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Day: January 8, 2025
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The latest in sports
More NFL coaches are fired, the Jets interview their former coach, a star wideout is staying put, a Cy Young Award winner signs, the No. 1 team in men’s college basketball is upset, a judge rules that a university’s firing of its former football coach is justified and Elon Musk eyes buying a marquee sports franchise. Correspondent Gethin Coolbaugh reports.
A former Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) employee is privately helping Senate Democrats solicit hostile testimony about her former boss, Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the country’s next defense secretary.
The former employee, Kat Dugan, worked at CVA for eight months while Hegseth served as CEO of the organization, and has sent messages to former CVA colleagues urging them to contact the Senate Armed Services Committee and assuring them they can do so anonymously. She has also provided closed-door testimony to the committee, according to correspondence obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Dugan, formerly Kathleen Volandt, received a poor performance review in 2014 when she was serving as CVA’s North Carolina state director. Shortly thereafter, she filed for short-term disability, then long-term disability, and ultimately tendered her resignation in December 2014. Shawn Pattison, who served as CVA’s national field director at the time, told the Free Beacon that Dugan “consistently fell short of performance expectations.” A copy of her performance review reviewed by the Free Beacon substantiates that assessment.
Pattison offered praise for Hegseth’s leadership abilities, noting that he “transformed CVA from a pilot project into the organization that delivered on [Veterans Affairs] reforms.” He added: “His leadership was what pushed us” and made the job “one of the most fulfilling professional experiences I’ve had so far.”
The text messages and documents shed new light on the high-profile opposition campaign against Hegseth, which has played out in the press and comes largely from anonymous sources. The news could also bolster claims from Hegseth and his allies, who have blamed the negative publicity on “disgruntled employees” waging a “manufactured media takedown.”
In fact, this is not the first time Dugan has been linked to unflattering media reports about Hegseth. In March 2018, when Hegseth was floated as a possible nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, his lawyer sent Dugan a cease-and-desist letter accusing her of making “false and defamatory statements” about Hegseth to J. Arthur Bloom, a writer who has contributed to The Spectator, “intended to damage Mr. Hegseth’s reputation and his potential future employment prospects.”
That same day the letter was sent, The Spectator published an article reporting that, while at CVA, Hegseth promoted a “fraternity-like culture that involved heavy drinking” and turned a blind eye to a sexual assault complaint against another employee. The story, which cited unnamed sources, was published under the magazine’s pseudonymous byline “Cockburn.” The headline asked, “Is Pete Hegseth Really a Suitable Candidate for Secretary of Veterans Affairs?”
Bloom declined to comment on whether he wrote the article, which made reference to a “sexual assault complaint” filed by a female CVA employee. He did, however, share a copy of a letter that Dugan wrote to an attorney two months after departing CVA regarding that sexual assault complaint—which did not pertain to Hegseth—in which Dugan described a “sexist and drinking culture” that “set the stage for this kind of incident.”
The Free Beacon spoke to the CVA staffer who filed the sexual assault complaint and whose name is being withheld in this article. She said that her complaint involved another male employee and that she did not experience broader problems with the organization or with Hegseth.
Dugan, she said, has contacted her “a few times” to ask her to talk to the Senate Armed Services Committee about Hegseth, but she has declined. She told the Free Beacon her complaint was resolved internally years ago and that Hegseth had no involvement in the matter.
In recent weeks, several news reports, most prominently a piece in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer, have accused Hegseth of drinking heavily while working at CVA and as a Fox News host, of promoting a misogynistic work environment, and of mismanaging corporate funds, accusations that echo those aired in The Spectator six years ago.
“A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events,” Mayer wrote.
Both Bloom, now a self-employed blogger, and Dugan, who now appears to sell health tinctures online, remain staunch opponents of Hegseth.
Bloom published a piece on his Substack urging the New Yorker’s Mayer to hit Hegseth “harder” and charged that his nomination is garnering support from GOP senators because he is pro-Israel, or, as Bloom put it, “on the right side of the Likud crime syndicate.” (He has also accused Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro of loyalty to Israel over the United States.)
Dugan, meanwhile, has pressed former colleagues to contact Democratic committee aide Jonathan Clark and assured them their anonymity will be protected. “When calling, state ‘I am calling as a whistleblower and understand that my identity will be protected’ once confirmation is received, simply state any information. They are asking for any supporting documents,” she wrote in a message obtained by the Free Beacon, adding that whistleblower laws ensure that “anyone speaking to the below contact is strictly anonymous and CANNOT be subpoenaed to testify IF a confirmation hearing proceeds.”
Hegseth allies, who claim Dugan is the source of anonymous negative stories about him dating back to 2018, say her rocky employment history with CVA raises questions about her credibility and the motivations for her claims, arguing that she was a poor performer and left the organization on bad terms.
