Anger over a $355 million civil judgment against former President Donald Trump has major investors reconsidering doing business with New York. Real estate mogul Grant Cardone said Wednesday his firm Cardone Capital will no longer underwrite New York real estate in the wake of Judge Arthur Engoron’s ruling Friday in a civil lawsuit brought by Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James that also prevents Trump from doing business in the state for three years.
“Immediately discontinue ALL underwriting on New York City real estate,” Cardone posted Wednesday on X. “The risk outweigh the opportunities at this time. Recent political decisions will continue to deteriorate price and benefit states that don’t have these challenges.
“Focus on Texas & Florida.”
Cardone is the second high-profile investor this week to state they will no longer invest in the state. “Shark Tank” host Kevin O’Leary said Monday he was “shocked” by the ruling.
“This award, I mean, just leaving the whole Trump thing out of it and seeing what occurred here … and I’m no different than any other investor, I’m shocked at this,” O’Leary told Fox Business. “I can’t even understand or fathom the decision at all. There’s no rationale for it.”
In a post Monday on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “Kevin O’Leary is so great, and tells it like it is. Businesses will flee NYC & State after the Corrupt Judge’s ruling!”
Cardone told Fox News on Wednesday when Engoron issued his ruling, “it was like, ‘Pencils down. Don’t touch it. Don’t go there.’ “
“We invest for 14,000 investors at Cardone Capital that depend on cash flow,” Cardone said. “And if I can’t predict the cash flow because of some ruling, or because of the migrants, or because I can’t evict people, New York City just keeps doing every single thing they can to sell real estate in Florida, not sell real estate in New York.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, speaks to the media as he leaves a closed-door House Republican meeting at the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 20, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, hinted Wednesday that the Department of Justice is operating under a double standard after it moved to indict an FBI informant who allegedly provided false evidence of corruption involving President Joe Biden, while letting the author of the debunked Steele dossier off the hook.
Special counsel David Weiss indicted Alexander Smirnov—who told the FBI in 2020 about alleged corruption involving Ukrainian energy company Burisma, Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden—on one count of making a false statement and on one count of creating a false and fictitious record.
Jordan appeared to suggest this as a double standard because Christopher Steele, a former operative of the Secret Intelligence Service, never got charged for the discredited Steele dossier, which was used to try and remove former President Donald Trump from office.
“I don’t believe that David Weiss had even approached the FBI, looked at this—this issue with this confidential human source,” Jordan said in an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo. “I’m not sure he had done that until he’s named special counsel. You know, they—they’ve had this investigation going for four and a half, five years. So we’ll have to see how that—that all shakes out.”
Smirnov told the FBI that Burisma executives had talked about paying millions of dollars to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden to guarantee the elder Biden would employ his political clout to safeguard the company’s interests. James Biden, the president’s younger brother, laughed off a suggestion that the Biden family’s Chinese business dealings could harm its reputation, citing “plausible deniability,” according to the transcript of a closed-door testimony released Friday. James Biden is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Feb. 21 about the family’s alleged influence-peddling scheme.
“What I do know is, again, with Christopher Steele, who gives false information about President Trump to the FBI, he continues to get paid,” Jordan added. “With this Smirnov guy, he gives false information to the FBI about the Biden’s and he gets indicted. Doesn’t seem to me to be the—the same standard. But again, we’ll have to wait and see.”
The FBI offered in October 2016 to pay Steele $1 million for proof to back up claims made in his dossier about then-candidate Trump’s 2016 campaign, FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified, according to CNN. Steele failed to “prove the allegations” and never received the $1 million.
Congress approved approximately $113.4 billion in spending related to the Ukraine conflict, while the government spent only $37.82 billion on Customs and Border Protection. (Photo: Luis Diaz Devesa/Moment/Getty Images)
From February 2022 to December 2023, Congress appropriated about three times as much money for its response to the conflict in Ukraine as the federal government spent on Customs and Border Protection. Congress approved approximately $113.4 billion in spending related to Ukraine conflict during that period, while the government spent only $37.82 billion on Customs and Border Protection.
“The U.S. Congress appropriated approximately $113.4 billion in supplemental appropriations for the U.S. response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine between February 2022 and December 2023, making the United States the largest single donor of assistance to Ukraine response,” said a report published Feb. 15 by the inspectors general for the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“This funding,” said the report, “supports security assistance for NATO and other partner nations; support for an enhanced U.S. military presence and activity in Europe; and the replenishment of U.S. military stocks transferred to the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF).”
“The funding,” it said, “also supports security, economic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and other countries affected by the war; support for the operations of U.S. government agencies involved in Ukraine response.”
“While the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) succeeded in recovering more than half of the territory that Russian forces had seized at the start of the conflict, the front line of the war in Ukraine has not moved significantly since the gains made in the fall 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive,” said the IG report.
“During the [last] quarter [of 2023], Russian forces continued to occupy most of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea oblasts,” said the report. “This lack of substantial progress on both sides belies the heavy fighting and high casualty rates during 2023.”
From February through September 2022, the U.S. government spent $12.063 billion on Customs and Border Protection, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. In all of fiscal 2023, which ended last Sept. 30, it spent $20.032 billion; and, in October through December, it spent $5.727 billion.
That means that from February 2022, when Russia started its all-out war against Ukraine, until December 2023, the U.S. government spent a total of $37.822 billion on Customs and Border Protection. That equals just 33.35% of the $113.4 billion that, according to the inspectors general, Congress approved “in supplemental appropriations for the U.S. response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine” during that same period.
So, what happened at the U.S. border during this period?
As this column has noted before, the number of individuals on the terrorist watchlist that the Border Patrol encountered trying to sneak across our southern border has steadily increased in recent years—rising from 15 in fiscal 2021 to 169 in fiscal 2023. So far in this fiscal year, there have been 58.
Which poses a greater security threat to the American people: Terrorists coming across our southern border or a war between Russia and Ukraine?
In 1793, when France declared war against Britain and the Netherlands, President George Washington saw no reason to involve the United States in that conflict. As this column has noted before, he promptly issued a Neutrality Proclamation.
“[T]he duty and interest of the United States require, that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers,” Washington declared.
He never backed down from this position. In his Farewell Address, Washington reiterated the principle of his Neutrality Proclamation.
“Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other,” Washington said. “Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.”
“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation,” said Washington. “Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
“Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course,” he said.
“Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation?” Washington said. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?”
What would Washington think about a Congress that invested more in a conflict between Russia and Ukraine than it invested in securing our own border?
In response to the New York City lawfare campaign against Donald Trump, Truckers are waging a boycott against the city. New York is fining the former President 355 Million dollars in a victimless crime. What will the criminal steal if there’s nothing on the shelves?
Truckers Plan to Stop Shipments to NYC in Response to Political Hack Judge Engoron’s $350 Million Ruling Against Trump and His Sons (VIDEO)
Truckers bravely exposed some of the worst COVID shutdowns in the world when they parked their trucks in Ottowa to protest the iron-fisted approach used against citizens by the Justin Trudeau regime. Truckers in the US showed solidarity for their Canadian neighbors and helped block shipping between the US and Canada in Detroit, Michigan. Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was being considered for Joe Biden’s VP, quickly threatened arrest for truckers who dared to block the Ambassador Bridge.
American truckers are now reportedly threatening to stop deliveries into New York City over the grotesque $350 million judgment against President Trump and his sons Don Jr. and Eric by partisan hack Judge Engoron on Friday. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become.
Most importantly, Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, explains how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, under the pretext of countering “misinformation,” rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online. The 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the “two most censored events in human history.” And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship-industrial complex.
The problem here is profound, with deep historical roots that go back to the aftermath of World War II and the creation of the CIA along with a host of U.S.-funded international institutions. But for our purposes, it suffices to understand the problem in its two most recent stages: the period from 1991 to 2014, and from 2014 to the present.
At the outset of internet privatization in 1991, free speech online was seen as an instrument of statecraft. At that time, says Benz, internet free speech was championed by the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments as a way to support dissident groups around the world in their efforts to overthrow authoritarian or disfavored regimes. It allowed the U.S. to conduct what Benz calls “insta-regime change operations,” in service of the State Department’s foreign policy agenda.
The plan worked really well. Among other things, free speech on the internet allowed U.S.-backed groups to assert control over state-run media in foreign countries, making it much easier to overthrow governments. The high-water mark of this way of deploying free speech online, Benz explains, was the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, when governments the Obama administration considered problematic — Egypt, Tunisia, Libya — all began falling in so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions. During that time, the State Department worked closely with these social media companies to keep them up and running in those countries, to be used as tools for protesters and dissident groups that were trying to circumvent state censorship.
But all of that changed in 2014 after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych and there was an unexpected pro-Russia counter-coup in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Later that same year, says Benz, when the people of Crimea voted to be annexed into the Russian Federation, “that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO.”
Thereafter, NATO, the CIA, and the State Department, together with the intelligence agencies of our European allies, did an about-face on internet free speech. They began instead to engage in what amounted to hybrid or information warfare to censor what they saw as Russian propaganda online. These efforts quickly spread beyond Ukraine and Eastern Europe to include the censorship of populist groups on the right that were emerging across the EU as a response to the Syrian migrant crisis.
By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016, explains Benz, NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot; the problem was spreading west from Central and Eastern Europe, and it had to be stopped. If it wasn’t, then Brexit might trigger the collapse of the entire EU, along with NATO and the entire constellation of supranational institutions that relied on NATO. The entire postwar architecture of institutions might come crashing down, all because the hearts and minds of the people were being swayed. So went the thinking, anyway. As far as the national security establishment was concerned, citizens were being swayed by Russian and far-right propaganda, and we can’t have that.
Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy." pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T
Under these circumstances, free speech was the last thing that could be allowed to flourish online. Censorship became the order of the day. As Carlson put it, these NATO and EU leaders identified their new enemy as democracy within their own countries — their own voters, in other words: “They feared that their people, the citizens of their own countries, would get their way. And they went to war against that.”
And then Trump was elected. From that moment — and indeed, as we know from the Russia-collusion hoax, even before Trump was elected in November 2016 — the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments, which had done so much to censor and weaponize the internet overseas, turned their attention to American citizens.
Initially, their predicate for domestic surveillance was Crossfire Hurricane, the fatuous notion that Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign and that Trump was a Russian asset. Once that collapsed, they needed another excuse to spy on and censor Americans who held disfavored opinions or who spread “misinformation,” to put it in the parlance of the censorship-industrial complex. To do that, they had to get around the prohibition against the CIA operating on American soil.
Since they couldn’t very well get away with openly spying on and censoring American citizens, they decided to house the bulk of their censorship operations inside the Department of Homeland Security, specifically in a part of DHS tasked with reducing and eliminating threats to U.S. critical physical and cyber infrastructure. Hence “domestic misinformation” — which is really just a term for opinions and information that the national security state doesn’t like or that run counter to State Department policy — was classified as an attack on “critical cognitive infrastructure,” and could therefore be censored. What it amounted to was an end-run around the First Amendment.
But even DHS couldn’t do this directly, so it outsourced online censorship operations to third parties like the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which consisted of four separate organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and a firm called Graphika. These private-sector “partners” did the nitty-gritty work of mapping out entire online networks of people who helped spread certain disfavored opinions, or what the censors called “false narratives.” Essentially they were deputized to censor Americans on behalf of the government.
It should come as no surprise that the people behind the EIP censorship network are leftists who hate Donald Trump, despise his supporters, and love censorship. For example, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos is the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He has compared “over half of the Republicans in Congress” to ISIS, called for Newsmax and OANN to be kicked off the air, and said, “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.” His views are typical among the managers of the censorship industry.
These managers and their partners inside the U.S. government went about their task with gusto, including a seven-month pre-censorship campaign ahead of the 2020 election. Any content challenging public faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes was flagged for violating new rules about “delegitimizing elections.” The censors, along with the government, had strong-armed the social media companies into adopting these rules, as documented in great detail last year with the release of the “Twitter Files.”
Indeed, the “Twitter Files” exposed a massive effort by the federal government to deputize Twitter and other social media companies to do what it could not, at least not legally. But in some ways, the “Twitter Files” just revealed the tip of the censorship iceberg.
We at The Federalist were caught up in all this during the 2020 election. As detailed in a recent lawsuit filed in December by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, the State Department illegally used a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” to censor Americans.
The State Department, through grants and product development assistance to private entities like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, was “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” according to the lawsuit.
In our case, it meant the federal government was using cutouts like NewsGuard to throttle our reporting and commentary on the 2020 election and its chaotic aftermath. Both the GDI and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) developed censorship tools that included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says. The State Department then gave these tools to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn to target disfavored media outlets, including The Federalist.
Through these and other methods, during the 2020 election cycle and the Covid pandemic, the government-backed censorship-industrial complex throttled millions of online posts, suppressing traffic to news sites, and undermined revenue streams for a host of outlets and influencers with disfavored or dissident views.
But this isn’t a thing of the past. All of the censorship infrastructure described above is still intact, still functioning, and is firing on all cylinders right now ahead of the 2024 election. If anything, the censorship-industrial complex is more robust than it was four years ago. Just last week, Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg boasted on CNBC that he currently has some 40,000 employees, which is nearly 60 percent of Meta’s entire workforce, tasked with censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Clegg also claimed Meta has spent about $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, on its censorship efforts — or what he euphemistically called “election integrity.”
What does that mean in practice? We don’t have to guess. Remember that Facebook infamously censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 at the behest of the FBI. With 40,000 employees now charged with censoring “hate speech” and ensuring “election integrity,” we can be fairly certain that if another Hunter Biden laptop story comes along this election cycle, it too will be quashed by the censors.
Why exactly is our government doing this? It’s not merely a partisan preference for ensuring Democrats stay in power, but something deeper and more insidious. To circle back to Carlson’s interview with Benz, it’s because the national security state has come to regard “democracy” not as the will of the people expressed through elections, but as the constellation of government agencies, government-backed institutions, corporations, media outlets, and nonprofit groups. Protecting democracy, in this view, means protecting these institutions from the people they were putatively meant to serve.
As Benz says at one point in the interview, “The relationship between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland has broken down, and that has played itself out in the story of the censorship industry.”
All of this seems rather complex and dense, at least in the details of how it works. But at root it’s very simple: Those who have power don’t want to be held accountable by the unwashed masses, by “populism,” and certainly not by the results of free and fair elections. They will not tolerate anyone, not even a duly elected president, going against the “interagency consensus” — that famous phrase of Alexander Vindman’s from the first Trump impeachment. They don’t think the people have that right, and they intend to use every tool they have to protect their power and privilege.
The stark truth is that if we don’t defeat and dismantle this censorship-industrial complex, it means the end of our republic and the rise of tyrannical military rule in the United States.
If you think that’s an overstatement, go watch the entire Benz interview and consider it in the context of what we have all seen play out in America over the past half-decade or so. There is no language alarmist enough to convey the gravity of what’s happening here. This is a hybrid war being fought mostly online but with real-world consequences that are every day becoming more obvious. We have to win the war to save our country, but we can’t even fight if we don’t know what’s happening, or how, or why.
About 15 minutes into the interview, I was again reminded of something I once heard the late, great Angelo Codevilla say in a lecture. He said our response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it took a “law enforcement” approach to terrorism that required the creation of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus to detect and stop terrorist attacks. Once the terrorist threat subsided, Codevilla explained, this surveillance apparatus would be turned on the American people and destroy the republic it was supposedly designed to protect.
That lecture was in 2013. Codevilla was right. It’s all happened exactly as he said it would. What happens next is up to us.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
A Catholic couple in Indiana is asking the Supreme Court to hold the state accountable for keeping their child out of their home after they declined to use his chosen name and pronouns. In M.C. and J.C. v. Indiana Department of Child Services, Mary and Jeremy Cox are appealing to the Supreme Court after they were investigated by Indiana officials for refusing to refer to their son using pronouns and a name inconsistent with his biological sex.
Becket is pursuing the case on behalf of the Coxes, arguing state courts allowed Indiana to keep the child from living in his parents’ home due to their disagreement with the child’s gender identity because of their religious beliefs. Notably, upon completing the investigation, the state determined the allegations of abuse against Mary and Jeremy were unsubstantiated, but still argued that the disagreement over gender identity was distressing to their child.
Lori Windham, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, told Fox News Digital that no parent should ever have to endure what Mary and Jeremy have been forced to go through.
“Keeping a child away from loving parents because of their religious beliefs—even when the state admits there was no abuse or neglect—is wrong and it’s against the law,” she said. “The Court should take this case and make clear that other states can’t take children away because of ideological disagreements.”
In 2019, Mary and Jeremy’s son told them that he identified as a girl, but in line with their Catholic religious beliefs that God created human beings with an immutable sex, male or female, they did not believe in referring to him using pronouns and a name inconsistent with his biology.
In addition, the Coxes believed their son was struggling with underlying mental health conditions, including an eating disorder, so they sought therapeutic care for both.
But, in 2021, Indiana officials began investigating the Coxes after a report found they were not referring to their child by his preferred gender identity, removing the teen from their custody and placing him in a “gender-affirming” home. Despite the unsubstantiated claims of abuse, they claimed the Coxes made the child’s eating disorder worse even though it worsened after he was removed and placed in a transition-affirming home.
The Indiana Department of Child Services declined a Fox News Digital request for comment, saying, “DCS does not comment on ongoing litigation.”
Protesters of Kentucky Senate Bill SB150, known as the Transgender Health Bill, cheer on speakers during a rally on the lawn of the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., March 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)
“This is what every parent is afraid of,” Mary and Jeremy Cox said in a press release. “We love our son and wanted to care for him, but the state of Indiana robbed us of that opportunity by taking him from our home and banning us from speaking to him about gender.”
“We are hopeful that the Justices will take our case and protect other parents from having to endure the nightmare we did,” they added.
When the case was first heard in trial court, Indiana officials argued the child “should be in a home where she is [ac]cepted for who she is” and restricted the Coxes’ visitation time to a few hours once a week, which barred them from speaking to him about their religious views on human sexuality and gender identity. Even though the court determined the Coxes were fit parents, it upheld the removal of their child which was later upheld by the appeals court.
“If this can happen in Indiana, it can happen anywhere,” Windhamn said. “Tearing a child away from loving parents because of their religious beliefs, which are shared by millions of Americans, is an outrage to the law, parental rights, and basic human decency. If the Supreme Court doesn’t take this case, how many times will this happen to other families?”
