The San Jose, California-based e-commerce company allegedly violated the Controlled Substances Act which regulates pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment, including pill presses and encapsulating machines, by requiring identity verification of buyers, record-keeping, and reporting to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
EBay denied the allegations, but said it was easier to settle than fight the case.
“While eBay acted lawfully and denies the DOJ’s allegations, we determined that this agreement is in the best interest of the company and its shareholders as it avoids the costs, uncertainty and distraction associated with protracted litigation,” the company said in a statement.
“EBay’s actions to remove products that could be used for counterfeit pills—including dies, molds and pill presses—prior to any request from the DOJ or other authorities, and years before the government turned its attention to these products, prevented tens of thousands of potentially problematic listings from appearing on our marketplace,” it added. “Government officials have repeatedly commended eBay for our partnership with law enforcement and efforts to support investigations into illegal pill press usage.”
America’s opioid crisis has been fueled in part by people using pill presses and encapsulating machines to make illegal drugs, including those laced with fentanyl, that resemble pharmaceutical pills.
The DOJ alleged eBay failed to comply with Controlled Substances Act requirements for thousands of pill presses and encapsulating machines that were sold through its website. The sales included high-capacity pill presses capable of producing thousands of pills per hour.
A federal investigation found that hundreds of people who bought pill press buyers through eBay also bought counterfeit molds, stamps or “dies,” allowing them to make pills that mimicked the products of legitimate pharmaceutical companies.
It also found and that many of the people who bought pill presses through eBay had been prosecuted in connection with trafficking illegal counterfeit pills.
“Counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl are a significant contributor to the deadly overdose epidemic,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. “The Department is committed to using all available enforcement measures to ensure that companies involved in selling the equipment that makes it possible to create these dangerous pills comply with the Controlled Substances Act.”
On top of the $59 million, eBay also agreed to enhance its compliance program with respect to its prohibited and restricted items policy as it pertains to sales of pill presses, counterfeit molds, stamps, and dies, and encapsulating machines, according to the Justice Department.
The settlement alleged the company failed to report the sale of thousands of pill presses to the DEA. It also said that eBay buyers with residential shipping addresses bought pill presses and counterfeit dies bearing the imprint “M30,” which is the marking associated with 30mg oxycodone pills.
The settlement agreement also noted that “the vast majority of these commercial-grade machines were shipped to residential addresses.” According to the agreement, eBay didn’t report a single transaction to the DEA from 2015 to the present day.
EBay’s revenue comes from collecting a percentage of the final sales price of each transaction completed on its website.
“Fentanyl—pressed into fake pills that look like real prescription medications—is killing Americans,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a statement.
“Drug traffickers buy the tools to make fake pills, like pill presses, online,” Milgram said. “EBay and other e-commerce platforms must do their part to protect the public. And when they do not, DEA will hold them accountable.”
(Steve Wilson, The Center Square) A federal judge on Wednesday smacked down Disney’s last-ditch lawfare attack on Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state of Florida, dashing its hopes to force the Republican leader to reinstate a longstanding sweetheart deal that gave the entertainment corporation unprecedented levels of autonomy.
“As stated by Gov. DeSantis when he signed HB9-B, the Corporate Kingdom is over,” said Jeremy Redfern, press secretary for the DeSantis administration.
“The days of Disney controlling its own government and being placed above the law are long gone,” he added. “The federal court’s decision made it clear that Gov. DeSantis was correct: Disney is still just one of many corporations in the state, and they do not have a right to their own special government. In short—as long predicted, case dismissed.”
U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor ruled in favor of the state in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed because of Disney’s opposition to the state’s anti-grooming law.
“In short, Disney lacks standing to sue the Governor or the Secretary, and its claims against the CFTOD (Central Florida Tourism Oversight District) Defendants fail on the merits because when a statute is facially constitutional, a plaintiff cannot bring a free-speech challenge by claiming that the lawmakers who passed it acted with a constitutionally impermissible purpose,” Winsor wrote in his ruling.
