(Daily Signal)—A Florida-based technology firm is suing to find out whether the Obama administration obstructed its long-running patent litigation against a U.S.-based competitor that does business in China.
The Oversight Project, a watchdog group, filed a lawsuit on behalf of ParkerVision Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida against the National Archives and Records Administration.
The records case stems from a legal clash that began in 2011 over a patent dispute with California-based technology firm Qualcomm. ParkerVision asserts that Qualcomm incorporated technology ParkerVision patented.
The records lawsuit seeks to identify Obama administration officials who had access to computers that frequently visited the ParkerVision website from the White House, the Justice Department, and Air Force One.
“The White House only looked at our page about the patent litigation against Qualcomm. For whatever reason, the White House thought I was interesting,” ParkerVision CEO Jeff Parker told the Daily Signal.
Parker later found that the Justice Department made similar visits to the company’s website in March and April 2013, as did the law firm Covington & Burling, which previously employed then-Attorney General Eric Holder and has done lobbying work for Qualcomm.
“The White House, the Justice Department, and Covington Burling, my website was very popular,” Parker added. “Did something happen outside the courtroom in our case? I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything. But I’d just like to see the documents.”
According to ParkerVision, marketing software that tracks visitors to its website documented visits from the Obama White House to pages concerning ParkerVision’s patent litigation. Those visits occurred around the same period that Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs hosted a fundraiser at his home featuring President Barack Obama.
The lawsuit says the National Archives identified records responsive to a December 2025 records request but has yet to produce them.
“Our records reflect that a computer within the Executive Office of the President assigned the foregoing IP address accessed the ParkerVision.com website and its Public Relations Patent Litigation page,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit further says: “It has now been more than six months since Defendants located, identified, and collected a set of records that Defendants purport to be responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA/PRA Requests. Yet Defendants appear to have taken no follow-up steps since that time.”
In 2013, a federal jury awarded approximately $173 million to ParkerVision in its lawsuit against Qualcomm. In June 2014, however, U.S. District Judge Roy Dalton overturned the jury’s infringement verdict, finding that the evidence presented by ParkerVision’s expert was insufficient.
Parker contends the timeline is suspicious.
On May 8, 2014, Jacobs hosted a fundraiser featuring Obama at his San Diego home. The $10,000-per-person event benefited the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Days later, ParkerVision documented visits to its website from an Executive Office of the President IP address on May 19, 2014.
Jacobs also was a donor to the Obama presidential library, according to the Oversight Project. Jacobs reportedly donated $2.1 million.
“ParkerVision and the American people deserve to learn why the Obama Administration was so darned interested in a case aimed like a dagger at homegrown and focused American innovator ParkerVision in order to allow technology to escape our borders and be usurped by China,” Jeff Clark, vice president of litigation at the Oversight Project, said in a statement.
The Oversight Project further said Qualcomm has been involved in offshoring key wireless and cellular technology to China, employs thousands of research and development engineers in China, has invested in at least 40 Chinese technology companies, and was sanctioned in 2016 by the Securities and Exchange Commission for corruption involving China.
The Oversight Project stressed that Chinese communist influence in the United States is broad. It said documents recently released by the Trump White House show election meddling, that Chinese spies were on the staffs of members of Congress, and that Chinese operatives co-opted universities.
For its part, Qualcomm has denied patent infringement and argued that ParkerVision’s patents are invalid. Qualcomm also argued that ParkerVision’s expert testimony and technical analyses regarding infringement and testing were unreliable or vague. A 2014 report on the overturned verdict described Qualcomm’s challenges to ParkerVision’s infringement evidence.
PDF Download: Final PV FOIA Complaint for Filing 8 31 26 (1)
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.