Tag: secrecy

Obama Judge Tanya Chutkan Blocks Trump Education Department From Naming Foreign Donors Who Dumped Billions Into Harvard, Columbia, and Other Elite Campuses

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from publicly releasing the names of foreign donors and contract counterparties tied to some of America’s most prominent universities.

DC US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Obama appointee who presided over the federal election case against President Trump, issued a temporary restraining order barring the Department of Education from releasing a list of foreign donors tied to as much as $5.2 billion in gifts and contracts reported by the schools since 2020.

The Department of Education announced in February that universities disclosed more than $5.2 billion in reportable foreign gifts and contracts during 2025 alone, involving more than 8,300 transactions. The agency said universities have reported a cumulative $67.6 billion in foreign funding since Section 117 was added to federal law in 1986.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act already requires schools that take federal money to report foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more.

The department began collecting individual donor names in 2020, during President Trump’s first term, while telling the schools the names would stay confidential.

In June 2026, the department reversed course. It has already published 92 “counterparties of concern.” Friday was supposed to be the day the rest of the list went public.

According to the New York Post, Chutkan ruled that disclosure of the information could “constitute irreparable harm.”

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Sen. Bill Hagerty Asks Tennessee to DISBAR Jack Smith Over Secret Subpoena for Republican Senators’ Phone Records

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) has asked the Tennessee bar to strip former Special Counsel Jack Smith of his law license, accusing the Biden-era prosecutor of hiding critical facts from a federal judge so he could secretly seize the call logs of sitting U.S. senators, including Hagerty’s own.

On September 30, 2026, one day after Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hagerty sent a four-page formal complaint to R. Culver Schmid, chairman of the Board of Professional Responsibility of the Supreme Court of Tennessee.

Smith’s Tennessee bar number is 034063. Hagerty is demanding the harshest penalty on the books: disbarment.

“I filed a bar complaint against Jack Smith this morning,” Hagerty wrote on X. “He’s a blatantly partisan actor and his prosecutorial misconduct damaged our constitutional order. He should never be able to practice law again.” He closed with a warning: “Next up, @Verizon.”

According to the complaint, Smith, while serving as special counsel in the Biden Justice Department, sent a grand jury subpoena to Verizon for non-content telephone records of sitting senators. Those logs show who called whom, the date, and how long the call lasted. They do not include the words spoken. The records, Hagerty says, “pertained to our duties as legislators.”

Attached to that subpoena was a secret nondisclosure order signed by D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg. The order barred Verizon from telling anyone, senators included, that the government had come for the data.

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Napoleon’s secret code deciphered after 217 years using AI to read emperor’s mysterious letter

After more than 200 years, a coded letter written by the wee warlord Napoleon Bonaparte has been deciphered.

Napoleon’s stepson, Eugene, the Viceroy of Italy, sent the original letter to French general Auguste de Marmont in March of 1809 amid France’s ongoing conflict with Austria.

At the time, Marmont, a close companion of the emperor, was positioned with his troops in Dalmatia, on the far side of the Adriatic, where he was totally isolated from other French forces and their allies.

While the opening line of Napoleon’ correspondence is in his native French, the next 24 are an incomprehensible mix of symbols, letters, and numbers.

Experts believe the OG correspondence would have come with a deciphering key, but that key has been lost to the mists of time, until now.

Carter Church, an engineer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, has cracked the centuries-old code with the aid of AI. 

‘I used GPT–6 Astra to break an unsolved cipher to one of Napoleon’s generals that had gone unread for 217 years. What makes this impressive isn’t actually the codebreaking, but that Astra completed the entire multi-modal workflow in six hours from a single image and goal,’ he explained on X. 

The first line reads: ‘Vous avez dû recevoir, Monsieur le Général Marmont, mes lettres des 8, 14 et 20 courant,’ which translates to: ‘You must have received, General Marmont, my letters of the 8th, 14th, and 20th of this month.’

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New Jersey Democrat Rebecca Bennett Dodges Net Worth Question Three Times Despite Calls for Transparency

New Jersey Democrat congressional candidate Rebecca Bennett repeatedly declined to disclose her net worth during a Sunday debate against incumbent Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-NJ), even as she campaigned on removing money from politics and criticized the incumbent over his financial dealings.

Bennett has pledged to “get money out of politics” and accused Kean of lacking transparency with New Jersey voters. During Sunday’s debate, however, a moderator asked her three times about her own net worth without receiving a figure.

“What is your net worth?” the moderator asked.

“I don’t know the exact number. I’m happy to follow up later, but I will say that ultimately, I think what I hear loud and clear from people is that we need to get money out of politics,” Bennett responded.

“I mean, it is deeply corrosive. I think you can draw a line from the Citizens United decision to where we are as a country right now,” she continued. “And so, what I want you all to know is that I am going to work to get dark money out of politics to end Citizens United to make sure I’m not taking any corporate PAC money because I want you all to know that I am doing this to serve all of you, and not to serve any special interests.”

