☕️ LET THEM CRANK ☙ Saturday, July 25, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A paper bag in Honolulu, $38 million in covid contracts, and the buried reason state-level indictments suddenly started. Plus: The Science™ gets cranky about customs forms. And even more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Greetings from (very) Sunny Florida, and welcome to the Weekend Edition. Your roundup includes: Your roundup includes: a sitting Lieutenant Governor indicted over covid testing contracts, which the New York Times filed under local color; the four Hawaii Democrats who went down with her, one of whom is currently unreachable in the Philippines; why state-level corruption prosecutions suddenly started happening everywhere at once, and the small D.C. office that spent decades making sure they didn't; a $22.5 million mountain of covid tests the state bought, never opened, and then paid extra to get rid of; CNN's discovery that federal scientists find customs declarations oppressive; the NIH researcher who allegedly carried monkeypox through Detroit and assured agents it was nothing; corporate media's designated victim, who also happens to be the only man in the story formally barred from taking federal research money; and the British broadsheet that finally broke ranks on Senator Paul's Slack messages — along with the one sentence from a molecular biologist that quietly demolishes twenty years of gain-of-function funding arguments.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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You had to scroll all the way down this morning’s New York Times web page to find it, but the story reported, “Hawaii Lt. Gov. Is Indicted in Corruption Investigation.” The short article is almost mind-numbingly boring, packed with passive-tense, soft verbs, and a distinct absence of outrage. Maybe the reserved tone was because the indictments were more Democrats, including the highest-ranking Democrat official under indictment yet.

The Times may have downplayed it and gone light on details, but the real story emerges when you actually dig into the local Hawaii sources, and it is a doozy. It’s a tale of cash in envelopes, secret dinners at Morton’s Steakhouse, and —unsurprisingly— lucrative covid testing contracts. Pandemic connection— check.

On Friday, an Oahu grand jury indicted Hawaii’s sitting Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke (D) on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, and falsifying candidate committee reports. To put this in perspective: the Lieutenant Governor is one step below a sitting U.S. Governor. Luke has long been considered the “Governor in waiting,” widely expected to take over that job next.

You’d never know it from the dull “local interest” story’s framing, but this is one of the Trump 2.0 DOJ’s highest state-level prosecutions yet.

Also —though you’d never know it from the headline— Luke didn’t go down alone. The grand jury indicted four more individuals, all top Hawaii Democrats or party insiders. Including: Ryan Yamane, the former director of the Department of Human Services under current Democrat Governor Josh Green; Ford Fuchigami, the state’s Airport Administrator; Leo Asunción, former chair of the Public Utilities Commission and Luke’s campaign treasurer; and Tobi Solidum, a businessman and lobbyist who suddenly departed for an extended Philippines holiday on conveniently short notice. (Portlanders: that means he fled.)

Back in January 2022, when Luke was the powerful chair of the House Finance Committee, she attended a swanky private dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse in Honolulu. Also at the table were Tobi Solidum and state Rep. Ty Cullen. What they didn’t know was that Cullen had already been busted for bribery, flipped, and was wearing an FBI wire.

The gist of the dinner’s tabletop conversation was that Mr. Solidum needed the state health department and the legislature to approve emergency funding for his client company’s lucrative, no-bid covid testing contracts. He assured Lt. Gov. Luke, “By next week we’ll have 35 — so it will be halfway to our 70.” That’s $35,000 down, $70,000 total— for public health.

The U.S. Attorney described the initial payment as being delivered “in a paper bag.” Hawaii’s DHS Director Ryan Yamane, meanwhile, was allegedly stuffing cash in envelopes and texting Solidum using brilliant spy codes like, “have 1500 and wanted to pick up another 1k here. Mel will leave cash in Manila for you.” Masterminds at work.

