Category: Corruption O’ The Day

Observation O’ The Day
The law — and the DOJ — only protects people the Administration likes.
That’s been made quite clear.

DOJ Official Admits Targeting Pro-Lifers Is Response to Overturn of Roe.

The Justice Department has been targeting pro-life activists through the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act as a response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, according to Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

Gupta delivered remarks at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division’s 65th Anniversary earlier this month. The associate attorney general described the overturn of Roe v. Wade as a “devastating blow to women throughout the country” that took away “the constitutional right to abortion” and increased “the urgency” of the DOJ’s work—including the “enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”

She did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division enforces the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which “prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services.”

It protects both pro-life pregnancy centers and abortion clinics, as a DOJ official noted to Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, last week.

At least 98 Catholic churches and 77 pregnancy resource centers and other pro-life organizations have been attacked since May, but the DOJ has apparently not charged a single person in connection with these attacks. Meanwhile, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has charged 26 pro-life individuals with FACE Act violations this year.

The DOJ has not responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment on this point.

Pregnancy resource centers are typically run by pro-life women who seek to offer expectant mothers alternatives to abortion. Such centers provide diapers, baby clothes, and resources for both mothers and fathers, empowering them to care for their child, overcome addictions, build community, and find jobs.

Twitter Files Expose Dangerous Deep State-Big Tech Revolving Door

It’s not just the Forrest Gump of Russiagate — ex-FBI General Counsel James Baker — who is core to the conspiracy to crush the First Amendment

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This weekend I was pleased to appear in print in the New York Post to discuss the cozy and corrupting ties between the U.S. government — particularly the security state — and Big Tech revealed in the Twitter Files.

I connect the dots in the Post — dots that I believe collectively depict a key piece of the overall War on Wrongthink picture: A Ruling Class conspiracy to crush the First Amendment in pursuit of total ideological and therefore cultural and political power.

Read the whole thing here.

The Twitter Files were also one subject of our latest “NatCon Squad,” which you can check out below or wherever you get your podcasts.

BLUF
By every measure – economic, national security, militarily, culturally and electoral integrity – the Biden administration has been a disaster of incalculable proportions.   All of this has occurred in just two years.  Ben Franklin was right when he noted that the Founders created “a republic, if you can keep it,” and Reagan’s warning that  “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”  

One of the most important things Trump accomplished was that the left, so deranged by hatred of the man, revealed who they really are: Ideological totalitarians who actually embrace communism of the Chinese variety.

They have to be stopped.

The terrible, horrible, no-good consequences of stolen elections and government corruption

Elon Musk was true to his word, as far as we know, with regard to his promise to release Twitter documents, first by Matt Taibbi and then by Bari Weiss.

Thus far, he has exposed that social media site’s calculated censorship of any and all information that might silence conservative voices, including President Trump’s, as well as information that reflects badly on the Biden family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, lockdowns, and vaccines.

He has done exactly that, probably not to the fullest extent, but he’s released enough to prove how much Twitter, the mainstream media, and all the other social media sites interfered with the 2020 election.

Their interference amounts to both fraud and treason.  The Democrats engineered the Biden victory and subsequently bragged about it.

Twitter’s big part of the game has finally been revealed for all to see.  Twitter, on their own or often due to orders from the Biden White House and/or the FBI, de-platformed anyone who posted anything remotely critical of the Biden regime and/or its horrific policies, especially those related to COVID lockdowns and vaccines.

The left cheats; they can’t win if they don’t cheat, so they regularly cheat.  Nothing makes that clearer than the 2022 midterm elections in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Polls show that about sixty percent of the American people believe the 2020 election was stolen; those people are not all Republicans.

Chances are that in their heart of hearts, ninety percent of Americans know it was stolen.

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The next installment of the Twitter Files

Matt Taibbi
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th

2. The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th… 

3. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies. 

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Cue the shocked meme…..

BREAKING: New Twitter Files Dump Exposes Blacklists, Secret Cabal Censoring High-Profile Conservatives.

