On August 8, 2022, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Biden Administration declared war on the principle of equal justice for all citizens, and told at least half the American population that they are persona non grata. With the unprecedented FBI raid on the home of a former President, we witnessed the most evident sign yet of the Sovietization of America that is already in advanced stages. With that declaration of war, it is time for the gloves to come off in resisting this mortal threat to our democracy and if there is to be any chance of saving what is left of what once was America.
There are numerous steps that are essential to win the war to save the country, and the first and most urgent is the dismantling of the corrupt organization known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI has been out of control for years, and the agency’s previous commitment to the equal administration of justice is long gone. With the raid on Mar-A-Lago by at least 30 FBI agents and DOJ attorneys, there isn’t even a pretext of that remaining. It is the single largest lawless element in the U.S. today, largely as a result of the agency’s politicization at the highest levels.
I don’t like to predict future events, but this raid and the abuse of power it represents has galvanized opposition to Biden and the Dems — already at record levels — and has further galvanized support for Donald Trump. Trump is almost certainly going to announce his candidacy for the presidency — making the raid not just on a former president, but on a future candidate for president. Even more certainly, the Dems are going to lose control of the House by a significant margin in November, and very possibly the Senate as well. While the Republicans have shown themselves on more than one occasion as capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, one hopes they will be as energetic at rooting out the very real corruption and unequal administration of justice as the Dems have been in pursuing their chimeras and bogus conspiracy theories over the past six years. All with the complete and knowing complicity of their co-conspirators in the mainstream media.
Dismantling the FBI
The first substantive post on this blog, Threading the Needle Badly, which appeared on June 9, 2017, recounted the malfeasance committed by former FBI Director James Comey. I continued to report on that malfeasance, which included commission of felonies by Comey, both before and after President Trump relieved Comey of his duties. Comey’s successor, current FBI Director Chris Wray, has further weaponized the Bureau against Trump supporters and opponents of the Biden regime (a legitimate word to use now — calling it an administration is a euphemism, at best).
The first step in rooting out the rot should be dismantling the FBI, starting at the top and working down. The organization, over the past six years and beyond, has shown itself as beyond reform and incapable of dealing with its own wrongdoers. Congress, once the Republicans gain control, needs to make reorganization of the FBI its first, but not only, priority.
This would not be without precedent. In the 1970s, the Church Committee, headed by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, investigated abuses committed by the intelligence community, the CIA, NSA, and FBI. That was a different time, when Democrats were concerned about abuses and civil liberties, a far cry from their highly politicized position today. Another case of agency reorganization was the merger of the United States Information Agency (USIA) into the State Department in 1999.
Once the FBI is dealt with, attention should be focused on cleaning out the rot in the CIA and the rest of the intel community, which has declared itself by its actions as a government unto itself. That has no place in our democracy. And yes, I am a former intel officer (in the State Department), and at that time I was always told there was a bright line between intelligence and policy. That line is now obliterated, and that merging of the two poses a mortal threat to the country on a number of fronts.
The Dems’ War on Ordinary Americans
The raid on Mar-A-Lago is not the only front in the Dems’ war on America. This week they also managed to push through, on a purely partisan vote, their fraudulently named Inflation Reduction Act. A key feature of that law is provision of $80 billion for the IRS to double in size, adding 87,000 new agents and other employees. Part of the fraud is the claim that these new agents will be to conduct audits on the uber wealthy, when in fact they’re coming after you and me. Most audits, by a wide margin, are done on people earning under $200,000 a year, and it is estimated that 60% of the audits to be conducted by the new agents will be on taxpayers earning less than $75,000 a year.
Add in skyrocketing crime rates in cities nationwide, an open border that has allowed a record number of illegal aliens, along with a flow of deadly drugs, terrorists, and human traffickers, to enter the country, and the targeting of parents unhappy with their childrens’ non-education — branded as “terrorists,” by the slimy Merrick Garland and the DOJ — and it’s clear the Democratic Party has set its sights on altering life in America as we’ve known it. And their vision is not a pretty one.
Four years ago I realized I could no longer vote for Democratic candidates, reversing what had been my voting pattern through most of my life. With the sell out of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema on the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, we see clearly that there are no trustworthy Democrats. If you vote for someone with a D after their name, you are voting for the Sovietization of the country’s justice system and the destruction of our way of life. Sorry, there is no way to sugar coat that. That’s where we are today. We each have to pick our side — I know which side I am on — and the present and future of the country hang in the balance.
Featured Image: The American flag burns, Lukas Gojda via Shutter Stock. Used under Fair Use.
