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Judicial Watch exposes Biden team pressure on Special Counsel Hur

Judicial Watch announced it received from the US Department of Justice in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit 49 pages of records detailing pressure asserted by Biden White House and Joe Biden’s personal lawyers on Special Counsel Robert Hur regarding the October 2023 interviews of  then-President Biden in the criminal investigation into his theft, retention, and disclosure of classified records. Non-disclosure agreements signed by the president’s lawyers are also included in the records.

Judicial Watch filed a July 2024 FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice for all communications about the Hur report with the Office of the White House Counsel and Biden’s personal lawyers (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02179)).

Judicial Watch has several ongoing FOIA lawsuits about Biden’s document scandals and the related unprecedented partisan prosecutorial and judicial abuses of former President Donald J. Trump.

In April 2025, Judicial Watch uncovered Justice Department records showing White House staffers suggesting edits to transcripts of President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur regarding his handling of secret documents.

In February 2025, a federal court ordered the Department of Justice to declare whether it intends to continue denying Judicial Watch’s request for the full audio of former President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. The Trump Justice Department has until May 20, 2025, to report its position on the release of the videotape.

In June 2024, the Biden administration was forced to admit that the transcripts of audio recordings of Biden’s interviews with Special Counsel Hur had been altered and are not accurate.

The new records include an October 18, 2023, letter, just a few days after Hur’s interviews of Biden, from Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber and Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer to Hur. They express concerns about the release of the report:

At our meeting last Friday, we requested that you provide an overview of where matters stand in this case, particularly any remaining questions or concerns we should address. We also asked for the opportunity to discuss your expected report to the Attorney General at the conclusion of the investigation, including time to review it prior to its submission to the Attorney General. You advised us that you were not prepared to engage with these requests at that time but would take them under consideration.

Moreover, to the extent that your report touches in any way upon procedures in this or prior administrations for the handling of sensitive national security information, your report will also be read with intense interest in every foreign capital. It could affect the national security interests of the United States in ways that none of us can anticipate.

An October 31, 2023, email from Sauber to the Special Counsel’s Office documents the repeated efforts by the Biden legal team to review the report before its release. The letter states:

In our October 18 letter to you, we asked to have the opportunity to review and comment on a draft of the “confidential” report that you are required to write under the Special Counsel regulations. We also noted that we would follow up on the subject of the Special Counsel’s “final report” requirement more broadly.

At a minimum, the report should adhere to the kind of product contemplated by the Special Counsel regulations. As discussed, in contrast to the detailed independent counsel reports setting forth a “full and complete” description of their work, the Special Counsel regulations contemplate only that the Special Counsel will “explain[] the prosecution or declination decisions.” … We support your faithful fulfillment of this requirement. But, consistent with the Department’s description of a “limited” and “summary” product, … , the report should be economical. It should include the factual information necessary to the charging decision, but facts or events that are not essential to the decision have no place….

In a December 15, 2023,  2023, letter Sauber and Bauer reiterate the request and also ask for access to the classification review of the materials found and the return of the records of a personal nature to Biden.

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The Left’s Outcry Over South African Refugees Exposes Their Anti-White Bigotry

In the Biden era, we saw about infinity pseudo-refugees stream across the southern border from every corner of the third world. “Give us your poor, huddled masses, yearning to be free,” the Democrats chanted, as they called us callous racists for daring to suggest their professed humanitarianism was anything but. Yet in the Trump era, all it took was a handful of Afrikaners to lay the real intent of their immigration program bare. 

The lib-left establishment isn’t pro-migrant, and they’re certainly not concerned with taking in genuine refugees fleeing political violence. They’re just anti-white. 

The Trump administration brought in 59 Afrikaner refugees on Monday — white, European-descended Africans fleeing violence and political persecution in their native South Africa. The refugees landed in D.C. on a State Department-chartered plane, where, American flags in hand, they were met with an official welcome delegation and a ceremonial news conference. If the video footage is anything to go by, they appear to be mostly nuclear families with young children, a strange contrast from the single, military-aged men usually seen flooding the border and social services facilities. 

Corporate media was quick to imply racist hypocrisy. The administration has pushed to freeze most settlement programs for “refugees” — in other words, economic migrants from the Global South that Democrats and their NGO allies resettle with a wink and a nod — so the warmness towards Afrikaners must only be due to the fact that they’re white. 

Yet what’s happening in the black supremacist government of South Africa makes Afrikaners exactly the type of refugee the American system seeks to aid. For years, South African political leaders have engaged in genocidal rhetoric against white farmers, the Boers, egging on a frenzy of violent resentment at political rallies. Chants of “Kill the Boer,” mean just that, despite Western media fact-checks. So-called political reforms are ostensibly done under the banner of decolonization, redistributing resources from “colonizers” back to the “natives,” such as the new land expropriation policy the government enacted earlier this year. But the legacy of African decolonization, from Algeria to Rhodesia to Sierra Leone, shows that widespread political violence never lags far behind.

