THE OBAMAS SELL THEIR MARTHA’S VINEYARD HOME TO EPSTEIN BENEFACTOR!

Barack and Michelle Obama’s Former Martha’s Vineyard Hideaway Sells to Victoria’s Secret Billionaire Les Wexner for $37 Million

August 4, 2025

Instagram/Michelle Obama; Evan Joseph

The sprawling Martha’s Vineyard estate where Barack and Michelle Obama used to spend their summers has sold for a staggering $37 million—having reportedly been snapped up by billionaire businessman Les Wexner.

Known as Blue Heron Farm, the sprawling Massachusetts property played host to the Obamas for three consecutive summers starting in 2009, with reports at the time suggesting that the family paid a staggering $50,000 a week to rent the abode.

But the family was forced to find an alternative summer sanctuary when the Chilmark home was sold to new owners—who carried out extensive renovations on the 28.5-acre property, while also taking it off the rental market, instead using it as a full-time dwelling.

In May, those owners, Norman Foster and his third wife, Elena Ochoa Foster, decided to part ways with their waterfront playground, listing it for $39 million. The property went under contract just a few weeks later.

Now, the sale price of the opulent dwelling has been revealed, with records showing that it was sold for $2 million below the initial list price. The deal officially closed on July 10, just over two months after the listing went live.

Barack and Michelle Obama's Former Martha's Vineyard Hideaway Lists for $39 Million as Couple Spark Furious Divorce Rumors — A stunning Martha’s Vineyard estate that once served as Barack and Michelle Obama’s summer escape has sold for $37 million, having reportedly been snapped up by Victoria’s Secret mogul Les Wexner. Evan Joseph

EXCLUSIVE: Barack and Michelle Obama's Former Martha's Vineyard Hideaway Sells for Jaw-Dropping $37 Million — Known as Blue Heron Farm, the property last traded hands in 2011, when it was purchased for $22.4 million by architect Norman Foster. Evan Joseph

As first reported by The Real Deal, the property was purchased via a trust with close ties to Wexner, 87, who founded L Brands, the parent company of major brands such as Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, and Lane Bryant.

Wexner is also known for having a long-term personal and professional relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who served as the L Brands founder’s financial adviser for 20 years, until 2007.

Records indicate that the trust is managed by Matthew Zieger, Wexner’s longtime attorney, who is based in Ohio, where many of Wexner’s business interests are located.

In addition to Blue Heron Farm, Wexner and his wife, Abigail, reportedly own properties in New Albany, OH, which serves as their main residence, and Jupiter, FL.

Realtor.com® has contacted Wexner’s spokesperson for comment.

The property—which was listed by Brian Dougherty and Maggie Gold Seelig with Corcoran—was last sold in 2011, when the Fosters bought it from Mollie and William Van Devender for $22.4 million.

Since then, Norman—who founded architecture firm Foster + Partners and has since been involved in the design of several iconic U.K. structures, including The Gherkin and Wembley Stadium—has made several significant updates to the property, which features a main residence and a guesthouse.

In total, there are 13 bedrooms, a design studio, gym, tennis court, equestrian riding rings, and paddocks.

A 150-year-old barn that was originally built in Pennsylvania before being relocated to the Martha’s Vineyard site is the first structure to greet guests as they make their way up the lengthy drive to the main residence, which offers 7,000 square feet of living space and a beautiful wraparound porch.

During his ownership of the abode, Foster added an expansive—and very modern-looking—pool house, which complements the waterfront boathouse that was already located on the property.

OAK BLUFFS, MA - AUGUST 25: (AFP OUT) U.S. President Barack Obama (C) and first lady Michelle Obama shake hands with people before going to lunch at Nancy's Restaurant while vacationing on Martha's Vineyard with his family August 25, 2010 in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. The Obama's are heading into their last weekend on the island before returning to Washington on Sunday. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images) — The Obamas vacationed at the property for several years, reportedly paying $50,000 a week to use the estate. Darren McCollester/Getty Images

“This historic estate with notable farming roots has been meticulously updated and modernized over the years, with significant investments made in timeless renovations, extensive foliage planting, and build-out for new amenities across the property,” a statement about the listing reads.

The home’s many amenities are rounded out by a private dock and a private stretch of beach, allowing guests and residents to enjoy all manner of outdoor activities—while still maintaining a sense of privacy and seclusion.

It was that feeling of safety that first drew the Obamas to the home, according to Gold Seelig and Dougherty, who said in a statement that the then-president and his family picked the property “for its incredible privacy, serenity, and significance.”

Indeed, the Obamas were so fond of the home that—according to Foster—Barack tried to persuade him to continue leasing it to them as a summer rental.

In an interview with the New Yorker in February, Foster revealed that the former president had approached him about renting the home again after they met at a gathering at a neighbor’s house.

Foster noted that Barack had applied “jokey pressure” to encourage him to continue the arrangement that the Obamas had with the former owners, but said that he ultimately had to turn the father of two down.

“[He] was quite amusing about it,” Foster said, but noted that Barack’s humorous plea had done little to change his mind about leasing the property, recalling that he told the former president: “Sadly, no.”

The change in ownership of the Martha’s Vineyard abode did not deter the Obamas from continuing to summer in the tony neighborhood—with the family pivoting to renting another nearby dwelling in 2013.

In 2019, the couple opted to invest in their own home in the area, snapping up an $11.65 million dwelling that they still own to this day.

That property is one of several in the couple’s portfolio, which also includes a dwelling in the Kalorama Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC, where Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were based during Donald Trump‘s first presidency. That home still serves as the couple’s main residence, more than seven years after they purchased it in an off-market deal.

The couple is understood to have paid $8.1 million for the nine-bedroom, 8.5-bathroom residence, which was previously the home of Joe Lockhart, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton.

In 2018, Michelle opened up about their move into the property from the White House, joking to TV host Ellen DeGeneres that her husband had been “shortchanged” by getting the “smallest room” as his office space.

“He still talks about this,” she told DeGeneres. “He got so shortchanged on this whole deal. He doesn’t have enough closet space—sorry! He’s got the smallest room for his office.”

Should Barack require a bit more space, however, he need only venture to one of their other homes, including their $1.65 million property in the tony Chicago neighborhood of Kenwood. The Obamas snapped up that property in 2005, before Barack entered the White House for his first term, and they are thought to still own it.

