Daily Caller
Russia Has Mostly Managed To Dodge One Of Biden’s Key Energy Sanctions

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Nick Pope
Russia is dodging a U.S.-led sanction meant to limit its energy revenues by using a fleet of “shadow tankers” to sell oil at higher prices, according to The New York Times.
Led by the U.S., Western countries imposed a $60 per-barrel price cap on Russian oil after the Ukraine war started in February 2022, a policy proponents claimed would severely limit Russia’s ability to generate oil cash while falling sort of imposing onerous costs on developing countries. However, Russia has managed to sell about 70% of its oil sales above the West’s price by utilizing a fleet of “shadow tankers” — vessels that are unregistered or registered in nations that are not party to the price cap agreement — to dodge the restrictions, the NYT reported, citing a new report by the Kyiv School of Economics Institute.
In the first half of 2024, Russia managed to sell about 75 million barrels of oil each month using vessels with an average age of 18 years, according to the NYT. Russia spent about $10 billion to develop its “shadow tanker” fleet.
Ukraine Reportedly Sending Cooks, Mechanics To Frontlines Of War Against Russia As Manpower Problem Grows Worsehttps://t.co/aLDjzZsW9j
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 18, 2024
Moreover, ships that are a part of the Russian “shadow tanker” fleet or that are subject to sanctions for breaking the price cap carried a record amount of oil and related products in September, according to the NYT. Some of these vessels made deliveries to ports in China and India, buyers that have purchased considerable amounts of Russian oil despite the Western sanctions against Putin’s economy.
Some officials inside the Biden-Harris administration want to see the government take a harder line against the “shadow tanker” fleet to continue to squeeze Putin, but others are in favor of treading lightly out of concern that cracking down could put upward prices on energy prices with a pivotal presidential election looming, according to the NYT. More broadly, policymakers have been especially careful in how they’ve handled Russia’s energy industry given the risks of a hot war between Iran and Israel, which would likely drive prices up.
While the U.S. and allies will continue working on enforcement, Russia is still selling oil at suboptimal prices and spending billions on its “shadow tanker” fleet, meaning that the sanction is still a success even if it is being evaded to some degree, one U.S. official who requested anonymity to speak freely on the subject told the NYT.
The White House and the Department of the Treasury did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
Daily Caller
Biden Administration Was Secretly More Involved In Ukraine Than It Let On, Investigation Reveals

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Wallace White
The U.S was far more directly involved in aiding Ukrainian forces against Russia than previously understood, a New York Times investigation revealed Monday.
American backing of Ukraine was an instrumental piece in forces of the eastern European nation wounding or killing more than 700,000 Russian soldiers during the course of the war, according to the NYT. Methods the U.S. used to aid Ukraine included giving target information while officially obfuscating their nature, dispatching American advisers close to the frontlines and sweeping oversight over its use of missile systems granted by officials.
One European intelligence official was taken aback as to how deep U.S. involvement was, telling the NYT that American officials had become “part of the kill chain.”
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Ukrainian officials met in Wiesbaden in Spring 2022, the headquarters of the U.S. European Command, to discuss strategy with U.S. forces and the extent to which the U.S. would aid the Ukrainians.
During the meeting, U.S. European Command settled with Ukrainian officials that they would reportedly dispense target locations as “points of interest” to the Ukrainians, not officially calling them “targets” as they believed the language would be too “provocative.”
“If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” a U.S. official told the NYT. Most artillery strikes were carried out with the M777 Howitzer system, in part provided by the U.S.
Due to diplomatic risks, the Biden administration wanted to share intel in the most plausibly deniable way possible, with a total restriction on sharing the whereabouts of Russian military figures and targets on Russian soil, one senior U.S. official told the NYT. The information shared would have to adhere to NATO guidelines of intel sharing to not provoke the Russian’s ire against other nations in the alliance.
“Imagine how that would be for us if we knew that the Russians helped some other country assassinate our chairman,” the official told the NYT. “Like, we’d go to war.”
European Command also had sweeping oversight of the Ukrainian use of the HIMARS missile system, the Americans retaining the ability to shut off the activation key cards required to fire the missiles, according to the NYT. HIMARS strikes regularly resulted in hundreds of Russian deaths weekly.
Advisers regularly made visits to the frontlines of the war, referred to as “subject matter experts” in their official capacity, according to the NYT. Their official names only changed back to “advisers” once Ukrainian leadership changed, which was also followed by a threefold increase in advisers.
Despite the deep cooperation, there was often tension between the U.S. and Ukraine, with Kiev often accusing the Americans of being overbearing, while the Americans questioned why sometimes Ukrainians did not heed their advice, according to the NYT.
Business
Biden’s Greenhouse Gas ‘Greendoggle’ Slush Fund Is Unraveling