Acts of hostility against U.S. churches more than doubled in 2023, highlighting a trend that has accelerated in six years, according to a report published Tuesday by the Family Research Council. FRC documented at least 436 acts of hostility in 48 states and Washington, D.C., from January to November of last year, dwarfing the less than 200 incidents that took place in 2022, according to the annual report titled, “Hostility Against Churches.”
“There is a common connection between the growing religious persecution abroad and the rapidly increasing hostility toward churches here at home: our government’s policies,” FRC President Tony Perkins said in the release. “The indifference abroad to the fundamental freedom of religion is rivaled only by the increasing antagonism toward the moral absolutes taught by Bible-believing churches here in the U.S., which is fomenting this environment of hostility toward churches.”
California had the most incidents in 2023 with 33. Texas was next with 28. Hawaii and Wyoming had none.
FRC identified 915 acts of hostility against U.S. churches since 2018, the first year it began collecting data.
Most of the 2023 incidents came in the form of vandalism (315). Arson was next with 75 acts, which also included 20 bomb threats. Regardless of the incident type or motivation, the report’s author, Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at FRC Arielle Del Turco, said the effect is “religious intimidation.”
“They send the message that churches are not wanted in the community or respected in general,” Del Turco said in the release. “Our culture is demonstrating a growing disdain for Christianity and core Christian beliefs, and acts of hostility against churches could be a physical manifestation of that.
“Regardless of the motivations of these crimes, everyone should treat churches and all houses of worship with respect and affirm the importance of religious freedom for all Americans.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken—seen here on the final day of foreign affairs ministers’ meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Nov. 29—reportedly sent a memo urging staff to avoid using terms like “brave men and women” and “manpower.” (Photo: Omar Havana/Getty Images)
Someone needs to tell the Biden administration that George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” isn’t an instruction manual.
The administration, and the Left more broadly, has adopted a form of totalitarian “newspeak” that aims to make criticism of transgender orthodoxy unthinkable by eliminating gendered words from the English language. This echoes the totalitarian government of “Nineteen-Eighty-Four,” which systematically seeks to destroy words in order to render criticism of the government unthinkable.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly sent a memo directing staff at the State Department—the government agency that represents America around the world—to avoid using “problematic” terms that suggest human beings are male and female.
National Review’s Ryan Mills first reported Blinken’s Feb. 5 memo, “Modeling DEIA: Gender Identity Best Practices.” Blinken reportedly claims he sent the memo to “support an inclusive work environment.” The State Department told National Review that it does not comment on leaked documents, which appears to confirm the memo’s legitimacy. DEIA stands for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
Blinken instructs staff to use “gender-neutral language whenever possible,” warning that making assumptions about a person’s gender “can be problematic” and send a “harmful, exclusionary message.”
He recommends staff avoid terms such as “manpower,” “you guys,” “ladies and gentlemen,” and gender-specific words such as “mother/father,” “son/daughter,” and “husband/wife.” He suggests they use “labor force,” “everyone,” “folks,” “you all,” and terms such as “parent,” “child,” and “spouse” or “partner.”
In a hilarious twist of fate, Blinken’s memo urges staff to “avoid using phrases like ‘brave men and women on the front lines,’” in favor of “more specific language such as ‘brave first responders,’ ‘brave soldiers,’ or ‘brave DS agents.’” DS stands for diplomatic security.
Blinken appears not to have gotten the memo. On Nov. 11, just three months before sending the memo, he celebrated Veterans Day, posting on X, “we stand united in honoring the brave men and women who served our country.” How “problematic.”
This Veterans Day, we stand united in honoring the brave men and women who served our country. For your dedication, service, and the ultimate sacrifice for the nation, thank you. pic.twitter.com/skMxItShUn
Blinken’s slip-up illustrates the absurdity of attempting to root out biological truth from the English language. Human beings are male and female, and human reproduction requires male and female gametes. A small minority of people have disorders of sexual development, but these people do not represent a “third sex.” Most languages have three “genders”—male, female, and neuter, generally using the latter for inanimate objects. As the word itself implies, “neuter” represents the absence or removal of sex or gender, not a novel gender or sex.
Advocates of gender ideology aim to erase these biological facts from existence, acting as though banning the use of gendered terms will somehow magically change the way the world works. Ironically, they often do so in the name of “inclusivity,” even though telling people that they can’t tell the truth excludes all but the most ideologically pure acolytes.
The fact that Blinken himself used the forbidden term “brave men and women” underscores the ultimate futility of this brazen act of censorship. Blinken may instruct staff to use pronouns like “they/them” and “ze/zir,” but he knows that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl. If he truly believes the nonsense he spouted in this memo, he’ll have to watch his own language 24/7 to make sure he doesn’t slip up and mistakenly refer to his child-assigned-female-at-birth as his “daughter.”
The language police in Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” demonstrate the potential abuses of unchecked government power, but they also show the ultimate futility of attempting to silence all dissent from government propaganda. The government succeeds in silencing the main character, the dissenter Winston Smith, yet the cost of doing so—an invasive surveillance apparatus and a Ministry of Truth dedicated to erasing all evidence contrary to the government’s version of the past—illustrates how difficult it is to silence the truth.
The transgender movement’s attempts to silence dissent by rendering basic biology unthinkable are dangerous but ultimately doomed to failure—not because they are “too inclusive,” but because they exclude the one thing that ultimately matters: the truth.
Bill Wood demonstrates with an anti-Trump sign near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Liberal voters are expressing a sense of fatigue in their ongoing resistance against former President Donald Trump as the 2024 election approaches, The New York Times reported on Monday. Fury propelled voters to cast ballots against Trump in the 2020 presidential election and Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections, according to Democrats the Times spoke to. However, this fervor has diminished since then as the effort required to maintain it has been draining to these voters.
“Some folks are burned out on outrage,” Rebecca Lee Funk, founder of the Outrage, a progressive activism organization, told the Times. “People are tired. I think last election we were desperate to get Trump out of office, and folks were willing to rally around that singular call to action. And this election feels different.”
President Joe Biden is attempting to rally the anti-Trump vote by portraying the former president as an existential threat to democracy but the message is struggling to fuel Democrats thus far, according to the Times.
Trump was ahead of Biden by 4.3 points in the RealClearPolitics average in late January, which is his largest lead this cycle against the president. He never led Biden in the RealClearPolitics average during the 2020 election.
“Exhaustion is underlying the entire attitude toward our presidential election,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told the Times. “When you’ve got two people that are opposed by 70 percent of Americans who want a different choice, it creates frustration, anxiety, and discouragement.”
Americans across party lines are concerned about Biden’s age and some Democrats are failing to maintain their outrage against Trump as the sentiment has dragged on for the better part of a decade at this point, according to the Times.
Among American adults, 86% believe Biden is “too old” ahead of the 2024 election, compared to 62% who said the same of Trump, an ABC News/Ipsos survey recently found.
“We’re kind of, like, crises-ed out,” Pittsburgh security guard and Democrat Shannon Caseber told the Times. She described the likely Trump-Biden rematch as a “dumpster fire,” adding, “It’s crisis fatigue, for sure.”
“Any sense of urgency that we had with the 2020 election—I think it’s still there in the sense that no one wants Trump to be president, at least for Democrats, but it’s exhausting,” she told the Times.
Nearly 40% of Democrats selected “exhaustion” as their sentiment about the 2024 election compared to 26% of Republicans, according to a September Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
“We’ve dealt with so many emergencies these past few years: national emergencies, perceived emergencies, real emergencies—it’s just kind of like, that is not really a strong motivator for me anymore,” anti-Trump Los Angeles voter Mr. Dower told the Times. “A lot of us would like a more positive thing to motivate us … Not just purely, ‘Do this or else this bad thing is going to happen.’”
Over 85% of Republicans and conservatives said they were “extremely/very motivated” to vote in the 2024 election compared to 74% of Democrats and liberals, according to a recent CNN poll.
The Outrage did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
A project in North Dakota wins a $350 million Energy Department grant despite emitting three times more carbon dioxide than it captures and stores. Pictured: President Joe Biden talks about “investments” in green energy while flanked by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Oct. 19, 2022, at the White House. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Despite the Energy Department’s admission that the Tundra Project would emit three times more carbon dioxide than it captures, a department grant worth up to $350 million is going to this proposed carbon capture and storage endeavor. The venture is backed by two American companies, Minnkota and Kiewit, as well as Canada’s TC Energy and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
But Project Tundra, planned for North Dakota’s Oliver County, presents a climate problem of its own. The project could emit more greenhouse gases than it stores because of the energy it takes to transport the carbon dioxide.
Once the coal is used to produce energy, Project Tundra would employ the Fluor Corp.’s Econamine PG Plus system, which captures CO2 and sulfur hexafluoride using a fluoride-amine solvent, reheats the solvent, isolates the captured gases, and pumps the gases for storage one mile below ground.
However, according to the Institute for Energy Economic and Financial Analysis, Fluor’s system was tested on a slipstream 10 times smaller than the retrofitted North Dakotan plant. Upscaling the technology often leads to unanticipated problems, as previous tests of such facilities have shown.
Project Tundra would emit more greenhouse gases than it saves, but some carbon capture and storage facilities both have reduced emissions and provided marginal economic benefits.
For example, Petra Nova in Texas received $190 million in Energy Department grants to reinject captured carbon into oil reserves to store the gases and flush out the hydrocarbons. From 2017 to 2020, Petra Nova exchanged 3.9 million short tons of captured CO2 with 4.2 million barrels of oil while reducing total emissions by 33%.
Although carbon capture and storage facilities such as Petra Nova provide some natural resources to offset the retrofitting cost, Project Tundra would rely solely on government grants and federal “45Q” tax credits, which provide $85 per ton of CO2 permanently stored underground.
The initial estimated cost in 2022 of $1 billion for Project Tundra has risen to $1.9 billion. Despite the increased cost, it received authorization for a $150 million loan from the North Dakota Industrial Commission last July through the state’s Clean Sustainable Energy Authority. In December, Project Tundra secured the additional $350 million from the Energy Department.
Even with the infusion of more taxpayer funds, there is substantial worry that Minnkota customers also would have to finance this new carbon capture and storage facility. In some states, climate initiatives force citizens to pay almost 20% more for green energy projects at a time of unprecedented inflation.
Despite these increased costs, Project Tundra’s carbon capture goals actually have decreased. Originally, it was supposed to reduce carbon emissions by 95%. Today, the goals have decreased to a 74% reduction, a drop of 21 percentage points before construction of the facility has begun.
This decline relates to a troubling trend that appears when examining major carbon capture and storage projects. According to the National Energy Technology Library, 175 such CCS facilities are planned or operational in the U.S.
Among 13 flagship CCS facilities capturing roughly 55% of total carbon captured worldwide, only a few have been sustainable even with carbon taxes or subsidies. Others either failed or are performing 20% to 50% below original target rates due to unscalable capture technology.
Investors in Project Tundra will decide whether to move forward a little later in the year. Foreign and domestic firms are certainly free to invest in Project Tundra and other such pilot technology.
However, distributing more than half a billion in taxpayer dollars to a carbon capture and storage venture that emits three times the amount of carbon it sequesters is completely unwarranted anytime—especially when Americans are suffering through a period of unprecedented inflation caused by government spending.
The reason they, the Washington D.C. elite Uni-Party, hate Trump and will do whatever it takes to stop him and MAGA, is because he stands in the way of their communist-globalist agenda, which is ultimately more power and money for them and less money and power for We The People. Endless wars, open borders, mass censorship, the climate change hoax, anti-2nd Amendment laws, and digital currency are all designed to limit our individual freedoms and expand their power and control over us.
“The War Room Is Not Here to Unite the Country; The WarRoom Is Here to Fight Your Cultural Marxism, Your Globalism” – Steve Bannon Responds to Biden (VIDEO)
Steve Bannon shared a video of Joe Biden claiming to want to bring the country together yesterday. This is something impossible for Biden to do. You cannot steal an election and then call for peace. The only possible way would be to resign, admit you stole the election, and ask for forgiveness, which is something the Democrats will never do. Bannon responded to Biden with this: READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • New Report Shows 89,000 Babies Saved From Abortions Since Roe v. Wade Overturned • Donald Trump Supports Pro-Life Law to Protect Babies From Abortions • This Washington D.C. Abortionist is Committing Infanticide and He Must be Stopped • Alabama Supreme Court Rules Frozen Embryos are Unborn Children
More Pro-Life News • Five Babies Were Killed in Infanticides or Late-Term Abortions. They Deserve Justice • New Bill Would Stop Using Aborted Baby Parts for Research • Donald Trump Supports Ban on Late-Term Abortions, Protecting Unborn Babies • Pro-Life Group Slams NAACP for Supporting Abortion, Which Has Killed 20 Million Black Babies • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Joe Biden has the greatest mental acuity of any president in the history of the United States — at least that’s what the White House wants you to believe. Throughout the past week, regime-approved media and administration officials have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to gaslight Americans into believing Biden is as “sharp” and “vigorous” as he’s ever been, despite incident after incident showing he’s in mental decline. These laughable claims come in response to the release of the Hur report, which found that Biden mishandled classified documents but concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter” because the president “would likely present himself to the jury … as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” federal prosecutors claimed.
Despite the White House’s attempted spin, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that Biden’s mental faculties are rapidly waning. Recent polling has shown the vast majority of Americans (76 percent) have “major or moderate concerns” about the president’s overall physical and mental fitness.
While corporate media will never admit it, Biden can barely answer basic questions, let alone complete a sentence. So, to bring a little humor to your day, The Federalist has compiled a list of 30 questions likely to stump America’s befuddled commander-in-chief.
1. What day is it today?
2. What are the names of your grandchildren? (And how many do you have…?)
3. When is your birthday?
4. What is a woman?
5. Who’s the president of France?
6. What year is it?
7. When were you first elected to the Senate?
8. What are the main ingredients in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
9. What is aluminum foil made out of?
10. How many fingers are on your left hand?
11. What year did you fight Corn Pop?
12. What color is the White House?
13. What is the shape of the Oval Office?
14. What NFL team just won the Super Bowl?
15. What’s the opposite of up?
16. What numbered day in July does the Fourth of July fall on?
17. What’s the name of your vice president?
18. Why do Christians celebrate Easter?
19. Where do babies come from?
20. What does 5+5 equal?
21. What state were you born in?
22. What’s the difference between “effect” and “affect”?
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The door to mission work in the former Soviet Union began to open in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. In August 1991, communism was overthrown in the USSR, and the former Soviet republics became independent. The largest country of these, Russia (155 million), became a huge new mission field.
My name is Tom Ruhkala. I made contact with the formerly underground Baptist churches in Russia in the winter of 1992. We had lived in Tampere, Finland, since 1980, where my wife and I were Baptist missionaries with our three children. I am an evangelist and church planter. I made my first trip into St. Petersburg, Russia, in February 1992.
The Baptists were starving. They could only afford one or two small meals a day. And the winters are bitterly cold and long. We brought in humanitarian aid and Bibles and began working with those Baptist churches in western Russia. They were separate from the state Baptist churches, because they refused to follow the Soviet mandates controlling the teaching of children and did not let the KGB monitor their preaching services.
During the next 10 years, I was able to preach hundreds of times in western Russia and as far north as the Arctic Ocean. I got to know the Russian people well and established a rapport with the Russian Baptist Christian community. We had an open door to preach the Gospel in the schools, colleges, hospitals, prisons, community centers, everything from small house churches to large public buildings and outdoor tent meetings for evangelism in the summer.
The Russian people were curious, even eager, to hear what we had to say. For 70 years, the Bible was banned, and Christians were persecuted. In order to understand the Russian prison system, you have to understand the cruelty of a godless nation and how they treat their religious minorities.
Since the Bolsheviks took over in 1917, first under Lenin and later Stalin, the Soviet Union was officially an atheist state. All religion was carefully regulated and never allowed to grow. Our Russian Christian friends were unregistered with the state and, therefore, not allowed to attend university or learn a foreign language. Their pastors had all been arrested at one time or another, and many were sent to prison camps in Siberia. Many never returned. They were put in the regular prison population with hardened criminals.
I talked with Pastor Dimitri Minyakov, who was sent to one of the most remote prisons in Siberia for preaching the Bible. He was a political prisoner like Alexei Navalny and considered the most dangerous foe to the Soviet state. He was subjected to harsh conditions of labor with a reduced food ration. He almost didn’t survive.
Rev. Tom Ruhkala with Russian Baptist Pastor Dimitri Minyakov (Courtesy Tom Ruhkala)
The system is intended to break you. Minyakov’s children had to bring him food and clothing from way across Russia. These Christians were the persecuted minority, because they wanted to raise their families according to the Word of God. If they were caught holding an unsanctioned religious meeting, they were considered criminals, and their Bibles were confiscated, and the men sent to prison. Sometimes the authorities would even take their furniture and personal belongings and leave families destitute. In grade school, teachers mocked their children before their peers for refusing to wear the Communist Young Pioneer pins. Times were hard for the unregistered Christians.
Seventy years of atheism purged society of the knowledge of God. They learned to lie and cheat to get ahead, so much so, that corruption was the accepted norm in society. I remember my Russian brother telling me, “Never believe a Russian.” They are accomplished liars and thieves. It is a hellish society where there is no fear of God, no ultimate accountability for one’s actions.
The police were almost all corrupt and easily bought off. Women sold themselves for money. Families were destroyed through alcoholism, and there was little compassion for the children left on the street. I’d never seen drunken men before sleeping in the middle of the street with their little children trying to wake them up and pull them to the side of the road. In fact, sometimes it was the Mafia that created order in all this chaos as businesses paid them money for security.
I can remember preaching the Gospel of Jesus in a large circus tent where we held evangelistic meetings for two weeks in St. Petersburg. Older ladies came forward in tears crying, “Prosti minya!” “Forgive me! Forgive me!” They groaned in pain and cried out, saying they didn’t know. They had forgotten God. The gospel of Christ changed hardened hearts right before our eyes.
A certain Baptist pastor was sent to one of the Siberian prison camps for preaching the Gospel. He shared the Good News of Jesus, His death and resurrection, with his fellow inmates. One of the other prisoners, named Sergei, was a big, strong gang member. He was known to the prison guards for being extremely violent.
