Special counsel Robert Hur concluded in a stinging report released Thursday that President Joe Biden willfully kept classified documents from his time as vice president, shared them with an author and knew he had them as far back as 2017, but he recommended against prosecution.
Read More
The U.S. Capitol Police announced on Thursday that they have declined to press charges against the former Democrat Senate staffer who filmed a gay sex video in a Capitol Hill hearing room last month.
In a news release, the USCP said there was no evidence that Aidan Maese-Czeropski, a former aide for Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), broke the law by filming himself copulating with another male inside the Hart Senate Office Building on the morning of Wednesday, December 13.
Read More
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress on Wednesday said the tech firm has “no plans” to make a kids version of its Instagram platform.
He acknowledge “discussions internally” on the idea but also said Meta has not “actually moved forward with that, and we currently have no plans to do so.”
Read More
Washington glitterati assembled at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in October to celebrate federal employees making a difference in government. Hosted by CNN anchor Kate Bolduan, the black-tie affair featured in-person appearances by top Biden White House officials including Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack.
Midway through the evening’s festivities, Max Stier, president of the group sponsoring the event – the Partnership for Public Service, a $24 million nonprofit based in Washington that recruits individuals to work in the civil service – took the stage to thank his high-profile guests. “Great leaders are the heart and soul of effective organizations,” Stier said, “which is why I am so thankful to see so many of our government’s amazing leaders here tonight.”
Read More
Scott Rasmussen has done America an enormous service. He and his team have identified the driving forces behind the destructive radicalism which is pushing us into a cultural civil war.
While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.
Read More
Top executives at Hong Kong-based WH Group Limited, the world’s largest pork producer that controls vast swaths of U.S. farmland through its American subsidiary, are Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of corporate records and state-run media reports.
Records and reports reviewed by the DCNF identify four top executives and the chairman of the pork giant as CCP members with extensive ties to the Chinese government. WH Group controls nearly 150,000 acres of land across 29 U.S. states through its subsidiary Smithfield Foods, a family-run business established in 1936, which it purchased for $7.1 billion in 2013. While a keyword search on Smithfield’s website returned only two articles mentioning the firm’s relationship with WH Group, neither of the two articles mentioned China. An online map of Smithfield’s global business activities does not list any operations in, or connection to, Asia, despite archived reports from their website suggesting otherwise.
Read More
Congressional negotiators from the Senate and House of Representatives announced a deal on Tuesday to increase the child tax credit and negotiate a new bilateral tax treaty with Taiwan, among other matters.
The child tax credit was first enacted in 1997 to provide parents with greater funds to care for children under the age of 17 and was expanded in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan Act, though that expansion expired in 2022 and has not been reauthorized. The new deal — known as the “The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024” — reached between Democrats and Republicans in Congress will change the way the tax credit is calculated, increase the credit every year until 2025 and index it to inflation, according to a technical summary of the plan published by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Read More
The art dealer who sold Hunter Biden’s paintings told Congress that President Joe Biden both called and met him at the White House as he was pitching Hunter’s artwork and that the first son also made an unusual request to be informed about who bought his pieces, according to testimony that directly undercuts the White House narrative on the sales.
The Biden White House repeatedly told the public that Hunter Biden’s art sales were covered by an ethics agreement to ensure they were arms-length and that the first family — Hunter included — was blinded to the identity of buyers.
Read More
The current youngest generation may soon elect more of its members to the United States Congress.
According to The Hill, several more members of Generation Z, also known as “Zoomers,” are attempting to expand their ranks in Congress after the first Zoomer was elected in 2022. The age group, the next in line after Millennials, is generally considered to start with those born in 1997 or later. Currently, the sole Zoomer in Congress is Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), who was elected in 2022 at the age of 25.
Read More
The FBI conducted FISA surveillance on one of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partners while other federal prosecutors secured evidence that a second Chinese associate of the first family was present when foreign bribery payments were made. And a major bank reported to the U.S. Treasury Department that in 2017 a $5 million loan the Bidens got from a Chinese energy company smacked of a Beijing influence operation targeting Joe Biden before he was president.
A fast-growing body of evidence from bank transactions to court transcripts is putting pressure on Congress to resolve an important question: Did Joe Biden or any of his family members get a defensive briefing from U.S. intelligence that some of their foreign business partners had unsavory ties or were engaged in criminal behavior?
Read More
The Senate has adjourned for the remainder of the year after failing to negotiate a deal to reform border security in exchange for aid to Ukraine and pass appropriations bills to fund the government.
