NEWLY OBTAINED EMAILS INCLUDE PRIVATE-SECTOR EXECUTIVES’ PANDEMIC-RELATED COMMUNICATIONS WITH KUSHNER, MNUCHIN

PUBLISH DATE: APRIL 9, 2021

In March 2020, then-President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner took on a major role in key aspects of the coronavirus response, despite a lack of related experience and expertise. Kushner’s task force, which relied on private companies to address challenges such as testing and medical-supply shortages, raised questions about undue influence and created confusion among federal officials who were uncertain about the roles of Kushner’s private-sector team members. At the time, Politico reported that “the scope of his authority now exceeds that of Health Secretary Alex Azar.”

American Oversight previously published documents that showed communications Kushner and other top officials had with executives of private companies during the early months of the pandemic. American Oversight has now obtained additional records that show the potential influence wielded by members of the private sector as well as their easy access to top officials, including Kushner and then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in the spring of 2020. 

On March 15, 2020, Nat Turner, the CEO of Flatiron Health, sent an “Updated deck on social distancing recommendations” to Kushner as well as to then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield and then-White House Coronavirus Coordinator Deborah Birx. Turner, like Adam Boehler, another task force member, had previously invested in Oscar Health, a company founded and run by Kushner’s brother. 

Also on March 15, biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong sent an email to Mnuchin with the subject line, “Executive order to save lives.” Soon-Shiong has been criticized by medical professionals for his brash public persona and tendency to exaggerate the success of his medical technology, and was reportedly considered by Trump prior to Trump’s inauguration as a potential head of the National Institutes of Health. Mnuchin forwarded Soon-Shiong’s email to multiple White House officials, including Kushner.

The documents also include an exchange, forwarded to Mnuchin on March 16, between Vidar Jorgensen, the chairman of the World Health Care Congress, and Alfredo Ortiz, the CEO of the Job Creators Network, who has ties to Trump. Jorgensen had sent an email to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, outlining his concerns about the “overcentralization of the SBA process,” referring to the Small Business Administration. Gingrich looped in Ortiz, who wrote: “We share your exact same concerns and agree. I believe we have a solution which we will be sharing with the Treasury Secretary later today.” 

Jorgensen said he supported Ortiz’s solutions, and emphasized that the president should promote “more freedom and lower regulation.” After the emails were forwarded to him, Mnuchin asked Brent McIntosh, Treasury’s undersecretary for international affairs, to work on “helping SBA” that same day. 

Also on March 16, Mnuchin forwarded Kushner an email from Ortiz: “Here is an idea we had we wanted to share with you. The small business loan idea is being finalized and I will send to you later this morning.” 

The documents include other instances in which private-sector executives reached Kushner through Mnuchin. On March 15, Mnuchin forwarded Kushner an email from Sen. Lamar Alexander that said that Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the Cleveland Browns and then the CEO of Pilot Flying J truck stops, wanted “to volunteer parking space at many of those sites for testing truckers. He says truckers need to be on the road so people can get the things that they need during this slow down.” 

The same day, Robert Vitale, the CEO Of Post Holdings, referenced a call with “Trump, Pence, Mnuchin, and Perdue” and offered suggestions about how to preserve supply chains. 

Part of Investigation:

• Jared Kushner’s Role in the Coronavirus Response

PARASITOLOGY

LEVIN REPORT
JARED KUSHNER AND IVANKA TRUMP ARE ALREADY WORKING ON THEIR NEXT GRIFT
The duo is advising a new group with “the mission of perpetuating former president Trump’s populist policies.”

BY BESS LEVIN APRIL 13, 2021

VANITY FAIR, HIVE

PARASITES AT NUREMBURG

Attending a joint news conference with German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, in the East Room of the White House.BY ANDREW HARNIK/A.P. IMAGES.