Dugan was employed by CVA for eight months, starting in April 2014.
In October 2014, before Dugan left the organization, Nathan Martin, Dugan’s direct supervisor, wrote in a performance review that Dugan’s work was “lackluster as compared to other state directors,” according to a copy obtained by the Free Beacon.
“Her ability to lead a team is average, at best. Whether it is focusing on the wrong faults, not praising the right strengths, or personality conflicts, her leadership is rather ineffective,” the review stated. “While it may seem odd, I do believe there is potential to lead in almost everyone. However, it has not manifested itself in tangential [sic] form with Kathleen.”
Hegseth, according to Martin, “worked very hard to make sure the organization did well.”
“I’ve always considered him an exceptional leader,” he told the Free Beacon.
The post Source Behind Hegseth Claims Is Disgruntled Former Employee appeared first on .
PANAMA CITY, Fla.—CNN anchor Jake Tapper never apologized for airing a “devastating” report that falsely portrayed Navy veteran Zachary Young as an “illegal profiteer” operating in a “black market” during America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Young testified Tuesday.
Young is suing CNN in a Florida court for $1 billion in damages. He argues that Tapper’s November 2021 portrayal and an accompanying segment irreparably harmed his reputation and destroyed his contracting company, Nemex Enterprises, by airing false and defamatory claims about his efforts to get Afghans out of the country as the Taliban took control.
The trial has been over two years in the making, with CNN facing a number of setbacks in the lead-up. Young rejected a settlement offer from the network and pointed to its disparaging coverage of Fox News’s $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Jurors during Monday’s selection process appeared open to forcing CNN to cough up a 10-figure payout to Young.
CNN removed the term “black market” from the online version of its segment. The network also issued an on-air apology acknowledging Young had not broken any laws, but anchor Pamela Brown was filling in for Tapper that day.
“Did Mr. Tapper deliver that apology?” the plaintiff’s lead attorney, Devin Freedman, asked.
“No, he never did,” Young replied.
During his testimony, Young produced his 2018 contract with DynCorp. It included a clause indicating that he would be terminated without severance if he participated in a “black market” in his host country.
“It’s hard to explain to someone outside my world how devastating” it is to be accused of operating in a black market, Young testified. “It’s devastating when you’re labeled a criminal all over the world.”
Before proceedings began, Judge William Henry told the jury that Young “did not act illegally or criminally” and “did not take money from Afghans.”
Young said the CNN report took a toll on his family, particularly his disabled, 75-year-old mother, whom he financially supports. Jurors were shown photos of her, and some smiled at a picture of Young and his German Shepherd. During Monday’s selection process, only 1 of the roughly 40 prospective jurors admitted to “regularly” watching the network, and only 2 said they knew who Tapper was.
The November 2021 segment on The Lead with Jake Tapper centered on private contractors using an illegal “black market” and charging “exorbitant fees” to evacuate people from Afghanistan as the Taliban regained control during the Biden-Harris administration’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal. The segment singled out Young, who was given only two hours to respond when CNN national security correspondent Alex Marquardt reached out for comment.
“CNN felt they had a sensational story that would drive ratings and they didn’t care about the truth,” an attorney for Young, Kyle Roche, said during his opening statement Tuesday. “CNN chose theater over truth and destroyed the life of an American patriot.”
He said Young helped 22 women evacuate Afghanistan on behalf of Audible and Bloomberg L.P.
“The facts didn’t matter,” Roche said. He noted that CNN’s editors admitted in internal messages that the segment was “full of holes like Swiss cheese” and “80% emotion and 20% obscured fact.”
Lead CNN attorney David Axelrod, during his own opening statement, called CNN’s reporting “tough and fair and accurate” and argued that it “never implied Young did anything criminal.”
“There is no there there,” Axelrod said. There’s “no evidence in this case that there was anything sensational about this story.”
He also admitted that President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was a “disaster.”
“I served a very important job that the [U.S.] government wasn’t able to do,” Young said during his testimony.
CNN has faced a number of pre-trial losses since Young filed suit in June 2022. Henry ruled Thursday that, at trial, Young could use Tapper calling Fox News a “cancer on the democracy we have” and other disparaging remarks he made about the network in November 2023. He also ruled that Young’s attorneys could present text messages that the veteran says will show that CNN employees had an agenda to smear him as a war profiteer. In one, Marquardt told colleagues he wanted to “nail this Zachary Young mfucker.” In another, CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan called Young “a shit.”
CNN’s legal team is set to cross-examine Young starting Wednesday morning.
The post Jake Tapper Never Apologized for ‘Devastating’ Report That Falsely Accused Navy Vet of Operating in ‘Black Market,’ Testimony Reveals appeared first on .
