The Biden Autopen Scandal just exploded — and now every single one of Joe Biden’s executive actions and presidential pardons may be constitutionally invalid.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is sounding the alarm after explosive revelations from the Oversight Project and damning admissions by Joe Biden himself in a recent interview with The New York Times.
The scandal centers around the White House’s unprecedented use of an autopen to grant pardons and approve executive actions without Biden’s direct review or approval.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that six criminals were “pardoned” by a robotic pen while Biden was vacationing and golfing in St. Croix on December 30, 2022. That’s right — not a single drop of ink came from Biden’s hand.
And now, it gets worse.
According to The New York Times, Biden did not individually approve each name on the clemency list. His aides pushed the final names through the autopen without his review — even after major changes were made to the list.
Staff Secretary Stefanie Feldman reportedly “processed” the clemency records through the autopen. Biden’s team tried to spin it as a “routine” action, but constitutional watchdogs are calling it a brazen abuse of executive authority.
In a bombshell interview on Hannity, Comer dropped the hammer:
“I think it would be a hard pitch in front of a court of law to try to defend what Joe Biden just admitted to The New York Times — that he didn’t know exactly who all was getting pardons or not. He didn’t know who was being pardoned with the use of his autopen, and that’s the whole basis of this investigation.
This is just the pardons. What about the executive orders? I mean, there was no process that we have found thus far. We’ve brought in four people in our interviews and depositions — no defined process by which Joe Biden was the one saying, “Yes, use this autopen to sign my name on this pardon or this executive order.”
Sean, we’re just talking about signing your name — one signature. It doesn’t even take into account whether or not he was mentally able to understand what he was even signing.
This is bad, and I think this puts all of those pardons in peril from the Biden administration.”
WATCH:
They are so Fooked…
James Comer said the Autopen Scandal puts every single Pardon and Executive Action Joe Biden Took as President under Peril
Joe Biden just admitted to the NYT who all was getting pardons
Jeff Zients, former Chief of Staff for Joe Biden and former COVID Response Coordinator before that.
Jeff Zients is a former Obama and Biden official who served as the Chief of Staff for Joe Biden.
In December 2020, Zients was named as the presumptive coordinator of the COVID-19 response team and counselor to the president.
Jeff Zients was later promoted to Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff from February 2023 until the end of his failed presidency in January 2025 when Joe Biden left office.
In May 2021, Jeff Zients was pushing for COVID boosters ahead of the Biden FDA approval for the shots.
Then FOX News host Chris Wallace roasted the Biden administration for pushing the dangerous COVID boosters early as the Biden team insisted “we will listen to the scientists and we are not going to get ahead of the science.”
Now, according to emails leaked to The New York Times, we discover that Biden Chief of Staff and former coordinator of the COVID-19 response team, Jeff Zients, was a key official in the pardon of Dr. Tony Fauci!
Zients approved of the use of the autopen to pardon Dr. Fauci and others.
“At the Jan. 19 meeting, which took place in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House residence, Mr. Biden kept his aides until nearly 10 p.m. to talk through such decisions, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“The emails show that an aide to Mr. Siskel sent a draft summary of Mr. Biden’s decisions at that meeting to an assistant to Mr. Zients, copying Mr. Siskel, at 10:03 p.m. The assistant forwarded it to Mr. Reed and Mr. Zients, asking for their approval, and then sent a final version to Ms. Feldman — copying many meeting participants and aides — at 10:28 p.m.”
“Three minutes later, Mr. Zients hit ‘reply all’ and wrote, ‘I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.’”
According to emails leaked to NYT, a key aide in the pardon of Anthony Fauci was Jeff Zients, the former COVID czar who pushed for everyone to get a booster shot before the FDA had approved them. pic.twitter.com/yVyQIk7lBC
The same guy who made millions off of the government healthcare policies pardoned Dr. Tony Fauci. What a surprise!
Via Mike Benz.
So Fauci was pardoned by the White House Covid-19 coordinator, who made tens of millions of dollars off financial bets exploiting federal government healthcare policies. https://t.co/UJdJ0vbuHmpic.twitter.com/Fp61yt7ex5
As more details have emerged over the last few weeks regarding the Russian Collusion hoax, Devin Nunes, the former congressman who initially led the Russia investigation in 2017, has disclosed that a new document suggests that John Brennan, James Comey, and others knew right from the start that the ‘Russian Collusion’ story was “stirred up” by the Clinton campaign.
Yet, the rollout of the long-debunked hoax was still rolled out with the effect of diminishing President Trump’s first term in office.
