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In this era of escalating trade tensions and geopolitical uncertainty, the U.S. cannot afford to cede another critical industry to China. Though we have long stood as the global leader in biotechnology, we are now at risk of losing that position, just as we did with semiconductors a generation ago.

American innovation brought about the semiconductor revolution. For decades, we supplied the world with those innovations, too: U.S. manufacturers produced nearly 40% of all semiconductors in 1990. Today, that number is hardly over 10%. And while the Chinese chip industry has long lagged behind global leaders, China has spent billions catching up and is expected to have captured nearly 25% of the worldwide chip manufacturing market by 2030. 

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History is about to repeat itself, this time in the biotech sector, as we write in a new report with our fellow Commissioners on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB). The Chinese government has been heavily investing in its biotech sector for decades, and while many of the most consequential discoveries in the field were made by American scientists in American labs, we are now quickly losing ground to China in everything from the production of critical medications to the development of defense applications.

The NSCEB has put forward recommendations to speed up the American biotech sector while slowing down Chinese advancement, but the successful implementation of those recommendations will require real, tangible collaboration between industry and government. 

Here, we highlight two critical areas for immediate action: 

1. Limit the influence of adversarial capital on American biotech

Too many American biotech companies, struggling to raise funding and traverse the “valley of death”—the phase of technology development when research funding runs dry but before commercialization and profit are possible—have accepted capital from foreign investors, including Chinese entities. 

Once those entities hold a stake in an American business, they may influence the trajectory of product development, or even work to degrade the company’s relationship with the American government. For instance, some forms of Chinese investment make companies ineligible for many government contracts. At the least, they gain insight into the state of American biotech and access to valuable intellectual property. China’s recent restrictions on investment in American companies only further demonstrate the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness to alter investment regulation as part of their strategy for competition. 

Biotech companies have a responsibility to better understand the dangers of adversarial investment. Unlike the pharmaceutical industry, biotech is relatively uncoordinated, with fewer centralized bodies dedicated to regulation or information sharing. This also means there are minimal mechanisms for a unified response to those dangers. Therefore, industry leaders must organize to take up this issue, not just for the sake of national security, but also because it’s good business: protecting our biotech ecosystem’s intellectual property is critical for its economic success.

Government action is also essential in combatting this threat—that’s why the NSCEB has recommended that Congress create the Independence Investment Fund. Managed by an expert, non-government partner, the fund would back start-ups that strengthen American national security but are struggling to attract traditional investors. It would support businesses in exactly the situation that most often leads to foreign investment, allowing up-and-coming American biotech companies to survive difficult periods in their development and successfully enter the global market. This infusion of strategically deployed federal capital into our biotech sector would make a disproportionate impact at this critical moment in the development of the industry, paving the way for private investment.

2. Create better information flow between the biotech sector and the American government, particularly the intelligence community

If we believe, as we NSCEB Commissioners do, that economic security is national security, we must enhance reciprocal communication between our intelligence establishments and industry. Briefing business leaders on the risks their companies face will allow them to take action in the boardroom. To a similar end, we must manage the over-classification of intelligence that often prevents the sharing of important findings with civilian business leaders, particularly when complex geopolitical dynamics are involved. 

Greater collaboration will also permit our government to better understand the industries they seek to protect: access to the perspectives of biotech leadership will allow the intelligence community to recognize the most pressing issues for our government to monitor. We also must involve many more people across government with knowledge of biology and science, outside of the traditional and narrow framing of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. Without people in the room who can understand the biotech sector and its needs, we will fail to effectively navigate this increasingly important theater for U.S.-China geopolitical competition. 

The risks presented by adversarial capital and the siloing of information are just two opportunities for the kind of public-private collaboration that could protect our biotech industry. And importantly, like the other areas for action the NSCEB identifies in our report, they are issues we have the ability to fix before it’s too late. 

Decades ago, we failed to preserve our position as the global leader in semiconductor manufacturing. That error required us to take extraordinarily expensive, difficult, and uncertain measures to regain what we lost. Today, as we face a similar risk with biotech, we must not make the same mistake again.

