Washington Free Beacon

In the final weeks of the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded a lucrative environmental justice grant to a left-wing nonprofit whose CEO—LaTricea Adams—personally applied for the taxpayer funding while simultaneously serving as a member of a top White House advisory council.

The Biden EPA announced in December that it selected Young, Gifted & Green to receive a $20 million grant under its so-called Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Program—the largest grant allowed under the program. The EPA dished out 105 grants—including the grant to Adams’s Tennessee-based group—totaling $1.6 billion as part of the program after receiving 2,801 applications from groups nationwide, according to internal agency documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The EPA documents also show that Adams was listed as the individual applicant for the grant, which she applied for on behalf of Young, Gifted & Green in late September. Adams personally submitted the application while serving as a member of former president Joe Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which was housed at the EPA. She served on the council from March 2021 through the end of the Biden administration.

It remains unclear the extent to which Adams, in her role on the Environmental Justice Advisory Council, advised the EPA on its grantmaking activity or implementation of the Community Change Program. Young, Gifted & Green did not respond to requests for comment.

But the revelation adds further weight to questions about the Biden administration’s process for doling out grants and whether the administration played favorites when it came to such programs. Federal officials are generally expected to avoid even the appearance of impropriety when carrying out their duties.

The Free Beacon previously reported that groups whose leaders served on Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council were the recipients of EPA grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars during the previous administration. The Young, Gifted & Green grant, though, represents the only known instance in which a council member personally applied for the funding their group ultimately received from the EPA.

The Trump administration has taken aim at both environmental justice programs as part of its energy agenda. It has also initiated audits of climate spending executed under the Biden administration as part of its efforts to cut government waste and abuse.

“The deep ties between the Biden-Harris administration, their donors, advisers, and grant recipients are a staggering wake-up call,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin told the Free Beacon in a statement. “There will be zero tolerance for waste or abuse at EPA under the Trump administration.”

“Being a good steward of American hard-earned tax dollars to protect human health and the environment is my top priority, not following the corrupt example of those who funneled funds through kickbacks and pass throughs to far-left activists,” Zeldin said.

The EPA’s billion-dollar Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Program was created by the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August 2022. The purpose of the initiative is to fund local efforts to fight climate change in ways that “benefit disadvantaged communities.”

Young, Gifted & Green said it would use its $20 million grant to finance energy efficiency upgrades in 150 low-income homes in Memphis, Tenn., and support small businesses that seek to install solar panels or replace gas appliances with electric alternatives. The group added that it would construct new greenspaces.

The size of the EPA grant dwarfs the amount of money Young, Gifted & Green had previously handled. Since it registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2020, the group has reported a total revenue of $2.7 million, about 14 percent the size of its EPA grant, according to tax filings reviewed by the Free Beacon.

“These shocking revelations solidify the Biden administration’s legacy as the most corrupt in modern history,” Tom Jones, the executive director of right-leaning watchdog group the American Accountability Foundation, told the Free Beacon.

“While everyday Americans suffered under Bidenflation, rampant cronyism flourished—a disgrace that demands full investigation and accountability and proves once again the necessity for all these grants to be impounded by the Office of Management and Budget immediately,” Jones continued. “The American people deserve nothing less.”

Daren Bakst, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, argued that Zeldin should consider investigating the full extent of the Biden administration’s environmental justice initiatives. He said the case involving Young, Gifted & Green could expose deeper issues with how the Biden administration approached such programs.

“The entire Environmental and Climate Justice Program should be in his sights,” Bakst told the Free Beacon. “As part of this, the EPA should ensure that grant recipients were eligible for the money.”

“It is quite possible that White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council members can be leaders of organizations receiving the grants,” he said. “But this would be yet again another example of the problems with the Inflation Reduction Act and how the Biden EPA implemented the programs.”

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MSNBC is canceling Joy Reid’s 7 p.m. show on the network in an apparent effort to eliminate low-rated programs and replace them with shows people might actually watch. The final episode of The ReidOut will air sometime this week, after which a trio of MSNBC weekend anchors—former Kamala Harris adviser Symone Sanders, anti-Trump “Republican” Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez, the daughter of former Democratic senator and convicted felon Bob Menendez—will take over the time slot.

Variety reported last week that MSNBC was poised to announce major programming changes that would reflect the network’s eagerness to “maintain its progressive stance, rather than trying to tack towards middle ground.” Viewed in this context, canceling Reid’s show was a logical step, given the host’s reputation for sober analysis and pragmatic centrism, not to mention her preternatural ability to connect with normal working-class Americans.

During the 2022 election, for example, Reid was one of the first media personalities to acknowledge that the word “inflation” was “not part of the normal lexicon” for most Americans until nefarious Republicans “taught people the word” in order to attack Joe Biden. Following Trump’s victory in 2024, Reid channeled the anxieties of working Americans who couldn’t believe that Harris had lost despite waging a “flawlessly run” campaign and being endorsed by Queen Latifah, who “never endorses anyone.” Reid expressed shock in 2020 when a Latino congressman suggested “Latinx” was not “the preferred term” among actual Latinos.

These insightful remarks persuaded MSNBC to give Reid an annual salary believed to be in the range of $3 million. Network executives clearly valued her cerebral reporting and “in-depth interviews with politicians and other newsmakers,” according to the New York Times. In November, for instance, Reid interviewed a Yale psychologist who argued Democrats were “entitled” to shun their Trump-supporting family members because it “may be essential for your mental health.” For reasons that defy explanation, Reid was one of the lowest-rated hosts on MSNBC. Last Thursday’s episode of The ReidOut drew just 59,000 viewers in the coveted 25-54 age demographic. For the sake of comparison, Laura Ingraham’s competing 7 p.m. program on Fox News drew 389,000 viewers in the demographic. The vast majority of MSNBC viewers are memory care patients whose home health aides forgot to turn off the television, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

Reid’s sway at MSNBC was such that the network didn’t even bother to figure out what really happened to Reid’s old blog after internet sleuths uncovered a series of bigoted posts in 2017. Reid accused “hackers” of having “accessed and manipulated” her blog to post hateful content—targeting gays, Jews, and Muslims—that was “fabricated.” She urged the FBI to investigate. The results of the alleged investigation were never released, but Reid was promoted to a full-time host in 2020. Some might view the cancelation of Reid’s show as a blessing in disguise because it will allow the tenacious journalist to spend more time hunting down the real hackers and bringing them to justice.

Alas, there is likely a more sinister explanation for Reid’s departure from the MSNBC airwaves. She is a proud and outspoken black woman. Many have already suggested white supremacy is to blame, especially since the news comes several weeks after another proud black woman—former MSNBC president Rashida Jones—allegedly resigned from the network. Another woman of color, Alex Wagner, was expected to return to MSNBC in April to resume hosting the 9 p.m. hour, but that plan has been scrapped. Jen Psaki, a white woman who served as Biden’s press secretary, is now widely expected to take over that time slot for at least one night per week. It remains to be seen what MSNBC’s alleged anti-blackness means for the future of Al Sharpton, the notorious anti-Semite who still hasn’t been fired after his nonprofit group received $500,000 from the Harris campaign before Sharpton interviewed the candidate in October 2024.

