'Well, well, well,' as the old-time movie detectives always say when they surprise the culprits with their hands in the cookie jars.

WHAT HAVE WE HERE?

Three short weeks ago, a newly confirmed Lee Zeldin got to his office at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and hit the broom closet to start sweeping.

Thanks to the previous braggadocious occupants and their already well-documented pre-exit shoveling of cash and grants out the door, he had an inkling there might be plenty of questionable transactions to uncover that hadn't exactly been notated 'on the books' or done 'by the book' either.

I mean, what were the odds?

It didn't take long for Zeldin to find himself a whopper of a honeypot hidden away that made quite a splash when he announced it, particularly as it was tied to an infamous Project Veritas video from December boasting about its very surreptitious creation.

David covered the reveal.

Project Veritas dropped a shocker of a video back in December, in which an EPA manager was bragging that the Biden administration was metaphorically 'dropping gold bars off the Titanic.' They were shoving every dime they could out to their NGO buddies so they could harass the Trump administration and continue to suck off the taxpayers' teat for years to come. 

We all know such things happen, but to have it so vividly described was revealing. 

Well, Lee Zeldin is retrieving those gold bars, and it turns out to be a lot of them. $20 billion, all sitting in the equivalent of a bank vault. 

The massive scale of this scam--which as with so many things is SOP at government agencies--blows your mind. Pushing $20 billion out the door to friends of the administration with little to no financial controls, zero accountability, and lots of malice aforethought is only different in scale and not in kind. 

BREAKING: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin just announced that his team has discovered a staggering $20 BILLION that the Biden regime laundered to corrupt NGOs.

Zeldin has referred the matter to the Inspector General & Attorney General Pam Bondi.

"Shockingly, roughly 20 billion of… pic.twitter.com/ngpouVQqnQ

— George (@BehizyTweets) February 13, 2025

...Zeldin has referred the matter to the Inspector General & Attorney General Pam Bondi.

"Shockingly, roughly 20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rushed job with reduced oversight. Even further. This pot of $20 billion was awarded to just eight entities that were then responsible for doling out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion, with far less transparency. Just under $7 billion was sent to one entity called the Climate United Fund."

As if $20B squirreled away in a Citibank account wasn't insult enough, when the dollar sleuths started digging into who the money was earmarked for - because surely someone had a bead on those bucks - one of the names that popped up for a two billion dollar payday was an organization associated with none other than the cranky claimant to the governorship of Georgia and President of Earth, Stacey Abrams.

Her organization - Power Forward Communities - was only a few months old and had a whopping $100 in the bank at the time of the $2B with a "B" award.

But they sure had good deeds planned - oh, you betcha. That's what they needed the money for.

...How did Biden's EPA even know who they were, less mind that they were worthy of a couple of billion of federal largesse aka Green grift?

One can only assume it was because the President of Earth was connected to the enterprise.

...Power Forward Communities was established in October 2023 as a coalition of groups led by Rewiring America, a left-wing group that advocates for electrification policies and a transition away from fossil fuel dependence. Abrams, who serves as Rewiring America's senior counsel, said at the time that she was "thrilled" to be part of the Power Forward Communities coalition. "This is how we expand access to clean energy—by prioritizing housing, equity and resilience," she wrote in an X post.

...In its only press release to date, Power Forward Communities said that, in addition to induction stoves, it would use the $2 billion received from the EPA to help install heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, solar panels, home battery systems, EV chargers, and weatherization upgrades.

Not suspicious at all.

Stacey Abrams’ Power Forward Communities—a ‘nonprofit’ with $100 in revenue, born in 2023—gets $2 BILLION from Biden’s EPA.

That’s 20 MILLION times its worth! DOGE digs it up, and it’s stashed at Citibank like a cartel slush fund. This is peak government—grift so bold it’s art pic.twitter.com/LekPuy9AjN

— Gene Mikhov (@genegmb) February 20, 2025

March roared in like a lion, and so did Zeldin and the DOGE money bloodhounds.

And what they found is confounding and outrageous in its bald-faced thievery.

Zeldin was on Jesse Watters last night and sketched out the what they've uncovered. As he tells Watters, it's $20B parked in an outside bank with the funds dedicated to only eight specific NGO's. 

You have to listen to get the gist of the whole scheme. I only transcribed a snippet.

EXCLUSIVE: @LeeMZeldin exposes the GREEN SLUSH FUND. $20 billion given to 8 NGOs towards the end of the @JoeBiden administration. Many of them were created JUST to get this money. And the money was going to Democrat donors and Biden and @BarackObama’s friends. Zeldin says that… pic.twitter.com/usM1y8dAPE

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) March 7, 2025

'...It's a green slush fund. $20B parked at an outside bank towards the end of the Biden administration, given to just eight NGOs...These NGOs were created for the first time, many of them just to get this money. And their pass-throughs...So the EPA entered into this account control agreement with these entities, Treasury enters into a financial agent agreement with the bank, and they design it to tie the EPA's hands behind their back -to tie the federal government's hands behind its back. So when the money goes through the NGOs to subgrantees, many of them also pass-throughs, we don't know where it's going. We don't have the proper amount of oversight. And, as you pointed out, it's going to people in the Obama and Biden administrations, it's going to donors. It's not going directly...to remediate that environmental issue...deliver that clean air...'

This is just some stunning stuff. As Zeldin told the NY Post:

...As Zeldin told The Post: “Of the eight pass-through entities that received funding from the pot of $20 billion in tax dollars, various recipients have shown very little qualification to handle a single dollar, let alone several billions of dollars.”

