INVESTIGATIONS

The New York Democrat vying to fill Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R.) seat successfully pushed the Library of Congress to remove a damning interview calling his would-be constituents lazy alcoholics who couldn’t replace his migrant farmhands.

Blake Gendebien, who’s running for New York’s 21st Congressional District, said during a 2013 interview that local upstate residents “show up late” and “drink too much,” while his Hispanic employees work 12-hour days. But that interview, conducted by the Library of Congress for a special project documenting the culture of contemporary American workers, was recently taken offline at Gendebien’s request, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

“In this case, the subject of the interview requested that it be taken down from our site,” a Library of Congress representative told the Free Beacon on Tuesday morning. “We are typically generous in honoring these requests since they are personal narratives, however we keep the descriptive information online and make the collection accessible onsite in our reading room. That is what we’ve done in this case.”

The precise date of the interview’s removal is unknown, but internet archives indicate that the audio was accessible on the Library of Congress’s website until at least Feb. 2. The Free Beacon noticed it was missing Monday after the New York Post reported Gendebien’s remarks Sunday.

Gendebien’s attempt to scrub the interview hints at an effort to mitigate potential damage to his campaign, given that most Americans approve of President Donald Trump’s efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the country. Since taking office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has intensified its efforts to deport dangerous aliens, with 11,000 total arrests reported as of Monday. This includes targeted operations in New York.

Stefanik plans to vacate her seat if she’s confirmed as President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. In 2024, she won her district with 62 percent of the vote, making Gendebien’s campaign a longshot.

In the interview, meant to document his life as a dairy farm owner, Gendebien argued local residents in upstate New York could not replace his migrant workers for a variety of reasons.

“It’s hard to find one local person that doesn’t have domestic abuse problems, alcohol problems, wage garnishments,” Gendebien said. “So you have all these plans and these [local workers] leave for court all the time because they are in custody battles and child-support battles. It’s just awful.”

“They show up late. They drink too much. There is just no labor force out there,” he added.

By contrast, Gendebien said his Hispanic farmhands work about 12 hours a day, “six and a half days a week,” calling it “their choice.”

“Three Hispanic employees. They would need to be replaced by probably six local people,” Gendebien said.

The congressional hopeful even admitted that he once paid $10,000 to bail out a farm worker that ICE had detained. He claimed that agents “profile” people based on “skin color.”

While the Library of Congress allows the removal of content containing “personally identifiable information” from its online platform upon request, items may still be accessed onsite in Washington, D.C. On Wednesday morning, the Free Beacon confirmed Gendebien’s interview was indeed still available onsite. A library employee also told the Free Beacon that the interview would be reinstated online “certainly by next week,” suggesting that Gendebien regretted his initial decision to have it removed.

Gendebien did not respond to a request for comment.

Jessica Schwalb contributed to this report.

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Locals near Vistra Energy’s Moss Landing Power Plant noticed anomalies in the days leading up to last month’s lithium ion battery fire at the facility, including dead sea lions with skin lesions, sounds of explosions, chemical smells, and symptoms like burning eyes and throats. Those issues could mean there were problems at Moss Landing even before the blaze broke out, consumer advocate and environmental activist Erin Brockovich said during a Tuesday virtual town hall.

The event demonstrated how, even as Newsom looks to ditch fossil fuels, he is making enemies in the environmentalist movement. Local residents near the lithium battery storage facility have faced some of the same health issues after the Jan. 16 fire at Moss Landing, which sent up thick black smoke and a sharp chemical smell throughout Monterey County. Those symptoms are consistent with exposure to hydrogen fluoride, a compound that can be lethal at high levels, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Soil samples have also found that the flame spewed out heavy metals, with at least one test site accumulating dangerous concentrations.

Lithium batteries are needed to store energy from renewable sources, making them essential to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s goal of fully transitioning California’s power grid away from fossil fuels by 2045. Regulators predict the state will need 52 gigawatts of battery storage to meet that target—nearly four times the 13.3 it has today.

Environmental activists have largely embraced battery-dependent green technologies like electric cars. In this case, however, the famed environmentalist Brockovich is squaring up against the Newsom administration, arguing that the Moss Landing battery facility caused the health of local residents to suffer.