Winsor cited Hubbard vs. AlabamaEducation Association, a 2015 case from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The precedent was an action constitutionally permissible—as it was for the state of Alabama to ban the practice of taking union dues from members’ paychecks—prevents a free-speech case being brought against a governmental entity.
In a statement released by the company, Disney officials said it intends to appeal the decision.
“This is an important case with serious implications for the rule of law, and it will not end here,” said the statement.
“If left unchallenged, this would set a dangerous precedent and give license to states to weaponize their official powers to punish the expression of political viewpoints they disagree with,” Disney claimed. “We are determined to press forward with our case.”
The dispute began when Disney opposed the Parental Rights in Education Act, a 2022 bill that prohibited teachers in kindergarten through fourth grade from teaching about gay and transgender issues.
Leftists rallying to support the woke company have insisted the law threatens to ban all LGBT instruction, deceptively dubbing it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
However, parental rights advocates maintain that the objective is to ensure that any such instruction is age appropriate, curricularly relevant, and thoroughly vetted, amid widespread concerns about classroom indoctrination and sexualization of children.
After Disney waded into the politically charged debate over the bill in an apparent bid to leverage their economic clout against the popular governor, the state’s GOP-led legislature disbanded the Reedy Creek Improvement District, established in 1967 as one of the incentives that brought Disney to Florida.
Lawmakers have since replaced it with a body whose members were appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the state Senate.
The special designation allowed Disney to exercise almost complete autonomy over 25,000 acres of property. This included having power over development projects, roads and taxes, with the district providing fire and emergency medical services and contracting with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office for police protection.
The governmental body largely controlled by Disney also had the power to borrow money for infrastructure improvements at municipal bond rates, saving the company millions.
Disney, according to an audit report, provided perks to Reedy Creek employees.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
(Mike Maharrey, Money Metals News Service) The Federal Reserve didn’t do anything at all at the January Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. But Jerome Powell aggressively ran “open-mouth operations” trying to dampen market expectations for a rate cut at the March meeting.
Nevertheless, one thing is clear: interest rate cuts are on the horizon.
Just not yet.
The FOMC left the federal funds rate unchanged in a range between 5.25 and 5.5 percent. That was the only actual policy announcement coming out of the meeting.
Everything else was just talk.
But Fed-talk – open-mouth operations – moves markets just as forcefully as concrete policy changes – sometimes even more so. The central bankers at the Fed use messaging as a policy tool.
That’s what Wednesday was all about. Powell and Company released enough hawks to slow the market’s roll but let just enough doves fly to prevent a market meltdown.
The Fed Is Finished Hiking Interest Rates
The first message out of the FOMC meeting was rate hikes are over. The committee made that clear by removing language from its official statement.
For months, the FOMC statement has included a phrase asserting “In determining the extent of any additional policy firming that may be appropriate to return inflation to 2 percent over time, the Committee will take into account…”
In the latest statement, the committee removed all mention of “additional policy firming.” Instead, the statement reads, “In considering any adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will carefully assess incoming data.”
This clearly signals that the next move on rate cuts will be down.
During the post-meeting news conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell confirmed that the central bank has likely reached the peak of this hiking cycle.
We believe that our policy rate is likely at its peak for this tightening cycle and that if the economy evolves broadly as expected, it will likely be appropriate to begin dialing back policy restraint at some point this year.
We Want Our Interest Rate Cuts!
The stock market has soared over the last few months, hitting record highs in anticipation of a return to the easy money everybody loves and desires. Most people believed cutting would begin in March.
Easy money is the mother’s milk of this debt-riddled economy. The Federal Reserve spent more than a decade holding interest rates artificially low and pumping liquidity into the economy. That incentivized borrowing, and today, everybody from the federal government to American consumers is buried to their eyeballs in debt.
