US Producer Prices Plunge Most Since COVID Lockdowns
While CPI printed 0.1% lower (headline MoM) – exactly as expected – this morning’s headline producer price index was also expected to drop 0.1% MoM “confirming peak inflation” and stoking the fires of ‘pause/pivot/soft-landing’ narrative buyers.
They were right as the headline PPI print tumbled 0.5% MoM – the biggest monthly drop since April 2020.
Source: Bloomberg
That dropped the YoY PPI to +6.2%, the lowest since March 2021.
Prices for final demand goods moved down 1.6 percent in December, the largest decrease since falling 1.8 percent in July. Leading the December decline, the index for final demand energy dropped 7.9 percent. Prices for final demand foods decreased 1.2 percent.
Nearly half of the December decrease in the index for final demand goods can be traced to a 13.4-percent decline in prices for gasoline. The indexes for diesel fuel; jet fuel; fresh and dry vegetables; canned, cooked, smoked, or prepared poultry; and basic organic chemicals also fell. In contrast, prices for carbon steel scrap increased 8.3 percent. The indexes for chicken eggs and for electric power also moved higher.
Prices for final demand services edged up 0.1 percent in December after rising 0.2 percent in November. The December increase can be traced to margins for final demand trade services, which advanced 0.3 percent. (Trade indexes measure changes in margins received by wholesalers and retailers.) Conversely, the index for final demand transportation and warehousing services fell 0.2 percent, while prices for final demand services less trade, transportation, and warehousing were unchanged.
A major factor in the December increase in prices for final demand services was a 17.6 percent jump in margins for fuels and lubricants retailing. The indexes for deposit services (partial), airline passenger services, inpatient care, and professional and commercial equipment wholesaling also moved higher. In contrast, prices for truck transportation of freight decreased 1.7 percent. The indexes for residential real estate loans (partial), machinery and vehicle wholesaling, and guestroom rental also fell.
The outlook for headline PPI is also trending lower as intermediate demand PPI is slowing rapidly…
Source: Bloomberg
One more silver lining for corporations, CPI printed higher than PPI for the first time since Dec 2020 (easing margin pressures broadly speaking)…
Source: Bloomberg
However, it wasn’t all great news (for the peak inflation-ers), as Core PPI (excluding the volatile food and energy components) actually rose 0.1% MoM.
This will be greeted as good news by the market but maybe worrisome for its “unwarranted easing” effects by The Fed.
“I Am Taking This Very Seriously”: BlackRock’s Larry Fink Struggles With “Demonized” ESG Narrative
BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has faced increasing backlash about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. A handful of US states have pulled billions of dollars from BlackRock funds over accusations of “greenwashing,” hurting the fossil fuel industry and turbocharging America’s “woke” culture.
On Tuesday, BlackRock’s Larry Fink told Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos that ESG investing has been tarnished:
“Let’s be clear, the narrative is ugly, the narrative is creating this huge polarization. “
Fink continued:
“We are trying to address the misconceptions. It’s hard because it’s not business any more, they’re doing it in a personal way. And for the first time in my professional career, attacks are now personal. They’re trying to demonize the issues.”
The Republican crusade, including states such as Florida, Louisiana, and Missouri, said they would pull funds out of BlackRock, citing that the asset manager’s ESG efforts could impact investor returns.
In December, Florida made the most significant withdrawal, pulling $2 billion from BlackRock.
“Using our cash to fund BlackRock’s social-engineering project isn’t something Florida ever signed up for.
“It’s got nothing to do with maximizing returns and is the opposite of what an asset manager is paid to do,” Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer, said in a recent statement.
Meanwhile, Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick has urged state officials to label BlackRock as a hostile entity for its action in the attempt to crush the oil and gas industry.
BlackRock is “capriciously discriminating'” against fossil fuel firms, Patrick said as he called for the asset manager to be added to the list of financial firms that “boycott” fossil fuels.
Several other states are pushing back on BlackRock.
However, in the interview, Fink said BlackRock took in $230 billion in 2022 from US clients, and the outflows were small, though he takes the issue “very seriously” and was trying to address the negative mood around ESG:
“We are doing everything we can to change the narrative.”
While Fink tries to save the ESG narrative, a former BlackRock senior executive, Terrence R. Keeley, recently opined in a WSJ article that after “trillions of dollars have poured into environmental, social and governance funds in recent years … there is astonishingly little evidence of its tangible benefit.”
Organized criminal gangs active in the Netherlands and France, mostly made up of Moroccan migrants, are blowing up ATMs in Germany at a record pace in highly professional robbery operations. In 2022, government statistics indicate that they blew up 500 such machines, with statistically more than one machine being blown up every day.
Cash remains popular with Germans, and to feed this demand, banks operate nearly 100,000 ATMs located throughout the country, with the machines routinely containing between €50,000 and €100,000. Criminal gangs are taking advantage of this, and they are willing to use extreme methods to gain access to this money. These criminal networks are said to meticulously plan their operations out, including initial surveillance, demolition, and the getaway. Police also say they act with brutality and ruthlessness, putting human lives at risk.
In fact, these migrant gangs are blowing up banks with such powerful explosives, that they are destroying entire buildings. In some cases, they have blown bank vault doors up to 30 meters away, underlining how powerful these blasts can be. Police say the danger facing Germans is unprecedented, as many of these banks are located in residential buildings.
