Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle,

Shortly after I broke news last week about the new science journal born out of pandemic censorship, Wired Magazine’s scicomm writer Emily Mullin dashed out an attack piece to bash the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health.” Mullin’s hit piece contains factual errors and several misleading claims, but her article serves as an interesting case study in science writing, a journalism adjacent media profession.

Because Trump is now President and science writers have gone full TDS, I’m going to walk you through the details of how Mullin constructs her scicomm narrative to help you spot future examples. You will definitely run across some.

I’m going to ignore much of the rhetoric that infuses her piece—because Mullin says so, the journal is “controversial” and might “politicize science”—and jump to something that might not be obvious at first: Wired Magazine is in the business of servicing liberal pieties, not informing readers. How do we know this?

Mullin’s Wired piece is getting little traction on X, where users span the ideological spectrum, but it’s being gobbled up on Bluesky the social media app for liberal activists. Liberals love to complain that X is “right-wing” but that’s simply nonsense—Fact check wrong! After Trump won the election with Musk’s support, millions of liberals fled X in protest to join Bluesky. CNN reported weeks later that X was finally ideologically balanced.

According to CNN, when Musk bought X in 2022 it was very partisan, 65% of users were Democrats and only 31% were Republicans. By late 2024, X had become more ideologically diverse with 48% Democrats and 47% Republicans. Here’s CNN’s report.

BREAKING- CNN: Musk’s X Now Represents U.S. Voters ‘Far Better’ Than Ever Before |

“Look at this. The party ID among those who regularly use X/Twitter for news——Back in 2022, 65% of those who regularly used Twitter/X for news were Democrats. Just 31% were Republicans.”

“Look at… pic.twitter.com/lttDGI6bWf

— الاحداث العالمية 🌍 (@World_News8888) November 26, 2024

Right after Mullin published her hit piece, she posted it simultaneously on X and BlueSky. After a few hours, hardly anybody read it on X, but it took off on Bluesky with dozens of shares and likes.

Around 18 hours later, very little had changed on X for Mullin’s article. A few more people shared and a few more liked it, but on Bluesky, over 100 liberal activists promoted the article to their followers.

What excites liberals is news they find at places like Wired that confirms their own priors. That’s why they left X after Musk stopped the censoring and joined Bluesky. What they don’t care about is journalism, and they are not bothered by obvious errors in Mullin’s piece that tickle them in their political privates.

Mullin constructs a fake allegation to make the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” appear “controversial” by claiming Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta published a paper that concluded 50% of Brits were infected by the COVID virus in early 2020. Mullin also claims Gupta’s paper was proved “later to be incorrect.”

This is simply false, as I will explain in a bit. But Mullin tries to make Gupta’s study seem even more scary and “controversial” by highlighting that Gupta’s “paper was a preprint that had not been peer-reviewed or published in scientific journal.” This is a Mullin lie by omission. Mullin doesn’t explain to readers that, at the time Gupta published in early 2020, pretty much every COVID “paper was a preprint that had not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.”

Anyways, here’s Mullin’s false and misleading passage in Wired:

In reality, Gupta’s preprint was a theoretical model to determine how fast the virus was spreading. Gupta published this paper to show that other theoretical models might be inaccurate, and she and her co-authors argued that Britain needed to invest in tests and assays to determine how many people had already been infected “to determine how many people will require hospitalisation (and possibly die) in the coming weeks.”

Does this sound like a scary, “controversial” paper to you?

And despite Mullin’s misleading claim in Wired, Gupta’s paper did not argue that “half the UK population may have already been infected.” That claim is not found anywhere in Gupta’s writing. You can read the preprint paper here yourself: “Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic.”

And as for Mullin’s claim that Gupta’s paper was proved “later to be incorrect” … It was a theoretical paper based on models, and here’s the concluding paragraph.

Is anyone going to argue that we didn’t need tests to see how many people got COVID to create real data that helps assess policies to slow cases of COVID? So how was Gupta’ paper proven “later to be incorrect”?

It wasn’t. Mullin just made it up.

But it gets a bit better. One of the tricks science writers deploy to enforce narratives, is to quote from narrative enforcers. It doesn’t matter whether a narrative enforcer is actually a subject matter expert; what matters is that they give a point of view that aligns with the science writer’s own narrative.

