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‘Void, Vacant, and of No Further Effect’: Did Autopen Make Joe Biden’s Presidency Invalid?

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If President Donald Trump has his way, Joe Biden’s entire presidency may be wiped away with the stroke of an autopen.

The 47th president and many others have raised the possibility that numerous consequential actions taken during the Biden-Harris administration, including his pardons for his family members, may be null and void. The administration has suggested Biden had no knowledge of some of the legislation and executive orders he allegedly signed into law — but which a new analysis finds was actually signed by a machine known as an autopen, which reproduces the president’s signature, with or without his authorization.

Biden’s lame-duck pardons of then-Rep. Liz Cheney, members of the controversial House January 6 Select Committee, “and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!” wrote President Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social, early Monday morning. (Emphasis in original.) “The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime.”

Trump also posted a meme on the same account replacing Joe Biden’s presidential portrait with a picture of an autopen.

If upheld in court, the president’s theory could repeal a broad swath of Biden’s presidency, according to a new investigation spearheaded by investigators from a world-renowned think tank.

“We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his presidency,” announced The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year.”

The project seemed particularly keen to learn “[w]ho is behind this autopen on 12/30/2022 that pardoned six criminals (with the exact same autopen signature) while Joe Biden was vacationing and golfing in the U.S. Virgin Islands,” which, like all other documents, “say they are ‘Signed in the City of Washington.’”

“It is really unprecedented with what we found here,” Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice Monday. His team combed through 51 presidential documents pardoning or granting clemency to criminals from the Biden presidency and found 32 were signed by autopens. Their analysis determined two different autopens signed each half of those 32. Each of the two autopen’s signatures differed slightly.

As one of his last acts in office, President Biden offered his son, Hunter Biden, “a full and unconditional pardon” for “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part” during a nearly 11-year period coterminous with Hunter’s highly compensated service on the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. Biden bestowed legal absolution on five other family members, including his brother, Jim, and sister-in-law, Sara; his sister, Valerie, and her husband, John T. Owens; and another of the Biden brothers, Frank. The Biden family had a decades-long history of shady business deals which critics said resembled influence-peddling.

The Biden-Harris administration also pardoned Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief author of the COVID-19 pandemic response; Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who admitted to communicating with Chinese miliary officials behind President Trump’s back during the Trump-Pence administration; January 6 committee members; and thousands of people convicted of drug offenses, including a child killer.

“It’s really important to examine this in the context of President Biden’s mental decline during his presidency,” explained Brosnan. “You have a president whose mental facilities are declining significantly throughout his presidency to the point where he doesn’t run for reelection.” Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race following a disastrous June 27 debate, albeit only after being pressured to drop out by numerous legislators, including then-longtime friend Nancy Pelosi.

But does the use of an autopen ipso fact render his pardons null and void? “We need to examine a couple of key questions here: Did the president authorize the autopen signature for each and every clemency warrant that has an autopen signature? Who had access to the autopen? What were the procedures in place there?” asked Brosnan. “Because if those clemency warrants were signed when the president did not authorize them, or did not even have knowledge of who he was pardoning, then you get into really sticky legal territory.”

At a minimum, the use of an autopen on official presidential documents raises thorny constitutional issues, all the more so given President Biden’s diminished capacity at the time. Senior administration officials later revealed they went months without meeting the president in person, as unelected officials handed out orders purportedly issued by him. One former staffer explained others all-but arrogated the power of the presidency to themselves. “I feared no one as much as I feared that [staffer]. To me, [the staffer] basically was the president,” a former White House staffer told the New York Post. “There is no clarity on who actually approved” bills, but they continued to be signed. “No one ever questioned [the staffer]. Period.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) has requested the Justice Department review the extent to which others manipulated Joe Biden’s signature of legislation and executive actions over the course of his tenure in office.

“Under the 25th Amendment, his inability to make decisions should have meant a succession of power. Instead, it appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden’s incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them,” wrote Bailey in a March 4 letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. “I am demanding the DOJ investigate whether President Biden’s cognitive decline allowed unelected staff to push through radical policy without his knowing approval. If true, these executive orders, pardons, and all other actions are unconstitutional and legally void.”

“There are profound reasons to suspect that Biden’s staff and political allies exploited his mental decline to issue purported presidential orders without his knowing approval,” Bailey wrote to Horowitz.

“Who has been running the country for the last few years?” he asked.

Bailey asked Horowitz “to launch an investigation, or refer my request to another investigative body, to determine which of Biden’s purported orders were knowingly issued by a competent President and which were not.”

Bailey is far from the first figure in Washington to question Biden’s cognitive state during his tenure as officeholder. Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded Biden had broken federal laws on handling classified information, but Hur declined to prosecute him on the grounds that the president appeared to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) also recounted a conversation in early 2024 when President Biden insisted he had not signed an executive order bearing his signature, which restricted an oil pipeline. “I didn’t do that,” Johnson recalled the president telling him.

“I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We are in serious trouble — who is running the country?’” said Johnson. “I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know,”

The second Trump administration significantly tightened the rules for auto-signing legislation. Trump-47 White House Staff Secretary William Scharf drafted a memo noting, “Our practice around autopen usage is far more restrictive than most previous administrations. We do not use the autopen for documents that exercise the powers of the Presidency. So, for example, we do not use the autopen for executive orders, presidential memoranda, decision memoranda, nominations, appointment orders or commissions, or bills to be signed,” he specified.

President Trump said he tries to sign every document that crosses his desk, including requests for autographs. “If you do letters where people write in, I’ll sign them whenever I can, but when I can’t, I would use an autopen. But to use them for what Biden used them for, is terrible,” he said.

The Oversight Project’s inquest has broadened beyond pardons, commutations, and executive orders to the signature legislation Biden signed during his four years in office. “Our investigation is continuing into other exercises of presidential power, including copies of enrolled bills and enrolled executive orders,” Brosnan told Hice. “We’re requesting copies of enrolled bills from the National Archives.”

The Constitution (Article 1, section 7) specifies, “Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated.” Signing any bill with an autopen raises questions about its validity, although a 2005 memorandum opinion from George W. Bush’s Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said the practice would be legal. The 43rd president notably departed from standard order through his expansive use of signing statements.

The practice of signing bills by autopen appears to have begun under Barack Obama, who used the machine to extend the PATRIOT Act while he traveled through Europe in 2011. “It is apparently the first time in U.S. history this has been done,” reported NPR. At the time, it triggered a constitutional challenge from then-Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.). Weeks later, he and a handful of fellow Republicans asked Obama to again sign the extension by hand “out of an abundance of caution,” because “it is clear that assigning a surrogate the responsibility of signing bills passed by Congress is a debatable issue, and could be challenged in court.” Obama made no reply.

If Brosnan’s investigation holds up, it could erase much of the legislation signed during the last four years — ironically earning Joe Biden a historic role in U.S. presidential history.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Only Signed 12 of 162 Executive Orders!

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

EXCLUSIVE: How Chris Wright Plans To Help America Climb Out Of Energy ‘Hole’ Dug By Biden Admin

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HOUSTON — Energy Secretary Chris Wright explained his plans to fortify America’s fragile power grid and a host of other energy policy issues in a Monday interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Wright has his work cut out for him atop the Department of Energy (DOE) after the Biden administration and former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm left him with elevated energy prices and fragile power grids in both the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Before addressing other topics, like the massive portfolio of green energy loans he inherited from his predecessor and the future of climate alarmism politics, Wright made clear that the first step toward strengthening the grid is to “stop digging” a deeper hole with policies that undermine power supply. 

“I’m very concerned about the grid, very concerned about the grid,” Wright told the DCNF, noting that average electricity prices surged on the Biden administration’s watch despite relatively limited growth in demand over the same period of time. “We have to make significant changes in a complicated system. Changing permitting laws is part of that, changing how regulation is done, and then just some common sense moves to enable technology to get more to the existing grid in the time that demand is arriving. We have to increase throughput with the existing physical assets. I think it can be done, but it is a daunting challenge. And I wish we weren’t walking into the hole we’re in right now, but we were dug a hole by the previous administration, and that’s our starting point.”

Grid experts and operators have warned that the Biden administration’s aggressive regulatory agenda for power plants threatens grid reliability in the U.S., with huge swaths of the country already facing risks of inadequate supply in the event of stronger-than-usual conditions in the summer or winter. Shoring up the grid is an even more urgent task in light of the projected surge in aggregate demand analysts are expecting to come from the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and the power-hungry data centers needed to sustain the cutting-edge technology.

In Wright’s view, part of the solution to America’s power grid problem is using the levers of government to forestall the retirement of coal-fired power plants capable of providing cheap, reliable power to the grid, he told the DCNF.

“If you want to grow your supply, the first thing to do is stop digging the hole. We’ve been closing coal plants for quite some time now. That’s gotta stop. We have to keep these firm, reliable existing plants online. That’s objective number one,” Wright said. “And then there’s existing plants that are open that run at low operating percent of the time because of regulations and things put in the way. We have a fair amount of electricity generating capacity that already exists and connected up to wires. So, that’s low-hanging fruit.”

Another lever at Wright’s disposal to ramp up the U.S. power supply is the Loan Programs Office (LPO), a DOE sub-office that provides financing for innovative energy technologies. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act supercharged LPO’s coffers, and the office proceeded to pump billions of dollars into green energy projects.

Wright mentioned “nuclear and next generation geothermal,” as well as grid resilience technologies and other undertakings “that can help resource supply chains for electrical equipment in the United States” as specific things that LPO may look to finance while he runs DOE. However, Wright — a self-professed energy wonk who has worked with a host of different energy sources in the private sector and the founder of Liberty Energy — said that the agency’s general preference is to see the private sector take the lead and innovate.

“The first and primary tool is private capital and private businesses. Most of these things, with a reasonable business climate, will happen in the marketplace,” Wright explained. “That is our preference. But, if there are issues that are critical and have to happen in a timely fashion because of the mess we’re in with our electricity grid today, then we will deploy capital.”

Notably, the Biden LPO rushed to shove billions of dollars in loans and conditional loans out the door in the lame duck period, powering through the concerns of the DOE’s internal watchdog and elected Republicans that the rush to get funding out may have put taxpayer funds at risk of being wasted. Wright told the DCNF that the DOE will honor its end of LPO contracts that it is obligated to fulfill and that the agency will keep an eye on conditional loans to ensure counterparties are meeting conditions, adding that the agency “will deploy capital only if it’s in the best interest of American taxpayers” in situations where DOE has discretion.

Wright is evidently concerned about the condition of the power grid that keeps the lights on for all 50 states, but he is also keen to work with Puerto Rico — a U.S. territory — to address its own ailing power infrastructure.