He’s called for the EPA’s inspector general to investigate; who knows what other rank misuse that might turn up.

Bondi and Patel are already on the case, and I hope someone from Scott Bessent's Treasury IG thinks they should be as well.

Crawl up their collective butts, the lot of them.

But the digging is bearing even more fruit because it's gotten the attention of papers like the Post, which still have the wherewithal and interest to root through the detritus of paperwork and grants and follow the files to see what sort of vermin fall out.

And good Lord, didn't they have themselves a time in practically no time since, thanks to Zeldin's efforts, they were headed in the right direction?

You might even recognize a name or two. It'll really piss you off when you see the BIG number that the Citibank $20B is part of and who was handing what out.

$375B EPA slush fund handled by John Podesta gave billions to charities founded only months earlier

The Biden administration funneled at least $20 billion dollars into environmental groups, most of which had only recently been founded, The Post has discovered.

In one case, former Vice President Kamala Harris handed over a check for nearly $7 billion to Bethesda, Maryland, based group Climate United Fund, which does not appear in the IRS’s charities database, and has no federal filings.

The non-profit fund had only been incorporated in Delaware on November 30, 2023, according to public records, five months before Harris handed over the cash in April 2024.

...“What was the purpose of creating middlemen entities when there are so many established groups in the climate space with good track records? What was the value-added in [by] doing it this way, especially with such large sums of taxpayer funds?”

The cash for the charity came from a huge $370 billion climate slush fund of taxpayer money overseen by John Podesta, a political consultant who was chair of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 bid for president and White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton.

...A spokeswoman for the Climate United Fund told The Post the Biden-controlled EPA “encouraged groups to work with coalitions” to receive the cash.

She said that the EPA cash sent to Climate United Fund is parked with Calvert Impact, a related non-profit.

The Post found three entities called Calvert Impact, all of them based in Bethesda — making it more difficult to track the flow of money.  

...The FBI and the Department of Justice have both launched investigations into the grants, and bank accounts holding billions of dollars have been frozen as the EPA attempts to get it back, the New York Times reported Tuesday.  

I mean, DAY-YUM.

Wait 'til they really start digging into those hundreds and hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars. The Post just scratched the surface of some of the twenty.

My posts from this fall on what was going out the door at the last minute and how the DoE's own inspector general* was throwing the flag - which was ignored and mocked by the EPA grants department - should be pretty interesting reading side-by-side with this corruption as they find it.

I don't ever, ever want to see another waggling Democratic finger in my face about anything.

Somebody had best be going to jail.

*Beege Adds: Okay - my aging brain had the departments wrong. It was the Department of Energy's Inspector General, not the EPAs (and I fixed the post), who tried throwing the flag on the billions going out the door in climate cult 'loans' to wholly unvetted and unqualified recipients. And got told to 'suck a stone' by the DoE's loan program manager.

...Yesterday, the Department of Energy's Inspector General sent a letter to the Under Secretary of Energy for Infrastructure that basically laid a whuppin' on the whole spend-a-palooza.

KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE HANDOUTS

The Federal Government prohibits conflicts of interest to safeguard the taxpayers against selfdealing, collusion, and fraud by Government officials and Government contractors.  In the private sector, each party has a “baked in” economic incentive to watch, track, and account for its own dollars.  That economic incentive does not exist in the public sector, where Federal dollars are more likely to be treated as “monopoly money.”  For this reason, implementing and overseeing robust conflict of interest protections is a critical role for Federal officials. 

The Department of Energy Loan Programs Office (LPO) is administering more than $385 billion in new loan authority without ensuring a regulatory and contractually compliant and effective system to manage organizational conflicts of interest. 0F 1  This poses a significant risk of fraud, waste, and abuse.  Congress issued this unprecedented volume of loan authority in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and related legislation. 2  The projects funded with this authority, which involve innovations in clean energy, advanced transportation, and tribal energy are inherently risky in part because these projects may have struggled to secure funding from traditional sources such as commercial banks and private equity investors.   

That was the introduction. The body of the missive lays out exactly how the DoE loan office is purposefully ignoring the existing safeguards and protocols meant to protect the public from fraudulent use of their tax dollars as they engage in this frantic handout session. 

And the Loan Program Office at the DoE answered back.

...In an attachment, the DoE politely pushed back on those requests because time was running short (Get the distinction?). IOW, get bent, dudes. 

I took a quick glance at the EPA's IG page and didn't see anything nearly as robust or inflammatory, but I don't have time right now to really dig. Maybe there's a gem hidden there somewhere.

The two agencies worked hand in glove on a lot of big money giveaways. This one was announced December 20, 2024, hello.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced approximately $850 million for 43 projects selected for negotiation that will help small oil and gas operators, Tribes, and other entities across the country to reduce, monitor, measure, and quantify methane emissions from the oil and gas sector as part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda. The funding builds on unprecedented action across the Biden-Harris Administration to dramatically reduce methane emissions, with agencies taking nearly 100 actions since 2023, including the finalization of an EPA rule that is expected to reduce methane emissions from covered oil and gas sources by 80% from 2024 to 2038 compared to projected emissions without the rule.  

Today’s investment incentivizes companies’ near-term actions to conserve valuable energy resources for American consumers, improve operational efficiencies in a global market, and reduce methane emissions.  

$850M to 43 'projects.'