https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjJaBEKOv70
Judge faces impeachment for blocking DOGE's Treasury access: 'Judicial overreach'
FEBRUARY 11, 2025
Representative Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) announced Tuesday morning that he is filing articles of impeachment against the judge who blocked the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, from accessing the Treasury Department's payment systems.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, appointed by former President Barack Obama, issued a temporary restraining order on Saturday in response to an emergency request from 19 Democratic attorneys general. They argued that DOGE's access could risk exposing sensitive and confidential information.
That funding caused internal friction across multiple administrations, according to those who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon. In some cases, USAID fought to conceal how taxpayer funds were spent. And when it came to Israel, officials recalled battling USAID over funding for groups that worked to undermine the Jewish state or maintained ties to terror organizations.
"For those who believe in a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, elements of USAID have been problematic for years," said one former State Department official who worked with USAID during the Biden administration. "There was even a lack of embarrassment among some USAID staffers about being associated with terrorist organizations."
Some of the terror-tied funding initiatives are publicly known. In November 2022, for instance, USAID awarded $100,000 to a Palestinian activist group whose leaders hailed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terror group. Just six days before Hamas's Oct. 7 assault on Israel, USAID handed $900,000 "to a terror charity in Gaza involved with the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh."
USAID's hostilities toward the Jewish state, however, ran deeper than the agency's grantmaking.
Under Samantha Power, former president Joe Biden's pick to run USAID, agency officials fought pro-Israel policymaking at the State Department, often urging their colleagues at Foggy Bottom to pare down statements that praised the Jewish state, former officials said. In 2021, during a period of conflict with Hamas, Power herself refused to meet with Israel's ambassador unless Israel reached a ceasefire with the Iran-backed terror group. The decision put Power at odds with the White House National Security Council, which had signed off on the meeting, emails obtained by the Free Beacon show.
Years later, in September, Power's USAID accused Israel of deliberately blocking Gazan aid deliveries, which Hamas is known to steal for its own use and for black market sales that fund its terror activities. USAID staffers went as far as to urge the Biden State Department to end military aid to Israel. Former secretary of state Antony Blinken rejected the request.
"They weren't even in line with some of the Biden administration's policies," the State Department official who worked under Biden and Blinken told the Free Beacon. "It's more than just problematic grants to anti-Israel organizations. It's also their role in the internal approval processes and statements within the administration. There's an entire bureaucratic process they're a part of. They carry out their obstructionist ideology on that front as well."
The rogue nature of USAID under Power has motivated the Trump administration's push to dismantle the agency. During his recent trip to El Salvador, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described a longstanding "frustration" with the agency, which he called "completely unresponsive." The "level of insubordination," Rubio said, "makes it impossible to conduct a sort of mature and serious review that I think foreign aid writ large should have."
Federal investigations lend credence to that assessment. A January memo from inspector general Paul Martin, for example, noted that the agency "does not maintain a comprehensive internal database of subawardees." In other words, the foreign entities that work with a primary grantee on a USAID project often go unreported, impeding the ability of agency investigators to vet "fraud allegations," according to the memo.
Such allegations often include the diversion of taxpayer-funded aid to terrorist organizations. In a November report, for example, Martin "identified deliberate interference and efforts to divert humanitarian assistance" by foreign terrorist organizations, including "systemic coercion of aid workers by FTOs" and "FTO influence over beneficiary selection."
Those diversion efforts are particularly pronounced in Hamas-controlled Gaza.
A February report from the Middle East Forum think tank found that USAID had awarded "millions of federal dollars" to "organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas." In one Biden-era case, USAID funded an "educational and community center in Gaza" controlled by a local group called the Unlimited Friends Association. The association openly collaborated with Hamas, inviting the terror group's officials to its office and boasting of U.S.-funded projects in Hamas-controlled newspapers. In 2021, its director called for Jerusalem to be cleansed "from the impurity of the Jews."
A separate report, released in January by Israeli research organization NGO Monitor, outlined millions in USAID funding for two nonprofits—Mercy Corps and American Near East Refugee Aid—that "have closely coordinated with a Gaza-based ministry, run by a senior Hamas official identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as previously responsible for part of Hamas’ smuggling operation."
When it resumed funding for the Palestinians in 2021, the Biden State Department issued an internal warning that there was a "high risk" Hamas would steal U.S. aid. But information about terror-tied grant recipients in Gaza and elsewhere came mostly from watchdog groups. When members of Congress pressed USAID on those grants, they were often obstructed.
