Walk the crowded streets of Flushing, Queens, and you’ll pass a dense stretch of social adult daycare centers that have long raised questions about Medicaid scams, and billings that often appear phantom in nature.

A recent investigation by the New York Post turned up a conspicuous connection, revealing that the owner of one of the area’s most lucrative facilities has collected tens of millions from the program while also writing checks to Governor Kathy Hochul’s campaign.

Baoli Zhang, a 69-year-old local powerbroker and accomplished erhu musician who has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Juilliard, remains at the center of the latest reporting.

Through Bao Kang Adult Day Care and related businesses, his operations have billed Medicaid at least $32 million since 2018 for services tied to tens of thousands of patients. Campaign records show Zhang personally gave Hochul $10,000 in 2022, with another $5,000 coming from Bao Kang itself.

While Zhang listed himself as the owner and manager of Bao Kang on campaign finance disclosures, local and federal Medicaid data list other individuals as the owners, a pattern that also appears with Empire Adult Day Care, another facility he has claimed.

Local politicians have long treated the centers as ready-made voting blocs. “If you get 100 people in there and you make them vote, it’s very powerful for a primary. Every politician goes to these daycares for help,” one industry source told the New York Post.

Hochul’s office claims the governor has rooted out waste and fraud, saving billions, reforming Medicaid, and prosecuting wrongdoers, adding that contributions do not influence decisions.

Rep. Grace Meng (D) welcomed good-faith investigations while rejecting what she described as political targeting of Asian American seniors. State Sen. John Liu (D) called Zhang a longtime respected community leader and said any suspected fraud should be fully investigated.

Zhang is not alone. Jiemin Shang runs Livingwell Day Care, which donated $5,000 to Hochul the same year it billed Medicaid $5.8 million, plus another $5,000 from Finest Adult Day Care, which he also operates.

Together, these two men account for nearly half of the roughly $55,000 that Flushing social adult daycares channeled to Hochul’s 2022 campaign.

Nine such centers overall gave more than $5,000 each that year, including American Adult Daycare, Big Apple Adult Daycare, and Greater New York Social and Health, and those same nine billed Medicaid a combined $49 million in 2022 alone.

When reporters stopped by the flagship locations last month, the picture looked quiet. Livingwell, which federal data link to about $27 million in billings from 2018 to 2024 for more than 26,500 unique patients, stood empty, with staff quickly asking the visitors to leave.

Bao Kang told a similar story: a worker said the place typically handles 100 to 200 people a day, yet the rooms appeared vacant and the $32 million figure drew only a shrug. Neither Zhang nor Shang has been accused of any wrongdoing, and both declined to comment.

A source familiar with the industry said, “In 2021, [social adult daycare centers] were dying due to COVID. Someone threw them a lifeline and must have said something like, ‘Take care of me, I’ll take care of you.’ They’re making more money than ever now.”

The money trail shows sharp growth after the pandemic. Livingwell’s Medicaid claims jumped from just $114,000 in 2018 to more than $8 million by 2024. Bao Kang climbed from $1.5 million to $7.22 million over the same stretch.

Across Flushing’s dense concentration of these centers; dozens packed into a one-mile radius that collectively bill more than $100 million a year, according to reporting and a July CBS News data analysis, monthly revenue has nearly doubled from pre-COVID levels.

Zhang’s reach extends further. He also owns Confucius Social Daycare in Manhattan’s Chinatown, which billed another $15.7 million over the six-year period, plus related management companies including Silver Arch Management and AA Plus Management Inc., the latter of which billed roughly $2.65 million as a point-of-service Medicaid provider.

That same building on Baxter Street in Chinatown that Zhang lists as a business address also houses Cathay Adult Daycare, which donated $5,000 to Hochul in 2022 while billing $8.4 million that year; Zhang is not listed as its owner and any connection remains unclear.

He founded the Asian American Adult Daycare Association in 2023, with Shang serving as secretary-general, and has given to other Democrats as well, including $7,800 to Rep. Grace Meng and nearly $5,000 to State Sen. John Liu.