Since departing Washington for Miami back in January, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have maintained relatively low profiles. Oh, sure, Kushner penned an op-ed in which he offered Joe Biden some unsolicited foreign policy advice, and Trump has made herself readily available for the paparazzi to catch her jogging with Kushner, eating ice cream with her kids, and pointing at things with her assistant. But otherwise, it’s been unusually quiet on the Javanka front. And that’s probably by design as the couple attempts to rehab their image and shake off the taint of the last four years in general and the January 6 insurrection specifically, not to mention the unfortunate press that comes after forcing one’s Secret Service detail to go to extreme lengths to “find a bathroom.”

Of course, as a couple of people who see themselves returning to the White House in a presidential capacity—they’ve already determined Trump will be the first woman POTUS—the duo are no doubt planning their next moves behind the scenes, and on Tuesday, one of the projects they’ve been working on was revealed.

Per Axios:

A constellation of [Donald] Trump administration stars today will launch the America First Policy Institute, a 35-person nonprofit group with a first-year budget of $20 million and the mission of perpetuating former president Trump’s populist policies…. Two top Trump alumni tell me AFPI is by far the largest pro-Trump outside group, besides Trump’s own Florida–based machine. In the coming months, the group plans to take a large office space near the U.S. Capitol as a symbol that it’ll fight to be a muscular, well-heeled center of the future of conservatism…. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are informal advisers.

The president and CEO is Brooke Rollins, a Texan who was head of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council. Rollins, who met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week to update him on plans for the group, told me the group wants to be “dreamers and…risk-takers.” The board chair is Linda McMahon, who was a member of Trump’s Cabinet as the administrator of the Small Business Administration, after winning fame as a pro-wrestling entrepreneur. The vice chair is Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, a longtime CNBC personality who's now a Fox Business host. AFPI—now based in the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia—has been in the planning stages since December. The group will also have offices in Fort Worth, where Rollins remains based, Miami, and New York. Rollins plans to move the group to Washington to be closer to the action.

Rollins told Axios she hopes the group’s budget will double to $40 million in 2022. It’s not clear how AFPI plans to fundraise, though if it‘s anything like how Trump’s campaign did it, it’ll be wildly underhanded and deceitful. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that over the course of the 2020 election, Team Trump ripped off unwitting supporters for tens of millions of dollars through a simple yet extremely shady scheme in which the default option for donations authorized the campaign to transfer the pledged amount from people’s bank accounts not once, but every single week. Later, the campaign introduced a second prechecked box that doubled a person’s contribution and was known internally as a “money bomb.” In order for people to have noticed this before it was too late, they would have had to wade through “lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language,” the Times wrote. Few people did, and in the final two and half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and their shared accounts were forced to issue a staggering 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. Days later, the Times reported that the political arm of the House Republicans had upped the ante re: bilking supporters, with a truly psychotic prechecked box that warned “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR.”


In other Trump fundraising ploys, a significant portion of the money the ex-president’s legal defense fund raised—ostensibly for 2020 election suits—went to his Save America super PAC, which he can tap to pay for all kinds of personal expenses. But we’re sure this group will be entirely above board and legit. Ivanka and Jared would never be involved with something that wasn’t.

Ivanka and Jared Are “Advisers” to New Cash-Flush Right-Wing Think Tank

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump arrive with family at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida, on June 18, 2019.JOE BURBANK / ORLANDO SENTINEL / TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMAGES

BYZachary Petrizzo, Salon

PUBLISHED April 16, 2021

On Tuesday, it was reported that a group of former advisers to Donald Trump, with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s guidance, would launch a new right-wing nonprofit aimed at “perpetuating former President Trump’s populist policies,” according to Axios. The new foundation is just the latest in a long string of recent announcements about Trump-centered think-tank-style organizations popping up in Washington aimed at doing Trump’s bidding, all while the former president attempts to maintain control of the Republican Party from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

The new nonprofit America First Policy Institute, which lists Ivanka Trump and Kushner as “informal advisors,” will boast a 35-person crew with an operating budget of $20 million in its first year. In a flashy ad, the group claims it will be “the heart of [an] effort” to save the “soul of this country.”