New details say Gurtsiev died in a blast during a meetup with a man from a gay dating app, who allegedly carried a bag with a hidden bomb planted by unknown individuals.

Kicking the can down the road: A group of keffiyeh-clad students “descended on Manhattan Criminal Court on Wednesday to face formal arraignment for their roles in a violent takeover of Columbia University’s Butler Library,” our Jon Levine reports from the scene. Though their lawyer asked the court to consider dismissal (and accused Israel of genocide), they aren’t off the hook yet and are due back in court in July.

“A total of 56 defendants were arraigned at the courthouse, with a few joined by their nervous parents,” writes Levine. “Among the defendants present were Ramona Sarsgaard, the nepobaby daughter of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. Dima Aboukasm—whom Mayor Eric Adams once hailed as a peace activist—also had her day in court. They were represented by Matthew W. Daloisio, the same attorney who represented those arrested for storming Columbia’s Hamilton Hall in 2024.”

“Daloisio defended his clients’ conduct, saying they ‘set up a teach-in in a library.’ He asked the court ‘to consider dismissal in the interest of justice’ before requesting and receiving an ‘adjournment for supporting depositions’ from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which requires law enforcement to produce documents ‘signing off on the criminal allegations [and] saying the charges are true,’ local defense attorney Jason Goldman told the Washington Free Beacon. Goldman speculated that Daloisio ‘wants this adjournment to see in fact whether Bragg’s office upholds the arrests and moves the case forward in a criminal prosecution.'”

If last summer is anything to go off of, Bragg will do the opposite. Stay tuned for more.

READ MORE: Dismiss Our Cases, Keffiyeh-Clad Columbia Radicals Tell NYC Court

Mugged by reality: Jake Tapper, the CNN host best known for ignoring the Biden cover-up before writing a best-selling book about it, is starting to learn a thing or two about the Democratic Party—mainly that it’s full of “a bunch of woke scolds who are obsessed with racism and routinely denigrate normal men,” writes our Andrew Stiles.

Tapper “discussed his belated epiphany—many years after the Democratic Party started hating men and denouncing everything as racist—on a podcast with tech baron Scott Galloway.” He recounted an appearance on a different, “left-leaning” podcast in which the cohost—since identified as Jason Stewart of How Long Gone—suggested Tapper’s football-playing teenage son could be racist because he wants to be a police officer.

“That was the big laugh, and then I got dragged in the comments and all that stuff, and I thought to myself, ‘This is why you fuckers are losing elections,'” Tapper said.

“Alas, Tapper is unlikely to reflect on the media’s role in perpetuating the Democratic Party’s radically antagonistic attitudes toward police officers and young men who enjoy football and war,” Stiles writes. “CNN in particular has been one of the party’s most reliable allies in promoting the woke views that Tapper finally claims to realize are obnoxious and condescending. Cool epiphany, bro. Thanks for noticing.”

READ MORE: Jake Tapper Finally Notices His Beloved Democrats Are Woke Scolds Who Hate Men and Think Everything Is Racist

Rotten apple: Donald Trump and his allies have long accused New York AG Letitia James of abusing her office. Now, a former high-ranking official in her office is saying the same.

Former assistant New York solicitor general Brian Ginsberg, our Andrew Kerr reports, “warned the Supreme Court in a May 12 filing that James is abusing her prosecutorial powers in an ongoing Title IX case against a western New York school district over four disparate sexual misconduct allegations between its students.” He took issue with legal maneuverings James used to interfere in the case, given that a state attorney general like James is typically “barred from intervening in legal disagreements between individuals or small groups of people.”

“The same New York State Attorney General who initiated this action against the School District has been judicially chastised for abusing her power to initiate representative actions to launch ‘predatory lawsuits that seek to impose punishment while searching for a crime,'” Ginsberg wrote in his filing. Sounds familiar.

