Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

Biden Ignoring Ukraine in Favor of Russia

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The real hurt and consequence is Ukraine as you read on.

The Biden administration has waived sanctions on a company building a controversial gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The US also lifted sanctions on the executive – an ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin – who leads the firm behind the Nord Stream 2 project.

The move came in a report on Russian sanctions delivered to Congress by the Department of State.

Critics say the pipeline is a major geopolitical prize for the Kremlin.

The project, which would take gas from the Russian Arctic under the Baltic Sea to Germany, is already more than 95% complete.

The Department of State report notes that Nord Stream 2 AG and its chief executive, Matthias Warnig, a former East German intelligence officer, engaged in sanctionable activity.

Nord Stream 2: Biden waives US sanctions on Russian pipeline - BBC News

How it bypasses Ukraine further putting Ukraine into a financial crisis –>

Ukraine crisis: Europe's stored gas high as prices soar - BBC News

But it concludes that it is in the US national interest to waive the sanctions.

 

The Department of State also imposed sanctions on four Russian ships involved in the building of Nord Stream 2, though detractors said that would not be enough to stop the pipeline.

Meanwhile:

Ukrainians breathed a collective sigh of relief last month when Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would withdraw the majority of more than 100,000 troops that had been shifted to the Russian-Ukrainian border. So did the U.S., NATO and the rest of Europe.

But nobody should be breathing easy: Putin isn’t one to stay on the retreat. So, where should we expect his next provocation? Very likely, the waters of the Black Sea.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and carved off the strategically vital peninsula of Crimea, the largest land grab from a sovereign state in this century. Since then, he has supplied money, training, arms and military advisers to separatist forces in the Donbas region of southeast Ukraine.

The recent buildup was probably a signal to the West of how relentless Putin will be on pressuring Ukraine, and of his deep opposition to it joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was also a distraction from his persecution of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and played well with Putin’s base in Russia, where his approval rating soared during the Crimea annexation. Finally, the buildup allowed the Russian military a pretty effective practice run, in case Putin does decide to roll the dice and invade across the border.

Although one should never underestimate Putin’s ability to surprise his geopolitical rivals, this doesn’t seem like the moment for a full-blown land incursion. Putin is already financially overextended with his overseas adventures. Reconstructing Syria will come with a huge bill. Support to Ukrainian separatists is expensive. He has a great appetite for expensive new weapons (militarizing space, for example). And he remains under significant sanctions from the West. source

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Seems President Biden got the lobby memo to support Moscow.

OS: Biden has not made any moves that would prevent completion of the pipeline, which would transfer natural gas from Russia to Germany while bypassing Poland and Ukraine. That’s a win for both Berlin and Moscow. It’s also a win for Washington lobbyists.

Companies involved with the pipeline spent more than $1 million lobbying on sanctions and other issues related to the project through the first three months of 2021.

Nord Stream 2 AG spent $840,000 on lobbying in the first quarter of 2021, on pace to surpass its nearly $3.6 million lobbying spending last year. The Swiss firm is wholly-owned by Russia’s state-run energy firm Gazprom. Alexei Miller, Gazprom’s executive chairman, is longtime Putin ally, as is Nord Stream CEO Matthias Warnig.

The company spent $600,000 to dispatch Vincent Roberti, a top lobbyist and prolific Democratic donor. Roberti reported lobbying on “issues related to the U.S. position toward the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, including potential financial sanctions affecting the project.” The firm spent another $240,000 to dispatch BGR Group’s Walker Roberts, a former Republican staffer for foreign affairs congressional committees.

Other foreign firms are also dispatching lobbyists to advocate for the pipeline. Five foreign companies partnering on the project — Austria’s OMV AG, the Netherlands’ Shell International, France’s ENGIE, and Germany’s Wintershall and Uniper SE — hired lobbyists at McLarty Inbound to lobby the State Department and the National Security Council. They collectively paid the firm more than $840,000 for lobbying in 2020 and $210,000 in the first quarter of 2021.

