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--:-- John Bickley: I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Thursday, July 27th, and this is your Morning Wire afternoon update.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Welcome to the show, everyone. I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- John Bickley: The Department of Justice will not pursue campaign finance charges against the disgraced former crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried after the DOJ learned that the U.S. hadn't obtained permission from the Bahamas to extradite Bankman-Fried on that charge.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Bankman-Fried, who ran the multi-million dollar crypto investing firm FTX, was charged on eight counts, including fraud, money laundering and campaign finance violations. He was a major Democrat donor.
--:-- John Bickley: The change in his indictment came late Wednesday night.
--:-- Georgia Howe: A congressional subcommittee heard testimony on Thursday about radical gender ideology and sex change surgeries and other procedures.
--:-- John Bickley: The testimony was emotional for both those who supported so-called transgender care for minors and those who opposed it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Among those who testified were Chloe Cole, a detransitioner who received sex change procedures at the age of 15, an NCAA athlete, as well as a trans-identifying attorney and a mother who has a trans-identifying child.
--:-- Chloe Cole: I needed compassion. I needed to be loved. I needed to be given therapy to help me work through my issues, not affirm to my delusion that by transforming into a boy it would solve all my problems.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That story is the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of young people who receive these treatments are getting them after careful assessment and because they really need them.
--:-- Chloe Cole: To sum up the university's response, we, the women, were the problem, not the victims. We were expected to conform, to move over and shut up. Our feelings didn't matter. The university was gaslighting and fear-mongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The Supreme Court has struck down a ruling from a lower court that prohibited the construction of a 300-mile natural gas pipeline being built through Virginia and West Virginia from moving forward.
--:-- John Bickley: This morning, the High Court vacated stay orders put in place by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The lower court had sided with the plaintiffs, environmental groups, Wilderness Society and Appalachian Voices who wanted the pipeline construction stopped.
--:-- John Bickley: That ruling was opposed by both the fossil fuel industry and the Biden administration.
--:-- Georgia Howe: West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin said he is relieved that the high court upheld a law passed by Congress and signed by the president.
--:-- Joe Manchin: The Supreme Court has spoken, and the decision to let construction of the Mountain Valley pipeline move forward again is the correct one.
--:-- John Bickley: Former President Donald Trump's attorneys Todd Blanche and John Loro were reportedly told by the prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith's office to expect an indictment for their client over the events leading up to and during the January 6th Capitol riot.
--:-- Georgia Howe: However, Trump denied this report on Truth Social and said it was a productive meeting.
--:-- John Bickley: The U.S. gross domestic product outpaced expectations and grew at a 2.4 percent annualized rate in the second quarter this year.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That follows a 2 percent pace of growth in the first quarter and comes after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced Wednesday his team's positive economic outlook for the rest of the year.
--:-- John Bickley: So the staff now has a noticeable slowdown in growth starting later this year in the forecast. But given the resilience of the economy recently, they are no longer forecasting a recession.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Bo Bergdahl, the American soldier who was captured in Afghanistan and later traded for five Taliban leaders in a prisoner exchange, has had his desertion conviction vacated after a federal judge said the original case could have been clouded by a conflict of interest.
--:-- John Bickley: Daily Wire senior editor Joel Needler has more.
--:-- Joel Needler: According to U District Judge Reggie Walton, Judge Jeffrey Nance did not disclose his application to be an immigration judge under then Donald Trump.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Walton argued that Bergdahl's trial could then be construed as a conflict of interest because Trump's vocal criticisms of Bergdahl and that Nance's neutrality was undermined because he might be inclined to appeal to the president's expressed interest in the plaintiff's conviction and punishment when applying for the immigration judge position.
--:-- John Bickley: Authorities confirmed that three Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina were found dead in a car at a Speedway gas station earlier this week.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Here with the cause of death is Daily Wire reporter Zach Jewell.
--:-- Zach Jewell: The Pender County Sheriff's Office received a call Sunday from the mother of one of the Marines who became worried when her son didn't arrive home in Oklahoma on his scheduled flight Saturday night.
--:-- John Bickley: After beginning an investigation, authorities found the missing Marine, along with two other Marines, dead inside a vehicle at the Speedway station around 30 miles south of the base.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Deputies were directed to the gas station by the mother, who pinged her son's phone to find its location.
--:-- Zach Jewell: Law enforcement officials say that the Marines died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
--:-- John Bickley: All right, those are your drive-home updates this afternoon.
--:-- Georgia Howe: To learn more about these stories, go to dailywire.com. And for more in-depth discussion of the biggest stories of the day, listen to our latest full episode of Morning Wire. Every morning.
