☕️ FRENCH FRIED ☙ Monday, July 14, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Long-overdue multiplier incoming: DOJ’s Epstein video blows up again; Trump’s tariffs spook holdouts; Zelensky’s bill gets outsourced; MTG drops a killer tax cut; and TACO may be off the menu.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! We have a long-overdue but exciting new multiplier; you’re going to love it. The roundup includes: the Epstein train wreck falls off another cliff as Wired exposes undisclosed DOJ video manipulation; Trump negotiates a lucrative deal for somebody else to pay for Zelensky’s weapons supplies; Trump’s new tariffs terrify uncooperative countries trying to wait out the lawsuits; the Times starts to catch on that Trump might not actually TACO; and MTG takes another swipe at the tax code with one of the most exciting tax cuts yet put on the table.

🪖 C&C ARMY POST 🪖

🪖 MULTIPLIER ORDERS: It’s multiplier time again! You’ve had a lot of leave since the last one, but now the C&C Army needs your help for one of the pandemic’s worst-treated covid heroes, Dr. Kirk Moore.

Last week, courageous Dr. Moore faced down a federal criminal trial where he could get 35 years in prison. According to Biden’s DOJ, his alleged crime was providing “fake” vaccine cards to about 1,500 parents for their kids, and “fraudulently” injecting the kids with saline instead of mRNA. On Friday, in a wonderful surprise, and after intense lobbying by fiery Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Attorney General Pam Bondi dramatically dismissed all Dr. Moore’s charges.

It was a miracle. But Dr. Moore has been nearly bankrupted by funding his defense. It is time for us to send a message.

For new readers, the C&C multiplier is a quick, painless task where every reader takes about 30 seconds to donate any amount, no matter how small, as long as it ends in a ‘2’. Depending on what you can easily afford, give $222, $22, $12, $2, or even $0.02. Even though our individual donations may be small, we have so many readers that it mounts up to an inspiring collective amount.

That’s the power of the C&C Army. We used it terribly effectively throughout the pandemic. Now we have a new mission. Take just a few seconds and donate to Dr. Moore’s GiveSendGo. Do it right now, then continue reading today’s terrific roundup. For inspiration and encouragement, you can watch your fellow C&Cers’ donations stream in on the GSG site. Donations can be anonymous. It works because we all do it together, as a community, a powerful army pushing back against the narrative.

Dr. Moore’s current donation total is woefully short. We’re about to fix that right up. Today we’re sending a message that they can try, but they will never break us. Here’s the link again.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🔥🔥🔥

As if this story couldn’t get any worse. Last Friday, Wired Magazine ran an explosive story under a very carefully worded headline, “Metadata Shows the FBI’s ‘Raw’ Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Was Likely Modified.” It was a rookie mistake. The sub-headline cautiously clarified, “There is no evidence the footage was deceptively manipulated, but ambiguities around how the video was processed may further fuel conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death.”

The story was about the critical hallway camera footage from the morning Epstein allegedly hanged himself in federal custody, following a suspicious series of “coincidences” involving broken cameras and sleeping guards. Wired’s cavils and reservations were appropriate, even if darkly hilarious. Saying there’s “no evidence” that a manipulated video was deceptively manipulated on purpose is technically true, but the altered video itself is the evidence of deception.

Let me try explaining this another way, for people who live in a distant Northwestern city where they elect mayors who turn over large portions of downtown to unruly mobs who enthusiastically recreate demonic set scenes combining Mad Max Thunderdome with an (accidentally) LSD-infused church summer camp production of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Metadata are digital codes that get embedded in files saved on computers. They aren’t secret, tricky, encrypted, or password-protected or anything like that. They are more like digital fingerprints, or maybe kind of like the stickers that the oil change people put on your inside windshield to remind you when to get the next one. Except that you can’t see metadata without looking for it. It’s ‘hidden’ in the sense that your car’s alternator is hidden unless you open the hood.

WIRED hired independent video forensics experts, who examined the DOJ video and discovered various metadata. The metadata showed that, rather than being exported straight from the prison’s surveillance system, the “raw” video footage was modified, more than once, probably with a professional editing tool called Adobe Premiere Pro. Wired said the file appears to be assembled from at least two source clips, was saved multiple times, exported from Adobe as a single file, and then uploaded to the DOJ’s website, where —importantly— it was presented to the world as “unedited” footage.

For my cherished Northwestern town readers, which today shall remain nameless: If a particular video is somehow important to establish some desired fact, like the fact that somebody wasn’t murdered in their prison cell, and that video is presented in court as the real deal, the unvarnished, unalloyed, undisturbed truth, to constitute proof of non-homicide, and the offeror never says “well, we did mess with it a little,” then the recipients are entitled expect something called authenticity. The genuine article. The real McCoy.

