The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.

The FBI’s nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president’s Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington—not Miami, as has been widely reported—according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau’s counterintelligence division led the 2016–2017 Russia “collusion” investigation of Trump, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team—Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten—has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian “disinformation,” an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

In congressional testimony this month, Wray confirmed that “a number of” former Crossfire Hurricane team members are still employed at the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review. In the meantime, Wray has walled off the former Russiagate investigators only from participating in FISA wiretap applications, according to the sources.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked Wray for copies of recent case files and reports generated by Auten and whether he is included among the team the FBI has assembled to determine which of the seized Trump records fall within the scope of its counterespionage investigation and which fall outside of it.

Some former FBI officials worry that Auten, a top bureau expert on Russia and nuclear warfare, will have a hand in analyzing the boxes of documents agents seized from Trump’s home on Aug. 8 to help determine if any of the alleged Top Secret material he kept there might have been compromised, potentially putting national security at risk.

“It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. “I would substitute other analysts and agents.”

An examination of the bureau agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid reveals other connections between them and FBI officials who played key roles in advancing the Russiagate hoax.

Sources told RealClearInvestigations that Jay Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in Justice’s national security division, who happens to be a Democratic National Committee donor, has been coordinating the Mar-a-Lago investigation with Alan Kohler, who heads the FBI’s counterintelligence division.

Kohler replaced Bill Priestap in that post after Priestap stepped down from the bureau amid criticism of his role in the Russiagate probe. Kohler had worked at FBI headquarters under Priestap, specializing in countering Russian intelligence threats.

Before that, he worked in London as the FBI’s liaison with British intelligence and law enforcement. The sources say Kohler was close to Stefan Halper, an academic and longtime FBI contractor whom the bureau ran as an informant in a failed effort to suborn Trump campaign officials. He also worked closely with Stephen Somma, a lead case agent in the Crossfire Hurricane probe whom Horowitz said was “primarily responsible” for some of the worst misconduct in the FISA warrant abuse scandal. Somma is a counterintelligence investigator in the FBI’s New York field office, where he has been reassigned to the China desk.

In 2019, Kohler was promoted to special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division at the FBI’s Washington field Office, where he worked alongside then-assistant agent-in-charge Timothy Thibault, who was reassigned by Wray just days prior to the Mar-a-Lago raid, after whistleblowers raised questions about political bias. They asserted that Thibault, who has taken aim at Trump and Republicans on social media, worked with Auten to falsely discredit evidence of alleged money laundering and other activities against Hunter Biden and prevent agents from investigating them.

The Washington field office’s counterintelligence division is now run by Anthony Riedlinger, who previously worked at FBI headquarters as a section chief under Priestap. Some of the agents involved in the raid on Trump’s home came from that Washington field office, according to the sources and FBI case documents.

Bratt, the top counterintelligence official at Justice, traveled to Mar-a-Lago in early June and personally inspected the storage facility while interacting with both Trump and one of his lawyers. Trump allowed the three FBI agents Bratt brought with him to open boxes in the storage room and look through them. They left with some documents. After leaving, Bratt made a request to Trump’s lawyer for increased security at the facility and asked to see surveillance footage from the security cameras. The lawyer complied with the requests. Months went by before the Justice Department took the politically explosive step of sending FBI agents unannounced to Trump’s home, seizing documents, photos, and other items not just from the storage facility but from multiple rooms on the property, including the former president’s office.

Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said the search warrant that agents obtained is quite wide-ranging. He pointed out that it authorized the seizure of any information in any form related to “national defense information,” which he said “does not necessarily include classified material.”

“This is a huge, broad search warrant and a huge, broad investigation leveled against the former president,” Swecker said.

What’s more, he said the physical search of the former president’s residence was far more sweeping than first reported and included unsupervised snooping in several dozen bedrooms, as well as numerous storage rooms and closets, including those of the former first lady. FBI agents took numerous boxes and containers of documents and other material, including several binders of photos and even three passports held by the former president.

Although Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the DOJ seeks to “narrowly scope any search that is undertaken,” details of the warrant reveal agents had the authority to seize entire boxes of records—including those potentially covered by attorney-client privilege and executive privilege—if just a single document inside the container were marked with a classified marking.

Agents were allowed to also seize any containers or boxes “found together with” ones containing classified papers, according to ATTACHMENT B (“Property to be seized”) of the warrant. In addition, the FBI agents were given the authority to confiscate “any government and/or presidential records created between Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021,” which covers Trump’s full term in office. That meant they were able to take any item related to the Trump administration.

All told, dozens of boxes and containers were removed from Trump’s residence, very few of which actually contained classified information, the sources said.

According to Federal Election Commission records, Bratt has given exclusively to Democrats, including at least $800 to the Democratic National Committee. The sources said he is close to David Laufman, whom he replaced as the top counterintelligence official at Justice. An Obama donor, Laufman helped oversee the Russiagate probe, as well as the Clinton email case, which also involved classified information.

A Senate investigator told RCI that Laufman was the “mastermind” behind the strategy to dust off and “weaponize” the rarely enforced statutory relic—the Foreign Agents Registration Act—against Trump campaign officials, a novel legal move that the investigator noted is similar to the department’s current attempts to enforce the Presidential Records Act against Trump—which is a civil, not a criminal, statute—by invoking the Espionage Act of 1917.

Laufman signed off on the wiretapping of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which the Department of Justice inspector general determined was conducted under false pretenses involving doctored email, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and other malfeasance.

Suddenly resurfacing as a media surrogate for the Justice Department defending the Mar-a-Lago raid, Laufman has been a key source for stories by the Washington Post, CNN, and other outlets.

On CNN, for instance, he claimed the documents seized from Trump’s storage were “particularly stunning and particularly egregious,” and their discovery ”completely validates the government’s investigation” into the former president—though he quickly added, ”Whether this investigation transforms into an outright criminal prosecution remains to be seen.”

Swecker said that there is strong reason to fear that the FBI’s counterintelligence division might politicize this case.

“For sure, the FBI has dug themselves into a huge hole because of how they handled the Clinton (email) case and then Crossfire Hurricane and Hunter Biden,” Swecker said. “Myself and many of my colleagues think they are treading on very thin ice here.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, “you can’t recuse an entire FBI division.”

Patel: ‘It’s Just Insane’

Former federal prosecutor and Trump administration official Kash Patel said the FBI may have a personal interest—and a potential conflict—in seizing the records stored by Trump.

He noted that Trump in October 2020 authorized the declassification of all the investigative records generated from the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane as well as the Clinton email investigation, codenamed “Midyear Exam,” and he said that the FBI may have confiscated some of those records in its raid, ensuring they won’t be made public. In addition, he said, the agency may be digging for other documents to try to justify, retroactively, their questionable, politically-tinged 2016 opening of the Trump-Russia “collusion” case, which came up embarrassingly short on evidence.

“Tragically, the same FBI characters that were involved in Russiagate are the same counterintel guys running this ‘national security investigation’ against Trump,” said Patel, who deposed Crossfire Hurricane team members as a former House Intelligence Committee investigator.

Patel noted that the Horowitz report indicated FBI analyst Auten hid exculpatory information about Trump’s adviser Page from other investigators and the FISA court, which should be more than enough to keep him at arm’s length from other investigations involving Trump.

“And to top it all off, this guy admits [to Horowitz’s investigators] he’s unrepentant about his role in making up the biggest hoax in election history, and Wray still lets him be a supervisor at the FBI,” he said. “It’s just insane.”

The Justice Department’s national security division has ultimate authority over the grand-jury probe of Trump for possible violations of the Espionage Act, including alleged mishandling of classified material—the same statutes invoked in the Clinton email investigation. (In that case, in contrast, the FBI never searched the former secretary of state’s Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion, where she set up an unsecured basement server to send and receive at least 110 classified emails and where she also received government documents by fax.)

Former FBI counterintelligence official and lawyer Mark Wauck said he is troubled by signs that the same cast of characters from the Russiagate scandal appears to be involved in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

“If these people, who were part of a major hoax that involved criminal activity and displays of bias and seriously flawed judgment, are still involved, then that’s a major scandal,” he said in an interview.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

For a damning picture of the modern left, it doesn’t get much clearer than this.

The Democratic Party, which spent the 2020 presidential election year trashing the police and cheering on rioting mobs wreaking havoc on American cities is now desperately trying to rebrand itself for the midterm election year as the party of loyalty to federal law enforcement agencies hellbent on pursuing former President Donald Trump and his supporters.

But as a Twitter post published Wednesday by a member of the previous Democratic administration shows, all it’s really proving is basic ignorance, or utter contempt, for the foundations the country was built on.

The post was published by Tommy Vietor, now a co-host of the blasphemously liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” but a man who rose to public attention as one of the more abrasively juvenile members of the Obama administration.

The tweet included a link to a CNN report (of course) about the surveillance footage that was taken of last week’s FBI raid on Trump’s home in South Florida’s Mar-a-Lago Club, and a comment from Vietor that probably said more about the mindset of the modern left than Tommy ever intended.

The staff at the Trump household had refused an FBI request to turn off surveillance cameras in the home, which would have left the agents free to do anything they chose without fear of exposure.

“Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information,” Vietor wrote.

Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information. https://t.co/J6l1gtMpMc

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) August 17, 2022

He’s “very confused” about an American household disobeying an order from the FBI? And a “direct order” at that?

It’s a good bet he wasn’t at all confused by the George Floyd rioters failing to follow the orders of local police as they set about looting and torching businesses in the name of “social justice” in the summer of 2020.

For many Democrats, anarchy in the streets, theft and destruction of property, even outright murder are completely acceptable (just ask the gangsters who benefited from the bail organization Vice President Kamala Harris supported).

But failing to fall into lockstep obedience with the feds when they show up armed with a search warrant and plenty of weaponry? That passes Vietor’s comprehension.

Naturally, being a blue-checked liberal, Vietor has plenty of simpering sympathizers in the social media world (even the Twitter bots Elon Musk talks about have more brains than that herd), but fortunately for the future of the republic, there were more than a few responses to set Vietor straight:

See Teachers’ Union Ad Attack ‘Extremists’ Who Are a Threat to Education, But It’s Not Who You Think

Lol “direct order”. Under what authority?

— Eager Beaver (@_eager_beaver) August 18, 2022

You say, “No thank you, I prefer to film my home during your official duties.” The official duties of the officer are not private, and first amendment permits filming officers.

— Zag (@hoperidesagain) August 18, 2022

It sounds to me like the .@FBI is hiding more than they accused Trump of.

— Paul M. (@ArizonaPaul) August 18, 2022

And then there was this classic:

If they told you to do the hokey pokey, would you do that too?

— AmericanIPA8 (@AmericanIpa8) August 18, 2022

Now, it’s easy to dislike Vietor and the rest of the coterie of sophomoric arrogance that surrounded the Obama White House. (The State Department’s Marie Harf was another, along with Harf’s old boss Jen Psaki.)

With Obama administration posts that included membership in the National Security Council and special assistant to the president, Vietor helped saddle the country with the bogus Iran nuclear deal that even Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to the Obama White House, admitted had been sold in an “echo chamber” of mainstream media ignorance. (And to New York Times Magazine, no less.)

But he’s worth paying attention to, if only to see where the leftists of the Obama years are leading their party and — regrettably — the country today.

His podcast is an influential voice in leftist politics — the DigitalTrends website ranked it as the third-best political podcast for 2022. (No. 1 was NPR’s “The NPR Politics Podcast,” which says everything that needs to be said about DigitalTrends’ political preferences.)

To his marginal credit, Vietor appeared to learn something from his Twitter post, as one respondent explained a search warrant does not give law enforcement — even the big, bad FBI — powers to do more than search the premises involved.

“A search warrant authorizes…a search, per 4th Amd. It does not create other powers or cancel out civil liberties,” the user wrote.

“I remember when people used to be skeptical of the police, *especially* when they were dealing with someone we thought was a criminal.”

— Daniel Laufer (@lauferdaniel) August 17, 2022

Vietor seemed to get the message — or maybe he’d just finally realized how cringingly submissive his initial tweet came off and remembered that he’s supposed to be a man.

“Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this ‘order’ because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous,” he wrote.

Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this “order” because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous.

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) August 18, 2022

“A little ridiculous” should have been a first reaction to the blatantly political operation. “Outrageous!” “Infuriating!” “Totalitarian BS!” would have been even better.

But for the leftist mindset of 2022, steeped in the openly anti-American tradition birthed by the disastrous Obama years, the initial reaction is not to defend American freedoms but to question why Americans can refuse a “direct order.”

This is a man who served in the Obama White House, remember, where the abuse of power at federal agencies — such as the IRS, with the likes of Lois Lerner; the FBI with the “leadership” of James Comey; and the Justice Department under political grifters like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch — had to have been considered almost commonplace.

It’s a basic distortion of the country’s foundation of law and order, pervasive among leftists in the mainstream media, in popular culture and in the Democratic Party from local governments through the House, the Senate and the White House:

They have nothing but contempt for the law; they worship orders.

There are many sorry countries, with many sorry histories, where that attitude is the norm. The United States isn’t one of them.

State CFO proposes 4-pillar protection plan to fight back

The IRS has already been tracking annual sales of $600 or more on eBay and other selling platforms. eBay sent me a letter regarding this change (AKA a warning notice). What person making over $400,000 is going to bother selling items on eBay? [US Patriot]

PUNTA GORDA, Fla.–On Aug. 16, small business owners and independent contractors across Florida became fearful of their futures as Gov. Ron DeSantis questioned the sanity of Washington.

On that day, Joe Biden signed into law the “Inflation Reduction Act,” giving the IRS nearly $80 billion, with $45.6 billion going towards “enforcement,” which requires hiring more agents.

But what stood out the most among Florida’s small business owners was who the expanded agency would target for auditing.

At a press event on Aug. 17, DeSantis expressed frustration.

“What have they done? … 87,000 new IRS agents and they are going after you.”

They will be unleashed on American taxpayers, he said. ” … they are gonna go after independent contractors.”

Uber drivers, handymen “and others” are identified as independent contractors and all are “contenders” for audits, DeSantis said. “They’re going to crush a lot of people by doing that.”

Not only will small businesses be targeted, but also “people that the government doesn’t like,” the governor said.

“Let’s just be honest,” he said. “We’ve seen how this operates–you have these enforcement agencies that basically represent one faction of the country and they are going after the other.”

Even though IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in an Aug. 4 letter to Congress that the billions in funding won’t increase “audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” others beg to differ.

Bobby Gross Jr. is part owner of his family’s 50-year-old paving company located in Port Charlotte and believes that the IRS is coming after small businesses like his.

“They’re (IRS) there to hunt, and we’re the prey,” Gross told The Epoch Times on Aug. 17. “The government is going to pay for the Inflation Reduction Act on the backs of small businesses.”

Gross believes small businesses are the key to raising the $750 billion price tag for the new law because “there aren’t that many billionaires in the country,” that can “generate enough money to pay for it.”

Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis agreed and will propose in the upcoming legislative session what he calls the “Four Pillars of IRS Protection.” He is doing this to “get in front of” whatever the IRS has planned. But make no mistake, he says, “Florida is a target,” especially conservatives.

“Even though the Free State of Florida cannot control the insanity of Washington we must do what we can to protect our small businesses,” Patronis told The Epoch Times on Aug. 18. “This massive super expansion of the IRS is concerning to me. I think Washington is totally disconnected from what real Americans and Main Street is feeling.”

The four pillars of protection Patronis is suggesting involve requiring state-chartered banks to generate a regular report on IRS engagement in order to identify if patterns of “targeting the middle class and small businesses are ongoing. Second, establishing a Civil Liability Trust Fund to help small businesses defend themselves–or sue the IRS–in cases of politically motivated audits or any federal overreach. Third, requiring new IRS agents coming into the state to have a Florida license. And last, establishing criminal penalties by enforcing laws based on viewpoint or political discrimination.

Political discrimination, as Patronis called it, is a concern for Carl Mottler, who owns a land-clearing company in Southwest Florida.

“I think every conservative, every conservative business, every conservative-run state and city will be targeted because that’s exactly what we have seen in the past,” Mottler told The Epoch Times on Aug. 17.  “We saw it with the IRS targeting the Tea Party when Obama was president.”

In 2013 Lois Lerner “retired” from her position as the director of Exempt Organizations of the IRS. She was found guilty of “neglect of duties” after she testified in a Congressional oversight committee hearing that the IRS had “wrongly scrutinized conservative groups” and that it “had been going on for years.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the IRS projects to bring in almost $204 billion in revenue from 2022 to 2031. In the fiscal years 2015 and 2019 IRS audits declined by 44 percent, according to a 2021 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report.

Mottler said the process in any IRS audit is “unfair” and that the IRS has an “unfair advantage.”

“The problem with the IRS is that they are judge, jury, and executioner of all things financial,” he said. “There’s no due process, they can take and seize everything you have, and you have to try and show that you’re in the right; and you have to because they’re the ones who judge whether you’re right or wrong, and then they’re the ones who impose the sentence.”

Mottler said the IRS needs an “overhaul” not hiring more agents–especially ones that carry firearms.

Nurse practitioner Lisa Ransom said she has the same fears and doesn’t understand why IRS agents would carry a firearm and be asked to possess the “fortitude to pull the trigger.”

“These political people who held office … being arrested and strip-searched. Well, look at Trump—if they can do that to him and other people what will they do to us? “she asked. “This is still America. Are they really going to force their way onto your private property?”

Ransom who began her private medical practice three months ago said she is bothered and upset at the prospect of losing everything she has worked for because of the new law.

“Without any notice, they can just seize your assets and bank accounts before you have had a chance to defend yourself,’ she said. “They can put you out of business.”

Above all, Ransom said she worries about what IRS scrutiny could do to the economy.

“People will just stop using their bank accounts and go straight to operating on a cash basis,” she predicted. “I guarantee that’s what’s going to happen because you can’t track cash.”

Patronis said Ransom’s concerns are justified.

“Lisa is right, it’s gonna have a chilling effect on commerce,” Patronis said. “You will have people hoarding cash, out of just a simple fear.”

Gross said he wonders if cash apps like PayPal will be affected by the new legislation.

“What if you want to sell your couch on Craigslist to pay bills,” he said. “Will the IRS track that and wonder what you did with the money?”

“What strikes me as odd is the way the government is going about this … like World War II stuff where they are tracking our every move and we will be labeled and targeted based on our political views and affiliations,” he said.  “What happens after the audit—financial concentration camps?”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Emails reveal how Hunter got Obama to officially recognize partnership

The Biden administration last month warned of a Chinese Communist Party front group that seeks to “co-opt” state leaders as part of Beijing’s sprawling foreign influence operation. Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show the first son and his business partners helped the organization gain a foothold in the United States while his father was vice president.

In 2015, Biden’s partners lobbied the State Department to publicly approve a partnership between the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and State Legislative Leaders Foundation, a nonprofit group that hosts forums for state legislators and corporate leaders. Hunter’s team portrayed the initiative as a boon for U.S.-Chinese relations.

But emails show they hoped the U.S. government’s recognition of the partnership would help the foundation establish an office in Beijing. It is not clear why the partnership—or the Obama administration’s blessing of it—would have helped Hunter Biden’s business prospects. What is clear is that he and his colleagues believed it would: Biden associate James Bulger wrote in a July 17, 2015, email that the Beijing office would be “a great business driver” for a joint venture they sought with Harvest Fund Management, a Chinese investment firm led by Henry Zhao, a businessman and reported member of the Chinese Communist Party.

The lobbying campaign proved wildly successful on all fronts. After a September 2015 meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, President Barack Obama endorsed the partnership between State Legislative Leaders Foundation and the Chinese group. Months later, Hunter Biden’s company finalized its multimillion-dollar deal with Harvest Management.

Biden’s emails, which have not been previously reported, show how the younger Biden helped a Chinese Communist Party influence outfit that his father’s administration now views as a national security threat. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said last month that the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries seeks “to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote the PRC’s global agenda.”

On April 28, 2015, Bulger told Hunter Biden that State Legislative Leaders Foundation president Stephen Lakis wanted to meet to discuss a path forward to setting up a SLLF office in China and creating a partnership between his organization and the Chinese organization.

“Whatever you need on this just let me know and I’ll make it work,” Biden replied.

Between April and July 2015, Biden’s longtime friend and business partner Eric Schwerin arranged meetings between the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and State Department officials to help advance the partnership with the Chinese group. Schwerin, who had dozens of White House meetings with members of then-vice president Joe Biden’s office, was “instrumental” in arranging the State Department sessions, according to an email from Bulger.

The Biden group’s primary goal was to have Obama reference the collaboration between the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and the Chinese group in his upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping. On May 11, 2015, a foundation adviser wrote Evan Ryan, who then served as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, that a reference by Obama would help them gain “top level approval” from Chinese officials to set up a foundation office in Beijing.

Ryan, who now serves as White House cabinet secretary and is married to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appears to have played a major role in midwifing the partnership. Schwerin noted in an email to Biden that Ryan had “helped with” the effort to officially acknowledge the foundation’s work with the Chinese group. Other emails show Biden and Schwerin in frequent correspondence with Ryan on other matters.

The U.S. intelligence community has increasingly warned that Beijing uses American businessmen and nonprofit groups—often through “deceptive and coercive” means—to promote China’s political agenda in the West. Republicans have said Hunter Biden would have been a prime target for such an influence operation, given his extensive dealings in China and his access to policymakers in Washington. Biden, who is under federal investigation over his taxes and foreign business dealings, earned millions of dollars from a deal with CEFC China Energy, whose chairman was suspected of having ties to Chinese military intelligence. Biden also provided legal services to a CEFC executive whom he referred to as “the fucking spy chief of China” and who was convicted for trying to bribe African officials for oil rights.

The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and State Legislative Leaders Foundation have hosted five “Cooperation Forums” in Honolulu, Las Vegas, Wuhan, and Shijiazhuang since 2015, providing the Chinese influence group access to dozens of state legislative leaders and American business executives. While the U.S. government has not publicly scrutinized the forums, the State Department in 2020 pulled out of a forum between the Chinese group and the National Governors Association due to the former’s efforts to “spread Beijing’s malign influence in the United States.”

Biden’s associates began lobbying the U.S. government as a ploy to land a lucrative investment from Harvest Fund Management, one of China’s largest asset managers. Biden allegedly touted his family’s political connections in seeking a $5 million investment from Harvest founder Henry Zhao, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Zhao is believed to be a Chinese Communist Party official, according to the New York Post.

The Biden team had worked with the State Legislative Leaders Foundation before. The foundation helped Biden and his associates at the private equity firm BHR Partners in 2015, when Hunter’s team helped the Aviation Industry Corporation of China purchase Michigan auto parts maker Henniges Automotive, the Free Beacon reported earlier this year.

The Biden emails provide a detailed roadmap of how the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, the Biden team, and Zhao sought to use an official blessing from the U.S. government to advance their business interests. In a September 2014 email, Lakis, the foundation president, told Zhao he was a “shareholder” in Bulger’s company. He urged Zhao to consider an investment in the Biden joint venture, saying he had “every confidence that such a partnership will be beneficial to all parties.”

Back in China, Zhao was “working with the Chinese Governments [sic] counterparts in Beijing” to have the foundation’s efforts mentioned during the Obama-Xi summit in September 2015, Bulger told Biden in a July 17, 2015, email. Having the initiative mentioned in an official document for the summit “would be a huge boost to [Zhao’s] effort in China.” That in turn “would be a great business driver for Burnham/Harvest,” referring to their joint venture, said Bulger. Bulger, a relative of mobster Whitey Bulger, also wrote that Zhao wanted Biden’s “help with this matter.”

The emails do not detail what steps Biden took to help the initiative, but he cheered the partnership between the foundation and the Chinese group in a November 2015 email to Zhao. Biden wrote he was “very happy to hear that the State Legislative Leaders Foundation matter was worked out and was highlighted during President Xi’s State Visit in September.”

Burnham and Harvest finalized the joint venture in March 2016, according to emails Biden sent to Zhao.

“This is an exciting milestone and I look forward to helping building [sic] a cross border institution that helps investors in our respective countries across the globe,” Biden wrote Zhao on March 18, 2016.

While Biden had high hopes for the partnership with Zhao—he said his company had “no greater partner” than the Chinese businessman—the joint venture went south in May 2016 after another Biden partner, Devon Archer, was indicted on fraud charges.

It is unclear whether Biden was aware of his son’s activities, though Hunter has kept his father in the loop on several of his other business ventures. Joe Biden met in 2017 with Michael Lin, a longtime Hunter business partner who advised the State Legislative Leaders Foundation on its first foray into China, the Free Beacon reported in May 2021.

None of Biden’s associates—Schwerin, Lakis, or Bulger—have registered with Congress as lobbyists, despite their outreach to the State Department. None returned requests for comment. Biden’s attorney and the White House also did not respond to requests for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

John Bridgeland worked on Obama White House council, cheered Biden victory

On the campaign trail, Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) touts the endorsement of a man named John Bridgeland as evidence of his cross-party appeal.

There are just a few details the congressman leaves out, at least when he’s trying to win over voters in his increasingly red state: Bridgeland worked in the Obama administration, celebrated Joe Biden’s election, and cofounded a nonprofit dedicated to remaking policing.

The founder of “Republicans for Tim Ryan,” Bridgeland has worked on left-wing policy initiatives for years. Former president Barack Obama in 2010 appointed Bridgeland to the White House Council for Community Solutions. Bridgeland also cofounded a firm, COVID Collaborative, that works with the Biden administration on vaccine messaging. In December 2020, Bridgeland wrote an op-ed for the website of Maria Shriver, a Democratic activist and member of the Kennedy family, about how he was “so encouraged” by Biden’s win.

Democrats touting endorsements from nominal Republicans who routinely attack the Republican Party is a familiar strategy. Lawmakers who have been rubber stamps for Biden’s agenda, such as Ryan, are hoping that voters forget their records. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who is running in a competitive race this cycle, recently released a list of endorsements from Republicans, several of whom work for the the Lincoln Project, an activist group dedicated to electing Democrats but helmed by individuals who once considered themselves Republicans. 

Bridgeland’s endorsement comes as Ryan seeks to separate himself from the president. Biden’s approval rating is 23 points underwater in Ohio—a state that former president Donald Trump won twice. When Biden traveled to Ohio for a speech last month, Ryan scheduled campaign stops hundreds of miles away.

Ryan shared Bridgeland’s endorsement on Twitter and wrote he was “proud” to have Bridgeland on his “team.”

“Republicans for Ryan is a platform for Republicans to sign up to help Tim Ryan. I am a registered Republican and vote in Republican primaries and in general elections,” Bridgeland told the Free Beacon. “I believe in limited, effective government, … civil society and the nonprofit and private sectors, and respecting both individual rights and responsibilities.”

Bridgeland worked from the mid-1990s to 2003 as a senior official in then-representative Rob Portman’s (R., Ohio) office and in former president George W. Bush’s administration. In an op-ed for a local Ohio newspaper, Bridgeland wrote that he supports Ryan’s “love of our democracy” and “many of his policies.”

Bridgeland attacked Ryan’s Republican Senate challenger, J.D. Vance, as “lacking the energy of the U.S. senator he is trying to replace—Rob Portman.” Portman endorsed Vance immediately after Vance in May won the Republican nomination.

Bridgeland’s endorsement of Ryan was leaked to Politico days prior as part of a story about the Ryan campaign’s strategy of appealing to Republican voters. That story also featured Bridgeland speaking favorably about Ryan and how Ryan could make inroads with Republican voters in Ohio. Missing from Politico‘s story was any mention of Bridgeland’s work since he left the Bush administration in 2003.

Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.

Other than Bridgeland, no appointees with experience in Republican politics were appointed to Obama’s White House community solutions council. There, Bridgeland worked alongside the likes of Laurene Powell Jobs and Jon Bon Jovi to provide advice to the president on “innovative community solutions and civic participation by all Americans.”

Bridgeland later cofounded ACT NOW, a nonprofit that works “to reimagine ‘public safety’ … and eliminate the root causes of systemic racism.” ACT NOW’s staff includes Ray C. Kelly, who in 2018 received an award from George Soros’s Open Society Institute-Baltimore.

According to internal voter data obtained by the Free Beacon, Bridgeland voted in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. A June column he wrote for the Cincinnati Enquirer called for new gun control measures. The column also touted his work with a group called the People’s Filibuster for Gun Safety. That group, according to its website, partners with left-wing nonprofits such as the Anti-Defamation League and March for Our Lives to pass gun-control legislation.

Bridgeland’s cheerleading for Biden appears out of step with Republican voters. Following Biden’s State of the Union address in March, Bridgeland celebrated the speech as passionate and “articulating values and ideas that transcend our divisions.” A Reuters poll released Aug. 9 found 86 percent of self-identified Republicans disapprove of Biden.

Ryan will face Vance in November. There is little high-quality polling of the race available, although most political analysts believe Vance is the favorite. Portman’s seat has been held by a Republican since 1999.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A former director of national intelligence said Aug. 12 that it is “virtually impossible” to prosecute people for mishandling classified documents, and asserted that former President Donald Trump has the “ultimately declassification authority” in terms of such documents.

“The president does have ultimate declassification authority. He can literally declassify—and President Trump had that authority, and could declassify anything you want while he was president,” John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman before Trump appointed him to be director of national intelligence, said on Fox News.

According to documents unsealed earlier Friday, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was raided by FBI agents on Aug. 8 because of potential violations of several laws, including the Espionage Act, which some legal experts say relates to possessing classified defense information.

An inventory showed that agents seized what they listed as classified, secret, and top secret documents.

Ratcliffe said on Fox that before the search warrant materials were made public, he didn’t believe the raid was about classified materials.

“It has to be more than that because the Department of Justice and the FBI have already set a standard that makes it virtually impossible to prosecute a case like that,” he said, pointing to how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s possession of classified documents was handled by the FBI, including then-Director James Comey.

“As people talk about Espionage Act and classified documents and all of that, the standard was set in 2016. Remember the Department of Justice and the FBI took the official position that Hillary Clinton, who was in possession of classified documents … that [being] in possession of that, that wasn’t enough, and that being grossly negligent and being careless, Jim Comey told us, that’s not enough under the Espionage Act. You have to know you’re violating the law,” Ratcliffe said.

“Even if you assume the worst case scenario for President Trump, that there were classified documents in his possession at Mar-a-Lago, that only puts him where Hillary Clinton was. And what the FBI and the Department of Justice would have to show is that he knew the documents were there and he didn’t think they were declassified,” he added.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that all the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were declassified.

“He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified,” a Trump spokesperson told Just the News. “The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the President of the United States. The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat, with classification authority delegated BY THE PRESIDENT, needs to approve of declassification is absurd.”

Others weren’t sure.

“He can’t just wave a wand and say it’s declassified,” Immerman said. “There has to be a formal process. That’s the only way the system can work,” Richard Immerman, an assistant deputy director of national intelligence during the Obama administration, told NBC News. “I’ve seen thousands of declassified documents. They’re all marked ‘declassified’ with the date they were declassified.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A federal court has reimposed an Obama-era freeze on coal leasing from federal lands that former President Donald Trump axed in a bid to unlock domestic energy production, though the judge left the door open to resuming the coal leases if a more extensive environmental review is done.

In a ruling on Aug. 12 (pdf), U.S. District Judge Brian Morris faulted the Trump-era review of the coal leasing program for limiting the environmental impact review to “just” three issues: greenhouse gas emissions, socioeconomic impacts, and water quality.

“The Court determines that such a limited analysis fails to consider ‘all direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts’ of re-starting the federal coal-leasing program,” Morris wrote in the ruling.

The judge said the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tried to curtail the potential environmental impacts of coal leases in its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review, calling the bureau’s decision “arbitrary and capricious.”

Morris also objected to BLM evaluating only four approved leases under the program, calling it “insufficient.”

In the ruling, the judge said that the coal leasing program would be put on hold “until the completion of sufficient NEPA review analyzing revocation of the moratorium.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to BLM for comment, with no response received by publication.

Interior Department spokesperson Melissa Schwartz told The Associated Press that officials are reviewing the ruling.

‘End to the War on Coal’

In January 2016, in a decision known as the Jewell Order, the Department of the Interior put a temporary freeze on leasing federal land for the purpose of mining coal, in part over concerns about climate change.

“Given serious concerns raised about the federal coal program, we’re taking the prudent step to hit pause on approving significant new leases so that decisions about those leases can benefit from the recommendations that come out of the review,” said then-Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

Trump, who championed domestic fossil fuel production as a bulwark against energy dependency on foreign countries, reversed the freeze in a sweeping executive order in March 2017 that also undid other Obama-era climate policies.

Announcing that “my administration is putting an end to the war on coal,” Trump said at the time that, “with today’s executive action, I am taking historic steps to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion, and to cancel job-killing regulations.”

Under Joe Biden, a review of coal leasing impacts on climate change and taxpayers was launched in April 2021, but the Trump-era decision to pull the plug on the Jewell Order was not reversed—until now.

‘Significant Victory’ Versus ‘Deeply Troubling’

National Mining Association President Rich Nolan said in a statement that the industry group would appeal the ruling, citing the imperative of energy supplies that are cheap and secure.

“This is a deeply disappointing decision with energy-driven inflation, energy affordability, and energy security top concerns for Americans,” Nolan said.

“Denying access to affordable, secure energy during an energy affordability crisis is deeply troubling,” he continued, adding that “Americans need the energy affordability and energy security buttressed by coal production on federal lands.”

In 2017 and 2018, the most recent years of available data, the U.S. government sold leases for 134 million tons of coal on public land in six states, according to Interior Department figures.

Environmental groups hailed the court’s decision and called on the Biden administration to go further and terminate existing coal leases.

“This is a significant victory for our climate and the communities across the country who are impacted by our continued reliance on this dirty and dangerous fuel, but we cannot stop here,” Jenny Harbine, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office, said in a statement.

“While this ruling reinstates the moratorium on new coal leasing on public lands, the Biden administration must go further by urgently phasing out the existing coal leases that are destroying our planet,” she added.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Judicial Watch is suing the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court to release records ordered declassified and released by President Trump the day before he left office. 

Don’t Let the Left Take Over the Nation, Become a Trump Life Member Today!

Despite Trump’s order, Justice Department officials are not releasing the records.

The ordered-declassified records relate to “Crossfire Hurricane,” a Justice Department operation against President Trump, his 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates that falsely accused the Trump campaign of “colluding” with Russian government agents to influence the results of the 2016 presidential election. (RELATED: Leading Republicans Reveal What Durham’s Up Against)

It was later revealed it was Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose campaign worked with Russian agents to produce false material to influence the race. (RELATED: Prosecutors Argue Clinton Lawyer Used FBI to Orchestrate ‘October Surprise’ Against Trump)

“The Obama-Biden Administration and Deep State spying on Trump and his associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an absolute right to see!”

JW notes a “Just the News report details that the documents include ‘transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.’”

The lawsuit was filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a February 17, 2022, FOIA request for:

All records regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that were provided to the White House by the Department of Justice on or about December 30, 2020. For purposes of clarification, the records sought are those described in a January 19, 2021 Presidential Memorandum (see https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/ ).

All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and any official or employee of any other branch, department, agency, or office of the federal government regarding the declassification and release of the records described in part one of this request.

Trump’s memo authorized the declassification and release of the records:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:

Section 1.  Declassification and Release.    At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.  Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public.  I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.

I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible.  In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure.  I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.

I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder.  This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.

My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

There’s reason to suspect that the FBI search of the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump was improperly intrusive, according to several lawyers. The raid prompted a rebuke from Trump and Republicans more broadly and further escalated political tensions in the nation.

About two dozen FBI agents entered Trump’s Palm Beach resort of Mar-a-Lago at about 9 a.m. on Aug. 8 and left about 10 hours later with “a handful of boxes of documents,” one of Trump’s attorneys on the scene, Christina Bobb, told Insight.

“I didn’t actually get to oversee the search, they wouldn’t let anybody see what they were doing,” she said.

It isn’t clear what legal basis the FBI had for the raid. The agents had a search warrant signed by a judge. However, the affidavit explaining the basis—its probable cause—was filed under seal, and Trump’s lawyers weren’t allowed to examine it, Bobb said.

In general, the agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records,” she said.

“I don’t think there was anything of substance.”

Trump’s legal team will take steps to obtain the affidavit, according to Bobb.

There has been a dispute between the National Archives and Trump about whether he has documents that should be stored at the archives under the U.S. Presidential Records Act.

Trump has been cooperative on that front and had previously invited the FBI to Mar-a-Lago to examine the White House records he had in storage at the time, Bobb said.

“Nothing had been hidden, and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all the more ridiculous,” she said.

Potentially Illegal

“I’m stunned and dismayed,” Marc Ruskin, a 27-year FBI veteran and former federal prosecutor, told Insight. “The disregard for traditional norms and apparent lack of concern with the appearance of impropriety is indicative of an abandonment of even a veneer of independence and objectivity.”

Former federal prosecutor Mike Davis went even further, saying the raid may have been illegally invasive.

“Under the case law, you can’t do a home raid if you can secure the documents through less intrusive means,” he told “Bannon’s War Room” on Aug. 9.

The FBI had to first determine that requests for the documents or even subpoenas wouldn’t be sufficient, said Davis, who formerly advised Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on judicial nominations and now heads The Article III Project.

“There’s zero evidence” that Trump wouldn’t have cooperated, he said.

“There was no allegation or evidence that he [Trump] was destroying any of this evidence or putting it into the wrong hands. This is banana republic-level tactics from the Biden Justice Department.”

Even if Trump took classified documents, he took possession of them when he was still chief executive and had the authority to declassify them, according to Davis.

Bobb suggested that the invocation of classified documents was a disingenuous attempt of “shrouding this in a national security blanket.”

“They don’t want to disclose what they’re doing, because what they’re doing is wrong. And so they want to hide it behind the premise of  ‘Oh, it’s a matter of national security and classified documents, so we can’t disclose to you what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. But just trust us. We’re not lying to you,’” she said. “Well, no, the American people aren’t going to stand for that anymore.”

Even if the DOJ tried to charge Trump with withholding documents, it wouldn’t hold up because the statute in question requires a “willful” violation, and Trump would have had to have “some malicious intent” to take specific documents, according to Bobb.

“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office” or ordered somebody what specifically to take, she said.

History of Missing Documents

If Trump had documents that should go to the archives, it would add him to a lineup of former government officials.

Former FBI Director James Comey took his handwritten notes when he was fired by Trump in 2017. His home wasn’t raided. He handed the notes to FBI agents who came to interview him.

The Obama administration didn’t just fail to hand over documents, tens of thousands of its documents went missing or were destroyed. No homes were raided.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to hand over tens of thousands of emails and documents from her server, claiming that they were of a personal nature. The FBI was able to retrieve some of the documents, revealing that many were work-related. Moreover, the documents were under congressional subpoena at the time when a Clinton aide deleted them.

Immediate Skepticism

The raid prompted an immediate wave of skepticism, particularly because the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have a history of breaking protocol, misrepresentations, and even forging evidence in their case against Trump and members of his campaign.

“After six years of unfounded, absurd investigations of President Trump, the presumption is that any investigation of President Trump is politically motivated, and the burden of proof is on FBI/DOJ to prove otherwise,” Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Internet Accountability Project, wrote in an Aug. 9 Twitter post.

In 2017, the FBI and DOJ obtained two extensions of a spying warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page even though the warrant was based on false or unsubstantiated allegations. The FBI later acknowledged that spying based on the extensions was illegal.

The FBI also has a history of harsh treatment of people associated with Trump. His aides have been arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, and “perp-walked,” and their homes and offices have been raided in pursuit of trivial or nonviolent offenses, even when the targets were cooperating with the government.

Shoe on the Other Foot

The Trump raid increased the already polarized political playing field, as Republicans can now argue that home raids of former presidents are acceptable.

“They’re setting a very dangerous precedent where you can do a home raid of a former president of the United States,” Davis said, noting that such a thing has never happened “in our 250 years as a republic.”

Already, Republican lawmakers are promising to subject the DOJ and the FBI to intense scrutiny, with the expectation of reclaiming the majority in the House after the November midterms.

“When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 8 statement. “Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”

Judge’s Epstein Connection

The search warrant was issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in the Southern District of Florida. Reinhart was a senior prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida when the office reached a nonprosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, who was later indicted for sex trafficking children and died by apparent suicide in a New York jail.

Upon leaving office, Reinhart went into private practice and represented multiple Epstein associates and employees in civil cases against Epstein by his alleged victims.

Reinhart was appointed a magistrate judge in 2018 by the district judges in the Southern District of Florida.

The warrant was issued on Aug. 5, the day after FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee and was questioned about multiple whistleblower reports alleging the politicization of the bureau. Wray cut the questioning short because he said he had to urgently travel. Flight records indicate he flew in the FBI private jet to his vacation retreat in the Adirondacks, according to New York Post columnist Miranda Devine.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the time around which the search of Donald Trump’s residence started. The raid started at about 9 a.m. Insight regrets the error.

Update: The article has been updated with a comment from Marc Ruskin.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

THE PLOT SICKENS.

Judge Bruce Reinhart – who is reportedly the most likely judge behind the warrant authorizing a raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar A Lago estate – is a former attorney who represented employees of convicted sex offender and notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, The National Pulse can reveal.

The National Pulse can also reveal that Judge Reinhart has donated to the campaigns of former President Barack Obama and to the establishment opponents of Donald J. Trump during the 2016 election, including Jeb Bush.

Politico – the news outlet closest linked to the establishment in Washington, D.C. – named Reinhart in their morning playbook e-mail on Tuesday, 9th August 2022:

As reported by the Miami Herald, Judge Reinhart began representing Epstein’s employees on January 2nd, 2008, just one day after departing the U.S. Attorney’s Office where he served as an assistant U.S. attorney closely involved on the convicted pedophile’s case.

Accused of leveraging “inside information about Epstein’s investigation to curry favor with Epstein,” in 2011, he was named as a prosecutor who allegedly violated the rights of an underage girl whom Epstein solicited sex from in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit.

Reinhart appears to have exploited his role in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to launch a private criminal defense practice, according to the Miami Herald:

“On Oct 23, 2007, as federal prosecutors in South Florida were in the midst of tense negotiations to finalize a plea deal with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a senior prosecutor in their office was quietly laying out plans to leave the U.S. attorney’s office after 11 years. “On that date, as emails were flying between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors, Bruce E. Reinhart, now a federal magistrate, opened a limited liability company in Florida that established what would become his new criminal defense practice.”

Reinhart insisted that he never represented Epstein himself — “only Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, described by some victims as Epstein’s sex slave.”

MUST READ: Yes, The White House’s ‘Dark Brandon’ Memes Contain Nazi Imagery With CCP Influences.

Reinhart has also participated in Newsmax interviews, appearing to defend Epstein by downplaying allegations of the financier and his associates soliciting underage prostitutes.

Reinhart donated twice to Obama’s campaign in 2008 totaling $2,000. Reinhart, who was appointed U.S. magistrate in March 2018, also donated to the campaign of Trump rival Jeb Bush in 2015.

The unearthed links come as Reinhart is believed to have signed off on a warrant responsible for the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach estate. A “source said FBI agents obtained a search warrant from a federal magistrate judge in West Palm Beach,” reports the Miami Herald.

Politico explained that of the three magistrate judges in that office, two recent warrant applications, both of which were assigned to Reinhart, were entered into the system on Monday. The subject of the warrants, however, remains sealed.

WILL THAT HEFTY TRUMP ENDORSEMENT COME ON TIME?

It would be difficult to find mainland U.S. Congressional districts much further away from each other than Washington’s 3rd District, in the far Southwest Corner of the state and Florida’s 7th District, which hugs Florida’s East Central Coast. But the swamp reaches everywhere in America, and these two districts are now inextricably linked by the shady tactics of the GOP establishment, working to defeat conservative candidates on behalf of Kevin McCarthy, alongside pro-impeachment forces and a compliant herd of RINOs they control.

McCarthy – a failed leader and an expert at talking out of both sides of his mouth – claims to be outraged about the deep state’s war against Trump and the conservative grassroots while he simultaneously works in the shadows to direct millions of dollars to anti-Trump, establishment candidates like those opposing Green Beret Joe Kent and Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini.

