Tag: corruption

Evidence Suggests Alaska’s ‘Decoy Dan’ Illegally Colluded With Democrat Dark-Money Group

Americans for Public Trust outlined in a Federal Election Commission complaint how “Decoy Dan,” a purported spoiler candidate with the same name as Alaska’s incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, may have violated federal election laws by coordinating with a dark money group. Recent reporting by The New York Times alleges that Democrat candidate Mary Pelota’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee actively recruited candidates to confuse voters and manipulate Alaska’s U.S. Senate race.

Together, this suggests a more complicated scheme to influence that race and possibly tip the balance of control of the U.S. Senate. Americans deserve answers about what happened in Alaska and whether federal election laws were in fact violated.

The New York Times reported last week that in the summer of 2025, Mary Peltola’s aides directed a staffer to search for every Dan Sullivan in Alaska. Jerid Kurtz, an operative introduced to the Peltola campaign by aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, called a Peltola aide in late May to say he had just arrived in Petersburg, the hometown of Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. (“Decoy Dan”), shortly before he filed to run for Senate.

The Times describes Petersburg as “a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea.” Kurtz was not the only notable visitor that spring. Peltola held a campaign event on May 26, three days before Decoy Dan filed his candidacy. Decoy Dan denies any connection, telling KFSK, “I have not been in contact with her or her campaign.”

The Times also reported on texts in which Peltola advisers, watching a focus group, wrote, “Do we have a scheme for you.” The Peltola campaign and the DSCC deny recruiting anyone. Decoy Dan has maintained, including through his attorney in court, that his campaign is genuine.

Public discussion has largely coalesced around the view that ballot-stacking is not illegal. That view misses the bigger legal story. That story is found in Americans for Public Trust’s Sept. 8 complaint.

The complaint describes how Decoy Dan’s only known campaign consultant, who was only made known after metadata revealed her relationship with the campaign, also held a leadership role at a dark-money group that spent more than half a million dollars attacking Sen. Dan Sullivan in the three months leading up to the August primary. Holding both a role within the Decoy Dan campaign and an outside group that attacked the campaign’s primary opponent could have violated federal election rules on coordination.

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Tucker Carlson Says Trump Is Considering a Nuclear Strike on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain

Tucker Carlson claimed in a post on X on Sunday night that the Trump administration is considering launching a nuclear strike targeting Pickaxe Mountain in central Iran and that the president is expected to make a decision by November 7.

“Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran,” Carlson wrote.

Carlson said that Israeli intelligence has claimed that the “Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program” underneath Pickaxe Mountain, allegations that Tehran has denied.

“No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place,” Carlson said. “No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place.”

For his part, Trump has publicly ruled out using a nuclear bomb against Iran, but he has been threatening to strike Pickaxe Mountain. “We’ve knocked out their nuclear. We still have to take care of, I would say one or two sites, but we can do that in 10 minutes,” Trump told reporters over the weekend. “You probably could look at Pickaxe Mountain, and you have to take care of that. We can do that all very quickly.”

In his post, Carlson said that Netanyahu was pushing for the US nuclear strike due to his precarious political position following Israel’s October 27 Knesset election. Netanyahu’s coalition led his opposition but failed to gain the majority needed to form a government.

“To that end, [Netanyahu has] applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war they’ve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations,” Carlson wrote.

The former Fox News host, who spoke with President Trump before he launched the war on February 28, went on to discuss the potential consequences of the US using a nuclear bomb, which would mark a first since World War II.

“An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final,” Carlson said.

He pointed out that the Pentagon has been rewriting the US nuclear strategy to “make first use of so-called ‘battlefield nukes’ easier and therefore more likely.” The Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, has for more than a decade called for the US to develop additional capabilities to fight a “limited nuclear war.”

Carlson cited “close observers” who said Trump would likely decide by the weekend, or November 7, whether or not to carry out a nuclear strike. He also said that the president is “hesitating” for the time being and is “listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made.”