If you want to write an article that says, “John is a terrible person,” then you just dial up all of John’s known enemies for a quote. It’s a very common practice.

There’s actually a term for this: “dial-a-quote”. That’s when a journalist calls someone for an “independent” opinion, even though the reporter already knows what the source is going to say. That’s why Mullin quotes University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom claiming the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” is part of an ongoing effort to cast doubt around “established scientific consensus.” Mullin doesn’t require Bergstrom to point to any “established scientific consensus” that the journal has questioned, because that’s not the point. Mullin just needs Bergstrom to say something bad that she can copy and paste into her news story.

And Mullin knows Bergstrom is the guy to call, because there’s a “science writer consensus” that Bergstrom is the guy to call when you need a quote like this. How do we know this?

In a similar takedown piece of the journal that appeared hours after Mullin quoted Bergstrom in Wired, Science Magazine also called on Bergstrom for “dial-a-quote” expertise. In this second example, Science Magazine allowed Bergstrom to allege that the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” might spread “misinformation” without explaining what that “misinformation” might be.

It’s not that Bergstrom is a bad guy. He’s just one of the many COVID narrative professors grateful for science writers at Wired and Science Magazine to pass him around like an eager freshman cheerleader who sneaks in to the varsity football locker room.

Finally, I want to point out that Mullin also quotes Johns Hopkins researcher Gigi Gronvall, a professor well-known for dismissing the dangers of virus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the institute the CIA now suspects released the COVID virus.

Here’s how Mullin quotes Gronvall:

“This seems like more of a club newsletter than a scientific journal,” says Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Gronvall dismisses the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” as a “club newsletter”. But what makes this so silly is that Gronvall publishes fairly often in her own university’s “club newsletter”, a journal called “Health Security.”

The journal “Health Security” is run by Thomas V. Inglesby, who is Gigi Gronvall’s boss at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The journal “Health Security” is rarely if ever cited by other scientific journals and has a dismal impact factor of 2.1—approximately 0.

Every working associate editor who helps run “Health Security” is a colleague of Gronvall’s at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and they have published 1/3 of Gronvall’s papers in the last decade.

It’s quite a club.

Despite such a dismal academic record, Mullin still ran to Gronvall for “dial-a-quote” because she knows exactly what Gronvall will say, and history finds that Gronvall will say things without fear of shame. In an incident two years ago, Gronvall embarrassed and humiliated herself when she tried to knock down the evidence that the pandemic started in a Wuhan lab.

Gronvall’s public shaming happened during a televised debate hosted by reporters Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinky, where MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt humbled Gronvall as she tried to defend virologists and Anthony Fauci’s funding for research in Wuhan.

I would not dare ask you to watch all 21:00 minutes of this debate, in part because Gronvall rarely made sense as she attempted to deny that the pandemic could have started in a Wuhan lab, and made up all sorts of reasons why taxpayers should continue to pay for dangerous gain-of-function virus research that may have led to the creation of the COVID virus.

(Brief aside: one of the people on the editorial board of Gronvalls’ “Health Security” club newsletter is Anthony Fauci, who Biden pardoned, in part, for lying under oath to Congress about funding for gain-of-function research he provided to the Wuhan lab; Biden’s pardon covers all Fauci activity back to 2016, the year Fauci started funding the Wuhan lab.)

Gronvall embarrassed herself so much during the debate, that both reporters burst into laughter at the end when Ryan Grim noted, “I think Gigi made the best case she could, but … I think this was pretty clear.”

(3/4) “I think this one’s pretty clear…”
At the end of the debate, hosts Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinky cannot contain their laughter at how unpersuasive Gigi Gronvall’s defense of gain of function research was. pic.twitter.com/OiCt3dkNdl

— Bryce Nickels (@Bryce_Nickels) September 12, 2023

A Biden-appointed Judge on Thursday blocked parts of two executive orders issued by President Trump banning or restricting various forms of ‘gender-affirming care’ – or as one of the executive orders is titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”

US District Judge Brendan Hurson of Baltimore ruled that a group of transgender teens and LGBTQ organizations that sued were likely to prevail on all of their claims that the EOs are without authority and amount to illegal and unconstitutional discrimination.

“Stopping care in the middle of receiving it, any care, really, casts doubt on whether in fact the goals are to protect the recipients of the care,” said Hurson.