Republicans in Congress have refused to support a $60 billion aid package to Ukraine during its war against Russia, requested by President Joe Biden unless Senate Democrats permit the passage of conservative border security priorities. After convening the Senate during its holiday recess on Monday, to give time for more negotiations, the Senate adjourned on Wednesday night for the remainder of the year without reaching a compromise, as well as without passing appropriations bills submitted by the House of Representatives to fund the government and a bipartisan railway safety bill.
Read More
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with increased tensions in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific region, has generated many debates. Debates about the stability of the international order, the cohesion of NATO, and many others. But for the United States, one significant debate regards the size and expansibility of the American defense industrial base. It’s a discussion that is well past due.
Last year, Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl testified to Congress that, “What the Ukraine conflict showed is that, frankly, our defense industrial base was not at the level that we needed it to be to generate munitions.” But the challenge with ammunition is more symptom than cause, in economic terms something of a “leading indicator.”
Read More
Congress has assembled a growing body of evidence that Hunter Biden’s dealings with a Chinese energy company that landed the family millions of dollars in 2017 actually began in 2015 and may have involved a meeting with his father before he left office as vice president, according to documents reviewed by Just the News.
The new evidence includes statements made to the FBI by a longtime Biden family friend who was involved in the deal with CEFC China Energy executives like its Chairman Ye Jianming, contemporaneous emails from Hunter Biden and testimony recently released from two IRS whistleblowers.
Read More
Congress voted Thursday to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with no reforms as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA.
Section 702 of FISA is a tool that intelligence officials have allegedly abused as it enables them to surveil Americans without obtaining a warrant. After the Senate passed FISA through the NDAA on Wednesday and failed to get sufficient support to eliminate the four-month extension, the House of Representatives finalized it in a vote on Thursday.
Read More
Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party.
If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts.
Read More
Over 70 members of Congress called for the removal of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Friday following their testimony at a Tuesday hearing, which caused widespread outrage.
Harvard President Claudine Gay, Penn President Elizabeth Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth refused to say during the hearing if calls for genocide were violations of their campuses’ codes of conduct, and Gay and Magill later backtracked on their statements following widespread backlash. The letter, spearheaded by Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, calls on the boards of the universities to “immediately remove each of these presidents” from their positions.
Read More
“Anti-woke economic terrorists have now wiped out $5 trillion in stock value.”
That was a headline from Afru.com bemoaning the sideways performance of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) funds the past year or so, accusing anyone opposed to ESG with inflicting “economic terrorism” and “erod[ing] financial portfolios of color” as “global investments in ethical companies have nosedived by nearly $5 trillion over the past two years.”
Read More
Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci is set to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in early January, the subcommittee announced Thursday.
Fauci will take part in a two-day interview on Jan. 8 and Jan. 9, making his first appearance before the 118th Congress, according to the subcommittee. Fauci also agreed to testify in a public hearing, though the date of that hearing has yet to be announced.
Read More
Republican Rep. George Santos of New York announced on Thursday that he will file a resolution to expel Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York, even as Santos faces the threat of expulsion from the House of Representatives.
Santos, who has been indicted on federal charges regarding alleged campaign finance felonies and faced numerous attempts of expulsion by Democrats and Republicans, is facing expulsion from the chamber following a report by the House Ethics Committee that found “substantial evidence” he committed the crimes alleged against him. On Thursday, Santos told reporters that he would introduce a resolution to expel Bowman, who recently pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for pulling the fire alarm at the Cannon House Office Building on Sept. 30, The Hill reported.
Read More
In episode 43 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) about her outsider approach to handling her job in Congress.
Read More
Out of sheer perversity, I follow stories in the Washington Post related to weather. It matters not what the weather brings, the cause is global warming (or climate change depending on the temperature of the disaster). Having a flood? Global warming. Got a heavy snow or ice storm? Climate change. They haven’t yet figured out how to blame earthquakes on global warming, but the mainstream media will probably find a cause and effect relationship somehow.
Read More
While Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips continues his longshot campaign to wrest away the Democrat nomination for president from incumbent Joe Biden, the Wayzata millionaire officially announced on Friday that he’ll no longer pursue a fourth term in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Representing our nation’s most civically engaged community in Congress has been the most joyful experience of my life,” Phillips said in a social media post shortly after noon on Friday. “Now it’s time to pass the torch — with gratitude and optimism.”
Read More
The Supreme Court will consider next week whether the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) use of in-house judges violates the right to a jury trial guaranteed in the Seventh Amendment.
Congress empowered the SEC to use its own in-house administrative law judges (ALJs) to try cases brought by agency enforcement when it passed the Dodd-Frank Act following the 2008 financial crisis. George R. Jarkesy, who has been caught in the SEC’s administrative proceedings since the agency charged him with fraud relating to his investment activities in 2013, challenged that grant of power as unconstitutional.
