instead of supporting businesses desperately in need of workers will further extend shortages,” he wrote in a July 12 research note. “Just think of the incredible growth we would have if another 2 to 4 million workers re-entered the workforce. Supply shortages would dry up and inflation pressures would dissipate. Instead, the Fed’s actions will slow growth and inflation will persist longer than it should.”
However, Deutsche Bank analysts believe that the U.S. central bank needs to maintain its hawkish attitude as inflation continues to show that it’s “a demand-driven phenomenon.” In the past couple of months, consumer demand has eased. Personal spending rose by just 0.2 percent in May, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Retail sales unexpectedly fell by 0.3 percent in May, the Census Bureau reported.
At the same time, with near-term recession fears growing, the financial institution expects the peak fed funds rate will be 4.1 percent, but economic downturn concerns “could well short-circuit the Fed’s hiking cycle before it reaches our current terminal rate expectations.”
Following the June FOMC meeting, the Fed updated its dot-plot from March, projecting that the benchmark rate would hit 3.4 percent this year, 3.8 percent in 2023, and drop back to 3.4 percent in 2024 (pdf).
“My expectation is that inflation will soon peak,” Lachman said. “It will do so as a result of the U.S. and world economy moving into a recession, as well as a result of the slump presently underway in international commodity prices in general and oil prices in particular.”
Next on the inflation front, the BLS will release the June producer price index on July 14. Economists forecast that it will come in at 10.7 percent year-over-year, down from 10.8 percent in May.
Resident Joe Biden was among a group of world leaders that Uber had access to, when the ride-sharing company was aggressively expanding its global presence, according to leaked company files.
The Uber files—containing more than 124,000 emails, memos, text messages, company presentations, and other documents dating from 2013 to 2017—were leaked to British newspaper The Guardian. The outlet then shared the files with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its media partners.
The person who leaked the files is Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief European lobbyist.
According to an ICIJ report on the Uber files published on July 10, the files showed how Uber executives, including co-founder Travis Kalanick, lobbied and courted politicians around the world for favors, during its dramatic expansion.
In total, Uber executives held more than 100 meetings with public officials from 17 countries and the European Union, according to the report. Among those meetings, 34 were with European Union officials, and 9 were with European Commissioners. Twelve of the meetings with European Commission representatives had not been publicly disclosed.
Former Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick stands on a balcony above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the company’s IPO in New York City, on May 10, 2019. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
Biden met with Kalanick in Davos, Switzerland, in 2016, just before the then-U.S. Vice President delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum, according to the report.
Kalanick was apparently not pleased that Biden showed up late at their meeting in Biden’s suite at the InterContinental Hotel.
“I’ve had my people let him know that every minute late he is, is one less minute he will have with me,” Kalanick wrote in a text message to a colleague.
At their meeting, Biden was impressed by what Kalanick said, how Uber was transforming cities and the way people work for the better, that the then-Vice President “tweaked his keynote speech,” according to the report.
Biden did not name Uber or Kalanick in his speech.
“Ride-sharing companies employ tens of thousands of new people. I met with the CEO today of one of those companies,” Biden said in the speech. “He said he is gonna add two million new jobs this year, allowing them freedom to work as many hours as they wish, manage their own lives as they wish.”
Then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden gestures during his speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on Jan. 20, 2016. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
“Uber took special care to keep Kalanick’s meeting with Biden confidential,” the report said, before adding that the meeting was arranged “through a chain of former Obama staffers.”
In response to ICIJ’s questions in June, a White House spokeswoman said Biden was “committed to combating employee misclassification which deprives workers of critical protections and benefits, including minimum wage, overtime, and family and medical leave,” according to the report.
Kalanick served as Uber CEO from 2010 to 2017 before he resigned amid scrutiny over Uber’s treatment of female engineers and questionable business practices. However, he held on to his seat on the company’s board of directors until the end of 2019.
Europe
The report also named French President Emmanuel Macron, specifically about how he was an Uber ally when he was the country’s finance minister.
Uber’s service was partially suspended in France’s city of Marseille on Oct. 20, 2015, the report said, following protests by local taxi drivers.
“Could you ask your cabinet to help us to understand what is going on?” MacGann wrote to Macron.
Less than a day later, Macron responded, “I’ll look into this personally. Send me all the facts and we’ll decide by tonight. Let’s stay calm at this stage, I trust you.”
Hours later, authorities in Marseille said they would revise the suspension order, according to the report.
The report said the exchange between MacGann and Macron was “one of more than a dozen undisclosed communications” between Uber representatives and Macron.
French President Emmanuel Macron gestures as he speaks during a joint press conference with the Hungarian Prime Minister in Budapest on Dec. 13, 2021. (Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images)
Marcon’s office has responded to the Uber files, saying the economy minister had frequent contacts with companies disrupting the service industry at the time, and it was appropriate to facilitate the lifting of red tape, reported French newspaper Le Monde.
Kalanick also met with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in 2016.
“Right now you are seen as aggressive,” Rutte told Kalanick according to meeting notes cited in the report.
Rutte suggested that Kalanick “change the way people look at the company” by emphasizing the company’s positives.
The first lady badly butchered the pronunciation of “bodegas,” pronouncing the New York stores “boguhdahs.”
Biden was speaking at a conference event for UnidosUS, a pro-illegal immigration NGO funded by oligarchs such as Bill Gates.
The group disclosed an endowment of more than $142,000,000 in 2018.
Biden was speaking at the group’s “Latinx IncluXion Luncheon.” She described the diversity of the Hispanic community as “unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio.”
Hispanics broadly reject the invention of the word “Latinx,” with many pointing to the word as a social engineering attempt to vandalize the gendered Spanish language.
In the speech, Jill Biden declined to discuss the porous state of the U.S-Mexico border under her husband’s administration.
A seemingly ceaseless stream of illegal aliens broke the yearly record for border apprehensions in 2021, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
At the same time, the Biden administration shelved most deportations.
Transnational crime and human smuggling has imposed a state of chaos on many border communities, which are predominantly inhabited by Hispanics.
The Democratic Party has devastated its own political prospects with Hispanics during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Some polling indicates that Hispanics disapprove of Biden more so than any other ethnic group in America, in a political game changer for a demographic once thought of as a reliable constituency for Democrats.
Republicans have already secured upset victories fueled by Hispanic voter discontent during Biden’s presidency.
Republican Mayra Flores replaced a retiring Democrat in a south Texas congressional district last month, and Republicans are eyeing more gains in the state’s Rio Grande Valley.
Cringeworthy and politically incorrect soundbites will do nothing to help save Democrats from bottoming out with Hispanic voters in November.
The Army suspended a decorated general for criticizing a tweet by first lady Jill Biden, USA Todayreported.
The branch released retired three-star lieutenant general Gary Volesky, a veteran of the wars in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan, from advising senior officers because of his June 25 response to a Jill Biden tweet about the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade.
“For nearly 50 years, women have had the right to make our own decisions about our bodies,” the first lady tweeted. “Today, that right was stolen from us.”
“Glad to see you finally know what a woman is,” Volesky replied.
Volesky’s tweet has since been taken down.
Volesky was likely talking about Biden’s support for transgender rights, a cause the military has also embraced. As Russia this year began its bloodthirsty invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Army was training officers on “gender pronouns” and “when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery,” the Washington Free Beaconreported. Top-ranking General Mark Milley, who secretly promised to warn the Chinese People’s Liberation Army about U.S. military actions, has in recent years embraced left-wing causes, saying he wants to “understand white rage” and apologizing for appearing with former president Donald Trump.
This is the second time this month that the Army has punished service members for disagreeing with someone in the Biden White House. The Army announced July 1 that it will deprive soldiers of pay and benefits if they do not comply with the administration’s vaccine mandate.
Volesky, who retired in 2020, received the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest decoration for valor, the New York Postreported. He served as the Army’s chief of public affairs from 2012 to 2014 and commanded the 101st Airborne Division.
As Biden depletes US oil reserve, China amasses huge stockpile
Resident Joe Biden’s decision to deplete America’s oil reserves is helping a top adversary—China, which has built up its own stockpile while taking advantage of Biden’s firesale.
Biden’s Department of Energy in April sold roughly one million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation, which is wholly owned by the Chinese government. That decision came just two months after Unipec launched an “unusual buying spree” aimed at boosting China’s own oil reserves.
The communist nation’s strategy was clearly successful—from mid-March to mid-May, China increased its oil reserves from 869 million barrels to 926 million barrels, according to Bloomberg. America’s oil reserves, meanwhile, are in freefall under Biden. The Democrat inherited 638 million barrels of reserve oil; that number is set to drop to 384.6 million barrels, the lowest level since 1984.
China’s newfound oil reserve advantage poses a serious national security threat, Republican lawmakers told the Washington Free Beacon. As war rages on in Ukraine, China has strengthened its energy relationship with Russia—in May, for example, Beijing entered discussions with Moscow to buy discounted Russian oil to further fill its reserves. For Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), that development stresses the need to ramp up U.S. energy production “rather than begging foreign governments for more supply.”
“At a time when millions of Americans are suffering financially at the gas pump, Joe Biden is helping replenish our biggest adversary’s energy reserves with our own damn oil,” Waltz said. “It’s astonishing how clueless this administration is when it comes to trusting bad actors like China to help alleviate our economy. If we want to compete with China, we need to begin expanding production here at home by expanding federal drilling leases and building more pipelines.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R., Alaska) echoed Waltz’s remarks, calling the fall of American energy independence under Biden “national security suicide.”
“Make no mistake: The biggest fans of Biden’s radical energy policies are Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin,” Sullivan told the Free Beacon. “We are in a new era of authoritarian aggression led by the dictators in Russia and China. The Biden administration needs to wake up to the fact that this new era—and our need for oil and gas—will be with us for decades to come.”
Neither the White House nor the Department of Energy returned requests for comment.
It’s unclear if the reserve oil Biden sold to Unipec went directly to China’s own reserves, but the sale helped China grow its stockpile regardless, Power the Future founder and executive director Daniel Turner argued. Even if Unipec released the oil it purchased from the Biden administration into the global market, Turner said, the sale gave the state-controlled company additional supply that would allow China to place oil from other sources into its reserves.