Record number of cases
Although the final number of such bank heists has not yet been released for 2022, according to police sources obtained by Welt Am Sonntag, there were 500 such attacks, reaching a record high. Germany’s interior ministry is now holding high-level meetings on the issue, but it appears the robbery crews show little sign of slowing down. In 2021, the Federal Criminal Police reported that there were 414 cases of attempted or successful demolitions, while 2020 saw similar numbers.
Authorities describe how the gangs are most active in the west of Germany, with the most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia, along with Lower Saxony, the most popular targets. For one, these regions are the closest states to the Netherlands, where the gangs are most active — although some gangs also operate out of France, which is also nearby.
How do the gangs operate?
The gangs tend to target banks located close to major motorways in order to make a quick getaway, with most banks targeted in the early morning hours when the roads are mostly empty.
They usually work in teams with each member playing a specific role. In one case near the small town of Heusenstamm in Hesse, the gang doused garbage bins in gasoline and set them on fire in the middle of the road, effectively creating a roadblock for both lanes of traffic. This roadblock would later hinder the police from pursuing the getaway vehicle.
Another two men, wearing face masks and tracksuits, pried the door open of the Commerzbank. They were filmed breaking open the ATM’s cash slots and then using a hose to fill the machine with acetylene and oxygen, which serve as the two ingredients for their bomb. Another individual who then detonated the bomb was in a BMW 320d behind the bank.
The men worked “with the precision and speed of a racing team at a pit stop,” according to Welt.
However, that is just one incident. Such explosions are rocking Germany nearly every night, and often the damage is far worse than thousands of euros lost from the machines.
A report from Die Welt details how powerful explosions have badly damaged buildings and led to residents being evacuated from their homes. Videos of explosions in buildings, supermarkets, and other public spaces routinely run on German news the next morning.
In one court trial for a gang member police managed to arrest, a judge from Hesse described “war-like damage” in German inner cities during sentencing. Police investigators from the prosecutor’s office described the gang as conducting “explosive attacks in public spaces.”
As a result, the line between robbery and terrorism is beginning to blur in such cases.
“It’s a miracle that there haven’t been any deaths yet,” says Swen Eigenbrodt, the lead investigator of a special new unit in the Hessian State Criminal Police Office (LKA). The unit has been actively targeting the gangs who have participated in the ATM heists seen in the state.
In Hittfeld (Landkreis Harburg) ist ein Geldautomat gesprengt worden. Ob die Täter Geld erbeuteten, war zunächst unklar. Durch die Explosion wurde auch der Supermarkt-Eingang beschädigt. Mehr dazu: https://t.co/AHBOghi1nCpic.twitter.com/eAlaQz60Zb
Some perpetrators have been brought into custody, often through small but legally devastating mistakes. For example, some have left fingerprints at the scene, others have been caught by speed-trap cameras while trying to race away from the scene, and sometimes they are apprehended with their smartphones, which provide movement data. Nevertheless, an arrest at the scene of the crime is very rare, as the teams move so fast, and despite some arrests, there are enough teams active that the demolitions continue to rise.
Utrecht is a hotspot
The Dutch city of Utrecht is prosperous, but it also faces pockets of poverty and in some neighborhoods, up to 60 percent of the population has a migration background. Now, Dutch and German law enforcement are working together to stop these organized gangs, as many of them come from this city.
Dutch criminologist Cyrille Fijnaut, a professor emeritus, has been observing these ATM heist crews for 20 years and actively advises the Dutch government. He said that the network of criminals consists of about 200 to 400 young men and that “many of them have Moroccan roots.” He said they often follow in the footsteps of older boys in their neighborhoods, who sport expensive watches and sports cars.
A few years ago, one of the top gang bosses set up his own training center for ATM demolition crews. He simply rented out a factory building, ordered discarded ATMs online, and began training members in what served as a sort of school for gang members. However, these criminal networks are also active in cities such as Amsterdam and Alkmaar.
A famed Dutch defense lawyer, Vito Shukrula, also said that these types of heists are actually used as “seed” money to enter into the Dutch cocaine trade. He described it as “easy money” for these teams.
As Remix News has previously reported, the Moroccan Mafia earns billions in revenue every year from the drug trade in the Netherlands. The criminal group has assassinated not only rivals, but also state witnesses and even journalists. The group has become so feared that 18-year-old Dutch Princess Amalia went into hiding over credible kidnapping and assassination threats just months ago. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has also beefed up his security due to threats from the group.
“Brought To Justice”: Italian Mafia Boss Arrested At Hospital After Three Decades On The Run
Italy’s most wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested on Monday at a private hospital in Sicily during a cancer treatment, after being on the run since 1993.
Nicknamed “Diabolik” and “‘U Siccu” (The Skinny One), Messina Denaro had been sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the 1992 murders of two anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Two armed police led the 60-year-old mafia boss away from Palermo’s “La Maddalena” hospital, where he had registered under a fake name.
“We had a clue to the investigation and followed it through to today’s arrest,” said Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia.
Magistrate Paolo Guido, who was also in charge of investigations into Messina Denaro, said dismantling his network of protectors was key in reaching the result following years of work.
A second man, who had driven Messina Denaro to the hospital, was arrested at the scene on suspicion of aiding a fugitive.
Images on social media show locals applauding and shaking hands with police in balaclavas as the minivan carrying Messina Denaro was driven away from the suburban hospital to a secret location. –Reuters
“We have not won the war, we have not defeated the mafia, but this battle was a key battle to win, and it is a heavy blow to organised crime,” said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who traveled to Sicily to congratulate police chiefs on the arrest.
