FBI Mole Wore Wire Inside Newsom's Inner Circle: Lawyer

 A mole working for the Biden FBI was secretly recording Gavin Newsom's inner circle before the agency expanded its corruption probe into the California governor and his wife, according to a bombshell report by the NY Post. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom, Alexis Podesta

Democrat insider Alexis Podesta, a 45-year-old Sacramento consultant and Newsom appointee - no known relation to John Podesta - secretly taped conversations for the FBI as early as June 2024, while Joe Biden was still in the White House, according to McGregor Scott, the former US attorney now representing Dana Williamson. Williamson, 53, ran Newsom's office as chief of staff until late 2024; in May she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and lying to federal agents.

Federal prosecutors accused Williamson and others of orchestrating a scheme to siphon roughly $225,000 from a dormant campaign account which belonged to former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra -disguising the payments as legitimate consulting fees while routing the money to benefit Becerra's former chief of staff, Sean McCluskie. According to Podesta's attorney, she was placed in charge of overseeing the account in question - but did not know the payments were improper.

Becerra is now the Democratic nominee to succeed Newsom as governor. 

"Alexis wore a wire, and Dana did not," said Williamson's lawyer and former US attorney for the Eastern District of California, McGregor Scott. 

"A lot of people received letters essentially informing us that there were certain periods of time where the FBI was given access to follow phone calls," said assemblymember Josh Hoover (R-Folsom), who said he was among those who received a letter even though he had never spoken with either Podesta or Williamson. 

"I don’t know how these investigations work, but it sounds like they cast a pretty broad net across the Capitol community to see what they could find." 

A separate source with knowledge of the matter said they knew of four Sacramento insiders who also received FBI notifications confirming they had been recorded.

One recipient told the source: “Dude, I got this f—ing letter. I never even met with Dana Williamson!”

“Their curiosity was that they never even met with Dana Williamson, so they were wondering what this is all about,” the source said.

“And now you have the answer.” -NY Post

News of the wire comes just over two weeks after Newsom claimed that the Trump administration is punishing him because he may run for president in 2028. 

"They're demanding records, they're abusing the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random documents. Donald Trump isn't just coming after me because of my mean tweets, he's coming after me because I'm considering running for president, because he hates that I've consistently called him out over and over again for his lies and deceit," Newsom said, before sending a mass email asking for political donations. 

Sources close to the investigation, however, told The Post that the feds have spent the past year digging into Newsom, his staff, and his wife's taxes after whistleblowers reportedly dropped the dime that led to the probe. Williamson's attorney told the outlet that his client declined to cooperate because she didn't have anything on Newsom. 

Podesta - a former staffer for the late Dianne Feinstein, is a longtime Democratic power broker who remains on California's State Compensation Insurance Fund board - to which Newsom appointed her in January 2020. She also held senior positions in Gov. Jerry Brown's administration, and served as secretary of the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. While she hasn't been charged with a crime, her attorney identified her as an uncharged co-conspirator in the Williamson indictment.

Of note, Podesta is still getting paid $60,797 by the state while cooperating with the FBI, while she sits on the Insurance Fund Board. 

Campaign finance records show Becerra's committee making $10,000 monthly payments to 'Podesta Company' during 2023 and 2024. During this period, Williamson - while Newsom's CoS - shared confidential info with Podesta regarding a corporate client that has now been identified as Activision Blizzard.

Williamson’s plea agreement states that she was captured in a June 2024 wiretap strategizing with the co-conspirator about how to respond to a Public Records Act request involving the state’s litigation against the company. Williamson and Podesta exchanged text messages on the issue, according to court records. Podesta has not publicly commented on the matter. -NY Post

Hoover, the Republican assemblymember, told The Post: "All of this stuff just raises so many questions ... "What is going on in this administration? What types of conversations are being had? I think the entire case should be really concerning for the general public. It’s really raising a lot of mistrust."

"I think it underlines how problematic this current administration is. [Newsom] is someone who wants to run for president of the United States. It’s really disappointing to see that this is the level of our politics."

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-mole-wore-wire-inside-newsoms-inner-circle-lawyer

Canada, Alberta announce new west coast oil pipeline to boost exports

Canada announced plans to build a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific coast, which would give the world's fourth-largest oil producer greater capacity to export to Asia and ease its reliance on the United States.


Prime Minister Mark ‌Carney made the announcement in Calgary alongside Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, whose government said construction of the 1-million-barrel-per-day pipeline would begin as early ‌as September 2027.


The plan marks the culmination of months of political wrangling and compromise on all sides. It represents the Carney government's attempt to balance Canada's environmental ideals with the economic reality posed ​by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs policy.

