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🔵 TRADE WAR
Citizen Frank
February 02, 2025
Good morning. It’s Sunday, February 2.
Important note: cf.org is rebranding to thefrank.com. Soon you’ll find us under our new name.
Canada and Mexico’s top leaders blasted President Trump Saturday hours after he imposed a 25% tariff on the neighboring countries — and announced they would retaliate by enforcing their own on the US.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed he and Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo agreed to work together to push back against Trump’s long-awaited taxing program, which he claimed was aimed at halting the influx of drugs into the US.
Trump put a 25% tariff on Canadian and Mexican imports, while Chinese products will receive a more modest 10% tariff.
Left-wing social media influencer David Hogg has been elected vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), making history as the first member of Generation Z to assume the position.
Hogg, a well-known anti-gun activist, rose to national prominence following the 2018 Parkland school shooting.
He accepted the nomination in a speech that lasted approximately one minute. “Who’s ready to take the fight to the Republicans?” he said. “Let’s go and kick some ass!”
The U.S. Army on Saturday evening released the name of the third pilot on the Black Hawk helicopter involved in the fatal collision with an American Airlines regional jet this past week.
The third pilot has been identified as 28-year-old Captain Rebecca M. Lobach. The disclosure comes after the family, in an unusual move, initially asked the Army not to release the pilot’s name to the public.
“Army releases name of co-pilot of Blackhawk helicopter: Captain Rebecca Lobach, a star ROTC student who graduated from UNC with top honors and wanted to attend medical school after her Army service,” Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin reported. “She had 500 hours of flying time, about 250 flights, considered on the high end for a Captain, according to Army officials.”
The Trump administration has approved plans to grant Treasury officials affiliated with Elon Musk’s team access to the federal system that handles trillions of dollars in payments, according to two people familiar with the situation.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has signed off on a plan to give access to the payment system to a team led by Tom Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group, who is now working for the Treasury Department and serves as a liaison to Musk’s DOGE group that operates out of the United States Digital Service. One person familiar with the effort said Krause’s role will be subject to safeguards that would not allow any ability to make changes to the system and that no one outside Treasury would have access.
“The secretary’s approval was contingent on it being essentially a read-only operation,” the person said.
Trump signed an Executive Order to build an Iron Dome for America, which aims to defend the homeland “against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks.”
It’ll also importantly include space-based monitoring and interception systems. Some of the latter will have “non-kinetic capabilities” too, likely referring to directed-energy weapons (DEWs), but it’s unclear whether they’ll be deployed on the ground and/or in space.
Here are five takeaways from this monumental move.
President Donald Trump is taking further action against the 50 former intelligence officials who falsely suggested Hunter Biden’s laptop was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” instructing agencies to also ban those individuals from stepping foot in secure U.S. government facilities, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.
The Jan. 29 cabinet memorandum, first obtained by The Daily Wire, expands Trump’s day-one executive order, which revoked the security clearance for the 50 individuals. Sent “on behalf of the President,” it orders the country’s top national security agencies to “revoke unescorted access to secure U.S. Government facilities from the 50 former intelligence officials named in the Executive Order.”
“These individuals no longer possess a need to access secure facilities, and as outlined in the Executive Order, do not have the appropriate security clearances to access classified information,” the memo states.
A Chicago-based subcontractor is suing one of the firms involved in managing the construction of the Obama Presidential Center for $40 million, claiming racial discriminatory practices forced the firm to do extra work that left it at risk of bankruptcy, according to a lawsuit.
Robert McGee, the owner of II in One, which provided concrete and rebar services for the center starting in 2021, filed the lawsuit in federal court last month against New York-based Thornton Tomasetti, which oversees structural engineering and design services for the $830 million project.
McGee claims that Thornton Tomasetti changed standards and imposed new rules around rebar spacing and tolerance requirements that differed from the American Concrete Institute standards, which resulted in “excessively rigorous and unnecessary inspection” and massive overruns.
Former Fox Sports anchor and reporter Julie Stewart-Binks has accused one of her ex-bosses at the network of sexually assaulting her on a balcony outside his Marina del Rey hotel room in 2016.
A lawsuit filed Friday in Los Angeles County Superior Court alleges that FS1 executive producer of content Charlie Dixon held Stewart-Binks against a wall, “forcefully” pressed his body against hers and “tried to force his tongue into her mouth” after the two originally got together to discuss plans for an upcoming show.
Stewart-Binks eventually slipped away from Dixon, the lawsuit states, but soon after the incident her contract with Fox was not renewed. In June 2017, after she had finished working for Fox, Stewart-Binks was interviewed by the network’s human resources department as part of an investigation into a different Fox executive, according to the filing.
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