From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Audrey Streb

“It’s clear from these documents that Biden’s EPA cut corners to get the money ‘obligated’ before the funds expired on September 30, 2024, even if it meant ‘finalizing’ agreements with grantees they fully intended to re-negotiate later. In the private sector, this is the kind of thing that sometimes lands people in jail.”

The Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hastily shoveled billions in taxpayer dollars to Democrat-aligned green groups without having concrete agreements in place, according to documents obtained by watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT).

The documents indicate that the Biden EPA awarded grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) — a program that shelled out $20 billion to nonprofits linked to Democrat donors and insiders — on a timeline that allowed changes to the terms even after the money was awarded. The Biden EPA had until September 2024 to award the taxpayer funds, and staff were advised to delay outstanding questions and issues in order to meet the looming award deadline, the documents indicate.

“The more information that is revealed about the GGRF, the shadier the entire scheme looks,” Michael Chamberlain, director of PPT, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The irony is that when federal employees finally start cutting red tape and expediting a process, it’s to make sure taxpayer money is irrecoverable to taxpayers. It’s clear from these documents that Biden’s EPA cut corners to get the money ‘obligated’ before the funds expired on September 30, 2024, even if it meant ‘finalizing’ agreements with grantees they fully intended to re-negotiate later. In the private sector, this is the kind of thing that sometimes lands people in jail.”

2024 EPA 05147 Responsive RecordsPPTFinal by audreystreb on Scribd

Although the money was legally committed in August 2024, the Biden EPA mapped out a timeline that extended revising terms and conditions past the September 2024 deadline to “resolve outstanding issues through December 31, 2024.” Another slide notes the looming deadline and argues that EPA staff needs to “accept that not all questions will be resolved prior to award.”

E&E News reporter Jean Chemnick asked in May 2024 about GGRF’s “transparency and accountability guardrails,” and in response, a Biden official argued that the program had strong oversight when it planned to change the terms after the funding deadline, the documents indicate. The Biden official pointed to other similar EPA programs as examples of the agency’s experience, though the programs listed were either brand new or less than one-thousandth of the size of GGRF, the PPT notes and the documents show.

“Now we really know what throwing gold bars off the Titanic looks like,” Chamberlain said, referencing a video covertly recorded by conservative activist group Project Veritas in which a Biden EPA official likened the rush to fund green groups before Trump’s arrival to hurling money off a sinking ship. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has also repeatedly cited the Project Veritas video in comments about the GGRF.

Several of the GGRF grantees are laden with Democrat donors and former high-level Obama and Biden administration officials. Established under Biden’s signature 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the multi-billion-dollar program budget far exceeded any previous EPA budget. Federal reviewers flagged “excessive” executive pay and questionable financial statements ahead of the final GGRF grantee selections, the DCNF previously reported.

Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), Power Forward Communities (PFC) and Climate United Fund (CUF) are among the three grantees loaded with Democrat donors and insiders that federal reviewers flagged for seemingly unjustified high executive salaries.

CGC declined to comment and PFC did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

CU pointed to appeals court filings which confirm that the terms and conditions were changed in December 2024, though it argued that these changes were not substantive.

“Changes to terms were administrative in nature and provided more clarity around reporting requirements and account controls, as detailed in court filings,” a CU spokesperson told the DCNF. “EPA has not used the changes to terms and conditions as a part of their legal arguments since they were addressed in court earlier in the case.”

Additionally, the CU spokesperson said that adjusting federal grant terms is not out of the ordinary and that the Biden EPA was transparent about the GGRF throughout the program.

“The more you look at this, the worse it gets. Not only was the Biden EPA tossing billions of taxpayer dollars ‘off the Titanic,’ to borrow their language, but under every stone you find more well documented incidents of self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, and intentionally reduced agency oversight,” Zeldin told the DCNF. “These grants were rightfully terminated months ago, and Congress just fully repealed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program in the One Big Beautiful Bill.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed the GGRF program and rescinded remaining unobligated program funds.

The agency’s inspector general, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI are investigating the GGRF for potential fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars, and Zeldin has highlighted the program as a key example of Biden-era corruption on numerous occasions.

EPA froze 129 Citibank accounts holding the funds in February, and in response, several grantees sued the agency and Citibank, arguing that the freeze lacked legal justification and that the EPA had acted properly in distributing the money. An appeals court intervened to stay an earlier ruling that would have forced the EPA to free the frozen funds.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Mariane Angela

Former State Department official Mike Benz raised serious concerns on Fox News Monday about the events surrounding the shooting in Butler, Pa., asking whether federal law enforcement played a more significant role than originally reported.

It’s been a year since the shooting of President Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, and while investigations have shed light on the incident, several critical questions remain unanswered. During an appearance on “The Will Cain Show,” Benz said he believes the lack of transparency in the case has led to many critical questions remaining unanswered.

“So the question is, if Crooks was cultivated or if he was being monitored or potentially interacted with by federal law enforcement agents who put him onto that? And I think that the total lack of transparency, it’s sort of defying the laws of surveillance state physics,” Benz said. “I think most people believe that if federal law enforcement were to get ahold of their phone, that pretty much everything could be scraped from it. You don’t know if, for example, in this case, he was communicating with a foreign government.”

Benz then raised concerns that the investigation into the Butler shooting could extend beyond the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), suggesting that agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) might be involved in cracking encrypted communications.

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“This, to me, may go beyond, you know, FBI, DHS. We know that the NSA is able to crack these sorts of things. And so it’s all very strange to me,” Benz said. “But, again, there’s another whistleblower report that I believe Josh Hawley’s whistleblower mentioned, which was that HSI [Homeland Security Investigation] agents kind of mysteriously replaced a fair number of Secret Service agents that day because Secret Service was said to be split between the NATO summit and Jill Biden being away.”

Benz referred to what he called a troubling series of events leading up to the Butler shooting.

“And that Secret Service had denied, I think, about 10 requests for additional security from the Trump campaign prior to the shooting. And so it is just a strange confluence of variables that just do not sit well for the American public,” Benz said. “And I think that there should be a sort of transparency task force so that these specific questions about HSI and the potential recruiting as an informant about the contents of the phone and the like can be answered.”

A report released Sept. 2024 uncovered whistleblower allegations about the Secret Service’s security failures during the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler. The office of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri published the whistleblower report and revealed previously undisclosed claims about the DHS and Secret Service committing multiple failures.

Whistleblowers allege that the agent in charge of the Butler rally failed a key examination during federal training and was considered “low-caliber.” The report also said that the Secret Service’s intelligence units were absent from the rally, which contributed to communication failures between law enforcement agencies.

Senior U.S. Secret Service officials were aware of a “classified threat” to Trump’s life 10 days before the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt but failed to inform the agents protecting him. A report from the Government Accountability Office said Sunday that the intelligence, presented to Secret Service leadership, never reached the field team due to a “siloed practice for sharing classified information.”

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News)