☕️ BUGS ☙ Wednesday, June 3, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh Hires Project 2025 Author; Pulte Takes Over ODNI Intelligence; NIH Scientists Caught Smuggling Monkeypox; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup includes: the Project 2025 author Kevin Warsh just hired to redesign the Fed, the three-hat bulldog Trump parked on top of the entire intelligence community, and the BSL-4 virus chief caught smuggling 113 vials of Congolese monkeypox through Detroit in a picnic cooler.

I’ll cover yesterday’s various primary results in tomorrow’s post, when I unveil my theory about how Republicans might be quietly giving up trying to pull the policy boulder uphill in deep blue jurisdictions and instead are allowing it to roll along downhill.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Last week, Keven Warsh was sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas as our newest Fed Chair. The ceremony was held at the White House, which was not the customary spot at the Fed’s HQ. Read into that what you will. Kevin has apparently unpacked and is already smashing norms and customs. Yesterday, CNBC breathlessly reported, “Fed Chair Warsh makes first hires at central bank, including ‘Project 2025’ author.”

To say that the establishment and the corporate media are frantically waiting for their chance to criticize whatever Kevin does next is like saying that Attila the Hun considered acquiring some real estate. Meanwhile, Kevin Warsh has done an admirably Trump 2.0 job of keeping the details of his plans more or less buried in word salad. Until now.

Yesterday, Warsh placed his first two hires on the chessboard. Their credentials provide what we might call a ‘signal,’ in the same sense that —to carry the Attila metaphor a little further— the Western Roman Empire might have described as ‘unrest in the plains.’ On paper, it looks wonkily boring: Kevin hired two conservative economic policy researchers. Yawn. The first, Daniel Heil, is a fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution think-tank, where Warsh previously held a position before joining the Fed.

The second hire was much more suggestive and triggering for big-government economists. Paul Winfree is one of the “Project 2025” authors, which is bad enough, but he also wrote the chapter on the Federal Reserve. Get ready. Winfree’s chapter described Fed reforms going far beyond any of Kevin Warsh’s public calls for “regime change” or even “breaking some heads.”

When I say ‘far beyond’ anything Warsh has hinted at publicly, I mean like this: if Warsh staked a Fed-reform position as far from DC as Arlington, Virginia, then Winfree’s proposals are located in the suburbs on one of Neptune’s outer moons.

To merely call Winfree’s chapter on the Fed ‘radical’ is to do it a grave injustice. Winfree argued that the Fed has mushroomed into an overpowered, politicized institution that causes the boom‑bust and inflation cycles it is supposed to tame. In Winfree’s view, the Fed should only be focused on protecting the value of the dollar and restraining inflation, and not messing about with jobs policy, climate/ESG agendas, and “too big to fail” rescues.

His Project 2025 chapter offers a buffet-style menu of options to drastically shrink, tightly leash, and outright abolish the Federal Reserve as we know it. There’s a common theme: stop using monetary policy to ‘manage the economy’ and refocus the Fed (or its replacement) on hard constraints around money and inflation. In the appetizer section of his menu, Winfree describes completely ending the Fed and moving to “free banking,” where competing private banks, not a central planner, issue notes and deposits, and the government can no longer mint new money at will.

Short of ‘free banking,’ which would require an almost unimaginable act by Congress, Winfree suggests something equally wild in DC terms: returning to some form of commodity standard, such as a gold‑backed dollar. Crazy, right? He also called for Congress to explicitly bar the Fed from launching any central bank digital currency, which Winfree said would give the state “unprecedented surveillance and potential control” over individual financial transactions.

I may regret saying this, but once again, we must nod at the ‘Q’ team, which predicted these sorts of themes, at least directionally. Winfree’s proposals describe a realistic, legalistic pathway to the kinds of radical Fed reforms hinted at in various Q drops and mythologized in the QAnon community — shrinking or even ending the modern Fed, moving back toward “sound money,” and slamming the door on a surveillance‑heavy CBDC.