Debt and high interest rates don’t mix and that’s why everybody yearns for rate cuts – sooner rather than later.
Powell threw cold water on those hopes and dreams, going out of his way to talk down expectations for cuts at the March meeting. While the FOMC made it clear those cuts remain on the table, the messaging was “not yet” and was clearly intended to dampen market enthusiasm.
That’s likely because every member of the FOMC knows that inflation isn’t dead and buried. No matter how you slice the most recent CPI data, it remains well above the mythical 2 percent target. Powell even said so out loud.
Inflation is still too high, ongoing progress in bringing it down is not assured and the path forward is uncertain.
Powell emphasized the committee may need additional signs that inflation is easing before it begins “dialing back the restrictive level” and cutting rates.
Interestingly, according to the Chicago Fed National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI), monetary policy is not at a “restrictive level” at all. The NFCI came in at –0.56 in the week ending January 26. A negative number indicates a historically loose monetary policy.
The central bankers at the Fed have to know this, don’t they? I suspect it’s likely part of the reason they are trying to hold rates at this level just a little longer. Despite all the rhetoric, they know in their heart of hearts that this was a half-hearted inflation fight.
Powell emphatically tried to snuff out hope that interest rates would start coming down in March, saying cuts at the next meeting are “probably not the most likely case or what we would call the base case.”
Based on the meeting today, I would tell you that I don’t think it’s likely that the committee will reach a level of confidence by the time of the March meeting to identify March is the time to do that. But that’s to be seen.
Powell went on to say that “the median participant wrote down three rate cuts this year.”
But I think to get to that place where we feel comfortable starting the process, we need some confirmation that inflation is in fact coming down sustainably to 2 percent.
Powell leaned heavily into the “data dependent” mantra.
We want to see more good data. It’s not that we’re looking for better data, we’re looking for a continuation of the good data we’ve been seeing.
The emphasis on “data” gives the Fed an out to do pretty much anything at the next meeting. The FOMC could conceivably point to some big change in “data” and cut or even raise rates at in March and plausibly say, “We told you this was a possibility.”
Market Reaction to Federal Reserve Messaging
The markets did exactly what one would expect in light of the hawkish rhetoric.
They tanked.
All of the major stock indices fell significantly on Wednesday after the FOMC meeting and Powell’s press conference. The Dow Jones dropped 318 points, a 0.8 percent decline. The S&P 500 fell 1.6 percent. Meanwhile, the NASDAQ being most hungry for easy money and speculation tumbled by 2.2 percent.
The dollar strengthened and gold fell modestly after the meeting.
This has been the typical knee-jerk market reaction to any hawkish rhetoric from the Fed or good economic news that might lead to more hawkish rhetoric from the Fed over the last year.
It reveals just how much they depend on monetary policy. The hope for a return to the easy money policies of the past almost entirely drove the recent stock market boom.
In other words, the markets want inflation.
It’s important to remember that a pivot back to rate cuts — whenever that happens — means a return to the very policies that caused price inflation to begin with.
In other words, any “victory” over inflation that involves a return to easy money really means a surrender to inflation. Easy money policies are inflationary. That’s what the markets are begging for.
And make no mistake; they’ll get their easy money.
Here’s the reality: rate cuts and more inflation are hurtling down the tracks. It’s just a matter of time. When something breaks in the economy – and something will break in this debt-riddled economy with interest rates at 5.5 percent – the Fed will be forced to cut. And we’re not talking small cuts here. We’re talking about interest rates going back to zero and a more quantitative easing.
That’s what the Fed does during an economic crisis.
It’s not so much that the Fed is in danger of breaking the economy with higher interest rates today. The Fed broke the economy more than a decade ago when it pushed rates artificially low and left them there for years. This incentivized debt and malinvestments. It’s only a matter of time before the house of cards falls down.
The markets know this. That’s why they’re clamoring for rate cuts.