The group’s noteworthy hires include former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who will serve as the organization’s vice chair, former Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. “In the coming months, the group plans to take a large office space near the U.S. Capitol as a symbol that it’ll fight to be a muscular, well-heeled center of the future of conservatism,” Axios further reported.

Furthermore, the group seemingly seeks to impact conversations in the nation’s capital the very same way the conservative think-tank heavyweight, The Heritage Foundation, has long done in D.C. policy, potentially sparking a rivalry between the two non-profits. Heritage recently hired former Vice President Mike Pence, but it remains to be seen exactly how it will seek to influence policy on Capitol Hill in a post-Trump era.

Asked by Salon about the new pro-Trump group, Heritage vice president of communications Rob​ Bluey said his organization looks forward to working with America First Policy. “The Heritage Foundation congratulates the talented team at America First Policy Institute and we look forward to working with them on a range of policy issues. Heritage already has strong relationships with many of America First Policy Institute’s leaders, including Brooke Rollins, from their service in the Trump administration,” Bluey told Salon via email on Thursday. “Heritage has a long history of cooperating on policy solutions with conservative organizations. The America First Policy Institute and the other new conservative groups in Washington are welcome allies. It’s more important than ever to work together on positive solutions for the American people while also countering the left-wing agenda from the White House and woke corporations.”

While the America First Policy Institute appears to be the largest and most prominent pro-Trump think tank to emerge since the former president left office, there are a series of other groups in D.C. being launched. Pence announced in early April that he would start his own think tank called Advancing American Freedom, alongside such Trump allies as Kudlow and Kellyanne Conway. “Advancing American Freedom plans to build on the success of the last four years by promoting traditional Conservative values and promoting the successful policies of the Trump Administration,” Pence said in a statement upon the group’s launch.

Another group that looks to shape a post-Trump Washington includes a legal enterprise founded by anti-immigration Trump adviser Stephen Miller, the America First Legal Foundation, which aims to give the Biden administration headaches in the courts. “Those who believe in America First must not shy away from using our legal system to defend our society and our families from any unlawful actions by the left,” Miller said in a statement on the group’s launch. “Those looking to hold the new administration in Washington to account finally have their answer. Our self-imposed policy of legal disarmament is now over.” Miller’s group says it will aim to hamstring the Democratic agenda by creating a coalition of attorneys and state attorney generals dedicated to stalling or stopping Biden’s policies from being implemented.

The new Trump organizations come on the heels of the apparent collapse of Charlie Kirk and Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Falkirk Center at Liberty University, amid the growing scandal around Falwell that has driven away Kirk and several other pro-Trump figures. “Now, less than two years later, Falkirk’s high-profile founders are gone, and Liberty is rethinking the center’s future in a post-Trump world,” The New York Times reported.

Although The Falkirk Center claimed to be a conservative think tank, it has operated more as a communications firm, fixated on cable news hits on Fox News and having its “Falkirk fellows” promote the center on social media. That said, it often appears that right-wing media is precisely where conservative discussions of policy occur, although often boiled down to the most simplistic and incendiary talking points.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout

Zachary Petrizzo  is a staff writer at Salon. He previously covered politics at Mediaite and The Daily Dot. Follow him on Twitter: @ZTPetrizzo.

Secret Facebook pages for elite military members are full of QAnon conspiracies and calls to murder officials: report

Sky Palma
April 16, 2021

Shutterstock

Secret Facebook groups exclusively for special operations forces that were accessed by NBC News show members posting debunked claims about the 2020 election, racist rhetoric, and even QAnon conspiracy theories, NBC News reports.

One Facebook post in a forum shows a member of a special forces group complaining that several aides to former Vice President Mike Pence were part of a "Concerted effort by the thieves and pedophiles walking the hallowed halls of the peoples government" to undermine former President Donald Trump, according to NBC News.

