Tag: Hunter Biden
Covering up the cover-up

Covering up the cover-up

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That’s a photo of Attorney General Merrick Garland. If he looks like a rabid weasel, that’s because he is exactly that. Ever embittered for being denied a place on the High Court in the dying days of the Obama administration, Merrick Garland now takes out his resentment on all the country not aligned with this ever-more-unpopular regime and the Democratic Party more generally. Any thought of maintaining a modicum of equal justice by the DOJ he heads has been long jettisoned, despite the AG’s high-sounding rhetoric. This was never more in evidence then when Garland made his bogus appointment Friday of David Weiss as a “special counsel” in investigating Hunter Biden’s various crimes.

If there is a more clear case of the fox — or in this case, the weasel’s minion — guarding the hen house, one would be hard-pressed to think of it. Here are the simple facts that illustrate the relationship:

  • Weiss is the same federal prosecutor who has been dragging his heels in his supposed “investigation” of Hunter Biden for nearly four years, ever since Hunter’s now infamous laptop came into the FBI’s possession in December 2019.
  • Weiss is the same federal prosecutor who allowed the statute of limitations to run on Biden’s failure to file taxes from 2014-2016 and then let him skate for years of not filing timely returns on millions of dollars of income by turning all that into two misdemeanor charges (try that stunt yourself and see what happens to you).
  • Weiss, again, turned a gun charge against Hunter — a charge that, in virtually 100% of other cases, results in jail time — into an agreement to let him go into a diversion program and exactly zero days behind bars. So much for this administration’s bleating about guns.
  • In an unprecedented move, Weiss also was willing to forego prosecution on other criminal matters still under investigation, such as Hunter’s violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Besides the obvious conflicts of interest, the first provision of the Special Counsel law states that the special counsel shall — not should, not could, not be preferred to, but shall — come from outside the government. Someone who supposedly doesn’t have any vested interest in the outcome of an investigation. Instead, Weasel Garland dug deep into the very guts of the beast he heads and pulled out Weiss. Weiss, who Garland — previously, under oath, and quite untruthfully — asserted already had the same powers as a special counsel.

But wait! you shout. The nation’s top law enforcement officer can’t be allowed to get away with violating the statute! Well, dear naive reader, the statute ends by stating there is no mechanism for remedying a violation. Don’t you just love how those in power write statutes that benefit them and no one else?

By the way, don’t be led astray by those who claim Weiss was a Trump appointee. Yes, technically speaking, he was. But he was put forth into nomination by Delaware’s two Democratic senators and its Democratic Party structure, all part of the First State’s political snake pit of which Joe Biden has been a leading member since God was a boy, and Trump simply rubber-stamped the appointment. Not his finest act.

Unraveling the sweetheart deal

That’s not a weasel in the photo above. It’s U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika who was expected to approve — but didn’t — the DOJ’s sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden. And that explains why now, after all this time, after making the sweetest of sweetheart deals in the history of sweetheart deals, with the President’s son, Merrick sees the need to officially give Weiss special counsel powers.

We need just go back a couple of weeks to when Noreika, also in Delaware, saw through all the holes in the deal offered Biden by the DOJ and sent it back to the drawing board. Judge Noreika was expected to just pass her blessing on the deal, as would be expected of one of the Delaware political morass dwellers. But much to everyone’s surprise and both sides’ dismay, the judge — to quote Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacre — “wasn’t going to look at the eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was,” and it was an (un)typical case of “American Blind Justice.” Noreika actually read the text of the deal and she picked out a paragraph in it giving Biden immunity from prosecution forever and ever. Aren’t there some things still under investigation, she had the utter temerity to ask? Wouldn’t this be unprecedented? Uh, yeah, well, yes, your honor, the government lawyers had to admit. So, of course, there’d be no immunity for them.

