Mayor Zohran Mamdani has never treated CAIR as a problem, and New York taxpayers are still paying the groups tied to it. He took political help from CAIR-linked PACs, hired from the same network, and City Hall now acts like the paper trail is a smear instead of a record.

Texas and Florida designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The UAE did it years earlier.

CAIR spent years selling itself as a civil-rights shop. Prosecutors listed it as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, the largest Hamas-financing trial in American history. A CAIR board member later drew a 65-year sentence in that same world of cases.

None of that stopped CAIR-tied money from becoming one of the biggest institutional boosts behind Mamdani’s rise. Linda Sarsour said it out loud at a CAIR conference: the Unity and Justice Fund, the CAIR-backed super PAC, was the largest institutional donor to the pro-Mamdani PAC. 

Campaign records showed two gifts from the Unity and Justice Fund into New Yorkers for Lower Costs: $25,000 on May 30, 2025, which is on the FEC report, and $75,000 on June 16, which Politico confirmed when it reviewed the filings. Added together that is the $100,000 figure. The later running total on Transparency USA is $120,000.

CAIR’s 501(c)(3) can deny writing a campaign check. That is technically true. The PAC Linda Sarsour called “the CAIR super PAC” on a CAIR stage still wrote those checks, and CAIR Action’s own director was its treasurer (Jerusalem Post).

After the election, CAIR and CAIR-NY treated the win as theirs. They called it a “historic turning point” and a rebuke of “anti-Palestinian politics.” They stood with Mamdani when hewent after Netanyahu and framed pushback as bigotry. Then he staffed City Hall from the same network. Three cofounders of a group that blamed Israel for October 7 landed administration jobs. One of them had already done a tour at CAIR-NY.

The city money never stopped. The Muslim American Society’s Brooklyn shop took more than $265,000 in Council discretionary funds. Then it hosted a fundraiser where vendors sold trinkets for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — all U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. After the story broke, the Council still sent another $85,000. Leadership promised better vendor screening. The checks cleared. MAS people sat on Mamdani’s transition team.

Sarsour’s old shop, the Arab American Association of New York, had already pulled more than $4 million from city and state coffers. Watchdogs mapped tens of millions more flowing to groups tied to Mamdani allies. New York’s matching-funds program made it worse. Small donations from staff at outfits like ICNA got multiplied with public cash. Taxpayers were not just watching the network. They were helping pay for the campaign that put its preferred mayor over a $100 billion budget.

This is not a one-off association. Years earlier, Mamdani recorded a track that sent “love to the Holy Land Five” and told listeners to look them up, the men convicted in the Hamas-financing case that also named CAIR. He has not spent his mayoralty drawing a line under any of it. The answer from his corner is the same every time: call the questions Islamophobia and change the subject.

That dodge only works if you ignore the Holy Land record, the state designations, the vendor tables hawking Hamas and Hezbollah paraphernalia in Brooklyn, and the Council votes that followed.

This week made it harder to miss. Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, Mamdani signed remembrance orders and then handed the ceremonial pen to an aide who once represented an al-Qaeda defendant. Allied groups still collect city money after selling terror souvenirs in Brooklyn. City Hall made the hire and signed the grants. The rest is commentary.

New Yorkers are allowed to ask why their taxes keep following that money trail. The receipts are already in the Council ledgers and the FEC filings. City Hall can keep calling it a smear. The documents do not.

President Trump announced Thursday that the federal government will send $500 refund checks to nearly one million Americans who paid full price on the federal Obamacare exchange and were hit with excess user fees collected during the Biden years.

Those fees were passed through to consumers as higher premiums and then sat unused in government accounts. The White House fact sheet   says the checks start going out in October to people in the 30 states that rely on Healthcare.gov, and that the action will “directly refund the Americans most exposed to the higher costs” imposed by the Biden Administration’s “gross mismanagement of Obamacare.” The same document describes a surplus “not used to benefit the Americans who paid these higher premiums.”

