☕️ MALUM PROHIBITUM ☙ Wednesday, March 11, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

FBI's four secret spy ops buried in ghost files, but now they're out; CBS finds 89 hospices in a single small building; Oil returns to under $90; More big corps, Starbucks founder left the blue; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup today includes: the FBI ran not one but FOUR secret spy operations against Trump spanning nine years and four administrations — and buried the evidence in files that literally don’t exist in searches; Bari Weiss’s CBS commits actual journalism by finding a single LA building with 89 registered hospice companies (and patients who never seem to die); oil prices crash back under $90 just one day after CNN predicted doom, while Trump announces the first new US oil refinery in fifty years; and the Great Blue State Exodus accelerates as Washington passes a millionaires tax while Starbucks’s founder posts his farewell to Seattle from the departure lounge.

⛑️ C&C ARMY POST ⛑️

The Mike Rowe Podcast episode that I taped a couple of weeks ago is up! Here’s the link from Spotify. Enjoy, I think it was a great one, maybe one of the best yet. (The video version on YouTube isn’t uploaded yet, but should be up soon. I’ll let you know.)

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Independent media is having a moment. Remember Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the RussiaGate illusion Obama and Hillary cooked up that led to the Mar-a-Lago raid? Turns out it was only the beginning. Yesterday, John Solomon’s Just the News broke the story as an exclusive, headlined, “Trump targeted by four FBI code-named counterintel probes that ensnared hundreds of Americans.” Four! Corporate media completely ignored it, but early this morning (Q followers: at 12:57am, in case that means anything), President Trump reposted the story on Truth Social without comment.

Beginning in the summer of 2016, at the precise moment Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Obama’s FBI launched a counterintelligence operation against him. They were having such a great time. The first operation was code-named Crossfire Hurricane, named after a Rolling Stones song with the upbeat lyrics ‘it’s a gas, gas, gas.’

The party was just getting started. Crossfire Hurricane was only the opening act.

Over the next four years of the Biden Autopen regime, the FBI ran three more domestic spying operations —using tools meant for terrorists and spies— against Trump and Republicans. They were each called: Round River, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost. The ops ran sequentially, each successive “probe” starting as the prior one concluded, so that the spying continued in a single glorious, uninterrupted arc from the summer of 2016 until the final hour of the Biden administration on January 20, 2025, literally right up to President Trump’s inauguration.

Ten years. A whole decade of constitutional abuse. It wasn’t really four different operations. It was one ten-year operation, code-named “Spy on Republicans.”

Each successive operation swelled in size as the domestic surveillance increased. The final op, Arctic Frost, targeted nearly 400 conservative groups and thousands of Americans, including 1,200 persons specifically identified as being in “protected First Amendment categories” like lawmakers, defense lawyers, filmmakers, and journalists.

The article reported that “officials said the two middle operations, Round River and Plasmic Echo,” which sound like names for Dollar Store scented candles, “are just beginning to be declassified so Congress can be fully read in, and may produce some of the most troubling abuses.” These will be new, never-before-seen scandals.

At least a dozen members of Congress and their staffers were swept up in surveillance. Eight sitting Republican senators were surveilled. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called it “unconstitutional overreach that makes Watergate look like jaywalking.” Trump’s future White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, was targeted. A political consultant’s emails were penetrated via a classified subpoena two weeks after joining the 2024 Trump campaign— the subpoena captured, verbatim, “correspondence on The Trump Campaign’s private strategies and deliberations.”

Since the subpoenas were classified, the targets had no way to challenge them or even know about them. Judges signed off on them, too. (That’s a whole different problem. According to various reports, between 1979 and 2023, the secret FISA court judges denied only 12 FBI applications out of forty-two thousand.)

Kash Patel himself was surveilled (ironically, by the same FBI that he now runs). At least 1,200 Americans specifically identified in constitutionally protected categories were subjected to warrants, wiretaps, phone record analysis, or grand juries. The ugliest part is that the records of the four operations were all stamped “prohibited access” and kept out of FBI computer systems (paper only), and hidden from most rank-and-file FBI agents themselves.