Biden’s and his attorneys didn’t like that idea, which they said they hadn’t agreed to, so they pulled out of the deal right there in the courtroom — even though they effectively were on the same side as the government on it — and Biden pleaded not guilty to the implied crimes alleged in the deal. The DOJ would have to take the charges to trial and Hunter would have a chance to defend himself against them. But you see, dear naive reader, that’s about the last thing the government, doing the bidding of Hunter’s daddy in the White House, wants. So now what was called for was covering up the cover-up represented by the sweetheart deal, and that is where Garland’s appointment of Weiss as special counsel comes in.

Covering up the cover-up

The photo above portrays two other weasels. They may look like Joe and Hunter Biden, but they’re weasels through and through. So, if you want to know the real objective of any of this chicanery, it’s to keep all the blow back of Hunter’s misdeeds from reaching his daddy, the “Big Guy” mentioned in Hunter’s own emails that were found on his laptop. The Big Guy, who increasingly can be, has to be, seen as the real head of the Biden crime family. So to understand how Garland and the administration think this will work, consider that:

  • There have been no indictments nor any charges filed against Hunter. The most critical violations expire with the statute of limitations in October, just two months off. If there are no indictments, no charges, Hunter is off the hook for them and he can walk away unscathed.
  • Weiss can take his case anywhere in the country, which means he can judge shop to have venue changed away from Delaware and from Judge Noreika and get a judge more amenable to the whole corrupt plan and who will approve a new but equally sweet sweetheart deal.
  • By avoiding a trial, the administration also avoids the discovery and testimony that can definitively tie Joe to Hunter’s illicit overseas business deals. Again, keep in mind that this concerns Hunter only to a trivial amount. The real objective is protecting the Big Guy, his father, the President.

Of course, in a country with a fair and unbiased media none of this would fly. It would be considered the biggest political scandal of half a century, if not forever. But those in power know we don’t have that kind of fair and unbiased media, and the official state media — compliant to the wishes of the Democratic Party — are doing their utmost to cover the whole affair up. In fact, some readers may be seeing some of this for the first time if the likes of NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, or the Washington Post, and some other reliably biased outlets, are the sources for what passes for their news. A democracy starved of truthful coverage of its alleged leaders cannot function nor survive. And that’s where we are at today.

But even as the state media does their best to bury this story, there are things underway in the (barely) Republican-controlled House of Representatives. This latest move by Garland, combined with the evidence being uncovered through banking records showing tens of millions of dollars funneled from overseas sources to the entire Biden family through a maze of 20 shell companies, as well as the revelations made by Hunter business associate Devon Archer to Congress that directly tie Joe to Hunter’s deals, are pushing things closer and closer to Speaker McCarthy declaring an impeachment inquiry against the President. And with that comes subpoena and discovery power that will bring the whole sordid matter into the limelight. Even the state media will find that hard to ignore.

Note: No weasels were harmed in the writing of this piece. Also, no insult was intended to the actual animals. It’s the human weasels we’re referring to derogatorily.

Featured Image: Omniverous, FotoEmotions, via Pixabay. Used with permission.

Judge Maryellen Noreika, U.S. District Courts. Public domain.

Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden. Photo by Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

 

 

 

 

 
It’s Time to Break Up the FBI

It’s Time to Break Up the FBI

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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.

While the FBI and DOJ conduct their ongoing witch hunts against Trump and his coterie, the blatant criminality of the Biden family is blithely ignored. Just as the egregious criminal offenses committed by Hillary Clinton are ignored. It is only if your name is Trump that the heavy hand of justice is mustered against you. The concept of equal justice under the law no longer applies in this country, which should be a cause for concern for every American.

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.

Marina Ovsyannikova holds sign protesting war in Ukraine on Russia's Channel One TV
Back to the USSR: America’s Media Corruption

Back to the USSR: America’s Media Corruption

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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.”

