Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations

January 3, 2023 – Twitter Files: Twitter and the “FBI Belly Button” – FBI’s Elvis Chan: “We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies”

January 3, 2023 – Twitter Files: Former House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff asks Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry

 

Paul Sperry responds 1/04/2023:

January 4, 2023 – Twitter Files: Twitter is pressured by Intel Community (including Senate Intel, Mark Warner)

“Matt Taibbi has a new substack out on the Twitter Files. This one concentrates on how Twitter found itself under political pressure from the Deep State to, in essence, lend support to the Russia Hoax. This, as usual, was an evidence free operation. Twitter looked but couldn’t find evidence of Russian “meddling”. Twitter execs said so to one another, but buckled to Deep State pressure. Overall, what we’re seeing from the Twitter File revelations is that the anti-Trump campaign was the biggest gaslighting of the public population ever witnessed since lower tech operations by the likes Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. It was all done with the appearance of an open society, but nothing could have been further from the truth. And it happened under a Republican administration. This will all be red meat for Sundance, as you’ll see the central role of Mark Warner and the Senate Intel Committee. Nevertheless, you can be sure that political masters higher up the food chain were directing all of this.

What I’ve done here is simply pasted in the text of Taibbi’s tweets—sans documentation, which you can find at the link.

1.THREAD: The Twitter Files

How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In

2.In August 2017, when Facebook decided to suspend 300 accounts with “suspected Russian origin,” Twitter wasn’t worried. Its leaders were sure they didn’t have a Russia problem.

3.“We did not see a big correlation.”

“No larger patterns.”

“FB may take action on hundreds of accounts, and we may take action on ~25.”

4.“KEEP THE FOCUS ON FB”: Twitter was so sure they had no Russia problem, execs agreed the best PR strategy was to say nothing on record, and quietly hurl reporters at Facebook:

5.“Twitter is not the focus of inquiry into Russian election meddling right now – the spotlight is on FB,” wrote Public Policy VP Colin Crowell:

6.In September, 2017, after a cursory review, Twitter informed the Senate it suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with “possible links” to those accounts, amid a larger set of roughly 2700 suspects manually examined.

Note the “possible”. That suggests that Twitter believed it best to offer up some meager results, whether there was real evidence or not.

7.Receiving these meager results, a furious Senator Mark Warner of Virginia – ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee – held an immediate press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as “frankly inadequate on every level.”

8.“#Irony,” mused Crowell the day after Warner’s presser, after receiving an e-circular from Warner’s re-election campaign, asking for “$5 or whatever you can spare.”

“LOL,” replied General Counsel Sean Edgett.

9.“KEEP PRODUCING MATERIAL” After meeting with congressional leaders, Crowell wrote: “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them.”

So, Twitter execs weren’t stupid. They knew exactly what this was about—politics. Evidence free political gaslighting, but of the entire country.

10.“TAKING THEIR CUES FROM HILLARY CLINTON” Crowell added Dems were taking cues from Hillary Clinton, who that week said: “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.”

11. In growing anxiety over its PR problems, Twitter formed a “Russia Task Force” to proactively self-investigate.

So joining the gaslighting party had nothing to do with evidence—it was to handle a “PR problem”, which was really a problem with the political masters who regulated, or might regulate, their platform.

12.The “Russia Task Force” started mainly with data shared from counterparts at Facebook, centered around accounts supposedly tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). But the search for Russian perfidy was a dud:

Despite their best gaslighting intentions, there just wasn’t anything that could be plausibly called evidence.

13. OCT 13 2017: “No evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity (different timing, spend, targeting, <$10k in ad spend).”

14.OCT 18 2017: “First round of RU investigation… 15 high risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT.”

What to do? Cast the net more widely! But—still no fish in the net.

15.OCT 20 2017: “Built new version of the model that is lower precision but higher recall which allows to catch more items. We aren’t seeing substantially more suspicious accounts. We expect to find ~20 with a small amount of spend.”

16.OCT 23 2017: “Finished with investigation… 2500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive… 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today…remaining <$10k in spend.”

Basically, a total bust. But that was good enough to generate MSM headlines to gaslight the populace and spread Russia hysteria.

17.Twitter’s search finding “only 2” significant accounts, “one of which is Russia Today,” was based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines like “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone”:

18.The failure of the “Russia task force” to produce “material” worsened the company’s PR crisis.

That sure has a Stalinesque show trial ring to it, doesn’t it? If you can’t prove guilt, you may be the guilty party! You may be a “wrecker”, a saboteur, … a, a, AGENT OF PUTIN!

19.In the weeks after Warner’s presser, a torrent of stories sourced to the Intel Committee poured into the news, an example being Politico’s October 13, “Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes.”

20.“Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB… they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform,” Johns Hopkins Professor (and Intel Committee “expert”) Thomas Rid told Politico.

21.As congress threatened costly legislation, and Twitter [again] was subject to more bad press fueled by the committees, the company changed its tune about the smallness of its Russia problem.

Fake confession time.

22.“Hi guys.. Just passing along for awareness the writeup here from the WashPost today on potential legislation (or new FEC regulations) that may affect our political advertising,” wrote Crowell.

23. In Washington weeks after the first briefing, Twitter leaders were told by Senate staff that “Sen Warner feels like tech industry was in denial for months.” Added an Intel staffer: “Big interest in Politico article about deleted accounts.”

24.Twitter “pledged to work with them on their desire to legislate”:

25.“Knowing that our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight, I wanted to share some relevant highlights of the legislation Senators Warner, Klobuchar and McCain will be introducing,” wrote Policy Director Carlos Monje soon after.

It’s bipartisan.

26.“THE COMMITTEES APPEAR TO HAVE LEAKED” Even as Twitter prepared to change its ads policy and remove RT and Sputnik to placate Washington, congress turned the heat up more, apparently leaking the larger, base list of 2700 accounts.

27.Reporters from all over started to call Twitter about Russia links. Buzzfeed, working with the University of Sheffield, claimed to find a “new network” on Twitter that had “close connections to… Russian-linked bot accounts.”

28.“IT WILL ONLY EMBOLDEN THEM.” Twitter internally did not want to endorse the Buzzfeed/Sheffield findings:

29. “SENATE INTEL COMMITTEE IS ASKING… POSSIBLE TO WHIP SOMETHING TOGETHER?” Still, when the Buzzfeed piece came out, the Senate asked for “a write up of what happened.” Twitter was soon apologizing for the same accounts they’d initially told the Senate were not a problem.

30.“REPORTERS NOW KNOW THIS IS A MODEL THAT WORKS”

This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.

The desired result has been achieved—Twitter is transformed into the PR gaslighting arm of the Intel Committee, censoring information that might lead the public to become suspicious of what its masters were up to.

31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture.

In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”

Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”

32.Twitter let the “USIC” into its moderation process. It would not leave.

Wrote Crowell, in an email to the company’s leaders:

“We will not be reverting to the status quo.”

(Meaning In History/Substack, 1/4/2023)  (Archive) (Taibbi thread)

January 5, 2023 – US Attorney Lausch urges AG Garland to appoint a special counsel the day after his investigators interviewed Biden aide Kathy Chung

January 6, 2023 – Louisiana AG lawsuit reveals Biden regime pressured Facebook to censor Tucker Carlson and targeting of Robert Kennedy, Jr.

(…) On Friday, January 6, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry released communications between Joe Biden’s Director of Digital Strategy, Joe Flaherty, pressuring Facebook to censor Tucker Carlson of FOX News.

Joe Flaherty demands to know what “reduction” of the information looks like on Facebook. The White House is very upset that the FOX News host is questioning the dangerous experimental vaccine.

Jeff Landry also released a Facebook document telling the White House how to censor Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense Fund. (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 1/7/2023) (Archive)

More on Rob Flaherty,  White House Director of Digital Strategy:

(…) This guy is middle management incarnate. Flaherty’s cartoonishly disrespectful language as he barks orders at various tech employees — who without fail respond with a “Thanks Rob” — has made me laugh aloud several times. I wanted to learn more about this perfect caricature of modern-day fascism. A bit about his background…

Rob Flaherty (Credit: Ithaca College News)

Flaherty got into politics as an undergraduate at Ithaca College. His social media aptitude quickly accelerated his career, landing him a position on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign just two years after graduating.

Screenshot of Flaherty post on Medium.

His thoughts on Hillary from an old blog post:

“Hillary Clinton went right in. That’s what she does. She’s tough as shit. It’s that toughness that, even in my worst moments in the last few months, has been genuinely inspiring to me. When she’s up against the wall, she grinds it out.”

I’m sure Mark Middleton can attest to that inspiring toughness.

Shortly thereafter, Flaherty became the “Digital Director” for Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 presidential campaign, engineering totally-not-authoritarian fundraising schemes like this one:

Apparently a huge success (note the timestamps compared to Beto’s):

Flaherty’s accolades do not end there. The social media savant was even behind the famous “We did it Joe!” promotional video, which announced Biden’s presidential victory for those who’d missed it. From Ithaca College News:

“One key moment in the campaign for Flaherty was the announcement of Biden’s running mate, then Senator Kamala Harris… had an extensive rollout plan, including a text message announcement, a video of Harris receiving the call from Biden.”

(Read more: Zero Hedge, 1/8/2023)  (Archive)

January 9, 2023 – Twitter Files: Pfizer board member used same Twitter manager as the WH to suppress debate on Covid vaccines

Former FDA Commissioner and present Pfizer board member, Dr. Scott Gottlieb. (Credit: Twitter)

On August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb – a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers – saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines.

The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to “follow the science” and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates.

It came not from an “anti-vaxxer” like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but from Dr. Brett Giroir, a physician who had briefly followed Gottlieb as the head of the Food & Drug Administration. Further, the tweet actually encouraged people who did not have natural immunity to “Get vaccinated!”

No matter.

Todd OBoyle, Sr. Manager, Twitter Public Policy (Credit: LinkedIn)

By suggesting some people might not need Covid vaccinations, the tweet could raise questions about the shots. Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on Covid public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.

Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House.

The post was “corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. He worried it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.” (Read more: Alex Berenson/Substack, 1/9/2023) (Archive)

January 11, 2023 – Ten senior Biden administration officials were hired to their current or former positions after stints at the Penn Biden Center

(Fox News, 1/11/2023)  (Archive)

January 12, 2023 – Twitter Files: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots – Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence

January 12, 2023 – Former Biden assistant is questioned by law enforcement over classified docs

“A former top aide to President Biden — who reportedly was questioned by federal investigators as part of the probe into the president’s handling of classified documents — exchanged emails with Hunter Biden on numerous occasions, according to a Fox News Digital review.

Kathy Chung, Biden’s executive assistant when he was vice president and the Pentagon’s current deputy director of protocol, is among several former aides to the president to be interviewed by law enforcement, NBC News reported Thursday. Chung and the others questioned reportedly helped move materials and belongings from Biden’s office at the end of the Obama administration in early 2017.

Throughout much of her five-year tenure working for Biden during the Obama administration, Chung regularly communicated with Biden’s son Hunter Biden, transmitting information about his father’s schedule and passing messages directly from the then-vice president, according to emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and verified by Fox News Digital.

Kathy Chung invited Biden family members to attend State Department luncheon honoring Chinese President Xi in September 2015 (Credit: Fox News Digital)

Chung’s relationship with Hunter Biden also appears to date back before she worked for his father. The emails showed that Hunter Biden recommended Chung for the executive assistant role when the previous holder of the job, Michele Smith, departed the White House in the spring of 2012.

At the time, Chung worked in former Sen. Mark Udall’s, D-Colo., office as his scheduling director. She previously worked for Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, who was appointed to replace Biden in the Senate in 2009 and is a longtime confidante of Biden dating back decades.

In response to her message, Hunter Biden responded later that day saying that the job would make her the primary gatekeeper of Biden and would be “involved in everything that goes on outside of policy.”

Amy Gutmann (Credit: Wikipedia)

(…) And on multiple occasions, the pair coordinated schedules for meetings with former University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann. Shortly after taking office, the president selected Gutmann to be the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

“VP will be meeting with President Guttman on Friday, Jan. 8, 11:00 am, at the Lake house in DE,” Chung wrote in an email to Hunter Biden, other family members and several White House officials in January 2016. “VP hopes that you will be able to join him for this meeting. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!!”

After Chung invited Hunter Biden to another meeting with Gutmann in April 2016, he suggested in a follow-up message to his business partner that he may need to reschedule a previously-scheduled meeting with the prime minister of the Ivory Coast. He added that “the Guttman mtg is a must attend for me per Dad.” (Read more: Fox News, 1/12/2023)  (Archive)

January 13, 2023 – Court filing: The FBI admits Seth Rich was directly involved in the DNC “hack”

 

Vox.com used the above graphic captured from a Fox News report to use in a published piece titled “The Bonkers Seth Rich Conspiracy Theory, Explained” on May 24, 2017. Now we know it’s no longer a conspiracy theory. (Credit: Fox News)

(Read more: Court Listener PDF (21 pages) , 1/13/2023)  (Archive)

Attorney Ty Clevenger explains further:

January 13, 2023 – Recently questioned Biden assistant Kathy Chung, appears in Biden laptop report 31 times, suggesting multiple felonies

From Marco Polo Biden laptop report:

January 13, 2023 – Twitter Files: More Adam Schiff ban requests and “Deamplification”

January 14, 2023 – Lawsuit: 6 Shocking Revelations of Government Censorship

(Credit: Getty Images/Forbes)

1. CISA considers your thoughts “Cognitive Infrastructure”

One of the most stunning things we’ve learned from this lawsuit is that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency now considers your thoughts and what you post online, a part of the United States Government’s “critical infrastructure,” thereby giving them the authority to regulate them. I don’t think anyone asked everyday Americans if they’d want the government regulating what goes on inside their brains, but alas, here we are.

2. Rob Flaherty coerced Facebook to ban and censor the vaccine injured, despite acknowledging their posts were true and didn’t break the Terms of Service

Rob Flaherty (Credit: public domain)

Rob Flaherty is the White House Director of Digital Strategy and a senior advisor to President Joe Biden. The government initially attempted to hide his involvement in censorship, but other discovery exposed his name, and the judge granted written interrogatory and discovery to the Plaintiffs in this case. As we will see in the examples below, Flaherty often acts as a ”boss” or manager to social media executives, cursing at them and treating them with disdain when they don’t follow his directives to censor the speech of Americans.

In an email response to Flaherty, Facebook beamed about removing post visibility and censoring the vaccine injured, stating:

3. Flaherty wanted Facebook to take more action in censoring the encrypted chat program “WhatsApp”

Rob Flaherty spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Facebook to more stringently censor WhatsApp, despite Facebook telling him they had no way to read the messages its users were sending one another. Facebook added multiple layers of censorship to the app, deboosting posts that were forwarded often and pinning what it called “authoritative” messages about COVID and vaccines to the application.

4. Flaherty wanted to know what Facebook was doing to censor vaccine claims that were “dubious” but not false

Rob Flaherty consistently demanded information about what Facebook was doing to censor content that was not false but that they considered “dubious.” He demanded internal data from the organization to confirm their efforts to censor Americans were working.

5. Joe Biden was inadvertently swept up in the censorship algorithm the White House forced Instagram to implement

In what can only be considered a stroke of serendipity, Joe Biden’s account on Instagram was inadvertently demoted and shadowbanned due to the frequency with which is was posting content about COVID-19 vaccines. Instagram, at the behest of an abusive Rob Flaherty, created an algorithm to demote accounts that were sharing an inordinate amount of vaccine-related content. Flaherty realized that the POTUS account wasn’t picking up followers and emailed execs at the company to let them know. They responded, stating that they couldn’t get into details, but the account had been fixed. After a profanity-laced email sent back from Flaherty, the execs were forced to admit that the very censorship algorithm they created to censor everyday Americans swept up the President as well. Needless to say, the White House didn’t much like being censored.

6. The office of First Lady Jill Biden was also involved in censoring Americans on Twitter

The First Lady also got into censorship action, begging Twitter to remove an edited video of Jill Biden that was clearly a parody. Twitter fought back against the demand but ultimately removed the content after Flaherty became involved and was copied on communications. We wouldn’t have known that censorship extended to the sitting First Lady without the expedited discovery order covering Rob Flaherty.

(Much more including docs: UndercoverDC/TracyBeanz, 1/14/2023)  (Archive)

January 15, 2023 – Andrew McCabe says the DOJ should obstruct the House GOP’s investigation into the Biden document scandal

(…) McCabe said it’s time for the DOJ to play hardball and obstruct Republicans in Congress.

“Chairman Jim Jordan announced this House Judiciary Committee investigation into the DOJ actions related to the President’s handling of the classified documents today,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said on Friday. “How much does that impact the DOJ ongoing investigation?”

McCabe said the DOJ should refuse to cooperate with the House GOP’s investigation and hide documents under the guise of an ‘ongoing investigation.’

“I certainly would advise them — if they were willing to listen to my advice — I would advise them to take a very hard line against that,” McCabe said. “There is a clear precedent here of not sharing information from an ongoing criminal investigation with Congress. And I think the DOJ is in a very strong position to resist on those grounds.”

“Who knows what comes of that resistance?” McCabe continued. “Maybe DOJ leadership starts getting subpoenaed.

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 1/15/2023)  (Archive)

January 16, 2023 – Former intel official Douglas Wise knew Hunter Biden laptop ‘had to be real’ but signed ‘disinfo’ letter anyway

Douglas Wise (DIA)

“A former top intelligence official who signed on to a letter attacking The Post’s bombshell 2020 reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation has now admitted he knew a “significant portion” of the recovered files “had to be real” – but doesn’t regret dismissing the exposé.

Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, was one of 51 erstwhile intelligence brass who issued the public letter on Oct. 19, 2020 — five days after The Post began a series of reports on the now-first son’s shady overseas business dealings.

“All of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible,” said Wise — who didn’t respond when The Post reached out for an explanation in March of last year, but found his tongue when he spoke to The Australian.

January 17, 2023 – Justice Department declined to oversee search at Biden’s residences

The access road to President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del., is seen from the media van Friday, Jan. 13, 2023. (Credit: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

“The Justice Department reportedly considered accompanying President Joe Biden’s lawyers as they searched his residences but declined to do so.

Officials believed joining in the search would complicate the investigation’s later stages. They also cited trust in the Biden team as a reason to avoid tagging along, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

The Justice Department’s treatment of Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents differs greatly from their treatment of allegedly mishandled classified documents by former President Donald Trump.

Trump’s team had been in contact with the National Archives, but talks between them deteriorated and lead to the FBI raiding the former president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. They found classified documents in the search. Officials believed Trump’s team had not been honest when they claimed they had turned over all documents that were property of the federal government.

Biden’s lawyer originally disclosed the finding of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president at the Penn Biden Center to the National Archives in November 2022. There were several follow-up communications about additional classified documents found at his Wilmington, Delaware, residence.

In both Trump’s and Biden’s cases, Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed special counsels to investigate the alleged mishandling of the classified documents. (Read more: Washington Examiner, 1/17/2023)  (Archive)

January 19, 2023 – Biden laptop pics put Hunter Biden at classified docs home while raking in million from the CCP

…the Washington Free Beacon reports that photos from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop place him at the Wilmington House in July, 2017. Of note, the classified documents were reportedly brought to the house in January of that year.

The photos ‘are the most concrete evidence to date’ that Hunter – who was actively negotiating a deal with a CCP-linked Chinese energy company – had access to areas of his father’s home where classified documents were stored.

A Washington Free Beacon review of the laptop found four 2017 photographs of Hunter Biden, clad in a white collared shirt and a camouflage baseball cap, behind the wheel of his father’s 1967 Corvette Stingray. GPS metadata embedded in the photos indicate they were taken within a minute of each other at 6:49 p.m. on July 30 of that year, just outside the president’s Wilmington, Del., residence. The photos show Hunter Biden posing in the vehicle beside two young girls. One appears to be his then-12-year-old niece, Natalie Biden. The other could not be identified.

Former Secret Service agent and certified cyber forensics expert, Konstantinos Gus Dimitrelos, analyzed the photos and confirmed their authenticity.

“If requested, I will testify the photographs are genuine and were taken on July 30, 2017,” he told the Free Beacon.

And as the Beacon further reports – corroborating Breitbart‘s reporting, “At the time the photos were taken, Hunter Biden was negotiating a lucrative business deal with the now-defunct Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC, which was closely tied to the Chinese government. Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski claimed to have met with Joe Biden in person in early May 2017—less than three months before Hunter Biden was pictured taking the wheel of his father’s prized vehicle—to discuss the Biden family’s Chinese business dealings.”

In total, CEFC paid Hunter Biden $6 million in legal and consulting fees in 2017 and 2018.

And of course, the same media which suggested the Trumps were Russian operatives based on a hoax – are virtually silent at actual risks to national security posed by the Biden family. (Read more: Zero Hedge, 1/19/2023)  (Archive)

January 21, 2023 – Feds search Biden Delaware home and find six more classified documents

“Six more classified documents were found at the Wilmington, Delaware home of Joe Biden on Friday during a nearly thirteen-hour search of the home by the Department of Justice according to a statement released Saturday evening by Biden’s private attorney Bob Bauer. This is the fifth batch of classified documents found in Biden’s possession and the fourth to be found at the Wilmington home in searches stretching from December 20 to Friday. The first batch was found at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. on November 2nd. (Update at end.)

Bauer also said, “The DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years,” and that some of the items taken by investigators were from Biden’s time as a senator as well as vice president.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents on January 12. Hur has not yet taken over the case from U.S. Attorney for Chicago John Lausch; the search was conducted by FBI agents under Lausch.

(The Gateway Pundit, 1/21/2023) (Archive)

January 21, 2023 – Sergei Millian tweets about a “secret sealed SpyGate case” that involves the Renteria Memo

On or about January 21st of this year, Sergei Millian teased a “secret sealed SpyGate case” via a series of now deleted tweets. Shout out to The Washington Pundit Telegram channel for posting this screenshot of it.

Twitter user @mgEyesOpen searched PACER and found it. Sure enough, it exists and is sealed.

I searched the case myself, 21-SC-3164 (ZMF), and it was difficult to find. That is probably on me for being a bit inexperienced and/or lacking some knowledge in how best to use PACER’s query system. I kept at it and did eventually locate the sealed case just as @mgEyesOpen did. However, in my searches for the case that Millian had teased everyone with, I kept getting a return for a different case, with a slightly different name:

20-SC-3361 (ZMF)

I didn’t find much on it, but the Case Title:

‘IN RE APPLICATION OF USA FOR 2703(d) ORDER FOR SIX EMAIL ACCOUNTS SERVICED BY GOOGLE LLC FOR INVESTIGATION OF VIOLATION OF 18 U.S.C….’

…was intriguing to me, so I bookmarked it.

About once or twice a week since, I have checked that bookmark and searched around again. Always coming up empty-handed… until now.

Paydirt.

Paydirt.

The New York Times filed to have records unsealed (notice that the violations that are being investigated here are redacted) in the very case that I kept happening upon when searching for the case that Millian teased. If that makes sense…

Here, just for clarity’s sake:

21-SC-3164 (ZMF) = Super secret Spygate case that Millian teased (Filed ?)

20-SC-3361 (ZMF) = Six Email Accounts Disclosure Case (Filed January 5th, 2021)

1:21-MC-00091 (ZMF) = NYT Case asking for unsealing in the Six Email Accounts Case (Filed June 8th, 2021)

As I began to read the first filing in the Time’s suit, I was struck by a familiar name from page 3.

I’m sure many readers will recall that Special Counsel Durham added Small to his team back on August 1st of 2022. However, it is possible Durham may have been tasking Small to do work for the Special Counsel’s Office before then. And the court battle over this case played out just a couple months before Small was added.

Which begs the question:

Is this Six Google Email Accounts case connected to the Durham SCO?

Back to the filing…

Two orders. One for information, another to gag the NYT’s attorney.

Four New York Times journalists?

What 2017 news report?

(checks the footnote)

Eric Lichtblau… his name came up in the Sussman case. Sussmann’s defense team wanted to call him up to testify, but wished for the scope of that testimony to be limited. In the end, they decided against it.

What April 2017 news report?

I wonder who the other journalists are?

Oh my.

DOJ was seeking information from the email accounts of these four journalists plus two others because of this article!

They are talking about the Renteria Memo!

This is about the highly classified Renteria Memo and who leaked information about it to the New York Times!

Article in that footnote.

Boom.

I wonder… are Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett the other two journalists whose email accounts DoJ was interested in?

Gone Spearfishing.

At this point in the dig I decided to search around to see if anyone else had reported on this case. Something this significant has surely made waves somewhere.

It had.

This article is worth reading in full, but to summarize it…

In the last weeks of the Trump Administration the Justice Department seized the phone records of those New York Times journalists who are named in the filing and are the authors of that famous Comey piece — Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt. They also seized the records of journalists at the Washington Post and CNN. I’m guessing the other two journos must work at those organizations. The order for this seizure was issued by Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui, hence the (ZMF) on the case titles.

DOJ also asked for and Judge Faruqui approved an unprecedented gag order on several executives at the Times to prevent them from alerting those journalists of the seizures. They specifically cited a concern that if the journalists knew of the order they may delete records.

There were some constraints on the records seizure. It was for “non-content information,” meaning only the order “covered… to whom the emails were sent and when they were sent and received.”

In early June of 2021, DoJ asked Judge Faruqui to quash the orders and he did, thus allowing the execs at the New York Times to inform the journalists of the seizure and the newspaper to then inform the public.

DoJ also informed the journalists “that it had obtained several months of their 2017 phone records and had unsuccessfully sought non-content information about their emails.” Google fought the production of the “non-content information” and delayed it over and over. Google’s efforts paid off.

Just days before the gag order was lifted, DoJ announced they would change their policy on seizing such records.

The Accidental Discovery.

The case I had accidentally found while searching for the “super secret SpyGate case” was 20-SC-3361 (ZMF) , the Six Email Accounts Disclosure Case (Filed January 5th, 2021).

The case I found that is connected to it, 1:21-MC-00091 (ZMF), is the NYT Case asking for further unsealing in the Six Email Accounts Case. They wanted the Justice Department to unseal the Application for the seizure of records and everything else.

The Times was successful in getting unsealed much, not all but much, of the docket for the case titled APPLICATION OF USA FOR 2703(d) ORDER FOR SIX EMAIL ACCOUNTS SERVICED BY GOOGLE FOR INVESTIGATION OF VIOLATION OF 18 U.S.C. §§ 641 AND 793.

With the full title there, I want to now define the violations being investigated here.

18 U.S. Code § 641 – Public money, property or records

18 U.S. Code § 793 – Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information

Interesting…

Does this perhaps indicate that someone involved in the Renteria Memo leak sold that classified information?

Drawing the Line From Here to Durham.

I’ve already mentioned that Adam Small was on at least some filings in the case, but there is another connection I want to draw. It’s the “why it matters” now connection.

First though, just in case you don’t recall or did not click the links to read the Times’ Comey article or the WaPo article in this substack, I need to remind you, or perhaps inform you, of what the Renteria Memo is.

During the 2016 primaries, a document was given to the FBI that purported to be “Russian intelligence.” It revealed that there was an “understanding” between the Clinton Campaign and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

This document described an email in which AG Lynch “had privately assured someone in the Clinton campaign that the [investigation into Hillary’s use of a private email server] would not push too deeply into the matter.”

The document is controversial and ultimately the FBI concluded it was unreliable.

However, that document was a major factor in FBI Director Comey deciding to himself announce in July of 2016 the closure of the investigation into Hillary’s Email Server, because, partially based on that document, he did not feel comfortable giving the investigation over to AG Lynch. Comey did not coordinate with the Justice Department when he did this. It was an extraordinary move and a very unpopular one with media, the administration, Democrats and Republicans.

To this day, media and Democrats are FURIOUS with Comey for doing this because in announcing the closure, he retained control of the investigation and then later reopened it 11 days before Election Day 2016. These two acts have media and Dems, likely Clinton as well, convinced that Comey cost Clinton the election.

The email described in the document (a copy of the email is not actually in the document) is between Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was at time the chair of the Democratic National Committee, and Leonard Benardo, an official at the George Soros owned Open Society Foundations. Wasserman Schultz informs Bernado that AG Lynch had privately communicated with Clinton Campaign staffer Amanda Renteria and told her that “she would not let the FBI investigation into Clinton go too far”.”

Remember of all of this information, even the very existence of the document, was highly classified AND STILL IS. The Renteria Memo has never been released and the Comey article triggered a criminal referral from “an agency in the intelligence community.”

During testimony on Capitol Hill in December 2018, Comey said in regards to the Renteria memo,

“So far as I knew at the time, and still think, the material itself was genuine, which is a separate question, though, from whether it was what it said was accurate…”

“[I’ve] tried to be very careful in public comments about this. There was material that had not been verified that I believed if it became public, would be used to cast doubt on whether the Attorney General had acted appropriately with respect to the investigation… I don’t think I’m allowed to go beyond that in characterizing that material.”

So, why does it matter right now, in February of 2023?

This New York Times article from January 26th, 2023 is why.

This hit and spin piece on Barr and the Durham SCO, this smear piece, has one significant, never before revealed, very ‘dasting piece of information in it.

DOJ was investigating the Renteria Memo’s leak and now Durham is investigating the email described in it!

And notice what the Times doesn’t include:

That from June 2021 through December 2021, they were in court fighting the Justice Department over the seizure of the email records of four of their own reporters, THE SAME ONES WHO WROTE THE COMEY ARTICLE! THE ARTICLE THAT INFORMED THE WORLD OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE RENTERIA MEMO!

In the Sussmann case, Durham broke the Clinton Campaign’s attorney client privilege over a number of emails. This exchange from the transcript provided one of the most memorable, and for [them], foreboding exchanges.

“Not for this trial…”

Another possibility worth considering:

Might the issue Comey described with the memo, that the “material was genuine” but it’s accuracy was in question be due the fact that it may have come from a fake Debbie Wasserman Schultz email account like the one Imran Awan created and used?

It’s a darn good question and a strong possibility.

As detailed in this Daily Caller article,

“Wasserman Schultz frantically fought to stop police from looking at the laptop’s hard drive. For more than two months, police had been telling her they suspected him of cybersecurity breaches, including what she called “data transfer violations,” but she maintained that she thought the police were picking on him and wanted to protect his “due process” — even though she knew how serious cyber breaches can be because she was head of the DNC when its emails were released last year.”

The Durham Special Counsel’s Office ran at least two, possibly three, grand juries in 2022 while also putting on two trials.

We now know that one of those grand juries received documents from the Open Society Foundation and an appearance by Leonard Benardo.

I think we can be confident that Durham asked him about the Wasserman Shultz email.

And I think we can be confident that the Justice Department, in seeking the email records of the journalists who revealed the existence and some details of the classified Renteria Memo, are investigating that leak and did not give up on that effort because it was a dead end. Remember, they did seize the records. And look at this section from a filing that is STILL heavily redacted.

There’s a future shock to [their] systems under those black bars.

While taken separately, these seemingly-disparate nuggets of information appear as Small as the man this dig started on, by tying the various threads together, a tapestry begins to appear.

Or a web.

One that could tie the Media Industrial Complex together, and bind them in their own lies. Their complicity.

Keep those Saint Durham candles lit.

I don’t think he’s done quite yet.

(Just Human/Substack, 2/15/2023)  (Archive)

(Re-published in full with permission)

January 21, 2023 – A connection emerges between the Penn Biden Center, hearsay whistleblower, and Trump impeachment hoax

“The Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center, a Biden adviser named Michael Carpenter, now finds himself embroiled in a national controversy that threatens to take down a president. But it isn’t his first time.

Carpenter is implicated in the high-profile scandal since classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency were stored at the Penn Biden Center on his watch. The scandal has led to the quick appointment of a Special Counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

(…) Dr. Carpenter, readers might remember, was flanked to Biden’s right at the Council on Foreign Relations panel in 2018 where Biden infamously announced that he threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if it did not fire the prosecutor charged with investigating the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

Burisma, of course, just so happened to be employing his son Hunter Biden on its Board of Directors for the hefty stipend of over $80,000 a month. Of course, we are to dismiss the obvious ‘quid pro quo’ implicated in the former vice president’s demands.

Such a ‘quid pro quo’ is a normal part of diplomacy (“sticks and carrots”), but it would become a scare word during the Trump impeachment hoax. If you recall, a “whistleblower” named Eric Ciaramella had relayed second-hand information that Trump was attaching aid to Ukraine to assurances from then-president Volodymyr Zelensky that Biden’s demand for the prosecutor be fired get properly investigated.

That was it. The Democrats, desperate to wound and potentially rid the U.S. government of their nemesis Donald Trump, nonetheless launched theatrical impeachment hearings over the matter.

The unnamed star at the center of the impeachment theater was the “whistleblower,” believed by investigators to be pictured with Dr. Michael Carpenter below.

Carpenter, interestingly, is a Biden adviser with expertise on Russia and Ukraine, as well as on weapons trafficking, according to his bio at the Atlantic Council.

It is unknown what is in the classified documents discovered at the Penn Biden Center and at Joe Biden’s Wilmington Delaware home. However, CNN has reported that the classified documents involved Ukraine.

“Among the classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president discovered in a private office last fall are US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom,” a source told CNN.

“A total of 10 documents with classification markings were found last year in Biden’s private academic office and they were dated between 2013 and 2016,” the report added.

Joe Biden in 2016 had pressured the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma’s leadership for corruption.

A series of documents from the Obama-Biden administration showed that representatives for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with the State Department in February 2016 to discuss the corruption allegations.

Burisma’s representatives invoked the former vice president’s youngest son, Hunter, in order to try to get a meeting with the State Department. The FOIA documents obtained in a lawsuit by John Solomon did not indicate if the meeting ever took place.

On one of the last days of his term as vice president, Joe Biden traveled to Kyiv. FOIA documents hosted at the U.S. State Department show one possible explanation why.

Viktor Nebozhenko, a political scientist, was cited in an email from then Foreign Service Institute director Karen Robblee to former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch speculating on the timing of Biden’s visit and what it could possibly mean.

“Donald Trump said that he will carry out an audit of investments in security and democracy in Ukraine,” Nebozhenko said. “For 8 years the US Administration has turned a blind eye to our corruption and gave a lot of money through the IMF and various funds. And all this has disappeared somewhere. Trump, as the new director of the company under the name of the United States, wants to know where that money went.” (Read more: Trending Politics News, 1/21/2023)  (Archive)

January 22, 2023 – Biden attorneys did not inform the DOJ of the illegal possession of classified docs at the Penn Biden Center; The National Archives IG informed them

“With the discovery of yet more classified documents at President Biden’s Wilmington home on Friday, the disclosure of which was withheld from the public until after the NFL playoff coverage began on Saturday evening, the Biden team is trying to put its best spin on things: The president, you’re to believe, is being fully cooperative.

The truth of the matter is that, like most criminal suspects as to whom there is already strong evidence of felony offenses, Biden consented to a search knowing that, if he did not, newly appointed special counsel Robert Hur would apply for a judicial warrant from a federal judge. Biden would then have been subject to the same political damage that has dogged former president Donald Trump since the Mar-a-Lago search in August: a judicial finding of probable cause to believe he has committed multiple offenses for which the penal code prescribes prison terms of up to ten years (for each offense).

National Archive IG, Dr. Brett M. Baker (Credit: NARA)

(…) The president did not consent to an FBI search of his home because he is unconcerned. He consented to it because he knew law enforcement had more than sufficient evidence to compel a search of his home. From his standpoint, with his 2024 reelection hopes now teetering, it was better to pose as a cooperative volunteer than be forced to open his door to federal agents brandishing a judicial warrant.

On this point, the scandal is: Why did the Justice Department wait so long? And why, in the interim, did both DOJ and the Biden White House allow Biden private lawyers who did not have security clearances conduct what turn out to have been incompetent searches that both (a) exposed them to secret intelligence they were not authorized to possess, and (b) failed to locate the secret intelligence they said they were looking for? (And recall that Biden spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre assured us nearly ten days ago that Biden’s lawyers had completed the search for classified documents—only to have still more documents be discovered hours later.)

Remember the timeline here. The first batch of classified documents was found illegally stored in Biden’s office on November 2—i.e., over two-and-a-half months before the FBI finally conducted Friday’s search. Contrary to Biden’s claim of self-reporting, he did not report that discovery—evidence of a serious crime—to law enforcement. Rather, his private lawyers reported it to the Biden White House, which then notified not the Justice Department but the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). It appears Biden was hoping NARA would just return the documents to the files and no one would be any the wiser.

The discovery, however, came to the attention of NARA’s inspector general—the watchdog official who reports agency wrongdoing to Congress. It was the IG’s office that, on November 4, notified the Biden Justice Department. (Read more: National Review, 1/22/2023)  (Archive)

January 23, 2023 – Former FBI official, Charles McGonigal, is charged with concealing $225,000 in cash received from Oleg Deripaska

Ex-FBI counterintelligence official, Charles F. McGonigal (left), was charged with receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (right). (Credit: Law and Crime)

“Charles F. McGonigal, 54, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field office, has been arrested on charges relating to his receipt of $225,000 in cash from an individual who had business interests in Europe and who had been an employee of a foreign intelligence service, while McGonigal was serving as Special Agent in Charge of FBI counterintelligence efforts in the New York Office. McGonigal retired from the FBI in September of 2018.

The announcement was made by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office Donald Alway, and Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office David Sundberg.

According to the nine-count indictment, unsealed today, from August 2017, and continuing through and beyond his retirement from the FBI in September 2018, McGonigal concealed from the FBI the nature of his relationship with a former foreign security officer and businessperson who had ongoing business interests in foreign countries and before foreign governments.  Specifically, McGonigal requested and received at least $225,000 in cash from the individual and traveled abroad with the individual and met with foreign nationals.  The individual later served as an FBI source in a criminal investigation involving foreign political lobbying over which McGonigal had official supervisory responsibility.  McGonigal is accused of engaging in other conduct in his official capacity as an FBI Special Agent in Charge that he believed would benefit the businessperson financially.

McGonigal’s initial appearance in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia has not yet been scheduled.

“Covering up your contacts with foreign nationals and hiding your personal financial relationships is a gateway to corruption,” said U.S. Attorney Graves. “The FBI should be commended for handling the delicate and difficult task of investigating a former executive. This investigation demonstrates their commitment to act as an impartial enforcer of the law.  The FBI and the Department will guard the best interests of the United States and hold to account those who make false statements and try to deceive the Bureau.”

“Mr. McGonigal betrayed his solemn oath to the United States in exchange for personal gain and at the expense of our national security,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge Alway. “A senior FBI executive at the time, McGonigal is alleged to have committed the very violations he swore to investigate while he purported to lead a workforce of FBI employees who spend their careers protecting secrets and holding foreign adversaries accountable.  Agents in my office, with the support of agents in Washington, D.C. and New York, vigorously pursued a former colleague without bias.”

“As an FBI agent, Charles McGonigal took an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge Sundberg. “In betrayal of that oath, McGonigal is alleged to have received money from a businessman with foreign business interests, to have concealed these payments, and to have lied about related foreign contacts and travel. Integrity is one of the FBI’s core values and we hold our own to the highest standards.”

The charge of falsification of records and documents carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The charge of making false statements carries a statutory maximum sentence of five years in prison for each count. The charges also carry potential financial penalties. The maximum statutory sentence for federal offenses is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes. The sentencing will be determined by the court based on the advisory Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. (Read more: Justice.gov, 1/23/2023)  (Archive)

January 23, 2023 – Former FBI Charles McGonigal is indicted for taking $225,000 from former Albanian intel official and then shakes down opponents running against Socialist President Edi Rama

(…) In twin indictments last month, McGonigal was charged with taking secret cash payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer, holding secret meetings with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, and attempting to remove top Kremlin oligarch Oleg Deripaska from a US sanctions list.

The Albanians cited by prosecutors tie this scandal to Hunter Biden and the Chinese energy company CEFC that paid him and uncle Jim Biden millions of dollars in a deal which Joe Biden was slated to join after his vice presidency ended.

According to prosecutors, McGonigal received $225,000 in cash in the fall of 2017 while he was the FBI’s counterintelligence chief in New York, from an Albanian former intelligence official, identified in the Albanian and European media as Agron Neza.

Mayor of Tropoja, Rexh Byberi (r), and former intel official, Agron Neza (l), recognize Charles McGonigal (c) with an award on September 23, 2021. (Credit: public domain)

In turn, Neza introduced McGonigal to another well-connected Albanian, Dorian Ducka, who was an adviser to Rama and also worked for CEFC.

Edi Rama (l), Dorian Ducka (c), and Charles McGonigal (r) (Credit: VOX News Albania)

A photograph published last month in Albanian media sourced from China Daily in May 2017 shows Ducka standing with CEFC chairman Ye Jianming, who famously gave Hunter a 3.16-carat diamond estimated to be worth $80,000 in February 2017.

(…) Why were the Albanians paying McGonigal?

According to Belind Kellici, the Opposition Democratic Party candidate for May’s mayoral election in Tirana, Albania, McGonigal opened FBI investigations into political opponents of Albanian Socialist Party PM Rama, probes used to declare them personae non gratae, unable to do business or open a bank account in the US.  (Read more, New York Post, 2/15/2023) (Archive)

January 23, 2023 – Indicted FBI official, Charles McGonigal, led a shakedown operation on Albanian oligarchs, hauling in 30 million Euros

(…) McGonigal, while still serving as a senior FBI official, became a fixer for Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama and his ruling Socialist Party. Albania is a staunch U.S. ally and NATO member, but since Rama took over in Tirana a decade ago, that small country has become a hotbed of corruption, plus Europe’s leading narcostate, with deep connections to Latin American drug cartels. Why the Biden administration turns a blind eye to all this remains a troubling question. Buying senior American officials such as McGonigal is part of how Rama keeps pulling it off. The Albanian opposition is up in arms over this scandal, featuring a top U.S. intelligence official serving as the fixer for the ruling Socialists.

Edi Rama (Credit: ART News)

McGonigal made several trips to Albania to help Rama, including in September 2017, when the accused was still a top FBI official. While this trip had an official FBI purpose, its unofficial purpose was helping out Rama by bullying his opponents in Albania. A new report by the Washington Post reveals some of this sordid visit:

“McGonigal, who was still working for the FBI at the time, gave the prime minister Bureau ‘paraphernalia’ and warned him against awarding lucrative drilling licenses to companies that were fronts for Russian interests. While McGonigal appeared to be acting in his role as a counterintelligence officer against Russian influence, prosecutors allege that, in fact, Neza and another Albanian man working with McGonigal, identified by prosecutors as an informal Rama adviser, had their own financial interests in the oil fields.”

The truth is worse than that. It’s bad enough that a top FBI official got involved unpleasantly, for cash, in the internal politics of an American ally. This column can report that what McGonigal did on that fateful trip to Albania was considerably worse than the federal authorities or media have admitted. High-level Albanian sources who witnessed McGonigal’s appalling conduct while he was in that country recount that the FBI senior official worked a shakedown operation on wealthy Albanians for personal profit.

McGonigal told successful Albanians, not all of whom were in the good graces of the Rama government, that they were facing imminent U.S. sanctions, which would destroy their businesses, seize their bank accounts, and end their foreign travel. However, McGonigal could fix this problem for a modest fee of a few million dollars. The message was clear: Pay me or I will destroy your life. The worried Albanians took this threat seriously, given McGonigal’s FBI position, and many of them paid up. Some paid “only” 3 million euros. Others paid much more.

Albania’s top oil magnate, Shefqet Kastrati (l), and Charles McGonigal. (Credit: Gijotina)

Sources tell me that McGonigal shook down Shefqet Kastrati, Albania’s top oil magnate, for 12 million euros, worth nearly $15 million in 2017. Kastrati’s representatives have adamantly denied the allegation to the Washington Examiner. Apparently, McGonigal also attempted to get bribes from Samir Mane, a leading Albanian businessman, in a similar fashion. Balkan sources say that McGonigal’s haul from this shakedown was on the order of 30 million Euros, though that presumably was split with his Albanian partners.

Where did the money go? This was unlikely to have been a cash operation, given its sensitivity, and Balkan intelligence sources tell me that cryptocurrency, including bitcoin, was involved. Those sources say that McGonigal attempted similar shakedown operations in Albania’s neighbors, Macedonia and Montenegro, both of which contain significant ethnic Albanian minorities.

Details are murky and need thorough investigation, but Albanians in a position to know insist that they witnessed this unprecedented activity by Charles McGonigal when he was one of the FBI’s top officials. This is the worst scandal in the FBI’s long history. It demands immediate congressional investigation. What the DOJ has indicted McGonigal for looks like the small tip of an astonishingly corrupt Balkan iceberg.  (Read more: Washington Examiner, 2/13/2023)  (Archive)

January 23, 2023 – Former special agent in charge of NY FBI Counterintelligence Division charged with violating U.S. sanctions on Russia

Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Michael J. Driscoll, Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced the unsealing of a five-count Indictment charging CHARLES MCGONIGAL and SERGEY SHESTAKOV with violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”) and with conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering.  SHESTAKOV is also charged with making material misstatements to the FBI.  The defendants were arrested on Saturday evening, and they will be presented this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave in Manhattan federal court.  The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Jennifer H. Rearden.

Charles McGonigal played a key role in the bureau’s controversial “Russiagate” probe — and gave a “defensive briefing” of Hillary Clinton’s lawyers. (Credit: NYP)

(…) According to the allegations contained in the Indictment unsealed today in Manhattan federal court:

In 2014, the President issued Executive Order 13660, which declared a national emergency with respect to the situation in Ukraine.  To address this national emergency, the President blocked all property of individuals determined by the U.S. Treasury to be responsible for or complicit in actions or policies that threatened the security, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine, or who materially assist, sponsor, or provide support to individuals or entities engaging in such activities.  Executive Order 13660 and regulations issued pursuant to it prohibit making or receiving any funds, goods, or services by, to, from, or for the benefit of any person designated by the U.S. Treasury.

On April 6, 2018, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) designated Oleg Deripaska as a Specially Designated National (“SDN”) in connection with its finding that the actions of the Government of the Russian Federation with respect to Ukraine constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy (the “OFAC Sanctions”).  According to the U.S. Treasury, Deripaska was sanctioned for having acted or purported to act on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation and for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy.

CHARLES MCGONIGAL is a former Special Agent in Charge (“SAC”) of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York, who retired in 2018.  While working at the FBI, MCGONIGAL supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska.  SERGEY SHESTAKOV is a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who later became a U.S. citizen and a Russian interpreter for courts and government offices.

In 2021, MCGONIGAL and SHESTAKOV conspired to provide services to Deripaska, in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed on Deripaska in 2018.  Specifically, following their negotiations with an agent of Deripaska, MCGONIGAL and SHESTAKOV agreed to and did investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for concealed payments from Deripaska.  As part of their negotiations with Deripaska’s agent, MCGONIGAL, SHESTAKOV, and the agent attempted to conceal Deripaska’s involvement by, among other means, not directly naming Deripaska in electronic communications, using shell companies as counterparties in the contract that outlined the services to be performed, using a forged signature on that contract, and using the same shell companies to send and receive payments from Deripaska.

MCGONIGAL and SHESTAKOV were aware that their actions violated U.S. sanctions because, among other reasons, while serving as SAC, MCGONIGAL received then-classified information that Deripaska would be added to a list of oligarchs considered for sanctions as part of the process that led to the imposition of sanctions against Deripaska.  In addition, in 2019, MCGONIGAL and SHESTAKOV worked on behalf of Deripaska in an unsuccessful effort to have the sanctions against Deripaska lifted.  In November 2021, when FBI agents questioned SHESTAKOV about the nature of his and MCGONIGAL’s relationship with Deripaska’s agent, SHESTAKOV made false statements in a recorded interview.

CHARLES MCGONIGAL, 54, of New York, New York, and SERGEY SHESTAKOV, 69, of Morris, Connecticut, are charged with one count of conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, in violation of the IEEPA, one count of violating the IEEPA, one count of conspiring to commit money laundering, and one count of money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.  SHESTAKOV is also charged with one count of making false statements, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

The maximum potential sentences are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendants will be determined by the judge.

Mr. Williams praised the outstanding work of the FBI New York Field Office’s Counterintelligence Division and the valuable assistance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection as well as the New York City Police Department.

The case is being prosecuted by the Office’s Public Corruption Unit.  Assistant U.S. Attorneys Hagan Scotten, Rebecca T. Dell, and Derek Wikstrom are in charge of the prosecution with assistance from Trial Attorney Scott A. Claffee of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. (Read more: Justice Department, 1/21/2023)

McGonigal is also included in the Biden Laptop Report:

January 27, 2023 – Twitter Files – Hamilton 68 plays major role in catapulting Russiagate fake news

January 29, 2023 – Kash Patel: “FBI criminal government gangsters Peter Strzok and Charles McGonigal texts unearthed, Russiagate set up exposed”

 

In the below, now declassified text messages between, at the time, FBI agents Peter Strzok and Charles McGonigal, we can see the inception of the Russiagate scam on the American people and President Donald J. Trump beginning to unfold. (FightWithKash.com, 1/29/2023)  (Archive)

February 1, 2023 – Hunter Biden admits infamous laptop belongs to him

Graphic by The Times, UK

A lawyer for President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, urged state and federal agencies in a letter on Feb. 1 to probe what he said were attempts by close allies of former President Donald Trump and others to “weaponize” the contents of a laptop that an electronics repair shop owner says was dropped off at his Delaware store in 2019.

The letters from Hunter Biden’s attorneys mark the first time he and his legal team have publicly acknowledged that it was his personal data found on the laptop.

The letters were sent by Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell to the Delaware attorney general, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

They call for an investigation into former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, campaign lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as well as Giuliani’s own lawyer, Robert Costello, and the owner of the Wilmington computer repair shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, who said Hunter Biden dropped a laptop off at his store in April 2019 and failed to return to pick it up.

“We write on behalf of our client, Robert Hunter Biden, to request an investigation into the following individuals for whom there is considerable reason to believe violated various federal laws in accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden’s personal computer data,” states the letter (pdf) to the DOJ’s top national security official, Matthew Olsen. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 2/23/2023)  (Archive)

February 1, 2023 – After 2005 DoD and Ukrainian agreement to secure pathogens, the Bidens contract to build biological weapons laboratories

February 2023 – FBI searches, retrieves materials from Biden document stashes at University of Delaware

The University of Delaware announces the creation of the Biden Institute in February 2017. (Credit: Josh Shannon/Newark Post)

“The FBI twice searched the University of Delaware in recent weeks for classified documents stashed by President Joe Biden and retrieved materials from two separate locations, according to a report Wednesday evening.

Though the material retrieved by the FBI reportedly did not have classified documents, the agency reportedly did take certain materials with them. “Investigators retrieved materials from two university locations on two different days. The material did not appear to have classified markings, according to the source, but they are now being reviewed by the FBI,” CNN reported.

That the FBI searched the University of Delaware is notable. According to a Government Accountability Institute analysis, the University of Delaware received more than $6.7 million from anonymous donors from China. The donors include direct funds from the Chinese government.

The university is the second academic institution where searches have occurred for stashes of Biden’s classified documents. Classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center housed by the University of Pennsylvania, which has also received millions in anonymous donations from China. That trove was found on November 2. (Read more: (Breitbart, 2/15/2023)  (Archive)

February 6, 2023 – Elon Musk identifies the State Dept as the origin behind Twitter content control mechanisms

… He still hasn’t identified the source code, the proverbial ghost in the machine, buried deep in the algorithmic code; however, Twitter owner Elon Musk has finally identified the agency within the U.S. government who spearheaded the creation.  The “Global Engagement Center” (GEC) of the State Dept.

The GEC mission is described as, “To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations,” (link).

[Musk Tweet Link – GEC Center Link]

(…) To put it in brutally honest terms, the State Dept initially created the partnership between the U.S. government and Twitter (Arab Spring).  However, when the operations needed to become domestically centered (post Trump election), another agency stepped in…. The United States Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) is the operating system running in the background of Twitter.

You can debate whether Elon Musk honestly didn’t know all this before purchasing Twitter from his good friend Jack Dorsey, and/or what the scenario of owner/operator motive actually is.  Decide for yourself, but with public statements it genuinely looks like Musk didn’t know.

Regardless of foreknowledge, I feel confident the conflicting and odd data points only reconcile in one direction.  The State Dept started it, but now DHS, via CISA, controls Twitter.

Wittingly or unwittingly (you decide) Elon Musk is now the face of a quasi govt controlled enterprise.

If you concur with my researched assessment, then what you see being released by Elon Musk in the Twitter Files is actually a filtered outcome as a result of this new ownership dynamic.

Put simply, DHS stakeholders, to include the DOJ, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), are mitigating any consequential public exposure of their domestic surveillance activity by controlling and feeding Mr. Musk selected information about their prior Twitter operations.  DHS is still the ghost in the machine.

TikTok is to Beijing as Twitter is to Washington DC.

The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, and then ultimately controlling and influencing public opinion.

Mr. Elon Musk and his team are combing through millions of lines of algorithmic code, trying to find that “fundamental part” that will deliver their own ‘ah-ha’ moment.  Until then, we keep watching and smiling… (Much more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/07/2023)  (Archive)

February 8, 2023 – Rep. Anna Paulina Luna discusses how government and Twitter officials communicated on private cloud to censor Americans

During the House Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna calls out the U.S. government and Twitter’s use of the private cloud server, Jira, to censor American citizens.

Luna: “Do you remember communicating on a private cloud server [with government entities] to remove a posting? Yes or no.

Roth: “I don’t believe I can give you a yes or no answer.”

Luna: “Well I’m gonna tell you right you you did it… It is highly illegal.”

Part 1: Anna Luna discusses the hearing with WarRoom’s Steve Bannon:

Part 2

February 8, 2023 – Marjorie Taylor Green questions former Twitter official Yoel Roth about banning her account before an election and also exposes the problem of child porn on Twitter

“Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: “You permanently banned my personal Twitter account and it was my campaign account, too…You abused the power of a large corporation, big tech, to censor Americans…I’m so glad you’ve lost your jobs. Thank God @elonmusk bought Twitter.”

Child pornography on Twitter was also addressed:

 

February 8, 2023 – Rep. Jim Jordan grills Twitter official, Yoel Roth, about shadowbanning and security clearance

Jim Jordan Confronts Ex-Twitter Executive Yoel Roth Over Suppression Of Hunter Biden Story, security clearance

February 8, 2023 – FBI Richmond division creates report warning Virginians that Catholics who prefer Latin mass are white supremacists

(Credit: NBC News)

“The FBI’s Richmond Division would like to protect Virginians from the threat of “white supremacy,” which it believes has found a home within Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. An intelligence analyst within the Richmond Field Office of the FBI released in a new finished intelligence product dated January 23, 2023, on Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVE) and their interests in “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” or RTCs. The document assesses with “high confidence” the FBI can mitigate the threat of Radical-Traditionalist Catholics by recruiting sources within the Catholic Church.

The acronym, new to many in the Domestic Counterterrorism field, comes with a footnote by the writer explaining RTCs are “typically characterized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council.” The writer makes an unsubstantiated leap that a preference for the Catholic Mass in Latin instead of the vernacular and a number of more traditional views on other world religions can amount to an “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” This writer draws the important distinction between “traditional Catholics,” who simply prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings, and RTCs, who espouse “more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”

A discerning reader may wonder why the writer believes such divisions exist and if there is evidence of the extremist and violent rhetoric within the Catholic church. The analyst’s note doesn’t provide specifics. When the FBI generates an intelligence product, it is important to note the analyzed sources. Typically, strict source vetting removes partisanship and bias, so a product is both consistent with federal law and can add value to the FBI’s overall mission. Of note, this document was reviewed and approved for release by the FBI Richmond Chief Division Counsel, who is the office’s top lawyer.

The attached appendices refer to a number of articles and the out-of-FBI-policy Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) at the end of the document. For example, Appendix D is a direct copy of the SPLC list of “Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups,” including the web address accessed. The SPLC appears to be a source for the intelligence analyst’s beliefs that RTCs exist and that they are anti-Semitic. The SPLC description for this “hate group” states RTCs “may make up the largest single group of serious anti-semites in America.” Often in the intelligence world, this type of statement without any established evidence is often followed by the acronym “NFI” or “No Further Information” to indicate it is an unsubstantiated opinion. Additionally, SPLC states RTCs “embrace extremely conservative social ideals with respect to women.” Nothing reported by the SPLC indicates the number of adherents to this alleged ideology nor any instances of violence. This lack of evidence and blatant partisan blindness is one of many reasons the FBI has distanced itself from the SPLC as a source in the past 10 years. The intelligence product includes endnote citations from two other sources: the far-Left online magazine Salon and the equally left-leaning The Atlantic. The Salon articles cited are typical of partisan click-bait writing: “Traditional Catholics and White Nationalist Groypers Forge a new Far-Right Youth Movement” and “White Nationalists Get Religion: On the Far-Right Fringe, Catholics and Racists Forge a movement.” These articles were released a day apart as a series but include substantially the same information. The articles offer only circumstantial suggestions of affiliations between inflammatory figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes and a man pictured standing on the steps of a Catholic church in New York after the Dobbs decision. The Salon writer makes the wild leap that using a photo of someone at a church indicates the pictured individual or his beliefs are relevant within a religious institution with 70 million adherents in the United States alone and over 2000 years of tradition and history. (Read more: UncoverDC, 2/8/2023)  (Archive)

February 8, 2023 – James Baker denies colluding with government while at Twitter

Fired Twitter executives James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth and Anika Collier Navaroli testified at a hearing on social media bias. (Credit: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)

Jim Baker, the controversial former FBI counsel who served as deputy general counsel for Twitter between 2020 and 2022, testified at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee today alongside former Twitter executives, to answer for the platform’s politically partisan censorship in the runup to the 2020 election.

FULL EVENT: “Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias” 2/8/23

Baker, a prominent defender of the USA Patriot Act, has been described as “Mr. FISA” for his defense of the controversial secret courts system.

In his comments before the House Oversight Committee, Baker denied any improper conduct with regards to the platform’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was broken by Breitbart News Emma-jo Morris in the New York Post shortly before the 2020 election.

“I was not aware of, and certainly did not engage in, any conspiracy or other effort to do anything unethical, improper, or unlawful while i was at Twitter, period,” Baker told the assembled lawmakers.

“I did not act unlawfully or otherwise inappropriately in any manner with respect to the Hunter Biden laptop,” said Baker. “I urged caution with respect to the matter and noted that we needed more information to fully assess what was going on.”

What’s more, the former FBI lawyer said that Twitter took no direction from the government or political campaigns in its decision to suppress the story, which had a major impact on the 2020 election.

“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” said Baker.

“At no time was I an agent or operative of the government or any political actor when I worked at Twitter,” said the former FBI counsel.

But documents released via the Twitter Files, the disclosure of which triggered Baker’s departure from the company, show an intense effort by the FBI, aimed at Twitter executives, to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story. (Read more: Brreitbart, 2/08/2023)  (Archive)

February 9, 2023 – Matt Gaetz presses Dem witness on ‘Revolving Door’ between FBI ‘senior officials and lobbying’

“Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz pressed a Democrat witness on his position as a partner at a lobbying firm that reportedly represents Pfizer and Google during a hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday.

The line of questioning was directed at Elliot Williams during a House Judiciary Committee hearing investigating “the politicization of the FBI and DOJ and attacks on American civil liberties.”

“Mr Williams, wouldn’t the American people feel like this government wasn’t so weaponized against them if there wasn’t such a revolving door between Department of Justice senior officials and lobbying?” Gaetz asked Williams.

Williams is a principal at the Raben Group, a lobbying firm that represents Pfizer, Microsoft, Google and other companies, according to the hearing.” (Read more: Daily Caller, 2/09/2023)  (Archive)

February 9, 2023 – The State Department bankrolls a group secretly blacklisting conservative media

 

(Credit: Washington Examiner graphic)

This is the second part of a Washington Examiner investigative series about self-styled ‘disinformation’ tracking groups that are cracking down on conservative media and part of a lucrative operation that aims to defund disfavored speech. To read part one, click here.

The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed “disinformation” tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.

The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged “disinformation,” the Washington Examiner reported . This same “disinformation” group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress.

“Any outfit like that engaged in censorship shouldn’t have any contact with the government because they’re tainted by association with a group that is doing something fundamentally against American values,” Jeffrey Clark, ex-acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, told the Washington Examiner. “The government or any private entity shouldn’t be involved with this entity that’s engaged in conduct that is either legally questionable or at least morally questionable.”

GDI compiles a “dynamic exclusion list”  that it feeds to corporate entities, such as the Microsoft -owned advertising company Xandr, emails show. Xandr and other companies are, in turn, declining to place ads on websites that GDI flags as peddling disinformation.

The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on this exclusion list. The list includes at least 2,000 websites and has “had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites,” said GDI’s CEO Clare Melford on a March 2022 podcast.

GDI has identified that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post. (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 2/09/2023) (Archive)

February 9, 2023 – Nancy Mace grills Twitter official Vijaya Gadde about censoring Covid information; mentions her personal health problems after receiving vaccine

Rep. Nancy Mace Admits to Serious Long-Term Injuries From the Covid “Vaccine”

 

 

February 09, 2023- Prof. Jonathan Turley hits back at Debbie Wasserman-Schultz attempt to discredit him at House hearing

Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University testified before the House Committee on Weaponization this week. Turley was there to offer analysis as a legal expert on Twitter and the revelations of the Twitter Files. (Credit: Still-shot from YouTube)

“Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University testified before the House Committee on Weaponization this week. Turley was there to offer analysis as a legal expert on Twitter and the revelations of the TwitterFiles.

His testimony was calm and reasoned, as usual, but when Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had a chance to question him, all she did was try to discredit him.

Turley recently wrote at The Hill:

Congress is set to expose what may be the largest censorship system in U.S. history

(…) In his opening remarks, which you should watch below, Turley points out the fairly recent public distrust of the FBI, which he says is dangerous.

He also comments on what the Twitter files have exposed, saying “This may be the largest censorship system in the history of our country.”

After all of that eloquent and reasoned commentary, enter Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Mike Miller writes at RedState:

Here’s how Wasserman-Schultz kicked off her line of questions of the legal expert:

“So essentially your answers to questions yesterday were your own opinion and pure conjecture.”

As is his style, Turley politely responded, “No, I wouldn’t say that, I try to base them on what we know from the Twitter Files—” before DSW interrupted with the same nonsensical premise: “But this is only just your opinion, would you say, as a Twitter account user?” Is it possible Debbie’s unaware of the role of legal expert, or any expert witness?

Turley tried again: “No, I’ve come to give legal advice based on facts that are in the public domain and I would really refer to—” but Wasserman Schultz again butted in, telling Turley he was using up her time. So, that’s how that went. Wasserman Schultz was simply in way over her head, and Turley refused to agree with her silly premise, so she continued to interrupt him.

Turley addressed her line of questioning on FOX News:

JONATHAN TURLEY: The congresswoman was asking if I’ve ever worked at Twitter as a condition for my talking about what the Twitter Files say. It’s like saying you have to work at the Pentagon if you want to testify about the implications of the Pentagon Papers. The point of witnesses before committees is often to give legal analysis based on what is known and what could be found in this investigation. The exchange she was referring to was a member who expressly asked me about the Twitter Files and what this suggests about what I’ve called censorship by surrogate. And then she went into this issue of, ‘Well, you’ve never worked at Twitter.

How do you know what goes on at Twitter?,’ which is completely absurd. The whole premise of my testimony was that Twitter has now authenticated and confirmed these facts. These facts are coming from Twitter. These are Twitter files. And the facts indicate that they had weekly meetings with the government. They indicate that the government would send long lists of citizens and others to be targeted, censored, to be in some cases, banned. Those are very serious allegations that raise constitutional questions, which is why I was there to discuss it.

(Read more: Legal Insurrection, 2/11/2023) (Archive)

February 10, 2023 – Judicial Watch: Secret Service releases new docs related to Hunter Biden’s gun purchase

Still shots from a video on Hunter Biden’s laptop. (Credit: Hunter Biden laptop)

“Judicial Watch announced today that it received 487 pages of records from the United States Secret Service (USSS) related to the investigation of Hunter Biden’s gun, reportedly disposed of in a dumpster in Delaware in October 2018. The records show agency officials discussing media reports of its alleged involvement with one finding it “odd” that the Secret Service was involved in the investigation when Joe and Hunter Biden were not receiving Secret Service protection at the time. Another official responds: “Maybe we were asked for a favor?”

The records show the agency alerted the Biden White House and crafted a public statement insisting it had “no involvement in this alleged incident” and refusing to provide any additional clarification to media inquiries.

Judicial Watch is investigating whether and how the Secret Service intervened for Hunter Biden in an incident involving a gun allegedly owned by him. In September 2022, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records or communications about the reported purchase, possession, and disposal of a firearm owned by Hunter Biden found in a Delaware dumpster in October 2018 (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:22-cv-02841)).

Judicial Watch reported in December 2022 that the Secret Service repeatedly changed its position about whether it is in possession of records related to the investigation of Hunter Biden’s gun.

On October 29, 2020, a person whose name is redacted emails a Secret Service official in the “PID” (Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division) with a link to a Blaze article published earlier that day, reporting that Hallie Biden had taken a handgun owned by Hunter Biden in October 2018 and thrown it into a supermarket trash bin. The official then forwards the article to another official in the PID.

An official whose name is redacted later comments in this chain: “Oh dear…”

After being forwarded the same Blaze article, an unidentified Protective Intelligence Research Specialist responds to his colleagues: “It’s kind of odd that we were involved in the missing gun investigation when neither Hunter or Joe were even receiving USSS [Secret Service] protection at the time? Hmmm.” Another official replies: “Maybe we were asked for a favor?” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 2/10/2023)  (Archive)

February 14, 2023 – Details on those to be identified in the Epstein scandal – The Doe List

(Credit: KnowYourMeme.com)

“We have word from the FBI.

They will provide us with their interview(s) of Jeffery Epstein in the next couple months.

Here’s the FBI’s representation:

“FBI has completed its search for documents responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request and anticipates beginning to produce any non-exempt documents responsive to Plaintiff’s request as early as April 2023. FBI anticipates only one production of documents instead of rolling productions due to the relatively limited number of responsive documents.”

There’s a ton of unanswered questions about Epstein’s involvement with the FBI, and we hope that these records provide some answers. The FBI has fought the disclosure of these records, necessitating the filing of our lawsuit (a lawsuit which was possible through your support – thank you for that).

(…) The Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell “John Does”

There’s more on the Epstein front. A federal judge in New York’s Southern District is currently considering whether to disclose the names of the “John Does” arising out of Virginia Giuffre v. Ghislaine Maxwell. Here’s the list she’s reviewing.

Sadly, reporting from the media has created a lot of false hope about whose names might be unsealed. I have to break the unfortunate news: this isn’t “Epstein’s list.”

Let me lay out the facts of what we do know about these individuals. Here’s the breakdown:

  • There are approximately 165 “John Does”. These are not all perpetrators. The vast majority are witnesses of varying degrees (meaning material or immaterial), employees of Epstein, or affiliates of Epstein or the victims. The term “affiliate” ranges from those in Epstein’s address book to the doctors or acquaintances of the victims.
  • The majority of the John Does – nearly 100 of them – have already been identified, whether through the media or court proceedings.
  • Many of the unidentified John Does are immaterial to the allegations against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The roles of some are unknown. Some are only referenced in passing, such as a deposition question where the deponent denies knowing the individual. For many others the nature of the information relating to them is “not salacious.”
  • There are approximately 67 John Does that remain unidentified. Of that number, around 11 are listed as potential victims.
  • By my count, there are two alleged perpetrators who have yet to be identified: John Doe 058 and John Doe 094. More on them below.
  • There are two other John Does of interest. John Doe 086 is an alleged “Epstein Affiliate”; some material related to them is “salacious.” John Doe 113 is an alleged “Alleged Epstein Affiliate; Alleged Witness”. This individual “is alleged to have engaged in serious wrongdoing.” Counsel for Maxwell maintains John Doe 113 is referenced in a “hearsay statement that the name appears in Epstein’s address book.”

Here are the alleged perpetrators who are yet to be identified:

John Doe 058 (identified as “Alleged Witness Affiliate; Alleged Perpetrator”)

John Doe 058 is referenced in a letter submitted by counsel for Professor Alan Dershowitz. We suspect his identity may be disclosed in these quotes from the e-mails of Sarah Ransome:

John Doe 094 (identified as Alleged Victim Affiliate; Alleged Perpetrator)

John Doe 094 is discussed in the deposition of victim Virginia Giuffre. The excerpts from her deposition (docket entry 235-4) filed with the court are nearly 90 pages.

There’s a significant amount of redactions and a number of alleged perpetrators – both relating to Epstein/Maxwell and not having anything to do with Epstein/Maxwell – within Giuffre’s deposition. This makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact claims against John Doe 094. In fact, it’s entirely possible that John Doe 094 doesn’t have to do with Epstein or Maxwell. However, if we were to focus on the Epstein/Maxwell connection, here are two different allegations – either of which might relate to John Doe 094:

 

Giuffre describing a foreign president she met in New Mexico.
Giuffre’s allegations from France

This isn’t to say that we won’t learn anything about those whose names have already been publicized. We anticipate that there may be new and important information, or information that provides additional context, about some of the alleged “perpetrators” – of which the John Doe log lists approximately 17. This includes Sarah Kellen, who is alleged to have to have taken part in Epstein’s abuse scheme. (Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 2/14/2023)  (Archive)  (Doe List-Archived)

February 2023 – DHS and HHS whistleblowers expose the U.S. government of enabling child trafficking

Whistleblowers Kyle Seraphin (l) Aaron Stevenson (c) and Tara Rodas (r) (Credit: Kyle Seraphin/Rumble)

Kyle interviews two Federal Whistleblower who helped uncover different angles of the same problem: The US federal government assisting in settling “unaccompanied children” with known members of organized crime for sex and labor trafficking.

Aaron Stevenson (@Called_Out_DHS) is a prior USMC and spent a decade within the Department of Homeland Security. Tara Rodas (@TaraLeeRodas) is a Spanish speaker with over 20 years in federal service who volunteered to help out HHS. They combined and shared their stories with @Project_Veritas in order to expose the intel and the actions of our government that wants to ignore the problem. The details will shake you.

See their Project Veritas Expos:
https://t.co/aYrhMUJK0d
https://t.co/AcjFv9gZSj

February 17, 2023 – Fox vs Dominion discovery docs show their employees, including Eric Coomer, expressed concern about the security of their voting machines

“Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News, and naturally all the coverage shrieks, “OMG FOX KNEW IT WASN’T TRUE BUT LIED!”

Actually, I think we all remember Tucker Carlson grilling Sidney Powell and the fact that the news network scarcely dipped a toe into any investigative work in the area. As their lawyers argued in response to Dominion, Fox’s role was limited to reporting to its viewers the claims and counterclaims surrounding the election.

(…) More galling, however, is the refusal to cover the admissions found by Fox, that Dominion employees themselves were not sure about the security of their own systems.

Page 15 of Fox’s filing reveals fascinating discovery material.

Some of the most critical examples include (with emphasis added):

Discovery in this case has revealed that Dominion’s own employees expressed serious concerns about the security of its machines. Mark Beckstrand, a Dominion Sales Manager, confirmed that other parties “have gotten ahold of [Dominion’s] equipment illicitly” in the past.

Beckstrand identified specific instances in Georgia and North Carolina and testified that a Dominion machine was “hacked” in Michigan.

Beckstrand confirmed that these security failures were “reported about in the news.”

And just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Dominion’s Director of Product Strategy and Security, Eric Coomer, acknowledged in private that “our shit is just riddled with bugs.” Indeed, Coomer had been castigating Dominion’s failures for years. In 2019, Coomer noted that “our products suck.”

A photo from Eric Coomer’s Facebook page is included in his Deposition Exhibits, page 56

He lamented that “[a]lmost all” of Dominion’s technological failings were “due to our complete f— up in installation.” And in another instance, he identified a “*critical* bug leading to INCORRECT results.” He went on to note: “It does not get much worse than that.”

And while many companies might have resolved their errors, Coomer lamented that “we don’t address our weaknesses effectively!”

These were recent (2019) messages, which don’t just provide justification for a news network covering potential exploitation of voting machines, but are enough to warrant a wider investigation of Dominion, State Street Capital, and their products and services. (Read more: Raheem Kassam/Substack, 2/17/2023)  (Archive)

February 20, 2023 – Twitter Files – Matt Taibbi is sniffing around the Senate Intel Cmte connection to manipulation of social media; what else could he discover?

“Matt Taibbi [@mtaibbi] is a smart guy, he’ll get there.  I’m not sure why my gut says to trust him, but it does – and I do. Recently he’s been getting hit by the leftists who are asking why Taibbi is not looking at the Trump administration pressure on social media to control and manipulate public information [Twitter Here].

Taibbi has been hitting back against his detractors by saying, there’s no evidence of Trump doing that; yet there is massive evidence of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) contacting Twitter to do exactly that.

This is interesting to me and CTH readers because we outlined in real time what the SSCI and HPSCI were doing in order to promote the Trump-Russia conspiracy before and after the 2016 election.

What’s fascinating about this… is that the same people who are attacking Taibbi right now, are the same people who received and promoted the propaganda from the SSCI (Burr and Warner) in addition to the HPSCI (Schiff and Swalwell).

In essence, the ancillary media attack hounds are attacking Taibbi because at the end of the research trail Taibbi is following he will find the same names of the ancillary media who are attacking him.

[SEE SHORT THREAD HERE]

In my opinion, Taibbi is on the right trail in following the SSCI and HPSCI manipulation of the social media platforms, specifically Twitter.  In addition to the SSCI creating the structure that supports the intelligence weaponization by DHS and FBI, Senate Intel Chair Richard Burr and then Senate Intel Vice-Chair Mark Warner are at the epicenter of it.

I know I sound like a broken record on this, but it’s been true since the outset of my own research discoveries of the issue four years ago.  The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative couldn’t exist without the SSCI participating in it.   This is why I have talked and written so much about it.

James Wolfe (Credit: public domain)

Factually, and I say this with no compunction for attribution, if you want to tell the public the story of the larger issue, the absolute best starting point is how SSCI Vice-Chair Mark Warner told SSCI Security Director James Wolfe to leak the Carter Page FISA application to then Politico journalist Ali Watkins.   It’s an easy story to outline because there is ample evidence to highlight it, including open admissions by the DOJ and FBI (in documented court records) that the leak event on March 17, 2017, took place.

That week in mid-March, 2017, when Mark Warner leaked the Page FISA application followed two days later by James Comey testifying to congress (March 20th), was/is the most openly documented evidence-based story that leads to everything that follows.

On March 17, 2017, Senator Mark Warner leaked the FISA in order to stimulate the media to support the demand for a Trump-Russia special counsel.  On March 20, 2017, holding the exact same motive, FBI Director James Comey first made the public admission that President Donald Trump was under FBI investigation for the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy.   Senator Warner and Director Comey held the exact same motive.

Everything done by the SSCI before and after that mid-March event, touches everything before and after the special counsel was appointed.  It’s like a fulcrum point that creates massive tentacles into the entire apparatus of the effort by the legislative branch, the executive branch, the intelligence community and the Weissmann/Mueller special counsel to cover it up.

Expose that moment on March 17, 2017, and the entire house of cards built by Weissmann/Mueller and the DC media apparatus collapses.

There is not another single moment during the entire arc of the Trump-Russia madness, that creates the inflection point as well as the March 17, 2017, leak.  EXAMPLE:

(Source)

Keep cheering on Matt Taibbi.  Keep supporting him as he follows this trail.  Yes, you know where it ends, but you are a select rare few who have followed this story.  Taibbi can blow it wide open if he continues.

Additionally, remember and understand that the entirety of the media apparatus was in on this scheme.

Every single outlet promoted the narrative that was collectively pushed by Senator Mark Warner, Director James Comey, the corrupt intelligence apparatus and the Robert Mueller special counsel.  They are all opposed to Taibbi following this trail.

(Conservative Treehouse, 2/20/2023)  (Archive)

February 22, 2023 – Fighting Lawfare: Commission for Lawyer Discipline vs Sidney Powell – Final Summary Judgment

Sidney Powell (Credit: The Epoch Times)

“On March 1, 2022, the Texas Bar filed suit against Sidney Powell in Texas state court, alleging six ethical violations arising from the election fraud suits she filed on behalf of electors following the 2020 presidential election.

Full discovery ensued with multiple depositions, Powell’s production of more than 55,000 pages of documents and a massive privilege log.

Yesterday the Texas Judge applied settled law and held that the Bar had no evidence as a matter of law that Powell violated any rule in her four election fraud cases.(Defending the Republic, 2/23/2023)  (Archive)   (Sidney Powell Final Summary Judgment)

February 22, 2023 – Georgia’s ‘get Trump’ grand jury forewoman accidentally confirms the recommended charges against Trump are bunk

Emily Kohrs

The grand jury’s conclusions flowed from what the DA presented to the Fulton County jurors — a case built on lies about a telephone call.

Jury in Georgia Trump Inquiry Recommended Multiple Indictments, Forewoman Says,” The New York Times blared with its midday breaking news headline on Tuesday. But it is what followed that revealed the real story: that the grand jury recommended bogus charges based on the Fulton County district attorney’s misrepresentation of evidence.

“We definitely started with the first phone call, the call to Secretary Raffensperger that was so publicized,” Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the special purpose grand jury said, noting that prosecutors played the recording for jurors the first day. “I will tell you that if the judge releases the recommendations, it is not going to be some giant plot twist,” Kohrs continued. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there.”

Yes. Yes, we do: bunk.

Since Fulton County’s Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis first sought to impanel a “special purpose grand jury” — “special purpose” because it can only make recommendations and cannot indict — to assist in her investigation “into any coordinated attempts to unlawfully alter the outcome of the 2020 elections in this state,” she has misrepresented the substance of Donald Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, telephone conversation with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Just as the Times did in its article yesterday, Willis falsely stated that during Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger, the then-president requested that “the Secretary ‘find 11,780 votes’ in the former President’s favor.”

But as I’ve been forced to detail time and again because the corrupt media continue to lie about the conversation, the transcript of the call established that Trump “did not request that Raffensperger ‘find 11,780 votes.’ Period. It never happened.” Rather, during that “telephone conversation between Trump’s legal team and the Secretary of State’s office, Trump’s lawyer explained to Raffensperger that ‘the court is not acting on our petition. They haven’t even assigned a judge.’”

And it was because the Fulton County judge responsible for assigning a judge to hear Trump’s election lawsuit — ironically, the same Judge Chris Brasher who authorized Willis’ special purpose grand jury — held up his legal challenge that Trump’s legal team reached out to Raffensperger, requesting the secretary of state’s office investigate the evidence of widespread violations of election law.

The transcript of Trump’s call with Raffensberger confirms this fact, with lawyers for the then-president ticking “off the numerous categories of illegal votes of which they had concrete evidence — some 25 categories.” Here, the DA appears to have pushed a second falsehood, with Willis reportedly asserting in a subpoena that during that call, Trump’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, “parroted claims of voter fraud.’”

Mitchell did no such thing. She was not pushing claims of voter fraud but instead wanted the secretary of state’s office to investigate violations of Georgia election law.

The grand jury, however, only knew the facts Willis decided to share with the group. The jurors, who came from all walks of life — including the 30-year-old unemployed forewoman — also needed to rely on the DA’s office to decipher the meaning of any criminal statutes.

And from Kohrs’ statements to the press, we know that the prosecutor’s office focused the grand jury’s attention on Trump’s telephone conversation with Raffensberger, opening the proceedings by playing a recording of the call. But the transcript of that call has been released and confirms both that Trump never asked Raffensberger to “find” him the votes and that his legal team asked the secretary of state’s office to investigate the evidence of illegal voting.

Yet the DA framed the case as one about fraud, with the grand jury writing in its report that it “heard extensive testimony on the subject of alleged election fraud from poll workers, investigators, technical experts, and State of Georgia employees and officials, as well as from persons still claiming that such fraud took place,” and concluding, “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”

So the grand jury’s view “that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it,” is meaningless. And that Kohrs said the special purpose grand jury recommended more charges, and that the list is not a short one, means nothing. Those conclusions flowed from the case Willis presented to the Fulton County jurors — a case built on deceptions about a telephone call.

(The Federalist, 8/14/2023)  (Archive)

February 22, 2023 – Biden “moneyman” to flip and provide House Oversight Cmte with documents proving money laundering and wire fraud

Eric Schwerin (l) and Hunter Biden (Credit: public domain)

“Hunter Biden’s top financial lieutenant Eric Schwerin is expected to “soon” provide documents to the House Oversight Committee’s investigation of the Biden family for nine violations, including money laundering and wire fraud, a spokesperson for the committee told Breitbart News.

Schwerin, who shared bank accounts with President Joe Biden and dubbed the family’s “moneyman,” also maintained guest lists for White House functions and negotiated the settlement with Hunter’s first wife, Kathleen. Emails from Hunter’s laptop show Schwerin was deeply embedded in Hunter’s personal life and the Biden family networks for nearly two decades and is even pictured at campaign events with Joe Biden.

Schwerin was also the president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, a fund created by Hunter Biden and several​ associates that spawned business deals in Russia, Ukraine, China, and Romania. Many of those deals yielded the Biden family business millions over decades while Joe Biden was an elected official.

Joe Biden and his team have claimed at least seven times the president is not involved in the family’s international business deals, but more than 17 instances show that Joe Biden was involved in the business. In one example, Schwerin visited the White House and other official locations 27 times when Joe Biden was vice president.

A committee spokesperson told Breitbart News it has been in contact with “Schwerin’s attorney and expect him to start producing documents to the Oversight Committee soon.”

Wednesday was the deadline set by the committee for Schwerin, James, and Hunter to comply with demands to disclose a host of both classified and unclassified documents, records, and communications between business associates and family members, including Joe Biden.

While Hunter has refused to comply with the request, the committee told Breitbart News that James has received correspondence from his attorneys. It is unknown if James is complying with the requests.

“Oversight Committee staff will be in communication with them about Chairman Comer’s request,” the spokesperson said.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) has stated in February the “next step” to compel the relevant information from Hunter and James is to issue subpoenas to Hunter and James if they do not comply.

The revelations about Schwerin’s willingness to turn over documents to the committee comes as Republicans have been stonewalled by Hunter, the Treasury Department, and former FBI “point man” Timothy Thibault, who allegedly “improperly” “shut down” a probe into Hunter’s laptop that is likely unrelated to the ongoing criminal probe concerning reported tax fraud by the president’s son.

In January, the Treasury denied the Committee’s request to disclose 150 suspicious reports flagged by U.S. banks concerning Biden family business transactions, causing Comer to threaten a subpoena. (Read more: Breitbart, 2/22/2023) (Archive)

February 22, 2023 – Arkansas cops rule suicide in death of Clinton aide linked to Jeffrey Epstein

Mark Middleton (Credit: Middleton Heating & Air)

“The grisly scene where a top Bill Clinton adviser was found hanged from a tree with a gunshot wound to his chest has finally been revealed nine months after he died.

But the sheriff’s report into Mark Middleton’s mysterious death raises more questions than answers as it rules he died by suicide – despite no sign of the weapon that killed him.

Middleton, 59, was found dead last May at the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas, an hour west of Little Rock.

Release of the report was held up after members of his family petitioned a judge. They were worried that pictures from the gory scene would be made public.

The judge eventually ruled that details could be released but photographs could not.

The report, written by Perry County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Lawson, says he was called to the ranch by worker Samantha McElroy who had found Middleton’s abandoned black BMW SUV.

(…) ‘I could see that he had a gunshot wound to the chest and that he had a knot tied in an extension cord that was around his neck and it was attached to the limb directly above him.

(…) Middleton was a special advisor to Bill Clinton in the 1990s and signed Jeffrey Epstein into the White House on seven of the 17 times the late pedophile visited.

Middleton also flew on Epstein’s jet, nicknamed the ‘Lolita Express’. More recently he had been working for his family’s HVAC business in Little Rock.

The police report was released to DailyMail.com by the Perry County sheriff’s office.

According to the Arkansas Times, Middleton’s family said he was suffering from depression.

Middleton’s life in recent years was a world away from the power he enjoyed in the 1990s.

White House visitor logs previously reported by DailyMail.com showed that he appears as the authorizing signatory on seven of Epstein’s White House visits, most of which were to the West Wing.

In addition to being a special assistant to the President, Middleton was also assistant to the chief of staff, Thomas ‘Mack’ McLarty.  (Read more: Daily Mail, 2/22/2023)  (Archive)

February 23, 2023 – Victoria Nuland: The Woman Behind the Wars

February 23, 2023 – Internal FBI memos chronicle years of drunk driving, lost weapons and other misconduct

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officers take a knee with demonstrators, as they march on Pennsylvania Av. Thursday, June 4, 2020, in Washington, during a protest over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for several minutes. (Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP)

“Scores of FBI employees have been caught over the last five years engaging in unethical and illegal conduct such as driving drunk, stealing property, assaulting a child, mishandling classified documents, and losing their service weapons — but they often escaped being fired, according to internal disciplinary files provided to Just The News.

One agent left a highly lethal M4 carbine unsecured in his government car during a Starbucks run and had the weapon stolen, but even he received only a two-week suspension despite violating the bureau’s protocols for weapons storage, the records show.

“Although there was a lockbox in the trunk for storage of weapons and sensitive items,” the agent chose to store the rifle bag behind the car’s front passenger seat, one report shows. “While Employee was in the Starbucks, the Bucar was burglarized. The rear passenger, rear driver, and tailgate windows were broken, and the rifle bag containing the M4 was stolen.”

Sexual misconduct was also rampant in the reports dating to 2017, including inappropriate affairs with felons in prison, confidential sources and subordinate employees. The sexual transgressions, however, often resulted in firings, unlike the drunk driving and lost weapons offenses.

Typically emailed to all Bureau employees each calendar quarter, the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) reports provided to Just the News by a whistleblower afford an unprecedented look into the breadth of misconduct among the FBI’s workforce of 35,000, including agents, intel analysts, lab scientists and crime scene technicians.

You can read all of the reports here.

The reports emerge at a sensitive time for the FBI as it deals with a sprawling congressional probe into allegations by two dozen whistleblowers of political bias, misconduct and weaponization of law enforcement powers.

The extensive reports were in fact so impactful that the FBI suspended distributing them for seven months in 2021-2022, due to complaints that the “employees harmed by misconduct” might feel shamed. But in the end, the bureau resumed publishing them because of the belief it might sensitize workers in the future to avoid committing crimes or violations of conduct policies,

“OPR suspended sending our quarterly email that details employee misconduct and its consequences,” the April 2022 email noted, explaining: “We wanted to weigh the value of publishing this information with the discomfort employees harmed by misconduct may feel at its having been published.”

The bureau concluded most agents wanted the memo to continue as a reminder of the professional and ethical standards they are sworn to uphold. (Read more: Just the News, 2/23/2023)  (Archive)

February 23, 2023 – Judge Amy Berman Jackson orders depositions of Trump, Wray in Strzok/Page lawsuit

“A federal judge has agreed to permit former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to take sworn testimony from former President Donald Trump for two hours as part of their long-running lawsuits related to Strzok’s firing in 2018 after Trump repeatedly and publicly pilloried the pair.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson (Credit: public domain)

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Thursday that Strzok and Page — whose text messages disparaging then-candidate Trump cast a pall over the FBI’s investigation of links between the Trump campaign and Russia — would also be allowed to depose FBI Director Christopher Wray for a similar two-hour period on a limited set of topics.

But there’s a twist: Their ability to ask Trump and Wray about these circumstances might come down to a decision from President Joe Biden. Jackson’s order gave the Justice Department a month to “inform the Court whether the current President will invoke … executive privilege” over any aspects of Trump’s testimony.

Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, also stressed that she had not yet considered all potential objections to the demands for testimony from Trump and Wray. That could include arguments by Trump that he has the unilateral right as a former president to assert executive privilege.

Trump has spent years publicly assailing Strzok and Page for their disparaging private messages about him, claiming they proved that FBI bias fueled the Russia probe, despite independent reviews that failed to substantiate those claims. Strzok was fired amid the controversy, and Page resigned. Strzok is contesting his dismissal, and both are claiming invasion of their privacy over the manner in which the Justice Department released hundreds of their text messages.

In the suits, Strzok and Page contend that Trump and his Justice Department appointees were carrying out a political vendetta.” (Read more: Politico, 2/23/2023) (Archive)

February 23, 2023 – Billionaire Investor and friend of the Clintons, dies from self-inflicted gunshot wound

Thomas H. Lee (Credit: Getty Images)

“Billionaire financier and investor Thomas H. Lee was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his Manhattan office on Thursday morning, police sources said.

Cops responded to a 911 call at 767 Fifth Avenue — where Thomas H. Lee Capital, LLC is located on the sixth floor — at around 11:10 a.m., the sources said.

EMTs pronounced the 78-year-old businessman dead at the scene.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will determine the official cause of death. (Read more: New York Post, 2/23/2023)  (Archive)

Lee is pictured golfing with then-President Bill Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

(…) Lee was a good friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton and in June 2008, following Hillary’s unsuccessful presidential run, the couple reportedly stayed at his East Hampton home. (Read more: The Daily Mail, 2/23/2023)  (Archive)

February 25, 2023 – Biden officials address pro-war rally led by Ukrainian Nazi supporters

(Credit: The Grayzone)

USAID’s Samantha Power joined EU and US officials who rallied at the Lincoln Memorial at a pro-war demonstration organized by a clique of Ukrainian activists that have described themselves as “true Banderites” and “Right Sektor’s Washington DC branch.”

Karen Donfried (Credit: World Economic Forum)

High-ranking Biden foreign policy officials including USAID Administrator, Samantha Power, and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Karen Donfried, observed the first anniversary of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. There, on February 25, 2023, they rallied alongside a band of Beltway-based Ukrainian activists dedicated to honoring and fundraising for ultra-nationalists and war criminals. The demonstrators demanded that the US send F-16 fighter jets to Kiev and “punish Russia” by any means necessary.

Power’s USAID promoted the event with a media advisory that redirected visitors to the rally’s principal organizer, an NGO called US Ukrainian Activists. This was one of two Ukrainian diaspora groups that organized the rally, and both have openly supported far-right elements in Ukraine since the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014.

Nadiya Shaporynska and confessed war criminal and neo-Nazi, Mamuka Mamulashvili in 2017. (Credit: public domain)

US Ukrainian Activists was founded by Nadiya Shaporynska, an avowed supporter of neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist militias like the Azov Battalion, whom she has described “heroic defenders of Ukraine.” Shaporynska’s fundraising efforts for extremists groups that were at one point blacklisted by the US Department of Defense have been prolific and very public.

In a video tweeted by Power the day before the rally, Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, is seen giving the USAID Administrator a tour of a local Ukrainian government-funded cultural and business center in DC. Markarova points to a portrait of a woman on a wall and informs Power she is “Nadiya [Shaporynska], a tireless activist here in DC.”

Power and Sahporynska would become officially acquainted the following day, as pro-proxy war demonstrators descended on Washington DC’s National Mall.

The February 25 rally for Ukraine at the Lincoln Memorial featured prominent US officials on its speaker roster. Alongside Power was Karen Donfried, the Biden Administration’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Donfried spent close to 20 years working at the American and German government-funded German Marshall Fund think tank, leaving her role as its president to join the White House in 2021. Other notable speakers included Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova; District of Columbia Secretary of State Kimberly Bassett; Mark Ordan, chair of the Board of Directors at the US Chamber of Commerce; and the European Union’s Ambassador to the United States, Stavros Lambrinidis.

Paul Grod (Credit: World Economic Forum)

Also appearing on stage was Paul Grod, president of the Ukrainian World Congress. Grod has made a career out of defending the legacy of Nazi collaborators, and even once petitioned the Canadian government to officially recognize the genocidal Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, as ‘designated resistance fighters.” This designation would have funneled Canadian tax dollars directly into the pension accounts of Nazi collaborators.

In 2010, Grod honored the legacy of the Waffen SS Galicia, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists as heroes who fought “for the freedom of their ancestral Ukrainian homeland.” These groups were driving forces behind the genocide in Eastern Europe during World War Two.

Grod’s Ukrainian World Congress hosted the February 25 pro-proxy war rally through its affiliate, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. His group has declared Stepan Bandera, the Nazi collaborator whose forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war, as “the undisputed symbol of Ukraine’s lengthy and tragic struggle for independence.”

(Read more: The Grayzone, 3/04/2023)  (Archive)

February 27, 2023 – A whistleblower claims he gave DOJ damning information on Biden family foreign business deals; is then arrested

“An Israeli think tank executive who served alongside Hunter Biden as an adviser to a Chinese energy conglomerate widely suspected of serving as a front for the Chinese Communist Party now says he provided the FBI with damning information about the Biden family’s foreign business dealings.

Author of the book “De-dollarization, ” Gal Luft, of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security says “there’s no reason why two countries that already have vast exposure to the U.S. dollar should maintain their trade in a third party currency” December 2022. (Credit: CNBC)

Gal Luft, the co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, says he provided information about Hunter Biden, his father, and his uncle, Jim Biden, to the Justice Department in March 2019. Luft served as an adviser to CEFC China Energy, a conglomerate that “aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two,” according to CNN. The group, which donated at least $350,000 to Luft’s think tank, paid Hunter Biden at least $6 million in 2017 to procure energy investment deals in the United States.

(…) Luft’s threat to “name names” comes after his arrest in Cyprus on Feb. 16 on charges that he illegally sold weapons to Libya and China. Luft asserts that the United States is seeking his extradition as part of a “politically motivated” payback for his exposure of the Bidens.

“DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim & Hunter Biden,” Luft said. An Israeli lawyer for Luft claims his client provided information about Hunter Biden to the FBI in 2019.

While Luft’s claims might otherwise be easily dismissed as a bluff, his connection to CEFC China Energy suggests he may know something about the Bidens. And an American lawyer for Luft has signaled he will provide information to Congress about Luft’s case.

“Dr. Luft is a whistleblower,” Luft attorney Robert Henoch told the Washington Free Beacon. He asserts that prosecutors decided against pursuing Luft’s information “and are instead targeting him with trumped-up and false charges.”

“This unfortunately appears to be part of an attempt to discredit a witness with critical information about an ongoing congressional and DOJ investigation.” (Read more: Washington Free Beacon, 2/27/2023)  (Archive)

February 28, 2023 – A month after her grand jury investigation of Trump ends, Fani Willis burns midnight oil attending an event hosted by Kamala Harris at the VP residence

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis reportedly had a five-hour meeting at the White House with Vice President Kamala Harris months before former President Donald Trump’s Georgia indictment, according to a record of the schedule.

Mike Howell, a member of the Heritage Foundation and its Oversight Project, announced on Tuesday that the group uncovered a record of Willis, showing her visiting the White House on February 28, 2023, months ahead of Trump’s Georgia indictment.

A screenshot of the apparent schedule shows the meeting with Harris spanning over five hours:

The event Fani Willis most likely attended:

The invitation-only celebration was held at the private residence of Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff.

In honor of Black History Month and in keeping with the theme of celebrating Black excellence, Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff hosted trailblazing Black leaders at their private residence last month.

In collaboration with BET, Harris and Emhoff opened the door to their home on the evening of February 28 to honor a group of emerging, young Black leaders who are making impactful changes in several industries throughout the country. Harris spoke to more than 400 guests at the event about the importance of Black History Month and the responsibility of each generation to carry forward the “baton.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and BET Honor Young Black Trailblazers During Black History Month

 

February 28, 2023 – Twitter Files: The partisans who wove the ‘Censorship Complex’…a vast and tangled web

“While the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s coverage of the Global Disinformation Index have revealed an expansive Censorship Complex that seeks to silence Americans for money, politics, ideology, and power, much still needs to be unraveled.

A search of government contracts and grants for the eight fiscal years from 2016 through today for the keywords “misinformation” or “disinformation” reveals 538 federal government grants and 36 contracts were awarded to a wide range of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations.

(…) Of the think tanks identified in Twitter communications, Alliance Securing Democracy (ASD) might be the most notorious thanks to Matt Taibbi’s exposé on ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard.

(…) According to its website, ASD is a project of the German Marshall Fund, which “is heavily funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.” The fund has also received grants from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The ASD likewise receives financing from left-leaning foundations, such as the Craigslist founder’s Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

(…) Another prominent organization the “Twitter Files” revealed as pushing for censorship — including multiple censorship requests flowing through that group to the tech giant — is the Election Integrity Partnership, which is run out of Stanford’s Internet Observatory.

(…) Further research on the other members of the Election Integrity Partnership reveals the Atlantic Council receives donations and federal grants, including from Facebook, Google, and the U.S. Department of State. And as will be shown shortly, the Atlantic Council is also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.

(…) Another member of the Election Integrity Partnership, Graphika, describes itself as a “network analysis company that examines how ideas and influence spread online.” Graphika’s chief innovation officer, Camille Francois “leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment.” Francois was previously the principal researcher at Google’s Jigsaw unit.

(…) The “Twitter Files” also made mention of the Center for Internet Security. In 2018, that nonprofit launched the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which “it claims supports the cybersecurity needs of election offices.” As part of those efforts, the Center for Internet Security crafted a one-page document for election officials, with directions for reporting misinformation or disinformation to the EI-ISAC. The federal U.S. Elections Commission would link to the CIS flyer on its government webpage.

(…) Other emails released as part of the “Twitter Files” reveal Clemson University’s role in the push for censorship at Twitter. And as was the case with Hamilton 68’s dashboard, Twitter’s team had concerns about Clemson’s disinformation research.

(…) Clemson’s research was used by another group joining the “disinformation” trend, Defending Democracy Together (DDT). In 2018, DDT launched the RussiaTweets.com project to supposedly provide “the evidence of Russian interference in American politics.”

(…) While Stanford and Clemson were the two main universities identified in the “Twitter Files,” Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub webpage identifies members of its “Disinformation Working Group,” revealing academia’s involvement in the Censorship Complex spans much further. It includes: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Lab, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Duke University, Bowdoin College, the University of South Carolina, Vanderbilt University, Georgetown University, and Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian University supported by a Facebook grant.

Jeffrey Lees is Clemson’s coordinator with The Disinformation Working Group, a global, multidisciplinary research virtual space where members meet regularly to present work in progress at the frontier of research on disinformation, broadly defined. (Credit: Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub webpage)

The University of Buffalo, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University are likewise involved in the disinformation project, with a Clemson News release revealing that faculty at those universities, along with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, launched a project titled “Disinformation Range to Improve User Awareness and Resilience to Online Disinformation.” The government, through a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is supporting those efforts.

(…) The Aspen Institute is also entwined in the Censorship Complex, having hosted in the fall of 2020 “a series of off-the-record briefings to help prepare every major US newsroom and tech platform for potential hack-and-leak operations and a contested post-election environment.” One of the briefings involved a tabletop exercise facilitated by Aspen’s Garrett Graff that posed a hack-and-leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden.

(…) Another nonprofit, the Global Disinformation Index, has already begun pushing an “actionable response to the disinformation crisis,” by pressuring advertisers to dump news outlets based on GDI’s view of their “disinformation risk.” However, as the Washington Examiner revealed in Gabe Kaminsky’s investigative series, the GDI’s December 2022 report, prepared in partnership with the University of Texas-Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab, brands only conservative outlets as the top “riskiest.” Conversely, the “least risky” outlets all lean left, other than The Wall Street Journal, and are also the same outlets that got the most significant news stories of the last decade wrong.

(…) A strong connection also exists between GDI and the U.S. government through an arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, which has also made several appearances in the “Twitter Files.”  (Much more: The Federalist, 2/28/2023)  (Archive)

(Timeline editor’s note: This timeline entry wins the most tags award!)

March 1, 2023 – Infighting within Hunter Biden’s legal team leads to resignation of criminal defense attorney, Joshua Levy

Joshua Levy is an Adjunct Law Professor at Georgetown University Law Center and teaches seminars on “Congressional Investigations.” (Credit: LinkedIn)

“Levy, who was hired to work on opposing congressional investigations that seek to reveal the complexities of the family’s business schemes, is no longer representing the infamous Biden family business member, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Abbe Lowell (r) has represented members of both the Trump and Biden families. (Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Levy has removed himself from the case, reportedly due to infighting within Hunter’s legal team and specifically with Abbe Lowell, who was hired in December to defend Hunter and the Biden family from nine congressional probes, including money laundering and wire fraud. In the past, Lowell has represented high-profile individuals engulfed in political scandals, such as Bill Clinton and Jared Kushner.

Levy was reportedly discontented with Lowell’s legal strategies and feared that his tactics could flop. In February, Lowell was a part of the effort to send Rudy Giuliani, Tony Bobulinski, and 12 others “litigation hold” letters to preserve “Laptop from Hell” records, a move seen by some critics as a public relations tactic to change the troubling narrative for the Biden family.

Mike Davis, founder and president of the pro-Trump Article III Project, told Breitbart News those letters were a “desperate, frivolous, and laughable” effort that would hurt the family’s legal position because the lawsuit will lead to discovery, a legal process by which Hunter would be deposed on camera.

The Times reported on why Hunter initially hired Levy:

President Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, had recommended Mr. Levy for the job. But Mr. Levy had clashed with Kevin Morris, a lawyer and close adviser to Hunter Biden who has lent him money to pay his back taxes and some other bills, according to a person familiar with the strategy. Mr. Morris and Hunter Biden brought on Mr. Lowell late last year, prompting Mr. Levy’s departure.

Lowell’s involvement in Hunter’s defense has not only forced the exit of Levy but has also triggered infighting with attorney Chris Clark, another high-profile attorney who leads Hunter’s criminal defense. Clark’s professional history includes working as a partner at the same Washington, DC, law firm where Rep. Liz Cheney’s husband works. The firm’s biography of Clark says he represents Hunter in the “grand jury investigation regarding tax issues.”

“Chris Clark, the lead criminal defense lawyer representing Mr. Biden in the Justice Department investigation, has kept Mr. Lowell at a distance in dealing with that matter,” the Times reported. With Clark keeping “a distance,” and Lowell and Levy’s departure, Hunter’s very expensive legal team has begun to crack just months into the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family business.” (Read more: Breitbart, 3/01/2023)  (Archive)

March 2, 2023 – FBI agents wanted to close Trump documents probe; DOJ and FBI leaders pushed for Mar-a-Lago raid

(Credit: Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images; Inset – Department of Justice via AP; Breitbart edit)

“Some Federal Bureau of Investigations field agents wanted to shut down the probe into suspected classified documents held by former President Donald Trump as early as June, but Justice Department leaders pushed for and ultimately got a surprise raid on Mar-a-Lago in August, according to a report.

According to the Washington Post, FBI officials and the DOJ clashed fiercely over how to handle recovering suspected classified documents from Trump, with FBI agents arguing for a cooperative approach and the DOJ pushing for the unprecedented raid on a former president’s home.

The aggressive approach was starkly different than the cooperative one the DOJ and FBI have taken towards classified documents held by President Joe Biden at his former office at the Penn Biden Center office in D.C. and his home garage in Delaware.

According to the Post, two senior FBI officials argued a raid on Mar-a-Lago would be “too combative” and proposed to seek Trump’s permission first, but DOJ prosecutors argued that Trump was “knowingly concealing secret documents” at Mar-a-Lago and pushed the FBI to conduct a surprise raid.

Even before the raid on August 8, 2022, FBI agents in the Washington field office as early as May wanted to slow the probe into the suspected classified documents and some wanted to shut down the investigation altogether in early June, after corresponding with Trump’s legal team. (Read more: Breitbart, 3/02/2023)  (Archive)

March 2, 2023 – ‘F*ck Eric’: Hunter plotted to betray key family business partner, Eric Schwerin, who is expected to cooperate in House probe

Hunter Biden, Eric Schwerin, Joe Biden (Credit: MEGA)

“Hunter Biden plotted in 2019 to betray the family’s top financial lieutenant Eric Schwerin amid their crumbling relationship, built upon an off-the-books business arrangement, text messages obtained by Breitbart News from Hunter’s laptop reveal.

Hunter’s damaged relationship with Schwerin is notable because Schwerin is expected to “soon” provide revealing documents about the Biden family business to Republican House investigators, according to the House Oversight Committee. It is unknown what information he may provide in the wake of his deteriorated relationship with Hunter.

