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Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A defendant in the Proud Boys trial over Jan. 6, 2021, charges moved March 9 to dismiss the case, after some footage from the day of the breach was shown for the first time.

Dominic Pezzola is one of the Proud Boys members on trial for obstruction of an official proceeding and other charges. The newly disclosed footage, shown on Fox News this week, “is plainly exculpatory,” Pezzola’s lawyers said in the new motion.

“It establishes that the Senate chamber was never violently breached, and—in fact—was treated respectfully by January 6 protestors,” they said.

Among the clips Fox’s Tucker Carlson broadcast were moments where Jacob Chansley, another defendant who is serving a jail sentence after pleading guilty, was walking around accompanied by police officers. The officers did not stop Chansley and even tried opening doors for him. Chansley eventually made it into the Senate chamber, where he and others later knelt and prayed. Chansley, during the prayer, gave thanks to the officers for “letting us into the building.”

Pezzola also entered the Capitol, and prosecutors have argued that he and others being inside forced Congress, which was certifying electoral votes from the 2020 election, to go into recess.

The new footage, though, shows that members “could have continued proceedings,” Pezzola’s attorneys said. “It was not Pezzola or codefendants who caused the Congress to recess. Congress interrupted its own proceedings.”

The lawyers are asking U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee overseeing the case, to dismiss it. If Kelly rejects that request, he is asked in the motion to declare a mistrial.

Brady Violations

Prosecutors must provide defendants with evidence that can be exculpatory, or help defendants prove their innocence. The rule was crystallized in Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 Supreme Court decision. “Suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused who has requested it violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution,” the decision states.

Zachary Rehl, another Proud Boys defendant, requested all information regarding Congress going into recess on Jan. 6 as early as late 2021.

“While Brady obligations do not extend to the entirety of the government, they do include investigative agencies or agencies closely related who knew or should have known that information would be material to a prosecution arising from their direct involvement. Here the U.S. Capitol Police are directly related and fully aware of the events of January 6, 2021,” lawyers for the defendants said.

They cited previous court decisions, including one that found a prosecutor “has a duty to learn of any favorable evidence known to the others acting on the government’s behalf in the case, including the police.”

“We will respond through the court,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia told The Epoch Times via email.

The U.S. Capitol Police did not return a request for comment.

Albert Watkins, who represented Chansley, said on Fox on Wednesday night that the footage the outlet aired this week had not been provided to him.

“The government knew that Jake had walked around with all of these police officers. They had that video footage. I didn’t get it. It wasn’t disclosed to me. It wasn’t provided to me,” Watkins said. “They had a duty, an absolute duty, with zero discretion to provide it to me so I could share it with my client.”

Justice Requires Dismissal: Motion

Another development supports a dismissal, according to the new motion.

FBI special agent Nicole Miller is being accused of hiding a tab in a spreadsheet that showed some of her emails.

Miller was testifying on March 8 when Nick Smith, a lawyer representing Proud Boys member Ethan Nordean, revealed the secret tab, leaving over one thousand hidden Excel rows of messages, Nordean’s attorneys said in a separate filing.

Miller said in one email that “my boss assigned me 338 items of evidence i have to destroy” and in another that colleagues should go into a confidential human source report and “edit out that I was present,” according to the filing.

The hidden emails featured Miller “admitted fabricating evidence and following orders to destroy hundreds of items of evidence,” Pezzola’s lawyers said, adding, “If justice means anything, it requires this case to be dismissed.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Erik Kenerson, an assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said in court Wednesday that even if there were missing messages, the defense could have asked the government to produce them. He said that prosecutors decide which messages to provide to the defense, so it was not appropriate to imply the agent hid them.

The Associated Press reports that alleged members of a Mexican drug cartel penned a letter apologizing for the kidnapping of four Americans and the killing of two of them last week. The letter also claimed that the five perpetrators of the violent attack had been handed over to Mexican police. 

"We have decided to turn over those who were directly involved and responsible in the events, who at all times acted under their own decision-making and lack of discipline," the letter reads. The AP obtained the letter through a Tamaulipas state law enforcement official. It added those involved in the attack on the Americans had gone against the Gulf cartel's rules, which include "respecting the life and well-being of the innocent."

Images posted on Twitter show five men on the pavement with their hands tied -- next to a small pickup truck, with a handwritten letter of apology on the windshield.

While letters from cartels aren't unprecedented, the apology is very unusual, according to former CIA officer and FBI agent Tracy Walder, who spoke with the NBC 5 Dallas-Forth Worth media outlet. 

"I can't remember the last time that I saw something where you have an actual faction saying, we did this: 'We're sorry. We're the people responsible,'" said Walder.

According to Walder, the apology was issued amid turf wars between the Cyclones and the Scorpions, two subgroups of the cartel. 

Mexican authorities have theorized cartel members probably mistook the Americans for drug smugglers and abducted them while killing two. 

The ambush took place last Friday in Tamaulipas, a state in the northeast region of Mexico, and in a border town called Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. 

Despite the killing of Americans, the Biden administration on Wednesday ruled out designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

The chaos on the border highlights how the immigration policies by the administration have exacerbated the crisis along the US-Mexico border. 

The Chief Administrative Officer of the House of Representatives, Catherine L. Szpindor, told lawmakers Wednesday their personal information was exposed in a "significant data breach" at a health insurance marketplace. 

"I have been informed by the United States Capitol Police and DC Health Link* of a data breach impacting Members and staff. DC Health Link suffered a significant data breach yesterday, potentially exposing the Personal Identifiable Information (PII) of thousands of enrollees. As a Member or employee eligible for health insurance through the DC Health Link, your data may have been comprised," Szpindor wrote in a letter to colleagues on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

It did not appear that lawmakers were specifically the target in the breach, Szpindor said. She continued:

"Currently, I do not know the size and scope of the breach, but have been informed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that account information and [personally identifiable information] of hundreds of Member and House staff were stolen. I expect to have access to the list of impacted enrollees later today and will notify you directly if your information was compromised."

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) were told by the FBI that cyber security agents found personal information from DC Health Link on the dark web, according to The Washington Post, citing a letter sent by House leadership to the health insurance marketplace. Agents found the names of spouses, dependent children, their social security numbers, and home addresses.

DC Health Link confirmed the breach and stated, "data for some DC Health Link customers have been exposed on a public forum."

Szpindor told lawmakers and staff to "freeze your credit" to prevent anyone from being able to "open a credit card, or taking out a loan in your name."

The House Administration Committee tweeted its "aware of the breach and is working with the CAO to ensure the vendor takes necessary steps to protect the PII of any impacted member, staff, and their families."

Here's Szpindor's full letter to lawmakers about the data breach:

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Twitter owner Elon Musk suggested Monday that he may be compelled to place propaganda warnings on tweets posted by CNN after it emerged that the network actively discouraged staff not to look into or share any COVID lab origin information.

Fox News reports that an inside source at CNN has charged that the former president Jeff Zucker gave the order to everyone at CNN to back off any talk about COVID having originated in a Chinese lab, labelling it a “Trump talking point.”

After a bombshell leak revealed that the Department of Energy has concluded, in addition to the State Department and the FBI, that the virus did likely leak from the Wuhan lab, the CNN insider said “People are slowly waking up from the fog,” adding “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”

Not only did CNN back off the lab leak theory, it began actively trying to debunk it with minions like Oliver Darcy writing stories headlined “Here’s how to debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories from friends and family.”

With all of this in mind, Musk responded Monday to a Twitter user who asked him, “When are you going to label CNN as State Affiliated Media?”

Good point. If an organization portrays itself as balanced, but is not, it should be labeled to inform the public.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2023

Musk also responded to a tweet from Dr Jay Bhattacharya, noting that Fauci “egregiously betrayed the public trust,”:

Exactly. Fauci egregiously betrayed the public trust.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2023

Musk previously called for prosecuting Fauci, before releasing a host of Twitter Files in December that exposed how the Biden government attempted to control the pandemic narrative with censorship and suppression of information.

Elon Musk Triggers Deep State Operative With ‘Prosecute Fauci’ Tweet

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Authored by Chris Hedges via The Chris Hedges Report,

There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6. Their vision for America, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, blind support for Trump and embrace of reactionary fact-free conspiracy theories leaves a very wide chasm between their beliefs and mine. But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events, a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe. 

Image: Executing the Law - by Mr. Fish

The U.S. legal system has a very sordid history. It was used to enforce segregation and legitimize the reign of terror against Black people. It was the hammer that broke the back of militant union movements. It persecuted radicals and reformers in the name of anti-communism. After 9/11, it relentlessly went after Muslim leaders and activists with Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). SAMs, established by the Clinton administration, originally only applied to people who ordered murders from prison or were convicted of mass murder, but are now used to isolate all manner of detainees before and during trial. They severely restrict a prisoner’s communication with the outside world; prohibiting calls, letters and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members. The solitary confinement like conditions associated with SAMs undermine any meaningful right to a fair trial according to analysis by groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and can amount to torture according to the United Nations. Julian Assange faces SAMs or similar conditions should he be extradited to the U.S. The Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, begun under the Reagan administration, also allows evidence in a trial to be classified and withheld from defendants. The courts, throughout American history, have abjectly served the interests of big business and the billionaire class. The current Supreme Court is one of the most retrograde in decades, rolling back legal protections for vulnerable groups and denying workers protection from predatory corporate abuse.

At least 1,003 people have been arrested and charged so far for participation in events on Jan. 6, with 476 pleading guilty, in what has been the largest single criminal investigation in U.S. history, according to analysis by Business Insider. The charges and sentences vary, with many receiving misdemeanor sentences such as fines, probation, a few months in prison or a combination of the three. Of the 394 federal defendants who have had their cases adjudicated and sentenced as of Feb. 6, approximately 220 “have been sentenced to periods of incarceration” with a further 100 defendants “sentenced to a period of home detention, including approximately 15 who also were sentenced to a period of incarceration,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. There are six convictions and four guilty pleas on charges of “seditious conspiracy.” This offense is so widely defined that it includes conspiring to levy war against the government on the one hand and delaying the execution of any law on the other. Those charged and convicted of “seditious conspiracy” were accused of collaborating to oppose “the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” by preventing or delaying the Certification of the Electoral College vote. While a few of the organizers of the Jan. 6 protest such as Stewart Rhodes, who founded Oath Keepers, may conceivably be guilty of sedition, and even this is in doubt, the vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results. 

Joseph D. McBride went to law school because his brother was serving a 15-year sentence for a crime he did not commit. He provided free legal advice as a law school student to those encamped in Zuccotti Park in New York City during the Occupy movement. Following law school, he worked as a public defender and in the Legal Aid Society. He represents several of those charged in the Jan. 6 incursion, including Richard Barnett. Barnett was photographed in Nancy Pelosi’s office with his leg propped up on her desk. Barnett was convicted by a federal jury, which deliberated for two hours, on eight counts, including disorderly conduct in the Capitol building. He faces up to 47 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 3.

“The post 9/11 model is being applied to American citizens,” McBride told me when I reached him by phone. “That model is the 19 hijackers. Everyone who is a religious Muslim is a suspect for the next 20 years. They should be waterboarded. They should be put in fucking jail and left in Guantanamo Bay. Lock them up. Throw away the key. Because they are psychopath extremists who believe in Allah and we don’t have time for that. They’re a threat based on who they are, what they look like, what they believe in. When the truth is, the vast majority of these guys don’t do drugs, don’t drink alcohol, they have five kids and they live pretty good lives. But because of the label of ‘terrorism’ and ‘Osama Bin Laden’ and ‘al-Qaeda’, everybody who is a Muslim is now a target. If we get on a plane next to one of these people, we get nervous about it because that’s how much it’s ingrained in us. The same thing is happening, except it’s being applied to a new group of people, primarily white Christians, Trump supporters, for now.” 

“Power is going to change hands,” he warned. “The Democrats are not going to be in power forever. When power changes hands, that precedent is going to travel with it. If somebody else from the other side gets in and starts to target the people who are in power now, their families, their businesses, their lives, their freedom, then it’s over. America goes from being a free democracy to a tribalist partisan state. Maybe there’s not ethnic-cleansing in the streets, but people are cleansing each other from the workplace, from social media, from the banking system and they’re putting people in jail. That’s where we’re headed. I don’t know why people can't see what’s on the horizon.”

The Jan. 6 protestors were not the first to occupy Congressional offices, including Nancy Pelosi’s office. Young environmental activists from the Sunrise Movement, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even congressional staffers have engaged in numerous occupations of congressional offices and interrupted congressional hearings. What will happen to groups such as Code Pink if they occupy congressional offices with Republicans in control of the White House, the Congress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pretrial detention? Will they be given lengthy prison terms based on dubious interpretations of the law? Will they be considered domestic terrorists? Will protests and civil disobedience become impossible?

McBride said those who walked to the Capitol were not aware that the Department of Justice had created arbitrary markers, what McBride called an “imaginary red line that they draw around the Capitol grounds.” Anyone who crossed that invisible line was charged with violating Capitol grounds.

He railed against the negative portrayal of the protestors in the media, the White House and Democratic Party leadership, as well as a tainted jury pool in Washington composed of people who have close links to the federal government. He said Change of Venue motions filed by the defense lawyers have been denied.

“The D.C. jury pool is poisoned beyond repair,” McBride said. “When you just look at what the January 6  Committee did alone, never mind President Biden’s speeches about ‘insurrectionists,’ ‘MAGA Republican extremists’ and all this stuff, and if you just consider the fact that D.C. is very small, that people who work in the Federal Government are all by definition, kind of victims of January 6 and what happened that day, their institutions and colleagues were ‘under attack.’ How can anybody from that town serve on a jury pool? They can’t. The bias is astounding.”

Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon shaman” who was adorned on Jan. 6 in red, white and blue face paint, carried an American flag on a spear-tipped pole and wore a coyote-fur and horned headdress, pleaded guilty to obstruction. He was sentenced to more than three years in prison. Chansley, who says he is a practitioner of ahimsa, an ancient Indian principle of non-violence toward all living beings, was not accused of assaulting anyone. He was diagnosed in prison with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. 

Guy Wesley Reffitt, who did not enter the Capitol building, nevertheless was sentenced after three hours of deliberations to seven years and three months in prison on five charges, including “two counts of civil disorder, and one count each of obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a firearm, and obstruction of justice.” His obstruction of justice charge came from “threatening” his two teenage children to prevent them from reporting him to law enforcement.

Daniel Ray Caldwell, a Marine Corps veteran, who sprayed a chemical irritant at a group of police officers outside the Capitol and entered through the Senate Wing doors where he remained inside for approximately two minutes, was sentenced to more than five years in prison. He spent, like many who have been charged, nearly two years in pretrial detention.

Even the charges against Rhodes, who faces 20 years in prison, and other militia leaders of groups such as the Proud Boys are problematic. The New York Times reported that, “despite the vast amount of evidence the government collected in the case — including more than 500,000 encrypted text messages — investigators never found a smoking gun that conclusively showed the Proud Boys plotted to help President Donald J. Trump remain in office.” The government has relied on the testimony of a former Proud Boy, Jeremy Bertino, who is cooperating with prosecutors to build an “inferential case” against Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, the five defendants in the current Proud Boy case. Bertino, on cross-examination, admitted that in previous interviews with the government, he repeatedly told investigators that the Proud Boys did not have an explicit plan to halt the election certification and that he did not anticipate acts of violence on Jan. 6. The FBI had as many as eight informants in the Proud Boys that included its leader, Enrique Tarrio, during the storming of the Capitol, raising the very real possibility of entrapment.

“They’re changing the laws,” McBride said. “Look at the 1512 charge, the obstruction charge. That was used for document shredding in Enron. It has no applicability to Jan. 6 whatsoever. They took it. They repurposed it. They weaponised it against these people and made it impossible for them to defend themselves. When you look at the civil disorder charge, they are saying that if January 6 was one big civil disorder, and if you had any type of interaction with a police officer that day that may or may not have caused the police officer to step away from his duties for a moment, you can go down with civil disorder and get five years in jail.”

Ryan Nichols, a Marine Corps veteran, is living under house arrest in Texas after nearly two years in pretrial detention, much of it in solitary confinement, in Washington, D.C and Virginia jails. He faces five felony and three misdemeanor charges. Prosecutors say Nichols assaulted officers and obstructed an official proceeding. He has been ordered to “stay away from Washington, D.C.” except for business related to his case, according to court documents. He has had to submit to “location monitoring technology” and is denied access to the internet and his phone except to perform functions related to his case. He cannot have contact with anyone involved in the Jan. 6 events, including co-defendants. Nichols must remain in his home 24 hours a day except for medical and court appointments. He is permitted to attend Sunday church services at Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview, Texas. He is facing 20 years in prison. He is scheduled to go to trial on March 27.

I spoke with Bonnie Nichols, Ryan’s wife, by phone from their home in Longview, Texas. 

Ryan was arrested on Jan. 18, 2020. The FBI surrounded their house at 5:30 am in armored vehicles. They unscrewed the bulbs from flood lights and cut the wires to the couple’s security cameras before kicking in the front door. The couple and their two children, then aged 4 and 6, were at Bonnie’s parents house during the raid. The FBI confiscated their weapons, electronics and documents, including Social Security cards. 

“We wanted to cooperate,” she said. “We didn’t know anything was wrong. They asked Ryan to come in for questioning. Ryan went and turned himself in. They arrested him and I didn’t see him again for over a year and a half.”

Ryan, who had no criminal record, ran a nonprofit called Rescue the Universe where he carried out search-and-rescue operations after natural disasters. He was denied bail. He was sent to a holding facility in Grady County Oklahoma for two months before being flown to Washington, D.C. where he was met by some two dozen U.S. Marshals. His feet were shackled. His arms were shackled to a chain around his waist. He was placed in long term solitary confinement and denied video calls or visitation from his family, including his children. He was denied access to his trial documents for nearly a year and prohibited from attending religious services in the jail.

Ryan, whose most serious offense appears to be incendiary rhetoric calling for a “second American revolution,” spent nearly 22 months in solitary confinement. Depressed, struggling to cope with the physical and psychological strain of prolonged isolation, he was eventually placed on suicide watch. He was strapped to a bench in a room where a light was never turned off. Guards would periodically shout through a window “Do you feel like killing yourself?” Those on suicide watch who said  “yes” remained strapped to the bench. Those who said “no” were sent back to their cells. Ryan was often prohibited from having nail clippers — the guards told him he could chew his toenails down — or getting a haircut unless he agreed to be vaccinated for COVID-19. When Ryan appeared before Judge Thomas Hogan, who finally released him on Nov. 23, 2022, he told Ryan, with his long unkempt hair and fingernails, that he looked like Tom Hanks in the film Cast Away.

Every night, for the two years Ryan was held in solitary confinement, Bonnie and her two small boys would say prayers that Ryan would one day come home. She said she and her family have received numerous death threats.

“Ryan deals with insomnia,” Bonnie said of her husband. “He deals with extreme anxiety, depression and paranoia. He will not even go outside of his backyard because he’s scared that if he goes outside, that they’re going to take him back to jail. He has liver issues from the food that he ate because they fed him baloney sandwiches and trash while he was in D.C. He’s having a lot of medical issues. He also has lower testosterone than a 60-year-old man because he wasn’t able to have any sunlight. His vitamin D levels are low. The list goes on and on. This man does not sleep at night. He has nightmares. He whimpers at night in his sleep because he has dreams that he's back in D.C. I mean, he’s a mess. This is the result of what has happened to him. He has vision loss. He doesn’t see as good as he used to.”

Ryan’s family, like many families of those charged, are struggling financially. Bonnie said their savings are gone. She and Ryan are heavily in debt. She has set up a fundraising page here.

“We are God-loving patriots,” she said. “Who’s going to be next? It’s not about Republican or Democrat or white or Black, Christian, or Muslim. We are all children of God. We are all U.S. American citizens. We are all entitled to our constitutional rights and freedom of speech. We can all come together and agree on that, right?”

The cheerleading, or at best indifference, by Democratic Party supporters and much of the left to these show trials will come back to haunt them. We are exacerbating the growing tribalism and political antagonisms that will increasingly express themselves through violence. We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas. We are corroding democratic institutions. We are hardening the ideology and rage of the far-right. We are turning those being hounded to prison into political prisoners and martyrs. We are moving ever closer towards tyranny.