“The energy market’s uncertainty is a good reason for any country to stockpile oil in their strategic reserves, yet America is seemingly depleting its oil reserves to help China fill theirs,” Turner told the Free Beacon. “China couldn’t create a more favorable economic and national security approach to strategic oil reserves if they had created it themselves.”
The Biden administration claimed its sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec would “address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump” and combat “Putin’s price hike.” In the months following the sale, however, the national average for a gallon of gas surpassed $5 for the first time ever. Unipec also ramped up its shipments of Russian oil in May, giving Putin a much-needed income source as Russia’s economy slumps in the face of Western sanctions.
While the Biden administration has blamed sky-high gas prices on Russia’s war, prices at the pump were increasing long before Putin invaded Ukraine. Biden railed against the oil and gas industry on the campaign trail in 2020, pledging to “end fossil fuel.” He went on to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and halt new gas leases on federal land during his first month in office. Those decisions have not been well received—nearly 75 percent of Americans are not satisfied with the federal government’s national energy policy, the highest level in roughly two decades, according to a January Gallup poll.
A survey discovered that charging logistics is the primary reason why Americans aren’t buying electric vehicles.
Consumer Reports, which said it surveyed around 8,000 Americans, found that 61 percent said they wouldn’t seek to own an electric vehicle because of charging logistics while 55 percent cited the number of miles a vehicle can go per charge. Another 52 percent said that the costs of buying and maintaining an electric vehicle are cost-prohibitive.
Another 46 percent of the respondents stated they have not heard of any financial incentives available for owners of electric vehicles.
“We found that 14 percent of American drivers say they would ‘definitely’ buy or lease an electric-only vehicle if they were to buy a vehicle today,” said Consumer Reports. “That’s up markedly from the 4 percent who said the same in a 2020 nationally representative survey from CR of 3,392 licensed U.S. drivers.”
According to recent figures from Kelly Blue Book, the average price of a new electric vehicle hovered at roughly $56,000. In contrast, the average price of a new compact was about $25,000 at about the same time. The average price of a new, non-electric SUV was $34,000, while the electric version was nearly $45,000.
Meanwhile, a recent report from data analysis and advisory firm J.D. Power, however, found that electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids may have more problems than internal combustion engines.
While internal combustion engine vehicles averaged 175 problems per 100 vehicles, this jumped to 239 among plug-in hybrids and 240 among electric vehicles, a June 28 press release of the J.D. Power 2022 U.S. Initial Quality Study stated. Lower scores represented higher-quality vehicles.
Tesla models, which were included in the industry calculation for the first time, averaged 226 problems per 100 vehicles, according to the report.
“Automakers continue to launch vehicles that are more and more technologically complex in an era in which there have been many shortages of critical components to support them,” David Amodeo, director of global automotive at J.D. Power, according to the press release.
Amid elevated gas prices, White House officials have continued to suggest that Americans buy an electric car as Republicans have faulted the Biden administration’s policies for the spike in prices.
In mid-June, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm suggested that Americans can deal with $5 per gallon of gasoline by ditching an internal combustion engine in favor of an electric one.
“If you filled up your EV [electric vehicle] and you filled up your gas tank with gasoline, you would save $60 per fill-up by going electric rather than using gasoline, but it’s a very compelling case,” she said in a clip circulated by Republicans on social media on June 14. “But again, we want to bring down the price at the point of purchase.”
The Biden Justice Department has yet to take action against abortion extremists menacing pro-life clinics and members of the Supreme Court. Republican lawmakers are resolved to hold leadership accountable after the midterm elections—even if that means impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), who is in line to take over the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans prevail in November, didn’t take a Garland impeachment inquiry off the table in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon. Jordan cited a range of alleged misconduct, from failure to enforce black-letter law to protect clinics and justices, to secret collusion with leftwing groups opposed to parents protesting woke curricula changes.
“That’ll be a decision that will be made by the entire conference,” Jordan said of an impeachment push.
The oversight planning is a response to conflict roiling the country following the High Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Pro-abortion protesters tried running Justice Brett Kavanaugh out of a downtown Washington, D.C., steakhouse on Wednesday night, weeks after a gunman came to his home planning to assassinate him. And the militant pro-abortion network Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for more than a dozen acts against pro-life clinics and churches, ranging from vandalism to fire-bombing.
It is a federal crime to demonstrate outside of a judge’s home with intent to influence deliberations. Regular pro-abortion demonstrations outside the homes of the conservative justices seem to fit that bill exactly. The Justice Department has taken no action against protesters as of this writing. Local police told inquiring neighbors that federal agencies are declining to enforce the judicial anti-picketing law, according to a Fox News report.
Jordan wonders whether the Justice Department and the White House are following a template.
“The key question we would like to find out, if in fact the American people put us in control, is was this similar to what happened with parents at school board meetings? In other words, was the Biden White House working with some outside left wing influence groups, and also then communicating that information to the DOJ?” Jordan said.
The Ohio Republican added that a dozen whistleblowers have quietly come forward to speak about the Biden Justice Department and FBI matters, though he declined to get into specifics.
The Free Beacon was first to report that White House aides colluded with the National School Boards Association to push the Justice Department into investigating parents protesting critical race theory and gender ideology as domestic terrorists.
It’s also a federal crime to attack or destroy houses of worship and clinics for pregnant women. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who enforces those laws, has derided pro-life clinics in the past. While Biden administration officials have shared intelligence assessments with clerics and local law enforcement, the administration has yet to make even a single arrest or indictment related to dozens of attacks on churches and pro-life crisis pregnancy centers.
There have been almost 50 documented instances of violence, vandalism, or intimidation at houses of worship and pro-life clinics since the Dobbs draft leaked, according to a June report from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
House Republicans will be better positioned than their Senate counterparts to force Biden officials to cooperate if they stonewall investigators. Senate committee rules incentivize, but do not require, bipartisan cooperation when issuing subpoenas. The House has no such constraints. And House committees have historically taken the lead on compelled testimony and sharing of evidence.
Republican senators are putting public pressure on federal law enforcement to take immediate action. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray in June requesting a briefing on the bureau’s efforts to combat pro-abortion extremism.
“Our law enforcement officers are obliged to duly enforce the laws of our country—not just those that are politically suitable to the current administration,” Grassley’s letter reads.
“We’re usually the tip of the spear in terms of shining a light on issues and embarrassing an agency into compliance,” a Republican Senate aide told the Free Beacon. “The more attention they get for ignoring congressional oversight, the worse it looks for them. And that’s a pretty effective tactic for us.”
Outside groups are also pressing GOP lawmakers for accountability. Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, said there is ample reason to remove Garland from office. Davis was nominations chief for Grassley during the Kavanaugh confirmation and led the outside support team for Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.
“When Republicans reclaim the House in January, they must impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland,” Davis told the Free Beacon. “There must be consequences for his dangerous dereliction of duty that has led to highly dangerous attacks on the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Former White House adviser Steve Bannon agreed on July 10 to testify in front of the House Jan. 6 Committee after he received a letter from former President Donald Trump telling him that Trump will waive executive privilege.
Bannon, who’s slated to go on trial for criminal contempt charges in July for defying a previous subpoena by the panel, said he wanted to testify in public, according to a letter from his lawyer, Bob Costello.
“While Mr. Bannon has been steadfast in his convictions, circumstances have now changed,” Costello wrote in the letter, according to numerous media outlets. “Mr. Bannon is willing to, and indeed prefers, to testify at your public hearing.”
Trump told Bannon that he would waive his executive privilege. Previously, Bannon’s lawyers have said that he wouldn’t respond to the panel’s subpoenas because of the privilege.
“When you first received the Subpoena to testify and provide documents, I invoked Executive Privilege. However, I watched how unfairly you and others have been treated, having to spend vast amounts of money on legal fees, and all of the trauma you must be going through for the love of your Country, and out of respect for the Office of the President,” Trump wrote in his letter.
“Therefore, if you reach an agreement on a time and place for your testimony, I will waive Executive Privilege for you, which allows you to go in and testify truthfully and fairly.”
A member of the House panel, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), told CNN on July 10 that the committee received Bannon’s letter. But Lofgren suggested that the panel won’t have Bannon testify in public.
“Ordinarily, we do depositions. This goes on for hour after hour after hour. We want to get all our questions answered. And you can’t do that in a live format,” Lofgren said.
For not complying with Congress’s subpoenas, Bannon—the former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News—faced two contempt charges. Federal prosecutors have denied his argument that he has executive privilege and said Bannon wasn’t working for the White House during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach.
Both counts are misdemeanors and carry a minimum of 30 days to a maximum of 1 year in jail, as well as fines of $100 to $1,000, according to the Department of Justice.
In November, Bannon surrendered to the FBI and told reporters at the scene: “We’re taking down the Biden regime. … I want you guys to stay focused, stay on message. Remember signal, not noise.”
His trial is scheduled to start on July 18.
Representatives from Bannon’s team didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
White House communications director Kate Bedingfield is stepping down from her position, according to the Biden administration’s chief of staff.
In a statement released on July 6, the White House said that Bedingfield has “played a huge role” in the administration. The announcement came after a number of legacy news outlets, citing unnamed White House officials, said Bedingfield would depart soon.
“Her strategic acumen, intense devotion to the President’s agenda, and fierce work on his behalf are unmated,” said White House chief of staff Ron Klain. “She will continue to remain a critical player in the Biden agenda forward from the outside.”
Neither Klain nor the unnamed officials provided a reason why Bedingfield is leaving. Meanwhile, she hasn’t made a public comment on the matter.
“In the White House, Bedingfield continued as the President’s top communications aide and was similarly integral to every major public relations effort while leading the White House Communications Department, ensuring that each part of the team was working to deliver the President’s message and advocate for his agenda,” the statement said.
Characterized as a longtime aide to Biden, Bedingfield helped work for his campaign in 2020 before she was hired to work in the White House. According to recent White House disclosures, she was slated to make $180,000 in 2022, one of the highest-paid administration officials.
Several weeks ago, Jen Psaki, resident Joe Biden’s first press secretary, left the White House and was replaced by Karine Jean-Pierre. Psaki is reportedly slated to join cable channel MSNBC, according to an announcement earlier this year.