Schwerin is a powerful figure in the Biden family business. He shared bank accounts with Hunter and President Joe Biden and was president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, a fund created by Hunter and several​ associates that created business deals in Russia, Ukraine, China, and Romania. Schwerin also maintained guest lists for White House functions and negotiated the divorce settlement with Hunter’s first wife, Kathleen.

Despite Schwerin’s close relationship with the family, Hunter’s text messages in 2018 begin to show a deep distrust of Schwerin and his involvement in the family’s affairs, in which Hunter apparently owed Schwerin money. Their relationship seemingly became so poor that Hunter announced Schwerin was his “worst enemy…And everyone knows it.” By 2019, their relationship had deteriorated to the point that Hunter hatched a plot to cut Schwerin out of an ongoing off-the-books business arrangement. (Read more: Breitbart, 3/02/2023)  (Archive)

March 3, 2023 – Flynn sues DOJ, FBI for malicious prosecution; wants $50 million

Lt. General Michael Flynn (Credit: public domain)

“Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and others, alleging he was maliciously prosecuted. He is demanding at least $50 million in compensation.

“Defendant maliciously investigated and prosecuted General Flynn by initiating and continuing a baseless counterintelligence investigation and by filing a criminal information lacking probable cause,” says the suit, filed on March 3 with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (pdf).

The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under the Obama administration was investigated by the FBI starting in August 2016 for supposed ties to Russia. In 2017, he was charged with lying to the FBI during an interview earlier that year.

The suit alleges that the FBI, and later prosecutors from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, investigated and prosecuted him for political reasons, considering him a threat.

“General Flynn—who already had a reputation as a hands-on disruptor at DIA, who had publicly excoriated the politicization of the intelligence community, and who had made clear his desire to overhaul the national security structure and the ‘interagency process’—was a direct threat, not only to the self-interest of entrenched intelligence bureaucracies and the federal officials involved, but to exposing their prior and ongoing efforts to derail and discredit President Trump,” the suit says.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 3/03/2023)  (Archive)

March 3, 2023 – Two Russian billionaires connected to the Bidens have dodged sanctions

Vladimir Yevtushenkov attends a court hearing in Moscow in November 2014. (Credit: Radio Free Europe)

“Two Russian billionaires who have managed to dodge US sanctions over Moscow’s year-old invasion of Ukraine went property shopping with Hunter Biden, dined with then-Vice President Hunter Biden, and discussed “favors” they might swap, sources tell The Post.

New details of Joe and Hunter Biden’s association with Yelena Baturina and Vladimir Yevtushenkov flesh out tantalizing clues from the first son’s abandoned laptop. The sources spoke with The Post this week after the duo was yet again spared a fresh batch of sanctions announced by the Treasury Department Friday.

“I think it’s very fishy,” said one source who had firsthand knowledge of the business relationship between Hunter Biden and Yevtushenkov — who is sanctioned by the UK and Australia but not by the US.

“I think he should be sanctioned,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told The Post of Yevtushenkov — estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.7 billion. “I don’t understand why he has not been.”

Yevtushenkov, whose Sistema business empire until recently included Russian rocket and radar-maker RTI and drone-maker Kronstadt, admitted last year he met with Hunter Biden for breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan on March 14, 2012 — but denied any further contact.

However, emails and calendar entries from Hunter’s former laptop show that they were set to meet again on Jan. 27, 2013, for dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano before looking at a commercial real estate development the next day near Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia.

(…) A different source, meanwhile, told The Post he vividly recalled Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, looking “like an odd couple” at a now-infamous, intimate dinner with Hunter and his father, the then-vice president.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden and Hunter reportedly used to dine with business associates such as Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina (r)  and former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov (l).  (Credit: Getty Images)

It’s long been uncertain whether Baturina, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.4 billion, and Luzhkov actually attended the April 16, 2015 dinner at Cafe Milano — the same Georgetown restaurant where Hunter and Yevtushenkov set a date more than two years prior.

“They could have played themselves on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said the source, who attended the dinner and was able to identify the couple in part because he met Luzhkov — who died in 2019 — on several other occasions. (Another source previously told The Post that a pair matching Baturina and Luzhkov’s general appearance was there.)

Luzhkov, who was Moscow’s mayor for 18 years until 2010, “looked a lot older” than Baturina — 27 years her husband’s junior — who “went overboard” on her appearance and ended up resembling Jennifer Coolidge’s comedic portrayal of an insecure heiress in HBO’s “The White Lotus,” the source recalled.

“It was an odd dinner because there was [then-Kazakhstani Prime Minister Karim Massimov], Luzhkov and his wife, and it was not a big table and then there was somebody there from some food charity making a pitch for support,” they added. “I mean, it was, was — it was a little odd, the whole thing.”

In an email at the time, Hunter wrote that the meal would be “ostensibly” about his role a chairman of the World Food Program (WFP) USA.

His father, the sitting vice president, arrived at the dinner and stayed for about 40 minutes, the second source told The Post, even sitting down to eat and then posing for a photo with the Kazakhstani group.

The gathering also featured Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year beginning in 2014 while his VP dad controlled the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.(Read more: New York Post, 3/03/2023) (Archive)

March 3, 2023 – Tracy Beanz breaks down General Flynn’s lawsuit against the DOJ and FBI

March 6, 2023 – The Intel Community is laying the groundwork for FISA 702 renewal

“Ugh, it makes me sick to see these schemes as they are constructed and yet feel helpless to stop them from organizing.  Remember which media outlets push the PR campaigns of the U.S. Govt.  (1) CNN drives Dept of State; (2) Washington Post drives CIA; and (3) NYT/Politico advance the interests of the domestic intelligence apparatus.

With that in mind, here comes the Intelligence Community laying the groundwork for reauthorization of the FISA-702 surveillance system on American citizens.

They are so damned transparent in their agenda, the stenographers have even dropped “FISA,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as the term within the construct.  Now they are just calling it “702 reauthorization.”

(VIA POLITICO) – The intelligence community has a critical congressional ally in its bid to reauthorize a sweeping warrantless surveillance program. However, even he thinks its officials aren’t making a convincing enough case.

“One of the things the community’s got to do a better job of is explaining, in practical non-classified terms, how valuable this tool is,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a recent brief interview. “And they’ve not done that as well as they should.”

Warner sits at the heart of what will be a months-long, knockout debate about whether to reauthorize the warrantless surveillance program, known as Section 702, by the end-of-year deadline. The program is designed to gather the electronic communications of foreigners abroad, but has the potential to sweep up those of Americans.

The Virginian, who argues continuing the program in some form is essential but is open to changes, will have his work cut out for him. Influential and newly emboldened House Republicans have made it clear they won’t let Section 702 stay alive without significant changes — if they support reauthorization at all — amid an all-time-low relationship with the Justice Department and the FBI.

And the intelligence community can also count Section 702 critics among House Democrats and senators in both parties, many of whom believe this is their best chance to force more limits on the program. (read more)

As most people are now aware, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) sits at the epicenter of how the surveillance state is weaponized against American citizens.  It is the SSCI who helped create the surveillance network, and it is the SSCI who now seek to defend the unconstitutional system they have created.

Pretenses are being dropped, and you will note how in this reauthorization schedule they are dropping “foreign” communication with American citizens, as a limitation on the authority they have already usurped.  Yes, it is factually true the ‘foreign’ aspect was always a ruse, a false premise, that granted the Dept of Justice, National Security Division (DOJ-NSD), and FBI legal authority to conduct intrusive Title-1 surveillance on any American citizen.

Well beyond the “cell phone metadata,” in the era of your portable transponder having internet and social media connection, just about everyone has metadata connected to a foreign person or entity.  Use the Twitter app on your phone, you are connected to foreign entities.  Use Instagram or Facebook, WhatsApp or Telegram, same/same/same/same.

TicTok? Fughetaboudit.  The auspices of only looking at U.S. persons engaged in foreign contacts is totally moot.

The “702 authorities,” which is an innocuous term for a “U.S. Person“, permit DHS, DOJ, FBI and any national security apparatchik to open up your data and check you out. This is the reality of the modern era.  This total surveillance reauthorization is what the SSCI wants to permit.  It must be stopped completely.  It cannot be “reformed.”

4th Amendment – “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” the United States Constitution, or you are not.

Either you are secure from federal search of your “private papers,” as outlined in– 

There is no aspect of this “702” nonsense, where a secret court grants a secret authorization, to engage in secret surveillance, by some secret entity of government – which might be a contractor, just to “see if” you might be doing something suspicious, or against the interests of the federal government.  The premise behind “702” reauthorization is unconstitutional. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 3/6/2023)  (Archive)

March 8, 2023 – FBI agent Nicole Miller lies under oath and conceals evidence in Proud Boys trial

March 9, 2023 – Twitter Files: Matt Taibbi Statement to Congress-The Censorship-Industrial Complex

March 9, 2023 – DOJ attempt to jail man for anti-Hillary memes just got much uglier

Last month, Revolver profiled the Biden Administration’s persecution of former Twitter anon Doug Mackey, who was a famous pro-Trump voice back in 2016 under the moniker of Ricky Vaughn.

For those whose memory is foggy, a quick review: In the late stages of the 2016 race, Mackey posted several memes, designed to resemble Hillary Clinton campaign images, claiming that supporters could vote by simply texting a phone number.

The memes were a Twitter-generation version of the common joke about telling one’s political opponents to turn out for the election next Wednesday. But, in an unprecedented move, the Biden Administration says Mackey violated the Ku Klux Klan Act by systematically acting to strip Americans of their civil rights. The KKK Act was passed to prevent literal assaults and terrorism that prevented black Americans from voting, but now the DOJ’s prosecutors say it applies to satirical online speech — they say Mackey broke the law, even though they can’t produce a single person who failed to vote due to Mackey’s stunt.

(By the way, you can donate to Mackey’s legal defense here or here or here).

All of that is bad enough, but newly-unsealed documents released on Wednesday reveal new, sinister depths to the DOJ’s agenda.

Last fall, we warned about a new tool in the arsenal of weapons used by the regime to justify censorship and rolling back the basic rights of Americans. With this new tool, corrupt journalists like Taylor Lorenz can dox, harass, and lie about anyone they want and enjoy total immunity from criticism. Why? Well, if you dare to criticize a journalist like Lorenz, someone, somewhere, might become outraged and decide to commit an act of violence. With this remarkable censorship tool, the media’s attack dog journalists are magically absolved from any criticism because some nut job, somewhere, maybe, at sometime, might act violently upon this criticism.

The tool goes by the name “stochastic terrorism.”

Basically, “stochastic terrorism” is the idea that, when somebody on the right criticizes somebody, they aren’t really just making a political argument. Instead, they are trying to “stoke hatred” in the expectation that some random third party will be “radicalized” and then commit political violence on their behalf.

…

[T]he concept perfectly flows from being a personal attack to being a legal one. The implicit claim behind every complaint about stochastic terror is that dissident speech isn’t really speech, and therefore it doesn’t really deserve protection, because conservatives, or anyone liberals don’t like, harbor a hidden inner desire to inspire violent attacks. Any complaint about the liberals or, more importantly, the Regime, in any venue, can now be dressed up as “violent” speech deserving no constitutional protection.

Read the Rest: Behold, the Regime Unveils Its New Catchphrase for All Political Dissent: “Stochastic Terrorism”

Back in October, “stochastic terrorism” was just a concept for the media, the blogosphere, and the Twitterati, and it was only a weapon for curbing speech.

But everything moves faster in the digital age. Just five months later, the Biden Department of Justice is using the logic of “stochastic terrorism” to justify stripping core constitutional due process rights from dissident American voices. 

In its latest filings, the DOJ reveals that one of the group chats it is currently using as evidence against Mackey contained a person who is now working with the FBI as a federal informant. According to the government, the “Confidential Witness” (or CW) was a pro-Trump, “alt right” leader who pleaded guilty to the same conspiracy to deprive civil rights charges that Mackey faces, and is now collaborating with the government.

In its filings, the government declines to say what CW’s current role with the government is, except that he is “presently engaged in proactive investigations, working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and may engage in additional investigations in the future.” Based on that statement, the government is asking that CW’s identity be kept secret, and that Mackey’s defense team be barred from asking any questions about CW’s current work. (Read more: Revolver News, 3/9/2023)  (Archive)

UPDATE:

March 12, 2023 – FBI’s concealed evidence is deemed classified by Proud Boys trial judge and “claws back” the exculpatory material from their defense team

March 12, 2023 – The Parliamentary Motive Behind the J6 Fedsurrection

Much has been made of the events of January 6, 2021, and with the latest broadcast of CCTV video from inside the Capitol Hill complex, more questions have been raised.

Within the questions: the FBI and government apparatus had advanced knowledge of the scale of the J6 mall assembly yet doing nothing?  Why were the Capitol Hill police never informed of the FBI concerns?  Why didn’t House Speaker Nancy Pelosi secure the Capitol Hill complex, and why did she deny the request by President Trump to call up the national guard for security support?  Why did the FBI have agent provocateurs in the crowd, seemingly stimulating rage within a peaceful crowd to enter the Capitol building?  There have always been these nagging questions around ‘why’?

Long time CTH reader “Regitiger” has spent a great deal of time reviewing the entire process, looking at the granular timeline and then overlaying the bigger picture of the constitutional and parliamentary process itself.  What follows below is a brilliant analysis of the federal government motive to create a J6 crisis that permitted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to trigger an emergency session and avoid the 2020 election certification challenges.

Those congressional floor challenges, known and anticipated well in advance of the morning of January 6, 2021, would have formed a legal and constitutional basis for ‘standing’ in judicial challenges that would have eventually reached the Supreme Court.  The certification during “emergency session” eliminated the problem for Washington DC.

Regitiger explains below, only edited by me for clarity and context:

I think most, not all, but a large number of people, are totally missing what happened; and why this happened on Jan 6th.  I am going to try my best to outline the events that day, blast past the commonly held assumptions and get right down to the core corruption.

I will present this as a series of questions and answers.

♦ Q1: How do you prevent congress from delaying the certification of state electoral votes?

A: It requires a crisis. A crisis that creates an “emergency” …An “emergency” that invokes special house rules.

FACTS: Remember carefully, focus please. Just moments, literally 3 minutes before two representatives issued a vote for motions to suspend the certification, the House members were “informed” by capitol police and other “agents” that a protest was about to breach the chambers. It was at this time that key people: Pence, Pelosi, Schumer, Mcconnell can be seen being walked out and escorted from the chamber. This effectively halted the Entire Chamber Process.

♦ Q2: Why was it necessary to halt the chamber process?

A: The crisis was created to eliminate the motion challenges to halt the certification and to begin voting to look into voting irregularities and fraud

FACTS: The two motions were completely legal and constitutional under at least two constitutionally recognized procedures… procedures that would REQUIRE the house to pause the certification and then vote to determine whether the motions of suspend could move forward.

♦ Q3: What was so important to refuse this motion and the subsequent votes to suspend the electoral certification?

A: It was important to remove that process entirely and continue the fraud and certify the fraud with no detractors on record. This effectively gives no standing for a SCOTUS ruling appeal!  Understand this.  If those two motions, even just one had successfully been voted EVEN IF THE MOTIONS were DENIED IN VOTE, this gives those who presented them with STANDING FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL LEGAL ARGUMENT BEFORE SCOTUS. 

♦ Q4: Could this have been done some other way other than creating a crisis/protest?

A: Unlikely. In order to prevent those two motions, requires that speaker of the house, minority leaders, and the president of the congress (vice president of the United States: Pence), to NOT BE PRESENT IN THE CHAMBERS.

Once the capitol police and other “law enforcements agents” informed the speaker and these three other individuals, Pelosi UNILATERALLY UNDER EMERGENCY RULES, suspended the business of the congress. This protest was necessary. The crisis was created because there is no other way to suspend the business of certification UNILATERALLY. By creating a crisis invokes emergency procedures. No other circumstances other than war or mass simultaneous explosive diarrhea can create such unilateral speaker delivered suspension of the certification.

♦ Q5: Why did the motions, once that the speaker RECONVENED congress, move forward back again to the floor for votes? Why were members disallowed to even consider putting forward ANY motions to the floor in when the chamber business was reopened?

A: The Speaker initiated the NEW sessions under special emergency rules. These rules abandon and make it clear that the ONLY purpose of the new session was to EXPEDITE the certification and dismiss all prior regular session procedural rules. This is why those two motions to table votes to consider a debate and pause to the certifications of state vote electors never happened later that evening when the house business was reconvened!

♦ Q6: Other than new rules, emergency rules, what other peculiar things occurred when the speaker reconvened?

A: Members were allowed to “vote” in proxy, remotely, not being present.  You can use your imagination about what conditions were placed on ALL members during this time to prevent anyone from “getting out of line”.

Also clearly, it was at THIS NEW SESSION that VP Pence, President of Congress, would also have no ability to even consider pausing the electoral certification, because there were no motions of disagreements on the matter. So, in a technical legal claim, he is correct that he had no constitutional authority to address any issues of fraud or doubts about electoral irregularities. But this completely dismisses the FACT that congress created rules in this crisis/emergency that never allowed them to be floored!

Understand what happened in Jan 6, 2021.  Don’t get hung up on Viking impostors, stolen Pelosi computers, podium heists, and complicit capitol police. Understand the process and what happened and what WAS NOT ALLOWED TO HAPPEN.

This was a coup….it was a very organized and carefully planned coup. VP Pence without a doubt as well as most members of the house were quite aware of how the certification was going to be MANAGED.  It would require new rules to prevent the debate clause from occurring!  New rules that ONLY AN EMERGENCY CRISIS COULD CREATE! So, they created an emergency.

•NOTED: I understand why many people have great interest in debunking the j6 event. I get that. I think it is important to dissect and examine the events of that day but please, step back and understand WHY these things happened. Examine the chain of events in congress.  Why those two motions that would have at least paused the certification THAT WOULD GIVE VP PENCE THE CONSTITUTIONALLY RECOGNIZED POWER TO MOVE TO SUSPEND THE ELECTORAL CERTIFICATION AND THEN EXAMINE THE IRREGULARITIES AND CLAIMS OF FRAUD!

At the very center of this coup stands Mike Pence, the same individual who also spoiled President Trump’s first opportunities in the earlies hours of his Presidency just 4 years prior, when he created and facilitated the removal of Lt General Michael Flynn. I will not spend much time on this thread explaining why Lt Gen Flynn was so important to President Trump and why the IC was so afraid he would have advisory power to the President. That I will leave for another day, another time. But understand this clearly: MIKE PENCE WAS AND IS WORKING FOR THE MOST CORRUPT CRIMINAL TREASONOUS PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT.

•PRO TIP: If you really want to get a true understanding of this matter videos of protesters walking in the capitol is not going to address them. Actual video and timeline records of events and the specific actions taken by the speaker just moments before TWO MAJOR ELECTORAL ALTERING MOTIONS WERE ABOUT TO BE FLOORED.

This crisis was developed just in time with a precise coordination to prevent those two motions to be entered into the chamber record. The two motions do not exist. The emergency powers established in the new session made sure they never could be entered. The emergency powers could never happen without a crisis.

God Bless America!”

[link]

Note from Author: “I started this effort years ago.  To date, no one and I mean no one has replied.  It’s as if everyone that can expose it that has a larger platform is either disinterested or suspiciously withdrawn from the issue.  I made several comments about this over the years right here at CTH, on article threads that are relevant to the topic.

I was watching the certification live that day. I recorded it ALL on every channel. I was doing this because no matter what happened that day, I KNEW IT WOULD BE A PROFOUND AND SIGNIFICANT EVENT TO REMEMBER. I never in my wildest imagination (and I have a pretty vivid imagination, always have), expected to see the unmistakable perfectly timed “coincidences” that occurred.

One member raises a motion (with another in waiting for his turn) those two motions were well known and advertised. These were motions to vote for a pause in the certification to examine electoral vote fraud and irregularities. I can’t speak to the veracity and substance of those motions. They were never allowed to even be floored. it was at that exact moment that the house chambers were suspended and 4 of the key members, Pence, Pelosi, Schumer and McConnell were escorted OUT right after initiating the end of the session.

Effectively, this resulted in that motion never being floored at all.  Then, when reconvened under special emergency rules, inexplicably those two motions (and perhaps more – we will never know – or will we?) were not even attempted to be motioned. That was not just peculiar to me.

It all started to make more sense when I did some study on constitutional law AND THE HISTORY of specific special authorities given to president of the congress, Pence in this case. Not only did he have the authority and power to suspend the certification, but the duty to address the motion in the same sense that it becomes vital to the debate clause. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse/Regitiger, 3/12/2023)  (Archive)

March 14, 2023 – The corporate media admits the U.S. was funding gain-of-function (bioweapon) research at Wuhan Lab, and they were double-billed

March 15, 2023 – Feds’ foreign-corruption double standard: Protecting the Bidens as they bore down on Trumpworld

Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, was convicted in a 2018 corruption case. At trial, U.S. prosecutors redacted Hunter Biden’s name from court exhibits and did not explore evidence of his lucrative dealings with the powerful Chinese figure. (Credit: public domain)

(…) A federal database shows the Bidens failed to register as foreign agents while engaged in activities on behalf of CEFC, a state-owned entity suspected of being a front for Chinese intelligence. Federal anti-spying laws require anyone acting as a lobbyist for a foreign power to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The DOJ did not prosecute either Biden family member for potential violations of FARA for representing the interests of the Chinese.

This stands in stark contrast to the DOJ’s aggressive pursuit of alleged FARA violations involving no fewer than six Trump campaign officials. In August of 2016, shortly after receiving a tip that a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had allegedly been told that the Russians might have dirt on Hillary Clinton, the bureau opened FARA investigations into Papadopoulos and three other Trump associates with no clear ties to Papadopoulos: national security adviser Michael Flynn; campaign manager Paul Manafort; and campaign adviser Carter Page. The FBI subsequently investigated Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates; and Trump’s Mideast adviser Walid Phares under the same statute.

As RCI has previously reported, the FBI used FARA as the basis for a wide-ranging probe that included tailing them, staking out their homes, digging through their trash, and using confidential sources to secretly record them. Only one of the six was convicted for FARA-related violations, and none was charged with any espionage or conspiracy crimes involving Russia.

Only one of the six was convicted for FARA-related violations, and none was charged with any espionage or conspiracy crimes involving Russia.

“It’s 100% a double standard, and it’s absolutely corrupt to the core,” former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker told RCI. “And meanwhile, [current FBI Director] Chris Wray fiddles.”

Other veterans of the bureau say the Obama and Biden administrations have politicized and weaponized FARA.

“Starting in 2016, the Obama-Biden administration used FARA and the criminal justice system as tools to attack and eliminate the opposition,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello, adding that many of the same officials are “back in charge and making sure those tools won’t be turned on themselves.”

An FBI spokeswoman said the agency had no comment on why it did not apply the foreign lobbying law equally. The Justice Department did not return requests for comment.

Ho and Hunter: A Lucrative Relationship

Court records and other documents show that Hunter Biden met with Ho’s boss Ye Jianming in February 2017 in Miami, where the CEFC chief offered him up to $30 million for “introductions alone,” according to emails. Ye – who had connections to both China’s Communist Party in China and its armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army – sealed the deal with a lucrative gift to Hunter: a 3.16-carat diamond worth an estimated $80,000. (Hunter never returned the large gem.)

Not long after their private dinner, CEFC began wiring millions of dollars from China to pass-through companies set up by Hunter Biden. Over the next 14 months, Hunter and Jimmy Biden (as the latter is known to family and friends) ultimately received almost $6 million from CEFC entities, according to congressional investigators, including $1 million from Ho. At the time, the FBI was tracking Ho’s and CEFC’s “bank and wire transfer records,” according to DOJ records, which indicates agents were aware of the China-based payments to the Bidens.

(Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 3/15/2023)  (Archive)

March 15, 2023 – NewsGuard is a recipient of $750k pentagon contract, denies it is ‘government funded’

NewsGuard, the establishment “news-rating” project that presents itself to the public as an impartial authority on the trustworthiness of news publishers, is telling reporters that it is not “government funded” — despite receiving a $750,000 contract from the Department of Defense to track “misinformation.”

Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, co-CEOs of NewsGuard (Credit: D Dipasupil and Stephen Chernin /Getty)

The claim was made in an email to Matt Taibbi, a Twitter Files reporter who testified at a landmark House Judiciary Committee hearing on the topic of government-backed censorship last week.

In the email, NewsGuard co-founder and CEO Gordon Crovitz said the organization was a “business with many licensees” that pay for access to it and that the Pentagon is just one of those licensees.

Via Twitter:

Matt:

I noticed with interest and surprise how you referred to NewsGuard in your congressional testimony on Thursday. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about NewsGuard and our work.

During the hearing, NewsGuard was inaccurately described as “U.S. government funded.” Unlike other entities mentioned during the hearing, we are not a non-profit funded by government grants. We are a business with many licensees paying to access our proprietary data, including government entities that pay to license our data. These licenses are only for access to our data and are entirely unrelated to our rating of news publishers.

For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostiles governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.

As Breitbart News previously reported, the $750,000 Pentagon contract was for NewsGuard’s “misinformation fingerprints” project, described by the organization as “a catalogue of known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online.”

In 2022, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Pentagon to preserve its documents related to NewsGuard, expressing concern at the organization’s “extreme partisan bias.” (Read more: Breitbart, 3/15/2023)  (Archive)

March 17, 2023 – House Oversight releases bank records that show Hallie Biden, now verified as the “unknown Biden,” is recipient of money from Chinese energy company

 

 

UPDATE:

Vice President Joe Biden consoles Hallie Biden before a viewing for Beau Biden, June 2015. (Credit: Associated Press)

“President Biden’s daughter-in-law Hallie is the mysterious “new” Biden family member who got paid Chinese cash in 2017, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer revealed exclusively to The Post Thursday.

Comer said the payments to first son Hunter Biden’s sister-in-law-turned-former lover were revealed in subpoenaed bank records.

The records show Hallie Biden received $35,000 over two transfers in 2017 from Biden family associate Rob Walker, who got $3 million on March 1, 2017, from State Energy HK Limited, a firm affiliated with CEFC China Energy.

President Biden, who allegedly was the “big guy” mentioned in communications about the same Chinese venture, dined at Hallie Biden’s residence last Friday during his regular weekend trip home to Delaware. It’s unclear if they discussed the looming bombshell, which Comer (R-Ky.) publicly teased Monday night on Fox News’ “Hannity.”

One transfer to Hallie from Robinson Walker LLC was for $25,000 on March 20, 2017, Comer’s staff wrote in a Thursday morning memo to committee members. Another $10,000 was transferred on Feb. 13 — raising “many questions” according to a committee aide because it came shortly before, rather than after, the $3 million haul.” (Read more: New York Post, 3/17/2023)  (Archive)

 

March 17, 2023 – Twitter Files: The great Covid lie machine; Stanford U; the Virality Project; Censorship of “true stories”

UPDATE:

March 20, 2023 – Laura Aboli “Transhumanism: The End Game” Full Speech

World Council for Health to Host Second Better Way Conference in Bath, UK

Laura [Aboli’s] entrepreneurial career started in the year 2000 when she co-founded World-Check, a database of Politically Exposed Persons and heightened risk individuals and organisations, which soon became the de facto standard for identifying and managing financial, regulatory and reputational risk within the world’s financial and legal institutions. Following World-Check’s success, she co-founded Wealth-X in 2010, which went on to become the leading provider of intelligence on ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

Having exited both companies by 2014, she continued her life-long passion for interior design, by establishing a property development and design company which she continues to run. Having been born into an artistic family, Laura has a passion for art, sculpture, music and dance and her critical and inquisitive mind has led her into the realms of metaphysics, spirituality, health and psychology. Her experience and her dedication to helping others have led her to step onto the public arena in order to share what she considers to have been important life lessons in her own journey. 

In May of 2020, prompted by the way events surrounding the global pandemic were affecting people’s livelihoods, civil rights and mental health, Laura founded the United Democratic International Movement for Awareness and Freedom, an organisation dedicated to creating a better world through awareness, inspiration and the relentless pursuit of truth. 

March 20, 2023 – New docs from National Archives directly link Joe Biden to Hunter’s profiteering in Ukraine

March 20, 2023 – Judge rules JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank must face lawsuits alleging they knowingly participated in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation

(Credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

(…) Two women, who claim they were sexually assaulted by Epstein, filed lawsuits in November accusing the banks of enabling Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking operation, Reuters reported. The lawsuits allege JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank ignored Epstein’s misconduct because he was an important client and used the banks to send cash payments to his victims, the outlet note.

Epstein was a client of JPMorgan from 2000 – 2013 and Deutsche Bank from 2013 – 2018, Reuters reported. JPMorgan is suing former executive Jes Staley for his alleged relationship with Epstein and blaming him for the bank’s alleged dealings with Epstein.

Manhattan Judge Jed Rakoff also ruled JPMorgan must face a lawsuit from the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) for its relationship with Epstein, Reuters reported. The USVI lawsuit accused the bank of turning a “blind eye” to Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking operation, and it was filed shortly after the Virgin Islands’ fined Epstein’s estate $105 million in December. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 3/20/2023)  (Archive)

March 22, 2023 – Hunter Biden used FBI mole named ‘One-Eye’ to tip him off to China probes

Hunter Biden had an FBI mole named “One-Eye” who tipped off his Chinese business partners that they were under investigation, according to an Israeli energy expert arrested in Cyprus last month on gunrunning charges.

Professor Guy Luft (Credit: ynetnews)

The House Oversight Committee is investigating the explosive claims by Dr. Gal Luft, a former Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonel with deep intelligence ties in Washington and Beijing, who says he was arrested to stop him from revealing what he knows about the Biden family and FBI corruption — details he told the Department of Justice in 2019, which he says it ignored.

Luft, 56, first made the claims on Feb. 18 on Twitter, after being detained at a Cyprus airport as he prepared to board a plane to Israel.

“I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S. The U.S., claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer.

“DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden.

Luft remains in jail awaiting extradition to the US over what he says are trumped-up charges of arms trafficking to China and Libya, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Through his American lawyer, Robert Henoch, Luft said he tried four years ago to inform the DOJ that Chinese state-controlled energy company CEFC had paid $100,000 a month to President Biden’s son Hunter and $65,000 to Joe’s brother Jim, in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.

Luft learned about the scheme through his own relationship with Hunter’s Chinese business partners, Patrick Ho and Ye Jianming, the chairman of CEFC.

From 2015 to 2018, Luft organized international energy conferences in partnership with Ho’s think tank, the nonprofit China Energy Fund Committee (CEFC-USA), a front organization for Ye’s CEFC.

Ye confided to Luft that Hunter had an informant in the FBI “or formerly of the bureau, extremely well placed, who they paid lots of money to [provide] sealed law enforcement information,” says Henoch.

The FBI mole was called “One-Eye.”

“One-Eye” told Ye that the Southern District of New York was investigating him and/or Ho in late 2017, and that “an Asian, an African, and a Jewish guy” were named on a sealed indictment, says Henoch.

Soon after that tipoff, Ye offered Hunter $1 million to be his “private counsel” and flew to China, leaving his wife, daughter, son, mother, and nanny in his $50 million penthouse at 15 Central Park West.

He was detained in Shanghai three months later and disappeared.

Before he left New York, Ye told Ho that the coast was clear for him to come back to the US.

On Nov. 18, 2017, Ho flew into JFK Airport, where he was arrested by FBI agents on bribery and money laundering charges.

“Ho was the patsy … the fall guy,” says Henoch.  (Read more: New York Post, 3/22/2023)  (Archive)

March 27, 2023 – Durham states Clinton, Inc. formed “joint venture” of “co-conspirators” to smear Trump

The Alfa Gang – Left to Right: Andrew Sullivan, Hillary Clinton, John Durham, Michael Sussmann, Mark Elias

Special Counsel John Durham stated in a Monday night filing that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and researchers trying to dig up dirt on the Trump campaign “should be considered as co-conspirators”in an effort to smear Donald Trump with the Russia collusion hoax, Just the News reports.

According to Durham, Clinton and her cronies formed a “joint venture or conspiracy” in order to harm Trump’s chances of being elected.

“Durham has just shown the whole world what major pieces of our Russiagate investigation revealed,” said former House Intelligence Committee GOP investigative counsel, Kash Patel. “Hard evidence, emails and text messages, showing the Clinton Campaign, Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, Joffe, and the media were all synced in August of 2016 pushing the false Alfa BaClnk server story, while also all working on the Steele Dossier matter. Durham submits all this evidence as ‘joint venture conspiracy’ under the rules of evidence.”

Durham’s filing also highlights an unearthed text message from disgraced Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann in which he lies to the FBI about not working for Clinton when he hand-delivered now-discredited anti-Trump research prior to the election.

The existence of the text message between Sussmann and then-FBI General Counsel James Baker was revealed in a court filing late Monday night by Durham’s team. Prosecutors said they intend to show Sussmann gave a false story to the FBI but then told the truth about working on behalf of the Clinton campaign when he later testified to Congress.

“Jim – it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss,” Sussmann texted Baker on Sept. 18, 2016, according to the new court filing. “Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own – not on behalf of a client or company – want to help the Bureau. Thanks.”

Prosecutors said the text message will become essential evidence at trial to show Sussmann lied to the FBI. –Just the News

According to Durham, “The defendant lied in that meeting, falsely stating to the General Counsel that he was not providing the allegations to the FBI on behalf of any client,” adding “In fact, the defendant had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including (i) a technology executive (“Tech Executive-1”) at a U.S.-based Internet company (“Internet Company-1″), and (ii) the Clinton Campaign.”

Sussmann eventually admitted he lied a year later during testimony in front of the House.

“We had a conversation, as lawyers do with their clients, about client 1 needs and objectives and the best course to take for a client,” Sussman told Patel in a sworn deposition. “And so it may have been a decision that we came to together. I mean, I don’t want to imply that I was sort of directed to do something against my better judgment, or that we were in any sort of conflict.”

Durham says he plans to present evidence that Sussmann worked with the Clinton campaign, ‘Tech Executive 1’ Rodney Joffe, and others in aforementioned “joint venture” to push the Russian collusion hoax, particularly the fabrication that Trump had a secret backchannel to the Kremlin via the Moscow-based Alfa bank. (Read more: Zero Hedge, 3/28/2023)  (Archive)

March 29, 2023 – Attorney from law firm suing Trump and Giuliani, is arrested for possession of child porn

“A 53-year-old West Palm Beach licensed attorney has been arrested with possession of child pornography. Michael T. Dolce will appear in a West Palm Beach federal court tomorrow for his initial appearance.

Michael Dolce (Credit: BocaNewsNow)

According to the filed criminal complaint affidavit, on March 15, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Dolce’s West Palm Beach apartment. They discovered Dolce actively downloading child pornography using peer-2-peer software. Nearly 2000 images and videos of child pornography were recovered from his devices.

U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe for the Southern District of Florida and Special Agent in Charge Jeffrey B. Veltri of the FBI, Miami Field Office, announced the charges.

FBI Miami, West Palm Beach Resident Agency investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Schiller is prosecuting the case. (Read more: justice.gov, 3/29/2023)  (Archive)

“On the heels of the Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump, the NAACP, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson and civil rights law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll filed a lawsuit against the former president, Rudy Giuliani and two white supremacist groups, citing their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday morning in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Trump and Giuliani, in collaboration with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, conspired to incite the riot to keep Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. It claims they did so in violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era statute designed to protect both formerly enslaved African Americans and lawmakers in Congress from white supremacist violence.

Reps. Hank Johnson and Bonnie Watson Coleman will join the litigation as plaintiffs in the coming days, according to a press release shared with POLITICO.

The lawsuit recounts Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, building a case against him in similar fashion to House impeachment managers. It cites Trump’s remarks during “Save America” rally as evidence that he mobilized and directed insurrectionists to storm the Capitol. After his supporters entered the halls of Congress, the lawsuit alleges, Giuliani called lawmakers individually, asking them to try to “slow down” the Electoral College vote count. (Read more: Politico, 2/16/2021) (Archive)

April 3, 2023 – Pelosi and Clinton discuss Putin’s interference in the 2016 election – A lie launched by Hillary’s campaign

Hillary Clinton is still whining about Vladimir Putin and her 2016 election loss.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and twice-failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton spoke at an event backed by Columbia University.

Pelosi said Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election to derail Hillary Clinton because she was more feared than Donald Trump.

No serious person believes this. (Gateway Pundit, 4/03/2023)

April 3, 2023 – Matt Colangelo: The link between the Biden DoJ and DA Bragg driving President Trump’s “hush money” indictment

Alvin Bragg (l) and Matt Colangelo (r) (Credit: public domain)

(…) The real culprit behind the “get Trump” radicals in New York is the corrupt, newly hired, former Obama-Biden DOJ attorney named Matt Colangelo.

Attorney Mike Davis unloaded Colangelo’s name along with Steve Bannon on the War Room today.

In their interview, Davis noted that Matt Colangelo is the link between the Biden DOJ and DA Bragg in their corrupt acts in targeting and putting together a BS indictment against President Trump. This guy was in the Obama White House and the Biden DOJ and appears to have been brought in to indict President Trump on whatever he could come up with.

Donald J. Trump Indictment by Jim Hoft

(…) Davis and Bannon dissected the corrupt actor pushing anti-American full woke actions in the corrupt DOJ now working with Bragg, Colangelo. (Read more: Gateway Pundit, 4/03/2023)  (Archive)

Presiding over the historic case is Judge Juan Merchan, a Colombian-born 60-year-old judge who has spent more than 15 years on the bench and has experience in numerous high-profile prosecutions—including those against associates of Trump.

(…) In 2022 Merchan oversaw a criminal trial of two of Trump’s companies—the Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corp.— that ended with the real estate company convicted by a jury of tax fraud and fined $1.61 million.

While Trump himself wasn’t charged in the case, one of the Trump organization’s longtime executives, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty, taking full responsibility for the crimes, and telling jurors from the witness stand at the time that, “It was my own personal greed that led to this.”

Weisselberg was sentenced to five months in jail in exchange for agreeing to testify against the company. Trump has said the case was politically motivated.

Nicholas Gravante, who represented Weisselberg in the plea negotiations, said Merchan was “a real listener, well-prepared, always accessible, and a man who kept his word.”

“He was mindful of the role my colleagues and I played as advocates, treating us with the utmost respect both in open court and behind closed doors,” Gravante added.

Other Cases Related to Trump

Merchan is also presiding over a criminal case involving former Trump administration strategist and White House adviser Steve Bannon. In September, Bannon pleaded not guilty to New York state charges of money laundering, conspiracy, and fraud related to a nonprofit that raised funds for the “We Build the Wall” effort, which would create a privately owned section of the U.S.–Mexico border wall.

Prosecutors have accused Bannon of defrauding donors who contributed more than $15 million to the effort. Bannon, who faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted, has dismissed the case as “nonsense.” (Read more:  Zero Hedge, 4/04/2023)  (Archive)

April 3, 2023 – Rep. James Comer expresses concern about classified doc Hunter Biden shared with Burisma

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said Monday he is “concerned” about a government document Hunter Biden sent Burisma officials that could have originated from the troves of classified information that President Joe Biden mishandled.

Speaking with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, Comer raised concerns that the family’s “influence peddling” could be connected to Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified information.

“We don’t the know the true extent of what he [Joe Biden] has done,” Comer said. “All we know is he had classified documents scattered all over the place dating back to the time as U.S. senator.”
“There is one document in particular that I can tell you from my investigation of Biden family influence peddling that we are very concerned about with respect to the document that Hunter Biden sent to officials at Burisma in Ukraine,” Comer said.

“It was a government document. We are concerned that it may have been one of the classified documents,” he added.

President Biden is under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Hur in connection with classified documents found at his Wilmington home and in his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC. According to a CNN source, the classified documents found at Biden’s “private office” pertain to Iran, the U.K., and Ukraine, where the Biden family conducted business deals. (Read more: Breitbart, 4/03/2023)  (Archive)

April 3, 2023 – Leonardo DiCaprio testifies a CCP-linked Malaysian financier sent $30 million to Obama during 2012 campaign

Leonardo DiCaprio took the stand Monday in the federal trial of a prominent ’90s rap artist accused of funneling money from a Malaysian financier who reportedly sought to donate tens of millions of dollars to President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

The Hollywood star, who has partied with the fugitive money man, Jho Low, said the financier once casually dropped in a conversation that he hoped to make a huge contribution to Obama’s campaign.

Leonardo DiCaprio with Jho Low in 2013. (Credit:
Getty Images)

“It was a significant sum — something to the tune of $20-30 million,” DiCaprio testified. “I said, ‘Wow that’s a lot of money!’”

Prakazrel “Pras” Michel is accused of profiting from an embezzling scheme by Malaysian financier Jho Low who allegedly recruited Michel into funneling the money to Obama’s reelection bid .(Credit: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Low allegedly recruited Prakazrel “Pras” Michel – the founding member of the iconic 1990s hip-hop group The Fugees – to funnel the money to Obama’s reelection bid as foreigners cannot donate to US campaigns under federal election law.

Michel took tens of millions of dollars to lobby the government on behalf of Low and the Chinese government as a whole, prosecutors alleged.

Much of the money was reportedly stolen. Low is accused of embezzling a whopping $4.5 billion from Malaysia’s state investment fund known as 1MDB.

DiCaprio, 48, was called as a witness due to his years-long relationship with Low, who he believed to be “a huge businessman” with connections in Abu Dhabi and Malaysia, he said. Low helped fund his 2013 movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” for which the star won a Golden Globe for best actor.

Low, who also donated to the “Titanic” star’s charity, was known among Hollywood A-listers for throwing lavish parties and inviting people on expensive vacations via his private jet. (Read more: New York Post, 4/03/2023)  (Archive)

April 4, 2023 – Analysis of the Trump Indictment for “hush money” to Stormy Daniels

Trump and his legal team during his arraignment on April 4, 2023. (Credit: public domain)

After nearly 8 years of investigations by federal and state authorities – spanning from Russian collusion to obstruction of justice to campaign finance violations to tax fraud – former president Donald Trump was indicted last week by the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg.

And today we saw the next step in the unprecedented prosecution of a former president and current GOP presidential candidate: Trump turned himself in at the Manhattan DA’s office.

Trump arrived at approximately 1:30 p.m. for arraignment with thousands of supporters and demonstrators watching from the streets and millions watching from home or from work. It was the most important courthouse appearance in recent memory to answer for one of the weakest indictments in New York history.

As has been reported, Trump was formally charged with 34 felonies – more on those below – and pleaded not guilty.

Here is the indictment that was just released this afternoon.

And here is the statement of facts.

Trump faces 34 counts relating to “Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree, in violation of Penal Law § 175.10.” These charges relate to bookkeeping records concerning a hush money payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels soon before the 2016 election; a $30,000 payment to a former Trump Tower doorman by AMI (National Enquirer); and an AMI/National Enquirer payment of $150,000 to a woman who said she had a sexual relationship with Trump when he was married.

The indictment specifies that Trump “made and caused false” entries in the business records of enterprises “kept and maintained by the Trump Organization.” Trump is said to have done this with the “intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission” of that crime. (Intent to defraud is construed broadly in New York, and can include acts that seek to avoid responsibility for a violation of law or to conceal offenses; there need not be financial harm.

(…) Look past the vague descriptions of influencing the 2016 election and you find that the indictment and statement of facts have one curious omission: the federal laws or state laws that Trump supposedly violated.

While this may not be technically necessary in New York, DA Braggs owes the public a duty to be forthright and transparent and honest about Trump’s alleged criminal conduct, as the prosecution carries national consequences.

Yet Bragg chose to deny the public that information.

By doing so, Bragg has protected himself and his office from oversight and scrutiny from Trump’s team, from the media, outside lawyers and experts, and from the general public. Instead, we’re given vague allegations of the violation of “election laws” and the mischaracterization of payments “for tax purposes.” That’s not good enough for there to be a complete and thorough analysis of the charges. And Bragg knows it. (Read more: Techno Fog, 4/8/2023)  (Archive)

April 4, 2023 – Kathy Chung testifies Joe Biden stored classified documents in D.C. Chinatown

From the House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, 4/04/2023:

“Today we learned that when Joe Biden left the vice presidency, boxes containing classified documents, vice presidential records, and other items were stored in three different locations around the Washington D.C. area, including an office near the White House, an office in Chinatown, and eventually the Penn Biden Center. At some point, the boxes containing classified materials were transported by personal vehicle to an office location. The boxes were not in a ‘locked closet’ at the Penn Biden Center and remained accessible to Penn Biden employees as well as potentially others with access to the office space. We need to find out who had access to these documents.”

Kathy Chung (Credit: Marco Polo)

April 5, 2023 – Kim Dotcom: Obama pulls the strings

February 23, 2018 – Rice attorney admits in letter to Grassley and Graham, Obama officials knew the substance of Trump team communications, before and after the election

Obama tag

April 5, 2023 – Judicial Watch sues Homeland Security for records on censorship meetings with Big Tech

Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department Homeland Security (DHS) for records showing cooperation between the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and social media platforms to censor and suppress free speech (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:23-cv-00552)).

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (a component of DHS) failed to respond to a December 2022 request for:

Records and communications of Jen Easterly, Director, CISA; Christopher Krebs, Former Director, CISA; Matt Masterson, Former CISA Senior Cybersecurity Advisor; and Brian Scully, CISA Senior Cybersecurity Advisor, regarding:

  1. CISA facilitated or hosted USG-industry meetings with Meta (@meta.com); Facebook (@facebook.com); Twitter (@twitter.com); Wikimedia Foundation (@wikimedia.org); Pinterest (@pinterest.com); LinkedIn (@linkedin.com); concerning election security;
  2. Election Infrastructure Subsector Government Coordinating Council Meetings;
  3. Election Infrastructure Subsector Government Coordinating Council Joint MDM Working Group Meetings; and
  4. Preparatory meetings with any employees of the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Office of the Director of National Intelligence; National Security Agency; U.S. Secret Service; concerning any of the aforementioned USG-industry meetings and/or Coordinating Council Meetings.

On December 2, 2022, journalist Matt Taibbi used the social media platform Twitter to expose the “Twitter Files,” which include multiple mentions of the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency’s censorship activities.

A December 16 tweet thread includes:

37.Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”

A supplemental tweet thread on December 18 reports:

2. In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats.

3. The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th “DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,” that “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.”

9. He then sent another note internally, saying the premise of the questions was “flawed,” because “we’ve been clear that official state propaganda is definitely a thing on Twitter.” Note the italics for emphasis.

A March 9 tweet thread includes:

3. But Twitter was more like a partner to government. With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police

4. Emails from the FBI, DHS and other agencies often came with spreadsheets of hundreds or thousands of account names for review. Often, these would be deleted soon after.

19. The same agencies (FBI, DHS/CISA, GEC) invite the same “experts” (Thomas Rid, Alex Stamos), funded by the same foundations (Newmark, Omidyar, Knight) trailed by the same reporters (Margaret Sullivan, Molly McKew, Brandy Zadrozny) seemingly to every conference, every panel.

Other “Twitter files” released by Elon Musk show that FBI pressure on “Russian disinformation” led to censorship:

San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan “[sent] 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” the evening before the release of the Post story.

The “Twitter files” show the FBI pushed Twitter to also censor countless Twitter users who tweeted concerns (and jokes) about election integrity just before the 2020 election.

In testimony before the “House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” Taibbi reported extensive collusion between Big Tech and government, at all levels – including the Biden White House, the Democratic National Committee, and federal, state and local law enforcement – all meant to stifle free speech and withhold information from the American people.

In May 2022, the States of Missouri and Louisiana sued President Biden and several federal employees in their official capacities for violation of the First Amendment.

In one of the depositions in the case, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Cyber Branch for San Francisco Division of the FBI, Elvis Chan, testified he and fellow officials had weekly meetings with major social media companies to warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election. The lawsuit also produced Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency meeting minutes that discuss its attempts to manage information being posted by social media contributors.

The Twitter Files also mention a report titled The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election, which was prepared by the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a left-leaning collective of organizations that worked with the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency on its censorship of online information during the 2020 election.

“There is an unholy conspiracy in the Biden administration to censor Americans in collusion with Big Tech,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This new Judicial Watch lawsuit shows the censorship abuse is furthered by unlawful secrecy and cover-ups.

Judicial Watch is heavily involved in countering government and Big Tech censorship. Buried within the Twitter Files are references and descriptions of meetings and communications Judicial Watch has been investigating through FOIA requests and lawsuits. (Read more: Judicial Watch, 4/05/2023)  (Archive)

April 6. 2023 – Judge Juan Merchan is overseeing Trump’s trial and violating New York’s Code of Judicial Conduct

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, left, and former President Donald Trump. (Marc A. Hermann for NYDN; AP)

Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing former President Donald Trump’s case in Manhattan, violated New York’s Code of Judicial Conduct by making three donations to Democrats in 2020, which could be grounds for an ethics investigation, according to several legal experts and former prosecutors.

Under Section 100.5 of the New York Code of Judicial Conduct, sitting judges cannot “directly or indirectly engage in any political activity.” Prohibited political activity includes “(h) soliciting funds for, paying an assessment to, or making a contribution to a political organization or candidate.”

The New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics’s yearly-updated handbook makes this clear, stating:

A sitting judge may not make political contributions at any time, even to a U.S. presidential candidate or to a federal congressional candidate outside of New York State (Opinion 11-146; 22 NYCRR 100.5[A][1][h]).

Furthermore, the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct states that unless permitted by law, a judge shall not “solicit funds for, pay an assessment to, or make a contribution to a political organization or a candidate for public office.”

However, Merchan — a New York state judge — made three political donations in 2020, according to public Federal Election Commission records.

According to the FEC records, Merchan donated $15.00 to Biden for President — the campaign of Trump’s opponent, on July 26, 2020, via ActBlue.

On July 27, 2020, he donated $10.00 to Progressive Turnout Project, an organization dedicated to turning out Democrat voters, and $10.00 to Stop Republicans, a part of Progressive Turnout Project “dedicated to resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy,” also via ActBlue.

According to Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert and law professor at New York University, such donations are forbidden.

“The contribution to Biden and possibly the one to ‘Stop Republicans’ would be forbidden unless there is some other explanation that would allow them,” Gillers told CNN on Thursday.

Gillers told Breitbart News in an email on Wednesday that violations of the N.Y. Code of Judicial Conduct would be investigated by the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct and could potentially result in removal. (Read more: Breitbart, 4/06/2023)  (Archive)

April 7, 2023 – More on Kathy Chung appearances in the Biden laptop report

The surname of a petite woman of Korean extraction is found 31 times in our dossier: Chung. She was Ted Kaufman’s aide in the U.S. Senate (Kaufman, by the way, was practically hand-picked by Joey when Joey left the “upper chamber” for the vice presidency). Chung was then installed by Joey’s son, Hunter, to be Joey’s personal aide at the White House. After Joey’s stint as the V.P., she followed the crew to Joey’s “transition” office & then to his smattering of “centers,” “foundations,” & other slush funds. All of these movements by Chung & Joey’s broader entourage—including the two federal crimes that Chung participated in—are explained in our nonprofit’s Report on the Biden Laptop.

Earlier this week, Chung—who you, as a federal taxpayer, still subsidize as Chung is currently the deputy Director of Protocol at the Department of Defense—appeared before the U.S. House Oversight Committee & (to her credit) answered some of their questions about Joey’s document fiasco & (hopefully) other matters. Accordingly, we felt it our duty to provide the public with more granularity on this figure who had/has such close access to the man with the nuke codes. We’ll copy directly from the Report:

—

Page 106 in the dossier: Organized a Biden family luncheon for ChiComs

Page 488: Hand-picked for a White House gig by the “smartest man” Joe knows

Pages 188-190: Facilitated FARA violations with Mexican foreign principals & shared non-public information with Hunter

Page 53: The federal statutes & the federal regulation violated:

Lastly, we felt the need to include some photos of the woman. After all, many outlets (Fox News, the Daily Mail, CNN, the New York Post, Axios, & many others) released stories about Chung, but did not include photos. Here are a few:

Rep. Jamie Comer, chairman of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, was smart to bring her in. What our tour through the Biden Laptop has shown us is that rank is oftentimes untethered to value creation and proximity. In other words, the younger or lower-ranking people (e.g. executive assistants) typically know much more about the operations of an enterprise (in this case, a political mafia) than many people might suspect. Marco Polo recognizes this fact and does not get distracted by mere titles—and we take pride in turning over every rock, no matter how small.

–Garrett Ziegler, Founder

If you want to support Marco Polo (EIN: 61-199994), you can do so here.

(More pics: Garrett Ziegler/Substack, 4/07/2023)  (Archive)

April 9, 2023 – Peter Schweizer: “Does This Compromise President Biden?”

The Chinese government has spoken openly about its desire to upturn and change the global order for its benefit. What we have in the Biden family is a family that has become wealthy by enabling, helping, aiding, and abetting the Chinese in doing exactly that. Pictured: US President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, NY on February 4, 2023. (Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

The notion that a declining power like Russia, which has domestic problems, a shrinking economy, a shrinking demographic base, is somehow a bigger threat than China is laughable. It is indicative of a larger issue, which is that Biden essentially has a soft spot for Beijing. The question, of course, is why?

This is a commercial relationship that not only has made the Bidens money. It has advanced the strategic and military interests of the Chinese government itself.

The first one is a private equity arrangement or deal that Hunter Biden has with the Chinese government itself. This is a deal that began and was finalized in December of 2013. It led to the creation of something called Bohai Harvest RST or BHR Partners…. the Chinese government poured in a billion dollars. They later expanded that to a-billion-and-a-half dollars…. One of the partnering firms that created BHR was Hunter Biden’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners.

Hunter Biden was put on the board of directors of BHR Partners…. What is astonishing about this is, first of all, that the Chinese government funded this venture. Again, these are not individual Chinese companies. This is Chinese government money.

In 2017, his lawyers admitted that he [Hunter Biden] also took a personal stake. In addition to the firm that he owned part of, he took a personal stake in these deals. That is deal number one. Then there is deal number two with the Chinese government. This involves a real estate firm called Rosemont Real Estate, of which Hunter Biden was a co‑founder.

Rosemont then becomes Gemini Rosemont Realty. The Chinese government is later to put in more than $100 million in cash. They publicly say that they are going to put billions of dollars of equity into this entity to make it even more successful. Here you have two large deals.

When you look at what that private equity firm does, the first thing they do is they become an anchor investor in a Chinese firm called China General Nuclear (CGN). Why is this interesting? This is a nuclear energy firm that about eight months after Hunter Biden’s BHR becomes an anchor investor, they are charged by the FBI in the United States. That firm was stealing nuclear secrets in the United States.

In particular, CGN is trying to gain technologies related to the small nuclear reactors that are put on submarines, which provide a huge military advantage to the United States.

Another acquisition they make is that Hunter Biden’s BHR firm buys half of a company called Henniges in Michigan — and another Chinese entity buys the other half. That other half is bought by AVIC, which is the Chinese state‑owned aviation military contractor. AVIC builds all the military aircraft for the Chinese military.

What I think is important about the Biden story is not simply the fact that the Biden family made money because of the Chinese military and that Joe Biden speaks very kindly about the Chinese since those deals have gone down, but also that the Biden family involving the son of the vice president directly benefit the Chinese military.

China is a power that has demonstrated over the last decade that they want, by 2025, to supplant the United States as the major economic power in the world. Then by 2030, they want to match the United States militarily.

The Chinese government has also spoken openly about their desire to upturn and change the global order for their benefit. What we have in the Biden family is a family that has become wealthy by enabling, helping, aiding and abetting the Chinese in doing exactly that.

In terms of Hunter Biden doing nothing wrong, it does not seem that there has been anything illegal. I have always contended that the problem in Washington DC is that some of the worst crimes or worst acts of corruption are done by people who engage in legal behavior. In Washington DC, the political class gets to make their own rules. They get to rig the game, as it were, to ensure that the real lucrative stuff that is corrupt — and should be illegal — is the very stuff that they engage in.

Hunter Biden has stepped off the board of directors of BHR. Here is the problem: he still retains his equity stake with this Chinese firm. He still has other deals that he conducted with the Chinese from which he benefited.

The Biden team has lied repeatedly. I can go into greater detail… It has been subterfuge from the beginning. They need to be called out on it….. The American people understand if somebody’s giving you a sweetheart deal, particularly an actor like China… without getting something in return. They are not that stupid.

The problem is the way that rules are written in Washington DC, they are written by the political class themselves. They carve out certain things…. If [Biden] gets a $250 campaign contribution from a GE executive, it is disclosed by the FEC…. If his adult son flying on Air Force Two, clearly close with the vice president, strikes a series of deals with a foreign government that are lucrative and beneficial to him, there is no requirement for disclosure — which, to me, is shocking. One of the things that has to change is that we need greater transparency.

The great gold mine that they have discovered are these foreign entities. With Hunter Biden, you have these deals in China. You also have the deal in Ukraine that everybody’s familiar with…. [Hunter Biden] is given a million dollars a year by a company even though he has no background in Ukraine and no background in energy. Everybody knows what is going on. Unfortunately, it is legal.

There ought to at minimum be a requirement that you disclose any foreign dealings involving the family members of politicians, Republican, Democrat, executive branch, legislative branch. That would be very, very helpful. The way you discuss this and you explain this to people is: It is not a question about what is legal. There are lots of things that are legal in Washington that are highly corrupt. The key thing is, does this compromise Joe Biden?… Has he done favors for that foreign power?

One of the things that the great Roger Robinson has been working on…. He is looking into the fact that in 2013, the Obama administration signed a letter which said that the Chinese companies listed in the New York Stock Exchange did not have to conform to Sarbanes‑Oxley auditing and some of the other requirements that US and other foreign firms do. It is quite a cutout for the Chinese.

The question about blackmail, to be blunt about it, is, are they going to need to blackmail Joe Biden? Joe Biden’s posture towards China is incredibly soft.

[T]here has been a complete lack of curiosity by the media, and even, as we have seen, suppression.

Something may emerge but I am not sure there is something that they want that he is not already prepared to give them. (Read more: Gatestone Institute, 4/09/2023)  (Archive)

April 11, 2023 – Whistleblower: Joe Biden boosted Ukraine gas industry as Hunter took Burisma role

 

(…) Then-Vice President Joe Biden visited Ukraine on a mission to bolster the country’s energy industry days after his son Hunter joined the board of natural gas company Burisma in 2014 — which a former White House stenographer claims implicates the now-80-year-old in a foreign influence-peddling “kickback scheme.”

Mike McCormick (Credit: Fox News)

Mike McCormick says he was with current national security adviser Jake Sullivan — then a Biden aide — in the press cabin of Air Force Two en route to Kyiv on April 21, 2014, as he outlined how the world’s wealthiest country would help the deeply corrupt post-Soviet state build its gas industry.

Giving a rundown of priorities for the trip, Sullivan — described in a transcript as an anonymous “senior administration official” — said Biden would “discuss with [Ukrainian officials] medium- and long-term strategies to boost conventional gas production, and also to begin to take advantage of the unconventional gas reserves that are in Ukraine.”

Asked for details, the Biden aide said the US was interested in providing “technical assistance to help [Ukraine] be able to boost production in their conventional gas fields, where presently they aren’t getting the maximum of what they could be” while offering “technical assistance relating to a regulatory framework, and also the technology that would be required to extract unconventional gas resources; and Ukraine has meaningful reserves of unconventional gas according to the latest estimates.”

Jake Sullivan (Credit: public domain)

In December of that year, amid broader Obama administration support for Ukraine, Congress approved $50 million to support the country’s energy sector, including the natural gas industry.

McCormick, who worked more than a decade at the White House, told The Post this week he believes the timeline of events, featuring the unmasked longtime Joe Biden aide, demonstrates that the president used his prior position to help his son’s foreign business interests.

“Joe Biden was over there telling them, ‘You can’t be corrupt! You can’t be corrupt!’ while he was corrupt,” McCormick says. “Look, this is Air Force Two. This is Joe Biden’s plane. He’s in control of it. Jake Sullivan was in the front of the plane with Joe Biden in a meeting and then he walks back in the plane to talk to the press.”

Now, McCormick tells The Post that he wants to testify before the federal grand jury in Delaware considering charges against Hunter — saying he has relevant information that the FBI ignored.

“They’ve been looking at Hunter Biden, but this ties Joe Biden and [Sullivan] into promoting a kickback scheme with Ukraine,” he said. “It’s the timeline that does it.” (Read more: New York Post, 4/11/2023)  (Archive)

April 11, 2023 – DCCC, Marc Elias firm accused of ‘apparent civil violations’ of federal election law

Attorney Marc Elias preps on Aug. 3, 2016, before the hearing for his lawsuit against Arizona over voting rights. (Credit: David Jolkovski/Getty Images)

An anti-Biden political action committee (PAC) filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) alleging “apparent civil violations” of election law between the House Democrats’ campaign arm and top liberal lawyer and former Hillary Clinton attorney Marc Elias’ law firm.

Dan Backer (Credit: LinkedIn)

Counsel for the Committee to Defeat the President Dan Backer, who sent the letter to the DOJ, told Fox News Digital for “years, the infamous Marc Elias and the corrupt Democrats in his orbit have violated federal campaign finance laws, and it’s high time to hold them accountable.”

(…) “Americans deserve to know the truth about the Democratic Party’s shady money laundering schemes, especially when campaign funds are supposed to be spent in one way and they get spent in another,” Backer said.

“Based on the Committee’s robust research, and Elias’ own shady past, it seems pretty clear that Elias and other Democrats have engaged in false reporting, and that cannot go unchecked,” he continued.

A letter from the FEC obtained by Fox News Digital acknowledged the receipt of the complaint.

In the letter, Backer wrote to Heberle about “possible criminal violations of both the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and the federal Criminal Code” allegedly committed by the DCCC and Elias Law Group.

“I hope that you will not allow the Biden Administration’s political appointees within the Department of Justice to allow President Biden’s close political allies to gain an unfair advantage in the electoral process by violating federal criminal law with impunity,” Backer wrote.

Backer pointed out the “FECA requires each political committee to report to the FEC the purpose of each of its operating expenditures over $200” and that in “a series of FEC filings over the course of 2021 and 2022, the DCCC reported making a total of $5,177,460.62 in payments between October 19, 2021, and July 15, 2022, to Elias Law Group for ‘RECOUNT LEGAL [SERVICES].’

(…) ”Backer also alleged that Elias, “the name partner of Elias Law Group, has a history of allowing Democratic political committees to misrepresent the nature of his firm’s legal services to shield their activities from public scrutiny,” pointing to his former firm, Perkins Coie’s work on the debunked Steele dossier.

“Elias has also been sanctioned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for lack of candor,” Backer wrote. “Another federal court accused him of attempting to ‘impinge[]’ upon ‘free, open, rational elections.’”

“It is reasonably possible Elias Law Group facilitated the DCCC’s false reporting by providing fraudulent billing statements misrepresenting the purpose of the firm’s charges, to assist in shielding the true nature of their activities from public scrutiny,” Backer alleged.

Backer alleged Elias Law Group and the DCCC “may have violated four federal statutes:” “FECA criminal provisions,” the “Sarbanes-Oxley Act,” statutes regarding “false statements,” and “conspiracy” statutes. (Read more: Fox News, 4/17/2023)  (Archive)

April 12, 2023 – DNC parts ways with Marc Elias, the Clinton lawyer behind the Clinton/DNC/Steele dossier

“The Democratic National Committee is cutting ties with lawyer Marc Elias, who heavily pushed the discredited Steele dossier that sought to link the former president to Russia falsely.

Elias, who has represented the DNC since 2009, has had several disagreements with the committee, according to sources who spoke with PunchBowl News. Elias Law Group, his firm founded in 2021, works on behalf of many Democratic lawmakers and entities, such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, records show.

Elias was general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and commissioned the Trump-Russia dossier. The lawyer hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which, in turn, brought on British ex-spy Christopher Steele in 2016. Steele was offered “up to $1 million” in the run-up to the 2016 election by the FBI to prove the dossier’s allegations against Trump but did not get the money due to lack of evidence, FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified in October 2022.

The following month, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent several written questions to the FBI in the wake of “bogus information” being received from informants, including Steele, the Washington Examiner first reported. Then-prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis for John Durham, who was appointed as special counsel to investigate the FBI’s 2016 Russia election interference inquiry, grilled Elias in May 2022 over his role in pushing the collusion narrative. (Read more: Washington Examiner, 4/12/2023)  (Archive)

April 12, 2023 – Chinese-American bank records show millions in transactions between Hunter Biden, China firms: Sen. Johnson

Cathay General Bancorp is the holding company for Cathay Bank. Cathay Bank has branch locations in nine U.S. states as well as Hong Kong, and overseas representative offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Taipei. (Credit: public domain)

“Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson says the financial institution Cathay Bank has given Senate Republicans records showing millions of dollars going from Chinese companies to President Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

Republicans and others started raising concerns during President Biden’s successful 2020 White House campaign, if not earlier, that Hunter Biden used the family name and influence while his father was vice president to make millions in overseas business deals, which also could have compromised U.S. national security.

Johnson told The Washington Times the records show the Biden family involved with the now-defunct CEFC China Energy, which had connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

The firm reportedly gave $1 million to Hudson West III, which was a joint venture owned by Hunter Biden and Gongwen Dong, a business associate of CEFC’s founder and chairman, Ye Jianming, according to the bank records.

“In my mind,” said Johnson, “it’s the Chinese government telling Joe Biden, ‘We got the goods on you, buddy. And we’re willing to dish it up.'” (Read more: JusttheNews, 4/12/2023)  (Archive)

April 17, 2023 – House Oversight: Six additional Biden family members may have benefited from the family business schemes

Vice President Joe Biden, flanked by his wife Jill Biden and family members, acknowledges the audience at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sept. 6, 2012, on the final day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC). (Credit: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) issued the following statement after he and several lawmakers went to the U.S. Department of the Treasury to view financial records related to the Biden family and their associates’ business transactions:

“Thousands of pages of financial records related to the Biden family, their companies, and associates’ business schemes were made available to members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which confirm the importance of this investigation. The Biden family enterprise is centered on Joe Biden’s political career and connections, and it has generated an exorbitant amount of money for the Biden family. We’ve identified six additional members of Joe Biden’s family who may have benefited from the Biden family’s businesses that we are investigating, bringing the total number of those involved or benefiting to nine.

“The Oversight Committee will continue to pursue additional bank records to follow the Bidens’ tangled web of financial transactions to determine if the Biden family has been targeted by foreign actors and if there is a national security threat. We will soon provide the public with more information about what we’ve uncovered to date. The American people need transparency and accountability, and the Oversight Committee will deliver much needed answers.”  (oversight.house.gov, 4/17/2023)  (Archive)

April 18, 2023 – Hillary’s 2016 campaign CFO and current SEC Chairman, Gary Gensler, claims he wasn’t aware of payment for Steele Dossier

(…) It was also clear at this time that Gensler was running Hillary’s campaign finances.  Gensler also worked with Hillary’s attorney Marc Elias in creating the Hillary Victory Fund, according to Bloomberg in a piece in June 2016:

Gensler’s portfolio stretches into other areas as well. He, along with campaign lawyer Marc Elias and national finance director Dennis Cheng, led the process last year to create the Hillary Victory Fund, which jointly raises money for the campaign, the DNC, and state Democratic parties.

Elias was Hillary’s general counsel at the time Gensler was CFO.

It was during this time when Gensler oversaw the Hillary campaign’s finances that Hillary’s campaign paid millions to law firm Perkins Coie.  This was also the time that the Steele dossier was paid for.

We know that Gensler has hidden meetings he had with  Hillary, Soros, Pelosi and others from his calendar.

Today Gensler was asked whether he facilitated the payment for the Steele dossier for the Hillary campaign.  He claimed after much hesitation that he wasn’t aware of the payment for the Steele campaign.

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 4/18/2023)  (Archive)

April 18, 2023 – American black leftist groups and activists are being charged with felonies for posting memes and other political content against the war in Ukraine

A federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, returned a superseding indictment charging four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals with working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States. Among other conduct, the superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda; the indicted intelligence officers, in particular, participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.

Additionally, in a separate case out of the District of Columbia, a criminal complaint was unsealed charging Russian national Natalia Burlinova with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent of Russia in the United States.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

“Efforts by the Russian government to secretly influence U.S. elections will not be tolerated,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “As today’s announcement demonstrates, the Criminal Division is committed to eradicating foreign malign influence from the U.S. political system and helping ensure the integrity of our elections.”

“Today’s announcement paints a harrowing picture of Russian government actions and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere with our elections, sow discord in our nation and ultimately recruit U.S citizens to their efforts,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “All Americans should be deeply concerned by the tactics employed by the FSB and remain vigilant to any attempt to undermine our democracy. The FBI remains committed to confronting this egregious behavior and ultimately disrupting our adversaries and those who act on their behalf.”

United States v. Ionov, et al.

According to the superseding indictment returned in the Middle District of Florida, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow, was the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow, Russia, and funded by the Russian government. Ionov allegedly utilized AGMR to carry out Russia’s malign influence campaign. Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by Moscow-based FSB officers, including indicted defendants Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov and Yegor Sergeyevich Popov.

“The prosecution of this criminal conduct is essential to protecting the American public when foreign governments seek to inject themselves into the American political process,” said U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg for the Middle District of Florida. “We thank our partners at the FBI for their tireless investigation of these events and their commitment to ensure justice is done.”

Among other illegal activities, the superseding indictment alleges that Ionov, Sukhodolov and Popov conspired to directly and substantially influence democratic elections in the United States by clandestinely funding and directing the political campaign of a particular candidate for local office in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2019. For instance, the superseding indictment alleges that Popov expressly referred to this effort on behalf of the FSB as “our election campaign,” and Ionov referring to the candidate as the “candidate whom we supervise.” Ionov and Popov allegedly intended that this election interference plot would extend beyond the 2019 local election cycle in St. Petersburg, and subsequently discussed that the “USA Presidential election” was the FSB’s “main topic of the year.”

Moreover, from at least November 2014 until July 2022, Ionov allegedly engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign targeting the United States. As a part of the campaign, Ionov allegedly recruited members of political groups within the United States, including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement (collectively, the APSP) in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia and a political group in California (referred to in the superseding indictment as U.S. Political Group 3), to participate in the influence campaign and act as agents of Russia in the United States, including the following indicted defendants:

  • Omali Yeshitela, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the chairman and founder of the APSP;
  • Penny Joanne Hess, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the leader of a component of the APSP;
  • Jesse Nevel, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as a member of a component of the APSP; and
  • Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Atlanta, who served as a leader of the APSP and a founder of Black Hammer in Georgia.

APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela (Credit: African Peoples Socialist Party)

One focus of Ionov’s alleged influence operation was to create the appearance of American popular support for Russia’s annexation of territories in Ukraine. For example, in May 2020, Ionov allegedly sent a request he stated was from “Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic” – an apparent reference to a Russian-occupied region in eastern Ukraine – to Yeshitela and members of other U.S. political groups to make statements in support of the independence of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed breakaway state in eastern Ukraine. Ionov later allegedly touted to the FSB that Yeshitela’s video-recorded statement of support was the first time that “American nonprofit organizations congratulated citizens” of the occupied region.

Ionov’s use of the APSP to promote Russian propaganda relating to Ukraine allegedly continued after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Feb. 24, 2022, Ionov allegedly emailed Nevel an “URGENT MESSAGE” which contained pro-Russian talking points in support of the invasion. Thereafter, throughout March 2022, the APSP repeatedly hosted Ionov via video conference to discuss the war, during which Ionov falsely stated that anyone who supported Ukraine also supported Naziism and white supremacy, and Yeshitela and another APSP member allegedly made statements of solidarity with the Russian government.

Ionov, Sukhodolov, Popov, Yeshitela, Hess, Nevel and Romain are charged with conspiring to have U.S. citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government within the United States without providing prior notification to the Attorney General, as required by law. If convicted, they each face a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Yeshitela, Hess and Nevel are also charged with acting as agents of Russia within the United States without such prior notification. If convicted, they each face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. If convicted, a federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Daniel J. Marcet and Risha Asokan for the Middle District of Florida, Trial Attorney Menno Goedman of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, and Trial Attorney Demetrius Sumner of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section are prosecuting the case.

United States v. Burlinova

According to the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint unsealed in the District of Columbia, Russian national Natalia Burlinova, a resident of Moscow, conspired with an FSB officer to recruit U.S. citizens from academic and research institutions to travel to Russia to participate in a public diplomacy program called Meeting Russia. The program was operated by PICREADI, a Russian organization led by Burlinova, funded by the Russian government and devoted to promoting Russian national interests.

“The defendant is accused of subverting our foreign agent notification laws to promote Russian national interests here in the United States, concealing from the public that her recruitment efforts were funded by a Russian security service,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves for the District of Columbia. “We will continue to expose these serious crimes and hold all who perpetrate them accountable.”

The affidavit alleges that the FSB officer provided funding and other support for Burlinova’s foreign recruitment and her efforts to advance Russian interests in the United States. In return, Burlinova provided the FSB officer with extensive information about U.S. citizens who were recruited to attend her programs, including their résumés, passport information, photographs and analyses of their views toward Russia. Burlinova further identified for the FSB officer particular U.S. citizens who, in Burlinova’s view, had expressed positive attitudes towards Russia and were prepared to continue to collaborate. During a recruitment trip to the United States in fall 2018, Burlinova met with U.S. citizens at various universities and research institutions and provided to photographs of her meetings to the FSB officer. The FSB officer used the information Burlinova provided prepare FSB intelligence reports. Burlinova never notified the Attorney General of these efforts or otherwise disclosed to the public that her recruitment efforts were supported and funded by a Russian security service.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael J. Friedman for the District of Columbia and Trial Attorney Emma D. Ellenrieder of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are prosecuting the case. (justice.gov, 4/18/2023)  (Archive)

Glenn Greenwald adds an important perspective to this story in this Twitter thread:

April 20, 2023 – Fake news reckoning…Buzzfeed shuts down their news service

BuzzFeed News Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith talks with colleagues BuzzFeed headquarters, December 11, 2018 in New York City. (Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s memo announcing the mercy killing Thursday morning and the memo was tweeted out by a media reporter* for the far-left New York Times.

In part, the memo read:

Additionally, I made the decision to overinvest[**] in BuzzFeed News[***] because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism[****] for social media.

…

Just as we reduced our footprint in NYC last year, we will be reducing our real estate in Los Angeles from four buildings to one[.]

…

HuffPost and BuzzFeed Dot Com have signaled that they will open a number of select roles for members of BuzzFeed News

…

As part of today’s changes, both our CRO Edgar Hernandez and COO Christian Bressler have made the decision to exit the company.

Overall, BuzzFeed will cut 15 percent of its 1200-person staff.

(…) In its early days, BuzzFeed News made a cottage industry out of attacking Breitbart News with lies and gossip. You see, they were angry about us telling the truth about them. But the whole thing was biased and dull and doomed from the start. Then, eight or nine years ago, BuzzFeed News fell off the radar entirely until Christian Bressler violated every journalistic protocol ever written to publish the Deep State’s phony Russia dossier on Donald Trump.

Then everyone forgot about BuzzFeed News again. Then Ben Smith left to do business with the Nazis in China, and now it’s finally over. (Read more: Breitbart, 4/20/2023)  (Archive)

April 20, 2023 – Federal Court blocks ex-Trump investigator from testifying before House Judiciary Committee

Mark Pomerantz (l) and Alvin Bragg. (Credit Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: CBS/Shutterstock)

A federal court temporarily stopped former Special Assistant District Attorney Mark Pomerantz from being required to testify over Manhattan District Attorney Bragg’s investigation into former President Donald Trump.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan subpoenaed Pomerantz after Bragg indicted Trump for allegedly falsifying business records, with the congressman accusing Pomerantz of politicizing the investigation and encouraging Bragg to press charges. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil turned down Bragg’s request to stop the subpoena’s enforcement in his April 11 lawsuit against Jordan, but the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a temporary administrative stay of the subpoena’s Thursday return date so a three-panel judge could consider Bragg’s subsequent appeal.

(…) Pomerantz said in his book “People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account” that he resigned from Bragg’s office in February 2022 when he came to believe Trump would not be indicted and told Bragg he was responsible for a “grave failure of justice.” (Read more, The Daily Caller, 4/20/2023) (Archive)

April 21, 2023 – Trump tells Gen Flynn, “it’s only a year and a half, just stay healthy”…why Flynn is still dangerous to establishment neocon and neoliberal globalists

April 21, 2023 – The ‘senior’ official accused of political interference in Hunter Biden case is Merrick Garland

Merrick Garland (Credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press)

Attorney General Merrick Garland is under fire for allegedly obstructing the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of current President Joe Biden, after a whistleblower came forward in sworn testimony to name a “senior” official who is supervising the case.

The whistleblower, represented by a lawyer who sent a bombshell letter to Congress, has claimed that a “high-profile, controversial” case managed by the Department of Justice (DOJ), believed to be the investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged failure to pay taxes, faced “clear conflicts of interest.”

The whistleblower claimed to have information that contradicted the sworn testimony of a “senior” Biden administration official, who has been identified as Merrick Garland. The identification was first made by the New York Post, and later by the Washington Examiner and Daily Mail, all citing anonymous sources.

Thus, the Attorney General would be guilty of committing perjury in statements given to Congress under oath, if the accusations are shown to be accurate.

Garland’s testimony to Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee in April 2022, where he assured that there would be no political interference in the investigation into Hunter Biden, has been called into question.

Garland had also stated that U.S. Attorney David Weiss of Delaware, a Trump appointee, was the supervisor of the investigation and had full authority to bring charges. Garland reiterated this promise in March 2023 during testimony to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. However, it remains unclear which specific testimony the whistleblower was referring to. (Read more: Becker News, 4/21/2023) (Archive)

April 21, 2023 – Blinken was on Facebook and Google’s payroll three weeks before 2020 election

Source: (Fast Company, 10/29/2017)

April 21, 2023 – Ex-CIA official: Biden campaign behind letter framing Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation

A former deputy director of the CIA was prompted by the Biden campaign to frame the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation in a letter signed by dozens of former senior intelligence officials ahead of the 2020 presidential election, according to testimony revealed by Congressional lawmakers.

Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell was among the 51 signatories of an open letter (pdf) that said the New York Post’s October 2020 report dismissing the explosive contents of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden.

The letter said that the “arrival on the U.S. political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving of the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Subsequent reporting has confirmed that the laptop wasn’t part of a Russian disinformation campaign but had been abandoned at a computer repair shop. Some of the contents found on the laptop included embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden, including one apparently showing him passed out with a crack pipe.

At the time, Biden’s presidential campaign cited the letter in framing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. Polling suggests that if voters had been aware of the laptop’s contents, some would have voted differently, with a potentially different outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Morrell said in Congressional testimony cited by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that Morrell had organized the letter at the urging of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who at the time was serving as an adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign.

Jordan, who heads both the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, has demanded that Blinken answer a series of questions about Morrell’s testimony and provide records of related communication. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 4/21/2023)  (Archive)

UPDATE:

(…) The decision to drop the appeal came on Friday night after Bragg’s office said they had come to an agreement with the committee.

“Our successful stay of this subpoena blocked the immediate deposition and afforded us the time necessary to coordinate with the House Judiciary Committee on an agreement that protects the District Attorney’s privileges and interests. We are pleased with this resolution, which ensures any questioning of our former employee will take place in the presence of our General Counsel on a reasonable, agreed upon timeframe,” a spokesperson for his office said.

A spokesman for Rep. Jordan’s office also confirmed that the parties had reached an agreement.

“This evening, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office withdrew its appeal in Bragg v. Jordan. Mr. Pomerantz’s deposition will go forward on May 12, and we look forward to his appearance,”  spokesman Russell Dye said.

This week a federal judge rejected Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s request to block a former prosecutor in his office from testifying before the House Judiciary Committee about the criminal case against former President Donald Trump.

“The committee and its chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), had subpoenaed ex-assistant district attorney Mark Pomerantz to give testimony about the DA’s investigation into Trump, 76, that culminated in the former president’s indictment in March. Bragg filed suit against Jordan and the Judiciary Committee, claiming the subpoena was an overreach by the GOP-led House and an attempt to influence a state criminal proceeding,” the New York Post reported. “But Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found the subpoena was issued with a valid legislative purpose and that it was not the role of the federal judiciary to dictate how Congress operates.”

“Mr. Pomerantz must appear for the congressional deposition. No one is above the law,” Judge Vyskocil wrote in an opinion issued after a Manhattan federal court hearing. (Read more: Conservative Brief, 4/21/2023)  (Archive)

April 25, 2023 – Former DNI Ratcliffe: Media ‘knew’ intel community concluded Hunter laptop wasn’t Russian misinformation

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe pointed out that the media knew that the intelligence community had already concluded that the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn’t Russian misinformation when they used “Mike Morell and Antony Blinken’s coordinated letter” on the laptop story as a reason to falsely declare the story Russian misinformation.

Ratcliffe said that not only have the media largely ignored the new developments on the letter, “It’s that the media [were] in on it. [14] hours before Mike Morell and Antony Blinken’s coordinated letter was published in POLITICO, I went on national TV and put out a statement refuting what Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was saying that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign. So, they all knew that the official position of the intelligence community was that this was not Russian disinformation. But they all went with it anyway. Laura, remember, this was just two weeks before the presidential election. They just had to mislead the American people and keep this false narrative alive for two weeks to pull off the election interference that they were clearly engaged in.” (Breitbart, 4/25/2023)  (Archive)

April 26, 2023 – Rapper Pras Michel found guilty of funneling illegal foreign donations to Obama campaign

Pras Michel (Credit: The Globe and Mail)

A Washington, D.C., jury found famous rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel guilty on 10 federal charges, including corruption, conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.

The Grammy award-winning artist from the world-famous 1992 hip-hop group “The Fugees” who was at the center of multimillion-dollar political conspiracies was convicted on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press. The trial included testimony from high-profile political and entertainment figures, including actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Michel received more than $100 million from Malaysian billionaire Jho Low, which he used effort to influence American politics, prosecutors charged. He was also convicted of lobbying on behalf of the Chinese government, according to the BBC.

(…) Low allegedly funneled money to Michel, and is accused of stealing about $4bn from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund during the 1MDB scandal, according to the BBC. He is currently wanted by the U.S. government.

(…) Michel said he met Low in 2006 when he was associated with big Hollywood names and helped finance Hollywood films, including DiCaprio’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” DiCaprio testified that Low seemed to be a legitimate businessman who was interested in donating to former President Barack Obama’s campaign, according to The Associated Press. (Read more The Daily Caller, 4/27/2023) (Archive)

April 26, 2023 – Trump lawyers provide key insight on background of Mar-a-Lago raid via letter to Gang of Eight

If you are deep in the political research weeds about the weaponization of government, there is a letter from lawyers representing President Trump to the chair of the House Intel Committee that is very interesting [pdf available here].

The letter is written to HPSCI Chair Mike Turner and copied to the other seven members of the gang-of-eight in the Senate and House.  The letter outlines the details of the documents that became the contested issue between the DOJ-National Security Division (‘NSD’, important distinction), specifically a DOJ-NSD official named Jay Bratt, and the attorney for President Trump, Mr. Evan Corcoran.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

The letter is fascinating because it outlines how the process of moving documents from the White House was weaponized by a politically motivated National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”), and the letter also gives fulsome context to the types of “classified materials” that have been insanely over emphasized by media.

[…] “Tim Parlatore and Jim Trusty, two of the undersigned counsel for President Trump, reviewed all 15 boxes at NARA earlier this year and based on that review, it is clear to us what happened. The boxes contain all manner of documents from the White House, are loosely grouped by date, and include newspapers, magazines, notes, letters, and daily schedules. Following its review of the materials, NARA inserted placeholder pages where it had removed documents with classification markings. That allowed Messrs. Parlatore and Trusty to discern what the documents were, as well as what other materials in the boxes were in the proximity of the marked documents when the White House staff packed them. The vast majority of the placeholder inserts refer to briefings for phone calls with foreign leaders that were located near the schedule for those calls.”  (page 3, pdf link)

Additionally, get this part…  despite the standard process that has been in place for the prior four administrations, the NARA refused to participate in the collection of any documents from the White House during the transition phase following the November 2020 election.

The NARA refused to assist in the collection of the Trump records for national archive holding and review, and then the NARA triggered a sequence of events that led to the DOJ using a reference from the NARA, to weaponize a process they refused to engage in.  The NARA refused to do their specialized bureaucratic job, and then the NARA used what they defined as an incomplete job as a reason to refer the outcome to the DOJ.   The details are quite interesting.

The letter details how the DOJ-NSD then weaponized the process, fought with the FBI investigative and supervisory agents who were saying Trump was doing nothing wrong, and then culminating in a documented lie to the Florida magistrate, in order to get a politically motivated search warrant.

The DOJ will not release the documents they used to convince the judge to obtain the warrant.  Additionally, the DOJ will not release a list of the documents, or even describe the documents, they later claimed are classified.   To this date, the Trump defense team is being told President Trump held classified documents, yet the DOJ will not describe to the lawyers who represent President Trump, what those classified documents are.

I strongly urge anyone interested to read the 10-page letter.  It is a key part of the puzzle being explained and outlined.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/27/2023)  (Archive)

April 26, 2023 – HHS whistleblower claims US government Is ‘middleman’ in child trafficking operation

Tara Lee Rodas, the HHS whistleblower, gives her opening statement on the child migrant crisis to the House Judiciary Committee.

April 27, 2023 – House Ways and Means protects IRS whistleblower claiming political interference in Hunter Biden tax probe

House Ways and Means Committee Chair, Jason Smith (Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) has permitted an IRS agent to inform Congress about alleged political interference by the Justice Department in the Hunter Biden tax probe.

The Ways and Means Committee has authorized two lawyers for the IRS whistleblower to collect information about what their client witnessed at the IRS regarding Hunter’s tax probe.

Specifically, the IRS agent claims two Biden administration political appointees within the DOJ are working to block charges against Hunter for tax violations despite recommendations. In addition, the IRS agent believes Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to name a special counsel in the probe to provide a degree of separation between the probe and President Joe Biden.

“Last week, a whistleblower came forward with troubling claims about abuses of power,” Chairman Smith told IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel during a congressional hearing Thursday. “We are conducting a review of this matter and will go wherever the facts lead us. I expect full cooperation from the IRS, particularly with regard to ensuring this whistleblower is protected from retaliation.” (Read more: Breitbart, 5/1/2023)  (Archive)

April 27, 2023 – DOJ IG Horowitz testifies there were 3.4 million backdoor FISA searches on American citizens in 2021 with a 30% error rate

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz (Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz could not answer how many people in the federal government can use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on Americans through backdoor searches when Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz asked him at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Thursday.

FISA Section 702 enables intelligence agencies to carry out targeted surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S., but they have improperly used it on Americans. There were 3.4 million backdoor searches in 2021, according to an Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2022 Transparency report.

There was around a 30% error rate in these queries, Horowitz said in his testimony.

“How many people can perform these backdoor queries?” Gaetz asked.

“I’m gonna defer to board members ’cause you have the review ongoing,” Horowitz responded, referring to Sharon Bradford Franklin, Chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 4/27/2023)  (Archive)

April 28, 2023 – After Hunter Biden divested from Chinese firm BHR Partners, his top attorney, Kevin Morris, obtains control of a ten percent stake

Author Kevin Morris, who is also Hunter Biden’s attorney, attends his “White Man’s Problem” book release party on June 3, 2014, in Los Angeles, California. (Credit: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, controls an entity with a ten percent stake in BHR Partners, a Chinese state-backed investment fund founded just days after Hunter and President Joe Biden visited China in 2013, a source confirmed Friday to Breitbart News.

After pressure increased on Hunter Biden to divest from BHR Partners due to a conflict of interest upon Joe Biden assuming the White House, Hunter Biden’s lawyer told the New York Times in the fall of 2021 that his client “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly in either BHR or Skaneateles.”

Skaneateles LLC, the entity which owns ten percent of BHR Partners, according to Chinese public records from Baidu, was controlled by Hunter as the sole governor until its dissolution in September 2021, a Washington, DC, registration indicated. 

But new documents obtained by Breitbart News, first revealed by nonprofit Marco Polo, show the control of Skaneateles LLC is being held by Kevin Morris, Hunter’s top attorney, who also paid Hunter’s IRS debts.

In a document entitled, “AMENDED AND RESTATED JOINT VENTURE CONTRACT of BHR PARTNERS (SHANGHAI) EQUITY INVESTMENT FUND MANAGEMENT CO., LTD. A FOREIGN-FUNDED ENTERPRISE,” Kevin Morris is listed as the Managing Member of Skaneateles LLC.

The document shows Skaneateles LLC holds a ten percent stake in BHR Partners, equivalent to $3 million.

Breitbart News also obtained a copy of an email with the subject line, “Signing Instructions,” sent by a BHR Partners’ company email address from the name Heng-Yin Zhang to Jimmy Bulger, who is a Biden family longtime business partner. Hunter Biden previously was a BHR Partners board member with Bulger.

Bulger’s firm, Thornton Group LLC, is deeply connected with business in China. Thornton Group LLC is also listed in the agreement, the document shows.

“We have mailed you the documents for signing (Fedex tracking no.: 8137 6269 8141 0448). We would like to share with you the signing instructions of the documents in the order of their placements inside the envelope we send to you,” an email reads to Bulger from Heng-Yin Zhang, an individual with a BHR Partners’ email address. 

Breitbart News confirmed and authenticated the venture contract and the “Signing Instructions” email with a source with knowledge of the transaction. In addition, the source confirmed “Kevin Morris is the ‘managing partner’ of Skaneateles, LLC’ and that ‘Skaneateles has a 10 percent stake in the [BHR] venture.’” (Read more: Breitbart, 4/28/2023)  (Archive)

April 30, 2023 – On Sunday Morning Futures, Sen. Ron Johnson accuses Antony Blinken of lying under oath about contacting Hunter Biden

Blinken told Johnson’s committee he did not email Hunter Biden. Now Johnson has those emails.

Senator Ron Johnson: What is interesting, Marie, and here’s a little news for you. Anthony Blinken finally did come in and sit down for a voluntary transcribed interview in December of 2020 because he wanted to be secretary of state. And now, because of more information that’s come out, we know that he lied bold face to Congress about never emailing Hunter Biden. My guess is he told a bunch of other lies that hopefully we’ll be able to bring him and his wife back in, tell them to preserve their records. You cannot trust Joe Biden. You cannot trust Hunter Biden. You can’t trust the Biden family. You can’t trust so many of the people that they have surrounded themselves with these made men. I basically agree with that statement…

…What do you do when you have, in effect, co conspirators of the Biden family inside the agencies, inside our intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, the FBI. And you have the political party, the Democrats, who couldn’t care less, have no interest whatsoever in the corruption that is being uncovered bit by bit as we pull back the layers of the onion here… He must preserve his emails. We must get to the bottom of this. We need to show how corrupt these individuals are.

Sunday Morning Futures, 4/30/2023

April 30, 2023 – Epstein’s private calendar emerges: Among prominent names listed are Biden’s CIA chief and Obama’s WH attorney

In 2014, current CIA director William Burns had three meetings with Jeffrey Epstein when Burns was Obama’s deputy secretary of state, and after Epstein had been convicted of child sex exploitation, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Burns and Epstein first met in Washington prior to Burns visiting Epstein and his Manhattan townhouse, according to a trove of leaked documents that include Epstein’s schedules which were not contained in Epstein’s “black book” of contacts or flight logs.

Burns, who became CIA Director under Biden in 2021, met with Epstein while he was preparing to leave his position in the government, according to agency spokeswoman Tammy Kupperman Thorp.

“The director did not know anything about him, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector,” she said, adding “They had no relationship.”

Mr. Burns, 67 years old, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Russia, had meetings with Epstein in 2014 when Mr. Burns was deputy secretary of state. 

A lunch was planned that August at the office of law firm Steptoe & Johnson in Washington. Epstein scheduled two evening appointments that September with Mr. Burns at his townhouse, the documents show. After one of the scheduled meetings, Epstein planned for his driver to take Mr. Burns to the airport.

Mr. Burns recalls being introduced in Washington by a mutual friend, and meeting Epstein once briefly in New York, said Ms. Thorp. “The director does not recall any further contact, including receiving a ride to the airport,” she said. -WSJ

One month after meeting with Epstein, in October 2014, Burns stepped down from this role at the State Department to serve as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. He ran it until he was nominated by Biden to serve as CIA director in early 2021.

Epstein also had dozens of meetings with then-Obama White House attorney Kathryn Ruemmler, who went on to become Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer in 2020. Epstein also planned for her to join him in 2015 on a trip to Paris, and in 2017 to visit his private island in the Caribbean.

Obama White House attorney Kathryn Ruemmler appears on Meet the Press, June 2014. (Ccredit: Meet the Press)

According to a spokesman for Goldman, Ruemmler had a ‘professional relationship’ with Epstein tied to her role at law firm Latham & Watkins LLP, and did not travel with him.

“I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein,” she said.

According to the documents, however, they knew each other well enough… following Epstein’s 2006 conviction for sexually abusing girls in Florida as young as 14-years-old.

He asked for avocado sushi rolls to be on hand when meeting with Ms. Ruemmler, according to the documents. He visited apartments she was considering buying. In October 2014, Epstein knew her travel plans and told an assistant to look into her flight. “See if there is a first class seat,” he wrote, “if so upgrade her.”

(…) Other notables in the new report include;

  • Leon Botstein, president of Bard College
  • Noam Chomsky, who was scheduled to fly with Epstein to have dinner at the pedophile’s Manhattan townhouse in 2015
  • Anthropologist Helen Fisher, who says she ‘didn’t have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, “But I remembered it because of his spectacular house and because of the six young women.”
  • Joshua Cooper Ramo, then co-chief executive of Henry Kissinger’s corporate consulting firm.
  • Harvard professor Martin Nowak
  • Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak

(Read more: Zero Hedge, 4/30/2023)  (Archive)

May 1, 2023 – Judge says Epstein sent a JPMorgan exec photo of young woman in ‘sexually suggestive pose’

Jes Staley (Credit: public domain)

Then-top JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley allegedly abused “some” of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims — and received a “sexually suggestive” photograph of one young woman from the now-deceased pedophile, a judge indicated in a ruling.

Released on Monday afternoon, Senior U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff’s 54-page opinion and order explains why he advanced claims alleging that JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank knowingly profited from Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme. Rakoff revealed new details about the bank, and its former executives, in explaining his reasoning.

The most prominent among these bankers is Staley, who later moved on to become the CEO of Barclays Bank, before resigning amid scrutiny of his Epstein ties.

JPMorgan has tried to shift the blame to Staley in a separate lawsuit, claiming that their former executive disguised his Epstein ties for personal reasons. Jane Doe, the anonymous woman suing JPMorgan in a proposed class action, claimed in a deposition that Staley sexually abused her.

Rakoff’s ruling suggests that she’s not his only accuser. (Read more: Law and Crime, 5/1/2023)  (Archive)

May 2, 2023 – Lawsuit against key speech silencers threatens to blow open the Censorship-Industrial Complex

The members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with government actors to censor speech at Big Tech companies in violation of the First Amendment, a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday alleges. The case, Hines v. Stamos, promises to blow open the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

Jim Hoft, founder of The Gateway Pundit, and Jill Hines, the co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana, a consumer and human rights advocacy organization, filed suit earlier today in a federal court in Louisiana against the organizations and individuals behind the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and Virality Project, seeking to represent a class of similarly situated plaintiffs. The 88-page complaint alleged four claims against the defendants, all of whom held roles in the EIP and Virality Project’s efforts to censor the plaintiffs’ speech.

According to its website, the Election Integrity Partnership was formed in 2020 “between four of the nation’s leading institutions focused on understanding misinformation and disinformation in the social media landscape: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.” Then, in early 2021, the same four entities expanded their focus to address supposed Covid-19 “misinformation” on social media, calling the efforts the “Virality Project.”

The class-action lawsuit named as defendants Stanford Internet Observatory as well as the Leland Stanford Junior University and its board of trustees, the latter two of which are allegedly legally responsible for the observatory’s conduct. The complaint also named Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Renée DiResta, its research manager. Plaintiffs also sued the Atlantic Council, the group’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and the lab’s senior director, Graham Brookie, who is alleged to have played a “leading role in the censorship activities.”

The Allegations

Over the course of the nearly 90-page complaint, the plaintiffs alleged the defendants caused the censorship of Hines, Hoft, and other similarly situated individuals, based on their viewpoints related to the 2020 election and Covid-19. Significantly, the complaint also detailed the extensive connections between, and involvement with, the government and the individual defendants and private entities.

Those allegations indicate government actors helped coordinate the establishment of the EIP, funded its activities, and fed it complaints of supposed election and Covid disinformation and misinformation that the EIP then forwarded to the social media companies for censorship. The complaint also alleged the defendants viewed the EIP as a way to skirt the First Amendment and do for the government what the Constitution prohibited the government from doing for itself: censor speech.

Based on these allegations, the plaintiffs alleged in count one that the defendants conspired to violate the First Amendment. Count two alleged the defendants, while not government employees, were nonetheless acting “under color of State law,” and as such violated the First Amendment. The class-action complaint added two more state law claims, one based on the defendants’ alleged interference with the plaintiffs’ contractual and business relationships. The final claim alleged the defendants intentionally breached the duty they owed the plaintiffs “not to interfere unlawfully with their freedom, rights, and ability to speak, write, listen, read, and communicate freely on social media with others.” (Read more: The Federalist, 5/02/2023) (Archive)

May 3, 2023 – House and Senate GOP seek document from FBI alleging a pay-to-play bribery scheme involving then VP Joe Biden

House and Senate GOP investigators said Wednesday they have learned the FBI possesses a document alleging a pay-to-play bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and have subpoenaed it in an explosive new twist in their long running corruption probe of the first family.

Senate Budget Committee ranking member and long-time whistleblower advocate Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said they learned of the document, known as FD-1023, from a whistleblower.

 Grassley – Comer letter.pdf

“We believe the FBI possesses an unclassified internal document that includes very serious and detailed allegations implicating the current President of the United States,” Grassley said. “What we don’t know is what, if anything, the FBI has done to verify these claims or investigate further. The FBI’s recent history of botching politically charged investigations demands close congressional oversight.”

Said Comer: “The information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national. The American people need to know if President Biden sold out the United States of America to make money for himself. Senator Grassley and I will seek the truth to ensure accountability for the American people.”

 Comer Subpoena cover letter and Wray Subpoena 050322 (1).pdf

Comer said his committee issued a subpoena designed to compel the FBI to produce the memo. (Read more: Just the News, 5/03/2023)  (Archive)

May 3, 2023 – Epstein was an FBI source before his 2007 plea deal

Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest drew national attention, particularly focusing on a deal that allowed him to plead guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida and avoid more serious federal charges. | (Credit: Richard Drew/Associated Press)

Back in 2007, the Department of Justice gave Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart deal that deferred prosecuting Epstein for federal offenses – including the interstate sex trafficking of minors and recruiting minors to engage in commercial sex acts – in exchange for Epstein pleading guilty to Florida state-level solicitation of prostitution and procurement charges.

The deal was shocking in both its timing and scope. It was made before the FBI had interviewed all of Epstein’s victims and before the FBI had seized Epstein’s computers.

It immunized Epstein’s known and unknown co-conspirators who were credibly accused of trafficking and abusing minors, a rare and troubling agreement you will not find in any other federal non-prosecution agreement:

“if Epstein successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, or Nadia Marcinkova.”

And it implicated both the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida (Alex Acosta) and Main Justice in Washington, D.C., which approved of the plea deal, delayed the grand jury, and stopped victims from being notified of the agreement in violation of federal law.

Adding to the intrigue were the words of Alex Acosta, the then-US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida who gave Epstein his non-prosecution agreement. According to the Daily Beast:

Acosta cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

Then we discovered (in 2018) that Epstein had been informing the FBI way back in 2008 after his plea deal with the DOJ had been signed.  In the FBI’s words: “Epstein has also provided information to the FBI as agreed upon.”

That raised a red flag, and caused us to suspect that Epstein’s relationship with the FBI went back further than 2008. So we demanded all of Epstein interviews from the FBI. The FBI didn’t deny these records existed; instead, it hid behind the FOIA law enforcement exemption.

Good news – we have defeated that exemption, at least partially. In doing so, we have uncovered records concerning Epstein’s history as a source for the FBI. And it dates back before his 2007 plea deal.

Here’s what we can confirm: Epstein’s history of cooperation with the FBI goes as far back as 2002. We have the summary of his FBI interview – the 302 – in which he reported financial fraud from concerning a potential telecommunications investor. (Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 5/03/2023)  (Archive)

May 4, 2023 – How Corrupt Is Our Current Situation? It’s Worse Than Most Can Fathom…

Everything that preceded the 2020 federal election was a complex system of control by a network of ideologues, federal agencies, allies in the private sector, financial stakeholders and corrupt interests all working toward a common goal.  There’s no need to go through the background of how the election was manipulated and how the government and private sector, specifically social media, worked to influence the 2020 outcome because you have all seen it.

Whether it was local election officials working to control outcomes, federal agencies working to support them (CISA, FBI, DHS), financial interests working to fund them (Zuckerberg et al), or social media platforms controlling the visible content and discussion (Twitter Files, Google, Facebook etc.), the objective was all the same.  It was a massive one-sided operation against the freewill of the American voter.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, those same system operators, govt officials, corporate media, private sector groups and social media platforms then circled the wagons to scatter the evidence of their conduct.  If you questioned anything you were a threat.  That’s the context to the dynamic that unfolded.

Lawfare operatives joined forces with Democrat staffers, and allies in social media platforms all worked in concert to target the voices of anyone who would rise in opposition to the corruption that was stunningly clear in the outcome of the election process.  Corporate media then labeled, isolated, ridiculed and marginalized anyone who dared to point out the obvious.

When AG Merrick Garland says this of January 6, 2021: (…) “the Justice Department has conducted one of the largest, most complex, and most resource-intensive investigations in our history. We have worked to analyze massive amounts of physical and digital data. We have recovered devices, decrypted electronic messages, triangulated phones, and pored through tens of thousands of hours of video. We have also benefited from tens of thousands of tips we received from the public. Following these digital and physical footprints, we were able to identify hundreds of people.” {link} The targeting operation needs context.

Do you remember on April 27th when DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz recently said, “more than 3.4 million search queries into the NSA database took place between Dec. 1st, 2020 and Nov. 30th, 2021, by government officials and/or contractors working on behalf of the federal government.”  The result was “more than 1 million searches of private documents and communication of Americans that were illegal and non-compliant,” and over “10,000 federal employees have access to that database.” {OIG Testimony}.

Put the statement from Garland together with the statement from Horowitz, and you get an understanding of what was done.

Hundreds of stakeholders in the Lawfare network joined forces with hundreds of people who became staff researchers for a weaponized Congress.  Hundreds more social media background agents then poured thousands of hours into feeding private information to the DOJ, FBI, J6 Committee and all of their hired staff working on the project.

How do I know?

I was one of their targets.

Before telling the rest of the story, some background is needed.

I am well versed in the ways of the administrative state and the corrupt systems, institutions and silos that make up our weaponized government. I can (a) see them; (b) predict their activity; and (c) know where their traps and operations are located.

Traveling the deep investigative weeds of the administrative state eventually gives you a set of skills.  When people ask how the outlines on this website can seem so far ahead of the sunlight that eventually falls upon the outlined corruption, this is essentially why.  When you take these skills on the road, you learn to be a free-range scout, and after a long while you learn how to track the activity.

When I was outlining how the Fourth Branch of Government works and/or Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop and the DHS system operating inside it, I wasn’t shooting from the hip. However, people will always seek to dismiss the uncomfortable truth.

Sometimes you just have to wait for the evidence you know exists to surface, or for a situation to unfold that is driven by a self-fulfilling prophecy. The bizarre CTH predictions turn out to be the truth of the issue because they are based on the factual evidence of the issue.

That level of how the system works came in very handy when I received this subpoena from Chairman Bennie Thompson and the J6 Committee.  Warning, things are about to get very uncomfortable if you don’t accept the scale of corruption that exists.

Pay attention to the red box on the page shown. This is essentially the probable cause that justifies the subpoena itself.  I have redacted a name in the box for reasons you will see that follow.

I was never in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, nor did I work with or communicate with anyone who was involved in any of the activities that are subject to the J6 committee investigative authority.