Eligibility is narrow on purpose. The money goes to enrollees who did not receive premium assistance.

Florida, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee and 23 other states that use Healthcare.gov are on the list.

If you bought an unsubsidized plan through the federal exchange, you are the target of this refund.

You do not get the check if Washington already helped pay your premium.

Anyone who bought coverage through a state-run exchange instead of Healthcare.gov is out, including New York, California, Pennsylvania, and the other states that run their own enrollment sites. This refund is only for unsubsidized enrollees in the 30 Healthcare.gov states. If you were subsidized, or you live in a state that does not use Healthcare.gov, this $500 is not yours.

CMS has not issued a consumer notice.

Trump framed the refund as giving people their own money back. In the video released with the announcement he said the $500 would, in many cases, cover the entire premium spike families absorbed after enhanced subsidies expired and insurers kept raising rates. That claim will get picked apart, but the surplus itself is not a rumor. Officials described the funds as already sitting there, collected and never spent on the operations they were supposed to finance.

The politics are not complicated. Midterms are weeks away, healthcare costs remain a top voter complaint, and a check arriving in October.

User fees on Healthcare.gov are charged to insurers and then baked into premiums. Under Biden those fees ran well above what it actually cost to keep the exchange running. This White House is choosing to refund the excess rather than invent another program for it.

The administration’s larger argument is straightforward. Money taken in the name of running Healthcare.gov should pay for running Healthcare.gov. What is left over should go back to the people who paid it, not sit in a federal account and not get recycled into another program. That is the waste cut: unused fees returned instead of spent.

A $500 check will not rebuild the Affordable Care Act. It does show what this White House says it wants healthcare policy to do. Stop treating premium dollars as agency revenue. Give the surplus to the households that funded it.

Checks are scheduled to start going out in October.

Elaine Chao, the wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell, accepted honorary and advisory titles from Communist Party-linked organizations when she served as secretary of labor under President George W. Bush and secretary of transportation under President Donald J. Trump, according to Chinese government and state-media records translated by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

DCNF identified at least four Chinese honorary and advisory titles since 2008. Three came from local affiliates of groups under the United Front Work Department, the Party’s overseas network for courting prominence, access, and talent. The United Front is not a civic club.

In December 2008, while still labor secretary, the Jiading branch of the China Overseas Friendship Association named Chao and her father honorary chairmen of its third council.

In October 2009, after she left Labor, the municipal government of Wuhan named her an international advisor. City notices cited her experience in foreign affairs and her value in attracting overseas talent. She was quoted saying she would do her best to fulfill the duties. The New York Times first reported the title in 2019. A 2009 Chinese report recorded the same titles.

From 2012 to 2017, the Jiading branch of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese listed Chao as an advisor and committee member of its fifth council. The Daily Caller, citing translations of Jiading local reports, says the district’s Overseas Friendship Association listed her in the same span as an advisor to its fourth council. Those years overlap her confirmation and the opening stretch of her tenure as transportation secretary.

Chao did not list the Chinese titles on her 2017 confirmation materials. DCNF reports the Senate questionnaire covered positions held in the previous ten years. In 2019, after the Times raised the Wuhan title and other Chinese accolades, a Transportation Department official at the time called the omission “an oversight.”

United Front websites in Jiading, her father’s hometown, ran Chao biographies for years and presented her as a distinguished native. In 2004, while she was labor secretary, two of those groups sent her a Christmas card. She replied in 2005 and enclosed an autographed photo.

In August 2008, during the Beijing Olympics, she and her father visited Jiading and met the same district Communist Party and United Front officials who named them honorary chairmen four months later. Both United Front-linked groups later put her on their councils.

James Chao was later listed as a Wuhan advisor as well. Her late sister, Angela Chao, was identified in 2019 as a director of COFA’s national organization and as a Wuhan advisor.