According to the article, Director Patel has assigned a small team of agents to hunt for the files and uncover abuses, assisted by a handful of senior executives who can navigate the bureau’s Byzantine storage systems and unearth well-buried evidence.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told John Solomon that criminal charges are “indeed possible” under the Klan Act’s conspiracy against rights charge, which she noted “dates back to the start of the Ku Klux Klan.” The article noted that the FBI has been working with a grand jury in South Florida since last summer.

In 1975, the Church Commission found the CIA’s “Family Jewels”— hidden internal memos describing decades of unconstitutional abuse. That discovery led to the only major intelligence reform in American history: oversight committees, the (useless) FISA court, and a ban on assassinations. “Prohibited Access” is our generation’s Family Jewels scandal— except this time, the hidden files don’t describe what the FBI was doing to foreigners.

They describe what the FBI did to an American president, his allies, his lawyers, four hundred conservative groups, and thousands of his fellow citizens. In 1975, Congress publicly investigated the CIA. In 2020, the FBI began secretly investigating Congress. The party in power —the Democrats— weaponized the justice system against its domestic political opponents. If this story were about Turkey or Brazil, the New York Times would easily identify it as “banana republic tactics.” If it bothered.

This kind of thing is literally the hallmark of authoritarian governance. It is a full-blown constitutional crisis. A lot of books will be written about this.

Matt Taibbi at Racket News broke the ugliest story: Prohibited Access files aren’t just classified. They’re ghosts. When an agent searches for them in Sentinel, the system returns a false negative— it doesn’t say “access denied,” it says the file doesn’t exist. The FBI confirmed this to Congress: “search terms that exist in Prohibited Access-status cases … will receive a false-negative Sentinel search response.”

That’s not a ‘security measure.’ Don’t make me laugh. It’s a cover-up architecture.

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi uncovered that there are no written rules for transferring knowledge of these files between administrations. It’s described as an oral tradition, passed down among senior officials, independent of agents below and political appointees above. An oral tradition! As though it were a family cookie recipe. For files that don’t officially exist.

🔥 For nine consecutive years, the FBI treated an elected President of the United States as a national security threat. The operations ran through four administrations — Obama, Trump’s first term, Joe the Cabbage, and into Trump’s second. That means the FBI maintained continuous surveillance of a sitting president during his own presidency. The executive branch was spying on the head of the executive branch. That’s not a rogue operation. That’s a parallel government.

Then someone buried those files in an illegal filing system to ensure nobody could ever find them. It would be funny if it weren’t so offensive. The FBI’s job is to find things, not hide them from itself.

Running off-books operations against Americans is a very strange way of protecting National Security. To say the least.

Calling it the “biggest political scandal in American history” feels inadequate since that phrase has been rendered meaningless by overuse. But for nine consecutive years, through four administrations and four code-named operations, the FBI treated the once and future President of the United States as an enemy of the state. Someone in the bureau stamped those files so nobody could find them. But we found them anyway.

In the end, they failed at failing. Their secret filing system is seeing the light. Four code names, nine years, piles of burn bags, uncounted secret SCIFs, and the only thing they caught was their own gluteus maximus. This cannot possibly stand without a forceful answer. Prepare for the Reckoning.™

🔥🔥🔥

Real investigative journalism is back. The nation is healing. Yesterday, CBS ran a long-form, 3-D, multimedia style article headlined, “CBS News Investigation: Hundreds of LA hospices have multiple indicators of fraud.”

Remember when corporate media mocked Nick Shirley for doing exactly this kind of shoe-leather fraud journalism — walking into buildings, knocking on doors, finding empty offices? Now CBS is doing it. The only difference is its new news editor, Bari Weiss.