Keeping America in the dark on illegal entries, Adrees Latif/Reuters, via the New York Post. Used under Fair Use.
This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share this piece.
America’s newsrooms could use more people like Marina Ovsyannikova. That’s her there, holding up that sign on Russia’s state-run Channel One TV informing viewers that they’re being lied to about Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
“NO WAR,” the sign says, and then in Russian, “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you here,” and finally ending with, “Russians Against War.”
Facing possible prosecution and severe punishment, Ovsyannikova, a news editor at the station, felt she couldn’t stay silent any more as state television pumped out falsehoods to gin up public support for the country’s invasion of its neighbor. Her dramatic display of dissent was followed in short order by the similarly inspired resignation of Lilia Gildeyeva, a long-time anchor at Gazprom Media-owned NTV — technically a commercial station but closely aligned with the Kremlin — who fled the country before submitting her resignation, saying she feared she wouldn’t be allowed to leave if she resigned first. Just last year Gildeyeva was on a list of journalists praised by Putin for “achievements in developing mass media.”
Some of us have known for a long time that the mainstream media were complicit in deceiving the American public, largely on behalf of the Democratic Party and party elites and in the rabid and irrational manifestation of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). As a recovering journalist, I’m more attuned to these things than most, and have been calling out the lies and deceit in the nearly five years I’ve been posting my pieces on FJY.US and now on Substack. It’s always nice to be right, and as the truth inexorably comes out, things I’ve reported and opined on have almost in all cases been proven correct. It’s bitter pleasure, though, seeing how readily so many people, including people I know personally, bought, and continue to buy, into the lies being fed them.
Unless one is a regular viewer of Fox News — itself maligned by the media and political propagandists — or is willing to search out and read or listen to knowledgeable sources not corrupted by the prevailing political orthodoxy, one wouldn’t have a clue what really is going on in this country.
It only took 17 months and what amounts to a fraudulent presidential election for the exalted New York Timesto finally acknowledge that the laptop reported in October 2020 by the New York Post to belong to First Son Hunter Biden is, in fact, authentic. The Times couldn’t even admit that it had covered up the story at the time it broke — part of a massive media and Big Tech coverup geared toward getting Hunter’s father, Joe, elected president, and to block the reelection of the Orange Menace. It buried the acknowledgment in a story this week reporting how Hunter borrowed money to pay a million dollar delinquent tax bill and remains under a federal investigation into his shady international business deals.
“People familiar with the investigation,” the Times bleated, “said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer [Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud] and others about Burisma [the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Biden served for a cool million dollars a year despite knowing nothing about either energy or Ukraine] and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
Duh. Ya think?
Covering Up Biden’s Corruption
If you were reading my posts — or the New York Post — in October 2020 none of this would be news to you. You’d already know about the connection between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Burisma, and the whole sordid affair. And if you were reading my posts or watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News, you would know about how the corruption involving Hunter ties directly to his father, then Vice President and now doddering about the White House masquerading as President while Ukraine goes up in flames. And if at the time you listened to Carlson’s interview with Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski you’d also know how that corruption extends to China and the Biden family’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
If you didn’t listen to that interview or read the Post stories and other key pieces of information I linked to in my October 29, 2020, piece on Applying RICO to the Biden Crime Family, the Dems, and the Media, now would be an opportune time to do so. Better late than never.
In a coordinated move that would make the Russian censors proud, most of the U.S. media and Big Tech — led by Twitter and Facebook — squelched the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election, going so far as to lock out the Post‘s own accounts and shutting down anyone who even mentioned them. They were given cover by a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials — including such professional Obama Administration liars and current CNN pundits as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, who has admitted previous support for the Communist Party — which said the Hunter laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Never mind that, by their own admission, they had no evidence to support this audacious claim.
“If we are right” — operative word if — “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this,” the letter said.
What would have been correct, and honest, would have been if they wrote “this is the Democratic Party trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.” But that was the last thing they wanted Americans to know as they were already casting their votes. Now these same “former intelligence officials” refuse to withdraw or apologize for their own misinformation discrediting the laptop story.
Following the election, one-in-six Biden voters polled — 17 percent — said they would have changed their vote had they known about the laptop story or the other stories concerning scandals related to the Biden-Harris ticket that the media and Big Tech suppressed. Of course, I wonder what it would take, if all that isn’t enough, for the other 83 percent to change their vote. In any case, what even the 17 percent number says is that the outcome of the election would have been very different had the media and Big Tech not conspired to pull the wool over the eyes of American voters. Russian disinformation, indeed.
