Tag: taxes

DOJ Launches Inquiry Into “Individuals and Networks Stealing Government Property” After Referral by Elon Musk’s DOGE Team

Here we go!

The Justice Department will launch an inquiry into the individuals and networks stealing government property and threatening government employees.

Ed Martin, the Acting US Attorney for DC, sent Elon Musk a letter informing him that he will be launching an inquiry after a referral from DOGE.

“Thank you for the referral of individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees. After your referral, as is my practice, I will begin an inquiry,” Ed Martin wrote in a letter to Elon Musk.

Earlier this week Ed Martin announced his office would be charging and arresting individuals who threatened Elon Musk’s DOGE team.

Ed Martin did not name any names as he announced that arrests and charges were coming. It is unclear which laws were violated.

“Our initial review of the evidence presented to us indicates that certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees,” Ed Martin said.

“We are in contact with the FBI and other law-enforcement partners to proceed rapidly. We also have our prosecutors preparing,” Ed Martin added.

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Trump Directs Elon Musk’s DOGE Team to Conduct Comprehensive Audit of Pentagon

President Donald Trump revealed that he has directed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to conduct a comprehensive audit of the Pentagon’s funding.

During a press conference with Japan’s prime minister, when asked by a reporter about directives related to Pentagon budget reviews, Trump confirmed his decision.

“Yes, I have [directed Musk to review] Pentagon, Education, just about everything,” Trump said.

Trump continued, “We’re going to go through everything, just as it was so bad with what we just went through with this horrible situation [with USAID]. I guess 97% of the people have been dismissed. It was very, very unfortunate. You’re not going to find anything like that, but you’re going to find a lot.”

It can be recalled that acting USAID Director and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reportedly downsizing the bureaucratic agency, retaining only 294 of the agency’s 14,000 employees worldwide. This move cuts 97% of USAID’s staff.

“I’ve instructed him to go check the Pentagon, which is the military. Sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad. But I don’t think, proportionately, you’re going to see anything like we just saw,” Trump said.

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USAID funneled MILLIONS to Black Lives Matter through Tides Center

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) issued a $24.7 million grant to the George Soros-funded Tides Center, which then funneled millions of taxpayer funds to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Tides granted more than $12.6 million from its Black Lives Matter Support Fund to help support BLM Grassroots during the height of the racial justice riots following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. BLM Grassroots is an organization that works with local Black Lives Matter chapters and similar racial justice groups.

The discovery was revealed after the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation sued the Tides Center in California court last year, accusing the nonprofit of withholding $33 million in donations to the foundation. Tides was forced to issue a clarification that the funds were intended for BLM Grassroots, which is a distinct organization separate from BLMGNF, and other racial justice groups. Tides, which manages roughly $1.4 billion in assets, said the amount awarded was $12.6 million, according to a statement issued to Bloomberg.

The Black Lives Matter anti-police racial justice riots caused billions of dollars worth of damage to cities across the United States in 2020.

The findings resurfaced after Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, took a wrecking ball to USAID this week. DOGE revealed that the government agency has been spending billions of taxpayer dollars on outlandish expenses, such as $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala, $20 million on a children’s TV show in Iraq, $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language,” $6 million for advancing LGBT issues in “priority countries around the world,” and the list goes on.

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Arkansas Senate Passes Bill To Use Medical Marijuana Revenue To Fund Free Breakfasts For Students

The Arkansas Senate has approved a bill to set aside revenue from medical marijuana taxes to pay for free breakfast for students.

The legislation, SB 59, would supplement federal free and reduced-price meal funds with money from a state Food Insecurity Fund, paid for by cannabis taxes as well as private grants and money from the state’s general fund.

Bill sponsor Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R), noted ahead of the floor vote that “25 percent of our kids wake up food insecure every single day when they go to school.”

“Sometimes that meal that they get at school is the only nutritious meal they get in a day,” he said. “These kids have no way to feed themselves, and if they have parents that aren’t willing to sign the cards or send them with money, those districts are required to feed them, and they build up debt. But this would allow every kid in the state of Arkansas to be entitled to have a free breakfast.”