Grassroots favorite Kent – Gold Star husband and recipient of six bronze stars who was endorsed by Trump in Washington’s 3rd Congressional district – thrilled grassroots Republicans by narrowly toppling pro-impeachment Republican incumbent Jamie Herrera Beutler in a huge comeback, after trailing badly on election night.

Kent triumphed despite millions of dollars of establishment money being spent to defeat him. The night he took the lead for good in the GOP primary, Kent appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, renewing his call for a fundamental reining in of the deep state and intelligence agencies that had just conspired to raid Mar a Lago, the curbing of which he had made a centerpiece of his congressional campaign.

Even as the vote was still being counted, Kent sounded the alarm on Twitter about the same cast of characters that spent more than $4 million in dark money attempting to defeat him now targeting Sabatini, another grassroots conservative favorite who is currently leading the race in Florida’s open seat 7th Congressional district (August 23rd primary).

“The left uses dark money to seize the levers of power,” he tweeted in response to the news that a mysterious dark money firm, with the same financial backers and structure that had targeted him, was going after his friend and political ally. “Look at Soros Zuck etc. The right uses dark money against candidates who want to fight back against the left. Send @anthonysabatini whatever support you can. They are coming for him because he’s fighting for us.”

The left uses dark money to seize levers of power, look at Soros, Zuck etc, the right uses dark money against candidates who want to fight back against the left.

Send @AnthonySabatini whatever support you can, they are coming for him because he’s fighting for us. https://t.co/29YtkVWoZK

— Joe Kent for WA-3 (@joekent16jan19) August 5, 2022

Kent’s victory was indeed remarkable. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, widely considered the nation’s leading guru on redistricting and elections, described Herrera-Beutler early in the campaign as a lock to make it to the general election.  Thanks to Trump and a grassroots push, she failed.

MUST READ: REPORT: Judge Behind Mar A Lago Raid Is Epstein-Linked, Obama Donor.

But the swamp plays for keeps , and nothing enrages them like a loss. They thought they had won in Washington State on election night, where Herrera Beutler had a large lead against Kent, only to watch it wither away over the following days as Pro-Trump election day votes were counted. The establishment had spent more than $4 million in late, dirty, DC money to attempt rescue Herrera Beutler, one third of which went directly to boost her, one third of which went to attack Kent and one third of which went to split the grassroots vote by boosting a fake alternative to Herrera Beutler who reneged on a pledge to exit the race.

Sabatini, the latest target of the establishment’s ire, is a strongly pro-Trump and pro-DeSantis America First candidate and military veteran who, like Kent, has crusaded against the nation-building wars that the GOP establishment and Democrats combine on to fleece American taxpayers. He’s been the strongest and most outspoken voice in the Florida legislature on everything from critical race theory (CRT) to immigration and has been described as the most pro-Trump member of the Florida legislature.

Sabatini has led in the public polling in the race, and the money (more than $600,000 so far, with doubtless more to come) has been timed, as it was with Kent, so that the donors do not need to disclose their names until after the primary election. Sabatini is hoping that the grassroots energy that has powered his campaign will provide him with sufficient funding to hold on against the onslaught.

MUST READ: Yes, The White House’s ‘Dark Brandon’ Memes Contain Nazi Imagery With CCP Influences.

In a brief interview, Sabatini encouraged patriotic conservatives to “raise the volume” of their protests against the establishment, claiming that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and to make sure they let their friends in Florida’s 7th district know the national importance of the race.

“The war within the Republican party now determines what the GOP will do in the future, and the establishment is hiding in the shadows and playing every dirty trick in the book. The real fight is in the primary.”

Sabatini is cautiously optimistic for a late Trump endorsement (it helps that he leads in the polls and counts Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz in his corner). Florida political operatives are confident this would put him over the top—but Trump’s attention has to this point been focused on going after explicitly pro-impeachment representatives and other major Trump critics, while Sabatini’s top opponents are ciphers with no record to stand on.

“The Republican establishment wants 22 to be a referendum against America 1st.  They want controlled, weak Republicans who vote as they are told.” said Joe Kent in a tweet thread late in the primary campaign.

The Republican establishment wants 22’ to be a referendum against America 1st, they want controlled weak republicans who vote as they are told.

In the last week 2.5 million has been spent against me b/c I’m leading in the polls & Beutler might not make the top 2.

— Joe Kent for WA-3 (@joekent16jan19) July 24, 2022

Happily those efforts failed in Washington’s 3rd Congressional district.  If grassroots GOP voters stay vigilant, they will fail in Florida as well.

Revisionist powers, nations whose leaders seek to undermine American leadership in the world, seem to be on the march.

Russia persists with its heavy bombardments in Ukraine. Its army holds on, at least for now, not only in eastern Ukraine but also on the Black Sea coast, shutting off Ukraine from supplies and trade with the rest of the world.

China is threatening retaliation for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. The regime of President Xi Jinping may be mollified for the moment by the Biden White House’s hints that it wasn’t their idea, or deterred by the staging of U.S. naval forces nearby. But there’s no doubt that China has much more military capacity to attack Taiwan and inflict damage on U.S. forces than when Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan in 1997.

Iran, meanwhile, is showing little interest in Biden administration efforts to reinstate the JCPOA, the nuclear pact signed by the Obama administration in 2015 and from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018. The mullah regime seems unblushingly intent on achieving nuclear weapons capability.

In reflecting on these threats, I am struck by how much longer the leaders of each of these revisionist polities have been in power, how secure their hold on it has been, how short the tenure has been and how weak the hold of elected leaders here in the United States and among our allies.

Consider Vladimir Putin. When he took power in the last hours of 1999, he was unknown beyond Moscow and not expected to be around a generation later. Yet he’s still there 22 years and eight months later, longer than the reign of Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) and not that many years less than the 29 years of Joseph Stalin (1924-1953). There’s speculation that the 69-year-old Putin’s hold on power has been endangered by the failure of his apparent plan to absorb Ukraine, but last year, he signed a law that would allow him to serve until 2036.

Speaking of changing term limits, China abolished its limit of two five-year terms in 2018. Xi is expected to be granted another 10 years in power this fall. Those term limits were established by Deng Xiaoping, a close observer and sometime victim of the violent lurches in the nearly 27-year rule of Mao Zedong (1949-1976).

Now Xi, at age 69, is positioned to challenge that record, though not that of the 18th-century Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796). But Xi may want to stick around for the 100th anniversary of the Communist takeover in 2049, at which point the regime hopes to become the world’s dominant power, according to Michael Pillsbury’s “The Hundred-Year Marathon.”

The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, is already a record-setter. He has held that position since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989, 33 years ago. That’s nearly as long as the 37-year reign of the Shah Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979).

There’s an obvious contrast here with Western leaders. The two most recent American presidents won a majority of electoral votes by margins of 77,000 and 42,000 popular votes in three states. Though there’s some continuity in their administrations’ policies, they’re not on speaking terms. Oh, and they’re also currently 76 and 79 years old.

Other Western countries are in similar flux. Britain awaits a vote of some 160,000 Conservative Party members that will determine who becomes prime minister next month. France’s Emmanuel Macron lost his parliamentary majority last month. Germany’s Olaf Scholz, in office since December, leads an unwieldy coalition. Japan’s prime minister lacks the counsel of his long-lasting predecessor Shinzo Abe, assassinated July 8.

Successive Western leaders have supposed that they can change the behavior of revisionist leaders. American China policy since Henry Kissinger assumed that China could be prodded to be more open, more democratic, less aggressive. It didn’t work much before Xi, and under Xi, China has been moving in the opposite direction.

The first three presidents this century sought some kind of reset with Russia, and Donald Trump had some positive words for Putin (but the charge he colluded with Russia was always a hoax). But these approaches never worked out better than Hillary Clinton’s mislabeled reset button. As for Iran, presidents including Reagan, Obama and now Biden have reached out for better relations — and have gotten nothing for their concessions.

Putin and Xi are both 69, and Khamenei, the only one older than Biden and Trump, is 83. None will last forever. But deaths are hard to forecast and regime change even harder. There are underlying geopolitical forces behind Russia’s and China’s challenge to American leadership, and a religious motivation behind Iran’s.

The downside risk is that revisionist leaders, or Western mistakes, may plunge much of the world into destructive war. That has happened in Ukraine, although the violence is minuscule next to the carnage of the 20th century’s two world wars. The negative potential in Taiwan could be worse, and the reverberations of communist conquest more profound, as defense analyst Elbridge Colby argues. But those are subjects for another column.

In the meantime, let’s hope recent events have made the West’s wobbly buttressed leaders skeptical of the possibilities of enticing the revisionist leaders to see things our way. They’ve played this game before.

SOURCE: Right and Free

SURPRISE! ANOTHER BIDEN HIRE IS A CCP SHILL!

A Co-Chair of Joe Biden’s forthcoming White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health has appeared in documentaries produced by Chinese Communist Party-run outlets; lauding the regime’s agriculture and food policy as an approach that should be “learned by the whole world.”

Ertharin Cousin, one of five individuals selected by Biden to lead the conference, has also repeatedly praised the Chinese Communist Party’s agricultural policies, with her quotes frequently appearing on regime-run media.

Set to take place in September, the White House’s conference is slated to address nutrition and health in addition to food security and agriculture. It comes as inflation and food shortages plague the economy, dovetailing with efforts by left-wing activists and billionaires to eliminate meat from Western diets to supposedly combat climate change.

Cousin, who was a former executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, appeared on an episode of China Global Television Network’s (CGTN) show Full Frame titled “The Hunger Paradox.”

Cousin is the sole interviewee in the 20-minute program aired by CGTN, which is entirely owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party. It has been described by the Freedom House think tank as “a long-standing weapon in Beijing’s arsenal of repression” whose “mission is to attack designated enemies of the Communist Party.”

The episode peddles Chinese Communist Party talking points surrounding the success of its agriculture methods despite the regime’s notoriety for famine and food rationing during the Cultural Revolution.

“In China, agricultural reforms ensured most rural farmers had land to grow on, allowing them to be food self-sufficient. China’s poverty reduction efforts have contributed to 70 percent of the world-wide poverty reduction since the 1980’s,” asserts the host, who makes no mention of China’s history of famine.

MUST READ: REVEALED: Pelosi-Linked Lobbyists Are Pushing China’s Social Credit System For American Citizens.

“One of the things I’ve heard you say, which I think is fascinating and true, is that policies do make a difference and you point to China. So many people lifted out of poverty, so many people hungry that now have meals, so policies do make a difference don’t they,” he continues.

“Yes they do,” responds Cousin, adding “You would often hear me use China as an example of a country that the world said would never feed itself. That it would always depend upon assistance from the global community because 50 years ago, China was WFP’s largest recipient, and that all evolved to the point where President Xi now says that he will eradicate poverty by the end of 2020.”

“I’m looking forward to that,” Cousin exclaims.

Cousin proceeds to explicitly praise the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, praising the regime for its “commitment”:

“It did take commitment from government to developing the programs, investing in the activities that were necessary to ensure the agricultural system was one that could provide access to food, but also ensuring that people who could not afford food had access to food. And that made a difference in the evolution of China, and there are many other factors involved there but the reality of it is is it began with a commitment by leadership to ensure that they were self-sustained in food access.”

Cousin, who served in the Obama administration as the Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, has made similar comments throughout her public service tenure.

MUST READ: EXC: Anthony Fauci Is STILL Funding China’s Military-Run Labs With U.S. Taxpayer Cash.

“China has made enormous progress in dealing with hunger and its experience can be learned by the whole world,” Cousin said during a visit to China in 2013, which was hyped in an article by state-run media outlet China Daily.

In 2016, speaking with another state-run media outlet Xinhua, she claimed that “China has created significant lessons for the world and established a true benchmark for what the world can achieve.”

As recently as July 2021, while delivering a keynote address at a conference, Cousin again praised the Chinese Communist Party for “despite the fact that some 60 years ago, the world said China would never be able to feed itself, not only does it feed itself today, but it is also a donor country, supporting food access across the globe for developing countries.”

In addition to Cousin’s praise for China potentially complicating her leadership role for the upcoming White Conference, she has also served on the Advisory board of pharmaceutical giant Bayer since 2019.

Michael Shapiro joins Blackstone from the Department of Transportation

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s son-in-law has joined private equity giant Blackstone as a “managing director of government affairs,” the latest addition to the New York Democrat’s family lobbying empire.

Michael Shapiro, who recently served as Joe Biden’s deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Department of Transportation, will focus on infrastructure investments and projects at Blackstone, according to the firm. Shapiro lands the new gig as Schumer is poised to decide the fate of legislation on infrastructure spending and tax loopholes of interest to Blackstone. The move was first reported by Capitol Account, a newsletter founded by two former Bloomberg reporters devoted to covering the intersection of Wall Street and Washington.

Schumer is already under fire for blocking a vote on legislation opposed by companies that employ other members of his family. Progressive groups and Republicans have unsuccessfully pressured Schumer to schedule a vote on antitrust legislation that would rein in Big Tech firms. Schumer’s daughters, Jessica and Alison, are lobbyists for Amazon and Facebook’s parent company Meta, respectively. Shapiro married Jessica Schumer in 2016, after meeting at the Obama White House. The New York Times described their courtship as a “real West Wing romance.”

Blackstone said Shapiro, who advised Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, will not lobby his father-in-law on issues related to the firm. But the private equity behemoth, which manages nearly $900 billion in assets, has lobbied the Senate on the Build Back Better Act, the massive infrastructure spending program. Blackstone also lobbied the Senate on carried interest, the loophole by which private equity firms obtain lower tax rates for income. Schumer is leading negotiations on the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes language to close the carried interest loophole.

Schumer has ties to other lobbyists for Blackstone. Steve Elmendorf, a prominent Democratic donor who runs the firm Subject Matter, in the past has defended Schumer over the senator’s ties to Wall Street. “In working with him for 25 years, he very aggressively represents the state of New York. Sometimes that means he’s representing one interest over another,” Elmendorf said in 2015.

Schumer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Tehran slated to sell China $27 billion in oil this year

Iran’s illegal oil trade has boomed under the Biden administration, with the hardline regime selling more than $44 billion worth of its heavily sanctioned oil to malign regimes like China, Syria, and Venezuela, according to figures published by a watchdog group.

From January 2021, when Joe Biden took office, to June 2022, Iran sold around $44.7 billion in oil primarily to China. The regime’s export revenues between March 2021 and March 2022 from oil, gas, and related products “totaled $39 billion, compared [with] $22 billion for the previous year—a rise of 77 percent and an extra $17 billion,” according to United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), a watchdog group that tracks Iran’s network of illegal oil tankers.

“This drastic increase in revenue is not surprising when you look at the increase in oil exports that have occurred under the Biden administration,” UANI chief of staff Claire Jungman told the Washington Free Beacon. “This is the result of terminally lax sanctions enforcement.”

In addition to looser sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to enforcement as it seeks to ink a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal. These moves are meant to appease Iran and cajole it into signing a deal that will remove virtually all sanctions on the hardline regime, including its oil trade. China is the primary beneficiary of this policy, with Iranian oil imports quadrupling to the country in 2021 to $23.1 billion. The China-Iran oil pipeline is on pace to hit around $27 billion in 2022, according to UANI’s figures.

If sanctions on Iran are lifted as part of a new nuclear deal, Iran-China trade could reach around $60 billion per year, according to one former U.S. official.

“China made a mockery of the credibility of our sanctions programs and emboldened rogue actors across the world to follow suit,” Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon.

Iran’s foreign currency reserves— which were nearly drained under the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign—will have “increased nearly tenfold by the end of this year,” according to Noronha.

“The United States refused to enforce its sanctions even while Iran was continuing to advance its nuclear program and its regional terror attacks,” Noronha said. “The result was that Iran’s economy revived itself.”

This financial relief gave Iran a cushion and lessened pressure that could have forced it into accepting a more stringent nuclear deal.

“The Iranian leadership does not feel pressure to finalize the nuclear deal because they’ve already enjoyed the benefits of effective sanctions relief,” Noronha said. “The fact that the Biden administration can’t even manage a return to the notoriously weak [nuclear deal] is evidence of the sheer diplomatic malpractice carried out by the Biden administration, particularly Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. envoy for Iran Rob Malley.”

As Iran and China boost their oil alliance, the U.S. emergency crude stockpiles dropped to their lowest levels in 37 years. This comes after the Biden administration agreed to sell China several million barrels from the U.S. stores, sparking a congressional investigation.

In July, Iran sold 746,915 barrels of oil per day to China, according to UANI.

Under pressure from watchdog groups like UANI, the Biden administration is beginning to issue new sanctions on Iran’s oil trade.

The State Department announced on Monday that it is “designating six entities” for their role in “facilitating illicit transactions related to Iranian petroleum.”

The administration says it is committed to reviving the nuclear deal, but will issue sanctions until the agreement is signed.

“The United States has been sincere in pursuing a path of meaningful diplomacy to achieve a mutual return to full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” the State Department said, referring to the 2015 deal by its official name. “Until Iran is ready to return to full implementation of the JCPOA, we will continue to use our sanctions authorities to target exports of petroleum, petroleum products, and petrochemical products from Iran.”

UANI’s Jungman said the new sanctions are a good first step, but that “there are many gaps that need to be filled.” The administration still has not designated several oil tankers known to be ferrying illicit Iranian oil.

“Without designation on the vessels, the tankers will just register under new companies and continue to assist Iran in exporting its oil,” she said.

Noronha says these sanctions have come too late.

“China took advantage of the Biden administration’s weak posture and blatantly flouted our sanctions on Iran for over 16 months before the United States made any attempt to stop the trade,” he said.

The State Department says that it continues to engage China diplomatically as part of its efforts to crack down on its oil partnership with Tehran.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

TURNS OUT IT HAS BEEN THE RADICAL LEFT TAKING INSTRUCTION FROM THE KREMLIN.

The only demonstrable evidence of Russian interference in U.S. politics came quietly out of the U.S. Department of Justice today, with the unsealing of an indictment charging a Russian national with “orchestrating a years-long foreign malign influence campaign that used various U.S. political groups to sow discord, spread pro-Russian propaganda, and interfere in elections within the United States.”

The New York Times report on the subject buries the names of the groups allegedly utilized by the Russian government in the scheme, namely the “Uhuru Movement” of St. Petersburg, Florida, which is part of a wider entity known as the African People’s Socialist Party.

Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that from “at least December 2014 until March 2022, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow, together with at least three Russian officials, engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign targeting the United States. Ionov is the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow and funded by the Russian government. Ionov utilized AGMR to carry out Russia’s influence campaign.”

“Ionov allegedly orchestrated a brazen influence campaign, turning U.S. political groups and U.S. citizens into instruments of the Russian government,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The Department of Justice will not allow Russia to unlawfully sow division and spread misinformation inside the United States.”

Ionov is alleged to have used his control over a handful of groups such as the Uhuru movement, in order “to spread pro-Russian propaganda under the guise of a domestic political organization, and to interfere in local elections,” the DOJ says.

One example cited stems from January 2016, when Ionov apparently guaranteed “financing for — and ultimately funded — a four-city protest tour undertaken by U.S. Political Group 1 in support of a ‘Petition on Crime of Genocide against African People in the United States’.”

In 2017 and 2019, Ionov is alleged to have supported two St. Petersburg, Florida, political campaigns, as well as further instructing Russian handlers of his campaigns. He is charged with conspiring to have U.S. citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government – a crime with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Meanwhile, on a Facebook live post, Uhuru movement chairman Omali Yeshitela divulged that police had “handcuffed me and my wife,” before going on to discuss potential funding from “anyone else who wants to support the struggles for Black people.”

Ionov has previously been accused of raising funds for convicted Russian spy Maria Butina, who is now a Member of the State Duma in Russia. Butina targeted conservative groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) having been given a student visa by the Obama administration.

With an expected GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives following November’s midterm elections, Republicans in the chamber are poised to launch a slew of investigations aimed at dialing up the pressure on the Biden administration over a range of issues—from border security to Hunter Biden to the origins of the pandemic.

Domestic concerns faced by everyday Americans—most notably a historic inflation rate—will be key priorities, according to Chair of the House Republican Conference Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).

House Republicans will take the administration to task on alleged “policy failures that have created an inflation crisis, energy crisis, border crisis, and crime crisis impacting every American family,” Stefanik told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices will also be scrutinized, she added.

On the foreign policy front, the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the United States and abroad, and U.S. strategy toward Iran are set to come under focus.

Republicans are already laying the groundwork to take on “an aggressive oversight role” next year by issuing preservation notices and document requests so a potential GOP majority “will be ready to hold the Biden administration accountable from day one,” a House GOP leadership aide told The Epoch Times in an email.

Oversight Committee

Many of the inquiries are expected to be spearheaded by the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the chamber’s main investigative panel that has broad authority to scrutinize various facets of the administration.

The committee’s ranking member James Comer (R-Ky.), who is poised to take the chair should the Republicans flip the House, foreshadowed an ambitious agenda by a GOP-led panel.

“[W]e will return the House Oversight and Reform Committee to its core mission of rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government and holding the Executive Branch accountable,” Comer told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

Another committee member Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) had a clear message for the Biden administration via email to The Epoch Times: “Their days of corruption, fraud, and abuse will no longer be met with blind eyes.”

Hunter Biden

Chief among a GOP-led House Oversight Committee’s priorities is an investigation into Hunter Biden and his foreign business dealings.

For more than two years, the president’s son has been at the center of growing controversy over his overseas business activities, including in Ukraine, Russia, and China, conducted while Biden was vice president in the Obama administration.

Hunter is currently the subject of a federal investigation being run out of Delaware and, according to a recent CNN report citing unnamed sources, it is “nearing a critical juncture.”

Hunter has previously denied wrongdoing, and the elder Biden has maintained that he has never discussed Hunter’s business activities with his son.

The president’s son’s extensive financial dealings with foreign individuals and businesses, raise concerns about conflicts of interests, illegal lobbying, and whether his ties influenced U.S. foreign policy during the Obama administration, critics say.

Republicans have honed in on Hunter’s work for Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, while his father was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine, and Hunter’s dealings with several Chinese companies and businessmen with links to the Chinese Communist Party.

“We will continue to conduct oversight of Hunter Biden and the Biden Family’s pattern of peddling access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves,” Comer said.

“They have racked up over 150 suspicious activity reports for their foreign business deals, which is a national security threat,” the lawmaker said, referring to a CBS report saying that U.S. banks had flagged more than 150 financial transactions involving Hunter or the president’s brother, James, for further review by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Some of the transactions involved large wire transfers, the report said.

“We need to know if resident Biden benefited financially from these deals and if he is beholden to the interests of foreign adversaries,” Comer said.

COVID-19 Origins

The ranking member highlighted that the committee would continue to investigate the origins of COVID-19, focusing on the possibility that the pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

“Growing evidence shows COVID-19 likely originated from the Wuhan Lab and the Communist Party of China covered it up,” Comer said.

An array of circumstantial evidence has prompted some officials and scientists to point to the WIV as the most likely source of the pandemic. These include the WIV’s gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, reports that staff members became sick with symptoms consistent with both seasonal flu and COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, before the Chinese regime acknowledged the outbreak, and that a WIV public database of 22,000 samples and viral sequences was taken offline in September 2019 before the onset of the pandemic.

The Chinese regime’s persistent refusal to allow outside access to the lab and its data has made it nearly impossible to fully investigate the lab leak theory.

Domestically, the potential role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in aiding WIV’s activities has been viewed with particular alarm by Republicans, who are looking to intensify the inquiry. The NIH has previously funded WIV via New York-based health nonprofit EcoHealth, including one grant that amounted to what experts have described as gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

“We will seek to hold U.S. government officials accountable for any wrongdoing, and ensure Americans’ tax dollars aren’t being used on risky research at unsecure labs,” Comer said.

Other Key Priorities

The ongoing struggle by the administration to control the flow of illegal immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border is set to become another focal point for Republicans serving on the House Oversight Committee, and other panels.

“We will also continue our oversight of Biden’s border crisis that has led to historic illegal immigration, a surge of deadly drugs pouring across the border, and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars,” Comer said.

With a GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee, Biden’s energy policies amid a deepening global squeeze on oil and gas are expected to come under close scrutiny.

“We will build on our robust oversight over how the administration is censoring conservative speech, shutting down American energy and increasing gas prices, abusing its public health emergency powers, [and] colluding with political allies like teacher’s unions,” a spokesperson for Energy and Commerce Republicans told The Epoch Times in an email.

Meanwhile, a Republican-led House Financial Services Committee would focus on probing regulatory agencies’ alleged efforts to impose a “far-left agenda” on the U.S. financial system, as well as the Biden administration’s implementation of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan, said Laura Peavey, communications director for the House Financial Services GOP, in an email to The Epoch Times.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Amir Handjani in hot water over his role as top adviser to repressive Gulf monarch

A federal court has ordered a Quincy Institute fellow and Atlantic Council donor to turn over records relating to his potential role in an alleged hack-and-leak operation that targeted an American businessman.

Amir Handjani, a vocal media advocate for the Iran nuclear deal, has been ordered to produce documents and communications related to the alleged hacking victim, Farhad Azima, as well as documents related to entities involved in the attack, including Ras al-Khaimah, a kingdom in the United Arab Emirates. Handjani served as a top adviser to the kingdom’s authoritarian ruler, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al Qasimi.

The order, issued on July 15 by a U.S. Southern District of New York judge, could bring to light new details about the alleged international spy-for-hire plot, which the lawsuit claims was carried out on behalf of Handjani’s boss.

The ruling comes three years after a lawyer for Ras al-Khaimah’s investment fund, Dechert’s Andrew Levander, threatened to sue the Washington Free Beacon for defamation over its coverage of Handjani’s role as an adviser to the kingdom’s ruler. A British judge in May found “shocking” malpractice at the firm as part of an unrelated case.

Handjani has been fighting requests to produce his records for over a year as part of a lawsuit brought against him by Azima, who is seeking the records for a counterclaim in an ongoing British civil case.

In court filings, Azima claims that private hackers working for Ras al-Khaimah in 2016 illegally obtained his emails and other records and leaked them to the public. He alleges that Handjani and the law firm Dechert, which served as advisers to Ras al-Khaimah, helped oversee the operation.

Handjani has denied any involvement in the hacking. But court records show he was included on email correspondence with other kingdom advisers about targeting Azima and discussions about the hacked documents.

A British private investigator hired by Ras al-Khaimah told the court earlier this year that Handjani personally “instructed” him to investigate a Jordanian businessman who in 2020 accused the kingdom of kidnapping and torture. The private eye said he later enlisted an Israeli hacker to handle the case.

Handjani is still listed as a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute, a non-interventionist think tank staffed by Iranian regime supporters and anti-Israel activists. The Atlantic Council said Handjani left the group’s board last year. His last disclosed contribution to the think tank was between $50,000 and $99,999 in 2020.

Update July 27, 2022 3:11 p.m.: A previous version of this article stated that Handjani remains a donor to the Atlantic Council. Handjani is no longer a donor to the organization.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) alleged on July 25 that there were “systemic and existential problems” within the Justice Department and the FBI, after “highly credible” whistleblowers informed his office that officials from the bureau labeled evidence against Hunter Biden as disinformation.

“The allegations provided to my office appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation,” Grassley wrote in a letter (pdf) to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Grassley, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the “volume and consistency” of the whistleblowers’ allegations “substantiate their credibility.”

The latest revelation is part of Grassley’s ongoing effort to probe into Hunter Biden’s business activities. In September 2020, he and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) released a report, discovering that there was “potential criminal activity relating to transactions among and between Hunter Biden, his family, and his associates with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, and Chinese nationals,” while Joe Biden was vice president during the Obama administration.

In March, the two senators presented bank records on the Senate floor showing CEFC China Energy, a now-defunct company, made payments to Hunter Biden. Currently, the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware is investigating Biden for possible tax violations.

Whistleblowers

According to whistleblowers, the FBI came into possession of information about Hunter Biden’s “criminal financial and related activity” in 2020, which prompted FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten to open an assessment in August 2020, according to the letter. An FBI headquarters team subsequently used the assessment to “improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation” and caused the bureau’s investigation on Hunter Biden “to cease.”

A month later, the FBI team placed findings by FBI agents involved in Auten’s assessment in “a restricted access sub-file.” Grassley said the decision was “problematic.”

“[I]t does not allow for proper oversight and opens the door to improper influence,” Grassley explained.

Auten was previously known for being under investigation for failing to properly vet the now-discredited Steele dossier, which contained false and fabricated claims accusing former President Donald Trump of colluding with Russia.

In October 2020, “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” surfaced, and the reporting was “verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants,” whistleblowers told Grassley. However, the FBI did not pursue the reporting after Timothy Thibault, an assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, shut it down.

“Thibault allegedly ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required by FBI,” the letter said. FBI officials, including Thibault, then tried to “improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future.”

In May, Grassley requested an Inspector General investigation into Thibault, expressing concerns about how the agent had demonstrated “a pattern of active public partisanship,” in violation of his “ethical obligation as an FBI employee.” In his letter (pdf) to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz at that time, Grassley documented Thibault’s left-wing social media posts, including retweeting a post from the anti-Trump political-action committee the Lincoln Project.

In response to Grassley’s letter, Horowitz wrote back (pdf) saying that Thibault may have violated the Hatch Act, and asked the Office of Special Counsel to review the case. The Act, passed in 1939, bans federal government officials from taking in certain political activities.

Request

Grassley said Garland and Wray must take the whistleblower allegations seriously.

“If these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and FBI are—and have been—institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law,” Grassley wrote in his letter.

Grassley ended his letter by asking Garland and Wray to turn over records and information relating to the Biden family, Austen, and Thibault before Aug. 8.

The senator requested “all leads” that were either “ordered closed” or denied further review by Thibault.

“All records related to derogatory information on Hunter Biden, James Biden, and their foreign business relationships,” Grassley wrote as one of his requests.

The FBI said it has received the letter but declined to comment further.

Eva Fu contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Deputy National Cyber Director Camille Stewart has called for a race-focused defense agenda

Solving “perceived” systematic racism by implementing systematic racism. Sounds like a democrat. Stop looking for hand-outs and start lending a hand. [US Patriot]

Resident Joe Biden’s incoming cyber defense deputy has claimed that “systemic racism” is one of the greatest threats to U.S. cybersecurity.

Camille Stewart, a former Google strategist whom Biden reportedly tapped for White House deputy national cyber director, has argued that “our #NatSec apparatus must be a part of dismantling systemic racism,” and “pursuing anti-racist and anti-hate policy outcomes” should be a chief national security focus for the administration.

Biden’s new hire is likely to stoke concerns from Republican legislators that his administration has been more focused on pushing a race-focused ideological agenda than on traditional national defense issues—such as the increasing risk of cyberattacks from Russia, Iran, and China. The Department of Justice said in June it is bracing for more cyberwarfare from adversarial countries. Last month, the FBI revealed it intercepted an Iranian-backed cyberattack against Boston Children’s Hospital, and Russian hackers targeted an American satellite company in Ukraine earlier this year.

Stewart, who served as policy adviser for the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, has criticized the United States as an intrinsically racist society in her writing and on social media.

She claimed that the U.S. economy “lost $16 trillion b/c of Racism against Black Americans,” and warned in 2020 that “SYSTEMIC RACISM WILL RUIN THIS DEMOCRACY,” arguing that systemic racism was a part of “every institution not just the criminal justice system.”

“[Solutions] to cybersecurity challenges will never reach their full potential until systemic racism is addressed and diverse voices are reflected among our ranks at all levels,” Stewart wrote in a 2020 column for the Council on Foreign Relations titled “Systemic Racism Is a National Security Threat.”

She added that “communities of color are disproportionately affected by cyberattacks that target critical infrastructure.”

In a 2020 column for the Hill, Stewart said the Biden administration’s efforts to combat systemic racism “must be woven into leadership priorities, processes, structures, and domestic and international strategy.”

Stewart proposed that U.S. foreign policy leaders be encouraged to “talk about systemic racism in the U.S on a global stage” and acknowledge the “detrimental effects of racism at home and in U.S. foreign policy towards regions of the world.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A White House press release on Monday said Stewart was “regarded as not only an expert but also as an inspiration, especially to women and underrepresented minorities.”

Republican lawmakers have objected to other recent hires by the Biden administration, including U.S. special representative for racial equity and justice appointee Desirée Cormier Smith, who claimed white diplomats lack empathy and humility.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Several individuals connected to a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign plot to cast Donald Trump as a covert Kremlin collaborator are working in high-level jobs within the Biden administration—including at least two senior Biden appointees cited by Special Counsel John Durham in his “active (and) ongoing” criminal investigation of the scheme, according to recently filed court documents.

Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser, and Caroline Krass, a top lawyer at the Pentagon, were involved in efforts in 2016 and 2017 to advance the Clinton campaign’s false claims about Trump through the media and the federal government, documents show. Other evidence shows that two other Biden officials—senior State Department official Dafna Rand and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler—also are entangled in the so-called Russiagate scandal.

It’s not known whether these Biden appointees have been interviewed by Durham’s investigators. But as the probe widens, some government ethics watchdogs anticipate that Biden’s presidency could be pulled into the scandal, which saw the FBI abuse its surveillance powers to spy on a Trump campaign adviser based on Clinton opposition research.

Just as the Democrats have used their control of Congress to cast President Trump and the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol as threats to American democracy, Republicans are vowing if they regain power after November’s congressional elections to investigate the years-long effort to question Trump’s 2016 victory and undermine his presidency.

The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Turner, recently pledged to hold hearings and issue subpoenas “to get to the bottom of [Russiagate] so this never happens again, so we never have Americans having to distrust their own government because of the politicization of the FBI [and] of our intelligence community.”

RealClearInvestigations has learned that Congress has referred to the Special Counsel’s Office at least a dozen cases of potential perjury involving former Clinton campaign officials and Obama administration officials who have testified behind closed doors about their involvement in Russiagate. Hill lawyers and investigators have met with Durham’s staff about the criminal referrals stemming from the sworn depositions.

Republican sources say that the roles played in Russiagate by Krass, Sullivan, Rand, and Gensler may be among the first to draw attention in hearings. Although the full range of their efforts has not been made public, here’s what is known so far.

Caroline Krass: Clinton Donor and Top CIA Lawyer

Krass, 54—whom Biden appointed as general counsel of the Defense Department early last year—is the former top CIA lawyer cited by Durham as “General Counsel of Agency-2” in his indictment of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann.

Durham alleged Sussmann first tried to plant a fabricated report with the FBI’s general counsel about a secret cyber-link between Trump and Russia-based Alfa Bank in order to set in motion an investigation of Trump before the 2016 election. Then, after the election, Sussmann filed a similar report with Krass’ legal shop at the CIA, the prosecutor said.

Although a Washington, D.C. jury in May acquitted Sussmann of lying about who was paying him to approach the FBI, the trial revealed that FBI field agents specializing in cyber crimes debunked his report within days of receiving it, and even suspected some of the evidence was cooked up. “We think it’s a set-up,” one agent warned in an internal FBI email. FBI brass working under then-Director James Comey, however, prolonged the investigation for several months.

Nevertheless, after Trump won the election, Sussmann brought the same Trump-Alfa Bank ruse to Krass—a Clinton donor and Obama appointee, then working under CIA Director John Brennan. Durham has found evidence that Krass welcomed the tip.

“We’re interested,” he said Krass told him in their December 2016 phone call. “We’re doing this review and I’ll speak to someone here, and someone will get back to you to arrange a meeting.”

Krass allegedly told Sussmann she would consider the information for inclusion in the intelligence review of alleged Russian interference in the election that Obama had ordered at the time. A declassified version of the review, known as the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), was released to the public the next month and accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of meddling in the election to help Trump win. A classified version included an annex with several unfounded and since-debunked allegations against Trump developed by the Clinton campaign as part of the so-called Steele dossier. It’s not known if the two-page annex, which claimed the allegations were “consistent with the judgments in this assessment,” included the Alfa Bank canard, since several sections remained blacked out when it was made public in 2020.

The ICA became a foundational document for subsequent Trump-Russia probes and has been used by Democrats and the media to suggest the 2016 election was stolen from Clinton.

“The greatest concern with the role of Krass is her ‘interest’ [in Sussmann’s tip] despite the lack of foundational support [for it],” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told RCI. “As with the FBI, the Clinton campaign found eager [Obama] officials to move on any such allegation [against Trump].”

On Feb. 9, 2017, Sussmann secured a sit-down meeting at CIA headquarters with “a representative from the Office of General Counsel,” according to documents reviewed by RCI, where he turned over more dubious material allegedly linking Trump to Russia. The CIA lawyer he met with worked under Krass, who did not leave the agency until several months later, despite the change in administrations.

The attorney, identified at trial only as “Steve M.,” said he would pass the tips on to CIA technical experts, as well as an FBI liaison officer, but they too dismissed the data as “self-generated,” meaning they appeared to be designed to arrive at a predetermined conclusion of a nefarious cyber-link. Complete datasets were withheld from the CIA.

Apparently, the CIA did not even ask for the source of Sussmann’s walk-in tip, including where he got the data files he gave the agency. The FBI exhibited a similar lack of curiosity when Sussmann reported the false Trump-Alfa Bank connection.

However, like FBI brass, Krass and her boss at the time, CIA chief Brennan, were aware of Clinton campaign efforts to portray Trump as a Kremlin agent, and it was no secret that Sussmann’s Perkins Coie law firm represented her campaign.

“As Brennan’s top lawyer, she would know everything about that,” said Kash Patel, the former House Intelligence Committee investigator who interviewed Sussmann in a closed-door deposition in December 2017, and was the first to discover the Alfa Bank smear operation he ran at the FBI and CIA on behalf of Clinton campaign operatives.

Evidence shows that Krass had other reasons to be skeptical of Sussmann’s claims. As legal adviser to Brennan, she was involved in the referral her boss made to the FBI in 2016 to open a counterespionage case to find out how Russian intelligence intercepted information about Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie up Trump in a Kremlin scandal. The intercept revealed the Russians were on to a plot by Clinton and her then-foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan to “stir up” a scandal on Trump about Russia during the Democratic convention in late July 2016.

Brennan appears to have been less concerned about the Clinton campaign’s disinformation campaign than the fact Moscow knew about it. This so alarmed Brennan that he briefed Obama about it, according to a summary of his handwritten notes, declassified in 2020.

The referral, known as a counterintelligence operational lead (CIOL), was sent to Comey, who in turn forwarded it to then-FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok to investigate.

Strzok—who was fired by the FBI after his anti-Trump views became public—opened an investigation, not of Clinton but the Trump campaign. Krass’ chief of staff at the time, Brian Greer, confirmed that the purpose of the CIOL was not to investigate the Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks, but to run a counter-spying probe to see if the Russians had penetrated the Clinton camp. The concern, he said, was that Clinton “may have been spied on by a hostile intelligence service.”

Seemingly reflecting the attitude of his former boss at the spy agency, Greer opined that “there’s nothing illegal about” what Clinton did to Trump. “Even if it’s unsavory,” he shrugged, “that’s just politics.”

Federal campaign records reveal that Krass donated at least $3,575 to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 and 2008 campaigns for president. Before Obama appointed her to the CIA in 2014, she served as his special counsel for national security affairs in the White House.

Brennan’s handwritten notes were turned up by Durham and opened a new track in his investigation, which early on had appeared to clear the CIA of wrongdoing. But now Durham is actively investigating this CIA front, according to one of his pre-trial filings. His grand jury has interviewed at least eight current and former CIA employees, and he is seeking out other agency employees who may have attended the meeting with Sussmann.

“The government has been undertaking additional steps to determine if additional personnel were, in fact, present at this [Feb. 9] meeting with [CIA] employees,” Durham noted. “In addition, the Special Counsel’s Office maintains an active, ongoing criminal investigation of these and other matters that is not limited to the offense charged in the [Sussmann] indictment.”

It could not be determined if Krass is among former CIA employees interviewed by Durham’s team. Durham’s office remains tight-lipped, and neither the CIA nor Pentagon responded to requests for comment. Attempts to reach Krass were also unsuccessful.

During his 2017 House Intelligence Committee interview, Sussmann and his lawyer promised to provide the committee copies of all the documents he gave to the CIA, but Patel said they failed to turn them over. The former staff counsel said he is confident Durham has obtained them.

Meanwhile, Judicial Watch is suing the CIA for all its records of contacts with Sussmann under the Freedom of Information Act. The Washington-based watchdog group recently filed the lawsuit after the CIA failed last year to reply to a request for the records, including notes, related to agency phone conversations and meetings with the Clinton campaign attorney.

“The CIA is in cover-up mode about its communications with the [Clinton] lawyer implicated in a shady spy operation against President Trump,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “What is the CIA hiding about its role in this plot against Trump?”

Fitton maintains that what happened at the CIA could be an even bigger scandal than what happened at the FBI.

As one of the Intelligence Community’s top attorneys, Krass also was involved in Obama’s sudden decision after Trump won to make it easier for the CIA and FBI to root through raw personal communications intercepted globally by the National Security Agency, according to sources familiar with high-level legal consultations regarding the revision to spying rules at the time.

The departing president’s executive order relaxing rules for mining the NSA’s highly classified databases went into effect less than three weeks before Trump took office. At the same time, the White House rushed to preserve all intelligence related to Trump and Russia and disseminate it across U.S. agencies.

The order, known as “12 Triple 3,” allowed the FBI for the first time to sift through large troves of incidental communications—including phone calls and emails—involving U.S. citizens, without NSA filtering or even wiretap warrants. In effect, agents could put advisers and appointees of Trump, along with their family members and friends, under warrantless surveillance.

The easing of longstanding restrictions on intelligence-sharing set off a massive fishing expedition.

The FBI didn’t have much time to exploit the raw intercepts before Trump put his own people in place. So in a last-minute scramble, it asked both the CIA and NSA to search their holdings and collect as much information as possible on Russian oligarchs and other figures for any links to Trump and his advisers—namely, Gen. Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Carter Page.

The information was hastily processed and compiled into analytical reports and shared with other agencies, as well as Congress, putting Trump and his presidency under suspicion before he could even take the oath of office. Some of the material also was leaked to the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, and other major media—even though it was largely unsubstantiated.

In short, the new rules that Krass, along with other intelligence agency lawyers, helped draft making it easier to share raw streams of communications also made it easier to frame Trump as a Russian stooge before Obama left office.

Although Brennan’s appointment ended the day Trump was inaugurated, Krass stayed behind in her CIA job through the end of April 2017. When she finally resigned, she left behind a team of around 150 attorneys in her legal shop at Langley. They all remained in their positions in spite of the change in administrations.

Krass is not the only Russiagate-tied official who has resurfaced in the Biden administration.

Jake Sullivan: Potentially False Testimony

Sullivan, 45, played a pivotal role in the baseless Alfa Bank story as the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy adviser.

He is the “foreign policy adviser” referenced in the Sussmann indictment as one of the campaign officials who was briefed on the scheme to cook up the debunked rumor that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were secretly communicating through Alfa Bank’s computer servers. Sullivan promoted the “secret hotline” hoax in a campaign statement via Twitter just days before the November 2016 election, claiming, “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.” He even called on “federal authorities” to investigate.

Former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified at Sussmann’s trial that he discussed the Alfa Bank project with Sullivan before going to Clinton herself for approval to publicize it.

Sullivan is also the “foreign policy adviser” cited in U.S. and Russian intelligence as the mastermind behind the Clinton campaign plot to “stir up” a Trump-Russia scandal ahead of the Democratic National Convention in July 2016. During the party’s gathering in Philadelphia, Sullivan drove a golf cart from one TV network news tent in the parking lot to another, pitching producers and anchors the fable that Trump was conspiring with Putin to steal the election.

Now operating out of the West Wing as Biden’s national security adviser, Sullivan is under scrutiny for potentially false testimony he gave to Congress regarding his knowledge of, and role in, the campaign’s opposition research efforts against Trump. Lying to Congress is a felony, although it’s rarely prosecuted.

“He has the gall to come into Congress—I took so many of those depositions—and say he had no idea how the [Clinton-funded Steele] dossier was created, or who the $10 million [that] Jake Sullivan and the DNC were paying was being utilized [by] to collect fraudulent information [on Trump and his advisers],” said Patel, a former federal prosecutor, who had worked for GOP intelligence chair Devin Nunes when he took the depositions. ”So, I think John Durham’s on his case.”

An attorney for Sullivan did not respond to questions, while a spokeswoman for the National Security Council declined comment.

