Big Balls to the rescue: DOGE saves a terabyte of data destroyed by USIP employees

 

By Monica Showalter

I've never heard anything good about the United States Institute for Peace.

It's been in bed with neocons, coupmeisters, and the Soros color revolution crowd for years. The quasi-government agency that runs like a private NGO is always sneaky and non-transparent.

So it didn't surprise me a bit to learn that USIP showed unusual resistence to anyone poking into their spending from DOGE.

Did you hear how the staff as USIP acted when DOGE showed up?

They literally BARRICADED themselves in their offices, cut the phone lines and power to elevators, sabotaged office equipment and the Head of USIP had to be arrested & removed. pic.twitter.com/Ay8xLdt2nU

— DuaneCates001 (@THEDuaneCates) March 30, 2025

They even called the cops on DOGE, only to get arrested and hauled off themselves:

USIP officials attempted a petty little coup against Trump and Doge.

Here’s the twist—Metro PD were called in by USIP, but when they arrived, they removed the USIP officials instead.

To the Leftists eager for an uprising: The police and military aren’t on your side. pic.twitter.com/qjvVOKfT0a

— Mirthful Moments (@moment_mirthful) April 1, 2025

And they seem to have had a siphoning game going on:

🚨 USIP UNDER FIRE: $13M FUNNELED TO PRIVATE ENDOWMENT, TALIBAN-LINKED PAYMENTS UNCOVERED

Each year, the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) receives $55M in taxpayer funding. But over the past decade, $13M was quietly transferred to its private Endowment—outside congressional… https://t.co/vBxrmZgYg1 pic.twitter.com/tRkOZvYSp5

— DOGE Tracker (@Tracking_DOGE) March 31, 2025

According to a hostile, biased report from Newsweek:

Elon Musk has accused the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) of deleting a terabyte of financial data to "cover their crimes."

Musk reposted a claim from the Conservative page 'amuse' on X (formerly Twitter) which stated that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had found USIP contracts going to Afghanistan's former chief of protocol, who had been a member of the Taliban, and to the Iraqi League for Youth.

Musk wrote on X: "They deleted a terabyte of financial data to cover their crimes, but they don't understand technology, so we recovered it."

Any government institution is most likely to be the opposite of its name https://t.co/hUfinp5Ujm

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2025

Nothing they did ever had the slightest relationship to promoting "peace."

They were bribing the Afghan Taliban warlords to keep the drugs flowing. That’s what the US Institute of Peace payments were for. https://t.co/2dwhkISdLY pic.twitter.com/WFf0lyU2Zp

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) April 1, 2025

They had an opaque structure that was an invitation to corruption:

DOGE: The agency called USIP has/had a structure that should never been allowed in a democracy - they were allowed to operate as a private corporation (non-profit) and a federal agency at the same time. They didn't have to follow any rules.https://t.co/X0L0jgXhNU

— @amuse (@amuse) April 1, 2025

Each year, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) receives $55M in congressional (taxpayer) funds.

- Prior management would sweep excess funds into its private Endowment (zero congressional oversight).
-In the past 10 years, USIP has transferred ~$13M to its private…

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) March 31, 2025

The most vivid and satisfying aspect of this story is that the USIP characters tried to destroy data to hide their acts -- and ran into BigBalls, or someone like him at DOGE, who quietly recovered the data they tried to destroy.

DOGE & of course, Big Balls 😏 found over a TERABYTE of deleted information from the US funded "US Institute of Peace".

Fraud waste & abuse will start dropping a lot of people in jail.

I hope they're prepared for what's coming to them. https://t.co/ZsumrlJWnO

— Jeri Lynn Simpson (@DreamerJeri) April 1, 2025

 

Sometimes, the good guys really do win, and for the most embarrassing of reasons for the bad guys -- they didn't know tech like Elon's team knows tech.

Now their chief may be facing criminal charges based on this bid to avoid accountability.

What were they hiding? It must have been something pretty big. But whatever it was, it's satisfying to know that they need to respect the will of the people who pay their paychecks and bankroll their slush funds, and like any NGO, need to provide a minimum of accountability with no record destruction.

One can only hope that they will be made an example of, if for nothing else, to deter the others.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/04/big_balls_to_the_rescue_doge_saves_a_terabyte_of_data_destroyed_by_usip_employees.html

America’s federal court judges: a self-anointed priesthood

 

By Andrea Widburg

Although the Democrats were initially rocked by the speed with which Trump moved upon taking office, they’ve regrouped and are coming back with a formidable counterattack: Judges. This counterattack would have stunned the Founders, who intended the unelected judiciary to be the weakest branch of government, but it’s completely logical to those of us who have seen leftist judges at work over the decades.