But the Fed is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It knows that higher rates will eventually cause the economy to collapse. It also knows that inflation hasn’t been beat. So, it faces a choice: higher inflation or an economic crisis.
Or perhaps both.
The central bank is trying to walk a tightrope high over Wall Street with no safety net.
As financial analyst Jim Grant put it, Powell and other Fed officials seem to look in the mirror and see themselves as Captain Chesley Burnett “Sully”Sullenberger who managed to land a crippled U.S. Airways jet on the Hudson River.
The Fed has arrogated to itself the role of central planning agency. … It’s going to try to balance economic growth with the stability and integrity of the currency. How do they do that? I don’t think it’s given to mortal man and woman to do these things.
(Headline USA) Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and a special prosecutor she hired for her lawfare attack on former President Donald Trump were issued subpoenas by a defense attorney who has alleged Willis and the prosecutor had an inappropriate romantic relationship.
Lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, who represents Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, filed a motion Jan. 8 seeking to dismiss the indictment and to remove Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade from the case.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who’s presiding over the election case, has ordered Willis’s team to respond by Friday to the motion and to remove Willis from the prosecution. He has set a hearing on the matter for Feb. 15. Merchant confirmed that she has subpoenaed both Willis and Wade to testify at that hearing.
Merchant’s law firm also filed a lawsuit Tuesday accusing Willis’s office of failing to comply with the Georgia Open Records Act, saying they “appear to be intentionally withholding information” that she has requested. Merchant had to repeatedly file certain requests after they were prematurely closed, and she was incorrectly told certain records did not exist, the lawsuit said.
Willis spokesperson Jeff DiSantis declined to comment on the subpoenas, but disputed Merchant’s open-records claims.
“We’ve provided her with the information she’s entitled to,” he said, adding that some of the records were still being compiled. He provided a letter that the office sent to Merchant last week with an update on the status of requests she’d made, as well as screenshots showing that Merchant had accessed some records.
The lawsuit argued that, despite sending that letter, the district attorney’s office “failed nonetheless to provide most of the requested documents.”
Neither Willis nor Wade has publicly addressed the allegations of an inappropriate relationship. Willis’s office has repeatedly said a response to Roman’s motion will come in a court filing.
Willis, an elected Democrat, hired Wade in November 2021 to help with her investigation into Trump, whom she had campaigned on the promise of prosecuting.
Since a Fulton County grand jury in August returned an indictment against Trump and 18 others, Wade has led the team of lawyers Willis assembled to prosecute the case. Four co-defendants have since struck plea deals with prosecutors. Trump and the others who remain have pleaded not guilty.
Trump, the current GOP presidential frontrunner, has pointed to the D.A.’s ethical impropriety in order to question the legitimacy of the case against him. Trump and co-defendant Robert Cheeley, a Georgia lawyer, have joined the motion from Roman, a former Trump campaign staffer and one-time White House aide.
Roman’s filing alleges that Willis had paid Wade large sums for his work and then improperly benefited when Wade paid for the pair to go on trips, creating a conflict of interest. It also questioned Wade’s qualifications for the job.
Willis spoke out during a church service nearly a week later, claiming the growing scrutiny of her and Wade was racially motivated, but she did not address the allegations of a relationship.
In a court filing seeking to avoid sitting for a deposition in Wade’s divorce case, Willis accused Wade’s wife of trying to obstruct the election case. In a filing in response, Wade’s wife included credit card statements that showed Wade had bought plane tickets for Willis to travel with him to San Francisco and Miami.
(Headline USA) U.S. officials said Wednesday they disrupted a state-backed Chinese effort to plant malware that could be used to damage civilian infrastructure, as the head of the FBI warned that Beijing was positioning itself to disrupt the daily lives of Americans if the United States and China ever went to war.
The operation, announced just before FBI Director Chris Wray addressed House lawmakers, disrupted a botnet of hundreds of U.S.-based small office and home routers owned by private citizens and companies that had been hijacked by the Chinese hackers to cover their tracks as they sowed the malware. Their ultimate targets included water treatment plants, the electrical grid and transportation systems across the United States.
