>>22625947 DOJ Announces Investigation into United Healthcare Medicare BillingPN
https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1892924762483019956
Moscow Demanded US-NATO Withdraw Forces From Eastern Europe In Riyadh Talks
A fresh report in Financial Times has revealed that during US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Moscow demanded that NATO and American forces are withdrawn from eastern Europe as a condition for "normalizing relations."
Sources in Romania's government revealed the request, which was rejected by the team led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But NATO countries along the alliance's so-called Eastern flank are still worried: "Cristian Diaconescu, the Romanian president’s chief of staff and adviser for defense and national security, said on Wednesday that the US delegation had rejected Moscow’s demand, but that therewere no guarantees that Washington would not eventually make this concession to Vladimir Putin," FT reports.
Of course, NATO militarization right to up Russia's doorstep, a historic trend which reaches back to 1990s, when Moscow demanded not one more inch east, remains a key Kremlin justification for the Ukraine war.
Given this week's anti-Zelensky rhetoric coming out of the US administration, the European allies are worried Trump will give away more (after already declaring that Ukraine won't become a NATO member). This concern was expressed to FT as follows:
"As far as I understand, the situation can change from hour to hour or from day to day," Diaconescu told Antena3 television, in a reference to US President Donald Trump’s scathing criticism of the Ukrainian leader and his concessions made to Russia even before talks began.
Diaconescu stressed that the Russian delegation to the talks in Riyadh earlier this week "failed to convince the Americans" on a Nato withdrawaland that further visits by the leaders of the UK and France to Washington next week would seek to persuade Trump not to give in to this demand.
No real details on specifically what the Russians requested as a condition for fully restoring and improving US relations has been revealed by the US side. However, staff at each of their respective embassies are being restored.
The New York Times has written of Rubio based on a phone call with European diplomats after the Riyadh meeting, "The Secretary of State sought to reassure nervous European allies that the talks [in Riyadh]did not represent an abrupt departure from American policies, as many feared."
In December 2022, just before Russian forces poured across the Ukraine border later in February, President Putin told a news conference, "You promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly."
But the Kremlin is signaling it believes the Trump White House understands its positions well. FM Sergey Lavrov had also hailed the Riyadh meeting as "very useful" and that talks will continue."I have every reason to believe that the American side understands our position,"Lavrov had said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/moscow-demanded-us-nato-withdraw-forces-eastern-europe-riyadh-talks
Citizen Free Press
@CitizenFreePres
KEEP THE KASH MEMES COMING, AMERICA.
From
NautPoso memes 🇮🇪☘️
12:00 PM · Feb 21, 2025
·
7,238
Views
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1892982666024083660
Riley Gaines
@Riley_Gaines_
President Trump announces Maine will not receive federal funding until they comply with the executive order keeping men out of women's sports.
Moral clarity & accountability are back in the White House. Praise God.
From Rapid Response 47
9:54 PM · Feb 20, 2025
·497.3K
Views
https://x.com/Riley_Gaines_/status/1892769867851296818
What I don’t get why these states don’t believe Trump when he does an EO and when he can withhold federal funding
These states have obviously gotten away with a lot of shit.
PDJT next go after the Chinese pot farms in Maine
Nick Sortor
@nicksortor
🚨 WTF?! @RandPaul just unveiled on the Senate Floor that U.S. taxpayers spent $4.8 MILLION in Ukraine for “social media influencers.”
And we spent several hundred thousand more to send Ukrainians designers to a fashion show in Paris
AMERICANS WANT A REFUND. Plus interest!=
3:35 PM · Feb 20, 2025
·
1.5M
Views
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1892674447674319105
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Victor Davis Hanson short speech
From
Kelly
2:33 AM · Feb 21, 2025
·
6.2M
Views
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1892840058555691152
Rep. Wesley Hunt Press Office
@RepWPH
🚨 BREAKING: An exclusive video was released of two illegal migrants involved in a high speed chase outside of the sanctuary city Chicago!
You will never guess what they found in the car…❌7 POUNDS OF FENTANYL!!!=
9:59 AM · Feb 21, 2025
·14.7K Views
https://x.com/RepWPH/status/1892952313309896920
Rand Paul
@RandPaul
The Senate is voting on my amendment to cut spending by at least $1.5 trillion.
