Jan. 28: Gates, Arabella Come for RFK

Trump issues Pentagon EOs; Iron Dome for America; Israel to expel UNRWA

Jan 28, 2025

The Big Story

Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is slated to appear before Congress for confirmation hearings this week. Opposing his nomination are “doctors,” according to a Tuesday headline in NPR. Which doctors? That part’s unclear. The physicians cited by NPR come from the Committee to Protect Health Care, which published an open letter earlier this month seeking to block RFK’s Senate confirmation. The letter boasts more than 20,000 signatures.

The problem, Breitbart found, is that the signatories faced no verification process to sign the letter. A representative from the outlet was able to sign the letter “as Dr. Donald Duck, OG, of Disney World, FL, specializing in podiatry,” and health influencer Jillian Michaels posted a screenshot in which she was able to successfully submit her place on the letter’s list as “Dr. Bullsh*t.”

So, what is the Committee to Protect Health Care? According to InfluenceWatch, it’s a 501(c)(4) super PAC connected to a related 501(c)(3) nonprofit, The Committee to Protect Health Care Fund. While the former doesn’t have to disclose its donors, the latter does, and the report in Breitbart reveals that the donors are the usual suspects: namely, The Sixteen Thirty (1630) Fund and Hopewell Fund, which together poured hundreds of millions of dollars into fake news sites to influence the 2020 presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor, according to OpenSecrets. Both funds are two of six such funds managed by Arabella Advisors, the “philanthropic” consulting firm founded by former Bill Clinton staffer Eric Kessler. Arabella’s nonprofits collect billions of dollars from donors such as Bill and Melinda Gates and the Ford Foundation and disperse them to various left-wing groups and causes. Arabella’s causes have ranged from the fight against Trump’s Supreme Court nominees to standard Democrat environmental fare and smaller-scale efforts such as the funding of radical left-wing journals.In a 2022 article, Tabletcontributor Hayden Ludwig found that Arabella collected $2.4 billion in the 2020 election cycles, twice as much as the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. On their strategies, Ludwig wrote:

These nonprofits … manage and supervise a vast array of ‘pop-up’ groups—mainly political attack-dog websites, ad campaigns, and “spontaneous” demonstrations staffed by Arabella’s network of activist professionals who pose as members of independent activist organizations. These groups … typically emerge very suddenly in order to savage the political opposition on the policy or outrage of that particular day or week, then vanish just as quickly.

That strategy seems perfectly in line with the Committee to Protect Health Care’s efforts to sabotage the nomination of RFK Jr. What is interesting, though, is that the effort is aimed at RFK Jr., a former Democrat, as opposed to harder-right nominees, such as Kash Patel, for FBI Director, or Pete Hegseth, before he was confirmed as secretary of defense. The Gates Foundation’s outsize role in Arabella’s funding—it gave Arabella groups $210,000,000 in 2019 alone, Capital Research Center found— is one probable explanation. Bill Gates tried to control the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a fact elaborated upon in this 2022 Politico article, and RFK Jr. rose to public prominence in his opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine. The way Arabella managed to get the media to point to an “organic” campaign of doctors coming out against RFK Jr. eerily mirrors the way the group manages to make certain left-wing protests appear “grassroots.”

Nevertheless, Ludwig pointed out in the aforementioned article that despite Arabella’s massive dark-money infrastructure and seemingly endless web of loosely affiliated shell groups and blacked-out donors, it hasn’t had much political success. Some Tablet contributors speculate that the effort to sabotage RFK JR. will also be another Arabella failure. Indeed, several Democratic senators, including John Fetterman, Bernie Sanders, and Cory Booker, have said they are open to supporting RFK Jr.’s nomination, according to The Hill.

When asked about RFK Jr.’s likelihood of being confirmed, one Tablet contributor said, “The Senate doesn’t want to use too much capital right now. I imagine he gets confirmed—if he stays disciplined.”

The Rest

→In his four latest executive orders issued Monday, President Trump seeks to radically transform the direction of the Department of Defense. The EOs aim to reinstate service members who left or were forced out of the military for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, eliminate DEI at the Pentagon, and combat “gender radicalism” in the military, which would prevent transgender people from “openly” serving, according to The Hill. Rob Smith, an openly gay combat veteran, argues that the removal of trans people from the military is the right move because, he says, transgender service members are non-deployable, meaning that while their treatments are covered by Veterans Affairs, they effectively can’t serve the military primarily because they require ongoing medical treatments that are not compatible with military readiness. So, while some are criticizing the removal of 8,000 service members from the military, Smith and others assert that the executive orders remove 8,000 non-deployable service members and replace them with 8,000 deployable members. The other executive orders ban all DEI offices within the military. Coinciding with Pete Hegseth’s first day at the Pentagon, Trump instructed Hegseth to set new military preparedness requirements.