“China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike,” Wray said.
“This is a world where a major crisis halfway across the planet could well endanger the lives of Americans here at home through the disruption of our pipelines, the severing of our telecommunications, the pollution of our water facilities, the crippling of our transportation modes—all to ensure that they can incite societal panic and chaos and to deter our ability” to marshal a sufficient response, Easterly said.
The comments aligned with assessments from outside cybersecurity firms including Microsoft, which said in May that state-backed Chinese hackers had been targeting U.S. critical infrastructure and could be laying the technical groundwork for the potential disruption of critical communications between the U.S. and Asia during future crises.
At least a portion of that operation, attributed to a group of hackers known as Volt Typhoon, has now been disrupted after FBI and Justice Department officials obtained search-and-seizure orders in Houston federal court in December.
U.S. officials did not characterize the disruption’s impact, and court documents unsealed Wednesday say the disrupted botnet was just “one form of infrastructure used by Volt Typhoon to obfuscate their activity.”
The hackers have infiltrated targets through multiple avenues, including cloud and internet providers, disguising themselves as normal traffic.
The U.S. has in the past few years become more aggressive in trying to disrupt and dismantle both criminal and state-backed cyber operations, with Wray warning Wednesday that Beijing-backed hackers aimed to pilfer business secrets to advance the Chinese economy and steal personal information for foreign-influence campaigns.
“They are doing all those things. They all feed up ultimately into their goal to supplant the U.S. as the world’s greatest superpower,” he said.
Complicating the threat is that state-backed hackers, especially Chinese and Russian, are good at adapting and finding new intrusion methods and avenues.
U.S. officials have long been concerned about such hackers hiding in U.S.-based infrastructure, and the end-of-life Cisco and NetGear routers exploited by Volt Typhoon were easy prey because they were no longer supported by their manufacturers with security updates.
Because of the urgency, law enforcement officials said, U.S. cyber operators deleted the malware in those routers without notifying their owners directly—and added code to prevent re-infection.
A Justice Department official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the government said officials were determined to disrupt the Volt Typhoon operation as soon as possible because the hackers were using the botnet as a stepping stone to hide in U.S. internet traffic while burrowing into the networks of critical infrastructure, ready to maliciously exploit that access at a time of their choosing.
“The truth is that Chinese cyber actors have taken advantage of very basic flaws in our technology,” Easterly said. “We’ve made it easy on them.”
Cybersecurity veteran Amit Yoran, the CEO of Tenable, called Wray’s warning “an urgent call to action. Continuing to turn a blind eye to the risk sitting inside our critical infrastructure is the definition of negligence.”
Cybersecurity experts say major software providers too often sacrifice security for convenience, and that’s biting back.
On the eve of a June visit to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, state-backed Chinese hackers foiled Microsoft cloud-based security in hacking the email of officials at multiple U.S. agencies that deal with China.
On Wednesday, U.S. officials said allies were also affected by Volt Typhoon’s critical infrastructure hacking but, asked by reporters, would not discuss any countermeasures they might be taking.
China has repeatedly denounced the U.S. government’s hacking allegations as baseless. Beijing has accused the U.S. of “almost daily” and “huge amounts of intrusions against Chinese government, with Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, saying last year that “China is the biggest victim of cyber attacks.”
But Gen. Paul Nakasone, the outgoing commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, said “responsible cyber actors” do not target civilian infrastructure.
“There’s no reason for them to be in our water,” Nakasone said. “There’s no reason for them to be in our power.”
On Tuesday, testifying before the same committee, Leon Panetta, who served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the defense secretary in the Obama administration, said he believed that the Chinese agents had “planted malware within our own computer networks” and warned that the Chinese government would use artificial intelligence to spread disinformation.
