(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) As the nation of Mexico appeared to be gearing up Thursday for a crackdown on illegal immigration into America from its side of the border, some speculated that U.S. President Joe Biden had bribed Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to take care of his border crisis.
Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin posted a video of Mexican border patrol officers being bussed to the border near Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, to slow the record-pace illegal immigration into America.
Mexico is bringing legions of immigration officers into Juarez to keep migrants away from the U.S. border in El Paso.
Mexico has massively increased enforcement on their side of the border after record high numbers in December, and a meeting in MX w/ Secretary of State Blinken. https://t.co/NONQNRYpeZ
Another journalist, Center for Immigration Studies fellow Todd Bensman, recorded video evidence from south of the border that Mexico was gearing up for what appeared to be a crackdown on immigration into America, particularly targeting Texas-bound immigrants.
Bensman posted a video of official state vans headed north toward the Texas-Mexico border.
Naturally, the mounting evidence of Mexican efforts fueled speculation that United States officials may have paid a “ransom” to Mexico, for help in securing the border.
Earlier this month, Obrador demanded additional aid to the tune of $10 billion per year from the U.S. to crack down on illegal immigration through his country.
Obrador’s demands went beyond mere cash payments, however.
In a 60 Minutes appearance, aside from cash, he demanded the lifting of the Cuban embargo and the legalization of millions of generally-law-abiding but illegal immigrants in the United States.
If speculation about Biden capitulating were indeed true, then the president and his party may be trying to have their cake and eat it too as the 2024 election approaches.
After having already resettled an estimated 11 million illegals via open-border policies, slowing the crisis would make it seem less acute and neutralized one of presumptive GOP candidate Donald Trump’s main talking points, as even Democrats begin to acknowledge the some of the immediate problems that mass is causing.
However, Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the granddaughter of Latino labor activist Cesar Chavez, appeared to concede that the U.S. president himself had no plan to close the border.
Meanwhile, Trump—who previously used the threat of tariffs and a trade embargo to compel action from Obrador—reacted to his 60 Minutes interview by slamming Biden as weak and ineffective.
“I wouldn’t give them 10 cents,” Trump said of Mexico’s demands.
(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Leonel Moreno, a “migrant influencer” from Venezuela who posted videos on social media encouraging his fellow illegal immigrants to squat in the homes of American citizens and commit other various acts of borderline criminality, faced arrest and may incur charges for illegal possession of a firearm, according to the New York Post.
It is unclear whether the charges were related to a series of videos Moreno posted in a gun store on March 14, appearing to gloat over a judge’s recent determination that illegals were protected under the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.
Authorities arrested Moreno in Columbus, Ohio after failure to appear for required check-ins with the local police force and his extreme social media posts.
Many of Moreno’s posts feature him holding fat stacks of cash, which he alleged to be from government handouts, and bragging about his taxpayer-funded checks.
“I didn’t cross the Rio Grande to work like a slave, I came to the U.S. to mark my territory,” he said in a Feb. 21 post.
“You’re hurt because I make more than you without much work while you work like slaves, understand? That’s the difference between you and me,” he continued. “I’m always going to make lots of money without much work, and you’re always going to be exploited and miserable and insignificant.”
Video sharing platform TikTok banned Moreno for his more incendiary posts, but he still has a presence on Instagram and Facebook.
He had an estimated 500,000 TikTok followers before the banishment of his account; he retained 18,500 on Instagram.
Moreno illegally crossed the border in 2022 and fled the local authorities shortly after crossing.
John Fabbricatore, a former field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, said that such “absconders” are usually successful in their attempts to flee from the law.
“The ICE Alternatives to Detention program, despite its multibillion-dollar budget, is failing to meet necessary standards and has alarmingly high absconder rates,” he said. “ICE fails to track down absconders and instead just removes them from the program.”
Fabbricatore also expressed hope at Moreno’s capture and arrest, and said that illegal immigrants hoping to come into possession of firearms and ammunition should be wary of criminal charges.
American homeowners have faced arrest and death for attempting to remove squatters from their private property.
(Headline USA) In a scathing indictment of Microsoft corporate security and transparency, a Biden administration-appointed review board issued a report Tuesday saying “a cascade of errors” by the tech giant let state-backed Chinese cyber operators break into email accounts of senior U.S. officials including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
The Cyber Safety Review Board, created in 2021 by executive order, described shoddy cybersecurity practices, a lax corporate culture and a lack of sincerity about the company’s knowledge of the targeted breach, which affected multiple U.S. agencies that deal with China.