McLarty managing partner Richard Burt, the former U.S. Ambassador to West Germany and a member of several influential Washington think-tanks, reported lobbying for a slate of foreign companies that have partnered on the project on “Russian sanctions issues” and “natural gas as an element of European energy security.” Burt donated $2,000 to Biden’s 2020 campaign and $10,000 to pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country while he was a registered lobbyist for foreign companies partnering with Nord Stream on the pipeline. Biden’s campaign had not refunded Burt’s money at the time of publication, more than 6 months after the donations were given, despite pledging to reject lobbyist donations.

Because firms working for proponents of the pipeline registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act instead of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, details of which government officials the lobbyists met with remain hidden from the public.

Lobbyists for private entities that would otherwise be required to follow FARA disclosure requirements may choose to instead register under the LDA with the House Clerk’s Office and Secretary of the Senate so long as the “principal beneficiary” of the influence operation is not a foreign government or political party. Nord Stream is owned by a Russian state-run firm, but the Kremlin has insisted the pipeline is a “commercial project.”

At Least 18 Scientists Demand Lab Leak Investigation on Covid

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Primer: Who is Dr. Ralph Baric and what is his role in the Wuhan lab?

UNC-CH ranks as a world leader in COVID-19 research - here ...

This page lists documents in Professor Ralph Baric’s emails, which U.S. Right to Know obtained via a public records request. Dr. Baric is a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). He has developed genetic techniques to enhance the pandemic potential of existing bat coronaviruses in collaboration with Dr. Zhengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with EcoHealth Alliance.

The emails show internal discussions and an early draft of a key scientists’ letter about coronavirus origins, and shed some light on relationships between U.S. and Chinese experts in biodefense and infectious diseases, and the roles of organizations such as EcoHealth Alliance and National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Please email anything of interest we may have missed to [email protected], so that we can include them below.

Items from Baric emails

  1. Tracy McNamara, Professor of Pathology at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California wrote on March 25, 2020: : “The Federal govt has spent over $1 billion dollars in support of the Global Health Security Agenda to help developing nations create the capacity to detect/report/respond to pandemic threats. An additional $200 million was spent on the PREDICT project via USAID looking for emerging viruses in bats, rats and monkeys overseas. And now the Global Virome Project wants $1.5 billion dollars to run around the world hunting down every virus on the face of the earth. They will probably get funding. But none of these programs have made taxpayers safer right here at home.” (emphasis in the original)
  2. Dr. Jonathan Epstein, Vice President for Science and Outreach at EcoHealth Alliance, sought guidance for a request from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) about communicating “potentially sensitive dual-use information” (March 2018).
  3. EcoHealth Alliance paid Dr. Baric an undisclosed sum as honorarium (January 2018).
  4. Invitation to U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) U.S. China Dialogue and Workshop on the Challenges of Emerging Infections, Laboratory Safety, Global Health Security and Responsible Conduct in the Use of Gene Editing in Viral Infectious Disease Research, Harbin, China, Jan 8-10, 2019 (November 2018-January 2019). Preparatoryemails and a travel memorandum indicate the identities of the American participants.
  5. NAS invitation to a meeting of U.S. and Chinese experts working to counter infectious disease and improve global health (November 2017). The meeting was convened by the NAS and the Galveston National Laboratory. It took place on January 16-18, 2018, in Galveston, Texas. A travel memorandum indicates the identities of the American participants. Subsequent emails show that the WIV’s Dr. Zhengli Shi is present at the meeting.
  6. On February 27, 2020, Baric wrote, “at this moment the most likely origins are bats, and I note that it is a mistake to assume that an intermediate host is needed.”
  7. On March 5, 2020, Baric wrote, “there is absolutely no evidence that this virus is bioengineered.”

For more information

A link to Professor Ralph Baric’s emails can be found here:Baric emails (~83,416 pages)

U.S. Right to Know is posting documents from our Biohazards investigation. See:FOI documents on origins of SARS-CoV-2, hazards of gain-of-function research and biosafety labs.

