The mushroom cloud of central bank monetary destruction keeps growing, and is increasingly fueling discontent among workers whose standards of living are eroding along with the purchasing power of their wages. 

Europe has already seen a wave of strikes aimed at securing inflation-offsetting pay raises. Now it’s Canada’s turn: At midnight, more than 155,000 Canadian federal government workers went on strike in what’s being described as the largest walkout against a single employer in the country’s history. 

The strike was called by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) union, which has been in negotiations for a new contract since 2021. This strike primarily encompasses two groups of federal employees: 120,000 at the Treasury Board and 35,000 at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).  

Union reps for the Treasury Board employees have been asking for a 13.5% pay hike over three years. The CRA staffers want an immediate 9% raise and 20.5% over three years. The PSAC also wants the government to curtail contract work and make remote work more broadly and uniformly available. 

The most hilarious PSAC demand? In what has to make many of its members groan with dread, the union is demanding more anti-racism training.

“We truly hoped we wouldn’t be forced to take strike action, but we’ve exhausted every other avenue to reach a fair contract,” said PSAC President Chris Aylward on Tuesday evening. The union has ordered members to show up at picket locations — or else be hit with union fines and the loss of strike pay and member privileges. 

The strike makes for dicey politics for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose government has increased the ranks of public employees by more than 33% since 2015.  The labor-aligned New Democratic Party is a key backer of Trudeau’s ruling coalition, but disruption of services to Canadian citizens and markets is likely to fuel public ire. 

At the same time, the strike also promises spillover effects across the Canadian economy, as it may inspire more strikes against private employers. 

Since government workers are among the first to receive newly-created money — and thus, in accordance with the Cantillon effect, among the principal beneficiaries of central bank inflation — there’s something darkly amusing about seeing government staffers lead Canada’s rebellion against the ongoing loss of purchasing power.   

Canada has more tax collectors than active army personal. tax collectors are going strike bcuz they want a 20% salary increase. Trudeau printed a bunch of money to hire more tax collectors which caused more inflation which the tax collectors want a salary increase to compensate😂

— NVK ⚡️🌞 nvk.org/nostr (@nvk) April 19, 2023

Though “idle federal employees” may sound like a redundancy, the strike promises to affect individual Canadians in a variety of ways, to include tax refunds and filing guidance ahead of the May 1 deadline, and slowed or halted processing of applications for passports and veterans benefits.

About 47,000 of the employees included in the strike are considered “essential” to the safety or security of the public, and will report to work. The union requirement for members to show up at picket locations raises a challenge for the legions of employees who were hired mid-pandemic, have always worked remotely — often from rural locations — and have no office to picket.  

The walkout will involve two-thirds of the Canadian Grain Commission’s employees, and a majority of grain-export inspectors. Watch for a ripple in markets for wheat and canola — two of Canada’s principal agricultural exports.  

While the Bank of Canada helped set the stage for the inflation-fueled strike, a spokesman told Bloomberg that the strike won’t materially affect its operations. That is to say, the money printer will keep going brrrr.  

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

An appeals court has ruled against banning natural gas hookups in new buildings – an idea put forward by the city of Berkeley in California as a means of reducing emissions.

In its ruling, the court said that Berkeley’s 2019 ban on gas hookups in effect banned all appliances operating with natural gas, which it cannot do because federal legislation pre-empts such local legislation, Reuters reported.

“By its plain text and structure, EPCA’s preemption provision encompasses building codes that regulate natural gas use by covered products,” Judge Patrick Bumatay, one of a three-member panel at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote.

“And by preventing such appliances from using natural gas, the new Berkeley building code does exactly that.”

Berkeley is one of about a dozen cities around the United States that are basically waging war on natural gas and choosing to do it by banning the use of the fuel for household needs and, in some cases, business needs such as in restaurants.

Berkeley, however, was the first. Several major cities, including Denver, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, have followed in Berkeley’s example.

The governments of the states they are in, in turn, have struck back with legislation banning such prohibitions.

For the proponents of gas bans, the benefits are clear, or rather, the benefit: lower emissions. For the opponents, there are too many disadvantages, from the cost of switching a house from gas to electricity to the effect of more all-electric households on the grid when the ban only applies to newbuilds.

The news about Berkeley would be welcome by the gas industry, which has been naturally opposing the string of bans, and by restaurants, for which natural gas is the most efficient and cheap option.

