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Daily Caller

Kash Patel Is Already Making Beltway Bandits Sweat

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Morgan Murphy

Kash Patel will soon be confirmed as director of the FBI. It can’t come quickly enough. Patel’s pending confirmation may be why the searches for “witness protection,” erase iPhone,” and paper shredder” have skyrocketed in D.C. since Jan. 20th.

The Beltway bandits are on the run.

Just last month Dems fantasized that they might block Patel, along with Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. Trump’s surging popularity, now at the highest its ever been, destroyed any chance of that.

On Thursday, the former Department of Defense chief of staff cleared his first Senate committee on a vote of 12 to 10, putting him on track for a full Senate vote as early as this week.

Americans now know how deeply the deep state runs in Washington, D.C. The looming confirmation of Kash Patel will be the first reckoning at the FBI since the Church Committee’s 1975 probe in the wake of Watergate.

Since Trump’s first run at the White House in 2016, the FBI has been trying to take him down.

Patel led the investigation for Devin Nunes’ congressional probe into Russian interference, without which we might never have known that Hilary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the so-called Steele Dossier, which was essentially a smear campaign passed off as actual non-partisan intelligence.

The FBI and Justice Department then used that “dossier” as justification for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) warrant to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.

Think on that a hot second — a Democrat administration used the FBI and Justice Department to spy on a Republican campaign. It makes Watergate look like a parking ticket by comparison.

It gets worse.

Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, the FBI actively worked against the President. In fact, the FBI’s #2 official at the time, Andrew McCabe, confirmed to CBS that there were meetings at the Justice Department with the FBI on how they might remove the 45th President of the United States.

Having unsuccessfully tried to remove a sitting president, the FBI then went on to make sure Joe Biden won. During the 2020 campaign, the FBI laid the groundwork with the media and social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. As the New York Post reported, the “‘FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,’ an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote on Oct. 14, 2020.”

Instead of having its reporters hailed as modern day Woodward and Bernstein’s, the New York Post (the nation’s oldest newspaper) found itself censored and suppressed.

With Trump gone, the FBI then ran amuck, sending at least 26 agents to the Capitol on January 6th, most of which engaged in illegal activities, according to the long-awaited Inspector General’s report. It then dedicated 5,000 employees — more than 10% of its workforce — to prosecuting J6 protestors.

The FBI didn’t stop there. Biden’s G-men labeled angry parents as “domestic terrorists” and traditional Catholics as violent extremists.” The FBI went to far as to propose infiltrating Catholic churches as “threat mitigation.”

After 10 years of abuses, the FBI’s judgement day of reckoning may arrive this week in the form of Senate confirmation for Patel.

What might day one look like?

First to go will be partisan agents bent on changing elections and subverting democracy.

Pundits have also speculated that Patel might shutter the FBI’s brutalist concrete headquarters building on Washington, D.C.’s famous mall and boot its 7,000 agents out into the heartland where they belong. It might happen.

But those who know Patel expect him to make the Bureau get back to basics: FBI agents being cops, not intelligence agents.

The core mission of the bureau is to protect Americans from crime and defend the U.S. Constitution from domestic threats. Patel will likely target the top 10 cities for violent crime and work closely with the Department of Homeland Security and Tom Holman to extradite illegal aliens.  Expect him to redirect gumshoes to come down on cyber criminals and state actors who commit 800,000+ cybercrimes and ransomware attacks each year.

He’ll also likely be working closely with newly confirmed Health and Human Services Director, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to investigate racketeering and collusion among big pharma, medical boards, and medical journals.

What worries Washington most? In Patel we’ll have an FBI director who is serious about investigating corrupt public officials.

In an age where senior lawmakers are literally accepting gold bars as bribes and lawmakers making $200k a year have net worth’s north of $50 million, Americans are asking questions.

Expect the FBI’s new director to start finding answers.

Morgan Murphy is military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.

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Tesla Vandals Keep Running Into The Same Problem … Cameras

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hudson Crozier

People damaging Teslas in anger toward their owners and Elon Musk aren’t picking up on the fact that the vehicles have multiple cameras capable of catching them in the act.

At least nine perpetrators have been caught on video keying, writing graffiti or otherwise defacing Tesla vehicles in parking lots across the U.S. in the month of March alone. Most have led to an arrest or warrant based partly on the footage, which Tesla’s “Sentry Mode” automatically films from the side of the unattended vehicle when it detects human activity nearby.

“Smile, you’re on camera,” Tesla warned in a March 20 X post about its Sentry Mode feature. Musk’s company has been working to upgrade Sentry Mode so that the vehicles will soon blast music at full volume when vandals attack it. The camera system, however, has not stopped an increasing number of vandals from singling out Tesla owners, usually in protest of Musk’s work in the Trump administration for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

One incident happened on March 29, the same day leftists coordinated protests around the country for a “Global Day of Action” against Musk. That Saturday also saw alleged instances of violence at protests. The demonstrations stemmed from an online call to action by groups such as the Disruption Project, which encourages activists to foment “uprisings,” find a “target’s” home address and other confrontational tactics.

Tesla’s press team did not respond to a request for comment.

One man allegedly caught on camera keying a Tesla SUV on March 24 apologized to the owner who confronted him in a parking lot in Pennsylvania, police and media reports said. The man faces charges of criminal mischief, harassment and disorderly conduct for allegedly carving a swastika onto the vehicle.