NR:

For well over a year, a certain clique of researchers tarred the idea that COVID-19 initially escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan as a conspiracy theory. Now, their grip on that narrative within the scientific community is loosening, as a growing chorus of experts calls for a closer look at this lab-leak hypothesis.

In a letter published this afternoon at Science, 18 scientists call for an investigation into the pandemic’s origins that does not discount the possibility of a lab leak. “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” they write. “Knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.”

These researchers include Dr. Ralph Baric, a leading coronavirus expert who has done research on bat coronaviruses with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and several other prominent virologists. They have joined the WHO director-general, top intelligence officials, and other U.S. government experts in asserting that such a leak remains a possible explanation, despite a joint WHO-China study’s findings that such a theory is “extremely unlikely.” Like the Biden administration and 13 other countries that signed onto a U.S.-led statement after the report’s release, they raise concerns about how the panel reached its findings. Their letter comes as members of Congress have started to ramp up their scrutiny of a potential lab-leak origin. Already, the scientists’ letter has caught the attention of lawmakers involved in COVID investigation efforts, with Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Brett Guthrie, and Morgan Griffith, saying in a statement, “We look forward to working with them and all who will follow the science in order to complete this investigation.”

Jamie Metzl, an adviser to the WHO and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, explained the letter’s significance on Twitter. “The chokehold on public consideration of an accidental lab incident as a possible #pandemic origin has just been broken. Following publication of the Science letter, it will be irresponsible for any scientific journal or news outlet to not fully represent this viable hypothesis.”

The Science letter finds the joint WHO-China report lacking and evaluates the likelihood of the different origin theories that the panel assessed: “Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as ‘likely to very likely, and a laboratory incident as ‘extremely unlikely.’”

The authors of the letters add, “Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.”

The letter doesn’t claim that the lab-leak hypothesis is more credible than the zoonotic origin theory. It’s notable, however, that a letter in a major scientific journal is putting these two theories on equal footing.

The Lancet, another journal, rejected a letter submitted by 14 biologists and geneticists in January arguing that “a lab origin cannot be formally discarded.”

Some figures associated with The Lancet have called the lab-leak scenario a conspiracy theory, including Jeffrey Sachs, the chair of the medical journal’s COVID commission, and Peter Daszak, the chair of the commission’s sub-committee on COVID’s origins. Daszak, whose nonprofit research group received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the National Institutes of Health for studies on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was a member of the joint WHO-China panel and has faced accusations that he failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University chemical biology professor, told National Review last month that their efforts helped to create the false impression that there is a scientific consensus against the possibility of a lab-leak origin. “No such consensus existed then. No such consensus exists now,” he said.

This latest entry into the debate, in the pages of a preeminent scientific journal, shows that the ground is shifting away from a hollow narrative that has been all-too pervasive since the start of the pandemic.

 

HHS Shifting $2 Billion to UAC’s Confirms it is a Crisis

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Shuffling money to cover for a self-made crisis at the border…..remember President Trump was excoriated for doing the same thing but this is different?

So, we sacrifice the national stockpile for pandemics for the border insurgency? This is $ billion but does that only cover what has already been spent or for the next month or so…inquiring minds want to know the full accounting..

*** The Trump administration is currently housing 12,800 ...

Politico: The Department of Health and Human Services has diverted more than $2 billion meant for other health initiatives toward covering the cost of caring for unaccompanied immigrant children, as the Biden administration grapples with a record influx of migrants on the southern border.

The redirected funds include $850 million that Congress originally allocated to rebuild the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile, the emergency medical reserve strained by the Covid-19 response. Another $850 million is being taken from a pot intended to help expand coronavirus testing, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The reshuffling, which HHS detailed to congressional appropriators in notices over the last two months, illustrates the extraordinary financial toll that sheltering more than 20,000 unaccompanied children has taken on the department so far this year, as it scrambled to open emergency housing and add staff and services across the country.

It also could open the administration up to further scrutiny over a border strategy that has dogged President Joe Biden for months, as administration officials struggle to stem the flow of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children into the U.S.