Back to the Beginning: Hillary Clinton
As I said, some of us have known all along that the so-called Russian collusion theory, which attempted to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, was a hoax perpetrated by Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Once the Mueller investigation ended in March 2019 with no evidence of collusion, prosecution of the real guilty parties should have been commenced, but wasn’t. The wheels of justice, to the extent they turn at all, turn exceptionally slowly, especially when highly placed individuals are concerned, and 14 months later, in May 2020, we began to get further confirmation of the extent to which the effort to discredit Trump essentially amounted to an attempted coup d’etat.
Once the 2020 election was over it was considered safe to reveal details of the conspiracy that led to the election of Jell-O Joe Biden and, more at issue, the defeat of Donald Trump. The full details of this conspiracy — that’s the actual word used by the author of the Time story detailing the process — were contained in a pivotal February 2021 piece by Time‘s National Political Correspondent Molly Ball. Titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” in it Ball writes that she gained access to “the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum.”
Admitting the story sounds like “a paranoid fever dream,” Ball wrote of “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” And this from a highly placed media person who ostensibly approves of this sort of thing.
“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it,” she wrote. “And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”
Ignoring, if you can, Ball’s use of a semi-colon, you can be excused if you think this sounds a lot like incessant Democratic blathering about “saving democracy,” which you also would not be wrong to equate to the same sort of electoral manipulation that led to the 2020 results. Only they want it in perpetuity. The classic one-party state. All with the full complicity and collusion of the “liberal” mainstream media. Back to the USSR.
In July of last year I posted a piece I titled If You Don’t Read Anything Else This Year, Read This. If you didn’t follow that guidance then, now would be a good time to do it. That piece quotes 36 tweets by researcher, writer, and podcaster Darryl Cooper in which he lays out why, exactly, ordinary people know that the 2020 election was stolen. It closely parallels what Ball says about the conspiracy involved in its “fortifying,” and things I’ve been reporting on all along.
Finally, last month, we got the latest filings from the long-enduring investigation being conducted by Special Counsel John Durham which ties the whole Russian collusion hoax back to its source: Hillary Clinton. We already knew that she was willing to sacrifice national security by conducting classified and sensitive official business on an unsecured private server when she was Secretary of State under Obama, but we now have evidence that her campaign was actually attempting to garner information directly from the Oval Office during Trump’s presidency.
We’ve also had evidence, which predates even the 2016 election and Clinton’s ludicrous “reset” with Russia, of her ties to Putin and his oligarch cronies. We also had evidence, which alarmed even some in the FBI, how Clinton Foundation — the Clintons’ family business — activities in Russia posed a potential threat to U.S. national security and risked providing “. . . a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application.”
With grifters like Clinton and Biden and their cronies, and with media that coverup the facts and perpetuate the lies and deceit, that collude to “fortify” our elections, who needs Russians? It might be too much to hope for a Marina Ovsyannikova, but at least some journalistic ethics and integrity and less malpractice and corruption would go a long way. Even those things, it seems, have gone beyond the range of expectation. And with them goes the viability of our democracy.
Featured image: Marina Ovsyannikova Tells It Like It Is, AFP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.
Hunter Biden, from his own laptop, via the New York Post. Used under Fair Use.
Vlad and Hillary Cozy Up in Vladivostok on Sept. 8, 2012, AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, Pool. Used under Fair Use.
This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
For half a century we’ve heard one political scandal after another called “bigger than Watergate.” None other than Watergate co-reporter Bob Woodward has uttered those words over and over as he peddled his various books across the years, relying on the famed laurels he earned at the early pinnacle of his career. And now, finally, thanks to the plodding but relentless investigation of Special Counsel John Durham, we’re getting details of a scandal that, if substantiated, really is bigger, far bigger, than Watergate.
A recent 19-page court filing made by Durham’s team contains clear indications that the now nearly three-year-old investigation is looking past — far past — indicted Hillary Clinton presidential campaign legal advisor Michael Sussmann. Three times in the submission Durham informs the court that he is conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” not limited to defendant Sussmann. Sussmann, for his part, has pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI, and has answered with his own six-page filing accusing Durham of being wrong about key facts and attempting to prejudice the jury pool.