Notably, prominent leaders have gone on record not ruling out a future call “for the slaughtering of whites.” And while official figures are hard to come by, Trump has noted how the white farmers are “being killed” as a result of a political situation that amounts to a “genocide.” 

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Los Angeles approves $30 minimum wage for airport, hotel workers

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a $30 an hour minimum wage hike for airport and hotel workers, which will be enacted by 2028 in time for the Olympics. City council members approved the measure in a 12-3 vote. While union officials praised the approval, those working in the hospitality industry vigorously opposed the legislation and warned that the pay increase could result in mass layoffs, increased costs for consumers, and hotels shutting down.

According to the Olympic Wage ordinance, hourly pay will increase by $2.50 each year until 2028, where it will cap at $30 per hour. The first increase will occur on July 1, 2025, at an amount of $22.50 an hour, as stated in the measure. The current minimum wage is set at $20.00 per hour.

American Hotel and Lodging Association CEO Rosanna Maietta issued a warning about the proposal last month. She stated at the time, according to California Globe: “Hotel employees in Los Angeles are paid the highest wages in the country, but right now their jobs are at risk. City leaders are considering a damaging proposal that will jeopardize these jobs; it would devastate much needed tourism related tax revenue and lead to the closure of hotels that are desperately needed to successfully host the 2026 World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and the 2028 Olympics.”

Despite the opposition, Los Angeles lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected the concerns and called the passing of the bill a “win” for the working class.

“This is what it looks like when people come together and fight – we win,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, who voted to approve the ordinance. “For too long, the workers who make this city run have been treated as disposable. This ordinance makes it clear if you work in this city, you deserve to live in this city – with dignity, healthcare, and a living wage.”

Jessica Durrum, deputy director of Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), echoed a similar sentiment, stating that the “common sense” measure was critical to ensure that “tourism workers can afford to live in the city where they work and not be displaced by skyrocketing housing costs.”

While the majority of council members approved the bill, councilwoman Monica Rodriguez was not one of them. She explained to the paper that she opposed the increase because it lacked “fiscal foresight” and could elevate unemployment.

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Defense Health Agency Must Not be Allowed to Thwart an Honest Investigation Into COVID-19 Shot Injuries, Say Those Who Witnessed the Devasting Effects Firsthand

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s efforts to restore the military are appreciated, but those injured by the COVID-19 shot are feeling abandoned.

After being forced to take two doses of the Moderna COVID-19 shot to remain in the Army in 2021, Karolina Stancik, now 25 years old, has suffered three heart attacks, a stroke, an emergency pacemaker surgery, neurological maladies, the contemplation of suicide, and other adverse events. In October 2023, it was determined that her debilitating heart injury did, in fact, occur “In Line of Duty” and was linked to the shot.

Retired Navy Medical Service Corps officer Lt. Ted Macie told The Gateway Pundit he is not surprised.

As the whistleblower who exposed a significant rise in incidents of myocarditis, pulmonary embolism, ovarian dysfunction, and more across the Department of Defense (DoD) following former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s now-rescinded 2021 COVID-19 shot mandate, he said, “I know others who were injured from the shot, and I know people who died from it—and the latter can’t even claim to be vax injured because they’re no longer here to do so.”

On the heels of Defense Secretary Hegseth determining that the shot was “unlawful as implemented,” TGP spoke to Stancik. She wants Hegseth to acknowledge “someone’s unlawful actions caused injury … severe injury … and even death.”

The former member of the Army National Guard questions “what will be done about the unlawful actions that caused grave injury, destroyed lives, and even led to death in some cases?”

What support is there for people like her? And what consequences will there be for those who unlawfully implemented the shot?

She admitted that not every person who supported the shot mandate knew it was unlawful, but after the advice of countless service members facing separation informed them, many willfully violated the law.

The author of this article has reviewed dozens of Religious Accommodation Requests that also spelled out the illegalities of the COVID-19 shot mandate to their chain of command.

For example, service members, including Stancik, expected but did not receive informed consent, nor were they ever offered a “vaccine” approved by the Federal Drug Administration.

Rather, they were subjected to an experimental shot approved for emergency use only and were told they “might have some cold symptoms” as a result.

So, as one example, what about the military leaders that knowingly violated the law after being fully informed about 10 U.S.C. § 1107a at the start of the mandate? “We have to start with proper investigations to find out who they were,” Stancik pleaded. “My patient rights, my human rights, were violated at minimum.”

And if SecDef Hegseth genuinely believes the mandate was “unlawful as implemented,” she said, “a crime has been committed and there must be Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) action taken against those who broke the law.”

There must be a penalty for their actions, even some that might lead to courts-martial.