"We've agreed the time for action is now," said Carney.

The pipeline could make Canada a major global energy supplier, as Asia's top importers seek oil from outside the Middle East in the wake of the Iran conflict.

No cost estimates have been released for the pipeline, which will be built by government-owned Trans Mountain Corp in coordination with Pembina Pipeline Corp to transport crude from Alberta's oil sands to British Columbia's southwest.

The federal government through Trans Mountain and the government of ‌Alberta through its Alberta Petroleum Marketing Corporation would be ⁠majority owners of the pipeline. Pembina would have a 10% stake through construction, with the opportunity for up to an additional 10% once the project enters operation.


Smith said funding details of the project are still being negotiated.

The plan has been formally submitted by the provincial ⁠government to Canada's major projects office for potential regulatory fast-tracking.

PIPELINE HURDLES

Canada's oil output, which in 2026 is expected to exceed last year's record of 5.3 million bpd, currently has only one way to access Asian markets, the Trans Mountain pipeline, which runs along a similar route to the proposed new pipeline.

An expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline was completed ​in ​2024, seven years after Kinder Morgan threatened to cancel it due to heavy environmental and ​Indigenous opposition.

Ottawa bought the Trans Mountain system for C$4.5 billion ($3.15 billion) ‌in 2018 to finish the expansion. Construction delays and budget overruns pushed its price tag to C$34 billion over four years.

Industry representatives have said regulatory uncertainties remain a major risk to crude oil pipeline construction in Canada, and no private company has expressed interest in taking a majority stake in Alberta's proposal.


Canada's environmental policies, especially under Liberal former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, had stoked anger in oil-rich Alberta and fueled a nascent separatist movement. Carney has been seeking to improve relations with Alberta and last October signed an agreement to drop certain climate regulations and help the province grow its energy sector.

In a separate deal signed with British ‌Columbia on Thursday, Carney committed to retaining an existing federal ban on oil tankers along ​the northwest coast. He also committed to help fund infrastructure upgrades aimed at expanding the capacity ​at the Roberts Bank Terminal, part of the port of Vancouver, while ​also pledging to accelerate the building of new liquefied natural gas projects in B.C.

British Columbia Premier David Eby had strongly opposed the ‌idea of a northwest oil pipeline route due to concerns about ​the risk of an oil spill in ​the ecologically fragile area. On Thursday he appeared to open the door to a pipeline going through his province, as long as the tanker ban remains in place.


Carney has said any new crude pipeline must be developed in partnership with Indigenous communities, and is also dependent on the oil ​industry building a large-scale carbon capture and storage project.

On ‌Thursday, Alberta's government said it is close to finalizing a tripartite agreement with Ottawa and the Oil Sands Alliance industry group that will ​pave the way for the carbon capture project to move ahead. Details of this agreement are expected to be released in the coming ​days.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/canada-alberta-announce-west-coast-030609877.html

Bronx DA’s charges against ‘gang members’ expose disturbing trend of NY’s Raise the Age law

 Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark this week charged 19 reputed gang members with a range of criminal charges, including conspiracy, attempted murder, assault and weapons-related crimes.

And every single one of these thugs, save the leader, was a minor.

Is there more compelling evidence that New York’s Raise the Age law is a horrific failure?

The charges follow a 13-month long investigation into the “McKillville” gang’s turf war with rivals, which featured all manner of shootings, conspiracies, assaults — and pure terror for the community.

Prosecutors say the minors were 14- to 17-year-old boys who older men “urged” to “elevate themselves” by “committing attempted murders and assaults.”

Their alleged leader, 28-year-old gang leader Tyreik “Tubby” Seth, even told the kids to shoot rivals, “and they did so,” added Clark, “to win their leader’s favor.”

It’s a downright disturbing trend: During the six year after the passage of the Raise the Age law — which upped the age for criminal responsibility as an adult from 16 to 18 — the number of juvenile shooters spiked nearly 200%.

The law meant minors would rarely face serious consequences, even for violent crimes, so gang bosses turned to them to do their dirty work. 

Innocent New Yorkers get caught in the crossfire.

Yet progressives — and, most shamefully, Gov. Kathy Hochul — stand by this sick system, thinking they’re doing the kids a favor by saving them from paying a stiff price.

They couldn’t be more wrong: The kids instead learn the lesson that crime pays; many wind up embarking on long criminal careers that wreck their lives.

Clark was right to slam the law as she announced the charges.

Indeed, the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York has long urged the state to fix the law, after watching teens cycle through the system, re-offend and not be held accountable for even violent crimes. 

“The youth justice system, quite frankly, is broken,” fumed Clark.

