Authored by Paul D. Thacker via RealClearInvestigations,

Jay Bhattacharya was in pretty terrible shape five years ago. He was losing sleep and weight, not because of the COVID-19 virus but in response to the efforts of his colleagues at Stanford University and the larger medical community to shut down his research, which questioned much of the government’s response to the pandemic. 

Some of his Stanford colleagues leaked false and damaging information to reporters. The university’s head of medicine ordered him to stop speaking to the press. Top leaders at the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, dialed up the attacks, dismissing him and his colleagues as what Collins termed “fringe epidemiologists” while their acolytes threw mud from a slew of publications, including the Washington Post, The Nation, and the prestigious medical journal BMJ.

In the years since, many of Bhattacharya’s scientific concerns about the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates have been corroborated. Fauci, meanwhile, accepted a pardon from President Biden, protecting him from COVID-related offenses dating back to 2014, the year he started funding research at a Wuhan, China, lab that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe probably started the pandemic. And this week, Bhattacharya looks set to achieve surprising vindication as the Senate holds a hearing on his nomination to head the NIH, in a Department of Health and Human Services run by science nonconformist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Bhattacharya’s path from health policy scholar to NIH director nominee is pockmarked with craters from missiles launched to destroy his scientific credibility by NIH leaders and their minions in academia. Even as he seeks to advance medical research, Bhattacharya’s personal experience will likely inform his pledge to clean up the NIH and clear the agency of some career civil servants who silenced dissenting scientific voices during the pandemic and created national policies that were not always supported by the public. 

“Free speech is fundamental for science to function properly,” he notes simply.    

Bhattacharya first caught the attention of the nation’s scientific bureaucracy in April 2020 when he reported that the COVID virus was not as dangerous but more widespread than many of his colleagues and government officials were maintaining. This suggested a policy focusing on the most vulnerable populations with fewer restrictions on younger, healthier Americans. The study was discussed at the highest levels of the government and was passed around by Fauci and others in the White House, according to emails made public by a Freedom of Information Act request.

“For anyone with an open mind, the study’s results implied that the lockdown-focused strategy of March 2020 had failed to suppress the spread of the disease,” Bhattacharya wrote in a 2023 essay. But the paper’s other obvious conclusion put Bhattacharya in the crosshairs of Stanford faculty: It suggested that fear-mongering about the fatality rate of the virus was irresponsible. 

Bhattacharya’s contrary conclusions generated complaints that the research was unsound, and Stanford put together an ad hoc group to investigate. It directed him to change the study protocols, which would have shut down the research. “They also demanded to review and approve any manuscripts we would write,” Bhattacharya said. But he eventually ignored them and kept publishing.

In April 2020, a series of damaging articles by Buzzfeed reporter Stephanie M. Lee carried allegations that Bhattacharya and his colleagues failed to disclose funding for their study, even though they had actually already disclosed it to Stanford. Buzzfeed is the now-defunct news site that first published the now much-maligned Steele dossier.

Bhattacharya was confused by the articles when they appeared. He later concluded from the intimate details that Stanford faculty were leaking the information to the reporter to harm him, including a false allegation that a “whistleblower” had come forward. 

Responding to the Buzzfeed flurry of reports, Stanford announced a fact-finding investigation of Bhattacharya’s research, which he began calling an “inquisition.” The administration later informed him there was no “whistleblower” as Buzzfeed had falsely reported, and they sent a confidential report that found him and his colleagues at no fault.

“I got a letter which basically says we did nothing wrong. But also a condition that I’m not allowed to release the letter,” Bhattacharya explained in a 2023 interview. “This was a low period in my life. I was getting death threats, racist attacks, because the press was attacking me.” 

Bhattacharya also suspects that some of the attacks at the time were being generated by Stanford’s major funders in the federal government – the NIH’s Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci. Collins and Fauci orchestrated a campaign against Bhattacharya in earnest in October 2020. Collins resigned from his NIH position last Friday and did not respond to questions sent to him through the NIH communications office nor sent to his NIH contact. Fauci did not respond to questions sent to him through his attorney.

That month, Bhattacharya and professors Martin Kulldorff, then at Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford released the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which called for rejecting harmful COVID lockdowns in favor of “focused protection” for society’s most vulnerable, such as the elderly. With the declaration building support, Collins, four days later, on Oct. 8, 2020, sent Fauci an email with the subject line “Great Barrington Declaration.”

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the [Health] Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford,” Collins wrote. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that on line yet – is it underway?”

Some hours later, Fauci forwarded Collins a “refutation” of the Great Barrington Declaration written for The Nation by his friend and advocate Gregg Gonsalves, an AIDS activist who is now a professor at Yale. Fauci rose to prominence in the 1980s as an HIV/AIDS researcher. “Indeed, and well said,” replied Collins. The Gonsalves essay referenced no actual science but denigrated Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff for ignoring what he called “progressive principles of justice and equality” in favor of “survival of the fittest.”

Fauci has praised Gonsalves several times over the years and, in his recent memoir, singles out Gonsalves and a handful of other activists “for their unflinching support over the past few years.”

Four days after Fauci forwarded Collins the Gonsalves essay in The Nation, Collins dismissed the Declaration in public comments as “fringe” politics. “This is not mainstream science,” Collins argued in a public statement. Gonsalves contacted Collins later that same day, emailing him another essay he had written, again vilifying the Great Barrington Declaration, this time in the Washington Post. 

“Saw your comments on the ludicrous Great Barrington Declaration and wanted to thank you for speaking out and doing it ‘undiplomatically,’” Gonsalves emailed Collins. “After we saw what you had said about ‘fringe’ epidemiology, we wondered why we were so nice in our op-ed.”

Collins then forwarded Gonsalves’ email to Fauci, who responded with a smiley face emoji.

Several months later, Gonsalves was among those who hosted a surprise birthday greeting for Fauci. “We did it!” tweeted HIV activist Peter Staley. “A small gang of Tony Fauci’s HIV/AIDS comrades managed to surprise him yesterday with an 80th birthday Zoom.” A screenshot of the Zoom shows Gregg Gonsalves beaming into his camera.