Commenting on the court ruling, a spokesperson for the association of restaurants in the U.S. told Reuters that the ban had been “an overreaching measure beyond the scope of any city.”

J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc., the fourth largest trucking company in the US, reported Monday first-quarter profit and revenue that missed expectations, as it explained volumes and revenue per truckload fell amid fears of a “freight recession.” 

“To start, we’re in a challenging freight environment where there is deflationary price pressure for an industry that continues to face inflationary cost pressures,” President Shelley Simpson told investors in a post-earnings conference call.

Cargo demand has been softening as consumers spend more money on services than goods. Inflation and soaring credit card rates also hurt consumer demand. We recently asked: Is a second trucking bloodbath on the horizon? 

According to Bloomberg, the latest data from American Trucking Association shows the truck tonnage index dropped 5.4% in March versus February, the largest decline since Aug. 2012. 

“Falling home construction, decreasing factory output and soft retail sales all hurt contract freight tonnage,” said Bob Costello, chief economist for the ATA.

“The freight market is one of the most volatile markets on the planet. Hot markets can turn ice cold in a flash, particularly after the federal government and central bankers flooded our economy with so much liquidity and then proceeded to institute the fastest monetary tightening cycle in history,” supply chain data firm FreightWaves said. 

FreightWaves pointed out, “The freight market downturn is a thing of the past. The freight recession has come, and carriers, regardless of whether they operate in the contract or spot markets, are having to contend with it.” 

FreightWaves’ data also shows spot rates of truck hauls have plunged over the last 12 months, tender volumes are sliding, and there’s a trucking overcapacity issue. 

Despite all the gloom, Ravi Shanker, Morgan Stanley transportation equity analyst, recently told clients besides “all the bad headlines and mixed data points on macro, our latest quarterly Shipper Survey keeps showing signs of improvement under the surface.” 

Well, that depends if the consumer can survive even more tightening of monetary conditions as the Fed is expected to increase interest rates by 25bps next month to around 500bps. 

By Michael Every of Rabobank

The old Disraeli line is that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Like most market commentary, I focus on the former two (i.e., politics) and the latter, pointing out all the inconsistencies in the numbers on the screen that get markets so excited, whether that be US payrolls’ birth/death model, CPI’s hedonic regressions, or Chinese GDP’s internally inconsistent expectations-beating ‘magic’. However, yesterday we got a prime example of the Big Market Lie: talking only about statistics, as if nothing else more important is happening.

Monday’s policy speech from ECB President Lagarde, was called “astounding” by a national-security expert, and my team said sounded like she has been reading our research: given the ECB staff do read it, that wasn’t hyperbole. The second-most important central banker in the world behind Powell stated: we are seeing fragmentation into competing geopolitical blocs, which is structurally inflationary; rival FX architecture is emerging; trade invoicing and swap lines are key in that shift; Western fiscal policy must be expansionary on the supply side and into defence; monetary policy needs to act like it did in the 80s; yet it must also work with fiscal policy for “strategic goals” – and Lagarde added later in the day that once the 2% CPI target has been met, “discussions” can be had on changing it(!); central bank digital currency may be needed to deliver hypothecated fiscal spending and trade invoicing; in “systemic competition”, the bloc that does state capitalism/mercantilism best will fare better; and central banks’ role is at the heart of it. We are not talking 2% CPI, nor 2°C.

This has vast implications across every asset class, the economy, and the political economy. To have given this speech, Lagarde would have had to have cleared it with layers of stakeholders. It wasn’t a mistake or slip. It was a deliberate, establishment-approved declaration: we face an open-ended global political-economy competition with policy drift in just one direction, not a rate-hiking cycle, or a pause, and certainly not a pivot.

And how did the market react? It didn’t. How did the financial press covering every market cough, sneeze, and shill react? It didn’t. There were very few headlines, almost no commentary, and no analysis. The focus was on relatively irrelevant statistics like Chinese GDP, or subscriber numbers. In short, we got an orchestrated ostrich-like policy of denial.

Some might say that the magic of 0DTE options trading means nothing means anything anymore, and market volatility can keep going down, and stocks up, while real world volatility is exploding higher; but forever, and if rates keep rising?

