Blog

Jeffrey Epstein plea deal is subject of new criminal probe after Florida governor orders investigation into Palm Beach County Sheriff and State’s Attorney offices

The prosecutors who ironed out the non-prosecution deal signed by Jeffrey Epstein in 2008 and the deputies who oversaw the pedophile’s incarceration may soon find themselves facing criminal charges. 

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida announced on Tuesday that he had ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to take over the investigation of how the Epstein case was handled by state employees.

‘I am requesting a preliminary inquiry into misconduct and allegations that go beyond the reported concerns with Jeffrey Epstein’s work release,’ wrote Governor DeSantis.

At the same time, he issued an Executive Order reassigning the matter from Palm Beach County State’s Attorney Office to the Nineteenth Judicial Circuit of Florida.

This move was suggested in some part by Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who sent a formal request to the Governor on Tuesday stating that FDLE should ‘assume the existing criminal investigation.’

He closed out the request by writing: ‘I believe the public interest would be best be served by an FDLE-led investigation examining every aspect of the Epstein case, from court sentencing to incarceration.’

Bradshaw said that the internal investigation launched by the department last month would continue at the same time. 

Keep reading

ICE Hastily Scraps Plan for Deportation Bonuses

Immigration and Customs Enforcement abruptly canceled a plan to offer cash bonuses for rapid deportations just hours after announcing the incentive on Tuesday. ICE agents were told in an internal email that they could earn $200 for each immigrant deported within a week of arrest, and $100 for those deported within two weeks, the New York Times reports. The pilot program, meant to last 30 days, was canceled just four hours later after the Times reached out for comment. “PLEASE DISREGARD,” read a follow-up message to staff.

Documents seen by the Times showed the now-scrapped program would have encouraged agents to use expedited removal, a fast-track process with no court hearings, or urge voluntary departures. The memo said it was intended to reduce a backlog, “reducing overall removal costs and decreasing strain” on detention resources. Critics say cash bonuses for deportations risk undermining due process. “You can’t incentivize government agents to short circuit people’s procedural rights,” said former DHS official Scott Shuchart.

Homeland Security downplayed the plan, insisting it was never enacted. But the episode highlights the mounting pressure on ICE to hit President Trump’s aggressive deportation targets. The agency’s annual budget is set to soar from $8 billion to $28 billion, more than double that of the FBI. Last week, the agency launched a recruiting push, offering up to $50,000 in signing bonuses for “brave and heroic Americans.”

Keep reading

Mass Shooting in Montana Exposes Mental Health Outsourcing to China

After the horrifying killing in Anaconda, Montana, where Army veteran Michael Paul Brown is accused of killing four people and remains at large, local families are reeling—not just from the violence, but from the unanswered questions about what could have prevented it.

A relative of one of the victims told reporters, “Mental health is real,” referring to Brown’s long-documented struggles with multiple mental health labels that have no objective way to be verified by brain scans, blood work, or x-rays—including schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and bipolar disorder. Like in the case of Robert Card, the 2023 Lewiston, Maine shooter who killed 18 people and injured 13 others, Card was referred for psychiatric review by his Military command.  After the autopsy, Card, who taught explosives for the military, suffered traumatic brain injury. There can certainly be real medical issue that produce symptoms, that might appear to be mental health related but in fact are medical conditions.

Montana’s response to mental health challenges has come under intense scrutiny, especially after state leaders chose to outsource control of the entire mental health system to a global consulting powerhouse tied to China. In 2023, state officials awarded a $300 million contract to Alvarez & Marsal, a New York-based firm partnering with Zhongze Group, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate. The decision locked Montana’s most private health data and program oversight into the hands of consultants with questionable allegiances, bypassing community input and local providers.

AbleChild.org spearheaded the battle to expose these arrangements, demanding transparency and warning of the risks when public health oversight is handed to multinational firms with foreign connections. As tragedy rocks the community, the state’s willingness to let outsiders manage—and profit from—Montana’s most vulnerable populations reflect a crisis not just of care, but of trust.

Beyond Montana, concern is mounting nationally about states outsourcing mental health administration or data management to firms with Chinese partnerships or ownership around data privacy, security, and sovereignty. While Montana’s is one of the highest-profile cases due to the large investment and public outcry, other states have also engaged with global consulting firms whose networks include Chinese interests, sparking debates on protecting vulnerable populations from outside influence.

The mental health killings all have one thing in common: the withholding of mental health records released to the public on exactly who was treating these individuals and the exact names of the drugs prescribed.