“And I think that’s a clear contrast to my opponent, Congressman Tom Kean Jr. who has traded over $3 million worth of stocks and who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate PAC money,” Bennett added.

“I’m looking just for a number, rough estimate on your net worth,” the moderator pressed.

“My net worth is very similar to what we see of a lot of families around here, you know, it’s that both my husband and I work, and so we are very fortunate that we’ve been able to build the life we want,” Bennett responded.

“I want to just try and get a number. You know, let me see if I can just be more broad. Are you worth over a million dollars?” the moderator asked.

“My, like I said, I’ve been very,” Bennett began before the audience erupted in laughter.

“My husband and I have worked really hard for where we are right now. I was able to go to college on an ROTC scholarship. I used the GI Bill for my MBA, and so ultimately, this is about making sure that we are fighting for the version of the country that we’re going to leave for my daughters and the next generation,” Bennett continued.

Bennett’s refusal to disclose her net worth comes as Kean’s campaign has raised questions about her previous career in the healthcare industry.

“As a health care executive, my opponent set up lucrative deals with companies that put profits over people,” Kean wrote in a September 27 post on X. “Patients deserve leaders who will put their health, safety, and access to quality care first. Not the bottom line.”

Kean also disputed Bennett’s allegations about his stock trading during Sunday’s debate.

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Force the CIA to Disclose Its Chile Records

For some odd reason, the CIA steadfastly refuses to disclose all of its records relating to the 1973 Chilean coup, which the CIA ardently supported. The CIA says that “national security” will be jeopardized if its records are disclosed to the American people.

That’s ridiculous. What do they think will happen — that the United States will fall into the ocean or be taken over by the communists, the terrorists, the Muslims, or some other scary boogeyman?

The disclosure issue is more relevant than ever, given that September 21 was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronni Moffitt on the streets of Washington, D.C.

Letelier had served in the administration of Salvador Allende, a socialist who was democratically elected president of Chile in 1970. U.S. officials, especially those in the U.S. national-security establishment, concluded that Allende posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security.” Therefore they set into motion the events that would ultimately lead to the violent 1973 coup, which resulted in one of the most brutal military tyrannies in history — one supported by the U.S. government.

Letelier and Moffitt were driving to work that September 21 morning when a car bomb exploded and killed them both. Moffitt’s husband, who was also in the car, survived. It was a knowing, deliberate, intentional act of murder and terrorism here in the United States.

It was ultimately determined that the person in charge of planting the bomb was a man named Michael Townley. He confessed to traveling from Chile to the United States and organizing a team of Cuban exiles that assisted him in planting the car bomb.

It has always been assumed that Pinochet ordered the bombing, in large part because the CIA conducted an investigation that concluded that Pinochet did, in fact, order the bombing. That conclusion has become an important part of the historical case against Pinochet. In fact, some people are demanding the release of the CIA’s long-secret Chile records to help establish that Pinochet did, in fact, order the bombing.

That’s, of course, a distinct possibility. Letelier was living here in the United States and working for a think tank that was actively working in opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship, including trying to convince Congress to cut off aid to the Pinochet regime. Thus, it stands to reason that Pinochet certainly had a motive to kill Letelier.

However, there is something else to consider. Pinochet was not a dumb man. He had to realize that if a major terrorist attack on American soil could be traced to his regime, his good, solid relationship with the U.S. government, including foreign aid to Chile, would be finished. It is very difficult to believe that he would have been willing to take that chance just to silence a prominent critic of his regime.

There is another possibility, one that the U.S. officials and the U.S. mainstream press are loathe to consider. That possibility is that it was the CIA, rather than Pinochet, that ordered the hit on Letelier.

Yes, I know what U.S. supporters of the CIA will respond. They’ll point to that CIA investigation that concluded that it was Pinochet who ordered the hit. But isn’t that sort of like saying that the Gestapo investigated one of its murders and concluded that someone else did it? If the hypothesis being investigated is CIA involvement in the assassination, how can the CIA’s own official conclusions be treated as dispositive, especially given the CIA’s longtime expertise in covering up its assassinations?

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SpaceX Launches Classified U.S. Space Force Mission in California

The partnership between SpaceX and the U.S. Space Force has been essential to the United States’ quest for space superiority.

On Saturday, that partnership continued when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a classified payload for the U.S. Space Force, was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The launch was part of Space Force’s USSF-385 mission, but details regarding that mission have been classified.

Per KTLA:

SpaceX launched a mysterious, classified U.S. Space Force mission from California Saturday morning, with little publicly known about what was sent into orbit or where it was headed.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the USSF-385 mission lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on California’s Central Coast at 7 a.m.

The mission’s payloads, their activities and even their exact destination are classified, according to Space.com.

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Mystery Deepens As Spy Aircraft Disappears From US Air Base Without Explanation

An SR-71 Blackbird parked for years on an outdoor display at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is no longer visible in commercial satellite imagery, and the agency has offered no public explanation of where it went.

The spy aircraft, the NASA 844, has been absent from its pad since at least May 17, according to Aviation Week.