"In a just world, they would have already been taken out behind the court house and shot," a member commented.
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"Trump was sabotaged once again!" a member of US Special Forces Team Room wrote Jan. 7 about the Capitol riot, adding that "trying to get to the bottom of the obvious election fraud now looks like it doesn't have a chance."

Former Army Ranger and Green Beret says that the story of "radicalization in special operations is a story that needs to be told."

"It has shocked and horrified me to see what's happened to these guys in the last five or six years," he said.

Extremism in the military has been a closely watched phenomenon, especially after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But as NBC News points out, it's especially worrying to see such high levels of America's military being vulnerable to such corrosive ideologies.

According to former Green Beret Robert Wilson, members of these forums "are radicalizing themselves online, just like many of these lone-wolf ISIS terrorists did."

"It's a problem, and it's an internal threat to the United States," said Wilson, who was counterterrorism director on the National Security Council during the Obama and Trump administrations.

Read the full report over at NBC News.

QAnon Has Some Truly Unhinged Theories About Prince Philip’s Death

The Duke of Edinburgh died of natural causes, but QAnon believers are sharing the rumor that he died as a result of being vaccinated against COVID-19.

By David Gilbert

The bombshell news last weekend revealing the real identity of Q and the revelation that Matt Gaetz is reportedly being investigated for child sex trafficking barely registered a blip inside the QAnon conspiracy movement. But the death of a member of the British royal family from natural causes at the age of 99? Now that’s something to get excited about.

Within minutes of the announcement from Buckingham Palace that the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, had died peacefully in Windsor Castle on Friday morning, QAnon followers began flooding their online message boards and groups with thousands of messages.

Many of them were displaying glee and excitement over the prince’s death, and many more were crudely predicting that Queen Elizabeth would be next to die, following the death of her husband of 73 years.

But those posts were quickly replaced by a vast array of unhinged conspiracy theories about Prince Philip’s death, including the increasingly popular claim that he died as a result of recently being vaccinated against COVID-19.

Conspiracies like claims he had already died a long time ago, or that he had been executed, or that his death was a distraction for some other nefarious activity, or that he died of an “adrenochrome shortage” were all spread quickly on fringe websites like Gab, Telegram and the QAnon-focused message board the Great Awakening.

QAnon followers have long been fascinated by the Royal Family.

“The British Royal Family has of course long been a subject of interest to QAnon followers: on the one hand because they represent the elite—their sworn enemies—and on the other because of the types of actually credible accusations that have been made over the years against some members of the Royal Family, such as with Prince Andrew and his involvement with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein,” Nick Backovic, a researcher with Logically, a fact-checking group that tracks QAnon, told VICE News.


QAnon typically latches onto major world events to search for links to its own core conspiracy mythos, typically by finding links between real-world events and the messages posted by Q, the anonymous leader of the movement—just as it did last month when the Ever Given container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal.

Q has not posted a new message—or “Q Drops,” as they’re known—in over four months, so followers need to rely on the back catalog of almost 5,000 Q Drops that have been written since late 2017.

Typically what followers try to do is come up with proofs that feature “deltas” or anniversaries of older posts.

Which is exactly what Mel Q, an influential QAnon promoter, did in this post, which tries to link the Prince’s death to a Q drop written exactly a year ago:


This so-called “proof” attempts to link the Prince’s death to a Q Drop through the use of the term “scot free,” which Mel Q says is a reference to the Prince being called the Duke of Edinburgh, a city in Scotland.

Another “proof” being widely shared on Telegram attempts to link the death to Q through the term “bridge” which was a phrase often used in Q’s posts. The link this time is that the funeral plans for Prince Philip’s funeral were known as Operation Forth Bridge. The Queen’s funeral plans are known as Operation London Bridge.

Another Telegram user flagged that the Prince died on the 9th aged 99, and what number do you get when you turn 999 upside down? That’s right, 666.