Part of Durham’s allegations is that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was spied on by Sussmann, working with cybersecurity experts, and touting the information to the media and government agencies, including the FBI and CIA, hoping to spur an investigation of Trump. Which, we may recall, is exactly what eventuated, in the form of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the subsequent ill-fated, but costly and highly destructive, investigation conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
While the Watergate burglars physically broke into Democratic Party headquarters, Durham’s allegations imply an electronic break-in to the Trump campaign. Those kinds of dirty tricks might make the scandal as big as Watergate, but not necessarily bigger. The bigger issue, the one that — again, if substantiated — would make this scandal not only bigger than Watergate, but substantively a direct threat to national security, is that a government contractor, referred to as “Tech Executive-1” in the Durham filing but reported to be early Internet industry pioneer Rodney Joffe, may have been gleaning and passing on data from White House communications during Trump’s presidency. Joffe has not been charged in the case.
Was Trump Right?
Trump has alleged all along that his campaign and, subsequently, his presidency, was spied on. He called the campaign spying “Spygate” and alleged it was conducted by his opponent, who is called Crooked Hillary. He clearly feels, if prematurely, vindicated by Durham’s filing. In an exclusive interview earlier this week Trump told Fox News Digital, “It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you’re going to see a lot of other things happening, having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century. This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.”
In a prior statement, Trump said, “What Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left Democrats did with respect to spying on a President of the United States, even while in office, is a far bigger crime than Watergate.” He called for further criminal charges and implied that the perpetrators, in an earlier time, would face the death penalty, which is what his opponents would have called for were he the offending party.
“Can you imagine,” Trump said in his statement, “if the roles were reversed and the Republicans, in particular President Donald Trump, got caught illegally spying into the Office of the President? All hell would break loose and the electric chair would immediately come out of retirement.”
Asked by a Daily Mail reporter to respond to the allegations contained in the Durham filing, Clinton first ignored the question, walking masked past the reporter and waving. She later came out with a tweet to blame Trump and Fox News for “spinning up a fake scandal.”
“Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y,” Clinton tweeted. ‘The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.”
To back up her denial, she linked to an article in Vanity Fair written by Democratic Party toadie Bess Levin and subtitled, “In less breaking news, Donald Trump remains a moron.”
Aside from the two former candidates sparring, part of the issue revolves around the value of the data mined by Joffe’s group. According to Durham’s filing, the investigation has approximately 17,000 documents related to Tech Executive-1’s companies, including approximately 226 emails relevant to Sussmann’s defense. While it is not clear whether any specific information was gathered from White House communications, it appears that Joffe’s efforts “exploited” the communications to garner what is called DNS — Domain Name System — information indicating which computers White House computers connected with in an effort to garner derogatory information about Trump. One objective, which failed, was to tie Trump to the private Russian bank, Alfa Bank.
Durham Has the Clinton Campaign in His Sights
It’s been known for some time that the Clinton campaign and the bogus Russian dossier, which contained numerous unsubstantiated and false accusations that attempted to tie Donald Trump to Moscow, has been under investigation by Durham’s team. On Nov. 3 of last year the primary source for the infamous dossier, Igor Danchenko, was arrested and charged with lying to federal officials about his Russian contacts during his 2017 interviews with the FBI.
Along with supplying fabricated information to Christopher Steele, the former British intel operative who provided the dossier to the Clinton campaign, Danchenko had lied about never speaking with what was identified as “PR Executive-1,” described as a “long-time participant in Democratic Party politics.” It was later revealed that PR Executive-1 is Charles Dolan, Jr., a former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and also volunteered for her 2016 campaign. It is alleged that Dolan supplied Danchenko with information and Danchenko’s deception about his contacts with Dolan “was highly material to the FBI’s investigation of these matters.”
One key thing revealed in Durham’s recent filing is that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz had not been fully forthcoming about his activities that are relevant to Durham’s probe of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. For one thing, Horowitz had failed to disclose that he met with defendant Sussmann in March 2017. A focus of that meeting was discussion of how the computer of an employee of the Office of the Inspector General had been detected connecting to a virtual private network in another country, information Sussmann had gathered through his connection with Joffe.
Also revealed was that Horowitz had failed to turn over two cell phones belonging to FBI General Counsel James Baker, the official Sussmann is accused of lying to, claiming he was not advising the Clinton campaign while peddling stories of Trump-Alfa Bank connections. Durham has sought possession of a number of FBI phones, including the Baker phones, and is “working diligently” to review relevant materials on them for presentation to the court.
Unindicted Co-conspirators
During the Watergate festivities we heard a lot about “unindicted co-conspirators.” Well, there are plenty of them in the current imbroglio. Not the least of them are the media miscreants who spouted the lies about the alleged “Russia-Trump” conspiracy as if they were fact (and in most cases, still do, and who are now covering up the latest Durham revelations), and Democratic Party apparatchiks, not the least of which are California Representative Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who almost certainly knew, and know, the allegations about Trump were bogus. Working in tandem, those co-conspirators wasted the country’s time, trust, and resources for the better part of five years, and are continuing to squander the national trust and treasure in an effort to drive a stake in Trump’s heart.
