President-elect Donald Trump, in an angry midnight rant, criticized the United States on multiple fronts and called for the Central Intelligence Agency, a U.S. civilian foreign intelligence entity, to conduct investigations within the United States—a move potentially unlawful and contrary to its charter, and a possible threat to Americans’ civil rights. Hours later, he appeared to directly blame President Joe Biden for the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, currently under FBI investigation as an act of terrorism.

Declaring America a “disaster,” and a “laughing stock all over the World,” Trump, early Thursday morning, alleged the U.S. has “open borders,” and “weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.”

He also claimed the “DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors” are “incompetent and corrupt” and “have not done their job,” but rather, “spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself.”

“Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country,” Trump declared, never specifying what he was railing against, before calling for the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate.

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“The CIA must get involved, NOW, before it is too late. The USA is breaking down – A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it. See you on January 20th,” Trump announced, referring to his upcoming inauguration, before closing with his slogan.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, pointing to Trump’s Truth Social post, reported that the President-elect “again seems to connect the attack in New Orleans to the border.”

The suspect in that attack is a 42-year-old American from Texas, a U.S. military veteran, who is believed to have plowed a pickup truck into people celebrating on historic Bourbon Street in New Orleans early on New Years’ Day, killing 14 or 15 people, and injuring many others. The attack is being investigated by the FBI as an act of terrorism, according to multiple reports.

“The FBI said the suspect, who was killed in a firefight with officers, had an ISIS flag in the vehicle at the time of the attack,” CNN reported Thursday.

Despite the suspect being an American and a veteran, Trump had implied the attack had been carried out by an undocumented immigrant.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump had claimed Wednesday. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!”

Reporting that Trump had “shared anti-immigrant misinformation moments after an inaccurate report from Fox News,” HuffPost notes that “Fox News had reported minutes prior to Trump’s Truth Social post that the vehicle used by the suspect had crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, from Mexico two days before the attack. Just over an hour later, the conservative network retracted that reporting, saying its sources had advised that the truck crossed the border on Nov. 16 apparently driven by someone else. Later in the afternoon, it reported that the truck never crossed over from Mexico.”

As Raw Story reported Wednesday afternoon, Fox News delivered an on-air fact check of Trump’s remarks.

“Now the former president said ‘criminals coming in’ in a statement, meaning into our country, but to be clear,” Fox News justice correspondent David Spunt told viewers (video below), “the suspect was born in the United States, he served in the United States Army, he was a veteran, the FBI is the lead agency in this investigation going through the social media and any other accounts associated with the suspect.”

READ MORE: Trump Medicare Pick Dr. Oz Says Uninsured ‘Don’t Have Right to Health’ in Resurfaced Clip

Later Thursday morning, Trump doubled down, this time directly attacking President Joe Biden.

“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER. What he and his group of Election Interfering ‘thugs’ have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA,” Trump posted to his Truth Social account.

In 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA, “directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration.”

“Under the 1947 act setting up the C.I.A., the agency was forbidden to have ‘police, subpoena, law enforcement powers or internal security functions’ inside the United States. Those responsibilities fall to the F.B.I., which maintains a special internal security unit to deal with foreign intelligence threats,” The Times had reported.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Fox after reading statement from Trump: The former president said criminals coming in in his statement meaning into our country. To be clear, the suspect was born in the United States. He served in the United States army. He was a veteran. pic.twitter.com/H6OeisOeas

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 1, 2025

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Citing “deepfakes” and “targeted disinformation campaigns,” the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced on Tuesday sanctions against affiliates of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), alleging they “aimed to stoke socio-political tensions and influence the U.S. electorate during the 2024 U.S. election.”

Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz may have been the target of one such effort, according to a previous Washington Post report.

“Today’s actions build on sanctions previously imposed on the IRGC, the GRU, and their numerous subordinate and proxy organizations, pursuant to several authorities targeting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and malicious cyber-enabled activities,” the U.S. State Dept. wrote in a press release.

“The Governments of Iran and Russia have targeted our election processes and institutions and sought to divide the American people through targeted disinformation campaigns,” said Acting Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Bradley T. Smith. “The United States will remain vigilant against adversaries who would undermine our democracy.”

READ MORE: Trump Medicare Pick Dr. Oz Says Uninsured ‘Don’t Have Right to Health’ in Resurfaced Clip

Treasury adds that the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE) “directs and subsidizes the creation and publication of deepfakes and circulated disinformation about candidates in the U.S. 2024 general election. CGE personnel work directly with a GRU unit that oversees sabotage, political interference operations, and cyberwarfare targeting the West.”

“At the direction of, and with financial support from, the GRU, CGE and its personnel used generative AI tools to quickly create disinformation that would be distributed across a massive network of websites designed to imitate legitimate news outlets to create false corroboration between the stories, as well as to obfuscate their Russian origin,” the Treasury Dept. said. “In addition to using generative AI to construct and disseminate disinformation targeting the U.S. electorate in the lead up to the U.S. 2024 general election, CGE also manipulated a video it used to produce baseless accusations concerning a 2024 vice presidential candidate in an effort to sow discord amongst the U.S. electorate.”