Day after day, the news is filled with stories of Democrat-appointed federal judges (with a very few NeverTrump Republicans thrown in for good measure) blocking Trump’s initiatives. While their orders are issued in minutes, the Democrats know that it may take months or even years for them to work through the legal system.

You know how it goes. An appellate court affirms or reverses the lower court’s order. The losing party takes it to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court places it on the calendar to be heard eventually. At long last, there’s a big hearing, only to have Justice Amy Coney Barrett ignore the glaring substantive constitutional issues and focus on an inconsequential procedural matter that requires returning the whole thing to the trial court. Then, the cycle starts again.

The plan is obvious: Mire the Trump agenda in a legal morass from which there is no escape, whether before the midterms or even before the next general election. Unlike the Russia Collusion hoax, which was meant to be a full decapitation, this will be death by a thousand judicial cuts. The virtue of this approach is that, unlike the failed Russia Collusion hoax, not all of these cuts need to succeed for the administration to bleed out and die.

As many have said, the Supreme Court must stop this—and this is true whether the deciding justices are NeverTrumpers like Roberts, cowards like Comey Barrett, Gorsuch, or Kavanaugh, or even leftists like Sotomayor, Kagan, or Brown Jackson. If these justices wish to continue to be employed, they’d better return to the institution of the federal judiciary to at least some gloss of impartiality and reverence for the rule of law. Otherwise, the lower court’s overreach will spell the federal judiciary’s doom, as the voters will either (a) elect representatives who will defund the system entirely or (b) cease to respect its rulings and will urge their elected leaders to do the same.

The need for an immediate Supreme Court intervention is especially necessary because of something notable about this round of rulings against Donald Trump’s initiatives: The judges aren’t even pretending to abide by legal principles—and this goes beyond arrogating to themselves the right, not just to decide the case before them, but to blog entire administrative actions.

Judge Boasberg is the poster child of a judge without regard for the law. When asked to stop the flight containing illegal alien Tren de Aragua members headed to El Salvador, he threw procedure and law to the wind.

Although the federal procedural rule controlling temporary restraining orders, whether oral or written, must contain specific information to justify the ruling, Boasberg issued a bare-bones oral order from the bench. The same federal rule requires that the party seeking a restraining order must post a bond, but Boasberg ignored that requirement, too. And most importantly—really, the predicate matter—Boasberg ignored entirely controlling Supreme Court authority, stating explicitly that unelected judges have no authority whatsoever to touch an elected president’s decisions under the Alien Enemies Act.

It wasn’t just Boasberg. When the Trump administration appealed the order, the D.C. appellate court did exactly the same: It, too, ignored entirely the fact that it lacks jurisdiction and opted for a substantive analysis that the same long-standing rule of law prohibits it from exercising.

Then, just yesterday, Edward Chen, a federal trial judge in San Francisco, blocked the Trump administration from ending the temporary legal protection that Biden gave to Venezuelans who entered America illegally. To justify this, the judge effectively said that it just wasn’t fair for the Trump administration to send these 350,000 people away because he’d made the substantive finding that doing so would destroy America’s very safety and economy. The same, he said, applied to the 500,000 Haitians who illegally flooded America.

The problem is that, had Chen bothered to check the law in his own circuit (the Ninth), he would have discovered that this is another area in which judges have no say. Oh, wait! He did know. It was his ruling that the Ninth Circuit reversed!

Those are just a small number of examples, but you can find dozens more. Judges, whose role is supposed to be limited to applying the law, have tossed out that job description and are busy making the law.

So, what gives? Well, as it happens, I had a few decades to learn what’s going on because I spent my career working as a defense attorney on business litigation claims in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the Bay Area, of course, businesses are automatically assumed to be guilty. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you eventually prove through facts or law (or both) that they are innocent. The judges will still undercut you.

I worked on cases where judges said, “I don’t care about the law,” where they said, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” where they gave erroneous instructions to the jury, knowing that the business had no resources to appeal, and where they simply lied about objective facts (as in, there was clear documentary evidence) to force their position against my clients.

So, again, what gives?

Well, my theory requires a small acquaintance with parish priests in the late medieval era. If you’ve ever read Boccaccio’s wonderful The Decameron, written during and after the Black Death (1348-1353), you’ll know the priests I mean. These tales describe greedy, illiterate, irreligious, and very, very lusty priests. Although exaggerated, this was a problem across Christendom. Many in the priestly class just didn’t live up to the church’s ideals.