We voted for fiscal responsibility when we elected @realDonaldTrump and the Senate should vote for it now!
Voted Down
12:56 AM · Feb 21, 2025
·1.8MViews
https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1892815571953041535
Publius@OcrazioCornPop
Here’s the list of the 29 "Republican" senators who voted NO with Democrats and the years they are next up for re-election. The re-election dates are based on the standard six-year U.S. Senate term cycle, with elections occurring in even-numbered years (e.g., 2026, 2028, 2030).
Banks (R-IN) - 2030 (Elected 2024)
Blackburn (R-TN) - 2030 (Elected 2024)
Boozman (R-AR) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Budd (R-NC) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Capito (R-WV) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Collins (R-ME) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Cornyn (R-TX) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Cotton (R-AR) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Cramer (R-ND) - 2030 (Elected 2024)
Crapo (R-ID) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Fischer (R-NE) - 2030 (Elected 2024)
Graham (R-SC) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Grassley (R-IA) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Hawley (R-MO) - 2030 (Elected 2024)
Hoeven (R-ND) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Hyde-Smith (R-MS) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Lankford (R-OK) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Marshall (R-KS) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
McConnell (R-KY) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Moran (R-KS) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Mullin (R-OK) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Murkowski (R-AK) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Ricketts (R-NE) - 2030 (Elected 2024)
Rounds (R-SD) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Scott (R-SC) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Sullivan (R-AK) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Thune (R-SD) - 2028 (Elected 2022)
Tillis (R-NC) - 2026 (Elected 2020)
Wicker (R-MS) - 2030 (Elected 2024)
*NOTE: These dates assume no resignations, special elections, or other unforeseen changes.
All 47 Democrats voted no
10:40 AM · Feb 21, 2025
·20.3K
Views
https://x.com/OcrazioCornPop/status/1892962526771519881?mx=2
Trump’s legislative agenda is in turmoil 1/2
Burgess Everett
Burgess Everett
Updated Feb 20, 2025, 5:00pm EST
THE NEWS
President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda is a mess right now.
Senate Republicans are on the cusp of advancing a budget that would tee up national security legislation, hoping to spend quickly on border security and defense while postponing action on the thorny topic of tax cuts. Yet Trump hasn’t signed off on senators’ plan.
The president largely favors the approach in the House, where the GOP is trying to kick off votes next week on a budget setting up both massive tax cuts that still need to be negotiated and national security spending. House Republican leaders can’t afford to lose more than a single vote on their budget, and plenty of their members are balking.
That’s left Senate Republicans both skeptical that the House can pass its plan and worried that the other chamber’s budget framework falls short of Trump’s vision. In addition to whacking at Medicaid, senators suspect the House approach will fall short of permanently extending Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts.
To make matters worse, the House and Senate have bickered about the right strategy for well over a month and are way behind the pace that both parties set the last time that each controlled Congress and the White House, in 2017 and 2021. Several GOP sources said this week they fear the party’s agenda will remain rudderless unless Trump gets more intimately involved after weeks of deference to the squabbling House and Senate.
“I have no clarity,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told Semafor about the path forward. “Let’s stop playing the game of chicken. Let’s get on one page here. It’s clear we need to sit down and have really substantive negotiations.”
Hawley is raising alarm at the prospect of big Medicaid cuts called for by the House’s template, harmonizing with some moderates whose leeriness of safety net cuts could derail the chamber’s budget. At the same time, some Senate Republicans are antsy about their own leaders’ decisions, given that Trump swiped at their strategy on Wednesday.
And it’s increasingly likely that even if the House succeeds in passing a budget next week, it won’t survive the Senate unscathed. In addition to unease about Medicaid cuts, Republican senators don’t like the House’s trigger that lowers the ceiling for tax cuts if Congress can’t come up with massive spending cuts.
Senate Finance Committee Republicans say they won’t support anything that doesn’t make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, a bar they see the House resolution as failing to meet.
“There’s a lot of stuff in it that makes it really, really complicated over here,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who signed onto a letter to Trump about the tax concern.
