Marco Rubio Knowingly Gave Federal Contract to Kremlin-Tied Company

The State Department offered a government contract to Oxygen Forensics even after federal officials were made aware of the company’s ties to Moscow.

Last week, the Justice Department announced that Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber (an American) and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They were also accused of orchestrating a scheme to conceal the company’s Russian ownership from the federal agencies to which they supplied phone hacking software.

The government knew of this by at least August 28, when Oxygen Forensics sued a former employee turned whistleblower, Max Weissberg, for making the plot public. Nonetheless, the State Department agreed to a $50,000 contract with Oxygen Forensics that same day, according to federal procurement data obtained by PunchUp.

Reiber advertised that his company, which provides forensic and archival services for electronic data, exclusively sold American-made software and had no foreign ownership.

Yet five Russian nationals, including Davydov, allegedly owned and controlled Oxygen Forensics through a holding company based in Cyprus, according to a criminal complaint released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. The company’s software, too, was Russian, the complaint alleged.

Several executive agencies were affected by the scheme: the Defense Department and components of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Secret Service, the National Computer Forensics Institute, Homeland Security Investigations, and the DHS Office of Inspector General, according to the complaint. But the federal procurement data would suggest that the State Department—as well as the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia, which awarded the contract—could also have been compromised.

The Virginia-based group allegedly concealed its true ownership after the U.S. imposed additional sanctions on Russia in early 2022, following its invasion of Ukraine. Months later, Reiber—of Boise, Idaho—was appointed the company’s CEO, president, and chairman of the board, while mentions of Russian ownership were stripped from the company’s public filings, according to the complaint.

Details released in the affidavit suggest that Reiber was well aware of the conspiracy. In November 2023, Reiber wrote to Davydov and the other alleged Russian accomplices after a reporter asked about Oxygen Forensics’ connection to a Russian company. Reiber noted at the time that the reporting “could destroy” a pending contract with the National Computer Forensics Institute, and that the “current existence of this company hangs in the balance,” according to the criminal complaint.

Kash Patel’s FBI has been fudging the numbers to boost the agency’s success rate on apprehending fugitives from its Top 10 Most Wanted List.

Patel announced the addition of a new name to the agency’s Top 10 Most Wanted List on Tuesday, and bragged about the agency’s rate of successful captures under his leadership.

“This FBI has had historic success manhunting Ten Most Wanted fugitives—since the start of the Trump administration, we’ve captured TEN of the Top Ten Most Wanted, 2.5 times the number of TMW fugitives captured during the previous four years combined,” Patel wrote on X.

However, Patel’s FBI has imposed new policies that manipulate that data by adding the names of fugitives who are expected to be imminently captured, according to MS NOW.

Those aren’t the only statistics that Patel is padding: The director also instructed FBI field offices to include any suspects arrested in the presence of agency personnel to be included in official arrest counts, MS NOW reported.

So when Patel claims that his agency had “forty-five thousand violent offenders arrested last year, twice as many as 2024,” that includes suspects in cases led by local police departments and other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

The double counting didn’t help to remove more alleged criminals from the streets, but it did give Patel a handy statistic to cite when he’s dodging questions about his alleged excessive drinking, unexplained absences, and other erratic behavior.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants Americans to hand over their health data to the government, so it can then be searched by artificial intelligence.

At an event held by the MAHA Institute, run by anti-vaccine activist Mark Gorton, Kennedy said he wanted the federal government to collect Americans’ health data, including doctor’s visits, so it could be shared with independent researchers and be searchable by AI, The Guardian reports.

RFK Jr. seemed to believe the data could help AI prove the long-debunked connection between vaccines and autism.

“We need to use America’s health data to determine whether the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the vaccines that we’re administering, the other environmental and lifestyle exposures are contributing in one way or another to the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said at the event Monday.

“Your health information should follow you wherever you go,” Kennedy added, noting that tech companies, insurance companies, and health care providers are already doing that through apps, and that health records are easier to access for the government as a result. Kennedy is already collecting data from the agencies in his department, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Medicaid is a really useful vehicle for studying … because there are hundreds of millions of lives in there, including tens of millions of children who’ve been in that program for 10 or 20 years,” Kennedy said. “Medicare gives us enormous amounts of information on older Americans and people with disabilities.”

Regarding AI, Kennedy said that it has been a boon to his efforts.

“Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds. You can ask questions and you can get immediate answers, and that’s what we’re doing today,” Kennedy said. “[AI] can help researchers find patterns across millions of health histories that human beings could never find by reading those records one at a time.”

