Steve Bannon surrendered himself at the FBI Washington Field Office in Washington, D.C., on Monday morning.
The former aide to former President Donald Trump was indicted Friday by a federal grand jury for failing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He is charged on one count of refusing to present documents the committee request and another count related to his failure to appear for a deposition. The Justice Department said each count could carry a maximum of one year in jail.
Bannon, 67, said that he was live-streaming his surrender to the FBI on social media platform Gettr and encouraged people to follow his War Room show.
“I don’t want anyone taking their eye off the ball,” he said. “We’re taking down the Biden regime.”
🚨 Moments ago outside FBI Field Office in D.C., Stephen K. Bannon urges supporters to focus on "signal, not noise," and stay tuned into War Room: Pandemic, which goes live in minutes on https://t.co/MG9jTpnslD and on @RealAmVoice.
He will make an initial appearance in court this afternoon. He will be arraigned and enter a plea.
According to Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton, Bannon refused to even communicate with the committee, distinguishing himself from others in the committee’s cross-hairs. Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows communicated with the committee through a lawyer.
Like Bannon, Meadows has also refused to provide documents to the committee, citing executive privilege. Meadows failed to comply with the committee’s deadline on Friday to appear before the committee and provide documents.
Trump asserted executive privilege over communication with his staff during the lead-up to the Jan. 6 riots. The Biden administration waived claims of executive privilege in early October.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson has also dismissed assertions of executive privilege and demanded that the committee gets access to all relevant documents and testimony.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday that Bannon’s indictment on two counts of contempt of Congress demonstrates the Justice Department’s commitment to following the rule of law.
“Since my first day in office, I have promised Justice Department employees that together we would show the American people by word and deed that the department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law and pursues equal justice under the law,” Garland said in a statement. “Today’s charges reflect the department’s steadfast commitment to these principles.”
An appellate court blocks OSHA in a withering rebuke.
President Biden was warned that he lacked the power to mandate vaccines for private workers, but he ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to do it anyway. Late Friday came a sharp rebuke by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that marks an important check on the runaway administrative state.
“The Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote for the unanimous panel in a withering opinion that extends the court’s earlier stay on the OSHA mandate, which had been challenged by GOP states, numerous employers and individuals.
With his approval numbers sagging, Mr. Biden in early September ordered OSHA to require private employers with 100 or more workers to mandate that their employees be vaccinated or tested weekly. “Our patience is wearing thin,” he declared. The mandate at the time polled well among most Americans.
After the announcement, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle’s tweet that stated, “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” For “work-around,” read illegal.
***
The court’s opinion takes apart the OSHA mandate every which way—on constitutional, statutory and procedural grounds. The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the police powers to regulate individual behavior to protect public health and safety. The Administration tried to circumvent this limitation on federal power by conscripting private employers via an OSHA “emergency temporary standard.”
Under federal law, OSHA may bypass for six months the notice-and-comment required by the Administrative Procedure Act to respond to emergencies if it determines that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards” and that such a standard is “necessary to protect employees from such danger.”
As the appeals court explains, OSHA failed to satisfy either condition. OSHA couldn’t show exposure or even the presence of Covid at all covered workplaces. Its “attempt to shoehorn an airborne virus” widely present in society and not life-threatening to most workers “into a neighboring phrase connoting toxicity and poisonousness” is a “transparent stretch.”
The panel also lambastes the mandate as both over- and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees regardless of their risk of exposure and doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity. On the other hand, OSHA sets an arbitrary threshold of employers with 100 workers because they “will be better able to administer (and sustain) the Mandate.”
Even so, the “Mandate flunks a cost-benefit analysis,” the panel notes, because OSHA failed to show that the “protection afforded to workers” would “outweigh the economic consequences” such as unvaccinated workers getting fired or quitting.
As for the alleged emergency justification, some 80% of adults have received at least one vaccine dose. The virus has been spreading in the U.S. for at least 20 months, so it can hardly be defined as a “new hazard” under the law. “OSHA itself spent nearly two months” writing the rule, the panel notes, which suggests it doesn’t perceive a true emergency.
Beyond the statutory violation, the panel held the OSHA rule “likely exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause because it regulates noneconomic inactivity that falls squarely within the States’ police power. A person’s choice to remain unvaccinated and forgo regular testing is noneconomic inactivity.”
