The House Administration Oversight Subcommittee and its chairman Barry Loudermilk on Tuesday released an interim report on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, concluding the attack was preventable and also asking for an investigation into former Rep. Liz Cheney for criminally tampering with a witness during the Democrat-led congressional inquiry of the tragedy.

“Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, the former Vice Chair of the January 6 Select Committee, and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the report released by the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee and its chairman Barry Loudermilk stated.

"Evidence uncovered by the Subcommittee revealed that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge.," it added. “This secret communication with a witness is improper and likely violates 18 U.S.C. 1512. Such action is outside the due functioning of the legislative process and therefore not protected by the Speech and Debate clause."

Federal law criminalizes witness tampering of varying degrees, and subjects a defendant to as many as 20 years in prison.

You can read the full report here.

The report also took direct aim at former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Cheney’s star witness at the nationally televised hearings, alleging that Cheney encouraged false testimony about a handwritten document and noting her sensational claim that former President Donald Trump tried to commandeer his presidential limousine that day to take it to the Capitol was directly refuted by the Secret Service.

Loudermilk’s report suggested Cheney also bore responsibility for Hutchinson's testimony.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation must also investigate Representative Cheney for violating 18 U.S.C. 1622, which prohibits any person from procuring another person to commit perjury,” the report said. ”Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, Hutchinson committed perjury when she lied under oath to the Select Committee.”

The report delivers a second bombshell, revealing Loudermilk’s team uncovered “evidence of collusion” between Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Democrats’ Jan. 6 committee led by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Cheney.

When Smith released a trove of documents in October that were used in his filings in the Trump case, present in the batch was an unredacted transcript from one Jan. 6 Select Committee interview with a witness.

"Given that the Select Committee did not archive, or otherwise destroy this transcript, and that the White House refused to provide an unredacted version to the Subcommittee, the only remaining explanation is that Special Counsel Smith received the unredacted version from one of the two institutions which did not cooperate fully with the Subcommittee," Loudermilk's committee concluded.

The report confirms numerous stories reported by Just the News over the last two years that have substantially changed the public's understanding of that tragic day, including:



Loudermilk accompanied the interim report with a personal letter to his House colleagues, saying his review of the Democrats' Jan. 6 committee provided evidence that Congress has ventured into the business of misleading Americans for political gain and imploring them to help reverse that dynamic.

“Americans expect and deserve a government that is small in size, limited in scope, and fully accountable to the people, as our Founders intended,” he wrote. “The actions of some elected officials and certain government bureaucrats in the aftermath of January 6, 2021, are evidence of how we have ventured far away from those basic principles of our constitutional republic.

“Transparency, accountability, and equal application of the law are the only solutions to return our nation to one that is free, safe and full of opportunity,” he wrote.

Your first book was called Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. I greatly enjoyed it. What do you make of the recent events in South Korea?

Well, it definitely was not a coup d'état, because the president made no attempt to recruit military chiefs to follow his orders or anything of the sort. He just abruptly had a moment of panic and realized that he proclaimed martial law.

Because there were neither secret nor non-secret events that justified it, as soon as he proclaimed it, basically none of the authorities moved to implement it. Then there was a parliamentary reaction, a popular reaction, and obviously, he will either resign or be resigned, one of the two.

I don't know what happened. It could have been a purely personal nervous breakdown. Now, it is a nervous breakdown in the context where the national capital is within rocket range of North Korea, and where there are supposedly preparations for national emergency and a provision for martial law in order to respond to a sudden North Korean attack. There have been North Korean attacks in the past, including one that penetrated the presidential Blue House complex and killed the wife of then-ruler Park Chung-hee.

So we don't know. It could be a private psychiatric event. It could be a piece of information that reached him directly without being filtered by professionals, and which he took upon himself to view as a warning of an imminent all-out attack....

Amidst the annual holiday boom in turkey sales, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing a new rule to reduce salmonella in poultry. That's a laudable goal, but the actual regulation—as is often the case—is being shaped in a way that hurts small farmers and meat processors while helping large agricultural conglomerates.

