Adaptive Warrior!

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has spent nearly $500,000 of campaign funds on private lawyers to navigate an active FBI public corruption investigation tied directly to his major donors. Those donors — the Duong crime family of California Waste Solutions — are now federally indicted alongside former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao on charges of bribery, conspiracy, mail and wire fraud. Bonta accepted over $155,000 from them and their associates over the years. When the raids hit in June 2024, he returned the money “out of an abundance of caution.” His campaign then burned through $469,000 on one of the most expensive law firms in the state. In May 2024, disgraced political operative Mario Juarez sent Bonta a letter warning him that Andy Duong possessed a “compromising video” of the Attorney General and had a pattern of secretly recording elected officials for blackmail. Bonta’s campaign spent hundreds of thousands more in legal fees after that letter surfaced. This is the same Rob Bonta who, as an Assemblymember, personally intervened to secure a $3.4 million state grant for Viridis Fuels — a failed biofuel company run by donor Mario Juarez, a man with tax liens, a surrendered real estate license, and a history of stiffing business partners. That same address later became his wife’s 2021 campaign headquarters. Bonta built a sophisticated pipeline that directed over $517,000 in corporate behested payments and direct campaign funds into nonprofits that employed and paid his wife six-figure salaries. He created his own foundation, took behested money from lobbyists into it, then moved $25,000 to his wife’s organization while initially trying to hide the transfer as a “loan” on tax filings. While positioning himself as a national leader on data privacy and suing companies for far smaller violations, his Department of Justice leaked the full personal data of more than 240,000 Californians who held concealed carry permits — names, home addresses, dates of birth, and license numbers — in what an independent review called a catastrophic institutional failure. The breach happened days after the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, at a time when Bonta was publicly furious about the ruling. He has used the Attorney General’s office to manipulate ballot language against tough-on-crime measures that later passed with nearly 70% of the vote, lost a 6-3 Supreme Court case for violating First Amendment donor privacy rights, and allowed foreign-linked money to influence high-profile litigation he then personally championed for political gain. Rob Bonta is not the people’s lawyer. He is a compromised operator who has used the most powerful law enforcement position in America’s largest state to protect his donor network, enrich his family, and shield himself from accountability.

Children of Gaza.

CNN report: The U.S. has conveyed a message to Iran stating that Israel will not escalate its attacks in Lebanon.