The FBI has declassified interview memos that may shed light on how fake Russiagate leaks came into being. The witness or witnesses whose interviews are memorialized in these memos laid the blame squarely on Adam Schiff, who at the time was the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. You can read the memos here, and draw your own conclusions.
These are some of the good parts:
(U//FOUO) When working in this capacity, XXXXXXX was called to an all-staff meeting by SCHIFF. In this meeting, SCHIFF stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States Donald J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to Indict President TRUMP. XXXXXXX stated this would be illegal and, upon hearing his concerns, unnamed members of the meeting reassured that they would not be caught leaking classified information.
More:
According to the account given to XXXXXXX, the staffer met with XXXXXXX for a drink later that evening, during which XXXXXXX provided the same detailed description of the leaking process within the HPSCI minority. XXXXXXX emphasized that this was not a one-time thing. Under the system established by XXXXXXX, notes would be run up to the ranking member, ADAM SCHIFF, after which a decision was made as to who would leak the information.
The Russia collusion hoax predated the 2016 election, but it gained force after Donald Trump unexpectedly (to some) defeated Hillary Clinton. It became the principal means through which the Democratic Party sought, with great success, to undermine the fledgling Trump administration:
Following the U.S. presidential election in November 2016, the mood within HPSCI was indescribable, said XXXXXXX. Ranking Member Schiff was particularly upset, as he believed he would have been appointed as the Director of CIA had candidate HILLARY CLINTON won the election. The HPSCI minority viewed the election and its aftermath as a constitutional crisis and, by February 2017, XXXXXXX stated that all hell broke loose. During a meeting on 13 February 2017, XXXXXXX instructed the staff that he wanted to drive the “Russian involvement” issue into a joint inquiry, similar to the 9/11 commission. To do so, XXXXXXX instructed the staffers to use any sources they had developed [in] the [U.S. Intelligence Community] to gather information, which would then be made public through the media in order to compel public opinion.
Further:
The Democratic minority leadership of HPSCI was aware of the leaks but was under the impression that leaking the information was one way to topple the administration and fix the constitutional crisis.
Nothing in these documents comes as a surprise. The Democrats’ plot to use the fabricated Russia Collusion Hoax to bring down the Trump administration has been amply documented, and Schiff himself not only leaked, he lied: he claimed publicly to have seen intelligence documents implicating Trump that did not, in fact, exist. Apart from these most recent documents, Adam Schiff is one of the most despicable people to have served in the federal government in the last 50 years.
Schiff has, of course, denied the truth of what was reported to the FBI in these interviews. He says the principal source was fired and has been discredited. I have no idea whether that is true or not.
These documents indicate that Schiff said he thought he would be immune from criminal prosecution for his leaks under the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which is ridiculous. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, the FBI chose not to pursue Schiff and others some years ago. On his last day in office, Joe Biden (or someone) pardoned Adam Schiff, but only with regard to his role on the committee that investigated the January 6 protest.
Will more marijuana use make America a better place? Not many who’ve seen and smelled what legalizing the drug has done to cities like New York, D.C., and San Francisco would say so.
Yet President Donald Trump is contemplating a change to marijuana’s federal classification that would make it easier to buy and more profitable to sell. The pot industry is heavily invested in getting its product recategorized from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 drug, and industry leaders ponied up for a $1-million-a-plate Trump fundraising dinner earlier this month to hear what the president had in mind, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The president should ignore the well-funded cannabis lobby. What matters is what more and cheaper marijuana will mean for ordinary Americans.
Twenty-four states have legalized recreational use of the drug, despite the revealing results experienced by the first state to do so. Taking advantage of high Democratic turnout the year of President Barack Obama’s reelection, activists passed a Colorado ballot measure to make pot legal back in 2012.
Legalization didn’t take effect until 2014, but by 2022 marijuana use in Colorado and other states that had legalized by then was 24 percent higher than in states where recreational use remained illegal.