While many in Russia know they’re being lied to by their so-called news media, many Americans have been slow to catch on that their so-called news media have been lying to them, too. Incessantly fed tall tales of “Russian collusion” and “Russian misinformation” and “Russian interference in American elections” by their own print and broadcast news sources, Americans have been led down a path of divisiveness, lies, coverups, and political fraud that would put Russian propagandists to shame.

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 Times to 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?

Hunter Biden himself from his laptop

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.

Hillary and Vlad Vladivostok Sept 8 2012

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.
Applying RICO to the Biden Crime Family, the Dems, and the Media

Applying RICO to the Biden Crime Family, the Dems, and the Media

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At the end of my last piece in this space, I promised to discuss why, and how, the RICO statute – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – can and should be applied to the Biden crime family, the Democratic Party which has protected and furthered it, and the mass and social media that have engaged in a deliberate cover-up of its criminal activities. That’s what I will do in this piece.

Let me make some things clear up front. First and foremost, this is not about partisan politics. This is about corruption and crime that goes so deep that every American, regardless of political preference, needs to be not just concerned, but outraged. As a matter of disclosure, I will say that I support Donald Trump and will vote for him on election day, not so much because I am a huge fan of Trump – though I have more reasons to be one this time around than I did four years ago – but because the alternative is utterly unacceptable, and should be to any right-thinking voter. The pity is that so many people have already early voted without full knowledge of key facts that may have influenced how they voted.

Second, I’m not going to try to detail all of Joe Biden’s wrongdoing. That can take (and has taken) books. I’ve laid out in some detail much of the wrongdoing in my posts over the past year, and I urge to you read the primary stories where I laid out the corruption fostered by Biden in Ukraine and China. Many of the conclusions I drew then and in subsequent stories concerned how Biden’s son Hunter exploited his father’s position as Vice President of the United States to further his own business and profit interests. We now have compelling evidence that not only confirms what I detailed in those pieces, but that goes further to clearly and unambiguously implicate Joe Biden himself in clear abuse of his position and illegal profiteering, with the extent of the wrongdoing taking in many more countries, including Russia, Kazakhstan, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

“Plausible deniability”

Rather than simply repeat information that now is publicly available – though repressed by most in the mainstream media and censored and blocked by the social media giants – I urge you in the strongest terms to go directly to the primary sources (links below) for confirmation that this is not just speculation at this point, and it decidedly is not Russian disinformation, as frauds and liars such as Calif. Rep. Adam Schiff would try to mislead you into believing. Both John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence, and the FBI, the latter of which seized the Hunter Biden laptop in December 2019, have confirmed that the emails are not the product of Russian misinformation.

Foremost in your own investigation, if you did not watch it in real time as it aired on Fox News on Oct. 27, spend the time to listen to Tucker Carlson’s hour-long interview with Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner with the Bidens, who lays out exactly the highly dubious nature of the Bidens’ business activities and Joe Biden’s role in them (Bobulinkski, among other things, confirms that it is Joe Biden who is referred to as “the big guy” and “the chairman” in the emails contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop):

Tucker Carlson interview with Tony Bobulinkski – video and transcript of the full interview on the RealClear Politics site

Read and download the full report (below) of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance – focus especially on the summary, and on pages 65-87 of the report:

Final Report – Homeland Security/Finance Committees

Read the transcript of former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s speech to the Republican National Convention in August in which she outlines the corruption of Joe Biden and the Biden family

And read the stories in the New York Post about the emails and other items on Hunter Biden’s laptop:

The initial Oct. 14 story about how emails reveal how Hunter introduced a top Burisma official to his father.

Oct. 15 story detailing Hunter Biden’s murky business dealings in China

Oct. 16 story about Hunter’s troubled life and pained soul

Oct. 23 story about how Biden business group eyed N.Y. Gov. Mario Cuomo and Sen. Chuck Schumer for deals

Oct. 27 piece by Michael Goodwin in the Post about Joe Biden meetings

See an index of more of the Post‘s Hunter Biden stories

At one point in the Carlson interview, Bobulinski, a former Naval officer, said this:

“And I’m — I’m thinking about the Biden family, like, how are they doing this? I know Joe decided not to run in 2016, but what if he ran in the future? Aren’t they taking political risk or headline risk?