A legal team from the law firm Singleton Schreiber, which includes Brockovich, filed a lawsuit last week on behalf of four residents against Vistra and other defendants, including the lithium-ion battery-maker LG Energy Solution, and California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric. The firm hosted the virtual town hall in hopes of recruiting more plaintiffs.

“I knew right away something was wrong because so many of you were reporting to my community health book,” Brockovich told Monterey County residents on the Zoom call. “Anytime I wake up and I see 50 new emails from the same town, I generally have an idea what’s going on.”

Brockovich, known for her work in clinching a $333 million 1996 settlement with Pacific Gas & Electric for water contamination, has advised people across the country on environmental disasters, from East Palestine, Ohio, to Flint, Mich.

Tuesday’s Zoom meeting lasted over two and a half hours, and more than 200 people called in asking Brockovich and attorney Knut Johnson for advice on how to test their water, how to get doctors to help them, and how to assess the safety of food from the surrounding farms in the Salinas Valley—known as “America’s Salad Bowl” because it produces 70 percent of the state’s lettuce.

Others, like local resident Gayle Eisner, detailed strange experiences in the days before the Moss Landing fire.

“We live right next door to the harbor, right next to the beach, and I noticed a lot of sea lions washing up on shore,” Eisner said. “They were dead, they had these little red rings around them … kind of similar to a ringworm kind of thing—a skin lesion. I could tell they were not from sharks.”

A few days after the fire, “there were three more sea lions and an otter that were dead,” she added. “So I kind of started thinking there’s a little trend going on here.”

Brockovich said it’s “always concerning when you see animals sick or covered in lesions or tumors or washing up dead when that isn’t something that would be common to the area. That’s generally not common, period.”

Another local, Janie Smythe, said she heard an explosion several days before the fire—and faced health issues.

“A bunch of us were having symptoms the three days prior,” Smythe said. “We don’t know exactly what was going on, but our eyes were burning and our throats were burning, and it wasn’t like allergies. It was weird.”

A woman from Prunedale—some 17 miles from the factory—said her neighborhood group also complained about hearing explosions.

“My gut’s telling me that … that’s part of it,” she said during the Zoom meeting. “There’s issues been going on there that we have not been privy to.”

These accounts, which have not yet been reported, could help paint a picture of the battery fire origins, Brockovich said.

“That’s helpful information. It really is,” Brockovich said. “You’re there. What you know, what you’re seeing, what you’re experiencing, others have too, but that can help … tell the story as to why.”

Vistra Energy did not respond to a request for comment.

Singleton Schreiber’s lawsuit is seeking individually tailored compensation for toxic chemical exposure, property damage, and economic losses on behalf of four plaintiffs who live near Moss Landing. It accuses the corporations of negligence and alleges that the plant’s design—a “contained and roofed building that housed an outdated and dangerous lithium-ion battery storage system”—is similar to storage sites worldwide that have suffered large thermal runaways, fires, and exposures that have killed and injured people. The complaint notes that the Jan. 16 fire is Vistra’s third at the Moss Landing plant since 2021 and claims that this time, the fire suppression system failed to work.

One local, Myrt Hawkins, said during the town hall that the disaster wouldn’t have happened “if our elected officials and our regulatory agencies had done their damn job.”

“I would strongly encourage you, whoever had the authority to give those permits be brought to task,” she said.

The lawsuit also details health issues the plaintiffs have faced since the fire, including nasal and eye irritation, breathing difficulties, headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats, lung congestion, burning lungs, dizziness, unexplained blood discharge, sores, skin irritation, and more. These symptoms match those recounted by hundreds of locals through a Facebook group, “Moss Landing Power Plant/Vistra Fire Symptoms,” which has amassed some 3,500 members. Many are still reporting sickness nearly four weeks after the blaze.

Following the town hall, a resident of Carmel—a town about 22 miles south of the plant—posted in the Facebook group that she was “curious” about the anecdotes from before the fire.