But as tenuous as these “proofs” are, others in the QAnon world went much further, writing down the first thing that came into their head — and in the case of one poster on the QAnon-focused Great Awakening message board, it was this: “Adrenochrome supply got held up in Suez Canal and unfortunately Prince Pompous Philip permanently fainted.”

Adrenochrome is the chemical that QAnon followers believe a group of elites around the world are collecting from the blood of tortured children and that they subsequently drink to prolong their lives.

The Passion of the Christ’s Jesus Christ Thinks Celebrities Are Harvesting Children’s Adrenaline

OY AND IF HE AIN'T A CELEBRITY WHO IS
Jim Caviezel is a card-carrying member of QAnon

Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ

Alex Young

April 17, 2021

Who had Jesus from The Passion of the Christ becoming a card-carrying member of QAnon, subscribing to the batshit crazy conspiracy theory that celebrities are torturing and harvesting children for their adrenaline, on their 2021 Bingo card?

As TheWrap points out, actor Jim Caviezel, who portrayed the titular character in Mel Gibson’s 2004 biblical blockbuster, appeared alongside other QAnon luminaries like Michael Flynn, Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and My Pillow’s Mike Lindell at a COVID-19 “health and freedom” conference in Oklahoma on Friday night. When it was his turn to speak, Caviezel addressed “the adrenochroming of children.”

“Essentially, you have adrenaline in your body,” Caviezel began. “And when you are scared, you produce adrenaline. If you’re an athlete, you get in the fourth quarter, you have adrenaline that comes out of you. If a child knows he’s going to die, his body will secrete this adrenaline.”
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“It’s the worst horror I’ve ever seen,” Caviezel went on to claim, before hilariously admitting in the very next sentence that he had in fact never witnessed such a horror in person. “The screaming alone, even if I never, ever, ever saw it, it’s beyond — and these people that do it, umm, there will be no mercy for them.”

Caviezel also claimed that Tim Ballard, founder of the “anti-trafficking” organization Operation Underground Railroad, was unable to attend Friday’s conference because “he’s down there saving children as we speak.” Caviezel portrays Ballard in an obscure new film called Sound of Freedom, which Caviezel said “is on a level of Academy Award level.”

And here we thought Mel Gibson was the most problematic person in The Passion of the Christ cinematic universe.

NRA’s Ex-Top Finance Officer Questions Whether Gun Group Could Survive without Wayne LaPierre’s Fundraising

ADAM KLASFELD

LAW & CRIME

Apr 16th, 2021



The National Rifle Association’s former chief financial officer and treasurer previously told a bankruptcy court that he tried to reform an organization under the thrall of its CEO Wayne LaPierre, who allegedly instilled an institutional culture of subordinates justifying a disregard for internal control with the words “Wayne said.”

On Friday, that ex-CFO, Craig Spray, questioned whether the NRA would fold entirely without its current leader.

“Isn’t it fair to say that the NRA could survive without LaPierre at the helm?” Assistant New York Attorney General Yael Fuchs asked Spray.

“I think it would be very challenging,” Spray replied.

Responding to that testimony, a lawyer for the NRA’s longtime public relations firm Ackerman McQueen quizzed Spray about the late French army officer and statesman Charles de Gaulle’s line about “indispensable men.”

“The cemeteries are full of them,” lawyer Mike Gruber answered his own question, paraphrasing de Gaulle’s line in a meditation on change and the arc of history.


The man at the helm of the NRA for roughly three decades, LaPierre testified for two days last week about his alleged receipt of gifts that New York regulators claim represent undisclosed conflicts of interest. The NRA chief justified his decision to voyage on Hollywood producer Stanton McKenzie’s 108-foot yacht, the Illusions, after the Sandy Hook shooting for “security” reasons, but he also acknowledged taking regular trips to the Bahamas on that vessel for years, starting in 2013.

He offered the same rationale for flying exclusively by private charter jet, and he defended his receipt of nearly $300,000 in Italian suits from a Beverly Hills Zegna, which the group’s longtime public relations Ackerman McQueen bought him for television appearances.

