March 6: The EPA Slush Fund
Turmoil at ActBlue; Jihadi uprising at Barnard; Hamas operative coordinated campus protests
The Big Story
As The Scroll has been pointing out for more than a year, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), with its hundreds of billions in spending on climate change, was a boon for the sort of soft corruption that has become common in the modern Democratic Party—namely, party insiders in government channeling taxpayer money to nonprofits and businesses controlled by their friends and political allies. As we reported in December 2023, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency entrusted $50 million in grant money under the IRA to the Climate Justice Alliance, to be distributed in sub-grants to fund “environmental justice projects” by “community-based non-profits.” The problem was that the CJA was less a climate group and more a grab bag of far-left causes, from police abolition to the struggle to free Palestine.
This week, new details have emerged about suspicious IRA-related spending. For example, the New York Post reports on what it calls a “$375 billion EPA slush fund” overseen by the Democratic operative John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. The Post doesn’t name the fund, and the $375 billion number appears to match the total amount of “energy security and climate change” spending in the IRA, so we assume that’s what it’s referring to. More damning, however, is a report in The Free Press on a genuine “slush fund”: the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), which distributed billions to charities that were founded months before receiving the payments. The eight recently formed groups received sums that ranged from $400 million to more than $6 billion. As one Biden-era EPA official accidentally revealed in a video published by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, the handouts were “akin to tossing gold bars off of the Titanic.”
In one of the cases of these recently founded charities being given blank checks, former Vice President Kamala Harris offered a $7 billion check to a Maryland-based group Climate United Fund, according to the Post. The Climate United Fund—a coalition of three left-of-center nonprofit finance institutions, Calvert Impact, the Community Preservation Corporation, and the Self-Help Credit Union, according to Influence Watch—was incorporated in Delaware on November 30, 2023, according to public records, mere months before Harris’ payment. Its newness means there are no published accounts of how it plans to spend the money.
“Ethically speaking, it’s concerning,” Laurie Styron, CEO of CharityWatch, an independent charity watchdog group, told the Post. “What was the purpose of creating middlemen entities when there are so many established groups in the climate space with good track records?”
Created in Spring 2023 and managed by the EPA, the GGRF was supposed to address the climate crisis and revitalize communities considered “historically left behind.” But the boards and staff of the groups that received the “gold bars” from GGRF are, according to The Free Press and the Post’s reporting, full of Democratic politicians, Democratic donors, and people with connections to Obama and Biden. One of those Democrats, Stacey Abrams, was senior counsel for one of the groups called Rewiring America, which was set to receive $489 million from the GGRF, as The Scroll noted on Feb. 20. The GGRF is now being investigated by the Justice Department, according to The Free Press.
President Donald Trump’s EPA administrator Lee Zeldin emphasized to The Free Press his desire to claw back funds squandered by programs like the GGRF:
It is my utmost priority to get a handle on every dollar that went out the door in this scheme and once again restore oversight and accountability over these funds. This rush job operation is riddled with conflicts of interest and corruption.
Senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Judge Glock said the grants handed out to these groups are among the biggest in American history. Even worse, the biggest groups to receive the grants, Climate United Fund and the (501)(c)3) Coalition for Green Capital, were empowered by Biden’s EPA to choose the smaller nonprofits that will do climate change work in the form of loans; there is nothing in the GGRF that calls for oversight over those loans. Glock continued:
This clearly was intended from its beginning to be a slush fund. The goal was to give them money with minimal strings and allow them to lend it to people they favored. It is an absolutely wild program. I haven’t seen the likes of in previous government-lending history.
On Tuesday, Madeleine Rowley reported in a separate piece for The Free Press, the EPA sent a letter to the eight nonprofit recipients of the GGRF grants asking what they plan to do with the money. Zeldin told Fox News in an interview this week that the program was set up to diminish government oversight and that he has no idea where all the money is going. The nonprofits have until March 28 to respond, lest they risk violating the grant agreement.