On Tuesday, the first bill of the 119th Congress was passed. All Congressional Republicans, along with 48 Democrats, voted in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which would require federal authorities to detain illegal immigrants convicted of theft-related crimes. The Senate is expected to vote on the bill later this week. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) stated that securing the border is the nation’s “number one priority.” As a member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and the Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management, Johnson discusses the GOP’s plans to secure the border, combat terrorism, and reduce government spending. Big changes are coming to content moderation on Facebook and Instagram after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to restore free speech on his platforms and work with President Trump. In a statement on Tuesday the Meta CEO says they are getting rid of fact-checkers and replacing them with a community notes system similar to what X (formerly Twitter) has. Zuckerberg explained he hopes to combat the censorship that formed on his platform with sweeping change. Senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center, Daniel Cochrane shares why this is a step in the right direction but explains how social media algorithms still pose censorship issues. Plus, commentary from columnist David Marcus. Photo Credit: AP
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Three weeks after Donald Trump’s reelection victory sent cryptocurrencies on a bull run, Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., spotted an opportunity.
Collins started buying thousands of dollars’ worth of a meme coin called Ski Mask Dog. His legally mandated disclosure of those purchases helped drive the coin’s price up more than 100 percent.
The purchases once again raised the question of whether members of Congress should trade assets that might fall under their oversight. It also highlighted just how rare it is for members of Congress to buy or sell crypto — despite the growing, bipartisan enthusiasm for unleashing it on Americans.
Only four members of Congress, including Collins, reported buying or selling cryptocurrencies over the past two years, according to a review of trading information compiled by data provider 2iQ. All four were members of the House: two Democrats and two Republicans.
The lack of trading activity suggests that the ranks of lawmakers holding crypto has not changed much since December 2021, when a Wall Street Journal review found that only 11 members of Congress were invested in it.
Members of Congress and industry observers pointed to a range of factors that could explain the reticence, from skittish financial advisers to conflict-of-interest concerns. One crypto skeptic, meanwhile, said he thought the lack of trading activity might simply be a case of “do as I say, not as I do.”
“If those numbers are accurate, and only a few members of Congress own it, it reflects where most Americans are,” said Mark Hays, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “Most Americans don’t see a lot of utility and are worried about how speculative and risky crypto looks.”
Opinions on the Hill itself vary wildly for why members of Congress hold so little cryptocurrency — and whether they should. One enthusiastic senator told The Intercept that Congress was just too old to get what crypto was all about, and a more skeptical one said she was glad so few members created conflicts of interest by owning securities they are tasked with regulating.
“Crypto Capital”
The dearth of crypto trading on Capitol Hill is especially stark because the last Congress adopted crypto as one of its pet causes, and the new Congress seems even more eager to push crypto into the mainstream.
In May 2024, the House overwhelmingly passed the industry’s favorite piece of legislation. The bipartisan bill, called the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, would transfer oversight of many digital assets from the Securities and Exchange Commission to a more lightly staffed regulator seen as friendlier to the industry, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The Senate never took the bill up, but the November election made clear that crypto would have many champions in both chambers of Congress.
Ahead of the ballot, crypto-allied super PACs amassed a $200 million war chest and spent with abandon to prop up candidates from both parties willing to toe the industry line. The results were very good for crypto, which pulled off a complete sweep in contested Senate elections and racked up a winning record in House races.
“Our Founding Fathers would have been bitcoiners,” said Republican Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who unseated the incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown. “They believed in decentralization of power and control. That’s what this is.”
Moreno said he held bitcoin but sold it all before the election.
Then there was the man at the top of the ticket — Donald Trump — who has promised to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Trump is backing a crypto platform of his own, for which he is assuming no liability but where his family could take 75 percent of revenues from the cryptocurrency sold on the platform.
Photo: Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Crypto Congress
The hyperbolic statements of support from many elected officials about crypto contrast sharply with what they actually hold in their portfolios.
Back in 2021, a Wall Street Journal review found that only two out of 100 senators and nine out of 435 House representatives held crypto.
In the Congress that just ended, only four members bought or sold crypto, despite an industrywide rebound in the wake of the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fraud.
Besides Collins, the other crypto traders in the last Congress were Reps. Barry Moore, R-Ala.; Shri Thanedar, D-Mich.; and Jeff Jackson, D-N.C.
During the same time period, 151 members of Congress reported making more than 21,000 trades overall of assets that included bonds, stocks, and mutual funds.
Two crypto enthusiasts in the Senate gave different answers for why so few of their colleagues are getting in on the action.
“I joke that the median age in the Senate is about 107.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he thought it might be a lack of familiarity with crypto in general.
“I joke that the median age in the Senate is about 107,” Cruz told The Intercept.
The ignorance, Cruz said, could pose a problem for would-be backers of regulations: “It’s one of the dangerous things, when Congress tries to regulate crypto, is there are so few members that have any familiarity with it, that there’s an enormous danger of wreaking havoc and unintended consequences, which is one of the reasons I have been the leading advocate of a light touch from government on crypto to give it space to grow.”
