Report: Biden May Not Have Even Known About Detrimental Climate Policies of his Own Administration

Power The Future | May 28, 2025
While the Biden administration was quick to tout and implement its aggressive climate agenda, a closer look raises a more troubling question: did President Joe Biden ever even know about some of the sweeping actions taken in his name?
We reviewed eight major executive actions that fundamentally reshaped American energy policy, from banning offshore drilling to invoking emergency powers to boost solar manufacturing, and found no evidence that President Biden ever personally spoke about any of them. Not in a press conference. Not in a speech. Not even a video statement.
These aren’t minor procedural documents, memos, or messaging documents. They include:
- Clean AI Data Centers EO (Jan. 14, 2025): Gave the Departments of Defense and Energy the green light to lease public land for AI data centers, provided they’re powered by “clean energy,” of course.
- Offshore Drilling Ban (Jan. 6 2025): Pulled over 625 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf out of future oil and gas leasing. Biden never mentioned it on camera.
- EO 14143 (Jan. 16 2025): A last-days-of-the-administration decree making AmeriCorps alumni eligible for preferential federal hiring, potentially reshaping the makeup of the federal workforce without public debate and allowing eco-left to insert themselves in the administration.
- Arctic Drilling Ban (March 13, 2023): Prohibited oil and gas leasing in sensitive areas of the Arctic. Notably timed just after approval of the Willow Project, this was a political fig leaf, not a presidential priority.
- Defense Production Act Invocation (June 6, 2022): Used Cold War-era emergency powers to push solar panels and heat pumps without a peep from Biden himself.
- EO 14027 (May 7, 2021): Created a “Climate Change Support Office” buried in bureaucracy, giving climate staffers yet another taxpayer-funded silo of influence.
- EO 14030 (May 20, 2021): Ordered all federal agencies to assess “climate-related financial risk,” laying the groundwork for ESG-style investing mandates across the government.
- EO 14057 (Dec. 8, 2021): Committed the entire federal government to net-zero emissions by 2050 and required 100% carbon-free electricity by 2030—one of the most expansive decarbonization orders in history.
After uncovering this slew of major executive actions reshaping America’s energy landscape that were never publicly addressed by President Biden, Power The Future Executive Director stated: “Americans deserve to know which unelected staffers or radical unnamed activists implemented sweeping change through an autopen. The Biden energy agenda destroyed livelihoods of energy workers and fueled the record-high inflation that broke the budgets of millions of Americans. The question is simple, and deserves an immediate answer: what did Joe Biden know, and when did he know it?”
Despite their massive consequences for American energy producers, workers, and consumers, President Biden made no public comment, on camera or to press, about any of these actions.
This lack of public acknowledgment begs the question of whether these orders were auto-penned by eco-left policy by ghostwriters?
Americans deserve to know whether their president is making energy policy or whether it’s being run by anonymous staffers in federal agencies and activist NGOs behind closed doors.
When executive power is used to shut down energy production, rewire the economy, and restructure the federal workforce, the American people should at least expect their elected leader to own it.
Instead, we’re left with a pile of signed orders and zero accountability. Power The Future will continue investigating the true origins of these impactful policies.
Washington’s “Golden Dome” – Multi-Trillion Tax Dollar Heist at Best, Dangerous Provocation at Worst
By Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook – May 25, 2025
US President Donald Trump has announced his administration has chosen the architecture for the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system, claiming it will cost $175 billion and be operational in “less than three years” with a “success rate close to 100%.”
During President Trump’s announcement on May 21, 2025, it was claimed the Golden Dome will consist of technology deployed across land, sea, and space capable of intercepting hypersonic, ballistic, and advanced cruise missiles, “even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space.”
Former-US President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program (also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative) was repeatedly cited during the announcement. That program sought to use space-based weapons to void the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” allowing the US to conduct a nuclear or non-nuclear first strike on another nation and avoid what had otherwise been an inevitable nuclear retaliation that would destroy both nations in the process.
Specifically, because mutually assured destruction was seen as a better deterrence against a first strike by one nuclear-armed nation against another, along with concerns over costs, technological limitations, and then-existing arms control treaties like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the initiative was never fully realized.
Granting the US Impunity to Attack, Not “Defend” Itself
US Space Force General Michael Guetlein, picked to lead the Golden Dome project and present during its announcement, would claim:
As you’re aware, our adversaries have become very capable and very intent on holding the homeland at risk. While we have been focused on keeping the peace overseas, our adversaries have been quickly modernizing their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads, building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling at 6,000 mph, building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defenses and building submarines that can sneak up on our shores and worse yet, building space weapons. It is time that we change that equation and start doubling down on the protection of the homeland.
Yet what General Guetlein calls “keeping the peace overseas,” is in reality the United States encroaching along the borders and shores of nations like Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea.
This includes the stationing of not only missile defense systems like Patriot, THAAD, and the Aegis Ashore system in close proximity to these nations in violation of the ABM treaty the US has since abandoned, but also first-strike offensive weapons like the Typhon missile launcher capable of firing both Standard SM-6 anti-air missiles, but also ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles previously prohibited under the INF treaty the US has also since abandoned.
For example, the US has positioned THAAD systems in both the Middle East and Asia, and its Typhon missile system is currently stationed in the Philippines with additional units on the way, specifically aimed at China.
Beyond the global-spanning military footprint of the United States, Washington is also preparing for or already directing multiple proxy wars against these nations.
