FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money
142 comments
·March 14, 2025kelnos
TFA links to what I think is a much more informative article: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/12/judge-epa-climate-g...
sharemywin
“Can you proffer any evidence that [the grant] was illegal, or evidence of abuse or fraud or bribery — that any of that was improperly or unlawfully done, other than the fact that Mr. Zeldin doesn’t like it?” Judge Tanya Chutkan said.
Judge Chutkan also ordered the Justice Department to provide the court with details about the alleged fraud, “because I don’t have the credible evidence that’s required.”
This whole calling things fraud without actually have any evidence is really starting to get old.
wenwolf
The minimum to cause change is judges expending more effort on imprisoning law enforcement agents for perjury.
jmward01
A weaponized justice department requires the judiciary to respond in kind.
wenwolf
Personally, I've considered the problem to be a long term one and fixing it as a possible silver lining. I have to admit that I'm a bit of a pessimist about the integrity of the American people. I was wrong about what would happen with the first Black President, I was sure the racism was going to have a silver lining of cutting down the POTUS and not allowing a show like this. But the POTUS office is still the reason the US will kill itself at a minimum. (Nothing good can go unpunished?)
garyfirestorm
And disbarring lawyers for malpractice - for knowingly bringing frivolous lawsuits
thaumasiotes
> The minimum to cause change is judges expending more effort on imprisoning law enforcement agents for perjury.
Is that a thing judges can do? They can imprison you for contempt of court; wouldn't perjury need a prosecutor?
gamblor956
The judge can request that the lawyers involved lose their admission to practice in federal court for serious ethical violations like the ones here.
However, this very rarely happens except in the most egregious cases where the lawyer is usually also disbarred for their conduct (i.e., Guiliani) so it's not a meaningful disciplinary measure.
dghlsakjg
Is it just custom not to exercise it?
Why do these judges allow people to show up to court and make exceptionally stupid arguments?
jonstewart
Funnily enough, a Trump crony is running to head the DC bar…
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-...
brookst
It’s far more likely that we judges imprisoned for ruling the wrong way.
null
roenxi
On the scale of Wild Things happening in US politics, this one is pretty minor. Provoking that sort of constitutional crisis over it seems poorly advised - it'd be better if the judicial system sticks to their traditional role of telling people to do things differently when it has been established that the government is acting illegally.
In my lifetime politicians have associated with flagrant lies that led to 100,000s of deaths and they aren't even expected to apologise. The Iraq war alone is a study - eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Body_Count_project.
apical_dendrite
Initiating criminal investigations into the administration's political opponents without evidence is NOT "pretty minor".
FireBeyond
No, it's pretty major. You're freezing funds to charities who are providing in some cases life-changing/saving services.
Locking them out of THEIR money because some petty fucking despot and his unelected sidekick decides that's the best way to claw back SOME money that was legally granted because fuck it, it'll hurt/anger/annoy some libs along the way, too.
_DeadFred_
The one good thing is this is going to end the Courts giving 'good faith' waivers to the government prosecutors for everything (oh the cops didn't keep chain of custody on this evidence but that's OK we are going to waive chain of custody requirements because we know you all are acting in good faith is such a BS policy).
kristopolous
Traditionally when people are on an endless campaign of accusation, they are actually up to their ears in whatever they're accusing others of. The anti-gay politician is exposed as gay, the evangelical pastor is leading a life of excess and vice, people talking about fake news fabricate deceptions and try to pass it off as news... This is generally so reliable, you can just change the pronouns from "They" to "We" and get an accurate statement.
I'm pretty sure the actual fraud and abuse here is coming from inside the house. Claiming the richest man in the world isn't motivated by money is like claiming Jeffrey Epstein wasn't motivated by sex.
kyleee
I suspect Epstein was not motivated by sex, rather he was likely some sort of spook. We will probably never know unfortunately
kristopolous
What gives you that idea
JadeNB
Chutkan is quite familiar with this administration's methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Chutkan#Notable_cases
QuantumGood
Thank you for not flagging this, yet.
lawn
Aged like sour milk.