CNBC didn’t say it out loud, but it did strongly hint that Warsh’s first two hires mean the new Fed chair is considering options once considered impossible or the stuff of conspiracy theory.

It won’t be easy. There’s only so much he can do without Congress passing or changing laws. More challenging, Kevin Warsh’s reforms will be opposed by some of the existing Fed governors, including Jerome Powell himself, who broke 70+ years of tradition and didn’t actually retire, but clung to his job as one of the twelve Fed governors, which he was technically allowed to do— a bold, defiant move that previous Fed Chairs have never historically made.

So, Warsh needs leverage — not just inside the Eccles Building, but across the parts of government that hold kompromat and control the surveillance tools. That observation leads us directly to the next story.

🔥 Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Trump picks mortgage chief Bill Pulte to lead on national intelligence.” Corporate media reports sneered at the new appointment as “strange.” Yesterday, President Trump appointed bulldog Bill Pulte, the Director of Federal Housing Finance and Director of Fannie/Freddie with a third job: as actingDirector of National Intelligence, replacing Tulsi Gabbard. He’s giving Marco Rubio a run for his money in the stacked jobs department. What’s got everyone buzzing is that Bill has zero previous intelligence background. He is a baby in Spookland.

CLIP: CNBC’s full interview with FHFA Director Bill Pulte (14:10).

Alert readers will recall the clean-cut, pugilistic mortgage chief, who has referred various progressive luminaries for mortgage fraud prosecution, including Senator Adam Schiff (D-Ca.), New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Fed governor Lisa Cook. This disgruntled Democrats. Writing for the Atlantic, left-wing lunatic and self-selected elite David Frum called Bill an “ultra-partisan with a highly quarrelsome personality and great inherited wealth.”

As far as I can tell, “ultra-partisan” is right of “ultra-right-wing,” which right of the Third Reich and possibly as far right as it gets without the WaPo breaking out the thesaurus again.

Democrats are not taking this well. They can’t decide whether to laugh or feign outrage. A congressman you probably never heard of claimed to be terrified. “Frighteningly, he’s got more of a platform at the ODNI than as a housing regulator,” Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said in an interview. “There’s a lot of opportunity for mischief here,” he added conspiratorially.

Mischief was an odd word in this context. I’m not sure it completely bears the load of “frighteningly.” It sounds like Himes was describing a Dennis the Menace-style caper or something. I was only trying to help!

Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), 71, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who is not a little anything, was a little insulted. Warner snapped that Bill Pulte has “no time in the military, no time in Congress, no time in the diplomatic corps, no time in law enforcement.” On a four-in-a-row-‘no’ roll, Warner concluded: “It is an insult.” But, to whom? At least he didn’t say “mischief.”

The article unintentionally betrayed what Democrats are really worried about: Congress is preparing to vote to reauthorize FISA, the controversial law allowing warrantless surveillance of foreigners overseas. The actual problems with FISA are legion, but the only problem mentioned by WaPo —about a law Democrats lovedwhile bugging Trump officials, but that is now keeping progressive party chiefs up at night— is that “those intercepts sometimes collect data from communications involving U.S. citizens.”

Uh-oh! In other words, ODNI can read and listen to Democrat politicians’ discussions with foreign actors. Now, all of a sudden, FISA poses a crisis for democracy.

🔥 ODNI is not just another federal office to be plugged. It is one of the most critical slots in the Trump 2.0 Administration’s accountability structure. You’ll remember that Tulsi has been building the case since last year that Russiagate was a treasonous conspiracy, and collecting evidence related to the stolen 2020 election. Even aside from those significant projects, ODNI also oversees all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Media is struggling to understand what’s really going on, and whether novice Bill Pulte will be immediately rolled by career IC operatives or possibly figure out how to “make mischief.” It is admittedly confusing. Why assign Bill Pulte, who’s a willing fighter but not a spook, into this ultra-sensitive role? And why also leave him in his multiple old jobs, forced to share time with the mortgage and housing finance agencies?