Independent journalist Bari Weiss took to Twitter on Thursday night to unload a second trove of internal memos and documents exposing how Twitter officials silenced the voices of prominent conservatives on the platform. Radio host Dan Bongino, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, and activist Charlie Kirk were among those Twitter censored or blacklisted, along with the popular “Libs of TikTok” account.

“A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss, a former New York Times reporter, wrote. “The authors [of the Twitter Files] have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.”

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We Now Have the Full Transcript of Fauci’s Deposition in Social-Media Collusion Case

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry deposed Anthony Fauci last month in the states’ case accusing the Biden administration of “colluding with social media companies to censor speech” related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, they released the full transcript of that interview (you can read the entire document below).“Today, Louisiana and Missouri are releasing the full transcript for the deposition of Dr. Anthony Fauci, which was taken on November 23rd, 2022. The deposition was taken as part of Louisiana and Missouri’s landmark lawsuit against the federal government and the Biden Administration for colluding with social media companies to censor speech,” said Landry in a press release. “Fauci’s recent deposition only confirmed what we already knew: federal bureaucrats in collusion with social media companies want to control not only what you think, but especially what you say. During no time in human history was this more obvious than during the COVID-19 crisis where social engineering tactics were used against the American public, not to limit your exposure to a virus, but to limit your exposure to information that did not fit within a government sanctioned narrative.”“Missouri and Louisiana are leading the way in exposing how the federal government and the Biden Administration worked with social media to censor speech. In our deposition with Dr. Fauci, it became clear that when Dr. Fauci speaks, social media censors,” added Schmitt in his own press release. “I invite everyone to read the deposition transcript and see exactly how Dr. Fauci operates, and exactly how the COVID tyranny that ruined lives and destroyed businesses was born.”

In a Twitter thread, Schmitt noted that know-nothing Fauci blurted out, “I don’t recall,” 174 times during the deposition, “including when asked about emails that he sent, interviews that he gave, and other important information.”

Fauci did, however, “vaguely recall” telling former HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell in early 2020 not to wear a mask when traveling. “Just a couple months later, he was advocating for universal mask mandates,” Schmitt noted.

Also from Schmitt: “One of Fauci’s deputies joined a WHO delegation to China in February of 2020, and in talking to Fauci afterwards, was impressed with how the Chinese ‘were handling the isolation, the contact tracing, the building of facilities to take care of people.’”

Indeed, Fauci admitted that this American official told him the U.S. “may have to go to as extreme a degree of social distancing to help bring our outbreak under control.” But then Fauci clammed up and said he “didn’t recall” the individual discussing this with him when he returned home.”

This is a breaking story. We’ll have more details to report in an upcoming article. 

Full Redacted Fauci Transcript by PJ Media on Scribd

Twitter and the FBI on a Collision Course After Sworn Document Shows Conflicting Narratives

The pipeline of revelations surrounding Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden story keeps pumping out new material.

As RedState has reported extensively (click here and here for a taste of what’s transpired), Elon Musk delivered on a promise to release a trove of documents related to the decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story just prior to the 2020 election. Revelations include the fact that the Biden campaign had a direct through-line to get content removed, as well as the fact that Twitter lied about the “hacked material” excuse that was used to justify their actions.

But as I’ve written on before, Twitter is just one piece of the puzzle, and in some ways, the company was more a willing lackey than a mastermind of the plot. That distinction goes to the FBI, which was having weekly meetings with Twitter’s leadership to discuss what content to remove from the site. Further, it was the FBI that first planted the idea that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian hacking operation meant to spread “disinformation.”

How do we know that? Because of this unearthed FEC disclosure signed by none other than Yoel Roth, who recently left as Twitter’s head of “Trust and Safety.”