The energy secretary met with Puerto Rico Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón in February to discuss fixing Puerto Rico’s grid, which has been ravaged by hurricanes. The Biden administration made a major push to make the island a “poster child” for the benefits of green energy, but Wright says his predecessors’ efforts did little — if anything — to seriously address the problem, Wright explained.

“Congress appropriated a significant amount of money to rebuild it entirely, and the Biden administration decided they wanted to make Puerto Rico the poster child of renewable energy, and therefore would only fund the building of renewable energy. Needless to say, very little has been built. Electricity prices are high. The grid is unreliable. They’ve had many years in a row of negative population outflow,” Wright told the DCNF.  “The businesses are at risk of being unable to continue to manufacture pharmaceutical drugs, for example, that come into the mainland of the United States, and a new governor got elected to fix this energy problem. We are excited to get to work and invest money already appropriated by our Congress to better the lives of Puerto Ricans, millions of Puerto Ricans.”

“I would say, it’s simply an outrage that the money has been there for years, but since it didn’t fit a political narrative, it wasn’t spent,” Wright continued. “Puerto Ricans are victims of energy politics. We’re humans-first administration. They were a politics-first administration.”

More broadly, Wright believes that commonsense energy politics is overtaking climate alarmism, though declaring the latter dead for good is “too optimistic,” he told the DCNF.

“I think this president, shooting straight on energy, putting humans first, won the election. So, clearly the pendulum is slinging that way. I think President Trump is a good part of the reason that the pendulum is swinging the other way. He had the courage to speak common sense about energy,” said Wright. “He’s been a bold, outspoken person about energy and the interests of American people, and he has started that pendulum going the other way. I am thrilled to be on the team with President Trump to help continue this swing towards what I call ‘energy sobriety.’”

AUTHOR

Nick Pope

Contributor.

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Trump Ends Democrats’ DEI War on Police, Firemen, and Public Safety

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The Trump administration has dismissed a series of DEI lawsuits brought by the Biden administration which claimed physical fitness tests had no bearing on someone’s ability to be a policeman or fireman. The Biden Justice Department insisted that written or physical tests were not “job related,” and even claimed that testing applicants is racist and sexist — because not enough women or minorities could pass them. One of Biden’s lawsuits branded the policies of then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s police force as discrimination.

The genius of the second Trump administration has been its ability to enact commonsense reforms exposing left-wing policies that are unhinged and unpopular, improve the core functions of government, restore power to the American people, and make liberals react in a way that makes them and their policies even more unhinged and unpopular.

Perhaps no case illustrates this trend than the disposing of four Biden-Harris lawsuits, which the White House said “lowered standards and endangered public safety” to promote left-wing ideology. “American communities deserve firefighters and police officers to be chosen for their skill and dedication to public safety — not to meet DEI quotas,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi as she dismissed the lawsuits last Wednesday. The Trump administration is “dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity nationwide,” especially for “front-line public-safety workers who protect our nation,” because “[p]rioritizing DEI over merit when selecting firefighters and police officers jeopardizes public safety.”

Interestingly, one of the Biden-Harris administration’s lawsuits targeted policies overseen by a member of its own Cabinet.

Suing Pete Buttigieg’s South Bend

The Biden Justice Department filed a legal complaint that the South Bend police force required applicants to pass physical fitness and written aptitude tests since at least 2016. The mayor of South Bend from 2012 to 2020 was none other than Pete Buttigieg, the failed 2020 presidential hopeful and Transportation secretary who now presents himself as a born-again DEI opponent as he eyes a run for higher office in Michigan. “From 2016 through August 2019, approximately 87.6 percent of male test-takers passed the PFT, while approximately 45.5 percent of female test-takers passed,” stated the DOJ lawsuit. Around August 2019, the department “lowered the passing standards,” and something curious happened. “Since August 2019, approximately 83.8 percent of male test-takers passed the PFT, while approximately 47.4 percent of female test-takers passed.”

That is, the number of women who passed the less rigorous physical test rose by 2.9%. But is it plausible that fewer men could pass the test’s weaker criteria?

The new test outcomes prove that, if Mayor Pete’s police force engaged in job discrimination, it certainly did not disadvantage women. Yet the change did not satisfy the Biden administration, which sued to foist its views on South Bend once Buttigieg moved away and no longer had to face the electoral consequences.

Biden’s DOJ aimed a similar lawsuit at the Maryland Department of State Police, because the MDSP required applicants to pass a Functional Fitness Assessment Test (which has the unfortunate acronym “FFAT”). Applicants had to do 18 push-ups in one minute, 27 sit-ups in one minute, have the flexibility to sit down and stretch their fingers 1.5 inches past their toes, and run 1.5 miles in 15 minutes, 20 seconds. The majority of applicants passed: 81% of men and 51% of women. MDSP applicants also had to get at least a 70% on the written test, the Police Officer Selection Test (POST), in its three categories of reading, writing, and grammar. The DOJ reported that an even larger majority of applicants cleared this hurdle: 91% of whites and 71% of blacks passed the POST. Yet shortly after Republican Governor Larry Hogan left office, the Biden-Harris administration began negotiating a settlement with up-and-coming Democratic Governor Wes Moore (who happens to be black).

Employing White Firemen ‘Undermines Public Safety’: Biden Admin

The lawsuits were filed by the leader of Biden’s DOJ civil rights division, then-Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who holds an idiosyncratic view of public safety. “The under-representation of [b]lack people in the fire department workforce in Durham, and across the country, undermines public safety efforts,” said Clarke without proof.

Her words echoed the views of Los Angeles Fire Department Deputy Fire Chief Kristine Larson, who asserted (again, without proof) that a rescue worker who “looks like you” gives victims “a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better.” The deputy chieftess dismissed concerns that she or others lack the sorts of qualifications South Bend and Maryland hoped to test. People frequently asked, “‘Is she strong enough to do this?’” Larson revealed. Some said, “‘You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire.’ [To] which my response is, ‘He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.’”

Indeed. That would be implicit in his being surrounded by flames. But if a woman lacks the muscle to fulfill her taxpayer-funded job duties to save human lives, she has gotten herself in the wrong place.

Clarke claimed any policy that disproportionately harms a minority group may ipso facto be considered racist. For instance, she sued the Durham (North Carolina) Fire Department, because the DFD’s written test “disqualified Black applicants from employment at significantly disproportionate rates.” Her DOJ claimed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “prohibits not only intentional discrimination but also employment practices that result in a disparate impact on a protected group, unless such practices are job related and consistent with business necessity.” However, the Supreme Court largely invented the doctrine of “disparate impact” in its 1971 ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power Company. In the end, the term’s definition came from neither the legislative nor the judicial branch but from the unelected bureaucracy. “Agencies, not courts, first developed disparate impact under the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” noted Olatunde C.A. Johnson of Columbia Law School in a 2014 paper on the legal doctrine’s pedigree. He argued in favor of “the continuing role that federal administrative agencies play in shaping the meaning of disparate impact today.”

These are perfect lawsuits for social engineers whose radical commitment to imposing left-wing ideology exceeds everything, including human life. Clarke — for whom the Article III Project made a criminal referral after she allegedly committed perjury by misleading Congress about her history of domestic violence — also sued the state of Utah for refusing to house male inmates who identify as transgender in female prisons. Once again, Clarke justified the radical doctrine in identity politics wrapped in the guise of civil rights: Clarke called housing males in female prisons a “basic right [which] extends to those with gender dysphoria.”

The Biden administration’s Justice Department sued the state of Tennessee over its aggravated prostitution law (§ 39-13-516), which punishes with a Class C felony anyone who knowingly sells sex for money after testing positive for HIV/AIDS, on the grounds that state lawmakers “unlawfully discriminate against individuals with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a disability.” Only a radical left-wing ideologue could treat a law designed to restrict the spread of the world’s deadliest virus as conservatives’ hard-hearted attempt to pick on cripples.

Of course, the Biden-Harris administration began promoting DEI radicalism in its first day in office via Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” That became the first of 78 Biden-era executive orders President Donald Trump repealed on day one.

The president’s disapproval has only caused the Left to double down on DEI. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) insisted anyone trying “to eradicate DEI is saying, ‘We’re going to eradicate black and brown people and women and gay people and people with disabilities.’” (That may not be the most logical construction of the underlying sentence.) Another Minnesota Democrat, State Rep. Alicia “Liish” Kozlowski of Duluth (who identifies as non-binary) recently called a bill to prevent men from competing in women’s sports “another example of state-sanctioned bullying and genocide.” But while the Left insists ending DEI programs ranks a human rights atrocity somewhere between the Armenian Genocide and the Holodomor, Democrats censor anyone who complains about the impact of state-sponsored racism and sexism. “I am tired of the white tears,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas). “The only people that are crying are the mediocre white boys that have been beaten out.”

The Left will soon have more to lament. “Today’s dismissal is an early step toward eradicating illegal DEI preferences across the government and in the private sector,” said Bondi. But Christians should rejoice.

Replacing Liberal Extremism with Constitutional Order and Biblical Morality

The Trump administration’s legal reversal restores one of the core functions of government. “God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men,” wrote John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government. The chief end of the law is “to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, war is made upon the sufferers, who having no appeal on earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such cases, an appeal to heaven,” added Locke, the philosopher most quoted by the Founding Fathers. “To avoid this state of war … is one great reason of men’s putting themselves into society.”

More importantly for Christians, halting lawsuits that put racial discrimination over public safety conforms to biblical morality. “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him,” said the Apostle Peter (Acts 10:34). The principle comes from the Old Testament, which repeatedly emphasizes that diverse measures — such as disparate physical fitness standards — constitute a form of fraud (Proverbs 20:10). “One law and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourneth with you,” wrote Moses (Numbers 15:16 and 29; see also Leviticus 24:22, among other verses).

For generations, Christians have prayed, “We beseech thee also, so to direct and dispose the hearts of all Christian rulers, that they may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of Thy true religion, and virtue.” President Trump’s banishment of state-sponsored racism brought their prayers one step closer to reality.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Whistleblower: Biden Turned the NSA into ‘a Cult Hellbent on Pushing Gender Ideology’

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The Trump administration promptly ordered the firing of roughly 100 federal employees whom whistleblowers exposed for turning the nation’s intelligence agencies into “a cult that was hellbent on pushing gender ideology,” creating “a counterintelligence risk” that is “going to get people killed in the field.” The employees produced messages from an online forum dedicated to government work items in which agents promoted transgender surgery, sexual fetishes and polyamory, while cheering the death of evangelical leader Pat Robertson.

“They hate capitalism. They hate Christians. They’re always espousing socialist and Marxist beliefs,” said one of the two insiders at the National Security Agency (NSA).

