• Who/What/When/Where/Why: Judicial Watch sued the DOJ, FBI, and ODNI after FOIA requests were ignored about Michael Caputo, whose Google email account was reportedly subject to a secret warrant in September 2023 and who received notice of the collection in March 2025, alleging Biden-era surveillance of Trump campaign aides.
• Allegation: Caputo and Judicial Watch contend the FBI and DOJ monitored Caputo’s emails weeks after he joined the Trump 2024 campaign to work on “Weaponization of Government” issues.
• Classified subpoena: A classified subpoena issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. to Google on August 21, 2023 sought Caputo’s email, billing, VOIP and related data; the collection was later disclosed to Caputo via Google notice.
• Russiagate context: Caputo was name-checked by James Comey in a 2017 House Intelligence Committee hearing and has a history of work in Russia during the 1990s and early 2000s, including USAID-funded projects and PR consulting.
• Informant interactions: The piece recounts 2016 approaches to Trump associates by FBI informants or assets (e.g., Henry Greenberg/Oknyansky, Stefan Halper, Felix Sater) offering information or engagement with campaign figures.
• Documentary and DNI finding: Caputo produced “The Ukraine Hoax” (aired January 21, 2020); a March 17, 2021 DNI report linked that film to Andrei Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik, a connection Caputo disputes and says contained no Russian funding.
• Broader surveillance examples: The article cites other instances of notices and collection affecting figures such as Kash Patel, Dan Scavino, Jeff Clark, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Tucker Carlson, and references FISA and Five Eyes-related collection and leaks.
• Legal and personal stakes: Caputo seeks records and accountability via lawsuits after FOIA refusals, citing family distress and raising questions about continued use of surveillance tools and oversight of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

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Michael Caputo, left, was in Moscow when he heard he was being “name-checked” by James Comey, right, on national television

Judicial Watch today announced lawsuits filed against the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), for failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests in the case of longtime Donald Trump adviser Michael Caputo. For those who think Russiagate as ancient history, welcome to its second chapter, about Biden-era surveillance:

Judicial Watch submitted the requests in response to information that Caputo’s email was the subject of a secret search warrant of his Google email account in September 2023, three weeks after he began working for the Trump 2024 presidential campaign…

“The evidence shows that the Biden FBI and Justice Department were spying on the Trump campaign. Caputo used his emails to help devise strategy for the Trump campaign, and the Biden gang was rooting through it all!” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The lawsuits show that the lawfare and spying against Trump was only paused. These records can’t be released soon enough.”

Earlier this summer, after FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard began releasing documents exposing the original Russiagate probe as the product of manipulated intelligence and alleging a “treasonous conspiracy,” critics dismissed the matter as old news. Russiagate never ended for some, however.

Not only did Patel, Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, and Regulatory Czar Jeff Clark all receive notices informing them of email monitoring from the last election cycle, but at least one longtime Trump aide is still under investigation by the administration he worked to elect.

A notice from Google in March told Caputo he’d been monitored by the FBI since September, 2023, weeks after he agreed to take on “Weaponization of Government” issues for the 2024 Trump campaign. In addition to Patel, Scavino, Clark, and himself, Caputo describes six other colleagues in a similar position. “If I know if there are ten, there are fifty,” says the garrulous Buffalo native with a radio voice. “The one thing I’m sure of is, I don’t know everything.”

Caputo hopes his lawsuit and efforts to get his case closed will jog something loose, from enforcement agencies he still doesn’t trust. “I think Kash and Dan and Tulsi have really big fish to fry,” Caputo says, “But the reason I’m bringing it up now is because my family has had enough. I want them to leave my family alone.”

The devout Catholic who nearly died of cancer during the scandal speaks of the original investigators as a spiritual horror. “These people,” he says, “are demons.”

The nightmare began on March 20, 2017. Caputo was in Moscow of all places, on a trip for his consulting business, staying at the Metropol hotel made famous by Master and Margarita author Mikhail Bulgakov. In the evening, a well-known American reporter called his cell.

“She said, ‘Michael, what the hell is this?’” Caputo recalls. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘You just got name-checked in a House Intelligence Committee hearing by James Comey for being too close to Russia.’ I asked if she was kidding. She said, ‘I’m not kidding, where are you?’ I said, ‘Why do you need to know?’”

Caputo knew his life was about to be turned upside down. The Trump-Russia controversy was white-hot then. Four intelligence agencies concluded Russia meddled with the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. From there, the heads of anyone with even fleeting ties to Russia began rolling. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign after reported contact with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from Russia matters. And Caputo didn’t know it, but Comey that day just announced the existence of an FBI investigation into Trump’s “links” to Russia in hearings led by California congressman and Russia-hunter-in-chief, Adam Schiff.

Walking outside, Caputo found himself at the foot the Kremlin, a stone’s throw from the Metropol, staring at its red brick. He thought of his family and felt ill. “I lean over with both my hands on the wall, and I vomited all over the wall,” he recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, oh God.’ I was retching for two or three minutes.” He got up, tried to clear his head, and ducked into a nearby Western bar to clean himself up. Before he could get to a bathroom, he saw a man at the bar staring at him. “I look at him, and he points at the bar TV. My face is on the TV.”

The critical exchange in Congress involved an exchange between California Congresswoman Jackie Speier and Comey.

“All right, let’s move on to someone else in that web,” the Bay Area’s Speier said. “His name is Michael Caputo. He’s a PR professional, conservative radio talk show host. In 1994, he moved to Russia… In 2000 he worked with Gazprom-Media to improve [President Vladimir] Putin’s image in the United States.” She paused. “Do you know anything about Gazprom, Director?”

“I don’t,” the head of America’s top counterintelligence agency said about the world’s largest natural gas company, and Russia’s largest company. Completing the ignorance loop, Speier incorrectly explained, “Well, it’s an oil company,” then went on.