According to the old Twitter regime, they were simply responding to what the FBI told them, which was that the laptop had been hacked and leaked as a way to spread disinformation about Joe Biden. Meanwhile, the FBI has claimed in the past that they never gave such detailed descriptions to any social media company, but rather relied on general threat warnings of possible foreign interference. Yet, Roth says they specifically mentioned Hunter Biden, which would leave the laptop story unambiguously the subject at hand.

So who’s lying here? The safest bet is to assume both entities are lying. Clearly, given the document dump that happened on Friday evening, Twitter was far more involved in censoring the story than just listening to the advice of the FBI. Democrat elected officials were colluding with the company to decide what should be taken down.

On the other hand, the FBI obviously lied when it told Twitter (and other social media companies) that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a “hack and leak operation.” There was never any evidence that the laptop was hacked, and the FBI had been in possession of it for over a year at that point. Further, they gained possession of it from the computer repair store where the laptop was left. That means the FBI knew its provenance the moment The New York Post broke the story, but agents (no doubt backed by leadership) chose to falsely claim it was a foreign hacking operation anyway.

In the end, Twitter and the FBI did what they thought they needed to do to ensure Donald Trump wouldn’t be re-elected. There are no good guys or innocent bystanders here. The FBI lied, but Twitter wanted to believe what it was being told, and it pushed well past the boundaries of its stated TOS to ban the Post and block the Hunter Biden laptop story.

 

Matt Taibbi

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter. 
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer. 
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time. 
5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” 
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly. 
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”Image

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Portland’s Antifa ‘Justice’ Strikes Again

A Portland “anti-fascist” activist has been found not guilty of being a fascist by roughing up a journalist and stealing his phone because he didn’t like what the reporter said about his Antifa friends. After the Portland judge let off the notorious Portland Antifa attacker, he delivered a lecture to the victim, reporter Andy Ngo.

There’s your justice, Portland.

Ngo sought justice in court for three-and-a-half years against John Hacker, one of a mob of activists that has made a point to follow, chase, hassle, and attack Ngo multiple times.

 

The Post Millennial reported that Hacker confronted Ngo in a Portland area 24 Hour Fitness where he assaulted the reporter, poured water on him, and stole his phone. Ngo captured part of John Hacker’s attack on video.

“The shaky video is less than 30 seconds long, but prosecutors say it’s a key piece of evidence showing Hacker approaching Ngo, grabbing the device, and yelling, “I will break your f*cking phone,” the news website reported.

The Deputy District Attorney argued before the judge that Hacker had conducted a “harassment campaign targeting Ngo for years.”

Indeed, Hacker was part of a mob that chased Ngo in downtown Portland, forcing the journalist to seek a hiding place at a posh hotel.

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The FBI will not be forgiven after Tuesday.

The House Republicans’ bruising report is a statement of intent

It is said that towards the end his life as he sank into dementia, Maurice Ravel was tormented by the theme from Bolero playing over and over in his head. I would not be surprised to hear that Christopher Wray, head of America’s Staatspolizei (also known as the FBI) is suffering from a similar torment as the theme from the movie Jaws plays over and over in his noggin.

In fact, I suspect that John Williams’s minatory masterpiece is playing at Democratic redoubts all across the country. Merrick Garland hears it, as do Raphael Warnock, Tim Ryan, Mark Kelly, Catherine Cortez Masto, Katie Hobbs and Gretchen Whitmer. I decline to speculate about the music bouncing around in John Fetterman’s head, but I know it is loud and distressing. As one commentator noted, Tuesday’s red wave in the midterm elections is going to be like the red elevator scene in The Shining. I had to look that one up but, yep, it seems like an appropriate metaphor for what is about to happen.

Some hapless scribe called Emily Oster recently wrote an article for the Atlantic called “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” That’s not bloody likely, Emily. The fallen angel Anthony Fauci and power-hungry apparatchiks throughout the land destroyed businesses, ruined nearly two years of education and socialization for children, made it impossible to visit your dying grandmother, go to the beach or to church or celebrate your favorite nephew’s birthday. Meanwhile, they forced millions to wear pointless masks and undergo experimental vaccinations whose safety, it now emerges, is highly questionable. The spectacle of the coercive power of the state being wielded against ordinary citizens going about their lives was frightening and outrageous.