Prosecutors say the Clinton campaign operation to tar Trump continued even after the election, with Sullivan again taking a prominent role.

In February 2017, Sullivan met with another central figure in the plot to plant the Trump-Alfa smear with investigators—Daniel Jones, a former FBI analyst and Democratic staffer on the Hill, whose goal was to reignite the investigation and put Trump’s fledgling presidency under a cloud of suspicion.

On Feb. 10, 2017—one day after Sussmann met with a member of Krass’ staff at the CIA—Sullivan secretly huddled with Jones and his partners at FusionGPS, an opposition research firm that worked for the Clinton campaign, to hatch the post-election plan to resurrect rumors Trump was a tool of the Kremlin. As RCI first reported, the meeting—which lasted about an hour and took place in a Washington office building—also included former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The group discussed raising money to finance a multimillion-dollar opposition research project headed by Jones to target the new president. They ended up raising several million dollars for the effort, organized under a nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project. In effect, Jones’ operation would replace the Clinton campaign’s operation, continuing the effort to undermine Trump.

It’s not known whether Sussmann also attended the Feb. 10 meeting, but he had paid a visit to CIA headquarters that same week to peddle new disinformation about the supposed secret server.

At the time, the FBI closed its Alfa Bank probe, finding nothing sinister. ”The FBI’s investigation revealed that the email server at issue was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization but, rather, had been administrated by a mass-marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump hotels and hundreds of other clients,” Durham wrote in his indictment.

Nonetheless, Jones and Sullivan kept promoting the canard as true. Jones reached out to old bureau colleagues to pass on supposedly fresh leads, and the FBI looked into the new leads, while Sullivan went on national media to give the impression there was still something to the rumors.

In a March 2017 interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, for example, Sullivan discussed a story leaked to CNN by unnamed sources that the FBI was continuing to investigate the rumors of “a secret hotline between Trump and Russia.”

“How surprised were you to hear last week that this investigation is still ongoing?” Blitzer asked.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Sullivan said, “because what we learned during the campaign was that very serious computer science experts—people who work closely with the United States government—had uncovered this secret hotline between the Alfa Bank, the Russian bank, and the Trump organization.”

Sullivan insisted that the computer scientists “weren’t just making up crackpot theories.”

In fact, Durham is actively investigating their leader for potential fraud and conspiracy: computer contractor Rodney Joffe, who was offered a top post in a future Clinton administration, according to recent court filings. Joffe, who recently was terminated for cause as a longtime FBI informant, has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to cooperate with grand jury subpoenas. His lawyer did not respond to phone calls and email messages.

Dafna Rand: An Anti-Trump Outfit Called TDIP

A longtime Clinton aide currently serving in the Biden administration as the director of the Office of Foreign Assistance, Rand also played a key role in spreading the Alfa Bank hoax.

In early 2017, Jones recruited Rand, a former Senate Intelligence Committee colleague, to sit on the board of The Democracy Integrity Project to help dig up new dirt on Trump, according to incorporation papers, while continuing to push the debunked Trump-Alfa Bank allegations.

In October 2018, TDIP blasted out an email to top Washington journalists with the subject line, “TDIP News Brief,” which attempted to keep the Alfa Bank hoax alive. The three-page bulletin, a copy of which was obtained by RCI, rehashed the alleged “connections between a computer server associated with the Trump Organization and servers associated with Russia’s Alfa Bank.” It speculated Democrats would subpoena information from “the server in question” if they regained control of Congress in the midterm elections the following month.

Rand’s resume on LinkedIn omits her role at TDIP (pronounced T-DIP), which is revealed only in the nonprofit’s IRS tax filings. A Democratic Party donor, Rand previously worked as a top aide to Clinton at the State Department. Before that, she served in the White House as a national security adviser to Obama.

Responding to grand jury subpoenas, her old colleague Jones reportedly has cooperated with Durham’s investigation.

Rand did not return requests for comment.

Gary Gensler: At SEC, Still After Trump

Biden nominated the longtime Clinton operative to head the Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2021, and Gensler was confirmed by the Senate and then sworn in as chairman of the Wall Street regulatory agency two months later.

Notably, the SEC press release announcing his appointment and detailing his personal biography omitted his prior role as chief financial officer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election team, where he managed the campaign budget, including expenditures that weren’t properly reported.

In March of this year, the Federal Election Commission fined both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee for violating campaign finance laws by falsely claiming that more than $1 million used for the Steele dossier and other opposition research against candidate Trump was for “legal advice and services.”

Durham has sought these and other financial records as part of his investigation and has interviewed several former Clinton campaign officials including Mook, who handled opposition-researching spending and other budget matters and consulted with Gensler’s office during the campaign.

Patel said investigators would be wise to continue following the money trail. He maintained that he and other lawyers on the House Intelligence Committee found that the Clinton campaign failed to report the proper purpose of millions of dollars in additional funding.

“They need to keep digging, because there’s at least $10 million and maybe $20 million more that went directly into opposition research,” Patel said, adding that the Clinton effort to frame Trump as a Russian agent was ”massive.”

Last year, Gensler named Melissa Hodgman his associate director of enforcement. She happens to be married to disgraced former FBI official Peter Strzok, who’s also implicated in Durham’s probe. Strzok led the investigation of Trump and his campaign, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” before he was fired in 2018 over anti-Trump texts he exchanged with his mistress, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

As adviser to the head of the SEC’s enforcement division, Hodgman currently is helping oversee an investigation into Trump’s social media start-up, Truth Social. According to regulatory filings, the SEC last month served Trump Media & Technology Group with a federal subpoena for records. The company owns Truth Social, Trump’s answer to left-leaning Twitter, which kicked him off its platform last year over remarks he made concerning the Jan. 6 riot.

The SEC reportedly wants to know more about merger talks between Trump’s parent company and Digital World Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded company regulated by the SEC. RCI contacted the SEC about the investigation and Gensler’s previous work for the Clinton campaign, but did not hear back.

Patel warned that too many of the people who “abused their power” in the Russiagate conspiracy to frame Trump have returned to power.

“A lot of these Russiagate conspirators are back recycled in the Biden administration,” said Patel, who recently published a book related to the Russiagate scandal, “The Plot Against the King.” “They must be held accountable or they’ll only abuse their power again.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Advocacy group Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleging that the agency is slow-rolling a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to turn over records tied to resident Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Judicial Watch filed the FOIA suit against DHS on July 17 at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asking the court to force the agency to turn over all non-exempt records concerning government-provided security services to Hunter Biden or companions on any international trips from 2010 to 2013.

The advocacy group said in a July 20 statement that the Secret Service, which is part of DHS, had “failed to respond adequately” to three FOIA requests in March and April demanding records of security services—and related use of taxpayer funds—provided to Hunter Biden and companions.

“The Secret Service is violating FOIA law by slow-rolling and hiding Hunter Biden records,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in the statement. “What is the Secret Service trying to hide about Hunter Biden?”

DHS didn’t respond by press time to an Epoch Times request for comment on the lawsuit.

‘Questions Have Been Raised’

The backdrop for the lawsuit is Secret Service records obtained by Judicial Watch in 2020 showing hundreds of international trips taken by Hunter Biden during the first several years of the presidency of Barack Obama while receiving Secret Service protection.

“While it is typical for the families of the president and vice president to travel with them, questions have been raised about whether Hunter Biden used the government trip to further his business interests,” Judicial Watch stated.

Missing from the records the advocacy group obtained in 2020 was information on whether Hunter Biden’s travel was on Air Force One, Air Force Two, or other government aircraft or whether other family members were present.

Judicial Watch’s complaint indicates that the Secret Service had acknowledged the group’s FOIA request and by April 19 had “located potentially responsive records, was processing the records, and would send them” to Judicial Watch “upon completion of the processing.”

But those records haven’t been handed over to Judicial Watch, nor has DHS explained why it hasn’t yet transmitted the documents, the complaint alleges.

Other Hunter Probe

Besides Judicial Watch, Republicans in Congress have also sought Secret Service records tied to Hunter Biden’s travels while his father was vice president.

While the Secret Service turned over 259 pages of records (pdf) to Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the pair of senators objected to what they said were “extensive” and “improper” redactions that impede their ability to “understand the full scope of the interactions between Hunter Biden, his associates,” and the Secret Service.

Grassley and Johnson have been probing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. The senators released a report in 2020 (pdf) that said Hunter Biden’s job with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma created a “potential conflict of interest” for his father, who was heavily involved in U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

In 2019, Hunter Biden sat for an interview with ABC News, in which he insisted he hadn’t done anything “improper” in his business dealings, although he acknowledged “poor judgment.”

Hunter Biden told the media outlet that he “did nothing wrong at all,” but conceded that it was “poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is … a swamp … in many ways.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Ohio Democrats attacked Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance’s trip to Israel, where he pledged to be a strong advocate for the Jewish state.

Vance’s Wednesday address at a gathering in Tel Aviv was met with mockery from Vance’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan. Ryan’s communications director Izzi Levy falsely stated that Vance campaigned in Israel before holding a single event in Ohio. Michael Beyer, the communications director for the Ohio Democratic Party, said Vance would rather be in Israel than his home state.

Both comments mirror the anti-Semitic trope that American politicians are more loyal to Israel than to the United States, and highlight how the Jewish state’s security has transformed into a partisan issue. While Ryan previously said he supports Israel’s right to self-defense, he voted in 2021 against funding for the Iron Dome and supported the Obama administration’s Iran Deal.

In Israel, Vance pledged to be “as strong an advocate for the U.S.-Israel relationship as anyone.” He called the Iran Deal “a disaster” and applauded former president Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

Brad Kastan, chairman of JewishColumbus’s Community Relations Council, said Democrats “should strongly encourage, not discourage, our leaders to visit the Jewish state.”

​​”Israel is our strongest and most important ally in the Middle East. All Americans and particularly the citizens of Ohio benefit from the strong strategic and economic ties, not to mention shared values, we enjoy with Israel,” Kastan said. “Ohio Democrats, or anyone who appreciates the role our U.S. senators must play in foreign policy, should strongly encourage, not discourage, our leaders to visit the Jewish state.”

Ryan himself visited the Jewish state in 2016 during his House reelection campaign. It is unclear whether Ryan at the time would rather be overseas than in Ohio.

The attacks from Ryan’s campaign and allies come as the race between the longtime House member and Vance heats up. Vance won May’s Republican primary on the back of an endorsement by former president Donald Trump and is viewed as the favorite to win in November given the current political climate.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Almost half of small business owners said their businesses are on the brink of closing after inflation last month hit another record high.

A report published Thursday by the Alignable Research Center found that 47 percent of small business owners say they may close by the fall, marking a 12-point increase from last summer, when only 35 percent of business owners said they were at risk. More than half, meanwhile, said they expect to make less money than they did last year.

More than 60 percent of respondents said inflation has damaged their business more than the COVID-19 pandemic, the report showed. Inflation shot up to 9.1 percent in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists, including former Obama administration officials, have said resident Joe Biden’s nearly $2 trillion stimulus package contributed significantly to skyrocketing inflation.

Other causes of financial instability, respondents said, include increased gas prices, rent hikes, labor issues, the broken supply chain, reduced consumer spending, rising interest rates, fears of recession, and continued pandemic recovery.

Retailers, construction firms, and car dealerships were among the hardest hit small businesses. Half of restaurant owners said their businesses are in danger. Of small business owners in general, almost 60 percent agreed the summer of 2022 has been economically challenging.

“Small businesses do not like high inflation since it raises their costs and squeezes their profit margins,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Desmond Lachman told the Washington Free Beacon. “This forces them to have to raise prices, which might be difficult to do both because they might get pushback from their consumers and because they might lose market share. The high degree of uncertainty associated with high inflation makes it difficult for small businesses to plan and operate.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Measures to make regime pay US terror victims shot down

Congressional Democrats killed a handful of measures that would have stopped the Biden administration from providing U.S. taxpayer funds to the hardline Iranian regime and increased economic sanctions on the country.

Democrats running the House Rules Committee last week shot down seven Republican-led measures targeting Iran. Republican foreign policy leaders were pushing for the measures to be included in the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the sprawling annual funding bill for national security priorities.

Congressional sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon said House Democrats rejected the measures to help the Biden administration in its push to secure a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord. Those negotiations are ongoing, and the White House is pushing its allies in Congress to avoid passing any measures that may upset the hardline regime and erode progress in talks.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) “opposed the original JCPOA, and I hoped congressional Democrats might come to their senses and oppose Biden’s disastrous Iran reboot,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) told the Free Beacon, referring to the nuclear deal by its official acronym.

Banks said he expected at least some Democrats who have been critical of the Iran nuclear deal to back measures that would stop the Biden administration from awarding Tehran with taxpayer funds.

“But Democrats’ foreign policy is even weaker now than it was during the Obama years,” Banks said. “House Democrats voted to pave the way towards a JCPOA 2.0 that will enrich terrorists and bring Iran even closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon. It’s not just Joe Biden—the whole party is to blame.”

Banks and his Republican colleagues attempted to pass what they described as a common-sense measure to block the Pentagon from sending any taxpayer dollars to the Iranian regime. The measure would have stopped any funds allocated in the fiscal year 2023 NDAA from going to “the government of Iran,” “any person owned or controlled by the government of Iran,” and “any person identified on the list of specially designated nationals,” according to a copy of the rejected amendment.

Another measure the Republicans expected to receive Democratic support would have terminated the president’s authority to waive sanctions on Russians who work on Iran’s contested nuclear program. Even with a bipartisan opposition to Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine, Democrats rejected this provision.

Other measures would have sanctioned the Iranian supreme leader’s office for human rights abuses and required the Biden administration to submit a report to Congress on Iranians who could be targeted with additional sanctions.

Democrats also rejected a measure that expressed support for forcing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans, to pay compensation to its victims. The resolution also expressed support for keeping the IRGC on the U.S. terrorist lists. The Biden administration was rumored to be considering dropping the designation as part of a concessions package to Tehran in nuclear talks. Biden during his first visit to the Middle East last week said dropping the designation is no longer under consideration.

One measure that was killed would have stopped funds from being allocated to any effort aimed at removing Iran from terrorist financing watchlists, and another would have mandated congressional reports on Iran’s illicit oil trade, which has skyrocketed since the Biden administration relaxed sanctions.

Meanwhile, Iranian leaders announced over the weekend that the country officially has the technical know-how to produce an atomic bomb, a disclosure that has increased calls for the Biden administration to cease diplomacy and begin sanctioning Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

JUST AS WASHINGTON BEGINS TO TAKE THE TIKTOK THREAT SERIOUSLY, THE DEMOCRATS JOIN THE PLATFORM.

The Democratic National Committee has officially joined TikTok, a controversial social media platform with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party, despite advising their own campaigns against joining the Chinese-owned app during the 2020 election cycle.

“We continue to advise campaign staff to refrain from using TikTok on personal devices. If you are using TikTok for campaign work, we recommend using a separate phone and account,” the DNC security team instructed its candidates two years ago.

Despite the warning, the Democratic Party has completed an about-face on the platform, at the same time Washington, D.C. begins to take seriously the threat of spying through the app.

The DNC’s stark reversal comes amidst evidence revealing that the TikTok parent company employs former Chinese Communist Party officials, including individuals with military ties, to executive roles and even grants party members preferential treatment in hiring processes.

The app’s founder also pledged to use ByteDance to “promote socialist core values” and devotion to the Chinese Communist Party in 2018.

TikTok’s threat to national security and data privacy – previously acknowledged by the DNC – prompted the Trump administration to attempt to ban the platform from operating in the U.S. – an effort recently quashed by the Biden White House.

The committee maintains it is employing security precautions such as dedicating individual devices that are isolated from “other DNC assets/processes/businesses as a mitigation to the privacy risk.” The DNC attributed its decision to an effort to reach more voters, particularly younger generations.

The move comes amidst a massive lobbying campaign mounted by TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. Many of the lobbyists and firms hired by the company have ties to Democratic politics and leaders such as Nancy Pelosi.

MUST READ: Would-Be British PM Rishi Sunak’s Family Runs A China-Linked, World Economic Forum Partner Company Pushing Digital ID and Social Credit Scores.

Internally, TikTok has also hired several Democratic Party alumni, including Obama administration National Security Council members to run its Trust and Safety operations.

TikTok also funds several fact-checking organizations used by other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, which frequently exercise their censorship capabilities against conservative users and stories critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) still does not have an account on the platform.

“We do not have any plans to give the Chinese Communist Party our data, nor do we plan to use their spyware,” said RNC spokesperson Nathan Brand.

Resident Joe Biden’s administration has made two major changes to immigration policies by re-interpreting federal law.

Immigrants, many illegal, from certain countries are shielded from deportation and allowed to be legally employed if the secretary of homeland security decides their home country meets certain conditions.

The designation is known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

Fifteen countries are currently designated, including Afghanistan, El Salvador, Somalia, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of immigrants from those countries are protected.

Up until July, those protected by TPS had to remain in the country unless they received approval to travel.

If TPS beneficiaries did leave the country and returned, they’d have the same status—illegal or legal—when they returned, based on language from Miscellaneous and Technical Immigration and Naturalization Amendments, even though they could remain temporarily protected by TPS.

But U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which handles the nation’s legal immigration system, has changed that policy.

Now, all beneficiaries that return will be “inspected and admitted,” a bureaucratic term that means one has entered the country legally. “This is true even if the TPS beneficiary was present without admission or parole when initially granted TPS,” USCIS said in an alert (pdf).

“That basically launders the fact that they came here illegally and that will put them on the path to a green card,” Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Epoch Times.

“This is an end run on U.S. immigration law, and Congress,” added Emilio Gonzalez, who directed USCIS during the George W. Bush administration. “It really is a left-handed way of legalizing people.”

USCIS said in its alert that the change stemmed from a court decision, guidance from the lawyers at its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and an evaluation of current and past policy. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.

Supreme Court

The Supreme Court in 2021 ruled that immigrants who receive TPS are not admitted for purposes of obtaining legal permanent residency.

“A grant of TPS does not cure a foreign national’s entry without inspection or constitute an inspection and admission of the foreign national,’” Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, wrote in the 9–0 decision.

But USCIS seized on a footnote in the ruling, in which the court said it was not expressing a view on whether a parole enables a TPS recipient to become a legal permanent resident. The secretary of homeland security can parole an illegal immigrant, which allows them to enter or remain in the country legally.

The USCIS also cited a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which said that the law mandates TPS beneficiaries who travel outside the country be inspected and admitted upon returning, and be treated as entering the United States legally, even if they originally entered illegally.

The DHS Office of General Counsel, on the request of USCIS, reviewed the rulings and the law and concluded that USCIS was “well within its authority” to rescind Trump era guidance and allow illegal immigrants to use leaving the country and coming back to become legal.

“This is just a transparent workaround that I believe is illegal, and almost certainly is going to be challenged,” Vaughan said.

Another Big Change

The Immigration and Nationality Act, says that immigrants who were illegally in the United States and left cannot re-enter for a certain period of time. Illegal immigrants who were in the country for less than one year have to wait three years to be able to re-enter the country; those who were present for one year or more would be inadmissible unless he or she waits 10 years to re-enter.

The immigrants were expected to wait outside the United States, to comply with the law.

USCIS, though, is now saying that an immigrant can be inside the United States, and that will not reset the clock.

“The statutory 3-year or 10-year period begins to run on the day of departure or removal (whichever applies) after accrual of the period of unlawful presence. This statutory period continues to run, without interruption, regardless of whether or how the noncitizen returned to the United States during the 3-year or 10-year period. Thus, it is immaterial whether the noncitizen has spent the applicable statutory 3-year or 10-year period in or out of the United States,” USCIS says in its policy manual.

The change was made on June 24 to be consistent with two recent court rulings and an unpublished Department of Justice Board of Appeals decision, the agency said in an alert on the alteration.

“This is basically an invitation for any deported alien to pay the cartels to smuggle them back into the U.S. while they let the clock run out,” Rob Law, who headed the USCIS policy office during the Trump administration and directs the America First Policy Institute’s Center for Homeland Security and Immigration, told the Washington Times, which first reported on the update.

Court Decisions

The move stemmed from two 2020 rulings.

In the first, a Japanese woman overstayed her nonimmigrant status by five years. She left voluntarily in 2003 but returned just two years later, well before the 10-year period mandated in the law.

While she didn’t follow U.S. immigration law, her lawyer argued she shouldn’t have been denied permanent residency when she applied for it in 2019 because she was married to a United States citizen and because over 10 years had elapsed.

Government lawyers said that aliens to whom the law applies “must remain outside of the country for the entire duration of the inadmissibility period” and, if they do not, they cannot be admitted.

U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall, a Carter appointee, ruled for the plaintiff, agreeing on the argument that over 10 years had gone by before Yayomi Kanai asked for residency.

“This policy change would be great for our client. That means she could have been granted adjustment of status by the USCIS and she wouldn’t have had to go through all these problems,” Michael Piston, who represented Kanai, told The Epoch Times.

“It feels very, very good that they’re doing the right thing,” Mario Urizar, a lawyer who represented the man in the other case, told The Epoch Times.

In that case, a Brazilian national overstayed a tourist visa and was ordered deported in 1994. He left the United States in 2000.

Two years later, the man re-entered, even though the 10 years had not elapsed. When he went to adjust his status later, in 2016, authorities noted he violated the law and thus remained inadmissible.

U.S. District Judge Kevin McNulty, an Obama appointee, ruled that the law “is silent” on the time after 10 years elapses. He said imposing what amounted to a lifetime ban from the United States was wrong.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has declined a plea offer to plead guilty to a contempt of Congress charge, the lead federal prosecutor in the case told a judge on Friday.

Navarro had pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress on June 17 after he refused to cooperate with the House January 6 committee’s probe into the breach of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.

He cited executive privilege due to his former position at the White House under the Trump administration. But Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, rejected his claims of executive privilege, and the committee voted in late March to advance criminal charges against Navarro.

A grand jury indicted Navarro on June 3 on two counts: one for his refusal to produce the documents the committee requested, and the other for his refusal to comply with the committee’s subpoena to show up and testify. Each count carries a maximum of one-year imprisonment.

At a status hearing on July 15, federal prosecutor Elizabeth Aloi told U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that the Justice Department had offered to let Navarro plead guilty to a single count instead of the two he was indicted with.

Prosecutors also said the deal would mean they would not have sought more than the minimum 30-day jail time.

But the deal would have required Navarro to “comply with the January 6 committee subpoena to the satisfaction of the Justice Department,” Aloi said.

Navarro attended the hearing with two defense attorneys. He had been representing himself before he was indicted on the criminal charges.

“It’s a complicated constitutional case involving separation of powers,” John Irving, one of the defense attorneys, told reporters outside the courthouse after the hearing.

“It involves not only the President of the United States asserting his executive privilege, but [also] over 50 years of DOJ opinions that make it clear that top presidential aides are able to assert absolute immunity and not testify before Congress. Not only that, but also the Justice Department has longstanding policies about not prosecuting someone criminally for this kind of situation,” he added. “So I wonder what changed.”

John Rowley, another defense attorney, told reporters: “This is the first time in our nation’s 250-year history that a senior adviser to a president has been criminally charged for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena.

“In essence, this is a dispute between the Office of the President and Congress, and Mr. Navarro was placed on the horn of the dilemma—either to follow the executive direction or risk prosecution.”

Trump’s attorneys have previously argued that former White House officials shouldn’t comply with congressional subpoenas because the requested information is protected by Trump’s executive privilege.

Navarro’s trial is set for Nov. 17.

Judge Expresses Concern Over Treatment of Navarro

Mehta, an Obama appointee, said at the hearing that he was concerned about how Navarro was treated by the government.

Navarro was arrested on June 3 at Reagan National Airport by the FBI as he prepared to board a flight to Nashville, and was hand-cuffed even though he had been in touch with the FBI previously and lives across the street from the FBI’s office in Washington, D.C. He was later taken into custody by agents from the U.S. Marshals service.

At the time, Navarro said that he was denied a call to a lawyer, which prosecutors have denied. The former White House adviser also said he wasn’t informed that he needed to turn himself in before he was arrested.

“It is curious to me, at a minimum, why the government treated Mr. Navarro’s arrest the way it did,” Mehta said on July 15. “It is a federal crime, but it is not a violent crime.”

“It’s surprising that self-surrender was not offered as an opportunity,” he added.

Navarro is the second former Trump adviser charged for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee. The first was Steve Bannon, who faces a similar set of two contempt charges. Bannon’s case goes to trial on July 18.

Navarro in December 2020 released a report that alleged widespread election irregularities. At the time, he said the findings of the report suggest there was “a coordinated strategy” to “strategically game the election process” against Trump. Navarro released the report in his capacity as a private citizen, and had called on journalists and U.S. politicians to acknowledge the irregularities in the 2020 election and carry out investigations. Trump later praised the report.

Thompson had cited the report among other references in announcing in February the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoena to Navarro.

“Mr. Navarro appears to have information directly relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation into the causes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol,” Thompson said at the time, alleging that Navarro “hasn’t been shy about his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has even discussed the former President’s support for those plans.”

Joseph Lord and Reuters contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Who’s the better boy: Hunter Biden or Mohammed bin Salman?

Resident Joe Biden visited oil-rich Saudi Arabia on Friday to grovel before its authoritarian leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), in a desperate attempt to stem the soaring price of gasoline in the United States. The president fist-bumped MBS upon arriving in Jeddah, which was an embarrassing moment. Not quite as embarrassing, however, as Barack H. Obama’s servile bow before the late King Abdullah during his 2009 apology tour.

The trip revealed that Biden’s campaign pledge to make Saudi Arabia “pay the price” for human rights abuses—including the 2018 murder and bone-saw dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi—and “make them in fact the pariah that they are” was a blatant lie. (Yes, a lie. The Washington Free Beacon is using that word in contravention of longstanding journalistic norms in an effort to highlight the president’s dangerous dishonesty.)

Above all, Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia provides an opportunity to discuss a topic the American mainstream media too often neglect: fatherhood. One of the reasons why the president’s meeting with MBS is so significant is that the crown prince is merely the country’s de facto leader after gently seizing control from his 86-year-old father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud.

Shortly after Biden took office in 2021, the White House insisted that King Salman—not the 36-year-old MBS—was “the president’s counterpart” in Saudi Arabia. Friday’s fist-bump suggests otherwise. Nevertheless, Biden and King Salman have a lot in common. As of Nov. 20, they will both be octogenarians. More importantly, they both understand what it’s like to be the famous father of an infamous son.

Speaking of which, Hunter Biden and MBS have a fair amount in common as well. They are both fans of prostitutes and cocaine. Hunter’s exploits are legendary, of course, but almost certainly pale in comparison with the debauchery of the crown prince. New York Times reporter Ben Hubbard noted in his 2020 book, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman, that MBS once rented out an entire resort in the Maldives and “hosted a string of blowout parties.” Shakira and Pitbull reportedly performed at the gatherings, which also featured “an abundance of prostitutes and cocaine.”

READ MORE: ‘Bareback Rocket Ride’: The Hunter Biden Story

Both sons would presumably have amounted to nothing if not for their powerful dads, who helped finance their lavish and degenerate lifestyles. Just as MBS tapped the royal bank account to pay for his drug-fueled island orgies, Hunter persuaded Joe to keep wiring him money to help cover his $30,000 escort bill. It is safe to say that Hunter is more likely than MBS to film himself having threesomes with crack-addled hookers, but who’s to judge?

Hunter and MBS both have five children, although King Salman probably recognizes all of them, unlike Joe, who continues to deny the existence of the baby girl Hunter sired with a stripper named “Dallas.” To be fair, it is not publicly known how many children MBS has fathered with strippers and prostitutes who may not enjoy the protections granted by the U.S. justice system.

Unlike his Saudi counterpart, the Biden heir has not yet been credibly accused of murdering and dismembering a journalist. Yet Hunter does enjoy some of the same benefits afforded to Saudi royalty. For example, U.S. mainstream media outlets and tech companies actively suppressed negative stories about Hunter during his father’s 2020 presidential campaign. The revelations once denounced as “fake news” have since been largely corroborated.

It is difficult to say, given the facts, which famous father has raised the better boy. Perhaps the most notable difference between Joe Biden and King Salman is that the elderly and infirm Saudi royal knew when it was time to call it quits and hand power to a younger generation. Biden does not appear to share this outlook. This is not to suggest that he should anoint Hunter as his heir apparent, although there’s no question the whore-loving crackhead scion would get more votes than Kamala Harris.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Television, movies, news media, universities, sports, nonprofits and even major corporations are increasingly controlled by leftists.

One island of conservative sanity is talk radio, a medium in which leftists have been unable to succeed despite their best efforts and the government funding of NPR, which even some liberals are finding to be too much.

The Hispanic community in South Florida, with its large Cuban-American population, has been right-leaning and pointedly anti-communist. That has made a success of Radio Mambi — WAQI-AM — in Miami, with its conservative Spanish-language programming.

But not for long, if a George Soros-backed sale of the station and others is completed.

The leftist billionaire is a “lender,” as opposed to an investor, in the development of the Latino Radio Network, which will be made up of WAQI and 17 other Hispanic radio stations, Fox News reported.

The purchase of the stations from Univision would include some financing by Lakestar Finance, which is affiliated with a Soros fund management firm.

The Latino Radio Network’s founders both worked for former President Barack Obama.

Stephanie Valencia was deputy director of the Latino Vote Program for Obama’s 2008 campaign and went on to have several positions in the Obama White House’s Office of Public Engagement, according to her LinkedIn page.

Meanwhile, Jess Morales Rocketto, a former senior new media strategist for the AFL-CIO who also worked on Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, was the engagement program manager for Obama’s 2012 re-election bid.

Valencia is the executive chairwoman of the board for the Latino Radio Network, while Rocketto is a board member.

Neither woman sounds like a good match for Radio Marti. Neither does the inflow of Soros money.

Some on-air personalities have broadcast they will not accept retention bonuses to stay with Radio Mambi.

Lourdes Ubieta announced earlier this month that she’s moving to Americano Media, a SiriusXM radio network that features a conservative Spanish-language perspective.

This week, Dania Alexandrino and Nelson Rubio said they too were leaving WAQI for that venture, Fox News reported.

En vivo a las 11:00 am hora del este, con los tres que presentadores que hacían parte de @radiomambi710 y rechazaron la oferta para continuar, después de la oferta de compra por parte de Latin Network, financiado por el extremista de izquierda George Soros. pic.twitter.com/QB6f4ujKdG

— Americano Media (@AmericanoMedia) July 12, 2022

Soros Gets a Shock When He Tries to Buy Local Radio Station with Conservative Latina Behind the Mic

“They don’t want a dime of Soros money,” said Jorge Bonilla of the Media Research Center.

Some advertisers are planning to leave, too, he said.

Bonilla said the planned purchase “is about controlling the flow of information to a specific community for political purposes.”

“You’re looking at the shutdown or the radical restructuring or the reformatting … of an iconic radio station, a station that for decades has been a beacon to Miami’s Cuban-American community,” he said.

Radio Mambi, according to Bonilla, “has been really the community’s voice politically and culturally. It’s a beacon of anti-communism, and so these are the concerns that emerged as a result of this transaction.”

He said a parallel would have been for Rush Limbaugh to be removed from WABC-AM, his flagship station in New York, in the 1990s and replaced with Air America, the left’s unsuccessful talk radio effort.

Bonilla called the Radio Mambi situation “unprecedented.”

A long-forgotten mandate of the Federal Communications Commission — which must approve the sale of the stations to the Latino Radio Network — is that, according to the Communications Act of 1934 — stations should operate “in the public interest, convenience and necessity.”

Were the FCC operating along those lines, a serious case could be made that Radio Mambi was fulfilling its public mission by its focused service to a specific ethnic community.

But if its past behavior is any indication, it’s unlikely the FCC — its board made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, with one vacancy — will oppose the sale.

There have been some demonstrations against the proposed sale, and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has been critical of it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, also a Republican, tweeted, “The Soros-funded radical Left is running a scheme to manipulate local media in Florida to push their Marxist agenda on voters.”

The Soros-funded radical Left is running a scheme to manipulate local media in Florida to push their Marxist agenda on voters.

In Florida, we reject the professional Left & their attempt to infiltrate our state & will always stand for truth and freedom.https://t.co/OeLbSDpJVh

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantisFL) June 6, 2022

His campaign has run ads in Spanish that said, “Warning, voters! The left is taking control of our local media. Billionaire George Soros, known for financing extreme leftist causes, is now financing the purchase of Hispanic radio stations right here in Miami,” Fox News reported last month.

And there was an event at Radio Mambi that has a kind of precedent.

Veteran broadcasters know the first two things new owners do when they take over a radio station: First, they say there will be no changes in personnel. Second, they fire everybody.

The loss of current staffers might reduce the value of the station. That may be one reason Valencia went to Miami on July 7 to attempt to calm angry Radio Mambi staffers, according to Fox News.

Under new ownership, she told them, “Nothing will change.”

“Nobody believes her,” an individual at the station told Fox News. “Honestly, they really believe we are that stupid.”

Now more personalities have left WAQI, and Americano Media is poised to carry on the tradition of conservative Hispanic talk radio.

Founder Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, told NBC News the venture, which launched in March, was coming at just the right time.

“Democrats took Hispanics for granted for too long, and no one thought to create a home for us in conservative media,” Garcia-Hidalgo said.

“There is an appetite for this,” he said. “You see it on social media. You see it in elections.”

And that, Comrades Soros, Rocketto and Valencia, is one way we do capitalism.

Senate candidate Alex Lasry spent weeks blasting Sen. Ron Johnson for participating in a congressional delegation to Russia

Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Alex Lasry—who has spent the past few weeks slamming Sen. Ron Johnson (R.) for traveling four years ago on a congressional delegation to Moscow—visited Russia himself shortly after President Vladimir Putin’s controversial election in 2012, according to a now-deleted post on Lasry’s Facebook page.

Lasry, the son of a hedge fund billionaire, posted a photo of himself posing on a gold-carved, red velvet throne while dining at a luxury tourist restaurant inside an imperial palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, according to a copy of the June 17, 2012, post obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“Oh I just can’t wait to be king,” wrote Lasry in the caption for the photo, in which he is holding a red crystal goblet.

The picture could complicate Lasry’s attempts to contrast himself with Johnson, whom Lasry has blasted as a “Putin apologist” who “would rather spend the Fourth of July in Moscow than Wisconsin.” It could also play into criticism from Lasry’s Democratic primary opponents, who argue that his massive family wealth has left him out of touch with voters.

The restaurant, Russian Ampir, is a popular site with tourists, according to TripAdvisor, which says the hotspot gives diners an “acquaintance with the cuisine of Russian aristocracy in the days of the imperial St. Petersburg.”

“Even the most exacting audience will be fascinated by the view of tables served with 24-karat gold flatware, exclusive porcelain of 18th century, crystal wares encrusted with gold,” said the travel guide.

Lasry, who is polling in a dead heat against fellow Democrat and Wisconsin lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes in the party’s Senate primary, has been running ads criticizing Johnson over the Russia trip, saying Wisconsinites can’t count on the senator to “represent our values of freedom and democracy.” Johnson in July 2018 traveled to Moscow on an eight-member Republican congressional delegation led by then-Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Richard Shelby (R., Ala.). The Kremlin later barred Johnson and several other senators from visiting on a bipartisan delegation trip in 2019, reportedly in retaliation for their support of U.S. sanctions against Russia.

“I’ll always represent you, as a Wisconsinite and as an American,” said Lasry in the ad.

Lasry’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the nature of the trip. At the time, Lasry had just finished a three-year stint as an aide in the Obama administration. He went on to attend graduate school at the New York University Stern School of Business.

Lasry’s trip took place amid global outcry and massive protests against Putin’s 2012 election, which many pro-democracy activists said was fraudulent, and as U.S.-Russian relations were growing increasingly rocky.

One year after Lasry’s Russia trip, Lasry’s father, hedge fund billionaire and Democratic donor Marc Lasry, was dropped from consideration as the Obama administration’s ambassador to France due to alleged involvement with an illegal high-stakes poker ring and reported ties to a Russian mobster. The poker game later became the focus of the film Molly’s Game.

The younger Lasry went on to work as an executive for the Milwaukee Bucks, which is co-owned by his father.

One of Lasry’s far-left Democratic primary opponents, Tom Nelson, during a party forum last week slammed him as an “out-of-state billionaire,” citing the candidate’s wealth and East Coast upbringing. The Democratic primary is scheduled for Aug. 9.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Resident Joe Biden was among a group of world leaders that Uber had access to, when the ride-sharing company was aggressively expanding its global presence, according to leaked company files.

The Uber files—containing more than 124,000 emails, memos, text messages, company presentations, and other documents dating from 2013 to 2017—were leaked to British newspaper The Guardian. The outlet then shared the files with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its media partners.

The person who leaked the files is Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief European lobbyist.

According to an ICIJ report on the Uber files published on July 10, the files showed how Uber executives, including co-founder Travis Kalanick, lobbied and courted politicians around the world for favors, during its dramatic expansion.

In total, Uber executives held more than 100 meetings with public officials from 17 countries and the European Union, according to the report. Among those meetings, 34 were with European Union officials, and 9 were with European Commissioners. Twelve of the meetings with European Commission representatives had not been publicly disclosed.

Biden met with Kalanick in Davos, Switzerland, in 2016, just before the then-U.S. Vice President delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum, according to the report.

Kalanick was apparently not pleased that Biden showed up late at their meeting in Biden’s suite at the InterContinental Hotel.

“I’ve had my people let him know that every minute late he is, is one less minute he will have with me,” Kalanick wrote in a text message to a colleague.

At their meeting, Biden was impressed by what Kalanick said, how Uber was transforming cities and the way people work for the better, that the then-Vice President “tweaked his keynote speech,” according to the report.

Biden did not name Uber or Kalanick in his speech.

“Ride-sharing companies employ tens of thousands of new people. I met with the CEO today of one of those companies,” Biden said in the speech. “He said he is gonna add two million new jobs this year, allowing them freedom to work as many hours as they wish, manage their own lives as they wish.”

“Uber took special care to keep Kalanick’s meeting with Biden confidential,” the report said, before adding that the meeting was arranged “through a chain of former Obama staffers.”

In response to ICIJ’s questions in June, a White House spokeswoman said Biden was “committed to combating employee misclassification which deprives workers of critical protections and benefits, including minimum wage, overtime, and family and medical leave,” according to the report.

Kalanick served as Uber CEO from 2010 to 2017 before he resigned amid scrutiny over Uber’s treatment of female engineers and questionable business practices. However, he held on to his seat on the company’s board of directors until the end of 2019.

Europe

The report also named French President Emmanuel Macron, specifically about how he was an Uber ally when he was the country’s finance minister.

Uber’s service was partially suspended in France’s city of Marseille on Oct. 20, 2015, the report said, following protests by local taxi drivers.

“Could you ask your cabinet to help us to understand what is going on?” MacGann wrote to Macron.

Less than a day later, Macron responded, “I’ll look into this personally. Send me all the facts and we’ll decide by tonight. Let’s stay calm at this stage, I trust you.”

Hours later, authorities in Marseille said they would revise the suspension order, according to the report.

The report said the exchange between MacGann and Macron was “one of more than a dozen undisclosed communications” between Uber representatives and Macron.

Marcon’s office has responded to the Uber files, saying the economy minister had frequent contacts with companies disrupting the service industry at the time, and it was appropriate to facilitate the lifting of red tape, reported French newspaper Le Monde.

Kalanick also met with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in 2016.

“Right now you are seen as aggressive,” Rutte told Kalanick according to meeting notes cited in the report.

Rutte suggested that Kalanick “change the way people look at the company” by emphasizing the company’s positives.

“This will make you seem cuddly,” Rutte said. 

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has asked a watchdog to investigate its decision to audit former FBI officials James Comey and Andrew McCabe.

“The IRS has referred the matter to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration for review,” a spokesperson for the agency told The Epoch Times in an email.

“IRS Commissioner Rettig personally reached out to TIGTA after receiving a press inquiry,” the spokesperson added.

The IRS is part of the Treasury Department. Commissioner Charles Rettig was appointed by former President Donald Trump.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, established in 1998, independently oversees the IRS. Its actions include investigating allegations of misconduct by IRS employees.

The watchdog could not be reached.

Comey’s 2017 tax return was “selected at random for a compliance research examination” while McCabe’s 2019 return was picked at random for the same type of audit, according to letters from the IRS to the former officials published (pdf) by the New York Times.

Comey, an Obama appointee, was fired by then-President Trump in May 2017 at the recommendation of the attorney general and deputy attorney general. The officials said Comey was “not able to effectively lead the bureau.”

Comey was later found to have violated FBI policies by providing a memorandum to a friend with instructions for the friend to share the memo with a reporter, and to have kept copies of other memos at his home after his firing.

McCabe, who succeeded Comey, was fired the following year by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Trump appointee, at the recommendation of the FBI because he lied to the bureau about allowing information to go to a reporter.

Comey, McCabe React

Both Comey and McCabe suggested they should not have been audited.

“Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the I.R.S. to get at a political enemy. Given the role Trump wants to continue to play in our country, we should know the answer to that question,” he told the New York Times.

“I think they handled the business OK, the person I dealt with was fine, but the question remains, how was I selected for this?” McCabe, who has been a CNN analyst since shortly after being fired, said on CNN.

Trump told the paper through a spokesperson, “I have no knowledge of this.”

The IRS spokesperson said that federal privacy laws prevent the agency from discussing situations involving specific taxpayers.

“Audits are handled by career civil servants, and the IRS has strong safeguards in place to protect the exam process – and against politically motivated audits. It’s ludicrous and untrue to suggest that senior IRS officials somehow targeted specific individuals for National Research Program audits,” the spokesperson added.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 on June 30 that the Clean Air Act doesn’t give the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) widespread power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions that a popular theory says contribute to global warming.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s majority opinion (pdf) in West Virginia v. EPA, court file 20-1530. Roberts was joined by the court’s other five conservatives. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.

While “capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” Roberts wrote, quoting a 1992 precedent, “it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d)” of the Clean Air Act.

“A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body,” he wrote.

West Virginia and 18 other states challenged the authority the Clean Air Act provides the EPA.

In 2016, the Supreme Court overturned the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP), which expanded controls over the industry. Next, the deregulation-minded Trump administration reversed course, easing control on the industry with its Affordable Clean Energy Rule (ACE Rule).

On Jan. 19, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the ACE Rule, restoring some of the EPA’s authority in American Lung Association v. EPA (pdf). The court held that the EPA, under Trump, had misconstrued section 7411(d) of the Clean Air Act.

In the new opinion, the Supreme Court reversed the D.C. Circuit decision and remanded the case “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

In Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, she criticized the court majority for a decision she said “strips” the EPA of the power Congress gave it to respond to “the most pressing environmental challenge of our time,” citing Massachusetts v. EPA (2007).

“Climate change’s causes and dangers are no longer subject to serious doubt. Modern science is ‘unequivocal that human influence’—in particular, the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide—’has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.’”

“Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. And let’s say the obvious: The stakes here are high. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who previously told The Epoch Times that the EPA is trying to transform itself from “an environmental regulator into a central energy planning authority,” praised the Supreme Court.

“For many years, we’ve argued that EPA only had a narrow bit of authority to regulate carbon emissions,” Morrisey, a Republican who brought the appeal, said at a press conference.

“I think that the court today amplified that point. And once again, they also made clear that when you have something this big, something with vast economic and political significance, then that represents an extraordinary question. And that means Congress needs to step in, as opposed to the unelected bureaucrats.

“We know that over the last year and a half, the Biden administration has tried to run roughshod over the American economy with respect to its energy agenda.

“We want to make sure that the Biden agenda is limited by basis of what Congress authorized these agencies [to do],” he said.

“Our founders envisioned” that “Congress and not the unelected bureaucrats” should make decisions “about the major issues of the day.”

“They didn’t want to just have these unelected bureaucrats reach out and try to seize power where it didn’t exist,” Morrisey said.

U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) criticized the ruling and the six conservative justices.

“As the devastating impacts of climate change are becoming ever-more present, it is mind boggling and deeply alarming that the Supreme Court today has decided to hamstring the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. This ruling not only restricts the agency’s ability to limit air pollution from the second-largest source of emissions in America, it also undermines the landmark Clean Air Act that gave it such authority,” the senator said.