Nunes claimed that this document was undisclosed to the investigators until late 2020. During a FOX News interview with Trey Gowdy, who was also involved in the 2017 investigation, Nunes discussed the undisclosed document, and more importantly, the still-unpublished report that Nunes wrote in response to the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia Collusion:
“…there was a document that you nor I saw back in 2017, and 2018 while we were doing this investigation, it didn’t appear until right before the election in 2020. In October 2020, then-Director Ratcliffe declassifie[d] this document. And it was sent in September 2016 from the CIA to Director Comey and Peter Strzok. That document we never saw.
You got to put a little bit of common sense to this. If you listen to what your interaction with Brennan was, he never briefed us on this. He knew, the CIA sent to Comey and to the FBI, that the Russians and others knew that the Clinton Campaign and the DNC were actively involved in stirring up a Russian controversy with Trump. That was real intelligence. It never made it to us. It really didn’t allow President Trump to govern in his first term…because…everything was about Russia all the time. And it was all a bunch of non-sense. And hopefully now they’ll be able to get to the bottom of this and people can be held accountable.
Nunes does not elaborate on what specifically the document contains nor when he hopes it will be publicly released. However, Nunes then refers to the report he submitted regarding the CIA Intelligence Community Assessment that has been declassified (twice) but has never been publicly released:
Right after the election in 2017, we were briefed by the FBI and the other intelligence agencies, and we were told everything was normal. Yeah, the Russians, all the usual suspects, were up to their usual games but there was nothing unusual about it. This was a week or two after the election in 2016. We…had been running an investigation and warning the Obama administration about Putin for a very long time.
Then we went home for Thanksgiving and the Senate got a different briefing. So, in between that time, Obama and company, including, had to be Comey and had to be Brennan, conspired to produce this ICA that then in December [2016]…I warned that ‘look this looks like political nonsense here.”
…Why does all this matter? We then did a long investigation looking into this ICA that had the [Steele] Dossier shoved into it, that should have never been shoved into it, because now we know that Brennan and Comey and everybody knew that this was a Clinton campaign hoax.
So what happened to that ICA? We did an exhaustive study of it, Trey. You remember. That report, which I still can’t believe this, that report has still not been put out. Now, Director Ratcliffe put out something recently about the tradecraft issues at the CIA, but the report that we did…that still has not been released. And I think Chairman Crawford…has requested that be put out. And I think you and I both agree that that it should be put out.
Devin Nunes discusses a document that Brennan sent to Comey in 2016 which showed THEY KNEW Russia collusion was a Clinton campaign hoax
“[Brennan] knew. The CIA sent to Comey and to the FBI, that the Russians and others knew, that the Clinton campaign and the DNC were… pic.twitter.com/JHp83FF5Vm
— Patri0tsareinContr0l (@Patri0tContr0l) July 14, 2025
Once again, it is not clear specifically what report Nunes is referring to; however, in March 2025, President Trump ordered “all of the materials referenced in the Presidential Memorandum of January 19, 2021” to be declassified. President Trump did determine that certain material proposed for redaction by the FBI in 2021 would remain classified. He also stated that the declassification “does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the [FISA] Court,” as well as personally identifiable information.
FBI Director Kash Patel was also intimately involved in this investigation and laid the foundation for his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters.” However, at that time, the Durham Report was the keystone investigation into ‘Russia Collusion’ and did not suggest that Brennan, Comey, or any other leadership at the FBI or CIA knew that the Russia Collusion narrative was initiated by the Clinton campaign.
So glad @CannConActual & I recently did Government Gangsters on Book Club. The administration was always prioritizing Russia Gate. They’ve been building the record for years. And those plot lines were left hanging in Kash’s book. Nunes is now reviving them.
FBI Director Kash Patel has launched a “Grand Criminal Conspiracy” investigation into the decade-long weaponization of the federal government — a probe that specifically circumvents the statute of limitations, allowing investigators to finally pursue justice for long-buried crimes.
According to a report by JustTheNews, Barack Obama, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and other high-level Obama-era operatives have been named in the investigation, which shows a coordinated criminal conspiracy to target political enemies, shield Democrat allies, and manipulate multiple presidential elections — from 2016 through 2024.
But it gets better: The probe may now shift jurisdiction to Florida — thanks to none other than Special Counsel Jack Smith’s own raid on Mar-a-Lago.
The Gateway Pundit previously reported that Solomon teased that within the next 10 days, bombshell revelations would be made public — possibly exposing how weaponized federal agencies colluded to rig the political landscape against Trump and deceive the American people.
Solomon: “I think next week — over the next 10 days — the base who’s been wondering, “Where’s all that accountability?” is going to get some big surprises. Over the next week, we’ll learn where the conspiracy began — a few weeks before Crossfire Hurricane was opened — and when it ended, all the way in 2024, when they were still trying to pursue Donald Trump to keep him from winning the presidency.
There’s a big case that’s been built by the Justice Department and the FBI.