“Amnesty” comes from the Greek word ἀμνηστία, whose primary meaning is “forgetfulness.” In common parlance, the word carries a suggestion of forgiveness as well. But neither forgetfulness nor forgiveness is on the docket. People are not about to forget what the politicians and their bureaucrats just did to them. And if they do not forget, neither will they forgive.

Nor are they going to forget what the FBI has done and is doing to us. The dawn raids against non-violent political rivals of the regime and pro-life activists, the nationwide dragnets to nab people who protested against the 2020 election, the spying on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, manufacture of forged evidence in order to mobilize the awesome surveillance apparatus of the state against American citizens and undermine Trump’s presidency. The bill of indictment is long and damning. How long? More than a thousand pages in its first iteration, which GOP members of House Judiciary Committee dropped on Friday under the title “FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the Politicization of the FBI and Justice Department.”

What they indicate is an agency that has gone rogue and should be dismantled. This has been a theme sounding for more than a years now. Roger L. Simon, writing for the Epoch Times, said that the FBI, like ancient Carthage, must be destroyed. Holman Jenkins, writing for the Wall Street Journal, said that the agency had to be abolished. I’ve argued the same case several times, here, for example, and here. In my column for the December Speccie, I suggest that FBI be relocated to Kansas City and have its budget cut by 75 percent. “Then,” I write, “it should be taken apart altogether,” not least because “a national police is probably unconstitutional certainly un-American”

With few exceptions, the consensus is that the Bureau is beyond reformation or reclamation. Friday’s lengthy J’Accuse underscores the moral bankruptcy and corruption of the FBI.

Its opening statement provides a bracing summary:

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‘Politicized bureaucracy’ has FBI ‘rotted at its core,’ GOP charges in shocking report.

The FBI is “rotted at its core,” has a “systemic culture of unaccountability” and is full of “rampant corruption, manipulation and abuse,” according to whistleblowers cited in a damning report released Friday by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.

The report, which runs 1,050 pages with appendices, amounts to a preview of coming investigations should Republicans win back the House in the Nov. 8 midterm elections.

“America’s not America if you have a Justice Department that treats people differently under the law,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News Friday morning. “It’s supposed to be equal treatment under the law. That’s not happening and we know it’s not happening because 14 brave FBI agents came to us as whistleblowers and told us what exactly is going on here.”

In the document, GOP lawmakers accuse the bureau’s top brass of pursuing a “woke, leftist agenda” by artificially inflating the number of domestic extremism investigations, burying the investigation into first son Hunter Biden, and forcing out conservative employees.

“Quite simply, the problem — the rot within the FBI — festers in and proceeds from Washington,” the report’s introduction read. “[T]he FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”

 

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BLUF
Democrats,  Demoncraps, who have spent years delegitimizing the Supreme Court and rule of law, undermining legislative norms, cheering on unprecedented and blatant executive abuses, and using the DOJ to target their political enemies, among other “democracy”-destroying behaviors, do not occupy any high moral ground. And while “democracy” was once just a transparently silly euphemism for “stuff we want,” it has since evolved into a rhetorical device that denotes a decisively illiberal mindset.

DEMOCRATS Demoncraps: The Only Way To Save Democracy Is One-Party Rule.
‘Save Our Democracy’ is the new ‘Russia Collusion.’

At this point, it would save everyone time if Democrats could simply point to a policy agenda item that isn’t going to save democracy — if such a thing exists.

If Republicans vote, they are killing democracy. If they don’t vote, they are killing democracy. The only way to “save democracy,” writes The Washington Post’s Max Boot, is to empower one-party rule — a position that probably sounds counterintuitive to anyone with a middle-school education. “Now you need to vote to literally save democracy again,” contends President Joe Biden, or we will lose our “fundamental rights and freedoms like the right to choose, the right to privacy, the right to vote — our very democracy.”