Submitted by Blue Apples

Since late January when a fatal shooting between Atlanta-area police and ANTIFA-affiliated broke out, Georgia's capital has become ground zero of the continually fomenting hostilities from the radical leftist group. The tenuous situation saw that violence continue at the site of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Under the pretense of a "mostly peaceful protest," rioters unleashed their fury by destroying construction equipment at the site of where Georgia State Patrol Troopers had exchanged gunfire with protesters occupying the site in late January. The latest ANTIFA insurgency resulted in the arrest of 23 people on domestic terrorism charges.

One arrest in particular particularly sticks out. Thomas Webb Jurgens was one of the 23 arrested on Sunday according to DeKalb County arrest records. Jurgens arrest is notable because he is a staff attorney at the Decatur, Georgia office of the Southern Povery Law Center. Ironically, the SPLC have cultivated a partnership with state and federal law enforcement across the United States to designate and investigate extremists groups like those engaged in domestic terrorism across the country. Now, they are in a position where it's difficult to unequivocally deny the criticism levied against them that their own members qualify to be designated among those ranks.

One of the Antifa members arrested on domestic terrorism charges in Atlanta last night is a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The FBI has historically used the SPLC as a source for who should be considered domestic terrorists. pic.twitter.com/y5isk5AHaq

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 6, 2023

According to Jurgens LinkedIn page, he joined the SPLC in September 2021 as a new hire to its Economic Justice Project. He presently is admitted to both the Georgia and Florida state bar associations. Jurgens had graduated with his Juris Doctor from the University of Georgia School of Law, the campus of which is located in Athens, Georgia. The campus is just 60 miles from Atlanta where he was arrested.

The Atlanta Police department detailed how the events leading to Jurgens arrest unfolded. Those arrested initially convened under the cover of gathering for a protest before events turned violent. "They changed into black clothing and entered the construction area and began to throw large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police officers." according to Atlanta police who responded to the scene of the crimes. Footage released by the police department shows approximately 150 masked rioters breaking into the construction site. 35 were detained in total, with 23 already being charged and the potential charges looming for the remaining 12.

CONSTRUCTION SITE BURNS: Huge plumes of smoke and massive police response after @defendATLforest / #StopCopCity protesters face off with police at the site of Atlanta’s future Public Safety Training Facility. I’m told Molotov cocktails were thrown. Construction equipment is on… https://t.co/6dIyrPff6T pic.twitter.com/0F9qj8dgFn

— Billy Heath III (@BillyHeathFOX5) March 5, 2023

Fortunately, unlike the police engagement in January, the events from Sunday evening went without any serious injuries or fatalities. No indication that any of the arrested ANTIFA supporters were armed with a firearm has arisen yet either. Despite that outcomes, Atlanta police aren't viewing that good fortune as an auspice of what lies ahead. Officials cataloged Sunday night's arrests as a catalyst for reactionary violence in the coming days. Police department officials forewarned "with protests planned for the coming days, the Atlanta Police Department, in collaboration with law enforcement partners, have a multi-layered strategy that includes reaction and arrest."

Following violence during the "Night of Rage" ANTIFA organized in response to January's shooting, Georgia Governor Brian P. Kemp issued a response indicating that state prosecutors would execute a new strategy to prosecuted rioters under domestic terrorism charges. Kemp’s Attorney General, Chris Carr announced his office's intention to continue to pursue sweeping indictments against ANTIFA members for domestic terrorism continuing to riot. Carr also took the media to task for categorizing ANTIFA members as protesters. The arrest of 23 more ANTIFA rioters, including the SPLC's Thomas Jurgens, conveys the commitment to a concerted effort between Georgia's law enforcement and attorney general's office to prosecute rioters to the furthest extent of the law.

The SPLC could not be reached for comment and has released no official statement regarding Jurgens arrest. In addition to domestic terrorism charges, Jurgens faces potential discipline from the bar associations he is admitted to in Georgia and Florida which could result in the loss of his license to practice law. The revelation of his arrest should also be cause for law enforcement officials around the country to reassess their working relationship with the SPLC. If Jurgens arrest says anything about the non-profit, it's that their offices are a place where hate groups are apparently being cultivated instead of persecuted.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires.

Premodern Barbarism

We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism. The signs unfortunately appear everywhere. Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns.

Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned. Yet no one knows—or even seems to worry about—how to stop it.

So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking. The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers. In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities—which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.

All accept that defunding the police, no-cash bail, Soros-funded district attorneys, and radical changes in jurisprudence have destroyed deterrence. The only dividend is the unleashing of a criminal class to smash-and-grab, carjack, steal, burglarize, execute, and assault—with de facto immunity. Instead we are sometimes lectured that looting is not a crime, but lengthy incarceration is criminally immoral.

We have redefined felonies as misdemeanors warranting no punishment. Misdemeanors are now infractions that are not criminal. Infractions we treat as lifestyle choices. Normality, not criminality, is deemed criminal. We all know this will not work, but still wonder why it continues.

Many among the middle classes of our cities who can flee or move, do so—like 5th-century equestrians who left Rome for rural fortified farms before the onslaught of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. For most of our lives we were lectured that the old southern states—Florida, Tennessee, Texas—were backward and uninviting. Now even liberals often flee to them, leaving behind supposedly cosmopolitan Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and New York. The more people leave the blue states, the more those states praise themselves as utopian.

The less well-off, without the means to leave, hope that their environs have hit bottom so things can only improve. The elite who caused this premodern catastrophe assumes they will always have the money and wherewithal to ensure that themselves and their own can navigate around or even profit from the barbarism they unleashed. For them the critic, not the target of criticism, is the greater threat.

The hard urban work of the 1990s and early 2000s—cleaner, safer subways, secure nightlife downtown, clean sidewalks, low vacancy rates, little vagrancy, and litter-free streets—so often has been undone, deliberately so. We are descending to the late 1960s and 1970s wild streets—if we are lucky the mayhem does not devolve even further.

A mere 10 years ago, if an American learned that a man was arrested for clubbing, robbing, or shooting innocents, and yet would be released from custody that day of his crime, he would have thought it an obscenity. Now he fears that often the criminal will not even be arrested.

A once secure border no longer exists. Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas simply demolished it and allowed 6-7 million foreign nationals to cross illegally into the United States without audits—to the delight of their apparent constituent, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

What would shame a Biden or Mayorkas? What would change their minds? Billions of dollars spent on social services for the lawbreaking at the expense of the American poor?

Would 100,000 annual lethal overdoses—12 times more than those who died over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined—from drugs that flow across the open border sway them? Or would it take 200,000, or 300,000 deaths before Joe Biden relented and ceased his chuckling?

What does a people do when its highest officials simply renounce their oaths of office and refuse to enforce laws they don’t like? Everyone knows the border will eventually have to become secure, but none have any idea whether it will take another 20, 30, or 50 million illegal entrants and 1 million more fentanyl deaths to close it.

Polls show race relations have hit historic lows. Much of the ecumenicalism of the post-Civil Rights movement seems squandered—almost deliberately so.

The Left now rarely mentions Martin Luther King, Jr. or even the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Perhaps it knows it has violated the spirit and legacy of both.

Today, our identity politics leaders believe that the color of our skin, not the content of our character, certainly matters more. The practitioners of the new tribalism in some sense fear outlawing segregation and discrimination by race. They know to do so would end racially restricted houses and safe spaces, racially exclusive graduations, and race-based admissions, hiring, and promotion on campus.

Read Professor Ibram X. Kendi and his message is implicit. For him, the problem with a Jim Crow-like system was not segregation or racial chauvinism per se, but merely who was doing the victimizing and who were the victims: so the original racism was bad; but racism in reverse is good.

We abhor violence, racism, and misogyny—in the abstract. Yet the entire hip-hop industry would find no audience—or so we are told by its appeasers—if rappers refrained from “ho” misogyny, brags of violence against law enforcement, and self-described proprietary use of the N-word.

Most know that young black males under 30 commit violent crimes at well over 10 times their 3-4 percent demographic of the population—so often victimizing the nonwhite. All know that reality must remain unmentionable even as its causes need to be debated and discussed if lives are to be saved. Yet the greater crime seems not the crime itself, but even mentioning crime.

Postmodern Abyss

Postmodernism in our age is deadlier even than premodernism. Sexually explicit drag shows that allow the attendance of children 20 years ago would have been outlawed—by liberals worried over the trauma of the young watching performance-art simulated sex.

Now the children come last and the performers first—as ratified by the same liberals. But to fathom the new transitioning, simply learn from ancient transitioning and gender dysphoria, an unhappy classical theme from Catullus’ Attis poem (stimulatus ibi furenti rabie, vagus/ devolsit ili acuto sibi pondera silice/ itaque ut relicta sensit sibi membra sine viro) to Giton in Petronius’ Satyricon.

Current “science” is now synonymous with ideology, religion, or superstition. Lockdowns, mRNA vaccinations, masking, transgenderism, “climate change,” and green power brook no dissent. They are declared scientifically correct in the manner that the sun used to revolve around the earth, and any dissenting Galileo or Copernicus is cancel-cultured, doxxed, and deplatformed.

It is now verboten to cite the causes of the current upswing. We must remain silent about the classical exegeses that cults, pornography, and constructed sexual identities, when not biological, were the manifestations of a bored culture’s affluence (luxus), leisure (otium), and decadence (licentia/dissolutio).

The classical analyses of an elite collapse focus on a falling birth rate, a scarce labor force, ubiquitous abortion, an undermanned military, and a shrinking population. We suffer all that and perhaps more still.

Millions of young men are detached and ensconced in solitude, their indebted 20s too often consumed with video-gaming, internet surfing, or consumption of porn. Many  suffer from prolonged adolescence. Many assume that they are immune from criticism, given that the alternative of getting married, having children, finding a full-time job, and buying a house is society’s new abnormal.

Rarely has an elite society become so Victorian and yet so raunchy. A slip with an anachronistic “Gal” or “Honey” can get one fired. Meanwhile, grabbing one’s genitals while pregnant on stage before 120 million viewers is considered a successful Super Bowl extravaganza.

Our army is short of its annual recruitment by 25 percent. We all suspect but do not say out loud the cause. The stereotyping of poor and middle-class white males as both raging and biased, and yet expected yet to fight and die in misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, has finally convinced the parents of these 18-year-olds to say, “no more.”

Need we say anything about the lack of efficacy or morality of the Department of Justice, FBI, or CIA?

Or rather is there anything the FBI will not do?

Doctor court evidence? Hire Twitter to suppress the news? Monitor parents at school board meetings? Allow directors to lie under oath or “misremember” before Congress?

Swiping clean subpoenaed phones? Hiring fakers to compile dirt on a presidential candidate—and then using that known smear to hoodwink a judge to allow spying on Americans?

Suppressing evidence on a laptop to warp an election? Raiding an ex-president’s home with a SWAT-like team? Spying on Catholics in mass? Storming a home full of children of a man accused of a politically incorrect misdemeanor?

The more the military has been stalemated in Iraq, humiliated in Afghanistan, and dreading what China will soon do or what Iran will even sooner let off, the more it insists our priorities should be diversity, equity, and inclusion. Will that escapism ensure more lethal pilots, tank commanders, and Marine company commanders?

The mindsets of too many of our new generations of command are twofold: first to be promoted by virtue signaling woke policies that they must know eventually will hamper combat readiness, and then in the future to rotate at retirement into multimillionaire status by leveraging past expertise for defense contractors. Keep that in mind and almost every publicly uttered nonsense from our highest in the Pentagon makes perfect sense.

Them

There is a third challenge. Our enemies—illiberal, deadly, and vengeful—have concluded we are more effective critics of ourselves than are they. They enjoy our divided nation, torn apart by racial incivility, dysfunctional cities, and woke madness. (Notice how even the communists long ago dropped deadly Maoist wokeism, or how the Russians viewed the Soviet commissariat as antithetical to their military and economic agendas.)

Iran believes that this present generation of Americans would likely allow it to nuke Israel rather than stop its proliferation. China assumes that Taiwan is theirs and the only rub is how to destroy or absorb it without losing too many global markets and income. Russia  conjectures that the more we trumpet its impending defeat, the more it will destroy Eastern Ukraine and call such a desert peace.

Our “friends” can be as dangerous as our enemies.

A visitor from another world might conclude Mexico has done more damage to America than North Korea, Iran, and Russia combined. It has, by intent, flooded our border with 20 million illegal aliens. It has allowed cartels with Chinese help to conduct multibillion-dollar profiteering by killing 100,000 Americans per year (did the Kremlin ever match that tally in a half century of the Cold War?).

Mexico drains $60 billion from its expatriates on the expectation that American subsidies will free up their cash to be sent home. The more the cartels run wild, the more money trickles down—while their top drug enforcement official Genaro García Luna was found guilty in a New York courtroom  for collusion with the cartels.

How did all of this so quickly erode our great country? Our crisis was not the next generation of foreign Hitlers and Stalins. It was not earthquakes, floods, or even pandemics. It was not endemic poverty and want. It was not a meager inheritance from past generations of incompetents. Nor was it a dearth of natural resources or bounty.

Instead our catastrophe arose from our most highly educated, the wealthiest and most privileged in American history with the greatest sense of self-esteem and sanctimoniousness. Sometime around the millennium, they felt their genius could change human nature and bring an end to history—if only they had enough power to force hoi polloi to follow their abstract and bankrupt theories that they had no intention of abiding by themselves.

And then the few sowed the wind, and so the many now reap their whirlwind.

President Biden's disastrous border policies put the safety of the American people at risk, as an announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said four Americans were kidnapped and assaulted upon crossing into northeastern Mexico from Texas. 

On Friday, four Americans crossed into Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, driving a white minivan with North Carolina license plates. Shortly after crossing into Mexico, "unidentified gunmen fired upon the passengers in the vehicle... all four Americans were placed in a vehicle and taken from the scene by armed men," the FBI wrote in a statement. 

CBS News' Christina Ruffini reports a Twitter post shows the moment four Americans were kidnapped in Mexico. Ken Salazar, US ambassador to Mexico, said in a statement that "an innocent Mexican citizen was tragically killed" in the same incident. 

According to Salazar, American law enforcement officials are collaborating with Mexican authorities to ensure the kidnapped Americans' safe return.

After reports of the kidnapping began circulating on local media outlets, the US consulate in Matamoros issued an alert on Friday.

Event: The US Consulate Matamoros has received reports of police activity occurring in the vicinity of Calle Primera and Lauro Villar in connection to a shooting. Media reports indicate that one individual has been killed. US government employees have been instructed to avoid the area until further notice. The US Consulate General reminds US citizens that Tamaulipas is classified as Level 4: Do Not Travel in the State Department's travel advisory for Mexico.

How long will it take for the Biden administration to acknowledge the missing Americans? 

Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times,

A radical social justice Marxist and former member of the Black Panthers discovered that one of her ancestors arrived in the New World from England on the 1620 Mayflower expedition.

On Tuesday’s PBS episode of “Finding your Roots,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. interviewed Angela Davis, whom he said came to the show to have the mystery of her lineage solved.

In the show’s final moments, Gates revealed that the investigation into her ancestry dated back to her tenth great-grandfather, a white man named William Brewster, who was born in England in 1570 and traveled to America on the Mayflower.

A visibly stunned Davis said, “No, I can’t believe this. My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower. That’s a little bit too much to deal with right now.”

Marxist Angela Davis, Who Teaches That America Was Built By Racist Colonizers, Finds Out Her Ancestors Was On The Mayflower pic.twitter.com/j7XBpthT69

— 757 Patriot (@757patriot) February 26, 2023

Davis emerged in California during the late 1960s as a prominent civil rights figure and a member of the Communist Party.

She’s continued to support radical, far-left politics, and is currently a professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Amid her social justice activism, Davis was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for her alleged involvement in the armed seizure of a Marin County Courthouse in California that left four people dead, including a judge.

It had been shown that Davis purchased the guns used in the attack.

Davis went into hiding but was eventually arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges.

She was imprisoned for 16 months before being released on bail and later acquitted by an all-white jury in 1972.

Born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama, Davis told Gates she had always assumed that her ancestors were slaves.

While that’s partially true on her grandmother’s side, she also descends from slave owners, a piece of information that runs contrary to the message of the current social justice movement for which Davis advocates.

Critical Race Theory

Davis has been a proponent of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a variation of a concept put forth by German philosopher Karl Marx called “Critical Theory,” which divides people between oppressors and the oppressed.

The CRT variation of the theory focuses on the concept of “white supremacy” in that it labels white people as the oppressors and all other races as the oppressed while blaming white people of today for slavery that took place in the past.

...

Descended From a Patriot Slave Owner

According to the lineage, Davis’s mother was named Salley Belle, and Belle’s father was a white Alabama attorney and lawmaker named John Austin Darden.

This was another surprise to Davis.

When Gates pointed out that John Austin Darden was a prominent member of the community, Davis asked, “Well, was he a member of the Klu Klux Klan or the White Citizen’s Council? That’s something I would also want to know because in those days, if one wanted to achieve that power one had to thoroughly embrace white supremacy.”

The information of her lineage only drifted further from the social justice dogma.

Her fourth great-grandfather, Stephen Darden, was born in colonial Virginia in 1750, and later served in the Revolutionary War.

After the Revolutionary War, Darden moved from Virginia to Georgia, where he owned a farm and six slaves.

Angela’s grandmother, Mollie Spencer, lived next door to a white man named Murphy Jones, whom the genetic profile showed to be Davis’ grandfather.

Jones and Spencer had four children together. Murphy later sold Spencer 22 acres of land for $200, PBS reported.

On processing the information about her ancestry, Davis told Gates, “I always imagined my ancestors as the people who were enslaved. My mind and my heart are swirling with all of these contradictory emotions.”

Read more here...

Authored by Julie Kelly via American Greatness,

Tucker Carlson now has the equivalent of nearly five years of surveillance footage captured by U.S. Capitol Police security cameras on January 6, 2021. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) turned over the tapes to the Fox News host earlier this month, according to Axios. Carlson’s producers and researchers are already distilling the footage; the first round of clips is expected to air in a few weeks.

While some grumble that McCarthy did not fulfill his promise to publicly release the footage—arguably a valid complaint—Carlson’s team undoubtedly will give the massive trove much-needed context and maximum impact. Carlson released a three-part documentary, “Patriot Purge,” in November 2021 that explained how the events of January 6 helped launch a second “war on terror” against American citizens out of step with the Biden regime.

Since early 2021, Carlson has used his nightly show to expose the cruel treatment of Trump supporters suffering pretrial detention orders; raised questions about the use of undercover assets including FBI informants and the mysterious role of Ray Epps; asked why the case of the January 5 “pipe bomber” remains unsolved; and demanded the release of the surveillance video as late as last month.

Releasing the video never should have been a political fight; after all, the footage was recorded on a taxpayer-paid closed circuit television system installed on public property to monitor public employees. Contrary to arguments by Capitol Police and the Justice Department, the video belongs to the public, not federal agencies.

But both entities, with the help of D.C. District Court judges, have successfully kept the trove largely under wraps for more than two years. Even the FBI and D.C. Metropolitan Police departments signed agreements a few days after the Capitol protest to acknowledge that the tapes technically belonged to Capitol Police.

In a sworn statement filed in March 2021, Thomas DiBiase, general counsel for the Capitol Police, insisted the footage constituted “security information” that required very limited access. “Our concern is that providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will . . . [be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again,” DiBiase warned.

The Justice Department subsequently designated the tapes as “highly sensitive” government material subject to protective orders in January 6 prosecutions. It’s been a major battle for defendants and their attorneys to properly access all of the video tied to their cases; defendants cannot watch any clips without the presence of a legal authority and none of the footage can be shared or downloaded.

Of course, there have been some exceptions. Capitol Police shared cherry-picked clips with the House Democrats on the second impeachment committee as well as the January 6 select committee. For example, the brief clip of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) running through a hallway that afternoon presumably after the breach was produced from surveillance video. HBO also accessed surveillance footage for its slanted documentary on January 6. “Security” concerns, my foot.

Imagine the universal outrage in any other situation had crucial video of what the government considered a terror attack been kept away from the public for more than two years. Influential opinion pages would have banged the drum incessantly for its release, insisting some sort of cover up was unfolding. Progressive activist groups and elected officials would demand a full accounting of what happened before, during, and after the “attack,” including all government-produced evidence. Influential lawyers and legal defense funds would lament the deprivation of due process for those involved in the allegedly heinous act.

Instead, the usual defenders of accountability, transparency, and constitutional rights have been completely AWOL. The fight has been waged by outmatched defense attorneys in the rigged legal and judicial system in the nation’s capital. And a handful of influencers like Carlson.