The big question was how men who were so openly sinning against Biblical morals and church rules could consecrate the host and administer the sacraments. Congregants were worried about their eternal salvation, so the answer mattered. The Church’s response was that the priests’ ordinations turned them into vessels...conduits, really. No matter their personal sins, they were a straight channel to God, so when they performed mass, no matter their failings, the parishioners were still receiving appropriate religious ministrations. Problem solved (at least for another 100+ years or so).

Leftist judges have dispensed to themselves a variation of the medieval church’s approach to inadequate priests. These judges feel that, when their nominations are confirmed, their oaths taken, and their robes donned, they have become a conduit to something higher and better than laws and facts. They have achieved the Marxist equivalent of a spiritual ascendence, making them not only wiser than the people’s elected officials and the judges who came before but also imbuing them with a moral purpose that requires them to use their power to impose their political vision on America.

The Founders would be horrified, and we should be, too. Ours is a nation of laws, from the Constitution on down.  When the judges hold themselves above the laws, we are a nation on the brink.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/04/america_s_federal_court_judges_a_self_anointed_priesthood.html

Taiwan says 76 Chinese warplanes, 15 warships detected around island

 Taiwan's defence ministry said on Wednesday that in the previous 24 hours it had detected 76 Chinese military aircraft and 15 Chinese military ships operating around Taiwan.

China on Tuesday began its latest round of war games near the island.

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-04-01/taiwan-says-76-chinese-warplanes-15-warships-detected-around-island

Chief of Russia's sovereign wealth fund to meet Trump envoy in Washington this week, source says

 The chief of Russia's sovereign wealth fund Kirill Dmitriev is expected to visit Washington this week for talks with the Trump administration, said a source familiar with the plan, the first visit by a senior Russian official since Moscow invaded Ukraine.

Dmitriev, who was appointed last month as Russia's special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation, will meet with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Their meeting was reported earlier by CNN, which said Dmitriev and Witkoff will hold talks about strengthening relations between the two countries as they seek to end the war in Ukraine.

"Maybe. The resistance to US–Russia dialogue is real—driven by entrenched interests and old narratives," Dmitriev said in a post on X responding to the CNN report.

"But what if improved relations are exactly what the world needs for lasting global security and peace."

The White House and the U.S. Department of State did not immediately provide comment. The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dmitriev's trip follows recent telephone calls between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin and comes as Trump seeks to meet with his Russian counterpart soon as the two countries have sought to mend damaged relations.

After being hit by Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine and capitalizing on Trump’s comments about repairing bilateral ties, Russia is keen to bring back international investors to its vast resources and help to diversify its economy driven chiefly by war since it invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Dmitriev, considered the most U.S.-savvy member of Russia's elite, has said the two countries have already started talking about projects in Russia, such as a joint rare earth metals deal, after Putin suggested in February that the United States might be interested in exploring joint exploration for the deposits in Russia. Russia has the world's fifth-largest reserves of the metals used in lasers and military equipment.

Russia has also been keen to attract investors to help develop its Arctic region, Dmitriev said last week. Putin wants commerce ramped up via the Northern Sea Route through Arctic waters as Russia shifts trade towards Asia and away from Europe because of Western sanctions.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/senior-russian-official-visit-washington-224823466.html

"No Negotiating": Tesla Firebombing Suspect Hit With Federal Charges, Faces 20 Years In Prison

 by Rudy Blalock via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed federal charges against a suspect in connection with a firebombing attack on a Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado.

Cooper Frederick. Larimer County Sheriff's Office

Cooper Frederick, 24, faces federal charges related to the March 7 attack, according to Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who announced the charges on Monday.

“I made it clear, if you take part in the wave of domestic terrorism, I’ve made it clear if you take part in the wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, we will find you, arrest you, and put you behind bars,” Bondi stated. “Today, I’m proud to announce that the Department of Justice has unsealed federal charges against another Tesla attacker.”

Frederick, a Fort Collins resident, was initially arrested by Loveland Police on March 13 on multiple state charges, according to a City of Loveland news release. The charges included possession of explosives, second-degree arson, criminal mischief, and criminal attempt to commit a felony.

A fire erupted after an incendiary device was thrown at the Tesla building and landed between two vehicles. Several people inside the building were cleaning at the time and could have been injured, according to the news release, which stated a responding officer quickly extinguished the fire.