Rev. Tom Ruhkala is a retired Baptist missionary. He served in Finland for 40 years. He made multiple trips to Russia and traveled extensively throughout Western Russia. (Courtesy Tom Ruhkala)
One of those guards, named Andrei, was often tasked with keeping Sergei in a special cage. Then something strange happened. Sergei became quiet and obedient. He had heard the gospel from the Baptist pastor and had believed in Jesus. Andrei observed the change in behavior and thought it was Sergei’s new way to fool the guards. But Sergei’s good behavior continued, and he even began to share his testimony of God’s forgiveness through the blood of Christ.
This unexpected transformation made Andrei think that there might be some truth to this thing about Jesus. In the end, Andrei also accepted Christ as his Savior and was changed from the inside out. When I met them, they were Christian brothers and members of the same Baptist church in Volodarskaya, a suburb of St. Petersburg.
I was invited twice to the young men’s prison in Arkangelsk, the city in the far north on the White Sea of the Arctic Ocean. The prisoners were young men whose ages ranged from 14 to 22 years old. Warden Plakinov was the commandant and a major in the Red Army. The Russian prison system is run by the Red Army. These young men had committed every serious crime, from rape to murder. But there was hope that they would turn from their evil ways.
Rev. Tom Ruhkala preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to young men in a Russian prison (Courtesy Tom Ruhkala)
When I spoke from the Bible about the Lord Jesus, I had a captive audience in more ways than one. They listened with great interest that the Son of God died for sinners like them. Later in the prison yard, many of them came up to me thanking me for coming and caring for their souls. The second time I visited this prison, they remembered me, and many had eagerly embraced the message of salvation.
Warden Plakinov was the commandant and a major in the Red Army. The Russian prison system is run by the Red Army.
During those 10 years, I made over 35 ministry trips to Russia and Estonia. We always had to be careful about keeping our car in a secure compound called a “staianka” guarded by armed guards for the night. The streets were not safe. Once, when my wife and daughter came with me to St. Petersburg, they wanted to go outside for a walk. Our host pleaded with them not to go because it was very dangerous. We had to exercise caution at all times. People still managed to steal from us and swindle us and pass counterfeit bills to us.
America is becoming more of a godless society like Russia was in those days. Besides the Russian Christians that we worked with, we found that we were viewed as rich western targets to be exploited in every way. If the people appeared friendly, it was always to con us somehow. We learned that the average Russian on the street was an opportunist, willing to take advantage of anyone.
In a society where there is no fear of God, there is cruelty and suffering on every hand. America is sadly heading in that direction.
Rev. Tom Ruhkala is a retired Baptist missionary. He served in Finland for 40 years. He made multiple trips to Russia and traveled extensively throughout Western Russia.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Newsmax on Monday that the New York Court of Appeals should “unanimously” reverse the $355 million judgment levied against former President Donald Trump on Friday in the New York civil fraud trial brought by Attorney General Letitia James.
“Oh, my goodness, I can’t imagine if the Court of Appeals is anywhere near a straight court — that’s the highest court in New York — that this wouldn’t be reversed unanimously,” Giuliani said during an appearance on “Wake Up America.” “We’ve seen some Democrat courts now turn on their distortion of the Constitution. … [Judge Arthur] Engoron, for example, went so far that, I think, to reclaim its honor, the New York court system is going to have to reverse that case. The man acted like a … I don’t know what he acted like. He didn’t act like a judge, let’s put it that way.”
“Also, the number bears no relationship to reality,” he continued. “When you put a judgment against someone, there’s got to be some reality to it, to be upheld on appeal.
“Where did the number come from? Nobody lost money. Nobody had any claims against him. In fact, you might argue he should get money because he made money for the banks. So, maybe they didn’t pay him the right amount. He made up that number, literally pulled it out of his … you know.”
Trump will reportedly appeal the $355 million fine imposed by Engoron in New York’s civil fraud trial by challenging his definition of fraud. He was ordered to pay the massive fine after Engoron, a Democrat, found the Republican former president, The Trump Organization, top executives, and his adult sons liable for fraud.
Giuliani also commented on the election interference case against Trump in Georgia and whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will remain on the case after it was discovered she hired a special prosecutor with whom she was having an improper relationship.
“Not if Georgia wants to have a slim hope of being thought of as a state that has a fair justice system,” he said. “I know Wade. I spent five hours with him in the grand jury and walked away long before this incident saying what the heck did she hire him for? He doesn’t know what he’s doing. And that was not particularly adversarial.”
“He couldn’t ask a question that made any sense; his people had to help him out,” he continued. “So, my lawyer, Bob Costello, and I kept wondering, What’s this guy doing here? We didn’t think about what happened, but we both thought this is weird. In this important case they’ve got a guy that’s kind of … He didn’t seem comfortable even in a grand jury.”
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Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
A push by President Joe Biden’s administration for a two-state solution is falling on deaf ears because Israel is winning the war against Hamas and could end it in less than a month, retired Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt said Monday on Newsmax.
“The Israelis are winning this war right now,” Holt said on “Wake Up America.” “Even Egypt is backing off. And when you’re winning a war, you don’t tend to look at your ally and say, ‘Oh, we’ll stop fighting now.’ They’re going to victory, and then they’re going on their way to Hezbollah.”
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rejected the latest Hamas calls for a cease-fire as it prepares for a final invasion of Rafah, giving the terrorists until March 10 to release the remaining hostages, which are estimated to be in the range of 100 that have yet to be confirmed dead.
“I think what the March 10 thing looks like is: We’re going to continue to prepare the battle space and take care of as many civilians as we possibly can in advance of March 10; we’ll get people diverted, replace them as we prepare for this onslaught, because this is the final push,” Holt said of the Israel position.
“This is no more than the IDF just saying we’re going to take care of civilians, and while we do, you should reconsider your position on the hostages.”
Israel has long condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack and taking of hostages as human shields to use as leverage for its long-sought statehood, brought on by acts of barbaric terrorism.
“I’m not certain if Hamas has any ability whatsoever to do a thing about the hostages, whether they have control over them, whether they’re alive, and what that means, because the International Red Cross and other groups have not produced one ounce of proof of life,” Holt said. “But I think March 10 militarily means we’re going to close the curtain on this chapter of this war.”
Holt said Israel and world leaders have little fear in telling the Biden administration to stay out of their war decisions.
“Openly and on the world stage, you’ve got states now telling the United States and this administration in particular: ‘You’re not going to bully us; you’re not going to – just because you have a political problem at home with your own elections doesn’t mean you get to inflict political damage here in our country where we’ve endured horrific, barbaric attacks that are unprecedented in the modern age and that we would somehow reward the Palestinians’ – who three times by the way rejected a two-state solution, because they want a one-state solution where Israel is driven into the sea, in their words only,” Holt said.
“The administration, its academics, it’s nonpractitioners – it’s folks who know zero about warfare and geopolitics – are looking at polls here domestically with the Arab populations that they have lost for voters.
“They’ve certainly lost a lot of the Jewish vote, and they’re looking at how to fix it. And they want to fix it on the backs of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the Israelis, and it’s quite sick.”
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Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
President Joe Biden on Monday accused House Republicans of “walking away from the threat of Russia.”
While walking gingerly in the cold from Marine One and across the White House lawn with first lady Jill Biden, Biden briefly stopped to answer a couple of reporters’ questions, as seen on C-SPAN. After saying he’d be willing to meet with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Biden then was asked whether he would “go as far as to say that Alexei Navalny’s blood is on the hands of House Republicans right now?”
Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in prison Friday, Russia’s prison agency said. Biden later blamed Putin for Navalny’s death and warned there could be consequences, saying he was “not surprised” but “outraged” by the opposition leader’s passing.
Conservative lawmakers have refused to support aid to Ukraine until Biden and Democrats agree to stricter border security measures to deal with the migrant crisis.
The president on Monday said the GOP is “making a big mistake” regarding Russia.
“The way they’re walking away from the threat of Russia, the way they’re walking away from NATO, the way they’re walking away from meeting our obligations, it’s just shocking. I mean, they’re wild. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Biden said.
The reporter followed up to ask whether Navalny’s death might nudge the House Republicans to take up Ukraine aid.
“I hope so, but I’m not sure anything’s going to change,” he said.
Another reporter asked whether the president was looking into imposing sanctions against Russia following Navalny’s death.
“We already have sanctions but we are considering additional sanctions, yes,” he said before turning and walking toward the White House.
The Democrat-led Senate on Tuesday passed a $95.34 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Taiwan. A $66.3 billion bipartisan House bill to fund military aid to those countries and tighten border security was unveiled Friday.
ERA would create a ‘blank check’ to discriminate against people of faith, expert warns.
ERA would create ‘blank check’ to discriminate against people of faith, expert warns. The proposed amendment does not include any protections against religious discrimination.
The Minnesota Queer Caucus held a press conference Thursday to reaffirm their support for the so-called “Equal Rights Amendment” (ERA). Attempting to enshrine abortion and gender identity into Minnesota’s constitution, the ERA is a major priority for the Democratic majorities in Minnesota’s state legislature.
“We are going to pass the most inclusive, comprehensive ERA off the floor that we can this year,” said Rep. Leigh Finke, a transgender legislator and chair of the Queer Caucus. READ MORE…
Washington D.C. seems to be more concerned with Ukraine’s borders than the millions invading their own U.S. borders from countries around the world with military-age men, crime, Fentanyl killing our kids, human trafficking, and Terrorism threats. Nor are they troubled by the $33 trillion debt that has grown out of control.
Biden Border Crisis: Military-Age Syrian Men Illegally Cross Into San Diego (VIDEO)
Three Syrian men were encountered by Griff Jenkins of Fox News at the southern border. The invasion of illegals has spiked in Jacumba (east San Diego County) since Texas has locked up the border.
“Where are you from?” Griff Jenkins asked. “From Syria,” the illegal said. Syria is a country known for its ties to terrorism yet military-age men from this region are pouring over the border on Joe Biden’s open border invitation. San Diego County has seen an increase of illegals coming through the southern border. TGP previously reported that in one week’s time illegals from 73 different countries were reported in San Diego. READ MORE.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A male high school athlete who identifies as a female took first place in a girls’ high jump competition on Sunday, defeating all female athletes in the girls’ Division II high jump at the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association indoor track and field championship.
Maelle Jacques completed a 5-foot-2-inch jump to secure the top spot at the meet held at Plymouth State University, according to meet results. By comparison, 5-foot-8-inches was the lowest completed jump in the boys’ Division II championship meet. The winning jumper on the male side performed a 6-foot jump.
Jacques is a trans-identified Kearsarge Regional High School sophomore who competes as a girl. According to New Hampshire’s Track and Field Results Reporting System, the athlete is tied as the top-ranked high jumper in the division.
Women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines reacted to the news of Jacques winning the state title in a Wednesday post on X, which included a photo of the male athlete adorned with medals.
Maelle Jacques (male) won a state title in girls high jump this past weekend in New Hampshire
He won the women's category with a 5'2" jump. This is 10 inches lower than the best boys high jump at 6'0"
“Another less than mediocre man atop a women’s podium,” Gaines wrote. “He must be so proud.”
In a follow-up post, Gaines shared a video of Jacques performing the high jump that won him the state title.
Video of his high jump that won a girls state title. Watch as he celebrates when his female competitor doesn't clear the jump: pic.twitter.com/c4PUPP5wQH
The NHIAA, which oversees high school sports in the Granite State, did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.
NHIAA policies state that the association is “committed to providing transgender student-athletes with equal opportunities to participate in NHIAA athletic programs consistent with their gender identity.”
“Therefore, for purposes of sports participation, the NHIAA shall defer to the determination of the student and his or her local school regarding gender identification,” the NHIAA policy document reads. “In this regard, the school district shall determine a student’s eligibility to participate in a NHIAA gender specific sports team based on the gender identification of that student in current school records and daily life activities in the school and community at the time that sports eligibility is determined for a particular season.”
A school district is required to verify that a student is not merely pretending to identify as trans for the purpose of gaining an “unfair advantage” in competitive athletics. The athlete competed in four regular-season indoor track meets and won first place in the high jump each time, according to the results.
During a congressional hearing last year regarding the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX rule changes, Gaines stressed that inclusion cannot take priority over “safety and fairness” for women and girls. Under the proposed rule changes, policies that prevent males who identify as females from competing on female sports teams would be considered a violation of the law.
The women’s sports advocate also highlighted studies that have found trans-identifying male athletes typically maintain a biological advantage, on average, over women even after taking feminizing hormones. She also cited examples of female athletes suffering serious injuries after competing with men.
“There’s a place for everyone to play sports in this country,” the former University of Kentucky swimmer said. “But unsafe, unfair and discriminatory practices towards women must stop. Inclusion cannot be prioritized over safety and fairness.”
Gaines competed against and tied trans-identifying athlete Lia (Will) Thomas during the National College Athletics Association championships in 2022. Thomas competed on the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania for three years before he began competing on the women’s team.
Despite tying with the male athlete in the 200-yard freestyle race for fifth place, she said she was denied the trophy during post-meet photos. According to Gaines, an NCAA official told her that it was necessary for Thomas to hold the trophy for photo purposes.
“It was clear to me, my teammates, and my competitors that they had reduced everything we had worked for our entire life to a photo-op to validate the feelings and the identity of a male,” Gaines said.
A Christian flag flies below the flag of the United States. | (Photo: Pixabay / SESpider)
Apparently, any Christian who wants to see just laws grounded in biblical principles and Christian morality enacted in America these days is now a scary “Christian nationalist,” according to secularists.
As Dr. Mark David Hall explained in his white paper on Christian Nationalism for the Freedom Center’s Theology of Politics series, “Christian nationalism is an amorphous concept that is primarily used to tar Christians who are motivated by their faith to advocate for policies that critics don’t like.”
Now, many politically engaged conservative Christians either don’t like — or outright reject — the label of “Christian nationalism.” Many argue that it’s unhelpful, too vague, too provocative, ill-defined, etc. That’s a debate for another day, and there are reasonable arguments on both sides.
But what I think all Christians need to understand is that what the secular opponents of Christian nationalism mean when they use that phrase is just “conservative Christians who vote their values.” One of the main ways they hide this, and simultaneously try to shame and silence conservative Christians, is by accusing them of “lusting for power.”
In this article, I am going to show you, from the primary sources, how these radical secularists do this and then provide a biblical critique of their rhetorical trick.
Because what these activists masquerading as “scholars” want is nothing less than to silence politically engaged conservative Christians. We can’t let that happen. Because what America needs now, more than ever, is even more Christians voting their values and bringing their faith into the public square. That’s not a quest for power, it’s just biblical faithfulness.
Power politics
So, what exactly is this form of “Christian nationalism” that threatens to “destabilize democracy” in the United States? In Taking America Back for God, sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead define Christian nationalism as a “cultural framework — a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems — that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.” Their 2020 book sought to expose the “underlying causes and social consequences” of Christian Nationalism by “systemically and empirically [examining] Christian nationalism and its influence in American social, cultural, and political life.”
The empirical basis for their data was built on a six-question survey that asked respondents to weigh in on statements ranging from “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” to “the federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state” to “the success of the United States is part of God’s plan.” Depending on how strongly a respondent agreed or disagreed with the statements, Perry and Whitehead would categorize them as either “Rejectors, Resisters, Accommodators, or Ambassadors” of Christian nationalism.
Interestingly, Perry and Whitehead separate what they understand as Christian nationalism from American “civil religion.” While they appear generally favorable towards civil religion, which they call “America’s dominant self-understanding and ethical lodestar,” they argue that the Christian nationalism they expose — and is dominant in our society — “includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.”
And here is where their book, despite any useful data it may contain, begins to go astray. Bundled into their working definition of “Christian nationalism” are foundational and incontrovertible expressions of biblical Christian ethics, such as opposition to abortion and homosexual marriage. Furthermore, front-loaded into the book’s first main argument, “that understanding Christian nationalism and its consequences is essential for understanding much of the polarization in American popular discourse,” is the blatantly political assumption that desiring an enforced physical barrier along the United States southern border is proof-positive of “xenophobia.”
They ask, ‘Why do so many Americans advocate so vehemently for xenophobic policies, such as a border wall with Mexico?” The answer, according to Perry and Whitehead? Christian nationalism.
This is hardly an empirical statement of fact; rather, it is an explicitly political opinion. So we see that, even in the earliest pages of their work, they begin to allow “apparent personal biases [to] color their assessment of what constitutes Christian nationalism,” in the words of Dr. Andrew Walker, professor of ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as quoted in a book review in the Oxford Academic Journal of Church & State.
These biases work their way out onto full display in their chapter “Power.” They argue that “Americans who adhere most strongly to Christian nationalist ideals have political interests primarily in mind. Religious interests rank second if they rank at all.”
But what are the indicators of political interest superseding religious motivations? It’s support for Donald Trump, a desire for a pro-American immigration policy that properly vets refugees, opposition to abortion, and support for the Second Amendment, and so forth. Ultimately, they dismiss any rational biblical basis for these positions and conclude that “Christian nationalism is all about power.”
Similar allegations abound in Katherine Stewart’s book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Stewart argues that:
“For too long now America’s Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated. Most Americans continue to see it as a cultural movement centered on a set of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, preoccupied with symbolic conflicts over monuments and prayers. But the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative. It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.”
Here again is that word: power. As she examines the rise of the Moral Majority and their opposition to abortion, support for traditional (biblical) gender roles, etc., it is all viewed through the lens of power. In an interesting admission of disinterest at best and ignorance at worst, Stewart acknowledges that she will “leave it for theologians to decide whether their views are consistent with Christian teachings.”
One would think that the question of whether or not widely held Christian positions on relevant political issues are theologically informed, or even constrained, by Christian theology would be of primary interest to a chronicler of Christian nationalism. Because if so, then said positions are a matter of faithful discipleship, not power politics. But Stewart shows no interest in answering this question.
When describing a visit to a local Baptist church in Unionville, North Carolina, Stewart recounts that a local pastor running for political office gave a speech in which he argued that “God’s straightforward message for women is that they should ‘submit’ to their husbands” and “oppose abortion.” In the next paragraph she notes that “these views may seem far from mainstream … Yet [his] outlook is far from the fringe within Christian nationalist circles.”
This same message — equating pro-life positions, opposition to homosexual marriage, and support for biblical views on gender roles and marriage with a dangerous and destructive Christian nationalism — runs through the entirety of Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s recent critique of white evangelicalism and “militant masculinity.” In the book, Du Mez argues that “Christian nationalism … is linked to opposition to gay rights and gun control … and traditionalist gender ideology.”
