First Epstein dox only implicate our European betters. Feb. 2026 Ukraine culture change, Chair of Ukraine Parliament submits bill to lower legal age of marriage to 14-Thierry Meyssan

9/6/2025, Ukraine Parliament Chair Stefanchuk (author of bill to lower Ukraine marriage age to 14) with US Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in Canada. “The Chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Ruslan Stefanchuk, met with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2/17/26, “Epstein, Yermak, and Zelensky,” by Thierry Meyssen, Voltaire Net

“While Epstein may have seemed to enjoy committing his crimes, we must not forget that he worked for a secret service, Mossad. The horrors he committed were primarily a means of blackmailing his friends. Although, for the moment, no Ukrainian figure has been directly implicated, numerous elements compel us to investigate who, in Ukraine, supplied children to the Epstein network.”…

[parag. 5]: “We don’t know how the US Department of Justice chose the order in which to release the documents it possesses. For the moment, they only implicate European figures and spare its targets in the United States. Perhaps this is a coincidence, perhaps it’s a way to destabilize allies while waiting for public opinion, disgusted, to tire of the situation….

[parag. 10]: “Among the third of Epstein’s known documents are several Ukrainian passports, but the Department of Justice has redacted the names, addresses, and photos of the holders with whom Epstein associated. Furthermore, other documents attest that Epstein traveled to Kyiv several times and tasked the Frenchman Jean-Luc Brunel with shopping there.

[Image via BBC, 2/21/2022, “Jean-Luc Brunel: Epstein associate found dead in Paris prison cell”]

Brunel was the director of the modeling agencies Karin Models (Paris) and E=MC2 (Miami). He was charged in France with pimping and had the good sense (like Epstein) to “commit suicide” in La Santé prison. Timur Mindich was also the director of the Fire Point modeling agency (Kyiv). However, it is unknown how many young Ukrainian men and women fell into their clutches.

It is in this context that Volodymyr Vatras, a member of the Verkhovna Rada’s (Parliament) Legal Affairs Committee,

submitted a draft reform of the Ukrainian Civil Code on February 6, 2026 [4].

Besides protecting the reputation of those prosecuted for corruption until their final conviction,

this bill lowers the age of marriage to 14.

Let’s be clear about what this means: consequently, any prosecution for child abduction or rape of children aged 14 to 18 will become impossible under other Ukrainian laws. The Ukrainian press refers to this as

“state-sponsored pedophilia“ [5].

Many Ukrainians, relying on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, have launched petitions against this regressive reform [6]. You still haven’t grasped what this is about: this reform will be retroactive and will apply to all events after 2014 (that is, after the Maidan coup). This reform abolishes the provisions of the Ukrainian Penal Code against pedophilia [7].”…

[2/9/26, “The Verkhovna Rada registered a new version of the Civil Code on Jan. 22, formally titled the Code of Private Law. The bill was submitted by Ruslan Stefanchuk, the Chair of the Verkhovna Rada, who described it as the result of nearly six years of work by a recodification group involving hundreds of experts….In a Facebook post marking Ukraine’s Unity Day, Stefanchuk said the 832-page draft was the first full civil code codification submitted by lawmakers of the ninth legislative convocation and aimed to modernize private law in line with European practices.”...”Ukraine’s Top Lawmaker Faces Backlash Over Draft Bill Allowing Marriage at 14,” Kiev Post]

(continuing): “Do you know of any state in the world, today or in the past, that has lowered the age of marriage retroactively? No, of course not.

Let’s remember that the Ukrainian government accuses Russia of having abducted 900,000 children. Moscow, which disputes this figure, argues that it did not capture them, but rather collected them from the battlefield and brought them to Russia to protect them from the war. To date, Ukraine has only released a list of 339 children whose names the Zelensky administration is demanding. Where are the thousands of others?

The answer lies somewhere in the still-secret 6 million pages of the Epstein case.

Hunter Biden’s medical experiments on Ukrainian soldiers outraged you;

the Zelensky clique’s abductions of Ukrainian children will make you sick.

Speaking before the Verkhovna Rada on February 11, MK Inna Sovsun declared: “The standard that the members of the Law Commission are trying to pass, regarding marriage with 14-year-olds, is pure barbarity. It contradicts common sense and European standards. How many other problems there are in this code, we don’t know. Therefore, I join the lawyers’ demands to remove the draft Civil Code from consideration, to examine it carefully again in committee, to discuss it in society, and only then to submit it to Parliament.”

Ruslan Stefanchuk, the Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada and ideologue of the Servant of the People party (Zelensky’s party), invested considerable effort both in drafting this Civil Code and in defending it before his assembly. He is a scientist and educator who has long worked with children. He, too, is implicated in the Midas case. However, all the experts have pointed out that his statements do not correspond to the text as presented. Stefanchuk was in Washington last week. On February 7, he met with Riley M. Barnes, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Rights. He explained at length that no Ukrainian children had «disappeared», but that 900,000 had been captured by Russia.