“What possible reason would the Trump campaign have for hiring Putin’s image consultant? No thoughts on that, Director?”

“No thoughts.”

About Caputo as “Putin’s image consultant”: in Caputo’s defense, Putin at the turn of the century wasn’t a full-blown villain in the American diplomatic community. Ex-Ambassador to Russia and leading Russiagate finger-wagger Michael McFaul at the time lauded Putin as a “bright counter” to the gloomy international picture. Future Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland called him a “kindler, gentler sort of Kremlin chief,” welcoming his “quick pat” to her “third-trimester belly.” Even Bill Clinton declared Putin a “man we can do business with.” Only the dwindling independent Russian press absolutely recoiled from him.

Like me, Caputo worked in Russia through the nineties and early 2000s. When we met, he was working on “democratization” projects in the Yeltsin years with USAID-funded organizations like the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, along with groups like the International Republican Institute (IRI), helping launch a Russian version of the “Rock the Vote” campaign.

He was also part of an expensive group U.S. effort to get Yeltsin re-elected, one eventually memorialized in headlines like “Yanks to the Rescue!” in Time and in Hollywood movies like the Jeff Goldblum/Lieb Schrieber vehicle Spinning Boris. “I was part of the original meddling team,” Caputo laughs. He recalls that meetings on that subject were also often attended both by high-level Democrats who’d later become leading Russiagate torch-bearers, and a translator named Konstantin Kilimnik. A 2020 Senate Intelligence Report would later allege that working with Kilimnik was “what collusion looks like.”

Caputo’s life went downhill quickly after that night in Moscow. He and friend Roger Stone would co-earn their own chapter in the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, under the heading, “Other Potential Campaign Interest in Russian Hacked Materials.” History unfolded differently, but the header should have read, “FBI Informants Offering Russian Aid to Trump Figures Without Success.”

In May, 2016, months before the official opening of the Trump-Russia investigation, a mysterious stranger named Henry Greenberg approached a partner in his business, Zeppelin Communications, in May of 2016, asking if they would do PR for his restaurant. It turned out he didn’t want PR for his restaurant at all ( it was never built, according to a [Miami Herald](http://(never built, according to the Miami Herald)) [article](http://(never built, according to the Miami Herald))), just an introduction to Caputo’s friend Roger Stone. “Henry Greenberg” was really Henry Oknyansky, a.k.a. Gennady Arzhanik, a.k.a. Gennady Vorovtsov, a career criminal who by his own admission was also an informant for both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security:

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“Henry Greenberg” explains his service to the FBI and DHS

A satirist couldn’t have invented this footnote character to the Mueller report. In 1993, while still in Russia, Greenberg-Oknyansky-Vorovstov posed as Gennady Arzhanik, the son of a Soviet war hero, Admiral Vasily Arzhanik. Using this identity, he induced a company called FinInTorg to fork over about $2.7 million for a shipment of canned goods. The moment money was transferred, he swiped it, then fled to America. In a 2002 article, Russia’s Kommersant Daily described him as having been “a fugitive from national and international justice for more than six years,” suspected in the theft of “over $50 million.”

This is the person who asked Caputo to introduce him to Roger Stone, in order to pitch a deal: information about Hillary Clinton laundering money, for $2 million. Stone asked how much money Hillary allegedly laundered. “Hundreds of thousands,” answered Greenberg/Oknyansky. “That isn’t much money,” laughed Stone. Greenberg reportedly said it wasn’t Stone’s money he wanted, but Trump’s. Mueller wrote that Stone “refused the offer, stating that Trump would not pay for opposition research.” The Special Counsel wasn’t impressed with the episode, saying it “did not identify evidence of a connection between the outreach… and Russian interference efforts.”

Mueller left out the detail about Greenberg’s history as a federal informant. Sort-of Russians with vague government or party ties offering dirt on Clinton to Trumpworld figures would be a consistent theme in the scandal. Registered FBI informant Felix Sater suggested that Trump attorney Michael Cohen push for a hotel deal in Moscow. Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya in search of information on Clinton was “at long last, the smoking gun,” according to the Los Angeles Times, but even NBC’s Ken Dilanian was later forced to consider the episode in a “new light” after it emerged that the information Veselnitskaya offered came from the P.R. firm Clinton hired, Fusion-GPS.

Stefan Halper, another FBI asset, nudged Trumpworld figures like Carter Page with provocative suggestions, like one to seek Russian funding: “I imagine you could probably find funds” and “you could do alright there” and my favorite, “Nobody needs to know exactly where it’s from”:

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FBI informant Stefan Halper (CHS) pushes Carter Page (“Crossfire Dragon”) to seek Russian funding

George Papadopoulos, sold in the papers like the New York Times as the Patient Zero of Russiagate, had an experience similar to Caputo’s. He was approached out of the blue by a mysterious Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud, who made extravagant claims about access to Russian information. Papadopoulos ended up a national villain just for mentioning the story to an Australian diplomat, who quickly fed the story to American authorities, after which the FBI’s “Crossfiure Hurricane” probe was officially announced on July 31, 2016. Like Caputo, Papadopoulos is convinced he was set up, and that only the release of records about American cooperation with foreign governments like our main “Five Eyes” partners (the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) will clarify who Mifsud was and why he was approached.

“I’m not mad that this has not been revealed yet, because I believe it will be,” Papadopoulos says now. “Recent trips by Gabbard and Patel to the UK and Australia signal that there is momentum towards this transparency.” Sources have told me the Trump administration is indeed making inquiries to some of those countries about older communications involving Russiagate.

