A U.S. House of Representatives committee has obtained access to Donald Trump’s tax returns, following a years-long court fight with the Republican former president who has accused the Democratic-led panel of being politically motivated.

“Treasury has complied with last week’s court decision,” a Treasury Department spokesperson said in an emailed statement late on Wednesday. The spokesperson declined to say whether the committee had yet accessed the documents. The development was reported earlier by CNN.

The Ways and Means Committee obtained the tax returns following a Supreme Court decision clearing their release. It has been seeking the returns spanning 2015 through 2020, which it says it needs to establish whether the Internal Revenue Service is properly auditing presidential returns and whether new legislation is needed.

The panel will have little time to do its work, with Republicans poised to take the House majority in January.

Trump, who on Nov. 15 began his third consecutive run for the presidency, fought the committee tooth and nail to avoid releasing them.

He was the first president in four decades not to release his tax returns as he sought to keep secret the details of his wealth and the activities of his real estate company, the Trump Organization. It had long been customary, though not required, for major party presidential candidates to release their returns.

Trump, who served as president from 2017 to 2021, reported heavy losses from his business enterprises over several years to offset hundreds of millions of dollars in income, according to news media reporting and trial testimony about his finances. That allowed him to pay very little in taxes.

A major question hanging over the committee’s work is what will happen to the returns when Republicans take control of the House from the Democrats. The committee first requested Trump’s returns in 2019.

Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, the counterpart to the Ways and Means Committee, were considering their options on any action relating to Trump’s tax returns, according to an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. Democrats held their Senate majority in November’s midterm elections.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, attempted to distance himself from suggestions of fraud in his first public appearance since his company’s collapse stunned investors and left creditors facing losses totaling billions of dollars.

Speaking via video link at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit with Andrew Ross Sorkin on Wednesday, Bankman-Fried said he did not knowingly commingle customer funds on FTX with funds at his proprietary trading firm, Alameda Research.

“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” Bankman-Fried said in the hour-long interview, adding that he doesn’t personally think he has any criminal liability.

He also denied knowing the full scale of Alameda’s position on FTX, claiming that it caught him by surprise.

The liquidity crunch at FTX came after Bankman-Fried secretly moved $10 billion of FTX customer funds to Alameda Research, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. At least $1 billion in customer funds had vanished, the people said.

Bankman-Fried told Reuters in November the company did not “secretly transfer” but rather misread its “confusing internal labeling.”

FTX filed for bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried stepped down as chief executive on Nov. 11, after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal.

“That week, so much happened,” he said.

Bankman-Fried said he was speaking from the Bahamas and that the interview was against the advice of his lawyers. He was seen in the video link talking from a room, dressed in a black T-shirt and occasionally drinking from a mug.

FTX faces a flurry of investigations. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan in mid-November began investigating how FTX handled customer funds, a source with knowledge of the probe told Reuters. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have also opened probes.

When asked if he could come to the United States, Bankman-Fried replied that to his knowledge he could, and that he wouldn’t be surprised if he traveled to Washington for upcoming congressional hearings on the company’s collapse.

The implosion of FTX marked a stunning fall from grace for the 30-year-old entrepreneur who rode a cryptocurrency boom to a net worth that Forbes pegged a year ago at $26.5 billion. After launching FTX in 2019, he became an influential political donor and pledged to donate most of his earnings to charities.

He said Wednesday that he now has “close to nothing” left and is down to one working credit card with “maybe $100,000 in that bank account.”

Since FTX filed for bankruptcy, Bankman-Fried has distanced himself from the image he projected in media interviews and on Capitol Hill, telling a Vox reporter his advocacy for a crypto regulatory framework was “just PR” and his discussions on ethics within the industry were at least partly a front.

Bankman-Fried said he was “confused” as to why FTX’s U.S. entity, which was included in the bankruptcy filing, is not processing customer withdrawals. Redemptions are currently paused for both U.S. and international customers.

“To my knowledge all American customers and all American regulated businesses here are, I think at least in terms of client assets, are okay,” he said, adding that derivatives contracts at one of its U.S. subsidiaries were “fully collateralized.”