Upon returning to Kyiv, Ruslan Stefanchuk faced a public outcry. He admitted that, as it stood, he could not submit the draft of the new Civil Code to a parliamentary vote. But the problem that this reform clumsily attempted to bury remains.

We currently know only a third of the Epstein case. When we have more information, we will have to inventory what information he possessed and examine how Israel used it.”

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Roger Lagassé

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[1] «Ексречниця Зеленського розкрила шокувальні подробиці про Єрмака: чим він займався», Ігор Бережанський, Телевізійна Служба Новин, 31 січня 2026 р. (“Zelensky’s former spokeswoman revealed shocking details about Yermak: what he did,” Ihor Berezhansky, Television News Service, January 31, 2026).

[2] “Operation Midas exposes the corruption of the Ukrainian ruling class”, Translation Gregor Fröhlich, Voltaire Network, 14 November 2025. “Zelensky’s Final Days: Implicated in the Trump Attack and the Murder of Charlie Kirk?”, by Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, Translation Roger Lagassé, La Jornada (Mexico) , Voltaire Network, 30 November 2025. « WC en or pour le « portefeuille de Zelensky » et son « agence de mannequins » qui construit des drones », par Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, Traduction Maria Poumier, La Jornada (Mexique) , Réseau Voltaire, 20 novembre 2025

[3] «Єрмак після відставки зустрічався з Камишіним, Умєровим та послом України в Ізраїлі», Надія Собенко, Суспільне Мовлення, 6 лютого 2026 p. ((“After his resignation, Yermak met with Kamyshin, Umerov and the Ukrainian ambassador to Israel,” Nadiya Sobenko, Public Radio and Television, February 6, 2026).

[4] «Проект Цивільного кодексу», Верховна Рада, 6 лютого 2026 р. (“Draft Civil Code”, Verkhovna Rada, February 6, 2026).

[5] «“Державна педофілія”: відомий експерт заявив, що в Україні можуть декримінализувати секс дорослих з 14-річними,», Уляна Виноградова, Блік, 8 лютого 2026 (“State-sponsored pedophilia”: A well-known expert has stated that sexual relations between adults and 14-year-olds could be decriminalized in Ukraine, Ulyana Vinogradova, Blik, February 8, 2026.). «Сексуальний підтекст і “дрімучі норми” Цивільного кодексу: шість суперечностей його нового проєкту», Жанна Безп’ятчук, BBC, 9 лютого 2026 (“Sexuality and norms without consequences : of the Civil Code: six contradictions of his new project, Zhanna Bezpiatchuk, BBC, July 9, 2026.).

[6] For example: «Петиція», Верховна Рада, 6 лютого 2026 р. (« Pétition », Verkhovna Rada, 6 février 2026.). «Проєкт нового Цивільного кодексу: чому норма про шлюб з 14 років викликає занепокоєння», Українська Гельсінська спілка, 6 лютого 2026 (Draft new civil code: why the norm on marriage from the age of 14 is a source of concern, Ukrainian Union of Helsinki, February 6, 2026.).

[7] «Шлюб з 14 років: межа між кримінальним злочином та турботою про неповнолітніх (відео)», Українська Служба Інформації , 11 Лютого 2026 (Marriage at 14: the line between a criminal offense and custody of minors (video), Information Service of Ukraine, February 11, 2026).”

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Ivanka’s parasite husband Jared to meet with great world leader Pres. Putin in Moscow

11/26/25, “Trump says Witkoff, Kushner to meet with Putin in Moscow next week,“ Tass.com

“Donald Trump told reporters that his son-in-law Jared Kushner “is involved in the process” of Ukrainian reconciliation.”

“US President Donald Trump said his Special Envoy Steven Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow next week.

The US leader told reporters that Kushner “is involved in the process” of Ukrainian reconciliation and that he will “maybe” travel to Russia with Witkoff.

“They’re going to be meeting with President Putin, I believe, next week in Moscow,” Trump said.”

 

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Ukraine elites stole $100 million from state-owned nuclear energy company Energoatom. US officials are aware of theft-Voltaire, 11/14/2025

 “The amount of money stolen is believed to exceed $100 million. Each contracting company with Energoatom was required to pay bribes of 10 to 15%.”

11/14/25, “Operation Midas exposes the corruption of the Ukrainian ruling class,“ Voltaire International

“Operation Midas by Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) focused on the state-owned nuclear energy company Energoatom, which has an annual turnover of about $4 billion. On 11 November, five suspects were arrested, while two others (Tymur Mindich and Oleksandr Tsukerman)

have fled the country.

• 70 houses were searched, including that of Herman Halushchenko, Minister of Justice and member of the National Defense and Security Council. He was suspended from his duties by Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko.

• Current secretary of the Defense and National Security Council Rustem Umerov (who accumulates undeclared properties in Florida [1]), has also reportedly been implicated. He is

currently on a trip to Istanbul, Türkiye.

