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Today — 19 February 2025Main stream

Trump Cabinet Officials Embrace Far-Right Influencer Who Has Praised Fascists

18 February 2025 at 22:34

Last week, the Washington Post sparked a media kerfuffle when it reported that talk-show-host-turned-defense secretary Peter Hegseth had invited MAGA provocateur Jack Posobiec to “participate” in Hegseth’s first overseas trip and that this was “triggering alarm among US defense officials worried about the military being dragged into partisan warfare.”

This article and pieces in other outlets noted that Posobiec was a 2020 election denier and a promoter of conspiracy theories who had championed  Pizzagate—the bonkers idea that Democrats were running a Satanic pedophile ring from the basement of a Washington, DC, eatery. They reminded readers that last year at a conservative conference, he had proclaimed, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

As it turned out, Posobiec, a podcaster and a senior editor at Human Events, an ultra-right publication, told Politico that he didn’t tag along with Hegseth. Instead, he accepted an invitation from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to travel with him as media to Ukraine for the secretary’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

All of this raises a troubling question: Why are Trump cabinet officials reaching out to a right-wing activist who has associated with white nationalists and who has pushed dangerous and debunked conspiracy theories (one Pizzagate believer showed up armed at the restaurant and fired an AR-15 rifle inside)? Moreover, last year, Posobiec published a book that praised fascist leaders who used violence to suppress their opponents and that demonized modern-day progressives as “unhumans,” claiming these diabolical people are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” to annihilate American civilization.

In Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), Posobiec and his co-author Joshua Lisec, urged a crusade to wipe out these “unhumans.” The book villified them as “people of anti-civilization” who are “ugly liars who hate and kill.” The book was a hyper-othering of political rivals, loaded with rhetoric that could provoke violence. The “unhumans,” Posobiec and Lisec maintained, were behind the Black Lives Matter movement, in charge of academia, and in control of corporations, the media, and even churches. “They just want an excuse to destroy everything,” they wrote. “They want an excuse to destroy you.”

“Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

Repeating many assertions of the tinfoil-hat crowd, Posobiec, who was part of MAGA’s fraudulent Stop the Steal movement, and Lisec insisted that the riot at the US Capitol was a “lawfare trap” sprung to “destroy” Donald Trump’s followers and “make them an example to any other Republicans who want to get uppity in the future.” They claimed all was calm on Capitol Hill until guards “fired on the peaceful crowd with nonlethal munitions and flash-bangs.” The “insurrection hoax was used to begin a purge of Trump supporters from the military and from public life,” they wrote. In their eyes, the violent rioters, who injured more than 150 law enforcement officers, were “well-meaning patriots.”

With Unhumans, Posobic and Lisec went beyond the usual Tump-land talking points and hailed the efforts of past fascist dictators, while calling for trampling democracy in order to vanquish their political enemies. To defeat the “unhumans” (liberals, Democrats, and others of that ilk), the pair contended, the right must be vicious and adopt extreme and underhanded measures. “Our study of history,” they wrote, “has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

As examples of those who successfully fought against “unhumans,” they cited Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist tyrant, and Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s fascist despot. These two men each led a murderous and repressive regime that smothered democracy. The Spanish government estimated that 114,000 Spanish civilians disappeared and were presumably killed by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War and his subsequent 36-year-long dictatorship. Pinochet disappeared and killed thousands during and after the military coup he led in 1973 that overthrew a democratic and socialist government.

In their book, Posobiec and Lisec described Franco, who was backed by Nazi Germany, as “a great man of history.” And they justified the brutality and violence of Pinochet’s regime: “The story of tossing communists out of helicopter hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism during the mid to late 1970s. Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

In their subtitle, the authors stated their goal was to “crush” the political opposition—a battle they see as being underway today. For them, Franco and Pinochet are excellent examples of winners in the right’s crusade against the “unhumans” of the left.

In the midst of President Trump’s blitzkrieg against the federal government and his political foes, Trump’s most senior officials are embracing Posobiec. But Hegseth and Bessent are not the first Trumpers to do so. Before the book was published last year and before he became Trump’s running-mate, JD Vance gave a thumbs-up to this McCarthyite paranoia by providing a blurb that the duo used to peddle the book:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Vance’s recent speech in Munich, in which he was a cheerleader for the AfD, a far-right extremist party with a strong Nazi taint, echoed the sentiments of Posobiec and Lisec’s work.

Other MAGA luminaries have celebrated the book. Steve Bannon wrote a foreword for it. Donald Trump Jr. proclaimed it “teaches us how…to save the West.” Ret. General Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced first national security adviser, declared Unhumans “exposes their battle plans and offers a fifth-generation warfare system to fight back and win.” And Tucker Carlson said of Posobiec that he “sees the big picture and isn’t afraid to describe it.”

When Bessent, Hegseth, Vance, or other Trumpers cozy up to Posobiec, they are legitimizing and boosting a purveyor of falsehoods, a denigrator of democracy, and an agitator who has extolled murderous fascist dictators as role models for the right’s fight against Democrats, progressives, and the left. Put simply, they are endorsing a fan of right-wing political violence.

Yesterday — 18 February 2025Main stream

To Win America, Democrats Must Win the Story

18 February 2025 at 15:25

The below article is an updated version of a piece that first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Politics is a realm of stories. It is through stories that people understand their lives and the world. All good stories have heroes and villains. Whoever defines the story in a political battle usually triumphs, and the more a story is repeated, the greater the likelihood it prevails. Democrats and citizens who care about preserving American democracy must keep this in mind.

In December 2017, the New York Times reported, “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” The first season of Donald Trump’s presidency didn’t always play out that way, as he stumbled along—and then came the midterms, a sound rejection of Trumpism; the pandemic that he mismanaged, with lethal consequences; and the 2020 election that he lost and failed, though he tried, to overturn with his criminal conniving and promotion of violence.

In Season 2, Trump has stuck to the script. To get elected last year, he went full demagogue and mounted an extensive disinformation campaign that demonized immigrants and Democrats even more than he had done before. (“They’re eating the dogs…They’re eating the cats.”) He invented enemies—Venezuelan gangs taking over whole cities in Middle America—and vowed to conquer them. And as president once again, he has set up a series of rivals to best, including Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Colombia—as well as migrants, anything woke, the transgender community, anyone involved in past prosecutions that targeted him and his January 6 brownshirts, and, most of all, the US government.

Define the narrative, win the narrative.

At the center of his blitzkrieg has been the assault led by Elon Musk on the executive branch, with the US Agency for International Development and foreign aid the first targets for vanquishing. How the story of this attack is conveyed to the public will determine how it registers—and that will determine whether Trump, with the help of Musk, will succeed in establishing an autocracy that will crush the common good and benefit an American oligarchy. Are Trump and Musk fighting to remake a bloated, corrupt, inefficient, out-of-control bureaucracy and save American taxpayers money? Or are they waging a battle to undermine the one force that can counter the otherwise unchecked power of wealth and safeguard Americans from corporate abuses that threaten their safety, health, security, and well-being, as well as the environment we all share? Define the narrative, win the narrative.

Trump and Musk might have the advantage at the moment. Theirs is a holy war against waste, fraud, and abuse—against anonymous federal workers who are depicted as lazy and dumb yet underhanded and diabolical. Musk insanely has characterized USAID as a “criminal organization” that is part of a nefarious cabal that uses its funds illegally to support leftists, Democrats, the liberal media, academia, and evil election-riggers. The Trump White House decried USAID for spending $47,000 for a “transgender opera in Colombia.” (It didn’t.) And Trump denounced the agency as being run by left-wing “lunatics.”

For Trump and Musk, USAID has been merely the first and most vulnerable casualty of their war on the inept and capricious feds.

It’s a reckless smear campaign against an agency that spends $23 billion—one-third of 1 percent of the federal budget and far less than Musk’s $101 billion proposed compensation package from Tesla—helping millions of people around the world avoid malaria, obtain clean water and health care, build democracies, and develop better economies. The smearers know that the American public is both skeptical and uninformed about US foreign assistance. Americans tend to believe that 25 percent of the US government’s budget is used for foreign aid, while noting it should probably be 10 percent, far higher than the actual level of spending.

For Trump and Musk, USAID has been merely the first and most vulnerable casualty of their war on the inept and capricious feds—which has spread to an assortment of agencies that do crucial work, including the EPA, the IRS, the FAA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. A battle against supposed bloat is how they want Americans to see their crusade, and the media are helping them.

Recently the New York Times published a lengthy account on Musk’s “aggressive incursion into the federal government.” (There were six names on the byline.) “Empowered by President Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy,” the newspaper declared. It noted his goal was to “reshape the federal work force.” It quoted Trump publicly praising Musk for being “a big cost-cutter.”

The piece did point out that there are extensive and unprecedented potential conflicts of interest for Musk, given the multitude of financial interests he and his companies have related to the federal government. And it quoted historian Doug Brinkley calling Musk’s efforts “a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.” Overall, though, the article cast what’s transpiring in terms favorable for Musk and Trump. Battling the federal bureaucracy and reshaping the workforce to save money probably sounds good to many Americans. No one really likes a bureaucracy, right? It’s faceless, an abstraction. Think Kafka. Disruptors versus nameless red-tape pushers—that’s a characterization that favors the destroyers.

Musk wants to emasculate, if not eradicate, government and create a libertarian dystopia in which modern-day robber barons like him can romp along however they like.

But Trump and Musk are prosecuting a war on institutions that exist to serve and protect the public interest. (They do sometimes fail, can be hampered by fraud, waste, and political influence exerted by powerful interests, and warrant scrutiny and, frequently, reform.) These agencies and departments establish rules and standards to prevent corporations from despoiling the air and water. They establish safety regulations for the railroad business and other transportation industries. (Air traffic controllers!) They make sure foods, medical devices, and drugs are safe. They research remedies for disease and plan to thwart pandemics. They try to keep workplaces safe. They seek to monitor Big Finance and maintain a stable financial system. They protect consumers from being ripped off. They oversee national security. They strive to bolster cybersecurity. They should be monitoring the rise of artificial intelligence and ensuring it is safely and wisely developed and implemented. And they do much more.

Musk wants to do away with most of this. During a public chat on X with Vivek Ramaswamy and two GOP senators, he expounded, “Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.” He said, “These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done.” The man who has amplified racist, antisemitic, far-right, and loony social media posts also blathered, “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”

His is not just an effort to cut costs and modernize a bureaucracy—an appealing-sounding task. He wants to emasculate, if not eradicate, government and create a libertarian dystopia in which modern-day robber barons like him can romp along however they like, and the rest of us work and live at their mercy.

What’s up for grabs is the foundation of America. We are fighting over what sort of society this country will be.

That was not the story told by the New York Times. In all its thousands of words, the article did not include Musk’s publicly stated wish to eliminate all regulations or explain his desire to empower the powerful and erase any checks on the elites. Remember the awful derailment in 2023 in East Palestine, Ohio, of a train carrying hazardous materials? Republicans, including JD Vance, then a US senator from that state, blasted the Biden administration for failing the good people of East Palestine. Musk wants to weaken the government’s ability to prevent such accidents. Or to prevent E. coli outbreaks in food. Or to track climate change. Or to develop intelligence on national security risks to the United States. Or to pursue criminals. Or to regulate crypto and other financial interests.

In a recent issue of my Our Land newsletter, I asked whether Democrats realized they were in a war. In the days since, more of them seem to be getting it and displaying the fierceness and fight required to meet this moment. But as they rush—or speed-walk—to the barricades, they need to be as savvy as Trump and Musk and, without the supersized bully pulpits these two demagogic liars possess, figure out how to out-story the forces of fascistic populism and to convey clearly the aims of Trump and Musk and the true nature and stakes of this fight.

Democrats have been forceful in defending USAID. But they should not allow this conflict to become mainly a clash over foreign aid, an easy matter for Musk and the right to exploit. The war goes far beyond that. What’s up for grabs is the foundation of America. We are fighting over what sort of society this country will be. Trump sees this battle as an entertaining TV show in which he can be the valiant hero, with the richest man in the world as his faithful sidekick, combatting a malignant mass of do-nothing, self-serving, out-of-touch unelected functionaries. By pushing this simple plotline, he seeks to turn the United States into an oligarchic empire that he rules. Those who wish to preserve the nation as a somewhat functioning democracy that often (though hardly always) serves the common good and that applies some checks on the influence and actions of the wealthy and powerful have the arduous task of counterprogramming Trump TV with reality, as ugly and messy as it may be. Whoever succeeds in establishing the story will likely write the ending.

Before yesterdayMain stream

National Archives Head Resigns as Trump Takes Control of Records

15 February 2025 at 01:03

The acting head of the National Archives announced his resignation on Friday, paving the way for Donald Trump to continue his takeover of the government’s records and the agency that serves as custodian of the nation’s history.