Unless it’s fixed, kids will continue down a dark path, facing few consequences while the adult leaders remain free and the public remains terrified.

https://nypost.com/2026/07/02/opinion/bronx-das-charges-against-gang-members-expose-the-disturbing-trend-of-nys-raise-the-age-law/

Cruise on lockdown off Cal. coast, 120 passengers down with symptoms

 A cruise ship is on lockdown in San Francisco after an outbreak of norovirus affecting more than 100 passengers and 20 crew.

The Ruby Princess, operated by Princess Cruises, was on a 20-day round-trip Alaskan voyage when the horrific bug struck 125 people on board. The trip also included a stop in British Columbia, Canada.

The CDC said 3.4% of the passengers and 2% of the ship’s crew reported being ill during the June 12 to July 2 trip. Most symptoms included diarrhea and vomiting.

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A cruise ship is on lockdown in San Francisco after an outbreak of norovirus affecting more than 100 passengers and 20 crew.Getty Images

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The company says the vessel implemented enhanced sanitation protocols and that cases have decreased since then.Getty Images

The company says the vessel implemented enhanced sanitation protocols and that cases have decreased since then.

“Princess Cruises can confirm that a limited number of guests reported mild gastrointestinal illness during the 20-day June 12 Ruby Princess voyage from San Francisco,” the company said in a statement. “Our crew responded promptly by implementing enhanced sanitation protocols across the ship, and cases have since decreased and remain low.” 

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Other measures taken by the company included isolating passengers and crew, collecting stool samples to test, and contacting the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, the agency said.PCG HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Other measures taken by the company included isolating passengers and crew, collecting stool samples to test, and contacting the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, the agency said.

Officials say the ship is undergoing “comprehensive cleaning and disinfection prior to departing in the afternoon for her next voyage.”

Norovirus is the most common cause of gastrointestinal illness outbreaks on cruise ships, according to the CDC. The disease accounted for 17 out of the 23 CDC-reported cruise ship outbreaks last year.

The Ruby Princess outbreak comes a little over a month after a norovirus outbreak slammed another Princess Cruises ship. A norovirus outbreak aboard the Caribbean Princess sickened over 100 passengers and more than a dozen crew members during its 14-day voyage through the Eastern Caribbean.

The ship can carry 3,080 guests and 1,200 crew across its 19 decks, according to the cruise line. The ship is 951 feet long with more than 1,500 guest staterooms.

https://nypost.com/2026/07/02/us-news/cruise-ship-docked-off-california-coast-after-100-passengers-sickened/

Memo to Dems like Abdul El-Sayed and Melat Kiros: My mom did NOT deserve 9/11

 My mother Audrey Valentine, who spent her career as a detective with the NYPD, was one of the first responders who ran toward the towers on Sept. 11, 2001, while everyone else was running away.

She worked in the city morgue for weeks afterward, identifying the remains of victims.

Some of those victims were her friends. Some were her colleagues.

She has carried the weight of that day for 25 years, in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder that never fully leaves.

In prurigo nodularis, a chronic skin condition is tied to her exposure at Ground Zero, a permanent bodily reminder of where she stood that morning.

In the memory of friends she will never see again.

She didn’t deserve any of it. No American did.

That shouldn’t be a controversial sentence — but within the Democratic Party, it’s increasingly treated as one worth debating.

Take Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat.

He’s campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, a media personality who says America “deserved” 9/11.

When pressed on it, El-Sayed didn’t distance himself from Piker’s reprehensible comments; he merely said they needed to be viewed “in context.”

Context, for the murder of nearly 3,000 people on American soil.

Or take Melat Kiros, the Democratic Socialists of America member and winner of this week’s Democratic congressional primary in Colorado, who called both the 9/11 attacks and the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel “inevitable consequences” of American and Israeli foreign policy.

Abdul El-Sayed, candidate for US Senate in Michigan, speaks at Mumford High School on May 3, 2026, in Detroit, Michigan.Getty Images

Not tragedies, not atrocities — inevitabilities.

As if the men who flew planes into buildings full of office workers, and the terrorists who slaughtered families in their homes, were simply following a script written by us.

Even James Carville, lifelong Democratic strategist, called Kiros a “bridge too far” for his party.

He’s right.

But the fact that a rising faction on Carville’s own side requires such a public correction should alarm every Democrat who still believes in the country their party claims to represent.

This burning hatred for America isn’t a fringe internet phenomenon anymore.

These are candidates for federal office, people who could soon hold a Senate or House seat, who are being defended and praised and funded by sitting officials.

Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros speaks after winning the Democratic nomination during a primary election night watch party at The Broadway, Tuesday, June 30, 2026, in Denver, Colorado.AP Photo/Rebecca Slezak

And they’re getting a platform to suggest that American civilians had it coming.

My mother did not have it coming.

Neither did the firefighters who climbed the stairs as the towers came down.

Neither did the office workers, the janitors, the Cantor Fitzgerald traders, the Windows on the World waitstaff or the passengers on four hijacked planes who tried to fight back.

Neither did the Israeli families and concertgoers murdered and taken hostage on Oct. 7.

There’s a meaningful difference between debating American foreign policy — which is fair game in this country and always has been — and excusing mass murder as a foreseeable and justified response to it.

One is politics.

The other is a moral collapse dressed up as nuance.

The Democratic Party has a choice to make.

It can continue to let candidates like El-Sayed and Kiros carry its banner while explaining away language that excuses terrorism — or it can draw a clear line and say this evil has no home in the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy.

So far, the response from party leadership has been meek.

I’m not asking Democrats to abandon their politics; I’m pleading with them to remember that some things sit outside of politics entirely.

The murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on a Tuesday morning in September is one of them.

My mother’s PTSD is not a talking point.

Her dead friends are not debate props.

Her scars, physical and otherwise, are not context for anyone’s foreign-policy argument.

If the Democratic Party cannot say, clearly and without qualification, that the United States didn’t deserve 9/11, it has a much bigger problem than messaging.

And Americans must ask whether today’s Democrats know what it means to stand with this country at all.

Harrison Fields, a senior vice president at CGCN Group, served as principal deputy press secretary in the second Trump administration.

https://nypost.com/2026/07/02/opinion/memo-to-dems-like-abdul-el-sayed-and-melat-kiros-my-mom-did-not-deserve-9-11/

Billionaire Governor Pritzker Embraces Socialist Candidates As Future Of Dem Party

 It's a common and almost inevitable component of communist history that the leaders of proletariat movements always end up becoming some of the wealthiest people in those movements.  The idea of "equity" is a fantasy; every society no matter how "progressive" has an elitist class with more money and more power than the common citizen. 

Socialist and communist societies have some of the most egregious power gaps imaginable; they even reinstate archaic systems of hereditary succession.  Just look at North Korea or the "princeling" (taizidang) system in China which favors the descendants of founding revolutionaries.  The notion of an economic Utopia where outcomes are equalized and no one has to struggle is a fantasy sold to the masses by clever elites seeking unfettered control. 

Someone always comes out on top, and it's usually the same money-players that leftists claim to be fighting against.

For example, Democrat Socialist and rising Democrat star Zohran Mamdani comes from an affluent family with a net worth in the tens of millions.  Socialist and Islamist influencer Hasan Piker is worth $8 million alone, but his family is affluent with extensive corporate and political connections.  Ilhan Omar's husband listed their net worth at up to $30 million before they suddenly revised it down to $95,000 in the face of voter backlash.  She is currently facing a DOJ investigation into her odd financial history.

The point is, these are not working class people who experience the struggles of the everyday laborer.  If they have not always been rich, they have at the very least always had a family safety net of considerable wealth.  Enter Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (a billionaire), who jumped on the Democrat Socialist train this week in an interview with CNN.

On CNN's "The Source", Pritzker defended progressive/Democratic Socialist candidates as the "recipe for winning" for the Democrat Party going into the future.  His statements come just as news hit that Kamala Harris has been in touch with Zohran Mamdani for months in preparation for the 2028 election cycle.  Meanwhile, new polls show that 32% of Democrat voters openly support socialist candidates.   

The trend is clear; the political left is either doubling down and embracing radicalism, or they are simply revealing their true nature.  The Democrat Party is riding the socialist wave and the extremists are in charge.  

Pritzker went on to suggest that Donald Trump's concerns over the radicalism of socialist candidates are unfounded and a "sign of dementia".  This is coming from the same man who outright denied that Joe Biden was showing signs of cognitive decline in the lead up to the 2024 elections, calling Biden "completely mentally sharp" during personal meetings.  

Pritzker, confronted with the potential hypocrisy of an ultra rich politician supporting his party's shift into open socialism, suggested that he's actually "one of the good billionaires".

At bottom, there is a large contingent of billionaires and ultra-wealthy elites backing the Democratic Party and, like Pritzker, none of them are worried about socialist ideology taking over.  Why?  Because they know what the leaders of every communist revolution have known - That they will end up in charge regardless, and militant activists are nothing more than useful idiots paving the way for the elites to gain even more power.      

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/billionaire-governor-pritzker-embraces-socialist-candidates-future-democrat-party