READ MORE: Letitia James’s Former Colleague Says ‘Opportunistic’ NY AG Abused Her Power

In other news:

• Muhammed Sinwar, the de facto leader of Hamas and younger brother of slain October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar, is dead, Bibi Netanyahu announced Wednesday. The IDF took him out in a strike targeting a Hamas control center beneath a hospital.
• DEI is not dead in San Francisco, where the public school system is rolling out a “Grading for Equity” program that will “reportedly exclude homework or weekly tests from final grades and allow students to pass with scores as low as 21 out of 100.”
• The FBI apprehended yet another suspect in the sprawling Feeding Our Future fraud scheme following a fresh raid on a nonprofit implicated in the scheme. The individual, Hibo Daar, attempted to flee to Dubai after news of the raid surfaced. Read the Free Beacon report about the country’s largest COVID fraud scheme here.

The post Columbia Library Stormers Stay on the Hook (For Now). Plus, Has Jake Tapper Seen the Light? appeared first on .

Here is an inconvenient truth: our forebears used the unrestrained free market to effect a staggering destruction of continental wildlife, an unforgivable crime against evolution in America. They believed all life was created by a deity, and therefore extinction was impossible. Biblical ideas about the utility of animals encouraged them to think of creatures like beavers, sea otters, bison, passenger pigeons, and many others as simple market commodities, without value except for the money they might bring. The end result was myopic, almost casual obliteration of one ancient species after another. As a 2018 article in the National Academy of Sciences put it, since the start of the colonial age, here and elsewhere, we have destroyed half a million years of Earth’s genetics, a near “worst case scenario.”

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Enacting that history, many Americans enriched themselves. Southerners who slaughtered snowy egrets on their nests for fashion industry feathers, westerners who shot down entire bison herds for tongues and hide leather, “wolfers” who poisoned predators on behalf of the livestock industry—for their efforts, many of them joined the middle class. In a single year, market hunters in Bozeman, Mont. shipped out the body parts of about 7,700 elk, 22,000 deer, 12,000 pronghorns, 200 bighorn sheep, 1,680 wolves, 520 coyotes, and 225 bears at the time. It was a haul of wild animal parts that netted them $1.6 million in today’s dollars. They told Yellowstone’s superintendent that so long as the government stood aside, they planned to continue doing exactly as they wished. To be sure, the unrestrained freedom to destroy the country’s wild legacy for money bought many of these people houses, islands, and ranches. John Jacob Astor, one of the country’s first millionaires, became a famous and wealthy celebrity through the near eradication of beavers and otters and the vital, ancient ecologies they created.

During the years after the Civil War, America embraced an economic philosophy called laissez-faire, celebrating the notion that government should stand aside and let capitalism work. Both political parties believed in it so ardently that the federal government failed to act to save bison (now our National Mammal) or passenger pigeons, both among America’s most numerous and iconic species. In the 1870s, Congress twice considered bills to make the non-Native market hunt for female bison illegal. Neither attempt became law. The first successful federal law the U.S. established to halt the slaughter of wildlife was place-specific when Congress created the country’s first national park, Yellowstone, and banned hunting in the area.

In an environment so regulation-free, America’s bison population plunged from roughly 30 million in 1800 to fewer than 10 million in 1865. At that point, railroad transport and new uses for bison leather ramped up a post-war, industrial level of animal destruction. In a too-late effort to halt the mayhem, General Philip Sheridan enlisted the departments of War, Interior, and Indian Affairs to drive market hunters off Indian lands. But few animals of any kind were left to save. In 1885, an estimate of 1,000 bison remained alive in the West, so few it was a scramble to preserve enough genetic diversity to save the species at all. When Congress in 1894 imposed stiff fines for killing bison and other animals in Yellowstone, Sheridan’s troops were the only protectors a weak government could muster.

Then there’s the pigeon story. Of all the grim capitalist crimes against American animals (and there is competition), among them are the 1840s extinction of our northern hemisphere penguin, the great auk, and an 1886 sale in London of the skins of 400,000 American hummingbirds. But the passenger pigeon’s fate occupies a special place on the shelf of historical horrors. Having thrived on the continent for 15 million years, pigeons couldn’t survive a mere three centuries of the free market. By 1914, they were entirely erased. Extinction is one of those non-ideological “objective facts” and “truths” it’s hard to deny. While I’d love to see passenger pigeons de-extincted, that wouldn’t change the historical lesson.