Under Hurson’s ruling, various federal agencies are now temporarily prohibited from withholding or conditioning funding based on whether a health care facility provides ‘gender-affirming’ care anywhere in the country.

In addition to the transgender teens, two organizations – PFLAG and GLMA – claimed that hospitals across the country have quickly moved to cancel appointments after Trump’s two executive orders, which the administration deemed a crackdown on “gender ideology.”

The first order which Trump signed on day one states that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” while another signed on Jan. 28 directs agencies to ensure that any institution receiving federal funds does not provide gender-transition treatments for individuals up to the age of 19.

“That order had immediate consequences,” ACLU lawyer Joshua Block said during Thursday’s hearing, The Hill reports.

The DOJ contested the lawsuit, insisting that the case was premature and required additional guidance. Judge Hurson rejected those arguments, calling their position “disingenuous.”

“When there’s smoke coming out of your house, you don’t know what room it’s in, but you don’t wait to call 911 until you know the exact location of the fire,” said Hurson, adding “These plaintiffs have received phone calls stopping their care.”

The ruling is the latest in a series of court orders across the country in recent days blocking Trump’s actions – including orders restricting birthright citizenship, and another which restricts transgender prison inmates from living in women’s facilities.

Another Thursday lawsuit from a group of government employees sought to block Musk and DOGE from accessing sensitive data and removing federal employees until “Musk is properly appointed pursuant to the U.S. constitution.”

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics,

President Trump is slapping America in the face. If we’re lucky, it will revive our sleepwalking nation.

While cramming more action into a few hundred hours than FDR could in 100 days, he has diverted our somnambulant gaze from the shiny objects both parties have used to distract us from their failure to address our nation’s aching challenges. As he awakens us to fundamental problems of governance, Trump has even managed to make math great again.

The last few weeks have made clear that we’ve spent far too long talking about the wrong things in the wrong way. Instead of seeing the federal government for what it chiefly is – the world’s largest business, spending more than $6 trillion every year – we have turned it into a debating society for emotionally charged claims about woke culture and populism. Both parties have been happy to expend much of their energy demonizing the other because they saw partisan anger as a pathway to power – and because it is much easier to grandstand on inflammatory talking points than to make the hard choices required to smoothly operate such a massive entity. As a result, we became like farmers arguing over the best use of their land while their crops were withering.

That is how our unsustainable national debt has reached $36.5 trillion, gravely threatening our future. The current convulsions in Europe are offering a preview of what happens when nations run out of money.

What Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are making clear is that as much as our perilous financial situation has been bandied about, we have spent little time actually digging into the numbers behind it.

Old habits die hard, and Trump and Musk have continued to play the culture war card because that still seems the best way to get people’s attention. So their recent focus on USAID spending has highlighted the multi-million-dollar grants to LGBTQ+ groups in Guatemala and Serbia and the $47,000 earmarked for a transgender opera in Colombia. Such line-by-line scrutiny is important, but DOGE’s more meaningful work is exposing the shocking lack of oversight and accountability regarding far larger piles of government spending. On Saturday, for example, Musk sent out this Tweet:

“To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:

• Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
• All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!”

Heads would roll and prison terms contemplated if this were happening in the private sector. But it’s government, so it’s been met with a shrug. How else to explain the fact that the Pentagon, which has a budget of $824 billion, has failed seven consecutive audits – though its leaders promise it will achieve its first clean audit by 2028. Try telling that to the IRS agent auditing your personal return.

Or consider the recent finding from Open the Books that “Congress allocated at least $516 billion for federal programs with expired authorizations in fiscal year 2024.” The watchdog group reported that this may only be the tip of the iceberg: “Congress funded 1,264 ‘zombie’ programs this year, the CBO found. Half of them expired at least 10 years ago, and one has not been authorized since 1980. Analysts were only able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, totaling $516 billion. It is unknown how much funding the other 773 programs received.”

No doubt many of these programs – such as the $38.4 billion Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which expired in 2003 – would be reauthorized if Congress did its job. But the laxity surrounding the budget-making process is scandalous. Along those lines, the National Institutes of Health recently placed a 15% cap on “indirects,” which is the amount of grant money that could be spent for any purpose apart from the funded work. Last year, $9 billion of the $35 billion the agency awarded for research went to such overhead expenses, mostly at universities. At some leading institutions – including Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins – more than 60% of research funding appears to have gone to such costs. NIH says its new policy will save $4 billion per year.