It’s been masked by a lot of this infighting and drama and soap opera. The matter is — MAGA-base Americans are going to be happy when they see where this is all heading in the next few weeks.
Kash Patel is going nowhere.”
During an interview with Sean Hannity, Solomon said that under the leadership of Director Kash Patel, the FBI has officially opened a grand criminal conspiracy case designed to circumvent the statute of limitations and expose years of unprecedented weaponization of government agencies against President Donald Trump.
Sean Hannity: According to a bombshell report from JustTheNews.com, the FBI is now seeking answers to years of weaponization of the federal government, opening the door for a special prosecutor to look into everything — starting with the Russia, Russia, Russia collusion hoax — all the way through Jack Smith and what impact it may have had on the elections, intervening in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
Sean Hannity: You wrote a very long, comprehensive investigative piece about how the FBI opened a case several weeks ago under the new FBI Director, Kash Patel, and that this would be a grand conspiracy case on the issue of weaponization.
We were right about FISA abuse. We were right about the double standard in terms of top-secret classified information. But what I’m reading in your piece tells me that, starting with the Russia hoax and going all the way through Jack Smith, we’re talking about every incident of weaponization used against Donald Trump — and how it could be part of a broader, grander conspiracy that actually took place, with lawbreaking involved.
And also, that the statute of limitations would not be applicable in this case as a result. This would include names like Comey and Clapper and Brennan. Take it from there.
John Solomon: Yeah — and Barack Obama, too, because he was in on these early meetings. What the FBI has done is treated the last decade of weaponization — all the great work that James Comer has turned up through his Oversight Committee — and put it into a timetable.
They said: this looks like an ongoing conspiracy — a “wash, rinse, repeat” cycle of: Democrat gets in legal trouble (Hillary Clinton in her email case, Hunter Biden with his taxes, Joe Biden with his classified documents), and they’re let off the hook, even when there is extraordinary evidence suggesting they shouldn’t be.
Then a parallel track occurs, where the Republican — in this case, Donald Trump — is investigated falsely for things like Russia collusion, Ukrainian interference, and his own home at Mar-a-Lago.
This is a criminal conspiracy. And by treating it as a conspiracy, you eliminate the five-year statutes on individual crimes. So if something happened in 2016, but it was part of an ongoing conspiracy that continued with Jack Smith raiding Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, it can be charged in the larger conspiracy. Even though, if you tried to charge it as an individual case, you wouldn’t get it.
Furthermore, you could also change the venue.
John Solomon: Remember the troubles John Durham had bringing prosecutions to Washington, D.C.? Jurors wouldn’t convict — even if they thought there was criminality going on.
In this case, you could pick a place like Florida — where Jack Smith did the raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home — and say, “That’s where we’re putting the grand jury.” You’d get a more fair jury pool, a more fair grand jury pool.
It gives Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, an enormous amount of flexibility to do something historic — finally bring some accountability for all the things that Chairman Comer, Chairman Johnson, Chairman Grassley, and Chairman Jordan have brought and proven to the American people.
Sean Hannity: Yeah, okay. Bring us a little deeper into this and, more specifically, tell us what this might entail — who might be appointed special counsel, how long this investigation is likely to take, and how involved will it be?
Because we’ve talked at length on this program — maybe more than any other show — about how the deep state, these three-letter agencies, have been using and abusing their power. I don’t care if it’s the 51 intel agents who knew nothing about Hunter’s laptop. I don’t care if it’s Russia-Russia. I don’t care if it’s a false valuation of Mar-a-Lago. I don’t care if it’s a double standard when it comes to top-secret classified documents — how Trump was treated versus Biden versus Hillary Clinton.
There’s a lot to unpack there.
John Solomon: There is. There’s a couple of things.
First, because of the great work of Chairman Comer, Chairman Jordan, Chairman Johnson, and Chairman Grassley, most of the evidence is already available to the Justice Department. You’re not going to have to pry it out.
Now, there are two pieces of evidence that Donald Trump could declassify — they are still classified — and they would be explosive. They would put it at the start of the conspiracy.
Hillary Clinton was cleared from her email scandal by James Comey shortly after the FBI got new classified evidence from an intelligence agency saying there might be more criminality. It never got investigated — it got swept under the rug. The evidence exists in a classified annex in the Justice Department’s investigations of documents.
If Donald Trump were to declassify that, he would put this investigation on fast-forward.
Same thing with the day that Donald Trump was being investigated at the start of Russia collusion: an intelligence intercept comes in saying that Hillary Clinton approved doing a Russian collusion dirty trick on Donald Trump — essentially sticking a fake scandal on him. Instead of the FBI taking that into account, they opened up on that very allegation and ignored the evidence — which defies all investigative rules that the FBI has.
John Solomon: If Donald Trump declassified those two pieces of intelligence, a special prosecutor would have a jumpstart. This could be wrapped up in a couple of years.