• The same goes for former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernihiv (aka “Che Guevara”), whose whereabouts do not seem to be known at the time [2] .

• The amount of money stolen is believed to exceed $100 million. Each contracting company with Energoatom was

required to pay bribes of 10 to 15%.

The money was allegedly laundered by the office of the former director of Energoatom (2006-2007), Andriy Derkach (who attempted, in 2019, to reveal Hunter Biden’s crimes in Ukraine to Rudy Giuliani). A complete set of black bookkeeping was discovered on site.

• The investigation, which began at the beginning of the year [2025], accelerated in June when the US State Department sent eighty investigators to conduct an audit of Ukraine (see VIN 3630 [3]). US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned at the time that “any irregularity will have consequences”. He made sure then that Ruslan Kravchenko was appointed Prosecutor General of Ukraine. He is now the one in charge of “Operation Midas”.

• The investigators have several hundred hours of phone tapping that leave them in no doubt about who is responsible. The FBI was dispatched to the scene.

• Tymur Mindich (aka “Karlson”) was arrested in June, then released before he left for Israel. He returned to Ukraine in October, before fleeing again on November 11. He is the owner of the Kvartal 95 TV channel,

which he founded with his friend Volodymyr Zelensky.

At this stage of the investigation, the latter has not been implicated. In January 2021, despite the Covid lockdown instructions, the two partners and their many friends celebrated the president’s birthday in Mindich ’s house [4]. Investigators are currently investigating Tymur Mindich’s

role in the supply of drones.

• In a speech on the evening of 10 November, Ukraine’s un-reelected president Volodymyr Zelensky said:

“There is an urgent need to take effective measures against corruption. Sanctions are essential. Integrity within the company [Energoatom] is a priority. In the energy sector, every industry and every person involved in corruption schemes must face clear legal consequences and convictions. Government officials should collaborate with NABU and work together as necessary to achieve results.” [5]

• Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, the remaining Ukrainian authorities will be under constant threat from revelations by the Trump administration in the US and will have to align themselves with its policy demands.”

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“This is the editorial from our paywalled “Voltaire, international newsletter“, n°151. For more information, do not hesitate to subscribe: 500€ per year.”

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[Footnotes]

“[1] «ЦПК знайшов в родини Умєрових 8 елітних об’єктів нерухомості у США: три квартири у Флориді, одну – у Нью-Йорку та 4 вілли біля Маямі», Antac.

[2] «Former Deputy Prime Minister notified of suspicion of illicit enrichment», NABU, November 11, 2025.

[3] “Voltaire, International Newsletter N°137”, Voltaire Network, 13 June 2025.

[4] ««Зе-карантин»: день народження Зеленського, VIP-гості ресторанів та бездіяльність поліції (розслідування)», Radio Svoboda, 04 лютого 2021.

[5] «There Will Be a Cleansing and Reset of Energoatom’s Management – The President», President of Ukraine, November 12, 2025.”

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Deutsch Español français italiano italiano

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Translation
Gregor Fröhlich

 

 

 

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Remembering World War II Army Air Force pilot in the Pacific, Ed Mullen, born in Brooklyn in 1922

Above, Ed Mullen, WWII Army Air Force pilot in the Pacific, here training with his Stearman biplane. Ed was born in Brooklyn in 1922, died in his New Jersey home in 2017.

Above, WWII Army Air Force pilot Ed Mullen in 1940s.

Above, WWII US Air Force pilot Ed Mullen with his mother in front of her Brooklyn home in 1940s.

Above, Ed Mullen in 1940s in his WWII Army Air Force uniform in front of his mother’s Brooklyn home.

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Above, here’s Dad on Tinian Island in 1945……..

 

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NY City mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa comforts distressed homeless man who's been living in Penn Station for 6 years, August 21, 2021

  

 

 

 

 

 

Above, August 21, 2021, During his first campaign for NY City Mayor Curtis Sliwa comforts distressed homeless man living in Penn Station, You Tube: 

What's up man? What's your name? How long you live here? Six years? Have you ever been hospitalized? But you're supposed to be on medication? What kind of medications? It's OK, it's alright, we'll take care of you. I've seen you here many times, many, many times. You shouldn't be out here in the streets, you shouldn't be in Penn Station." The homeless man now crying says, "I just don't want to take advantage of you guys." Curtis replies, "You're not taking advantage, this is our responsibility. I'm running for Mayor, I'm going to make sure that you and your other friends out here are taken care of. Do you want to stand with us as we continue? Why don't you stand right  here with us?"...(@ 1:50)

 

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Team Trump grossly intervened in upcoming NY City Mayor election to help Democrat Andrew Cuomo win, persuaded Eric Adams to drop his re-election bid-NY Times, 9/20/2025

At September’s meeting “Team Trump wanted Mr. Adams to drop his re-election bid, to help clear the field for Andrew Cuomo.”

9/20/2025, “What the Mayor Got Away With Has Already Changed America,“ New York Times, By Noah Shachtman. Guest Essay/Opinion

“Mr. Shachtman, a former editor in chief of The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone, has reported extensively on corruption in New York City and Washington, D.C.”