The Obamas are also understood to have recently invested in a property in Hawaii, having spent years using the same vacation rental for their island getaways.

Reports began emerging in 2020 that the pair were lining up their own property on the island of Oahu—a stunning beachfront home that is part of a trio of residences being developed by their close friend Marty Nesbitt.

Nesbitt purchased a prime plot of waterfront land for the eye-watering sum of $8.1 million in 2015 and began building a luxury compound of homes, one of which is rumored to have been earmarked for the Obamas.

MERIT HIRING FINALLY BY USA GOVERNMENT, END OF HIRING ANY ONE THAT WALKS IN THE DOOR!

After 46 years, DOJ ruling restores merit-based hiring by federal agencies

The Department of Justice on Friday terminated a Carter Administration rule that hamstrung federal agencies from conducting merit-based hiring.

Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon / DOJ photo

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division ended a Carter era decree that required federal agencies to get permission before implementing testing of job applicants to determine who was the best person for the position.

“For over four decades, this decree has hampered the federal government from hiring the top talent of our nation,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division. “Today, the Justice Department removed that barrier and reopened federal employment opportunities based on merit — not race.”

A DOJ press release noted that, in Luevano v. Ezell, the Court dismissed a consent decree based on a lawsuit initially brought by interest groups representing federal employees in 1979.

“The decree entered in 1981 imposed draconian test review and implementation procedures on the Office of Personnel Management — and consequently all other federal agencies — requiring them to receive permission prior to using any tests for potential federal employees, in an attempt to require equal testing outcomes among all races of test-takers,” the DOJ said.

President Donald Trump challenged the decree when he took office in January, which forced the reopening of the case.

The Trump Administration argued that, in light of the Supreme Court’s decision against affirmative action, it was likely that the decree was no longer considered to be constitutionally valid. Luevano, who is still living though the original judge is not, agreed to terminate the decree.

“It’s simple, competence and merit are the standards by which we should all be judged; nothing more and nothing less,” said U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. “It’s about time people are judged, not by their identity, but instead by the content of their character.”

FINALLY WE WILL HAVE TO STOP MAKING FUM OF GOVERNMENT “”WORKERS?

PUBLIC BROADCASTING EXORBITANT SALARIES, EXPOSED AND NOW SHUTTING DOWN, FINALLY!

CEO’s Salary At Defunded Corporation For Public Broadcasting Could Fund A Radio Station For Years

If the CPB board cared about keeping rural broadcasting viable, it would not have spent $19.3 million on CPB salaries and benefits in 2022.

You would cry too, if you were losing a compensation package bigger than the salary of the president of the United States. In 2022, CPB CEO Patricia Harrison’s compensation was $524,000, according to the CPB’ most recently available 990 tax exempt form.

CPB is a nonprofit created by Congress in 1967 to administer funding for Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).

Each year, Congress gives CPB loads of federal taxpayer money, and CPB decides the amount to give to 1,581 public radio and television stations. But the Big Beautiful Bill trimmed CPB out of appropriations, meaning it gets zero money instead of the $1.07 billion it expected for 2026 and 2027.

During its meeting, the board spent 30 self-indulgent minutes extolling the importance of public broadcasting and warning that life without it could harm rural communities. Diane Kaplin used Radio Station KSDP in Sand Point, Alaska as an example, saying without it, “There would be no information” about the recent earthquake and tsunami warning.

But that is a lie. Sand Point and everywhere else in the United States gets Wireless Emergency Alerts — instant emergency information delivered to cell phones to keep the public informed, not just the ones who think to turn on the radio.

In 2022, CPB gave KSDP $211,000. The radio station’s total revenue was $265,000. The CPB portion could have been paid by Harrison’s salary alone for two years. The folks at KSDP might be angry to learn that their annual budget for the compensation packages for all employees combined that year, ($141,067), was slightly less than Harrison’s 2022 bonus ($144,645). At least one person on the KSDP staff has a second job.

If the CPB board really cared about keeping broadcasting viable in small towns like Sand Point, it would not have a huge, overpaid staff in Washington, D.C.

In 2022, CPB spent $19.3 million on salaries and benefits. At least 14 CPB employees that year had compensation packages worth more than $260,000. Of those, five employees were paid over $470,000. Not bad for government work. It is obscene to the point of corruption.

The Aleutian Islands are not a typical U.S. community and there KSDP radio may actually be a treasure to the 6,000 residents in its listening area, but in 2022 it only took in $1,650 in contributions; zero in membership drives; and just over $18,000 in “underwriting,” which is tax-free advertising. The station is almost fully subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. That is how it works at most public broadcast outlets.

Is there Bias? Sure.’

The funding cut was sparked by President Donald Trump’s May 1 executive order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” A rescission proposal explains why CPB was targeted for defunding, saying, “These funds would be used to subsidize a public media system that is politically biased and an unnecessary expense to the taxpayer. Enacting the rescission would eliminate Federal funding for CPB.”

Public broadcasting’s far left bias is well known, and the Federalist has reported on it often.

“Is there bias? Sure, we’re not perfect, but we were working on that. It’s not a legitimate reason to shut down everything,” Harrison, 86 said during the board meeting. It was a flippant response to an existential threat.

A 2023 Pew Research Center report shows public radio and television has suffered from a declining audience since 2017.

“The American people, many of whom have not followed this, will wonder what happened. Somebody’s going to have to tell them what happened,” board Chair Ruby Calvert said during the meeting.

Wait — with access to 1,581 radio and television stations CPB didn’t tell their audience what was happening? No, they did. But CPB could not generate enough public interest. The truth is, most Americans don’t care if public broadcasting continues. There are many more media options competing for the public’s attention than in 1967, and when you routinely deal in bias, you lose audience. It’s a reality all broadcasters must face.

During the most pretentious part of the board meeting, Harrison compared employees at CPB to English King Henry V’s “ragtag army” that was “outnumbered by the French at the Battle of Agincourt, but won despite those odds.” Harrison then quoted (imprecisely) William Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V.

“And those now against us shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their honor cheap when any speaks that walk with us upon St. Crispin’s Day,” she said before her voice faltered, and she began to cry. But Harrison was interrupted by Tom Rothman, who added to the quote, “We few, we happy few…” and went on to quote a movie he produced, comparing Harrison to an inspiring moment in the film. His voice halted and cracked, nearly crying, and for 10 seconds, Rothman turned off his microphone to gain his composure.