For Spray, the flipside of that is that LaPierre has become a key part of the NRA’s fundraising power.

“Nobody can attract dollars the way that LaPierre can,” Spray remarked.

On Jan. 29th this year, LaPierre sent the NRA’s staff and board a letter claiming that Spray resigned “due to health concerns.”


Referring to Spray’s prior testimony undermining that narrative, Fuchs quoted him telling the court: “The day of your departure was ‘certainly not the date you would have chosen’?

“Correct,” Spray responded.

The exchange highlighted a running theme in the case New York regulators have been making for a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas: that LaPierre ran the organization by fiat, retaliated against dissidents, and ousted those who, like Spray, hoped to reform the organization.

Spray testified that his pushback as the NRA’s ex-top finance officer to the group’s usual way of doing business sparked ire, including his concerns about the group’s non-profit tax records known as form 990s for the year 2019. LaPierre ultimately signed the forms himself while Spray investigated his reservations.

New York regulators appeared skeptical that the NRA’s fundraising operations amounted to a one-man shop.

“It’s a pretty large and diverse operation,” Fuchs noted, describing mail campaigns and a staff of volunteers.

“It’s not overly complex, but there is some complexity to it,” Spray replied.

When it comes to the group’s big-ticket donors, Spray said, the NRA’s fundraising sophistication becomes much simpler.

“When they come to those meetings, they come to meet with Wayne,” Spray testified.

Earlier this week, Spray testified that the NRA’s decision to file for bankruptcy blindsided him and that he was not even aware that LaPierre had created a company Sea Girt, LLC to establish jurisdiction in Texas. The NRA’s general counsel John Frazier and board member Phillip Journey, a Wichita judge, offered similar testimony. The NRA described itself as being in good financial health when LaPierre surprised its top officials with the bankruptcy gambit, which New York regulators are trying to block as a “bad faith” effort to scuttle their lawsuit seeking to shut down the organization for allegedly violating charity law.

Listen to highlights of LaPierre’s testimony last week on the Law&Crime podcast, “Objections.”

DOJ Investigating Whether Former National Security Official and Trump Loyalist Disclosed Classified Information: Report

JERRY LAMBE

LAW & CRIME

Apr 17th, 2021

Kash Patel

The Department of Justice is investigating whether Kashyap “Kash” Patel, a former high-ranking national security official in the Trump administration, improperly disclosed classified information in attempt to reveal that former President Donald Trump was being targeted by the alleged “deep state” within the federal government, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The possible existence of the inquiry into the 41-year-old Patel was revealed by Post columnist David Ignatius, who said his report was based on “two knowledgeable sources who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe.”

“The sources said the investigation resulted from a complaint made this year by an intelligence agency, but wouldn’t provide additional details,” Ignatius wrote, adding that Patel “repeatedly pressed intelligence agencies to release secrets that, in his view, showed that the president was being persecuted unfairly by critics.”

Patel and an attorney said to be representing him did not respond to multiple requests to comment on the alleged investigation, per Ignatius.

A former counterterrorism prosecutor in the Justice Department’s National Security Division and senior congressional aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, Patel had a rather meteoric rise in Washington during the Trump era, proving himself to be one of the president’s most steadfast loyalists inside the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Patel was lionized by conservatives for authoring the infamous 2018 “Nunes Memo,” which alleged that the FBI intentionally misled a FISA court judge regarding the origins of the “Steele Dossier” in an effort to unlawfully surveil the Trump campaign and help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 presidential election.

The memo was roundly mocked by legal professionals and law enforcement officers. Even Trump’s hand-picked FBI director Christopher Wray issued a statement saying the bureau had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Some of the allegations regarding the FBI’s abuse of the FISA system were later proven true, but an exhaustive investigation by the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General concluded that the abuses were widespread throughout the Bureau and not motivated by any political bias.