The committee, chaired by Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., was established last year with a mandate of countering China, kicking off with a prime-time hearing. The Chinese government has lashed out at the committee, demanding that its members “discard their ideological bias and zero-sum Cold War mentality.”
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Reporter Jake Sherman, the founder of Punch Bowl News, reported Thursday that there will be no criminal charges against the men who had gay sex in a Senate hearing room.
Sherman released a statement from the Capitol Police, which said it’s closing down an investigation into the matter.
“It was determined that—despite a likely violation of congressional policy—there is currently no evidence that a crime was committed. Although the hearing room was not open to the public at the time, the congressional staffer involved had access to the room,” the Capitol Police said.
“The two people of interest were not cooperative, nor were the elements of any possible crimes met. The congressional staffer, who has since resigned from his job, exercised his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and refused to talk to us. Our investigators are willing to review new evidence should any come to light.”
USCP says they will not charge anyone in the sex video incident in a Senate hearing room. pic.twitter.com/9ocL5zWg4k
The bizarre incident was first reported in December by the Daily Caller, which obtained footage of the gay sex.
“The alleged staffer can also be seen in a photo, naked on all fours, looking back at the camera on the table where Senators often sit to ask questions during a hearing. It appears to be unprotected sex,” the publication said.
Videos of the scene are included in the Daily Caller’s article. Headline USA has not reviewed them. Daring readers can do so by clicking this link. However, videos spread like wildfire on Twitter and elsewhere.
According to conservative personality Lauren Loomer, the staffer worked for Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md.
Another conservative influencer, Greg Price, reported that the staffer in question is allegedly Aidan Maese-Czeropski.
The Spectator also reported that it received photos and videos of the incident.
“One pic in particular … was taken in what certainly appears to be a conference room in the Hart Senate Office Building, where his boss’s office is located,” the publication reported.
“In the photo, the strapping young gentleman is naked but for a jock strap, on on all fours, facing away from the camera. A cartoon of the Capitol Dome tastefully covers the extremities of his rear end — best to be tasteful after all.”
(Headline USA) White House senior adviser John Podesta will add international climate policy to his job responsibilities, replacing special climate envoy John Kerry as the top U.S. official on international climate issues, the White House said Wednesday.
Podesta will take over Kerry’s responsibilities, though not his title, when he departs, likely this spring, the White House said.
Kerry’s job was created by the Biden administration specifically to fight climate change on the global stage. His appointment did not require confirmation by the Senate, but a law passed in 2022 requires that special envoys reporting to the secretary of State will have to win Senate approval.
In a step a move to circumvent Senate oversight, Podesta was not named as climate envoy but rather a senior adviser to the president for international climate policy.
He was notoriously at the forefront of the so-called Pizzagate scandal after Wikileakspublished emails from his hacked account that showed him using coded language similar to that used in pedophile communities on the dark web.
The messages fueled growing suspicions and conspiracy theories that Podesta and many of his powerful Democrat associates may have been operating a Satanic child-sex ring, although the evidence was never substantiated apart from his emails.
In one such, Jim Steyer, the brother of Democrat mega-donor and former presidential candidate Tom Steyer, wrote Podesta a message that was interpreted as coded language for an orgy involving young black boys:
“Hey John, We know you’re a true master of cuisine and we have appreciated that for years … But walnut sauce for the pasta? Mary, plz tell us the straight story, was the sauce actually very tasty?”
In another, Susan Sandler, a major Democrat donor whose family foundation is behind the recent efforts to discredit Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote to Podesta that after a recent meeting he might have left behind a keepsake handkerchief stained with bodily fluids, according to interpretations:
“The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yorus [sic]? “
Podesta wrote back, “It’s mine, but not worth worrying about.”
The Pizzagate scandal, which lay largely dormant following President Donald Trump’s defeat of Clinton in the 2016 race, recently resurfaced following the news that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had appointed Marina Abramović, a Serbian artist and “spirit cooking witch,” to help rebuild the war-torn nation’s school system.