To be clear: I don’t know the plan. (And I don’t want to know the plan.) But there are some dots we can connect, and as usual, timing is our best clue. As today’s first segment reminded us, Kevin Warsh just stepped up as Fed Chief and is starting to overturn tables in the Fed’s executive dining room. Maybe there’s something there?

Curiously, there are a couple of connections between Warsh and Pulte, at least in their interests. The WaPo story said Bill Pulte “was a leading voice in trying to oust then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell.” Indeed, Bill surfaced Fed governor Lisa Cook’s obvious mortgage fraud in what was, at the time, considered a pressure campaign against the rebellious Fed chief. And Pulte, from his spot at the mortgage agencies, has been intensely critical of Powell’s interest-rate decisions.

🔥 In last year’s CNBC clip that I linked above, Bill began with a rant about the Fed. “I don’t believe for the last four years that the Fed has been independent,” Bill explained. “You see that even right now. You’ve got Lisa Cook, who’s being represented by Norm Eisen. Norm Eisen is the guy who tried to take down Trump, failed at it, but led the first impeachment. He’s the lawyer for Lisa Cook. This is a raging Democrat. Then on top of it, you’ve got Jerome Powell who’s sitting silent.”

“Powell doesn’t like our president,” Bill continued. “Look at what he did the last many years with Biden right before the election. And now you have low inflation and he’s not cutting rates. And then he gets a lady who’s alleged guilty of credible mortgage fraud, and he doesn’t even say, ‘hold on’ or announce an investigation. It’s very odd.”

If it’s not a coincidence, it’s a whirlwind of related action. Tulsi tendered her resignation notice on May 22nd— two days after Warsh was sworn in as Fed Chair. Ten days after that, Trump announced the placement of fierce loyalist and bulldog Bill Pulte at Tulsi’s spot at ODNI. It makes you wonder whether some coordination was involved.

Not only that. Bill Pulte’s appointment as acting DNI looks a whole lot like Todd Blanche’s appointment as acting Attorney General. Both men are “hyper-partisan” loyalists; thus, neither man could possibly be confirmed in the malfunctioning Senate. Now, through careful procedural gamesmanship, both men enjoy at least a year to make big moves.

🔥 Now sitting astride the country’s giant mortgage engines and the intelligence community, Bill Pulte is uniquely positioned to watch money move around the world, and to connect those flows to the people and groups behind them.

As FHFA director and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Bill already oversees institutions that touch or guarantee a large share of U.S. mortgages, giving him access (directly or via agency tools such as anti‑fraud analytics) to extraordinarily detailed, often nonpublic financial and property data on elites and institutions.

Layer on top of that his new ODNI role, which coordinates foreign‑intelligence collection and analysis, including programs that sometimes sweep in the communications and financial dealings of U.S. citizens talking to foreigners, and suddenly the same hard‑charging operator willing to wield mortgage records against the Administration’s political enemies can, in principle, cross‑reference housing, credit, and ownership patterns with intelligence‑grade information about foreign contacts, shell structures, and illicit funding streams.

There’s a lot of potential there. But more, if an administration seeks leverage on powerful actors who thought their finances were opaque or hidden safely offshore, putting a fiercely loyal bulldog at the junction of Fannie/Freddie’s data firehose and ODNI’s surveillance and analysis capabilities is about as close as you can get to a purpose‑built leverage machine. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening. I’m just saying.

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The swamp-draining and accountability at the big health agencies continue apace. Even better: More arrests! Even better than that: more arrests of Fauci-aligned scientists. Yesterday, Newsweek blandly reported, “Why two federal virus researchers just got arrested by the FBI.”Here we go again!