I’m going to skip a lot of background noise, irrelevant legal stuff, jurisdictional issues, discoveries from discussions with lawyers and the experience gained in association with this ridiculous subpoena.  I am going to focus on the biggest story within it.

Sticking to the information in the Red Box above, notice how the J6 committee has evidence, “public-source information and documents on file”, showing my participation, communication, and contact with people and technology that are material interests to the committee.

Here’s the kicker…. I had no clue what the hell they were talking about.  There’s not a single aspect of their outline that I had any knowledge or connection of.

I had no idea what Zello was. I had no idea who 1% watchdog might be. I had never heard of “Stop the Steal J6” or associated “channel.”  I had never heard of the person redacted, and I had never communicated with any Oath Keeper, any communication system, or platform, or anyone or anything – nothing – that is outlined in that subpoena.

Those points of evidence outlined in the subpoena had no connection to me at all.

The subpoena might as well have been asking me to appear in Michigan because my Red Ferrari was involved in a hit and run accident, during my trip to Detroit.  I don’t own a Ferrari; I have never been to Michigan; I certainly never had an accident; I wasn’t on a trip and have never visited Detroit.  The entire construct of their probable cause for the subpoena was silly. Complete and utter nonsense.

That said, how could there be “public records” and “documentary” evidence of something that never happened?

At first, I thought this was some silly case of mistaken identity and they just sent a subpoena to the wrong person.  However, the investigators were adamant the evidence existed, and the need for testimony was required.

After taking advice from several smart people, and after discovering the costs associated with just the reply to the committee and/or representation therein; suddenly I realized there might be more value for me in this subpoena than the committee.  After all, how can there be public-records and documents that I own a red Ferrari and went to Michigan when I don’t and never did.

After several back and forths I discovered, through their admissions of their own research, and through documents they extracted as an outcome of their tasks to prove the merit of their claims, that someone *inside* Twitter had created a fictitious identity of me associated with the networks and communications as the investigators described them.

Think about what was discovered here.

Someone inside the Twitter platform, an employee of Twitter, had made a decision to target me. As a result: (a) they had been doing this for a long time with a specific goal in mind; and (b) they created an elaborate trail of background activity and identity that was entirely fabricated.

Eventually, my assigned investigative unit admitted this.

Once, the federal investigators realized what took place they wanted to get rid of me -and my snark filled curiosity- with great urgency.

They also had an ‘oh shit’ moment, when they contemplated everything, including what they had revealed to me from the outset of my contact, now several months prior.

What I discovered in this experience was that DHS, and by extension DOJ/FBI and the January 6 investigators, had direct administrative level backdoors into all social media platforms.

Overlay the Twitter files now, and then expand your thinking….

In their quest to prove that I owned a Red Ferrari, traveled to Michigan and had a hit-and-run accident, these investigators outlined to me how the United States Government, through their DHS authority, has employees, agents and contractors with open portals into all social media platforms.

Yes, the federal government is inside the mechanics of the systems (Twitter, Facebook, Meta, Instagram, Google, YouTube, WhatsApp, Zello, etc) and they have administrative access in real time to monitor, review, extract and evaluate everything, soup-to-nuts.

It was only because the investigators and forensic data knuckleheads have these portals, that they were able to locate the source of the fabricated evidence they were originally attributing to me.  This was an investigative process and research discovery being conducted in the data processing systems of Twitter in real time as they questioned me.

Once they realized what had taken place, and as soon as I started asking how they were making these admissions (now carrying an apologetic certainty), suddenly the investigators wanted no further contact or communication with me.  You’re good, whoopsie daisy, our bad, sorry.

Now, take some time to fully digest and absorb what I have just shared.

The U.S. government is worried about TikTok, because U.S. citizen data might be extracted?

Meanwhile, the U.S. government, at a fully unrestricted administrative level, is inside Twitter, Facebook, Meta, Insta, YouTube etc., running amok and extracting anything – including private messages… and they’re somehow worried about protecting us from TikTok data collection.  Think about it.

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/4/2023)  (Archive)

May 5, 2023 – Biden names failed OMB nominee Neera Tanden to replace Susan Rice at White House

Neera Tanden (c), president of the Center for American Progress, with co-founder John Podesta (l), and Hillary Clinton, poses during a gala celebrating the 10th anniversary of the center on October 24, 2013. (Credit: Chip Somodavilla / Getty Images)

President Joe Biden named Neera Tanden, his failed nominee for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to replace Susan Rice as his domestic policy advisor at the White House on Friday.

Tanden, a Hillary Clinton loyalist with a checkered past, was forced to withdraw her nomination to lead OMB — a post that requires Senate confirmation — in 2021 due to her past controversial remarks and volatile behavior.

As Breitbart News noted:

Tanden famously mocked Biden as a “mess” in a leaked email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta in 2015, arguing that the former vice president’s bumbling made Clinton look like a better candidate for president.

She also frequently disparaged Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and his supporters during the 2016 Democrat primary.

After serving in President Bill Clinton’s White House, Tanden ran the leftist Center for American Progress, raising money from foreign interests and corporate donors to push left-leaning policy.

Tanden was also disparaged by staff at the Center for American Progress after she revealed the name of an anonymous victim claiming sexual harassment in a staff meeting.

Tanden worked as an associate director for domestic policy at the Clinton White House and was also an advisor to First Lady Hillary Clinton. She also served as a senior advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services under the Obama administration.

In addition, Tanden reportedly assaulted a journalist in 2008 for asking about her vote for the Iraq War. (Read more: Breitbart, 5/5/2023)  (Archive)

May 5, 2023 – The government wants to renew FISA 702, yet drags feet on transparency and needs reform

May 8, 2023 – ChatGPT helps journalist find scrubbed articles on internet re Antony Blinken’s connection to the Aspen Institute who held a “hack and dump” exercise in September 2020 on Biden laptop

(…) Michael Shellenberger posted a “Twitter Files” thread on December 19, 2022 where he uncovered a “hack-and-dump” operation that was conducted as a “tabletop” exercise by the Aspen Institute, two months prior to the 2020 election. Much like the World Health Organization ran Event 201, a think tank that game-planned pandemic scenarios strikingly similar to the circumstances surrounding COVID-19, the Aspen Institute’s “Hack-and-Dump” exercise revolved around the handling of information. Ironically (or not), it revolved around information dumped in relation to Hunter Biden’s leaked emails.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Aspen Digital, an arm of the liberal Aspen Institute, in September 2020 convened a working group of social media executives, journalists, and academics to develop a coverage strategy for a hypothetical “hack and dump” of Hunter Biden’s emails.”

Garrett Graf (Credit: Aspen Institute)

Garrett Graff, the Director of Cyber Initiatives at Aspen Digital, published an article for Wired just a week before Miranda Devine’s explosive, and heavily censored, article in New York Post. Graff’s article was a playbook for how the media should respond to an “October Surprise”. The byline of the article, given those in attendance of their “event”, sounds more like marching orders than an informative piece: “The media knows it screwed up in 2016 with John Podesta. Here’s how it should do better in the final weeks of the 2020 race.”

It gets even more interesting. We now know that Antony Blinken has close ties to the Aspen Institute through his membership with the Aspen Strategy Group. The extent, however, is unclear as much of this seems to have been outright scrubbed from the internet. Literally: scrubbed.

About the only relation between Blinken and the Aspen Institute online still is a publication by the Aspen Strategy Group titled “American Purpose” that lists Blinken as “Staff Director, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

AI to the Rescue

Badlands Media co-founder and investigative journalist Jon Herold took to ChatGPT to help with a stymied research initiative. He started by establishing that ChatGPT’s “knowledge cutoff” is “September 2021.” This means, according to ChatGPT that “I am not aware of any changes that have occurred after my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, including changes to websites or the removal of information from the internet.”

Given that baseline, Herold then asked ChatGPT “When were Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken both former members of the Aspen Strategy Group?” ChatGPT responded that Harris has not been a former member, but that Blinken “has been a member of the Aspen Strategy Group since at least 2017.”

When asked for sources, ChatGPT gave a link to Aspen Institute’s website for Aspen Strategy Group, which had no published ties. However, the AI bot also mentioned that “additionally, multiple news sources have reported on Blinken’s participation in the Aspen Strategy Group, including CNN, The New York Times, and Politico.”

This is where it gets downright strange. Herold then asked ChatGPT to provide him with the links. The first three links were for CNN, NYT, and Politico. All three were “404 not found.” Then Herold searched all of the archive sites he could possibly find. Nothing.

When asked to provide more sources, ChatGPT spit out three more articles from Bloomberg, Reuters, and Foreign Policy. All three were “404 not found.” None of them were archived.

Herold told ChatGPT that the links were “404 not found”. ChatGPT quickly apologized and said “Here are some updated links to articles that mention Blinken’s membership in the Aspen Strategy Group:” referencing articles by The Hill, NYT, and CNN again. Again, “404 not found” and no archives.

In total, ChatGPT spit out 13 articles regarding Antony Blinken’s ties to the Aspen Strategy Group and all 13 came back “404 not found” with no archives of any of them. That’s odd considering the WayBack Machine archives all of those websites mentioned above numerous times each and every day (Note: ALL 13 articles searched are linked at the bottom of this article).

Seemingly hitting a brick wall, Herold then asked ChatGPT if it could “provide the full text of this article www.newsweek.com/antony-blinken-bidens-pick-secretary-state-connected-aspen-strategy-group-1550906.”

ChatGPT obliged:

(See link below for photos of ChatGPT response.)

(…) The obfuscation of any information connecting the Aspen Institute and Antony Blinken is concerning, especially when considering the Aspen Institute led a workshop that strategized a Hunter Biden “Hack and Dump” just months before his actual laptop and emails were disclosed. However, what is also concerning is a grant award that took place almost exactly one year after the “Hack and Dump.”

(…) To summarize, Antony Blinken is reported to be the “impetus” behind the 51 former intel officers’ letter that labeled the Hunter Biden laptop as having all the “earmarks” of classic Russian disinformation. We know Michael Morrell drafted this letter to give Joe Biden “talking points” in his debate against Trump. Blinken further had some relationship, although unclear to what extent, with the organization that put together a workshop outlining how to handle a Hunter Biden “Hack and Dump”. Then, when Joe Biden “won”, Blinken was appointed Secretary of State and his State Department awarded the Aspen Institute with a grant 23 times larger than the only other two grants they’d received from the State Dept previously.

And despite a concerted effort to scrub any relationship details from the internet, ChatGPT exposed it all.

(Read more: Badlands Media, 5/8/2023)  (Archive)

A list of all 13 “404” articles sourced by ChatGPT (which retained a full-text of each article due to its Sept 2021 “knowledged cut off”):

Note:  even a search of the articles titles yielded no results on the websites.

Feb 27, 2015
Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken discusses foreign policy with Aspen Institute President & CEO Walter Isaacson.

May 9, 2023 – Sen. Ron Johnson: “We have the evidence that Hunter Biden paid tens of thousands of dollars for prostitutes that were sex trafficked through an international sex trafficking ring”

May 10, 2023 – House Oversight reveals the nine Biden family members who received wire transfers from foreign nationals

May 10, 2023 – Rep. Byron Donalds describes the Biden family’s influence-peddling scheme and their web of shell companies

(…) The House Oversight Committee spoke at length about the Biden family’s damning ties to an alleged Romania bribery scandal during today’s press conference.

Rep. Byron Donalds describes the Biden family’s influence-peddling scheme, the web of shell companies, and the millions that poured in from foreign nations while Joe Biden was Vice President:

Rep. Byron Donalds describes the Biden family’s influence-peddling scheme, the web of shell companies, and the millions that poured in from foreign nations while Joe Biden was Vice President:

“The Biden’s associates created at least 16 companies while Joe Biden was Vice President. Now, the list is 20, and as we continue our investigation, that list is growing. To serve what purpose? And the purpose of all these companies being created is to conceal money that the Biden family has been gaining because Joe Biden has been sitting at the upper echelon of our politics for almost five decades…

Here’s an example of what I mean, you have Rosemont Seneca Partners, Rosemont Seneca Advisers, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, RSP Holdings, RSTP II Alpha, RSTP II Bravo, Rosemont Seneca Thorton, Rosemont Seneca Bohai, and the list goes on. Cycling through this many companies serves no purpose… The only logical conclusion of a financial professional is that you are concealing money from either the IRS, credit agencies, or from other people in general…

It’s interesting that the Department of Justice has been investigating Hunter Biden for quite some time, and we seem to never get anywhere. I wonder what’s going on at the Department of Justice. The bottom line is there is no real business here. None. Many in this room wanted to go down all the various schemes our colleagues from the other side of the aisle accused the former president of.

To be very clear, the former president actually had a business… A very big business and legitimate business that everybody in this room cleary knows and can point to. Joe Biden has no business except for his position in politics, and it is the requirement of this committee to investigate that. We are going to continue to do that, and we are going to let the facts speak for themselves.”

(Read more: Revolver, 5/10/2023)  (Archive)

May 10, 2023 – FBI refuses to turn over unclassified investigative report detailing Joe Biden bribery scheme

Christopher Wray (Credit: Andrew Harnik/The Associated Press)

During all of my research and discoveries about the DOJ and FBI, the one constant from everyone with a specific and granular knowledge of how the silo information operations are conducted is that the FBI is comprehensively and institutionally corrupt at every level.

Let us not pretend with each other. As an outcome of President Obama and Eric Holder’s specific actions, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was weaponized (top to bottom) as an enforcement mechanism to protect the interests of the DC democrats.   Top to bottom the FBI is a fully weaponized federal police agency with the primary mission to target political opposition.  In the modern political era, this is the sole purpose of the FBI – nothing more, nothing less.

Congress has specific knowledge of an investigative document inside the FBI known as an FD-1023.  The FD-1023 details the evidence delivered by confidential human sources to investigators.  The specific FD-1023 is a multi-page document outlining the entire bribery scheme used by Joe Biden and his family.  The person who helped detail the FD-1023 documents has informed Congress of its existence.

Because this unclassified FD-1023 outlines the details of how Joe Biden used his office to accept bribes from foreign officials, the FBI is refusing to release it. Instead, the FBI is telling Congress they have no right to see it [LETTER to Congress Here].

The FBI is claiming that reports from Confidential Human Sources (CHSs) cannot be released, regardless of classification status.  Further, what you will note in the claims of the FBI and DOJ is essentially what we have been talking about on these pages for several years.  Information is intentionally put into institutional silos that keep the information hidden and protected.  The silo use is everywhere in Washington DC.

WASHINGTON DC – House Oversight: […] “It’s clear from the FBI’s response that the unclassified record the Oversight Committee subpoenaed exists, but they are refusing to provide it to the Committee. We’ve asked the FBI to not only provide this record, but to also inform us what it did to investigate these allegations. The FBI has failed to do both. The FBI’s position is ‘trust, but you aren’t allowed to verify.’ That is unacceptable. We plan to follow up with the FBI and expect compliance with the subpoena,” said Chairman Comer.

“While the FBI has failed to produce the specific document by the subpoena deadline, their offer to provide an accommodation process in response to our legitimate request indicates the document is real. So the question remains, what did the FBI do to investigate very serious allegations from an apparent trusted FBI source implicating then-Vice President Biden? Today’s letter from the FBI raises additional questions, including whether the FBI has an open investigation based on these allegations. The American people pay the FBI’s salaries, and they’re entitled to a fulsome response,” Senator Grassley said.

Based on whistleblower disclosures, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation possess an unclassified FD-1023 form that describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions. It has been alleged that the document includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose. (read more)

The only way through this issue is to defund and dismantle the FBI. (Conservative Treehouse, 5/10/2023)  (Archive)

Some House Republicans Call for Holding FBI Director in Contempt of Congress for Failing to Comply With Subpoena

May 10, 2023 – Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know – A citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel

Illustration: mrmooremedia.com

Introduction by Matt Taibbi

(…) The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”

Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”

Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense. In the Twitter Files we repeatedly find documents like this unsigned “Sphere of Influence” review circulated by the Carnegie Endowment that wonders aloud if tech companies really need to be competing to “get it right”:

In place of competition, the groups we’ve been tracking favor the concept of the “shared endeavor” (one British group has even started a “Shared Endeavour” program), in which key “stakeholders” hash out their disagreements in private, but present a unified front.

Who are the leaders of these messaging campaigns? If you care to ask, the groups below are a good place to start.

“The Top 50 List” is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same “hate-mapping,” guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons. There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same “hairball” graphs.

Where they compete, often, is in the area of gibberish verbiage describing their respective analytical methods. My favorite came from the Public Good Projects, which in a display of predictive skills reminiscent of the “unsinkable Titanic” described itself as the “Buzzfeed of public health.”

Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of “balance” between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation. Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that “shared vocabulary” to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that “vocabulary,” which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.”

Without further ado, an introduction to the main players in this “CIC”:

(Read more: Racket News, 5/10/2023)  (Archive)

May 10, 2023 – House Oversight Cmte: Biden family gets $1 million from Romanian real estate tycoon convicted of bribery; Joe vows to help clean up corruption in Romania

Republicans are digging in on over $10 million received by Biden family members from foreign actors, including previously undisclosed $1 million in Romanian-linked payments, and a ‘web’ of 20 companies created while President Joe Biden was vice president and pushing anti-corruption efforts abroad.

On Wednesday, House Oversight Committee Republicans led by Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., released a ‘Second Records Memorandum’ that expands on information it received from subpoena returns as the committee continues its investigation into the Biden family’s business practices.

The memo specifically outlines the Biden family’s ties to Romanian ‘influence peddling’ and a web of LLCs created while Biden was vice president. It also accuses President Biden for a ‘lack of transparency’ regarding his family’s receipt of funds from China, which he has said are ‘not true.’

It details the efforts by the family to hide, conceal and confuse sources of money – including more China money, according to a committee aide.

‘The White House refuses to correct the president’s statement. The president is now using the federal government to run interference for his family and his own role in these schemes,’ said Comer during a press conference announcing the memo Wednesday.

During Biden’s time as vice president, there were 20 companies affiliated with certain Biden family members created intentionally with a ‘complicated corporate structure’ the memo states.

Hunter Biden and his associates, including Rob Walker, formed ‘at least 15’ of those companies, after Biden took the office of the vice president in 2009.

Several of those entities including Owasco P.C. – which Hunter owned – Hudson West III, LLC, Robinson Walker, LLC, and Rosemont Seneca Bohai, LLC, accepted funds from foreign companies ranging from $5,000 to $3 million, the committee says.

During Biden’s time as vice president, there were 20 companies affiliated with certain Biden family members created intentionally with a ‘complicated corporate structure’ the memo states.

The Romanian transactions outlined in the bank records released by the committee were from Cypriot – a company controlled by Gabriel Popoviciu, who was at the time under investigation for criminal corruption in Romania and later convicted for bribery-related offenses.

This specifically is ‘evidence of influence peddling and a correlation between Biden family and their business associates’ work, allege the Republicans who point to multiple anti-corruption speeches and meetings with Romanian leaders then-Vice President Biden engaged in between 2014 and 2015.

Biden, pictured in 2014, condemned corruption during a speech in Romania before his family allegedly received a $ 1 million payment from a real estate tycoon convicted of bribery. (Credit: The Associated Press)

The Romanian transactions outlined in the bank records released by the committee were from Cypriot – a company controlled by Gabriel Popoviciu, who was at the time under investigation for criminal corruption in Romania and later convicted for bribery-related offenses.

Between 2015 and 2017, Robinson Walker, LLC received $3 million from Bladon Enterprises Limited – Popoviciu’s Cypriot company – which was then paid out to Biden family members in a total sum of over $1 million.

The first payments were received by the LLC just weeks after then-Vice President Biden hosted Romanian President Klaus Iohannis to the White House and they discussed anti-corruption policies.

Biden family accounts gained $1.038 million from Robinson Walker, LLC in a series of 17 deposits, 16 of which were made while Biden was still in the White House. The payments went to associate James Gilliar, Hunter Biden, Hallie Biden, Owasco LLC and an ‘unknown Biden bank account.’

‘It appears from bank records the Bidens were using Robinson Walker, LLC to conceal that the source of these payments was Popovici,’ the memo says.

According to emails from Hunter’s laptop obtained by DailyMail.com, Popoviciu hired the president’s son in 2016 as part of an influence campaign to persuade anti-corruption prosecutors to cut a deal or drop the case – all while his father was sitting vice president.

(Read more: Daily Mail, 5/10/2023) (Archive)

May 11, 2023 – Judge blocks Trump deposition in Peter Strzok and Lisa Page lawsuits

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page (Credit: public domain)

The Department of Justice (DOJ) last week secured a court order to block former President Donald Trump from a deposition appearance in connection with lawsuits filed by former FBI officials Peter Strzok an

d Lisa Page.

“The deposition of former President Donald Trump is hereby stayed until the deposition of [F.B.I. Director] Christopher Wray and any ensuing motion practice as to the remaining necessity of the former president’s deposition have been completed,” the order reads in part. It was issued by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Thursday, May 11.

(…) Previously, Jackson had ruled that Wray and Trump could be deposed in connection to the lawsuits, according to court documents. U.S. DOJ lawyers had argued that Wray should be deposed first because he was ranked lower than Trump and that any information that he provided in the suit could mean that Trump would not have to testify.

“The Court is somewhat surprised to learn that since then, the parties have done nothing more than wrangle over the order of the two depositions,” Berman Jackson wrote. “The government seems chagrined that the Court did not order that the deposition of the FBI Director be completed first, but it may recall that it was the Court’s view that it was Director Wray, the only current high-ranking public official in the group of proposed deponents, whose ongoing essential duties fell most squarely under the protection of the doctrine in question.”

(…) Strzok has alleged that the FBI had caved to “unrelenting pressure” from Trump when it fired him and that he was unfairly terminated for expressing his political opinions. As part of the lawsuit, Strzok’s lawyers have said they want to question Trump about whether he met with and pressured FBI and DOJ officials to fire him.

But the DOJ says that the former FBI deputy director, David Bowdich, has already said that he made the decision to fire Strzok on his own, and that he did not recall Wray ever telling him about any meeting in which the president pressured him about Strzok.

“These circumstances do not rise to the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ necessary to authorize the deposition of a current or former high-ranking government official, much less a former President,” the DOJ also wrote. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 5/14/2023)  (Archive)

May 11, 2023 – CNN tries to fact check Trump when he says Biden stored classified docs in Chinatown

During Trump’s Town Hall in New Hampshire, CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins interrupts and attempts to fact check him when he asked why Biden can store 9 boxes in Chinatown while taking a lot of money from China.

 

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report: The Ohrs played bigger roles in dossier than known

Bruce and Nellie Ohr (Credit: public domain)

While it’s bad enough the debunked dossier the FBI used to spy on the Trump campaign was paid for by the Clinton campaign and authored by a foreign FBI informant and his carousing researcher, the newly released report of Special Counsel John Durham strongly suggests a top Justice Department official and his wife had an early hand in shaping the political rumor sheet.

According to the 306-page report, former Justice

Sergei Millian (Credit: Twitter)

Department prosecutor Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr first plowed the ground for the dossier with a series of research reports she wrote for Fusion GPS, the D.C.-based opposition research firm the Clinton campaign commissioned to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia.

Obtained by Durham, her reports zeroed in on Sergei Millian and his connections to Russia and Trump, falsely portraying him as a key intermediary between the Kremlin and the Republican candidate. They would later provide the foundation for the dossier’s many fictions.

“Fusion GPS records demonstrate that Nellie Ohr first identified Millian,” Durham states in his report. “All told, Ohr prepared at least 12 reports that discussed Sergei Millian.”

(Glenn Simpson (l) and Christopher Steele (Credit: Neil King and public domain)

She wrote her first Millian report in April 2016, the month before Fusion GPS hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to put his imprimatur as a supposed former “spy” and “Russian insider” on the dossier.

“This report was prepared just ten days after Fusion GPS was retained by [Clinton campaign law firm] Perkins Coie to conduct opposition research on Trump,” the Durham Report states, “and prior to Steele being retained by Fusion GPS.”

Durham suggests Nellie Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the allegations attributed to him.

Igor Danchenko (Credit: public domain)

In fact, Durham says that Millian initially wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector” Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who’s admitted much of the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip. Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor said “implicated” Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads. circular

Meanwhile, the prosecutor added, Bruce Ohr, an anti-Trump Democrat, pushed his wife’s reports that cited Millian — 12 in all — onto the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI headquarters that was investigating Trump and his campaign for possible espionage. Agents used her reports as a source of corroboration for the Steele reports they received in the summer and fall of 2016, even though it was circular reporting.

“The reports prepared by Ohr and others at Fusion GPS were ultimately provided to Crossfire Hurricane investigators by Ohr’s husband, Bruce Ohr,” according to the Durham Report.

Durham notes that Danchenko was tracking leads on Millian from Nellie Ohr within “approximately one week” of Fusion GPS retaining Steele to compile the dossier. He concludes that this “strongly supports the inference that Fusion GPS directed Steele to pursue Millian.”

In other words, Steele was not the catalyst behind the dossier’s central claims. Rather, it was Clinton’s contractor Fusion GPS — but more specifically, the wife of a senior DOJ official who worked for Fusion. So the FBI wasn’t really investigating “Crown reporting,” as officials referred to Steele’s dossier, implying it was British intelligence. More accurately, it was investigating information from inside its own department that was laundered through Steele and his dossier.

Michael Gaeta in Rome. (Credit: public domain)

On page 97 of their book, “Crime in Progress,” Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch maintained that it was Steele who identified Millian as “one of the key intermediaries between Trump and the Russians.” Durham’s report shatters their claim.

The special counsel also found that Simpson worked with Bruce Ohr to pressure the FBI to investigate the dossier allegations.

On Aug. 22, 2016, Simpson asked Ohr to call him. About an hour later, Ohr emailed the FBI agent handling Steele as an informant to, as he said, “check in.” Ohr and the agent, Michael Gaeta, spoke over the phone on Aug. 24. During their call, Ohr inquired if the FBI was going to do anything with the dossier reports that Steele had passed along to Gaeta in July. In response, Gaeta “told Ohr that a group at FBI headquarters was working on them,” according to the Durham report. This undercuts the official FBI timeline of when HQ first received the dossier. For years, the bureau has insisted it did not receive the reports until a month later — Sept. 19, 2016.

(L–R) Former FBI agent Peter Strzok; former FBI Director James Comey; and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. (Credit: Getty Images/Illustration by Epoch Times)

The Ohrs also appear to have directly influenced the dossier and the FBI’s investigation. Both Bruce and Nellie Ohr, who previously worked for the CIA, met with Steele in Washington at a critical time. Emails reveal that on July 30, 2016 — the day before the FBI formally opened its overarching case against Trump, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane” — the couple sat down with Steele and an unidentified “associate” of his at the Mayflower Hotel in D.C. to compare notes — Nellie and Steele literally passed pieces of papers back and forth — regarding their research into “suspicions that Russian government figures were supporting the candidacy of Donald Trump.” After their breakfast, Bruce Ohr reportedly contacted then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe to relay their concerns.

Fusion GPS also pitched the press the false narrative that Millian was a key intermediary between Trump and Russia. For example, on June 27, 2016, Fritsch sent an email to Franklin Foer, a reporter at Slate magazine, stating “this dude is key” and claiming “he is clearly kgb.”The next month, Simpson reached out to ABC News producer Matthew Mosk about Millian. Mosk emailed Simpson and reported back that he was “making arrangements to interview Millian on camera” and that he and Simpson “should chat.” On July 29, 2016, Millian ultimately was interviewed by Brian Ross, formerly of ABC News, who asked Millian whether he was a Russian spy.

On Sept. 13, 2016, Mosk emailed Simpson and asked, “What’s the most official thing we have showing Millian tied to Trump? That would make it hard for the Trump org to disavow Millian?”

Ross later left ABC after being suspended for erroneous reporting on Russiagate, while Mosk has moved to CBS News.

Rodney Joffe (Credit: New York Post)

Throughout the summer and fall of 2016, Fusion GPS also promoted to the Washington media the false allegation the Trump campaign maintained a secret hotline to Moscow through Russia-based Alfa Bank. In an attempt to tie Millian to the Alfa Bank allegations, Durham found that Fusion GPS sought the assistance of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who in turn contacted D.C. tech executive Rodney Joffe to determine if Millian had any ties to Alfa Bank.

On Aug. 20, 2016, Joffe emailed federal computer contractors at Georgia Tech a document titled “birdsnest-1.pdf’ that contained “known associates” of Trump. Included in the attached document was a description of Millian along with his past mailing addresses; various email addresses; websites; and IP addresses that were associated with him. Joffe, who was recently fired as an FBI informant, described Millian as “the most likely intermediary” between Trump and Russia.

On Sept. 27, 2016, Simpson and Fritsch emailed IP “look-up” information for one of Millian’s websites to then-New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau, whom Fusion was pressuring to write a story about the Trump-Alfa Bank allegations. In the email, Fritsch pointed out that “Alfa” was the website service provider for Millian’s website. However, Durham determined that the relevant IP information did not indicate that “Alfa Bank” was the service provider, but rather Alfa Telecom — a Lebanese-based telecom company, which appears to have no affiliation with Alfa Bank.

Fusion GPS and Steele also provided the substance of the Alfa Bank allegations to Bruce Ohr, the DOJ official, who passed the false tip on to the FBI. The Crossfire Hurricane team used Ohr as a conduit to continue to receive information from Steele about Trump throughout 2017, even after the FBI had to terminate Steele as an informant for leaking information about its investigation to the media. (RealClearInvestigations, 5/16/2023)  (Archive)

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report: Sunlight on detail never released by IG Michael Horowitz about FBI Targeting Trump

I’m going to go into the deep weeds on this story, because many people are missing a key facet.  The names behind the Trump targeting operation are included, along with citations for independent checks by House congressional investigators.

Inside the recently released report by John Durham [CITATION], the special counsel outlines how former FBI Director James Comey was intimately involved in the creation of the Carter Page FISA application.  Durham notes that Comey kept asking the DOJ National Security Division and FBI counterintelligence investigators, “Where’s the FISA, we need the FISA.”  However, John Durham never interviewed James Comey or Andrew McCabe.  The former FBI Director and Deputy refused to cooperate or give testimony to John Durham.  So, how did John Durham have details about the demands of Comey?

The answer is found in the footnotes.  Durham reviewed transcripts of interviews given by Andrew McCabe to the Office of the Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, who previously investigated FBI conduct in the origin of the Carter Page FISA.  Durham pulled quotes from that transcript. [Footnote #1207, page 199 – Durham Report]

♦QUESTION: If Andrew McCabe gave testimony to the OIG about the motives and impetus of FBI Director James Comey in pushing for the Carter Page FISA application, why did the OIG report never outline those transcribed interviews?  Why was the interview transcript never included in the 2019 OIG report?

(NOTE to Congress.  Now that you know a transcribed interview of Andrew McCabe exists in the OIG office, request the transcription and release it to the public.)

Let me answer those questions without the customary pretending from the DC professional political class.  The short version is that OIG Michael Horowitz was trying to protect the DOJ and FBI. The longer version is a coverup that includes Rod Rosenstein, Bill Barr and yes, John Durham.  I will share that story below.

“Where’s the FISA?  We need the FISA?” ~ James Comey

The DOJ-NSD and FBI CoIntel needed to find a safe and legal way to spy on the Trump campaign. The 2016 FISA Title 1 surveillance of former FBI employee Carter Page became the fraudulent justification for that intent.

Because “FISA Title I” surveillance authority against a U.S. citizen is so serious (the U.S. government is essentially calling the target a spy), only a few people are authorized to even apply for such surveillance warrants.  One of the four people authorized to make such a Search Warrant request is the Asst. Attorney General as head of the National Security Division of the DOJ.

In September and October of 2016, at the same time the DOJ was putting the finishing touches on the FISA Court application to be used against Carter Page, Asst. Attorney General John P Carlin resigned as head of the DOJ-NSD. [CITATION] Did Carlin resign in protest or fear?

Here’s context:

Carter Page was used as a UCE (FBI undercover employee), responsible for the bust of a high-level Russian agent in 2013 – and remained a UCE – throughout the court case of Evgeny Buryakov, a Russian citizen who U.S. prosecutors say posed as a banker while participating in a Cold War-style spy ring. [CITATION]

Carter Page was an FBI undercover source for the FBI UP TO May of 2016.   How was it possible that on October 21st, 2016, Carter Page is put under a FISA Title 1 surveillance warrant as an alleged Russian agent?  Conclusion: Carter Page wasn’t a Russian agent. The DOJ National Security Division and the FBI Counterintelligence Division knew he wasn’t.

In order to manufacture the justification for the Carter Page FISA warrant, the DOJ-NSD and the FBI flat-out lied to the FISA Court.  Remember, IG Horowitz said there was no ‘Woods File’ in the Carter Page FISA application. Instead of the required section substantiating and citing all the claims in the application, the FBI used the Chris Steele Dossier.

However, as to the motive of John Carlin resigning before the application was completed and submitted, we look back to the March 2016 DOJ Press Release of the guilty pleading in the Evgeny Buryakov case as announced from the New York office:

…”Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and John P. Carlin, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, announced”…  (link)

DOJ-NSD head John Carlin obviously could not submit a FISA application against Carter Page, accusing him of being an “agent of a foreign government,” when just a few months earlier he used Carter Page as a witness and FBI UCE source in the case against Buryakov.

As James Comey is demanding that Andrew McCabe and his FBI counterintelligence agents get the FISA warrant, likely an ass covering necessity, the person responsible to get the warrant from the court, John Carlin, quits the DOJ.  Considering all the facets outlined above, this cannot be accidental.

Here’s where it gets SERIOUSLY sketchy.

The next in line person, who can fulfill the DOJ/FBI goal of getting the fraudulent application through the FISA court, is Mary McCord.  Put into the position as Acting Asst. Attorney General for the National Security Division, the job of submitting the FISA application now falls upon Mary McCord.

On October 21, 2016, When the FISA application was finally submitted, signed by DAG Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey, it was Mary McCord who did the actual process of filing the application and gaining the Title-1 surveillance warrant.

At the time the Carter Page application was filed (October 21, 2016), Mary McCord’s chief legal counsel inside the office was a DOJ-NSD lawyer named Michael Atkinson.  In his role as the legal counsel for the DOJ-NSD, it was Atkinson’s job to review and audit all FISA applications submitted from inside the DOJ.  Essentially, Atkinson was the DOJ internal compliance officer in charge of making sure all FISA applications were correctly assembled and documented.

Obviously, with the background and context of the entirely fraudulent Carter Page FISA application, a government surveillance warrant using a Clinton-funded political opposition research file known as the Steele Dossier to support the warrant, both Mary McCord and Michael Atkinson would know they were directly involved in an intentional effort to weaponize the mechanisms of the justice department against a political candidate.

While James Comey and Sally Yates’ signatures were on the FISA application falsely vouching for it, the attestations of legal compliance fall upon DOJ-NSD head Mary McCord and her top legal advisor Michael Atkinson.  McCord and Atkinson are doing, in October of 2016, what former DOJ-NSD head John Carlin refused to do.

WATCH WHAT COMES NEXT: Mary McCord then resigns from her position in the DOJ, and Michael Atkinson is left, as lawyer for the DOJ-NSD, to become Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.

♦ The Impeachment Effort – Do you remember how the impeachment effort against President Donald Trump was created?  Do you remember Alexander Vindman, the claims about Ukraine; the statements of hearing from a CIA whistleblower about the content of a phone call between President Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky?

When the anonymous CIA whistleblower complaint was filed against President Trump for the issues of the Ukraine call with President Zelensky, the Intelligence Community Inspector General had to change the rules for the complaint to allow an anonymous submission.  Prior to this change, all intelligence whistleblowers had to put their name on the complaint.  It was this 2019 IGIC who changed the rules.

Who was the Intelligence Community Inspector General?  Michael Atkinson.

When ICIG Michael Atkinson turned over the newly authorized anonymous whistleblower complaint to the joint House Intelligence and Judiciary Committee (Schiff and Nadler chairs), who did Michael Atkinson give the complaint to?  Mary McCord.

Yes, after she left main justice, Mary McCord took the job of working for Chairman Jerry Nadler and Chairman Adam Schiff as the chief legal advisor inside the investigation that led to the construction of articles of impeachment.   As a consequence, Mary McCord received the newly permitted anonymous whistleblower complaint from her old office colleague Michael Atkinson.

Can you see how Atkinson and McCord are working together, both connected to the fraud behind the false FISA application used in the Trump-Russia narrative in 2016 and 2017, now both working together on a 2019 impeachment effort against President Trump holding an identical motive?  Can you see the stunning conflicts of interest and the coordination?

The weaponized FISA surveillance of the Trump administration doesn’t exist without Mary McCord and Michael Atkinson creating the surveillance mechanism.  The weaponized impeachment origin doesn’t exist without McCord – now in congress working for Nadler/Schiff – and Atkinson changing rules as CIA Inspector General, to create the baseline of a fraudulent whistleblower complaint.   Can you see it? 

But wait…. It gets worse.

♦ Chief Justice John Roberts – As if things could not possibly be more corrupt, now we have the construct of Atkinson and McCord forming the predicate for the impeachment effort.  To wit, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts now becomes the presiding judge over the impeachment trial of President Trump.

Mary McCord is married to a fellow traveler named Sheldon L. Snook.

From 2014 though 2020, not coincidentally the timeline of the Trump targeting and administration in office, Mary McCord’s husband, Sheldon Snook, was the special assistant to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s counselor. [CITATION]

As noted by the Washington Post in discussing both McCord and Snook, “The counselor’s office advises the chief justice not only on the management and budget of the Supreme Court but also on his interactions with the executive and legislative branches, along with numerous other public roles in which Roberts serves.” [CITATION]

From 2014 through 2020, Sheldon Snook was responsible for running the office of the lawyer legally advising and counseling John Roberts.

Let me put this another way.  The most important guy in the judicial branch, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, has a lawyer to advise and construct the responsibilities of the SCOTUS chief judge, which includes the construct of the FISA court and appointment of judges therein.

As Chief Justice, John Roberts is in charge of everything to do with the FISA court.  The guy running the office of the lawyer doing the counseling of Roberts, is Mary McCord’s husband.

Mary McCord, knowingly and with specific intent, lied to the FISA court to support the FBI targeting of Trump.  Mary McCord’s husband runs the office which would intercept any communication from the FISA court to the Chief Justice if the FISC had any concerns about the false FBI application.  See the problem?

♦ SUMMARY – Now, we go back to where we came in.

Why did the Office of the Inspector General never publish the interview transcript about Andrew McCabe talking about how desperate FBI Director James Comey was to get a FISA warrant?

Why did John Durham never publish those same interview transcripts, but instead simply referenced the existence of the transcript in a footnote?

Follow these questions to their logical conclusion, and you will discover that all of the participants including Rod Rosenstein, Bill Barr, James Baker, Dana Boente, Michael Horowitz and John Durham are trying to protect bureaucrats, who did criminal acts, and preserve institutions from collapse that sunlight would create.

Sunlight…

… The best disinfectant.

(Support CTH HERE)

(Conservative Treehouse, 6/04/2023)  (Archive)

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report: FBI shut down four criminal investigations into the Clintons

(Credit: Win McNamee/AFP/Getty Images)

Special Counsel John Durham’s highly-anticipated report on the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 revealed that top leaders at the Bureau shut down four criminal investigations into Hillary and Bill Clinton.

In 2014, the FBI investigated a “well-placed” confidential source’s claims that an unnamed foreign government intended to “contribute to Hillary Clinton’s anticipated presidential campaign, as a way to gain influence with Clinton should she win the presidency,” the report said.

The field office investigating these claims “almost immediately” sought a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant, but it remained “in limbo” for approximately four months, primarily due to Clinton’s then-expected presidential campaign.

 

As stated in Durham’s report:

According to another agent, the application lingered because “everyone was ‘super more careful’” and “scared with the big name [Clinton]” involved. 321 “[T]hey were pretty “tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next President.”

Durham’s report also revealed that three separate FBI field offices in Washington, DC; Little Rock, Arkansas; and New York City, New York, opened investigations into “possibly criminal activity involving the Clinton Foundation” less than one year before the November 2016 presidential election.

One of these investigations was spawned by Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash, which exposed the Clinton Foundation’s global nexus of influence peddling.

As Durham’s report detailed:

Beginning in January 2016, three different FBI field offices, the New York Field Office (“NYFO*), the Washington Field Office (“WFO*), and the Little Rock Field Office (“LRFO**), opened investigations into possible criminal activity involving the Clinton Foundation. The IRFO case opening communication referred to an intelligence product and corroborating financial reporting that a particular commercial “industry likely engaged a federal public official in a flow of benefits scheme, namely, large monetary contributions were made to a non-profit, under both direct and indirect control of the federal public official, in exchange for favorable government action and/or influence.” The WFO investigation was opened as a preliminary investigation, because the Case Agent wanted to determine if he could develop additional information to corroborate the allegations in a recently-published book, Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, before seeking to convert the matter to a full investigation. Additionally, the LRFO and NYFO investigations included predication based on source reporting that identified foreign governments that had made, or offered to make, contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment from Clinton.

Speaking with the DailyMail, Schweizer said he received “a call from somebody from the New York FBI office after the book came out.”

“There was a New York Times piece on Uranium One. It was kind of confirming what we had in the book. That’s what I think triggered the interest,” Schweizer said. “With the Clinton Foundation, you have the transfer of large sums of money, you had policy positions that were affected, and you had certifiable evidence.”

“I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t say what was illegal. But there was definitely a there there, with all the speeches, donations, and policy effects, and nobody’s ever really disputed that,” he added.

Ultimately, FBI leadership held a joint meeting with the three field offices, FBI Headquarters, and appropriate United States Attorney’s offices. The first joint meeting occurred on February 1, 2016. However, the Department of Justice Public Integrity Section Chief, Ray Hulser, said the FBI briefing at that meeting was “poorly presented,” and saw “insufficient predication for at least one of the investigations.”

A second joint meeting occurred on February 22, 2016, which former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe chaired.

McCabe “initially directed the field offices to close their cases,” but later agreed to “reconsider the final disposition of the cases,” Durham’s report noted.

Paul Abbate, who was the FBI Washington Field Office’s Assistant Director-in-Charge at the time, described McCabe’s demeanor during the joint meeting as “negative,” “annoyed,” and “angry.”

As the report detailed:

According to Abbate, McCabe stated “they [the Department] say there’s nothing here” and “why are we even doing this?” At the close of the meeting, Campbell directed that for any overt investigative steps to be taken, the Deputy Director’s approval would be required.

Durham’s report also revealed that former FBI Director James Comey demanded, through an intermediary, the New York Field Office “cease and desist” their Clinton Foundation investigation.

Earlier in the week, McCabe claimed the Durham report was “never a legitimate investigation.”

Andrew McCabe — a former FBI official who was fired by Donald Trump in 2018 — said that he stood by the original Russia investigation into Trump even after the Durham report revealed evidence that the probe had no serious basis. ((Credit: Screenshot / CNN)

“We knew from the very beginning exactly what John Durham was going to conclude, and that’s what we saw today. We knew from the very beginning this was never a legitimate investigation,” McCabe said. “This was a political errand to exact some sort of retribution on Donald Trump’s perceived enemies and the FBI.”

Durham’s report highlighted the FBI’s different approaches regarding their investigations into Clinton and former President Donald Trump.

“The use of defensive briefings in 2015 contrasts with the FBI’s failure to provide a defensive briefing to the Trump campaign approximately one year later when Australia shared the information from Papadopoulos,” the report stated. (Read more: Breitbart, 5/18/2023)  (Archive)

May 15, 2023 – IRS removes investigative team from Hunter Biden probe in move whistleblower calls ‘clearly retaliatory’

Hunter Biden gives journalists a thumbs-up on May 15, 2023, during the college graduation of his daughter Maisy. (Credit: AFP via Getty Images)

The IRS on Monday removed the “entire investigative team” from its long-running tax fraud probe of first son Hunter Biden in alleged retaliation against the whistleblower who recently contacted Congress to allege a cover-up in the case, The Post has learned.

The purge allegedly was done on the orders of the Justice Department, the whistleblower’s attorneys informed congressional leaders in a letter.

“Today the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Supervisory Special Agent we represent was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress. He was informed the change was at the request of the Department of Justice,” Mark Lytle and Tristan Leavitt wrote.

The whistleblower, who supervised the Hunter Biden probe since early 2020, hasn’t publicly identified the first son as the subject of the case that he says is being brushed under the rug, but congressional sources confirmed it.

“On April 27, 2023, IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel appeared before the House Committee on Ways and Means. He testified: ‘I can say without any hesitation there will be no retaliation for anyone making an allegation or a call to a whistleblower hotline.’ However, this move is clearly retaliatory and may also constitute obstruction of a congressional inquiry,” the lawyers went on.

“Our client has a right to make disclosures to Congress … He is protected by 5 U.S.C. § 2302 from retaliatory personnel actions — including receiving a ‘significant change in duties, responsibilities, or working conditions’ (which this clearly is) because of his disclosures to Congress.

“Any attempt by any government official to prevent a federal employee from furnishing information to Congress is also a direct violation of longstanding appropriations restriction. Furthermore, 18 U.S.C. § 1505 makes it a crime to obstruct an investigation of Congress,” Lytle and Leavitt wrote.

The whistleblower’s team added: “We respectfully request that you give this matter your prompt attention. Removing the experienced investigators who have worked this case for years and are now the subject-matter experts is exactly the sort of issue our client intended to blow the whistle on to begin with.” (Read more: New York Post, 5/16/2023)  (Archive)

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report: Why there was no review of the DNC hack attribution

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report: FBI didn’t investigate Clinton Plan to frame Trump, even after CIA briefed Obama and Biden

Hillary Clinton reacts to FBI finding no criminality re her emails, before boarding her campaign plane at Miami airport October 26, 2016. (Credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters)

The FBI didn’t open any inquiry into an alleged Hillary Clinton campaign election interference plan even after the CIA director briefed then-president Barack Obama and other senior administration officials, Special Counsel John Durham’s report noted.

The FBI received Russian intelligence analysis in July 2016 alleging that Clinton’s campaign cooked up a scheme to divert attention away from “her use of a private email server,” the Durham report stated.

The alleged scheme, dubbed the “Clinton Plan,” showed that the Clinton campaign “had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal” against Trump “by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee,” the Durham report reads.

The intelligence community didn’t know the accuracy of the Russian intelligence, but the findings were notable enough for then-CIA Director John Brennan to inform the Obama administration “within days” of learning about it.

Brennan briefed President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey about the Clinton campaign’s plan, the Durham report says.

The findings also prompted the CIA to send “a formal written referral memorandum” to Comey and “the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, Peter Strzok, for their consideration and action.”

In contrast to the speed at which the FBI opened a full investigation into Trump “on raw, uncorroborated information,” the FBI “never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information,” Durham wrote. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 5/16/2023)  (Archive)

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report – During infamous August 2016 WH briefing, Obama and Biden allow highest officials to use fabricated evidence to frame Trump as traitor

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report PDF

Durham Report/Justice Department PDF

Archive)

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report: Durham ignores role of U.S., U.K., and Australian intelligence operatives in setting the stage for Crossfire Hurricane

Failed Prosecutor John Durham’s report on the Hillary Clinton campaign plot to convince the American electorate and U.S. allies that Donald Trump was a stooge of Russia totally ignores the role that intelligence operatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Israel played in helping set the stage to provide the FBI with the pretext of predication for launching its now discredited Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump Campaign.

Let me take you back to an article I wrote in May 2019. John Durham and his team failed to address any of the issues and leads I raised:

Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS) by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele’s FBI handler (those reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.

The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as “liaison reporting.” This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.

One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit’s Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.

This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don’t have to have access to intelligence information to understand this. For example, you simply have to ask the question, “how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar.” I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was “masked.” But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names “unmasked.” You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report.

We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow. Don’t take my word for it, that’s what Robert Mueller reported:

In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov’s purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).

Sater’s communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies–GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the “bait” to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant.

By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign Manager John Podesta’s email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:

“That’s good, sooner it’s clarified the better, and the stronger the better,” Budowski replies, later adding: “Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria.”

The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway.

This was more the opposition research. This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets–Hakluyt:

there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against Donald Trump.

Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co., founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums. . . .

Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Henry Williams as “one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world” and as “a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking … ”

I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopoulos:

It was Downer who told the FBI of Papadopoulos’ comments, which became one of the “driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” The Times reported.

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Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt’s advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive:

But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.

His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.

Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain–there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway.

This was more than opposition research. This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets–Hakluyt:

there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against Donald Trump.

Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co., founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums. . . .

Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Henry Williams as “one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world” and as “a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking … ”

I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopoulos:

It was Downer who told the FBI of Papadopoulos’ comments, which became one of the “driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” The Times reported.

Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt’s advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive:

But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.

His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.

Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain–there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

But no steps are being taken to hold the intelligence operatives accountable for their role in helping portray George Papadopoulos, a Trump foreign policy advisor, as someone compromised by the Russians.

Let me give you the timeline for Papadopoulos:

  1. Starting in August of 2015, George Papadopoulos, who lived in London at the time, sent emails to Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s Campaign Manger at the time. Those emails were intercepted by the United Kingdom’s GCHQ, which is the British version of the National Security Agency.
  2. Papadopoulos is working for Energy Stream in October 2015 and helps put on the “London Oil and Gas Forum, a two-day conference at the Rag Army & Navy Club.”
  3. Within a month of that Conference, Papadopoulos is approached by Nagi Khalid Idris who offers George a position at the London Centre of International Law Practice. George defers the offer and starts working for the Ben Carson for President Campaign.
  4. November 2015, alleged diplomat Joseph Mifsud joins the Board of the London Centre of International Law Practice aka LCILP. In my opinion, the LCILP is the kind of organization used by British Intelligence to identify potential assets and to plant stories in the public domain.
  5. January 2016, George Papadopoulos joins the LCILP as Director of the Centre’s International Energy and Natural Resources Division.
  6. Early March 2016 Papadopoulos’s offer to join the Trump Campaign is accepted via email and phone conversations with Michael Glassner, executive director of the Trump Campaign, and Sam Clovis. Remember, Papadopoulos is living in London and all of these communications are intercepted by British Intelligence.
  7. Papadopoulos notifies Nagi that he will be joining the Trump Campaign and Nagi reacts with anger.
  8. The next day Papadopoulos has a productive phone call with Sam Clovis. Calls like these are routinely collected by GCHQ, according to information revealed by Edward Snowden.
  9. The next day Nagi does an about face. Papadopoulos writes, ““Then Nagi comes by my office again. His attitude has suddenly changed. It’s a night-and-day difference. He starts telling me that there is someone I have to meet, a very important person who will be very useful to me during my time with Trump. I remember Nagi telling me, “He’s a man who knows many people.” Then he insists I join him at a conference at Link Campus University in Rome.”
  10. March 12, 2016 — George is introduced to Joseph Mifsud by Nagi at the Link Campus. Papadopoulos and Mifsud meet for dinner that night. During the dinner Mifsud says, “I’m going introduce you to everyone and set up a meeting between Trump and Putin.”
  11. March 14, 2016 — Nagi Idris informs George that Mifsud will introduce him to “Putins niece”. (NOTE — Putin does not have a niece).
  12. March 22, 2016 — Washington Post names Papadopoulos as one of Trump’s foreign policy advisors. He is now on the public radar.
  13. March 24, 2016 — Papadopoulos meets Mifsud and Olga Vinogradova (allegedly Putin’s niece) at the Grange Holborn Hotel. George writes in his book that Mifsud talked up a variety of potential deals and interactions with Russia. When lunch is over, Papadopoulos sends an email to Clovis at the Trump Campaign describing the meeting and mentioning “Putin’s niece.” That conversation as well was captured by GCHQ. The phrase, “Putin’s niece” is a red flag.
  14. March 31, 2016 — Papadopoulos attends the meeting of Trump’s “foreign policy” advisors at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
  15. April 1, 2016 — Papadopoulos flies to Israel where he is slated to speak at an energy conference and meets his “old friend” Eli Groner, the director general for the Office of Prime Minister Netanyahu.
  16. Early April 2016 — Papadopoulos cuts ties with LCILP and contacts Olga Vinogradova and Joseph Mifsud to discuss arranging a possible foreign policy trip to Russia for Trump.
  17. April 18, 2016 — Mifsud introduce Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, who is the program director at the Russian International Affairs Council and claims to have high level contacts at the Russian Foreign Ministry.
  18. April 26, 2016 — Mifsud returns from Valdai Conference, meets with Papadopoulos and tells him, “The Russians have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, he tells me. “Emails of Clinton,” he says. “They have thousands of emails.”
  19. May 3, 2016 — This is two days after Trump’s controversial foreign policy speech, which Papadopoulos claims he helped draft. Papadopoulos is contacted by Christian Cantor, an Israeli Embassy official in London, because he wants to introduce George to his girlfriend, Erika Thompson. Erika is an Australian “diplomat” and berates Papadopoulos throughout the meeting at a pub for working for the menace, Donald Trump.
  20. May 5, 2016 — Papadopoulos writes, “two military attachés at the US embassy in London, Terrence Dudley and Gregory Baker, reach out to me to set up a meeting.”
  21. May 6, 2016 — Erika Thompson, Australian “diplomat” and “girlfriend” of an Israeli Embassy in London officer, contacts Papadopoulos to arrange a lunch with her boss, Alexander Downer, Australia’s former top diplomat in London.
  22. May 10, 2016 — Papadopoulos and Downer meet for lunch and Downer gives George a verbal beat down. Here is Papadopoulos account of that exchange:

“Downer starts talking: He tells me he’s connected to a British security firm called Hakluyt. He boasts about being a board member and that the firm has a great presence in London and close ties to the Obama administration. “We advise many governments,” he says.
I nod. I’m not sure what to say about this. He shifts gears:
“George, I used to be the UN envoy to Cyprus, and what you are talking about in Cyprus is wrong, and it’s a threat to British interests.”

And the rest is history. Downer used that meeting to claim in a subsequent report made to the FBI two months later that Papadopoulos said, “the Russians have a surprise or some damaging material related to Hillary Clinton.” Papadopoulos denies ever saying this, so it is his word against that of the esteemed, well-connected Australian diplomat. It is important to note that Downer’s claim mirrors what Mifsud told Papadopoulos a month earlier.

If you take time to read the Durham report regarding the Downer information you will see that Durham correctly notes that it lacked the substance to be used as a predicate to open Operation Crossfire Hurricane. That is the positive. The negative is that Durham did not devote any of the report to the circumstantial evidence that Papadopoulos was targeted by British, U.S., Australian and Israeli intelligence operatives and “diplomats” in creating evidence that could be used to suggest that there were some Russian shenanigans underway in the Trump campaign.

Why would the Brits, the Aussies and the Israelis agree to participate in such a scheme? They all feared that Trump would damage their national security interests, particularly in the Middle East. The Wikileaks publication of the purloined DNC emails was an unexpected curveball that was used to produce another “anti-Russian” narrative pinning the blame on Putin for exposing Hillary Clinton’s perfidy rather than holding her accountable for her misuse of classified material. I believe that Georg Papadopoulos was an unwitting pawn in a massive information operation designed to handcuff Donald Trump (figuratively and, if possible, literally) and prevent him from becoming President.

That operation failed, spectacularly so, but it provided a narrative that is still being used effectively to attack Donald Trump and eliminate any possibility of having normal, peaceful relations with Russia. (Gateway Pundit/Larry Johnson, 5/22/2023)  (Archive)

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report: Techno Fog/Media lies and political bias

They lied.

They deceived the public for years, alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. President Trump and his advisors, the agents of Russia, were guilty of treason. The FBI investigation was above reproach, led by career agents and civil servants, and insulated from politics or influence from FBI leadership.

Their sources, anonymous to the public and known to only them, were from within the US intelligence and law enforcement communities. These were the originators of the falsehoods; the journalists were merely vessels. In return for this cynical tradecraft, the media protected – and continues to protect – high ranking current and former US government officials. Anything to keep the information flowing.

The list of publications and “journalists” (for purposes of this exercise, any of these other terms might apply: stenographers or adulators or parasitic hosts) who put out the now-discredit claims of the Trump-Russia hoax is long and distinguished. They were nearly all guilty; the skeptics were few. The volume of lies, spread in print and on TV and on social media, would take months, if not years, to compile. The Columbia Journalism Review’s “The press versus the president”, a thorough analysis of some of the worst Trump-Russia era reporting (including stories from The New York Times and The Washington Post), was a four-part series that only touched the surface.

Jim Sciutto and Evan Perez of CNN, citing “multiple current and former US law enforcement and intelligence officials,” said US investigators “corroborated some of the communications.” Jake Tapper, the face of CNN, was more than happy to use his primetime slot to spread these lies and others involving allegations of “collusion”. Marshall Cohen and Jeremy Herb of CNN made similar claims: “many of the allegations that form the bulk of the [Steele] intelligence memos have held up over time, or have proven to be at least partially true.” Durham would disagree: “not a single substantive allegation pulled from the Steele Reports and used in the initial Page FISA application had been corroborated at the time of the FISA submission -or indeed, to our knowledge, has ever been corroborated by the FBI.”1

CNN’s Jake Tapper, Evan Perez, and Jim Sciutto accept the Merriman Smith Award from ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C., April 28, 2018. (Credit: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters)

Natasha Bertrand was perhaps the most notoriously wrong reporter during the Trump-Russia hysteria. She spread the lies of the US intelligence community through various national platforms (Business Insider, The Atlantic, Politico, etc.): that the Steele Dossier had been corroborated, that the Horowitz probe would be of questionable quality, that it was “much more plausible that Trump did go to Russia and he did have these kinds of sexual escapades with prostitutes.”

By reporting these falsehoods as truth, Bertrand gave legitimacy to an improper and unlawful investigation. She also served the purposes of her sources – to slice through the hamstring of the Trump Administration, to put it on the defensive, to help influence elections. Her reward was professional advancement from near obscurity to her current position as National Security Reporter for CNN. No doubt her anonymous sources, which probably continue to enjoy their quid pro quo with Bertrand, are pleased with their investment.

Numerous reporters from The New York Times were guilty of similar offenses. The day before Trump’s 2017 inauguration, for example, The Times reported this bombshell from current and former senior American officials: “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump.” This was followed by The New York Times’ articles in February and March of 2017 pushing allegations of Trump-Russian Intelligence connections.

Peter Strzok (Credit: public domain)

What we didn’t know at the time was that high ranking FBI officials disagreed with The Times’ reporting. Internal FBI communications from Trump Russia collusion Peter Strzok himself said of The Times’ articles: “no substance and largely wrong.” Durham puts the FBI’s discussions of The Times reporting into context:

based on declassified documents from early 2017, the quid pro quo own records show that reports published by The New York Times in February and March 2017 concerning what four unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials claimed about Trump campaign personnel being in touch with any Russian intelligence officers was untrue. 2

While the reporting itself is part of the story, there’s something else here: the identity of the sources.

(Read more: Techno Fog/The Reactionary/Substack, 5/21/2023)  (Archive)

May 15, 2023 – Why the Durham Report Matters – Part Two: The FISA Court Silo and SSCI Vice-Chairman Mark Warner

(Part One, understanding how the silos are used to deflect accountability.)  In this Part 2 outline we give specific background examples of how weaponized Trump-Russia fraud worked and calling out names with examples of what they did.

On March 15, 2017, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes held a press conference announcing there was no specific evidence of “wiretaps” at Trump Tower {HERE}.  However, on March 22, 2017, Nunes held another press conference saying information was brought forth to the HPSCI showing the Trump campaign was under Title-1 surveillance by the FBI and former Obama administration {SEE HERE}.  In between those critical six days, something happened that was important.

(Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

With the full backdrop of the Durham report as the baseline, we now know there was zero evidence of any Russian interference effort in the 2016 election.

The Trump-Russia narrative was created by the Clinton campaign, promoted by the FBI and Main justice and advanced in narrative construction by the Obama administration.

On March 17, 2017, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman Mark Warner asked the FISA court for a copy of the FISA application used against Trump campaign official Carter Page.

This is not in doubt and was evidenced in DC USAO court records related to SSCI security director James Wolfe who was initially indicted for leaking that specific copy of the FISA application.  The FISC stamp is also visible on the copy of the FISA that was eventually released.

QUESTION:  Why did Mark Warner request a copy of the FISA application from the FISA COURT and not from DOJ Main Justice?  The answer to that question falls into how insiders played the silo game against the Trump administration.

Warner didn’t request the FISA application from Main Justice because (1) the DOJ insiders were going to fight the release of any toxic information that proved the Trump campaign was under active Title-1 surveillance; they were going to fight release to Devin Nunes. And (2) the legislative branch was part of the Trump-Russia attack construct and the SSCI membership were active participants with the DOJ and FBI (executive branch).

To weaponize the FISA in the effort to get a special counsel appointed, Mark Warner needed to work around the system that was being discussed in the media.  Warner asked the FISA Court for their copy of the application.  On March 17, 2017, a copy of that application was delivered by FBI agent Brian Dugan from the FISC to the SSCI.  It was classified a ‘read and return’ Top Secret product with NO FOReign National access allowed.

Most people are unaware the declassified public version of the FISA application released by the DOJ was this Mark Warner copy.   We know it was this copy again due to the FISC stamp on the document that eventually became declassified and public.

QUESTION:  If the original FISA copy originated from the FISA Court, read and return, how did it end up in Main Justice as part of the eventual July 21, 2018, public release of the Carter Page FISA application?

Put another way, how did the 2017 physical copy go from the FISC to the SSCI and then end up at Main Justice for a 2018 release?

These are the awkward questions that cut through the use of the silo defense mechanisms.

The March 17, FISC copy ended up at Main Justice because the Washington Field Office case file against the leaker, SSCI Security Director James Wolfe, along with all the other evidence therein (which included text messages from Mark Warner), went back through the Mueller special counsel before Wolfe’s eventual indictment.  This is when the Mueller team had to make a decision about releasing it to the public.

Weissmann freaked out when he saw the Dugan file against James Wolfe, and the looming probability that Senator Mark Warner would be caught as the person who told Wolfe to leak the FISA.

The FISA application was leaked. Mueller, Weissmann and Mark Warner knew that back in 2017, but what they didn’t know until the evidence file came in 2018 was that the FBI had proof the FISA was leaked.

Oh snap!

How to dilute that catastrophic issue?

The Weissmann team released the FISA application to the public on July 21, 2018.

Now…. Remember, both Michael Horowitz and John Durham destroyed the DOJ position on the predicate for the FISA application.  In December 2019, IG Horowitz pointed out the missing ‘Woods File’ and 33 material issues with the application (one of which led to the criminal conviction of Kevin Clinesmith).   Three years later, John Durham completely destroys the justification for the Trump-Russia premise behind it.

Notice how no one in the executive branch DOJ, FBI, ODNI, ever criticized Robert Mueller, yet we know to a demonstrable certainty the Mueller special counsel was likely more corrupt than the originating DOJ/FBI corruption the special counsel was protecting.

The origin of ‘Spygate’ was bad, but the totality of the cover-up effort in the Mueller-Weissmann special counsel was exponentially worse.  More actual laws and policies within the justice department were broken by Robert Mueller than any preceding corrupt official.

♦ Amid a series of documents released by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 [SEE HERE] there was a rather alarming letter from the DOJ to the FISA Court in July 2018 that pointed out the DC agenda, the “institutional cover-up.” [Link to Letter]

Before getting to the substance of the letter, it’s important to put the release in context. After the FISA Court reviewed the DOJ inspector general report (Dec 2019), the FISC ordered the DOJ-NSD to declassify and release documents related to the Carter Page FISA application.

In the cover letter for this specific release to the Senate Judiciary and Senate Intelligence committees, the DOJ cited the January 7, 2020, FISA court order:

Keep in mind that prior to this release only the FISA court had seen this letter from the DOJ-National Security Division (DOJ-NSD).

As we walk through the alarming content of this letter, I think you’ll identify the motive behind the FISC order to release it.

First, the letter in question was sent by the DOJ-NSD to the FISA Court on July 12, 2018. It is critical to keep the date of the letter in mind as we review the content. This letter to the FISA Court was sent nine days before the DOJ released the FISA application to the public.

Aside from the date, the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it.

The DOJ is telling the FISA court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application still contains “sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause” to approve the application.

In essence, in July 2018 the DOJ (now with Mueller in place) is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still valid.

However, it is within the justification of the application that alarm bells are found. On page six the letter identifies the primary participants behind the FISA redactions:

As you can see: Christopher Steele is noted as “Source #1”. Glenn Simpson of Fusion-GPS is noted as “identified U.S. person” or “business associate”, and Perkins Coie is the “U.S-based law firm.”

Now things get very interesting.

On page #8 when discussing Christopher Steele’s sub-source, the DOJ notes the FBI found him to be truthful and cooperative.

This is an incredibly misleading statement from Main Justice to the FISA court, because what the letter doesn’t say is that 18-months earlier the sub-source, also known in the IG report as the “primary sub-source”, informed the FBI that the material attributed to him in the dossier was essentially junk.

Let’s look at how IG Michael Horowitz framed the primary sub-source Igor Danchenko, and specifically notice the FBI contact and questioning took place in January 2017 (we now know that date to be January 12, 2017):

Those interviews with Steele’s primary sub-source, Igor Danchenko, took place in January, March and May of 2017, and clearly the sub-source debunked the content of the dossier itself.  In May of 2017, Weissmann and Mueller were in charge.   This is when the special counsel attempted to pay Danchenko $300k to throw a bag over him.

Those Danchenko interviews were 18-months, 16-months and 14-months ahead of the July 2018 DOJ letter to the FISC. The DOJ-NSD, with the instructions from the Mueller Special Counsel, says the sub-source was “truthful and cooperative” but the DOJ doesn’t tell the court the content of the truthfulness and cooperation. Why?

Keep in mind, this letter to the court was written by AAG John Demers in July 2018. Jeff Sessions was Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein was Deputy AG, Christopher Wray was FBI Director, David Bowditch is Deputy, and Dana Boente is FBI chief-legal-counsel.  Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann were at their apex.

Why would the DOJ-NSD not be forthcoming with the FISA court about the primary sub-source? This level of disingenuous withholding of information speaks to an institutional motive.

As noted by Durham, from the outset the FBI and DOJ knew the Trump-Russia stuff was nonsense.  By July 2018, the DOJ clearly knew the Steele dossier was full of fabrications, yet they withheld that information from the FISA Court and said the predicate was still valid. Why?

It doesn’t take a deep-weeds-walker to identify the DOJ motive.

In July 2018 Robert Mueller’s investigation was at its apex.

This letter, justifying the application and claiming the current information, would still be a valid predicate therein, speaks to the 2018 DOJ needing to retain the validity of the FISA warrant.  The DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller & Weissmann had already extracted from the fraudulent FISA authority. That’s the silo motive.

In July 2018, if the DOJ-NSD had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were fatally flawed, Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann would have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a result of its exploitation.  In essence, Main Justice in 2018 was protecting Mueller’s poisoned fruit.

If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there’s a strong possibility some, perhaps much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated… and cases were pending. The solution: mislead the court and claim the predication was still valid.

That motive clarifies why the FISC would order the 2020 DOJ, now headed by Bill Barr, to release the letter they received from Main Justice.

Remember, in December 2019 the FISC received the IG Horowitz report, and they would have immediately noted the disparity between what IG Horowitz outlined about the FBI investigating Steele’s sub-source, as contrast against what the DOJ told them in July 2018.

The DOJ letter is a transparent misrepresentation when compared to the information in the Horowitz report. Hence, the FISC orders the DOJ to release the July ’18 letter so that everyone, including congressional oversight and the public can see the misrepresentation.

The NSD silo inside Main Justice wrote this letter to the FISC silo – never intending for it to become public.

The court was misled.  Everyone can clearly see it. However, no one in the legislative or executive branch touched it because the court was misled by Robert Mueller.

The court was misled by the special counsel.  Reflect on this for a moment.

The content of that DOJ-NSD letter, and the subsequent disparity, points to an institutional cover-up; and as a consequence the FISC also ordered the DOJ to begin an immediate sequestration effort to find all the evidence from the fraudulent FISA application – the proverbial fruit from the poisonous tree.  In hindsight, the FISC was covering their own ass.

Two more big misstatements within the July 2018 letter appear on page #9. The first is the DOJ claiming that only after the application was filed did they become aware of Christopher Steele working for Fusion-GPS and knowing his intent was to create opposition research for the Hillary Clinton campaign. See the top of the page.

According to the DOJ-NSD claim, the number four ranking official in the DOJ, Bruce Ohr, never told them he was acting as a conduit for Christopher Steele to the FBI. While that claim is hard to believe, in essence what the DOJ-NSD is saying in that paragraph is that the FBI hoodwinked the DOJ-NSD by not telling them where the information for the FISA application was coming from. The DOJ, via John Demers, is blaming the FBI.

 

The second statement, equally as incredulous, is at the bottom of page nine where the DOJ claims they had no idea Bruce Ohr was talking to the FBI throughout the entire time any of the FISA applications were being submitted – October 2016 through June 2017.

In essence, the claim there is that Bruce Ohr was working with the FBI and never told anyone in the DOJ throughout 2016 and all the way past June 29th of 2017. That denial seems rather unlikely; however, once again the DOJ-NSD (Weissmann) is putting the FBI in the crosshairs and claiming they, the special counsel, knew nothing about the information pipeline.

Bruce Ohr, whose wife was working for Fusion-GPS and assisting Christopher Steele with information, was interviewed by the FBI over a dozen times as he communicated with Steele and fed his information to the FBI. Yet the DOJ claims they knew nothing about it.

Again, just keep in mind this claim by the DOJ-NSD is being made in July 2018, six months after Bruce Ohr was demoted twice (December 2017 and January 2018). If what the DOJ is saying was true (it wasn’t), well, the FBI was completely off-the-rails and rogue.

The DOJ was claiming in the July 2018 letter the FISA application predication was still valid.  However, if the DOJ-NSD (Mueller team) genuinely didn’t know about the FBI manipulation, they would be informing the court in 2018 the DOJ no longer supported the FISA application due to new information. They did not do that. Instead, in July 2018, they specifically told the court the predicate was valid, yet the DOJ-NSD knew it was not.

The last point about the July 2018 letter is perhaps the most jarring. Again, keep in mind when it was written; Chris Wray is FBI Director, David Bowditch is Deputy and Dana Boente is FBI chief legal counsel.

Their own FBI reports, by three different INSD and IG investigations, had turned up seriously alarming evidence going back to the early 2017 time-frame; the results of which ultimately led to the DC FBI office losing all of their top officials; and knowing the letter itself was full of misleading and false information about FBI knowledge in/around Christopher Steele – this particular sentence is alarming:

“The FBI has reviewed this letter and confirmed its factual accuracy?”

Really?

As we have just shared, the July 2018 letter itself is filled with factual inaccuracies, misstatements and intentional omissions. So who exactly did the “reviewing”?

This declassification release raised more questions than any other; and yet no one, not a single investigative body, asked questions about it.

Why?…

Because the letter itself was prima-facie evidence of lies directly from the special counsel of Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann.

No one in the executive branch, legislative branch or even judicial branch wanted to highlight the corruption of the special counsel.

Here’s the Full Letter. I strongly suggest everyone read the 14-pages slowly. If you know the background, this letter is infuriating…  AND keep in mind, every single staff member in the House and Senate (those investigating the issue) said they never saw it.  Why, because the DOJ was using silos to hide information.

That’s how badly broken the system of justice, and the system of checks-and-balances in Washington DC, really is.  What we are seeing in the blatant targeting, silencing, and outright in-your-face behavior is a downstream result of the system knowing everyone involved is part of the corrupt operation.

We need to break through these created silo walls by questioning the participants together.

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/22/2023)  (Archive) [Support Conservative Treehouse HERE]

May 15, 2023 – Durham Report: Key revelations on former CIA director that implicate Obama

Few other officials in government had such a large hand in establishing and promoting the Russia-Collusion Hoax as did former CIA Director John Brennan.

Brennan admitted during congressional testimony that he “made sure that anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign was shared with the FBI.” And by his own admission, Brennan even used likely illegal incidental collection of U.S. citizens in the process, telling Rachel Maddow, “Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI.”

Now, we know beyond any doubt that Brennan knew the entire Russia-Collusion narrative was a hoax. And, as we shall see, Brennan knew this in July 2016—before the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation was even opened.

But, of course, it never was an investigation. It was a political operation.

May 15, 2023 – Why the Durham Report Matters – Part Three: Durham Did Not Touch the Julian Assange and DNC Hack Claim, More Silos

The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election.  This DNC hack claim is the fulcrum issue structurally underpinning the Russian election interference narrative pushed by the Weissmann and Muller Special Counsel.  However, this essential claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as outlined during a Dana Rohrabacher interview and by Julian Assange’s own on-the-record statements.

Assange was arrested at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London immediately after the Weissmann/Muller report was released to Bill Barr.  Despite investigating the background of the Trump-Russia nonsense, John Durham never touched the DNC hacking claim – the core of the Mueller report.  Why? Because Durham knew the U.S. Government threw a bag over Assange to protect the fraudulent Trump-Russia and Russian interference claims.

Again, this reality speaks to the corruption within the John Durham investigation.  Durham was protecting Weissmann, Mueller and the core of their justification for a 2-year investigation.   Durham knows why Assange was arrested.  Durham stayed away from it, intentionally.

The Russians HAD TO have made efforts to interfere in the election, or else the factual basis for the surveillance operation against candidate Donald Trump is naked to the world.

That’s why so much DOJ, FBI and Mueller special counsel energy was exhausted framing the predicate.

“Seventeen intelligence agencies,” the December 29th Joint Analysis Report, the expulsion of the Russian diplomats which was an outcropping of the JAR, the rushed January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, shoving microphones in everyone’s faces and demanding they answer if they believed Russia interfered – all of it, and I do mean every bit of it, is predicated on an absolute DC need to establish that Russia Attempted to Interfere in the 2016 election.

The “Russian Malicious Cyber Activity – Joint Analysis Report” (full pdf) is pure nonsense.  It outlines nothing more than vague and disingenuous typical hacking activity that is no more substantive than any other hacking report on any other foreign actor. However, it was needed to help frame the Russian interference narrative.

There were no Russian diplomats involved; there was no Russian election interference; there was no Russian hacking of the DNC; it was all a fraud created by the intelligence community (IC), FBI and Main Justice to support Hillary Clinton’s lies and then cover their own targeting tracks.

On September 26, 2021, Yahoo News published an extensive article about the CIA targeting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2017 and the extreme conversations that were taking place at the highest levels of the U.S. government about how to control him.

There is a much bigger story transparently obvious when overlapped with CTH research files on the Mueller investigation and the U.S. intelligence community.  Specifically, the motive intentionally not outlined by Yahoo News.

What I am going to share is a deep dive using the resources and timeline from within that Yahoo article and the specific details we have assembled that paints a clear picture about what interests existed for the Deep State, the Intelligence apparatus and the Mueller-Weissmann special counsel.

This fully cited review is not for the faint of heart. This is a journey that could shock many; it could alarm more and will likely force more than a few to reevaluate just what the purpose was for Mike Pompeo within the Donald Trump administration.

As the Yahoo News article begins, they outline how those within the Trump administration viewed Assange as a risk in 2017.

Here it is critical to accept that many people inside the Trump administration were there to control events, not to facilitate a policy agenda from a political outsider.   In the example of Assange, the information he carried was a risk to those who attempted and failed to stop Trump from winning the 2016 election.

Julian Assange was not a threat to Donald Trump, but he was a threat to those who attempted to stop Donald Trump.  In 2017, the DC system was reacting to a presidency they did not control.  As an outcome, the Office of the President was being managed and influenced by some with ulterior motives.

Yahoo, via Michael Isikoff, puts it this way: “Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”

As we overlay the timeline, it is prudent to pause and remember some hindsight details.  According to reports in November of 2019, U.S. Attorney John Durham and U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr were spending time looking carefully at CIA activity in the 2016 presidential election. One quote from a media-voice increasingly sympathetic to a political deep-state noted:

“One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that, “It is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”“. (Link)

It is interesting that quote came from a British intelligence official, as there was extensive pre-2016 election evidence of an FBI/CIA counterintelligence operation that also involved U.K. intelligence services. There was an aspect to the FBI/CIA operation that overlaps with both a U.S. and U.K. need to keep Wikileaks founder Julian Assange under tight control.

To understand the risk that Julian Assange represented to FBI/CIA interests, and effectively the Mueller special counsel, it is important to understand just how extensive the operations of the FBI/CIA were in 2016. It is within this network of foreign and domestic operations where FBI Agent Peter Strzok was clearly working as a bridge between the CIA and FBI operations.

By now, people are familiar with the construct of CIA operations involving Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor generally identified as a western intelligence operative who was tasked by the FBI/CIA to run an operation against Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos in both Italy (Rome) and London. {Go Deep}  John Durham ignored him.

Criminal cartel. Center: HILLARY CLINTON and BARACK OBAMA, ringleaders. Counterclockwise from top left: JOSEPH MIFSUD, Maltese professor linked to Russian intelligence and UK intelligence; STEFAN HALPER, academic and CIA operative since 1970s; GLENN SIMPSON, founder of Fusion GPS; CHRISTOPHER STEELE, MI6 agent working undercover as private contractor; BRUCE OHR, then-top-level DOJ executive who conspired with Brennan, Simpson, Steele, and his wife Nellie; NELLIE OHR, CIA asset who covertly passed along fictional dirt on Trump from Simpson, Steele, and her husband Bruce to Brennan; MARC ELIAS, Deep-State lawyer for Obama, Clinton, and the DNC, laundering money from them to Simpson; JAMES COMEY, then-Director of FBI; JOHN BRENNAN, then-Director of CIA; LISA PAGE, FBI counsel and secret lover of Peter Strzok; SENATOR HARRY REID, then-Democratic Leader; PETER STRZOK, CIA/FBI liaison, who secretly worked with Carter Page since at least 2013; GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS, Brennan tool planted inside the Trump campaign; CARTER PAGE, admitted operative for the FBI and CIA, and a Brennan plant inside the Trump presidential campaign to manufacture phony “connections” to Russia; BILL PRIESTAP, head of FBI Counterintelligence, also with long-time ties to Carter Page (Credit: Chalet Reports)

In a similar fashion, the FBI tasked U.S. intelligence asset Stefan Halper to target another Trump campaign official, Carter Page. Under the auspices of being a Cambridge Professor, Stefan Halper also targeted General Michael Flynn. Additionally, using assistance from a female FBI agent, under the false name Azra Turk, Halper also targeted Papadopoulos.  Again, John Durham ignored it.

The initial operations to target Flynn, Papadopoulos and Page were all based overseas. This seemingly makes the CIA exploitation of the assets and the targets legal and much easier.  If Durham went into this intelligence rabbit hole, there would be a paper trail that leads back to Robert Mueller.  Durham didn’t go there.

John Durham and IG Michael Horowitz both outlined how very specific exculpatory evidence was known to the FBI and Main Justice, yet that evidence was withheld from the FISA application used against Carter Page and/or it was ignored.  The FBI fabricated information in the FISA and removed evidence that Carter Page was previously working for the CIA.  This is what FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was indicted and convicted for doing.

One week after the FBI and DOJ filed the second renewal for the Carter Page FISA [April 7, 2017], Yahoo News notes how Mike Pompeo delivered his first remarks as CIA Director:

[…] On April 13, 2017, wearing a U.S. flag pin on the left lapel of his dark gray suit, Pompeo strode to the podium at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, to deliver to a standing-room-only crowd his first public remarks as Trump’s CIA director.

Rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the agency, Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by WikiLeaks. (link)

Why would CIA Director Mike Pompeo be so concerned about Julian Assange and Wikileaks in April 2017?

In April of 2017 Pompeo’s boss, President Donald Trump, was under assault from the intelligence community writ large, and every deep state actor was leaking to the media in a frenzied effort to continue the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy.

The Trump-Russia effort was so all consuming that FBI Director James Comey was even keeping a diary of engagement with President Trump in order to support an ongoing investigation built on fraud – yet, Mike Pompeo is worried about Julian Assange.

Again, here it is important to put yourself back into the time of reference.  Remember, it’s clear in the text messages between FBI Agent Strzok and Lisa Page that Peter Strzok had a working relationship with what he called their “sister agency”, the CIA.

♦ Former CIA Director John Brennan admitted Peter Strzok helped write the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which outlines the Russia narrative; and it was also Peter Strzok who authored the July 31st, 2016, “Electronic Communication” from the CIA to the FBI that originated FBI operation “Crossfire Hurricane.”  Strzok immediately used that EC to travel to London to debrief intelligence officials around Australian Ambassador to the U.K. Alexander Downer.

In short, Peter Strzok was a profoundly overzealous James Bond wannabe who acted as a bridge between the CIA and the FBI. The perfect type of FBI career agent for 2016’s CIA Director John Brennan to utilize.

Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson hired CIA Open-Source analyst Nellie Ohr toward the end of 2015, at appropriately the same time as “FBI Contractors” were identified exploiting the NSA database and extracting information on a specific set of U.S. persons.  One, if not the primary extractors, has now been identified as Rodney Joffe at Neustar.   “The campaign plot was outlined by Durham in a 27-page indictment charging former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false report to the FBI.  The plot was also outlined in the finished Durham report.  Eight individuals who allegedly conspired with Sussmann but does not identify them by name. The sources familiar with the probe confirmed that the leader of the team of contractors was Rodney L. Joffe.” {Go Deep}

It was also Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson who was domestically tasked with a Russian lobbyist named Natalia Veselnitskaya. A little reported Russian Deputy Attorney General named Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was working as a double agent for the CIA and Kremlin. Karapetyan was directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Glenn Simpson was organizing her inside the U.S as part of his Trump-Russia creation.

Glenn Simpson managed Veselnitskaya through the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. However, once the CIA/Fusion GPS operation using Veselnitskaya started to unravel with public reporting, back in Russia Deputy AG Karapetyan died in a helicopter crash.

Simultaneously timed in late 2015 through mid 2016, there was a domestic FBI operation using a young Russian named Maria Butina tasked to run up against Republican presidential candidates. According to Patrick Byrne, Butina’s handler, was FBI agent Peter Strzok who was giving Byrne the instructions on where to send her. {Go Deep}

All of this context outlines the extent to which the FBI/CIA was openly involved in constructing a political operation that settled upon anyone in candidate Donald Trump’s orbit.  A large international operation directed by the FBI/CIA and domestic operations seemingly directed by Peter Strzok operating with a foot in both agencies. [Strzok gets CIA service coin]  Durham eviscerated the predicate for all of this in his report, yet stayed away from the part that leads to Robert Mueller in 2017.

Recap: ♦Mifsud tasked against Papadopoulos (CIA). ♦Halper tasked against Flynn (CIA), Page (CIA) and Papadopoulos (CIA). ♦Azra Turk, pretending to be Halper asst, tasked against Papadopoulos (FBI). ♦Veselnitskaya tasked against Donald Trump Jr. (CIA, Fusion GPS). ♦Butina tasked against Trump and Donald Trump Jr (FBI).

Additionally, Christopher Steele was a British intelligence officer hired by Fusion GPS to assemble and launder fraudulent intelligence information within his dossier. And we cannot forget Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, who was recruited by Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to participate in running an operation against the Trump campaign and create the impression of Russian involvement. Deripaska refused to participate.

All of this engagement directly controlled by U.S. intelligence, and all of this intended to give a specific Russia impression. This predicate was what John Durham was reviewing in November of 2019, and then released in his final report – while whitewashing the parts that led to the Mueller silo.

The key point of all that contextual background is to see how committed the CIA and FBI were to the constructed narrative of Russia interfering with the 2016 election. The CIA, FBI, and by extension the DOJ and a multitude of political operatives, put a hell of a lot of work into it.

We know John Durham looked at the construct of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA); and talking to CIA analysts who participated in the construct of the January 2017 report that bolstered the false appearance of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This context is important, because it ties in to the next part that involves Julian Assange and Wikileaks.This is where the motives of Mike Pompeo in mid/late 2017 come into play.

[…] By the summer of 2017, the CIA’s proposals were setting off alarm bells at the National Security Council. “WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo’s,” said a former Trump administration national security official. (link)

On April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment was unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA). From the indictment we discover it was under seal since March 6th, 2018:

On Tuesday April 15, 2019, more investigative material was released. Again, note the dates: Grand Jury, *December of 2017* This means FBI investigation prior to….

The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time. The grand jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation, April 2019.

Why the delay?

What exactly was the DOJ waiting for from March 2018 to April 2019?

This timeframe is the peak of the Robert Mueller/Andrew Weissmann special counsel investigation.

Here’s where it gets interesting….

The Yahoo article outlines, “There was an inappropriate level of attention to Assange“, by the CIA according to a national security council official.  However, if you consider the larger ramifications of what Julian Assange represented to all of those people inside and outside government interests who created the Trump-Russia collusion/conspiracy, well, there was actually a serious risk.

Remember, in May 2017 Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann effectively took over the DOJ.  The purpose of the Mueller investigation was to cover up the illegal operation that took place in the preceding year.   The people exposed in the Trump-Russia targeting operation included all of those intelligence operatives previously outlined in the CIA, FBI and DOJ operations.  These are the people John Durham did not indict.

The FBI submission to the Eastern District of Virginia Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.”

(August 2017, The Hill Via John Solomon) Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year’s election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful information about the leaks in the near future.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to Russia and chairs an important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy, became the first American congressman to meet with Assange during a three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.

Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill.

“Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year’s presidential election,” Rohrabacher said, “Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.”

Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher said he had information to share privately with President Trump. (read more)

Dana Rohrabacher later published this account of the events:

Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative; and knowing that Assange could essentially destroy the baseline predicate for the entire Trump-Russia investigation – which included the use of Robert Mueller; it would make sense for corrupt government officials to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange.

That contact between Rohrabacher and Assange explains why those same government officials would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and cover) for a grand jury by December 2017.

Within three months of the grand jury seating (Nov/Dec 2017), the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018.

The EDVA then sat on the Julian Assange indictment while the Mueller/Weissman probe was ongoing.

As soon as the Mueller probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed (link).

As a person who researched this fiasco, including the ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17 intelligence agencies”, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for cover’s anti-Russia narrative in December ’16, and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January ’17, this timing against Assange is not coincidental.

It doesn’t take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State motive to control Julian Assange, because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.  Again, John Durham stayed away from it!

♦ This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election.

This claim is the fulcrum underpinning the Russia election interference narrative.  However, this core and essential claim is directly disputed by Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange’s on-the-record statements.

The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Shawn Henry (Credit: Chip Somodeville/Getty Images)

The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment (Peter Strzok); and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from another Michael Sussmann partner, Shawn Henry at Crowdstrike, yes another DNC contractor and collaborator with the Clinton campaign.

The CIA held a massive conflict of self-interest problem surrounding the Russian hacking claim as it pertained to their own activity in 2016. The FBI and DOJ always held a massive interest in maintaining the Russian hacking claim.  Robert Mueller and Andrew Weismann did everything they could to support that predicate; and all of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also carried a self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative.

Julian Assange was/is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange claimed he has evidence it was from an inside DNC leak, not from a DNC hack.

The Russian “hacking” claim was ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K Intelligence apparatus.  Well, right there is the obvious motive to shut Assange down as soon as intelligence officials knew the Mueller report was going to be public.  And that is exactly what Main Justice and the U.S. intelligence community did.

This is why John Durham never touched it.

All of them know what happened.

All of them know why Julian Assange was taken from the Embassy in London.  A bag had to be thrown over Assange in order to retain the justification for the Weissmann/Mueller special counsel and the larger Russian election interference claims.  None of them do not know this.  They all know.

Put the panel of Barr, Rosenstein, Horowitz, Mueller, Weissmann, Durham and Wray in front of congress.  Ask each one: “Who is Seth Rich?”

Then start asking the right questions about the timeline of Assange being arrested.  Ask them about the DNC hack and Russian provenance according to Crowdstrike.  Ask them key and specific questions about the FBI working with Crowdstrike and about the DOJ and EDVA case against Assange.  Watch them squirm.

They all know what happened.  SO DO WE!

Ask them questions about it in public.  Watch them squirm.

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/23/2023)  (Archive)

May 15, 2023 – Why the Durham Report Matters – Part One, Remember the Russian Diplomats Expelled by Obama?

I am going to be outlining some details for those of you who walk the deep weeds of understanding on behalf of our nation.

If you are a “tldr” person, this effort is not for you; feel free to continue sitting on the back bench and complaining about stuff. However, if you are a person who absorbs information so that you can confront our ‘representatives‘, then these articles and points are arrows in your quiver.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board is finally starting to get it.  They wrote an article this weekend recognizing how the Durham report totally eviscerates the foundation of the Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann special counsel investigation [SEE HERE].  The conclusion they reach is accurate:

… “All of this suggests that the Mueller probe was as much a cover-up as an attempt to find evidence of collusion.” (link)

Welcome to the party WSJ, nice of you to join us.  But it’s worse.  Much worse.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Keep in mind that John Durham has laid the Mueller/Weissmann probe naked to their enemies. Unfortunately, Weissmann and Mueller don’t have any enemies in Washington DC amid any party {Go Deep to 2021}. Our representatives are not representing. The true DC enemy is ‘We The People‘ – and I choose to fight them.

How entrenched is the defense mechanism? Well, consider a few things:

♦ First, John Durham clearly shows in his 306-page report with a 48-page classified appendix, that Russia did nothing to interfere in the 2016 election. The entire Russian Interference operation was a Clinton fabrication, later enhanced by a Federal Bureau of Investigation who used the fabrication as a cover-up justification to hide their surveillance of the Trump campaign.

♦ Second, accepting the empirical, factual, and inherently true reality of the first point – consider that President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats to retain the Clinton fabrication and FBI lies. Think about this one carefully, the Obama administration expelled Russian diplomats in order to retain a domestic political ruse! President Obama did this *after* CIA Director John Brennan briefed him about the Clinton fabrication.

There were no Russian diplomats involved; there was no Russian election interference; there was no Russian hacking of the DNC; it was all a fraud created by the intelligence community (IC), FBI and Main Justice to support Hillary Clinton’s lies and then cover their own targeting tracks.

♦ Third, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, with the full support of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, indicted 14 Russian entities under completely bogus pretenses. All of that effort was done to assist the Clinton narrative, cover for Obama and then use the special counsel to cover up the Trump targeting operation. The totally bogus construct explains why the fabricated indictments were sealed in the DOJ National Security Division in perpetuity, thereby keeping the fraudulent construct hidden from public review forever.

♦ Fourth, the only Russian entity who choose to push back against the Mueller/Weissmann fraud was the Russian Concord catering company – literally a ham sandwich operation. The outcome of that Russian confrontation was Weissmann/Mueller telling the DC judge they had to drop the case because any effort to prosecute the nonsense would create a risk to “national security.” Nice escape hatch from righteous sunlight on a case that was founded in nonsense.

Why do I bring these four points up? Because not a single person in Washington DC will mention it, and it’s the reality of the thing. I am committed to fighting this crap, and if the Wall Street editorial page is going to finally join the fight, that’s good. Let’s keep pushing.

The next post is going to showcase another very granular example of the silo system in operation. However, the prior discussion about silos carries forward as the baseline to understand, so here’s that reminder once again.

CURRENT STATUS – Let me uncomplicate the complex, and more importantly, let me propose the outline of a solution.

Michael Horowitz (Credit: public domain)

♦ SILO #1 – Inspector General Michael Horowitz was given instructions by outgoing President Barack Obama to review the internal decision-making inside the FBI, Main Justice and DOJ-NSD as it pertained to the Hillary Clinton classified document scandal.

In early January 2017, IG Horowitz was tasked to review the FBI decisions during the Clinton exoneration and deliver a report on his findings.

First, it is important to remember the DOJ inspector general can only review internal government conduct. The IG does not review or investigate outside involvement and has no authority to compel investigative compliance from outside parties. The Office of Inspector General is an internal review agency.

Second, it is important to remember the DOJ inspector general was not authorized to conduct any oversight of the Dept of Justice National Security Division, DOJ-NSD. During the Obama era, when the DOJ-NSD was created by Attorney General Eric Holder, through the entirety of the Obama era, there was no inspector general oversight into any operations conducted by the DOJ-NSD – that included the FISA process. It was not until later in 2017 when the Trump administration granted the OIG authority to conduct oversight into the DOJ National Security Division.

Think of IG Michael Horowitz as an investigative silo. You will see why this matters.

♦ SILO #2 – Robert Mueller (truthfully Andrew Weissmann) was appointed in May of 2017 by Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, as Special Counsel to investigate Trump-Russia and the reports of prior Russian influence in the 2016 election.  Robert Mueller was a figurehead – a person in name only to give credibility to the purpose and intent of the group who assembled under his shingle.  Andrew Weissmann was the actual manager of the investigation, events and details of the Mueller probe.

On the outward face, in the aftermath of FBI Director James Comey being fired, the Mueller investigation was created to look at Russian interference in the 2016 election – against the background that Comey’s firing by President Trump was related to an intent to impede the ongoing Crossfire Hurricane investigation.  However, on the internal dynamic, inside the mechanics of how DC silos are created, the Mueller probe existed to hide the DOJ and FBI weaponization of government that was deployed under the justification of the FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Sometime around June of 2017, while conducting his review of the FBI conduct in the Clinton investigation, Inspector General Michael Horowitz discovered troubling internal communications between FBI agent Peter Strzok and DOJ-NSD assigned lawyer to the FBI, Lisa Page.  Silo #1 now intersects Silo #2.

Lisa Page was the DOJ lawyer advising FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.  Peter Strzok was the lead FBI counterintelligence agent working on the Clinton email investigation.  Lisa Page, Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe were the core of the Clinton investigation and intrinsically linked to the Clinton exoneration as announced by FBI Director James Comey.

IG Horowitz knew of the Clinton investigation and was investigating the details therein.  Horowitz did not initially know about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation which, by June of 2017, had subsequently morphed into the Special Counsel Mueller investigation.

Horowitz’s 2017 task only pertained to the Clinton classified documents and decision-making. However, it was the exact same FBI and DOJ people who investigated then exonerated Hillary Clinton, who then opened an investigation of Trump, who then transferred into an expanded Robert Mueller probe.

Horowitz (Silo 1) was bound by requirements of his office to inform Robert Mueller that individuals inside his investigation (Silo 2) were under investigation.

This presented a problem for Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann who were conducting a coverup and targeting operation.

Essentially, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were a threat, as they were bringing an IG review into the security of the Mueller silo.  Almost immediately, Strzok and Page were removed by Mueller/Weissmann to purge the problematic window they represented.

Mueller and Weismann then continued their operation, absorbing any Main Justice information that had anything to do with Trump-Russia.  Simultaneous to their unilateral empowerment, Weissmann and Mueller continued to fabricate a false premise of Russian interference in the 2016 election.  This ‘Russia narrative’ was supported as the justification for their continued operation throughout 2017, 2018 and into 2019.

It is important to remember that Mueller/Weissmann had full control over everything that had anything to do with the Russian interference narrative or the Trump-Russia narrative.  Any ancillary investigation from any government office that touched on these issues was subsequently absorbed by Weissmann and team.

As an example, this Weissmann/Mueller absorption and control included the FBI case against SSCI Security Director James Wolfe, the man who leaked the Title-1 surveillance warrant (FISA application) deployed by the Crossfire Hurricane team against Carter Page.  The Wolfe investigation (April ’17 through January ’18) was conducted by FBI Washington Field Office agent Brian Dugan. James Wolfe was indicted by USAO Jessie Liu for leaking the FISA application to journalist Ali Watkins.  However, the evidence file was reviewed by the special counsel, and after threats by the defense team to subpoena Senate Intelligence Committee members, the specific charge of leaking the FISA was dropped from the criminal case.

Because Weissmann/Mueller controlled everything that touched the Trump-Russia issues, in June of 2018 when the Carter Page FISA application was made public, it came from the Weissmann/Mueller team release.  This was one of the lesser discussed revelations from the Rod Rosenstein June 2020 testimony about the Mueller probe.

♦ SILO #3 – After taking office in February of 2019, Attorney General Bill Barr received the Mueller report in March, and a debate with Mueller/Weissmann about the content and report release began.  In May 2019, AG Barr appointed Special Counsel John Durham to review the FBI operations that initiated the Trump-Russia probe.

It is important to note that John Durham was appointed *after* Bill Barr received the Mueller report from Andrew Weissmann. It is also important to note that despite the originating mandate of Weissmann/Mueller being predicated on their obligation to look into the accusations of Trump-Russia, the Clinton campaign organization of the Trump-Russia narrative does not appear in the Mueller report.

There is nothing about Clinton’s work with the Perkins Coie law firm and lawyer Michael Sussmann to work as a cut-out for the Clinton campaign contacts with Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr or any other substantively manufactured system that was used to create the illusion of the Trump-Russia connections.  The absence of that information inside the Mueller report begged the obvious question:

How could Mueller investigate Trump-Russia for two years and never find the origin of Trump-Russia?

After realizing the Mueller report contained none of this information, in May of 2019 Bill Barr appointed John Durham and Silo #3 was created.

Each of the silos, purposefully created by those who operate within the DC systems of political power, were created to have specific usefulness and function.  This is how the system operates.

We hear things like “ongoing investigation” as sunlight blocks, or “potential interfering with an investigation” as another technique.  Each time a silo is created, the purpose of the silo is to control information and isolate the larger system from scrutiny.

When Robert Mueller (silo 2) appeared before a congressional committee in June 2019 to answer questions about his report, he was asked about the origination of Trump-Russia.  Mueller’s jaw-dropping response was, “That was not in my purview.”

Wait, how can your existence be predicated on investigating Trump-Russia, and yet the origin of Trump-Russia is not in your “purview”?  See the problem.

Unfortunately, and not accidentally, Robert Mueller was able to avoid scrutiny of never having investigated the origin of Trump-Russia because there was another silo, John Durham (silo 3), to take the heat off him.  Each silo is sequentially created to deflect and distract from questioning that surrounds the originating corruption. Attorney General Bill Barr created Silo #3 (Durham), for exactly this reason.  Bill Barr was the Bondo, John Durham the spray paint.

John Durham finishes up Silo-3 operations, delivers a report, and now we have a Silo #4 in operation via the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith.

As you can see, each silo creates an internal defense system which also allows media to deflect, ignore and distract.  However, in the Trump-Russia story you will note there is a flow to how the silos are sequenced.  The silos are designed to absorb information, deflect sunlight and keep accountability away.  The silos are constructs, preservation systems, for the DC administrative state.

Ultimately, each silo is created to stop seeing the larger picture – the unlawful targeting of a presidential candidate, and then a subsequent coup against that candidate after the election.   The evidence of the weaponized government is in the full story that resides, compartmented, inside purposefully constructed containment silos; each intended to block sunlight upon specific components of the evidence.

♦ SOLUTION – There is a way to bring the sunlight and destroy the silo system.  The method is to use the inertia of the construct against itself.

Obviously, I hope you can understand why it would be imprudent to go too deep into this right now.  However, suffice to say – here are the broad strokes.

In front of you sits a panel of SEVEN people:

Barr, Rosenstein, Horowitz, Mueller, Weissmann, Durham and Wray.

You do not deconstruct the silos by questioning them separately. Each silo will avoid sunlight by deflecting inquiry to the mechanism of the other.

Instead, you rain sunlight down upon the silos by questioning each of the participants individually while located together.

All prior guidelines remain valid.

You use very granular and specific questions that pertain to the flow-through details that each silo was created to hide.

The usefulness of the silo process is dependent on its ability to stand alone.

When you put direct questions to the assembly of silos, there is nowhere to deflect.

Two days. Eight hours each day. Five rounds of questions. No one reading statements – only questions.

Very, very specific questions.

The goal is sunlight. Rip the Band-Aid off, call the baby ugly, and start the process to fix this crap by exposing it. Restore the First and Fourth Amendments and heal the injury. What we need is a full, uncensored, brutally honest expose’ of how bad things have become and how that system can be dismantled.  The existing constitution is the protection; just remove the stuff that is violating it.

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/22/2023)  (Archive)

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May 15, 2023 – Durham Report is released; Techno Fog quick analysis

Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation – an inquiry into government corruption, lies to secret courts, the weaponization of the US intelligence apparatus, the FBI’s attempt to take down a sitting president – has concluded.

The Durham Report has been released.

Here are some of the main findings:

  • “The FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia.”
  • Crossfire Hurricane “was opened as a full investigation without [the FBI] ever having spoken to the persons who provided that information.” Days after it was opened, Peter Strzok was telling a London FBI employee that “there’s nothing to this.”
  • Internal FBI communications discussing the Crossfire Hurricane during its early stages: it’s “thin” and “it sucks”.
  • British Intelligence pushed back on Mueller requests for assistance: “[a British Intelligence person] basically said there was no [expletive] way in hell they were going to do it.”
  • Durham documents TWO investigations into Hillary Clinton – one involving the Clinton Foundation and one involving illegal foreign contributions to Clinton’s Campaign.
  • In one Clinton Campaign investigation, an FBI confidential human source (CHS) had offered an illegal foreign contribution to the campaign through an intermediary. The Clinton Campaign was “okay with it” and “were fully aware”. The CHS offered the FBI a copy of the credit card charge; the FBI never got receipts. In fact, the FBI handling agent told the CHS “to stay away from all events relating to Clinton’s campaign.”

  • In February 2016, FBI Assistant Director Andrew McCabe directed the Clinton Foundation investigation to be shut down. He walked that back after receiving push-back, but McCabe made sure that his approval was required for any further investigative steps.
  • The New York Field Office was called on behalf of FBI Director Comey and informed to “cease and desist” from the Clinton Foundation investigation.
  • The FBI and DOJ restricted both of those Clinton investigations, making sure that “essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.” In comparison, the FBI opened a full investigation into the Trump Campaign based on unvetted “intelligence”.
  • The CIA had direct knowledge of the Clinton plan (“Clinton Plan”) to vilify Trump by linking him to Putin and Russia. On August 3, 2016, CIA Director John Brennon met with President Obama, VP Biden, and other senior Administration officials, including but not limited to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey. At that meeting, Brennan informed them of the Clinton Plan:

  • In September 2016, the CIA sent the FBI this information on the Clinton Plan to link Trump and Russia:

  • Somehow, the FBI did nothing to vet or investigate the Clinton Plan – even though they were using parts of the Clinton Plan (the Steele Reports) – to investigate the Trump Campaign. Durham writes: “No FBI personnel who were interviewed by the Office recalled Crossfire Hurricane personnel taking any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence.”
  • In fact, it was as if the CIA’s Clinton Plan memo was somehow buried within the FBI. Most members of Crossfire Hurricane “had never seen the intelligence before”. And, as we have previously discussed, it was never disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in contravention to that court’s local rules.
  • FBI Director James Comey was deeply interested in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and micromanaged it, demanding the Carter Page FISA warrant, telling Assistant Director Andrew McCabe: “Where is the FISA, where is the FISA?”

  • Dina Corsi (Credit: FBI)

    The FBI knew, relatively early, that its Carter Page FISA warrants were dubious. That FBI knowledge only intensified by 2018, as FBI analysts discussed how “Steele’s subsources could have been compromised by the Russians.” They were going to prepare their findings in a memorandum. FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, Dina Corsi, met with the review team and directed them not to document any recommendations, context, or analysis in the memorandum they were preparing.” An FBI attorney was at that meeting. “He confirmed that the team was told not to write any more memoranda or analytical pieces and to provide their findings orally.” Corsi’s demands, according to one FBI Attorney, were “the most inappropriate operational or professional statement he had ever heard at the FBI.”

  • Igor Danchenko, the Steele primary subsource charged with (and acquitted of) lying to the FBI, was paid $220K by the FBI as a confidential human source. This was paid after the FBI knew Danchenko lied to them. As the Durham Investigation proceeded, Durham learned “the FBI proposed making continued future payments to Danchenko, totaling more than $300,000, while [Durham] was actively investigating this matter.” The FBI, in effect, was seeking to influence a key witness who would later face criminal charges.
  • The FBI’s reasons for paying Danchenko were certainly curious. Interviews with Durham’s office revealed: “the FBI’s Executive Assistant Director for National Security, made clear that they were not even able to accurately describe the value or contributions of Danchenko that would justify keeping him open, much less making hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to him.”