And if later on, the recipient hands the video evidence to an expert who concludes “this is a badly drawn cartoon,” the recipient can assume the video’s offeror was trying to deceive them. The burden shifts to the video’s offeror, who now has a massive bit of ’splaining to do: they must persuasively prove why they edited the video and why they didn’t disclose tampering with it in the first place. They must produce the unedited version. They must now disclose everything and try to somehow explain away all their ‘well-intended’ edits.

“If a lawyer brought me this file and asked if it was suitable for court, I’d say no. Go back to the source. Do it right,” Wired’s digital forensic expert said. “Do a direct export from the original system—no monkey business.” The DOJ’s “raw” video’s metadata included references to at least two different Adobe project files and two specific source clips with different dates.

If this happened during a trial, the judge might even allow ultra-rare mid-trial discovery, so the recipient’s lawyers could take depositions, scrutinize hard drives, and so forth. You can bet that motion would be filed, at least.

Then, even if the video offerer could prove all those new things, the edited video would still be thrown out of the offeror’s case as inauthentic, and be handed right over to the recipient as admissible impeachment evidence for convincing the jury that the video’s offeror is a liar. It would then be up to the offeror to convince they jury they didn’t lie, not exactly, not on purpose. It would be a major credibility crisis.

So, it’s technically true that the altered video is not proof of an intent to deceive, but in a trial, it would allow a legal presumption of the offeror’s intent to deceive.

🔥 Wired was more than fair. It suggested, without prompting, various scenarios where the DOJ might have cleaned up the video for public consumption with good motives. DOJ said that a missing minute was just an automatic nightly break in the feed. That might explain the two clips. “But the absence of a clear explanation for the processing of the file using professional editing software,” Wired admitted, “complicates the Justice Department’s narrative.”

It’s complicated. Complications are just what you don’t need when defusing a conspiracy theory.

The problem is, the DOJ released two versions of the video: one labeled “enhanced,” and one labeled “raw footage.” You see where this is going. The “raw” version was the one Wired examined. “Raw” means “unedited.”

The DOJ could now just release the real raw footage, in however many files it takes. They could. But at this point, folks will still wonder whether even a new version isn’t just a better compilation of clips.

Here’s the weirdest part: The metadata could easily have been scrubbed. There’s even a check box to wipe metadata right in the Adobe export screen. Or you could just play the video while screen-capturing, and save the screengrab. A user sophisticated enough to use Adobe Pro would surely know how to scrub the metadata in many different ways.

In other words, if DOJ meant to deceive, they had tools to produce a far better deception. Were they sloppy? Or did they want to get caught? What do you think?

🔥🔥🔥

Last week, the New York Times ran an amusing story headlined, “Trump Says NATO Countries Will Buy Weapons to Give to Ukraine.” If NATO wants so badly to keep Ukraine on a gunpowder IV drip, fine, let them pay for it.

“We’re sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons, 100 percent,” President Trump told NBC News. “The weapons are going to NATO, and then NATO is going to be giving those weapons” to Ukraine, he said, adding, “And NATO is paying for those weapons.”

Alternatively, under the proposed plan, allies can give their own weapons systems to Ukraine, and then buy replacements from American defense manufacturers. Replacements can be painfully slow. The Grey Lady reported that Germany just gave Ukraine eight of its Patriot Missile Defense systems —retailing $1 billion each— and ordered new ones from Raytheon. The replacements are scheduled for delivery in 2029.

While it’s true that the US contributes a lot of money to NATO, and those funds would presumably be used to buy US weapons for Kyiv under the plan, our money is already committed, no matter what. So, instead of paying for salaries, junkets, planning cruises, Swiss retreats, sexy assistants, or whatever, NATO will have to prioritize its own budget. And recall that the other NATO countries recently agreed to up their own contributions, reducing the overall burden on the United States.

In other words, Trump made a deal, a deal that will result in money flowing into the US Treasury and our economy. Since neither Russia nor Ukraine show any sign of wanting to quit fighting, Trump is monetizing the war.

🔥🔥🔥

On Saturday, PBS ran a tariff dashboard story headlined, “Trump announces 30% tariffs against Mexico and European Union beginning Aug. 1.” Northwestern town residents: That’s in two weeks.

Over the weekend, Trump unleashed a bunch of new tariff letters on Truth Social, simultaneously delivered, one assumes, to the unlucky recipients, who are probably feeling like ‘gently used’ punching bags at this point. Including Saturday’s letters, Trump has now issued new tariff conditions to 24 individual countries plus the 27-member European Union bloc.

The three letters generating the most headlines were his letters to Canada (35%), Mexico (30%), and the European Union (30%).

President Trump first thanked Mexico for helping shutter the Southern Border. Still, we have a fentanyl problem. “Mexico has been helping me secure the border, BUT, what Mexico has done, is not enough,” Trump demanded. In his letter to the E.U., the President explained to Brussels, “Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal.”