Cedric Richmond, a former congressman from Louisiana, had led Biden’s Office of Public Engagement, but he recently left the White House to work with the Democratic National Committee. He was replaced by former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Anita Dunn, who previously drew criticism for praising Chinese Communist Party tyrant Mao Zedong, recently returned to the White House as a senior adviser on policy issues.
In a statement last week, Dunn told news outlets that Bedingfield “ensured that our message in 2020 and in the White House was consistent with his voice and principles,” and asserted she would “always be a core member of this family, even as she takes a little time to put her own family first.”
Her departure also comes after White House rapid response director Mike Gwin left in June. Gwin is now at the Treasury Department’s public affairs division.
The Biden administration is funding the distribution of crack pipes, according to a report from the Daily Caller, which indicates that so-called harm reduction facilities that received administration grants are in fact distributing the pipes.
The news comes after administration officials insisted taxpayer dollars would not be used for this purpose and described a WashingtonFree Beacon report on their harm reduction grant program as “misinformation.” The Callerreported Friday, however, that it received two smoking kits that contain crack pipes, condoms, and lubricant from the New York Harm Reduction Educators, which received $398,960 in May from the Department of Health and Human Services through its harm reduction grant program.
The Caller received its crack pipes “after spending about 10 minutes on paperwork with basic information,” according to the report. Not only were they given drug paraphernalia: The reporters were invited to smoke on the premises. One employee asked a reporter to use the crack pipe in a supervised room at the harm reduction center, saying the drug paraphernalia could not be used outside the facility because it was too close to a school.
When HHS announced the recipients of its $30 million harm reduction program in May, it included a note at the top of its grant webpage stating that “no federal funding is used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to purchase pipes in safer smoking kits.” The announcement came after the Free Beacon first reported in February that the HHS harm reduction program was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes. The White House denounced the story as “disinformation” and said smoking kits funded by its program would not include a crack pipe. The Free Beaconsubsequently obtained smoking kits in five East Coast cities that all contained crack pipes.
HHS, in a statement to the Caller, claimed the New York Harm Reduction Educators has yet to use the federal funds it received and that its purchases will have to be approved by the government.
The report comes as Congress moves to stop the Biden administration from funding crack pipe distribution. The House Appropriations Committee this month voted unanimously to include a provision in the HHS budget that prevents the agency from funding the drug paraphernalia.
“None of the funds made available by this Act should be used to purchase, procure, or distribute pipes or similar cylinder objects for smoking or inhaling any controlled substance in schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act,” the amendment states.
The amendment vote comes one week after the House passed a separate Democrat-sponsored bill that similarly banned the department from funding crack pipes through mental health and substance abuse programs.
The votes signal that resident Joe Biden’s congressional allies no longer believe White House claims that the administration never planned to fund crack pipes. Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), who sponsored the amendment in the HHS funding package, said he was pleased that Democrats have now joined Republicans to hold Biden accountable for his radical policies.
“While most of the media stopped following the crack pipes story and some outlets tried to suppress it, the Free Beacon deserves a lot of credit for continuing to shine a light on this issue,” Moolenaar told the Free Beacon. “Now even Democrats are recognizing this was an abuse of tax dollars.”
A second professor from Laval University in Quebec City has been suspended for questioning the need to vaccinate children against COVID-19.
Nicolas Derome, a professor of molecular biology, was suspended for the same reason and under similar circumstances as his colleague Patrick Provost, a professor of microbiology, infectious diseases, and immunology.
Derome and Provost both participated in activities organized by Réinfo COVID, which describes itself as a collective of nurses, physicians, scientists, and citizens seeking to generate debate about how the pandemic has been handled by the government.
Derome gave an online presentation organized by the collective in late November 2021, in which he said children were not at high risk for complications from COVID-19.
He said there had been “zero” serious cases among the 0 to 17 age bracket, with or without comorbidity, with his presentation slide indicating the data came from Quebec’s public health institute (INSPQ) and expert assessments.
A review of the INSPQ data for the first four waves, covering Feb. 23, 2020, to Dec. 4, 2021, reveals there were 73 ICU admissions for individuals between age 0 and 19. The data does not indicate if the admissions were “because of COVID” or “with COVID.”
These 73 ICU admissions represent an average of 1.6 percent of total ICU admissions across age groups during the four waves covered.
Derome also said children between 1 and 14 years old were 15 times more likely to die from a road accident than from COVID, and noted there had been no deaths for the 5 to 19 years olds.
“This information is very important to have in order to make a free and informed choice regarding this vaccination campaign for kids 5 to 11,” he said at the start of his presentation.
A current review of data for the first four waves shows one death occurred for the 10–19 age group during the third wave. A separate INSPQ chart reviewed on deaths and presence of comorbidities shows no deaths reported for the 19 and under category with the mention that percentages are not reported when the total number is less than 5.
Derome said, quoting published literature, that children have a better innate response to defend against COVID, which explains why they suffer less serious outcomes.
The professor also quoted from the U.N. children agency UNICEF, which said at the time that the World Health Organization (WHO) did not recommend COVID vaccines for children, due to lack of trials and little to no safety data for that age group.
Since then, the WHO has said that the Pfizer vaccine can be safely administered to children from 5 years of age and that both Pfizer and Moderna are licensed for use in children above 12.
The professor also raised the issue of the waning efficacy of vaccines—not only against infection, but hospitalizations—by quoting White House COVID adviser Anthony Fauci.
Derome gave his presentation when Quebec had just started its vaccination campaign for 5- to 11-year-olds.
Derome was contacted by The Epoch Times but was not available to comment.
Laval University said when contacted that it would not comment on the “personal situation of its employees.”
At the time Derome’s video was published, Laval spokesperson Andrée-Anne Stewart told Radio-Canada that his remarks “in no way reflect the stance of Laval University and its faculty of science and engineering regarding the health crisis.”
“Like all members of the teaching staff, professor Derome is held to all the rigour and scientific integrity required by this function,” Stewart said.
‘Sliding Into Dictatorship’
On Dec. 7, 2021, Derome’s colleague, Patrick Provost, said in a scientific panel organized by Réinfo COVID that, based on provincial data, there is more risk of hospitalization for children from the vaccines than from COVID-19 itself, in addition to not having a portrait of mid- to long-term side effects.
Provost was suspended for eight weeks without pay in mid-June for his comments. It’s likely that Derome received a similar penalty.
Réinfo COVID posted a letter on its website presumably from Provost asking, on behalf of Laval University, that the video of the panel he participated in be taken down, or else he could face further sanctions, including being fired.
The collective refused, citing the need for the public to be aware of the “utility, efficacy, risks, and ethics of vaccinating children.”
Réinfo said it would try to help the professors, noting: “If universities gag their professors, as do different professional orders, we’re sliding into dictatorship.”
The suspensions of Derome and Provost have added fuel to the debate about academic freedom in Quebec, which just last month adopted a law to protect it.
“Those situations at Laval University confirm that it was necessary to legislate on this issue and the law stipulates that every university must, within a year, write a policy and put in place a committee to monitor the implementation of the policy and review the complaints related to academic freedom in universities,” Higher Education Minister Danielle McCann said in a statement to The Epoch Times.
“The law also emphasizes that academic freedom must be practiced in conformity with norms of scientific rigour.”
The professors have the support of their union, which has filed a grievance, and of the larger union federation it’s affiliated to.
“Independently of what we can think of comments or statements made by a colleague, heads of the university have no legitimacy to intervene in the content of comments made by those colleagues,” says an email sent by the Laval teacher’s union (SPUL) to its members.
“The leadership of Laval University made a wrong call and hurts the principles guaranteeing the functioning of the University and academic freedom,” SPUL president Louis-Philippe Lampron said in a tweet.
The Epoch Times reached out to SPUL but didn’t hear back by publication time.
A provincial university professor’s labour union federation to which the SPUL is attached, the FQPPU, said the suspension of the two professors was even more “serious and surprising” since it occurred after the province passed the law on academic freedom.
“The conformity to the consensus of a scientific community is in itself not a sufficiently precise norm to justify a disciplinary sanction against a professor who exercises his academic freedom,” the FQPPU said in a statement.
It said it’s the duty of colleagues and other academics to refute or point out weaknesses in remarks or works presented.
“In an institution that respects academic freedom, it’s by refutation that professors and others participating in teaching and research must push back against comments which drift away from the knowledge validated by proven methods.”
It pays to be close to the president—or at least one of his closest advisers.
That’s surely what General Motors executives were thinking in recent months when they met with resident Joe Biden’s adviser Steve Ricchetti, whose brother lobbies for the automaker.
Ricchetti met on March 8 with GM public policy chief Omar Vargas and General Counsel Craig Glidden, according to White House visitor logs released this month. The meeting came weeks after GM chief executive Mary Barra urged Biden to expand subsidies for electric vehicles and increase spending on semiconductor manufacturing. Jeff Ricchetti, the younger brother of the Biden consigliere, lobbies for GM on the same issues. The carmaker has paid Ricchetti $280,000 since hiring him on Feb. 1, 2021, according to lobbying disclosures.
Ethics experts have raised conflict of interest concerns about the Ricchetti brothers’ relationship. Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, told the Washington Free Beacon that Steve Ricchetti should “completely recuse himself from any part of the legislation that his brother’s firm is lobbying on.”
The White House ethics office has forced the longtime Biden adviser to recuse himself from matters involving four of his brother’s clients, GlaxoSmithKline, Vaxart, Horizon Therapeutics, and TC Energy.
Steve Ricchetti’s work on issues related to General Motors has been the subject of scrutiny before. The Washington Postreported last year that when Biden flew to Michigan to discuss plans to build electric vehicle charging stations, Ricchetti remained in Washington to negotiate the bill with Congress. The newspaper questioned whether Ricchetti’s involvement undercut Biden’s campaign pledge to “restore ethics in government.”
General Motors has secured extensive access to the Biden administration, though the meeting in March is the first time company executives are known to have met with Steve Ricchetti. Biden in November visited a GM facility in Michigan. He praised the company in January for announcing a $7 billion investment in an electric vehicle manufacturing plant that will employ 4,000 workers. The carmaker in February hired Biden’s niece, Missy Owens, to be its “Environment, Sustainability, and Governance” chief.
Jeff Ricchetti saw an influx of lobbying clients after Biden launched his presidential campaign, a trend that ethics experts have attributed to Ricchetti’s brother’s close relationship with the president. Ricchetti in early 2019 represented three companies. His firm has added 16 clients since then.