Critiquing Billy Graham’s message that “the stability of the home was key to both morality and security,” Du Mez casts Graham’s teaching as a “patriarchal interpretation” that “reflected the more reactionary tendencies of early-20th-century fundamentalism.” But Graham took it one step further, Du Mez argues, claiming that he “added a new twist … by wedding patriarchal gender roles to a rising Christian nationalism.”
Apparently, from Billy Graham to your faithful Baptist grandfather, the overriding feature of politically active evangelicalism is a thirst for power made manifest in “Christian nationalism” as a means to achieve certain desired political and cultural dominance.
A biblical critique
What Perry and Whitehead, Stewart, and Du Mez — and all those who echo their characterizations and critiques of what they define as Christian nationalism — fail to address is the stubborn fact that the Bible either explicitly constrains Christians to adopt, or provides more than reasonable support for, the political positions they see as being weaponized for the sake of maintaining power.
In Walker’s review of Taking America Back for God, he provides a critique that applies to all three of the books considered here:
“Their arguments about abortion, same-sex marriage, gender complementarity, and a host of other issues in Christian ethics that they deem elements of Christian nationalism belie the fact that Christians who are pro-life, for example, are not so out of reasons of Christian nationalism but for reasons of creedal orthodoxy.”
Over and against Perry, Whitehead, Du Mez, Stewart, and company, I want to underscore that Christians must unapologetically and wholeheartedly love and embrace God’s created order, vision, and commands for human flourishing — and work to manifest that vision, as faithfully as they can, in their national environment.
This means Christians must embrace a pro-life political posture as an unavoidable outworking of Exodus 20:7, Leviticus 18:2, Leviticus 20:1-5, and Psalm 139:13-16.
Christians must also acknowledge God-given binary gender reality and embrace complementarian gender roles because of the clear teachings of Genesis 1:26-27, Genesis 2:21-25, 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, Ephesians 5:22-33, and 1 Timothy 2:12.
Christians must oppose homosexuality and transgenderism as sin because we are constrained by Genesis 1:26-27, Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:24-27, and 1 Corinthians 6:9-11.
Because each of these issues touches on the sacred nature of the Imago Dei and the marriage of our spiritual and physical realities, I argue that to subvert the priority of these concerns to lesser political interests, whether economic, environmental, or even related to the tone and tenor of the political candidate at hand, is to fail to exercise moral judgments in the political realm as guided by Scripture.
Conclusion
Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the “Christian nationalism” that contemporary secular critics deride — that is, Christians who advocate for laws that protect life, honor marriage, and acknowledge biological reality both through the national culture and the laws of the land — is nothing more than faithful Christians seeking to steward their God-given political talents in America in such a way as to love God and their neighbor.
As Jason Mattera wrote in his excellent article for the Standing for Freedom Center, “The Canard of Christian Nationalism”:
“Those throwing the biggest temper tantrums regarding Christian nationalism are doing so because they despise any push by Christians to ‘reproduce’ other biblically grounded Christians in the areas of law, politics, and culture.
The real target isn’t Christian Nationalism, whatever that is. Or even ‘people of faith’ in politics. The real target is conservative Christians in politics.”
You don’t have to adopt, or even like, the term “Christian nationalism” to be able to see that this is what’s really going on.
These secular scholars aren’t trying to silence “Christian nationalists” — they are trying to silence you, the average conservative Christian who reads and believes your Bible and then votes accordingly.
Don’t let them. Fight for the unborn. Fight for marriage. Fight for just laws grounded in Christian morality. And fight for your freedom to live out the one true Christian faith in the public square. Do that — and then don’t care what they call you.
William Wolfe is a visiting fellow with the Center for Renewing America. He served as a senior official in the Trump administration, both as a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon and a director of legislative affairs at the State Department. Prior to his service in the administration, Wolfe worked for Heritage Action for America, and as a congressional staffer for three different members of Congress, including the former Rep. Dave Brat. He has a B.A. in history from Covenant College, and is finishing his Masters of Divinity at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Follow William on Twitter at @William_E_Wolfe
In response to reports that Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison, your rulers in Washington want you to be angry.
Your corrupt government, which is at this very moment working to put your Christian neighbors in prison for protesting abortion, wants you to be very angry at a foreign leader nearly 6,000 miles away so you won’t pay attention to what your leaders are doing to you in your own backyard.
Your government, which wants to disarm you and prevent you from defending yourself, wants you angry at a leader who has no power over you whatsoever. The government that censors you and lies to you about viruses it helped create wants your focus elsewhere. The government that sold your economy off to China and then destroyed the value of your currency wants you mad at someone else.
The government that banned you from going to church and then tried to fire you for not taking its worthless “vaccine” wants to whip you into a frenzy over literally anything else other than what it’s doing to you right now.
The government that opened your borders to invasion and looked the other way as violent crime enveloped your cities wants you to believe that crime on another continent is the only crime you should care about. And that the borders of a country half a world away are the only borders worth protecting.
America’s government would never treat its citizens like foreign tyrants do, you’re supposed to keep comfortably believing. It would never imprison an individual whose life and knowledge suddenly became a huge liability to the regime. And it would definitely never kill him in prison, wipe the video cameras that recorded his death, then claim he committed suicide.
And the American government would certainly never try to ban its chief political opponent from the ballot, try to bankrupt him with frivolous lawsuits, or attempt to imprison him to prevent him from winning an election. The American government would never tap attorneys appointed by the president’s hand-picked lawyers to absolve the president of a whole host of crimes committed by the president and his family.
On top of that, the American government would never imprison thousands of political dissidents for protesting against the regime’s history of rigging elections or refer to them as a bunch of filthy kulak wrecker insurrectionists. And you better believe the American government would never ally with corrupt oligarchs who owe their fortunes to monopolies protected by the government to censor the government’s political opponents to prevent them from talking about the corruption of the family running the government.
They’re manipulating you, gaslighting you, and trying to emotionally blackmail you into going along with their nonsense because those things are only supposed to happen in other countries. Stop letting them get away with it.
Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
On Thursday, Special Counsel David Weiss unsealed an indictment charging a longtime confidential human source (CHS) with making false statements. But it wasn’t Christopher Steele, the CHS who threw the country into turmoil for four years by peddling the fraudulent Steele dossier. Former CHS Stefan Halper, who helped further the Russia-collusion hoax, also wasn’t the subject of the indictment. Nor was CHS Rodney Joffe, who sought to destroy the Trump presidency with the Alfa Bank hoax.
No, it was the CHS who, on June 26, 2020, told his handler that the owner of Burisma claimed he had paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes in exchange for protection from being investigated by the Ukrainian prosecutor.
Thursday’s indictment revealed the name of that CHS for the first time — Alexander Smirnov — and alleged that Smirnov’s aforementioned statements, which were memorialized in an FD-1023 report, were false.
False Statements Allegations
Since news first broke of the existence of that FD-1023 last summer, House Republicans championed the CHS’s reporting as further evidence of Biden family corruption, while Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley focused on the Department of Justice’s apparent failure to investigate the veracity of the FD-1023 as part of their probe into Hunter Biden’s business affairs.
Weiss’s indictment presents a powerful case that Smirnov lied on June 26, 2020, when the CHS told his handler he’d had conversations with Burisma executives in 2015 and 2016: An investigation by Weiss’s team concluded Smirnov did not meet the Burisma executives until March 1, 2017, meaning the earlier conversations could not have occurred. The indictment references introductory emails that established the alleged accurate timing of events, as well as travel records of other individuals, which contradict Smirnov’s claims. That evidence, the special counsel’s office concluded, was sufficient to charge Smirnov with making false statements and creating a false record.
If Smirnov lied to his handler in June 2020 about his conversations with Burisma executives, the indictment is well deserved. Not only did Smirnov’s alleged lies violate the federal criminal statute that prohibits false statements, but they also proved especially damaging to society as a whole by interfering in the House’s impeachment inquiry.
The harm here is not merely that investigators wasted time chasing apparently false leads, or that Hunter and Joe Biden suffered from Smirnov’s allegedly false accusations, but also that Smirnov’s lies may overshadow the other unrelated — and substantial — evidence implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal, rendering it more difficult to obtain justice.
What About Other CHS Lies?
Smirnov, however, is but one CHS whose alleged lies have created havoc for our country.
Consider the lies peddled in the Steele dossier to our FBI. CHS Christopher Steele represented his sourcing as trusted, reliable, and well-placed when it was none of those things. That dossier led to the DOJ obtaining four unconstitutional surveillance warrants against an innocent American, resulted in our government spending millions investigating a hoax, and impaired the functioning of the Trump administration. Yet even after Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham referred the matter to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation, Steele reaped no consequences for the lies he sowed.
Then there was CHS Stefan Halper who, according to an electronic communication, told the FBI the Russian-born Svetlana Lokhova had “latched” onto Michael Flynn at a Cambridge academic gathering and then, after the dinner, “surprised everyone and got into [Flynn’s] cab and joined [Flynn] on the train ride to London.” Halper, however, never attended the dinner, so he could not have witnessed any of the happenings, and the supposed cab ride was completely fictional.
The FBI’s summary of his debriefing also memorialized Halper claiming Trump volunteer Carter Page asked Halper during a July 18, 2016, meeting whether he “would want to join the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser.” In an exclusive interview with The Federalist in 2020, however, Page, “unequivocally denied asking Halper ‘to be a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign.’”
Add to those two sources Rodney Joffe, the CHS who helped concoct the Alfa Bank hoax. That fairytale went that the Trump organization had a secret communication channel with Putin operating through the Russian-based Alfa Bank. Joffe peddled that tale to the FBI and, with the help of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, pushed the CIA to investigate this second Russia hoax just as the Trump presidency was beginning.
While the double standard is infuriating, assuming the allegations against Smirnov are true, charges are eminently justified. Also justified? Impeaching David Weiss.
Thursday’s indictment established that no one in U.S. Attorney Weiss’s office investigated Smirnov’s serious claims against Hunter and Joe Biden until after Grassley released a copy of the FD-1023 on July 20, 2023. It would be over a month later before FBI investigators would speak with Smirnov’s handler about the FD-1023. And, according to the indictment, it was not until Sept. 27, 2023, that the FBI interviewed Smirnov. That timeline confirms the incompetence of Weiss in handling the investigation into Hunter Biden because in October 2020, Weiss’s Delaware office received “a substantive briefing” concerning the FD-1023 from the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, then-Attorney General William Barr tasked then-Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady with screening evidence related to Ukraine. Last year, Brady testified before the House Judiciary Committee about that screening process, including how his team handled the FD-1023.
Brady explained the Pittsburgh FBI office sought to corroborate anything they could from the FD-1023, but he noted that his office lacked the authority to use a grand jury for the screening process. Brady’s team nonetheless succeeded in obtaining travel records of the CHS and “interfaced with the CHS’s handler about certain statements relating to travel and meetings to see if they were consistent with his or her understanding.”
What they were able to identify, Brady testified, was consistent with the CHS’s representations in the FD-1023. Additionally, the CHS was a longtime source for the FBI and considered “highly reliable” — something the indictment confirms given his length of service and the government authorizing Smirnov to commit crimes while operating as a CHS.
Brady further testified that his office had vetted the FD-1023 and the CHS “against known sources of Russian disinformation.” To conduct that analysis, his team worked with the Eastern District of New York. “It was found that it was not sourced from Russian disinformation,” Brady told the House Judiciary Committee.
Then when his team finished screening the FD-1023 and other evidence related to Ukraine, a Pittsburgh assistant U.S. attorney briefed Weiss’s office on the evidence, explaining how they had screened it, and noting they concluded it had “some indicia of credibility” and should be investigated further.
Thursday’s indictment of Smirnov suggests the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office sat on the FD-1023 for nearly three years, until after Grassley released a copy to the public. Instead, Weiss’s office offered Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea agreement, which fell apart only because the federal judge assigned to the case inquired into the strange arrangement that appeared to give Hunter Biden blanket immunity in a pretrial diversion agreement — something she had never seen before.
Special Counsel Weiss clearly knows how bad this looks because, in the indictment, he tried to spin the assessment into the FD-1023 as being closed out by the Pittsburgh FBI office, implying that is why his office did not conduct any further investigative steps.
“By August 2020, FBI Pittsburgh concluded that all reasonable steps had been completed regarding the Defendant’s allegations and that their assessment, 58A-PG-3250958, should be closed,” Weiss wrote. “On August 12, 2020, FBI Pittsburgh was informed that the then-FBI Deputy Director and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States concurred that it should be closed.”
However, as former Attorney General Barr has made clear numerous times, the Pittsburgh office was merely charged with screening the evidence, and the investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.”
“On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
No further investigation occurred, however. That alone should justify Weiss’s removal — and not merely for what he failed to do, but also because the country can’t trust that his special counsel team will follow all the leads, including the ones we don’t know about.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Ford’s top boss, CEO Jim Farley, said Thursday that the company will “think carefully” about where it builds future vehicles following the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike. The strike came with a heavy price for the Detroit automaker. For one, the company’s Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville was the first to shut down when thousands of UAW union members walked off the job. It was a major play in the UAW’s strike last fall against Detroit’s Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
During the Wolfe Research Global Auto Conference in New York, Farley said the strike had been “an extremely difficult moment” for the company, noting Ford had “prided itself on not having a strike since ’70.”
Ford CEO Jim Farley attends a Red Bull Racing unveiling of the team’s new Formula One car during a launch event in New York City on Feb. 3. (ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
He continued by saying that Ford, unlike its competitors, has 57,000 UAW workers and that 100% of its trucks are made by such workers in the U.S.
“Our competitors do not do that. They went through bankruptcy, and they moved production to Mexico and other places. So it has always been a cost for us. And we always thought it was the right kind of cost,” he said.
The moment Ford’s plant shut down was a “watershed moment.”
“Really, our relationship has changed,” Farley told the conference. “Does this have business impact? Yes.”
A “UAW On Strike” sign is held by a picketer outside the General Motors Co. Spring Hill Manufacturing plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, on Oct. 30, 2023. (Kevin Wurm/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
In a statement to The Associated Press, UAW President Shawn Fain argued that Ford should “find a CEO who’s interested in the future of this country’s auto industry.”
“Maybe Ford doesn’t need to move factories to find the cheapest labor on Earth,” he said. “Maybe it needs to recommit to American workers.”
It was the first time a president appeared alongside striking workers in modern history.
The work stoppage cost the industry billions of dollars, and the Big Three all ratified record contracts with the union in order to get production lines running again.
A Harvard professor said that “all hell broke loose” and he was forced to go out in public with armed security after he published a study that found no evidence of racial bias in police shootings.
During a sit-down conversation with Bari Weiss of The Free Press, Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer discussed the fallout from a 2016 study he published on racial bias in Houston policing. The study found that police were more than twice as likely to manhandle, beat or use some other kind of nonfatal force against blacks and Hispanics than against people of other races. However, the data also determined that officers were 23.8 percent less likely to shoot at blacks and 8.5 percent less likely to shoot at Hispanics than they were to shoot at whites.
When Fryer claimed the data showed “no racial differences in officer-involved shootings,” he said, “all hell broke loose,” and his life was upended.
Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Roland Fryer speaks during the annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York, New York. ((Photo by Ramin Talaie/Corbis via Getty Images))
Fryer received the first of many complaints and threats four minutes after publication.
“You’re full of s—t,” the sender said.
Fryer said people quickly “lost their minds” and some of his colleagues refused to believe the results after months of asking him not to print the data.
“I had colleagues take me to the side and say, ‘Don’t publish this. You’ll ruin your career,'” Fryer revealed.
The world-renowned economist knew from comments by faculty that he was likely to garner backlash. Fryer admitted that he anticipated the results of the study would be different and would confirm suspicions of racial bias against minorities. When the results found no racial bias, Fryer hired eight new assistants and redid the study. The data came back the same.
After the report was published, Fryer lived under police protection for over a month. He had a seven-day-old daughter at the time and went shopping for diapers.
Former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who made headlines for refusing to say if genocide of Jews was against Harvard policy during a congressional hearing, was also accused of multiple accounts of plagiarism. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with the armed guard. It was crazy. It was really, truly crazy,” he said.
Fryer, who became the youngest tenured Black professor at Harvard at age 30, was suspended for two years from the university in 2019 after he allegedly engaged in “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature. He continues to deny the allegations. At the time, then-Harvard dean Claudine Gay claimed Fryer’s research and conduct with other employees “exhibited a pattern of behavior” that failed to meet expectations within the community.
“The totality of these behaviors is a clear violation of institutional norms and a betrayal of the trust,” she said.
Gay resigned from her position as Harvard president in early January after widespread plagiarism allegations and criticism of her testimony to Congress, where she failed to fully clarify whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s policies against bullying and harassment.
Weiss, referencing Gay in her conversation with Fryer, asked him if he believes in karma.
A New York judge ruled Friday against Donald Trump, imposing a $364 million penalty over what the judge ruled was a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated the former president’s wealth. Trump also was barred from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for three years.
Judge Arthur Engoron issued his decision after a 2½-month trial that saw the Republican presidential front-runner bristling under oath that he was the victim of a rigged legal system.
The stiff penalty was a victory for New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, who sued Trump over what she said was not just harmless bragging but years of deceptive practices as he built the multinational collection of skyscrapers, golf courses and other properties that catapulted him to wealth, fame and the White House.
Trump’s lawyers had said even before the verdict that they would appeal.
In a statement Friday, lawyer Alina Habba said this: “This verdict is a manifest injustice – plain and simple. It is the culmination of a multi-year, politically fueled witch hunt that was designed to ‘take down Donald Trump,’ before Letitia James ever stepped foot into the Attorney General’s office. Countless hours of testimony proved that there was no wrongdoing, no crime, and no victim.
“Given the grave stakes, we trust that the Appellate Division will overturn this egregious verdict and end this relentless persecution against my clients.”
James sued Trump in 2022 under a state law that authorizes her to investigate persistent fraud in business dealings. The suit accused Trump and his co-defendants of routinely puffing up his financial statements to create an illusion his properties were more valuable than they really were. State lawyers said Trump exaggerated his wealth by as much as $3.6 billion one year. By making himself seem richer, Trump qualified for better loan terms, saved on interest and was able to complete projects he might otherwise not have finished, state lawyers said.
