Tag: chuck schumer

Johnson and Schumer Invite War Criminal and Mass Murderer To Address Congress

Mark this most recent event as yet another piece of evidence that Israel literally owns the U.S. Congress.

From Politico:

Netanyahu accepts Congress’ invitation to speak despite blowback.

Tensions have been mounting in recent weeks after Speaker Mike Johnson announced his plan to invite Netanyahu to address Congress

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday accepted an invitation from congressional leaders to address a joint session, a decision that has sparked tension within the Democratic Party over Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

In a post to X, formerly known as Twitter, Netanyahu wrote that he was looking forward to the opportunity to “present the truth” to Congress about the “just war” that Israel has been waging in Gaza since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, when 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 others were taken hostage. In the months following Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, at least 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities, while millions of others have fled from their homes.

“I am very moved to have the privilege of representing Israel before both Houses of Congress and to present the truth about our just war against those who seek to destroy us to the representatives of the American people and the entire world,” Netanyahu wrote.

Tensions have been mounting in recent weeks after Speaker Mike Johnson announced his plan to invite Netanyahu to address Congress. The Democratic Party has splintered over U.S. support for Israel in its ongoing war in Gaza, particularly after recent strikes in a designated safe zone for Palestinians in the southern city of Rafah that reportedly killed at least 45 people.

Progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has been outspoken in his disapproval of U.S. military support for Israel’s war, denounced the invitation.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. He should not be invited to address a joint meeting of Congress. I certainly will not attend,” Sanders wrote in a post to X.

Sanders also referenced the International Criminal Court’s seeking arrest warrants for both Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar for alleged war crimes committed on both sides.

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Chuck Schumer’s Brother Works For Law Firm Behind Bragg’s Get-Trump Indictment

Following Donald Trump’s conviction in Manhattan last week, Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer proclaimed, “The undeniable fact is Donald Trump went through the same legal process that all Americans go through, he was tried according to the facts and the law, and he was found guilty by a jury of his peers.” 

Nothing could be further from the truth, and Schumer knows it because his brother’s law firm, branded the “Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center” by Bloomberg, spurred the indictment of the former president.

Sen. Schumer’s brother, Robert Schumer, is a partner in that law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison. As I detailed Monday, Paul, Weiss granted three highly paid attorneys leaves of absence to join the Manhattan district attorney’s office in its targeting of Donald Trump. And Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of the former president came about only after the intentional leaking of a resignation letter from Mark Pomerantz, one of the Paul, Weiss attorneys on loan to the DA. 

In his resignation letter, Pomerantz criticized Bragg for failing to seek criminal charges against Trump and for indefinitely suspending the investigation into the former president. The letter was soon provided to The New York Times, creating a political firestorm over the news that Bragg did not intend to charge Trump.

Pomerantz’s ploy worked: Bragg soon publicly claimed the investigation was ongoing and then moved to “jump start” his investigation into Trump by hiring yet another outsider, Matthew Colangelo.

Colangelo left Biden’s Department of Justice to join Bragg’s get-Trump team, having previously been appointed by Biden as acting associate attorney general — the third-highest-ranking official in the DOJ. Following Colangelo’s arrival, Bragg indicted Trump, resulting in last week’s conviction.

This road to Trump’s conviction isn’t even in the same universe as the “legal process that all Americans go through.” In fact, the Manhattan DA scoring a top criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor on leave of absence from Paul, Weiss to work “solely on the Trump investigation” was so out of the ordinary that even The New York Times acknowledged that “the hiring of an outsider is a highly unusual move for a prosecutor’s office.” 

Even more unusual, though, was Pomerantz’s resignation letter that declared, “I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition” — accusations soon leaked to The New York Times, which led to a Biden administration lawyer leaving the DOJ to work on a state court prosecution. This is most assuredly not business as usual in the criminal justice system.

Sen. Schumer undoubtedly knows this and Paul, Weiss’s connections to the Manhattan DA’s prosecution of Donald Trump because his brother is a partner at the firm. And so does Joe Biden, who during a June 2019 fundraiser at Paul, Weiss gave a “shoutout” to Robert Schumer. 

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Chuck Schumer Attacks Lifesaving Zyn Nicotine Pouches

Less than three months after launching an attack on energy drinks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has a new target: Zyn nicotine pouches.