Vice President JD Vance told Senate Republicans on Wednesday that Trump is OK with the Senate’s approach, despite the president’s endorsement of the House approach.
But on Thursday,Vance told the CPAC conference that Trump deemed it “very rare” to pass two party-line bills in the same Congress (notably, the Democrats did it in 2021 and 2022).
https://www.semafor.com/article/02/20/2025/trumps-legislative-agenda-is-in-turmoil
KNOW MORE 2/2
During the GOP’s last period of full Washington control in 2017, Medicaid politics dominated the party’s attempt to repeal Obamacare. Many conservative states rely heavily on the program, which provides health care to lower-income Americans.
Trump has sent mixed signals on Medicaid cuts, both saying he won’t touch the program and also supporting a House budget that almost certainly will cut it. Hawley’s been the loudest warning about Medicaid, telling Semafor: “I don’t want a whole bunch of Medicaid cuts.”
A large swath of Senate Republicans are likely to heavily scrutinize any changes to Medicaid, even as House Republicans hunt for spending cuts.
“I’m from a state that is heavily reliant on Medicaid. And, you know, I always look at it with a more focused eye,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. She said if the House passes its budget and sends it to the Senate, then “I think we’ll change it.”
Despite their vast differences on strategy and policy, Republican leaders in both chambers are trying not to publicly alienate each other. In the end, each chamber will have to adopt the same budget blueprint in order to unlock the power to evade Democratic filibusters of their party-line bills.
Which is why Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is keeping close tabs on House Speaker Mike Johnson. The two spoke on Wednesday, Graham told Semafor.
Though Graham said the House budget resolution’s “tax provisions would have a hard time right now” in the Senate, he’s trying to stay publicly upbeat and encouraging the House to try its way first
BURGESS’S VIEW
After claiming their disagreements were merely tactical, Republicans are now more openly disagreeing on policy, too.
The two chambers of Congress are led by Thune and Johnson, who share affable approaches and are both relatively new to their jobs — which leaves room for Trump to play the heavy to get his agenda done.
It’s just not clear he has any interest in doing so.
ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT
Even as rifts open on multiple fronts and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul opposes the Senate GOP’s plan, some Republicans argued that everything would come together.
“We’re completely united on where we want to get to. We want to prevent this huge $4 trillion tax increase. We want to secure the border. We want to have American peace through strength, and we want to unleash American energy,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said on Thursday.
Dave Weigel contributed.
NOTABLE
Trump’s own aides were blindsided when he supported the House budget’s Medicaid cuts, per Politico.
First-term Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-Pa., is writing publicly to his constituents in defense of Medicaid.
https://www.semafor.com/article/02/20/2025/trumps-legislative-agenda-is-in-turmoil
Justices rule out “commingled funds” theory in Hungarian Holocaust survivors’ compensation suit
By Amy Howe
on Feb 21, 2025 at 12:23 pm
A unanimous Supreme Court on Friday threw out a ruling by a federal appeals court that allowed a lawsuit brought by survivors of the Hungarian Holocaust to go forward. The survivors contended that their claims fell within an exception to the general presumption that foreign governments cannot be sued in U.S. courts because Hungary and its national railway confiscated their property, sold it, and mixed it with their other funds to do business in and with the United States. But allegations that a foreign government has commingled the funds from confiscated property are not, Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained for the court, enough on their own for a case to proceed.
More than 560,000 people were killed in the Hungarian Holocaust, which Winston Churchill reportedly characterized as “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world.” Collaborating with Nazi Germany, the Hungarian government nationalized the property of Hungarian Jews and sent them on cattle cars to death camps; MAV, the national railway, took property from them before they boarded the trains.
A group of survivors and their heirs filed a lawsuit against Hungary and MAV in 2010. Although the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act generally prohibits lawsuits against foreign governments in U.S. courts, they relied on an exception to that rule for cases involving property taken in violation of international law. That exception, known as the “expropriation exception,” applies when the confiscated property or any property “exchanged for it” – is either located in the United States in connection with a commercial activity or owned or operated by an agency or instrumentality” of the foreign country that engages in commercial activity in the United States.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the survivors that their case could go forward. Even if they did not contend that any of the property that Hungary and MAV confiscated during World War II is now located in the United States or owned by the railroad, the court of appeals reasoned, it was enough that Hungary and MAV commingled the funds from the sale of the property with other government funds that they used to do business with and in the United States – for example, to issue bonds and buy military equipment and to maintain an agency that sells train tickets in this country.