Trump was also supposedly favoring diplomacy before joining Israel’s 12-Day War against Iran in June 2025 and before launching the current war alongside Israel on February 28.

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VAERS and VSAFE: The “Worst Case Scenario” Twice

Files that were removed from the internet are in the evidence pack.

The scale of the violation is hard to imagine, I know. After the dazed feeling wears off, let’s get busy. I also want to thank Dr. Clayton Baker, who was the first to bring my attention to the role of Tom Shimabukuro in covering up vaccine safety signals for over ten years. Incredibly, he is still at the CDC, serving as the deputy director of the Influenza Division in their National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD).

The following research brief benefited from various digital research assistants, and I have not edited the language yet. But the information cannot wait.

Read and share with friends and family. It’s not over yet.

The United States began vaccinating against Covid-19 on 14 December 2020. Two CDC programs were designed and paid to catch any harm that clinical trials had missed. VAERS takes reports from doctors, patients and manufacturers. V-safe sends vaccinated people text messages asking how they feel. Here we follow the paper trail of those two systems from the Christmas 2020 rollout into 2022. The bottom line:

The government’s “worst case” for amount of Covid vaccine injury reports assumed 1,000 reports a day. For fourteen months it was double that. For some of those months, it was triple.

The document that matters most is a monthly report from the contractor that runs VAERS for the CDC, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). It covers December 2020 and went to the CDC’s contracting officer’s representative on 16 January 2021, with CDC program staff and an FDA reviewer copied. Its first page carries a chart.

A red line marks 1,000 reports a day, which the government’s own planning called the “worst case.” The reports crossed that line on 21 December, the winter solstice, in the first week of the rollout. They dipped under it for three days around Christmas. From 26 December they stayed over it. The contractor told the CDC. that it was “unable to meet processing and other timeframes (data processing, telephone inquiries, clinical inquiries, etc.)” (GDIT report, PDF p. 8). All this while they were telling everyone everything was ok.

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Carney Liberals block motion to study Canadian church arsons

A motion by a Conservative MP to study arson attacks and crimes against Christian churches and other religious places was shot down by Liberal MPs, who claimed that it is not warranted.

On October 29, during debate in a House of Commons Heritage Committee meeting, Conservative MP Andrew Lawton made a motion to “undertake a study of no fewer than eight meetings on vandalism, arson, shootings and other criminal attacks against places of worship in Canada.”

Lawton’s motion noted that since 2015, “police-reported hate crimes targeting religion have more than doubled, from 469 to 1,115 a year.”

He called on the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture to “appear on a panel of his own, without other witnesses, for no less than two hours, and invite the Minister of Public Safety, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Statistics Canada, police services and their hate crime units, and representatives of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and other faith communities, including congregations whose places of worship have been attacked, as well as any other witnesses the committee deems relevant,” to discuss the matter.

However, the committee chair, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner, ruled the motion “inadmissible as it exceeded the mandate of the committee.”

When the question was asked, “Shall the decision of the Chair be sustained?” all Liberal and other MPs except the Conservatives on the committee voted “yes.”

Lawton then brought forward another motion asking the committee recognize that “historic religious buildings and faith traditions are important parts” of Canadian society and must be protected and reported to the House for further debate.

This motion was voted down as well.

Conservative MPs for some time have urged Liberal MPs to back a bill that, if passed, would make church arsonists pay for the damages they cause, saying that it is needed, as “vandalizing places of worship is unacceptable.”

The Liberals thus far have refused to back the bill.

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Dartmouth Provost Who Warned About AI Cheating Resigns After Investigation of His Own AI Usage

Santiago Schnell, who stepped down this week as provost of Dartmouth College, had built part of his public profile warning that universities weren’t doing enough to fight AI cheating. An internal investigation found he’d failed to disclose his own extensive use of artificial intelligence, including in that very warning.

Ars Technica reports that Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed on August 9 titled “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” An advisory committee at Dartmouth later found that he had not disclosed significant AI use in that op-ed, nor in at least one academic paper, even though both publishers required such disclosure.