The Rest
→Seven senior officials resigned last month from the online Democratic fundraising organization ActBlue, plunging the institution into “turmoil,” according to The New York Times. The departures come as congressional Republicans have placed ActBlue under investigation, but it’s unclear what exactly led to the departures. Two unions representing ActBlue workers sent a letter to the organization’s board of directors last week listing the names of the seven officials and lamenting that their departure eroded confidence in ActBlue’s stability. According to the letter, the officials began leaving on Feb. 21. After they left, the last remaining lawyer at ActBlue, Zain Ahmad, wrote in an internal Slack message that he’d been cut off from his email and other internal communications platforms and that all his previous messages had been deleted, saying, “We have anti-retaliation and whistleblower measures for a reason.” He’s now been placed on leave.
ActBlue has been at the center of a number of recent controversies. For instance, we reported on Jan. 13 that the “Pod Save America” bros directed their listeners to donate money to victims of the Los Angeles wildfires through the Vote Save America Action PAC, a 501(c)(4) that routed donations through ActBlue Charities. ActBlue takes a 3.95% cut of all donations, leading Republican consultant Luke Thompson to accuse the “Pod Save” bros of using the fires for lead generation. In December 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into ActBlue after reports that its platform enabled fraud, according to a message published by his office. In his Tablet article “The People Setting America on Fire,” Scroll editor Park MacDougald found that the Tides Center-backed Community Justice Exchange, a far-left group working on criminal justice issues, and the National Bail Fund Network, of more than 80 separate community bail funds, raised money through ActBlue for the legal defense and bail fund of the A15 Action/Strike 4 Gaza “blockade.”
→Demanding the reversal of the expulsion of pro-Palestinian students who disrupted an Israeli history course last month, activists staged another sit-in at a Barnard College building yesterday, with several of them being detained by the New York Police Department after a bomb threat was called in. The bomb threat was found to have been unfounded, according to The Washington Post. A Barnard spokesperson told CNN that the protesters physically assaulted a university employee, who was sent to a hospital. Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury said her “line in the sand” had been crossed last week when pro-Palestine activists stormed another building, causing $30,000 in damages. Tensions have ramped up on campuses like Barnard as schools try to comply with President Trump’s call for the expulsion of students who engage in antisemitic protest.
→A lawsuit is alleging that pro-Hamas activists on college campuses like Barnard coordinated with a Hamas operative, Abdallah Aljamal, The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports. Aljamal, a Gaza-based “journalist,” was killed last year during an Israeli raid that freed three hostages from his home. The former hostages are now suing a publication Aljamal collaborated with, called the Palestine Chronicle. The website is operated by a nonprofit group in Washington state, the People Media Project. U.S. Representative and Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Jason Smith (R-MO), have suggested that the outlet was using its tax-exempt status to pay Hamas terrorists, including Al-Jamal, according to Influence Watch. The aforementioned lawsuit includes a first-hand account of the freed hostages’ experiences in captivity where they were informed that Hamas was in contact with the pro-Hamas college protesters. Due to the Palestine Chronicle’s tax-exempt status, the lawsuit alleges that U.S. taxpayers subsidized Aljamal’s propaganda. Also named in the case is Ramzy Baroud, the Palestine Chronicle’s founder and editor in chief. Baroud, who formerly served as an editor and executive for Al Jazeera, knowingly employed a Hamas footsoldier, according to the lawsuit. Aljamal published two to three articles a day during the time that he held the Israeli hostages in captivity.
To read the full article, click the link below
https://freebeacon.com/israel/hamas-hostage-taker-who-wrote-for-us-based-website-boasted-of-actively-coordinating-with-american-campus-protesters-lawsuit-alleges/
→Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser announced Tuesday that the city will remove the Black Lives Matter mural that lines the ground for two blocks across Lafayette Square, The New York Times reports. The mural was originally created by Keyonna Jones and four other artists in response to the death of George Floyd in 2020, when the square was renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” The mural and the creation of the plaza was a “statement of defiance” by Bowser against Trump, says the Times, but the Tuesday announcement suggests that she no longer sees defiance as a good strategy. The mayor, who visited Trump in Mar-a-Lago before the inauguration and has promised to work with him on issues such as bringing federal employees back to their offices, said her decision to remove the mural was a pragmatic one in the face of both a Republican Congress that has sought to chip away at the city’s autonomy and a Trump administration supportive of a federal takeover of D.C. Trump was evidently not appeased by the mural removal and took to TruthSocial to demand Bowser deal with D.C.’s homeless encampments: “If she is not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her!”