Some might say there’s a Gramscian hegemony over intellectual debate in markets (“Don’t mention the war! Do mention the pivot!”). But that’s not true from recent coverage of the trends in geopolitics, which have even mentioned Gramsci, Kalecki, Polanyi.

Some might defend markets by noting the difficulty of talking political-economy rather than basis points or pips. As Taleb just tweeted on universities, applying here too: “The standard academic is selected to go very deeply and rigorously into the most shallow questions, and very shallowly and handwavingly into the most significant issues. Knowledge comes exclusively from the rare, very rare, tail exception.” So why listen to such market voices? At least ask them how they think their markets would trade if Lagarde is flagging a policy shift, rather than assuming she isn’t ‘because my market’.

Some might say “quirky” (I prefer “iconoclastic”) big picture narratives don’t matter because while this might all happen one day, in the meantime the adults have to make money. Taleb asks how that standard academic stance worked in the GFC or the worst bond performance in centuries in 2022 – and more examples will follow if Lagarde is a harbinger. Indeed, the CSIS think tank, in ‘It’s All about Networking: The Limits of Renminbi Internationalization’, stresses CNY cannot replace the USD in the global system, but bilateral trade settled in CNY reduces China’s reliance on the dollar, exert more influence over its trading partners, and mitigate risks from potential US financial sanctions. The latter implies the US would have to lean on real economy decoupling or non-financial weapons for pressure. That is deeply concerning, and I have expressed that here repeatedly of late, even if most markets won’t see it.

However, on the most profound level, I understand the lack of reaction. As Dostoyevsky put it: “Very little is required to destroy a person: one has only to convince him that the business he is engaged in is not necessary to anyone.”

On which, veteran market player Jeremy Grantham just broke Gramscian hegemony to tell an interviewer that the US financial sector is: “In a way, like a giant bloodsucker. We have more than doubled in size, and are sucking more than twice the blood out of the economy. And we do not generate any widgets. We do not generate any real increase in income. We are just a cost. Collectively, we fulfil a completely necessary service. But what we have done is created layers upon layers of more convoluted, expensive financial instruments. And that’s what makes all the profits for the financial industry. And it’s taken a lot of ingenuity and salesmanship to make this happen. A lot of lobbying in Congress, etc. And we have imposed on the rest of the economy the idea that banking and finance are utterly important at all times. If you do anything wrong to us, the entire economy will collapse in ragged disarray.”

Ask yourself, is this sustainable in a “systemic competition” between global blocs where the other side is using ‘common prosperity’ to co-opt its financial sector to accelerate the shift to supply-chain and production? Do we need a reallocation of resources from “convoluted, expensive financial instruments” to “widgets” too? The purveyors of said instruments, and their media, will say no, but the Pentagon, which had its eye on SVB, says yes – and now so does Lagarde. We only have Powell left to flip, which even markets might notice: Jackson Hole this year is going to be interesting.

But, until then, I expect that even as everything is about the big geopolitical picture, all we are going to hear are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Except here, where I will keep sharing headlines:

• ‘China criticizes US sanctions on fentanyl trade, say they ‘undermine’ Washington-Beijing relations: report’

• ‘China’s defence minister applauds Putin for ‘promoting world peace’ amid Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine’

• ‘Macron ‘working on secret plan’ with China to end Ukraine war’ – where a US hawk would say the problem is that cheese-selling surrender monkeys cannot surrender other people’s cheese;

• ‘NATO Seeks Deal With China Over ‘Responsible Use’ of Military AI’ – which shows Macron was correct to call the institution “braindead.”

• ‘Iran Invites Saudi King to Visit Amid Thaw in Ties’; as Iran chose Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel to say it will destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa if Israel attacks it; voices warn the window for Saudi-Israeli peace will close within the year; and China says it now wants to try its hand at the peace process there.

Only two years ago numerous alternative media sources including Zero Hedge were accused of spreading “conspiracy theories” and false information relating to the origins of the Covid-19 virus. Specifically, anyone who dared to suggest that the Level 4 virology lab in Wuhan, China (right across town from covid ground zero) might be the source of the outbreak, faced outright censorship on social media. The question many people should have been asking is: “Why?” – Why was the censorship so aggressive over clearly reasonable investigations into Wuhan lab operations?

Not only that, but why were the denials and spin from officials like Anthony Fauci so swift?  Why not simply examine the evidence instead of dismissing it out of hand?