Read More
Both houses of Congress have adjourned for two weeks until after Thanksgiving even as major legislative work that must be completed before the year ends remains unfinished.
Read MoreFifty years ago this week, legislation authorizing construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
The whole process took all of five days.
Read More
Both houses of Congress have passed a bill to temporarily fund the U.S. government until early 2024, following a vote by the Senate on Wednesday, after they were unable to pass appropriations bills for the current fiscal year.
The Further Continuing Appropriations and Other Extensions Act, 2024, known commonly as a “continuing resolution” or “CR,” would temporarily fund certain government agencies — such as the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development — until Jan. 19, 2024, while funding the rest of the government until Feb. 2, 2024. The bill was passed by the Senate on Wednesday by a vote of 87 yeas to 11 nays after being passed by the House on Tuesday, thus preventing a government shutdown on Nov. 17, when funding under a previous continuing resolution was set to expire.
Read More
Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss has told Congress he sought special authority from the Justice Department in 2022 to file tax charges against Hunter Biden in other jurisdictions but was never granted it, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan disclosed Tuesday.
Jordan told reporters after a closed-door interview with Weiss that the prosecutor’s acknowledgement to lawmakers that he sought “special attorney” powers in the Biden case amounted to a new change in the DOJ’s story and corroborated allegations made earlier this year by IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler.
Read More
Congress’ approval rating has dropped to 13% — just 4 points higher than the all-time low in November 2013, according to a Friday poll.
After a tumultuous three weeks without a speaker of the House, a contentious spending fight that nearly resulted in a government shutdown and another ally involved in a war abroad, Americans’ approval of Congress has plummeted by 4 points to the lowest it’s been since October and November 2017, according to a Gallup poll. Republicans and Democrats gave Congress 8% and 10% approval ratings, respectively, with the latter figure dropping by 12 points since September and the former remaining the same.
Read More
Several current and former congressional oversight staff have been recently informed that the U.S. Justice Department seized their phone and email records back in 2017 as part of leak investigations, belated revelations that have touched off an inquiry by DOJ’s internal watchdog and raised serious concerns about the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.
Over the last week, several current and former Senate and House staff from both political parties have alerted Congress that they received belated notifications from Apple, Google or other Big Tech firms that their email or phone records were obtained from their personal devices via a grand jury subpoena.
Read More
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released a statement calling on federal lawmakers to vote against President Joe Biden’s request for Congress to fund an lump aid package for both Ukraine and Israel.
Read More
While many lawmakers have preached for years the need for federal spending cuts, the amount of taxpayer money that Congress spends on its own operations has swelled 38% since FY2014 from $4.3 billion to $6.9 billion this year, according to a Just the News review of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports on annual federal budgets.
Read More
Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott is leading a bloc of 19 other Senate Republicans in an effort to stonewall all legislation unrelated to government funding until Congress approves all of its appropriations bills.
The lawmakers warned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of their intentions amid an intense congressional battle over spending that saw House conservatives take the unprecedented step of ousting Speaker Kevin McCarthy. At issue are 12 annual spending bills, which Congress must approve by Nov. 17 following the passage of a continuing resolution this weekend to avert a government shutdown.
Read More
In the current atmosphere of acrimony surrounding the failure of Congress to produce a balanced budget, or even an unbalanced budget, it is important to review the facts. The facts are important because the Uniparty, the Swamp, the Establishment, and many media propagandists are engaged in a parade of fearmongering.
Because House Republicans did not timely produce a budget as required by law, “they,” the leaders of the Uniparty, began championing their preferred budget mechanism, the “Continuing Resolution (CR).” We know it is their preferred option because they use it every year.
Read More
For years, Americans who believe in limited government and putting the American people first have had to watch as states like California, New York, and Illinois have turned their cities into dystopian hellscapes and sent unhinged politicians to Washington DC to inflict their policies on the rest of the nation.
But something very interesting has been happening over the past decade and this trend is only accelerating – the most left-wing states are slowly losing power as their populations decrease and residents move elsewhere. California, New York, Illinois, and others are losing population as residents move to friendlier and freer states. What this translates into is a mathematical solution to leftism and centralized government control.
Read More
The chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee tells Just the News he plans to soon make public new testimony that corroborates IRS whistleblowers’ accounts of interference in the Hunter Biden probe and new evidence to support the nascent impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) said Thursday his panel will hold a vote to make the new information available, including testimonies from two IRS agents who back the accounts of whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler about slow-walking and interference in the Hunter Biden tax case.
Read More
House Republicans are set to hold the first impeachment inquiry hearing against President Joe Biden next week as Congress investigates allegations of abuse of power and corruption.