“There are 10 bathrooms in the connected penthouses atop the Plaza hotel, and an 82-foot-long terrace that looks north over Central Park from 21 floors up.

A winding staircase descends from the upper floor to a level filled with mirrors and skylights and a pair of kitchens. An in-unit elevator drops down to

three of the triplex’s seven bedrooms. Presiding over all this on an evening in September 2020 are Emma Duo Liu, a former Miss China, and her husband, a billionaire who first made his money in a Beijing nightclub and movie theaters.

The name he’s using on this night is

Hui Qin,

though he has frequently operated under an alias, given to him by a Chinese government official.

Mr. Qin and Ms. Liu are hosting a 60th birthday celebration for Eric Adams. He is Brooklyn’s borough president, but everyone has higher aspirations for him. The cake, which is in the shape of a box of Cohiba cigars, prominently bears the word “mayor.”

Many of the 70 or so guests stay out on the giant terrace smoking actual cigars and snapping selfies. They include

Eric Ulrich,

who will later be indicted on bribery charges as Mr. Adams’s buildings commissioner,

and Winnie Greco,

who will come under intense scrutiny for her ties to the Chinese government, her luxe fund-raisers that allegedly included fake donors, and her attempt to give a City Hall reporter a wad of cash stuffed into a sour cream and onion potato chip bag.

As for Mr. Qin, he went on to serve seven months in a U.S. prison for immigration fraud and illegal campaign donations, including to Mr. Adams, and then was forced to leave the United States.

In all, 27 people in Eric Adams’s orbit — donors, allies, top aides–

have been indicted since that birthday party.

Then there’s No. 28: the mayor himself.

The indictment, unsealed by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York on Sept. 26, 2024, accused Mr. Adams of defrauding the city, accepting illicit donations and taking bribes from the Turkish government.

It was a startling development. But those charges, which included accusations that Mr. Adams accepted upgraded flights and hotel suites in return for municipal favors, are just a fraction of the corruption that is alleged to have pervaded the Adams administration, and of the questionable deals that prosecutors were investigating.

A second U.S. attorney’s office, in the Eastern District of New York, was already investigating a different covert influence campaign — undertaken not by Turkey but by China. National security and public integrity prosecutors from that office were looking into Ms. Greco. Local news outlets such as The City uncovered evidence of illicit contributions on a much greater scale than anything in the Southern District’s indictment.

The purported corruption ran from the grand scale of global politics to the most parochial, penny-ante payoffs.

Ingrid Lewis-Martin,

a former top aide whom Mr. Adams describes as his “sister,” was indicted on money laundering and bribery charges for allegedly calling in favors in exchange for a bit part in an MGM+ streaming show and cash that her son used to buy a new Porsche.

And it swept up almost every department in Mr. Adams’s administration — especially, and most important, the New York Police Department.

The culture of impunity described in dozens of lawsuits, indictments and whistle-blower complaints was so widespread that one of the mayor’s own former police commissioners sued him for enforcing what the commissioner characterized as

a culture of “lawlessness.”

The mayor has not been convicted of any crime. He has said that he “never violated my role as the mayor” and that his only mistake was placing his trust in people who disappointed him. But it’s hard to deny that Mr. Adams’s tenure has become an object lesson in how

corruption left unchecked can build on itself.

The implications extend far beyond the five boroughs of New York City. They ripple through law enforcement offices and legislatures and courthouses across the nation, all the way up to the highest office in the land.

Even if Mr. Adams broke no laws, he has been the flywheel for a corrupt machine. Each turn of the gears moves us further from the ideal of public officials who observe the rule of law.

The most wrenching turn of all was how

the Trump administration ordered prosecutors to make the case against Mr. Adams disappear.

Over the past few decades, courts and legislators have made it harder to fight dirty money and dirty deals. Dropping the case against Mr. Adams advanced that process significantly. A great many observers say it was designed to soften New York City up for President Trump’s sweeping deportation raids and to turn the mayor into a puppet on Mr. Trump’s string. That would mean that in that one deal, Mr. Trump’s corruption enabled Mr. Adams’s and Mr. Adams’s corruption enabled Mr. Trump’s.

In response to detailed questions, Mr. Adams’s press secretary told me that while critics “have tried to paint his relationship with the federal government as anything other than beneficial to New Yorkers, the fact is there is absolutely no truth or evidence to support that claim.” His good relationship with the president, she said, helps the city in many ways.

But the Adams deal didn’t just insulate the mayor. It also cracked the Justice Department’s public integrity section and

undermined the proudly independent Southern District. It sent a clear signal to prosecutors everywhere that

the Department of Justice won’t pursue these cases anymore,

unless someone gets on Mr. Trump’s bad side.

And it functionally killed Mr. Adams’s credibility, and his chances at a second term, despite a record that in many other ways — [alleged] fewer shootings, cleaner streets, more housing — has been solid. So lately there’s been talk of another possible deal, this time for Mr. Adams to drop out of the mayor’s race

and join Mr. Trump’s administration.