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

The public should expect lots of news stories about Trump killing Sesame Street in the coming months. CPB is going to use all its political clout to fight the defunding.

“We’re pursuing two parallel strategies as we continue to do everything possible to secure annual appropriations for [fiscal year] 26,” Harrison said during the board meeting. “And we’re actively preparing for the possibility of close out, or transition funding, should Congress not reverse course. So it’s very difficult. Hope on the one side and sort of acceptance on the other.”

As I reported in July, Rothman, Kaplin and Laura Ross were members of the CPB board until Trump removed them “effective immediately” on April 28. The next day they went to court to prevent Trump from removing them, but they lost the case. But they continued to show up for board meetings, and the other board members allowed them to participate. They even changed the bylaws (again, after they were removed and had no authority) saying a president could not remove them. The Trump administration had to go back to court and ask it to make the board members pay back money they earned while remaining on the board and to rescind any decisions they made while acting as board members.

The board’s website still shows Kaplin as a board member and now lists Ross and Rothman as former board members. Hopefully the rest of the CPB staff will not do the same thing and refuse to leave on Sept. 30 — the date the board has targeted for employees to end their time at CPB as it closes out operations.

CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY APPARATUS INFILTRATED THE FEDERAL RESERVE, USA IS CLULESS!

Evidence of Chinese Infiltration at America’s Central Bank

A decade-long infiltration campaign by the Chinese Communist Party has penetrated the Federal Reserve—coercing employees, stealing sensitive data, and compromising America’s financial core.

Most Americans have heard about Chinese spies targeting our military or hacking private companies. But there’s another front in this quiet war, one that’s gone largely unreported—and it may be the most dangerous of all: China’s long game to infiltrate and manipulate the United States Federal Reserve.

A 2022 Senate investigation offered a rare glimpse into this operation, but even that barely scratches the surface. What’s playing out behind closed doors isn’t just a few bureaucratic missteps or naïve collaborations—it’s a full-blown economic espionage campaign.

This is warfare without bullets.

The Fed: A Prime Target for Chinese Espionage

The Federal Reserve is the engine of the U.S. economy. Its decisions move markets, shape global capital flows, and set the tone for the world’s monetary system. Infiltrating the Fed doesn’t just give China intelligence – it gives them influence.

Over at least a decade, the CCP has targeted Fed employees through a mix of coercion, recruitment offers, unauthorized data access, and propaganda partnerships, mostly hidden behind Chinese academic institutions and think tanks.

According to this damning Senate report, the Fed’s own counterintelligence team identified a group of 13 employees across eight regional banks—internally referred to as the “P-Network”—who exhibited serious red flags linked to the Chinese government.

This pattern could be replicated at scale.

Hard Evidence of Espionage and Infiltration

Here are some documented examples that received little attention from the mainstream media:

1. Detained and Surveilled in China (Individual A)

• In 2019, a Fed employee was detained four separate times by Chinese authorities during a visit to Shanghai. He was threatened, told his family would be harmed, and coerced into handing over sensitive U.S. economic data. Chinese agents accessed his Fed laptop, phones, and internal contact lists. He was ordered to “tell a good story about China” back in the U.S. This employee returned to his post with full access to confidential monetary policy data.

2. Secret Data Transfers to Chinese Institutions (Individual B)

• Another employee sent modeling code and restricted Fed data to a university linked to China’s central bank (PBOC). He proposed deeper collaboration between his Reserve Bank and Chinese state institutions while maintaining access to Class II FOMC data, which includes sensitive internal forecasts and deliberations.

3. Coordination with Chinese Propaganda Outlets (Individual C)

• Another Fed employee took a paid visiting professorship in China funded by the CCP and subsequently acted as a liaison with Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government’s propaganda arm. He even helped Chinese journalists and officials gain access to Fed contacts, often bypassing formal Fed communication channels.

4. Suspicious Talent Recruitment Programs (Individual D)

• Another Fed employee attempted to transfer large U.S. data sets to Chinese institutions. He was found to have joined the Thousand Talents Program, China’s premier foreign recruitment tool for stealing scientific and economic research. This affiliation was never disclosed and the employee continued working at the Fed.

A Named Case: John Harold Rogers

The Justice Department indicted John Harold Rogers, a former senior adviser in the Federal Reserve’s Division of International Finance, for allegedly passing sensitive U.S. economic data to agents tied to the Chinese government .

Rogers served at the Fed from 2010 to 2021, holding access to confidential materials related to FOMC deliberations, economic forecasts, and tariff policy analysis .

He allegedly began working with Chinese co‑conspirators posing as university students starting around 2013, and intensified the misconduct after 2018, using personal email and printed documents to transfer restricted Fed data .

In 2023, Rogers is accused of receiving approximately $450,000 from a Chinese university while teaching and meeting with these supposed “students” in China, including hotel rooms where he shared Fed trade secrets.

I can exclusively reveal Rogers’s even deeper ties to the CCP, as revealed throughout his resume.

He delivered an address – “The New Paradigm and New Macroeconomy” – at the China International Capital Corporation (CICC) Investment Strategy Conference on June 12th 2024. CICC is a Chinese partially state-owned multinational investment management and financial services company. He also spoke at the Western China International Finance Summit in 2023.

Additionally, he’s spoken at CCP-owned universities including Peking, Tsinghua, and the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

His resume also includes countless works of academic research on topics including “The Effect of the China Connect”; “Crossing the Renminbi Rubicon: The Implications of China’s Policy Challenges and Capital Flows”; “U.S. China Tensions” and “Visible Hands: Professional Asset Managers’ Expectations and the Stock Market in China.”

Former Fed Governor Frederic Mishkin also received an honorary professorship from Renmin—China’s top state-run economics university.

Academia: The Trojan Horse of CCP Influence

Federal Reserve economists are coauthoring research with Chinese universities—many directly tied to the CCP and its economic warfare apparatus.

These aren’t innocent academic projects; they’re strategic intel-gathering operations. Every shared model, dataset, or forecast gives Beijing deeper insight into how the Fed thinks and moves.

Let’s call it what it is: infiltration disguised as scholarship.