Patrick O’Connor, a spokesman for Chao and Foremost Group, says she never held a foreign government job and never served one. He called the story insulting and racist. He also said she was unaware of the Wuhan title, in part because she is not fluent in Chinese.

That claim is at odds with a May 2010 Ningbo interview. Her father told Chinese reporters that he and Xiaolan were both advisors to the Wuhan municipal government. She stood beside him and held the microphone. The scene is in contemporaneous print coverage and photographs.

Chao was born in Taipei and moved to the United States at eight. The Chao family and Foremost Group have long conducted business in Chinese. McConnell’s office declined to comment. Scrutiny returned this summer after Chao traveled to Beijing while McConnell was hospitalized.

Gordon Chang’s response was simpler. “No American, no matter how high and mighty, should have any ties with the Communist Party’s UFWD,” he told DCNF. “This organization is dedicated to destroying our country.”

Jacqueline Deal, an advisory board member of State Armor, said the United Front titles “should be disqualifying for dogcatcher, much less a Cabinet position.”

O’Connor says she did not know. Her father said she did. She was standing there. Those titles belonged on the 2017 form. They are public now.

The Brennan File: Saudi Visas, a CIA Station, and 9/11

Twenty-five years later, our country mourns the victims of 9/11. Gatherings take place around the sites where the planes, manned by terrorists, struck and killed innocent people. Names are still read, and we stand together as Americans, in solidarity.

What is rarely discussed on this day is how they got in. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals. Their visas were issued in Jeddah and Riyadh. Most of the Jeddah stamps came from one single consulate.

Four were issued at the embassy in Riyadh. Eleven of the Jeddah stamps were handled by a single junior consular officer. Overlooked paperwork there made all that occurred on this day possible.

The State Department’s own accounting, confirmed in the days after the attacks and later laid out in the 9/11 Commission’s terrorist-travel monograph, showed the pattern. Most of the applications were incomplete.

Four were issued at the embassy in Riyadh. The 9/11 Commission’s terrorist-travel staff report later recorded the pattern: one consular officer issued visas to eleven of the nineteen hijackers. Most of the applications were incomplete. Almost none of the applicants were interviewed.

The rejection rate for Saudi visitors at the time was about 3%. That was not fate. It was a cultivated culture of approval: a system that treated a high-risk threat as a low-risk transaction.

John Brennan sits in that story as CIA chief of station. Before that, he was a political officer in Jeddah in the early 1980s. He ran the Agency’s station in the Kingdom from 1996 to 1999. Station chiefs sit at the intersection of liaison, collection, and influence with the host service. In Saudi Arabia that meant the General Intelligence Presidency, a relationship Washington had cultivated for decades and was reluctant to strain.

A station chief is judged by what he makes a priority. In Saudi Arabia in those years, the priority was the liaison relationship. Visa screening of young Saudi men was not.

The culture at the consulate was to approve.

Brennan left the station in 1999. The culture did not leave with him.

Former consular officer J. Michael Springmann ran the visa section in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989. He has spent years arguing that the CIA used that post to move people it wanted in the United States, mujahideen first, others later, and that State officers who objected were overruled.

Springmann’s tour ended long before 9/11. He later wrote about that work in Visas for Al Qaeda. He says the U.S. consulate there did not function like a normal State Department office: CIA officers worked there while posing as regular diplomats, and the consul general and the CIA’s local chief pressed visa officers to approve travelers who failed the usual tests. Those tests ask whether a person has real ties at home and an honest reason for the trip. Springmann says the standing rule was to make travel easy for Saudis.

His account describes a practice. Most of the world faced a hard look: an interview, a full application, and proof the traveler would go home. Thin files were supposed to be refused. Favored Saudi travelers, he says, often skipped that review when the Saudi government or the CIA office wanted them moved. Springmann left Jeddah more than a decade before the hijackers got their visas.

In June 2001 that practice was made official. Visa Express, mandated Kingdom-wide on June 1, let applicants drop paperwork at designated travel agencies. No interview required. Three of the hijackers used it: Abdulaziz al-Omari, Salem al-Hazmi, and Khalid al-Mihdhar on his June 13 renewal.