Who is Matteo Messino Denaro?
As the Evening Standard reports, he was born in Sicily in 1962. His father was a powerful Cosa Nostra boss.
Messina Denaro, known as “the skinny one,” was involved in several crimes, including racketeering, money laundering and drug trafficking.
“I filled a cemetery, all by myself,” he is said to have once claimed.
Timeline of crimes and arrest
1992
Anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were killed by car bombs within months of each other.
The attacks also killed several bodyguards and policemen, as well as Falcone’s wife.
1993
The mafia organised a series of bomb attacks in Milan, Florence, and Rome.
On May 27, a bomb was detonated outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, killing five people and injuring dozens more. Ten people were killed in the series of bombings.
In November, Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a former mafia member turned state witness, was kidnapped. He was held captive and tortured for two years before being killed and his body dissolved in acid.
Messina Denaro became a fugitive but is thought to have continued to issue orders.
2002
Messina Denaro was sentenced to life in jail in absentia in 2002 for a number of murders, including the 1992 killings and the 1993 bomb attacks, despite still being a fugitive.
2013
His sister Patrizia and several associates were arrested.
2023
Messina Denaro was arrested on January 16. -Evening Standard
“In the aftermath of the anniversary of the arrest of Totò Riina, another head of organised crime, Matteo Messina Denaro is brought to justice,” said PM Meloni, adding “My warmest thanks, together with those of the entire government, go to the police forces, and in particular to the Ros dei Carabinieri, to the national anti-mafia prosecutor, and to the Palermo prosecutor for the capture of the most significant exponent of mafia crime.”
Crisis Over? Europe’s Gas Stocks At Seasonal Record High
By John Kemp, senior energy market analyst
Northwest Europe is half-way through the winter heating season and gas inventories are at a record high following an extended period of exceptionally mild temperatures since the middle of December.
Preparation and luck have combined to rescue Europe from potential gas shortages this winter:
Preparation by policymakers and forward-looking gas markets ensured inventories began the winter season at the one of the highest levels on record.
Market-driven high prices have significantly reduced gas and electricity consumption by major industrial customers and more modestly by residential and commercial users.
Luck in the form of exceptionally mild weather has transformed comfortable stocks in mid-December into plentiful inventories by mid-January.
At Frankfurt in Germany, a proxy for the densely populated northwest Europe mega-region, half of winter heating demand occurs on average on or before January 15.
On January 15, inventories across the European Union and the United Kingdom amounted to 922 terawatt-hours (TWh), according to Gas Infrastructure Europe (“Aggregated gas storage inventory”, GIE, January 17).
Stocks were 268 TWh (+41% or +2.57 standard deviations) above the prior ten-year average, up from a surplus of 173 TWh (+23% or +1.58 standard deviations) when the warm spell began on December 19 and 92 TWh (+10% or +0.86 standard deviations) at the start of the winter season on October 1.
Heating demand started this winter close to the long-term average, with an unusually mild October offset by colder-than-normal temperatures in the first part of December. By December 19, Frankfurt had experienced a total of 675 heating degree days, very close to the long-term average of 682.
Between December 19 and January 15, however, the region experienced an exceptional and extended period of much warmer temperatures that reduced heating demand significantly.
Frankfurt experienced an additional 184 heating degree days, the lowest this century, and compared with a seasonal average of 341.
Cumulative heating demand so far this winter was 20% below the long-term seasonal average by January 15 compared with a 5% deficit by December 19.
As a result of mild weather, gas inventories depleted by just 18 TWh over the 27 days ending on January 15, compared with an average ten-year depletion of 113 TWh.
EMERGENCY OVER
Stocks are now projected to fall to a low of 612 TWh before winter ends, up from a projected low of 518 TWh on December 19 and 440 TWh when the winter season started on October 1.
Inventories are on course to end the winter at the highest level on record, with storage sites still more than 54% full.
Prices have already slumped to redirect more liquefied natural gas (LNG) to other regions of the world, encourage more consumption in Europe and stem inventory accumulation.
Futures prices for deliveries in March 2023 have halved to €56 per megawatt-hour from €110 on December 19 and €177 at the start of winter.
Lower prices will buy back some consumption lost earlier this winter from the most price-sensitive customers directly exposed to wholesale markets, mostly power producers and energy-intensive industrial users.
Gas-fired electricity generators are likely to operate for more hours at the expense of coal-fired and fuel oil-fired competitors, absorbing some of the surplus. Manufacturers of fertilizer, iron and steel, ceramics, glass and chemicals, as well as non-ferrous smelters, are likely to restart some idled capacity if prices remain lower.
Futures for gas delivered to Northwest Europe are now trading at a discount to gas delivered to Northeast Asia, from a premium over €11 per megawatt-hour on December 19 and almost €43 at the beginning of winter.
Relatively lower European prices should reduce the incentive to maximise LNG inflows and redirect more gas to importers in East and South Asia, which will also limit the further build up of a surplus in Europe.
Italian Lawmaker At Center Of EU’s Qatargate Scandal Agrees To Spill Beans
One of the handful of EU officials at the center of the Qatargate scandal which emerged last month and shook confidence in European Parliament decision-making is going to spill the beans, in what looks to be a breakthrough for investigators amid what’s widely considered “the most egregious case” of corruption the body has seen in years.
According to Politico on Tuesday, “Pier Antonio Panzeri, a former Italian EU lawmaker detained in the European Parliament corruption probe, has struck a plea deal with the Belgian prosecutor to exchange information about bribes he made in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
This means that likely for the first time the specifics of how the Qataris hoped to shape debate and outcomes in European Parliament will be revealed.