Even before the trial began, Engoron ruled that James had proven Trump’s financial statements were fraudulent. The judge ordered some of Trump’s companies removed from his control and dissolved. An appeals court put that decision on hold.
In that earlier ruling, the judge found that, among other tricks, Trump’s financial statements had wrongly claimed his Trump Tower penthouse was nearly three times its actual size and overvalued his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, based on the idea that the property could be developed for residential use, even though he had surrendered rights to develop it for any uses but a club.
Trump, one of 40 witnesses to testify at the trial, said his financial statements actually understated his net worth and that banks did their own research and were happy with his business.
“There was no victim. There was no anything,” Trump testified in November.
During the trial, Trump called the judge “extremely hostile” and the attorney general “a political hack.” In a six-minute statement during closing arguments in January, Trump proclaimed “I am an innocent man” and called the case a “fraud on me.”
Trump and his lawyers have said the outside accountants that helped prepare the statements should’ve flagged any discrepancies and that the documents came with disclaimers that shielded him from liability. They also argued that some of the allegations were barred by the statute of limitations.
The suit is one of many legal headaches for Trump as he campaigns for a return to the White House. He has been indicted four times in the last year — accused in Georgia and Washington, D.C., of plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, in Florida of hoarding classified documents, and in Manhattan of falsifying business records related to hush money paid to porn actor Stormy Daniels on his behalf.
On Thursday, a judge confirmed Trump’s hush-money trial will start on March 25 and a judge in Atlanta heard arguments on whether to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from his Georgia election interference case because she had a personal relationship with a special prosecutor she hired.
Those criminal accusations haven’t appeared to undermine his march toward the Republican presidential nomination, but civil litigation has threatened him financially.
On Jan. 26, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him in 2019 of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. That’s on top of the $5 million a jury awarded Carroll in a related trial last year.
In 2022, the Trump Organization was convicted of tax fraud and fined $1.6 million in an unrelated criminal case for helping executives dodge taxes on extravagant perks such as Manhattan apartments and luxury cars.
James had asked the judge to impose a penalty of at least $370 million.
Engoron decided the case because neither side sought a jury and state law doesn’t allow for juries for this type of lawsuit.
Because it was civil, not criminal in nature, the case did not carry the potential of prison time.
James, who campaigned for office as a Trump critic and watchdog, started scrutinizing his business practices in March 2019 after his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress that Trump exaggerated his wealth on financial statements provided to Deutsche Bank while trying to obtain financing to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.
James’ office previously sued Trump for misusing his own charitable foundation to further his political and business interests. Trump was ordered to pay $2 million to an array of charities as a fine and the charity, the Trump Foundation, was shut down.
Trump incorporated the Trump Organization in New York in 1981. He still owns it, but he put his assets into a revocable trust and gave up his positions as the company’s director, president and chairman when he became president, leaving management of the company to sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr.
Trump did not return to a stated leadership position upon leaving the White House in 2021, but his sons testified he’s been involved in some decision making.
Engoron had already appointed a monitor, retired federal judge Barbara Jones, to keep an eye on the company.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
President Joe Biden’s policies arguably strengthened Iran’s proxies in the Middle East, including the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Pictured: Thousands of Houthi supporters, holding Yemeni and Palestinian flags, gather Feb. 9 at Sebin Square to stage a solidarity demonstration with Palestinians and protest in Sanaa, Yemen, against Israel’s efforts to eradicate the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip. (Photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Anadolu/Getty Images)
Not only has the president empowered Iran by relaxing former President Donald Trump’s sanctions on the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism, but he has also empowered Iran’s proxies through various geopolitical moves that make war more likely. Biden is not alone; previous administrations have directed funds to ostensible U.S. allies in the region, funds that likely contribute to the proxies’ forces.
Biden’s relaxation of Trump-era sanctions netted Tehran at least $77 billion, some of which Iran directs to proxies across the region. Yet the president’s other policies also emboldened Iran’s proxies, who have attacked Israel, U.S. forces, and global shipping since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel.
“We have enabled and fed our enemies and constricted our friends,” Rob Greenway, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told The Daily Signal. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
Greenway, who orchestrated Trump’s sanctions against Tehran, warned that Biden’s policies have “strategically appeased Iran.”
Benham Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow focused on Iran at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told The Daily Signal that Iran has propped up proxies that represent “a state within a state,” exploiting instability in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen to “benefit from the largesse of U.S. policy.”
Taleblu notes that this poses a “philosophical problem” for America, which funds Iraq and Lebanon, even though it cannot prevent those governments from funneling that money to Iran’s proxies in their countries. Iran excels at “indigenizing the capabilities” of its allies by partnering with groups that have already arisen in another country.
Neither the White House nor the State Department provided comments for this article.
1. The Houthis
The Iran-backed Houthi movement, a Shiite militant group in Yemen, adopted the slogan “God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” The Houthis took control of Sanaa, Yemen’s capital city, in 2014, pushing the country’s then-president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, to the east. Hadi and his successor, Rashad Muhammad al-Alimi, enjoy support from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
During the Trump administration, the U.S. provided billions of dollars worth of arms to the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis in Yemen. Trump vetoed a bill to block this funding in 2019. Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, designated the Houthis a terrorist group in 2021.
Under Biden, however, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reversed the terrorist designation in a move the administration framed as intended to “alleviate or at least not worsen the suffering of the Yemeni civilians who live under Houthi control.”
In February 2021, Biden announced: “We are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”
The Houthis have repeatedly fired on international commercial shipping since mid-November, mostly targeting vessels with commercial ties to the U.S., Britain, or Israel. These attacks have prompted many companies to reroute ships to avoid the Red Sea, which offers a quicker, more direct route for global trade; the companies take the longer, more expensive route around Africa.
Since Jan. 11, U.S. and British planes have carried out retaliatory strikes across Yemen to respond to the Houthi attacks.
Greenway, the Heritage expert, warned that “Yemen aid is also invariably being diverted to the Houthis.”
He said the terrorists “create the humanitarian crisis, demand aid, and divert aid,” in a vicious spiral.
Last month, the Biden administration moved to redesignate the Houthis as a terrorist group, though it stopped short of the harsher designation Pompeo had used. Trump’s secretary of state had put the Houthis on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list, which bars members’ entry into the U.S. and enables the freezing of any Houthi assets in the U.S., among other things.
Blinken, by contrast, announced on Jan. 17 that the State Department would consider the Houthis a “specially designated global terrorist group” after a 30-day delay in which the U.S. would try to facilitate “humanitarian assistance” to Yemenis.
Edem Wosornu, the United Nations’ aid operations director, warned Wednesday against designating the Houthis as a terrorist group, saying the move may harm “Yemen’s already fragile economy.”
Rich Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who previously directed a Trump White House program to counter Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, called Blinken’s forthcoming sanctions on the Houthis “toothless,” noting that they include “five broad general exemptions.”
Goldberg mentioned Saudi Arabia’s truce with Iran last year, which he said involved the Saudis “basically buying off the Houthis and the Iranians in exchange for the Houthis stopping drone strikes.”
Goldberg told The Daily Signal that the Biden administration sent Saudi Arabia many signals that it wouldn’t back Riyadh when facing Iran’s provocations.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman “decided there is no U.S. support, the U.S. is pumping money into threats attacking Saudi Arabia, so they need to cut their own deal with the Iranians to protect themselves,” Goldberg said.
The Saudis are pouring an “unknown amount” of money into Yemen, he said.
Ben Taleblu, the other senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, warned that the Houthis have “some of the most damning” missile capabilities of any Iran proxies. He noted that the Houthis launched the medium-range Burkan-3 ballistic missile for the first time in 2019.
2. UNRWA and Hamas
Biden restored funding that may have directly contributed to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, when Hamas terrorists brutally massacred at least 1,200 Israelis, including raping women and murdering babies, and taking hundreds hostage.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East portrays itself as an aid organization, but the Israel Defense Forces provided evidence that 12 UNRWA employees took part in the Oct. 7 massacre. The U.S., Germany, Britain, and seven other countries cut off UNRWA aid after the revelations surfaced late last month.
Israel revealed Sunday that Hamas operated a tunnel right underneath UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City. UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini insisted that the U.N. agency “did not know what is under its headquarters.” He said the agency left its headquarters Oct. 12, five days after Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel.
In 2014, however, part of the parking lot at the UNRWA headquarters began to sink, likely because of a Hamas tunnel underneath, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“No one talked about what was causing the collapse,” a former UNRWA official said, according to the Journal. “But everyone knew.”
U.N. Watch’s Hillel Neuer revealed what he claimed to be a chat group with 3,000 UNRWA teachers celebrating the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Neuer testified that U.N. leaders “could not possibly have been shocked that UNRWA employees are implicated in terrorism,” because his organization sent them reports in 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2021.
In 2018, the State Department under Trump announced that the U.S. would stop contributing to UNRWA, noting that the U.S. had shouldered a “very disproportionate share” of the burden and criticizing the U.N. relief agency’s “business model and fiscal practices” as “simply unsustainable.”
In 2021, the Biden administration announced plans to provide $235 million to UNRWA, restoring part of the approximately $360 million that the U.N. agency would have expected if the U.S. had not cut off funding in 2018.
It remains unclear how much of this money went to Hamas or to UNRWA employees who may have helped Hamas on Oct. 7.
“Hezbollah is a threat 10 times larger than Hamas, with long-range capabilities, precision-guided munitions, [unmanned aerial vehicles], and the ability to inflict far more damage on Israel than we’ve seen Hamas do even on Oct. 7,” Goldberg, the senior adviser at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told The Daily Signal.
Hezbollah started a war on July 12, 2006, when militants captured two members of an Israel Defense Forces patrol inside Israel and killed the other three. Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel as a diversion. After Israel responded with rockets, a ground invasion, and a blockade, the United Nations negotiated a cease-fire.
The United Nations approved, and both Israel and Lebanon agreed to, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which, among other things, requires Hezbollah to disarm and withdraw its forces north of the Litani River. That river is about 19 miles north of Israel’s border with Lebanon.
The U.S. has spent billions of dollars over decades funding both the Lebanese Armed Forces and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, a “temporary” U.N. peacekeeping body established in 1978. Resolution 1701 states that the U.N.’s Lebanon force must disarm Hezbollah south of the Litani River, yet to this day, Hezbollah has armed forces south of that river.
“The return on investment is quite negative for the U.S. taxpayer in Lebanon these last two decades,” Goldberg said. “The threat has metastasized to such a degree that Israel is almost deterred from action in a full-scale attack on Hezbollah, and potentially deterred from action against Iran and its nuclear program.”
According to leaks following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, Biden warned Israel against launching a preemptive strike against Hezbollah. “Now we see Hezbollah’s ramped up,” Goldberg noted.
Since Oct. 7, Hezbollah has attacked Israeli outposts along the Lebanese border and launched rockets into Israel. The Jewish state has evacuated tens of thousands of civilians from Israeli villages and towns near the border with Lebanon, fearing an Oct. 7-style attack from the north. Israel has demanded that Hezbollah abide by the terms of Resolution 1701.
A Biden envoy, Amos Hochstein, has been negotiating in the region. According to Axios’ Barak Ravid, earlier this month Hochstein presented a peace proposal to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The proposal wouldn’t require Hezbollah to move its forces north of the Litani River but only 5 to 6 miles from the Israeli border, with the Lebanese Armed Forces filling in.
Hezbollah has already moved most of its elite Radwan force north of this line. Israel would have to pull forces away from the border and move its jets out of Lebanese airspace. Western powers also would send money to Lebanon to sweeten the deal for Hezbollah.
Goldberg denounced the plan as a “bag of magic beans.” He noted that the plan doesn’t explain how fighters who live in southern Lebanese towns would be forced to leave, or how Israel could verify that missiles had been moved from under schools, homes, and hospitals in southern Lebanon.
“Who would ensure Hezbollah can’t come in to attack Israel?” Goldberg asked. “It will be the LAF and UNIFIL. That’s ludicrous after 17 years of teaching us that they will not do anything to stop Hezbollah.”
He was referring to the Lebanese Armed Forces and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has “taken effective political control of the country,” so the LAF does not represent any sort of check on Hezbollah, Goldberg said.
“In exchange for giving Israel no sense of security, there reportedly will also be a massive bailout of the Lebanese economy, and an Israeli commitment to negotiate giving up territory on the Lebanese border,” he said. “It’s completely insane.”
Israel needs the ability “to give residents of evacuated communities enough confidence to return to their homes” and to “prevent an Oct. 7-type invasion,” Goldberg argued, and this proposed deal doesn’t come close to meeting those goals.
The U.S. has generously funded the Lebanese army for years, with a slight, unexplained pause during the Trump administration.
“A lot of the money we give to the government of Lebanon goes to Hezbollah,” warned Greenway, director of Heritage’s Center for National Defense.
Goldberg noted that Congress knew the UNIFIL funding wasn’t deterring Hezbollah and yet continued to approve it, anyway.
“Going back to 2007, every year members of Congress wrote letters about the enforcement of [Resolution] 1701,” Goldberg said, specifying that many lawmakers demanded answers from the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Biden. “It has been a bipartisan failure for years.”
Goldberg noted that the Trump administration attempted to “start enforcing congressionally mandated Hezbollah sanctions” and that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the Justice Department reopened investigations into the terrorist group that were closed during the Obama administration.
“You haven’t heard anything on cracking down on Hezbollah since Joe Biden took office,” Goldberg said.
Hezbollah released videos in July 2023 showing how the terrorist group prepared for a multipoint invasion to kill and capture Israelis in Israel, Goldberg noted, adding that these videos “look like Oct. 7, only they’re set in Northern Israel, not on the Gaza border.”
“Hamas executed a plan that Hezbollah created,” he said.
4. Iran-Backed Militias in Iraq
The U.S. launched airstrikes on Feb. 2 targeting al Hashd al Shabi, an Iran-linked militia and part of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, following a Jan. 28 drone attack on the military base Tower 22 in Jordan that killed three American service members.
Heritage’s Greenway explained that the government of Iraq “owns” the Popular Mobilization Forces, but Iran effectively controls them. The U.S. has supplied $10 billion or more each year to Baghdad on semimonthly cargo flights carrying massive pallets of cash, drawn from Iraqi oil sales proceeds deposited at the Federal Reserve, The Wall Street Journal reported. It remains unclear how much of this money goes to Iran-backed militias.
Greenway warned that the Popular Mobilization Forces—an umbrella organization of about 67 diverse militias—are often “bigger than the army, and most groups are under Iran specifically and are designated terrorist groups.”
He also argued that when the U.S. allows Iraq to send money to Iran in exchange for natural gas, these electricity payments constitute a form of money laundering. (The State Department in November extended a waiver allowing Iran to sell electricity to Iraq and use the money to purchase goods overseas.)
As of 2022, Iraq was the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, producing 4.61 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Yet Iraq imports electricity from its eastern neighbor.
“A major oil producer importing electricity? It’s the stupidest thing in the world,” Greenway previously told The Daily Signal. “Iraq deliberately decides they need electricity and it won’t bring in countries to improve its electric grid.”
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella term for pro-Iran Shiite Islamist insurgents in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the Jan. 28 attack on the military base. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is an ally of the Popular Mobilization Forces.
Taleblu, the expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, explained that the Iran-backed militias in Iraq started the Islamic Resistance in Iraq as an “umbrella group designed to further hinder attribution” for attacks.
When Islamic Resistance in Iraq takes responsibility for attacks like the one Jan. 28, it prevents the U.S. and allies from identifying which specific militia carried out the attack, Taleblu said. He described the resistance group as a “proxy for the proxies” of Iran.
For his part, Goldberg noted that the Trump administration attempted to start “squeezing Baghdad to stop financing these militias using U.S. cash.” But its efforts largely failed, he said, due to opposition from within the Defense Department, which sees the militias as allies against the Islamic State terrorist group.
Biden’s Vision for Iran
Why does Biden seem intent on helping Iran? Goldberg attributed the Biden administration’s policy to a balance-of-powers mentality that sees U.S. intervention as the major threat to Middle East peace.
“There is a worldview that in order to create an equilibrium in the Middle East that avoids conflict, you have to empower Iran to be an equal of the Sunnis and Israel,” he said. “Once they have a mutually assured destruction going on, the U.S. can pull out of the Middle East.”
“It’s a completely extremist, nonserious, ideologically fringe worldview, driven by the belief that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not an enemy but an enemy we have created,” Goldberg said.
If Biden wants to avoid a wider war in the Middle East, he needs to take action to deter Iran’s proxies. Unfortunately, the president’s policies seem to have done the opposite so far, perhaps even by design.
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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report Thursday, February 15, 2024
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Top Stories • Five Full-Term Babies Were Brutally Slaughtered in Abortions. Where’s the Outrage? • Joe Biden Uses Old Law Targeting KKK to Put Pro-Life Americans in Prison • Actor Kevin James Condemns Euthanasia: “Only God Pulls the Plug on Me” • American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Admits Abortion Pill Reversal Process Works
More Pro-Life News • New Hampshire Defeats Amendment to Make Killing Babies in Abortions a Constitutional Right • Federal Court Dismisses Satanists’ Lawsuit Against Idaho Abortion Ban • Mother Bravely Refuses to Abort Her Twin Daughter • Politifact Admits Pro-Life Laws Don’t Put Women in Prison • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis takes the stand as a witness. (AP)
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis took the witness stand Thursday and forcefully pushed back against what she described as “lies” about her romantic relationship with a special prosecutor during an extraordinary hearing over misconduct allegations that threaten to upend one of four criminal cases against Donald Trump.
A visibly upset Willis, who originally fought to stay off the witness stand, agreed to testify after a previous witness said her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade began earlier than they had claimed. The district attorney’s testimony grew heated under questioning from a defense attorney who’s trying to remove Willis from Trump’s 2020 election interference case, with the prosecutor at one point raising papers in front of her and shouting: “It’s a lie!”
“Do you think I’m on trial? These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial no matter how hard you try to put me on trial,” Willis told defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant. At another point, Willis said, “Merchant’s interests are contrary to democracy.”
Willis is expected to return to the witness stand on Friday to continue to answer questions.
The probing questions for Willis and for Wade, who testified before her, underscored the extent to which the prosecutors who pledged to hold Trump accountable are themselves now under a public microscope, with revelations about their personal lives diverting attention away from Trump’s own conduct and raising questions about the future of the case as Trump vies to reclaim the White House.