The committee’s report said Schnell showed “insufficient cooperation” during the investigation. He handed over his Dartmouth laptop but did not turn over logs from his personal AI accounts tied to the writings under review, and he declined to meet with the committee. Investigators did get access to his Claude enterprise account, used through Dartmouth, and those logs showed him using the chatbot to revise papers, find and fix bugs in code, and edit or generate figures.

In one exchange cited in the report, Schnell asked Claude to review a paper headed for the journal ChemSystemsChem as though it were a specialist referee. “I am getting read[y] to submit the enclosed paper, its supplementary materials and the enclosed repo to ChemSystemsChem. This paper is not biological, but rather chemical. Imagine that you are a reviewer for this paper with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics. What would be your referee report for this paper?” he wrote. He also asked language models to take TeX files, correct files and a code repository, and generate new figures.

The report also describes Schnell uploading a manuscript titled “Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance” to Claude and asking whether it contained “many signatures of AI writing.” He then submitted a revised version incorporating the chatbot’s suggested changes.

Schnell told Semafor he had used AI chatbots “to refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors.” He told one journal editor he had “used AI as an editorial tool” to “help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments.” Asked why he had not disclosed AI use to an academic journal, he said he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.”

The committee wasn’t satisfied it had the full picture. Its report said “the nature of the Provost’s actual AI use” remained unclear, and that his public statements may have understated how much he actually relied on AI tools, noting his use “went beyond his other public” characterizations of it.

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Alaska’s Decoy Scandal Brings Back The Usual Suspects For Shady Election Tactics

Marc Elias is back. The notorious Democratic lawyer who played a critical role in the 2016 Russia hoax is again in the news. His law firm has been identified by the New York Times as part of the expanding scandal involving Democratic effort to confuse voters in Alaska with a decoy candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan.

For those familiar with Elias’s checkered history, this is a case of rounding up the usual suspects.

The scandal involving Democratic candidate Mary Peltola has quickly snowballed this week. A New York Times blockbuster investigative report quotes former staff who claim she knew of a cynical effort by her own campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to confuse voters by recruiting and fielding a decoy “Dan Sullivan” candidate in the race against incumbent Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan (R-Alaska). State and federal investigations are now unfolding, with dozens of federal subpoenas raining down on Alaska.

The effort to get voters to cast mistaken ballots is grossly unethical and, even in these rage-filled times, a uniquely disgraceful scheme. Peltola and the Democratic Party had long denied any involvement in the other Sullivan’s candidacy. So when the Times produced evidence that she allegedly knew, and that Democratic staffers and lawyers had been deeply involved from the beginning, many of us were surprised – that is, until the name “Marc Elias” emerged. Then it made more sense.

The Elias Law Group was already in the news this election cycle for threatening reporters with defamation lawsuits if they kept asking questions about the health of former Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for Senate in North Carolina. Earlier, Elias caused a stir during an unsuccessful Democratic gerrymandering effort, raising the idea that Democratic leaders could abolish the entire Virginia government after courts blocked their attempted radical redistricting plan.

The fact that figures such as Peltola and Cooper wanted to be associated with any law firm headed by Elias is itself an indictment of their judgment and standards.

Despite his losses in cases such as National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, Elias is still a favorite of many on the left thanks to his aggression and partisan fervor. The controversies that make him notorious to many make him popular with others.

Elias was the general counsel to the Clinton presidential campaign when it secretly funded the infamous Steele Dossier and pushed the false Alfa Bank conspiracy theory. (His fellow Perkins Coie partner, Michael Sussmann, was later indicted but acquitted for making a false statement to the FBI.)

Clinton campaign officials lied to reporters during the 2016 campaign, denying any involvement in the Steele Dossier. Journalists discovered the truth after the election – that the Clinton campaign had hidden payments for the dossier as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to Perkins Coie. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said that when he tried to report the story, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.'”