Sources told the publication that the plane was moved into a hangar earlier this year for an inspection, though NASA has not described what that inspection involves, why it is taking place, or how long it will last.

The Serial 61-7980 was the last SR-71 built and the last to fly, completing its final flight in 1999 after the Air Force had already retired the type and NASA had retained a few surviving airframes for high-speed research.

Lockheed Martin produced 32 of the reconnaissance aircraft, 12 of which were lost in accidents and none to enemy action.

Questions about the disappearance of the SR-71 come a week after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman discussed plans for a new high-altitude, high-speed X-plane and displayed images of silhouette that closely resembled a Blackbird at annual the All-In Summit in Los Angeles. 

“In the service of the first A [aeronautics] in NASA, we are rebuilding our X-plane fleet. The X-59 is researching quiet supersonic flight, but it’s just the beginning,” the NASA head told attendees.

“As NASA recommits to flight test and works alongside industry to push the boundaries of airframe and propulsion design, it will not be long before NASA once again is flying as high and as fast as we had in decades past, and then even more.”

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ICE Denounced for Enacting ‘Official Government Policy of Disappearing People’

Critics reacted with horror to a Monday report from The Associated Press detailing how US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has abruptly ended its practice of disclosing the locations of thousands of detainees.

According to the AP, ICE “has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding… detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them.”

Immigration attorneys who spoke with the AP said that their clients had “vanished” from the system after ICE removed them from its online detainee locator system last week.

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the AP that families of detainees “are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be.”

Chen added that the new policy has “serious implications” for attorneys’ ability to make contact with their clients.

Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project, told the AP that the new policy is “just another iteration of disappearing people.”

“Why would we do that in the United States of America?” Mendez asked. “It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”

Tom Jawetz, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, echoed Mendez’s analysis, writing in a social media post that the AP report reveals “an official government policy of disappearing people,” as “systems for attorneys and loved ones to know where—even whether—a person with a final removal order is in ICE custody have been wiped clean.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, described the new ICE policy as “unprecedented” for US immigration enforcement.

“People who have been detained for months are suddenly disappearing from the locator system—even if they haven’t been moved anywhere,” Reichlin-Melnick explained. “And people newly arrested are not showing up at all, their location now hidden from view.”

Georgetown University political scientist Jonathan Ladd argued that the ICE policy was a fundamental violation of long-established rights in the US that date to before the country’s official founding.

“The government moving or hiding jailed people to avoid review by courts isn’t some loophole in our habeas corpus rights,” Ladd explained. “This government behavior has been considered a violation of the people’s habeas corpus rights since at least the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679.”

Ladd further pointed out that “habeas corpus rights are guaranteed by Article I of our Constitution,” which means “hiding prisoners from the courts is unconstitutional.”

Journalist Gillian Brockell observed that the new ICE policy “will make it nearly impossible to file habeas petitions, because attorneys won’t even know what federal district their client has been moved to to stage for their removal.”

Among those sharing the AP report on social media was Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an attorney for Wilbur Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan shot by ICE in Austin, Texas on Sunday.

Initially, she and the immigrant’s wife could not make contact with him, because ICE moved him from the hospital “to an undisclosed location,” but Lincoln-Goldfinch said Monday afternoon that her client “is being held at Pearsall for interrogation.”

“We got Wilber on the phone live from detention at the press conference,” the attorney added. “He says he still has the bullet lodged in his shoulder. He says he is not doing well and has not received the medical care he needs.”

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Ottawa spent $1.9 billion housing asylum claimants since 2017, but cannot say how many are currently housed

The federal government has allocated approximately $1.9 billion to help provinces and municipalities house asylum claimants since 2017, but Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada cannot say how many people are currently living in facilities supported by the program.

The figures were disclosed in a response to an order paper question submitted by Conservative MP Fred Davies.

The Interim Housing Assistance Program pays provinces and municipalities to provide temporary accommodations and other housing support for asylum claimants. Eligible expenses include temporary housing, coordination, support services and the construction or acquisition of housing facilities.

Despite the program’s $1.9-billion price tag, IRCC said it does not have access to operational or client-specific information showing how asylum claimants move from hotels into municipally owned or controlled housing.

The department also said it cannot confirm how many people are presently housed, how many have left the system or the real-time capacity of facilities receiving federal funding.

Since January 2025, recipients have been required to report the number of asylum claimants supported twice per year.

As of May 2026, IRCC estimated that approximately 15,000 claimants received housing support between January and September 2025. Municipalities and provinces projected they would support roughly 40,000 claimants between January 2025 and March 2027.

Those plans include more than 1,500 bed spaces and 350 transitional-housing or reception-centre units.

Toronto reported supporting 7,030 asylum claimants, followed by Ottawa with 3,490 and Peel Region with 3,170. Other recipients included Durham Region, Hamilton, York Region, Waterloo Region, London, Halton Region, Simcoe County, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador.

IRCC said jurisdictions must report twice annually on expenditures and outcomes. The department acknowledged, however, that it has no real-time information about how many people are occupying the federally funded spaces.

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