It concluded that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul” given the company’s ubiquity and critical role in the global technology ecosystem.
Microsoft products “underpin essential services that support national security, the foundations of our economy, and public health and safety.”
The panel said the intrusion, discovered in June by the State Department and dating to May “was preventable and should never have occurred,” blaming its success on “a cascade of avoidable errors.”
What’s more, the board said, Microsoft still doesn’t know how the hackers got in.
The panel made sweeping recommendations, including urging Microsoft to put on hold adding features to its cloud computing environment until “substantial security improvements have been made.”
It said Microsoft’s CEO and board should institute “rapid cultural change” including publicly sharing “a plan with specific timelines to make fundamental, security-focused reforms across the company and its full suite of products.”
In a statement, Microsoft said it appreciated the board’s investigation and would “continue to harden all our systems against attack and implement even more robust sensors and logs to help us detect and repel the cyber-armies of our adversaries.”
In all, the state-backed Chinese hackers broke into the Microsoft Exchange Online email of 22 organizations and more than 500 individuals around the world including the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns.
Hackers accessed some cloud-based email boxes for at least six weeks and downloaded some 60,000 emails from the State Department alone, the 34-page report said. Three think tanks and foreign government entities, including a number of British organizations, were among those compromised, it said.
The board, convened by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in August, accused Microsoft of making inaccurate public statements about the incident—including issuing a statement saying it believed it had determined the likely root cause of the intrusion “when, in fact, it still has not.”
Microsoft did not update that blog post, published in September, until mid-March after the board repeatedly asked if it planned to issue a correction, it said.
Separately, the board expressed concern about a separate hack disclosed by the Redmond, Washington, company in January—this one of email accounts including those of an undisclosed number of senior Microsoft executives and an undisclosed number of Microsoft customers and attributed to state-backed Russian hackers.
The board lamented “a corporate culture that deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management.”
The Chinese hack was initially disclosed in July by Microsoft in a blog post and carried out by a group the company calls Storm-0558.
That same group, the panel noted, has been engaged in similar intrusions—compromising cloud providers or stealing authentication keys so it can break into accounts—since at least 2009, targeting companies including Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Dow Chemical and Morgan Stanley.
Microsoft noted in its statement that the hackers involved were “well-resourced nation state threat actors who operate continuously and without meaningful deterrence.”
The company said it recognizes that recent events “have demonstrated a need to adopt a new culture of engineering security in our own networks,” adding it has “mobilized our engineering teams to identify and mitigate legacy infrastructure, improve processes, and enforce security benchmarks.”
(Headline USA) A northern Virginia town has been excluded from a countywide police training academy after the town’s chief complained about Chinese signatures on trainees’ graduation certificates.
Herndon Police Chief Maggie DeBoard complained that the academy director, Maj. Wilson Lee, used Chinese characters to sign the certificates that graduates receive when they complete training at the Fairfax County Criminal Justice Academy.
In an email sent last month and obtained by the Associated Press, DeBoard told Lee, “I just found out that the academy graduation certificates were signed by you in some other language, not in English. This is unacceptable for my agency. I don’t want our Herndon officers to receive these and I am requesting that they are issued certificates signed in English, the language that they are expected to use as an officer.”
On March 18, the county’s deputy executive for safety and security, Thomas Arnold, wrote to DeBoard informing her that the county was terminating Herndon’s affiliation with the academy.
In a statement, Herndon Town Manager Bill Ashton said the town is reviewing the incident.
He defended DeBoard. “It is unfortunate that Chief DeBoard’s recent interaction with Fairfax County’s Criminal Justice Academy has been viewed as discriminatory. I have personally known Chief DeBoard for over 12 years and this interaction is completely inconsistent with the dedicated public servant that I know,” Ashton said.
The Town of Herndon is a part of Fairfax County, just outside the nation’s capital, but the town maintains its own police force.
The much larger Fairfax County Police Department is the primary user of the academy, which also serves the town of Vienna, the county sheriff’s office and the county fire marshal.
Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis declined to comment on the dispute. But in an email he sent to officers, he defended Lee, saying. “For 16 years of an impeccable career, memorializing a legal name given at birth with a signature that exudes heritage pride has not garnered a single criticism. Nor should it.”