Reportedly Panzeri has said he’s ready to disclose financial arrangements and which countries and officials were involved, as well as who benefited. The other country likely to be named is Morocco.
Panzeri is currently in jail and as of Tuesday morning he had withdrawn his appeal of provisional detention. He’s facing charges related to criminal organization, money laundering and corruption.
The former MEP’s daughter, Silvia Panzeri, is also being investigated for allegedly being aware of, or even possibly complicit in her father’s activities.
Other high-level suspects are Greek MEP Eva Kaili, her partner Francesco Giorgi, and lobbyist Niccolò Figà-Talamanca. As a result of the scandal, which was revealed after police raids on multiple offices and homes (including a hotel) in Brussels turned up stacks of cash totaling around €1.5m (£1.3m), Kaili was swiftly removed as a vice-president of the Parliament.
The governments of Qatar and Morocco, as well as now former vice-president of the Parliament Kaili, have all vehemently denied wrongdoing. There may be more officials that are named as a result of Panzeri’s pending deal.
The BBC notes that “Mr Panzeri’s reference to unknown people within the investigation suggests more revelations are due to emerge.”
The report says that “Belgian prosecutors have already sought to lift the immunity of two more centre-left MEPs. Belgian Marc Tarabella and Andrea Cozzolino from Italy.” Thus the scope of the scandal could expand as Panzeri hands the prosecutor more information and specifics of corruption involving EU lawmakers.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has slammed Germany’s left-wing government, accusing the Green party of “really embarrassing itself” by sanctioning a new coal-lignite mine in the latest sign of progressives attacking one another in pursuit of a wildly unrealistic environmental policy.
“Disappointed is one way of putting it. I think it’s very weird to see the German government, including the Green Party, make deals and compromise with companies like RWE, with fossil fuel companies, when they should rather be held accountable for all the damage and destruction they have caused,” she said in response to the left-wing’s government with German energy multinational RWE to excavate the area near the village of Lützerath.
The ongoing drama in the village, which has been cleared of thousands of protesters to make way for a lignite mine, has seen climate change activists turn on each other. Protesters — who had been illegally occupying the disused village and were forcibly removed by police last week — blamed the German Greens for making a backroom deal with RWE despite promises to fight climate change.
The protesters’ cult hero, Greta Thunberg, arrived in Lützerath for the second time over the weekend to offer solidarity with the illegal squatters, who have continued to ignore a court-mandated eviction order. They are crying foul play against police, while authorities argue they have little choice but to clear the protesters.
🎥 Greta Thunberg and climate friends were kicked out by the police in Germany pic.twitter.com/mlNwiTX0pm
The Swedish activist, however, appears to have used the vast majority of her visit to Germany to criticize the country’s government — which includes the German Greens in its coalition — for failing to act at her behest.
During an interview on the Anne Will program on Sunday, the Swedish climate campaigner called Germany “historically one of the biggest polluters in the world,” and accused the current federal government of doing little to address this unwanted title.
Green voters in Germany are finding it difficult to stomach that it was primarily Green politicians who reached the agreement with RWE to raze the village of Lützerath to aid the energy company’s expansion of the Garzweiler coal mine. Mona Neubaur, Green vice premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), and Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy and climate minister, were perhaps the two most influential Green politicians behind the deal.
When asked about the deal, Thunberg told the program: “It’s not my role as an activist to watch compromises between governments and very destructive corporations,” before proceeding to make it her role by accusing the deal of “endangering the lives of countless people.”
She continued to call the discussions between prominent Green politicians and RWE “very hypocritical,” and dismissed Habeck’s claim that Lützerath would be the “last village” to give way for lignite in Germany, asking: “How can (Lützerath) be a symbol of the end if they plan to move on, to move on with this?”
Environmental activists have campaigned across Germany for years in favor of cleaner energy production; however, leaders are currently finding a need to revert back to coal given the energy fall-out from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and Green party politicians have also accepted the reality of the current energy situation.
Since campaigning to phase out nuclear energy in Germany, climate activists will be horrified to see the rise in coal mining, a far more harmful form of production for the environment than the former. And with coal constituting a staggering 31 percent of German electricity production, compared to 8 percent recorded in 2015, eco-warriors only have themselves to blame, writes Wolfgang Munchau of Eurointelligence.
Thunberg’s criticism of Green politicians in Germany’s federal government is reflective of the way many Greens voters are feeling about their elected representatives.
“I voted the Greens and I will never, ever do [so again],” said David Dresen, from the neighboring village of Kuckum as cited by news outlet Politico.
“It’s a gut punch that Green ministers now try to sell this backroom coal deal as a success. We won’t accept that,” added Olaf Bandt, the chair of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation.
Speculation is growing in Republican media circles that the recent scandal over President Joe Biden’s improper possession of classified information from his time as vice president represents an internal coup. The theory holds that Democratic Party insiders, particularly Obama-era officials situated within the Biden administration, are using the revelations of Biden’s carelessness to push him aside or at least prevent him from running for reelection in 2024.
Capitol Hill sources say it’s true that the Biden administration is a hornet’s nest with several factions vying for control, including one led by domestic policy adviser Susan Rice and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, both Obama loyalists. However, a careful look at the evidence shows that senior Biden aides, Democratic officials, and the party’s media apparatus are circling the wagons to protect Biden. What we’re watching isn’t a coup but a coverup.