→TruthSocial of the Day
Despite Trump’s hostile threat toward Hamas yesterday, his administration has proceeded with its talks with Hamas that, according to The Times of Israel, have focused on proposing a 60-day cease-fire in exchange for the release of 10 hostages, including Israeli American Edan Alexander and the bodies of several others. We don’t know what the disconnect here is exactly—whether it’s the administration running a policy independent of the president’s wishes or if the president is playing the bad cop in a “good cop, bad cop” approach—but the gap between Trump’s public statements and the policy playing out should be noted.
→You Can’t Make This Up
CNN fact-checked President Trump’s State of the Union claim that DOGE discovered that $8 million in taxpayer money had gone toward “making mice transgender.” CNN attempted to correct the statement by pointing to a National Institutes of Health study that gave female hormone therapy to monkeys to study how gender-affirming care might affect the immune system and someone afflicted with HIV. The problem, CNN later found, was that $8 million was used to give mice gender-affirming hormones, though CNN clarified that the study was related to how the hormones would impact humans. Nevertheless, Trump was right: USAID were spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on making mice trans.
→President Trump announced on TruthSocial today that he’d offer a one-month exemption on tariffs for imports from Mexico that trade under the rules of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade pact he signed in his first term, according to The New York Times. Trump described his relationship with Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum as “very good” and emphasized that they are working together to stop the flow of illegal migrants and fentanyl into the United States. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick echoed Trump’s sentiment in a press conference earlier today but didn’t mention if those exemptions would apply to Canada.
→Hunter Biden is broke, Byron York writes for Washington Examiner. In 2023, Biden sued Garret Ziegler, founder of the nonprofit Marco Polo which has kept the Biden laptop leaks available online, over Ziegler’s role in disseminating information from those leaks. Earlier this week, Biden asked a judge to withdraw the lawsuit because he no longer has the money to cover it. Biden was receiving the majority of his income from 2021 onward from both the sales of his paintings as well as those of his memoir Beautiful Things. Between 2021 and 2023, Biden made $1,477,999 from his painting sales, but since 2024 he’s only sold one for $36,000. After 2023, sales of his books fell to 1,100 copies. Biden’s house in the Palisades was damaged by the wildfires earlier this year, but York reminds us that sympathy towards the political son shouldn’t extend too far: “Biden’s much larger problem is that he built his career, his way of making income, on the fact of having a powerful father,” he writes. As Joe Biden’s career ended, his son’s earnings dried up with it.To read the full article, click the link below.
→Frustration is growing inside of the White House at the slower-than-expected pace of deportations, The New York Times reports. Border czar Tom Homan told President Trump that the rate of arrests needs to increase, citing financial shortfalls at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While the 23,000 arrests made this month are substantially more than those made during Biden’s tenure, arrests have fallen since the explosion of them at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, and deportations haven’t kept pace with those arrests. While Trump is happy with the slowed traffic at the U.S. border, both Homan and adviser Stephen Miller have been vexed by the pace of deportations. Some deportation efforts have been botched. In February, for instance, an Aurora, Colorado, deportation effort led by hundreds of ICE agents resulted in merely 30 arrests.
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I guess I'm pretty jaded, because I think Hunter going bankrupt, ,the Pres threatening Palestinians who have helped hold the hostages in obscene conditions with death and destruction, continuing to imprison and deport illegal immigrants who commit crimes including students and prestigious colleges and Democrats melting down is a pretty good news day.
Witkoff stated that the negotiations either Hamas were going nowhere and that was what prompted Trump’s tweet on the issue Hamas will learn that you don’t play around with this president