Chilling stuff. But it doesn’t end there. You will remember that by failing to “reform” the filibuster, which would entail authorizing the thinnest of fleeting majorities to shove through massive generational “reforms” without any national consensus or debate, we are also killing democracy. This has been the position not only of left-wing pundits and the New York Times editorial board, but also senators tasked with defending their institution. I wonder if they will support this democracy-saving fix next session, as well?

Then again, if we don’t nationalize the economy to avert a climate crisis, we are also killing democracy. “We’ve got to save democracy in order to save our species,” Jamie Raskin explains. And if we don’t empty the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to temporarily keep gas prices low to help Democrats win in 2022, we are killing democracy. “We find ourselves in a situation, where keeping gas prices low is key to preserving and strengthening the future of our democracy,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes says.

We must allow the president to unilaterally create trillion-dollar spending bills and break existing private sector contracts by fiat. For democracy. We must pack the court to “save democracy.” We must create a Ministry of Truth to help with “strengthening democratic institutions.” We must vote for a Pennsylvania candidate who can’t cobble two consecutive coherent sentences together because the “fate of our democracy” is at stake, says our former president.

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Former FBI Official Will Testify About White House Pressure to Inflate Domestic Extremism Numbers

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee announced on Thursday that they would be calling a former top FBI official to testify before Congress to address claims that the Biden administration pressured agents to label cases as domestic extremism or a white supremacist threat even if they did not meet that criteria in order to match Joe Biden’s rhetoric.

Last month, current and former FBI agents came forward claiming the Biden administration has been deliberately exaggerating the danger posed by white supremacists. According to the whistleblowers, high-ranking FBI officials were pressuring field agents to fabricate domestic terrorism cases and label people as white supremacists in order to “meet internal metrics.”

“The demand for white supremacy” coming from FBI brass “vastly outstrips the supply of white supremacy,” one agent told the Washington Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate white supremacists than we can actually find.”

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” one whistleblower said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

On December 2, members of the House Judiciary Committee will interview Jill Sanborn, a former assistant director of the FBI Counterterrorism Division and executive assistant director of its National Security Branch, who has been accused of pressuring agents to reclassify cases per the White House’s requests.

The FBI claims it only investigates those “who commit or intend to commit violence and criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security” and that it does not target individuals or organizations based on their political beliefs.

Last year, the administration previously came under fire for using the resources of the Department of Justice to target angry parents at school board meetings and treat them like domestic terrorists. Merrick Garland authorized the FBI to investigate parents who protested school board meetings alleging a “disturbing trend” of teachers being threatened or harassed. However, PJ Media’s Megan Fox looked into those allegations and concluded that they’re mostly bunk.

In addition, the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which had prompted Garland to write the memo with a letter likening parents to domestic terrorists, eventually apologized for doing so. Despite this, Garland has not rescinded the memo. Late last year, a whistleblower revealed an internal email showing that the FBI was using counterterrorism tools to monitor parents despite Garland denying before Congress that the FBI was doing so. This summer, whistleblowers revealed that the FBI “pressured and incentivized” agents to classify cases as domestic violent extremism.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: BEYOND DEMOCRATIC DESPOTISM

John Adams Wettergreen (d. 1989), writing in 1988 with a startling prescience of our present time:

In 1970 I believed that Tocqueville’s soft despotism was the aim of the bureaucratizers. However today we cannot be so optimistic as was possible in 1970. Today’s bureaucratizers are not soft despots at all. The political use of criminal law, such as began during the Watergate scandals and has begun to be regularized during the Reagan administration, is characteristic of tyranny-not Tocqueville’s ‘new,’ ‘soft’ one, but a harsh one. . . To the carrot-spending unlimited by law-the legislature has now added the stick-the penalties of the criminal law.

What Wettergreen perceived in the shadows more than 30 years ago is now evident to most everyone with eyes to see.