On its own, the $2.13 billion in diverted money exceeds the government’s annual budget for the unaccompanied children program in each of the last two fiscal years. It is also far above the roughly half-billion dollars that the Trump administration shifted in 2018 toward sheltering a migrant child population that had swelled as a result of its strict immigration policies, including separating children from adults at the border.

In addition to transferring money from the Strategic National Stockpile and Covid-19 testing, HHS also has pulled roughly $436 million from a range of existing health initiatives across the department.

“They’ve been in a situation of needing to very rapidly expand capacity, and emergency capacity is much more expensive,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute who led HHS’ Administration for Children and Families from 2013 to 2015. “You can’t just say there’s going to be a waiting list or we’re going to shut off intake. There’s literally not a choice.”

HHS spokesperson Mark Weber told POLITICO that the department has worked closely with the Office of Management and Budget to find ways to keep its unaccompanied minor operation funded in the face of rising costs.

“All options are on the table,” he said, adding that HHS has traditionally sought to pull funding from parts of the department where the money is not immediately needed. “This program has relied, year after year, on the transfer of funds.”

Health secretary Xavier Becerra has the ability to shift money among programs within the sprawling department so long as he notifies Congress, an authority that his predecessors have often resorted to during past influxes of migrant children.

But these transfers come as HHS has publicly sought to pump new funds into the Strategic National Stockpile and Covid-19 testing efforts by emphasizing the critical role that both play in the pandemic response and future preparedness efforts.

“The fight against Covid-19 is not yet over,” Becerra testified to a House panel on Wednesday in defense of a budget request that would allocate $905 million for the stockpile. “Even as HHS works to beat this pandemic, we are also preparing for the next public health crisis.”

Becerra later stressed the need to “make sure we’ve got the resources” to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile, which came under scrutiny early in the pandemic after officials discovered it lacked anywhere near the amount of protective equipment and medical supplies needed to respond to the crisis.

“We’ve learned that this is going to be a critical component of being able to respond adequately and quickly to any future health care crisis,” he told Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.).

In another exchange, Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) repeatedly pressed Becerra over whether HHS would benefit from Congress investing more in other parts of its operation, rather than funding a further expansion of Covid testing. Mullin specifically cited the record numbers of migrant children arriving at the border.

But Becerra batted that suggestion away, telling him that “we have to continue an aggressive testing strategy.”

“We have to continue to make investments to prevent the spread of Covid and its variants,” he said.

Beyond taking funding from the stockpile and Covid testing, Weber could not immediately say what other areas within HHS have been affected. After publication of this article, HHS insisted that additional public health funding Congress allocated as part of a Covid aid bill passed in February could be steered toward the stockpile and supplementing its pandemic response.

Still, funneling money away from existing HHS programs could raise fears of undermining other critical health initiatives and irritate the public health groups and lawmakers who advocate for the funding every year.

The Trump administration faced withering criticism in 2018 for transferring hundreds of millions of dollars meant for biomedical research, HIV/AIDS services and other purposes to cover the expenses tied to an unaccompanied child population that would peak close to 14,000 that year.

That scrutiny was driven in part by bipartisan disapproval over then-President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that separated children from their parents, which left HHS with responsibility for carrying out a costly reunification effort.

The Biden administration, by contrast, has moved to unwind several of the Trump era’s most restrictive immigration policies. Yet as it confronts the need to care for an even greater number of migrant children, health groups have bristled at the prospect it could take away from public health priorities even as the U.S. combats a pandemic.

“It is concerning any time funds need to be diverted from their originally intended purpose because of limited resources,” said Erin Morton, executive director of the Coalition for Health Funding. “We have consistently asked our public health system to do more with less and we have underfunded essential programs that today are critical to addressing the multitude of challenges facing the country.”

The transfers could also stretch funding for other programs within HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, which oversees various social services including child care and support for newly arrived refugees.

Biden cited concerns about the strain on the HHS refugee office involved with both aiding refugees and caring for unaccompanied children in his initial refusal to raise the refugee admissions cap from historic lows — a decision he later reversed in the face of swift blowback.