Until Congress passed a mild federal law called the Lacey Act in 1900, which banned interstate shipment of some market-killed animals and their body parts, America never stepped up to rein in capitalism’s assault on the natural world. We allowed the Singer Sewing Machine company to log down the last habitat with a verified ivory-billed woodpecker population as late as the 1940s! Destroying species for money was an American freedom. Some argued it was part of our “franchise.” In truth, it was the best example of what we mean now when we say something is “Like the Wild West,” a place where human nature goes entirely unrestrained.

Economists have long used the fate of America’s bison and pigeons in particular to argue that, sans effective regulation, market forces inevitably diminish nature’s diversity. The truth is, if you’re an American, an often unacknowledged result of our past of unfettered capitalism is to diminish the world you get to experience. As early as the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau lamented all the species already gone from his time: “I should not like to think some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.” The past does not remain in the past for us, either. A great many charismatic creatures are missing from 21st-century America because of the actions of our ancestors.

Read More: How the Endangered Species Act Saved America

Yet as part of the Trump administration’s blizzard of executive orders and business-friendly policies, in March, Lee Zeldin, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reframed the purpose of his agency, announcing “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.” President Trump followed that with an executive order, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, that accused historians of “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” Both these signal an effort to reframe our national story, emphasizing a return to the kind of unbridled economic freedom that once characterized the country’s history, and coincidentally compromised many of America’s most dramatic wild spectacles.

Much of this history, however, is in danger of being scrubbed, canceled, or banned from libraries. If that were to happen, it would leave future generations perplexed about why a half-century ago the U.S. needed to pass legislation like the Endangered Species Act in 1973. It would also create a public consciousness that is unable to understand our country’s long practice of extending rights to those who lack them. While a new, politicized version of history is bound to deny it, expanding the circle of moral inclusion and compassion has long characterized Americans as a people. It is who we are.

Is this story ideological? I don’t think so. It calls on an undeniable history to point out how nature will fare when governments are missing in action with respect to environmental regulation. It’s an American story that urges us to be very suspicious of a future of unregulated capitalism. The purpose of history, after all, is not to make some look good and others bad. Its purpose is, or should be, to let us consult the past so we can create the future we want.

As the plight of ordinary Ukrainians resulting from Russia’s ongoing attacks on their country falls off Western news coverage a group of Italian bike enthusiasts decide to do something about it.

You may be familiar with POTUS (President of the United States), MAGA (Make America Great Again), and GOP (Grand Old Party), but there’s a new acronym that President Donald Trump isn’t a fan of.

Short for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined the phrase shortened as “TACO” to describe the President’s pattern of making major disruptive policy moves, such as levying hefty tariffs on effectively every country in the world, before reversing course after the moves cause panic and economic shock. 

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The shorthand, which has been picked up by others, has clearly ruffled Trump’s feathers.

“Don’t ever say what you said, that’s a nasty question,” Trump shot back when a reporter asked him about “TACO” on Wednesday. “To me that’s the nastiest question.”

“You call that chickening out?” Trump said. “It’s called negotiation,” adding that he “usually [has] the opposite problem—they say, ‘you’re too tough!’”

Trump’s apparent sensitivity will likely only ensure the acronym’s longevity among critics. “I want to be famous for my dumb joke, definitely, but I also don’t want the President to ruin the U.S. economy,” Armstrong told Axios. “And so I’d like to have both of those things, if at all possible.”

But TACO isn’t the only acronym to take off in Trump’s second term. Here’s a guide to some of the others to know.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)

“DEI is DOA,” Trump’s son Don Jr. posted on X in March, referencing the medical acronym for “dead on arrival.” It’s a common refrain among Republicans and supporters of the President’s push to dismantle diversity-related policies across the federal government and private sector. Whereas Trump’s first-term Administration focused most of its attacks on “CRT” (Critical Race Theory), his 2024 campaign and current Administration have made “DEI” a main target and scapegoat.

DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency)

What started in the 2010s as a nickname for an internet-viral shiba inu and morphed into a “meme coin” became an official initialism in November when then-President-elect Trump announced the Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory body spearheaded by tech billionaire Elon Musk. The initiative, aimed at slashing federal spending, has overseen mass layoffs and sweeping cuts to government programs in the early months of Trump’s second term.

Musk, who announced on Wednesday that he is exiting the Trump Administration, has long hyped up the Doge meme, including naming a SpaceX satellite “DOGE-1,” and boosted the cryptocurrency, including when he changed the then-Twitter logo to the dog-image meme.

Knock, knock … it’s @DOGE pic.twitter.com/yFDXlZgnmn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2025

FAFO (F-ck Around, Find Out)

Amid a dispute over deportations with Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro in January, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform an AI-generated image of himself wearing a fedora with the letters FAFO in red on a sign next to him. “This is awesome,” Musk said, resharing the image on X. Trump had previously reshared a post by right-wing internet troll that said “5 days until FAFO” alongside an image of Trump, on Jan. 15, five days before Trump’s second-term inauguration.

The acronym, which stands for “f-ck around, find out,” has been adopted “as a slogan” by far-right groups, according to Merriam Webster, but is also widely used across the ideological spectrum “as an expression of schadenfreude” about someone receiving negative consequences for their actions. The Times of London dubbed it “Fafo diplomacy” when Trump pressured Colombia to quickly reverse its opposition to accepting deportation flights after Trump threatened to hike tariffs on the nation’s exports. 

( @realDonaldTrump – Truth Social Post )
( Donald J. Trump – Jan 26, 2025, 2:51 PM ET ) pic.twitter.com/qxrSqAKZ6m

— Donald J. Trump TRUTH POSTS (@TruthTrumpPosts) January 26, 2025

MAHA (Make America Healthy Again)

MAHA is a spin on Trump’s tried-and-tested slogan “Make America Great Again”—only with a focus on health. It took off in 2024 after Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—known for his fringe and sometimes disinformation-based views on health including vaccine skepticism—suspended his presidential campaign and threw his support behind Donald Trump. Trump nominated Kennedy to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Kennedy has since continued to use the slogan for government initiatives. 

TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome)

“Are you or your loved ones suffering from illnesses such as TDS, also known as Trump Derangement Syndrome?” begins a satirical ad released by Kennedy’s former running mate, Nicole Shanahan, in late August, days after Kennedy suspended his presidential bid and endorsed Trump. (Trump even promoted the video on his Truth Social platform.)

“It’s a horrible, horrible terminal disease. It destroys the mind before the body, but the body eventually goes,” Trump said of TDS at a Moms for Liberty event in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 30, 2024.

While the phrase originated during Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, TDS has become an increasingly popular diagnosis Trump and his supporters like to give his critics. 

Five Republican state senators in Minnesota introduced a bill in March to codify TDS and categorize “verbal expressions of intense hostility toward” Trump as a mental illness. The bill defines TDS as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies” of Trump. It also lists symptoms as “Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior.”

“This is possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history,” Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, a Democrat, said. “If it is meant as a joke, it is a waste of staff time and taxpayer resources that trivializes serious mental health issues. If the authors are serious, it is an affront to free speech and an expression of a dangerous level of loyalty to an authoritarian president.”

Rep. Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, on May 15 also introduced a bill in Congress to direct the National Institutes of Health to study TDS. “Instead of funding ludicrous studies such as giving methamphetamine to cats or teaching monkeys to gamble for their drinking water,” he said, “the NIH should use that funding to research issues that are relevant to the real world.”

My team never sleeps pic.twitter.com/THH4MiMMMI

— Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) August 29, 2024

America has a talent pipeline problem.

