Washington Post in Uproar Over Jeff Bezos Reaction to FBI Raid

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has stayed noticeably silent after one of the newspaper’s reporters, Hannah Natanson, had her home searched by federal agents Wednesday—and the Post’s staff isn’t happy.

Status.news reports that several of the publication’s employees aren’t happy with their owner’s muted reaction to the raid. One called it “nauseating and irresponsible to have our owner remain silent given this unprecedented event,” while another said they were “disappointed” but “not surprised.”

“If there was a moment to stand up for our journalistic values, this would be it,” a third staffer said.

The newspaper’s executive editor, Matt Murray, forcefully condemned the search, which resulted in a phone and a smartwatch being seized from Natanson’s home.

“This extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” Murray wrote in an internal memo. “The Washington Post has a long history of zealous support for robust press freedoms. The entire institution stands by those freedoms and our work.”

Bezos, though, hasn’t said anything, even as the Post’s own editorial board and other publications, such as The New York Times, have spoken out. That’s possibly due to Bezos’s efforts to cozy up to President Trump in his second term, donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and attending the inauguration in person.

Since then, Bezos has shifted the Post’s opinion section to the right, paid $40 million to first lady Melania Trump for the rights to a documentary, and has met privately with the president multiple times. All signs point to Bezos staying silent in order to keep Trump happy and protect his billions.

How are ICE agents picking where to commit their next act of wanton violence? Well, Palantir has an app for that!

According to a user guide obtained by 404 Media, the app provides ICE agents with a digital map populated by potential deportation targets, each of which has their own detailed dossier, including information such as their name, date of birth, Alien Registration Number (a unique identifier assigned by the U.S. government), and a photograph of the target. The dossier also includes a “confidence score” out of 100 as to how certain the app is of the target’s address.

“Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) is a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics,” the user guide states.

The information comes from a number of sources, including the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and something called CLEAR, which could be an investigation software from Thomson Reuters, according to 404Media.

The app’s “Geospatial Lead Sourcing Tab” allows ICE agents to select targets based on a number of criteria, including “Bios & IDs,” “Criminality,” “Location,” and “Operations,” the user guide shows. Using the app, ICE agents can select individual targets or multiple targets at once by drawing a shape around a selected area. During a sworn deposition earlier this month about a “dragnet” raid in Woodburn, Oregon, an officer with ICE’s Fugitive Operations Unit said that agents used the app to find target-rich areas.

“You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than … like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent … you’re not going to go there,” said the agent, who was identified as “JB” in the court documents obtained by 404 Media.

While the user guide does not explicitly state what company created the app, the app’s full name appears in a $29.9 million supplemental agreement with Palantir that started in September and is planned to continue for at least a year, 404Media reported.

ICE previously signed an agreement with Palantir in July to develop an ImmigrationOS platform, which would use artificial intelligence to identify and track potential targets. ICE has also assembled a team to monitor social media 24/7, surveying platforms including Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement used artificial intelligence to streamline its rush to add 10,000 more agents to its countrywide crackdown, according to NBC. This resulted in a grave technical error, as recruits were hired and assigned to field offices without adequate training.

The AI was supposed to simply scan résumés and identify recruits for the law enforcement officers, or LEO, program. The program requires four weeks of online training, while applicants who aren’t LEOs require eight. But most of all recent applicants reviewed were classified by the AI as LEOs, allowing them to forgo half of the required training even though they had no law enforcement experience whatsoever—a decision that could be dangerous for all involved.

The mistake was not identified until mid-fall, when ICE was through most of its hiring upswing. While it is in the process of correcting the mistake, how many of those 10,000 officers entered American streets with only four weeks of training?

Update: A senior official at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that the study has been cancelled.

The Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is funding a heavily flawed vaccine trial in west Africa that is being described as “another Tuskegee.”

The health newsletter Inside Medicine obtained the protocols for a study receiving $1.6 million to experiment on babies in Guinea-Bissau. The experiment is a “randomized controlled trial to assess the effects of neonatal Hepatitis B vaccination on early-life mortality, morbidity, and long-term developmental outcomes,” according to a Federal Register notice. 

The comparisons to Tuskegee, an experiment in which the U.S. government let syphilis go unchecked in African Americans in Alabama from 1932 to 1972, came from an unnamed CDC official who spoke to Inside Medicine. 

“This is another Tuskegee,” the official said. “We are allowing children, infants, to be exposed to Hepatitis B when we could prevent it, and then follow them for five years to see what happens. That’s not long enough to see the long-term benefits, but might be long enough to find some non-specific effects.”

The experiment had raised ethical concerns at the time the funding grant was announced in December, with Professor Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine telling The Guardian that it “has set alarm bells ringing in the global health community.” The World Health Organization has recommended the hepatitis B vaccination at birth since 2009. 

But the experiment’s protocols not only legitimize those concerns, they raise them. Inside Medicine found that there’s no placebo in the trial, and that this experiment is studying  a vaccine known to be effective in order to find “non-specific effects” of vaccines. That’s language straight from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s echo chamber, as he and his fellow anti-vaxxers make unfounded claims that many vaccines have unknown harmful effects. 

The study is also flawed because hepatitis B causes serious problems later in life, not shortly after birth, so trying to measure mortality and morbidity is not likely to yield any useful conclusions right away. Plus, none of the vaccines in the study are FDA-approved, raising the question of why the CDC is funding a study of vaccines that aren’t available to Americans. 

Other issues in the trial include a lack of testing of mothers for hepatitis B, meaning that some of the babies at the highest risk for contracting it could be left without the vaccine, and that there’s no “stop” protocol in case the results are very bad for the participants. The Department of Health and Human Services is defending the study by claiming Guinea-Bissau isn’t mandating the hepatitis B vaccine until 2027 anyway.

However, the $1.6 million grant could instead be used to vaccinate Guinea-Bissau’s children for a decade against hepatitis B, calling into question the usefulness of this experiment. 

All of this seems to confirm that Kennedy’s views are now becoming U.S. government and CDC policy, with eugenics-style experiments being given the green light in an attempt to legitimize anti-vaccine views. How many experiments like this will there be, and how many lives will be lost? 

President Trump is keeping proceeds from the first sale of Venezuelan oil in an offshore bank account based in Qatar, according to reporting from Semafor. The sale was worth $500 million.

This unprecedented move is yet another middle finger to Venezuelan sovereignty and once again raises questions about the president’s cozy relationship with the Qatari government.

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren told Semafor. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

That seems to be exactly what Trump is doing. Trump has vowed to “indefinitely” control Venezuela’s oil, claiming the proceeds will be given back to the U.S. and Venezuela.

Still, it remains unclear just how that money held in Qatar will benefit the Venezuelan people the administration claims to care about.