You could pick anybody. You don’t have to pick someone in the Justice Department. You could pick a Senate-confirmed person — like Lee Zeldin — and get a prosecutor going.
Sean Hannity: And he’s a lawyer, so that would be a good choice in my view.
John Solomon: He’s a lawyer and a prosecutor, yeah, man.
What is the point of state-sponsored mediocrity in the arts?
(Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
Thirty-some years ago, I quite enjoyed myself debating the abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts on campuses and in halls of state across the fruited plain. My forensic opposite numbers tended to be arts bureaucrats or recipients of federal largesse, and they assumed that I must be a philistine who’d gotten all bent out of shape due to the handful of high-profile NEA grants for pornographic or scatological pranks: the urine-soaked crucifix of Andres Serrano, the bullwhips of Robert Mapplethorpe, etc.
I may well be a philistine. Hey, summer’s here, and the time is right for my annual binge of ’70s drive-in movies; anyone up for a Jan-Michael Vincent film festival? But I refused to play the part I was assigned in those debates. My argument was not that subsidized artists are subversive but that they are tame, neutered, obedient.
I didn’t quote Jesse Helms but rather the long and raggedly noble roster of artists who have spurned or denounced government sponsorship: Beat impresario Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pop Artist Larry Rivers, Jacques Barzun, Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, John Updike—this line of what Robert Frost called “insubordinate Americans” stretches back to the New Deal’s Federal Art, Theatre, and Writers’ Projects, the earliest attempt to pen artists in the federal corral.
William Faulkner and Edward Hopper pointedly refused any connection with these projects, for, as Faulker declared, the writer “mustn’t accept gratuity from the state. He mustn’t let the state buy him.” (Faulkner’s brother John even wrote an anti-New Deal novel, Men Working.)
The dividing line was never one of ideology but rather temperament. In 1937, John Sloan, former art editor of the socialist magazine The Masses and cofounder of the Ashcan School of art, dismissed the proposed Bureau of Fine Arts: “I hate nearly everything [government] does, its support of privilege, the wars it gets us into. Why shouldn’t I hate it in my own line, my own calling? Having the government the advocate of the mediocre in art, the employer of art, would be a good thing. We would know where to locate the enemy.”
I fully realize how terribly quaint this all sounds today. Abjure power? Nah—the dead-eyed bores of the woke left and the rough boys of the nationalist right fetishize power, and when they achieve it they damn sure intend to use it.
Conscientious objectors who wish neither to wield nor submit to power are as impractical as unemployed poets, whiskey priests, and dandelions.
Like the Interstate Highway System, NASA, and metric conversion, the National Endowment for the Arts was a Cold War baby. Its most vigorous congressional advocate, Rep. Frank Thompson (D-NJ), a “liberal’s liberal,” as the New York Times called him, declared: “Making Washington the cultural center of the world would be one of the very best and most effective ways to answer the Russian lies and defeat their heavily financed effort to have Communism take over the world.”
A national arts agency would prove to the world that Americans are not “gum-chewing, insensitive, materialistic barbarians,” harrumphed Thompson, whose career went splat when in 1980 he was caught in the FBI’s Abscam sting. Convicted of bribery, he spent two years in the federal pokey, where gum-chewers were the least of his worries.
Saying what the heck, I served on an NEA panel one weekend in 2004, during the endowment’s golden age: Its chairman, Dana Gioia, was and is a major American poet.
I was impressed by the diligence of the NEA staff, though I’m afraid I committed a faux pas by casting the lone nay vote on our final package due to the gross regional imbalance of the grantees, more than half of which were located in California and New York. Same as it ever was: One year, New York City accounted for 45 percent of all Federal Art Project dolesters while not a single artist in Texas or either Dakota received a penny.
After that spasm of public-spiritedness—you may thank me for my service—I gave up writing or speaking about subsidized art. I had nothing more to say about the matter, and, given the enormity and enormousness of Uncle Sam’s death-dealing in the Middle East, it seemed kinda silly to whine about the relative pittance Washington sent to perfectly fine symphony orchestras and striving regional theaters and even borderline-personality-disordered performance artists. I just didn’t care anymore.
What’s next for the NEA? There are abolitionists within the Trump administration, God bless ‘em, though I’d not be shocked by a compromise that installed Lee Greenwood as national recording-artist-in-residence. Just leave the rest of us alone, and please 86 the next functionary who says that art streams from a government spigot.
Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon at TPUSA Student Action Summit in July, 2025 (@bannonswarroom/Instagram)
On Saturday, July 12, conservative populist titan Steve Bannon electrified the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, FL, by delivering a hardcore, patriotic speech in primetime.
“I love you guys. You are the heart of the movement. You were with President Trump in 2021, when they stole the election. Who had his back? You guys did,” Bannon opened his speech.