The White House, Ricchetti’s lobbying firm, and General Motors did not respond to requests for comment.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) on Friday introduced a bill in the House to bar the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from acquiring ammunition.
The bill (pdf), known as the “Disarm the IRS Act,” stipulates that the IRS is “prohibited from acquiring ammunition” and “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) are co-sponsors of the measure, according to his office.
It came after Gaetz, in interviews with Fox News and other outlets, expressed concern after he discovered that the IRS purchased more than $700,000 in ammunition in recent days. The congressman suggested that it’s part of a broader White House plan to disarm Americans.
“Here’s the Biden plan: Disarm Americans, open the border, empty the prisons–but rest assured, they’ll still collect your taxes, and they need $725,000 worth of ammunition, apparently, to get the job done,” he told Fox News last week.
The bill, he said, would put a “total moratorium on the IRS buying ammo. When we used to talk about the IRS being weaponized, we were talking about political discrimination, not actual weapons for the IRS.”
“Undeniably, part of the strategy is that with one hand, the Biden regime is doing everything they can to suppress access to ammunition for regular Americans, while with the other hand, they are scooping up all the ammo that they can possibly find,” Gaetz alleged.
5 Million Rounds
According to a report released by the Government Accountability Office in 2018, the IRS has been stockpiling ammunition and weapons for years. As of 2018, the agency had 4,487 firearms and 5,062,006 rounds of ammunition in its inventory, the report said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) walks in a courtroom in Atlanta, Ga., on April 22, 2022. (John Bazemore/Pool/Getty Images)
A 2018 report from Forbes noted that the IRS buys guns and ammunition for its Criminal Investigation Division. Agents in that division are the only employees in the IRS that carry firearms, according to its website.
But in an interview last month with Breitbart, Gaetz said he’s heard concerns that it’s part of a larger trend to “have any entity in the federal government buy up ammo to reduce the amount of ammunition that is in supply, while at the same time, making it harder to produce ammo.”
“You cannot fully exercise the complement of your Second Amendment rights if you are unable to acquire ammunition in your own country because your government has reduced the production of that ammunition, and then on the other hand, tried to soak up the supply,” the congressman added.
Republicans in June expressed concerns over a report suggesting the Biden administration would block private ammunition companies from using the federally owned ammo factory in Missouri, potentially creating a “backdoor” ban on AR-15-style rifles. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of the GOP leadership, later confirmed that the White House will keep the Lake City factory running.
The IRS and Treasury Department have not responded to requests for comment.
A bombshell witness for the Jan. 6 committee is being mocked as a dud.
On Tuesday, Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows delivered testimony that has since been contradicted in at least two cases.
Eric Herschmann, a former Trump White House lawyer, has contradicted her claim of having taken dictation from Meadows and said a note she insisted under oath she wrote was in fact written by him.
The handwritten note J6 Star Witness testified she wrote was actually written by Eric Herschmann. She flat out lied. The committee knew it because Eric testified under oath that he wrote that note. Cheney questioned him about it. She knew Cassidy was lying https://t.co/56vRvA64Uk
Former Trump Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Tony Ornato has poured a generous dose of cold water on her claim that former President Donald Trump wanted to take control of his presidential SUV, according to reports that say he wants to testify that no such thing took place, according to The Guardian.
Carol Leonnig of The Washington Post, who wrote about the Secret Service, said, “Sources tell me agents dispute that Donald Trump assaulted any agent or tried to grab the steering wheel on Jan. 6. They agree Trump was furious about not being able to go to Capitol with his supporters. They offer to testify under oath,” according to The Guardian.
“The Jan. 6 committee’s ‘smoking gun’ is literally female Jussie Smollett,” commentator Caleb Hull noted.
The Jan. 6 committee’s “smoking gun” is literally female Jussie Smollett
Attorney Jody Hunt, who is representing Hutchinson, said that the testimony was essentially hearsay.
“Ms. Hutchinson testified, under oath, and recounted what she was told. Those with knowledge of the episode also should testify under oath,” Hunt tweeted.
In her response to Hutchinson’s testimony, former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway noted that it is a major step for Secret Service agents to say they will go public.
Conway said on Fox News that Trump’s enemies “really make folk heroes out of anyone who’s willing to become go from working for Donald Trump, wanting to continue to work for Donald Trump to becoming part of the resistance.”
“Look, she was under oath today, but I think it’s pretty remarkable that you have Secret Service agents and in this case, the deputy chief of staff for the White House also willing to go under oath just to dispute the firsthand account they were in the vehicle. They can tell us what happened and what didn’t happen.
“It’s pretty remarkable that they would do that. I mean, often law enforcement doesn’t really want to get involved, doesn’t like to testify and get involved in anything seen political. But they were watching what you were watching,” she concluded.
A cheat sheet giving U.S. resident Joe Biden specific instructions on how to behave was captured on camera during a June 23 conference.
The 79-year-old president unintentionally held up the pre-written staff notes, titled “Offshore Wind Drop-By Sequence of Events” at a White House meeting with wind-industry executives. The snapped sheet contains a list of bullet points, which begin by telling Biden to “enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants.”
Next, the instruction reads “YOU take YOUR seat.”
The president should also give two-minute comments after reporters arrive, as the paper instructs, and ask AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, joining virtually, one question after the press departs. Ignoring the guidance, Biden spoke for over seven minutes at the event.
The notes end with “YOU thank participants” and “YOU depart.”
This is not the first time the 46th president inadvertently flashed his note card to reporters and photographers. Last July, Biden was seen alerted by an aide to remove a speck from his chin via a handwritten message during a live-streamed event at the White House.
The president was spotted in March carrying a cheat sheet containing possible tough questions with potential responses on Vladimir Putin, after he previously stated in Poland that the Russian leader “cannot remain in power,” causing confusion as to whether the United States was seeking to topple the Russian regime. He also confused Iran with Ukraine in his first State of the Union speech amid the Russian invasion.
A host of Biden’s so-called gaffes since he took office have also drawn fire from Republicans and raised further suspicions over his mental well-being. Almost 40 Republican lawmakers requested in a February letter that the president take a cognitive test, which is beyond “a partisan issue,” following the example set by former President Donald Trump.
U.S. resident Joe Biden speaks during an event with members of the Wounded Warrior Project’s Soldier Ride, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on June 23, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, however, laughed off a question in an interview with CNN earlier this month, when asked about Biden’s physical and mental capabilities.
“You’re asking me this question? Oh my gosh,” Jean-Pierre said in response. “He’s the president of the United States. … That is not a question that we should be even asking.”
Last November, after Biden underwent a physical examination and colonoscopy, his doctor Kevin O’Connor said the president “remains fit for duty. ” He did not specify whether Biden took a cognitive exam.
Republican lawmakers said that the Biden administration is attempting to essentially ban AR-15-style rifles by banning commercial production of AR-15 ammunition at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Missouri—a move the White House has recently denied.
The factory, which is owned by the Department of Defense, allows private firms to operate the facility to produce 5.56mm ammunition for most AR-15 firearms.
“Severely limiting the commercially available 5.56 ammunition, which is most popularly used in modern sporting rifles (MSRs), is effectively a politically sanctioned semi-automatic rifle ban. This blatantly infringes on the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution by limiting law-abiding gun owners’ ability to legally purchase or use lawful semi-automatic rifles,” lawmakers wrote in their letter on Monday to resident Joe Biden.
The GOP representatives, led by Reps. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), added that the Missouri plant “currently produces a significant portion of this type of 5.56mm ammunition for the commercial market” and allows the operator to keep the factory at a high state of readiness. That factory, they continued, ensures that the U.S. “Army is ready to ramp up production in the event of a national emergency.”
“This decision will result in the immediate termination of up to 500 highly skilled employees and undermine the facility’s ability to hire and retain the skilled workforce needed to carry out the contract with the Department of Defense,” they wrote in the letter (pdf). “Additionally, the decision will exacerbate an already serious shortage of ammunition in the commercial market currently facing law-abiding gun owners.”
Hartzler said that the reported decision to ban the factory’s production of 5.56mm rounds is merely an attempt to quash Americans’ Second Amendment rights.
“This is a backdoor attempt by President Biden to bypass Congress and ban legal and highly popular commercial ammunition used by law-abiding Americans across the country,” Hartzler said. “The Biden administration has made their priorities clear: dismantle the Second Amendment, compromise military readiness, and push inflation to new heights. It’s time for the Biden administration to stop its attack on our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”
The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for comment.
On Monday, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates disputed a report on a firearms blog alleging Winchester Ammunition, which operates the Missouri plant, was told by the government that it can no longer sell M855 and SS109 ammunition “produced in excess of the military’s needs on the civilian market.”
In reference to the report, Bates wrote Monday on Twitter that the “story isn’t true,” adding that it wouldn’t allow the plant to close down.
The Republican letter comes as several Republican and Democrat senators are working to pass a gun-control bill that would expand funding to states that use red-flag laws, end straw purchases, and other measures in the wake of several high-profile mass shootings in New York, Texas, and Oklahoma.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) said the White House and media outlets lied about Florida’s health policies when they claimed he “reversed course” by permitting health care providers to order COVID-19 vaccines for children under the age of five.
“Not surprised the White House would lie, definitely not surprised that legacy media would amplify the lie because that’s what they do,” DeSantis said during a Monday news conference.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday said that after “repeated failures” to order vaccines, DeSantis “reversed course” and decided to allow health care providers to order the shots for children between six months old and five. But Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state has always allowed providers to place orders for vaccines. DeSantis said Thursday that Florida discourages COVID vaccination for young children and would not place orders for the vaccine to be distributed to them, but the state would not block providers from acquiring it themselves.
“Doctors can get it. Hospitals can get it. But there’s not going to be any state programs that are going to be trying to get COVID jabs to infants and toddlers and newborns,” DeSantis said. “That’s not where we’re going to be utilizing our resources.”