To be fair, a consortium called the Press Coalition forced a few federal judges to lift protective orders on a small amount of surveillance video. Representing more than a dozen major news companies, the coalition successfully won the release of limited security footage that, in some instances, contradicted the assertion that police did not allow protesters into the building that afternoon. Unsealed video also showed how police brutalized women inside the lower west terrace tunnel.

In a laughable “reality check” in his article, Axios reporter Mike Allen suggested the public has seen enough surveillance video since the “Jan. 6 committee played numerous excerpts of the footage at last year’s captivating hearings.” But not only were most of the evidentiary video clips sourced from protesters’ cell phones, the surveillance video clips offered by the committee represented an infinitesimal sliver of the total collection.

Which, notably, is much bigger than what the government has made available to January 6 defendants. Axios reported that Carlson’s team has 41,000 hours of raw footage—nearly three times the amount that the Justice Department allowed into evidence, which only covered the time period between noon and 8:00 p.m. on January 6. The tapes now in Carlson’s possession apparently covers the entire 24-hour period from “multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds.”

One can only guess what the videos will reveal. It’s possible, even likely, the never-before-seen footage will show the elements of a preplanned attack engineered by the same political and government forces that attempted to destroy Donald Trump for the better part of six years. Will the tapes finally answer the questions that top law enforcement officials such as FBI Director Christopher Wray refuse to answer and the January 6 select committee buried—not the least of which was the role of the FBI?

Withholding the video is only one part of the massive cover-up about January 6. Republicans should seek similar demands for records, emails, and communications from Capitol Police to expose the full scope of the cover-up. But like all good political scandals, the path to the truth begins with the tapes.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he has continued to keep his promise of transparency with regard to the company's past behavior

Thanks to the revelations in the so-called  'Twitter Files', we have seen clear evidence that the FBI and other three-letter agencies worked directly with various social media entities to suppress perfectly "lawful speech" for purely political reasons.

Twitter suppressed or removed content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company was under government pressure to purge such content and its purveyors from the platform, though most of the time it was cooperating with the censorship requests willingly, the documents indicate.

And yet, as Matt Taibbi writes, these extremely newsworthy revelations...

2. The #TwitterFiles have revealed a lot: thousands of moderation requests from every corner of government, Feds mistaking both conservatives and leftists for fictional Russians, even Twitter deciding on paper to cede moderation authority to the “U.S. intelligence community”: pic.twitter.com/njklzvX0n1

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

...have produced exactly zilch in mainstream news coverage in the last two months.

Something he discussed with Joe Rogan this past week...

However, as Taibbi notes, House hearings were held last week, at which one witness told a story about Donald Trump asking to remove a mean tweet by Chrissy Teigen.

The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news!

And so, Taibbi throws down the gauntlet in the latest 'Twitter Files', "purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area"...

5. Purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area, let’s introduce a pair of loud new data points, and see if any press figures at all cover either of them.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a U.S. Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?

Here’s Maine Senator Angus King writing to Twitter to call a slew of accounts “suspicious” for reasons like:

• “Rand Paul visit excitement”

• “Bot (averages 20 tweets a day)”

• Being followed by rival Eric Brakey

• Or, my personal favorite: “Mentions immigration.”

Taibbi notes that King’s office declined comment. If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like:

Read the full (rather lengthy) spreadsheet here in a Google doc to see if you're on 'the list'.

Yes, the Maine Senator demanded @ZeroHedge (and 100s more) Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (and Facebook Groups) be instantly removed for being "suspicious".

As one wit on Twitter responded via DM when we remarked on Senator King's actions: "the f**king balls on these people!!"

We could not have said it better.

As Matt writes in a follow-up...

One of the funniest things about the @SenAngusKing suspicious accounts list is that they seemed to think @zerohedge is a bot. https://t.co/2jiOKvpc9o

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

Taibbi concludes the latest tweet thread with a big reality-check slap to the face of the mainstream media

The fact that mainstream outlets ignored the Schiff story but howled about Teigen shows what they're about.

Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives.

The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about a ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy that's not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.

Beginning in March, we'll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

All of which, roughly translated, sounds like - look out MSM, there's so much more to come that you will never get away with not covering it! We won't hold our collectively censored breaths but with Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others on the forensic case, we suspect the run up to the 2024 election will be a little more 'free' than the run-up to the 2020 election.

Authored by Julie Kelly via American Greatness (emphasis ours),

It’s week five of the Justice Department’s most high-profile—and high-stakes—criminal trial related to the events of January 6, 2021. Five members of the Proud Boys face the rare “seditious conspiracy” charge. Guilty verdicts—almost certain given the government’s near-perfect conviction rate for January 6 defendants—would build legal momentum for a similar indictment against Donald Trump. (The trial is so crucial that Matthew Graves, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia responsible for prosecuting every January 6 case, has shown up in the courtroom on at least three occasions.)

Trump is a major figure in this trial, an unindicted coconspirator of sorts. Last week, Judge Timothy Kelly allowed prosecutors to play a clip of Trump’s extemporaneous comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark uttered during a presidential debate in September 2020 more than three months before the Capitol protest. The Justice Department wants to portray the comment as a call to arms, tying the alleged “militia” group to the former president.

The clip is just another thin reed of evidence in the government’s landmark domestic terrorism case. In fact, much of the “evidence” amounts to nothing more than worthless trinkets, braggadocious group chats, and otherwise protected political speech. 

It now appears that one key piece of evidence was not the work of any defendant in this case but rather written by a one-time government intelligence asset with unusual ties to both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, another group involved in January 6.

A document titled “1776 Returns” is cited by the government to indicate the group had an advanced plan to “attack” the Capitol. In two separate criminal indictments, prosecutors explained how the document ended up in the hands of Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys: “On December 30, 2020 [an unnamed] individual sent Tarrio a document—[that] set forth a plan to occupy a few ‘crucial buildings’ in Washington, D.C. on January 6, including House and Senate buildings around the Capitol, with ‘as many people as possible’ to ‘show our politicians We the People are in charge.’”

Calling the document a “high-level summary,” a prosecutor last week combed through each page of “1776 Returns” with an expert witness even though the government conceded there was no proof Tarrio opened the file or shared it with others.

“The plan, essentially, is to have individuals inside these buildings, either cause a distraction, or—pull fire alarms in other parts of the city to distract law enforcement so that a crowd can then rush the buildings and occupy the interior so they can demand a new election,” FBI Agent Peter Dubrowski told the jury.

In other words, an “insurrection!”

But a bombshell motion filed over the weekend debunks the Justice Department’s suggestion that the document was a product, or at least a roadmap, used to guide the group’s conduct on January 6. The filing suggests that the handling of “1776 Returns,” like so much of January 6, was yet another sting operation. 

“It appears that the government itself is the author of the most incriminating and damning document in this case, which was mysteriously sent at government request to Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio immediately prior to January 6 in order to frame or implicate Tarrio in a government created scheme to storm buildings around the Capitol,” wrote Roger Roots, attorney for Dominic Pezzola, in the motion seeking a mistrial. “As such, [the document] and the government’s efforts to frame or smear defendants with it, constitutes outrageous government conduct.”

Turns out, the person responsible for preparing the document is a man named Samuel Armes, a young cryptocurrency expert living in Florida. But Armes’ résumé raises many red flags, particularly in a case involving the use of multiple government informants. 

Armes told the January 6 select committee last year that he has worked for the State Department and Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. “A lot of the work that I did for the government was in counterthreat finance or regulatory environments around crypto,” he testified.

As a student at the University of Southern Florida, Armes was enrolled in a special program that prepared graduates for a career in the intelligence sector. Armes told House investigators he was “groomed to be in the CIA, FBI, or any intel agencies.” When asked to clarify what that meant, Armes explained he was “trained and educated” to eventually work as an intelligence asset. 

Part of that training required preparing different responses to potential terror threats. And Armes was no slouch. “I reported under Colonel [Joshua] Potter’s counterthreat finance unit. And I actually developed for them critical research on cryptocurrency that may have been used by drug cartels or ISIS. And so I did similar scenarios with them, wargaming scenarios, of why these terrorist groups might be using cryptocurrency and how they might go about doing so.”

That background in “war games” apparently motivated Armes to do the same before January 6. After reading reports about the Transition Integrity Project, a collection of high-level Trump foes plotting to remove Trump from office regardless of the election’s outcome, Armes said he felt compelled to perform his own “worst case scenario.” 

Hence the “1776 Returns” paper.

But Armes’ explanation as to why he put thoughts on paper is strange, to say the least. His reasons for “brainstorming,” as he called it, what might happen after the election veered from the Terry Schiavo case—“when government authorities are kind of confused and people don’t know who to obey or who to answer to, anarchy kind of breaks out, and certain parties take advantage of that anarchy,” he said of the protracted legal battle over the famous right-to-die case two decades ago—to Trump’s unpredictability, to the 2020 summer riots, to total anarchy in the streets. 

Even more odd is that his internal “brainstorming” document ended up in the inbox of Erica Flores, a business associate in Florida—who just happened to be Tarrio’s girlfriend at the time. “I had told her that I was kind of brainstorming what I think might happen, and she seemed interested. And she asked if she could see it, and I said sure. And so I ended up sharing it with her on a Google Drive.”

Flores then sent the document to Tarrio.

Flores’ version of events, however, is quite different from Armes’ account. While he disputed being the sole author of the document, Flores reportedly told the January 6 committee that Armes wrote the whole thing. Further, contrary to Armes’ testimony to the committee, she said Armes told her to send it to Tarrio.

For now, it’s unclear whether the public, or more importantly, the defendants, will learn the truth about the origins of the “1776 Returns” missive. Armes admitted he cannot find the original document in his Google files. And although Flores spoke with the January 6 committee, her transcript is not publicly available, buried with hundreds more at the National Archives.

That’s not the end of Armes’ weird story; he also was in contact with a member of the Oath Keepers in 2020. Armes’ name showed up on a hotel reservation for James Beeks, now on trial in D.C. for his participation in the January 6 Capitol protest. When House investigators asked Armes why Beeks included his name on the same hotel room, Armes claimed the man had a romantic interest in him.

Armes also admitted he and Beeks had many conversations before January 6 on topics such as the election and domestic politics. But just like Armes’ original “1776” document, those messages are missing, too.

As evidence piles up to show how federal assets played an animating role before and on January 6, Armes’ weird account—and background in government intelligence—cannot be dismissed as coincidence.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the New York Post on the call of Bill Gates to use Artificial Intelligence to combat “political polarization” on the Internet. It turns out the problem on the Internet is those pesky humans “who want to believe … things” that they should not. Enter the new AI Overlords to bring collective peace and tranquility through content assimilation.

Here is the column:

“We are the AI.”

That Borg-like greeting could be coming soon to the internet in the form of new AI overlords. In a recent chilling interview, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates called for the use of artificial intelligence to combat not just “digital misinformation” but “political polarization.”

He is only the latest to call for the use of either AI or algorithms to shape what people say or read on the internet. The danger of such a system is evident where free speech, like resistance, could become futile.

In an interview on a German program, “Handelsblatt Disrupt,” Gates calls for unleashing AI to stop certain views from being “magnified by digital channels.” The problem is that we allow “various conspiracy theories like QAnon or whatever to be blasted out by people who wanted to believe those things.”

Gates added that AI can combat “political polarization” by checking “confirmation bias.”

Confirmation bias is a term long used to describe the tendency of people to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms their own beliefs. It is now being used to dismiss those with opposing views as ignorant slobs dragging their knuckles across the internet — people endangering us all by failing to accept the logic behind policies on COVID, climate change or a host of other political issues.

This is not the first call for AI overlords to protect us from ourselves. Last September, Gates gave the keynote address at the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy. He told his fellow billionaires that “polarization and lack of trust is a problem.”

The problem is again … well … people: “People seek simple solutions [and] the truth is kind of boring sometimes.”

Not AI, of course. That would supply the solutions. Otherwise, Gates suggested, we could all die: “Political polarization may bring it all to an end, we’re going to have a hung election and a civil war.”

Others have suggested a Brave New World where citizens will be carefully guided in what they read and see. Democratic leaders have called for a type of “enlightened algorithms” to frame what citizens access on the internet. In 2021, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) objected that people were not listening to the informed views of herself and leading experts. Instead, they were reading views of skeptics by searching Amazon and finding books by “prominent spreaders of misinformation.”

Warren blamed Amazon for failing to limit searches or choices: “This pattern and practice of misbehavior suggests that Amazon is either unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products.” In her letter, Warren gave the company 14 days to change its algorithms to throttle and obstruct efforts to read opposing views.

Social media responded to such calls and engaged in widespread censorship of those who held opposing views of mask mandates, vaccine safety, school mandates, and the origin of COVID-19. Many of those criticisms and views are now acknowledged as plausible and legitimate, but scientists were banned and censored. There was no “polarization” allowed. The public never was allowed to have that full debate on social media because such views were declared disinformation.

President Biden joined in these calls for censorship, often sounding like a censor-in-chief, denouncing social media companies for “killing people” by not blocking enough. Recently, he expressed doubt that the public can “know the truth” without such censorship by “editors” in Big Tech.

They found an eager body of censors at companies like Twitter. After taking over as CEO, Parag Agrawal pledged to regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”

That view was echoed last week in the first hearing on Twitter’s censorship program. Former Twitter executive Anika Collier Navaroli testified on what she repeatedly called the “nuanced” standard used by her and her staff on censorship. She explained that they did not just balance free speech against public safety in deciding whether to allow someone to speak. Rather censorship depended on the persons involved: “Whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely?”

All of that could be much easier with an AI Overlord that can protect us against our own doubts and divisions. Currently, Microsoft, the company Gates founded, uses NewsGuard, a self-described arbiter of misinformation, which rates sites and has been widely criticized for targeting conservative media.

Now, this work could be turned over to an AI Overlord. Of course, the intelligence remains artificial. A human has to program what is truth and what is intolerable “polarization.” It would be a ramped-up version of ChatGPT, the popular AI service that Microsoft just incorporated into its Bing search engine. It censors “offensive” content and bars certain viewpoints because it was told to do so.

AI enforces the collective truth that needs to be amplified for a greater good as determined by figures like Gates.

We are clearly not facing a giant menacing cube circling our planet (No, the Chinese balloons don’t count). Yet, after years of censorship, you would be forgiven if it all sounds chillingly similar to “Lower your shields and surrender … Resistance is futile.”

Authored by Chris Hedges via Scherpost.com,

Woke culture, devoid of class consciousness and a commitment to stand with the oppressed, is another tool in the arsenal of the imperial state...

The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.

The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.

Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.

Colonial regimes find compliant indigenous leaders — “Papa Doc” François Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran — willing to do their dirty work while they exploit and loot the countries they control. To thwart popular aspirations for justice, colonial police forces routinely carried out atrocities on behalf of the oppressors. The indigenous freedom fighters who fight in support of the poor and the marginalized are usually forced out of power or assassinated, as was the case with Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lakota chief Sitting Bull was gunned down by members of his own tribe, who served in the reservation’s police force at Standing Rock. If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed. This is why the FBI, along with Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton and was almost certainly involved in the murder of Malcolm X, who referred to impoverished urban neighborhoods as “internal colonies.” Militarized police forces in the U.S. function as armies of occupation. The police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are no different from those in reservation and colonial police forces.

We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.

“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report told me in 2018.

“These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”

Ford called those who promote identity politics “representationalists” who “want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want Black scientists. They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”

The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department for Health and Human Services. As of 2021, Black and Native American children lived in poverty at 28 and 25 percent respectively, followed by Hispanic children at 25 percent and white children at 10 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties.  African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.

Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control. 

Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about  incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them. 

A class I taught in a maximum security prison in New Jersey wrote “Caged,” a play about their lives. The play ran for nearly a month at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it was sold out nearly every night. It was subsequently published by Haymarket Books. The 28 students in the class insisted that the corrections officer in the story not be white. That was too easy, they said. That was a feint that allows people to simplify and mask the oppressive apparatus of banks, corporations, police, courts and the prison system, all of which make diversity hires. These systems of internal exploitation and oppression must be targeted and dismantled, no matter whom they employ. 

My book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” uses the experience of writing the play to tell the stories of my students and impart their profound understanding of the repressive forces and institutions arrayed against them, their families and their communities. You can see my two-part interview with Hugh Hamilton about “Our Class” here and here.

August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” foretold where diversity and identity politics devoid of class consciousness were headed. In the play, Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated real estate developer, is about to launch his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. His wife, Mame, is angling to become the governor’s press secretary. Wilks, navigating the white man’s universe of privilege, business deals, status seeking and the country club game of golf, must sanitize and deny his identity. Roosevelt Hicks, who had been Wilk’s college roommate at Cornell and is a vice president at Mellon Bank, is his business partner. Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks: 

You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got blindyitis. A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.

Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.

*  *  *

NOTE TO READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

For much of 2017 through 2021, Americans suffered the “bombshell” and “walls are closing” mythologies first of Russian collusion, then of supposedly vast Russian social media investments to sabotage the election. From there we moved on to the Alfa Bank ping-pong fable, the supposed Putin bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan that Trump was said to have ignored and, of course, the idea that Hunter’s laptop was just “Russian disinformation.” 

These were journalistic sins of commission, warping the news cycle to advance ideological agendas and win elections. There emerged, however, other real landmines of omission—things the media deliberately ignores, but have the potential to go off and blow up a presidency. 

Taxes Paid by Mr. 10 Percent? 

Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) mocks the Hunter Biden laptop scandal of a “half-fake” laptop. Yet such puerile flippancy only confirmed her own trademark arrogance and ignorance. Is she claiming the laptop was, was not, or is just sorta not genuine? Hunter’s lawyers are suing to stop the dissemination of his “half-property”? 

Hunter, who never in the past has denied ownership of the laptop, has now confirmed it really was his. A revisionist Hunter should have first conferred with his dad, since, on the presidential debate stage in 2020, Joe Biden swore to the American people the laptop was a product of Russian disinformation. He cited as support “50 former intelligence officials” who signed a statement claiming as much—all organized to deceive the pre-election electorate by former CIA Directors James Clapper and John Brennan. Both previously were best known for admitting to lying under oath to Congress. 

Any fair examination of the laptop’s contents would conclude that Joe Biden received percentage payments from the various quid pro quo enterprises for the merchandising of his name and status as a senator and then vice president. So it should be a simple task for the IRS to compare his reported income over those years with his net worth and yearly likely expenditures, to determine whether he paid taxes on his alleged 10 percent cut, or whether any of the Biden family paid gift taxes on their various cash interchanges with one another. 

It is one thing to fight the IRS over deductions, but quite another over income. The former can become sticky matters of legal interpretation, the latter is mostly black or white: Money either came in and was reported—or not. If Biden did not pay income tax on percentage payouts to him by his family and business associates, then he committed tax fraud, and likely would be impeached. 

The laptop and classified documents revelations are landmines well beyond their incriminatory evidence that Joe Biden received payments from Hunter Biden’s influence-selling team or improperly took away top secret papers. If Hunter’s trove of business assessments are found to have drawn on his father’s classified files—and there are already allegations that they did—then such use of his father’s illegally transferred federal documents for familial profit would end the Biden presidency. 

No president could sustain his office if it were proven true that previously he transferred classified documents out of the White House or Senate and allowed such top secret analyses to be monetized by his son to enrich his family—and himself. 

A Real Bombshell? 

Octogenarian journalist Seymour Hersh’s recent allegations that the United States blew up sections of the Russo-German Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were scarcely covered by the media that otherwise runs with the usual Hersh-fed embarrassments to the U.S. government. Oddly, in this case, it stayed mum. The story was adamantly denied by the Biden Administration and most of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. 

The news media’s neglect cannot be due to any journalistic standards, because a sloppy and corrupt media long ago swore falsely that Trump let Putin put kill-bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan, and insisted the Biden laptop was authentic evidence of Russian disinformation designed to help Trump. 

So we have no idea whether the media suppression of the story was due to its usual warped ideology or a rare, disinterested standard of ignoring a conspiracy theory. 

Hersh’s reporting was largely based on one anonymous source, but oddly marked by an unusual level of detail about the planning, carrying out, and purpose of the operation. 

The Left had long deified Hersh for the consistently anti-American government themes in his sensationalized dispatches. His accuracy, however, is not always contested, given he was largely accurate in the disclosures about the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses. But in this instance, he has been met with ridicule rather than the usual adulation from the liberal media. 