In a letter sent to Rubio last week, Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) detailed USAID's "willful sabotage of congressional oversight." The agency, she wrote, falsely claimed that certain grants were classified in a "desperate attempt to limit congressional oversight of public information."
Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) described similar interactions with USAID staffers. In some cases, he told the Free Beacon, USAID "refused to disclose what groups were getting money and gave tens of millions in American cash to be distributed without American supervision."
"Before and after Oct. 7, USAID flowed uncountable hundreds of millions of dollars toward Hamas that enabled it to launch the attack and keep battling Israel afterwards," Cruz said. "The full story of USAID funding Hamas is vast and much of it was done in secret."
U.S. officials involved in foreign policy emphasized in interviews with the Free Beacon that, despite its many issues, USAID does fund essential work providing medicine and other lifesaving aid. Rubio has made similar statements, expressing his desire to continue funding programs "providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent."
Over time, however, "more and more money flowed to groups and organizations whose work is contrary to the interests of the United States," one official who has worked closely with USAID across multiple administrations told the Free Beacon. "How bad it got is finally coming to light and there is finally transparency."
The Trump administration plans to scale back the agency by dissolving it and placing its core functions within the State Department, where roughly 600 current USAID staffers would work. The agency employed some 10,000 staffers when President Donald Trump took office last month.
In two speeches given less than 24 hours apart in the French city of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivered some of the most shocking yet brutally honest words from a European politician, openly calling for the older French to be replaced by a “Creole” generation of mixed races and cultures.
The leader of France’s far-left LFI is calling outright for replacement of White French people, conjuring up the Great Replacement term that has been demonized as a conspiracy theory by the left for years.
“In our country, one person in four has a foreign grandparent. 40% of the population speaks at least two languages. We are destined to be a Creole nation and so much the better! May the young generation be the great replacement for the old generation,” said Mélenchon.
According to the dictionary, Creole is defined as a “a person of mixed European and black descent, especially in the Caribbean.”
He also goes on to make a number of further statements, saying the new immigrants need “to heal France from the wounds of racism.” According to Euronews, France is among the five European countries with the least discrimination. Furthermore, he makes inflammatory statements, calling for “torch-bearers” to bring about change, which has revolutionary undertones, although he stops short of any calls for direct violence.
In a world of cartels and other foreign government criminal enterprises, it is not surprising that very smart, organized attacks have been made to steal from the American taxpayer. After all, it is as simple as Willie Sutton’s answer to the question of why he robbed banks, “because that’s where the money is.”
DOGE head Elon Musk has already estimated, based upon work done to date, that there is approximately $1 trillion in fraud, waste and abuse in the system that can be identified and prevented. It took two weeks of analyzing the government payment systems to make this incredible pronouncement.
It is surprising that the various systems that are in place to ostensibly prevent fraud failed so spectacularly, and it is fair to wonder if some of those in charge of them were part of the steal? After all, the question of valid identification in our election systems has been a hot button issue for at least a decade, it never occurred to those outside of government that the payment system did not require valid identification to receive government benefits. Who decided to not worry about requiring ID to receive a government check?
And as recent Democrat-led lawsuits have shown, these systems are run by long-time career bureaucrats who apparently have not been doing their jobs very well. The fact lawsuit after lawsuit is being filed to prevent employees of the White House directly appointed by the President access to the payment systems reveals the lack of accountability which the nameless, faceless and highly compensated federal bureaucrats have traditionally enjoyed.
However, it is fair to ask what the U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees have been doing over the past twenty years? Where was their spending oversight? Why have they not forced these systems to be opened up for public review so they could dig deep into the spending on authorized programs to determine whether they are being administered properly and that the taxpayer has been getting their monies worth.
In short, why didn’t Congress tell us about all of the wasteful spending that only now the Treasury’s payment systems’ data is now revealing?
The answer may be as simple as they messed up by trusting those entrusted with protecting the treasure of the United States, and the hired guards let them down. But another aspect is that Congress does not have access to this information simply because they never passed a law making public access all of the layers of government spending mandatory.
This isn’t about whether various programs that are riddled with fraud should exist, but whether they should cost what the taxpayer is being charged? And the answer is clearly no, not even close.
This doesn’t even count the misuse of USAID funds, Ukraine spending, the breadth of Medicaid spending or big ticket Department of Defense items that are subject to political debate and determination. Those should have a full political review by both Congress and the White House. What is being revealed by DOGE is plain and simple theft of taxpayer dollars.