The buried lede that the New York Times completely ignored is that this wasn’t just about a $35,000 paper bag. The real money was in the covid contracts. Solidum’s consulting business was paid more than $7 million just for “consulting” on overpriced covid testing contracts, plus another $1 million ‘dividend,’ to make a round $8 mil. Mr. Solidum, who remains at large in the Philippines, recently transferred his real estate, and moved all his bank accounts offshore:

Only $70,000 in cash political donations traded for $8 million in covid consulting fees for Solidum and a $30.5 million test contract for his client. Not bad for a week’s work! But wait. It gets better.

The National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii —Tobi Solidum’s NGO client— charged taxpayers wildly above-market prices for covid tests (up to $166 per test, when the national average was $62), with zero competitive bidding because pandemic emergency rules suspended normal procurement policies.

Even more laughably, at the time Solidum’s client got its lucrative contract, the State of Hawaii was sitting on $22.5 million in covid tests it bought in 2020 for $30 each. It never used any of them. Later, it paid a contractor $63,000 to destroy them all. One Hawaiian doctor noted, “If anyone else in the state had wasted $22 million, heads would roll. This is unconscionable.”

🚨 The pandemic emergency created a $54 million federal funding stream, and Hawaii’s uniparty Democrat machine built a not-very-subtle private extraction operation around it. The $70,000 was just the grease for the gears.

Right before she was indicted, Lt. Gov. Luke released a statement strenuously claiming she had “never granted special favors to a contributor” and had “prized integrity and honesty above all.” Irony alert!

Lt. Gov. Luke surrendered to law enforcement early last evening and promptly posted $80,000 bail.

Governor Josh Green issued a wishy-washy statement: “The Lieutenant Governor needs to consider formally resigning.” She’s not considering it. In another ironic wrinkle, Green’s own DHS Director, Ryan Yamane, was among the indicted. He stepped down in May when subpoenas began flying. Yamane:

Local affiliate KHON2’s political analyst, John Hart, explained why the Governor can’t fire the Lt. Gov. Hart said, “In the Hawaii system, they didn’t get elected together. They were on a ticket, but they ran separately. So constitutionally, he can’t tell her to resign.”

Hart added, “I think her political career is probably at an end at this point, regardless of whether she’s convicted or not.” Headline from Hawaii’s Civil Beat, yesterday:

And thus, the Democrats’ bench shrinks again. Polycrisis.

🚨 This leads us to a larger point about Trump 2.0’s Department of Justice. While many in the MAGA base are still spreading “waiting for someone to get arrested” memes, high-profile, state-level arrests are happening all over the country.

How? The Trump administration systematically dismantled the so-called “ethical” gatekeepers in D.C. The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section —which historically acted as a brake and a bottleneck, protecting favored politicians and shutting down local investigations— was slashed from 36 lawyers down to just two. The long-standing requirement that local prosecutors consult with D.C. before indicting any local political figures was suspended.

By removing the federal roadblock, the Trump DOJ effectively unleashed state-level corruption prosecutions. The Hawaii case, for example, is being prosecuted by the state Attorney General’s Special Investigation and Prosecution Division, using evidence provided by the feds.

We are watching this exact same dynamic play out in California. Governor Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, was indicted on 23 counts of bank and wire fraud and recently pleaded guilty. She was caught funneling $225,000 from a dormant campaign account belonging to Xavier Becerra, and claiming $1.7 million in fake business expenses to buy consumer luxuries like a $15,000 Chanel bag, chartered private jets, and a $170,000 birthday trip to Mexico (which I would not have believed possible).

Both California and Hawaii are Democrat uniparty states. They never expected anyone would even look at what they were doing. They felt safe. The move they overlooked was DOJ pulling the power out of the so-called “Public Integrity” section.

The California prosecution chain is a thing of classic beauty. Williamson flipped, leading to cooperating witnesses, which led to guilty pleas from prominent Sacramento lobbyists and gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra’s former chief of staff. The investigation is now creeping toward Governor Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who is under DOJ investigation for possible tax fraud. (Newsom, predictably, loudly claims the investigation is a “baseless political witch hunt.”)

We’ve seen this movie before.

Sometimes, bad actors must be prosecuted for relatively banal crimes because those are easiest to prove. It’s the Al Capone strategy. Capone ran a bootlegging empire and ordered the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, but they finally nailed him on tax evasion. Spiro Agnew took bribes in state office before he got to the White House, but he went down on a single count of tax evasion for not reporting the bribes.