Now-indicted John Rogers, for example, has a robust history of co-authoring research papers with individuals from CCP-run institutions. Examples include “Forward-Looking Monetary Policy and the Transmission of Conventional Monetary Policy Shocks” alongside Wenbin Wu of Fudan University.

A previously unreported form of influence also comes from the involvement of CCP-linked individuals actively working on research papers aimed at guiding the Fed on a variety of issues including China.

During the Finance and Economics Discussion Series at the Fed in 2020, for example, the paper mentioned above was circulated to influence discussion surrounding variables used in projections.

The paper “Reserve Requirements and Optimal Chinese Stabilization Policy” from the San Francisco Fed features two Fed employees in addition to researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This university has been caught engaging in both direct espionage and attempting to subvert Americans into leaking classified documents.

No issue appears off limits, as a 2016 paper entitled “Does Trade Liberalization with China Influence U.S. Elections?” featured Justin R. Pierce, a member of the Board of Governors of the Fed, and Yi Che of the controversial Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

“This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on U.S. Congressional elections,” begins the paper’s abstract.

Feng Dong and Yi Wen, of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the St. Louis Fed, respectively, published “Flight to What? Dissecting Liquidity Shortages in the Financial Crisis ” concluding a “sharp reduction in the quality, instead of the liquidity, of private assets was the culprit of the recent financial crisis.”

“In particular, too much intervention for too long can depress capital investment,” they continued.

Even a cursory search of publicly available resumes for Fed employees reveals individuals like Haoyang Liu, formerly at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now at the Dallas equivalent for having been educated at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This was one of the universities singled out by the Senate report for targeting American Fed employees with espionage offers.

These affiliations may appear harmless, but the Senate report empirically shows they are exactly the kinds of connections China uses to gain influence and extract sensitive insights.

Under Powell: A Leadership Failure of Historic Proportions

Though some CCP activities predate Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s tenure, the threat deepened dramatically under him.

Despite receiving internal reports of attempted data thefts, coercion, and foreign recruitment, Powell’s team allowed the implicated employees to keep working with minimal restrictions.

The Fed also expanded international research collaborations without tightening security—leaving the door wide open. Powell did not mandate disclosure of foreign academic affiliations or payments, even from known adversary nations.

The only meaningful policy change came after the Senate launched its investigation, banning compensation from “countries of concern”—but still allowing Chinese affiliations if unpaid.

The Big Picture: Economic Sabotage

This isn’t just academic misjudgment. It’s economic warfare.

The Chinese Communist Party has made clear its goal is to replace the U.S. dollar with the yuan, dominate global finance, and sideline America from the world stage. Infiltrating the Fed gives them access to internal rate forecasts before public release, insights into inflation expectations, stress tests, and market interventions, and influence over who the Fed talks to—and how.

This is not just a scandal—it’s a national emergency. The CCP is already inside the house. If we don’t act, we’re handing them the keys to the global financial system—and walking away.

ANNUAL BIKE RALLY HAS 700,000 ATTENDEES! NOTE MOSTLY OLD GUYS, LOL…

LET’S RIDE

Record 700,000 bikers descend on US city for historic festival that began with only nine stuntmen and some horses

This year’s 85th anniversary could match or surpass the 75th rally’s record

INTERSTATE 90 is bracing for an explosive week as more than 700,000 bikers roar into town for the 85th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

This year’s milestone event is expected to break attendance records and bring the thunder to South Dakota’s Black Hills.

Large group of motorcyclists in a parade. — A record 700,000 bikers are expected to flood Sturgis, South Dakota, for the 85th annual motorcycle rally from August 1 to 10Credit: City of Sturgis South Dakota

700,000 bikers at a US city festival. — The iconic event, which began in 1938 with just nine riders, now brings in over $1.4 million in state tax revenueCredit: City of Sturgis South Dakota

The rally officially runs from Friday, August 1 through Sunday, August 10, but the action kicks off even earlier with pre-parties starting July 28.

Sturgis, a small town in Meade County, transforms into the fourth largest city in South Dakota during the rally.

What began in 1938 with just nine stunt riders and a few horses has become the biggest motorcycle rally in the world.

Attendance has climbed steadily over the decades, from 3,000 in 1940 to a record 747,032 in 2015.

In the past five years, the rally has averaged around 500,000 people annually.

Last year’s turnout dropped 8.1% from 2022, totaling 458,161 attendees, according to Harley-Davidson.

This year’s 85th anniversary could match or surpass the 75th rally’s record.

The city of Sturgis rakes in major profits during the rally, with $784 million generated in 2022 alone, according to officials.

The event also pumped $1.4 million in sales tax revenue into South Dakota’s coffers in 2024, despite a slight decline from 2023.

Opening ceremonies kick off August 1 with a flag procession, a blessing of the bikes by Mayor Kevin Forrester, and a parade featuring the Budweiser Clydesdales.

Harley-Davidson dealership shuts for good after sudden sale to rival – but fans of the iconic brand can still get a bike

Centenarian rider Gloria Tramontin Struck will serve as grand marshal, leading the celebration after nearly 85 years on the road.

The speed limit near rally hotspots like Buffalo Chip and Full Throttle is just 35 mph, and traffic slows it down even more – low-speed handling is key.

Many riders also take the opportunity to explore Black Hills landmarks like Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial.

The rally brings together bikers from all over the world to celebrate freedom, horsepower, and the open road.

Sturgis Bike Rally

Dates:
August 1–10, 2025
(Pre-party runs July 28–31)

Location:
Sturgis, South Dakota – in the Black Hills

Anniversary:
85th annual rally, first held in 1938 with just nine riders

Expected Attendance:
700,000+
(2015 record stands at 747,032)

2023 Attendance:
458,161 – down 8.1% from the previous year

City Revenue:
$784 million generated in 2022

State Sales Tax (2024):
$1.4 million collected during rally week

Major Concert Headliners:
ZZ Top, Gene Simmons, Nickelback, Jason Aldean, Marilyn Manson, Five Finger Death Punch

Buffalo Chip Pass Sales:
Up 67% compared to 2024

Vendor Count (2024):
896 registered temporary vendors

Speed Limit Near Rally Venues:
35 MPH — slower with rally traffic congestion

Nearby Attractions:
Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial

Grand Marshal:
100-year-old biker Gloria Tramontin Struck

ZZ Top opens the lineup on August 1 at 10 PM, followed by Gene Simmons on August 3.

