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--:-- John Bickley: 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.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We have new details on the manhunt in New York City.
--:-- John Bickley: I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, December 6th, and this is Morning Wire. A Senate investigation finds a vast majority of federal workers are still working from home, with some not clocking in at all.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We only have 6% of our federal workforce actually going into work every single day.
--:-- John Bickley: Something I've been pushing on is getting those federal workers back into the offices or eliminating the buildings that they occupy.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And a new House report concludes on how COVID-19 likely originated, while accusing both U.S. and Chinese officials of trying to cover it up.
--:-- John Bickley: 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.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- John Bickley: 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.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Hey, Tim, so what do we know about the shooter so far? Not much, though police do have a few leads.
--:-- John Bickley: 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 two other men, though it's not clear if authorities have been able to track them down.
--:-- Tim Pierce: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: The shell casings taken from the scene appear to carry a message. They had the words deny, defend, and depose written on them. That reminiscent of a 2010 book highly critical of the health industry called The Lay Deny Defend And the suspicion here is that Thompson may have been singled out by the attacker correct Yes that how police are treating this case Authorities called it a premeditated, preplanned, targeted attack.
--:-- Tim Pierce: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: The killing itself took place early Wednesday morning as Thompson walked to the New York Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The hotel was hosting United Health Group's Investor Conference, and Thompson was slated to be a speaker.
--:-- Tim Pierce: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: Here's how one witness described the scene. I was holding my phone, then I hear the shot, you know. And when I look, the guy was with a gun, like, you know, the silent gun, got like a black gun. And I saw him after he shot him. He ran across the street this way.
--:-- Tim Pierce: 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 one man in a city of 8 million people.
--:-- John Bickley: One 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.
--:-- Tim Pierce: 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 one 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.
--:-- John Bickley: 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.
--:-- Tim Pierce: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: For example, tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, formerly of the New York Times and Washington Post, wrote a piece on her sub stack after Thompson's death headlined, why we want insurance executives dead. Pretty alarming reaction, to say the least.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Let's hope police are able to find this killer.
--:-- John Bickley: Tim, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Thanks for having me.
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--:-- John Bickley: 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.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: Hi Georgia So Senator Ernst is chair of the Senate Doge Caucus and the Department of Government Efficiency is definitely going to be interested in this She said the federal government is still operating as if it March 2020 in the midst of the COVID pandemic Government office buildings have a 12 percent occupancy rate And yet taxpayers are spending $16 billion a year operating them. If we're not using the space, we need to get rid of it.
--:-- John Bickley: Those federal office buildings cost us $8 billion every single year to lease and maintain, plus another $7 billion on top of that for the utilities. And we're not using those buildings. So use it or lose it.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke to reporters after meeting with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are heading up Doge. One 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.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: Musk has indicated that if workers don't like it, they can quit, which could be the quickest way of shrinking the federal workforce.
--:-- John Bickley: At some agencies, a majority of remote workers have actually moved to lower cost of living areas, but kept collecting D.C. 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.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: So unions now are going to 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.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: The Biden administration just spent $120 million renovating Social Security's massive headquarters, even though it's 91% unused. Meanwhile, one Social Security worker was running a home inspection business while he was supposedly working from home. He had his mom occasionally send emails from his account, and he got away with it for years.
--:-- John Bickley: 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.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: Here are some of the most egregious examples. Some food inspectors now inspect food facilities for safety remotely through video chat. One third of calls to a veteran's mental health outline went unanswered, while a manager responsible for scheduling posted online that he was working from a bubble bath.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: So what is the economic impact, though, of having all these government workers working from home? Well, the mayor of D.C. won't say it publicly, but she's got to be overjoyed that Trump won. The economy of D.C. has been hollowed out without government employees spending money at restaurants and so on.
--:-- John Bickley: Democrats in the D.C. 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.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: Well it sounds like there a lot of low fruit for Elon efficiency task force Luke thanks for reporting.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: Absolutely
--:-- John Bickley: 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 two-year investigation, is meant to serve as a roadmap for how to handle future pandemics.
--:-- Ash Short: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: They base 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 U.S. tried to hide facts that would confirm the lab leak theory, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci prompting doctors to write a report undermining the theory in early 2020.
--:-- Ash Short: 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?
--:-- John Bickley: 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.
--:-- Ash Short: 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.
--:-- John Bickley: So it sounds pretty comprehensive. Did it also talk about schools?
--:-- Ash Short: Yes, it also confirmed that locking down schools had a significant negative impact on children's education, and the billions spent on pandemic aid was rampant with fraud and waste.
--:-- John Bickley: 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.
--:-- Ash Short: Senator Mike Lee of Utah said on social media that the report should, quote, stand as a warning for future generations of what not to do.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, this was a stunning chapter to live through, and it's good that we're remembering what happened.
--:-- Ash Short: Ash, thanks for reporting.
--:-- John Bickley: You're welcome. Hey, thank you for listening this morning. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and stand with that mission, consider subscribing, giving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.
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--:-- John Bickley: And if you're looking for some great holiday gifts, check out our shop at dailywire.com slash shop. We have stuffers, gifts for your church friends, and hot items for holiday gift exchanges for under $30.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Make your parties memorable with Michael Knowles' game, Yes or No, or shock your liberal relatives with merch from Matt Walsh's number one documentary, Am I Racist? Plus, score up to 40% off and grab exclusive holiday bundles. Get ahead on your list at dailywire.com slash shop.