Throughout his remarks, Kennedy kept bringing up vaccines as a major, if not the main, reason for his initiative, mentioning that the CDC has a Vaccine Safety Datalink that compares health outcomes for unvaccinated and vaccinated people and is looking at vaccine ingredients, their timing for infants, and other factors.

The whole thing has alarming implications. Kennedy already has faced criticism for proposing an autism registry and been lambasted by a federal judge for using fake studies created by AI. Kennedy didn’t mention any safeguards for Americans’ health data in his remarks, and his entire vision seems to be based on his anti-vaccine agenda. Despite, or even because of this, he still has a job in the Trump administration.

In case you needed any evidence that Republicans have absolutely no dirt on former special counsel Jack Smith, look no further.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Senator Eric Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024, in Atlanta. For context, Schmitt added, that was the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis revealed her affair with prosecutor Nathan Wade. 

“I definitely did not go to a Hawks game,” Smith answered, and suggested that he hadn’t spent any time in Atlanta, and had never met with Willis or Wade. 

Then Schmitt accused the former special counsel of perjury. 

The Missouri Republican’s staff displayed a poster board that the senator claimed showed a series of text messages from Smith’s team that allegedly discussed his plans to attend the Hawks game. Almost as soon as it was put up, it was pulled down again. 

Smith was unable to offer a response to the accusation, noting, “You just took it down really quick.” Schmitt refused to hold the board up again, instead calling Smith a “dirtbag.”

Later, Smith circled back to clarify that he remembered attending a college basketball game in February 2024 between the University of Maryland and the University of Iowa during which Caitlin Clark had played.  

Senator Amy Klobuchar then offered a possibility: “Could it then be that University of Iowa was the Hawkeyes?” she said. 

Schmitt interjected that Klobuchar was trying to “rehabilitate the witness.” He insisted that the text messages—which again, he’d not allowed anyone to review—“could have obviously been related to the prosecution that was coordinated in his office in Atlanta.”

“I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong,” Klobuchar said. 

Shortly after, Klobuchar was able to confirm Smith’s story. 

“The game was in fact in Maryland, Mr. Smith,” she said. “And I would just say, for a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on a confusion about the name of a team, which I knew knowing my Midwestern sports, and imply that you were in another city, that you were somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia and then call you a dirtbag is something that deserves an apology.”

A closer look at the supposedly damning text messages Schmitt attempted to display showed that they made no mention of the “Hawks”—failing further to back up his far-flung line of questioning.

Republicans appear so desperate to attack the former official, who says he found proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump committed “serious crimes” related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and steal classified documents to advance his own career, that they are willing to resort to absurd antics and allege ill-informed conspiracy theories.

Later Tuesday afternoon, Schmitt attempted to defend his face-plant moment in an appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show. 

“It was the only NBA or NCAA’s Men’s game going on that time in Atlanta. He claimed later that he was at another game,” Schmitt said. “My job is to ask the questions, he’s already—and if that’s what his answer is, then that’s what his answer is.”

Schmitt admitted that he wasn’t really asking fact-finding questions, but was looking for a gotcha moment. 

“Jack Smith has lied under oath time and time again, and so the purpose of today is just to get him to answer a bunch of questions and to see if he ensnares himself in more lies because he’s done that before,” Schmitt said. 

But it seems that the lawmaker’s lazy research—and conservatives’ total dismissal of women’s sports—got in the way.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration’s brand new, ultra-secure, “damn good” artificial intelligence chatbot can’t be hacked—yet.

The new technology, hosted on America.gov, was unveiled during a summit Tuesday morning. It’s supposed to act as the new face of the federal government, a way for the general public to access publicly available government information in a familiar chatbot format.

In relatively brief remarks, Donald Trump pledged that the access point was built with cutting-edge technology that would not save or risk user data.

“With America.gov, for the first time in history, the government is offering an experience that matches and in some ways even exceeds the state of the art,” Trump said.

“It’s built from the ground up with your privacy and security in mind,” Trump said. “They’ve used a brand new technology—it’s absolutely brand new. It’s amazing, people don’t even have access to it for the most part, to ensure that your personal information is not collected or stored and your conversation disappears when you leave and everything stays totally private.”

But his confidence in the burgeoning portal only extended so far.

“Cannot, in theory, be hacked into,” Trump continued, ad-libbing that when “they figure a way to do that, we’ll end it.”

“Because they always figure a way, right?” Trump said. “If anything does happen. We think it might not happen.”

The site was created by Airbnb co-founder and U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia with the intention of centralizing numerous government databases and websites for easier public consumption, creating a pathway for users to access federal information without needing to navigate the “maze” of government websites.

The administration said that the platform could eventually be used as a waypoint for passport applications, name changes, campsite reservations, and even Medicare plans.