Last year, a former Herndon police officer sued the town in federal court, saying she suffered sexual harassment and discrimination at the hands of a supervisor. The lawsuit accused DeBoard of failing to stop the harassment even though she was aware of it.
The lawsuit was eventually settled before trial, but court papers indicate that other officers complained of racial discrimination during the time DeBoard has been chief.
In the court papers, the town said DeBoard took the female officer’s concerns seriously and that she would have recommended firing the officer accused of harassment, but he resigned before she could do so.
Lawyers for the town said the complaints of racial discrimination were made by officers who faced disciplinary action.
Herndon Police referred questions Wednesday to the statement issued by the town manager.
(Headline USA) The government’s chief human resources agency issued a new rule on Thursday making it harder to fire thousands of federal employees, hoping to head off former President Donald Trump’s promises to once again attempt to drain the Swamp of its corrupt permanent bureaucracy if he wins back the White House in November.
The Office of Personnel Management regulations will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers, who are more easily dismissed from their jobs.
It comes in response to Schedule F, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2 million federal employees and thus reduce their job security protections.
The final rule, which runs to 237 pages, is being published in the federal registry and set to formally take effect next month. OPM first proposed the changes last November, then reviewed and responded to 4,000-plus public comments on them.
“This is not a wonky issue, even though it may be billed that way at times,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the far-left Democracy Forward, which led a coalition of nearly 30 advocacy organizations lobbying the Biden administration to preemptively block the re-implementation of the Trump-era rule.
“This is really foundational to how we can ensure that the government delivers for people—and for us, that’s what a democracy is about,” Perryman claimed.
President Joe Biden nullified Schedule F upon taking office. But if Trump, the presumptive GOP nomineee, were to revive it during a second administration, he could dramatically increase the around 4,000 federal employees who are considered political appointees and typically change with each new president.
The intention was to do away with corruption under the previous “spoils” system, when the winning party had carte blanche over civil appointments and would often give preference to friends and benefactors over those more qualified.
However, it became patently apparent in Trump’s first term that the present bureaucracy has itself become inherently corrupt and anti-democratic, with unelected pencil pushers—many of whom identify politically with the extreme Left—exerting considerable power and influence to undermine the duly elected leader.
By contract, because the bureaucracy favors Democrats, there has been inadequate oversight and accountability for Biden and other Democratic leaders, who have indeed weaponized it against their political enemies as Biden did in using the National Archives to wage a lawfare attack on Trump.
The health and functionality of America’s democracy now hinges on the ability to hold its unelected officials accountable, in addition to those wielding elected power.
In a statement issued Thursday, Biden called the new OPM rule a “step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people.”
The National Treasury Employee Union used freedom of information requests to obtain documents suggesting that workers like office managers, specialists in human resources and cybersecurity might have been among those subject to reclassification under Schedule F.
The new rule moves to counter a future Schedule F order by spelling out procedural requirements for reclassifying federal employees and clarifying that civil-service protections accrued by employees can’t be taken away, regardless of job type. It also makes clear that policymaking classifications apply to noncareer, political appointments.
“It will now be much harder for any president to arbitrarily remove the nonpartisan professionals who staff our federal agencies just to make room for hand-picked partisan loyalists,” National Treasury Employees Union President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement.
Left-wing activists have cheered the rule. They viewed cementing federal worker protections as a top priority given that replacing existing government employees with new, more conservative alternatives is a key piece of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page playbook, known as Project 2025.
That plan calls for vetting and potentially firing scores of federal workers and recruiting conservative replacements to wipe out what leading Republicans have long decried as the “deep state”.
Democrats have couched the political outcomes of the entire 2024 election in similar terms—suggesting that any critics or opponents of the Biden agenda constitute a “threat to democracy” while appearing to have a limited understanding of what “democracy” really means.
Traditional liberals, including current independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have noted that the authoritarian tendencies of the Biden administration, in coordination with the permanent bureaucracy that lays cover for him and attacks Republicans, constitutes a far greater threat to the fundamental process of democracy.
If Trump wins another term, his administration could direct the Office of Personnel Management to draft new rules. But the process takes months and requires detailed explanation on why new regulations would be improvements—potentially allowing for legal challenges to be brought by opponents.