We’ll follow this up with a much deeper analysis hopefully by tomorrow. Part of that story is the problem with the Durham investigation: the fact that its scope didn’t include the attribution of the DNC hack. (The Reactionary/Substack, 5/15/2023)  (Archive)

May 26, 2023 – In a healthy ‘democracy’ John Brennan would already be in prison

Barack Obama meets with John Brennan, Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, in the Oval Office, on January 4, 2010. (Credit: Pete Souza/White House)

The just-released Durham report confirmed that the FBI not only failed to corroborate the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s oppo-doc against Donald Trump, but it regularly ignored existing, sometimes dispositive, evidence to keep the investigation alive. Some officials were credulous. Others were devious. But no one “stole” our democracy — other than perhaps intelligence officials and the journalists who helped feed the collective hysteria over Russia.

John Brennan, Hamas-loving authoritarian and partisan propagandist, almost surely knew it was a con from the start. Yet he spent four years on television sounding like a deranged subreddit commenter. Even after privately admitting he knew there was no collusion, Brennan kept lying and using his credentials to mislead the public.

From Durham’s report:

CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials. When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General’s Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that “they found no conspiracy.”

As Durham points out, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report, and after Brennan admitted no one found a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, the former head of the CIA went on with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, another all-star election “denier,” and claimed that he “suspected there was more” to collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin than Mueller had let on.

Did I mention this was the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency?

Brennan must have been relying on that same gut instinct that led him to sign a letter asserting that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop, a journalistic effort with more corroboration than virtually anything connected to Trump’s alleged “collusion,” had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

(…) The House Judiciary Committee recently uncovered a Oct. 19, 2020, email from CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who was working with the Biden campaign to concoct “a talking point” to “push back on Trump” during the final presidential debates, asking Brennan to sign on to the “disinformation” letter. “Ok, Michael, add my name to the list. Good initiative. Thanks for asking me to sign on,” was Brennan’s reply.

That’s all it takes for the former CIA director, a man who was given immense unchecked power — a man who oversaw secret kill lists and was the driving force behind drone strikes on civilians (including an American citizen) — to sign a letter he knew would obstruct the workings of “democracy” and the free press.

This is a man who still has access to classified documents. You might remember all the hand-wringing over broken norms when Trump allegedly barred intelligence agencies from sharing classified information with Brennan. The New York Times even gave him a column to argue that Trump’s claims of “no collusion” were “why the president revoked my security clearance,” which, again, he almost certainly knew was a lie. (Read more: The Federalist, 5/15/2023)  (Archive)

May 16, 2023 – Adam Schiff still insists Trump conspired with Russia after Durham Report further discredits FBI probe

Adam Schiff (Credit: public domain)

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif), the past chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who now hopes to be California’s next Democratic senator, remains unswayed by the newly released Durham Report in his conviction that members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with Russian intelligence operatives to steal the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.

When asked by The Epoch Times about the Durham Report’s conclusion of no collusion between Trump and Russia and whether the lawmaker stood by his claims to the contrary, Schiff replied, “If you read Mr. Durham’s report, what he said is that there wasn’t evidence of collusion before they began the investigation. That’s obviously a very important distinction.”

The California Democrat then pointed to what he described as “secret meetings” between Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian intelligence agent. Schiff accused Manafort of “providing that agent with internal polling data with their strategy for key battleground states, while that unit of Russian intelligence was engaged in trying to help Donald Trump win.”

Schiff said that for “most Americans that looks like plain collusion.”

But the Durham Report described the FBI’s top expert on Russian intelligence as finding no such evidence.

“The FBI Intelligence Analyst who had perhaps the most in-depth knowledge of particularly sensitive Russian intelligence information in FBI holdings during the relevant time period disclosed that she never saw anything regarding any Trump election campaign conspiracy with the Russians, nor did she see anything in FBI holdings regarding Carter Page, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, or Paul Manafort engaging in any type of conspiracy with the Russians regarding the election,” the report said.

(…) Schiff further claimed that Donald Trump Jr. was closely connected with Russian intelligence.

“But you also had the Russians reaching out through an intermediary to Donald Trump’s son, offering dirt on the Democratic candidate for president as part of what was described as the Russian government’s effort to help elect Donald Trump. And rather than refuse it, Don Jr. said that [if] it’s what was represented, they would love it,” Schiff told The Epoch Times.

(…) Finally, Schiff said former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was involved in the campaign’s collusion.

“Let me just add that the President’s National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, [was meeting] secretly with the Russian ambassador; they were having conversations secretly with the Russian ambassador to undermine bipartisan sanctions on Russia for its interference in the election. And then lying about it. Most Americans again, [would say] this is collusion,” Schiff said.

The conversations between Flynn and then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak regarding U.S. sanctions, however, took place weeks after Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election and as part of Flynn’s preparation for taking over his White House duties following the inauguration of the new Chief Executive. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 5/16/2023)  (Archive)

May 16, 2023 – Senator Hawley calls for Clinton prosecutions after Durham Report is released

During Monday’s interview on Jesse Waters’ show, Senator Hawley passionately expressed his belief that there must be consequences for the actions revealed in the Durham Report, urging for prosecutions of the Clinton campaign and Hillary Clinton herself.

Hawley emphasized the alarming connection between Clinton’s public statements on collusion and her campaign’s alleged involvement in feeding misinformation to the FBI.

“People need to be prosecuted for this. The Clinton campaign and Hillary Clinton herself, is it any coincidence that she is tweeting about collusion at exactly the same time her campaign operatives are feeding this BS to the FBI? I don’t think so,” stated Hawley firmly during the interview. (Read more: Trending Politics, 5/16/2023) (Archive)

May 17, 2023 – Marco Polo/Biden Laptop: “Hunter’s firm paid over $25k for Joe’s second iPhone, circumventing White House security protocols”; phone records subpoenaed


(Archive)

(Archive)

 

Schweizer: Oversight Committee Has Subpoenaed Phone Records for Joe Biden Phone Paid by Hunter Biden

May 21, 2023 – Jeffrey Epstein appeared to threaten Bill Gates over affair with Russian Bridge player

Mila Antonova discussed playing bridge with Bill Gates in a video that was posted online in 2010. (Credit: video screenshot)

Jeffrey Epstein discovered that Bill Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and later appeared to use his knowledge to threaten one of the world’s richest men, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Microsoft co-founder met the woman around 2010, when she was in her 20s. Epstein met her in 2013 and later paid for her to attend software coding school. In 2017, Epstein emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the course, according to the people familiar with the matter.

The email came after the convicted sex offender had struggled and failed to convince Gates to participate in a multibillion-dollar charitable fund that Epstein tried to establish with JPMorgan Chase. The implication behind the message, according to people who have viewed it, was that Epstein could reveal the affair if Gates didn’t keep up an association between the two men.

“Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” said a spokeswoman for Gates. (Read more: The Wall Street Journal, 5/21/2023)

May 18, 2023 – FBI whistleblowers testify to House Government Weaponization Committee, their security clearances were revoked and they can no longer work

FBI agents Garrett O’Boyle (l), Steve Friend (c), and Marcus Allen (r) were suspended for questioning the agency’s handling of the January 6 case and stating their beliefs that the FBI has been weaponized against conservatives. (Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP)

House Republicans joined FBI whistleblowers in alleging “retaliation” for exposing political “rot” within the bureau, while the FBI revoked some of their security clearances and Democrats accused them of being a “national security threat.”

The controversy spilled out as the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), released a report on what they called the “politically weaponized” FBI and held a whistleblower hearing on Thursday. Meantime, the FBI pushed out a letter criticizing some of the witnesses testifying to counter their allegations.

“The FBI’s mission is to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people,” an FBI spokesperson told the Washington Examiner late Thursday. “The FBI has not and will not retaliate against individuals who make protected whistleblower disclosures.”

Jordan called the whistleblowers “brave” for speaking out and said they suffered backlash from the FBI as a result.

“They came forward, and I want to thank them for doing it. But because they did, man oh man, have they faced retaliation,” Jordan said.

The new House Republican report blasted improper “retaliation” by the FBI against the whistleblowers who testified on Thursday: FBI special agent Stephen Friend, FBI special agent Garret O’Boyle, and FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen.

“Whistleblower testimony makes clear that the FBI rid itself of employees who dared to speak out against FBI leadership or to raise good faith concerns about FBI operations,” the report states. “The FBI has taken personnel actions against whistleblowers who raised concerns within the Bureau and, later, to Congress. In several instances — Friend, O’Boyle, and Allen — the FBI weaponized the security clearance adjudication process to silence employees who fight against the politicized ‘rot’ within the FBI leadership.”

The GOP report added that “because a security clearance is necessary to work at the FBI, revoking or suspending an agent’s security clearance effectively indefinitely suspends the agent and leaves the agent to languish in an unpaid purgatory.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 5/19/2023)  (Archive)

May 18, 2023 – Peter Strzok attacks Peter Schweizer for his work on Biden corruption

Peter Strzok (l) (Credit: Saul Loeb/Getty Images) and Peter Schweizer (Credit: public domain)

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok, a key figure in the “Russia collusion” hoax, attacked Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer on Thursday for his work on alleged corruption by Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden.

Stzrok linked to a New York Times article published Thursday about Republicans’ interest in investigating another FBI agent, Timothy R. Thibault. The Times noted that the FBI had once approached Schweizer for documents and information relating to his own investigations into Hunter Biden’s business dealings:

Before the [2020] election, two agents contacted Peter Schweizer, who is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, which has received millions of dollars from prominent conservative donors. Mr. Schweizer also writes for Breitbart, a right-wing news outlet, and had ties to Stephen K. Bannon, a former White House strategist for Mr. Trump.

In an interview, Mr. Schweizer confirmed that the two sought information about Hunter Biden, the president’s son, whose foreign business dealings have been the subject of intense Republican scrutiny for years.

Mr. Schweizer had recently published a book, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite,” delving into the financial dealings of the Biden family. The agents, Mr. Schweizer said, wanted to know if he could share documents related to Hunter Biden’s foreign business ties that he might have gathered for his work. Mr. Schweizer said he passed on corporate records and other files.

Schweizer told the Times that the FBI did not contact him for more help after Hunter Biden’s laptop emerged in 2020, even though he reached out to the agency to inform it that he had a copy of the contents of the laptop.

Schweizer noted that the Times had verified his reporting, including that which was published in Clinton Cash, an exposé that apparently prompted the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to commission the false dossier on Trump and Russia — which was fed to the FBI and formed the basis for its subsequent “collusion” inquiry. (Breitbart News, 5/19/2023) (Archive)

May 19, 2023 – FISA Court releases report stating, FBI continues to abuse surveillance tool after Trump-era abuses

(…) The FISA Court’s report detailed the nearly 300,000 abuses logged between 2020 and early 2021.

For instance: After the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, an FBI employee ran a whopping 23,132 separate queries of Americans “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence related to the query term used,” Contreras found. Justice Department officials “concluded there was no specific factual basis to think the searches would turn up foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime” and the court opinion found that “no raw Section 702 information was accessed as a result of these queries.”

In June 2020, the FBI searched for digital data and communications of 133 people arrested “in connection with civil unrests and protests between approximately May 30, and June 18, 2020,” when protests and riots erupted across the country over George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

That search was done, officials said, to see if there was counter-terrorism information about those individuals. When questioned about the searches later, FBI officials said it was reasonable for agents to think the searches would return foreign intelligence. The court opinion describing that effort has significant redactions, making it unclear why the FBI developed its theory.

Incredibly, the Court also found a long pattern between 2016 and 2020 in which the FBI conducted FISA searches targeting “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects,” according to the court opinion. The Justice Department found these searches violated the rules “because there was no reasonable basis to expect they would return foreign intelligence or evidence of crime.”

In its defense, the FBI argued “that querying FISA information using identifiers of the victims — simply because they were homicide victims — was reasonably likely to retrieve evidence of crime.”

Even more egregiously, an FBI analyst “conducted a batch query for over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign” because the campaign was supposedly “a target of foreign influence,” the opinion said.

Justice Department officials found that “only eight identifiers used in the query”—such as a name, phone number or an email address—”had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities” that complied with the FISA standards.

Officials said lawmakers who were briefed months ago about the problems have been pushing authorities to make them public. The delay in doing so was due to discussions of redactions of a separate part of the opinion, which described a novel application of surveillance techniques, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters.

Senior law enforcement officials said Friday that the problems in the report do not represent FBI’s current practices. The problems were discovered largely due to Justice Department audits, they said, and have been remedied.

“We’re not trying to hide from this stuff, but this type of non-compliance is unacceptable,” a senior FBI official said. “There was confusion historically about what the query standard was,” said another senior law enforcement official.

The FBI has rolled out a host of changes to how agents and analysts use the Section 702 database. While a previous version of the system automatically included it in a list of areas that agents could search for information, agents and analysts must now specifically seek and choose to search 702 information. FBI users of the database are also required to write, in their own words, why they think their search will return foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime, and an attorney must approve any “batch” searches involving large numbers of people.

In recent months, authorities have touted that the number of 702 searches conducted that involve U.S. residents or companies has dropped dramatically — more than 90 percent last year. Officials said Friday that the dropoff was largely the result of the Justice Department audit having found significant compliance failures by the FBI.

The problems identified by the court and the Justice Department are separate from criticism lodged against the FBI in 2019 by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and again this week by special counsel John Durham, over the FBI’s use of a different kind of foreign intelligence surveillance court order, which specifically targeted a former Trump adviser in 2016 and 2017 based on faulty and incomplete FBI applications.

In 2021, a follow-up report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz found “widespread” failures by the FBI to follow one of the key rules of FISA surveillance, indicating that the problems went far beyond the FBI’s investigation of former Trump adviser Carter Page.

Additionally, the court opinion included information regarding what officials called a “highly sensitive” surveillance technique, and a court debate about the novel use of that technique. Details about the technique are redacted, making it difficult to determine the purpose and scope of the controversial surveillance.

In a statement to American Greatness, Jordan said: “Chris Wray told us we can sleep well at night because of the FBI’s so-called Fisa reforms. But it just keeps getting worse.” (Read more: American Greatness, 5/19/2023)  (Archive)

The FBI’s Illegal Surveillance Is Not New, but the Magnitude of the Problem Has Never Been Fully Disclosed—Until Now – Video

May 21, 2023 – Hillary Clinton shares unknown story about Putin and his parents, even the CIA didn’t know

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday said Russian President Vladimir Putin told her a story about his parents that, at the time, had been unknown, even to the CIA.

Speaking at a wide-ranging interview at the FT Weekend Festival, Clinton said Putin shared with her how his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, rescued his mother, Maria Ivanovna Putina, from a pile of bodies during a war and nursed her back to health prior to his birth.

“He said, ‘You know, my father was on the frontlines during the siege [of Leningrad]. And he would have to be there for three days. There was no food. There were rats everywhere. He was trudging back to the apartment where he lived with my mother and as he’s walking down the street, there’s a huge pile of bodies. As my father was walking by the pile of bodies, he looks down and he sees my mother’s foot. He ran over and he was pulling what he thought to be the body of his wife,'” Clinton shared in the interview.

“So his father took the woman’s body and she wasn’t dead. He took her back to the apartment and nursed her back to health. And then after the war, Putin was born,” she continued.

Clinton later said she shared Putin’s story with her team and found out that no one, not even the CIA and U.S. Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul, knew about the incident between the Russian leader’s parents.

“After it was over, I got my team and told my team. We had people from the CIA with us. We had the whole entourage. I told them the story and no one has ever heard it before,” she said.

(…) That being said, the tale Clinton included in her memoir is different from the story Putin told in his 2000 autobiography, “First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President.” In it, Putin said his mother was laid to rest near a pile of bodies after she fainted due to starvation. She later “woke up in time.” He also noted that his father was at war the whole time and had no chance to look for his mother. In another anecdote, Putin said it was his mother who later found his father in a hospital. (Read more: IB Times, 5/22/2023)  (Archive)

May 22, 2023 – Missouri vs. Biden files motion for a temporary injunction against government censorship

Recently the Plaintiffs filed their motion to support the temporary injunction – a hearing we have been waiting on for nearly a year because of the government’s delays and obfuscations. It was 1,200 FACTS about government-coordinated censorship.

The government responded with a 1200-page monstrosity arguing they did it all – but because of foreign actors and the “safety” of the American people – lest they be exposed to harmful “misinformation.” Then they asked the judge to give them another week and postpone this hearing – again, arguing they wouldn’t have time to digest the Plaintiff’s response to their last filing.

The judge told them he wouldn’t be postponing this hearing again. A few days ago, the Plaintiffs filed their response – and it is an encyclopedia of their expedited and limited discovery so far. I want to explain why this case is NOT like any other we have seen.

This isn’t what we are used to — a weak judge capitulating to the government. In fact, the judge hasn’t capitulated ONCE. Neither has the appellate court, and neither has a DC court.

What is the remedy sought? Well, if the temporary injunction is granted (I am nearly certain it will be), the remedy is to bar the government from working with social media companies to flag and censor posts. They will also be barred from working through NGOs to do the same. (Here’s looking at you, EIP and Stanford internet observatory, and Atlantic Council) – no FBI task force inside Facebook or Twitter, no emails back and forth about “vaccine misinfo” and how to stop it. The government has to Cease.

What follows will be a detailed breakdown of the latest filing,  an answer to the government’s excuses for why:

A. What they did isn’t really censorship (mainly that they didn’t *force* the social media companies to take action)

B. Why what they did is “OK.” The guise of national security and “safety” and protecting Americans from “Mis, dis, and Malinformation.”

They begin with a hypothetical. They do this because the government tried to make all this behavior “Ok” by claiming that the Trump administration did the same thing.

That is an exercise in futility- the plaintiffs don’t care WHAT administration did it, only that it happened, and besides- the Trump White House directed NONE of this activity.

As an added zing, they used book burning as their hypothetical- appeals directly to the left angry that we don’t want pornographic books in kids’ libraries.

In the very first sentence of the brief, the government filed to argue why there should NOT be a temporary injunction halting their communication and threats to social media companies- they hide behind the “Foreign” assaults on critical election infrastructure.

However, evidence obtained in this case demonstrates that the Federal government overwhelmingly targets DOMESTIC speech by American citizens.

Depositions and evidence obtained in the case prove that actors responsible for censorship admit that most of what they consider “misinformation” was DOMESTIC in nature, including from the EIP (Keep the EIP front of mind). (Read more: DC Undercover, 5/24/2023) (Archive)

May 22, 2023 – Hunter Biden investigation: Grassley shut out from IRS whistleblower investigation

Chuck Grassley (Credit: Getty Images)

A top Senate Republican with a long history of advocating whistleblowers is being shut out from the Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower investigation by a Democratic Senate chairman despite the whistleblower wanting the GOP senator on the case.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), a member of the Senate Finance Committee and a co-chairman of the Whistleblower Protection Caucus, is being denied access to the investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the Washington Examiner has learned.

Lawyers for the IRS whistleblower sent letters to Congress on April 19 and May 15 providing details about their client’s protected disclosures alleging wrongdoing related to the federal investigation into President Joe Biden’s son. The attorneys have gone out of their way in both letters to include Grassley despite the Iowa Republican not being a current chairman or ranking member for a committee with specific jurisdiction regarding the tax code, but he is a leader of a Senate caucus dedicated to protecting whistleblowers.

The IRS whistleblower’s legal team told the Washington Examiner on Monday, “Naturally, we addressed letters to Sen. Grassley because he is co-chair with Sen. Wyden of the Whistleblower Protection Caucus as well as a senior member and past chair of both the Finance and Judiciary committees. Also important, though, is that he is more trusted than any other public official by whistleblowers to give them air cover regardless of the political implications and keep fighting to protect them when others cut and run. What whistleblower wouldn’t want Chuck Grassley in on their case?”

Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code requires the chairman of congressional tax committees to grant access to sensitive tax return information, and Wyden has refused to provide that access to Grassley or his team.

Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy told the Washington Examiner the IRS whistleblower’s lawyers had “specifically included” Grassley “in their communications with Congress, so there’s no legitimate reason to exclude Grassley’s staff from participating in this investigation.”

The Grassley spokesman said that “Grassley and his investigations unit are subject matter experts on both whistleblower protections and the Biden family business controversies” and that “they also happen to be very familiar with the specific statutes protecting sensitive tax information.”

Grassley and Wyden are co-founders of the Whistleblower Protection Caucus, and the whistleblower’s attorneys are warning about “clearly retaliatory” action against their client.

The whistleblower’s attorneys said Wyden and Grassley have historically had a good relationship and should be able to cooperate — “unless partisanship is getting in the way.”

“Although our client is an IRS supervisor, his protected disclosures implicate the Justice Department, so the Judiciary Committees and others in Congress will need to have access to some version of the disclosures in order to give the Justice Department’s conduct in this case the public scrutiny that it deserves,” the legal team said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Our client’s interests and the country’s interests would be best served if Congress would resist the urge to be distracted by jurisdictional turf wars or playing partisan defense and offense.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 5/26/2023)  (Archive)

May 22, 2023 – Second Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower emerges after dismissal despite five years on case

(Credit: John Hinman, Director, IRS Whistleblower Office)

A second IRS whistleblower in the criminal investigation of first son Hunter Biden emerged Monday in documents sent to Congress following the purge of the entire investigatory team looking into President Biden’s son for tax fraud and related crimes.

The new whistleblower is a special agent in the IRS’s international tax and financial crimes group and worked on the Hunter Biden case since it was opened in 2018 — until he was ousted without explanation last week.

The agent joins his supervisor, who plans to testify behind closed doors before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, in publicly registering concerns about how the Justice Department has handled the investigation.

Both IRS whistleblowers expressed concerns internally for years about the case being swept under the rug but got nowhere, and they lay out extensive claims of retaliation in new disclosures to Congress.

Hunter, 53, allegedly failed to pay taxes on millions of dollars he received from foreign associates who in some instances interacted with then-Vice President Joe Biden.

Hunter wrote in communications retrieved from his abandoned laptop that he had to share “half” of his income with his father.

The IRS supervisor, who oversaw the probe since January 2020, and his 12 subordinates were removed from the case — allegedly on Justice Department orders — after he contacted Congress on April 19 to allege “preferential treatment” and false testimony to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

(Read more: New York Post, 5/22/2023)  (Archive)

May 23, 2023 – Court filings reveal USVI Del. Stacey Plaskett misled the public about her deep ties to Jeffrey Epstein

U. S. Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett (Credit: public domain)

Democratic Del. Stacey Plaskett, a representative of the U.S. Virgin Islands in Congress, has distanced herself from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, claiming she was completely “unaware” of his donations. However, recent court filings shed light on a much closer relationship between Plaskett and Epstein than previously known.

The unsealed documents outline a decade-long association involving direct solicitations for money, personal meetings, and employment at a law firm deeply connected to Epstein’s shadowy network.

Plaskett not only repeatedly sought financial contributions from Epstein and had multiple face-to-face encounters with him, but she also worked directly for a St. Thomas-based law firm that played a role in cultivating influence for Epstein’s clandestine activities.

In a deposition last month, Plaskett disclosed that she was introduced to Epstein by Erika Kellerhals, an attorney who lobbied on his behalf and represented his business and philanthropic ventures. Kellerhals’s significance goes beyond a casual connection. Before Plaskett’s congressional tenure, she worked at Kellerhals Ferguson Kroblin PLLC, the boutique tax firm in the Virgin Islands from 2013 to 2014, a period in which Epstein was a major client.

Plaskett’s involvement with Epstein may extend further back, as she previously served as counsel on the Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority (EDA), which granted Epstein $300 million in allegedly improperly obtained tax exemptions over the course of two decades.

Asked during her deposition if she worked for Epstein or any Epstein-linked businesses while serving at the Kellerhals law firm, which specializes in EDA assistance, Plasket responded, “I don’t recall.”

The two years during which she worked for Epstein’s lawyer are notably missing from Plaskett’s LinkedIn account, with a two-year gap between 2012 and when she entered Congress in 2015.

Emails and testimony, however, closely link Plaskett’s rapid political rise with Epstein’s deep pockets. (Read more: Lee Fang, 6/27/2023)  (Archive)

May 24, 2023 – Missouri vs Biden/govt censorship: Jen Psaki challenged court order to be deposed using a govt friendly court; loses decision; coughs up discovery docs originally requested

“Inside With Jen Psaki” at the NBC News bureau in Washington, D.C.((Credit: William B. Plowman / MSNBC)

Missouri v. Biden was filed on May 5, 2022. Since it was initially filed, it has taken quite a trip through the court system. The complaint has been amended 3 times, with the most recent Amendment being to transform the case into a class suit – due to the overwhelming evidence of broad harm to the constitutional rights of all Americans. You can view the docket by using this link. Part I:

The complaint alleged that the US Government was not only threatening and coercing social media companies to censor Americans on social media, but they were also working WITH social media companies to accomplish that goal.

It alleged that topics surrounding COVID-19, the origins of COVID, the Great Barrington Declaration, election integrity concerns, the COVID shot, the Hunter Biden laptop story (and more) were under scrutiny by the White House and other government agencies – and that the government had very publicly threatened to take action against social media companies should they not act to censor viewpoints on those topics that were disfavored by the government.

The Plaintiffs in the case (the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with several other private plaintiffs) moved for expedited discovery to be able to obtain a limited set of evidence as well as depositions of certain officials. They argued that this evidence would allow them to make the case for a temporary injunction to stop the government from infringing on the first amendment rights of Plaintiffs and their citizens.

Mueller special counsel team members Jeannie Rhee (l) with  Andrew Weissmann (r) and Rush Atkinson(c).  (Credit: Tom Brenner/The New York Times).

Unlike what many have come to expect, the judge GRANTED the motion for expedited discovery and depositions. A struggle ensued between the Government and the Plaintiffs, with the government fighting against the judge in this case (Judge Terry Doughty) to stop discovery and certain plaintiffs from being deposed. They took those complaints to the 5th Circuit of Appeals and a court in Virginia – a court that *usually* is friendly to the government.

At the appellate court level, the government argued that NO ONE should have to leave their government jobs to sit for lengthy depositions in this case, but certainly not the HEAD of CISA, for example.

The appellate court wouldn’t play ball with the government and remanded the case back to Louisiana with some guidance on how the judge should proceed. If memory serves me right, this happened three times.

One particularly interesting exchange came with the deposition of former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. She made threats to social media companies from the podium. They sought to depose her about those threats. She left the office. The government said they had no responsive documents to explain her comments. So Missouri and Louisiana said, “Then we have to depose Jen Psaki.”

The court agreed and ruled that now private citizen Psaki needed to testify. The government and Psaki- represented by Rhee – went to a court in Virginia to try to get THAT judge to stop the deposition.

The judge, in that case, laid into both the government and Psaki. It was so stunning I literally read the transcript of the hearing as its own video.

This went back to Louisiana after the Virginia judge said, “You won’t like how I rule on this, and your argument is terrible, so I’m sending it back to the judge who SHOULD be making this decision. The judge in Louisiana again decided Psaki should be deposed IF the government didn’t have any responsive docs from the press office. Somehow, those docs must’ve appeared.

All along the way, the government has lost- over and over again. They were also caught hiding discovery materials – the judge rapped them and ordered them to produce or else – which they did. (Read more: UncoverDC, 5/24/2023)  (Archive)

May 24, 2023 – FBI official admits she hasn’t read Durham Report

May 19, 2023 – Greenwald shatters Bellingcat’s “fact-checking” facade and exposes dark funding strings

(Credit: Glenn Greenwald)

Bellingcat presents itself as an independent “fact-checking” organization. But there’s a lot more to this group than meets the eye. Some believe that Bellingcat is just another left-wing activist group masquerading as a “fact-checker.” Bellingcat’s reporting and political narratives reinforce those beliefs. Recently, Bellingcat came under intense scrutiny when they shared a manipulated image of a Hispanic shooter, casting him as a right-wing extremist and a so-called “white nationalist.” This incident wasn’t just a slip-up but a glimpse into their broader strategy of manipulation and propaganda.

Elon Musk actually called out Bellingcat recently over that ridiculously fake-looking propaganda picture.

Elon isn’t the only one calling out Bellingcat. In a thought-provoking exposé, Glenn Greenwald — an award-winning independent journalist known for his critical views on media — examined the financial ties Bellingcat shares with various entities. Greenwald’s research shows a web of funding from organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a U.S.-based non-profit that supposedly spreads “democracy” in foreign countries. While NED claims its mission is to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through non-governmental efforts, some critics argue that its involvement with Bellingcat raises questions about both groups objectivity and goals. Clearly, the government has a vested interest in what Belligcat has to say.

Critics of Bellingcat also believe that this funding relationship has severe implications for journalistic integrity, which is Glenn’s area of expertise. He examines what’s really going on with Bellingcat in this informative and compelling exposé that explores their possible funding ties to the US government.

Watch the show here:

(Read more: Revolver News, 5/25/2023)  (Archive)

May 30, 2023 – James Comey: “I think he [Trump] poses a near existential threat to the rule of law”

(…) The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a lie.  The Democrats and media knew it was a lie.  We now know that the Hillary Clinton Campaign was behind the entire narrative.  Democrats used this in their attempted coup of the sitting president.  They jailed and bankrupted innocent men in their coup attempt.

It was all a lie and Hillary hatched the lie and then later promoted the lie.

James Comey knew this all along and yet pushed an intelligence investigation against candidate and president-elect Trump and President Trump knowing the entire investigation was based on lies concocted by the Hillary Campaign.

(…) On Tuesday morning disgraced FBI Director James Comey joined MSNBC and had the gall to accuse President Trump of being a threat to America. This man is devoid of a conscience.

James Comey: “I think he poses a near existential threat to the rule of law. He will do everything he can in a new term to try to tear down the institutions that he sees as threats and dismantle them and the people who occupy them.” (The Gateway Pundit, 5/30/2023)  (Archive)

 

May 31, 2023 – Judicial Watch: Major revelations in Trump Russia scandal, Clinton Corruption—Hillary did It, Obama knew

(Credit: Judicial Watch)

(…) This month, significant new evidence comes to correct the historical record—and prove Tom right. The new evidence comes from the report of Special Counsel John Durham.

Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham in April 2019 to get to the bottom of the Russia mess. Barr told Congress he wanted a review of “the genesis and conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016.”

Durham’s prosecution record is a bust—two failed court cases and one low-level plea deal—but his 300-page, highly detailed final report is sensational.

Durham’s central mandate was to investigate the opening and conduct of the Crossfire Hurricane probe into possible Trump collusion with elements of the Russian government, particularly whether “any person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaign.”

“Our findings,” the Durham Report notes, “…are sobering.”

Finding: at the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, there was no evidence of collusion.

 “Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” the Durham Report noted. [Italics added].

 Durham goes into stunning detail. He notes that Crossfire Hurricane “was opened as a full investigation without [the FBI] ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information…without (i) any significant review of its own intelligence databases, (ii) collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, (iii) interviews of witnesses essential to understand the information it had received, (iv) using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence. Had it done so…the FBI would have learned that their own experienced Russia analysts had no information about Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials, nor were others in sensitive positions at the CIA, the NSA, and the State Department aware of such evidence.”

Finding: Obama and Biden knew about Clinton plans to link Trump to Russia.

Durham reports that  top Obama administration officials—including the president, Vice President Biden, the FBI director, the Attorney General and others—were briefed by CIA Director John Brennan on reports of a plan by the Clinton campaign to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

Elements of the Clinton Plan were disclosed in 2020 when the Director of National Intelligence reported it in a declassified letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Durham adds significant new context—and hints there is more hidden behind the walls of government secrecy. In a classified appendix to the report, Durham notes, there are “specific indications and additional facts that heightened the potential relevance of [the Clinton Plan intelligence] to the Office’s inquiry.”

In an interview with the special counsel, Durham notes, Hillary Clinton dodged questions about “her alleged plan to stir up a scandal between Trump and the Russians. Clinton stated it was ‘really sad,’ but ‘I get it, you have to go down every rabbit hole.’”

Finding: the Steele Dossier was a slanderous Clinton campaign creation devoid of real evidence and used by the FBI to target Carter Page.

 Durham devotes more than 150 pages of his report to the Steele Dossier and its devastating ramifications.

“Perkins Coie, a law firm acting as counsel to the Clinton campaign…retained Fusion GPS…to conduct opposition research on Trump and his associates.” Fusion GPS hired Steele. From July through December 2016, Durham wrote, “Steele and Fusion GPS prepared a series of reports containing derogatory information about purported ties between Trump and Russia. According to the reports, important connections between Trump and Russia ran through campaign manager Paul Manafort and foreign policy advisor Carter Page.”

Durham details at length how the Steele reports “played an important role in [FBI] applications to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] targeting Page, a U.S. person. The FBI relied substantially on the [Steele] reports to assert probable cause that Page was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Russia.”

The problem with the FBI’s assertion? Durham notes: “the FBI was not able to corroborate a single substantive allegation contained in the Steele reports, despite protracted efforts to do so.” [Italics added.]

Finding: Clinton good—Trump bad—the FBI repeatedly gave all things Clinton a pass while hitting Trump hard.

 In the course of his investigation, Durham learned of three attempts by foreign governments to funnel money to the Clintons or otherwise buy influence. Durham is measured, but it’s easy to read between the lines on the double standard. “The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign,” Durham noted.

In the eighteen months leading up to the 2016 election, “the FBI was required to deal with a number of proposed [Clinton] investigations that had the potential of affecting the election. In each of those instances, the FBI moved with considerable caution.”

In one instance, the FBI ended the case after its confidential source was found to be funneling money to the Clintons. In a second case, the FBI placed so many restrictions on how matters were to be handled that “essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.” In the third case, the FBI elected to give “defensive briefings” to Clinton and others. No such briefings, Durham notes, were offered at any time to the Trump campaign.

Finding: Investigations into the Clinton Foundation were killed by top Justice Department and FBI officials.

 Durham notes that beginning in January 2016, three different FBI field offices—Little Rock, New York, and Washington—“opened investigations into possible criminal activity involving the Clinton Foundation.” Foreign governments were suspected of making, or planning to make, “contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment” from Hillary Clinton.

Top Washington officials opposed the probes, Durham reports. One Justice Department section chief interviewed by Durham recalled the department’s reaction to a Clinton Foundation briefing as “hostile.”

At a February 2016 meeting about possibly closing the Clinton Foundation cases, a participant told Durham that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was “negative” and “annoyed” and “angry,” wanting to close the probes. “Why are we even doing this?” McCabe is reported to have said. Judicial Watch has reported extensively on McCabe and his Democratic Party ties.

FBI field officials prevailed on McCabe at that meeting to keep the investigations open, but six months later the inquiries were dead in the water, Durham reports. The Washington and Little Rock field office probes were folded into the New York investigation. But the New York investigation went nowhere because Justice Department branches in New York declined to issue subpoenas.

Last week, the New York Times added new twists to the Clinton Foundation story, noting that after prosecutors in New York declined to issue subpoenas, the case moved back to Little Rock. Prosecutors in Little Rock closed the case in January 2021 but not without protest from line FBI agents in Arkansas. The “top agent in Little Rock,” the Times reported, “wanted it known that career prosecutors, not FBI officials, were behind the decision” to close the case.

The Times reported that the FBI received an official “declination memo” closing the case in August 2021—effectively making the decision to stop investigating the Clinton Foundation a move by the Biden Administration.

That’s a move worth a closer look. So is the FBI claim, according to the Times, that all of the evidence developed during the investigation “has been returned or otherwise destroyed.”

After all the revelations about misconduct at the highest levels of government in the Trump Russia saga, it’s impossible to take FBI assertions at face value—as John Durham has proved, and as Tom Fitton presciently recognized so long ago. (Read more: Judicial Watch, 5/31/2023)  (Archive)

May 31, 2023 – Comer & Grassley to Wray: Provide the unclassified documents or face contempt; Wray counters

Chuck Grassley (Credit: Getty Images)

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today issued the following statements after their discussion with FBI Director Christopher Wray about producing to Congress the unclassified, FBI-generated record alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national.

Christopher Wray (Credit: public domain)

“Today, FBI Director Wray confirmed the existence of the FD-1023 form alleging then-Vice President Biden engaged in a criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national. However, Director Wray did not commit to producing the documents subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee.

While Director Wray – after a month of refusing to even acknowledge that the form existed – has offered to allow us to see the documents in person at FBI

James Comer (Credit: public domain)

headquarters, we have been clear that anything short of producing these documents to the House Oversight Committee is not in compliance with the subpoena. If the FBI fails to hand over the FD-1023 form as required by the subpoena, the House Oversight Committee will begin contempt of Congress proceedings,” said Chairman Comer.

“While the FBI has apparently leaked classified information to the news media in recent weeks, jeopardizing its own human sources, it continues to treat Congress like second class citizens by refusing to provide a specific unclassified record. Director Wray confirmed what my whistleblowers have told me pursuant to legally protected disclosures: the FBI-generated document is real, but the bureau has yet to provide it to Congress in defiance of a legitimate congressional subpoena. This failure comes with consequences,” Senator Grassley said. (House Oversight Committee, 5/31/2023) (Archive)

Read More:

Grassley, Comer Demand FBI Record Alleging Criminal Scheme Involving Then-VP Biden

Comer and Grassley on FBI Failing to Comply with Subpoena Deadline

Comer: FBI’s Delay in Producing Unclassified Record is Unacceptable

Comer & Grassley Blast FBI for Refusing to Provide Subpoenaed Record Alleging Then-VP Biden Engaged in a Bribery Scheme

Comer Statement on FBI’s Refusal to Comply with Congressional Subpoena

 

Update June 2 2023:

BREAKING: FBI Chief Chris Wray Caves to Comer – Agrees to Hand Over Damning Document Detailing China’s $5 Million Bribe to Joe Biden!

May 30, 2023 – After John Durham bombshell, judge breathes new life into Clinton Foundation whistleblower case

Moynihan and Doyle testify to the House Oversight Government Operations Subcommittee on oversight of foundations and restrictions to their political activities, with a focus on the New York-based Clinton Foundation. (Credit: CSpan)

Just a few weeks after Special Counsel John Durham revealed significant failures to investigate allegations against Hillary Clinton’s family charity, a U.S. Tax Court judge has once again breathed new life into a years-long whistleblower case alleging IRS improprieties involving the controversial Clinton Foundation.

U.S. Tax Court Judge David Gustafson has already once before denied an IRS request to dismiss the whistleblower case, first brought in 2017. And three years ago, he ordered the tax agency to reveal whether it criminally investigated the foundation, citing a mysterious “gap” in its records.

The IRS filed a new motion to dismiss, and all parties filed arguments over the last year. But on Monday, Gustafson postponed ruling on those motions, instead asking for new arguments in light of three recent precedent-setting court rulings, once again frustrating IRS efforts to make the case go away.

The three recent rulings in other tax cases “may affect the parties’ positions as to the pending motions,” Gustafson wrote. “We will order further filings so that the parties may address those recent opinions.”

 ClintonFoundationMay302023Ruling.pdf

The judge gave whistleblowers John Moynihan, a former federal agent, and Larry Doyle, a corporate tax compliance expert, until June 30 to update their arguments and the IRS until July 28 to respond. That means the case will almost certainly stretch on for many more months.

The judge also noted the IRS hasn’t responded to a request to update the court record with new evidence.

Monday’s ruling adds new intrigue in a case that first surfaced nearly five years ago when Doyle and Moynihan, two respected forensic financial investigators, revealed the existence of their 2017 IRS whistleblower complaint against the foundation during a congressional hearing.

(…) Judge Gustafson’s new request gives Moynihan and Doyle a fresh opening to incorporate Durham’s bombshell allegations in their court filings due next month.

The judge also called attention to a specific recent ruling in a Tax Court case titled Berenblatt vs. IRS Commission that he said might be relevant.

In that ruling last week, the court decided that IRS whistleblowers may be entitled to discovery they ordinarily would not be granted if they could show the agency had engaged in earlier bad faith conduct to keep information out of the case.

“Whistleblowers may be granted limited discovery if they make a significant showing that there is material in the IRS’s possession indicative of bad faith on the IRS’s part in connection with the case or of an incomplete administrative record compiled by the IRS,” the court ruled.

 USTaxCourtBarenblatt2023Ruling.pdf

(Read more: Just the News, 5/30/2023)  (Archive)

June 1, 2023 – How the FBI lost, found, and rewarded the alleged Russian spy pivotal to surveilling Trump

Igor Danchenko: suspected Russian spy was secretly groomed by Brian Auten of the FBI, and paid $220,000 to target Trump. (Credit: public domain)

Paul Sperry/RealClearInvestigations

Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with ‒ Brian Auten ‒ told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow.

But Danchenko had not left the U.S., court documents show. He was living in the Washington area. In fact, he had been arrested in Maryland in 2013 by federal Park Police for being drunk and disorderly, something the FBI analyst could have easily discovered by searching federal law enforcement databases. Clueless, the FBI closed its espionage case on Danchenko.

Auten would quickly rise to become the FBI’s top Russian analyst. In 2016 and 2017, he failed to properly vet the Steele dossier, a collection of salacious allegations created for Hillary Clinton’s campaign which sought to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, before clearing it as the central piece of evidence used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Brian Auten, FBI supervisor: The Steele dossier’s bogus “Report 94,” alleging secret Page-Russia meetings, helped make the case for spying on him. (Credit: Twitter)

Working out of headquarters as a supervisor, Auten knew Danchenko helped Christopher Steele compile the dossier while living in the area. But instead of contacting the Baltimore agents, Auten secretly groomed him as an informant, arranging payments of $220,000 to target Donald Trump and his former aide Page. 

One result: Danchenko, the suspected Russian spy, falsely accused Page, a former U.S. Navy office who had previously helped the FBI, of being a Russian spy in the dossier.

Auten also never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the FBI’s longstanding concerns about Danchenko.

Like the Baltimore agents, investigators at FBI headquarters relied on Auten to build their counterintelligence cases on Page and three other Trump advisers. Auten provided the reports and memos they used to establish probable cause in each case. Auten also supported investigators working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

Auten’s conduct was first singled out for rebuke by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who in 2019 issued a report detailing how Auten cut corners in the dossier verification process. Horowitz referred Auten to the FBI for discipline, which does not appear to have been administered.

His earlier and deeper connections to Danchenko have only been more recently revealed in the report issued by Special Counsel John Durham. His findings suggest that if Auten had done his job over a decade ago, chances are the now-discredited dossier never would have been created and used by the FBI to eavesdrop on Page and help launch the Russiagate probe. It’s likely that Danchenko, the main source of the dossier’s allegations, would have been deported years earlier and flagged in the system, according to the recently released Durham Report.

The embattled analyst was recommended for suspension from the bureau last year, and his case has been under disciplinary review for several months. Contacted by RealClearInvestigations, an FBI spokeswoman declined to say if Auten has been suspended. “In keeping with our usual practice,” she said, “we have no comment on personnel matters.”

According to the Durham Report, Danchenko came onto the radar of agents working out of the Baltimore field office in 2010 after two former Brookings colleagues entering the government told the FBI that he had solicited classified information.

The agents subsequently opened an espionage case after discovering Danchenko had previous contacts with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers.

“In particular, the FBI learned that in September 2006, Danchenko informed one Russian intelligence officer that he had an interest in entering the Russian diplomatic service,” the report stated. “Four days later, the intelligence officer contacted Danchenko and informed him that they could meet that day to work ‘on the documents and then think about future plans.’”

The next month, Danchenko contacted the intelligence officer “so the documents can be placed in [the following day’s] diplomatic mail pouch,” according to the report.

In addition, Danchenko had been identified as an associate of two other espionage suspects, Durham learned from a review of his case file.

In July 2010, the FBI initiated a request to obtain a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on Danchenko. Auten helped research Danchenko and provided information for wiretap applications. However, the investigation was soon closed after the FBI incorrectly concluded Danchenko had left the country in September 2010. Danchenko and his wife continued to reside openly in the Washington area.

Rod Rosenstein: The U.S. attorney who once prosecuted Danchenko, later the top Justice Department official during the Trump-Russia affair. (Credit: The Associated Press)

But the probe wasn’t completely dead. In 2012, Auten exchanged emails with one of the Baltimore agents in which they speculated whether Danchenko had actually left the country. Then in 2013, the U.S. Park Police arrested Danchenko in Greenbelt, Md., on drunk-and-disorderly charges, court records first obtained by RCI show.

Danchenko’s case was visible in the federal law enforcement database and prosecuted by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who years later, as acting attorney general, would sign one of the 2017 applications to renew a wiretap targeting Page and authorize an expansion of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.

The Russian-born Danchenko, who was living in the U.S. on a work visa, was released from jail on the condition he undergo drug testing and “participate in a program of substance abuse therapy and counseling,” as well as “mental health counseling,” the records show. His lawyer asked the court to postpone his trial and let him travel to Moscow “as a condition of his employment.” The Russian trips were granted without objection from Rosenstein. Danchenko ended up several months later entering into a plea agreement and paying fines.

Despite the flurry of legal records generated on Danchenko in the federal system, it is not clear why the FBI failed to take note of his presence in the country. What the record does show is that the bureau did not reopen the espionage case against him.

Danchenko reappeared on Auten’s radar in late 2016 as he and the FBI were using the Steele dossier he helped create on Trump to seek warrants to spy on Page.

Auten identified his old espionage target in December 2016 as the “primary subsource” of the document. Instead of wiretapping Danchenko, the FBI recruited him as an informant and paid him $220,000 to help the bureau continue wiretapping the former Trump aide. FBI headquarters proposed paying Danchenko an additional $300,000 even as Durham was actively investigating him as the “linchpin to the uncorroborated allegations contained in the Steele Reports.” After asking officials at FBI headquarters about the bureau’s relationship with Danchenko, Durham determined that they were unable to justify keeping him open as a confidential source, “much less making hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to him.”

David Laufman: At the DOJ, he was involved in an immunity offer to Danchenko. (Credit: wiggin.com)

After examining FBI documents, Durham discovered that Auten interviewed Danchenko over three days in January 2017 as part of a plan to recruit him as a paid informant, despite the unresolved counterespionage investigation. Working with then-DOJ official David Laufman, the FBI offered immunity from prosecution to the longtime spy suspect and invited his lawyer to sit with him during the interviews.

“If this recruitment was successful, the FBI planned to mine Danchenko for information that was corroborative of the damaging allegations about President-elect Trump in the Steele Reports,” Durham said in his report.

Auten confessed to Durham that Danchenko “was not able to provide any corroborative evidence related to any substantive allegation contained in the Steele Reports ‒ and critically ‒ was unable to corroborate any of the FBI’s assertions contained in the Carter Page FISA applications,” according to the Durham report (emphasis in the original).

Danchenko was kept on the FBI payroll for more than three years.

In internal FBI documents, Danchenko’s handling agent Kevin Helson incorrectly stated that there was no “derogatory” information associated with Danchenko and that he had not been a prior subject of an FBI investigation.

“This was clearly not true as there had previously been the unresolved Baltimore FBI counterespionage investigation of Danchenko that was only closed because it was believed he had left the country and returned to Russia,” Durham pointed out.

Agent Helson later learned that the informant he was assigned to handle had been investigated as a suspected spy. However, Auten advised Helson that the espionage case against Danchenko was “interesting, but was not a significant” matter, according to the Durham report.

“Notably,” the report added, “Auten did not inform Helson that he had previously assisted in the Baltimore investigation.”

 A Suspected Kremlin Agent ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’

The Baltimore agents were shocked to learn from Durham’s office that Danchenko had been signed up as a confidential FBI source. One of them interviewed by Durham’s investigators believed Danchenko was a Kremlin agent “hiding in plain sight” in the U.S., while frequently traveling overseas to be debriefed by Russian intelligence. The other Baltimore agent said the counterintelligence case on Danchenko remained unresolved and, in her opinion, “certainly a lot more investigation” should have been conducted on Danchenko.

“It is extremely concerning that the FBI failed to deal with the prior unresolved counterespionage case on Danchenko,” Durham concluded in his report.

“Given Danchenko’s known contacts with Russian intelligence officers and his documented prior pitch [to colleagues at Democratic think tank Brookings] for classified information, the Crossfire Hurricane team’s failure to properly consider and address the espionage case prior to opening Danchenko as a CHS [confidential human source] is difficult to explain, particularly given their awareness that Danchenko was the linchpin to the uncorroborated allegations contained in the Steele Reports,” the special prosecutor added. Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the FBI’s Russia investigation.

In an RCI interview, Danchenko’s lawyer denied his client ever spied for the Russian government. He said Danchenko feared Russian President Vladimir Putin and was concerned for his personal safety. However, Durham examined immigration records which revealed that Danchenko lived in the U.S. but traveled frequently to Russia, casting doubts about his security concerns.

Yet in sworn affidavits to obtain the FISA warrants targeting Page, FBI agents led judges on the secret surveillance court to believe Danchenko was “Russian-based” – and therefore presumably more credible as a source of the allegations that Page was a Russian agent. By 2017, Auten knew the “Russian-based” claim was untrue. Even so, he let case agents slip it into two FISA renewal requests targeting Page. And so the “Russian-based” fraud lived on through 2017.

Auten assured the court that Danchenko was “truthful and cooperative,” never telling the judges about unresolved questions that made him a suspected Russian agent.

And Auten’s imprimatur carried great weight. In Durham’s telling, Auten was known internally as one of the “Triumvirate of Control” in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, along with senior counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and intelligence section chief Jonathan Moffa. Some case agents working under them believed the surveillance of Page was a “dry hole,” but the “triumvirate” insisted they continue secretly intercepting his emails, text messages, and other communications, according to Durham.

AP

Oct. 19, 2016: As the candidates debated, the FBI was busy with the Clinton-funded dossier behind the scenes. (Credit: Assiciated Press)

On Sept. 19, 2016, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team formally received a dossier report alleging that Page had held secret meetings with sanctioned Kremlin officials in Moscow earlier that summer in which they allegedly discussed lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia. That same day, an anxious Auten urged department lawyers to consider including the dossier report as part of the initial FISA application targeting Page.

Charles Dolan: Dossier source tied to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. (Credit: public domain)

In an email to attorneys, Auten forwarded an excerpt from the dossier report and asked, “Does this put us at least *that* much closer to a full FISA on [Page]?”

The attorneys thought it was a “close call” when they first discussed a FISA targeting Page in early August, but the dossier report in September “pushed it over” the line in terms of establishing probable cause.

Except that the dossier allegation about secret Kremlin meetings was bunk. Auten knew there were serious doubts about it ‒ yet withheld those concerns from FISA judges.

On Oct. 17, 2016, Auten received an email alerting him to a conversation an informant covertly recorded with Page that day in which Page “outright denied” meeting with the Russian officials ‒ or even knowing them.

“Nevertheless,” Durham noted, “Page’s exculpatory statements were not included in the initial FISA application signed just four days later.”

Before the application was submitted, Auten also was aware that the dossier was being funded and promoted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

On Sept. 2, 2016, CIA personnel briefed Auten at FBI headquarters about credible foreign intelligence they received about the Clinton campaign’s machinations. Yet Auten took no steps to analyze the intelligence and how it might impact the Trump campaign investigation and surveillance requests. Nor did he inform the FISA court about it. Asked why he failed to disclose the “Clinton plan” intelligence, Auten told Durham’s office that it was “just one data point.”

As the FBI made requests to renew its spy warrants throughout 2017, Auten continued to gloss over major holes in the dossier. He even pressured agents and analysts to back off looking into a questionable source of key allegations, according to the Durham report. It turns out that source, Charles Dolan, was also tied to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.

Agent Helson told Durham that Auten told him to “hold off” on interviewing Dolan, who was never interviewed.

Auten also told a female FBI analyst working for Mueller “to cease all research and analysis related to Dolan,” according to the Durham report. She wrote a memo in September 2017 documenting Dolan’s ties to the dossier, but said that “Auten had made edits to her memorandum, some of which removed information regarding Dolan.” She said she was frustrated by the censorship and wondered if there was “a political motive” behind it. The analyst told Durham she prepared a contemporaneous timeline in case she was ever questioned about her role in the Mueller investigation.

Perhaps most concerning was Auten’s reluctance to corroborate even the existence of a ghost-like source Danchenko claimed had provided him a stream of bombshell allegations that were essential to the FBI’s case for probable cause against Page. The alleged source, Belarus-born businessman and Trump booster named Sergei Millian, actually had no connection of any kind to Danchenko. There is no evidence the two men ever met or spoke. Yet Danchenko attributed to Millian the dossier’s core allegation: that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.” This claim, which Durham found to be completely conjured up by Danchenko, formed the backbone of all four of the FBI’s applications to the FISA court to spy on Trump.

Auten knew there were serious problems with the attribution. While debriefing Danchenko in January 2017, Danchenko was dodgy about his supposed conversations with Millian. Still, Auten made no effort to validate Millian as a source. He never examined either Danchenko’s or Millian’s phone records, for starters.

Durham did pull the call records, however, and easily determined that Danchenko never actually spoke with Millian. He also learned from Danchenko’s email records that he fabricated his conversations with Millian, which means he also made up the dossier allegation that Carter Page masterminded the Democratic National Committee email leak, a claim the FBI also vouchsafed to the FISA court to attain the Page wiretaps.

“Nevertheless, the information allegedly provided by Millian remained in the Page FISA applications,” Durham stated in his report.

Auten told Durham that he did, however, check with the FBI’s partners at the CIA to see if they had anything on file to corroborate Danchenko’s  reporting in the dossier.

“They received no corroborating information back,” Durham said.

Durham interviewed a career counterintelligence analyst at Langley who said the dossier was transparent fiction. “Indeed, after the dossier was leaked and became public,” Durham relayed in his report, “that [CIA] expert’s reaction was to ask the FBI, ‘You didn’t use that, right?’”

For several years, Auten moonlighted teaching law enforcement, intelligence, and surveillance courses at Patrick Henry College in North Virginia. He was removed from the Patrick Henry website soon after RealClearInvestigations published a July 2020 story first identifying him as the anonymous “Supervisory Intelligence Analyst” singled out in 2019 by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz for cutting corners verifying the dossier.

Auten also is no longer listed as a member of the college’s Strategic Intelligence Board of Advisors. Patrick Henry’s communications director did not reply to requests for an explanation for Auten’s removal from the website. But a faculty spokesman confirmed over the phone that he is no longer teaching there.

He is, however, apparently, still employed by the FBI. Auten’s most recent activities that have come to light? Possibly using false information to undermine allegations of criminal activity on the part of Hunter Biden. According to a July 25, 2022, letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Auten’s “scheme” entailed using deceptive and derogatory information to derail the FBI’s investigation.

“First, it’s been alleged that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” Grassley wrote. “It is further alleged that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by an FBI Headquarters (“FBI HQ”) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.” (RealClearInvestigations, 6/01/2023)  (Archive)

Correction, Thursday, June 1, 2023, 10:28 AM Eastern

Because of an editing error, an earlier version mischaracterized Brian Auten’s recollection of an interaction with the CIA. He told Special Counsel John Durham that he did check with the agency in an effort to corroborate Igor Danchenko’s reporting in the Steele dossier. It is not the case that he said he never checked.

June 2. 2023 – Max Blumenthal confronts Rachel Maddow about her years of Russiagate lies

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate discuss Max Blumenthal’s attempt to question MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about her years of Russiagate lies.

 

June 5, 2023 – New York Times admits Nazi symbology at heart of Ukraine army

Ukrainian soldiers are displaying Nazi iconography on their uniforms, the New York Times has finally accepted, even admitting that “diplomats, Western journalists, and advocacy groups” avoid making mention of it, therefore allowing it to spread.

Army photos “highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II,” the Times reports, echoing the kind of reporting produced by The National Pulse over a year ago. 

As an example, the “Black Sun” symbol, which appeared in the castle of the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, is regularly appearing on the uniforms of Ukrainian soldiers.

Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points.
– New York Times, June 2023

Both corporate and social media have gone to extreme lengths to cover for Nazi and Neo-Nazi activity at the heart of Ukraine’s war effort. In 2022, Facebook created a special exemption for the nation’s Azov battalion, known for using Nazi overtones. The Washington Post finally admitted to the role of Azov and its relationship with Nazism last year. PBS in fact tried to cover-up for some of the Nazi imagery by blurring the background of a Ukrainian politician. (The National Pulse, 6/5/2023)  (Archive)

June 7, 2023 – Bill Barr confirms Jamie Raskin lied about Biden family corruption investigation

(Credit: Amazon)

‘The FBI is attempting a coverup, and Democrats are doing their bidding by lying to the American people,’ Rep. James Comer told The Federalist.

It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”

Former Attorney General Barr went on the record with The Federalist following statements Raskin made to the press Monday afternoon. Soon after attending a closed-door meeting with House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and the FBI — at which lawmakers reviewed the FD-1023 form summarizing a CHS’s detailed allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions — Raskin spoke to the media.

Jamie Raskin (Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

“What I learned,” Raskin claimed, “was that Attorney General Barr named Scott Brady, who was the U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania, to head up a group of prosecutors who would look into all the allegations related to Ukraine.”

“After Rudy Giuliani surfaced these allegations,” Raskin continued, Brady’s team looked into the FD-1023 and “in August determined that there was no grounds to escalate from an initial assessment to a preliminary investigation,” and so “they called an end to the investigation.”

The Maryland Democrat then reiterated his claim that this was “under Attorney General William Barr and his handpicked prosecutor Mr. Brady, who was a Trump appointee.” “They were the ones who decided” there were no further grounds for investigation, Raskin’s claimed, adding: “If there is a complaint, it is with Attorney General William Barr, the Trump Justice Department, and the team that the Trump administration appointed to look into it.”

Raskin would then double down on his claim that it was Barr and Brady who closed down the investigation, issuing a press release saying that in August 2020, Barr and his “hand-picked U.S. Attorney” signed off on closing an assessment into the FD-1023 form that memorialized the CHS’s claims.

But that’s just not true, according to the former attorney general. Instead, the confidential human source’s claims detailed in the FD-1023 were sent to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office for further investigation, according to Barr.

That, however, was just one of Raskin’s deceptions: The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee also falsely suggested the CHS’s allegations were related to the investigation of information Rudy Giuliani had unearthed of the Biden family corruption in Ukraine.

Not so, according to an individual familiar with the investigation who told The Federalist that the CHS and the FD-1023 summary of his statement were both “unrelated to Rudy Giuliani” and “not derived” from any information Giuliani provided. This corroborates the House Oversight Committee’s representation that the June 30, 2020, FD-1023 “stands on its own” and was not part of the documents Giuliani provided the FBI in January 2020.

In fact, according to the House Oversight Committee, the FD-1023 in question “contains information from the FBI’s confidential human source dating back to another FD-1023 generated in 2017,” which completely removes Giuliani from the mix.

Raskin’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

These new revelations prove significant for two reasons. First, there’s the underlying scandal of the FBI’s alleged failure to investigate the FD-1023 and FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten’s opening of an assessment in August 2020 to discredit that information, which “caused investigative activity to cease.”

Knowing that the FD-1023 originated in Brady’s Western District of Pennsylvania proves explosive because Grassley’s whistleblower alleged that in September 2020, FBI headquarters placed the information contained in Auten’s assessment in a restricted-access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s info could access. How then could the FBI agents in Delaware further investigate the allegations?

And those allegations, further detailed by Comer on Tuesday, are shocking. “A trusted confidential human source obtained information from a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Biden,” Comer told The Federalist. So the CHS didn’t just pass on information from some random third party: He spoke directly with the individual who claimed to have bribed Biden.

FBI headquarters branding that information as “disinformation” without undertaking an appropriate investigation is outrageous — especially since the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office was directed to further investigate the FD-1023.

The second scandal is equally as large because it reaches the top of the FBI: Director Christopher Wray.

Wray may well have been in the dark about FBI headquarters falsely labeling the FD-1023 as misinformation and secreting it away from other agents. But framing the intel from the “highly credible” longtime FBI CHS as coming from Giuliani reeks of a cover-up. And suggesting that Barr and Brady closed down an investigation into the FD-1023 when it was instead sent to Delaware for further investigation is a cover-up. (Read more: The Federalist, 6/07/2023) (Archive)

June 7, 2023 – Twitter Files: FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info, including journalists

(Credit: The Epoch Times)

Authored by Aaron Maté via Substack,

In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.

The Ukrainian government’s FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile. In its response to the FBI, Twitter agreed to review the accounts for “inauthenticity” but raised concerns about the inclusion of me and other “American and Canadian journalists.”

The FBI’s attempt to ban Twitter accounts at the request of Ukrainian intelligence is among the most overt requests for censorship revealed to date in the Twitter Files, a cache of leaked communications from the social media giant.

The FBI’s censorship request was relayed in a March 27th, 2022 email from FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets, the Assistant Legal Attaché at the US Embassy in Kyiv, to two Twitter executives. Four FBI colleagues were copied on the exchange.

“Thank you very much for your time to discuss the assistance to Ukraine,” Kobzanets wrote. “I am including a list of accounts I received over a couple of weeks from the Security Service of Ukraine. These accounts are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation. For your review and consideration.”

 

The document, drafted by Ukraine’s SBU, contained 163 accounts, including mine. (The list is numbered to 175, but some accounts have two corresponding numerical lines).

The listed Twitter profiles, the SBU alleged, have been “used to disseminate disinformation and fake news to inaccurately reflect events in Ukraine, justify war crimes of the Russian authorities on the territory of the Ukrainian state in violation of international law.”

In order “to stop Russian aggression on the information front,” the SBU continued, “we kindly ask you to take urgent measures to block these Twitter accounts and provide us with user data specified during registration.”

The SBU expressed its “gratitude for the existing level of interaction.”

If granted, the users on the list would not only have been banned from Twitter but had their phone number, date of birth, and email address disclosed to both the FBI and SBU.

In response, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then-Head of Trust and Safety, informed Special Agent Kobzanets and his FBI colleagues that Twitter would “review the reported accounts under our Rules.” But he warned that the list included “a few accounts of American and Canadian journalists (e.g. Aaron Mate).” Therefore, Roth said, Twitter’s review would “focus first and foremost on identifying any potential inauthenticity.”

(Read more: Aaron Maté/Substack, 6/7/2023)  (Archive)

June 7, 2023 – Instagram connects a vast pedophile network using the same key words seen in Podesta’s Pizzagate emails

(Credit: Revolver News)

In a surprising and unexpected development, the Wall Street Journal has given credibility to “Pizzagate.” For those who may not be familiar with it, “Pizzagate” is a theory that claims elites use coded “pizza references” to openly discuss their hidden pedophile sex ring. According to this theory, terms like “pizza” and “cheese” are allegedly used as code words for illicit activities involving children.

Like many theories that paint the left in a negative light, the Pizzagate theory was swiftly labeled a “right-wing conspiracy” and disregarded by the usual suspects, and anyone who dared to mention Pizzagate was quickly shot down and called a Q-kook.

But now, thanks to this shocking article in the WSJ, everything could be turned upside down. Apparently, Instagram, owned by Meta, has become a sanctuary for a large network of pedophiles who use hashtags related to “cheese pizza,” among others, to communicate and pursue their sinister and depraved intentions against innocent children.

The term “cheese pizza” is used by these perverts because it shares the same initials as “child pornography.”

These are sick and demonic people.

Wall Street Journal:

The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza,” which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.”

The bombshell WSJ piece has rocked social media; as if so-called leaders like Mark Zuckerberg didn’t realize this was going on right under his nose? Perhaps he was too busy trying to punish Trump supporters for posting anti-vaccine memes to notice an expansive pedo-ring operating on his site.

Washington Examiner:

Instagram has taken down 27 child pornography networks and intends to remove more, Meta said. It has also blocked thousands of hashtags used to sexualize children and restricted the platform from recommending search terms associated with sexual abuse.

Twitter is also a standard tool for promoting child pornography, Stanford said, but the platform is more aggressive in removing those accounts than Instagram. The response has reportedly improved from Twitter. The platform struggled to keep up with child pornography accounts, according to a February New York Times report testing the website’s content moderation efforts. (Read more: Revolver News, 6/07/2023) (Archive)

June 7, 2023 – Testimony reveals senior FBI official expressed concerns about Trump Mar-a-Lago raid

Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. (Credit: public domain)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) just sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland revealing new information related to the raid of former President Donald Trump’s residence and the Department of Justice’s reported indictment of President Donald Trump. This information was obtained from the Committee’s transcribed interview of Steven D’Antuono, the former Assistant Director-in-Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. Mr. D’Antuono described several abnormalities in the raid.

According to Mr. D’Antuono, the abnormalities include:

The Miami Field Office did not conduct the search. Mr. D’Antuono testified that FBI headquarters made the decision to assign the execution of the search warrant to the Washington Field Office (WFO) despite the location of the search occurring in the territory of the FBI’s Miami Field Office. Mr. D’Antuono stated that he had “absolutely no idea” why this decision was made and questioned why the Miami Field Office was not taking the lead on this matter. Mr. D’Antuono stated that the FBI “learned a lot of stuff from [the] Crossfire Hurricane” investigation—notably “that the [FBI] Headquarters does not work the investigation, it is supposed to be the field offices working the investigations.” Mr. D’Antuono indicated that his “concern is that [the] DOJ was not following the same principles . . . .” In fact, as recently as May 2023, in response to the report of Special Counsel Durham, the FBI asserted that “investigations should be run out of the Field” and not from Washington, D.C.

The Department did not assign a U.S. Attorney’s Office to the matter. According to Mr. D’Antuono, it was unusual to not have a U.S. Attorney assigned to an investigative matter, especially a matter of this magnitude. He explained that he “didn’t understand why there wasn’t a US Attorney assigned” and “raised this concern a lot with” Department officials because this was out of the ordinary. Mr. D’Antuono indicated that he “never got a good answer” and was told that the National Security Division would be handling this matter—with Jay Bratt, who leads the Department’s counterintelligence division, as “the lead prosecutor on the case.” Mr. Bratt is the same Department lawyer who allegedly improperly pressured a lawyer representing an employee of President Trump.10 Mr. D’Antuono again noted his concern regarding lessons learned from Crossfire Hurricane, that the Justice Department was not following the principle that “Headquarters does not work the investigation . . . .”

George Toscas serves as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General/the National Security Division. (Credit: justice.gov)

The FBI did not first seek consent to effectuate the search. Mr. D’Antuono recounted a meeting between FBI and Department officials during which the Department assertively pushed for the FBI to promptly execute the search warrant.12 Based upon his over-20-year tenure at the FBI, Mr. D’Antuono testified that he believed that the FBI,  prior to resorting to a search warrant, should have sought consent to search the premises. He testified that this outcome would have been “the best thing for all parties” involved— “[f]or the FBI, for former President Trump, and for the country . . . .” Mr. D’Antuono indicated a belief that either you or Director Christopher Wray made the decision to seek a search warrant, despite opposition from the line agents working this case in the WFO. Following that meeting, Mr. D’Antuono described how Justice Department counterintelligence official George Toscas—who also reportedly worked on the “Crossfire Hurricane and Clinton email investigations”—told him that FBI agents were ready to execute the warrant.16 Mr. D’Antuono pushed back on the Department for trying to unilaterally allocate FBI resources.

The FBI refused to wait for President Trump’s attorney to be present before executing the search. Mr. D’Antuono testified that the FBI sought to exclude President Trump’s attorney from the search, a move with which Mr. D’Antuono disagreed. Mr. D’Antuono believed that the FBI should have worked with the attorney to get consent to search the residence prior to seeking a warrant for the search. Mr. D’Antuono believes that “there was a good likelihood that [they] could have gotten consent . . . .”

Read the full letter to Attorney General Garland here. (House Judiciary Committee, 6/09/2023)  (Judiciary Transcript)  (Archive)

June 7, 2023 – House Judiciary Committee interviews FBI’s Steven D’Antuono and Christopher Wray about J6 pipe bombs

More insights from FBI whistleblower, Kyle Seraphin

June 8, 2023 – Key player in Biden documents removal was also involved in Bill Clinton-era Chinagate scandal

The custodian of Joe Biden’s vice presidential records, a key witness in his classified documents probe, was caught up in another documents scandal while working at the Commerce Department during the Clinton administration, court records reveal.

Longtime Biden aide and gatekeeper Kathy S. Chung, who has been interviewed by federal prosecutors and congressional investigators in the Biden case, was part of a team sanctioned for withholding and even destroying key documents in the federal case that sought sensitive records from a central figure in the so-called Chinagate fundraising investigation of the late 1990s, RealClearInvestigations has learned exclusively.

Hunter Biden: Questions about the period in 2017-2018 when the Chinese were wiring almost $6 million to Hunter and his uncle Jimmy. (Credit: The Associated Press)

A special prosecutor is now investigating whether Biden unlawfully handled top secret materials in early 2017, when he tasked Chung with removing boxes containing classified documents from the White House and storing them at various private offices in D.C., including the Chinatown neighborhood. Some of the highly sensitive papers also ended up at his home in Wilmington, Del.

Noting that Chung came into Biden’s orbit through working with the president’s son, Hunter, during the 1990s, congressional investigators want to know if the Biden family dealings in China have anything to do with the stockpiling of classified documents. They note that the mishandling of White House papers took place during the 14-month period in 2017-2018 when the Chinese were wiring almost $6 million in payments to Hunter and his uncle Jimmy Biden without providing any known legitimate services. They have expressed concern that the payments, which were flagged by the U.S. Treasury Department, were part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering operation.

Chung is central to the Justice Department’s investigation of Biden’s breach of classified documents.

James Biden, with wife Sara: Were payments to him part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering operation? (Credit: The Associated Press)

On Jan. 4, federal agents interviewed Chung while working with an investigative team led by U.S. Attorney John Lausch, who was tasked to conduct a preliminary probe of the security breach. Alarmed by what his investigators reported back to him about Chung’s role in the possible illegal removal and retention of state secrets, Lausch urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel. The following day Garland complied, naming veteran federal prosecutor Robert K. Hur to take over the criminal case as special counsel. Hur’s office reportedly has obtained more than 100 pages of documents from Chung, including emails and text messages.

While Donald Trump and Mike Pence are also under investigation for removing classified documents from the White House and storing them at their private residences, GOP congressional investigators say comparisons to Trump and Pence miss the point. In interviews with RCI, they insisted that Biden’s document scandal is potentially more serious than just mishandling state secrets. They suspect it could mushroom into a counterespionage case involving China and national security, though the White House dismisses such speculation as “baseless.”

Robert Hur, special counsel: His office reportedly obtained more than 100 pages of documents from Kathy Chung. (Credit: The Associated Press)

Chung’s lawyer Bill Taylor did not return a request for comment. But in an earlier statement, he scolded Republicans for “suggesting someone is a traitor without any evidence.”

Chung’s dual role – as an aide to Joe Biden when he was vice president and a friend of Hunter Biden, who emails show received sensitive information from Chung from his father’s office – further highlights the murky ethics that exist between the Biden family’s public service and business interests.

Hunter Biden and Chung have a long history dating back to their days working together at the Commerce Department during Bill Clinton’s presidency. It was there that Chung – a longtime Democrat working in the federal bureaucracy – became a witness in a case involving convicted Chinagate fundraiser Jian-Nan “John” Huang, who was a top Commerce official.

John Huang: In 1999, pleaded guilty to a felony violation of campaign finance laws for arranging illegal foreign donations. (Credit: The Associated Press)

In 1993, President Clinton named Huang, a China-born banker friend from Little Rock, deputy assistant secretary of international economic affairs at Commerce, where he was responsible for Asian trade matters. Within a month, Huang was given a top secret security clearance and received twice-weekly intelligence briefings by CIA analysts. At the same time, it was later revealed, he was meeting regularly with Chinese diplomats and other officials tied to Beijing.

Watchdog group Judicial Watch sought documents concerning Huang’s access to trade secrets and his trips to China. Chung was one of the administrators responsible for producing such documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

But the department was sanctioned for withholding and even destroying key documents in the federal case ‒ Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Commerce, et al ‒ in which Huang was listed as the lead defendant. After U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled Commerce’s search “grossly inadequate” and “unlawful,” Chung and her superiors were ordered to conduct another search. Still, Chung came up short in producing Huang-related documents from the computer of her boss, Melissa Moss, in the Office of Business Liaison, according to her sworn declaration in the case, a copy of which was obtained by RCI. A Clinton appointee like Hunter Biden, Moss worked with Huang on controversial Asian and other foreign trade junkets for Democrat donors. She came to Commerce from the Democratic National Committee, where she had served as finance director.

Joe Biden with the Librarian of Congress and Kathy Chung on January 3, 2017 (Credit: Marco Polo)

“In performing this search, I was assisted by an employee of the Computer Help Desk who informed me that some documents could not be opened,” Chung told the court in the 1999 affidavit, which was never uploaded to PACER, the electronic federal court records system. (After several requests to the court, Leayrohn King, a records clerk for the U.S. District Court for D.C., provided RCI a copy of Chung’s declaration and commented that it was odd that it was missing from PACER. The court has since made it available in the online docket system.)

Chung, who now works as a top aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, was not directly accused of wrongdoing. But lawyers for Judicial Watch complained her department was covering up for Huang, whom they suspected was trading government secrets and access to China.

While Chung remained at the Commerce Department, Huang left to work for the Clinton reelection effort. He raised almost $3 million for the DNC and Clinton in 1996, half of which was later found illegal or improper and returned because the donations came from foreign sources, many of them tied to Beijing.

The Justice Department, through a specially appointed task force, investigated Huang as a possible “agent of influence” for China. In 1999, Huang pleaded guilty to a felony violation of campaign finance laws for arranging illegal foreign donations. Even though the felony charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, he was sentenced to one year of probation and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation of several co-conspirators.

After Hunter Biden left the Commerce Department in 2001, where he served as executive director of e-commerce policy, he joined a K Street law firm founded by William Oldaker, a major political donor of his father. Records obtained by RCI show lawyers for Oldaker, Biden & Belair LLP represented another boss of Chung at the Commerce Department in the ongoing FOIA case, which wasn’t settled until 2004.

A decade later, Hunter recommended his father hire Chung as his personal assistant in the Office of Vice President, according to emails found on his abandoned laptop. Starting in July 2012, Chung was responsible for overseeing then-Vice President Biden’s office affairs, including handling his briefing books and scheduling his travel abroad. She handled the details for Hunter Biden’s controversial 2013 trip to Beijing with the vice president, during which Hunter met with Chinese investment partners and arranged for his father to shake one of their hands. Emails show Chung also invited Hunter to attend a 2015 lunch with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the State Department.

In January 2017, as Biden moved out of the White House, Chung helped pack 13 boxes with files from his office cabinets and store them at a transition office nearby, according to a partial transcript of Chung’s recent deposition taken behind closed doors at the Capitol. Around July 2017, Chung reloaded the boxes in her car and moved them to a private office that she leased in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, before they ended up early the next year at the China-funded Penn Biden Center in D.C., according to the transcript.

The boxes turned out to contain dozens of highly classified documents, including ones so secret they could only be viewed in a Sensitive Compartment Information Facility, or SCIF. Yet they were found last year in an unlocked storage room at the center that required no key to access. (The White House initially claimed, falsely, they were stored in a “locked closet.”) Prosecutors are investigating the chain of custody of those loosely stored intelligence papers to determine whether any were copied or passed through foreign hands.

Chung, who held a Top Secret security clearance and had experience handling and identifying classified documents, told congressional investigators she was unaware the boxes contained classified material – even though some of the file folders in the boxes were emblazoned with cover sheets stating they contained secret government documents. She insisted she never noticed any classified papers or saw any classified markings, even though she unpacked the boxes when she relocated them to the center and then re-packed them last summer at the request of Biden’s lawyers.

At least 20 highly classified papers marked at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level were found at the center, which the FBI searched earlier this year. The materials reportedly covered Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom, among other foreign countries.

Chung helped Biden research his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” It’s not known if Biden or Chung referenced any of the materials from the boxes for his book, which was published in November 2017 and revealed insider accounts of Biden’s various roles in U.S. foreign policy, including Ukraine. Biden listed Chung first among people he acknowledged for their contributions: “Thank you for all of this, and more, to Kathy Chung.”

A House GOP depiction of the alleged China-to-Bidens money trail. Ye, left, gifted Hunter an $80,000 diamond.
(Credit: House Committee on Oversight and Reform)

Overlapping Scandals?

Hunter first made contact with Chinese executives with CEFC China Energy, a suspected front for Chinese intelligence, in 2015. Emails found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop show a CEFC adviser arranged a private Washington dinner in December 2015 with Hunter and then-CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming, who reportedly has ties to the Chinese military.

In an email Chung sent to Hunter Biden that same year, she included a list of personal cell phone numbers for high-profile Washington officials, including then-White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and several Cabinet secretaries, as well as Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and a number of powerful senators and members of Congress.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer speculated that Hunter may have been trying to “prove his worth to these people that were paying these enormous sums of money to him,” in part by “showing them he had cell numbers for powerful individuals.”

Chung continued her dealings with Hunter Biden after she left the White House. On Feb. 2, 2017, shortly after Chung packed up Biden’s White House files, Hunter emailed Chung to ask her to “come work with me … so that I can make everyone money.” The next year, messages found on Hunter’s laptop show Chung sent Biden family members a link to an encrypted messaging app called Signal and urged them to install it on their electronic devices.

Later in February 2017, Hunter received an $80,000 diamond from Ye, who left the rare gem with a thank-you note at Hunter’s hotel room after they met in Miami. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Hunter admitted taking the expensive stone, though he says he doubts it was meant as a bribe.

Comer said he is investigating whether the Bidens’ Chinese partners “had access to the classified documents found.” He noted that Hunter Biden, in 2017, planned to share office space in D.C. with another one of his Chinese partners, Gongwen “Kevin” Dong, who was the CEFC money man who signed off on the wire payments to the Bidens.

“This level of access and opportunity raises questions about who had access to the classified documents,” Comer said.

In November 2017, another Biden partner from China ‒ CEFC’s Patrick Ho ‒ was arrested by FBI agents on charges of bribery and money laundering. According to federal documents obtained by RCI, the FBI raided CEFC’s D.C.-area offices shortly after Ho’s arrest and searched them for evidence. The FBI had been “electronically monitoring” Ho as a suspected Chinese spy under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap warrant, the documents further reveal.

Within months of learning his Chinese partner had been arrested, property records show Hunter terminated the lease on his own D.C. office and closed the facility, where he’d made keys for both Dong and his father, Joe Biden, according to emails found on his abandoned laptop. That same month – February 2018 – the former vice president opened a D.C. office for the China-funded Penn Biden Center, where Hunter maintained access.

It’s not known if any White House records were stored at Hunter’s Georgetown office or transferred from there to the Penn Biden Center about four miles away. The center is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, which has received several million dollars from anonymous Chinese sources since opening the center. But Hunter’s arrangement with his Chinese benefactors clearly raised counterintelligence alarms at the FBI, which began monitoring their communications. For whatever reason, the Bidens were never prosecuted as unregistered foreign agents and their own offices were never raided. Biden’s unauthorized removal and storage of classified intelligence went unnoticed – until after the 2022 congressional elections.

Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin, left, accuses Comer, right, of falsehoods based on a “bigoted conspiracy theory.” (Credit: The Associated Press)

Chung, who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign, was grilled on Capitol Hill about her access to and handling of classified information in April. She gave sworn testimony to the House Oversight Committee for roughly four hours behind closed doors.

Comer suggested earlier this year in a Fox News interview that his investigators were looking into possible ties between Chung and the Chinese Communist Party. Fox host Maria Bartiromo asked if Chung was “reporting back to the CCP about any of the former vice president’s documents,” and Comer replied, “We’re looking into that.”

Added Comer, “We’re looking into at least three different people that Hunter Biden was directly involved with that have very close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”

 

(Read more: Real ClearInvestigations, 6/8/2023)  (Archive)

June 8, 2023 – Trump is indicted for having the Mar-a-Lago documents – An Analysis by Techno Fog

The indictment of Donald Trump has been released. You can view it here.

Waltine Nauta (Credit: public domain)

Trump has been charged with 37 counts relating to the retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, the withholding or concealment of documents and records, a scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations. (There is a 38th count in the indictment relating to his aide, Waltine Nauta.)

Here’s our quick assessment: it’s weaker than we thought.

Factual allegations

There’s a basic assumption – one that very well might be incorrect – underlying Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment. It’s that Trump “was not authorized to possess or retain” documents he “caused” to be taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago in Florida. These boxes were stored at various locations in Mar-a-Lago, including the club’s ballrooms, business center, and storage room. In June of 2021 there were more than 80 boxes of documents stored there that related to Trump’s time in office.

The Special Counsel alleges that these documents included classified documents originated by, or implicating the equities of, numerous intelligence and governmental agencies, including the CIA, Department of Defense, and the National Security Agency.  The Special Counsel further alleges that Trump made disclosures of classified information in private meetings at Mar-a-Lago. One example cited in the indictment was a recorded discussion (allegedly with Mark Meadows and his book writer) relating to a presentation made by Gen. Mark Milley’s plan of attack against Iran.  (Read more: Techno Fog. 6/07/2023)  (Archive)

Trump responds on Truth Social while curiously standing before a historical picture related to the legislation of the Monroe Doctrine in the early 1900s. (Truth Social posts do not open up in Word Press. Also, I found that all YouTube videos of this speech stop playing about halfway through. More censorship by the Deep State.)

(Credit: Truth Social)

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/110511303632102309

Rumble link:

The Trump campaign responds:

The Political Weaponization of the Department of Justice is a Disgrace

“President Donald J. Trump has long been the biggest threat and the top political target for Joe Biden and the corrupt Democrat Party. As President Trump’s dominance grows, the nastier the Deep State attacks become. 

Today’s act of open legal ‘warfare’ by the highly politicized and partisan Department of Injustice, has taken things to a new level, and set a dangerous precedent. By politically weaponizing the DOJ, the Biden administration and their henchmen in the Swamp are now conducting an all-out prosecution of the leader of the current administration’s political opposition. 

This is un-American and wrong. 

President Trump violated no laws and is being held to a different legal standard than other former Presidents and Vice Presidents. We are confident that no matter how crooked the Executive branch has become, the American justice system is resilient and will throw this case out in its entirety. If not, our cherished Constitution is in serious trouble. 

“President Trump will fight this unconstitutional abuse of power until he is ultimately vindicated. He will never stop fighting for the American people, and he will continue to work to restore the greatness of the United States of America.”

Hillary Clinton, the bloated gloater of Twitter, refers to the Trump indictment while also trying to sell hats:

A comment left in her gloating Twitter thread:

June 9, 2023 – Judicial Watch: The “Clinton Sock Drawer” case vs. the Trump Mar-a-Lago raid and indictment case

More from this Twitter thread:

In 2010, Judicial Watch submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to Clinton Library and Presidential Museum, seeking access to the Clinton audiotapes from his time as President. The Obama National Archives (NARA) responded that the audiotapes are personal records and therefore not subject to the Presidential Records Act or FOIA. Judicial Watch subsequently sued and requested that the Court to declare the audiotapes to be Presidential records and, because they are not currently in the government’s possession, to compel NARA to assume custody and control over them.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against Judicial Watch. In doing so, she explained:

“Under the statutory scheme established by the PRA, the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President’s term and in his sole discretion, see 44 U.S.C. § 2203(b), so [NARA] could not make . . . a classification decision” different from that of President.

“Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records.”

“The PRA contains no provision obligating or even permitting the Archivist to assume control over records that the President ‘categorized’ and ‘filed separately’ as personal records. At the conclusion of the President’s term, the Archivist only ‘assumes responsibility for the Presidential records.’”

“Plaintiff contends that its factual allegations about the nature and substance of the audiotapes clearly establishes them to be Presidential records, regardless of how they were treated by President Clinton. The Court is not so sure. But even if the Court were inclined to agree with plaintiff’s reassessment of President Clinton’s decision, it would not alter the conclusion that the injury cannot be redressed: the PRA does not confer any mandatory or even discretionary authority on the Archivist to classify records. Under the statute, this responsibility is left solely to the President. While the plaintiff casts this lawsuit as a challenge to a decision made by the National Archives, the PRA makes it clear that this is not a decision the Archivist can make, and in this particular case, it is not a decision the Archivist did make because President Clinton’s term ended in 2000, and the tapes were not provided to the Archives at that time.”

Background:

While in office, President Clinton enlisted historian Taylor Branch to assist him in creating an oral history of his eight years in office by recording 79 audiotapes that preserved not only President Clinton’s thoughts and commentary on contemporaneous events and issues he was facing as president, but, in some instances, recorded actual events such as presidential telephone conversations. For example, the audiotapes contained the following content:

(More)

June 10, 2023 – Trump indictment reveals lawfare word games – The difference between “classified documents” and “classified markings”

(…) The indictment accuses President Trump of withholding documents containing “classified markings,” a very specifically deployed obtuse wording intended to create the implication of something nefarious where nothing nefarious exists.  It is entirely possible for a person, any person, especially a person who follows the news, to possess documents containing “classified markings.”

There is a big difference between a classified document and a document containing classified markings.  As an example, anyone who has looked at the Carter Page FISA application made public in July 2018, has reviewed a document containing “classified markings.”  When a document is declassified, they do not remove the markings.

You might think this is a one-off use of the “documents with classification markings” lingo, but it’s not.  This language is the underpinning of the entire DOJ/FBI framework that predicated the raid on Mar-a-Lago.   Specifically, neither NARA nor the DOJ-NSD requested President Trump or his team to return Classified Documents.  The DOJ demanded the return of any documents that contained “classified markings.” [SEE BELOW]

Because the verbiage is so intentionally obtuse (ie. Lawfare), a fulsome production in compliance with this DOJ demand would include any newspaper or magazine articles that had a picture of the Carter Page FISA application, or any printed online article that might contain the same or similar elements.  There is a big difference between asking for a classified document return, and asking for a return of documents that contain “classified markings.” [Example from CTH, below]

As a result, it is entirely possible, I would say almost certain, that President Trump -and his legal team- returned every document that contained classified information but may have omitted documents that retained “classified markings”.  There’s the spirit of compliance, and the letter of absolute compliance when contrasted against a very granular interpretation of the request.

It is obvious from the demand, the DOJ/FBI was casting a wide net on the compliance side, knowing that amid hundreds of thousands of presidential documents and records, there would be obscure documents with classified markings that had nothing to do with national security.  Thus, the “classified markings” establishes a Lawfare compliance tactic.

It will be interesting to see how this nonsense progresses.  It becomes easier to call it nonsense, when you simply accept the approach being used.  If the DOJ-NSD, FBI, Special Counsel or NARA were genuinely interested in ‘national security issues’, they would not be playing obtuse word games in order to structure court filings simply for media narrative engineering and propaganda purposes.

Again, all of these insufferable pretending elements simply create more avenues for smart legal minds to highlight to the court.  The judges can see through this nonsense, and their action or lack thereof becomes part of showcasing their own agenda.  Fortunately, Judge Cannon has a very solid background on the Mar-a-Lago documents case.  She wouldn’t need to have this stuff pointed out to her; she has already experienced it. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 6/10/2023)  (Archive)

June 11, 2023 – If the documents do not belong to President Trump, then why did the government dump them in the WH parking lot and tell him to deal with them?

CBS News legal analyst Rikki Klieman and CBS News investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge join “Face the Nation” to discuss what’s in the indictment — and what it means for Trump. [Transcript Here]

Before getting to the video, it’s valuable to see Rikki Klieman representing the interpretation of the media outlook toward the indictment handed down by Special Counsel Jack Smith.  It is also valuable to see CBS’s Catherine Herridge represent the defenders of the institutions, from the outside vulgarian personage of Trump.

Klieman buys the Lawfare narrative completely, including the framework of classified documents as opposed to documents containing classified markings.  She sells the Lawfare outline as gospel and makes all assertions from that position.  Herridge looks at how the bureaucracy responds to Trump, including how the institutions hold power of determination higher than a President of the United States.

Bill Barr said emphatically earlier today, “The documents do not belong to Trump,” continuing with “The documents belong to the government who created them, not the man for whom they were created.”  So sayeth the defender of the omnipotent Dept of Justice.  This is where a sharp intellectual knife to cut through the chaff and countermeasures is needed, and notice no one brings up the visible and practical deconstruction point.

If the documents did not belong to President Donald J. Trump, then why did the government dump them in the parking lot of the White House and tell him to deal with them?

 

If the documents belonged to the government, and not to the man for whom they were created, then why did that same government give them to him and force him to take them to a location of his choosing?   Can you see the obtuse argument fall apart when simple pragmatic questions are raised?

The institutions are presented, by the sellers of the Lawfare narrative, as higher than the authority of the President of the United States.  This is how ridiculous our government has become.

Institutions are not omnipotent entities; they are buildings and networks full of people who facilitate processes that are an outcome of policy.  Those buildings and offices are not the government. The elected politicians who we send to Washington DC are not subservient to the processes, norms and morays they determine within the bureaucracy that the politicians are in charge of.

The argument(s) against Donald Trump are akin to a business saying that all work product created during the tenure of employment belongs to the enterprise of the business and not to the employee.  If you want to hold that line of thought, fine.  However, you then need to reconcile that the business enterprise intentionally gave all the work product to the employee, dumped it in their lap, told them to take it and leave, and then comes back at a later date and says – we now need to review the stuff we forced you to take because some of it might not actually belong to you.

Does this happen anywhere else?  Of course not.

The fact that the National Archives and Record Administration refused to take custody of the documents upon the end of the White House tenure, combined with the fact the NARA dumped those documents in the parking lot of the White House for Trump to deal with, is a direct statement the bureaucracy was telling President Trump these are your records.  His records – not their records on loan to him.

The Presidential Records Act is the overriding legislative guidance for the flow of work product post-term in office.  These are essentially document arguments.  The fact that NARA together with the Biden administration would weaponize the disposition of documents, they intentionally forced Trump to take ownership of, speaks to an intent within the bureaucracy that is transparently obvious.

Bill Barr’s entire mindset is based on a belief the institutions are of a higher power than the individuals we elect to control them.  In essence, the President of the United States is subservient to the bureaucracy.  This is nonsense.  This is also why former AG Bill Barr was more concerned about preserving the institutions than stopping the weaponizing activity that flows from them.

President Trump could store his “presidential records” anywhere he wants to; they are his records.

Now, watch Klieman obscure the difference between classified documents and documents containing classified markings.  Despite her pontifications to the contrary, the indictment is not based around any classified documents.  The classification of the documents is technically and factually moot to the ridiculous point the special counsel is making.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 6/11/2023) (Archive)

June 12, 2023 – Georgia’s Halderman Report is released and reveals Dominion voting machines are hackable

J. Alex Halderman (Credit: CSpan)

On Wednesday, the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia unsealed the 96-page Halderman Report – the Security Analysis of Georgia’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been hiding this report from the public for two years.

University of Michigan Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Halderman and Security Researcher and Assistant Professor at Auburn University Drew Sringall collaborated on the report where they discovered many exploitable vulnerabilities in the Dominion Voting Systems’ ImageCast X system.

Far-left Judge Amy Totenberg sealed and covered up the results of the investigation of Dominion voting machines in Georgia and sat on the report until this week.

The report confirms that votes can be altered in the Dominion voting machines.  In fact, the report reveals that the Dominion software is vulnerable and can be hacked.

On Thursday VoterGA founder Garland Favorito joined Steve Bannon on The War Room to discuss the findings from the explosive report.

Trump-hating Secretary of State Raffensperger hid this information from the public until now.  Why is that?

Here is a copy of the Halderman Report released this week.

Halderman Report on Georgi… by Jim Hoft

Professor Halderman wrote about his findings in a blog post on Wednesday.

Back in September 2020, the Court granted the Curling Plaintiffs access to one of Georgia’s touchscreen ballot marking devices (BMDs) so that they could assess its security. Drew and I extensively tested the machine, and we discovered vulnerabilities in nearly every part of the system that is exposed to potential attackers. The most critical problem we found is an arbitrary-code-execution vulnerability that can be exploited to spread malware from a county’s central election management system (EMS) to every BMD in the jurisdiction. This makes it possible to attack the BMDs at scale, over a wide area, without needing physical access to any of them.

Our report explains how attackers could exploit the flaws we found to change votes or potentially even affect election outcomes in Georgia, including how they could defeat the technical and procedural protections the state has in place. While we are not aware of any evidence that the vulnerabilities have been exploited to change votes in past elections, without more precautions and mitigations, there is a serious risk that they will be exploited in the future.

On Thursday Professor Halderman tweeted out that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger will not install Dominion’s security patches before the 2024 election.

This was taken from a recent Raffensperger statement.

Raffensperger, a vocal Never-Trumper, has been aware of the investigators’ findings for two years!

That means he ran the vulnerable machines during his reelection in 2022!

What is up with Brad Raffensperger? (The Gateway Pundit, 6/15/2023)  (Archive)

Also via Gateway Pundit, 6/15/2023:

(…) Garland Favorito brought the receipts with him on The War Room.

Garland Favorito: Finally,  just yesterday I believe this report was released and it has some amazing findings that basically say what we have been saying all along.  What Mike (Lindell) has been saying, what you and I have been saying, and so many people, that the system is very insecure. It can be hacked.

So what Dr. Halderman did is he looked at only the ballot marking device part of the system.  This (investigation and report) is limited to that. It doesn’t actually even include the scanners which have another incredibly vulnerable. Which we have already found have been compromised in the 2020 election in Fulton County. So that’s the background, Steve, of all of what’s been going on.

Steve Bannon:  I just want to make sure. I want you go through the slides. Holleman’s totally independent, right? He’s some guy that’s an expert in the field. He’s a subject matter expert. He has no axe to grind on this, correct?

Garland Favorito: Absolutely. And if anything, he leans far more on the Democrat side than the Republican. But as you said, he’s an independent professor. Certainly has no axe to grind, particularly for Donald Trump or any Republicans…

…It was a titanic fight. People from all over different organizations have requested that this report be released for the security of their own voting systems. The Secretary of State of Louisiana requested that it be released. OAN requested that it would be released for part of their lawsuit. I think Fox News as well, because Dominion is suing them. It’s critical information, but it’s critical to the security of elections in the country because you could do Dr. Halderman could have done the same thing to a different vendor as well.

Slide two if Cameron has that already. But basically this is about what we call the Dominion ICX, which is the ballot marking device. And — Dr. Holleman says that…  the ICX suffers from critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited to subvert all of its security mechanisms. He goes on to say that he demonstrates that these vulnerabilities provide multiple routes by which attackers can install malicious software on Georgia ballot marking devices. And he continues on, he says, “I explain how such malware can alter voters’ votes while subverting all of the procedural protections practiced by the state. That’s about as damning as you can get.

You go on to number slide three, and he says that attackers can alter the QR codes on the printed ballots to modify voter selections. The QR code, Steve, as you know, contains the votes. The votes are accumulated out of the QR code. The system does not accumulate what the voter actually can see on text. And he also found that the attackers can forge or manipulate the smart cards that the ballot marking device uses to authenticate technicians, poll works, and voters you can manipulate. He goes on to show how they are forged. He actually forged the cards and did all sorts of things as part of his analysis.

So flipping on to the next slide, he says that the software update that Georgia installed in October 2020 left Georgia’s ballot marking devices in a state where anyone can install malware with only brief physical access to the machines. And he goes on to say, I showed that this problem can potentially be exploited in the polling place even by nontechnical voters. Go on to the next slide. And he goes on to say, I demonstrate that attackers can execute arbitrary code with root supervisory privileges, which means that. You have control of everything on the machine.

And he says by altering the election definition file that county workers copy to every BMD before each election, this has been the key point of our concerns, is that this election definition file comes from the state, and the state propagates this to every county, which propagates it to every voting machine. And Professor Holland again says that attackers could exploit this to spread malware to all ballot marking devices across the county or the entire state. And we believe that has actually been done because in 2017, we found that the Secretary of State’s Election Management Server, the state server, was exposed to the Internet for virtually anyone in the world to place malware on it. So head on to the next slide. The ICX contains numerous unnecessary Android applications.

And he talks about a terminal emulator that has a supervisory command interface that overrides all of the access controls. So he goes on to say that an attacker can alter the ballot marking devices audit logs simply by opening them in the on screen text editor application. So you could literally audit you could audit the audit logs just like you would create or change a Word document. That’s how easy that would be.

Going on to the next slide. He says that I developed a series of proof of concept attacks, which he goes over in his 96-page report. And he says that – vulnerabilities in the ballot marking device could be used to change the personal votes of individual Georgia voters, it is very likely that there are other equally critical flaws that are yet to be discovered…

…He said that attackers only have to find one of the flaws. They don’t have to find them all. He found I don’t know how many, probably a dozen or more.

Next slide. He goes on to say that the ICX BMDs that’s the Dominion ICX ballot marking devices are not sufficiently secured against technical compromise to withstand vote-altering attacks by bad actors who are likely to attack future elections in Georgia… Despite the addition of a paper trail, the malware can still change individual votes and most election outcomes without detection. And then we’ve got just one or two more slides.

The next slide: Using vulnerable ICX BMDs for all in-person voters, as Georgia does, greatly magnifies the security risk compared to jurisdictions that just use handmark paper ballots but provide the ballot marking devices to the voters upon request. So in other words, if you have a voter with an impairment, they need ballot marking device. But when you give this ballot marking device to every single voter, it increases the security risk by an incredible order of magnitude. And Dr. Haldeman goes on to say that the critical vulnerabilities in the ICX indicate that it was developed without sufficient attention to security during design, software engineering and testing. Certainly, I think that is true because why would a vendor come out with a QR-coded voting system after we had 15 years of complaints against the unverifiable voting of the old paperless DREs these systems? And it’s not just Dominion, it’s E&S as well. They have one. They are ill-conceived from the point that they were originally designed.

Video via Midnight Rider

 

June 13, 2023 – Senator Grassley reveals redacted part of FBI 1023 report on Confidential Human Source alleging there are audio tapes of his conversations with Joe Biden

Things are certainly getting interesting on the Biden bribery story. Apparently, in the unclassified interview with the Confidential Human Source, the FBI redacted the source alleging he has audio recordings of himself speaking to Joe Biden.

Senator Chuck Grassley revealed this little bit of information today from the security of the Senate floor.

(Transcript) – Last week, I came to the Senate Floor to give a speech about the Biden Justice Department and FBI playing games with the American people by hiding the FBI-generated 1023 document from Congress.

Director Wray was going to be held in contempt for refusing to produce the 1023 that I told Chairman Comer about. Then, instead of contempt, the FBI committed to showing the 1023 and related documents to Congress.

So, the FBI showed but didn’t provide possession of that 1023 to the House Oversight Committee last week.

As the public knows that 1023 involves an alleged bribery scheme between then-Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden and a foreign national. The same allegations that Chairman Comer and I made public on May 3 of this year.

And on the same day that the FBI provided a redacted version of the 1023 to the House Oversight Committee, the Justice Department announced that former President Trump had been indicted and charged with 37 crimes relating to his alleged mishandling of classified records.

Attorney General Garland signed off on prosecuting Trump for conduct similar to what Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton engaged in. Two standards of justice in this country will turn our constitutional Republic upside down. Thanks to the political infection within the Biden Justice Department and FBI, we’re well along the road for that to happen.

This senator will do all that he can to fight that political infection. And you fight it by bringing transparency to what the government does. The public’s business ought to be public. Transparency brings accountability.

With respect to the 1023 shown to that House Committee, from what I’ve been told by folks who’ve reviewed it, it’s filled with redactions. So, Director Wray placed redactions on a document that was already unclassified.

More than that, the FBI made Congress review a redacted unclassified document in a classified facility. That goes to show you the disrespect the FBI has for Congress. On a previous time on the Senate Floor, I asked my fellow senators what’s so unusual about an unclassified document being given to the public, when on May 18 of this year, there was leaked to the New York Times a classified document and even the name of a confidential human source. So, we’re kind of in a strange situation here. A classified document can be leaked to the New York Times, but an unclassified document can’t be made public to 300 million Americans.

Accordingly, Congress still lacks a full and complete picture with respect to what that document really says. That’s why it’s important that the document be made public without unnecessary redactions for the American people to see.

Let me assist for purposes of transparency.

The 1023 produced to that House Committee redacted reference that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them. Seventeen total recordings.

According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses fifteen audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden. According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then-Vice President Joe Biden. These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot. The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden.

So, as I’ve repeatedly asked since going public with the existence of the 1023, what, if anything, has the Justice Department and FBI done to investigate?

The Justice Department and FBI must show their work. They no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. It’s clear that the Justice Department and FBI will use every resource to investigate candidate Trump, President Trump and former President Trump.

Based on the facts known to Congress and the public, it’s clear that the Justice Department and FBI will use every resource to investigate candidate Trump, President Trump and former President Trump. Based on the facts known to Congress and the public, it’s clear that the Justice Department and FBI haven’t nearly had the same laser focus on the Biden family.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has used a recording against former President Trump. Well, what’s U.S. Attorney Weiss doing with respect to these alleged Joe and Hunter Biden recordings that are apparently relevant to a high-stakes bribery scheme?

Getting a full and complete 1023 is critical for the American people to know and understand the true nature of the document and to hold the Justice Department and FBI accountable.

It’s also important for asserting constitutional congressional oversight powers against an out-of-control Executive Branch drunk with political infection. Remember, Congress has received 1023’s in the past and they’ve been made public. So asking for this 1023 to be turned over to the American people to read is not unusual.

Congress owes it to the American people and the brave and heroic whistleblowers to continue to fight for transparency in this matter and make this document public without unnecessary redactions.

I want everyone to remember, that I have read the unredacted version. (Transcript Link)

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 6/13/2023)  (Archive)

June 13, 2023 – A few theories on the identity of the Confidential Human Source/Whistleblower, regarding Biden corruption

June 13, 2023 – Marco Polo’s, Garrett Ziegler, reveals identity of second IRS whistleblower on Biden family corruption

Garrett Ziegler founder of Marco Polo joins Steve Bannon’s War Room and reveals that they received a subpoena from an insider at J.P. Morgan in May of 2019. The subpoena lists a gentleman named Joseph Ziegler who is now coming forward as the 2nd IRS whistleblower exposing the Biden family’s crimes. The first IRS whistleblower is Gary Shapley who recently interviewed with CBS.

(Warroom, 6/13/2023)  (Archive)

June 14, 2023 – Hillary Clinton: Republicans defending Trump on classified docs “beyond anything that I ever thought possible in this country”

June 20, 2023 – Actor Jim Caviezel implicates US agencies in child sex trafficking and worse

Actor Jim Caviezel joined Steve Bannon on The War Room on Tuesday evening.

(…) Caviezel worked with several former federal agents and 30 Navy SEALS while filming in Colombia.

During the interview, Jim Caviezel implicated several US agencies in child sex trafficking and worse.

Steve Bannon: Do you believe that that’s part of the senior government apparatus just does not want to touch this? They profit off it. They don’t mind if it happens. I mean, why would DHS when when they’re in charge and like you said, there’s five drug agents to every one human trafficking agent… It’s my opinion I don’t know what Jim’s opinion is, but it’s definitely my opinion that this is something they don’t want to solve…

Jim Caviezel: …You might have 14 people in the room and they all want you, but two have big enough voices where they can shut down those twelve. And so right now, I don’t think it was smart for Bud Light to somebody woke up in the morning and said, “Hey, let’s put this transgender on our beer can.” Okay? And then Target is looking going, “Wow, look at all the billions they’re losing. We got to do this, too.” Obviously, something’s going on, right?… The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. What monastery are they from?…

Let’s go back to Ms. Rodas. She comes out and says, 85,000 children are missing. That’s damn near a Rose Bowl stadium. And I think it’s a lot more than that. After I talked to Tim and many of them, they were saying, Jim, these are small numbers. Okay, fine. But that’s not newsworthy the next day. Like, you don’t want to pick that up? And then I started noticing that’s a tell. But it’s a huge tell. It’s over and over. Every time something trafficking comes out, next day, nothing. Nobody wants to talk about this story. Nothing. But I went through this on The Passion of the Christ. Yes. I was told every day that this…

This is the most important film. This is why movies were supposed to be made. This is why I wanted to become an actor. I wanted to do things to bring the light on evil. And this is a perfect good versus evil film…

But while we were doing this, I had a really great team around me (in Colombia) But all of a sudden, they disappeared. They saved 200 children in the middle of this whole thing,

Steve Bannon: Tim’s team was working the film down there. Those guys go out and they save they saved 200 children while we were down there. This is the power of this movie… Okay, go to angel.com/WarRoom to get your tickets. You got to take your friends on 4 July… Look, you’ve got all these other issues – about harvesting and all this apparatus. You say the alphabet agencies are here are involved somehow. You’re meeting with people. You want hearings, you want investigations, you want whistleblowers, you want everybody to start coming…

Jim Caviezel: I want media to do what Laura Logan’s doing. That woman is a hero. She puts herself right into hell and she goes out and she doesn’t just say, hey, they told you to just read these today…

Steve Bannon: Would you say? Now, if we could organize, get all the media and by the way, Lara Logan is going to be the show later in the week. If we get all these if we… and you would take them down and you would show them…

Jim Caviezel: I would love for them to meet a lot of these agents. And that can be provided for them, but they have to go into hell to see it, and then going into the Dark Web to get…

Steve Bannon: Can we help to arrange that?