As someone who has been advocating for limited government for my entire professional life, I always instinctively knew that there was some level of graft and corruption, but the level being revealed in just a short amount of time and the elaborate networks to hide it are absolutely stunning. Having confirmed the worst suspicions of those who have railed against the cost of government for years, the question is what can be done about it?
First and foremost, Congress needs to increase financial auditors and investigators in its employ to ask the right questions and demand answers prior to appropriating the taxpayer’s dollars. Rather than operating off of a budgeting platform that assumes the current level as the baseline, they need to force every administration to justify every dollar spent on a program rather than signing a virtual blank check — and pass laws mandating more of this information be posted publicly.
This is more than a DOGE committee designed to get headlines but with no power to fix anything. It is a real reform where Congress grows up to its 21st century responsibility to oversee a $7 trillion operation with real financial oversight.
Elon Musk, for his part, has described a series of systems that are designed to be unaccountable to those reviewing the spending without artificial intelligence to connect the disparate dots. Congress needs to work with the U.S. DOGE Service to ensure that new systems are put into place which creates transparency in federal government spending — for good.
A system that cannot easily be dismantled by a future president who might instead prefer and be expert at creating complex, impossible to untangle money laundering schemes for example.
Based upon the USAID spending, which has been revealed to be largely used to buy media and fund Non-Government Organizations with politically powerful sponsors and board’s, it is obvious why unraveling the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered is under legal attack by the left in an attempt to thwart federal government spending transparency.
After the political weaponization of government by the Obama and then Biden administrations, concerns about politically appointed government employees (and all DOGE employees are government employees) accessing personal data are valid. It would have been nice if they showed the same concern when just removed USAID head Samantha Power, when she was UN Ambassador in Jan. 2017, unmasked hundreds of her political foes in the waning days of the Obama administration. Or if they had stepped up and joined Republicans in decrying the IRS and other government agency attacks on people involved in the tea party movement. Or if they had spoken up when Marco Rubio had his tax records leaked from the Tampa IRS office or President Trump had the same done to him.
But they didn’t, so spare me your fake concern about abuse of power, the left’s real concern is that the entire spider web of left-wing political funding using taxpayer dollars is being unraveled.
To be clear DOGE is examining systems and finding loopholes, not picking figures and funders of the far-left for a forensic colonoscopy. They are looking for anomalies or connections which indicate fraud, and suggesting ways to close those loopholes to make the system work better.
This doesn’t mean that, as a result of this granular review that massive fraud rings won’t be uncovered, prosecuted with some of the stolen money recovered and the thieves thrown behind bars. It means that there are systems in place to pull the threads on the great Treasury robbery and identify the thieves and throw them in prison. What has been missing are effective ways to identify where the money is going, and ensure that it is not being stolen.
Three weeks into the Trump administration, it is not a far stretch to guess that stopping the wholesale raiding of the federal treasury will be one of his top three accomplishments, and who knows, it might even give us a way out of the national debt sword that hangs over all of our collective necks.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
The Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas and other Palestinians on October 7, 2023 could have been released a long time ago had the Biden administration exerted pressure on Qatar to use its good relations with the Islamist group to force it to do so.
All Qatar had to do was to summon the Hamas leaders in Doha and give them an ultimatum to release all the hostages immediately or face deportation from the Gulf state. It is hard to see how the Hamas leaders would have been able to say no to their major political and financial patrons and backers.... The Qataris were never under the slightest pressure.
"For years, Qatar supported the Taliban, and last year [2021] it helped it in its coup against the democratically elected Afghan government, and 13 American service members were killed in the violence. Today, Qatar is doing everything it can to give the Taliban international legitimacy and aid." — Yigal Carmon, President and founder of the MEMRI, who served as counterterrorism advisor to two Israeli prime ministers, Haaretz, May 10, 2022.
"Any Arab who hears American officials say that Qatar is America's ally would burst into laughter.... Ask Egypt, not just the rulers, but the people and journalists. Ask the Emirates, the government and people. Ask Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan. They all know that for decades Qatar has been promoting Islamist and terrorist organizations. There are lawsuits against Qatar in the U.S. and Europe in connection with its support for terrorism." — Yigal Carmon, MEMRI, November 1, 2023
The Trump administration needs to understand what Arabs have known for years: that Qatar's support for Hamas and other extremist Islamist groups is the main reason thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have died over the past few years.
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.