Two NSA employees, one still with the agency, turned over screenshots of numerous explicit online messages from the Interlink messaging program designed for the U.S. intelligence community’s professional activities. Some of the messages — written by employees of a wide range of federal intelligence services — discussed the sexual benefits of having one’s genitals removed, disowning family members who expressed opposition to gender ideology, and “ethical non-monogamy.”

The intelligence agencies, intended to investigate national security threats, became infested with hives of like-minded activists who used their perch in the sensitive government agencies to promote their views at taxpayers’ expense. “According to the current NSA employee, these groups ‘spent all day’ recruiting activists and holding meetings with titles such as ‘Privilege,’ ‘Ally Awareness,’ ‘Pride,’ and ‘Transgender Community Inclusion,’” revealed investigative journalists Christopher Rufo and Hannah Grossman, who published many of the messages that fell into their hands.

Promoting Transgender Surgery and Polyamory

Several employees discussed the physical euphoria they experienced after having transgender “bottom surgery,” which attempts to transform healthy male anatomy into faux female genitalia. “Mine is everything,” wrote one intelligence agent, who dubbed the surgery “100000000% worth it … [I] would not change anything if [I] had to do it again.”

An employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency recounted that “one of the weirdest things that gives me euophoria is when” he urinates.

“[I]’ve found that [I] like being penetrated (never liked it before GRS [so-called Gender Reconstructive Surgery, or genital mutilation]), but all the rest is just as important as well,” another message stated.

Some intelligence employees fetishized cross-sex hormone injections. One NSA employee said he wanted to develop large breasts; “I want proportions that would give me back pain,” he said. One message said, “Look, I just enjoy helping other people experience [breasts].”

Long discussions mulled the propriety of increasingly non-biological pronouns. An employee at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) insisted that, if someone asks you to use dehumanizing it/its pronouns, or foul language long used as slurs, “refusing to is a form of erasure.” One such individual made a self-introduction on the chat forum: “[I]t/its user here. While I understand we can make some people uncomfortable, keep in mind that the dehumanizing aspect either a) doesn’t apply or b) is a positive effect when we’re requesting it.” Other chat participants used “xe/they” and “they/them” pronouns in their bios.

The message boards often devolved into discussions of polyamory and “gangbangs,” the whistleblowers revealed. One NGA employee attempted to explain the ponderous relationships of members of a “polycule,” a group of people who engage in “polyamory,” or open relationships: “A is my [girlfriend], and B-G are her partners. . . . then B&C are dating but not C&D, nor E, F, or G with any of the others, though there are several MWB (metas-with-benefits) connections. LOL.” The casual sex habits of “polycule” members get so tangled that “in some cases not all members have even an idea who the others are.”

Employees were constantly trying to “one-up” one another with how pro-trans they were and how deviant their practices had become, said a whistleblower.

Rufo recoiled when The New York Times described the messages as containing “sexual themes” in its coverage of the story. “The chat messages contained more than ‘sexual themes.’ They weren’t discussing symbolism in Madame Bovary,” noted Rufo on Wednesday.

Hating Pat Robertson, Ben Shapiro, and ‘Anti-Queer’ Trump Nominees

Federal intelligence agencies spent numerous messages on the government message board expressing political opinions, particularly demonizing their perceived political enemies.

Several entries in 2022 celebrated the death of Pat Robertson, evangelist, 1988 Republican presidential hopeful, and decades-long host of “The 700 Club.”

“The gates of hell opened up to let him in,” said one.

“He’s dead. Good,” said another.

“This is a recurring theme in the NSA chatrooms: hatred against Christians, conservatives, Italians, and heterosexuals. One intelligence officer even casts aspersions on his own grandmother,” said Rufo, an investigative journalist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute known for his tireless opposition to critical race theory.

“MAJOR housecleaning is needed,” replied Elon Musk.

A separate message from September 2022 celebrated the “good news” that the social media platform then known as Twitter suspended Libs of TikTok (Chaya Raichik), whom one poster falsely accused of “inciting violence against hospitals.” One poster said the account’s founder “is such a f****** monster. I’m embarrassed that she is a Jew.”

Intelligence agency employees also targeted Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, saying he “constantly spouts hate speech” and stating that “any Jew who says Judeo-Christian without any irony as much as Ben Shapiro does should be expelled from the tribe.” Another made a blanket statement that her fellow Americans of Irish and Italian descent are “terrible people.” Still another denounced his or her “homophobic” uncle.

Others attempted to rally opposition to President Donald Trump’s political appointees. A member of U.S. Space Command said of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying, “I hope the [Republican] senators will come to their senses on RFK and not confirm him.” Another poster derided RFK Jr. as an “em-brainwormed person.”

Some branded Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as “a Russian agent” who is “fervently anti-queer.” They also insulted Gabbard’s religious beliefs, saying, “She belongs to a cult. 2 if you count MAGA.” One claims “a lot” of Trump appointees “are troublesome to my prospects of continued existence along with the continued existence of a lot of people I care about.”

Trump Administration Moves to Fire More than 100 Radical Activists

Such uses of the intelligence agencies’ message boards violate their terms of employment, one agency stated. “All NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Interlink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action,” an NSA press official told Rufo.

Yet, Rufo wrote in City Journal that there are “at least hundreds of gender activists within the intelligence services who cannot distinguish between male and female, and who believe that discussing castration, polyamory, and ‘gangbangs’ is an appropriate use of public resources.”

“There are over 100 people across the intelligence community who participated in this. … I put out a directive today that they all will be terminated, and their security clearances will be revoked,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Fox News host Jesse Watters Tuesday night.

But the problem went much deeper, she said. “This is just barely scratching the surface. … They were brazen in using an NSA platform intended for professional use to conduct this kind of really, really horrific behavior. And they were brazen in doing this, because when was the last time anyone was really held accountable?” she asked.

“Today’s action in holding these individuals accountable is just the beginning of what we’re seeing across the Trump administration, which is carrying out the mandate the American people gave him: Clean house, root out that rot and corruption and weaponization and politicization so we can start to rebuild that trust in these institutions that are charged with an important mission of serving the American people, ensuring our safety, security, and freedom,” Gabbard concluded.

The Left’s Long March through Intelligence Agencies

The continual left-wing recruitment is the culmination of decades of Democratic presidents’ decisions to open the intelligence agencies to increasingly niche, radical activists. President Bill Clinton allowed members of the LGBTQ movement to have access to classified information when he signed Executive Order 12968 in 1995. The Obama administration began openly recruiting such activists no later than 2012. Michael Barber, program manager of the CIA’s LGBT Community Outreach and Liaison, co-hosted a recruiting event with the Miami-Dade Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. The Biden administration posted ads for intelligence agents who identified as LGBTQ.

An NSA whistleblower told Rufo the cultural arrangements began a decade ago, under then-President Barack Obama. Slowly, the niche events and discussions overtook the entire organization. An employee “could be hired as a mathematician, a staff officer, or system engineer, but you would spend your time going to these events and having meetings all day about it. They got themselves into position to help craft policy and started pushing the idea that if you want to get promoted, you have to participate in these events.”

“And then everything became Pride,” the whistleblower said. “It was like a cult that was hellbent on pushing gender ideology.”

There are only “a very small number of them, but they wield an enormous amount of power. And outside of the sick stuff, you also see a prevalent Marxist philosophy,” said the whistleblower. “They hate capitalism. They hate Christians. They’re always espousing socialist and Marxist beliefs.”

The intelligence agency employees abused those who objected to their radical activism by engaging in cancel culture. “They just got hammered. They would just start coming out with ‘transphobe’ and ‘homophobe’ right away or calling you a ‘racist.’ And that’s why a lot of folks are still hesitant to say anything, because you still have people at these agencies in those key spots. It infected everything,” said a whistleblower.

The activism impacted national security. Analysts sometimes refused to write complete and accurate reports on America’s adversaries, because they may have to use to use that person’s “dead name,” the name they used before identifying as transgender. “[T]he folks that are into this don’t put their effort into their work. I don’t care if you’re politically left or right; you can’t have an unbiased mind if you’re writing a report, and you’re constantly focused on ‘how does this apply to gender ideology,” the whistleblower said. “[W]hen you do that, it’s going to get people killed in the field.”

“The folks like that were quite unstable. I see it as a counterintelligence risk. But it’s being normalized and it’s being praised,” said the whistleblower. “I hope this is the start of getting our intel agencies back to what they should be doing, which is focused on intel and supporting the warfighter.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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As a Matter of Fact, I DO Care What People Do in Their Bedroom

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Turns Out Top Execs Of Org Picked For Billions By Biden EPA Are Big Time Democrat Donors

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Top executives of a green organization that the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) selected to receive billions in public funds have collectively made hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal political donations to Democratic candidates and organizations in recent years, a Daily Caller News Foundation review of Federal Election Commission (FEC) data found.

The Biden EPA chose the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC) as an awardee of $5 billion in taxpayer funds through the administration’s massive Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) program in April 2024. Reed Hundt, the CGC’s former CEO and chairman, has personally donated nearly $60,000 to Democratic candidates and aligned political organizations going back to 2013, while Richard Kauffman — the group’s CEO who replaced Hundt in January — has personally donated more than $600,000 to help Democrats since 2020, according to FEC data.

Hundt made donations of $10,000 to the Harris Victory Fund and Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2024, and he also cut a $10,000 check to the Democratic State Central Committee of Maryland in 2016, FEC records show. Kauffman, meanwhile, gave $150,000 to the DNC in 2020 before giving another $20,900 to the DNC in 2024, the same year in which he made a $50,000 contribution to the Harris Victory Fund, government records show.

Kaufmann also donated to numerous state-level Democrat Party organizations and to boost Democrat Senate candidates like former Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey in the 2024 race, FEC records show. Notably, the CGC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, meaning that it may not directly or indirectly engage in politics, at least as far as the Internal Revenue Service is currently concerned.

“Between 2009 and 2023, CGC and its network mobilized more than $25 billion in public and private capital across America to deliver more affordable electricity, clean air and water, as well as the power to help ensure America’s AI leadership,” a CGC spokesperson said in a statement to the DCNF. The CGC spokesperson declined to address specific questions about how it squares the political spending of Hundt and Kauffman, as well as the political connections of other board members, with the organization’s official status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Hundt formerly worked in the Clinton administration as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and was a close ally of Vice President Al Gore, while Kauffman was a senior advisor to former Energy Secretary Steven Chu during the Obama administration, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Notably, Hundt’s personal account on X featured numerous anti-Trump posts — including ones endorsing efforts to remove Trump from the ballot — before it was deleted. Hundt did not respond to a request for comment.