In a 2022 Chinese-language report following earlier Flushing fraud cases, Zhang praised New York’s system, saying the state “is one of the states with the best welfare in the United States” while warning that “excessive consumption will only deprive their descendants of resources.”

Flushing has become one of the most prominent focal points for questions about New York’s social adult daycare program. Statewide, the centers have drawn 387 referrals for investigation since 2021, roughly one-third of which were elevated to the Attorney General.

Those referrals sit alongside earlier federal cases, including the February charges against two Flushing men in an alleged $120 million kickback scheme covered by Gothamist, and findings from State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s February audit of questionable payments and capacity violations. Recent reporting has most fully connected the billing patterns, empty facilities, and political donations.

These centers are meant to offer socialization for frail seniors who need more support than regular senior centers, along with structured activities, and meals.

But, the combination of empty rooms on ordinary weekdays, sky-high billings, and steady political donations has left many wondering how tightly the system is being watched, and where the hardearned taxpayer money is really going.

As of now, no charges have been filed against Zhang, Shang, or any of the centers named in connection with the donations and high Medicaid billings, leaving the larger questions about oversight and accountability unresolved.

Recent reporting based on newly detailed court filings has revealed that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner warned the FBI about Jeffrey Epstein in 2005, yet agents delayed meaningful follow-up for about 15 years.

The allegations, first reported by Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown on her Substack  from the court filings, show that Hefner repeatedly contacted the FBI in 2005 to report sexual abuse and trafficking claims involving one of his Playmates.

According to the documents, former Playboy Playmate Audra Lynn Christiansen, who was Miss October 2003, confided in Hefner while living at the Playboy Mansion that Epstein had raped her shortly after they met and trafficked her for roughly a decade, including to wealthy associates.

Among those she specifically named to Hefner was Macau casino billionaire Stanley Ho, known as China’s “Godfather of gambling,” a figure later referenced in Epstein-related documents who died in 2020.

Christiansen, who was then in her early 20s, asked Hefner to make the calls to authorities himself. She believed his connections and public standing would ensure the FBI would take the report more seriously than if she contacted them alone. The complaint states Hefner called multiple times on her behalf to report Epstein.

The bureau allegedly indicated it would look into the matter.

These claims rest on Christiansen’s account and her declaration in the lawsuit; the specific 2005 tip from Hefner is not corroborated by currently public FBI documents.

Despite those assurances, Christiansen did not hear from the FBI until October 2020; roughly 15 years later and more than a year after Epstein’s death by suicide in a New York jail cell while facing federal sex-trafficking charges.

By then, both Hefner and Epstein were deceased. Even after she contacted the FBI herself in 2020, citing family threats and hiring an attorney, the bureau showed continued reluctance to meet.

She has also described problems with an FBI Form 302 in which identifying details, including her Playmate status, were allegedly improperly unredacted around the time of a public survivors’ statement, requiring later correction efforts.

The delay forms part of a broader negligence complaint filed by roughly 32–34 Epstein survivors in the Southern District of Florida (case 9:25-cv-80880). The suit alleges the FBI failed to investigate credible tips about Epstein’s crimes dating back years.

The Hefner tip joins a longer record of ignored warnings about Epstein, most notably artist Maria Farmer’s 1996 report to the FBI, which also sat for years without meaningful follow-up, according to congressional records and subsequent reporting.

Local Palm Beach police opened an investigation in 2005 after a separate complaint involving a minor, the same year as the Hefner tip, yet federal action remained limited for years afterward.

In the current lawsuit, survivors argue the FBI violated its own mandatory policies requiring investigation of credible child sexual abuse and trafficking reports.

They contend the failure to act created a foreseeable risk that allowed Epstein’s operation to continue harming additional victims.

The government has moved to dismiss the case, asserting that the bureau is not required to investigate every complaint and citing investigative discretion and statute-of-limitations issues.

A magistrate judge issued a report and recommendation that touches on immunity and discretion grounds.