Since Weiss took over at CBS News, something remarkable has been happening: a legacy network is once again committing acts of journalism. Weiss personally tweeted about the hospice investigation —“Incredible investigation today from @CBSNews”— with 36,000 likes. Finally, a news CEO who isn’t hiding from her reporters’ work but rather showcasing it.

This matters because the hospice fraud story has been sitting in plain sight for years. Dr. Oz started shouting about it in January. The numbers were already public — the explosive growth from 300 to 2,500 facilities, the billions in suspicious billing, the organized crime connections. Any news network could have sent a reporter to that building with 89 hospice companies in it. But only one did.

And it’s the one run by the journalist who left the New York Times because she thought the paper had stopped doing its job.

CBS noticed that 18% of all Medicare home health billing in America comes from one California county. Los Angeles County has 1,923 hospice providers — more than 36 other states combined. That’s 33 times more than senior-seasoned Florida, despite Florida being America’s retirement capital. One very hard-working doctor is listed as the clinical director for forty-five hospices.

Those numbers have been sitting in the data for years. Someone either wasn’t looking, or they were choosing not to look. Neither option is complimentary.

“CBS News reached out to the 56 hospice offices whose state and federal data indicate they have five or more red flags,” the article reported. “Many of the phone numbers were either disconnected or went straight to voicemail.” It continued, “The CBS News analysis reveals that over 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospices in LA County trigger multiple red flags for fraud as defined by the state.”

CBS’s reporter also found that, in many LA hospices, the patients are immortal. They never kick the bucket. Court records show hospices billing Medicare for 18 months or longer for patients who weren’t terminal. The whole point of hospice is that the patient is dying. If nobody’s dying, it’s not hospice— it’s a subscription service.

When Dr. Oz pointed out Russian-Armenian organized crime involvement, Governor Newsom didn’t prosecute the fraud; he filed a civil rights complaint against Dr. Oz alleging racism. Because this country’s vile history of discrimination against Armenians is well-known.

It’s still early. One investigation doesn’t make a reformation. But if you want to know what it looks like when a news organization starts prioritizing reporting over narrative cultivation, these are the first baby steps: a CBS reporter standing in front of an empty office with dead phone lines and mail piling up on the floor, asking the question that billions in welfare fraud should have prompted years ago.

See? All it takes to get news platforms to actually investigate government waste, fraud, and abuse is installing a Republican president over the hurdle of four secret FBI spying operations. Two systems designed to prohibit discovery. Both now disclosed to the people the system was attempting to exclude. Irony.

🚀🚀🚀

First up in our war news update: yesterday’s Times of Israel reported, “US military says it destroyed 16 Iranian minelaying vessels Tuesday in Strait of Hormuz.” At 8:07 pm EDT, President Trump posted to Truth Social that if Iran placed mines in the Strait of Hormuz, American forces would respond with consequences the world had “never seen before.”

By 9:17 pm, seventy minutes after Trump’s Truth Social post, sixteen Iranian ships capable of laying mines crashed into the ocean floor. It might be a world record. No mines were apparently laid. Instead, the Iranian Navy laid an egg.

That incredible effort by the American Navy did not stop panicked people from doomcrying for an hour between 8:07 and 9:17 pm. This is it! Iran’s mines will shut the Strait! It’s all over! The New York Times quickly excreted a story about how Iran was using small, untrackable boats loaded with 2-3 mines each and … Then it was abruptly over.

Welp, never mind.

🚀 Next, oil prices have plunged back down, well under the magic $100 a barrel mark. This morning’s market lists Brent Crude at $89 a barrel, defying pessimistic projections —including, sadly, among many conservative commentators— that high oil prices would sink the Trump presidency faster than an Iranian minelayer. Story in two headlines. CNN, Monday:

One day later… Yesterday, Politico:

This is almost exactly like the Great Tariff Panic of 2025. Except faster. Gosh. It’s almost like there was a plan. LTMW!