When the original deal came to light, I worried it might be part of a larger push to normalize corruption. Seven months later, there is no longer any reason to doubt that it was. It was Chapter 1 in a new playbook in Washington. Chapter 2 has already led to the Trump family’s pocketing billions of dollars.

Chapter 3 could be the real smash and grab.

Politics is grimy. Politics is transactional. Politics is whom you know. And for too long, sanctimonious prosecutors tried to criminalize this kind of ordinary give-and-take — all while generating a demand for their $2,000-per-hour services when they became white-collar defense lawyers. So goes an argument that’s been made by more than one ally of the president. Besides, they say, if you look hard enough into any politician’s past, you can probably find some ticky-tack violation of campaign finance rules or civil service procedures. Honking your horn is illegal in this town, too.

You can hear that logic loud and clear from people in Mr. Adams’s circle. On her lawyer’s radio show, Ms. Lewis-Martin, the mayor’s “sister,” said, “We have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or scale that requires the federal government and the D.A.’s office to investigate us.”

Which is a far cry from saying they did nothing illegal….

The Trump administration is eagerly using these arguments to defend itself and its allies. Under past presidents, “EVERY TIME DOJ has pursued expansive theories of public corruption, the Department has been rebuked by the Supreme Court,” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, posted on X. “The case against Mayor Adams was just one in a long history of past DOJ actions that represent grave errors of judgment.” And of course, by advancing the idea that the mayor was the victim of lawfare, Mr. Trump’s supporters advance the idea that the president was, too.

In the summer of 2021, federal investigators began looking into Mr. Adams’s foreign connections.

They examined ties to the governments of

Qatar, Israel, South Korea, Uzbekistan and China — and Turkey,

where they quickly found what they considered to be evidence not just of influence peddling but

also of a criminal conspiracy.

When the charges against Mr. Adams were announced, however, some members of the legal community were underwhelmed. Flight upgrades in exchange for pressuring the Fire Department to waive an inspection of the Turkish Consulate? Was that the best the feds had on Mr. Adams? And whatever Mr. Adams was accused of, he did it before he was elected mayor. How could that be an “official act”? Even within the Justice Department, there was serious debate. On the other hand, low-level city employees are prosecuted for pocket-change bribes, so why should the mayor get a free pass?

But travel perks were never the whole story. Prosecutors said in court papers that

Mr. Adams had accepted campaign donations that had been broken up into small denominations and

falsely attributed to other people to avoid local limits on contributions.

Those are known as straw donations, and they are

one of the few ways that you can still break federal campaign finance laws.

Another way is to knowingly take contributions from foreigners. Prosecutors allege that Mr. Adams did that, too.

It’s not just a matter of accounting. In total, Mr. Adams’s first mayoral campaign unlocked $10 million of New York’s exceptionally generous 8-to-1 program of public matching funds. If some of that was based on deceptive donations, that’s fraud. And $10 million could go a long way in

a race he won by just 7,197 votes.

There were strong indications that even more charges against Mr. Adams were coming. A few days after the mayor’s indictment, one of Mr. Adams’s aides was charged with

trying to get witnesses to lie to investigators and destroy evidence.

According to court papers, he said he did it with Mr. Adams’s full knowledge….

The friendship is the favor. And Eric Adams is always willing to make new friends.

On one of Mr. Adams’s upgraded trips to Istanbul, he is reported to have met with Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, a wealthy Turkish businessman. According to the indictment, during the meeting, Mr. Adams asked him for money, and he agreed to “contribute $50,000 or more” to the mayor’s campaign,

“believing that Adams might one day be the president.”

The big payment never arrived. Mr. Korkmaz was arrested and extradited to Utah on charges that he was part of a billion-dollar scam involving a biodiesel firm, a former C.I.A. director and a polygamist blood cult.

His trial date, however, came and went

without further notice on the federal docket. This summer, social media showed Mr. Korkmaz enjoying himself in New York City.

Mr. Korkmaz had been getting ready to testify against Mr. Adams, Los Angeles magazine reported, until Mr. Trump pulled the plug on the mayor’s prosecution. The wheel of corruption turns again.

However advanced Turkey’s persuasion program is, China’s is an entirely different class. It’s been especially active in New York City, where the Chinese diaspora is over 600,000 people strong and émigré politics are particularly intense. According to prosecutors, the Beijing government stalked a former Tiananmen Square protester who ran for Congress in Manhattan,

 steered millions of dollars to the family of an aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Kathy Hochul and tricked a former New York Police Department officer into helping surveil enemies of the Chinese state.

Mr. Adams said in 2019 that during his years as Brooklyn borough president he made seven trips to China. At least three of them were with Winnie Greco, who has been by Mr. Adams’s side for more than a decade — as an adviser, a community liaison, a $196,000-per-year city employee — despite being connected to one scandal after another.