The CGC has received funding in the past from left-of-center and environmentalist nonprofits including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the ClimateWorks Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The CGC features a number of other Democrat insiders in its ranks, the DCNF reported in 2023 when the group was rumored to be on the shortlist for a major EPA payday. For example, its board of directors includes David Hayes, who served as a climate advisor to former President Joe Biden; Cecilia Martinez, a former official in the Biden White House Council on Environmental Quality; Julie Greene Collier, chief of staff for the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a major organized labor federation that endorsed Biden and, subsequently, former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race. The union donated cash to help Democrats in the 2024 cycle, according to FEC records.

“Coalition for Green Capital, like so many organizations funded by the Biden Administration, has no business receiving a dollar of funding from the federal government, much less billions of dollars,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher for the Capital Research Center, told the DCNF. “It is plain to see that the organization is intended to be a slush fund for bailing out the floundering green energy investments of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors.”

Notably, two other groups that the Biden EPA picked to receive billions of taxpayer dollars — Power Forward Communities and Climate United — are also loaded with Democrat insiders, the DCNF reported previously. The political connections that each of these recipients possess caught the attention of congressional Republicans in May 2024, and current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is working to claw back as much cash from the GGRF as possible.

AUTHOR

Nick Pope

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden-Harris Admin Handed Billions To Coalition Partnering With Stacey Abrams’ Org Dedicated To Turning Out Voters

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

FBI ‘Mission Drift’ Targeted Christians, Ignored Islamist Threats: Fmr. Advisor

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has drifted far off course, warned former FBI senior advisor Hedieh Mirahmadi Falco, a Christian convert from Islam, on “Washington Watch.” “It’s not just mission drift. It’s mission chaos. And the only way we can undo that is by putting a focus [on] these agencies to undo the harm that has been done.”

“I’ve been involved as a federal contractor for 20-plus years,” Falco explained. “We were building terrorism prevention programs to be to the ‘left of boom,’ which means we wanted to get ahead of a terrorist attack. And, in order to do that, we were developing all kinds of [tools], whether it’s countering radicalization, social cohesion, integration programs, how do we understand radicalization?”

This counter-terrorism focus continued throughout the Obama administration, she added. “Though the Obama administration called it CVE (countering violent extremism), clearly the focus was on Islamic extremism,” Falco said. “They just didn’t want to use the word and offend the community.”

But with the (surprise) election of President Trump, the FBI’s counter-terrorism work took a sharp turn. “Fast forward to 2016,” described Falco. “President Trump gets elected. He gets into the White House, and the building shuts down. I mean, our program was shut down. All of the efforts that we were focused on were shut down.” Falco didn’t know it at the time, but the FBI’s whole attention would be consumed by the fake investigation into the Russia collusion hoax, which the FBI already knew to be a plant of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“The FBI has run like a paramilitary organization and takes its marching orders from the Department of Justice [DOJ],” Falco explained. “So, when that program shift, that mission shift occurs, the leadership is responsible. … And the fine men and women of the FBI who investigate crimes, who want to fight crime, are forced to follow the directives of their superiors.”

When President Trump left the Oval Office four years later, the FBI’s retooled investigative units had to find new targets. “After that, then you see all the grants and the programs after the J6 investigation,” Falco continued. “They open all of these cases … on grandmothers and people who were strolling by the Capitol.”

The massive number in J6-related cases led to an “uptick” in “the number of … what they described now as ‘racially motivated violent extremists,’ which is basically [code for] ‘white Christians.’ Even though … a lot of them are not white, they’re basically Christians, conservatives. And so, the whole department, the agency shifted to that focus,” Falco detailed.

The FBI used this to spin its own political narrative. “They elevated the threat by saying, we have all of these open investigations against racially-motivated, violent white people,” said Falco. “So the threat is no longer Islam. The threat is Americans practicing their religious liberty engag[ing] in all kinds of activity.” Falco described how the FBI borrowed a Pyramid of Radicalization — “a model used to define Islamic terrorism” — and filled it with disconnected groups that were Christian or right-leaning. “They inserted the names of organizations like CBN [Christian Broadcasting Network] and Charlie Kirk’s organization [Turning Point USA]” and the base of the pyramid, “and then KKK and the radical violent groups at the top.”

“The funding mechanisms that we had for radicalization and identifying terrorism prevention programs were shifted to crowdsource policing, basically, in a conservative town like Miami Valley, Ohio, to basically disrupt the access to the public square,” Falco continued. “Millions of dollars went to these kinds of programs.”

“Even though they identified this as probably illegal,” she added, the federal law enforcement bureau did it anyway. “The stated purpose was to prevent them from advancing their goals and their ideas.”

Unfortunately, such a grave departure from the FBI’s mission (“to protect the American people and uphold the U.S. Constitution”) did not harm only its new targets. Concentrating so much attention on peaceful Americans meant the FBI had to divert its attention from jihadist threats.

“This wasn’t just, ‘All right, so we’re going to start harassing these Christians.’ It was shifting the resources they had away from radical Islamists to focusing on grandmas and pro-life protesters outside of abortion clinics,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “But that came at a price. To shift that focus, we have events like occurred … on New Year’s Day in New Orleans, where you had a radicalized American — through Islamic influence, kill Americans on a street in America.”

Falco confirmed this analysis. “The program that I was hired … to scale and replicate — a program I built in the private sector — was shut down. And it was designed to help field offices identify cases like that and be able to intervene before an act of violence. So that individual was reported dozens of times. … And there should have been intervention programs in place, multidisciplinary teams that would have intervened, knocked on the door, said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’”

Instead, the FBI was too busy parsing whether Grandma Becky stepped off the sidewalk in front of an abortion center six years ago, or what those traditionalist Catholics were really saying in their Latin mass, or whether those concerned parents were about to drive their Suburban through the school board meeting.

If the FBI had its way, Americans would not even know that the New Orleans attacker was motivated by Islamist extremism. “There was a real problem within the culture of the FBI … just kind of double talking,” said Perkins. “New Orleans [was] the latest example of that [because] the first words out of the FBI’s mouth [were], ‘This was not a terrorist incident.’” That lie exploded upon impact because “social media had already identified that [ISIS] flag” in the shooter’s truck, said Falco.

The point is not to make the FBI as a whole look ridiculous. “I know there are fine men and women at the agent level who think this stuff is preposterous,” noted Falco. But “Their management is telling them that the focus is on right-wing extremism, that this Islamic threat has diminished to the point where we don’t need to be concerned about it.”

At this point, said Perkins, it’s difficult to tell whether the FBI brass “want to cover up” their improper mission drift, or “they’re just that blind that they can’t see that this is a terrorist incident.” With the advantage of hindsight, it’s easy to claim (but harder to prove) that incidents like the New Orleans terror attack were preventable. But if the FBI could have prevented any terror attacks by maintaining its attention to radical jihadist plots, this attack would likely have been one of them.

That’s why “it is so fundamentally important for us to undo what has happened at the Bureau and at the Department of Justice and at DHS [the Department of Homeland Security],” Falco urged. Hopefully, the team selected by President Trump — including U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and (still awaiting confirmation) FBI Director Kash Patel — is up to the task of cleaning up America’s federal law enforcement agencies.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: USAID: From Cold War Sentinel to Ideological Sideshow

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Proposed Gaza Ceasefire Is a ‘Terrible Deal for Israel’

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1/17/2025 9:16 a.m. This story has been updated to reflect that the Israeli Cabinet has voted to approve the ceasefire deal.

A prisoner exchange and ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was reached Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced. But, after “many months of intensive diplomacy” between the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar, the deal they devised would require Israel to give away the farm, leaving them no leverage to ensure that all their hostages are safely returned. “It’s a terrible deal for Israel,” complained Frank Gaffney, president of the Institute for the American Future. “I fear that it amounts to a victory for Hamas.”

The details of the deal have not been published, but according to reports, the ceasefire agreement would occur in three phases.

In the first phase, Israel would release 100 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences (a.k.a. “pedigreed jihadists,” Gaffney stated) and 1,000 other prisoners not involved with the October 7 attacks, and Hamas would release 33 hostages in return. “I’m getting some signals out of Israel that this is not the best deal for Israel,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “I’m told the ratio is 50-to-1 for every hostage.”

These lopsided prisoner exchanges would be spaced out over a six-week ceasefire — an unexplained delay that left Perkins “a little puzzled” — during which time Israel would pull its military out of all the populated areas of Gaza and allow hundreds of aid trucks to enter the Gaza Strip, bringing humanitarian aid and tens of thousands of temporary homes.

In the second phase, the two sides would declare a permanent end to the war, and Israel would withdraw the rest of its forces from Gaza. Hamas would also release more hostages in exchange for more prisoners.

In the third phase, Hamas would return the rest of the hostages, including the remains of those it killed. In return, it would get “a major reconstruction plan for Gaza,” in President Biden’s words.

To review, Israel would have to pack up and go home before getting the hostages it came for, and Hamas would not only have its pre-October 7 autonomy restored, but it would get its own personal Marshall Plan, and spring 50 terrorists per hostage.

What an odd way to punish its terrorist atrocities! What an odd way to deter future iterations.

Unfazed by these particulars, Biden declared he was “deeply satisfied” that a deal had been reached — likely so he can claim credit. “We got the world to endorse it,” he boasted. Given how the world feels about Israel, that should be a warning sign.

“I think it’s, in some ways, worse than the plan … that Joe Biden put together” last year, said Gaffney. By agreeing to this deal, Israel would be “effectively surrendering the entirety of Gaza to the people who perpetrated this horrific attack on October 7th,” and who have “been at war with Israel … from the inception of this terrorist organization and will be until it is put out of business.”

“All of the progress that Israel has made to root out Hamas, to deprive it of resources, to close its infrastructure … will essentially be undone because they will be allowed to have the run of Gaza again,” warned Gaffney.

And all of this assumes that Hamas will keep up its end of the agreement through all three phases. But that might be the least likely outcome, based on its past behavior and genocidal hatred of Israel. “Hamas broke ceasefires with Israel in 2003, 2007, 2008, and nine times in 2014,” listed National Review’s Jim Geraghty, not to mention a terrorist shooting during a ceasefire in 2024.

Over the past year, Geraghty continued, “Hamas either rejected ceasefire proposals or hostages-for-prisoners trades, walked away from the table, or refused to restart negotiations in the months of December, January, February, March, April, May, June, and July 2024. … Hamas has proven a bad-faith, bloodthirsty, irrational, and self-destructive negotiator at every step in this process.”