Other major acts include Five Finger Death Punch, Marilyn Manson, Jason Aldean, Nickelback, Buckcherry, Tesla, and Stone Temple Pilots.

Concerts are included with camping admission and typically begin at 8 pm or 10 pm nightly.

Buffalo Chip pass sales are up a staggering 67% over last year, showing the massive anticipation for this year’s rally

MUSK GETS $29 BILLION IN RESTRICTED STOCK FINALLY!

Tesla awards CEO Musk millions in shares valued at about $29 billion

Tesla is awarding CEO Elon Musk 96 million shares of restricted stock valued at approximately $29 billion, just six months after a judge ordered the company to revoke his massive pay package.

The electric vehicle maker said in a regulatory filing on Monday that Musk must first pay Tesla $23.34 per share of restricted stock that vests, which is equal to the exercise price per share of the 2018 pay package that was awarded to the company’s CEO.

In December Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick reaffirmed her earlier ruling that Tesla must revoke Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package. She found that Musk engineered the landmark pay package in sham negotiations with directors who were not independent.

At the time McCormick also rejected an equally unprecedented and massive fee request by plaintiff attorneys, who argued that they were entitled to legal fees in the form of Tesla stock valued at more than $5 billion. The judge said the attorneys were entitled to a fee award of $345 million.

The rulings came in a lawsuit filed by a Tesla stockholder who challenged Musk’s 2018 compensation package.

FORCED INDOCTRINATION IN LIBERAL IDEAS COURT APPROVED!

Creeping collectivism’: Appeals court upholds ideological mandate on doctors to keep licenses

Dr. Azadeh Khatibi’s lawyers warn “there is little to stop governments around the country from compelling continuing education instructors in any trade or profession to profess all manner of controversial state-endorsed topics.”

The legal doctrine of government speech, which inhibits individual First Amendment rights, got a massive expansion from the Pacific to the Rockies thanks to a federal appeals court that upheld ideological requirements for ongoing professional licensing rules, according to lawyers for a California doctor challenging her state’s rules.

The Pacific Legal Foundation told Just the News it will file a petition for rehearing by the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals following a three-judge panel’s ruling Friday that deemed the Golden State’s mandatory “implicit bias” training in accredited continuing medical education, of which doctors must complete 50 hours every two years, government speech.

Beyond California, the ruling blesses current or potential ideological requirements in CME in Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Alaska, Montana and Hawaii. The panel was nominated by presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden, all Democrats.

The logic of the ruling means “there is little to stop governments around the country from compelling continuing education instructors in any trade or profession to profess all manner of controversial state-endorsed topics,” said PLF lead attorney Caleb Trotter.

It’s a “dangerous misuse” of government speech prohibited by the Supreme Court’s 2017 Matal ruling against a statutory ban on “disparag[ing]” trademarks including for the Asian-American rock band The Slants, Trotter said, quoting Matal.

A Florida Christian high school, supported by football greats including Tim Tebow, is trying to get SCOTUS to review a similar 11th Circuit ruling, binding on Florida, Georgia and Alabama, that upheld a ban on prayer over the public address system by religious teams at games in taxpayer-funded venues, deeming them government speech.

PLF sued California two years ago on behalf of ophthalmologist Azadeh Khatibi, a peer-reviewed researcher who treats infectious diseases and teaches CME courses, and medical advocacy group Do No Harm, which has CME-teaching members.

The group argued AB 241 requires doctors to be taught “white individuals are naturally racist” as a condition of their licensing but lost at the district court a year ago. This spring PLF sued to block even broader Michigan rules on behalf of Grand Rapids dentist Kent Wildern, arguing the scientific rigor behind implicit bias has been questioned since at least 2009.

The conservative Young America’s Foundation and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and libertarian Cato Institute supported Khatibi in friend-of-the-court briefs. Khatibi’s co-plaintiff and CME instructor Mary Singleton, an early black female physician who blasted the mandate as racist in The Washington Post, died before oral argument.

A childhood immigrant from Iran, Khatibi obtained a preliminary injunction against another California law banning so-called medical misinformation, prompting the Legislature to revoke the law before it could be struck down. Khatibi, then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others sued again months later, claiming California was still threatening doctors.

“Dr. Khatibi never imagined that she would escape the oppression of her childhood only to face creeping collectivism and unfree speech in America,” PLF says on the case page. “Regardless of its relevance in her CME courses, she must replace some of her instruction with a discussion of implicit bias.”

Like congressionally ‘mandatory funding of beef commercials’

Governments routinely invoke their own speech rights to defeat First Amendment litigation, such as the Biden administration’s pressure on social media companies to suppress disfavored narratives, New York’s pressure on banks and insurance companies to dump the National Rifle Association as a client and a school district’s promotion of Black Lives Matter.

The 9th Circuit portrayed the dispute over AB 241 as simple to resolve, claiming CME courses are clearly government speech because California “has a longstanding tradition of regulating the medical profession,” the public would “tend to” attribute course content to the government and it “imposes several restrictions” on the “form and delivery” of course content.

It dismissed the scientific question over implicit bias as irrelevant to the case while acknowledging the parties and their supporters sharply disagree on “the existence of implicit bias in medicine generally” and how the training would affect it, if at all.

Applying the 2022 unanimous SCOTUS ruling in Shurtleff, which found the city of Boston’s flag-raising program was not government speech and hence it discriminated by viewpoint against a “Christian flag,” the panel conducted a “holistic inquiry” to determine “whether the government intends to speak for itself or to regulate private expression.”

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch rejected the majority’s three-part test, however, saying the question should be “whether the government is actually expressing its own views or the real speaker is a private party and the government is surreptitiously engaged in the ‘regulation of private speech.'”

California “from beginning to end dictates, controls, and approves the provider, form, purpose, and content of CMEs,” Judge Jacqueline Nguyen’s opinion says, comparing it to congressionally “mandatory funding of beef commercials by private cattle merchants,” privately funded monuments in public parks and specialty license plates.

She distinguished CME content from the trademarks at issue in Matal, since the latter “have not traditionally been used to convey a Government message,” are not created or meaningfully reviewed by public officials and the government explicitly denies that registration means it approves of the mark.