Many figures like this are in Mr. Adams’s orbit. What makes Ms. Greco different is her connections to Beijing and its network of so-called United Front cultural and charitable groups. She is reported to have consulted for a provincial association funded by the Chinese government and attended numerous Communist Party events and did work for an affiliate of a Chinese propaganda outfit.

During one of Mr. Adams’s trips with Ms. Greco, he handed the Chinese government a win by praising its controversial Belt and Road initiative in interviews with state-backed news agencies. On another, he met with Lu (Harry) Jianwang, who was later indicted on charges that he operated a clandestine Chinese government police station in Lower Manhattan. When he became mayor, Mr. Adams skipped a reception with the Taiwanese president after the top Chinese diplomat in New York asked him to, in the name of “friendship.”

All the while, Ms. Greco acted as one of Mr. Adams’s most aggressive fund-raisers. Ms. Greco hosted a soiree at the 7,500-square-foot Long Island home of Lian Wu Shao, the operator of the New World Mall in Flushing. Caviar was passed; a D.J. kept the party going; lobster and $400 bottles of wine were served. The event brought in 231 donations. Each contribution was for $249 or $250 — right at the city’s upper limit for its generous matching funds. That meant the evening’s haul was $55,000, which the Adams campaign used to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in public matching funds. Many names listed as contributors belonged to cashiers and delivery people at the mall. Three of those people told The City they had never given to Mr. Adams, suggesting the kind of arrangements that prosecutors have, in other cases, labeled illegal straw donations.

Ms. Greco maintains she is innocent. People around her keep getting indicted — charged with skimming more than a million dollars off a contract meant to help migrants in need, with buying a townhouse for a city official who was responsible for granting lucrative government contracts. Hui Qin was arrested after an incident involving an ax and was accused by his wife of strangling her. The F.B.I. raided Ms. Greco’s two homes in the Bronx and the New World Mall office where she ran her fund-raising operation.

Some members of the team working the Adams Turkey case — who requested anonymity out of fear of political retribution — told me they kept wondering when the Eastern District would charge Ms. Greco. If it had happened before Mr. Adams was indicted, it could have bolstered their case against the mayor. But despite what they considered to be a mountain of publicly available evidence, the charges never came.

Corruption is sometimes described as a victimless crime, just skimming from a bottomless pool of [defenseless US taxpayers’] government cash. The story of the New York Police Department under Mr. Adams should put that idea to rest.

Mr. Adams, a former police captain, has called himself the department’s “overbearing dad.” He installed his former cop friends at the top levels of the department and of his administration generally. Many of them padded out their entourages and gave their buddies cushy assignments and huge overtime payouts. That added to the pressure on other cops, who were often forced to work supplemental shifts on top of their regular duties.

“Something’s got to break here,” Kevin O’Connor, a former Police Department assistant commissioner, told me last December [2024]. “You’re running your personnel out so bad that they become ineffective to some point.”

In the four months that followed, 1,400 cops quit.

None had a better reason to leave than Lt. Quathisha Epps.

Lieutenant Epps entered the public conversation last November, when the tabloids called her out for earning more than twice her salary in overtime for a desk job, $403,000 in all. She responded with a shocking accusation in a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Her boss, the chief of department, Jeff Maddrey, had pressured her into serving that overtime with him at 1 Police Plaza, where he had repeatedly sexually abused her. “I keep saying, ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.’ And he just kept on,” the lieutenant, a 19-year veteran of the force and a mother of three, recalled, heaving with tears, in a televised interview last March. “This guy is a monster.” She said Mr. Maddrey, a friend and an ally of Mr. Adams for more than 20 years, demanded a kickback from the overtime pay and even told her to pay for a vacation for him and his wife. Mr. Maddrey denied any wrongdoing, claiming his relationship with Lieutenant Epps was

merely an “office fling.”

After the lieutenant came forward with her accusations, nude videos of her circulated on police group chats. Then the Police Department tried to claw back the overtime money that her predator boss allegedly coerced her into taking.

Mr. Adams’s first police commissioner had tried to discipline Mr. Maddrey over an unrelated matter. The mayor overruled her, and she quit not long after that.

Mr. Adams brought in a replacement;

after 14 months, that commissioner resigned amid an investigation into his participation in a scheme to shake down local bars and nightclubs.

When the mayor brought in Tom Donlon, a former F.B.I. official, to take over as interim commissioner, Mr. Adams said he needed someone with a “clean record” to take over.

It took only hours on the job, Mr. Donlon recently told me, to learn that Mr. Adams not only favored his own cronies but also considered them his best guys and expected Mr. Donlon to give them maximum latitude.

In a remarkable federal lawsuit, Mr. Donlon described a culture of corruption that Mr. Adams personally enforced. Top officers “knew they had this pipeline right to Adams and could do whatever they want, Maddrey in particular,” he told me.

Within months, Mr. Donlon was pushed out.

