Authored by Julie Kelly via Declassified With Julie Kelly,
In what has become the latest trend in #Resistance fashion, another government lawyer made a splashy exit from the Department of Justice this week. Denise Cheung, chief of the criminal division for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, sent a three-page letter to her boss explaining why she would have to quit rather than follow orders to pursue an investigation into potential wrongdoing tied to the Biden administration.
In noting her 24-year career at the DOJ—she once worked as former Attorney General Eric Holder’s national security advisor—Cheung, like those before her, claimed the moral high ground as her excuse not to do her job. “I have always worked to enforce the rule of law, to vindicate the rights of victims. and to protect the security of the nation,” Cheung wrote to Ed Martin, the acting D.C. U.S. attorney and President Trump’s pick to permanently run the powerful office, on February 18. “I believe that the values the Department of Justice stands for, and the many people that work every day to fulfill them, are to be promoted and cherished.”
Recent antics by DOJ employees indicate one “value” is the ability to defy superiors with a change of the political winds. In Cheung’s case, she challenged the veracity of evidence presented as the basis for a potential investigation into a Biden-era “climate” initiative with all the markings of a political slush fund ripe for fraud and corruption.
Biden-Style Grift on His Way Out the Door
The so-called Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund first got attention when Lee Zeldin, the new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, laid out details of the jaw-dropping arrangement in a video posted last week. “Roughly twenty billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA,” Zeldin said on February 12. “This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”
Zeldin noted that the money, now understood to be “parked” at Citibank, was awarded to eight climate nonprofits who then “doled out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion with far less transparency.” He referred the matter to both the DOJ and EPA inspector general:
🚨The Biden EPA tossed $20 billion of “gold bars off the Titanic”.
BIG UPDATE! We found the gold bars and they are now being recovered for you, the hardworking American taxpayer.
Here are more of the details: pic.twitter.com/DM4C0TQcpj
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) February 13, 2025
There is no question about the political origins of the fund; the Biden White House touted the program with great fanfare months before the 2024 election. During a campaign stop last April, Kamala Harris announced the eight chosen winners of the $20 billion climate lottery. Harris also noted the unique nature of the arrangement, boasting that “for the first time in history, we are providing tens of billions of dollars directly to community lenders to finance local climate projects. This is a novel approach, it is actually the first time we have taken this approach.” (The list of recipients is here.)
Here is Kamala Harris announcing the $20 billion climate lottery in April 2024.
Lee Zeldin and Trump DOJ want an investigation into abuses of this fund—which is not overseen by Congress but by Citibank. First of its kind arrangement.
I mean—what could go wrong? pic.twitter.com/JIfbLvMRuD
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) February 19, 2025
And far from being a single-minded mission to reduce carbon emissions, the pot primarily is reserved for “communities with environmental justice concerns, communities of color, low-income communities, rural communities, [and] Tribal communities.” Projects could involve something as basic as replacing insulation and installing solar panels to buying a fleet of electric trucks to start a delivery service, Harris said in her speech.
What possibly could go wrong?
A Ripe Target for Investigation—But Not So, Says Cheung
One can only imagine how climate and social justice activists spending billions in free money with apparently no accountability might abuse the system. This is especially true of Joe Biden, who has a long history of leveraging his government power to enrich his family and friends. (Breaking news indicates one grantee is tied to Stacey Abrams. More on this in a follow up piece.)
The unusual nature of the arrangement alone—a major bank rather than Congress handling a big chunk of tax dollars with no known oversight mechanism established just a few months before the election—should raise the Spidey senses of any federal prosecutor, especially one with a stellar DOJ resume that stretches back more than two decades.
But not so with Cheung.
Evidence? What Evidence?
Apparently acting on information described by Zeldin, who is an attorney, and a separate video produced by Project Veritas that showed a Biden political appointee at the EPA admitting the administration was rushing to move the climate money before Trump got into office, acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove sought to initiate an investigation.
“I was asked to review documentation supplied by [Bove] to open a criminal investigation into whether a contract had been unlawfully awarded by an executive agency before the change in Administration and to issue grand jury subpoenas pursuant to this investigation,” Cheung wrote in her resignation letter. “I was told that there was time sensitivity and action had to be taken that day because there was concern that contract awardees could continue to draw down on accounts handled by the bank handling the disbursements.”
Cheung said she then conferred with DOJ employees who have “substantial white collar criminal prosecution experience.” They concluded, however, “the existing documents on their face did not seem to meet this threshold” for an investigation.
Bove additionally sought a letter to Citibank ordering a “freeze” of funds related to the unidentified grant recipient. Cheung then contacted the famously corrupt Washington FBI field office for more guidance; she then concluded that enough evidence supported potential conspiracy and wire fraud charges.
But the letter from the FBI only “recommended” a freeze of the funds.
When confronted by Martin, who wanted to send a follow-up letter demanding, not recommending, the freeze, Cheung refused. “When I explained that the quantum of evidence did not support that action, you stated that you believed that there was sufficient evidence,” she told Martin. “I still do not believe that there is sufficient evidence to issue the letter you described, including sufficient evidence to tell the bank that there is probable cause to seize the particular accounts identified.”
She then resigned per Martin’s request.
Cheung’s sanctimony and sudden devotion to careful prosecutorial scrutiny is hard to swallow given her history. After years of helping the DOJ pursue clearly politically motivated investigations against Republicans, Cheung suddenly suffered an alleged attack of conscience when it came to investigating Democrats?
This is, after all, the same Denise Cheung who was part of the DOJ team that initiated the dubious investigation into Donald Trump over Jan 6; brought federal charges against Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for defying an illicit congressional committee; and helped manage the largest criminal prosecution in Justice Department history resulting in the arrest of nearly 1,600 Americans for the events of Jan 6.
Cheung’s “moral, ethical, and legal obligations,” as she bragged in her resignation letter, never got in the way of her office’s unlawful use of a post-Enron obstruction statute to turn hundreds of J6 protesters into lifelong felons. Or when her office applied federal misdemeanors such as “parading” in the Capitol for the first time against political protesters. Or when her office added terror enhancements to sentencing recommendations in order to throw nonviolent J6ers in federal prison for years. Or when her office sent women in their 70s to jail for protesting outside of abortion clinics.
The list of abuses by the DOJ tacitly endorsed by Cheung over the past decade or so is long and ignominious. Which is why her preachy indignation in the face of investigating Democrats rather than Republicans rings hollow.
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2025 – 17:40