The deal is so bad for Israel that it could put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in trouble domestically. “The Left has, of course, wanted his head on a pike for a long time,” said Gaffney, but “there are a lot of people now on the right who feel that all of this is for naught — all of the war efforts — if this [deal] is allowed to go forward.” Throughout the war, Israel has maintained its sovereign right to self-defense, which involves the right to react to the ongoing threat posed by Hamas, a terrorist group operating from within its borders.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have come out against the deal; while aligned with Netanyahu, they control enough votes to destabilize his coalition. “This could cause his governing coalition to implode,” Perkins exclaimed.

If fact, it seems that Netanyahu himself was reluctant to agree to the deal, until he met with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s incoming special envoy to the Middle East. The Biden administration’s State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed that input from Trump’s team was “absolutely critical in getting this deal over the line.”

“Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu] basically had his knees broken” by Witkoff, said Gaffney. “He took what Donald Trump meant as leverage on the Hamas terrorists, putting them on notice that if the hostages were not released … by the time he came to office … all hell would break loose. Now, that was intended to be pressuring Hamas. Instead, Witkoff — and the Biden team, of course — turned this into leverage on Bibi Netanyahu.”

In fact, Gaffney suspected Witkoff of showing more loyalty to Qatar than to Trump. Witkoff said “that ‘Qatar is doing God’s work in these negotiations.’ I think he might have meant Allah’s work, because what has been done, I think, is not in the service of Israel,” he alleged. “This is a man who may work for Qatar, but I don’t honestly think he’s worked effectively for Donald Trump or the interests of the United States, to say nothing of Israel.”

Trump initially celebrated the “EPIC” ceasefire agreement that “could only have happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signaled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies.”

But Gaffney cautioned that Trump might not have the full picture. “I hope that the president, Donald Trump, will think better of this as he learns more about what’s been done,” he said. “I’d be a little surprised if President Trump knew when he put [Witkoff] in this position that he had actually done a $600 million hotel deal with the nation of Qatar.”

The Israeli cabinet approved the deal “after examining all political, security, and humanitarian aspects, and understanding that the proposed deal supports the achievement of the war’s objectives, the Ministerial Committee for National Security Affairs (the Political-Security Cabinet) has recommended that the government approve the proposed framework..”

Netanyahu accused Hamas of creating a “last-minute crisis” by making additional demands over the identity of the prisoners Israel will release. Netanyahu explained the deal Israel agreed to “gives Israel veto power over the release of mass murderers who are symbols of terror,” but Hamas now “demands to dictate the identity of these terrorists.”

Instead of approving the lopsided ceasefire right away, Israel launched overnight airstrikes against 50 terrorist targets in Gaza. Hamas-aligned sources claimed that the airstrikes killed at least 75 people — most of whom were probably terrorists. In a statement, the IDF confirmed the death of Muhammad Hasham Zahedi Abu Al-Rus, a terrorist who participated in the October 7, 2023 massacre at the Nova Music Festival.

The world may be ready to move on from Hamas’s atrocities, but Israel will not — cannot — rest secure until the Hamas threat within their own borders has been eliminated.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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RELATED VIDEO: The Catastrophic Israel-Hamas ‘Ceasefire’

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Poll: Majority of Americans Say Biden Is Worst President Since Nixon

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According to a newly released Gallup poll, Americans rate President Joe Biden as the second worst U.S. president since the 1960s, just barely above Richard Nixon.

The survey, released Tuesday, asked respondents to rate how 10 presidents from the last 60 years will go down in history. The presidents included JFK, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump’s first term, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and Richard Nixon.

Just 6% of respondents gave Biden an “outstanding” rating, with 13% giving him an “above average” rating, 26% giving him an “average” rating, 17% giving him a “below average” rating, and 37% giving him a “poor” rating. Cumulatively, Biden scored a net positive rating of -35 percentage points — only Richard Nixon fared worse, with -42. Biden’s 37% “poor” rating was the highest of any of the 10 presidents in that category.

Overall, a majority of Americans — 54% — said Biden will be remembered as “below average” or “poorly.”

Under Biden’s four-year term, America has experienced a series of disastrous outcomes across a wide array of fronts.

On the economic front, a recent Economist report found that the U.S. currently ranks 20th in the world on a combined scale over the past year of gross domestic product growth, stock market performance, core inflation, change in unemployment rate, and government deficits. Despite this, Biden claimed last month that “we’ve entered a new phase of our economic resurgence.” He also stated, “I believe the economy I’m leaving at the moment … [is] the best economy, strongest economy in the world and for all Americans, doing better.”

But American voters did not appear to share the president’s enthusiastic economic outlook. After experiencing record-high inflation on food, gas, and housing prices and significant spikes in homelessness under Biden’s watch, almost 70% of Americans characterized the nation’s economy as “not so good” or “poor” in exit polls following the November election.

On America’s borders, a true crisis emerged after Biden reversed President Donald Trump’s border security policies shortly after taking office in February 2021. As a result, 10 million illegal border encounters occurred (compared to 2.4 million under Trump’s first term), child sex-trafficking more than tripled, and fentanyl trafficking increased, with over 250,000 Americans dying from fentanyl overdoses (an 80% increase since Trump’s first term). In addition, violent crime spiked significantly across the country under the Biden administration.

Regarding foreign affairs, global stability unraveled drastically following Biden’s decision to abruptly withdraw American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, resulting in the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers from a suicide bomber outside Kabul Airport and the deaths of an unknown number of American allies in the country (in addition to $7 billion worth of military equipment left behind, which the Taliban acquired). Six months later in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of approximately 80,000 Ukrainian troops and 200,000 Russian troops and a combined 800,000 wounded. In addition, approximately 12,100 Ukrainian civilians have also been killed, and there is currently no end in sight to the conflict, with North Korean troops joining the war in October 2024. A year and a half after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in October 2023, the terrorist group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, resulting in 1,200 Israeli deaths. This engulfed the Middle East in widespread conflict between Israel and the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others. The Iranian regime also launched direct attacks against Israel.

On the domestic policy front, Biden made highly polarizing and controversial issues the focal point of his administration, including completely unrestricted abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, the targeting of pro-life advocates and political opponents through the Department of Justice, the promotion of gender transition procedures for minors, and more.

“I think the American people are very kind to only give the outgoing administration the second worst grade of any administration since JFK,” Matt Carpenter, director of FRC Action, told The Washington Stand. “To my knowledge, the Nixon administration didn’t publish guidelines for biological males to ‘chestfeed’ their infants, subsidize abortion in the Pentagon, promote dangerous and irreversible gender transitions for minors, flood the country with millions of illegal aliens, and so forth. In my mind, Biden was the worst president since JFK and it’s not even close.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Dems ‘Tilted the Scales of Justice’ Regarding J6, Lawmaker Says

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As Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) continues to focus on prosecuting individuals involved in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, lawmakers and experts say the administration and the Democratic Party have embellished the facts of what occurred, misallocated federal resources, unjustly prosecuted nonviolent protestors, and weaponized the incident for political gain.

On Monday, the fourth anniversary of the riot, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a statement claiming in part that “five officers … lost their lives in the line of duty as a result of what happened to them on January 6, 2021.” But as noted by National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, “no police officers died in the line of duty during the Capitol riot.” As he went on to write, some of the officers involved in protecting the Capitol tragically passed away after the incident as a result of medical complications and suicides, but “[n]ot a single charge of murder of a federal officer, nor conspiracy or attempt to murder a federal officer, was alleged by DOJ” related to January 6 (J6).

Despite this, Garland’s DOJ has filed charges against almost 1,600 individuals in connection with J6, with reports on Monday indicating that as many as 200 more individuals may be charged as well. As Garland acknowledged in his statement, “Over the past four years, our prosecutors, FBI agents, investigators, and analysts have conducted one of the most complex, and most resource-intensive investigations in the Justice Department’s history.”

But Republican lawmakers argue that much of the narrative surrounding J6 has been distorted to paint anyone who was present at the Capitol that day as a violent “insurrectionist” and blame President Donald Trump for instigating the violence. On Monday, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to discuss an interim report released by the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight regarding J6.

“[Garland] certainly, I think, overdid it” with regard to the number of individuals charged, Griffith contended. “That’s not to say there weren’t bad actors on January 6th,” he added. “There were some, but the vast majority of folks were there to protest, but they were planning on a peaceful protest. And then, you know, everything broke loose and got out of control, but it is amazing how they don’t want to tell the whole narrative. And you know, what we need to do is tell the whole truth, right? [The] good, the bad, the ugly on both sides of this thing.”

Griffith went on to point out that Trump attempted to contain the chaos on that day with the National Guard.

“[O]ne of the biggest things that has struck me from our investigation is the fact that President Trump authorized the National Guard to come in,” he emphasized. “[But] it was the D.C. politicos … Nancy Pelosi and company who — and I can’t say that she made the decision herself — but they didn’t want to have this image of the National Guard coming in. They had bicycle racks up for a perimeter, knowing that there were going to be tens of thousands, if not more than 100,000 people in Washington that day to protest. Today, for example, they’ve been putting up for about a week … these huge fences that kept people from getting anywhere near the Capitol. None of that was done in advance [of J6].”

“Our law enforcement was not prepared,” Griffith continued. “Nobody in D.C. was prepared. And then the people who could have ameliorated this issue were left sitting on the sidelines. The National Guard was told just to sit by and wait for orders. And then even after the military folks gave the orders at the highest level, a general decided he wasn’t going to issue that order right away and held on for another couple of hours before sending in the National Guard. So we need to look at all the totality of the circumstances and look at each individual case if we’re really going to make a decision as to whether or not these people had evil in their hearts on that day. I would submit a lot of them did not.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins concurred, observing that officials took extra precautions with barricades in D.C. following the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, but curiously did not implement the same security measures ahead of J6. “When you add those facts and these perceptions with what happened post January 6th with the sham investigation that took place by Nancy Pelosi and the January 6th committee, it only fuels that idea that this was politically motivated to advance a narrative.”

“I don’t think there’s any question,” Griffith agreed. “The January 6th select committee that Nancy Pelosi put together was politically motivated. I think the evidence is clear on that from the very beginning, from day one. They wanted to project that this was all Donald Trump’s fault, that he was the big bad guy, and the evidence just didn’t bear that out.”

The congressman further contended that the January 6th Select Committee “gave partial truth, and sometimes maybe even given Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, was clearly in error, if not just falsehoods. … And the witnesses who were on the scene that the January 6th Select Committee had in their possession before they issued their report was not in that report. And they should have given the American people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They chose not to do so because they had a political agenda.”

Griffith additionally noted that Pelosi kept “conservative Republicans off of the commission, who could have asked the pointed questions, who could have brought out [further] information,” further detailing that “there was about a terabyte of information that was deleted or attempted to be deleted by the J6 Select Committee. That should have gone to the archives of the United States. That’s just gone.”