The conflict in Ukraine was entirely engineered by the United States, beginning with Kiev’s political capture in 2014, the training and arming of Ukraine’s military, and the capture, reorganization, and direction of Ukraine’s intelligence agencies by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
The US has been waging war and proxy war against Iran for decades, including invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq right on its borders, invading and overthrowing the government of Iran’s ally Syria, the waging of war on Yemen-based Ansar Allah – also an Iranian ally. The US also maintains constant financial, political, and military support for Israel, which has repeatedly attacked Iran and its allies.
And despite officially recognizing Taiwan as part of “One China,” the United States has continued supporting separatist political parties administering Taipei, is arming local military forces, and is even stationing US troops on the island province itself.
All of this has forced Russia, Iran, China, and other nations to respond by bolstering military spending, increasing research and development into missile technology, and the creation of credible deterrents against decades-spanning US aggression and proxy war along and even within their borders.
While the Trump administration depicts the Golden Dome as necessary to “forever end the missile threat to the American homeland,” it is instead being built to enable the US to forever threaten other nations around the globe with its missiles.
Dubious Claims About Golden Dome’s “Near 100%” Success
At one point during the Golden Dome’s announcement, US President Trump would claim:
I will tell you an adversary told me, a very big adversary, told me the most brilliant people in the world are in Silicon Valley. He said, “we cannot duplicate them. We can’t.”
He also claimed:
We have things that nobody else can have. You see what we’ve done helping Israel. You probably wouldn’t have in Israel. They launched probably 500 missiles all together and I think one half of a missile got through and that was only falling to the ground as scrap metal.
Except none of this is true.
If President Trump is referring to the 2024 Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel, up to 200 missiles were fired, with dozens if not scores of them circumventing Israeli missile defenses and striking targets, including dozens striking and damaging Israel’s Nevatim Airbase alone, according to NPR.
No air or missile defense system has a “success rate close to 100%.”
While any particular system may have a “success rate close to 100%” intercepting individual targets, retaliatory strikes are planned specifically to include a large enough number of missiles, drones, and other projectiles to saturate a defense system’s ability to intercept them all during a single attack. This means that while many incoming targets will be intercepted, many others will not, and critical targets will inevitably be struck and destroyed.
Regarding the state of US missile defense technology, unless President Trump is referring to undisclosed innovations, nothing the US currently is known to possess in terms of air and missile defense systems consists of “things that nobody else can have.”
And while in the past Silicon Valley drove unparalleled advances in technology contributing to a decisive military advantage for the US, the gap has since drastically closed and in some instances is widening in favor of nations like Russia and China.
The conflict in Ukraine, for example, has demonstrated glaring Russian advantages in several key areas that void the entire premise the Golden Dome is predicated on. Russia has demonstrated that it is capable of producing both larger quantities of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as layered integrated air defense systems and at a fraction of the cost the US and its European partners spend on arms and ammunition production.
Russia’s advantage is so great, it prompted the first-ever US National Defense Industrial Strategy in 2022.
The paper admitted the US (and the rest of the collective West) suffers from a bloated, inefficient military industrial base incapable of meeting the demands of the type of large-scale, high-intensity, protracted warfare taking place in Ukraine and likely to take place in future conflicts with either Russia or China.
As previously reported, the paper lays out a multitude of problems plaguing the US military industrial base including a lack of surge capacity, an inadequate workforce, overdependence on offshore downstream suppliers, as well as insufficient “demand signals” to motivate private industry partners to produce what’s needed, in the quantities needed, when it is needed.
In fact, the majority of the problems identified by the report involved private industry and its unwillingness to meet national security requirements because they were not profitable.
Nations like Russia and China do not rely on private industry partners for national defense programs. Much of the industrial power researching, developing, and mass-producing arms and ammunition in these countries takes place within state-owned enterprises. Because national defense is the chief priority of these enterprises, money is invested whether it is profitable or not.
This is what allows Russian and Chinese industry to maintain huge workforces, facilities, and tooling even when production is reduced, while private industry in the West would slash all three to maximize profitability. The first model allows a nation to surge the production of arms and ammunition on short notice – the other requires strong enough “demand signals” to justify the time-consuming process of building up the levels of all three – a process that can take years.
None of the problems described regarding the US military industrial base have been addressed since the National Defense Industrial Strategy was published in 2022. Corporations like Lockheed, Raytheon, L3Harris, and newer companies like Anduril slated to play a role in the proposed Golden Dome system continue to pursue a strictly for-profit model that will create the same disparity in quantity and quality seen playing out on and over the battlefield in Ukraine.
This leaves the likelihood the Golden Dome – like all other modern US military programs – will fall far short of stated expectations because of the fraud, waste, and abuse that defines US military industrial production.
The ultimate irony is that while the Golden Dome is sold to the public as “protecting” America, vast sums of public money that could actually improve the lives of Americans at home through infrastructure, education, and healthcare, will instead be siphoned off by demonstrably incompetent and corrupt arms manufacturers, all in an attempt to enhance Washington’s ability to menace the rest of the world with greater impunity – not protect the US at home.
The rest of the world will predictably react to the Golden Dome by creating their own means to defend themselves and retaliate against the US if attacked, making Americans not only less safe, but in the process of building the Golden Dome, less prosperous.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
EU hands US state media outlet €5.5 million lifeline
RT | May 22, 2025
The European Union has pledged €5.5 million in emergency funding to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) to prop up the Cold War-era broadcaster, which is widely regarded as a Western propaganda outlet.