Still, there were a variety of circumstances that kept the smothered story breathing—and for a multitude of reasons. The only concerned countries with the operative ability to carry out such an intricate attack were likely Russia, the United States, and European Union countries. The Washington Post in December concluded that, despite initial circumstantial evidence, there was no reason to believe Russia blew up its own multibillion-dollar investment that was deemed critical for future Russian foreign exchange revenues. 

While Hersh mentioned Denmark and Norway as cooperating with the United States, it is equally difficult to believe that any European Union or NATO nation would on its own attack the assets of another member, especially the shared investments of Germany that for some time has dominated the governance of EU and the policies of European members of NATO. 

More disturbingly, on the eve of the Ukraine war in January 2022, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland quite indiscreetly boasted, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” She did not say what she meant by “another” way. 

That was not an isolated threat. Joe Biden reiterated the same warning a month later. “If Russia invades,” he said, “then there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2 . . . We will bring an end to it . . . I promise you; we will be able to do it.” His choice of “end” implied more than voluntary German disconnection from an otherwise intact Russian pipeline. 

More recently, Nuland post facto expressed glee in an exchange with Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that her earlier threat had been reified, “Senator Cruz, like you, I am—and I think the administration is very pleased that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you say, a pile of metal at the bottom of the ocean.” 

Apparently, the position of the Biden Administration was not just belated official disapproval of the pipeline—as President Trump had made abundantly clear during his own tenure with sanctions. Rather, this government was pledged (“I promise you”) to “bring an end to it,” and had the ability to do just what it promised (“We will be able to do that”). 

When the pipeline was actually bombed, the U.S. government expressed satisfaction with that violent act: “Very pleased that . . . Nord Stream 2 is now . . . a pile of metal at the bottom of the ocean.” It would be hard to think Nuland was praising Putin for purportedly destroying his own multibillion-dollar investment, given that Germany did stop much of its deliveries of natural gas without the ruin of the pipeline. 

Even if we put aside the question of who destroyed the pipelines (and they could be rendered useless if seawater continues to erode the interior linings), it was highly unusual for the president of the United States and an under secretary of State publicly to hint at a preemptive attack against a key asset of its ally Germany and a formidable power with over 6,500 nuclear weapons. 

Nor do NATO nations destroy, preemptively and stealthily, the property of other NATO nations—especially given that Germany was facing the onset of autumn and winter, and did not have the wherewithal to keep its 80 million citizens warm without the full gas deliveries through the pipeline. There are no suggestions that the German government might have winked and nodded at the explosion—given Berlin might have been otherwise afraid voluntarily to close down the pipeline given public support for the deliveries. 

If the United States took extra measures—alleged in detail by Hersh—to evade legal responsibilities to apprise a select group of senators and representatives of a planned major covert operation, then that too might well be an impeachable offense. 

As of now the story remains unproven, if not wild. But unfortunately it dovetails with the prior statements of the highest American officials, and the apparent strategic agenda of the United States, better than do current competing narratives—as the Washington Post reminded us in the case of Russia. 

But even a slight chance that the story rings true is terrifying in its implications—preemptively attacking a nuclear power, destroying the multibillion-dollar investment of an ally and its ability to bring fuel to its strapped citizenry, and deliberately breaking federal laws to avoid congressional compliance. 

Silencing Americans 

Another landmine was a recent, also underreported, almost nonchalant accusation that the CIA used the FBI as a sort of entre to Twitter so the kindred federal agencies could suppress the expression of particular Americans. 

Journalist Matt Taibbi published a recent disturbing trove of internal communications, apparently revealing that the CIA, with help from the FBI, consistently sought to modulate and censure content on Twitter.

Taibbi noted that the CIA was sensitive that it was prohibited by statute from the domestic surveillance of American citizens. And so it preferred the nebulous phraseology, “Other Government Agency” (OGA). At the same time, he pointed out how top Twitter executives such as top censor Yoel Roth simply could not keep up with the avalanche of requests from the FBI, and by extension the CIA, Department of Defense, and State Department. In other words, a left-wing Twitter hierarchy, infamous for selectively banning the communications and expressions of more conservative users, was outdone by the thought police of the U.S. government.

If the FBI had sought to subvert the Bill of Rights through its hire of a third-party, private contractor, the CIA knowingly broke the law, apparently convinced that the overwhelmingly left-wing control of Twitter provided the government with a golden moment to pursue agendas antithetical to the Constitution, if not patently illegal.

Finally, we are witnessing the strangest provocations to U.S. sovereign airspace in history. China apparently has been sending with impunity surveillance balloons throughout American skies. Our woke military either did not know of all of them, or could not or would not stop them, or did not disclose these apparent serial violations to their own civilian overseers.

Biden mysteriously allowed an enormous Chinese spy balloon to traverse nearly the entirety of the continental United States. When pressed, his administration issued a series of untrue statements or at least mutually contradictory excuses for its own paralysis: the device may have been just a weather balloon; it was a harmless, anemic primitive spy device; it may have been more sophisticated than we thought but we took measures to ensure our sensitive locales were protected; we could not shoot it down because it had caused no harm; we could not shoot it down because the debris might have hurt people on the ground; we could not shoot it down over Alaskan waters because they are too deep and too cold; Trump was to blame for not stopping them earlier; and on and on.

When pressed about his reaction to this Chinese sustained and successful aggression, designed either to surveille and probe U.S. strategic sites or to humiliate and embarrass America to the world as clueless or timid, or both, Biden simply said the intrusions had not damaged U.S.-Chinese relations.

The first duty of a president is to keep his country safe and secure. Joe Biden has failed that oath when he did to our airspace what he had done previously to the southern border—allowed anyone or anything to violate our sovereignty at will.

Whether any of these landmines goes off, depends on the release of information from the government. But nemesis is already playing a role.

Consider: a Democratic House majority once criminalized noncompliance with a congressional subpoena. A Democratic Ways and Means Committee institutionalized demanding and successfully obtaining the tax records of a president. A Democratic president declared the unlawful storage of classified information to be worthy of a special counsel’s criminal investigation.

A left-wing media destroyed the high-bar rules of journalistic evidence and investigation protocols through its concoction of Russian collusion and disinformation hoaxes. A discredited media claimed that any perceived presidential laxity with an aggressive foreign adversary—like China’s serial intrusions into U.S. airspace—was supposedly prima facie evidence of a compromised president “colluding” as an “asset” of an enemy.

Ironically Biden, the media, and the old Democratic House majority have provided Republicans the same tools to discover the truth which the Left had once used to destroy it.

Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

We have word from the FBI.

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

Here’s the FBI’s representation:

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

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

We won’t overpromise or guarantee what these documents might reveal. Until we get our hands on the documents there are still a ton of questions, such as: will the FBI improperly redact the interview(s), or will the FBI refuse to release all their Epstein interviews?

We’ll see.

The Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell “John Does”

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

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

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

• There are approximately 165 “John Does”. These are not all perpetrators. The vast majority are witnesses of varying degrees (meaning material or immaterial), employees of Epstein, or affiliates of Epstein or the victims. The term “affiliate” ranges from those in Epstein’s address book to the doctors or acquaintances of the victims.

Subscribers to The Reactionary can read the rest here...

Update 12:40 am: Some three hours after he first opened fire, the suspect in the Michigan State University mass shooting has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police reported at a 12:25 am press conference. Per police scanner traffic, he shot himself as police approached him at an off-campus street location. WDIV reported that location is about five miles from campus, in northeast Lansing. 

Police say they're confident there was only one shooter and that the threat is over. They lifted the directive for students and staff to shelter in place, but all campus activities have been cancelled for 48 hours. 

Three people are dead, and five wounded. Fatalities occurred both at Berkey Hall -- an academic building -- as well as the MSU student union building. 

Beyond his previous description as a "black male, shorter in stature," the shooter has not yet been identified, nor do police know if he has any affiliation with the university. Police have not yet said what type of firearm or firearms were used in the attacks. 

* * *

A Monday night mass shooting at Michigan State University has reportedly resulted in multiple casualties -- and it may not be over, with the perpetrator still at large and reports of shots fired still being relayed by dispatchers more than two hours after the rampage began.

With the manhunt underway, police held a press conference, announcing that "initial information is that the suspect is a black male, shorter in stature, wearing red shoes, a jean jacket and a ball cap." 

Associated Press reports three people are confirmed dead and five wounded in an attack that started at 8:18pm local/Eastern Time. Soon after it began, the university urged students and staff to "Secure-in-Place immediately." Videos circulating on social media show large groups of students fleeing danger, and police forces rushing past them to locate the shooter. 

??#BREAKING: Chaotic scenes at Michigan State University as heavily-armed police search for active shooter°°??#EastLansing | #Michigan

Watch as terrifying video as dozens, of Students run for their lives as a Active shooter fires multiple rounds around the Michigan State… https://t.co/SctzoIFFzY pic.twitter.com/mNnWKLzN2N

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) February 14, 2023

The shooting appears to have spanned multiple locations on campus. On a live feed of Greater East Lansing Public Safety police radio, dispatchers were heard passing on reports of shots heard at various buildings around the campus, which is about 90 miles northwest of Detroit. 

A dispatcher was also heard reporting multiple casualties in at least two different classrooms, and that students reported that the shooter was in the hallway of Berkey Hall and that they were attempting to flee the building by jumping out the classroom windows. Shooting was also reporting at the student union.

One tweeted video appears to show a body on a sidewalk being moved to a gurney: 

#BREAKING MSU Active Shooting:
- At least 1 dead, multiple injured, after shooting at Michigan State University campus in East Lansing
- Shooter is wearing a mask and is at large
- Multiple shooting scenes on campus
- FBI and ATF responding #ActiveShooter #MSU #MassShooting pic.twitter.com/UoJQdhh286

— That Guy Shane (@ProfanityNewz) February 14, 2023

Early on, MSU police tweeted that the suspect has been described as a "short male with a mask, possibly Black."

UPDATE: The suspect description is a short male with a mask, possibly Black. Please continue to shelter in place. We are still receiving multiple calls of an active shooter on campus. pic.twitter.com/7imm32DhAA

— MSU Police and Public Safety (@msupolice) February 14, 2023

On social media, some people echoed claims that multiple shooters were involved in the attack. However, an MSU police tweeted that "it appears there is only one suspect at this time."

In the initial police radio reports, shots were reported at Berkey Hall, which is home to MSU's College of Social Science, Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, and the Department of Sociology. 

??#BREAKING: This is the initial 'shots fired' call on Michigan State University campus captured on @Broadcastify. pic.twitter.com/roBl89R2Rs

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) February 14, 2023

Compounding the mayhem, a dispatcher announced that a caller to 911 claimed that explosives had been placed on the campus.  

This article will be updated as the story develops...

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the New York Post on the growing attacks on those who are challenging the alleged abuses by the FBI and the censorship system on social media.

Here is the column:

“The Democratic Party [is] the bedfellow of international communism.”

Those words from Sen. Joe McCarthy captured the gist of the Red Scare and the use of blacklists and personal attacks to silence critics. The Democrats this week appear to have taken up the same cudgel in labeling opponents and critics Russian sympathizers and fellow travelers in opposing government involvement in a massive censorship system.

The Red Scare is back and it is going blue.

I testified this week in Congress on the Twitter Files and how they suggest what I have called “censorship by surrogate” or proxy.

The files show dozens of FBI and government employees actively seeking the censorship of citizens and others for their viewpoints. In my testimony, I warned that this was reminiscent of the McCarthy period where the FBI played a role in the establishment of blacklists for socialists, communists, and others. I encouraged Congress not to repeat its failures from the 1950s by turning a blind eye to such abuse.

This view was amplified by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who became persona non grata for her anti-war sentiments in Congress. She was later labeled a “Russian asset” by Hillary Clinton, who has refused to support that scurrilous claim against a former member.

For years, the Democrats pushed a Russian collusion theory that collapsed. It was later disclosed that the Clinton campaign hid and then lied about funding the infamous Steele Dossier. Nevertheless, people like Carter Page were falsely accused of being Russian agents and critics of the investigation labeled as Russian apologists. Ironically, the FBI was warned that the dossier appeared to be the result of Russian disinformation and relied on a presumed Russian agent.

If anything, my warning of McCarthy-like attacks and measures seemed to be taken more as a suggestion than an admonition by some.

Soon after the end of the hearing, MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill appeared on MSNBC to denounce the member witnesses (Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Ron Johnson, and former Rep. Gabbard) as “Putin apologists” and Putin lovers.

She exclaimed, “I mean, look at this, I mean, all three of those politicians are Putin apologists. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard loves Putin.” (For the record, she also attacked me as not being “a real lawyer.”)

What was most striking is the level of attacks on those seeking an investigation into possible FBI abuses. The Democratic Party was once the greatest defender of free speech, the greatest critic of corporate power, and the greatest skeptic of the FBI. It is now opposing the investigation into the FBI’s involvement in a massive corporate-run censorship system.

In the 1950s, it was easy for politicians to avoid discussing underlying views by just labeling their opponents as fellow travelers. We are watching the same use of personal attacks today as a way to evade the troubling disclosures in the Twitter Files.

While some like McCaskill yell “Russians!” others use more modern labels, such as “conspiracy theorists.” That notably includes the FBI itself.

When criticized for the role FBI agents played in secretly targeting citizens for censorship, the FBI called critics “conspiracy theorists . . . feeding the American public misinformation.” It is something that you might expect from a pundit or politician. It is far more menacing when this attack comes from the country’s largest law enforcement agency.

Where the Hoover FBI would call dissenters “Communist sympathizers,” the Wray FBI labels them “conspiracy theorists.”

Alternatively, various Democrats portrayed anyone criticizing Twitter for censorship as supporting insurrections against the government. Member after member suggested that seeking to investigate the government’s role in censorship was to invite or even welcome another Jan. 6.

Thus, when Thomas Baker, a former FBI agent, testified on his extensive writings about changes in the FBI, he was attacked by freshman Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) who asked him if he had any experience investigating extremist groups. He didn’t get the answer he hoped for. When Baker responded, “Yes,” and tried to explain his prior experience, Goldman immediately cut him off and accused him of trying to sell a book.

For my part, I got off light. I was not accused of being a Russian mole or fellow traveler of insurrectionists. After responding to a question on the specific content of the files (released and confirmed by Twitter itself), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), denounced me for offering “legal opinions” without actually working at Twitter. It is like saying that a witness should not discuss the content of Pentagon Papers unless one worked at the Pentagon. (By the way, the content of the Pentagon papers as well as the Twitter Files are facts. The implication of those facts are opinions. I was asked about both the factual content of the files and their constitutional implications).

It is all tragically familiar. The effort this week was to attack witnesses rather than address what appears to be the largest censorship system in the history of this country. It is, of course, ironic that those seeking to check such government-supported censorship are the ones being called Putin lovers. Putin loves censorship and likely stands in awe at the success of the left in using the FBI and corporations to regulate speech on social media.

Putin and other authoritarian countries have long feared the Internet and social media. They have struggled to gain the very level of censorship carried out by Twitter and other executives with the support of politicians and pundits.

We now know that members like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) secretly sought censorship of critics, including a columnist. Their success would make Putin blush.

However, Democrats have insisted that freedom is tyranny.

Columnist and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich went full Orwellian when he previously dismissed calls for free speech in social media and warned that censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

He then added bizarrely of uncensored social media: “That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.”

Indeed, it is a nightmare, but a familiar one.

Via 'Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf' Substack,

As I type, I am undergoing the excruciating experience of listening to C-SPAN, which is airing “Twitter’s Response to Hunter Biden Laptop Story.” The larger issue is: who censored Twitter, and why, and whether there was illegal collusion (there was) between Twitter and the US government.

So I finally am seeing them — up close, in real life, in person. I am finally able to look at the faces of the heretofore faceless technocrats who took it upon themselves to try to destroy my life and ruin my name.

I am witnessing, as I see them seated primly in rows in a Congressional hearing room, the very faces — the somber, ill-cut but costly blue suits, the bad wire-rimmed glasses, the judgmental expressions — of those who were personally responsible for the misery, trauma, reputational damage, shattered dreams, and loss of income, in my one life, over the course of last two and a half years.

Here at last are the very people who took it upon themselves, or who oversaw their colleagues, to single me out, to collude with the White House, and with Carol Crawford of CDC, and with DHS perhaps, to suspend me — following an accurate tweet of mine that warned women of menstrual harms following mRNA injection.

The positions of these people, the views of them — their self-regarding, self-satisfied, smug certainty that their rightness is the only rightness that could ever be — do not remind me of the testimony or views of actual Americans. They remind me rather of the affect of functionaries in a Stalinist show trial, or of the nameless bureaucrats in Kafka’s The Trial.

There, onscreen, present at last, is Yoel Roth, “Former Twitter Head of Trust & Safety” - with that oddly prim, pursed mouth that these technocrats all seem to have; with those fingertips touching each other, presenting himself as if he is the moderator of reality itself, and as if he finds himself in the presence of something that smells bad. There are his glazed defiant blue eyes, his slightly balding pate; the costly haircut; there is the sneering downward cast of his mouth. I try not ever to make critical personal remarks, but the ugliness, sorrow, loss, isolation and pain I sustained, and still sustain every day, at the hands of these until-now-faceless, self-righteous people, tend to make me see them aversively; or perhaps I see the moral ugliness of their decisions, as if manifested in their faces and body language.

Sorry — not sorry.

There he is: Mr Roth, wrongly claiming that, “paradoxically,” more speech equals more danger and not more safety for society.

There he is, this person so sure that he is so right, having tweeted that Republicans are “NAZIS”.

And here he is, sorry about that tweet now - that is, now that he is being asked about it - by those same Republicans.

There is Anika Collier Navaroli, “Former US Safety Policy Team Senior Expert,” talking about “dangerous speech”. There is her pale-gray jacket, her earnest if not bullying posture, as she leans forward, passionately describing the terrifying nature of freedom of speech. She describes a Twitter policy to address “coded incitement to violence” and to “address dogwhistles”. Overt threats of violence are of course already illegal, and they are the province of law enforcement, not of social media functionaries. Yet based on these “coded” tweets, rather than on actual threats of violence, Ms. Navaroli calls for more censorship. Thus she is already staking out and defending the Orwellian province of “thought crimes” or “pre-crime.” It was never Ms Navaroli’s role to decide if “dogwhistles” would lead to violence; that is the role of police and of the FBI. Why is she claiming that a social media platform is supposed to take on the role of maintaining physical public safety, that belongs to law enforcement?

Ms. Navaroli ends her hectoring introductory peroration with a pious, condescending conclusion that her mission is to make communication online “safe.” Her evidence of the crimes committed by speaking on Twitter, include this 1984-level sentence: “The President said he liked to send out his tweets like “little missiles”; and to me that sounded like weaponization of a platform.”’ Has the woman never taken an English class or learned about metaphors? Still later in the hearing, she accuses “fan fiction” of leading directly to the murder of people on Jan 6 — putting herself right in line with the many despots and tyrants who, since the birth of the novel, have accused the act of reading of causing social mayhem.

Here is Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), asking Yoel Roth about Twitter’s marking of certain speech as “unsafe”.

There is Rep Eleanor Holmes Norton, a leader whom I used greatly to respect, fulminating about “conspiracies.” There she is using the dangerous language of “incitement”, a meaningless word that serves only to criminalize First Amendment- protected speech. There is Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), on her first week on the job, alarmingly wrongly stating that it is her task to “protect the American people from misinformation” — a role for a member of Congress that is identified literally nowhere in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights.

There is former Twitter counsel, former “head of legal, policy and trust” at Twitter, Ms Vijaya Gadde, with her slightly more polished look and her sapphire-colored jacket; a package that proves however only that pure evil can be as well dressed and coiffed as not. There Ms. Gadde is, prevaricating when Rep Nancy Mace (R-SC) asks her directly if Twitter ever censored Americans pursuant to demands from the Government. After Ms. Gadde’s mumbled gibberish in response, haplessly phrased in the passive voice, Rep Mace thanked Ms Gadde for admitting that Twitter had become a “subsidiary” of the FBI in illegally violating the First Amendment rights of Americans.

It is so painful for me to see these faces. I have a very intimate relationship to these people.

They tried to destroy me, and did a fair job of it, by some measures.

These are the people — “my”people, paradoxically; people educated like me, people who shared my political views until 2020; these are people who vacationed where I used to vacation, who hang out with people I know — who were the agents behind full- on Stalinist-type persecution of innocent Americans; of me; these are the people who ruined my life, or sought to do so, and destroyed my career, or sought to do so. These emotionally ugly, these nasty, self-satisfied folks, so sure that they are right, so very, very wrong; are here at last; right here on C-Span.