Florida is the only state in the country that did not place advance orders for the pediatric vaccines, a position media outlets including Forbes, CBS News, and McClatchy DC claimed DeSantis reversed after Jean-Pierre’s comments on Friday. DeSantis’s approach to infant vaccination mirrors that of Scandinavian countries including Sweden, which decided not to recommend vaccinating children under 11 due to the “low risk for serious disease for kids,” and Denmark and Norway, which do not offer vaccines to children under five.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines for children five and younger on Friday, but only 18 percent of parents are eager for their child under five to receive the vaccine, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed. Less than a third of children ages 5-11 have received the vaccine since it became available to them in November.
A White House official made a false claim on June 20 about COVID-19 vaccines while encouraging parents to get their young children vaccinated.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, said that “there have not been any serious side effects of these vaccines.”
Contrary to Jha’s claim, severe allergic reactions, blood clotting, heart inflammation, and paralysis are among the serious side effects linked to the three COVID-19 vaccines that are available in the United States.
“There is a well-documented risk of myocarditis from the COVID vaccine, especially in young men and adolescent boys, and an elevated risk of clotting in young women with the Moderna vaccine,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“It’s not right for government scientific advisers to downplay documented risks of the vaccine because it ultimately undermines confidence in public health.”
White House officials didn’t return a request for comment.
Jha, who recently took a post with the Biden administration and is on a break from being dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, was on a media tour on June 20 promoting COVID-19 vaccination for children younger than 5.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for young children last week, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that virtually every child who’s now eligible get one of the vaccines.
Jha said the steps happened because the data on the vaccines were “quite compellingly clear” and that the vaccines were both safe and effective, even though major questions have arisen about their safety and efficacy.
“It’s really reassuring to know that for young kids, these vaccines are exceedingly safe,” Jha said.
Children in Moderna’s trial were more likely to suffer a severe adverse event after vaccination than after getting a placebo, while more vaccinated volunteers in Pfizer’s trial experienced severe COVID-19 cases when compared to the placebo group.
“The phrase ‘safe and effective’ has become meaningless and can no longer be trusted. It has been hijacked by commercial interests. A more accurate phrase would be ‘buyer beware,’” Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who started a group called Woody Matters, told The Epoch Times in a recent email after reviewing the data from the trials.
Jha also said the vaccines “are doing an extraordinary job at keeping kids out of the hospital.” While that appears to have been the case earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, it may not be now, according to data presented during meetings with the government’s vaccine advisory panels last week.
For example, effectiveness against hospitalization was just 22 percent after 60 days among 12- to 15-year-olds who received Pfizer’s vaccine, according to data from the CDC’s VISION network.
Other studies indicate higher effectiveness, but it’s unclear whether the vaccines are doing an “extraordinary job.” There’s also no clinical evidence that the vaccines will shield against severe COVID-19 cases in young children.
Jha was speaking on CBS and ABC.
All of the experts who advise the government voted in support of the vaccines. But some said parents should know key details, including how the safety and efficacy data were based on small numbers of children.
“I think it’s the right decision today to make these vaccines available for this age group, but I also think it’s important that people understand it’s a small number of children who have received these vaccines, and the safety is not as well established as it is in adolescents and adults,” Dr. Cody Meissner, who advises the FDA on vaccines, said during one of the meetings. “So it’s important to continue to follow the safety profile of these vaccines. I don’t think they should be required for any specific situation.”
On the other hand, others said they think parents should get their children vaccinated, regardless of the child’s health.
“My personal hope [is] that every child in the U.S. seeks and gets vaccinated in the near future,” said Dr. Michael Nelson, another adviser.
Steve Bannon’s legal team has issued subpoenas to top Democrats and members of the controversial Jan. 6 House of Representatives panel in a development in Bannon’s ongoing contempt of Congress case.
In October, the Democrat-led House voted to certify a contempt of Congress charge against Bannon, who had refused a subpoena from the Jan. 6 panel, asserting a right to executive privilege as a former White House staff member.
Despite legal questions over the validity of the panel’s subpoenas, the Department of Justice decided to pursue a criminal case against Bannon.
Now, Bannon’s lawyers have issued 16 subpoenas to top members of the committee, as well as other Democrats.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who chose the panel’s members; Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the panel’s chairman; and the only two Republicans on the committee, Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), were among those subpoenaed.
The subpoenas, which were obtained by The Epoch Times, demand that members turn over documents touching on an array of issues relevant to the case against Bannon.
In one section, Bannon’s lawyers ask for, “All documents … regarding the establishment of the January 6th Select Committee (‘Select Committee’), its membership, its staffing, its budget, its authority and functioning, and the authority of the Select Committee to issue subpoenas.”
The circumstances surrounding the establishment of the January 6 commission, which was created in a mostly party-line vote, have been a rallying point for critics of the panel.
Despite a longstanding House tradition of allowing minority leaders to choose their party’s members on committees, Pelosi refused efforts by House GOP Leader McCarthy (R-Calif.) to name Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) ranking member of the committee. Instead, Pelosi appointed Kinzinger and Cheney to the commission in an unprecedented breach of House tradition. McCarthy withdrew his picks in protest.
The subpoenas also demand all documents “regarding President Donald J. Trump’s assertion of executive privilege in response to any request of the Select Committee.”
Since the establishment of the January 6 panel, many former Trump officials have refused to testify or hand over documents, asserting a right to executive privilege.
Legal scholars are divided on the validity of these claims. However, some GOP critics of the commission have in the past argued that because the issue is so uncertain, federal courts should be consulted before moving ahead.
The subpoenas also request all documents “that reference making an example of Mr. Bannon, punishing him, hoping to influence or affect the conduct of other potential witnesses before the Select Committee, or words or similar meaning and effect.”
Many critics have accused the Jan. 6 commission of partisanship due to the Democrat-dominated commission almost exclusively targeting Republicans.
By the same token, another request in the subpoenas suggests that Bannon’s legal team suspects bias toward Bannon by some members of the panel.
Specifically, it requests “All documents … which tend to show the bias of any Select Committee member or staff (including animosity toward Mr. Bannon, or animosity toward a group with which Mr. Bannon is affiliated).”
The documents were delivered to targeted members electronically “to avoid the spectacle of approaching individual Representatives and staff members to personally serve them,” said David Schoen, an attorney for Bannon, in a letter affixed to the subpoenas.
It is not clear whether the subpoenas have yet been accepted. A lawyer for the House did not respond to a request for comment.
Bannon was for a long time the only person to face criminal charges for refusing a January 6 commission subpoena.
The commission has not restricted itself to only former Trump officials, going so far as to target sitting members of Congress like Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), and even House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
McCarthy called the efforts to subpoena sitting members of Congress an “abuse of power,” and all three House Republicans refused to testify before the committee.
The panel also set its sights recently on Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, over claims that she texted Meadows during the Jan. 6 rally.
In view of the partisan nature of the summons and charges advanced by the commission some Republicans, including Trump, have accused it of a “witch hunt” exclusively targeting Democrats’ GOP enemies.
Others, like McCarthy, have been more ambiguous in their critiques of the committee. When the commission sent out its subpoena to Bannon, McCarthy argued that the ongoing legal disputes made the subpoena’s legitimacy unknown.
“They’re issuing an invalid subpoena,” McCarthy said. “Issuing an invalid subpoena weakens our power. He has the right to go to the court to see if he has executive privilege or not. I don’t know if he does or not, but neither does the committee. So they’re weakening the power of Congress itself by issuing an invalid subpoena.”
Following the commission’s recent decision to subpoena several prominent Republicans—marking the first time in U.S. history that sitting members of Congress have been subpoenaed by a congressional body—McCarthy further expanded on his argument that the subpoenas are potentially invalid.
“All valid and lawfully issued subpoenas must be respected and honored,” wrote Elliot S. Berke, McCarthy’s attorney, in a lengthy May 27 letter (pdf). “Unfortunately, the words and actions of the Select Committee and its members have made it clear that it is not exercising a valid or lawful use of Congress’ subpoena power.
“In fact,” Berke continued, citing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) refusal to place minority-selected members on the commission, “the Select Committee is not even operating in compliance with the rules its own members voted to put in place.”
If convicted of contempt of Congress, Bannon faces a minimum sentence of one month in jail or a maximum sentence of 12 months in jail, in addition to a fine ranging from $100 to $100,000.
NO WONDER THERE’S NO END TO AMERICA’S SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES.
A leading advisor to Joe Biden on supply chains is an alum of several World Economic Forum climate change initiatives, who additionally served as a former fellow at a think tank chaired by Hunter Biden.
Betty Cremmins, whose LinkedIn profile reveals she’s held the position of Director for Sustainable Supply Chains at the White House, since February 2022, has overseen the U.S. government’s ongoing supply chain issues, exacerbated by policies that mandated vaccines for many American workers and truckers.
Prior to taking over the White House’s supply chain initiative, Cremmins was a National Security Fellow and Climate Affiliate Group Co-Lead at the Truman National Security Project. The Washington, D.C.-based, left-leaning foreign policy network has featuredBiden’s son Hunter Biden on its board since 2011.
Archived versions of the organization’s website reveal that Biden ascended to the role of vice-chairman of the board, serving there until at least March 2019 and, therefore, overlapping with Cremmins’s fellowship.
CREMMINS’S WORK HISTORY.
In addition to her ties to the Hunter Biden-linked group, Cremmins is also an alum of the World Economic Forum (WEF), chaired by Klaus Schwab. The WEF, which seeks to abolish private property ownership, has exploited issues like COVID-19 and climate change for its controversial “Great Reset” agenda.
Cremmins was previously the Lead of “1t.org,” a WEF initiative in support of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, from June 2020 to July 2021. The initiative seeks to “conserve, restore and grow one trillion trees by 2030,” demonstrating how environmental issues are often intertwined with WEF’s broader agenda. She was later promoted to the Lead on Engagement for “1t.org” and the WEF Natural Climate Solutions Alliance, which seeks to combat climate change through “voluntary or compliance action” with businesses, governments, and investors.
“Beyond the disruptive and tragic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world finds itself facing a crisis like no other in every corner of the planet; the accelerated destruction of nature and the impacts of climate change. Although these issues have often been regarded in silos, we cannot ignore that they are inextricably linked,” explained Cremmins in a post from July 29th, 2021.
Cremmins also worked for Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a “not-for-profit charity that runs the global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states and regions to manage their environmental impacts.” The CDP runs a Supply Chain program, where Cremmins previously served as its Senior Account Manager, that prioritizes sustainability and combatting climate change among the world’s leading multinational corporations.
