Daily Caller
$40 million weekly cash shipments from US are stabilizing Afghanistan’s Taliban government
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
It is common knowledge that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a complete disaster, but lots of people do not know that the Biden administration has been sending cash to the Taliban every week since then.
When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, our troops were ordered to leave behind $7 billion worth of military equipment which ended up in the hands of the Taliban. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the Taliban also likely gained access to approximately $57.6 million in funds that the United States had provided to the former Afghan government. But that was just the beginning of the financial atrocities.
“According to an August 2023 World Bank report, the UN has purchased, transported, and transferred $2.9 billion in U.S. currency to Afghanistan since August 2021,” said a SIGAR report published in January. “This included $1.8 billion provided in 2022 and $1.1 billion provided in 2023, as of August 2023.”
“The U.S. is the largest international donor to Afghanistan, having provided about $2.6 billion in funding to the UN, other international organizations (PIOs), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Afghanistan since August 2021,” said the SIGAR report.
The U.N., which handles the transportation of these payments, claims it needs to send cash because the country does not have the infrastructure to wire funds.
I recently hosted a guest on my podcast who goes by the name of “Legend” to talk about these payments. He is an Afghan American and former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer who has deployed to Afghanistan multiple times, and who traveled to Kabul during the Afghanistan withdrawal to rescue individuals left behind.
Legend confirmed: “Yes, the money does end up feeding and supporting the Taliban.” He explained that the United Nations flies the cash from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan Central Bank which is managed by a terrorist who is on an active U.S. sanctions list. That bank then holds an “auction” where groups bid to take those dollars and convert it to the local currency. Every week the winner of that auction is someone associated with the Haqqani Network, a terror group with ties to Al-Qaeda.
These terrorists take the money and convert it to Afghani to distribute. Some of that money stays with the Haqqani Network, some goes to the terrorists running the bank, and the rest of the money is given to the local implementing parties or non-government organizations (NGOs).
However, the Taliban is the group handing out NGO licenses in Afghanistan. If a Taliban sympathizer asks for an NGO license, they get it. So, many of these groups send money directly to the Taliban or to support the families of suicide bombers.
Legend also said if the United States suspended these weekly payments, we would see signs of the Taliban and other Afghanistan-based terror groups crumbling within a year. The $40 million weekly cash shipments have stabilized the Afghani, making the Taliban’s newly printed currency the world’s best performer, beating the U.S. dollar in September 2023.
It is not like this administration doesn’t know who they’re dealing with. President Joe Biden was a senator and Vice President Kamala Harris was an attorney in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan with an iron fist. During that time, women were stripped of their rights and treated as prisoners, and the Taliban provided safe haven to al-Qaeda in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks.
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, their spokesperson said: “Nobody will be harmed in Afghanistan. Of course, there is a huge difference between us now and 20 years ago.” It was a laughable statement, and no sane person should have believed it. Terrorists don’t change.
The Taliban’s return to oppression started slow. First, they banned women from driving more than 45 miles without a male relative. Then they stopped them from going to school. Then they banned women’s faces and voices from being displayed in public, and prohibited women from looking at men they are not related to. These women are now prisoners in their own country as much as they were in the 1990s. And we are funding their oppressors.
The fact that a single penny of American tax dollars has ended up in the hands of terrorists is a disgrace. I introduced a bill that would do three things to stop it:
First, my bill states the policy of the United States is to oppose support to the Taliban. It also calls for a report on any foreign countries that have given support to the Taliban and calls for the secretary of State to develop a strategy to discourage foreign countries from providing support. Second, it calls for a report on cash assistance programs in Afghanistan and the safeguards in place to prevent the Taliban from accessing it. Third, it requires a report on the Afghan Fund and the Afghanistan central bank and what controls are in place to make sure those funds are not diverted or misused.
The House passed my bill earlier this year, but unfortunately the Senate won’t vote on it. This should be a bipartisan issue, and we need to keep pushing for it.
Many people lost everything because of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Women lost their freedom, Afghan citizens lost their lives, and 13 U.S. servicemembers were killed. One of those servicemembers was my constituent, Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss. He had recently finished a deployment in Afghanistan when he heard we were evacuating and he volunteered to go back to help. He was 23 years old when he was killed.
We need to honor their sacrifice as best as we can. That starts by halting the payments we have been sending to the Taliban. No more American money for terrorists.
Rep. Tim Burchett has represented Tennessee’s 2nd District in the U.S. House of Representatives since January 2019. Prior to that he served for eight years as mayor of Knox County, 12 years in the state senate and four years in the state house.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The U.S. intercepted and seized a vessel in international waters near Venezuela, marking the second such operation in recent weeks, multiple outlets reported Saturday.
The U.S. Coast Guard led the operation with assistance from other branches of the military, U.S. officials told CNN.
The interdiction follows on the heels of the Dec. 10 seizure of a sanctioned tanker off the Venezuelan coast. It also comes just days after President Donald Trump announced a sweeping blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers arriving to or leaving the South American nation, the ruling regime of which he designated a foreign terrorist organization.
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“The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping,” Trump posted Tuesday on Truth Social. “I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.”
When asked following the first seizure what the U.S. would do with the confiscated oil, Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.”
The operations come amid months of escalating U.S. pressure on Venezuela.
American armed forces have steadily increased their presence and operations in the southern Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast, including numerous strikes on drug smuggling vessels. The buildup has fueled speculation about a potential full-scale confrontation with Maduro or even a material push for regime change.