Christiansen’s account, as detailed in the filings, describes how her modeling agents introduced her to Epstein after her Playboy centerfold appeared. She has said the FBI still showed reluctance even when she later reached out with legal representation. Other former Playmates, she has indicated, remain reluctant to come forward out of fear.

The revelations, first widely reported in August 2026 after the court documents, have renewed scrutiny of institutional responses to Epstein over two decades.

Survivors and their attorneys continue to press for greater accountability, arguing that earlier intervention could have disrupted the network long before the 2008 non-prosecution agreement or the 2019 federal charges.

As the litigation presses forward, the Hefner tip stands as one of the more telling examples of how prominent warnings reportedly failed to prompt timely federal action, leaving questions about priorities, resources, and bureaucratic gaps that survivors say enabled years of additional harm.

The Trump administration is moving to restore Second Amendment rights for Americans who have paid their debt to society and can demonstrate they are no longer a danger to the public. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Monday that the Justice Department has finalized a new process allowing certain people barred under federal law from possessing firearms to apply to have those rights restored.

For more than three decades, the relief process authorized by Congress was effectively unavailable to most applicants. The new system does not automatically hand guns back to criminals. Applicants must show that their record, reputation, circumstances, and subsequent conduct demonstrate they are unlikely to threaten public safety.

Violent felons, registered sex offenders, illegal aliens, and others considered ongoing dangers will remain presumptively ineligible. That distinction matters. The Second Amendment is a constitutional right, not a privilege government should permanently erase without considering whether an individual still poses a threat.

The Trump administration is protecting law-abiding citizens, keeping firearms away from dangerous people, and rejecting blanket lifetime prohibitions that offer no meaningful path to restoration. The Trump administration has increasingly treated the Second Amendment as a genuine civil right, with the Justice Department also challenging restrictive state and local gun policies. That represents a major shift in Washington D.C.

Instead of asking how the government can place more barriers between Americans and their constitutional rights, the Trump administration is asking when the government has gone too far. After all, when the Founding Fathers wrote “shall not be infringed,” they left no ambiguity.

They wanted the public and the militia to be “well-regulated,” which means in the parlance of the day, they were to be heavily armed. If an individual poses no threat to society, they should be able to own firearms without question. Trump administration policy now makes that abundantly clear.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is in full retreat. The man who once dictated pandemic policy from the highest perch of government power, believing he was above the law, is now dodging questions, refusing interviews, and hiding behind lawyers as a damning revelation exposes how he personally helped censor the lab-leak COVID origin theory.

Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran, a liberal reporter with a modicum of integrity, just admitted on The Fifth Column podcast that his 2021 Nightline investigation into the Wuhan lab origin of COVID was gutted hours before airtime. Moran and his team had produced a serious examination of evidence pointing to a lab accident, including Chinese military funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Then the script went for “review.” It returned “incomprehensible,” stripped of meaning and loaded with caveats meant to protect those who were likely responsible. When Moran demanded answers, he was told one ominous word: “Fauci.” Lawyers, standards editors, and the nation’s top infectious-disease official had intervened.

Moran was “absolutely livid,” cursing in the booth. The segment that aired was not his work at the fact that his important work was being censored and repressed. While Fauci and his allies dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” and racist, he was quietly ensuring mainstream audiences never heard a coherent case for it.

The pattern continues to this very day. Sen. Ron Johnson’s subcommittee requested a private transcribed interview. Fauci’s attorney refused, claiming it would “impermissibly harass” him for political purposes. This is the same Fauci who once claimed he had “nothing to hide.”

After he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment under oath, that showed the public once and for all that he had something to hide. The walls are closing in. There is now a public mandate to charge Fauci with crimes against humanity. The Trump administration must make the most of this opportunity.

President Trump is taking American public-health policy back from globalist control, this time by reshaping childhood vaccine recommendations despite the World Health Organization’s objections. President Trump signed an order directing much-needed changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, including spacing out the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines rather than relying exclusively on the combined MMR shot. 

His administration has made the case that the changes are necessary to give parents more flexibility while aligning U.S. recommendations with scientific evidence and practices in other developed nations. Predictably, the WHO lashed out at the Trump administration, defending its recommendations to pump as many Big Pharma shots into the bodies of children as possible. This response from the WHO is music to the ears of the MAGA faithful.