Patel joined the Trump administration as a staffer for the National Security Council (NSC) in 2019 where he reportedly “misrepresented” himself to Trump in order to affect Ukraine policy by telling him the country was a hotbed of corruption — though Patel has denied those allegations.

In the closing months of the administration, Patel became the chief of staff to acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller. Soon thereafter, then-CIA Director Gina Haspel reportedly threatened to resign after Trump attempted to install Patel as her deputy in an effort to oust her from her role leading the agency.

In one of his final acts as a government official, Patel reportedly blocked the Biden transition team from having access to career officials and experts within the Department of Defense and changed policy descriptions “to include content that reflects favorably on Trump’s policies before the information [wa]s shared with the Biden transition team,” NBC News reported in December.

[image via YouTube/CBS News screengrab]

R.I.P. 

Felix Silla, Actor Who Played Cousin Itt on The Addams Family Dead at 84

Silla also had roles in Return of the Jedi and Spaceballs

Felix Silla as Cousin Itt in The Addams Family


Alex Young 

APRIL 16, 2021 |

Felix Silla, who famously portrayed Cousin Itt on the 1960s TV sitcom The Addams Family, died Friday (April 16th) at the age of 84 from pancreatic cancer.

Silla was never actually seen on The Addams Family during its two-season run between 1964 and 1966. Rather, the 3’11” actor wore a full-body hairpiece, sunglasses, and a bowler hat. He was also unintelligible to the audience, as his rapid gibberish could only be understood by The Addams Family members themselves.

Due to his small stature, Silla also landed roles in Return of the Jedi as an Ewok, in Spaceballs as a Dink, and in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as the robot Twiki. Silla also voiced Mortimer Got in The Sims 2 video game.

Prior to his career in acting, Silla was a trained circus performer who toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

2 Arrested Friday Night During March to Demand Justice for Adam Toledo

Published April 17, 2021 • 




Two people were arrested Friday night, police said, among the thousands who marched throughout Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood to demand justice for Adam Toledo, one day after the release of body camera video showing an officer fatally shooting the 13-year-old.

Authorities said Anthony McCollom, 20, was charges with misdemeanor Reckless Conduct at approximately 9:55 p.m. He was part of a large crowd observed pushing Chicago Police, according to officials.

At approximately 9:45 p.m., Graham Lefauve, 18, was on a bicycle and split into a vehicle of Chicago police, striking one of the officers, authorities said. The Cook County State's Attorney's office denied his charge of felony Aggravated Battery to a Police Officer for unknown reasons.

Earlier at a large rally at Logan Square Park, speakers called for the defunding and abolishment of the Chicago Police Department and pleaded with those in attendance to stay united in their fight against police.

"Why are we standing here today when that baby had his hands up, telling a cop not to shoot?" one speaker said. "...Why do they keep killing us then asking us to stay calm?"

As music filled the air, protesters chanted: "What we do want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! If we don't get it? Shut it down!"

Speakers also listed the names of others who were fatally shot by Chicago police officers, and called for justice in their cases.

"We got to feel this pain for every single person that is shot and killed by the police," one person said. "We must feel this pain."

A number of streets were closed and CTA buses were rerouted as a result of the marches late Friday.

Adam's death sparked calls for a release of body camera footage and other materials, and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, Chicago's police oversight agency, responded to those calls by releasing the information on Thursday.

Body camera footage shows Adam running from a Chicago police officer down a Little Village alley on March 29. Adam starts to turn toward the officer, and is in the process of putting his hands up when the officer fires his weapon once, striking the teen in the chest.

It did not appear in video that Adam was holding a weapon when he was shot. A weapon was discovered behind a fence shortly after he was shot, according to the footage released by COPA.

Following the video's release, a number of protesters expressed outrage in demonstrations across the city Thursday evening, with many calling for charges to be filed against the officer who shot and killed the teen.

