Good morning and welcome to Wednesday, April 29, 2026. Glad you’re here. Today, among other things, is Denim Day. It’s also International Guide Dog Day, International Noise Awareness Day, National Shrimp Scampi Day, and National Rugelach Day. And you’re smack dab in the middle of National Auctioneers Week. Here’s a little something to help you celebrate.
1550: Emperor Charles V grants inquisitors additional powers.
1661: The Chinese Ming dynasty occupies Taiwan.
1813: First U.S. rubber patent is granted to Jacob F. Hummel.
1852: First edition of Peter Roget’s Thesaurus is published in Britain and has never been out of print since.
1872: Jesse James’ gang robs a bank of $1,500 in Columbia, Kentucky, killing bank employee Robert A.C. Martin during the crime
1882: Werner von Siemens tests the “Elektromote,” forerunner of the trolleybus, in Berlin.
1905: Two inches of rain falls in 10 minutes in Taylor, Texas.
1927: Construction of Spirit of St Louis (the monoplane which Charles Lindbergh was to fly across the Atlantic) is completed.
1939: Whitestone Bridge connecting the New York boroughs of Bronx and Queens opens.
1961: ABC’s Wide World of Sports debuts
1967: Aretha Franklin releases her single “Respect,” which Otis Redding wrote.
1975: U.S. begins to evacuate its citizens from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind in response to advancing North Vietnamese forces, bringing an end to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
2004: Oldsmobile builds its final car, ending 107 years of production.
Birthdays today include: Oliver Ellsworth, 3rd Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; William Randolph Hearst, American newspaper publisher; Duke Ellington; Hirohito, 124th Emperor of Japan and longest reigning emperor at 62 years; Donald Mills, jazz and pop singer and vocal trombone; Joe Porcaro, drummer and percussionist; Lonnie Donegan, singer-songwriter; Rod McKuen, singer-songwriter; Willie Nelson; Lucianne Goldberg, journalist, author, ‘key player’ in the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton; Bernie Madoff, fraudster and financier who committed the largest fraud in U.S. history; Klaus Voormann, German rock bassist and album cover artist; Tommy James, singer-songwriter; Dale Earnhardt; Jerry Seinfeld; Kate Mulgrew, actress; Daniel Day-Lewis; Michelle Pfeiffer; Andre Agassi; and Uma Thurman.
If today is your cake day too, celebrate!!
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Several high-profile cases we’ve been waiting on are finally breaking open.
Take Aimee Bock and her adult sons, who allegedly leaked confidential court records to the Minnesota Star Tribune and others. Bock sits hip-deep in the roughly $300 million “Feeding Our Future” fraud, with seven felony convictions already on the books. My read: This isn’t over until prosecutors drag at least one name from “the Strib” before a judge. According to the AP, some 70 defendants across the case all ran schemes to defraud COVID-19 relief programs.
The Minnesota case has also drawn attention for an attempt to bribe a juror in an earlier trial and witness tampering in Bock’s trial, which began last month. Thirty-seven defendants have already pleaded guilty, while five were convicted in a group of defendants who were tried last year.
The jury also convicted a co-defendant, Salim Ahmed Said, owner of the now-defunct Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis.
Bock, 44, and Said, 36, were charged with multiple counts involving conspiracy, wire fraud and bribery. Said was also charged with money laundering. Bock allegedly pocketed nearly $2 million, while Said was accused of taking around $5 million. They both maintained their innocence and testified at trial.
The AP story goes on to point out:
Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who came under heavy criticism from Republicans who said his administration should have caught the fraud earlier, told reporters he remains “furious” with “criminals that preyed on the system that was meant to feed children.” But he pointed out that nobody in state government, which administered the federal funding, was ever charged in the case.
Yet, Timmy, my boy. No charges filed against them yet.