The Hawaii Democrats aren’t headed for prison for destroying their state’s economy during the pandemic or imposing draconian lockdowns and mandates. They are going down for passing envelopes of cash around at Morton’s Steakhouse. Gavin Newsom’s inner circle isn’t going down for destroying California. They are going down for buying Chanel bags with stolen campaign funds.

The mechanism doesn’t matter. What matters is that the accountability machine is humming, and corporate media can’t conceal it fast enough. They don’t want to encourage us.

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As a follow-on to yesterday’s special edition about Senator Paul’s electrifying “Proximal Origins” disclosures, we examine CNN’s whiny Wednesday report headlined, “American scientists see prosecutions as part of federal campaign against them.” Poor scientists! This is persecution, dammit!!

As we all know, The Science™ is a majestic, infallible entity, sort of like a surreal combination of Albert Einstein, Gandalf, and a Social Security office clerk. For years, we were told that we must unquestioningly obey The Science™, even when The Science™ told us to stand exactly six feet apart, mask our children while they were running track, and furiously scrub our groceries with bleach.

But lately, one gets the impression that The Science™ has been driving over a bit of a rough road with bad suspension. It turns out that when you start asking The Science™ basic questions —like, “Hey, why did you bring vials of deadly monkeypox on a commercial airplane without telling anyone?”— The Science™ gets cranky.

CNN’s article was a masterclass in unintentional comedy. It framed a completely reasonable expectation —that government scientists shouldn’t smuggle biological pathogens in their carry-on luggage— as a terrifying “federal campaign” of rabid anti-science persecution.

I’ve reported this part of the story before, but let me quickly remind our cherished Portland readers, who, bless them, are doing their best to keep up with the rush of events. The villain is Dr. Vincent Munster (I know; Vincent Price + Herman Munster. You can’t make it up.). Munster is a cheesy infectious disease researcher at the storied National Institutes of Health. Specifically, he works at the highly sus, high-security Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana.

Dr. Munster is apparently the kind of guy who runs over to the Republic of Congo, scrapes up samples of highly dangerous viruses, and hauls them back. This is fine. After all, we want scientists studying these things. Right?

Yes and no, as it turns out. In January this year, Munster and a research fellow named Claude Kwe were stopped by alert CBP staff at the Detroit airport. According to federal prosecutors, they were carrying undisclosed vials of mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox, before the name became racist)— and then they lied to customs agents, claiming the specimens were just for diagnostic use, since they lacked the necessary paperwork for smuggling highly contagious viruses of concern for lab research.

What exactly are they doing with monkeypox in Montana? Inquiring minds want to know; but I digress.

A few months later in June, federal agents rudely arrested the two scientists. They were charged with conspiracy to smuggle mpox into the United States, and of lying to border agents. These are serious charges. But it could be worse. At first they weren’t even worried, since they travel in the justice system’s First Class section. Or at least, they always have before.

If you or I tried to smuggle a deadly pathogen through customs in our luggage, we would currently be residing in a windowless room at Guantanamo Bay, sharing a cell with a tattooed guy nicknamed “Sammy the Strangler.” But because Munster is a Scientist, his colleagues are absolutely appalled that the federal government is suddenly enforcing laws heretofore reserved for the little people.

According to CNN, alarmed scientists across the U.S. are now viewing the Munster arrest —along with other recent crackdowns by the Trump 2.0 Administration— as an attack on their entire profession.

“This just gives ammunition to the people that are trying to stop this valuable research,” complained Kim Hasenkrug, a scientist emeritus at the NIH. “Even people who have trusted us in the past, this sows seeds of distrust. How could it not?”

Yes, Kim. How could it not? It is truly a mystery why the American public might harbor even a teensy sliver of distrust toward federal health officials who lie to customs agents while transporting monkeypox from Congo to Montana on a commercial Delta flight.