***
This judicial smackdown is so overwhelming that it’s fair to conclude the Administration gave only passing thought to the law. It acted for political reasons, but even that has proven to be a mistake. The White House panicked amid the Afghanistan fiasco and Delta variant breakout, but it missed how resistant millions of people are to government orders regarding their health.
The mandates have increased political polarization, and they are becoming less popular as people see that the vaccines, while effective, do not prevent infection as well as we might have hoped. They are still worth getting, but it ought to be a personal choice. Mr. Biden chose the progressive default of coercion.
This is typical of his Presidency, and it’s one reason he has sunk in the polls. The Administration says it plans to continue defending the mandate but it will almost certainly lose if a challenge makes it to the Supreme Court. The Covid scourge has given government a political excuse to exceed its legal powers, and it’s vital that the courts rein it in for liberty’s sake.
Climb in the haven asset accompanies other signs that investors are starting to seek more protection from rising consumer prices and interest rates.
A three-decade high in inflation has broken gold from its long 2021 rut, a sign investors are seeking greater protection from the prospect of lingering consumer-price increases.
Most-actively-traded gold futures just notched their best week in six months, rising 2.9% to $1,868.50 a troy ounce after data showed persistent supply shortages and strong consumer demand lifting prices at the fastest 12-month pace since 1990. That data spurred bets that inflation could linger longer than Federal Reserve officials expect, driving gains in assets including Treasury inflation-protected securities and gold.
The haven metal’s surge carried it to a five-month high, ending months of sideways trading, which some analysts had taken as a sign of Wall Street sanguinity about inflation. Investors prize gold for its history as a store of value, so its stability suggested they didn’t expect inflation to erode returns in other assets.
Prices remain down nearly 10% from their record highs above $2,050, hit in August 2020, when nervous investors worried the pandemic might upend their recovering stock portfolios. Still, last week’s gain marked a sign that investors fear inflationary pressures could linger longer than initially expected, some said.
“We’re really seeing investors say, ‘Well, this inflation could be a little more sticky, so we do need to add precious metals,’ ” said Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at TIAA Bank. He is recommending clients increase their gold allocations toward the upper end of his normal 5% to 10% range.
The gains have lifted gold mining stocks. U.S.-listed shares of Barrick Gold Corp. gained 5.9% last week, while Colorado-based Newmont Corp. rose 4.2%. The VanEck Gold Miners ETF finished the week 6.2% higher, ahead of the S&P 500’s 0.3% decline. Shares of miners tend to be more volatile than gold prices themselves.
The climb accompanies other recent signs of investors beginning to seek greater protection against rising consumer prices and interest-rate increases from the Federal Reserve. Investors’ demand for 30-year Treasury inflation-protected securities, which offer payments that adjust with consumer prices, pushed already-negative yields to record lows.
Falling inflation-adjusted returns on bonds have supported gold prices because the metal doesn’t offer fixed income simply for holding it and becomes more attractive when long-term government-bond yields retreat. Even after the inflation data sparked a climb last week, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note settled Friday at 1.583%. That’s still well below its 2021 high of 1.749% reached at the end of March and even its recent peak of 1.674% on Oct. 21.
Gold prices above $1,850 are likely to attract new investor money, putting $1,900 within reach, Citigroup analysts said in a note last week. UBS analysts raised their price target for the end of March to $1,800 from $1,700.
Some analysts worry a rebound in yields and a strengthening dollar could slow the gains. The WSJ Dollar Index, which measures the U.S. currency against 16 others, recently hit its highest levels since September 2020, making gold, which is denominated in dollars, more expensive for overseas buyers. A rebound in bond yields could further lift the dollar, and make bonds’ income more attractive for yield-seeking investors.
Some bitcoin fans contend the cryptocurrency will supplant gold as an inflation hedge, though many analysts question that assertion, pointing out that bitcoin has tended to perform well during market rallies and hasn’t been tested during any prolonged downturn or inflationary episode.
For now, some expect inflation fears to support gold prices.
“Despite both U.S. rates and the dollar rising of late, gold seems to have found its stride and is focusing on the troubling inflation picture instead,” wrote Ed Meir, a consultant focused on metals at brokerage ED&F Man Capital Markets, in a note.
Cloth masks are of little use against COVID-19, according to a recently published analysis.
Federal health authorities and a slew of jurisdictions require or recommend wearing masks as a way to limit spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.