“Despite the fact they broke the law,” Stancik said, “we cannot violate their rights and deny due process in return. We must act lawfully to correct this.”

For her, it is imperative for people to understand “a lot of our lives have been completely destroyed by what people claimed for a few years to be lawful.”

If this is truly no longer the case, injured service members are waiting in the background for SecDef Hegseth to publicly address the issue of the physical harms the mandate caused.

“At the end of the day, there’s so many people who lost their jobs, kicked out of the military,” Stancik shared. “But it’s not just the people who lost their jobs; there are injured service members who are being ignored,” she lamented.

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Thousands of enormous holes discovered on the seafloor, evenly-spaced with “eerie regularity”

The central California coast hides a dimpled and pockmarked seafloor region that is roughly the size of Los Angeles – five hundred square miles of soft‑edged pits stretching from Big Sur to Morro Bay.

For decades ocean scientists assumed these round depressions – a whopping six‑football‑field stretch from rim to rim and about 16 feet deep – were scars left by bubbles of methane burping up through the mud.

That tidy explanation raised eyebrows once plans for an offshore wind farm landed on the same patch of continental slope between 1,600 and 5,200 feet below the waves. If methane were still leaking, could turbine anchors stay put?

Curiosity turned urgent when more than 5,200 of the formations, known as pockmarks, appeared to be distributed with “eerie regularity.”

The pattern suggested an active force was sculpting and preserving the craters even today.

To settle the debate, a research team rolled out a fleet of high‑tech robots and a mountain of sensors – and overturned a favorite myth about how the seafloor breathes.

Seafloor full of large pockmarks

Autonomous underwater vehicles zipped barely yards above the bottom, beaming back sonar so sharp it mapped individual ripples of sand.

The survey refined ship‑based maps and revealed that most pockmarks sit almost perfectly spaced apart, each nearly circular and averaging 656 feet across.

Back at mission control aboard the research vessel, experts from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and Stanford University watched the topography scroll across their monitors at one‑foot resolution.

The robots also carried a CHIRP sub‑bottom profiler, a sound cannon that peeks some 25 feet beneath the mud.

Instead of pockets of gas, profiles showed neat layers: thin bands of fine silt interrupted by coarser sand sheets. Those buried sand sheets hinted at something far more dramatic than gentle gas seepage.

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US official admits misleading Trump on US troop numbers in Syria

Outgoing Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the U.S. special envoy for Syria, admitted in an interview with Defense One to misleading President Donald Trump about the true number of U.S. troops deployed in Syria and convincing the president not to withdraw troops.

Jeffrey said, “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.” Jeffrey said the actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the approximately 200 troops Trump agreed to keep in the country in 2019.

According to anonymous sources who spoke with Defense One, the true number of U.S. troops in Syria is said to be around 900, though the precise number is classified and reportedly remains unknown even to Trump and other members of his administration hoping to bring U.S. troops out of foreign engagements.

Trump called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria at the end of 2018 and again in October 2019, both times receiving pushback. Despite calling for the withdrawals, both times Trump was convinced to leave a contingent of U.S. troops in the county.

“What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey told Defense One. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”

After his October 2019 call for the withdrawal of troops from Syria, Trump was convinced last year to agree to keep between 200 and 400 U.S. troops in the country to maintain control of oil fields. The actual number of troops in the country is said to be much higher than Trump was led to believe.

CNN national security correspondent Jim Sciutto similarly tweeted hearing claims that Department of Defense officials deceived Trump about the true U.S. presence in Syria.

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Medieval alchemy dream comes true: How physicists made gold from lead

In a breakthrough that would make medieval alchemists envious, scientists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold, producing 89,000 atoms per second.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a giant particle accelerator that smashes atoms together at super-high speeds. Scientists there have found a way to knock three tiny particles called protons out of lead atoms, turning them into gold atoms.

The team behind this discovery, called the ALICE collaboration, used a unique way to create gold. Instead of crashing lead atoms head-on, they looked at what happens when the atoms just barely miss each other. Researchers explained that when this happens, powerful electromagnetic fields around the atoms can cause them to change into different elements.

“It’s impressive that our detectors can handle both major collisions that create thousands of particles and these smaller events that make just a few particles at a time,” Marco Van Leeuwen, who leads the ALICE project, said in a press release.

During one period of experiments from 2015 to 2018, the scientists created about 86 billion gold atoms. That sounds like a lot, but when you add up all that gold, scientists said it only weighs about 29 picograms, which is less than a trillionth of a gram. You’d need trillions of times more to make even a tiny piece of jewelry.

The machine can create about 89,000 gold atoms every second, but each atom only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before breaking apart. Recent upgrades to the machine have almost doubled the amount of gold it can make, but it’s still far from practical use.