Bankman-Fried said that Alameda had built up a substantial position on FTX and that as digital asset prices plummeted this year, Alameda became increasingly more levered to the point of no return earlier this month.

“Realistically speaking, (there was) no ability for FTX to be able to liquidate that position and generate everything that was owed,” he said.

He added that he “wasn’t trying to commingle funds,” but said that when FTX didn’t have a bank account, some customers wired money to Alameda and were credited on FTX, which likely led to discrepancies.

Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO of Alameda in October 2021, four years after founding the company, and ceded the role to Caroline Ellison and Sam Trabucco, who acted as co-CEOs until Trabucco departed the firm in August.

For his part, Bankman-Fried said he regretted focusing on the bigger picture at FTX at the expense of risk management, which he said he paid less attention to over “the last year or two.”

His companies “completely failed” on risk management, he said.

“There was no person who was chiefly in charge of positional risk of customers on FTX, and that feels pretty embarrassing in retrospect.”

Blast at Kyiv’s embassy in Madrid injures staff member; nine people killed in fires to heat homes in Ukraine

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There is this tricky little fact about malignant narcissists. And that fact is — there is no cure. There is no medicine one can take to make narcissism go away. It is a personality disorder, and though one can live with such a disorder, there is no way of curing that which is not curable.

And many times, narcissists get worse in their disorder. That is precisely what is happening to Donald Trump. Like a spool of thread, the narcissist is unraveling. It gets worse every day now. But the other day, it definitely got better for special prosecutor Jack Smith because Donald Trump confessed.

Of course, this took place on Truth Social. Trump was in the midst of yet another meltdown when he said the following: “When will you invade the other presidents’ homes in search of documents which are voluminous, which they took with them, but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?”

“As I did.”

Sounds like a confession to me. After all, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it certainly is a duck.

These words were likely unnecessary as there seems to be so much evidence against his royal narcissist that I think they could charge him without these words.

But every bit helps. And these words show premeditation. And they show Trump did not take any documents “by accident.” He knew what he was doing.

That is why when dealing with a narcissist — particularly one under criminal investigation for espionage — it is pretty important if one is representing the narcissist to keep him away from any little gadget he might confess his sins on.

Apparently, this did not work with Trump. And now everybody is talking about his confession — when they’re not talking about his antisemitic dining companion, of course.

This really is the unraveling of a narcissist — the ultimate narcissist. Wouldn’t it be funny if it is his own words that doom him? It looks like that just might be the case.

The post Donald Trump is unraveling appeared first on Palmer Report.

The conviction of the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia on seditious conspiracy charges was hailed as a significant win for the Justice Department and a “victory for the rule of law.” But the verdict against Stewart Rhodes and his associate Kelly Meggs, who face up to 20 years in prison after being convicted on the extremely rare charge in connection with the Jan. 6 attack, is unlikely to dampen a growing anti-government movement that has long since moved on from Rhodes’ Oath Keepers organization, splintering into new extremist groups that are younger, more aggressive, and more online.

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“We shouldn’t conflate this tactical victory against the Oath Keepers as a final kind of silver bullet success against what is unfortunately a thriving anti-government, anti-authority movement in the United States today,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “The life or death of the Oath Keepers as an entity…doesn’t change the fact that they have a significant number of individuals who continue to support the ideals, the ethos, the conspiracies that made the Oath Keepers who they were.”

Prosecutors alleged that members of the Oath Keepers organized, equipped and trained ahead of Jan. 6, and coordinated their actions during the attack on the U.S. Capitol using hand signs, cell phones, and encrypted apps. Some members were caught on camera forcibly entering through the rotunda doors wearing tactical vests, radios and helmets.

Read More: Inside One Combat Vet’s Journey From Defending His Country to Storming the Capitol.