Jim Caviezel: I think that would be amazing. I think there’s Jason Jones would be a great guy to go to. And then all the connect oh, that would be awesome.

Jim Caviezel: “All of our children are in trouble, it’s got to stop, we have the power to do it”

(Gateway Pundit, 6/20, 2023) (Archive)

Other Interviews regarding Caviezel’ s movie, “Sound of Freedom”:

Jim Caviezel Goes In Depth On Human Trafficking And New Movie “Sound Of Freedom”

 

Spread Awareness Of Child Trafficking With The Film ‘Sound of Freedom’ At Angel.com/WarRoom

U.S. Is #1 World Consumer Of Child Trafficking While Mexico Is #1 Supplier | Eduardo Breaks Down How U.S.-Mexico Are Hurting Each Other

 

June 21, 2023 – Durham Hearing: Jim Jordan’s opening statement

June 21, 2023 – Durham Hearing: Why numerous Russiagate co-conspirators weren’t interviewed in his investigation

June 21, 2023 – Durham Hearing: The FBI kept intel on the Clinton plan to ‘link Trump with Russia’ from agents working the case

June 21, 2023 – Durham Hearing: Hillary Clinton fabricated it; Obama and Biden knew it; The FBI orchestrated it; and the mainstream media sold it

June 21, 2023 – Durham Hearing: Gaetz questions Durham for not going after Andy McCabe; investigating the Mueller team; why they smashed phones; and who honey-potted Papadopoulos

June 22-July 20, 2023: IRS whistleblowers and FBI testimony confirm FBI knew Hunter Biden Laptop was authentic before meeting with Twitter, Facebook

On June 22, 2023, the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government reveals testimony from IRS whistleblowers who confirm the FBI knew Hunter Biden’s laptop was authentic.

The FBI confirmed the authenticity in 2019.

On July 17, 2023, the House Judiciary Committee conducted an interview with Laura Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF).

Dehmlow confirmed the FBI knew the Biden laptop was real on October 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post broke the laptop story, and the same day the FBI was meeting with social media platforms to censor American citizens who were sharing the laptop story.

The committee followed up with a letter to FBI Director, Christopher Wray on July 20, 2023, asking why the FBI failed to alert the social media platforms that the laptop was real.

June 22, 2023 – IRS whistleblower says search warrants, charges for Hunter Biden blocked, Joe met Chinese client

Hunter Biden (l) and supervisory IRS agent Gary Shapley (r) (Credit: The New York Post)

A supervisory IRS agent divulged to Congress widespread interference in the probe of Hunter Biden, including the blockage of two search warrants and more extensive criminal charges, while also confirming the government had evidence that Joe Biden met with his son’s Chinese business partners, according to testimony released Thursday,

Just the News obtained the testimony of IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley shortly after the House Ways and Means Committee voted to pierce Hunter Biden’s tax privacy and make the agent’s allegations of preferential treatment and political interference public.

He confirmed career prosecutors originally intended to charge Hunter Biden with numerous tax violations dating to 2014, but in the end appointees of Joe Biden nixed the plan for a more sweeping indictment. In the end, the charges were narrowed to two counts in 2017 and 2018 that most likely spared the presidential son prison time.

“I am blowing the whistle because the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, Department of Justice Tax, and Department of Justice provided preferential treatment and unchecked conflicts of interest in an important and high-profile investigation of the President’s son, Hunter Biden,” he told lawmakers.

You can read the full testimony here.

 Whistleblower 1 Transcript_Redacted.pdf

Shapley divulged in his testimony that federal prosecutors twice blocked search warrants seeking evidence from Hunter Biden, including one for a storage locker with corporate documents and another for Joe Biden’s Delaware residence where Hunter Biden was living, even though agents had met the standards for probable cause. (Read more: JustTheNews, 6/22/2023)  (Archive)

June 22, 2023 – Transcript of IRS whistleblower interview reveals texts of Hunter Biden shaking down Chinese benefactor with threats like “you will regret not following my direction”

Photos Place Hunter Biden At Father’s House The Day He Invoked Dad’s Name to Threaten Chinese Business Partner

June 22, 2023 – Hunter Biden got kicked out of a private sex club for “grabbing women’s asses”

Hunter Biden was kicked out of the SNCTM sex club (above) for “grabbing women’s asses” and acting “like a spoiled child,” founder Damon Lawner (front) told The Post. Lawner said the IRS investigated Biden’s $10,000 payment.
(Credit: Matthew McDermott/NY Post)

Hunter Biden got kicked out of a private sex club for “grabbing women’s asses” and acting “like a spoiled child,” the founder exclusively told The Post.

The president’s troubled son is “a really bad guy — not a good person. He’s just not,” said Damon Lawner, who founded the notorious SNCTM club, where membership ran as high as $75,000 a year. And Hunter’s $10,000 payment led to Lawner receiving an IRS subpoena.

Lawner claimed that the payment was made through a mystery woman in 2018 and that he was later informed of a probe by the IRS criminal division who “asked me about book-keeping and records.”

Lawner said he decided to disclose Biden’s sex club membership after Biden was given a virtual slap on the wrist on Tuesday in an income tax and a gun case after a five-year federal investigation.

The whopping fee, Lawner said, was made through an LLC that hid Hunter’s name and paid by a mystery woman who accompanied the president’s son — “high as a kite and zonked out” — to the club.

Sometime in 2018, Lawner said, the woman applied for membership in the upscale sex club, which reportedly was attended by celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow and Bill Maher. The woman told Lawner, who approved all memberships, that she would be accompanied by a handsome man.

When Lawner requested more information, she would only state that his “name was Hunter and that he was a member of a prominent political family.”

On their first and only visit, Hunter acted so rude to upscale female members — “grabbing women’s asses” and other behavior that went against the club’s rules — that Lawner asked him to leave and banned him from future events.

One of the club rules at SNCTM was “always ask before you touch,” Lawner said. “When I told Hunter he had to leave, that people were complaining about his behavior, he was belligerent and acted like a spoiled child. But he did leave.”

Hunter’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

At the time of Biden’s visit, Lawner said he still wasn’t certain who he was or which prominent family belonged to.

It was only when The Post broke the story last year of Hunter’s laptop — which contains, among other things, pornographic photos of the first son and women, as well as pictures of him doing drugs and even proof of payments to prostitutes — that Lawner saw Hunter’s photo for the first time and realized he was the stoned guy who had been banned from the club.

Lawner said that, on Nov. 1, 2021, he received a subpoena by mail from the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service. He claimed the entities OWASCO, PC and OWASCO, LLC were listed in the subpoena as part of the investigation; according to press reports, they allegedly belong to Hunter. (Read more: New York Post, 6/22/2023)  (Archive)

June 23, 2023 – After AG Garland denies main justice interference, IRS whistleblower reveals names of witnesses to show Garland lying

Things are getting spicy in/around Main Justice in DC.  On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy AG Lisa Monaco denied any involvement interfering with the decisions made by USAO David Weiss regarding the investigation of the Hunter and ¹Joe Biden bribery and tax fraud scheme. However, in response, the IRS whistleblower is now naming additional witnesses to Weiss’s statements.

Through his attorneys, whistleblower Gary Shapley is now naming additional witnesses to the statements of USAO Weiss:

“In an October 7, 2022, meeting at the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, U.S. Attorney David Weiss told six witnesses he did not have authority to charge in other districts and had thus requested special counsel status. Those six witnesses include Baltimore FBI Special Agent in Charge Tom Sobocinski and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ryeshia Holley, IRS Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gary Shapley and Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon, who also independently and contemporaneously corroborated Mr. Shapley’s account in an email, now public as Exhibit 10, following p. 148 of his testimony transcript.

Mr. Shapley would have no insight into why Mr. Weiss would make these statements at the October 7, 2022 meeting if they were false.  That Mr. Weiss made these statements is easily corroborated, and it is up to him and the Justice Department to reconcile the evidence of his October 7, 2022 statements with contrary statements by Mr. Weiss and the Attorney General to Congress.”  (source)

Someone is lying, and the whistleblower appears to have all his information well documented and cited.  Mr. Weiss, Mr. Garland and Mrs. Monaco have some explaining to do.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 6/25/2023)  (Archive)

June 23, 2023 – John Kirby walks out of press briefing after question about Hunter Biden message to China that undermines all prior White House denials

White House Coordinator for National Security Council Strategic Communications, John Kirby, walks out of the press briefing room after being asked about Hunter Biden’s WhatsApp messages with China implicating President Biden

THE MESSAGE: “I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made was not fulfilled. Tell the director I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And Zhi, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang or the Chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows, and my ability to forever hold a grudge, that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

John Kirby uncomfortably said he would not comment on the text message and refused to answer any questions. WATCH: (Conservative Treehouse, 6/24/2023)  (Archive)

June 23, 2023 – Joe Biden: “…and I sold a lot of state secrets and a lot of very important things we shared”

June 25, 2023 – Peter Schweizer reports Joe Biden was using a secret cell phone while VP

Peter Schweizer, head of the “Government Accountability Institute,” told Maria Bartiromo on FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that he tipped off the House Oversight Committee to look into records for a private global cell phone he alleges Hunter Biden’s business gave to Joe Biden during his time as vice president:

PETER SCHWEIZER: It’s interesting, what is the line of communications between Hunter Biden and his business partners and Joe Biden when he’s vice president of the United States? It’s not the government phone, it’s not Joe Biden’s personal phone. We know from the laptop that Hunter Biden’s business paid for a private phone line that Joe Biden used while he was vice president. It was from AT&T, it was $300 a month, it was a global phone where you could access somebody anywhere around the world.

We shared that phone number and that account information with people in the House Oversight Committee. My hope is that they if they haven’t already, they will subpoena those records because I think it will give an indication on how tight the communication was.

And that may be the phone, for example, that the Ukrainian, the Burisma executive might have used in this allegation that the he talked to Joe Biden in recorded conversations.

I would just say one other thing, Maria, as it relates to that sort of shakedown phone call with Henry Zhao that we alluded to, Henry Zhao in 2015 had already sent $5 million to the Bidens. He was the head of a Harvest Investment firm. And what’s interesting is in the correspondence there, Hunter Biden again talks to Zhao in the context of “this is a deal that’s important to my family” involving his father.

Let’s also keep in mind, we fixate on the criminal element of this, we also have to focus on the espionage element of this. Henry Zhao paid $5 million to Hunter Biden from an account that was part of a company that he co-owned with the family of the Minister of State Security of China, who’s in charge of the entire spy apparatus. And you see that in every deal that Hunter Biden did in China. These individuals that are sending him money have ties to Chinese intelligence. (Read more: RealClearPolitics, 6/25/2023)  (Archive)

Update: Ring, ring! You’ll never guess who picked up when @jsolomonreports called Hunter Biden’s secret cell phone.

June 26, 2023 -O’Keefe Media Group files lawsuit alleging Chinese ties to ActBlue scheme

June 25, 2023 – Adam Kinzinger refers to ‘Patriot Front’ group as ‘federal officers’

I reported earlier on the viral video of the Patriot Front-like characters getting unmasked in Portland, Oregon, after they showed up and tried to crash a political rally. Rallygoers, including members of the Proud Boys, weren’t having it. They didn’t want to get smeared with whatever the Patriot Front-like characters might say or do. The rallygoers called the group “racists,” told them to get the heck out (in more colorful language), and then proceeded to de-mask a few of them. That caused the Patriot Front-like guys who were exposed to panic and cover their faces. The video now has almost 15 million views.

There was a lot of speculation that the Patriot Front group and others like it are astroturfed: either made up of “feds” or of leftists trying to make people on the right look bad. But either way, whether they are astroturfed or real white nationalists, they have nothing in common with conservatives, and conservatives completely reject them and mock them at every opportunity. I also noted reasons why the folks in these videos might not have been “real” Patriot Front guys—the outfits are different, for instance—and one of the local people claimed it was an area Rose City group.

But one of the funniest reactions to the video came from Adam Kinzinger, the former Illinois representative who now is a “senior political commentator” for CNN.

Does Kinzinger know what he just said? He just called these guys federal officers. Does Adam know something the rest of us don’t? Did he just say something he shouldn’t have said? Is the former Jan. 6 Committee member saying federal officers embed themselves in groups? Can we say “whoopsies” in a big way? (Read more: Red State, 5/25/2023) (Archive)

June 27, 2023 – Prosecutor who signs Hunter Biden plea deal worked for Hunter Biden business partner, Louis Freeh

By now everyone is aware how the corruption in Washington DC is fraught with internecine relationships; however, this one takes the proverbial cake.  The prosecutor who organized and signed the plea deal for Hunter Biden worked for Hunter Biden’s business partner.

Senator Ron Johnson is calling attention to Title 28, Section 45.2 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which says: ‘no employee shall participate in a criminal investigation if he has a personal or political relationship with […] any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation.’

As if this entire episode wasn’t sketchy enough, Assistant United States Attorney Derek Hines (top left) was one of the prosecutors to sign off on Hunter Biden’s charges and plea deal. Hines previously worked under ex-FBI director Louis Freeh (bottom left), who was a business partner of Hunter Biden.  Hines worked for Freeh Group International Solutions which was specifically involved in the foreign company influence issue at the heart of the Hunter Biden case, and Freeh is a close friend of the entire Biden family.

This is nuts.

(Via Daily Mail) – A prosecutor who signed off on the documents charging Hunter Biden with tax and gun crimes previously worked with one of the First Son’s business partners, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Delaware US Attorney David Weiss officially filed charges against the president’s son last Tuesday after a near five-year probe into his alleged tax crimes and foreign financial dealings.

Weiss’s deputy, Assistant United States Attorney Derek Hines, signed off on the charging documents alongside his boss and two other assistant US attorneys – indicating he has a central role in Hunter’s criminal prosecution.

Freeh worked with Hunter on a $3million job consulting for a Romanian criminal, a deal that is allegedly now part of his federal criminal investigation and is being investigated by Congress.

Republican Senator Ron Johnson told DailyMail.com the link between the prosecutor and Hunter’s business associate ‘calls into question the integrity of their entire investigation’ – after GOP lawmakers slammed the relatively minor charges filed by the Delaware prosecutor this week as a mere ‘slap on the wrist’.

DailyMail.com has previously revealed that Freeh and his firm worked closely with Hunter Biden trying to get the US State Department to help limit the prosecution of Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu, who was on the brink of a bribery conviction in 2015. (read more)

The same DOJ who cut this Hunter Biden deal, are going after Donald Trump in part simply because of letters exchanged with Kim Jong-Un.

This entire corrupt DC system is beyond repair. (Conservative Treehouse, 7/03/2023)  (Archive)

June 29, 2023 – Tony Bobulinsk was open to testifying to Delaware grand jury; Delaware U.S. Atty David Weiss never asked for his testimony

David Weiss (l) and Tony Bobulinski (Credit: public domain)

A former business partner of Hunter and James Biden, who worked directly with them on a 2017 China energy deal, was never asked to testify to a Delaware grand jury investigating Hunter Biden, two sources familiar with the discussions tell CBS News.

Tony Bobulinski, the former business partner, was open to testifying, and his attorney reached out to the office of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Weiss did not return their calls, the sources said. Weiss’ decision not to bring Bobulinski is the latest indication that prosecutors investigating Hunter Biden may have avoided investigating allegations about his father, President Joe Biden.

In October 2020, Bobulinski was invited by the Trump campaign to attend a presidential debate after he released business records about his dealings with Hunter and James Biden. At a press conference before the debate, he claimed to have met with Joe Biden in May 2017, as part of discussions over a potential business deal with a Chinese energy firm, CEFC.

“I’ve heard Joe Biden say that he’s never discussed business with Hunter. That is false. I have firsthand knowledge about this because I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden,” Bobulinski said at the press conference. Contacted this week by CBS News, Bobulinski said he stands behind those statements.

Bobulinski’s claims have garnered new interest among GOP congressional investigators after IRS whistleblowers gave closed-door testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee. In those transcripts, released last week, the whistleblower alleges the president’s son received preferential treatment that allegedly stymied federal investigators. The whistleblower, Gary Shapley, testified that investigative leads that might have led to Joe Biden were not pursued in the late summer and fall of 2020. At the time, Donald Trump was president and the attorney general was Bill Barr. (Read more: CBS News, 6/29/2023)  (Archive)

August 3, 2017 – Hunter Biden to CEFC official: “The Biden’s are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnership”

(Credit: House Oversight Committee)

July 2, 2023 – Hunter Biden laptop photos show him committing two crimes on camera

Hunter Biden documented his conduct behind the wheel in images found on his laptop computer.

The U.K. Daily Mail released pictures Hunter Biden took while he was en route to a session with some Las Vegas prostitutes on Aug. 1, 2018.

At the time the picture was taken, Hunter Biden was driving 172 mph.

(Credit: Biden Laptop)

Another photo dated June 12, 2018, which was also found on the laptop, showed the driver holding a charred crack pipe while driving 35 mph in Arlington, Virginia.

(Credit: Biden Laptop)

(Read more: The Western Journal, 7/02/2023)  (Archive) 

July 3, 2023 – Taibbi, Brand, & Shellenberger expose the censors as malign disinformation superspreaders

“How long can we allow convenience, safety, and security to enable centralized authoritarian systems to shut down communication and free speech?

“What is the nature of this new centralizing authoritarian system?”

“What is the misanthropy that lies at the heart of a discourse that believes our speech needs to be controlled?”

“Where is the moral authority that is entitled to make those decisions on our behalf?”

That is what Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have been brave enough to dare to ask and even braver, to answer, in the following videos of the pair joining Russell Brand in London for a live discussion of The Censorship-Industrial-Complex (joined by Tim Robbins and Stella Assange).

Shellenberger began by laying out the many governments enacting previously unthinkable laws encroaching on your free speech rights (and more) driven by ‘The Elites’ desire “to censor the authentic voice of the people.”

As he ended his initial thoughts, emotions began to well up as Shellenberger explained:

“The most painful thing – and there’s a lot of painful things that one goes through – is losing almost all of your friends as a consequence of using your speech.”

Something many on the right can empathize with.

But there is hope, as he noted: “The only positive thing to come out of this is to make new friends. It is not the most obvious thing you expect to lose all of your friends in your late 40s, but the ones you keep are so dear.”

Shellenberger turned to his ‘new’ friend Matt Taibbi, they embraced, and the legendary investigative reporter began… by noting that he had written 1000s of words for his opening statement but would instead cherry pick the most notable (since his friend Michael had done such a good job) – you can read Taibbii’s full note here.

Several points stood out from Taibbi’s summary including the day – during their Twitter Files discovery – that:

it became “clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves…

…What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself.”

In fact, he went on to warn ominously:

“…after enough time online, users will lose both the knowledge and the vocabulary they would need to even have politically dangerous thoughts.

What Michael calls the Censorship-Industrial Complex is really just the institutionalization of orthodoxy, a vast, organized effort to narrow our intellectual horizons.”

Citing a company called Graphika, Taibbi explains the causation:

“This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.”

The point he makes is if there is no ‘middle’ – you are either defined as ‘approved’ or ‘unapproved, or as Orwell put it ‘good’ or ‘ungood’ – individuals will naturally self-sort and self-homogenize, “and this is happening all across society.”

What happens to a society that doesn’t square its mental books when it comes to facts, truth, errors, propaganda and so on?

There are only a few options.

Some people will do what some of us in this room have done: grow frustrated and angry, mostly in private.

Others have tried to protest by frantically cataloging the past.

Most however do what’s easiest for mental survival. They learn to forget.

This means living in the present only. Whatever we’re freaking out about today, let’s all do it together. Then when things change tomorrow, let’s not pause to think about the change, let’s just freak out about that new thing. The facts are dead! Long live the new facts!

We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory.

Sadly, Brand notes that the framing of ‘free speech’ as only being an enabler of hate speech continues to dominate the narratives, and both Shellenberger and Taibbi reflected on the disappointing realization that despite all the ‘truths’ exposed by The Twitter Files, it has done little to shift the mainstream (in fact, it has done the opposite with the MSM directly targeting the reporters, and downplaying/normalizing the censorship (self-defined or imposed) we all live with every day. (Read more: Zero Hedge, 7/07/2023)  (Archive)

 

July 4, 2023 – Federal Judge rules Biden can’t coordinate with social media to suppress free speech

Judge Terry Doughty (Credit: public domain)

A federal judge issued an injunction Tuesday ruling that the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment when it worked with social media companies to censor opposing views.

Calling the censorship “Orwellian,” Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, stated that Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri “have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content,” the Washington Post reported.

Doughty barred members of the Biden administration — including officials with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — from communicating with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech,” The New York Times reported.

While this preliminary injunction does not allow officials to communicate with social media agencies for the purpose of censoring opposing viewpoints, government agencies are still allowed to notify platforms regarding crime, foreign propaganda or threats to national security, the outlet noted. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 7/04/2023)  (Archive) (Louisiana Ruling, 7/04/2023)

Update:

Judge’s Injunction On Biden Censorship Operation Is More Far-Reaching Than Initially Reported

Conservatives celebrated Tuesday after a federal judge issued an injunction against government agencies collaborating with tech companies to censor online speech, but the order is even more far-reaching than first reported.

Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty granted the broad injunction barring President Joe Biden’s administration from collusion with pro-censorship nonprofit organizations, in addition to social media companies, in the free speech lawsuit Missouri v. Biden. The injunction found that government officials likely violated the First Amendment by suppressing protected speech and the order states that government actors are barred from “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with” research groups and projects that advocate for censorship.

Specifically, the order calls out the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project and the Stanford Internet Observatory and it prevents the government from engaging with them and other groups and projects “for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content posted with social-media companies containing protected free speech.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 7/06/2023)  (Archive)

Updated update:

July 10, 2023 – Judge Doughty Denies Biden Administration’s Attempt to Halt Preliminary Injunction in Historic First Amendment Case

Judge Terry Doughty denied the Biden Administration’s attempt to halt preliminary injunction pending the outcome of appeal in the historic First Amendment case that was reported on Independence Day.

The plaintiffs in the case consist of the State of Missouri, the State of Louisiana, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty (“Kheriaty”), Dr. Martin Kulldorff (“Kulldorff”), Jim Hoft (“Hoft”), Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya (“Bhattacharya”), and Jill Hines (“Hines”).  (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 7/10/2023)  (Archive)

July 5, 2023 – ‘Missing’ Biden corruption case witness Dr. Gal Luft details allegations against the Biden family (video)

The “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, Israeli professor Dr. Gal Luft, has laid out his bribery allegations against the president’s family in an extraordinary video filmed in an undisclosed location while he’s on the run.

In the 14-minute recording, obtained exclusively by The Post, the fugitive former Israeli army officer claims he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals with alleged ties to Chinese military intelligence and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.

The self-proclaimed fall guy says he provided the incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice in a secret meeting in Brussels in March 2019 — but alleges that it was covered up.

“I, who volunteered to inform the US government about a potential security breach and about compromising information about a man vying to be the next president, am now being hunted by the very same people who I informed — and may have to live on the run for the rest of my life on the run …”

“I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I have no political motive or agenda … I did it out of deep concern that if the Bidens were to come to power, the country would be facing the same traumatic Russia collusion scandal — only this time with China. Sadly, because of the DOJ’s cover-up, this is exactly what happened …” (Read more: The New York Post, 7/05/2023)  (Archive)

July 5, 2023 – Biden admin appeals injunction preventing it from coordinating with social media to suppress speech

Joe Biden (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Biden administration appealed a preliminary injunction Wednesday issued to prevent federal officials from communicating with social media platforms to censor content containing protected speech.

Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty issued the injunction Tuesday after finding plaintiffs in the free speech lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, had produced “evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.” The Biden administration appealed the injunction to the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday.

The injunction prevented federal officials, including those in the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI, from communicating with social media platforms for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 7/05/2023)  (Archive)

July 7, 2023 – GOP Sen. Schmitt: Our lawsuit shows Biden used legal threats to get censorship and judge agrees

On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Kudlow,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) discussed the lawsuit against social media censorship efforts by the Biden administration that he filed as Missouri’s Attorney General at the time and noted that the ruling in the case agreed with Missouri’s assertion that the Biden administration used the threat of regulation to coerce censorship from tech platforms.

Schmitt said,

“In that lawsuit, when we filed against the Biden administration, we were alleging and now have shown that they engaged in a vast censorship enterprise, and much broader than anybody ever had any idea [of]. And if it wasn’t for our lawsuit, it wasn’t for Elon Musk buying Twitter and the Twitter Files, all of this stuff would still be hidden, Larry, people would be dubbed conspiracy theorists for questioning, but what they did was and what’s been shown and what the judge agreed is this is perhaps the most chilling example of censorship in our country’s history…the government coerced these social media giants to take posts down, to de-platform people, they threatened regulatory action, they threatened investigations, they threatened legal action to get them to do their bidding.”

Schmitt added,

“Jen Psaki was standing at the podium saying that they were demanding accountability and were flagging posts for our partners, very kind of Orwellian stuff. … They were very out in the open about this, Larry.”

In the opinion, Judge Terry Doughty noted that in May of 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated, “[M]ajor platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19, vaccinations, and elections.” And Biden “also supports better privacy protections and a robust anti-trust program. So his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation; disinformation; damaging, sometimes life-threatening information is not going out to the American public.” The opinion also notes that, two months later, Psaki said that “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” And that shortly after Psaki’s July comments, accounts that the administration had sought to suppress were taken down. (Read more: Breitbart, 7/07/2023)  (Archive)

July 8, 2023 – DOJ prosecutor/DNC donor blacked out all references to Trump cooperating with DOJ re Mar-a-Lago documents

July 10, 2023 – House Judiciary Report: FBI colluded with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Americans on social media

“Such an array of crimes against the foundations of the state’s national security,
and the links recorded between Ukrainian security forces and Russian special services
raise very serious questions about their respective leaders.”
– Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, July 17, 2022.

     The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is the bedrock of our
political system and guarantees every American the right to speak his or her mind freely and
without interference from the government. It is predicated on the understanding that no
government official has a monopoly on the truth and that every American is capable of
evaluating competing claims and deciding what to believe.

     On February 15, 2023, as part of its investigation into the federal government’s role in
censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the Committee on the Judiciary issued a
subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent
company of Google and YouTube. Documents obtained in response to those subpoenas revealed
that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian
intelligence entity, requested—and, in some cases, directed—the world’s largest social media
platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online.

The Committee’s investigation has revealed that the FBI, the federal law enforcement
agency responsible for disrupting foreign malign influence, facilitated censorship requests to
American social media companies on behalf of a Ukrainian intelligence agency infiltrated by
Russian-aligned actors. In so doing, the FBI violated the First Amendment rights of Americans
and potentially undermined our national security. In light of well-documented instances of the FBI’s civil liberties abuses, this new information raises grave concerns about the FBI’scredibility as the nation’s premier law enforcement organization.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) sought to identify and impair suspected Russian influence operations on social media. The SBU enlisted the FBI in support of this effort, transmitting to the FBI lists of social media accounts that allegedly “spread Russian disinformation.”

The FBI, in turn, routinely relayed these lists to the relevant social media platforms, which distributed the information internally to their employees in charge of content moderation and enforcement. The graphic above illustrates the FBI’s intermediary role in the SBU’s censorship operation; the graphic below illustrates the remarkable frequency with which requests were sent by the FBI and SBU to American social media platforms.

(Read more: House Judiciary Committee Report, 7/10/2023)  (Archive)

July 12, 2023 – An assortment of Republican questions for FBI director about rampant misconduct while indignant Democrats defend the Bureau

Rep. Troy Nehls catches Wray in lies on child pornography cases and asks about Ray Epps

Rep. Tiffany asks Chris Wray about Joe Biden’s criminal bribery schemes and foreign bribes

Rep. Johnson asks Wray about the FBI colluding with big tech to censor Americans

 

Rep Harriett Hageman also questions Wray about the FBI colluding with big tech:

Matt Gaetz reads Hunter Biden shakedown WhatsApp message, then asks Wray if he’s ‘protecting the Bidens’ – Also addresses warrantless spying on Americans

 

Rep. Jordan asks Wray about FBI targeting Catholics

Rep. Massie questions Wray about Jan. 6 pipe bombs and missing phone data

Rep Biggs asks Wray if there were any undercover FBI agents in or around the U.S. Capitol on January 6

Rep Kiley asks Wray about FBI targeting parents protesting school boards

Rep Kiley asks Wray if he will apologize for targeting parents

Former Obama CIA Director John Brennan, says GOP misrepresented ‘truth’ in Wray hearing

Entire hearing via YouTube::

‘What About Hillary Clinton… And Joe Biden… And Hunter Biden?’: Wesley Hunt Grills FBI’s Wray

July 13, 2023 – Former Kiev diplomat, Andrii Telizhenko: Biden’s corruption led to Ukraine’s destruction

Former Ukrainian government official and diplomat Andrii Telizhenko joins Aaron Maté to discuss how, in his view, powerful US figures including Joe Biden have used Ukraine for personal corruption and the geopolitical aim of bleeding Russia — all to the detriment of Ukrainians.

Telizhenko worked for the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in Kyiv before moving to Ukraine’s US Embassy in 2015. He went on to work for Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-run lobbying firm that represented Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that appointed Biden’s son Hunter to a lucrative board seat.

Telizhenko, who cooperated with Rudy Giuliani’s effort to dig up information about the Bidens’ alleged corruption in Ukraine, has been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for “having directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign influence in a United States election.”

Guest: Andrii Telizhenko. A political consultant who was previously a Ukrainian government official and diplomat. (The Grayzone, 7/16/2023)  (Archive)

July 13, 2023 – Jordan letter to Wray demands documents related to FBI spying on two Nunes staffers in 2017 who were investigating the FBI’s Russia collusion hoax

 

July 14, 2023 – Fixing FISA: House Judiciary holds hearing on the expansion of warrantless surveillance of Americans

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance will hold a hearing on Friday, July 14, 2023, at 9:15 a.m. ET. The hearing, “Fixing FISA, Part II,”  examines the concerning expansion of warrantless surveillance of Americans, the FBI’s continued abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and its failure to implement meaningful reforms.

WITNESSES:
Jonathan Turley, J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law, George Washington University Law School – testimony
Phil Kiko, Principal, Williams & Jensen; former Chief of Staff and General Counsel, House Judiciary Committee; former Chief Administrative Officer, House of Representatives – testimony
Gene Schaerr, General Counsel, Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability – testimony
Elizabeth Goitein, Senior Director, Liberty and National Security Program, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law – testimony

 

July 13, 2023 – Hunter Biden worked to secure US visa for Ukrainian oligarch involved in suspected bribery scheme

Mykola Zlochevsky (Credit: Energy Security For the Future)

Hunter Biden and his business associates attempted to get Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky a U.S. visa shortly after the president’s son became a board member of the Ukrainian energy firm, according to emails reviewed by the Daily Caller.

The emails in Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop archive show a coordinated attempt to obtain a visa for Zlochevsky while he was being investigated by Ukrainian authorities for corruption.

Biden and some of his associates were potentially “engaging in registrable lobbying activity,” and one email indicates that Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) violations could have been occurring outside of the exchanges, a FARA expert who reviewed the emails told the Caller.

From 2014-16, Hunter Biden worked with former Burisma board member Devon Archer, Rosemont Seneca adviser Eric Schwerin, former Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP Partner Heather King and other business associates to assist Mykola Zlochevsky with his visa reapplication process after the State Department revoked his visa in 2014.

Zlochevsky is the “foreign national” involved in an alleged bribery scheme with President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confirmed to the Daily Caller.

Greene, alongside other House Oversight Committee members, viewed a redacted version of an FBI FD-1023 form, where an informant allegedly detailed how Zlochevsky spoke to him about making a $10 million bribe to the Bidens, Greene said. FBI Director Christopher Wray redacted the foreign national’s name, according to Greene, but “within the same sentence, it says ‘him/ Burisma.’”

“If you’re anyone who is familiar with the whole Burisma story and the information on the laptop, it’s easy to make the connection of who it is. It’s like a no-brainer … No one has refuted that it’s not him,” she added. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 7/13/2023)  (Archive)

July 19, 2023 – Joe Rogan discusses the intent behind Epstein’s painting of Bill Clinton in blue dress: “I got you bitch” (video)

A photo captured from the hallway outside of the room Clinton’s blue dress photo was hanging in Epstein’s home. (Credit: public domain)

Joe Rogan shared his wild theory on late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and former President Bill Clinton’s relationship during an episode of his podcast shared Tuesday.

Rogan was deep in conversation with comedian Duncan Trussel when he asked, “why do you think Epstein had that giant painting of Bill Clinton in a dress in his foyer?” The painting in question apparently featured the former President posing in a blue dress and red heels while pointing toward the viewer quite provocatively.

“Epstein’s taste in art was not great,” Trussel responded, making a joke but missing the point Rogan was trying to make. “That painting is like, ‘I got you b*tch,” Rogan explained. “That’s what that is. You got a president who was on [Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet] flight logs 26 times with Epstein, and you got that guy in a f*cking dress in your house.”
(Read more: The Daily Caller, 7/20/2023) (Archive)

This photo was also found in Epstein’s NY home after his death:

July 19, 2023 – IRS whistleblower, Joseph Ziegler, gives opening statement to House Oversight Committee re Hunter Biden investigation

Special Agent & whistleblower Joseph Ziegler delivers his opening statement regarding the Hunter Biden Investigation before the House Oversight Committee. Watch the full hearing HERE.

 

July 20, 2023 – House Democrats attempt to censor Democratic presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy Jr., in committee hearing on government censorship

House Democrats tried and failed to censor Robert Kennedy Jr., a Democratic Party candidate for president, at a hearing on censorship.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) moved to shift the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing on Thursday to executive session “because Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made despicable anti-Semitic and anti-Asian comments as recently as last week.”

The congresswoman cited a House rule against testimony that may tend to “defame, degrade, or incriminate” any person, which would allow the committee an aside to determine whether to allow the testimony at issue during the open hearing. In making her case, Wasserman Schultz cited, “among many other things,” comments Kennedy recently made about COVID-19, which the candidate says has been misconstrued.

“COVID-19, there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy claimed, according to The New York Post. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”  (Read more: Daily Wire, 7/20/2023)  (Archive)

July 20, 2023 – The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government holds hearing on government censorship

The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government holds a hearing on Thursday, July 20, 2023. The hearing examines the federal government’s role in censoring Americans, the Missouri v. Biden case, and Big Tech’s collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech.

July 20, 2023 – Grassley releases FBI FD-1023 document outlining statement by witness of Biden bribery and corruption

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley released the FBI witness statement known as the FD-1023 [Document pdf Here] that lies at the heart of the Biden bribery and corruption scandal.

BACKGROUND: Initially, the FBI refused to hand over the unclassified FD-1023 stating there is an ongoing investigation using the confidential human source who made allegations outlined in the document. Remember, the allegations and the statement record were created in July of 2020, over three years ago. The FBI refused to say the 6-page unclassified document existed. After House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer told FBI Director Chris Wray, he had already seen the unclassified document via a whistleblower, then Wray admitted the FBI indeed had it. On June 1st, the FBI refused to release the document, stating it was captive as part of an “ongoing investigation.” Today, Chuck Grassley released it.

Grassley – “For the better part of a year, I’ve been pushing the Justice Department and FBI to provide details on its handling of very significant allegations from a trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme. While the FBI sought to obfuscate and redact, the American people can now read this document for themselves, without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats, thanks to brave and heroic whistleblowers. What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long? The Justice Department and FBI have failed to come clean, but Chairman Comer and I intend to find out,” Grassley said.

“The FBI’s Biden Bribery Record tracks closely with the evidence uncovered by the Oversight Committee’s Biden family influence-peddling investigation. In the FBI’s record, the Burisma executive claims that he didn’t pay the ‘big guy’ directly but that he used several bank accounts to conceal the money. That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money,” House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer said. 

“At our hearing with IRS whistleblowers, they testified that they had never seen or heard of this record during the Biden criminal investigation, despite having potentially corroborating evidence. Given the misconduct and politicization at the Department of Justice, the American people must be able to read this record for themselves. I thank Senator Grassley for providing much needed transparency to the American people. We must hold the Department of Justice accountable for seeking to bury this record to protect the Bidens.”

Grassley first disclosed the FBI’s possession of significant and voluminous evidence of potential criminality involving the Biden family last year. He has since worked to unearth the FBI record, eventually partnering with Comer on a subpoena to compel its public disclosure. After delays, the FBI provided a highly redacted version of the document to select members of the House of Representatives, but it remained shielded from the public and omitted key details, including references to recordings. Following the FBI’s failure to fully comply with the congressional subpoena, Grassley received the legally protected disclosure with limited redactions to protect a trusted FBI source, handling agents, department whistleblowers and identifiers related to other ongoing investigations. (more)

(Conservative Treehouse, 7/20/2023)  (Archive)

July 21, 2023 – Former ABC News reporter who “debunked” Pizzagate pleads guilty to possessing child porn

James Gordon Meek (Credit: The Associated Press)

Former ABC News reporter, James Gordon Meek, who bragged about ‘debunking’ evidence of an elite pedophile ring dubbed ‘Pizzagate’ was arrested and pled guilty to child pornography charges.

Meek pled guilty to the transportation and possession of child sexual abuse material after the FBI conducted a raid on the journalist’s Arlington home in April 2022, finding a Dropbox account of ‘sickening child rape’ materials of minors stored on Meek’s account.

Court papers indicate the investigation began when Dropbox reached out to the FBI to discuss videos showing the sexual abuse of children. The Department of Justice reported some of the images and videos depicting “prepubescent minors and minors under the age of 12, including an infant being raped.” (Read more: Valuetainment, 7/28/2023)  (Archive)

July 21, 2023 – The ODNI releases FISC report that recommends all FISA search logs be erased after 10 years from query

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] has released a 117-page April 2023 order/opinion by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISC] about the compliance audit conducted by internal review as the U.S. intelligence agencies seek reauthorization.   Everything FISC happens in secret, and the report is heavily redacted; however, some interesting information can be obtained if you read the report carefully.

Here’s an example.  The FISC is now agreeing with the NSA and FBI that all search logs and audit trails should be erased after 10 years from query.  That means every audit trail from the period up to August 2013 is about to be erased.  That means almost all of the Obama era search queries will disappear before the next administration takes office.

They are not erasing our data; they are erasing the logs of their search inquiries into our data.  FU!

Readers here know my position.  I do not believe the FISA court is needed; nor do I believe the NSA, FBI, NCTC or CIA should have any search access to the metadata [full-scope electronic records] of American Citizens without a court order.

The DOJ and FBI should go to the ordinary federal courts for search warrants.  The CIA and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) both have foreign service missions, so they do not need access to American citizen metadata (702 acquired).  Why would the CIA and NCTC need to snoop into the private data of American citizens when their legislative authority forbids them from conducting domestic surveillance?    Additionally, the NSA should not contain a lifetime repository for all electronic records of American citizens.  That’s my opinion.

(Conservative Treehouse, 7/21/2023)  (Archive)

July 21, 2023 – FISC Report: FBI searched U.S. Senator’s name in foreign-spying database

CIA Director David Petraeus, whose agency reads Americans’ email and listens to their phone calls, loses his career because the FBI read his emails. (Credit: Ted Rall)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wrongfully searched a foreign-intelligence database for information about a U.S. senator and two state officials last year, a federal surveillance court said, a disclosure that could fuel a bipartisan effort in Congress to overhaul the spying program.

In June 2022, an FBI analyst conducted four overly broad searches of the U.S. senator’s last name in a database of calls, texts, emails and other electronic information collected by the National Security Agency, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said. The analyst also searched the data using the last name of a state senator. The names of the senators haven’t been made public.

The analyst had information that an unnamed foreign intelligence service had been targeting the two legislators, but the analyst failed to meet standards required to conduct the search, the court said.

Additionally, an unidentified state judge’s social security number was wrongfully used in an October 2022 search of the foreign-intelligence trove after the judge complained to the FBI about alleged civil-rights violations perpetrated by a municipal chief of police, the court said.

Also Friday, U.S. intelligence agencies revealed that counterterrorism officials use the database to help them vet immigrants being processed to travel to the U.S.

The court opinion, written in April but partially declassified only Friday, overall applauded the FBI for what it described as dramatic improvements in adhering to rules for conducting searches of Americans’ data.

The National Security Agency collects the data under a law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which allows the secretive eavesdropping agency to siphon digital data from U.S. technology providers. The data can then be searched without a warrant by various spy agencies, including the FBI, which has a robust counterintelligence mission. (Read more: The Wall Street Journal, 7/32/2023 – Archive copy)

July 23, 2023 – Breitbart politics editor and recent congressional witness: “…our government institutions had zero credibility after the Hunter Biden laptop story’s social media censorship”

Breitbart politics editor Emma-Jo Morris said on this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that our government institutions had zero credibility after the Hunter Biden laptop story’s social media censorship.

Anchor Maria Bartiromo said, “You testified in front of this committee last week, walking through how the intelligence community censored you. That had to be incredibly tough for you.”

Morris said, “Yeah, it was quite surreal, you know? This has been my life over the last three years, and sometimes I forget about how scandalous it is. It’s just so scandalous. And then you get in front of a crowd that may be new to the story or may be new to you especially after such aspersions have been cast on me and my reporting, and you just tell the story exactly how it is and exactly how you know it to be true, and you do know it to be true. The feedback from it has just been incredible. It’s been incredible. People know what happened. The American people are very wise, and they know what happened. What I’ve been hearing from them has just been gratitude for finally saying what everybody has been thinking, which is we know what happened, and this is what it is.”

She continued, “There was something that was really striking about the reaction to that testimony which was I think the reason why it went so viral and why people had such a strong reaction was this moment when I was reading that Politico headline of the former 51 intelligence officials say this is Russian disinformation, and I kind of burst out laughing because it’s so is ridiculous it’s beyond parody, and we all know it. There’s this thing that we have to, I guess, pretend to take that claim seriously. But I think that the reason why people so resonated with that is because our institutions have zero credibility, like, zero credibility. And yet everybody in Washington and New York and in the establishment walks around pretending that these are serious people, and I just couldn’t do that.” (Breitbart, 6/22/2023) (Archive)

July 25, 2023 – Longtime Biden ally was prosecutor in US Attorney Weiss’ office during Hunter probe, called him ‘a brother’

Chief Deputy Attorney General Alexander Snyder Mackler (Credit: WMDT screenshot)

A longtime friend and ally of Hunter Biden and the Biden family served as a prosecutor in the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s office when that office led the federal investigation into Hunter Biden and has visited the White House at least five times during the Biden administration, a Fox News Digital investigation has found.

Alexander Snyder-Mackler, a former legal counsel to Joe Biden when he was vice president and a press secretary for then-Sen. Biden between 2007 and 2008, served as an assistant United States attorney in the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s office under David Weiss from August 2016 to May 2019. During that time, Weiss was leading the federal investigation into Hunter Biden for tax fraud and illegal foreign business dealings.

According to emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, which were reviewed and verified by Fox News Digital, Mackler and Hunter Biden remained in close contact, with Mackler once signing off an email saying, “Love you brother.”

(…) Mackler has been the Deputy Attorney General of Delaware since May 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile.

According to visitor logs reviewed by Fox News Digital, he visited the White House five times last year, including a one-on-one meeting with President Biden.

On March 28, 2022, Mackler met with White House counsel Steve Ricchetti for a one-on-one meeting. On April 11, he met with President Biden in a one-on-one meeting. On Aug. 28, he met with Biden’s 2024 campaign manager, Julie Rodriguez, who was also serving as Biden’s senior adviser, for a one-on-one meeting. And on Sept. 21, he met one on one with Claudia Marconi, senior adviser for congressional engagement. Mackler also attended a White House event in December.

Fox News Digital reviewed emails and text messages that reveal Mackler has maintained relatively frequent contact with the younger Biden for many years.

In a text message dated March 10, 2019, well after the federal investigation was underway, Mackler texted Hunter Biden, saying he was “in the car for a long drive” and “just wanted to say hi.”

Biden responded the next day, calling him “buddy.” (Read more: Fox News, 7/25/2023)  (Archive)

July 25, 2023 – Biden defense lawyers accused of impersonating Congressional staff to remove derogatory evidence against Hunter

U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika (Credit: Wikipedia)

Things are awful sketchy in Delaware, as the Hunter Biden case is about to enter court for Judge Maryellen Noreika to review a sweetheart plea deal between corrupt DOJ officials and Hunter Biden lawyers.

As the situation unfolded, Congress filed an amicus brief opposing the plea deal and outlining new evidence discovered by the House Oversight Committee so the judge would have additional background on the deal.  The amicus filing was done by GOP lawyer Mr. Theodore Kittila, from the committee.

Someone from the defense team, a lawyer later identified as Jessica Bengels from the law firm of Latham and Watkins, then contacted the clerk of the court -falsely claimed to be working with Theodore Kittila- and asked the clerk to remove the amicus filing.  The clerk removed the filing.

GOP lawyer Kittila found out and contacted the clerk to understand what was going on.  Mr. Kittila then confronted the lawyers for Hunter Biden, and Judge Noreika is a little angry about the Biden team manipulation. [COURT ORDER]

Jessica Bengels (Credit: Latham and Watkins, LLC)

(New York Post) – […]  In an evening order, Noreika gave Hunter’s attorneys until 9 p.m. to “show cause as to why sanctions should not be considered for misrepresentations to the Court.” — while noting they had not formally filed any request to seal evidence in the matter.

However, she also ordered the filing sealed until close of business Wednesday.

“We filed what was already public (voted out by Congress) as something for the judge to be aware of,” Ways and Means Committee spokesperson JP Freire told The Post. “They then misrepresented themselves to get it taken down.”

Shortly before 9 p.m., Bengels submitted an affidavit in which she blamed a miscommunication among the clerks for the removal of the Ways and Means filing.

“I am completely confident that I never indicated that I was calling from Mr. Kittila’s firm or that I worked with him in any way,” she said. “The only mention of his name was when [the clerk] had asked me if the filings had been entered by Mr. Kittila’s firm and I answered that I believed that to be the case.” (read more)

(Conservative Treehouse, 7/25/2023)  (Archive)

July 25, 2023 (evening):

(…) In a letter obtained by Fox News, Biden’s legal team told the judge that the lawyer who called the clerk had accurately represented her affiliation with her law firm.

“The matter under consideration appears to stem from an unfortunate and unintentional miscommunication between a staff member at our firm and employees of the Court,” the lawyers’ defense read. “We have no idea how the misunderstanding occurred, but our understanding is there was no misrepresentation.”

“We hope this letter and the attached declaration dispels any suggestion that undersigned counsel or our staff would ever intentionally misrepresent or mislead the Court with respect to any matter,” the letter added. (Read more:  Fox News, 7/26/2023)  (Archive)

July 25, 2023 – Grassley: The Justice Department and FBI must tell the American people what was done with Biden FD-1023

Transcript:

Today, I’d like to address the unclassified FBI-generated 1023 form that I made public last week.

This is the 1023 that Director Wray refused to admit existed until I and Chairman Comer told him that we had read the document.

The FBI provided a highly redacted version to the House Committee on Oversight, and in the process ignored the Senate access to that document.

That version redacted references to the alleged audio recordings between then-Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden and the foreign national. It also redacted references to text messages and financial records that allegedly exist to prove the criminal act was done.

Those redactions are obstructive conduct by the [FBI].

Why? Because this was an unclassified document. It’s not even marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive.” And, by the way, Justice Department and FBI leaks exposed the source well before the 1023 became public.

Now, there’s been allegations in the media that this 1023 consists of unverified information. That didn’t stop the media’s breathless reporting for years about the unverified and very famous Steele Dossier. But, the Justice Department and the FBI haven’t told us what they did to investigate the 1023 document. So since the FBI hasn’t told us anything about their investigation of the 1023, how does the media know it’s unverified?

From what I’ve seen, much of the media reporting has missed the essential question: did the Justice Department and the FBI follow normal investigative process and procedure to run the information down or did they sweep this information under the rug?

Several media outlets have interviewed law enforcement sources with knowledge of the 1023 who start to answer that question.

One law enforcement source reportedly said, “This was a confidential human source that had a long relationship with the FBI, had given information that was used in multiple other investigations unrelated to Burisma or the Bidens.”

That law enforcement source said there was a “fight for a month” to get the FBI handler to re-interview the FBI source.

That re-interview was necessary because a separate 1023 mentioned Hunter Biden. And that re-interview ultimately produced the 1023 that I made public last week. When seeing that, my first question was – why the fight to re-interview the FBI source?

Then, the law enforcement source said, “we got that report back and we’re like, holy smokes, this is something.”

News reports also show that Justice Department and FBI personnel were able to validate some claims in the 1023 report without compulsory process.

For example, a news report quotes a law enforcement source, “There were multiple meetings alleged overseas. Some of the confidential human source’s claims were corroborated against the confidential human source travel records, and contemporary knowledge from the handler about him attending meetings with Zlochevsky and other people present.” The news report also notes that public records also validate some of the 1023 claims, including Zlochevsky’s efforts to buy into the American energy market.

A separate news report based on a law enforcement source with knowledge says that Weiss’s team was briefed on the validations. This begs the question, what did the investigators do to investigate?

Well, it’s been reported that a law enforcement source believed U.S. Attorney Weiss was reluctant to pursue leads because of political sensitivities. More precisely, the Weiss team was concerned about investigating because it would involve then-presidential candidate Biden. Well, that didn’t stop the Justice Department when Trump was a candidate the first or second time.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a July 25, 2022, letter I wrote to the Justice Department and FBI. That letter talked about the FBI shutting down verified and verifiable investigative avenues into Hunter Biden separate from the ongoing U.S. Attorney Weiss investigation and the 1023. It’s clear that even if information is verified, the FBI has shut it down in the past if it relates to the Biden family.

Now, former Attorney General Bill Barr has said that the 1023 was credible enough to be passed on to Delaware for “further investigation.” He’s also said that a review was done to ensure the 1023 wasn’t disinformation before passing it on.

Director Wray likewise informed me and Chairman Comer of its credibility, noting that it’s relevant to an ongoing investigative matter. This all took place in the phone call that Comer and I had with Wray. He also didn’t say that it’s part of Giuliani’s information and he didn’t tell me and Comer that it’s the product of any disinformation.

Accordingly, I want to make clear what my oversight focus is and will be: holding the Biden Justice Department and FBI accountable to explain to the American people what they did to investigate and what they found. To do that, congressional oversight must focus on the Justice Department and FBI investigative process and whether U.S. Attorney Weiss’s scope includes bribery.

Congress and the public must get answers to these questions: What did the Justice Department and FBI do to investigate the information contained in the 1023? Did the Justice Department and FBI follow normal investigative process and procedure or try to sweep it all under the rug because of political bias? More precisely, did the FBI and DOJ seek to obtain the evidence referenced in the document? Did DOJ and FBI seek to interview individuals relating to the 1023? If not, why not? If so, one way or the other, what did they find?

We’re in July 2023 and we’re talking about a June 2020 document. The FBI can easily answer those questions. The fact that they haven’t indicates to me that the Justice Department and FBI haven’t followed normal investigative protocol.

Congress must also find out the true extent to which the August 2020 assessment created by Brian Auten was used to shut down Biden family investigative leads. For example, we know that the FBI had at one time over a dozen sources who provided potentially criminal information relating to Hunter Biden. Did the August 2020 assessment shut any of them down?

In conclusion, as we prepare to celebrate National Whistleblower Day, let’s not forget the only reason why Congress has been able to make this information public is because of brave and very patriotic whistleblowers who’ve approached my office.

Remember this: to-date, the Justice Department and FBI have not disputed any of their allegations. Further, remember this: that includes information relating to this 1023 that I’ve made public, and some of this information goes back to October of last year. And in that period of time, the Department of Justice and the FBI haven’t disputed any of that information. And a perfect chance for Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI, to do that would have been with that telephone conversation that he had with Chairman Comer and me.

Giving you all this information, that ought to tell you something about what the FBI’s up to [and] what the DOJ’s up to. (Ad lib ending to floor speech): And the information I’ve given you today ought to tell you that there’s plenty out there in the media and the media should not be questioning whether or not this information in the 1023 has any validity. I yield the floor./blockquote>

(Senator Chuck Grassley, 7/25/2023)  (Archive)

July 26, 2023 – Devon Archer loses on all appeals in $60 million securities fraud

Devon Archer is reportedly in talks to speak about Joe and Hunter Biden’s alleged $10 million bribes. (Credit: Alec Tabak/New York Post)

Yesterday, former business partner Devon Archer lost on all issues brought in his appeal to the United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit.  Archer had previously been released while awaiting judgment regarding the securities fraud case he was convicted in with co-defendant John Galanis.

Last month, and again earlier this week, it was announced that he would be testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee.  Many have predicted that he would testify about at least 24 instances of Joe Biden’s engagement with Hunter’s foreign business partners over the phone.

Archer’s year-long prison sentence was upheld, but it is not clear when he will turn himself in and whether or not he will still testify. (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 7/27/2023)  (Archive)

July 26, 2023 – Hunter Biden sweetheart plea deal is shelved; Judge orders new “Conditions of Release” that he must comply with

HUNTER IS REQUIRED TO:

1) NOT possess a firearm
2) NOT use or possess any controlled substances (including marijuana) unless prescribed
3) Submit to full federal supervision
4) NO use of alcohol AT ALL
5) Seek active employment
6) Submit to testing for prohibited substances
7) Participate in substance abuse therapy

PENALTIES FOR VIOLATING COULD INCLUDE:

1) Immediate issuance of an arrest warrant
2) Revocation of release
3) Forfeiture of bond
4) Prosecution for contempt of court

Transcript Link

May 24, 2023 – Devon Archer still travels the world while awaiting a prison sentence that has been pending since SCOTUS refused to hear his case in November 2021

Devon Archer is reportedly in talks to speak about Joe and Hunter Biden’s alleged $10 million bribes.  (Credit: Alec Tabak/New York Post)

U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams has given Hunter Biden’s former partner Devon Archer a judicial ticket to fly around the world for business and pleasure while his criminal sentencing appeal is pending.

Jurors in her court convicted Archer and others of fraud in 2018, yet the others went to prison and Archer hasn’t served a day.

He awaits a decision from appellate judges who heard argument on his sentence on May 9.

He can’t leave the country without the court’s permission; his requests have never been rejected.

Abrams approved 17 foreign trips in two years between the indictment and trial, and 26 foreign trips in five years since the trial. (See travel log below) (Read more: Madison-St. Clair Record, 5/24/2023) (Archive)

July 27, 2023 – Special Counsel Jack Smith indicts Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

A third person was charged Thursday in the case related to former President Donald Trump allegedly retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home.

Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira as part of the ongoing investigation into the former president’s handling of the documents, according to the superseding indictment.

The indictment alleges De Olivieria, 56, moved boxes within the Florida residence.

The superseding indictment also includes additional charges against Trump, bringing his total in the case up to 40. The new charges include an additional count of willful retention of documents and two extra counts of obstruction. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 7/27/2023)  (Archive)

July 27, 2023 – The Facebook Files – Part One

July 28, 2023 – Facebook Files – Part Two

July 28, 2023 – Comer: 6 major banks filed 170 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) on Bidens for money laundering, human trafficking, fraud

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has dropped a bombshell by revealing that six major American banks have filed over 170 suspicious activity reports (SARs) against Democrat President Joe Biden’s family.

According to Comer, the banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, filed the SARs with the Treasury Department regarding alleged serious criminal activity involving the Bidens.

Comer, who served as a bank director for a decade, revealed that the reports were related to activity involving money laundering, human trafficking, and tax fraud.

Speaking during an appearance on Sen Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) podcast show, Comer explained that a SAR is essentially a red flag raised by a bank when it suspects that a client may be involved in illegal activities.

Despite misconceptions to the contrary, Comer clarified that SARs are very rare and not issued lightly by banks.

For a comparison, Comer revealed that the bank he directed only issued two SARs over the ten years he worked there.

For multiple banks to issue over 170 SARs against one family is incredibly unusual, Comer explained.

“In the banking industry, if you had two SARs against you, it would be hard for you to open an account somewhere,” Comer said.

“There wouldn’t be any bank that would want to have you as a customer, because it’s not worth the paperwork.”

The Oversight Committee chair then stated that the Biden family had been subjected to a staggering number of SARs.

These reports raised suspicion of money laundering, human trafficking, and tax fraud, all connected to different members of the Biden crime family.

Comer illustrated the nature of these suspicions by using the example of a $3 million wire transaction from China to an associate of the Biden family.

The payment was subsequently funneled through various shell companies within 24 hours. (Read more: Slay News, 7/28/2023)  (Archive)

July 31, 2023 – Devon Archer provides more details on Joe and Hunter Biden’s dinner in D.C. with wife of Russian oligarch and former Kazakhstan PM

(…) On Monday Hunter Biden’s best friend and business associate, Devon Archer, testified that Joe Biden met with Russia’s Yelena Baturina who later invested $40 million into Hunter Biden’s real estate ventures. Baturina also paid Hunter Biden $3.5 million in “consulting fees.”

Here is a copy of the Rosemont deal with Yelena Baturina.

Yelena Baturina, the billionaire widow of a corrupt Moscow mayor, was left off of Biden’s Sanctions list.

The Daily Mail reported on the relationship back in October 2022:

Hunter Biden’s real estate company received a $40 million investment from a Russian oligarch, new emails reveal.

The relationship between the president’s son and Yelena Baturina, the billionaire widow of a corrupt Moscow mayor, has already been flagged as alarming by a Senate report after she mysteriously wired $3.5million to a company linked to Hunter.

Baturina’s brother Viktor Baturin told DailyMail.com the money was ‘a payment to enter the American market.’

But DailyMail.com can now reveal that Hunter’s financial relationship with Baturina was far more extensive, with her firm investing $40million in a real estate venture by Hunter’s company Rosemont Realty.

In 2012 Hunter’s firm had a $69.7million plan to invest in 2.15million sq ft of office space in seven US cities.

Documents outlining the plan said the money came from a mix of investors, including $40million from Inteco Management AG, a Swiss company owned by Baturina.

The Inteco group is a plastics and construction behemoth that made Baturina the richest woman in Russia at the time. She has a current net worth of $1.4billion according to Forbes.

Last year Biden would not tell reporters why he left Baturina off the Russian sanction list:

The dinner also included Kazakhstani businessman Kenes Rakishev — who wired $142,300 used on a luxury car business for Hunter Biden — and former Kazakhstani Prime Minister Karim Massimov,

Rakishev provided $142,300 in funding to Hunter Biden to purchase a Fisker Karma automobile in 2014.

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 8/03/2023)  (Archive)

July 31, 2023 – Devon Archer testimony exposes a few key untruths in Hunter Biden memoir, “Beautiful Things”

(…) The account seems to comport with now-President Biden’s repeated denials that he discussed business with his son or had any substantive involvement with his partners. 

However, Archer told a different story to U.S. lawmakers during a deposition earlier this year. “Jonathan Li and [Vice] President Biden had coffee,” Archer said, according to a recently released transcript of his interview with the House Oversight Committee. “They had coffee in Beijing,” he recalled, suggesting there may have been talk about their business relationship.

Li would later offer Hunter a 10% stake worth potentially millions in a Chinese investment fund controlled by the state Bank of China. The fund, BHR Partners, is based in Beijing. 

Jonathan Li: Archer said Hunter put his Dad on the phone with Li. Hunter’s memoir didn’t mention this. (Credit: BHR Partners)

Archer’s testimony included other details ignored or distorted in the memoir. He said the vice president called Hunter while he was meeting with Li in Paris, and Hunter put his father on speakerphone so he could join their conversation. And in early January 2017, while Biden was still in the White House, Hunter arranged for his father to write letters of recommendation for Li’s son and daughter to Ivy League colleges. 

Before committee lawyers began questioning Archer during the July 31 closed-door hearing, they warned him that providing false testimony could subject him to criminal prosecution for perjury. Hunter, in contrast, was under no such legal peril while writing his manuscript.

The same Oversight panel that quizzed Archer will now lead a formal impeachment inquiry, announced this month by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to investigate whether Biden used his office to enrich his family. Investigators are weighing subpoenaing Hunter Biden, which makes examining his claims in his memoir highly instructive as to his and his father’s credibility. They’re also tracing millions of dollars wired from China into a maze of accounts that ended up in the hands of Hunter and several other Biden family members, belying claims by the president that Hunter received no money from China. 

Hunter also raked in millions from Ukraine while his father was “point man” for Ukraine policy as vice president. 

Mykola Zlochevsky: Hunter and Archer disagree on important details. (Credit: Svetlana Pashko/Wikimedia)

Hunter addresses the controversy in the sixth chapter of “Beautiful Things,” describing the allegation that he traded on his father’s influence in Ukraine to land an unusually lucrative five-year stint on the board of the corrupt Ukraine energy giant Burisma Holdings as “the decade’s biggest political fable.” 

He insisted neither he nor his father, who as vice president husbanded Ukraine’s new regime, did anything criminal or corrupt. “There is, in short, no there here,” Biden wrote. 

Hunter then explained how he came to serve on the Burisma board, raking in $83,000 a month despite having no experience in the energy sector. Biden claimed that Archer, his international consultancy partner, brought Burisma into their business orbit after first meeting Burisma’s founder in Kyiv. 

“During one such trip to Kyiv, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner and president of Burisma,” Biden said. “After returning from Kyiv, Devon told me about his talk with Zlochevsky.” 

Devon Archer: His disclosure that the relationship with Burisma was hatched in Moscow is at odds with the political narrative President Biden has carefully crafted by demonizing Russia. (Credit: AP)

But Archer, who served on the Burisma board alongside Biden, relayed a different account to Congress, testifying he first met the Russian-tied Ukrainian oligarch in Moscow, not Kyiv. 

In fact, Archer said he sat down with Zlochevsky in the Russian capital on the same day that Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. “It was just me meeting [with him],” Archer added. Within days, Burisma asked him to join the board. And Hunter Biden came aboard shortly thereafter. 

Archer’s disclosure that their relationship with Burisma was hatched in Moscow is at odds with the political narrative President Biden has carefully crafted, demonizing Russia as Enemy No. 1 of America and NATO. Hunter’s telling of the genesis, with the initial meeting with Zlochevsky taking place in Ukraine’s capital, is far more palatable. 

Hunter wrote that he only agreed to accept Zlochevsky’s offer in order to enable Ukraine to strengthen its energy independence from Russia. He said the prospect of helping build a “bulwark” against Russian oil and gas imports assuaged “whatever dissonance I might have felt between idealism and generous compensation.” He said he was more interested in “fighting” for the Ukrainian people against an aggressive neighbor, which aligns his employment with Burisma with his father’s pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia stance. 

“Having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable fuck-you to Putin,” Hunter maintained. 

But according to Archer’s testimony, Burisma hired them in part to help expand its energy operations outside of Ukraine – particularly in the U.S., where the energy industry is heavily regulated by the federal government, and having such politically connected Americans on the board was valuable to the oil and gas conglomerate. Plus, he and Hunter were motivated by the windfall Burisma was paying them: “It was a million dollars per year [apiece] on the board contracts,” Archer confirmed. 

Hunter further contends in his memoir that his father didn’t know about his joining the Burisma board until he read about it in the Wall Street Journal on May 13, 2014. But White House emails show the vice president’s staff was coordinating damage control weeks earlier when the news first broke in the foreign press.  

And Archer testified that a month earlier, he had met with Vice President Biden in his White House office with Hunter, who had arranged the meeting. Their high-level pow-wow took place on April 16, the day after records show Archer received his first payment from Burisma. 

It’s not clear what the trio discussed in Biden’s office, but Hunter had emailed Archer a Burisma strategy memo just three days earlier. Also on April 13, Hunter had emailed Joe Biden’s best friend Ted Kaufman and the vice president’s then-deputy counsel Alex Mackler to discuss Ukrainian politics. On April 21, Biden visited Ukraine to offer energy and economic aid. 

But that’s not the biggest whopper Hunter apparently told about Burisma in his book. On page 127, he claimed: “No one at Burisma had even hinted at wanting me to influence the [Obama-Biden] administration.” 

Several Burisma emails to Hunter, along with Archer’s congressional testimony, put the lie to this claim.

(Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 9/19/2023)  (Archive)

August 1, 2023 – Jack Smith indicts Trump in DC for questioning the 2020 election – A Techno Fog analysis

Donald J. Trump has again been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith, this time relating to efforts to challenge the 2020 election. For the first time in American history, a former American president is being indicted for his conduct while in office. The political conduct of then-President Trump has been criminalized. And Special Counsel Smith prosecutes these political acts with novel, if not dubious, legal theories.

In total, Trump faces 4 counts: Conspiracy to Defraud the United States; Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding; Obstruction of, and Attempting to Obstruct, an Official Proceeding; and Conspiracy Against Civil Rights.  Read the indictment here.

Special Counsel Smith goes to great lengths to unsuccessfully try to paint the indictment as not touching upon Trump’s right to speak publicly about the 2020 election or to contest the election results. Those efforts are unpersuasive for the reasons we’ll address below.

In total, Special Counsel Smith alleges Trump took part in “three criminal conspiracies”:

  1. A conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government;
  2. A conspiracy to obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results are counted and certified (“the certification proceeding”); and
  3. A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.

Here are the alleged facts and statutory violations against Trump – which are each addressed with specificity.

Factual Allegations:

Special Counsel Smith alleges Trump, along with six unnamed and unindicted (at least for the time being) co-conspirators, undertook” criminal efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election and retain power.” The “manner” of this alleged conspiracy consisted of Trump pushing “officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote” and use “knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to subvert the legitimate election results.” This included the use of alleged “fraudulent slates of electors” in a number of states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

It is also alleged that Trump, “using knowingly false claims of election fraud,” tried to convince Vice President Pence to “fraudulently alter the election results.” On that point of Trump making “knowing” false claims (an important point to be discussed below), Special Counsel Smith maintains that leadership at the DOJ, Director of National Intelligence, DHS, as well as senior White House attorneys, Trump campaign staffers, and a number of state legislators and officials, all informed Trump that the evidence of election fraud was “unsubstantiated” or “unsupported” or “false”. Special Counsel Smith further alleges that Trump “knew” the allegations of election fraud were “false” because he had been informed of this “falsehood” by various state attorney generals – many of whom, like those in Michigan, oversaw elections with substantial security deficiencies and the violations of Equal Protection rights (see Detroit).

The indictment – really, a speaking indictment – is long on the factual allegations that relate to all counts, detailing the state-specific efforts by Trump, et al., to challenge the 2020 election. It also describes Trump’s post-election interactions with VP Pence and Trump’s attempts to persuade VP Pence that he had the right to “reject or send to the states Biden’s legitimate electoral votes, rather than count them.” The indictment makes a point to include Trump’s tweets about VP Pence’s power to “reject fraudulently chose electors.” And it alleges Trump gave the January 6 crowd “false hope that the Vice President might change the election outcome.”

The Law: 

(Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 8/01/2023)  (Archive)

August 2, 2023 – Tucker Carlson interviews Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer

Tucker Carlson sat down with Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer following Mr. Archer’s testimony to a House Oversight Committee. {Direct Rumble Link}.  The first part of that interview was broadcast by Tucker Carlson via Twitter.

Within this part of the interview Tucker Carlson asks Devon Archer about the overall business model Archer and Biden formed in Burisma and what was the specific set of skills that Hunter brought to the enterprise.  As noted by Mr. Archer, the relationship and purpose of Hunter Biden was entirely about access to government systems that could benefit the businesses who hired their firm.  They were selling influence as a business model and Joe Biden was part of the process.  WATCH:

There are many people rightly demanding Joe Biden be impeached for selling his office and influence, as exhibited in the examples of Hunter Biden. However, I would temper any expectations in that direction by noting this “influence selling” is the currency of the entire system. Democrats and Republicans both have family members and businesses based on this system.

Additionally, as we have written in these pages for many years, the entire purpose of the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committee is to sell political policy influence to foreign governments. Seats on committees are assigned to politicians based on their status within the hierarchy. The example of Hunter Biden and Devon Archer via Burisma is one of hundreds of similarly constructed mechanisms.

Joe Biden will never be impeached for selling his office to foreign governments. It will never happen. Senator Joe Biden was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for exactly this reason. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/02/2023) (Archive)

Tucker Carlson/Devon Archer – Part 2

August 3, 2023 – DOJ never prosecuted Hillary Clinton for ‘Conspiracy to Defraud U.S.’ with Russia hoax

Special Counsel Jack Smith charged former President Donald Trump on Tuesday with four counts relating to his challenges to the 2020 presidential election, including “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” The supposed act of “fraud” was that Trump said the election had been stolen, despite knowing, or at least being told, otherwise. But if pushing a false claim of stolen elections is a federal crime, then Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, the media, and the Department of Justice itself should be charged.

To recap: Hillary Clinton falsely claimed in 2016 that Russia was colluding with Trump. With help from election lawyer Marc Elias, Hillary’s campaign, and the Democratic National Committee, hired the Fusion GPS opposition research firm to create the phony “dossier” on Trump’s Russia ties. They shopped it, successfully, to the FBI, which began spying on a Trump campaign aide. Aides like Jake Sullivan (now the National Security Advisor) continued to spread the “Russia collusion” claim within the media.

After Trump won, the hoax took on new life. Despite conceding to Trump the morning after Election Day in 2016, Hillary kept claiming that the election had, in fact, been stolen. The Department of Justice renewed surveillance warrants even after it knew the “dossier” was false. Outgoing FBI director James Comey triggered the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate, though he had reason to know there was no evidence of “Russia collusion” — and, indeed, none was ever found.

The hoax undermined the legitimacy of the incoming Trump administration and interfered with its ability to conduct foreign policy. Even after Mueller came up empty, the hoax took on new life in the form of the 2019 impeachment investigation, which focused on Trump’s conversation with the Ukrainian president but implied that the president was secretly trying to help Russia. In the 2020 election, the perpetrators of the old hoax claimed, falsely, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

In short, there has never been a greater or more consequential hoax in modern American history than the “Russia collusion” hoax. And yet no one has ever been prosecuted for it — least of all Hillary Clinton, who was ultimately responsible for it. The Department of Justice, through Special Counsel John H. Durham, pursued a few low-level prosecutions, but no one was ever targeted for the overall “fraud” — even though the story of how the “Russia collusion” hoax was concocted eventually emerged. (Read more: Breitbart, 8/02/2023)  (Archive)

August 3, 2023 – Dr. Jan Halpert-Hayes interview suggests Trump can re-litigate 2020 election fraud and says DoD ‘has the goods’

Full interview:

The Act of 1871:

Trump’s original post.

UPDATE – New interview 8/06/2023

August 3, 2023 – Former Capitol Police Chief calls Jan 6 events ‘a cover up’ in Tucker Carlson interview hidden by Fox News

Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund told then–Fox News host Tucker Carlson that events surrounding the January 6th riots at the U.S. Capitol appear to have been a “cover up,” in never-seen-before footage published exclusively by The National Pulse.

In the hour-long interview, Sund laments the behaviors of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as well as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who he says had intelligence to suggest problems on Capitol Hill, which they failed to communicate with Sund and his cops on the ground.

“If I was allowed to do my job as the chief we wouldn’t be here, this didn’t have to happen,” Sund begins, around 19 minutes into the conversation, during which he describes himself as “pissed off” about being “lambasted in public” over the events. Sund has written a book, Courage Under Fire, about his experiences.

Having served as a police officer for over 30 years, including taking over as Chief of the United States Capitol Police in 2019, Sund explains the events leading up to January 6th, including prior to the incident at the Capitol itself, and the aftermath, appeared to be a “cover up.”

“Everything appears to be a cover up,” says the decorated police chief, explaining that most things to do with his department were political, specifically because he reported to politicians including then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

“Like I said, I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” Sund explains, “…but when you look at the information and intelligence they had, the military had, it’s all watered down. I’m not getting intelligence, I’m denied any support from National Guard in advance. I’m denied National Guard while we’re under attack, for 71 minutes…” (Read more: National Pulse, 8/03/2023)  (Archive)

 

August 3, 2023 – Facebook Files – Part 3: The lengths WH was willing to go to control COVID narrative on social media

August 5, 2023 – DOJ lawyers handling Trump J6 case declined to prosecute disgraced FBI Chief Andrew McCabe for lying under oath

Andrew McCabe arrives for a meeting with members of the Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary committees December 21, 2017. (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

When Special Counsel Jack Smith entered a D.C. courtroom on Thursday afternoon to witness the arraignment of Donald Trump on four criminal counts related to the former president’s alleged attempt to “overturn” the 2020 election, one longtime Department of Justice official accompanied Smith: Molly Gaston, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia now tasked to Smith’s team.

A federal grand jury on August 1 indicted Trump on conspiracy and obstruction charges following a year-long investigation by DOJ into Trump’s post-election efforts to uncover voting fraud and halt the certification of the electoral college results on January 6, 2021. “[For] for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” Smith wrote in the 45-page indictment.

Gaston, according to reports, was the prosecutor awaiting the grand jury’s decision on Tuesday then filed the indictment with the D.C. District Court late that afternoon.

But just a few years ago, Gaston appeared unconcerned with “lies” told by another top government official. Gaston and fellow prosecutor J.P. Cooney, also currently assigned to Smith’s team, informed Andrew McCabe—the former acting FBI Director who was fired in 2018 for lying to federal investigators—that he would not be charged.

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz had concluded McCabe lied to FBI and OIG agents on four occasions—including three times [under] oath—related to his involvement in authorizing a leak to the Wall Street Journal about an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation “to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership.”

“[The] OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ,” Horowitz wrote. He then forwarded the matter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; the referral ultimately ended up on Cooney’s desk.

Ironically, or not, Cooney and Gaston now have a leading role in prosecuting the former president for “creat[ing] an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erod[ing] public faith in the administration of the election,”—something that DOJ employees including McCabe did successfully by attempting to run Trump out of office based on lies about Trump-Russian election collusion. (Read more: Julie Kelly, 8/05/2023)  (Archive)

August 5, 2023 – The curious case of Alex Kotlarsky who helped Hunter secure a position on Burisma’s Board and collected a ‘finders fee’ from him

Alex Kotlarsky (Credit: Marco Polo)

Attentive readers of our Report on the Biden Laptop (“Report” or “dossier”) likely noticed that for a select few individuals we could not locate a photo before publication. We attempted for over a year, utilizing multiple PIs & other tools, but the Report was released in October 2022 with a few outstanding: Kathy Chung (since identified), OH Suk “Scott” (still trying; see pages 109-110 in our dossier), & Alex KOTLARSKY. Those individuals were clearly demarcated with a question mark in the dossier, as seen below on page 140.

KOTLARSKY is critical to the Burisma grift — both for Hunter Biden & Devon Archer, whose recent limited hangout interviews & Congressional testimony has generated significant press in the Conservative, Inc world. We urge you all to re-read the relevant portions of our Report which deal with this enigmatic figure:

Page 140 in our Report

Page 141 in our Report

Page 166 in our Report

Additionally, footnote 376 on page 67 in our Report explained the relevant money flow with respect to Burisma & KOTLARSKY: “Based on the contents of the Biden Laptop, Marco Polo can prove that the following statement was a blatant lie: ‘Because of Burisma’s stated commitment to corporate best practices, it was able to attract well-qualified board members, including the former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, a leading advocate of democratic principles in the region. President Kwasniewski, familiar with Hunter’s work on behalf of Burisma, recommended that Hunter join the board.’ In reality, Hunter joined Burisma’s board due to the Kremlin-tied Alex KOTLARSKY. In fact, for the first 10 months of his board membership, Hunter paid KOTLARSKY one-third of his board payments as a [so-called] ‘Finders Fee.’”

The only Congressional action that Marco Polo is aware of with regard to KOTLARSKY is a letter to the Department of Treasury in June about any SARs filed mentioning him. That is woefully inadequate. KOTLARSKY needs to be deposed & compelled to produce documents immediately. We specify which documents need to be produced in our Report. All one has to do is read it.

–Garrett Ziegler, Founder (MarcoPolo/Substack, 8/05/2023)  (Archive)

Marco Polo (EIN: 61-199994) has established a legal defense fund to fight back against the egregious lawfare from Kevin Morris & Joey B’s other proxies, which you can find here: donorbox.org/mplegalfund

August 6, 2023 – Schweizer: Devon Archer’s testimony was ‘absolutely devastating’ for the Bidens

During this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Government Accountability Institute president Government Accountability Institute, author of “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” gave Biden business associate Devon Archer high marks for his testimony to a House committee last week.

Schweizer called the testimony “absolutely devastating” for the Bidens and predicted that there was more to come as House Republicans continue their inquiries.

“I think that Devon Archer’s testimony was absolutely devastating,” Schweizer said. “I was concerned going in. Keep in mind that his lawyer works at Boies Schiller, which is where Hunter Biden was a lawyer from 2009 to 2014. That firm has a long association with the Bidens and the Democratic Party. But it did not dissuade his testimony. And I thought Devon Archer was measured and focused and key because, having studied this since 2016, he is really the guy with the business acumen. Of all the people that are sort of revolving around Hunter Biden with these various entities that were set up, Devon Archer was the adult in the room in terms of how this business should be structured. And he confirmed everything that everybody assumed the worst, of which is that Joe Biden was the product that this firm was selling. And he unequivocally said any people discussing or claiming that he was not involved with his son’s business is totally and completely incorrect.”

“I would add the next shoe that may drop is there’s another individual involved with Hunter Biden named Eric Schwerin,” he added. “If Devon Archer was the sort of business guy, the deal guy in how you structure this, Eric Schwerin was the money guy. He’s the guy that moved money around. And based on the Hunter Biden laptop, Schwerin had access not only to Hunter Biden’s accounts but also Joe Biden’s accounts. So, when he testifies before the committee, it’s going to be interesting to see what he says and what pressure he might be under from this administration.” (Breitbart, 8/06/2023) (Archive)

August 7, 2023 – Facebook Files – Part 4: FBI lied under oath about extensive meetings with Zuckerberg’s platform re the Biden laptop

Elvis Chan and Laura Dehmlow (Credit: public domain)

In a sworn deposition in the Missouri v. Biden case, FBI special agent Elvis Chan, who is the main conduit between the bureau and big tech companies, claimed that apart from one instance, he was not aware of any meetings between Facebook and the FBI regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In the same deposition, he also claimed that he had “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s investigation regarding the troubled Biden son’s laptop.

The Facebook files reveal both claims to be false. An internal Facebook communication reveals that Chan had more than one meeting with Facebook regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Moreover, it reveals that, contrary to his claims of having no knowledge about the investigation, Chan confidently told the tech company — a day after the story broke and had been censored by the platform — that there was no evidence of any foreign connection “there was no current evidence to suggest any foreign connection…of the leaks.”

When Facebook initially asked the FBI if the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, Laura Dehmlow, currently Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, said “no comment.” At that point, the FBI was fully aware that the laptop was real, according to Rep. Jordan. (Read more: Breitbart, 8/07/2023) (Archive)

August 7, 2023 – Memos show indicted FBI agent had ties to 2016 Trump-Russia probe and Clinton defensive briefing

Ex-FBI counterintelligence official, Charles F. McGonigal (left), was charged with receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (right). (Credit: Law and Crime)

Former FBI agent Charles McGonigal, who is charged with violating U.S. sanctions by working with a Russian oligarch, was tied to the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, as well as a separate defensive briefing given to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI New York field office, was indicted by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York in January on five counts related to services he allegedly provided to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The five counts include violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and conspiring to commit money laundering. The former FBI agent had investigated Deripaska over the since-debunked allegations that the Trump 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

A court filing submitted on Monday said that “McGonigal may wish to enter a change of plea.”

McGonigal previously pleaded not guilty to the five charges as well as the federal charges brought against him by the U.S. Attorney for D.C. for allegedly concealing $225,000 in cash from a person who worked for the Albanian intelligence service.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into McGonigal in February.

McGonigal had some involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and the FBI’s interactions with the Clinton campaign.

According to an FBI document dated Oct. 22, 2015, McGonigal was copied on a defensive briefing for Clinton.

 ClintonDefensiveBriefing.pdf

The document details a defensive briefing that Clinton’s attorneys, David E. Kendall and Katherine Turner, received a week earlier regarding an attempt to influence the then-Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign.

The FBI told the attorneys that there were attempts to influence Clinton’s campaign “through lobbying efforts and campaign contributions,” according to the document.

The attorneys “were advised the FBI was providing them with this briefing for awareness and so Ms. Clinton could take appropriate action to protect herself,” the document later added. The lawyers were also “asked to advise the FBI … if Ms. Clinton is approached by anyone connected to or acting at the direction of the [redacted].”

In Special Counsel John Durham’s report, he noted, “FBI Headquarters and Department [of Justice] officials required defensive briefings to be provided to Clinton and other officials or candidates who appeared to be the targets of foreign interference.”

(…) “No defensive briefing was provided to Trump or anyone in the campaign concerning the information received from Australia that suggested there might be some type of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians either prior to or after these investigations were opened” the special counsel added. “Instead,” said Durham, “the FBI began working on requests for the use of FISA authorities against Page and Papadopoulos.” (Read more: Just the News, 8/09/2023)  (Archive)

August 8, 2023 – Homeland Security publishes guidance for using Artificial Intelligence as tool for surveillance, monitoring and tracking of American citizens

(Credit: Center for Public Policy Innovation (CCPI)  -Government , Industry, and Congressional Leaders Discuss the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Homeland and National Security – AI Symposium, February 2021)

You might ask, why is the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) in the business of conducting widescale surveillance, monitoring and tracking of American citizens.

Unfortunately, if you are asking that question, then you likely don’t know the first, fourth and fifth amendment to the U.S. constitution were usurped by the 2001 Patriot Act.

George W Bush and Dick Cheney created the domestic surveillance system under the auspices of DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  Barack Obama and Joe Biden then took that DHS surveillance system and modified the dials (Justice Dept., FBI) so the surveillance only applied to their ideological enemies.

If you have followed my outlines on this issue [Category Here], you will note exactly where this latest development falls on the continuum.   The 2024 election is right around the corner. Previously I stated the artificial intelligence (AI) component to the internet surveilllance system was going to launch toward the end of this year.  Well, DHS has just announced exactly that [SEE HERE].

I find it very interesting the DHS memo was issued on August 8th, but only published for the general public yesterday.  July and August were when I first identified AI spider crawls were already underway.  Pay very, very close attention to the two underlined words in the following paragraph:

Take out the word “improper” and the admission is, DHS uses AI to profile, target and discriminate.  In the second sentence, DHS currently participates in systemic, indiscriminate and/or large-scale monitoring, surveillance, or tracking of individuals.  The only thing those sentences in the paragraph say, is that DHS will not allow AI to create improper outcomes within a system they outline that already exists.

Stop and reread that last sentence as much as needed.  Inasmuch as this DHS guidance is telling us the rules for Homeland Security (DHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as they use AI, they are also outlining what current processes of surveillance would be enhanced by it.

DHS’ AI task force is coordinating with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on how the department can partner with critical infrastructure organizations “on safeguarding their uses of AI and strengthening their cybersecurity practices writ large to defend against evolving threats.”

What are those critical infrastructure organizations?  They include voting systems.  Who or what are those evolving threats?  You!

Federal News Network – […] The report also recommends DHS encourage pursing off-the-shelf commercial solutions instead of “building everything in-house.”

Mayorkas emphasized the need for DHS to adopt AI quickly, regardless of whether it’s commercially acquired or internally developed technology.

“We have got to change the procurement capabilities of a government agency to actually move quickly and nimbly, so that when we’re dealing in a very dynamic environment, we can actually move with dynamism,” Mayorkas said. “I’m not suggesting moving to a sole source model, but we just have to be quick.”

He also stressed the need for DHS to prioritize where it will use AI, rather than attempting to adopt it across every mission and use case. The report points to combatting both fentanyl and human trafficking as use cases that could be “accelerated and championed” across DHS. But it also suggests DHS “integrate AI/ML into as many areas of the DHS mission as possible.”

“We’re going to need to prioritize what aspect of our mission should we really double down on to harness AI because I worry about diluting our focus too much,” Mayorkas said. “And I really do want to demonstrate, as quickly as is responsible, how this could really be a game changer for us in advancing our mission . . . we have to pick our spots here, in my view, somewhat surgically.” (more)

Notice the emphasis on speed.  Get this AI system launched into DHS surveillance, tracking and monitoring systems as quickly as possible.

Now do you see my point about how radical and fast everything is going to change?  It’s the 2024 election targeting.

Remember, the Dept of Defense (DoD) will now conduct online monitoring operations, using enhanced AI to protect the U.S. internet from “disinformation” under the auspices of national security. {link}

I share this information with you so that you understand what is being constructed and what is about to be deployed on a large scale throughout the U.S. internet operating system.  The U.S. internet will be different.  The social media restrictions became more prevalent and noticeable in the past several years; now it is time for DHS to expand that process to the entire U.S. internet. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 9/15/2023)  (Archive)

August 8, 2023 – Background of DC judge Tanya Chutkan in cases against Trump – Recusal for her previous defense of Burisma and Fusion GPS?

Appearing with Sebastian Gorka, Kash Patel puts some excellent context on the issue of Dircuit Court Judge Chutkan presiding over the special counsel case against President Trump.  {Direct Rumble Link Here}

I was unaware of the detail where Judge Chutkan originally presided over the case when Fusion GPS tried to block Devin Nunes and Kash Patel from revealing the source of the payments for the Chris Steele dossier.  This is a big datapoint. WATCH:

TRANSCRIPT – Kash Patel:

“Judge Chutkan, for those who don’t know, represented Burisma, Hunter Biden’s fraudulent consulting firm, she was a lawyer at the same law firm with Hunter Biden. But Seb, let’s put that aside. What other matters are there for her recusal? In 2017 when Devin Nunes and I were running the Russiagate investigation, we figured out who paid for the Steele dossier. Fusion GPS, the DNC, and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Christopher Steele millions of dollars and they laundered it through the FBI and the FISA court to unlawfully surveil Donald Trump. That’s big-time stuff.

On the eve of us winning that disclosure, before the world knew, Fusion GPS took us to federal court and that case landed in JUDGE CHUTKAN’S COURT ROOM. … After a month of heavy litigation where Judge Chutkan knew the ins and outs of Fusion GPS, our proceedings, all possible witnesses, etc., when she could not prevent us from prevailing, she recused -on her own- from that case. Why?”

“We found out her law firm, Boies Schiller, represented Fusion GPS. The very client that was in front of her in federal court was one of her former clients. That is rule #1 for disqualification.”

GORKA: “Boies Schiller Flexner is the same company where Chutkan and Hunter Biden worked!”

PATEL: “You gotta ask yourself, Seb, how come it took Chutkan a month [to recuse herself]? … She wanted to block the bank records.

Imagine if we never found out who paid for the dossier. … She set the precedent. She cannot neutrally and arbitrarily preside over Donald Trump’s criminal trial when she recused herself from the very representation of the Democratic entrenchment: the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, because she was so biased because of her prior representation from Boies Schiller.

How could she possibly be allowed to stay on this case? And it wasn’t us, Seb. We got her off because of her own history. That precedent is what Donald Trump’s lawyers must apply this week.”

Perhaps this recusal issue is why four other district court judges including Boasberg sat in the back of the courtroom for President Trump’s appearance last week. Perhaps the judges were proactively contemplating who would meet the DC recusal threshold. (Conservative Treehouse, 8/12/2023)  (Archive)

August 9, 2023 – Trump legal team subpoena’s January 6 Committee documents, finds they have been illegally destroyed

In a recent interview with Eric Bolling, former President Donald Trump blasted the sham January 6 “Unselect” Committee for a cover-up.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that the sham committee overseeing the investigation of the January 6th Capitol riot has destroyed their documents and records illegally.

“So now that I have full Subpoena Power because of the Freedom of Speech Sham Indictment by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and the DOJ, it has just been reported that the Unselect January 6th Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs has illegally destroyed their Records and Documents. This is unthinkable, and the Fake Political Indictment against me must be immediately withdrawn. The system is Rigged & Corrupt, very much like the Presidential Election of 2020. We are a Nation in Decline!” Trump wrote.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) sent a letter to House January 6th Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) on November 2022 demanding preservation of committee records for the incoming Republican-controlled Congress next January 2023. McCarthy also said Republicans would hold hearings on why the Capitol was “not secure” on January 6, 2021.video

“The American people chose Republicans to lead the 118th Congress. On January 3, 2023, your work as Chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will come to an end. For those reasons, I remind you and your staff on the Committee to preserve all records collected and transcripts of testimony taken during your investigation in accordance with House Rule VII. As the Chairman, regardless of who may be directing the work of the Committee, you are responsible for the work done by its members and staff,” the letter read.

On Wednesday, Trump told Bolling that the actions of the Democrats were criminal.

“Now that we have the subpoena power, because we now have subpoena power, all of a sudden, the J6 Committee, the “Unselect” I call them, everything was deleted and destroyed. The documents – everything was deleted and destroyed. That’s a criminal act,” Trump said during the interview.

“All of that stuff, all of that nonsense you watch for a year and a half, go on with all Democrats and two so-called Republicans, but they were worse than any of the Democrats – Kinzinger and Cheney – it’s all been deleted and gotten rid of. They deleted it because they didn’t want anybody to see it, because the real answers were there, but they didn’t want to report it,” Trump added.

WATCH:

According to Fox News, Democrat Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told House Republicans in a letter, stating, “Consistent with guidance from the Office of the Clerk and other authorities, the Select Committee did not archive temporary committee records that were not elevated by the Committee’s actions, such as use in hearings or official publications, or those that did not further its investigative activities.”

The letter continued, “Accordingly, and contrary to your letter’s implication, the Select Committee was not obligated to archive all video recordings of transcribed interviews or depositions. Based on guidance from House authorities, the Select Committee determined that the written transcripts provided by nonpartisan, professional official reporters, which the witnesses and Select Committee staff had the opportunity to review for errata, were the official, permanent records of transcribed interviews and depositions for the purposes of rule VII.”

Video compilation revealed the hypocrisy of the far-left lawmakers regarding destroying evidence during their made-for-TV show trial of President Trump.

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 8/09/2023) (Archive)

August 28, 2019 – August 9, 2023: Biden “lied” at least 16 times about his family’s elaborate business schemes

President Joe Biden “lied” at least 16 times about his family’s elaborate business schemes, the House Oversight Committee recounted Thursday.

The committee says Joe Biden lied in five different ways about his family’s foreign business endeavors: 1) That Joe Biden never spoke to his family about their business dealings; 2) His family did not receive $1 million through a third party; 3) Hunter Biden never made money in China; 4) Hunter Biden’s dealings were ethical; 5) and his son did nothing wrong.

Below are the 16 examples.

Joe Biden on not talking to his son about his business dealings:

1) August 28, 2019

Joe Biden: “First of all, I have never discussed with my son, or my brother, or anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses, period. What I will do is the same thing we did in our administration. There will be an absolute wall between the personal and private, and the government. There wasn’t any hint of scandal at all when we were there. And I will impose the same kind of strict, strict rules. That is why I have never talked with my son or my brother, or anyone else in the distant family about their business interests, period.”

2) September 21, 2019

Reporter: “Have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?”

Joe Biden: “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

3) October 4, 2019

Reporter: “Excuse me. There was a photo of you golfing with your son Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer. Do you stand by your statement that you did not discuss any of your son’s overseas business dealings?”

Joe Biden: “Yes, I stand by that statement.”

4) October 9, 2019

Joe Biden: “I don’t discuss business with my son. I didn’t know that was the case when in fact I found out after the fact. And I don’t discuss things with my son or my family because I don’t want to have any knowledge of any, I don’t want to be accused of well you talk with your son, you talk with your whomever.”

5) October 15, 2019

Joe Biden: “I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having do with Ukraine. No one has indicated I have. We’ve always kept everything separate.”

6) October 16, 2019

Joe Biden: “I never discussed with my son anything having to do with what was going on in Ukraine. That’s a fact.”

7) October 27, 2019

Joe Biden: “I’ve never discussed my business or their business, my sons and daughters. And I’ve never discussed them because they know where I have to do my job and that’s it.”

8) October 29, 2019

Joe Biden: “I’ve never discussed my son’s business with him.”

9) April 5, 2022

Reporter: “The President has said that he never spoke to his son about his overseas business dealings. Is that still the case?”

Jen Psaki: “Yes.”

10) June 26, 2023

Reporter: “Did you lie about never speaking to Hunter about his business dealings?”

President Biden: “No.”

11) August 9, 2023

Reporter: “There’s this testimony now where one of your son’s former business associates is claiming that you were on speakerphone a lot with them talking business. Is that what?”

President Biden: “I never talked business with anybody, and I knew you’d have a lousy question.”

(Read more: Breitbart, 8/24/2023)  (Archive)

August 9, 2023 – House Oversight releases Biden bank records memorandum; received $20 million from oligarchs in Russia, Kazakhstan & Ukraine

August 10, 2023 -Trump White House official confirms Michigan voter fraud report and claims Bill Barr shut down investigation

On Thursday, former Trump administration General Counsel Personnel Police Operations Andrew Kloster joined Steve Bannon on The War Room to discuss the Muskegon, Michigan 2020 voter fraud scandal.

Andrew Kloster said he notified Bill Barr’s DOJ – and Barr and his cronies smacked him down and killed the investigation.

(…) Below is the transcript:

Steve Bannon: Tell me your story related to this situation that’s come up the last couple of days, a Gateway Pundit breaking this story on the situation in Michigan about these applications, voter registration applications in  Michigan. Can you walk me through your knowledge of this?

Andrew Kloster: So it was kind of funny. I saw GBI Strategies on a Tweet, and I immediately went down the rabbit hole because it brought back a lot of memories of the waning days of the Trump administration. So this was right before the election, 2020. I was in the White House. I was also at the Office of Personnel Management. So I was like the main personnel attorney, government-wide and hatchet man and all of that. And I did a lot of spot projects and fixing just generally across the admin on behalf of the president and his agenda…  I’ve been in the movement for a long time. I was at Heritage. I’ve worked with lots of people at the state level. I did the Wisconsin investigation for Gableman. So I have a wide network. And I got a call basically saying, look, I’ve got a spooked law enforcement senior guy, been there like 20 years, unimpeachable record out in Muskegon, Michigan, and he’s got a story that we think is worth looking into. And that’s exactly what Gateway Pundit is talking about. So I can confirm a lot of the details and give you some more.

What ended up happening is my understanding, I reached out and spoke with some local law enforcement. What happened was there was a woman, my understanding is basically loitering outside of a dropbox all day, and she gets picked up by a junior guy and arrested because he’s like, what are you doing? You’re stuffing this box. What’s going on? So they arrest her, and she basically spills the beans. She’s a democratic operative. She’s got filled-out ballots, like 7000 is what I was hearing, and they arrested her. Now, the senior guy, my understanding was off at the time. So the junior guy who picked her up, got her statement and released her, and she went back to Detroit… She went back to Detroit. The senior guy comes back in the next day or later in the day and says, what the know? You had her dead to rights. Why did you release her? And starts trying to get an extradition order from Detroit, because this is before the election. We’re hearing there could be voter fraud. And here you’ve got someone basically copping to it and caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

Detroit doesn’t give an extradition order, and the next thing you know, everyone clams up and I’m hearing, well, Benson’s leaning on people threatening jobs. So when I hear this in the, you know, we’ve got our eyes out, at least the loyal ones, I try to raise a red flag. I do a little bit of light reaching out, not to disrupt anything, but just to kind of vet and make sure that I’m dealing with people who aren’t lying and people who are credible.

And then I try to reach out to different components within the Trump administration to this. There’s at least probable cause? Now, I’m an attorney, I’ve worked on some criminal stuff. There’s at least probable cause here. Someone should take a look, talk with the relevant law enforcement and figure out what happened here. Because just as what happened with you know, you’ve got someone basically copping to voter fraud and, you know, you get the whole story and then the next thing you know they’re out in Jamaica or whatever. The Dems have found the person, co opted them, told them to shut up and then plugged all the leaks.

There were basically, my understanding, was there were standing orders not to deal with election matters, both from the White House Council and from Barr. I happened to know Barr’s Chief of Staff, Will Levi, because I had worked at Heritage and ran into him at a lunch basically for Senate staffers. And he had been a Senate counsel when I was there. So I knew him. I called him up and tried to put the flag up into the voting rights section, CRD-DOJ and White House Counsel in a couple different places and got stiff-armed. And then later on hear from Johnny and others that basically then the White House counsel swoops in and starts screaming, what the hell are you guys doing? So that’s really the nuts and bolts of it.

The Gateway Pundit cannot confirm or deny Andrew’s statement on Steve Bannon’s appearance today.  We hope to get commentary from all of those involved.

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 8/11/2023) (Archive)

August 9, 2023 – Johnson/Grassley pressure Pentagon to reveal if DARPA investigated DNC email hack in 2016 that was falsely blamed on Russians colluding with Trump

The original DARPA logo.

Was the Pentagon‘s research agency involved in pushing false claims Russians working for Donald Trump hacked the Democratic National Committee email server in 2016?

It’s the question two Republican Senators are demanding answers to after unearthing a new email showing links between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and computer scientists investigating who was behind the cyber attack that shook the presidential campaign.

The latest call for an investigation comes months after Special Counsel John Durham concluded there was no evidence Trump conspired with Moscow to help him defeat Hillary Clinton in a damning report.

Since then, the hunt for those responsible for pushing fabricated stories of Trump’s link to the Kremlin to politicians and the press have intensified.

The hack led to a leak of emails that were damning for Clinton and the DNC, and some say it contributed to her loss to Trump.

Hackers tied to Moscow were initially deemed the perpetrators, but Durham’s report sparked allegations DARPA were behind the false narrative.

The claims stemmed from DARPA’s highly-contested work with research partner Georgia Institute of Technology and one of their computer scientists Dr. Manos Antonakakis.

An email obtained by Durham revealed Antonakakis, who was investigating the DNC and Republican National Committee (RNC) databases, said ‘the only thing that drives us is that we just don’t like [Trump],’

DARPA have continuously denied they were behind the allegations Russia was involved in the hack.

But Republicans say a new email raises fresh questions about their claim and the origins of the now-debunked allegations.

Senators Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa said the new evidence proves DARPA signed off on a project related to the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Democratic National Committee (DNC).

DailyMail.com has exclusively obtained a letter they wrote this week to Dr. Stefanie Tompkins, Director of DARPA, demanding answers about the agency’s work with the Georgia Institute of Technology on the Enhanced Attribution (EA) program related to the 2016 hack of DNC communications.

The EA program probes malicious cyber attacks.

The email from Antonakakis reads:  ‘Folks, last night as I was thinking what we can study, I also realized that we do not know much about the RNC and DNC networks out there. Wrote a job that run [sic] over night and I know [sic] have 292 *hand verified* at this point networks that are linked with RNC, DNC, and all local/state committee networks around the US.

‘An adversary would find those networks interesting for a number of reasons.

‘So, I think we should run a reverse Pythia and see what we can see.

If you approve this, [DARPA employee], I would like from you to think how we will break any bad news to these people? If you cannot think of a clear and clean way to inform them (is this DHS’s role or FBI’s or USCC’s?), perhaps we should let them remain infected. Thanks, Manos

The response from DARPA read: ‘Sensitive stuff but yes, I know who to talk to if we find anything. Worth doing.’

Antonakis wrote back: ‘OK, then. I will work with these networks and see what I can come up with.’\

Democratic cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussman was indicted last year for allegedly concealing his clients, including 2015 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, when he pushed since-debunked claims of a connection between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank to the FBI.

In April 2018 the DNC filed a lawsuit accusing the Russian government, the Trump campaign and Wikileaks alleging they colluded to influence the 2016 election with the hack.

It’s not yet clear what the source of the claims is for the allegation the Trump team and Russia coordinated the DNC hack.

In May of this year, Durham referred two matters to the Department of Defense Inspector General and the Defense Intelligence Agency, including ‘[o]ne matter involv[ing] the execution of a contract between DARPA and the Georgia Institute of Technology…’ and a ‘separate matter involv[ing] the irregular conduct in 2016 of two former employees of the Department of Defense.’

DARPA has denied any role in attributing the 2016 DNC hack to Russia after an email showed special counsel John Durham’s team asked Antonakis whether DARPA had had a role in the attribution of the hack.

Antonakis expressed dismay that the Durham team questioned whether DARPA should be poking around the origins of a hacker of a political entity.

The emails first published by The Federalist read:  ‘During one of my interviews with the Special Counsel prosecutor, I was asked point blank by Mr. DeFilippis, ‘Do you believe that DARPA should be instructing you to investigate the origins of a hacker (Guccifer 2.0) that hacked a political entity (DNC)?’ Let that sync [sic] for a moment, folks,’ Antonakakis wrote last summer. ‘Someone hacked a political party (DNC, in this case), in the middle of an election year (2016), and the lead investigator of DOJ’s special council [sic] would question whether U.S. researchers working for DARPA should conduct investigations in this matter is ‘acceptable’!’

Antonakakis added: ‘While I was tempted to say back to him, ‘What if this hacker hacked GOP? Would you want me to investigate him then?’, I kept my cool and told him this is a question for DARPA’s director, and not for me to answer.’ (Read more: The Daily Mail, 8/11/2023)  (Archive)

August 11, 2023 – AG Garland announces he is designating U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss as special counsel for the Biden criminal investigation

August 12, 2023 – “Protected” whistleblower who exposed Clinton profits from Uranium One deal, is running for congress in West Virginia

Nate Cain (l) and Hillary Clinton (Credit: Twitter)

(…) It was a politician with that very voice that I encountered when I spoke to Mr. Nate Cain, a Republican candidate for Congress in West Virginia’s District Two.

For over an hour, we discussed his faith, life, career, and what ultimately drove him into politics. Not once during the entire conversation did he ask me for connections, donations, or even proclaim his strong positions on ideological grounds. Instead, his message to me was a candid discussion of his grassroots movement into politics, a journey he believes he was called to undertake through his faith.

From preaching in churches to engaging with small country communities, every story that Cain told me about his campaign had a common theme. It was about the people he was meeting, what they were saying to him, and how his prospective constituents felt that they had been left behind in politics. But after hearing him tell his story, they were willing to promise him their vote.

And for good reason, as Nate Cain’s story is quite a compelling one, and not exactly the stereotypical journey into politics one might expect.

For those who are well versed in politics, you may remember the story from the 2016 election cycle: the Uranium One scandal that rocked the Clinton campaign. An anonymous informant came forward with credible intel that linked the Clinton Foundation to a Russian company’s acquisition of Uranium One. This controversial deal allowed Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned atomic energy corporation, to gain control over about 20% of the U.S.’s uranium extraction capacity. The sale required approval from nine federal agencies, including the State Department then headed by Hillary Clinton. Allegations arose that the approval was directly influenced by donations to the Clinton Foundation by individuals connected to Uranium One, sparking accusations of a “pay-to-play” scheme.

What you may not know about this story, even if you are very up to date on politics, is that Nate Cain was the very whistleblower who came forward with that intel. As a result of this courageous act, his entire life was turned upside down. The decision to reveal the information was not made lightly, and the consequences were severe. He faced legal threats, personal attacks, and even physical danger. His reputation was put on the line, and he nearly died for speaking the truth.

When I asked specifically if he knew the danger he was putting himself in by coming forward with that intel, Cain was quite clear that he understood what he was getting himself into. He knew that taking such a stand would expose him to retaliation from powerful interests. He was aware that his actions could lead to professional ruin, legal challenges, and even threats to his personal safety. But despite these risks, he felt a moral obligation to bring the information to light.

“It was absolutely dangerous. And in fact, my whistleblowing attorney after handling my case packed up and left the mainland, moved to Puerto Rico.”