Press reports show that at the beginning of November 2022, Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in his office at a Washington think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania that bears his name: the Penn Biden Center. This account is improbable. If Biden’s legal team, rather than his administrative staff, typically sorted through his papers, it’s likely they would have previously identified the classified records in question.
There were at least two other opportunities for Biden’s aides to find the papers among his belongings. The first came when his staff packed his boxes as he left the Office of the Vice President in January 2017. It isn’t yet known where the documents were kept between then and when they were moved to the Penn Biden Center when it opened in 2018. The move would have given his staff another chance to find the classified documents. Hence, it seems likely that it was an outside source that alerted either the Biden team, the National Archives, or the Department of Justice to the fact that the president was improperly holding classified documents.
In a press conference on Jan. 12, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that on Nov. 9, 2022, he asked the FBI to assess whether those records had been mishandled. On Nov. 14, 2022, he asked the U.S. attorney in Chicago, John Lausch, to conduct an initial investigation.
Administration officials and Biden loyalists in federal law enforcement knew they had a problem. Mishandling classified documents was the basis of a broad Democratic Party campaign against Biden’s possible 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump.
The FBI raided Trump’s Florida home in August 2022 to seize classified documents, and rumors circulated that indictments were in the offing. Eventually, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump. Biden even chastised his predecessor for mishandling classified documents in a September 2022 media interview. And now, here was Biden as culpable as the man they hoped to destroy with the same instrument—classified documents.
The Biden team moved to attenuate the potential fallout with a leak to the press. A Nov. 14, 2022, Washington Post article citing “people familiar with the matter” explained that “FBI interviews with witnesses so far, they said, also do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property.”
That is, contrary to the public outcry that Trump had taken the documents for illicit purposes—he was selling U.S. nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia, one journalist claimed without evidence or reason—there was nothing sinister at play. Rather, he was simply motivated by ego.
The Nov. 14, 2022, article was evidence that the Biden circle was walking back its scorched-earth campaign against Trump on classified papers. Nearly three months later, it’s clear why—to reframe the context for when news of Biden’s own problems with classified documents went public.
When the story broke last week in administration-friendly media outlets, Democratic lawmakers not only rallied around the president but also compared his response favorably to Trump’s. Unlike Trump’s team that argued with the institution tasked to keep U.S. records, Biden’s lawyers, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) intimated, “appear to have taken immediate and proper action to notify the National Archives.”
Dozens of media publications, from The New York Times to Vox, have published explainers showing why what Trump did is much worse than what Biden did.
Trump had more documents, the argument runs; Biden’s lawyers were more forthright; and so forth. The fact is that no one on the Democratic side has broken with the president or even so much as hinted that he did something wrong. This isn’t what an internal coup looks like.
The special counsel appointed to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents identifies as a Republican but he appears to be a Never Trump Republican. Robert Hur is a protégé of Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general under Trump who reportedly offered to wear a wire to spy on the previous president.
Rosenstein furthered the anti-Trump cause by withholding documents from the investigation led by former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) into alleged FBI crimes and abuses committed during the bureau’s Trump–Russia probe. He also allegedly threatened to subpoena Nunes’s staffers, including Kash Patel. A winter 2018 chain of emails (pdf) between Department of Justice officials shows that Hur was part of the law enforcement team tasked to stonewall Nunes’s investigation.
Former congressional investigators say that Hur’s appointment as special counsel is intended not to uncover potential crimes committed by the president but rather to give the appearance of a genuine investigation and thereby bury the issue once and for all. And thus, actions taken by the Biden administration and the responses of Democratic officials and the media show that what’s unfolding at present isn’t a coup, but a coverup.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, the layer in the world’s stratosphere containing a high concentration of ozone had ruptured every year since the 1980s due to harmful chemicals being released into the air and depleting the atmosphere’s naturally occurring ozone. Striking a hopeful note for the successes possible in environmental and climate conservation, the phase-out of substances like CFCs are expected to reverse the damage done.
The UN Ozone Secretariat supplies data on the annual global consumption of ozone-depleting substances and how their use decreased since the end of the 1980s.
CFCs (Chlorofluorocarbons) and halons had been the single most consumed ozone-depleting gases some decades ago and were used in aerosols and fire extinguishers or as refrigerants and solvents. Their use has all but been phased out. The use of other ozone-harming gases has also been cut down to a minimum. The exception are Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), which have been employed as a bridge technology to phase out more harmful sustances faster. They are still used today but due to their shorter lifespan in the atmosphere do much less harm. The substances are scheduled for a complete phase-out by 2030. Another substitute for ozone-harming gases – Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – do not have an effect on the ozone layer. However, their emissions from the use in air conditioning, insulation and refrigeration are many times as potent as CO₂ emissions in warming the global climate.
Holes in the ozone layer have been forming over the Earth’s poles due to the globe’s wind pattern and the regions’ cold winter climate, which fosters conditions for ozone depletion that manifest themselves in the spring. Due to Antarctica featuring a cold-attracting landmass, the hole in the ozone layer in the Southern hemisphere has usually been larger. Once a hole in the ozone layer has formed, ultraviolet radiation from the sun hits the Earth more strongly, for example heightening the risk of skin cancer.
Documents revealed by Twitter’s new owner, tech billionaire Elon Musk, show the social media company intertwined with a government-private censorship apparatus.
Twitter suppressed or removed content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company was under government pressure to purge such content and its purveyors from the platform, though most of the time it was cooperating with the censorship requests willingly, the documents indicate.
