Connect with us

Published

on

?At least 10 current and former high?-ranking Biden administration officials — including Secretary of State Antony Blinken — worked at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the president’s namesake Washington, DC-based think tank where classified documents were discovered in November, according to a report.?

The foreign policy institution associated with the University of Pennsylvania counted Blinken, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and White House counselor Steven Richetti as former employees, Fox News reported Wednesday.

?Blinken and ?Richettei were managing directors of the center while Kahl was a strategic consultant.

In addition to the trio, other former workers at the center include Spencer Boyer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy, who was a senior fellow. ??J??effrey Prescott, the deputy to the US ambassador to the United Nations, was a strategic consultant; ??Ariana Berengaut, a senior adviser to the national security adviser, was a center director; ????Michael Carpenter, the US representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was a managing director; ??Juan Gonzalez, a special assistant to the president, was a senior fellow; and ????Carlyn Reichel, a special assistant to Biden and senior director for speechwriting and strategic initiatives, was the director of communications, according to Fox. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is among a number of administration staffers who worked at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Sarah Silbiger – Pool via CNP / Steven Richetti and President Biden at the White House on July 22, 2021. Richetti is among administration staffers who worked at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.AFP via Getty Images

Brian McKeon, a senior director at the center, was the deputy secretary of state for management and resources until he stepped down last month. see also Intel memos on Iran, Ukraine among docs found at Biden office: report

Since taking office, Biden has named longtime Penn president Amy Gutmann as the US ambassador to Germany while tapping David Cohen, the former head of the school’s board of trustees, as ambassador to Canada.

Biden praised Gutmann at the opening ceremony of the Penn Biden Center in February 2018 when he was interviewed by NBC News senior foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, another Penn alum. 

“??President Gutmann, when you came to me before the [Obama] administration was up and asked me whether I [would] consider to be a professor at Penn, the first thought I had was that it sounded like an intriguing idea, but it became even more intriguing after the outcome of the [2016] election when you said I could bring along with me some serious, serious people,” Biden said.

“Serious staff people and much more than staff and they start with Tony Blinken and Steve Ricchetti and others, so thank you for allowing me to bring along some really, really bright people.” Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, once worked for the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Shutterstock

L?awyers for the president found 10 documents with classified markings in a locked closet at the center on Nov. 2, 2022. The papers reportedly were mixed in with Biden family documents — including details of funeral arrangements for the president’s son Beau, who died in 2015.  see also Redacted affidavit behind Trump Mar-a-Lago raid finally released by DOJ

Some of the documents, which dated from between 2013 and 2016 when Biden was vice president, were labeled “Top Secret” and included material about Ukraine and Iran, according to CNN.

Special counsel to the president Richard Sauber said in a statement Monday night that Biden used the office from “mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 campaign” in April 2019. 

He said the National Archives and Records Administration was immediately informed and the agency retrieved the documents the next day. 

Biden, speaking Tuesday in Mexico City, where he was attending a summit with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said he was “surprised to learn” that the classified documents were taken to the office.

?”?I dont know whats in the documents. My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were. Ive turned over the boxes, theyve turned over the boxes to the Archives, and were cooperating fully, cooperating fully with the review, which I hope will be finished soon and therell be more detail at that time?,” he told reporters.  President Biden speaks at the University of Pennsylvania on March 30, 2017.

Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Chicago US Attorney John Lausch, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, to examine the documents and he has already submitted a preliminary report. Start your day with all you need to know

Morning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more. Enter your email address

Please provide a valid email address.

By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Thanks for signing up!
Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters

But Republicans are pointing out a double standard in the way the Biden materials are being treated compared with the way classified documents discovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida resort are being handled. 

Hundreds of classified documents were found at the former president’s Palm Beach resort in an FBI raid on Aug. 8 and Garland later named a special counsel, veteran prosecutor Jack Smith, to lead the investigation.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chair of the House Oversight Committee, said Tuesday that his panel will launch an investigation into the Biden documents and sent letters to the National Archives and White House seeking more information.  

He said the National Archives failed to publicly disclose the discovery of the classified documents and that Biden may have violated the law days before the midterm elections. 

“Meanwhile, NARA instigated a public and unprecedented FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago? ?? ?former President Trumps home? ?? ?to retrieve presidential records,” ?Comer wrote in the letter. “NARAs inconsistent treatment of recovering classified records held by former President Trump and President Biden raises questions about political bias at the agency.” 

Continue Reading

Business

Ofwat could be scrapped in water reforms

Published

on

By

Ofwat could be scrapped in water reforms

An independent review of the water industry is to recommend sweeping changes to the way the sector is managed, including the potential replacement of Ofwat with a strengthened body combining economic and environmental regulation.

Former Bank of England governor Sir Jon Cunliffe will publish the findings of the Independent Water Commission on Monday, with stakeholders across the industry expecting significant changes to regulation to be at its heart.

The existing regulator Ofwat has been under fire from all sides in recent years amid rising public anger at levels of pollution and the financial management of water companies.

Read more:
Serious water pollution incidents in England up 60% last year

Why has there been a surge in water pollution?