Fauci and Collins’ effort to create a “quick and devastating” takedown of the Great Barrington Declaration remained secret until the emails between them and Gonsalves became public in late December 2021. In response, Gonsalves dashed off a Christmas note to Collins and Fauci thanking them for their service and alerting them to their now-public emails “that some on the right have been circulating as ‘proof’ of a conspiracy against the Great Barrington Declaration.”

“It’s interesting that an effort to call out genuinely dangerous recommendations from the GBD is called a conspiracy,” Collins emailed back to Gonsalves. “Truth itself seems to have become a conspiracy in many minds.”

“It’s been a privilege to have you as our leader at the NIH!” Gonsalves replied.

Gonsalves remained a dogged Fauci supporter throughout the pandemic, even attacking former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield when he went public in 2023 that he believed Fauci’s funding for gain-of-function virus research in the Wuhan lab may have led to the pandemic. “Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC Director, has been trashing former NIAID director, Anthony Fauci,” Gonsalves tweeted in March 2023. “Anyone who knows Bob Redfield knows what an unsavory character he is.”

Working in concert with Gonsalves, two other academics were especially active in criticizing Bhattacharya’s COVID work: David Gorski, a Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University, and Gavin Yamey, Director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University. 

“They specifically targeted the scientific community to undermine Jay,” said a Trump transition team member, who is not allowed to speak to the press while shuffling Bhattacharya around the Senate. “There’s a market for hot pieces to attack Bhattacharya, and these academics coordinate on social media, repeating and amplifying the same narrative to dirty him up.”

Gorski is a self-described “misinformation debunker” and runs a website called Science Based Medicine. It doesn’t always get its facts straight. After the European Medicines Agency concluded in April 2021, for example, that unusual blood clots should be listed as a very rare side effect for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, Gorski decried the decision on his X account claiming, “Reported blood clots appear to be no higher than background and very likely unrelated to the vaccine.” The UK government eventually stopped offering AstraZeneca’s jab, and the company finally admitted that its COVID vaccine causes harm in what The Telegraph reported could result in millions of dollars in legal claims.

“Gorski is damaging to science,” said Bhattacharya. “He creates an environment where researchers can’t speak their mind if they cross the biopharmaceutical industry.” Bhattacharya described Yamey and Gorski as part of a network that carried out Collins’ devastating takedown. “I’ll never publish in a big mainstream journal,” he said a couple of years ago in an interview.

“Those of us in academic medicine, all we have is our reputation,” former CDC Director Robert Redfield told RealClearInvestigations. “These attacks, it impacts you substantially. You can’t function. You don’t get invited to talks, and groups won’t have anything to do with you.”

In late 2021, Gorski partnered with Yamey on a piece for the BMJ falsely charging that Bhattacharya and other Great Barrington Declaration signers were supported by billionaires “aligned with industry.” Bhattacharya and the other signatories met at a conference hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which, Yamey and Gorski argued, “has also received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, which was founded and is chaired by the right-wing billionaire industrialist known for promoting climate change denial and opposing regulations on business.” 

While Gorski and Yamey provided no evidence that Koch money funded the GBD signatories, the BMJ still published their piece. Association with a nonprofit that has distant links to Koch money was apparently enough to carry the whiff of dark money corruption, a charge that still circulates on social media to this day. 

“The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication,” wrote Martin Kulldorff in The Spectator. “While the AIER has received only a single $68K (£50,000) Koch donation a few years ago, many universities have received multiple, much larger Koch donations, including million dollar gifts to Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford.”

Contacted by RealClearInvestigations, Gorski did not respond when asked why he had not corrected his allegations against Bhattacharya.

It was later revealed that Bhattacharya’s attackers had even more conflicts. In March 2022, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a trove of documents revealing Yamey’s ties to EcoHealth Alliance, a Fauci-funded organization run by Peter Daszak, which subcontracted with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. USAID scientist Dennis Carroll ran a pandemic preparedness program called PREDICT and worked with several researchers, including Daszak and Yamey, documents show, to redirect federal funds from the PREDICT program to set up a nonprofit called the Global Virome Project.

After directing federal funds to create the Global Virome Project, Carroll retired from federal service and became head of the organization, along with Daszak as a board member.

“It would appear that Dennis Carroll violated federal law that prohibits the use of official resources for private gain or for that of persons or organizations with which he is associated personally,” Craig Holman of Public Citizen said when shown emails from the document trove.

In March 2023, CBS News broke a story that EcoHealth Alliance may have double-billed the federal government for research in Wuhan, and the USAID Inspector General launched a criminal probe of the group’s finances. Some days before Trump was sworn into office, HHS excluded EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak from working with the agency in response to congressional investigations that uncovered wrongdoing, including using taxpayer money to fund gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 “But the defamatory damage was already done,” Bhattacharya wrote in Newsweek, calling out Yamey and Gorski for their BMJ errors, “and many scientists stayed silent as schools closed and children were harmed, even though they knew better. They did not want to be similarly smeared.”

“Yamey is a narrative enforcer for the pandemic preparedness industry that likely funded the research that caused the pandemic,” Bhattacharya said.

And the smears continue. Referencing the false “dark money” charges by Yamey and Gorski, Lucky Tran, director of communications for Columbia University Irving Medical Center, posted a denunciation of Bhattacharya on the social media platform Bluesky after Trump nominated him. “Bhattacharya has spread disinformation on COVID, fought against lifesaving measures including vaccines, masks, and social distancing, and is backed by dark money groups pushing corporate interests.”

RealClearInvestigations contacted Columbia’s vice president of communications, Vanita Gowda, to ask if Lucky Tran’s post was Columbia’s official position on Trump’s NIH choice. Gowda was also asked whether the university could provide any evidence that Bhattacharya was funded by “dark money.” Gowda did not respond to multiple requests to explain these charges.

USAID’s criminal investigation began with subpoenas sent to several concerned parties. Duke University’s Yamey did not respond to repeated inquires on whether he had received a subpoeana. .