Deputy Archivist William Bosanko informed staff in an email Friday that he will step down on Tuesday. Bosanko, who has worked at the agency since 1993, has been the acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration for just a week, after Trump fired Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan.

Under federal law, a president can fire the archivist but must also “communicate the reasons for any such removal to each House of the Congress.” Trump did not do that. Over a week ago, the Trump White House moved to make Secretary of State Marco Rubio the acting archivist, despite standing law that the deputy archivist assumes those responsibilities if the position is vacant.

Bosanko’s exit is part of a Trump putsch at the agency, which was deeply involved in the case of the top-secret documents Trump removed from the White House when he left office in 2021. According to two sources familiar with the situation, Bosanko was pushed out by Jim Byron, a 31-year old who was recently president of the Richard Nixon Foundation. Byron delivered Bosanko an ultimatum: Resign now or be fired next week.

Reached by phone Friday evening, Byron declined to comment.

Byron has been working out of the Archives’ offices as a political appointee representing the White House. Byron has often described himself as a mentee of Hugh Hewitt, an ardent pro-Trump commentator who preceded Bryon as head of the Nixon Foundation and who now sits on its board. (The Nixon Foundation and the Archives have occasionally been in conflict with each other, which often happens with presidential foundations and the government agency that oversees presidential libraries, according to an Archives source.)

Speculation at the Archives regarding the next head archivist has focused on Hewitt and two other candidates: John Solomon, a far-right journalist known for reporting and promoting false claims about Joe Biden’s connections to Ukraine in 2019, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former senior director of intelligence at the National Security Council in the early days of the Trump administration, who was hired by then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (before Flynn was fired) and later ousted by H.R. McMaster, Flynn’s successor. (In 2022, Trump designated Solomon and Kash Patel, now his pick to lead the FBI, as his representatives to the Archives.)

After this story first published, Hewitt told Mother Jones, “I am never going back into government. Ever. I want to stay on air through the end of the story and then enjoy grandkids. Not for me.”

Trump clashed with the National Archives after leaving office in 2021 with a slew of government documents, many highly classified. Trump refused efforts by the Archives to retrieve the material, prompting the Justice Department to subpoena him for the missing documents. Trump allegedly then had staffers at his Mar-a-Lago residence hide boxes of classified documents from FBI investigators. And he allegedly ordered an aide to delete security camera footage of boxes being moved in a bid to hide evidence from a grand jury. Trump was also charged with violating the Espionage Act by showing classified material to visitors who lacked security clearances.

Trump, who has maintained without evidence that he declassified all the material he removed from the White House, avoided trial after Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, threw out the case based on the claim that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges, had not been properly appointed.

This makes the Archives a target for the revenge-a-thon Trump’s administration is mounting.

Under federal law, the chief archivist must “be appointed without regard to political affiliations and solely on the basis of the professional qualifications required to perform the duties and responsibilities of the office.” Trump, though, may have other qualifications in mind. With the archivist appointment, he not only will be able to extract payback; he will be able to control the government agency that helps shape American history.

Kash Patel Failed to Disclose Companies Involved in a Million-Dollar Land Deal

14 February 2025 at 21:39

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, failed to divulge an important set of corporate ties on the financial disclosure form and questionnaire he was required to fill out as part of his Senate confirmation process.

These connections involve a land purchase he made in Virginia with a friend through a chain of limited liability corporations in which Patel held an interest. Patel’s filings acknowledge his ownership of the property, but the lack of disclosure of these LLCs obscures the partnership he formed when acquiring this undeveloped lot.

Here’s what happened. On November 1, 2021, Patel registered a company called Skeleton Coast in Nevada. That same day another LLC named Dons of Marbury was created in Nevada, with two officers—Patel’s Skeleton Coast and a Virginia-based firm, NextGen Building & Management LLC.

NextGen Building is a real estate development company founded by realtor Jordan Shahin, a friend of Patel who plays with him on an ice hockey team called the Dons that competes in a Washington, DC, league. According to a recent Washington Examiner article on Patel’s hockey hobby, Shahin has “grown close” to Patel in recent years.

Patel and Shahin registered two other LLCs in Nevada on November 1, 2021, according to Nevada state business records: Monarchs of Marbury LLC and Marbury Empires LLC. For each company, two officers were listed: Patel’s Skeleton Coast and Shahin’s NextGen Building.

Several months later, on March 7, 2022, Marbury Empires purchased a 3.64-acre vacant lot in Chantilly, Virginia, for $550,000, according to Loudon County property records. The land abuts a development named Marbury Estates. A year earlier it had been listed for sale for $850,000, according to Zillow. (The sellers were two companies, Bethany LLC and 931 Bonnie Brae LLC. Their owners are not publicly known.)

Eight months after Marbury Empires LLC bought this property, Patel and Shahin changed the officers of this company, removing Skeleton Coast and NextGen Building and replacing them with the Dons of Marbury LLC as the sole officer. This placed a layer of corporate ownership between the companies for which Patel and Shahin were publicly identified as officers and the LLC that purchased the Virginia property.

In April 2023, the undeveloped lot, still owned by Marbury Empires LLC, was listed for sale for $1,095,000—about twice what Patel and Shahin had paid for it. Two months later, it was taken off the market. This past October it was again listed for sale, this time for $1.8 million. As of Friday, the listing remained active.

On the questionnaire that Patel filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee, he disclosed he was a managing member of Skeleton Coast and noted that his equity interest in this LLC was $773,357. He did not disclose his interest in Dons of Marbury, Monarchs of Marbury, or Marbury Empires.

On his financial disclosure form, he likewise recorded his position as an officer of Skeleton Coast, but on this document he said the LLC had no value (contradicting his Senate questionnaire). He did report on this form that he owned undeveloped land in Chantilly worth between $500,001 and $1 million dollars. He did not disclose his ties to any of the Marbury LLCs.

The financial disclosure form Patel filled out required him to report “all positions as an officer, director, trustee, general partner, proprietor, representative, employee, or consultant.” And the Senate questionnaire instructed him to list all “corporations, companies, or other enterprises [and] partnerships…with which you have been affiliated as an officer, director, partner, proprietor, or employee since graduation from college.” Patel appears to have had a controlling or significant interest in the LLC that purchased the Chantilly land through two other LLCs he set up, yet he did not disclose two of these three firms.

Because the rules for financial disclosures can provide wiggle room, it’s unclear if Patel violated any in not revealing the LLCs that he and Shahin used to purchase this land. But for a national security position, it’s important that all significant financial relationships be revealed. And Patel kept these interactions hidden.

Patel and a spokesperson for Patel did not respond to queries about this land deal and the LLCs he did not disclose. Shahin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The missing LLCs are not the only problem with Patel’s disclosures. Investigative journalist Roger Sollenberger revealed this week that Patel had failed to acknowledge his financial ties to two companies connected to a specialist in off-shore banking. And Patel did not file his financial disclosure statement until two days after the Senate Judiciary Committee held his confirmation hearing. That meant senators at this session could not ask him about any of the questions his disclosures (or lack thereof) have raised. This includes questions about a payment from a Kremlin-linked source, Patel’s stake in a Chinese manufacturing firm, and money he received for “consulting” work for Qatar that he has not publicly explained.

On Thursday—after Republicans on the committee voted to approve his nomination and send it to the Senate floor—Senate Democrats sent Patel a list of queries. Several referred to unresolved matters related to his disclosures. One concerned the story first reported by Mother Jones that Patel received $25,000 from a Ukrainian-Russian-American filmmaker who has worked for a propaganda operation funded by Vladimir Putin. None of the questions related to Patel’s partnership with Shahin and the LLCs he did not mention.

Kash Patel Failed to Disclose Companies Involved in a Million-Dollar Land Deal

14 February 2025 at 21:39

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, failed to divulge an important set of corporate ties on the financial disclosure form and questionnaire he was required to fill out as part of his Senate confirmation process.

These connections involve a land purchase he made in Virginia with a friend through a chain of limited liability corporations in which Patel held an interest. Patel’s filings acknowledge his ownership of the property, but the lack of disclosure of these LLCs obscures the partnership he formed when acquiring this undeveloped lot.

Here’s what happened. On November 1, 2021, Patel registered a company called Skeleton Coast in Nevada. That same day another LLC named Dons of Marbury was created in Nevada, with two officers—Patel’s Skeleton Coast and a Virginia-based firm, NextGen Building & Management LLC.

NextGen Building is a real estate development company founded by realtor Jordan Shahin, a friend of Patel who plays with him on an ice hockey team called the Dons that competes in a Washington, DC, league. According to a recent Washington Examiner article on Patel’s hockey hobby, Shahin has “grown close” to Patel in recent years.

Patel and Shahin registered two other LLCs in Nevada on November 1, 2021, according to Nevada state business records: Monarchs of Marbury LLC and Marbury Empires LLC. For each company, two officers were listed: Patel’s Skeleton Coast and Shahin’s NextGen Building.

Several months later, on March 7, 2022, Marbury Empires purchased a 3.64-acre vacant lot in Chantilly, Virginia, for $550,000, according to Loudon County property records. The land abuts a development named Marbury Estates. A year earlier it had been listed for sale for $850,000, according to Zillow. (The sellers were two companies, Bethany LLC and 931 Bonnie Brae LLC. Their owners are not publicly known.)

Eight months after Marbury Empires LLC bought this property, Patel and Shahin changed the officers of this company, removing Skeleton Coast and NextGen Building and replacing them with the Dons of Marbury LLC as the sole officer. This placed a layer of corporate ownership between the companies for which Patel and Shahin were publicly identified as officers and the LLC that purchased the Virginia property.

In April 2023, the undeveloped lot, still owned by Marbury Empires LLC, was listed for sale for $1,095,000—about twice what Patel and Shahin had paid for it. Two months later, it was taken off the market. This past October it was again listed for sale, this time for $1.8 million. As of Friday, the listing remained active.

On the questionnaire that Patel filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee, he disclosed he was a managing member of Skeleton Coast and noted that his equity interest in this LLC was $773,357. He did not disclose his interest in Dons of Marbury, Monarchs of Marbury, or Marbury Empires.

On his financial disclosure form, he likewise recorded his position as an officer of Skeleton Coast, but on this document he said the LLC had no value (contradicting his Senate questionnaire). He did report on this form that he owned undeveloped land in Chantilly worth between $500,001 and $1 million dollars. He did not disclose his ties to any of the Marbury LLCs.

The financial disclosure form Patel filled out required him to report “all positions as an officer, director, trustee, general partner, proprietor, representative, employee, or consultant.” And the Senate questionnaire instructed him to list all “corporations, companies, or other enterprises [and] partnerships…with which you have been affiliated as an officer, director, partner, proprietor, or employee since graduation from college.” Patel appears to have had a controlling or significant interest in the LLC that purchased the Chantilly land through two other LLCs he set up, yet he did not disclose two of these three firms.

Because the rules for financial disclosures can provide wiggle room, it’s unclear if Patel violated any in not revealing the LLCs that he and Shahin used to purchase this land. But for a national security position, it’s important that all significant financial relationships be revealed. And Patel kept these interactions hidden.

Patel and a spokesperson for Patel did not respond to queries about this land deal and the LLCs he did not disclose. Shahin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The missing LLCs are not the only problem with Patel’s disclosures. Investigative journalist Roger Sollenberger revealed this week that Patel had failed to acknowledge his financial ties to two companies connected to a specialist in off-shore banking. And Patel did not file his financial disclosure statement until two days after the Senate Judiciary Committee held his confirmation hearing. That meant senators at this session could not ask him about any of the questions his disclosures (or lack thereof) have raised. This includes questions about a payment from a Kremlin-linked source, Patel’s stake in a Chinese manufacturing firm, and money he received for “consulting” work for Qatar that he has not publicly explained.

On Thursday—after Republicans on the committee voted to approve his nomination and send it to the Senate floor—Senate Democrats sent Patel a list of queries. Several referred to unresolved matters related to his disclosures. One concerned the story first reported by Mother Jones that Patel received $25,000 from a Ukrainian-Russian-American filmmaker who has worked for a propaganda operation funded by Vladimir Putin. None of the questions related to Patel’s partnership with Shahin and the LLCs he did not mention.

Foreign Money, Alleged Lies, and Extremism—What GOP Senators Voting for Kash Patel Ignored

13 February 2025 at 16:31

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on Thursday morning to approve the nomination of Kash Patel to be FBI director, despite a host of issues that once would have sunk any nominee for this critical national security and law enforcement post. These include Patel’s reported role in a planned political purge of FBI agents and his apparent lies to the committee regarding that and other matters. And there’s much more. Patel has received payments from sources linked to Russia, China, Qatar, and other foreign interests that he has not explained, or, in one case, divested from. He has embraced false and dangerous conspiracy theories, including falsehoods about the 2020 election. He has endorsed using government power to seek revenge against his and Donald Trump’s political enemies. He has even seemingly encouraged violence against Trump critics.