“Obviously this will have a significant impact on the ability of ORR to serve refugees and asylees,” Bob Carey, who ran the Office of Refugee Resettlement from 2015 to 2017, said of the potential need to shift more funding toward sheltering migrant children.

Still, Carey and others defended the transfers as unfortunate yet necessary, and a consequence of the urgent need to get rising numbers of unaccompanied children out of jail-like facilities at the border.

After effectively sealing the southern border last year, the Trump administration never expanded its shelter capacity to the level that HHS has pegged as critical to its preparedness, Greenberg said, leaving the department shorthanded when Biden resumed allowing migrant children into the country.

The pandemic further handicapped HHS, halving its number of available beds due to the need to follow Covid-19 precautions. That forced a scramble to build out a dozen emergency shelters that have historically, on average, cost more than double the amount per day to house each child than it does in licensed facilities.

More than half the migrant children in HHS custody are now housed in emergency shelters, Weber confirmed. And implementing pandemic measures like testing and quarantine areas in shelters has cost HHS at least $850 million in additional expenses alone.

HHS in recent months has additionally agreed to hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts with an array of emergency response and logistics companies to build out services and staff at the emergency shelters.

“If they had started this year with 16,000 beds instead of 8,000, they could have managed in February and had time to determine how in an orderly way to expand capacity for the very large numbers in March,” Greenberg said. “Fundamentally, it’s this mix of: numbers were greater than expected, capacity was less than needed and there was tremendous pressure to alleviate crowding at [the border].”

Those dynamics are expected to hold for at least the next couple months, as hundreds of new unaccompanied minors arrive at the border daily and are transferred into the health department’s care.

And with no indication so far that the Biden administration will seek new emergency border aid from Congress, that means HHS’ expenses are only likely to balloon further, forcing additional costly transfers within the department.

“It’s going to be expensive,” Carey said. “I can’t think of a situation that’s more complex than this.”

 

 

Is this an Extension of Red Flag Law(s) by DHS?

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JTN: The Department of Homeland Security has launched a $500,000 grant program for research and data collection on insider threats in the country’s law enforcement agencies.

A blue banner displaying the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seal with the text National Terrorism Advisory System - Bulletin - www.dhs.gov/advisories

The premise for the grant, “Insider Threats in American Law Enforcement,” is that the U.S. is facing a rising number of internal threats and an understanding of the changing environment is needed.

“Due to the growing number of threats our nation is combating,” the grant synopsis explains, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate “supports the evolving threat landscape of a dynamic world with changing motivations, actors, communication models and weaponry.”

The grant prioritizes data collection and technological innovation as means to identify, understand and combat the purported threat of penetration of U.S. law enforcement agencies by violent extremists.

“Objectives of this effort will identify high quality data to understand the risks posed to the United States by the potential for violent extremist organizations or lone actors to infiltrate law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and other government institutions,” the synopsis states.

While billing U.S. taxpayers $500K for this initiative to understand these clandestine “extremist organizations” infiltrating law enforcement, the grant neglects to define what it means by “extremist organizations.”

The research and data collected under the grant is to be shared with a variety of agencies, including private organizations. Yet civil rights and liberties will not be violated in the combined public-private harvesting and sharing of data about undefined “extremists,” DHS insists.

“Knowledge and findings from this research will be transferred to federal, state, local, and private organizations to enable education and awareness to reinforce a whole-of-society prevention architecture while respecting civil rights and civil liberties,” according to the grant description. “These prevention efforts will equip and empower local efforts — including peers, teachers, community leaders, and law enforcement — to minimize a threat as it evolves while enhancing emergency preparedness and response.”

The grant will task the awardee with understanding law enforcement threats from the perspectives of numerous fields, including including economics, psychology, politics and criminology. “The awardee(s) will assist with a range of activities,” the grant specifies, including designing data collection strategies, collecting data from primary and secondary sources, and analyzing data while identifying subject matter experts to participate in interviews and/or focus groups.”