“To transform the global economic system to prevent dangerous climate change,” explains the objective of the program in a slideshow presentation delivered by Cremmins.
Cremmins’s unearthed role in the White House follows The National Pulse revealing another WEF-linked activist advocating for Chinese Communist Party-style “re-education camps.”
A probe of the National School Boards Association’s call for federal investigations of parents as domestic terrorists found the White House was involved in the drafting process that led to the controversial request.
The association commissioned an internal investigation following outcry from parent groups and association board members who were upset by the inflammatory rhetoric in a Sept. 29 letter to President Joe Biden. The group found that Chip Slaven, then-CEO of the National School Boards association, told a White House senior policy adviser on Sept. 21 that he planned to ask Biden to use the FBI and Justice Department to investigate threats against school board members under counterterrorism statutes and the Patriot Act.
The White House adviser, Mary C. Wall, solicited Slaven for examples of threats made against school board members in advance of a Sept. 22 meeting with the Justice Department and other White House offices. The association detailed these previously unreported exchanges in a report released Friday.
“Evidence indicates that White House officials discussed the existence of the Letter, its requests, and the contents of the Letter with Department of Justice officials more than a week before the Letter was finalized and sent to President Biden,” the report says.
The letter sparked controversy at the time after Attorney General Merrick Garland formed a federal task force to monitor threats against school boards and teachers. Parent groups and Republicans accused the Biden administration of colluding with the NSBA to use the letter to justify scrutiny of school board meetings. They’ve questioned the involvement of federal investigators in local school board issues and alleged that the federal task force is intended to intimidate parents who voiced concern over schools’ coronavirus policies and left-wing curricula. Members of the association also complained about the contents of the letter, as well as being left out of the loop before it was sent.
The Washington Free Beaconreported on Oct. 21 that the White House was in contact with the National School Boards Association before the group sent the letter. But it was not known then that the White House knew of the controversial rhetoric in the document.
“It is inexcusable that a senior White House adviser would have the audacity to collaborate on a public request to use the Patriot Act against families,” Nicole Neily, the president of Parents Defending Education, said in a statement about the association’s report. “This is, quite literally, a betrayal of trust by the highest levels of government.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), who questioned Garland about the federal task force in a Senate hearing last year, said the association report showed the letter was a “political hack job … drummed up by progressive activists and their partners in the Biden White House to chill parents’ exercise of free speech.”
The association said in a statement that the letter did not represent its views and that it does not support federal intervention in school board meetings. The report places most of the blame for the letter on Slaven, who served as the group’s interim CEO until November.
According to emails included in the report, Slaven began toying with the idea of asking the White House for federal support at school board meetings on Sept. 8. He told other association executives about a complaint from an Ohio school board member who received a threatening letter from a parent. Slaven said the intense atmosphere at school board meetings reminded him of the aftermath of “Waco or Ruby Ridge.”
Slaven shared his concerns with Wall, the White House adviser, on Sept. 14. Wall asked Slaven to provide her with some of the “egregious examples” of threats made against school board members. She followed up on the request on Sept. 21, saying that she wanted to cite them in a meeting the next day with the Justice Department.
Slaven gave Wall several examples from across the country. He also shared a summary of a letter he planned to send to the White House. Slaven told Wall he planned to ask Biden to use the FBI and Justice Department to use its counterterrorism divisions to investigate threats against school board members. Slaven also made reference to the Patriot Act and “domestic terrorism” investigations.
Slaven sent Wall a final copy of the letter hours before publishing it on Sept. 29. The White House official raised no objections to the language in the letter, and instead offered Slaven support.
“Thank you for sending in advance,” she wrote. “We will review, and we remain committed to working with you on these very important issues. As the President has stated, we stand with educators who are doing right by kids—and we know they/you all need to be protected now more than ever.”
Slaven was in contact with other federal officials after sending the letter to Biden. Anthony Coley, a Justice Department adviser to Garland, asked Slaven for a phone call on Oct. 4, the day that Garland formed the task force to monitor school board threats. Coley sent Slaven a preview of the statement before the Justice Department released it.
The Department of Homeland Security also contacted the association on Oct. 4.
Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina are seeking access to communications between the Department of Education and the National School Boards Association over a letter from the latter comparing protesting parents to domestic terrorists.
In a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona exclusively shared with the Washington Examiner, the representatives demanded the department turn over all communications with the NSBA, the Department of Justice, and the White House regarding the September letter asking President Joe Biden to investigate protesting parents as domestic terrorists.
Jordan told the Washington Examiner the push for accountability from the agency is important because “moms and dads should be the ones making decisions about their kids, not the government. This idea that somehow the government is smarter than parents is ridiculous.”
The NSBA has since apologized for the September letter, which infamously prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to issue a memo forming an FBI-DOJ task force to investigate parents protesting at school board meetings. Emails later showed the White House had coordinated with the NSBA on the release of the letter.
Jordan and Foxx are the ranking members for the House Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Education and Labor, respectively.
The letter asks for communications between administration officials and the NSBA regarding the appointment of the association’s president, Viola Garcia, to the National Assessment Governing Board, which publishes the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “nation’s report card.”
NCSBA’s separation follows the South Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri School Board Associations’ cutting ties from the NSBA after its Sept. 29 letter to the White House comparing parents to domestic terrorists.
Union County Public Schools Board Chair Melissa Merrell was on her way to an NCSBA convention when she received an alert from the NCSBA announcing its separation.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” Merrell told The Epoch Times. “I definitely did not see this coming. I’ve had a couple of board members who had been requesting and sending emails to the NCSBA asking if it were going to withdraw our membership from the NSBA, and they (the NSBA) had asked for our feedback, and then, on the way to the convention, we saw this message.”
Merrell said nothing was mentioned at the convention about the NCSBA’s departure from the national board.
According to Parents Defending Education (PDE), an organization that investigates indoctrination in schools, as of Nov. 9, 26 states have distanced themselves from the NSBA after the letter.
The NSBA, which represents more than 90,000 school board members and 14,000 public school districts in the United States, had written a letter to President Joe Biden asking that the parents who have protested COVID-19 restrictions and the teaching of critical race theory in public schools be regarded as domestic terrorists that should be investigated by agencies such as the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI.
This led to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4 memorandum to the FBI directing the agency to work with U.S. attorneys to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
“The September 29 letter from NSBA to President Biden, in both its inflammatory language and the request for federal agencies to intervene in our communities, was just one in a series of lapses in governance,” said NCSBA President Amy Churchill in a press release. “NCSBA shares its members’ concerns about safety at school board meetings. As a proponent of local control, NCSBA believes that local law enforcement is in the best position to respond to those concerns and seek outside assistance if necessary.”
On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology, stating that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
State Response
The PDE requested statements from 47 states affiliated with the NSBA, and reported that the Alabama Association of School Boards (AASB) said it “has withheld its dues to join the NSBA for the current membership year, though AASB’s bylaws require it to be an NSBA member.”
According to the PDE, the AASB said it would be voting in December on changes to its bylaws that would give the AASB board of directors authority to determine its membership with the NSBA.
The PDE said it received no response from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MSCA), prompting the PDE to file a public record request for emails “to get a sense of their position.”
“It turns out that Glenn Koocher, executive director of the MSCA, was so happy about the letter that he put it in an email to NSBA CEO Chip Slaven,” the PDE said.
“We in MASC are all very happy that the NSBA has reached out to the FBI and, based on local coverage, has been identified as a key agent for generating federal support,” Koocher said in the email.
Thirty-six Republican state representatives asked that the South Carolina School Boards Association (SCSBA) end its NSBA membership.
“NSBA has labeled parents as domestic terrorists, with no evidence to justify that term,” the House Republicans wrote in a letter to the SCSBA executive director. “The reality is that parents and stakeholders are beyond frustrated being ignored and left out of decisions with their child. The NSBA is detached from reality and fails to recognize that Americans are angered by what is happening in our classrooms.”
SCSBA Executive Director Scott Price told The Epoch Times that the decision to separate from the NSBA was “aimed at protecting our membership from fallout from NSBA’s September 29 letter.”
“Any pressure that SCSBA was under stemmed primarily from our desire to keep this from impacting our members (local school boards),” Price said.
The NSBA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
GQ Pan and Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
A group of Republican lawmakers are planning to introduce a resolution to strike down President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate after the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released its emergency temporary standard requiring businesses with 100 or more workers to have their workers get vaccinated or submit to regular testing for COVID-19.
In a statement issued on Thursday, House Education and Labor Committee Republican Leader Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) confirmed that GOP lawmakers on her committee will “introduce immediately a Congressional Review Act resolution to nullify OSHA’s ’emergency’ rule when it is received by Congress.”
Biden’s rule (pdf) will go into effect on Jan. 4 in a bid to raise vaccination rates and get more people back to work. However, a significant number of trade groups have issued warnings about the mandate, saying that it would exacerbate supply chain bottlenecks and staffing shortages nationwide—leading some association presidents to ask the White House to delay the rule until after the holiday season.
Employers are not required to provide or pay for tests, and the rule offers medical and religious exemptions. Unvaccinated people have to wear masks while on the job, the rule stipulates.
Those who do not comply with the mandate will result in an approximately $14,000 fine per violation with a scale that increases with several violations, according to the rule. It’s not clear what penalty will be handed down for workers who don’t wear face masks and who are not vaccinated.
A senior Biden administration official said Thursday that the White House believes the mandate will spur vaccinations across the United States.
“Thousands of employers have answered the president’s call and stepped up to implement vaccination requirements covering tens of millions of Americans,” the official said.
After Biden announced the mandate on Sept. 9, a number of Republican governors and attorneys general promised to file lawsuits against the rule. So far, more than a dozen GOP-led states have sued the administration over a related but separate mandate that federal contractors and workers get the vaccine.
And on Wednesday, a group of Republican senators sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) signaling their intention to block funding for the vaccine mandate.
“We will oppose all efforts to implement and enforce it with every tool at our disposal, including our votes on spending measures considered by the Senate,” the letter led by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) read. “To be sure, we agree that countless Americans have benefitted from the protection offered by the COVID-19 vaccines. Nevertheless, the decision whether to be vaccinated against COVID-19 is a highly personal one that should never be forced upon individuals by the federal government.”