“I am honored and humbled by President @realDonaldTrump’s nomination of me to be the next @NIH director,” Bhattacharya posted on X. “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”

Redfield said that Collins, Fauci, and other critics should apologize to Bhattacharya for the years of harassment and actions that were both wrong and unprofessional. “If you survive these attacks, and you have a resurrection, you do very well,” Redfield said. “You now have a reputation for substance and standing up for what you believe is true. Not everyone has that. I’m pretty confident he’ll do well, move forward, and do the right thing.”

Editor’s note: In 2023, Dr. Bhattacharya was named the first recipient of the Samizdat Prize, an annual award sponsored by the RealClear Media Fund to recognize standout foes of censorship.

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump said on March 5 that his administration had informed Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser that she must clean up homeless encampments in the city.

“We have notified the Mayor of Washington, D.C., that she must clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments in the City, specifically including the ones outside of the State Department, and near the White House,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

“If she is not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her! Washington, D.C. must become CLEAN and SAFE! We want to be proud of our Great Capital again.”

Last month, Trump criticized the high rate of crime, graffiti, and homelessness plaguing the nation’s capital city and suggested the federal government should take over running Washington, which has had a limited form of self-governance under the control of Congress since 1973.

“[Officials are] not doing the job—too much crime, too much graffiti, too many tents on the lawns, there’s magnificent lawns and there’s tents,“ he told reporters on Air Force One on Feb. 19. ”It’s a sad thing. Homeless people all over the place. We’ve got to take care of the homeless, but I can’t have that in Washington, D.C. I think we should take over Washington … I think that we should run it strong, run it with law and order, make it flawlessly beautiful.”

Bowser rejected the idea and said she believed the current system of governance is best.

On March 4, the mayor announced that Washington is removing the Black Lives Matter mural from near the White House.

The 50-foot-tall painting on a two-block section of 16th Street North West close to the White House is part of Black Lives Matter Plaza. The plaza was created in 2020 amid nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. It was made permanent in 2021.

Bowser said in a March 4 statement on social media platform X, “The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference.”

The mayor added: “The devastating impacts of the federal job cuts must be our number one concern. Our focus is on economic growth, public safety, and supporting our residents affected by these cuts.”

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has terminated tens of thousands of federal workers across several agencies, including employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health.

Bowser’s comments came a day after Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) introduced legislation that would withhold federal transportation funds from Washington unless it changed the plaza’s name to “Liberty Plaza.”

In a March 3 statement, Clyde backed Trump’s efforts to clean up Washington’s streets and said he believed that removing Black Lives Matter Plaza “must be part of this critical effort.”

“It’s past time for Congress to exercise its constitutional authority over Washington’s affairs to remove BLM Plaza and rename the street to Liberty Plaza,” Clyde said. “Our capital city must serve as a beacon of freedom, patriotism, and safety—not wokeness, divisiveness, and lawlessness.”

In February 2023, National Park Service employees cleared a large homeless encampment near the White House, tearing down dozens of tents and warning that those who resisted could be arrested.

Workers in white jumpsuits used rakes, shovels, and pitchforks to clear McPherson Square, tossing the remnants of the encampment into garbage trucks.

The Epoch Times contacted Bowser’s office for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times,

Americans will again change their clocks on March 9, setting them one hour ahead to observe Daylight Saving Time in a yearly cyclical pattern that experts say leads to more car accidents, heart attacks, and strokes.

Efforts are underway to stop this process. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is touting a bipartisan effort known as the “Sunshine Protection Act,” which would make Daylight Saving Time the national year-round standard.

In 2023, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) launched similar legislation under the same name. Rubio’s bill passed through the Senate, but Buchanan’s version stalled in the House.

Those efforts, or some version of them, may now come to fruition under the new administration.

President Donald Trump said in December 2024 that the Republican Party “will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time … [which] is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

That move, unlike Congress’ efforts, would make Standard Time permanent, which is what Americans experience from November through March after setting their clocks back one hour.

While that would retain the exceedingly early winter evenings that many criticize, it would still mean an end to the time changes, which experts cite as the primary health and safety risk.

Elon Musk, who Trump tapped to helm his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), polled users on the social platform X, asking Americans if the time changes are canceled, would they prefer clocks to be set “an hour earlier,” retaining Standard Time, or “an hour later,” which would keep Daylight Saving Time year-round.

Of more than one million users polled, 58.1 percent said they’d prefer clocks to stay one hour ahead, versus 41.9 percent who said one hour behind.

While most of the nation participates in Daylight Saving Time, Hawaii and parts of Arizona opt out, according to the Transportation Department.

The U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands also do not participate.

America’s Second Attempt at Ending DST

If the Trump administration succeeds in ending the time switch, it won’t be the first time for the United States.

Daylight Saving Time began more than a century ago and was used throughout both world wars as a cost-saving measure, where adding additional daylight hours helped conserve energy.

In 1973, Congress voted to make Daylight Saving Time permanent for two years after a brief stint of permanent DST during World War II.

However, many criticized the change for the unusually late darkness in winter mornings, which is a common complaint among supporters of Standard Time.

That early-morning darkness proved fatal: Eight children in Florida were killed in traffic accidents in the weeks following the change, causing Florida Gov. Reubin Askew to ask Congress for a repeal.

Other metrics painted a more complicated picture. Pre-sunrise fatalities had increased to 20 from 18 the year prior, according to the National Safety Council.

Roger Sant, who was the assistant administrator-designate for the Federal Energy Administration, wrote a letter detailing a 1 percent energy savings after America went to Daylight Saving Time year-round, which totaled more than 20,000 tons of coal not being burned daily.

He also said afternoon accidents had decreased.

Congress eventually passed legislation repealing the experiment, returning the nation to twice-yearly clock changes.

Pros and Cons of Standard Versus Daylight Saving Time

While supporters of year-round Standard Time cite the late darkness in winter mornings as a reason to reject a full transition to Daylight Saving Time, those who wish to go back to the early 1970s experiment argue Standard Time leads to shorter days and earlier sunsets.

The transition to Daylight Saving Time each spring leads to an increase in heart attacks and strokes in the days afterward, according to a March 2024 report from the American Heart Association.