Here’s the kicker: All of this has been going on in plain sight. Almost nobody thought to pay any attention to it. Journalists share much of the blame for this failure. Like the politicians we cover, we found it a lot easier to seize on hot-button social issues; it’s hard to make numbers sound sexy. We’ve long believed that readers know these issues are important, but they aren’t too interested in reading about them. We’ve viewed government inefficiency as the antithesis of news, a classic dog-bites-man story.

Trump and Musk have upended all of that. Their relentless pursuit of transparency and accountability has made math sexy again. The steady stream of figures being released on X through accounts such as @DOGE and @DataRepublican (small r) is the greatest show on earth right now as they lift the veil on massive problems. Their work evokes the old hymn, I once “was blind, but now I see.”

This story is only beginning to unfold. Finally figuring out what we are spending our money on is only the start of a difficult conversation. While many conservatives are broad-brushing government outlays as examples of fraud, waste, and abuse, the truth is that most of it simply reflects priorities they don’t share. What’s more, for all the good they are doing, Trump and Musk are still ignoring the fundamental fiscal challenge hiding in plain sight: the cost of entitlements that are devouring most of the federal budget.

Still, as they rouse Washington and the American people from a long slumber in which we ignored the failure of our leaders to run the government with a modicum of efficiency, we can be thankful that they have made being “woke” great again.

J. Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist. He previously worked as a book review editor and book columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing won several national honors. Zane has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University.

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge in Massachusetts on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants, marking the fourth time the policy was blocked by a judge.

In a 31-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin stated that two lawsuits—one filed by 18 states and the District of Columbia and the other by nonprofit organizations—are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that implementing the order would cause irreparable harm. The plaintiffs have argued that the order violates the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.

“The record before the court establishes that children born without a recognized or lawful status face barriers to accessing critical health care, among other services, along with the threat of removal to countries they have never lived in and possible family separation. That is irreparable harm,” Sorokin stated.

“It is difficult to imagine a government or public interest that could outweigh the harms established by the plaintiffs here.”

Sorokin said that the Trump administration appeared to have “no legitimate interest” in enforcing the order and said it did not demonstrate how continuing birthright citizenship would harm the public.

According to the ruling, the administration’s stance that birthright citizenship requires the mutual consent of both the individual and the nation would disregard the 14th Amendment’s original purpose, which was “to recognize as birthright citizens the children of enslaved persons who did not enter the country consensually, but were brought to our shores in chains.”

“Simply put, the Amendment is the Nation’s consent to accept and protect as citizens those born here, subject to the few narrow exceptions recognized at the time of enactment, none of which are at issue here,” Sorokin stated.

“The Fourteenth Amendment says nothing of the birthright citizen’s parents, and efforts to import such considerations at the time of enactment and when the Supreme Court construed the text were rejected. This Court is likewise bound to reject such theories now.”

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, along with 13 other attorneys general, issued a joint statement welcoming the ruling, stating that it showed the president is not in the position to “rewrite the Constitution.”

Lawyers for Civil Rights, representing the nonprofit organizations and an expectant mother whose children would be affected by Trump’s order, said the plaintiffs are gratified by the court’s decision.

“Birthright citizenship is a sacred right granted by our Constitution,” Oren Sellstrom, litigation director for Lawyers for Civil Rights, said in a statement.

Trump’s order on birthright citizenship, issued on Jan. 20, stated that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause does not extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.

According to the executive order, the citizenship clause has “always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’.”

The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the clause excludes an individual if that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the country and the individual’s father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of his or her birth, Trump’s order states.

The order also states that U.S. citizenship does not apply to an individual whose father was neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident at the time of their birth, and whose mother’s presence in the country was lawful but temporary at the time of their birth.

At least nine lawsuits have been filed challenging the new policy, which was initially slated to take effect on Feb. 19. Federal judges in New Hampshire, Washington, and Maryland have also issued preliminary injunctions preventing the Trump administration from denying birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive a reply by publication time.

A new poll reveals that former Vice President Kamala Harris would be the Democratic frontrunner for governor of California if she were to enter the state’s 2026 race to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).

In a hypothetical gubernatorial bid, nearly 6 in 10 Democratic primary voters in California – 57%, would vote for Harris, according to the survey by Emerson College Polling/Inside California Politics/The Hill.