The jury found that Rhodes, a 57-year-old former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, played a central role in the violent plot to block the transfer of power and keep Donald Trump in office. Rhodes encouraged members of the self-styled militia to consider themselves as “the last line of defense against tyranny,” and adopted slogans that cast the group’s mission as defending the nation against perceived enemies. Last fall, a leaked roster of 38,000 members revealed dozens of elected officials in its ranks, along with large numbers of police officers, sheriffs, and current and former military.

The testimonies of some of the Oath Keeper members on trial alongside show how effective these tactics could be. Jessica Watkins, a defendant who was found guilty of obstruction and other Jan. 6-related charges but not seditious conspiracy, is a transgender U.S. Army veteran who struggled after she was “forced out of the military after her sexual orientation was discovered,” according to court documents. She worked as a firefighter, an EMT and a bartender before co-founding the small Ohio State Regular Militia. The group soon became a “dues-paying subset” of the Oath Keepers, according to the FBI.

Watkins became obsessed with right-wing conspiracies, testifying that she watched Alex Jones’ InfoWars show “five or six hours every day,” feeding her fears of a United Nations invasion, forced vaccinations and the bombing of U.S. military bases by China. After hearing about the Oath Keepers on the program, she saw her involvement with the group as a way to “still serve in another way” after losing her military career, she said. Many members of the group are drawn by what they see as an existential struggle against a government “co opted by a cabal of elites actively trying to strip American citizens of their rights,” in the words of the indictment against one of the Oath Keepers involved on Jan. 6.

Read More: For the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, Jan. 6 Was Just the Start.

But even before the insurrection, the group had “lost a bit of steam” as younger, more Internet-savvy far-right organizations like the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo movement entered the broader right-wing ecosystem, says Lewis of GW’s Program on Extremism. Rhodes saw the attack on the Capitol as an opportunity to push the Oath Keepers into the spotlight, amplifying fears of impending conflict with the U.S. government. After Jan. 6, however, Rhodes’ reputation among Oath Keepers took a hit as he stayed in Texas while fellow members were being arrested and accusations of informants roiled the group. Some local militia groups split away from the Oath Keepers, becoming disillusioned with the lack of responsiveness from the national organization, but have continued to actively organize and hold recruitment sessions.

While analysts expect the Oath Keepers to wither in the absence of its leader, “these groups aren’t going away,” says Roudabeh Kishi, the director of research and innovation at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit that tracks political violence and extremist groups. “If anything they have adapted to the post-January 6 landscape and they’re continuing to adapt and evolve.”

Far-right groups are increasingly mobilizing around anti-LGBTQ or white nationalist narratives, bringing in new groups of people, Kishi adds. “Some of these bigger names that people have become increasingly familiar with, like the Oath Keepers, are just scratching the surface of these groups,” she says. “The far right isn’t a monolith led by Stewart Rhodes. It’s very, very splintered.”

Read More: ‘A Perfect Storm.’ The Michigan Plot Lays Bare the Dangers of Ignoring the Far-Right Threat

Even with Rhodes and other leaders likely in prison and the Oath Keepers’ national organization diminished, the leaders of far-right groups are increasingly reliant not on local chapters or dues-paying member but rather the online forums and encrypted messaging apps where they recruit and organize. “The threat is the network,” says Lewis. “And those have not gone away since Jan. 6. If anything, they have become more prominent, more mainstreamed.”

Swiss drugmaker Roche (ROG.S) is closing down most clinical trials of its experimental Alzheimer’s drug gantenerumab after it failed to slow advance of the mind-robbing disease in a pair of large, late-stage studies, the company said on Wednesday.

Roche presented full results of twin trials at an Alzheimer’s meeting in San Francisco after announcing in November that the drug had failed in the two trials. read more

Unlike Eisai Co Ltd (4523.T) and Biogen Inc’s (BIIB.O) lecanemab, which appears to be on track for U.S. regulatory approval after presenting successful trial results on Tuesday, Roche’s drug did not show a statistically significant benefit in patients with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease.

Both drugs are designed to remove forms of the protein beta amyloid from the brain, sticky plaques believed to play a major role in the disease.