Trump reportedly offered Maduro a deal in late November to vacate power in exchange for safe passage for him and his family. The U.S. also placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro in August, the largest sum ever offered for a sitting head of state.
In announcing the blockade Tuesday, Trump warned the “illegitimate Maduro Regime” that the “Armada” surrounding the country “will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.” He also demanded that Maduro “return to the United States of America all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.”
Despite the growing pressure, Maduro dispatched two non-sanctioned vessels Thursday carrying oil to China, Reuters reported.
The Coast Guard referred questions on the operation to the White House, which did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Daily Caller
Ex-FDA Commissioners Against Higher Vaccine Standards Took $6 Million From COVID Vaccine Makers
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The FDA old guard criticized the new leadership in a Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) letter over a higher regulatory bar for vaccines, namely the expectation that most new vaccine approvals will require randomized clinical trials, arguing it could hamper the market.
“Insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit,” the former commissioners wrote. “Abandoning the existing methods won’t ‘elevate vaccine science’ … It will subject vaccines to a substantially higher and more subjective approval bar.”
But while the former commissioners disclosed their conflicts of interest to the medical journal — per standard practice in scientific publishing — reporters didn’t relay them to the broader public in reports in the Washington Post, STAT News and CNN.
The headlines about a bipartisan rebuke from former occupants of FDA’s highest office give the impression that the Trump administration is contravening established science, but closer inspection reveals a revolving door between pharmaceutical corporations and the agencies overseeing them.
Three of the signatories have received payments totaling $6 million from manufacturers or former manufacturers of COVID vaccines.
Scott Gottlieb has received $2.1 million in cash and stock from his position on the Pfizer board of directors, where he has advised on ethics and regulatory compliance since 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stephen Ostroff has received $752,310 from Pfizer in consulting fees since 2020, according to OpenPayments.
Mark McClellan has received $3.3 million from Johnson & Johnson as a member of the board of directors since 2013, SEC filings also show. McClellan also consults for the new pharmaceutical arm of the alternative investment management company Blackstone, which invested $750 million in Moderna in April 2025.
Gottlieb and McClellan did not respond to requests for comment. Ostroff could not be reached for comment.
FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad outlined the higher standards and shared the results of an internal analysis validating 10 reports of children’s deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine in a Nov. 28 memo to staff. He called for introspection and reform at the agency.
The NEJM letter criticizes Prasad for cracking down on a practice called “immunobridging” that infers vaccine efficacy from laboratory tests rather than assessing it through real-world reductions in disease or death. The FDA under the Biden administration expanded COVID vaccines to children using this “immunobridging” technique, extrapolating vaccine efficacy from adults to children based on antibody levels.
Norman Sharpless — who in addition to previously serving as acting FDA commissioner also served as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute — consults for Tempus, a company that collaborates with COVID vaccine maker BioNTech. He has helped steer $70 million in investments in biotech through a venture capital firm he founded in November 2024. Sharpless also disclosed $26,180 in payments in 2024 from Chugai Pharmaceutical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that markets mRNA technology among other drugs, on OpenPayments.
“I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as NCI Director and Acting FDA Commissioner in the first Trump Administration, and strongly support many of the things President Trump is trying to do in the current Administration,” Sharpless said in an email.
Margaret Hamburg, another former FDA commissioner and signatory of the NEJM letter, has since 2020 earned $2.8 million as a member of the board of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which markets RNA interference (RNAi) technology.
Hamburg did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.
Most signatories disclosed income from biotech companies testing experimental cancer treatments. These products could face tighter scrutiny under Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist long wary of rubberstamping pricey oncology drugs — which Prasad points out often cause some toxicity — without plausible evidence of an improvement in quality of life or survival.
The former FDA commissioners disclosed ties to Sermonix Pharmaceuticals Inc.; OncoNano Medicine; incyclix; Nucleus Radiopharma; and N-Power, a contractor that runs oncology clinical trials.
Andrew von Eschenbach, who like Sharpless formerly served both as FDA commissioner and the head of the National Cancer Institute, disclosed stock in HistoSonics, a company with investments from Bezos Expeditions and Thiel Bio seeking FDA approval for ultrasound technology targeted at tumors.
Some FDA commissioners who signed onto the letter opposing changes to vaccine approvals have ties to biotechnology investment firms, namely McClellan, who consults Arsenal Capital; Janet Woodcock, who consults RA Capital Management; and Robert Califf, who owns stock in Population Health Partners.
Califf did not respond to an email requesting comment. Woodcock did not respond to requests for comment sent to two medical research advocacy groups with Woodcock on the board. Eschenbach did not respond to a LinkedIn message.
The two signatories without pharmaceutical ties may find their judgement challenged by the FDA investigation into COVID-19 vaccine deaths, having either implemented or formally defended the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of vaccines and boosters to healthy adults and children.
David Kessler executed Biden’s vaccination policy as chief science officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, helping to secure deals for shots with Pfizer and Moderna.
Meanwhile Jane Henney chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report published in October 2025 that praised the performance of FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine surveillance during the pandemic — underwritten with CDC funding.
That assessment clashes with that of a Senate report, citing internal documents from FDA, finding that CDC never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, and that top officials in the Biden administration delayed warning pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after their approval in some children in May 2021, months after Israeli health officials first detected it in February 2021. The Senate investigation named Woodcock, a signatory of the NEJM letter, as one of the FDA officials who slow-walked the warning.
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