Larimer County Jail records show Frederick bonded out of jail on March 14.

Bondi stated in the same announcement that, following the latest charges, Frederick was re-arrested in Plano, Texas, following an investigation by the FBI.

Frederick’s arrest comes amid a wave of violent attacks against Tesla properties since CEO Elon Musk became head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Trump administration.

Incidents have occurred in at least nine states since January, with targets including Tesla showrooms, vehicles, and charging stations.

According to a report by The Epoch Times, on March 18, two Cybertrucks were set ablaze at a Las Vegas repair center, and “Resist” was spray-painted on the building.

Over that incident, police arrested 36-year-old Paul Hyon Kim on March 27, charging him with 15 offenses, including arson and firearms violations. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren said Kim had self-proclaimed affiliations with far-left organizations, including Communist Party USA-affiliated groups and other movements.

In February, a suspect allegedly threw eight Molotov cocktails at a Tesla showroom in Salem, Oregon, while armed with a suppressed AR-15 rifle.

Additional attacks have also occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, and Austin, Texas.

“All of these cases are a serious threat to public safety. Therefore, there will be no negotiating. We are seeking 20 years in prison,” Bondi said.

In Canada, approximately 80 Tesla vehicles were also vandalized in Hamilton, Ontario, on March 19.

President Donald Trump has condemned the attacks on Tesla properties, suggesting perpetrators would face long sentences for their crimes.

“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” he said in a March 21 post on Truth Social.

During a town hall event in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Sunday, Musk condemned the attacks.

“They’re burning Teslas and shooting up dealerships and calling for the death of the president and me … That’s somebody else’s car. Leave it alone,” Musk said during the livestreamed event.

A group called Tesla Takedown has organized protests at dealerships nationwide. On its website, the group states that “Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it.” The group called for a Global Day of Action on March 29, which saw protests targeting Tesla around the United States and smaller-scale rallies in several European locations.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/there-will-be-no-negotiating-tesla-firebombing-suspect-hit-federal-charges-faces-20-years

Indian Refiners Seek Alternatives To Russian Oil After Trump Tariff Threat

 Indian oil refiners have started looking for alternative supplies of crude after President Trump threatened secondary sanctions on Russian energy exports if Moscow refuses to sign a ceasefire deal for the Ukraine.

Bloomberg reported that companies such as Bharat Petroleum Corp. and Hindustan Petroleum Corp. were looking for oil cargoes from the Middle East, the North Sea, and the Mediterranean for May delivery in anticipation of tariff action.

India has emerged as one of the biggest buyers of Russian crude since the start of the war in Ukraine, with grades including Urals accounting for almost 40% of the nation’s imports last year. Refiners have enjoyed elevated profits due to the cheaper supplies, although that advantage has waned in recent months. China has also purchased bigger volumes since the invasion.

President Trump threatened a 25% tariff on all Russian oil, saying “If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” in an interview for NBC.

“That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil,” Trump elaborated.

The mechanism would be the same as the one Trump applied to Venezuela, slapping a 25% tariff on all imports from countries that continue buying crude from the South American nation.

Since the US is India’s top trading partner, under a scenario of “secondary tariffs” for buyers of Russian oil, it’s likely that the South Asian nation would look for alternative supplies, said Warren Patterson, the head of commodities strategy for ING Groep NV in Singapore.

“Traditional sanctions have created enough uncertainty,” he said. “The idea of secondary tariffs only intensifies this uncertainty, given that it is a new tool. Buyers need to decide whether the advantages of picking up discounted crude outweigh the potential hit on its economy from additional tariffs.”

“The big question is, will these repeated shocks end up structurally reducing Indian appetite for Russian crude? I have my doubts, as long as the economics works,” said Vandana Hari, founder of Vanda Insights in Singapore. “It’s a bluff, a bargaining ploy on the part of Trump. But refiners need to prepare, they can’t rely on hunches, no matter how bizarre and unlikely a supply threat.”

Such a tariff would be a considerable problem for India, whose dependence on imported crude hit an all-time high in the latest fiscal year. India imported 88.2% of the crude it consumed in the April 2024-February 2025 period, according to oil ministry data released at the end of last month. This is up from 87.7% for the previous fiscal year.

Due to this dependence, India is particularly price-sensitive, which is why it stepped up its purchases of Russian oil following the barrage of Western sanctions directed at Russia’s energy industry. Russia is currently India’s biggest single oil supplier.