A new study by the South Korean scholar Sunyoung Lee in the International Review of Law and Economics examines what’s happened to crime levels in U.S. states that have legalized pot. Lee writes his findings “do not yield conclusive evidence supporting a reduction in crime rates after legalizing recreational marijuana. Rather, they underscore notable positive associations with property crimes and suggest potential correlations with violent crimes …”
The marijuana lobby often claims prohibition, not the drug itself, drives crime. That would be a bad argument even without evidence like Lee’s which suggests legal weed makes crime worse. After all, any profit-driven criminal enterprise could be shut down by legalizing the crime in question: If bank robbery were legal, bank robbers wouldn’t need to use guns. If auto theft were legal, there wouldn’t be violence associated with black-market chop shops because the chop shops would be as legal as the commercial marijuana industry is today.
Legalize everything Tony Soprano does, and Tony won’t have to get so rough—but he’ll only do more of what he was doing before.
Libertarians who argue for legalizing drugs to stop drug violence are closer than they realize to the radicals on the left who argue property crimes shouldn’t be prosecuted. The psychology is the same: They sympathize with those who make it harder to live in a civilized society, and they reject society’s right to defend itself.
There are downsides to laws against marijuana, just as there are costs to protecting private property and citizens’ bodily safety. But the costs are well worth paying when the alternative is passivity in the face of aggression—handing your belongings or your life over to any thug who makes a demand.
At first marijuana legalization was sold to voters as a matter of leaving people alone to consume what they want in private, without bothering anybody else. Yet millions of Americans have now lived long enough with pot legalization, or non-enforcement of laws still on the books, to know the pot lobby perpetrated a fraud: What the country has actually had to deal with is pot smoking so rife in public the offensive smell—and the sights and sounds of intoxication—smacks you in the face.
It’s hardly different from dope-heads blowing smoke right in your eyes on the street. That’s not the worst crime in the world—but neither is shoplifting, and there’s no reason to tolerate either. Tolerating such things only breeds more tolerance for worse abuses, which is what has accustomed progressives to treating even violent criminals leniently.
Two scenes in the suburbs of D.C. convinced me pot acceptance has gone too far: First was seeing an African American bus driver, on a blazing hot summer day, order two dope-smoking teens to put out their joints and notice there were children around. To the extent our cities work at all is because of working-class men like him—and the rest of us have to decide whether we’re on his side or the teens’.
A year or so later, I watched a young mother one bright October afternoon hold her small daughter’s hand as they walked through a neighborhood reeking of high-potency pot. The multibillion-dollar weed industry got to advertise its product to a little girl about 4 years old that day. (It’s an industry that, notoriously, even sells its drug in candy form, as “gummies.”)
Our cities and towns shouldn’t be open-air drug dens, and President Trump shouldn’t let the pot lobby get high off of making Americans’ lives worse.
According to the Times, California was “walloped by its worst summertime surge since 2022.” Miller found “walloped” a strange description for a lower test-positive rate, and notes that deaths attributed to COVID were also “significantly lower” in 2024 than in previous years. As in 2020, deaths attributed to COVID were not necessarily caused by COVID, and the same goes for illnesses. For example, California health officials have been warning of “razor blade throat,” which Miller finds “an entirely made-up condition done to describe normal reactions to seasonal respiratory illnesses.” And of course, the remedy is the same.
State Public Health officer Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health, proclaims that everyone aged six months and older “should have access and the choice to receive currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines, with an emphasis on protecting higher-risk individuals, such as infants and toddlers, pregnant individuals and others with risks for serious disease.” The quest for vaccination of infants and toddlers in 2025, Miller noted, came “despite the lack of testing for boosters targeted at nonexistent variants, risk of side effects, and miniscule efficacy that rapidly wanes over time.”
According to Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Katy Grimes of the California Globe discovered, every state reports “very low” level of respiratory illness activity. Even so, California officials find an “uptick” in something called “COVID flu,” which is most likely the flu, the whole flu, and nothing but the flu.
“The Covid flu hysteria and controls have conditioned many Americans not to believe the government the next time,” Grimes explains. “We need to ask our politicians and elected officials, why people in government want to cause fear. And notably, so do people running newspapers and media.”
In similar style, Ian Miller recalls, “the many, many pieces of misinformation laundered through the media throughout the pandemic. Media outlets are creating an atmosphere of permanent fear for susceptible members of the public who refuse to admit they were misled by Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the ‘expert’ community, and the media they rely on.” This was on full display in the run-up to the 2024 Super Bowl.
Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs was pushing vaccines for new COVID “variants” to be conveniently taken with the annual flu shot. According to the CDC, the latest variant, JN.1, was “closely related to the variant BA.2.86 that CDC has been tracking since August,” and JN.1 has “only a single change” in the spike protein with BA.2.86. In other words, the “variants” are basically the same, just given a new number and menacing name.
According to Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt, and someone who regards Fauci as a “genius,” the infectiousness, transmissibility and severity is “about the same” as the Omicron variant. The “new vaccines” are “expected to be effective against the variant,” which is not the same as proven effectiveness. As Americans will recall, the vaccines mandated by Fauci failed to prevent infection and transmission of COVID, which the fully boosted Fauci proved by testing positive.
“If you haven’t been vaccinated—and so many people have not yet,” said Schaffner, “there’s still time to get vaccinated, and while you’re at it, get your flu shot too.” Pushing the COVID comeback in 2025 is Dr. Erica Pan, an appointee of Governor Gavin Newsom and California’s acting state public health officer from Aug. 10, 2020 to Jan. 3, 2021.
Stanford grad Erica Pan earned an MD at Tufts but as with Fauci it’s unclear if she ever practiced medicine or treated a single COVID patient. Pan boasts an MPH, but like Fauci her bio shows no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology Like Fauci she is not a virologist. Her MD and MPH are bureaucratic credentials like Jill Biden’s EdD.
During the pandemic, Pan simply repeated the mandates of the CDC and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci directed since 1984. The infamous six-foot social distancing rule, Fauci revealed last year, was “arbitrary,” lacked any scientific basis, and “sort of just appeared.” The establishment media accepted the rules with fathomless credulity, and that continues in 2025.As this plays out, another Fauci ally has been making the rounds.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2009-2021, recently appeared on (the recently canceled) The Late Show With Stephen Colbert claiming that under the Trump administration, he was“completely muzzled.” In reality, the chief muzzler was Collins himself.
Fauci’s lockdown regime drew a challenge from medical scientists of the Great Barrington Declaration, headed by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. Collins tasked Fauci with a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the Barrington scientists, whom he smeared as “fringe epidemiologists.”
As it happens, the highly qualified Bhattacharya is now director of the NIH and has removed from their posts Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, Fauci’s successor as NIAID director, and NIH bioethics chief Christine Grady, Fauci’s wife since 1985. Grady did not reveal that connection in her 1995 book The Search for an AIDS Vaccine, which contends that children and pregnant women are suitable subjects for drug trials.
Grady’s book served as justification for Fauci’s drug trials with foster children in New York City. Those trials are the subject of the 2004 documentary Guinea Pig Kids, and explained at length in The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now heads the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
In 2012, when the NIH gave Grady the bioethics post, the agency made no mention of her marriage to Fauci and the huge conflict of interest that created. As parents might recall, during the pandemic, Fauci recommended COVID vaccines for children under the age of five. The NIH bioethics boss was fine with that and it’s hard to find any objection from Collins or Grady to anything Fauci did or said. That includes Fauci’s claim that he represents science, and that those who criticize him are “attacking” science.
On his last day in office, Joe Biden pardoned Dr. Anthony Fauci, without indicating any crime he committed. The loathsome Lysenko figure has allegedly retired but state health bureaucrats and their media allies are his fearmongering variants. If they were so wrong on COVID, we may wonder why we should take their advice on anything else.
Pharmaceutical companies can continue to charge the federal government—and Medicare beneficiaries—full price for a handful of drugs that might have seen price reductions as soon as next year.
That’s because Congress changed the law to outright exempt or delay consideration of more than 300 medications for the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program.
That includes 17 of the top 50 products on Medicare’s drug spending list.
Here’s what lawmakers did, why they did it, and how it affects federal and consumer costs.
Medicare Now Negotiates Some Drug Prices
The federal government, the world’s largest purchaser of prescription drugs, has been legally authorized to negotiate prescription drug prices since 2022.
To be considered for price negotiation, a drug must have been on the market for at least nine years, or 13 years for biologic drugs, those derived from biological material rather than chemicals.
While the program is intended to arrive at a “maximum fair price” for medications, the pharmaceutical industry considers it a form of government price setting rather than negotiation.
“This system ignores the nature of the research and development (R&D) process, discouraging continued R&D after a medicine is FDA approved and deeming some types of medicines as not worth the real-life impact they can have on patients,” trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America states on its website.