While Eisai’s infusion succeeded in slowing the advance of Alzheimer’s by 27% after 18 months, Roche’s drug reduced decline by just 8% in the Graduate I study and 6% in the Graduate II study compared with a placebo after two years.

A key difference may have been in the drug’s ability to clear amyloid from the brain.

In a presentation on Wednesday, researchers said gantenerumab, which is given by injection, only achieved amyloid clearance in 28% of patients in the Graduate I trial and 25% in Graduate II after two years, half of what the company expected to see.

Lecanemab, by contrast, cleared amyloid in 68% of those in the study after 18 months.

Dr. Howard Fillit, chief science officer at the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, said there are a number of reasons why Roche’s drug may have failed, including differences in chemistry, dosing and the way it was administered via injection versus infusion.

But the fact that the drug failed to remove amyloid deposits in the brain as expected clearly played a role, he added.

The field of Alzheimer’s research is littered with failure and disappointment, including for several drugs in the same class, and previous efforts to prove gantenerumab’s worth.

In 2014, the drug failed to show a benefit when given at a lower dose among patients with mild Alzheimer’s, and it failed again in 2020 in a Washington University School of Medicine trial of patients with an inherited form of Alzheimer’s.

“Obviously, within the class, some drugs are working and some aren’t,” Fillet said.

A Roche spokesman said in an emailed statement that the company will stop all gantenerumab studies in early Alzheimer’s disease, including extension studies of the Graduate trials and the Skyline Phase III study in patients with evidence of amyloid in the brain but no signs of cognitive decline.

“In the Graduate studies, the level of amyloid removal was lower than expected. We expect the same, lower effect in the Skyline population, and consider this insufficient to continue,” the spokesman said.

Roche is still testing a different formulation of gantenerumab called trontinemab, designed to ferry the drug across the blood brain barrier – protective blood vessels that prevent chemicals in the bloodstream from entering the brain – in hopes of getting more of the treatment into the brain.

“We remain committed to Alzheimer’s disease and will direct our focus to new and potentially improved approaches for new treatments,” Rachelle Doody, Roche’s global head of neurodegeneration drug development, said in a statement.

A Montana judge declined a petition to halt the state’s controversial wolf hunt Tuesday, rejecting a claim from two environmental groups that continued killing would cause irreparable harm.

In a highly anticipated hearing Monday, Lewis and Clark County Judge Matthew Abbott considered a potential first-of-its kind closure of Montana’s wolf hunting and trapping season, following an October lawsuit filed by WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote against the state, its wildlife commissioners, and its Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.

The battle over wolves in the Northern Rockies has reignited a culture war going back generations in the West. Last year’s wolf hunt, the most aggressive in modern Montana history, culminated in the deaths of one-fifth of Yellowstone National Park’s entire wolf population, with some three-quarters of those killed in Montana.

“There’s a lot of frustration that Montanans are not being heard and their best interests are not at play here for a few vehement, vocal wolf haters.”

Conservationists argue that Montana’s most extreme anti-wolf lawmakers have hijacked and politicized a formerly revered system of wildlife governance. Despite tens of thousands of public comments demanding a more measured approach to wolf management, the state has continued to pursue a campaign of large-scale population reduction.

“There are important justified values and ideals at play here,” Michelle Lute, the carnivore conservation director at Project Coyote, told the court Monday. “There’s a lot of frustration that Montanans are not being heard and their best interests are not at play here for a few vehement, vocal wolf haters.”

In court, the environmental groups argued that a flawed population model led Montana to overestimate its wolf population by hundreds of animals. The inflated numbers, they alleged, became the basis for legislation signed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte in 2021 calling for the killing of at least 450 wolves — approximately 40 percent of Montana’s estimated population of more than 1,100 animals.

According to a plan developed in the early 2000s during wrangling over removing wolves from the endangered species list, Montana is required to review its wolf management regime at least every five years. The conservation organizations alleged that the reviews never happened, and the state adopted a controversial population estimation model — the central focus of Monday’s hearing — without adequate public comment and set statewide quotas based on the “stale” management plan.