That clock switch also increases the risk of fatal traffic accidents by 6 percent, particularly in the first few days after the change, according to a 2020 study by Current Biology.

Researchers at the Sleep Foundation say twice-yearly clock changes interfere with one’s sleep-wake cycle and may disrupt the feeling of alertness in the morning and sleepiness at night, as they change the hours we are exposed to natural light.

This can lead to sleep loss and sleep debt, which is the cumulative result of getting insufficient sleep over days or weeks.

However, unlike Scott’s bipartisan effort in Congress, the researchers support year-round Standard Time, arguing that it better suits circadian rhythms and public health and safety.

Industries Split on Time Changes

The view among businesses is mixed.

The golf industry is a long proponent of Daylight Saving Time after lobbyists in the 1980s estimated that businesses in the sector could earn an additional $200 million in golf club sales and green fees each year if the United States had an extra month of Daylight Saving Time.

The additional hour allows golfers to play into dusk, providing more revenue for courses and clubs.

Michael Downing, the author of “Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time,” said in 2007 that lobbyists for candy companies had pushed to get the autumn clock change moved into November so children would have an extra hour of daylight during Halloween to collect more candy.

In 2005, Congress passed legislation extending Daylight Saving Time, so it would end on the first Sunday in November and start on the second Sunday of March.

The Air Transport Association opposed that extension, arguing that it would cost the airline industry $147 million.

Although some believe Daylight Saving Time was invented to give farmers another hour of light to work on their fields, many farmers opposed it due to having one less hour of daylight in the morning and little time to get goods to market.

Downing also suggested that more people go out when there’s additional daylight during Daylight Saving Time, leading to more driving and gasoline consumption.

“Daylight Saving increases gasoline consumption, something the petroleum industry has known since 1930,” he said.

With Trump calling for an end to the clock change, and Musk’s poll showing a lean towards a permanent adoption of Daylight Saving Time, it’s not yet clear what path the administration will take if Republicans finally decide to stop the twice-yearly transition.

A federal judge in Missouri has found that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) covered up the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and hoarded protective equipment – costing the world precious time and lives. Now, Missouri officials are vowing to go after CCP assets.

Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. on Friday ordered China to pay a staggering $24 billion for their role in the disaster, a ruling that could pave the way for Missouri to seize Chinese-owned assets – including farmland, the NY Times reports.

The lawsuit, filed by the Missouri attorney general’s office in April 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, accused the Chinese government of withholding information about the existence and spread of the virus and then of cutting off the supply of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., from the rest of the world. Chinese officials said Friday that they did not accept the judge’s decision.

Limbaugh wrote in his decision that “China was misleading the world about the dangers and scope of the Covid-19 pandemic,” and had “engaged in monopolistic actions to hoard P.P.E.,” which hampered early response to the pandemic.

The ruling in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri imposed the judgement against China, the ruling CCP, local governments in China, a Chinese health agency, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Limbaugh, a Bush W. Bush appointee, had initially dismissed Missouri’s lawsuit, only to have it returned to him by an appellate court – after which he held a bench trial in January at the federal courthouse in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. China did not show up to the hearing.

According to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the ruling held China accountable for its actions.

“China refused to show up to court, but that doesn’t mean they get away with causing untold suffering and economic devastation,” said Bailey, adding: “We intend to collect every penny by seizing Chinese-owned assets, including Missouri farmland.”

Related:

• Arkansas Plots Massive Crackdown On China As Fears Grow Over U.S. Land Grab
• Kyle Bass Sounds Alarm Over China’s ‘Insane Battlefield Asymmetries’ In U.S. Land Ownership
• Second-Largest Foreign Owner Of US Land Is Member Of The CCP
• As Chinese Purchases Of US Farmland Soar, It’s Becoming Impossible To Track How Much It Owns

The Chinese government is crying foul – and refusing to acknowledge the ruling.

“The so-called lawsuit has no basis in fact, law or international precedence,” a spokesman for China’s embassy in Washington fumed. “China does not and will not accept it. If China’s interests are harmed, we will firmly take reciprocal countermeasures according to international law.”

It remains unclear how or when Missouri might start grabbing Chinese assets, but Bailey has made it clear he isn’t bluffing. His office has suggested turning to the Trump administration for help in identifying Chinese-owned property that could be seized to pay the massive judgment.

Missouri has already been at the forefront of efforts to curb Chinese land ownership in the U.S., with state lawmakers pushing restrictions on foreign adversaries buying American soil. Bailey’s new push could escalate the battle, potentially setting the stage for a historic legal fight between the Show-Me State and Beijing.

Foreign governments can be sued in American courts, though the circumstances under which those lawsuits can proceed are sharply limited by a measure known as the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. In his earlier dismissal ruling, Judge Limbaugh said that Missouri’s lawsuit was unable to move forward because of that act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said one of Missouri’s claims, about the hoarding of P.P.E., was not excluded by that act, and sent that portion of the case back to the district court. -NYT

Former Missouri Attorney General and now-Senator Eric Schmitt took a victory lap on social media after the ruling, declaring:

“When I was AG in Missouri, I sued China for unleashing Covid on the world. Missouri can now seize assets.”

🚨BREAKING: When I was AG in Missouri I sued China for unleashing Covid on the world

My successor & friend @AGAndrewBailey continued the work & today the court awarded Missouri $24+ Billion in damages

Missouri can now seize assets

Just call us the Show Me (the money) state.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) March 7, 2025

This unprecedented case marks one of the largest legal judgments ever against a foreign government over a global crisis. While China is unlikely to pay up voluntarily, Missouri’s push to enforce the ruling through asset seizures could shake up U.S.-China relations.

While this is nice and all, when are US institutions involved in the offshoring of gain-of-function research to Wuhan going to be held accountable?

Update(1905ET): After several days of radical Sunni Islamist militants targeting religious minorities in Syria for mass killings, mainly in coastal areas, the mainstream media has belatedly begun to cover it (as the killings are growing to the point of getting too hard to ignore). Some correspondents estimated that there are thousands dead and wounded, mostly Alawites but also Syrian Christians among them, as post-Assad Syria unravels under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) Jolani.