“[L]et all the proper evidence in and let the chips fall where they may,” Griffith concluded. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But you know what? They didn’t do that. They tilted the scales of justice for political reasons, and it’s atrocious.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Biden DOJ Poured Over $100,000,000 Into ‘Restorative Justice,’ DEI Efforts For K-12 Students, New Report Finds

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) under President Joe Biden awarded K-12 schools $100,113,942 in grants aimed at increasing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts since 2021, a new report says.

The DOJ divvied up at least 30 grants that explicitly mentioned DEI or stated an intention to improve outcomes for a specific demographic group. Many more included topics of restorative justice and social emotional learning, according to Parents Defending Education (PDE). A total of 102 grants involving such topics were sent to 946 school districts in 36 states, representing about 3,235,414 students.

Nearly $2 million went to the Minnesota Department of Education to “create safe learning environments where practices of anti-racism and anti-oppression are embedded,” PDE said. The award said the Minnesota department was committed to “supporting LGBTQ inclusion” within all school districts.

Many of the grants mirrored this promise, specifically naming LGBT and nonwhite students as their intended targets.

Pennsylvania State University received $1,785,773 as part of an anti-bullying campaign to help K-12 schools “provide an opportunity to meaningfully advance equity in violence prevention for communities historically underserved, marginalized, adversely affected by inequality, and disproportionately impacted by crime, violence, and victimization (People of Color (POC), women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ community),” according to the grant document.

The Milwaukee Public Schools was awarded $986,757 for a project meant to “promote racial equity” and “dismantle institutionalized barriers,” documents show. Another program implemented in Pennsylvania school districts received $1,688,668 from the DOJ to teach students “community policing, trauma informed conflict emphasizing racial/historical and intergenerational trauma, impacts of social media on conflict and conflict escalation and management, anti-bias education, restorative practices.”

DEI is being uprooted in many states as governors move to ban such programs. Major companies like Walmart and several universities are also moving to end their employee and student DEI trainings and race-based admission and hiring decisions.

A report released after Texas banned the programs said that schools with DEI policies did not improve learning outcomes for their target groups. Another report said that DEI policies made people much more likely to agree with racist statements from Adolf Hitler.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

Jaryn Crouson

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden Admin Singled Out ‘Pro-Life, Pro-Family’ Americans as Terrorists, 17,000-Page Report Explains

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During its four years in office, the Biden-Harris administration conducted a whole-of-government attempt to surveil, censor, and possibly imprison conservative Christians — and the FBI acted as “a witting participant” in their harassment campaign, a massive new government report details.

The Democratic administration’s attempt to harass “pro-life, pro-family” citizens takes up a significant part of the 17,019-page report, which the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released on December 20. The efforts included painting concerned parents and “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as incipient domestic terrorists.

“The Select Subcommittee revealed and stopped the FBI’s effort to target Catholic Americans because of their religious views, detailed the Justice Department’s directives to target parents at school board meetings, stopped the Internal Revenue Service from making unannounced visits to American taxpayers’ homes, caused the Justice Department to change its internal policies to respect the separation of powers and limit subpoenas for [l]egislative [b]ranch employees, and highlighted the vast warrantless financial surveillance of Americans by federal law enforcement,” states the report, which proved so sprawling it had to be released in four parts.

“The report underscores the risks posed by a weaponized federal government,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in an email sent to The Washington Stand.

Biden ‘Misused Federal Law’ to Go after Concerned Parents

Perhaps the most heavy-handed weaponization of government undertaken by the Biden-Harris administration came when it declared war on mothers and fathers who objected to having their children indoctrinated in the public school system. After teachers unions and liberal authorities closed in-person classes in government schools, parents realized the extent to which activists had smuggled critical race theory and extreme gender ideology into the curriculum. Soon, they began voicing their objections to the local school board.

“As the radical left pushed its woke agenda on America’s children, parents across the country started speaking out at school board meetings against critical race theory, unscientific mask mandates, transgender ideology in the classroom and bathroom, and anti-America curricula. Concerned parents were vocal and unafraid in their opposition to this indoctrination,” states the report. “The National School Boards Association (NSBA) and the Biden [a]dministration, however, could not abide this growing parental rights revolution and colluded to create a pretext—articulated in an October 4 memorandum from Attorney General [Merrick] Garland — to use the federal law-enforcement apparatus to silence parents.”

The report documents how Democrats “worked with education special interests to generate” the underlying basis of the directive. Specifically, the Biden administration “colluded” with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) beginning in October 2021 and “misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes.” The FBI conducted 25 “Guardian assessments,” including investigating a mother because she belonged to a “right-wing mom’s group” and a father because “he rails against the government.”

“No one I spoke with in law enforcement seemed to think that there is a serious national threat directed at school boards,” one U.S. Attorney told the subcommittee.

Yet the investigations followed the memo, which Biden’s Justice Department released one month before the 2021 Virginia governor’s election. The Democratic state elected Republican Glenn Youngkin, who promised to give parents greater control over education. In their debate, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

“Despite federal law enforcement’s task to protect all Americans, the Biden-Harris [a]dministration pursued a two-tiered system of justice. … [T]he FBI singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists.”

‘Radical’ Catholics or Radical Abuse of Government?

Whistleblower Kyle Seraphin revealed the existence of a memorandum written by the FBI’s Richmond office describing an alleged tie between terrorism and “radical-traditionalist Catholic” Christians. Despite the lack of evidence to support the allegation, this purported link would allow federal agents to spy on members of a Christian denomination, remotely or in person.

The “FBI’s own internal review identified errors at every step of the drafting, review, and approval of” the document. “FBI employees could not define the meaning of ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic’ when preparing, editing, or reviewing the memorandum. Nevertheless, this single investigation became the basis for an FBI-wide memorandum warning about the dangers of ‘radical’ Catholics,” notes the report. “The two FBI employees who co-authored the memorandum later told FBI internal investigators that they knew the sources cited in the memorandum had a political bias — sources including the Southern Poverty Law Center, Salon, and The Atlantic.”

Basing a proposed infiltration of Latin Mass parishes on such a flimsy intelligence product proves that “the FBI abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists and that there was no legitimate basis for the memorandum to insert federal law enforcement into Catholic houses of worship,” investigators conclude. By the time public outcry led to a public apology, the FBI had already interrogated a priest and choir director, “relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment, and the FBI even proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leadership.”

In other words, the FBI planned to place undercover informants inside churches.

“The FBI was a witting participant in the [a]dministration’s anti-parent endeavor,” the report concludes, but abusing the rights of U.S. citizens became an all-of-government undertaking. Although “the FBI has targeted its employees who hold conservative viewpoints, investigated parents at school board meetings, and sought to invade the sacred spaces of Catholic churches in the name of fighting ‘domestic terrorism,]” such “abuses are not limited to the FBI,” says the report. “Federal agencies including the IRS, the Treasury Department, and other Justice Department components like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), have misused federal funds to target Americans.”

The report also notes the government’s attempt to “prebunk” the Hunter Biden laptop story, the first-ever FBI raid on the home of a former President Donald Trump and subsequent acts of lawfare against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, government harassment of Elon Musk and Twitter (now known as X), mistreatment of whistleblowers, and the financial surveillance of American citizens.

The report’s 12,757-page appendix chronicles the subcommittee’s hearings, letters, subpoenas, depositions, and transcribed interviews.

This tome comes as the latest in a series of devastating reports chronicling the rampant corruption of the Biden-Harris administration and its enablers burrowed deep into America’s bureaucratic infrastructure. Earlier this month, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its 520-page report titled “After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward” found nearly every COVID-19 conspiracy theory was true.

The voluminous report represents the full body of research the subcommittee has undertaken since the House of Representatives formed the 20-member investigative body, comprised of 11 Republicans and nine Democrats, in February 2023. The subcommittee acted as part of the House Judiciary Committee, also chaired by Jordan.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED PODCAST: The Legacy of Joe Biden

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Biden Admin Invoked ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ To Cut Alaska Drilling, But Some Tribal Leaders Are Ready For Trump

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The Biden administration justified major crackdowns on fossil fuel and mineral development in Alaska by playing up its commitment to Native American tribes, but some community leaders who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation said they did not feel respected by the administration

Over the course of the last four years, the Biden administration moved to shut down drilling activity on tens millions of acres of land in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), retroactively canceled lease sales and effectively blocked a major mining project in the state, often touting the administration’s commitment to protecting the environment for native communities in official statements and press releases. However, these actions were a major disappointment to some of Alaska’s natives, who told the DCNF that the administration seems to have mostly ignored their desire to allow development that generates revenues for their communities and that they are ready to work with the incoming Trump administration to strike an appropriate balance.

“With climate change warming the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, we must do everything within our control to meet the highest standards of care to protect this fragile ecosystem,” Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said in a September 2023 statement after the administration moved to shield 13 million acres from drilling activity in the NPR-A and retroactively canceled lease sales. “President Biden is delivering on the most ambitious climate and conservation agenda in history. The steps we are taking today further that commitment, based on the best available science and in recognition of the Indigenous Knowledge of the original stewards of this area, to safeguard our public lands for future generations.”

However, the administration’s deference to “Indigenous Knowledge” did not mean much to some tribal leaders and officials in light of the government’s apparent disinterest in meaningfully engaging with them about key issues related to resource development.

Nagruk Harcharek is the president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, an organization that represents the interests of numerous native communities in the resource-rich North Slope region of Alaska. In his view, the Biden administration was not particularly interested in hearing what his organization had to say about the value of the economic benefits that resource development provides for his community.

“I started here in 2022. The first thing I did was try to get in there and make sure our voices were heard, because what we’re hearing from the administration is that we’re the most tribally-friendly administration in the history of the United States, right? ” Harcharek told the DCNF. “At least from our perspective, that’s not our impression.”

“We’ve always tried to stress that we are part of the environment. We utilize it for subsistence hunting, for our culture, and it’s extremely important to us. We don’t need to be protected from our own environment,” Harcharek continued. “We can make decisions and help administrations make decisions that are both good for the region and also good for the environment and good for the state, good for the nation. And that just wasn’t the case. There was a lack of engagement, meaningful engagement. Oftentimes, we heard of policy changes in the news and not from phone calls from folks, even though everybody has our number.”

Harcharek says his organization attempted to secure a meeting with Haaland on nine different occasions, but only managed to get a chance in June of this year. Other times, the Department of the Interior (DOI) sent staffers or other officials to meet with them, if their outreach to the government was even returned.