The surviving applications, pulled and reviewed after the attacks, reveal careless oversight. The review found misspellings, blanks, and answers that should have required a second look.

Wail al-Shehri listed his occupation as “teater.” He and his brother gave “Wasantwn” as a destination. Mihdhar listed “Hotel” as a U.S. address.

The program that let those forms through had been pitched as a courtesy to a wealthy ally whose citizens almost never overstayed. In practice it was also a gift to anyone who already knew how to fill out a form badly and still get a stamp.

Brennan later became CIA director. When the 28 pages and the families’ lawsuits kept the Saudi question alive, he repeated the institutional line: no evidence the Saudi government as an institution directed the plot. That sentence is carefully drawn.

It does not explain why the man who had been the Agency’s senior officer on the Arabian Peninsula during the years the network assembled was never forced to answer, in public and under oath, what his station knew about the flow of young Saudi men through Jeddah and Riyadh.

No one has produced a confession. The record is dates, incomplete forms, and a liaison relationship that treated Saudi visas as low-risk until nineteen men proved they were not.

Remembering 9/11 as only fanatics with box cutters is a kind of amnesia. The pilots and the muscle needed a door. The door was a consular system built around an ally, a station that lived off that alliance, and a generation of managers who were promoted for keeping the relationship smooth.

Brennan sat at the top of it in the years the network assembled, then climbed past the wreckage without a public accounting of what his station saw, what it asked the Saudis for, and what it decided not to fight.

Twenty-five years on, the visas are still treated as a mysterious part of the story. The mystery is how a station that was supposed to see the Kingdom clearly left the paperwork so easy, and why the officer who ran it rose instead of being asked to explain it under oath.

These men got into the country because someone inside the United States government decided Saudi paperwork was not worth a hard look. That choice did not come out of nowhere.

George H.W. Bush spent decades tying the American presidency to the House of Saud. He did it as CIA director, as vice president and then president during the Gulf War alliance with King Fahd, and later as a Carlyle adviser who traveled to Jeddah to court Saudi investors, including the bin Laden family.

Prince Bandar was close enough to the family to be treated as one of their own. A relationship that intimate makes a hard look at a Saudi file feel like a diplomatic problem. That is the part of 9/11 that still does not get a ceremony.

The Justice Department’s investigation into the origins and handling of Trump-Russia inquiries has moved deeper into the grand-jury phase. Prosecutors in Florida have reportedly issued a new round of subpoenas, shifting parts of the inquiry from voluntary interviews to compelled testimony. Former CIA Director John Brennan has been identified as a potential target.

Investigators are examining whether intelligence and law-enforcement officials crossed legal lines while scrutinizing President Donald Trump and his associates, and the inquiry also reaches matters connected to the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago. Based on the exhaustive amount of information that has been declassified and released, it should be an open-and-shut case for the Grand Jury to bring about charges to disgraced deep state spooks of the Obama-Biden era.

For years, arguments over “Russiagate,” intelligence assessments, surveillance, and federal investigative power were fought through congressional hearings and inspector-general reports.

Many important facts have been unearthed, but there has been little movement in terms of indictments. A grand jury can change that in a hurry. Prosecutors can compel witnesses and documents, and they develop admissible evidence backing up an indictment. The time for action is now. We have waited with baited breath for almost two years, and Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Rosenstein, McCabe and the rest of the lowlifes are still free men. If they are not charged and jailed, nothing will prevent them from doing the same operation the next chance they get.

The grand jury must do its job and work to restore the rule of law in this country before it is too late.

A Honduran court has unilaterally dropped all charges against former President Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH), who received a full pardon from President Donald Trump last year after being ensnared in a conspiracy by the Biden-era deep state coercing testimony from narcotraffickers who JOH had been responsible for incarcerating.