In a distant second place at 9% support was former Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who left the House to run for Senate last year, only to lose.

Former speaker of the California State Assembly Antonio Villaraigosa (D) and current Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalaki (D) tied for third at 4% each. Another 17% were undecided.

With Newsom leaving office next year, speculation has swirled over whether Harris might throw her hat in the ring – with some seeing Newsom’s vacancy as an opportunity for her to fill his seat. As a former state AG and state Senator, Harris has a long history in the Golden State.

That said, last Friday she deflected when asked about a possible gubernatorial bid to replace Newsom.

“I have been home for two weeks and three days. My plans are to be in touch with my community, to be in touch with the leaders and figure out what I can do to support them,” Harris told reporters after visiting wildfire-ravaged areas of Southern California.

“I am here and would be here regardless of the office I hold, because it is the right thing to do, which is to show up in your community and thank the folks who are on the ground.”

Authored by Justin Logan via Cato Inst/AntiWar,

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a terrific, bracing speech yesterday to the Ukraine Defense Contact Group that deserves praise.

For more than two years, European capitals have been encouraging maximalism regarding the Ukraine war, and more generally encouraging the doddering US president’s romantic ideas about the transatlantic relationship.

It all came crashing down today.

Hegseth made clear, inter alia, that,

1. “NATO membership for Ukraine is [not] a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement”;
2. “as part of any [postwar] security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine”;
3. a return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders, an official Ukrainian war aim, is “an unrealistic objective”;
4. “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe”; and that,
5. “the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.”

For too long, US policy on Europe has been driven by airy romanticism, not by a cold, hard assessment of the strategic environment.

As Joshua Shifrinson and I wrote in Foreign Affairs last year:

With no candidate for European hegemony lurking, there is no longer any need for the United States to take the dominant role in the region… U.S. policy does not need to aim at formal withdrawal from or continued membership in NATO; it simply needs to make clear that Washington’s tenure as Europe’s pacifier is coming to an end, and if European defense planners feel that leaves a hole to fill, they must fill it themselves. 

Hegseth’s speech suggests the Trump administration agrees. The division of labor in the transatlantic relationship needs to change now.

In this single passage, JD Vance makes manifest the core lie driving US/EU foreign policy for decades: we claim everything we do is for “advancing democracy” when the goal is often the exact opposite.

Never imagined a senior US official saying this:pic.twitter.com/xHxhRAS611

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 14, 2025

Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Hegseth both have important speeches to come during the remainder of this trip. We should hope for similar themes to be raised – and for policy to follow.

Internet search trends in the Washington, DC, metro area have been nothing short of stunning in recent weeks, reflecting what appears to be growing panic within the federal bureaucracy as President Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) root out corruption in non-governmental organizations (NGO) and federal agencies. 

Earlier this week, internet search trends for “Criminal Defense Lawyer” and “RICO Laws” went viral on X, fueling speculation that Washington’s political elites were in panic mode. The searches coincided with DOGE’s efforts to neuter USAID’s funding of NGOs that propped up a shadow government, as well as begin cutting tens of thousands of workers from various federal agencies.

DC Internet Searches For “Criminal Defense Lawyer” & “RICO Law” Erupt As DOGE Drains Swamp https://t.co/4ytzi4YcgV

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 13, 2025

Now, more suspicious search trends have erupted among DC residents as DOGE efforts went into beast mode at the end of the week. 

“Washington DC searches soar for “Swiss bank” (yellow), “offshore bank” (green), “wire money” (red) and “IBAN” (blue),” WikiLeaks wrote on X late Thursday. 

Washington DC searches soar for “Swiss bank” (yellow), “offshore bank” (green), “wire money” (red) and “IBAN” (blue) pic.twitter.com/OBEg0hW8g0

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 13, 2025

Search terms “Wipe” (blue) and “Erase” (red) also moved higher in recent weeks. Wipe hard drives?

Washington DC searches soar for “wipe” (blue) and “erase” (red) according to Google trends data. pic.twitter.com/WTbK1C1zxy

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 14, 2025

Well, yes, the search term “wipe hard drive” across the DC metro has gone absolutely parabolic.

And “BleachBit” too! 

Searches for “lawyers” have jumped. 

Washington DC searches for “lawyer’ have increased 400% (data from Google trends) pic.twitter.com/CxeSJ0VKgG

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 13, 2025

“Statute of limitations” also soared. 

