Secret Service Deputy Director Quits Amid Questions Over Ties To Drone-Defense Maker Fortem

Deputy Director Matt Quinn announced his resignation from the Secret Service in an internal agency email Friday amid questions about his conflicts of interest over the agency’s counter-drone technology.

Quinn served 23 years as a Secret Service agent before retiring in 2021. He then went to work at drone-manufacturer Fortem Technologies, which sells the DroneHunter product, as a senior vice president for three years before returning to the agency last year to serve as deputy director. His last day will be Nov. 7.

As RealClearPolitics first reported, Quinn was criticized by several current and former Secret Service agents for admitting during a mostly softball Sunday CBS News “60 Minutes” interview that the Secret Service was not prepared for an attack by a drone swarm.

The piece featured a DroneHunter demonstration without mentioning several technical problems the platform has experienced. RealClearPolitics over the last 48 hours submitted detailed questions to the Secret Service about some of the statements made during the “60 Minutes” interview about the drone technology, its effectiveness, whether the DroneHunter’s purchases were competitively bid, and the agency’s track record in taking out drones.

The “60 Minutes” report did not mention Quinn’s prior work for Fortem. The Secret Service did not respond to RCP’s questions.

Even before Quinn’s announced departure, several Secret Service sources were questioning a report in a recent CBS “60 Minutes” segment that the agency used electronic jamming equipment to take down a drone at the Army-Navy game in Baltimore last December. The game was attended by the president and several members of Congress.

The sources suggest that the Secret Service is not providing the proper context about the downed drone, while raising concerns that it was most likely a friendly-fire incident.

CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell sat down with Secret Service Director Sean Curran and Quinn in a joint interview that aired Sunday night, Oct. 11. The three discussed this year’s surge in threats to President Trump and his Cabinet and how the agency is trying to adapt to dangers posed by autonomous attack drones, not just lone gunmen.

The 13-minute report features scenes of Curran and Quinn at the agency’s Rowley Training Center demonstrating counter-drone systems. The segment featured drone-fighting technology, including the DroneHunter, a weapon that uses AI and radar to disable what O’Donnell referred to as “enemy drones.” When it’s working properly, the DroneHunter captures targeted unmanned aerial vehicles in a net.

At one point, Quinn, who concedes during the interview that the agency doesn’t have the capability to stop a swarm of drones, narrates as a DroneHunter hexacopter captures an unmanned aerial vehicle in a training demonstration.

“Whoa,” O’Donnell remarks while watching the capture starting to take place.

“What you see is the drone hanging from the drone hunter,” Quinn explains. “So, the bad guy drone is now captured. It’s gonna take it to a predetermined safe area.”

Near the end of the segment, O’Donnell states without citing a source: “60 Minutes has learned the Secret Service took down a drone using electronic jamming equipment at the Army-Navy game in Baltimore last December where the president and members of Congress were in attendance.”

It was just one line in the segment, and there was no explanation of whether the drone posed a genuine threat to Trump and everyone else gathered in the stadium for the annual military academy football rivalry. The report also didn’t indicate whether the drone was associated with a foreign actor or was simply a hobbyist’s drone that posed no threat at all.

Active and retired Secret Service agents are now calling on agency leaders to explain more fully what happened. Their biggest question is whether it was a case of friendly fire. Instead of intercepting an alien drone that may or may not have posed a threat, a Secret Service officer or agent used a handheld drone-jamming gun to disable and take out one of its own surveillance drones monitoring the stadium, the sources tell RealClearPolitics.

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Nearly 40% of FDA Advisory Meetings Included Patient Representatives With Ties to Pharma

Nearly 40% of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee meetings held between 2013 and 2022 included patient or consumer representatives affiliated with organizations funded by pharmaceutical companies, according to a study published this month in Health Affairs Scholar.

FDA advisory committees assess the safety and effectiveness of drugs, including vaccines, and make recommendations on whether the FDA should approve them.

Researchers Genevieve Kanter, Ph.D., and Toni Mankowitz of the University of Southern California found that 38% of the meetings included representatives of industry-funded advocacy organizations.

In 11% of meetings, representatives attended on behalf of organizations funded in part by the manufacturer whose drug the FDA was evaluating.

“These prevalence rates show that these organizational relationships extend beyond isolated cases and signal a broader problem warranting FDA policy attention,” the researchers wrote.

According to the FDA website, the agency has about 50 technical and scientific advisory committees and panels. Members include “science-oriented” professionals, including doctors, researchers, biologists, chemists, statisticians and others, selected for their expertise on a specific committee’s function and topic area.