The now-deposed communist government slapped charges of fraud and money laundering on Hernandez as part of the comprehensive effort to railroad him and destroy his reputation.

“This chapter of political persecution has now ended,” Hernandez said after the charges were dismissed. “Those who orchestrated this operation not only wanted to see me banished from Honduras forever, never to return, but they were determined to leave my family on the street.”

It is now an undeniable fact that President Trump’s pardon of JOH changed the course of Latin American history.

JOH was extradited to the U.S. due to an extradition treaty that he personally approved to help fight crime in the region. JOH was triumphed in bipartisan fashion as a hard-nosed reformer and ally of American interests, but that changed after he emerged as a top President Trump ally in the fight to repel migrants flooding across the U.S. southern border.

After he left office in 2022, the incoming far-left LIBRE Party regime of Xiomara Castro colluded with the Biden administration to get JOH removed. They worked together to get their pound of flesh in the retaliatory efforts against all those who helped the Trump administration achieve their successes.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris strutted around with Castro amidst her inauguration. They intended to usher in the liberal future of Honduras with the country’s first female president at the helm. But unfortunately for the Biden/Harris regime, Castro proved to be stunningly corrupt and incompetent.

Whereas the criminal case against JOH relied mostly on dubious second-and-third hand accounts, Castro’s own family was caught on video negotiating bribes with drug dealers to fund LIBRE Party operations. For some reason, the Biden administration looked the other way regarding Castro white doing everything in its power to engineer a guilty verdict against JOH.

When the show trial against JOH was ultimately successful, it appeared to shut the door on any hope for freedom in Honduras. The communist government had all the momentum, the National Party base was demoralized, and far-left communists had successfully infiltrated the Liberal Party of Honduras to effectively rig the system.

Enter President Donald J. Trump at the 11th Hour. He changed the game less than week before the election, issuing a full-throated endorsement of the National Party’s presidential candidate Tito Asfura. He also called out the communist collusion between Asfura’s competitors, Roxi Moncada of the LIBRE Party and Liberal Party’s effeminate botox-cheeked Salvador Nasrallah donning his infamous plaster-cast hair piece.

This began to change the dynamics of the race as more Hondurans were once again considering the National Party, but it would be the JOH bump that would tip the scales toward victory. When President Trump shocked the world and announced he would be pardoning JOH, it showed every disaffected Honduran patriot that their voice mattered.

When JOH was hauled off from his home in front of the cameras by an army of police officers, it was a garish display meant to subjugate every Honduran who cared about law and order and conservative values. It was a forceful demonstration that their voice no longer mattered, and they were doomed to watch their country morph into Venezuela before their very eyes.

President Trump inspired the decent people of Honduras. When hundreds of TikTok videos were produced of entire villages celebrating and holding raucous spontaneous celebrations in response to the news, it became obvious that what we were being told about JOH was far from the truth. This was a man celebrated as a hero by his people, not a pariah or an outcast.

When JOH finally made his valiant return to Honduras, he received a welcome like few would have imagined. Tens of thousands rallied to demonstrate their national pride and celebrate the restoration of their sovereignty. With the dismissal of his charges, doubt no longer lingers regarding JOH’s innocence. His record is now fully cleared, and the dawn of the Honduran people has come.

The JOH saga is far from over. Democrats have vowed to get revenge after being humiliated and besmirched by the JOH pardon. If they gain political power in the midterms, they boast that they will come after myself and others who advocated for the freeing of JOH, spinning a conspiracy out of whole cloth. Despite the exhaustive amount of proof indicating that JOH was framed, they will abuse the levers of power to give the opposite impression.

But in the eyes of the Honduran people, there is not a shadow of a doubt regarding JOH’s innocence. The specter hanging over JOH and his family has been removed. They can live in peace now. And Honduras is set to become a foundational cornerstone of the Donroe Doctrine that is eradicating leftism in the Western Hemisphere. That is the legacy of the JOH pardon, and it is indeed a beautiful one.