Keep reading

‘Fearing Zionism Could Die Among Democrats,’ Party Leaders Stage Phony ‘Break’ With Israel

AIPAC-funded Democrats’ phony “break” with Israel is a stopgap measure to try and avoid turning opposition to the Jewish state into a litmus test for the midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries, CNN reports.

From CNN, “Pro-Israel Democrats try breaking with Netanyahu to stop party’s shift amid Gaza crisis”:

Fearing Zionism could die among Democrats, many party leaders are explicitly breaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to stop anti-Israel attitudes from becoming a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries.

But privately, several tell CNN, they worry it may be too late.

Last week’s failed resolution to block new arms sales to Israel, supported by a record number of Senate Democrats, was just the start. A new letter to recognize a Palestinian state is gaining signatures in the House. Devoted allies of Israel are speaking out against its government, brushing off whatever texts and phone calls they’ve been getting from the dwindling number of party voters or donors still standing steadfast behind Israeli actions in Gaza nearly two years after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack.

It’s no longer just the far left rejecting Netanyahu’s years of identifying more with Republicans. There is also a bitter backlash among many Democratic politicians, who have felt bullied by the Israeli government and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, and there’s revulsion over the images of starvation and dying children.

“We can disagree about a lot of things in the foreign policy space, but there’s no room to tolerate mass starvation,” said Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, who is Jewish and widely seen as one of the party’s future leaders in the Senate. Schatz argues there’s a conflation of opposing the Israeli government and opposing Israel’s right to exist that he calls “ridiculous” and an “intentional strategy” meant to distract.

“I think there’s a recognition that Netanyahu is making Israel and Israelis and Jews unsafe all over the world,” Schatz said. “More and more of us are saying so and voting accordingly.”

[…] Leaders of multiple Jewish and pro-Israel groups told CNN privately that they have grimly determined their best and most practical approach is essentially to quietly wait out the trauma and hope the politics turns. There’s another Israeli election next year, and while Netanyahu is now in a minority coalition, he has been counted out before.

The same is of course true among “liberal Zionist” commentators like Jon Stewart and others, as I wrote about last week.

Keep reading

No Doubt Left… Russiagate Was A Cover-Up

The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release…

It was a cover-up.

The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time. It even has multiple names thanks to its peculiar chronology. From 2016 until April 2019 — while Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations that would topple Donald Trump — it was generally known as the Trump-Russia scandal. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments, attention began to be cast on the scandal’s fraudulent construction, how it was propped up by political spying, illegal leaks, and WMD-style intelligence fakery. Trump and others began to call it Spygate or the Russia hoax, but the name that stuck was Russiagate.

Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do, after a month of disclosures, capped yesterday by the release of an explosive (and inexplicably long-classified) annex to the report of Special Counsel John Durham. Finally, it seems, we can explain how the idea that Donald Trump was “gaffing his way toward treason” through a secret love affair (really!) with Vladimir Putin and extensive “ties” or “links” with Russia suddenly became The Biggest Story in the World in the summer of 2016.

It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail. Characteristically, the most powerful political family since the Kennedys won’t just bring many individuals down with them, but whole institutions, as the FBI, the CIA, the presidency of Barack Obama, and a dozen or so of the most celebrated brands in commercial media will see their names blackened forever through association with this idiotic caper. A fair number of those media companies should (and likely will) go out of business.

Now, we know. With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes.

One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme. The last stage required the enthusiastic cooperation and canine incuriosity of the entire commercial news business, which cheered as conspirators made an enforcement target of Trump, actually an irrelevant bystander.

I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge.

Now, there’s no doubt.

Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple…

Keep reading

RFK Jr. pulls $500 million in funding for vaccine development

The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary and a longtime vaccine critic, announced in a statement Tuesday that $500 million worth of vaccine development projects, all using mRNA technology, will be halted.

The projects — 22 of them — are being led by some of the nation’s leading pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna to prevent flu, COVID-19 and H5N1 infections.

Keep reading

Germany Turns Its Back on Decades‑Old Privacy Protections with Sweeping Surveillance Bill

For half a century, Germany’s privacy laws were treated like sacred scripture. Politicians swore by them, courts fortified them, and bureaucrats turned them into a national export. Other countries rolled out surveillance programs; Germany rolled out lectures about why that was a terrible idea. It was all rooted in the same ugly history lesson: if you give the state a big enough file on you, sooner or later you’ll end up in it.

That memory ran deep. The Nazi regime used personal records like ammunition, and the East German Stasi built a domestic surveillance industry so bloated it could have applied for EU funding.