🚀 Politico’s story conceded okay, they have it under control for now but sneeringly suggested it will catch up with them soon! In other words: Trump is somehow barely managing to cling on, but don’t worry, Iran’s invisible Ayatollah will soon show those pesky Americans a thing or two.

Not so fast, mon amie. First, this morning the Wall Street Journal reported, “IEA Proposes Largest Ever Oil Release From Strategic Reserves.” The International Energy Agency is a group of 32 countries, including mostly advanced economies in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, such as the United States, Japan, France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, South Korea, and others.

The world’s nations are queuing up to help. Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said the country would unilaterally release oil from its strategic reserves as soon as March 16. “We must send a very clear message,” France’s Finance Minister Roland Lescure said. “If we can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz right away, we will replace it with other oil.”

IEA member countries hold 1.2 billion barrels in public stocks, plus another 600 million in mandatory commercial inventories, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said Monday. The Journal did math, and calculated that comes to around 124 days’ worth of lost supply from the Gulf.

🚀 Next— surprise! Saudi Arabia activated an unused pipeline it apparently had just laying around, and will divert its oil cross-country to avoid the Strait of Hormuz altogether. Barron’s reported, “How Saudi Aramco Plans to Move Oil Without the Strait of Hormuz.”

The Saudis built the pipeline in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. It’s not a complete fix, since their Red Sea port handles less capacity. But it’s another piece in the mitigation puzzle.

🚀 But what about the long term? Yesterday, Spectrum News reported, “President Trump announces first new U.S. oil refinery to open in Brownsville.” The last oil refinery built in the United States was completed in 1976— Jaws (the first one) was in theaters, and it was two years before disco peaked and five years before the first IBM personal computer. Now the creaky apparatus of oil production is getting a tune-up.

For fifty years, the United States has been unable to build a single new oil refinery despite producing more oil than any country on Earth, having an enormous surplus of light shale oil, and having more lawyers, engineers, and capital than most continents combined. The reason, as I understand it, is related to a pipeline of paperwork.

“For years, investors believed building a new refinery in the United States was impossible,” said Nick Ayers, a former Assistant to the President who is joining America First Refining. “What changed was leadership and policy.”

Construction of the historic facility begins next month. Get this: India not only invested up front in building the plant, but has also agreed to buy long-term production for twenty years. In other words, the capital is surging back into the United States, for once. TAW.

🚀 Ironically, Trump’s moves to shore up oil production while the Iran war continues could conceivably result in record-low oil prices once the shooting stops. This week’s wild fluctuations in price-per-barrel —Brent crude spiked to $120 and then crashed back below $90 in forty-eight hours— don’t reflect real supply issues. Nobody actually ran out of oil.

The recent price spikes reflect market fears about future supply constraints, with traders betting on worst-case scenarios that haven’t materialized yet. In other words, the price spike isn’t real.

But the Administration’s responses to it are very real.

On Monday, Trump announced the first new American oil refinery in fifty years. Every president since then —Republican and Democrat alike— let the regulatory state strangle new refinery construction while simultaneously complaining about gas prices. Trump just uncorked the bottle. Simultaneously, the IEA proposed its largest-ever strategic reserve release —more historic moves— flooding the market with supply and helping drive prices back under $90 almost overnight. OPEC, sensing the shifting winds, has been quietly increasing production quotas.

Here’s what corporate media is missing: all of these moves compound. A new refinery doesn’t just add supply once— it adds permanent domestic refining capacity for decades. Strategic reserve releases calm the market for months. And Trump’s energy-dominance executive orders from January are still working their way through the pipeline, accelerating permits for drilling, LNG exports, and exploration on federal land. (Don’t worry, Elizabeth Warren is being relocated off her tribal lands.)

Just connect the dots. The Iran war spiked oil prices based on fear. Trump took advantage of that fear to trigger a massive policy response: new refineries, reserve releases, and accelerated domestic production. When the war ends, probably much sooner than the panickans worry, the fear premium will evaporate.