In a press release Sunday, Schumer labeled Zyn a “quiet and dangerous” alternative to vaping, claiming that with the decline in smoking, tobacco companies are adapting by focusing on new products like oral nicotine. Zyns are small pouches of nicotine meant to be placed between the lips and gums. Two strengths of the product are available at three and six milligrams of nicotine, and they come in several flavors.

Schumer’s ire appears to have been raised by the rapid growth in sales of nicotine pouches and so-called “Zynfluecers” on TikTok promoting the product. Schumer fears nicotine pouches could become a teen trend, as vaping did in 2019 before rapidly declining as the tobacco age was raised to 21 and schools became more aware of the problem. To head off a potential increase in youth nicotine addiction, Schumer wants the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration to investigate the marketing of Zyn and potentially restrict their flavors.

But Schumer’s framing has the story backward. Zyn is not a dangerous alternative to vaping but a dramatically safer alternative to smoking. One of the reasons smoking has declined substantially over the last decade is because safer nicotine alternatives like vapes and Zyn are switching smokers away from cigarettes. The closest equivalent for which we have decades of data is an oral smokeless tobacco called snus. Snus is most prevalent in Sweden, and not coincidentally, Sweden has the lowest smoking and lung cancer rates in Europe because those interested in using nicotine do so in a much safer form.

Schumer is right that nicotine pouches are enjoying enormous sales, but he would be wrong to assume nicotine-naive youth are driving these sales. According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey, only 1.5 percent of middle and high schoolers use nicotine pouches, and just 2.3 percent have ever tried a nicotine pouch. Even among the minority of young people who use products like Zyn, most are not nicotine newbies. A study of adolescents and adults aged 15-24 who used nicotine pouches found the vast majority were smokers or had smoked cigarettes in the past at 73 percent and 81 percent, respectively. Just like with e-cigarettes, nicotine pouches disproportionately appeal to people who are already using nicotine most often in its most dangerous form, which is cigarettes.

Schumer’s concern that Zyn comes in several flavors like cinnamon and citrus is also misguided. For one, Zyn has already applied to the FDA to be authorized for sale, and the agency will determine whether it presents a net benefit to public health. But suppose flavors in nicotine products are inherently youth-appealing, as Schumer suggests. In that case, he should be just as outraged that nicotine gums, which have been around for decades, are sold in flavors like “cinnamon surge,” “fruit chill,” and “spearmint burst.” Nicotine flavor bans have a poor track record in improving public health, with bans on flavored vapes associated with an increase in cigarette sales.

Schumer’s intervention drew mockery on X (formerly known as Twitter), including from Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators defending Zyn. The reaction is perhaps unsurprising, given that Tucker Carlson is the most famous Zyn consumer.

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Video shows suspect accused of operating secret Chinese police stations mingling with Schumer, Adams

One of the two men accused by federal prosecutors of running a secret Chinese police station in New York City purportedly has been captured on video attending an event alongside two prominent Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and New York City Mayor Eric Adams. 

Video recorded on March 18 appears to show Lu Jianwang standing alongside Adams most recently at an event where Schumer also spoke. Lu was arrested last week and charged with conspiring to act as an agent of China’s government, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. 

In a statement, Adams’ office told Fox News that the mayor’s attendance at an event is either to show support for a local community or the city and does not signal any kind of endorsement. 

A spokesperson for Adams also said he does not know Lu. 

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Here’s The Lawmaker Who Accepts More BlackRock Money Than Any Other Member Of Congress

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accepted more donations in the last election cycle from BlackRock and individuals affiliated with the firm than any other member of Congress.

The connection between the lawmaker and the asset management company was noted by the American Accountability Foundation, a non-profit government oversight and research organization, after Schumer rebuked efforts to scrap a Labor Department rule that would allow retirement fiduciaries to allocate funds in accordance with the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, also known as ESG. Both the House and Senate passed a resolution opposed to the rule, which President Joe Biden is expected to veto.

BlackRock is a leading proponent of the ESG movement, which critics say mingles political and social causes such as decreasing carbon emissions and achieving racial diversity in a manner that compromises or distracts from profitability. Schumer nevertheless accepted $103,950 from individuals associated with BlackRock and $10,000 from a political action committee controlled by the company, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.