QuantumGood
Hacker News seems one of the best places to discuss politically-influenced news, yet because such discusssions are near-univeraally fraught in some way, it is discouraged, which is not my preference. I have seen in checking the history of some HN commentors that it is not uncommon for those who say some version of "no politics, please" say it when they disagree with the general slant of those discussions where they make such comments.
reseasonable
A dedicated hacker news of politics site is long overdue. Civil discussions, amazing moderation, and the intelligent insight of experts to hash out complex issues. I’d be on it and participating nearly all day long.
Huntsecker
daily stories coming from the US are pretty crazy, FBI being used as a tool to try and revert something from under the previous administration. Feels like whatever balances and checks that should be in place to stop an autocracy are missing
kayodelycaon
In theory, congress can remove a president. Start placing your bets! Does he get removed before he dissolves congress? :)
I’m only partial joking. The check and balances in the country won’t work if half the population wants to replace democracy with theocracy.
alienthrowaway
> In theory, congress can remove a president
In practice, the president is threatening to remove any Republican member of congress who crosses him by supporting a primary challenger.
rufus_foreman
>> the president is threatening to remove any Republican member of congress who crosses him by supporting a primary challenger
Democracy is scary stuff to some people.
Alupis
Just because you are unhappy with how things are being governed doesn't mean democracy is failing, etc. We just had an election, and the current administration won. Midterms are just around the corner. This is exactly how things are supposed to work.
MostlyStable
Congress voluntarily giving up its powers to the executive branch [0] (unfortunately not new, but worsening), isn't exactly Democracy failing, but it's certainly a breakdown of the system of checks and balances upon which our Federal government was conceived, and is most definitely not "how things are supposed to work".
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/house-republicans-block-con...
a4aur5uiu
He's literally dissolving, dismantling, and undermining the systems that you're claiming are "working". And federal judges are deciding cases along strict party lines, which is a pretty clear demonstration that they're utterly ignoring the actual written words of the law. And Congress has completely given away their intended control of federal spending. So let's cut the shit. You like Trump and you want this to continue. Don't lie to me and tell me you believe one single word of the mental diarrhea that you just wrote.
It's like we're standing on the street watching a building burn down and you're saying "look the sprinklers are on, this is how it's supposed to happen". No one is stupid enough to say what you're saying and actually believe it. So clearly you're just lying.
fransje26
> The check and balances in the country won’t work if half the population wants to replace democracy with theocracy.
It looks like this entire nonsense is heavily going to hurt the wallets of more than half of the population. So why would they be so keen to vote for a theocracy?
Although at this stage I also wouldn't put it past the clowns in power to actively tamper with elections to get the results they want.
chaos_agent
[dead]
kristopolous
Republicans are the right wing party, Democrats are the conservative. That's why their response is to uphold the status quo and existing power structures while they do ineffective, ceremonial, wonky frittering around the edges.
Their progressive policies were adopted after Fortune 500 and major institutions had changed theirs.
Whether it be climate change or gay marriage, established companies like Goldman Sachs and Amazon were there first and the Democrats followed because they desperately align themselves with the status-quo regardless of where it is.
Just scroll through the Google News result for "Democrats". People scratch their heads because they assume they're supposed to be oppositional as opposed to institutional.
Once you understand they're the party of establishment, status quo and hegemony, there's literally no more confusion on their motivations or lack of action.
salynchnew
Yeah, I thought it'd be a cold day in hell before I saw the FBI going after Habitat for Humanity and the United Way.
accrual
I hope it leads to stronger checks and balances.
not2b
A president can revert an executive order from the previous administration. But the Inflation Reduction Act is a law, not an executive order. If Trump doesn't like it, he can get Congress to repeal it. But he isn't the king. The constitution requires that the president "take care that the laws be faithfully executed". It isn't fraud when funds that were allocated by the act were distributed according to the act. If someone cheated then by all means they can bring charges if they have any evidence, which they apparently do not.
caycep
the problem is there has to be credible enforcement. Either a credible threat of impeachment, or a separate branch of Us Marshals that works directly for the judiciary or something.
roamerz
>>The constitution requires that the president "take care that the laws be faithfully executed".
You mean like Biden enforcing our border laws?
apical_dendrite
Most of us learn in kindergarten that "but he got to do it" is not a valid excuse for bad behavior.