“The death toll from two days of clashes between Syrian security forces and loyalists of ousted President Bashar Assad and revenge killings that followed has risen to more than 1,000, a war monitoring group said Saturday, making it one of the deadliest acts of violence since Syria’s conflict began 14 years ago,” The Associated Press reports.

The jihadists, which include foreign fighters as well as ruling HTS members, in some cases are simply going into the homes of non-Sunnis and massacring whole families. The terrorists haven’t been shy about uploading their killings on the internet as well as in livestreams. Men, women, children, and even babies are being brutally murdered.

More on the jihadist terrorist regime’s massacres of Alawite families
“The attack was swift and merciless. The militants stormed the apartment, slaughtering the family without hesitation”
👇 https://t.co/yT9NDDBotD

— OstensibleOyster (@Ostensiblay) March 8, 2025

“The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in addition to 745 civilians killed, mostly in shootings from close distance, 125 government security force members and 148 militants with armed groups affiliated with Assad were killed. It added that electricity and drinking water were cut off in large areas around the city of Latakia,” AP continues.

But instead of calling out the obvious ethno-religious genocide unfolding, the European Union had the audacity to issue this statement:

The European Union strongly condemns the recent attacks, reportedly by pro-Assad elements, on interim government forces in the coastal areas of Syria and all violence against civilians. 

This is incredibly shameful. https://t.co/n6maaBgtIA

— Sam Noble (@TricycleRepair) March 9, 2025

But the truth has been summarized by a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is the predominant Christian faith of Syria and the Middle East. “As you see the unfolding tragedy in Syria, keep in mind, this is your tax dollars at work. This was brought to you by the US government, the State of Israel, and Turkey. They said Assad was bad. This is what they replaced Assad with,” Priest John Whiteford said on X.

Syria has once again become a warzone as HTS insurgents open fire on Alawite homes in Homs. They’re murdering people based on their race. pic.twitter.com/J6YUsrXma3

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 6, 2025

Gruesome images of bodies piled up on streets in and around Latakia have been widely circulating – many of them too disturbing to republish. 

Fox has underscored that Tulsi Gabbard was right once again…

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s warning of a terrorist takeover in Syria looks to be coming true amid reports that al Qaeda-linked terror forces aligned with Syria’s interim new president—a former al Qaeda terrorist—are being accused of massacring Alawites as well as members of the country’s dwindling Christian community. 

…At Gabbard’s Senate confirmation hearing she said “I have no love for Assad or any dictator. I just hate al-Qaeda. I hate that our leaders cozy up to Islamist extremists, calling them “rebels”, as Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton, “al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” Syria is now controlled by al-Qaeda offshoot HTS, led by an Islamist Jihadist who danced in the streets on 9/11, and who was responsible for the killing of many American soldiers.”

🚨🇸🇾 📍 Jableh: Terrorists in the jihadist regime shoot & throw grenades at restaurant & Alawite homes

Reports indicate they murdered the restaurant owner
& his entire familypic.twitter.com/TiOdP0nvE1 https://t.co/5bDsqWwJ8i

— OstensibleOyster (@Ostensiblay) March 8, 2025

So far Damascus has remained relatively quiet, but in areas where there are no media cameras, particularly countryside areas of Syria – the jihadists are going on a murderous rampage. Sadly it looks to get worse.

When the Syrian “revolution” began 14 years ago the jihadists were chanting to slaughter Alawites and other minorities and later attacked Christian/Druze towns like Maaloula and Adra killing many. They were always bloodthirsty orcs and now they rule Syria. What did you expect? pic.twitter.com/7XbiykNoDf

— Hadi (@HadiNasrallah) March 8, 2025

Entire Alawite families have been massacred, such as the below…

Meanwhile Syrian Christians fear they are next to be targeted on a large-scale. Their warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears in the West…

This book is the result of years of Syrian Christians warning what’s coming. We collected the interviews from 2015-2020. Last words to me of a priest in Damascus while we sat on Straight Street: “We are a church of martyrs & we will stay.” #Syria is home. https://t.co/JsjacQwNJO

— Brad Hoff (@BradRHoff) March 9, 2025

* * *

As Middle East Eye explained earlier, The UK has lifted sanctions on 24 Syrian entities, including the central bank, in a landmark move that could be a turning point for Syria’s devastated economy. Britain has become the first country to unfreeze all assets of the Central Bank of Syria.

The state airline and state-owned oil companies are amongst other previously sanctioned entities removed from the sanctions list on Thursday afternoon. “This approach underscores our commitment to help the people of Syria rebuild their country and economy, including through support for a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition process,” a UK government spokesperson said.  “We will continue to judge Syria’s interim authorities by their actions, not their words.”

The new Syrian government inherited a daunting economic crisis from Bashar al-Assad’s government, which was toppled in December.

Government corruption, devastating conflict and crippling international sanctions all contributed to wrecking Syria’s economy under Assad. According to the UN, nine out of 10 Syrians live in poverty.

On December 17, interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa [al-Qaeda name: Abu Mohammad al-Jolani] urged Britain and other countries to lift all the sanctions that had been imposed on the country under Assad.

“They should lift all restrictions which were imposed on the flogger and the victim. The flogger is gone now. This issue is not up for negotiation,” he said.

‘Desperately needs a boost’

The UK’s major policy shift could bring new opportunities for Syria, if other nations follow suit. Western countries lifting sanctions could help stabilise the Syrian economy and facilitate foreign investment. 

The Syrian government is led by the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which remains a proscribed terrorist organization in the UK, as well as in the US. Western countries have lifted some sanctions, but have made sanctions relief contingent on political reforms.

In February the European Union partially removed restrictions on the central bank and suspended sanctions on the energy and transport sectors. The US waived a ban on transactions with the Syrian government, facilitating humanitarian aid – but has kept sanctions in place.

As long as US sanctions remain, the material impact of Britain’s move will be limited. But the policy could be a turning point in encouraging other European nations to lift more sanctions.

It is certainly a bold decision from the Labor government, which will be seen to be designing its own Middle East policy, distinct from that of the US.