“Sometimes we didn’t even get a response from those emails, so saying that they’re the most tribally-friendly and then not speaking to most of our tribes or us in a timely manner or a meaningful manner, the just question is, who are you? Who considers you the most tribally friendly organization? Because it sure isn’t us, or we’re not getting that sentiment,” Harcharek said.

Doreen Leavitt, secretary for the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope (ICAS), also ripped Haaland for lackluster engagement with her community since 2021 and expressed hope that Republican North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — Trump’s pick to replace Haaland — will be a better leader at DOI.

“Secretary Haaland’s leadership for ICAS and our region was not just deeply frustrating, but it was saddening because as an indigenous woman myself, who wants to see other indigenous women in leadership succeed and grow, her lack of respect for our region was frustrating, to say the least, despite her recognition of tribal stewardship, our requests for consultation on critical issues were ignored or dismissed,” Leavitt told the DCNF. “I don’t know much about Secretary Burgum, other than that he comes from the Dakotas, but we will expect the incoming secretary to provide that meaningful consultation, that transparent process and respect for our tribal sovereignty and self-determination and those things we did not see under Haaland.”

Leavitt also explained that resource development has provided the money her community needed over the past 50 years to establish and maintain basic things like running water, school systems, health clinics, emergency services and more.

Without taking a political stance, Leavitt noted that she and her organization are “especially looking forward to having the government-to-government relationship rights respected” by the incoming Trump administration.

Charles Lampe, the president of Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, said that he and his people are looking forward to Trump’s return to power after sensing that most of his community’s concerns about cracking down hard on resource development were “pretty much just cast aside” by the Biden administration.

“We’re really excited about the next four years. With the previous administration, the Trump administration, we had a great relationship. We just felt like we were actually listened to during that time,” Lampe told the DCNF.

AUTHOR

Nick Pope

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

436 Church Attacks in 2023, Zero Prosecutions under the FACE Act, Notes House Hearing

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The Biden-Harris administration did not prosecute a single one of the hundreds of attacks against churches that took place last year under a 1994 law designed to protect houses of worship, a congressional hearing established on Wednesday, citing research from Family Research Council. Even as violence and vandalism against churches and pro-life centers skyrocketed over the last two years, 92% of Biden administration cases using that law targeted pro-life advocates.

Those facts emerged Wednesday during a House Judiciary hearing about the implementation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. The FACE Act explicitly punishes anyone who “intentionally damages or destroys the property of a place of religious worship” in 18 U.S. Code §248(a)(3), imposing a $10,000 fine and a jail sentence of up to six months for a first conviction. Each subsequent conviction can add $25,000 in fines and up to 18 months in prison for nonviolent protests, or up to 10 years if the defendant is convicted of causing any bodily injury.

“Since the start of the Biden-Harris administration until May 2024, the DOJ had brought a total of 24 FACE Act prosecutions against 55 defendants, with only two of these cases concerning attacks on pregnancy resource centers. To this day, the FACE Act has never been used in defense of a church since it was passed in 1994,” said the subcommittee chairman Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas). In all, 50 of the 55 defendants were pro-life, and the department obtained 34 convictions, according to data from the Biden Justice Department.

“Statues of Lady Justice show her wearing a blindfold, because it is not supposed to matter who is being judged, what they believe, or who they voted for. Unfortunately, over the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has weaponized this act [through] disproportionately targeting pro-life Americans for FACE Act violations while simultaneously failing to protect pregnancy resource facilities, despite being the target of growing violence,” said Roy.

‘Those Who Hate Wisdom Love Death’

Although the law putatively covers churches, it has never been used to protect America’s first freedom as churches come increasingly under attack after the May 2022 leak of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

“The Family Research Council identified 436 attacks on churches just in 2023,” testified Erin Hawley, senior counsel and vice president at the Alliance Defending Freedom. “Last year, Arielle Del Turco with the Family Research Council reported to this committee over 400 incidents of hostile acts directed at churches … including hundreds of acts of vandalism, dozens of arson attacks, and incidents involving guns or bomb threats.”

“There have been zero — zero — prosecutions under the FACE Act for that violence,” noted Hawley.

“Those who hate wisdom love death,” said Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), paraphrasing Proverbs 8:36. “And I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.”

Technically, the report — “Hostility Against Churches Is on the Rise in the United States | Analyzing Incidents from 2018-2023” by Del Turco — documented 436 church attacks during the first 11 months of 2023, a whopping 800% increase over six years.

FRC also documented 67 acts of violence or vandalism against pro-life pregnancy centers between the Dobbs decision leak and May 2023, 39 assaults against pro-life churches by October 2022, and 24 attacks on pro-life organizations by January 2023. Hawley cited some specific attacks:

  • On June 7, 2022, CompassCare’s office in Buffalo, New York, was firebombed and tagged with spray paint reading, “Jane was here.”
  • On June 10, 2022, the Gresham Pregnancy Resource Center in Gresham, Oregon was burned.
  • On June 25, 2022, Life Choices Free Pregnancy Services in Longmont, Colorado, was firebombed and spraypainted with the message, “if abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.”

Hawley cited numerous other hostile acts against pro-life women’s centers in her unabridged, written testimony.

Pregnancy resource centers make a “strange target,” since they’re giving away diapers and baby formula for free, noted Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.).

‘I Became a Slave to Ideological Tyrants’: Pro-Life Advocate Remembers

At the hearing, Hawley and her fellow witnesses detailed ways “the Biden administration has weaponized the [FACE] Act to target pro-life individuals,” said Hawley. “The Biden DOJ has upped the ante, placing pro-life Americans in as much jeopardy as possible.” Steve Crampton, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, noted that the Biden administration has invoked the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 “for the first time in our nation’s history” to accuse pro-life advocates of engaging in a “conspiracy against rights.”

The act increases the jail sentence for a nonviolent first violation from six months to more than 10 years in prison.

One of the people facing the barrel of a federal gun was pro-life advocate Paul Vaughn, arrested in 2022 for a pro-life demonstration in Tennessee. After Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) invoked Project 2025, Vaughn replied, “I would like to tell you about the DOJ’s Project 2022. It happened on October 5, 2022, at approximately 7:15 in the morning, when my house was assaulted, my wife and children were terrorized, and I was kidnapped at gun point by four armed men.”

“Lethal force was abused to abridge my God-given and constitutionally secured rights. At the moment of being placed in handcuffs, I became a slave to ideological tyrants, either the ones holding the weapons or the ones they obeyed,” remembered a traumatized Vaughn. “The process is the punishment.”

“Government has been weaponized against We the People,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), citing the similar arrest of pro-life advocate Mark Houck by heavily armed federal agents in front of his wife and seven children.

Reps. Scanlon and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) held that the disparate enforcement of the law came about because pro-life advocates violate it more often. Yet one study found pro-life centers were 22 times more likely to be attacked than abortion facilities.

Despite that evidence, President Joe Biden formed the Reproductive Rights Task Force, led by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, in July 2022 to combat state pro-life protections and prosecute sidewalk counselors. “DOJ continues to robustly enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,” boasted a “fact sheet” from the White House Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, stated last December that the entire department is “working to ensure that prosecutors across the country are equipped to bring FACE Act cases. And we have emphasized that Civil Rights Division attorneys are always available for consultation and technical assistance.”

Targeting peaceful pro-life Christians singing hymns in the lobby of an abortion facility seems unusual “in an atmosphere where we’re told police officers should deescalate” for violent criminals, noted outgoing Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). “That must stop, and I guarantee you they will stop in the next administration.”

“I can assure you, we will have justice back in America on January 20,” agreed Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas).

When pro-abortion domestic terrorists are prosecuted, they tend to get lighter sentences than required by law. Judge William Conley, an Obama appointee, sentenced the man who confessed to firebombing the Wisconsin Family Action in May 2022, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, to 7.5 years rather than the 20-year maximum sentence allowed by federal law.

“While we expect the incoming administration to end this horrific practice of the DOJ, that is not good enough. The American people deserve to know that their rights are not going to be abused no matter which administration is in power,” said Roy.

Roy: Repeal the FACE Act

Roy introduced the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2023 (H.R. 5577), which would apply to any FACE Act prosecution underway at the time of its passage, last September. The legislation currently has 47 cosponsors, including Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and Greg Steube (R-Fla.).

Crampton noted that, since Roe v. Wade has been repealed, the FACE Act guards a non-existent right. “There is therefore no federal constitutional right to abortion, and the very reason for FACE’s existence no longer exists. Under the well-established doctrine of cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex, ‘when the reason for a law ceases, the law itself ceases,’” he testified.

“Today’s hearing on the FACE Act should highlight how it has been repeatedly weaponized by corrupt bureaucrats and officials against peaceful pro-life advocates. The committee should call on their colleagues to abolish this federal law if it will continue to be unevenly applied by pro-abortion radicals in government to punish peaceful pro-life activists while attacks on pregnancy centers and churches continue unabated,” said Tommy Valentine, director of the Catholic Accountability Project at CatholicVote, in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. “We hope that under President Trump’s watch, true impartiality and justice will be restored to our governing agencies, and the exploitation of governmental power which we have seen run rampant under the Biden administration will no longer be tolerated.”

Democrats Try to Tie Pro-Life Republicans to Violence

Democrats on the committee accused Republicans of stoking violence against abortionists by repealing the 1994 law.

“The motivation here is very clear: In repealing the FACE Act, they would invite every anti-abortion extremist to use violence, threats, intimidation, to block access to abortion nationwide,” said Scanlon. “They knowingly enable dangerous and hostile rhetoric … and ultimately, that makes them complicit in the consequences of those actions.”

“Anti-abortion extremists continue to use violence, threats, and disruption to curb access to abortion, so Republicans want to repeal the law that protects … from these ongoing threats,” claimed Nadler.

But the Thomas More Society holds that the act is unconstitutional and must be overturned on the grounds of sound jurisprudence.

‘Promises Made, Promises Kept’

Roy said the next administration “must act to reverse these wrongful imprisonments, reuniting families who have been collateral damage of this administration. The Trump administration should consider pardoning and commuting” the sentences of those wrongfully targeted.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon peaceful pro-life advocates and other “political prisoners” who have been convicted of FACE Act violations or similarly trumped-up federal charges. “I will appoint a special task force to rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration … so that I can study the situation very quickly and sign their pardons or commutations on day one,” promised President Trump, who then sought the Republican presidential nomination, in his address to the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit. “Never again will the federal government be used to target religious believers.”

“I will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept,” said Trump in his 2024 victory speech.