“Make no mistake, with this devastating ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, the conservative majority of the Court continues to take our country backward and more worrisome, it opens the door to far-reaching implications for how other federal agencies generally create regulations to implement existing legislation moving forward.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-narrows-epas-ability-to-regulate-carbon-dioxide-emissions_4565239.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-30-2&utm_medium=email&est=6oovwrShipuyLCYRzcrqlByg%2BR%2FdDHhpaUwfy6%2Bebq2I9z2xBtKKax8qz%2FJv6jTr%2BA%3D%3D

Former president hires one-term city council member who was ousted for supporting defund police initiative

Former president Barack Obama has a new top staffer at his foundation—a far-left activist who was ousted from the Minneapolis City Council for supporting an initiative to defund police.

On Monday, former Minneapolis council member Phillipe Cunningham thanked Obama after starting a “new role at the Obama Foundation as the deputy director – U.S. lead of global leadership programs.” The move comes just months after voters ousted Cunningham, who backed a failed measure to defund city police, from the Minneapolis City Council in November. Cunningham in June 2020 also spoke at a defund-the-police rally, where the activist and nine other council members pledged to “end policing as we know it.” Cunningham’s opponent, LaTrisha Vetaw, said that pledge made her feel “silenced” and called public safety “the only issue” in the race.

Obama’s decision to ignore voters in deep-blue Minneapolis and hire Cunningham for a top position contradicts the former president’s rhetoric on the defund-the-police movement. Obama in November 2020 said he would not defund police and criticized activists who use the phrase. But Obama appeared alongside Cunningham at a virtual town hall when the activist was openly calling to defund police—during that June 2020 event, Cunningham stressed the need to “completely transform our public safety system.”

Resident Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president, claimed last year that those who say Democrats want to defund police are “lying.”

As part of the Obama Foundation, Cunningham will head the U.S. branch of the group’s global leadership programs, which aims to provide “emerging leaders” with “values-based leadership development frameworks to help build their skills and scale their work across public, private, and nonprofit sectors.” It’s unclear how Cunningham’s values align with the program—the Obama Foundation did not return a request for comment on the hire and whether the group agrees with Cunningham’s position on defunding police.

Republican National Committee spokesman Nathan Brand said Obama’s new hire shows “there is no daylight between the looney left and the Democratic Party establishment.”

“With radical defund-the-police leaders like this in charge, it is no wonder Democrats are alienating more and more Americans and are set to lose in November,” Brand told the Washington Free Beacon. “From that perspective, Dems couldn’t have picked a better person to lead these efforts.”

Cunningham, a biological woman who transitioned as a college junior, became the first transgender man of color to be elected to public office in the United States in 2017. Roughly three years later, following George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020, the then-councilmember stood behind a giant “DEFUND POLICE” sign at a Minneapolis rally and argued that the city’s residents could “keep our own community safe” without police. Cunningham also praised those who “threw the first bricks at police officers” during the Stonewall Riots in New York City.

One year later, as the defund police movement lost popularity, Cunningham did not back down. In 2021, Cunningham backed an unprecedented amendment to dismantle the city’s police department. The measure, which Minneapolis voters rejected by double digits, would have replaced the city’s police department with a “Department of Public Safety” and called to abolish the city’s minimum funding requirements for police.

Cunningham’s decision to back that amendment came as Minneapolis experienced a surge in violence. In the last week of 2021, the city notched its 96th homicide, just one murder shy of its record level seen in 1995. That trend has continued into this year—in late April, Minneapolis had 9 murders in 10 days, putting the city on track to surpass its 1995 numbers.

Obama has worked with far-left activists beyond Cunningham. Defund-the-police organizer and MSNBC contributor Brittany Packnett Cunningham served on the former president’s policing task force. She later argued that rising crime rates are the police’s fault.

“This rise in crime is not the fault of the movement, it’s actually the fault of the police,” Packnett Cunningham said during a June 2021 MSNBC appearance. “This has been our point all along—why should we keep funding systems and institutions that keep rendering themselves ineffective?”

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/this-far-left-activist-was-too-woke-for-minneapolis-but-not-obamas-foundation/

MSNBC’s Neal Katyal: In wake of Roe overturn, GOP legislatures could ban Tylenol

Left-wing lawyer and #Resistance hero Neal Katyal, who once represented al Qaeda terrorists, said on Monday that Republican states could soon ban over-the-counter pain medication such as Tylenol.

“It wouldn’t shock me if the legislature of Alabama started being opposed to Tylenol or something like that,” Katyal told MSNBC in comments about abortion pill access in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Katyal, who warned that the High Court is “really out of step with the mainstream of American society,” is best known as the face of the “al Qaeda 7,” a controversial group of lawyers who represented al Qaeda terrorists before joining the Obama Justice Department.

The former acting solicitor general also faced criticism in 2020 when he appeared before the Supreme Court to defend his corporate clients, Nestlé and Cargill, against charges of abetting child slavery in Africa.

Katyal has in recent years championed several left-wing legal causes, leading challenges against former president Donald Trump’s travel ban and border separation policy.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/al-qaeda-lawyer-frets-gop-too-radical/

Ohio’s Marcy Kaptur distances herself from D.C. after serving for nearly four decades

Ohio Democratic congresswoman Marcy Kaptur says she’s fed up with “people in Washington” who “care only about the coasts.” She’s been in Congress since 1983 and votes in lockstep with her party’s coastal leaders.

In her first ad of the general election cycle, titled “Feeling Squeezed,” Kaptur claims “too many of us” are hurting economically because “the people in Washington only care about the coasts.” The Democrat should know—she’s served in Congress for nearly four decades and votes with resident Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) 100 percent and 99 percent of the time, respectively. Kaptur also routinely touts her vote in favor of the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s $2 trillion stimulus package. Prominent liberal economists say that bill drove the nation’s inflation surge.

This is hardly the first time Kaptur has attempted to distance herself from her record as a career politician as she navigates a competitive reelection campaign for the first time in decades. With record-high gas prices seen under Biden driving voters away from Democrats, Kaptur is blaming BP and other “big oil” companies for “gouging consumers.” But Kaptur has taken thousands of dollars in campaign cash from major oil and gas companies since 2013, including $12,000 from BP. And when Biden similarly blamed oil and gas companies for “pad[ding] their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans,” energy experts debunked the claim.

Bernie Moreno, Ohio chair of the nonpartisan group U.S. Term Limits, said Kaptur’s ad proves the Democrat is “desperate” with the midterm elections looming.

“Democrats are desperate for shifting narratives, so they pretend they’re something they’re not. Because the polling and the public sentiment is crystal clear—people don’t want career politicians, so the only way they think they can win is by pretending none of that exists,” Moreno told the Washington Free Beacon. “It’s unbelievable to see them try to morph into something they’re not. For example, Marcy Kaptur, she’s been there for 40 years. All the problems she’s talking about, well, why didn’t you solve those while you were there for four decades?”

Kaptur’s campaign did not return a request for comment. Her attempt to distance herself from Washington, D.C., Democrats is particularly bizarre given her unwavering support for Biden. When Biden visited Kaptur’s district in February, Kaptur called him the best president she’s “walked alongside as a member of Congress.” “resident Biden, your report card is outstanding for your first year as president,” Kaptur added. Just 27 percent of Ohioans approve of Biden, while 62 percent disapprove, according to Civiqs.

Kaptur’s February speech explicitly touted Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which the Ohio Democrat said would lead to “the modernization of our nation.” Instead, former Obama administration economic adviser Larry Summers says the legislation led to inflation. Buckeye Institute research fellow Greg Lawson agrees—he told the Free Beacon Kaptur was “sticking her head in the sand” if she believed Biden’s $2 trillion stimulus package wouldn’t be inflationary.

“It’s a massive amount of money that really wasn’t essential and has now created all kinds of reverberation effects,” Lawson said. “So at the end of the day, it was a bad deal. And now we’re paying for it quite a bit.”

Over her nearly 40-year career, Kaptur has won all but three of her reelection bids by at least 20 points. That will almost certainly change in November—Ohio’s redistricting process made her district considerably more red, meaning Kaptur will likely face the toughest reelection bid of her career in November. The Democrat is set to face Air Force veteran J.R. Majewski, who won his primary contest by 5 points in May. Roughly two months earlier, Majewski signed a U.S. Term Limits pledge to limit terms for elected officials. Kaptur, meanwhile, said in 1995 that term limits would cause “upheaval” and lead to a “bunch of juvenile congressmen.”

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/tone-deaf-democrat-whos-been-in-congress-since-1983-goes-after-people-in-washington/

Marcy Kaptur blames oil companies for ‘gouging consumers’ after taking thousands from their PACs

For years, Ohio Democratic congresswoman Marcy Kaptur had no problem taking thousands of dollars from big oil companies. But now that record-high gas prices are threatening the 39-year incumbent’s reelection chances, she says those same companies are “gouging consumers.”

Kaptur has taken nearly $18,000 from major oil and gas companies since 2013, including $12,000 from BP Corporation North America, federal campaign finance disclosures show. With Ohio experiencing record-high gas prices under resident Joe Biden, however, the Democrat is blaming the trend on BP and other “big oil” companies. “As Big Oil raises prices and gouges consumers, one CEO recently called his company a ‘cash machine,'” Kaptur said in a May tweet that included a graphic with a slash over BP’s logo. “It’s outrageous.”

Kaptur’s newfound blame game shows how Democrats are attempting to avoid political backlash over sky-high prices at the pump, which come after Kaptur’s House Democratic colleagues pressured oil executives to produce less gas. Biden—who pledged to “end fossil fuel” during his campaign—has repeatedly blamed oil companies for rising gas prices, even after energy experts debunked the claim. In April, meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) insisted the American public is “blaming oil companies” for record-high gas prices instead of Democrats—even as poll after poll after poll finds that voters blame gas prices and surging inflation on Biden.

Power the Future executive director Daniel Turner admonished Kaptur for her recent rhetoric, noting that the oil and gas industry produces hundreds of thousands of jobs and tens of billions of dollars in revenue in Ohio.

“If the congresswoman really thinks these companies are doing damage, then why would you accept any money from them whatsoever? It’s one big joke,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “And if she really wanted to see the energy industry rebound, she would distance herself from Biden’s failed energy policies, which have caused the energy crisis we’re in. Ohio is a very important and critical energy state.”

Kaptur’s campaign did not return a request for comment. 

Kaptur claims she’s worked to lower gas prices for “working people” by supporting the Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act, a Democrat-led bill that Kaptur and her colleagues say would combat oil companies’ “greed.” But four House Democrats voted against the legislation, with Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D., Texas) arguing the bill “would not fix high gasoline prices” and “has the potential to exacerbate the supply shortage our country is facing, leading to even worse outcomes.” Former Obama administration economic adviser Jason Furman also criticized Democrats’ price gouging bills, which he called “gimmicky.”

In addition to Kaptur’s big oil campaign cash, the Democrat in December held up to $100,000 worth of stock in Nutrien, a fertilizer company that relies heavily on fossil fuels, Business Insider reported. 

Kaptur first joined Congress in 1983 and has won all but three of her reelection bids by at least 20 points. This November, however, she is set to face one of the most difficult campaigns of her career after Ohio’s redistricting process made her district considerably more red. Kaptur will face Air Force veteran J.R. Majewski in November—the Republican has raised $257,000 to Kaptur’s $974,000 as of April 13.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/this-ohio-dem-loves-taking-big-oils-money-now-she-needs-a-high-gas-price-scapegoat/

Tom Donilon has promoted investments in China, opposed tariffs on regime

The Biden administration’s pick to advise the State Department on “strategic competition” with Beijing chairs an investment think tank that urged Americans to triple their investments in China.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday selected BlackRock Investment Institute chairman and Obama administration national security adviser Tom Donilon to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board amid the State Department’s pivot to China.

Donilon’s work at BlackRock could pose a conflict of interest for the board, which provides “advice, feedback, and perspectives” to senior State Department officials on foreign policy matters. Under his leadership, the Investment Institute has urged investors to dramatically increase their stakes in Chinese companies. What’s more, BlackRock views “strategic competition” with China as bad for the company’s bottom line.

“Strategic competition between the U.S. and China and resulting tensions have also contributed to uncertainty in the geopolitical and regulatory landscapes,” reads BlackRock’s most recent annual report. The firm listed U.S.-Chinese competition as a factor that could hurt its revenue and profit. BlackRock opened a mutual fund in China in September, making it the first American firm approved to sell financial products there.

BlackRock’s Chinese entanglements have raised concerns that the company is undermining the United States. The company has come under fire for investing in sanctioned Chinese companies, including surveillance giant Hikvision. Even progressive megadonor George Soros called BlackRock’s investments in China a “tragic mistake” that would damage U.S. national security interests.

Donilon has sided with China in the debate over tariffs imposed during the Trump administration. He chided government officials in 2019 about the tariffs and inaccurately warned that they would cause a global recession.

“Future generations of Americans will judge today’s leaders harshly for squandering this moment,” Donilon wrote in an article touted by China Daily, a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.

Tariffs “are hurting U.S. businesses, consumers, and farmers,” Donilon wrote. “They are alienating U.S. allies. And, analysts warn, they are increasing the risk of a global recession.”

The Foreign Affairs Policy Board plays a crucial role at the State Department. The department says the board is “necessary to supplement the advice and support the Secretary gets from the Department” on a broad range of international issues. Its meetings are closed to the public due to “discussions on sensitive, and often classified, topics and materials.”

Tariffs are likely to be an area of focus for the board, as will the administration’s position on China’s human rights record and increased military activity in the Pacific and South China Sea. Blinken has accused Beijing of waging genocide against Muslims in western China. Other officials, including climate envoy John Kerry, have refused to confront Chinese leaders on the topic for fear of hurting cooperative efforts on climate change.

Donilon, whom Blinken has called his “dear friend,” is the latest in a string of Biden allies to land an influential advisory post. The State Department picked Dominic Ng, the chairman of East West Bank, to represent the United States on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s Business Advisory Council. Ng, a major Biden donor, has criticized U.S. foreign policy toward China and served on organizations linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

Biden selected his longtime friend, Chris Dodd, to serve as special adviser for the Summit of the Americas. Dodd signed an ethics agreement because his lobbying firm represents some of the countries represented at the summit. Biden appointed another major donor, Joe Kiani, to serve on the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Neither the State Department nor BlackRock returned requests for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-state-department-taps-beijing-bull-to-run-china-shop/

Four key House Republicans are questioning a $500 million earmark sought by resident Joe Biden for an international group headquartered in Oslo, Norway, and led in the United States by political appointees of former President Barack Obama.

The $500 million would go to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI), a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), which was formed in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and the World Economic Forum (WEF), according to the group’s website.

The website claims that “CEPI’s early coronavirus investments combined with its global focus, multi-sectoral partnerships, and ability to move quickly resulted in 20+ vaccines against COVID-19 and its variants.” The website also quotes Microsoft founder Bill Gates as crediting CEPI with helping “develop COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year.”

It’s not clear how CEPI can claim credit for vaccines that were prompted and overseen by the Operation Warp Speed program initiated at the outset of the virus in the United States by then-President Donald Trump in 2020.

Shortly after leaving the Obama administration, Dawn O’Connell, former Counsel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Obama, became CEPI’s Washington, D.C. Executive Director, according to the House GOPers in a June 16 letter. O’Connell is now back at HHS as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), a position in which she could be helpful to CEPI.

The signers are Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), the Ranking Member of the House Administration Committee, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

All four of the GOP signers could become chairs of their respective committees if Republicans retake the House majority in the November congressional elections. Their letter was addressed to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young, and Samantha Power, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Acting Administrator.

“President Biden’s FY23 budget calls for a specific allocation to CEPI through no evident bidding process. In addition to the creation of a $4.5 billion Global Health Security and Pandemic Preparedness Fund to contract with international health organizations, the budget request includes a separate $500 million line item for CEPI,” the GOP letter signers wrote.

“This $500 million request for CEPI is significantly larger than the federal government’s previous five-year distribution of $20 million, making the United States the single largest contributor to CEPI,” the letter continued.

“The lack of transparency and justification for this funding increase raises concerns. Furthermore, CEPI’s close ties to the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris Administrations, suggest a revolving door of politically-connected personnel where Administration friends are rewarded with federal dollars,” the letter said.

In addition to moving from HHS to CEPI and then back to HHS, O’Connell, during her four years running the NGO’s Washington office, “lobbied the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in ‘support of appropriations from USAID to CEPI… [and an] Unsolicited Proposal Concept Note… for possible cooperative agreement funding relationship,’” according to the letter, citing federal lobbying records.

The letter further notes that O’Connell has never registered as a foreign lobbyist and that “CEPI’s current Director of the U.S. office is Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as ASPR under the Obama Administration.”

A spokesman for CEPI did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment. A spokesman for O’Connell did not reply after asking The Epoch Times for written questions and being given these queries:

Why did she not register as a foreign agent during her tenure in CEPI’s Washington, D.C. office as required by the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) statute, given her employment and lobbying activities targeting USAID?

Has she recused herself as ASPR from any decision-making process, both formally and informally, at HHS that potentially could result in federal dollars or other resources being directed to CEPI?

With whom at OMB or elsewhere in the White House has she discussed the proposed $500 million grant to CEPI prior to today?

The four GOP letter signers want to know how the Biden administration can justify a 2,400 percent increase in funding from the federal government’s current $20 million annual contribution to CEPI.

The signers also want to know if any other NGOs were invited to be considered as alternative grant recipients and which federal agencies, offices and individuals were consulted about CEPI during development of the $500 million grant proposal.

In addition, the signers want to know why has “no lobbyist for CEPI ever registered under [FARA], given the primary beneficiaries of such a large infusion of taxpayer dollars will be the foreign governments funding the group’s operations?”

On its website, CEPI describes the CCP Virus that is also known as the COVID-19 as the main reason for its formation for the development and implementation of the NGO’s proposal of a plan it claims can eliminate the prospect of any similar pandemics in the future.

“As COVID-19 has so amply demonstrated, emerging infectious diseases represent an existential threat to our way of life. It was not the first and, unless we take dramatic action, will not be the last pandemic of the 21st century,” according to the CEPI website.

“But unlike some of the other big threats that humanity faces, we have the tools to substantially reduce and even to eliminate the risk of future pandemics. A decade ago such an ambition would have seemed utopian; now, having compressed a decade of technology development into less than 12 months, it is well within our grasp—if we take action,” according to the site.

The site claims that “CEPI has secured financial support from Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Denmark, the European Commission, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Switzerland, The Republic of Korea, United Kingdom, USAID, and Wellcome.”

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Thursday praised fellow Justice Clarence Thomas for his dedication to the high court’s integrity in light of recent protests and threats that were made against the institution.

Speaking at the American Constitution Society, Sotomayor, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, said Thomas is a “man who cares deeply about the court as an institution.”

And while the two often disagree in their opinions, Sotomayor said she and Thomas have a “common understanding about people and kindness towards them,” adding, “Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name, every one of them. And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories.”

“He’s the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, ‘Is your son okay? How’s your daughter doing in college?’ He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida,” Sotomayor added of Thomas, who was nominated by former President George H.W. Bush.

Her comments come as the Supreme Court remains poised to release decisions on several high-profile cases, including potentially overturning Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court will also soon issue a ruling in a New York gun rights case that could expand the scope of protection afforded under the Constitution’s Second Amendment—the first major decision on a gun-rights case in more than a decade.

Several weeks ago, the Supreme Court confirmed that a staffer may have leaked a majority opinion signaling that the court will indeed overturn Roe v. Wade, triggering a cascade of protests as well as threats against the institution.

An armed individual was arrested outside the Maryland home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week. The suspect allegedly told investigators that he was planning to kill Kavanaugh because he believed the justice would side with rulings to overturn Roe v. Wade and would side to expand gun rights in the United States.

“We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said after the draft was leaked. “We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want. The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that.”

Later, Thomas commented on the leak, saying that “I do think that what happened at the court is tremendously bad.”

“I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them,” Thomas continued, adding that there is a “different attitude of the young” in how they view institutions and the rule of law.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-justice-sotomayor-reveals-her-thought-about-clarence-thomas_4540763.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-18-2&utm_medium=email&est=RitgvwUi31LjvTvxDAaM2L636xdQYrZ9gBkaoLBi1UAE6fgl9QEc4IIU70DmvEdX4w%3D%3D

An excerpt from Matt Walsh’s new book, ‘What Is a Woman?’

The following is an excerpt from Matt Walsh’s new book, What Is a Woman? One Man’s Journey to Answer the Question of a Generation, an investigation into the radical gender ideology movement. The passage is taken from Chapter 5, “The Transgender Takeover.”

***

Transgenderism has taken the (western) world by storm, and there’s no medium where we aren’t confronted with it, often on a daily basis. While this appears to have happened rather rapidly, pressure had been building for quite some time.

In the early 1950s, a former GI from the Bronx who renamed himself Christine Jorgensen went to Copenhagen, Denmark, received a sex change surgery and massive doses of estrogen, and became the first international transgender media sensation. Three wire services together sent out a sum total of 50,000 words on the Jorgensen story in the first two weeks of coverage. While Alfred Kinsey and John Money conducted their experiments and the ideas behind sex change surgery and gender theory spread through academia, society at large took passing interest in the transgender issue after Jorgensen. One could be forgiven for living life in the mid 20th century without worrying if your daughter would come home and announce she is actually a man. It was a simpler time. Jorgensen was a media sensation, but like all media sensations, he was soon forgotten.

In the 1970s, the controversy over Renee Richards broke onto the scene, presaging debates we are still embroiled in today. Renee Richards was a tennis player who underwent a sex change and proposed that, as a result, he was a woman. As Dr. Bowers recounted to me, “Renee Richards was a competitive tennis player who was assigned male at birth, went through a transition, and when her [sic] situation was found out, the women in the U.S. tennis circuit were very upset, thinking that she [sic] had a competitive advantage, and [they] tried to block her [sic] from competing.”

Renee’s case went all the way up to the New York State Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor, writing that forcing Renee to take a Barr body test to determine his sex before being eligible to compete was “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and violative of her [sic] rights under the Human Rights Law of this state.”

After that, it was yet again largely quiet on the western front until all of a sudden the trans movement stopped making splashes in the headlines and began to form a tidal wave that would wash over society. In 2008, the reality show “America’s Next Top Model” featured a transgender character, normalizing transgenderism with regular appearances on many Americans’ TV diets. A few years later, Bruce Jenner was reborn as “Caitlyn.” Vanity Fair ran a flattering cover story, and nearly every media outlet in America praised him as a hero. Soon after, the Obama administration lifted the ban on transgender service members in the military (a ban that President Trump reinstated and resident Biden lifted yet again).

Transgenderism was moving from sideshow to the main stage, and now it’s in absolutely every sphere of life. There’s no avoiding it. Transgenderism is the heart of the cultural conversation in America, and the only escape is death or becoming Amish.

In the movie industry, Amazon Prime produced a remake of the classic Cinderella, casting the fairy godmother as transgender. In the Marvel Universe—which produces the biggest blockbuster hits today—Disney (which owns Marvel) announced that there would soon be a transgender superhero.

Television boasts its own array of transgender characters. The hit show Glee on Fox introduced a transgender character as far back as 2012. A series called Transparent about a father of three grown children announcing he is transgender ran for five seasons until 2019. Orange is the New Black on Netflix featured a trans character played by an actual trans actor, Laverne Cox. Netflix is reportedly introducing its first non-binary (meaning not following the “binaries” of male or female) character in a series for preschool children.

The celebrity world is filling up with a sizeable collection of trans or non-binary personas from Chaz Bono to the creators of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers (now proclaimed “sisters”), to actress, singer/songwriter Demi Lovato. Lovato—a former Disney child star—is a self-anointed prophet of the sexual anarchy pioneered by Kinsey and Money. One of her Instagram posts in 2021 read, “Be a slut. Show your body. Get naked. Have all the safe, different, consensual sex you want. Be kinky. Masturbate. Make/watch porn. Make money. Just a reminder that being sexual is okay.”

Lest you worry that only adults and former Disney child stars are in on the fun, Desmond is Amazing is a prepubescent drag queen who was featured glowingly in a segment on Good Morning America. His abuse-courting parents also allowed him to dance at a Brooklyn gay club while grown men tossed dollar bills at him. Of course, no cell phones were allowed while he danced for the men at the bar.

Even if you aren’t a pop culture junky, it’s impossible to get by watching the news over the past few years without enduring a continual parade of transgender “firsts.” Rachel Levine was confirmed as the first transgender cabinet secretary, and he now runs the Department of Health and Human Services charged with managing health policies governing, among other issues, Medicare, Obamacare, and the coronavirus. We’ve had our first transgender Rhodes Scholar, our first transgender boy scout, our first transgender national political party convention speaker, and even our first high-profile transgender government leaker and whistleblower in the person of Chelsea Manning. The amount of history being made is just staggering.

Drag Queen Story Hour swept across the country as frighteningly dressed and confused men (generally) with a strange affection for young children formed chapters and invaded local libraries across the country. Human Resource specialists and allies everywhere have taken it upon themselves to announce their preferred pronouns in emails and everyday conversations at work and in social gatherings. You can be sure if you refuse to do the same, your lack of inclusivity will be noted.

Even having a baby has become another avenue for the pervasive touch of gender theory. Hardly a hospital in America has blue or pink blankets and caps for tiny newborns anymore. They are either a mixture of pink and blue—or lack the colors at all—apparently in an effort to save that puffy-eyed nugget of a baby from having a gender imposed on her at any point in time.

There is no escape. Maybe you’ve already had your kids, and you’re not having any more. Maybe you work from home or for yourself, and you even homeschool your kids. Maybe you’ve already cut the cord on the television, deleted the social media apps, and the only celebrities you can name are Elvis Presley, John Wayne, Audrey Hepburn, and Mickey Mouse. Well, that doesn’t stop the parents down the street from engaging in the hot new trend of raising their children Zyler and Kadyn as genderless or genderfluid. (Zyler and Kadyn, by the way, are actual twin children in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose parents are raising them without gender so that the children can decide for themselves when they’re older.)

You don’t just have to worry about your kids. When was the last time you had a real conversation with your spouse about gender identity? When I spoke with Dr. Bowers, I asked him how his family dealt with his transition, seeing as he was married and had kids at the time. “If you marry someone who is your best friend, they’re likely to understand you, and they’re likely to be with you in the long run,” Dr. Bowers said. “We’re still married legally,” Dr. Bowers said of his wife, “but I wouldn’t call it a marriage. I would call it more like a modern family.”

“Is your experience typical, where the spouse is supportive?” I asked.

“Increasingly so,” he said. “I think as trans as a phenomenon has emerged and become, you know, more acceptable, spouses go along for the ride.” He continued, “If somebody is not a great spouse, whether male or female, and you add this into the mix, you’re likely to create problems. But if you have someone who you’ve been friends with and you have mutual respect for, you know, it often remains.” Got it. So if your spouse declares that he or she is the opposite sex and the marriage breaks down, it’s really your fault for not accepting it. There were probably already problems with you in the first place.

Matt Walsh is a writer at the Daily Wire. His book, What Is a Woman?, was published this month by DW Books. A companion documentary of the same title was also released in June.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/how-transgenderism-moved-from-sideshow-to-the-main-stage/

A third judge was also asked to step down

An Obama-appointed federal judge in New York who owns between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of Pfizer stock has recused herself to avoid the possible appearance of bias or prejudice since she was overseeing a case of NYC teachers trying to get exemptions to the COVID vaccines.

Recusal, in legal terms, means that a judge excuses him or herself because of a potential conflict of interest.

Valerie Caproni is a United States District Court for the Southern District of New York who was overseeing two cases that could potentially have a conflict of interest.

“Plaintiffs argue that the Undersigned’s ownership of stock in Pfizer Inc. ‘constitutes a direct financial conflict of interest in the outcome of this case,’” reads the order granting recusal (pdf) of Caproni—the first judge—which was filed on June 11.

Att. Sujata Gibson, who represents one of the lawsuits, Kane et al. v. de Blasio, told The Epoch Times: “Federal law prohibits federal judges from taking part in a case in which they have any financial interest, no matter how small. Pfizer stocks have been impacted by court injunctions against COVID vaccine mandates, and ownership of this stock, therefore, constitutes a conflict of interest. We are glad that Judge Caproni is stepping down after improperly overseeing this case for eight months.”

The second appointed judge also stepped down for similar reasons.

On the morning of June 14, plaintiffs filed a motion to disqualify Judge Edgardo Ramos, who was initially assigned and has agreed to step down due to his investments in Pfizer and other COVID vaccine stocks.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, Edgardo Ramos and other 130 federal judges broke the law by overseeing court cases where they or their families owned stock in the company or companies involved.

According to the outlet, Ramos handled a lawsuit between TIG Insurance Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. unit related to pollution allegations while owning up to $50,000 of Exxon stock.

A third judge, who also appeared to own Pfizer and J&J stocks, was asked to step down but denied the request.

“Application denied. The application is based on outdated information,” Judge Naomi Buchwald responded on June 14.

Gibson’s team requested updated financial disclosures.

“The court has now twice reassigned the case to other members of the judiciary with even worse financial conflicts of interest,” Gibson said. “We were alerted that the case was reassigned to the Hon. Naomi Reice Buchwald, who owned up to a quarter of a million dollars in Pfizer stock, and up to $100,000 in Johnson and Johnson stock as of 2020. We have three times now asked that the Court appoint a judge without financial conflicts of interest.”

Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is sponsoring the two cases in NYC, representing workers that were fired for rejecting the jabs.

On Nov. 13, 2021, some NYC teachers were granted a right to reapply for their religious exemptions, overturning Caproni’s original denial of relief.

Main plaintiff Michael Kane told The Epoch Times: “Judge Caproni presided over my case for more than 8 months knowing the entire time she had a conflict of interest in owning Pfizer stock. I can’t help but think of all the teachers and New Yorkers who are now on welfare, losing their homes, can barely feed their children, and wonder if it would have been different for them if only we had an impartial judge before us.”

In March, NYC Mayor Eric Adams granted vaccination exemption for the city’s athletes and performers and later denied accusations of being lobbied by economic groups to nullify the requirement.

“What our economic team has been doing is stating, ‘How do we turn around our economy?’” Adams said during an appearance on FOX5 in March.

“That’s why we did the outside dining, that’s why we lifted the determination of must-have the vaccine inside the restaurants. We listen to people and stated we’re going to do this at the right time so that we can turn around our economy and make sure we don’t do it [in a way] that’s going to impact our health,” Adams said.

However, Adams admitted that ex-City Council Speaker Corey Johnson lobbied him on behalf of the Brooklyn Nets prior to granting exemptions to local athletes from New York’s vaccine mandates.

“Corey reached out, clearly stated he was speaking on behalf of the Nets when he reached out,” Adams said. “I received calls from people who were against and for—that happens in this city. I said, ‘Corey, like any other person, I’m going based on what my doctors stated.’”

In the public record of the contract, it shows that the lobbying is targeting three city officials: Eric Adams, Frank Carone, Adams’s counselor, and his chief legal adviser Brendan McGuire.

The Epoch Times reached out to Caproni’s office for comment.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/two-ny-federal-judges-consecutively-step-down-from-vaccine-mandate-lawsuits-over-ownership-of-pfizer-stock_4530355.html?utm_source=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2022-06-17&utm_medium=email&est=DC9kAzgJrF%2BXVEgLsOnGfoNWXIsphLjsHihy38LOPH638uz0y7vMz60iUlK6P%2FChGA%3D%3D

A California doctor has been sentenced to two months in prison for being involved in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol and stepping inside the restricted premises along with her co-defendant John Strand.

Dr. Simone Melissa Gold was initially charged with entering a restricted building or grounds, violent entry, and disorderly conduct, and arrested on Jan. 18, 2021. She spent two days in custody. On March 3, 2022, she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of illegally entering the restricted building. Gold was sentenced June 16 to serve 60 days in jail, one year of supervised release, pay a $9,500 fine, and $500 restitution.

Gold is the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), a nonprofit that has spoken out against the emergency use authorization of COVID-19 vaccines and promoted the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the initial days of the pandemic.

While inside the building, Gold delivered a speech through a megaphone to a crowd gathered in Statuary Hall, where she stated her opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates and government-imposed lockdowns.

Gold expressed regret for entry into the Capitol building in a Jan. 12 interview with The Washington Post. “During the same interview Strand stated that he was also inside the U.S. Capitol with Gold and was there to protect Gold,” according to an official statement.

“I was misguided. I should not have entered,” Gold said. “Everything I did on January 6, misguided or not, was consistent with my effort to do my best for people.” She sounded emotional when she told Cooper that she was “shocked” the prosecutors believed she was not remorseful and did not intend to take part “in a situation that was so destructive to our nation.”

Strand—the communication director at AFLDS and Gold’s boyfriend—has been charged along with Gold. He has pleaded not guilty and rejected an offer for a plea agreement. Strand’s trial is scheduled for July 18.

Regarding Gold’s sentencing, an AFLDS press release on Thursday said, “Like most January 6 defendants, she is a victim of selective prosecution—the defining feature of corrupted governments.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to AFLDS for comment.

However, district Judge Christopher Cooper, a Barack Obama appointee, said that AFLDS was “leaving people with the misimpression that this is a political prosecution or that it’s about free speech,” as he delivered the sentence.

“January 6 was about a lot of things, but it wasn’t about the First Amendment or COVID vaccinations … the only reason you are here is where and when and how you chose to express your view,” Cooper said.

Gold had raised over $400,000 for her and the organization’s legal issues. Cooper said that the funds were a “disservice to the true victims that day.”

Gold’s attorney Dickson Young asked for a sentence of community medical service, stating that his client did not commit or incite violence.

“The loss of our country’s freedoms,” said Gold in a tweet on Friday regarding the sentencing.

Over 800 people have been charged with federal crimes over the breach on Jan. 6, with 300 pleading guilty and nearly 200 sentenced.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-simone-gold-sentenced-to-two-months-in-prison-and-fines-for-capitol-breach_4540013.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-17-3&utm_medium=email&est=2Rtmaolo%2BAwYeLV%2BmB4EdNin2%2FQG%2BjF4%2FLcnba57jAMyC5kkrKBl87DuoAlO0JwTgw%3D%3D

FBI agents, just weeks before the 2016 election, opened an investigation into allegations of a secret communication channel between Donald Trump and Russia. The bureau closed the probe after several months but did not make public that it had dismissed the claims, which came from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a group of researchers.

Details of the FBI’s analyses, and CIA treatment of the claims, emerged during the trial of ex-Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann.

‘Jumped to Conclusions’

The white paper and data handed over to the FBI by Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, asserted there was a “secret email server” used by the Trump Organization that was communicating with Alfa Bank in Moscow through “another unusually-configured server” at Spectrum Health in Michigan.

“These servers are configured for direct communications between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank to the exclusion of all other systems,” researchers wrote. “The only plausible reason,” they claimed, “is to hide the considerably recent email traffic occurring between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank.”

Scott Hellman, an agent who specializes in investigating cyber crimes, took the first crack at the allegations with Nathan Batty, a colleague. The pair spent inside of a day examining the data, and quickly concluded that whoever penned the white paper “had jumped to some conclusions that were not supported by the technical data,” Hellman testified.

The allegations were based on purported “look-ups,” or Domain Name System requests, between mail1.trump-email.com, the server allegedly controlled by Trump’s business, and servers belonging to the Russian bank. DNS lookups are a way for a computer to find another computer’s Internet Protocol address (IP address), a unique number needed for communication between computers.

The researchers said they tried to connect with the Trump server and that the server would not accept mail from their IP address, or returned what was essentially an error message, Hellman said. The researchers used that, among other data, to suggest the Trump server would only communicate with certain devices, such as those linked to Alfa Bank.

“That didn’t make sense to me. It was sort of like if I knocked on your door, and you told me to go away—I don’t want to talk to you—I’m then going to assume that you’re only willing to talk to other people. I can’t make that assumption. I don’t know if you’re willing to talk to anybody. But that’s what they had done,” he said. “When they received an error message, they assumed that that computer wasn’t willing to talk to them, but it was willing to talk to others, and there was no evidence to suggest that. So assumptions like that is what I was referring to.”

Hellman and Batty wrote in their assessment that they found it suspicious that the activity the researchers highlighted began just three weeks before the researchers began their investigation. They called it “abnormal” that Trump would name the supposed secret server a name that included his name, use a domain registered to his own business, and communicate directly to Alfa Bank’s IP address as opposed to masking the communications.

They also said that Russia’s state-sponsored technical abilities “exceed the [operations] of that suggested in the report.”

Hellman, who is still with the FBI, said in a chat message at the time that the paper “feels a little 5150ish.” He said he meant that “perhaps the person who had drafted this document was suffering from some mental disability.”

Batty wrote that the data was “intended to overwhelm and confuse the reader.” “We think it’s a setup,” he later told Dan Wierzbicki, an FBI supervisor.

‘No Evidence’

Under pressure from then-FBI Director James Comey and other senior officials, a hybrid cyber-counterintelligence team based in Chicago took control of the data and opened a full investigation, the most serious step the FBI could have taken.

Thumb drives containing the white paper and the underlying data outlined the conclusions reached by the researchers and some of the data they used, but that was just a “snapshot,” forcing FBI investigators to “create the whole picture from scratch,” Allison Sands, the agent who led the investigation, said on the stand.

Sands, now with Roku, compared it to trying to assemble a puzzle without the benefit of having a box at which to look.

The Trump domain was on a server in Pennsylvania owned by a company named Listrak, an internet server provider. The domain was registered to a company named Central Dynamics, which is based in Florida. The domain was being leased from GoDaddy.

Agents reached out to the companies for data and answers. Listrak confirmed that the server was only configured to send emails, not receive any. It also provided some 135,000 records. Central Dynamics provided closer to 500,000 records and GoDaddy handed over a similar amount.

The Chicago team determined that the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank servers “almost certainly did not communicate intentionally or covertly,” according to a heavily redacted assessment dated Oct. 3, 2016.

The determination was based on an examination of the allegations conducted on behalf of Alfa Bank. The examination concluded the Alfa Bank servers may have conducted the DNS lookups in response to spam emails sent by Listrak or Central Dynamics.

“Alfa Bank’s conclusions corroborate current FBI investigative activity, which has not identified any evidence to support the whitepaper’s hypothesis that Alfa-Bank and Trump Organization servers intentionally, covertly communicated via DNS channels,” the document stated.

It was learned that Central Dynamics established the domain in partnership with the Trump Organization in 2009 but the company never used the domain, which had only received about 14 emails, all of which were blocked as spam or malware.

“It was largely dormant for the lifespan of its life, was currently inactive, and that it was entirely a ‘from’ email address, so it only sent outbound messages,” Sands explained.

Additionally, the FBI saw that in logs from Listrak, the server had sent emails to over 30,000 domains in 107 countries, none of which were affiliated with Alfa Bank, according to the document on the closing of the investigation.

“From all of the U.S. companies we had spoken to, of the logs that we had looked at, as well as the Mandiant report from the Alfa Bank servers, there was no evidence that this covert communication channel existed,” Sands said.

“Our investigation was unable to substantiate any of the allegations in the white paper,” said Curtis Heide, another FBI agent involved in the probe.

Listrak and Central Dynamics did not respond to requests for comment. Rodney Joffe, another client of Sussmann; his business associate April Lorenzen; and Georgia Institute of Technology professors David Dagon and Manos Antonakikis, who created the white paper and compiled the data, did not respond to inquiries. Several of the researchers were poised to testify, but were not called after they said they would plead the Fifth Amendment.

‘Did Not Pass Analytical Muster’

The other piece of the allegations involved Spectrum. Researchers said the nonprofit healthcare company was essentially being utilized as an intermediary between Trump’s business and Alfa Bank, through a The Onion Router (TOR) node, a technology designed by the U.S. government that enables anonymity.

FBI investigators went to a website, TORproject.org, to see if any of Spectrum’s servers were or had ever been used as a TOR node, and found that they had not.

The agents also received logs and records from Spectrum, and “did not see any unusual activity,” Sands said.

That part of the allegations “did not pass analytical muster,” Ryan Gaynor, an agent monitoring the investigation for senior leaders from the Washington area, testified. “It didn’t have merit.”

“In 2016, media coverage alleged internet traffic between a computer server affiliated with the Trump organization and the computer servers of Alfa Bank (a Russian bank) and Spectrum Health. Spectrum Health does not and never has had any relationship with Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations,” a Spectrum spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

“As we have previously stated, we concluded a rigorous review with both our internal IT security specialists and expert cyber security firms. That review’s detailed analysis of the alleged internet traffic did not find any evidence of any actual communications (no emails, chat, text, etc.) between Spectrum Health and Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. While we did find a small number of incoming spam marketing emails, they originated from a third party,” the spokesperson added.

CIA Conclusions

According to special counsel John Durham’s team, which prosecuted Sussmann—the lawyer who was acquitted—the CIA also analyzed the allegations, and concluded they were not only not true, but were not plausible.

Sussmann went to the CIA in early 2017, apparently frustrated by the FBI’s investigation. He met with a retired agent first, then with two agents on Feb. 9, 2017.

Sussmann handed over white papers and underlying data purportedly supporting documents, which included allegations involving Trump’s business and Alfa Bank and allegations concerning Russian-made phones, according to a memorandum of the meeting and testimony by one of the agents.

In court papers, prosecutors referred to the CIA as “Agency-2.” They said that CIA analysts believed the data from the researchers was fabricated.

“While the FBI did not reach an ultimate conclusion regarding the data’s accuracy or whether it might have been in whole or in part genuine, spoofed, altered, or fabricated, Agency-2 concluded in early 2017 that the Russian Bank-1 data and Russian Phone Provider-1 data was not ‘technically plausible,’ did not ‘withstand technical scrutiny,’ ‘contained gaps,’ ‘conflicted with [itself],’ and was ‘user created and not machine/tool generated.’” prosecutors said in a filing before the trial.

Little was said on the subject during the trial because U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, ruled that prosecutors could not broach the possibility of the data being spoofed unless the defense did. Defense lawyers did not bring it up.

There were several moments, however, when statements slipped through.

When presented with an email Joffe sent to his group just five days before Sussmann gave the data to the FBI, Heide said that “it appears, from this email, that this report may have been fabricated.”

The statement was later struck from the record, as was the email.

Cooper also ordered redacted a portion of the report authored by Hellman and Batty that said the data “might have been intentionally generated and might have been fabricated,” according to Andrew DeFilippis, one of the prosecutors.

“I will not allow [Hellman] to talk about whether it’s fabricated or spoofed,” Cooper said, adding that doing so would encroach on his order.

Ankura, a Washington-based consultancy hired by Alfa Bank, said in a previous report (pdf) obtained by Just the News that its analysis of records and the timing of the allegations suggested that somebody mimicked the Central Dynamic servers to send fabricated emails, or “inauthentic DNS queries, ” to Alfa Bank “to create a connection between Alfa-Bank and the Trump Organization.”

The CIA didn’t respond to an inquiry. The Epoch Times has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the CIA documents.

Years of Speculation

Speculation about the nefarious activity alleged in the white paper continued for years as the FBI and CIA remained silent about their findings.

The first stories about a possible secret link between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank ran in Slate and the New York Times on Oct. 31, 2016—just one week before the presidential election.

The logs the researchers studied “suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence,” Slate reporter Franklin Foer wrote in his article. “We don’t yet know what this server was for, but it deserves further explanation,” he added later.

Foer was one of multiple reporters in communication with Fusion GPS, the firm hired by the Clinton campaign that conducted opposition research on Trump, before his article was published.

The New York Times said the FBI was investigating the purported link but “ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.”

In March 2017, CNN reported, citing anonymous sources, that the FBI investigation into the matter was still ongoing. That was false, according to the trial documents and testimony.

The New Yorker, in late 2018, published a lengthy article suggesting there was a secret channel between Trump’s business and the Russian bank.

Only Slate’s article has been corrected, and not since a day after publication. Some of the stories still contain false information; all have outdated details. Spokespersons for the publications did not respond to requests for comment.

The allegations divided technology experts when first promoted, but reporters found a number willing to make comments supporting the researchers’ theories.

“The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project,” Paul Vixie, the CEO of Farsight Security, told Slate. Richard Clayton, of the University of Cambridge, told the New Yorker he believed the server connections signaled times when Trump Organization and Alfa Bank officials wanted to talk.