(This should not be taken as accepting your premise)
Aloisius
Em. Deportations increased substantially under Biden.
That said, laws generally permit some leeway to the executive to set spending priorities/focus. It can be pretty limited since Congress tends to specify what department and sometimes program money must be spent on, but it still it allows for things like deciding you're going to prosecute more drug dealers even though they're long shot cases rather than easier to win fraud causes. This is done at all levels of government.
Shifting spending priorities as the law allows, though, is rather different from actively breaking the law.
Terr_
> to try and revert something from under the previous administration
More-importantly, it's nowhere close to "normal" try-to-reverts, where one President tries to replace an equally "soft" policy put in place by another President.
Here the newly-installed crooks are trying to deny a hard "money shall be spent on X" law passed by Congress, which is an unconstitutional attempt to seize the "power of the purse".
Same legal-vibes as if Trump declared people on his Friends List were exempt from taxes.
jagged-chisel
> … as if …
This hasn’t happened already?
Terr_
Not precisely: Trump fired so many people that the IRS can't check whether the rich are submitting fake paperwork to cheat on their taxes.
Related outcome, but different in mechanics/constitutionality.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-hamstrung-irs-is-a-gift...
pjc50
> as if Trump declared people on his Friends List were exempt from taxes
I'll pencil that in for April. After all, the president can direct who is and is not prosecuted..
tempodox
I was about to say, “don't give him any ideas”, but it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway.
chaos_agent
[dead]
crypto_is_king
[flagged]
tremon
No he didn't. If he had, you would have posted a credible link.
burkaman
I searched for a while and haven't been able to figure out what you're referring to, can you explain?
chaos_agent
[dead]
9283409232
Some information from the linked document about the non-profits that are being targeted.
> 2. Conflicts of Interest and Political Favoritism
> A $2 billion grant was awarded to Power Forward Communities, a new nonprofit with ties to Stacey Abrams, despite reporting only $100 in total revenue in 2023
> Young, Gifted & Green was awarded $20 million, even though its CEO applied for funding while serving on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
The balls for this administration to attempt to call out other people on conflicts of interest and political favoritism is crazy.
narutosasuke
Power Forward Communities: A coalition of five nonprofit organizations — Enterprise Community Partners, Habitat for Humanity International, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), Rewiring America and United Way Worldwide.
Abrams' connection to Power Forward Communities, is through Rewiring America, one of the five organizations that leads the program.
That seems pretty weak. No idea what the other group is but I mean if the above is what's being lead with, I don't find myself concerned. Looks more like working your way backwards from "I don't want this money spent so I will find whatever connection I can to corruption"
alwa
And it takes some kind of chutzpah to claim that Habitat for Humanity has no track record or competency building affordable housing, just because this collaboration is new…
kristjansson
LISC and ECP too. Like 1.5m affordable units developed between them
kristjansson
The gall to describe a group counting habitat for humanity and united way as members as “a new nonprofit”…
It’d be funny if it wasn’t so serious
9283409232
That is McCarthyism[1] in a nutshell. You find someone or something you don't like then work backwards.
llamaimperative
“Ties to Stacey Abrams”, by the way, is that she is an advisor to one of the five organizations that founded Power Forward Communities…
I.e. that a community organizer was involved in a community organization…
crypto_is_king
[flagged]
fabian2k
I don't think you can reasonably expect the claims by this administration to be true. There are far too many examples where they claimed fraud without any evidence.
tokioyoyo
My take is, either everyone should be allowed to scam, or nobody. It sounds very stupid, but I don’t like it when people in power give preference to their own scams.
Obviously I want no scams, but the US has chosen administration that is ok with insider scams. So as an outsider, I’d rather see equality instead.
koolba
[flagged]
epgui
What do you think the word “scam” means?
kelnos
I don't think GP said that. Please don't put words in people's mouths.
londons_explore
Both sides of the political divide attempt to funnel taxpayers money into their own interests, which are often thinly veiled ways to get taxpayer money into their own pockets. This is nothing new.
Whenever there is a change of admin, the new admin attempts to claw back or redirect money the old admin directed to their own pockets. This is also nothing new.