Similarly, Boston waited until a religious group sought to raise its own flag before reviewing or controlling the content of any previous applicant’s flag, making its “control over the physical premises” or flag-raising schedule “insufficient” to demonstrate government speech.

Not like Apple, Burger King slogans

States have regulated medicine “from time immemorial,” Nguyen wrote, quoting with emphasis an 1889 Supreme Court ruling, which the high court reaffirmed 21 years later in upholding the police power over medicine as “too well settled to require discussion.”

The California Medical Board has “specifically and continually” adopted and administered CME requirements since 1980, and the Legislature has repeatedly added content requirements since 1992, such as ordering all physicians to complete CMEs on pain management and terminally-ill treatment since 2001 and “cultural and linguistic competence” since 2006.

Khatibi claimed that “CMEs have never been used to convey messages to the public,” in Nguyen’s paraphrase, that California is comparable to the Patent and Trademark Office and that it’s “myopic” to review the long regulatory history of CMEs.

“It would be a serious affront to the Constitution if regulatory history alone were sufficient to immunize speech from First Amendment scrutiny,” Nguyen responded, noting the Medical Board’s origin in combating “quack doctors in the decades following the Gold Rush.”

“Just as we cannot equate something to monuments and conclude it is government speech, we cannot simply deem CMEs distinct from monuments and license plates, conclude they are nontraditional forms for government expression, and then terminate the inquiry,” she said.

Khatibi’s assertion that California has not been “dreaming up” CME content “has no footing in law or logic,” with repeated regulatory and legislative requirements, while the PTO never told Apple how to come up with its early motto “Think Different” or “ordered the noble patrons of Burger King to rate its motto of ‘Have it your way,'” Nguyen wrote.

MILLIONS DOUBLE ENROLLED ON MEDICAID, BILLIONS WASTED ON THIS FRAUD!

Administration Finds Millions of Individuals Double Enrolled in Taxpayer-Funded Coverage

The existence of duplicate payments demonstrates the left’s desire to make all Americans dependent upon government.

A new investigation increased both the number of enrollees with duplicate forms of taxpayer-funded coverage and the amount taxpayers are paying for such unnecessary double-dipping. It provides an example — one of many — to rebut leftist claims that the recently passed budget reconciliation bill will somehow destroy the safety net.

Explosion of Wasteful Spending

The Journal analysis of Medicaid data from 2019 to 2021 found taxpayers spent $4.3 billion over three years, providing duplicate coverage to an average of 660,000 people per year. The Trump administration recently examined what happened after four years of Biden administration policies, designed to promote enrollment in taxpayer-funded coverage at all costs.

The analysis by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) of 2024 enrollment data concluded that, last year, “an average of 1.2 million Americans each month were enrolled” in Medicaid in multiple states — nearly double the level of duplicate enrollment cited by the Journal in the opening years of the Biden presidency. Moreover, CMS also noted that another “1.6 million Americans each month were enrolled in both Medicaid” and taxpayer-subsidized coverage on the insurance Exchange plans.

According to CMS, the total cost of all this unnecessary spending on a total of 2.8 million duplicate enrollments is $14 billion per year — more than three times the $4.3 billion figure the Journal reported earlier this year. CMS didn’t specify if that $14 billion figure represented total Medicaid costs (i.e., including the share of Medicaid costs that states pay themselves), or only the potential costs to the federal government.

Regardless, it represents a large amount. For purposes of comparison, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that, during the last fiscal year, the federal government would spend $607 billion on Medicaid. Simply eliminating the duplicate payments would reduce federal Medicaid spending by roughly 2.3 percent — without doing anything to harm beneficiaries, who would still have taxpayer-funded coverage, just not in multiple places at once.

Phony Coverage Losses?

The CMS data highlights two important points regarding Medicaid and taxpayer-funded insurance programs. First, the discussion about the number of individuals who will “lose” coverage seems overstated.

CBO has yet to release detailed coverage estimates regarding the final version of the bill, enacted into law. But the case described above demonstrates the absurdity of this type of exercise. The left might scream about 2.8 million people “losing” coverage — even though they “lost” coverage only on paper and are still insured elsewhere (and at taxpayer expense) in the system.

Many of the other supposed “losses” from the legislation fall into similar buckets: individuals who choose not to comply with the new work requirements, undocumented migrants denied taxpayer-funded coverage for public policy reasons, and so forth.

A good percentage of Americans would have few qualms about lawmakers making these types of reasonable policy judgments. And yet the left hopes to overwhelm such rational behavior with screaming headlines talking about Trump taking away health care from 15 million Americans.

Welfare-Industrial Complex

More fundamentally, the fact that these types of duplicate payments can exist, have existed for many years, and grew substantially under the last administration demonstrates the left’s desire to make all Americans dependent upon government.

The Biden administration self-evidently had little interest in controlling spending on individuals obtaining taxpayer-funded coverage from multiple sources. Even if it wasted taxpayer funds — and even if the multiple payments fattened the coffers of insurance companies, who got paid to provide coverage that beneficiaries never used — Biden’s CMS simply wanted to juice the enrollment numbers by any means necessary.

With this kind of attitude, it seems little wonder that our federal government faces $36 trillion in debt and counting. Ending the nonsense of people enrolled in duplicate coverage won’t solve the debt problem on its own, but recent actions by CMS — not to mention Congress in the reconciliation bill — to expose this madness and stop it provide a welcome dose of common sense for a change.

WE GOT LIMITLESS CLEAN ENERGY RIGHT UNDER OUR FEET-LETS USE IT!

Fervo Energy

The Secret to Unlimited Energy Is Beneath Our Feet—And It Could Power Earth for Millions of Years

If the U.S. could tap into just 2 percent of the geothermal power beneath Earth’s crust, it could supply more than 2,000 times our total annual energy consumption.

A new type of geothermal power plant has sprung up in the Nevada desert. It started with the drilling of two deep bore holes to a depth of about 1.5 miles through rocky sediment and sandtone, where temperatures were up to 380 degrees Fahrenheit. Then the drills dug sideways, tunneling a 3,250-foot horizontal passage between the two shafts.

Next, engineers injected water into one of the holes at a pressure so high it cracked the hot rocks deep underground. The water then flowed through the gaps, absorbing the intense heat, before gushing through the horizontal passage, creating a sort of underground reservoir. As the water flowed between layers of hot rock, it continued accruing heat. Finally, the water pumped back out of the second well—now at about 375 degrees Fahrenheit—back to the surface where it can be used to power businesses and homes.