Originally created in the 1950s and covertly financed by the CIA to disseminate pro-Western narratives into the Soviet bloc, RFE/RL has more recently operated under the oversight of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order eliminating most of the agency’s funding as part of a sweeping cost-cutting agenda.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced the bloc’s financial lifeline on Tuesday, describing it as “short-term emergency funding” to support what she called a “vital” mission. The €5.5 million package will act as a “safety net” to help RFE/RL maintain operations in countries within Brussels’s sphere of interest, including Russia, Belarus, Iran, and several Central Asian states.
“In a time of growing unfiltered content, independent journalism is more important than ever,” Kallas said following a meeting of EU foreign ministers. She acknowledged that Brusssels could not fully replace the lost American funding but emphasized the symbolic value of the move, urging individual member states to offer further support.
Since Trump’s defunding order, RFE/RL has furloughed staff, suspended programming, and launched legal challenges. Although a Washington judge temporarily halted the administration’s decision in April, a federal appeals court later blocked the release of funds pending further litigation. The broadcaster has warned that it faces permanent shutdown in multiple regions if its financial crisis is not resolved.
The Trump administration framed the defunding as part of a broader campaign to dismantle bureaucratic institutions that no longer align with US strategic interests. RFE/RL’s leadership has disputed that rationale, with its president, Stephen Capus, calling the funding cuts a “massive gift to America’s enemies.”
Administration officials and critics have argued that RFE/RL and its sister outlet, Voice of America (VOA), have lost their relevance and veered toward partisan editorializing. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has publicly called for both outlets to be “shut down,” writing on X: “Nobody listens to them anymore.”
Telegram’s Durov names French official he accused of censorship request
RT | May 19, 2025
Telegram founder Pavel Durov has claimed that French foreign intelligence chief Nicolas Lerner personally asked him to censor conservatives on his platform ahead of the contentious rerun of Romania’s presidential elections. The Russian-born entrepreneur said he refused the request.
The accusations of foreign meddling first surfaced last year after Romania’s top court annulled the November election results, in which independent right-wing candidate Calin Georgescu came first with 23%. Authorities cited “irregularities” in his campaign, along with intelligence reports alleging Russian interference – claims Moscow has denied. Georgescu was later barred from running again.
On Sunday, pro-EU centrist Nicusor Dan was elected president of Romania. His conservative, Eurosceptic opponent George Simion accused France and Moldova of attempting to sabotage his campaign.
In a post on X on Sunday evening, Durov said he met with Lerner, head of France’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), in Paris. The agency, operating under the Ministry of the Armed Forces, is tasked with gathering intelligence and combating terrorist threats.
“This spring at the Salon des Batailles in the Hotel de Crillon, Nicolas Lerner, head of French intelligence, asked me to ban conservative voices in Romania ahead of elections. I refused,” Durov wrote. “We didn’t block protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in Europe,” he added.
Durov had previously hinted that France asked him to “silence” Romanian conservatives. The French Foreign Ministry rejected the allegations of election meddling as “completely unfounded.”
“France categorically rejects these allegations and calls on everyone to exercise responsibility and respect for Romanian democracy,” the ministry stated, labeling the accusations “a diversionary maneuver” aimed at distracting the public from “the real threats of interference targeting Romania.”
Last year, French authorities charged Durov with facilitating the distribution of child sexual exploitation material and drug trafficking due to alleged moderation failures on Telegram. He was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget Airport in August before being released on €5 million ($5.46 million) bail. Durov, who has denied any wrongdoing, was eventually allowed to leave France in March.
Hep B Vaccines Come With High Risk, Little Benefit — Why Does CDC Recommend Them for Every Newborn?
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 13, 2025
As public concern grows over the large and growing number of shots on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) childhood immunization schedule, several critics are sounding the alarm about one shot in particular — the hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccine.
Among the 76 vaccine doses on the schedule, the CDC recommends that every infant born in the U.S. get their first dose of the Hep B vaccine on the day they are born. Studies show that more than 90% of infants typically do so.
By age 24 months, most of those infants have received the recommended three doses of the vaccine.
Hepatitis B is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV), which can range from a mild, short-term, acute illness lasting a few weeks to a serious, long-term, chronic infection.
The virus is transmitted through bodily fluids, most often via intimate contact such as sex or sharing intravenous (IV) drug equipment. Being an IV drug user is the most common risk factor for the disease.
Infected pregnant mothers can also pass the disease to their infants, but relatively few do — about 25,000 pregnant women per year, or 0.69%, have Hep B, and about 1,000 of them pass it to their babies, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The CDC says, “almost all children and older adults infected with acute HBV recover completely with no lasting liver damage.”
Women can be tested for the disease to see if their babies would benefit from vaccination, but that’s not what the CDC recommends.
Instead, today the Hep B vaccine is required for children to attend either childcare, school, or both, in every state except Alabama.
School-age children don’t fit the profile of those at risk for contracting Hepatitis B. Also, the CDC has no evidence that Hepatitis B has ever been transmitted in a school setting, according to a records search posted on Substack by attorney Aaron Siri, who made the request.
Siri argues the Hep B mandate is about profit, not about protecting children from a contagious disease.
“The Hepatitis B vaccine is a case study in agency capture,” Siri wrote. All children would not be required to take the shot, he said “if pharma didn’t stand to earn billions through a wider mandate of this product.”