One of the leaked emails showed she had invited Podesta to a “spirit cooking” event at her home.
This lady did a 6 hour art show where she wipped herself and carved that devil sign into her stomach with a razer blade and lady on a cross of ice at a art gallery pic.twitter.com/zSSsLSOUl1
— FashionFiles(1).JPEG | #Balenciaga (@FashionArtFiles) December 21, 2022
Podesta also likely had a hand in plotting the Russia-collusion hoax used by the Clinton campaign to smear Trump.
And during the 2020 election, his prints were on several election-meddling efforts, which included participation in the Transition Integrity Project, a group that had gamed out the possibilities for a blue-state secession and civil war in the event that Trump were re-elected.
As climate czar, Podesta will have access to a vast but nebulous budget, long criticized for its lack of accountability given that the jet-setting Kerry’s official job responsibilities were largely unspecified.
Kerry, whose flatulence at the recent COP28 received more attention than his diplomatic efforts, announced in mid-January that he would step down from the climate job to work on President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.
Podesta, who played a behind-the-scenes role in the Clinton and Obama administrations, was brought back to the White House last year to put into place an ambitious U.S. climate program revived with the $375 billion approved in the 2022 climate law. He also led the administration’s climate task force.
As outlined Wednesday by the White House, Podesta will continue to be involved in overseeing federal spending under the climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, along with domestic climate priorities, adding the international portfolio that Kerry handled.
White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said Kerry “has tirelessly trekked around the world” to help confront the climate crisis.
“There is no one better than John Podesta to make sure” the U.S. continues to “meet the gravity of this moment,” Zients said, calling Podesta “a fierce champion for bold climate action” who has served three Democratic presidents and has Biden’s trust.
The Washington Post first reported Podesta’s appointment.
Trump filed his lawsuit against British spy Christopher Steele last October, after similar litigation in the U.S. failed. At the time, pundits said his case has a much better chance in the UK, which has stricter defamation and privacy laws.
But according to The Guardian, the court ruled Thursday that Trump’s lawsuit against British spy Christopher Steele “has no reasonable grounds for bringing a claim for compensation or damages, and no real prospect of successfully obtaining such a remedy.”
The London court reportedly added that the “only other remedy claimed was for a compliance order erasing or restricting processing of the memoranda” but that this would be “pointless, and unnecessary, in circumstances where the dossier was freely available on the internet, and the defendant had in any event undertaken to delete the copies it held.”
In the lawsuit, Trump’s lawyers reportedly said he was “compelled to explain to his family, friends, and colleagues that the embarrassing allegations about his private life were untrue”—referring to baseless allegations in the Steele dossier, such as the false “pee tape” claim.
“This was extremely distressing” for him, the filing said, asserting that Steele had presented the claims in a “sensationalist manner” that was “calculated to cause tremendous embarrassment,” according to the New York Times.
While Trump lost his recent lawsuit, two Russians, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, won damages of 18,000 pounds ($22,900) each from Steele’s firm in 2020, after they argued that allegations about them in the dossier violated data-protection laws.
Steele, for his part, has claimed that Trump is engaging in “frivolous and abusive legal proceedings” against him—a rich claim, considering that his dossier essentially derailed Trump’s presidency before it began.
Funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Trump, the often salacious allegations in the now-debunked dossier were deliviered via secret back-channels to the FBI, which then leaked them to the media after opening its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation.
The media, in turn, used the FBI investigation as justification to disseminate the reports publicly, presenting them as factual documents, in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration.
In May, Special Counsel John Durham released a report on the scandal, finding that the FBI lacked a legitimate basis for launching its Russiagate investigation into Trump.
However, Durham’s work fell far short of what Trump and his allies had hoped for. The special prosecutor ended his work without any more criminal charges against those involved in Russiagate.