This rule has been in the works for a while. In 2020, the USDA's Food Inspection Safety Service (FSIS) started making moves to reduce salmonella illnesses by 25 percent—part of the federal government's "2030 Healthy People" initiative. The government has been targeting salmonella in the country's poultry supply for even longer than that, and those efforts have brought down its prevalence in chicken and turkey. Yet that has not translated into a reduction in salmonella-based illnesses among Americans.

Many reasons have been proposed for this discrepancy. One likely cause is the fact that there are more than 2,500 salmonella serotypes but only around 100 cause human illnesses—and of those, only a handful are considered high-virulence in terms of the threat they pose. Current federal policy focuses on testing for any variant of salmonella instead of concentrating on the most problematic strains.

Theoretically, the new proposal will create a more nuanced and targeted system that focuses on just six serotypes in raw poultry that cause the most illnesses. (The agency finalized a similar rule on salmonella in breaded chicken products earlier this year.) But while the intent to exchange the regulatory axe for a scalpel is commendable, the actual impact will disproportionately hurt small farmers and meat processors—and still might miss the most important way to keep consumers from coming down with these diseases.

The proposed rule is based on numerous "components" that the USDA concludes will help with controlling salmonella in poultry. The agency proposes that if various raw poultry products contain "any detectable level of at least one of the [six high-virulence] Salmonella serotypes of public health significance," the product will be considered "adulterated" and barred from being sold. The rule also would require chicken processing establishments to "incorporate statistical process control monitoring principles into microbial monitoring programs."

If "statistical process control monitoring" sounds more like something you might see inside an Amazon warehouse than on a farm, welcome to 21st century American agriculture. In its benevolence, the USDA offers small meat processors "access to laboratory services" provided by FSIS, as well as a 3-year grace period to implement the changes (instead of the 1-year period for large establishments). But the compliance costs and headaches for small processors and farmers run much deeper than these modest accommodations.

Small processors and farmers are symbiotic partners in the larger ecosystem of the poultry industry, which is notorious for its vertical integration and the dominance of a few megacorporations, such as Tyson and Perdue. Unsurprisingly, "Big Chicken" companies like Tyson and Perdue support USDA's new rule, since they are able to afford the costs of partnering with sophisticated compliance companies that specialize in "Poultry Integrator Compliance-Readiness Programs" whose "lab robotics" and "artificial intelligence algorithms" will ensure adherence to the regulations.

Meanwhile, non-algorithmic farms and processors are hitting the panic button. "The larger, integrated facilities will be able to find ways to meet these regulations," said Charles Ryan Wilson, owner of Common Wealth Poultry in Maine, in an interview with Successful Farming. "That won't be available to the smaller processors and producers." Wilson points out that larger operations have the resources to afford real-time vaccines or mitigation strategies like chemically treating poultry to either make salmonella-positive birds safe or repurpose the meat for other products.

For smaller processors, the options are more limited. "Our farmers and our processors cannot handle that chaos where a larger outfit absolutely can," Kristen Kilfoyle Boffo of Walden Local Meat told Successful Farming. "If [the larger companies] get a salmonella positive, they're just going to waterbath chill those birds and then send them to get cooked and be made into something else, and those birds will remain legal and it won't really cause any disruption in their supply chain. But for us, we'd be dead in the water."

In turn, smaller processors could become so concerned about potential liability that they may simply stop accepting chickens and turkeys from small farms altogether. And even if more processors onboard mitigation protocols like chemical bathing of salmonella-positive poultry, this would not necessarily be a public policy win. As the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance notes, "USDA's approach to salmonella has created a culture of chemical dependency, in which processors are incentivized to use more and harsher chemicals in an effort to produce a sterile final product."

While producers and processors alike recognize the importance of reducing salmonella illnesses, there are ways to make the rules more narrowly tailored. For example, the agency could develop a "safe harbor" for small-sized poultry farms and processors, under which these operations would be considered in compliance with the new rule so long as they followed a predetermined set of slimmed-down (and more feasible) safety protocols.