In addition, the website states, “each committee typically includes a consumer representative and an industry representative and, based on the meeting topic, a patient representative who provides the patient or caregiver experience for a particular disease, condition, or medical product.”

According to the study, which focused only on potential conflicts of interest among consumer and patient representatives:

“Although the FDA has enacted policies to curb conflicts of interest common among its scientific members, it has paid less attention to potential conflicts arising from patient and consumer representatives who have ties to organizations financially supported by pharmaceutical companies.”

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Carney’s little conflict of interest

Prime Minister Mark Carney is facing conflict-of-interest allegations over his $2-billion heat pump rebate program, following revelations about past investments in manufacturers that could benefit from the subsidies.

Conservative MPs have questioned whether his former ties to Brookfield and related businesses create a conflict, much like other government initiatives launched since Carney took office. The available disclosures on the matter do not technically establish that Carney designed the program to benefit those companies, but the connection seems obvious to critics.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is facing conflict-of-interest allegations over his $2-billion heat pump rebate program after ethics filings revealed past investments in manufacturers that could benefit from the taxpayer-funded subsidies.

“How is that not corrupt?” Conservative MP John Brassard, chair of the Commons ethics committee, demanded in the House of Commons on Thursday.

“The conflict of interest is so blatantly obvious, but what’s surprising is the Prime Minister’s not even hiding it anymore,” Brassard said.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre also accused Carney of directing taxpayer money toward Brookfield-connected businesses while speaking to reporters on Parliament Hill before question period.

“The Prime Minister just finished announcing he’s going to take $2 billion out of the pockets of Canadians and give it to companies like those owned by Brookfield,” Poilievre said.

He argued Canadians should decide for themselves whether to purchase heat pumps rather than have Ottawa redistribute their money.

The rebates, however, are intended for homeowners rather than direct corporate grants, although manufacturers and installers could benefit from increased demand.

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House Oversight Democrat in Sexual Relationship with Leftist YouTuber Tied to Influencer Program That is Under Investigation by Her Committee: Report

A House Democrat is reportedly in a sexual relationship with a liberal YouTuber at the same time her committee is investigating one of his projects.

Sources Say News’ Juliegrace Brufke, a veteran Capitol Hill reporter previously employed by Axios and The Daily Beast, reported on Thursday that 34-year-old Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) has been seeing 24-year-old Jack Cocchiarella while the House Oversight Committee is looking into Chorus’s influencer program.

The Chorus Creator Incubator Program is a leftist nonprofit initiative that pays online influencers like Cocchiarella up to $8,000 per month to spread Democratic propaganda.

Cocchiarella sits on the creative council of Chorus and is listed as a co-founder.

According to Brufke, Ansari and Cocchiarella have been together on several occasions, including at the young leftist’s 24th birthday party last Friday.

More from Brufke:

Ansari was at Cocchiarella’s residence for his 24th birthday party on Friday, according to sources in attendance, with one source describing them as having a flirtatious dynamic with the congresswoman and helping set up ahead of the gathering kicking off.

It was not a one-off, according to other sources.

The pair appeared affectionate at the MS NOW party during White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, according to screenshots of text messages from multiple confirmed MS NOW party attendees describing what they had witnessed. Two others confirmed they saw the pair together at the party. One source said Cocchiarella confirmed to them directly that he was involved with “a Democratic congresswoman.”

Both Ansari and Cocchiarella turned up at a MoveOn “Won’t Back Down” event in Phoenix in August. Cocchiarella has also had Ansari on his YouTube show as recently as July.

In some cases, the personal relationships of public officials are no one’s business. But when a member of Congress is DATING a person whose program is under investigation by the legislative body, this should be national news.

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Since 2025, Trump Made More Stock Trades Than All 535 Congress Members Combined

President Donald Trump made nearly 30,000 stock trades since his return to office, marking a far higher volume of trades than all 535 members of Congress combined, a new Bloomberg analysis finds.

Between his inauguration in January 2025 and the end of June, Trump and his team made nearly 28,700 trades, his financial disclosures show. That amounts to roughly 80 trades per market day for nearly a year and a half.

In that period, House lawmakers reported making 19,400 stock trades, while senators reported 2,900, for a total of 22,300 transactions. A few lawmakers were responsible for a large portion of the trades, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who reported 8,000 transactions in that time.

Trump’s trades have been a major boon for him, as the only modern president who’s ever disclosed trading individual stocks. Previous reports have found that Trump’s 2025 trades alone were worth as much as $1.8 billion, and his trades in the first three months of 2026 were worth as much as $750 million.