When the story of Caputo’s interaction with Greenberg became public, the question the press should have been asking is how and why an FBI informant was trying to sell Trump aides information in May of 2016, or why another FBI informant in Halper was “ingratiating himself” to Page at a London symposium on July 12th, when the FBI investigation didn’t begin until July 31st, ostensibly because of Papadopoulos. Instead, Papadopoulos became a New York Times cover subject, and Caputo and Stone were denounced for failing to mention Greenberg when the House Intelligence Committee asked if he’d been approached by any Russians during the campaign.

California Congressman Eric Swalwell zeroed in on this testimony, telling Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff that Caputo and Stone “lied through their teeth,” to “protect the fact that they were willing and eager to take a meeting with Russians” — Russians, plural — “who were offering dirt.” He added Stone was “communicating with individuals associated with the Russian hacks.” There was never evidence that Greenberg had real restaurant plans, let alone connections to Russian intelligence. Asked this week which “individuals” were “associated with Russian hacks” and how he knew that, Swalwell didn’t reply.

In 2019 Caputo — whose wife is Ukrainian — produced a documentary called, “The Ukraine Hoax.” The film, which Caputo insists was a low-budget affair funded via his attorney with “no Russian money for obvious reasons,” was made with a few key points in mind. Though it criticized the Trump impeachment over a call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as baseless, its main message was historical. “I made a movie about how we’re going to go to war and we better watch out,” he says.

The film also dug into the Hunter Biden-Burisma story, with one scene even showing Caputo standing in front of Burisma’s offices. It aired on One America News (OAN) a day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, on January 21, 2021, and is still up on Rumble:

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Caputo in front of Burisma

Caputo’s plan was to have the movie run, do a publicity tour, then publish a book. “Covid hit and the plan was scrapped,” says Caputo. The book was eventually published, but in March, 2020, Caputo joined Trump’s government, working for the Department of Health and Human Services as a spokesperson at the outset of the pandemic. Within six months he was diagnosed with head and neck cancer. “Russiagate almost killed me,” he said. “It was 100% stress.”

Caputo stepped away from government. Government didn’t return the favor. On March 16, 2021, a few months into Biden’s presidency, the Director of National Intelligence released a National Intelligence Council report that identified “The Ukraine Hoax” as a product of the Russian Secret Services, by way of Ukrainian parliamentary member Andrei Derkach and the selfsame Kilimnik, with whom Caputo says he never got along, even when they were co-workers at the International Republican Institute in the nineties. “He wouldn’t buy me a drink in a bar in the nineties,” Caputo says. The key passage reads:

Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences… They also made contact with established US media figures and helped produce a documentary that aired on a US television network in late January 2020.

The next day, March 17, 2021, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty identified Caputo as the subject of the report. Neither the NIC nor any of the media treatments explained what the basis was for connecting Caputo’s film and Derkach, Kilimnik, or Russia.

Two years later, considerably thinner but recovered, Caputo decided to re-unite with Trump and join his second re-election campaign. Asked what he’d like to work on, Caputo didn’t hesitate. Stung by the 2016 experience, he sent a memo on August 4th, 2023, headed, “SUBJECT: DIRECTING WEAPONIZATION REFORM.” He wrote to the campaign leadership:

This memorandum outlines a campaign strategy to develop and execute federal government reform policy, focused on transformation of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and more.

Five weeks later, on August 21, 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia issued a classified subpoena to Google, demanding access to Caputo’s emails, subscriber information, billing and finacial information (including Google wallet), VOIP calls, data transfer volumes, and other records. He didn’t find out about this until March 18, 2025. In another preposterous plot-twist, he was by that time himself an advisor to the new U.S. Attorney of the District of Columbia, Ed Martin.

“I actually was notified that this was an investigation initiated by the US attorney in the District of Columbia while sitting in the office of the US Attorney for the District of Columbia,” he recalls.

The classification on Caputo’s subpoena tolled, so like Patel, Scavino, and Clark, Caputo received a notice from the company informing him his data had been collected.

Across the years, a huge range of people connected to Russiagate received similar notices. Congressional investigators on both sides of the scandal were monitored in leak investigations, from Senate staff looking into Russiagate’s origins like former Judiciary Committee Counsel Jason Foster to members of Congress like Swalwell and Adam Schiff, who were pushing the probe in the opposite direction. Mueller targets like Rick Gates, too, received Google notices post-factum, and figures like Page and Paul Manafort were monitored under FISA.

Even Tucker Carlson appeared victim to the not-uncommon Russiagate cocktail of “incidental” FISA collection and media leaks, when Axios in 2021 reported he was “talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin.” The amusing source: “People familiar with the conversations.” A later story by Charlie Savage of the New York Times hypothesized that the NSA “may have incidentally” captured his conversations without “intentionally targeting him as part of any nefarious plot.” Savage didn’t hypothesize about the intentionality or nefariousness of the leak.

“It was definitely part of Russiagate,” Carlson says. “The NSA read my texts and leaked the details to the New York Times. Ultimately they admitted it, but no one was ever punished. I rarely think about it, but it infuriates me every time I do.”

Since Russiagate started it’s become common to learn that intelligence agencies were either intentionally or incidentally collecting information even on politicians. A December, 2021 Inspector General’s report quietly disclosed in a footnote that a U.S. Congressman was the subject of “overly broad” and “non-compliant” FISA searches (it turned out to be Illinois Republican Darin LaHood). Current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was physically monitored by Air Marshals under the TSA’s Quiet Skies program. The New York Times even just reported that the leak case involving John Bolton involved communications captured by a Five Eyes ally in the Biden years. Who isn’t under surveillance now?

Caputo’s notice read, saying, “Hello, Google received and responded to a legal process issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation”:

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In conjunction with news about other Google notices, he lost it. “Come on,” he says. “The future Director of the FBI? Dan Scavino, the one of the President’s best friends, and the member of the campaign? Me, a member of the campaign, and they popped me weeks after I send a memo on how to pursue a Weaponization of Government policy? That’s a huge mop-up operation.”