Analyzing research from these various fields and experts will help fill in the gaps in understanding the threat environment and help “counter the threats posed by violent extremists and violent ideologies to United States LEAs and the public,”

The closing date for the grant applications is May 16, a day after the country concludes National Police Week. The week of May 9-May 15 has been designated as National Police Week since 1962 to recognize the service and sacrifice of federal, state and local law enforcement.

As reported by Just the News this week, the DHS and the Department of Defense have announced internal investigations of “extremism” within their departments, raising alarms among conservative civil liberties watchdogs, as the agencies’ notions of “extremism” were  vague and appeared to omit from scrutiny far-left extremist groups implicated in widespread political violence in 2020.

***

Date Issued:  Friday, May 14, 2021 02:00 pm ET
View as PDF:  National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin – May 14, 2021 (pdf, 1 page, 359.67KB)

Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland

 

The Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the current heightened threat environment across the United States.  The Homeland is facing threats that have evolved significantly and become increasingly complex and volatile in 2021. These threats include those posed by domestic terrorists, individuals and groups engaged in grievance-based violence, and those inspired or influenced by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences.  Social media and online forums are increasingly exploited by these actors to influence and spread violent extremist narratives and activity.  Such threats also are exacerbated by the impacts from the ongoing global pandemic.

 

Duration

Issued:  May 14, 2021 02:00 pm
Expires:  August 13, 2021 02:00 pm

Additional Details

  • Violent extremists may seek to exploit the easing of COVID-19-related restrictions across the United States to conduct attacks against a broader range of targets after previous public capacity limits reduced opportunities for lethal attacks.
  • Historically, mass-casualty Domestic Violent Extremist (DVE) attacks linked to racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) have targeted houses of worship and crowded commercial facilities or gatherings. Some RMVEs advocate via social media and online platforms for a race war and have stated that civil disorder provides opportunities to engage in violence in furtherance of ideological objectives.
  • Through 2020 and into 2021, government facilities and personnel have been common targets of DVEs, and opportunistic violent criminals are likely to exploit Constitutionally-protected freedom of speech activity linked to racial justice grievances and police use of force concerns, potentially targeting protestors perceived to be ideological opponents.
  • Ideologically-motivated violent extremists fueled by perceived grievances, false narratives, and conspiracy theories continue to share information online with the intent to incite violence. Online narratives across sites known to be frequented by individuals who hold violent extremist ideologies have called for violence against elected officials, political representatives, government facilities, law enforcement, religious or commercial facilities, and perceived ideologically-opposed individuals.
  • The use of encrypted messaging by lone offenders and small violent extremist cells may obscure operational indicators that provide specific warning of a pending act of violence.
  • Messaging from foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Qa‘ida and ISIS, intended to inspire U.S.-based homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) continues to amplify narratives related to exploiting protests. HVEs, who have typically conducted attacks against soft targets, mass gatherings, and law enforcement, remain a threat to the Homeland.
  • Nation-state adversaries have increased efforts to sow discord. For example, Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked media outlets have repeatedly amplified conspiracy theories concerning the origins of COVID-19 and effectiveness of vaccines; in some cases, amplifying calls for violence targeting persons of Asian descent.
  • DHS encourages law enforcement and homeland security partners to be alert to these developments and prepared for any effects to public safety. Consistent with applicable law, state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) law enforcement organizations should maintain situational awareness of online and physical activities that may be related to an evolving threat of violence.

How We Are Responding

  • DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continue to provide guidance to SLTT partners about the current threat environment. Specifically, DHS has issued numerous intelligence assessments to SLTT officials on the evolving threat.
  • DHS is collaborating with industry partners to identify and respond to those individuals encouraging violence and attempting to radicalize others through spreading disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false narratives on social media and other online platforms.
  • DHS has prioritized combatting DVE threats within its FEMA grants as a National Priority Area.
  • DHS remains committed to identifying and preventing domestic terrorism.