“Unequal application of the law is not truly law; it is tyranny imposed on those [who] didn’t have the power by those who do have it. That’s contrary to everything we believe as Americans,” said Roy. The Democratic administration’s history of unequal prosecution and protection highlights the need for “permanent and fundamental reforms at the Department of Justice.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Groundbreaking Troop Bill Heads to Biden’s Desk with First-Ever Rebuke of Trans Ideology

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After a frustrating and bitterly divided year in Congress, one thing that will go down as a bright shining success for the GOP is the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). On Wednesday, the Senate voted to send the 1,800-page behemoth to President Joe Biden’s desk, where he will be forced to do something neither side ever thought possible: sign a bill protecting children from his radical transgender agenda.

It’s a stunning turn of events for both parties. For Republicans, the idea that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) could negotiate a deal that not only stopped taxpayer-funded gender transitions for military kids, but also erased the women in the draft provision and axed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts with his narrow majority still has insiders shaking their heads in amazement. On the flip side, it shows just how vulnerable Democrats are after the November elections — especially on the trans issue, which pollsters almost universally believe cost Kamala Harris the White House.

That’s not to say that some of Schumer’s extremists didn’t put up a fight. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) was furious at the policy change, threatening — for the first time in her career — to vote against the NDAA, “a position I do not take lightly,” she insisted. “It’s flat-out wrong,” she fumed on the Senate floor, arguing that taxpayers should be forced to fork over their hard-earned dollars for the butchery of children.

In a move that was mostly for show, Baldwin fought to add an amendment to the NDAA that would reinstate the language for taxpayer-funded gender surgeries and hormones. “Let’s be clear: we’re talking about parents who are in uniform serving our country who have earned the right to make the best decisions for their families,” Baldwin and 20 senators wrote. “I trust our servicemembers and their doctors to make the best healthcare decisions for their kids, not politicians.”

The amendment to remove the protections for minors was backed by Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey (Mass.), Brian Schatz and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden (Ore.), Cory Booker and Andy Kim (N.J.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Chris Van Hollen (Md.), Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), John Fetterman (Pa.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), John Hickenlooper (Colo.), and Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.).

FRC’s senior director for Government Affairs, Quena Gonzalez, dismissed the push as “rank political theater.” “The effort failed,” he pointed out to The Washington Stand, “because it was designed to fail. If the Democrats who run the Senate had really wanted to block protections for military kids from taxpayer-funded gender transition procedures, they could’ve done that before the bill was ever negotiated with the Republican-led House.”

Instead, he points out, “language to protect kids was included in the base House text and in the base Senate text, even before it was negotiated. So to complain now — and file an amendment that won’t get 60 votes and is therefore doomed to fail — is pure posturing. Why did they wait until now, when it’s too late to do anything meaningful?” Gonzalez wondered. “Maybe they knew they didn’t have the votes. Or maybe they understood that it’s a political loser, but feel they have to keep pandering to their hard-core radical base. Two House Democrats, Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), wasted no time blaming the Left’s extremism on the related ‘gender identity’ issue of boys being allowed in girls’ sports, restrooms, showers, and locker rooms, etc.”

Fortunately for the Democratic Party, Schumer wouldn’t allow his senators to press the issue. Rather than let his members take a politically damaging vote that puts them on the record for a policy that Americans are very much against, he quietly shelved the amendment, telling the press brightly, “The NDAA is now on a glide path to final passage.” Throwing a bone to his far-Left caucus, he added, “Of course, the NDAA is not perfect. It doesn’t have everything either side would like. … But of course, you need bipartisanship to get this through the finish line.”

To most observers, this is one of the biggest signs yet that the country is at a tipping point on extreme gender ideology. “The passage of this NDAA is a huge loss for the Left,” Gonzalez insists. “Democrats ran for president and for Congress in part by calling conservatives who stood up to the woke mob ‘transphobic.’ For the longest time, we Christians have been told that we’re ‘on the wrong side of history,’ but we are on the right side of truth. This should give Christians courage,” he underscored. “When we stand up univocally for truth, even when it’s not culturally popular, we stand for unchanging principles that will ultimately be vindicated by a much higher authority than Congress, the president, or the Supreme Court.”

By way of background, the speaker explained to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “This Week on the Hill,” that the NDAA is usually passed with broad bipartisan agreement — a rarity in a city that can barely agree on anything. This year, he said, “We had some unnecessary controversy. One of the things that we were really focused on is … return[ing] the emphasis of our national defense policy to national defense. And so, we really were on guard to make sure that a lot of the woke progressive agenda was not part of that policy prescription. And we prevailed in that.”

Jubilantly, Johnson pointed out, “We, for the first time in federal law, will be preventing [the funding of] trans surgeries on minors. … You know, there [are] about two million-plus children that are [in] military families that are insured by Tricare, which is the big federal insurer. And we wanted to make sure that those taxpayer-funded dollars don’t go in any way to the provision of any kind of ‘gender-affirming care,’ as they call it. That would do dramatic harm — permanent harm — to these young people.”

Asked what it says about the Democratic Party that they’d pursue this cultural obsession at the expense of our military, the speaker could only shake his head. “I wish I could tell you,” he said. “I think that there [are] some on the Left [who] want to use every institution of the government to advance their woke progressive socialist policies [and] experiments, [hoping for] the transformational kind of change that they always brag about that they want to hoist upon America. But I can tell you what this election cycle affirmed for us, and that is that the American people are not having that. I mean, I think that’s one of the large reasons why President Donald J. Trump got reelected with the large mandate he has and why we won control of the Senate and the House for the Republican Party, because we’re advancing common-sense ideas. These traditional ideas that have made our country what it is are still held by the American people.”

At the end of the day, Johnson believes, “We’re still a center-Right country — in spite of what they’ve been trying to convince us of for the last several years, that we’ve gone progressive Left. We have not. And the American people demand common sense. They demand and desire and certainly need a military that is focused on lethality and protecting our national interest.”

Now, he celebrated, “This experimental, non-scientific nonsense that’s been going on everywhere will no longer be a part of the federal health care of our military servicemembers. So that was a big win. And we did a lot of other things as well,” he wanted people to know. “We’re trying to root out the DEI education nonsense in the military academies. And it goes on and on. But in addition to all of that, we also included the largest pay increase in many years for active-duty service members, enlisted members, a little over 14% pay raise. And that’s desperately needed. And we also added a lot of things to help with the quality of life for those who put on the uniform to serve our country, their families, and those related to them. So a lot of great, great wins in this policy, and we’re really excited that it got over the line.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Disney Leaves LGBT Activism on Cutting Room Floor in New Series

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

By Electing Trump, American Voters Say They Want a Ukraine Peace Deal (Part 1)

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On November 5, 2024, American voters rendered their verdicts on several important questions where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had polar opposite policies. The Russia-Ukraine war was one of them.

  • In September, Trump said, “I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly killed by the millions. … It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting.”
  • Harris, after having opposed a peace agreement worked out between Ukraine and Russia in 2022, said in late September, “I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.”
  • Harris, who reminded us constantly that “democracy [was] on the ballot” here in the United States, seemed to care not a bit that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had canceled Ukraine’s elections, perhaps in a bid to avoid his own voters. Further, in a Gallup poll of Ukraine, conducted in August and October 2024, “an average of 52% of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. Nearly four in 10 Ukrainians (38%) believe their country should keep fighting until victory.”

When many millions of Americans and Ukrainians clearly want peace, and neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris can define “victory,” what are we to make of Joe Biden’s two, giant, post-election steps towards expanding the war into Russia proper and central Europe?

  • Step 1) Initiating unprecedented direct missile strikes on Russia: Biden took the first step on November 17, 2024 when he (or his handlers) delegated his authority over targeting U.S. ATACMS long-range missile batteries in Ukraine to Volodymyr Zelensky. Not only did Biden authorize Zelensky to select targets inside the Russian Federation, he also authorized Zelensky to have virtual command and control through U.S. military and civilian personnel who are the only military forces capable of firing these missiles and using NATO/U.S. satellites to guide them to the Russian and North Korean facilities, soldiers, and civilians Zelensky wanted destroyed or killed!
  • Step 2) Asking Congress to write Biden another Ukraine war check: President Biden wants a Supplemental Appropriations of $24 billion for Ukraine before he leaves office on January 20, 2025. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wisely refused to permit a lame-duck Congress to authorize Biden and Zelensky to continue the war into 2025 in an effort to box in or block Trump from ending it, because until noon on January 20, 2025 when Donald Trump takes office, he has no formal veto powers — all Trump has is the moral authority to call the nation to its senses.

With most of official Washington focused on the transition, the president-elect’s appointments, and the drama of confirmation battles in the Senate, now is a good time to reflect on some basic truths about the defense of our homeland against invasions and attacks by enemies, both foreign and domestic. For good or for ill, significant portions of this struggle over whether official Washington and London want a “hot” war with Russia will be played out in the congressional budget process during the deliberations of any future Appropriations bills, made all the dicier because of the micrometer-slim Republican majority in the House, where, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives” (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 7, Clause 1).

And remember, Republican and Democratic House and Senate war hawks, as well as their civilian supporters, campaign donors, weapons’ manufacturers providing local jobs in 70-plus U.S. cities, leftist media harpies, and the legions of “Never Trumpers” have not disappeared. So, concern over Ukraine war funding still applies to any future Appropriations for Ukraine after January 20, 2025.

  • On November 19, following Biden’s delegation of authority to Zelensky to command U.S. troops to target Russian territory, “President Vladimir Putin … formally lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons … [that] allows for a potential nuclear response by Moscow even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power.”
  • On November 29, Hungarian Defense Minister Kristof Szalay-Bobrovniczky stated, “Until the inauguration of the U.S. president on January 20, we will go through the most dangerous period in the Russia-Ukraine war that has been going on for nearly three years now.” Hungary is a NATO member.

In electing Trump, Americans also voted resoundingly for aggressive defense of the homeland. They will not tolerate continued invasions and attacks on our people and infrastructure by foreign nationals, organized criminal gangs, border jumpers, and terrorists. Russians and Ukrainians have the same rights to self-defense and self-determination. We know exactly what Americans would think if our homeland, territories, or military installations were threatened or attacked by Russia’s or any other hostile power’s missiles based in Cuba, Mexico, or overseas. We would either respond in kind or at least seriously and convincingly warn of equal repercussions.

Donald Trump Jr. “gets it.” Last month, the president-elect’s son posted on X:

“The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives. Gotta lock in those $Trillions. Life be damned!!! Imbeciles!”

And, right on queue to prove his point, some current NATO advisors are urging that President Biden give the Zelensky administration nuclear weapons. Several NATO officials “… suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov responded, “These are absolutely irresponsible arguments of people who have a poor understanding of reality and who do not feel a shred of responsibility when making such statements. We also note that all of these statements are anonymous.”

AUTHOR

Bob Marshall

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.