He told me he took every precaution to maintain his anonymity during the initial release of the intel, understanding the gravity of the information he was about to reveal. This was not a decision made in haste but a calculated move, carefully planned and executed. Cain was fully aware that the information he possessed could provoke a strong reaction from those implicated, and he knew that his safety could be at risk.

In his own words, he described the measures he took, simply to buy himself time:

“I was wearing sunglasses, a hat, a hoodie. You know, basically trying to disguise. And I told Michael, I didn’t wanna say any words, in case they had some sort of listening device, and I knew eventually they’d figure out who I was, but I wanted to buy myself as much time as I could.”

WC: A full on spy transaction.

“Oh Yeah, well I didn’t want to be killed.”

These precautions were not taken lightly. They were a reflection of the serious nature of the information he was revealing and the potential backlash he could face. Cain’s efforts to conceal his identity were not about fear or evasion but about strategy and prudence. He knew that once his identity was revealed, the real battle would begin, and he would have to face the consequences of his actions head-on.

His careful planning and the steps he took to protect himself underscore the risks involved in whistleblowing, especially when it involves powerful political figures and sensitive information. Cain’s story illustrates the lengths to which individuals may have to go to ensure that the truth is heard, even when it means putting themselves in harm’s way.

Yet despite his attempt at remaining anonymous, he was proven right. Not long after turning this information over, his home was raided by federal law enforcement, despite his protected whistleblower status. This was not a routine investigation but a full-scale operation that seemed to disregard the legal protections typically afforded to whistleblowers.

Cain described the raid in vivid detail:

“So they came in, it was kind of like a Mar-a-Lago style of raid, 16 agents. He comes in, he says, “Well, the reason we’re here is about a thumb drive.” And I said, “Yeah, I took the thumb drive. But I’m a protected whistleblower under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act.” Then I said, “I’ve already turned over the information to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.”

WC: “Now, you said it was agents at your house who exactly? What agency was this?”

“The FBI.”

The response from law enforcement was not what one might expect given his status as a protected whistleblower. Instead of acknowledging his rights, they proceeded to search his entire house for hours, questioning him without a lawyer present, and taking personal items without clear legal justification.

“They never gave me a Schedule B. And since I’d never been raided before, I had no idea to even ask them for the Schedule B. So my defense attorney had to basically threaten them to get a copy of it. And when we got it, there were multiple things they took that were not on the list.”

The raid was not only a violation of Cain’s rights but also a stark reminder of the risks he had taken in coming forward. It was a clear indication that the forces he was up against were willing to go to great lengths to suppress the information he had revealed. The fact that federal agents would conduct such a raid, knowing his protected status, speaks to the gravity of the situation and the potential implications of the information he had brought to light.

Even after this incident, and being informed directly of Cain’s protected status, the agent in charge of the investigation continued to request information from Cain that he wasn’t legally required to give, or even to speak about without his attorney being present. This was not a mere oversight but a persistent and deliberate effort to obtain information from Cain, seemingly without regard for his legal rights as a whistleblower.

Cain recounted the unsettling experience:

“The agent calls me and I’ve already given him my lawyer’s information, and my lawyer instructed me not to say anything more. He calls me directly and tries to get me to give him my password to my phone and my password to my computer. And, I cooperated, I gave him, stupidly, I gave him the password to my phone. I immediately regretted it. And then he asked me for the password to not just my computer, but to my government computer, and when I refused he hung up angrily.”

If the persecution for coming forward with credible intel wasn’t enough, the story takes another turn, one that adds a new layer of complexity and intrigue to Cain’s already harrowing experience. Shortly after these events, Cain tells me that he received a call from a journalist at The Daily Caller. The journalist, who seemed to have inside information, informed him that The New York Times had somehow found out about the raid on his home and was about to publish a hit piece on him.

Cain recalls the shock and disbelief he felt at that moment:

“This guy then went on, you know, he basically leaked my information to the New York Times. I’m pretty sure it was him, because somehow the New York Times found out that I got raided.”

The revelation that a major news outlet had obtained information about the raid raises serious questions about the confidentiality of the investigation and the motives behind the leak. How did The New York Times get this information? Was there a breach of trust within the law enforcement agency, or was there a concerted effort to discredit Cain and undermine his credibility?

The impending publication of the hit piece added to the pressure and anxiety Cain was already facing. It was a clear indication that his ordeal was far from over, and that powerful forces were aligned against him. The leak to The New York Times was not just a violation of privacy; it was a strategic move to tarnish his reputation and cast doubt on his motives. The very act of exposing the truth had made him a target, and the stakes were escalating.

However, if you think that the persecution he faced was enough to deter his conviction to tell the truth, you would be mistaken. This is where Mr. Cain’s story takes an even darker turn, one that transcends the realm of political maneuvering and enters into a territory that is both deeply personal and profoundly disturbing.

After his information had been leaked to the press, it wasn’t long before he ended up in the hospital with symptoms resembling a stroke, despite being in perfect health prior to the event. The story is shocking, and it raises questions that go beyond the usual political intrigue:

“I ended up for six weeks having neurological symptoms that were identical to a stroke. Every test didn’t show anything, but that was after I went down to my car and reached up under my door handle, and there was some oily, wet substance under there. At the time, I thought, “Oh, gross.” And I wiped it off on my pants and got in the car, and I just wanted to get home. But I ended up in the emergency room with full-blown stroke symptoms, and thank God I was taking a vasodilator. I think that’s probably what saved my life.

“I had symptoms that lasted for six weeks. I went and saw a specialist in neurology who’s been in it for 50 years, and at the end of all these tests, he said to me, “What do you do for a living? Because I’m not finding anything in your charts. In fact, your arteries in your brain are pristine.” And he said, “So this doesn’t make any sense. What do you do for a living?” I said, “I’m a cybersecurity.” And he goes, “That just doesn’t make any sense. I’ve only known one guy who’s had all the symptoms that you had and had charts like yours, and that guy worked for an industrial chemical factory and touched some chemicals without his gloves on.” It triggered a memory of that that day I reached under my door handle and there was that oily liquid. And I realized what had happened.”

Cain’s sudden illness, coming on the heels of the leak and the raid, suggests a level of malice and intent that is truly chilling. Was this a coincidence, or was it something more sinister? The timing, the circumstances, and the nature of his symptoms all point to a deliberate attempt to silence him, to incapacitate him, or worse. (Read more: The W.C. Dispatch, 8/12/2023) (Archive)

August 12, 2023 – More info about GBI Strategies LLC including high Dem officials as clients and ties to another company previously investigated for voter registration fraud

August 13, 2023 – Sen. Ron Johnson warns Covid was ‘preplanned by elite group’ to ‘take total control of our lives’

Republican Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has issued an explosive statement on national television by warning the American people that Covid was “preplanned by an elite group of people.”

During an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Johnson said that “a very powerful group of people” intentionally engineered the pandemic to “take total control of our lives.”

Johnson associated this alleged plot with Event 201, which took place on October 18, 2019. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, hosted this high-level pandemic exercise in New York City. The event, held mere weeks before the initial Covid-19 cases surfaced in China, outlined cooperative measures between governments, private entities, and globalist organizations in response to a major pandemic. Its declared aim was to mitigate extensive economic and societal impacts during and post-pandemic.

“This was all pre-planned by an elite group of people,” the senator said. “Event 201 – it occurred in late 2019, prior to the rest of us knowing about this pandemic.

(Read more: Becker News, 8/13/2023) (Archive)

Notable comments in this Twitter thread:

August 14, 2023 – Georgia grand jury indicts Donald Trump and 18 other individuals

Georgia grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump and 18 other individuals in an election interference case. Trump faces thirteen charges, the most significant charge being a violation of the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act.

Among the additional individuals charged are former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (who led the city through the aftermath of 9/11), former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorney John Eastman, former Department of Justice attorney Jeffery Clark, attorney Sydney Powell, attorney Kenneth Chesebro, and pro-DeSantis attorney Jenna Ellis. The indictment in total is 98 pages long.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, during a late night press conference, said that the RICO charges faced by the 19 individuals entailed prison sentences. The defendants have been told they have until noon on August 25th to voluntarily surrender. She added that she intends to try all of the defendants together.

Willis declined to comment on the errant posting of a docket report listing the charges against former President Trump earlier in the day. She also declined to comment on if she’s had any discussions with Department of Justice special prosecutor Jack Smith.

In response to the news of the indictments, the Trump campaign issued a statement blasting District Attorney Fani Willis as “…a rabid partisan who is campaigning and fundraising on a platform of prosecuting President Trump through these bogus indictment… They could have brought this 2 1/2 years ago, yet they chose to do this for election interference reasons in the middle of President Trump’s successful campaign.”

(Read more: The National Pulse, 8/14/2023) (Archive)

August 14, 2023 – Hillary Clinton hypocrisy (Russiagate anyone?): Trump ‘set out to defraud’ Americans, silver lining is that ‘the system is working’

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed approval of the indictments levied against former President Donald Trump on Monday’s edition of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Maddow pointed out that Clinton once warned the public that Trump was a threat to American democracy, and asked the former secretary of state if she felt “satisfaction” amid Trump’s mounting indictments. Clinton denied feeling satisfied, but said that she feels “profound sadness” that a former president has been indicted over allegedly attempting to overturn unfavorable election results.

“We don’t know yet what the charges coming out of Georgia are. But if you stop and think about what the public evidence is, and you’ve been talking about some of that for the last hour, he set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation. He used tactics of harassment, intimidation. He made threats. He and his allies went after state officials, local officials responsible for conducting elections. Now we know they even went into voting machines in order to determine whether or not those voting machines had somehow been breached when they were the ones actually doing the breaching,” Clinton said. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 8/14/2023) (Archive)

May 2022 – August 2023 – Timeline: Biden White House coordinates with Fani Willis to indict Donald Trump

TIMELINE🚨 Biden White House Coordinates Fani Willis Indictment of Donald Trump

Yesterday, in a shocking revelation, @MarcoPolo501c3 uncovered a significant connection between Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’ lead prosecutor, and the Biden White House.

Fani Willis’ lead prosecutor held meetings with Biden’s White House Counsel on May 23 and Nov. 18, 2022, before indicting Donald Trump, Biden’s leading presidential opponent.

Remember when Fani Willis prematurely leaked Trump’s indictment before announcing it at a late-night press conference at 11:37 pm?

Newt Gingrich told @charliekirk11 that someone from DC called Fani Willis and demanded she indict Trump that Monday night, Aug. 14, 2023, to divert attention away from the Weiss “screw up.”

That Weiss “screw up” originated on July 19, 2023, when IRS whistleblowers testified before Congress about DOJ and Weiss blocking investigators from filing felony charges against Hunter Biden, tipping off Hunter about search warrants, preventing witness interviews, and restricting any investigation into President Joe Biden.

Senator Chuck Grassley later released an FBI FD-1023 form detailing a $10 million bribery scheme involving VP Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

One week later, Judge Noreika dismantled Weiss’s unprecedented sweetheart immunity deal for Hunter, questioning why the DOJ granted full-scale immunity to Hunter Biden for unrelated crimes.

In the following weeks, the House Oversight Committee released bank records showing payments to the Bidens from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.

Rep. James Comer disclosed over 170 suspicious activity reports submitted by six banks to the Treasury Department, implicating the Biden family in money laundering, human trafficking, and tax fraud.

Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner, claimed President Joe Biden was involved in over twenty calls regarding his son’s foreign business dealings.

Leading up to Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, when Garland appointed Weiss as Special Counsel despite prior false statements to Congress that Weiss already had the authority to file charges against Hunter, further exposing the DOJ’s corruption.

Garland appointed Weiss after he was the attorney who approved Hunter Biden’s unprecedented sweetheart deal, and IRS whistleblowers testified before Congress that Weiss had obstructed the investigation into the Bidens for the last five years.

This would explain why Fani Willis leaked the indictment prematurely on Monday, Aug. 14, 2023, before holding a press conference at a quarter to midnight, shifting the media’s focus away from the DOJ protecting Biden to Fani Willis indicting Trump.

As revealed in yesterday’s court filings, Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’ lead prosecutor, held meetings with Biden White House Counsel at the beginning and near the end of her grand jury, strategically coordinating Biden’s prosecution of Donald Trump.

TIMELINE🚨 Biden White House Coordinates Fani Willis Indictment of Donald Trump

May 2, 2022 – Fulton County special grand jury selected for Fani Willis’ Trump investigation

**May 23, 2022 – Fani Willis’ lead prosecutor, Nathan Wade has 8-hour Conference with Biden White House Counsel

May 27, 2022 – New York Times: “Up to 50 subpoenas expected as grand jury begins Trump inquiry”

June 1, 2022 – Grand jury begins hearing evidence with Brad Raffensperger first to testify

July 5, 2022 – Grand jury subpoenas Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, and others

August 25, 2022 – Grand jury subpoenas Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, Boris Epshteyn, and others

Nov. 15, 2022 – Gov. Brian Kemp testifies before grand jury

Nov. 15, 2022 – Donald Trump announces candidacy for President

Nov. 16, 2022 – CNN: “Georgia DA floats immunity deals for fake electors as investigation into Trump hits roadblock”

**Nov. 18, 2022 – Fani Willis’ lead prosecutor, Nathan Wade, has 8-hour Interview with Biden White House

Nov. 22, 2022 – Sen. Lindsey Graham testifies before grand jury

Nov. 29, 2022 – Mark Meadows ordered to testify before grand jury

Dec. 8, 2022 – Former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn testifies before grand jury

Jan. 9, 2023 – Fulton County special grand jury completes its work

February 28, 2023 – Fani Willis meets with Kamala Harris in White House (included by timeline editor)

————

July 19, 2023– IRS whistleblowers testify that DOJ blocked felony charges, restricted witness interviews, prevented search warrants, and prohibited questions about Joe during Hunter Biden investigation

July 20, 2023 – Sen. Grassley releases FBI FD-1023 alleging VP Biden Ukrainian Burisma bribery scheme

July 26, 2023 – Judge Noreika blows up DOJ’s unprecedented sweetheart Hunter Biden immunity deal that protected him from foreign lobbying and money laundering crimes unrelated to what he was pleading guilty to

July 27, 2023 – Rep. Comer says six banks submitted over 170 suspicious activity reports to the Treasury Dept. alleging the Biden family’s involvement in money laundering, human trafficking, and tax fraud

July 31, 2023 – Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner, claimed that President Joe Biden participated in over twenty calls about his son’s foreign business dealings

Aug. 9, 2023 – House Oversight Committee releases Third Bank Memo detailing payments to the Bidens from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine

Aug. 10, 2023 – AG Garland appoints Weiss Special Counsel after Weiss was already caught giving Hunter Biden an unprecedented sweetheart deal, and Garland and Weiss falsely claimed that he had the authority to file charges against Hunter Biden in California and DC

Aug. 14, 2023 – Fani Willis holds a press conference at 11:37 pm announcing the indictment of Donald Trump, after pre-maturely leaking the indictment

August 15, 2023 – Disgraced FBI official McGonigal pleads guilty to extorting Russian oligarch; Federal charges for extorting Albanian oligarchs still in limbo

McGonigal and Rama graphic (Credit: Politiko.al)

(…) Enter the plea deal granted to Charles McGonigal, the rogue senior agent whose last assignment before retiring in 2018 was serving as the counterintelligence boss of the bureau’s powerful New York Field Office.

In a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, the disgraced McGonigal pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired to violate international sanctions on a notorious Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, and committed money laundering. Although these are serious charges and McGonigal faces up to five years in prison, nobody expects his sentence, which will be handed down towards the end of this year, to be that severe since he reached a plea deal with the Department of Justice, admitting his guilt.

(…)The Russian side of the McGonigal scandal is the tame one. Although the media never paid it sufficient attention, the accused is facing more federal charges stemming from McGonigal’s taking $225,000 from a former Albanian intelligence officer in 2017, when the accused was still an FBI official. This is fundamentally a Balkan spy-meets-corruption scandal, and that wasn’t addressed by McGonigal’s guilty plea this week.

The Balkan angle here is unpleasant and raises disturbing questions. As the New York Times put it gently this week, the accused “befriended the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, and used his position to drum up foreign business for his associates, according to the indictment filed against him in Washington. On one occasion, McGonigal opened an FBI investigation into a lobbyist for the Albanian prime minister’s main political rival.”

The truth, as The Examiner reported on multiple occasions , is considerably more troubling than that. In exchange for cash, McGonigal became the “heavy” for Rama and his Socialist government, threatening their political rivals and shaking down Albanian oligarchs for cash in exchange for protection from U.S. sanctions. This was a secret, mafia-like extortion ring run by a top FBI official, which netted tens of millions of dollars, according to multiple sources. Such underworld tactics are hardly unexpected since, during the decadelong rule of Rama and his Socialists, little Albania has become Europe’s epicenter for the global illegal narcotics trade, with the tacit support of the Biden State Department.

Although what’s termed “the McGonigal affair” in Albania is widely discussed there, this shocking story has made little impression in Western media. That may have something to do with the fact that Rama and his allies are able to quash European media stories which report on their corruption and connections to international organized crime.

Officially, the Balkan portion of the McGonigal scandal remains an open case with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., and no plea bargain has yet been reached. However, McGonigal’s attorney stated during a recent court hearing that he expects the Albania-related charges to also be resolved without going to trial, according to ABC News. (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 8/17/2023)  (Archive)

August 15, 2023 – Tucker Carlson interviews Robert Kennedy Jr about his campaign, U.S. foreign policy, Ukraine, Russia, NATO, Bio-Labs and who killed his uncle

August 16, 2023 – House Oversight Chairman, James Comer, asks National Archives to hand over records related to Joe Biden’s email accounts using pseudonyms

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer asked the National Archives on Wednesday to hand over any unredacted records in which President Biden used a pseudonym during his vice presidency — as Republicans move closer to launching an impeachment inquiry into his role in son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.

Emails previously released by the Archives and retrieved from Hunter’s abandoned laptop reveal that Joe Biden used the email address “Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov” while he wa s President Barack Obama’s second-in-command and that his aide John Flynn cc’d Hunter on 10 emails containing the elder Biden’s daily schedule between May 18 and June 15, 2016.

Comer’s request covers records using Biden’s other known pseudonyms — “Robin Ware” and “JRB Ware” — and makes pointed requests for certain documents, such as drafts of Biden’s December 2015 speech to Ukraine’s parliament.

“Joe Biden has stated there was ‘an absolute wall’ between his family’s foreign business schemes and his duties as Vice President, but evidence reveals that access was wide open for his family’s influence peddling,” Comer (R-Ky.) said in a statement.

“We already have evidence of then-Vice President Biden speaking, dining, and having coffee with his son’s foreign business associates,” Comer went on.

“We also know that Hunter Biden and his associates were informed of then-Vice President Biden’s official government duties in countries where they had a financial interest. The National Archives must provide these unredacted records to further our investigation into the Biden family’s corruption.“ (Read more: New York Post, 8/17/2023)  (Archive)

August 16, 2023 – Zelensky collaborates with Ukraine’s most notorious neo-Nazi

Volodymyr Zelensky meets with Andriy Biletsky in a video posted by the president on August 14, 2023 (Credit: Grayzone)

Western media has dismissed evidence of neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine by citing President Zelensky’s Jewish heritage. But new footage published by Zelensky shows the leader openly collaborating with a fascist ideologue who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky has uploaded a video to his Telegram channel showing him holding court with one of the most notorious neo-Nazis in modern Ukrainian history: Azov Battalion founder Andriy Biletsky.

On August 14, just over an hour after Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced another $200 million in military aid to Kiev, Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky published the video depicting what he called an “open conversation” with Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade.

“I am grateful to everyone who defends our country and people, who brings our victory closer,” Zelensky wrote, following his encounter with the unit on the outskirts of Bakhmut.

While casual Western observers might not have realized it, the brigade Zelensky was addressing is actually the newest iteration of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

“The 3rd separate assault brigade, excellent fighters,” Zelensky wrote days after the consultation, in a Twitter post which also alluded to a separate meeting with the Aidar Battalion, another neo-fascist outfit that has been accused of war crimes by Amnesty International. “They have stopped the enemy from advancing towards Kostiantynivka and pushed the occupiers back up to 8 kilometers.”

But the group’s origins are no secret. Describing their most recent rebrand in a YouTube video released in January, the unit explained: “Today we officially announce that the SSO AZOV is expanding to a brigade. From now on, we are the 3rd separate assault brigade of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

Like its predecessor, the unit is led by Andriy Biletsky, who founded the Azov Battalion and has long served as a figurehead for the closely-aligned National Corps political movement.

But in spite of Biletsky’s rich Nazi pedigree, the video Zelensky published shows him sharing a moment of bonhomie with a white nationalist militant who has described Jews as “our enemy,” or as the “real masters” of the oligarchs and craven politicians that have corrupted Ukraine.

“How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked on the eve of Russia’s invasion, pointing to his Jewish heritage. “How could a people who lost eight million lives fighting Nazis support Nazism?”

Perhaps the question needs to be asked again of the Ukrainian president following the tribute he paid to his country’s top neo-Nazi ideologue.

(Read more: The Grayzone, 8/16/2023)  (Archive)

August 17, 2023 – Watchdog opens investigation into 12 state AGs for their participation in a foreign influence operation to censor Americans

(Credit: The Intercept)

America First Legal, the advocacy organization led by former Trump White House official Stephen Miller, has launched a multi-state investigation into collusion between Democrat attorneys general and the leftist Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) to censor Americans.

Funded by a pro-China investment entity, the CCDH is a British nonprofit that became infamous during the Biden administration as the origin of the “disinformation dozen,” a group of Facebook accounts the nonprofit identified as the top sources of “COVID misinformation.”

Joe Biden used the CCDH’s research to call on Facebook to censor the accounts, accusing the social networking platform of “killing people” by allowing the accounts to continue posting.

The accounts in the “disinformation dozen” included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the leading opponent to Biden in the Democrat presidential primary.

America First Legal has now launched a series of state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests into Democrat attorneys general who allegedly colluded with CCDH to add to the pressure on social media companies to censor Americans.

Via America First Legal:

The attorneys general called on the social media networks to “effectively root” “out fraudulent information about coronavirus vaccines.” The evidence is that they prepared this letter in coordination with the CCDH. CCDH describes itself as a “not-for-profit non-governmental organization” that “works to stop the spread of online hate and disinformation through innovative research, public campaigns and policy advocacy.”

On March 24, 2021, CCDH published a list of “twelve anti-vaxxers who play a leading role in spreading digital misinformation about Covid vaccines,” and urged social media platforms to “establish a clear threshold for enforcement action” and “to deplatform the most highly visible repeat offenders, who we [CCDH] term the Disinformation Dozen.”  The list consisted entirely of Americans, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. AFL launched an investigation into potential government collusion with this list.

On the same day, these twelve state attorneys general sent a letter stating, “Twitter and Facebook have yet to remove from all their platforms the accounts of prominent ‘anti-vaxxers’” such as the “12 ‘anti-vaxxers’ personal accounts and their associated organizations, groups and websites [that] are responsible for 65% of public anti-vaccine content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.”

In a statement announcing the investigation, America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton branded the actions of the attorneys general tantamount to collusion with a foreign-influence campaign.

“In 2021, in an extraordinarily anti-American move, twelve state attorneys general did the bidding of an organization with extraordinary foreign ties to pressure social media companies to censor Americans’ speech. We are going to obtain any and all communications between those offices and anyone associated with CCDH so that the American people can see for themselves the extent of this foreign-influence operation at the state level,” said Hamilton. (Breitbart, 8/17/2023)  (Archive)

August 19, 2023 – Hunter Biden was involved in Trump’s first impeachment re Ukraine

(Read more: Politico, 8/19/2023) (Archive)

August 21, 2023 – New memos prove Biden went rogue on Shokin and the 2019 Trump impeachment was based on a lie

Just weeks before then-Vice President Joe Biden took the opposite action in late 2015, a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials declared that Ukraine had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, according to government memos that conflict with the narrative Democrats have sustained since the 2019 impeachment scandal.

“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) – a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid.

 UkraineTaskForceLoanGuaranteeMemo.pdf

The recommendation is one of several U.S. government memos gathered by Just the News over the last 36 months from Freedom of Information Act litigation, congressional inquiries and government agency sources that directly conflict with the long-held narrative that Biden was conducting official U.S. policy when he threatened to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to force Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, the country’s equivalent of the American attorney general.

At the time the threat was made in December 2015, Shokin’s office was conducting an increasingly aggressive corruption investigation into Burisma Holdings, an energy firm the State Department deemed to have been engaged in bribery and that employed Hunter Biden and paid him millions while his father was vice president.

New details on the impact of that probe have emerged in recent days.

Shokin’s pursuit was rattling Burisma, and the firm was putting pressure on Hunter Biden to deal with it, according to recent testimony and interviews with Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner and fellow Burisma board member.

The memos obtained by Just the News show:

  • Senior State Department officials sent a conflicting message to Shokin before he was fired, inviting his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session and sent him a personal note saying they were “impressed” with his office’s work.
  • U.S. officials faced pressure from Burisma emissaries in the United States to make the corruption allegations go away and feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled.
  • A top U.S. official in Kyiv blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anticorruption policy in Ukraine through his dealings with Burisma.

During Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019, State officials testified that Hunter Biden’s acceptance of a job at Burisma at a time when his father was vice president created the appearance of a conflict of interest but did not materially impact U.S. policy in Ukraine.

Marie Yovanovich (Credit: Greg Nash/The Hill)

George Kent (Credit: public domain)

But in a private, classified email shared with Just the News, one of the top U.S. officials in the Kyiv embassy told then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch at the end of the Obama administration that Hunter Biden had, in fact, impacted the U.S. anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine.

“The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter’s presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules,” embassy official George Kent wrote to Yovanovitch in the Nov. 22, 2016, email marked “confidential.”

 KentBurismaEmailNov222016.pdf

Joe Biden’s role in pressuring then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in December 2015 to fire Shokin has been a searing controversy since April 2019, when the lead author on this story, as a columnist for The Hill, unearthed a 2018 videotape of the former vice president bragging about his role to a foreign policy think tank.

At the time Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption, the company was paying Hunter Biden and Archer, $83,333 a month as board members.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recounted in the speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

The disclosure prompted then-President Donald Trump to ask Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate. (Read more: Just the News, 8/21/2023) (Archive)

Lee Zeldin says this information would have been a “game ender” for Dems in 2019.

They left guarded those bombshell memos and made sure they did not come out during the 2019 sham impeachment. The Just The News piece continues:

“I did nothing wrong,” Biden said during 2019 CNN-New York Times debate. “I carried out the policy of the United States government in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. And that’s what we should be focusing on.”

Multiple lawyers who worked on Trump’s impeachment defense as well as some of the GOP House impeachment members told Just the News they did not recall ever seeing the documents unearthed by Just the News and said they would have made a significant difference to the impeachment case.

“This new evidence being uncovered and reported by Just The News is incredibly significant,” said former New York Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin. “It directly undercuts multiple false narratives that were being pushed by Congressional Democrats, some of their key impeachment witnesses, and Democrat allies in the media.”

Jay Sekulow, a lawyer who helped lead Trump’s legal team during the impeachment, said he did not believe the defense had access to such memos.

“The fact of the matter is none of these documents were handed over to us,” he said. “Our legal team never received documents from the House impeachment. So of course, they’re not obligated to in the sense of like in a courtroom. But when you have exculpatory documents, you would think that under just a good faith standards of the House of Representatives would have said, ‘You know, here’s what we’ve got.’”

Sekulow continued: “But of course, they weren’t going to do that. Because as soon as they did that, everyone knew their narrative was false.”

Dems are well-known for this little game. They feverishly and sloppily sweep these matters under the rug, only for them to be unearthed later when the damage has already been done. This pattern can be seen in how they handled the 2020 sham election, January 6, COVID-19 policies, and the vaccine rollout, among other things. Will anyone be held accountable? Not likely, especially not under this crooked administration, where transparency and truth seem to be in very short supply. (Read more: Revolver News, 8/22/2023)  (Archive)

August 21, 2023 – The Clinton Global Initiative puts out their annual call for contributions…international elites respond

Clinton at the main annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting, on September 22, 2014 in New York City. (Source: John Moore / Getty Images)

World Bank President Ajay Banga and the Bahamas’ Prime Minister Philip E. Davis will be there. So too Hollywood stars Jose Andres, Orlando Bloom, and Matt Damon. Those are just some of the people who have put their hands up to attend the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) 2023 next month in New York City.

All the Clinton family will be on hand to personally meet them, too, along with major corporations including Cisco, JetBlue and Pfizer, who will help with charitable funding.

Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and Clinton Foundation Vice Chair Chelsea Clinton announced Monday the conference this year would seek even more commitments to “address climate change, health care issues, gender-based violence, the war in Ukraine and a host of other issues.”

A subset of the Clinton Foundation, the CGI “convenes global and emerging leaders to create and implement solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges,” according to its website.

The annual call for financial contributions follows a long and controversial tradition with the CGI, an organisation which infamously had its genesis on a celebrity-laden private plane flight to Davos and subsequent assertions of charitable efforts around the globe.

The CGI ended in 2016 as Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign.

The year before, donations plummeted by 37 percent amid allegations Clinton used the charity to solicit millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments and corporations in exchange for giving these entities favorable treatment while she served as Secretary of State.

Breitbart News and its senior contributor Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash first revealed the worldwide nexus of shady deal-making between Clinton Foundation donors, their impact and link to the CGI, the six-figure speeches given by Bill Clinton, and the corresponding actions approved by the U.S. State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

“Every day, billions of people around the world, even in the face of the most dire circumstances, make a profound decision to choose hope and keep going,” the former president told the Associated Press in an emailed statement ahead of the 2023 meeting.

“At CGI, we’re focusing on how to move forward in the face of daunting challenges—to act now, find new partners, and stick with it to make a positive difference in people’s lives.”

The list of attendees embraces local U.S. politicians as well. (Read more: Breitbart, 8/21/2023) (Archive)

August 13, 2023 – 14 newly revealed Epstein associates that never appeared in his ‘Little Black Book’

Graphic credit: Business Insider)

(…) Epstein’s infamous “little black book” of contacts is known to contain many famous names, including prominent politicians, businessmen and entertainers.

Now, New York Magazine has compiled a list of high-profile individuals known to have met with Epstein who do not appear in the black book. Its reporting is based on documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The names include:

  • Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black
  • Bard College president Leon Botstein
  • Google co-founder Sergey Brin
  • CIA Director William Burns
  • Professor Noam Chomsky, whose meetings with Epstein included a dinner with director Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn
  • Former U.S. Virgin Islands first lady Cecile de Jongh, who is accused of helping Epstein get visas for his alleged victims
  • Bill Gates, whose ties to Epstein have been well known for years
  • FedEx board member Joshua Cooper Ramo
  • Former diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen
  • Edmond de Rothschild Group chairwoman Ariane de Rothschild
  • Goldman Sachs general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler
  • JPMorgan executive Jes Staley
  • Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers
  • PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel

New York’s list also includes Prince Andrew and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whose names do in fact appear in Epstein’s black book.

The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Epstein’s calendar was packed.

On one day alone, Sept. 8, 2014, he had scheduled meetings with Gates, Black, Ruemmler and Botstein, as well as with Hyatt Hotels chairman Thomas Pritzker, media owner Mortimer Zuckerman and adviser Barnaby Marsh.

The previously unreported documents reviewed by the Journal include thousands of pages of emails and schedules dating from 2013 to 2017.

The Times said it had obtained Epstein’s schedules “through a public records request to the attorney general for the U.S. Virgin Islands, which had sued Mr. Epstein’s estate.”

Several of the power players identified in the documents gave statements to the Journal. (Read more: The Western Journal, 8/23/2023)  (Archive)

August 23, 2023 – Journalist Whitney Webb discusses Jeffrey Epstein: “He was just the tip of the iceberg”

Journalist Whitney Webb sits down with Redacted’s Clayton Morris for a dense conversation about her bombshell new book on Jeffrey Epstein’s deep connections to the world’s biggest power players. She exposes the deep corruption and cover up at the heart of the western power structure.

August 24, 2023 – Trump is arraigned in Georgia; He then makes surprise return to Twitter and posts his mugshot; Memes ensue

I will try to update with some of the better memes that are bound to come from this infamous pic:

 

August 25, 2023 – Federal Judge orders 2nd hearing for removal of the Fulton County case against Trump and 18 others

Jeffrey Clark, former Acting Assistant Attorney General, testifies during a Jan. 6 field hearing held by Rep Matt Gaetz on June 13, 2023. (Credit: Michael McCoy/Getty Images)

A federal judge has ordered a second evidentiary hearing for removal of the Fulton County case against former President Donald Trump and 18 others over violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act in their challenge of the 2020 election results.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is prosecuting the case, claimed the actions constituted a “criminal racketeering enterprise” and gave the 19 defendants until noon on Aug. 25 to surrender or face arrest. All defendants surrendered before the deadline.

Jeffrey Clark, former Justice Department (DOJ) official, filed a notice of removal on Aug. 21, requesting that his case be moved from state to federal court, where he is expecting the charges to be dismissed. A request to expedite the process before the arrest deadline was denied by Judge

Obama nominated Steve Jones Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on July 14, 2010. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Steve Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, who will oversee the hearings related to removals.

The hearing will take place Monday, Sept. 18, and the district attorney’s office has until Sept. 5 to file a response.

The indictment accuses Mr. Clark of violating the RICO Act as well as allegedly making a false statement when he issued a DOJ statement alerting Georgia officials to election fraud concerns. He is arguing that he acted as a federal official, and thus “asserts federal jurisdiction” in the case.

“The Court now must determine if it clearly lacks subject matter jurisdiction over Clark’s removal action, which would require summary remand,” Judge Jones wrote, adding that he is not commenting on the assertions at this time but expects to hear arguments from both sides at the Sept. 18 hearing. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 8/25/2023)  (Archive)

August 25, 2023 – Ukrainian prosecutor Biden wanted fired, speaks out about U.S. president’s ‘corruption’

Former Ukraine prosecutor general Viktor Shokin claims that President Biden and his son Hunter accepted bribes to orchestrate his removal from office in 2016.

“I do not want to deal in unproven facts, but my firm personal conviction is that, yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade in a preview of the interview released on Friday.

Shokin, who could potentially be a key figure in a future impeachment inquiry against Biden, questioned the ethics behind Biden’s admission that he influenced his firing.

“And the fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in US money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing, isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” Shokin added.

His credibility could significantly impact the impeachment attempts, given that he’s rarely featured in Western media. Shokin was ousted from his position in March 2016 by Ukraine’s parliament, following intense pressure from then-Vice President Joe Biden. At the time, his office was investigating Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of Burisma Holdings, a company that paid Hunter Biden a significant sum to serve on its board.

Biden has publicly acknowledged leveraging $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to influence Shokin’s removal, stating at a 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event, “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

Recent information adds fuel to the controversy. An FBI informant’s file released last month claimed Zlochevsky said he was “coerced” into paying $5 million each to Joe and Hunter Biden to ensure Shokin’s removal. Congressional Republicans are now asking for accountability from the FBI and U.S. Attorney David Weiss’ office, which reportedly received this information in June 2020.

In another segment of the interview, Shokin alleges that Biden played a role in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, stating, “Everybody knows that it was because of Joe Biden’s actions that Russia was able to claim Crimea without firing a single shot.”

Democrats counter that scrutiny of Biden and his family is politically motivated, pointing out that Trump was impeached in 2019 for pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

However, defenders of the former president now believe there is ample reason to believe that he was justified in pressing the former Ukrainian president to turn over evidence of alleged Biden corruption.

Among this newly surfaced evidence are emails from the Obama-Biden administration indicate some officials were surprised by Biden’s push for Shokin’s removal.

One year after leaving the White House, Biden boasted about the quid pro quo offer he made to then Ukrainian president Poroshenko to fire Shokin. He explained that he told Ukrainian officials the U.S. would withhold up to $1 billion in aid if Shokin remained in his position.

“I said, ‘Nah, I’m not going to – we’re not going to give you the billion dollars.’ They said, ‘You have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said –.’ I said, ‘Call him.’” Biden remarked during a January 2018 event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. “I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the $1 billion.’”

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here,'” Biden added. “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, told the House Oversight Committee that Burisma sought to use Hunter Biden’s name to deter legal challenges. Archer also mentioned that Biden personally met with Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi earlier in the year when he made the ‘quid pro quo’ threat to the Ukrainian president.

March 31, 2023: Biden White House Counsel staffer meets with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s aide before Trump indictment

The White House counsel’s office met with a top aide to Special Counsel Jack Smith just weeks before he brought charges against former President Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents — raising serious concerns about coordinated legal efforts aimed at President Biden’s likely opponent in 2024.

Jay Bratt (Credit: public domain)

Jay Bratt, who joined the special counsel team in November 2022, shortly after it was formed, took a meeting in the White House on March 31, 2023, with Caroline Saba, deputy chief of staff for the White House counsel’s office, White House visitor logs show.

They were joined in the 10 a.m. meeting by Danielle Ray, an FBI agent in the Washington field office.

Nine weeks later, Trump was indicted by Smith’s office on June 8, 2023.

Bratt, 63, also met with Saba at the White House in November 2021, when Trump was mired in negotiations with the National Archives, who were demanding the return of presidential records from his Mar-a-Lago estate before a formal investigation had not yet been opened.

Saba, who is not an attorney, left the White House in May to attend law school.

Bratt had a third meeting in the White House in September 2021, this time with Katherine Reily, an advisor to the White House chief of staff’s office.

Biden White House Counsel staffers Caroline Saba (l) and Katherine “Katie” Reily (r) (Credit: LinkedIn)

The logs offer no information about what was discussed at the meetings.

Critics and legal experts questioned why Bratt was taking meetings at all with the White House counsel’s office while part of an active investigation into President Biden’s likely 2024 Republican opponent.

“There is no legitimate purpose for a line [DOJ] guy to be meeting with the White House except if it’s coordinated by the highest levels,” said former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a one-time top federal prosecutor in the Southern District.

When asked if he believed the White House and special counsel were coordinating the prosecution of Trump, Giuliani said: “You’re damn right I do.”

“What’s happening is they have trashed every ethical rule that exists and they have created a state police. It is a Biden state prosecutor and a Biden state police,” he continued.

The former mayor, who represented Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2018 probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, was indicted last week in Fulton County, Georgia in connection with attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the March meeting was particularly troublesome and “raises obvious concerns about visits to the White House after [Bratt] began his work with the special counsel.” (Read more: New York Post, 8/26/2023)  (Archive)

August 28, 2023 – National Archives has about 5,400 emails, records linked to Joe Biden’s email aliases

The National Archives in Washington D.C. (Credit: National Archives.gov)

The email aliases — “Robert Peters,” “Robin Ware,” and “JRB Ware” — were used to share government information and discuss business with Hunter Biden and associates, according to the Southeastern Legal Foundation, which filed a lawsuit to compel the agency to turn over the emails.

“All too often, public officials abuse their power by using it for their personal or political benefit. When they do, many seek to hide it,” Southeastern Legal Foundation general counsel Kimberly Hermann told Just the News in a statement. “The only way to preserve governmental integrity is for NARA to release Biden’s nearly 5,400 emails to SLF and thus the public. The American public deserves to know what is in them.”

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) in August requested the Archives hand over all documents and communications in which then-Vice President Joe Biden used pseudonyms such as “Robert Peters,” “Robin Ware,” and “JRB Ware.”

“Joe Biden has stated there was ‘an absolute wall’ between his family’s foreign business schemes and his duties as Vice President, but evidence reveals that access was wide open for his family’s influence peddling,” Comer wrote in a statement. “The National Archives must provide these unredacted records to further our investigation into the Biden family’s corruption.”

The “Robert Peters” alias raised concerns among Republicans since 2021 as it is unusual for government officials to use an obscure government network with an alias.

“I’ve been suspicious ever since my office uncovered this fact back in 2021, and we have unfortunately gotten no response from the White House to the four letters that my office has sent on this matter,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Breitbart News last week. “It is incredibly worrisome that Joe Biden continues to evade our oversight efforts surrounding his corruption.” (Read more: Breitbart, 8/28/2023)  (Archive)

August 28, 2023 – Newt Gingrich: ‘The real corruption is Hillary Clinton and Obama, Biden is the smallest of the three players’

Newt Gingrich has broken the code of silence that surrounds the U.S. capitol and named who is behind “the real corruption” in the upper echelons of the Washington D.C. swamp.

The Republican former Speaker of the House lifted the lid during an interview with Mark Levin on Fox News.

“The depth of corruption is breathtaking,” Gingrich declared.

“And frankly, the more I dug into it, the more I’ve studied it, and the more stunned I am at how people like you and me have been sort of sleepwalking.

“Not realizing the scale of the corruption, taking over the system.

“And now it’s all coming out in the open because they’re so terrified of Donald Trump.

“And they also figure if they can take out Trump, they can take out anybody.

“They can alone, they can own the electoral system.

“They can own the courts.

“They can own the prosecutors.

“And they can monopolize our politics and our government forever more.

“It’s important to understand Biden is the tip of the iceberg.

“The real corruption is Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama — and Joe Biden is the smallest of the three players.”

(Read more: Slay News, 8/28/2023) (Archive)

August 29, 2023 – DOJ tells Jordan FBI subpoenas can’t ‘be enforced,’ warns Hunter Biden inquiry ‘ongoing’

DOJ Assistant Attorney General, Carlos F. Uriarte (Credit: Department of Justice)

The Department of Justice informed the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday night that it would not cooperate with subpoenas for two FBI agents involved in the department’s investigation of Hunter Biden because of the committee’s stipulations for their depositions.

Carlos Uriarte, DOJ assistant attorney general, claimed in a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner to committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) that his subpoenas to the two agents “lack legal effect and cannot constitutionally be enforced” because Jordan had prohibited DOJ lawyers at their depositions.

“The subpoenas issued by the Committee prohibit the attendance of agency counsel at appearances by two FBI employees where the Committee has indicated it will ask questions regarding information they learned within the scope of their official duties, including regarding the ongoing criminal investigation,” Uriarte wrote.

He also noted that compelling testimony from the pair of FBI officials, special agents Thomas Sobocinski and Ryeshia Holley of the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office, was “premature” because the DOJ was open to continuing “discussions” with Jordan.

Jordan’s deposition rule aligns with House rules, which do not permit department counsel at depositions. The DOJ and the committee could, however, negotiate to have Sobocinski and Holley appear voluntarily with DOJ lawyers instead of appearing in the form of a deposition.

Uriarte indicated that negotiations were plausible. And while he was deferential to the committee’s oversight authority throughout the letter, he also continuously warned that the DOJ’s Biden investigation, led by newly appointed special counsel David Weiss, was ongoing and that information flow would be limited during that time. (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 9/01/2023)  (Archive)

Rep. Nancy Mace to Joe Biden: “We’re Coming for You” – Says Just One Treasury Suspicious Activity Report for Biden family money laundering was for “tens of millions of dollars and then some”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said on Monday that just one Suspicious Activity Report (SARS) on the Biden family’s finances that she reviewed at the Treasury Department earlier this year involved “tens of millions of dollars and then some.” Mace made the revelation in an interview with America’s Newsroom co-host Dana Perino on the Fox News Channel. Mace also had a warning to Joe Biden on behalf of House Republicans: “We’re coming for you.”

Mace said while she is not allowed to reveal details of the SARS reports, she said the Biden family money laundering schemes involved well over $50 million from overseas sources. Mace said the amount is “staggering.”

Mace told Perino that the House is seeking Biden family bank records, saying they would document the money trail shown in the SARS reports.

“I would say the shock and awe comes from the amount of money laundering that we’re talking about is staggering. And I’ve said this a couple times, the amount of money the Bidens, I believe, benefited from is gonna be over $50 million–$17 million from Ukraine alone, so far. It will be much higher than that overall when we talk about Romania, China, Russia, etc. Just one report in one of the SARS reports–there are 170 of them, plus–was tens of millions of dollars and then some. It’s a staggering amount of money we’re talking about between the Biden family and their business associates and these corrupt countries. It’s, it’s insurmountable, in my opinion, and I am disgusted the mainstream media has not investigated it.” (Read more:  Gateway Pundit, 8/29/2023)  (Archive)

August 30, 2023 – Recap of GBI Strategies Director Gary Bell having 70 organizations operating in 20 states; ties to Biden

Mr. Reagan (Credit: YouTube)

On Tuesday, Mr. Reagan on YouTube released a video that has since gone viral. In the video, Mr. Reagan highlights the recent work by The Gateway Pundit and our Michigan contributors and investigative team, Patty McMurray, Ben Wetmore, Phil O’Halloran, and Braden Giacobazzi on the GBI Strategies voter registration scandal.

Mr. Reagan: Ladies and gentlemen, now we’ve got it. We have got the evidence. This is all due to the amazing reporting of Ben Wetmore and Patty McMurray and, of course, Jim Hoft over at the Gateway Pundit. This is the smoking gun, folks. It’s a smoking gun of widespread voter fraud in Michigan and also indicates widespread voter fraud across the country. Now, this should be the biggest story in the country right now, and yet no one is covering it. The only one I’ve seen pick up the story in any significant way is Steve Bannon. No mainstream news organizations have covered this at all…

…What if I told you that now we have proof of widespread voter fraud in favor of Joe Biden, the smoking gun that Democrat politicians and so called journalists have insisted does not exist since November of 2020? What if I told you we’ve got it? Well, then not only would we be able to prove that Donald Trump is innocent of this big lie nonsense, but we might even be able to prove that he actually won in 2020. Let’s get into it. In October 8, 2020, a black female identifying herself as Brianna Hawkins dropped off a massive dump of voter registration applications at the Muskegon, Michigan city Clerk’s office. It is estimated that Hawkins delivered between eight and 10,000 voter registration applications. These applications were immediately flagged as fraudulent, and the police were called. The police then followed Brianna Hawkins back to her office, which they then raided. In these offices, police found guns, silencers, burner phones, prepaid cash cards, and, of course, partially filled out voter registration applications.

October of 2020, some women brought in some stacks of these registrations in Muskegon, Michigan, into the city clerk’s office. We’re talking about tens of thousands, we believe, but in that office, the report says 8000. And the city clerk noticed that they all had the same handwriting. She contacted the state police. They started an investigation. They found the two offices locally where they were filling out these registrations. The policeman raided one of these offices. When they went into these offices, Steve, they found semi automatic weapons. They found silencers. They found bags of these prepaid cash cards. They found burner phones. It’s unbelievable, this story. And we also know that this group had several offices across Michigan.

Gary Bell’s current employer, CompMo Group, DELETES WEBSITE after viral reports of Michigan voter registration scandal. (Credit: CompMo Group)

Jim Hoft: They turned it over to the FBI, and you know what happened, Steve? This will shock you but it died. The last update was, I believe, in 2022, and it says that it’s still being investigated. So you know what that means. Steve nothing’s being done. They have done nothing with this. Just like Hunter’s laptop that goes to the FBI and then disappears. So this is just another instance that shows that our FBI is against the people of this country and they’re participating in stealing the elections. I think we found the culprits here.

Mr. Reagan: Now, keep in mind that these were not fraudulent ballots. These were fraudulent voter registration applications. But a great way to get legitimate ballots that you would then fill in fraudulently would be to get a lot of fake voter registrations processed. So when we’re talking about voter fraud, this is one step in the process of rigging an election. This is just as serious as if they’d found boxes full of fake ballots.

They were filling out registrations. They need these bloated voter rolls in order to cheat and steal. And I believe that that’s something I firmly believe it’s the predicate when you get them to get the mail in the phony ballot, harvesting the mail in ballots, the predicate you got to get the phony registrations. That’s what they’re doing in the college towns that’s they did in Nevada, that’s they did in Pennsylvania. That’s what they’ve done. That is a predicate, has to be done.

Watch the entire video below. (Gateway Pundit, 9/01/2023)  (Archive)

 

August 30, 2023 – Joe Biden confirms he appointed one of the nation’s leading emergency managers to Lahaina, Maui, and has been on the ground since BEFORE the fires erupted

A clip from comments left in Twitter thread:

Irony:

August 30, 2023 – Rep. James Comer: Hunter paid Joe Biden’s bills


“There’s no question Hunter Biden was enriching himself and his family while riding on Air Force Two at the expense of the American taxpayer, but what’s more concerning is Joe Biden’s role in all of this…

Joe Biden was front and center. He met with every one of these people he claimed he never met with and never spoke to…

Hunter Biden was paying for things for Joe Biden in these accounts. These are the accounts that we are now asking for and are probably going to head to court in the near future to try to obtain…

There’s consensus in our conference now that we are going to have to go to an impeachment inquiry… That’s imminent…

There are 5,400 emails with at least 3 different Joe Biden pseudonyms… There was an email to a Joe Biden pseudonym with Hunter copied on it…

It was an email about Ukraine policy, while Devon Archer testified that the owners of Burisma were squeezing Hunter to call Washington for help…

We know that the President’s son committed money laundering.

We’re investigating whether or not Joe Biden committed money laundering, but we are pretty certain that he committed serious offenses that the entire Congress will be concerned about.”

August 30, 2023 – New Hunter Biden emails reveal over 1,000 between Rosemont Seneca and the Office of Vice President

America First Legal (AFL) released three more tranches of emails (Productions 5, 6, and 7) from the National Archives in response to AFL’s request and lawsuit for records from Joe Biden’s time as Vice President in the Obama Administration and Hunter Biden’s corrupt foreign business dealings.

The latest documents reveal a staggering number of emails between Rosemont Seneca and the Office of the Vice President, revealing further evidence that there was no separation between Hunter’s private business dealings and the official business of the Obama-Biden White House. Rosemont Seneca frequently used the Biden name to gain access to and favors from the White House.

The documents also reveal further evidence of Hunter’s influence in the official Office of the Vice President. Hunter had the ability to direct correspondence, plan guest lists for State dinners and receptions, and bring people into the White House at his discretion. This evidence further calls into question Joe Biden’s claims that he was never involved with, never discussed, and did not know about Hunter’s business dealings, and it raises questions as to the propriety of the massive payments Hunter was receiving while he was commanding such influence in the Office of the Vice President.

The latest documents reveal a staggering number of emails between Rosemont Seneca and the Office of the Vice President, revealing further evidence that there was no separation between Hunter’s private business dealings and the official business of the Obama-Biden White House. Rosemont Seneca frequently used the Biden name to gain access to and favors from the White House.

The documents also reveal further evidence of Hunter’s influence in the official Office of the Vice President. Hunter had the ability to direct correspondence, plan guest lists for State dinners and receptions, and bring people into the White House at his discretion. This evidence further calls into question Joe Biden’s claims that he was never involved with, never discussed, and did not know about Hunter’s business dealings, and it raises questions as to the propriety of the massive payments Hunter was receiving while he was commanding such influence in the Office of the Vice President.

  1. “Rosemont Seneca” was merely the private arm of Joe Biden’s Office of the Vice President: 

The sheer volume of emails exchanged between Hunter and his associates at Rosemont Seneca and the Office of the Vice President is telling in itself. Just since AFL’s last release, NARA has processed another 861 emails sent or received between January 2011 and December 2013 that contained the name of Hunter Biden’s company, “Rosemont Seneca.”

The vast majority of these emails consisted of direct communications between Rosemont Seneca employees, including Hunter Biden, and the Office of the Vice President. Contrary to Joe Biden’s claim that there is an “absolute wall between the personal and private, and the government,” the White House asserted executive privilege to withhold 200 emails in their entirety because “Release would disclose confidential advice between the President and his advisors, or between such advisors.”

2. Hunter Biden used his family name to leverage access to the White House:

Emails obtained by AFL reveal the broad access Hunter Biden enjoyed to the official government channels while his father was Vice President. Below are just a few examples of how Hunter Biden had free reign in directing the use of official government resources.

Hunter Biden played a role in planning high-profile White House events

Even though Hunter had no official role in the Obama-Biden Administration, he was intimately involved in planning for high-profile White House events, including the January 2011 China State Luncheon, the June 2011 State Arrival Ceremony for German Chancellor, the March 2012 United Kingdom State Dinner and Visit, the May 2013 Turkey State Luncheon, and the 2014 France State Dinner.

(…)  Statement from Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel:

“These records provide even more evidence that no daylight existed between Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings and the Office of the Vice President during the Obama Administration. The evidence accumulating against the Biden family’s malfeasance is staggering. We will continue to put the pieces of this puzzle together and expose the truth to the American people,” said Gene Hamilton.

Read all of the productions here.

Follow us on social media to get the latest updates on America First Legal’s fight to protect your constitutional rights!

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(Read more: America First Legal, 8/30/2023)  (Archive)

August 31, 2023 – Devin Nunes: The Biden Bribery Files with guest John Solomon – All roads lead to Obama (video)

 

August 31, 2023 – Judicial Watch: Records show Biden Justice Department set up unprecedented apparatus to target January 6 protestors

Judicial Watch announced today it received 90 pages of records from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, a component of the Department of Justice, in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that detail the extensive apparatus the Biden Justice Department set up to investigate and prosecute January 6 protestors.’’

The documents were uncovered by FOIA lawsuit against the Justice Department and FBI for records related to the death of Ashli Babbitt (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:21-cv-02462)).

A January 25, 2021, confidential draft chart indicates staff assignments. Several “Lead AUSAs” (assistant U.S. attorneys) are listed. One is assigned to “White Nationalist Militias.” Two others are assigned to “Proud Boys.” Another is assigned to “Oath Keepers.”

The chart identifies “Branch 2: Priority Incidents and Subjects.” Its tasks are to investigate “specific incidents comprising the Capitol attack. Branch investigations are staffed by Criminal Division sections with designated lead prosecutors reporting up to their section supervisors:”

To identify and prosecute the individuals and organizations responsible for planting pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC.

To identify and prosecute rioting activity in the “Speaker’s Lobby,” and in particular to determine whether there is civilian criminal culpability for the death of Ashli Babbitt.

To identify and prosecute rioters responsible for the death of USCP Brian Sicknick.

To review force allegations against USCP and MPD officers, including the officer-involved shooting of Ashli Babbitt….

The chart lists “Branch 3: Intake, Assignment and Rapid Indictment” as: “Branch 3 intakes proposed prosecutions against individual rioters and assigns them for horizontal prosecutors; it also may channel individual defendants to Branches 1 and 2 based on those branches’ responsibilities. Branch 3 is the fulcrum of our reactive prosecutorial effort.”

The chart then describes a process for the “rapid indictment” of January 6 defendants:

Phase 1: Command Center (FMC): Co-located prosecutors and law enforcement agents in the command center screen referrals and assign them to Phase 2 or refer them/push up intelligence to Branches 1 and 2.

Phase 2: Complaints (FMC/Details): Cases referred from Phase 1 are assigned to AUSAs, a CTS [likely Civil Trial Section] attorney, and a WFO [FBI Washington Field Office] team who work in coordination with AUSOs/FBI field offices throughout the country to obtain criminal complaints and appropriate process.

Phase 3: Rapid Indictment (FMC): Cases charged out of Branch 3 are funneled to this unit, which will rapidly indict them. Only priority cases and Branch 2 and 3 cases are indicted by vertically organized AUSAs.

Phase 4: Indicted Prosecutions (Criminal Division): Indicted cases are returned/assigned for prosecution. Cases are centrally tracked with ticklers for Speedy Trial Act, discovery, intelligence gathering.

The chart describes “Branch 4: Advance Litigation Support” as “Branch 4 is a litigation, coordination and technology branch that provides support to all three investigative branches. Branch 4 has both litigation and technological responsibilities.”

The chart lists five roles for personnel to carry out:

Mass Data Collection (Process/Litigation): This team will coordinate and handle sensitive search warrants and other process directed at collecting large scale data (e.g., Geofence/Ad Tech).

Media Issues (Process/Litigation): This team will coordinate evidence collection from the media under the Justice Manual and develop litigation strategy for media-related defenses.

Filter (Support/Litigation): This team will develop filter protocols, staff filter reviews, and support filter-related litigation.”

Discovery (Planning/Litigation): This team will coordinate discovery, including protocols, Giglio, and litigation, focused on addressing “One Government” issues.

Litigation Technology (Support/Analysis): This team will stand up and maintain the apparatus tailored to store, process, analyze, and produce the unprecedented amount of data.

“Investigation and Litigation Technology Support Apparatus” lays out the array of technological sources to be use against January 6 defendants. The chart lists “Categories of data” which includes “cell phone records and device location data, cell phone data dumps, ad tech company locational data, financial locational data, social media accounts, email accounts, cloud storage accounts, financial records, flight travel records, and others.”

“Technological needs” listed in the chart include “devoted cloud storage, processing capacity to upload data to analytical and review platforms, analytical tools (e.g., Palantir), devoted review platform accessible across multiple DOJ and law enforcement components, and integration capacity – for purposes of analysis and discovery.”

“Complicating issues” related to the “Investigation and Litigation Technology Support Apparatus” include “unprecedented volume, high number of prosecutors, agents, analysts and support staff involved, data collected by multiple FBI field offices, trial prosecutions,” and others.

“These documents detail a troubling and unprecedented deployment of federal resources to prosecute Americans caught up in the January 6 disturbance. The documents seem to describe a massive political and spy operation masquerading as a law enforcement operation,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

A previous review of records from this lawsuit highlighted the prosecution declination memorandum justifying the decision not to prosecute U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd for the shooting death of Babbitt. (Read more: Judicial Watch, 8/31/2023)  (Archive)

April 2022 – August 2023: Letitia James visited Biden White House on three occasions while she prosecutes Trump

September 1, 2023 – Lawyer for Virgin Islands reveals JPMorgan flagged over a billion $ in financial transactions related to sex trafficking, after Epstein died

That’s BILLION, with a “B”.   According to recently revealed court transcripts, in the US Virgin Islands lawsuit against JPMorgan, in the aftermath of Epstein’s death the massive bank reported over $1 billion in suspicious activity reports to the U.S. Treasury.

Attorney for USVA, Mimi Liu, outlined details to Judge Jed Rakoff in U.S. District Court in Manhattan last Thursday.  According to the astonishing revelations, the entire financial relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and JPMorgan was centered around payments for sex trafficking.  There was no other business between the two entities in the 16 years of Epstein’s use of the bank.  All of the Epstein account transactions were based around his sex trafficking operation.

Additionally, in the aftermath of Epstein’s death, JPMorgan then reported at least $1 billion worth of transactions under the auspices of “suspicious activity.”  This certainly looks like what lawyer Mimi Liu called in court, “covering their ass.”

[VIA CNBC] – JPMorgan Chase notified the Treasury Department of more than $1 billion in transactions related to “human trafficking” by Jeffrey Epstein dating back 16 years after the notorious sex predator killed himself in 2019, a lawyer for the U.S. Virgin Islands told a federal judge at a hearing.

“Epstein’s entire business with JPMorgan and JPMorgan’s entire business with Epstein was human trafficking,” Mimi Liu, an attorney for the Virgin Islands, told Judge Jed Rakoff in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Thursday, according to a transcript reviewed by CNBC.

Liu cited the bank’s notification to the Treasury Department as she argued that Rakoff should issue a summary judgment against JPMorgan.

The huge bank is being sued by the Virgin Islands government for allegedly facilitating sex trafficking by Epstein of young women when he was a JPMorgan customer from 1998 through 2013. (read more)

This certainly puts some semblance of scale to the issues around Epstein and his exploitation of the sex industry to his high profile and powerful clients.   The full scale is obviously unknown; however, if JPMorgan is reporting $1 billion in transactions that might be considered risk for them, we can only guess at the amount of the total transaction through the bank.

Keep in mind, JPMorgan already agreed to pay the Epstein Victims $290 million {GO DEEP} to make the victim issues go away.   What the hell is the scale of the full banking network if this amount of money is being used to throw a bag over it?

Pulling back to the 30,000-foot view, how the bank was operating certainly does start to make the shadows in the background become more visible.  After all, the U.S. government relied on JPMorgan to stabilize the banking sector recently.  And, when you overlay the influence of the BIG BANKS on domestic politics, and contrast in parallel with their assistance for corrupt activity like Epstein, suddenly the catchphrase “too big to fail” takes on an entirely new meaning.

Many of us have always said the top of the corrupt pyramid is banks, global financial institutions and multinationals.  The activity of the political industry takes place below the power structure of the financial system.  The banks control the politicians.  The banks control almost everything, and are the benefactors for the DNC, RNC, RGA, etc. etc.

This is the apex circle of influence, where Jeffrey Epstein operated in concert with the banks – who then facilitated his operations and were regulated by Epstein’s clients.

(Conservative Treehouse, 9/04/2023)  (Archive)

 

September 1, 2023 – MI clerk whistleblower reveals private Facebook group where MI clerks discuss evidence of organized fraud in 2020 election

After publishing the report that exposed a massive cover-up by Michigan’s Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel and Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of an explosive, statewide investigation by the MI State Police, Muskegon, MI Police Department, we began to receive tips from individuals who read our story and wanted to help us close the gaps in the highly redacted MI State Police report.

The whistleblower who contacted us explained that they do not want to be identified over fears of retribution by elected officials in Michigan. They confirmed for us that the details of the police report were accurate but explained there was much more to this story than ONE city clerk receiving boxes of suspicious voter registrations; in fact, clerks across the state of Michigan received boxes and priority mail envelopes stuffed with registrations, many of them with the same signatures, the same last four numbers of their social security number, fake names and fake addresses.

For three years, Michigan residents were told by their Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson that they had nothing to worry about, that Michigan’s 2020 election was “the most secure election” in history.

Today, the Gateway Pundit is releasing the latest evidence we have obtained from our 2020 election fraud investigation…

Our whistleblower contacted the Gateway Pundit after reading our first report and revealed that, in private conversations on social media, many Michigan clerks were privately concerned about potential fraud in the 2020 election in the months PRIOR to the November election. 

CLERKS IN PRIVATE: OBSERVING ONGOING FRAUD
CLERKS IN PUBLIC: “SAFE AND SECURE ELECTION”

Many of the Clerks have denied that any voter fraud occurred in the 2020 election. They have parroted the line from the left-wing power establishment that the 2020 General Election was the ‘most secure in history’ despite privately expressing severe doubts as to whether the election was secure at all.

President Trump and his allies, including the entire slate of 2020 alternative electors in Michigan, are facing multiple felonies and the threat of imprisonment for expressing the very same doubts publicly that these clerks were expressing privately.

In the 2020 election, one Michigan clerk, who is now retired, posted an image of what her fellow clerks called a “care package” from a left-wing campaign and organizing group that occasionally went by the name GBI Strategies and other times went by the name “Empower Michigan.”

Clerks reported receiving what they called “care packages” from GBI Strategies, with whom several were on a first-name basis. They also referenced “EM” interchangeably with GBI. “EM” is short for “Empower Michigan,” which was a Democrat group working alongside GBI, which appears to share the same address as the Michigan Democrat Party.

Here is Clerk #1’s original post to her fellow clerks on October 5, 2020:

Another current Michigan clerk chimed in to say that she had received similar likely fraudulent voter registration applications from the same address as GBI was using. Her fellow clerk, Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch, knew the answer in the post’s comments because Meisch was on a first-name basis with GBI Strategies/Empower Michigan. Meisch was the clerk who notified police after receiving over 10,000 suspicious and fraudulent voter registrations sent to her Muskegon office from GBI Strategies.

The same box, with the same PPE materials within, was being sent to clerks all over Michigan. Is it possible Muskegon’s Ann Meisch reported it because it was so outlandishly out of proportion to the City of Muskegon voter file? The MI State Police report and Muskegon Police report provide no evidence that any of these other clerks reported the GBI Strategies fraud to law enforcement.

And Meisch was right; the return address did come from a hotel in Auburn Hills that appeared to be part of the GBI/Empower Michigan, AKA “EM” operation where boxes of voter registrations were being sent to clerks across the state. (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 9/02/2023)  (Archive)

September 1, 2023 – JPMorgan flagged over $1 billion in suspicious Epstein transfers

A view of the exterior of JP Morgan Chase & Co. corporate headquarters in New York City. (Credit: Mike Segar/Reuters)

JPMorgan flagged over $1 billion in suspicious transactions linked to deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which the bank reported to the US government, the US Virgin Islands has claimed in its lawsuit against the bank.

“JPMorgan was a full-service bank for Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” said Mimi Liu, an attorney for the USVI, which says the enormous sum bolsters key allegations in their legal action against the bank, which they say knowingly benefited from Epstein’s wrongdoing, Bloomberg reports, noting that this is the first time in the case that the ‘sheer volume of Epstein’s financial activity at JPMorgan over a 16-year period has been disclosed.’

The suspicious activity was detailed in a 2019 filing to the US Department of Treasury, a USVI attorney told a federal court in Manhattan on Thursday. The filing was made after Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell a month after his arrest on sex trafficking charges. Epstein had been with the bank from the late 1990s through 2013, when they finally cut ties with him.

JPMorgan denies that it let Epstein’s activities slide, and says it reported around 150 cash transactions to a federal regulator between 2002 and 2013.

Last month, the USVI told the judge in the case that the bank facilitated over $1.1 million in payments from Jeffrey Epstein to “girls or women,” many of whom had Eastern European surnames.

Over $320,000 of the payments were made to “numerous individuals for whom JPMorgan had no previously identified payments,” Singer wrote, accusing the bank of failing to disclose the payments until after the end of discovery – the period in which parties in a lawsuit exchange evidence.  (Read more: Zero Hedge, 9/01/2023)  (Archive)

September 3, 2023 – Fani Willis is linked to massive election fraud and money laundering RICO enterprise

Voter Fraud graphic (Credit: public domain)

In a shocking turn of events, a bombshell investigation has uncovered jaw-dropping connections between Fani Willis and a sprawling web of election fraud and money laundering activities.

Fani Willis’s involvement will be sure to send shockwaves through the political landscape.

The investigation, which spans across multiple states and multiple jurisdictions, has revealed a complex network of illicit operations aimed at undermining the very foundation of our Constitutional Republic and the rule of law. Sources close to the matter suggest that Willis was a massive beneficiary in the Federal and Georgia RICO enterprises. It appears that she is currently playing a key role in orchestrating a systematic scheme to manipulate election outcomes, casting doubt on the integrity of the entire electoral process.

In the lead up to the 2022 midterm elections, my team uncovered a massive money laundering network of campaign finance contributions being made via ActBlue. One of the top beneficiaries of this money laundering RICO enterprise was none other than Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock. The Gateway Pundit was the first news organization to cover the massive money laundering network that financed the Raphael Warnock campaign.

As our investigation progressed, we expanded our efforts into other states such as Missouri, Maryland, Wisconsin, Arizona, and then into every single state.

Working with the Epoch Times investigative journalist Steven Kovac, we made a stunning find. Many of the top ActBlue “Contributors” never made the individual contributions. Many of these “Not Employed Individual Contributors” were the victims of a highly sophisticated money laundering scheme.

The scheme was further exposed when I provided the data to James O’Keefe and his people at O’Keefe Media Group who captured many unwitting “Money Laundering Smurfs” in Maryland.

This massive ongoing money laundering operation involves wire fraud, evasion of campaign finance limits, structuring of financial transactions, tax fraud, non profit fraud, identity theft, and elder abuse.

The RICO operation is still in operation today. Using the identities of unwitting elderly, and other democrat voters, this massive RICO money laundering enterprise is the fuel for the entire election fraud RICO operation.

BUYING A DISTRICT ATTORNEY

The criminal money laundering enterprise operates at the Federal, state and local levels. The first local elected official identified as part of this ongoing money laundering operation was Alvin Bragg.

Alvin Bragg received massive numbers of campaign finance contributions from the network of individuals who had been identified as smurfs. The investigation into Alvin Bragg also helped to uncover the use of pre-paid credit and debit cards in the structuring of the campaign finance contributions and the payment of ballot harvesting mules.

Does anyone find it interesting that Alvin Bragg charged Donald J Trump criminally with a campaign finance violation, while benefiting from a money laundering RICO enterprise?

Has Alvin Bragg refunded all of the illegal campaign finance contributions made to his campaign yet?

BUYING THE “JUSTICE YOU WANT”

This systematic funneling of illicit campaign finance funds was also identified in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race of Janet Protasiewicz. The Janet for Justice campaign took in massive amounts of money from “Individual Contributors” who were also identified as part of the nationwide ActBlue money laundering RICO enterprise.

How much does it take to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023? Over $23.3 million, was raised, mostly from leftist PACs funded largely through Soros linked organizations and the ActBlue money laundering enterprise.

The nationwide ActBlue money mules and smurfs made massive numbers of individual contributions to the PACs that largely financed the Janet for Justice campaign.

Should the people of Wisconsin be concerned about the purchase of a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat via a massive nationwide money laundering scheme using the stolen identities of the elderly?

How many other judges and courts have been compromised nationwide at the Federal, State and local levels?

THEY SAY “FOLLOW THE MONEY” SO WE DID…

The information on Fani Willis campaign contributions was obtained directly from the State of Georgia campaign finance database “HERE”.

Why would elderly people who do not contribute in their own local elections be interested in making campaign contributions to a little known Georgia district attorney beginning in 2022?

One of the out of state Fani Willis campaign contributors had made over 9,178 individual contributions just at the federal level since 2018.

THE FIRM

THE BANKS

THE FEC

THE RICO ACT

Issues Relating to Mail and Wire Fraud as Predicate Acts

Like district attorneys, judges, and other government officials…

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 9/03/2023) (Archive)

September 5, 2023 – Defense attorneys sound alarm on ’recycled jurors’ for J6 trials

Numerous defense attorneys representing January 6 defendants are perplexed in discovering that potential jurors are being recalled or “recycled.”

On Sept. 5, a day after Labor Day, defense attorneys discovered their potential jury pool consisted of jurors who were excused the week before.

Stephen Metcalf (Credit: Washington Post)

“I have never seen this in all my years of practicing law.” defense attorney Steven Metcalf fumed while exiting the federal courthouse after jury selection of Zachary Alam’s trial. ”Are there any jurors left in DC? What is going on here?”

The Gateway Pundit sat as the lone observer in the courtroom for nearly the entire duration of Alam’s 8-day trial and spent hours talking with Metcalf about this peculiar jury selection.

Repeatedly throughout Alam’s jury selection, Metcalf asked each potential juror that he was allowed to vet whether they recognized anyone else in the room.

By day 2, dozens of the potential jurors answered in the affirmative, referencing other individuals they convened with at the federal courthouse just a week prior when they were struck down for jury duty in other J6 cases.

Metcalf’s line of questioning confirming jurors are being “recycled” became a running joke in the courtroom.

“Do recognize anyone in this room,” Metcalf a woman who was later seated on the jury.

“Yes, I saw some of the people here last week when I was called for jury selection in another case,” she replied.

Conspicuously, one potential juror after another took the stand with the same story.

As Metcalf spoke to the approximate twentieth potential juror who confirmed they were at jury selection the week prior for another J6 trial, Judge Dabney Friedrich visibly restrained from bursting into laughter.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich (Credit: public domain)

Neither Friedrich, the Marshalls nor the prosecutors could keep a straight face.

Jury selection is a big mystery amongst a litany of shocking aberrations of the application of the law in J6 trials.

Getting called for jury duty is a simple luck of the draw. Many Americans go through their lives never being summoned or answering a jury duty summons.  Few are called repeatedly and actually answer. But for some reason, many in Washington DC are reporting for jury duty for two different trials two weeks in a row. 

A computer randomly picks prospective jurors from the jury pool during a “Detailed Randomization Procedure,” according to the Jury Selection Plan for the United States District Court For the District of Columbia.

The alleged random selection process makes it unlikely that someone will get summoned to serve twice, comparable to winning the lottery multiple times.

Once an individual reports for service, their name is pulled from the jury pool for at least the next 12 months, even if the individual does not get placed on a jury.(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 10/04/2023)  (Archive)

September 5, 2023 – Facebook Files – Part 5: Biden White House relied on foreign “disinfo” activists to pressure Facebook to censor Americans

September 6, 2023 – FOIA lawsuit reveals Hunter directly represented Burisma in its dealings with the Obama White House yet was not registered as a foreign agent

September 7, 2023 – The Deep State ‘Catch-22’ Trap of General Flynn

For anyone following the saga of Lt. General Michael T. Flynn (Ret.), the one theme that helps explain the case is: It Just Never Ends.

As reported by both UncoverDC and The Washington Pundit back in March 2021, the Defense Department Inspector General (DoD OIG) had concluded a “long-delayed investigation into Michael Flynn,” sending its findings to the Army “in a case that could bring tens of thousands of dollars in financial penalties for President Donald Trump’s first NSA (National Security Advisor).” The investigation centered around Gen. Flynn’s business dealings during his time as a private citizen in between serving as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under President Obama and his appointment as NSA by President Trump.

The story again made headlines earlier this year in May when Just The News (JTN) reported Gen. Flynn had received a notification letter from the Biden Pentagon stating the Dept. of the Army Office of the General Counsel had determined he had violated the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution and would be forced to repay proceeds out of his pension for allegedly unauthorized work on behalf of foreign governments performed as a private citizen after leaving the Army. Gen. Flynn would discuss the letter the day after the JTN article was published in an interview with John Solomon—the article’s author—and Amanda Head.

Gen. Flynn mentioned during the interview that DoD had declined to provide him with a copy of the OIG investigation report. In response to the investigation, UncoverDC filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and recently obtained a copy of the report. The details are quite eye-opening and expose what a partisan witch-hunt the entire investigation was from the very beginning. And believe it or not, it could have been a lot worse.

From the response letter to UncoverDC’s FOIA request for DoD OIG’s report of Gen. Flynn’s “Emoluments” investigation

The dates listed at the top of the report are the first thing that jumps out. DoD OIG “initiated an investigation” into Gen. Flynn in April 2017. This is less than two months after Gen. Flynn was forced to resign as President Trump’s NSA. It also has nothing to do with the allegations of lying to the FBI about his call with Russian Ambassador Kislyak and is separate from the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) investigation he would be subjected to by the Mueller Investigation. It demonstrates further how the Deep State was throwing everything—including the kitchen sink—at him around this time by weaponizing the full force of the U.S. government to “get Flynn” at all costs.

From the Jan 2021 DoD OIG “Emoluments” investigation report of Gen. Flynn

The report stems from a referral made by the House Oversight Committee to DoD OIG. Sadly, the House investigation was a bipartisan effort headed up by then-Republican Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and the Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD). Chaffetz—who now makes regular appearances on Fox News whining about his own targeting by the administrative state—went on to gleefully discuss the referral with Greta Van Susteren on MSNBC.

If you want to know how we arrived at the point of having an openly political and weaponized FBI raiding the homes of journalists, political opponents, and the former President of the United States, we present to you Exhibit A:

The DoD OIG investigation would be put on hold in June 2017, around the same time the Mueller Investigation set its sights with their multifaceted and ever-changing attempts to indict Gen. Flynn on something … anything. The DoD OIG investigation would remain on hold until President Trump ended the Mueller fiasco in November 2020 by granting Gen. Flynn his full Pardon of Innocence.

President Trump boarding Marine One for the final time on Jan 20, 2021

The one date that really jumps out is when the report was issued, Jan 27, 2021. Conveniently enough, one week after President Trump left office when he or his political appointees could no longer review or intervene to shut down this latest witch-hunt.

Before diving any further into the details of the DoD OIG report, it is important to highlight just how frivolous the basis of this investigation was, to begin with. The Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution can be categorized in the same sphere as violations of the Logan Act of 1799. No one with any knowledge of U.S. law takes either one seriously. They are simply used as a cudgel by partisan politicians to target their political opponents. As we will detail in a subsequent column, the use of the Emoluments Clause was a novel legal theory originally concocted by Obama official, Trump impeachment architect, and Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Norm Eisen to repeatedly harass President Trump, members of his family, and administration.

Attorneys Viva Frei and Robert Barnes broke down the news of the rekindled DoD OIG investigation when it was first reported by The Washington Post’s crack staff of “deeply sourced and relentless” Pulitzer Prize-winning Pee-Pee Hoax journalists back in March 2021. Barnes drops some very interesting nuggets that have not come out before.

The report indicates DoD OIG investigated Gen. Flynn on four separate allegations. It is unclear whether the Biden Pentagon will or is able to act on the other findings listed. For the purposes of this column, we focus on the one which the Dept. of the Army appears to be pursuing the General on related to his paid speaking engagement at a December 2015 Russia Today (RT) Gala.

From the Jan 2021 DOD OIG “Emoluments” investigation report of Gen. Flynn

RT 10-Year Anniversary Gala in Moscow (December 2015)

Defense attorney Sidney Powell addressed Gen. Flynn’s attendance at the RT Gala along with other accusations made in the DoD OIG report in numerous interviews throughout his Mueller Investigation trial.

As the JTN article details, Gen. Flynn made DIA fully aware of his planned trip to Moscow to speak at the RT event. This was confirmed by a signed affidavit from former DIA Senior Executive David Becker. Gen. Flynn contacted DIA ahead of time to let them know he expected to meet with “Senior Leadership of Russia,” including the Director of the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate)—Russia’s main military intelligence agency and counterpart of the DIA. No less than 10 U.S. counterintelligence officials briefed Gen. Flynn on collection requirements and “intelligence threat[s]” potentially directed towards him. Immediately upon his return, he contacted DIA, was debriefed, and turned over all information he had collected while on his trip, including “a thumb drive of pictures and other information.” The encrypted thumb drive, the secure laptop used on the trip, and other secured devices used to collect Intel were likely all provided to him by DIA in advance of the trip.

From the signed affidavit by former DIA Senior Executive David Becker

The engagement itself was arranged by Leading Authorities, Inc. (LAI), which is the main speakers’ bureau used by nearly all public figures to book paid speaking engagements. Gen. Flynn was unaware President Vladimir Putin would be in attendance and was seated next to the Russian leader for only 10 to 15 minutes after Putin made the surprise appearance.

Gen. Flynn attended the RT Gala along with former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein who also had the trip arranged and was paid to give a speech by LAI. The appearance has been used to relentlessly smear Flynn as a secret agent for Russia. Stein also wound up being accused of being a “Russian asset” by Hillary Clinton, which is an epic backfire since Stein herself was one of the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax originators.

Gen. Flynn seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2015 RT anniversary banquet. Jill Stein is also pictured in the foreground wearing grey.

The DoD OIG report includes a “Description of Attached Relevant Documents” section—although the attachments were not included with the response to UDC’s FOIA request. Included in the list of attachments are copies of transcripts from the RT Gala from the U.S. Dept of State, Headquarters – Dept. of the U.S. Army (HQDA), and U.S. Army Human Resources Command (HRC). So multiple sections of the U.S. Dept. of State and the Dept. of Defense were keenly aware of Gen. Flynn’s attendance and speech for well over a year before it suddenly became problematic.

From the Jan 2021 DoD OIG “Emoluments” investigation report of Gen. Flynn

The real accusation seems to be a technicality that Gen. Flynn did not seek or receive “proper approval” before making the speech and receiving payment. Well, is that true? This is where the information Robert Barnes revealed might tell the real story. Listen again to the Barnes sound byte and then what Gen. Flynn seems to hint at in his JTN interview.

Did you catch it? Conventional wisdom—even by those coming to the defense of Gen. Flynn—has always been that he scheduled the RT speech himself through LAI and then reached out to the DIA for the intelligence briefings. So DIA was just taking advantage of the opportunity … “Well, since you’re going to be there anyways …”

If Barnes is correct, that does not seem to be the case at all. DIA came up with the idea and initiated the trip for Gen. Flynn in the first place. They put him up to it. Gen. Flynn seems to add credence to the theory in his JTN interview when he says,

I know there are classified documents that go along with everything I did. So you know, I mean release the damn classified documents. I won’t speak to those, but I know that they exist.

The next logical question is, “How would Robert Barnes know?”. He is just a constitutional attorney and has never even worked for the government. Barnes is a top defense attorney—who holds a law license in DC—and has represented a number of clients in highly politicized cases. In fact, he represented former FBI agent Robyn Gritz in her a sexual harassment complaint against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. This is the case where Gen. Flynn personally intervened on behalf of Gritz. McCabe likely held a grudge against Gen. Flynn from that point forward and probably was a factor in McCabe leading the witch-hunt to take Gen. Flynn out.

Barnes also represented several individuals targeted by the Mueller Investigation due to their association with Gen. Flynn and even informally advised the General during his criminal trial. At one point, Barnes was considered to take over as Flynn’s defense counsel from Covington & Burling, LLP before recommending Sidney Powell, who would be hired instead. So Barnes would have knowledge directly from Gen. Flynn and related sources within the Intel Community, as he has mentioned on different occasions.

Therein lays the Catch-22. The DIA under President Obama—the same man who fired Gen. Flynn for voicing opposition to the Iran Nuclear Deal and warning about the rise of ISIS—asks him to carry out an intelligence gathering operation. Being the American patriot he is, the General decides to put his country above politics and agrees. The mission proved to be wildly more successful than anyone could have hoped, with a top U.S. intelligence agent getting to sit with the President of Russia and collect invaluable information that our government can exploit in future dealings with one of our top geopolitical rivalries for years to come.

Six years later, the Pentagon—now under Joe “Hey … why don’t we try using the Logan Act“ Biden—can now use the RT mission to launch a new smear campaign against Gen. Flynn. They can bury the documents behind classification since they would reveal “sources and methods” of inserting a U.S. spy into a direct meeting with the President of Russia. These would be some highly classified documents within the possession of the U.S. government—unlikely to ever see the light of day. And they know Gen. Flynn can’t breathe a word about the true nature of the mission in his own defense. If he reveals they put him up to it, he risks criminal prosecution for violating his oath and disclosing classified information. So they can go on trashing the reputation of an American war hero, believing he just has to sit there and take it.

These people are truly sick and have no shame … but it’s not going to work.

Stay tuned for our follow-up column when we will deep-dive into the other allegations detailed in the DoD OIG report on Gen. Flynn, where we will expose how government officials continue to use fake news stories to justify their politicized investigations and targeting. (The Washington Pundit, 9/07/2023)  (Archive)

September 8, 2023 – A fourth IRS supervisor testifies he recommended IRS whistleblower Gary Shapely be removed from Hunter Biden case; also confirms prosecutors in DC and California blocked David Weiss from charging Hunter Biden

Darrell Waldon (Credit: public domain)

IRS agent Darrell Waldon echoed IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley’s testimony that prosecutors in Washington, DC, and California previously blocked now-special counsel David Weiss from charging Hunter Biden in those jurisdictions.

“Mr. Weiss went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office — I can’t recall the dates — and they did not agree to prosecute the case in D.C.,” Waldon told the House Ways and Means Committee during a transcribed interview in September, the Washington Examiner reported.

“I’m aware that it was presented to the District of Columbia and, at some point, the Central District of California, I believe,” he added.

Waldon’s transcribed interview comes after he previously confirmed Shapley’s claims in April of political interference. Waldon later left the Hunter Biden case for another responsibility within the IRS.

As the investigation progressed, Weiss never charged Hunter Biden in the jurisdictions of Washington, DC, or California. Instead, he formed a sweetheart plea agreement with Hunter Biden that collapsed in July under judicial scrutiny. Shapley’s testimony in April reportedly triggered the plea deal, filed in Delaware. Weiss later brought three gun-related charges in Delaware against Hunter Biden.

The recent testimony by Waldon, who was Shapley’s boss, is notable because Attorney General Merrick Garland testified Wednesday that nobody had the authority to block Weiss from charging Hunter Biden, though “they could refuse to partner with him.”

“You said [Weiss] had complete authority, but he’d already been turned down. He wanted to bring an action in D.C. and the US Attorney there said, ‘No, you can’t’ — and then you go tell the U.S. Senate, under oath, that he has complete authority?” House Oversight Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked.

“No one had the authority to turn him down; they could refuse to partner with him.” Garland replied.

“You can use whatever language — ‘refuse to partner’ is turning down,” Jordan replied.

“It is not the same under a well-known Justice Department practice,” Garland claimed.

Waldon previously confirmed Shapley’s notes presented to Congress regarding an October 7, 2022, meeting between Waldon, Shapley, and Weiss, among others. “Darrell asked me to shoot an update from today’s meeting. Darrell — feel free to comment if I miss anything,” the top line of the email read.

In point two of the email to Waldon, Shapley recapped that “Weiss stated he is not the deciding person of whether charges are filed. I believe this is a huge problem — inconsistent with DOJ public position and Merrick Garland testimony.”

Waldon replied to Shapley, “Thanks, Gary. You covered it all”:

(Read more: Breitbart, 9/23/2023) (Archive)

IRS Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon told the House Ways and Means Committee in closed-door testimony on Friday that he suggested Shapley’s removal due to a “perceived” bias, according to Fox News.

“So before I left the special agent in charge position, in February, I recommended to [IRS Director of Field Operations Michael Batdorf] that Gary Shapley be removed as the [supervisory special agent] from the Hunter Biden investigation, primarily due to what I perceived to be unsubstantiated allegations about motive, intent, bias,” Waldon said.

“And, again, my goal was to protect the integrity of the investigation and figure out a way forward.”

(Read more: The Local Report, 9/15/2023)  (Archive)

September 9, 2023 – Marco Polo posts an IRS pictorial directory naming agents who were involved in the Biden investigation

The IRS is the first of several agency pictorial directories we will publish.

The news this summer surrounding the U.S. pResident & his family has been dominated by the testimony & exhibits produced by Gary Shapley, a Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) from the IRS. Shapley was one of the lead agents of the “Sportsman” investigation, a code name which the FBI created for the federal inquiry into the U.S. pResident’s degenerate & corrupt second son.

Marco Polo takes the final clause of the First Amendment more seriously than perhaps any group in America — it is essential that we petition our Government for a redress of grievances. To properly do that, you need to know not only names but also faces, backgrounds, biases, etc of the feds involved. To that end, we present below our first rundown of who precisely at the IRS was/is involved in this total fiasco and miscarriage of justice: media.marcopolousa.org/pdf/irsdirectory.pdf

The corruption & bureaucracy is so expansive that only when faces are memorized can one begin to deeply understand the sins committed.

Next up: The DOJ, then the FBI, & finally the US Attorney’s office in Delaware.

(As always, we are attentive to — and abide by — 18 USC § 119.)

–Garrett Ziegler
Founder

Marco Polo (EIN: 61-199994) has established a legal defense fund to fight back against the egregious lawfare from Kevin Morris & Joey B’s other proxies, which you can find here: donorbox.org/mplegalfund

(MarcoPoloUSA/Substack, 9/09/2023)
(Archive)

September 11, 2023 – Benghazi hero agrees Hillary Clinton is ‘one of the most disgusting humans on the planet’ – ‘worse than her husband’

Mark Geist (Credit: Screenshot/YouTube/Shawn Ryan Show)

Mark “Oz” Geist, a member of the CIA Annex Security Team that fought during the 2012 Benghazi attack, agreed with host Shawn Ryan’s assessment of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a Monday appearance on “The Shawn Ryan Show.”

Ryan rattled off some facts about the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. mission and diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, saying Geist had been shot 22 times and saved dozens of lives in the process. The attack claimed the lives of four Americans, including then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens.

“It was, once again, one of the most incompetent times of American leadership,” Ryan said. “And, um, I know it strikes a chord with you. I can’t even imagine.”

Ryan said the Benghazi attack and lack of accountability resonated with at least half of the country.

“I think, at the time [Obama got elected] — and this is the opinion of Mark Geist — Hillary Clinton saw her chance to put together a coalition and go after ‘the bad guy,’” Geist said, referring to then-Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. “That’s when Ambassador Stevens … in 2011, was pushed into Benghazi, along with a team to put together the coalition of militias to fight against Gaddafi.”

“And Hillary Clinton put together the coalition of foreign countries  — Germany, Italy, France, the U.S. and a few others — those were the big four, to get rid of Gaddafi. … I remember hearing that Gaddafi’s sons, this was in 2011, were in D.C. trying to negotiate with the U.S. to allow their father to exile to a third country.”

Geist said that, in his opinion, Clinton “wanted to have a platform to run on in 2016 that said, ‘Look what I did, I overthrew this country, I put this coalition together and we got rid of one of the worst bad guys in the world.’”

“Hillary Clinton is one of the most disgusting human beings on the planet,” Ryan said.

“Very much so,” Geist agreed.

“Always has been, always will be.”

“She’s worse than her husband,” Geist said.

(Read more: Daily Caller, 9/14/2023)  (Archive)

September 11, 2023 – Trump seeks to recuse DC Judge Tanya Chutkan

September 12, 2023 – A third IRS official says Justice Department blocked Weiss from charging Hunter Biden

A third IRS official confirmed that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss faced roadblocks when attempting to bring charges against Hunter Biden, contradicting denials issued Wednesday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Michael Batdorf (Credit: public domain)

IRS Director of Field Operations Michael Batdorf told the House Ways and Means Committee in a closed-door interview on Sept. 12 that he felt “frustrated” by the refusal of the Justice Department to approve tax charges that IRS agents viewed as well-supported by evidence, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by the Washington Examiner.

He also said the IRS removed agent Gary Shapley, a whistleblower, from the Hunter Biden case at the direction of Weiss despite having done nothing wrong.

Batdorf’s testimony was the latest piece of evidence to suggest Weiss did not enjoy the unfettered authority to pursue Hunter Biden that Garland and others claimed he had.

Still, Batdorf, who was above Shapley in the IRS chain of command, stopped short of attributing the DOJ’s actions to bias in favor of President Joe Biden.

In addition to the two Joe Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys who refused to allow Weiss to bring charges against Hunter Biden in their districts, Batdorf said the DOJ Tax Division opposed bringing charges.

Batdorf said DOJ Tax argued against charges for Hunter Biden during a June 2022 meeting with Weiss and IRS officials, who were in favor of advancing the case.

“DOJ Tax would have to authorize charges prior to David Weiss recommending an indictment or prosecution,” Batdorf said during his interview.

“So, I mean, my understanding is that, I mean, he can’t make that decision without DOJ Tax authorization,” Batdorf said.

The IRS supervisor confirmed that Hunter Biden’s defense team was given an unusual number of chances, possibly as many as four, to meet with DOJ Tax investigators and argue why its client should not face charges. (Read more: Washington Examiner, 9/21/2023)  (Archive)

September 12, 2023 – House Subcommittee on Coronavirus Pandemic report: CIA bribed analysts to conceal Wuhan lab leak truth

New evidence provided by the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic shows that the CIA allegedly provided “monetary incentives” (no semantical elaboration provided) to its own analysts to abandon their conclusions that COVID originated in a dingy communist lab in China.

Via New York Post (emphasis added):

“The Central Intelligence Agency offered to pay off analysts in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, new whistleblower testimony to Congress alleges.

A senior-level CIA officer told House committee leaders that his agency tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans, according to a letter sent Tuesday to CIA Director William Burns.

Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA’s COVID Discovery Team by Sept. 26.”

From the Subcommittee’s letter to CIA chief William Burns (emphasis added):

“The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (Select Subcommittee) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) (together “the Committees”) have received new and concerning whistleblower testimony regarding the Agency’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

A multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer has come forward to provide information to the Committees regarding the Agency’s analysis into the origins of COVID-19. According to the whistleblower, the Agency assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team (Team). The Team consisted of multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise. According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis. The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive* to change their position.”

*”Monetary incentive” is obviously an amorphous phrase that could mean any number of things from direct cash payments to promises of promotions. These claims necessitate further investigation – not by the CIA but by a trusted authority, to the extent that there is such a thing left anywhere in the public domain.

It’s increasingly common knowledge that COVID emerged as a joint CCP-US government partnership spearheaded by still-unindicted former NIAID head Anthony Fauci who used the Chinese lab to skirt a prohibition on dangerous gain-of-function issued by federal authorities in 2014.

Yet, were the CIA, Fauci, NIH, et al. to have had their way, the massive censorship effort undertaken to prevent the truth from emerging would have potentially obscured COVID’s true provenance forever – an attempted cover-up of unprecedented proportions that cries out for punishment of those conspirators responsible. (Read more: Armageddon Prose/Substack, 9/15/2023)  (Archive)

September 12, 2023 – Ex-FBI agent Timothy Thibault, accused of Biden laptop cover-up, meets with Congress

(Credit: Newsweek)

A former senior FBI official who has become a top target for Republicans in their Hunter Biden investigation met with the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning.

Timothy Thibault, who worked as an assistant special agent in charge in the FBI’s Washington Field Office, was seen entering the committee’s main meeting room at about 10 a.m. accompanied by two others. They did not take any questions.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and committee member Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) were also seen joining Thibault in the meeting.

Thibault’s appearance comes after House Republicans sent the former FBI official numerous letters while they were in the minority asking him to voluntarily appear for an interview with the committee, but they were met with pushback from Thibault’s legal counsel.

Committee Republicans have said they are investigating allegations made by FBI whistleblowers that Thibault worked to shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden while Thibault worked at the FBI and that he pushed to inflate the number of cases of domestic violent extremism the FBI was handling.

His meeting with the committee comes against the backdrop of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announcing Tuesday that he directed Jordan and two other chairmen, Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Jason Smith (R-MO), to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden based on allegations that he was inappropriately involved in his son’s business dealings when he was vice president.

Thibault, whose communication with the committee could now be used as evidence in the broader impeachment inquiry, left the FBI in August 2022 as allegations against him began to make headlines, though he said through his legal counsel at the time that the move was a planned retirement and nothing more.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who first made mention of Thibault last year, also accused the former FBI official of political bias and pointed to an example of Thibault reposting a comment on social media from the “Never Trump” Lincoln Project that said, “Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man.”

(…) Committee Republicans have said they are investigating allegations made by FBI whistleblowers that Thibault worked to shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden while Thibault worked at the FBI and that he pushed to inflate the number of cases of domestic violent extremism the FBI was handling. (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 9/12/ 2023)  (Archive)

September 13, 2023 – House Oversight Committee: 20 examples of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling schemes

There is mounting evidence that Joe Biden was involved in his family’s influence peddling schemes, including while he served as Vice President. However, Democrats and their corporate media allies continue to ignore this overwhelming evidence as they seek to distract the American people from the Biden family’s corruption. Below are over 20 examples of Joe Biden’s involvement.

1) In July 2023, former Biden business associate Devon Archer described how Joe Biden was “The Brand” and was used to send “signals” of power, access, and influence to enrich the Biden family from foreign sources.

2) Devon Archer alone was aware of at least 20 times in which then-Vice President Biden spoke on speakerphone with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates. Democrats would have Americans believe that these phone calls with then-Vice President Biden were simply to discuss the weather.

3) In February 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden dined with oligarchs from Russia and Kazakhstan who funneled millions of dollars to Hunter Biden and his business associates.

4) In April 2015, then-Vice President Biden dined with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates, including Ukrainian Burisma executive Vadym Pozharsky. Burisma was then being investigated by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin for corruption.

5) Then-Vice President Biden had coffee with Hunter Biden’s Chinese business associate, Jonathan Li of BHR, in Beijing and wrote a college letter of recommendation for his daughter.

6) In 2015, then-Vice President Biden hosted Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and other business associates at the official residence of the Vice President. The topic of discussion was filling the top seat at the United Nations. The Kazakhstani government official who wanted the U.N. position attended both dinners at Café Milano with then-Vice President Biden.

7) Using the pseudonym “Robert L. Peters,” Vice President Biden was informed by his staff of a call in 2016 with President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko. Copied on that official email? Hunter Biden, who was sitting on the board of the Ukrainian company Burisma.

8) On December 4, 2015, Biden business associate Eric Schwerin wrote to Kate Bedingfield in the Office of the Vice President providing quotes to use in response to media outreach regarding Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Later that day, Ms. Bedingfield responded to Mr. Schwerin saying, “VP signed off on this[.]” According to Devon Archer, after a Burisma board of directors meeting in Dubai on the evening of December 4, 2015, Hunter Biden “called D.C.” to discuss pressure that Burisma asked him to relieve.

9) In May 2017, James Gilliar, a Biden family associate, emailed Hunter Biden and other associates to formalize how they would divide the profit from their deal with CEFC, a Chinese Communist Party linked energy company. Gilliar indicated Joe Biden would receive 10 percent, which has been confirmed by former Biden family associate, Tony Bobulinski.

10) On May 20, 2017, James Gilliar told Tony Bobulinksi, another business associate, “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face[.] I know u know that but they are paranoid[.]”

10 more examples of evidence:

(Read more: House Oversight Committee, 9/13/2023) (Archive)

September 14, 2023 – Hunter Biden is indicted on three gun charges

(Credit: Inside Edition)

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has been indicted on felony gun charges in Delaware, according to a partially redacted court filing by Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel David Weiss.

Biden was indicted Thursday on three counts for providing false statements and knowingly possessing the gun while he was addicted to drugs, in connection with the acquisition of a Colt Cobra revolver in October 2018, the indictment states. He faces a maximum prison sentence of ten years for the first and third offenses, with the second offense holding a maximum of five years, according to a defendant information sheet.

“Robert Hunter Biden, provided a written statement on Form 4473 certifying that he was not an unlawful user of, and addicted to, any stimulant narcotic drug, and any other controlled substance, when in fact, as he knew, the statement was false and fictitious,” the indictment reads. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/14/2023) (Archive)

Jonathan Turley breaks down the ‘conspicuous’ elements of the indictment:

“It’s conspicuous, as you’ve noted, as Chairman Comer noted, as to what was not charged. They were giving out FARA charges against Trump officials with great speed and alacrity. You know, they hit Paul Manafort with charges based on the same facts,” Turley told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “What the media is ignoring is these uncharged crimes do have one common possible motive. When you don’t declare yourself a foreign agent, when you don’t declare income, when you create these questionable international transfers, all of them can be effectively succeed in hiding that trail.”

“If you declare income, you got to say where the income came from. If you declare yourself a foreign agent, you have to explain what you’re doing for foreign governments and if you create this labyrinth of accounts through different shell companies and through different banks, it makes it hard for people to see those transfers,” Turley continued. “All of that fits a unified theory of an influence peddling scheme that involved potential criminal acts so I think it’s rather obvious that the one outlier, the gun charge, is the only thing that has been charged.”

September 14, 2023 – Fired FBI agent, Peter Strzok, wants an FBI unit to protect agents from Americans

Disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok, who now spreads disinformation on MSNBC, wants an FBI unit to protect agents from Americans. They already have all the power they need since they weaponized the department, but nonetheless, he wants more power to go after Americans. This shows you how dangerous a national police force is. He has the same idea your ordinary dictator has had.

Nicole Wallace is a partisan activist who sows anti-Republican discontent nightly on MSNBC. She thinks Americans terrorize the FBI. This is as the Biden administration terrorizes Americans. So ironic.

Wallace held a panel discussion, and one of the guests was the mundane, reliably anti-Republican Strzok. Mr. Strzok said we need a special unit to protect FBI agents from Americans.

“In my opinion, we’re not doing enough. I mean, look, when push comes to shove, absolutely, the FBI and DOJ need to band together and protect their personnel to allow them to do their job. They’re going to do it, but they need to be able to do it without fear for their lives. When the FBI was fighting Al Capone, there was not a unit dedicated to protecting FBI personnel, and the FBI was fighting organized crime families in New York and all around the US. There was not a unit dedicated to protecting FBI personnel.”

The FBI and DOJ classify everyday Americans, like parents at board meetings, as domestic terrorists. They call J6 rioters terrorists. This is who he’s talking about, along with Republican congressmen.

(Read more: Independent Sentinel, 9/14/2023) (Archive)

September 2023 – Ex FBI agent, Timothy Thibault, testifies FBI received evidence from second informant (Schweizer) in Biden case, but was labeled as disinformation and shut down

A retired FBI supervisor has revealed to Congress that the bureau’s Washington field office had a second “politically connected” informant providing information relevant to the Biden family investigation, but was asked to shut down the source in the fall of 2020 shortly before Joe Biden was elected president, Just the News has learned.

Retired Special Agent Timothy Thibault, the former No. 2 supervisor in the FBI’s Washington field office, told the House Judiciary Committee last week in a transcribed interview he was somewhat taken aback when he received the request from the lead agent in the Hunter Biden tax case in October 2020 to shut down the confidential human source (CHS).

“It shocked me a bit because I’m, like, the purpose of – a confidential informant is to support a case,” Thibault told investigators in portions of a transcript reviewed by Just the News.

Thibault did not further identify the source in his testimony, but best-selling author Peter Schweizer told Just the News Sunday that he believes he is the person described in the transcript based on past comments from Thibault and after The New York Times recently suggested the FBI had received information in the Hunter Biden case from a “right-wing author.”

Schweizer said the FBI approached him and he provided to agents evidence about possible criminality in fall 2020. He said there was no politics involved, just facts and he pushed back on the narrative of the Times, noting its journalists reported on the Hillary Clinton-funded Steele dossier submitted to the FBI in 2016.

“There are no ‘right wing facts’ or ‘left wing facts.’ There are only facts,” he said. “And of course they happily accepted the unsubstantiated and unsourced dossier from Hillary Clinton’s lawyer without reservation.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan summoned Thibault for the interview as he investigates allegations that U. S. Attorney, David Weiss and is team did not follow normal investigative procedures when probing Hunter Biden and his family’s overseas business dealings.

Thibault retired after revelations he had made anti-Trump posts on social media while an agent, and has been a target of sharp criticism from some Republicans, including Sen. Charles Grassley, (R-Iowa). (Read more: Just the News, 9/17/2023)  (Archive)

September 15-17, 2023 – Smith files “narrowly tailored motion” to gag Trump; Turley: “It is neither narrow nor wise”

(Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Alex Brandon/ AP)

Jonathan Turley has an updated and expanded version of his NYPost article on Jack Smith’s motion to gag Trump pre-trial. Turley has long questioned the use of gag orders on First Amendment gournds. Such orders, as I noted recently, have become rather common in federal trials. In past tweets and articles on the Trump case Turley continued that trajectory, but he also maintains that this gag order would be particularly dangerous because this trial is different—it is essentially based in politics and, thus, any gag order would necessarily involve political speech. I think he explains this well. I certainly hope that the collusion of the prosecutor and the openly biased judge in this case does lead to the early appeal that Turley foresees.

Of course, Smith has a history of patently politically motivated prosecutions—prosecutions clearly designed to take out Republican politicians who show potential on the national scene. That was clearly the case with his prosecution of former VA governor Bob McDonnell—which destroyed McDonnell politically but was trashed 9-0 by the SCOTUS. The merits of the prosecution itself wasn’t the point for Smith—the point was a hit on a Republican politician who might pose a threat for the presidency. It may turn out, however, that the American public has wised up to lawfare tactics and that this scheme to gag a populist enemy of the Ruling Class will backfire—by creating more sympathy rather than less for Smith’s, and the Ruling Class’s, target.

Follow the link for the whole expanded article. Here I excerpt what I take to be the nub of the case:

Gagging Donald: Turley Slams Smith’s “Narrowly Tailored Motion” To Silence Trump

Below is a longer version of my column in the New York Post on the gag order motion docketed Friday night in Washington, D.C. by Special Counsel Jack Smith. While described by Smith as “narrowly tailored,” even a cursory consideration of the broad scope and vague terms belies such a claim. It would sharply limit the ability of former President Donald Trump to publicly discuss the evidence and allegations in a case that is now at the center of the presidential campaign.

…

Smith seeks to bar comments “regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses” and “statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating.”

Gag orders have become commonplace in federal trials, particularly high-profile cases.

I have criticized the increasing use of gag orders for years due to concerns over the free speech. Typical orders often seek to shutdown public comments in the interests of protecting jury pools. Even “narrower” orders are written with vague terminology like “disparaging” and “intimidating” that expose defendants to punitive action if they cross uncertain lines in public defending themselves. No one seriously questions the ability of courts to limit the release of sealed material or to bar threatening comments directed at jurors, witnesses, or court staff. Moreover, there are laws on the books allowing for the prosecution of cases of threats or efforts to influence jurors or witnesses.

More importantly, this is no typical case.

Smith has pushed for a trial before the election and the court inexplicably shoehorned the trial into a crowded calendar just before the Super Tuesday election.

Judge Chutkan previously stated that “I cannot and I will not factor into my decisions how it will factor into a political campaign.”

This motion, however, would impose substantial limits on a national political debate and begs the question of whether the court is failing to balance the rivaling constitutional interests in this unprecedented situation.

It could not only test Chutkan’s position but prompt an early appeal.

One of the top issues in this presidential campaign is Trump’s insistence that the Justice Department and the criminal justice system have been weaponized by Democrats.