Treasury did not specify who that candidate was, but reporting from The Washington Post suggested in previous reporting that it may have been Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz.

In October, The Washington Post reported that a “former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.”

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The Post’s Catherine Belton reported that the “documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.”

“Disinformation researchers say Dougan’s network was probably behind a recent viral fake video smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, which U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday was created by Russia. It received nearly 5 million views on X in less than 24 hours, Microsoft said.”

The Washington Post’s Belton, pointing to the Treasury Dept. press release said it confirmed the Post’s reporting from October.

“Though none of the entities sanctioned by the Treasure [sic] Department Tuesday are affiliated with China,” NBC News adds, “the department said in a separate letter Monday that its computers had been hacked in a state-sponsored Chinese operation in ‘a major incident.’ China denied that allegation.”

In September, Trump suggested he would remove sanctions on Russia, Iran, and China, The New Republic reported.

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Image via Flickr and a CC license

Mehmet Oz, widely recognized as television’s “Dr. Oz” and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid, has sparked controversy over resurfaced remarks from a 2013 speech, where he addressed the balance between personal and governmental responsibility for the uninsured.

Dr. Oz told members of the National Governors’ Association (video below) that uninsured Americans “don’t have the right to health,” but should be given “a way of crawling back out of the abyss of darkness of fear over not having the health they need.” That, he suggested, could come via physicals in a “festival-like setting.”

Oz, described by the AP as a “celebrity heart surgeon turned talk show host and lifestyle guru,” had urged members of the NGA to “think about” those physicals, promoting them as “incredibly inexpensive to run,” while declaring that “local hospitals will fund” them.

“You can screen thousands of people for almost nothing, and you allow a conversation and take place in more of a festival-like setting,” Oz said. “It’s not scary, and I mentioned earlier that almost everybody’s come into our 50-minute physicals has a job, but a lot don’t have insurance.” (At one point he appears to say “15-minute physicals,” and at another, “50-minute physicals.”)

READ MORE: Trump Claims Dems Will Use ‘All Sorts of Tricks’ to Stall Controversial Nominees

“Give them a way of crawling back out of the abyss of darkness of fear over not having the health they need, and give them an opportunity, cause they don’t have the right to health, but they have the right to access a chance to get that health.”

Earlier this month top Senate Democrats, in a letter to Oz, questioned both his qualifications to become the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, along with what they described as his previous call to privatize Medicare.

Democrats, led by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), in the letter, expressed to Oz, “concerns about your advocacy for the elimination of Traditional Medicare and your deep financial ties to private health insurers.”

NBC News reported that the “Democrats referred to a 2020 opinion piece that Oz co-wrote calling for putting all Americans into Medicare Advantage, effectively replacing the traditional Medicare program in which the government directly insures Americans 65 and older in tandem with private insurance plans.”

“Indeed, private insurers that run the Medicare Advantage program drastically overcharge for care,” the senators wrote, NBC News reported, saying they were “citing analysis from the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Committee.”

The Hill added that the Democrats “said they were especially concerned about Oz’s potential conflicts of interest. Oz reported owning more than $550,000 in UnitedHealth stock in his 2022 financial disclosures. UnitedHealth is the largest private insurer under Medicare Advantage and largest employer of physicians in the nation.”

“The company is currently under a sprawling antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice — including for its role in aggressively upcoding Medicare Advantage enrollees to secure higher payments from CMS — and has been sued on multiple occasions for Medicare fraud. Under your plan, UnitedHealth’s revenue from Medicare Advantage would roughly double to $274 billion annually,” the Democrats wrote.

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In 2022, when the video first resurfaced during Oz’s failed campaign to become a Republican U.S. Senator for Pennsylvania, criticism was strong.

“This is such a crazy thing to say: ‘they don’t have the right to health’???” remarked journalist Soledad O’Brien.

Other commenters have also weighed in.

“As someone who studied health and healthcare in Guatemala, this sounds awful familiar,” wrote Dr. Caitlin Baird. “T minus two years until these ‘clinics’ are provided by ‘missionaries’ and pre-med volunteers with zero medical training.”

“For a physician to say that the uninsured don’t have the right to health is so unethical I am at a loss for word,” remarked pediatrician Jeffrey W Britton.

“This is the guy Trump wants in charge of healthcare for millions of Americans who cannot afford the healthcare he has access to,” observed former investigative reporter Jayne Miller. “’15 minute physicals’ Then what?”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Dr. Oz said the uninsured “don’t have the right to health,” but should be given “a way of crawling back out of the abyss” with “15-minute physicals” provided by the government “in a festival like setting.” pic.twitter.com/YMyhpZfEFI

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) September 7, 2022

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