The COVID-19 pandemic badly damaged public confidence in global health authorities, which was led by the WHO. Guidance changed repeatedly, legitimate scientific inquiry was purposefully stifled, and fearmongering propaganda warped the public’s psyche in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. 

Whatever one’s view of vaccines may be, Americans should never outsource critical health-policy decisions to an unaccountable and discredited international bureaucracy. 

President Trump’s order indicates that public health will now answer to American families, American doctors and American institutions, not global organizations obsessed with mandates and forced compliance. The WHO can feel free to offer advice. It will likely fall on deaf ears with the Trump administration and rightfully so. We are making America healthy again, and if that offends the enemies of American sovereignty, so be it.

On August 12, 2026, the American public finally learned that by the end of 2019, a full protection racket was already in place for Joe Biden and his family. It was run by the very intelligence and law-enforcement agencies that are supposed to be politically neutral and driven by facts. Instead, they ignored the facts and played politics.

This happened while President Donald J. Trump was still in his first term; and, ironically, just weeks after John Paul Mac Issac turned the infamous Hunter Biden laptop over to the FBI.

According to the declassified ODNI summary and the Defensive Briefing Spreadsheet released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, the FBI had already received derogatory information about Joe Biden and his family, including specific allegations of corruption, from at least 14 confidential human sources.

Instead of investigating those allegations, the intelligence community launched a secret counterintelligence operation designed to label much of that reporting as Russian disinformation. In effect, they went to work protecting one of their own.

That operation was called Round River.

The effort was launched by the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force–Russia (FITF-R) around December 2019. A group of analysts was unofficially formed to gather previously reported confidential human source information on Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Burisma, and related Ukraine corruption topics, collectively called the “Ukraine narrative,” and flag that reporting as Russian disinformation.

The operation remained active and continued to meddle through the 2020 election.

The FBI was knee-deep in this protection scheme. Internal spreadsheets functioned almost like a watchlist, sorting people into two categories: “conduits” of Russian disinformation versus “targets.” One key document, the Defensive Briefing Spreadsheet, contained multiple tabs tracking nomination status, position, and other indicators.

The effort extended far beyond the informants themselves. Documents show the bureau formally designated senior Trump administration officials, including then-Attorney General Bill Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as well as Republican senators such as Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham, and House figures including Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan, as “conduits” for Russian disinformation.

Journalists and media figures who examined the allegations, predominantly conservative-leaning, were also labeled conduits.

These designations came even as the officials and lawmakers pursued legitimate oversight. All of this unfolded during the 2020 election cycle, even as the FBI already possessed Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Earlier whistleblower accounts and congressional releases had already indicated the FBI maintained more than 40 sources offering criminal information related to Joe, Hunter, and James Biden.

FD-1023 reports detailed alleged Burisma-related schemes, yet investigative follow-through was limited or curtailed in key instances, with headquarters assessments used to shut down or discredit leads under the disinformation banner.

The disinformation label applied through the Round River assessment did far more than simply flag the Hunter Biden laptop story as suspect. It actively enabled the suppression of the story itself. It supplied the institutional cover that Facebook and Twitter used to throttle, limit, and ultimately bury the New York Post’s reporting in real time.

By treating the material as the product of a foreign influence operation, the platforms could justify censorship under the banner of “election integrity” during the final weeks of the 2020 campaign.

That decision rested on a broader information operation that had already primed both the press and the social media platforms to expect precisely this kind of “hack-and-leak.”

After the public learned that Hunter Biden’s laptop had been dropped off and abandoned at John Paul Mac Isaac’s computer repair shop, a letter was quickly drafted by former CIA directors, intelligence community leaders, and senior officials. The letter did not claim the laptop was fabricated. Instead, it declared that the story “has all the classic earmarks of Russian disinformation.” That carefully worded framing was immediately amplified by major news outlets.

Within hours, the phrase “Russian disinformation” was already swirling through the media narrative. It gave social-media executives the perfect pretext to suppress the story.