“And I remember looking at Jim Biden [Joe Biden’s brother and a campaign adviser, and one of the main beneficiaries of the Biden family business] and saying, how are you guys getting away with this, like, aren’t you concerned?

“And he — he looked at me and he laughed a little bit and said, ‘plausible deniability.’ ”

You may recall that the administration of Richard Nixon attempted – unsuccessfully, as it turned out – to cover its tracks during Watergate through application of “plausible deniability,” and it’s been used as a form of cover by the CIA going back to the Kennedy administration.

The RICO Act

The RICO Act was passed in 1970 to combat crime conducted as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. It targets organizations, and not just individuals, engaged in such criminal activities as illegal gambling, money laundering, bribery, kidnapping, extortion, sex and drug trafficking, murder, counterfeiting, and embezzlement, among others. To obtain a RICO conviction, the government must prove two or more covered criminal acts over a 10-year period, and must show that a defendant was invested in, maintained an interest in, or participated in a criminal enterprise that was involved in interstate or foreign commerce.

Read the full text of the RICO Act here

If you look at the Biden situation, referring to the above sources, several elements appear to fall under the RICO Act:

  • An ongoing enterprise
  • More than two instances of possible criminal activity
  • Involvement in interstate or foreign commerce
  • Potential criminal activities, including:
    • Extortion (using U.S. public funds, adding an additional level to the offense)
    • Bribery
    • Money laundering
    • Tax evasion
    • Violation of FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act)
    • Violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
    • Sanctions violations (negotiations to acquire a percentage of the Russian state-controlled energy company, Rosneft)

Any of the actions of the Biden family would be bad enough, but what becomes a matter of grave national concern are the deliberate and coordinated actions of the Democratic Party, Party-affiliated PACs, the mass media, and social media, to cover up the various potential offenses committed by Joe Biden, a candidate for President of the United States, and to prevent a large percentage of the American electorate from gaining knowledge of those offenses. This could have lasting impact on the country, and given the criminal nature of the actions being concealed, these parties are implicating themselves in their conduct and, therefore, should also be investigated for RICO violations.

If you have any doubt that this cover-up is deliberate and coordinated, all you have to do is consider that no mainstream broadcast network, other than Fox News, has spent any time reporting on any of this. Even worse than the usual lack of any kind of journalistic vetting of Biden or his running mate, you would have heard how the whole email thing is a product of “Russian disinformation.” Never mind the enormous resources and time the media spent on the last bout of “Russian disinformation,” waged allegedly to support Trump, which turned out to be a complete hoax. This time around, this matter is far from a myth or a hoax, but no attention is being given to it by the mass media. Publicly supported NPR went so far as to state outright that they won’t cover the Biden email scandal.

It has been credibly reported that officials of Democrat-controlled PACs called major media chiefs following the Bobulinski interview and threatened that they would have no access to a Biden administration if they carried any news of the interview. The result: Zero minutes of coverage on any media network outside Fox News. This goes beyond mere journalistic malpractice, which has become a commonplace. This is extortion, and by being complicit in it the media has become an accomplice to a crime. Given the national interest in the outcome of the election and the ability to make valid judgments about the candidates, and the very real possibility that a Presidential candidate could be compromised with America’s leading adversary, Communist China, I would argue this should at minimum merit a RICO investigation, and possible prosecution, by the Justice Department.

As troubling, Tucker Carlson is reporting as I’m writing this, on the night following the Bobulinski interview, that a package of original documents associated with the case, shipped cross-country from New York to Los Angeles by major national private courier, arrived opened and empty, and a thorough investigation by the courier company could not reveal what happened to the documents or who was involved in absconding with them. These are tactics more associated with Communist China or the former Soviet Union. But this is what is happening in 2020 America, a week before the most critical election in our time.