Republicans don’t seem to care about any of this. In fact, they appear eager to confirm Patel before more damaging information about him emerges. Here is a rundown of some of the matters these Republicans are ignoring.

The purge

On January 30, the same day Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, news broke that Trump administration officials had ordered the firing of multiple senior FBI executives. The next day, reports emerged that Trump appointees were compiling a list of thousands of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases, with the possible aim of firing them.

Patel told the Judiciary Committee—under oath—that he was not involved in personnel issues nor in touch with the White House about any such decisions. He further claimed he would protect FBI officials from political retribution for past work.

But on Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, accused Patel of lying about this. In a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Durbin said he had learned from “multiple sources that Kash Patel has been personally directing the ongoing purge of career civil servants” at the FBI. In that letter and during a Senate floor speech, Durbin said whistleblowers told him that Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a former personal lawyer for Trump, told top FBI officials in a January 29 meeting that Patel wanted the bureau to remove targeted employees quickly. “KP wants movement at FBI,” a person at the meeting wrote in notes that Durbin said he reviewed.

Durbin also said his sources reported that Patel, as he has awaited confirmation, has been receiving information from an advisory team at the FBI and then passing on instructions to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, “who relays it to” Bove.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Judiciary Committee, dismissed Durbin’s new charges as “hearsay.” He expressed no interest in gathering more information and rejected Democrats’ call for a second confirmation hearing where they could ask Patel directly about the firings of FBI officials. 

Responding to Durbin’s letter and floor speech, a Patel spokesperson said, “The media is relying on anonymous sources and secondhand gossip to push a false narrative.” That was not a clear denial. When Mother Jones asked if Patel communicated with Miller about firing FBI personnel, neither Patel nor his spokesperson responded.

Possible perjury

During Patel’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) asked, “Are you aware of any plans or discussions to punish in any way, including termination, FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations?” Patel said he was “not aware of that” and added: “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there.”

Patel made similar claims in written responses to questions that six Democratic senators sent to him after the hearing. Each of these senators submitted queries regarding whether Patel knew of plans to oust senior FBI officials and whether he was involved in that effort. He repeatedly answered that he could not recall any such conversations and claimed he was not involved in these decisions.

“Did you approve or have any role in the decision to terminate these senior FBI employees?” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) asked. “No,” Patel responded.

Those replies, if Durbin is correct, were lies. But Grassley and other Republicans are unwilling to confront Patel about this possible perjury.

Other possible lies

Asked during his testimony about his promotion of a recording of a song performed by the so-called J6 Prison Choir, which was comprised of inmates at a DC jail who faced assorted charges for their participation in the January 6 insurrection, Patel said he was “not aware” that this group was composed of imprisoned rioters. He also testified that he “didn’t have anything to do with the recording.” In fact, Patel personally released the song on Steve Bannon’s War Room show, and told Bannon that he had overseen the song’s recording and mastering. And he hailed the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.”

Patel has insisted that the money he raised from the recording went to the families of January 6 prisoners who were not convicted of any violent offenses. In his written responses, he claimed “the financial details” on his use of the funds were in his organization’s public disclosures. That’s not true. Patel’s nonprofit, the Kash Foundation, says in an IRS filing that it gave “direct cash assistance” totaling $167,821 to 50 people, but it does not identify them. That leaves Patel’s claim that he did not support families of violent attackers impossible to verify.

Patel also said under oath that he was not familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for spreading false claims about Covid. Patel, however, has appeared at least eight times on Peters’ podcast. Following the hearing, Peters declared: “Clearly Kash Patel is lying.”

Ties to Russian propagandist

As Mother Jones first reported, Patel last year was paid $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI documentary produced by a Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties. That filmmaker, Igor Lopatonok, worked on an overt Russian propaganda campaign funded by Vladimir Putin’s office, and in 2019 he produced a pro-Putin film partly financed by an Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician who had been sanctioned by the United States since 2014. Lopatonok also worked with an American who obtained political asylum in Russia and who has mounted extensive disinformation operations against the United States.

Patel declared in the documentary that the Russians had not intervened in the 2016 election—despite multiple investigations confirming they did so to assist Trump—and Patel said that he hoped to “shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the “Deep State.” Patel later said that remark was “hyperbole.” He has not explained whether he knew of the filmmaker’s background as a Russian propagandist.

Foreign ties

In the financial disclosure form Patel submitted to the Senate, he revealed that he was paid an unspecified amount in 2024 for “consulting services” for Qatar. That raised the question of why Patel did not register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Patel has not addressed that subject. But a “source close to Patel’s confirmation” told the far-right Federalist that “his work for Qatar was limited to securing the 2022 FIFA World Cup and other security measures” and that this did not require him to register as foreign agent.

The problem with that explanation is that Patel reported working for Qatar until November 2024. That was two years after the World Cup took place there. And it includes the time Patel spent working as a surrogate for Trump’s most recent presidential campaign. Patel’s disclosure form notes that he was paid by the Qatari embassy in Washington, which runs the Gulf state’s US lobbying efforts, not Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, which organized the nation’s World Cup effort and related programs. Spokespersons for Patel, the Supreme Committee, and the Qatari embassy did not answer questions regarding the details of Patel’s work for Qatar.

Patel’s financial disclosure report also revealed he worked for the Czechoslovak Group, a Prague-based arms company, as it was buying Vista Outdoor, a US company that owns assorted ammunition brands, including Remington. Senate Republicans previously argued that the Vista Outdoor purchase was a threat to national security. But none have publicly asked Patel to explain what he did for the Czechoslovak firm.

Patel also disclosed that he was given between $1 million and $5 million worth of unvested stock in Elite Depot Ltd. for consulting work he did not explain. Elite Deport is the Cayman Islands-based parent company of Shein, a Chinese fashion company. Patel has declined to divest his stake in the company—even as he prepares to oversee FBI counterintelligence operations against China. After Trump slapped a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports, including Shein’s, Patel’s stake in the company means he has a personal interest aligned with Chinese business interests.

In a letter sent to Patel on Wednesday, five Democrats on the committee noted Shein has faced “criticism for its use of forced labor in China, including persecuted ethnic minorities and children.”

“Continuing to profit from forced labor by refusing to divest your financial interest in this company,” they wrote, “demonstrates a callous disregard for forced labor victims and calls into question your judgment and ability to impartially lead the FBI’s efforts to combat the scourge of human trafficking and the PRC’s foreign influence activities.”

A few years ago GOP senators aggressively opposed some Biden administration nominees for perceived links to, or past work for, Chinese businesses. But no Republicans have publicly pressed Patel about his plan to retain an interest in a Chinese manufacturer.

QAnon 

Patel has pushed far-right conspiracy theories, including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; the baseless claim that the January 6 riot was instigated by the FBI; and the false notion that there was no Russian effort  to help Trump win the 2016 election. But perhaps his looniest far-right flirtation has been his past support for QAnon, the movement that holds that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles—which includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and business tycoons—has been operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination, with Trump secretly battling against them. And QAnon is not just a kooky theory; it has sparked multiple acts of violence.

Patel repeatedly has hailed QAnoners and promoted their unhinged narrative. On social media, he amplified QAnon messaging. He has been a guest on numerous QAnon-supporting shows to promote Trump’s Truth Social platform. On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.” On another occasion, he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel chimed in: “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it.”

When Democratic senators inquired about those comments, Patel insisted his remarks were “taken out of context.” He asserted, “I do not support or promote QAnon.” His past comments show he did precisely that.

Retribution and violence

Patel has long portrayed himself as an avenging angel for Trump who has battled the supposed Deep State on Trump’s behalf. Appearing on Bannon’s podcast in 2023, he proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether its criminally or civilly.”

In his 2023 book Government Gangsters, Patel called for mounting “investigations” to “take on the Deep State.” In an appendix, Patel presented a list of 60 supposed members of the Deep State who were current or former executive branch officials and who presumably would be targeted. Patel listed names that would be the obvious purported cabalists for a MAGA activist, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Merrick Garland, Hillary Clinton, former CIA chief John Brennan, and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. This line-up also included a number of Republicans and onetime Trump appointees: Bill Barr, who served as attorney general for Trump; John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers during his first White House stint; and Mark Esper, a secretary of defense under Trump.

This roster has been characterized as Patel’s “enemies list” of people he might target for investigation or prosecution should he become FBI chief. During his confirmation hearing, Patel denied he had any intention of seeking revenge against Trump’s political foes. He referred to this list as merely a “glossary.”

When Senate Democrats challenged him on this characterization in written questions—noting he had told Bannon that “Deep Staters” would “be held accountable and prosecuted, criminal prosecutions” during a second Trump presidency—Patel sidestepped. “This language is taken out of context and does not accurately or fully represent my prior statements or positions,” he wrote. No Republican Senator has publicly expressed concern over Patel’s demonstrated desire to use government power to extract revenge.

One of the most absurd moments of the hearing came when Patel was questioned about a 2022 social media post he had amplified that showed an AI-generated video of him using a chainsaw to attack various Trump critics, including former Rep. Liz Cheney, Sen. Adam Schiff, and Anthony Fauci. He claimed this meme had been taken out of context—it hadn’t—and pointed out that he had not created it, as if that were mitigating. Asked about this meme in the written questions, Patel replied that he had reposted the “meme in question as a private citizen.” He added, “It was clearly intended as humor. A chainsaw as a symbol of government reform is not unusual.” He also stated that “reposting an individual’s perspective on a specific issue does not constitute my endorsement of how their views or other positions may be interpreted.”

Here was a nominee to be FBI director both justifying and downplaying his dissemination of a meme that could be read as encouraging violence against his political enemies, including Schiff, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee overseeing his nomination. It was just one more troubling thing for Senate Republicans to ignore.

How Trump and Musk’s War on Government Will Lead to More Abortions

12 February 2025 at 19:48

In 2023, during a speech at a Washington, DC, gala for the far-right Faith & Freedom Coalition, Donald Trump declared that he was proud to be “the most pro-life president” in US history. Yet with the war on the federal government that he and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk are now waging, one probable result will likely not please his conservative Christian allies: an increase in the number of abortions, perhaps by over 1 million.

The first target of the Trump-Musk crusade has been the US Agency for International Development, the federal agency that distributes foreign aid through programs that help millions of people defend against deadly diseases (such as malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, Covid, and ebola), obtain clean water, gain access to health care, bolster democratic institutions, and build more productive local economies. Of its $23.4 billion budget for 2024, the agency earmarked $2.2 billion for health initiatives. About one-quarter of that was to be spent on clean-water programs. Two-hundred-and-forty-seven million dollars was committed to maternal and child health. Programs for family planning and reproductive health received $191 million. (Including other government programs, Congress in recent years has annually appropriated about $600 million in total for overseas family planning.)

President Trump’s executive order freezing most US foreign aid for 90 days has led to chaos within USAID and around the world, causing the suspension of programs that conduct clinical trials, provide food assistance, and aid war refugees. For some bizarre reason, Musk has venomously attacked USAID, spreading a baseless and vicious conspiracy theory that it is a diabolical and corrupt outfit covertly financing the media, Democrats, academia, and assorted components of the left in the United States. He has, of course, provided no evidence of this bunk, and boasted of “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”

The Trump administration also proclaimed it wants to gut the agency’s staff from about 10,000 to a few hundred. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked pieces of the Trump-Musk plan to shutter most of the agency, but the stop-work order regarding its programs and all foreign aid remained.

With everything else, family planning and reproductive health programs were halted. In one instance, a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, called in women who were participating in the testing of a new device to prevent pregnancy and HIV infection. The USAID-funded program had lost its financial support and now had to remove the device, a silicone ring inserted into a vagina, from all the women in the program.

Since the 1973 passage of the Helms Amendment—named after ultra-right Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina—US foreign aid cannot be used to fund abortion. Instead, the United States has focused on supporting contraceptive services overseas that decrease unintended pregnancies, as well as abortions, which are unsafe in many regions.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research outfit that studies reproductive health issues, Trump’s stop-work order will over three months deny 11.7 million women and girls in low- and middle-income countries contraceptive care and lead to a rise in unintended pregnancies and abortions. “Of the estimated 4.2 million unintended pregnancies, there would be 1.3 million unsafe abortions,” the group estimates in a statement provided to Mother Jones. Guttmacher focuses on unsafe abortions—which include those performed using a non-recommended method or by an untrained provider—not all abortions. The total number of abortions will be higher than the 1.3 million figure.

Here’s one example of the freeze’s impact. Ben Bellows, a former researcher at the Population Council, runs a company called Nivi Inc. It had a six-figure contract for a program to help about 300,000 women in India receive reproductive health care information, digital counseling, and referrals to nearby pharmacies and clinics. With the loss of USAID funding, he says, “projects like ours are closing. He adds, “Fewer contraceptive options mean women stay on a method they don’t like but can’t quit or don’t take up any protection against unintended pregnancy. The end of our project and others like it will lead to more unintended pregnancies and more abortions.”