Letter requesting federal help on rowdy school board meetings prompted DOJ action
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee started an investigation Wednesday into what they called “collusion” between the Biden administration and the National School Boards Association ahead of the Justice Department’s decision to intervene in squabbles between parents and school officials.
In a letter to NSBA officials, the Republicans asked for their communications with the White House, FBI and Justice Department related to the organization’s Sept. 29 letter to President Biden calling for federal assistance and comparing threats against school officials to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
The NSBA board of directors issued an apology last week to its state affiliates for the letter, after Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4 directive bringing in the FBI to address “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against school officials.
“We are investigating the troubling attempts by the Department of Justice and the White House to use the heavy hand of federal law enforcement to target concerned parents at local school board meetings and chill their protected First Amendment activity,” said the 19 House Judiciary Republicans in the letter obtained by The Washington Times.
They cited internal emails posted by Parents Defending Education in which NSBA President Viola Garcia and interim Executive Director Chip Slaven said their staff had been in discussions with the White House about the letter before it was sent.
“The Biden administration seemingly relied upon the NSBA letter — which it coordinated in advance with the NSBA — as justification to unleash the full weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus upon America’s parents,” said the Republican letter, led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the committee.
The GOP letter also asked “whether the NSBA will urge Attorney General Garland to withdraw or rescind his October 4 memorandum.”
“Concerned parents are absolutely not domestic terrorists and, to the extent actual threats exist, local law enforcement — and not the FBI — are the appropriate authorities to address those situations,” said the GOP letter. “Parents cannot tolerate this collusion between the NSBA and the Biden administration to construct a justification for invoking federal law enforcement to intimidate and silence parents using their constitutional rights to advocate for their child’s future.”
Mr. Garland refused to retract the memo under questioning Wednesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying it came “in response to concerns about violence, threats of violence, other criminal conduct — that’s all it’s about.”
He also made it clear that he never referred in his memo to “domestic terrorism.”
“The language in the letter that they disavow is language that was never included in my memo and never would have been,” Mr. Garland said. “I did not adopt every concern that they had in their letter. I adopted only the concern about violence and threats of violence and that hasn’t
changed.”
The NSBA letter backed up its request for federal involvement by citing two dozen articles about school board meetings featuring outspoken parents alarmed about critical race theory and mask mandates, but the reports listed only two arrests.
One of those arrested was Scott Smith, a parent in Loudoun County, Virginia, who was charged with disorderly conduct in June after he sought to confront the board about his daughter being sexually assaulted in a bathroom at Stone Bridge High School.
A Loudoun County juvenile court judge ruled Monday that the attacker engaged in “non-consensual sex” and would be sentenced in November.
“The letter cited a number of interactions at school board meetings, the vast majority of which did not involve violence or threats,” the Republicans said. “Notably, as one ‘example’ of alleged domestic terrorism, the NSBA cited an instance in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a father angrily confronted members at a school board meeting about the heinous sexual assault of his daughter.”
On Monday, Mr. Smith asked the NSBA for a full retraction and apology for being called a domestic terrorist, according to ABC7 News.
The Washington Times has reached out to the NSBA for comment.
The NSBA board of directors said in its Oct. 22 memo to state affiliates that “we regret and apologize for the letter,” which was signed by Ms. Garcia and Mr. Slaven, not the board.
“There was no justification for some of the language included in the letter,” the board said. “We should have had a better process in place to allow for consultation on a communication of this significance. We apologize also for the strain and stress this situation has caused you and your organizations.”
The memo said the organization would be conducting a formal review of its procedures.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki struggled to answer questions from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy on Wednesday about President Joe Biden’s border crisis, including whether Biden has ever even been to the southern border.
“Just following up on this very basic, but very important question, you’re telling us that the DHS chief has the most recent numbers about how many of these Haitians under the bridge have been sent back and how many have been released into the U.S.,” Doocy said. “The DHS chief is telling us that he doesn’t know. So, who else can we ask?”
“You can certainly ask the Department of Homeland Security,” Psaki said.
“The chief says he doesn’t know,” Doocy responded.
“I am confident he wanted to have the most up-to-date numbers, and we will venture to get you those, I promise you, this afternoon,” Psaki claimed.
WATCH:
DOOCY TIME: “You’re telling us that the DHS chief has the most recent numbers about how many of these Haitians….have been sent back and how many have been released into the U.S. The DHS chief is telling us he doesn’t know, so who else can we ask?” pic.twitter.com/4rRipqGIbJ
“Is this an issue of not knowing, or is this an issue of a lot more people are being released into the U.S. than are being sent out?” Doocy pressed.
“That is certainly not the issue,” Psaki claimed without evidence. “First, I think it’s important to reiterate what I conveyed earlier about what the actual process is: Individuals are expelled under Title 42. If they can’t be expelled under Title 42, they are put into a removal process. If they’re put into a removal process, they’re either transported to an ICE facility or released with a legal document. That legal document includes fingerprints, photos, phone numbers, an address in the United States, and a background check.”
WATCH:
Doocy: “Is this an issue of not knowing or is this an issue of a lot more people are being released into the U.S. then are being sent out?”
“Has President Biden ever been to the southern border?” Doocy pressed.
“In his life?” Psaki asked.
“Yes,” Doocy answered.
“I will have to get — look back in my history books and check the times he’s been to the southern border. I’d be happy to,” Psaki claimed.
“We have been looking all morning, and we cannot find any record of him visiting the border as president, vice president, senator, or even as a concerned citizen,” Doocy responded. “Why would that be?”
“I can check and see when the last time or when he may have been,” Psaki claimed.
WATCH:
Doocy with the question of the day: “Has President Biden ever been to the southern border…We have been looking all morning and we can not find any record of him visiting the border as President, Vice President, senator, or even as a concerned citizen. Why would that be?” pic.twitter.com/JJF5NasUy6
“But tell me more about why you’re asking,” Psaki continued.
“Because this is a president who makes a point when there are disasters in this country, like a wildfire or a hurricane, to go and see for himself firsthand what the needs are of the local community so that he can have an informed POV to make policy,” Doocy answered. “Why doesn’t he do that — why doesn’t he go down to Del Rio, Texas, and see what’s going on?”
“Well, first of all, Peter, I think the situation at the border is the result of a broken system,” Psaki claimed. “And the president certainly relies on his experience.”
Psaki claimed that Biden relies on “all of his experiences and his time in office” to deal with the problem, even though she could not name a single time that Biden has ever been to the border.
WATCH:
Doocy: “This is a President who makes a point when there are disasters in this country, like a wildfire or hurricane…so that he can have an informed POV to make policy. Why doesn’t he do that? Why doesn’t he go down to Dell Rio, Texas and see what’s going on?” (6/6) pic.twitter.com/fFj04LkTA9
White House reporters are protesting after President Joe Biden’s handlers did their best imitation of screaming banshees as they blocked reporters from asking him questions during British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to the White House on Tuesday.
Johnson and Biden held a brief photo op in the Oval Office during which Johnson answered questions from the British media.
As he finished his answers, the race was on between White House staff yelling at reporters that it was time to leave and reporters trying to get in a question as Biden impassively observed the screeching scrum.
MOMENTS AGO: Staff orders news media to leave The White House as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks mid-sentence pic.twitter.com/MXg2m0o1hq
Ed O’Keefe of CBS News said he was able to ask Biden for his reaction to events at the nation’s southern border, where waves of illegal Haitian immigrants have swamped the region around Del Rio, Texas.
O’Keefe tweeted that he heard Biden say “violence is not justified.”
UPDATE: We have played back the tape and part of the president’s answer is decipherable. I asked for his response to the situation on the southern border and he says in part, “Violence is not justified.”
He is wearing a mask and there is shouting so nothing else is decipherable
The comment appeared linked to media claims that Border Patrol agents on horseback were using whips in their efforts to control the mass of migrants. In fact, they were holding the horses’ reins.
White House Correspondents’ Association President Steve Portnoy said editorial members of the media pool confronted White House press secretary Jen Psaki to make a formal complaint about the incident.
“The entire editorial component of the US pool went immediately into Jen Psaki’s office to register a formal complaint that no American reporters were recognized for questions in the president’s Oval Office, and that wranglers loudly shouted over the president as he seemed to give an answer to Ed O’Keefe’s question about the situation at the Southern Border,” he said in a statement, according to Fox News. “Biden’s answer could not be heard over the shouting.
“Psaki was unaware that the incident had occurred, and suggested that she was not in position to offer an immediate solution. Your pooler requested a press conference. Psaki suggested the president takes questions several times a week.”
Portnoy also addressed the incident on Twitter, writing Tuesday, “IN THE PRESIDENT’S OVAL OFFICE: Boris Johnson recognized two British reporters for questions. Joe Biden then signaled it was time for the press to leave, without taking any questions from his own press corps.”
The White House received a sound scolding from others for its tactics in protecting the president from the press.
NO ANSWER QUESTIONS BIDEN: How can the American people tolerate the president NOT taking nor answering questions from the press? A flagrant plan to keep him silenced to hide his severely weak cognitive state. The leader of the free world is faking it. https://t.co/lxI5Vpmmrk
He may not scream “fake news” but his aides have no problem screaming “let’s go, thank you!” That’s Biden White House code for “get the heck out of the Oval” https://t.co/Bgat0pkzt7
Prior to the shrieking denouement of the photo op, Johnson had asked Biden about allowing a question or two, according to the New York Post.
“Good luck,” Biden said.
The questions came from British reporters, one of whom asked about Northern Ireland and the other an American government employee who killed a British teenager in a car crash.
Johnson then interjected a comment, but before he finished speaking, reporters were given the bum’s rush.
The White House and federal health officials are standing by the decision to announce the plans for COVID-19 booster shots for many Americans back in August ahead of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) approval for the extra doses.
The announcement issued by eight top government doctors on Aug. 18 notes clear evidence the COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness decreases over time and reveals a plan to roll out booster shots in response. The Biden administration then laid out plans to begin giving booster shots to more Americans starting Sept. 20.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met Friday morning to discuss whether booster doses will be recommended. It voted 16–3 against providing the booster for most people, but recommended it for those over 65 years old and those at high risk. The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will hold a two-day meeting next week to make its recommendation.
The decision to make the announcement in August has raised questions of whether the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put undue pressure on the regulatory agencies to approve boosters by making the potential need for a third dose public.