Unless you are a highly educated government scientist with a taxpayer-funded travel budget, you probably do not look forward to going to the airport. You know the drill. You stand in a security line longer than the history of the Byzantine Empire. You place all your items in a decidedly unclean-looking plastic carrier, which invariably exposes to your fellow passengers various embarrassing personal objects you would prefer remained private. You stand in a high-tech x-ray scanner that probably finishes off the last heroic gut bacteria clinging to life in your stomach because, in the hyper-vigilant minds of the Transportation Security Administration, you might have a machete secreted in your jockey shorts.

You do all of this willingly, because you are a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen who understands that Rules Are Rules, and that the federal government means well and is presumably keeping us safe from the unimaginable threat of slightly-too-large bottles of Head & Shoulders.

Meanwhile, in the VIP lane of international travel, we have The Experts.™

💉 According to a federal criminal complaint recently filed in a city famous for many things, such as flexible balloting, but rarely known for being the primary port of entry for exotic African viral pathogens, two scientists working for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

Their names are Vincent “Herman” Munster, a 53-year-old citizen of the Netherlands, and Claude Kwe, a 38-year-old citizen of Cameroon. Vincent is not just any old NIH scientist; he is the Chief of the Virus Ecology Section at the NIH’s premier Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana. Claude is a “research fellow” in Vincent’s section. Their job, according to official government documents, is to study “emerging viral pathogens” and how they “cross the species barrier.”

Sound familiar? It should:

The two ‘scientists’ worked in the Montana lab’s premier Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. For Portland readers, “Biosafety Level 4” is the highest possible level of bio-security. It is the kind of lab you see in horror movies, where scientists wear pressurized space suits, pass through multiple airlocks, and are probably tackled by a team of guys armed with industrial Lysol sprayers if they so much as think about sneezing.

BS4 is designed to keep the most horrifying, flesh-melting viruses on Earth from escaping into the wild.

So, how did these two highly trained, BSL-4-certified global health experts decide to transport their latest research samples from the Republic of Congo back to Montana? Did they use a secure, military-grade biological containment transport system flown in on special reinforced military aircraft? Did they employ a specialized courier with armed guards and a refrigerated, bulletproof safe?

Nope. They jammed them in a plastic suitcase and boarded a commercial airliner.

💉 Correct! A packed commercial airplane. With regular passengers. People who were probably complaining about the lack of legroom or the fact that their complimentary bag of pretzels contained only three pretzels— entirely unaware that a few rows away, the Chief of Virus Ecology was flying coach with a carry-on full of monkeypox.

According to the FBI, Munster and Kwe arrived at Detroit Metro Airport’s McNamara Terminal on January 25, 2026, after a lovely getaway to Brazzaville, Congo— which, by sheer coincidence, was experiencing an active outbreak of monkeypox (now trendily called “mpox” by people who don’t want to offend monkeys).

As they rolled through customs, alert Customs and Border Protection officers noticed they were hauling a “large black plastic case.” The officer, doing his job, inquired as to what was in the large black plastic case.

Now, if you or I were asked this question, and we had a suitcase with a bottle of undeclared Mexican Viagra, never mind full of infectious tropical diseases, we would probably pass out from sheer terror. But Munster and Kwe are trained Public Health Experts. They wield degrees, credentials, and enough smug arrogance to satisfy Stalin’s entire General Committee. So of course they looked the CBP officer in the eye and calmly explained that the case contained only “diagnostics and testing equipment.”

This is what we in the legal profession call a “fib.” It was like getting caught with a trunk full of stacked hundreds and telling the police it was just “currency-testing paper.”

When the authorities opened the case, they did not find diagnostic or testing equipment. Instead, they found Styrofoam coolers containing 113 vials. One hundred and thirteen vials. That is more virus vials than you might observe in the mad scientist’s laboratory in an above-average 1950s horror movie.

💉 The FBI, having recently become suspicious of NIH scientists who lie about concealed virus sample vials, decided to test a few of them. As of the indictment, the feds have tested 20. The results were a delightful biological potpourri. Of the 20, 17 vials contained ‘deactivated’ monkeypox virus. 1 vial contained chickenpox virus. 2 vials contained only human DNA.