According to Uliana Dmitrieva, a scientist for the ALICE collaboration, this is the first time scientists have been able to detect and study gold production at the LHC in this way.

“Thanks to the unique capabilities of the ALICE ZDCs, the present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally,” Dmitrieva said in the release.

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How NYT Reports on Weaponized Famine So You Don’t Have to Give a Damn

More than two months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a complete blockade of aid—including food, water and medical supplies—from entering the besieged Gaza strip. It’s a severe escalation of Israel’s now 19-month genocide against Palestinians in Gaza—and what the World Health Organization (5/12/25) has described as “one of the world’s worst hunger crises, unfolding in real time.”

With no replenishing stock, aid groups have begun running out of supplies to distribute to families in need.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (5/16/25) reports that their “flour and food parcels have run out,” and that “one third of essential medical supplies are already out of stock.” More than a week ago, World Central Kitchen reported that they no longer have supplies to cook hot meals and bake bread for starving families—they’ve since repurposed their pots to distribute filtered water.

With Gaza’s entire population experiencing crisis-level food insecurity, and with three-quarters facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of deprivation, the famine has been recognized by Human Rights Watch interim executive director Federico Borello as “a tool of extermination.”

At first glance, the April 29 New York Times offered what many would call an objective account with the headline: “UN Faults Israel Over Blockade of Aid for Gaza” (web version here: 4/28/25).

A closer look at the piece however, reveals the Times’ usual spinelessness in its Gaza coverage, unquestioningly accepting Israeli framing in its supposed right to carry out its ongoing genocide.

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DEA Blames Legal Marijuana States For Inadvertently Aiding Cartels While Also Admitting That Prohibition States Create Illegal Market Opportunities

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says that states that have legalized marijuana are providing cover for illicit cultivation operations by foreign cartels—while at the same time implicitly acknowledging that ongoing prohibition in other states creates opportunities for that cannabis to be sold on the illegal market.

The agency’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment that was released on Thursday includes a section on marijuana trafficking, claiming that cartels and other organized crime groups “operate under business registrations granted by state licensing authorities in jurisdictions where marijuana cultivation and sales are ‘legal’ at the state level.”

“However, absent overt evidence such as the trafficking of marijuana across state lines or the commission of non-drug crimes such as money laundering and human trafficking, it can be difficult for law enforcement to immediately identify violations or discover an illegal grow,” the report says. “Asian [Transnational Criminal Organizations, or TSOs] defy restrictions on plant quantities, production quotas, and non-licensed sales, and hide behind state-by-state variations in laws governing plant counts, registration requirements, and accountability practices.”

DEA suggested that cartels are leveraging state cannabis markets by transporting “large amounts of marijuana directly from ‘legal’ states to states that have not legalized recreational use and those where state-level recreational approval is sufficiently recent to not yet have an established, regulated cannabis industry.”

Underlying that analysis seems to be a perhaps inadvertent acknowledgment by DEA that cartels are profiting off ongoing prohibition outside of legal states—indicating that the main demand for illicit marijuana isn’t coming from within states that provide regulated access to consumers but instead those where cannabis remains criminalized.

Implicit in that analysis is exactly what advocates have long argued: Legalization disrupts the illegal market.

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Sen. Mike Lee’s obscenity bill is a free speech nightmare straight out of Project 2025’s playbook

A new bill in Congress threatens to dictate what Americans can read, watch and say online. On May 8, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah and Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill.,  introduced the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act” (IODA) — a recycled attempt to ban online pornography nationwide.

While concerns about pornography, including moral and religious ones, are part of any healthy public debate, this bill does something far more dangerous: It empowers the federal government to police speech based on subjective values. When lawmakers try to enforce the beliefs of some Americans at the expense of others’ rights, they cross a constitutional line — and put the First Amendment at risk. 

The legislation aims to rewrite the legal definition of obscenity, an area of law that represents a very narrow exception to First Amendment protections.

The IODA seeks to sidestep the Supreme Court’s long-standing three-part test for obscenity, established in the 1973 case Miller v. California. The material must appeal to a prurient interest, depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Lee’s bill would scrap that standard and replace it with a broader, far more subjective definition. It would label content obscene if it simply focuses on nudity, sex or excretion in a way that is intended to arouse and if it lacks “serious value.” 

By discarding the concept of community standards, the IODA removes a key safeguard that allows local norms to shape what counts as obscenity. Without it, the federal government could impose a single national standard that fails to account for regional differences, cultural context or evolving social values.

The bill also deletes the requirement that material be “patently offensive,” a crucial element that keeps the obscenity test anchored in societal consensus. Instead, it replaces it with a subjective inquiry into whether the work was intended to arouse or titillate. But intent is notoriously difficult to prove and easy to allege. That language could easily sweep in a wide range of protected expression, including art, health information and sex education.

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