These trades have come as he’s driven policy for and outright publicized companies that he has bought stock in; a recent report by Democrats on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee found that Trump has made up to $15.5 million in profits on his oil and gas holdings as the companies’ stocks have risen due to his war on Iran.

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Florida Judge Resigns After Caught Making $30,000 in Donations to Left-Leaning Political Organizations and Candidates, Including Joe Biden

A local Florida judge resigned after she was caught making $30,000 in donations to left-leaning political organizations and candidates, including Joe Biden.

Diana Tennis served on the Ninth Circuit Court in Orange and Osceola Counties for more than a decade.

An investigation revealed that Diana Tennis broke the Florida Code of Judicial Conduct and made 900 donations to left-leaning candidates.

Judge Diana Tennis resigned four months before her term ended.

WESH 2 reported:

A local judge is resigning following an investigation that revealed she was making political contributions.

Diana Tennis has been serving the Ninth Circuit Court in Orange and Osceola counties since 2015. Tennis came under investigation last September.

The judicial qualifications commissioner found that she contributed nearly $30,000 in 900 donations to left-leaning political organizations and candidates, including Joe Biden and Sen. Bill Nelson, between 2016 and 2021.

In July, the state Supreme Court ordered a suspension, a fine and public reprimand.

Instead, Tennis resigned, meaning she won’t serve the remaining four months of her term.

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Obama-Appointed Judge Who Blocked FBI from Moving Headquarters to Reagan Building Donated Almost $6k to Dems

The Obama-appointed judge who ruled that the FBI cannot relocate its headquarters to the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center has donated thousands of dollars to Democrats and has a history of ruling against President Donald Trump.

Judge Theodore D. Chuang, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, found on Monday that the administration’s plan cannot proceed. As CBS News reported:

Last November, the state of Maryland sued Patel and the bureau, alleging that the Trump administration had attempted to “unlawfully sabotage” the 2023 plan and illegally divert funding that Congress had designated for the plan — over $323 million — away from it.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang sided with Maryland, writing in a 47-page opinion that the Trump administration’s move to divert the funding and cancel the plan was “arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with law,” in addition to other violations of federal law.

In December, FBI Director Kash Patel said that moving the headquarters to the Reagan Building would save billions in taxpayer funds.

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Vaccine Amnesia: 75 Forgotten News Segments That Could Never Air Today

Before the press was captured, vaccine injuries were openly covered on national TV. Now the dam of censorship is breaking, and we can finally confront the tragic history that keeps repeating.

A key theme I’ve tried to highlight in this publication is that the same medical catastrophes keep repeating (because those responsible are never held accountable), so by understanding what happened in the past, you can see and understand what is happening now and what will likely happen in the future.

For example, because vaccines are “risky but necessary,” the medical profession and government, again and again, concluded that they needed to tell the public all vaccines were “safe and effective” as the potential injuries a mass vaccination campaign would cause were outweighed by “necessary” benefit the vaccines could offer. As such, examples can be found again and again of severe injuries being systematically covered up for the “greater good” (e.g., the earliest documented example I know of this happened in 1874 with the smallpox vaccine) and health authorities concocting the same set of excuses we’ve seen since smallpox as to why those vaccines failed to prevent the diseases they were supposed to.

Since the risks of most vaccines (detailed here) far outweigh their benefits, a mass-vaccination paradigm can only be sustained by censoring the evidence of harm — and then citing that manufactured silence as proof of safety. Over the decades, more and more has been done to conceal those harms. For almost a century, severe neurological injuries after vaccination were routinely reported in the medical literature. Now vaccine injuries are censored, and it is nearly impossible to publish anything critical of vaccines in a “reputable” journal.

Likewise, despite the “science” that says vaccines are safe, it is nearly impossible to obtain the raw datasets that could actually answer the question — as Steve Kirsch showed the public throughout COVID-19 with his relentless, endlessly stonewalled quest to get that data. Likewise, VAERS, a public injury-reporting database only exists because the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act required a way for patients to bypass doctors refusing to report their injuries, and as such, ever since a law mandated its creation, everything possible has been done to undermine and discredit VAERS (except when the industry uses it as “proof” to prove vaccines are safe).

This is the inescapable problem at the heart of mass vaccination. When you take a product that is not completely safe and give it to an entire population, tens of millions of healthy people, most of whom were never at meaningful risk from the disease, even a small rate of serious harm guarantees that enormous numbers are injured or killed. Since there is no way around that arithmetic the authorities have chosen concealment every time, suppressing the data, reclassifying the injuries, and dismissing each casualty as a coincidence, because the alternative is admitting the paradigm itself produces the ever-increasing wave of chronic illness sweeping our society.