“The issue is that the data doesn’t match the predictions of the model,” Francisco Javier Santiago Ávila, a conservation manager with Project Coyote, testified Monday, adding that his review of state records indicated that Montana overestimated its wolf population by as many as 300 animals in recent years.

The groups requested the injunction on hunting and trapping to prevent irreparable harm to the state’s wolf population, Montana’s system for democratic wolf management decision-making, and the organizations and individuals committed to wolf recovery.

Officials with Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks responded in court by defending the state’s Integrated Patch Occupancy Model, or iPOM, as a sound tool created in conjunction with experts as part of a decade-and-a-half process. The department said the model had been presented to the public.

In a 26-page opinion rejecting the injunction request, Abbott wrote that he was not convinced that Montana’s population estimation is “so unreliable or so substantially tending to overestimate wolf populations” that its continued use would cause the kind of damage that warranted the injunction.

“There is no evidence that this season is the pivotal season for Montana’s wolves,” he wrote. “Even if 450 wolves are killed, no witness presented evidence that this year will plunge Montana wolf populations below a sustainable level.”

The plaintiffs could have a winning argument on Montana’s failure to review the wolf plan, Abbott went on to say, however, the proposed remedy for that issue was to order the state to review the plan, not to end its hunting and trapping season.

Abbott said his task was “not to decide what Montana’s policy should be or to predict the outcome of this case.”

“The attention this case has garnered so far might lead one to believe the Court is deciding the fate of the Gray Wolf in the Northern Rockies today. It is not,” Abbott wrote. “Gray wolf management is principally a matter for the political branches; at most, this Court’s role is simply to ensure those branches of government are coloring within the lines set by the Constitution and the statute. And even that is not truly before the Court today: here, the Court considers only a request for preliminary injunction.”

To achieve the wolf reduction mandated by the Republican-controlled state Legislature, a panel of Montana wildlife commissioners appointed by Gianforte approved an array of highly controversial hunting and trapping methods in 2021, including the use of bait to lure wolves off protected lands, night hunting with night vision goggles, the use of snares, and an increase on bag limits that allowed a single individual to kill 20 wolves.

Most controversially, Montana abolished hunting quotas that had limited the number of wolves that could be killed in two hunting districts north of Yellowstone to one per year. The result was the deadliest winter the national park has seen since the animals were reintroduced in 1995. (Montana reinstated wolf hunting quotas outside Yellowstone in August — albeit with a threshold five times higher than it was at the time of Gianforte’s 2020 election.)

With the 2021 legislation still in effect, WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote filed suit on October 27. Abbott then issued a temporary restraining order reinstating the 2020-era quotas outside Yellowstone and Glacier National Park, reducing the number of wolves an individual hunter could kill to five, and prohibiting the use of snares.

Gianforte, who unlawfully killed a collared Yellowstone wolf himself a month after taking office, responded by attacking the judge’s credibility.

“The legislature makes laws, the Fish and Wildlife Commission sets rules based on both those laws and science, and FWP implements those rules,” the governor tweeted. “Unfortunately, another activist judge overstepped his bounds today to align with extreme activists.”

With his decision Tuesday, Abbott’s restraining order was lifted, and the regulations that were in place before went back into effect.

The eight-hour hearing in Abbott’s courtroom followed more than a year of escalating conflict over Montana’s management of wolves. At the center of that story is the relationship between Gianforte and the state’s once-vaunted fish and wildlife department.

By law, Montana’s governor is to make selections for the state’s “quasi-judicial citizen board” of wildlife commissioners, who set policy for FWP, “without regard to political affiliation” and “solely for the wise management of the fish and wildlife of the state.”

As The Intercept detailed in an investigation in July, all but one of Gianforte’s nominees, were high-dollar contributors to his political campaigns. One was his former running mate. The commissioners hailed from the trophy hunting, outfitting, oil and gas, and livestock industry. Gianforte did not select a single representative from Montana’s expansive community of conservationists for the critical panel.

Veteran Montana wildlife managers have accused the governor, through his commission, of tarnishing a respected and professional department and seeking to return the state to the 1880s, when wolves were systematically extirpated from the landscape.