Musk took over Twitter in October, taking the company private. He then fired around half of the staff and much of the upper management, vowing to take Twitter in a new direction. The “#TwitterFiles” releases have been part of his promised focus on transparency for the company.
He allowed several independent journalists to submit search queries that were then used by Twitter staff to search through the company’s internal documents, sometimes under the condition that the resulting stories would be first published on the platform itself.
The two journalists primarily responsible for the releases have been journalists Matt Taibbi, a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, and Bari Weiss, a former editor at both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both are liberals who have expressed disillusionment with the more extreme currents of progressivism and neoliberalism.
Others involved in the releases have been independent journalists Lee Fang and David Zweig, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, as well as author and environmentalist Michael Shellenberger.
The journalists have only released a fraction of the documents they reviewed. They’ve also redacted the names of employees involved, other than some high-level executives.
The documents show that the FBI and other state, local, and federal agencies have been scrutinizing the political speech of Americans on a significant scale, and trying to get lawful speech suppressed or removed online. Many conservative and traditionally liberal commentators have deemed that a violation of the First Amendment.
Twitter, a major hub of political speech, has been among the main targets of censorship. Many news stories have broken on Twitter in recent years and a significant portion of the nation’s political debate takes place on the platform, as it allows an efficient way for direct and public interaction between all on the platform, from the most prominent to the least.
Twitter resisted some censorship requests, but there was little sign the company did so as a matter of principle. Rather, executives sometimes couldn’t find a policy they could use as a justification. Prior Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was under pressure from his lieutenants to expand the policies to allow more thorough censorship, the documents show.
“The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that (by just reducing prevalence overall),” said Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, which governs content policy, in a 2021 internal message published by Weiss.
“We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations—especially for other policy domains.”
In many cases, Twitter leaders de facto allowed the government to silence its critics on the platform.
Many censorship requests came in with an imperious attitude, particularly those from the Biden White House, but also some from the office of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who at the time headed the powerful House Intelligence Committee.
Around November 2020, Schiff’s office sent a list of dema to Twitter, including for the removal of “any and all content” about the committee’s staff and suspend “many” accounts including that of Paul Sperry, a journalist with RealClearInvestigations.
Schiff’s office accused Sperry of harassment and promoting “false QAnon conspiracies.”
Sperry rejected the allegation, asking Schiff to show evidence for his claims and announced he was considering legal action.
Schiff’s demands were apparently a response to Sperry’s articles that speculated on the identity of the White House whistleblower that alleged a “quid pro quo” between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Sperry reported, using anonymous sources, that the whistleblower was likely then-CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, who was overheard talking in the White House with Sean Misko, a holdover staffer from the Obama administration. Misko later joined Schiff’s committee.
Twitter rejected Schiff’s demands, save for reviewing “again” Sperry’s account activity. Sperry’s account was suspended months later. Taibbi said he wasn’t able to find out why.
Under Pressure
The many censorship requests Twitter received via the FBI were phrased as merely bringing information to its attention, leaving it up to the company to decide what to do with them. But Twitter executives clearly felt compelled to accommodate these requests, even in cases where they internally struggled to justify doing so, the documents show.
The government pressure took several forms. The FBI would follow up on its requests and if they weren’t fulfilled, Twitter had to explain itself to the bureau. If Twitter’s position on an issue differed from the one expected by the government, company executives would be questioned and made aware that the bureau, and even the broader intelligence community, wasn’t happy. That would send the executives into triage mode, rushing to salvage the relationship, which it apparently considered essential.
Corporate media served as another pressure point. If Twitter wouldn’t do what it was told fast enough, the media would be provided with information portraying Twitter as ignoring some problem of paramount importance, such as possible foreign influence operations on its platform.
One censorship request, for instance, targeted an account allegedly run by Russian intelligence, though Twitter wasn’t given any evidence of it.
“Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I’ve generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,” said one Twitter executive that previously worked for the CIA, according to Taibbi.
“Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution and reporting on it.”
The internal email suggests that Twitter, despite having no concrete evidence to back it, wouldn’t dare to disobey the request because of the media fallout of the government publicly labeling the account as run by Russian intelligence.
Congress was perhaps the heaviest sword of Damocles hanging over Twitter’s head. Lawmakers could not only spur negative media coverage, but also tie up the company in hearings and investigations, or even introduce legislation that could hurt Twitter’s bottom line.
For instance, just as Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) was pushing Twitter to produce more evidence of Russian influence operations on its platform in 2017, he also teamed up with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) to propose a bill that would have required extensive disclosures of online political advertising.
In the meantime, Twitter managers were convinced that lawmakers were leaking information Twitter provided them and seeding negative news stories, even as the company was trying to placate them with increasingly stringent actions toward actual and alleged Russia-linked accounts.
Even though the FBI was officially only alerting Twitter to activities of malign foreign actors, many of the censorship requests were simply lists of accounts with little to no evidence of malign foreign links. At times, Twitter tried to ask for more information, noting that it couldn’t find any evidence on its end, but often it simply complied. It was impossible for Twitter to do its due diligence on each request—there were simply too many, according to Taibbi.
One request revealed by Taibbi claimed that “the attached email accounts” were created “possibly for use in influence operations, social media collection, or social engineering.”
“Without further explanation, Twitter would be forwarded an excel doc,” Taibbi said.
Censorship requests were lopsided against the political right. Some researchers said that the right was much more involved in spreading misinformation, but the documents indicate that the censorship wasn’t so much a matter of a right-left dichotomy, but rather a pro- and anti-establishment one. Even some left-leaning accounts were targeted if they strayed too far from the official government narrative.