It comes just days after Turkey’s Deputy Foreign Minister Nuh Yilmaz met Britain’s Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer to discuss Syria’s future, including sanctions and economic development.

Chris Doyle, chair of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said: “This is a belated if very welcome step by the UK. The Syrian economy desperately needs a boost and removing or easing sanctions is one of the key measures than can assist in this process.”

He added: “Getting Syrians back to productive work, running their businesses, and getting out of a situation of being aid dependent is all part of ensuring a successful transition away from decades of Assad regime rule.”

Watch: HTS militants drop ‘barrel bombs’ on civilians long the Syrian coast amid an ongoing ethno-religions cleansing campaign targeting Alawites (and the MSM remains silent)…

I’d never imagined we’d be on the side dropping the barrel bombs,
we who labelled Assad “the barrel bomb regime”

This is too much to stomach. pic.twitter.com/7dxtgSDv0G

— Rami Jarrah (@RamiJarrah) March 7, 2025

The developments come as the HTS-led government carried out helicopter strikes on Thursday on the former Assad stronghold of Latakia, after fighters loyal to an elite Assad unit killed security personnel.

Video purporting to show impact…

Barrel bombs dropped on Syrian coast cities by the Jolani regime

These tactics are what made Assad a “monster,” but Jolani has friends in Washington pic.twitter.com/RTsrUx8yS1

— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) March 7, 2025

In the last few weeks, the government has launched extensive campaigns seeking to root out Assad loyalists from his former bastions. It is under further pressure in the southwest, where Israel has occupied a UN-buffer zone and now commands the high ground looking over Damascus.

Israel has also sought to portray itself as a protector of Syria’s Druze community, an ethno-religious minority, in a bid to deepen its foothold in Syria.

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened military action to “defend” a suburb three kilometres southeast of Damascus that is home to many Druze.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Just like clockwork, there is talk of recession in the air. The announcement will come soon and be confirmed by summer. The Atlanta Fed just revised its output forecast for the first quarter to expect a contraction at-2.8 percent. This is very sudden. Only a week earlier, the same tools (GDPNow) had forecast a 2 percent increase in output in the first quarter.

At this point, many people are probably dismissing all these forecasts and big numbers emanating from experts on the public payroll. They have been wrong about so much for so very long. And yet, Wall Street is moved by such data reports, even when the problems with them are so obvious. As they say, the numbers might be fake but they are all we have.

The basis on which this forecast is being made concerns construction spending, and it is truly hard to justify based on industry numbers showing no such thing.

My own thinking: this is a game of catch-up and blame placing. Analytics commissioned by Brownstone Institute—but which can also be intuited by any living adult over the last four years—documents a technical recession since 2022 based on a clearer reading of the best data. Even then, there was never a clear recovery from March 2020 when the global economy was deliberately plunged into a forced depression.

Since those days, not much has made sense in macroeconomic data as conventionally collected and distributed.

There are many problems. Conventional output data counts government spending, even when it is based on debt finance that is ultimately financed by money printing, as positively contributing to GDP. These very years have seen the largest increase in government spending, by any measure, that we have on record in the history of recorded time.

Obviously, this has distorted GDP numbers for years.

There is another problem: much of the “growth” over four years has consisted in gradual and iterative repair of the damage done by lockdowns and supply-chain freezes. Breaking things and fixing them does not count as overall progress but in the way that GDP is collected, it necessarily does.

That factor skewed output data for years.

All GDP data has to be adjusted for inflation if it is to have any meaning. That much is commonly known. Less commonly known is that the same has to happen to retail spending, factory orders, and durable goods purchases. It makes no sense at all to count higher prices as meaningful increases in spending.

It matters which inflation measure you use against which the GDP is adjusted to generate real GDP. For years now, the CPI has been dramatically underestimated on whole classes of goods and the entire index as well. At this point, it is beyond dispute. How much it has been underestimated is a matter of debate. Conventional data show a 22 percent decline in purchasing power over four years but it could be closer to 30 percent or more, at points reaching much higher levels.

Even using a conservative measure of underestimating and mixing it with unadjusted GDP generates a macroeconomic environment in the red for three years—a technical recession.

When we published our study, I expected tremendous blowback from industry economists and others. What we saw instead was silence. This stunned me until I realized that most everyone knows that this is correct.

In other words, Trump has inherited an economic environment that has been called wonderful for years but in fact has been extremely weak and deeply damaged. It was a trap. Deny economic weakness for four years while it has been otherwise obvious, then once the new president comes to office, become transparent and truth-telling about how bad things are.

The trouble with U.S. culture is that there is a media overlay between economic conditions and whoever happens to be in office at the time. It is not at all a coincidence that the recession seems to be hitting exactly as Trump has taken power. It will be pinned on his policies: the tariffs, spending cuts, government disruptions, or just uncertainty in general.

This is akin to someone just noticing that the house is a mess once the cleaning crew arrives, and blaming the workers for all problems.

On the other hand, it is far too soon to declare that we are somehow out of the recessionary woods. There is a very long way to go, and Trump is right to urge patience and even suggest, as he did in his address to Congress, that there is going to be some pain along the way.

The soaring rhetoric about the dawn of a new Golden Age is thrilling but premature. The budget has to be fixed. The agencies have to be curbed and cut. The regulations must be repealed. The health agencies have to be defanged. All taxes need to be lowered or abolished.

On the tariffs, it is easy to follow the thinking here. Because it is cheaper to produce most things in most other countries than the United States, due mainly to the strength of the dollar, the deployment of tariffs is designed to even the score. It is an attempt to recreate the old-fashioned account settlement that we had before the end of the gold standard. The theory is that this proves some room for U.S. manufacturing to compete, possibly drawing in foreign capital for domestic investment.

This strikes me as a circuitous method of getting around a more fundamental problem that traces to a broken international monetary system. That said, there is no button to push to fix it, not one that I’ve seen, anyway. The most near-term effect of these tariffs, however, will simply be to increase costs for U.S. importers and U.S. consumers. They have many small businesses worried to the point of panic. In all, this is a risky gamble. I’m hardly alone in my concern that this hyper focus on tariffs long before we have reform in taxes and spending is strangely disproportionate, reflecting a personal idiosyncrasy of Trump rather than clear economic thinking.