In a statement Tuesday, Lizzy Pennock, a Montana-based carnivore coexistence advocate at WildEarth Guardians who testified at Monday’s hearing, said her organization would continue its challenge to Gianforte’s campaign to slash Montana’s wolf population.

“We are devastated that the court has allowed countless more wolves — including Yellowstone wolves — to be killed under the unscientific laws and regulations we are challenging,” Pennock said. “We will keep fighting for Montana’s wolves in the courtroom while our case carries on and outside the courtroom in every way possible.”

The post Montana Judge Won’t Halt Gov. Greg Gianforte’s Aggressive Wolf Hunt appeared first on The Intercept.

At first it was anti-Muslim and anti-Hispanic hate speech. Then (in no particular order) it was disabled-reporter bashing, Russia-colluding, pussy-grabbing, family business destroying, income tax concealing, Bannon-appointing, Muslim travel banning, inauguration crowd size exaggerating, war hero attacking, Gold Star family disparaging, Paris climate agreement withdrawing, Obama spying accusing, one-percenter tax cutting, longest-shutdown-in-history causing, pipeline building, Christine Blasey Ford mocking, woman raping, Ukraine blackmailing, Covid quack cure promoting, pandemic ignoring, Georgia election official threatening, insurrection provoking, election denying, science denying, reality denying, money laundering, income tax cheating, white supremacy promoting (and dining), lying, cheating, misogynist, racist, treasonous, murderous, and insufferable scumbaggery. That didn’t get Republican leaders and Trump lickspittles and MAGA loonies to stop promoting Donald Trump.

What finally did it is they are finally tired of losing. Donald Trump really finally did prove that he could shoot some guy on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote, and it wasn’t just metaphorical either. But what he couldn’t do, what he cannot do, what they won’t stand for him doing, is being a loser. And Donald Trump is a loser and they’re finally getting tired of losing. They are finally tired of Donald Trump.

But they’re still afraid to say his name out loud because they’re still afraid of Trump. To be sure, Mitch McConnell will come out and proclaim that dining with white supremacists and anti-semites is not the Republican Way and no one who does is ever likely to be president, but he won’t say Donald Trump’s name out loud. He’s still afraid of Trump because if Mitch McConnell has proven anything over the years he’s he’s proven that he’s a coward.

In fact they are all cowards. Nobody wants to be the first to stand up and say his name out loud and tell Donald Trump to stay home, that he’s no longer of value to the Republican Party. Well that’s hardly surprising. But the most amazing part is, they may be turning their collective backs on him now (however slowly), but they’re doing it because he can no longer help them keep their (in the words of Mel Brooks) phoney baloney jobs. Trump is no longer a source of power.

It’s not because he’s the worst president in history or because he’s one of the most horrible human beings that ever lived, it’s because he can’t be used to win elections. That’s why they don’t want him, and that’s the only reason. Because deep down they know they’re just as horrible as he is.

It’s as if they had their own personal Hitler, and they repudiated him not because of the Holocaust, not because of the jingoistic nationalism and brutality, not because of the them-and-us hatred he promoted, but because he could no longer win battles. Otherwise they were just fine with him. Until that moment they loved him.

That is today’s Republican Party. The party of right and wrong, the party of personal responsibility, the party of family values, that party no longer has principles or morals or values. For a brief moment in history they had a horrible man who helped them gain power. But that man is no longer useful to them so they’re discarding him. Slowly, to be sure, because they are snivelling cowards and don’t want to be too hasty. But they don’t care that he is evil, they never cared that he was evil, they only care now because he is no longer useful.

That is why I can’t forgive the Republican Party. They get no points from me for turning on Trump. It’s too late for that. Trump may have finally demonstrated to them that he’s no longer fit to get re-elected as president, but they have demonstrated to me beyond any doubt that they are no longer fit to be anything. Republicans may be tired of losing, but I am tired of them. It’s now time for Republicans to go. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.

The post Tired of losing appeared first on Palmer Report.