“I have nothing against your car, and I have nothing against you,” the suspect said while the owner filmed him in the parking lot. “Obviously, I have something against Elon Musk.” The man called his own behavior “misguided.”

The defendant’s lawyer told Fox News his “client is a proud father, long-time resident, and is currently undergoing cancer treatment” and that he would not comment publicly “pending the outcome of the case.”

One of the most aggressive acts caught by Sentry Mode was in the case of a man who drove an ATV-style vehicle into a Tesla on March 25. Texas police identified the man as Demarqeyun Marquize Cox, arrested him and said he allegedly gave two other nearby Teslas the same treatment while also writing “Elon” on them. The public defender office representing Cox did not respond to a voicemail from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Tesla cameras also caught three other people in FloridaTexas and Arizona keying and smearing bubble gum on the vehicles in March. The three suspects named by police do not have attorneys listed in county records available for contact.

Many of the vandalism cases since Trump’s return have reportedly caused thousands of dollars in damage for individual owners. For example, the bubble gum incident in Florida brought $2,623.66 in costs, while another keying incident in Minnesota brought $3,200.

Some reported attacks on Tesla vehicles and chargers have gotten the attention of federal law enforcement, including cases of alleged firebombing or shooting.

Two other suspected vandals in New York, one in Minnesota and one in Mississippi have reportedly avoided arrest for now — with one owner declining to press charges — but were all seen on the Teslas’ cameras scratching up the vehicles. Police identified the Mississippi suspect as an illegal migrant from Cuba.

One Tesla owner in North Dakota ridiculed a man who allegedly carved the letter “F” into his Cybertruck in a Costco parking lot — as seen on the Cybertruck’s camera. The defendant faces charges of criminal mischief, and county records say he is representing himself in court.

“I can’t believe this guy is potentially ruining his life to follow a political ideology,” the owner told WDAY News.

“If you’re going to vandalize these vehicles, you’re going to get caught,” the owner said.

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Daily Caller

‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Or $50 Oil — Trump Can’t Have Both

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

President Donald Trump has often made clear his goal of cutting prices for energy as part of his overall agenda to break the back of chronic inflation left behind by the Biden presidency. When talking about this goal, the president has placed special emphasis on lowering the price of crude oil, given its integral relationship to gas prices at the pump and transportation-related costs which go into the price of food, clothing and other consumer goods. 

“A very big thing that I’m very happy with is oil is down,” Trump said in remarks in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “We’re getting that down. When energy comes down, prices are going to be coming down with it. So, in a very short period of time, we’ve done a very good job.” 

White House advisor Peter Navarro has been quoted by The New York Times and other media outlets as saying that an average oil price of $50 per barrel would help tame inflation and set the stage for a return to a healthier economy. If that is indeed the goal, this week’s confluence of events, featuring a bigger-than-expected increase in oil production quotas from the OPEC+ oil cartel preceded less than 24 hours earlier by the president’s announced reciprocal tariffs on a wide array of countries went a long way to doing the trick. 

Just prior to Trump’s tariff announcement Wednesday afternoon, the price for West Texas Intermediate crude stood at $70/bbl. Less than 48 hours later, the price had fallen below $61, a drop of about 15%. It was the largest 2-day decline in crude prices since 2021. How much of the price decrease is due to the tariffs as opposed to the OPEC+ agreement to pour another 137,000 barrels per day onto the international market is hard to know, but there is no doubt both actions had an impact.  

As I’ve noted previously, this action to force lower prices for oil and natural gas lies directly at odds with the concurrent Trump “drill, baby, drill” objective which he sees as a key part of his American Energy Dominance agenda. The White House gave a nod to the oil refining segment in the Wednesday tariff announcement by exempting energy imports, another action at least in part aimed at lowering prices for gasoline and diesel fuel.  

But that nod to the downstream segment does little for upstream companies who have seen supply chain muck-ups and Biden-era inflation raise break-even prices above Friday’s levels. The Q1 2025 Energy Survey Report published March 26 by the Dallas Federal Reserve estimates that drillers in the Permian Basin require a $61 oil price just to break even on drilling new shale wells. The needed breakeven price rises higher in other, less prolific basins. CNN quoted independent oil analyst Andy Lipow as saying that many upstream companies require prices closer to Monday’s $71/bbl level for new shale wells. It almost goes without saying that operators will have little incentive to “drill, baby, drill” if they stand to lose money doing it. 

In an interview with Fox Business host Stu Varney on Tuesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, himself a former oil industry executive, said, “If your state has expensive energy, it’s because of choices made by politicians in those states to virtue signal somehow they’re on some global mission. They’re going to solve climate change by making your utility bills more expensive and your businesses want to relocate out of the states. That’s just nonsense.” He added that Trump was pursuing energy policies based on common sense, saying, “common sense will deliver more investment in our country and lower energy prices.” 

No doubt, few executives in the industry would agree that a pursuit of $50 oil prices has anything to do with common sense for their companies. If prices should drop that far and linger there for any length of time, layoffs and idled drilling rigs will become the prevailing topic of the day in oil and gas.  

So, while the White House might continue touting its “drill, baby, drill” slogan for the time being, we won’t hear it echoing through the barbecue and Tex-Mex joints in Midland, Texas, for the time being. 

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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