The real reason for the campaign to silence discussion on the Wuhan lab becomes evident as the connections between Fauci, the NIH and the lab are revealed. Elements of the US government including Fauci were in fact bankrolling gain of function research on coronaviruses at Wuhan, and shielding it from government oversight. It is undeniable. If one accepts that the most likely source for the covid pandemic was the Wuhan laboratory then one must also accept that Fauci and his associates helped to create the pandemic.

Fauci lied about these connections incessantly under oath. Here is Anthony Fauci defending his initial lie to Congress using further lies during questioning by Sen. Rand Paul:

Evidence of the research includes documents from the Department of Defense (obtained by Project Veritas) which confirm that  EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in 2018 about gain of function research on bat borne coronaviruses under a proposal called Project Defuse. DARPA rejected the proposal on the grounds that it did not outline the risks of such experimentation and violated a moratorium on gain on function research.  EcoHealth then went to Fauci and the NIH for funding, and Fauci was quick to support it using the labs in Wuhan.

Documents from the NIH itself also show that the group engaged in gain of function research at Wuhan focusing on developing coronaviruses that could be transferred from animals to humans.  Fauci was aware of this research by at least 2021 (and was likely involved from the very beginning) and yet continued to lie about NIH involvement.

Meanwhile, the National Pulse – which has done multiple deep-dive investigations on the topic, uncovered in May of 2001 that the WIV scrubbed all mention of its partnership with the NIH from their website.

Scrutiny over Fauci’s disinformation campaign may be too little too late, and we have to wonder if the man will ever face consequences for his actions.  However, the exposure of Fauci and the NIH is so overwhelming that the former Director of National Intelligence now admits that Fauci misled Congress and the American public.

The former Director of National Intelligence agrees with the former CDC Director that Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Congress under oath about funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab:

“Some of Dr. Fauci’s testimony is inconsistent with some of the intelligence that we have… pic.twitter.com/raoVCBQdyR

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) April 18, 2023

Hopefully, this revelation will help to discourage people from blindly following the claims of government bureaucrats during the next manufactured global crisis.

Via SchiffGold.com,

Peter Schiff recently appeared on Real America with Dan Ball to talk about the weakening US dollar, the less-than-stellar jobs report, and the trajectory of the economy.

Peter kicked off the interview with a startling statement when Dan said whether it’s oil, de-dollarization, or President Biden’s horrible economic policies, everything is pointing toward a recession this year.

We’d be very lucky to escape with just a recession. I think this is a depression. We’re probably already in it. It’s just going to get worse.”

As far as the March jobs report, Peter pointed out that one of the reasons the numbers weren’t worse is governments created around 50,000 jobs, while private sector job creation was well below estimates. And the problem with government jobs is the taxpayers get the bill.

Most of these bureaucrats aren’t producing anything. In fact, they’re making the rest of us less productive. We need private sector jobs to pay for themselves and that add to our productivity, not more government jobs that require taxpayer funding and diminish our collective productivity.”

Peter said the real threat is foreigners pulling the rug out from under the US economy. By abandoning the dollar.

That’s what makes this dysfunctional economy that we have possible. We have a trillion-dollar-a-year trade deficit. That means we import a trillion dollars-a-year worth of stuff that we didn’t make. And the only reason we can do it is because foreigners will take the paper that we print for all the stuff that they produce. But if they don’t want to do that anymore, then how is our economy going to function without all this stuff? Because we certainly don’t have the factories to produce it.”

Dan brought up the fact that mainstream journalists keep talking about the strong job market despite all of the layoffs, especially in the tech sector. Peter said it’s the good jobs that are being eliminated.

Look at the jobs that weren’t created by government. The number one is ‘leisure and hospitality.’ These are restaurants and hotels. And of course, a lot of these are people returning from their COVID absences. But these are low-paying jobs. In fact, many of the jobs that are being created are part-time jobs for the people who lost their good full-time jobs. The people who are getting laid off from these tech companies are getting two or three jobs waiting tables or working in hotels, and somehow the economy is stronger because, on a number basis, we have more jobs. But the quality of those jobs has gone down. And most people who have two or three lousy jobs — they would rather have one good-paying job. But unfortunately, they no longer have that option.”

Peter reiterated that we are in the early stages of another financial crisis that will ultimately be worse than 2008.