At the time, the public was told there was no coordinated suppression. Years later, after multiple hearings, Silicon Valley executives admitted they had received warnings and instructions from government officials — and acted on them.

The same narrative had been seeded by the FBI a few weeks earlier. Intelligence and law-enforcement channels had warned platforms that Russia or other adversaries were preparing a late-cycle dump of damaging material.

It is a known fact that the FBI received a copy of the laptop hard drive directly from John Paul Mac Isaac. When the New York Post published its exclusive story on October 14, 2020, the suppression began immediately. Twitter locked the New York Post out of its own account for posting the article. Facebook limited distribution of the story. The reporting was effectively buried at the most critical moment of the campaign.

Round River’s formal counterintelligence designation, the 51 officials’ letter, and the earlier private briefings to Silicon Valley together formed a bureaucratic coup. The feds, to protect their own, manufactured the threat of a Russian hack-and-leak, stamped the real laptop story with that label, and then gave the platforms cover to suppress the reporting under the banner of election security.

In some cases, longstanding source files were amended after the fact to portray earlier reporting as false, without any apparent independent corroboration of the underlying “Ukraine narrative” claims.

FBI Director Kash Patel later confirmed the existence of the 14 sources providing negative information on Biden and noted that Round River had flagged a broader set of 53 sources overall. He directed the release of their reporting for transparency review and terminated the Foreign Influence Task Force.

Why was the FBI protecting a political candidate?

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has now confirmed he received the same “defensive briefing” from the FBI in 2020 — a briefing he calls “a farce.” Agents told him to stop looking into Hunter Biden. The briefing was part of the same Round River operation that labeled Jordan, Grassley, Johnson, and other Republicans as Russian “conduits” while protecting the Bidens.

The goal was clear: plant the narrative that any investigation into the Biden family’s foreign dealings was foreign disinformation, then leak it to the press. That same narrative later helped Facebook and Twitter censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.

It all happened under Christopher Wray’s FBI. Elected officials who were allies of President Trump and trying to protect the truth were outright lied to.

What the documents ultimately reveal is not merely bureaucratic caution or institutional bias. It was a sustained effort by elements inside the FBI to shield one presidential candidate while actively undermining the sitting president’s administration and its allies.

By attempting to soil legitimate oversight by Trump officials, Republican senators, and House investigators as “Russian disinformation,” the bureau tilted the information battlefield in favor of Joe Biden during a contested election. That is the definition of election interference conducted from within the federal government itself — carried out against the administration then in power and for the benefit of its opponent.

The illegality cuts deeper than political favoritism. Federal law prohibits the use of government resources to influence elections, and intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are barred from targeting domestic political activity or suppressing constitutionally protected speech under the guise of counterintelligence.

The FBI’s counterintelligence apparatus weaponized its authority against a political opponent of the sitting president — an abuse of power that strikes at the core of democratic legitimacy and the principle that law enforcement must remain neutral.

Round River’s formal designation of American officials, journalists, and elected representatives as foreign “conduits,” combined with the deliberate preconditioning of social-media platforms to censor damaging material, crossed that line.

By the time Operation Round River was launched in late 2019, this was already part of a pattern. The FBI had previously run Crossfire Hurricane against the Trump campaign, then opened Oxferd Comma against the sitting president himself after he fired James Comey. Later came Plasmic Echo and Arctic Frost. Round River was simply the latest in a series of code-named operations that treated Trump and those around him as the threat.

Never in the history of this country has a president been targeted by such a sustained, two-tier justice system. The American people can see it plainly: the FBI worked against an outsider who was never part of the Deep State.

At what point did it become acceptable for the FBI to run secret operations against a sitting president in order to protect his political opponent?

What the newly declassified documents make unmistakable is a justice system that shields the politically connected while treating outsiders as existential threats. The same bureau that spent years manufacturing cases against Trump and his associates ran a quiet internal campaign to neutralize evidence of Biden family corruption and brand it as foreign disinformation. One set of rules for the protected class. Another for everyone else.