The trading partners are freaking out, especially the Europeans. “If the tariffs do indeed take effect,” PBS explained, “the potential impact on Europe could be vast.” The problem seems to be that they are taking too long to make deals. Trump already paused his original Liberation Day tariffs for three months, yet most countries are still holding out for better terms. They are probably hoping the courts will shut Trump down if they wait long enough.

Trump is obviously boiling the frogs. I don’t mean the French, that would be racist, though apparently it was the Dutch who, back in the 1600’s, first started calling them “frog eaters.” It’s something about arrogant French people loving frog legs and sneering at other people who prefer fried potatoes instead of leaping reptiles.

You know, freedom fries.

What I mean instead is, Trump first grabbed their attention with insanely high Liberation Day taxes, backed off, and now seems to be slowly turning up the heat. There’s an old saying about how, if you drop frogs into nice warm water, then turn the flame up very, very slowly, eventually the frogs will volunteer to fund Zelensky’s artillery hobby with their own baguette money. Or words to that effect. You get the idea.

🔥 Related: maybe, after all, Trump won’t TACO. This morning, the Times ran a narrative-crushing story headlined, “Bluffs and Bluster Aside, Trump’s Tariffs Are Here to Stay.”

“President Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have prompted investors to bet that he will ‘always chicken out,’” the Times reported, but “events of the past week have cast serious doubt on that bet.” They are finally beginning to recognize that the President is making history. “While the president may ultimately give way on some of his most recent threats,” the story continued, “he has still steadily and dramatically raised tariffs to levels not seen in a century.”

Here’s the thing: “even if some deals are reached,” the Times said, “American tariffs on trading partners are still likely to rise significantly.” In other words, even though China, Britain, and Vietnam have all done deals, all three countries now face permanent, double-digit tariffs.

It’s already working across the board. “Since Mr. Trump came into office in January,” the article said, “the average effective U.S. tariff rate has soared to 16.6 percent from 2.5 percent.” And the inflation that the experts gloomily predicted has yet to appear on stage. “While economic data shows that tariffs have begun to push up prices for some goods, overall consumer price inflation has remained muted,” the Times conceded.

What happens next is anybody’s guess, and the corporate media is bursting with pundit-industrial-complex-fueled speculation. Will he TACO? Will the EU deploy its trade-war nuclear option? Who knows. But from up here in the cheap seats —top row, feet on the rail, fried frog legs in hand— it’s all vastly entertaining.

🔥🔥🔥

Last week, Realtor.com ran an exciting story headlined, “Marjorie Taylor Greene Shares Plans To Eliminate the Home Equity Tax: A ‘Gift to the American People.’” On Thursday, Representative Greene (R-Ga.) introduced the No Tax on Home Sales Act, a bill to eliminate the federal capital gains tax on the sale of a primary residence. That was right after solving Dr. Moore’s terrifying DOJ problem. I just love that woman.

This is how you do it. Nibble away at the taxes one tiny bite at a time. Tips, Social Security, overtime, and now, hopefully, capital gains on homestead sales.

If you’ve never run into it, this particular tax is one of the most hated and feared taxes around. When people finally sell their homes —very often retired seniors— they are often horrified to discover that the United States government wants a big piece of the action. When you sell, every dollar above what you paid gets taxed as capital gains income (subject to complicated exceptions that don’t apply to most people).

Since primary homes are most Americans’ largest investment (guilty), and since real estate values slowly appreciate —if for no other reason than inflation— if you keep your home longer than five years, you almost certainly get hit with the tax. The longer you stay in your home, the bigger the ultimate tax bill gets.

Some people get house-locked —trapped in aging homes, unable to move closer to grandkids or downsize— because they can’t afford the IRS’s cut. If they’ve already taken money out, such as through home equity loans, the taxes could even exceed whatever they net from the sale. Even if they walk away with a little cash after tax, it’s often not enough to buy a new house— especially in today’s market.

Greene said, “They just say it’s not worth it for people to pay that capital gains penalty and then not be able to replace the home they have.” Her bill is refreshingly simple. It is one sentence: “Gross income shall not include gain from the sale of a principal residence.”

By limiting her new proposed tax exemption to principal homesteads, Greene smartly excluded real estate investors and flippers. That makes her bill much more politically palatable. Democrat retirees own homes, too.

It’s political genius, especially as the midterm battles heat up. It drives yet another wedge into Democrats’ coalition— this one between the anti-wealth activists and retirement-age homeowners. Even Bernie Bros have Boomer parents.

Let me know what you think.

Have a terrific Monday! My dear procrastinators: here’s Dr. Moore’s donation link again! Do it now! Then, swivel back around tomorrow morning, for even more delicious essential news and commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com