The plant, which began operating in late 2023 to keep Google’s Nevada data center running, is the first of at least three geothermal stations Houston-based Fervo Energy is planning.

Earth’s 24/7 thermal power complements other renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Yet it has one distinct advantage—a core of magma that will stay liquid for billions of years, making geothermal energy both reliable and virtually unlimited. Industry estimates say that at least 20 percent of the entire world’s energy needs could be fulfilled for the foreseeable future if we could capture just a tiny fraction of geothermal heat that dissipates constantly from Earth’s molten nickel and iron core.

Worldwide, geothermal powers only 0.34 percent of the world’s energy sources. However, that figure is growing as technology overcomes the challenges of deep drilling. The future of geothermal energy could be unlimited if we continue to innovate ways to capture the power inside Earth’s crust.

Fervo’s method of extracting heat from the Earth is based on the fracking technology that shoots water into rock to release oil and gas from the ground. But instead of disturbing fossil fuels, it’s a sustainable method that simply uses Earth’s powerful interior oven to heat water to a “supercritical” temperature, which means the water gets extremely hot without boiling, because the intense pressure keeps it in liquid form. Unlike other power plants, this one doesn’t turn the water from deep underground into steam that will rotate a turbine and generate electricity. Instead, this system uses that hot water, called “brine,” to heat up and vaporize another batch of water. At that point, the vapor spins a turbine to make electricity. The brine is sent right back underground, where it reheats and returns to the surface, forming an efficient, closed loop system.

It’s different from typical geothermal power plants that need to drill down six or more miles to access temperatures that are 400 degrees Fahrenheit or more. One of the Fervo system’s unique features is the horizontal pipeline system, which efficiently heats water passing through rocks, eliminating the need to drill truly deep crust that gets hotter than 400 degrees. Like other geothermal plants, this system can also store energy like a large battery, and scale its electricity output up or down as needed.

Traditional geothermal power plants have long been built near tectonic plate boundaries—places like Iceland, Indonesia, and New Zealand—where volcanic activity brings heat close to Earth’s surface. In fact, geothermal energy powers about a third of Iceland’s electricity needs and about 90 percent of its homes. To succeed in accessing heat far from tectonically active areas, engineers are co-opting existing technology, the way Fervo borrows techniques from fracking.

For example, Quaise Energy, a spinoff from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, designed a novel drill using existing technology. Needing to drill deeper to reach heat in cooler sections of crust means boring for miles through dense, ever-hotter rock. Before long, the heat and the rock’s changing textures can deform drill heads, though they’re typically made of tough metal alloys that contain tungsten and titanium. Quaise got around this problem with drills that can shoot and vaporize stubborn rock with concentrated millimeter-wave beams that are over a megawatt in power, about 10¹² times more efficient than a laser beam. This millimeter-wave part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is wedged between longer microwaves and shorter visible light waves, is typically used to heat plasma for fusion generators. So far, the Boston-based company has completed some successful tests, and is now planning to bore a hole 12.4 miles deep over 100 days. At these depths, the temperature will likely be around 932 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to provide a practical source of geothermal energy.

Meanwhile, a new Fervo plant under construction in Utah could produce more than 100 times as much power as its 3.5-megawatt Project Red Nevada test plant which is now powering Google. The new facility should produce about 400 to 500 megawatts per hour, enough to support the annual electricity needs for more than 400,000 average homes, Quinn Woodard Jr., director of Fervo’s surface facilities, tells Interesting Engineering.

According to Utah Forge, a Department of Energy (DOE) field lab, if the U.S. could capture just 2 percent of the geothermal power from two to six miles beneath Earth’s crust, it could supply more than 2,000 times our total annual energy consumption. The Geothermal Technologies Office of the DOE aims to achieve a carbon-free electricity grid by capturing 60 gigawatts of Earth’s thermal power by 2050. Whenever it happens, geothermal could become a cornerstone of global energy for generations to come.

OBAMA, HILLARY CLINTON, THE FBI AND CIA HID THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSSIAGATE!

Five Crucial Facts From the House Intel Report on 2016 Russian Interference

by American Greatness

(American Greatness via Zero Hedge)—Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard did an excellent service to our nation this week when she released a declassified version of a critical September 2020 House Intelligence Committee staff report on a major January 2017 intelligence report, known as an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), titled “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.”

Gabbard’s decision came after a years-long tug-of-war over the release of this report between Republican members of Congress who believe it provides critical information about the Russia collusion hoax and the involvement of Obama officials and the U.S. Intelligence Community versus Democratic congressmen and deep state intelligence officials who have desperately tried to hide this report from the American public.

Press accounts have reported most of the essential details of the House report, such as how it was rushed out on President Obama’s orders to be published just before Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017. Media stories have also detailed how substandard intelligence was used to justify the ICA’s finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win and that this bad intelligence was included on the orders of CIA Director John Brennan over the objections of senior CIA analysts. The media has also reported the House Intelligence report’s finding that a hand-picked group of five analysts wrote the ICA and that it was not adequately vetted by U.S. intelligence agencies and analysts. It is also clear in the House report that, despite numerous statements by Brennan denying it, the fraudulent Steele dossier was heavily used in the ICA.

I am very familiar with the House Intelligence Committee report. I was permitted to read a classified version of the report when I served as Chief of Staff of the National Security Council in August 2018. I also discussed efforts by the White House to pressure the CIA to release the report a month before the 2020 presidential election with the late Lou Dobbs. This reportedly included President Trump visiting the CIA to retrieve the report personally.

Based on my understanding of this issue, here are five key points about the House Intelligence Committee report that most Americans may not be aware of.

1. The House Intelligence Committee report is a credible and carefully drafted paper.

Although the House report was written by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican staff, its fairness and balance are a credit to its authors and then-Chairman Devin Nunes.

The report says on page 1 that committee investigators spent over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports and interviewed 20 intelligence and FBI officers. Its conclusions reflect objectivity and would not be found in a biased, partisan report. For example, the House report concedes at the beginning that the ICA’s finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and to weaken an inevitable Clinton presidency used proper intelligence tradecraft. However, the House report took issue with the ICA’s distortions of intelligence tradecraft standards to assess that Putin had a clear preference for Trump to win and “aspired to help his chances of victory.”