Fans of diversity, equity, and inclusion might take comfort in the news that MSNBC is also reportedly considering Politico reporter Eugene Daniels as a candidate to host the 9 p.m. time slot at least one night a week. Daniels was widely predicted to be the “breakout star” of the 2024 election, but he ended up being one of the biggest losers. The self-described “walking Beyoncé encyclopedia” has become a minor liberal celebrity within the Beltway bubble. Best known for his flamboyant attire, Daniels excelled at laundering Democratic talking points while covering the Harris campaign, but it seems unlikely he will ever be able to match the exceptional passion and journalistic integrity of Joy Reid.

May her memory be a blessing.

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JERUSALEM—Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas fired his prisoners’ affairs commissioner this week, seemingly demonstrating new seriousness about reforming the system of payments for terrorists that the commissioner oversaw and vocally defended.

But Abbas simultaneously replaced the former commissioner, Qadura Fares, with another convicted terrorist and leading proponent of the payments, Raed Abu al-Humus. The incoming boss quickly confirmed his support for killing Israelis.

Just hours after his appointment, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs published a photograph of Abu al-Humus smiling alongside two arch-terrorists, Ahmed Barghouti and Mohammed Aradeh, whom Israel recently released to Cairo as part of a hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas. Barghouti, 48, was sentenced to 13 life sentences for orchestrating a series of terrorist attacks that killed 12 Israelis and wounded dozens, and Aradeh, 42, was given life in prison for attempted murder and other crimes.

The photo is among a number of early signs that Abbas will once again disappoint international donors who expect him to end “pay for slay,” as critics call the Palestinian Authority’s longstanding payments to security prisoners and the families of terrorists killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.

“The problem is the Palestinian Authority believes that terrorists are the most honored people, and they still believe they’re the most honored people,” Itamar Marcus, the director of Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli watchdog group that has closely tracked the terrorism payments for years, told the Washington Free Beacon. “They are not saying they’ve decided it’s wrong to reward terrorists. They are saying that this [reform] is something we were forced to do because we’re in a financial crisis. That’s why there’s no meaning to this, and that’s why there’s no reason for any optimism.”

In a vaguely worded presidential decree last week, Abbas revoked the Palestinian Authority’s “financial allowances to the families of prisoners, martyrs, and the wounded” and made the recipients “subject to the same standards applied without discrimination to all families benefiting from protection and social welfare programs, in accordance with the standards of comprehensiveness and justice.” Abbas also transferred oversight of the terrorism payments from the prisoners’ affairs commission to the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution, a body controlled by his office. 

International media hailed the move as the “end” of the terrorism payments and a “serious reform.” European Commission officials called the “awaited decree law” a “significant political development” that “signals the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to implement far-reaching reforms that will improve its efficiency and stabilise its fiscal situation.” 

“A reformed and revitalised Palestinian Authority remains at the core of efforts towards a two-state solution,” the officials added in a statement this week. “Therefore the [European Union] stands firm in its support to the Palestinian Authority and calls on international partners to provide the Palestinian Authority with political and financial support to empower the Palestinian government to continue to pursue its ambitious reform agenda.”

A State Department spokesman said last week that Abbas’s decree “appears to be a positive step and a big win for the Trump Administration.” But earlier this week, the Trump administration froze funding for the Palestinian Authority Security Forces.

Meanwhile, Palestinian officials have reassured the Arab public that the terrorism payments will continue. Abbas affirmed his commitment to the payments at a meeting of his Fatah political party’s parliamentary body on Friday, using the same uncompromising language that he and other Palestinian leaders have often used in the past.

“We repeat and emphasize that we are proud of the sacrifice of the martyrs,” Abbas said in televised remarks. “Even if we only have one cent left, it will go to the prisoners and martyrs. They must receive everything as in the past, for they are more precious than all of us put together.”

Qatar’s Al-Sharq newspaper quoted unnamed senior Palestinian officials last Wednesday as saying the terrorism payments would continue “without any reduction.” The officials reportedly explained that Abbas’s decree was a response to growing U.S., European, and Israeli financial pressure that has left the Palestinian Authority $3 billion in debt to local banks and unable to borrow more.

Munir al-Jaghoub, a senior Fatah official, told the UAE’s Al-Mashhad TV a day earlier that Abbas “did not stop anyone’s salaries.” According to al-Jaghoub, the president simply “issued a law to transfer these salaries to another entity that is not subject to restrictions” by the European Union. 

Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar told international media on Tuesday that the Palestinian Authority has continued “with its usual deception and its pay-for-slay strategy.” 

“Based on their statements and intelligence we have, payments to families of terrorists proceed this week as always,” Saar said. “The [authority] continues to finance and encourage terrorism.”

Saar’s remarks echoed a reported assessment by senior Israeli security officials at a security cabinet meeting on Tuesday. According to Israeli media, the officials described Abbas’s purported reform “a deception, a cosmetic move, and a facelift designed to gain legitimacy with the U.S. administration.”

Abbas’s office, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, and the National Economic Empowerment Institution did not respond to requests for comment. 

In 2018, the last year the Palestinian Authority published a budget, the terrorism payments totaled $340 million, or 7 percent of planned spending. 

Abbas’s Palestinian Authority has long used diplomatic and accounting maneuvers to evade international pressure to end the terrorism payments. In 2020, Abbas backed out of negotiations with the Biden administration to reform the system, and in 2014, he attempted to hide the payments by temporarily shifting their distribution to the PLO’s Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. 

In the early 2000s, Israel brought in three top international accounting firms as part of an effort to block the PLO’s diversion of funding for the second intifada, a yearslong wave of Palestinian terrorism. But according to Yossi Kuperwasser, then the head of Israeli military intelligence’s research division, the accountants found the Palestinians’ bookkeeping impenetrable. 

“It took exactly three months for these elite companies to declare they were leaving because they couldn’t do the job,” Kuperwasser, who went on to become the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and now heads the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security think tank, recalled to the Free Beacon. “All through these games and tweaks, the Palestinians kept paying the salaries to terrorists. So I doubt we are going to see a change this time.”

If the Palestinian Authority were to end or significantly reduce the payments, prisoners and their families would undoubtedly lead mass protests that could threaten the authority’s survival, Kuperwasser, Marcus and other Israeli experts on the Palestinian Authority agreed.

The experts said that many of the Palestinian Authority officials in charge of the terrorism payments have long been convicted terrorists who served time in Israeli prisons, and that is unlikely to change. Marcus pointed to Abu al-Humus as an example. While Abu al-Humus’s prisoners’ affairs committee no longer formally oversees the payments, he is listed online as a board member of the body that does, the National Economic Empowerment Institution. 

“This is the Palestinian Authority,” Marcus said. “And the Palestinian Authority is a terror-supporting entity.”

In 2022, Abu al-Humus, then the head of international relations at the prisoners’ affairs commission, effusively praised Nasser Abu Hamid, a late founder of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist group who died of cancer in Israeli prison while serving seven life sentences for murdering Israelis. Abu al-Humus, who spent 10 years in prison alongside Abu Hamid for his own involvement in terrorism, remembered his late comrade as a “masked lion” and an “inspiration” to the “Palestinian youth.”

“He was not interested in political work but rather focused greatly on the struggle [against Israel],” Abu al-Humus told the Palestinian Wattan News Agency. “He worked with his colleagues in the resistance to end [Israel] and sweep it from the Palestinian land.”

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Last week I was in Austin and stopped into the LBJ Presidential Library, which is definitely worth a visit. It’s got the presidential limo, a replica Oval Office, and even the suit Johnson wore when John F. Kennedy was shot. Of course Johnson was in the car behind JFK. How convenient!

Speaking of which, Dominic Green returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of Louis Ferrante’s Borgata: Clash of Titans: A History of the American Mafia: Volume 2 of the Borgata Trilogy.

“Ferrante is a fluid raconteur. Even his picture captions are gripping: ‘Johnny Dio socks a photographer during a break at the Rackets Committee.’ His clashing titans are the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, and the criminal fraternity headed in Florida by Santo Trafficante, in Louisiana by Carlos Marcello, and in Chicago by Sam Giancana. The road to Dallas begins with Bobby Kennedy using the McClellan Committee (a.k.a. the ‘Rackets Committee’) to launch his political career by taking down Jimmy Hoffa, the more than necessarily mobbed-up president of the Teamsters union. Hoffa backed Nixon in the 1960 presidential elections. The mafia bosses backed JFK, funneling ‘millions of dollars’ into the West Virginia primary and, it seems, fixing the Illinois vote in 1960 (‘gross and palpable fraud,’ said the Chicago Tribune).

“‘It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian city,’ Britain’s prime minister Harold Macmillan said when the Kennedy brothers arrived in Washington, D.C.

“Jack appointed Bobby as attorney general, even though Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s string-pulling had failed to win Bobby a spot at Harvard Law and Bobby had never fought a case in court. Bobby built up a ‘hit list’ of 2,300 mobsters, beefed up the Justice Department’s racketeering section by 400 percent, and mobilized every possible branch of the federal government against the Mob. ‘That rat bastard, son-of-a-bitch,’ Giancana reportedly ranted to Trafficante, ‘we broke our balls for him and gave him the election, and he gets his brother to hound us to death.’

“Bobby Kennedy, a ‘little fart’ in Sen. Lyndon Johnson’s estimation, wanted to make a big noise. He cut corners in his zeal. In April 1961, INS agents grabbed Carlos Marcello, put him and a companion on a plane and flew them to Guatemala. Expelled to El Salvador, they were put onto a bus and dumped in a jungle in Honduras. They staggered 17 miles to the nearest human settlement in ‘silks suits and alligator shoes,’ guided most of the way by two local boys with machetes. Aided by a bribe to the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and possibly by Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana, Marcello returned to the United States more than somewhat peeved.”

But peeved enough to pull the trigger? Release those files!

If you ask James Erwin, our belief in such conspiracies was driven by Oliver Stone’s movies. But films have always held sway over the culture, he explains, dating all the way back to Birth of a Nation.

“In 1915, when movies were not two decades old, Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation in the White House, the first film to be played there. A giant leap forward in the language of cinema, The Birth of a Nation was a Lost Cause paean to the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen were portrayed as a noble and chivalrous brotherhood protecting white women from the predations of their freed slaves who had turned to drink, rape, and political corruption with wicked alacrity in the absence of slavery.

“‘It’s like writing history with lightning,’ the president reportedly remarked after the screening. ‘My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.’

“Ironically, neither the quotation nor the events depicted in the film were ‘terribly true.’ The sentiment, however, was correct. Cinema has the unique power to burn a striking impression on the psyche of popular audiences far more effectively than any academic like Wilson could have dreamed. Making a historical film, biopic, or period piece is writing history with lightning, and the product is certain to dazzle the imaginations of viewers far more than any rigorously researched tome. The Birth of a Nation proved so influential that the Ku Klux Klan, which had largely been stamped out in the 1870s, was refounded in 1915 and counted some six million members by its peak in the early 1920s.

“As fewer and fewer Americans read books, movies continue to grow in their influence over public perceptions of history. Much as news consumption has moved from print to screen, historical pedagogy will be shaped more by Hollywood productions than rigorous literature. Film is simply too compelling an art form for the written word to compete.”

You know what film is not compelling? Captain America: Brave New World. Our John Podhoretz has a few thoughts to share.

“The movie can’t decide if Sam is being made to feel less-than by our evil white supremacist culture, given that Sam is black—or whether he’s exhausted because he feels like he must represent all underrepresented people, because he’s black. All I’m saying is, he’s black, and that’s pretty much all the movie is saying about Sam Wilson, who appears to have two friends and no family and no backstory and is of absolutely no interest as a character. The original Captain America, Steve Rogers, had a wonderful backstory in which he was a 90-lb. weakling genetically engineered during World War II into a giant hunk of a guy who only agreed to the tampering to help save his country but found himself relegated to being a show pony in patriotic pageants. Apparently only white guys get good backstories.

“If Sam weren’t as good as Steve Rogers, that would be evidence he was only chosen to carry the shield because he was black. Now, in one sense, that would be fine, no? I mean, if Sam is there to represent the marginalized people in our society, then he was a diversity hire—and what would be wrong with that in the eyes of Hollywood’s liberal culture? After all, Hollywood literally casts roles by putting out casting calls and saying which parts need to be ‘diverse.'”

Another failure “is how the movie also requires some knowledge of the Marvel TV show called Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which featured a Black Lives Matter-inflected plot. We learn in that series that there was a black Captain America before Sam. He was a black soldier named Isaiah Bradley who drank the serum that transformed Steve Rogers a decade later, during the Korean War. But because he was black, see, he was thrown in prison for 30 years because he couldn’t be allowed to exist by the racist country that was created in 1619.

“I’m sure this all makes sense to Ta-Nehisi Coates, but then, so does licking the undersole of a Hamas boot. Bradley is released from prison at the end of that TV series and becomes part of the plot in this movie. He is mind-controlled into taking a shot at the president, but very specifically mind-controlled, in that he’s supposed to miss. Man, that mind control is specific and accurate! In any case, what he’s doing in this picture and why makes no sense unless you watched the 2021 show. Which I hope you didn’t, because Falcon and the Winter Soldier was very, very bad and not worth your time even if you were a Chinese person in Wuhan who had been soldered into your apartment.”

It takes super-human skill to put together a show like Saturday Night Live, week in and week out for 50 years. But that is exactly what Lorne Michaels has done. Alexander Larman reviews Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison.

“Morrison uses a structure that sometimes makes the book feel like the longest New Yorker article you’ve ever read (and, at over 600 pages, this is long). She supplies sharp, pointed vignettes of a typical week’s preparations for the show, which Jonah Hill is down to host, as we go behind the scenes into sketch ideas, prima donna antics from the cast, and Michaels’s autocratic power over everything that is broadcast live on the night. Then there are flashbacks to lengthier chronological sections from Michaels’s early career as a gag writer for shows like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which made Goldie Hawn’s name but failed to make his, to his success with SNL, early disillusionment that eventually led to him quitting the show after five years, and then a triumphant return and success in making the brand a consistently beloved—if not always artistically top-drawer—one.

“It is an inevitability that the early sections, which include a fantastically annoying, drugged-up John Belushi, a smarmy and self-assured Chevy Chase, and a near-catatonically laid-back Bill Murray, feature the strongest characters and the most arresting vignettes. We learn that Michaels’s stock advice to joint-smoking, coke-snorting colleagues was to ‘rotate your drugs’ and that the famous Lennon-McCartney story, in which the two nearly appeared live on the show in 1975 to collect the check for $3,000 that the producer solemnly offered on air for the Beatles to perform, was only partially true. They considered heading down to 30 Rockefeller Plaza the following week, but the show was on hiatus then, meaning that the opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime reunion was never possible.

“SNL today is a safer, less risky environment for writers and performers alike, which may also have taken some of the seat-of-your-pants thrills out of the show. It is taken as a given that staffers will attend therapy, and they are advised to meet their shrinks on Monday afternoons, when it is also expected that they will discuss their stressful and demanding work with Michaels. Although the producer is, naturally, a liberal, he has also strived to make the show as apolitical as possible—including famously inviting Donald Trump to host in 2015—and pushes back against criticism by saying, ‘On whatever side, if there’s idiocy, we go after it. We can’t be the official organ of the Democratic Party.’ He reminds the performers that ‘we’ve got the whole country watching—all fifty states.'”

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Tell me what you think about Lee Harvey Oswald, and I’ll tell you how you vote. Every year since 1963, Gallup has polled Americans on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the weeks after Kennedy’s killing, less than 30 percent of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone and 52 percent believed that “others were involved in a conspiracy.” In the 2023 poll, those numbers were 29 percent and 65 percent.

Only 20 percent of those who did not attend college believe that Oswald was a lone assassin; 73 percent of them believe in a conspiracy. Republicans align with this, 25 percent versus 71 percent. Independents line up with Republicans, 25 percent versus 68 percent. College graduates, who now constitute nearly half the population, are twice as likely to believe that Oswald acted alone (41 percent), but a clear majority (57 percent) believes in a conspiracy. Democrats agree with them, 39 percent versus 55 percent. Only among the fifth of Americans with postgraduate degrees are the conspiracists in a minority (44 percent).

Exactly 50 percent of the smart set believe that Oswald did it alone. Not all postgrads are liberals, but most liberals are postgrads. They were also more likely to believe it when federal agencies and the media told them that a man can become a woman and that COVID-19 came from bats in a wet market. They were more likely to believe that Donald Trump is a Russian plant, that Hunter Biden is innocent, that Joe Biden was not senile, and Kamala Harris is not a halfwit. They now believe that USAID was doing just fine before Elon Musk looked at the books.

On the Kennedy assassination as on much else, liberal Democrats live in an epistemological bubble. They departed from the American consensus on Oswald after 2013—just as affluent liberals and their informational environment were parting company with reality. So you are not necessarily mad if you doubt the official explanation for JFK’s killing. You are not necessarily a conspiracy theorist, either, though it should be said that while not all JFK assassination theorists are conspiracy theorists, all conspiracy theorists are JFK assassination theorists. None of them have theories about the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

If not Oswald alone, then who and how? Borgata: Clash of Titans advances an unofficial explanation: The Mob did it.

This is the second volume in Louis Ferrante’s “Borgata Trilogy,” a history of the American Mafia. Mr. Ferrante knows his subject. An erstwhile employee of the Gambino crime family, he served eight-and-a-half years for robberies and hijackings before he sank to writing books. His first volume, Rise of Empire, described how the American Mafia stayed close to its roots in the feudal and post-feudal societies of Sicily and southern Italy, while also becoming distinctively American. Over the first half of the 20th century, the Mafia rose from a fragmented and local concern into a corporation that combined the monopolistic mentality, and tightly enforced hierarchies and terms of membership, of a medieval guild, with the freebooting, flexible, and infinitely ambitious spirit of 20th-century American capitalism.

Clash of Titans describes the trouble that came with success. Like The Apogee in John Julius Norwich’s “Byzantium” trilogy, or Pax Britannica in Jan Morris’s eponymous trilogy, Clash of Titans is the centerpiece of a triptych. The pace slows as the hinge of the grand narrative turns. Key scenes take on the detail of portraiture. Evidence is assayed, motives are assessed, and considered conclusions are advanced: “Dickie Palatto died in mysterious circumstances; he drowned in three feet of water, which might not have been odd if he was only two feet tall.”

Ferrante is a fluid raconteur. Even his picture captions are gripping: “Johnny Dio socks a photographer during a break at the Rackets Committee.” His clashing titans are the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, and the criminal fraternity headed in Florida by Santo Trafficante, in Louisiana by Carlos Marcello, and in Chicago by Sam Giancana. The road to Dallas begins with Bobby Kennedy using the McClellan Committee (a.k.a. the “Rackets Committee”) to launch his political career by taking down Jimmy Hoffa, the more than necessarily mobbed-up president of the Teamsters union. Hoffa backed Nixon in the 1960 presidential elections. The mafia bosses backed JFK, funneling “millions of dollars” into the West Virginia primary and, it seems, fixing the Illinois vote in 1960 (“gross and palpable fraud,” said the Chicago Tribune).

“It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian city,” Britain’s prime minister Harold Macmillan said when the Kennedy brothers arrived in Washington, D.C.

Jack appointed Bobby as attorney general, even though Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s string-pulling had failed to win Bobby a spot at Harvard Law and Bobby had never fought a case in court. Bobby built up a “hit list” of 2,300 mobsters, beefed up the Justice Department’s racketeering section by 400 percent, and mobilized every possible branch of the federal government against the Mob. “That rat bastard, son-of-a-bitch,” Giancana reportedly ranted to Trafficante, “we broke our balls for him and gave him the election, and he gets his brother to hound us to death.”

Bobby Kennedy, a “little fart” in Sen. Lyndon Johnson’s estimation, wanted to make a big noise. He cut corners in his zeal. In April 1961, INS agents grabbed Carlos Marcello, put him and a companion on a plane and flew them to Guatemala. Expelled to El Salvador, they were put onto a bus and dumped in a jungle in Honduras. They staggered 17 miles to the nearest human settlement in “silks suits and alligator shoes,” guided most of the way by two local boys with machetes. Aided by a bribe to the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and possibly by Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana, Marcello returned to the United States more than somewhat peeved.

The bosses wanted to undo the Cuban revolution of 1959 and recover their offshore assets. So did the CIA. Their discreet collaboration ended, at least officially, on JFK’s orders after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion. This completes the upstage shadows: betrayed Cubans, betrayed mobsters, deniable CIA and FBI freelancers such as David Ferrie and Guy Banister doing deniable things with undeniably bad people.

“If the mob and the government worked together in a plot to kill Fidel Castro, why then should it shock us that they worked together to take out who they believed was another mutual enemy?” Ferrante asks. It shouldn’t. If it does, that’s because Hollywood, and especially the Godfather movies, have cast a sepia shroud over the sordid, murderous reality of the Mafia.

Not all of the whispers from upstage are hearsay, as when Marcello is reported as saying in 1962 that killing Bobby Kennedy would not be enough: “What good dat do? You hit dat man and his brother calls out the National Guard. No, you gotta hit de top man.” An FBI wiretap caught mob associate Willie Weisberg telling Philadelphia don Angelo Bruno that he wanted to kill the president: to “stab and kill the fucker” in the White House.

J. Edgar Hoover may have been right when he called Lee Harvey Oswald a “lone nut.” You had to be a nut, or a communist, to defect to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. You had to be lonely to want to come back. But loneliness and nuttitude are not motives. All the other lone nuts had a motive. James Earl Ray, a white Southerner, shot Martin Luther King because he opposed civil rights. Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, shot Robert F. Kennedy because Kennedy supported Israel. John Hinckley shot President Reagan because he wanted to impress Jodi Foster. Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon because he wanted to emulate Holden Caulfield. We don’t yet know Thomas Matthew Crooks’s motive for trying to kill President Trump in August 2024. It’s about time we did.

We don’t know Oswald’s motive. One reason is that Jack Ruby shot him two days after JFK’s assassination. Another is that although Oswald was interrogated for 12 hours, Ferrante writes, “no audio, video, or stenographic recordings were made.” This is “an extremely odd omission for an investigation into one of the most important and consequential murders in human history.” Also odd is that during his disturbed adolescence in New Orleans, Oswald lived with and worked for Charles “Dutz” Murret, who was Carlos Marcello’s bookmaker, and joined the Civil Air Patrol as a cadet, which is how he came to be photographed with David Ferrie, a captain in the Patrol. Small world.

We know more about Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission concluded there was no “significant link between Ruby and organized crime.” Yet Ruby was a career criminal from Chicago. An FBI informant since 1959, with links to Marcello and Trafficante and their men, Ruby went to Dallas for Sam Giancana as a “mafia-police” liaison. Ferrante, more expert in these matters than Earl Warren, observes, with italics for emphasis, that “the mafia does not allow men to maintain close ties to the police unless the men are corrupting the cops on behalf of the mob.”

Ruby ran bars and strip clubs in Dallas. The local police were regulars. It is inexplicable that Ruby, an “armed mobster with a criminal record who had absolutely no valid reason to be anywhere” near Oswald, was able to wander around the Dallas police station for hours without being challenged or thrown out. Actually, it is explicable. Ferrante finds it obvious that Ruby was granted access to the police station by a police officer. It is hard to disagree. Ferrante also adduces the 100-plus tipoffs that the FBI received in the week after Kennedy’s killing, linking Oswald and Ruby, and Ruby and David Ferrie. Ferrie admitted his ties to Marcello, but denied he knew Oswald, though a photograph shows them together.

It is possible that Oswald acted alone. It is possible that he believed he was acting alone, but wasn’t. It is possible that he realized this before he too was murdered. It is possible that he knew something but not everything about the involvement of other parties, which is why he declared himself to be the “patsy” when he was arrested. The penumbra of possibilities and associations around the JFK killing is unique. Nothing like it attends the murders of Gandhi, MLK, RFK, or John Lennon. Mr. Ferrante avoids overstepping his facts.

What we can say with certainty is that Ruby, a middle-ranking mobster, got into the police station with Oswald, whose interrogation left no record and whose pre-assassination activities remain obscure. We can also say that Oswald and Ruby were highly likely to have known each other and that both were, as we now say, already “known to the authorities.”

We are accustomed to hearing “known to the authorities” whenever a terrorist carries out an atrocity. We are also accustomed to learning that the authorities knew the perpetrator not just as a criminal, but also as an informant. We have become accustomed to the idea that, as the interwar theorists of airpower once said, “the bomber always gets through.” This has corroded our trust in the police, and especially in the security agencies which offer a deal—your privacy for your safety—only to fail to keep up their end.

People were more innocent about these things in 1963. You can see why those in charge of the agencies would have seen keeping it that way as in the national interest. You can also see, as the failure to intercept the 9/11 attacks showed, that interagency competition and general incompetence allow disasters to happen, regardless of what the authorities know beforehand. This failure in turn leads to the most common kind of cover-up, the covering of the posterior.

America was not the same after JFK’s killing. Things were never the same for the Mafia, either, after the 1960s. Frank Sinatra retired, standards of dress declined, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act of 1970 gave the federal agencies an instrument that RFK, who was two years dead by then, had always wanted. But RFK had lost his taste for hunting the mob after his brother’s murder. In a further oddity, he did not push for “any investigation into his brother’s death.”

Nicholas Katzenbach, who served as JFK’s deputy attorney general and President Johnson’s attorney general, wondered if that was because “Bobby was worried that there might be some conspiracy, and that it might be his fault. … It might very well have been that he was worried that the investigation would somehow point back to him.” Shades of Michael Corleone at the end of Godfather II, brooding alone by the dark waters where his brother was shot.

Borgata: Clash of Titans: A History of the American Mafia: Volume 2 of the Borgata Trilogy
by Louis Ferrante
Pegasus Books, 432 pp., $29.95

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

The post The Mob Wanted Kennedy Dead. But Did They Do the Unthinkable? appeared first on .

Next week, an ever-smaller audience will tune into the Oscars to watch the Hollywood elite congratulate themselves on their bravery for sharing the opinion that Donald Trump is a bad man. Hollywood’s ironclad embrace of the Democratic Party line is nothing new—it is evident in Best Picture nominee A Complete Unknown. The film pretends that Bob Dylan was ostracized from the folk music scene because he went electric when in reality it was because he did not share their radical left-wing politics. This rewriting of history through the movies is sadly the rule, not the exception, when it comes to Hollywood biopics.

Hollywood productions have almost always reflected the political Left’s worldview, or at least the preferred narrative of the Democrats. President Woodrow Wilson, the only academic historian to serve in the White House, was a man of the Left and the founder of America’s modern progressive movement. He was also a segregationist born in Virginia during the Civil War, and his academic career was largely spent popularizing the Lost Cause narrative of the War of Northern Aggression.

In 1915, when movies were not two decades old, Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation in the White House, the first film to be played there. A giant leap forward in the language of cinema, The Birth of a Nation was a Lost Cause paean to the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen were portrayed as a noble and chivalrous brotherhood protecting white women from the predations of their freed slaves who had turned to drink, rape, and political corruption with wicked alacrity in the absence of slavery.

“It’s like writing history with lightning,” the president reportedly remarked after the screening. “My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

Ironically, neither the quotation nor the events depicted in the film were “terribly true.” The sentiment, however, was correct. Cinema has the unique power to burn a striking impression on the psyche of popular audiences far more effectively than any academic like Wilson could have dreamed. Making a historical film, biopic, or period piece is writing history with lightning, and the product is certain to dazzle the imaginations of viewers far more than any rigorously researched tome. The Birth of a Nation proved so influential that the Ku Klux Klan, which had largely been stamped out in the 1870s, was refounded in 1915 and counted some six million members by its peak in the early 1920s.

As fewer and fewer Americans read books, movies continue to grow in their influence over public perceptions of history. Much as news consumption has moved from print to screen, historical pedagogy will be shaped more by Hollywood productions than rigorous literature. Film is simply too compelling an art form for the written word to compete.

Those with an agenda are drawn to this kind of power as moths to the flame. Patriotic mythmakers like John Ford and communists like Dalton Trumbo understood this in the 1950s and strove not for historical accuracy in their films but to morally instruct the nation.

By the time of the Vietnam war, most major studios went bankrupt and a new generation of auteurs, steeped in radical campus politics, took Hollywood by storm with low-budget, artistically inventive films. This Hollywood Renaissance entrenched the antiwar generation of boomer lefties—Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen—that is still working today. Once in power, they were loath to relinquish it and eager to deploy their arts on American history.

Oliver Stone is perhaps the foremost example of an activist director from that generation. His presidential trilogy (JFK, Nixon, and W.) reflects more than merely an innocent fascination with the commander in chief—it represents a lifelong ambition to define these men for his generation.

JFK is the most obvious example. The Kennedy assassination continues to loom large in the boomer imagination because they were becoming culturally aware at the precise moment of the president’s untimely demise. Forever young, Kennedy became a symbol of the boomers’ lost innocence and the focal point of counterfactuals about avoiding the Vietnam War. Into this milieu, Stone introduced a conspiracy theory about a CIA plot as some sort of revenge for the Bay of Pigs failure. Nixon doubles down through a scene where Kennedy’s defeated rival meets with some shadowy businessmen who ominously hint that Kennedy will not be in the picture if he runs in ’64. Today, a staggering 65 percent of Americans believe there was a wider conspiracy than the lone gunman, in part thanks to Stone.

Even when filmmakers strive to avoid outright propaganda, storytelling often necessitates relying on one historian’s view of ambiguous events. A recent example is the smash-hit Oppenheimer (2023) which, like many films of its type, originated from a filmmaker reading a book about a historical subject, thinking it would make a good movie, then hiring the authors to advise the project. The result is a communist sympathizer driving the on-screen treatment of a notorious midcentury communist of dubious loyalties. The film leaves one with the impression that Dr. Robert Oppenheimer was treated unfairly in the revocation of his security clearance. Whether the filmmaker seeks to deliberately advance an agenda or simply relies on bad advice, the general public comes to believe that which is not true.

There remains, however, some cause for hope. The crop of historical miniseries released by HBO in the early 2000s—Band of Brothers, John Adams, and Generation Kill—offer a model for the future of Hollywood historical adaptations. None is totally free of inaccuracy, but a certain dedication to realism prevailed among the filmmakers. It helped that the authors of Band of Brothers and John Adams were both serious historians. Likewise, Generation Kill tells a very recent story based on the first-hand account of Operation Iraqi Freedom by embedded reporter Evan Wright. In all three cases, the miniseries format works far better for a detailed account of history. Audiences will stream 7 to 10 hours of content broken into hourlong chunks as readily as they will sit for 2 hours to watch a movie; only one of these formats requires condensing. Last year, Masters of the Air served as a similarly good example.

All movies are propaganda on some level, historical movies more so than most. As the Left continues to dominate Hollywood, Marxists will rewrite our history to delegitimize the entire Founding of the United States, convincing millions in the process. Patriotic Americans can respond by rewarding those filmmakers who take their moral responsibility for historical accuracy seriously. Conservatives, moderates, and all those who value good historical education ought to support miniseries that prize accuracy over politics without sacrificing entertainment. The survival of the American experiment depends, in part, on such works—regardless of what the Oscars say.

James Erwin is director of Innovation Policy at Americans for Tax Reform and has previously written for National Review, RealClear, and The Hill.

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Beyond headlines about the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, and the Biden administration’s failure to prevent them, the Indian Ocean and its inlets garner little U.S. media attention. Off the coast of East Africa, however, another battle is brewing—one that pits the United States against the Chinese Communist Party.

The Indian Ocean sits between Beijing and Africa, where Xi Jinping plans to overthrow the U.S.-led international order in part by using the Belt and Road initiative to “extract resources from Africa, turn them into manufactured goods in China, and export them to developed economies such as Europe and the United States,” the Hudson Institute’s Mike Watson writes from Oman. But Xi’s interest in the ocean isn’t just economic. China’s special envoy to the Middle East has vowed to use it for military aims as well.

Central to the CCP’s plan are the Chagos Islands, which the British control (for now). When U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer visits Washington next week, he’ll spend part of the trip requesting Donald Trump’s approval to give the islands away to nearby Mauritius.

“The turnover would be a disaster for the United States, since Diego Garcia is one of these islands,” Watson writes. “The British cleared out the Chagossians about 50 years ago to construct an American base there that, among other things, can host heavy bombers. Starmer claims to have secured a 99-year-lease, but there are reasons to doubt that it will hold.”

The Mauritian government is known for its corruption and it’s long been a Chinese ally. “China already has a free trade agreement with Mauritius as well as a lot of investments there, and it is far better at exploiting that weakness than Western powers are. Beijing also flagrantly violates its own transfer agreement with Britain over Hong Kong,” Watson warns. “In foreign policy, opportunities to do good and do well are few and far between. Vetoing this deal should be a no-brainer for Trump.”

Read more: Trump, Xi, and a Brewing Battle Over the Indian Ocean

On Friday, as Israelis anguished over the macabre scenes of Gazans celebrating the murder of innocent children, as well as Hamas’s failure to return the body of Shiri Bibas, they took another punch to the gut. A forensic review of the bodies of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, found that Hamas terrorists strangled them with their bare hands just weeks after abducting them from their home in kibbutz Nir Oz.

“Contrary to Hamas’s lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a devastating video statement. “The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys—they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.” Israel shared the intelligence behind that assessment with U.S. intelligence officials, who concurred with the findings.

Benjamin Netanyahu promised retribution, saying on Friday that he “will not rest until the savages who executed our hostages are brought to justice. They do not deserve to walk this earth. Nothing will stop me. Nothing.” Hours later, Donald Trump gave his own assessment and told Bibi he has a green light to restart the war effort in Gaza and annihilate Hamas’s remaining forces.

“He’s actually not torn, I mean, you know where he stands, he would like to go in, and he just is so angry and he should be,” Trump said of Netanyahu in an interview with Fox News. “They were babies. And it’s rough stuff. It’s rough stuff. And it looks like they were celebrating as they were bringing the bodies back. … It’s so barbaric.” Asked whether he would be “OK” with Netanyahu restarting the war, Trump said, “I am. I really am.”

Read more: Hamas Terrorists ‘Brutally Murdered’ Bibas Children With Their Hands, IDF Announces

First CNN, now NBC. Just weeks after CNN settled a high-profile defamation lawsuit brought by Navy veteran Zachary Young, the network’s left-wing friends at NBC followed suit, settling a defamation suit with Georgia obstetrician Mahendra Amin.

Top anchors from Rachel Maddow to Nicolle Wallace and Chris Hayes falsely accused Amin of performing “mass hysterectomies” on women detained at a Georgia immigration facility and dubbed him “the uterus collector.” Last year, a federal judge ruled that the MSNBC hosts made 39 “verifiably false” statements about Amin, setting the stage for explosive proceedings that, much like CNN trial, were likely to expose embarrassing internal communications and end with an even more humiliating verdict.

NBC mostly avoided that fate by settling with Amin. Still, the case did reveal messages between top network journos like Jacob Soboroff and Danielle Silva in which the pair expressed concern about the Amin story’s veracity. It also pulled back the curtain on conference calls between Hayes and MSNBC standards executive Chris Scholl, who said, “We just don’t know if any of this is true,” and, “We don’t know the facts here.”

“Right, right, right, right,” Hayes responded.

CNN paid Young $5 million in economic and emotional damages and a separate amount for punitive damages that remains confidential. Amin sought $30 million from NBC but the terms of his settlement are unknown. With those cases out of the way, attention will turn to CBS, which is eyeing a settlement with Donald Trump over his lawsuit targeting the network’s sloppy edit of Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview.

Read more: NBC Settles Defamation Lawsuit With Georgia Doctor Whom Rachel Maddow Dubbed the ‘Uterus Collector,’ Avoiding High Stakes Trial

Away from the Beacon:

• Global “internet watchdogs” that scour the web to “fight disinformation” are “slashing operations and laying off employees” after DOGE cut off their U.S. taxpayer funds, Bloomberg reported. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer set of people.
• Two-term congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, purportedly a “rising star” of the Democratic Party, said she finds herself “rooting for Canada” and “rooting for Mexico” over the United States because “they are really the ones that are speaking truth to power right now.” You go, girl!
• Jerry Nadler, best known for wearing his pants nearly up to his nipples and for his status as the “smelliest member of Congress,” may face a primary fight against nepo baby journalist and Cruella de Vil lookalike Molly Jong-Fast, according to Politico. Get your popcorn ready.

Check out our full lineup below. Enjoy your weekend, we’re back on Monday.

The post Battle With China Brews in the Indian Ocean, Hamas Savagery Hits a New Low, and NBC News Settles a Defamation Suit appeared first on .

A federal civil rights investigation uncovered evidence that the George Washington University faculty retaliated against Jewish students based on “shared ancestry-related advocacy” by placing them in a remediation program after the students lodged an anti-Semitism complaint against an anti-Israel professor.

The Department of Education also ordered the school to conduct a review of former GW psychology professor Lara Sheehi’s social media posts—which included calls to “destroy Zionism” and described Israelis as “genocidal fucks”—to determine if the comments created a “hostile environment” for Jewish and Israeli students.

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights raised the concerns in a confidential settlement letter with GW on Jan. 16, which followed a two-year investigation, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

As part of the settlement, GW agreed to “review and revise” its anti-discrimination policies and train professors against “unlawful discrimination.” The school also agreed to expunge any disciplinary action from the students’ records.

A group of Jewish and Israeli psychology students at GW filed the civil rights complaint in 2023, saying the school failed to protect them after they were “singled out for repeated and persistent harassment” by anti-Israel professors and classmates in the program and later subjected to retaliation when they complained.

In the letter, the civil rights office said it had “concern that the students may have been placed on remediation plans in retaliation for asserting their rights” under the Civil Rights Act’s Title VI anti-discrimination clause. It added that the decisions to place those students into a remediation program “appear to encompass [the students’] shared ancestry-related advocacy.”

“Evidence provided to OCR indicated that the students made in-class statements during the course that constituted protected activity,” the letter stated.

StandWithUs, the group that brought the complaint on behalf of the students, told the Free Beacon that the settlement letter was a positive step.

“StandWithUs welcomes this result, as well as the requirement that GW must also remove all vestiges of the retaliatory disciplinary process to which Sheehi and fellow Program faculty subjected some of those students when they displayed the courage to speak up about the antisemitism they were experiencing,” said Carly Gammill, the group’s director of legal policy.

In the complaint, Jewish students said that Sheehi, the GW psychology professor, targeted them for their religion and Israeli nationality. When one of the students introduced herself to the class as an Israeli, Sheehi responded, “It’s not your fault you were born in Israel,” according to the complaint.

Sheehi also invited a guest lecturer who reportedly assailed “white Israeli racism” and praised a Palestinian terrorist who stabbed an Israeli child, according to the complaint. When some Jewish students pushed back on Sheehi’s anti-Israel rhetoric in class, the professor allegedly argued that Zionism was racist and anti-Semitic.

Sheehi reportedly complained about the students to other professors in the psychology program, and “faculty voted to initiate disciplinary proceedings against [the students],” according to the complaint.

Sheehi—who attacked Israel on social media as “racist” and “genocidal”—has since left GW for Hamas-friendly Qatar. The university hired a law firm to investigate the allegations against her, which found “no evidence substantiating the allegations of discriminatory and retaliatory conduct,” according to a statement from the firm.

But the OCR settlement letter indicates that the case still remains a concern.

The office ordered the school to “evaluate and determine whether a hostile environment based on national origin, including shared ancestry, was created for students on campus as a result of [Sheehi’s] social media activity,” including anything she posted before resigning. GW must submit its findings to OCR by later this spring, according to the settlement.

“Far from exonerating Sheehi or GW, OCR made clear that what happened to these students was wholly unacceptable under Title VI, and it imposes concrete obligations on GW to best ensure that such mistreatment does not recur,” said Gammill.

A GW spokeswoman declined to comment. She directed the Free Beacon to a statement on the school’s website that said the “investigation concluded without any finding that GW was in violation of Title VI nor any other law” and that the settlement was a “voluntary agreement, which is similar to agreements recently adopted by a wide variety of other universities.”

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Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass (D.) on Friday terminated city fire chief Kristin Crowley, whom she accused earlier this week of failing to warn her about last month’s wildfire threats before Bass traveled to Ghana.

In a press release, Bass said, “1,000 firefighters that could have been on duty on the morning the fires broke out were instead sent home on Chief Crowley’s watch.” At the time the flames erupted on Jan. 7, Bass herself was at a cocktail party in Ghana.

“Bringing new leadership to the fire department is what our city needs,” said Bass, who is herself facing dismal approval numbers and threats of a recall.

Bass also said that Crowley refused to conduct an after action report on the fires. Ronnie Villanueva, a recently retired LAFD deputy chief, will run the department while Bass’s office conducts a national search for a permanent replacement.

Crowley’s firing follows weeks of rumors that Bass was set to remove her. On Tuesday, in her first interview about the wildfires since they started, the mayor said she traveled to Ghana because Crowley didn’t warn her about the coming dangerous fire conditions. The National Weather Service of Los Angeles, however, had warned of “extreme fire weather conditions” two days prior to her trip and upgraded the threat the day before she left.

“When I talked about it with the fire chief, what she said is that we have warnings of Santa Ana winds a lot. But predicting this?” Bass told Fox 11. “That level of preparation didn’t happen. So it didn’t reach that level to me to say something terrible can happen and maybe you shouldn’t have gone on the trip.”

The fire department itself disputed this assertion, telling the Washington Free Beacon that before the wildfires broke out on Jan. 7, it posted public notifications, conducted multiple media interviews, coordinated with other city departments, and “notified City Officials about the upcoming weather event.” The department declined to specify when city officials were notified or if the mayor was among them.

Still, Bass’s office knew of the dangers while the mayor was abroad, posting her own warning on Jan. 7 at nearly 4 a.m. Ghana time. Nonetheless, Bass remained in Ghana until the fires erupted, ultimately burning through some 40,000 acres and more than 17,000 structures until they were finally contained on Jan. 31.

In a Wednesday email to the Free Beacon, the mayor’s office denied that Bass was pressuring Crowley to resign.

Bass has consistently blamed Crowley throughout the wildfire crisis. When she returned to the fire-ravaged city from Ghana, she refused to answer questions about her involvement in an alleged delay in deploying extra firefighters when the blazes first hit, deferring instead to Crowley, who said the department had done all it could in the face of wind and fire warnings, without knowing where the blazes would break out.

The mayor likewise repeatedly deflected blame for her decisions last year to cut the fire department budget by more than $17 million, even though Crowley had warned her its inadequate staffing would hamper wildfire response. Instead, Bass said she was “confident” the cuts hadn’t hurt the response and blamed climate change for the disaster’s magnitude.

“I think we all understand in our city that, due to climate change, we’re going to continue to see very unusual weather events,” Bass said, noting that severe winds “not seen in L.A. in at least 14 years” propelled the fires.

A few days later, her office scrubbed a November memo from Crowley that stated Los Angeles had roughly half the number of firefighters necessary for a city of its size, the Free Beacon has reported.

Rick Caruso, a prominent Los Angeles developer who ran against Bass in 2022, called Crowley’s firing “very disappointing” and “more blame passing.”

“Chief Crowley served Los Angeles well and spoke honestly about the severe and profoundly ill-conceived budget cuts the Bass administration made to the LAFD,” Caruso posted on X. “That courage to speak the truth was brave, and I admire her. Honesty in a high city official should not be a firing offense. The Mayor’s decision to ignore the warnings and leave the city was hers alone. This is a time for city leaders to take responsibility for their actions and their decisions.”

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The network settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum Thursday, avoiding a jury trial that was scheduled to begin on April 22 in Georgia’s Southern District. The suit arose from explosive MSNBC reports in 2020 alleging that Mahendra Amin, whom network anchors dubbed the “uterus collector,” conducted unnecessary and unauthorized gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, on immigrant women at an ICE facility.

Maddow, Wallace, and Hayes aggressively pushed those claims, which stemmed from a whistleblower complaint and became a centerpiece of MSNBC’s coverage of alleged abuses under President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Amin sued MSNBC for defamation in September 2021, denying that he had performed any unnecessary medical procedures.

A federal judge ruled last year that the MSNBC hosts made 39 “verifiably false” statements about Amin. The judge found that a jury could reasonably conclude the network acted with “actual malice.” Internal NBC documents revealed lingering doubts among reporters about the whistleblower’s claims, but aired the story anyway. Emails and texts uncovered during discovery showed that journalists, including Maddow and Hayes, had early reservations about the allegations.

Maddow—who was deposed for the lawsuit—and Hayes were personally involved in the off-camera vetting and editorial conversations around the segment to an extent that can be unusual for on-camera hosts, according to documents revealed during discovery. Last year, Maddow took a $5 million pay cut, reducing her annual salary from $30 million to $25 million over the next three years. At the time, she was hosting her show only one night per week, but she resumed a full five-night-per-week schedule during the first 100 days of Trump’s administration.

The saga began with a Sept. 15, 2020, NBC News article about the “uterus collector” by Julia Ainsley, a homeland security reporter, Jacob Soboroff, who covers immigration for NBC News and MSNBC, and Danielle Silva, an NBC News national reporter who covers immigration and education. The journalists obtained a whistleblower complaint from Dawn Wooten, a former nurse at the ICE facility, and interviewed her. The resulting story reported that “women are routinely being sent to a gynecologist who has left them bruised and performed unnecessary procedures, including hysterectomies.”

Soboroff wrote in one text message that an immigration attorney he spoke with offered “mixed feelings” about Wooten. In another text, Ainsley expressed concern at the small number of procedures Amin was alleged to perform asking Soboroff, “Just two hysterectomies?”—far fewer than the “mass hysterectomies” the reporting suggested.

Still, MSNBC used the story to fuel its anti-Trump rhetoric, generating significant viewership and profits for NBCUniversal and its parent company, Comcast. The liberal network spent much of Trump’s first term pushing the debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative, including in dozens of segments on Maddow’s program.

Soboroff, meanwhile, didn’t face any changes to his role over his involvement, with NBC putting him on air more than 30 times to cover the California wildfires that burned through Los Angeles, including for an extensive interview with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.). Soboroff’s father, developer Steve Soboroff, serves as Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass’s (D.) wildfire recovery czar.

MSNBC previously settled a defamation lawsuit with Nicholas Sandmann after the network aired more than a dozen segments about the Kentucky high school student’s confrontation with a Native American activist at the National Mall in 2019. MSNBC employees accused Sandmann of a “hate crime,” among other allegations.

NBCUniversal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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