I stress that, because $300 million spread among a mere 70 people in my view, strains credulity. Even Walz Democrats at the state level couldn’t have missed red flags of that size — and I have a hard time believing a healthy chunk of that money didn’t land in someone’s political coffers. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, the New York Post reports that James Comey is now indicted. Read the motion here — only three pages. The charge: making threats against the President. My expectation is that the trial will surface facts that trigger further charges down the line. One cannot help but draw a line between the charges against Comey and Cole Allen, who actually tried to make good on his threat the other day. Make of that parallel, what you will. I’m thinking the Cole Allen thing will focus any jury on the seriousness of the charges against Comey.
Finally, we see the DOJ has unsealed an indictment against David Morens, who served as Senior Adviser to Anthony Fauci during the COVID era. The indictment names two co-conspirators: Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, and Dr. Gerald Keusch, associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory Institute. EcoHealth Alliance is the nonprofit that received grant money from the National Institutes of Health and funneled it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct coronavirus research on bats — including gain-of-function experiments aimed at making the virus more contagious, which, of course, is itself illegal.
You may recall the scenario: Fauci and his allies at NIH repeatedly and fanatically insisted that COVID-19 emerged naturally in the wild, not as a result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. To the end of controlling the story, the conspirators are accused of deleting their mail traffic in an effort to cover their tracks. The thing is, they didn’t know that in spite of deleting the emails, they were kept by the servers. It is those copies that are being used as evidence today.
NIH closed ranks for what should be an obvious reason: Fauci and his team had a massive conflict of interest. If the virus leaked from WIV, NIH’s funding of directly relevant research through EcoHealth Alliance would become public, and NIH and its scientists — Fauci chief among them — would (In my own view) rightly face blame for the epidemic and the literally millions of deaths that occurred because of their actions — by some estimates 18-20 million worldwide. That puts it on a scale with WWII Germany at 25 million.
Our remarkable Matt Margolis gets into this in some detail. Notably:
Justin Goodman of White Coat Waste called the indictment a start, not a finish. “Morens wasn’t a lone wolf, and other lab leak cover-up lackeys are still in government raking in taxpayer-funded salaries,” Goodman said. “Morens’ indictment should be the beginning—not the end—of long-overdue lab leak accountability at NIH.”
Indeed, this is by no means the end of this.
These cases have dragged on forever, and I expect we’ll see explosive movement across all of them — and more — over the next two years.
But the timing of this sudden movement on all these cases at once interests me. Did everything break loose at once because Trump finally kicked Pam Bondi to the curb? Everyone knows he was frustrated with her — she sat on these cases and went nowhere with them. I am reminded of Henry Fonda, in the movie In Harm’s Way from (I think) 1965. (Forgive me any errors in the quote; this is strictly from memory.)
Abe Lincoln once found himself in the same predicament with General George B. MacClellan. MacClellan was a great little organizer, but he couldn’t make up his mind when to fight. And, indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy his will to win or even to survive.
Lincoln called in a hard-headed Yankee named Grant. Grant didn’t give a damn about organization, but neither was he afflicted with the virus. He just pointed his battalions in the right direction and shoved off.
As impressive as I found Bondi in Florida, I suspect that was the concept that led to her removal from the federal role, and the reason things are going so fast now. As Matt points out in another piece at the beginning of this month, there may have been other reasons as well:
According to a report from the Daily Mail, the reason Trump gave Bondi the axe is that he believes Bondi tipped off Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) about the FBI’s plans to release documents tied to his decade-old relationship with a suspected Chinese spy. “She’s intervening in those matters,” a source close to the situation told the paper. “The White House wasn’t pleased she was intervening due to her personal friendship with Swalwell.”
Something here gives me pause — though I’m not buying Swalwell’s innocence claims for a second. What interests me is that what actually brought him down had nothing to do with any of the making bang bang with Fang Fang. Instead, it centered on other women Swalwell pursued — some against their will, and in the cases he reportedly drugged, without their knowledge. That makes Matt’s scenario a lot more plausible to me. No proof of course, but it fits the known facts pretty well. Wittingly or unwittingly, did Bondi damage the Swalwell case, somehow?
Anyway, all of this is moving quite quickly, and it looks to me like these events will load heavily on the upcoming midterms. I mean, how can it NOT?
Thought for the day: “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” –William James
I hope to see you here tomorrow.
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