So far, there have been no big howls from the anti-abortion movement about the Trump-Musk assault on USAID and foreign aid and the resulting rise in abortions. This week, the website of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America has featured multiple posts praising Trump for anti-abortion measures he has taken since returning to the White House. There was no mention of the USAID shutdown. Ditto for the National Right to Life Committee.

Four anti-abortion advocates did write a piece for the New York Times criticizing Trump’s foreign aid freeze for halting the work of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a multibillion-dollar global health initiative known as PEPFAR started under President George W. Bush, which funds HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in Africa. It has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented mother-to-child transmission of the virus, allowing  nearly eight million babies to be born free of the disease. They did not address the cut-off in family-planning assistance.

At his recent confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theory-monger whom Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, said over and over that Trump considers every abortion “a tragedy.” By this measure, Trump and Musk, with their assault on USAID and foreign aid, will generate more than a million new tragedies.

Foreign Money, Alleged Lies, and Extremism—What GOP Senators Voting for Kash Patel Ignored

13 February 2025 at 16:31

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on Thursday morning to approve the nomination of Kash Patel to be FBI director, despite a host of issues that once would have sunk any nominee for this critical national security and law enforcement post. These include Patel’s reported role in a planned political purge of FBI agents and his apparent lies to the committee regarding that and other matters. And there’s much more. Patel has received payments from sources linked to Russia, China, Qatar, and other foreign interests that he has not explained, or, in one case, divested from. He has embraced false and dangerous conspiracy theories, including falsehoods about the 2020 election. He has endorsed using government power to seek revenge against his and Donald Trump’s political enemies. He has even seemingly encouraged violence against Trump critics.

Republicans don’t seem to care about any of this. In fact, they appear eager to confirm Patel before more damaging information about him emerges. Here is a rundown of some of the matters these Republicans are ignoring.

The purge

On January 30, the same day Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, news broke that Trump administration officials had ordered the firing of multiple senior FBI executives. The next day, reports emerged that Trump appointees were compiling a list of thousands of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases, with the possible aim of firing them.

Patel told the Judiciary Committee—under oath—that he was not involved in personnel issues nor in touch with the White House about any such decisions. He further claimed he would protect FBI officials from political retribution for past work.

But on Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, accused Patel of lying about this. In a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Durbin said he had learned from “multiple sources that Kash Patel has been personally directing the ongoing purge of career civil servants” at the FBI. In that letter and during a Senate floor speech, Durbin said whistleblowers told him that Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a former personal lawyer for Trump, told top FBI officials in a January 29 meeting that Patel wanted the bureau to remove targeted employees quickly. “KP wants movement at FBI,” a person at the meeting wrote in notes that Durbin said he reviewed.

Durbin also said his sources reported that Patel, as he has awaited confirmation, has been receiving information from an advisory team at the FBI and then passing on instructions to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, “who relays it to” Bove.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Judiciary Committee, dismissed Durbin’s new charges as “hearsay.” He expressed no interest in gathering more information and rejected Democrats’ call for a second confirmation hearing where they could ask Patel directly about the firings of FBI officials. 

Responding to Durbin’s letter and floor speech, a Patel spokesperson said, “The media is relying on anonymous sources and secondhand gossip to push a false narrative.” That was not a clear denial. When Mother Jones asked if Patel communicated with Miller about firing FBI personnel, neither Patel nor his spokesperson responded.

Possible perjury

During Patel’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) asked, “Are you aware of any plans or discussions to punish in any way, including termination, FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations?” Patel said he was “not aware of that” and added: “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there.”

Patel made similar claims in written responses to questions that six Democratic senators sent to him after the hearing. Each of these senators submitted queries regarding whether Patel knew of plans to oust senior FBI officials and whether he was involved in that effort. He repeatedly answered that he could not recall any such conversations and claimed he was not involved in these decisions.

“Did you approve or have any role in the decision to terminate these senior FBI employees?” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) asked. “No,” Patel responded.

Those replies, if Durbin is correct, were lies. But Grassley and other Republicans are unwilling to confront Patel about this possible perjury.

Other possible lies

Asked during his testimony about his promotion of a recording of a song performed by the so-called J6 Prison Choir, which was comprised of inmates at a DC jail who faced assorted charges for their participation in the January 6 insurrection, Patel said he was “not aware” that this group was composed of imprisoned rioters. He also testified that he “didn’t have anything to do with the recording.” In fact, Patel personally released the song on Steve Bannon’s War Room show, and told Bannon that he had overseen the song’s recording and mastering. And he hailed the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.”

Patel has insisted that the money he raised from the recording went to the families of January 6 prisoners who were not convicted of any violent offenses. In his written responses, he claimed “the financial details” on his use of the funds were in his organization’s public disclosures. That’s not true. Patel’s nonprofit, the Kash Foundation, says in an IRS filing that it gave “direct cash assistance” totaling $167,821 to 50 people, but it does not identify them. That leaves Patel’s claim that he did not support families of violent attackers impossible to verify.

Patel also said under oath that he was not familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for spreading false claims about Covid. Patel, however, has appeared at least eight times on Peters’ podcast. Following the hearing, Peters declared: “Clearly Kash Patel is lying.”

Ties to Russian propagandist

As Mother Jones first reported, Patel last year was paid $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI documentary produced by a Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties. That filmmaker, Igor Lopatonok, worked on an overt Russian propaganda campaign funded by Vladimir Putin’s office, and in 2019 he produced a pro-Putin film partly financed by an Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician who had been sanctioned by the United States since 2014. Lopatonok also worked with an American who obtained political asylum in Russia and who has mounted extensive disinformation operations against the United States.

Patel declared in the documentary that the Russians had not intervened in the 2016 election—despite multiple investigations confirming they did so to assist Trump—and Patel said that he hoped to “shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the “Deep State.” Patel later said that remark was “hyperbole.” He has not explained whether he knew of the filmmaker’s background as a Russian propagandist.

Foreign ties

In the financial disclosure form Patel submitted to the Senate, he revealed that he was paid an unspecified amount in 2024 for “consulting services” for Qatar. That raised the question of why Patel did not register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Patel has not addressed that subject. But a “source close to Patel’s confirmation” told the far-right Federalist that “his work for Qatar was limited to securing the 2022 FIFA World Cup and other security measures” and that this did not require him to register as foreign agent.

The problem with that explanation is that Patel reported working for Qatar until November 2024. That was two years after the World Cup took place there. And it includes the time Patel spent working as a surrogate for Trump’s most recent presidential campaign. Patel’s disclosure form notes that he was paid by the Qatari embassy in Washington, which runs the Gulf state’s US lobbying efforts, not Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, which organized the nation’s World Cup effort and related programs. Spokespersons for Patel, the Supreme Committee, and the Qatari embassy did not answer questions regarding the details of Patel’s work for Qatar.

Patel’s financial disclosure report also revealed he worked for the Czechoslovak Group, a Prague-based arms company, as it was buying Vista Outdoor, a US company that owns assorted ammunition brands, including Remington. Senate Republicans previously argued that the Vista Outdoor purchase was a threat to national security. But none have publicly asked Patel to explain what he did for the Czechoslovak firm.

Patel also disclosed that he was given between $1 million and $5 million worth of unvested stock in Elite Depot Ltd. for consulting work he did not explain. Elite Deport is the Cayman Islands-based parent company of Shein, a Chinese fashion company. Patel has declined to divest his stake in the company—even as he prepares to oversee FBI counterintelligence operations against China. After Trump slapped a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports, including Shein’s, Patel’s stake in the company means he has a personal interest aligned with Chinese business interests.

In a letter sent to Patel on Wednesday, five Democrats on the committee noted Shein has faced “criticism for its use of forced labor in China, including persecuted ethnic minorities and children.”

“Continuing to profit from forced labor by refusing to divest your financial interest in this company,” they wrote, “demonstrates a callous disregard for forced labor victims and calls into question your judgment and ability to impartially lead the FBI’s efforts to combat the scourge of human trafficking and the PRC’s foreign influence activities.”

A few years ago GOP senators aggressively opposed some Biden administration nominees for perceived links to, or past work for, Chinese businesses. But no Republicans have publicly pressed Patel about his plan to retain an interest in a Chinese manufacturer.

QAnon 

Patel has pushed far-right conspiracy theories, including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; the baseless claim that the January 6 riot was instigated by the FBI; and the false notion that there was no Russian effort  to help Trump win the 2016 election. But perhaps his looniest far-right flirtation has been his past support for QAnon, the movement that holds that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles—which includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and business tycoons—has been operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination, with Trump secretly battling against them. And QAnon is not just a kooky theory; it has sparked multiple acts of violence.

Patel repeatedly has hailed QAnoners and promoted their unhinged narrative. On social media, he amplified QAnon messaging. He has been a guest on numerous QAnon-supporting shows to promote Trump’s Truth Social platform. On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.” On another occasion, he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel chimed in: “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it.”

When Democratic senators inquired about those comments, Patel insisted his remarks were “taken out of context.” He asserted, “I do not support or promote QAnon.” His past comments show he did precisely that.

Retribution and violence

Patel has long portrayed himself as an avenging angel for Trump who has battled the supposed Deep State on Trump’s behalf. Appearing on Bannon’s podcast in 2023, he proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether its criminally or civilly.”

In his 2023 book Government Gangsters, Patel called for mounting “investigations” to “take on the Deep State.” In an appendix, Patel presented a list of 60 supposed members of the Deep State who were current or former executive branch officials and who presumably would be targeted. Patel listed names that would be the obvious purported cabalists for a MAGA activist, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Merrick Garland, Hillary Clinton, former CIA chief John Brennan, and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. This line-up also included a number of Republicans and onetime Trump appointees: Bill Barr, who served as attorney general for Trump; John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers during his first White House stint; and Mark Esper, a secretary of defense under Trump.

This roster has been characterized as Patel’s “enemies list” of people he might target for investigation or prosecution should he become FBI chief. During his confirmation hearing, Patel denied he had any intention of seeking revenge against Trump’s political foes. He referred to this list as merely a “glossary.”

When Senate Democrats challenged him on this characterization in written questions—noting he had told Bannon that “Deep Staters” would “be held accountable and prosecuted, criminal prosecutions” during a second Trump presidency—Patel sidestepped. “This language is taken out of context and does not accurately or fully represent my prior statements or positions,” he wrote. No Republican Senator has publicly expressed concern over Patel’s demonstrated desire to use government power to extract revenge.

One of the most absurd moments of the hearing came when Patel was questioned about a 2022 social media post he had amplified that showed an AI-generated video of him using a chainsaw to attack various Trump critics, including former Rep. Liz Cheney, Sen. Adam Schiff, and Anthony Fauci. He claimed this meme had been taken out of context—it hadn’t—and pointed out that he had not created it, as if that were mitigating. Asked about this meme in the written questions, Patel replied that he had reposted the “meme in question as a private citizen.” He added, “It was clearly intended as humor. A chainsaw as a symbol of government reform is not unusual.” He also stated that “reposting an individual’s perspective on a specific issue does not constitute my endorsement of how their views or other positions may be interpreted.”

Here was a nominee to be FBI director both justifying and downplaying his dissemination of a meme that could be read as encouraging violence against his political enemies, including Schiff, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee overseeing his nomination. It was just one more troubling thing for Senate Republicans to ignore.

How Trump and Musk’s War on Government Will Lead to More Abortions

12 February 2025 at 19:48

In 2023, during a speech at a Washington, DC, gala for the far-right Faith & Freedom Coalition, Donald Trump declared that he was proud to be “the most pro-life president” in US history. Yet with the war on the federal government that he and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk are now waging, one probable result will likely not please his conservative Christian allies: an increase in the number of abortions, perhaps by over 1 million.

The first target of the Trump-Musk crusade has been the US Agency for International Development, the federal agency that distributes foreign aid through programs that help millions of people defend against deadly diseases (such as malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, Covid, and ebola), obtain clean water, gain access to health care, bolster democratic institutions, and build more productive local economies. Of its $23.4 billion budget for 2024, the agency earmarked $2.2 billion for health initiatives. About one-quarter of that was to be spent on clean-water programs. Two-hundred-and-forty-seven million dollars was committed to maternal and child health. Programs for family planning and reproductive health received $191 million. (Including other government programs, Congress in recent years has annually appropriated about $600 million in total for overseas family planning.)

President Trump’s executive order freezing most US foreign aid for 90 days has led to chaos within USAID and around the world, causing the suspension of programs that conduct clinical trials, provide food assistance, and aid war refugees. For some bizarre reason, Musk has venomously attacked USAID, spreading a baseless and vicious conspiracy theory that it is a diabolical and corrupt outfit covertly financing the media, Democrats, academia, and assorted components of the left in the United States. He has, of course, provided no evidence of this bunk, and boasted of “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”

The Trump administration also proclaimed it wants to gut the agency’s staff from about 10,000 to a few hundred. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked pieces of the Trump-Musk plan to shutter most of the agency, but the stop-work order regarding its programs and all foreign aid remained.