There are plenty of guilty parties who may or may not ever be indicted by Durham or anyone else. These include not just Hillary Clinton herself, but also the current occupant of the Oval Office who, along with his boss Barrack Obama, was informed of the phony efforts to defame Trump and allege collusion with Russia to distract attention from Clinton’s illegal use of a private server for conduct of classified government business. They also include former CIA Director John Brennan, who informed Obama and Biden of the plot, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who knew the allegations against Trump were unsubstantiated and who lied to Congress, former FBI Director James Comey, who approved of false filings to the national security FISA Court, his deputy, Andrew McCabe, and former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, all of whom furthered the bogus plot.
We know all this went on thanks to former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Clapper’s successor, who held multiple conversations with Durham and confirmed there was sufficient documentation of all this rot. Perhaps most explosive and damning is a CIA Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) that the CIA forwarded to Comey and Strzok stating that Clinton allegedly approved in the 2016 election “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
Does it get any clearer than that? I don’t think so. Now the question is, will any of these big names, whether it’s that of Hillary Clinton or Comey or Brennan or Obama or Biden, wind up in any indictments? I doubt, and have doubted for a long time, that our dual system of justice will bring justice to the biggest offenders. As I said about three years ago, in March 2019:
“But do I see it happening? Do I believe that tomorrow the sun will come up in the West and set in the East? The depth of corruption, the extent of the collusion, and the two levels of justice we live with in this country all make prosecution of Hillary and most of the other guilty parties about as likely. Sure, there might be some low-level functionaries punished, beyond the resignations and firings that have already taken place. Maybe. But the worse offenders? The most egregious actors? Not likely.”
I hope I’m proven wrong. But I doubt I will be. The better chance is that we’ll see Hillary again vying to be crowned to what she sees as her divinely ordained place as President of the United States. May that divinity have mercy on our souls.
Featured image: Hillary Shocked, source unknown, from BizPacReview.com. Used under Fair Use.
Donald Trump, source unknown, from HuffingtonPost.com. Used under Fair Use.
John Durham, source unknown, from NeoNettle.com. Used under Fair Use.
Adam Schiff, Getty Images, from DailyCaller.com. Used under Fair Use.
This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
This is third part of a posting, Another Swing, Another Miss, that I initially put up on Oct. 2. Part II appeared on Oct. 4 and, ostensibly, this will be the final installment in the series. If the points made in these postings aren’t clear to you by the time you’ve gotten through this third part, we’re both wasting our time.
In the first part I predicted that the Democrats’ latest attempt to pin something, anything, on President Trump would fail, as did all their previous times at bat against him. In that part I promised to explain what “there” there is in the Ukraine imbroglio, the latest incarnation of the Dems’ attempt to undo the results of the 2016 election – a “there” not with Trump, but with former VP and current presidential contender Joe Biden. I kept that promise in the second part and then went on to say there is a much bigger “there” in which Biden and his son Hunter are involved.. Now, in this part, I will explain that biggest “there” of all, which involves China.
If you haven’t read the first two parts in the series yet you should now, and then go on to read this part. All this will make much more sense to you if you understand what leads up to it.
A Profitable Family Outing on Air Force Two
On Dec. 4, 2013, then-Vice President Joe Biden, son Hunter Biden, and Finnegan Biden, Hunter’s daughter and Joe’s granddaughter, stepped off of Air Force Two into the chill winter air of Beijing. They were greeted by children bearing flowers before being whisked off to meetings with top Chinese leaders. With the trappings of a family outing – all, of course, on the U.S. taxpayer’s nickel – the Bidens had arrived on what turned out to be not just a high-profile state visit, but a most lucrative few days for Hunter.
Hunter, Joe, and Finnegan Biden tour Hutong Alley during December 2013 visit to Beijing. What back alley deals did Hunter make during the visit? Photo by Andy Wong – pool/Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.
Remember in Part II of this series I asked you to remember the name “Bohai”? Well, there you have it: Bohai – the name of the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea – represents the Chinese government’s investment in the private fund headed by the son of the then-VP of the United States. The other principal in the fund was Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then Secretary of State John Kerry. Together Bohai Capital and Rosemont Seneca formed Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). The RS stands for Rosemont Seneca and the T stands for the Thornton Group, headed by James Bulger, the nephew of notorious Massachusetts gangster Whitey Bulger. James Bulger’s father, younger brother of Whitey, Billy Bulger, longtime leader of the Massachusetts state senate and ally of John Kerry, serves on the board of the Thornton Group.