“I smelled a chemical fire and tasted metal in my mouth a day or two prior,” she wrote. “I was confused when I found nothing near me, and then especially weirded out when I heard of the battery fire starting so soon after this experience.”

When the Moss Landing fire broke out, Monterey County issued an evacuation order, though it was lifted by the next evening. Some residents immediately fled—including a Ukrainian woman who remembers the Chernobyl disaster. Others outside the evacuation zone also left, some even taking their large animals including horses. Those who didn’t move their livestock worry the smoke and fallout could hurt them moving forward, locals said during the virtual town hall.

“We ended up evacuating our animals out on Friday [Jan. 17], and a lot of my friends who came and helped, we all started experiencing symptoms, and we still have symptoms,” said a woman who lives outside the evacuation zone but smelled the smoke. “I evacuated all the horses, the sheep, goats, all the things. I don’t know exactly how they were impacted.”

The Environmental Protection Agency reported zero air quality threats before handing its monitoring operations over to a private consulting firm retained by Vistra. Monterey County’s own air quality agency meanwhile said the only air downgrades were from people using wood-fired stoves.

But preliminary soil tests around Moss Landing show that smoke from the fire deposited significant levels of heavy metals in the surrounding soils, with one site showing dangerous concentrations of cobalt, the Free Beacon has reported. Olukayode Jegede, an agricultural toxicologist from University of California, Davis, said that suggests there would have been “very high” concentrations of those contaminants in the air when the fires were burning. High cobalt exposure can cause impaired lungs, asthma, interstitial lung disease, breathing difficulties, and wheezing.

A coalition of residents, who have branded their efforts as a movement called “Never Again Moss Landing,” tested surrounding areas up to 46 miles from the fire for heavy metal deposits. Using wipe tests, they found the highest concentrations of cobalt, manganese, lithium, and nickel were three to six miles from the battery fire site. They are awaiting scientific analysis of what these levels could mean.

Moreover, nearly a month since the fire, local officials haven’t issued health warnings specific to this disaster beyond recommending the immunocompromised or chronically ill to stay indoors or wear masks. This response has frustrated locals, who say it’s stymied their quest to get medical help for their ongoing symptoms.

“Our doctors are clueless,” one woman said on Tuesday’s Zoom call, saying that most point to the EPA’s declaration that the air was safe, as do Poison Control and the CDC. “It shut down a lot of help we could have received.”

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The Federal Communications Commission is investigating Comcast and its subsidiary NBCUniversal over whether its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs violate federal anti-discrimination laws.

In a letter to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts on Tuesday, FCC chairman Brendan Carr said there is “substantial evidence” that the media conglomerate is promoting DEI initiatives, a potential violation of FCC regulations and civil rights laws. Carr pointed to Comcast’s promotion of DEI as a “core value of our business” and said that NBCUniversal, which operates NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC, has executives “specifically dedicated” to promoting DEI on its television programs.

“But promoting invidious forms of discrimination cannot be squared with any reasonable interpretation of federal law,” Carr warned. “It can only deprive Americans of their rights to fair and equal treatment under the law.”

Carr said he expects the investigation “will aid the Commission’s broader efforts to root out invidious forms of DEI discrimination across all of the sectors the FCC regulates.” The FCC chairman opened an investigation last week into whether NPR and PBS violated federal regulations that bar taxpayer-funded outlets from running commercials for corporate sponsors.

The Comcast probe comes as the media giant plans to spin off MSNBC and CNBC into a separate, publicly traded company. President Donald Trump has been a vocal critic of Comcast and NBC, vowing in 2023 that he would investigate the conglomerate over its “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” Trump blasted MSNBC last month after the Washington Free Beacon reported that Kamala Harris’s campaign paid $500,000 to Al Sharpton’s nonprofit, the National Action Network, shortly before the activist interviewed Harris on his MSNBC show.

Sharpton, a longtime Trump critic, could become a focus of Carr’s DEI probe.

The controversial activist, known for his history of anti-Semitic rhetoric, has used his MSNBC show to promote a boycott he is leading at the National Action Network against corporations that have scrapped their DEI programs. Sharpton announced on his MSNBC show, PoliticsNation, that he would select two corporations for the boycott, which he billed as a “shake-up” of corporate America.

Indeed, Sharpton arguably owes his MSNBC gig to Comcast’s DEI initiatives.

Comcast hired Sharpton to host his MSNBC show in August 2011, six months after he agreed to publicly support Comcast’s acquisition of a majority stake in NBCUniversal—a lobbying campaign in which Sharpton submitted a letter to the FCC supporting the deal.

To win Sharpton’s support, Comcast signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Action Network and two other civil rights groups to bolster its “diversity” initiatives by airing content from four television channels owned by black people.

The agreement is published in the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” section of Comcast’s corporate website.

The New York Times at the time questioned whether Sharpton’s hiring created a conflict of interest for Comcast, and the Daily Beast asked whether Sharpton was an “affirmative-action beneficiary” of the Comcast-NBC merger.

Comcast also donated $140,000 to the National Action Network, which has in some years paid Sharpton a salary of more than $1 million. He reportedly makes north of $750,000 as an MSNBC host.

In 2015, black media mogul Byron Allen sued Comcast and Sharpton, accusing them of entering “sham diversity agreements.” Allen alleged that Sharpton “has a business model and track record of obtaining payments from corporate entities in exchange for his support.”

Comcast did not respond to questions about whether Sharpton will be allowed to continue promoting the National Action Network boycott at MSNBC. A company spokeswoman said Comcast will cooperate with the FCC investigation. “For decades, our company has been built on a foundation of integrity and respect for all of our employees and customers,” said spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury.

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Talk about a career climax.

Jeffrey Toobin, one of the world’s most prominent masturbators, is coming to the New York Times as a contributing opinion columnist. It’s another stroke of luck for the so-called legal analyst, who has managed to fully revive his career after being caught pleasuring himself during a Zoom meeting in October 2020.

The road to redemption has been hard and slightly curved for Toobin, who lost his job at the New Yorker after the infamous Zoom call, which featured employees of the esteemed magazine and WNYC radio taking part in an election simulation. “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers,” Toobin told Vice News at the time. “I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video.”

CNN, where Toobin served as the network’s premier legal analyst and abortion expert, did not fire the disgraced masturbator but granted his request for “some time off while he deals with a personal issue.” Eight months later, Toobin made his triumphant return to CNN and attempted to defend himself during a cringe-inducing interview with Alisyn Camerota, who tried (unsuccessfully) to get Toobin to explain “what the hell” he was thinking. “I’m a flawed human being who makes mistakes,” said Toobin, who denounced his firing from the New Yorker as “excessive,” and claimed he was “trying to be a better person” by going to therapy and volunteering at food banks.

Toobin hung around at CNN for another year before announcing his departure in August 2022. That same year, he resumed publishing op-eds in the Times as a contributing opinion writer. In May 2023, he published a book about Timothy McVeigh and “the rise of right-wing extremism.” In early 2024, Toobin started popping up again on CNN as a “guest” analyst, and he continues to make regular appearances on the network as if nothing happened.

Before getting caught red-handed on a Zoom call, Toobin was best known for having an extramarital affair with his co-worker’s daughter, Casey Greenfield. After getting her pregnant, Toobin insisted he wasn’t the father, refused to take a paternity test, and offered money to pay for an abortion. When Greenfield refused, Toobin told her “she was going to regret it” and “shouldn’t expect any help from him,” according to the New York Daily News.

Toobin’s new gig at the Times was first reported by Dylan Byers, the former CNN reporter best known for exposing the Washington Free Beacon‘s financial ties to Donald Trump and for his previous role as unofficial public relations adviser to ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos. Byers described Toobin as a “famed legal analyst,” but did not elaborate. He originally reported that Toobin was joining the Times staff, which wasn’t true.

The Times opinion section already boasts a stable of insightful commentators, including Jamelle Bouie and Lydia Polgreen, both of whom assessed that Joe Biden’s disastrous (and career-ending) debate against Donald Trump in June 2024 was a tie.

Further reading: The Jeffrey Toobin Dick Slip Scandal, Explained in New Yorker Cartoons and CNN Chyrons

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