But a trio of researchers pored over the studies often cited by the officials and found they were poorly designed and offered scant evidence supporting mask usage.
Many of the studies are observational, opening them up to confounding variables, the researchers said in their analysis (pdf), which was published on Nov. 8 by the Cato Institute.
Of 16 randomized controlled trials comparing mask effectiveness to controls with no masks, 14 failed to find a statistically significant benefit, the researchers said. And of 16 quantitative meta-analyses, half showed weak evidence of mask effectiveness while the others “were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks,” they added.
“The biggest takeaway is that more than 100 years of attempts to prove that masks are beneficial has produced a large volume of mostly low-quality evidence that has generally failed to demonstrate their value in most settings,” Dr. Jonathan Darrow, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Officials mulling mask recommendations should turn their attention to interventions with larger and more certain benefits, such as vaccines. Based on the evidence currently available, masks are mostly a distraction from the important work of promoting the public health,” he added.
One widely-cited study (pdf) by mask proponents, of rural villages in Bangladesh, found that surgical masks appeared to be marginally effective in reducing symptomatic COVID-19 but that cloth masks did not, Darrow and his colleagues noted. The other real-world randomized controlled trial examining mask effectiveness, conducted in Denmark, did not find a statistically significant difference in infections between the masked and unmasked groups.
“The remainder of the available clinical evidence is primarily limited to non-randomized observational data, which are subject to confounding,” the researchers said, including accounting for other differences in behavior among those who don’t wear masks.
They did say that there is evidence masks reduce droplet dispersion, though cloth masks are unlikely to capture the particles even if worn properly.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers cannot wait for higher-quality evidence to support masking, but from an ethical standpoint, they should “refrain from portraying the evidence as stronger than it actually is,” the researchers concluded.
Some outside experts’ views align with the researchers, including Dr. Martin Kulldorff, senior scientific director of the Brownstone Institute.
“The truth is that there has been only two randomized trials of masks for COVID. One was in Denmark, which showed that they might be slightly beneficial, they might be slightly harmful, we don’t really know—the confidence interval kind of crossed zero,” he said. “And then there was another study from Bangladesh where they randomized villagers to masks or no masks. And the efficacy of the masks was for reduction of COVID was something between zero and 18 percent. So either no effect or very minuscule effect.”
Some experts, though, say the existing evidence does support masking recommendations, and several reacted strongly to the new analysis.
The analysis drew some pushback, including from Kimberly Prather, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment.
Prather noted on Twitter that researchers said masks reduce the amount of virus in the air and believed that ran counter to their conclusions.
Darrow responded by saying the amount of virus in the air was a surrogate, not a clinical endpoint.
“The amount of pathogen in air (to be inhaled) directly determines the dose. This is directly linked to risk,” Prather added. “Or can you explain how less virus in the air could be higher risk? It’s equivalent to saying that less pathogen in drinking water is higher risk so don’t filter water.”
“If the theory diverges from what you see in real life, which one do you believe?” Darrow said.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn called for the United States to adopt more religious conformity Saturday, saying the country needs to have “one religion under God.”
The adviser to former President Donald Trump spoke at the ReAwaken America tour, which stopped in San Antonio, Texas, from Nov. 11-13. During his time onstage, Flynn said religion is the foundation of the U.S. and that the country should have one faith.
“If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
Michael Flynn tonight: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.” pic.twitter.com/ShGVrsQ9hW
Flynn claimed the U.S. was described in the Bible as “the city on the hill” in the book of Matthew. He claimed Matthew was not talking about the ground he was currently on and was instead talking about a place in the distance.
Flynn’s comments raised controversy on social media, with some agreeing with him and others accusing him of supporting a “MAGA cult.”
Michael Flynn and the hard right MAGA cult want a theocracy in this country for a white Christian minority. Just replace everything they say about Jesus with Muhammad and Christianity with Islam and how would the GOP respond? They're telling your their vision and their plan.
I’m Catholic and do we really want government to force everyone to go to confession? I got baptized in college and those Church courses were soooo long. Michael Flynn would fall asleep in Church class.
Flynn was issued a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee on Nov. 8 for being “involved in efforts to promote false claims of election fraud or overturn the results of the 2020 election.”
Flynn said on Nov. 12 he would respond to the requests, saying he does not “have anything to hide.”
A longtime confidant to President Joe Biden has raised skepticism on whether the president would run in 2024.