You don’t have to believe, as Mr. Donlon alleged, that all of this makes Mr. Adams the head of some vast racketeering enterprise. And you can give him some credit for hiring the current police commissioner, who appears to operate by the book. But the ballooning overtime, the accusations of selling of promotions, the attempts to neuter internal investigations — that’s all on Mr. Adams.

He ran for mayor on a public safety pledge.

His tolerance for his corruption undercut that. It endangered people, even police officers, like Quathisha Epps, who were

supposed to keep the rest of us safe.

The day Mr. Adams was indicted, Mr. Trump held a news conference at his skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. He cast Mr. Adams as a fellow victim. “I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city,” Mr. Trump recalled. “And I said, ‘You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year.’”

Addressing New Yorkers, Mr. Adams took a more nuanced tone. “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target,” he said. Mr. Adams’s overtures to Mr. Trump grew more direct over time, eventually becoming so intense that the president’s aides were openly laughing at how embarrassing they were.

Despite Mr. Trump’s comments, some people involved in the Adams prosecution thought they could still sell the new administration on the Adams case. “I believed going into the Trump administration that we’d be able to persuade them that this case was righteous and that we were doing the right thing and that we had the goods and that everything was fine, essentially,” said a source with direct knowledge of the legal proceedings.

“In retrospect, obviously, I feel like a dummy for having thought that.”

The prosecutors continued to work at a feverish pace, even as Mr. Trump got ready to take power. They were preparing a fresh indictment of Mr. Adams for obstructing justice. Then Danielle Sassoon, the prosecutor who had just been installed as the Southern District’s top attorney, heard from

Emil Bove, Mr. Trump’s acting No. 2 at the Justice Department.

Mr. Bove saw the Adams case as exactly the kind of criminalization of ordinary politics that sparked the prosecution of Mr. Trump….

In public, Mr. Bove and Mr. Adams insisted that the dismissal of the case did not constitute some kind of shady deal. The White House told me it’s “restoring integrity and fairness to the Department of Justice, which was weaponized under the Biden administration.” The mayor’s allies say his relationship with the president has spared New York from the high-profile influx of federal forces we’ve witnessed in Los Angeles and Chicago….

The thing is, corruption actually is a matter of faith; it corrodes what little faith the public has left in our government.

It teaches people to expect less of public officials, thereby opening the door to more cynical self-dealing and precisely the kind of score settling that the Trump administration has pursued in numerous investigations targeting its political enemies.

Mr. Trump wasted no time in remaking the Justice Department and dismantling anticorruption efforts nationwide….The attorney general, Ms. Bondi, who had been registered as a lobbyist for Qatar, disbanded the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force. A handful of public corruption cases have been allowed to continue, but an elite F.B.I. unit dedicated to investigating such crimes at the highest level has been dismantled.

The dismissal of the Adams case was the clearest signal yet that the old guardrails were gone. For decades, the Southern District took on dirty politicians — and it did so by exercising its own judgment. Now it was clear that the so-called Sovereign District of New York would have to follow the White House’s directives. That sent a message to the other U.S. attorney’s offices: Don’t bother going after a high-profile public official, because unless the official is a foe of Mr. Trump, your case has no chance.

Ms. Sassoon and several of her colleagues quit in response.

So did three more members of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, an office that has now dwindled to just five people from 30.

The judge in Mr. Adams’s case ruled that the grounds for dismissal were bogus, but he admitted that there was nothing he could do to force the Justice Department to finish what it had started.

Mr. Trump and his family have begun a self-enrichment campaign on a scale unrivaled in American history: eight-figure payments from companies like Meta, Disney and Paramount to settle sham lawsuits. A nine-figure jet from Qatar, which Mr. Trump says he’ll donate to his presidential library after he leaves office. Ten figures in crypto acquisitions by Trump Media & Technology Group. The New Yorker magazine put the running total for that and a lot else at $3.4 billion.

Mr. Trump has fired or demoted more than 20 inspectors general, [supposedly] politically independent officials whose mission includes investigating corruption. He nominated Mr. Bove to a lifetime seat as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals. When a whistle-blower — one of three — filed a complaint trying to block the confirmation, the Office of Inspector General said it lost the complaint for two months….

On June 26, [2025] Mr. Adams began his re-election campaign on the steps of City Hall.

Winnie Greco and Ingrid Lewis-Martin are once again part of the team. As though the past 12 months had never happened, people listed in public records as Adams donors are once again saying they never gave.

The first day of September was Eric Adams’s 65th birthday. This time the mayor headed to Florida for what his spokesman said was a personal trip. Turns out he was meeting with Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul who is Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy. The last time they had gotten together in Florida, it had been with Mr. Trump, back in January, shortly before the administration took the first steps to deep-six Mr. Adams’s case.

This time, a new transaction was in the air: Members of Team Trump

wanted Mr. Adams to drop his re-election bid, to help clear the field for Andrew Cuomo,

a rival for City Hall who had been the subject of his own criminal investigations.