Not in sports—we’ve got that covered. From the moment a kid picks up a football, we’ve built an entire ecosystem to scout, train, and elevate them through high school, college, and into the pros. It’s a structured path from raw talent to professional achievement. But when it comes to preparing young Americans for jobs in the industries that actually drive our economy—healthcare, tech, finance, real estate, the professions and trades, advanced manufacturing, AI—we’ve got nothing close to that same focus and program.

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And that is a massive missed opportunity.

We don’t just need to fix what’s broken—we need to build what’s missing. What I’m proposing is simple: a farm club system for American jobs of the future. A national pipeline—backed by private enterprise and public policy—that starts in K-12 and follows a young person all the way into a career with dignity, purpose, and a paycheck.

Because here’s the truth: while politicians argue over immigration and trade policy, the real threat to American economic dominance is internal. It’s our failure to prepare the next generation for the economy that’s coming.

We’re short millions of skilled workers — not because Americans aren’t willing to work, but because we haven’t shown them where the jobs are, how to get them, and why they matter. We’ve disconnected our education system from our economic engine. 

Right now, we let young people stumble through the most important years of their lives with little real-world guidance. They graduate from high school (sometimes) and are left to figure it out on their own. Some go to college and rack up debt. Others go straight to work, but too often in low-wage, low-growth jobs that don’t match their talents.

This isn’t just inefficient. It’s a national liability.

The good news? We already know how to build a farm system. We’ve done it in professional sports. We’ve done it in the military. We’ve done it in music and the arts. The missing piece is vision and leadership—and belief. We have to believe in young people as assets, not problems. And we have to organize our economy to cultivate their potential from an early age.

That means starting in elementary school with exposure: showing kids what’s possible beyond their neighborhoods. It means bringing business leaders into classrooms — not just for speeches, but for partnerships. Real apprenticeships. Real mentorships. Real pathways. Like right here at Operation HOPE, and specifically the AI Ethics Council that Sam Altman and I co-chair, and its new AILP3 – which is a AI learning pipeline for young people from elementary school through college in Atlanta, where I live, a partnership with Mayor Andrew Dickens, Atlanta Public Schools and Georgia State University and it’s Robinson College of Business. This is a focus Ph.D and Ph.Do too.

By middle school, we should be identifying interests and aptitudes—whether it’s coding, caregiving, carpentry, or clean energy—and channeling them into hands-on experiences. By high school, students should be plugged into sector-specific programs that align with real industries in their region, whether that’s aerospace in Atlanta, robotics in Pittsburgh, or renewable energy in Texas.

And by the time they graduate, they should have credentials, not just diplomas. A line of sight into a career, not just a hope and a prayer.

This isn’t about eliminating college. It’s about making it one of many valid routes — not the only one. We need to dignify the skilled trades again. We need to champion community colleges and technical schools. We need to stop telling young people that success looks only one way.

We also need business to step up. Not just with donations—with hiring commitments, onramps and training investments. The companies of the future can’t just be headquartered in America. They need to be rooted in American talent. That means betting on the 15-year-old in Detroit just as seriously as we bet on the five-star recruit in Alabama.

And government has a role, too. We need federal and state policies that incentivize school-to-career partnerships, reward innovation in workforce education, and fund modern infrastructure that connects schools, employers, and community-based organizations. This is how we close the skills gap. This is how we rebuild a middle class that’s been eroded for decades. And this is how we future-proof America—by investing in our own people.

The world isn’t waiting for us to figure this out. China, Georgia, and South Korea are investing in its next generation. And we’re still debating whether shop class belongs in school.

Let’s build a workforce farm system that rivals anything we’ve ever done in sports. Let’s treat our young people like draft picks—not dropouts. Let’s give them a bench, a coach, and a playbook for the game of life. That’s how you raise up a nation. That’s how you grow GDP. That’s how you win the future.

Gurtsiev, a Russian major involved in the airstrikes on Mariupol in 2022 and later appointed to a city government post, was reportedly killed in a grenade explosion in Stavropol.

Over 20 Russians and Belarusians in Serbia face statelessness after long citizenship delays, trapped without travel rights despite years living, working, and raising families in the country.