The revelation of Willis and Wade’s romantic relationship has provided an opening for Trump and his Republican allies to try to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Willis’ case, which the former president has characterized as politically motivated. Other Republicans have cited them in calling for investigations into Willis, a Democrat who’s up for reelection this year.
Trump and his co-defendants have argued that the relationship presents a conflict of interest that should force Willis off the case. Wade sought to downplay the matter, casting himself and Willis as private people.
“There is nothing secret or salacious about having a private life,” Wade said. “Nothing.”
Robin Yeartie, a former friend and co-worker of Willis, testified earlier Thursday that she saw Willis and Wade hugging and kissing before he was hired as special prosecutor in November 2021. Wade and Willis both testified that they didn’t start dating until 2022, and that their relationship ended months ago.
During personal and uncomfortable testimony that spanned hours, Wade also admitted to having sex with Willis during his separation from his estranged wife, even though he had claimed in a divorce filing that wasn’t the case. That admission and Yeartie’s testimony together threaten to undermine the prosecutors’ credibility as they prepare for trial in the case accusing Trump and others of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
If Willis were disqualified, a council that supports prosecuting attorneys in Georgia would find a new attorney to take over who could either proceed with the charges against Trump and 14 others or drop the case altogether.
Willis and Wade’s relationship was first revealed by Merchant, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, a former campaign staffer and onetime White House aide. Merchant has alleged that Willis personally profited from the case, paying Wade more than $650,000 for his work and then benefiting when Wade used his earnings to pay for vacations the pair took together.
Wade, who took the stand after the judge refused to quash a subpoena for his testimony, testified that he and Willis traveled together to Belize, Aruba and California and took cruises together, but said Willis paid him back in cash for some travel expenses that he had charged to his credit card.
“She was very emphatic and adamant about this independent, strong woman thing so she demanded that she paid her own way,” Wade said.
Wade was pressed by defense attorneys to answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Willis, prompting objections from the district attorney’s office. The hearing began with lengthy sparring between lawyers over who must answer questions.
Willis’ removal would be a stunning development. Even if a new lawyer went forward with the case, it would very likely not go to trial before November, when Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee for president. At a separate hearing in New York on Thursday, a judge ruled that Trump’s hush-money criminal case will go ahead as scheduled with jury selection starting on March 25.
In a court filing earlier this month, Willis’ office insisted that she has no financial or personal conflict of interest and that there are no grounds to dismiss the case or to remove her from the prosecution. Her filing called the allegations “salacious” and said they were designed to generate headlines.
McAfee said during a hearing Monday that Willis could be disqualified “if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one.” He said the issues he wants to explore at the hearing are “whether a relationship existed, whether that relationship was romantic or nonromantic in nature, when it formed and whether it continues.” Those questions are only relevant, he said, “in combination with the question of the existence and extent of any personal benefit conveyed as a result of the relationship.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
U.S. forces intercepted an Iranian vessel packed with missiles and drones bound for Houthi rebels, the Pentagon said Thursday, according to The Washington Times. The seizure, on Jan. 28 in the Red Sea, marked another instance of Iran’s support for the Houthis in their maritime attacks. The operation, reminiscent of a previous January mission where two Navy SEALs perished during the boarding of an Iranian ship, resulted in the discovery of over 200 packages containing various weapons and equipment, including ballistic missile components, explosives, and anti-tank guided missile launcher assemblies, along with other weapons and equipment.
“This is yet another example of Iran’s malign activity in the region,” said Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, emphasizing Iran’s violation of international law and its continuing threat to maritime security.
The Houthis, backed by Iran, have launched numerous attacks using drones and missiles on ships since October, it says in retaliation for events related to the Israel-Hamas conflict. While the U.S. has been targeting Houthi operations in Yemen, including intercepting drones and missiles, the use of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) poses a new challenge. Rear Adm. Marc Miguez described USVs as an “unknown threat” with potentially lethal capabilities, highlighting the difficulty in gathering intelligence on Houthi weaponry. The Houthis’ aggression toward commercial and military vessels has escalated, prompting continuous patrols and interception efforts by the U.S. Navy in the region, Stars and Stripes reported.
The Houthis “have ways of obviously controlling them just like they do the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles), and we have very little fidelity as to all the stockpiles of what they have USV-wise,” Miguez said.
The carrier strike group, led by the USS Eisenhower and accompanying ships, has conducted more than 95 intercepts and more than 240 self-defense strikes on more than 50 Houthi targets. The strike group’s recent success includes intercepting and destroying seven anti-ship cruise missiles and an explosive USV poised for launch in the Red Sea, according to a U.S. Central Command report released Thursday.
Jim Thomas is a writer based in Indiana. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, a law degree from U.I.C. Law School, and has practiced law for more than 20 years.
Venezulean illegal immigrants wait to get paperwork to be admitted to shelters at a processing center on May 9 in Denver. (Photo: Helen H. Richardson/Media News Group/The Denver Post/Getty Images)
Denver is buckling under a financial crisis caused by illegal immigration. But the fault lies not in the stars, but with the city itself.
“Denver will cut hours at recreation centers, end in-person vehicle-registration renewals and eliminate spring flower beds to save $5 million this year, a response to the migrant crisis that is expected to cost the city $180 million,” the Colorado Sun reported.
But the city isn’t just cutting corners on niche city services.
According to KUSA-TV, the local NBC News affiliate, the city is asking nearly every city department—from animal shelters to the police department—to make budget cuts so they can meet the cost of the new arrivals.
City officials are also asking for the department that oversees elections to cut nearly a million dollars in an election year. The District Attorney’s Office has been asked to make a 5% cut, despite the fact that the city has been racked by violent crime.
Since Biden has been in office, we see what it’s like when local and federal authorities are equally lawless: Unchecked catastrophic chaos and financial implosion. Denver’s current mayor, Democrat Mike Johnston, perhaps not surprisingly, is pointing the finger at former President Donald Trump and Republicans for the mess his city is in. He blamed them because they refused to support the so-called Senate border bill—probably better described as a massive foreign aid and nonprofit organization slush fund bill—that would have helped codify illegal immigration and bogus asylum-seeking, rather than stop them.
“The choice by Republicans in Congress to purposefully kill a historic, bipartisan border deal … will have a devastating impact in Denver,” Johnston said after Republicans blocked the deal, Fox News reported.
Of course, Johnston insisted that the problem is in no way caused by the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who have come to the Colorado city. In one sense, I agree: If he’s looking for blame, he should look in the mirror and at his friends running the White House. Democrats and left-wing activists have no desire to halt the unprecedented spike in illegal immigration. They just want it to look less chaotic so voters won’t be quite as angry about the disaster. And sanctuary city and sanctuary state leaders want a big federal bailout funded by the American taxpayer to deal with the massive holes in their budgets. They want you to pay for their mess. We borrow and spend so much money these days, nobody will know the difference, they must think.
Denver has tried to shunt their problem onto other Colorado communities. This testimony from a Lakewood, Colorado, resident on Tuesday sums up the dynamic. It was posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, by LibsofTikTok.
Residents of Lakewood, CO unloaded on the city council last night after Denver suggested sending more illegals to their city and sheltering them on the taxpayer dime.
Illegals have brought crime, pr*stitut*on, and drugs to their quiet town.
If we, the people, want any control over this situation, then we have to make sure that the Denver, New York City, and other besieged blue cities pay for their own self-inflicted problems. Don’t let them shift the burden, financial and otherwise, elsewhere.
I’ll add that the sheer cost of the border crisis isn’t even the worst part of this whole disaster. They want you to pay while they hack away at the foundation of our free society. The complete evaporation of border enforcement portends something much worse than just the immediate effects of bloated budgets, cut services, dysfunctional cities and increased crime, as bad as all those things are. What it signals is a demolition of even the concept of citizenship.
Denver gives us another glimpse into the next stage of this farce. While Colorado has a law on the books preventing noncitizens from voting, Denver is potentially throwing open the door for noncitizens to become police officers and firefighters. I wish I were joking. According to Axios, two City Council members proposed on Monday “striking language from the city charter preventing the city’s police and fire departments from hiring noncitizens.”
Keep in mind, this is the same City Council that has tried several times to defund the police as crime spun out of control. Yet, the Left wants to make it so people who have broken our laws and who have demonstrated no loyalty to the United States can be the police officers of the future. This police and fire proposal is nearly as perverse as a proposal from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to allow illegal immigrants join the military. They really just want troops and members of our protective services to be loyal to their regime, don’t they?
This is end-stage Roman Empire stuff, brought to you by the Democratic Party. For people who obsess over the destruction of “our democracy,” the Left sure seems to have little regard for, well, democracy.
The Biden-caused border crisis isn’t just an economic or law enforcement problem; it’s a direct attack on self-government. It’s an effective tool to water down and obliterate the meaning of citizenship. It’s an attempt to transform the United States from a free republic based on deliberation and consent of the governed into a vast economic zone of farcical ballot-harvesting and technocratic rule from on high.
Denver sowed the seeds for this illegal immigration crisis years ago, just as many other big, blue cities have done. Federal policies exposed the reality of the problem. They are now paying a price for their decisions—as they must, if we as a nation have any hope of pulling out of this catastrophe.
The Climate Emergency Fund pays activists to vandalize national treasures and create disruptive protests globally, raising concerns over tax break-backed climate activism. Pictured: Police officers carry demonstrators from the German climate change group “Last Generation” off the roadway after they blocked a highway exit in Berlin on July 15, 2022. (Photo: Paul Zinken, picture alliance/Getty Images)
This week, a group of activists called Declare Emergency, funded by the Climate Emergency Fund, poured red powder on the case housing the Constitution in the National Archives and blocked the George Washington Parkway, which is perpetually filled with Washington, D.C., commuters. This follows climate change protests where activists smeared red paint on the African American Civil War Memorial honoring black soldiers last November.
The Climate Emergency Fund is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that declared revenues of $6 million in its latest published tax form in 2022. It has received over $1 million from John Paul Getty’s granddaughter, Aileen Getty, who is repudiating the oil legacy of her grandfather. And left-wing filmmaker Adam McKay, producer of the movies “The Big Short” and “Anchorman,” has pledged to donate $4 million to the fund.
The fund has used its nonprofit tax advantage to finance 116 left-wing climate organizations globally, including Britain’s Just Stop Oil and Germany’s Letzte Generation. Its main goal is to infuse money into climate organizations that engage in vandalism and what it calls “nonviolent” civil resistance—although vandalizing valuable objects with paint constitutes violence. The fund emphasizes the need for disruptive protest in the name of climate change while praising the deadly 2020 Black Lives Matter riots for increasing votes for Democratic candidates. As a nonprofit entity, the fund’s financial activities are disclosed in public tax documents. Revenues have grown rapidly, from $2.3 million in 2021 to $6 million in 2022. Of this $6 million, nearly $4 million was spent on donations to foreign entities. Domestic entities such as Declare Emergency received $1 million.
According to its official website, Last Generation’s mission is to “no longer accept this crime against humanity [climate change] without resistance.” The organization’s leaders are frequently invited to debate on major German talk shows, further increasing the group’s reach and influence. It has over 105,000 followers on X and over 65,000 on Instagram. During these media appearances, the group advocates for the use of renewable energy while ignoring challenges that come with the technology.
Despite its media following, Last Generation may have fewer than 100 official members and relies on funding from the Climate Emergency Fund.
Last Generation realized that the negative publicity in Germany from people frustrated by traffic disruptions and attacks on paintings necessitated a change in tactics. Starting in March, the group is shifting from blocking roads to obstructing “places of fossil destruction,” such as airports. Time will tell whether the Climate Emergency Fund’s disruptive protests in America will do the same—and whether they will also target airports carrying private jets owned by the wealthy elite.
The Climate Emergency Fund through Declare Emergency is now attacking the physical Constitution itself, the proverbial heart of our republic. The nonprofit attempted to damage the Constitution to further its own elitist agenda, even though the Constitution upholds America’s rule of law, its system of checks and balances, and even the tax structure that encourages contributions to such nonprofits. By risking the destruction of our founding document, these radical climate activists show their true colors and their intent to destroy the very fabric of our republic.
Crooked Biden, Xi of Chin, and the Ayatolha of Iran all would hate Trump to be reelected, and all for the same reason. Trump would put America first. Our enemies do not want America with an America First agenda, they would rather us have a weak president who is compromised that they can push around.
Putin Further Destroys the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax — Says He Prefers Joe Biden to Win Than Trump Because He’s More “Predictable”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has further destroyed the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, stating a preference for Joe Biden over Donald Trump due to the current U.S. president’s predictability and experience. During a state television interview reported by the Financial Times on Wednesday, Putin broke his silence on the U.S. political landscape. He described Biden as “more experienced, predictable, an old-school politician.” “Biden, he’s more experienced, more predictable, he’s a politician of the old formation,” Putin said.“But we will work with any U.S. leader whom the American people trust,” he added. READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Members of Congress Demand Justice for Five Full-Term Babies Killed in Abortions • Kamala Harris Continues Her Abortion Celebration Tour, Heads to Michigan to Applaud Killing Babies • Doctor Forced to Pay Parents for Not Diagnosing Baby’s Disability, They Would Have Aborted the Baby • 40 Days for Life Campaign Begins in 656 Cities, Hundreds of Thousands of People Pray to End Abortion
More Pro-Life News • Joe Manchin Sponsors Bill for Abortions Up to Birth, Claims He’s “Pro-Life” • Pro-Abortion Valentine’s Day Cards Claim Killing Babies is Loving • We Protect the Right to Life of Babies After Birth, We Should Protect Babies Before Birth Too • Democrat Wants to Give Abortionists Tax Credits to Move to Illinois to Kill Babies • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
The uptick in Chinese nationals illegally crossing the southern border proves the record-breaking number of foreigners walking into our nation and being shipped by border agents to American cities with little to no vetting is no longer a crisis but a full-fledged invasion.
The Biden administration’s long-held talking point is that the current border crisis is fueled by a surge of struggling migrants from unstable Latin American countries. Chinese migrants, however, not natural disaster victims in Central America, have become the fastest-growing people group to take advantage of the lapsed southern U.S. border.
Border Patrol agents in San Diego alone recorded encounters with 269 Chinese nationals on Monday, Fox News’s Bill Melugin reports. Since the 2024 fiscal year began, Customs and Border Protection clocked more than 20,000 Chinese nationals illegally crossing into the U.S. via the southern border. Some of them crossed with the help of the Chinese Communist Party-linked app TikTok.
The 2024 number is already dangerously close to the 24,000 Chinese border crossers who were apprehended in the 2023 fiscal year and up significantly from the 450 Chinese arrests border agents made during President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
A large amount of the illegal crossings in San Diego sector happen in Jacumba where there is a small gap in the wall that illegal immigrants pour through every day. (We shot this a couple weeks ago). Inexplicably, the Biden admin has made no effort to fill or fix this small gap. pic.twitter.com/wqQRI917VU
In January alone, border agents encountered 176,205 illegal border crossers. That number may be a significant drop compared to recent record-breaking months, but it still exceeds 23 of the last 24 Janauries on record.
Border Patrol chiefs in several high-traffic sectors have warned that the overwhelming number of foreign illegal border crossers entering the U.S. puts our nation at risk because “information can be hidden” and “their agendas, their ideologies, the reason for them coming could be missed.” Gloria Chavez, chief patrol agent for Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol, complained to the House Homeland Security Committee last year that the influx of specifically Chinese migrants has slowed her agents’ interview process to seven hours to ensure some level of vetting.
Even then, CBP does not turn them away. Instead, busloads of Chinese nationals are dropped off in the heart of the U.S. and told to appear for an immigration court date that is often set years in advance.
“My Committee has been informed that some of these Chinese nationals have even been found to be affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and those are just the ones we’ve been able to vet,” Chairman Mark Green noted. “As the CCP works to undermine and infiltrate our institutions and even military installations, Secretary Mayorkas has made it clear to the entire world that our borders are open. This is simply unsustainable, and the national security risks are massive.”
America’s number one foreign enemy isn’t just sending spies through gaps in the abandoned border wall. It’s also actively fueling the death and destruction at the open southern border. Communist China has long taken advantage of Biden’s lax policies to poison hundreds of thousands of Americans with one of the most potent, lucrative, and lethal drugs on the black market.
One gram of fentanyl alone, about the size of a pack of table sugar, can kill approximately 500 people. Yet, in 2023, CBP seized 27,000 pounds of fentanyl, nearly twice as much as they seized in 2022. Since Biden was elected, CBP has reported record-breaking fentanyl seizures nearly every month, marking an 800 percent jump since 2019.
Cartels do most of the fentanyl smuggling, but their operations are directly sustained by investors linked to the Chinese Communist Party, who fund thousands of illegal marijuana-growing and selling operations in Mexico and the U.S. They produce the precursor chemicals required to make fentanyl in Asia and then ship them to packaging facilities close to the southern American border.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The U.S. Intelligence Community asked fellow members of the “‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies,” sources told a small team of independent reporters who broke the story yesterday.
In “CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy on Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say,” journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported that top-line takeaway, along with several other key details. According to the authors, “multiple credible sources,” said that “the United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump advisors long before the summer of 2016.”
The article, published on Shellenberger’s Substack, noted, “Until now, the official story has been that the FBI’s investigation began after Australian intelligence officials told US officials that a Trump aide had boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had damning material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.” That probe, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, launched on July 31, 2016, although Special Counsel John Durham would later conclude the Australian tip failed to justify the investigation into the Trump campaign.
Spying on Trump
However, British intelligence sources began targeting Trump on behalf of American intelligence agencies possibly as early as 2015, according to Tuesday’s blockbuster article. Several outlets had previously reported that the British Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, had discovered “alleged ties between Trump and the Russian government.”
According to the British-based Guardian, “a source close to UK intelligence” claimed, “GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents.” Yet the Guardian reported:
GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US.
Not so, according to Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag’s sources, who were familiar with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation. “In truth, the US IC asked the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies,” the journalists reported their sources as saying, with the Five Eyes nations being the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Sources also claimed, according to Tuesday’s article, that “President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target.” According to the journalists, a source confirmed the IC had “identified [those associates] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate,” and claimed the individuals were “targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation.”
A source close to the investigation reportedly told the team of journalists that “[t]hey were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” and “sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. The MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up.”
Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag further reported their sources’ claim that “[u]nknown details about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and raw intelligence related to the IC’s surveillance of the Trump campaign are in a 10-inch binder that Trump ordered to be declassified at the very end of his term.” The three journalists stressed that this new information “is supported by testimony already in the public record.” In fact, much of the article confirms theories developed from the evidence gleaned over the years.
Years of Evidence
For instance, in “All The Russia Collusion Clues Are Beginning To Point Back To John Brennan,” I highlighted Brennan’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017 that he had “encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about.” Brennan told the committee back then that he didn’t know whether there was collusion with Russia, but that he passed the information on to the FBI. As I wrote at the time:
The evidence suggests, however, that Brennan’s CIA and the intelligence community did much more than merely pass on details about ‘contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign’ to the FBI. The evidence suggests that the CIA and intelligence community — including potentially the intelligence communities of the UK, Italy, and Australia — created the contacts and interactions that they then reported to the FBI as suspicious.
The known entities of this apparent conspiracy included Stefan Halper, an American confidential human source (CHS) informant for the FBI who, as I wrote at The Federalist, “worked at Cambridge University alongside Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of the British intelligence service MI6, and Christopher Andrew, the official historian for the British counterintelligence group MI5.”
It has long been known that Halper reached out to several members of the Trump campaign as a CHS for the Crossfire Hurricane team. But Halper’s efforts to ingratiate himself began before the official launch on July 31, 2016. In mid-July 2016, Halper approached Carter Page at a conference at Cambridge. American Steven Schrage, who organized that conference, detailed the happenings in the article “The Spies Who Hijacked America.”
As Schrage told it, “For most of the conference, Halper couldn’t be bothered with Page, about whom he made snarky comments about behind Page’s back.” But that changed after Dearlove arrived at the conference and spoke with Halper. Halper then “seemed desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign,” Schrage wrote.
While Halper’s outreach to Page came only a couple of weeks before the launch of Crossfire Hurricane, the apparent targeting of Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos first occurred in March 2016. Open-sourcematerial reveals that “on March 14, 2016, George met London-based college Professor Joseph Mifsud while traveling in Italy.” At the time, “Mifsud, then director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, claimed connections to the Russian Government.”
According to Papadopoulos, he had traveled to Italy, specifically Rome, at the encouragement of “a woman in London, who was the FBI’s legal attaché in the U.K.” That initial meeting of Mifsud led to several more, including the fateful one where Mifsud supposedly told Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton — the conversation the FBI claimed justified the launching of Crossfire Hurricane.
As has been detailed at length, most comprehensively by Lee Smith at RealClearInvestigations, Mifsud has numerous connections to Western intelligence services and has taught at the Link Campus University in Rome, a university whose “lecturers and professors include senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries, especially Italy and the United Kingdom.”
Confirming Theories
These details closely match the information that sources revealed to Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag. And should the raw intelligence reports exist, as those sources claim, there will be concrete confirmation that foreign intelligence services targeted the Trump campaign, which in turn will confirm many of the theories posited about the real start of the Russia-collusion hoax.
It seems unlikely there will be anything in writing to establish John Brennan or another member of the U.S. Intelligence Community solicited assistance from the other members of Five Eyes. Nonetheless, Americans deserve to know what was in that 10-inch binder and which foreign intelligence services interfered in our 2016 election by “bumping” members of the Trump campaign to craft the Russia hoax.
The now-known significance of that binder also raises the specter that the search of Mar-a-Lago wasn’t to protect classified materials but to protect intelligence agencies — American and foreign.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
22 Republican senators appear clueless about Americans’ fears when it comes to our ballooning national debt. The U.S. Senate once again proved its contempt for the American people.
After the collapse of the phony border security bill that would institutionalize the failing policies of the Biden administration, the Senate has passed a $95.3 billion foreign aid package — with zero offsets to pay for it.
The gap between the senators and the American people can be seen by looking at a poll we did at America’s New Majority Project from Nov. 3 to Nov. 6.
The American people are increasingly frightened because the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress keep spending more money as the national debt grows bigger. Interest payments on the national debt will soon be larger than the total cost of our national security system.
When asked if voters would prefer a Republican who insisted on spending offsets to a Democrat who wanted to spend more money on foreign aid without offsetting it, they chose the Republican by 50% to 34% over a Democrat. This was a 13-point swing from the generic ballot.
Apparently, 22 of the Republican senators did not get the message that their constituents believed it should be possible to find offsets in a $6 trillion budget. After all, if the aid to Israel and Ukraine (and the secondary amounts for Taiwan) are so important, aren’t there lower priority items in the budget that could be postponed or just dropped to make way for the foreign aid?
Not only did 56% of the American people favor the spending offsets in the America’s New Majority Project poll, but 50% preferred to have no bill if it could not be offset.
Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republicans are clearly listening to the American people. They should continue to fight for offsets — and for fundamental changes on the southern border.
Eventually, our senators are going to realize they should listen to the people who elected them — or find themselves looking for work.
Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-1999 and a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He is chairman of Gingrich 360.
NATO announced more members have met the 2% defense spending requirement, but almost half of members have still failed to meet the minimum, as Russia reportedly looks to increase its presence along the alliance’s borders.
“In 2024, NATO Allies in Europe will invest a combined total of 380 billion U.S. dollars in defense. For the first time, this amounts to 2% of their combined GDP,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a meeting of defense ministers.
“We are making real progress,” Stoltenberg insisted. “European allies are spending more. However, some Allies still have a ways to go because we agreed at the Vilnius Summit that all Allies should invest 2%, and that 2% is a minimum.”
Collective spending will hit 2% in 2024, according to Stoltenberg, rising from 1.56% spent in 2019 and 1.85% in 2023. Poland spends the most, with 3.9% of GDP spent on defense, followed by the U.S. at 3.49% and Greece at 3.01%.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in side-by-side with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. (Getty Images)
Stoltenberg credited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for spurring the rapid increase over the past two years, and spending could see another bump after Estonia claimed that Moscow is preparing for confrontation with the West within the next decade, starting with a buildup along the borders of NATO members. Last week, Denmark warned that an attack could occur within the next three to five years.
“Russia has chosen a path which is a long-term confrontation… and the Kremlin is probably anticipating a possible conflict with NATO within the next decade or so,” Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service chief Kaupo Rosin told reporters on Tuesday.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, center, arrives with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, right, at the first meeting of the North Atlantic Council of foreign ministers at NATO headquarters during the first day of the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels on Nov. 28, 2023. (Omar Havana/Getty Images)
Estonia claimed that Russia is looking to reform its forces following the embarrassing shortfall in Ukraine, including a change in command structure and adding new units and formations “in almost all branches” in pursuit of expanded personnel strength, aiming to double its forces to 1.5 million service members.
The reforms, which will roll out over three to four years, will include a shift in focus towards Finland’s border following its ascension to NATO and the addition of a 44th Army Corps.
Members of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division, 1st Battalion of the 506th Infantry Regiment are seen with Humvee vehicles near Tapa, Estonia, on May 19, 2023. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Rosin stressed that an imminent attack remains “highly unlikely as long as Russia continues its campaign in Ukraine, and could be averted if Europe matched Russia’s buildup.”
“If we are not prepared, the likelihood (of a Russian military attack) would be much higher than without any preparation,” Rosin stressed.
NATO’s announcement and Estonia’s intelligence report were released just after former President Donald Trump blasted the alliance as “busted” and said he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members who did not “pay your bills.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
Peter Aitken is a Fox News Digital reporter with a focus on national and global news.
Fox News contributor Kellyanne Conway urged Republicans to use the loss of a New York House seat as a teaching moment on “America’s Newsroom” on Wednesday after former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi won a closely watched special election against GOP rival Mazi Pilip. Conway said Suozzi successfully flipped the seat previously held by former Rep. George Santos by taking advantage of early voting rules and distancing himself from the Biden administration’s border policies.
KELLYANNE CONWAY: Suozzi did two things that were smart that the Republicans better learn from: number one, early voting. He killed it by two to one, I think, in Queens, and by 16% in Nassau County, or vice versa. The [snowstorm] yesterday in New York, where all three of us were, proves that this bank your vote early, getting that early vote and making Republican and center-right voters comfortable with voting early is incredibly important.
Number two, Suozzi, instead of lying like every other Democrat seems to be doing these days, ‘Mayorkas is doing a great job. There’s no crisis at the border. The border czar Kamala’s wonderful. Biden’s right.’ What did he do? He said, I better go against my party on the border. And he did it. Paid advertising, mailers, press conferences, public appeals. So he has shown the Democrats how to run on the border. I think Republicans should do the same thing with abortion. Instead of being ostriches and pretending, with their head in the sand, they should be peacocks and say, look, this is what it means to be pro-life in 2024. This is what it means to be pro-choice in 2024. And instead of hiding, own it and message it. I think he did a great job on that going against his party. Let’s see how many Democrats follow suit.
Democrat Tom Suozzi and Republican Mazi Pilip met face to face in the first and only debate, which aired Thursday night, in the special election for New York’s 3rd Congressional District. (Getty Images)
Conway added that Pilip erred by taking a “wishy-washy” stance on whether she supports former President Donald Trump’s candidacy.
“When you sit in the middle of the highway, you become political roadkill,” she added.
The Associated Press projected that Suozzi would defeat county lawmaker Pilip to win back his old job, with the call coming Tuesday night just over an hour after the polls closed.
With the GOP hanging on to a razor-thin majority in the House, national Republicans and Democrats poured big bucks into a race in suburban New York City where immigration and border security, crime and abortion were the top issues, and where the election was seen as a bellwether ahead of the all-but-certain November White House rematch between Trump and President Biden.
With the Republican majority in the House slipping to 219-213 once Suozzi is sworn in, the pickup by the Democrats now puts the GOP’s grip on the chamber further in peril.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., while not commenting directly on calls from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner’s call for President Joe Biden to declassify information about a “serious national security threat” Wednesday, told Newsmax that the foreign policy status of the U.S. under Biden has been “real slippery.”
“These things are not isolated incidents,” Donalds said on Newsmax’s“Newsline.” “When you leave Afghanistan the way that Joe Biden left, the disastrous withdrawal, it demonstrates to our enemies that America is not as strong as it used to be.”
Donalds noted that the situations in Israel and Ukraine, “are not isolated incidents. This is what happens when you have weak leadership in the White House.”
The world has taken note of Biden’s weaknesses and is pushing to see what it can get away with doing, he added.
“There’s this constant debate in our politics right now between isolationism and being a neo-con,” Donalds said. “I am neither. What I’m for is prudent national security and a strong America. … We need sound leadership in the White House and the United States doesn’t have it today.”
Donalds also on Wednesday discussed the House vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and called on the Senate to hold a full trial before lawmakers vote, rather than to call a quick vote to end the matter.
Donalds also commented on reports concerning Biden’s mental fitness for office, following a damaging report by special counsel Robert Hur that discussed the president’s age and memory capabilities.
The White House says Biden is getting a physical, but it does not include a cognitive test, and Donalds said he does not agree with that.
“The American people deserve to know if Joe Biden has the mental capabilities to serve as commander in chief,” he said. “It’s that simple. If he does not, then it is incumbent upon Vice President [Kamala] Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment and have the Cabinet vote on whether he should be removed from office.”
The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Mike Turner, issued an unusual cryptic statement on Wednesday saying the committee had made available to all members of Congress information about an unspecified “serious national security threat.” But sources close to ABC News report that the threat relates to Russia’s plans to place a nuclear weapon in space.
According to ABC: “This is not to drop a nuclear weapon onto Earth but rather to possibly use against satellites.”
The network said the development is “very concerning” and “a big deal.”
Turner wants the White House and Pentagon to release information about the threat.
“I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat,” Representative Mike Turner said in the statement.
Turner provided no further information, and his office did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.
Turner’s statement was released in the midst of intense debate in Congress over how the United States should be dealing with global threats from Russia and other rivals, with security hawks urging greater global involvement and some lawmakers most closely allied with former Republican President Donald Trump advocating for a more “America First” approach to world affairs.
The Biden administration has been ramping up its criticism of House Republicans for possibly blocking a $95-billion bill passed by the Senate that would supply aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Supporters of the bill argue that a major reason for the United States to back the government in Kyiv is to push back against threats from Russia that extend beyond Ukraine.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a staunch Trump ally who says he will not rush to allow a vote on the Senate bill, told reporters at the Capitol there was no need for public alarm. “Steady hands are at the wheel. We’re working on it and there’s no need for alarm,” he said.
‘NOT A CAUSE FOR PANIC’
Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the Democratic chairperson and Republican vice chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a joint statement saying their panel has the intelligence in question and has been “rigorously” tracking the issue.
“We continue to take this matter seriously and are discussing an appropriate response with the administration. In the meantime, we must be cautious about potentially disclosing sources and methods that may be key to preserving a range of options for U.S. action,” the statement said.
A source familiar with the matter said Warner and Rubio had been briefed on the threat two weeks ago. The source said the issue was not unrelated to the security spending bill, but there is no direct tie between them.
Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House intelligence panel, said the issue in Turner’s statement is significant, “but it is not a cause for panic.”
“As to whether more can be declassified about this issue, that is a worthwhile discussion but it is not a discussion to be had in public,” Himes said in a statement.
Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, declined to provide specifics. He said he had arranged a briefing for Thursday with congressional leaders and that he was surprised by Turner’s decision to issue the statement.
“That’s been on the books so I am a bit surprised that Congressman Turner came out publicly today, in advance of a meeting on the books, for me to go sit with him alongside our intelligence and defense professionals tomorrow,” Sullivan told a briefing.
“I’m not in a position to say anything further today. Like I said, I look forward to the discussion with (Turner) and obviously from there we will determine how to proceed, but standing here at the podium today I can’t share anything further,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan made clear that he had initiated the meeting with the Gang of Eight scheduled for Thursday. The Gang of Eight refers to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, and the top Republican and Democrat on the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Biden can’t do a softball one-on-one interview on CBS just before the Super Bowl but does a silly commercial complaining about shrink-flation on snacks and soda that he caused by the inflation his own Bidennomic policies created.
Shrinkflation: Reduction of quantity/quality of a good without corresponding price reduction
In economics, shrinkflation, also known as the grocery shrink ray, deflation, or package downsizing, is the process of items shrinking in size or quantity, or even sometimes reformulating or reducing quality, while their prices remain the same. The word is a portmanteau of the words shrink and inflation. Joe Biden is against it and wants to blame greedy corporations. Nice try, Joe.
Don’t let President Biden gaslight you. ‘Shrinkflation’ is not the problem, Bidenomics is. Businesses are trying to stay competitive in the market by limiting how much they raise prices to offset the cost increases they’ve encountered thanks to Biden’s economic policy decisions. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Kamala Harris Says She’s “Ready” to be President, But She’s America’s Biggest Abortion Cheerleader • Joe Biden Claims He Opposes Abortions Up to Birth, But That’s What His Administration Promotes • Pastor Wants Custody of Five Full-Term Aborted Babies so Abortionist is Held Accountable • Pro-Life Advocate Says Fatherlessness is the “Most Ignored Crisis”
More Pro-Life News • Babies are So Cute, How Could They be Killed in Abortions? • Pro-Life Lenten Prayer Campaign Prays for Women Considering Abortions • Catholic Church Condemns Assisted Suicide: “We Uphold the Dignity of All Human Life” • “He Gets Us” Ad Doesn’t Really Get Jesus. Here’s the Truth • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Pastor Joel Osteen speaks at Lakewood Church on Oct. 18, 2020. | YouTube/Lakewood Church
Despite reportedly using multiple aliases, including the male name Jeffrey Escalante, Genesse Ivonne Moreno, a mentally troubled individual who was shot dead by off-duty law enforcement officers after opening fire at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church on Sunday, has consistently identified as female, a Houston Police Department officer said Monday.
“Our shooter is identified by a driver’s license as Genesee Moreno 36 years old, Hispanic female. There are some discrepancies,” HPD’s Commander of Homicide Christopher Hassig said at a press conference. “We do have reports she used multiple aliases, including Jeffrey Escalante. So she has utilized both male and female names but through all of our investigation to this point, talking with individuals, interviews, documents, Houston Police Department reports, she has been identified this entire time as female.”
The clarification from HPD comes as some media reports have identified Moreno as a transgender woman who was born a male. Police say the shooter had at least six prior arrests since 2005, including unlawful carrying of a weapon, which Moreno pleaded guilty to; evading arrest; and assault on a public official.
In a recounting of the shooting at Lakewood Church, Hassig said Moreno pulled up to the west side of the building in a white vehicle at 1:53 p.m. on Sunday with a 7-year-old boy in tow.
“She gets out of her white vehicle. She opens the door, pulls out the 7-year-old child out of the backseat as well as a bag that is with her,” he said.
Moreno then “confronts a security guard who lets her in along the west side of the building” at 1:55 p.m.
Houston Police Department
Moreno “immediately starts firing” after entering a hallway of the church.
The off-duty officers, who were working approved security jobs for the church, engaged Moreno in a gunfight. Moreno and the child are brought down in a hail of bullets. Hassig said the child was shot once in the head but did not say who shot the child.
“Multiple rounds are fired by her at which point Officer Moreno of the Houston Police Department working an approved extra job at the location as well as TABC agent Herrera returned fire and the exchange is all there on the west side of the building,” Hassig said.
“In the hallway, multiple shots are exchanged by all three. She eventually falls to the ground. The 7-year-old child falls to the ground as well from gunfire — one gunshot wound to the head.”
Moreno was pronounced dead by Houston Fire Department personnel at 2:07 p.m. Hassig said, while the child remains in “critical condition” at a local hospital. Two weapons were recovered from the scene, including a .22 caliber rifle, which was not used in the shooting, and an AR-15 with a “Palestine” sticker, which Moreno fired at the officers.
“There was a sticker on the buttstock of the rifle that stated ‘Palestine.’ A sticker simply stated ‘Palestine’ on the buttstock,” Hassig said.
The homicide investigator, who said HPD has been working with both state and federal officials to come up with a motive for Moreno’s attack on the Lakewood Church, suggested that it might have been grounded in the shooter’s mental illness, coupled with an ongoing dispute Moreno had with her ex-husband who is Jewish.
“We do have some facts that she was put under an emergency detention order by Houston police officers, we believe in 2016. We do believe that she does have a mental health history that is documented through us and through interviews with family members,” Hassig said.