He was running on that issue even before the four separate criminal cases were filed against him in Florida, Georgia, New York, and Washington, D.C.

More importantly, it is an issue that is resonating with tens of millions of Americans.

One poll showed 62% of the public viewed the prosecutions as “politically motivated.”

Think about that. Here we have a candidate running for the presidency, with broad public support. One of his key issues is the Dem weaponizing of DoJ for political purposes, and public support also revolves around this issue. What happens next? DoJ prosecutes the candidate and attempts to gag him with a wide ranging gag order. It’s difficult to see how the SCOTUS could maintain credibility if it fails to address this gag order, should it be allowed. (Meaning in History/Mark Wauck, 9/18/2023)  (Archive)

September 15, 2023 – House Judiciary Committee subpoenas FBI agent who allegedly lied about Hunter Biden laptop

Chan told the media the 2020 election was the most secure election in history. He added, “People are trying to dispel the disinformation and misinformation that is going on that there are things happening with the election. We don’t see any credible threats at this point.” (Credit: Fox News)

The House Judiciary Committee is sending a subpoena to FBI agent Elvis Chan Friday after the Department of Justice (DOJ) blocked him from testifying in front of the committee about the bureau’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop story, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller.

Chan was expected to testify to the House Judiciary over his involvement with the FBI’s pressure on social media companies to censor the Hunter Biden laptop archive and false statements he appeared to make in November 2022 testimony for the ongoing Missouri v. Biden censorship lawsuit.

He volunteered to interview in front of the committee with his personal counsel, according to the letter. Chan’s interview did not end up taking place because the Department of Justice (DOJ) brought agency counsel to the interview, despite Chan’s decision to be represented by his personal counsel. Witnesses cannot be represented by agency counsel and personal counsel during interviews, per committee rules.

The Daily Mail first reported on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) effort to shut down his testimony by bringing an agency counsel to his interview.

“Today, after an FBI employee traveled across the country to voluntarily participate in a scheduled interview, he was denied the right to have his chosen legal counsel accompany him,” the FBI said in a statement to the Daily Caller. “Upon arrival at the Capitol, Committee staff directed agency counsel to leave the premises, and the interview was unable to proceed.”

Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, shared internal Facebook documents in August showing that Chan lied during his previous testimony about his meetings with tech companies regarding the Hunter Biden laptop.

“Internal FB docs reveal that an FBI Special Agent made false statements in testimony about the FBI’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Jordan tweeted.

Elvis Chan was the conduit between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and social media platforms ahead of the 2020 presidential election, according to internal documents known as the “Twitter files” and the House Judiciary Committee.

Chan and FITF Section Chief Laura Dehmlow met with Facebook on Oct. 14, 2020, when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in the New York Post, she testified in July. The FBI told Facebook “no comment” on whether the laptop was real, despite their knowledge that the laptop archive was real. Hunter Biden’s laptop contents have been verified by the Daily Caller News Foundation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/15/2023) (Archive)

September 18, 2023 – DOJ gives Ray Epps the James Wolfe treatment – charged with one misdemeanor count; Judge Boasberg presides

Ray Epps whispers in Ryan Samsel’s ear who then carries out a breach of the police barricades on January 6, 2021. (Credit: public domain)

The man who was seen on multiple video tapes urging the January 6th crowd to storm the Capitol building, the previously well-known agent provocateur Ray Epps, has been charged by the DOJ with one misdemeanor count of “Disorderly or Disruptive Conduct.”

Worse still, the announcement from Main Justice comes via the format of an “information” {SEE HERE} which implies a plea deal was already reached as the charge was made public.  Now the DOJ can say they ‘arrested‘ the guy, and simultaneously flip the narrative as evidence he wasn’t a confidential human source.

This velvet glove arrangement bears striking similarity to the DOJ approach when Senate Intelligence Committee head of security, James Wolfe, leaked the Top-Secret Carter Page FISA application, and was only charged with one count of lying to the FBI about it. {Go Deep} But wait… it gets better.  The pre-selected DC judge is none other than, James Boasberg. {Go Deep}  You just can’t make this stuff up folks.

WASHINGTON — Ray Epps, a Jan. 6 participant whose removal from the FBI’s Capitol Violence webpage sparked conspiracy theories that he was a federal informant, was charged in connection with the Capitol attack on Tuesday.

Epps is charged with one misdemeanor count, disorderly or disruptive conduct on restricted grounds. He was charged by information, suggesting that he plans to enter a plea deal. Not long after he was charged, a virtual plea agreement hearing was set for Wednesday, Sept. 20 before Chief Judge James Boasberg. (read more)

He doesn’t even have to show up in court for the DOJ to have Judge Boasberg rubber stamp the issue.

(Conservative Treehouse, 9/19/2023) (Archive)

September 19, 2023 – DHS Mayorkas appoints primary Trump-Russia conspiracy agents as “expert group” to identify domestic terrorists and disinformation

If you put the individual names within this group in the search bar, you will discover their connection.  Most of them were the primary background operatives who pushed the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy in ’16, ’17, ’18 and ’19.

With names like James Clapper (DNI), John Brennan (CIA), Tashina Guahar (DOJ-NSD), David Kris (DOJ-NSD, FISA), Paul Kolbe (CIA) and Benjamin Wittes (Lawfare), what you will find is that this specific group are functionaries of the corrupt intelligence apparatus that framed the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense.  This is the team now that will define for DHS how to focus their future targeting efforts.

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) Ken Wainstein, and Counterterrorism Coordinator Nicholas Rasmussen announced the establishment of the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group (Experts Group). The group is comprised of private sector experts who will provide their unique perspectives on the federal government’s intelligence enterprise to DHS’s I&A and the Office of the Counterterrorism Coordinator.

“The security of the American people depends on our capacity to collect, generate, and disseminate actionable intelligence to our federal, state, local, territorial, tribal, campus, and private sector partners,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas. “I express my deep gratitude to these distinguished individuals for dedicating their exceptional expertise, experience, and vision to our critical mission.”

“The Homeland Intelligence Experts Group is being formed at a time of unprecedented challenge, with the U.S. intelligence enterprise facing threats from a range of malign actors, to include foreign nation-state adversaries, domestic violent extremists, cyber criminals, drug-trafficking cartels and other transnational criminal organizations,” said Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Ken Wainstein. “The Experts Group will be an invaluable asset as we navigate through this evolving threat and operating environment and continue to strengthen our efforts to protect the Homeland.”

“The homeland threat environment is more diverse, dynamic, and challenging than at any point in our post 9/11 history, with threats tied to an array of different terrorist and violent extremist ideologies and narratives,” said Counterterrorism Coordinator Nicholas Rasmussen. “The experience, expertise, and perspective offered by Experts Group members will undoubtedly put the Department in a strong position to confront this threat landscape, and we are grateful for the willingness of the Experts Group members to serve in this important capacity.”

The Experts Group will provide DHS with a wide range of views and perspectives, with a membership that includes former senior intelligence officials, journalists, and prominent human rights and civil liberties advocates. (read more)

Keep in mind, the organization of this group follows the announcement that DHS will be launching online “Enhanced AI” to assist the government in combating  information they deem dangerous to national security.   Put the two together, and I think we can see who will be doing the “defining” of what constitutes “dangerous”.

You will notice I use the term “definition” quite often.  That is because the root of every control mechanism is grounded upon defining things.  When you accept the terms ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation’, and/or ‘malinformation’, you are buying into the process that permits definitions to determine your travel. Those who define both you and your destination, ultimately control your online experience.

Pay very, very close attention to the two underlined words in the following paragraph:

Take out the word “improper” and the admission is, DHS uses AI to profile, target and discriminate.  In the second sentence, DHS currently participates in systemic, indiscriminate and/or large-scale monitoring, surveillance, or tracking of individuals.  The only thing those sentences in the paragraph say, is that DHS will not allow AI to create improper outcomes within a system that already exists.

The assembly of a Homeland Intelligence Experts Group gives us the names of those who will be organizing the definitions.

Do not get alarmed, get informed. (Conservative Treehouse, 9/19/2023)  (Archive)

RESOURCES:

Using AI for Content Moderation

Facebook / META / Tech joining with DHS

Zoom will allow Content Scraping by AI 

AI going into The Cloud

U.S. Govt Going into The Cloud With AI

Pentagon activates 175 Million IP’s 👀**ahem**

Big Names to Attend Political AI Forum

DoD to use AI to monitor U.S. Internet for Disinformation

DHS Announces Guidelines for Using AI to monitor Americans.

DHS Announces “Expert Group”

September 20, 2023 – Former Capitol Police Chief Sund testifies he had 3 calls with Pelosi on Jan. 6 and has the proof – Pelosi said they never spoke

A House Oversight Subcommittee hearing with former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven A. Sund, September 19, 2023. (Credit: Cspan clipping)

On Tuesday, the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight held a hearing titled, “Oversight of United States Capitol Security: Assessing Security Failures on January 6, 2021.”

Rep. Barry Loudermilk heads the subcommittee. Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven A. Sund testified before the committee.

Chief Steven Sund has been outspoken of Nancy Pelosi and her failures to secure the US Capitol that day.

It has been widely reported that President Trump asked for the National Guard three days in advance of January 6. But Pelosi turned him down.  She refused to call in the National Guard despite numerous warnings of possible violence.

Pelosi then refused to turn over information about her culpability in the security breakdown during the Jan. 6 riot for over a year to congressional investigators.

Steven A. Sund, the Capitol Police chief on that fateful day, not only confirms her culpability along with the rest of the Democratic leadership. Sund reported that Pelosi utilized him as a scapegoat and forced him to step down as Police Chief. We all know now she was just trying to obfuscate her own responsibility for the attack.

The day after January 6, Nancy Pelosi blamed Chief Sund for the security failures that day.  Pelosi insisted she never spoke with Chief Sund the entire day.

On Tuesday Chief Steven Sund refuted Pelosi. Sund told the subcommittee he spoke with Pelosi three times on January 6 (while she was running the building with her film crew.)

Rep. Bryan Steil: Chief Sund, in your transcribed interview, you mentioned that you met with the House Sergeant at Arms regarding the National Guard prior to January 6. Is that correct?

Chief Sund: Yes, sir.

Rep. Steil: And who is the House Sergeant Arms leading up to and on January 6?

Chief Sund: That would be Paul Irving.

Rep. Steil: And the House Sergeant Arms is appointed. By who?

Chief Sund: He was appointed at that time by Speaker Pelosi.

Rep. Steil: And in your transcribed interview, you mentioned that when you first brought up the National Guard to the House Sergeant at Arms in the days leading up to January 6, that Mr. Irving said he, quote, “didn’t like the optics,” end quote, is that correct?

Chief Sund: That is correct. He referenced being concerned for optics.

Rep. Steil: And on January 6, when he went to Mr. Irving to get his approval to call in the Guard, mr. Irving said he would, quote, run it up the chain. Is that correct?

Chief Sund: Sir. That was a telephone call. I didn’t see him in person when I first made that request.

Rep. Steil: The House Sergeant Arms is considered probably the most senior security official on the House side. When Mr. Irving says he has to, quote, run it up the chain, end quote, what did that mean?

Chief Sund: I took that to mean his leadership chain.

Rep. Steil: And who would be his leadership chain? He’s functionally the most senior security official on the House side, correct?

Chief Sund: Yes, sir. That was a telephone call. I didn’t see him in person when I first made that request.

Rep. Steil: The House Sergeant Arms is considered probably the most senior security official on the House side. When Mr. Irving says he has to, quote, run it up the chain, end quote, what did that mean?

Chief Sund: I took that to mean his leadership chain.

Rep. Steil:  And who would be his leadership chain? He’s functionally the most senior security official on the House side, correct?

Chief Sund: That’s his title. That’s part of the title. The senior law enforcement official for the House of Representatives. But he would have been referring to the leadership team that goes up to Speaker Pelosi.

Rep. Steil: So the political leadership team, meaning elected officials, not another security official, is that.

Chief Sund: That is correct, sir. He’s the top security official for the House.

Rep. Steil: So running up the chain would most likely, in your opinion, is through the Speaker’s office and possibly to Speaker Pelosi?

Chief Sund: That would be where it end, yes.

Rep. Steil: Okay, let’s park that there, and then let’s jump to a second set here. In a press conference on January 7, Speaker Pelosi called for your resignation on national television. Speaker Pelosi also stated that she had not talked to you since the initial breach of the Capitol. But according to your transcribed interview, you were on the phone with Speaker Pelosi a few times. Can you explain that discrepancy?

Chief Sund: Yeah, that is correct. I spoke to Speaker Pelosi three times that evening. And she went on national TV and said, I’d never spoken to her, but I spoke to her three times. Three times were – The first time was when I went over to brief Vice President Pence at the secure location, I had called House Sergeant Arms Irving, and told him I was going over to brief the Vice President. I was also going over to do a personal assessment of the Capitol. At that point, things were getting under control. Went over there, and briefed him on when we can get them back into chambers with Mr. Irving, being fully aware. He said he wanted to get Speaker Pelosi on the phone. He made a phone call from his cell phone at approximately 534, where I first briefed Speaker Pelosi. The second call was when I left that location. As I was walking away, I met up with Mr. Stinger, and we started walking over to the Senate to go brief the Senate when Jennifer Hemingway I believe it was Jennifer Hemingway handed me her cell phone, and it was Emily Barrett’s cell phone calling her, and it was Speaker Pelosi on the other line.

This was my second call with Speaker Pelosi questioning the information I’d given to Vice President Pence about when we can get back into chambers. I assured her that information was correct. I could get them back into chamber by 07:00 P.M., and the call ended. That was call number two. Call number three was 06:25 p.m.. I was over at the Senate from the secure location I mean, from where the Senate had been sequestered. And on a cell phone, using Robert Caram’s cell phone, they dialed leadership, who was over off site at a secure location, and I briefed all of leadership of the plans to get them back into chambers. That would have been call number three with Speaker Pelosi.

Rep. Steil: So you didn’t have one call. You didn’t have two calls. You had three calls. So Speaker Pelosi’s comments that she didn’t speak to you are inaccurate?

Chief Sund: That is correct, sir.

Chief Steven Sund later told the subcommittee he can provide documentation to prove what he was saying was accurate.

Why would Pelosi lie about such a statement if she was not worried about her own actions that day? This should be investigated.  Pelosi needs to be called in under oath.  In fact the January 6 Committee should have called her in to testify when they started their faux investigation.  They didn’t.  And now we are starting to find out why Pelosi was ignored by the horrible leftists on that fake committee. (Gateway Pundit, 9/19/2023)  (Archive)

September 20, 2023 – A collection of questions posed to Merrick Garland at House Judiciary Committee hearing

FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin covers the hearing:

 

September 20, 2023 – A massive J6 database surfaces, engineered by ‘Sedition Hunter,’ a DHS front group

The Gateway Pundit has obtained THOUSANDS OF HOURS OF J6 FOOTAGE from “Sedition Hunter” online crowdsourcing groups.

Sedition Hunters are typically Antifa activists who define themselves as part of an anonymous group that tracks, identifies, and reports Trump supporters and protesters who attended the January 6 protests in Washington DC to the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Defense attorneys representing J6 defendants have access to over 41,000 hours of January 6 footage but are prohibited from publicly disclosing the footage until it is exhibited in discovery in a defendant’s trial.

J6 defendants typically view their discovery for the first time during trial.

GOP members of Congress have refused to release the footage to the American people.

In June, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green announced just three journalists were granted access to the footage, the Georgia Republican claimed groups like Sedition Hunters would use the footage to “hurt innocent people.”

But The Gateway Pundit has confirmed that Sedition Hunters have obtained nearly all the footage and have spent years documenting every aspect, angle, and dimension of the Capitol Riot.

Below is a copy of a spreadsheet compiled by Sedition Hunters containing links to thousands of hours of J6 CCTV footage, police body cams and more.

The document outlines minute-by-minute accounts linked to available video, from January 6th.

Open-Source Intelligence, Capitol Security Footage, Bodycams, J6 Deaths After J6 by Alicia Powe

The high-tech resources “hundreds of volunteer” Sedition Hunters have dedicated to cataloging thousands of hours of footage and tracking subjects with synchronized videos is shocking.

Their time invested in doxing demonstrators and creating highly advanced massive databases chronicling the events of January 6, akin to Nazis of Hitler’s Third Reich, is alarming

Yet, the evidence compiled by the left-wing reportedly government-contracted is already playing a significant role in helping the defense of political prisoners tangled in the Justice Department’s unprecedented j6 probe of conservative voters.

Many J6 prosecutions and indictments reference unnamed “confidential informants” of “known reliability” in reference to the Sedition Hunters group and those like it.

In practice, however, the government appears to be referencing its own agents posing as a citizens group to utilize illegally obtained evidence and use its high-end software and technology to conduct the mass surveillance and indictment of conservative voters.

Members of the intelligence community suspect footage they have compiled in several sophisticated databases was collected by the government through the Department of Homeland Security and its many contractors.

The feds utilized IMSI catchers, cellphone intercept technology, to identify and catalog every individual in the nation’s Capitol on January 6, a cyber security expert who analyzed the Sedition Hunters databases explained in an exclusive interview with The Gateway Pundit.

“The government appears to have provided IMSI-derived data to pseudo-investigative organizations like Sedition Hunters,” the intel analyst, who asked his name be withheld, said. “There’s great likelihood all of the organizations that work to identify J6 protesters are working with tips from the feds.

“Sedition hunters used IMSI-derived data to identify individuals on social media and across the internet platforms and scrape their images.”

The sedition hunter website Jan6Evidence.com contains a time-colored interactive map of every individual and group surrounding the Capitol building on Jan. 6. According to the website, the map was created by “contributors including data scientists, academic researchers, software engineers, and many others.”

“All are motivated by a desire to understand what happened on January 6 and why. Most wish to remain anonymous,” the website states.

The pseudo investigators, who also herald themselves as “Capitol Hunters” of the “Capital Terrorist Attack” did the bulwark of the groundwork for the FBI to secure more arrests, the cyber security expert argued.

“Sedition Hunters established the initial ‘probable cause’ for federal authorities to indict specific people who attended January 6th,” he said. “Establishing that critical first ‘link’ between grainy footage from security cameras and the names of specific people in the United States was necessary to start the criminal prosecution process.

“This fraud in making the initial identification is known within government circles as ‘parallel construction,’ where evidence is obtained illegally and admitted into court. It is laundered through other sources to help conceal the true source of the information. This law enforcement technique is used to obtain warrants, secure indictments, and make the critical first identification of a suspect.”

Approximately 1,146 defendants have been arrested in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021, according to the Department of Justice.

As the DOJ continues to expand its J6 probe, the sedition-hunting ‘citizen’ group continues to spoon-feed federal authorities information to bring charges to the estimated 80,000 protesters who attended the Stop The Steal protest.

Immediately after discovering a Sedition Hunter spreadsheet linked to hours of J6 footage, J6 defendant Eric Clark downloaded the entirety of the footage and began posting each segment from the riot on Twitter.

In the past week, Clark has already assisted four J6 defendants with isolating footage that will be used in their discovery to which they are barred access.

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 9/20/2023) (Archive)

September 21, 2023 – Jim Jordan issues second subpoena to FBI agent, Elvis Chan, who fled the country

FBI Agent Elvis Chan skipped a scheduled interview with Congress and Congress is not happy. Rep. Jim Jordan sends a letter to Elvis Chan along with a subpoena ordering him to appear at a future date. (Graphic Credit: Robert Gouveia Esq.)

Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is sending another subpoena to FBI agent Elvis Chan after he left the country when his scheduled interview Sept. 15 fell through, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller.

The House Judiciary Committee is demanding Chan appear for a deposition Oct. 5, 2023, to discuss his role on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) ahead of the 2020 presidential election. House Judiciary subpoenaed Chan on Sept. 15 to give an interview Thursday after a dispute between committee investigators and the DOJ derailed his scheduled interview, the Daily Caller previously reported.

“Based on representations that the date of your deposition conflicts with the dates of your official travel, as an accommodation, the Committee is issuing you a new deposition subpoena that compels your appearance on October 5, 2023,” the letter reads.

House Judiciary notified Chan before his scheduled interview that he was allowed to be legally represented by either his personal counsel or an attorney from the Department of Justice (DOJ), according to emails shared Thursday on Twitter by the committee. The DOJ brought a staff attorney to the scheduled interview, even though Chan agreed to be represented by his personal attorney, and the interview fell apart as a result.

“Today, after an FBI employee traveled across the country to voluntarily participate in a scheduled interview, he was denied the right to have his chosen legal counsel accompany him,” the FBI previously told the Daily Caller in a statement. “Upon arrival at the Capitol, Committee staff directed agency counsel to leave the premises, and the interview was unable to proceed.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/21/2023 )   (Archive)

September 21, 2023 – Texas AG Ken Paxton gets to the crux of how the 2020 election was stolen

Via Revolver News, 1/22/2024

(…) Ken [Paxton] appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, where he explained exactly how the Dems stole the 2020 election—the very moment when they stopped counting the votes.

Collin Rugg, the co-founder of Trending Politics, had this to say about the bombshell video:

NEW: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton explains how Democrats stole the election in 2020 when they stopped counting votes on election night.

These are the interviews Tucker would have never been able to have with Fox News 🔥

Paxton explained that vote counting stopped in toss up states so Democrats knew how many mail in ballots the needed to win.

“They needed to figure out was how many real votes there were so they could figure out how many mail-in ballots to apply to the election. That’s what they would’ve done in Texas. I’m convinced.”

This would explain how Trump won 80% of bellwether counties yet lost the election.

Watch:

September 23, 2023 – Zelensky taps ‘Spirit Cooking’ artist who cut pentagrams into her stomach, as new ‘ambassador’ for Ukraine schools

President Volodymyr Zelensky has an interesting collection of ambassadors and spokespersons for the country of Ukraine. Sarah Ashton-Crillo, a trans-identified male Floridian vet of the US Armed Forces was a spokesperson until just this week, when Ashton-Crillo was ousted.

Now, Zelensky has reportedly tapped Serbian experimental performance artist Marina Abramović to help rebuild schools in Ukraine. ‌”I have been invited by Zelensky to be an ambassador of Ukraine, to help the children affected by rebuilding schools and such,” Abramović said.

Abramović’s latest show, at the Royala Academy of Arts in London features “nude gates,” two naked male models, that attendees must traverse to enter the exhibit.

In an interview with the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai, she touted her accomplishment as “the first artist to support the Ukraine war against Russia and to give my voice. It is definitely a repetition of history.” Abramović grew up under communism behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Abramović has a storied career as a controversial performance artist. In one performance art piece, she sat for 700 hours staring at visitors who in turn stared at her. This was viewed by some 750,000. Another piece, called “Thomas Lips,” saw her carving a pentagram into her stomach with a razor, which she has said was not a pentagram but a five-pointed star. She has also burned pentagrams in her work.

Her piece “Rhythm 0,” which she premiered in 1974, saw Abramović stand before an audience for 6 hours and allow them to do anything they wanted to her. She offered 72 objects that they could use, from a feather to a gun. Her question for the piece was “What is the public about, and what are they going to do in this kind of situation?”

As she stood in the gallery, she allowed herself to be assaulted, cut with razor blades, her clothes cut off of her, thorns stabbed into her stomach. One person actually picked up the gun and pointed it at her head. Another person took it away. Many of her pieces have courted death.

When she was 29, she undertook a performance where she burned her body and her hair by lying in the middle of a burning star shape. “There was this one piece where I almost died lying in the burning star,” she told The New York Times in 2012. “My hair was burning; I was burned everywhere. In the morning, my grandmother was in the kitchen making breakfast. She saw me and thought she saw the pure devil and threw everything on the floor and ran away.”

She also held a dinner in which she had invited her friend Tony Podesta, who was the brother of John Podesta, who was running Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She sent an email to Tony, inviting him to a “Spirit Cooking” dinner. This gained her accusations of satanism and being “part of a global paedophile ring.”

The email, revealed during a leak from WikiLeaks of Podesta’s hacked emails, read “Dear Tony, I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina”

InfoWars Alex Jones made the claim in 2016 that “‘Spirit Cooking,’ refers to ‘a sacrament in the religion of Thelema,’ which was founded by alleged ‘satanist Aleister Crowley.'” Jones further said that “‘Spirit Cooking’ involves ‘an occult performance during which menstrual blood, breast milk, urine, and sperm are used to create a ‘painting’.'”

Mike Cernovich wrote that “Clinton’s inner circle includes child traffickers, pedophiles, and now members of a ‘sex cult,’ the recent Podesta emails from Wikileaks reveals.” He said further that “Spirit Cooking also includes symbolic acts of cannibalism,” and offered a video that is no longer available.

“This is something I have been deeply bothered by,” she told The Guardian in 2020. “I’m an artist, I’m not a satanist. They Googled me, and I am perfection to fit a conspiracy theory.”

“Some may look at that video and see a piece of late-’90s performance art,” Intelligencer wrote at the time. “Others, apparently, see a secret society mocking conservatives by rubbing their noses in its satanic deviance (under the guise of self-expression).” (Read more: HumanEvents, 9/23/2023)  (Archive)

September 24, 2023 – Hillary trolls America again; warns Russia may meddle in the 2024 presidential election

 

 

September 24, 2023 – The Canadian Parliament gave standing ovation to Ukrainian Nazi who fought for the Third Reich

The Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation on Friday to a 98-year-old immigrant from Ukraine who fought in a Third Reich military formation accused of war crimes.

The elderly veteran, Yaroslav Hunka was honored during a session in which President Volodomyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine addressed the lawmakers to thank them for their support since Russia invaded his country, saying Canada has always been on “the bright side of history.” The  Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota — who had compared Zelenskyy to Winston Churchill — recognized a “veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.”

The assembly then rose to applaud a man in a khaki uniform standing on the balcony, who saluted, according to this screenshot from Canadian television.

Yaroslav Hunka

The man was identified as Hunka by the Associated Press, which published a photograph showing Zelensky smiling and raising a fist during the ovation.

The AP caption described Hunka as having “fought with the First Ukrainian Division in World War II before later immigrating to Canada.” The First Ukrainian Division is another name for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, the military wing of the Nazi Party; the unit was also called SS Galichina.

This is the same unit that is honored by controversial monuments in Canada, Australia, and, as the Forward recently exposed, the suburbs of Philadelphia and Detroit. Jewish groups have called for their removal.

After a Forward article in August that was followed by coverage in the Philadelphia Inquirer, local television stations and other news outlets, the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia temporarily covered the monument located in a cemetery in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, pending discussions with local Jewish leaders. The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and regional branches of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League had expressed outrage about the monument.

Formed in 1943, SS Galichina was composed of recruits from the Galicia region in western Ukraine. The unit was armed and trained by the Nazis and commanded by German officers. In 1944, the division was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’ willingness to slaughter Poles.”

Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.

During the Nuremberg Trials, the International Military Tribunal declared the Waffen-SS to be a criminal organization responsible for mass atrocities including the “persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program, and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners.”

After the war, thousands of SS Galichina veterans were allowed to resettle in the West, around 2,000 of them in Canada. By then, the unit was universally known as the First Ukrainian Division.  (Read more: Forward, 9/24/2023)  (Archive)  (Video)

September 26, 2023 – Egyptian national indicted with “Gold Bar Bob” Menendez is arrested at Kennedy Airport

Wael Hana photographed in Uruguay (Credit: New York Post)

An Egyptian-American businessman charged with bribing New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez with gold bars tried to distance himself from the alleged crooked pol Tuesday by claiming, through his lawyer, that they weren’t friends.

Wael Hana, 40 – formerly of Edgewater, NJ – pleaded not guilty during a hearing in Manhattan federal court over allegations he bribed the veteran Democrat with at least two one-ounce gold bars, exercise machines, an air purifier and three payments of $10,000 to his wife Nadine Menendez, who is also charged in the scheme.

Outside court after the hearing, Hana’s lawyer Lawrence Lustberg said his client didn’t consider himself pals with the longtime Garden State senator, but admitted he had known Nadine for “many, many years.”

“He pleaded not guilty because he’s not guilty,” Lustberg said.

(…) Magistrate Judge Ona Wang allowed Hana to walk free on a $5 million personal bond secured by $300,000 cash and shares of company Capitol Management LLC. It was unclear what Hana’s relationship was to the company.

Hana cannot travel outside of New Jersey and parts of New York.

He was charged in a sweeping indictment Friday with having a corrupt agreement with Menendez, in which the since-resigned chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would allegedly dole out political favors for the Egyptian government and for Hana in exchange for the bribes. (Read more: New York Post, 9/26/2023)  (Archive)

September 26, 2023 – Hillary Clinton’s official portrait is unveiled at State Department

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served during the Obama administration, watched Tuesday as her official portrait was unveiled at the State Department, calling it an “incredibly emotional moment.”

“Looking out and seeing so many of you whom I was privileged to serve over my four years,” Clinton said before the portrait, painted by Steven Polson, was unveiled. “Now, 14 years ago, hard to believe, I knew there was something very special about this place and that having the singular honor of leading the State Department and USA ID would be an incredible, both personal and professional, experience.”

“Today, I was honored to return to the State Department and join Secretary of State Antony Blinken in unveiling my official portrait as 67th Secretary of State,” Clinton wrote Tuesday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Today, I was honored to return to the @StateDept and join @SecBlinken in unveiling my official portrait as 67th Secretary of State.

We’re delighted to share it with the American public right here, in case you don’t make it in person to headquarters in Foggy Bottom anytime soon. pic.twitter.com/YcPymY77aq— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 26, 2023

As it was unveiled, Clinton quipped that she had not seen the portrait — which shows her standing in front of an American flag — in quite a while. (Read more: Breitbart, 9/26/2023)  (Archive)

September 26, 2023 – Whistleblower testimony suggests Fauci ‘influenced’ the CIA’s review on the origins of COVID-19 with bribes

Anthony Fauci (Credit: Twitter)

Dr. Anthony Fauci was “escorted” into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, “without a record of entry,” and “influenced” the agency’s review of the origins of COVID-19, House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) has claimed.

In a Sept. 26 statement, Mr. Wenstrup said the new alleged evidence obtained by the panel adds to further alleged evidence slowly mounting against Dr. Fauci, who served as the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the head of then-President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response team.

This includes recent whistleblower testimony acquired by the panel alleging that the CIA “potentially skewed its COVID-19 origins review by offering six analysts significant financial incentives to conclude that the result of its investigation was inconclusive,” Mr. Wenstrup said.

It also includes recently uncovered evidence that Dr. Fauci “prompted” the drafting of a paper titled “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” which was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 and was heavily cited by experts and officials as evidence that COVID-19 didn’t originate from a lab leak.

The paper, which has been accessed more than 5.8 million times and cited more than 2,800 times, stated that SARS-CoV-2 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” but likely evolved naturally.

This mounting evidence, Mr. Wenstrup said, “lends credence to heightened concerns about the promotion of a false COVID-19 origins narrative by multiple federal government agencies.”

“According to information gathered by the Select Subcommittee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, played a role in the Central Intelligence Agency’s review of the origins of COVID-19,” the Ohio Republican said in the statement. “The information provided suggests that Dr. Fauci was escorted into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Headquarters—without a record of entry—and participated in the analysis to ‘influence’ the Agency’s review.”

‘The American People Deserve the Truth’

“Our goal is to ensure the scientific investigative process regarding the origins of COVID-19 was fair, impartial, and free of alternative influence,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote.

The lawmaker shared a letter (pdf) sent to the inspector general of the ​​Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Sept. 26, Christi Grimm, in which he detailed the latest “concerning information” allegedly obtained by his panel regarding Dr. Fauci.

Fauci, NIH Exerted ‘Undue Influence’ in Downplaying Lab Leak Theory

(…) In July, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic published a report detailing how officials with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Fauci, and World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, among other top scientists, exerted “undue influence” in downplaying the theory that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak.

That report cited various emails and transcribed interviews and found that Dr. Fauci suggested the drafting of the now infamous “Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” paper to officials and was involved in the day-to-day creation of the paper.

The goal of the paper, according to the subcommittee, was to “disprove” the lab leak theory to avoid blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it employed “fatally flawed science to achieve its goal” and contains arguments with “inaccurate assumptions and obvious inconsistencies.”

Earlier this month, the subcommittee also shared deeply concerning testimony (pdf) from an unnamed senior-level CIA agent turned whistleblower who claimed that the intelligence agency bribed six analysts to reject the theory that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak, most likely from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote in a letter to CIA Director William Burns.

(Read more: The Epoch Times, 9/26/2023)  (Archive)

September 26, 2023 – ABC News reporter who ‘debunked’ Pizzagate, faces life in prison for child rape

James Gordan Meek (Credit: public domain)

James Gordan Meek, who had worked for ABC News for nearly ten years until an investigation into his child sex crimes led to his arrest, was convicted on federal charges of transporting and possessing child sex abuse material in July.

Federal prosecutors are recommending that Meek receive a minimum of 15 years in prison.

Foxnews.com reports: The prosecutors detailed Meek’s actions in court papers that were filed last Friday. In them, prosecutors Zoe Bedell and Whitney Kramer wrote, “He clearly sought out individuals across the internet for the specific purpose of sharing (and expanding) his [Child Sexual Abuse Material] collection for his sexual gratification.”

They noted that Meek sent and received pornography of “infants and toddlers” as well as content “depicting sadistic and masochistic abuse of prepubescent children.”

In his search for the content, Meek solicited lewd images from underage individuals and even posed “as a minor himself.” According to court documents, law enforcement found text message conversations between the former journalist and two girls – one 14-years-old and the other 15 – who sent him pictures of their breasts.

The same messages included a video of himself “naked and holding his penis in his hand.”

The investigation into the ex-journo began last year after the FBI received a tip that videos involving the sexual abuse of children were associate with Meek. Law enforcement raided his home in Arlington, Virginia thereafter.

An FBI affidavit revealed that agents found dozens of child pornography images in the search that he had been collecting since 2014. (Read more: The Peoples Voice, 9/27/2023)  (Archive)

September 28, 2023 – Joe Biden’s Impeachment Inquiry hearing begins – Techno Fog

Today began what we might unofficially call the start of the impeachment of President Joe Biden. Or, as announced by the House Oversight Committee: the hearing on The Basis for an Impeachment Inquiry of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

For the more zealous among us, there is pressure to get on with it already. Start the proceedings, get the votes, and see what happens. A fair position, but we’re not there yet. The evidentiary record is not yet complete.

Thus, the “impeachment inquiry” is an essential investigative step, one which will require the testimony of scores of witnesses and numerous subpoenas for travel records, business and shell company records, bank records, and communications targeted at the Biden family and their business associates. Representative James Comer already has at least some of the investigation already planned; today he announced he is issuing subpoenas for Hunter Biden’s and James Biden’s personal and business bank records.

That wasn’t an empty promise. This evening, Comer “issued three subpoenas for Hunter and James Biden’s personal and business bank records.”

That’s where it should get juicy. The Biden family and their shell companies received over $15 million from 2014-2019. Their business associates, many of whom served as pass-throughs for the Biden family’s profits, received over $9 million. Where did all that money go?

To answer that question, there is perhaps the most important category of records investigators still need to obtain: the financial records of Joe Biden. Undoubtedly the Republicans will obtain those records as the investigation proceeds.

From there we might finally get confirmation to the admission of Burisma’s founder and CEO, who admitted to paying millions to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden – while Joe was the Vice President of the United States: “it cost 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden.”

More broadly, the intensification of the investigation relates to the need to further prove the conspiracy and criminal access-operation among the Bidens – Joe, Jim, and Hunter. Not that the evidence isn’t there. It certainly is. But impeachment is about getting votes from politicians hostile to accountability and convincing an American public of its necessity.

In other words, the inquiry must be deliberate and exhaustive, pursuing every investigative lead and interviewing every witness and getting every document. Think of the House as a type of special grand jury, assigned to investigate a matter of paramount importance. After all, this is one of the most important public corruption cases in American history.

Onto today’s House Oversight hearing, which featured three witnesses on behalf of the House Majority. The testimony of each is briefly summarized below.

Bruce Dubinsky, CPA, a forensic accountant and certified fraud examiner. Dubinsky is a world-class expert in complex financial fraud, especially where – as is the case with the Bidens – the perpetrators utilize shell companies and otherwise complex structures used to mask the source and distribution of funds. He has “investigated some of the world’s largest frauds.” This included the investigation of Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme (the largest in history), where he testified for the US government.

Dubinsky helped lay-out some of the most important questions that need further evidentiary support: why the Bidens were receiving million from foreign entities and individuals; why the Bidens used a complex web of shell companies; whether the money was fair market value for the alleged services rendered; and whether political favors were disguised as services. We note that the answers to many of these questions are in the public records released via the Hunter Biden laptop and Congressional investigations, there is no doubt there is significantly more to uncover.

Eileen J. O’Connor, Esq. led the DOJ’s Tax Division from 2001-2007 and has decades of working with tax administration and enforcement. She testified during the Hunter Biden investigation, “leads and procedures that would have been followed in any other case were thwarted. These included:

  • The denial of searches requested by IRS criminal investigators of Joe Bidens’ Delaware guest house and Hunter Biden’s storage facility, where probable cause existed to believe documents relevant to the criminal investigation existed.
  • The denial of interview requests of Hunter Biden family members and associates, including those which would have explained “10% held by H (Hunter) for the big guy.”
  • The sabotage of investigative steps to determine Joe Bidens’ presence – allegedly next to Hunter – while Hunter shook down a Chinese businessman.

O’Connor further detailed the necessity to investigate the investigators – those who allowed the statute of limitations on Hunter’s financial crimes to expire and why other criminal charges were not pursued.

Finally, Jonathan Turley testified to the public allegations of Joe Biden’s corruption that warranted a full investigation: (1) his lies about foreign dealings with his family; (2) the fact that he was the target (if not a cooperating figure) “of a multimillion-dollar influence peddling scheme”; and (3) that Joe Biden “may have benefitted from this corruption through millions of dollars sent to his family as well as more direct possible benefits.”

More Insight into the Biden Family’s Corruption

(Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 9/28/2023)  (Archive)

Sept. 29, 2023 – Jake Sullivan a week before Hamas attack on Israel: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades”

Peering through the clouds of vapor emitting from U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s various profilers and character witnesses over the years, here is what we learn: Sullivan is a “once-in-a-generation intellect,” according to Joe Biden, and a “once-in-a-generation talent,” “a potential future president,” according to Hillary Clinton. “The sky’s the limit,” says former Deputy Secretary of State and Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott. “He is somebody of extraordinary intelligence and temperament.” Sullivan has an admirable “habit of continually questioning his own assumptions” and a “methodical, hyperanalytical style.” He is “a genuinely nice guy” and “a good human being” with a “self-deprecating Midwestern modesty” who is a “really good listener” and “loved by everyone.”

‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.’ U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan speaks to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic Festival, Sept. 29, 2023 (Credit: BFA)

Sullivan’s path to power is indeed impressive, from middle-class Minneapolis public school student to Yale graduate, Rhodes scholar, Supreme Court clerk, aide to the presidents of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, chief counsel to the senior senator from Minnesota, adviser to the presidential campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, deputy chief of staff to the secretary of state, director of policy planning, national security advisor to the vice president, and finally, United States national security advisor—all before his 45th birthday. Such a meteoric rise to power indeed begs explanation, even for a coxswain of the Yale lightweight crew team.

There are two revealing anecdotes, often repeated in the creation of the Sullivan legend, which are meant to illuminate his dizzying ascent. The first is from June 2009, when President Obama pushed for the ouster of a member of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning staff who had asked Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance of Twitter because members of Iran’s Green Movement depended on it for communication. In a meeting with Obama and White House and State Department officials, Clinton reportedly stood by her staffer and Iran’s anti-regime movement against the wishes of Obama, who claimed, implausibly, that he didn’t want to harm the protesters’ cause by appearing to interfere in Iran’s domestic politics.

One of the aides present at the meeting was Sullivan, then Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. In “one of the rare occasions when Sullivan and Clinton diverged,” according to a Vox profile, Sullivan supported Obama’s position over that of Clinton, his boss. Readers of the profile are meant to come away with an appreciation for Sullivan’s independence of spirit, which he apparently showed by taking the side of the president of the United States. The supposed risk he assumed in dissenting from Clinton’s support for the Iranian protesters was rewarded shortly thereafter, when Obama entrusted Sullivan with conducting secret meetings with the Iranian government, culminating in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal.

The second anecdote concerns a trip Sullivan took to Myanmar in late 2012. During a lunch Obama hosted there for Clinton and her staff, the president reportedly turned to Sullivan—by then director of policy planning—for a brief history of the country. “‘I don’t know a whole lot,’ Sullivan began,” according to Foreign Policy, “before launching into a virtual dissertation on the topic—something colleagues say they’ve seen him do dozens of times on any number of subjects. A few weeks later, Obama asked Sullivan to replace [Antony] Blinken as then-Vice President Biden’s national security advisor.” (This is considered a promotion.)

This latter story is especially interesting, because once Sullivan joined Obama’s inner circle in early 2013, the administration would go on to devote extraordinary attention to Myanmar on the fantasy that Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and endured 15 years of house arrest, was in the process of taking power from a defeated military junta. In reality, the military was not allowing Suu Kyi to lead a “democratic transition,” as the Obama administration insisted. Instead, it used Western human rights fantasies to attract foreign investment before murdering tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims and driving hundreds of thousands more into Bangladesh.

Eight years later, shortly after Sullivan became national security advisor, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on Myanmar, driving the Burmese junta closer to China even as it drove Narendra Modi’s India—a fellow recipient of human rights censure from the Biden White House—further away from the United States, which in chess terms is the equivalent of exchanging a bishop for a pawn, and then losing the pawn. Myanmar was then pointedly excluded from Biden’s 2021 Summit for Democracy, to which Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were invited “to stand together in defending against threats from autocracies.”

All of which makes one wonder what exactly the young Jake Sullivan said about Myanmar that so impressed Barack Obama (whom it is difficult to imagine suffering a dewy Clinton staffer’s “virtual dissertation” on the country), and which made such an impression on his colleagues that they’ve been repeating the story and others like it to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The New Yorker, Politico, Vox, and Foreign Policy ever since. To find out what he actually said, I thought, might provide a key to understanding why so many of the stories meant to demonstrate Sullivan’s unusual intelligence, competence, and decency often have the opposite effect of conveying mediocrity and servility.

Alas, no one seems to remember—at least not anyone willing to talk. But there may be a partial answer in the emptiness of the memory itself. Search for any specific instance of leadership, wisdom, good judgment, erudition, originality of thought, or other such qualities in Sullivan’s record, and a diligent reporter will draw a blank.

Surely, if a good example of Jake Sullivan’s qualifications as a 21st-century George Kennan existed, it would have been rushed into print by now. His record includes a rapidly escalating stampede of failures: the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the failure of deterrence in Ukraine, the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, the economic war with China, America’s disastrous border policy, and now, decisively, U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran—which enjoyed the financial and diplomatic backing of Biden and Sullivan as it enabled the rape, murder, and kidnapping of thousands of Israeli Jews by a fascist death cult. The failure of the administration’s Iran policy, which Sullivan has shaped and promoted for a decade, has in turn forced Israel into a war of regime change in Gaza, sinking hopes for a peace deal with Saudi Arabia while promising to fill Vladimir Putin’s coffers with spiking oil prices. It is arguably the most rapid-fire set of American foreign policy failures on record, and their handmaiden, if not their author, in each and every case, was Sullivan. (Read more: Tablet, 10/26/2023) (Archive)

October 2, 2023 – Hillary Clinton characterizes Donald Trump as “dark and dystopian”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday on PBS’s “NewsHour” that she believed former President Donald Trump, who she characterized as “dark and dystopian,” would be the Republican Presidential nominee.

Clinton said, “The alternative is so dark and dystopian. He wants to undermine the rule of law, to destroy our institutions, to pull us out of NATO, do Putin’s bidding, to be unwilling to stand up for the real American values, to put one person above the country. None of that is American. So, I think that Biden/Harris deserves to be reelected. I think we have to reelect them given what the alternative is.”

She continued, “A big part of the Republican base feels a connection to Trump. I still believe sitting here today he will be their nominee, no matter how hard others may try to distinguish themselves. I think it’s a very sad commentary on what people are looking for in a leader, because everything that he allegedly stands for is at odds with so much of what has made this country work for a long time.”

Clinton added, “It’s the emotional, psychological, cultural connection to someone who really has unfortunately manipulated social media and also some so-called mainstream media in a way that people believe what he says to them. That’s hard to break. It is like being in a cult almost. So, I know the Republicans running against him are trying very hard. I don’t think they are going to be successful, given where we are. So then I think it is imperative on the country to once again defeat Trump and elect Biden.”

(Breitbart, 10/03/2024)  (Archive)

October 3, 2023 – Hunter Biden is arraigned on felony gun charges and pleads not guilty

Hunter Biden arrives at the Delaware federal courthouse for his arraignment on felony gun charges. (Credit: NBC News clipping)

Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to three firearms charges at his arraignment Tuesday in federal court in Delaware amid a high-profile legal battle that has pitted the president’s son against his Justice Department as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway.

“After twenty-five minutes of discussion, Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, entered the plea on his behalf. Lowell said the defense would be making a number of motions in a case that the president’s son had months ago hoped to put behind him, including on the constitutionality of the charge related to his purchase of a handgun. Lowell also said to expect a request for an evidentiary hearing ahead of the Nov. 3 motions deadline set by the judge.” (Read more: NBC News, 10/03/2023) (Archive) 

October 3, 2023 – Hillary Clinton describes Trump as dark and dystopian – two days later suggests his supporters need to be formally deprogrammed

“Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday on PBS’s “NewsHour” that she believed former President Donald Trump, who she characterized as “dark and dystopian,” would be the Republican Presidential nominee.

Clinton said, “The alternative is so dark and dystopian. He wants to undermine the rule of law, to destroy our institutions, to pull us out of NATO, do Putin’s bidding, to be unwilling to stand up for the real American values, to put one person above the country. None of that is American. So, I think that Biden/Harris deserves to be reelected. I think we have to reelect them given what the alternative is.”

She continued, “A big part of the Republican base feels a connection to Trump. I still believe sitting here today he will be their nominee, no matter how hard others may try to distinguish themselves. I think it’s a very sad commentary on what people are looking for in a leader, because everything that he allegedly stands for is at odds with so much of what has made this country work for a long time.”

Clinton added, “It’s the emotional, psychological, cultural connection to someone who really has unfortunately manipulated social media and also some so-called mainstream media in a way that people believe what he says to them. That’s hard to break. It is like being in a cult almost. So, I know the Republicans running against him are trying very hard. I don’t think they are going to be successful, given where we are. So then I think it is imperative on the country to once again defeat Trump and elect Biden.” (Read more: Breitbart, 10/03/2023)  (Archive)

October 7, 2023 – NY Times, CNN, Reuters and AP contract reporters embed with Hamas terrorists during their attack on Israel

The AP, CNN, Reuters, and The New York Times used footage and photos from reporters embedded with Hamas terrorists during their slaughter of hundreds of Jews.

These Western media outlets then posted the photos in their coverage of this horrendous surprise attack on Israel.

AP reporter Hassan Eslaiah took photos and video while traveling with Hamas killers during the massacre. Hassan also provided photos to CNN.

Yousef Masoud provided photos to The New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal also published a photo by Hassan Eslaiah.

Hassan was embedded with Hamas when they massacred Jews at the kibbutz of Kfar Azza. He was there during the slaughter and with them when they left.

Via HonestReporting.com:

On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.

What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.

AP: Photojournalists or Infiltrators?

Four names appear on AP’s photo credits from the Israel-Gaza border area on October 7: Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali.

Eslaiah, a freelancer who also works for CNN, crossed into Israel, took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza.

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 11/9/2023)  (Archive)

October 10, 2023 – Ex-CIA Chief Michael Hayden wants GOP Senator removed from ‘Human Race’

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Michael Hayden suggested Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville be “removed” from the “human race” Monday after an outbreak of conflict in the Middle East.

Hayden responded to a Democrat influencer on X, formerly known as Twitter, who asked whether the Alabama lawmaker maintaining a months-long hold on military promotions should be removed from the Armed Services Committee. Tuberville’s hold is a protest against the military’s endorsement of abortion and embrace of far-left standards of social justice.

“Should Tommy Tuberville be removed from his committee?” asked Nathalie Jacoby.

“How about the human race?” Hayden suggested.

The former CIA chief, who previously characterized the Republican Party as the most “dangerous” force on Earth, doubled down on his remarks about Sen. Tuberville Tuesday.

Hayden, who just more than a decade ago was authorizing drone strikes to gun down violent extremists, now serves on the advisory board of NewsGuard, a left-wing misinformation group that claims to operate as a disinformation watchdog.

NewsGuard is a popular pro-censorship browser extension being deployed in schools to indoctrinate students on acceptable news sources. The service consistently gives failing grades to conservative publications, while corporate outlets that routinely botch major stories, like the Hunter Biden laptop story, have perfect credibility ratings. Hayden also promoted the Russian collusion hoax to indict former President Donald Trump as an agent of the Kremlin.

NewsGuard did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

Hayden was among the more than 50 former intelligence officials who signed a joint letter published with Politico to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation in October 2020 despite early confirmation of the computer’s legitimacy. Even after Politico conceded the laptop’s authenticity 11 months after the New York Post’s blockbuster reporting, Hayden doubled down on the false claim that its contents are instruments of a Russian disinformation campaign. (Read more: The Federalist, 10/10/2023) (Archive)

UPDATE:

Tommy Tuberville Refers NewsGuard Adviser Michael Hayden to Capitol Police, Alleges Call for ‘Assassination’

October 11, 2023 – James Comer: Joe Biden aide with ties to Hunter handled VP’s classified docs 20 months before previously disclosed

(Joe Biden and Annie Tomasini Credit: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

President Joe Biden’s senior aide, Annie Tomasini, who reportedly told Hunter Biden she loved him multiple times, handled the president’s classified documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, 20 months before Joe Biden’s lawyer disclosed the discovery of the documents to the public, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) revealed this week.

Tomasini inspected the classified documents on March 18, 2021, 20 months before the president’s team said they discovered the documents, and just two months after Joe Biden assumed office, according to a demand letter from Comer to Joe Biden’s White House Counsel.

The letter also details the president’s timeline omitted multiple visits from at least five White House employees. Those include Dana Remus, Anthony Bernal, Ashley Williams, Annie Tomasini, and an unknown staffer. “There is no reasonable explanation as to why this many White House employees and lawyers were so concerned with retrieving boxes they believed only contained personal documents and materials,” Comer wrote:

Indeed, their visits dated back to March 2021, when Annie Tomasini initiated contact with Penn Biden Center to schedule a visit and “take inventory of what was left at the Center[.]” Importantly, no public statement has reflected that Ashley Williams, another White House employee, allegedly removed boxes from Penn Biden Center on October 13, 2022. To date, the White House has not disclosed what was in the boxes Ms. Williams retrieved or where they were delivered.

The White House claims that “what appear[ed] to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings” were found at Penn Biden Center on November 2, 2022.  The White House and President Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, further claim that National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was contacted on the same day. NARA “took possession of the materials the following morning.” Both the White House and Mr. Bauer, however, have failed to disclose that Pat Moore, President Biden’s personal attorney, scheduled a FedEx pickup with Penn Biden Center employees for November 2, 2022. The Committee has uncovered that a FedEx worker showed up to Penn Biden Center on November 2, 2022, to “load[] the documents and then [take them] down to the loading dock” to be shipped out. The Committee finds it troublesome that boxes of documents were potentially removed from Penn Biden Center prior to NARA’s arrival and assessment.

The omissions, along with Tomasini’s involvement and date of her document inspection. raises concerns given her ties to Hunter Biden. In emails reviewed by Fox News, Tomasini referenced him as her “brother,” and often ended her correspondence with “LY,” an abbreviation for “love you.”

“Why did the White House and President Biden’s attorney omit this critical piece of information? The Biden White House may have known President Biden had a document problem as early as 2021 and enlisted at least five White House employees to coordinate, organize, move and remove boxes from Penn Biden Center through 2022,” Comer told Fox News.

President Joe Biden is under investigation for mishandling classified documents by Special Counsel Robert Hur, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland on January 12, 2023. (Read more: Breitbart, 10/13/2023)  (Archive)

October 11, 2023 – House Oversight launches investigation into the Biden administration’s use of officials with compromising ties to the Iranian regime in secret negotiations

October 16, 2023 – Trump sues Christopher Steele over Hillary Clinton funded Russia dossier

Christopher Steele: Dubious hearsay from Danchenko’s drinking buddies and an old girlfriend became part of the dossier. (Credit: AP)

Donald Trump is suing a British private investigations firm in a London court to prove claims that he engaged in “perverted sexual acts” in Russia are false, the former U.S. president said in documents released on Monday.

Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is suing Orbis Business Intelligence for alleged data protection breaches over a dossier written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who co-founded Orbis.

The Steele dossier, published by the BuzzFeed website in 2017, alleged ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and said Trump engaged in sexual behaviour that gave Russian authorities material with which to blackmail him.

Many of the allegations were never substantiated and lawyers for Trump, 77, said in court filings on Monday that the report is “egregiously inaccurate”.

Trump said in a witness statement that the dossier contained “numerous false, phoney or made-up allegations” and that he sued Orbis to “prove, by evidence at trial, that the data are false”.

Trump said he had not at any time hired prostitutes to engage in “golden showers” – a sex act involving urination – in a Moscow hotel, taken part in “sex parties” in St. Petersburg or given Russian authorities “sufficient material to blackmail me”.

Orbis, however, argues that Trump is bringing the claim simply to address his “longstanding grievances” against the company and Steele. (Read more: Reuters, 10/16/2023) (Archive)

October 16, 2023 – House Oversight Committee launches an investigation into whether Biden family profited from stolen classified documents

The House Oversight Committee on Monday launched an investigation into whether Joe Biden’s stolen classified [documents] were used to make his family millions of dollars.

“We are investigating whether classified documents President Biden was caught mishandling included sensitive information related to specific countries involved in his family’s foreign business schemes that brought in millions for the Bidens,” the Oversight Committee said on Monday.

On Monday House Oversight Chairman James Comer sent a letter to Special Counsel Robert Hur demanding more information about Joe Biden’s stolen classified documents.

The House Oversight Committee last week revealed that five White House employees were involved in Biden’s stolen classified documents case.

The Committee also revealed Joe Biden and his attorney lied about communications and when the classified documents were discovered.

Joe Biden STOLE SCIF-designated classified documents and improperly stored them at the Penn Biden Center. He also stored classified documents in his garage next to his Corvette where his son Hunter had access to the sensitive materials.

Nine boxes of documents were taken from Joe Biden’s lawyer’s Boston office and we have no idea what is in those boxes because the National Archives is covering up for Biden.

Recall that it was reported that Joe Biden’s attorney first discovered “Obama-Biden administration documents in a locked closet while packing files as they prepare to close out Biden’s office in the Penn Biden Center” in November 2022. Biden and his team claimed they immediately contacted the National Archives upon discovering the documents in November 2022.

“They immediately called the Archives — immediately called the Archives, turned them over to the Archives, and I was briefed about this discovery,” Biden said in November 2022.

According to new information released by the House Oversight Committee, Joe Biden lied about the timeline. Annie Tomasini, Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor to the President and Director of Oval Office Operations, went to Penn Biden Center to take inventory of President Biden’s documents and materials on March 18, 2021.

The classified documents were discovered nearly TWO YEARS before Joe Biden’s lawyer said he ‘found’ them.

Chairman Comer in his letter cited Robert Hur’s interview with Joe Biden.

“Recent reports indicate you recently interviewed President Biden and other individuals involved in this matter, and the Committee now seeks information from your office to further our investigation,” Comer’s letter to Hur said. “As detailed in the Oversight Committee’s bank memoranda and Impeachment Inquiry Memorandum, evidence suggests President Biden may have used certain members of his family-particularly his son, Hunter Biden-to accumulate millions of dollars from foreign individuals and entities for the benefit of his family and himself.”

“Indeed, the Biden family received millions of dollars from foreign sources while President Biden served in public office and afterwards,” the Oversight Committee said. “If any of the classified documents mishandled by President Biden involved countries or individuals that had financial dealings with Biden family members or their related companies, the Committee needs access to that information to evaluate whether our national security has been compromised.”

(Gateway Pundit, 10/16/2023) (Archive)

October 18, 2023 – The prosecution, conviction and sentencing of Clinton meme poster, Douglass Mackey, is Anarcho-Tyranny in action

What we are seeing with the “Douglass Mackey Affair” is Anarcho-Tyranny in action.

In 2016, Mackey posted an obviously satirical meme encouraging Hillary Clinton supporters to “Avoid the line. Vote from home.” To anyone with half a brain, this was obviously a joke, a literal meme.

 

The federal government in its infinite wisdom then decided to file criminal charges against Mackey.

The prosecution couldn’t prove that Mackey’s actions swayed one single vote, but he was still nonetheless charged with “conspiring to deprive others of their right to vote” and sentenced to 7 months in federal prison.

By definition, anarcho-tyranny, as first articulated by the great Sam Francis, is a deliberate process of governmental dysfunction, in which the state is anarchically hopeless at dealing with societal-wide matters that are relevant, but ruthlessly tyrannical in the enforcement of smaller ones, that are generally irrelevant.

More to the point, it is often those who oppose the reigning ideology of the ruling elites, along with other entrenched centers of power perpetuating this ideology of dysfunction, who find themselves on the receiving end of the proverbial stick, rather than actual criminals causing harm to society.

Mackey’s actions did not change a single vote, but as Tucker Carlson most recently stated in the opening monologue to his interview with Douglass Mackey:

“If someone had told you even ten years ago that you could be indicted by the federal government and go to prison for 10 years for making fun of Hillary Clinton on social media, you would not have believed it. It’s a free country, we have free speech. But it turns out that not only is that possible, it has likely become much more common, because the actual war is over information.”

Information is any stimuli that has meaning in some context for its receiver. Mackey’s actions may not have changed a single vote, but they did, however, change the context of the conversation.

His satirical meme, while not directly impacting the outcome of the election, contributed to a broader discussion on the American electoral process and the growing sense that elections are not as “free, fair or open” as they are portrayed, while also highlighting the absurdity that characterizes contemporary politics.

This, in essence, is the power of information — the ability to influence and provoke critical thought, even through something as seemingly harmless as humor, and the reason why the Regime tyrannically crushes all dissent.

In the case of Mackey, his memes, though presented in jest, were perceived as a threat to the established order, particularly because they aligned with his support for Donald Trump, a then political candidate whose 2016 political platform of “America First” challenged the reigning powers that be.

This Trumpian alignment made Mackey’s satirical content even more dangerous in the eyes of those who opposed Trump and what he stood for. The reaction to Mackey’s satire epitomizes anarcho-tyranny in action, highlighting the increasing sensitivity of the Regime towards any form of dissent or mockery, especially when it not only challenges the status quo but also gives support to a controversial figure like Donald Trump, whose very political platform was a threat to the system.

The “Douglass Mackey Affair” serves as a cautionary tale about the fragility of free expression in an era where any and all means can, and will be weaponized by the state to crush those challenging its monopolization of power.

Furthermore, this scenario underscores the Regime’s progressively precarious hold on power, compelling it to adopt more aggressive measures against any dissent: perceived, real, or otherwise. It’s a trend that suggests an increasing move towards more overt and merciless forms of anarcho-tyranny in the coming years.

@RWDUSA: Both anarcho-tyranny and traditional forms of tyranny share a foundational element of oppression, yet they manifest in distinctly different ways.

Anarcho-tyranny is marked by a selective enforcement of the law, characterized by neglect or willful ignorance of critical societal issues. A prime example is the failure to address significant issues like unchecked illegal immigration, while simultaneously imposing stringent, often disproportionate, measures on comparatively minor offenses, exemplified by the harsh penalization of something as trivial as an internet meme.

In contrast, traditional tyranny operates through a more overt and indiscriminate exercise of power. Here, the state employs direct and forceful suppression of any dissent, regardless of the nature of the issue. This approach doesn’t differentiate between major or minor offenses; instead, it uniformly applies an iron fist to maintain control and suppress opposition.

In the case of the “Douglass Mackey Affair,” the characteristics of anarcho-tyranny are evident in the selective and excessive use of legal power against what essentially amounts to political satire, reflecting the state’s disproportionate and selective reaction to what it conceptualizes as a challenge to its authority. (Credit: Chad Crowley/X, 11/10/2023)  (Archive)

October 20, 2023 – Tucker Carlson: “The whole George Floyd story was a lie”

“Did, for example, a racist white cop actually murder a man called George Floyd, a civil rights leader in Minneapolis on Memorial Day of 2020? Now we’ve been told that that happened, told it relentlessly for more than three years,” Carlson says, adding “But the question is, did he [Derek Chauvin] actually murder George Floyd? And the answer is, well, no, he didn’t murder George Floyd, and we’re not guessing about that; we know it conclusively thanks to a new court case now underway in Hennepin County, Minnesota.”

The lawsuit, incidental to Floyd and Chauvin, unveiled sworn deposition excerpts from a conversation with County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker, indicating that Floyd’s passing was not due to asphyxiation or strangulation. Instead, factors including drug use and a fatal concentration of fentanyl were significant contributors, reframing his demise from the widely publicized ‘murder’ to an inadvertent overdose.

“In other words, George Floyd, according to the official autopsy, was not murdered. He died instead of what we used to call natural causes, which, in his case, would include decades of drug use, as well as the fatal concentration of fentanyl that was in his system on his final day,” Carlson continued – laying out how the initial George Floyd storyline was endorsed and amplified by mainstream media, and ignited nationwide protests, intensive racial discourse, and movements like Black Lives Matter.

These changes encompassed police defunding efforts, corporate hiring practices, and the institutionalization of new cultural observances like Juneteenth.

Carlson interviewed Vince Everett Ellison, author of “Crime Inc.” – who discussed the possibility of orchestrated degradation and victimization within the Black community by political entities, particularly the Democratic party.

Ellison suggests that the glorification of figures like George Floyd represents an insidious strategy to perpetuate a certain stereotype of blacks who are reliant on the system, thereby solidifying a voting base and maintaining a form of socio-political control. (Read more: Zero Hedge, 10/20/2023) (Archive)

October 20, 2023 – Comer provides evidence of ‘direct payment’ to Joe Biden in family influence scheme…raiding distressed hospital chain, Americore

(Credit: House Oversight Committee)

On Friday afternoon, Comer explained what his committee’s investigation has found and how a loan and a $200,000 check to Joe Biden from his brother, James, looks to be the evidence of direct financial benefit for President Biden Republican investigators have been searching for.

“We’re still digging into evidence subpoenaed from bank accounts belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, and James and Sara Biden – the brother and sister-in-law of the President,” Comer explained in a video published Friday. “A document that we’re releasing today raises new questions about how President Biden personally benefited from his family’s shady influence peddling of his name and their access to him.”

“Bank records obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability have revealed a $200,000 direct payment from James and Sara Biden to Joe Biden in the form of a personal check,” Comer revealed.

Comer explained how the Oversight Committee’s findings add up to a “troubling” reality:

In 2018, James Biden received $600,000 in loans from, Americore—a financially distressed and failing rural hospital operator.

According to bankruptcy court documents, James Biden received these loans “based upon representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.”

US Bankruptcy Court Complaint by James Lynch

 

On March 1, 2018, Americore wired a $200,000 loan into James and Sara Biden’s personal bank account – not their business bank account.

And then on the very same day, James Biden wrote a $200,000 check from this same personal bank account to Joe Biden.

James Biden wrote this check to Joe Biden as a “loan repayment.” Americore—a distressed company—loaned money to James Biden who then sent it to Joe Biden.

Even if this was a personal loan repayment, it’s still troubling that Joe Biden’s ability to be paid back by his brother depended on the success of his family’s shady financial dealings.

(Read more: Townhall, 10/20/2023)  (Archive)

Documents prepared as part of an ongoing lawsuit against Biden and his business partners allege they are in violation of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and have committed fraud.

Lawsuit Documents Allege James Biden Committed Fraud, Racketeering, 5/21/2020

October 20, 2023 – Supreme Court pauses ban on Biden admin’s censorship efforts with big tech

On the plus side, the Supreme Court will hear the case Missouri v. Biden.

Louisiana, Missouri, and private parties sued the administration for telling social media platforms to remove posts that went against the government’s stances on issues such as COVID.

The United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana ruled the plaintiffs would likely prove their case, and placed an injunction on the administration from contacting the platforms.

The injunction stops two things:

  • The government cannot “coerce” social media platforms to make moderation decisions.
  • The government cannot “meaningfully contro[l]” of the platforms’ moderation efforts.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the District Court, finding a “‘a coordinated campaign’ of unprecedented ‘magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.’”

The Fifth Circuit also issued a modified injunction.

The government appealed

Alito, instead, extended the injunction.

The government replied for another stay, which came with the petition to hear the case.

This time the Court granted the stay. Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas dissented.

Alito, writing for the three justices, said the officials had to prove likely irreparable harm if the stay did not happen.

Alito wrote that the government only provided hypothetical statements. This *might* happen. That *might* happen. No proof.

The government also complained the ban would prevent Biden from talking “to the public on matters of concern.”

Alito blasted the assertion because Biden is not the injunction’s subject, nor does it prevent any government official from talking about any matter.

Alito then crushed the majority for staying the injunction:

Despite the Government’s conspicuous failure to establish a threat of irreparable harm, the majority stays the injunction and thus allows the defendants to persist in committing the type of First Amendment violations that the lower courts identified. The majority takes this action in the face of the lower courts’ detailed findings of fact. But “[w]here an intermediate court reviews, and affirms, a trial court’s factual findings, this Court will not ‘lightly overturn’ the concurrent findings of the two lower courts.”

In conclusion, Alito fears what the government can do between now and the time the Supreme Court rules on the case:

At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate.

(Read more: Legal Insurrection, 10/20/2023)  (Archive)

October 24, 2023 – Hillary gets into screaming match with heckler exposing her warmongering

Hillary Clinton is an IGP leader. (Credit: Columbia.edu)

May 29, 2018 – FBI is slowwalking Strzok/Page texts in Judicial Watch lawsuit

(Related: Judicial Watch, 5/23/2018) (Archive)

October 23, 2023 – Forensic accounting expert testifies half of pandemic relief funds went to Russia and China

NEW: Forensic accounting expert Linda Miller testified to members of Congress this week that up to *HALF* of pandemic relief fraud was stolen by United States adversaries like China and Russia.

Holy s***!!

“Data on this is still being evaluated, but there are some estimates that half of the Pandemic unemployment assistance fraud went to adversarial nations,” she said, as reported by the Epoch Times.

“The nearly $5 trillion in government relief spending during the COVID-19 pandemic, much of which was disbursed as direct payments to citizens, created the perfect storm for fraud.”

“A combination of inadequate oversight and internal controls, large-scale organized fraud rings and antiquated data and information systems contributed to the massive, widespread fraud we saw during the pandemic.”

“Agencies were unprepared for the fraud they encountered largely due to a lack of attention on fraud risks.”

Unreal.

October 24, 2023 – Jack Smith continues Lawfare operation with more leaks to ABC, claiming Mark Meadows warned Trump about 2020 election result being accurate

Too many people continue falling for this Lawfare nonsense. CTH has been outlining what Lawfare operations are all about since we deconstructed the Trayvon Martin narrative. Perhaps a reminder is useful.

Lawfare, in its most obvious construct, is not a legal approach per se’, it is the intentional manipulation of the legal system to create the optics around information that is intended to be used by media to influence public opinion. {link}

That’s what Lawfare is all about, manipulating public opinion through leaks to the media.  The leaks do not need to be truthful, accurate or directly in line with the prosecution of the case; they are intended exclusively to manipulate public opinion.

Remember, on August 21st, in another ridiculous Lawfare operation, Special Counsel Jack Smith told ABC that Mark Meadows testified that President Trump never attempted to declassify any information {Go Deep}.   That report was transparently false, yet the media ran with it and multiple alternative media promoted it.  Pure nonsense.

In this latest Lawfare effort, again from Special Counsel Jack Smith, again to ABC news, again about former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, the claim is the Special Counsel granted Meadows immunity (that’s the hook), and that Meadows told President Trump the 2020 election was not rigged or stolen.

Now remember, Mark Meadows wrote about the rigged and stolen 2020 election in his book, so why would he undermine his own story by saying something completely the opposite to Jack Smith that is only coming out now?   The Occam’s razor answer is, he didn’t.  This lawfare story is all made up, fictitious, anonymous sources, manufactured to create a public impression.

Bolstering the likelihood that Meadows gave no such testimony, Meadows lawyers, when contacted by media, said the story is fake news.   Yet again, everyone falls for it.  This is how Lawfare succeeds, and this is how Trayvon Martin’s fake and fabricated ear-witness girlfriend becomes the key witness and embarrasses the prosecution on the stand.

(Via ABC) – Former President Donald Trump’s final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith’s team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The sources said Meadows informed Smith’s team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump’s prolific rhetoric regarding the election.

According to the sources, Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being “dishonest” with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in.

“Obviously we didn’t win,” a source quoted Meadows as telling Smith’s team in hindsight. (read more)

(Conservative Treehouse, 10/24/2023) (Archive)

October 24, 2023 – Islamic groups infiltrate US defense establishment

(From left to right) Dina Esfandiary, Ariane Tabatabai, Ali Vaez, and former US special envoy for Iran Robert Malley. (Credit: newsessentials.WordPress)

As I wrote in my op-ed a few weeks back about the intelligence-collection priority decisions of the Biden administration that amounted to a monumental failure in the defense of our nation, those same decisions have led to the installment of Iranian infiltration at the highest levels of the U.S. national security apparatus.

Let’s start with the Iranian influencer installed at the highest ranks of the Pentagon. Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian-American, is currently serving as the chief of staff to the assistant secretary of Defense for special operations. As reported last month by Semafor, Tabatabai, on multiple occasions, requested guidance from the Iranian Foreign Ministry dating back to at least 2014—the emails themselves are now public—when operating inside of the U.S. supposedly for our best interests.

As the former chief of staff for the Department of Defense (DoD) myself during the Trump administration, anyone caught seeking permission and guidance from the world’s largest state sponsor of terror would’ve been fired and relationships with the government terminated. In the Biden administration, she is rewarded. The Pentagon’s assistant secretary of Defense for legislative affairs (responsible for all of DoD’s engagements with Congress), Rheanne Wirkkala, issued a statement just last week, clearing Tabatabai of any wrongdoing. It’s confounding that Wirkkala, a former top aide to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and co-author of the now debunked Schiff memo—can justify anything given her own massive failures in putting out the truth. So, how did Tabatabai rise to such a senior rank, holding some of the highest security clearances in government? Who was her benefactor? I’ll get to that. As of today, she still has access to our nation’s most sensitive intel, leading special operations at DoD.

Barack Obama with Maher Bitar (and his family), the outgoing National Security Council Director for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs  in the Oval Office, September 21, 2015. (Credit: ObamaDiary)

Enter Maher Bitar, senior director for intelligence programs on Joe Biden’s National Security Council (NSC) since 2021. The primary purpose of his post is to head up the intelligence-collection priorities at the White House. Bitar is a Palestinian sympathizer who has previously worked for Samantha Powers at the State Department, was general counsel to Rep. Schiff on HPSCI, and was the other co-author of the falsified Schiff memo (see a pattern?). Before entering senior governmental positions, Bitar served as the executive director of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which, among other pro-Palestinian advocacy, supported convicted terrorist Leila Khaled to raise money for their causes (as reported by Revolver). After Hamas launched its war against Israel, the SJP called it a “historic win”—for Hamas. Don’t believe anything I’ve said? Fine, look at this photo—the writing’s on the wall. That’s Bitar front and center.

Bitar still maintains the highest security clearance at Biden’s White House and continues to be responsible for establishing intelligence-collection priorities. Still wondering how the Biden administration “missed” the attack on Israel?

Finally (well, as far as this article goes), there’s Robert Malley, known for his tenure in the Obama NSC (along with Bitar) and as one of the primary architects of the Iran Deal, the JCPOA. He and Bitar crossed paths, literally, in the Obama State Department, working on Middle East policy. Biden appointed Malley his special presidential envoy to Iran in 2021. This role commands the massive authority to establish American policy toward Iran—across the board. Malley hired Tabatabai into his Iran shop in Biden’s State Department and later sent her on to her current role. Semafor has recently revealed her decade-long relationship with the “Iran Experts Initiative” (a known Iran foreign ministry arm for covert operations), seeding Iranian nationals worldwide to advance Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s maniacal regime. Recently, the FBI suspended Malley’s top secret security clearance for “mishandling classified documents” (no further details provided). Shortly thereafter, he was put on a “leave of absence” by the State Department.

As I discuss in my new book, “Government Gangsters,” there are no coincidences in government. This sequence of events and personnel decisions led directly to the Hamas invasion, and war on Biden’s watch would have been included in the pages of the book. But the Biden administration blocked its release for nearly a year and froze my manuscript. I had to file a federal lawsuit just to get it to print. No coincidences.

When you couple the de-prioritization of collecting intelligence against Iran with Iranian sympathizers in senior government positions, one can no longer be surprised by the outcome. We now have the following in 2023 America: Iran has established direct communications to the Biden administration. These individuals are responsible for protecting America and our allies against Iran and preventing them from securing weapons-grade nuclear material for a bomb. Do you have confidence in a team whose leader can’t properly handle classified documents (the irony of Biden’s Corvette is not lost on me), where the head of intelligence has publicly demonstrated his proclivity for terror-affiliated groups while lying to the world with Adam Schiff, and someone who seeks permission from Iran’s foreign ministry when deciding how to “best” protect America? (Read more: PJ Media, 10/24/2023) (Archive)

Muslim Pentagon employees pray in the non-denominational Memorial Chapel which was built in the part of the Pentagon that was destroyed on 9/11. August 20, 2010. (Credit: Olivier Douliery/ABACAPRESS)

Inquiries have been launched against several officials in the Biden administration revealed to have ties to Islamic groups in the aftermath of the October 7th attack in Israel.

Yousra Fazili

Yousra Fazili (Credit: YouTube clipping)

The Department of Defense (DoD) is refusing to terminate Yousra Fazili, a senior Pentagon official with strong ties to the Qatari regime which openly funds the Muslim Brotherhood and its subsidiary, Hamas. Qatar, which provides safe haven to Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, also sponsors the pro-Hamas news outlet Al Jazeera. Following the October 7th attack in which Hamas operatives massacred 1,400 Israelis and kidnapped 200 as hostages, Qatar said it “holds Israel solely responsible.”

Qatar’s ruling Al-Thani family includes Meshal Bin Hamad Al-Thani, who since 2017 also serves as Qatar’s Ambassador to the US. After Al-Thani’s appointment it was revealed that Qatar was planning a covert influence operation which involved damaging the reputations of government officials who oppose Qatar.

During that time, Al-Thani’s strategic advisor was Yousra Fazili. For over three years, Fazili served Al-Thani by arranging “strategic partnerships.” Shortly after Joe Biden took office, Fazili was suddenly appointed special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs at the Pentagon.

Since then Fazili has been promoted twice and now serves as the Pentagon’s chief financial officer and chief of staff to the under secretary of defense for comptroller.

This caught the attention of US Congressman Jack Bergman (R-MI), who raised the alarm about Fazili. In an August letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Bergman requested details about how the Pentagon vetted Fazili and what safeguards, if any, are in place to ensure she does not influence policy related to the Persian Gulf.

Bergman was brushed off with a brief response from Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs Rheanne Wirkkala, who simply told the congressman that Fazili had been vetted “in accordance with all appropriate laws and policies.”

Following this month’s attacks by Hamas, Bergman sent a second letter but received no response at all.

Ariane Tabatabai

Ariane Tabatabai (Credit: public domain)

Wirkkala has also defended the Pentagon’s decision to employ Assistant Secretary for Special Operations Chief of Staff Ariane Tabatabai, who will keep her top security clearance despite being outed as an operative of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Emails obtained by Semafor last month show that Tabatabai was part of an Iranian influence operation called the Iranian Experts Initiative (IEI). The IEI’s objective was to recruit overseas academics and researchers to help shift policy towards Iran, particularly regarding its nuclear proliferation — an objective considered to have been successful.

Tabatabai was a core member of the IEI, which was overseen by Iran’s Foreign Ministry. She was reportedly in direct contact with senior Iranian officials such as then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and a top Foreign Ministry official named Mostafa Zahrani, from whom she requested permission to attend international conferences.

After joining the IEI, Tabatabai began writing articles for mainstream media outlets such as the Atlantic, Washington Post, and New York Times in which she promoted a nuclear deal with Iran. She claimed that Iran was seeking nuclear capabilities not to build nuclear weapons but for “production of radioisotopes for medical purposes” and for “desalination, an energy-intensive process.”

In addition to writing articles, Tabatabai also went on the lecture circuit at various globalist think tanks such as billionaire George Soros’ Center for American Progress and the Council on Foreign Relations, where she advocated for a nuclear deal with Iran.

Tabatabai also served as a key aide to former Biden administration Special Envoy to Iran Robert Malley, who was suspended in June for “mishandling classified documents.”

When US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) pressed the Pentagon for an explanation on why Tabatabai is retaining her post and her top security clearance, she received a similar brush-off from Wirkkala, who herself is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“We have confirmed that Ms. Tabatabai’s employment and clearance processes were carried out in accordance with all appropriate laws and policies,” Wirkkala wrote Sen. Ernst in an October 12th letter.

Nejwa Ali

Nejwa Ali (Credit: public domain)

The Biden administration did, however, place Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Nejwa Ali on “administrative leave” last week.

During 2016 and 2017 Ali served as a spokeswoman for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which created a “Palestinian Delegation to the US.” President Donald Trump banned the group, but she was able to find a position with the DHS as an adjudication officer for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It has been Ali’s job to determine whether asylum seekers should be granted entry to the United States.

Following the October 7th attack, Ali expressed support on social media for the Hamas attackers, writing: “I abso-f—ing-lutely celebrate [Palestinian hang-gliders], a–hole, f— you!” Her social media page, in which she describes herself as “American born” but “Palestinian @ heart”, contains several remarks about Jews such as: “F— Israel and any Jew that supports Israel.”

After the Daily Wire reported Ali’s posts, DHS spokesman Matthew Bourke confirmed she was placed on administrative leave. But the Biden administration has so far refused to terminate the former PLO operative despite several requests from lawmakers. (Frontline News, 10/24/2023)  (Archive)

Top Biden Intel Official Outed as Palestinian Activist Has Some Very Dark Associates

October 25, 2023 – Grassley: FBI received ‘criminal information’ from over 40 confidential sources on Joe, Hunter, and James Biden

Senator Chuck Grassley and Thomas Wray (Credit: public domain)

The FBI maintained more than 40 confidential human sources on various criminal matters related to the Biden family, including Joe Biden, dating back to his time as vice president, according to information obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

The confidential human sources “provided criminal information to the FBI relating to Joe Biden, James Biden, and Hunter Biden.” Those confidential human sources were managed by multiple FBI field offices across the nation, including the FBI’s Seattle Field Office.

But Grassley learned that an FBI task force within the Washington Field Office sought to, and in some cases, successfully, shut down reporting and information from those sources by falsely discrediting the information as foreign disinformation. That effort “caused investigative activity to cease.”

However, despite those efforts by the FBI task force, Grassley said in at least one instance, a confidential human source and its information had been vetted by multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices, which found “no hits to known sources of Russian disinformation.”

The revelations were laid out in a letter Grassley wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray late Tuesday night. The letter was exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital.

“Based on the information provided to my office over a period of years by multiple credible whistleblowers, there appears to be an effort within the Justice Department and FBI to shut down investigative activity relating to the Biden family,” Grassley wrote to Garland and Wray. “Such decisions point to significant political bias infecting the decision-making of not only the Attorney General and FBI Director, but also line agents and prosecutors.”

He added: “Our Republic cannot survive such a political infection and you have an obligation to this country to clear the air.” (Read more: Fox News, 10/25/2023)  (Archive)

October 25, 2023 – Federal prosecutors spied on Congress in search for leaks, now DOJ is being investigated for it

Several current and former congressional oversight staff have been recently informed that the U.S. Justice Department seized their phone and email records back in 2017 as part of leak investigations, belated revelations that have touched off an inquiry by DOJ’s internal watchdog and raised serious concerns about the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

Over the last week, several current and former Senate and House staff from both political parties have alerted Congress that they received belated notifications from Apple, Google or other Big Tech firms that their email or phone records were obtained from their personal devices via a grand jury subpoena.

Officials said the seizures were related, in part, to leak investigations stemming from the FBI’s now-discredited Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Russia collusion.

The targeted staffers include people who worked for the Senate Judiciary and House Intelligence committees who have direct oversight responsibility for the FBI and Justice Department, raising concerns that the legislative branch overseers were being monitored by those they oversee in the executive branch.

Jason Foster played a key role in the Fast and Furious Senate Judiciary Cmte. investigation. (Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi/The National Law Journal)

“The Justice Department’s secret targeting of congressional investigators is a new low in the agency’s sordid history of abusing its authority to evade accountability,” Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, told Just the News on Monday evening.

At least one of Grassley’s former investigators when the senator chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee and helped uncover FBI wrongdoing in the Russia case, Jason Foster, recently received a notification of a subpoena dating to fall 2017.

“Ever since the botched Crossfire Hurricane investigation came to light, the FBI and Justice Department have gone to great lengths to cover up and distract from their own malfeasance. Their actions only serve to underscore the importance of Congress’ constitutional oversight responsibility. This attack on congressional investigators will not deter us from that duty, and the department must answer for this abuse,” Grassley also said.

The newly notified congressional investigators join former House Intelligence Committee chief investigative counsel Kash Patel and one other aide who served on that same panel who got notifications last year. Patel recently sued the government for violations of his civil liberties.

KashPatelGoogleNotification.pdf

Kash Patel (Credit: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

The notifications suggest the grand jury probe began in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., under the Trump DOJ, involved leaks of sensitive information that had been shared with Congress in 2017 and targeted Republicans and Democrats, including former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. Those notified have expressed shock as well as outrage.

Patel told Just the News the effort to spy on congressional investigators and who they were talking with smacked of a “vengeance campaign in the form of government funded lawfare against myself and other senior congressional staffers” who uncovered wrongdoing by DOJ and the FBI.

“They utilized surveillance powers to leverage information against our investigation, because we had exposed their corruption of lying to a federal court and allowing a political party to buy the FBI’s central command and attack a political opponent,” he also said.

The focus, officials said, appears to be on information conveyed to Congress in spring 2017 and later leaked.

A government official told Just the News on Monday evening a dozen or more congressional staffers and lawmakers have received notifications in recent months that their personal phone and email records were obtained by grand jury subpoenas or search warrants and that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been investigating for months the targeting of the congressional staffers and whether federal prosecutors followed proper procedures designed to protect the separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch.

A source directly familiar with Horowitz’s inquiry confirmed the investigation is ongoing but has been slowed by delays in DOJ’s providing information to the watchdog.

A memo on the IG Web site summarizing Horowitz’s ongoing probes shows the inquiry into the targeting of Congress was started in June 2021 and is designed to determine if DOJ violated its own rules in how it pursued phone and email data of con[gress].

“The DOJ OIG is reviewing the DOJ’s use of subpoenas and other legal authorities to obtain communication records of Members of Congress and affiliated persons, and the news media in connection with recent investigations of alleged unauthorized disclosures of information to the media by government officials,” the memo stated.

“The review will examine the Department’s compliance with applicable DOJ policies and procedures, and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations,” the memo also states. “If circumstances warrant, the OIG will consider other issues that may arise during the review.  The review will not substitute the OIG’s judgment for the legal and investigative judgments made in the matters under OIG review.”

October 26, 2023 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. praises and endorses Hillary Clinton in 2000, 2008 and 2016

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. praised Hillary Clinton for her strength and experience to bring the war in Iraq to an end. (Credit: Getty Images)

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who recently announced he was running as an independent after initially running as a Democrat, has a long history of supporting two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, despite campaigning as a voice critical of the Washington, D.C., establishment.

In 2000, Kennedy touted Clinton’s “character” in a campaign ad supporting her campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in New York.

Eight years later, Kennedy reaffirmed his support for Clinton by endorsing her 2008 presidential run.

“Hillary Clinton has the strength and experience to bring the war in Iraq to an end and reverse the potentially devastating effects of global warming,” Kennedy said in a press release.

“I watched proudly as Hillary won over New Yorkers across the state in her race for the Senate seat my father once held. Since then, she’s been re-elected in a landslide victory and proven that she is ready to lead this nation from her first day in office. Hillary will inspire the real change America needs.”

Kennedy stumped for Clinton on the campaign trail in her quest for the White House against eventual President Barack Obama and once Obama had won, Kennedy praised her appointment as Obama’s secretary of state, calling her “great.” (Read more: Fox News, 10/26/2023)  (Archive)

October 29, 2023 – Former DIA director, General Flynn, alleges some U.S. Legislators are compromised by globalists due to their trips overseas where they “sleep with children”

In a recent no-holds-barred conversation with political commentator Joy Thayer, ex-Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), General Michael Flynn, unveiled a shocking narrative surrounding the moral integrity of certain members within the U.S. legislature.

He alleged that the hold of globalist agendas over these officials stems from compromising situations they find themselves in during official overseas trips.

He expressed his disdain for what he described as a “totally, completely broken” House of Representatives, which he alleges is under the thumbs of corporate lobbyists and globalists. According to Flynn, these external entities have managed to ensnare some legislators through compromising situations during Congressional Delegation (CODEL) trips overseas.

The former DIA chief’s narrative took an even darker turn as he alleged that some of these trips saw members of both the Senate and the House being compromised through sleeping with children.

General Flynn: “We have the House of Representatives right now is totally, completely broken. And they’re totally owned by the corporate lobbyists and frankly, by the globalists who own many of these people because they’ve been compromised on some of these what they call CODEL trips overseas, where these members of both the House and the Senate get compromised by sleeping with children. And they compromise. And these are real things. These are very real things, or they get them caught up in the world of big bucks, big money.”

Additional interview:

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 10/30/2023) (Archive)

October 2023 – In complaint to FEC, Biden’s 2020 campaign is accused of violating federal law, running ‘coordinated disinformation’ effort

(…) The allegations have been made in a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

The alleged campaign finance violation could ensnare Secretary of State Antony Blinken and 51 former senior intelligence officials who asserted without evidence in 2020 that reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop were part of a “Russian disinformation” campaign.

The complaint was filed by America First Legal (AFL), a conservative organization run by President Donald Trump’s former White House aide Stephen Miller.

AFL filed the complaint with the FEC in late October, alleging a “coordinated communication” campaign.

It also alleges an unreported in-kind contribution to the Joe Biden presidential campaign and related entities, in violation of federal law.

“[The] evidence suggests that the respondents failed to disclose coordinated expenditures constituting in-kind donations with respect to the infamous ‘Letter of 51’ former intelligence officials claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story had ‘all the classic earmarks’ of Russian disinformation,” says the 13-page AFL complaint.

The complaint also includes 110 accompanying pages of evidence.

The FEC complaint claims that the Biden for President campaign in 2020, the Biden Victory Fund, the Democratic National Committee, and the Biden Action Fund should have reported on coordinating efforts.

It was unquestionably published by the corporate media and cited by Democrats in the weeks before the  presidential election between Biden and Trump.

The Obama administration officials who signed the letter included former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former CIA director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

Former George W. Bush DNI Michael Hayden, a vocal Trump critic, also signed the letter.

The complaint notes that Panetta and Clapper donated to the Biden Victory Fund and the Biden for President campaign in 2020.

In March, former CIA Deputy and Acting Director Michael Morrell testified to the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committees that on Oct. 17, 2020, then-Biden campaign adviser Blinken contacted him to discuss the Hunter Biden laptop story first reported by the New York Post.

An April press release from the House Judiciary Committee said:

“Morell testified that his communication with Blinken was one of a few communications he had with the Biden campaign, explaining that he also received a call from Steve Ricchetti, Chairman of the Biden campaign, following the October 22 debate to thank him for writing the statement.

“Morell also explained that the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the public release of the statement.

“Morell further explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-[former] Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election.”

The letter from intelligence officials provided cover and credibility for social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the true Hunter Biden laptop story. (Read more: Slay News, 11/10/2023) (Archive)

October 30, 2023 – Archives locates 82,000 pages of Joe Biden pseudonym emails, possibly dwarfing Clinton scandal

(Credit: Clipping from Rob Schmitt/Newsmax news report, 8/17/2023)

Under legal pressure, the National Archives has located 82,000 pages of emails that President Joe Biden sent or received during his vice presidential tenure on three private pseudonym accounts, a total that potentially dwarfs the amount that landed Hillary Clinton in hot water a decade ago, according to a federal court filing released Monday.

The total of Biden private email exchanges was disclosed Monday in a little-noticed status report filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought against the National Archives and Records Administration by the nonprofit public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The foundation brought the lawsuit seeking access to the emails after Just the News revealed a year ago that Joe Biden had used three pseudonym email accounts — robinware456@gmail.com, JRBWare@gmail.com, and Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov – during the time he served as President Barack Obama’s vice president.

The status report filed Monday in a federal court in Atlanta was the first to provide an estimate of the size and scope of possible government business conducted through Joe Biden’s private email accounts.

“NARA has completed a search for potentially responsive documents and is currently processing those documents for the purpose of producing non-exempt portions of any responsive records on a monthly rolling basis,” the status report stated. “Given the scope of Plaintiff’s FOIA request, which seeks copies of all emails in three separate accounts over an eight-year period, the volume of potentially responsive records is necessarily large.

“NARA has identified approximately 82,000 pages of potentially responsive documents, and it is currently processing those documents and preparing any non-exempt responsive documents for production on a rolling basis,” the filing added.

You can read the full court filing here. (Read more: JusttheNews, 10/30/2023)  (Archive)

October 30, 2023 – Judicial Watch: The Clintons, Qatar, and the Israel Massacre

Shortly after the world began learning the details of the massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, Hillary Clinton published a note of support on X for “everyone affected by the horrific attacks by Hamas” and expressing “strong support of our ally,” Israel. The former secretary of state had nothing to say about one of Hamas’s key allies, the energy-rich kingdom of Qatar, and not surprisingly: Qatar is not only an important friend of the U.S. in the region but also for many years was a generous patron of Bill and Hillary Clinton. As JW President Tom Fitton noted on X, Qatar funneled money to the Clintons when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state and she “hid this until disclosures from Wikileaks and pressure from Judicial Watch forced her to admit to tens of millions of previously hidden foreign cash payments to ‘Clinton Inc.’”

Slipping money into the hands of slippery politicians—a time-honored tradition in the Middle East and elsewhere—of course is not the same as providing significant ongoing state support for a murderous terrorist organization. But the Clinton experience does provide a snapshot of the Qatari influence operation and a warning about what Qatar may be up to elsewhere, including in the United States.

The Qatar-Clinton money trail begins around 2008, when the Clinton Foundation—under pressure due to Mrs. Clinton’s imminent ascent to State Department leadership—published a list of donors. Among them: Qatar, listed as contributing between $1 million and $5 million. A Clinton Foundation spokesman later acknowledged that Qatar had been sending the Clintons money “since 2002.”

Pressure mounted on the Clintons in 2014 with the publication of a Judicial Watch investigative report disclosing that Bill Clinton had earned upward of $48 million in speaking fees around the globe, including from Arab countries, while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state. “Former President Clinton trotted the globe collecting huge speaking fees while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy,” Tom Fitton noted at the time.

In 2016, a leaked Wikileaks email revealed that five years earlier, in 2011, the Clintons had received a $1 million gift from Qatar. That gift was never reported by the Clintons, a clear violation of the disclosure agreement the Clintons had signed with the State Department when Mrs. Clinton took the helm. Soon after the 2011 gift, a high-ranking Qatari official pressed the Clinton circle for “five minutes” with the former president.

Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuits also turned up more evidence of Clinton conflict of interests, including the courting of Qatar. A JW FOIA disclosure in late 2016 revealed a list sent by a Clinton Foundation senior adviser to a high-ranking aide to Secretary of State Clinton; the list noted more than 200 foreign leaders to be invited to the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, including the emir of Qatar, the Qatari prime minster, and the minister of foreign affairs.

Qatar’s pursuit of influence in the United States is not limited to the Clintons and their allies. According to investigative reports, Qatar has given $1 billion to American universities since 2011. Qatar also is a major purveyor of anti-Semitism. Its media is filled with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda. And at the UN—not exactly a bastion of pro-Israel sentiment—a high-ranking Qatari official was recently denied a senior post on the grounds of anti-Semitism. That’s useful context when considering Qatar’s role supporting Hamas.

Here at Judicial Watch, we’re watching Qatar closely. At home, with concern rising about anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, we won a recent lawsuit forcing disclosure of information about Qatar’s funding of American universities. Abroad, with lessons learned from our Clinton investigations, we’re following the flow of Qatari money. We’ll keep you updated. (Judicial Watch, 10/30/2023)  (Archive)

 

October 31, 2023 – FBI Director Christopher Wray tells senators there is an “elevated” terrorism risk in the US; Mayorkas protects pro-Hamas DHS employee

FBI Director Christopher Wray told senators Tuesday there is an “elevated” terrorism risk in the US following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel — including a possibility of homegrown supporters of the jihadist group engaging in violence.

“We assess that the actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called ‘caliphate’ several years ago,” Wray told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The FBI chief added that while “the terrorism threat has been elevated throughout 2023 … the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole ‘nother level since the horrific terrorist attacks committed by Hamas against innocent people in Israel a few weeks ago.”

(…) Wray further cited recent failed attempts by Tehran-sponsored terrorist groups to carry out assassinations of “high-ranking current and former US government officials.”

Christine Abizaid
 (Credit: public domain)

The “Threats to the Homeland Hearing” hearing also featured Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) took Mayorkas to task for having employed a former spokeswoman for the Palestine Liberation Organization at his agency, who shared images of Hamas terrorists using paragliders and called for the “downfall” of Israel in personal social media posts.

“This is an asylum and immigration officer who is posting these, frankly, pro-genocidal slogans and images on the day that Israelis are being slaughtered in their beds,” Hawley told Mayorkas, referring to Nejwa Ali, an officer with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“This person works for the Department of Homeland Security. Have you fired her?” Hawley asked.

“To suggest that that is emblematic of the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security is despicable,” Mayorkas began to respond before being cut off.

(Read more: New York Post, 10/31/2023)  (Archive)

October 31, 2023 – FBI Director Wray confirms the government paid their Twitter “provider” to suppress information and violate Americans First Amendment rights

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Tuesday, so fireworks weren’t at all unexpected when it came time for that committee’s ranking Republican, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, to ask questions.

Predictably, the exchange on the collusion of government and social media to limit speech did not disappoint.

Paul confronted Wray on whether or not the FBI paid Twitter around $3 million for content moderation, an allegation that came to light late last year with the release of the “Twitter files” documents.

“Did the FBI pay Twitter money to moderate content moderation?” Paul asked.

“I’m not aware of us paying money to moderate content there or anywhere else,” Wray responded.

“What was the $3 million for that the FBI gave that’s been revealed in the ‘Twitter files’ which has been characterized by those writing the ‘Twitter files’ as payment for content moderation?” Paul pressed before asking Wray directly if he was “aware of the payment.”

“I am not aware of that specific payment but I can tell you that when it comes to payments, going back well over four decades when we are required by federal law, when a company like in this instance a provider goes through expenses to produce information, we are required to reimburse them for those expenses, and so I think a lot of the questions about payments revolve around exactly that.”

Paul went on to grill Wray as well as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on whether or not government agencies are actively engaged in attempting to censor social media content about issues like vaccine and mask efficacy, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and other issues which, according to Paul, “have nothing to do with national security,” a charge they both denied.

(Read more: Townhall, 10/31/2023)  (Archive)

November 1, 2023 – Students walk out of Hillary Clinton’s class at Columbia University

Hillary Clinton concession speech: ‘This is painful and it will be for a long time.’ (Credit: Getty Images)

Nearly 30 students walked out of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s class at Columbia University Wednesday in protest of the school’s response to pro-Palestinian protests, according to The New York Times.

Students at Columbia University held pro-Palestinian rallies following the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, and over 300 faculty members signed a letter condemning antisemitic incidents on campus. Students walked out of Clinton’s class to demand “immediate legal support for affected students” and “a commitment to student safety, well-being, and privacy” for students who participated in protests after a “doxxing” truck with their names circled campus, according to the Times.

The students protesting thought that the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo and Clinton would walk past them after class, but they never did, and the students later found out they had left through a side door, according to the Times.

Clinton joined Columbia in February as a professor at SIPA and a Presidential Fellow at Columbia Worlds Project. She teaches an “Inside the Situation Room” class with Yarhi-Milo that gives students a look into how international relations decisions are made using case studies.

Clinton took a strong pro-Israel stance after the conflict in Israel erupted, denouncing those calling for a ceasefire during a moderated discussion with former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, according to CBS News.

“People who are calling for a ceasefire now do not understand Hamas. That is not possible,” Clinton said, according to CBS News. (Read more: Daily Caller, 11/02/2023)  (Archive)

November 3, 2023 – Twitter File: The Senate, New Knowledge, and the manufacturing of the Russian bot hysteria

November 3, 2023 – The CEO of New Knowledge is the Senate’s top expert on Russian bots and helped create the Hamilton 68 dashboard

In the week before Christmas in 2018, scare headlines about Russian bots were everywhere. (Credit: Susan Schmitd/Substack)

 

 

New Knowledge CEO, Jonathon Morgan – During 2017’s Senate election in Alabama between Democrat Doug Jones, who would win, and Republican Roy Moore, Morgan was involved with a project that targeted 650,000 likely voters. (Credit: Ricardo Brazziell/Austin American Statesman)

 

November 6, 2023 – House Judiciary Report – The Weaponization of “Disinformation” Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech

The Weaponization of “Disinformation” Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech

November 7, 2023 – Hunter Biden wants daddy’s DOJ to investigate former business partner, Tony Bobulinski

Tony Bobulinski (Credit: public domain)

Former Navy lieutenant Tony Bobulinski, the Biden family whistleblower who recorded operatives begging him not to blow the whistle (“You’re just gonna bury all of us man”), may receive a knock from the Biden DOJ after NBC News reports that Hunter Biden wants him investigated.

According to the report, Bobulinski allegedly made false statements to the FBI.

“Specifically, we recently received information demonstrating that numerous statements made by Mr. Bobulinski in Washington, D.C. during an interview with the FBI on October 23, 2020, concerning our client, Hunter Biden, are false,” writes Hunter’s defense attorney, Abbe D. Lowell.

Hunter is asking that Biden-appointed DA for Washington DC, Matthew Graves, head the investigation. Graves was appointed by Biden after working on his 2020 presidential campaign as an unpaid policy advisor, according to the Daily Caller, citing a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire. Graves also donated to Biden’s 2020 campaign while he was an attorney in the private sector.

Graves testified to the House Judiciary Committee in October and confirmed he refused to partner with Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss on potentially charging Hunter Biden for alleged tax offenses, according to a transcript reviewed by the Daily Caller.

Bobulinski’s FBI interview in October 2020 was summarized by an FBI FD-302 form released in September by the House Ways and Means Committee as part of a trove of documents supporting testimony from IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler.

Lowell disputes Bobulinski’s claim to the FBI that he was present in Miami for a meeting Hunter Biden held with Chinese business associate Ye Jianming, the chairman of Chinese infrastructure company CEFC, NBC reported. -Daily Caller

Bobulinski told the FBI that he had attended the Miami meeting, where they discussed the work that the Biden family was doing for CEFC beginning when Joe was VP.

“CEFC had used its relationship with HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN – and the influence attached to the BIDEN name – to advance CEFC’s interests abroad. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN did not receive any monetary compensation for their assistance in these projects. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN did not receive any compensation because JOSEPH BIDEN was still VPOTUS during this time period,” reads the document.

“There was a concern it would be improper for payments to be made to HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN by CEFC due to its close affiliation with the Chinese government. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN both wanted to be compensated for the assistance they had provided to CEFC’s ventures; in particular, they believed CEFC owed them money for the benefits that accrued to CEFC through its use of the BIDEN family name to advance their business dealings.”

According to the report, Bobulinski was one of the business associates who discussed a “sinohawk” venture with CEFC, which Joe Biden was potentially going to be involved in, per the FD-302 form. Bobulinski told the FBI that he met with Joe Biden in Beverly Hills, California to discuss.

The proposed joint venture with CEFC appeared to be the subject matter of an infamous email thread where business associate James Gilliar referred to Joe Biden as “the big guy” in a message about potential equity distribution.

“10 held by H for the big guy?” Gilliar asked his colleagues, the email shows. He suggested making Hunter Biden chair of the company and Bobulinski the CEO.

The “sinohawk” venture appeared to fall through, and instead Hunter Biden and James Biden set up a joint venture with CEFC called Hudson West III in August 2017, according to bank records released Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee.

Hunter Biden and Jianming appeared to change the terms of the joint venture at the Miami meeting, emails released by the Ways and Means Committee show. -Daily Caller

“My Understanding is that the original agreement with the Director was for consulting fees based on introductions alone a rate of $10M per year for a three year guarantee total of $30M. The chairman changed that deal after we me in MIAMI TO A MUCH MORE LASTING AND LUCRATIVE ARRANGEMENT to create a holding company 50% percent owned by ME and 50% owned by him,” Hunter emailed Chinese business associate Gongwen Dong on Aug. 2, 2017.

“Consulting fees is one piece of our income stream but the reason this proposal by the chairman was so much more interesting to me and my family is that we would also be partners inn the equity and profits of the JV’s investments,” he continued. “Hence I assumed the reason for our discussion today in which you made clear that the Chaireman [sic] would first get his investment capital returned in the profits would then be split 50/50. If you saying that is not the case then please return us to the original deal 10M per year a guaranteed 3 years plus bonus payments for any successful deal we introduce.”

Read the rest here, and see what Bobulinski claims about the Bidens, in his own words.

(Zero Hedge, 11/7/2023) (Archive)

November 7, 2023 – Government censored prominent conservatives during 2020 election

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and Sean Davis were among several prominent conservatives targeted by a federal censorship operation carried out during the 2020 election, according to a new bombshell congressional report.

Released by the Sean Davis on Monday, the interim report documents how the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Global Engagement Center (GEC), which fall within the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, respectively, colluded with Stanford University to pressure Big Tech companies into censoring what they claimed to be “disinformation” during the 2020 election.

According to the analysis, this operation aimed to censor “true information, jokes and satire, and political opinions,” with prominent conservatives such as Hemingway and Davis being among the prime targets. Other notable targets include the social media accounts of former President Donald Trump, Newsmax, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Harmeet Dhillon, and Charlie Kirk, to name a few.

As The Federalist previously reported, CISA, which is often called the “nerve center” of the federal government’s censorship operation, “facilitated meetings between Big Tech companies, and national security and law enforcement agencies to address ‘mis-, dis-, and mal-information’ on social media platforms.” Ahead of the 2020 contest, the agency ramped up its censorship efforts by flagging posts for Big Tech companies it claimed were worthy of being censored, some of which called into question the security of voting practices such as mass, unsupervised mail-in voting.

Meanwhile, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland reported, GEC “funded the development of censorship tools and used ‘government employees to act as sales reps pitching the censorship products to Big Tech.’” One of these GEC-funded nongovernmental entities is the Global Disinformation Index, a so-called “disinformation” tracking organization “working to blacklist and defund conservative news sites,” including The Federalist.

At the heart of the federal government’s censorship apparatus, however, was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), “a consortium of ‘disinformation’ academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory” that coordinated with DHS and GEC “to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election.” According to House Republicans’ Monday report, the initiative was developed “at the request” of CISA during the summer of 2020 and effectively allowed federal officials to “launder [their] censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.” (Read more: The Federalist, 11/7/2023) (Archive)

From House Judiciary Report, 11/6/2023

November 8, 2023 – Three charged in connection with ‘brothel network’ compromising elected officials, pentagon officials, and others with a security clearance; Feds suspect Chinese espionage

DOJ Logo

Three people were arrested for allegedly operating “sophisticated high-end brothels” in Virginia and Massachusetts that catered to high-powered clients, including elected officials and government contractors with security clearances, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Wednesday.