Of the eight researchers mentioned or quoted in the pieces as suggesting the allegations made sense, none were willing to talk on the record about what they think now based on the newly emerged information.

“Thanks for reaching out, but I’m not interested,” Vixie, now with Amazon Web Services, told The Epoch Times in a LinkedIn message. “I know nothing of how they came to their conclusions,” Clayton added via email, referring to the FBI and the CIA. Of the Sussmann trial, he said, “I haven’t been following that.”

Steven Bellovin, a professor at Columbia University, referred a request for comment to his lawyer. “We are not going to comment on the matter,” the lawyer said.

Some outlets did publish articles portraying the allegations as unreliable, including The Intercept and the Washington Post. And some experts cast doubt on the claims, including Robert Graham, a cybersecurity specialist, who wrote that the allegations were “nonsense.”

“While I of course think the DNS logs were nonsense, I’m still not sure how [t]he FBI came to that conclusion,” Graham told The Epoch Times in a Twitter message. “I think the basic issue is that it looks like an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, and that this is why they didn’t do more.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-the-fbi-dismissed-claims-of-secret-trump-russia-link_4524152.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-12&utm_medium=email&est=pAxBEt9Aj0BKpPQBYlDcVPPMRDrGQ%2FbpCkGOU6MP6X9I%2FRmGR9zHxycrK4fFUXEYEw%3D%3D

The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) obtained documents disclosing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cultured 22 distinct human cell lines, including cells apparently extracted from parts of aborted fetuses and babies younger than four weeks.

ICAN’s lawyers sent the CDC a letter (pdf) on June 25, 2021, asking for documents that contained the word HEK.

HEK cells are immortalized cell lines likely obtained from a miscarried or aborted fetus.

“Immortalized human cell lines live outside of the body in nutrient media that, under ideal conditions, will replicate forever without death,” Dr. James Thorp, a maternal-fetal medicine expert told The Epoch Times.

“These various cell lines are used for numerous experimental purposes including the development of vaccine technology and genetic modification. The origin of these numerous human immortal cell lines is impossible to determine for certain but likely derived from abortions, miscarriages, fetal deaths, or other human sources derived from a variety of different organ systems,” Thorp said.

Recently, the CDC had to release 281 pages of related documents (pdf).

An email from 2015 with the subject “Research using Fetal Tissue” says in the unredacted part that “The list below contains all the cell lines Jason’s team has cultured,” which include 22 human cell lines.

It includes the human brain endothelium, liver, intestines, foreskin, lung, and other body parts.

Another email with the subject “Cell Lines from the last two years” shows 47 cell lines of which some are also human.

“Below are the cell lines we have produced in the last two years,” reads the email of the CDC researcher.

The main controversy with stem cell research arises in the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos that are usually conceived in a lab.

In 2009, former President Barack Obama lifted a ban that lasted for about 8 years on federal funding for most stem cell research.

In a bid to appease those concerned, Obama said: “We will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.”

Rev. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P., a biology professor at Providence College in Rhode Island wrote in a May 2020 publication titled “Moral Guidance on Using COVID-19 Vaccines Developed with Human Fetal Cell Line”:

Though HEK293 is commonly believed to have been obtained from an aborted human fetus, I received an e-mail a few months ago from Professor Frank Graham, who established this cell line. He tells me that to the best of his knowledge, the exact origin of the HEK293 fetal cells is unclear. They could have come from either a spontaneous miscarriage or an elective abortion.

Thorp, who has seen many complications in pregnant women and fetuses since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, believes that the manipulation of human cell lines should not be used for experimentation, on moral grounds.

“The potential harm from evil, unethical research can never be outweighed by potential benefits. We are made by God in His own image inherent in our DNA and any attempts to change this has profound implications for humanity,” Thorp said.

Some Catholic and Eastern Orthodox adherents also view the usage of HEK 293 and its derivatives for the production of vaccines and other medications as an ethical dilemma.

The Epoch Times reached out to the CDC for comment.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/foia-documents-disclose-the-cdc-has-been-producing-and-culturing-human-stem-cell-lines_4517584.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-11-3&utm_medium=email&est=dZpHqBYo5xHH7yTdvi9sX9U5zaIfrI5SAwfOtYO95UDlslxr5t3X11GQQVWtrlgb2Q%3D%3D

Congressional Republicans want to slash funding to the United Nations, Lebanon, and Iraq, and cut off funds that allow the Biden administration to implement a new nuclear deal with Iran.

The Republican Study Committee, Congress’s largest conservative caucus, unveiled on Thursday its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, a portion of which was exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The Republican budget proposal’s national security section includes landmark provisions that would significantly reshape U.S. foreign policy by nixing millions of dollars in spending in the region.

In addition to cutting foreign aid projects that Republican lawmakers say benefit Iranian-controlled militants such as Hezbollah, the RSC is moving to codify legislation that would bar the Biden administration from spending taxpayer dollars to implement a new nuclear deal with Tehran—effectively killing the deal the moment it is signed. At the same time, the budget would increase U.S. funding to Israel so that it can counter Iran and its regional terrorist proxies.

While Democrats are likely to oppose a majority of the proposals, the budget is meant to send a message to the White House that if they take a majority after the November elections, Republicans will work to undermine the administration’s foreign policy agenda.

“After two years of Joe Biden, the world is more chaotic and dangerous than ever before,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), RSC chair and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “But one thing hasn’t changed since Trump was in the White House: a strong America will always make the world safer. RSC’s budget provides a blueprint for taking on Iran’s terrorist regime, Putin’s aggression, and the new threat of jihadist terrorists in Afghanistan.”

The RSC wants to slash U.S. aid to “Iranian puppet regimes in the Middle East,” particularly Lebanon, which is controlled by Iran’s terror proxy, Hezbollah. The United States has long propped-up the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), despite overwhelming evidence they are loyal to Hezbollah.

The Biden administration announced earlier this year it is repurposing some $67 million in aid to the LAF and giving another $16.5 to the country’s Internal Security Forces. Republicans say this tranche of cash serves as “a slush fund in a country where Hezbollah’s economic presence is endemic.”

“In countering Iran, it is vital that we prohibit U.S. aid from going to Iranian puppet regimes in the Middle East,” the budget states. “Lebanon’s government has come fully under Hezbollah’s control as the terrorist group has a monopoly on the use of force in the country. Accordingly, the RSC Budget supports cutting off aid for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).”

American aid to Iraq also is on the line in the Republican proposal.

The RSC wants to cut taxpayer aid to Iraq’s Ministry of Interior and its Ministry of Defense, which both work closely with militant groups tied to Iran. These are the same groups that have claimed responsibility for attacks on U.S. forces and outposts in the country, including the 2019 strike on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

“Iran and Iran-aligned militias continue to have strong ties to some elements of Iraq’s traditional security forces,” the Pentagon disclosed in February as part of an inspector general report that is fueling the Republican bid to stop funding these entities.

American aid to the United Nations is also on the chopping block. Republicans want to cut funding for U.N.-operated programs in areas of Syria that are controlled by dictator Bashar al-Assad.

“Even former Obama administration ambassador to Syria Robert Ford has admitted this aid has been diverted to directly fund the brutal Assad regime, Iran’s main ally in the region,” the RSC writes in its budget.

The budget proposal also includes a package of Iran sanctions that lawmakers are touting as the toughest in history. These provisions are meant to send a signal to both the Biden administration and Iran that any sanctions relief granted as part of a nuclear deal will not survive a Republican Congress.

Israel would receive a boost in U.S. funding under the RSC budget—an effort that pro-Israel Democrats are likely to support.

In order to counter Iranian terrorist groups and other Jew-hating militants, Congress would allocate increased assistance to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, which destroys incoming rockets before they touch land.

“Israel continues to face threats to its existence from an emboldened Iran that continues to support Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists on its doorstep,” the RSC states in the budget.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/republicans-want-to-slash-aid-to-iraq-lebanon-and-the-united-nations/

As economic worries loom large before the midterms, self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) says Democrats should push for trillions of dollars in social spending to court voters.

Sanders on Tuesday told Politico Democrats should “raise the minimum wage,” “deal with Medicare,” and “deal with climate,” in order to keep Republicans from winning a legislative majority in November. By the senator’s own estimate on the 2020 campaign trail, Medicare for All could cost up to $40 trillion. And Sanders’s Green New Deal would cost at least $16 trillion. All told, his legislative proposals would total nearly double the current national debt.

The suggestion flies in the face of recent polls, which reveal voters greatest concerns involve the economy. Four in five Americans said inflation is the greatest concern determining their vote this November, a ABC News/Ipsos poll found this week.

After having passed resident Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan last year, Democrats are being blamed for contributing to record inflation, which is at a 40-year high. Liberal economists predicted the injection of federal stimulus would worsen the post-pandemic economy, with Obama advisers Steve Rattner and Larry Summers claiming Biden should now take responsibility for contributing to rising prices.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found Biden’s approval rating is at 33 percent, the same as the lowest number recorded for former president Donald Trump. A majority of Americans also disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy, according to the ABC/Ipsos poll.

Sanders said Democratic leadership should call out Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) for holding up passage of larger spending bills, referring to them as “two corporate Democrats.” He added that “Republicans stand an excellent chance of gaining control of the House and quite possibly the Senate” due to legislative gridlock and Democrats’ insistence on playing up rhetoric about Trump and the 2020 election.

“You really can’t win an election with a bumper sticker that says: ‘Well, we can’t do much, but the other side is worse.’”

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/bernie-sanders-wants-more-spending-as-dems-struggle-to-address-inflation/

Column: Biden must abandon his quest for a nuclear deal

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about: This week Iran escalated its war against the West.

On June 8 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution calling on Iran to explain traces of uranium that it found at three undisclosed sites of nuclear activity. Hours before the IAEA vote, Iran disconnected security cameras from one of its declared nuclear sites. Then Iran began taking down IAEA cameras throughout its territory. The world’s nuclear watchdog is flying blind. “When we lose this,” IAEA director Rafael Mariano Grossi told reporters, “then it’s anybody’s guess” what Iran is doing.

But we know what Iran is doing. Iran is playing hardball. For over a year now, the Biden administration and its European partners have attempted to lure Iran back into the 2015 nuclear deal, a.k.a. the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Those negotiations have failed. Iran keeps upping the ante. It wants Biden to drop sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its terrorist army, and to guarantee that future presidents won’t back out of the deal. The first demand is harmful to national security and a political hot potato. The second is impossible. Result: deadlock.

Deadlock that favors Iran. The mullahs have used the months of jaw-jaw to prepare for war-war. Ayatollah Khamenei has placed radicals in top positions, including the presidency. His proxy forces have spread violence in Iraq, Yemen, and throughout the Greater Middle East. He has plotted to assassinate U.S. officials. He has evaded sanctions. And he has built up his stockpile of nuclear fuel.

Iran has enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. Last week, David Albright and Sarah Burkhard of the Institute for Science and International Security (the good ISIS) wrote that “Iran’s breakout timeline is now at zero.”

Swell. How does resident Biden respond? He says there is still time to make a deal that even his lead negotiator, State Department official Robert Malley, admits is “tenuous at best.”

The complacency is maddening. The other day, when a reporter asked National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan for his thoughts on Iran’s dispute with the IAEA, Sullivan said, “From our perspective, we have to view these on separate tracks, and that’s how we’re going to proceed.” Translation: We won’t let Iran’s hostile behavior get in the way of appeasement.

On June 9, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Iran’s moves against the IAEA are “counterproductive and further complicate our efforts to return to full implementation of the JCPOA.” Also, the sky is blue. What’s Blinken going to do about it? “We continue to press Iran to choose diplomacy and de-escalation instead,” he said.

This is willful blindness. Iran made its choice. It rejected diplomacy and de-escalation. It opted for confrontation and resistance.

Yet America is too preoccupied, too distracted, too overwhelmed to act accordingly. Inflation, crime, the border, guns, abortion, and Ukraine command the public’s attention. The growing danger from Iran does not. Meanwhile, the secretary of defense is a background player. The secretary of state and the national security adviser are staffers, not independent leaders. The president is 79 years old and not good at his job. This moment demands confidence, willfulness, boldness, imagination, and risk. What we get are odd ramblings from Biden on Kimmel.

Things must change. Iran policy is a good—and urgent—place to start. Step one is to face reality. Close the open hand that the ayatollah has spat upon. Demand enactment of snap-back sanctions. Adopt the bipartisan Senate bill that would integrate air and missile defenses in the Greater Middle East. Call for a massive defense buildup. Ease restrictions, limits, and delays on lend-lease to Ukraine, then take the same approach to arming Israel and our Gulf partners (as well as Taiwan). Recognize the importance of the Abraham Accords as the foundation for regional stability. And revive the military option to demonstrate our seriousness.

The drift toward global disorder began after former president Obama decided not to enforce his red line against chemical weapons in Syria. That was almost a decade ago. One way to repair the jagged breach in American credibility and American deterrence would be to make good on our longstanding promise that Iran won’t obtain the world’s most terrible weapon.

The current path leads to a world where America is ignored, where Israel’s existence is threatened, and where the risk of nuclear war is greater than it is even today. We’ve been telling ourselves for a while that such a world would be unacceptable. Let’s act like it.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-iran-crisis-is-here/

SPECIAL REPORT – The totalitarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not only engaged in global and national influence campaigns, but its corrupting tentacles also reach even down to American state and local politics. (RELATED: China’s Draconian Policies Show What Many Democrats Want for US)

Over the past 15 years, U.S. officials at local, state and federal levels have received pressure through visits, emails and phone calls from Chinese officials intent on pushing their policies in China’s favor.

As I have written about here, here and here, the CCP tends to focus its corrupting influences on currently powerful, as well as up-and-coming Democrat politicians, most vulnerable to their pitch.

Politicos such as Congressman Eric Swalwell and his Communist Chinese staffer (‘concubine’?).

However, a recent report in The Epoch Times (ET) shows how the CCP’s tentacles extend down to the state level and also target Republicans.

Usually, these efforts take the form of promoting apparently benign resolutions of friendship between U.S. states and China, or statements in support of Chinese policies.

The ET report also shows how to fight back.

In one specific case, writes The Times in “late February 2020, as the pandemic was heating up in the United States, when a request from China caught Wisconsin state Sen. Roger Roth’s attention.”

Roth is a Republican, and the request came via email from Wu Ting, wife of the Chinese consul general in Chicago. Wu wanted Roth to help pass a resolution “in support of China’s fight against the novel coronavirus.”

As ET reports:

Once Roth realized the email was legitimate, he became “downright angry.”

“I dictated a one-word response to them, and I said: Dear Consul General, Nuts. Signed respectfully, Roger Roth,” he said. “Not only do we respond to them with the word ‘nuts,’ we even drafted our own resolution on the Communist Party of China, exposing who they really are.”

That one-word reply, a nod to Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s famous response to a German surrender ultimatum during World War II, was the last communication Roth had with the Chinese consulate in Chicago. Wu later wrote an email expressing shock at his response, which he never replied to. But that interaction pushed him onto the offensive in Wisconsin.

States which have not been so staunch in their response to Chinese influence efforts include, most egregiously, the New York Senate resolution that was approved in June 2019, which appears to be the nation’s first official gesture to commemorate Oct. 1, marking the CCP’s official violent takeover of China.

The resolution’s lead sponsor, state Sen. James Sanders, didn’t respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about whether the consulate had any role in the resolution’s eventual adoption.

As ET notes though, these aren’t the only states where Beijing has tried to exert influence:

Around the same period as the emails to Roth, the state of Utah was approving a resolution expressing solidarity with the Chinese people. In language similar to what Wu had put forward, the resolution noted “a friendly relationship and strong economic, cultural, and people-to-people ties” that Utah and China share, and “the unique, 14-year legislative relationship between Utah and Liaoning.”

That Feb. 25, 2020, resolution also urged against virus restrictions that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade and raise fear and stigma.” At the time, the Trump administration had imposed a flight ban to and from China in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, a move that initially sparked condemnation from the Chinese regime and the World Health Organization…

States like Utah that passed such resolutions didn’t know “what was really happening and how they were being used as pawns,” Roth said.

Georgia and New York also have passed a “China Day” resolution.

The Georgia version, passed in 2020, intended to “commend the special friendship between Georgia and the People’s Republic of China” and to “recognize the Consul General Cai Wei of the Consulate General of China in Houston.”

However, Trump’s State Department ordered the closure of that consulate five months later, for being a “hub of spying and intellectual property theft.” (RELATED: Ex-Obama-Biden Aide Pushing CCP China Propaganda via Amazon – Owners of Washington Post)

So, what else can be done about this massive Chinese effort to corrupt our state politicians and institutions?

Roth, the Wisconsin senator, has some excellent ideas.

Since his encounter with the Chinese, reports The Times, he has proposed a series of measures aimed at curtailing Chinese influence in his state.

These include barring Chinese military members from working in the University of Wisconsin system and curbing Chinese recruitment or propaganda programs within the university system.

His proposals should be copied by lawmakers nationwide. (RELATED: Analyst Warns That China Could Exploit Key US Military Weakness)

As Roth stated in The Epoch Times: “As lawmakers all over the country, everything we do plays into a larger narrative,” he said. And we have an opportunity, though it be limited … we have an opportunity to make a stand for freedom, and to make a stand for the freedom-loving peoples of China right now, or who are held hostage by this brutal regime.” ALD

READ NEXT: Toomey Underscores Need for Trade Deal With Taiwan >>

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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https://www.americanliberty.news/commentary/how-communist-chinas-tentacles-reach-into-us-state-politics-and-how-to-fight-back/pcrespo/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=5663

The FBI is investigating the president of the Brookings Institution for secretly lobbying for the government of Qatar, court documents show.

FBI agents last month executed a search warrant for the email account of John R. Allen, according to documents released Tuesday. Allen, a retired four-star general, in 2017 allegedly lobbied the Trump White House and Congress on behalf of Qatar, an oil-rich Middle Eastern country that has been accused of sponsoring terrorist groups. According to an FBI affidavit, Allen in a 2020 interview lied to the bureau about the nature of his work and failed to turn over “incriminating” emails to investigators, including one where he asked for a “speakers fee” to meet with Qatari officials to discuss their strategy to influence the Trump administration.

According to the FBI affidavit, investigators have “substantial evidence” that Allen and his colleagues intentionally violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law that requires lobbyists to disclose their work for foreign governments.

Brookings announced Wednesday that it had placed Allen on administrative leave.

The investigation marks a stunning development for Allen and Brookings, one of the world’s most influential think tanks. Brookings has long been accused of operating as a shill for Qatar and other foreign governments that fund the think tank. The embassy of Qatar donates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to Brookings. The Qatari government in 2014 pledged $14.8 million to Brookings to build a satellite campus in Doha.

Allen, who oversaw NATO forces in Afghanistan, was a senior fellow at Brookings at the time of his alleged work for Qatar. He was tapped in October 2017 to lead the think tank.

Details of Allen’s work have become public through a case against Richard G. Olson, who served as ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates under former president Barack Obama. Olson pleaded guilty to making false statements in federal ethics paperwork and to illegal lobbying. Court documents show Olson began cooperating with federal prosecutors on August 31, 2020, “with the express goal of assisting them in bringing criminal charges against General Allen.” Allen and Olson worked on behalf of Qatar with Imaad Zuberi, a Pakistani-American businessman convicted in a separate illegal lobbying scheme.

Allen has not been charged in the case. His spokesman said Allen has “voluntarily cooperated” with federal prosecutors.

Allen, who in 2015 retired from the military, played a major role in shaping the Trump White House’s views toward Qatar during a tense 2017 standoff with neighboring Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, the FBI alleges. Allen on June 9, 2017, asked then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster to issue a statement calling on the nations to ease a blockade against Qatar. Then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson later that day issued a statement along those lines.

In a meeting on June 10, 2017, Allen allegedly advised the Qataris how to influence the White House, as well as how to “own the narrative” in the United States about the blockade. According to notes Olson took in the meeting, Allen told the Qataris they could “shape” then-president Donald Trump’s opinion through McMaster. He also suggested using Al-Udeid Air Base in Doha as “leverage” to force the administration to take a friendly position toward Qatar. Olson’s notes also show Allen suggested that Qatar use “the full spectrum of info. ops,” including “black and white” operations, to advance its messages in the United States. Black ops commonly refer to illegal hacking activity.

Allen received $20,000 to meet with Qatari officials in Doha. He was pursuing business deals in Qatar at the same time on behalf of Spark Cognition, an artificial intelligence company at which he served as a director.

Update 5:31 p.m.: This piece has been updated to note that Brookings has placed John Allen on leave.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/incriminating-fbi-investigates-brookings-chief-over-qatar-ties/

Inflation levels are closer to the peaks of the Jimmy Carter era than the White House or media would have Americans believe, according to a report coauthored by Clinton administration Treasury secretary and Obama administration economic adviser Lawrence Summers.

At first glimpse, the inflation rate, which sits at roughly 8.3 percent, seems a far ways off from the March 1980 peak of 14.8 percent. Yet Summers and his colleagues argue that U.S. economic conditions are much bleaker than many policymakers assume and that inflation levels during these periods are actually similar.

Government data on inflation rates in years past are themselves inflated, Summers and his colleagues find. The 1951 inflation rating was 9.4 percent, for example, according to the consumer price index (CPI)—the index the federal government uses to measure the inflation rate. Summers and his colleagues found after calculating the rate using a formula that measures rising prices more accurately that the 1951 CPI was actually 3.3 percent.

The report paints a grim picture of the economic challenges facing President Joe Biden, who has been reluctant to call inflation an economic crisis and unwilling to curb domestic spending to help lower consumer costs. The only solution—if the inflationary environment is as dire as Summers and his coauthors allege—may be for the Federal Reserve to induce a recession by dramatically hiking interest rates and further harm consumers who have been spending an increased share of their income on household goods for nearly a year.

Summers’s paper never uses the word “recession” but makes repeated references to actions taken by former Fed chairman and Carter appointee Paul Volcker, who along with the fiscal policies of former president Ronald Reagan gets credit for helping the United States escape the stagflation malaise that defined the 1970s. Summers’s paper goes as far as to say “to return to 2 percent core CPI inflation [the Fed’s target rate] today will thus require nearly the same amount of disinflation as achieved under Chairman Volcker.”

While most economists believe Volcker’s policies were a success in the long term, the policies resulted in two harsh recessions in 1980 and 1981. Those policies included nearly doubling interest rates from 11.2 percent in 1979 to 20 percent in 1981. The interest rate today is set at around 1 percent, for comparison.

Summers and his colleagues believe that failures to adjust CPI measures have led to a misconception by policymakers that the United States can lower inflation without “large macroeconomic consequences.” Because the government-provided inflation rate appears far lower than the 14.8 percent peak in March 1980, many policymakers wrongly assume such drastic rate hikes are not necessary.

Biden and other White House officials appear unaware that the Fed may be forced to institute harsh rate hikes that will temporarily harm economic growth. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the president proclaimed that his agenda of respecting the Fed’s independence and domestic spending can help the United States “transition … to stable, steady growth, and bring down inflation without giving up all these historic [economic] gains.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last month echoed those remarks, saying all economic indicators suggest “that the Fed has a path to bring down inflation without causing a recession.”

Policymakers who use faulty data to inform their response to high inflation could not only fail to lower prices but could also make the problem worse, Summers’s paper alleges. Because such government services as Social Security benefits, federal retirement plans, and food stamps are tied to the CPI, “a slower than desired decline in the CPI could become self-reinforcing” and lead to inflation that takes “more time to exit the system,” the paper states.

Summers has become one of the most prominent liberal critics of the Biden administration’s handling of the economy. At the start of Biden’s presidency, Summers warned that the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan was far too large and could cause inflation. A study from economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve vindicated Summers, finding that COVID stimulus resulted in roughly 3 additional points of inflation during Biden’s first year in office.

Rising costs remains the number-one most concerning issue for voters, with more than 80 percent of Americans telling an ABC News/Ipsos pollster that inflation is “an extremely or very important factor in how they will vote.” That same poll found that only 37 percent approve of Biden’s handling of the economic recovery and that only 28 percent approve of how he is tackling inflation.

Polling does perhaps present one bright spot for Biden if the Fed decides to implement a Volcker-type response to rising inflation: A Maru Public Opinion survey released earlier this month found that 62 percent of Americans already believe the U.S. economy is in a recession.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/why-obamas-top-economist-thinks-inflation-is-even-worse-than-you-think/

While former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was acquitted of lying to the FBI, a number of new details came to light during his trial. Some haven’t been made known or been widely reported.

1. FBI Lawyer Sussmann Met With Sought Perkins Coie Job

Sussmann passed along claims about Clinton presidential rival Donald Trump to FBI lawyer James Baker on Sept. 19, 2016, as well as data that supposedly supported the claims.

Baker gave the information to others in the bureau, triggering an investigation. The FBI and CIA both determined the claims were unsupported.

Baker, while testifying during the trial, described Sussmann as a friend whom he met when both worked for the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI’s parent agency. Baker, who left the bureau in May 2018, revealed that he was seeking to work for Perkins Coie, the firm that employed Sussmann, soon after.

“To the best of my recollection, I think it was Michael’s idea,” Baker said. “I mean, Michael knew that I had left the bureau, and I was looking around for a job—I had a job at the time, so I was working—I was working at the time, but I was looking around at other jobs, including [at] law firms. And so somehow he became aware of that and inquired about whether I would be interested in working at Perkins Coie.”

In one of many text messages the men exchanged before and after the meeting, Sussmann told Baker on Sept. 29, 2018, that it was “great seeing you this week.” That was a reference to a meeting that involved discussing a job at Perkins Coie, according to Baker.

While Sussmann arranged interviews for Baker, Perkins Coie never made a job offer.

Baker described “a miscommunication” in which a headhunter he was working with told him that the firm had essentially rejected him. But when Baker conveyed the message to Sussmann, Sussmann “went and got it sorted out,” Baker said, adding that the firm was actually considering offering him a job. Baker, however, ended up taking jobs at the think tank R Street Institute and CNN. He left those positions to work at Twitter, where he’s currently employed.

2. Joffe Was an FBI Source, and Was Fired

The information that Sussmann took to the FBI was obtained by Rodney Joffe, among others. Joffe was a technology executive at Neustar who was one of Sussmann’s clients.

Joffe was a confidential human source (CHS) for the bureau for years, it was revealed during the trial. He had regularly helped the bureau on cybersecurity matters and was even recommended for an FBI award in 2013.

But Joffe was terminated, apparently because of his actions in 2016. He was “closed for cause as a source,” prosecutor Deborah Brittain Shaw said.

“Our understanding is that Mr. Joffe was terminated as a source for cause in 2021 as an outgrowth of this investigation,” Michael Bosworth, a defense lawyer, added later.

The defense successfully got U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, to order prosecutors not to reference Joffe’s status again, after they claimed it was “prejudicial to explore or elicit further testimony about his termination, given that it happened so late and was connected to this case.”

Bosworth called Joffe “one of the world’s leading cyber experts” during opening arguments.

Joffe “exploited his access” to non-public data from Trump Tower, Trump’s apartment in New York, and the White House to compile the data Sussmann eventually took to the FBI, according to prosecutors. Joffe could still be charged with crimes, prosecutors have indicated. He wasn’t called as a witness because he was going to refuse to answer questions, since he’s still under investigation.

3. ‘Tea Leaves’ Was April Lorenzen

The group that gathered the data that Sussmann presented to the FBI also included April Lorenzen, a data analyst at a firm called ZETAlytics.

It was known that a person in the group went online and posted some of the information under the moniker “Tea Leaves.” The posts were made in October 2016, shortly after Sussmann met with Baker.

But the identity of the person wasn’t confirmed until the trial, during which Bosworth said it was Lorenzen.

Bosworth was questioning FBI agent Ryan Gaynor, who monitored the investigation into the Trump–Russia claims from Washington on behalf of FBI leadership.

Gaynor acknowledged that, as far as he knew, nobody had tried to contact the person who posted the information online pseudonymously.

“And are you aware that, if they had done so, they would have discovered that the person posting was another cyber expert named April Lorenzen?” Bosworth asked.

“I am not,” Gaynor said.

Slate magazine, which was one of the first outlets to publish an article about the Trump–Alfa Bank claims, described “Tea Leaves” as a male, as did The Intercept.

“Tea Leaves” was mentioned in Sussmann’s indictment, which also described the person “Originator-1.” According to the indictment, “Tea Leaves” was a business associate of “Tech Executive-1,” who has long been known as Joffe.

Jared Novick, who conducted research for Joffe on Trump associates such as Carter Page, said on the stand that Joffe “had involvement in” a number of companies, including ZETAlytics. Joffe previously refused to answer questions about the businesses he owned or was otherwise affiliated with during a deposition for a lawsuit filed by Alfa Bank.

4. Multi-Pronged Effort to Seed Allegations

Lorenzen posted the data on a WordPress blog. One or more members of the group also reportedly took to Reddit to share the data, and Joffe directed Sussmann to go to the FBI with the claims, Sussmann indicated in previous testimony before Congress.

Separately, Joffe approached an FBI agent named Tom Grasso with several IP addresses that were purportedly linked to Alfa Bank, the Russian bank that Joffe’s group claimed had a secret backchannel with Trump’s business.

Grasso said on the stand that he’d been working with Joffe for years, even though he wasn’t Joffe’s handler. He also said the situation was “unusual” because “it concerned a matter that I normally did not work on with Mr. Joffe.”

“Most of the stuff I worked on Mr. Joffe with was cyber crime matters, and this was in the area of Russia and foreign influence and counterintelligence and things like that, which is why I quickly passed it off to who I thought were the people working that matter,” Grasso testified.

Grasso didn’t reveal Joffe was a CHS in passing along the information to others in the bureau. Instead, he described Joffe as an “anonymous reporter.”

During closing arguments, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis said: “This is Mr. Joffe trying to put these politically charged allegations into another part of the FBI in order to create the appearance of two different streams of information. And that makes sense with the broader plan that was at work here. They were trying to hide origins, hide the involvement of clients in order to get the FBI to investigate.”

Another aspect of the effort involved promoting the allegations to the media. Sussmann, operatives with Fusion GPS, and at least one Clinton campaign staffer shared the data with reporters to try to get stories written. That plan was approved by Clinton herself, campaign manager Robby Mook said on the stand. Among the reporters was Mark Hosenball of Reuters, who emails show was in contact with Fusion operatives. Hosenball went to the FBI to ask about the “Tea Leaves” post.

5. Clinton Lawyers Met Regularly With Fusion

Marc Elias, another lawyer with Perkins Coie, served as the Clinton campaign’s counsel after Clinton won the Democratic primary. He hired Fusion to perform opposition research and to help him with legal services. Fusion is the firm that compiled the infamous anti-Trump dossier with the help of former British spy Christopher Steele.

Elias was known to have met multiple times with Fusion co-founders Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson ahead of the election. But during the trial, documents entered by the prosecution show the trio convened regularly, and that Debbie Fine, a top lawyer with the campaign, was part of the meetings.

One document, titled “Daily Check in,” shows that meetings were scheduled every weekday for 30 minutes from June 6 until Oct. 31, 2016. Another shows a meeting of the quartet on Aug. 12 for its daily check-in. A third shows a meeting on Aug. 17.

Fine said on the stand that she communicated with Fusion operatives on average several times a week.

Fine didn’t recall daily check-ins. She said that as far as she knew, only she and Elias were aware of Fusion doing research, but she didn’t know why others weren’t aware.

“I operated on the assumption that, like most of the work that I did for clients, it’s on a need-to-know basis, so I just—I didn’t share it, and I wasn’t told not to share it. And I don’t know whether or not Marc Elias shared it with anyone,” she said.

Fine also said she didn’t recall discussions about Alfa Bank. Presented with an email she asked Elias to print in October 2016, she said the email was about the Trump–Alfa Bank allegations, as laid out in the Slate article.

Elias previously told a congressional panel that Fusion was “acting as my agents” and that he met with the operatives on a weekly basis.

Other documents entered during the trial showed that Elias met with Joffe in his office and spoke with him by phone, and that Elias sent an article related to Alfa Bank to top campaign officials, including campaign chair John Podesta, four days before Sussmann went to the FBI.

6. FBI Leaders Were Excited About Probe

Then-FBI Director James Comey was “fired up” about the Trump–Alfa Bank allegations, according to internal messages entered into evidence.

Comey was interested in the case, another agent wrote.

The decision to open an investigation was made by senior officials.

Joseph Pientka, an FBI official, wrote in a message that the Chicago team “must” open a case because Bill Priestap, another official, “says its [sic] not an option—we must do it.”

The case was opened later that day.

FBI leadership kept tabs on the probe, mainly through Gaynor, who volunteered to monitor it from Washington.

Senior FBI leaders imposed a “close hold” on the material, “which meant that the specific information about who had provided the allegation could not be provided to the field,” Gaynor testified during the trial. Leaders were also said to be behind efforts to stonewall agents who asked to interview the source.

“When we said that we were interested in interviewing the—when I say ‘the source,’ I mean the author of the white paper or the source of the data—I don’t know if that’s different people or not—but wherever it came from,” said Allison Sands, the FBI agent who was in charge of investigating the claims.

But leadership communicated that “we should, at the division level, focus on the technical analysis,” she added.

Headquarters “was not giving us the ability to go interview these people,” Curtis Heide, another agent working the case, recounted. He said he was frustrated.

Agents said that it’s important to know about sources’ political biases, such as Sussmann representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

Gaynor acknowledged he had been under investigation for violating the hold during an interview with employees of the DOJ inspector general’s office during a 2020 meeting. He said he was “woefully ill prepared” for the meeting. He believes he’s no longer under investigation.

7. Multiple Offices Worked on Investigation

Baker was based in Washington at the FBI’s headquarters. Gaynor monitored the investigation into the claims from Washington. Cyber experts in Chantilly, Virginia, initially analyzed the data, then passed the probe to a hybrid cyber-counterintelligence team in Chicago.

At least one agent based in Miami worked on the case, interviewing Central Dynamics, the company to which the Trump email domain was registered, while another agent or agents in Philadelphia handled interviews at Listrak, another company.

Grasso was based in Pittsburgh.

“It looks like the clearing house in London” received the same white paper as the one given to Baker, or a similar one, Sands wrote in a message on Oct. 4, 2016.

8. FBI Took Months to Close Investigation

A full investigation into the Trump–Russia claims was opened on Sept. 23, 2016. The probe wasn’t officially closed until Jan. 18, 2017.

FBI experts deemed the allegations likely false within a day. The team that did additional work in looking into the claims, which included contacting entities like Central Dynamics had come to a similar conclusion by Oct. 5, 2016.

The delay in closing the probe stemmed from not being able to figure out who handed over the thumb drives that contained the data, according to Sands.

The drives were serialized as 1b, which is digital evidence. When the bureau closes cases, it has to return items taken in the course of an investigation to their rightful owner.

“Well, in this case, we didn’t know who the owner of the thumb drives was, because James Baker wasn’t the owner,” Sands said. “He was like a middleman or something. He had given them to us, but we didn’t know who the thumb drives belonged to.”

The team moved to initiate an “abandonment hearing,” which would enable them to destroy the drives. However, because that involved layers of bureaucracy, Sands’s supervisor recommended reserializing the drives as 1a, which refers to anything an agent wants to have in a case file but isn’t necessarily evidence. She cited notes taken in an interview as an example.

The reclassification allowed the FBI to close the investigation. That means it was closed when CNN reported, citing anonymous sources, in March 2017 that it was still being investigated.

9. Paperwork Had ‘Mistakes’

The document memorializing the opening of the investigation said the DOJ referred the allegations to the FBI. So did the closing document.

Heide referred to both as “mistakes,” or “typos.” He said the team had apparently conflated the FBI’s office of general counsel with the DOJ.

That wasn’t the only problem with files related to the probe.

The closing document said that the was a “preliminary” inquiry as opposed to a “full” investigation.

“That’s a typo as well,” Heide said.

Heide said he was alerted to the issues for the first time in 2018 by the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General.

“I believe they brought it to my attention and asked me if it was accurate, and my response was the same, that I don’t believe it was accurate,” he said.

10. Investigation Into Crossfire Hurricane Continues

Special counsel John Durham’s team, which prosecuted Sussmann, is investigating the origins of the government’s counterintelligence probes into alleged Trump and Russia links. Many of the probes utilized information paid for by the Clinton campaign.

The FBI is also conducting its own inquiry into the probes, collectively known as Crossfire Hurricane, Heide said on the stand.

“And are you being investigated individually as part of that investigation?” a prosecutor asked.

“Yes. Myself and, I believe, others as well,” Heide said.

Heide is being investigated for “not identifying exculpatory information as it pertained to one of the Crossfire Hurricane investigations,” he added later. “There were various consensual recordings that were obtained from one of the subjects, and there were statements, I believe, used in a FISA application that were—the exculpatory information was not divulged to the FISA court”—the secretive court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

A previous watchdog probe found the FBI committed “significant” errors and omissions in all four of the applications made to the court to spy on Page. The most significant may have been how an FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, doctored an email to state that Page wasn’t a CIA asset when, in fact, he was. Clinesmith pleaded guilty to a charge stemming from Durham’s probe and received probation.

Heide, during testimony, denied that he withheld exculpatory information from the court.

Heide, who is still with the FBI operating out of Des Moines, Iowa, worked on both Crossfire Hurricane and the Mid-Year Exam, or the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s use while secretary of state of a private email server to send classified emails.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/10-underreported-revelations-from-trial-of-former-clinton-lawyer_4514516.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-07-2&utm_medium=email&est=7zuFZTiCJEU2Zpd4I%2FAyXDvS611%2B0uT159OLpb20zaiB0M0pxGaRDhmS3XauiNQFpw%3D%3D

Biden DOJ asks judge to go easy on Ivy League firebombers

On the cusp of nonstop, around-the-clock (primetime!) coverage of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, a couple of domestic terrorists are actually getting their day in court, and it is informative to see how Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is handling their prosecution.

Recall Garland’s breathless declaration, during his confirmation hearings, that “150 years after the Department’s founding, battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions also remains central to its mission.”

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were arrested in the “mostly peaceful” protests following George Floyd’s murder. The two lawyers handed out Molotov cocktails to the crowd, and Rahman tossed one into a police car before fleeing the scene in Mattis’s van. They reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors in October 2020 that wiped out six of the seven charges against them. Those prosecutors, nonetheless, sought a maximum 10-year sentence and argued that the incident qualified for a so-called terrorism enhancement that would turbocharge sentencing—a determination with which the U.S. Probation Office concurred.

Ginning herself up to distribute explosives to the crowd, Rahman gave a video interview in which she declared, “This shit won’t ever stop until we fuckin’ take it all down,” adding that “the only way [the police] hear us is through violence.”

Then, Garland and the U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District, Breon Peace, who’s handling the prosecution, took office, and you won’t believe what happened next!

In mid-May, the same career DOJ prosecutors who argued for that 10-year sentence were back in court withdrawing their plea deal and entering a new one that allowed the defendants to cop to the lesser charge of conspiracy. It tosses out the terrorism enhancement entirely.

The new charge carries a five-year maximum sentence, but the prosecutors are urging the judge to go below that, asking for just 18 to 24 months on account of the “history and personal characteristics of the defendants” and the “aberrational nature of the defendants’ conduct.” Because, you know, Mattis graduated from Princeton and New York University Law School and was an attorney at the white-shoe law firm Pryor Cashman, and Rahman was a public-interest lawyer whose “best friend,” Obama administration intelligence official Salmah Rizvi, guaranteed the $250,000 required to release her on bail.

Law360, which reported on the events, calls the new deal an “unusual step.” James Trusty, a former prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s criminal division, broke it down for us this way: “Swapping in a softer plea agreement after having gone through the plea hearing is an exceedingly rare event in federal court.” It can happen, he said, if there is “truly some new development or understanding about the defendants that merits a fresh look.”

In this case, the new development is the political persuasion of the folks running the Justice Department, and for them, Mattis and Rahman are the right kind of domestic terrorists—the ones whose cases and conduct will never be the subject of a congressional hearing or plastered from wall to wall on cable television.

Remember their names, and the special treatment they received at the hands of the Biden Justice Department, when the broadcasts begin on Thursday and when Garland next has the gall to feign concern about political violence directed at our democratic institutions.

Mattis and Rahman Change of Plea Hearing by Washington Free Beacon on Scribd

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/how-the-left-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-domestic-terrorism/

Illegal immigrants account for two-thirds of growth in foreign-born population, study shows

The foreign-born population of the United States has reached its highest level in more than a century under President Joe Biden, a surge driven by the record number of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. 

The country’s foreign-born population reached 47 million by the end of April, compared to 44.7 million when Biden was elected in November 2020, according to data compiled in a new paper from the Center for Immigration Studies, meaning the immigrant population has grown at a rate of 132,000 per month. Two-thirds of that growth, the paper’s authors estimate, can be attributed to illegal immigration.

The paper sheds light on the rapid demographic changes taking place under the Biden administration that are largely a consequence of a border crisis with little end in sight. The rate of growth of the foreign-born population on Biden’s watch is shattering levels during previous administrations—in former president Barack Obama’s first term, the foreign-born population grew at a rate of 59,000 per month, and 76,000 per month in his second term. That rate shrunk under former president Donald Trump, when the foreign-born population grew by an average of 42,000 a month before the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down migration into the United States.

Over the last 22 years, the foreign-born population has jumped by 51 percent and now makes up a total of 14.3 percent of the U.S. population. In 1970, the foreign-born population made up just 4.7 percent of the country, a third of what it is today.

Under Biden, the foreign-born population has grown at twice the rate of the native born population. Such a large discrepancy in growth rates between the two populations has not been observed in the United States since 1910, when the foreign-born population approached 14.7 percent before dramatically dropping for the next 50 years. The paper’s authors attribute the historic growth to a number of factors relating to the current administration’s weak immigration posture.

“The administration’s suspension of nearly all interior deportations and the resulting dramatic decline in immigration enforcement, including deportations, plus its refusal to automatically take custody of non-citizens released from jails and prisons have all likely made illegal immigrants feel safer, reducing emigration of those already here and encouraging new illegal immigration,” the authors write.

According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population will reach an all-time high of 14.9 percent foreign-born by 2028. The authors of the study believe that projection is conservative and fails to take into account the spike during the Biden administration—the paper projects the foreign-born share of the U.S. population will hit 14.9 percent by next September. By the conclusion of Biden’s first term, the authors write, the total number of immigrants in the United States will reach 51.3 million.

“It seems clear that something has fundamentally changed and the illegal immigration population has grown dramatically after being relatively stable for a number of years,” the authors write.

Biden has presided over the worst border crisis in recorded American history. Border officials encountered 234,000 migrants on the southern border in April alone, the most ever on record.

Of those 234,000 migrants, nearly 118,000 were released into the U.S. interior. Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last month that he expects future migrant encounters to be even higher should the administration be successful in ending Title 42, a public health measure that allows for the rapid deportation of anyone seeking entry into the United States.

More than 1.3 million migrants have been encountered on the southern border in the 2022 fiscal year so far, and a vast majority of them did not face immediate deportation. The 2021 fiscal year saw 1.7 million migrant encounters, the highest in more than 60 years. 

The immigration crisis is one of Biden’s largest electoral liabilities. Polling consistently shows a majority of voters disapprove of his handling of the border, including a Harvard-Harris survey released last month that found immigration was the third most concerning issue to voters.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/bidens-border-crisis-puts-country-on-pace-for-largest-foreign-born-population-in-us-history/

The mullahs in Tehran are now only weeks away from producing weapons grade uranium as Iran’s proxies menace our Middle Eastern allies.

A hearing with the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, shed light this week on how we’ve arrived here. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Malley’s exchanges with lawmakers made clear that while the Treasury Department has sanctioned individuals and entities for a variety of bad behavior, it has not enforced so-called secondary sanctions—which remain in force—against China, the largest purchaser of Iranian oil, allowing money to continue to flow into the mullahs’ coffers.

Iran can survive without access to the U.S. economy, but China would never take that risk: A U.S. crackdown would compel swift compliance by the Chinese. The Trump administration weighed this get-out-of-jail free card for China and decided against it. The Biden administration has taken a different tack: That’s why, in April, as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez pointed out, Iran sold on average 650,000 barrels of oil to China per day. The result, he said, has been “a flood of cash for the regime—tens of millions of dollars a day.”