Bobulinski is reported to be staying at a location remote from his family in order to help protect his family from attacks.

Be aware that at no time has Joe Biden or his campaign denied the existence of the Hunter Biden emails. The best they can do is try to discredit how they came into the possession of the Post, which, of course, is Russia, Russia, Russia. Keep in mind that the U.S. had a Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resign his office exactly 47 years ago this month for corruption that is probably vastly eclipsed by Biden’s corruption. How the country has changed since that time, when such things were taken seriously. What is happening now with the media refusing to cover a major corruption story is unprecedented. The overseas media is covering this story more than the American media, which is scandalous.

Jack Dorsey lies under oath to the Senate

In my earlier post, Democracy Dies in Darkness – which I consider perhaps the most significant piece I’ve written in my 50-plus-year journalism career – I expressed the alarm every American should share at the way the social media giants, Twitter and Facebook foremost among them, have suppressed the Post stories, and retweets of them. On Oct. 28, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lied under oath to Sen. Ted Cruz, falsely and repeatedly claiming the block against the Post had been lifted. It has not been lifted, and the Post went on to relate how other media outlets were content to stand by as Twitter attempted to get the Post to essentially retract its documented stand, not unlike what would happen in an authoritarian state.

Along with being investigated for RICO violations, one hopes that Cruz and other senators to whom Dorsey lied make a criminal referral for perjury naming Dorsey.

“The time for talk has passed,” said Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. “Take away the special status given these tech companies.”

Hawley has been a consistent critic of the tech companies, and an advocate of removing the Section 230 protections afforded them and which shield them from liability based on their biased actions. But as Hawley pointed out, it was two hours into the hearings when Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act even came up, indicative of how Congress has not shown any resolve in doing anything substantive to rein in the enormous power – and damage being done to our democracy – of the tech giants.

Already in a Brave New World

It would be inaccurate to say that we are facing loss of our democracy if these things are allowed to continue. In effect, we are already there, and we have clearly entered this Brave New World where truth is turned on its head and thought control is forced on us. Should there be a Democractic victory, as illegitimate as it might be, in next week’s elections, we are facing entrenchment of these things on a permanent basis, as I described in my last piece where I asked if America is ready for the one-party state Party leaders have in mind.

Perhaps, you might ask, how people can be so ready to sell out their own country and its freedoms in favor of an authoritarian enemy and system? But consider how for decades there were many Americans – and these included journalists, teachers, scientists, artists, and others – who sold out to the former Soviet Union. They did this in support of their ideology, their view of what a “just” society might look like, their belief, as misguided as it was, that Soviet Communism represented a better solution for the country.

Why should we be surprised now that there are those today – including those same categories of people who sold out to the Soviets, and maybe now throw in some politicians, corrupt and otherwise, too – who are ready to toss in with our leading adversary. That includes one of the two candidates for President of the country. After all, Joe Biden himself has said it: “Come on, man, I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.”

Again, the state of affairs in 2020 America.

Featured image: Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, Larry Downing, Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Tony Bobulinski, Fox News. Used under Fair Use.

Jack Dorsey on the cover of the New York Post of Oct. 29, 2020. Used under Fair Use.
Democracy Dies in Darkness

Democracy Dies in Darkness

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Democracy dies in darkness. If you care at all about the very survival of American democracy, you should be absolutely terrified of what is happening right now with the cold-blooded and utterly partisan repression of information being perpetrated by the social media giants, bolstered by the mainstream media. Unprecedented in the nation’s history – in the world’s history – it is not government carrying out this bald-faced censorship, but private enterprises, arguably the most powerful corporations on the face of the earth.

This frightening trend toward non-governmental repression, whether it is from the social media giants, cancel culture, or militant forces on the left such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, was the subject of my recent posting on Banned Books Week: Canceling of Thought in 2020 America on my Stoned Cherry blog. In just two weeks, its prescience has come to the fore in what I would assess to be the single biggest threat facing our democracy.