“And we do want to say that through our investigation, I mentioned antisemitic writing. We do believe that there was a familial dispute that has taken place between her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s family. And some of those individuals are Jewish, so we believe that that might possibly be where all of this stems from,” Hassig said.
In addition to Moreno’s death, and the injury of the 7-year-old boy, a 57-year-old man was shot during the gunfight at the church, which began just before a service for Spanish speakers. Police say the man was treated and released from hospital.
Houston Police Chief Troy Finner asked for prayers for the boy and everyone affected by the shooting.
“I want to ask for prayers for a 7-year-old kid who’s fighting for his life. Questions came up yesterday about him. I think that what we need to do for him is pray. He’s still in critical condition fighting for his life the last report I got,” Finner said.
“The 57-year-old male who was shot has been released. I want to ask for continued prayers for him and his family and all families involved. The Lakewood family … I spoke to Pastor Osteen this morning, and he would have been here, but his duty, his heart, is with his congregation right now trying to start the healing process. And we want to pray for them.”
Anyone with information that can help the police in their ongoing investigation of the shooting are being asked to call the Houston Homicide Department at 713-308-3600 or Crimestoppers at 713-222-TIPS.
In his appearance Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” embattled U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did what any failed political leader possessing little integrity and less self-awareness would do: He blamed others for his mistakes. Asked whether he bears any responsibility for the nightmare the Biden administration has wrought at the U.S. southern border and beyond, Mayorkas effectively said, don’t look at us.
“It certainly is a crisis and we don’t bear responsibility for a broken system, and we’re dealing a tremendous amount within that broken system,”he told moderator Kristen Welker.
Maybe the secretary should talk to the people living in and around the border towns, local law enforcement, and his own U.S. Border Patrol agents.
“Ask the people at the border in Texas. They think the blame belongs squarely with [the Biden administration],” the FAIR media director told me Monday morning on “Need to Know With Jeff Angelo” on NewsRadio 1040 in Des Moines.
Earlier this month, Mehlman and his traveling companions saw the illegal immigration crisis firsthand at Eagle Pass, a south Texas city of about 28,000 people bordering Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the Rio Grande. As the Dallas Morning News explained, “Eagle Pass, with two small international bridges, features relatively gentle Rio Grande currents that invite migrant crossings. It became a focal point of Texas action in December when the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants over multiple weeks overwhelmed Border Patrol agents and city resources.”
The border town has become a hive of humanity, as its population swells from a wave of illegal aliens pouring over the border on promises of easy entry from President Joe Biden and his nearly impeached Homeland Security chief. U.S. Customs and Border Protection still has yet to post numbers for January apprehensions at the Southwest border, but December saw a new all-time monthly record with more than 300,000 migrant apprehensions. Eagle Pass and its Del Rio sector alone have recorded a whopping 152,252 encounters in the first three months of the federal fiscal year, beginning in October, according to the agency.
Eagle Pass is now ground zero in a standoff between the state of Texas and the Biden administration, just as it is Exhibit A in the administration’s chaotic immigration policy. Gov. Greg Abbott, backed by several states, ordered state National Guard troops to stand guard at Eagle Pass’s gates and erect razor wire to check the invasion. A divided 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court order gave the administration the go-ahead to cut the wire, but Abbott is holding firm, arguing his state is under attack and the president is doing nothing to stop it. Abbott stands on his constitutional obligation to defend and protect his state, and the United States at large, from invasion.
“The message from the Biden administration is: Not only don’t we want to enforce immigration laws, we don’t want anyone else to do it,” Mehlman said.
The immigration reform activist says, from what he saw on his latest trip to Eagle Pass, Abbott’s strategy is working. And, from what’s he’s heard from law enforcement officials, there have been few attempts from federal authorities to remove the deterrents Texas has put in place. Abbott has said his Operation Lone Star has reduced illegal immigration numbers, a claim backed by a new Washington Examiner analysis.
“The numbers show how the percentage of arrests in Texas versus other border states has shifted. In 2021, 69% of illegal immigrant arrests across the southern border occurred in Texas,” the publication reported on Monday.
“As Abbott stepped up security at the start of the Biden administration in 2021, arrests of illegal crossers began to fall and dropped to just 34% last month.”
“This is a manageable problem, as Gov. Abbott has now demonstrated. If you deter people from coming across you will see the results almost immediately,” Mehlman said.
Mehlman does acknowledge, however, that the migrants are simply rerouting to Arizona and California, border states led by leftist governors committed to Biden’s open border policies.
Shifting blame, Mayorkas insists Congress is the “only one who can fix” the five-alarm border fire that he and Biden have dumped gasoline on. The secretary conveniently omits the many Trump-era policies the president has reversed and the orders he could sign to turn the tide of the illegal immigration flood. My colleague Tristan Justice last week detailed the dozens of times Biden has gutted border security since he took the oath of office.
The U.S. Senate’s bad joke of a border deal that died an ignominious death last week would have essentially codified the Biden administration’s awful policy to date. Mehlman and other critics say it would have exacerbated the crisis. He said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his top negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., “sold out” the House’s “good” version of the bill, creating a “lose-lose situation” for lawmakers serious about border security.
Meanwhile, last week’s failed effort by House Republicans to impeach Mayorkas is regrouping. Speaker Mike Johnson appears to believe his fellow Republicans will have the numbers —narrowly — this time around as Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., is back to political business after undergoing cancer treatment during last week’s vote.
Mehlman said Mayorkas deserves to be impeached.
“He has undermined the enforcement of our immigration laws, he has violated his oath of office and he’s been derelict in his duty as secretary of Homeland Security,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform official said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Former President Donald Trump can ride Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Joe Biden’s “diminished faculties” all the way to the White House if he does these three things:
1. Leans into voters’ concerns about the disastrous border crisis – and tells them how he’ll fix it.
2. Talks up his plan to keep the economy humming through deregulation, keeping taxes low and also by pushing his “Drill Baby Drill” plan to expand America’s energy stockpile and independence, and…
3. Shuts up about everything else. Don’t feed Democrat narratives with threats to abandon NATO or impose 60% tariffs on China. Stop whining about the 2020 election, stop denigrating rival and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s husband and wardrobe, and lay off President Joe Biden. The president is destroying his reelection hopes all by himself; he doesn’t need any help.
Also, talk less about what a great job you did before and more about how you’ll do it again, even better. Voters want to know and they want optimism.
There’s been a lot of chatter about what Joe Biden should do to confront the terrible blow delivered by Special Counsel Hur. There has been less commentary about how the presumed GOP nominee should navigate this gift from the blue. My view – don’t interrupt Biden’s decline and fall.
Odds makers have Donald Trump in the lead, with one site giving him a 52% chance of winning in November, against 27% for Biden. Shockingly, Michelle Obama is next most likely to become president, with a 15% chance. That says everything.
Democrats are in disarray, with many turning on their standard-bearer for letting them down. But really, it is the Democratic universe – the leadership, Dem donors in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, White House aides, the liberal media, Jill Biden and the whole dishonest crew – that has nurtured this cancer in their midst. They knew the president was in decline but have lied repeatedly about his vigor and his sharpness – even to themselves — and conspired to hide it from the public.
If you receive your news from MSNBC, you might have no idea Joe Biden can barely finish a sentence without stumbling. You don’t know that the White House has been shielding his decline by limiting his interactions with the press, using more easily-managed stairs to deplane and stage-managing his appearances to prevent him looking befuddled and lost.
On social media, clips of Biden’s deterioration are everywhere. His miscues are no longer “gaffes”; believing you just sat down with France’s former President Francois Mitterand, who died in 1996, is senility mixing up the channels.
There’s been a lot of chatter about what Joe Biden should do to confront the terrible blow delivered by Special Counsel Hur. There has been less commentary about how the presumed GOP nominee should navigate this gift from the blue.
Reliable lefties like Ross Douthat at the New York Times are openly calling for Biden to step aside at the convention, allowing delegates to choose another candidate. Maureen Dowd, also at the awakened (panicked) Times, says Biden’s denial of his infirmities isn’t going to beat Trump, though she fails to provide a better plan.
Trump can capitalize on Biden’s slide. But he must stop stepping in the middle of the story, such as he recently did when he recalled telling NATO members that if they didn’t pay their share of the alliance’s defense budget he would not protect them from Russia aggression. That, of course, made headlines of just the sort Democrats savor – Trump is reckless! Trump cannot be trusted!
Trump must keep the spotlight on the president’s age and on the horrors perpetrated by Biden – the millions of illegals swarming across the border, the soft-on-crime approach of this White House, the resulting mayhem in places like Chicago and New York and the hugely inflated prices of everything. These issues are shipping voters into the “R” column. They remember these problems didn’t exist under Trump.
Meanwhile, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East demolish Biden’s absurd claims of diplomatic know-how. Rather, those conflicts showcase the extreme cost to the world of a weak man sitting in the Oval Office. Biden touts his “experience”; what good is experience if you can’t remember?
Donald Trump is not a weak man. He is powerful – as a speaker and as a leader – ready to use the might of the U.S. presidency to close our borders. He has done it before and can do it again. Joe Biden has the same tools at his disposal, but refuses to take them out of the tool box. Trump should lay out how he will convince Mexico to host asylum-seekers on their side of the border, how he would deport criminals in the country illegally, and how he would team with Greg Abbott to prevent crossings instead of taking the Texas governor to court as Biden is doing.
Similarly, Trump should push for a reasoned America-first approach to energy. Rather than chasing oil supplies from enemies in Iran and Venezuela, the United States should exploit our abundant natural resources here at home. Open up new federal lands to drilling, accelerate permits and back off Biden’s costly new fees and regulations which are making it more costly to drill.
Greenlight LNG exports which help the U.S. reduce our trade deficits with China and Japan, are critical for our European allies, and which actually help the climate as natural gas backs out coal. Ease Joe’s fuel efficiency mandates which are costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and which may well kill U.S. automakers. When Ford is losing $60,000 on every EV it is forced to make, something is very wrong.
Finally, tell voters about Joe Biden’s plan to hike taxes, which will slow growth and cost jobs. The next president needs to extend the Trump tax cuts; the former president should make that happen.
Trump right now has the wind at his back. Jamie Dimon, one of the world’s financial leaders, told the shocked elites at Davos that Trump had been right on a lot of issues; he was correct.
If former President Trump can focus on those issues that worked for our country – the border, the economy and energy specifically – he can win in November.
Liz Peek is a Fox News contributor and former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. A former columnist for the Fiscal Times, she writes for The Hill and contributes frequently to Fox News, the New York Sun and other publications. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter @LizPeek.
Tony Bobulinski, former business partner of Hunter Biden, is testifying before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees Tuesday, alleging the Biden family peddled President Joe Biden’s influence to China and Ukraine — all with the “enabler” Joe Biden’s knowledge and blessing.
“It is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” Bobulinski said in his opening statement obtained by Newsmax before the closed-door testimony under oath. “His family’s foreign influence peddling operation — from China to Ukraine and elsewhere — sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.
“Joe Biden was more than a participant in and beneficiary of his family’s business; he was an enabler, despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability.”
The testimony is being taken under subpoena in the House GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry, and Bobulinski laments the U.S. government and complicit media has ignored his “extensive evidence” and allegations for years — even to the point of suppression — he said in his opening statement.
“For nearly four years, I have tried to tell the American people the truth about serious corruption at the very top of their government,” his statement read. “In return, I have been falsely accused of being a purveyor of ‘Russian disinformation’ and a political surrogate.
“My continuous efforts to inform the American people of the facts have been actively suppressed by both the United States government and the so-called ‘mainstream’ media.”
The Biden family was unconstitutionally peddling foreign influence on Biden’s name and the power of his higher office, Bobulinski said.
“The only reason any of these international business transactions took place — with tens of millions of dollars flowing directly to the Biden family — was because Joe Biden was in high office,” Bobulinski said. “The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period.”
Among the allegations of bribery are the ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the China Energy Company (CEFC), where the Bidens “successfully sought to infiltrate and compromise Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House,” according to Bobulinski.
The operation began in 2015 and continued until March 2018, when CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming “was detained for corruption in China, never to be seen again,” Bobulinski added.
“It is also not a coincidence that CEFC used the Biden family’s weakest link, Hunter Biden, and the promise of large sums of money to the tune of tens of millions of dollars initially, and eventually the profits from investing billions of dollars in the United States and around the world,” Bobulinski said.
Bobulinski bulleted four “critically important facts” in his opening statement.
1. “Joe Biden was aware of the CEFC transaction, enabled it and had a constitutional responsibility and obligation to the American people to shut it down before it began.”
2. “Joe Biden’s immediate family members were enriched to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from some of our most dangerous adversaries, including the Chinese Communist Party and players from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Kazakhstan, and other foreign nations and entities.”
3. “Joe Biden’s status as the head of the family served an enforcement role — for example, when Hunter stated deliberately that his father Joe was sitting right next to him while demanding immediate payment of the $10 million CEFC had committed to the Biden family, as well as when Hunter demanded CEFC circumvent SinoHawk Holdings.”
4. “United States law enforcement appears to have been singularly unwilling to speak with me or to hear the facts we will be discussing today. I have never been contacted to provide testimony nor asked to speak with anyone connected with Joe Biden’s administration, including his Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, or local law enforcement. That includes U.S. Attorney David Weiss for the District of Delaware or any of the several grand juries I now know were convened after my name became publicly known.”
Bobulinski noted he is a U.S. Navy veteran upholding the highest standards of truth and devotion to the U.S. and not a partisan operative — as has been alleged. Also, he is nonpartisan, despite admittedly having donated to Democrat political campaigns in the past.
“I implore each and every one of you to remove your partisan hats today and focus on one party: the United States of America,” his statement concluded. “I hope your focus will be on a thorough and extensive investigation and exposure of all of the facts and evidence — and on answering the question of how we as a country allowed the White House to be infiltrated by our most existential adversary, the Chinese Communist Party.
“I also hope you will hold the complicit parties, including Joe Biden, accountable for their actions, as well as enact new laws that prevent this kind of deep corruption from ever happening again.”
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
Senior House Democrats are considering the use of a discharge petition to get around Speaker Mike Johnson if he refuses to introduce the $95 billion overseas aid bill approved by a 70-29 vote in the Senate on Tuesday.
Johnson, R-La., has not said if he will bring the bill up for a House vote, but on Monday, he said the legislation, which provides aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, is silent on illegal immigration, “the most pressing issue facing our country,” reported Newsweek.
A discharge petition would require support from 218 House members, including at least four Republicans. If approved, the Senate bill could be voted on like any other legislation, likely not before the end of this month.
The Senate’s bill allows $60 billion of military aid for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, $8 billion for Taiwan, and less than $10 billion in wider humanitarian assistance, including in Gaza.
Johnson, in a statement Monday, said that House Republicans were “crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border.”
Without any border policy changes from the Senate, he said, “the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters. America deserves better than the Senate’s status quo.”
Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., posted on X that if Johnson won’t bring the “critical aid package to the floor, I stand ready to sign a discharge petition to get the job done. The world is watching.”
“We must deliver critical security assistance to our partners and humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza,” he added.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told CNN Monday that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries “said he has not ruled out using a discharge petition, which is a parliamentary maneuver to try and bring a bill to the floor.”
In addition, pro-Ukraine conservatives have also called for a discharge petition, including former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who on X called Johnson an “idiot” and said it’s “time for a discharge petition, or for three Republicans to vote against every rule until he agrees. You will not win unless you fight fire with fire.”
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., is joined by fellow Senate Republicans for a May 3, 2023, news conference where he urged the White House and Senate Democrats to pass House GOP legislation that would raise the debt limit but cut federal spending. More than nine months later, federal fiscal sanity is still in short supply. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Both chambers of Congress are locked in fierce battles over spending legislation.
A “supplemental” package has found bipartisan support in the Senate after the removal of flawed border and immigration provisions. However, its $95 billion price tag—$60 billion of which would go to Ukraine—means there will be stiff resistance in the House.
Meanwhile, Congress is also working on regular spending bills (known as appropriations) that fund national defense and federal agencies. The most recent deal funds part of the federal government through March 1 and the rest through March 8.
It remains to be seen whether these bills will be honest—or loaded with gimmicks, such as phony “emergency” spending in an attempt to trick the public about what’s going on.
The spending bills aren’t happening in isolation. Decades of budget gimmicks, spending sprees, and handouts to far left institutions have put America in an unsustainable position, as these new charts show.
While the federal government has a sorry track record of running deficits most of the time, the size
of the gap is also important. When deficits get too high, as happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, it adds to inflationary pressures on the economy.
If current trends continue, driven by the growth of spending as a share of the economy, deficits will balloon even in years without a recession or a major war.
The first-ever $1 trillion deficit happened in fiscal year 2009 and helped fuel the tea party movement in response.
Incredibly, not only are $1 trillion deficits now standard operation procedure, but the federal government is set to crack $2 trillion deficits every year as soon as 2031—even sooner if any new legislation expands the swamp.
Years of hefty deficits have added to the national debt. Relative to the size of the economy, the public national debt is now nearly as large as it was during World War II. However, there’s a vital difference between then and now: Once the war was over and civilization was saved, federal spending came down and the debt receded.
In contrast, most current federal spending is for categories where Uncle Sam has made firm commitments in the future, such as Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt. In turn, these categories represent the vast majority of expected spending growth, which is what drives long-term debt and deficits.
Both the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are on pace to go bust within the next decade, a reality that most of Washington would rather not talk about. While there are ways to save money on the programs that would retain the core safety-net aspect for seniors, addressing these imbalances will require political courage.
While the growth of the national debt is an important factor behind the recent rise of interest payments, the spike in interest rates is especially concerning.
Incredibly, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the federal government will likely spend more on interest payments in 2024 than on national defense. And if debt and deficits continue to grow out of control, that will remain the case.
Interest payments don’t help protect the nation or fund public investments. Instead, they represent the bill coming due on big-government spending from the past. If Congress remains asleep at the wheel, rising interest costs will continue to snowball and threaten the fundamentals of the entire economy.
Legislators will have important opportunities over the next few weeks to start the process of tapping the brakes on deficits. That means:
Saying “no” to new deficit spending, which includes balancing any potential increases in one area with real cuts somewhere else.
Getting rid of earmark boondoggles that waste taxpayer money on political cronies and white elephant projects.
With Washington’s culture used to easy money, going the other direction will not be easy. However, it is absolutely necessary for America’s fiscal health and prosperity.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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