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/indian-refiners-seek-alternatives-russian-oil-after-trump-tariff-threat

'China's Role In US Fentanyl Crisis Directed By Regime Leadership, Law Prof Says'

 by Terri Wu & Olivia Li via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Tensions have been simmering between the United States and communist China as the two countries escalate tariffs on each other’s imports. Meanwhile, Beijing’s rhetoric has become increasingly confrontational.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

In early March, the Chinese Embassy in Washington shared a social media post from its Foreign Ministry, repeating its message: “If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.”

President Donald Trump has warned that, while the United States does not seek war with China, it is “very well-equipped to handle it.”

Trump has imposed an additional 20 percent tariff on all goods made in China, citing a national emergency on the continued trafficking of fentanyl—a deadly opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine—into the United States.

To this day, China remains the primary source of fentanyl precursors, which are shipped to Mexico, where they’re manufactured into the illicit drug. It is then smuggled into the United States mainly via the southern border.

In response to Trump’s added tariff, Beijing imposed an additional 15 percent tariff on U.S. coal and natural gas and an extra 10 percent on agricultural equipment and pickup trucks.

The communist regime has also called the fentanyl epidemic the United States’ “own problem“ and has cast the U.S. tariffs as ”blackmail.”

Yuan Hongbing, a former law professor at Peking University in China who now lives in Australia, said the American opioid epidemic is far from the self-inflicted wound the CCP has suggested it is.

The Chinese regime has played a significant role in America’s fentanyl crisis, and blaming the United States for it has long been Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping’s strategy, Yuan told NTD, Epoch Times’ sister media outlet, in a recent episode of the Chinese-language program “Pinnacle View.”

Yuan, who has insider access to senior CCP leaders, said Xi has consistently given internal directives during both Trump’s first and second terms that Beijing must maintain the narrative that the drug crises in both Europe and the United States are not linked to China.

Yuan said the regime has also been directed by Xi to assert that China makes the chemical precursors legally, and that if they are converted into deadly drugs and smuggled into the United States or Europe, it is not China’s responsibility.

The China expert further stated that fentanyl is at the core of Xi’s bid to “take revenge” on the West. He said Xi blames the West for subjecting China to a century of humiliation as a result of the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century. During that time, China had to sign a series of unequal treaties that ceded Chinese territory and opened Chinese ports to foreign control.

“It is precisely due to Xi’s directives that we are now seeing a dramatic increase in both the production of fentanyl precursors in China and the export of these chemicals, fueling the ongoing fentanyl crisis in the United States,” Yuan said.

Fentanyl overdose deaths have become a national crisis, taking more than 200 American lives per day, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 2023 alone, about 75,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdose, a staggering 23-fold increase from 10 years ago.

A bag of illicit fentanyl pills is held as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tours the San Ysidro Port of Entry at the U.S.–Mexico border in San Diego on March 16, 2025. Alex Brandon/Getty Images

Today, accidental drug overdoses are the leading cause of death among Americans aged 18 to 45. On a more positive note, the number of opioid-related overdose deaths decreased by more than 20 percent in 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The fentanyl crisis has become a key concern among American voters and has become one of the driving forces behind the dynamics of U.S.–China relations, said China expert Alexander Liao.

He said relations between Beijing and Washington have fundamentally changed. During the Biden administration, the two countries went through a diplomatic “ice age,” when senior-level official communication froze for approximately 10 months in 2022 and 2023. However, Liao believes the confrontation has now escalated to a new level.

“Whether it’s trade or other aspects, the United States and China have basically turned against each other,” Liao told The Epoch Times.

“Little noise but fierce action” is how he categorizes the current state between Beijing and Washington, in contrast to the “big arguments and little action” going on between the United States and Europe.

“The politics play differently between enemies and friends,” he said.

US Makes Perfect Enemy for Chinese Regime

Over the past decade, China saw significant economic growth. Its nominal GDP is now over three-quarters of that of the United States, according to data from the World Bank. When measured by purchasing power, China’s economy surpassed that of the United States in 2016.

Xi rose in the CCP ranks a few years before that and in 2013 took over its leadership.

According to Yuan, Xi’s communist nature drove him to immediately cash in on China’s economic strength to establish a foreign policy program, the Belt and Road Initiative, aimed at expanding communist totalitarianism around the world.

Under the guise of infrastructure development, the $1 trillion geopolitical platform snatches up other countries’ natural resources, including critical minerals for computer chip production, and expands its use of their ports for its own civil and military purposes.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/chinas-role-us-fentanyl-crisis-directed-regime-leadership-expert-says