Bannon certified his calling card as the frontline warrior for American justice by immediately referencing the Special Prosecutor the White House is expected to appoint to investigate the Deep State’s many crimes against the American people.
“We are told there is going to be a Special Prosecutor named in the next week or two. And that will go back to the very beginning of how the Deep State tried to stop President Trump and install Hillary Clinton with Crossfire Hurricane in the summer of 2016,” Bannon said.
“The country would have been gone. Donald Trump had the greatest come-from-behind victory against the headwind of the Deep State trying to stop him. After he won, what did they do immediately? The nullification project; the phony Russiagate – just a rollover from Crossfire Hurricane.”
“It just continued on. Why? They wanted to stop President Trump from taking on the Deep State. Think about it. He had the economy on a roll. He had everything on a roll. And then, the Chinese Communist Party, in 2020, dropped a bioweapon from the Wuhan Lab. Then, they stole the 2020 election,” Bannon said.
Throughout his speech, Bannon delivered the ultimate roadmap for American justice.
Watch Bannon’s timely and patriotic speech, here.
“Let’s deconstruct what President Trump is saying on Truth Social. He says we’ve got to look into the 2020 election – that is going to be purview of the Special Prosecutor,” Bannon said.
“You have Crossfire Hurricane, before he won. You have the nullification project and the Russian hoax, after he won – to try and kill his first term. Then, you have the stealing of the 2020 election. And, let’s throw in January 6. Now, I would strongly recommend that, in the arc of looking at how the Deep State has tried to stop Trump and the MAGA movement, you can easily fit in the Epstein situation.”
“If you want the full release of documents, the Special Prosecutor can get to it – and here’s why. Epstein is the key that picks the lock on so many things – not just individuals, but also institutions – intelligence institutions and foreign governments. Who was working with him in our intelligence apparatus, and in our government?” Bannon said.
Bannon stressed that the American Patriot movement has reached another critical crossroads – now, American Patriots must prioritize the administration of justice.
“The time for choosing is now. We have to decide right now – back the president, and say, ‘How did we get 10 or 20 million [illegal immigrants] on Biden’s watch?’ That was, absolutely, a plan they had. That was not random. That has to be investigated, and people held accountable, like all these other things,” Bannon said.
“The Justice Department is clearly overwhelmed with all they are working on. The FBI is clearly overwhelmed. But the Special Prosecutor can take on many projects, and add people to them,” Bannon said.
Bannon delivered the gut punch in his speech that will one day be considered historic.
“The Deep State must be destroyed, to free the American people,” Bannon said.
“Is there any question about that? We have to destroy the Deep State – and this has elements at the Pentagon; the Justice Department; the FBI; the CIA; certain elements that work under DNI; those 17 intelligence agencies; also, parts of the State Department; the USAIDs of the world. That inner apparatus controls the government – and when President Trump tries to do something, they are always trying to thwart his actions,” Bannon said.
Bolstering Bannon’s statement, The Gateway Pundit reported that War Room Films’ 2024 adaptation of FBI Director Kash Patel’s blistering exposé, Government Gangsters, has already unmasked the illegal actions committed by President Obama and his Deep State actors against President Trump.
As The Gateway Pundit reported,
“Kash Patel underscored the methods by which James Comey’s FBI conspired to surveil President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Under President Obama, the FBI illegally obtained a warrant to surveil the Trump campaign, based on false evidence, from a secret, Washington, DC FISA Court.”
“Patel unleashed his personal findings following his historic, nonpartisan investigation into President Trump, while working for the US House Intelligence Committee from 2017-2018. Patel was forced to conclude, even to his own shock, that entrenched government interests had conspired with the Mainstream Media to illegally doctor and contrive the infamous “Russia hoax,” framing President Trump as a Russian agent.”
As Bannon emphasized in his Turning Point 2025 speech, the infamous “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” surveillance of President Trump’s 2016 campaign merely represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the government crimes that must be investigated by the newly appointed Special Prosecutor.
“I think you’re going to see President Trump, in identifying his prosecutors, he’s going after who set up Crossfire Hurricane. He’s going after the Russia Hoax. He’s going after the 2020 election, and how it was stolen, and who is responsible for it being stolen,” Bannon said.
Still, the American people cannot rely solely on government officials to carry out major investigations. Instead, the American people must themselves demand the removal of all Deep State government interests.
“The Deep State must be destroyed, and it’s your responsibility to do it,” Bannon said.
“We are not free. You do not give the Deep State the consent of the governed – therefore, it is your responsibility to destroy it. This is a sacred duty and responsibility of the American people.”
“No cavalry is going to come and save you. No foreign country is going to come and save you. No Deus ex machina is going to come down. No fairy dust is going to appear. You have to do it yourself. You can’t be neutral. We have to see this through to the end.”