With everything else, family planning and reproductive health programs were halted. In one instance, a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, called in women who were participating in the testing of a new device to prevent pregnancy and HIV infection. The USAID-funded program had lost its financial support and now had to remove the device, a silicone ring inserted into a vagina, from all the women in the program.

Since the 1973 passage of the Helms Amendment—named after ultra-right Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina—US foreign aid cannot be used to fund abortion. Instead, the United States has focused on supporting contraceptive services overseas that decrease unintended pregnancies, as well as abortions, which are unsafe in many regions.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research outfit that studies reproductive health issues, Trump’s stop-work order will over three months deny 11.7 million women and girls in low- and middle-income countries contraceptive care and lead to a rise in unintended pregnancies and abortions. “Of the estimated 4.2 million unintended pregnancies, there would be 1.3 million unsafe abortions,” the group estimates in a statement provided to Mother Jones. Guttmacher focuses on unsafe abortions—which include those performed using a non-recommended method or by an untrained provider—not all abortions. The total number of abortions will be higher than the 1.3 million figure.

Here’s one example of the freeze’s impact. Ben Bellows, a former researcher at the Population Council, runs a company called Nivi Inc. It had a six-figure contract for a program to help about 300,000 women in India receive reproductive health care information, digital counseling, and referrals to nearby pharmacies and clinics. With the loss of USAID funding, he says, “projects like ours are closing. He adds, “Fewer contraceptive options mean women stay on a method they don’t like but can’t quit or don’t take up any protection against unintended pregnancy. The end of our project and others like it will lead to more unintended pregnancies and more abortions.”

So far, there have been no big howls from the anti-abortion movement about the Trump-Musk assault on USAID and foreign aid and the resulting rise in abortions. This week, the website of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America has featured multiple posts praising Trump for anti-abortion measures he has taken since returning to the White House. There was no mention of the USAID shutdown. Ditto for the National Right to Life Committee.

Four anti-abortion advocates did write a piece for the New York Times criticizing Trump’s foreign aid freeze for halting the work of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a multibillion-dollar global health initiative known as PEPFAR started under President George W. Bush, which funds HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in Africa. It has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented mother-to-child transmission of the virus, allowing  nearly eight million babies to be born free of the disease. They did not address the cut-off in family-planning assistance.

At his recent confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theory-monger whom Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, said over and over that Trump considers every abortion “a tragedy.” By this measure, Trump and Musk, with their assault on USAID and foreign aid, will generate more than a million new tragedies.

Kash Patel Took $25,000 From Russia-Linked Firm to Appear on an Anti-FBI TV Series

7 February 2025 at 21:33

Last year, Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur whom Donald Trump has nominated to head the FBI, received $25,000 from a Russia-linked production company to participate in a documentary in which he assailed the FBI and called for closing its headquarters.

In November, Tucker Carlson’s online network released a six-part series called All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump that purported to chronicle the familiar MAGA conspiracy theory that a Deep State plotted against Donald Trump while he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and when he was president. The fourth episode focused on Patel and his years-long crusade to depict the Trump-Russia scandal—Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s efforts to cover up its existence—as nothing but a total hoax orchestrated by nefarious Democrats and rogue government operatives.

In this film—which credits Patel as an executive producer—he offers a blistering attack on the FBI. He calls it a “corrupt” enterprise and claims it has been on the Democratic Party’s “payroll.” He says, “I’m the guy that’s going to tell you they need major reforms. I’m going to tell you to shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the Deep State the next day. Seriously, you need 50 guys in Washington running the FBI.” He pushes the false claim that the FBI launched its Russia investigation in 2016 on the basis of the infamous and unconfirmed Steele memos. And he insists that the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “knew it didn’t exist.” He also asserts that “globalists” have been working with Al Qaeda to make a profit.

The series was produced for Carlson, who is featured in the final episode, by Global Tree Pictures, a Los Angeles-based firm run by Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker Igor Lopatonok. He and Russian-born film director Vera Tomilova, the chief financial officer of Global Tree Pictures, who holds a US green card, are listed in the film’s credits as its producers. Global Tree raised the financing for the series, according to a contract filed in Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy proceedings. (Giuliani also starred in the documentary.)

Lopatonok has ties to Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts.

In recent years, he has helped lead a Kremlin-financed effort to persuade Westerners to move to Russia. In 2023, he chaired a competition dubbed “To Russia With Love” that invited bloggers to produce content that would show the “most appealing side of Russia” and encourage people to emigrate there. This project was funded by the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, a state entity that Putin created in 2021 to “support projects in the field of culture, art and the creative industries.”

One of Lopatonok’s colleagues in this project was John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who received political asylum in Russia and who has been a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West. In May, the New York Times reported, “Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.” Dougan was listed on material as a member of the “Expert Council” of the “To Russia with Love” project and as a “mentor” for the winners.

Lopatonok has worked with famed director Oliver Stone on two documentaries on Ukraine that were widely described as pro-Kremlin, One of these films, titled Revealing Ukraine and released in 2019, was apparently financed in part by Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Vlast.kz, an independent media outlet in Kazakhstan. The film prominently featured Medvedchuk, a long-time ally of Vladimir Putin who was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. (Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine in 2021 and charged with treason; he was later traded to Russia in a prisoner swap.)

So, according to Patel’s own financial disclosure statement, he pocketed $25,000 from a production company operated by a filmmaker associated with a Kremlin-subsidized propaganda project, a pro-Putin oligarch, and a pro-Kremlin disinformation agent.

Lopatonok also appears to have been doing business—or trying to do business— in Russia. Last year, he and Tomilova set up a company there called Global 3 Pictures, according to Russian corporate records. This is the same name as a corporation they established in California in 2011. The Russian firm, according to the records, intended to produce films and television shows. The corporate listings note that the firm maintained a bank account at state-owned VTB, a bank subject to US sanctions. The records also note that Global 3 Pictures failed to submit a tax return.

Mother Jones sent Lopatonok and Patel each a list of questions and a request for comment. Neither responded.

The All The President’s Men series was loaded with Russian connections. Its director, Sean Stone, a son of Oliver Stone, hosted a show on RT America, the Russian state-funded network until it was shut down in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For this docuseries, Stone conducted the on-air interviews with Simona Mangiante, the wife of George Papadopoulos, a Trump foreign policy adviser who pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents during the Russia investigation and served 12 days in federal prison.

In another Global Tree Picture film released last year, Hunter’s LaptopRequiem for Ukraine, a documentary about alleged Biden corruption in Ukraine, Mangiante interviewed Andrii Derkach, whom the US Treasury Department sanctioned in 2020 for serving as a “Russian agent” and spreading disinformation to influence the American election that year—that is, disseminating false stories about then-candidate Joe Biden. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence later noted that Putin “had purview over” Derkach’s activities, meaning Moscow was running an operation to discredit Biden and help Trump. With this film, Lopatonok and Mangiante amplified the phony assertions peddled by an identified Russian agent.

The scriptwriting team for All the President’s Men included Lopatonok, Tomilova, and George Eliason, an editor at a website called Intelligencer that posts conservative and Putin-friendly material. Lopatonok and Tomilova are on its editorial board.

All the President’s Men featured the usual assortment of Trump champions who have for years pushed the Deep-State-is-after-Trump conspiracy tale, including Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Papadopoulos. It’s full of paranoia and debunked claims.

Despite Carlson’s backing, Lopatonok and Tomilova’s series didn’t register much on the media landscape. But it has one intriguing piece of information: Patel’s financial relationship with a production company tied to Russian propaganda and disinformation activity. That is hardly a reassuring credential for an FBI chief.


Trump White House Moves to Allow for a Musk Takeover of Government IT

5 February 2025 at 18:01

It’s a rather wonky position in the US government: chief information officer. Most federal agencies and departments have one. The role of the CIO, according to federal law, is to promote the effective, efficient, and secure use of information technology to accomplish the agency’s mission. Basically, make the IT work. It’s a technical position outside the realm of politics and policy and has been reserved for federal career appointees who are supposed to be impartial.

But the Office of Personnel Management, now being overseen by Elon Musk and his minions, just issued a memo, which was obtained by Mother Jones, to all heads and acting heads of federal agencies asking them to request a change in the status of CIOs from “senior executive service” and “career reserved” to “general.” This means Musk could move to take over the IT of the entire federal government by placing cronies and ideologues into these key posts.

As FedScoop notes, this “move seems to be focused on making it easier for the government to install outsiders—potentially from the tech industry or those associated with Elon Musk—into the CIO role, similar to the ongoing and highly controversial activities led by the Department of Government Efficiency.”

In all the flurry of news about Musk’s effort to seize control of the federal government and depopulate its workforce, this memo hasn’t received much attention yet. But if OPM succeeds in reclassifying the status of CIOs, Musk—or someone else—could gain control of the lifeblood of any modern organization: its IT.

Here’s the memo:

It’s a War. Do Democrats Get That?

4 February 2025 at 18:01

The below article is an updated version of a piece that first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

It’s a war.

In the first two weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk have initiated an all-out battle against the US government, the rule of law, and decency. They have mounted a blitzkrieg, a coup, an assault on the Constitution. It’s a mad power grab designed to steer the nation toward autocracy and full-fledged oligarchy. What’s under way is not merely the implementation of far-right policies but an attack on the American system and a hostile takeover of the nation.

Trump and his minions have rooted out civil servants they deem insufficiently loyal to Dear Leader and taken draconian steps to depopulate federal agencies that do the people’s business, such as safeguarding our food supply, researching cures for diseases, protecting workers and the environment, overseeing our transportation systems, and keeping the financial system secure and stable. They tried through an arguably illegal executive order to freeze funding for health care, education, transportation, and other services.

It’s class warfare, top-down. Feel free to call it fascism.

Musk and his mafia took over the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees hiring across the executive branch, installing their own servers. They also invaded the highly sensitive Treasury Department to gain control of the government’s payment system, presumably to cut off funds to programs Musk and Trump want to defund—a step that risked massive privacy violations, hacks, assorted abuses, and the possible breakdown of what is essentially the government’s circulatory system. Trump’s shock troops suspended foreign aid, a move that caused the closure of soup kitchens in famine-stricken Somalia, the cessation of medical services for war refugees in Thailand, the end to heating assistance for Ukrainians on the frontline of the war with Russia, and other programs—increasing misery, death, and disease around the world. Musk, the richest man in the world, called the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which distributes foreign aid that helps millions of low-income and indigent people, “a criminal organization” and tweeted, “Time for it to die.”

This is a revolution of the elite. Trump and Musk aim to gut government. Their intent is to emasculate the one force that can counter the excesses of the powerful and the wealthy. While Trump yearns to be a strongman who commands all corners of the government and demands absolute fealty to his whims and desires, Musk seeks to weaken the one entity that can check corporate power and abuses, including his own. During a Twitter chat with two GOP senators, he urged abolishing all government regulations. He’s pursuing a right-wing libertarian fantasy of unfettered capitalism. The disrupters and technologists shall rule as they see fit, without the pesky interventions of bureaucrats committed to the public good. This is not the typical fight of the well-to-do for tax cuts and deregulation—which, of course, the Republicans and their billionaire underwriters do crave—but an ideological crusade to change the foundation of American society and crush checks and balances that might prevent Trump, Musk, and others in the oligarchy from reigning supreme. It’s class warfare, top-down. Feel free to call it fascism.

Musk isn’t hiding any of this. He sees hardworking and devoted government workers as the enemy to be conquered. On Saturday, he joyously tweeted, “Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days! Working the weekend is a superpower.” He added a laughing emoji. And Trump is giddily flexing his muscle, hinting the use of military force to expand the American empire and imposing wide-ranging tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China that will raise prices for Americans. (On Monday, he paused the tariffs on Mexico and Canada for a month.) For his greater glory, he tells voters, they will have to go through “some pain”—the opposite of what he promised as a candidate. As any emperor would do, he pursued his purge by firing top FBI officials and federal prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases.

With this war raging, where are the Democrats?

Trump’s administration pulled down websites across the federal government and disappeared thousands of data sets. His new head of the Federal Communications Commission ordered an investigation of NPR and PBS—part of a wider administration effort to undermine the media that Trump has long demonized and schemed to discredit. The Pentagon kicked the New York Times, Politico and NPR out of the working press space, handing over those desks to far-right outlets (and HuffPost). Trump crassly and recklessly blamed the tragic aviation accident in Washington, DC, on DEI to justify his shuttering of diversity programs throughout the federal government. The Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture removed references to and information about climate change from its websites. In true Soviet fashion, Trump is trying to photoshop one of the most pressing problems facing the nation and the world out of existence.