The Hep B vaccine market, valued at more than $8 billion in 2023, is projected to grow to over $13 billion by 2032, with the U.S. making up the largest market for the vaccine, Fortune Business Insights reported.
Why did the Hep B vaccine get added to the childhood schedule?
In a Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics article, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland questioned the constitutionality of mandating the Hep B vaccine for children to access education, especially given that CDC data show that transmission is unlikely through routine contact among children.
She said the CDC’s position on mass vaccination for children changed after the pharmaceutical companies got legal protection from liability.
When the CDC vaccine advisory committee made its first Hep B vaccine recommendation in 1982, the agency observed that the U.S. was a place of “low HBV prevalence.” CDC officials recommended the shot only for people at higher risk, including healthcare workers, people likely to be in sexual or “needle stick” contact with an infected person and infants born to mothers infected with the virus.
In 1988, the committee called for all pregnant mothers to be screened to determine if vaccination would be necessary. At that time, it was estimated that 16,500 mothers per year were infected and that without vaccination, an estimated 3,500 infants would become chronic carriers.
Later that year, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), created by the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, was established. The law protects vaccine makers from liability for injuries related to vaccines on the CDC’s childhood schedule, and the VICP is meant to provide an alternative means of compensating people who suffer “accidental injury or death” from taking those vaccines.
By 1991, the CDC had begun describing HBV risks differently, stating that the consequences of infection were “major health problems” in the U.S. — even though rates had not changed and the number of children infected with HBV was just a few hundred.
The CDC’s advisory committee concluded that because it was challenging to vaccinate those at risk for HBV, mass immunization against the virus was “the most effective means of preventing HBV infection and its consequences.”
The committee recommended all infants be vaccinated, regardless of their mothers’ hepatitis B status, and the Hep B vaccine was added to the childhood immunization schedule.
Dangers of the Hep B vaccine
Then and now, there are two Hep B vaccines licensed for infants at birth: Merck’s Recombivax HB and GSK’s Engerix-B. Both are made using a genetic engineering technology that was new when the vaccines were developed.
The clinical trials for both brands included only a small number of children, and researchers followed up on safety monitoring with infants for only four or five days in the different trials.
No medium or long-term studies were done, no comparisons were made between vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects, and the vaccines were administered only to healthy babies.
According to the Recombivax HB label, during clinical trials, 434 doses of the drug were administered to 147 healthy infants and children up to age 10, who were each monitored for five days after each dose. During those five days, 10% of infants experienced systemic reactions, including “irritability, fever (≥101°F oral equivalent), diarrhea, fatigue/weakness, diminished appetite, and rhinitis.”
Among the much larger group of 1,252 healthy adults, reactions were wide-ranging and sometimes serious. They included injection site issues and fevers, upper respiratory infections, influenza, body pain, insomnia and hypotension.
The Engerix-B package insert doesn’t specify how many babies were included in its clinical trials. However, it does indicate the trial subjects were monitored for only four days. The insert lists similar adverse events to those of Recombivax HB.
Post-marketing studies, which collect voluntary reports of adverse effects registered in places like the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), the Vaccine Safety Datalink, or with the vaccine makers, showed many more serious side effects reported for both versions of the Hep B vaccine.
Examples include immune system disorders like systemic lupus erythematosus, thrombocytopenia, Guillain-barré syndrome, multiple sclerosis, transverse myelitis, febrile seizure, Bell’s Palsy, herpes zoster, encephalitis, and many more.
Premature infants who take either Hep B vaccine have also experienced sleep apnea, which the labels warn about.
The inserts indicate it is impossible to determine whether the vaccine caused any of the reported events. Heritage Foundation Policy Analyst Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D., criticized this approach to identifying adverse effects.
She wrote:
“To the extent that clinical trial data are insufficient to draw robust safety conclusions, patients are effectively used as test subjects post-licensure, but without knowledge that they are part of the test and without hope that their own adverse experiences will be scientifically useful as they would be in the case of a controlled trial. Voluntary adverse event data are suitable for identifying safety signals, but not for drawing conclusions about real risks.
The available data comes mostly from clinical trials that had small sample sizes, no control groups, and only a few days of follow-up, she added. The only other data source is post-licensure data, “which suffer from a lack of statistical usefulness.”
Peer-reviewed research also links the Engerix B vaccine to CNS inflammatory demyelination — a group of diseases in which the immune system attacks and damages the myelin sheath that protects the brain and spinal cord — namely multiple sclerosis in children.
Studies of children in the U.S. also linked the Hep B vaccine to arthritis, acute ear infections and sore throats. And a 2008 study associated Hep B vaccination of male newborns with autism diagnoses at three times the normal rate.
In a recent presentation about the Hep B vaccine, CHD science team member Heather Ray highlighted other safety concerns. For example, Ray noted that vaccine dosage is the same for newborn infants as it is for adults. Vaccine dosage doesn’t vary for a 7-pound infant or a 210-pound linebacker, she said.
The dose exposes babies to both the genetically engineered antigen and the aluminum adjuvant.
“Aluminum is a heavy metal that’s a proven neurotoxin and can cross the blood-brain barrier,” Ray said. “It has scientifically been shown to cause autism, asthma, autoimmune diseases and other horrendous neurological diseases and chronic illnesses.”
Infants’ organ membrane barriers are more permeable than those of adults, making them more susceptible to aluminum.