One might consider that, just as Hunter Biden had no experience with Ukraine or the energy sector when he made his lucrative deal with Burisma, he had no experience with China (other than a couple of visits preceding the Dec. 2013 trip to meet with top Chinese financial executives) or investment banking when he struck the even more lucrative deal with the Bank of China in formation of BHR. Keep in mind as well the point I made in Part II, that it’s not just impropriety that is the issue, but even the appearance of impropriety that public officials should avoid, an imperative seemingly lost on Joe Biden.
Now here is a little quiz for you: If you think this China deal was completely coincidental and not indicative of Hunter Biden’s leverage of his father’s position and influence, as some members of Congress and of the mass media would have you believe, I’d ask that you rate yourself on a scale of 0-10, where “0” equates to “I am hopelessly naive,” “5” equates to “I am profoundly dense and incapable of connecting the dots,” and “10” equates to “I am a staunch Democratic stalwart and believe only Trump and Republicans can do anything wrong.”
Not Just Some Gaffe: “You Know, They’re Not Bad Folks, Folks”
As questionable as the ethics of Joe Biden might be in allowing his son to leverage his position as VP in the deals Hunter Biden engineered in China and Ukraine, it’s important to consider how his son’s financial pursuits appear to have influenced the senior Biden’s view of global realities, particularly in regard to China. This is particularly critical given Biden’s bid to fill the highest office in the land.
In May of this year, Biden made a statement at a campaign stop in Iowa that boggles the mind of anyone even remotely familiar with the strategic threat China poses to the U.S. and, in fact, the world.
“China is going to eat our lunch?” rhetorically asked the former VP and man that would be president. “Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west. They can’t figure out how they are going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.”
It’s a bit ironic that Biden refers to corruption in China, but even that mention is embedded in the bigger muddle represented by those six sentences. And lest you write this off as just another of Biden’s gaffes, consider that, a couple weeks later at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Biden doubled down on his earlier remarks.
“What are we doing? We’re walking around with our heads down, ‘Woe is me,’ ” Biden told the crowd gathered to hear him. “No other nation can catch us, including China. I got criticized for saying that. I’ve spent as much time with Xi Jinping as any world leader has.”
Joe Biden, right, shares the stage with John Kerry, in front of the flag of Singapore. Photo by AP. Used under Fair Use.
There might be some element of truth in that last claim, but the time Biden spent with China’s president certainly didn’t seem to provide him with any clarification of Xi’s intents or those of the country he heads. Criticism of Biden’s comments came from across the political spectrum, ranging from former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders, one of Biden’s competitors for the top office.
“I’ll stick with the language in our national security strategy and our national defense strategy, which identifies China as a strategic competitor,” said Randall Schriver, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia. And FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said that China “ . . . in many ways represents the broadest, most complicated, most long-term counterintelligence threat we face.”
Even Trump, who regularly is accused by his detractors of not being fully conversant with global geopolitics, chimed in with the obvious: “For somebody to be so naive, and say China’s not a problem — if Biden actually said that, that’s a very dumb statement.” Indeed.
The issue of Chinese investment in Hunter Biden’s equity group becomes a problem for the U.S. when one looks at some of the investments made by Bohai Harvest RST. These include investment in a technology the Chinese government can use to surveil and repress its Muslim minority, as well as in an automotive firm, mining companies, and various technology ventures. Just one of those investments was the $600 million acquisition of Henniges Automotive, an American automotive supplier developing dual-use technologies with military applications, which was headquartered in Michigan. BHR took a 49 percent stake in the venture, with the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a Chinese state-run military contractor, acquiring the majority and controlling interest in the company.
Go along to get along might be Biden’s motto. Money makes the world go ’round, doesn’t it?
Pelosi’s Invention
So now, getting back to where all this started, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff want to Impeach Donald Trump for wanting to look into Joe Biden’s role in his son’s profitable business dealings in Ukraine and China. In any sane world this would appear to be beyond the bounds of reason, much less decency. But this isn’t a sane world. Rather, it’s the whack-o and thoroughly corrupt world of U.S. partisan politics.