But Malley is passing the buck. He would like Congress to believe that Iran’s predations are the result of the Trump’s administration and its policy of “maximum pressure.”

“Rather than compelling Iran to make concessions, the prior administration’s maximum-pressure campaign resulted in Iran’s maximum non-nuclear violations,” Malley said this week, referring to the spike in Iranian-orchestrated attacks on oil tankers, Saudi infrastructure, and U.S. bases that began a year after Trump withdrew the United States from Obama’s nuclear deal.

What he left out is that those operations largely stopped after Trump ordered the killing of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020, and that Iran only began the process of producing the highly enriched uranium suitable for a weapon after Biden assumed office in 2021. The mullahs also withdrew from an agreement with the United Nations’ atomic watchdog to allow full access for the agency’s inspectors to its program, fired ballistic missiles dangerously close to the U.S. consulate in northern Iraq, and dropped a drone on a U.S. outpost in Syria.

Meanwhile, as Malley and company desperately try to revive the Obama administration’s failed nuclear deal, it’s no mystery why the Iranians refuse even to meet the American delegation. Why would they? Biden won’t enforce the sanctions meant to pressure them to comply with the 2015 agreement.

Call it minimum pressure. The only silver lining is that, as Malley told the Senate panel, he is “not particularly optimistic” that the Biden administration can salvage the deal.

That’s no surprise, given that the Biden administration stopped enforcing the most crippling sanctions before the negotiations even started, and should Israel fail to halt Iran’s march to a nuclear bomb, Malley’s fingerprints—and Joe Biden’s—will be on the fuse.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/on-iran-bidens-minimum-pressure-campaign-comes-home-to-roost/

The Supreme Court on May 26 rejected a request from Republican-led states to block President Joe Biden and his administration from using a model to estimate the costs of greenhouse gas emissions.

Justices denied the application for a stay without an explanation.

Biden on the day he was sworn into office reestablished the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, the latter portion of the name referring to the model in question.

The order said that it was “essential” that federal agencies “capture the full costs of greenhouse gas emissions as accurately as possible, including by taking global damages into account.” Such costs, once modeled, should be included when conducting cost-benefit analyses that agencies regularly conduct, the president said at the time.

Louisiana and 10 other states sued, alleging the estimates were part of a power grab “designed to manipulate America’s entire federal regulatory apparatus through speculative costs and benefits so that the Administration can impose its preferred policy outcomes on every sector of the American economy.”

U.S. District Judge James Cain, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary injunction against the administration in February, finding that the use of the model “directly causes harm” to the plaintiff states’ rights to proceeds from oil and gas leases.

The estimates “artificially increase the cost estimates of lease sales, which in effect, reduces the number of parcels being leased, resulting in the States receiving less in bonus bids, ground rents, and production royalties,” Cain said.

But a three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed and overturned Cain’s order. The panel said the plaintiff states claimed injury that may result, calling the impact “merely hypothetical.”

“The government defendants are also likely to succeed in showing that the plaintiff states have failed to meet their burden on causation and redressability. The increased regulatory burdens the plaintiff states fear will come from the interim estimates appear untraceable because agencies consider a great number of other factors in determining when, what, and how to regulate or take agency action,” the panel—consisting of Judges Leslie Southwick, a George W. Bush appointee, and James Graves Jr. and Gregg Costa, both Obama appointees—wrote.

That set up the Supreme Court challenge, with the plaintiffs saying that without action, the executive branch would “continue using this made-up, nonstatutory metric to arbitrarily tip the scales toward its preferred policy outcome for every activity the federal government touches.”

Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general, had urged the court not to grant the request.

Article III of the U.S. Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act “preclude applicants from challenging the president’s directive to federal agencies to use a specified methodology in monetizing costs as part of their cost-benefit analyses in this abstract suit unconnected to any concrete final agency action,” she wrote, adding: “If and when an agency relies on those estimates in issuing a rule or taking other reviewable action that injures the applicants, they may challenge that particular final agency action and argue that its reliance on the estimates renders it unlawful. But applicants may not maintain this Executive-Branch-wide challenge to the interim estimates divorced from any concrete agency action.”

In a response to the Supreme Court decision, Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill told The Epoch Times in an email: “The Administration’s efforts to reorder the American economy using these made-up metrics underscores the truth of the one economist’s statement that this is ‘the most important number you never heard of.’ We are disappointed with the Supreme Court’s decision to not vacate the stay, but we are confident that we will be successful in reinstating the injunction after this matter is heard on the merits at the 5th Circuit. Briefing is underway. In the meantime, we will continue to flag the government’s use of these numbers.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-turns-down-request-to-block-biden-from-using-climate-model_4495450.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-05-27-3&utm_medium=email&est=QUNChOjLsfQLi4jfdCmlDGCNNs09n4iXH%2Fc6%2BcMmVJkocgzB%2Bbr06c%2BSia7hZ5HVHw%3D%3D

Senior Obama administration officials engaged in a secret meeting with Iran in 2018 as part of an effort to undermine the Trump administration’s diplomatic push to isolate the hardline regime, according to an internal State Department document.

As the Trump administration worked to increase economic pressure on Iran in 2018, a delegation of “U.S. former ambassadors held a secret, “off-the-record” meeting with former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at his residence in New York City, according to a State Department memo unearthed this week as part of a lawsuit brought to compel the release of this information. The meeting took place around the same time John Kerry was reported to be working behind-the-scenes with Iranian officials to salvage the 2015 nuclear accord.

The internal memo, which is marked unclassified, details how these former U.S. ambassadors conducted shadow diplomacy with Iran’s top envoy surrounding “nuclear weapons, potential prisoner swaps, [the] Afghanistan withdrawal, and negotiations with the Taliban,” according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a legal advocacy group that sued the State Department to obtain the internal memo.

The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts to keep negotiations with Iran alive, even as former president Donald Trump and his administration worked to isolate the regime, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo told the Free Beacon in exclusive remarks. Pompeo, who was not aware of these meetings while leading the State Department, said the memo corroborates reports from the time about Kerry’s efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal through back-channel powwows with Iranian officials.

“This memo reflects even more than we already knew about former State Department officials continuing on as if they were still in office,” said Pompeo, who is now senior counsel for global affairs at the ACLJ. “Trying, at every turn, to work with the foreign minister for a terrorist regime, Iran, to undermine the very sanctions put in place by America. It’s worse than not knowing when to get off stage. Actively seeking to protect the terrible deal they struck, these former officials—two years after Obama left office—were signaling that Iran should stand firm against America.”

Pompeo said it is startling to learn that members of a former U.S. administration attempted to handicap a sitting president’s policies, describing the disclosure as “bad stuff, dangerous stuff, un-American stuff.” These former officials, he said, “should be ashamed of themselves. Working against their own nation’s policies alongside such a brutal regime.”

The seven-page memo was assembled during the meeting with Zarif, which came just days after reports emerged that Kerry was seeking to salvage the Iran nuclear agreement after Trump nixed it earlier that year. The document was produced after the ACLJ sued the State Department for records about any secret meetings between Zarif, Kerry, current U.S. Iran-Envoy Robert Malley, and former Obama secretary of energy Ernest Moniz.

During the meeting, Zarif claimed that Trump’s policies have fomented anti-U.S. fervor in Iran and pointed to the popularity of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) leader Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump two years later in a drone strike.

“I was as popular as Soleimani, but now I am at 47 percent and his is up,” Zarif said, according to the memo. “He is closer to 80 percent. People of Iran once preferred engagement, now opted for resistance as the only reality. That is what the polls are telling us now and it is the reality of the region.”

Zarif also said his government would never give up its missile program or stop enriching uranium, the key component in a nuclear weapon and one of the conditions Trump placed on a potential new deal with Iran that never materialized.

“The U.S. says no peace deal and the U.S. will reimpose sanctions, but the condition is zero missiles, zero nuclear enrichment. This what [John] Bolton wants,” Zarif said, referring to Trump’s national security adviser. “I know Bolton and negotiated with him years ago. His views are so radical, that we could not reach an agreement. Absolute impossibility to reach an agreement with John Bolton unless you ask him to sit down and read at dictation speed what he wants and then you sign it. He is incapable of compromise.”

Zarif also discussed his views on Iraq, potential prisoner swaps with the United States, and Iranian support for terror groups like Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

As part of the ACLJ’s effort to force the release of further information on these back-channel talks with Iran, it received a series of internal State Department emails showing that after Kerry left office, he used State Department staffers to send correspondence to Zarif.

Ben Sisney, ACLJ’s senior litigation counsel, said the organization’s legal efforts prove that “there were even more secret meetings happening behind the Trump administration’s back than had been previously reported.”

But Sisney said it also raises further questions: “How did this memo of ‘former’ U.S. officials meeting with Zarif get into the State Department’s hands? Was someone at the State Department there? Did the State Department send an informal liaison?”

Update 7:35 p.m.: This piece has been updated to clarify Kerry’s role in the diplomacy with Iran.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/disclosed-how-obama-administration-officials-conducted-shadow-diplomacy-with-iran-to-undermine-trump/

A dozen liberal groups that pressured Twitter advertisers to boycott the platform in response to Elon Musk’s plans to acquire it received money from entities backed by Bill Gates and George Soros, an analysis of public filings shows.

In early May, a group of 26 organizations penned a public letter claiming that the Tesla CEO’s takeover of Twitter would “be a direct threat to public safety” and turn the platform into “a cesspool of misinformation.” The letter called for Twitter’s top advertisers to “hold [Musk] to account” by committing to “non-negotiable” standards for doing business with the site, one of which is to not restore the accounts of political and public figures banned for “egregious violations of Twitter Rules.” The letter contained the logos of Accountable Tech, Media Matters for America, and UltraViolet Action.

An analysis of the public filings and records shows that at least 11 of the letter’s signatories or their affiliated groups have taken money from organizations funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the three groups leading the letter has received over $1 million from billionaire financer George Soros’s grant-making network Open Society Foundations, while the two others were founded in part by former staffers for Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.

Eight signatories also collected roughly $10.25 million in federal grants and loans between 2020 and 2021, public records show.

The New Venture Fund, the recipient of more than $500 million in grants from the Gates Foundation since 2012, in 2020 gave $180,000 in total to two signees, Media Matters for America and Center for Media Justice. Another $11.2 million of the New Venture Fund’s 2020 grant money went to North Fund, a shadowy progressive nonprofit based in Washington that funnels money to a number of other activist groups, including Accountable Tech, which published the letter.

Accountable Tech’s website shows that two members on its team—its co-founder and digital director—worked for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Founded in 2004, Media Matters for America describes itself as a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” A key function of the organization is to provide tools for monitoring what it considers to be “conservative misinformation,” which it defines to be “news or commentary that is not accurate, reliable, or credible and that forwards the conservative agenda.”

The Center for Media Justice, which in 2019 was rebranded to MediaJustice, aims to promote “racial, economic, and gender justice in a digital age,” its website states.

Tides Foundation, a Gates Foundation grantee since at least 2013, has handed over $2.34 million to eight of the signatories or their affiliates over a three year-period since 2019.

Among the recipients is Indivisible Project and its nonprofit charitable arm Indivisible Civics that work to “defeat the Trump agenda,” of which the signatory Indivisible Northern Nevada is a local chapter.

The other seven signatories that received money from Tides Foundation in the past three years are: women’s advocacy group UltraViolet Action; environmentalist groups Union of Concerned Scientists and Friends of the Earth; pro-abortion association NARAL Pro-Choice America; Black Lives Matter South Bend, a local chapter of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation; GLAAD, which monitors media portrayal of LGBTQ groups; and Media Matters Action Network, a partner project of Media Matters for America.

UltraViolet Action’s board chair and board member Karen Finney was the Democratic National Committee’s first African American spokeswoman and had served as the senior spokesperson for Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to the group’s website. Another board chair, Arisha Hatch, was an organizer for then-candidate Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.

Access Now, which focuses on internet accessibility around the world, in 2021 received funds totalling $1.35 million from the Open Society Foundations that Soros founded and chairs, along with grants from Wikimedia Foundation, Microsoft, governments in Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Beginning in 2017, the Open Society Foundation has also awarded three grants with a combined value of 1.625 million to Free Press, a pro-net neutrality group that also signed on to the letter.

The Microsoft founder last month admitted to having taken a $500 million short position on Tesla shares, according to a leaked text message string between Gates and Musk said that the latter said was authentic.

Musk had reacted to the boycott letter by calling for an investigation of the signatories’ funders.

“Who funds these organizations that want to control your access to information? Let’s investigate …” he wrote on Twitter on May 3, adding: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

He later made note of a report that some signatories received funding from Soros and European governments. “Interesting. I wonder if those funding these organizations are fully aware of what the organizations are doing,” he wrote.

Twitter in recent years has drawn criticism for censoring and suspending conservative users. Among its list of banned public figures are former President Donald Trump, Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, COVID-19 vaccine critic Dr. Robert Malone, and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

Musk has called Twitter’s ban of Trump’s account in early 2021 “flat-out stupid.” He said he would reverse the move if he becomes the platform’s new owner.

At a recent Miami tech conference, Musk also said he would be voting Republican after having “voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.” He described the $44 billion deal as “not some right-wing takeover,” but instead a “moderate take over and an attempt to ensure that people of all political beliefs feel welcome on a digital town square and they can express their beliefs without fear of being banned or shadowbanned.”

The Gates Foundation connections were first reported by Breitbart. The Epoch Times has reached out to all the named organizations.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/12-groups-behind-protest-of-musks-twitter-takeover-have-ties-with-gates-foundation-soros_4493281.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-05-27&utm_medium=email&est=Hcd9Ay7OFxa2%2BF%2BTYbQlN7S2eGemkLkW3JBns57OH3FqIxrvdsam9Tc6gZhmOlGPMg%3D%3D

Democratic consultants may have misled the Department of Justice about foreign lobbying work for a company that counted Hunter Biden on its board of directors, a pair of Republican senators claim.

Blue Star Strategies disclosed this month that its founders, Karen Tramontano and Sally Painter, had two meetings in 2016 with State Department officials regarding Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings.  But according to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), Blue Star’s founders failed to disclose nine other meetings with government officials, including two American ambassadors to Ukraine.

“It appears that Blue Star Strategies’ top executives, Karen Tramontano and Sally Painter, filed incomplete and misleading information with the Department of Justice,” Grassley and Johnson wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland. The senators pointed to records from their investigation into Biden and Blue Star’s work for Burisma.

Hunter Biden, who served on the Burisma board of directors, recruited Painter and Tramontano in November 2015 to consult for Burisma and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky, who was under investigation for bribery. It is unclear what role Hunter Biden played in Blue Star’s foreign lobbying efforts. But the arrangement has come under scrutiny because Biden served in that role while his father was leading the Obama administration’s anticorruption efforts in Ukraine.

The senators’ findings raise questions about whether the Justice Department prematurely closed an investigation into Blue Star’s foreign lobbying. Painter and Tramontano, who served in the Clinton administration, disclosed their 2016 meetings in a filing earlier this month in order to resolve a Justice Department investigation into their foreign lobbying activity. A lawyer for the consultants said prosecutors closed the investigation after the firm disclosed the two meetings in a filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The end of the probe was a much-needed win for Hunter Biden, who is under investigation for his taxes and foreign entanglements. Federal prosecutors are reportedly looking into Biden’s work in China and Ukraine. Burisma paid Biden and a business partner more than $80,000 a month to serve on the board of directors. At the time, Zlochevsky was under investigation for allegedly paying $23 million in bribes for drilling rights.

Painter and Tramontano disclosed to the Justice Department that they met with State Department officials Amos Hochstein and Catherine Novelli in 2016 to discuss Burisma. The consultants arranged meetings between the officials and Burisma’s lawyer in order to ascertain the U.S. government’s position toward the firm.

Grassley and Johnson detailed nine other meetings between Blue Star and officials from the Departments of State, Commerce, and Energy from 2015 to 2019.

The senators asked Garland whether the Department of Justice was aware of the meetings and whether the agency plans to address the incomplete filings.

“DOJ must scrutinize Blue Star Strategies’ recently filed [Foreign Agents Registration Act] forms given the firm’s apparent incomplete disclosures and its lack of consistency with our investigative records,” they told Garland.

Painter and Tramontano did other advocacy work for Burisma that is not disclosed to the Justice Department. In 2017, the consultants arranged a partnership between Burisma and the Atlantic Council, the prominent Beltway foreign policy think tank. For $300,000, Atlantic Council granted access to Burisma for its energy conferences and other policy events. State Department officials cautioned Atlantic Council officials about Burisma prior to the engagement, citing concerns about the Ukrainian company’s reputation.

Blue Star Strategies and a lawyer for the firm did not respond to a request for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/hunter-biden-cronies-filed-misleading-lobbying-disclosures-senators-say/

Eric Lynn, who holds student debt from law school, says loan forgiveness ‘is the right thing to do’

A Democrat running for Congress in Florida thinks the Biden administration has found the perfect amount of student debt to cancel—$10,000, which happens to be how much student debt he holds.

In August, former Obama campaign adviser Eric Lynn said he “stand[s] with President Biden’s plan to forgive up to $10,000 per student” as “student debt loan forgiveness is the right thing to do.” Ten months later, the Democrat filed a financial disclosure that shows he would personally benefit from the policy. According to the disclosure, Lynn holds between $10,000 and $15,000 in unpaid federal student loans from his time at Georgetown Law School.

Lynn’s call to have taxpayers cover his student loan debt could backfire in his race to succeed Democratic congressman Charlie Crist in Florida’s 13th Congressional District. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, canceling up to $10,000 in student loan debt per borrower would cost the government $245 billion, a bill the American public would eventually foot. Top Florida Republicans are already running against the proposal—Governor Ron DeSantis in April called it “wrong” to “make a truck driver or a waitress or a construction worker” help pay off postgraduate student debt such as Lynn’s.

Lynn did not return a request for comment.

As a presidential candidate, Biden promised to cancel all undergraduate student debt for those who went to a public college or university and earn less than $125,000. After his inauguration, however, the Biden administration pushed Congress to cancel $10,000 in student debt for all borrowers. According to federal data reviewed by the Brookings Institution, 56 percent of outstanding student debt “is owed by households that hold graduate degrees.”

Following his time at Georgetown Law, Lynn served as a national security adviser on former president Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. According to his financial disclosure, Lynn now runs a strategic consulting business, Lynn Strategies LLC. The Democrat appears to be more than able to pay off his law school debt without the federal government’s help—his disclosure lists hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial holdings, as well as a Washington, D.C., condo worth up to $1,000,000. Should Biden limit student debt relief to those earning less than $125,000, Lynn could still be eligible. The Democrat reported earning $120,000 in 2021.

Lynn will almost certainly be the Democratic nominee to replace Crist, as two of his top primary opponents left the race last week. Florida’s new redistricting maps, however, will make Lynn’s general election campaign a difficult one. Those maps split St. Petersburg in a way that makes Crist’s 13th district more solidly red.

This is not Lynn’s first congressional bid. The Democrat ran against Crist in a 2016 primary but dropped out in favor of a state House campaign, which also saw him fail to progress to the general election.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/this-florida-dem-wants-taxpayers-to-cover-his-10k-in-student-debt/

New DOJ Notes From 2017 Reveal FBI Panic After Trump Tweeted That He Knew He Was Being Spied On | Truth Over News

TRUTH OVER NEWSJEFF CARLSON AND HANS MAHNCKE

Newly released notes taken by high-level Department of Justice officials at a March 6, 2017 meeting with FBI leadership expose some of the lengths the FBI went to, to cover up their corruption and malfeasance in spying on President Donald Trump.

The notes were released earlier this week by lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann as part of an effort to clear Sussmann for having lied to the FBI. In reality, while the notes do little to exonerate Sussmann, they provide quite a bit to incriminate the FBI.

The meeting at which the notes were taken took place just two days after Trump’s infamous March 4, 2017 tweet in which he accused former President Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower. Trump’s tweet panicked FBI leadership, who were unsure exactly how much Trump knew about their efforts to set him up. In response to Trump’s tweet, they tried to cover their tracks with another layer of lies and deception.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-doj-notes-from-2017-reveal-fbi-panic-after-trump-tweeted-that-he-knew-he-was-being-spied-on-truth-over-news_4462943.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-05-15-4&utm_medium=email&est=K2xL6aqW16WjKDpTo4BBSCSOS9KPbEyJ0ACArIvrsznIwnB3x9CZJFTlcsx3P4KoGA%3D%3D

At least they finally stopped saying ‘Latinx’

The Democratic Party is desperate to bolster its flagging support among Latino voters heading into the midterm elections. Finally accepting the fact that the word “Latinx” is weird and stupid—something white liberals do to feel better about themselves—is a good first start. Alas, the Democratic National Committee has chosen a rather unfortunate name for its new “signature outreach program” targeting Latino voters.

It’s called “Adelante,” which means forward or onward. As it so happens, slogans such as “¡Adelante!” or “¡La Revolución Seguirá Adelante!” were popular rallying cries under the communist regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, or as he is known to some elected Democrats, “el comandante en jefe.” The Cuban newspaper founded in 1959, the year Castro took power, is called Adelante, which boasts that it was “primero con la Revolución.”

The DNC, which announced the program on Wednesday, has already rolled out some fancy graphic designs urging Latino voters to move “adelente con los Demócratas.” They are pictured below alongside some of Castro’s communist propaganda.

Many Democrats were appalled by the party’s relatively poor showing among Latino voters in the 2020 election. Some argued that embracing “woke” terminology such as “Latinx,” a word most Latinos do not use or even understand, made Democrats seem out of touch. Others, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), faulted Democrats for alienating Hispanic voters with “loose talk of socialism,” according to the authors of This Will Not Pass, a recently published book about the 2020 election and its aftermath.

Pelosi wasn’t just spitballing. She had presumably seen survey data suggesting that a huge chunk of Latino voters—about 40 percent, according to the Democratic polling firm Equis Labs—were concerned about Democrats embracing socialism. There are plenty of ways Democrats could address these concerns. One would be to stop openly embracing socialism. Another might be—just throwing this out there—to not name your Latino outreach program after a communist dictator’s propaganda slogan.

Fun fact: Former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, best known for lying to journalists about the administration’s efforts to appease Iran, attended Fidel Castro’s funeral in 2016 alongside official delegations from China, Russia, and other prominent human-rights abusers.

Special counsel John Durham filed court papers on May 10 saying that the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are slowly producing documents related to his case against Igor Danchenko, who prosecutors say lied to investigators about how he obtained information that later appeared in the controversial and discredited Steele dossier that was used against former President Donald Trump.

Durham asked U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga (pdf) to set a new deadline for June 13, from May 13, to turn over classified materials to Danchenko’s attorneys. So far, most of the classified documents have been handed over to Danchenko’s lawyers, although Durham said that “recent world events continue to contribute to delays in the processing and production of classified discovery,” possibly referring to the Ukraine–Russia conflict.

“In particular, some of the officials preparing and reviewing the documents at the FBI and intelligence agencies continue to be heavily engaged in matters related to overseas activities,” Durham wrote in the filing, adding that his team is “continuing to press the relevant authorities to produce documents in classified discovery as quickly as possible and on a rolling basis, and no later than the proposed deadline set forth below.”

Danchenko, a Russian analyst, was indicted in November 2021 for lying to the FBI as it was investigating the alleged Trump–Russia collusion probe. Namely, he’s accused of misleading FBI officials regarding the sources of information that he provided to former UK intelligence agency Christopher Steele as he was interviewed several times by bureau officials in 2017 while the agency was attempting to corroborate allegations in the Steele dossier.

Steele himself was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS to look into claims that were made against Trump and members of his campaign in 2016. Fusion GPS was retained by Democratic Party-aligned law firm Perkins Coie, which was working for the Clinton campaign.

Collectively known as the Steele dossier, the former UK spy wrote notes and documents that asserted Trump had ties to Russian intelligence officials to defeat then-candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. However, numerous claims in Steele’s work were false, triggering congressional, criminal, and inspector general investigations.

Trump has said the claims were part of a longstanding witch hunt to denigrate his administration and reelection campaign.

Durham’s team alleges that Danchenko intentionally misled the FBI when he denied in 2017 that his primary source for the Steele dossier was former Clinton aide Charles Dolan. His trial is scheduled for November.

In November 2021, Danchenko pleaded not guilty, according to his attorney Mark Schamel. At the time, Schamel said that Danchenko’s work as an analyst is “above reproach.”

“For the past five years, those with an agenda have sought to expose Mr. Danchenko’s identity and tarnish his reputation while undermining U.S. National Security,” Schamel said in a statement. “This latest injustice will not stand.”

But, according to the indictment, Danchenko’s alleged false statements to the bureau “were material to the FBI because … the FBI’s investigation of the Trump Campaign relied” on the dossier to obtain warrants to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

“The FBI ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations contained in” the dossier, including whether Danchenko’s sub-sources were reliable,” the indictment stated. Steele’s dossier and other information provided by Danchenko “played a role in the FBI’s investigative decisions and in sworn representations that the FBI made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court throughout the relevant time period.”

In the May 10 filing, Durham stated that the government has produced about 5,000 classified documents and some 61,000 unclassified documents to Danchenko’s lawyers. Durham said he believes he has turned over most of the classified materials.

The court filing comes as the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who had worked for Perkins Coie, is scheduled to start later in May. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI; he’s pleaded not guilty.

When it comes to the rampant inflation that’s making Thanksgiving dinners – and everything else – more expensive this year, the American people have no one to blame but the Biden administration.

And the Biden administration and the Democratic Party have no one to blame but themselves.

They can’t say they weren’t warned.

That was the takeaway from an opinion piece published Tuesday by The New York Times, where Steve Rattner, a counselor to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers during the Obama administration, took apart Biden and his party for policies that have directly affected the pocketbooks of millions of Americans.

Starting with the American Rescue Plan — which passed in March without a single Republican supporter — Biden and his Democrats have launched programs that have led directly to the pressures American consumers are feeling today, Rattner wrote.

Camera Catches Video Conversion Software ‘Handbrake’ and ‘Format Factory’ on Prosecution’s Laptop

“They can’t say they weren’t warned — notably by Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary and my former boss in the Obama administration, and less notably by many others, including me,” he said. “We worried that shoveling an unprecedented amount of spending into an economy already on the road to recovery would mean too much money chasing too few goods.”

Most people familiar with the iron economic law of supply and demand would understand that. But that basic element of capitalism is likely lost on the New Age socialists of the modern Democratic Party, who seem to think a cloudy victory in the 2020 presidential election, a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives and command of the Senate by a single, tie-breaking vote somehow gave them the power to change the basic realities of human interaction.

As Rattner wrote, “The original sin was the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March. The bill — almost completely unfunded — sought to counter the effects of the Covid pandemic by focusing on demand-side stimulus rather than on investment. That has contributed materially to today’s inflation levels.”

Is inflation hurting your household?

For Democrats in office and their supporters in the mainstream media, inflation gets nowhere near the kind of attention that’s devoted to liberal boogeymen such as “climate change” and “systemic racism,” but it’s an actual, pressing problem for millions of Americans.

About the only Democrat on the national stage who seems remotely interested in the issue is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who published a Twitter post last week calling attention to “the economic pain Americans feel every day.”

By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not “transitory” and is instead getting worse. From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.

— Senator Joe Manchin (@Sen_JoeManchin) November 10, 2021

“How could an administration loaded with savvy political and economic hands have gotten this critical issue so wrong?” Rattner wrote.

Well, for starters, they’re Democrats.

‘My Shelves Are Bare’: Biden’s Failure to Control Inflation Is Wrecking America’s Food Banks

For the Biden administration, the answer to that economic pain is passing another bill — this time, regrettably, with Republican help — supposedly to revamp the nation’s infrastructure (but actually containing much more for Democrat-favored groups) with federal money the government doesn’t have.

“Mr. Biden also insists that the much-lauded infrastructure bill he just signed is fully paid for — but it isn’t. Indeed, the infrastructure figures show $550 billion in new spending and just $173 billion of additional offsets,” Rattner wrote.

And then there’s the big daddy of them all, Biden’s so-called Build Back Better plan, the mammoth now-$1.75 trillion spending plan chockablock with progressive priorities such as distributing billions of dollars to illegal immigrants through child tax credits, “clean energy” initiatives and other proposals.

The fact that those proposals are almost guaranteed to be a failure on a national scale for Biden and the American people as the infamous Solyndra solar power plant was for the Obama administration in Fremont, California, in 2011 (but without the possibility of recovery by a future Republican administration) is happily ignored by Democrats and the mainstream media.

With universal Republican opposition, the Build Back Better plan is going to require reconciliation to pass, with only Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (the Cruella de Vil of today’s Democrats) standing between it and the American people.

Being a former high-ranking Democrat, and a man who donated the maximum amount of $2,800 to Biden in both 2019 and 2020, according to the Federal Election Commission records, Rattner isn’t clearly opposed to the spending plans, but calls out the Biden administration for trying to pretend they’re being funded by “budget gimmicks” that will only add to the deficit – and future inflation.

Rattner wants higher taxes. “Given the importance of Mr. Biden’s spending initiatives, the right move would be to add significant revenue sources,” he wrote.

(Considering The New York Times has long ago surrendered its reputation as an actual newspaper to be a propaganda organ for the modern left, that bit about higher taxes is probably the only reason Rattner’s piece got published by the Gray Lady.)

A better, saner answer would be dropping the whole, insane spending plan now, before the Biden administration inflicts even more damage on the American economy than it already has (with the Thanksgiving prices to show it).

Biden already has given Americans plenty to blame him for. And next year’s midterm elections are likely to show it — not to mention the 2024 presidential election.

On Monday, Rattner’s former boss, ex-Treasury Secretary Summers, published an opinion piece in The Washington Post also warning of the dangers of high inflation to the current Democratic project – and predicting it could lead to the return of the Republican Democrats fear most in the world.

“Excessive inflation and a sense that it was not being controlled helped elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and risks bringing Donald Trump back to power,” Summers wrote.

….and shaped policy thinking at the central bank and in the administration.

Today, all five pillars are wobbly at best.

Read my analysis @PostOpinions

— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) November 15, 2021

“While an overheating economy is a relatively good problem to have compared to a pandemic or a financial crisis, it will metastasize and threaten prosperity and public trust unless clearly acknowledged and addressed.”

They can’t say they weren’t warned.

The former ambassador to Afghanistan under President Barack Obama testified virtually during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday, calling President Joe Biden’s military withdrawal from the country a “stain” on our national honor.

Ryan Crocker now serves as a non-resident senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“We have accrued a great debt there that extends also to the thousands of Afghans who helped us in their mission. The [special immigrant visa] process has let them down,” Crocker testified.

Ryan Crocker, ambassador to Afghanistan under Obama, calls Biden’s disastrous troop withdrawal “a stain…on our national honor.” pic.twitter.com/cv9JTDoBi0

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 17, 2021

Camera Catches Video Conversion Software ‘Handbrake’ and ‘Format Factory’ on Prosecution’s Laptop

“A member of the advisory committee for a group called No One Left Behind that has for years sought to move interpreters to safety [said] we left thousands behind. And that I think is a stain, again, on our national honor,” he added.

“So we need to figure out ways to go ahead. It won’t be easy. We gave up the leverage we had. We cannot give up the fight.”

Crocker’s official testimony included additional details.

“The list of damage to our national security and our values is long. We have allowed the Taliban and al-Qaida to reunite. The threat this poses to our own security is not theoretical — 9/11 actually happened, brought to us from Afghanistan by these same actors,” he wrote.

“At the same time, our complete withdrawal has degraded our intelligence capabilities. The strike in Kabul on what was supposed to be an Islamic State target but wasn’t foreshadows the future,” he added.

Crocker also said Afghan women and girls will “pay the price” for America’s failures in Afghanistan.

“We urged Afghan women and girls to step forward, into parliament, private enterprise, the classroom and the military. They did. And now they will pay the price for our lack of strategic patience,” he said.

“That has already started. Afghan interpreters and others provided direct assistance to our military and civilian personnel. They were critical to our efforts, and put their lives and those of their families at risk by working with us. … We left thousands behind.”

The former ambassador concluded with a shocking story that encapsulated the changes in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

GOP Leaders Urge UN Not to Recognize Afghanistan’s Taliban Leadership, Call It ‘Brutal Regime’

“One of the projects that had the greatest impact in Afghanistan cost the least amount of money. It was the reconstruction of Ghazi Stadium in Kabul to FIFA standards, meaning that it could host World Cup matches,” he said. “For a soccer mad country, this was huge. But there was a deeper meaning.”

The stadium is now used by the Taliban to “carry out public punishments after Friday prayers, including beheadings and the stoning of women.”

A mandatory ninth-grade ethnic studies curriculum at a school district in California’s Monterey County pushes dark and controversial political themes and imagery, says a critic of the program.

Kelly Schenkoske, a parent of homeschooled children and an opponent of ethnic studies and critical race theory (CRT), told The Epoch Times the ethnic studies curriculum being taught at schools in Salinas Union High School District (SUHSD) promotes anti-American, anti-Christian, and Marxist ideas.

The Epoch Times obtained a copy of the curriculum from Schenkoske who filed a California Public Records Act request through her attorney Craig Alexander. It was verified as legitimate by Kali Fontanilla, a former SUHSD teacher.

“So many parents don’t know what’s happening,” Schenkoske said.

Schenkoske claims the teaching materials contain anti-Christianity ideology while promoting other spiritual traditions. She said the curriculum also focuses on “counter-hegemony,” a concept developed by Marxist philosophers to target dominant social structures, such as capitalism.

CRT concepts are also clearly included on page 92 through 96 of the curriculum in excerpts from the article “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth” and page 97, featuring a diagram from “Examining Transformational Resistance Through a Critical Race and LatCrit Theory Framework: Chicana and Chicano Students in an Urban Context.”

“It’s absurd. This is propaganda schooling in every way, shape and form,” Schenkoske said.

SUHSD President Phillip Tabera and district superintendent Dan Burns did not respond to Epoch Times inquiries.

Schenkoske pointed out several examples of this dark imagery, including the work of Ernesto Yerena Montejano and Frank Shepard Fairey a contemporary street artist, illustrator, activist, and founder of OBEY. Fairey is also known for creating the famous Barack Obama “HOPE” poster.

The first page “Unit 2 Readings” on “Colonization and Dehumanization” in the SUHSD Ethnic Studies curriculum contains an illustration of a communist raised fist, the socialist rose and an OBEY symbol.

An illustration of a skull with American flags for eyes on Page 136 depicts the crucifixion of Jesus with pistols near both hands of the Christ figure nailed to a cross and hovering above a bottle with a skull-and-crossbones. Under Christ’s arms, dollar-signs and roots drape down near his sides.

“This particular drawing is offensive because it shows the crucifixion of Christ, with guns on either sides of his hands pointed outward, as if Christ Himself were holding and aiming them,” Schenkoske said.

The imagery, she said, is “biased propaganda” that some children in the district are currently being forced to learn.

“It’s offensive to Christians. It’s ridiculous,” she said.

The drawing also shows horses holding Britain’s Union Jack flag, a Spanish ship, sets of shackles surrounding Africa, vultures clasping hearts in their talons, and pigs.

“This is like looking at a representation of a nation that they believe should be dead,” Schenkoske said.

On the next page, a similar skull has “$” signs in its eye cavities. It shows military drones by the Liberty Bell, surveillance cameras, bulls, spilled oil barrels and burning oil wells with the heading “Colonization and Dehumanization.”

The image paints America and its flag in a negative light, Schenkoske said.

“This curriculum, and this image specifically, attacks capitalism,” she said.

On Page 46, the curriculum contains a chart from “Rethinking Ethnic Studies” that under “Religion” lists Christians as the “privileged/hegemonic” group responsible for “creedism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” forms of discrimination.

The chart lists “Muslims, Jews, non-major world religions, atheists and indigenous spiritual traditions” as “oppressed/marginalized” groups. The chart lists “religious freedom/regenerating indigenous spiritual traditions” as a form of resistance to this “oppression.”

Under “Class” the chart calls for the “redistribution of wealth,” and a “shift in economic thinking.”

Parents Sue the State

Meanwhile the Californians For Equal Rights and three San Diego parents recently joined the Californians For Equal Rights Foundation (CFER) to sue the State of California over its statewide ethnic studies program for allegedly violating their constitutional right to freedom of religion.

CFER and parents Eric Gonzales, Steve Houbeck, and Jose Velazquez filed a lawsuit on Sept. 3 against the state government and its agencies, including the State Board of Education and the State Department of Education. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was also named in the suit.

The co-plaintiffs allege that prayers to Aztec and Ashe gods in the state-approved Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) violate the California Constitution’s free exercise of religion and no government aid clauses.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation (Assembly Bill 101) on Oct. 8 making ethnic studies a statewide requirement for high school graduation starting in the 2029–30 school year. The new law also requires junior high schools to offer at least a one-semester course in ethnic studies, commencing with the 2025–26 school year.

The previous day, San Diego Superior Court Judge Eddie Sturgeon denied CFER’s petition for a Temporary Restraining Order “partially because AB 101 had not been signed into law at that time,” Wenyuan Wu, CFER’S executive director, told the Epoch Times in an email on Nov. 10.

“Our lawyers sent the court and defendants additional documents proving our case. The State of California emailed them asking to be dropped from the case, because the State doesn’t think it has legal standing in the case.

“But we don’t plan to drop the State of California from the list of defendants,” Wu said in the email.

Schenkoske declared in writing to the court that she would testify as a witness about the content in SUHSD ethnic studies program which documents the Aztec prayers.

Schenkoske states in the declaration that she learned through a public records act request SUHSD’s ethnic studies curriculum, has already incorporated the “In Lak Ech affirmation,” also known as the “Aztec prayers” that are being challenged in the lawsuit.

The California State Board of Education (SBE) met Nov. 3 and 4. The lawsuit was the first item on the agenda but discussion on the issue was held in closed session.

Aztec Chants Versus Christian Prayers

At a recent SUSHD board meeting, Schenkoske criticized the district allowing activism to seep into the classroom.

“Since when did public education become a political activist organization?” she asked. “Our government should be neutral. Our political ideologies should be left out of the classroom. It is time we all start questioning what every news media source says. It is time we start questioning what our teachers are doing in the classroom.”

She told the board the ethnic studies program teaches students about the Aztec god of human sacrifice. She later told The Epoch Times the lesson is on page 12 of local lesson plans and is included in the state curriculum.

The Aztecs believed Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of the sun, war “fed on human blood and hearts,” so they held human sacrifice ceremonies at which they cut open the bodies of prisoners or slaves and offered the victims’ hearts and blood to Huitzilopochtli, according to Brittanica.

“And this a god you want to pray to? “I mean, really?” asked Fred McCuistion, another parent at the same meeting.

If someone were to suggest reciting the Lord’s Prayer after the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning, “people would be having a cow,” McCuistion said.

Schenkoske pointed out that amid the ongoing CRT debate, Aztec dancers showed up in the parking lot before one school board meeting and often perform dances at school events in the district.

Critical Race Theory

Critics of the ethnic studies program claim it is based on CRT and pushes neo-Marxist ideology.

CRT has gained traction among left-wing activists and academia, but opposition from conservatives, Christians, parents and intellectuals reached a fever pitch over the summer and early fall. Opponents argue that teaching CRT in schools will further divide American communities along racial and political lines.

According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, CRT originally developed from critical legal studies, which formed in the 1970s. As described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, critical theories are largely rooted in ideas inspired by Marxism, with stated objectives such as explaining “what is wrong with current social reality” and providing “achievable practical goals for social transformation.”

While Karl Marx focused on class struggles between the “bourgeois” and the “proletariat,” CRT focuses on the struggle between white “oppressors” and “oppressed” other races. It uses “privilege,” “intersectionality” and other terminology to describe these concepts.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/parent-complains-of-anti-american-anti-christian-themes-and-dark-imagery-in-ethnic-studies-program_4108084.html

Administration says it will overcome opposition

President Joe Biden’s latest some $2 trillion social spending plan will add trillions to the national debt, make inflation worse, and hurt traditional energy businesses. These were the contentions of a group of Heritage Foundation policy scholars.

During a press briefing on Nov. 12, they reviewed the president’s Build Back Better policies.

The original Build Back Better proposal called for $4 trillion in spending. Some progressives said it was not big enough. But opposition from Senator Manchin (D-W.Va.) required the proposal’s price tag come down.

Heritage Foundation experts lambasted both the recently passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the latest $1.75+ trillion social and environmental spending proposal. The latter is pending in Congress.

“The White House’s newly released framework,” the Heritage Foundation said in a statement, “returns to a tried-and-true way to obscure the true cost of the legislation: the budget gimmick. Progressives claim the bill is a compromise when in reality, it is a profoundly radical document that would massively expand federal power, promote a variety of left-wing causes, kneecap the economic recovery, and waste a tremendous amount of taxpayer money.”

The White House Press Office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At the same time, a high Biden administration was recently predicting the latest package would pass Congress, which might take up the issue next week. Still, Heritage Foundation officials said it would be toxic.

Katie Tubb, an energy analyst, warned that spending billions of dollars proposed for alternative energy companies would repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration, which spent billions of taxpayer dollars on loan guarantees for the Solyndra solar energy company. The company later defaulted.

“I’m not sure why we are expecting this to be any different this time around,” she said.

Tubb contended much of the economic growth over the last few years has come from traditional energy sources. This Biden plan, she added, would punish those industries.

“Why is that important? Because Americans get 80 percent of their energy from traditional sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas,” she said.

Tubb argued, “these are legal industries in the United States that contribute to the wellbeing of the United States, yet you wouldn’t know this by the way this administration talks.”

Tubb warns Build Back Better policies conflict with most of the president’s constituents “because, as you increase energy prices, you increase the cost of almost every product and service.”

She also said Build Back Better would hurt right to work states, states in which workers can’t be required to join unions.

This Biden’s original social spending proposal included $555 billion for environmental programs and $400 billion to pay for universal pre-school and cap child care costs at seven percent of income for most families and $200 billion to expand the child tax credit for families that earn up to $150,000 from $2,000 to $3,000 per child or $3,600 for those under age 6.

Several Heritage Foundation officials also complained that the five infrastructure/stimulus plans that have been passed since the outbreak of COVID last year are too much. And while one or two of these packages may have been justified, they are now excessive, they said. They are adding too much to the debt and will hurt efforts of some private sector firms to recover, especially in the energy sector, they noted.

David Ditch, a Heritage Foundation federal budget policy analyst, said the latest Biden plan is part of a number of spending plans since the start of the pandemic that have “already added $5 trillion to the national debt.”

It would also be the “greatest expansion” of government welfare programs in history, according to Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation analyst.

“The deficit spending has consequences because we have massive structural consequences that will keep growing,” Ditch contended.

“There’s also no way to escape the fact that Build Back Better would increase deficits in the first five years. It’s really important to understand that every important economic headwind we face now would be worsened by Build Back Better,” according to Ditch.

Rachel Greszler, another Heritage Foundation analyst, said most of the Biden child care programs discourage the use of religious, or faith-based, child-care programs.

“To qualify, they would have to take most of the faith out of their programs. None of them are going to do that because the reason they set them up was to be in line with their faith.”

She also said the proposal will primarily benefit urban “high income families” at the “expense of more rural low-income areas.”

Still, a Biden administration official on Nov. 11 said the $2 trillion proposal is in good shape. Vice President Kamala Harris, in a speech in France, predicted the package “is poised to pass soon.”

“Just before I traveled here,” Harris added, “our Congress passed a landmark piece of legislation to make a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure. Another bill that will support our nation’s working families and help us meet our climate commitment is poised to pass soon.”

Alice Albright, recently tapped to lead a foreign aid agency in President Joe Biden’s White House, counts a six-figure investment in a private equity fund controlled by a Chinese Communist Party-run investment firm.

Albright was nominated to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a federal agency focused on economic development in foreign countries with an operating budget of roughly $800 million. An alum of the Obama administration and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI), she is the daughter of Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has a long track record of working with Chinese Communist Party influence groups and officials.

Albright’s 81-page financial disclosure reveals an investment worth $100,000 to $250,000 in the China-U.S. Industrial Cooperation Partnership. Formed in November 2017, the $5 billion private equity fund was jointly launched by the state-owned China Investment Corp (CIC) and Goldman Sachs.