Caputo turned to Judicial Watch, which filed FOIA requests to the DOJ, FBI, and ODNI, asking for records of his case. All were ignored, prompting the lawsuits filed today. He worries that elements of the FBI and other agencies who brought the original cases are still in place, using spy tools far too easy to access, with too little oversight. The only thing that would even begin to justify any of this would be evidence of Russian money backing his movie, but Caputo is steadfast on that score. “It’s been four and a half years by now,” he says. “You think they’d have found some kind of Oleg.”

Fifty years after Watergate, the idea of spying on aides to presidential candidates, Congressional staff, journalists, even candidates and presidents no longer shocks much of the country. Can that pattern be reversed?

• Who/What/When/Where/Why: Taco Bell has deployed voice AI ordering at more than 500 drive-throughs since last year to automate orders and test where AI adds value.
• Scale and usage: The system has handled more than two million customer orders so far.
• Customer response: Some customers have complained about glitches and delays, others feel uncomfortable, and some users troll the system with unrealistic orders like “18,000 cups of water.”
• Leadership view: Dane Mathews, Taco Bell’s chief digital and technology officer, says the company is learning and has experienced mixed results personally.
• Operational limits: Taco Bell is considering that AI may not be suitable for every drive-through, especially very busy restaurants where human staff might perform better.
• Franchisee collaboration: The company plans to work with individual restaurants and franchisees to recommend when to use voice AI and when to have staff monitor or take over.
• Industry context: Other chains have experimented with drive-through voice AI—McDonald’s paused an IBM trial and is working with Google Cloud, while Wendy’s is expanding its Google-based assistant; Yum Brands has a partnership with Nvidia.
• Next steps: Taco Bell continues analyzing performance data, refining deployment plans, and keeping voice AI as a central part of its roadmap while developing human offramps and monitoring strategies.

Taco Bell will work with restaurants to figure out the best use for AI, and when a human might be better. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The most transformative technology in over a century may have finally found its limit: ordering tacos.

Since last year, Taco Bell has rolled out voice AI-powered ordering at more than 500 drive-through locations, and now the chain is realizing that not every customer is a fan of the new tech.

Some have taken to social media to complain about glitches and delays. Others are simply just weirded out. And then there is a contingent intent on trolling the system with orders like, “18,000 cups of water, please.”

Dane Mathews, Taco Bell’s chief digital and technology officer Photo: Taco Bell

“We’re learning a lot, I’m going to be honest with you,” said Taco Bell Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews.

Even Mathews said he has had mixed experiences with it. “I think like everybody, sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me,” he said.

Mathews said he is now thinking carefully about where and where not to use this tech in the future. It might not make sense to exclusively use artificial intelligence at every drive-through, he said. For example, at super busy restaurants with long lines, a human team member might handle things better, he said.

It is the latest sign that nearly three years into the generative AI boom, companies are still simply figuring things out. While many have faith in the technology’s promise, they are pivoting and overhauling their AI strategies as they learn more about where the technology is actually working and where it isn’t.

Voice AI at the drive-through has been a particularly elusive use case. Last year, McDonald’s ended an experiment with International Business Machines aimed at making it work. Chief Information Officer Brian Rice told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year that he is now working on it with Google Cloud. Wendy’s said this year that it was expanding use of its drive-through assistant, FreshAi, also built on Google’s technology.

Taco Bell parent company Yum Brands has been working on it for years as well. In March it announced a partnership with Nvidia, aimed at potentially helping on this and other AI use cases.

The company is still moving forward on voice AI, which remains a critical part of the product road map. But there are open questions about exactly what Taco Bell will expect the technology to do and where it will build offramps for human staff to jump in.

Mathews said he would work with restaurants to help them figure it out. “For our teams, we’ll help coach them: at your restaurant, at these times, we recommend you use voice AI or recommend that you actually really monitor voice AI and jump in as necessary.”

Exact plans are still developing, as the chain continues analyzing data from the more than two million customer orders AI has taken so far.

“I can tell you it’s a very active conversation inside Taco Bell in partnership with our franchisees,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, it’s really, really early. And we feel that. And I think other brands feel that, too.”

Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com

• Who/What/When/Where/Why: Researchers and experts from institutions in the US, UK and Australia summarize caffeine’s effects, dosage, genetics, benefits and risks; published 7 January 2024; prompted by rising caffeine and energy drink consumption and the need to clarify health impacts.
• Dosage and timing: Regulatory guidance cites ~400mg/day as safe for healthy adults; last tea/coffee recommended ~8h48m before bed and stronger supplements ~13h12m before bed; caffeine half-life ~3–7 hours.
• Mechanism of action: Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors and stimulates pituitary/adrenal hormones, increasing alertness, heart rate and blood pressure; habitual use induces neural adaptations and tolerance within days.
• Genetic variation: CYP1A2 gene variants mainly determine caffeine metabolism speed; ADORA2A variants affect sensitivity to caffeine’s effects.
• Consumption patterns: Fast metabolisers tend to drink more coffee to achieve desired stimulant effects, and most people unconsciously adjust intake to a personal “sweet spot.”
• Energy drink concerns: Caffeinated energy drinks vary widely in caffeine (commonly 75–160mg, reported up to 500mg) and contain proprietary ingredient blends that may interact with caffeine unpredictably.
• Health and performance benefits: Moderate caffeine (up to ~300mg) can improve focus and endurance performance (small to moderate effect); observational evidence links coffee with reduced risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, liver disease and some cancers, though some benefits may derive from non-caffeine coffee components.
• Research and personalization: Ongoing studies aim to clarify caffeine’s effects and enable personalized intake guidance based on genetics; experts include Prof Jennifer Temple, Dr Marilyn Cornelis and Prof Rob van Dam.