Campaigners and politicians have accused Ofwat of failing to hold water operators to account, while the companies complain that its focus on keeping bills down has prevented appropriate investment in infrastructure.

In an interim report, published in June, Sir Jon identified the presence of multiple regulators with overlapping responsibilities as a key issue facing the industry.

While Ofwat is the economic regulator, the Environment Agency has responsibility for setting pollution standards, alongside the Drinking Water Inspectorate.

More on Environment

Sir Jon’s final report is expected to include a recommendation that the government consider a new regulator that combines Ofwat’s economic regulatory powers with the water-facing responsibilities currently managed by the EA.

In his interim report, Sir Jon said options for reform ranged from “rationalising” existing regulation to “fundamental, structural options for integrating regulatory remits and functions”.

He is understood to have discussed the implications of fundamental reform with senior figures in industry and government in the last week as he finalised his report.

Environment Secretary Steve Reed is expected to launch a consultation on the proposals following publication of the commission report.

The commission is also expected to recommend a “major shift” in the model of economic regulation, which currently relies on econometric modelling, to a supervisory approach that takes more account of individual company circumstances.

Read more from Sky News:
Police taking no further action over Kneecap’s Glastonbury show
New fee for Britons travelling to EU will cost more than expected

How water can teach Labour a much-needed lesson


Liz Bates

Liz Bates

Political correspondent

@wizbates

On Monday, the government’s long-awaited review into the UK’s water industry will finally report.

The expectation is that it will recommend sweeping changes – including the abolition of the regulator, Ofwat.

But frustrated customers of the water companies could rightly complain that the process of taking on this failing sector and its regulator has been slow and ineffective.

They may be forgiven for going further and suggesting that how Labour has dealt with water is symbolic of their inability to make an impact across many areas of public life, leaving many of their voters disappointed.

This is an industry that has been visibly and rapidly declining for decades, with the illegal sewage dumping and rotting pipes in stark contrast with the vast salaries and bonuses paid out to their executives.

It doesn’t take a review to see what’s gone wrong. Most informed members of the public could explain what has happened in a matter of minutes.

And yet, despite 14 years in opposition with plenty of time to put together a radical plan, a review is exactly what the government decided on before taking on Ofwat.

Month after month, they were asked if they believed the water industry regulator was fit for purpose despite the obvious disintegration on their watch. Every time the answer was ‘yes’.

As in so many areas of government, Labour, instead of acting, needed someone else to make the decision for them, meaning that it has taken over a year to come to the simple conclusion that the regulator is in fact, not fit for purpose.

As they enter their second year in office, maybe this can provide a lesson they desperately need to learn if they want to turn around their fortunes.

That bold decisions do not require months of review, endless consultations, or outside experts to endlessly analyse the problem.

They just need to get on with it. Voters will thank them.

Sir Jon has said the water industry requires long-term strategic planning and stability in order to make it attractive to “low-risk, low-return investors”.

The water industry has long complained that the current model, in which companies are benchmarked against a notional model operator, and penalised for failing to hit financial and environmental standards, risks a “doom loop”.

Thames Water, currently battling to complete an equity process to avoid falling into special administration, has said the imposition of huge fines for failing to meet pollution standards is one of the reasons it is in financial distress.

Publication of the Independent Commission report comes after the Environment Agency published figures showing that serious pollution incidents increased by 60% in 2024, and as Thames Water imposes a hosepipe ban on 15m customers.

Ofwat, Water UK and the Department for the Environment all declined to comment.

Continue Reading

Politics

Bitcoin becomes 5th global asset ahead of “Crypto Week,” flips Amazon: Finance Redefined

Published

on

By

Bitcoin becomes 5th global asset ahead of “Crypto Week,” flips Amazon: Finance Redefined

Bitcoin becomes 5th global asset ahead of “Crypto Week,” flips Amazon: Finance Redefined

Bitcoin adoption has been soaring, leading up to the optimistic regulatory expectations related to “Crypto Week” in Washington.

Continue Reading

Technology

The investor behind Opendoor’s 190% run nearly shut down his fund

Published

on

By

The investor behind Opendoor's 190% run nearly shut down his fund

Courtesy: Opendoor

On June 6, online real estate service Opendoor was so desperate to get its beaten-down stock price back over $1 and stay listed on the Nasdaq that management proposed a reverse split, potentially lifting the price of each share by as much as 50 times.

The stock inched its way up over the next five weeks.

Then Eric Jackson started cheerleading.

Jackson, a hedge fund manager who was bullish on Opendoor years earlier when the company appeared to be thriving and was worth roughly $20 billion, wrote on X on Monday that his firm, EMJ Capital, was back in the stock.

“@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years,” Jackson wrote. He added later in the thread that the stock could get to $82.

It’s a long, long way from that mark.

Opendoor shares soared 189% this week, by far their best weekly performance since the company’s public market debut in late 2020. The stock closed on Friday at $2.25. The stock’s highest-volume trading days on record were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.

Jackson said in an interview on Thursday that the bulk of his firm’s Opendoor purchases came when the stock was in the 70s and 80s, meaning cents, and he’s bought options as well for his portfolio.

Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson’s purchases. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.

What has changed dramatically is Jackson’s online influence and the size of his following. The more he posts, the higher the stock goes.

“There’s a real hunger for buying the next big thing,” Jackson told CNBC, adding that investors like to find the “downtrodden.”

It’s something Jackson’s firm, based in Toronto, has in common with Opendoor.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Social Capital's Chamath Palihapitiya

When Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020, it was riding a SPAC wave and broader gains driven by low interest rates and Covid-era market euphoria. Investors pumped money into the riskiest assets, lifting money-losing tech upstarts to astronomical valuations.

Opendoor’s business involved using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains. Zillow tried and failed to compete.

Opendoor shares peaked at over $39 in Feb. 2021 for a market cap just above $22.5 billion. But by the end of that year, the shares were trading below $15, before collapsing 92% in 2022 to end the year at $1.16.

Rising interest rates hammered the whole tech sector, hitting Opendoor particularly hard as increased borrowing costs reduced demand for homes.

Jackson, similarly, had a miserable 2022, coinciding with the worst year for the Nasdaq since 2008. Jackson said his key client withdrew its money at the end of the year, and “I’ve been small ever since.”

‘Epic comeback’

While his assets under management remain minimal, Jackson’s reputation for getting in early to a rebound story was burnished by the performance of Carvana.

The automotive e-commerce platform lost 98% of its value in 2022 as investors weighed the likelihood of bankruptcy. In the middle of that year, with Carvana still far from bottoming out, Jackson expressed his bullishness. He told CNBC that April that he liked the stock, and then promoted its recovery on a podcast in June. He also said he liked Opendoor at the time.

Investors willing to stomach further losses in 2022 were rewarded with a 1,000% gain in 2023, and a lot more upside from there. The stock closed on Friday at $347.52, up from a low of $3.72 in Dec. 2022, and almost triple its price at the time of Jackson’s appearance on CNBC in April of that year.

After Carvana’s 2022 slide, “then obviously began an epic comeback,” Jackson said. Opendoor, meanwhile, “continued to roll down the mountain,” he said.

Jackson said that the fallout of 2022 led him to pursue a different method of stockpicking. He started hiring a small team of developers, which is now four people, to build out artificial intelligence models. The firm has experimented with several models —some have worked and some haven’t — but he said the focus now is using what he’s learned from Carvana to find “100x” opportunities.

In addition to Opendoor, Jackson has been promoting IREN, a provider of power for bitcoin mining and AI workloads, and Cipher Mining, which is in a similar space. He’s seen his following on Elon Musk‘s social media site X, which he said was stuck for years between 32,000 and 34,000, swell to almost 50,000. And after a lengthy lull, investors are reaching out to him to try and put money into his fund, he said.

Jackson has a lot riding on Opendoor, a company that saw revenue and number of homes sold slip in the first quarter from a year earlier, and racked up almost $370 million in losses over the past four quarters.

In early June, Opendoor announced plans for a reverse split — ranging from 1 for 10 to 1 for 50 — to “give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.” With the stock now well over $1, such a move appears less necessary, as shareholders prepare to vote on the proposal on July 28.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jackson. “Those things usually further cement a company’s move into oblivion rather than hail some big revival.”

Opendoor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Banking on growth

Analysts are projecting a more than 5% drop in revenue this year, followed by 20% growth in 2026 and 12% expansion in 2017, according to LSEG. Losses are expected to narrow over that stretch.

Jackson said his analysis factors in projections of $11.5 billion in revenue for 2029, which would be well over double the company’s expected sales for this year. He looked at the multiples of companies like Zillow and Carvana, which he said trade for 4 to 7 times forward revenue. Opendoor’s forward price-to-sales ratio is currently well below 1.

With Zillow and Redfin having exited the instant-buying home market, Opendoor faces little competition in allowing homeowners to sell their property online for cash, rather than going through an extended bidding, sales and closing process.

Jackson is banking on revenue growth and increased market share to lead to a profitable business that will push investors to value the company with a multiple somewhere between Zillow and Carvana. At $82, Opendoor would be worth about $60 billion, which is roughly 5 times projected 2029 revenue.

Jackson said his model assumes that “like Carvana, Opendoor can prove that it can permanently turn the tide and get to sustained profitability” so that the “market multiple would get reassessed.”

In the meantime, he’ll keep posting on X.

On Friday, Jackson wrote a thread consisting of 11 posts, recounting the challenge of having “99.5% of my AUM” disappear overnight after his primary investor pulled out in 2022.

“Translation: he fired me for losing him too much money,” Jackson wrote. He said he almost shut down the fund, and was even encouraged to do so by his wife and accountant.

Now, Jackson is using his recent momentum on social media to try and attract investor money, while still reminding prospects that he could lose it.

“All I have is my reputation,” he wrote, “and, unless I keep picking good stocks, it will be gone.”

WATCH: Don’t yet know if IPO market is back to full health

Don't yet know if IPO market is back to full health, says Raymond James' Sunaina Sinha Haldea

Continue Reading

Trending