Washington DC searches for “statute of limitations” soar (data from Google trends) pic.twitter.com/OkNKHEQsXa

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 14, 2025

Why on Earth would DC residents panic-search keywords that suggest they are trying to cover up a crime?

Well, just take a look at this!

“Gold Bars Off The Titanic”: After Trump Victory, Biden EPA Scrambled To Funnel $20 Billion Taxpayer Funds Into ‘Green’ NGOs https://t.co/I9JuIFOQhr

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 13, 2025

The accountability sheriff: Trump & DOGE are in town – and the Deep State criminals who have been misappropriating taxpayer funds for years are in panic mode. 

Hence this…

BREAKING 🚨 There will be an announcement on Rep. Robert Garcia after he thre*tened Weapons to be used against Elon Musk for saving America

Democrats are the Party of Vio*lence

HE NEEDS TO BE CHARGED pic.twitter.com/fN1Lw1UYQz

— MAGA Voice (@MAGAVoice) February 13, 2025

Now DOGE’s “Big Balls” member, Edward Coristine, now listed as a “senior adviser” at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, should focus efforts on those outbound ACH transfers >$1 million in the past few months…

It would be awful if someone – say Big Balls – audited all the outbound ACH transfers >$1MM in the past month https://t.co/2UEC8VEUoc

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 14, 2025

. . . 

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Linda Sun, former deputy chief of staff to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, and Sun’s husband, Chris Hu, are facing additional charges in a case that alleges they acted as agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Sun and Hu were arrested and charged in September 2024 in a case that is part of the Department of Justice’s broader effort to root out communist China’s secret agents, who U.S. officials say are covertly advancing the CCP’s interests and targeting Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil in an effort known as transnational repression.

On Feb. 11, Sun and Hu pleaded not guilty at a hearing in Brooklyn federal court, prosecutors said, adding that the money laundering charge against the two had been amended to include additional legal statutes.

Hu also pleaded not guilty to three additional money laundering counts, according to prosecutors.

A superseding indictment filed on Feb. 4 didn’t provide more details other than saying that Hu’s charges were connected to three separate financial transactions totaling $1.5 million in 2020.

A spokesperson for federal prosecutors declined to comment beyond what was stated in the superseding indictment.

Jarrod Schaeffer, one of Sun’s attorneys, said the revised indictment also does not “remedy critical errors identified in the prior indictment.”

Sun and Hu remain free on bond and are scheduled to return to court on April 23.

Last year, Sun was charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy. Hu was charged with money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and misuse of means of identification.

Sun, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, worked for the New York state government under Hochul and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for about 15 years. During her political career, she held various posts, including deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs, chief diversity officer at the state’s Department of Financial Services, deputy chief diversity officer and director of Asian American Affairs for the state’s Executive Chamber, and director of external affairs for Global NY at Empire State Development.

Prosecutors alleged that Sun engaged in “numerous political activities in the interests of the PRC and the CCP,” such as preventing representatives of Taiwan’s government from having access to high-level state officials and changing the governors’ messaging to remove references to Taiwan and human rights abuses in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang.

In return, Hu received assistance for his various business activities in China, according to prosecutors.

Additionally, prosecutors said the financial arrangement with CCP officials helped Sun and Hu buy a $3.6 million home on Long Island, a $1.9 million condominium in Hawaii, and luxury automobiles, including a 2024 Ferrari.

In November 2024, Sun’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the charges, arguing that their client had been unfairly targeted.

“In the government’s view, Ms. Sun and her family simply have too much and so there must be a nefarious reason,” the filing reads.

“Sputtering about state ethics rules and undisclosed gifts, the government eventually reached the conclusion that when a woman of Chinese heritage allegedly receives unreported gifts from other Chinese individuals, she must be bought and paid for by China.”

Prosecutors, in their written response in December 2024, called the motion to dismiss the charges premature, saying that the initial indictment provides “ample factual details” to support their claims.

Prosecutors dismissed Sun’s argument that the FARA charge should be dismissed.

“Sun argues that unless the Indictment cites verbatim taskings from the PRC government or the CCP, pretrial dismissal of the FARA charges is appropriate. Sun is mistaken,” the filing reads.