“ESG opponents are trying to turn it into a dirty acronym, deploying attacks they’ve used for elements of a so-called woke agenda,” Schumer said on social media this week as the resolution moved through Congress. “They call ESG wokeness. They call it a cult. They call it an incursion into free markets. I say ESG is just common sense.”

Candidates from both parties benefit from BlackRock money, with Republicans getting $639,000 and Democrats getting $453,000 in the most recent midterm election cycle. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) were the second and third-largest individual recipients of funds from BlackRock and individuals associated with BlackRock.

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Chuck Schumer Learned Nothing From the Failure of Pot Legalization in California

During the next year, California officials said last week, the state expects to seize “more than $1 billion worth of illegal cannabis products.” That announcement came a few weeks after the U.S. Justice Department bragged about guilty pleas by 11 unlicensed California marijuana merchants who had been nabbed with help from state and local law enforcement agencies.

The continuing war on weed in California, which supposedly legalized marijuana in 2016, reflects the striking failure to replace black-market dealers with state-licensed vendors, a plan that has been doomed by high taxes, local bans, and overregulation. Judging from the marijuana legalization bill he introduced last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D‒N.Y.) has learned nothing from that experience.

Six years after California voters approved recreational marijuana, unauthorized suppliers still account for somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of sales. A recent report from Reason Foundation, which publishes this website, highlights one major reason why licensed businesses have had so much trouble competing with illegal suppliers: Taxes are too high.

Geoff Lawrence, Reason Foundation’s managing director of drug policy, found that California’s effective tax rate ranged from $42 to $92 per ounce, depending on the jurisdiction, compared to an estimated wholesale production cost of $35 per ounce. The corresponding rates in Colorado and Oregon, both of which have been more successful at displacing the black market, are about $33 and $21, respectively.

Despite modest tax relief approved this year, legal marijuana remains overpriced in California. It is also inconvenient to buy in much of the state, Lawrence notes, thanks to local sales bans that have created “massive cannabis deserts” where “consumers have no access to a legal retailer within a reasonable distance of their home.”

Legal sellers also must contend with burdensome licensing requirements and regulations. Dale Gieringer, California director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, says those rules help explain why legal marijuana prices are much higher than he anticipated.

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‘Who Could Be That Dumb’: Top Democrat Wants Federal Crackdown on Fake Vaccine Cards

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that the federal government needs to crack down on the proliferation of fake COVID-19 vaccination cards in the midst of restrictions and rhetoric around vaccine passports.

The majority leader, in an announcement, called for “all-out enforcement” by the federal government.

“They are paying money for a fake card and risking prosecution,” said Schumer, holding up a picture of a falsified Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) card. “Who could be that dumb, who could be that dumb, the vaccine is free, the vaccine is safe, get the vaccine.”

Schumer said that the practice is illegal while saying that there needs to be a federal education campaign showing that it is against the law to sell or buy a fake card.

“Too many people,” he said, “are looking to buy them.”

Schumer is demanding U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the FBI team up with officials from the Department of Health and Human Services to launch a crackdown on the counterfeit cards and start a campaign to make clear that forging the cards could land people in federal prison.

He also wants the Justice Department to immediately prioritize cases involving fake vaccine cards and is pushing for Customs and Border Protection to work harder to find counterfeit cards being sent from overseas.

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Schumer Says Senate Will Move Ahead on Marijuana Legalization With or Without Biden

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declared that Senate Democrats will move forward on marijuana legalization with or without Joe Biden’s support, highlighting Biden’s lack of influence within his own party.

In a Politico interview published Saturday, Schumer indicated that Biden’s hesitation to back federal marijuana legalization won’t stop the Democrats from enacting it.

“He [Biden] said he’s studying the issue, so [I] obviously want to give him a little time to study it. I want to make my arguments to him, as many other advocates will,” the Senate Democratic leader said. “But at some point we’re going to move forward, period.”

“When a few of the early states — Oregon and Colorado — wanted to legalize, all the opponents talked about the parade of horribles: Crime would go up. Drug use would go up. Everything bad would happen,” Schumer explained.  “The legalization of states worked out remarkably well.” 

“They were a great success. The parade of horribles never came about, and people got more freedom. And people in those states seem very happy,” he added.

Schumer’s remarks come after Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki noted on Friday that Biden “believes in decriminalizing the use of marijuana, but his position has not changed” on broader nationwide legalization.

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