On Friday the Supreme Court rejected that rationale. Simply alleging that funds from the sale of confiscated property were deposited in a government account, and that funds from that account were eventually used for commercial purposes in the United States, Sotomayor reasoned, does not show – as the FSIA requires – that the funds are “present in the United States.” “To conclude otherwise requires accepting an attenuated fiction that commingling funds in an account, even if done decades earlier, means the account today still contains funds attributable to the sale of expropriated property.” This is particularly unlikely, Sotomayor suggested, when a foreign government has used commingled funds “for commercial and governmental operations all over the world, as is the case here.”
A more expansive interpretation of the expropriation exception, Sotomayor continued, would allow more lawsuits against foreign governments in U.S. courts. And that could lead to “retaliatory or reciprocal actions” against the United States in foreign courts, she observed.
The court pushed back against the survivors’ contention that because money is fungible, a ruling for Hungary will allow foreign governments to easily circumvent the expropriation exception by selling confiscated property and then depositing it in their general treasury accounts.
Friday’s decision, Sotomayor emphasized, means only that plaintiffs like the survivors “cannot rely on a commingling theory alone” to show a commercial connection to the United States. It does not, she wrote, rule out other scenarios in which – for example – “commingling allegations may be part of broader allegations that collectively satisfy” the commercial nexus requirement.
And more broadly, the court stressed, the fact that “a particular claim cannot satisfy the expropriation exception means only that it cannot be brought here, not that it cannot be brought in any forum.As the Government correctly recognizes, ‘the moral imperative has been and continues to be to provide some measure of justice to the victims of the Holocaust, and to do so in their remaining lifetimes.’”
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/02/justices-rule-out-commingled-funds-theory-in-hungarian-holocaust-survivors-compensation-suit/
Citizen Free Press
@CitizenFreePres
JAMES CARVILLE ON HANNITY LAST NIGHT.
Watch at 15 second mark. What the hell happens to his voice.
From Mr Producer
12:54 PM · Feb 21, 2025
·7,480 Views
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1892996351991980365
Carville is either losing his mind or doing propaganda, or both. He just can’t accept Trump and Republicans won. And now he’s making up numbers. He actually says Trump has a low polling in popularity right now.
'I'VE HAD IT': Trump addresses Zelenskyy criticism
President Donald Trump joins 'The Brian Kilmeade Show' to discuss the latest on the war in Gaza after Hamas falsely claimed it released the body of Shiri Bibas and his take on the war in Ukraine amid growing tension with Zelenskyy.
16:59
https://youtu.be/Y_aSVsQdHto
Kilmeade is no expert on Ukraine or Russia, he repeats lies to Trump and Brian just hates Russia as much as Hannity.
I’m glad Trump kept calm, but Kilmeade is uneducated and using the FOX talking points
'SPARE ME': AOC mocked for latest anti-Musk rant
OutKick host Tomi Lahren joined 'Fox & Friends' to discuss her reaction to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's rally cry against DOGE spending cuts and Pete Buttigieg calling out the Democrats' DEI push.
Her biggest fear is Dems will not get the kickbacks they’ve Gotten for years
2:53
https://youtu.be/9igOj7NceMU
Trump makes BOLD prediction about midterm elections
RNC youth advisory council chair Brilyn Hollyhand joined 'Fox & Friends First' to discuss President Donald Trump's bold prediction for midterms and James Carville's suggestion that the Trump 'collapse' is already underway…KEK
3:33
https://youtu.be/2OrfQGJqvks
Greg Gutfeld: We're only a month into DOGE and honestly, it's exhausting
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and the panel discuss President Donald Trump weighing sending DOGE savings checks to taxpayers on ‘Gutfeld!’ This is funny not bummer news
12:37
https://youtu.be/oaVtGhGaK-I