“We can do all the tax cuts in the world; we can close the border; we can do all these amazing things; however, if we don’t get into what really tries to control the country – the Deep State, and take it apart… then, we are not going to win any more elections,” Bannon said.
In concluding his epic speech, Bannon pledged that persistence alone will ensure the Patriot Movement’s ultimate victory.
“The only thing that can stop us is ourselves. If you falter – if you quit, then we will lose. But if you hunker down, I guarantee you that we will be victorious, just like we were in 2024,” Bannon said.
“In 2024, President Trump won a sweeping victory. All your victories, in backing President Trump, are unparalleled – not just in American history, but in all history.”
“2024 will be studied in the history books, forever. Now, we are building a coalition bigger than FDR’s in 1932. That’s what we have to continue to build,” Bannon said.
Gateway Pundit readers, which American should be appointed as Special Prosecutor?
Roger Stone: Epstein Files Will Exonerate Trump and Expose the Clintons
In a bold and revealing statement, longtime political strategist Roger Stone —a close ally of former President Donald Trump— confirmed he has reviewed the files related to Jeffrey Epstein and that Trump will be fully exonerated. Contrary to the smear campaign orchestrated by progressive media and the Democratic machine, Stone says the real truth is buried deep within these documents —and it does not look good for the Clintons or the globalist elite.
One of the most explosive moments came when Stone pointed to Ghislaine Maxwell —Epstein’s convicted accomplice
Leading officials of the BRICS nations met last week for the 17th annual summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As American hegemony continues to strain and the U.S.-led unipolar world shows signs of stress and fractures, BRICS, the leading alternative to international governance, along with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, continues to organize and grow.
The seeds of BRICS were sown in 1996 with the core RIC grouping of Russia, China and India. Brazil joined in 2009, and BRIC held its first summit. A year later, South Africa became a member, and BRICS was formed. In 2024, Egypt, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Ethiopia joined. The international organization swelled to its current membership of ten when Indonesia became a full member at the beginning of this year.
BRICS is an international organization whose primary purpose is to balance U.S. hegemony in the new multipolar world. The group is neither an alliance nor a bloc, and it does not oppose the United States, with which many of its members have good relations. But it does seek to end the American-led unipolar world and replace it with a world with many poles and many nations who have equal voices regardless of their economic or military strength.
Though the U.S. and its Western allies dismiss BRICS with a broad brush as being, at its core, an alliance of autocracies, its membership list refutes that criticism. Multipolarity, which the organization promotes, includes respect for polyculturalism. Some BRICS members are autocracies, some are democracies, and some are a mix. Notably, BRICS includes three of the four largest democracies in the world, and with India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia, four of its 10 members are democracies.
BRICS is a truly global organization, with members from Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. It also now has ten partner countries hailing from a variety of regions: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Cuba, Bolivia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dozens more states are lining up at the door. BRICS now represents half the population of the world and 41.4 percent of GDP.
The BRICS group is diverse. Members lack a common ideology and have different and sometimes even conflicting goals. That is the meaning of multipolarity—a point often missed by Western critics who identify as potential weaknesses the “questions about the shared goals” and the “increasingly heterogeneous” nature of a group that is “divided.” When The Guardiansays that the “recent rapid expansion… has diluted its coherence as a body,” it is misunderstanding the entire meaning of multipolarity.
After the welcoming and introductory remarks, paragraph five of the 2025 BRICS Rio de Janeiro Declaration reaffirms the group’s commitment to multipolarity: “We reiterate our commitment to reforming and improving global governance by promoting a more just, equitable… representative… multilateral system.” Paragraph eight declares that multipolarity is already a reality and says, “it is crucial that developing countries strengthen their efforts to promote dialogue and consultations for more just and equitable global governance and mutually beneficial relations among nations.”
“If international governance does not reflect the new multipolar reality of the 21st century,” Brazil’s President, Lula da Silva, said in his opening remarks, then “it is up to BRICS to help bring it up to date.”
Despite Western warnings of BRICS’ heterogeneous nature, da Silva seems to have succeeded in his goal of keeping the members unified. In the section on “Peace, Security and International Stability,” the declaration stresses the need to prevent conflicts “through addressing their root causes” while “underscore[ing] that security among all countries is indivisible.” The mentions of “root causes” and the “indivisibility of security” are both coded support for Russia and its demand that the West cannot increase its security goals at the expense of Russia’s by expanding NATO into Ukraine. The declaration condemns Ukraine’s recent strikes on civilians and civilian infrastructure without criticizing Russia or blaming it for the war.
The declaration similarly supports Iran, condemning “the military strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” It says that the strikes “constitute a violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations” and that “deliberate attacks on… peaceful nuclear facilities under full safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency” are “in violation of international law and relevant resolutions of the IAEA.”