Rob Shriver, a Biden political appointee serving as OPM’s deputy director, said the new rule ensures that federal employee protections “cannot be erased by a technical, HR process” which he claimed, Schedule F sought to do.
“This rule is about making sure the American public can continue to count on federal workers to apply their skills and expertise in carrying out their jobs, no matter their personal political beliefs,” Shriver claimed, without evidence, on a call with reporters.
He further claimed that 85% of federal workers are based outside the Washington area and are “our friends, neighbors and family members,” who are “dedicated to serving the American people, not political agendas.”
Currently, Nebraska divides up three out of five of its Electoral College votes in proportion to which candidate wins in its three electoral districts—meaning that, unlike other states, candidates can split Nebraska, a heavily Republican state.
Because of the city of Omaha, pursuing one of Nebraska’s districts, District 2, becomes a viable play for Democratic candidates.
With the exception of Maine, which also apportions some of its votes to individual districts, all other states designate the Electoral College vote to delegates who have pledged to support the winning candidate, regardless of the margin of the victory.
Kirk referred to the Omaha district as “the most important electoral vote in America” during a recent interview with state Sen. Loren Lippincott, who introduced the bill earlier this year,
The Cornhusker State also received pressure from former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, to abandon the idiosyncratic system.
Nonetheless, the measure fell short, with only eight of its 49 total senators supporting the effort and 36 voting in opposition, including its 16 elected Democrats.
Lippincott said that he would try one more time later this month before the legislative session draws to a close.
Spoke with Lippincott, the sponsor of the winner-take-all bill. He says he will make one more attempt tomorrow to attach the bill’s language to LB 541, a bill by Sen. John Lowe of Kearney to change public power elections and make them partisan.
It remains unclear, however, that there is enough support for the winner-take-all measure.
State Republicans had tried to get Lippincott’s bill tacked on to other legislation as an amendment, but in the end it was determined not to be relevant enough.
Legislators have previously tried to alter the state’s approach to the Electoral College on several occasions, including in 2016, but it has failed each time.
Talk of such alterations has concerned President Joe Biden and Democrats more generally, who want to hang on to the perennial possibility of securing the district two electoral college vote.
“Democrats in Nebraska care about the importance of the president’s agenda and want him to succeed here in [District] 2 and across the state,” said Brent Comstock, a Democrat consultant. “They’re working together to make sure that happens …”
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A Virginia militia has publicly expelled a member who was encouraging others to commit illegal acts, suggesting that the provocateur might have been working for the federal government in a plot to entrap the group.
Documentarian Ford Fischer first reported the strange series of events, which began when Russell Richardson Vane IV first made contact with the “Virginia Kekoas” militia in April 2022.
INVESTIGATIVE VIDEO THREAD: The Virginia Kekoas, a pro-gun prepper militia based in Eastern Virginia and formerly affiliated with the Boogaloo movement, tells News2Share that they recently kicked out a member they believe may have been plotting an explosives-related entrapment… pic.twitter.com/Ubo3aXhVyk
According to the Kekoas leaders, Vane IV told them he was working for the CIA. While the leaders had reservations about Vane IV, they allowed him to enter one of their group chats because they thought he might have advanced knowledge of world-altering events.
But within two weeks of entering the chat, Vane IV allegedly asked the Kekoas about a “group fund,” as well as about starting his own chapter of the Kekoas. Vane IV was told that no fund exists and members pay their own way. Such a fund would likely be illegal.
Despite Vane IV’s suspicious behavior, the Kekoas made him a member of the militia last August. Soon thereafter, Vane IV again proposed illegal behavior, this time offering other members instructions for how to build bombs.
In February, Vane IV again promoted the idea of collecting Hydrogen Peroxide in a group chat with the Kekoas and other militias. He was then accused of being a provacatuer, with other members calling his posts “fed plot shit for real.”
“I told him that this was not allowed,” said one of the group’s leaders, who goes by the nickname “ICE.”
“You need to knock it off, don’t do it again. If you do, we will have to do something, up to releasing you.”
But that still didn’t stop Vane IV, who then asked the Kekoas whether they had plans if the President were to be assassinated.
To top it off, Vane IV allegedly gave another Kekoas leader named “Sasquatch” a batch of purported Defense Intelligence Agency documents about using homemade explosives.