What's new this year is people are talking about it.
llamaimperative
If both sides do it, then they should be able to publish better evidence than Stacey Abrams’ “ties” to Power Forward Communities.
The fact that all the DOGE and DOGE-adjacent claims of fraud have been so shamefully weak has actually reduced my confidence that the alleged behavior is actually widespread at all.
9283409232
What evidence do you have of Biden clawing taxpayer money back from Trump's friends?
lazyeye
Non-profits and ngos have such enormous potential for fraud and abuse. You get your political friends to setup an ngo, give it a nice name like "Climate Progress Coalition" or "Equity Action Network" etc. Hand it a billion dollars of hard-earned taxpayer money and it can then do (without oversight) what would be illegal for the govt to do with oversight. The potential for abuse is limitless...million-dollar salaries, campaign for the govt and so on...
counters
Then it should be pretty easy to demonstrate fraud and abuse, hmmm?
kristjansson
Yes yes American nonprofits, with their mandatory annual public financial disclosures including key individuals salaries, famously a great and easy way to misappropriate monies.
marcusverus
Have you read any of the disclosure forms? They're a joke. I read the 990 for one organization (NLIHC [0]), a mostly-government-funded organization with >10M in "revenue". They're required to list their three most cost-intensive activities in field 4a of the 990, and brother, those people don't do a damn thing. They listed 1) they helped local governments spend tax money 2) made 8 pamphlets (the one I saw was ~10 pages long), and 3) they helped some other organization prepare some webinars. They list more fluff and nonsense (including attending conventions), but no meaningful deliverables. They couldn't even be bothered to proofread their one required deliverable, as evidenced by the bullet points which they copy/pasted into field 4a!
They employ 40 people and their CEO makes 400K, BTW.
These orgs do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
[0]https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521...
xboxnolifes
I'm really not sure how to take the comment on the CEO's salary. Some days on HN, 400k is called one good software engineer's salary. Other day's its alluded to as being to as being an overpaid CEO. And then other days people try to justify CEOs making 100M a year.
kristjansson
> NLIHC
not mentioned in or at all related to TFA, but go off.
> mostly-government-funded
False. Just blatantly wrong. The 990 you linked reports zero revenue from government sources, (part 8, line 1e) and 21m from other grants and contributions (i.e. private sources). Regrettably their website's donors page is broken, but their most recent annual report[1] reports large contributions from exactly the large grant-making foundations you'd expect (Robert Wood Johnson, Hilton, Melville, Ballmer, Annie E. Casey, ...).
> 400k
354k, plus 44k in other benefits (i.e. health insurance etc.). Regardless, yes people working for nonprofits get paid. These are professional organizations. The people that fund these organizations want their contributions to be effectively utilized to pursue the mission of the nonprofit. Finding people who will accept the absolute minimum rarely leads to an effective, sustainable organization.
> deliverable
This is (primarily) an advocacy organization. Research, data, reports, analysis, consultancy, marketing material, etc. are their byproduct and collateral. Their goal is to cause impactful, beneficial programs to be funded, implemented, and have their effects realized by the needy populations their serve. The programs they've supported (e.g. National Housing Trust Fund) and their continued and growing support from private foundations should be evidence of success in their mission.
[1]: https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/2023_ANNUAL_REPORT.pdf
kyleee
Good work if you can get it. That is partly how the politicians and their friends and family get in on the grift.
sofixa
Isn't that billion given only for a specific project? Doesn't it come with mandatory audits? And isn't that fully public information?
Contrast with something like the Pentagon which has billions entirely unaccounted for, even after paying tens of thousands of dollars for common items such as a bathroom soap dispenser.
actionfromafar
Yes, I sleep so much better now when the dogebags and Musky protect us all from evil. Musk will never never abuse. Forever and ever, Amen.
Especially nobody won't abuse Medicare because there won't be any. If they want food they can beg in the streets or work at a plantation.
_DeadFred_
Wait until you hear about a politician that started his own meme coin right before entering office. I'm sure those attacking audited non-profits would go after such a blatantly fraud and abuse prone politician first.
stouset
Citation needed.
Vilian
>Non-profits and ngos have such enormous potential for fraud and abuse.