They persecuted not just me but Dr Martin Kulldorff; Dr Jay Bhattacharya; Dr Paul Alexander; Dr Peter McCullough. So many others. They scrubbed and manipulated the discourse of a platform that has no right to be any more censorious than a telecom company, because they were willing to collude illegally with the government to decide what can be said in America. The messaging from the FBI via “the super-secret James Bond tele-portal”, as Rep Jim Jordan so brilliantly and rightly put it, reached into the voices of Americans and strangled Americans’ rights; but Twitter and the company’s political friends went further than mere silencing. These smarmy people ultimately hurt, and may have helped to injure and kill, many thousands.

These are the people who decided to remove the accurate tweet of mine about menstrual symptoms subsequent to MRNA vaccines, that could have saved millions of women from the current agony and infertility that they now endure. These are the people who obeyed the instructions of their colleagues in government to censor me.

I looked at the bios of the people cc’d on Twitter’s communications with the White House about attacking my accurate tweet; they were a lot of young functionaries at the US Bureau of the Census, at least two of them, oddly, educated at the University of Delaware. These low-level Gen Z apparatchiks, and their incompletely articulate bosses, thought it was fine to destroy the career and try to shred the reputation of someone who had written eight international bestsellers, who had been a Rhodes scholar, and an advisor to a Presidential campaign and to a Vice President; who had gone back to school at midlife and had worked for seven years successfully to complete a D Phil at Oxford University; who had been invited onto every major platform and written for every major newspaper and was a commentator on every major news network for 35 years, and who, for those decades, by those same platforms and news sites, had been identified as a global leader in the feminist movement.

These nothing people in front of me, these hacks, these people of zero cognitive distinction, these essentially trivial-minded humans, used their unearned, thuglike, intellectually meaningless power — the intellectually two-dimensional power of a social media platform — to announce to the world that I was crazy, unhinged; to present what appears to have been a file, to the BBC, to NPR, to The New York Times - to my own former colleagues — seeking to re-present me, a lifelong writer of heavily annotated bestselling nonfiction, as not credible.

For the two years subsequent to my deplatforming, news outlets — including those where I used to be a columnist, such as The Guardian and the Sunday Times of London — did not need to claim, let alone prove, that I was actually wrong in any concrete way; all they had to do now — and they did this repeatedly, clearly, as we see now, at the behest of the government involved - was to repeat the phrase replicated around the world, and embedded into posterity via my Wikipedia bio:

“Naomi Wolf was banned from Twitter for misinformation.”

“Misinformation” is never in quotes; the accurate caveat — “what Twitter called “misinformation”’ — is never added, in spite of this being the journalistically ethical and correct phrasing. This damning but really meaningless summary, then, is to what 35 years of labor, a status as a feminist leader, two degrees, eight bestsellers, thousands of footnotes, and the publication of essays in every major news site in North America, as well as most of Western Europe — got reduced.

It is incredible to me, as someone who was raised in an American meritocracy, and who has until very recently believed in American meritocracy, that a group of nonentities in Twitter, in collusion with nonentities at CDC (hi there, Carol Crawford), the White House and the US Dept. of the Census — were able thus so simply, and at such immediate, nuclear scale, to destroy the reputation of someone identified since 1990 as a major American voice.

So: this can happen to any American voice.

These ill-dressed, ill-spoken, banal careerist ciphers, cost me so much.

I re-trained for almost a decade, in the middle of my life, to teach. It is all I had ever really wanted to do with my life. Now I will never be able to be the only thing I ever wanted to be — a Professor of English Literature at a university.

I am now sixty. It’s too late for me. Twitter, in collusion with the Biden administration, cost me my hard-won lifelong dream. I’ve been maligned and censored by Twitter since 2021.

Even if the company eventually settles my lawsuit against it, and even though Mr Musk has “let” me back on the platform, that would be, this is, no victory.

Twitter has not sent an advisory to all of the news outlets around the world that depicted me, at Twitter’s own direction, as crazy, that they were wrong to have done so; there has been no press release stating that they erred, and that I was right, and that they are sorry for wrongly abusing my reputation — and for destroying women and babies. No, forever I will remain “deplatformed from Twitter for misinformation” in the cybersphere, even though it is finally being established that sadly I was deplatformed for telling God’s truth.

It is unlikely that any university at this point would see past the grotesque imprint on my bio that Twitter, via the White House, CDC and perhaps the FBI, has taken care to embed in my bio, and in articles about me, around the world. It is unlikely, too, that I will ever recoup the six figure investments that investors withdrew from my company when Twitter, colluding with the government, was orchestrating the shredding of my reputation. It is unlikely that a 35 years career and legacy online of what had been seen until very recently as a life of significant accomplishment, can ever be re-established.

I try never to complain in public. I try never to show self-pity or weakness, at least not to my enemies. But Twitter’s attacks on me are not over, and I am simply sick of the damage these mediocrities have done to me, and continue to try to do.

Just yesterday LinkedIn sent me a notification that a Twitter “Political Staffer” was viewing my bio. A notice of scrutiny by a Twitter staffer with friends in the administration reached my inbox the day before Congressional hearings about the censorship both entities imposed on people such as me.

Intimidate much, @Twitter?

I am a brave person — I guess — and I won’t be daunted by this obvious effort at harassment. But I am also human, and I happen to have a broken shoulder at the moment, and I am simply tired; tired of fighting these monsters.

And yes, it is wearying and threatening and coercive to see that this massive behemoth, with their friends at the highest levels of government, are not done messing with my own, personal, only life.

Yoel Roth is to this very minute, defending the de-platforming of people due to their having “spread COVID misinformation”; that, dear Reader, would be me. To this day, this trimly-styled nonentity defends debunked magical thinking.

To which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene rightly responded: “Mr Roth: who put you in charge of what is true and what is not?”

Rep. Taylor Greene also said to Mr Roth:

“You abused the power of Big Tech to censor Americans. I am so glad you are censored now, and that you have lost your jobs.”

I cannot believe that “my own”people, my former tribe on the elite left, are joining forces with the government to violate the First Amendment rights of all Americans and then, worse still, to justify having done so. I can’t believe that Democrat after Democrat, liberal after liberal, is on C-Span singing the praises of censorship and inventing imaginary roles for government officials and social media platforms to keep Americans “safe” from the “threats“ of discourse and ideas. We used to be the side of Howl and Lady Chatterley’s Lover; of The Well of Loneliness. Heck, of the Free Speech Movement! What happened to us?

I can’t believe that people I thought were hostile to America’s interests — in this case, the Republicans demanding answers from the hacks and flunkies of Big Tech — are the allies in this hearing’s case at least, of truth and the Constitution and freedom of speech.

And I can’t believe that the forces who tore my life apart, temporarily half-destroyed my business, ended any hopes of my realizing my one life’s best dream, and set a match to my reputation, turn out, now that the curtain has been pulled back, as at the end of The Wizard of Oz - to be such small, small, sad, petty, miserable, mediocre people.

The larger issue is not the damage these smirking, small-minded people did to me. The larger issue is what the experience I underwent at their hands, represents for our culture.

There is a specific kind of damage that Twitter and the Biden administration did, in censoring and smearing the medical doctors — in silencing the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. Medical harms, medical damage, limits to medical options and open debate, follow.

But consider my example as an example of something else, that is equally serious.

I am not a medical doctor or a public health official — I am, or I was, an American writer, identified as a cultural figure. So what happened to me means that any American cultural figure can be taken down. Any American cultural movement can be mis-framed, defamed, broken. Any American writer, musician, artist, sculptor, actor, director, can be annihilated and memory-holed. Any American artistic movement can be burned alive. And remember — Twitter is an international company, and wars can be waged, culturally, against us by our adversaries.

Why should any young writer, watching what happened to me, believe in meritocracy in American culture any more — why should she work hard, aspire largely, and master her craft? Clearly keeping her head down and parroting the party line will keep her safer.

So this issue brings us squarely into the cultural climate of 1933, when books were dragged from university libraries to be burned in a pile, in Berlin: [https://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/archives-and-reference-library/online-resources/simon-wiesenthal-center-annual-volume-2/annual-2-chapter-5.html] or of 1937, when the Nazi party curated and hosted a “Degenerate Art” exhibit in Munich. [https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/degenerate-art] What happened to me brings us squarely into a climate in which specific American writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, social activists, can be identified as enemies of the state, or identified as culturally or socially untouchable.

“Degeneracy” in 1937 was defined essentially as that of which the Nazi party did not approve.

Today on C-Span, we heard a lot about the decision to violate Americans’ rights, based simply on sentiments of which the Biden administration, or Twitter’s employees, did not approve.

The larger issue is that once a society crosses this Rubicon, with one cultural figure, this can happen to any cultural figure or any cultural movement. And if we do not reject (and indeed prosecute and legislate against) this unlawful suppression of views at the behest of the government, then we no longer live in an American culture, in which ideas rise and gain currency on the basis of merit and on the basis of ideas’ appeals to others.

We will, rather, be in a Nazi reality in which petty officials distort and dictate culture itself and reputationally behead those cultural leaders who pose challenges to the power structure.

Berlin, Munich, in this respect, are here again, in their darkest sense; those who decided, based on a party line, on proper and improper art, books, views — are not dead and gone; lost in history; no; here they are.

But this time they appear in our America, in their bad blue suits, with their pompous nasal voices; saying “I have no knowledge of this matter”; or “I can’t hear the question”; as they occupy, with their damaged consciences, their nauseating excuses, seats in a hearing room on Capitol Hill in the United States of America.

Will we let these cultural functionaries — who operate just like those petty tyrants of the cultures of Berlin and Munich not so long ago — take up space, with impunity, in the heart of our America?

Or will we drag America back into daylight and sunlight again, and force these equivocating wretches to face their own degenerate crimes — crimes against freedom of speech and the Constitution?

*  *  *

Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support her work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Now China is jumping in on the trend, apparently, as authorities in China say they have spotted and are tracking an unidentified object over waters near the port city of Qingdao.

Scant details have been given, but the claim was briefly detailed in Bloomberg on Sunday, with the publication saying authorities are preparing to down the object.

Area fisherman and boats in the port waters have been alerted and told to follow safety precautions due to the object, which is hovering at an unknown altitude.

According to the report: 

An employee at the marine development authority of Qingdao’s Jimo district said “relevant authorities” are preparing to bring down the object, the report said. The employee was not informed what the object was.

By the vague description, it could be a balloon of some type, or alternately perhaps the Chinese are attempting to hype their own "foreign threat" news story as a counter following the Pentagon shooting down the Chinese 'spy' balloon, which Beijing has maintained all along was just a weather research platform.

As for the now recovered balloon which was shot down over a week ago Saturday off the US east coast, it is undergoing FBI analysis. However, the undercarriage, which US officials say contained surveillance gear, has yet to be lifted from the ocean, and is said to be large - at least 30 feet across. 

And then there's the bizarre couple of incidents over far northern parts of the American continent...

The object shot down above Alaska was an actual UFO:

"Other pilots saying that when they looked at the object they could identify no identifiable propulsion system and they did not know how it was actually staying in the air cruising at that altitude“ pic.twitter.com/k47jM99rdk

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 11, 2023

According to the latest this weekend, the US has said it shot down a third high-altitude object over northern Canada, just a day following a similar intercept of a mysterious object over far northeast Alaska. 

Authored by William Spruance via The Brownstone Institute,

Wednesday, Congress held a hearing on Twitter’s censorship of The New York Post and its coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. While House Republicans focused on issues like shadowbanning and government collusion with Big Tech, Rep. Jamie Raskin and other Democrats advocated for increased censorship from Silicon Valley companies.  

Raskin argued that the committee would be better served focusing on “the real threats of massive Russian disinformation and white nationalist violent incitement on social media.” 

Like the Biden Administration’s usurpation of the First Amendment, Raskin’s cohort’s goal is censorship and the accompanying augmentation of state power, not challenging the veracity of opponents’ arguments or claims.

In “Shouting Covid in a Crowded Theater,” I discuss how officials in the Biden Administration use wartime rhetorical strategies to slander dissidents. In doing so, they conflate dissent with threats to public safety to censor critics. 

When discussing public health, the regime consistently uses labels of “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But the more we learn about government operations, the more it appears that these labels are references to inconvenience, not falsity. 

This strategy extends beyond the country’s COVID response. 

Wednesday morning, Seymour Hersh published “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.” 

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 Pipelines exploded in September 2022. The Nord Stream 1 has delivered natural gas from Russia to Europe for over a decade, and Russia was developing the Nord Stream 2 at the time. Outlets like The New York Times called the explosions “a mystery.” 

The sabotage presented a major energy crisis for the United States’ European allies. Europe imports nearly 40% of its gas from Russia, and the Nord Stream 1 was responsible for delivering approximately one third of that supply. 

Now, Hersh reports that “the United States executed a covert sea operation” with Navy divers to sabotage Russia’s pipelines with explosives. 

For a less obsequious press corps, this should have been an easy story to crack. 

In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, President Biden announced his intention to act against the pipelines in the event of war. 

“If Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” he told reporters. “We will bring an end to it.” 

“How will you do that exactly?” a reporter asked. 

“I promise you we will be able to do it,” President Biden said with a slight smile. 

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland was equally as explicit. 

“I want to be very clear to you today,” she told reporters in January 2022.

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” 

In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed “Anglo-Saxons” in the West for “terror attacks” on the pipelines. “Those who profit from it have done it,” Putin told the press.

President Biden chastised Putin’s accusation for “pumping out disinformation and lies.” 

“Just don’t listen to what Putin’s saying,” Biden added.

“What he’s saying we know is not true.”

White House National Security spokeswoman Adrienne Watson backed up Biden’s claim, referring to Putin’s accusation as “Russia’s disinformation.” 

Russia’s U.N. ambassador also implied that the United States had been involved in the sabotage. Richard Mills, U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., responded by calling the claims “conspiracy theories and disinformation.”

Despite the Commander and Chief’s explicit announcement that he would take action against the Nord Stream pipeline, a credulous press corps has dutifully parotted government talking points that accusations of western involvement in the sabotage are “baseless” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “conspiracy theories.” 

This all follows a similar pattern to the informational warfare of the Covid era: an inconvenient narrative arises, the government and lemmings in the media slander it as false and dangerous, and, months later, the dispute in question turns out to be true (or at least highly plausible). 

Arguments over natural immunity, vaccine efficacy, masks, the lab leak hypothesis, school shutdowns, lockdowns, and the scientific basis of social distancing are just a few examples that followed this cycle of reporting. 

This was the same pattern as The New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop. Now, at hearings to investigate corruption that implicated Big Tech, intelligence officials, and the federal government, Raskin and his cohorts return to their familiar censorship ploys. 

For censors, augmentation of power, not truth, remains the chief objective. To achieve this goal, they conflate dissent with domestic terrorism.

For example, the Department of Homeland Security’s “National Terrorism Advisory Service” listed misinformation and disinformation as terrorism threats in February 2022. The memo identified these threats as efforts to “undermine public trust in government.” 

Regarding both Covid and Ukraine, the most powerful forces in the country have repeatedly lied and misled the American public. They censor critics to protect their delicate narratives of fiction, and they attack others for the public’s waning trust in government. 

Hersh’s article pierces through the hegemonic narrative; hopefully, exposing their lies and warmongering will disrupt their ploys for censorship and power. 

Authored by Julie Kelly via AmGreatness.com,

They sure don’t make tyrants like they used to.

Tyrants once rose to power the old-fashioned way: defeating the opposition on the battlefield or at the faux ballot box. Despite their atrocities, these despots at least had some swagger—perhaps a way with the ladies, a good sense of humor, strong persuasive abilities, commanding verbal skills, pride in their appearance.

Not so with modern-day martinets. Our 21st-century tyrants possess nothing more than useless degrees from woke institutions and deep contempt for at least half the country, likely born out of a lifetime of social isolation. History, after all, shows that outcasts often seek revenge against their childhood tormentors later in life.

Such appears to be the case with the former Twitter executives who testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Unimpressive by every measure—looks, personality, intellect, persuasiveness, grasp of the facts—the Twitter Four should serve as a reminder of what the defenders of freedom are up against. Thankfully, our enemies, while powerful for now, have the mental, physical, and emotional appeal of overcooked spaghetti.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, and Anika Collier Navaroli took the quasi-stand this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing to explain their roles in colluding with the government to suppress free speech during an election year, particularly related to the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020. Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI when the bureau used fabricated political opposition research to defraud a secret federal court and obtain a warrant to spy on Donald Trump, was fired by Elon Musk as Twitter’s general counsel after it was discovered Baker was vetting company files made available to independent journalists.

Roth, Gadde, and Navaroli were considered the “custodians of the internet,” Roth boasted in a New York Times opinion column published in November, shortly after he resigned. “The work of online sanitation is unrelenting and contentious,” Twitter’s former head of “trust and safety” lamented. Roth then outlined a series of steps the government, private companies, and Big Tech oligarchs should pursue to rein in Musk. 

“In the longer term,” Roth warned, “the moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online.” 

That sort of hubris was on full display this week as the Twitter Four defended their crusade to censor users on the Right, including the suspension of Trump in January 2021. In the process, these self-proclaimed warriors of truth and integrity revealed themselves to be nothing short of petulant foot-stompers unfit for employment anywhere outside of Silicon Valley or the government. Further, all four were clearly guided by their hatred for Trump and his supporters, contrary to their solemn assurances that decisions were based on unbiased considerations to protect the site from insidious content.

For example, Gadde retweeted a Nicholas Kristof piece in 2016, emphasizing Kristof’s conclusion that he had “never met a national politician in the U.S. who is so ill informed, evasive, puerile and deceptive as Trump.” She, like 98 percent of people working in Silicon Valley, is a generous contributor to Democratic Party officials and candidates.

She reportedly cried when she learned Musk had acquired the company.

But Gadde’s attempts to hide her partisan stripes failed this week. In a nonsensical explanation only an Ivy Leaguer could love, Gadde told committee members about the inner workings of the social media giant. 

“Defending free expression and maintaining the health of the platform required difficult judgment calls,” claimed Gadde, who was largely responsible for the decision to ban Trump’s account after January 6, 2021. “Most applications of Twitter rules were fact-intensive, subject to internal debate, and needed to be made very quickly. We recognized that after applying those rules, we might learn that some of them did not work as we had imagined and that we would need to update them. At times, we also reversed course.”

Coincidentally, just like occurrences in the traditional media, those rules and course reversals only affected one side: the Right. But when challenged to explain the imbalance, Gadde played dumb. She said she could only “make a guess” as to the application of a “search blacklist,” a tool that was frequently used by Twitter to hide the accounts of conservative influencers.

Vaccine-injured Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) angrily confronted Gadde about Twitter’s censorship of contrary views on COVID-19, especially vaccine efficacy. After forcing Gadde to admit she did not graduate from medical school, Mace presented tweets with CDC data on vaccine side effects that Twitter nonetheless labeled “misleading.”

Gadde told Mace she was “not familiar with those particular situations,” to which Mace snarked, “Yeah, I bet you’re not.”

Roth, a big talker behind the scenes and on the op-ed pages of regime-friendly newspapers, sheepishly confessed he “regret[s] the language he used” in some tweets including one that referred to the president and his administration as “actual Nazis.” He then complained that he was subjected to threats after Musk shared what Roth insisted was a “defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia.” Roth said he was forced to sell his house in the aftermath.

Anika Collier Navaroli perhaps best portrayed the emotional fragility and overall duncery of these social media tyrants. The “safety policy team senior expert” worked for months before January 6 to “minimize the threat of violence that we saw coming.” Part of the looming danger, Navaroli claimed, was Trump’s comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark not made on Twitter but during a presidential debate in September 2020.

Navaroli, now a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, sprang into action. “We crafted what we called a coded incitement to violence policy to address dog whistles like this,” she told the committee. Rather than follow her orders, Navaroli complained, Twitter “bent over backwards to find ways not to approve it.”

She continued her pressure campaign to remove Trump until the events of January 6. “Two days later, when it looked like it was going to happen all over again, I asked management whether they wanted more blood on their hands,” Navaroli said. “Only then did they act.”

Navaroli seemed to detect danger in everything Trump said. “The former president said he liked to send out his tweets like little missiles. To me, that sounded like weaponization of a platform in his own words and yet Twitter was not concerned.”

She left Twitter in March 2021 after her paranoid fantasies got the best of her. Navaroli told the January 6 select committee she “could no longer be complicit in what I saw to be a company and a product that was wantonly allowing violence to occur. [The] platform was going to continue to allow people to die, and I could not be a part of that.”