How You Can Help

Be Prepared and Stay Informed

  • Be prepared for any emergency situations and remain aware of circumstances that may place your personal safety at risk.
  • Maintain digital media literacy to recognize and build resilience to false and harmful narratives.
  • Make note of your surroundings and the nearest security personnel.
  • Business owners should consider the safety and security of customers, employees, facilities, infrastructure, and cyber networks.
  • Government agencies will provide details about emerging threats as information is identified. The public is encouraged to listen to local authorities and public safety officials.

If You See Something, Say Something®. Report suspicious activity to local law enforcement or call 911.

 

Retired Flag Officers’ Letter to Biden Challenging his Presidency

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Primer: As the Democrats are aggressively fighting for election reform with the most disgusting legislation known as H.R. 1, it should also be noted that Liz Cheney (R-WY) was essentially removed from Republican leadership over what she calls the ‘big lie’ But then Mollie Hemmingway, Senior Editor at The Federalist has just released her new book titled Rigged. Her book discussed how media, big tech and the Democrats seized the elections.

We also cannot ignore former Ambassador and former DNI Director Ric Grenell when he asserts that Susan Rice is the shadow president. In fact, he has said it often and rightly so.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized ... source

This is all going on while many state legislatures are passing more secure and stringent election laws.

Meanwhile, enter former flag officers…..

  • A group named “Flag Officers 4 America” released a letter signed by 124 former military leaders.
  • The letter questioned the 2020 election result and Biden’s physical and mental health.
  • One serving Navy leader told Politico the letter was “disturbing and reckless.”

BusinessInsider: More than 120 retired US military leaders have signed an open letter appearing to advance a false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged, and questioning President Joe Biden’s mental capacity to rule.

“Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the ‘will of the people’ our Constitutional Republic is lost,” said the letter released Tuesday by “Flag Officers 4 America,” and signed by 124 former admirals and generals.

“The FBI and Supreme Court must act swiftly when election irregularities are surfaced and not ignore them as was done in 2020.”

On its website, Flag Officers 4 America says it is a collection of “retired military leaders who pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the US against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

In the letter, the signatories, many of whom have been out of active service for decades, also addressed concerns over Biden’s health.

“The mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief cannot be ignored. He must be able to quickly make accurate national security decisions involving life and limb anywhere, day or night,” the letter said.

Insider has contacted the Department of Defense for comment.

Throughout the 2020 election campaign former President Donald Trump regularly cast doubts on Biden’s health and suitability to rule, calling him “Sleepy Joe” and saying in March 2020 that there was “something going on” with Biden’s mental abilities.

Earlier this month Biden’s personal doctor, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, released a report on the president’s health, in which he called him a “healthy, vigorous, 77-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.”

Biden is the oldest serving US president in history, and the White House said this week that the president will undergo a full check-up this year.

© Melina Mara/The Washington Post via AP, Pool Biden addresses a joint session of Congress on April 28, 2021. Melina Mara/The Washington Post via AP, Pool

In the Tuesday letter, the Flag Officers 4 America signatories also laid out what they deem to be the major threats facing the US, namely the rise of China, the rejoining of the Iran nuclear deal, immigration, and the ending of the Keystone Pipeline project.

The signatories also called for the removal of Section 230, a part of US law that shields tech companies from legal liability. Trump called for the section to be removed last year after Twitter flagged two of his tweets about mail-in voting.

“Our Nation is in deep peril,” the signatories wrote in the introduction to the letter.

“We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.”

Several military experts told Politico the letter was an outright partisan attack and dangerous.

One serving Navy officer told Politico the letter was “disturbing and reckless” while Jim Golby, an expert in civil-military relations, told the outlet it was a “shameful effort to use their rank and the military’s reputation for such a gross and blatant partisan attack.”

The letter’s organizer, Maj. Gen. Joe Arbuckle, told Politico: “Retired generals and admirals normally do not engage in political actions.”

“But the situation facing our nation today is dire … We are facing threats greater than at any other time since our country was founded. To remain silent would be a dereliction of duty.”

Read the original article on Business Insider