The legislation would provide meals to students regardless of whether or not they qualify for free or reduced-cost food under federal law.

“We would ask the first of federal dollars that are available be utilized, and anything else that’s remaining,” Dismang said. “The state of Arkansas would pick up utilizing the medical marijuana dollars to help make that district whole for providing that breakfast.”

The measure passed by a vote of 26-2 days after it was unanimously approved by the Senate Education Committee. It now heads to the House of Representatives for consideration.

The Senate’s passage of SB 59 follows an endorsement of the proposal last month from Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), who previewed the bill in her State of the State address. Notably, Sanders, a former press secretary under the first Trump administration, has historically resisted cannabis policy reform.

“We will also use those funds to make school breakfast in Arkansas completely free for any student that chooses to participate,” she said in the speech, saying the use of medical marijuana funds would make the program “sustainable for years to come.”

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New GOP Bill Would Block Marijuana Industry Tax Deductions, Even After Federal Rescheduling

Two GOP senators have introduced a bill that would continue to block marijuana businesses from taking federal tax deductions under Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code 280E—even if it’s ultimately rescheduled.

Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) filed the “No Deductions for Marijuana Businesses Act” on Thursday to maintain the tax barrier for the industry, which has been eagerly following the ongoing administrative process of moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in large part because it would address their 280E challenges under current law.

While rescheduling isn’t a guarantee, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) hearings on the proposal have been delayed, the senators are aiming to preemptively take the wind out of the industry’s sails.

The bill would amend the IRS code to say that, in addition to all Schedule I and Schedule II drugs, businesses that work with marijuana specifically would be barred from taking tax deductions that are available to other industries.

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Tariffs and the Constitution

The taxing power in the federal government resides in the Congress. The Constitution states that Congress has the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts” of the federal government. Indeed, in order to emphasize the location of this power in the Congress, the Constitution also requires that all legislation “for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.”

So, if only Congress can impose taxes, how can the president impose tariffs?

Here is the backstory.

However one characterizes a tariff, since it consists of the compulsory payment of money to the federal government, it is a form of taxation. It is – to use James Madison’s language – a duty or an impost. The federal government survived on duties and imposts – some of which were imposed on the states – from the time of its creation in 1789 until the War Between the States. Even under Abraham Lincoln, when unconstitutional income taxes were imposed, they were done by legislation, not executive fiat.

Then came Franklin D. Roosevelt and a congressional ban on the exportation of armaments to be implemented at the president’s discretion. This sounds fairly benign, yet it fomented the supercharged presidency that we have today. When Congress banned the sale of American arms to foreign countries, it did so by giving FDR the power to decide what to ban and upon which countries to impose the ban. Then it did the unthinkable: It made a violation of the president’s fiats a federal crime.

I call this unthinkable because under the Constitution’s Due Process Clause jurisprudence, at the federal level only Congress can make behavior criminal.

In defiance of FDR’s ban, Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, an American manufacturer of military hardware, sold armaments to the government of Bolivia, and the Department of Justice persuaded a federal grand jury to indict the corporation. Then a federal judge dismissed the indictment on the constitutional basis that only Congress can decide what behavior is criminal and it cannot give that power to the president.

The trial court merely enforced the well-known and universally accepted non-delegation doctrine. It stands for the principle that the three branches of government cannot delegate away any of their core powers. Among Congress’ core powers is writing laws and deciding what behavior is criminal. By giving away this power to the president, the trial court ruled, Congress violated the non-delegation principle, and thus FDR’s determination that arms sales to Bolivia was criminal was itself a nullity.

The government appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Had the court simply reversed the trial judge and sent the case back to him for trial, we might never have heard of this case or the policy it established.

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Could We Be Witnessing the End of Liberal Media?

For years, the liberal media has been a dominant force in shaping public opinion; whether parroting the Democratic Party’s talking points, attacking conservative figures, or downplaying major scandals that could harm their favored candidates, they had a virtual monopoly in the field of journalism. Things have changed. From the rise of conservative networks and independent journalists, people have more choices now, and it could spell the end of the liberal media.