With this war raging, where are the Democrats?

They should have a war room that operates 24/7 to generate and voice loud and smart opposition to the Trump-Musk onslaught. They need to be coordinating messaging and running a nonstop firehose of social media. A never-ending string of fiery speeches on the House and Senate floor, obstructionist tactics, the exploitation of every possible forum and platform. Their best and most media-savvy members—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Chris Murphy, say—should be denouncing and decrying on a daily basis. Instead of licking wounds, Democrats ought to be showing some fight, conveying the perilous reality of the moment, and presenting themselves as a fierce and united bulwark against this treacherous attack. It’s not about moving to the left or to the right. They need to rush to the barricades. All of them.

Yet…this is not yet happening. The recent confirmation hearings for Trump’s most extreme and dangerous appointments—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Department of Health and Human Services), Kash Patel (FBI), and Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)—suggested that the Ds may not be up to the task. There were moments when individual Democratic senators harshly grilled these nominees, but they generally were not able to collectively and effectively highlight the radical extremism of these Trump picks and the absurdity of awarding them top positions.

At the Patel hearing, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee tried to depict him as a Trump loyalist who would abuse power to seek revenge for Trump. Yet Patel managed to get away with smugly insisting he would abide by the rule of law. They never mentioned that he had been a QAnon supporter and lied so much about the Trump-Russia scandal to protect Trump that it would be fair to call him a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin. His irresponsible grifting—he peddled supplements that he claimed without any evidence “reversed” the Covid vaccine—received minimum attention. His promotion of a social media post encouraging violence against Trump’s political enemies came up only briefly.  

The Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. This is not how a party battling for its survival and the survival of the nation behaves.

When Tulsi Gabbard appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee, no Democrat dared raise the touchy subject of her life-long connection to a cult that demands complete loyalty to its megalomaniacal founder and that is tied to a Hong Kong company that has been a target of criminal and civil cases alleging fraud and racketeering in at least seven countries. This association certainly raises questions about her judgment and, perhaps, her priorities.

At the two confirmation hearings for Kennedy, Democrats pressed him on his anti-vax opposition but let him slide on the many bizarre and baseless conspiracy theories he has expounded over the years. And when the news broke that Kennedy had settled two cases in which he was accused of “misconduct or inappropriate behavior,” Democrats did not raise a fuss about this or vehemently demand details. (Kennedy claimed the charges were “unfounded” and refused to provide specifics on these cases.)

It’s far from certain that sharper questioning would lead to the defeat of any of these nominees. And the format of these sessions—generally five or so minutes per senator—prevents grilling that goes deep. But the Democrats needed to use these hearings as an opportunity to deliver a single message: Trump is stocking the government with radical and inexperienced extremists who pose tremendous risks to the nation. Some Democratic senators aimed to do this, others stuck to polite policy discussions that did not serve the simple mission of the day: Stop these people. When I asked Democratic aides if they intended to deploy video clips during these hearings to discredit the nominees, they said they did not have the capacity to pull something like that together and, if they could, the Republicans controlling the committees would not permit the display of videos.

I’m not the only one who sees a failure of fierceness among DC Democrats overall. Last week, as the New York Times reported, a gang of six Democrats called Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and urged him to be more aggressive in challenging Trump, his nominees, and his agenda. Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, told Schumer the Democrats needed a “down and dirty” online strategy. Schumer replied that Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) was in charge of the Senate Democrats’ social media and praised Booker. The newspaper noted:

Last week, Mr. Booker delivered a PowerPoint presentation to fellow Democrats about how to deliver their message online. In the slides, which were obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Booker offered his colleagues guidance on how often to post on each platform. Instagram: once or twice a day. Facebook: once a day. LinkedIn: three to five times a week. X: two to five times a day. TikTok: one to four times a day.

That paragraph should make any Democrat scream. The Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. This is not how a party battling for its survival and the survival of the nation behaves.

There are signs the Democrats are trying to rev up opposition. On Monday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries sent a letter to his party colleagues in the House outlining a 10-point plan for confronting Trump. The measures he advocated were reasonable and included proposing legislation—a largely symbolic effort, given the Dems’ minority status—to block Musk’s raid on the Treasury Department and various Trump executive orders of dubious legality. 

Trump and MAGA have demanded and prepared for this holy war, and now they are prosecuting it.

That afternoon, Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), and several other Democratic legislators assembled at USAID headquarters to blast what they called “Elon Musk’s illegal shutdown” of the agency. At this event, Murphy proclaimed, “This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today. Let’s call it what it is.” And Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) vowed to place a hold on all of Trump’s State Department nominees—which will not block these appointments but slow down confirmations and clog up the Senate—to protest the Trump-Musk assault on USAID. But why not all Trump appointees? The Democrats only have a chance of success if the entire party can demonstrate consistent boldness.

For years, Trump and MAGA have advertised their plans. Steve Bannon, for one, has declared the ultimate goal is to annihilate what he derisively called the “administrative state.” They have demanded and prepared for this holy war, and now they are prosecuting it. Not all Democrats seem to understand what’s at hand. This is an existential crisis for the party and the nation. While the MAGAists are implementing scorched-earth tactics, some Democrats have talked about working with Trump or Musk when they agree with them. (Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s not quite a Democrat, are in this category.) This only legitimizes Trump as a normal president who might have some good ideas.  

In recent days, there have been a few heroes. Two top security officials at the USAID tried to block Musk operatives from gaining entry to its computer networks. Officials from Musk’s misnamed Department of Government Efficiency wanted access to USAID security systems, personnel files, and classified information available only to those with security clearances. The DOGErs eventually got in, and the two security officials were placed on administrative leave.

At the New York FBI field office, the top agent, James Dennehy, sent out a defiant email to his staff and vowed to “dig in” after the Trump administration fired officials involved in January 6 investigations. He wrote, “Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy.” As the Times pointed out, this email “came after the Justice Department ordered the FBI on Friday to collect the names of bureau personnel who helped investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, raising the possibility that Mr. Trump’s political appointees plan to purge career bureau officials, including rank-and-file field agents. That number could reach 6,000—or about a sixth of the bureau’s 38,000 employees, according to the FBI.”

How long can Dennehy hold the line?

This is a break-glass moment. A five-alarm fire. The Democrats must tell that story to Americans over and over, every day and in every way. They must make sure the public clearly sees the crisis at hand, understands what’s at stake, and perceives the Democrats as ferocious warriors for the common good. That is indeed a tall order. But one thing is for sure: You cannot win a war you are not fighting.

If you appreciate this sort of kick-ass reporting on the crisis that has been triggered by Trump and Musk, please sign up for David Corn’s Our Land newsletter.

RFK Jr. Refuses to Disclose to Senate Details of Two “Misconduct” Cases He Settled

2 February 2025 at 22:02

On Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., responding to written questions from Senate Democrats, revealed information about his personal history that was not yet part of the public record: He had settled at least one case in which he had been accused of “misconduct or inappropriate behavior.” Kennedy also acknowledged that he had been party to at least one non-disclosure agreement.

But in that reply Kennedy provided no details about these allegations. He only offered a one-word reply when asked if he had ever been accused in such a fashion: “Yes.”

Consequently, Senate Democrats followed up with another written query to Kennedy, the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist who has been nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. This was the request:

Please describe the nature of the financial settlements (including total
amounts) and non-disclosure agreements reached and what these agreements involved. Please also indicate how many of these settlements and non-disclosure agreements you have signed.

On Sunday, Kennedy submitted his response:

Twice, I have been targeted by frivolous, unfounded allegations, which I
strenuously denied at the time and continue to deny. I entered into confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements to prohibit these individuals from continuing to make these allegations.

This was not a full answer. The Senate Democrats had asked for the total amounts of the settlements, and Kennedy did not provide that information. Nor did this response indicate what “misconduct or inappropriate behavior” had been alleged.

In this reply, Kennedy stressed that he denied the allegations, whatever they had been. But how can senators assess his refutation?

During his confirmation hearing on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), noting that “character matters,” asked Kennedy about the allegation from Eliza Cooney, who had been a babysitter for Kennedy’s family, that Kennedy had once groped her.

Murray noted that after the allegation became public in July Kennedy said he was “not a church boy… I have so many skeletons in my closet.” (He did not deny Cooney’s accusation.) Murray also pointed out that Kennedy had texted an apology to Cooney claiming he had no memory of the incident.

Kennedy shot back at Murray with a new position: “That story has been debunked.” Murray asked why then had he apologized to Cooney. Kennedy said, “I apologized to her for something else.”

But that was not how the text he sent to Cooney came across. It read, “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”

At the hearing, Kennedy did not specify what the “something else” was for which he had apologized to Cooney.

Kennedy’s exchange with Murray might lead senators to question the validity of his denial of the accusations of inappropriate behavior that he fended off with confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements. What happened in these two cases remains a mystery.

After Kennedy initially disclosed the existence of these agreements, Senate Democrats did not raise a fuss about these accusations. With his nomination heading toward a committee vote and possibly a floor vote this upcoming week, it’s unclear whether the allegations of misconduct that Kennedy smothered will play any role in the fight over his confirmation. Kennedy’s stonewalling may well succeed.

SCOOP: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Admits Settlement for “Misconduct” Accusation

31 January 2025 at 14:40

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has admitted to the US Senate that he has reached at least one settlement agreement in which he was accused of misconduct or inappropriate behavior.

After the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday completed its confirmation hearing for Kennedy’s appointment to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Democrats on the committee sent Kennedy a set of follow-up questions. The list included these two queries:

Yes or no, have you ever reached a settlement agreement with an individual or organization that accused you of misconduct or inappropriate behavior?

Yes or no, have you ever agreed to or been subject to a non-disclosure agreement with any individual or organization?

Kennedy answered “yes” to each question. He did not provide any further details.

Question 271. Yes or not, have you ever reached a settlement agreement with an individual or organization that accused you of misconduct or inappropriate behavior?

Response: Yes

Question 272. Yes or not, have you ever agreed to or been subject to a non-disclosure agreement with any individual or organization.

Response: Yes.

During Kennedy’s second confirmation hearing, held on Thursday by the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) raised the issue of personal misconduct. She referred to the allegation that Kennedy had once groped a babysitter. Kennedy denied the accusation. She then asked, “Are there any other instances where you have made sexual advances toward an individual without their consent?” Kennedy replied, “No.”

On Friday morning, Kennedy did not respond to a query from Mother Jones asking, “Will you disclose what those agreements were? What was the misconduct? Who were the individuals or organizations that accused you? Did this involve women who accused you of personal misconduct? Will you release anyone who has an NDA with you related to any of those settlements from that NDA?”

Katie Miller, who has served as a spokesperson for Kennedy, replied, “As a matter of policy, we don’t respond to Mother Jones.”

As of Friday morning, it was unclear whether the Democrats would press Kennedy to disclose more information about any such settlement or NDA.

Kash Patel Suddenly Can’t Seem to Remember His Long Record of Extremism

30 January 2025 at 22:02

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, published a book that included a list of political enemies he characterized as Deep Staters. He called for the prosecution of law enforcement officials who investigated President Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. He hailed January 6 rioters convicted of violence against police officers as “political prisoners.” On social media, he amplified a meme celebrating violence against Trump critics.

Yet when Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday for his confirmation hearing, he refused to acknowledge many of the over-the-top statements he has made and actions he has taken as a fierce pro-Trump warrior. He was trying to hide the real Patel.

Of all of Donald Trump’s high-level appointments, Patel has the record most replete with remarks and actions in sync with MAGA extremism. Throughout the hearing, Democrats confronted him with examples of his far-right soldiering for Trump—social media posts, quotes from his media interviews, passages from his book—and he kept dodging the questions, claiming the comments were taken out of context or “partial,” insisting that he could not recall them, or pleading ignorance.

When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) questioned Patel, he cited a statement Patel made on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media…We’re going to come after you.” To this, Patel said, “That’s a partial quotation.” (The intent of Patel’s statement did not differ in the remark’s fuller form.)

Whitehouse pointed out that Patel had published in a book what has been widely characterized as an “enemies list” of 60 so-called Deep State figures who ought to be investigated and had reposted a video depicting him taking a chainsaw to Trump’s political enemies (including former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff).

As an aide held up a photo of that particular social media post, Whitehouse asked, “Is that you reposting that?” Patel replied, “Senator, I had nothing to do with the creation of that meme”—a statement did not address his amplification of the violent imagery.

When Whitehouse noted that Patel had pushed the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had instigated the January 6 riot, Patel replied, “That’s completely incorrect.” (He had.) And when the senator recounted that Patel once said judges who rule against Donald Turmp should be impeached because they are “political terrorists,” Patel just stared at him.

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Patel to explain his support of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and referred to a 2023 interview: “You said that Donald Trump has every right to tell the world that in 2020, 2016, and every other election in between was rigged by our government, because they were.” Patel responded, “I don’t have that statement in front of me.”

