Chuck Callesto
@ChuckCallesto
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8h
BREAKING REPORT: Jussie Smollett juror says they all IMMEDIATELY knew disgraced Empire star was guilty and that his POOR TESTIMONY led to his conviction for faking hate crime...
Newsmax
@newsmax
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21m
Former President Donald Trump has seen a range of Christmas-time emotions from the U.S. military members, from the highs of a secret Middle East visit with troops in 2018 to the “dejected” woes now of service members struggling with President Joe Biden’s failed Afghanistan withdrawal.
“It was beautiful,” Trump tells Mike Huckabee of his unannounced visit on Newsmax’s one-hour special “Christmas in America,” which premieres Wednesday Dec. 15 at 9 p.m. ET. “We saw the troops. The spirit was incredible.”
As the pandemic raged, at least 75 lawmakers bought and sold stock in companies that make COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and tests
4h ago
FTA
At least 75 federal lawmakers held shares of Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer in 2020.
Lawmakers’ holding stock in these companies has prompted ethical concerns.
Several other lawmakers traded shares of companies with a direct stake in the pandemic.
Dozens of Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill have invested in companies that have a direct stake in the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an Insider analysis of federal financial records.
In 2020, at least 13 senators and 35 US representatives held shares of Johnson & Johnson, the medical behemoth that produced the single-shot COVID-19 vaccine that more than 15 million Americans have received.
At least 11 senators and 34 representatives also held shares in 2020 of another COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer, Pfizer. Two representatives or their spouses held shares of Moderna during the same year that the world went on lockdown in response to the pandemic.
Lawmakers held these investments in COVID-19-minded companies as Congress was at the center of pandemic relief efforts. In 2020 and 2021, members of Congress voted on six relief bills together worth nearly $6 trillion. Congress also authorized more than $10 billion to help drug companies develop and distribute vaccines and forced health insurers to cover the cost of getting the shot.
Policymakers especially viewed the coronavirus vaccines developed by Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna — which each spent substantial amounts of money lobbying the federal government in 2020 — as critical to helping countries around the planet overcome the grip of the pandemic.
The tally of investments is part of the exhaustive Conflicted Congress project, in which Insider reviewed nearly 9,000 financial-disclosure reports for every sitting lawmaker and their top-ranking staffers.
(more at link)