To date, no prices have been reduced by the negotiation program. The first round of negotiated prices won’t take effect until January 2026. This covers 10 of the more than 8,800 medications covered by Medicare and applies to Medicare Part D only.
Orphan Drugs Were Always Exempt From Negotiation
Orphan drugs are those used to treat a so-called orphan disease, a rare condition affecting a relatively small number of people.
Finding a cure for these diseases can be expensive and risky. The cost of bringing a new drug to market can range up to $2 billion, according to data cited by the Congressional Budget Office.
To encourage drug makers to keep looking for treatments for rare diseases, Congress exempted orphan drugs from Medicare price negotiations.
Any drug that treats just one disease affecting fewer than 200,000 people is not eligible for price negotiations, regardless of how much it costs or how long it’s been on the market.
Some of these orphan drugs are quite expensive. For example, Medicare Part D covered Ravicti, a drug for treating urea cycle disorder, for just 87 people in 2023 at a cost of more than $840,000 each.
Without the ability to recoup the high cost of developing such drugs, pharmaceutical companies say it would be impossible to invest in finding cures for rare diseases.
“Rare disease drug development is uniquely challenging, and a one-size-fits-all approach to policy can stymie innovation for the 30 million Americans living with a rare disease,” Stacey Frisk, executive director of the Rare Disease Company Coalition, said in a May statement.
The Big Bill Changed the Rules
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act tweaked the rules of the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program to allow more drugs either to qualify as orphan cures or to keep that designation after being approved to treat more common ailments.
Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), a physician, sponsored that part of the legislation, which was originally introduced as the ORPHAN Cures Act.
“The ORPHAN Cures Act ensures that proven, critical [research and development] incentives are in place so the millions of Americans with rare diseases can continue to have hope for the future,” Joyce said in a statement introducing the legislation.
First, the law widened the definition of an orphan drug to include those that treat more than rare diseases but do not treat non-rare conditions.
That excludes an additional group of 82 drugs from price negotiation.
Second, the law delayed the date at which orphan drugs that were later approved to treat more common diseases can be considered for price negotiations. That provision covers another 233 medications.
Normally, a drug must have been on the market for at least nine years, or 13 years for biologic drugs, to be considered for price negotiations. That provision was calculated to allow drug makers adequate time to recoup their investment.
Now, drugs that began as orphan drugs but were later approved to treat more common illnesses will get more time to market the drug to Medicare at full price.
For these drugs, that nine- or 13-year waiting period is keyed to the date the drug received approval for a more common disease, not the date it first entered the market.
That generally adds a year or more before the drug would be eligible for Medicare price negotiations.
“That’s an example of a good policy change, where innovation is being rewarded and not penalized,” AbbVie board chair and CEO Robert A. Michael told investors on a July 31 earnings call. A spokesperson for AbbVie declined further comment.
In 2024, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than $150 million to influence federal and state legislatures, according to watchdog group Open Secrets. Of the more than 700 pharmaceutical lobbyists, nearly two-thirds were former government employees.
These Drugs Will Remain Costly Despite Wider Use
These carveouts exempt an additional 82 drugs from Medicare price negotiations and potentially delay negotiations on 233 others, according to consulting firm Health Management.
These drugs comprise just 3.6 percent of Medicare-covered medications but accounted for 24 percent of the more than $211 billion in Medicare drug spending for 2022.
Darzalex, produced by Johnson & Johnson, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2015 for patients who had previously been treated for multiple myeloma.
Since then, Darzalex has received eight more approvals for treating multiple myeloma in other circumstances. Medicare and Medicaid together paid more than $10 billion for the drug from 2019 to 2023.
Blood cancer drug Venclexta, marketed by AbbVie, is also excluded from price negotiations. The federal government alone paid more than $3 billion for the medication over five years.
The cancer drug Keytruda, produced by Merck, entered the market in 2014 for the treatment of melanoma and has now received 40 approvals covering a variety of other cancers.
The federal government paid nearly $24 billion for Keytruda from 2019 to 2023.
Opdivo, made by Johnson & Johnson, and Yervoy from Bristol-Myers Squibb would have been eligible for Medicare price negotiation in 2026, but will now be delayed.