The tariffs will also become a scapegoat. If a recession is suddenly announced, if the first quarter GDP really does come in as dramatically down, tariffs and therefore Trump will find itself targeted for blame. This should be a primary political concern for the Trump administration right now.

All that said, Trump is on the right track in pointing out that we have just lived through the worst inflation in 48 years and possibly in American history. He was fact-checked hard for that statement but it is entirely defensible. So too on all these economic indicators from inflation to the jobs market. The reality is far worse than the agencies have reported for many years now.

Just remember: there is strong reason to believe we’ve been in technical recession plus high inflation for years now. Admitting it now is simply a matter of political timing. The ticket surrounding economic data and messaging is getting ever more layered and complicated, and it requires real sophistication to see through it.

The hidden sufferings of the past four years have been largely untold and hence the suddenly announced tribulations of the present moment are likely exaggerated.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) announced the payment of billions of dollars to more than a million Americans after two provisions that reduced or eliminated benefits for certain individuals were recently repealed.

Last week, the agency said that it will start paying retroactive payments to people whose benefits have been affected by the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO). Through March 4, “SSA has already paid 1,127,723 people more than $7.5 billion in retroactive payments,” the agency said in a March 4 statement. “The average retroactive payment so far is $6,710.”

The WEP and GPO provisions “reduced or eliminated the Social Security benefits for over 3.2 million people who receive a pension based on work that was not covered by Social Security (a non-covered pension).”

In January, former President Joe Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA) which ended both GPO and WEP. Since the provisions no longer applied as of January 2024, millions of Social Security beneficiaries became eligible for retroactive payments.

“President Trump made it very clear he wanted the Social Security Fairness Act to be implemented as quickly as possible,” said Lee Dudek, Acting Commissioner of Social Security. “We met that challenge head-on and are proudly delivering for the American people.”

SSA said it continues to pay the remaining retroactive payments.

Furthermore, the elimination of WEP and GPO makes many beneficiaries eligible for higher monthly benefits starting in April. The exact increase in payment will depend on factors such as the type of Social Security benefit they receive and the amount of pension received.

Teachers, police officers, firefighters, federal workers covered by the Civil Service Retirement System, and employees whose work is covered by a foreign social security system stand to gain under the new changes.

Beneficiaries set to receive retroactive benefits or see an adjustment in monthly benefits will receive a mail notice from the Social Security Administration explaining the matter.

Most people receiving retroactive payments may get their notice two to three weeks after receiving payments since “the President understands how important it is to pay people what they are due right away,” SSA said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) welcomed the SSA announcement of retroactive payments, according to a Feb. 27 statement. Earlier last month, she joined other lawmakers in sending a letter to the Acting Commissioner of the SSA, calling for quickly implementing the Social Security Fairness Act.

Murkowski said the WEP provision reduced Social Security benefits for people getting government pensions, while the GPO cut down benefits for widows, spouses, and widowers whose spouses received government pensions.

“I applaud the Social Security Administration for moving quickly to ensure Alaska’s public servants are able to access the benefits they are entitled to,” she said.

“I have been working on the Social Security Fairness Act for 22 years—and Alaskans have been waiting even longer for their benefits. I’m grateful to the administration for promptly implementing this law so that Alaskans will not have to wait any longer for the benefits they’ve earned.”

Advocacy group The Concord Coalition criticized the Social Security Fairness Act in December, arguing that it ignored “the real injustice.”

The group said most government employees receive both social security and public pensions because they contributed to the two plans while employed.

Less than 30 percent of workers employed at state and local governments do not participate in social security. “These non-covered workers are not being denied Social Security because of their public service careers.” Instead, “they do not receive Social Security benefits because they do not pay Social Security payroll taxes.”

“Non-covered workers are not being singled out for unfair treatment. Indeed, repealing the GPO and WEP would result in more favorable treatment. They would get more and pay less than everyone else. That would be an unearned windfall.”

Meanwhile, the jump in monthly benefits for certain Social Security beneficiaries beginning in April is above the cost-of-living adjustment made this year, which is applicable to all recipients.

SSA raised benefits by 2.5 percent this year for more than 72.5 million beneficiaries, which amounted to an average increase of $50 per month.

Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manríquez reports that an illegal alien who previously worked for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) reelection campaign self-deported in Decemeber to Colombia ahead of new immigration laws enacted under President Trump.

Manríquez spoke with Diego de la Vega, former deputy communications director for AoC’s reelection campaign, who told the online publication that he and his wife self-deported in December because he “wanted to be somewhere where I wasn’t considered illegal, where I wasn’t persecuted by the state, where I was welcome. So in December, my wife and I moved to Bogotá.”

“It’s bittersweet. I hadn’t left the country in 23 years—from age seven to age thirty. Now, I can’t go back to the US. It feels like exile. It’s a very permanent move. But my wife and I are confident we made the right decision. And after some time, it’s been a real pleasure to be here,” de la Vega said in the interview last week. 

He continued, “It feels surreal to not be illegalized anymore. I don’t have to live in the shadows or constantly worry about paperwork.” 

Manríquez provided readers with an understanding of the moment the illegal became a far-left organizer:

De la Vega became politically active after witnessing the failure of the Dream Act in 2010, when the bill fell just five votes short in the Senate. He started organizing for immigrant rights, first as a communications worker in the New York State Assembly, then for Make the Road NY, an immigrant rights organization. His first major victory came in 2021 when, as digital organizer for Make the Road, he helped secure a $2.1 billion fund that provided $15,000 relief checks to undocumented workers excluded from federal pandemic aid.

“That was direct money in people’s pockets,” recalled de la Vega, who by then had enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

His work did not go unnoticed. Within a year, he was hired by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s reelection campaign, where he eventually became her deputy communications director. “Alexandria comes from an organizing background herself, so she likes to hire people who share that experience,” he said. “She’s an excellent communicator, and the team she built is top-notch.”