Yet CNN went to great lengths to assure everyone that the virus was “inactivated” and therefore posed no threat to the public. So why did they have to lie? Never mind. Daniel Jernigan, a ‘retired’ CDC official, confidently declared that, if the samples were inactive, “the risk is zero.”

Well, that is a relief! I’m sure the passengers on that flight would have been totally fine knowing that the guy in seat 14B was carrying a hundred vials of monkeypox, just so long as he promised it was the “inactive” kind. After all, when has a federal health official ever been wrong about a virus? (Portlanders: please see years 2020-2023.)

But we are learning —sadly, far too late— that scientific adherence to strict customs rules about importing deadly viruses has always been, well, somewhat flexible. Among Senator Paul’s new disclosures last week was the report of a similar CBP interception from 2018— this one involving SARS antibodies, Chinese communists, U. Minn. scientists, and even the bat lady herself:

That 2018 stop —which did not produce any arrests— was just “more ammunition,” I suppose, for “the people trying to stop this valuable research.” If only they had succeeded.

The real comedy here was CNN’s pitiful framing. For years, the biomedical establishment demanded total transparency and absolute compliance from the American public. They wanted to know where we went, who we saw, whether we took the jab, and whether our toddlers were properly muzzled. They tracked our phones and mandated our most basic behaviors, down to and including breathing.

But the moment the federal government demands transparency from them —the moment the DOJ says, “Hey, maybe fill out the proper paperwork before flying with a viral pathogen”— they start screaming hysterically about “witch hunts” and a “campaign against science itself.” (Paging Dr. “Science Itself” Fauci.)

The article noted darkly that the arrests are part of a broader trend. The Trump Administration has suspended research on risky viruses, halted funding for sketchy global pathogen programs, and recently raided the home of David “Moron” Morens, a former top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Morens, you might recall, was caught using his personal email to evade Freedom of Information Act requests.)

The scientific community is clutching its collective scarves in sheer panic. CNN even quoted, and I am not making this up, ‘victim’ Peter Daszak— without mentioning anything about how he is the disgraced and debarred guy whose 2018 EcoHealth grant proposal perfectly described covid’s genetic design three years before the pandemic. CNN should be ashamed, not that its four remaining viewers would notice:

Poor little Peter complained that scientists are being targeted. “We are targets,” another ‘retired’ researcher whined. How could this have happened? CNN blamed, and again, I am not making this up: Laura Loomer. They called her “Trump’s loyalty enforcer.” (It was news to me that Trump needed an enforcer. He seems to do it pretty well on his own. Whatever.) CNN somehow missed its claim’s inherent irony: a single mid-tier social-media influencer is apparently running rings around all the geniuses nesting in the ‘scientific community’ and making them terrified. Stop it, Laura, you’re scaring them.

No, Peter, you aren’t a target. You are just finally being held to the exact same rules, laws, and transparency requirements that apply to the rest of us. And, while I have your attention, you should be in prison. So. But, never mind. We’ll revisit that later. I promise.

The era of the untouchable scientist is over. The shibboleth “important research” is no longer a get-out-of-jail-free card. If you want to study deadly diseases on the taxpayer dime, you must follow the law. You must fill out the forms, morons. You must stop deleting emails. And you absolutely cannot treat commercial airplanes like your personal Petri dish delivery service. Just. Stop. Already.

If this makes The Science™ cranky, well, let them crank.

🔥 In a more directly encouraging update to yesterday’s special edition, after all our noise bringing attention to the story, Senator Paul’s disclosures finally broke through to corporate media (though buried behind a paywall). From yesterday’s UK Telegraph:

“The Telegraph has approached the scientists for comments,” the story teased in its final sentence. Talk about a cliffhanger. Those guys sure have a lot of explaining to do. I wonder whether they’ll start blabbing and come clean, or start rabbiting and go dark? I predict rabbit.