Until 2001, the Hep B vaccines also contained 25 micrograms of the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal.
Since the VAERS was established in 1990, there have been 18,950 adverse events reported in children under age 2 following Hep B vaccination, and 31,082 reports in children under age 17.
VAERS has been estimated to contain approximately 1% of adverse events, according to David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Critics say Hep B vaccine poses many risks and no benefits for most babies
In terms of efficacy, the Hep B vaccine package inserts say the vaccine has been shown to produce antibodies to hepatitis B, and “appears to have protected infants whose mothers tested positive for hepatitis B antigens.”
Pakaluk wrote, “Therefore, we can conclude that the vaccine provides a robust antibody response to a disease to which they are not regularly exposed, and how long that antibody response lasts is unknown. In other words, for children not exposed to hepatitis B, there is no known benefit.”
Substack writer J.B. Handley, who has called for the elimination of the vaccine from the childhood schedule, wrote, “It’s a nearly useless vaccine, unless you are in the tiny minority of babies who have a mother with Hepatitis B.”
The Informed Consent Action Network, in 2020, filed a petition with the FDA demanding that the licensure of the Hep B vaccines be revoked or suspended until their safety was determined in a properly designed clinical trial.
CHD Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski said,
“The CDC immunization schedule was simply not written for most people. The childhood Hep B recommendation is a prominent example. It is a pathogen that is primarily transmitted between humans through dirty needles and unprotected sex.
“In rare circumstances, it may be transmitted between people who live together — if one of them has an active infection — by things like shaving razors. Most children have zero risk factors and zero exposure. Most children should not be vaccinated against hepatitis B.”
Watch Heather Ray’s Hep B presentation here.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
EU queen Ursula preached transparency – then did backdoor deals with Big Pharma
By Rachel Marsden | RT | May 16, 2025
Well, this is awkward. How many times has Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president and unelected de facto ruler of the EU, delivered sermons about transparency like she’s the high priestess of some kind of parallel Brussels Vatican? And now the EU’s own top court has called her out in a ruling for neglecting to practice what she preaches.
Back in 2023, during her State of the European Union address, doing her finest impression of someone elected by the actual public, von der Leyen declared the need to douse any and all sketchiness in sunlight in order to “not allow any autocracy’s Trojan horses to attack our democracies from within.”
“Transparency should characterize the work of all the members of the Commission and of their cabinets,” she said as far back as 2019. “I have asked commissioners…to engage more and be more transparent,” she proclaimed in a speech to EU parliamentarians last year. Transparency and accountability also figured prominently in her bid for reappointment by the EU’s ruling elites last year.
Great news! She can now finally embark on this noble mission, and begin her journey with little more than a simple glance in the mirror. Because the European Court of Justice – the body that rules on whether EU institutions have actually crossed into illegality, not just occupying their usual territory of elite-grade idiocy – has just decided that Queen Ursula’s Commission can’t just wave away a pile of her own Covid-era text messages by going, “Whoops! They disappeared. Oh well, what do you do?” Which is basically what the Commission’s response was to the New York Times when it asked to see those messages.
And how did the Times know that these texts even existed? Because Ursula literally told them, bragging in an interview about how she scored so many vaxxes because she’s super tight with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. All this was for a piece spotlighting her Covid efforts, published in April 2021: “How Europe sealed a Pfizer vaccine deal with texts and calls.”
The article featured the same kind of glamour photography reminiscent of the good ol’ days when Ursula was Germany’s defense minister from 2013 to 2019, under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, and doing photo shoots in front of military hardware while accusations swirled that she had bungled the budget with shady defense contracts, even as the Bundeswehr was stuck using brooms for guns during a NATO exercise, as the Atlantic Council reported in 2015.
“For a month, Ms von der Leyen had been exchanging texts and calls with Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer… Pfizer might have more doses it could offer the bloc – many more,” the NYT piece reads, referring to the “personal diplomacy” that “played a big role in a deal” for 1.8 billion Pfizer anti-Covid doses.
So the Times hears about these text messages and was like, “Oh, cool. Let’s see!”
Suddenly Queen Ursula became a lot less chatty. So the Times took the matter to the EU’s own top court to get the disclosure. And now this court has said, in legal terms, that Ursula can’t just ghost the Times – and the public by extension – without giving a real reason. That there has to be a “plausible explanation to justify the non possession” of the texts. And also, the court says that “the Commission has failed to explain in a plausible manner” why it thought that these messages were so trivial that they could be vaporized like they were just her Eurovision contest text voting and not a matter of public record which, by definition, should be maintained.
Out of these little chats came €71 billion in Covid jab contracts with Big Pharma’s Pfizer and AstraZeneca – 11 of them to be precise, totaling 4.6 billion doses, paid for with cash taken straight from EU taxpayers. Enough for ten doses for every EU citizen.
Turns out that freewheeling it may have resulted in some consequences that could have been avoided had a diverse group of minds been engaged on the issue, as protocol normally dictates, and not just Ursula’s. It’s not like there hasn’t been a costly fallout from all this. A big chunk of the EU, including Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, is shouting about surplus doses for which they’re on the hook, urging Brussels to renegotiate the contractual terms with Big Pharma. Germany alone has reportedly trashed 200 million of them. Tricky to negotiate, though, when no one’s even sure what the terms were, as the second-highest European court pointed out last year. “The Commission did not give the public sufficiently wide access to the purchase agreements for COVID-19 vaccines… The Commission did not demonstrate that wider access to those clauses would actually undermine the commercial interests of those undertakings,” it ruled.