Many of President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, including his recent threat that “Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff,” were plainly intended to protect U.S. hegemony and erect a roadblock to the emerging multipolarity. But they’ve had the opposite effect, pushing targeted countries further into the embrace of BRICS and enhancing trade between its member states, including trade in local currencies instead of the U.S. dollar.
The declaration expresses “serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff[s]” that “are inconsistent with WTO rules.” It calls for the elimination of unilaterally-imposed sanctions, “which undermine international law and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter.”
One long-standing goal of BRICS that has most concerned the U.S. is emancipation from U.S. dollar hegemony, which the U.S. has used to coerce ideological, economic and political adjustment form other countries, and which has allowed it to be the only country in the world that can impose crippling sanctions on virtually any country it wants.
Following Trump’s recent threat that BRICS countries “will face 100% Tariffs” if they challenge the hegemony of the U.S. dollar by “creat[ing] a new BRICS Currency” or “back[ing] any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar,” the declaration was carefully quiet on de-dollarisation, though it did support member cooperation on financing development.
But core individual leaders were less quiet in their remarks. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his video statement, said, “It is important to continue expanding the use of national currencies in mutual payments.” He added that “creating an independent payment and monetary system within BRICS will expedite currency transactions while also ensuring their effectiveness and security.” Putin then reported that the trend toward using national currencies for trade between BRICS partners is growing and that last year “the share of Russia’s national currency, the ruble, and the currencies of our friendly states in transactions with Russia and other BRICS countries reached 90 percent.”
Lula da Silva argued that the world “needs to find a way that our trade relations don’t have to pass through the dollar.”
Western media has claimed that this apparent unity is belied by the decisions of Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping not to attend the summit. In fact, Putin did attend, albeit virtually. And his decision not to attend in person may be explained by the International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest that would in theory have to be executed by Brazil, a signatory to the ICC statute. Putin made the same decision for the 2023 BRICS summit in South Africa. As with South Africa, Brazil probably couldn’t provide sufficient guarantees that Putin wouldn’t be arrested. Lula was likely protecting Putin, and Putin was likely protecting Lula.
Tremendous significance has been read into Xi’s decision not to attend. Reuters reports that it stole “some thunder” from the summit. The Guardianreports that Xi’s decision not to go caused “dismay” and prompted speculation “that China’s enthusiasm for the organisation may have diminished.” The Guardian ’s diplomatic editor says Xi’s and Putin’s decisions “may be a sign that the group’s recent expansion has reduced its ideological value to the two founding members.”
But Xi’s absence was not a snub to Lula or Brazil: Xi went to Brazil in November for a state visit, and the two leaders signed several cooperation agreements. It is not a snub to Putin or Russia: the Chinese-Russian partnership is only getting closer. It may, however, have been a mild snub to India. Alexander Lukin, who is Head of Department of International Relations at National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and an authority on Russia-China relations, suggested to me that Xi has missed some other events because of India, because “he is too big now to be lectured by anybody.” Still, Lukin said one can only speculate as to Xi’s reasons.
CNN provides a more sober assessment than most of the rest of the mainstream press. Citing expert observers, it maintains that “the Chinese leader’s decision not to attend—sending his No. 2 official Li Qiang instead—doesn’t mean Beijing has downgraded the significance it places on BRICS.” CNN suggests that weakened U.S. relations with key partnerships that had threatened China, heightened focus on China’s domestic economy, along with only modest expectations of a major breakthrough at the summit this year, may simply have made the trip a lower priority. Still, Xi did send his prime minister, Li Qiang, who is a highly trusted second-in-command.
“I don’t think there’s any international significance” to Xi’s decision, Sarang Shidore, who is director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, told me. “It probably reflects some domestic dynamics within China. As far as Chinese commitment to BRICS is concerned, I don’t see any pullback.”
Despite Western warnings that are more wish-casting than sober analysis, the just-concluded BRICS summit suggests that the international organization is a growing multipolar alternative to the U.S. unipolar model of world governance—an alternative that is increasingly attractive to the global majority.
Elbridge Colby is apparently a troubled man. Bloomberg calls Colby, current undersecretary of defense for policy, a “deep state thinker in a shallow Pentagon”. The Telegraph claims he is a “little known” Pentagon officer who blindsided Trump on Ukraine weapons freeze. POLITICO ran a hit piece on him. Jewish Insider is obsessed with him. The Daily Beast says he’s “pissing off” almost everyone with “rogue” decisions.
The accusations—and in the case of the British daily, the utter ignorance—stem from the fact that Colby takes his job seriously. His prime folly, as POLITICO and a recent Financial Times article point out, is to ask tough questions to his allies.