Just like the tyrants of old, this current crop hides its lust for power behind a cloak of fairness and the “common good.” No, they’re not cutting off food supplies or building labor camps but these modern-day tyrants seek the same ends: crush the opposition and control the masses.

Just with a lot less talent.

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former U.S. President Donald Trump says he finally sees some truth emerging about “the fake news.”

More than six years after the media began covering the former president’s alleged collusion with Russia–which Trump calls “the Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax–has been dissected from within journalism.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), which calls itself “the most respected voice on press criticism,” recently published findings from an 18-month investigation: a 24,000-word expose’ entitled, “The Press Versus The President.”

Days later, Trump reacted with righteous indignation to the tactics of the press, as revealed in the CJR article.

“It is a STAGGERING, detailed account of the lies, disinformation, and complete lack of journalistic integrity,” Trump wrote Feb. 2 on Truth Social, singling out “the purveyors of Fake News at the Washington Compost (sometimes known as the Washington Post), the Failing New York Times, and many others.”

Trump also decried the incalculable damage that dishonest coverage caused to his 2020 reelection bid.

“This Fake News, with all of its disinformation, had a huge impact on the 2020 Presidential Election, just one of the many ways that the Election was Rigged and Stolen,” he wrote in another Truth Social message. “This proves, once again, that the Corrupt, Woke, Radical Democrats stole the 2020 Election, making it impossible for that fact to be called ‘the Big Lie,’ as the Marxists and Communists in our Country attempt to portray it.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s allies cried out for media outlets to correct the record as his campaign to win back the White House gains momentum. Detractors, however, fault CJR for failing to put Trump himself far enough under the microscope.

Important but Too Long

CJR, in an introduction to its piece, wrote that the investigation’s findings “aren’t always flattering, either for the press or for Trump and his team.” CJR predicted that the article’s revelations would be “debated and maybe even used as ammunition in the ongoing media war being waged in the country.”

American computer analyst turned Russian citizen Edward Snowden, best known for leaking information about the National Security Administration’s spying on Americans, weighed in with a brief analysis on Twitter for people who may think the piece was “TL/DR,” an abbreviation for “too long, didn’t read.”

His summary of the CJR’s findings: Corporate media “knowingly suppressed facts that cut against popular narratives, ignored denials, eagerly laundered partisan attacks via ‘anonymous sources,’ and refuses to reflect on mistakes.”

CJR said its article raises issues that are “important, and worthy of deep reflection as the campaign for the presidency is about, once again, to begin.”

The publication also wrote: “No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate.”

That term refers to the FBI’s investigation of Trump, which began while President Barack Obama was in office and Trump was then running his first presidential campaign. Information later surfaced revealing that the federal government relied in large part on a “Trump-Russia dossier” to justify its investigation.

But that dossier was found to be of dubious origin. A former British spy, hired by people with connections to Trump’s political opponent, Hillary Clinton, used unverified information from people with ties to Russia.

Despite a 22-month investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller, none of the 103 allegations in the dossier was declared valid.

Big Impact

Reporting on the allegations “resulted in Pulitzer Prizes as well as embarrassing retractions and damaged careers,” CJR noted. “For Trump, the press’s pursuit of the Russia story convinced him that any sort of normal relationship with the press was impossible.”

When Trump first announced his run for president in 2016, the real estate magnate/media personality was laughed off as a joke. But then he morphed into somewhat of a media darling. Everything Trump-related became clickbait. Before long, however, the media put Trump in its crosshairs; reporters were “going all in on efforts to catalogue Trump as a threat to the country,” CJR wrote.

The publication said journalist Jeff Gerth took an “encyclopedic look at one of the most consequential moments in American media history.” Gerth is an investigative reporter who worked for almost three decades at The New York Times. His investigation for CJR required interviews with dozens of insiders connected to Trump and media organizations.

Gerth wrote that the U.S. news media’s coverage of Trump helped sink the American people’s trust in journalists.

Read more here...

An email from Hunter Biden to US aluminum company Alcoa is raising fresh concerns over the first son's access to classified documents which were recently discovered in his father's home in Wilmington, Delaware, as House Republicans kick off investigations into allegations of influence peddling.

The emails which date back to 2011 reveal Hunter Biden offering to trade information on Russian oligarchs to Alcoa for $55,000, according to the NY Post's original October 2021 report.

Specifically, Hunter - while his father was Vice President - offered to provide a "statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska, the Russian CEO of Basic Element company and United company RUSAL."

Deripaska had notably just signed a metal supply agreement with Alcoa - which Hunter also offered a "list of elites of similar rank in Russia, map of [Deripaska’s] networks based on frequency of interaction with selected elites and countries."

Now, in light of the fact that classified documents have been found all over the house that Hunter was living at, the Alcoa revelation raises new questions over Hunter's access to sensitive information.

The deeply detailed proposal has come under sharp scrutiny given recent revelations that Hunter Biden had access to the Delaware lake-front home where secret papers from his father’s time as vice president were discovered in a garage, basement and library — combined with Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the high-profile former chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, told The Post that the Alcoa solicitation fits within a broader picture. -NY Post

"The Biden family is the most corrupt family in the history of American politics," said Banks. "The biggest question facing Republican investigators: Where to begin?"

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has also raised the question over whether Hunter used classified documents found at the 6,850 sqft mansion in his business dealings.

Specifically, Johnson referenced an April 12, 2014 email from Hunter to his business partners about Ukraine, which looked "suspiciously" like it could have contained classified information.

"It reads like one of those scene-setters — highly detailed information in terms of Ukraine," Johnson told Fox News on Tuesday.

The email, from Hunter to partner Devon Archer, includes a 22-point memo which he described as "thoughts after doing some research." It included predictions such as the election of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, as well as "some sort of decentralization will likely occur in the East."

"If it doesn’t the Russians will continue to escalate there [sic] destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full scale take over of the eastern region most critically Donetsk," Hunter wrote. "The strategic value is to create a land bridge for RU[ssia] to Crimea."

Hunter was obviously fed detailed information on Ukraine so he could show Burisma why he was worth millions of dollars.

Was this classified information? Did Joe Biden know about this?

Inquiring minds want to know. pic.twitter.com/zFZkpye5Zh

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) January 24, 2023

Next week kicks off fresh hearings in the House Oversight Committee, which will investigate Hunter's alleged influence peddling - including cashing in on his ties to his father in order to rake in millions from foreign companies.

"We have evidence that … we’ll continue to be transparent with as we start our hearings next week, where this family is taking in millions of millions of dollars from our adversaries," said Rep. James Comer (R-KY), Chairman of the committee. "And I think we need to determine what was that money for [and] who supplied that money?"

"Why did the FBI, according to Elon Musk and the Twitter Files … the FBI was implying to them that that laptop was Russian disinformation," Comer continued. "It’s not, and what’s concerning is the FBI had the laptop. Why were they doing that?"

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer spreads the baseless conspiracy theory that "there most certainly is a connection" between Hunter Biden's business dealings in China and President Biden's classified documents case. pic.twitter.com/GCP5I3KJnE

— The Recount (@therecount) January 25, 2023

"The New York Post is fourth biggest newspaper in America; they’re a credible news organization. They’ve done extensive reporting on on the hard drive," Comer said, adding that the committee must dispel "a lot of misconceptions about the laptop."

"So we’re gonna start with with the hard drive, because there’s a lot of evidence on the hard drive that would suggest that Joe Biden knew very well what his family was involved in."

"There’s emails from some of these people’s texting and emailing Hunter Biden saying, ‘Thanks for setting up the meeting with your dad. This is why we’re investigating – we want to make sure that our national security is not compromised," Comer continued, adding that Hunter's international business dealings are particularly suspicious given the services he was providing to foreign agencies.

"We’d like to know what that consulting was. I feel like if China or anyone pays you millions of dollars they expect to get a return on that investment," said Comer. "If they would explain that, then think that a lot of these problems would subside a little bit, but all they do is just like roll their eyes or the audacity of Republicans to ask these questions."

The oversight committee has pressed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to release more than 150 suspicious activity reports filed by banks regarding foreign transactions and wires to and from Hunter Biden, his businesses and associates. -NY Post

"Right now, we just want the bank records. Those suspicious activity reports were created to help Congress and everyone communicate about foreign suspicious foreign transactions," said Comer. "If you do a major foreign transaction with a country, the bank is probably going to write a suspicious activity report to cover themselves for liability."

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has issued a scathing indictment of the New York Times for yellow journalism during the Trump-Russia saga.

In short, the hyper-partisan 'paper of record' was operating in bad faith.

It's wasn't just the Times either. CJR's findings accurately reflect what most objective thinkers have known this whole time - they were all operating in bad faith.

The @CJR review of post-2016 reporting is long, but important.

The TL;DR conclusion:

corpo media knowingly suppressed facts that cut against popular narratives,

ignored denials,

eagerly laundered partisan attacks via "anonymous sources,"

and refuses to reflect on mistakes. pic.twitter.com/PW27ztjxfi

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 31, 2023

That said, CJR aimed the majority of criticism towards the NYT.

"No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate. The story, which included the Steele dossier and the Mueller report among other totemic moments, resulted in Pulitzer Prizes as well as embarrassing retractions and damaged careers," wrote CJR executive editor Kype Pope in an editor's note.

The findings were published in a lengthy, four-part series. The first section begins with a story about then-New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet’s reaction when he found out Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t plan to pursue Trump’s ousting, telling his staff "Holy s---, Bob Mueller is not going to do it."  -Fox News

"Baquet, speaking to his colleagues in a town hall meeting soon after the testimony concluded, acknowledged the Times had been caught ‘a little tiny bit flat-footed’ by the outcome of Mueller’s investigation," according to Jeff Gerth - the author of CJR's lengthy retrospective.

"That would prove to be more than an understatement," he continued. "But neither Baquet nor his successor, nor any of the paper’s reporters, would offer anything like a postmortem of the paper’s Trump-Russia saga, unlike the examination the Times did of its coverage before the Iraq War."

According to Gerth, the Times destroyed its credibility outside of its "own bubble."

I highlighted a few parts last night from this series - the only real attempt by corporate media, apart from a few @ErikWemple columns, to grapple with their serial Russiagate misconduct and lying. They'll ignore it even though it's from @CJR and by Gerthhttps://t.co/TxLItPJrkh

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 31, 2023

What's more, the Times appeared to legitimize former British spy, Christopher Steele, who was indirectly paid by the Clinton campaign to fabricate the infamous 'dossier' that so much of the Russiagate coverage - and the DOJ's sham investigation, was based on.

The Times appeared to legitimize Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who authored the infamous dossier, claiming he had "a credible track record" while Steele's so-called "primary" source was telling the FBI that Steele "misstated or exaggerated" in his report and that information stemming from Russia was "rumor and speculation."

Part three offered examples of the Times' slight-of-hand coverage against Trump in comparison to other hostile outlets. For example, Trump explained his decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, mentioning the "Russia thing" as being a "made-up story" to NBC's Lester Holt but acknowledged the firing would likely "lengthen out the investigation."

"The media focused on the ‘Russia thing’ quote; the New York Times did five stories over the next week citing the 'Russia thing' remarks but leaving out the fuller context. The Post and CNN, by comparison, included additional language in their first-day story," Gerth wrote.

In another instance, the Times avoided covering some of the more damning texts from Peter Strzok, who wrote "there’s no big there, there" shortly after the appointment of Special Counsel Robert  Mueller, something Gerth noted was covered by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.  -Fox News

In closing, Gerth concluded that "the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work" is responsible for the broad distrust in the media.

No kidding.

"In January 2018, for example, the New York Times ignored a publicly available document showing that the FBI’s lead investigator didn’t think, after ten months of inquiry into possible Trump-Russia ties, that there was much there. This omission disserved Times readers. The paper says its reporting was thorough and ‘in line with our editorial standards," wrote Gerth. "Another axiom of journalism that was sometimes neglected in the Trump-Russia coverage was the failure to seek and reflect comment from people who are the subject of serious criticism. The Times guidelines call it a 'special obligation.' Yet in stories by the Times involving such disparate figures as Joseph Mifsud (the Maltese academic who supposedly started the whole FBI inquiry), Christopher Steele (the former British spy who authored the dossier), and Konstantin Kilimnik (the consultant cited by some as the best evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump), the paper’s reporters failed to include comment from the person being criticized."

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

Anarchy, American-Style

The Left runs Oceania, and we work for their various bureaus...

The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist. But it was waged against—not from—the establishment. Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to “turn on, tune in, drop out” from them.

The current revolution is much different—and far more dangerous—for at least three reasons.

The Establishment Is the Revolution

The current Left has no intention of “dropping out.” Why would it? 

It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked—corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the media, the Pentagon, network and most of cable news, professional sports, Hollywood, music, television, K-12 education, and academia. 

In other words, the greatest levers of influence and power—money, education, entertainment, government, the news, and popular culture—are in the hands of the Left. They have transformed legitimate debate over gay marriage into a hate crime. Transgenderism went from a modern manifestation of ancient transvestism or gender dysphoria to a veritable litmus test of whether one was good or evil.

Students have no need to jam administrators’ offices because the latter, themselves, are as radical as the protestors and often lead them on in a top-down fashion. Had they not long ago demonstrated they were perfectly willing to subvert meritocracy, free expression, and equality under the law, they would not be occupying their present positions.

Apple, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies are not 1980s and 1990s “alternative” media geeks and hipsters creating neat gadgets for the people. They are not Steve Jobs and his pugnacious Apple battling the evil Microsoft or IBM, or the Macintosh commercial of 1984 depicting a maverick throwing a hammer into Big Brother’s screen. They are the Orwellian screen.

The current generation of techies is effectively Stalinist. Big Tech now colludes with the FBI, the Democratic Party, and the bureaucratic state to suppress free expression, warp balloting, and serve as contractors of government surveillance. Currently, the most totalitarian people in America are likely to wear flip flops, have a nose ring or pink hair, and disguise their fascism with ’60s-retread costumes.

There are no “armies of the night” marching on the Pentagon. Would-be demonstrators see no need, since radical identity politics, and gay, woke, and transgendered agendas are fast-tracked by the Department of Defense. 

There are no protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau or the “La Migra” anymore by advocates of illegal immigration, because the Left owns the border. And it has utterly destroyed it. There is no border, no border enforcement, and no meaningful immigration law. As many as 6 million illegal entries during the first two years of the Biden Administration are proof enough of that. 

There are no cutting-edge Lenny Bruces or Mort Sahls fighting state censorship because entertainers accept that 1) there are no impediments to vulgarity or pornographic expression, but 2) no comic or commentator dares to take on the diversity, equity, and inclusion woke industry because he assumes he would be crushed, and his career ruined. 

Question the woke status quo, and one is not canonized in Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone as a fighter against the “uptight establishment” or “the man” as in the past, but now demonized as a racist purveyor of “hate speech” and enemy of the people.

The Left does not despise the FBI. It lauds it. And the bureau is no longer consumed with tracking down violent criminals and terrorists. Instead, it has become an enemy of parents worried about school indoctrination, or a retrieval service for lost first-family classified papers, laptops and diaries, or a Washington, D.C., cadre knee-deep in big money politics. 

FBI agents are praised on left–wing media—given they have been activist conspirators who sought to destroy conservative candidates, deleted subpoenaed data, lied to federal investigators or committees while under oath, colluded with Russian oligarchs, doctored court evidence, and paid foreign nationals to compile campaign dirt on American citizens.

There are no longer calls for a “three strikes” solution to violent crime as in the past, or talk of adopting the successful, time-tried “broken windows” theories of law enforcement, because there is no enforcement to modulate. The debate is no longer over enforcing the law, because de facto there is no law.

The new legal establishment has replaced the old by simply nuking centuries of jurisprudence. Violent repeat criminal offenders injure and maim innocents in the morning and are released by noon to prey again—themselves baffled that the state is even crazier than they are.

Note in the 2020-2021 riots, almost no one temporarily arrested was tried, despite $2 billion in damages, upwards of 40 violent deaths, the 1,500 injured law enforcement officers, and the torching of a courthouse, police precinct, and historic Washington, D.C., church. Instead, they were lauded by a mayor as participants in a “summer of love.” Seattle and Washington simply ceded city property to the violent protestors as if they occupied it by right of their superior morality.

The summation of the entire sordid summer was the CNN chyron assuring America that the protests on their screens were “mostly peaceful” as flames shot up to the sky in the background. In the 1960s, rioters forced social welfare concessions—or else!—on the establishment. Today the establishment welcomes urban unrest as an excuse to implement agendas that in normal times would be unpalatable.

In sum, we are living in anarchy, as institutions themselves have become nihilistic and weapons of the revolution. The Left, in viral fashion, took over the DNA of America’s institutions, and used them to help destroy their creators.

If we are bewildered why Harvard law-graduate prosecutors let out violent criminals just hours after their arrests; or why hyper-rich, pampered athletes who live in near-apartheid enclaves  insult the flag, ignore the National Anthem, and sloganeer woke platitudes, it is because they were taught to undermine the status quo by fundamentally becoming it. 

In our present anarchy, $7 a dozen eggs are affordable. Unaffordable gas prices become merely necessary “transitions” to fossil fuels. A “secure” border means there is none. Natural gas must be banned because it supposedly causes asthma. Tens of thousands of homeless defecate, urinate, inject, and fornicate in the increasingly vacant downtowns of Los Angeles and San Francisco, as the Golden Bear state, California, discusses reintroducing Grizzly bears. 

Cars and yards are evil, elevators, high-rises, and buses sacred. There are 81 genders (and counting), with even more names for them. “Racist” is our exclamation point, fillip, a mere add-on emphatic. Everything from SAT tests to obesity to working out is racist. When little is racist, then everything must become racist.

Batter someone to a pulp and you are out of jail in six hours; claim an election was suspicious and you can be in there for six months or more. Proven merit is a pejorative. Grades are deemed useless by those who could never earn As. Boilerplate equity oaths are the best guide to hiring, retention, and admission. The ACLU or the Anti-Defamation League exist only to spot the incorrect kind of censorship and the wrong kind of antisemitism.

Macintosh Becomes MacBeth

The second contribution to the present anarchy is big tech, which speeds up the revolution and spreads it broadly. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was predicated not just on the Sovietization of the state, but the electronically ubiquitous and near instantaneous means by which the apparat ensures its dominance. One of the strangest things about the Left is that it no longer warns of 1984 but emulates it.

How the Left became synonymous with the Internet, social media, mobile phones, pads, and laptops is a long story. But let it be said the Left, and not conservatives, have mastered them all. It has manipulated high tech to change the way we vote, access information, communicate, consume the news, buy, and sell, and express ourselves. In sum, they run Oceania and we work for their various bureaus.

Our tech complex has combined the ethos of the 19th-century monopoly with the Chinese Communist system of mass ideological manipulation. The result is that the old Twitter or Facebook mob can ruin a career in a nanosecond. Google can manipulate the order of search results to render you a clueless Winston Smith bewildered by the alternate “reality” that pops up on your computer screen. 

Wikipedia is pseudo-official falsification. Trotskization relied on scissors and paste; cancel culture can end you by a split-second use of the delete button—and erase you to 7 billion on the planet.

Big Money, Big Woke 

Globalization hollowed out the red-state interior and enriched the blue bicoastal elite. Wealth in mining, farming, construction, manufacturing, and assembly became dwarfed by riches of investment, high tech, social media, law, insurance, and real estate. The former were the up-by-the boot straps conservatives, the latter one day rich and the next moment through hype, investment, and venture capital, richer than anyone in the history of civilization.

The wealthiest ZIP codes and congressional districts are blue, not red. Most of the Fortune 400 billionaires are left-wing. So, there is no ’60s-style talk about the evils of corporations and the supposedly idle rich, none of the old conspiracy theories about Anaconda Copper, ITT, or the Rockefellers. 

The corporations are the Left and in service to it. Disney, American Airlines, and Nike are revolutionary icons, always ready to divest, cancel, fire, hire, and propagandize in service to woke commissars. That they are terrified by tiny bullies who have no constituencies is true, but then a Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao had initially no broad support either—at least before each mastered the use of terror and fright.

In our anarchy, “dark money” like Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million cash infusion into the 2020 balloting processes is now suddenly good, given it is almost all leftwing. Democrats outraise Republicans in campaign contributions by anywhere from three- to five-to-one. Bundling is noble.