The details of these contracts – how they were made, what they say, and how anyone’s supposed to back out of them if citizens politely decline to max out their ten-jab punch card – remain a mystery.
Back in 2024, Brussels more or less shrugged and suggested that it could really only be as transparent as the courts forced it to be. So hey, what can you do? “In general, the Commission grants the widest possible public access to documents, in line with the principles of openness and transparency,” the EU said, underscoring that the lower court ruling “confirmed that the Commission was entitled to provide only partial access.”
Well, good news, guys! Your very own top court just ruled that you can now be a lot more transparent! So go crazy. Be the change that you keep saying you want to be in the world. Nothing is holding you back now. If transparency were a vaccine, this court just gave Ursula a booster. So we’ll see if it takes. I won’t hold my breath.
NATO hit by corruption scandal
RT | May 16, 2025
Police have conducted arrests and searches in several countries as part of a corruption investigation involving current and former employees of the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA).
The raids, coordinated by Eurojust – the EU’s criminal justice agency – took place in Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and the US. The alliance told Luxembourg Times on Wednesday that NSPA’s main headquarters in the Grand Duchy had initiated the probe.
“NATO – including the NSPA – is working closely with law enforcement to ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice,” spokeswoman Allison Hart said. “We are actively strengthening our ability to mitigate risks and root out misconduct,” she added.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told reporters in Ankara on Thursday that the military bloc was working with the authorities. “We want to get to the root of this,” Rutte said.
The public prosecutor’s office in Luxembourg said that documents were seized pertaining to suspicions that NSPA staffers had “used their positions to enrich themselves.”
Two people were arrested in Belgium, and three in the Netherlands, officials said. Belgian prosecutors stated that the investigation centers around “possible irregularities in awarding contracts to defence contractors for the purchase of military equipment for NATO such as ammunition and drones.” The probe also looks at possible sharing of confidential information by NSPA employees with defense companies and money laundering.
The Dutch authorities said they arrested a former official with the Dutch Defense Ministry at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol on Monday. The former civil servant is suspected of taking bribes in 2023 regarding the awarding of defense contracts.
The investigation takes place as NATO members are looking for ways to boost their own defense and produce more weapons to be delivered to Ukraine. In March, the European Commission unveiled a plan to raise €800 billion ($896 billion) to “rearm” the EU.
US court hits Israeli spyware firm NSO with $167m fine over Pegasus abuses
MEMO | May 14, 2025
A federal jury in California has ordered Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group to pay Meta $167 million in punitive damages, marking the first time a court has imposed financial liability on a spyware vendor for abuses linked to its software.
The ruling sends a strong signal that private firms profiting from invasive surveillance technology will not be shielded by their association with government clients. After a single day of deliberation, jurors found that NSO had acted with “malice, oppression or fraud” in deploying its Pegasus spyware against 1,400 WhatsApp users.
Pegasus, which grants near-total access to a target’s device, including microphones, cameras and encrypted messages, was used not against criminals, but journalists, human rights defenders and political dissidents. Meta, which owns WhatsApp, described the hacking as “despicable” and a clear violation of privacy rights.
NSO has long claimed that its spyware is sold only to vetted state clients for national security purposes. However, investigations have shown Pegasus being deployed to facilitate transnational repression by authoritarian regimes.
The previous US administration blacklisted NSO over its role in such abuses, making it the first company added to the US entity list for enabling state surveillance. The jury’s decision is expected to add pressure on Washington to further regulate the commercial spyware sector.
While the financial penalty may prove difficult to collect, the judgement itself sets a precedent: spyware firms can be held directly accountable in US courts, regardless of the state affiliations of their customers.
In doing so, the case reframes digital privacy not merely as a user expectation, but as a civil right and signals that the impunity long enjoyed by private surveillance actors is coming to an end.
EU court overturns Commission’s denial of access to von der Leyen-Pfizer text messages

(Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)
By Thomas Brooke | Remix News | May 14, 2025
The General Court of the European Union on Wednesday annulled the European Commission’s refusal to grant a New York Times journalist access to text messages exchanged between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
According to a communication published on Wednesday, the judgment concluded that the Commission failed to provide a credible explanation for its claim that it no longer holds the requested messages, which were allegedly sent during Covid-19 vaccine procurement negotiations.
The ruling comes in response to a 2022 request by Matina Stevi, a Brussels-based journalist with The New York Times, who sought access to all text messages exchanged between von der Leyen and Bourla between Jan. 1, 2021, and May 11, 2022. The Commission denied the request, stating that it possessed no such documents. Stevi and The New York Times challenged that decision before the EU’s General Court.
The full transcript of the Court’s ruling was published on its website.
On May 11, 2022, Stevi submitted a formal request to the European Commission seeking access to the text messages. The request was registered by the Commission the following day, on May 12. When the Commission failed to respond within the time frame set by EU transparency rules, Stevi’s legal representative filed an initial confirmatory application on June 28, 2022, reiterating the request for access.
On July 20, 2022, the Commission responded to the initial application, stating that it did not possess any documents corresponding to the request. In response, Stevi’s representative submitted a second confirmatory application on Aug. 9, 2022, which was formally registered the same day. Later that month, on Aug. 31, the Commission notified Stevi that the deadline for its response would be extended by 15 working days, setting a new target date of Sept. 21.