When the New York Post broke the story confirming what many of us have long suspected, that former Vice President Joe Biden had used his official position to favor the business and financial fortunes of his son, Hunter, and, worse, may have himself gained vast financial benefit, not just in Ukraine but in China, the social media giants Twitter and Facebook immediately shut down the story. They then went even further, and blocked any attempts to repeat the story, such as through retweets, and even shut down the accounts of the Post itself and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. The mainstream media, in lockstep, hardly even mentioned, or downplayed, what the Post reported, and Biden and his campaign have been virtually silent on the story, and has not been pressed on it. You can be excused if you feel you’re in Belarus, Russia, China, or even North Korea, and not in the United States of America, with the concerted attempt to keep the public from even knowing about this story.

What we are witnessing is the utter crushing of the free flow of information in this country, and it is coming from private, but extraordinarily powerful, actors. And it is coming entirely from one side of the political spectrum. This is something I have been warning about on this blog for years now, but it has now reached a critical state.

Keep in mind that the Post is not some frivolous journal. Depending on the method and time of calculating circulation, its readership ranks anywhere from No. 1 to No. 6 nationally, and, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, it is the oldest continually published newspaper in the country. Despite allowing dubious stories negative about President Trump to appear and remain on their platforms, including stories based on anonymous sources and illegally obtained (and never verified) information, Twitter and Facebook justified their actions based on these very grounds, as well as the untrue grounds that the Post‘s information had been “hacked.”

This piece isn’t intended to deal in detail with what the Post found and reported about the senior Biden’s involvement in furthering his son’s business dealings, but rather with the egregious repression of the information to keep it from reaching the voting public. I’d direct you — and strongly urge you – to read the actual stories (we, not being Twitter or Facebook, are happy to be a medium for the free flow of information), which, if accurate, confirm in detail what I previously opined about Biden’s abuse of his office while he was Vice President in the Obama Administration:

The initial Oct. 14 story reporting on emails that reveal how Hunter introduced a top Burisma official to his father

The Oct. 15 story detailing Hunter Biden’s murky business dealings in China

The Oct. 16 story about Hunter’s troubled life and pained soul

The Post stories

In brief, the stories report what some 40,000 emails – as well as thousands of texts, videos, and photos, some showing Hunter in “very compromising positions,” including having sex with an unidentified woman while smoking crack cocaine – to and from Hunter Biden reveal about his personal life, business dealings, and the leveraging of his father’s position to further his business interests and prodigious income, both in Ukraine and China. The emails were on a water-damaged laptop left in April 2019 with a computer repair shop in Delaware, and which was never picked up. While the shop owner couldn’t identify the customer as Hunter Biden, the laptop bore a sticker of the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother, and the email address was that of Hunter Biden at that time.

The shop owner, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at contacting the customer, eventually informed the FBI of its existence, and the agency seized the laptop in December. Meanwhile, the shop owner had made a copy of the hard drive, which he turned over to Robert Costello, attorney for Trump legal advisor Rudy Giuliani. In due course, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon informed the Post about the emails, and on Sunday Giuliani turned the drive copy over to the Post.

While it is true that the authenticity of the emails has not been confirmed, the Biden campaign initially did not deny their existence or authenticity, pointing only to the action by the social media platforms to block stories concerning them as “proof” they weren’t true. Subsequently, the campaign painted them as promoting some sort of “conspiracy theory.” The Democratic smear campaign went into full “Russia conspiracy” mode, with California Rep. Adam Schiff, Liar-in-Chief in the Congress, hauling out that now long-debunked theory to attempt to delegitimize the emails. That there are people foolish enough to continue to believe that sort of nonsense is indicative of the deliberate failure of the media to propagate truthful information in this country.