Postwar Germany responded by making privacy a central pillar of its democratic identity. The Federal Constitutional Court even invented a “right to informational self‑determination,” which sounded academic but translated roughly to: “The government doesn’t get to rummage through your life just because it’s bored.”

Privacy commissioners became feared watchdogs who could slap down ministries and corporations alike. Every time politicians tried to sneak through a new security law, they’d be met with lawsuits, public outrage, and years of procedural trench warfare. It was tedious, but that was the point; democracy is supposed to make snooping inconvenient.

Now comes the Interior Ministry’s summer special: a bill that would let authorities hack devices without suspicion, track every airline passenger automatically, and scrap independent oversight.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Keep reading

50 Bizarre Side Effects of Common Medicines

Medicine saves lives every day, combating everything from infections to chronic pain. But the little-discussed reality is that adverse drug reactions are the third leading cause of death in the US, claiming over 250,000 lives annually.

Even more insidious, side effects can emerge months or years after starting—or stopping—a medication, long after you’ve forgotten about it, as seen with delayed tendon damage from antibiotics or bone issues from osteoporosis drugs.

These delayed reactions highlight how drugs can ripple through the body in unexpected ways, affecting organs and systems far beyond their intended target.

From hormonal havoc to bizarre behavioral shifts, here are 50 peculiar side effects that remind us: while medicine helps, it can also unleash chaos we never saw coming.

Keep reading

Jasmine Crockett Joins Dems Who Fled Texas, Says Republicans Are ‘Weak’ and ‘We About to Beat You Down’

Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) joined Democrats who fled her state to avoid voting on redistricting, and laughably claimed it’s Republicans who are “weak.”

Crockett also amped up the incendiary rhetoric by threatening violence in the wake of the controversy that caused her Democrat colleagues to tuck their tails and run away from the Lone Star State.

“This governor talks a lot of noise, and I made sure that I put up my warrant from four years ago,” Crockett began. “To make it plain that they talk a lot of noise, but these guys are weak.”

The wannabe leader of the Democrat party is referencing the fact that she was a major player in the same stunt Texas Democrats pulled in the state in July 2021 to prevent a vote on Republican election integrity bills. It’s a good reminder that Governor Greg Abbott had better put some teeth behind his arrest threats this time around.

“The difference is they expect Democrats to kind of be the nice guys that we are,” Crockett continued her rant. “They expect us to take the punch and say thank you. Well, I am here to tell you not only are we going to punch back, but we about to beat you down.”

Narrator: Nobody expects you to be the “nice guys,” especially when a recent study has shown the left is embracing an “assassination culture.”

Paging House Republicans – When are we going to have enough of Crockett and her street threats before we censure her for them? Are we waiting for the actual violence again, like in 2020?

This is the same woman who claims violence doesn’t come from the left side of the political aisle.

“The violence doesn’t come from Democrats, just to be clear,” she told comedian Hasan Minhaj. “I mean, obviously, anyone can be a criminal, but, um, it is MAGA. It’s specifically MAGA faction.”

Violence doesn’t come from Democrats, oh, and also … “We about to beat you down.”

Aside from Crockett’s violent language, several other prominent Democratic figures engaged in similar rhetoric. Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX) called the matter of fleeing to avoid a vote “an all-out war” while California Governor Gavin Newsom said the resistance party was prepared to “fight fire with fire.”

Considering their party’s rhetoric has led to multiple assassination attempts on the President, it should be taken seriously. That said, listening to them shout in defense of their colleagues who are currently hiding and dispersed throughout the country so they can avoid doing their jobs is utterly hilarious.

This is like running three blocks away from a street fight and then yelling back to your opponent, “I’m gonna kick your a**,” all while shaking a fist in the air.

Keep reading

‘Din’t get cracked’: Watch female police officer threaten to ticket ‘everyone’ because she didn’t have sex last night

A female police officer in the Houston area is now under investigation after posting a video on TikTok in which she threatened to give everyone a ticket because she did not have sex the previous night.

Harris County Constable Precinct 5 Deputy Jennifer Escalera was in uniform as she recorded herself writing on a notepad.

“Din’t get cracked last night so everyone is getting a ticket…” Escalera indicated in her now-deleted video.

Although she blurred portions of her uniform, the officer left her name tag visible.

“Our administration is aware and internal affairs has opened an investigation. We have no other comment at this time,” the constable’s office said.

The New York Post reported: “The female cop’s TikTok account features several posts showing her in uniform. She also posts about being a mom.

“One of the posts shows Escalera getting ready ‘to work as a female Police Officer’ as the text across the screen reads, ‘contemplating if I really need this job, knowing that I do.'”

Keep reading