That's such a bullshit argument that only a us-american can make, only someone hearing for years anti-goverment, anti-regulation, pro capitalism propaganda can say that without any proof, y'all look like you want that distopia, be happy with it then
npvrite
[flagged]
dang
Can you please make your substantive points without fulminating? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(This is not a comment on your substantive views, just a request to express them more thoughtfully, in the intended spirit of this site.)
chatmasta
If I had the authority to restructure the administrative state, I’d make a rule that every agency needs an anti-agency to hold it accountable. Let them swap roles every 7 years, with a consistently adversarial relationship to hold each other accountable. Basically a blue team vs. red team setup, or a blue/green deployment.
Checks and balances actually work pretty well, but we only use them at the topmost level between the three constitutionally defined branches. We need to apply the same mechanism throughout the federal bureaucracy.
sofixa
That probably won't work. Blue would have an incentive to prove red failed, so if red initiated a big long term project (say, building a new high speed rail network, or a new dam, or incentives to build auto factories or whatever that cannot be done in the every X years switches happen), blue will do their best to sabotage it. This happens in politics already (e.g. public transit projects started by previous governments get sabotaged), let alone if there's an adversarial relationship by the people supposed to be directly directing and overseeing this stuff.
chatmasta
Hmm. I guess the “public transit projects of previous governments being sabotaged” is by design. Regardless of two-party politics, if the people vote into power a new representative who disagrees with the previous one, then they’ll kill those projects. And they’ll spend their time campaigning on the basis of that. This results in “slow government” which – at least IMO – is a Very Good Thing.
But for agencies, you want the opposite – you want fast reaction to changing environment. So in that sense, career bureaucrats are an advantage as long as they remain relatively politically independent and prioritize based on requirements more than perception. The problems arise when they become affixed to one of the parties, but without the checks and balances.
I think this is maybe okay as long as the “fast reaction” has a “fast undo.” Otherwise a new executive (and their predecessor) actually has less power than the agencies within the executive branch.
renewiltord
The problem with America is that it’s too good at big projects and getting them done quickly. We can improve this by adding a bureaucracy that is incentivized to stall everything. I see. Wise.
nipponese
In all of human history, you think the US gov is the most corrupt? Time to crack open a history book.
beebaween
This is a private bank hoarding government (tax payer) dollars for seemingly no reason. The money sure as heck wasn't being used for "climate action". As an environmentalist and just someone who thinks the gov shouldn't be offshoring billions of dollars I fully support gov orgs looking into this...
It's easy to let politics color the perception of this but I for one although I dislike the current president support this effort.
beebaween
Idk why anyone who's "anti establishment" wants to rail against the gov or any reg body looking into... banks doing sketchy things with taxpayer money that should... improve the environment and tax payer's lives.
What on earth happened to ppl on HN?
kyleee
Most of the hackers got rich, and also a bunch of people who aren’t hackers/nerds/curious people jumped on the tech bandwagon for money, and have done well enough to view themselves as equals to the politicians and bigwigs. It has really changed the dynamic here and elsewhere, as you note
fzeroracer
This is an incredibly false characterization of the situation. Demanding that accounts be frozen while producing zero evidence for your claims isn't an investigation. Nor is it even following the bare minimum of the law.
actionfromafar
So, were are the arrests for all the "fraud"? Congress spent the money, it's not for Trump to steal.
actionfromafar
The current regime.
haliskerbas
The hero and godking of many on this very forum, Elon Musk is supposedly doing that.
bufferoverflow
[flagged]
kristjansson
If you didn’t have the benefit of your preferred news sources, would you still believe this?
bufferoverflow
I found out about Biden's family money laundering from NYTimes
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/arts/design/hunter-biden-...
tdeck
Of course as is typical this comment comes with no evidence.
Meanwhile we're supposed to believe that Trump supporters care about corruption when he did this?
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/g-s1-47817/trump-pardon-rod-b...
bufferoverflow
Now do Hunter Biden.
marcusverus
Yeah... neither party has leg to stand on when it comes to pardons. That specific pardon wasn't even the worst within the preceding 30 days!
Legal eagle did a good video with lots of context about this mess: https://youtu.be/5KApz1PdBgA