Most surprising of all, the Telegraph’s article was balanced, informative, and even-handed. For instance, it did not make any rhetorical effort to prop up the decaying “natural origins” claim. It quoted some of the spicier parts of the scientists’ Slack messages. It even quoted reactions from legitimate sources sharply critical of the natural-origins theory, like Rutgers’ brilliant molecular biology professor Richard Ebright, who did not pull any punches:

Even more encouraging, scientists who did not lie about the pandemic are beginning to call for investigations and debarments (grant stripping) of the scientists who obviously did. For instance, yesterday’s tweet by MIT/Harvard molecular biologist Alina Chan (75K followers):

While I was in Alina’s channel, I also noticed that she made yesterday perhaps the best point about gain-of-function research for “preparedness purposes” that I’ve ever seen. It’s worth repeating and explaining:

The scientific establishment has long defended dangerous pathogen enhancement research on national security grounds. The argument goes like this: if we engineer more dangerous versions of viruses in the lab now, we will understand them better, develop vaccines faster, and be better prepared when nature produces something similar.

Whoever does the most of this research first gains “biomedical dominance” and can respond to pandemics faster than rivals, develop medical countermeasures faster, and protect their population. It is essentially an arms race framing: we must do it, or else China will, and then they will have the advantage.

This nauseous argument has been used by Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance, and countless others to justify funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus research, including EcoHealth’s DEFUSE proposals to insert the furin cleavage sites —needed to infect humans— into bat coronaviruses. In fact, in 2012, the human cockroach Fauci said (in print!) that, “The benefits gained from the science outweigh the risk of an accidental pandemic.”

But in one short tweet, Alina explained why the WIV was a natural experiment that disproves the “biomedical dominance” justification. If you accept Fauci’s argument that covid was zoonotic (from nature), then why didn’t all the covid preparedness research prepare the WIV to better handle the outbreak?

The WIV conducted 10+ years of intensive SARS-like virus hunting and genetic engineering —even with a roadmap for the furin cleavage modification— which is exactly the kind of GOF work defenders argue confers biomedical dominance. The WIV was the world’s leading institution doing this research. If the theory were correct, the WIV and China should have been the best prepared entity on earth for a SARS-like coronavirus outbreak.

Instead, when covid broke out less than a mile from the best prepared lab in the world, what happened? Did the WIV and EcoHealth scientists spring into action, as subject matter experts who were completely prepared for just this kind of outbreak? Nope. Let’s call it a triple-P failure:

1. They failed to predict the outbreak, despite a decade of studying exactly these viruses. Their ‘early warning system’ did not flag the emerging outbreak in time to stop it.

2. They failed to prevent the outbreak. All that research did not translate into any prophylactic capability or containment advantage.

3. They failed to protect anyone. WIV did not develop any leading vaccines or medical countermeasures. The first or ‘best’ covid vaccines did not come from China; the mRNA vaccines came from Pfizer/Moderna (built on NIH spike protein research) and were considered far superior to China’s Sinovac/Sinopharm offerings. (Okay, vaccine skeptics like me might argue the Chinese jabs were ‘better’ in the sense they were less bad, but the point remains the same. None of it worked.)

Alina’s argument has a second, unstated but implied layer that is even more damning. If GOF research did cause the pandemic (the lab leak hypothesis), then the Wuhan case is even more catastrophic. It would mean the research not only failed to confer biomedical dominance, but it actively caused the exact catastrophe it was supposedly designed to prevent, and then failed to mitigate it.

Either way —whether the pandemic was natural or a lab leak— the WIV’s decade of coronavirus GOF research produced no protective advantage whatsoever. The entire premise of the “biomedical dominance” justification is empirically falsified by the one real-world test case we have. I hope our policy makers are paying attention.

I know the Senator has a lot of ground to cover, and I realize a lot of people are offering him suggestions, but Senator Paul should consider asking Fauci about this triple-P paradox at next week’s deposition. Just saying.

In short: the media’s short-lived embargo on Senator Paul’s disclosures has been broken, and the backlash has begun. We don’t yet know what it means or whether it will grow any legs. But it is extremely suggestive. And it is extreme progress. Things are getting spicy. It’s time to start paying attention again.

Have a wonderful weekend! We’ll return on Monday morning, bright and refreshed, with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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