The House Intelligence report also includes strong, nonpartisan recommendations, including a call for political appointees of outgoing administrations to recuse themselves from any involvement in intelligence reports drafted in the future under similar circumstances.

I spoke with the two principal authors of the House report after I read it in August 2018. I found them to be professional and knowledgeable. They answered all my questions and provided me with additional information that was not in the report. A CIA official told me earlier this month that one of the authors had been retained by the Agency to prepare the report for release.

2. The Republican House report is more credible than a similar bipartisan Senate report.

The authors of the House Intelligence Committee report told me they believed their report, written by the committee’s Republican staff, was more credible than a bipartisan report would be because many of the CIA officers they interviewed would not have spoken to a bipartisan investigation team. The reason was that Democratic staff and members of a bipartisan investigation might inform agency management about which agency officers had spoken to committee investigators, potentially leading to retaliation. I agree and believe this is why recent attempts by liberal reporters and Democratic congressmembers to use a similar bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee issued in April 2020 to discredit the House Intelligence Committee report are not credible.

3. The ICA omitted intelligence that Putin may have wanted Clinton to win the 2016 election.

Many press reports about the House Intelligence Committee report focused on how weak and fragmentary intelligence was used to support the ICA’s assessment that Russia wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. However, the House report also notes that the ICA ignored two significant alternative hypotheses suggested by the intelligence and Russian behavior: that Putin either did not care who won the 2016 election or wanted Hillary Clinton to win.

The House report said some of the omitted intelligence analysis indicated that Putin did not have a preference in the election outcome because both Trump and Clinton would be bad for Russia and unlikely to improve relations.

Also notable was the omitted analysis that Putin may have wanted Clinton to win the 2016 election because she would be a more vulnerable president than Trump and Russia had a reserve of compromising materials to use against Clinton but not Trump. Similarly, the House report also noted that the ICA did not address that Moscow viewed Clinton as a weaker candidate due to Russian intelligence reporting on her psychological health. In addition, the House report said the timing and content of Russian operational orders “indicated that Moscow assumed they had unique leverage over Secretary Clinton that would be more useful if she won the election.”

On the other hand, the House report said some senior Russian officials worried that a Trump administration would have a hardline national security team hostile to Russia. The report also quoted a redacted Russian source who “cautioned about the risks to Russia of a Republican administration, noting that ‘those who would hold positions in a Trump administration should he win will likely adhere to conservative anti-Russia positions.’”

4. The House Intelligence Committee report was stuck for years in the “turducken safe” at the CIA for political reasons and due to CIA Director Gina Haspel’s inept and partisan leadership.

Although the House report was completed by the summer of 2018 and considered an important and damning indictment of the Obama administration and U.S. intelligence agencies for politicizing intelligence to promote the Russia collusion hoax, House Republicans and the Trump White House were unable to convince CIA Director Gina Haspel to declassify and clear the report for release to the public.

Then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes sent the report to the CIA for clearance in the summer of 2018. The CIA dragged its feet in clearing the report and failed to do so before Nunes lost the committee chairmanship in January 2019, due to the Democrats winning control of the House in the 2018 election. After Congressman Adam Schiff succeeded Nunes as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the CIA refused to clear the report because Nunes was no longer the chairman and Schiff would not sign off on Nunes’s release request.

Because of the confusing politics and competing jurisdictions over the House report, it was kept at the CIA in a safe within a safe, leading the New York Times to call this the “turducken safe”—a gun box-like container controlled by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican members and located inside a CIA vault. The House Intelligence Committee’s Republican members refused to grant Democratic committee members access to their safe or allow them to review the report.

Haspel and NSA Director Paul Nakasone also objected to releasing the report, claiming it would reveal sensitive intelligence. In addition, Haspel and Nakasone reportedly opposed releasing the House report because they asserted it contained unverified information and “cherry-picked” intelligence. Democratic congressmembers also strongly opposed the release of the House Republican report. In opposing the report’s release in late 2020, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff charged that the report sought to whitewash Russia’s election interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Regardless of how ardently Haspel and Nakasone held their positions opposing the release of the House report, because the president is ultimately in charge of all U.S. intelligence and classification decisions, their refusal to cooperate with White House orders to release the report was, in my opinion, insubordination to a U.S. president. Moreover, DNI Gabbard’s action this week proved there were no valid national security reasons not to release a declassified version of this report.

5. President Trump and his senior White House staff regarded the House intelligence report as so crucial that Trump reportedly considered going to the CIA before the 2020 election to retrieve and release the report himself.

According to my sources at the White House and the House Intelligence Committee, the White House believed in the fall of 2020 that it was crucial for the American people to read this House report before the November 2020 presidential election.

The White House ordered CIA Director Haspel to release the report before the election. She refused.

I received a phone call about this matter in late October 2020 from Lou Dobbs, the host of the Fox Business Network show “Lou Dobbs Tonight” and a close friend of President Trump. I often appeared on Dobbs’ show as a former CIA analyst. He called to consult with me about a possible trip by President Trump to CIA headquarters to retrieve the House Intelligence Committee report so he could release it. I told Dobbs that I feared this would not work because CIA Director Haspel would learn about the president’s visit in advance and hide the inner safe containing the report before he arrived. Dobbs agreed with me and said he would convey this to President Trump. Trump’s alleged visit to the CIA to seize the House report never took place.

I would like to again thank Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for finally releasing the House Intelligence Committee’s critical report on how President Obama, senior Obama officials, and intelligence officials were responsible for issuing a rigged and politicized intelligence assessment just before Donald Trump’s first inauguration to destroy his presidency. This fraudulent intelligence report hounded Trump throughout his first term and contributed to his first sham impeachment in 2019. This perversion of U.S. intelligence also did grave damage to the objectivity and trustworthiness of America’s intelligence agencies, from which they still have not recovered.

It is my sincere hope that the declassified House Intelligence Committee report and other documents on the Russia collusion hoax released by DNI Gabbard and CIA Director Ratcliffe will lead to prosecutions of those involved and congressional hearings that ensure accountability and to send a strong message to future administration officials and intelligence officers that if they participate in another scheme to weaponize American intelligence to meddle in U.S. politics or to destroy a presidency, there will be severe consequences.