On Sept. 21, the Commission informed Stevi that the assessment of her application had been completed but that the draft decision still required approval from its Legal Service. Nearly two months later, on Nov. 16, 2022, the Commission issued its final decision, reiterating that it did not hold any of the requested text messages and therefore could not grant access.
The Court found that the Commission’s justification was insufficient and that Stevi and The New York Times had provided “relevant and consistent evidence” showing that such messages had existed. The Commission, it said, failed to meet its obligations under the Access to Documents Regulation and the principle of good administration as enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The judgment scrutinized the Commission’s procedural conduct, noting that it relied on assumptions and imprecise information throughout the request process. It also emphasized that public institutions must document and retain information related to their activities in a “non-arbitrary and predictable manner.”
In its decision, the Court stated that “despite those imprecisions, [the Commission] maintains that it does not possess the requested documents, with the result that it is for the applicants to produce relevant and consistent evidence capable of rebutting the presumption of non-possession of those documents.”
That presumption was indeed rebutted, the Court held, by a New York Times article and transcripts of interviews conducted by Stevi with both von der Leyen and Bourla in April 2021. The article reported that for a month during vaccine talks, von der Leyen and Bourla “had been exchanging texts and telephone calls.” In the interview transcript, Bourla said that “[the Commission President and I] exchanged text messages, if there was something that we needed to discuss,” and that von der Leyen had “sent me her phone [number].” These statements provided sufficient grounds for the Court to determine that the text messages likely existed at some point.
The Commission, by contrast, was found to have offered no credible detail about the searches it had conducted for the messages or about their fate. “It remains impossible to know with certainty,” the Court wrote, “whether the requested text messages still exist or whether they have been deleted and, if so, whether such a deletion took place deliberately or automatically.” The Commission also failed to clarify whether von der Leyen’s mobile phone had been replaced, and if so, what happened to the previous device and its data.
“The Commission did not provide in the contested decision any plausible explanation as to why it had not been able to find the requested documents,” the Court held.
Furthermore, the Court rejected the Commission’s argument that the messages did not constitute official documents because they were allegedly short-lived or lacked policy significance. Even if the messages were not registered in its document system, the Commission was still obligated to retain and account for them under EU transparency rules. “Institutions cannot deprive of all substance the right of access to documents which they hold by failing to register the documentation relating to their activities,” the Court held.
The Commission’s handling of the request, the Court concluded, “breached the principle of good administration laid down in Article 41 of the Charter.”
As a result, it annulled the Commission’s decision and ordered the institution to pay the applicants’ legal costs.
The judgment has led to calls for greater transparency within EU institutions and among the bloc’s leaders.
Rob Roos, a former Dutch MEP who was vice-president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament during the now-dubbed “Pfizergate scandal,” wrote how his legal challenge against the Commission was dismissed at the time.
“My case as an MEP was ruled inadmissible, while a foreign newspaper was accepted. Transparency isn’t optional. Democracy demands it. Back to court,” he wrote on X.
Hungarian MEP András László slammed the corruption scandals at the highest level in Brussels, which he claimed keep piling up. “Europeans want change in Brussels. We deserve better leadership! Qatargate, Pfizergate, Hololei, Reynders and money laundering, Green Deal and Timmermans, fake NGOs… The interests of Europeans are being sold out. Enough is enough!”
Several other European lawmakers demanded that the text messages now finally be released to see what agreements were reached over Covid-19 vaccines between von der Leyen and Bourla.
“She should have made her text messages in the Pfizergate affair public,” said Dutch MEP Marieke Ehlers. “This proves the need for the parliamentary commission of inquiry into transparency proposed by the Patriots for Europe [parliamentary group].”
Anna Bryłka, Polish MEP for the right-wing Confederation, and Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch of Vox, went further, calling on von der Leyen to resign following the judgment.
The European Commission is yet to formally respond to the judgment.
Hungary’s new sovereignty law: A firm stand against foreign influence
By Zoltán Kovács – About Hungary – May 14, 2025
On May 13, 2025, a new bill titled “On the Transparency of Public Life” was submitted to the Hungarian parliament. The proposal comes at a critical time when national sovereignty and democratic self-determination face mounting pressures from global influence networks. This legislation marks a significant step in Hungary’s commitment to shielding its public life from covert foreign interference.
The bill was introduced in response to escalating concerns about foreign-funded organizations and their involvement in shaping Hungary’s political discourse. Investigations and public disclosures in recent years have revealed that millions of dollars, primarily from American and Brussels-based entities, were funneled into Hungarian civil society groups and media outlets with clear ideological agendas. The government argues that these funds have been used not to strengthen democracy, but to distort it, aiming to manipulate voter sentiment and policy outcomes to suit external interests.
At the core of the proposed law is a simple but powerful principle: Democratic decision-making must reflect the will of the Hungarian people, not that of foreign powers or their proxies. The bill asserts that public life, including political activity and discourse, must be free from the influence of foreign financial resources. It expands the definition of foreign-funded influence to cover all legal entities and civil organizations whose activities, backed by external support, target national decision-making processes including elections, legislative debates, and public opinion shaping.
Just as the United States began cleaning house, freezing USAID funding, and initiating a major restructuring after widespread scandals, Hungary is also taking decisive steps to defend its democracy from covert political influence.