Former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who helped Biden pick his running mate last year, mentioned to The New York Times on Friday that Biden may not run for reelection in 2024.
“I’m hoping the president runs for reelection,” Dodd stated, “but for whatever reason that might not be the case, it’s hard to believe there would be a short list without Kamala’s name on it. She’s the vice president of the United States.”
Times reporter Maggie Haberman expressed shock at Dodd’s statement.
“Dodd quote in here is pretty stunning to hear,” she tweeted, referring to the article. “Usually this kind of thing isn’t said out loud.”
But still, back in March, the Washington Examiner reported that Biden had stated he plans to run for reelection in 2024.
Biden, 78, when asked during his first press conference since taking office on if he would run again, replied, “Yes, my plan is to run for reelection. That’s my expectation.”
Vice President Kamala Harris feels increasingly isolated inside the White House as her approval ratings plummet — with the first female veep believing she’s not getting the same support given to other members of the Biden administration, according to a detailed new report.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a white man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” a former Harris aide told CNN, which based its report on interviews with nearly three dozen insiders.
The ex-staffer was referring to the Biden administration springing to defend Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for taking paternity leave amid the global supply chain crisis. Buttigieg is considered a potential challenger to Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination either in 2024 or 2028.
Despite their public show of unity, Biden and his right-hand woman have a dysfunctional relationship that has reached an “exhausted stalemate,” according the network.
At a time when the president would usually be expected to promote his vice president as a future replacement, Biden has instead been sidelining Harris as a potential liability, the report said.
For their part, Harris’ allies are reportedly frustrated with the president for dumping politically fraught issues in her lap — including, infamously, the ongoing illegal immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border. “They’re consistently sending her out there on losing issues in the wrong situations for her skill set,” summed up one former top Harris aide to CNN.
Other aides say the vice president should have asked for better-defined responsibilities at the start of the administration, but has not done so out of fear of appearing disloyal to the president.
In March, Biden announced that Harris would lead the administration’s talks with Mexico and Central American countries about slowing the tide of migrants crossing the US border.
However, with the exception of a rocky visit to Mexico and Guatemala in early June and a brief trip to El Paso at the end of that month, Harris has largely avoided the issue in public. Last month — while Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas met with their Mexican counterparts about the issue — Harris was in New Jersey to promote Biden’s multitrillion-dollar social spending bill.
Insiders told CNN the West Wing has been especially bothered by Harris’ handling of the border issue. The veep’s trip to Mexico and Guatemala was overshadowed by a disastrous interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, in which Harris responded to Holt by noting that she hadn’t yet been to the frontier region by chuckling and joking: “And I haven’t been to Europe.”
Immigration advocates have also expressed disappointment with Harris. Fernando García, executive director of Border Network for Human Rights, told CNN that he was optimistic Harris would take action, but she instead just “disappeared.”
“We haven’t heard any substantive messaging push for better immigration policies,” he told CNN. “We haven’t seen her leadership.”
CNN reported that those close to Harris are miffed at the White House for, in their view, failing to mount a stronger defense of the vice president over the Holt interview. However, Biden aides were similarly silent when Harris inflicted her own political wounds by sending a tweet the Saturday before Memorial Day telling Americans to “[e]njoy the long weekend” while making no mention of honoring the country’s war dead — as well as when she told a college student who claimed Israel was committing “ethnic genocide” that “your truth should not be suppressed.”
The outlet also reported that Harris did not attend most of the meetings Biden held with members of Congress as he attempted to secure passage of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. At one point on Nov. 5, with the White House attempting to lock down crucial votes, Harris visited a NASA facility in suburban Maryland.
Eleni Kounalakis, the lieutenant governor of California and a longtime friend of Harris, confirmed there is irritation.
“It is natural that those of us who know her know how much more helpful she can be than she is currently being asked to be,” she told CNN. “That’s where the frustration is coming from.”
The CNN report is not the first time Harris has been the focus of DC whispers. At the end of June, Politico reported that her office was “chaotic” with a “tense and at times dour” atmosphere.“
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” one source told the outlet at the time. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”
That report suggested that efforts by Harris’ chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, to shield the VP from criticism had instead led to Flournoy dismissing or ignoring staff ideas, refusing to delegate responsibility, unnecessarily prolonging decisions, and shifting the blame for negative outcomes.