Moreover, the right didn’t appear too keen on demanding censorship to begin with. Taibbi couldn’t find a single censorship request from the Trump campaign, Trump White House, or even any Republican, though he was told there were some.
On the other hand, there seemed to be no appetite across the board for targeting misinformation coming from the establishment itself
Twitter’s suppression of the 2020 New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden, son of then-candidate Joe Biden, was dissected in the Twitter release in particular detail. Apparently, some Twitter executives, particularly Roth, head of Trust and Safety, were regularly invited to meetings with the FBI and other intelligence agencies to receive briefings on the online activities of foreign regimes. In the several months prior to the 2020 election, Roth had been conditioned to expect a “hack-and-leak” Russian operation, possibly in October and involving Hunter Biden.
The FBI alleged there was some evidence of Russian influence operation related to Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine. But the bureau was also aware that Hunter Biden left his laptop with a trove of explosive information in a New York repair shop and that a copy of it was handed to Trump’s then-lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The FBI picked up the laptop from the repair shop in December 2019 and had Giuliani under surveillance in August 2020, when the repairman gave him the copy. As the FBI knew, the laptop information was neither hacked, nor a figment of a Russian plot.
When the Post broke the story, Twitter executives were left with no doubt it was exactly what the FBI had been warning about.
“This feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation,” Roth commented in an internal email, despite acknowledging he had no evidence for such a claim, save for “questionable origins” of the laptop, which was apparently abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair shop.
Roth noted that the story didn’t actually violate any Twitter rules. Nevertheless, it was marked “unsafe” and blocked on Twitter under its policy against hacked materials, despite there being no evidence the materials were hacked.
Twitter’s then-Deputy General Counsel James Baker backed the censorship move, saying it was “reasonable” to “assume” the Hunter Biden information was hacked.
Baker was FBI General Counsel until May 2018. He joined Twitter in June 2020. At the FBI, Baker was closely involved in the Russia investigation scandal where the FBI embroiled the Trump campaign and later the Trump administration in exhaustive investigations based on paper-thin and fabricated allegations that Trump colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election. The allegations were produced by operatives funded by the campaign of Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The FBI was in fact aware of no intelligence suggesting a “hack-and-leak” operation ahead of the 2020 election, as testified in November 2022 by Elvis Chan, head of the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office, which was responsible for communications with Twitter and other tech companies with headquarters in its jurisdiction.
Twitter itself found very little Russian activity ahead of the 2020 election, Shellenberger reported, citing internal communications.
Shadowbanning
Twitter has long denied the practice of shadowbanning—suppressing the reach of an account without informing the user. The denial, however, specifically defined shadowbanning as making the person’s content invisible to others. What people have been complaining about is that Twitter would suppress how many people see their content without making it invisible altogether—Twitter has been doing that a lot, the internal materials show.
One Twitter engineer told Weiss: “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”
Among those whose accounts were surreptitiously throttled was Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford University professor of medicine and one of the early critics of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Others included Dan Bongino, conservative podcaster and former Secret Service agent, and Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, the country’s largest conservative youth group.
COVID-19
Twitter has extensively suppressed information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Anything about the origin of the virus, its treatment, the vaccines developed for it, and public policies to mitigate its spread had to align with the official position of the federal government, as promulgated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Zweig said he “found countless instances of tweets labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.”
Twitter user @KelleyKga, a self-described fact-checker, criticized a tweet that falsely claimed that COVID-19 was the leading cause of death by disease in children. @KelleyKga pointed out that such a claim would require cherry-picking data, backing his argument with data from the CDC. His criticism, however, was labeled as “misleading” and suppressed. On the other hand, the tweet that contained the false claim was not suppressed.
All physician Euzebiusz Jamrozik did was write on Twitter an accurate summarization of study results on COVID-19 vaccine side effects. The tweet was labeled “misleading” and suppressed.
Sometimes, it appears, Twitter suppressed the information on its own, but many of the COVID-19-related requests came from the government and even directly from the Biden White House, internal files show.
In one email, White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty accused Twitter of “bending over backwards” to resist one of his censorship requests, calling it “total Calvinball”—a game where rules are made up along the way. The email wasn’t part of the Twitter files. It came out during an ongoing lawsuit against the Biden administration filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.
Another White House staffer wanted Twitter to censor a tweet by Robert Kennedy, Jr., a long-time critic of vaccination. The staffer mused whether Twitter could “get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.”
“And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre that would be great,” he said in the Jan. 23, 2021, email.
The administration wasn’t always trying to get such content removed. People who merely expressed “hesitancy” about the vaccines were supposed to only have their content suppressed from reaching any significant audience, the documents indicate.
The Biden administration had a lot at stake as the vaccine rollout was one of its first and most high-profile tasks. There were other stakeholders as well.
Several censorship requests came from Scott Gottlieb, board member and head of the regulatory and compliance committee at Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that made the most popular COVID-19 vaccine and raked in tens of billions of dollars on sales of it over the past two years.
Gottlieb sent Twitter at least three requests. One targeted a doctor who argued on the platform that naturally acquired immunity to COVID-19 is superior to vaccination. Twitter suppressed the tweet, even though the doctor was correct.
Another request targeted author Justin Hart, who argued on Twitter against school closures, pointing out that COVID-19 fatalities among children are extremely rare. Gottlieb sent the request shortly before Pfizer received approval for the use of its vaccine on children. Twitter didn’t comply with the request.