But the best answer of all would be to look to another link in the chicken supply chain: the consumer. In the event one purchases a salmonella-positive chicken or turkey—such samples hover at slightly under 10 percent of all birds—one simply needs to cook it at a proper temperature to make it safe for human consumption.

Here is where the bigger problem comes in. Not only are many cooks uneducated about cooking temperatures, but research suggests that about a quarter of all home cooks cross-contaminate other food dishes they are preparing with raw chicken—and 40 percent neglect to wash their hands after handling raw chicken. Fortunately, there also is evidence that if consumers are given simple warnings and instructions about how to properly handle and cook raw poultry, they are quick to rectify their unsafe cooking habits.

If the USDA wants to crack down on salmonella, it could look to producing simple, easy-to-understand educational information on how to prepare chicken safely. Doing so would empower more Americans to protect themselves from disease while helping save the dwindling number of small businesses left in the American agricultural landscape.

Is this a "John Wick-meets-Erin Brockovich" murder, or something else altogether? Yesterday morning, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan in what authorities say looks like a targeted attack.

The killer was masked, and his gun was outfitted with a silencer. He "apparently knew which door Mr. Thompson was going to enter and arrived outside the hotel about five minutes earlier," per a New York Times report. After he killed Thompson, the shooter fled via e-bike. He has yet to be apprehended.

United provides health care coverage to almost 50 million people, bringing in $281 billion in revenue and paying Thompson $10.2 million in total compensation annually.

Normally, when someone is tragically murdered (God rest his soul), it would not be customary to mention their comp package. But it's unfortunately relevant to this story because hordes of people have seized on this murder, acting like it was warranted because a health care company CEO must be, in their telling, quite evil. Some have theorized that it's a spurned patient, someone who was deeply wronged, who may have a vendetta against Thompson. That is possible, but we don't know enough yet.

Some people have taken to celebrating this theoretical vigilantism, like prominent journalist Taylor Lorenz, who in few words has suggested that more CEOs be gone after due to their perceived misdeeds.



"And people wonder why we want these executives dead" she wrote yesterday on the same site.

"No shit murder is bad," wrote journalist Ken Klippenstein on the platform Bluesky, which appears to mostly be for people who've exited X in a huff. "The jokes about the United CEO aren't really about him; they're about the rapacious health care system he personified and which Americans feel deep pain and humiliation about."



In 2021, the company came under fire because it announced a plan to start denying payment for emergency room visits deemed unnecessary (something competitors also intended to do). "Threatening patients with a financial penalty for making the wrong decision could have a chilling effect on seeking emergency care," wrote the chief executive of the trade group American Hospital Association at the time.

But consider the incentives here: Of course an industry trade group representing hospitals wants more use of services, and thus more payout. And of course the entity doing the paying out wants to ensure patients are judicious and there's less overuse of expensive services. Everyone is playing their part perfectly here; there's not really a bad actor, per se—just two oppositional parties responding to incentives.

But it's that type of nuance that the pro–socialized-health care murder cheerleaders keep missing: This system sure is broken. There's no price transparency, and thus it's very hard to exercise real choice before you receive a service. Upcoding—when health care providers play fast and loose with the billing codes to get more reimbursement from either insurance companies or the government—happens all the time. Regulatory requirements constantly drive up costs. Customers are not well served by this, but it's not really the individual companies that are to blame, let alone the people who run them.

This isn't to say United never does anything wrong. One ProPublica investigation covered how the company attempted to deny coverage to a chronically ill college student, and how his family sued. This type of denial of coverage happens to a not-insignificant number of claims, and there are plenty of tragic stories of patients who were wronged. Alternatives like socialized medicine, administered by the government, don't create much better outcomes. (Government actors also respond to incentives, don't you know.)



CEOs like Thompson aren't cartoon villains twisting their mustaches, and Bluesky venting about how much you want the guillotine to come for them doesn't fix a broken system or make you morally decent. Though the popular theory is that a hit man must have been hired by a patient who has egregiously wronged by the company, this ignores that people who have a hard time paying their medical bills infrequently have wads of cash laying around to infuse into an assassin's pockets. More information will come out over the coming weeks, and in the meantime, let's just all agree to ignore journalists on Bluesky.