For a long time, the injuries were too numerous to fully hide, so the public kept reawakening to them and the mainstream media kept covering them. The industry’s solution came after it won liability protection in the 1986 vaccine law: spend whatever it took to censor the coverage and bury the injuries. But removing that check, the public finding out and objecting, removed the only real constraint on toxic vaccines reaching the market, and progressively more dangerous ones followed, until the COVID-19 catastrophe injured so many people that even a robust censorship apparatus couldn’t contain it. Numerous polls I’ve summarized in detail here demonstrate the scale of the vaccine injuries: depending on the survey, 7% to 13% of recipients reported a serious side effect, 24% to 28% say they know someone they believe died from the shot, and 46% to 55% believe the COVID vaccines have killed a significant number of people. Propaganda has its limits, and once numbers like those take hold, a new awareness of vaccine injury surfaces across the media ecosystem, occasionally on conservative networks, but mostly in the independent press.

Because we keep forgetting the past, the cycle repeats. My goal here is to show that what we are seeing now is nothing new, that it has happened countless times before, on a smaller scale that was easier to sweep under the rug, by collecting dozens of clips that were once routinely aired on television and are almost inconceivable today, given how brutal the censorship has become.

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Judge Presiding Over Madison Brooks Rape Trial Is Mother of Convicted Serial Rapist: Report

The son of the judge set to preside over one of the men accused in the horrific gang rape of Louisiana State University student Madison Brooks is a convicted serial rapist, and the judge herself once represented him in court, the New York Post reported.

The trial for Desmond Carter, 21, one of the three men charged with raping Brooks inside a vehicle before her death, is scheduled to begin August 17 before Judge Gail Horne Ray of the 19th Judicial District Court, according to WBRZ.

Brooks, a 19-year-old LSU student, was fatally struck by a car in January 2023 after a group of men allegedly raped her and then dumped her out of a vehicle onto a Baton Rouge highway.

Now it has been widely reported that Judge Ray’s son, Nelson Dan Taylor Jr., now 46, is a convicted serial rapist. In 1997, when he was 17 and a high school student, Taylor pleaded guilty to three counts of forcible rape and five counts of aggravated burglary stemming from a series of attacks on multiple girls, including some of his classmates, between the fall of 1995 and spring of 1996.

According to reports, Taylor surprised victims in their bedrooms while armed with a knife or gun and wearing a mask. He was sentenced to 50 years.

A later post-conviction arrangement reduced aspects of the sentence. Judge Ray, then a defense attorney, represented her own son in the case.

Taylor recently returned to court on July 22 seeking to have his rape convictions and sentences set aside nearly three decades later.

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RFK Debunks Sen. Warren’s Hypocritical Attack on His Supposed Big Pharma ‘Conflict of Interest’

Reuters and Washington Post have a new deceptive report out claiming that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has financially benefited from a settlement with a top pharmaceutical company. But they left the crucial context out that showed he personally received not a dime.

Democrats are never ones for context. They love to have reasons to pretend they are destroying corruption when they are really going after personal political opponents. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for instance, had her warpaint and Tomahawk out as she screeched, “Is RFK Jr.’s son getting a cut of a $50 MILLION settlement that his dad could have influenced? I’m investigating.” Naturally, she needs something to investigate to avoid investigating Anthony Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies that pushed COVID vaccines that we now know, courtesy of Fauci‘s journal, were quite ineffective and sometimes injurious.

Kennedy responded to Warren and the lefty media outlets at the same time. “The Washington Post editorial board accuses me of a conflict of interest that might bias me against Big Pharma, whose interests they apparently seek to protect,” he posted on X, highlighting the irony of media and politicians rushing to defend monopolistic businesses. “The alleged conflict comes from money I supposedly made from a settlement in a lawsuit against Merck for injuries caused by its Gardasil vaccine.”

He emphatically stated: “The problem is that I never received a penny from the Merck Gardasil settlement, and neither has my son nor anyone else in my family.” So Warren et al. are smearing Kennedy with — surprise, surprise — lies.

Kennedy explained further, “Before taking office, I relinquished any interest in potential Gardasil fees back to the Wisner Baum law firm, which publicly confirmed this during my confirmation process. Yet @SenWarren, @Reuters, and @washingtonpost editorial board — in their ardor to protect Big Pharma — continue to push a false narrative that makes Big Pharma the victim and me the mendacious villain.”

For yet more interesting context, according to a Fox News report from last year, Warren received a whopping $5 million from Big Pharma during her 2020 presidential bid. And the Washington Post freaked out when Kennedy proposed limiting pharmaceutical ads. Always follow the money.

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