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said Friday the announcement was made for two reasons: transparency and planning.
“If we saw a signal that indicated to us that protection was starting to wane and that additional shots might be required, that we would be transparent and open to the public about that,” said Vivek, adding, “You want to roll out booster shots to the population. You can’t flip a switch and make that happen overnight. There’s important planning that needs to take place.”
The White House also backed the August announcement this week when press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: “Our objective is to be prepared should all of this process move forward. It’s always been pending the approval of the ACIP and the FDA.”
The recent resignation of top vaccine officials within the FDA seems to suggest stark disagreement within the regulatory agency on the plan to roll out booster shots. Dr. Marion Gruber, the director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, and her deputy, Dr. Philip Krause, announced late last month their plans to leave the FDA in October and November.
The two were co-authors on a paper released this week in the scientific journal The Lancet saying that booster shots may only be appropriate for certain at-risk populations.
The article reads, “although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects … If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate.”
Officials say there is plenty of supply of boosters should they be approved.
The White House signaled Thursday its continued support of the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, following the release of documents detailing U.S.-funded coronavirus research in China.
Statements Fauci made to Congress have come under review following the release of more than 900 pages of documents, obtained by The Intercept, detailing the use of federal money by the U.S.-based health organization, EcoHealth Alliance, to fund bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Critics say the documents show Fauci misled Congress when he repeatedly asserted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has never funded the controversial gain-of-function (GOF) research at the Chinese lab.
When asked at Thursday’s White House Press Briefing if she would retract a previous statement that under “no circumstances” President Joe Biden would consider firing Fauci, White House press secretary Jen Psaki doubled down in support of the doctor.
“NIH has never approved any research that would make the coronavirus more dangerous to humans,” said Psaki.
“A reminder that there are previous and different coronaviruses than the existing one we’re battling, and the body of science produced by this research demonstrates that the bat coronavirus sequences published from that work the NIH supported were not the strain, the COV-2 strain. So, what [Fauci] said was correct.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, DC on Sept. 09, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The newly released documents include two grant proposals funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
One of which, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” totaled $666,422. It outlines a plan, led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, to “investigate the ecology, evolutionary biology, and transmission dynamics of bat coronaviruses at the human-wildlife interface.”
The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans, according to The Intercept.
In an email to The Epoch Times, an NIH spokesperson reiterated Psaki’s comment writing: “The research we supported in China, where coronaviruses are prevalent, sought to understand the behavior of coronaviruses circulating in bats that have the potential to cause widespread disease. The body of science produced by this research demonstrates that the bat coronavirus sequences published from that work NIH supported were not SARS-CoV-2. More importantly, because of similar research to understand coronaviruses, we were able to move swiftly to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and save lives.”
A sign is displayed behind Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) speaks to Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington on July 20, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds/Pool/Getty Images)
Fauci has sparred repeatedly with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) on the issue of GOF research during congressional hearings, including one instance in July where Paul suggested Fauci lied to Congress about whether the NIH funded GOF.
Fauci responded by saying he “never lied before the Congress” and that the NIH did not fund GOF research at the Wuhan lab. Fauci told Paul, “you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly.”
Paul seemed to see the release of documents by The Intercept as a victory when he tweeted out Tuesday: “I was right about his agency funding novel Coronavirus research at Wuhan.”
Paul’s tweet was a re-tweet of Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, who wrote: “The materials confirm the grants supported the construction—in Wuhan—of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.
“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”
The documents also shine a light on the theory that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic originated from a lab leak in Wuhan. The regime has faced criticism from the international research community and has been accused of engaging in a cover-up.
The Biden administration has forced out nearly a dozen Trump administration appointees from their positions on the advisory boards of U.S. military service academies, the White House confirmed on Wednesday.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a press briefing that the administration was seeking to ensure that the advisory board members were “qualified to serve” and “aligned” with President Joe Biden’s values.
Shortly afterwards, White House spokesman Chris Meagher said that all of the Trump appointees “either resigned” or have been “terminated from their position.” Eighteen members of military service advisory boards, including 11 officials appointed by former President Donald Trump, were asked to resign or be fired.
These included former Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway; the former president’s first White House press secretary Sean Spicer; Trump’s second national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster; and Russell T. Vought, a former White House Office of Management and Budget director under Trump.
“The president’s objective … was to ensure you have nominees and people serving on these boards who are qualified to serve on them and who are aligned with our core values,” Psaki said on Wednesday. “I will let others evaluate whether they think Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer and others were qualified or not political to serve on these boards.”
The duties of the boards are “to inquire into the state of morale and discipline, the curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods, and other matters relating to the academy which the Board decides to consider.”
Members typically serve the entirety of their three-year terms.
Newsmax reporter Sean Spicer is seen at the White House in Washington on March 20, 2020. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
Several of the officials posted screenshots on social media of the letters they said the White House sent them on Wednesday, asking that they either resign by 6 p.m. that day or be fired.
“On behalf of President Biden, I am writing to request your resignation,” White House Personnel Director Cathy Russell wrote to the appointees. “Please submit your resignation to me by the close of business today. Should we not receive your resignation, your position with the Board will be terminated effective 6:00 pm tonight. Thank you.”
Conway shared a letter addressed to Biden, saying that she wouldn’t resign from her advisory position at the Air Force Academy.
“Three former directors of presidential personnel inform me that this request is a break from presidential norms,” Conway wrote in her letter to the president. “It certainly seems petty and political, if not personal.”
Vought posted on Twitter a copy of the letter from Russell, saying he wouldn’t resign as a member of the Board of Visitors to the U.S. Naval Academy.
“No. It’s a three year term,” Vought wrote on Twitter.
“Instead of focusing on the stranded Americans left in #Afghanistan, President Biden is trying to terminate the Trump appointees to the Naval Academy, West Point and Air Force Academy,” Spicer said on Twitter.
Spicer said on his show on Newsmax that he and other appointees intend to file a lawsuit challenging the decision.
The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for additional comment.
The Biden White House granted the Chinese Communist Party-linked firm Huawei – which was crippled by Trump-era sanctions – licenses to purchase American auto chips, according to reports.
The decision follows the Beijing-backed tech firm hiring several lobbyists, including the brother of Joe Biden’s White House Counselor Steve Ricchetti and CNN guests who have pushed the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
“U.S. officials have approved license applications worth hundreds of millions of dollars for China’s blacklisted telecom company Huawei to buy chips for its growing auto component business, two people familiar with the matter said,” Reuters reported.
The reported approval follows a Trump-era crackdown on the telecommunications firm, which has extensive links to both the Chinese Communist Party. Labeled a “national security threat” by the Trump administration and a decades-long Chinese military collaborator by the U.S. Department of Defense, Huawei routinely provides the regime backdoor access to its products, networks, and devices.
Former President Donald Trump’s State Department also emphasized that the Chinese Communist Party uses Huawei as an “instrument not only for making money but also for pursuing the Party-State’s agenda and fulfilling its strategic objectives […] deeply enmeshed in Beijing’s system of oppression at home and its increasingly assertive strategic ambitions globally.”
The Biden White House, however, has taken a considerably softer approach to the company, as Reuters notes:
Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker, has been hobbled by trade restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on the sale of chips and other components used in its network gear and smartphones businesses. The Biden administration has been reinforcing the hard line on exports to Huawei, denying licenses to sell chips to Huawei for use in or with 5g devices. But in recent weeks and months, people familiar with the application process told Reuters the U.S. has granted licenses authorizing suppliers to sell chips to Huawei for such vehicle components as video screens and sensors.
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), who was the White House physician under former Presidents Obama and Trump, called on President Biden to resign during a Fox News interview amid the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying that Biden is “not cognitively prepared to be our president.”
“We’re looking horrible right now on the world stage, this is an absolute national embarrassment,” Jackson, who now represents Texas’s 13th Congressional District, said. “And instead of being out in front of this and talking about what’s going on, and what went wrong, and what the plan was, and what we’re gonna do next, Biden’s just been in hiding again, as he always has.
“Biden, once again, has failed us. He’s embarrassed as internationally,” Jackson continued. “And you know, honestly, it is time for him to leave. I’ve been saying this for a long time. I’ve been saying that he’s not, he’s not cognitively prepared to be our president. And this is just another example of his failure. And I think a lot of this is relevant to his cognitive ability. But he’s, he’s created a national security disaster for this country right now. And it’s time for him to move on and somebody else needs to do this job. He is not fit to be our commander in chief. It’s time for him to resign.”
During an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity in July, Jackson warned that Biden’s mental health was “only going to get worse.”
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), who was the White House physician under former Presidents Obama and Trump, called on President Biden to resign during a Fox News interview amid the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying that Biden is “not cognitively prepared to be our president.”
“We’re looking horrible right now on the world stage, this is an absolute national embarrassment,” Jackson, who now represents Texas’s 13th Congressional District, said. “And instead of being out in front of this and talking about what’s going on, and what went wrong, and what the plan was, and what we’re gonna do next, Biden’s just been in hiding again, as he always has.
“Biden, once again, has failed us. He’s embarrassed as internationally,” Jackson continued. “And you know, honestly, it is time for him to leave. I’ve been saying this for a long time. I’ve been saying that he’s not, he’s not cognitively prepared to be our president. And this is just another example of his failure. And I think a lot of this is relevant to his cognitive ability. But he’s, he’s created a national security disaster for this country right now. And it’s time for him to move on and somebody else needs to do this job. He is not fit to be our commander in chief. It’s time for him to resign.”
During an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity in July, Jackson warned that Biden’s mental health was “only going to get worse.”
“And I’ve been saying that it’s only going to get worse, and guess what? We’re watching that happen right before our eyes right now,” Jackson said. “And I’m at the point right now where, you know, I went from, you know, telling people, we should be concerned about what might potentially be going on, to now saying, hey, what is happening right now?”
“Where are the people in our academic medicine that were out there calling for President Trump to have a cognitive test? Where are these people?” Jackson added. “There’s something seriously going on with this man right now. And you know, I think that he’s either gonna, he’s either gonna resign, they’re going to convince him to resign from office at some point in the near future for medical issues, or they’re going to have to use the 25th Amendment to get rid of this man right now. There’s some serious stuff going on right now.”