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Michael Chamberlain
We warned you: this gas didn’t smell right from the beginning.
The Greendoggle has made the big time! Not every shady government giveaway to special interests gets its own Wall Street Journal editorial.
But how often does the new EPA administrator announce that his staff has discovered that $20 billion that had been appropriated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF or “Greendoggle”) had been “parked” in a bank by the Biden EPA until it could be ladled out as grants to climate industry cronies? That’s what Administrator Lee Zeldin announced back in February, referencing a Biden appointee who was infamously caught on tape explaining that the agency was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” – trying to get the unspent money out of the reach of the Trump administration. Zeldin’s “clawing back” that money, and the lawsuit by “public-private investment fund” Climate United to get the $7 billion it was awarded, has got the media paying attention. Finally.
Administrator Zeldin’s announcement that EPA is taking back the $2 billion awarded to an organization tied to prominent political figures marks another auspicious turn in the GGRF saga, which Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has followed and warned about since the beginning. Passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (Mr. Orwell, please call your office …), the GGRF was a massive spending program that would provide funds to environmentalist groups to finance green technology projects. The sheer amount of money Congress shoveled at the EPA was unprecedented. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with commensurate oversight resources – Mr. Zeldin says this was by design. The result was the Greendoggle, an environmentalist slush fund administered by insiders for insiders.
According to emails PPT obtained via FOIA request, the EPA invited a group of green activist organizations and thinktanks to a highly irregular November 2022 meeting to “provide early feedback on the RFI and ask clarifying questions.” And, as PPT foresaw, several groups with ties to EPA officials are on the invitation list. EPA’s “revolving door” with radical environmental groups spun fast in the Biden years.
PPT dug in and researched the green banks, finding multiple insider connections to the Biden administration. “With $27 billion dollars sloshing around, the American public should be on high alert for waste, fraud and abuse,” we warned in October 2023.
The next month, when the “short list” of coalitions vying to become GGRF distributors was announced, the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Nick Pope, whose reporting on the GGRF since early on has been essential in exposing the Greendoggle, revealed it featured “several organizations with considerable connections to the Biden administration, as well as the Democratic Party and its allies.” To put it mildly.
As the Greendoggle came together, the legacy media remained incurious, but for anyone paying attention, it smelled bad. There seemed to be no accountability, and given the Biden EPA’s ethical track record, that was concerning, to say the least.
One of the eight entities eventually chosen was the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), a green bank whose mission is to “accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology throughout the US while maintaining a targeted focus on underserved markets.” CGC board member David Hayes left the organization for nearly two years to join the Biden White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president. He then went back to the CGC board. As PPT put it in a complaint it filed in June 2024 with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the EPA’s inspector general (and which the Zeldin EPA cited in its legal defense of the clawback), while at the White House Hayes “presumably worked at the highest level on the very GGRF program from which CGC sought funding upon his return. This timing is suspect considering CGC itself publicly announced his return to its board as part of its effort to obtain GGRF funding.” Not very subtle, but it worked. CGC got a $5 billion windfall out of the Greendoggle.
It just so happened that, while Mr. Hayes was in the administration, so was another CGC veteran, Jahi Wise. Like Hayes, Wise was a special climate assistant to the president, until he joined the EPA in December 2022 as … founding director of GGRF. Subtlety doesn’t seem to be among the skill sets CGC looks for in its people. Wise at least didn’t return to CGC after that. He joined a George Soros foundation.
The GGRF should become a metaphor for congressional shortsightedness, bureaucratic arrogance and the venality of special interests at the government trough. The “green” industry is an industry like any other, green special interests are special interests and the color of a taxpayer dollar doesn’t change because it’s being wasted in a nominally noble cause.
The Greendoggle stank, gas and all.
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
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