Han Lee, 41, of Cambridge, Mass.; James Lee, 68, of Torrance, Calif.; and Junmyung Lee, 30, of Dedham, Mass., were charged with conspiracy to coerce and entice to travel to engage in illegal sexual activity, the DOJ said.

The interstate prostitution network included multiple brothels in Cambridge and Watertown, Mass., and just outside of Washington, D.C., in Fairfax and Tysons, Va., according to the DOJ. The brothels have allegedly been operational from at least July 2020.

The DOJ did not identify any of the high-powered clients the brothels allegedly served but said, “The investigation into the involvement of sex buyers is active and ongoing.”

“Over the course of the investigation, a wide array of buyers were identified, including, but not limited to, politicians, high tech and pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors, lawyers, scientists and accountants,” the department said. (Read more: The Hill, 11/09/2023)  (Archive)

November 8, 2023 – Clinton says she is concerned about those who ‘would try to do away with elections, and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press’

Authoritarians, Hillary Clinton explained Wednesday, don’t “usually telegraph” what they’re going to do, but when they do, you should “take [them] at [their] word.”

She then proceeded to telegraph exactly what Democrats are doing, and plan to continue doing, to bring about — as she put it — “the end of our country as we know it.”

Of course, in Wednesday’s appearance on “The View,” she accused Donald Trump — whom Clinton has clearly not forgiven for foiling her presidential aspirations — of being responsible for all those things. Trump, Clinton said, “means to throw people in jail who disagree with him, shut down legitimate press outlets, do what he can to literally undermine the rule of law and our country’s values.”

Let’s unpack that accusation.

Throwing dissidents in jail: Trump, after winning the presidency, declined to have his Justice Department prosecute Mrs. Clinton, despite the massive evidence of her illegal activity and the Obama Justice Department’s decision to come down on her classified information scandal with all the righteous indignation of a butterfly.

On the other hand, as “The View’s” Joy Behar admitted, Trump has been “criminally charged with 91 counts,” roughly half of which have been brought by his doddering 2024 opponent’s Justice Department, with the other half brought by state and local prosecutors like New York Attorney General Letitia James, who literally campaigned on bringing Trump down. (Read more: The Federalist, 11/09/2023)  (Archive)

November 10, 2023 – Federal judge in Georgia orders trial for case against Dominion voting machines

Judge Amy Totenberg (Credit: public domain)

Late Friday, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg denied a motion by Georgia election officials to dismiss a case that claims the state’s electronic voting system is insecure.

The Curling v. Raffensperger suit was initially filed in 2017 by Democrats who want the state to ditch its electronic voting machines in favor of hand-marked paper ballots. The plaintiffs argued that the paperless touchscreen voting machines had major cybersecurity flaws that amounted to a violation of voters’ constitutional rights in the Peach State. The suit was amended in 2019 to challenge the new Dominion election system, with claims that the new voting system had similar vulnerabilities.

Since 2019, Georgia has used Dominion’s election equipment in all 159 counties, which includes 34,000 ballot machines and several thousand scanners.

The suit maintains that the voting system, “as currently designed and implemented, suffers from major cybersecurity deficiencies that unconstitutionally burden the plaintiffs First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and capacity to case effective votes that are accurately counted.”

Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the Election Board had asked the judge to rule in its favor without the case going to trial, but Totenberg found there were “material facts in dispute” that must be adjudicated.

In her 135-page order, Totenberg detailed the relevant topics being examined in the years-long case:

• the use of computerized electronic voting systems in Georgia and the history of the cybersecurity and voting issues raised by Plaintiffs in their series of legal challenges, as previously addressed by this Court;

• the cybersecurity and reliability issues surrounding the use of the relevant electronic voting systems and the auditing of such systems and voting results;

• the cybersecurity experts’ evaluations and testimony regarding the State’s voting systems and exposure to breaches, especially in the absence of timely, needed software patches and the implementation of other cybersecurity protective measures;

• the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency’s (“CISA”) review of the Dominion ImageCast X system and software (currently used in Georgia) and CISA’s issuance of a national advisory notice on June 3, 2022 recommending that jurisdictions using this particular Dominion software and related technology implement specific measures to limit unauthorized access or manipulation of voting systems;

• the serious security issues and long-term ramifications surrounding the breach of the Coffee County election system and unauthorized access to the State Dominion voting software and election data, and the resulting impact on future voting security;

• Defendants’ principal defense that Plaintiffs lack standing to assert the constitutional claims raised in this case and, on the other side, the grounds Plaintiffs rely on to establish their legal standing to pursue their claims in this case — grounds including the alleged severe burden placed on their capacity to cast an effective and reliable vote by Defendants’ handling of the election system;

• The Court’s legal and evidentiary analysis of the issues in dispute raised by the Defendants’ pending Motions for Summary Judgment.

Totenberg stressed in her order that at this stage in the process, where she was considering the state’s motion for summary judgment, she was required to look at the facts in a light most favorable to the plaintiffs. At the upcoming trial, the plaintiffs have “a heavy burden to establish a constitutional violation” connected to the voting system, she wrote.

Even if she ultimately rules in their favor, she wrote, she can’t order the state to implement a paper ballot system. She said there are “pragmatic, sound remedial policy measures” that she could order or that the parties could agree upon, including: eliminating QR codes on ballots and having scanners read human-legible text; using a broader scope and number of election audits; and implementing essential cybersecurity measures and policies recommended by leading experts.

Dominion came under heavy scrutiny after the 2020 election when members of former president Trump’s legal team accused the company of flipping hundreds of thousands of votes for Joe Biden in key swing states. These concerns were roundly dismissed in the corporate media as unfounded conspiracy theories.

Dominion responded with litigation, notably reaching a $787 million settlement with Fox News in April.

In a footnote of her ruling, Totenberg made clear that the evidence in this case “does not suggest that the Plaintiffs are conspiracy theorists of any variety. Indeed, some of the nation’s leading cybersecurity experts and computer scientists have provided testimony and affidavits on behalf of Plaintiffs’ case in the long course of this litigation.”

“We look forward to presenting our full evidence at trial and obtaining critical relief for Georgia voters,” said David Cross, an attorney for some of the plaintiffs.

“But we hope this decision will be a much-needed wakeup call for the Secretary and SEB, and finally spur them to work with us on a negotiated resolution that secures the right to vote in Georgia.” (Read more: American Greatness, 11/13/2023) (Archive)

Judge Totenberg’s recent history regarding Dominion:

Corrupt Obama Judge Amy Totenberg sealed and covered up the results of an investigation of voting machines in Georgia.  This report has still not been released.  This week CISA released a report showing material discrepancies in these systems while attempting to downplay these material issues.

We first reported on Obama Judge Totenberg in 2018 when she got involved in that election and tried to steal the Georgia governor’s race for Democrat Stacey Abrams.

Then in 2021, Judge Totenberg committed her gravest offense as a judge.  She sealed and covered up the results of the Halderman report in Georgia.  To this day we don’t know what is in this report.  Halderman’s investigation into the voting machines in Georgia started before the 2020 Election and was completed in July 2021.

Steve Bannon interviewed Kurt Olsen, about cybersecurity analyst, J. Alex Halderman, who found flaws in Dominion voting machines and warned about the potential for future attacks.  Judge Totenberg sealed the report. According to court documents, Halderman wrote his report after he was given 12 weeks of access to an unused Dominion ICX voting machine. Professor Halderman requested the report to be unsealed to be shared with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a standalone United States federal agency responsible for our infrastructure, including our voting systems.

Here is the interview:

The report eventually made it to the CISA and they released their report this week.  Many believe that this CISA report was released in an effort to mitigate the results from the Halderman Report when it is finally released.

Judge Totenberg is the corrupt judge who also allowed Hillary’s attorney Marc Elias to use the 14th Amendment to try and prevent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from running in the 2022 Election:

…U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg, an Obama appointee, has been engaging in her own activism from the bench, allowing a bogus activist lawsuit to proceed, despite past court rulings that established its claims as void under the law.

The attack, masterminded by Steele Dossier architect Marc Elias, has tried to use an archaic section of the 14th Amendment to claim that Greene and several other prominent, pro-Trump Republicans, effectively seceded from the US and should be disqualified.

(The Gateway Pundit, 6/05/2022)  (Archive)

November 13, 2023 – The Biden and du Pont connections: From a prestigious golf club, real estate investments, and a controversial child rape plea deal

As the MSM turns on President Joe Biden heading into the 2024 election, the Washington Post had an interesting piece on Thursday exploring a little-known connection between the Bidens and the du Pont family, which revolves around a 2001 case in which then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) was voted in as a prominent new member of a prestigious Golf Club in Wilmington, Delaware, founded by a du Pont heiress.

That year, Biden, known for his “Middle-Class Joe” image and modest financial status, joined the exclusive Fieldstone Golf Club, a symbol of prestige and power. This move painted a contrasting picture: a politician aligned with working-class values, yet rubbing shoulders with the state’s most affluent family, renowned for their chemical company empire.

(…) Biden’s connection to the du Ponts extended beyond social interactions. His staffing choices, political allies, and personal real estate investments all reflected a deep integration with this influential family. His acquisition of a mansion built by a du Pont member further underscores this relationship.

Yet, Biden’s entry into the Fieldstone Golf Club raised eyebrows and led to a brief FBI investigation in 2007. The inquiry centered on how Biden obtained his club membership, especially as it involved an “unused” ticket from a company owned by the club’s founder, potentially bypassing a substantial partnership fee. The FBI’s probe, which included photographing Biden’s personal locker at the club, eventually closed without any allegations of wrongdoing. It’s unknown whether Biden was ever informed about the FBI investigation.

In 1974, Biden spent $185,000 to buy what he called a “gorgeous … enormous” mansion built six decades earlier by a du Pont family member in Greenville, Del. The home, which he named “the Station,” served as a base for Biden’s unsuccessful 1988 presidential campaign; he sold it for $1.2 million in 1996 and then bought a four-acre lakefront property in Greenville. -WaPo

(…) The Biden-du Pont connection, reinforced by this membership, raises questions about potential influences and reciprocal favors within these elite circles.

In particular, it seems appropriate to revisit a controversial 2009 plea deal offered by then-Attorney General Beau Biden to a du Pont heir accused of raping his own daughter when she was a toddler. Richards was originally charged with two counts of second-degree rape, which carried a minimum of 20 years behind bars. Instead, he pleaded guilty in 2008 to fourth-degree rape, which carries no minimum prison time.

Convicted rapist and du Pont heir Robert H. Richards IV (l) and Beau Biden (Credit: public domain)
T

(…) The deal was offered to du Pont heir Robert H. Richards IV, who had confessed to the fourth-degree rape of his 3-year-old daughter. He was spared prison time, a decision that sparked public outrage and scrutiny. Beau Biden defended the decision in 2014, citing the case’s weaknesses and potential for loss at trial, but these justifications were met with skepticism, given the family’s history with the du Ponts.

The plea bargain’s leniency towards a figure from a wealthy and powerful family contrasts sharply with the typically harsher sentences meted out to less privileged offenders. This disparity points to a potential bias within the judicial system, influenced by socio-economic status and connections.

The link between the Bidens and the du Ponts, established years earlier through Joe Biden’s golf club membership, suggests a narrative of mutual benefits and unwritten understandings among Delaware’s elite. While there’s no evidence of a link, the timing and context of these relationships paint a picture of intersecting interests and shared spaces between powerful families. (Read more: Zero Hedge, 11/13/2023)  (Archive)

November 17, 2023 – Brace Yourself For What’s Coming in 2024 – Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.

Victor discusses current political and social events and ideas, and current and past cultural trends.

November 16, 2023 – Report: Joe Biden to escape charges for mishandling classified docs

Robert Hur, special counsel: His office reportedly obtained more than 100 pages of documents from Kathy Chung. (Credit: The Associated Press)

Special Counsel Robert Hur, who is investigating President Joe Biden for mishandling documents, is not expected to charge anyone, sources familiar with the matter told CNN and the Wall Street Journal.

The report suggests a double standard of justice. While there will reportedly be no consequences for Biden, Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump in June for mishandling classified documents.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur in January to investigate Biden after classified documents from his time as vice president in Barack Obama’s administration were found in his possession at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, and at his Wilmington, Delaware, home.

(…) Joe Biden will still remain under investigation by the House impeachment inquiry, which subpoenaed former White House Counsel Dana Remus on Tuesday related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents.

In addition, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer requested four additional White House employees familiar with President Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified material, including Annie Tomasini, to appear before the committee for transcribed interviews.

Comer previously revealed that Joe Biden’s senior aide, Tomasini, who reportedly told Hunter Biden she loved him multiple times, handled the president’s classified documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, 20 months before Joe Biden’s lawyer disclosed the discovery of the documents to the public. (Read more: Breitbart News, 11/16/2023) (Archive)

November 19, 2023 – J6 police body cam footage is uncovered and released

(Credit: Gateway Pundit)

Live links at Gateway Pundit: Here is a trove of links to J6 police body camera footage Congress has yet to release:

JANUARY 6th, 2021 POLICE BODY CAMERA FOOTAGE
TIME CAM # LINK LOCATION

11:21:29 AM X6039BF88 https://archive.org/details/hp2NtasPKRC88hfGx

11:40:55 AM X6030853K https://archive.org/details/6rE2EpcKP9vjNykAL

12:17:04 PM X6039BK5 https://archive.org/details/ETyZnZkPEYjNKM4ST

12:17:05 PM X6039BKCJ https://archive.org/details/Csn63ixqXngxGqnYZ

12:17:07 PM X6039BJHB https://archive.org/details/Rgzbuu254Y7oKSfyc

12:21:44 PM X6039BCGW https://archive.org/details/KTcC7R4i2hREhwR2p

12:27:22 PM X6039BFAS https://archive.org/details/zFdyoXH7XLhtuPW53

1:00:55 PM X6039B3Q https://archive.org/details/83k7vCKJLExtdZAD3

1:10:41 PM X6039BF76 https://archive.org/details/Xw6Biy8aJPt26338J

1:13:15 PM X6030252F https://archive.org/details/kD5k9wgj6hj6GzTBg LOWER WEST PLAZA

1:14:02 PM X6039BKYG https://archive.org/details/7LaLnCx8Jr3cnLgc6 LOWER WEST PLAZA

1:14:45 PM X6039BKYG https://ia904507.us.archive.org/20/items/iSXWDs775iYBeaHy3/Sean_McHugh_Case_Bodycam_.mpeg4 LOWER WEST PLAZA

1:15:12 PM X6039BEYQ https://archive.org/details/FckgqEPzGEn4mZLAW

1:16:50 PM X6039BF4W https://archive.org/details/federico-klein-and-steven-cappuccio-436

1:19:03 PM X6039BEW6 https://archive.org/details/8Baje8tQ4YwYnAJf7

1:20:06 PM X6039BCAU https://archive.org/details/9AEcuNSqPsnzQS6GX

1:21:38 PM X6039BGKA https://archive.org/details/7pkt5shJwMDqFLY3D

1:22:01 PM X6039BLAL https://archive.org/details/sfde974NWXkJ2cTWW

1:27:40 PM X6039BJJA https://archive.org/details/45XrocRZaztcJvarY

1:27:49 PM X6039BF4W https://ia804504.us.archive.org/28/items/5QBmjS6RBpDA9wyJF/Sean_McHugh_Case_Bodycam_.mpeg4 LOWER WEST PLAZA

1:27:50 PM X6039BJJA https://archive.org/details/federico-klein-and-steven-cappuccio-414

1:29:04 PM X6039BEYR https://archive.org/details/gauquvpFr6nRaj25D

1:31:04 PM X6039BEYR https://ia902308.us.archive.org/5/items/qrG6MXQyuEZtkyzbg/qrG6MXQyuEZtkyzbg.mpeg4 LOWER WEST PLAZA

1:31:44 PM X603BCAU https://ia902306.us.archive.org/25/items/2oBsm8J6zxePsf6vP/Sean_McHugh_Case_Bodycam_Footage_3.mpeg4 LW PLAZA

1:32:09 PM X6039BCAU https://ia802303.us.archive.org/34/items/n2mZjn7ELwCkyREZM/n2mZjn7ELwCkyREZM.mpeg4 LOWER WEST PLAZA

1:32:22 PM X6039BBEYR https://ia802309.us.archive.org/29/items/8axYcvLxuRZ4jqizY/8axYcvLxuRZ4jqizY.mpeg4 LOWER WEST PLAZA

1:32:57 PM X6039BJJA https://ia802309.us.archive.org/29/items/8axYcvLxuRZ4jqizY/8axYcvLxuRZ4jqizY.mpeg4

1:34:00 PM X6039BFW https://archive.org/details/Fpwh9EechGrgyKZ76

1:34:15 PM X6039BF4W https://ia904509.us.archive.org/17/items/XMWQiHEsddR6r2p2z/Sean_McHugh_Case_Bodycam_.mpeg4

1:35:56 PM X6039BCAU https://ia902300.us.archive.org/8/items/uegvfjmQsAr99QdJj/uegvfjmQsAr99QdJj.mpeg4

1:36:56 PM X6039BEYR https://ia902300.us.archive.org/8/items/uegvfjmQsAr99QdJj/uegvfjmQsAr99QdJj.mpeg4

1:36:55 PM X6039BEYR https://ia902300.us.archive.org/8/items/uegvfjmQsAr99QdJj/uegvfjmQsAr99QdJj.mpeg4

1:36:56 PM X6039BDFC https://archive.org/details/XAuF6aBqnL8s8LsA6

1:37:11 PM X6039BD7G https://archive.org/details/FW7MbHofKrf2KpWCK

1:38:13 PM X6039BEYR https://ia902305.us.archive.org/18/items/rv5iCyS8jXLTxwoL5/rv5iCyS8jXLTxwoL5.mpeg4

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November 20, 2023 – Elon Musk (X Corp) files federal lawsuit against Media Matters for defrauding X advertisers with fake anti-Semitic smears

Clipping from Media Matters article dated November 16, 2023.

On Monday, X (formerly Twitter) filed a federal lawsuit against Media Matters and Eric Hananoki in the Northern District of Texas.

“Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform,” according to the lawsuit.

 

The complaint added, “Media Matters has opted for new tactics in its campaign to drive advertisers from X. Media Matters has manipulated the algorithms governing the user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.”

“Media Matters generated a specific, intended result that was not only inorganic, but exceedingly (and demonstrably) rare, all while taking specific steps to obscure this in its November 16, 2023 article. The overall effect on advertisers and users was to create the false, misleading perception that these types of pairings were common, widespread, and alarming. Media Matters hid its manipulations through omissions, deceptive image selections, misrepresentations, and secrecy settings.”

You can read the full lawsuit here..

(…) In his statement he released, Elon accused Media Matters of creating a fake account that then curated the posts and advertising appearing on the account’s timeline to misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts.

Elon and X Corp caught Media Matters lying to X advertisers about their ad placements. They caught Media Matters in completely fraudulent activity.

Here are the facts on Media Matters’ research from X’s press release:

  • To manipulate the public and advertisers, Media Matters created an alternate account and curated the posts and advertising appearing on the account’s timeline to misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts. These contrived experiences could be applied to any platform.
  • Once they curated their feed, they repeatedly refreshed their timelines to find a rare instance of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow. Our logs indicate that they forced a scenario resulting in 13 times the number of ads served compared to the median ads served to an X user.
  • Of the 5.5 billion ad impressions on X that day, less than 50 total ad impressions were served against all of the organic content featured in the Media Matters article.
  • For one brand showcased in the article, one of its ads ran adjacent to a post 2 times and that ad was seen in that setting by only two users, one of which was the author of the Media Matters
  • For another brand showcased in the article, two of its ads served adjacent to 2 posts, 3 times, and that ad was only seen in that setting by one user, the author of the Media Matters article
  • Media Matters’ article also highlights nine posts they believe should not be allowed on X. Upon evaluation, only one of the nine organic posts featured in the article violated our content policies, and we’ve taken action on it under our Freedom of Speech, Not Reach enforcement approach.

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 11/20/2023)  (Archive)

(…) While recent Media Matters aggression towards Elon Musk and his X platform may at first seem arbitrary, the moves are evidently part of a wider attempt to muzzle American conservatives and restrict free speech: a critical weapon in the arsenal of Biden regime dissidents.

Breaking! Joe Bidens election super pac is linked to a family friend, Media Matters, and was involved in a Hunter Biden mess too.

No wonder why the White House was involved in the Media Matters and X ordeal.

Lemme explain how.

Once upon a time, senator Biden had a long time family friend and Aide, Mark Doyle, who later became the chair of Unite the Country, the pro-Biden PAC.

Unite the country disbursed thousands to this Biden family friend who discussed business opportunities with Hunter. Over $60,000 to Prairie Avenue Advisors LLC for fundraising consulting services in one year.

Prairie Avenue Advisors is a Chicago-based company registered to Mark Doyle, who served as a senior Biden adviser in the Senate and later as the national finance director for Biden’s failed 2008 presidential campaign.

The close Biden confidante also previously discussed foreign business prospects with the president’s son. I’ll review this further in another post.

Biden Super PAC, Unite The Country, also joined forces with David Brock’s, American Bridge Group to form a $175 million anti-Trump coalition.

Now you may ask what does American Bridge have to do with Media Matters?

Well Media Matters used to share an address with the obviously linked American Bridge, along with CREW. All of these work together as seen in the Media Matters strategy guide.

There’s likely even more scandal here, but this is a start! All links to follow!

(Read more: The National Pulse, 11/20/2023)  (Archive)

Just as Democrats were trying to downplay the rampant antisemitism in their ranks, what happens? Elon Musk, who has lately become something of a darling on the right, suddenly becomes the poster boy for antisemitism. This is how the left works.

This latest twist started when Media Matters — the George Soros-backed media “watchdog” — released a report claiming that ads for major corporations were appearing next to antisemitic and white supremacist content.

This is a two-fer for the left. It both attacks Musk — whom the left now hates because he stopped Twitter’s side hustle as the federal government censor — and it takes the spotlight off the left’s virulent antisemitism on display after the Hamas attacks.

As soon as Musk took over Twitter and promised to live up to the company’s “free speech wing of the free speech party” mantra, the left went into fits of hysterics.

Media Matters puts it, “Musk has opened the floodgates to hateful content.” Really? Because Twitter was pure as the driven snow before Musk?

We seem to recall that “blue check” leftists had free reign to say whatever they wanted about conservatives on Twitter, up to and including calls for their assassination. After Donald Trump took office, to cite just one example, “assassinate Trump” was showing up all over Twitter. When Twitter banned Trump before Musk bought the company, it let Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continue to incite hate and violence on its platform. Etc., etc.

What companies’ ads were appearing next to this hate speech? Nobody cared.

Media Matters’ sole mission is to demonetize conservatives by scaring away advertisers from being associated with “controversial” voices. The attack on X was worse, however, because Media Matters essentially invented this “crisis” in order to exploit it. (Read more:  Issues & Insights, 11/21/2023)  (Archive)

UPDATE:

Missouri AG Andrew Bailey Sues Media Matters for Violating State Consumer Protection Laws and Defrauding Missourians

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey launched an investigation into Media Matters for America on Monday, December 11, 2023.

AG Andrew Bailey accused Media Matters of using fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to bully advertisers.

Attorney General Andrew Bailey made this explosive accusation, “We have reason to believe Media Matters used fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to bully advertisers into pulling out of X, the last platform dedicated to free speech in America.”

The Missouri Attorney General did not hold back in his attacks on Media Matters alleging the enemies of free speech, like Media Matters for America, are attempting to kill Twitter-X because they cannot control it now that Elon Musk took over. Bailey added, “I’m fighting to ensure progressive tyrants masquerading as news outlets cannot manipulate the marketplace in order to wipe out free speech.” (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 12/11/2023)

November 20, 2023 – Trump’s Truth Social platform files massive $1.5 billion lawsuit against 20 media companies

Truth Social, the social media platform connected to former President Donald Trump, announced a massive, billion-dollar lawsuit against 20 news media companies.

The company posted a statement about its lawsuit Monday evening.

“Today Truth Social filed a defamation lawsuit that is likely unprecedented in history, incorporating twenty publications – and even more may be added. All of them published the same false information about Truth Social and refused to fully retract their stories,” the statement read.

“To the Fake News outlets that think themselves about accountability: we’ll see you in court,” it added.

Some of the companies listed in the lawsuit were MSNBC, Axios, Reuters, the Daily Beast, Newsweek, Mediaite, Daily Mail, and CNBC. They are accused of participating in a “seemingly coordinated” media campaign to report that Truth Social had lost $73 million.

“This number was an utter fabrication,” the lawsuit read.

The company goes on to claim that it demanded a correction and retraction from the media outlets but that none of them complied completely or apologized. The lawsuit says that the false reports damaged the company’s ability to raise funds for a planned company merger.

“Existing investors and potential investors alike were concerned by the false stories,” the lawsuit read.

The lawsuit says that the figure cited by the news outlets does not appear in its SEC filing, which was readily available to any outlet.

The lawsuit asks for $1.5 billion from the defendants and also for attorneys’ fees. (Read more: The Blaze, 11/20/2023)  (Archive)

November 21, 2023 – DOJ prosecutor, Leslie Wolf, is subpoenaed to testify about her forewarning the Biden team of search warrants

Lesley Wolf worked closely with Alexander Mackler, who served as then-VP Joe’s White House Deputy Counsel from 2014 to 2016. (Credit: FedBar)

In a significant development in the investigation surrounding Hunter Biden, the Judiciary Committee, led by Jim Jordan, has issued a subpoena to Lesley Wolf, a DOJ prosecutor with connections to the Obama administration. This move is part of an ongoing inquiry into what is being termed as the Biden family cover-up.

The Lesley Wolf Subpoena and Its Implications

Lesley Wolf, who is an Assistant U.S. Attorney, has been accused of providing inside information to Hunter Biden’s defense team. This includes alleged warnings about potential investigations into storage facilities and other locations linked to Hunter Biden. Her and her husband’s history as Democrat donors, with contributions to Barack Obama and Amy Klobuchar among others, has raised questions about her impartiality in this politically sensitive case.

Whistleblowers, including Gary Shapley, have made serious allegations against Wolf. They claim she gave preferential treatment to President Biden’s son, such as notifying his lawyer about potential search warrants and advising investigators to avoid certain lines of inquiry, including references to “the big guy” or “dad”, presumed to be President Biden.

The subpoena demands Wolf’s testimony to understand her role in the DOJ’s investigation of Hunter Biden, and to ascertain the extent of President Biden’s alleged involvement or interference in the DOJ and Congressional investigations. This situation highlights the potential conflicts of interest in high-profile political investigations and raises concerns about the integrity of the investigative process. (Read more: Robert Gouveia Esq., 11/2023)  (Archive)

November 21, 2023 – Joe Scarborough goes on anti-Trump rant saying, “he will imprison, he will execute whoever he is allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country. Just look at his past. It’s not really hard to read.”

Via Gateway Pundit:

Relevant transcript:

Scarborough: We have a responsibility to tune out the voices of the haters who are constantly shilling for him…bending over backwards for him like he (Trump) is a normal candidate.

He is not a normal candidate. He is running to end American democracy as we know it.

He is an authoritarian… a court in Colorado ruled he led an insurrection against the United States Government.

If you want to be fair, you will frame it as Joe Biden who supports American democracy and Donald Trump who supports a new form of government. It’s really that simple.

By the way, Reverend Al, when people go “oh, you can’t compare him to past Nazi leaders…because he hasn’t done this.” Well, what hasn’t he done!

He hasn’t done things the American judicial system will not allow him to do last time but may very well allow him to do this time. Or, a judicial system that will be ignored by Donald Trump and ran over by Donald Trump to create the greatest constitutional crisis in our lifetimes.

Just because he hasn’t done it yet doesn’t mean he won’t do it when he gets a chance to do it!

And if he is voted into office then a lot of these people who are talking about literal, figurative or whatever the hell they’re saying, they’re going to look like idiots!

He will imprison, he will execute whoever he is allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country!

Just look at his past. It’s not really hard to read.

More media panic:

November 21, 2023 – Marco Polo releases an FBI pictorial directory of officials involved in the Biden investigations (Updated)

A sample from the directory that includes a description of  feds who participated in a Biden  investigation. (Credit: Marco Polo)

Marco Polo takes the final clause of the First Amendment more seriously than perhaps any group in America — it is essential that we petition our Government for a redress of grievances. To properly do that, you need to know not only names but also faces, backgrounds, biases, etc of the feds involved. To that end, we present below our second rundown—we published the first directory (of the IRS) 9 weeks ago—of who precisely at the FBI was/is involved in this total fiasco and miscarriage of justice: media.marcopolousa.org/pdf/fbidirectory.pdf

These directories should have been made for each agency involved in Crossfire Hurricane fiasco—it is truly lamentable that it was not done.

Next up: The DOJ, the US Attorney’s office in Delaware, followed by the US Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, & finally the US Attorney’s office in the Central District of California.

[As always, we are attentive to — and abide by — 18 USC § 119.]

–Garrett Ziegler
Founder

Marco Polo (EIN: 61-199994) has established a legal defense fund to fight back against the egregious lawfare from Kevin Morris & Joey B’s other proxies, which you can find & patronize here: FightBiden.org

(Marco Polo, 11/21/2023)  (Archive)

Shapley transcript
Ziegler transcript
Gordon transcript

November 25, 2023 – Vote recount in Georgia finds State AG Raffensperger failed to report election results

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (l) and chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state Gabriel Sterling, arrive to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, June 21, 2022. (Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

In Fulton County, Georgia, serious flaws in the 2020 election recount operations were identified. The Secretary of State and his staff originally lied about these mistakes, but then collaborated with the Attorney General’s office and the State Elections Board to exonerate the Secretary of State.

Georgian Joseph Rossi discovered 36 errors in the Fulton County data in the RLA report posted on the SOS website. Despite being turned down and ignored, Rossi managed to get these errors in front of Governor Kemp’s office. Kemp and his team took action when errors were pointed out, putting a team of four individuals on the 36 errors identified by Rossi and spending 8 weeks confirming their work.

The Georgia State Elections Board (SEB) initiated an investigation into the Fulton County data from the RLA report, labeled SEB2021-181. The SEB identified violations and errors in the 2020 Election recounts in Fulton County. Another complaint for Fulton County was filed July 8, 2022, specifically calling out 3125 duplicate ballot counts and 17,852 votes counted that do not have a corresponding ballot image. This complaint resulted in the creation of investigation SEB2023-25, which is complete and will be presented to the SEB on December 19, 2023.

The SOS’s office lied about the accuracy of the recounts in Georgia. Post-Governor Kemp’s validation letter from November 17, 2021, the SOS’s office, the AG’s office, and the Georgia SEB worked to exonerate the SOS of any responsibility for these numerous errors and violations. There is also an open inquiry before the Georgia SEB (SEBBI2023-001) regarding Election Code Violations committed by the SOS.

The investigations noted in this series were independent of two court cases that occurred in Georgia after the 2020 Election. At least three individuals involved in a recount identified 148,000 fraudulent ballots, and Fulton county and state are still preventing access to these ballots. A separate audit of voting machines was initiated after the 2020 Election, showing that the systems used in Georgia had security issues and bad actors could hack into them and change election results.

Gabriel Sterling from the SOS’s office emailed Joseph Rossi on February 9, 2021. In this email he stated,

“All of the tally sheets have been available online on the SOS website for nearly 2 months. Here is the link…”

After reviewing the tally sheets for both Houston County and Fulton County, Rossi found errors with Fulton’s batch sheets and stated in an email to Sterling dated February 21, 2021,

“Note that the total vote count for Fulton based upon a summation of the Batch Tally Sheets = 246,922 votes, which falls far short of the final vote count for Fulton County = 525,283.”

Sterling responded to Rossi in an email dated February 24, 2021,

“After reviewing your email, we reviewed our inventory of physical batch sheets for Fulton. We have determined that not all documents were scanned to digital files. We are in the process of scanning those documents. We expect to have our website updated before the end of the week.”

The original Sterling statement regarding “all of the tally sheets,” was obviously false. Furthermore, this is the first indication that Sterling/SOS office never bothered to check the errored data posted on the SOS website for public view and also that they could not be trusted with their statements.

In Gabriel Sterling’s email to Joseph Rossi, of February 9, 2021 – when referring to the RLA Report for Fulton posted on the SOS website, he stated,

“We know with 100% certainty that the ballots were not tallied multiple times because the hand re-tally showed that…”

In June of 2022, at the Jan 6th hearing, at the 13:00 minute mark of the Raffensperger/Sterling testimony, Sterling states, with Raffensperger seated to his right,

“And by going through the hand tally that the Secretary pointed out we showed that if there had been multiple ballots scanned without a corresponding physical ballot, your counts would have been a lot higher than the ballots themselves.”

When referring to the RLA Hand Audit – Sterling described it as “dead on accurate.”

“When we did the 100% hand recount we found 3 counties that messed up, you know, fairly significantly…number 2 was Fulton County. All of a sudden they were off by several thousand ballots, well it’s because you scanned some of these ballots twice.”

The RLA Hand Audit for Fulton County, as posted on the SOS website, cannot be both “dead on accurate” and “off by several thousand ballots” due to multiple scanning. SOS Raffensperger admitted to multiple scanning of thousands of ballots and shared that the results were “dead on accurate” in his Jan 6th hearing. The SOS’s office worked with others to cover up and exonerate them of any wrongdoing, as they had contrasting claims regarding the 2020 Election results. (The Lead Report, 11/25/2023)  (Archive)

November 26, 2023 – New video surfaces of Alexandra Pelosi admitting Jan 6 “insurrection” was a sham; D.C. courts are biased; partied with a Proud Boy

Alexandra Pelosi (l) makes a documentary about her mother. (Credit: Alexandra Pelosi)

(…) Nancy had a camera crew at the US Capitol as if she knew it was going to be a historic day.  It was quite a coincidence.

As it turned out, January 6 was a historic day.  It was also well-planned and staged.

Now there is never before released video of Nancy Pelosi’s daughter admitting to a January 6 defendant that the insurrection narrative was nonsense and that Washington, DC is too biased to hold fair trials for Trump supporters.

In the video below, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, is meeting with a January 6 defendant she wanted desperately to be in her sham documentary.   It is a meeting with this same J6 defendant and his attorney.  Alexandra Pelosi asked the defendant numerous times to participate.  He politely declined.

The Gateway Pundit reached out to the January 6 defendant in this video to confirm the details in the recording.

Alexandra Pelosi agreed to be recorded by the defendant.

In this video, Alexandra Pelosi is on camera saying many very shocking things.  She mocks the idea that January 6th was an insurrection and admits that DC is too biased to hold fair trials and that many J6ers would be found not guilty if their cases were handled anywhere else in the country, and much more.

This video has not yet been made public. This is an exclusive video for The Gateway Pundit audience.

From our source who was in the room during the filming:  “I did a lot of due diligence making sure that the defendant who shot this video had permission to do so. I spoke with his attorney who provided me documentation that Alexandra agreed to be filmed if they met.  I wanted to bring this to you before anybody else if you’re interested in featuring it. Nancy Pelosi has contributed to destroying countless lives with her “insurrection” narrative and sham committee – And here is her daughter on camera saying it’s all a crock.”

Here are some of the key moments in the video where Alexandra makes some particularly audacious comments.

Key moments:

2:43: Pelosi: “The Shaman did nothing… What did the Shaman do? He stood there.”

4:24: “After the Democrats lose the house, then they get rid of the committee, people may lose I think interest… no one is going to care after the democrats are out of power. And you take Biden out of office- then who cares!?”

4:50: “DC is a lot of people who work for the government. I don’t think they’re sympathetic. If you got it moved (changed trial jurisdiction from DC) you’d totally get off” (laughs while saying this)

6:50: “If there was an insurrection… you were supposed to have a plan!” “It was the sorriest insurrection in history”

8:11: “You’re going to be able to laugh about this one day”

14:53:  Pelosi talks about her friendship with Gavin McInnes and laughs at the notion that Proud Boys are white supremacists.

(Video at The Gateway Pundit, 11/26/2023)  (Archive)

(…) She then goes on to explain how she knows Gavin McInnes, the purported former leader of the Proud Boys.

According to Pelosi, she used to party with McInnes.

Meanwhile, Alexandra Pelosi has been busy cashing in on Jan. 6.

On top of all the political propaganda that the Democrats got out of Jan. 6, Alexandra Pelosi has been promoting her documentary about the so-called “insurrection.”

The Democrats’ allies in the corporate media have been fawning over the film.

(Read more: Slay News, 11/26/2023)

November 28, 2023 – The FBI is, again, ordered to create a timeline for the release of evidence related to the Seth Rich laptops, the DVD, and the tape drive

A federal judge has ordered the government and law enforcement to disclose to the court information about suspected DNC leaker Seth Rich’s murder. The release is to include Rich’s laptops, DVD, and the tape drive associated with the case.

Before this order, information that has been provided about the case through Freedom of Information Act requests has been heavily redacted and offered little with which independent investigators and journalists could use. It is known that he had the means, motive, and intel necessary to be the anonymous leaker.

Ever since former Democrat National Committee employee was mysteriously murdered in Washington DC, theories about the so-called “robbery gone bad” have revolved around the belief that Rich was leaking sensitive emails to DCLeaks and Wikileaks in June and July, 2016. Rich was murdered with two shots to the back in the DC area in July of that year.

These theories have been thoroughly “debunked” in an extremely coordinated effort by the UniParty Swamp, corporate media, “fact” checkers, and law enforcement. But the circumstances surrounding the “robbery” that resulted in nothing apparently being stolen and indications that Rich was in contact with multiple leak organizations has kept the conspiracy theories alive.

It’s conspicuous that Hillary Clinton was the candidate at the time. (Read more: America First Report/Substack, 11/29/2023) (Archive)

November 28, 2023 – US and UK military contractors launched initial censorship group that later became the Censorship Industrial Complex after 2016 election

US military contractor Pablo Breuer (left), UK defense researcher Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp (center), and Chris Krebs, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS-CISA)

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the “anti-disinformation” sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex.

The whistleblower’s documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques.

“Lock your shit down,” explains one document about creating “your spy disguise.”

Another explains that while such activities overseas are “typically” done by “the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense,” censorship efforts “against Americans” have to be done using private partners because the government doesn’t have the “legal authority.”

The whistleblower alleges that a leader of CTI League, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a “repeat of 2016.”

Over the last year, Public, Racket, congressional investigators, and others have documented the rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of over 100 government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that work together to urge censorship by social media platforms and spread propaganda about disfavored individuals, topics, and whole narratives.

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information (sic) [Infrastructure] Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role.

Emails from CISA’s NGO and social media partners show that CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and other US government contractors. EIP and its successor, the Virality Project (VP), urged Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship, it had yet to be determined where the idea for such mass censorship came from. In 2018, an SIO official and former CIA fellow, Renee DiResta, generated national headlines before and after testifying to the US Senate about Russian government interference in the 2016 election.

But what happened between 2018 and Spring 2020? The year 2019 has been a black hole in the research of the Censorship Industrial Complex to date. When one of us, Michael, testified to the U.S. House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex in March of this year, the entire year was missing from his timeline.

Now, a large trove of new documents, including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages, reveal that, in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework. These contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in the spring of 2020.

In truth, the building of the Censorship Industrial Complex began even earlier — in 2018.

Internal CTIL Slack messages show Terp, her colleagues, and officials from DHS and Facebook all working closely together in the censorship process.

The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.

In the spring of 2020, CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as  anti-lockdown narratives like “all jobs are essential,” “we won’t stay home,” and “open America now.” CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags like #freeCA and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting “takedowns” and reporting website domains to registrars.

CTIL’s approach to “disinformation” went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote “counter-messaging,” co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.

In one suggested list of survey questions, CTIL proposed asking members or potential members, “Have you worked with influence operations (e.g. disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms etc) previously?” The survey then asked whether these influence operations included “active measures” and “psyops.”

These documents came to us via a highly credible whistleblower. We were able to independently verify their legitimacy through extensive cross-checking of information to publicly available sources. The whistleblower said they were recruited to participate in CTIL  through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by DHS.

The FBI declined to comment. CISA did not respond to our request for comment. And Terp and the other key CTIL leaders also did not respond to our requests for comment.

But one person involved, Bonnie Smalley, replied over Linked in, saying, “all i can comment on is that i joined cti league which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach nonsense online during covid…. i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though.”

Yet the documents suggest that government employees were engaged members of CTIL. One individual who worked for DHS, Justin Frappier, was extremely active in CTIL, participating in regular meetings and leading trainings. (Read more: Public/Substack, 11/28/2023)  (Archive)

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify about the most shocking things they found in the Twitter Files including former FBI officials working with the Aspen Institute, corporate media, and social media to pre-bunk the Hunter Biden laptop story.

@mtaibbi: “The most alarming thing we saw was the regular organized stream of communication between the FBI, DHS, and the largest tech companies. They had an organized system for flagging content, not occasionally, but in enormous numbers involving spreadsheets of accounts that ran into the hundreds of thousands.”

@shellenberger: “For me, it was seeing the so-called former FBI officials within Twitter working with a variety of groups including the Aspen Institute to pre-bunk the Hunter Biden laptop story before it was ever published in the New York Post, and then to get it censored by Twitter, whose Twitter’s internal staff had concluded that the NYP tweet had not violated their terms of service and they censored it anyway.”

@mtaibbi: “This isn’t a crazy conspiracy theory. we’ve already had four federal judges rule that they believe this activity violates the First Amendment.”

@shellenberger: “We discovered that the Aspen Institute had created a workshop attended basically by all major media, including social media platforms, to basically pre-bunk in advance the Hunter Biden laptop story even though there was no evidence that it existed outside of the fact that the FBI knew they had it because they got in December 2019.”

November 28, 2023 – Clinton Foundation whistleblower, John Moynihan, files complaint with DOJ-OIG re evidence Trump prosecutor, Jack Smith, extorted millions from the wealthy in Kosovo

(Moynihan Complaint, 11/28/2023)  (Archive)

November 30, 2023 – At Weaponization of Government subcommittee hearing, Goldman engages in conspiracy theory that Rudy Giuliani and Russia might have manipulated Hunter laptop

(Credit: The Gateway Pundit)

(…) During a hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Federal Government on Thursday, journalist Michael Shellenberger delivered a striking rebuttal to Democrat Representative Dan Goldman’s suggestions of conspiracy involving Rudy Giuliani, Russia, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The hearing, aimed at examining federal government-sanctioned internet suppression and attacks on journalists and media outlets, featured notable figures such as Matt Taibbi, Twitter Files journalist and author; Michael Shellenberger, environmentalist and author; Rupa Subramanya, a Canada-based journalist for The Free Press; and Olivia Troye, former Homeland Security Advisor.

The confrontation between Shellenberger and Goldman (D-NY) arose when Goldman questioned the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop’s contents, implying potential manipulation by Giuliani or Russia. Shellenberger confidently asserted the legitimacy of the contents, challenging Goldman’s baseless conspiracy theory.

“You’ve talked about the Hunter Biden laptop and how the FBI knew it existed. You are aware, of course, that the laptop, so to speak, that was published in The New York Post was actually a hard drive that the New York Post admitted here was not authenticated as real. It was not the laptop the FBI had. You’re aware of that, right?’ Dan Goldman asked.

“It was the same contents,” Shellenberger responded, confidently challenging the representative’s implications.

“How do you know?” Goldman fired back.

“Because it’s the same,” Shellenberger replied curtly.

Goldman then theorized that hard drives can be manipulated, suggesting the possibility of tampering by figures like Rudy Giuliani or even foreign entities such as Russia. Shellenberger stood his ground, asking for evidence to back Goldman’s claims. As Goldman struggled to present any substantial evidence, Shellenberger accused him of “engaging in a conspiracy.”

Goldman: You would have to authenticate it to know it was the same contents. You have no idea. You know hard drives manipulated.

Shellenberger: Are you suggesting the New York Post participating in a conspiracy to construct the contents of the Hunter Biden laptops?

Goldman: No, sir. The problem is that hard drives can be manipulated by Rudy Giuliani or Russia.

Shellenberger: What’s the evidence that happened?

Goldman: Well, there is actual evidence of it, but the point is.

Shellenberger: There’s no evidence for it. So you’re engaging in a conspiracy.

Goldman, attempting to shift the conversation towards transparency, inquired if it would be more transparent for Hunter Biden to testify publicly in Congress rather than privately.

“I’m glad you agree with me, Mr. Schellenberger, that transparency is the most important thing. And my last question for you is, do you think it would be transparent if Hunter Biden came to this Congress and testified in a public hearing? And more transparent than if he testified privately?” Goldman asked.

Shellenberger admitted sarcastically that he hadn’t given it thought.

“I mean, literally, I’ve never thought about that. I have no idea,” said Shellenberger as the audience burst into laughter.

“Congress shall take no action to abridge freedom of speech, and that’s what you just describe,” Shellenberger

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 11/30/2023)  (Archive)

November 30, 2023 – House Judiciary Committee: The White House worked with YouTube to censor COVID-19 & vaccine ‘misinformation’

The logos for Google and the Google-owned video streaming service YouTube. (Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images /)

The Biden administration worked together with employees of Google-owned YouTube in 2021 to target alleged “misinformation” relating to the COVID-19 virus and its vaccinations, according to documents obtained by FOX Business.

The documents, acquired through a source close to the House Judiciary Committee, reveal a level of correspondence previously unknown to the American public, as President Biden and his aides sought to promote coronavirus vaccinations in efforts to quell the raging pandemic.

The campaign was led by former White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, who has since left the administration to help run Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign as a Deputy Campaign Manager.

Flaherty emailed Google team members in April 2021 to “connect […] about the work you’re doing to combat vaccine hesitancy, but also crack down on vaccine misinformation,” according to the documents.

Flaherty continued, asking for trends surrounding vaccine misinformation on the website, while offering government assistance in the form of COVID experts at the White House to partner in product work with YouTube.

Google, in an internal email, noted that after a subsequent meeting with Flaherty, the White House staffer “particularly dug in on our decision making for borderline content” — which is content that doesn’t cross Community Guidelines but rather brushes up against it, according to YouTube.

A week later, Google acknowledged that it sent the White House the total amount of videos removed for COVID vaccine misinformation, while discussing the government’s desire for even more data.

“Really [Flaherty’s] interested in what we’re seeing that is NOT coming down,” read an internal Google email between employees, seemingly referring to videos that had not yet been removed.

The next day, YouTube’s Government Affairs team emailed YouTube’s Product team flagging the interactions with the White House.

“…there is a very high degree of interest now coming from the White House now regarding vaccine misinfo/vaccine hesitancy and our work around borderline content,” the internal email from YouTube read.

“Unfortunately, the role of tech in addressing vaccine hesitancy is about to come under a massive spotlight particularly as the supply of the vaccine is soon to outpace demand,” the April 2021 correspondence added.

Then, the Government Affairs team asked if the Product team could brief the White House on YouTube’s work to reduce borderline content.

“We were hoping to get something on the books in the next two weeks or so to prevent anything from potentially spiraling out of control,” the email stated, stressing the urgency of the situation.

A week later, an update was presented, with YouTube’s Government Affairs team writing the Product team to inform them of the discussions between YouTube and the White House.

“Over the last several weeks, the Google & YT GAAP team have had conversations with the White House staff on YouTube’s policies and all the great work that is being done to raise authoritative information and fight harmful misinformation related to COVID-19 misinformation,” the email stated.

The Government Affairs team then asked if the YouTube Product team could meet directly with White House staff to highlight their efforts, because “[White House] staff continue[d] to have questions on the raise/reduce efforts,” related to supposed misinformation.

The email continued, imploring the Product team to meet with the White House as it could be beneficial for a future working relationship.

“…we believe having the opportunity for you both to share more background would be hugely beneficial as we seek to work closely with this administration on multiple policy fronts,” the Government Affairs team wrote.

The revelations of the documents between the White House and Google come roughly a year after the original Twitter Files were released, sparking a national debate about freedom of speech online.

Speaking on the interactions between YouTube and the Biden administration, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told FOX Business, “We knew the Biden White House worked to censor American speech with the help of Big Tech. Internal documents from Google obtained by the Judiciary Committee and Select Subcommittee show that their scheme extended to YouTube.”

“The Committees will continue their critical investigative work to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights and put an end to the vast government censorship enterprise,” he added. (Read more: Fox Business, 11/30/2023)  (Archive)

November 30, 2023 – House Weaponization Committee holds hearing on Big Government/Big Tech collusion to censor Americans

December 4, 2023 – Former Clinton official pleads guilty to decades of spying for communist Cuba

Victor Manuel Rocha (Credit: public domain)

A former top official in ex-President Bill Clinton’s administration has admitted to decades of spying on behalf of Cuba’s communist regime.

Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, a career diplomat who rose to prominence during Clinton’s tenure, was criminally indicted in December on charges that he secretly served as a spy for Cuba.

Rocha who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia during the latter part of Clinton’s presidency, informed a federal judge on Thursday that he intends to plead guilty.

He confessed to a charge of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, according to the Associated Press.

That plea, which will be finalized during an April 12 court hearing, came as part of a deal reached with prosecutors for his cooperation in exposing the extent of Cuba’s surreptitious intelligence-gathering inside the U.S. in exchange for the dismissal of more than a dozen other serious criminal charges Rocha faced.

In a Dec. 4 press release from the Justice Department, it was first revealed that former Ambassador Rocha had been a clandestine spy on behalf of the Cuban regime within the U.S. government for decades, and was only caught after he confessed his lengthy record of espionage to an undercover FBI agent that he believed was a member of the Cuban intelligence services.

“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement at that time. (Read more: Slay News, 3/03/2024)  (Archive)

December 4, 2023 – Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden

House Oversight Chairman James Comer on Monday released subpoenaed bank records revealing Joe Biden received direct monthly payments from Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC.

Hunter Biden is currently under federal investigation for using Owasco PC for tax evasion and other crimes.

Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed he never took a dime from China and was never involved with his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings.

Biden, in a ‘catch me if you can’ moment, taunted reporters in October inquiring about his family’s corruption and asked, “Where’s the money?”

Hunter Biden’s investment vehicle Owasco made DIRECT payments (screenshots below) to Joe Biden, according to newly obtained bank records.

“Payments from Hunter’s business entity are now a part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefitted from his family’s influence-peddling schemes,” Chairman Comer said.

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 12/4/2023) (Archive)

December 5, 2023 – Wray admits withholding the truth about Biden laptop helped protect Joe Biden during 2020 campaign

“Why didn’t the FBI just say, hey, the laptop’s real?” Senator Kennedy asked. “Why didn’t you just tell everybody the laptop’s real. We’re not vouching for what’s on it, but it’s real. This isn’t a fiction.”

Kennedy continued, “You’re the FBI. You’re not part of the White House and part of Homeland Security. You’re not supposed to be political. You see all this controversy going on? Why didn’t the FBI said, ‘Time out, folks. We’re not getting to the middle of this, but the laptop’s real.’”

Wray responded and said that their aim was to avoid election interference, “We have to be very careful about what we can say, especially in the middle of an election season,” Wray explained. (The Gateway Pundit, 12/5/2023) (Archive)

December 6, 2023 – Joe Biden’s alias exchanged 5 emails with Biden associate before 2014 Ukraine trip, 27 afterward

President Joe Biden’s email alias exchanged five messages with Eric Schwerin — a Biden family associate — immediately before Biden visited Ukraine in 2014 — when Hunter Biden sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma — and 27 emails after the trip ended, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) revealed Tuesday.

The timeline of Biden’s alias emails with Schwerin is significant because he was an integral member of the Biden business, Breitbart News previously reported:

  • Schwerin was the president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, a fund created by Hunter Biden and several​ associates that spawned business deals in Russia, Ukraine, China, and Romania.
  • Many of those deals yielded the Biden family business millions over decades while Joe Biden was an elected official.
  • Schwerin was the architect of the Biden family’s “various shell companies that launder money around the world,” according to Smith.
  • Schwerin shared bank accounts with Joe Biden.
  • He was dubbed the family’s “moneyman.”
  • He maintained guest lists for White House functions.
  • Schwerin negotiated the settlement with Hunter’s first wife, Kathleen.

The 32 emails are part of an 11-page log of emails Joe Biden sent and received between 2010 and 2019. In total, Joe Biden and Schwerin exchanged 327 emails. The House Ways and Means Committee obtained the emails from IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler.

The log does not contain the content of the alias emails.

The timeline of the 32 emails encompassed Joe Biden’s 2014 trip to Ukraine, where he threatened to withhold $1 billion if the Ukrainian president did not fire a Ukrainian prosecutor. Burisma was under investigation by the prosecutor. Hunter sat on the board of Burisma. (Read more: Breitbart, 12/6/2023)  (Archive)

December 7, 2023 – Second whistleblower comes forward with evidence of the Pentagon’s involvement in censoring Americans

Last week, Public and Racket published the first CTIL Files, which revealed the origins of the Censorship Industrial Complex in offensive tactics developed by US and UK military contractors.

Now, a second whistleblower has come forward with Slack messages showing far greater government and military involvement in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) than we had previously discovered.

The CTIL Slack “disinformation” channel and the “law enforcement escalation” channel included current and former FBI employees, as well as personnel from the Michigan Cyber Command Center, the US Defense Digital Service (DDS), and at least one European government.

DDS is headquartered in the Pentagon and was founded by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in November 2015. DDS’s website states, “The Department of Defense has a secret weapon.”

The Department of Defense told Public that it combined DDS with other agencies. “DDS merged with three other organizations to form the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) back in Feb 2022. CDAO is not currently involved with CTI and we do not have situational awareness on project participation which predated that merger,” a spokesperson said.

As for the CTI League, it claimed to serve an essential function, cybersecurity, protecting hospitals and healthcare systems from serious threats.

However, according to the new whistleblower, “The essential function of CTI League was largely duplicative of other free and paid threat services available to health care defenders.”

Justin Frappier, who worked for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), wrote on his profile, “The opinions expressed here are my own as an analyst, and not those of CISA, or the US Government unless otherwise stated.”

But Frappier put the CISA seal as his profile image and was an eager participant in the CTI League. When he first joined CTIL, he asked if the group was “consolidating a list of disinformation resources to validate.” A CTIL member replied, “Yes, we are working on that. There is a whole Disinfo gathering [and] analysis operation happening in another group connected to CTI-League, which we’re working to incorporate as a threat stream.”

Responded Frappier, “That’s awesome, I think it’s amazing to see this happening at scale, long overdue but massive effort.”

Note: we redacted the files to protect identities of individuals who did not appear to play a leadership role. (Read more: Public/Substack, 12/07/2023)   (Archive)

December 7, 2023 – House passes FISA-702 Reauthorization Bill (HR 6611) and expands Federal surveillance of Americans

(Illustration on examining the FISA court by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times)

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Chairman Mike Turner is celebrating the passage of HR 6611, the 2023 FISA reauthorization bill.

Chairman Turner would have granted a clean FISA renewal, he’s that kind of Republican; however, several Republicans demanded changes to the FISA-702 authorities that capture the data of American citizens without a warrant.  Thus, the HPSCI modified the authorities within HR 6611, but they made it worse.

(Via CDT) – Tucked away near the end of the bill the House Intelligence Committee reported on December 7 (H.R. 6611, the “HPSCI bill”) is a provision that would dramatically expand surveillance under the controversial Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA 702”), which sunsets on December 31 unless reauthorized. Section 504 of the bill, innocuously captioned “Definition of Electronic Communications Service Provider,” would expand the types of entities that can be compelled to disclose internet communications whether in storage or in transit.

FISA 702 permits the U.S. government to compel communication service providers to disclose for foreign intelligence purposes the communications of persons reasonably believed to be non-U.S. persons abroad. No warrant is required; a belief that the communications relate to U.S. foreign affairs or national security is sufficient.  Under current FISA 702, only entities that provide communication services like email, calls, and text messaging can be compelled to disclose these communications. 

As FISA Court amicus and longtime practitioner Marc Zwilligener and his colleague Steve Lane have already noted, the HPSCI bill would upend the current system, enabling the government to compel anyone with mere access to the equipment on which such communications are stored or transmitted to disclose those communications.  That could include personnel at coffee shops that offer WiFi to their customers, a town library that offers public computer internet services, hotels, shared workspaces, landlords and even AirBNB hosts that offer WiFi to the people who stay there, cloud storage services that host but do not access data, and large data centers that rent out computer server space to their clients.

The provision is intended to reverse a rare decision of the FISA Court of Review (FISCR), which had rejected the government’s claim that a service that a company provided fit within the scope of Section 702. In its effort to override the FISCR ruling, the HPSCI bill has opened Pandora’s Box.  

Because FISA 702 does not merely give the government power to compel production of communications but rather to require that businesses “provide the Government with all information, facilities, or assistance necessary to accomplish the acquisition,” [emphasis supplied] the government could use this new section to compel changes to the infrastructure and operations of some of the business entities listed above. For example, a provider of computer co-location services whose business model is to rent out and to service space on which its clients place their computer servers could be compelled to engineer its service to facilitate such access. In addition, because the HPSCI bill’s expansion is designed to pull in entities that do not currently even have access to communications, the extent of this forced restructure could be severe.

Such a shift not only affects American businesses, it is also likely to spur on overcollection and improperly sweep in Americans’ communications. The expansion would likely facilitate compelled  “Upstream” collection from these entities, a technique in which the government demands access to the entire stream of communications data, rather than obtaining only the communications to and from surveillance targets. It may be difficult for businesses that have access to equipment on which communications are stored and transmitted, but have never had to access the communications themselves, to ensure that only the data of Section 702 targets is turned over to the government.

Instead, they may be compelled to turn over entire communication streams or permit the copying and dragnet scanning of all the data on a server they host. Upstream collection performed by sophisticated giant telcos who operate the Internet backbone already has a fraught history of overcollection, including sweeping in wholly domestic communications (such as through multi communication transaction and “Abouts” collection). Forcing businesses that do not by practice even access communications to comply with FISA 702 orders—including Upstream orders—is reckless, and very likely to cause domestic communications to be improperly collected. (read more)

Here’s the core problem.  The DATA COLLECTION is not going away, meaning the wholesale gathering of the metadata on all electronic communication is the baseline.  As long as that baseline exists, the debate is about how the metadata can be accessed and what queries into that data can take place without a search warrant.

If FISA-702 was completely removed, the executive branch (DOJ-NSD) would be on the honor system, which essentially- they are now.

As long as the capability to retrieve and store the data exists, it will be exploited.   The data collection horse left the barn long ago.  That reality only leaves the ability to limit access as a solution to the abuses and warrantless surveillance.

Having looked extensively at this issue for years, and accepting the data collection is never going to be stopped, the only pathway to try and ensure rules and regulations are compliant with the 4th amendment, would be an oversight panel from the legislative branch put inside the process.

The only time the legislative branch has any power in the FISA process, is when they reauthorize its use.  Only at these specific moments is the legislative branch currently involved.  At all other times, it is the executive branch (DOJ, DOJ-NSD and FBI) involved, along with the FISA Court which represents the judicial branch.   The absence of the legislative branch in the process could be considered the oversight problem.

FISA, as it applies to American citizens caught up in the “incidental collection,” is clearly weaponized.  The underlying database, the storage system for all data, is the other problem.  As long as thousands of people in the executive branch have access to search this database, that access will be abused.

[CTH] – Office of Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified, April 27, 2023, that more than 3.4 million search queries into the NSA database took place between Dec. 1st, 2020 and Nov. 30th, 2021, by government officials and/or contractors working on behalf of the federal government. These search queries were based on authorizations related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Approximately 30% of those 3.4 million search queries were outside the rules and regulations that govern warrantless searches – what the politically correct government calls “non-compliant searches.”  That means during the year 2021, more than 1 million searches of private documents and communication of Americans were illegal and outside the rules.

Additionally, IG Horowitz admitted that somewhere north of 10,000 federal employees have access to conduct these searches of the NSA database; a database which contains the electronic data of every single American, including emails, text messages, social media posts, instant messages, direct messages, phone calls, geolocation identifiers, purchases by electronic funds, banking records and any keystroke any American person puts into any electronic device for any reason. (more)

In my opinion, instead of trying to put the FISA genie back into the bottle, Congress needs to work on the accountability piece.  The punishment for abusing the database needs to be defined – perhaps 5 years imprisonment for each search violation.

The only thing I can think of that will improve the “702” issue, is a legislatively created oversight panel forced within the process (that puts the legislative branch inside the DOJ/FISC relationship) that has full access to see and monitor everything that is being done by the DOJ/FBI.

I don’t know if that would work, but it’s better than what they are doing now.

The Committee on Rules will meet on Monday, December 11, 2023 at 4:00 PM ET in H-313, The Capitol on the following measures:

H.R. 357 – Ensuring Accountability in Agency Rulemaking Act
H.R. 1147 – Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2023
H.R. 6570 – Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act
H.R. 6611 – FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023  (link)

The current FISA-702 authority will likely be extended to April 19th.

Hopefully the Senate will block the modified House bill, HR 6611, which expands the current authority.

FUBAR

(Conservative Treehouse, 12/9/2023)  (Archive)

December 13, 2023 – Hunter Biden plays victim to the press; denies Joe was “financially” involved in his business; skips scheduled deposition with Congress

Hunter Biden gave an impassioned “I am a victim” speech to the press before his scheduled deposition on Capitol Hill. The arrogance and narcissism of this man is truly something to behold.

Yeah, Hunter isn’t showing up for the scheduled deposition because he is super duper special. I added his full statement at the end.

It’s all MAGA Republicans’ fault or something.

But the speech…the language is important, especially this part.

*Financially* It’s gone from Joe Biden did not know anything, to speaking on the phone with business partners, and now not financially involved.

It keeps evolving.

Hunter claimed, “I’m here. I’m ready.”

But yeah…he’s not going to show up to the closed-door deposition.


(Read more: Legal Insurrection, 12/13/2023) (Archive)

December 14, 2023 – Son of WEF co-founder turned whistleblower, Pascal Najadi: “global US military operation #STORM reality in 2024”

Pascal Najadi talks with Canadian journalist Will Dove, producer and founder of the Iron Will Report – December 14th 2023.(Credit: Rumble clipping)

In the year 2023, it has become evident that the Covid PsyOp was meticulously planned and executed long before its implementation. From 2020 until the present day, influential Traitors and Demociders such as Fauci, Biden, the WHO, the WEF, Gavi, Bill Gates, Swiss Health Minister and President Alain Berset, Emmanuel Macron, Lula of Brasil, Von der Leyen, Lauterbach, Drosten, Trudeau, and numerous other individuals in positions of power within governments, supranational organizations, NGOs, military factions, and the medical field, have actively worked against the welfare of humanity. They have committed a Democide and High Treason of unprecedented proportions, surpassing even the most devastating events described in biblical texts.

The motive behind their actions becomes clear when we examine their unified support for the injection of a Bioweapon disguised as an experimental mRNA Gene-altering substance into over 5.7 billion individuals worldwide. This coordinated effort, known as Lockstep or Gleichschritt, draws disturbing parallels to Nazi terminology.

To further their agenda, these malevolent actors have colluded with pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna, who have profited immensely from unconstitutional and discriminatory apartheid-like regimes. These regimes were established under the guise of Covid laws, which were based on a fraudulent and ineffective PCR test. The government and mass media, acting as accomplices, have manipulated public opinion by disseminating false narratives and discrediting esteemed institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, along with the top scientists who had warned against the dangers of these lethal and harmful shots.

In a shocking display of authoritarianism, the unvaccinated have been labeled as enemies of the “Collective,” a term reminiscent of the Nazi regime’s rhetoric. This demonization has coerced innocent families and their children into succumbing to unconstitutional restrictions and public shaming, ultimately leading them to flock to vaccination centers in large numbers.

The year 2023 has brought to light the sinister machinations of those in power, who have callously disregarded the well-being of their own people and violated the very constitutions they were entrusted to uphold. The consequences of their actions will forever be etched in history as a dark chapter of betrayal and deception.

Humanity was compelled to receive an injection of a state-sponsored substance that was marketed as safe, tested, and effective against the Corona PsyOp Virus, which has never been isolated in any laboratory on Earth. My mother and I, along with countless others, were coerced into getting the jabs, which is when force is used to make someone do something they do not want to do. The same rogue executors who subjected us to this are now claiming, with the support of unreliable Federal and Civil Justice Judges, that they did not use force. However, coercion is a form of psychological force and is considered the use of force under the law. All of this was done under unconstitutional circumstances, including the Swiss Constitution, which sounded not too bad until the Covid Injection Democide occurred.

Art 8.

Every person is equal before the law. No person may be discriminated against, in particular on grounds of origin, race, gender, age, language, social position, way of life, religious, ideological, or political convictions, or because of a physical, mental or psychological disability.

The Swiss Government’s violation of Article 8 has resulted in the establishment of a QR Code separated society. This has been followed by the implementation of illegal lockdowns and mask mandates, even affecting children. These actions have personally affected me and my beloved mother, Heidi, who is a descendant of Rudolf Minger, a renowned farmer and former President of the Swiss Federal Council. Minger dedicated himself to the well-being of his people, particularly during the horrific times of World War II, a devastating conflict that caused immense loss of life and injuries to millions of individuals.

Regrettably, we, along with 5.7 billion other individuals, have been deceived into receiving vaccinations. The majority of the Divine Human Species, including ourselves, fell victim to the lies and manipulation orchestrated by our respective governments. These governments, entrusted with upholding and defending our Constitution, as well as safeguarding our interests as We The People, have failed us. It is now scientifically evident that Pfizer and Moderna were fully aware of the involvement of rogue US Military elements in engineering this Bioweapon, with the assistance of Dr. Fauci and his colleagues in Wuhan, during the Bioweapons embargo on the USA and Canada from 2012 to 2014.

These malevolent entities not only deceived and manipulated the then-President and Commander in Chief, Donald J. Trump, during his first term, but also colluded with the World Health Organization (WHO), which enjoys Diplomatic Immunity in Geneva, Switzerland. Their objective was to orchestrate the first-ever Democide in the history of mankind, targeting the divine Human species. Shockingly, they even exploited Pope Francis, using the name of Jesus Christ and God Almighty to promote the injections into humans, all in the name of faith. The extent of these events is beyond imagination, yet they have all occurred and are well-documented.

And they all had a much more sinister plan for us Humans. It involved a prolonged and unrelenting lockdown that would span over two consecutive years. This diabolical scheme was set in motion with the alleged outbreak of the Wuhan surprise, a novel and highly contagious virus known as CoronaVirus. Dr. Fauci and his cohorts, including Tedros, Gates, Schwab, and others, deceived President Trump into signing emergency documents, which were carefully crafted to support their web of lies.

However, their carefully constructed house of cards began to crumble when President Putin unveiled the non-harmful Sputnik V vaccine, claiming it to be the first effective solution against this orchestrated PsyOp orchestrated by Fauci and his associates. To everyone’s astonishment, President Trump unexpectedly disrupted the Deep State’s plans by announcing the availability of a viable vaccine. This unexpected move was the first card he played, causing the Cabal’s house of cards to slowly collapse, thwarting their intentions to confine us for an extended period.

Their objective was not only to decimate the global middle class and commerce through these draconian measures but also to manipulate the human psyche into accepting any injected substance as a means to regain freedom of movement. Can you imagine spending two years confined indoors? Most of us would have become mere automatons, desperately in need of financial assistance. This is where the Federal Reserve (FED), the European Central Bank (ECB), and other insolvent central banks would step in, offering a universal state salary of USD 3,000 to every individual worldwide. However, this financial aid would come at a price – the acceptance of a world health pass combined with a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) wallet, which would grant mobility.

Under this dystopian regime, private property and personal vehicles would become obsolete, replaced by the concept of 15 Minute Cities, where everything one needed would be within a short distance. The control mechanisms were meticulously designed, with the CBDC having an expiration date, ensuring compliance and dependence on the system.

This was a feature emphasizing the importance of collective care and economic recovery following a prolonged two-year lockdown enforced by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO, unopposed by any of the 194 rogue government entities, some of which were influenced by neo-fascist and communist ideologies propagated by Klaus Schwab and the Globalist WEF club, sought to establish a Pandemic Treaty. This treaty aimed to grant the WHO unrestricted authority over our respective Constitutions, including all legislative, executive, and military branches, enabling them to utilize force in administering vaccinations to 70% of the population and detaining unwilling or allegedly infected individuals in re-education camps fortified with barbed wire.

However, the patriot protector, not only of the US Constitution but also of global interests, recognized the need to take action in the spirit of the 1776 Constitution and humanity. A decision was made to dismantle the global deep state through a strategic alliance known as the War Generals Alliance, consisting of 33 nations’ militaries operating under the leadership of the US Space Force, commanded by CIC and Wartime President Donald J. Trump. This operation was initiated following a well-coordinated Helsinki Summit in the summer of 2018, where President Trump and President Putin of the Russian Federation jointly agreed to proceed. The memorable Helsinki Summit Press Conference witnessed President Putin presenting a football as a gift to President Trump, exchanging meaningful glances and smiles, symbolizing their shared understanding. In a paraphrased statement, President Putin handed the ball to President Trump, stating, “Dear Mr. President, I present this football to you,” as he passed it over. President Trump accepted the ball, signifying his acceptance of the challenge, while Putin concluded by saying, “…and now the ball is in your court.”

This marks the undeniable commencement of the Deep State’s decline, with President Trump assuming the role of the unwavering WarTime President and Commander in Chief of the United States Military since 2020. The US Space Force, as the central command and control of the largest global military operation in history, surpasses any previous military endeavor. More than 200 esteemed war time Generals from over 33 nations tirelessly dedicate themselves to active duty under the operation commonly referred to as Operation Storm. President Trump’s resolute declaration, “The Storm is now upon us,” remains etched in our collective memory.

As a victim of three Pfizer Bioweapon mRNA shots, which unleashed an overwhelming number of toxic Nano Lipids into my body, resulting in the destruction of billions of Mitochondria, I took decisive action. Seeking justice, I approached the Swiss Police and filed Criminal Charges against a Health Minister whom I believed to be acting outside the bounds of the law. Granting Swiss Justice the benefit of doubt, I also filed criminal charges against the two doctors responsible for administering the shots without obtaining the legally required informed consent, which necessitated my signed approval prior to the injection. Regrettably, the responses from the courts in all three cases echoed a similar miscarriage of justice, asserting that force was not employed and that I should have educated myself about the potential dangers. Consequently, they deemed the injections non-poisonous, thereby negating the need for informed consent procedures.

This firsthand experience unequivocally confirms that our current Government, the majority of medical professionals, the prosecution, the courts, and their judges have converged into a single entity, one that is unreliable. They have forsaken their duty to safeguard and uphold the Swiss Constitution, as well as to serve and protect the very citizens who finance their livelihoods, nourish their families, and provide education for their children.

They all demonstrated a lack of reliability in relation to the constitution and us, the Humans. However, they diligently fulfilled their respective duties in an attempt to safeguard the unreliable elements within our government. This was particularly evident in my cases, as ruling in accordance with the written laws would have undoubtedly sparked a massive outcry from approximately 5 million Swiss individuals who had been injected into the country, demanding immediate retribution. Such a scenario had the potential to destabilize the rogue government elements, leading to a mass exodus of officials resigning from their positions. Naturally, this outcome could not be permitted, prompting them to resort to attempts to make me disappear.

Unfortunately for them, this proved to be a grave error, as they all fell into the trap of my deception, our deception. I now rightfully align myself with my fellow Human Guardian, President Trump, and assert that our justice system and judges are entirely unreliable. (Read more: CNBC, 1/09/2024)  (Archive)

December 14, 2023 – Former Assistant U.S Attorney, Lesley Wolf, refuses to explain order to remove Joe Biden from search warrant in Hunter Biden case

Lesley Wolf worked closely with Alexander Mackler, who served as then-VP Joe’s White House Deputy Counsel from 2014 to 2016. (Credit: FedBar)

Former Assistant U.S Attorney for the District of Delaware Lesley Wolf did not tell lawmakers why she protected Joe Biden from a planned search warrant ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Wolf testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 14 and declined to discuss an email she sent in August 2020 instructing FBI Agent Joshua Wilson to take Joe Biden’s name off a draft search warrant during the Hunter Biden investigation, according to a transcript reviewed by the Daily Caller.

“This is an email chain between you and FBI Special Agent Joshua Wilson. In the last sentence of the email that you sent, it states, ‘There should be nothing about political figure 1 in here.’ Can you tell us who political figure 1 is?” Wolf was asked.

“Looking at page 2 of the document, it would be, well, who’s described as former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., now President Biden,” Wolf responded.

“And can you tell us why you wrote ‘There should be nothing about political figure 1 in here’?”

She insisted political bias did not play a role in her decision to have Joe Biden removed from the search warrant and referred to her opening statement where she defended herself. Throughout her testimony, she claimed her actions on the Hunter Biden case were in line with Department of Justice (DOJ) policy.

“Okay. But in your opening statement, I think you indicated that none of these decisions were made for political reasons. Is that fair to say?”

“That is reflected in my opening statement, and I agree with that,” Wolf stated.

“Okay. So to extent you didn’t you asked the agents to take out political figure 1, there was no political motivation in requesting that?”

“I refer back to my opening statement where I said at no time there was politics playing a role in those decisions,” Wolf answered.

IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler have accused Wolf of giving Hunter Biden special treatment by slow-walking and shutting down investigative steps, such as searching Joe Biden’s Delaware guest house and Hunter Biden’s northern Virginia storage locker.

She recently left the DOJ in the wake of the IRS whistleblower accusations. Wolf similarly refused to address a memo written by Shapley detailing how she ignored potential campaign finance issues surrounding Hunter Biden’s financier Kevin Morris.

The House Ways and Means Committee released a trove of documents in September provided by the IRS whistleblowers to support their initial testimony.

Among those documents was the email Wolf sent Wilson in August 2020 referring to “political figure 1” and telling him to remove the figure from the Blue Star search warrant. A draft copy of the search warrant shows “political figure one” was then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

“So I am not able to answer questions about this particular search warrant or this particular draft,” Wolf replied. She proceeded to give a lengthy explanation of how drafting search warrants works and the requirements to obtain one.

“So in this instance, you stand by your statement that there should be nothing about political figure 1 in here?”

“I’m not able to speak to this particular warrant” Wolf said.

Wolf Email Joe Biden by James Lynch

(Read more: The Daily Caller, 12/21/2023) (Archive)

December 14, 2023 – Federal prosecutor, Lesley Wolf, accused of obstructing Hunter Biden investigation, quietly leaves DOJ

Lesley Wolf worked closely with Alexander Mackler, who served as then-VP Joe’s White House Deputy Counsel from 2014 to 2016. (Credit: FedBar)

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, who has been accused of obstructing the Hunter Biden probe, has left her post at the Justice Department, it was reported Thursday as she sat down for an interview with the House Judiciary Committee.

Wolf, who was interviewed behind closed doors Thursday for a transcribed interview, appeared under a subpoena, a day after the full House voted on a party line basis to formalize an impeachment inquiry into the president.

That came on a day when Hunter Biden delivered a blistering statement outside the Capitol but declined to appear for a closed interview with lawmakers, after saying he would appear in a public forum.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan had told Wolf in a letter she possessed ‘specialized and unique information that is unavailable to the Committee through other sources.’

She has left the Justice Department and is no longer employed there, Fox News reported Thursday.

Wolf was a top investigator in the Hunter Biden probe headed by Special Counsel David Weiss. Prosecutors last week unsealed a new new nine-count grand jury indictment in Los Angeles on tax charges.

IRS whistleblower David Shapley has testified that DOJ investigators tried to ‘limit’ the questions that investigators could ask related to President Biden.

Shapley said Wolf sought to limit questions that could connect the probe to the now-president, including in 2020 in preparations for an interview with Hunter business associate Robert Walker.

Wolf ‘interjected and said she did not want to ask about the big guy and stated she did not want to ask questions about “dad.”‘

Investigators were interested in asking questions based on a 2017 email about people involved in a deal involving the now bankrupt firm CEFC China Energy Co.

Chief Deputy Attorney General Alexander Snyder Mackler (Credit: WMDT screenshot)

It included a line that has prompted speculation that the ‘big guy’ is the now-president, and that the direction constituted an effort to hold back the probe. The party-line vote by House Republicans Wednesday will likely strengthen their ability to obtain other testimony, even though several Republicans have said they do not have evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

DailyMail.com reported last summer that Wolf was friends and colleagues with Alexander Mackler, who served as Joe Biden’s White House Deputy Counsel from 2014 to 2016 when he was vice president.

Jordan complained afterward that Wolf ‘refused to answer most of our questions’ about the ongoing investigation. Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland called the interview a ‘huge waste of time,’ saying there was not much she was permitted to say about the probe. (Read more: The Daily Mail, 12/14/2023)  (Archive)

December 14, 2023 – Rep. Clay Higgins discusses the FBI “ghost buses” with Lara Logan

December 16, 2023 – Could a mysterious missing binder be the real reason for the Mar-a-Lago raid?

Armed Secret Service agents during a raid on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. (Credit: Associated Press)

There’s been a lot of speculation about why the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, treating Trump as if he were the villain in “Scarface.” Most rational thinkers are skeptical that it was about classified secrets Trump supposedly shouldn’t have had. Instead, it seems more likely connected to a particular binder brimming with details that could potentially dismantle Obama and Hillary’s Crossfire Hurricane operation.

What are the odds that the regime was frantically searching for this crucial binder?

CNN:

A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.

In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.

The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.

The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.

Mike Davis, the former clerk for Justice Gorsuch, believes feds were looking for that binder. He responded to right-wing influencer Greg Price, who said the following:

Mike agreed and responded with this comment on X:

(Read more: Revolver News, 12/16/2023) (Archive)

December 18, 2023 – House Oversight identifies 20 Biden shell companies raking in millions from China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Romania between 2015-2019

December 18, 2023 – Michael Dreeben, the man behind three major anti-Trump operations, joins Jack Smith’s team

Michael Drebeen (Credit: Duke University of Law)

Eyebrows were raised last week when it was discovered that Special Counsel Jack Smith had added attorney Michael Dreeben to his legal team.

“An interesting detail: Michael Dreeben somehow snuck into Jack Smith’s office. He was Mueller’s appellate guy,” enthused Marcy Wheeler, a proponent of the debunked conspiracy theory that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia.

Fellow Russia-collusion hoaxer Rachel Maddow of MSNBC ran an entire segment to announce the exciting news that Dreeben is “helming this part of the case,” meaning Smith’s request to the Supreme Court to look at whether American presidents may be prosecuted for actions taken while they are president. Left-wing legal activist (and, yes, another bitter clinger Russia-collusion hoaxer) Joyce Vance said her “friend” Dreeben had “framed this petition” before the Supreme Court.

Mueller, of course, is Robert Mueller, the ostensible head of the Mueller probe that treated the Russia conspiracy scam as credible and leaked information to the propaganda press to ensure it had maximum effect. After 18 months, the investigation concluded with not a single American, much less a single Trump official, being found to have colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. On the way to that conclusion, it wreaked havoc on Republicans across the country, and a strong majority of Democrats still believe the “big lie” that Russians stole the 2016 election for Donald Trump.

(…) Now Dreeben has joined the Biden administration’s effort to try to convict Trump on Jan. 6-related charges before the 2024 election. This is not the first Democrat effort Dreeben joined. He was also brought on to help Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s successful effort at the Supreme Court in 2020 to get Trump’s taxes and related financial records.

New York Magazine reported that Dreeben was part of a key group of former Mueller prosecutors brought in by Vance to figure out ways to politically prosecute Trump. They weren’t the only lawyers brought into the Democrat operation. Vance secured legal help from a Biden-connected law firm in New York City to design the “get Trump” operation. The powerhouse law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison lent Mark F. Pomerantz, Elyssa Abuhoff, and Caroline Williamson to Vance. The law firm had held a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for Biden during his presidential campaign.

By the spring of 2023, Dreeben was publicly noting his affiliation with Just Security, “the legal beachhead of the Trump resistance.” The group helped launder Mueller probe legal theories into the general public and helped transition the Russia-collusion impeachment theory to the Ukraine issue once it became apparent that the Russia hoax was only believed by Democrats in echo chambers. Dreeben left the federal government in June 2019 after the Mueller probe ended, and he was viewed by Republican congressional staffers as being involved in Democrats’ impeachment efforts later that year along with Norm Eisen. Eisen, a frequent author at Just Security, was the House Democrats’ counsel for the 2019 impeachment.

Dreeben is one of the most experienced advocates before the Supreme Court, having argued 105 cases during his time in the solicitor general’s office. That the elite attorney is helping Democrats with their 2024 campaign strategy of lawfare is significant and showcases how much coordination between key Democrat operatives is behind this Soviet-style attempt to imprison President Joe Biden’s political opponents.

Democrat prosecutors began indicting Donald Trump and other Republican political opponents earlier this year. Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Vance’s successor, indicted Trump in March in a widely panned case involving payments to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. After the shocking raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in Florida in a classified documents case in June 2023. Democrat activist Fani Willis indicted Trump and more than a dozen other Republicans in August for contesting the poorly run 2020 election in Georgia. Smith also indicted Trump in Washington, D.C., in August on charges related to the Jan. 6 protest of the controversial 2020 election.

This is all happening while the Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James, who ran on an explicit campaign of using lawfare to harm Trump, is attempting to seize the Trump family business as punishment for his political views.

The focus on Smith’s second indictment in Washington, D.C., is occurring along with the realization that the other cases might not secure the quick and easy convictions in front of biased juries that are the hallmark of other show trials. (Read more: The Federalist, 12/18/2023)  (Archive)

December 19, 2023 – An ODNI investigation reveals how the CCP interfered in US election

(Credit: The Epoch Times/Shutterstock/clipping)

The Chinese regime interfered in the U.S. 2022 midterm elections through various means, according to a declassified intelligence report and multiple private-sector investigations.

The effort included a broad array of techniques orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including retaliation against U.S. lawmakers, the promotion of divisive content, and the impersonation of American voters online.

Noted China hawk Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) said the regime will continue its efforts to interfere in U.S. elections until the Biden administration deals more seriously with Beijing.

“Communist China has shown time and time again that they will stop at nothing to interfere in America’s elections,” Mr. Tiffany told The Epoch Times.

“The Biden administration needs to take a harder line on PRC meddling and espionage.”

PRC is the acronym for communist China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.
assessment published by the director of national intelligence (DNI) in December 2023 found that the regime tried to “influence” U.S. congressional elections involving both Democrats and Republicans who espoused tough-on-China policy stances.

The report also found that the scale and scope of foreign activity targeting the elections surpassed that of the prior midterms but remained below the level expected in presidential years.

The report assessed that the CCP had a “greater willingness to conduct election influence activities than in past cycles,” partly because it didn’t fear retaliation from the Biden administration.

The report states that CCP officials gave operatives more freedom to interfere in U.S. elections because the regime “believed that Beijing was under less scrutiny … and because they did not expect the current administration to retaliate as severely as they feared in 2020.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 1/25/2024)  (Archive)

December 19, 2023 – Mary McCord’s husband worked with Chief Justice John Roberts counsel; McCord is at center of all Trump investigations

(…) If there is one corrupt DC player who has escaped scrutiny for her corrupt endeavors, it would be Mary McCord.  More than any other Lawfare operative within Main Justice, Mary McCord sits at the center of every table in the manufacturing of cases against Donald Trump. {GO DEEP} Mary McCord’s husband is Sheldon Snook; he was the right hand to the legal counsel of Chief Justice John Roberts.

(Credit: Safe and Effective podcast/Jeff Melody)

When the Carter Page FISA application was originally assembled by the FBI and DOJ, there was initial hesitancy from within the DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) about submitting the application, because it did not have enough citations in evidence (the infamous ‘Woods File’).  That’s why the Steele Dossier ultimately became important.  It was the Steele Dossier that provided the push, the legal cover needed for the DOJ-NSD to submit the application for a Title-1 surveillance warrant against the campaign of Donald J. Trump.

When the application was finally assembled for submission to the FISA court, the head of the DOJ-NSD was John Carlin.  Carlin quit working for the DOJ-NSD in late September 2016 just before the final application was submitted (October 21,2016).  John Carlin was replaced by Deputy Asst. Attorney General, Mary McCord.

♦ When the FISA application was finally submitted (approved by Sally Yates and James Comey), it was Mary McCord who did the actual process of filing the application and gaining the Title-1 surveillance warrant.

A few months later, February 2017, with Donald Trump now in office as President, it was Mary McCord who went with Deputy AG Sally Yates to the White House to confront White House legal counsel Don McGahn over the Michael Flynn interview with FBI agents.  The surveillance of Flynn’s calls was presumably done under the auspices and legal authority of the FISA application Mary McCord previously was in charge of submitting.

♦ At the time the Carter Page application was filed (October 21, 2016), Mary McCord’s chief legal counsel inside the office was a DOJ-NSD lawyer named Michael Atkinson.  In his role as the legal counsel for the DOJ-NSD, it was Atkinson’s job to review and audit all FISA applications submitted from inside the DOJ.  Essentially, Atkinson was the DOJ internal compliance officer in charge of making sure all FISA applications were correctly assembled and documented.

♦ When the anonymous CIA whistleblower complaint was filed against President Trump for the issues of the Ukraine call with President Zelensky, the Intelligence Community Inspector General had to change the rules for the complaint to allow an anonymous submission.  Prior to this change, all intelligence whistleblowers had to put their name on the complaint.  It was this 2019 IGIC who changed the rules.  Who was the Intelligence Community Inspector General?  Michael Atkinson.

When ICIG Michael Atkinson turned over the newly authorized anonymous whistleblower complaint to the joint House Intelligence and Judiciary Committee (Schiff and Nadler chairs), who did Michael Atkinson give the complaint to?  Mary McCord.

Yes, after she left main justice, Mary McCord took the job of working for Chairman Jerry Nadler and Chairman Adam Schiff as the chief legal advisor inside the investigation that led to the construction of articles of impeachment.   As a consequence, Mary McCord received the newly permitted anonymous whistleblower complaint from her old office colleague Michael Atkinson.

♦ During his investigation of the Carter Page application, Inspector General Michael Horowitz discovered an intentional lie inside the Carter Page FISA application (directly related to the ‘Woods File’), which his team eventually tracked to FBI counterintelligence division lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith.  Eventually Clinesmith was criminally charged with fabricating evidence (changed wording on an email) in order to intentionally falsify the underlying evidence in the FISA submission.

When John Durham took the Clinesmith indictment to court, the judge in the case was James Boasberg.

♦ In addition to being a DC criminal judge, James Boasberg is also a FISA court judge who signed-off on one of the renewals for the FISA application that was submitted using fraudulent evidence fabricated by Kevin Clinesmith.  In essence, now the presiding judge over the FISA court, Boasberg was the FISC judge who was tricked by Clinesmith, and now the criminal court judge in charge of determining Clinesmith’s legal outcome.  Judge Boasberg eventually sentenced Clinesmith to 6 months probation.

As an outcome of continued FISA application fraud and wrongdoing by the FBI, in their exploitation of searches of the NSA database, Presiding FISC Judge James Boasberg appointed an amici curiae advisor to the court who would monitor the DOJ-NSD submissions and ongoing FBI activities.

Who did James Boasberg select as a FISA court amicus?  Mary McCord.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

♦ SUMMARY:  Mary McCord submitted the original false FISA application to the court using the demonstrably false Dossier.  Mary McCord participated in the framing of Michael Flynn.  Mary McCord worked with ICIG Michael Atkinson to create a fraudulent whistleblower complaint against President Trump; and Mary McCord used that manipulated complaint to assemble articles of impeachment on behalf of the joint House Intel and Judiciary Committee.  Mary McCord then took up a defensive position inside the FISA court to protect the DOJ and FBI from sunlight upon all the aforementioned corrupt activity.

You can clearly see how Mary McCord would be a person of interest if anyone was going to start digging into corruption internally within the FBI, DOJ or DOJ-NSD.

What happened next….

November 3, 2021 – In Washington DC – “Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the House Jan. 6 Select Committee has tapped Mary McCord, who once ran the Justice Department’s National Security Division, for representation in its fight to obtain former President Donald Trump’s White House records. (read more)

That’s the context; now I want to go back a little.

First, when did Mary McCord become “amicus” to the FISA court?  ANSWER: When the court (Boasberg) discovered IG Michael Horowitz was investigating the fraudulent FISA application.  In essence, the FISA Court appointed the person who submitted the fraudulent filing, to advise on any ramifications from the fraudulent filing.  See how that works?

Now, let’s go deeper….

When Mary McCord went to the White House with Sally Yates to talk to white house counsel Don McGhan about the Flynn call with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, and the subsequent CBS interview with VP Pence, where Pence’s denial of any wrongdoing took place, the background narrative in the attack against Flynn was the Logan Act.

The construct of the Logan Act narrative was pure Lawfare, and DAG Sally Yates with Acting NSD AAG Mary McCord were the architects.

Why was the DOJ National Security Division concerned with a conflict between what Pence said on CBS and what Flynn said about his conversations with Kislyak?

This is where a big mental reset is needed.  Flynn did nothing wrong. The incoming National Security Advisor can say anything he wants with the Russian ambassador, short of giving away classified details of any national security issue.  In December of 2016, if Michael Flynn wanted to say Obama was an a**hole, and the Trump administration disagreed with everything he ever did, the incoming NSA was free to do so.  There was simply nothing wrong with that conversation – regardless of content.

So, why were McCord and Yates so determined to make an issue in media and in confrontation with the White House?  Why did the DOJ-NSD even care?  This is the part that people overlooked when the media narrative was driving the news cycle.  People got too stuck in the weeds and didn’t ask the right questions.

Some entity, we discover later was the FBI counterintelligence division, was monitoring Flynn’s calls.  They transcribed a copy of the call between Flynn and Kislyak, and that became known as the “Flynn Cuts” as described within internal documents, and later statements.

After the Flynn/Kislyak conversation was leaked to the media, Obama asked ODNI Clapper how that call got leaked.  Clapper went to the FBI on 1/4/17 and asked FBI Director James Comey.  Comey gave Clapper a copy of the Flynn Cuts which Clapper then took back to the White House to explain to Obama.

Obama’s White House counsel went bananas, because Clapper had just walked directly into the Oval Office with proof the Obama administration was monitoring the incoming National Security Advisor.  Obama’s plausible deniability of the surveillance was lost as soon as Clapper walked in with the written transcript.

That was the motive for the 1/5/17 Susan Rice memo, and the reason for Obama to emphasize “buy the book” three times.

It wasn’t that Obama didn’t know already; it was that a document trail now existed (likely a CYA from Comey) that took away Obama’s plausible deniability of knowledge.  The entire January 5th meeting was organized to mitigate this issue.

Knowing the Flynn Cuts were created simultaneously with the phone call, and knowing how it was quickly decided to use the Logan Act as a narrative against Flynn and Trump, we can be very sure both McCord and Yates had read that transcript before they went to the White House.  [Again, this is the entire purpose of them going to the White House to confront McGhan with their manufactured concerns.]

So, when it comes to ‘who leaked’ the reality of the Flynn/Kislyak call to the media, the entire predicate for the Logan Act violation – in hindsight – I would bet a donut it was Mary McCord.

But wait, there’s more…. 

Sheldon Snook (Credit: X)

Now we go back to McCord’s husband, Sheldon Snook.

Sheldon was working for the counsel to John Roberts.  The counsel to the Chief Justice has one job, to review the legal implications of issues before the court and advise Justice John Roberts.  The counsel to the Chief Justice knows everything happening in the court and is the sounding board for any legal issues impacting the Supreme Court.

In his position as the right hand of the counsel to the chief justice, Sheldon Snook would know everything happening inside the court.

At the time, there was nothing bigger inside the court than the Alito opinion known as the Dobb’s Decision – the returning of abortion law to the states.  Without any doubt, the counsel to Chief Justice Roberts would have that decision at the forefront of his advice and counsel.  By extension, this puts the actual written Alito opinion in the orbit of Sheldon Snook.

After the Supreme Court launched a heavily publicized internal investigation into the leaking of the Dobbs decision (Alito opinion), something interesting happened.  Sheldon Snook left his position.   If you look at the timing of the leak, the investigation and the Sheldon Snook exit, the circumstantial evidence looms large.

Of course, given the extremely high stakes, the institutional crisis with the public discovering the office of the legal counsel to the Chief Justice likely leaked the decision, such an outcome would be catastrophic for the institutional credibility.  In essence, it would be Robert’s office who leaked the opinion to the media.

If you were Chief Justice John Roberts and desperately needed to protect the integrity of the court, making sure such a thermonuclear discovery was never identified would be paramount.  Under the auspices of motive, Sheldon Snook would exit quietly.  Which is exactly what happened.

The timeline holds the key.

Last point….  Remember the stories of the J6 investigative staff all going to work for Jack Smith on the investigation of Donald Trump?   Well, Mary McCord was a member of that team [citation]; all indications are that her background efforts continue today as a quiet member of the Special Counsel team that is still attacking Donald Trump.  (Conservative Treehouse, 12/19/2023)  (Archive)

December 19, 2023 – Former AG Ed Meese and two constitutional scholars file an amicus brief with SCOTUS claiming Jack Smith’s appointment is unconstitutional

Former Attorney General Edwin Meese applauds as President Donald Trump speaks during a ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Meese, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2019. (Credit: Alex Brandon/AP)

Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel is unconstitutional and so the Supreme Court must reject his petition against Donald Trump, lawyers representing former Attorney General Ed Meese and two top constitutional scholars in the country argued in a brief filed on Wednesday.

Their amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief argues that Smith lacks authority to represent the United States by asking the Supreme Court to weigh in (called a petition for certiorari) because the office he holds has not been created by Congress and his appointment violates the “Appointments Clause” of the Constitution.

The filing essentially claims U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland improperly appointed Smith to an office that does not exist with authority Garland does not possess.

Meese, Steven Calabresi, the co-chairman of the Federalist Society, and Gary Lawson, a prominent constitutional law professor, first argue that only Congress can create federal offices such as Smith currently holds, which Congress has not done.

While the Constitution creates the offices of President and Vice President, Congress has the sole authority to create additional offices, because the Constitution says those offices must be “established by Law.” Congress previously passed a law to authorize a similar position called an “independent counsel,” but that statute expired in 1999.

Garland cannot hire a mere employee to perform tasks that Congress has not authorized, the attorneys write. Only an “officer” can hold such a significant level of authority. In creating the Department of Justice, Congress gave it certain powers by law, yet it authorized no office with all the powers of a U.S. Attorney that Garland has given Smith.

The amicus brief further argues, “Even if one somehow thinks that existing statutes authorize appointment of stand-alone special counsels with the full power of a U.S. Attorney, Smith was not properly appointed to such an ‘office.’” They assert even if special counsels were authorized by Congress, anyone in possession of such powers would require presidential nomination and Senate confirmation.

Moreover, the brief argued that Smith has so much power, just like a U.S. Attorney, he is a “principal officer” under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, which means he must first be nominated by the president and then confirmed by a majority of the U.S. Senate.

“Improperly appointed, he has no more authority to represent the United States in this Court than Bryce Harper, Taylor Swift, or Jeff Bezos,” they write.  (Read more: Breitbart, 12/19/2023)  (Archive)

December 20, 2023 – Rep. Tim Burchett reveals that some of his colleagues are being entrapped and blackmailed to suppress the Epstein Client List

Rep. Tim Burchett reveals that entrapment/blackmail are being used to suppress the #EpsteinClientList:

“And too many of my colleagues, I’m afraid, are compromised in this area for whatever reason.

Somebody just whispered in their ear, said, hey, you don’t want something to come out on something else, you better keep your mouth shut on this.

And that’s exactly what they’ve done. And it continues to go, whether it’s the honey pot that the Russians used to use or something worse, I don’t know.”

December 24, 2023 – Former DNI John Ratcliffe discusses intel that proves China’s interference in the 2020 election

Former DNI John Ratcliffe tells Maria Bartiromo Russia, China, and Iran wanted a Biden presidency and they all have grown stronger since he entered the White House.

Maria Bartiromo: Former Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe was breaking news with me last month on FOX Business’s Mornings with Maria on China interfering in US elections. Now a new declassified report is out from the National Intelligence Council which confirms exactly what John Radcliffe told me there, revealing the extent of the CCP’s operation happening under President Biden’s watch. The report writes this, quote, “We assess that these directives gave PRC influence actors more freedom to operate ahead of the midterms than the presidential election in 2020, probably because PRC officials believe that Beijing was under less scrutiny during the midterms and because they did not expect the current administration to retaliate as severely as they feared they would in 2020.” Joining me right now with reaction is former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe…

… I’ve got the intelligence community assessment in front of me right now. Is China getting ready to interfere in our elections in 2024?

John Ratcliffe: Very clearly they are, Maria. But what the report also tells you is what you outlined there, which is that the intelligence community has to grudgingly walk back the erroneous assessment that in 2020, China was sitting on the sidelines.

Look, I was very vocal that we had collected specific intelligence of a specific plan or campaign by China to interfere in 2020 for the specific purpose of helping Joe Biden become president and – to harm President Trump in his reelection efforts.

And what this report acknowledges is that that’s exactly what happened. And they had to walk it back because the independent ombudsman came forward and said, look, there were analysts for China that were suppressing intelligence deliberately because they feared it would help President Trump. And so now you have Joe Biden’s own Director of the NSA and head of cyber command, acknowledging that China is going to intensify those efforts in 2024, that our greatest geopolitical foe has and will continue to want Joe Biden to be the president for the next four years because, stating the obvious, he’s been very good to China. China wanted him in the first place because Donald Trump had been so tough in terms of trade and tariff sanctions against China.

China correctly believed that Joe Biden would be more pro-China and frankly thought that he would be weaker as a Commander in Chief. And clearly, those things have played out.

Maria Bartiromo: And now we know that during their cakewalk in the park, when Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping in San Francisco, Xi Jinping was very clear to Joe Biden, telling him, yes, we are taking Taiwan, and we are expecting you’re not going to do anything about it. Your thoughts on what was said during that meeting in the park?

John Ratcliffe: …You know, the same Joe Biden and the administration that won’t confront China on Covid wouldn’t confront China on the spy balloon. All of these are the reasons why Joe Biden is, in many ways, the dream candidate for China to continue for the next four years. They’ve advanced so much, they’ve undermined us in the Middle east. They’ve gained footholds further in the Asian Pacific regions. Everything has gone well for China from their foreign policy standpoint, and it’s gone poorly for us…

… And so what, Maria, they’re going to do and what the acknowledgement is, is they’re going to intensify their efforts, meaning they’re going to deploy cyberweapons to try and influence election infrastructure. It means they’re going to engage in social media influence campaign to influence American voters, and they’re going to do the things that they can to help Joe Biden continue to be president because it is good for China if he is.

December 27, 2023 – DC police officer Byron Evans who sued Republicans under KKK Act for racist attacks on Jan. 6, now admits he was watching it on TV that day

Officer Byron Evans and seven black Capitol Police Officers sued Brandon Straka and several Trump supporters under the KKK Act for “racist” attacks on him and seven other police officers on January 6, 2021.

Officer Evans sued Brandon Straka and Roger Stone who was not even at the US Capitol that day along with leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and others.

Brandon Straka released video on Wednesday of Officer Byron Evans admitting he was watching the January 6 protests on a TV in a room in a secure location.

CNN reporter: Did you ever think this might be a life or death situation for you?

Officer Byron Evans: I remember specifically thinking it when I was on the floor. I remember thinking all that stuff. Like, Byron, this is the day. All those times you’ve given thought on what you would do. You’re doing it.

CNN hack: 4 hours. Evans and the senators watched the riot on tv from a secured location.

Officer Byron Evans: I just remember the anger I felt when I saw those images. Busting windows, climbing the walls and stuff like that. It was an audible gasp in the room.

Here is the video:

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 12/27/2023)  (Archive)

December 27, 2023 – Jack Smith files motion to stop Trump from raising new J6 evidence in his defense

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion Wednesday morning seeking to prevent former President Donald Trump from claiming in his federal case that he was targeted for political prosecution by President Joe Biden as a form of “election interference.”

Donald Trump, unironically, stands accused of “election interference” in connection to his legal and constitutionally protected election challenges over the 2020 election.

Smith said in his motion that Trump should be barred from “introducing evidence, making arguments, or framing questions to advance a theory of selective or vindictive prosecution.”

Judge Chutkan, an anti-Trump jurist who has consistently sided with the state’s prosecution efforts, is expected to fulfill all of Smith’s demands, no matter how contrary to due process or deleterious to the cause of justice.

The excessively constrictive measures would further rein in the speech of the 2024 presidential candidate in the midst of a campaign that has thus far established him as the clear favorite.

The absurdity of Smith’s court demands were further illuminated by legal analyst Julie Kelly.

(Read more: The Politics Brief, 12/27/2023) (Archive)

December 28, 2023 – Former Ukraine prosecutor, Andrii Derkach: “One united criminal group exists – this group is Biden, Blinken, and Nuland”

Andrii Derkach with Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos (Credit: @SimonaMangiante/X)

The well-known Ukrainian politician Andrii Derkach, who was the first to provide evidence of international corruption and influence peddling by Joe Biden in Ukraine, sat for his first exclusive interview after a long absence of two years. Despite the pause in communication with the media, Derkach used all this time to continue his investigative work and collect new evidence.

** It was Andrii Derkach who first broke the news in 2019 with hard evidence that Burisma Holding paid Joe Biden $900,000 for lobbying.

The full version of the interview was released on Thursday on the X/Twitter account of American journalist Simone Mangiante (https://twitter.com/SimonaMangiante), who managed to communicate with the “Ground Zero of Biden’s corruption in Ukraine” – Andriy Derkach.

Subsequently, the full text and video of the interview will also be posted on the website of the investigative Internet publication  Invesloan.

December 19, 2023 – Judge approves lawsuit against CIA and Mike Pompeo over Assange surveillance

November 16, 2023 — A U.S. court considered a lawsuit against the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo for their alleged role in spying on American attorneys and journalists who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In August 2022, four Americans — lawyers Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek, journalist John Goetz and Charles Glass sued the CIA and Pompeo. The lawsuit they brought alleges that as visitors Glass, Goetz, Hrbek, and Kunstler were required to “surrender” their electronic devices to employees of a Spanish company called UC Global, which was contracted to provide security for the Ecuador embassy. Furthermore, UC Global “copied the information stored on the devices” and shared the information with the CIA. The agency even had access to live video and audio feeds from cameras in the embassy.

Now, Judge John Koeltl of the Southern District of New York refused to accept Assistant U.S. Attorney Jean-David Barnea position who neither confirmed nor denied that the CIA had targeted Americans without obtaining a warrant. He also invited attorneys for the Americans to update the lawsuit so that claims of privacy violations explicitly dealt with the government’s lack of a warrant.

In his report about the hearing, journalist Kevin Gosztola notes that “the government effectively asserted in a U.S. courtroom that Americans cease to have constitutional privacy protections from U.S. government intrusion when they travel abroad.” (AssangeDefense.org, 11/16/2023) (Archive)

December 19, 2023 — Judge John Koeltl of the Southern District of New York ruled that four American attorneys and journalists, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was in the Ecuador embassy in London, may sue the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for their role in the alleged copying of the contents of their electronic devices.

After refusing to accept Assistant U.S. Attorney Jean-David Barnea position, who neither confirmed nor denied that the CIA had targeted Americans without obtaining a warrant, at the first hearing in November, the federal judge has now ruled that the plaintiffs are allowed to proceed with the lawsuit. (AssangeDefense.org, 12/19/2023) (Archive)

Richard Roth is the lead attorney suing the CIA and former CIA head Mike Pompeo for spying on journalists and lawyers for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange while he was living in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. A judge recently ruled that the lawsuit can go forward, rejecting the CIA’s contention that copying data from the visitors’ electronic devices was perfectly aboveboard.

Watch Jimmy’s interview with Roth about the case and the outrageous CIA overreach in the Assange case.

 

December 2023 – DOJ drops six charges against Sam Bankman-Fried, including campaign finance charges for giving customers money to Democrat congressional members

The U.S. government is dropping six charges against crypto scammer Sam Bankman-Fried including campaign finance violations and conspiracy to commit bribery charges.

Making bribes with stolen money is fine as long as that money is going to U.S. politicians.

SBF donated $100 million during the 2022 midterms, pouring tens of millions into dark money groups with customers’ funds.

Some of these groups were linked to Senate leaders including Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.

Here is Maxine Waters blowing him a kiss.