Caffeine has been getting a bad rap recently. Whether it’s highly caffeinated energy drinks making it difficult for kids to concentrate in class, or too many teas and coffees during the day leaving us unable to sleep at night, caffeine, in many people’s eyes, is a cause for alarm.

As such, the general advice regarding caffeine consumption increasingly seems to be to cut back on it or cut it out altogether. But it’s not as if caffeine is entirely without merit. There’s no denying it’s a psychoactive substance. Or, to put it more bluntly, caffeine is a drug (the world’s most widely consumed drug, in fact – chances are, you’re under its influence right now).

But, like many drugs, in the right dose, it has benefits. It was the clarity and energy that doses of caffeine provided (distributed via the tea and coffee houses of Europe) that helped usher in the Enlightenment and make the switch from farms to factories during the Industrial Revolution.

But dosage is the key variable. And although coffee and tea have been providing us with a tasty pick-me-up for centuries, nowadays more of us are consuming caffeine in much higher concentrations due to the boom in energy drinks and tablets.

This has prompted a rise in research into caffeine, as scientists work to better understand its effects on us and the mechanisms by which it produces them. So what are we learning from all this research? For one thing, just how differently each of us processes and reacts to caffeine.

But perhaps more importantly, it’s providing evidence that as well as perking us up in the morning, a few cups of coffee or tea each day might also help us stave off illnesses, such as diabetes and certain forms of cancer. So does caffeine really deserve its bad reputation?

The dose makes the poison

Anyone who consumes caffeine every day knows the importance of dosage: how much to take and when to take it. Get the dose right, and caffeine can lift your mood and make you more alert; overdo it and you risk anxiety, tremors and disrupted sleep.

Both the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority say that a daily caffeine intake of 400mg (about two to three mugs of filter coffee, depending on the size of the mug) won’t cause problems for healthy adults.

As for when to take caffeine – or rather, when to stop taking it in order to prevent it from affecting your sleep, that depends on how you administer it.

Researchers in Australia and the UK published a study in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews earlier this year that tried to give clear guidance on when your last ‘dose’ of caffeine should be. According to their report, you should drink your last tea or coffee 8 hours and 48 minutes before you go to bed.

Caffeine’s effects enable us to shake off our natural circadian rhythms, if we need to be awake and alert when we’d normally be asleep. - Photo credit: Getty

If, however, you use a pre-workout caffeine supplement, which typically has double the caffeine of a cup of coffee, that should be taken no later than 13 hours 12 minutes before bedtime.

The problem with giving definitive directions on how much caffeine is okay and when to stop consuming it, however, is that some of us are more sensitive to it than others.

How long it hangs around inside our bodies varies, too – caffeine has a half-life (the time required for a substance to lose half of its initial effectiveness) of 3-7 hours in adults. The reason for this is genetic. But to understand it, you first need to know what caffeine does inside your body.

Caffeine and your genes

During the day, a molecule called adenosine builds up in your brain. Adenosine binds with receptors on nerve cells, or neurons, slowing down their activity and making you feel drowsy.

But caffeine is also able to bind with these receptors, and by doing so it blocks adenosine’s effect, making your neurons fire more and keeping you alert. Caffeine also activates the pituitary gland at the base of your brain.

This releases hormones that tell the adrenal glands on your kidneys to produce adrenaline, causing your heart to beat faster and your blood pressure to rise. If, however, your daily caffeine intake is consistent, your brain will adapt to it.

“Your brain is like, ‘Okay, every morning I’m getting this caffeine that’s binding to these receptors and blocking adenosine from binding to them’. And so [your brain] creates extra receptors to give adenosine more of an opportunity to bind with them and have its usual effect,” says Prof Jennifer Temple, whose lab at University at Buffalo in New York, carries out research on the effects of caffeine.

“And more adenosine is also produced to counteract the caffeine. That’s why it takes more and more caffeine to have the same effect.”

These adaptations take place rapidly – within as little as a week. Part of the differences in how we respond to caffeine is down to the extent to which each of our bodies have adapted to it.

But then there’s also the effect of our genes. Caffeine is mainly broken down, or metabolised, by the CYP1A2 enzyme in the liver, and the gene that codes for that enzyme has been found to vary a lot between people.

Read more:

• How long does caffeine take to kick in?
• Why does coffee make me need a poo?

Research shows that, for the most part, it’s the version of the CYP1A2 gene you have that determines how quickly you can metabolise caffeine and therefore how long it hangs around in your body. Fast metabolisers are able to clear caffeine quickly, so the effect of an espresso wears off faster for them.

The adenosine receptors in the brain also vary a lot depending on a person’s genetic makeup. And there are also some variants of the ADORA2A gene, which encodes one type of adenosine receptor, that make people particularly sensitive to caffeine. It’s also our genes that influence how much caffeinated coffee and tea we drink each day.

“Coffee is naturally a bitter substance and so it’s interesting how such a bitter beverage has become so popular,” says Marilyn Cornelis, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University in Illinois who researches the links between genes and caffeine.

“Based on evolution, we should naturally avoid bitter foods – it’s a protective effect your body has to avoid poisonous things.” It’s therefore logical to assume that people who are less sensitive to bitter tastes will be the ones who drink more coffee. But that’s not the case.

A study led by Cornelis and published in Scientific Reports shows that the version of the CYP1A2 gene we have influences how much coffee we drink to a much greater extent than our sensitivity to bitter tastes.

People with the version of CYP1A2 that makes them fast metabolisers drink more coffee. And tests show fast caffeine metabolisers have lower caffeine levels in their blood.

“It suggests that they’re metabolising caffeine so quickly, [that] they’re consuming more coffee to get the stimulant effects we equate with caffeine,” says Cornelis.

But whether you’re a fast caffeine metaboliser or not, chances are you’re pretty good at moderating your caffeine intake.

