Transcript of Manhattan Manhunt Continues & Federal Workers Reviewed | 12.6.24

More questions arise about the man behind the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in Manhattan.

It is definitely a very strong motive and grievance that this individual had that would cause him to do this. This was highly orchestrated, and they wanted it to be on the front stage of the media.

We have new details on the manhunt in New York City.

I'm Daily Wire editor in chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, December 6th,

and this is Warning Wire. A senate investigation finds a vast majority of federal workers are still working from home with some not clocking in at all.

We only have 6% of our federal workforce actually going into work every single day. Something I've been pushing on is getting those federal workers back into the offices or eliminating the buildings that they occupy.

And a new house report concludes on how COVID 19 likely originated while accusing both US and Chinese officials of trying to cover it up.

I'm of the view that the origin of COVID 19 was the gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab, which was funded highly by the United States.

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The suspect has yet to be arrested in the brazen murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Authorities say the shooter disappeared in Central Park after fatally shooting Thompson outside of a hotel in Manhattan. Here to talk about the ongoing manhunt is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce. Hey, Tim. So what do we know about the shooter so far?

Not much, though police do have a few leads. NYPD has already released photos of a person of interest who appears to have stayed at a hostel on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Authorities have already searched the hostel and believe that their person of interest stayed there with 2 other men, though it's not clear if authorities have been able to track them down. The person was pictured at a Starbucks and boarding the subway. Near the crime scene, police found a burner phone and a water bottle that they believe they may be able to pull information from if the objects belong to the shooter.

The shell casings taken from the scene appear to carry a message. They had the words deny, defend, and depose written on them. That's reminiscent of a 2010 book, highly critical of the health industry called delay, deny, defend. And the suspicion here is that Thompson may have been singled out by the attacker. Correct?

Yes. That's how police are treating this case. Authorities called it a premeditated, pre planned targeted attack.

Many people passed the suspect, but he appeared to wait for his intended target. The suspect fled first on foot, then on an e bike, and was last seen in Central Park on Center Drive.

The killing itself took place early Wednesday morning as Thompson walked to the New York Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. The hotel was hosting UnitedHealth Group's investor conference, and Thompson was slated to be a speaker. Video of the street outside the hotel that morning shows Thompson in a blue suit making his way there when someone in a hooded jacket and mask wearing a backpack pulls a gun and shoots Thompson several times in the back. Here's how 1 witness described the scene.

I was holding my phone, then I hear the shot, you know. And when I look at the guy was with the gun, like, you know, the silent gun. I got, like, a black gun. And I saw him after he shot him. He ran across the street this way.

According to police, the shooter took off towards Central Park and hasn't been seen since. And what are the chances the suspect is actually able to get away here? Well, to put it in context, police are looking for 1 man in a city of 8,000,000 people. 1 of the big questions right now is could the shooter have changed clothes in Central Park? If he did, that would make tracking him around the city almost impossible without more information to go on.

So police could be in for a very tough manhunt here. Any more on the motive? Do police think the killer was connected with Thompson in some way? Well, we don't know. But we do know that as an executive of 1 of the largest healthcare companies in the world, Thompson did receive his share of threats.

His widow told NBC News that they had been job related, lack of coverage, for instance. But that isn't all that surprising. Healthcare executives routinely receive threats, and they're very often job related. And it appears that UnitedHealthcare hadn't provided Thompson or any of its other executives with personal security. But you can probably get an idea about the level of threats healthcare executives receive just by watching the social media reactions to Thompson's death.

Many accounts, including prominent accounts, suggested that Thompson may have deserved it. For example, tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, formerly of the New York Times and Washington Post, wrote a piece on her Substack after Thompson's death headlined, why we want insurance executives dead. Yeah. Pretty alarming reaction to say the least. Let's hope police are able to find this killer.

Tim, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

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A senate investigation found that 94% of federal employees are still working from home, and some of those might not be working very much at all.

Daily Wire reporter, Luke Roziak, joins us to talk about the state of the federal workforce. So, Luke, senator Joni Ernst worked with inspectors general to put out this pretty thorough and damning report. What did it find?

Hi, Georgia. So senator Ernst is chair of the senate Doge caucus, and the Department of Government Efficiency is definitely gonna be interested in this. She said the federal government is still operating as if it's March 2020 in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Government office buildings have a 12% occupancy rate, and yet taxpayers are spending $16,000,000,000 a year operating them.

If we're not using the space, we need to get rid of it. Those federal office buildings cost us $8,000,000,000 every single year to lease and maintain, plus another 7,000,000,000 on top of that for the utilities, and we're not using those buildings. So use it or lose it.