FBI Whistleblower Steve Friend, A Messenger Worthy Of The Message

The FBI is a threat to our civil liberties, at least with the current crop of HQ executives at the helm. Coupled with a Department of Justice, led by a Democrat party apparatchik, there has hardly been a time when the liberties enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution have endured such a subversive attack.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is a coward. You can see it in his soft, watery eyes. He simply does the bidding of his addled master, targeting the little guy — the most at-risk among us. Garland stands with his baton extended toward school board moms and January 6th attendees while a legion of his DOJ and FBI storm troops usher from the darkened denizens of the Hoover Building, backed by his cadre of Assistant U.S. Attorneys General.

What many people do not understand is the FBI and DOJ work hand-in-glove. The FBI collects information and builds a case, while DOJ brings prosecution. Consequently, the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, is lorded over by the U.S. Attorney General, his immediate boss. A courageous FBI Director would balk at Garland’s fascism, but Director Wray has made no attempt to protest.

So, there is no calumny perpetrated by the FBI that does not have its inception within the halls of DOJ, and there is no DOJ cabal that isn’t given birth within the Oval Office. Every executive power devolves from the Chief Executive, the President. Or, from whoever is filling the role of puppeteer these days. As President Truman said, “the buck stops here.”

Under such a dysfunctional regime, the responsibility to speak out devolves to those courageous souls with fractional power and with everything to lose. Several FBI whistleblowers have made their voices heard in recent weeks, but none as thoughtfully or as professionally as Special Agent Steve Friend — a messenger worthy of the message.

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Six Takeaways From WSJ’s Investigation Into the Stock Trades of Government Officials.

A Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that thousands of officials across the U.S. government’s executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made.
Across 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations. When the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules.
The Office of Government Ethics, which oversees the conflict-of-interest rules across the executive branch, is “committed to transparency and citizen oversight of government,” said a spokeswoman.
Among the findings of the investigation, which is the most comprehensive analysis of stock trading by officials in the executive branch of the government:
Numerous federal officials owned shares of companies lobbying their agencies:
More than 200 senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency. EPA employees and their family members collectively owned between $400,000 and nearly $2 million in shares of oil and gas companies on average each year between 2016 and 2021.
Issues emerged at a wide array of agencies:
At the Defense Department, officials in the office of the secretary or their family members collectively owned between $1.2 million and $3.4 million of stock in aerospace and defense companies, on average, during years the Journal examined. Some owned stock in Chinese companies while the U.S. considered blacklisting the companies.
An EPA official reported purchases of oil and gas stocks. The Food and Drug Administration improperly let an official own dozens of food and drug stocks on its no-buy list. A Defense Department official bought stock in a defense company five times before it won new business from the Pentagon.
Some officials traded ahead of regulatory actions:
More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.
Federal officials are big technology investors:
While the government was ramping up scrutiny of large technology companies, more than 1,800 federal officials reported owning or trading at least one of four major tech stocks: Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc. and

Amazon.com Inc.

Some officials made large and risky trades:
About 70 federal officials or their family members reported using sophisticated techniques such as options trading and short selling, with some individual trades of between $5 million and $25 million. In all, the disclosure forms revealed more than 90,000 stock trades during the six-year period reviewed.
The husband of a Commodity Futures Trading Commission economist in a single year shorted nearly 3,000 stocks, betting on a drop in their price. Such trading is contrary to CFTC rules, but the agency waived them, fearing it could be sued.
The scope of the investigation was extensive:
The Journal obtained and analyzed more than 31,000 financial-disclosure forms for about 12,000 senior career employees, political staff and presidential appointees. The review spans 2016 through 2021 and includes data on about 850,000 financial assets and more than 315,000 trades reported in stocks, bonds and funds by the officials, their spouses or dependent children.
The federal government doesn’t maintain a comprehensive public database of the mandatory financial disclosures of all senior executive-branch officials. The Journal built its own.