“The data suggests that, whether they’re conscious of doing it or not, people do a really good job of adjusting their caffeine intake to hit their sweet spot,” says Temple. “Because when they go over it, the effects are unpleasant and there’s a memory of that, so they go back to their sweet spot.”

Caffeinated energy drinks are enormously popular, but the amounts of caffeine,
as well as the blend of other ingredients they contain, can vary a lot between brands. - Photo credit: Getty

That perfect balance of caffeine intake is potentially harder to gauge with caffeinated energy drinks, though. Studies show that the top-selling caffeinated energy drinks in the UK and US contain 75-160mg of caffeine.

But research published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence reported that some contain as much as 500mg of caffeine. By comparison, a 240ml mug of filter coffee contains about 190mg. The varied caffeine levels in different energy drinks can make judging your caffeine intake tricky.

But the complicating factors don’t end there. “Energy drinks contain other ingredients that interact with the caffeine in a way that we’re still trying to understand because we don’t know what they are,” explains Temple.

“All these blends are proprietary so we don’t know the exact formulation. But people respond differently. [So] we’re studying the effects of energy drinks in the same way we’ve been studying coffee and caffeine systematically,” she says.

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• In praise of caffeine, the world’s most widely consumed psychoactive drug

The benefits of caffeine

While the formulations of caffeinated energy drinks, and the effects they have on us has prompted a lot of recent research, there’s also a growing interest in caffeine’s beneficial effects. For example, caffeine is increasingly being used as a legal performance-enhancing drug in competitive sports. A review of research into caffeine and athletic performance by the International Society of Sports Nutrition in 2022 said caffeine has a ‘small to moderate effect’ on muscular endurance and strength.

Its biggest effects on performance are seen in endurance sports, though. It’s thought that at least some of this performance boost is likely down to caffeine aiding muscle contraction by changing levels of calcium, sodium and potassium, as well as acting as a painkiller.

There has also been a raft of studies attempting to determine how caffeine boosts our cognitive abilities. They’ve found that a moderate dose, up to 300mg, helps us stay focused for longer. Some research also shows that in the long term, caffeine can boost our memory, but here the evidence is somewhat mixed.

When it comes to determining the long-term health benefits of caffeine, things get complicated as most of the research has been carried out with coffee, which contains a cocktail of bioactive ingredients. Deciphering whether it’s caffeine or one of the many other components of coffee that brings about a health benefit, is difficult.

This polarised
light micrograph image reveals the crystalline structure of caffeine. - Source: Science Photo Library

There’s good news for coffee drinkers, though. A review published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2020 reports that your regular coffee fix reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, liver disease and certain forms of cancer, such as liver cancer.

For some conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, research shows it’s not the caffeine but some other component of coffee that helps to prevent them – as decaf coffee reduces the risk just like caffeinated coffee.

“But interestingly, if you look at other conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease, it seems to be completely the caffeine,” says Rob van Dam, Professor of Exercise, Nutrition Sciences and Epidemiology at The George Washington University in Washington DC, who led the review.

“Then there are some that sit in the middle, like liver cancer – it seems that caffeine may have some benefit, but there might be additional gain from some other components of coffee.”

In the future, scientists will discover more about how our genes determine the effects caffeine and coffee have on us. And the more we learn, the closer we’ll get to the prospect of personalised guidance for daily caffeine intake.

“Most of the guidelines for caffeine have really been just looking at the population level,” says Cornelis. “They don’t account for the individual variation and we’re at a stage in research where there are opportunities for personalised nutrition.”

It means that one day a genetic test could tell you precisely what the ‘sweet spot’ for your daily caffeine intake is. And that day might not be as far off as you think. “When I first started this genetic research during my PhD around 2001, I couldn’t imagine a day where every individual would be able to access their full genome. Well, it’s 2023 and we’re at that point where people are knowledgeable about their genetics and have paid these companies to get access to them. I’ve had people email me and say, ‘Hey, I just got my genotype back and I read your paper and it looks like I’m a rapid caffeine metaboliser.’”

About our experts

Prof Jennifer Temple is director of the Nutrition and Health Research Laboratory at the University of Buffalo. Here she studies how caffeine impacts humans – particularly adolescents. Her research has been published in journals including Physiology and Behavior, Nutrition Research, and Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.

Dr Marilyn Cornelis is Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University, where she studies the link between caffeine and genes. Her work has been published in journals including Nature and Nutrients.

Prof Rob van Dam studies the role of diet in preventing disease at the Milken Institute School of Public Health. His work has been published in the Lancet, JAMA, BMJ, Annals of Intern Medicine, and Circulation.

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• The 5 laws of making better home coffee, according to science
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This article was originally published on 7 January 2024

• Who/What/When/Where/Why: Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO and newly commissioned U.S. Army reserve Lt. Col., in a July 2025 Journal meeting, warned that U.S. industrial shortfalls and supply‑chain dependence undermine deterrence amid the Russia‑Ukraine war and rising China challenges.
• Manufacturing vs. Stockpiles: The Ukraine conflict highlights that a domestic ability to mass‑produce and rapidly adapt weapons is more crucial than existing stockpiles.
• Venture Capital Influx: About $120 billion of venture capital has flowed into defense over three years, fueling firms such as Anduril, Shield AI and Saronic Technologies.
• Defense–Civilian Disconnect: Procurement has shifted from broad commercial participation to an 86% concentration among Pentagon‑centric contractors, reducing commercial innovation in defense.
• Procurement Failures: Bureaucratic acquisition produced slow, expensive programs (e.g., F‑35 lifecycle) and resisted commercial off‑the‑shelf solutions, prompting Palantir to litigate to supply its software to the Army.
• China’s Industrial Edge: Chinese defense firms earn an estimated 27% of revenue from the PLA, giving them commercial scale, rapid innovation, and cost advantages that challenge U.S. industrial primacy.
• Supply‑Chain Vulnerabilities: Sankar cites risks from dependence on Chinese components and materials (chips, rare‑earth magnets, medical supplies) and notes a $600 million Apple–MP Materials deal as one mitigation step.
• Remedies Proposed: Recommendations include reindustrialization, decentralizing procurement to combatant commands, expanding dual‑use manufacturing, and cultural efforts to restore patriotic industrial commitment.