That line of argument is grating for crypto skeptics like Hays.
“We have argued that, for the most part, the industry already has a regulatory framework that it needs to follow, because even though it offers products via new technological platforms, these products aren’t that different from existing securities,” Hays said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., thought the lack of crypto investors on the Hill might be due to how such purchases would be perceived.
“We’re already beat up over owning stocks, so why add another asset that you’re just going to get beat up over?”
“I don’t think they want to buy the brain damage of criticism,” she said in an interview. “We’re already beat up over owning stocks, so why add another asset that you’re just going to get beat up over? I think that’s part of it.”
Lummis is one of the most bombastically enthusiastic members of Congress when it comes to bitcoin, and has said that she owned five bitcoins before putting her holdings into a blind trust.
Since Trump’s election, bitcoin has soared from a price of about $60,000 over the summer to around $100,000 this week. Asked whether she still holds any of the cryptocurrency, Lummis said, “I hope it’s still there, obviously.”
The “Let’s Go Brandon” Debacle
One of the thinning number of elected officials to call for strict crypto regulation is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who said she was grateful that few members dabble themselves.
“I think it’s a terrible conflict of interest to own individual investments where Congress has important oversight,” she told The Intercept. “It’s just a plain old conflict of interest.”
If lawmakers needed an object lesson in how quickly crypto trading can create conflict-of-interest allegations, the saga of Madison Cawthorn and the “Let’s Go Brandon” coin provided one.
Cawthorn, who represented North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District for a single scandal-stained House term, bought 180 billion of the anti-Joe Biden meme coins in December 2021 at prices below market value. He then went on to promote the coin and sell it, all the while failing to follow disclosure rules. The House Ethics Committee ultimately fined Cawthorn $14,000.
During the meme coin’s monthlong life, Let’s Go Brandon — named for a right-wing slogan code for “Fuck Joe Biden” — soared to a $570 million market capitalization on claims that it would sponsor a NASCAR driver before plummeting to $0 on news that it would not. Litigation over the coin lives on.
“Memecoins have literally no usefulness beyond their buzz, their lulz.”
According to Garrick Hileman, an independent analyst who previously served as the head of research at Blockchain.com, such rapid changes of fortune are not uncommon for meme coins.
“What people typically mean when they discuss a meme coin is something that doesn’t even actually pretend to offer anything other than entertainment,” Hileman said. “Something may be funny, something that captures a moment. It’s not even pretending to solve something like the high costs of cross-border payments.”
Hileman said some digital assets seem to have found their footing for certain uses, such as Bitcoin as an alternative to gold.
“Meme coins, on the other hand, have literally no usefulness beyond their buzz, their lulz, whatever narrative is propping it up,” Hileman said. “And if that narrative or attention shifts, then you see the price collapse.”
Skiing to Profit?
None of that appears to have dissuaded Collins, the representative from Georgia, from buying up Ski Mask Dog. A classic meme coin, Ski Mask Dog promotes itself with pictures of dogs, in ski masks, and calls itself a bulwark against “manipulation by powerful entities.”
After news of Collins’s first buy became public, the coin more than doubled in value to gain over $100 million in market capitalization, a shift that cryptocurrency outlets attributed to his purchase.
Collins did not return a request for comment, but he’s previously given a curt explanation for buying Ski Mask Dog.
“I liked the coins, so I bought them,” Collins told the outlet Decrypt. “Washington and Wall Street have stigmatized emerging technology in the crypto ecosystem for far too long, and it’s about time that we start treating this industry with the respect it deserves.”
The enthusiasm for meme coins divides Collins from many in the crypto community. Investor and financial adviser Ric Edelman, the founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, said that there was a “level of skepticism” about meme coins from the rest of the industry.
“The vast majority of them are more speculative in nature, don’t have a legitimate business use case behind them and often are involved in scams and manipulative trading activities,” he said. “So it’s not merely that members of Congress shouldn’t be doing this; I don’t think the vast majority of Americans should be doing this.”
Edelman said he would support forcing members of Congress to put all of their holdings — crypto or otherwise — in a blind trust so they would not be able to personally manage their investments.
During the last session of Congress, then-Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., sponsored legislation that would have mandated the blind trusts. Dozens of bipartisan co-sponsors signed on, but the bill never got a vote.
Hileman, the crypto researcher, said he was wary of members of Congress buying meme coins, though he called the issue “more intellectually complicated” than straightforward bribery.
“My knee-jerk reaction is, of course they shouldn’t be doing this,” Hileman said. “It just seems like the signaling value of a sitting member of Congress is quite powerful, and the potential for abuse is significant.”
The post These Are the Members of Congress Who Are Trading Crypto appeared first on The Intercept.