CIC, a Chinese Communist Party sovereign wealth fund, describes itself as “a wholly state-owned company, with the mandate to invest and manage China’s foreign exchange reserves.” “We take advantage of Chinese Communist Party’s leadership,” notes the company in its description of its corporate culture.

CIC leadership ranks are also comprised of Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks.

Beyond backers of Albright’s investment being Chinese Communist Party officials, the fund seeks to use American capital to develop Chinese businesses.

Goldman Sachs outlined how the fund would “invest in American companies in the manufacturing, industrial, consumer and healthcare industries, among others, that have or can develop a material business connection to China” in an effort to “enhance commercial linkages and promote market access for US firms in China.”

Biden Climate Advisor Lauded ‘Global Benefit’ Of China’s Exploitative Belt And Road Initiative In Unearthed Op-Ed.

The Cooperation fund “was set up expressly to help U.S. companies penetrate the Chinese market” and “the fund is touting CIC’s involvement as a strategic advantage in accomplishing this goal,” notes Reuters. In confidential marketing documents obtained by the outlet, Goldman Sachs boasted to its clients how the fund would “bring new pathways for growth via China.”

The most recent federal election filings by Republican Congressional candidate Anna Paulina Luna, whose biography, history, and temperament are already the subject of criticism by many conservatives and those in the America First Movement, reveal a $150,000 dirty trick. In fact, there could be some serious ethical violations as she used that amount of campaign funds on legal fees. Not to mention, an additional $32,000 was spent on her campaign manager in one quarter alone. This is not the kind of person I want to send to Congress – she is already showing how reckless her spending is with other people’s money. 

Earlier this year, Luna (not her real name, and she is not Hispanic and does not speak Spanish) filed an extraordinary and sensational claim with the St. Petersburg Police Department and the State’s Attorney. She accused all of her prospective opponents in the upcoming primary contest for the Republican nomination for Congress in the 13th District (which is in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area) of plotting to murder her!

Luna’s sidekick, Erin Marie Olszewski, alleged that one of Luna’s then prospective Congressional opponents, William Braddock, told Olszewski in a phone call that he was involved in a plot with two other prospective Congressional opponents in the Republican primary, Amanda Makki and Matt Tito, to murder Luna in order to end her political ascendency. You can’t make this up! Makki ran for the nomination against Luna two years ago. Tito is a former State Representative candidate and decorated Marine combat veteran.

While this sensational charge got front page coverage in the Tampa Bay Times and POLITICO, both sources failed to point out that it was Olszewski who called Braddock (Braddock didn’t call her) at 1AM, and that the surreptitious recording of a phone call in which only the recording party knows the call is being recorded, is strictly prohibited by law in Florida. In fact, there are many instances of individuals being prosecuted for violating it.

Neither news organization pointed out that although a link to a recording of the entire call was included in Luna’s complaint to the St. Petersburg Police Department, because the call was conducted illegally, it could not be considered by the court in Luna’s failed effort to get a permanent restraining order against Braddock, who subsequently dropped out of the race.

Anna Mayerhofer (that’s Ana Paulina Luna’s real name) has pulled the restraining order scam at least 5 other times before. She filed a restraining order in an attempt to silence a family member who pointed out the falsification of her name and ethnicity, as well as against a woman in the panhandle who she thought was seeing her husband on the side. In fact, Luna claims that this woman violated the restraining order when she inadvertently visited a gentlemen’s club in Fort Walton Beach, Florida called the Red Rose Gentlemen’s Club, where Luna was violating military regulations by working as a dancer. Luna’s claim that she was only a cocktail waitress is vehemently denied by the club owner and multiple employees who worked in the club at the time. You can always tell when Anna Paulina Luna is lying; her lips are moving.

According to the Federal Election Commission report filed on October 15, it shows this legal hoax cost the Luna campaign $150,000 in legal fees. This is particularly problematic when you consider that Luna raised $231,000 in the last quarter, but spent $251,000. The filing for the Republican primary is not until next June, and the primary date is likely to be in August. The entourage of cult members, courtiers, hench-women, consultants, and camp-followers, and other hangers around Luna creates an unsustainable burn rate long before next year’s Republican primary. This campaign is just another example of political grifters like Luna trying to gain power while continuing to use GOP donor money on attorneys and consultants. It is the definition of The Swamp creatures that Donald Trump’s America First movement has tried to eradicate.

Perhaps Luna and her well-paid cabal believe the false “murder” narrative will distract voters from her past as a Democrat and Obama-supporter, not to mention her identifying herself on her California driver’s license as Caucasian rather than Hispanic. Anna Paulina Luna is the epitome of a chameleon; positioning herself as an America First candidate in the primary and then remaining silent on supporting Donald Trump in the 2020 general election. She has also done her best to cozy up to other “influencers” in the America First movement.

While I don’t know Ms. Makki, she appears to be an honorable woman. The smear of Matt Tito, who I do know, is both outrageous and insulting. Matt is a U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran who served his country with honor. He also took on a decidedly uphill race for the Florida state house against incumbent representative Ben Diamond who ironically is likely to win the Democratic nomination against a weak Democratic field.

In other words, should Matt Tito become the Republican nominee for Congress, this race against Diamond will be a rematch – except this time Tito will find a much more favorable constituency compared to the state house district in 2020. Tito took the nomination in a hopelessly Democrat district and waged an aggressive shoe-leather campaign running 18% ahead of President Trump and eight points ahead of Luna in this Democrat stronghold. Tito accepted the nomination largely because no other Republican would step forward and he felt strongly that no Democrat should get a free ride, particularly a Democrat as left-wing as Diamond.

Contrast this with Luna, who, although she served in the U.S. Air Force, was never deployed outside the country for combat. That makes her widespread use of a photograph of her in U.S. Marine fatigues and brandishing a military-style weapon, combined with her claim that “you can’t understand the concept of freedom being paid for with blood unless you’ve actually been there,” a very clear case of stolen valor. Falsely claiming combat duty is specifically prohibited under Florida State law. I can’t imagine the district’s many veterans will appreciate her lack of candor about her military record. 

Luna’s husband, Andy Gamberzky, who she married, divorced, and remarried, is indeed a combat veteran who served his country with honor, and nothing here is meant to diminish or dishonor his service. His wife’s obvious attempt to conflate his combat duty to her “service,” is, however, a transparent fraud. Of course, in the recent report filed with the Saint Petersburg Police, Gamberzky signed his last name as Luna. His last name is not Luna and Florida law clearly states that it is a felony to sign a fake name to a police report. It is also possible that it was his wife who may well have signed for him without his knowledge or consent, to continue her “con” regarding her name for the people that would in fact look up the report. Either way, the illegal activity continues for the “Luna” family. 

Luna and her supporters will counter all of this by pointing out that she was recently endorsed by former President Donald Trump. I highly doubt that our esteemed former President is aware of Luna’s false claims of combat duty, lack of any Hispanic ethnicity, name change, and her experience as a stripper, but then that’s what Republican primaries are all about. In fact, Donald Trump endorsed the opponent of Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina’s 11th congressional district in 2020 and Cawthorn defeated that Trump-endorsed candidate by 30 points. Today, Cawthorn is close with the former President. Endorsement mistakes happen and are often the result of establishment insiders having undue influence over outsiders like President Trump.

Who wins the Republican nomination in the 13th District of Florida is a crucially important contest when it comes to winning a majority back in the U.S. House of Representatives. Luna’s race against incumbent Charlie Crist was neither close nor impressive given Crist’s long service in both the State Senate and in various elected offices, including the Governorship. The flip-flopper Crist managed to hold on to 25% of the Republican vote against Luna. In fact, Luna ran 5 points behind President Trump, who only lost the district by one point.

Only time will tell what the impact of the revelations regarding Luna’s background, temperament, intellect, and ethics will have on Republican primary voters in the 13th District (or whether she will face legal action), but I am confident they, like President Trump, will learn not to make another mistake.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AmericanActionNews.com

https://americanactionnews.com/media/2021/10/18/anna-paulina-lunas-150000-dirty-trick-rs-fg/

Human smugglers transported more than 100 illegal immigrants by ferry into Roma, Texas, Monday night in an incident captured in exclusive video showing coordination with National Guard members.

The video, posted by Breitbart Texas on Tuesday, revealed numerous migrants crossing from Miguel Aleman, Tamaulipas, into Roma after being smuggled into the U.S.

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Smugglers Coordinate with National Guard to Ferry Migrants into South Texas https://t.co/haxhw48DIx

— BreitbartTexas (@BreitbartTexas) November 9, 2021

“The smugglers openly communicate with the soldiers and Border Patrol agents, coordinating where to beach the raft so children can easily climb the riverbank,” Breitbart Texas reported.

Woman Nearly Dies, Then Has Both Legs Amputated After Mistaking Mysterious Infection for COVID-19

“Once on dry land, soldiers and Border Patrol agents march the migrants downtown and take basic biographical information,” it added.

The smuggling has continued despite a strong push by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to stop the surge of illegal immigrants entering its state.

Despite the governor’s efforts, many migrants continue to slip through the border unstopped.

The Texas National Guard are prepared to stop any potential surge of illegal immigrants.

Through #OperationLoneStar, the Texas Guard & Texas Dept. of Public Safety are securing our southern border.

We continue to surge state resources to save lives & keep Texans safe. pic.twitter.com/1NBehW11Xs

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) November 8, 2021

The report comes just days after the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security issued a memorandum on Oct. 29 announcing its plans to end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols.

“After carefully considering the arguments, evidence, and perspectives presented by those who support re-implementation of MPP, those who support terminating the program, and those who have argued for continuing MPP in a modified form, I have determined that MPP should be terminated,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote.

“In reaching this conclusion, I recognize that MPP likely contributed to reduced migratory flows. But it did so by imposing substantial and unjustifiable human costs on the individuals who were exposed to harm while waiting in Mexico,” Mayorkas added.

On his first day in office, Biden issued executive orders ending border wall construction and shutting down the Migrant Protection Protocols, prompting the worst migrant crisis in 21 years.

‘Insane’: Hawley Blasts Dem Plan to Keep Criminal Illegal Immigrants in Country

The Biden administration also soon re-implemented the Obama-era “catch and release” policy.

Former President Donald Trump released a statement in June blasting the Biden administration’s efforts to end his “Remain in Mexico” policy.

“Remain in Mexico, also known as MPP (Migrant Protection Protocols), was not only a historic foreign policy triumph but one of the most successful border security programs anyone has ever put into effect anywhere,” Trump said.

“Along with our Central America Safe Third agreements, asylum reforms, and expedited removal procedures we drove border numbers to record lows and we ENDED the horrendous practice known as Catch-and-Release,” he said.

“No American President had ever done more to defend the border and safeguard the whole immigration system.”

More than a year ago, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe made a stunning series of declassifications—the full implication of which many in the legacy media either ignored or never fully grasped.

I believe this was due to mainstream media being handcuffed by many of the false narratives they had been peddling to the American public for a number of years about the Spygate scandal.

One of the explosive declassifications involved handwritten notes by then-CIA Director John Brennan, who had personally briefed then-President Barack Obama and several members of his national security council at the White House about intercepted Russian intelligence analysis.

The content of that intercepted analysis claimed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to smear the Trump campaign with a fake Russian collusion hoax that would be created by private operatives. (My earlier column about this can be found here.)

The Brennan notes, coupled with an investigative referral sent to the FBI, make clear that all the top DOJ and FBI officials involved in accepting fake evidence from private operatives during the course of the 2016 Presidential campaign knew they were being approached by people associated with the Clinton campaign.

These federal officials then started investigations of the Trump campaign and applied for federal surveillance warrants on Trump associates based on this fake information anyway.

The documentary evidence speaks very loudly and very clearly: none of these people at the federal agencies were fooled by either the fake Steele Dossier or the fake Alfa-Bank documents.

Not one of them.

James Comey, Peter Strzok, and Andrew McCabe, to just name three of the top people involved, knew all along who these operatives approaching them with these fake hoaxes were really working for.

They had been alerted in July 2016 about what Clinton’s campaign was preparing to do. And then both Comey and Strzok were alerted again in September of 2016 when they received the investigative referral from the CIA.

Yet despite this, Comey and Strzok nevertheless went ahead and took the Steele Dossier from the Clinton campaign’s operatives and made use of it for a federal surveillance warrant in late October of 2016.

Despite detailed rules and regulations mandating that all material facts in such a warrant be verified and that the documented evidence of that verification is placed in what’s called the Woods File, no effort appears to have been made to authenticate the key allegations used in the warrant against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.

In fact, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz extensively documented in a December 2019 report how the FBI didn’t even interview the man Steele named to the agency as his primary sub source until January 2017, when the warrant was up for the first of what turned out to be three renewals.

That’s always been the major scandal here, as far as the FBI is concerned. That somehow every single rule, regulation, and procedure about opening an investigation, filing a surveillance warrant, and then getting it renewed was deliberately subverted and bypassed.

In September 2020, when Comey was directly asked about that September 2016 investigative referral from the CIA alerting him to the fact the Clinton campaign planned to launch a series of fake Russia hoaxes targeting Trump and his campaign associates, Comey played dumb, insisting the memo didn’t ring any bells.

Of course, Comey cannot admit that almost two months before the Crossfire Hurricane team filed its FISA surveillance warrant with the court, both he and Strzok had been asked by the intelligence agencies to conduct an investigation on a rumored dirty tricks operation making use of private firms.

While the recent leaks to the mainstream news media by the targets of the Durham Special Counsel’s probe show he is presently focused on gathering more documentation about the crimes related to the Alfa Bank hoax, Alfa-Bank was always a minor act in the massive Spygate scandal.

The real heart of the scandal has always been the creation of the Steele Dossier, the FBI accepting it while knowing it was a hoax, and then FBI officials using the dossier as a pretext to spy on the Trump campaign.

As I have been saying for several years now, Carter Page was far from the only person who had his civil rights violated by this surveillance warrant that was granted on the basis of fraud. That warrant on Page gave the FBI a window into spying on an as of yet undetermined number of people in the Trump campaign, and then the Trump transition team following Trump’s election win.

Since the warrant was renewed three times and was only allowed to expire in September of 2017, the spying continued right on into most of the Trump administration’s first year in office—a relevant fact that very few people in the mainstream news media want to dwell on.

How many people ultimately ended up being surveilled based on that illegitimate warrant? I’ve been researching Spygate for five years now, and I can’t tell you that yet. The Durham Special Counsel’s Office likely could come up with a good estimate, but they’re not talking yet.

What we do know is that all these officials at the FBI who were involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation have a lot to answer for.

One thing is for sure, I don’t think any subsequent developments in the Durham investigation are going to be boring.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/nobody-at-the-fbi-was-fooled-by-clinton-campaigns-private-operatives_4080673.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

This exclusive except from Matt Palumbo’s forthcoming book shines more light on the backdrop of the attempts to use Ukraine to oust President Trump.

The following is an exclusive excerpt provided for National Pulse readers from Matt Palumbo’s forthcoming book The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros. Pre-order a copy before it’s banned. 

The Soros Circle: AntAC

In 2014, Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) and its grantees were active supporters in the creation of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) of Ukraine, a powerful NGO. Through the end of 2018, 17 percent of AntAC’s funding was coming from Soros’s group.

AntAC is run by Daria Kaleniuk, an American-educated lawyer. White House logs show Kaleniuk visited on December 9, 2015, reportedly meeting with Eric Ciaramella, the CIA employee many suspect is the anonymous whistleblower that sparked Trump’s first impeachment, the source of which was a faultless phone call with Ukraine’s president.

AntAC was responsible for creating the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), a law enforcement group separate from the prosecutor general’s office that was tasked with handling the biggest corruption cases. It has investigatory powers but cannot indict suspects. Only when it passes its findings to prosecutors does a subject of its inquiry become part of a criminal case. The agency was established in 2014 at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after its predecessor, the National Anti-Corruption Committee, was deemed a failure. Western governments funded NABU, which also enjoyed the backing of the FBI. Like all the Orwellian names of groups Soros had a part in, NABU acts independently in name only.

With the Obama DOJ’s launch of the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, aimed at battling large-scale public corruption in foreign states, the State Department, DOJ, and FBI began outsourcing some of their own work to AntAC.

In February 2015, Viktor Shokin was appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and was soon scrutinized for helping the owner of the energy company Burisma. Shokin had helped owner Mykola Zlochevsky regain control of $23 million that was frozen by British authorities. Burisma was made famous by Hunter Biden’s involvement in the company, and Zlochevsky was the one who struck the deal to appoint Hunter to the company’s board of directors in 2014 at a reported salary of $83,333 per month.

AntAC’s stance on Shokin was made clear; it tweeted on December 2015 that “One of the major goals of #AntAC for 2016 is to force #Shokin to resign.”

Shokin attempted to begin a probe into Burisma that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

This never materialized because Joe Biden (then Vice President) threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan to Ukraine unless Skokin was removed as prosecutor general. Biden even bragged about it on video to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, stating that when he attended a meeting with Ukraine’s president and prime minister, he 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.”

Biden insisted the U.S. wanted Shokin removed over corruption concerns shared by the European Union. But in tapes released by Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, Biden and Poroshenko reveal that the Ukrainian president admitted to doing Biden’s bidding. The quid pro quo is proven.

“Despite the fact that (Shokin) didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him…to resign.”

In another recording from March 22, 2016, the two allegedly discussed who would be appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and then who would be their eventual replacement. Former prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko was mentioned. The White House issued a press release confirming the pair talked again on this date.

The Virginia Result Heralds The End of the ‘Obama Effect’.

At the end of the call, Biden said, “I’m a man of my word. And now that the new prosecutor general is in place, we’re ready to move forward to signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.”

Derkach would later be punished for allegedly exposing Biden’s call with Poroshenko.

After the audio was made public, Poroshenko’s successor Volodymyr Zelensky called for an investigation into the recordings, and the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing the audio as “unsupported information” part of a campaign to “discredit U.S. officials.” They also accused Derkach, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, of being a “Russian agent.” 

The sanctions came less than a year after Derkach met with Rudy Giuliani in Kiev, which reports at the time said was to discuss possible misuse of U.S. tax dollars by Ukraine’s government.

“I can’t think of anything [Derkach] gave me that you could consider meddling in the election. Indicting [Steve] Bannon is a lot more meddling in the election than this. My best recollection is it was all information we had already. I know I kind of got bored during the deposition because I had already heard it.”

– Rudy Giuliani

“I can’t see how you can be accused of meddling in an election that is more than a year away,” Giuliani continued. “The only new piece of information he gave… is the report that $5.3 billion in foreign aid [to Ukraine] is unaccounted for, $3 billion of which is American money and a big portion of that went to nongovernmental organizations controlled by George Soros,” he continued.

As the 2016 presidential race began to intensify, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office began an investigation into AntAC about the alleged misuse of $2.2 million of funds. An inquiry was sent to former U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. George Kent, the second-in-command at the embassy, responded to Deputy Prosecutor General Yuriy Stolyarchuk with a two-page letter stating that the U.S. had “no concerns about the use of our assistance funds.”

Kent pressured Stolyarchuk about AntAC in the letter, writing: “The investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center, based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced.” That was written on April 4, 2016—less than a week after Shokin was removed.

A few months later, Yuriy Lutsenko was named prosecutor general and met with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Lutsenko recalls being stunned when the ambassador gave him a list of people who shouldn’t be prosecuted. The list included a founder of AntAC, and two members of Ukrainian Parliament who supported AntAC’s anticorruption agenda (while benefitting from corruption themselves).

As John Solomon puts it, the implied message to Lutsenko was clear: “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”

So what was motivating George Kent and Ambassador Yovanovitch to influence investigations in Ukraine of all places?

The Virginia Result Heralds The End of the ‘Obama Effect’.

The fact that Ukraine dealt with an organization created with the backing of the Obama administration, State Department, FBI, and George Soros. An investigation into AntAC could expose a whole chest of secrets—the least of which being that they’re not all concerned with corruption like they claim.

Memos uncovered by John Solomon from Soros’s Open Society Foundations before the 2016 election make that obvious. One advocates U.S. involvement in Ukraine and offers “behind the scenes advice and support to Ukrainian partner AntAC’s efforts to generate corruption litigation in Europe and the U.S. respecting state assets stolen by senior Ukrainian leaders.”

Another memo describes AntAC’s strategy of developing friendships in key government agencies to leverage within the countries Soros operates in.

“We have broadly recognized the importance of developing supportive constituencies in order to make headway in tightening the global web of anti-corruption accountability. We first conceived of this in terms of fostering and helping to build a political environment favorable to high-level anti-corruption cases.”

One such contact was Karen Greenaway, an FBI supervisor who was one of the lead agents in investigating Paul Manafort in Ukraine. She’s appeared at Soros-sponsored events and conferences before and joined AntAC’s supervisory board after retiring from the FBI. The FBI also separately confirmed her contacts with AntAC before she joined them, saying they were part of her “investigative work.”

One memo reportedly had a chart of Ukrainians that should be investigated, including people with ties to Paul Manafort.

While not mentioned by name, one of those mentioned is likely Dmitro Firtash, a Ukrainian billionaire with competing energy interests in Europe as Soros. Firtash previously beat civil charges alleging he had engaged in money laundering with Manafort.

All of this pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors was happening in the spring of 2016 as Manafort joined the Trump campaign.

At this time, Fusion GPS was just starting to conduct opposition research on Trump, and the DNC’s Ukraine expert Alexandra Chalupa was searching for dirt on Manafort. Meanwhile, Soros-funded AntAC was looking to probe Manafort’s Ukraine associates, and the U.S. embassy was trying to stop any and all inquiries that risk derailing AntAC’s work. With AntAC having the potential to “uncover” more dirt on the prime contender to Hillary Clinton, the motivations become obvious.

Prosecutor General Lutsenko himself suggested that the embassy applied pressure because it didn’t want Americans to see who was being funded with our tax dollars. “At the time, Ms. Ambassador thought our interviews of the Ukrainian citizens, of the Ukrainian civil servants who were frequent visitors in the U.S. Embassy, could cast a shadow on that anti-corruption policy.”

Another Soros-funded group targeted Firtash in 2018.

The Open Society-backed Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that Ukrainian businessman Igor Fruman and Russian-born businessman Lev Parnas created a shell company called Global Energy Producers, LLC to anonymously donate $325k to a pro-Trump super PAC. The investigation that followed uncovered a $1 million payment to Parnas’s wife from Firtash’s lawyer.

The hunt for any information that could possibly damage President Trump or anyone connected to him was now on.

For the rest, be sure to get the book by clicking here. It’s also on Amazon, here.

Back in 2009, in the early days of the first Barack Obama administration, I wrote the single truest sentence about the Democrat Party ever penned. In an essay for National Review entitled “I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin,” composed under the name of my alter-ego, the Hollywood leftist David Kahane, I made this observation: “think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.”

Ah, but I went on: “If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us. After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves… Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any… Of course, you won’t. You’re too nice, too enamored of history and tradition to realize that the rules have changed. Not for nothing is one of our mottos, ‘By Any Means Necessary.’”

I followed this sage advice up with a best-selling book, “Rules for Radical Conservatives,” published in 2010, outlining how to defeat the Left: by confronting them at every step, refusing to be bullied by them, and mostly by turning their own weapons of mockery, lawfare and, when necessary, physical resistance, against them.

Needless to say, such counsel was then and continues to be studiously ignored by the Republican establishment, which preferred Paul Ryan’s wonkism then and prefers Joe Biden’s wokism today. It’s not just that the party of Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy likes to lose, it’s that they want to lose. To fight back, or even God forbid win, would be rude.

Take the last-minute false-flag stunt pulled by Democrat operatives in Virginia, perhaps in collusion with the “Republicans” of the Lincoln Project, a ramshackle collection of Never Trump losers like Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson that soiled itself with accusations of homosexual sexual harassment against its co-founder, John Weaver, and then unfurled its true colors by bringing on board card-carrying Democrat strategist Joe Trippi in July.

Meant to harm gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in his race against former governor Terry McAuliffe, it involved lining up identically clad, tiki-torch carrying “conservatives” standing on guard near a Youngkin campaign bus while evoking the media-crafted “memory” of Charlottesville.

The problem was that several of the “supporters” were quickly identified as Democrat activists, whereupon the disgraced Lincoln Project, hoping that someone (in other words, the mainstream media) would still tumble for their scam, volunteered to take the fall—because, after all, even with the hated Trump defeated and gone, “our democracy” still requires saving.

And what did conservatives do about it? Did they strike back, try to embarrass McAuliffe in some way, launch strikes in New Jersey against Democrat incumbent Phil Murphy, put up a fuss about the continuing embarrassment of the Biden “presidency,” do anything to help extract the remaining hundreds of American citizens left behind in Afghanistan, protest on the floor of the House or the Senate the administration’s bruited payments of $450,000 apiece to illegal aliens who were “separated from their families” by the Trump administration, the choking off of the American energy industry while handing the begging bowl to Russia and the Saudis for help, unsnarling the chaos at West Coast ports that have disrupted the American supply chain, or—and I’m still waiting for this one—doing their best to countermand the very idea of a vaccine passport/ universal mandate advocated by Biden and the fascist Democrats?

Don’t be silly, Brandon.

A society that won’t fight back, that refuses to defend itself, is doomed, its people deserving of scorn and contempt. And yet when has the GOP establishment ever fought back? They hated Trump and did their best to sabotage him at almost every turn. (The rest of the sabotage he accomplished by himself, on the advice of Jared and Ivanka, aka Javanka, aka “the Democrats,” as they were known around the White House.) They wouldn’t kill Obamacare, they wouldn’t build the wall on the southern border, they wouldn’t even try to stop illegal immigration, they wouldn’t join the president in his trade war against China—why would they, since so many of them are in Chinese communist pockets?

Like the members of the Lincoln Project, some of them are even out-and-proud sham Republicans, such as Liz Cheney and the soon-to-be-retired Adam Kinzinger in Illinois, whose House district just vanished in redistricting. Unlike Democrat rebels such as senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are vilified daily by the media and their senate colleagues, neither Cheney nor Kinzinger has received much opprobrium, much less anathema. With a Stalinist ferocity that is almost admirable, Democrats police their own and enforce the party line. Meanwhile, Republicans make mock-shows of outrage and then meekly roll over and play dead when the media barks.

The days of Republican “dirty tricks,” which in the modern era date back to Watergate, are long gone. Merry prankster Roger Stone, a Nixon-era veteran, found himself arrested at predawn gunpoint by the FBI during the “Russian collusion” investigation for alleged witness tampering and lying to congressional investigators about something that never happened.

When Democrats get caught red-handed, on the other hand, they take a page out of Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky playback, grin sheepishly, and deny, deny, deny. Although Clinton was impeached, the Democrats decided that rather than ever come clean, they would double down on recalcitrance, and since then nothing ever happens to them even when they’re guilty as… well, Bill Clinton.

This is what organized crime does and has since the heyday of the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition. “I didn’t do nuthin’ and you can’t prove it” has been their motto for a full century now. They run a smooth operation, with pet politicians, pet judges, pet investigators, and a federal police force that might as well be on the take for all the even-handedness it exhibits.

Fleets of handsomely retained lawyers see to it that, when and if caught, their clients’ lives are as little-inconvenienced as possible, their bank accounts protected, and their reputations quickly refurbished.

All the while, the Republicans—the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters—dutifully play their assigned roles as chumps and stooges, voicing fake outrage, then pratfalling on cue while the media yuks it up and the war on real America takes another left turn. They’re the real clowns in the room—but the joke’s on us.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-republican-establishment-chooses-to-lose_4081813.html

If you think this country has gone mad, you’re absolutely right. And if you think things have a chance of improving any time soon, you’d better think again. Until the “progressive” wing of the Democrat Party is ripped out of our government, root and branch, we’ll continue down the road to hell, which turns out to have been paved not with good intentions but with malice aforethought.

Even though the next national elections are a year away, the time to start is now. We must not go quietly into that good night.

During the Trump administration, there was daily chatter on the left about the “resistance.” The cultural Marxists in the party hierarchy and their fellow travelers in the media made no bones about their contempt for the president, our republican form of democracy (“their” democracy was something else entirely, as we now know), and their wish to expel both Republicans and conservatives from the American body politic.

To that end, they used every weapon in their arsenal, including disputing the 2016 election, picking off Trump cabinet members like Mike Flynn, devising disinformation like the “Russian collusion” hoax and feeding it to their apparatchik house organs, the New York Times and the Washington Post, enlisting Big Tech to stifle their opponents, and impeaching Trump twice over nothing.

But let the right put up a fuss about anything and they’re immediately labeled “domestic terrorists,” free speech being among the many constitutional freedom that have been summarily abrogated by the absurd and unconstitutional panic over COVID-19.

Virginia and New Jersey

It’s time for the counter-revolution, and one place to start is in two off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Jersey is probably too far gone down the path of punitive socialism to be competitive—early returns by both mail and in-person (yes, they’re already voting even though Election Day is not until Nov. 2) show registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans 237,000-77,000, with another 56,000 ballots from independents. But the incumbent, Phil Murphy, one of the worst of the fascist COVID overlords, is widely loathed from the pine barrens to the hill country, so perhaps challenger Jack Ciattarelli has a chance.

In Virginia, former Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe is trying to regain the governorship for a second, non-sequential term—Virginia’s governors can serve two terms but can’t directly succeed themselves—but a race that seemed his to lose just a few weeks ago now has become just that. The reclamation of Virginia—the birthplace of eight presidents—would sting the left badly and offer hope of reclaiming the Electoral College in 2024.

Hapless Joe Biden’s plummeting approval ratings—he’s so far underwater now he’d need a diving bell to resurface—have dragged former favorite McAuliffe down into a virtual tie with his hitherto unknown challenger, Glenn Youngkin.

McAuliffe, who has never lost his atrocious Syracuse, N.Y., accent, is a brazen carpetbagger and D.C. swamp creature who relies on the federal workforce in northern Virginia bedroom communities to put him over the top. But his temper—he stormed out of a TV interview the other day—and his insistence that parents should have no say in what their kids are being taught in the public schools have seriously damaged him with the electorate. In the meantime, real Virginians are propelling Youngkin to what looks like a photo finish.

Totalitarian Mask

If McAuliffe loses, the reason will be that he let the totalitarian mask slip, something the emboldened cultural-Marxist left is increasingly doing these days. Just look at the Biden administration itself: nominating a literal, Soviet-born communist and graduate of Moscow State University named Saule Omarova as comptroller of the currency, installing an accused eco-terrorist named Tracy Stone-Manning as the head of the Bureau of Land Management.

Meanwhile, we’ve just learned that the putative secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, took two months of unannounced paternity leave, presumably to overcome his post-partum depression and to nurse the fraternal twins he and his same-sex partner recently adopted. In the meantime, the supply chains have collapsed, store shelves are reminiscent of Moscow in 1986 (I know, I was there), and the cargo ships off Long Beach can’t be off-loaded because of California’s environmental and employment laws.

And what are we to make of the surgically altered male who now calls himself Rachel Levine and was recently made a four-star transgender “admiral” of the Public Health Service? Four stars in the real Navy was the rank held by Chester W. Nimitz, the architect of the American victory in the Pacific that saw the Japanese rolled back from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa.

But then rank inflation is something we’ve come to expect from the left, which abhors and abominates the military and does everything it can to insult, degrade, and humiliate it. As Abraham Lincoln once said, calling a dog’s tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg; “Admiral” Levine is just the latest and (so far) most egregious example.

Inflicting Pain

Meanwhile, for the non-crime of “misgendering” the male child born Richard Levine who later himself fathered two children by calling him “him,” Republican representative Jim Banks of Indiana has been suspended by Twitter, which is now the official arbiter of wokeness, a tool of Democrat officialdom, a media echo chamber, and a merciless enforcer of political correctness. It needs to be abolished.

Elsewhere, we have Democrats decriminalizing crime in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where stores are closing thanks to a shoplifting epidemic, driving up energy prices in their quixotic attempt to impose “green energy” on the rest of us, destroying the domestic energy industry, and annihilating the sovereignty of the nation by throwing open the southern border as yet another giant “migrant” caravan of temporarily unarmed invaders makes its way through Mexico. (Don’t worry, they’ll acquire weapons soon enough.)

To top it all off, the Afghanistan debacle has proven that America is both toothless and worthless as an ally, its diplomatic corps more concerned with pronouns than policy, its president a stumbling shell of a man easily manipulated by the minions of his former boss, and happy to rule by executive order while maintaining a typically leftist “state of emergency” to give his actions a fig leaf of legitimacy.

The intention is to inflict maximum pain on the corpus of America—often in the guise of “care”—in order to punish it for its sins, to take it down a peg and humiliate it in front of the rest of an angry and resentful world that begrudges us our achievement but lacks either the talent or the willpower to emulate us.

In short, we live in a dangerous nuthouse and it has to stop and it won’t stop until it is stopped and it must be stopped. The gaslighting of America has been a calculated effort to turn the rest of us as crazy as they are, because misery loves company. Like Islam, “progressivism” demands submission; it is not enough that they can indulge their economic and sexual fantasies and psychological neuroses—we must join with them. And, better yet, pay for them.

If they really were trying to ruin the nation, what would they be doing differently? And what are we going to do about it?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-country-gone-mad-needs-a-counter-revolution_4069267.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

A group of 19 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Biden administration Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday to demand that he rescind a communication targeting parents at school board meetings.

The letter came after Garland appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week following his Oct. 4 message which called out concerned parents.

The controversial memorandum was sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigations after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden criticizing vocal parents as “domestic terrorists.”

“Your testimony before the Judiciary Committee last week concerning your October 4, 2021, memorandum targeting concerned parents at school board meetings was troubling,” the letter read.

#BREAKING: Judiciary Republicans demand Attorney General Garland withdraw school board memo.

RT if you think he should! pic.twitter.com/fo6q1MzGFP

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) October 25, 2021

‘Identifiable Harm’: Biden Kills JFK File Release, Issues Baffling Statement

“You acknowledged that you issued the unusual directive soon after reading about the thinly sourced letter sent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden and not because of any specific request from state or local law enforcement,” it added.

Despite Garland’s testimony, the letter concluded, the attorney general “sidestepped” the effect of his memorandum.

“During your testimony, you sidestepped the obvious effect of your ill-conceived memorandum and the chilling effect that invoking the full weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus would have on parents’ protected First Amendment speech,” the letter said.

Should Merrick Garland resign as attorney general?

The committee’s letter upheld the rights of parents to direct the education of their children, including involvement at school board meetings.

The response also clarified that local law enforcement is the appropriate group to respond to any threats or violence rather than the FBI.

“Parents have an undisputed right to direct the upbringing and education of their children, especially as school boards attempt to install controversial curricula. Local law enforcement — and not the FBI — are the appropriate authorities to address any local threats or violence,” the House members wrote.

GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio accused the Justice Department of creating a “snitch line” to tell on parents during the committee’s hearing with Garland last week.

“When the attorney general, the United States sets up a snitch line on parents, Americans aren’t going to tolerate it,” Jordan said.

‘Are You Kidding Me?’: Jordan Counters Nadler’s Claim DOJ Became Political Due To Trump

“I think they’re gonna stand up to this accelerated march to communism that we now see America is going to fight the good fight, they’re going to finish the course, they’re going to keep the faith, because Americans value freedom​,” he added.

The NSBA apologized on Friday regarding its September letter.

“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the NSBA wrote Friday.

“However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for some consultation on a communication of this significance,” the letter added.

The right has long been accusing now-President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden of engaging in criminal corruption and influence peddling, and these accusations have certainly not ceased since the former entered office as the nation’s 46th president.

So, it’s not particularly remarkable to see right-leaning outlets slam the notorious father and son now that Hunter Biden has entered the art world and is selling his amateur work for tens of thousands of dollars and we’re expected to believe that these price tags genuinely reflect the talent of the artist.

What is noteworthy, however, is that the former ethics chief to President Barack Obama is rebuking the White House in no uncertain terms for the appearance of wild impropriety — and for behaving as though the public has no right to know more.

Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki grew rather huffy when confronted by a New York Post reporter about the identity of prospective buyers of Hunter Biden’s artwork — which is, according to art critics, nothing short of entirely mediocre at best.

Biden launched his art career earlier this year about five minutes after supposedly kicking his longstanding crack cocaine addiction, with which he was still struggling while his father was running for president last year.

The 7 Blood-Boiling Items Hidden Inside Biden’s $3.5 Trillion Socialist Wish List

The White House previously insisted that everything was kosher because, don’t worry, neither Hunter Biden nor any other member of the American public will actually know the identity of the buyers and the gallery owner will absolutely make sure it’s all on the up and up.

Psaki doubled down on this position when confronted by the Post last week following reports that Hunter Biden’s work garnered a total of $375,000 in sales at a Los Angeles art gallery earlier this month — with the paintings being sold at $75,000 a pop.

“It still is the purview of the gallerist. We still do not know and will not know who purchases any paintings. And the president remains proud of his son,” the press secretary stated.

When pushed, she interrupted the reporter, asking in her usual strained and sassy manner, “Did you have another question on something else? Otherwise, we’re going to move on to some other topics, there’s a lot going on in the world.”

Do you think Hunter’s art career is suspicious?

I’m sorry, does the press secretary get to dictate what the members of the free media ought to ask her about during her briefings?

Absolutely not, as bluntly stated by Obama-era director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, in response.

“These are legitimate questions,” the former official wrote on Twitter at the beginning of a lengthy thread rebuking Psaki. “It’s disappointing to hear @jrpsaki send a message that the WH thinks the public has no right to ask about ethics. After the last 4 years, these questions have never been more important. I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but this stuff matters.”

“There is no ethics program in the world that can be built around the head of state’s staff working with a dealer to keep the public in the dark about the identities of individuals who pay vast sums to the leader’s family member for subjectively priced items of no intrinsic value,” he continued.

“If this were Trump, Xi or Putin, you’d have no doubt whatsoever that this creates a vehicle for funneling cash to the first family in exchange for access or favors. Nor would you doubt that the appearance of monetizing the presidency was outrageous,” he continued, referencing Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia.

CNN Disgraced After Someone Counted How Often Network Mentioned Hunter Biden vs. Dog the Bounty Hunter

These are legitimate questions. It’s disappointing to hear @jrpsaki send a message that the WH thinks the public has no right to ask about ethics. After the last 4 years, these questions have never been more important. I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but this stuff matters. https://t.co/fnGmbkLQZU

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) October 13, 2021

If this were Trump, Xi or Putin, you’d have no doubt whatsoever that this creates a vehicle for funneling cash to the first family in exchange for access or favors. Nor would you doubt that the appearance of monetizing the presidency was outrageous.

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) October 13, 2021

“It doesn’t matter that Trump was worse,” Shaub, who often criticized former President Donald Trump, continued. “What matters is that this sets a low bar for ethics. It embraces the mentality that ‘if it’s legal, it’s fine to do.’ It creates doubt that the difference in administrations is one of nature instead of merely degree.”

“It’s all the worse because Biden ran as the antidote to Trump,” he said. “So the message is that this is not just better than Trump, which is far too low a standard, but that this is the opposite of Trump, which is even worse.”

It doesn’t matter that Trump was worse. What matters is that this sets a low bar for ethics. It embraces the mentality that “if it’s legal, it’s fine to do.” It creates doubt that the difference in administrations is one of nature instead of merely degree.

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) October 13, 2021

It’s all the worse because Biden ran as the antidote to Trump. So the message is that this is not just better than Trump, which is far too low a standard, but that this is the opposite of Trump, which is even worse.

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) October 13, 2021

And that’s exactly right. To vehement Trump critics like Shaub who dare to be consistent, nothing could be more sickeningly hypocritical on the part of the Biden administration than to brush off ethics concerns as though they’re unimportant to the American people.

Shaub had a similarly scathing take in July on the White House’s “absolutely appalling” decision to trust a Manhattan gallery owner to ensure the office of the presidency was safely guarded against any ethical concerns surrounding the first son’s art career.

“So instead of disclosing who is paying outrageous sums for Hunter Biden’s artwork so that we could monitor whether the purchasers are gaining access to government, the WH tried to make sure we will never know who they are. That’s very disappointing,” Shaub tweeted at the time.

“The idea’s that even Hunter won’t know, but the WH has outsourced government ethics to a private art dealer,” he continued. “We’re supposed to trust a merchant in an industry that’s fertile ground for money laundering, as well as unknown buyers who could tell Hunter or WH officials? No thanks.”

This had come in response to a report from The Washington Post detailing the incredibly shady arrangement.

“White House officials have helped craft an agreement under which purchases of Hunter Biden’s artwork — which could be listed at prices as high as $500,000 — will be kept confidential from even the artist himself, in an attempt to avoid ethical issues that could arise as a presidential family member tries to sell a product with a highly subjective value,” the newspaper reported.

“Under an arrangement negotiated in recent months, a New York gallery owner is planning to set prices for the art and will withhold all records, including potential bidders and final buyers. The owner, Georges Bergès, has also agreed to reject any offer that he deems suspicious or that comes in over the asking price, according to people familiar with the agreement,” it explained.

It was remarkable at the time that a former Obama administration official was so pointed in his criticism of the outrageously terrible arrangement, as it is today that he’s calling out Psaki for behaving as though it’s absurd for a reporter to press her on it now that Hunter’s artwork has brought in so much cold, hard cash from an art show.

This isn’t even as bad as it gets — the George Bergès Gallery in Manhattan, you know, the Manhattan gallery which the White House has trusted with ensuring Hunter’s art dealings stay legit — received a suspiciously massive federal loan for COVID-19 disaster relief that was approved in July, the same month in which the Post reported the gallery had reached an arrangement with the White House to keep the first son’s art buyers confidential.

Now, this could certainly be a big coincidence but boy, it sure doesn’t look good all things considered.

We don’t need Obama’s former ethics chief to tell us that all of this stinks to high heavens, but it certainly is remarkable that a member of that ethically dubious administration is speaking out in such distinct terms speaks volumes.

And he’s absolutely correct, too. It’s already insane on its face that the White House is so shamelessly insisting that keeping Hunter Biden’s art buyers confidential, as opposed to public and well-documented so there’s no question of ethical concerns, is a believable safeguard against influence peddling.

Especially when you consider that Hunter and dad have been accused of high-priced influence peddling for years.

Yet for Psaki to actually mock a reporter for pressing her on the dubious arrangement is outrageous and incredibly insulting to the American people as a whole.

When Trump was in office, we were routinely reminded that a free press was the ultimate safeguard against corruption in the upper echelons of our federal government and, for all their self-aggrandizing and terrible, wildly biased reporting on his presidency, they certainly weren’t wrong on this count.

Ours is a government of the people and by the people and it is beyond disgusting for the White House press secretary to tell a reporter that there are other things she should be asked about.

She should be asked about whatever the American people see fit to ask her about, especially when ethics concerns are so massive that they’re being called out by a member of the president’s own party and former administration.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says President Joe Biden has a track record of errors on foreign policy.

Gates, who served under former President Barack Obama when Biden was vice president, was interviewed by Anderson Cooper for the CBS show “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

During the interview, Cooper mentioned comments Gates had made in his 2014 book, “Duty.”

The former defense secretary had written that Biden was guilty of “poisoning the well” with the military and was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” according to Politico.

Gates’s reply showed his opinion has not changed.

Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams Threaten the Tax-Exempt Status of 300 Churches

“I think he’s gotten a lot wrong,” he told Cooper.

Gates indicated Biden’s track record on foreign policy is bad.

“He opposed every one of Ronald Reagan’s military programs to contest the Soviet Union. He opposed the first gulf war. That list goes on,” he said.

During the interview, Gates said he was troubled by the debacle he witnessed in Afghanistan in August, from the Taliban takeover to the U.S. withdrawal.

“It was really tough. For a few days there, I actually wasn’t feeling very well. And I realized it was because of what was happening in Kabul,” he said.

“And I was just so low about the way it had ended, if you will. And — and I guess the other — the other feeling that I had was that it probably did not need to have turned out that way,” he said.

Gates said Biden mismanaged his way into a crisis.

“Once President Biden reaffirmed that there was going to be a firm deadline date, that’s the point at which I think they should have begun bringing those people out. You’d have to be pretty naïve not to assume things were gonna go downhill once that withdrawal was complete,” he said.

Every Living Former Secretary of Defense Signs Letter Issuing a Serious Warning to Trump

Gates said that he and others who shaped U.S. policy in Afghanistan had made significant errors.