I will just say this about the media’s reassuring label of ‘deactivated.’ In 2014, CDC investigators found that dozens of staff were exposed to anthrax samples labeled ‘fully inactivated’ but that still contained live Bacillus anthracis spores. In a separate incident the same year, some old vials at an NIH campus lab labeled “deactivated variola” —smallpox— were found to actually contain live virus, despite labeling that they were completely non‑infectious.

Who knows what surprises could be in the other 93 vials? Ebola? Covid? The common cold? It could be the secret formula for New Coke or Doctor Munster’s leftover botox. The point is, they broke a small volume of federal criminal laws and regulations by smuggling them onto a passenger plane in a cheap cooler that could have been purchased at a Montana Stop-and-Go to keep Coors Light bottles cold.

U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. summed it up perfectly: “These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo. Let that sink in.”

Oh, never fear, we are letting it sink in, Jerome. It is currently sitting in the bottom of our collective stomach, right next to the airport Cinnabon we regret eating.

💉 The beauty of this situation —if “beauty” is the word you want to use for a horror movie cliché-slash-potential biological outbreak squeezed into the overhead bin— is the magnificent double standard of the federal bureaucracy.

If a conservative rancher in Montana tried to transport a cow across state lines without the proper 47-page veterinary permit, the Department of Agriculture would descend upon him with the fury of a thousand suns. If a regular American citizen tried to bring a single, uninspected lime back from a vacation in Cabo to put in their Corona, CBP would treat them like a cartel kingpin and deploy a tactical team of agricultural sniffer beagles to hunt them down.

But apparently, if you are a foreign national working for the NIH, funded by the very taxpayers you are bypassing, you can go on a biological shopping spree during a live outbreak in the Congo, pack your samples next to your spare underwear, lie to federal agents, and expect to get away with it because you are doing Important Science.

Which is probably what always used to happen in the pre-pandemic period.

Jennifer Runyan, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Detroit Field Office, felt it necessary to remind the credentialed class: “No researchers should believe their positions, credentials, or professional status place them above the law.”

Which was a very nice sentiment, Jennifer, but let’s be honest. They absolutely believed they were above the law. And why wouldn’t they? They work for the NIH, an agency that has spent the last several years telling the American public that they are the Science, to quit doing our own research, and that anyone who questions them is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal who probably eats paste. Horse paste.

But times are changing. Munster and Kwe now face a maximum of five years in prison, and the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit is involved. Five years seems … well, like a good start. That is roughly the same amount of time you would face if you cracked a joke in the TSA line about the only bomb on your person being the one you would drop if you didn’t get to a bathroom soon.

One question remains unanswered in all the many stories about this encouraging arrest: their motive. Why would senior NIH scientists risk federal prison? What were they trying to achieve that was worth taking the chance? It’s possible they never considered it much of a risk, since they always got away with it before. They may have thought that irregularities in the paperwork would be overlooked if they deployed their NIH badges and impressed customs agents with tales of their heroic and dangerous work in the Congo.

Maybe. After all, properly declaring and packing the viruses takes a lot more effort than just jamming them into a travel-sized suitcase.

Maybe. But allow me to suggest another motive. Sneaking the samples into the US accomplishes one particularly valuable objective: it erases the chain of custody. All the pesky declarations and paperwork required by federal law would have established documentary evidence that the Congolese monkeypox traveled from its African source to the Montana lab in January 2026. If, say, a Midwest outbreak of Congolese mpox variants happened a few weeks later in February, people might start asking uncomfortable questions.

Anyway. I can’t appropriately express how wonderful it is to know that the CBP and the FBI are no longer letting high-ranking NIH scientists skate through customs. And that another member of the Fauci possé is facing the music.

So, if the person in the middle seat has a large black plastic case and is wearing a t-shirt that says “I ❤️ Virus Science,” you should probably ask to be reseated.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Fly back here tomorrow morning, for a lawfully declared but slightly subversive roundup of C&C-style essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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