“If this report and the outcome of the Special Counsel’s investigation leave some with the impression that injustices or misconduct have gone unaddressed, it is not because the Office concluded that no such injustices or misconduct occurred,” Durham said in the report, explaining his decision not to prosecute.
“It is, rather, because not every injustice or transgression amounts to a criminal offense, and criminal prosecutors are tasked exclusively with investigating and prosecuting violations of U.S. criminal laws.”
(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Tara Reade, who survived an alleged 1993 sexual assault by then-Sen. Joe Biden, has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the DOJ for misconduct, her attorney announced on Wednesday.
Jonathan Levy, Reade’s attorney, revealed that soon after she came forward with allegations of a 1993 sexual assault by Biden, the FBI subjected her to an operation aiming to “revictimize her a second time.”
As reported by Fox News, the complaint revealed that the FBI covertly employed tactics against Reade reminiscent of those used in Crossfire Hurricane—the infamous investigation into false allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.
Termed “Operation ‘Cassandra’” by Reade’s attorney, the investigation was initiated “to retaliate, intimidate, discredit, and if possible, eliminate Tara as a threat to President Biden.”
The complaint includes a July 2020 grand jury subpoena addressed to Twitter seeking all records of Reade’s account. The subpoena, led by the Monterey County District Attorney, was part of other surveillance efforts, the complaint said. Investigators sought to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA) to “wiretap, search, and seize information and property from Tara.”
The complaint specifically claims that federal investigators violated Reade’s Fourth Amendment, FISA rules and state privacy laws.
Levy declared, “The United States should not have a two tiered justice system, if President Trump and Mr. Giuliani can be assessed tens of millions in damages for their words; a weaponized FBI that seeks to silence, intimidate and eliminate Joe Biden’s victim, Tara Reade, must also be held accountable; failing to do so means our justice and legal system has become an instrument of political oppression and suppression.”
Reade gained national notoriety after coming forward with details of a harrowing sexual assault by Biden in 1993. At the time, Reade served as his Senate staffer.
Biden, who issued an apology in 2019 following widespread videos showing him getting uncomfortably close to individuals, has long denied the allegations.
In 2023, Reade moved to Russia in for her “safety.”
I was interviewed by @TuckerCarlson and he treated me with kindness as I spoke about that very rough experience of sexual assault by Joe Biden when I worked for him in the Senate. I hope there is an investigation into Joe Biden by Congress for what he did to me and to all of us. https://t.co/BXGNf4cB3p
Satanists from the Satanic Temple of Iowa were able to put the statue in the government building by using the state rules that allow religious displays in the capital, Trending Politics reported.
The statue caused a lot of outrage from the public, but it was “removed” only after Cassidy decided to decapitate the statue and, therefore, destroy it “beyond repair” on Dec. 14, 2023.
Cassidy was charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief, a misdemeanor, on Dec. 15, 2023.
“[My] conscience is held captive to the word of God, not to bureaucratic decree. And so I acted,” he said back then.
On Jan. 30, 2024, Polk County prosecutors charged Cassidy with felony third-degree criminal mischief, noting that the act was committed “in violation of individual rights” under Iowa’s hate crime statute.
“Evidence shows the defendant made statements to law enforcement and the public indicating he destroyed the property because of the victim’s religion,” which triggered the violation of individual rights enhancement, Lynn Hicks, a spokesman for the Polk County Attorney’s Office, said.
“[Satanic Temple making premature filings], like the timing and substance of the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s installation of a demonic statue in the capitol building… are only meant to evoke strong emotions and incite others,” Sara Pasquale, an attorney representing Cassidy, said.
Cassidy is scheduled to be arraigned on Feb. 15, 2024, according to court records. Before the announcement of the new charges, he was already able to raise more than $100,000 for his legal defense on GiveSendGo.
“The world may tell Christians to submissively accept the legitimization of Satan, but none of the founders would have considered government sanction of Satanic altars inside Capitol buildings as protected by the First Amendment,” Cassidy said shortly after he destroyed the statue.