We have a much bigger problem today than we had then, and the consequence is a much larger financial crisis now than the one we had then. It’s going to end, I believe, with an all-out US dollar currency and sovereign debt crisis. And then, inflation is going to explode through the roof.”

Peter noted that many more banks would have failed if the government hadn’t bailed them out. In fact, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank was just the tip of the iceberg.

Unfortunately, they’re not going to let them fail. They’re going to print a bunch of money and create inflation instead. So, instead of losing your money at the bank because your bank fails, your bank won’t fail. It’s going to get bailed out. But your money that’s at the bank is going to lose its value. So, yeah, you can go to your bank and take out your money, but then take it to the grocery store or gas station — you’re not going to buy very much.”

So, can this ship be righted to avoid some of the worst pain?

Peter said there is nothing we can do to avert this. We’re going to have to suffer the consequences of decades of bad policy.

The only way that we can minimize the pain, accelerate the healing of the economy and rebuild something viable is if the government gets completely out of the way. We need a massive reduction in the size of government. Government needs to cut spending across the board and repeal all sorts of rules and regulations to liberate the economy  – unshackle it from government taxation and regulation so we can dig ourselves out of this ditch that decades of central planning and central banking have placed us in.”

This year, 596 tech firms have laid off 171,308 workers. The list is anticipated to expand, with Meta Platforms Inc. initiating job cuts today and Walt Disney Co. preparing to reduce its workforce by thousands in the coming week.

According to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, the Facebook parent company told managers they should prepare for job cuts on Wednesday. The memo states jobs across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs will be affected. 

The move to reduce headcount by at least 10,000 positions at the company was outlined by founder Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of greater efficiency earlier this year. Another round of job cuts is expected next month. 

Meta already slashed its total workforce by 13%, or about 11,000 jobs, in November and has extended a hiring freeze through the first quarter.

Meanwhile, next week, Walt Disney is set to cut thousands of jobs, including 15% of its staff in the entertainment division, according to a separate Bloomberg report, citing people familiar with the plans.

“The cuts will span TV, film, theme parks, and corporate teams, affecting every region where Disney operates,” said the people. They said affected workers would receive termination letters as early as next Monday. 

Disney announced in February it planned to eliminate 7,000 positions from its 220,000 workforces, a move to save $5.5 billion per year. “Cuts are being carried out across the company,” the people said, adding cuts will even happen in the Disney Entertainment unit. 

Disney’s old and then-new again CEO, Bob Iger, came out of retirement in November to lead the restructuring of Disney. He elevated key allies in the company, including Alan Bergman and Dana Walden, the co-chairmen of Disney Entertainment. 

The pace of tech layoffs isn’t slowing down, according to job tracking website Layoffs.fyi. 

Simply put, tech firms overhired during the pandemic and are currently bracing for a downturn.

Largest Tech Layoffs Since November 2022:

1. Amazon: 27,000 employees
2. Meta: 21,000 employees
3. Google: 12,000 employees
4. Microsoft: 10,000 employees
5. Salesforce 8,000 employees
6. Dell: 6,700 employees
7. Twitter: 80% of employees
8. Uber: 30% of employees
9. Coinbase:…

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) April 19, 2023

Futures are trading near session lows, weighted down by the latest inflation data out of the UK where early this morning, we learned that March inflation remained in the double digits with annual price rises of 10.1%, coming in hotter than expected for the second straight month, and making it more likely that the Bank of England will increase interest rates next month.

February’s CPI was 10.4% and was expected to drop to 9.8% last month, and although petrol and diesel prices fell in the month, fresh sharp rises in the costs of food, recreation and culture — a broad category which includes theater, concerts and sporting events — kept the index in double digits.

The drop in headline inflation was almost entirely caused by motor fuels where the average price of a liter of petrol fell from just over £1.60 in March 2022 to just under £1.47 last month. Across components, the largest downward contributions to the moderation in headline inflation came from transport and housing. Offsetting this and keeping the headline rate high were soaring food prices, especially of bread and cereals, with prices rising 19.1% in the year to March.

Following the uptick in sequential pressures last month, today’s print showed a slowing in the seasonally adjusted MoM pace but the slowing was less than expected and the sequential pace for core inflation remains above that observed in Q4, reflecting continued strength in core goods in particular.