The federal government has already purchased more than $10 billion worth of Opdivo and $3 million of Yervoy.
The orphan drug provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will cost taxpayers $1.8 billion through 2034, according to a report commissioned by Alexion Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of AstraZeneca.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost at nearly $5 billion over 10 years.
Some Call That a ‘Handout’ to Big Pharma
President Donald Trump has asked drug makers to voluntarily reduce prices not just for Medicare but for Medicaid as well, or face “aggressive action” by his administration.
The president said on July 31 that his Most Favored Nation Prescription Drug Pricing plan, first announced in May, was met with blame shifting and requests for policy changes that would amount to billions of dollars in “handouts” to the industry.
Some patient advocates say the pharmaceutical industry has already received generous incentives from the federal government.
“The 42-year-old Orphan Drug Act already provides generous incentives such as tax credits and priority review vouchers, and those remain fully intact under the Medicare Negotiation Program,” Alyson Bancroft of Patients for Affordable Drugs told The Epoch Times by email.
A July study by researchers from Bentley University indicated that drug makers’ spending on research and development increased by $30 billion in the year and a half after the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program was approved as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, rising to $247 billion over that 18-month period.
The development of biologics has more than tripled over the last decade. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 17 of them in 2023, up from an average of 4 per year before 2014.
The Epoch Times requested comments from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, and received no response by the time of publication.
Strengthened Balance Sheet with $75 Million Equity Financing; Cash Position Expected to Fund Operations into the First Half of 2027
Aura Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: AURA), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing precision therapies for solid tumors designed to preserve organ function, today reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2025, and provided recent business highlights.
“We continued to focus on execution in our clinical programs in the second quarter, including our ongoing global Phase 3 CoMpass trial in early choroidal melanoma and our Phase 1b/2 trial in NMIBC,” said Elisabet de los Pinos, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Aura. “With the successful completion of our recent equity financing, we believe we are well positioned to advance the clinical development of bel-sar in our ocular and urologic oncology programs, where we believe our unique mechanism of action has the potential to meaningfully impact the lives of patients.”
ImmunityBio (NASDAQ:IBRX) stock surged 16% following the announcement of encouraging early results from its QUILT-106 Phase I trial for a novel cancer therapy targeting Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia (WM), a type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
The company reported complete responses in the first two patients treated with its CD19 CAR-NK natural killer cell therapy. One patient achieved a complete response with the CAR-NK therapy alone, while the second achieved complete response when the therapy was combined with rituximab. Both patients have maintained remission for six months to date.
The QUILT-106 trial is evaluating the safety and preliminary efficacy of CD19 CAR-NK cell therapy in patients with relapsed or refractory CD19⁺CD20⁺ B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Notably, all treatments were administered in an outpatient setting with no significant toxicities reported.
Dr. Jackie Thomson from Wits University Donald Gordan Medical Center in Johannesburg, South Africa, who is the lead author of the research paper, highlighted the significance of these findings. "The preliminary findings we have submitted for presentation at the American Society of Hematology annual meeting provides the first evidence that novel immunotherapy combinations without chemotherapy lymphodepletion can provide deep and durable remissions in WM even after multiple prior treatments," said Thomson.
The open-label study has enrolled 13 patients with NHL at three sites in South Africa, including three with WM. The trial continues to recruit patients to confirm these early findings and potentially establish this chemotherapy-free approach as a viable treatment option for relapsed WM, which is currently considered incurable with existing treatments.
Tourmaline Bio (NASDAQ: TRML) reported Q2 2025 financial results and highlighted significant progress in its clinical programs. The company announced positive topline results from the Phase 2 TRANQUILITY trial of pacibekitug, demonstrating rapid and significant reductions in high-sensitivity C-reactive protein with quarterly dosing.
Key financial metrics include cash position of $256.4 million as of June 30, 2025, providing runway into H2 2027. Q2 2025 saw net loss of $23.1 million ($0.90 per share), with R&D expenses at $19.6 million and G&A expenses at $6.3 million.
The company plans to initiate a Phase 2 proof-of-concept trial in abdominal aortic aneurysm in H2 2025 and is preparing for a Phase 3 cardiovascular outcomes trial in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Additional TRANQUILITY trial data will be presented at the upcoming European Society of Cardiology Congress.