When Klobuchar noted Trump’s claims of election fraud had been rejected by numerous courts, Patel would not accept that. “I don’t have enough of the facts in front of me,” he commented.

Klobuchar queried Patel about a statement in which he had declared that after a Trump victory there would be prosecutions of Justice Department officials for rigging the 2020 presidential election. “You’re reading a partial statement so I’m unable to respond,” Patel said.

Klobuchar asked Patel to comment on his suggestion that the FBI headquarters should be shut down and “reopened as a museum of the Deep State.” Patel didn’t explain this remark. Instead, he complained he was a victim of “false accusations and gross mischaracterizations.”

Several Democrats pressed Patel on his work with the J6 Prison Choir, a group of January 6 rioters who recorded a version of the national anthem mashed up with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The song became a mainstay at Trump’s campaign rallies.

Patel told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that he promoted the song to raise money for the families of January 6 attackers. But when Durbin asked “who sings on this recording,” Patel claimed that he didn’t know. Asked if the singers were January 6 rioters, Patel said, “I’m not aware of that.” That was a ludicrous answer.

In fact, in a May 10, 2023 post on Trump’s Truth Social platform, Patel said the song came from “political prisoners still locked in jail without trial following the January 6th protest in 2021. J6 Prison Choir consists of individuals who have been incarcerated as a result of their involvement in the January 6, 2021 protest for election integrity.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked Patel if the choir members were “political prisoners,” as Patel had described them. “I don’t know everyone in the J6 choir,” Patel answered. The senator then asked Patel about specific members of the choir, including Ryan Nichols, who was convicted of spraying police officers with pepper spray on January 6, and James McGrew, who was imprisoned for crimes that included throwing a wooden handrail at police officers on January 6 after punching others. Patel said he wasn’t familiar with them.

Blumenthal cited another choir member: Ronald Sandlin, who pleaded guilty after he was accused of shouting “you’re going to die” at police in the Capitol rotunda.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Patel said.

Throughout the hearing, Patel downplayed his association with the J6 Prison Choir members and did not acknowledge that his work promoting its song glorified these Trump supporters who had engaged in horrific violence.

Late in the hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), honed in on Patel’s claim that he “didn’t have anything to do with” the creation of the J6 choir song. Schiff highlighted an interview with Bannon in which Patel, using the word “we,” claimed credit for producing the recording of the song. Patel said he had been using “the proverbial we” and maintained he had not helped arrange the recording.

Schiff then asked if Patel had bothered to vet the members of the choir to determine if any of them had engaged in violence against police officers. He replied, “I didn’t record it myself.”

Democratic senators questioned Patel about his promotion of a line of pills that supposedly would help people “detox” from Covid vaccines. “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” Patel wrote in one post, NBC News reported. Did Patel, Klobuchar inquired, perform clinical trials before claiming the pills cured vaccine side effects? “I’m not a doctor, so no,” Patel said.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Patel if he made money from the pills. Patel said she should consult his financial records. “I don’t have those statements in front of me,” he said.

In one weird exchange, Durbin asked Patel if he was familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for false claims about Covid.

“Not off the top of my heard,” Patel said.

“You made eight separate appearances on his podcast,” Durbin responded. (This proved too much even for Peters. “Clearly Kash Patel is lying,” the host said after the hearing. “He absolutely does know who I am.”)

Antisemitic far-right broadcaster Stew Peters responds to Kash Patel claiming that he is not familiar with Peters, despite appearing on his show multiple times: "Clearly, Kash Patel is lying. He absolutely does know who I am."

Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) 2025-01-30T20:47:10.221Z

Again and again, Patel sidestepped his well-documented past as a Trump extremist who has advocated for vengeance against Trump’s political foes. He insisted he would be a neutral enforcer of the law if confirmed as FBI director. The statements, tweets, and quotes that he refused to acknowledge told a different story.

Kash Patel Suddenly Can’t Seem to Remember His Long Record of Extremism

30 January 2025 at 22:02

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, published a book that included a list of political enemies he characterized as Deep Staters. He called for the prosecution of law enforcement officials who investigated President Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. He hailed January 6 rioters convicted of violence against police officers as “political prisoners.” On social media, he amplified a meme celebrating violence against Trump critics.

Yet when Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday for his confirmation hearing, he refused to acknowledge many of the over-the-top statements he has made and actions he has taken as a fierce pro-Trump warrior. He was trying to hide the real Patel.

Of all of Donald Trump’s high-level appointments, Patel has the record most replete with remarks and actions in sync with MAGA extremism. Throughout the hearing, Democrats confronted him with examples of his far-right soldiering for Trump—social media posts, quotes from his media interviews, passages from his book—and he kept dodging the questions, claiming the comments were taken out of context or “partial,” insisting that he could not recall them, or pleading ignorance.

When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) questioned Patel, he cited a statement Patel made on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media…We’re going to come after you.” To this, Patel said, “That’s a partial quotation.” (The intent of Patel’s statement did not differ in the remark’s fuller form.)

Whitehouse pointed out that Patel had published in a book what has been widely characterized as an “enemies list” of 60 so-called Deep State figures who ought to be investigated and had reposted a video depicting him taking a chainsaw to Trump’s political enemies (including former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff).

As an aide held up a photo of that particular social media post, Whitehouse asked, “Is that you reposting that?” Patel replied, “Senator, I had nothing to do with the creation of that meme”—a statement did not address his amplification of the violent imagery.

When Whitehouse noted that Patel had pushed the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had instigated the January 6 riot, Patel replied, “That’s completely incorrect.” (He had.) And when the senator recounted that Patel once said judges who rule against Donald Turmp should be impeached because they are “political terrorists,” Patel just stared at him.

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Patel to explain his support of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and referred to a 2023 interview: “You said that Donald Trump has every right to tell the world that in 2020, 2016, and every other election in between was rigged by our government, because they were.” Patel responded, “I don’t have that statement in front of me.”

When Klobuchar noted Trump’s claims of election fraud had been rejected by numerous courts, Patel would not accept that. “I don’t have enough of the facts in front of me,” he commented.

Klobuchar queried Patel about a statement in which he had declared that after a Trump victory there would be prosecutions of Justice Department officials for rigging the 2020 presidential election. “You’re reading a partial statement so I’m unable to respond,” Patel said.

Klobuchar asked Patel to comment on his suggestion that the FBI headquarters should be shut down and “reopened as a museum of the Deep State.” Patel didn’t explain this remark. Instead, he complained he was a victim of “false accusations and gross mischaracterizations.”

Several Democrats pressed Patel on his work with the J6 Prison Choir, a group of January 6 rioters who recorded a version of the national anthem mashed up with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The song became a mainstay at Trump’s campaign rallies.

Patel told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that he promoted the song to raise money for the families of January 6 attackers. But when Durbin asked “who sings on this recording,” Patel claimed that he didn’t know. Asked if the singers were January 6 rioters, Patel said, “I’m not aware of that.” That was a ludicrous answer.

In fact, in a May 10, 2023 post on Trump’s Truth Social platform, Patel said the song came from “political prisoners still locked in jail without trial following the January 6th protest in 2021. J6 Prison Choir consists of individuals who have been incarcerated as a result of their involvement in the January 6, 2021 protest for election integrity.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked Patel if the choir members were “political prisoners,” as Patel had described them. “I don’t know everyone in the J6 choir,” Patel answered. The senator then asked Patel about specific members of the choir, including Ryan Nichols, who was convicted of spraying police officers with pepper spray on January 6, and James McGrew, who was imprisoned for crimes that included throwing a wooden handrail at police officers on January 6 after punching others. Patel said he wasn’t familiar with them.

Blumenthal cited another choir member: Ronald Sandlin, who pleaded guilty after he was accused of shouting “you’re going to die” at police in the Capitol rotunda.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Patel said.

Throughout the hearing, Patel downplayed his association with the J6 Prison Choir members and did not acknowledge that his work promoting its song glorified these Trump supporters who had engaged in horrific violence.

Late in the hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), honed in on Patel’s claim that he “didn’t have anything to do with” the creation of the J6 choir song. Schiff highlighted an interview with Bannon in which Patel, using the word “we,” claimed credit for producing the recording of the song. Patel said he had been using “the proverbial we” and maintained he had not helped arrange the recording.

Schiff then asked if Patel had bothered to vet the members of the choir to determine if any of them had engaged in violence against police officers. He replied, “I didn’t record it myself.”

Democratic senators questioned Patel about his promotion of a line of pills that supposedly would help people “detox” from Covid vaccines. “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” Patel wrote in one post, NBC News reported. Did Patel, Klobuchar inquired, perform clinical trials before claiming the pills cured vaccine side effects? “I’m not a doctor, so no,” Patel said.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Patel if he made money from the pills. Patel said she should consult his financial records. “I don’t have those statements in front of me,” he said.

In one weird exchange, Durbin asked Patel if he was familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for false claims about Covid.

“Not off the top of my heard,” Patel said.

“You made eight separate appearances on his podcast,” Durbin responded. (This proved too much even for Peters. “Clearly Kash Patel is lying,” the host said after the hearing. “He absolutely does know who I am.”)

Antisemitic far-right broadcaster Stew Peters responds to Kash Patel claiming that he is not familiar with Peters, despite appearing on his show multiple times: "Clearly, Kash Patel is lying. He absolutely does know who I am."

Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) 2025-01-30T20:47:10.221Z

Again and again, Patel sidestepped his well-documented past as a Trump extremist who has advocated for vengeance against Trump’s political foes. He insisted he would be a neutral enforcer of the law if confirmed as FBI director. The statements, tweets, and quotes that he refused to acknowledge told a different story.

It Took RFK Jr. Just Six Minutes to Lie to Congress

29 January 2025 at 17:45

Six minutes into his opening statement at his confirmation hearing Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services brazenly repeated a statement that has been cited as false multiple times.

“News reports claim I am anti-vaccine…I am not,” he said in his opening statement to the Senate Finance Committee.

At that, a protester in the audience, shouted, “You lie.” She was removed from the hearing room by Capitol Hill police.

The protester was right. In July 2023, Kennedy told a podcaster, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” That same month, during an interview on Fox News with Jesse Watters, Kennedy said, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” That notion has long been scientifically debunked. In 2021, he told a podcaster that people should “resist” guidelines from the Centers for Disease and Control on vaccines. He added, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated.” And the non-profit that he led promoted an anti-vaccine campaign with the slogan, “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”

And then there are all the anti-vax books he has written that certainly convey the impression that vaccines are dangerous.

Yet at the hearing, Kennedy tried to run from his past. He claimed that when it comes to vaccines he was merely “pro-safety” and only has asked “uncomfortable questions.” He said that vaccines play a “critical role in health care” and noted that “all my kids are vaccinated.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, was determined not to let Kennedy slip by with his Big Lie about vaccines. He cited several of Kennedy’s past remarks. Referring to Kennedy’s comment that his kids were vaccinated, Wyden noted that during a 2020 podcast interview, Kennedy said he “would do anything, pay anything, to go back in time and not vaccinate” his kids.

Kennedy tried to weasel his way out, claiming that no vaccine is safe and effective “for everyone.” But that’s obvious, given that all vaccines can have adverse reactions. He did not bother to counter the other comments that Wyden referenced. He also dodged questions about the assertion in a 2021 book he wrote that parents have been misled to believe measles is a deadly disease and that the measles vaccine is safe and necessary. When Wyden asked whether measles is deadly, Kennedy refused to provide a yes or no answer. But he told the committee that he supports the measles and polio vaccines. Wyden scoffed at this remark.

Kennedy had to call on his powers of slipperiness to duck tough questions. Asked about the petition he filed in May 2021 with the Food and Drug Administration to rescind the authorization for the Covid vaccine and to block future access to it, he said he had only been focused on the use of vaccines for six-year-old children. That was highly misleading. Kennedy’s request to the FDA claimed the vaccine’s costs outweighed the benefits for everyone, not just children.

Kennedy’s penchant for sidestepping was on continuous display through the morning. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), asked him about a bonkers comment pertaining to Covid he uttered in 2023: “Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” This remark had been widely interpreted as antisemitic and suggestive that the Covid was designed as bioweapon that would spare certain people.

Kennedy responded that he had not said “deliberately targeted”—and this silly dodge provoked laughter from the crowd. He said he had been merely referring to an NIH study. Bennet did not have the time during his five-minute allotment to look this up. But that NIH study—which Kennedy did not mention when he made those remarks in 2023—did not say this virus was designed to target certain demographic groups. It only noted that “genetic factors” might play a role in how the disease affects people.

This was classic Kennedy: Cite an informative-sounding source that does not actually say what he claims it says. In this instance, he had implied that Covid was a bioweapon, as he has said about other diseases, including Lyme disease. He had no proof for this—as with many of his conspiratorial claims—but when called out at this hearing he pointed to a study that does not confirm his outlandish allegation. Kennedy’s mastery of this methodology, when applied to issues of life-and-death, makes him a potentially dangerous appointment.