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WSJ Opinion: Russia-Ukraine War Drags on After White House MeetingsPlay video: WSJ Opinion: Russia-Ukraine War Drags on After White House Meetings

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Journal Editorial Report: Hopes of bringing Zelenskyy and Putin together appear to be fading.

You’ve heard the problems. A $2 million interceptor to shoot down a $2,000 drone. Ukraine consuming more artillery shells in two months than the U.S. produces in a year. U.S. antiship missiles expected to run out on day eight of any war over Taiwan. A single Chinese shipyard churns out more tonnage in a year than the U.S. has since World War II.

On the advice of Wall Street sharpie Bernard Baruch, who ran U.S. war production in 1917-18, President Franklin D. Roosevelt raided General Motors in late 1939 for its production genius. For nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, and before Germany’s subsequent declaration of war against the U.S., William Knudsen was already on the job, organizing U.S. defense production.

Hitler and Tojo knew to fear America’s slumbering industrial mass. The counterfactual is unresolvable. Had Washington acted sooner, who knows? World War II might have been avoided.

Today’s problems aren’t the same but are similar. If Ukraine teaches anything, it is that a stockpile of existing weapons is less important than a manufacturing base—the ability to produce lots more weapons fast, and to adapt them and innovate on the fly.

Now I’m channeling the thoughts of Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar. In a meeting last week with Journal editors, he introduced himself with these words: “The maniacal focus of my work over the last 20 years and hopefully the next 40 years is how do we prevent World War III or win it and how do we ensure American greatness going forward.”

Mr. Sankar was the 13th employee of Palantir, a software company founded in 2003 by serial entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Its market capitalization, recently around $373 billion, is more than three times that of Lockheed Martin.

This summer, Mr. Sankar became Lt. Col. Sankar, a reserve officer in the U.S. Army’s newly formed Executive Innovation Corps.

The good news: In the past three years, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, $120 billion of venture capital has flowed into the once-neglected defense sector. Silicon Valley has gotten over its woke resistance to the U.S. military. Anduril Industries is leading the way on autonomous warfare; Shield AI is delivering decision-making help to combat pilots and drones; Saronic Technologies is focused on naval warfare.

They’re fixing a problem that began during the Cold War, the estrangement of an ever-shrinking defense oligopoly from the fast-moving civilian economy. As recently as the 1980s, Mr. Sankar estimates, 6% of procurement dollars went to companies whose sole business was with the Pentagon. Now it’s 86%. Chrysler once built tanks and missiles. Ford built satellite equipment. General Mills—the cereal company—was in the artillery and guidance-system business.

Not anymore. The government became too difficult a customer—too many rules, too little opportunity to scale up. It stopped being open to the kind of innovation and learning that drives the rapidly evolving commercial marketplace.

Worse, “you lost the heretics, you lost the crazy engineers who were going to rage against the system,” Mr. Sankar says.

“Founders” and “founder types” don’t work well with the Pentagon bureaucracy. Such people can get a foothold anywhere if they’re tolerated. People like Kelly Johnson at Lockheed’s skunk works, who created the U2 spy plane. Like Adm. Hyman Rickover, who spent 30 years fighting his own service to bring the nuclear Navy into being—“our last remaining asymmetric advantage against the Chinese,” Mr. Sankar notes.

A renegade colonel and fighter pilot named John Boyd was the “founder” of the phenomenal F-16 fighter aircraft. In contrast, Mr. Sankar says, the F-35 “has no founder.” A $2 trillion program was spawned entirely inside the procurement bureaucracy. “We started in the mid-’90s, and it’s basically just working now. That’s a crazy lifespan,” efficient only in the narrowest Pentagon definition of the word.

How bad has it gotten? China’s defense industrial base gets only 27% of its revenue from the People’s Liberation Army, Mr. Sankar estimates. It has both the commercial scale and commercial incentive to innovate quickly and, as important, cheaply. “China is a peer adversary. We are the underdog right now.”

Mr. Sankar was born in India and spent his early years in Nigeria, where his father built a pharmaceutical factory until a shocking encounter with violent crime inspired him to relocate his family to the U.S. His father never again experienced great material success, but he plugged away at multiple entrepreneurial ventures and preached to his son that America was a place where anything was possible, even if not every dream comes true.

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The family settled in Orlando, Fla.—near the Space Coast, where the optimistic vision of 1960s sci-fi still ruled. After Cornell, the young Mr. Sankar came into the orbit of Mr. Thiel through a payment company, Xoom, which led to Palantir.

Mr. Sankar, 43, has youthful energy and an easy manner. Palantir has an occult reputation in some quarters, using sinister methods to predict the future for government police and spy agencies. Its real job, Mr. Sankar has said, is to make coders feel “as sexy as James Bond” while working on “data integration,” gathering and organizing information for use by decision makers.

Its commercial business grew nearly twice as fast last year as its government business. The two feed off each other. Mr. Sankar mentions a BP project that was later adapted to speed the Covid vaccine rollout for government.

At the Pentagon, though, Palantir discovered that the military’s program managers could behave more like competitors than customers. Palantir had to sue to get the Army to consider (and eventually adopt) an off-the-shelf combat intelligence-sharing software in place of one the Army hoped to develop itself.