The legislation introduces a registry system for entities that engage in such activities. If passed, the Sovereignty Protection Office will identify organizations whose foreign-funded efforts jeopardize Hungary’s constitutional values. These organizations will be listed, required to obtain state approval before receiving any foreign support, and their leaders have to file public asset declarations. Violations, such as accepting funds without approval, can lead to fines of up to 25 times the value of unauthorized support, or even a ban on further public engagement.
Crucially, the bill builds upon overwhelming public support. A recent national consultation revealed that over 98 percent of respondents back stronger measures to defend Hungary’s sovereignty and oppose foreign political influence. These figures highlight a deep societal consensus: that Hungary’s future must be determined by Hungarians alone.
Far from restricting legitimate civic activity, the bill aims to restore transparency and accountability in the political process. Just as political parties are banned from receiving foreign funds under EU rules, non-party actors should be subject to scrutiny when their operations affect public decision-making.
In today’s geopolitical climate, defending sovereignty is no longer a theoretical concern, it is a practical necessity. Hungary’s new legislation sets a precedent in protecting democratic institutions from external manipulation and reaffirms the nation’s right to self-governance.
If passed, this bill will be more than just a legal reform—it will be a declaration that in Hungary, democracy belongs to the people, not to foreign financiers.
Cover-ups, lies, smears and fake news from Ursula could be EU’s own suicide pill
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 12, 2025
Previous disparaging comments about the past of European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and her grandparents’ role in the second world war might have seemed truculent by Russian commentators. And yet, as each month passes, we seem to be witnessing VDL’s political identity – and her vision of the role of the EU – more and more in line with Nazi Germany. The total annihilation of the free press in Brussels was not her doing, as she inherited the draconian system when she took office. But her efforts to broaden the silencing of journalists right across Europe is telling as it becomes even more an act of desperation to stamp out any free and feral reporting while her own team are pumping out these entirely fake narratives every day. The Russians are planning on invading Baltic states. Russia is the new threat to a democratic Europe. And the latest blag, EU is a bastion of peace and democracy “which doesn’t invade other countries”.
The lies and hypocrisy are at an all-time high and so it seems fitting that the draconian measures of arresting or detaining journalists, like Chay Bowes attempting to cover the Romanian elections, is understandable.
And yet there is no evidence at all to back up the preposterous claim that Moscow has eyes set on invading Baltic countries; there is also no evidence to back up the claim that Russia is the real threat to European democracy, which, in fact is being destroyed each day by the EU and its elites themselves. And as for the EU being this example of a peaceful trading bloc which doesn’t have any intention of attacking its own members… that might have been true. Until now.
These days the EU elite in Brussels are panicking about losing their relevance. It is looking at though the anti-EU candidate in Romania might well win the presidential elections there. If that happens, this means an alliance of three rebels in the pack – Hungary, Romania and Slovakia – are going to give the EU, let alone NATO a real headache. It might be overzealous to say it could be the end of the EU, but it may well certainly be the end of the EU as we know it. The extraordinary elitist dictatorship which has no accountability to its own mercurial ambitions and acts, might have to learnt a thing or two about democracy and start respecting a few of its principles. NATO, arguably, might be hit even harder as three members holding back the EU’s dream of organizing an EU army in Ukraine will have longer-term ramifications to the prestige and relevance of both those Brussels based institutions.
Have the cracks already started? Are these elitists like VDL losing their grip with reality? The threat by Estonia to “shoot down” any planes flying from Slovakia to Moscow is a good sign of the lunatics running the asylum as this WTF moment naturally is not reported by mainstream media and so the Slovakian PM himself had to stream a piece to camera for X just to confirm the madness.
Yet Ursula is really losing her mind. She’s out of control and this obsession with fighting Russia at any cost may well provide the defining moment where she and the EU project falls on its own sword. The election meddling, arrests of journalists and sheer scale of the fake news coming from the EU is starting to get noticed and seen for what it is – not only in these three recalcitrant EU member states but right across Europe. This is evident in the rise of far-right movements in France, Britain and Germany. It’s plain to see. More and more people are simply no longer buying the BS that comes to their TV screens by these leaders in Brussels on immigration, COVID, LGBT and of course boosting EU defence budgets to new giddy heights. In the UK for example, the government is looking at how to cut disability benefits to its own citizens as the national coffers are empty due to 7.5 illegal migrants receiving state benefits, free housing and health care.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Just recently we read that the EU accuses Hungarian populist leader of pouring cash into a number of media outlets to boost his popularity. And yet HUNDREDS of journalists in Brussels each day working for all of Europe’s main broadcasters, even the BBC when the UK was a member, receive free productions services saving them possibly hundreds of millions of euros each year. We don’t know the figure because it’s all shrouded in secrecy, naturally, but the laughable accusation made by the EU must be noted for the pot calling the kettle black.
Hungary, Slovakia and soon Romania will all be targets for smear campaigns by Brussels-based so-called journalists as part of the new objective of VDL and her cronies. This is coming on a grand scale and the more this is intensified, you can literally watch the popularity of the far-right parties in ‘Old Europe’ rise each day. The model has an autodestruct facility built into it which fools like VDL can’t even see as they are too fixated with power grabbing and the dirty tricks which are needed therein. But the whole machinery is fed on lies which still too many gullible Europeans believe whether it be about Russia’s “threat” or electric cars, alternative energy and of course vaccines. All these areas represent hundreds of billions of euros being transferred from the public coffers to the private ones and there are still, sadly, a good number of ignorant Europeans who can’t join up the dots.