But all those new supply-side responses won’t evaporate with it. They’ll stay. Which means we could end up with more supply than before the war started, chasing the same demand, at prices even lower than anyone currently projects.

The traders who panicked on Monday might discover they were the cause of cheaper gas by summer. Deliciously ironic.

🔥🔥🔥

For years, conservative economists have tried to explain a concept to progressive legislators that, in fairness, does require a basic understanding of human behavior: if you punish people for making money, they leave. This is apparently a difficult concept. But reality is a patient teacher. This week, Washington State’s House passed a 9.9% income tax on millionaires after a 24-hour legislative marathon. Fox 13 Seattle reported, “WA House passes ‘millionaires tax’ after 24-hour debate session.”

The vote was close: 51-46. Eight Democrats defected. Washington was one of the few states in America with no income tax. Was.

State Representative Joshua Tenner warned his colleagues on the House floor: “This is not a tax on millionaires. This is a tax on all of us. It’s just a matter of when.” Rep. Jim Walsh added, “I’m deeply concerned that by changing our traditions, and changing our taxes and changing our culture, we are going to chase the next revolution away.”

Governor Bob Ferguson (D) gushed that the vote was “historic” and pointed out the tax would apply to less than one-half of one percent of people in the state. Which is true; but it also describes exactly the half of one percent that funds everything else, and which can most easily afford moving trucks.

Washington’s new tax doesn’t even take effect until 2029. Start the countdown.

The countdown has already begun elsewhere. Here’s what’s happening in the other direction:

• Yamaha Motor Co. is leaving California after almost fifty years, and relocating its U.S. headquarters from Cypress to Kennesaw, Georgia. The company cited “structural reforms” aimed at increasing profitability, which is corporate-speak for we did the math and Georgia won.

• Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks from a single Seattle storefront into an iconic global empire. Last week, he moved his family office to Miami. The company is opening a new major corporate office in Nashville, Tennessee. Last week, the official line was “we’re expanding, not moving.” The founder just left town.

• Exxon Mobil, incorporated in New Jersey since 1882, is asking shareholders to vote on redomiciling to Texas. Conservative influencer Steve Guest tweeted, “If Democrat-run states like New Jersey had an expressly stated goal to drive business out of their state, they wouldn’t be doing anything different than what they’re doing.” Exxon joins Tesla, Coinbase, and a growing list of companies that have reincorporated from blue states to Texas. A hundred and forty-four years of incorporation —through two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the invention of the automobile— and progressive tax policy finally broke the camel’s back.

The pattern is becoming so consistent it barely qualifies as news anymore. Blue state raises taxes. Companies and wealthy residents announce they’re leaving. Blue state loses the tax base it was trying to squeeze. Blue state raises taxes again to cover the shortfall. More people leave. Lather, rinse, repeat— until you’re Detroit.

If anything, the pace seems to be accelerating. Something is changing. Exxon has finally had it, after 144 years. Ditto Yamaha, after 50 years. This isn’t a trickle anymore; it’s starting to look like the Great Pandemic Migration all over again— except this time, people aren’t fleeing a virus. They’re fleeing Democrats.

Remember 2020-2021? U-Haul ran out of one-way trucks leaving California. Florida and Texas gained over a million residents each between 2020 and 2024. New York and California hemorrhaged population for the first time in decades. At the time, progressive platforms insisted it was a temporary Covid blip— people just wanted sunshine and space during lockdowns, and they’d race right back.

They didn’t race back. They stayed. And now the companies and CEOs are following.

The blue states that used Covid lockdowns to show their residents exactly how much control the government wanted over their lives are now discovering the long-term cost of that lesson. Turns out, once you teach people that the government sees them as a resource to be managed, they figure out they need a new manager.

Somewhere, an economist is banging his head against a Laffer Curve. They never learn.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Make sure you’re back here tomorrow morning, for the latest amusing installment of essential news and commentary. See you then.

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