De la Vega worked for AoC’s reelection campaign because federal rules bar illegals in any government position. He could not fulfill the Employment Eligibility Verification (I-9 Form) requirements. Congressional staffers also need extensive background checks that would reveal immigration status. Hence why the illegal was not able to work on Capitol Hill. 

De la Vega’s exit from America comes as Tricia McLaughlin, spokesperson at DHS, recently stated: “The best option for illegal aliens is to self-deport. If they leave now, they may still have an opportunity to return and live the American dream.”

The takeaway is that this is one less far-left illegal alien activist in American politics.

But there could be more…

Hey @AOC, aside from Diego de la Vega, how many other illegals did you have on your staff in 2024?

Here’s the publicly available list of people you employed at the expense of the taxpayer from July to September 2024.

You’ve also admitted Naureen Akhter entered the US illegally. https://t.co/EkIGgO6mB7 pic.twitter.com/uviCACdTaQ

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) March 7, 2025

Are taxpayers funding illegal alien far-left activists in American politics? 

Authored by Zoltan Vardai via CoinTelegraph.com,

Some US government agencies continue to deny transparency regarding their role in Operation Chokepoint 2.0, a period during the Biden administration when crypto and tech founders were allegedly denied banking services, according to Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal.

The collapse of crypto-friendly banks in early 2023 sparked the first allegations of Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Critics, including venture capitalist Nic Carter, described it as a government effort to pressure banks into cutting ties with cryptocurrency firms.

Despite recent regulatory shifts, agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) continue to “resist basic transparency” efforts, Grewal wrote in a March 8 post on X.

“They haven’t gotten the message,” he wrote.

Source: Paul Grewal

Coinbase has requested that the FDIC provide details in court on how it conducted “due diligence” to ensure no documentation related to the event was destroyed. However, the agency “repeatedly refused to do so,” Grewal said.

His comments come a day after the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) eased its stance on how banks can engage with crypto just hours after US President Donald Trump vowed to end the prolonged crackdown restricting crypto firms’ access to banking services.

Trump’s remarks were made during the White House Crypto Summit, where he told industry leaders he was “ending Operation Chokepoint 2.0.”

Source: Elon Musk

At least 30 tech and crypto founders were “secretly debanked” in the US during Operation Chokepoint 2.0, Cointelegraph reported in November 2024.

FDIC only produced “snippets” of FOIA requests

Grewal claimed the FDIC has also not fully cooperated with Coinbase’s documentation requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):

“[…] the agency has produced only snippets from a few documents that have little to nothing to do with the specific FOIA policies or practices that History Associates has challenged in its amended complaint. What exactly are they hiding?”

Moreover, Grewal said the FDIC has redacted a total of 53 pages, with many other pages containing “heavy redactions rendering the documents unintelligible.”

Grewal added that his team requested that the FDIC give a “sworn testimony” to the court.

On March 4, Coinbase also submitted a FOIA request to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to find out how many investigations and enforcement actions were brought against crypto firms between April 17, 2021, and Jan. 20, 2025.

Trump previously signed an executive order to end some banking challenges for Web3 companies and create clearer regulations for digital assets, Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 24.

The executive order excludes the US Federal Reserve and FDIC from cryptocurrency working groups, in a move that may put an end to the previous crypto industry debanking efforts, according to Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Custodia Bank.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump said March 7 that he is not considering pardoning Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer serving a multi-decade sentence on a range of charges related to the 2020 death of George Floyd.

A reporter told Trump in the Oval Office that  “your allies are calling on you to pardon Derek Chauvin,” before asking whether he’s considering a presidential pardon.

“No, I haven’t even heard about it,” the president replied. “No. I haven’t heard that.”

Trump’s remarks come in the context of a petition launched this week by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who called for a presidential pardon for Chauvin, who is serving a 22½-year sentence for unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and manslaughter.

Floyd’s final moments were captured on video, as Chauvin restrained him with a knee to the neck or upper back area while attempting to arrest him for using a counterfeit $20 bill at a store.

“As you know, this was the inciting event for the [Black Lives Matter] riots that caused $2 billion in property damage in cities across the United States and set America’s race relations on their worst footing in recent memory,” Shapiro’s petition reads.

“Yet the evidence demonstrates that Derek Chauvin did not murder George Floyd.”

Two autopsies were conducted after George Floyd’s death. The official autopsy by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner concluded Floyd died from cardiopulmonary arrest due to law enforcement restraint and neck compression, classifying it as homicide. It noted contributing factors such as heart disease, fentanyl intoxication, and methamphetamine use, but did not list them as the primary cause.

The report also found no life-threatening injuries to Floyd, including no evidence of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation, though experts have noted that neck compression can still be fatal without leaving clear physical marks.

An independent autopsy commissioned by Floyd’s family determined he died from asphyxiation due to sustained pressure on his neck and back. It also ruled the death a homicide but emphasized that police restraint was the sole cause, without highlighting preexisting conditions or drug use as significant factors.

Speaking on his radio show, Shapiro highlighted the fact that drugs were present in Floyd’s system and that he had heart disease, both of which have been confirmed by the official autopsy.

“George Floyd was high on fentanyl; he had a significant pre-existing heart condition,” Shapiro said. 

“George Floyd was saying he could not breathe before he was even out of the car. He was in the car saying he could not breathe.”

Shapiro argued that there was massive pressure on the jury to find Chauvin guilty—including from top government officials including former President Joe Biden—and that “there was no opportunity for blind justice to work” in the case.

Chauvin is serving concurrent sentences on state and federal charges, with a potential presidential pardon only applying to the federal case. He has appealed his conviction multiple times, in all instances unsuccessfully.

In November 2023, Chauvin was stabbed by a fellow inmate, a former gang leader and one-time FBI informant.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who prosecuted Chauvin, said after the stabbing that he was “sad to hear that Derek Chauvin was the target of violence.”

“He was duly convicted of his crimes and, like any incarcerated individual, he should be able to serve his sentence without fear of retaliation or violence,” Ellison said.

Following Shapiro’s call for Trump to pardon the former Minnesota police officer, Ellison told CNN that the convictions against Chauvin are “solid” and that a pardon would represent “blatant disrespect for the law.”