Times reporter Maggie Haberman later observed that “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” The Federal Election Commission ultimately sanctioned the Clinton campaign for the subterfuge.

While raising money as the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy, Elias’s group has been involved in gerrymandering and efforts criticized as seeking to invalidate Republican votes, including unsuccessful efforts to challenge Democratic electoral losses.

In Maryland, Elias’s team supported another abusive gerrymandering scheme that a court found not only violated Maryland law but the state constitution’s equal protection, free speech and free elections clauses. The court found that the proposed map “subverts the will of those governed.”

One media site accused Elias and his group of “making millions off gerrymandering efforts” while publicly denouncing Republican gerrymandering.

In 2024, Elias’s legal team was also accused of pushing “to bar third-party presidential candidates – including Cornel West – from swing state ballots where they might siphon votes” from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

Likewise, the New York Times reported that the Elias firm’s work “on behalf of a Soros-funded PAC in Texas … was opposed by a left-leaning election watchdog as undermining laws intended to limit the influence of major donors.”

His group’s work for New York’s redistricting effort was ridiculed as not only ignoring the express will of the voters and also effectively negating Republicans’ votes.

In 2024, the Chief Judge of the Western District of Wisconsin criticized the Elias Law Group for one of its challenges. Judge James Peterson (an Obama appointee) said that the argument “simply does not make any sense.”

Now, Elias’s group is linked to the decoy scandal in Alaska, which allegedly aimed to make voters cast mistaken ballots. What distinguishes lawyers involved in this type of voter disruption is less their talent as their willingness. There are simply some things that most lawyers will not do.

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California Jail Goes on Three-Hour Lockdown Rather Than Hand Criminal Illegal Aliens to ICE, Monterey County Supervisor Tells Agent They Will Not Release Anyone When ICE is Present

The Monterey County Jail in Salinas was visited by ICE agents on Tuesday for a targeted operation seeking three individuals with prior arrests for DUI, drug offenses, and providing false identification.

Instead of working with them to facilitate transfers, the jail was placed on lockdown for roughly three hours, suspending new bookings and inmate releases while a crowd of protesters and observers gathered outside.

ICE left without taking anyone into custody during the standoff, and the sheriff’s office has indicated that they would do it again.

The three criminal illegal aliens in question were Eduardo Castro-Lopez (also known as Jordan Eduardo Yac), Jose Luis Quinones (also known as Jose Manuel Garcia), and Angelina Ramirez-Sepulveda.

An ICE spokesperson told Border Hawk that “what should have been a simple, routine operation quickly went sideways.”

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“The Height Of Hypocrisy”: Charity Founder Gets Eight Years For Embezzling Millions

The founder of a charity that helped low-income workers cover emergency bills has been sentenced to eight years in federal prison for spending millions of dollars in donations on himself. Keith Taylor, 59, of New York, founded Modest Needs around 2002, and U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon sentenced him, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced Wednesday. He pleaded guilty in August 2025 to defrauding the charity and its donors and to evading more than $1 million in federal income taxes.

Modest Needs was a 501(c)(3) that used crowd-sourced funding to help people living paycheck to paycheck with unexpected costs such as medical bills or a broken appliance. Prosecutors say Taylor embezzled more than $2.5 million from the charity and its donors since at least 2015 and used it to fund his own lifestyle.

The list of what the money bought is the heart of the case. Taylor regularly ate at Per Se, Jean-Georges, Masa and Marea, sometimes twice a day, and spent more than $320,000 of charity funds at New York restaurants and steakhouses. Donations also paid over $300,000 of the rent on a 30th-floor apartment in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, more than $100,000 to food delivery services, and bills for his electronics and his own medical care. Another $270,000 went straight into his personal brokerage account.

“Keith Taylor embezzled millions from a charity for low-income families to pay for his own lavish lifestyle,” U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said. “This is the height of hypocrisy.” He added that Taylor “shattered the trust of those who believed in the mission of the charity, denying essential help to vulnerable individuals and families in genuine need.”