“A rational juror could find beyond a reasonable doubt that Sun acted to advance the interests of the PRC government and CCP and that her acts were taken at the behest of one or more foreign principals. Thus, the factual allegations of the Indictment are sufficient to support the government’s charge that Sun acted on behalf of the PRC government or the CCP.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

In his first major speech on the international stage, Vice President JD Vance criticized European leaders for allowing mass migration and extreme laws censoring speech, remarking that he worries more about Europe’s  “threats from within” than from external threats like Russia and China.

“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine … the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” said Vance.

“What I worry about is the threat from within – the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

Vice President JD Vance says there is “no room for firewalls” in Munich ahead of German elections where political parties have vowed to not work with AfD even though millions will vote for the anti-immigration party.pic.twitter.com/tJ44bTyaCz

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) February 14, 2025

The vice president’s confrontational remarks at the Munich Security Conference apparently surprised many officials who were expecting him to focus his remarks on Ukraine and Russia.

Instead, Vance called them out for embracing authoritarian policies and using “ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation” to enact laws marginalizing populist voters.

As an example of Europe’s draconian attacks on on free speech, the veep cited a recent egregious case in Great Britain:  “A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own,” Vance recounted. “After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son.”

Vance said the man was “found guilty of breaking the government’s new buffer zone law which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions” that could influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion within 200 yards of an abortion clinic. The man ended up having to “pay thousands of pounds to the prosecution” for praying.

In an even more extreme example of government overreach, Vance noted that Scottish officials recently distributed letters to citizens who reside within so-called safe access zones, “warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.”

Vance noted with disgust that the Scottish officials even encouraged citizens to report on anyone guilty of committing “thought crimes.”

“In Britain, and across Europe, I fear free speech is in retreat,” the vice president lamented.

JD Vance warns Europe against censorship during Munich Security Conference

“I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content.’

Or to… pic.twitter.com/5vC8kNeCv5

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 14, 2025

Vance also denounced Romania’s recent cancellation of presidential election results over accusations of Russian disinformation. “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with,” he said. “I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective.”

“Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls,” he added.

Vance also touched on pressing issue of mass migration in Europe, which has dramatically changed demographics in European cities and led to increases in both crime and terrorism.

“We know this situation didn’t materialize in a vacuum, it’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent and others across the world over the span of a decade,” he said.

The vice president highlighted the Thursday attack in Munich where an Afghan national drove a car into a crowd, injuring at least 30 people, and yelled “Allahu Akbar” when he was detained.

“We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” Vance said, offering his condolences to the victims.

“It’s a terrible story but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe and unfortunately way too many times in the United States, as well, he said. “An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid twenties, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community.”

“How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?” Vance asked. “No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” he added, pointing out that voters in Great Britain did vote for Brexit and have repeatedly voted against “out of control migration.”

According to the Financial Times, “European officials in Munich were horrified at what they saw as Vance’s unfair and untrue claims.”

Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius furiously objected to Vance’s characterization of European policies,  the far-left paper reported.

“I had a speech I prepared today,” Pistorius said. “It was supposed to be about security in Europe. But I cannot start in the way I originally intended . . . This democracy was called into question by the US vice-president.”

JUST IN: German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius starts whining about JD Vance’s speech, says it was “not acceptable.”

Looks like Vance’s speech was a success.

The whining came after Vance ripped European nations for criminalizing free speech and acting like tyrants.

“If I… pic.twitter.com/zM9DBo7V3M

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 14, 2025

The German defense minister added: “He compares the condition of Europe with what is happening in autocracies. This is not acceptable.”

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat, characterized Vance’s remarks as “lecturing”.

“I think we can deal with our own domestic issues,” Kallas told the FT.

“It was mad, totally mad,” a senior European diplomat fumed. “And very dangerous.”

Another senior EU diplomat complained that the vice president “lectured us, he humiliated us.”

“Some officials compared the speech with Vladimir Putin’s address at the same event in 2007, where the Russian president warned that Nato expansion risked conflict with Moscow,” FT reported.

“The mood in the room was exactly like the Putin 2007 speech,” the diplomat told FT. “It was outrageous.”

Watch Vance’s entire speech below:

The full speech of U.S. Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference.#USA #Europe #JDVance #Munich #MunichSecurityConference pic.twitter.com/9ONhYMSVtc

— Ulfh3dnar (@Ulfh3dnar_) February 14, 2025