Actually, while Schiff, who has his own questionable Ukraine connections, has been annointed head of the “impeach Trump” bunch in the House (keep in mind that impeachment usually falls to the House Judiciary Committee, headed by the incompetent Jerry Nadler, not the Intelligence Committee), Speaker Pelosi has held back from actually calling for impeachment. Her solution is to create what she calls an “impeachment inquiry.” Keep in mind that there is no Constitutional provision for anything called an “impeachment inquiry.” Nor is there any law that provides for such a thing. The whole concept is Pelosi’s invention. Ostensibly this is her way of bowing to pressure from within her caucus and to keep up harassment of the President, of continuing to throw whatever accusations, no matter how specious or lacking in basis, at him, all of which will be dutifully reported by the sycophantic mass media, while avoiding putting the whole matter to a vote.
It’s obvious to Pelosi that, lacking anything of real substance, even if the House votes to impeach Trump, there is absolutely zero chance that the Republican-controlled Senate would convict him and remove him from office, especially given polls that show little public support for impeachment. Such an outcome would represent a political embarrassment to Pelosi and a potential disaster to the Democrats, and one that would come in an election year that could not just doom the Dems’ hope to re-take the White House but even their chances of retaining control of the House. It also helps detract from the utter lack of anything of substance coming out of the Democratic-controlled House, leading to public approval ratings of Congress at and below an abysmal 19 percent level. Thus, we have this so-called “impeachment inquiry.”
Joe and Hunter Biden at Georgetown-Duke basketball game with the senior Biden’s boss, Barack Obama. Photo by Nick Wass/AP. Used under Fair Use.
In the midst of the ongoing firefight I think it would be naive not to expect the power-hungry Hillary Clinton from trying to exploit the whole morass and climb back on to the wagon she hopes will lead to her nomination as the Democratic candidate in 2020 and, ultimately, the presidency, which she sees as her birthright. Never mind how this might play out with voters. This is a matter of Hillary’s imperial, even divine, vision she has for her place in history. She already has been making her presence known after relative silence over the past three years. Again, the reality that whether it benefits Hillary or not, the current brouhaha will blow back on Joe Biden is not lost on Pelosi. As I earlier postulated, I think Pelosi and other influential Dems have realized that Biden can’t beat Trump and so are trying to knock him out of the race. It will be interesting to see what is thrown at him by his fellow contenders at the next Democractic Presidential Debate on October 15.
Of course lots of things might change in the coming weeks and months. Little is a given in politics, all the less so in the overwrought atmosphere presently prevailing. But all things being equal, this is how things look at this juncture, and thus my prediction that, for all the hoopla, the current wailing and gnashing of teeth will equate to one more swing and one more miss for the Dems as they flail about in their attempt to bring down the duly elected President of the United States.
Set your alarm for Nov. 3, 2020, and stay tuned to this space meanwhile, if you can bear to watch as more of this pathetic drama plays out.
Featured image: Joe, Finnegan, and Hunter Biden deplane from Air Force Two in Beijing. Photo by Telegraph.co.uk. Used under Fair Use.
This is a continuation of a posting, Another Swing, Another Miss, that I put up on Oct. 2. If you haven’t read it yet you should now, and then go on to read this part. What follows here will make much more sense to you if you understand what leads up to it.
In the first part I promised to explain what “there” there is where Joe Biden is concerned in the Ukraine imbroglio which certain members of Congress are attempting to pin on President Trump. I will explain the Ukraine “there” in this segment, which serves as a preface to what, in my estimation, is a far greater “there” where Biden and his son Hunter are involved: China.
Now, let’s look at where the Ukriane “there” that is, is. And it lies with the Bidens, Joe and Hunter, and Hunter’s associates, including the stepson of former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry. Reverting back to the senior Biden’s braggadocio about his threat to the Ukrainians, with which I began Part I, Biden claims it was the consensus of the U.S. government that the prosecutor that was the object of his threat, Viktor Shokin, was corrupt and had to go. But recent investigations by reporter John Solomon found that Shokin has sworn to a European court, under oath and penalty of perjury, that he was in fact investigating Burisma Holdings, the energy exploration and production company that had taken Hunter Biden onto its board.
In his statement to the court, Shokin said, “The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors. On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation.”
Consider that Hunter Biden had no experience either in the energy sector or in Ukraine, and yet he was brought on as a board member and hired as a consultant and paid up to $50,000 a month for this “expertise,” with much larger sums going to his private equity firm. This came within weeks’ of his father being named by Barack Obama as U.S. “point man” to the Ukraine. Even The New York Times reported in December 2015 that Burisma and its oligarch-billionaire founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, were under investigation by the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Plausible Deniability?
Joe and son Hunter Biden, right, play golf with Burisma board member Devon Archer, far left, in August 2014. Used under Fair Use.