“It freaked me the hell out … Inside of it, it’s literally showing how to use cellulose, how to get cellulose [Nitrocellulose is a highly flammable compound used in explosives], the applications for it—the whole nine yards,” Sasquatch told Fischer.
“The fact that he’s handing me this stuff … This is the one that scared me the most: Everyone saw that Air Force guy who leaked classified maps on Discord, and the maps looked exactly like this,” he added, referring to the classified Pentagon records allegedly leaked by Air Force intelligence officer Jack Teixeira.
If all that weren’t enough, Vane IV allegedly told the Kekoas that he had a contact in the Russian Embassy could pay “up to $50,000 a month to unify all militias in Virginia.”
The Kekoas have issued a statement on the matter.
“We The Virginia Kekoas are a militia type emergency preparedness group. We do not condone terrorist activity, nor do we condone violence towards any member of the government, former or current,” the group said.
“Furthermore, The Virginia Kekoas would never partner, ally or whatever with any foreign government.”
— The Virginia Kekoas (@VirginiaKekoas_) April 1, 2024
After Fischer published his story, the bizarre story became even stranger. On Wednesday, an obituary for Vane IV appeared online, claiming he had died on March 11, which would have been the day after he was formally kicked out of the Kekoas.
However, Fischer investigated further, and found that the obituary was likely fake.
“The obituary claims that memorial services were held at the PW Park on March 20th, and his ashes were placed near Chopawamsic Creek (behind Quantico),” Fischer noted.
“A PW Park Ranger by phone confirmed no such ceremony occurred, although he couldn’t rule out a family hiking to place ashes.”
Fischer’s reporting also prompted others to investigate the situation, turning up more suspicious evidence pointing to Vane IV possibly being an agent/informant-provocateur. Perhaps most notably, journalist Christina Urso, who’s making a documentary on the Whitmer kidnap plot, found that Vane IV’s father is a counterterrorism operator.
A biography for the father, Russ Vane III, states that he works for DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is infamously known for pressuring social media companies to censor content amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and ahead of the 2020 election.
Watch Urso’s video about the apparent provocateur here:
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Federal Railroad Administration is “still investigating” the 60,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate that disappeared from a train car a year ago, according to the Cowboy State Daily.
The local newspaper reported on March 25 that the “The FRA investigation is still being finalized,” and that the FRA’s findings are “pending potential enforcement actions.”
“FRA’s investigation is focused on both the railroad and the shipper,” the agency reportedly said. “Enforcement action would be taken against any party which violated rail safety regulations.”
The ammonium nitrate, which can be used as fertilizer or in explosives, was shipped by rail from Wyoming to California by the firm Dyno Nobel, and the cargo was lost en route.
The railcar loaded with the 30 tons of chemical left Cheyenne on April 12, 2023, and was empty when it arrived two weeks later at a rail stop in the Mojave Desert, California. Dyno Nobel suspected that the chemical fell from the covered hopper car during transit due to a leak through the bottom gate during one of its multiple stops.
According to Dyno Nobel’s press statement, the material, transported in pellet form, was being transported in a covered hopper car similar to those used to ship coal when it fell out of the car en route to Saltdale, approximately 30 miles from the town of Mojave.
According to the Cowboy State Daily, officials still suspect that the ammonium nitrate was leaked, as opposed to being stolen.
“As we have previously indicated, all the available evidence suggests this was a leak that occurred over the course of transportation from origin to destination,” Mike Jaixen, a spokesman for the Union Pacific, told the newspaper. “Such a leak is unlikely to pose any risk to public health or the environment.”
Congress passed a law on securing the handling of ammonium nitrate in 2007, authorizing Homeland Security “to regulate the sale of ammonium nitrate to prevent and deter the acquisition of ammonium nitrate by terrorists, and for other purposes.”
Ammonium nitrate is a potent explosive, capable of wreaking death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. The April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing was one such example—a homemade bomb containing ammonium nitrate that had been constructed and detonated with devastating consequences.
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) U.S. politicians and some military officials are preparing for a showdown with China in the coming years, but the Navy does not appear to be ready for such an endeavor.
The Navy released a report this week showing that ships from nine programs are running behind production schedules by as much as three years apiece. Cumulatively, the nine programs are experiencing an 11-year delay.