Taylor was arrested in June 2024, and prosecutors say the spending did not stop. He purportedly resigned and was barred from the charity’s bank accounts as a condition of pretrial release, yet he kept using its money for meals, medical expenses and the rent on the luxury apartment, in violation of those conditions.

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‘Epstein Files’ Include Information Pertaining To National Security

Attorney General Todd Blanche has claimed that there are no national security secrets included in the “Epstein files” – the trove of documents the Justice Department holds on deceased multimillionaire sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

“There’s not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding,” Blanche said around the time that the DOJ started releasing the Epstein files last winter.

However, an inventory of the Epstein files shows that, contrary to what Blanche said, there is classified information included in the files. Government documents ostensibly can only be classified if their release would damage national security.

The document that shows there’s classified material in the Epstein files is an inventory compiled by the FBI when they were redacting the files for public disclosure. The inventory says that on March 3, 2025, agents responded to a “request for any documents at a higher classification (50D serials 538, 539, 684).”

The inventory further reveals the presence of an “Inventory sheet with page counts and red lines showing classified material (x2).” It also says there are “CDs with classified materials (x2).”

The inventory was first reported by CBS News, which noted that the Epstein Files Transparency Act – which Congress passed to force disclosure of the files – authorizes withholding information in the interest of national security or foreign policy.

CBS also reported that there appears to be missing documents from the Epstein files, including financial records collected as evidence in a federal prosecution.

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog announced a review in April of the department’s compliance with the law mandating the release of the Epstein files.

The review from the inspector general’s office will focus on how the department collected, reviewed and redacted materials in preparation for their release, as well as its process for addressing concerns that arose after the files were made public, when Epstein survivors complained that personal information about them had been disclosed.

Meanwhile, at least 3 million documents from the Epstein files have yet to be released, according to public reports.

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FDA Official Urged Fatal Myocarditis Warning on COVID Vaccine Labels 10 Months Ago. It Was Never Added.

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety official recommended adding a warning about fatal myocarditis to mRNA COVID-19 vaccine labels in December 2025, after an agency review identified several pediatric deaths as possibly or probably related to vaccination.

More than 10 months later, the agency hasn’t added the warning.

According to documents obtained by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, an FDA pharmacovigilance expert — Dr. Meghna Alimchandani — emailed agency leadership on Dec. 5, 2025, formally recommending that a warning for fatal myocarditis be added to mRNA COVID-19 vaccine labels.

Her recommendation followed an internal memo from Dr. Vinay Prasad, then-head of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). The memo, later leaked to The New York Times, revealed that agency researchers had initially identified “no fewer than 10” child or teen deaths tied to vaccine-induced myocarditis.

However, documents released in June by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) showed that a month after CBER identified the 10 child deaths, it reduced the number of deaths to seven and downgraded the probability that the vaccines were directly responsible.

Several former FDA officials told RealClearInvestigations that the leaked memos and documents — along with reporting by The New York Times and other news outlets — “appears to have unsettled the FDA’s safety office,” leading the agency to reduce the number of child deaths that it linked to the COVID-19 shots.

In May 2025, the FDA directed Pfizer and Moderna to strengthen their COVID-19 vaccine label warnings by expanding the age group at risk for vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis and warning that myocardial injury can be lasting — but the warning about fatal outcomes has never been added.

Thacker suggested that overlapping political, pharmaceutical and media interests may have led to the FDA decision not to add the warning.

He attributed the lack of action partly to the Trump administration’s investment in Operation Warp Speed, which accelerated vaccine development in 2020, and to what he describes as the Biden administration’s reluctance to publicize findings that could undermine its vaccination policies.

Drug safety advocate Kim Witczak, a former member of the FDA Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, told The Defender that the warning label issue should not be partisan.

“This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats, Trump, Biden or RFK Jr., it’s about the American public’s right to know,” Witczak said. “If FDA scientists identified credible evidence of fatal myocarditis and recommended updating the COVID vaccine labels, why hasn’t that happened? Who made that decision?”

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