When Kennedy was asked by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the committee chair, if anything in his background “might present a conflict of interest,” he said no. That was misleading. In his financial disclosure filing, Kennedy revealed that he has earned millions of dollars by referring clients to personal injury law firms suing Merck in various courts on behalf of people who received HPV vaccines—which studies show help prevent cervical cancer. Despite his nomination, he indicated he plans to keep receiving fees from those lawsuits. That means he could receive a large sum if Merck loses the cases or settles them, a prospect that Kennedy, if confirmed, could potentially influence.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Kennedy on his financial stake in these lawsuits. Would Kennedy agree, she asked, not to pocket any money from these cases when he is secretary and for four years afterward? “There is a lot of ways that you could influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits,” Warren said, noting that Kennedy as HHS secretary could impact cases by publishing anti-vaccine claims in official government reports or by sharing FDA data with lawyers bringing the suits. Kennedy did not agree to eschew money from these lawsuits. Instead, he repeatedly misconstrued Warren’s request. “You are asking me not to sue vaccine companies,” Kennedy said. That was not what she was asking.

It was clear throughout the first hours of the hearing that none of Kennedy’s falsehoods and misrepresentations mattered to the Republican members of the committee. He was not meaningfully challenged by any of them. That was not surprising, for, as Kennedy displayed thoroughly, when it comes to adhering to the truth, his record on this front is similar to that of the fellow looking to hire him.

It Took RFK Jr. Just Six Minutes to Lie to Congress

29 January 2025 at 17:45

Six minutes into his opening statement at his confirmation hearing Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services brazenly repeated a statement that has been cited as false multiple times.

“News reports claim I am anti-vaccine…I am not,” he said in his opening statement to the Senate Finance Committee.

At that, a protester in the audience, shouted, “You lie.” She was removed from the hearing room by Capitol Hill police.

The protester was right. In July 2023, Kennedy told a podcaster, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” That same month, during an interview on Fox News with Jesse Watters, Kennedy said, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” That notion has long been scientifically debunked. In 2021, he told a podcaster that people should “resist” guidelines from the Centers for Disease and Control on vaccines. He added, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated.” And the non-profit that he led promoted an anti-vaccine campaign with the slogan, “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”

And then there are all the anti-vax books he has written that certainly convey the impression that vaccines are dangerous.

Yet at the hearing, Kennedy tried to run from his past. He claimed that when it comes to vaccines he was merely “pro-safety” and only has asked “uncomfortable questions.” He said that vaccines play a “critical role in health care” and noted that “all my kids are vaccinated.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, was determined not to let Kennedy slip by with his Big Lie about vaccines. He cited several of Kennedy’s past remarks. Referring to Kennedy’s comment that his kids were vaccinated, Wyden noted that during a 2020 podcast interview, Kennedy said he “would do anything, pay anything, to go back in time and not vaccinate” his kids.

Kennedy tried to weasel his way out, claiming that no vaccine is safe and effective “for everyone.” But that’s obvious, given that all vaccines can have adverse reactions. He did not bother to counter the other comments that Wyden referenced. He also dodged questions about the assertion in a 2021 book he wrote that parents have been misled to believe measles is a deadly disease and that the measles vaccine is safe and necessary. When Wyden asked whether measles is deadly, Kennedy refused to provide a yes or no answer. But he told the committee that he supports the measles and polio vaccines. Wyden scoffed at this remark.

Kennedy had to call on his powers of slipperiness to duck tough questions. Asked about the petition he filed in May 2021 with the Food and Drug Administration to rescind the authorization for the Covid vaccine and to block future access to it, he said he had only been focused on the use of vaccines for six-year-old children. That was highly misleading. Kennedy’s request to the FDA claimed the vaccine’s costs outweighed the benefits for everyone, not just children.

Kennedy’s penchant for sidestepping was on continuous display through the morning. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), asked him about a bonkers comment pertaining to Covid he uttered in 2023: “Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” This remark had been widely interpreted as antisemitic and suggestive that the Covid was designed as bioweapon that would spare certain people.

Kennedy responded that he had not said “deliberately targeted”—and this silly dodge provoked laughter from the crowd. He said he had been merely referring to an NIH study. Bennet did not have the time during his five-minute allotment to look this up. But that NIH study—which Kennedy did not mention when he made those remarks in 2023—did not say this virus was designed to target certain demographic groups. It only noted that “genetic factors” might play a role in how the disease affects people.

This was classic Kennedy: Cite an informative-sounding source that does not actually say what he claims it says. In this instance, he had implied that Covid was a bioweapon, as he has said about other diseases, including Lyme disease. He had no proof for this—as with many of his conspiratorial claims—but when called out at this hearing he pointed to a study that does not confirm his outlandish allegation. Kennedy’s mastery of this methodology, when applied to issues of life-and-death, makes him a potentially dangerous appointment.

When Kennedy was asked by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the committee chair, if anything in his background “might present a conflict of interest,” he said no. That was misleading. In his financial disclosure filing, Kennedy revealed that he has earned millions of dollars by referring clients to personal injury law firms suing Merck in various courts on behalf of people who received HPV vaccines—which studies show help prevent cervical cancer. Despite his nomination, he indicated he plans to keep receiving fees from those lawsuits. That means he could receive a large sum if Merck loses the cases or settles them, a prospect that Kennedy, if confirmed, could potentially influence.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Kennedy on his financial stake in these lawsuits. Would Kennedy agree, she asked, not to pocket any money from these cases when he is secretary and for four years afterward? “There is a lot of ways that you could influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits,” Warren said, noting that Kennedy as HHS secretary could impact cases by publishing anti-vaccine claims in official government reports or by sharing FDA data with lawyers bringing the suits. Kennedy did not agree to eschew money from these lawsuits. Instead, he repeatedly misconstrued Warren’s request. “You are asking me not to sue vaccine companies,” Kennedy said. That was not what she was asking.

It was clear throughout the first hours of the hearing that none of Kennedy’s falsehoods and misrepresentations mattered to the Republican members of the committee. He was not meaningfully challenged by any of them. That was not surprising, for, as Kennedy displayed thoroughly, when it comes to adhering to the truth, his record on this front is similar to that of the fellow looking to hire him.

The Madness of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

29 January 2025 at 11:00

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

The media has failed the public on a crucial matter: the derangement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Often he is described in news reports as a vaccine skeptic, when he is far more than that. He is an extreme vaccine opponent. And he has lied about this, saying he has “never been anti-vaxx,” though he recently declared, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” He still promotes the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism. In May 2021, he petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to stop the use of all Covid vaccines. He proclaimed it “the deadliest vaccine ever made”—though these vaccines were estimated to have saved 20 million lives globally in the first year of their use. His anti-vaccine advocacy also played a role in a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 that killed scores of children, and this, too, he has lied about.

But Kennedy’s false claims about vaccines and his own stance on the issue are merely just one slice of his craziness that has not been fully conveyed to the public. For years, he has pushed a host of conspiracy theories and false propositions in such an aggressive and unhinged manner as to raise profound questions about his judgment and analytical abilities. Placing a fellow this cracked, disingenuous, and paranoid in charge of the American public health system—which Donald Trump has proposed to do by nominating him to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services—threatens national and global security. This could be the most dangerous act of Trump’s presidency. Yet Republican senators and much of the public are ho-humming this perilous appointment.

Like Trump, Kennedy for years has wielded a firehose of falsehoods across multiple fronts and has engaged in assorted misconduct and odd behavior, so much so that the individual lies and misdeeds zip by and blur into a mess that becomes tough for the media to thoroughly depict and hard for the public to absorb.

He claimed that a global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world. This was Alex Jones-level crazy.

During the pandemic, he not only recklessly opposed the vaccines; he also made the baseless and seemingly antisemitic comment that Covid was engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people. He compared anti-Covid public health measures to the Holocaust and claimed Dr. Anthony Fauci was orchestrating “fascism.” (Kennedy published an entire book in 2021 outlandishly attacking Fauci, asserting this public health official, over his decades-long career, had mounted “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” In this book, he claimed that Fauci once funded testing of an AIDS treatment on a group of foster children and many of them died because of the experiment—a scurrilous allegation that has been debunked.) Kennedy, who has no training in science or medicine, also hyped unproven treatments for Covid, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

In 2022, Kennedy pushed a wild-eyed theory about the pandemic that showed how bonkers he can be. He claimed that a global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world. This was Alex Jones-level crazy. But Kennedy fervently insisted he had proof: the ominous-sounding Event 201. That was the name of a pandemic simulation held at a New York City hotel in October 2019, months before Covid struck. In one podcast, he said that no one had to take his word on this claim of a diabolical scheme and that you could look up Event 201 and even watch its recorded proceedings on YouTube. I did and discovered the simulation, conducted publicly by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, was a rather anodyne gathering of corporate execs, former government officials, and policy experts that did not come close to matching Kennedy’s description of it. Yet Kennedy maintained this exercise was proof of a worldwide plot to exploit a pandemic to “execute a coup d’etat against democracy.” Only an observer far removed from reality could sit through the three-and-a-half-hour-long Event 201 and reach such a loony conclusion.

While excitedly propagating this conspiracy theory, Kennedy demonstrated a methodology he has employed in other instances. He misrepresents facts. He fabricates. He sounds authoritative and offers what appears to be oodles of evidence. But he blends dollops of reality with fevered fantasies and concocts a goulash of irrational conspiracy. If he’s not a self-aware con man, he must be delusional. Whatever the case may be, he has pocketed millions of dollars—including $10 million last year—as an anti-vax champion.

On other health policy matters, he has peddled canards and shams. He falsely suggested that HIV did not cause AIDS and that this disease was attributable, in part, to the use of recreational drugs—notably, poppers—by gay men. He has frequently said that human-made chemicals in the environment could be making children gay and causing “gender confusion.” (There is no scientific evidence to back this up.) He has bolstered the baseless claim that the usage of antidepressants has led to school shootings. He has promoted the drinking of raw milk, which presents the risk of foodborne disease and the spread of avian flu, given the recent outbreak in dairy cows. He has pushed the unfounded view that fluoride in drinking water causes arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. (Major public health groups say fluoridation prevents cavities and is safe.)

Kennedy has compiled a long history of personal misconduct, conspiracy-mongering, and unrelenting lying. It may be too much for senators to vet and consider during his confirmation hearings.

Outside the public health realm, Kennedy has hawked other unfounded conspiracy theories. He once asserted, “They’re putting in 5G [high-speed broadband service] to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply.” (He also told podcaster Joe Rogan that wifi “radiation” causes cancer, “cellphone tumors,” and “opens your blood brain barrier” to toxins—of which there is no scientific proof.) Not surprisingly, he has long insisted that the CIA was part of the plot to assassinate his uncle, President John Kennedy. (He also believes Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of murdering his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, did not fire the shot that killed the senator and that a second gunman was involved.)

And then there’s just a wide range of RFK Jr. weirdness and questionable (if not scandalous) behavior. This includes dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park; decapitating a dead whale and taking its head home; allegedly sexually assaulting a babysitter; keeping a sex diary of his many extramarital affairs during his second marriage; hailing his past use of heroin; reportedly sexting with a reporter (while married to his third wife); and causing concern at an environmental group he led over his puzzling distribution of tens of millions of dollars.

Kennedy, once widely praised for his work as an environmental lawyer, has compiled a long history of personal misconduct, conspiracy-mongering, and unrelenting lying. It may be too much for senators to vet and consider during his confirmation hearings. But all this and his lack of experience managing a large government department warrants extensive scrutiny, as he is slated to take over the world’s biggest public health agency. Moreover, his recent policy pronouncements ought to spark worry. He has called for pausing all drug development for four years, as well as research into infectious diseases. So no work on pharmaceuticals that might help Americans stricken with cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses? And no research or vaccine development for a bird flu strain that might mutate into a virus transmitted between humans?

A forceful and articulate public speaker who has mastered the art of appearing to be well-informed, Kennedy has repeatedly showed that he is unfettered by reality and facts and that he is an erratic and stubborn pitchman for unfounded conspiracy theories and dangerously false propositions. Putting him at the helm of the nation’s public health system creates a risk of great magnitude. Had he succeeded in blocking the Covid vaccines, millions more Americans might have died.

A clear-eyed look at his positions, actions, and assertions leads to a frightening conclusion: He is an untrustworthy and unstable person. To put it simply, he is batty. And it is absolutely nuts for him to be in charge of an agency that must rely on sound science, solid research, and prudent policy to safeguard the health and well-being of the American people. If the Senate Republicans confirm his nomination, it will be an act of abysmal recklessness and irresponsibility. Out of mindless loyalty to Trump or fear of him, they will inject a potentially deadly virus into a system meant to protect us.

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