Environmental Protection Agency, which is in charge of clean drinking water, had toxic water in its own building because water was sitting stagnant in the pipes for so long. House speaker Mike Johnson spoke to reporters after meeting with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami who are heading up Doge.

1 of the first things that I think you'll see is a demand from the new administration and from all of us in congress that federal workers return to their desks and get back to the work that they're supposed to be doing.

Musk has indicated that if workers don't like it, they can quit, which could be the quickest way of shrinking the federal workforce. At some agencies, a majority of remote workers have actually moved to lower cost of living areas but kept collecting DC cost of living pay. That could backfire for them because if they're called back to the office full time, they may have to quit unless they're willing to move again. President Biden himself has said that workers should be on-site in order to ensure they're working productively with his chief of staff saying there's no substitute for face to face. Yet on his way out the door, his administration signed a contract with the Social Security Administration Union agreeing to remote work through 2029.

So unions now are gonna be an obstacle?

Yeah. Unions have demanded across the board telework, but they've also demanded full individual workstations be preserved on-site in case they want to come in. The Biden administration just spent a $120,000,000 renovating Social Security's massive headquarters even though it's 91% unused. Meanwhile, 1 Social Security worker was running a home inspection business while he's supposedly working from home. He had his mom occasionally send emails from his account and he got away with it for years.

Now, many people can do their jobs from home just fine, but Senator Ernst said that the government culture makes it easier to slack off with nobody noticing. When the Department of Health and Human Services looked at its server logs during the pandemic, It found that up to 30% of remote employees weren't even logging into their computers on any given day. Keep in mind, these are health department workers and this was during a pandemic, so it seems like maybe even some of these employees don't think their jobs are important. Here's some of the most egregious examples. Some food inspectors now inspect food facilities for safety remotely through video chat.

1 third of calls to a veteran's mental health hotline went unanswered, while

a manager responsible for scheduling posted online that he

was working from a bubble bath. Economic impact though of having all these government workers working from home? Well, the mayor of DC won't say

it publicly, but she's gotta be overjoyed that

Trump won. The economy of DC has been hollowed out without government employees spending money at restaurants and so on. Democrats in the DC suburbs of Maryland and Virginia are saying cuts to the federal workforce could harm their economies, but those suburbs are the richest areas in America. So it's not a very sympathetic argument, particularly from people who preach redistributing wealth. Senator Ernst is touting a bill that would move government agencies to places where they're more in touch with the residents they serve.

The agriculture department, for example, could move to a farm state. They would also save money there with lower cost of living.

Well, it sounds like there's a lot of low hanging fruit for Elon's efficiency task force. Luke, thanks for reporting.

Absolutely.

This week, a Republican led house committee has released a report stating that the COVID 19 virus, quote, most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The 520 page report based on a 2 year investigation is meant to serve as a road map for how to handle future pandemics. Here to discuss the report is Daily Wire senior editor, Ash Short. So, Ash, first off, who conducted this investigation?

This report is from the House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, which is chaired by Brad Wenstrup, a Republican congressman from Ohio.

And what did they find?

Well, as expected, the report found that the government misled the public about the origins of the COVID virus. Specifically, the report found that the virus, quote, likely emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident. They based this assertion on the biological characteristics of viruses and illnesses being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time the pandemic started. The report also found that officials in China and the US tried to hide facts that would confirm the lab leak theory, such as doctor Anthony Fauci prompting doctors to write a report undermining the theory in early 2020. That report, titled the proximal origin of SARS COV 2, claimed that it wasn't plausible for the virus to have escaped from a lab.

So basically, this report is confirming what people were censored and punished for saying back in 2020? Yeah. Basically. The report also accuses former New York governor Andrew Cuomo of medical malpractice for his role in covering up

the number of nursing home deaths in his state caused by forcing nursing homes to take COVID positive patients. Now the same panel previously referred Cuomo for criminal prosecution for his alleged lying about a report used to defend placing COVID patients in nursing homes. This current report also took to task Biden's vaccine mandate, which was struck down by the Supreme Court with the help of The Daily Wire. So it

sounds pretty comprehensive. Did it also talk about schools?

Yes. It also confirmed that locking down schools had a significant negative impact on children's education, and the 1,000,000,000 spent on pandemic aid was rampant with fraud and waste. The report also found that social distancing and mask mandates weren't based on hard science and that the prolonged lockdowns caused, quote, immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens. Senator Mike Lee of Utah said on social media that the report should, quote, stand as a warning for future generations

stunning chapter to live through, and it's good that we're remembering what happened. Ash, thanks for reporting. You're welcome.

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