To refit a meme, what did y’all think “America First” meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Colby needs no introduction, and his credentials need no defense. He is an intellectual star of the realist right, and perhaps the only such to hold a top position since at least the days of James Baker and the first Bush administration. He wrote the 2017 National Defense Strategy elaborating on the return of “great power competition.” As an official, he was one of the first to focus on the rise of China, and wanted to act on it instead of merely talking about it. His book is about a defense of Taiwan in extremis, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, in which he coined the titular strategy. (While I disagreed with some policy parts of the book, it is a logically sound doctrine in its own merit.) I know him personally and he is polite, responsive, and appreciative of disagreements, including from his critics!
The main contention against Colby comes from a section of entrenched interests who claim that he disgruntled American allies. Well, so what? Apparently he was brusque to the British when they performatively mentioned sending the HMS Prince of Wales, one of their two aircraft carriers, to the Pacific; he asked whether it was too late to turn it back. The Japanese cancelled their July 2+2 meeting when he asked them to raise their defense spending, and the Australians and Japanese both were taken aback when he asked for concrete logistical plans from their militaries in case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. He was also one who asked for a review of weapons being sent to Ukraine, given the shortages at home.
Let’s take these issues one by one. The British and French have legitimate interests in the Pacific, including bases and treaties. But none of them will be capable of changing the balance of power in the region on their own during conflict. If the British were really serious about helping the Americans or genuinely wanted to instantly increase their naval power, they would do one of the two things. First, they would focus on their core region, and home theaters in Europe, Atlantic, Mediterranean, and the North sea, rather than going to Asia. In the last great-power total war, the Royal Navy prioritized Europe after their prestige fleets were at the bottom of the sea at the hands of the Japanese. As Justin Logan wrote, “This is a very reasonable policy argument—secure your own neighborhood before you go gallivanting around the globe pretending to deter China.” Second, if the Royal Navy desires to be a global power, an easy way for them to do so is, as I wrote previously, initiating a joint CANZUK naval command that will instantly double the tonnage of their surface fleets and make them independent of NATO command. They of course will do neither. The performative nature of this is evident because sending a lone European warship to Asia is Europe’s way of keeping America engaged in Europe. Colby rightly argues for a better zonal burden sharing, and that is anathema to the European strategic elite.
The case for Japan and Australia is even stranger. The rise of China and potential Chinese hegemonic threat, if it truly materializes, will affect Japanese and Australians a lot more than it will affect Americans. It is absurd for them to throw a hissy fit at a mere request for clarity and a defense budget increase. As for Ukraine, much ink has been spilled, including by yours truly in this esteemed publication; doubling down on a peripheral theater is a total betrayal of the people who elected Donald Trump.
There is a separate question. Is the president aware of those who are not only ideologically aligned but have the intellectual chops and process knowledge to implement his agenda? Because if he were, he would promote Colby. The opposition to Bridge, as he is known among friends, reminds one of the opposition to Henry Kissinger in his time. Kissinger was hated by both liberals and neoconservatives alike for his amoral realism.
Colby is the most prominent official to question the status quo, and for that reason he is judged guilty by the sophisticates who were the architects of the policies that resulted in the precipitous decline of a hegemon’s relative power in a quarter century.
During a campaign event on Monday, New York City communist and Democrat nominee for mayor Zohran Mamdani was quickly whisked off camera by an aide when a reporter asked him to clarify his remarks about globalizing the Intifada.
The aide can be heard saying “I think we’re done here. We’re going to go.’
This is clearly a line of questioning that his campaign doesn’t like, which makes perfect sense.
Zohran Mamdani press conference abruptly ends with aide pulling him away during reporters questions
An endorsement event for Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, came to an abrupt end Monday when he was pulled offstage by a campaign aide.
After accepting the American Federation of Musicians, Local 802’s endorsement, Mamdani answered a few questions about former Gov. Andrew Cuomo deciding to stay in the race as an independent candidate and his upcoming meeting with House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.
About 20 minutes into the event, before Mamdani could continue answering reporters’ questions, his campaign staffers stepped in to say: “I think we’re done here. We’re going to go. Come on. We’re wrapping up, folks. Sorry folks. We’re wrapping up.”
But Mamdani stood by the podium, attempting to hear the reporters’ questions over the chorus of campaign aides’ voices, until the band on site for the event began playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” With a smile on his face, Mamdani was pulled away when a campaign aide grabbed his arm.
See the clip below:
After struggling to explain his reluctance to denounce “globalize the intifada,” Zohran Mamdani’s staffers pull a Biden & abruptly end his presser: “I think we’re done here” pic.twitter.com/U2GgwmB8aq
Does seeing that aide step in and shield Mamdani from the press look familiar? It looks an awful lot like the way the Joe Biden campaign operated, doesn’t it? It speaks volumes about his campaign and the people he has around him.