Mr. Witkoff was pushing the idea of Mr. Adams as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. When word got out, the mayor issued a statement saying he would “always listen if called to serve our country.” Shortly after that, he proclaimed he was going to be mayor for “another four years.” The front pages of the New York City tabloids framed it as a negotiation: What kind of payoff would it take to make him go away.

It felt at once both shocking and familiar, another in an endless round of deal making and scandal. The Trumpists are right: Politics is transactional. It does bend toward corruption. But only if you let it.”

 

 

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In 2020 CDC Labs were contaminated, sent Covid tests infected with Covid to states. Sloppy lab practices delayed Covid testing. "Astonishing lack of expertise, nobody was in charge." CDC lost credibility as US leading public health agency-NY Times, 4/18/2020

4/18/2020, “C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying Coronavirus Testing, Officials Say,” NY Times, Sheila Kaplan

“Sloppy laboratory practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused contamination that rendered the nation’s first coronavirus tests ineffective,

federal officials confirmed on Saturday.

Two of the three C.D.C. laboratories in Atlanta that created the coronavirus test kits violated their own manufacturing standards, resulting in the agency

sending tests that did not work to nearly all of the 100 state and local public health labs,

according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Early on, the F.D.A., which oversees laboratory tests, sent Dr. Timothy Stenzel, chief of in vitro diagnostics and radiological health, to the C.D.C. labs to assess the problem, several officials said.

He found

an astonishing lack of expertise in commercial manufacturing and learned that

nobody was in charge of the entire process, they said.

Problems ranged from researchers entering and exiting the coronavirus laboratories without changing their coats,

to test ingredients being assembled in the same room 

where researchers were working on positive coronavirus samples, officials said.

Those practices made the tests sent to public health labs unusable because they were contaminated with the coronavirus, and produced some inconclusive results.

In a statement on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., Stephanie Caccomo, said, “C.D.C. did not manufacture its test consistent with its own protocol.”

The F.D.A. confirmed its conclusions late this week after several media outlets requested public disclosure of its inquiry, which assuredly is part of a larger federal investigation into the C.D.C. lab irregularities by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Forced to suspend the launch of a nationwide detection program for the coronavirus for a month,

the C.D.C. lost credibility as the nation’s leading public health agency

and the country lost ground in ways that continue to haunt grieving families, the sick and the worried well from one state to the next.

To this day, the C.D.C.’s singular failure symbolizes how unprepared the federal government was in the early days to combat a fast-spreading outbreak of a new virus and it also highlights the glaring inability at the onset to establish a systematic testing policy that would have revealed the still unknown rates of infection in many regions of the country. The blunders are posing new problems as some states with few cases agitate to reopen and others remain in virtual lockdown with cases and deaths still climbing.

While President Trump and other members of his administration [in 2020]

assert almost daily that the U.S. testing capacity is greater than anywhere else in the world,

many public health officials and epidemiologists have lamented the lack of consistent, reliable testing across the country that would reflect the true prevalence of the infection and perhaps enable a return to some semblance of normal life.

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., and other health experts have long suggested that contamination in the labs might have been the culprit. But even as several officials at the F.D.A. late this week cited contamination as the cause, a spokesman for the C.D.C., Benjamin Haynes, asserted that it was still just a possibility and that

the agency was still awaiting the formal findings of H.H.S.

In a statement, however, he acknowledged that the agency’s quality control measures were insufficient during the coronavirus test development. Since then, he said, “C.D.C. implemented enhanced quality control to address the issue and will be assessing the issue moving forward.”

Initially, the C.D.C. was responsible for creating a coronavirus test that state and local public health agencies could use to diagnose Covid-19 in people, and then isolate them to prevent the spread of the disease.

“It was just tragic,” said Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “All that time when we were sitting there waiting, I really felt like, here we were at one of the most critical junctures in public health history, and the biggest tool in our toolbox was missing.”

Mr. Becker said that public health laboratories started receiving the C.D.C. kits on Feb. 7, and by the next day members were already calling him to report that the test was not working accurately. He alerted both the C.D.C. and

the F.D.A., which regulates medical devices, including laboratory tests.

“This is consistent with what we said was plausible when we found the problem at the beginning,” Mr. Becker said. “When we found the problem, it seemed to our community that it was a contamination issue that would cause a problem to this extent.”

The F.D.A. concluded that C.D.C. manufacturing issues were to blame and pushed the agency to shift production to an outside firm. That company, I.D.T., accelerated production of the C.D.C. test and says no more issues were reported.

Meanwhile, the F.D.A. also came under fire for not initially allowing commercial labs like Quest and LabCorp and others to begin ramping up production of their own tests.

More than two months later, nearly 700,000 Americans have become infected and close to 40,000 have died. Testing is still rationed in some states and uneven in others, and it can take days before doctors and patients receive results. Many infectious disease and public health experts say

testing is nowhere near widespread enough

to reopen the country

or return to some semblance of normal.”

…………….

“A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2020, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying National Rollout of Testing, Officials Say.”

 

 

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