Lawmakers are expected to review existing evidence and explain the inquiry’s status at the scheduled Sept. 28 hearing, Just the News confirmed Tuesday.
Read More
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy proposed a plan on Wednesday to halve the size of the federal administrative state in his first year in office — should he be elected.
Read More
As House Republicans have settled back into Washington, D.C. this week fresh off a month-long hiatus, all eyes will turn to whether the party in control of the lower chamber can muster any resistance against the current regime running roughshod over the nation and blatantly interfering with the upcoming presidential election.
Read More
When asked on Wednesday whether he planned to run for reelection in 2026, Mitch McConnell did not answer. Except that he did. The 81-year-old’s half minute of almost catatonic silence served as a loud “no.”
On Thursday, the Capitol physician described the Senate minority leader as “medically clear.” The doctor did not state that McConnell’s March concussion caused the incident — or the similar zone-out that occurred last month — but the peculiar wording of the statement may lead readers to draw that conclusion.
Read More
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with cancer.
Read More
The Pentagon has missed half of its deadlines to respond to requests from a Congressional watchdog in the last six months.
A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that the U.S. Department of Defense submitted about half of its agency comments and sensitivity or security reviews after deadlines set by the watchdog.
Read More
As the federal government’s funding deadline of September 30th approaches, several conservative members of Congress have advocated for another government shutdown, calling it a positive thing.
As reported by Politico, some of the most conservative members of the House of Representatives have floated the idea in recent weeks. Congressman Bob Good (R-Va.) said last week that if the federal government were to shut down, “most Americans won’t even miss” it.
Read More
Mark Houck, the father of seven arrested and charged by President Joe Biden’s administration for his pro-life advocacy, is now running for Congress.
“I am running for Congress to further protect my family, those in the 1st district & the Republic,” Houck says on his campaign website. “I will focus on restoring traditional values & principles that are central to the American identity, such as faith, family, & freedom of speech, religion, & the right to bear arms.”
Read More
Representatives Greg Steube (R-Fl.) and Ralph Norman (R-Sc.) say the idea of potentially impeaching President Biden is gaining momentum with some of their colleagues in Congress.
“We’re actually working on our own impeachment resolution for President Biden on all this corruption, and all the laws and crimes that he violated,” Steube said on the Wednesday edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show.
Read More
The future of humanity is becoming ever less human. The astounding capabilities of ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence have triggered fears about the coming age of machines leaving little place for human creativity or employment. Even the architects of this brave new world are sounding the alarm. Sam Altman, chairman and CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, recently warned that artificial intelligence poses an “existential risk” to humanity and warned Congress that artificial intelligence “can go quite wrong.”
Read More
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer has secured the cooperation of one of Hunter Biden’s closest business partners, setting an interview for next week with Devon Archer. Now Congress’ chief investigator is readying a subpoena to compel a New York firm to turn over a tranche of Archer’s documents that have been in storage since the FBI took them years ago.
Read More
Facing a potential contempt of Congress vote, FBI Director Christopher Wray relented and has agreed to bring a subpoenaed document from the Biden family investigation to Capitol Hill for lawmakers to inspect on Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced Friday. The document in question, an FD-1023, contains uncorroborated allegations that an informant provided the FBI in June 2020 alleging that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was engaged in a bribery scheme to change US policy in return for $5 million to his family’s businesses, lawmakers have said.
Read More
Just hours after informing Congress he wouldn’t comply with a subpoena and turn over an informant document on the Biden family investigation, FBI Director Christopher Wray hopped on the bureau’s Gulfstream jet and ferried off to the more friendly confines of Las Vegas.
The flight manifest for the FBI’s official jet shows Wray left the Washington suburb of Manassas, Va., at about 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday and landed about four hours later in Nevada’s most famous tourist city.
Read More
Special Counsel John Durham has finished his voluminous report outlining the Justice Department, State Department, intelligence agencies and FBI’s “confirmation bias” that led to a years-long investigation of former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, transition and then administration falsely alleging that Trump and his campaign were Russian agents who had helped Moscow hack the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and put their emails onto Wikileaks despite the fact that the FBI could not “corroborate a single substantive allegation in the [Christopher] Steele dossier reporting,” which was sourced to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.
Read More
One of the Left’s emotional weapons it uses to continue its open border agenda is unaccompanied alien children. A historic number of these children have crossed the southern border during the Biden administration—their parents were enticed by promises of entry into the U.S. and other immigration benefits for their children.
But they are often brutally mistreated on the journey, and many do not face happy endings once here. Sadly, unknown numbers are sex-trafficked, subjected to child labor, and face other abuses. But Congress has an opportunity to end this inhumanity beginning this week when it considers the Secure the Border Act in the House.
Read More