BREAKING: The Navy released a fact sheet late Tuesday showing that every major shipbuilding program they're working on is delayed by years. YEARS. It's jaw-dropping. pic.twitter.com/s0qPTozO2v
The delays affect ships such as Columbia-class submarine, which has been tagged as the future cornerstone of the country’s strategic deterrence, according to The Defense Post.
“The US Navy’s third Gerald Ford-class aircraft carrier will also be late by up to 26 months despite manufacturer Huntington Ingalls Industries laying its keel in 2022,” The Defense Post reported Wednesday.
“The review found that the construction of the navy’s first Constellation-class frigate by Fincantieri Marinette Marine is already 36 months behind schedule,” the military publication added.
“The fourth and fifth blocks of its Virginia-class submarine program are also projected to be delayed by 36 and 24 months, respectively.”
As if the delays in shipbuilding weren’t enough, the Navy is also experiencing a shortage of sailors. Forbes reported in December that the USS Gerald R. Ford has downsized its crew by 500 to 600 sailor in the last six months.
“The current complement appears to be unusually low,” Forbes commented. “Even the aircraft carrier’s December 2021 Selected Acquisition Report projected a ‘ship’s force’ of 2716 billets, far higher than the 2,380 sailors currently aboard.”
The shortage of sailors appears to be from attrition, with the Navy unable to replace sailors with new recruits. The Navy fell 20% short of its recruitment goals for 2023.
Despite those woes, the U.S. has been gearing up for a conflict with China under the guise of protecting Taiwan.
Four-star Air Force Gen. Michael Minihan is even preparing his 110,000 troops for war with China within the next two years. According to the Washington Post, Minihan has told his troops to “get their personal affairs in order” and to “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.”
“I hope I am wrong,” Gen. Minihan said of the possibility of a U.S.-China war. “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
(Headline USA) Disney shareholders have rallied behind longtime CEO Robert Iger, voting Wednesday to rebuff billionaire investor Nelson Peltz and his ally, former Disney Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo, who had sought seats on the company’s board.
Despite facing boycotts and other negative publicity surrounding its political agenda, the the woke company had recommended a slate of directors that did not include Peltz or Rasulo.
Peltz—who turned his grandfather’s New York produce truck into an estimated $1.7 billion personal net worth and an $8.5 billion portfolio via his Trian Fund Management—was a prominent supporter of former Republican President George W. Bush.
The dissident shareholders had said in a preliminary proxy filing that they wanted to complete a “successful CEO transition” at Disney and align management pay with performance.
They declared a victory of sorts following the vote, noting that since Peltz’s company, Trian Partners, started pushing Disney in late 2023, the entertainment giant has engaged in a flurry of activity, adding new directors and announcing new operating initiatives and capital improvement plans for its theme parks.
“Over the last six months, Disney’s stock is up approximately 50% and is the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s best performer year-to-date,” Trian said in a statement. Shares in Walt Disney Co., which is based in Burbank, California, closed Wednesday down 3.1%.
The group previously said it wanted to see Disney achieve “Netflix-like” financial performance, specifically citing a 2027 target for Disney to raise a profit margin measure called EBITDA—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—to levels of 15% to 20%.
But Disney is already operating at that level. In the quarter that ended in December 2023, Disney’s EBITDA margin was 18%, according to data compiled by CapitalIQ.
For the previous fiscal year that ended in September, Disney’s EBITDA margin was 16.5%, according to the same data.
Disney announced in November 2022 that Iger would come back to the company as its CEO to replace his hand-picked successor, Bob Chapek, whose two-year tenure had been marked by clashes, missteps and weakening financial performance.
Iger was Disney’s public face for 15 years as chief executive before handing the job off to Chapek in 2020, a stretch in which Iger compiled a string of victories lauded in the entertainment industry and by Disney fans. But his second run at the job has not won him similar accolades.
During Wednesday’s annual shareholder meeting, at least one conservative-leaning corporate watchdog group, the National Legal and Policy Center, held Iger to account for Disney’s ongoing promotion of the LGBT agenda—specifically its preferential treatment to transgender employees while ignoring the equivalent needs of detransitioners.
“Disney has become the Ursula that is stealing the voices of thousands of little Ariel’s across the world, by telling us we can be something that we can never become,” detrans activist Chloe Cole told Iger and other shareholders on the call.
“The lawsuits are coming, sir,” she continued. “It’s only a matter of time before current or past employees, whose bodies and lives have been irreversibly harmed, will show up at your door looking for justice and restitution.”