Netflix can buy the brand name of the Obamas for $100 million; George Soros can spend his pocket change of $40 million to elect district attorneys to destroy the law and empower criminals. Jimmy Carter used to be the poor-man idol of the old Democratic Party. Today, there is hardly a Democratic president, ex-president, or presidential candidate who is not a multi-multimillionaire—most by leveraging their heightened political profile.

What anarchy we live in when the richest among us are the most radical and wish to destroy for all others what they enjoy. 

John Kerry lectures us on climate change from his private jet. Your leaf blower, not his Gulfstream GIV-SP, is the global threat. Al Gore screams about the evils of carbon emissions—after pocketing $100 million by selling his failed and worthless cable station to smoky and sooty Qatar, fronting for the antisemitic Al Jazeera. 

The Clintons feel the pain of the poor all the way to their $100 million fortune from shakedown lectures, Wall Street, “consulting,” and “foundation” contributions. Van Jones, CNN expert, the object of Valerie Jarrett’s oohing and awing, famous for his “whitelash” exegeses, and recipient of a $100 million Bezos award, now lectures us that the five rogue black policemen in Memphis, who beat to death a black suspect, are still proof of white racism that accounts for blacks belittling the lives of blacks. 

In our present anarchy, we take seriously the lectures on microaggressions from the Duchess of Montecito. The Obamas weigh in on the dangers of climate change and rising seas from their seaside, multimillion-dollar Martha’s Vineyard estate, or Hawaii beachfront mansion that apparently has an invisible climate-change barrier on its beach. Kamala Harris is our border czar who assures us it is “secure,” defined by 5 million illegal entries since she took office.

Nancy Pelosi works for the “children” and, after a life in politics, that selflessness ends up worth $100 million from her husband’s insider real estate deals and stock tips. It is almost as if socialist Bernie Sanders owned three homes, or anti-capitalist Elizabeth Warren was once a house flipper.

So, the current revolution is anarchy, utter confusion, pure chaos. 

Every time one turns on a computer, there will be someone or something somewhere ideologically warping its use. Your vote means nothing when California cannot account for 10 million automatically, computer-guided mailed-out ballots. That state is still in a drought, defined by releasing most of the water to the ocean that the wettest winter in memory produced. 

Stanford students talk revolution, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter, and want to forbid the use of “American.” But from the look of their parking lots, they cannot decide whether Lexus, BMW, or Mercedes should be the most preferred campus car. Oprah and Whoopi suffer terribly from white supremacy. Jussie the foot soldier heroically took on one MAGA thug for each of his foot kicks.  

“Don’t take off your mask” at a California McDonald’s means the man who ordered that edict is maskless at the French Laundry. “Don’t get your hair done during the lockdown” means the architect of that fiat sneaks around her salon, which she has all to herself.

The common denominator to the anarchy? The hardcore Left is your FBI, CIA, and Justice Department all in one. It is Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is our era’s J. P. Morgan. 

No wonder we are confused by the establishment anarchists and the anarchy they produce.

Authored by Guy Benson, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Back in 2016, with a presidential election underway, I made the case that Senate Republicans should force Democrats to live under their own power-hungry rules.  They should do so, I said, by applying the Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer standards to the newly-created Supreme Court vacancy, following the death of the late great Justice Antonin Scalia.  Then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did precisely that, holding the seat open until after the election, paving the way for President Trump's trio of superb SCOTUS nominations.  The Democrats got red in the face and stomped their feet, but after decades of hyper-partisan, unilateral escalations in the judicial confirmation wars, they were merely getting a taste of their own medicine.  

When Democrats attempted to filibuster Neil Gorsuch's nomination to fill that seat, I urged Republicans to enact the Harry Reid standard and change the Senate rules to confirm Gorsuch.  They did so, thus fulfilling McConnell's famous prophesy that his colleagues across the aisle would come to rue the day they'd nuked the filibuster on executive and judicial nominations, for short-term partisan gain (eliminating a tool of the minority they'd abused for years while it benefited them).  In Washington, no one squeals louder than a Democrat held to his or her own standards.  A few Democrats mumbled about 'regrets' after their GOP colleagues pressed the Reid Rule button, but nearly all Senate Democrats now favor doubling down even further by jettisoning the legislative filibuster, which they've called a racist vestige, even as they've repeatedly used it themselves.  Expect some of them to change their tune if and when they lose the Senate majority in 2024.  They never fully learn, which is why the teachable moments need to be clear and painful for them.

Which brings us to the current contretemps over committee assignments in the House of Representatives.  

Democrats are hopping mad that Speaker Kevin McCarthy is moving to boot Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee, and that Ilhan Omar may be stripped of her slot on the Foreign Affairs Committee.  We'll see if he has the votes to do so. [ZH: he did and they were stripped of their positions]

In the last Congress, Democrats -- then in the majority -- stripped two Republicans of their committee assignments, due to offensive statements they'd made.  Dozens of House Democrats, led by the Squad, agitated for another GOP member to lose her committees, as well.  At the time, nearly every Republican in Washington, including many of those not inclined to defend their sanctioned colleagues, warned that if Pelosi and her party went down this path, the shoe would end up on the other foot.  If Democrats wanted break with tradition and wrest certain committee assignment decisions from the minority party, they would be answered in kind at the earliest opportunity.  And here we are.  In case you missed it, McCarthy was badgered about his decisions on this front by a journalist this week, using George Santos as the hook for her objections.  Conservatives quickly started circulating his response, which Julio wrote up yesterday:

Wow. McCarthy responds to a question about removing Schiff and Swalwell from the Intelligence committees and Santos. pic.twitter.com/f00hE2K21K

— Henry Rodgers (@henryrodgersdc) January 25, 2023

As I said on Fox Business, some of this is the 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes' effect.  If Democrats didn't want Republican leaders to pick and choose which of their members could serve on certain committees, they should have left those decisions to the GOP in the last Congress.  Once the die was cast on the other side, it became inevitable that reprisals would follow:

NEW HOUSE RULES: Speaker McCarthy formally kicks Congressman Schiff and Swalwell off Intelligence Committee @guypbenson reacts on @Varneyco #FoxBusiness #McCarthy pic.twitter.com/WbhnkvRhL3

— The Guy Benson Show (@GuyBensonShow) January 25, 2023

And because politicians will always find justifications for their moves beyond "they asked for it," there are substantive reasons behind each of these decisions.  

Omar is an unrepentant bigot.  

Swalwell is a smarmy mud-flinger who 'became close' with, and was allegedly compromised by, a Chinese spy.  He cites news 'fact checks' in his defense, but McCarthy says the FBI briefing he received on the underlying intelligence vindicate his call to keep the California Democrat away from sensitive national secrets.  

And Adam Schiff used his top perch on the Intelligence Committee to wage partisan war, including repeatedly lying about Trump-Russia "collusion," even after that explosive claim had been debunked by the Mueller investigation.  Schiff is angry.  Maybe he should have lied less, and maybe he should have told his party not to travel down this path, given the guaranteed tit-for-tat that would ensue  

If Democrats hadn't meddled in the House GOP's affairs last Congress, McCarthy would probably have let things lie, despite the case against all three (would-be) booted members.  But Pelosi and company pried open this Pandora's box, and now they may have to live with the results.  Enjoy.

Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times,

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) introduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday calling for an investigation into Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and proposed he be denied access to classified information.

The resolution (pdf), titled “Preventing Extreme Negligence with Classified Information Licenses Resolution,” or “PENCIL Resolution,” is an updated version of a similar resolution Gaetz introduced in 2019.

It calls for Schiff to be denied access to classified information and investigated by the House Ethics Committee. It also calls for his comments on the discredited allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign in 2016 to be struck from the official record.

“Congressman Adam Schiff led the effort for years to weaponize lies from the Clinton campaign and a corrupt Department of Justice to smear President [Donald] Trump while destroying any trust the country had left in America’s intelligence agencies,” Gaetz said in a statement.

“Speaker McCarthy kept his promise to remove Rep. Schiff from the Intelligence Committee, and with the PENCIL Resolution, we will express the sense of Congress that he should be barred from accessing any classified information at all,” he continued. “He can no longer be trusted by his colleagues in Congress or the American people.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy officially rejected Schiff for a seat on the House Intelligence Committee on Jan. 24, having argued that Schiff “lied to the American public.”

The day before McCarthy denied Schiff a seat, Charles McGonigal, a former FBI agent who played a role in investigating Trump’s 2016 campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos over the collusion allegations, was himself arrested for alleged ties to a Russian oligarch.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Jan. 23 that McGonigal had been charged with violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by laundering money on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian billionaire.

Gaetz argued that McGonigal’s arrest “proved that the very people investigating President Trump for Russian collusion were themselves taking orders from Russian oligarchs.”

U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) listens during the third hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington on June 16, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

PENCIL Resolution

Schiff served on the Intelligence Committee since January 2015, first as the ranking minority member when Republicans were last in the majority, then as chairman from January 2019 to Jan. 3, 2023, when Democrats were in the majority.

The Democrat was one of eight members, referred to by Gaetz as the “Gang of Eight,” who had access to critical and sensitive intelligence information that other members of Congress and the American people did not have clearance to access.

Gaetz’s resolution states that during his tenure, Schiff made false claims about collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election, despite the principal conclusions of the Mueller Report determining that there was no criminal collusion.

In December 2017, Schiff said during an interview with CNN: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help, and the president made full use of that help.” The resolution additionally notes that Schiff incorrectly claimed there was “clear evidence on the issue of collusion.”

Further, the resolution states that Schiff has been untrustworthy by advancing lies about Trump and that Schiff has attempted to cover his abuse of discretion with legislation.

In November 2020, Schiff’s office demanded Twitter remove “any and all content” by alleged harassers and spreaders of so-called misinformation about the committee’s staff. This included removing content created by State Department staffers that challenged the Russia collusion narrative. His office also called for the suspension of “many” accounts.

Ultimately, the resolution states that Schiff “can no longer be trusted by his colleagues in Congress or the American people.”

The Epoch Times contacted Schiff’s office for comment.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

Former President Donald Trump for now certainly seems to have had more documents labeled "classified" at Mar-a-Lago in Florida than did President Joe Biden at his various homes in Delaware.

Yet otherwise, the comparisons between the two cases, contrary to popular punditry, hardly favor Biden.

First, a stranger would face a far greater challenge entering a post-presidential Mar-a-Lago than a pre-presidential Biden home, office, or garage -- or who knows where?

Secret service agents and private security were stationed at Mar-a-Lago. Prior to the 2020 presidential election they were not at citizen Biden's various troves for most of 2017-2020, much less prior to 2009.

Second, we seem to forget that for much of the developing controversy, Biden's own team was investigating Biden.

On the other hand, the Biden Administration's Justice Department and the FBI were not just investigating Trump as an outside party, but as a former president -- and possible 2024 presidential candidate and opponent of Biden himself.

Remember, the narrative of the first Democratic impeachment of Trump was the allegation that Trump had used his powers of the presidency to investigate Biden and his family, a likely 2020 challenger to Trump's reelection bid.

Third, no one in a position of government authority had passed judgment on Biden's alleged security violations.

That was not the case of the still alleged violations of Trump.

Biden, as president, had weighed in, during his own Justice Department's ongoing investigations of Trump. Indeed, he proclaimed the former president to be guilty: "How could anyone be that irresponsible?" In contrast, he also dismissed the ongoing investigation of himself with "There is no there, there."

Fourth, Trump is certainly right that as president he had a far more substantial claim of declassification rights than did Biden, who took the papers out either as a senator or vice president.

Fifth, the FBI was not merely asymmetrical in melodramatically raiding the Trump home while allowing Biden lawyers to inspect various Biden stashes. The FBI also leaked the purported contents of the subjects of the Trump classified documents (falsely spreading the lie of "nuclear codes" and "nuclear secrets") in a way it has not with the Biden cache.

The FBI went so far as to scatter the documents on the floor for a fake news photo-op as if the papers were so messily arrayed when they arrived.

So far, the FBI has come lightly and belatedly to the Biden case without the SWAT team get-up, and only under pressure from the public and the Republican opposition.

Six, Biden did not "self-report." Biden's team did not call the relevant government authorities the minute they discovered the classified documents in Biden's office and home and garage.

In truth, Biden, or someone close to Biden, certainly knew that he or someone close to him had illegally removed classified documents when he left the vice presidency in 2017 -- or years earlier as a senator.

For at least the last six years -- at least -- Biden has felt no compunction to confess to authorities he illegally was in possession of classified documents.

Indeed, the only reason the current troves are coming to light was apparent White House paranoia that the media, the Biden Justice Department, and the special counsel were so fixated on the Trump documents that they likely feared someone might raise the logical question of whether a hypocritical Biden himself might be guilty of exactly the crime for which they were pursuing Trump.

Worse, Biden and his staff knew classified documents were in his possession before the midterms, but deliberately suppressed that information until after the elections were over.

Seventh, Trump's documents were stored only at one place -- Mar-a-Lago, and only for about 19 months. Biden's were stashed at various locations for nearly seven years, or perhaps over a decade.

There were far more opportunities of time and space for those without security clearances to have access to the Biden documents than to the Trump files.

Eighth, the press has exhaustively speculated, usually wrongly, about how the documents reached Mar-a-Lago and what they contained.

In contrast, no one knows or even asks why Biden took classified documents, what they concerned, or who if any in his family circle had access to them.

Ninth, Trump's documents did not expose other liabilities of the constantly investigated Trump. The Biden files so far have directed attention to the mysterious tens of millions of dollars in Communist Chinese money that poured into Biden's think tank at the University of Pennsylvania, the proximity of members of the quid pro quo Biden consortium to these classified papers, and the files' relevance, if any, to the Biden family's overseas businesses.

Did Hunter Biden ever consult or view classified documents while living in a home with them? Will there be fingerprint or DNA tests on the documents? If Hunter consulted any of these classified documents, then the Biden presidency is finished.

Tenth, Trump possessed contested documents as a private citizen. Biden's files under contention involve the current behavior of the president of the United States. Biden ran for office, was elected, and serves as president with the full knowledge that during all this time he unlawfully possessed classified documents.

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is introducing legislation to ban social media app TikTok from distribution in the United States.

Hawley announced the bill on Twitter early Jan. 24, saying that the app gives China’s communist regime a means of violating the privacy of Americans, including children.

“TikTok is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives,” Hawley said. “It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health.”

“Last month Congress banned it on all government devices. Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide.”

TikTok decried the move, saying that a ban on the app would not solve Hawley’s national security concerns.

“Sen. Hawley’s call for a total ban of TikTok takes a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy, and online harms,” said a TikTok spokesperson in an email to The Epoch Times.

“We hope that he will focus his energies on efforts to address those issues holistically, rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve any of the problems he’s concerned about or make Americans any safer.”

TikTok Used by China to Violate Americans’ Rights

Hawley’s announcement is just the latest in a long series of blows to the embattled social media company, which has been dogged by reports of its connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state.

Hawley originally introduced the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” in 2020, which sought to ban the use of the app on all government-owned devices due to such national security concerns. Another version of that bill was signed into law in late December 2022.

“In light of all we know, it is unthinkable to me that we should continue to permit federal employees, those workers entrusted with sensitive government data, to access this app on their work phones and computers,” Hawley said at the time.

“I’m encouraged by the bipartisan support we have seen in this body to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and that includes, by the way, holding accountable those corporations who would just do China’s bidding.”

Similarly, national security and intelligence leaders have warned that TikTok poses a national security threat due to its connections to its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, which itself has numerous ties to the CCP.

“Because the parent company of TikTok is a Chinese company, the Chinese government is able to insist upon extracting the private data of a lot of TikTok users in this country, and also to shape the content of what goes on to TikTok as well to suit the interests of the Chinese leadership,” said CIA Director William Burns during a December interview with PBS.

Likewise, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the app could be used to collect data on Americans for the CCP and to conduct untold numbers of influence operations.

“The Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose, or to control software on millions of devices which gives it opportunity to potentially technically compromise personal devices,” Wray said during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in November.

Moreover, a class-action lawsuit filed in December claims that TikTok violates state laws against wiretapping, because the app records every keystroke, click, swipe, and text communication, including information written but not sent by the user, when users enter other websites through the app.

Read more here...

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”

- John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

It takes a special kind of evil to prostitute and traffick a child for sex, and yet this evil walks among us every minute of every day.

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex.

Hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States alone.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 to 500,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

Child rape has become Big Business in America.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

Like so many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.

It is estimated that the number of children who are at risk of being trafficked or have already been sold into the sex trade would fill 1300 school buses.

The internet has become the primary means of sexual predators targeting and selling young children for sex. “One in five kids online are sexually propositioned through gaming platforms and other social media. And those, non-contact oriented forums of sexual exploitation are increasing,” said researcher Brian Ulicny.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable, either.

According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”

Every year, the ages of the girls and boys being bought and sold get younger and younger.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.”

“They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking.

“They’re little girls.”

This is America’s dirty little secret.

But what or who is driving this evil appetite for young flesh? Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

According to criminal investigator Marc Chadderdon, these “buyers”—the so-called “ordinary” men who drive the demand for sex with children—represent a cross-section of American society: every age, every race, every socio-economic background, cops, teachers, corrections workers, pastors, etc.

America’s police forces—riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct and drug abuse—represent another facet of the problem: police have become both predators and pimps. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex.”

Young girls are particularly vulnerable to these predators in blue.

Former police officer Phil Stinson estimates that half of the victims of police sex crimes are minors under the age of eighteen. According to The Washington Post, a national study found that 40 percent of reported cases of police sexual misconduct involved teens.

For example, in California, a police sergeant—a 16-year veteran of the police force—was arrested for raping a 16-year-old girl who was being held captive and sold for sex in a home in an upscale neighborhood.

A Pennsylvania police chief and his friend were arrested for allegedly raping a young girl hundreds of times—orally, vaginally, and anally several times a week—over the course of seven years, starting when she was 4 years old.

Two NYPD cops were accused of arresting a teenager, handcuffing her, and driving her in an unmarked van to a nearby parking lot, where they raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them, then dropped her off on a nearby street corner.

The New York Times reports that “a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio was charged with sexually assaulting the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented Guatemalan woman and threatening to have her deported if she reported the abuse.”

And then you have national sporting events such as the Super Bowl, where sex traffickers have been caught selling minors, some as young as 9 years old. Whether or not the Super Bowl is a “windfall” for sex traffickers as some claim, it remains a lucrative source of income for the child sex trafficking industry and a draw for those who are willing to pay to rape young children.

Finally, as I documented in an earlier column, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators.

Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on … social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.

Rarely do these children enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men.

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Unfortunately, as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government’s war on sex trafficking, much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime, has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public while doing little to actually protect our children from sex predators.

That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times,

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday officially rejected Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) for seats on the House Intelligence Committee after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) nominated them on Saturday.

McCarthy has publicly stated that he wants to remove Schiff and Swalwell from the panel, arguing that Schiff has “lied to the American public” and that Swalwell’s past connection to a suspected Chinese spy makes him a security liability.

“I appreciate the loyalty you have to your Democrat colleagues, and I acknowledge your efforts to have two Members of Congress reinstated to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” McCarthy wrote in a letter to Jeffries he shared on Twitter. 

“But I cannot put partisan loyalty ahead of national security, and I cannot simply recognize years of service as the sole criteria for membership on this essential committee. Integrity matters more.”

“As such, in order to maintain a standard worthy of this committee’s responsibilities, I am hereby rejecting the appointments of Representative Adam Schiff and Representative Eric Swalwell to serve on the Intelligence Committee,” he continued.

I have rejected the appointments of Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell for the House Intelligence Committee.

I am committed to returning the @HouseIntel Committee to one of genuine honesty and credibility that regains the trust of the American people. pic.twitter.com/ePxlbanxta

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) January 25, 2023

McCarthy told Jeffries the panel had been misused during the previous two Congresses, which had “severely undermined its primary national security and oversight missions—ultimately leaving our nation less safe.”

He added that he was committed to returning the panel to “one of genuine honesty and credibility that regains the trust of the American people.”

As speaker, McCarthy has the power to appoint “all select, joint, and conference committees ordered by the House,” according to the rules (pdf) of the House of Representatives. 

The House Intelligence Committee is a permanent select committee; Schiff and Swalwell served on it during the last Congress, with Schiff as chairman.

"Schiff has lied to the American public. He should not be on Intel," chided McCarthy.

?? @SpeakerMcCarthy on Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff: "He can serve on a committee, but he will not serve on Intel because it goes to the national security of America — and I will always put them first. pic.twitter.com/4kZSjd0rPP

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 25, 2023

‘Denial of Seats’

Over the weekend, Jeffries urged McCarthy to accept the return of Schiff and Swalwell to the panel, saying that denying them seats runs counter to the panel’s mission.