It’s a general principle that liars often trip themselves up because they can’t get their stories straight. While Joe Biden insisted he had no knowledge of this son’s business dealings and never discussed them with his son, Hunter said he did discuss them with his father – albeit only once, according to Hunter. And then, lo and belold, Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson this past week revealed an August 2014 photo of the senior Biden golfing with son Hunter and fellow Burisma board member and Hunter business associate Devon Archer. Archer had joined the Burisma board in April 2014, with Hunter Biden coming aboard the Burisma board the following month. Ever hear of “plausible deniability”? Apparently that’s what the senior Biden was hoping for until the plausibility of his denial got blown.
But wait! It gets better!
Hunter Biden and the stepson of then Secretary of State John Kerry, Christopher Heinz, had formed Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm, with Archer, a former college roommate of Heinz, who was the managing partner. The New York Times has reported that, after adding Archer and Biden to its board, Burisma paid $3.4 million to a company known as Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC (remember that last name, “Bohai,” which forms the basis for the bulk of the Biden iceberg). Apparently one of the three business associates, at least, saw the potential conflict of interest in this arrangement. Shortly after Biden and Archer’s association with Burisma was announced, Heinz, who had been a major fundraiser for his stepfather, sent an email to two of Kerry’s top aides at the State Department insisting he had no involvement with the Burisma deal. The conservative think tank Citizens United obtained a copy of the email through a FOI request.
“This email raises a lot of questions,” Citizens United President David Bossie said to the Washington Examiner. “Why would Chris Heinz distance himself from Hunter Biden’s decision to join Burisma’s board in an email to John Kerry’s senior staff at the State Department? It’s time for Joe Biden to answer questions about his family’s business in the Ukraine and what his own role was in those dealings.”
Added Bossie, “These are questions that congressional oversight committees should be demanding answers to.” Should be, but so far haven’t, choosing instead to pursue Trump.
Archer would subsequently resign from Rosemont Seneca and Burisma when he was arrested by federal agents in May 2016 on charges of defrauding a Native American tribe. A federal judge later overturned Archer’s conviction on the charges, citing insufficient evidence. But meanwhile, part of the investigation of Burisma being conducted by Prosecutor Shokin, whom the senior Biden managed to have fired, involved looking into the role the company played in the loss of $1.8 billion of the $3 billion in aid the U.S. provided to the Ukraine under the Obama Administration. And any responsible member of Congress, or any citizen, really, would question that the President of the United States would want this matter investigated? Really?
Joe Biden reminding former Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko that Poroshenko was paying for lunch, at the Nuclear Security Summit held in Washington in March 2016. Former SecState John Kerry, left, looks on. It was more than a lunch that Biden’s son managed to take out of Ukraine. Photo by Jonathan Ernst, Reuters. Used under Fair Use.
The official rules governing State Department employees require not just the avoidance of impropriety, but even the appearance of impropriety in their dealings. I wonder how much the former Vice President thought about the appearance, much less the substance, of what was going on as he dragged son Hunter along on his official coattails. As a Foreign Service officer, I used to have misgivings when someone or other would offer to buy me lunch. I’d usually reciprocate the gesture, anyway, and it would have taken a lot more than a bowl of pasta or a plate of grilled fish to influence me in execution of my duties to look after the interests of the U.S. taxpayer. But I guess not having a well placed daddy, as Hunter Biden did, might have deprived me of entrée into opportunities much more lucrative than a lunch.
The intricately interwoven net of connections and corruption involving highly placed members of the Democratic Party that come together in Ukraine defies any ability to diagram it. You, gentle reader, may wonder why the second poorest country in Europe should figure so highly in U.S. politics. It is more than that Ukraine is a surrogate in the West’s antagonism with Putin’s Russia. What is more salient is that the country is one of the world’s most corrupt. Transparency International gives Ukraine a rating of 32 points out of a perfect score of 100, ranking it as the 120thmost corrupt country out of 180 ranked. Corruption is endemic in the former Soviet republic, which The Guardian rates as “the most corrupt nation in Europe.” What better place to pursue corrupt schemes than where the ground has already been prepared and sown?
Now you may recall how I asked you, higher in this piece, to remember the name “Bohai,” as in Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, the company in which Hunter Biden is a principal and which was paid $3.4 million by Burisma Holdings. That is the link to an even bigger “there” there for the Biden father-son duo than the Ukraine deal, and it leads us to a much bigger actor on the world stage: China. Stay tuned for Part III along the trail as we go from Kyiv to Beijing and the biggest payday yet for the younger Biden.