As further confirmation of the clear media bias that has taken hold, moderator George Stephanopoulis did not ask Joe Biden a single question about the Post reports during Thursday night’s townhall on ABC, and neither did any of the voters posting their softball questions. How this is not considered journalistic malpractice eludes me. Meanwhile, on NBC, moderator Savannah Guthrie, sounding more like a petulant high school girl than a professional journalist, hurled accusatory statements (often inaccurate) at President Trump who, to his credit, responded to them, and the often challenging questions put to him by voters, with grace and directness. Given that NBC came under attacks both from without and within even for hosting the townhall with Trump, can there be any residual doubt that there is almost no fairness or honesty left in the mass media?

There are so many things wrong with this whole state of affairs it leaves one grasping for what to include and what to leave out, so as not to confuse the issue or wind up going on for thousands of words on the topic. With some 20 million people reported to have already voted in this critically important election, how can it be considered a democratic process when virtually all the powerful levers of information are working to suppress reports that, in earlier times, would have been considered crucial to determining the outcome of an election?

Applying the Twitter standard used to suppress the Post stories, the American public would not have known about the Pentagon Papers (hacked), COINTELPRO (stolen), Watergate (unidentified sources), or the revelations of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (hacked and unidentified soures), or Edward Snowdon (also hacked and unidentified sources). Would America be a different country today were those revelations suppressed? Undoubtedly. Would it be a better country? I doubt many would even attempt to make that argument. Further underscoring the issue, news of the trial of Assange has been largely ignored in the same media that relies on the First Amendment to defend its egregious actions, posing a further threat to freedom of expression, even more under attack in the U.K. than in the U.S.

Pushing back

There are some efforts going on to bring the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, all tech giants, to heel before things go further down the rat hole of Chinese-style repression. Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley have called for a subpoena to haul Twitter CEO Jack Dempsey to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 23, and Hawley – a key advocate for limiting the power of social media to suppress ideas they don’t like – is calling for the Committee to subpoena Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Hawley also has joined senators Marco Rubio, Kelly Loefler, and Kevin Cramer in seeking a clarification of the Section 230 rules which protect platforms from civil liability when third parties post false or misleading information. The argument is that the platforms are abusing the special protection Section 230 gives them and, if they are going to censor third-party posts, then they should be subject to the same liability as any media source not given such protection.

Additionally, the RNC has filed a complaint against Twitter with the Federal Elections Commission, alleging that its censorship of the Post stories amounts to an illegal campaign contribution to the Biden campaign.

I would contend that the time for hearings and testimony has past, and it’s time for action. In any event, note that all the concerns are being raised by Republicans. If you think the Democrats are concerned about protecting free speech, you would be seriously mistaken. When they have the weight of what amounts to state media on their side, they remain unmysteriously silent. Partisanship and the pursuit of power supersedes basic American and human rights, as far as they’re concerned. In the one-party Democratic state of California, for instance, an Orwellian-style “Ministry of Truth” has been proposed to seek out and block what it determines to be “fake news,” and a similar measure has been introduced by a Dem in Congress. They see themselves as the arbiters of what is “truth,” and the less you know about what is really going on, the better for them, they reason. But is that better for you?

How would you feel to learn that Joe Biden used his influence and public funds to have a Ukrainian prosecutor, who was investigating the company on whose board his son served, fired? Or that he lied to you about not meeting with a top executive of that same company? Or that he sold out American interests to companies and institutions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to benefit his son, and very possibly himself? Who, you might wonder, is the “big guy” referred to in one of the reputed Hunter emails, promised a carve out of 10% of a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars with China’s largest private energy company? Might it be Papa Joe himself? And have you ever wondered how Biden got as wealthy as he is, living off his government salary for 47 years?

Read the Post stories and see what you think.

If it’s up to Big Tech, the majority in the mass media, and the Democratic Party, you won’t ever find out answers to these, and many other, questions. And you should be very terrified, indeed. Democracy dies in darkness, and night is closing in all around us.

Featured image: Candle in Darkness, Rahul, Pexels. Used with permission.