ELON MUSK’S SPACEX HAS WON A $3 BILLION NASA CONTRACT TO PUT HUMANS ON THE MOON – BUT THE FULL MISSION WILL TAKE FAR MORE THAN THAT

Andrew Griffin@_andrew_griffin
14 hours ago

Nasa has chosen SpaceX to build the lander that will carry humans onto the Moon for the first time in decades.

Elon Musk’s rocket company has been chosen to build the human lander that will drop those astronauts onto the lunar surface. It will do so as part of the Artemis programme, which not only aims to put the first woman and person of colour on the Moon – but now the first commercial lander, too.

The contract is worth $2.89 billion to SpaceX, and Nasa noted that total price is fixed and dependent on reaching certain milestones.

But really the cost of the lander is just the start – or perhaps the end – of a programme that will cost far more, and involve vastly more complexity.

The newly-awarded contract is specifically for what SpaceX and Nasa refer to as the “human landing system”, or HLS, which does exactly as its name says.
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX wins contract to build Nasa moon landers

It will take the form of a SpaceX Starship – which is still in testing, and exploded in its last two most recent attempts – which will be specifically designed to land on the Moon. It will make use of the well-established SpaceX raptor engines and borrow on work done for the Falcon and Dragon vehicles that are already used today.

“Starship includes a spacious cabin and two airlocks for astronaut moonwalks,” Nasa said in ist announcement. “The Starship architecture is intended to evolve to a fully reusable launch and landing system designed for travel to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations.”

But to get close enough to drop onto the Moon, the astronauts will have to escape Earth first. They will do that using Nasa’s Space Launch System rocket, a vast vehicle with the power to propel astronauts away from Earth and towards the Moon, with costs nearing $19 billion already and which will cost billions for each launch

The actual journey to and from Moon will happen in another partnership with a private company: the Orion spacecraft, which is being built by Lockheed Martin and Airbus. Just like with the Apollo mission, that will stay hovering over the surface of the Moon as the lander carries astronauts down to the surface, before they climb back into it and journey back to Earth.

All of that will also work in tandem with the Lunar Gateway, Nasa’s plan to build a space station in the Moon’s orbit that will support the Moon missions – providing communications, storage and more for the trips to the surface

It is all of that taken together that makes up the Artemis programme. And it means that the cost – and time – quickly adds up to much more than the $2.9 billion spent on the lander.

The full cost is likely to be some $86 billion by 2025, according to a report from the Nasa Office of Inspector General published in February this year. Those costs accounts for everything involved in the project, including the lander as well as the launch system and other requirements.

(Nasa OIG)

All of that is supposed to take humans to the Moon by 2024, according to a target set by Mike Pence as vice president and still promoted by Nasa. But that target is looking unlikely: its own reports have suggested that it might miss its schedule, largely because of funding shortfalls.

While the total number sounds large, it is relatively small in comparison to the the costs to take humans to the Moon the first time: The Planetary Society estimates the cost of the total effort to get to the Moon was around $28 billion in actual spending, or roughly $280 billion accounting for inflation.

Supporters of the programme argue that those costs should not be seen as being lost in space: the money was spent down on Earth, funding research, engineering and work that moved through the economy in the US and beyond.

Nasa also notes that the benefits are present on Earth, too. The consequences of the Apollo missions can be seen in everything from supermarket foods to the end of a marathon: it brought digital flight controls, food safety protocols, space blankets and hearing aids.

It also argues that the same results will come from the Artemis programme. It will require the building of new technologies including research into ways to extract useful materials – water, oxygen and rocket fuel but also the sometimes valuable substances that make up the Moon itself – from the lunar surface.

“Technology created for Artemis will certainly find secondary applications on Earth,” the spac agency wrote in 2019. “And it will enable a new economy in space.

“Finally, the mission architecture itself — rocket and capsule, surface modules, spacecraft that will ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface, and all the technology that enables sustainable operations on the Moon — is a test bed for humanity’s next great leap – sending astronauts to Mars.”