Lee Zeldin is an ambitious man.
The former congressman, who left office in 2022 to get routed by Kathy Hochul in the New York governor’s race, has only been head of the the Environmental Protection Agency for three weeks.
But he’s already looking to make a name for himself.
Luckily his former House colleague #Kristi #Noem,
currently the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has provided a template.
After a grossly misinformed tweet by #Elon #Musk accusing New York of misappropriating disaster relief funds to house illegal migrants in luxury hotels, Noem snatched $80 million from the city of New York’s bank account.
The money had been congressionally allocated and was being used exactly as intended.
But Noem took a victory lap, blustering on X,
“Mark my words: there will not be a single penny spent that goes against the interest and safety of the American people.”
And #Lee #Zeldin said, CAN DO!
The babyfaced politician warned of “an extremely disturbing video circulated two months ago featuring a Biden EPA political appointee talking about how they were ‘tossing gold bars off the Titanic,’ rushing to get billions of your dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.”
“The gold bars were your tax dollars!” he intoned indignantly, adding that “tossing them off the Titanic meant the Biden administration knew they were wasting it.”
This leap of logic is sadly the least ridiculous part of this episode.
Because the “disturbing video” was made by #Project #Veritas, the rightwing smear factory that specializes in deceptively edited videos of Democrats.
In this case, the outfit appears to have secretly filmed a former EPA advisor in a bar talking about the rush to disburse clean energy funds before Trump took over and gutted the place.
The advisor’s fears were well-founded: Just hours after his inauguration,
Trump demanded that the government halt distribution of congressionally-allocated funds,
purporting to unilaterally cancel the grants and contracts that he didn’t like.
And he continues to do it despite multiple court orders instructing him to knock it off.
Zeldin was unbothered by the video’s sordid provenance.
He gleefully seized on the “gold bars” turn of phrase to raise his own profile,
while attempting to ingratiate himself with #Musk by crediting the #DOGE bros with the discovery.
In interviews with conservative outlets like #Newsmax and the Washington Free Beacon, he hyped the story, even concocting a stringboard theory to connect it to Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams.
“ICYMI: Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds Gold Bars from EPA at Stacey Abrams’ Connected Group, Biden-Harris Ethical Red Flags,” an EPA press release trumpeted,
attaching Zeldin’s press clippings like a campaign webpage.
Unsurprisingly, Zeldin was also repeatedly given free rein to lie to his heart’s content on #Fox.
On Maria Bartiromo’s show, he went as far as to allege that the lawful distribution of congressionally appropriated funds is tantamount to a “criminal scheme.”
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/lee-zeldin-stacey-abrams-gold-bars?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