In the process, Palantir coders would work directly with infantry units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instant feedback helped them improve their software products to help troops come back alive while fulfilling their missions. An epiphany followed: The U.S. has 11 functional and geographic commands in the U.S. and globally. Mr. Sankar estimates 95% of their procurement could be met by negotiating directly with vendors, bypassing the Pentagon’s centralized bureaucracy, allowing better customization and faster response times.

This is a start. To rebuild material deterrence will require heavy lifting, such as finding ways to keep specialized arms factories ticking over in peacetime. It also requires sponsoring more dual-purpose capacity, serving both the private sector and the military.

Mr. Sankar is a China hawk. Decoupling? He’s for it, if not right away then eventually. In the U.S. it isn’t a myth that Chinese companies have bought up land near U.S. bases, which ought to worry Americans after seeing how allies Israel and Ukraine were able to launch drone attacks on enemy countries from those countries’ own soil.

“The number of French submariners that are married to Chinese nationals would shock you. That’s not an accident,” Mr. Sankar adds. The Chinese know where the main French sub base is located. They target its personnel.

“We’ve lost deterrence,” he says. “And it didn’t just happen last year. Crimea was annexed in 2014.” Around the same time, “the Chinese militarized the Spratly Islands and were shocked that we did nothing in response. We now have North Korean soldiers fighting in Ukraine.”

Mr. Sankar is doubtful whether a current focus, depriving China of top Nvidia chips, pays off for the U.S. He favors instead working backward from our own vulnerabilities. “You could fix [many] things quickly,” he adds, pointing to a $600 million deal between Apple and U.S. government-backed MP Materials Corp. to reduce America’s dependence on rare-earth magnets from China, a component that allows greatly reduced size and weight in a myriad of civilian and military electronic devices.

But he worries: In a conflict with China, what happens when American families realize they might no longer be able to get a cheap antibiotic to treat their child’s severe infection? What happens if Washington is frantically trying to refill its weapons magazines at the very moment components from China are in short supply?

The U.S. already faces complicated readiness challenges, a factor reportedly in the unexpected retirement last week of U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin. Midnight Hammer, the attack on Iran’s nuclear program, showed sophisticated U.S. capabilities. It also reportedly illustrated strains on the U.S. bomber, tanker and escort fleets that have gotten less attention.

Mr. Sankar sees a second problem—cultural. London, he says, would have been a more natural landing spot for his father and family after Nigeria. “Why did he come here? Because he had this fully formed conception of America as the city on the hill from Hollywood.”

In the Reagan era, patriotism and U.S. can-doism were still featured in American cinema. Today’s movies are full of antiheroes and dyspeptic takes on U.S. institutions and life. Along the way, studios lost touch with the domestic audience. “Why did people go back to see ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ over and over and over in the theaters? They already knew the plot. They wanted the feeling.”

Shows favored by Trump voters, such as “Landman” (about oil wildcatters) and “Yellowstone” (cowboy ranchers) are making money, Mr. Sankar says. “Woke ‘Snow White’ is incinerating money. These studios are capitalists. They recognize there’s a taste dislocation happening.”

Hence Mr. Sankar’s newest venture, a production company started with friends. He won’t provide details, but one project has already been sold to a major studio. In July a leaked pitch deck referred to proposed movies about the evacuations that saved thousands before the Twin Towers collapsed, Israel’s intelligence war against Iran, and America’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In a 90-minute conversation, the word “deterrence” is recurring. America will change “the second we feel our existence is threatened,” Mr. Sankar predicts. “The question is, can we motivate ourselves to realize that it already is and get there ahead of conflict?” The U.S. has always met its soldiers (and their parents) halfway, trying to minimize U.S. casualties by burying its enemies in superior technology and firepower. What message do empty armories communicate at home and abroad? Not a good one. “If you can’t make the weapons, you might as well not have them,” Mr. Sankar says.

OK, an overstatement, but to deter a long war you need to be ready to fight one. If disturbers of the peace believe America is overstretched, they will be tempted to act accordingly. Mr. Sankar says: “I’m a reindustrialization maximalist.”

Mr. Jenkins, a member of the Journal’s editorial board, writes the Business World column.

Shyam Sankar. PHOTO: KEN FALLIN

• Who/What/When/Where/Why: Federal Reserve governance in Washington, D.C., amid recent Trump administration actions to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook and potential efforts to reshape regional Fed leadership to influence monetary policy.
• Fed makeover possibility: Fed watchers and economists openly discuss a plausible Trump-driven effort to give the Fed a MAGA-style makeover, with Tim Mahedy calling it “the most likely outcome” and warning it threatens Fed independence.
• White House rationale: The White House says Cook was “credibly accused of lying” in financial documents and claims her removal for cause improves Federal Reserve Board accountability and credibility.
• Regional Fed structure: There are 12 regional Federal Reserve banks (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, San Francisco); regional presidents are selected by local bank directors and approved by the Board of Governors.
• Board intervention precedent: Jim Bianco notes the Board has “never” voted down a regional president, though Trump-appointed governors Bowman and Waller abstained on Austan Goolsbee’s approval and could be persuaded to oppose reappointments, potentially targeting figures like NY Fed President John Williams.
• Concerns about politicization: Narayana Kocherlakota calls Board use to influence monetary policy a “logical possibility,” urges a more open reappointment process, but warns that conditioning approvals on alignment with the White House’s low-rate preferences would be “quite troubling.”
• Fed independence rationale: The Fed is designed to be independent to balance maximum employment and stable prices; political pressure for ultra-low rates risks inflation and higher long-term borrowing costs.
• Hurdles and uncertainty: Obstacles include a likely legal challenge by Cook, a Polymarket estimate giving a 25% chance she’s out by year-end, timing of regional-president approvals in late January, and uncertainty whether governors Waller and Bowman would support a reshuffle, though analysts see a possible path for Trump.