“I write today to submit for renomination two eminently qualified legislators to continue their service on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: Ranking Member Adam Schiff and Representative Eric Swalwell of California,” Jeffries wrote in a letter (pdf) on Jan. 21.

“It is my understanding that you intend to break with the longstanding House tradition of deference to the minority party Intelligence Committee recommendations and deny seats to Ranking Member Schiff and Representative Swalwell,” he continued.

“The denial of seats to duly elected Members of the House Democratic Caucus runs counter to the serious and sober mission of the Intelligence Committee.”

McCarthy indicated his intention to remove the pair in June last year if the GOP won the House, and in interviews with media on Jan. 9, said he’d remove Schiff, Swalwell, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from their committee assignments.

“Swalwell can’t get a security clearance in the private sector,” McCarthy told AP and Punchbowl, likely referring to reports that Swalwell was targeted by a suspected Chinese spy.

“I’m not going to give him a government security clearance.”

"The FBI was concerned about putting a Member of Congress on the Intel Committee — that has the rights to see things that others don't — because of his knowledge and relationship with a Chinese spy."

—@SpeakerMcCarthy on rejecting Democrat Eric Swalwell from the Intel Committee. pic.twitter.com/voUBDAzFsV

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 25, 2023

Precedent Disputed

According to House rules, no more than 13 members of the same party can be on a panel. Typically, the speaker of the House has given the minority leader the power to choose members for the panel, but this time, McCarthy has not done so, claiming that Democrats set this precedent in the past.

“The Democrats have created a new thing where they’re picking and choosing who can be on committees,” McCarthy told Breitbart News on Jan. 9.

“Never in the history [of Congress] have you had the majority tell the minority who can be on committee. But this new standard, which these Democrats have voted for—if Eric Swalwell cannot get a security clearance in the private sector, there is no reason why he should be given one to be on Intel or Homeland Security. He will not be serving there.”

Jeffries addressed this reasoning in his Jan. 21 letter, arguing that the two Republican members were removed from their committee assignments by a bipartisan vote in the House for “directly inciting violence against their colleagues.”

“This action was taken by both Democrats and Republicans given the seriousness of the conduct involved, particularly in the aftermath of a violent insurrection and attack on the Capitol,” Jeffries wrote.

“It does not serve as precedent or justification for the removal of Representatives Schiff and Swalwell, given that they have never exhibited violent thoughts or behavior.”

In 2021, the House voted to remove Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) from their committee assignments because of social media posts they had made that were considered controversial.

Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), then-speaker, also rejected McCarthy’s nominations of Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.) for the Jan. 6 Committee, prompting McCarthy, then-minority leader, to withdraw the rest of his nominations in protest.

In his letter, Jeffries did not mention that dispute but said he believed there was a lack of consistency, as Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who recently faced criticism for misrepresenting his education and work experience, has been given positions on two committees. Jeffries wrote that this inconsistency “risks undermining the spirit of bipartisan cooperation that is so desperately needed in Congress.”

Schiff, Swalwell and Omar said in a statement that McCarthy "capitulated to the right wing of his caucus" and "struck a corrupt bargain in his desperate, and nearly failed, attempt to win" the Speakership.

"Despite these efforts, McCarthy won’t be successful. We will continue to speak out against extremism and doggedly defend our democracy."

The battle over Twitter is often made to appear complex and chaotic, but it can all be boiled down to a simple dichotomy - It's about the people who demand censorship in favor of the establishment narrative vs. the people who want free speech and fair rules applied to everyone equally. 

Everything else is noise and distraction.

The complications arise when we try to define free speech when it comes to social media.  Private companies are not subject to many legal boundaries related to free speech rights.  This is an argument that the political left and government representatives made constantly during the massive purge of conservative and liberty oriented accounts by Big Tech companies since 2016.  And, as we saw with Twitter previous to Elon Musk's takeover, governments took full advantage of this legal loophole in order to silence people using social media websites as middlemen.  

The ongoing release of the Twitter Files proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that collusion between Big Tech and governments for the sake of censorship is a reality.  In America, at least, this is a constitutional no-no.  The fact that politicians and agencies like the FBI were actively seeking out and targeting ideological opponents and having them silenced on Twitter is a direct violation of the 1st Amendment and these people should be subject to prosecution (the FBI even shelled out at least $3 million to Twitter for services rendered). 

Prosecution might never happen, but at least the evidence is undeniable today after years of the public being lied to.

The reality that Twitter was acting as an enforcement agent for government censorship around the world tells us exactly why so many establishment officials have been up in arms over Musk's purchase of the platform.  Until now, every single major Big Tech company has been operating in lock-step with the establishment narrative.  People couldn't even talk about Hunter Biden's laptop, let alone talk about the inconvenient facts surrounding "climate change" or the covid mandates and vaccines.

This is a dynamic that elitists would still like to keep in place, and they are looking to use international trade rules as a means to pressure Musk into conforming. 

EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourová makes a statement from the frozen doorstep of Davos arguing that Twitter is subject to EU rules for preventing "harm to society".

“The time of the Wild West is over,” Jourova told EuroNews.

“We will have the Digital Services Act [DSA]. We will have the Code of Practice as a part of this legislation.”

“So, after Mr Musk took over Twitter with his ‘freedom of speech absolutism,’ we are the protectors of freedom of speech as well,” she added.

“But at the same time, we cannot accept, for instance, illegal content online and so on. So, our message was clear: we have rules which have to be complied with, otherwise there will be sanctions.”

 

Who is Vera Jourová to determine what type of speech is harmful to society? She's a bureaucrat who has long insisted that "hate speech" laws utilized in the EU should be instituted in the US.  In other words, she's nobody.  

But two very important conclusions can be derived from her statements here. 

• First, she is essentially admitting that the EU Commission was working directly with the previous Twitter leadership to censor the public in a bid to control their behavior. 

• Second, establishment bureaucrats overseas assume that they should have the power to dictate the policies of private media companies in the US when it comes to communication. 

It should be noted that these same bureaucrats were defending Twitter operations as a private company only a year ago (as long as company policies fell in line with government messaging).  As soon as Twitter started to allow more free speech, suddenly its operations as a private company became an international problem. 

Again, the conflict is about one question - Should people be allowed say what they want and share the information that they want within the confines of constitutional law?  For those that believe the answer is no, we have to then ask "Why?"  What about free speech is so threatening to them?  Can mere speech really do damage to society? Is this really about public safety?  Or, is it about power, and the means to lie to the public while removing their ability to contradict?       

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“How long to dispose of a body before it smells,” Brian Walshe asked Google. “What is the rate of decomposition of a body found in a plastic bag compared to on a surface in the woods,” was another query that law enforcement retrieved from some faceless server, a virtual witness to his horrific crime.

He did not ask, but should have, “Are Google queries retrievable by the FBI.” Instead, he typed 20 questions you definitely should not Google if you want to get away with murder [see here].

On China’s Baidu, queries for baby strollers fell 17% last year and are -41% since 2018. Searches for baby bottles are down by one-third since 2018. But queries for elderly care homes surged 800% last year, faceless servers bearing witness to China’s profound demographic challenge.

China’s population surged from 540mm in 1949 to 969mm in 1980 when the One Child policy was introduced. And still, the population climbed inexorably to over 1.41bln in 2021. But in 2022, deaths exceeded births by 850k. UN demographers see China’s population contracting by 100mm by 2050.

You could imagine Xi secretly typing, “What is the rate of decline of a nation that shrinks and ages before becoming wealthy.”

Japan hit “peak people” in 2011 at 127.4mm. Demographers see it shrinking to 97mm by 2050. Russia is in utter demographic collapse. And you could imagine Putin secretly typing, “How long can a nation remain intact without enough young men to fight.”

Europe is on the ageing, shrinking path too, but unlike China, Russia and Japan, immigration still tempers its demographic decline. It’s easy to imagine countless European leaders typing, “How to assimilate the waves of refugees needed to sustain the economy while retaining your culture.”

Such demographic decline has never happened across the major global economies. How this impacts geopolitics, economies, and markets remains uncertain.

There is no back-test for this. The US continues to be the outlier, growing, albeit slowly. And let’s hope Biden is typing, “How to reverse the opioid/fentanyl/diabetes public health catastrophe that has lowered US life expectancy.”

And in India, Google searches for baby bottles jumped 22% last year, while queries for cribs surged 500%.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

At least two Democratic senators have called for a full investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified materials after several batches of documents were found at an office and his home in Delaware.

“The reports about President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents are extremely irresponsible and disturbing,” Manchin (D-W. Va.) told Fox News on Jan. 20.

“These allegations should be investigated fully.”

The development “raises serious questions, and the appointment of an unbiased special prosecutor to investigate the matter is the right step,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told Fox.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who recently confirmed she wouldn’t be running for re-election in 2024, told NBC News last week that the reports of handling classified documents is a bad look for the White House.

“Well, it’s certainly embarrassing. Right?” Stabenow stated.

“I mean, it’s embarrassing that you would find a small number of documents, certainly not on purpose. They don’t think it’s the right thing and they’ve been moving to correct it, working with the Department of Justice, working with everyone involved, with the [National] Archives, and so from my perspective, you know, it’s one of those moments that obviously they wish hadn’t happened.”

Their comments came just hours before Biden’s lawyer confirmed the Department of Justice (DOJ) searched his home, while an FBI spokesperson confirmed the search to Fox News on Saturday. The search of his Delaware residence reportedly lasted hours, the FBI said.

“DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President,” Bob Bauer, his attorney, said.

“DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) speaks to reporters in the Hart Senate Office building in Washington, on Aug. 1, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Fitzpatrick confirmed Saturday that the FBI had executed “a planned, consensual search” of the president’s residence in Wilmington. The president and first lady Jill Biden were not at the home when it was searched. They were spending the weekend at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Speaking to reporters during a trip to California on Thursday, Biden said he was “fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.”

“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Biden said.

“We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department.”

The Biden investigation has also complicated the Justice Department’s probe into Trump’s retention of classified documents and official records after he left office. The Justice Department says former President Donald Trump took hundreds of records marked classified with him upon leaving the White House in early 2021, and that it had to obtain a search warrant to retrieve them.

After the initial discovery of Biden’s documents, Trump has asserted that the DOJ is treating the president differently.

“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Trump asked in a social media post earlier in January.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed former Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as a special counsel to investigate any potential wrongdoing surrounding the Biden documents. Hur is set to take over from the Trump-appointed Illinois U.S. Attorney John Lausch in overseeing the probe.

“Since the beginning, the President has been committed to handling this responsibly because he takes this seriously,” White House lawyer Richard Sauber said Saturday. “The President’s lawyers and White House Counsel’s Office will continue to cooperate with DOJ and the Special Counsel to help ensure this process is conducted swiftly and efficiently.”

A federal judge has ordered Donald Trump and his lawyers to pay $938,000 in sanctions for having filed a "completely frivolous" lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others, claiming they attempted to rig the 2016 election by smearing Trump with allegations that he was colluding with Russia.   

“We are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” wrote Judge Donald Middlebrooks in a 46-page order issued in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Gee, it's a small world -- Middlebrooks was nominated by Bill Clinton in 1997.

In April, Trump's lawyers filed a motion asking the judge to recuse himself from the case, arguing that "because her husband nominated Judge Middlebrooks to the Federal Bench, there exists a reasonable basis that Judge Middlebrooks’ impartiality will be questioned.” He denied the motion, citing precedents. 

Trump's lawsuit asked for $30 million in damages from Clinton and 30 other defendants, alleging racketeering, "a conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood" and other wrongdoing. When Middlebrooks threw the suit out in September, he said Trump "is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him."

Now Middleton has followed up by holding Trump, his lead attorney Alina Habba and Havva Madaio & Associates jointly and severally liable for $937,989.39. That means the penalty, which covers the defendants' legal expenses, can be collected from any one or combination of the sanctioned trio.

Other defendants include the Democratic National Committee, its 2016 chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Christopher Steele, and the FBI's James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Middleton had previously ordered $50,000 in other sanctions in the case. 

"This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim," wrote Middlebrooks in his sanction order. 

Middleton repeatedly condemned Trump, also calling him "the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, [who] cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer."

Middleton also criticized Habba for continuing to advance the central claims of the suit in media appearances, against the judge's order. He quoted her September interview with Sean Hannity, in which she said Hillary Clinton isn't being held accountable "because you have a Clinton judge...[who] basically ignored every factual basis which was backed up by indictments, by investigations, the Mueller report, et cetera..." 

"Thirty-one individuals and entities were needlessly harmed in order to dishonestly advance a political narrative," wrote Middleton, slamming Trump for "a continuing pattern of misuse of the courts." 

Meanwhile, there's been no accountability for Hillary and her allies having colluded with federal law enforcement officials to cultivate a patently false narrative that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election. 

Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times,

Thanks to the revelations in the Twitter Files, there’s evidence that the FBI and other agencies worked to suppress “lawful speech,” and if this type of action is allowed to continue, the United States is headed for “totalitarian state territory,” Matthew Peterson, the cofounder of New Founding, said in an interview with Epoch Times–NTD collaborative program “Newsmakers.”

New Founding helps people and organizations position themselves to avoid threats from Big Tech and “woke capital,” and Peterson has two decades of experience in digital media and political consulting.

When asked what will happen if the country’s current trajectory continues for three to five years, Peterson said, “We’ll be in totalitarian state territory, there’s no question about it.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray (C) on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Nov. 15, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“I mean, remember, this went so far as the government saying, ‘You need to find evidence that there are Russians influencing the election on Twitter.’ And Twitter saying, ‘No, that’s not happening.’

“And then [Twitter had] to be quiet about it and not even defend themselves when they knew that there wasn’t Russian interference that they could find,” he added.

Peterson further explained that the U.S. government drove a narrative that it knew wasn’t true and was the “antithesis” of America’s founding principles.

“[The government’s actions are] the antithesis of America. The American founding is basically contradicted by what’s happening here, over and over again. And if we don’t do something about that, we will not have free speech in this country,” Peterson warned.

FBI and Fake News

Peterson pointed out that one of the biggest revelations in the Twitter Files—a collection of internal emails and communications made public by the company’s CEO, Elon Musk—was that the intelligence community’s influence on Twitter was more significant than anyone imagined.

“What you first have to realize is that a lot of people from the intelligence community were already embedded in Twitter. So much so that they had their own Slack channel chat for people who are from the FBI,” Peterson said.

“And so, what you see with the censorship is not just a selective, ‘we don’t like this guy, we don’t like this guy.’ It’s promoting large-scale narratives, both pro and con repeatedly, again and again and again and again.”

And, Peterson said, the U.S. government didn’t limit itself to shadow-banning and censorship.

In reply to the question about the Twitter Files revelation, the Department of Defense used a back channel with Twitter to create fake accounts to push a specific narrative in the Arab world. Peterson stated such actions show a direct line between the government and social media.

“So, what we see is, again, direct channels from the U.S. government—both really creating fake news and deleting anything they don’t like. And people have to realize … what you see is a direct line again,” Peterson said.

Additionally, Peterson said before the Twitter Files, the U.S. government and Twitter were essentially gaslighting Americans.

Billionaire Tesla chief Elon Musk arrives at the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter on Oct. 26, stating, “let that sink in” as he completes his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company. (Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP via Getty Images)

“We should make clear that everyone claimed that this wasn’t happening, right? So, the whole world was being gaslit by Twitter and friends saying, ‘Oh, no. We’re not shadow-banning anyone. You know this is all crazy, right-wing talk.’

“And what the Twitter Files have done is give conclusive, definitive proof of what was actually going on. And what was going on was shocking.

“I think it was worse than a lot of regular people—and even experts—thought it was. I mean, Big Pharma having a direct line to censor people when it came to their thoughts and opinions about what was going on with the vaccine and COVID? Of course, famously, [there’s] the Hunter Biden laptop controversy in which news organizations were just outright censored, in violation of Twitter’s own rules.

“And what we see is a direct line between the government and other powerful organizations, and a media outfit, over and over again, censoring people, essentially, at the whim of the powerful.”

Peterson said such government and complicit media actions aren’t on the decline. Instead, he said, it’s “increasing every day.”

He said action is necessary to combat that and return America to its guiding principles of free speech and limited government. “What we need to see is increasing resistance with law, and other powerful forces, fighting against this. And that starts with exposing what Elon Musk has already exposed but is now being hidden from the American public in these Twitter files.”

The Twitter Files

Since taking over Twitter, Musk has consistently vocalized the need for transparency regarding what happened behind the scenes at the tech company. To that end, he, via a chosen few journalists, has released secret emails and discussions about shadow-banning or removing accounts that didn’t toe the party line.

In response to the allegations of collusion between the FBI and Twitter, the FBI said in a statement to Fox News, “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.

A seal reading “Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation” is displayed on the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington, on Aug. 9, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

“As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”

The FBI National Press Office responded similarly to The Epoch Times’ request for comment: “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.

“It is not based on the content of any particular message or narrative. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“We live in a surveillance state founded on a partnership between government and the technology industry.”

- Law Professor Avidan Y. Cover

In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.  

There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.

With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.

Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:

A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.

Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.

Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.

As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.

What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.

It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.

Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.

The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.

The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.

The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.

Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.

Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”

In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.

We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.

Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.

Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.

As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.

As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.

On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.

The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.

After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.

Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”

No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.

It’s George Orwell’s 1984 on a global scale.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, Orwell’s dystopian nightmare has become our looming reality.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Another power substation in North Carolina was damaged due to alleged gunfire—the third such incident in recent weeks—officials have confirmed.

EnergyUnited said officials discovered an “equipment issue” at the Pleasant Hill Substation in Thomasville on Jan. 17. Thomasville is about an hour from Moore County, where two other substations were damaged.

When crew members were sent to investigate the matter, they “discovered damage to the substation transformer from an apparent gunshot,” the firm said. “The damage was quickly assessed and contained to mitigate the impact to members in the Pleasant Hill area and law enforcement officials were notified.”

Customers who are served by the Pleasant Hill Substation didn’t experience any power outages due to the damage, EnergyUnited added. The Randolph County Sheriff’s Office said that investigators canvassed the station and later said they believe the shooting occurred at around 3 a.m. local time on Jan. 17.

The FBI and North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations were notified about the alleged gunfire, the sheriff’s office said. Investigations are ongoing.

“The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force responded to conduct a parallel investigation,” the statement also said. No suspects have been named, and no arrests were made.

“EnergyUnited continually strives to deliver safe, reliable energy to its members,” Steve McCachern, vice president of energy delivery for EnergyUnited, said in a statement. “While we are glad that our members did not experience any service interruptions, we take this matter very seriously and are currently investigating the incident.”

On Dec. 3, 2022, gunshots were fired at two substations in Moore County that left some 45,000 customers without power for several days. In that case, no suspects have been apprehended and no motive has been disclosed.

Officials said that a person or persons drove to the Duke Energy-operated substations and opened fire, causing significant damage. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said at the time that the Moore County incident “raises a new level of threat” while adding that federal and state officials are working to “harden our infrastructure where that’s necessary and work to prevent future damage.”

Duke Energy spokesperson Jeff Brooks said in a news conference last month that damage was done to major equipment.

“Some of this equipment does take a significant amount of work [to be installed]” he said. New substation equipment must be handled carefully and tested before it’s ready to serve the grid.

Around the same time, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin warning of a “heightened threat environment” ahead of the Christmas holiday season. Faith-based institutions, government buildings, U.S. infrastructure, schools, and public gatherings could be targeted by groups with “a range of ideological beliefs” and “personal grievances,” the agency said on Nov. 30, 2022.

Nevada Incident

Earlier in January, officials in Nevada said a man was facing terrorism-related charges after driving his car to a solar power plant, dousing it with gasoline, and setting it on fire. An employee told local media that the fire caused “major damage” and estimated it would take two years to receive replacement parts.

Read more here...

Authored by Lee Smith via The Epoch Times,

Speculation is growing in Republican media circles that the recent scandal over President Joe Biden’s improper possession of classified information from his time as vice president represents an internal coup. The theory holds that Democratic Party insiders, particularly Obama-era officials situated within the Biden administration, are using the revelations of Biden’s carelessness to push him aside or at least prevent him from running for reelection in 2024.

Capitol Hill sources say it’s true that the Biden administration is a hornet’s nest with several factions vying for control, including one led by domestic policy adviser Susan Rice and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, both Obama loyalists. However, a careful look at the evidence shows that senior Biden aides, