Category: Judicial Watch
Yes, ICE Agents Can Defend Themselves From People Using Cars As Murder Weapons
Vehicles are deadly weapons, and crazed lunatics using them that way should expect a proportionate response.
Minneapolis Mayor Blames ICE For Car-Ramming Attack On Immigration Enforcement Officers
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey decided to blame federal law enforcement agents on Wednesday for the fatal shooting of a woman who apparently attempted to ram her vehicle into an officer. According to Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, “ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and […]
Creep state: Corgan claims feds helped sideline rock
Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan says he was approached by government entities during the George W. Bush administration.
According to the singer, he is familiar with several instances of musicians being compromised and protected by the industry due to their willingness to play ball.
‘I’ve been approached by elements of the US government.’
The Smashing Pumpkins were among the most popular bands in the 1990s, with three records achieving at least platinum-selling status and 1995’s “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” reaching diamond status.
Now, among other ventures, Corgan hosts “The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan” podcast and recently had writer Conrad Flynn as his guest. The pair discussed dark influences in Hollywood culture, which led Corgan to reveal that he himself had been approached by the government in past decades.
Siamese scheme
“At different times, I’ve been approached by elements of the U.S. government to be involved in things that were just way above my pay grade,” he explained. “I’ve never talked about them in any depth publicly, but I’ve had experiences where I would find myself in a room with people and think, ‘Why are they talking to me?’ It was something out of, like, ‘Eyes Wide Shut,'” Corgan said, referring to the movie about the occult.
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Corgan explained that his experiences led to interactions with government officials hoping to capitalize on his influence.
“All I can say is I’ve experienced supernatural things and I’ve experienced things where I’ve had elements of the U.S. government reach out to me because they somehow want to hook my influence, which is not that great, into whatever they’re after.”
Chart of the deal
This led the singer to speak on the music industry, which is “certainly [his] area of expertise,” while adding the notion that “there are elements in popular music where people have been compromised, knowingly.”
“They were offered kind of a Faustian bargain. Pick door No .1 and we’re going to push you to the moon. … There are people who are protected, and they get every benefit of that protection, and I know it because I know the game, because I’ve lived it. And there are other people where they just, they decide to press a button and throw them off the ship.”
Some of these musicians may have been dumped for bad behavior, Corgan admitted, but in “other cases,” he said, it was likely because “they won’t do the bidding that people want them to do.”
RELATED: Corporation for Public Broadcasting dissolved by board after 58 years of funding PBS and NPR
Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images
Disarmed
The culmination of political influence on music — particularly rock music — resulted in the severe lack of edgy rock artists since the turn of the millennium.
“Here we are 25 years into the 21st century, and rock couldn’t be less of an influence on the on the social political order,” Corgan continued, noting how influential the genre was in the second half of the 1900s.
“Does anybody think that that’s kind of strange? That somebody decided to push a button somewhere and make sure that people like myself don’t say certain things any more?”
Corgan soon cut the conversation short, telling his guest he was not willing to directly state what he was asked and by whom.
Infamous CIA officer turned Soviet spy dies in prison
After more than 30 years since pleading guilty to espionage that reportedly compromised several United States assets during the Cold War, an infamous Central Intelligence Agency officer has died in prison.
Aldrich Ames died on Monday, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.
Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve ‘financial troubles, immediate and continuing.’
Ames was held in the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, where he was serving a life sentence without parole.
Ames, a career CIA agent, was arrested in 1994 on espionage charges years after he began cooperating with KGB agents in 1985. The information he provided to the Soviets is thought to have directly contributed to the compromising of several CIA and FBI sources, some of whom were executed after their discovery.
RELATED: Unveiling ‘Big Intel’: How the CIA and FBI became deep state villains
Photo by Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images
Over nearly a decade, Moscow paid him $2.5 million in exchange for betraying state secrets to the Soviets during and after the Cold War. Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve “financial troubles, immediate and continuing.”
“Well, the reasons that I did what I did in April of 1985 were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly. As simple as that,” Ames said in an interview archived by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, according to Fox News.
“I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution, and capital punishment, certainly, in the case of KGB and GRU officers who would be tried in a military court, and certainly others, that they were almost all at least potentially liable to capital punishment,” he added. “There’s simply no question about this.”
Ames’ wife, Rosario, was sentenced to 63 months in prison on charges of assisting his espionage.
Ames was 84 years old at the time of his death.
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From Monroe to ‘Donroe’: America enforces its back yard again
When President Donald Trump stood before reporters Saturday and invoked the Monroe Doctrine, he was not indulging nostalgia. He was announcing enforcement. Then came the line that removed all ambiguity: The Monroe Doctrine, he said, will now be known as the Donroe Doctrine.
The leftist political class recoiled on cue. Mainstream commentators scoffed. Corporate editorial boards feigned alarm. Strip away the theatrics, and the meaning was clear. The United States has decided to resume responsibility for the Western Hemisphere — not in the language of empire, but in the language of order, law, and consequence.
One reality is already clear. The Western Hemisphere no longer serves as an unguarded corridor for corruption, narcotics, and foreign subversion.
The Monroe Doctrine emerged in 1823, when President James Monroe warned European powers that further colonization or political interference in the Americas would not be tolerated. It never meant isolationism. It reflected realism.
Power vacuums invite conquest. Disorder invites domination. The early American republic understood that if Europe continued exporting its political systems into the New World, the hemisphere would remain unstable and unfree. America declared an end to European colonial ambition long before “decolonization” became a fashionable academic slogan.
Over time, enforcement varied in wisdom and restraint. Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary warned that chronic wrongdoing in the Americas could require U.S. intervention. During the Cold War, Washington invoked the doctrine — sometimes clumsily — to block Soviet expansion and nuclear weapons in the hemisphere.
Through each phase, the premise endured: The Western Hemisphere is a distinct political space, and the United States bears a special responsibility to prevent it from becoming a staging ground for criminal regimes and foreign adversaries.
That responsibility eroded in recent decades, replaced by a dangerous fantasy: that cartel-run states can invoke sovereignty to excuse any behavior so long as it occurs within their borders — or moves outward through drug routes and illegal oil networks. Venezuela stands as the clearest casualty of that delusion.
The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Nicolás Maduro on narco-terrorism charges for conspiring with drug cartels to flood the United States with cocaine. This was no symbolic gesture. It marked a recognition that Venezuela under Maduro is not a normal sovereign government, but a criminal enterprise masquerading as one. Enforcement, not rhetoric, gives such indictments meaning. That is what the Donroe Doctrine signals.
Democratic critics objected immediately, even though the indictment originated under the Biden administration. Some argued that because the United States cannot remove every tyrant everywhere, it lacks moral authority to act against any single one. That is moral paralysis disguised as principle. By that logic, no law should ever be enforced because more criminals remain at large. Police would stop making arrests. Courts would close. Justice would dissolve into excuses.
Others insisted Venezuela’s sovereignty places it beyond American reach. Sovereignty does not magically convert criminal conduct into legitimacy. A regime that finances itself through narcotics trafficking, collaborates with cartels, launders money through international systems, facilitates human trafficking, and exports violence across borders has already violated the sovereignty of others — especially the United States. Cocaine and fentanyl ignore borders. So do the trafficking networks Venezuela enables. By its conduct, the Maduro regime declared hostility. Enforcement followed.
Venezuelan officials now appeal to international law. The claim borders on parody. Venezuela ranks among the world’s most corrupt regimes. Its institutions lie hollow. Its courts serve politics. Its elections perform theater. For such a regime to suddenly demand protection from a rules-based order it has systematically violated is not irony; it is audacity. This is not a government. It is a cartel with flags and uniforms.
RELATED: The Venezuela crisis was never just about drugs
Photo by XNY/Star Max/GC Images
The more revealing question is not why the United States finally enforced its laws against a narco-state but why so many Western politicians rushed to defend it. How many careers, campaigns, and institutions have drawn quiet benefit from regimes like Maduro’s? How many activists and academics repeat talking points that align perfectly with the interests of Caracas, Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran?
America’s adversaries understand Venezuela well. China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran treat it as a strategic asset — oil-rich, geographically close to the United States, and governed by leaders willing to trade sovereignty for survival. Through Venezuela, hostile powers gain leverage and access in the Western Hemisphere. Only America’s political class pretended this did not matter.
Venezuelans themselves understand what is at stake. Many celebrated the renewed enforcement of U.S. law because polite diplomacy never delivered accountability. They lived under a regime that destroyed the economy, emptied shelves, silenced dissent, and drove millions into exile. They do not fear American responsibility. They welcome it. While American professors protest Donald Trump and plead for Maduro, Venezuelans cheer Trump and hope for freedom.
The Donroe Doctrine does not promise instant liberation or universal justice. It promises something more basic and more necessary: Criminal regimes will no longer receive legitimacy simply because they occupy a seat at the United Nations. Traffickers, tyrants, and their patrons now face consequences.
Whether this approach extends beyond Venezuela remains to be seen. But one reality is already clear. The Western Hemisphere no longer serves as an unguarded corridor for corruption, narcotics, and foreign subversion.
The age of moral neutrality is over. The age of the Donroe Doctrine has begun.
WAKE-UP CALL! Hilton Drops Minneapolis Hotel That Lied About Immigration Agent Ban: Report
According to a New York Post report, Hilton is yanking the Hilton name from a Minnesota Hampton Inn after the property banned immigration agents, and a video went viral.
Medicaid Makes $289 Million in “Unallowable Payments” to Insure “Deceased Enrollees”
A decade after Judicial Watch reported that Medicaid, the government’ s fraud-infested health insurance program for the needy, spent $26 million to provide dead people in one state alone with benefits, a federal audit reveals the problem continues full-throttle with hundreds of millions of dollars in “unallowable payments” on behalf of “deceased enrollees.” It is […]
The post Medicaid Makes $289 Million in “Unallowable Payments” to Insure “Deceased Enrollees” appeared first on Judicial Watch.
House Judiciary Alleges California Wildfire Relief Donations Went To Illegal Aliens, Podcasters And Admin Costs
‘Diverted donations intended for fire victims’
California Republican suddenly dies at age 65
Update: Reports now indicate that Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa passed away after suffering an aneurysm and later a heart attack during surgery.
Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa of California has tragically passed away at just 65 years old, according to multiple statements from GOP lawmakers issued Tuesday morning.
LaMalfa was a fourth-generation rice farmer representing California’s 1st congressional district, an agricultural area in Northern California. LaMalfa dedicated over two decades of his life to public service, first as a state legislator and later serving in Congress from 2013 to 2026.
‘Doug brought grit, authenticity, and conviction to everything he did in public service.’
In the wake of the sudden tragedy, many of LaMalfa’s colleagues expressed shock and extended their condolences to his family on social media.
Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
“Jacquie and I are devastated about the sudden loss of our friend, Congressman Doug LaMalfa,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) said in a post on X. “Doug was a loving father and husband, and staunch advocate for his constituents and rural America. Our prayers are with Doug’s wife, Jill, and their children.”
Republican Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who also chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, reflected on his friendship with LaMalfa, recounting personal memories with the late congressman.
“I am deeply saddened by the passing of my colleague and close friend, Congressman Doug LaMalfa,” Hudson said in a statement. “Doug was a principled conservative and a tireless advocate for the people of Northern California. He was never afraid to fight for rural communities, farmers, and working families. Doug brought grit, authenticity, and conviction to everything he did in public service.”
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Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
“I cherished our time serving together on the Agriculture Committee and discussing NASCAR — he was a real gear head and motorsports fan. I will deeply miss my ‘amigo.’ Renee and I are praying for his beloved wife, Jill, as well as Kyle, Allison, Sophia, Natalie, and all his loved ones, friends and staff during this incredibly difficult time.”
The House majority now sits at 218 Republicans and 213 Democrats.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to include Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa’s reported cause of death.
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Illegal alien truckers with California licenses accused of hauling $7M in cocaine across state lines
Two illegal alien truck drivers who obtained commercial driver’s licenses from California are accused of smuggling $7 million worth of cocaine across the Midwest.
‘Sanctuary policies put American lives at risk.’
Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Sunday lodged detainers against 25-year-old Gurpreet Singh and 30-year-old Jasveer Singh after local authorities arrested the two Indian nationals in Putnam County, Indiana.
The men were driving a semitruck along I-70 when an Indiana State Police trooper pulled them over for a routine traffic stop on Saturday, according to local reports.
The trooper’s K-9 unit gave a positive alert, prompting the officer to conduct a more thorough search of the truck. The trooper allegedly discovered 309 pounds of cocaine hidden in the truck’s sleeper berth.
The men were reportedly traveling from Joplin, Missouri, to Richmond, Indiana.
They were charged with a Level 2 felony of dealing narcotics.
Gurpreet Singh. Image source: Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security reported that the men were allegedly smuggling enough drugs to kill over 113,000 Americans.
Gurpreet Singh illegally entered the U.S. in March 2023 and was released into the country by the Biden administration. The DHS reported that he admitted to law enforcement that he was illegally in the U.S.
Jasveer Singh illegally entered the country in March 2017. He was arrested in San Bernardino, California, in December for allegedly receiving stolen property. ICE placed a detainer against him, but California did not honor it, and he was released from local custody.
RELATED: Border Patrol nabs 49 illegal aliens with commercial driver’s licenses
Jasveer Singh. Image source: Department of Homeland Security
The DHS blamed California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s policies for allowing the illegal aliens to obtain CDLs amid growing concerns about the surge of unqualified foreign nationals in the American trucking industry. Newsom’s office has repeatedly rebutted these criticisms by claiming that California’s CDLs for foreign nationals are issued in compliance with federal guidelines, based on work authorization documents provided by the U.S. government.
“Thanks to Gavin Newsom’s reckless policies, these two criminal illegal aliens were granted commercial driver’s licenses by the state of California and were arrested for trafficking a whopping 300 pounds of cocaine inside a semi-truck,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin stated. “Gavin Newsom and his fellow sanctuary politicians even refused to honor an arrest detainer on one of these criminal illegal aliens in December. Sanctuary policies put American lives at risk. ICE law enforcement lodged arrest detainers to ensure these drug traffickers are not allowed back into American communities.”
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