→The last of Trump’s military-related executive orders pertains to his plan for an “Iron Dome for America.” The name for the plan of course references Israel’s mobile, all-weather air-defense system designed in 2005 and deployed in 2011, which has been extremely successful in shooting down enemy rockets. Trump first referenced the idea at a campaign rally last June. According to reporting from Breaking Defense, the American Iron Dome calls for the development of “spaced-based interceptors,” or a missile defense system that stations in Earth’s orbit missiles designed to intercept and destroy incoming ballistic missiles. Trump’s EO gives Hegseth 60 days to develop the plan. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker told Breaking Defense in an interview that the project could be covered by money obligated to defense during the reconciliation process and that for American defense, the project is a “must.”

→Following a statement he made over the weekend, Trump insisted once more that Gazans should be removed from the Gaza Strip and take refuge in either Egypt or Jordan, The Times of Israel reports. After a call with both leaders, Trump said that neither Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi nor Jordan’s King Abdullah would have any issue taking in Gazans and that he’d be speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the topic soon. On Tuesday, Egyptian sources told Egyptian media that Trump hadn’t yet spoken with Sisi. When asked why Trump was pushing for the remigration of the Gazans, the president cited the many decades of violence that have plagued the territory and its persistent status as a disputed territory. “When you look at the Gaza Strip, it’s been hell for so many years,” he said outside Air Force One on Monday. “There have been various civilizations on that strip. It started thousands of years before, and there’s always been violence associated with it.”

Tablet contributor Tony Badran believes that the move is very much in keeping with Trump’s “MO with regard to the sacred cows” of the conflict: “Look at what he did with Jerusalem and Golan Heights. Washington went berserk when he made those calls, predicting all kinds of apocalyptic consequences, none of which materialized. Now, he’s breaking another taboo again representing a return to history. The fact that he’s offering Gazans, who launched a war and lost, a chance to move and have a normal life is an act of mercy.”

→CNN chief domestic correspondent Jim Acosta is expected to leave the network after it not only replaced his 10 a.m. slot with Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown’s show but also asked him to take on the graveyard shift last week. According to the New York Post, some executives thought Acosta had the talent to make late-night news appealing, but Acosta saw the schedule change as too much of a slight to endure. His greatest viral moment came as a White House correspondent in 2018, when he got into a spat with President Trump, who called Acosta a “rude, terrible person” and briefly had Acosta’s press credentials revoked. Acosta’s removal from his time slot reportedly comes as CNN is trying to rethink its approach to Trump after both his historic victory and one of the worst ratings declines in its history; in 2024, CNN’s primetime viewership dropped a shocking 47%, according to Yahoo Finance. Some are speculating on X that Acosta’s final straw came last week when the anchor was embarrassed during an exchange with Republican Congressman Tim Burchett, who joked that “Spongebob Square Pants reruns had better ratings than CNN,” and implied that the moralizing tone of anchors like Acosta was the reason.

→After being pardoned last week, one of the Jan. 6 political prisoners, Matthew W. Huttle of Hobart, Indiana, was fatally shot at a traffic stop with an Indiana State Police officer, The New York Times reports. The Indiana State Police said in a statement that Huttle resisted arrest, but didn’t explain why Huttle was pulled over. The deputy who shot Huttle has been placed on paid administrative leave, and the incident is under investigation. Tuttle’s lawyer, Nicolas Barnes, who had repped him for 10 years in driving and alcohol-related cases, said he never knew Tuttle to be violent and would personally look into the shooting, but he admitted that his client had numerous DUIs. Huttle had reportedly lived a tragic life and, in many ways, represented the “forgotten working man” that the MAGA movement was built upon. The mother of his two children died of a fentanyl overdose, and he suffered numerous injuries in 2015 after being badly beaten by her boyfriend. He also suffered from alcohol abuse. Huttle’s lawyer on the Jan. 6 case, Andrew Hemmer, said to The New York Times that Huttle wasn’t a firm believer in any political movement and got caught up with the case by merely offering his uncle Dale Huttle, who was convicted of using a flagpole to assault law enforcement officers, a ride to the event in question.

→The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the U.N. agency that supports relief for Palestinian refugees, will be barred from operating within Israeli sovereign territory within 48 hours over its failure to address Hamas infiltration within its ranks. Israel’s U.N. ambassador Danny Danon announced earlier today that UNRWA must vacate properties in Jerusalem by the Thursday deadline established by Israeli legislation passed by the Knesset in the fall. Breaking with the Biden administration’s policy, President Trump’s acting envoy to the United Nations, Dorothy Shea, backed the Israeli government’s move in remarks on Tuesday, citing reports that Israeli hostages were held at UN facilities while in Gaza. The Biden administration had paused funding to UNRWA in January 2024, after the Israelis published evidence that at least 12 members of UNRWA had participated in the Oct. 7 attack, but it ultimately renewed the funding due to what it said was the group’s essential role in facilitating humanitarian aid.

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