Yet another request targeted former NY Times reporter Berenson. Gottlieb claimed that Berenson’s criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of COVID-19 response in the Biden administration, was causing threats of physical violence toward Fauci. Twitter suspended Berenson’s account shortly after.
Gottlieb sent his requests to the same Twitter official who served as a contact person for censorship requests coming from the White House.
Trump Deplatforming
Trump was particularly effective on Twitter. His soundbites, honed over decades of dealing with the New York press, played well on the brevity-oriented Twitter, earning the president some 90 million followers and lending him the power to bypass media filters and instantly grab national attention. Trump’s Twitter presidency, however, brewed scorn in the beltway, especially among the foreign policy crowd that was used to diplomatic subtlety.
Twitter’s removal of Trump a few days after the Jan. 6, 2021, protest and riot at the U.S. Capitol appears to be one of those instances where Twitter executives acted on their own, breaking the platform’s content policies in suppressing the voice of a sitting American president, internal documents indicate.
Twitter suspended Trump’s account on Jan. 8, 2021, after the president made two posts.
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” said one of Trump’s tweets.
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” read the other.
Twitter moderators and supervisors agreed that the Tweets didn’t violate any rules.
“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer. “It’s pretty clear he’s saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday.”
Higher executives, under pressure from their many anti-Trump employees, wouldn’t accept that conclusion and continued to push for construing Trump’s comments as malicious.
“The biggest question is whether a tweet line the one this morning from Trump, which isn’t a rule violation on its face, is being used as coded incitement to further violence,” Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, argued in an internal message.
Another Twitter moderation team quickly furnished Gadde’s argument with a narrative. Trump was a “leader of a violent extremist group who is glorifying the group and its recent actions,” the team concluded, according to internal messages.
Undermining the Nunes Memo
In January 2018, then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) submitted his memo detailing FBI surveillance abuses in pursuit of the Trump-Russia investigation. The memo was correct on virtually all points of substance, as later confirmed by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
The memo was dismissed by the corporate media as a “joke,” but gained significant traction on social media nonetheless. Legacy media and several lawmakers then came out claiming the memo was boosted online by accounts linked to Russian influence operations.
However, Twitter found no evidence of Russian influence behind the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag.
The claims were all sourced to the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a group set up in 2017 under the German Marshall Fund, a think tank funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.
The ASD is closely linked to the U.S. foreign policy and national security establishment. It was headed at the time by Laura Rosenberger, a former Clinton campaign adviser who held various roles at the State Department and the National Security Council. Its Advisory Council includes former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, former CIA head Michael Morell, and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Mike Chertoff.
Twitter officials were at a loss as to how the ASD came to its conclusions.
“We investigated, found that engagement was overwhelmingly organic and driven by strong VIT [Very Important Tweeters] engagement (including Wikileaks, [Donald Trump, Jr., Rep. Steve King, and others),” Trust and Safety head Roth wrote in an internal message.
In fact, the “dashboard” ASD used to make its claims had already been reverse-engineered by Twitter—a fact Roth didn’t want to disclose to the media.
Twitter tried debunking the story behind the scenes without giving out such details, but to no avail. Initially, reporters ran with the story without even reaching out to Twitter, Roth wrote.
The initial letter on the matter from Schiff and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee at the time, also came out before giving Twitter a chance to respond, internal messages say.
Twitter tried to stop Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) from piling on with his own letter, but again failed.
“Blumenthal isn’t always looking for real and nuanced solutions. He wants to get credit for pushing us further. And he may move on only when the press moves on,” commented Carlos Monje, Twitter’s then-Public Policy director, in an internal message. Formerly a Department of Transportation official, Monje returned to the department under the Biden administration.
In the end, Twitter never publicly challenged the Russia narrative.
Aiding Pentagon Psyops
In 2017, a Pentagon official asked Twitter to “whitelist” several accounts the Defense Department was using to spread its message in the Middle East. Twitter obliged, giving the accounts similar privileges it was reserving for verified accounts.
Later, however, the Pentagon removed any apparent connections between the accounts and the U.S. government, making them de facto surreptitious. Even though the accounts should have been removed under Twitter’s inauthentic activity policy, the company left them up for several years, independent journalist Fang reported.
Federal ‘Belly button’ of Investigation
The FBI served as a conduit for other government agencies to pass information to Twitter and ask for favors, according to Taibbi.
In one exchange, FBI cyber head Chan explained that the bureau would funnel to Twitter communications from the U.S. intelligence community (USIC), but other election-related communications would come from the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,” Chan said. “CISA will know what’s going on in each state.”
He then asked if Twitter would like to communicate with CISA separately or if it would prefer to “rely on the FBI to be the belly button of the [U.S. government].”
Twitter executives were surprised to learn that the FBI had agents specifically dedicated to searching Twitter and flagging content policy violations.
Since 2017, Twitter has employed at least 15 former FBI agents, further entangling the agency with the platform. The practice is so common, there was an internal discussion group at Twitter for former agents.
The FBI responded to the Twitter files disclosures in a statement that labeled the reporting “misinformation” spread by “conspiracy theorists and others … with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Department of Homeland Censorship
The DHS has managed to shoehorn speech policing into its mandate to protect critical infrastructure. In January 2017, shortly before leaving the White House, President Barack Obama designated elections as critical infrastructure. The DHS’s CISA then made it its job not only to protect elections from hackers, but also from misinformation and disinformation.