It’s not just me saying it. Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of the USAID-funded Politico, also believes the heyday of left-wing media might finally be over.

And not just because they’re losing the slush fund money.

“The left right now, liberal media, has probably never been weaker in my lifetime than right now,” he said.

It’s not hard to see why. Prominent outlets like CNN, NBC News, and even The Washington Post have hemorrhaged viewers and readers amid declining trust and massive shifts in how Americans consume information. Could this be the beginning of the end for the left’s media empire? 

It’s safe to say that the collapse of left-wing media is not just anecdotal; hard numbers back the trend. CNN, for example, recently slashed approximately 6% of its workforce, eliminating roughly 200 jobs in a desperate bid to adjust to what the network called “irreversible shifts” in audience habits. Translation: fewer people are tuning in to their liberal propaganda. 

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Slashing Foreign Aid Redux

Hot damn!

Not only has Elon Musk brought the hammer down on the entirety of the Deep State’s foreign aid boondoggles, but his sleuths have apparently also uncovered one of the Swamp’s most pernicious artifices. To wit, numerous Federal agencies, including USAID, purchase a shit-ton of expensive subscriptions from beltway megaphones like Politico, which by pure happenstance, of course, favor their agency subscribers with a steady patter of “news” that tracks right down the UniParty fairway.

And we aren’t talking chump change. These “subscriptions” for the “pro” version of various Politico newsletters, for instance, come at $3,000 to $24,000 a pop. Since two of the latter were purchased by the climate crisis bureau over at USAID you have to wonder what that had to do with feeding the world’s starving masses or why USAID bureaucrats needed high-priced climate policy gossip when their inboxes were already flooded with free climate change propaganda from dozens of other Federal agencies, Federally-funded think tanks, NGOs and anti-fossil fuel activists.

As it happened, the tab across all Federal agencies just for the various Politico publications accumulated to $8.2 million over the past nine years according to USASpending.gov. Since most of that cash flow was due to purchase of the high-price “pro” versions, we can only imagine the “deep” insights that must be contained in the “Politico Pro Analysis” at $5,000 per year. Well, at least compared to the regular political gossip/news contained in the standard “Politico” subscription at $200 per year that a smattering of political junkies out in Flyover America apparently purchase.

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The Unraveling of the Propaganda Industrial Complex

On February 5, the White House confirmed that over $8 million of taxpayer money was paid to POLITICO during the final year of the Biden administration. It has also been reported that The New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, and the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) received millions of U.S. taxpayers dollars.

This story is still breaking, with the scale of the scandal escalating with every new X post, especially this one by Elon Musk, reposting a WikiLeaks apparent scoop: “USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 “media” NGOs, including nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine.” Musk, who is spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has been investigating government spending, posted a one word response: “wow.”

Musk also reposted a message from President Trump, which suggests an even wider scandal.

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Need Proof of USAID Funding Being Utilized to Orchestrate Coup D’Etat? Look No Further Than Joe Biden’s Own Admission

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, along with a team of young men at the Department of Government Efficiency, dealt a massive blow to the bureaucratic ‘Deep State’ last week with the temporary pause on funding to USAID.  The organization has previously come under scrutiny for its lack of transparency in how it allocates its almost $50 billion in funding, with many suggesting that the organization is a “front for the CIA.”

J. Michael Waller, author of Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went From Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villians,” pushed back on the “front for the CIA” claim in a post on X.  In it, he claimed, “It’s worse than that.  USAID became its own unaccountable covert operations agency.  USAID ran covert ops without presidential finding as required by law.”

While most of the “covert ops” may, in fact, be opaque and without presidential findings, not all are.  On Wednesday, Just The News reported on several examples of USAID exerting influence on foreign countries to sway political winds in favor of U.S. interests.

Among them was the East-West Management Institute, a Soros Open Society-backed organization that also received more than $260 million in USAID grants over the years.  This money, according to Just The News, was used to “promote rule of law in Georgia, strengthen civil society in Uganda, and advance Serbia’s accession talks with the European Union.”

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