President Donald Trump and his allies aren’t alone in accusing New York attorney general Letitia James of abusing her prosecutorial powers. A former high-ranking official in her office is now on the record saying the same.

Former assistant New York solicitor general Brian Ginsberg, who reported to James from 2019 through 2022, warned the Supreme Court in a May 12 filing that James is abusing her prosecutorial powers in an ongoing Title IX case against a western New York school district over four disparate sexual misconduct allegations between its students. Ginsberg minced no words about his former boss, urging the Supreme Court in his writ of certiorari to take up the case to “disabuse opportunistic attorneys general” like James from the notion they can misuse their parens patriae powers—the doctrine she used to justify her involvement in the case which enables the government in limited instances to prosecute lawsuits on behalf of individual citizens.

Ginsberg reminded the Supreme Court that James has a history of allegedly abusing her powers, citing comments from a justice of the New York supreme court in November 2024 reprimanding James for bringing forward a politically charged environmental case against Pepsi, which the court tossed.

“The same New York State Attorney General who initiated this action against the School District has been judicially chastised for abusing her power to initiate representative actions to launch ‘predatory lawsuits that seek to impose punishment while searching for a crime,'” Ginsberg wrote in his Supreme Court filing, citing comments from New York supreme court justice Emilio Colaiacovo in the Pepsi case.

Ginsberg’s allegations of prosecutorial abuse against James echo similar statements made by Trump attorney Clifford Robert, who admonished the attorney general in January 2024 for her “shameless abuse of power” in her efforts to prosecute Trump.

Ginsberg, who declined to comment, is no stranger to the rules governing James’s prosecutorial powers. As one of her assistant solicitor generals, Ginsberg was part of an elite team of attorneys that pursued appellate cases at the state and federal levels on behalf of James. Ginsberg helped litigate more than a dozen cases in the Supreme Court, including a 2021 case against the National Rifle Association and a 2020 case where he unsuccessfully defended New York’s coronavirus restrictions on places of worship.

Ginsberg left James’s office in 2022 to work in the private sector, and now the former assistant solicitor general is defending the Niagara Wheatfield Central School District against a 2021 lawsuit from James alleging it systematically failed to protect its students from sexual assault and bullying by their classmates. James seeks to force the school district to “stop its unlawful practices.”

The attorney general cited four disparate examples of student-on-student sexual assault and bullying at various schools. Typically a state attorney general is barred from intervening in legal disagreements between individuals or small groups of people, but James invoked the parens patriae doctrine, arguing that she has standing to pursue the matter because the school’s conduct impacted “the health and well-being of the People of the State of New York as a whole.”

A federal district court said James was wrong and dismissed the suit in 2022. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s ruling in October 2024 and allowed the case to proceed.

That’s where Ginsberg came in. He wrote in his May 12 writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court that the Second Circuit improperly gave James the green light to proceed in the case “on the basis of unrelated incidents involving individual students” that didn’t justify the use of the “extraordinary mechanism of parens patriae litigation by the State of New York.”

Ginsberg said it was high time the Supreme Court clarified the rules governing parens patriae powers, a tool he said is often wielded liberally and improperly by aggressive state attorneys general such as his former boss. Parens patriae lawsuits, Ginsberg wrote, withhold procedural protections from defendants in individual disputes because the plaintiff is backed by the full weight of the government.

Ginsberg’s unflattering description of his former boss is just the latest black eye for James. The Department of Justice this month launched an investigation into allegations that she falsified documents to obtain favorable loans on her properties in New York and Virginia.

Prominent Republicans noted the irony of the mortgage fraud allegations against James, who said “everyday Americans cannot lie to a bank to get a mortgage to buy a home” in February 2024 after she secured a $486 million judgment against Trump for allegedly falsifying his business records.

“The hypocrisy is staggering: Tish James allegedly committed the same crime that she falsely and illegally prosecuted President Donald Trump for,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) said in a statement highlighting her efforts to oppose James’s “political weaponization and abuse of her office.”

James did not return a request for comment.

The post Letitia James’s Former Colleague Says ‘Opportunistic’ NY AG Abused Her Power appeared first on .