“I think that we created an Afghan military in our own image. And one that required a lot more sophisticated logistics and maintenance and support than, say, the Taliban,” he said.

“Instead of being light and tactical and basically self-resourced as the Taliban were, we created a logistics-heavy, sophisticated-equipment-heavy military,” Gates said.

That the military collapsed was not unexpected, he said.

“And when you pulled that rug out from under them, and you add on top of that the corruption of the senior military leaders and so on, it’s not a surprise to me that the Afghan army collapsed,” the former secretary of defense said.

Gates also said the Biden administration’s concept that it can gather intelligence without being on the ground is not likely to pan out.

“This notion that you can carry out effective counterterrorism in Afghanistan from a great distance, it’s not a fantasy, but it’s just very, very hard,” he said.

In a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, Republicans are asking the executive to reverse his “anti-American energy policies” in order to increase domestic energy production and meet the demands of Americans as gasoline and food prices continue to rise.

Since taking office, Biden has distanced his administration from almost every policy endorsed by President Donald Trump.

Under Trump’s energy policies, America in 2019 become energy independent for the first time in 62 years, fulfilling a key campaign promise made during the 2016 election. Among these policies was the authorization of the Keystone pipeline and the approval of the use of hydraulic fracking, policies rejected by his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

By April 2020, the impact of these policies became clear as the price of gasoline plummeted to an average of around $1.94 per gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

A string of executive orders in the early days of Biden’s presidency reversed several Trump-era policies, fulfilling promises that Biden made on the campaign trail in 2020 that he would “transition [away] from the oil industry.”

Biden prefaced one such executive order with a summary of his administration’s policy: “Where the Federal Government has failed to meet that commitment in the past, it must advance environmental justice.”

To achieve these ends, Biden again halted construction on the Keystone pipeline and suspended new oil and natural gas leases on federal lands, among other executive actions.

Since Biden’s inauguration, data from the EIA shows average gas prices have increased every month, shooting up from $2.42 per gallon in January to $3.272 per gallon in September. Further indicating decreased energy production, crude oil prices also hit a 7-year high at $80 per barrel, prices last seen in October 2014.

As prices continue to increase, Biden has tried to regain control by enticing the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Plus (OPEC+), comprised of OPEC nations such as Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, along with non-OPEC members like Russia, to produce more oil to lower costs. Thus far, these efforts have been ignored.

At the same time, Democrats have touted their $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill’s new climate policies, which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has promised will constitute “an extremely aggressive [transformation of the U.S. energy system] away from fossil fuels.”

Now, Republicans in the House led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) are calling on the president to “[rescind] Executive Orders and other policies designed by your Administration to reduce access to to our country’s oil and natural gas resources.”

“Instead of continuing to call for increased prosperity for OPEC+ affiliated nations that seek to harm the United States,” McCarthy wrote, “we should meet American needs with American produced energy.”

McCarthy further decried Biden’s fledgling negotiations with OPEC+, noting that the organization includes U.S. enemies like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. “It is not in America’s interest to rely on these nations for energy,” McCarthy ruled.

McCarthy then turned to the benefit of Biden loosening his “anti-American” restrictions on energy production, saying that relaxing these “will increase American economic and job growth, enhance national and energy security, and lower energy prices for American families.”

The Republican congressman added that the United States producing more oil would actually reduce global emissions, arguing that “the United States produces energy with an environmental responsibility that exceeds those of [OPEC+ nations] upon which you wish for America to rely.”

McCarthy then addresses specific policies that he thinks ought to be reversed, including Biden’s “canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, proposing to ban fracking, declaring a moratorium on leases on federal lands and water for oil and natural gas production, and changing tax law to harm domestic production.”

At the same time that Biden is “knee-cap[ping]” domestic production, McCarthy said, Biden is helping foreign production.

As examples, McCarthy cites Biden’s tacit “green-light” to the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He also notes that “The liberal reconciliation bill that your Administration is supporting would dramatically increase our reliance on China for rare earth and critical minerals to meet your climate agenda.”

The Republicans concluded the letter with a plea that Biden “work with us to preserve America’s energy security and reverse your disastrous energy policies.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/gop-asks-biden-to-reverse-anti-american-energy-policies_4049475.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Some judges make the punishment fit the crime.

Some make the crime fit the punishment.

That seems to be the approach by one federal judge in Washington, when it comes to defendants in the Capitol incursion of Jan. 6 — especially when the punishment she’s imposing is more than even prosecutors ask for.

According to Reuters, a judge appointed to the federal bench in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama has gone beyond prosecutors’ sentencing requests in handling the guilty pleas of those charged in the incursion — imposing more jail time than Department of Justice lawyers sought, and describing their actions in far worse terms than the charges they pleaded guilty to.

According to the report, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Wednesday sentenced two cousins who took selfies in the Capitol that day to 45 days in jail — two weeks more than prosecutors had asked.

Report: Judge Judy Ditches Longtime Bailiff Because of Cost Concerns – But She Makes $47 Million Per Year

On Tuesday, Chutkan sentenced a woman to two weeks behind bars when prosecutors had recommended probation — and had cited her “cooperation with law enforcement” in making the recommendation, Reuters reported.

Last week, she sentenced another defendant to 45 days in jail. Prosecutors had recommended three months’ home confinement, according to The Washington Post.

“There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government, beyond sitting at home,” Chutkan said, according to the Post.

Whatever the merits of that opinion might be — the fact is that “attempted violent overthrow of the government” is not what the defendants were charged with, and it’s not what they pleaded guilty to, according to Reuters.

All had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of unlawful parading and picketing inside the Capitol, the news service reported.

Naturally, in the social media cesspool of Twitter, there were plenty of users who applauded Chutkan’s actions (it’s amazing how flexible liberal principles are). But even on Twitter, Chutkan had her critics.

This is political targeting.

Sentence them to what they deserve only. https://t.co/1LxMOlbhBS

— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) October 13, 2021

This is literally persecution.
One of the things people from other countries can claim for asylum. And now, an activist judge is persecution individuals for misdemeanors.

What happened to those who entered the Senate building during the Kavanaugh hearings?

— ChristopherXade (@ChristopherXade) October 14, 2021

Secret Police Docs Reveal There Was ‘No Good Reason’ to Shoot Ashli Babbitt: Judicial Watch Report

But this one put it perfectly.

This is not justice. https://t.co/OsHixHMlff

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 13, 2021

No, it’s not justice by any commonly understood sense of the term.

This is politics by another means.

According to the Post, Chutkan made it clear at last week’s sentencing that she was doing more than weighing the specific case before her and rendering a judgment on the defendant alone.

“Because the country is watching,” she said, “to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in this country before, for actions and crimes that undermine the rule of law and our democracy.”

It’s pretty clear that besides her legal briefs, Chutkan reads mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times to inform her world view. (She’s got well-established bona fides for a liberal on the federal court, ranging from trying to halt the execution of a man who raped and murdered a 10-year-old girl to ordering the federal government to help illegal aliens get abortions.)

Regrettable as the Capitol incursion was, as deplorable as the acts of violence by protesters that took place were — and they were deplorable — no sane person can conflate the actions of an overexcited mob with an armed insurrection against the government.

It’s important to remember that the only person who died as a result of deliberate violence that day was one of the protesters, shot to death for no apparent reason by a Capitol police officer.

And in a crowd where it’s reasonable to suppose there were a fair number of Second Amendment supporters, there were no firearms in evidence (and even the stories about fire extinguishers were inflated by the mainstream media to conjure up a story that protesters killed a Capitol police officer.)

Chutkan was right about one thing: The country is watching. It’s watching a perversion of the concept of justice in service of a political agenda, just as it watched for four years while the FBI was placed in service of the Democratic agenda to kneecap Donald Trump’s presidency, and just as it watched throughout 2020 as rioters savaged American cities and Democrats cheered (and even helped bail them out.)

It’s watched as the defendants in the Capitol incursion have been treated far worse than any Black Lives Matter mob that ever looted an AutoZone. (That didn’t stop the D.C. circuit court’s chief judge from asking in August why prosecutors were being so easy on the Jan. 6 defendants.)

It’s watched as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has openly turned the commission to “investigate” the incursion into yet another weapon in the Democrats’ war against Trump supporters.

Now, the country is watching as a Democrat-appointed judge comes up with her own descriptions of what criminal defendants have pleaded guilty to, and metes out sentences that are beyond what even prosecutors are seeking.

It doesn’t matter that the sentences amount to only a couple of weeks more behind bars. What matters is the principle of equal justice.

What Chutkan is doing is betraying that principle. It isn’t justice. It’s a disgrace.

And there was a time not so long ago that liberals would have known that.

Francis Collins leaves behind contentious legacy after pouring millions into fetal experiments

National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins will step down this year after a decade-long run, leaving behind a legacy defined as much by his bipartisan appeal as the bioethical controversies that occurred under his leadership. 

Collins is a born-again Christian who has written extensively on the relationship between religion and science, which attracted the support of presidents from both parties dating back to the Clinton administration. He oversaw the Human Genome Project under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before ascending to lead the NIH under President Barack Obama. But his leadership at one of the federal government’s top medical bodies has attracted the ire of bioethicists. The NIH under Collins spent millions of taxpayer dollars to fund studies that implanted aborted fetal organs into mice. Dr. David Prentice, an adjunct professor of molecular genetics at the Catholic University of America, said Collins moved the agency backward both ethically and scientifically.

“Sadly, Dr. Francis Collins will be remembered for impeding the development of some of the most promising miracles of science, such as patient-focused therapies using adult stem cells,” Prentice, who serves as vice president of the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon. “His support of biomedical experiments using aborted human fetal tissue, human embryonic stem cells, cloning, and horrifying human-animal chimeras led the NIH in a disappointing direction.”

The NIH did not respond to a request for comment.

The NIH gave at least $2.7 million in taxpayer funds to establish a “pipeline” for fetal research at the University of Pittsburgh since 2015, according to documents released in August after a number of FOIA lawsuits. Scientists used fetal organs to create “humanized mice” to test different diseases and medications. One of these studies, documents revealed, had a quota that 50 percent of the donated fetuses were minorities and 25 percent were black. Another study, funded in 2020 by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, implanted aborted fetal scalps onto lab mice to study skin diseases. 

David Daleiden, founder and president of the pro-life Center for Medical Progress, noted that Collins decided to step down not even two weeks after nearly 100 members of Congress wrote a letter demanding the NIH fully disclose its relationship with the University of Pittsburgh. 

“Dr. Collins’s time as NIH director has been marked by unprecedented levels of taxpayer funding for grotesque and illegal experiments with aborted baby body parts and even live-aborted infants,” Daleiden told the Free Beacon. “Before he leaves the NIH directorship, Dr. Collins should comply with the congressional document requests in full and salvage his legacy by revealing the full truth about government-sponsored trafficking of aborted infants.”

President Donald Trump enacted rules to stop the federal government from conducting aborted fetal research, which the Biden administration overturned in April. Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, said Collins failed to stop ethical malpractice at the agency. She has little confidence that Collins’s successor will put an end to such practices. 

“It is disgusting and disheartening that research on innocent preborn life will continue,” Day told the Free Beacon. “There is nothing ethical about this process. We must stop the exploitation of pregnant women and viable infants.”

The NIH’s budget increased 37 percent over Collins’s tenure to more than $41 billion annually. The agency has yet to comment on who will be Collins’s temporary replacement. President Joe Biden will nominate a new director, who will then be voted on by the Senate.

Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said the NIH should take the opportunity of a leadership change to reallocate its resources toward more ethical medical treatments. 

“Science should always be at the service of human life and dignity, not the reverse,” Mancini told the Free Beacon. “We sincerely hope that the next NIH director will aggressively pursue treatments and healing that promote life, and never exploit the human person under the guise of science.”

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/pro-life-rejoices-as-nih-director-steps-down/

As President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland keeps proving how right Republicans were to keep him off the Supreme Court.

Since his confirmation in March, Garland has repeatedly shown how willing he is to use the Justice Department for politically driven causes — from his handling of the fallout from the death of George Floyd, to his opposition to voter integrity laws, to his memo Monday to the FBI to crack down on parents protesting the decisions of their local school board.

If knee-jerk partisanship in the hands of a term-limited political appointee is dangerous, imagine the same man in a lifetime job on the nation’s highest court.

Most Americans should remember that Garland was the federal judge chosen in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the untimely death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

That nomination was stonewalled by the Republican Senate under then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (even McConnell’s most vicious critics on the right have to acknowledge that act of political heroism for the future of the Republic).

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In an interview Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends,” Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck brought up Garland’s past as a federal judge to explain why the order to the FBI on Monday was so troubling.

“Attorney General Garland was a judge, and he should know better than to try to use the FBI for political speech. So many of the courtrooms that we go into, we see this Greek goddess of Themis who had a scale on her left hand and the sword in her right hand, and she’s blindfolded,” Buck said.

“And she’s blindfolded because justice is blind. Justice is impartial — doesn’t care whether you’re white or black, man or woman, tall or short. Justice should not be used to attack a group of people expressing their opinions at school board meetings, whether they’re in favor of critical race theory or whether they’re opposed to critical race theory. Whether they’re in favor of masks or vaccines or opposed.

“That’s political speech that needs to be protected.”

Check it out here. Buck’s comments about Garland come about the 3-minute mark.

That’s all true, of course. The question is whether Garland believes it.

As conservative commentator Dennis Prager pointed out during the fight over Garland’s nomination, mainstream media outlets and liberal commentators went to huge lengths to paint Garland as the “moderate” kind of judge Americans needed on the high court, when the reality was he was a predictable liberal, likely to side predictably with the left on major issues from abortion to immigration to Second Amendment rights.

Even in an era dominated by lies from the administration — “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” of Obamacare — and lies promulgated by the mainstream media — the “hands up, don’t shoot” that helped launch Black Lives Matter as a movement — Garland’s alleged “centrism” was a major assault against verifiable truth.Is the Biden Justice Department a threat to American freedom?Yes No
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As if to prove it, the attorney general, the very same man whom luminaries at liberal outlets from coast to coast — like The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times — assured the country would be a “centrist,” has taken militantly leftists positions at every opportunity.

Instead of a moderate, Garland is revealing himself to be an attorney general firmly on the side of the progressive left, using the Justice Department to file a lawsuit against Texas over its pro-life law, for instance, or overseeing the treatment of defendants in cases stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion. (Even a liberal publication like The Daily Beast acknowledged the government’s bias, albeit from a twisted perspective.)

But with his latest move, Garland is showing himself to be the kind of AG only a progressive protofascist could dream of.

He’s openly ordering the Federal Bureau of Investigation — the FBI, for goodness’ sake — to keep tabs on the efforts of American parents who don’t want their kids subjected to critical race theory brainwashing, or requirements to keep their faces and noses covered throughout the school day on scientifically questionable grounds. (This isn’t just a view from the conservative side. If New York Media’s The Intelligencer doesn’t buy the mask argument, it’s got holes.)

With his memo on Monday, Garland proved he’s all too willing to wield the powers of the federal government to put the efforts of parents worried about their children’s education and future on a par with domestic terrorism.

At the same time, he’s part of the administration of a president whose political party took the side of actual domestic terrorism last year when mobs tore apart American cities and Democrats cheered them on (or bailed them out).

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Of course, a Garland defender could make the argument that Garland the attorney general is a different creature from Garland as Supreme Court justice — that he’s only fulfilling a role and he would have fulfilled duties on the high court differently. But it’s a hollow point.

Garland clearly thinks he has a legal right to take the actions he has, which means that as a Supreme Court justice, he’d likely approve of similar high-handed tactics on the part of the government (certainly as long as it was a Democratic administration implementing them).

Every day since his inauguration in January, Joe Biden has shown he’s not at all the “centrist” that was sold to the American public by a hideously biased mainstream media during the 2020 election.

Every day since he was confirmed, Merrick Garland has shown the same about himself.

Rep. Buck was right. Garland was a judge and should know better than to give the FBI an order like the one he gave on Monday.

He clearly doesn’t, or he doesn’t care.

And he almost had a lifetime seat on the United States Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term this week, which means all eyes have again returned to the justices’ marble palace at 1 First Street, N.E. This Court term, unlike the last one, promises to be a blockbuster: The hot-button issues of abortion, gun rights, and potentially affirmative action will all be on the justices’ docket. By the end of this term, we should have a definitive answer as to just how “conservative” the putatively conservative, 6 to 3 Republican-nominated majority Court actually is.

And just as all eyes have returned to the Court, observers of all stripes have been presented with a timely reminder as to how the Court’s progressives view their jobs: to wit, as unabashed liberal partisans. That reminder has now come courtesy of the current Court’s most far-left justice, Sonia Sotomayor. It follows an entire career’s worth of similar comments from Justice Sotomayor’s former colleague, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

According to reporting from both CNN and The Washington Post, Sotomayor recently offered what can only be interpreted as a substantive public policy position on S.B. 8, Texas’ recent anti-abortion fetal heartbeat law that has garnered much national attention. That Sotomayor would now offer a forthright political opinion on the topic is hardly unexpected: She dissented from the Court’s correct recent decision to deny Texas pro-abortion plaintiffs’ emergency request to enjoin any enforcement of S.B. 8, lambasting the law at the time as “flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Speaking at an American Bar Association event about diversity, the loose-lipped jurisprude allegedly said, according to CNN: “You know, I can’t change Texas’ law, but you can and everyone else who may or may not like it can go out there and be lobbying forces in changing laws that you don’t like.” Perhaps then realizing in real time that she had overstepped, Sotomayor allegedly then tried to half-walk back her comment: “I am pointing out to that when I shouldn’t because they tell me I shouldn’t. But my point is that there are going to be a lot of things you don’t like.”

It is difficult, likely impossible, to interpret these comments as anything other than Sotomayor actively encouraging the ABA audience to work to alter or repeal S.B. 8. Under standard canons of judicial ethics and federal law (28 U.S.C. 455) itself, Sotomayor should now be forced to recuse from future S.B. 8 litigation at the Supreme Court. She almost assuredly will not do so, of course.

Indeed, similarly left-wing Ginsburg was infamous for making precisely these sort of comments. As but one example, during pending same-sex marriage litigation at the Supreme Court, she haughtily dismissed a Bloomberg interviewer’s question about the Court possibly moving too quickly by constitutionalizing same-sex marriage under the Fourteenth Amendment. “I think it’s doubtful that (constitutionalized same-sex marriage) wouldn’t be accepted” by the whole country, Ginsburg said just a few months before she joined Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion constitutionalizing same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. It is just as ludicrous to now expect erudite “impartiality” from Sotomayor on the Texas Heartbeat Act as it was to expect such impartiality from Ginsburg on same-sex marriage.

The legal left’s long-standing “realist” approach to jurisprudence and judicial philosophy stands in marked contrast to the legal right’s traditionally more wooden “formalist” approach. That approach can be encapsulated by a quip from the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who once wrote: “Long live formalism. It is what makes a government a government of laws and not of men.” In a similar vein, then-Judge John G. Roberts famously said at his 2005 confirmation hearing to be Supreme Court chief justice that the role of a judge is analogous to a baseball umpire whose “job” it is to “call balls and strikes.” (Query whether the chief has since lived up to that standard.)

Sotomayor’s “gaffe” is yet another eye-opening insight into the legal left’s view of the courts: that of transparently political institutions pliable to political (read: judicial) actors’ sheer force of will. The remedy, at this increasingly late hour of the American republic, is not for the legal right to wholly abandon its more traditional, “formalist” fidelities to constitutional text, structure, and history, but rather to embrace a more holistic, morally imbued and substantive conception of the relevant text, structure, and history. The time for an avowedly “neutral” legal positivism has long passed, if it was ever felicitous to begin with. The legal right should not stoop to the legal left’s level, but it must get comfortable with a jurisprudence unabashedly rooted in the morality and justice of the American Founding and substantively oriented to reclaiming that morality and justice from those who seek to destroy it.

There are now foxes guarding the marble palace henhouse. Legal conservatives must wake up to that challenge, lest they be complicit in their own subjugation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/sonia-sotomayor-exposes-the-lie-of-an-apolitical-supreme-court_4033137.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Why won’t they report the verified facts about this D.C. career bureaucrat’s life?

Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes for Health (NIH) and one of the leading public voices during the COVID-19 pandemic will step down from his role following a number of investigative reports into Collins and his underlings.

Appointed by President Obama in 2009, Collins issued a statement this week saying: “I fundamentally believe … that no single person should serve in the position too long, and that it’s time to bring in a new scientist to lead the NIH into the future.”

But it is unlikely Collins’s belief in a revolving door at the NIH that has prompted the move. Rather, with pressure mounting on key public figures such as his minion Anthony Fauci and arms-length brother-in-arms Peter Daszak, it is worth looking at what the media won’t be saying about Collins this week.

The National Pulse has reported:

1. Francis Collins Advises Chinese Military Proxy-Linked Group Working Alongside COVID-19 Gene Storage Firm.

National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins serves on the advisory board of a conference sponsored by a Chinese military-linked genomics firm. The D.C.-based, health industry big-wig and boss to Anthony Fauci has even referred to the controversial company’s founder as a “friend”.

BGI Genomics has been flagged by U.S. intelligence officials for its robust efforts to “collect, store and exploit biometric information” on American citizens through COVID-19 test kits. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the firm has deep ties to both the Chinese Communist Party and its military.

Read more.

2. Collins Admits Funding Wuhan Lab: ‘We Had No Control Over What They Were Doing.’MUST READ:  Wuhan Lab Journal Edited By U.S. Officials, Published Dozens Of Studies From China’s Military.

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institute for Health (NIH), appears to have directly contradicted his underling Dr. Anthony Fauci in a bombshell moment from an interview with Hugh Hewitt.

The revelations further implicate those who approved U.S. grants to the lab, and the EcoHealth Alliance run by the British-born Peter Dazcak – who The National Pulse first reported on back in February.

Read more.

3. EVIDENCE: Fauci’s Bosses Signed Research Deals With Chinese Communist Military Front.

Under the leadership of Dr. Francis Collins – who recently admitted the U.S. had “no control” over the Wuhan lab despite funding it – the U.S. National Institutes of Health signed a memorandum of understanding to boost collaboration with a Chinese Communist Party-run scientific organization funding the People’s Liberation Army.

The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has also funded several studies conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including research focused on bat coronaviruses alongside U.S.-based research groups such as the Anthony Fauci-funded EcoHealth Alliance.

Read more.

4. INVESTIGATION: U.S. Has Funded Over 250 Studies for Chinese Communist Military Researchers.

Various National Institutes of Health agencies – including Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – have funded over 250 studies authored by researchers at institutions controlled by China’s People’s Liberation Army.

Following a unique investigation into the origins of scientific research papers, the whopping level of collaboration with the Chinese military will further concerns in the United States that the political class has surrendered to the Chinese Communist Party. Last week it emerged that the ranking General in the U.S. Armed Forces agreed to tip off China in advance of a U.S.-led attack.

REVEALED: Daszak Admits Fauci Funded Chinese Coronavirus Research at Conference Featuring Hunter Biden-Linked Pandemic Group.

Read more.

5. America Has Given Millions for ‘Research’ At Chinese Communist-Run Facilities Since COVID Outbreak.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has continued to funnel millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund scientific research in conjunction with Communist China since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, including to military-controlled organizations.

Over half of the grants sent since early 2020 came from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Read more.

6. U.S. National Institutes of Health Fires 54 Researchers As Ongoing Investigation Reveals 93% Failed to Disclose Links to Chinese Communist Party

The National Institutes of Health, the foremost research institute under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has investigated 189 researchers for undisclosed ties to foreign countries, 93 percent of which were linked to China.

The fresh round of terminations resulted from an ongoing investigation at the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) into the failure of grant recipients to disclose financial ties to foreign governments.

Read more.

In reality, accountability in a post-COVID era is what likely shuffled Francis Collins off from his otherwise immortal coil at the top of the NIH. Not that the corporate media would ever tell you any of that.

Sources: Former Obama administration communications guru Bill Burton and his company Bryson Gillette are working the high-profile campaign

The Facebook whistleblower who revealed herself in a 60 Minutes interview is getting strategic communications guidance from a top Democratic operative, according to a source with direct knowledge of the relationship, which was confirmed by another half-dozen sources with indirect knowledge of the partnership.

Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette. It is unclear when Haugen’s relationship with Burton and Bryson Gillette began, how big her communications team is, and whether it includes other political operatives.

But Burton is now deeply integrated with an emerging infrastructure on the left comprised of individuals and organizations, including the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology, seeking to press Facebook to more aggressively police political content.

In Haugen’s public testimony, industry and political insiders see a sophisticated communications campaign intended to put Facebook on defense, from a steady trickle of leaked internal documents that fueled a Wall Street Journal investigative series dubbed “The Facebook Files” to the blockbuster 60 Minutes interview to congressional testimony scheduled to begin Tuesday. Haugen on Sunday also debuted a slick personal website in part to field media requests.

“It does have the appearance of being an incredibly well-orchestrated communications campaign,” said the GOP operative Kevin McLaughlin, the former director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Neither Burton nor Haugen responded to a request for comment, though sources say reporters and Burton himself have been open about the relationship.

Haugen’s 60 Minutes interview kicked off a media feeding frenzy, with the story mentioned at least 200 times on cable news since the segment aired, according to a review conducted by the Washington Free Beacon.

Since 2016, both political parties have gone after Big Tech companies like Facebook, with the left charging that the company’s failure to adequately police “disinformation,” helped tip the election to Donald Trump and the right charging that it arbitrarily silences conservative voices.

Burton’s involvement helping to manage Haugen’s public debut suggests that her argument is part of a broader Democratic initiative. A Facebook employee in the company’s now-defunct “civic integrity” division until May, Haugen is calling for the federal government to intervene against the company. Though she did not specify in the Sunday interview what sorts of regulations she might support, she is likely to be pressed on that when she appears on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

Burton himself has also been an outspoken Facebook critic, likening them to tobacco companies that knowingly poisoned people and concealed the health risks of using their products — an analogy Haugen is expected to use in her congressional testimony.

“The thing that the social media companies are doing, it’s sort of like the tobacco companies, like when people first started making and selling cigarettes, people didn’t know about cancer,” he said. “But then they did, and the tobacco companies would sort of tinker with the nicotine to maximize the addiction.”

Haugen is expected to make the same point in her opening testimony tomorrow, according to a copy of that testimony obtained by Reuters. “When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms it caused, the government took action,” her testimony reads. “When we figured out cars were safer with seat belts, the government took action. I implore you to do the same here.”

Facebook pushed back on the report, telling 60 Minutes that the company works diligently to “balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place.”

Now a public affairs consultant, Burton, the founder of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action, also serves on the board of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization founded in 2018 that has pit itself against technology companies like Facebook, arguing that they are incentivized to stoke outrage and polarization at the cost of human well-being. The organization produced the 2020 Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma,” which explores the deleterious influence of social media on its users. Bryson Gillette has done communications work for the Center for Human Technology, according to an event agenda posted online by PR News in which Burton is expected to discuss his work to create a “cultural awakening around the impacts of social media on democracy and our daily lives.”

Haugen echoed that message on 60 Minutes, telling CBS’s Scott Pelley that because Facebook “can be hacked with anger, it’s easier to provoke people into anger.” She continued, “And publishers are saying, ‘Oh, if I do more angry, polarizing, divisive content, I get more money.’ Facebook has set up a system of incentives that is pulling people apart.”

The Center for Humane Technology’s “key advisers” also include Facebook cofounder and former New Republic owner Chris Hughes and is funded by left-wing charitable organizations including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson foundation.

The Center for Humane Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/top-democratic-operative-bill-burton-advising-facebook-whistleblower/

Biden administration officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) want to renew an Obama era regulation that allowed labor unions to skim an estimated $1 billion from Medicaid payments to home healthcare providers.

The proposal “will place a federal stamp of approval on abusive state and union practices to pressure, mislead, and ultimately lock home-care providers into assigning portions of their Medicaid payments to union special interest groups and associated funds,” the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF) said in a comment on the plan.

“Such assignments are generally irrevocable for a year or more, resulting in the diversion of Medicaid payments to third parties for political advocacy and other purposes over the express objections of home-care providers,” the NRTWLDF said.

The Biden proposal from HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) would rescind a 2018 Trump administration rule that upheld the intent of Congress to deny third-parties, including unions, access to Medicaid payments to providers of home-based health care for disabled persons.

Despite a federal law—Section 1902(a)(32) of the Social Security Act—that specifically prohibited assignment of payments to third-parties, the Obama administration adopted a special exemption in 2014 that permitted them for labor unions. The only exceptions recognized by the law cover court orders for wage garnishments, child support orders, and judgements for debts owed to states.

The U.S. Supreme Court also ruled in 2014 that compulsory union payments violate the First Amendment rights of home healthcare workers who prefer not to support union activities.

Home healthcare providers in more than a dozen non-right to work states faced requirements that a portion of their payments be provided to fund union activities, according to NRTWLDF.

Those states were able to enforce such requirements by automatically deducting such fees from Medicaid payments even though doing so violated federal law regarding Medicaid funds.

The skimming equaled an estimated $200 million annually prior to the Trump rule taking effect, according to the State Policy Network. There are more than 400,000 home healthcare providers in the U.S.

“Prior to the [Trump] rule, union officials had siphoned upwards of $1 billion from Medicaid payments, an effort which had been aided by the Obama Administration’s 2014 creation of a special exemption for union officials from Medicaid regulations,” the NRTWLDF said in a statement announcing the filing of its comments on the HHS proposal earlier this week.

“Union officials, especially at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), have long used deceptive and even unconstitutional tactics to divert taxpayer-funded Medicaid payments into union coffers,” the NRTWLDF said.

A spokesman for the SEIU did not respond to The Epoch Times request for comment. When the Trump administration proposed its rule in 2018, however, the SEIU issued a statement opposing the proposal.

In that statement, SEIU described the proposal as “a transparent attempt to interfere with workers’ freedom to choose to join together in a union and advocate for higher wages, better training, and basic benefits like affordable healthcare and paid sick time that are crucial to ensure quality home care for our parents, grandparents and children.”

The SEIU includes among its membership hospital and nursing home workers, particularly in the state of California.

The NRTWLDF claimed in its comment that “the proposed rule will undermine the purposes of Home and Community Based Service (HCBS) programs and facilitate abuses of home-care providers’ rights. HCBS programs exist to provide services to persons with disabilities so that they can live in their homes and avoid institutionalization.

“The proposed rule will divert Medicaid monies from this noble cause to fund union political advocacy, both by union political action committees and by exclusive union representatives (whose conduct is inherently political).

“It is a gross misuse of federal Medicaid funds, as well as morally appalling, for CMS deliberately to funnel millions in federal funds, meant to pay for care for disabled persons, to political organizations for partisan political purposes.”

Unless Congress acts to prevent it or the issuing department changes course, the proposed HHS rule will become effective by the end of 2021.

A federal district court judge in Texas who was appointed by former President Barack Obama has repeatedly violated ethics standards, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Judge Rodney Gilstrap of Marshall, Texas, in the Eastern District of Texas, failed to disqualify himself in 138 cases over eight years in which he or a family member had a financial interest in a company involved in the case before him, according to the Journal.

The Journal recently published the results of an investigation into judicial flouting of a 1974 federal law that bans judges from ruling in cases where they or a family member have an interest, even when assets are held in a trust.

Although Gilstrap is one of 131 judges the Journal said broke the rules, his 138 cases make up about 20 percent of the 685 cases between 2010 and 2018 in which the Journal found the law was violated.

Gilstrap told the Journal via email he did nothing wrong, but would not be interviewed.

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Some corporate giants were in the judge’s docket and in his portfolio, the Journal found, including Microsoft Corp., in which he made 53 rulings;  Walmart, with 36 cases and Target Corp. with 25 cases. The Journal noted that he ruled in favor of Disney in a patent-infringement case, despite having between $100,001 and $250,000 of Disney stock held by either him or his wife.

The Journal noted that in patent infringement cases, judges have a lot of power.

“The more important questions in any given patent case are the small discretionary, often procedural questions that the judge resolves before trial,” Paul Gugliuzza, a law professor at Temple University, said.

The Journal said that 85 percent of the cases Gilstrap heard that were in conflict with the law were in the area of patent litigation.

Gilstrap said he sees no conflict in ruling in cases involving corporations with stocks held in a trust created for his wife and her descendants.

The Journal found some who said that’s wrong.

“The judge must recuse if the trust for the spouse has even one share of stock in a party,” said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who the Journal said wrote a judicial ethics casebook, and reviewed the filings. “It does not matter that the spouse or child have no say in the investment choices.”

Ben Johnson, a law professor at Pennsylvania State University, agreed.

“He would have to recuse,” Johnson said.

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The Journal said Gilstrap shared with it a ruling from the federal judiciary’s ethics committee that said his past conduct was not, after all, following the rules.

The opinion said the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges “requires recusal when a judge has a financial conflict, regardless of the substance of the judge’s actual involvement in the case,” and “encompasses a situation where the Clerk’s Office assigns you a case, even where you do not act.”

Gilstrap promised to change some of his ways.

“In hindsight and considering the attached opinion from the Committee, I now understand that, despite my lack of any involvement or action, such cases result in a need for me to recuse,” he said.

However, the Journal noted that unlike many judges who, after the Journal’s investigation, issued notices to those in cases before them they needed to recuse themselves due to a disqualifying interest, Gilstrap had not done so.

The Journal said that based on data provided to it by Lex Machina, a legal analytics provider, 83 percent of the 6,929 patent cases Gilstrap faced were settled before trial, which is above the 69 percent average.

In trials, he has found defendants infringed upon patents in 34 cases and did not do so in 35 cases. That’s a different ratio from the nation as a whole, in which infringement was found in 277 cases and not in 204 cases, the Journal reported.

President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday unveiled a new rule aimed at protecting an Obama-era program that has shielded over 600,000 illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children.

The proposed rule (pdf) would “preserve and fortify” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, by trying to respond to a court ruling that the program was illegally created.

Then-President Barack Obama ordered the deferred action policy through an executive order but Congress never provided the Executive Branch authorization to allow illegal immigrants to stay in the country, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, a George W. Bush nominee, ruled in July.

Hanen halted the acceptance of any new applications made under the program and remanded to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the memorandum that actually established the program for further consideration. That memo, filed in 2012 by Obama’s attorney general, Janet Napolitano, did not under proper notice and comment rulemaking, which violated federal law, according to the judge.

The new DHS proposal, which will formally be published on Tuesday, is a response to the ruling. It includes many of the same provisions as Napolitano’s memo, including eligibility requirements like living continuously in the United States since June 15, 200.

It would also make additions to the program—among them, letting applicants apply for deferred action from deportation without submitting forms for employment authorization.

People will have 60 days from Tuesday to comment on the proposed rule.

“The Biden-Harris administration continues to take action to protect dreamers and recognize their contributions to this country,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “This notice of proposed rulemaking is an important step to achieve that goal. However, only Congress can provide permanent protection. I support the inclusion of immigration reform in the reconciliation bill and urge Congress to act swiftly to provide dreamers the legal status they need and deserve.”

Immigration activists refer to the illegal immigrants brought to the United States when they were children as dreamers.

In response to the rule, NumbersUSA, a group that seeks to educate policymakers and other Americans on immigration legislation and policies and pushes for lower immigration levels, said on Twitter, “DACA is illegal and unconstitutional.”

Congress has considered but failed to pass legislation for years that would address the approximately 616,030 DACA recipients in the country. Democrats wanted to include a pathway to citizenship in their budget, which they’re seeking to ram through using a reconciliation process, but the Senate’s top rules expert said last week it could not be part of the process.

Biden Administration Moves to Protect Obama-Era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (theepochtimes.com)

Hunter Biden requested a $2 million annual retainer and “success fees” to help unfreeze Libyan assets when his father, Joe Biden, was vice president, according to emails reviewed by Business Insider.

Through an intermediary, the younger Biden offered to help recover $15 billion in Libyan assets that the Obama administration froze during the reign of Muammar Qaddafi. The intermediary, a Democratic donor, in a Jan. 28, 2015, email asked for a “close circle of people” to be involved in the offer “for confidentiality,” adding that Joe Biden was considering running for president. Another email on Feb. 26, 2016, stressed the importance of only a small, close-knit group’s being involved “due to the sensitivities surrounding their involvement.”

The emails further reveal a well-established pattern of nepotism in the Biden family, in which Hunter Biden has made frequent and lucrative use of his father’s political connections. The New York Post in Oct. 2020 released a smoking-gun report that detailed meetings in 2015 between Joe Biden and the head of a Ukrainian gas company—less than a year before the then-vice president pressured government officials to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. At the time, Hunter Biden was being paid $50,000 to sit on on the board of the company.

The Democratic donor involved with Hunter Biden’s Libya deal, Sam Jauhari, advertised Biden’s access to high-ranking members of the State Department, the Treasury Department, then-secretary of state John Kerry, and his father, who Jauhari said had the “Libya file” in the Obama administration.

“Since he travels with dad, he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia,” Jauhari wrote of Hunter Biden, adding that he even “has access to highest level in [China].”

Jauhari warned his correspondent, Sheikh Mohammed al-Rahbani, an Obama donor, that Hunter Biden’s substance abuse may prove an issue.

“His negatives are that he is alcoholic, drug addict – kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches,” Jauhari wrote. Biden was discharged from the Navy Reserve, not the Army, after he tested positive for cocaine in 2014.

Business Insider said it found the emails while “reporting on an unrelated matter,” not among files on Hunter Biden’s now-infamous laptop, which contains emails and documents of Biden that peddle his political connections and images and videos of him abusing drugs and engaging in sex acts with what appear to be prostitutes.

An attorney for al-Rahbani told Business Insider that his client “knows to a certainty that he never spoke to and has no recollection of talking about Hunter Biden.”

Hunter Biden Requested More Than $2 Million To Unfreeze Libyan Assets When Dad Was VP (freebeacon.com)

Daniel Jones investigated claims at the center of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation

Senate Democrats tapped a political operative bankrolled by George Soros to investigate debunked allegations that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia, claims that are now at the center of an indictment in Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation.

According to court filings, a staffer for Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.) enlisted Daniel Jones—a former FBI agent who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Soros—to analyze computer data that purportedly connected Trump’s real estate company with the Russian oligarch-owned Alfa Bank. Democrats pushed the allegation and others about Trump and Russia to build a narrative that Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. The FBI disproved the Alfa Bank claim, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of a larger Trump-Russia conspiracy.

The Alfa Bank allegation has resurfaced in the wake of Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity attorney who represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. A federal grand jury indicted Sussmann on Sept. 16 on charges that he lied to the FBI about his efforts to investigate the purported Alfa-Trump links. Sussmann provided research to the FBI’s general counsel on Sept. 19, 2016, which he claimed showed that Alfa Bank’s computer servers had secret communications with the Trump Organization. Durham was appointed in April 2019 to investigate whether any U.S. officials improperly surveilled the Trump campaign.

Jones, a former FBI agent, has reportedly been called to testify before Durham’s grand jury in Washington. Best known as the Senate Intelligence Committee staffer who investigated CIA torture of suspected terrorists, Jones formed a nonprofit research group in January 2017 to investigate Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.

George Soros and other wealthy progressives have funded Jones’s operation. Tax filings show that Soros gave $1.5 million to Jones’s group, the Democracy Integrity Project, in 2017 and 2018. Television producer Norman Lear has also contributed to a related group formed by Jones called Advance Democracy, Inc. Jones worked closely with opposition research firm Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled a largely discredited dossier accusing Trump of colluding with Russia. Jones’s organizations paid Fusion GPS more than $5 million and Steele more than $1 million for research in 2017 and 2018, according to tax filings.

Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee obtained the Alfa Bank data in early 2017, according to a court filing Jones submitted this month. Jones said the committee asked him in early- to mid-2017 to investigate the Alfa Bank data. The committee also set up a meeting between Jones and a representative for the source who gave the Alfa Bank data to the committee. According to Jones, the committee told him the source for the records had a history of helping U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and had “sensitive contracts” with the U.S. government.

Thomas “Kirk” McConnell identified himself as Jones’s Senate contact in a court filing he submitted in July seeking to quash a subpoena from Alfa Bank. McConnell is a staffer for Sen. Reed on both the Armed Services and Senate Intelligence Committees.

It is unclear whether McConnell or Jones had contact with Sussmann regarding Alfa Bank.

According to the Durham indictment, Sussmann said that a tech executive he represented on other matters provided him with computer logs in July 2016 that allegedly showed suspicious server traffic between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Sussmann briefed journalists and Clinton campaign officials about the data prior to his meeting with FBI general counsel James Baker, according to Durham’s indictment. The indictment also alleges that the unnamed executive pressured subordinates at multiple internet service providers to access non-public information about Trump and his associates.

Alfa Bank’s owners allege that someone fabricated computer data linking Alfa Bank to Trump’s company. The bankers have subpoenaed a number of experts in an attempt to discover the origins of the Alfa-Trump conspiracy theory, including Mikey Dickerson, a cyber expert who worked in the Obama White House.

Dickerson’s connection to the Alfa Bank case is unclear, though he was identified in connection with another Democrat-funded disinformation campaign several years ago. Dickerson founded American Engagement Technologies, a tech startup funded by billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. According to the New York Times, American Engagement Technologies paid a tech firm called New Knowledge to create fake social media accounts to help Democratic candidate Doug Jones during the 2017 special election. New Knowledge created fake Twitter accounts to make it appear that Russian bots were following Jones challenger Roy Moore.

Prior to the exposé about New Knowledge, the Senate Intelligence Committee relied on research from the tech firm for an investigative report on Russia’s social media activities. Tax filings show that Jones’s organizations paid $485,000 to New Knowledge for research in 2018.

A lawyer for Jones did not respond to a request for comment. McConnell did not respond to a request for comment, and the Senate Armed Services Committee declined to comment. Alfa Bank’s lawyers have also not responded to requests for comment.

The Washington Free Beacon was once a client of Fusion GPS. All of the work Fusion GPS performed for the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product appeared in the Steele dossier. For more information, see here.

Senate Dems Tapped Soros-Funded Operative To Research Trump-Russia Conspiracy (freebeacon.com)

Rep. Tom Malinowski said some inmates should be ‘released to their home countries’

While working as a Washington, D.C., lobbyist, a New Jersey House Democrat lobbied for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, where senior Taliban government leadership were then imprisoned.

Rep. Tom Malinowski led the charge to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison—which holds some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and criminals—as early as 2007, arguing through lobbying channels and academic journals. As a Human Rights Watch lobbyist Malinowski advocated a Senate measure introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) that would have closed the facility and released some inmates to their countries of origin.

In 2014, Malinowski joined the Obama administration as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. During his tenure there, the Obama administration released five Taliban detainees in exchange for U.S. Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl. Four of the detainees released in the swap have now returned to power in Afghanistan’s newly installed jihadist government. Norullah Noori, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Khairullah Khairkhwa, and Mohammad Fazl all returned to Afghanistan after stints in Guantanamo and will occupy positions in the Taliban government overseeing issues from defense and intelligence to culture and tourism.

Wasiq is the new director of intelligence for Afghanistan. He was in Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2014. Noori, the Taliban’s border chief, deputy defense minister Fazl, and information and culture minister Khairkhwa also were imprisoned in Guantanamo during that time. During those years, Malinowski actively worked to close the prison camp.

“Guantanamo should be closed,” Malinowski wrote in 2008. “Most everyone agrees that this could be done quickly by bringing the prisoners to facilities inside the United States, at which point some would be prosecuted and others released to their home countries.”

Malinowski’s liberal record on foreign policy has been used against him during his campaigns. When he first ran for Congress in 2018, Republican outside groups including the Congressional Leadership Fund accused him of “seek[ing] legal protections for terrorists” and “criticiz[ing] America for waging war on al Qaeda.”

Malinowski has also faced scrutiny over his questionable stock trades. The congressman is facing an investigation from the House Ethics Committee into whether he violated a federal law that requires he disclose his stock trades.

The New Jersey Democrat is in a vulnerable position going into the 2022 midterms. His already competitive district could be substantially redrawn this year and see its share of Republican voters increase. Malinowski defeated Republican challenger Thomas Kean by just over 1 percentage point in 2020. 

Malinowski did not return a request for comment.

New Jersey Dem Lobbied To Close Guantanamo While Top Taliban Leaders Were Inmates (freebeacon.com)