On Sunday, Flournoy denied being one of those taking sides against her boss.
“If someone is accusing me of being loyal to Joe Biden, I’ll take that. If someone is accusing me of being disloyal to Kamala Harris, I won’t take that,” Flournoy told CNN. “She doesn’t believe there is a conflict between being loyal to her and being loyal to Joe Biden.”
Harris’ spokeswoman Symone Sanders also dismissed insiders’ griping.
“It is unfortunate that after a productive trip to France in which we reaffirmed our relationship with America’s oldest ally and demonstrated US leadership on the world stage, and following passage of a historic, bipartisan infrastructure bill that will create jobs and strengthen our communities, some in the media are focused on gossip — not on the results that the president and the vice president have delivered,” Sanders said.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki joined the defense of Harris Sunday night, tweeting: “For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country—from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband.”
The revelations emerged days after a USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed Biden with an approval rating of 37.8 percent, a new low for the president. However, Harris’ approval rating was 10 points lower, at 27.8 percent.
An Illegal Vaccine Mandate
An appellate court blocks OSHA in a withering rebuke.
President Biden was warned that he lacked the power to mandate vaccines for private workers, but he ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to do it anyway. Late Friday came a sharp rebuke by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that marks an important check on the runaway administrative state.
“The Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote for the unanimous panel in a withering opinion that extends the court’s earlier stay on the OSHA mandate, which had been challenged by GOP states, numerous employers and individuals.
With his approval numbers sagging, Mr. Biden in early September ordered OSHA to require private employers with 100 or more workers to mandate that their employees be vaccinated or tested weekly. “Our patience is wearing thin,” he declared. The mandate at the time polled well among most Americans.
After the announcement, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle’s tweet that stated, “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” For “work-around,” read illegal.
***
The court’s opinion takes apart the OSHA mandate every which way—on constitutional, statutory and procedural grounds. The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the police powers to regulate individual behavior to protect public health and safety. The Administration tried to circumvent this limitation on federal power by conscripting private employers via an OSHA “emergency temporary standard.”
Under federal law, OSHA may bypass for six months the notice-and-comment required by the Administrative Procedure Act to respond to emergencies if it determines that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards” and that such a standard is “necessary to protect employees from such danger.”
As the appeals court explains, OSHA failed to satisfy either condition. OSHA couldn’t show exposure or even the presence of Covid at all covered workplaces. Its “attempt to shoehorn an airborne virus” widely present in society and not life-threatening to most workers “into a neighboring phrase connoting toxicity and poisonousness” is a “transparent stretch.”
The panel also lambastes the mandate as both over- and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees regardless of their risk of exposure and doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity. On the other hand, OSHA sets an arbitrary threshold of employers with 100 workers because they “will be better able to administer (and sustain) the Mandate.”
Even so, the “Mandate flunks a cost-benefit analysis,” the panel notes, because OSHA failed to show that the “protection afforded to workers” would “outweigh the economic consequences” such as unvaccinated workers getting fired or quitting.
As for the alleged emergency justification, some 80% of adults have received at least one vaccine dose. The virus has been spreading in the U.S. for at least 20 months, so it can hardly be defined as a “new hazard” under the law. “OSHA itself spent nearly two months” writing the rule, the panel notes, which suggests it doesn’t perceive a true emergency.
Beyond the statutory violation, the panel held the OSHA rule “likely exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause because it regulates noneconomic inactivity that falls squarely within the States’ police power. A person’s choice to remain unvaccinated and forgo regular testing is noneconomic inactivity.”
***
This judicial smackdown is so overwhelming that it’s fair to conclude the Administration gave only passing thought to the law. It acted for political reasons, but even that has proven to be a mistake. The White House panicked amid the Afghanistan fiasco and Delta variant breakout, but it missed how resistant millions of people are to government orders regarding their health.
The mandates have increased political polarization, and they are becoming less popular as people see that the vaccines, while effective, do not prevent infection as well as we might have hoped. They are still worth getting, but it ought to be a personal choice. Mr. Biden chose the progressive default of coercion.
This is typical of his Presidency, and it’s one reason he has sunk in the polls. The Administration says it plans to continue defending the mandate but it will almost certainly lose if a challenge makes it to the Supreme Court. The Covid scourge has given government a political excuse to exceed its legal powers, and it’s vital that the courts rein it in for liberty’s sake.