Here are the key numbers:

• CPI (Mar): +10.1%; GS: +9.9%; Cons: +9.8%; Previous (Feb): +10.4%, all%yoy.
• Core CPI (Mar): +6.2%; Cons: +6.0%; Previous (Feb): +6.2%
• RPI (Mar): +13.5%; Cons: +13.3%; Previous (Feb): +13.8%

Following today’s release, Goldman said that it mechanically updated its UK inflation forecast and now expects headline and core inflation to be 3.9%yoy and 4.3%yoy, respectively, in December 2023. Also, given today’s upside surprise, the bank continues to expect the MPC to hike by 25bp at its upcoming May meeting.

And speaking of the BOE, the FT notes that the central bank had been watching these figures very closely as they were the last significant data release before its next meeting in early May and while officials had hoped that there would be the first signs of a significant drop in inflationary pressure, core inflation, excluding food and energy prices, remained unchanged at 6.2%, which remains too high to give them comfort.

The BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee has been looking for signs that underlying inflationary pressure is moderating and that declines in the headline rate are not caused solely by large energy price increases last year beginning to drop out of the annual comparisons.

The members will not be reassured by both services inflation remaining at 6.6 per cent and core inflation failing to fall, instead sticking at 6.2 per cent. The MPC has said that it will raise interest rates again from the current 4.25 per cent level, “if there were to be evidence of more persistent pressures”.

Grant Fitzner, chief economist of the ONS, said that inflation remained at a “high level”. Falling motor fuel prices “were partially offset by the cost of food, which is still climbing steeply, with bread and cereal price inflation at a record high.”

Kitty Ussher, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, said that the failure to see any drop in core inflation would require the bank to take action and raise rates again on May 4. “Taken together with yesterday’s strong labour market data, it is now clear that there is more demand in the economy than the Bank of England had expected in the first quarter,” she said.

Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the fall in the headline rate had been “too modest for the MPC to stop raising rates”.

Capital Economics, the consultancy, said that the stubbornness of high inflation raised the possibility that a rise in interest rates to 4.5% at the May meeting may not be the last.

UK inflation has not been falling as quickly as comparable indicators in many European countries which saw lower energy prices reflected in the March data, but headline rates for the UK are expected to drop significantly next month.

With gas and electricity prices for April already known, the annual increase in this component will fall from 96 per cent to 27 per cent, although consumers will not feel better off as the energy price cap will stay at the same level. These prices are expected to start falling in the summer.

Headline inflation is still on course to halve by the end of the year, meeting the government’s target. In a statement, Jeremy Hunt, chancellor, said: “These figures reaffirm exactly why we must continue with our efforts to drive down inflation so we can ease pressure on families and businesses”.

In kneejerk response, sterling strengthened against the dollar, with the pound up 0.3% against the dollar at $1.24 in early trading but it has since faded back to unchanged as the dollar rose amid a broad-based pullback in risk.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Monday introduced a resolution that would require President Biden to disclose the number of US troops inside Ukraine and share all documents outlining US military assistance for Kyiv with the House.

If the resolution is passed, it would require President Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to share the requested information within 14 days. The introduction comes after one of the documents allegedly leaked by Airman Jack Teixeira confirmed that US special operations forces are in Ukraine.

“The Biden Administration and other allied countries have been misleading the world on the state of the war in Ukraine. There must be total transparency from this administration to the American people when they are gambling war with a nuclear adversary by having special forces operating in Ukraine,” Gaetz said in a statement.

According to the document, 97 NATO special operations soldiers are in Ukraine, including 14 Americans. The leak confirmed an October 2022 report from The Intercept that said US special operations forces were deployed to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.

The Intercept report did not say what the American special operators were doing inside Ukraine but said it was part of a broad covert operation that includes CIA personnel who are also on the ground.

The leaked document said there is a total of 29 Defense Department personnel inside Ukraine, including the special operations forces.

The total also includes members of the Marine Security Guard Security Augmentation Unit (MSAU), who are typically deployed for embassy security.

So are we just going to overlook the fact that the leaks show Biden authorized US troops on the ground in Ukraine and then lied about it?

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) April 12, 2023

The total also includes the defense attaché and members of the Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC). The Pentagon said in October 2022 that personnel under the defense attaché and ODC based at the US embassy in Kyiv are conducting “onsite” weapons inspections inside Ukraine.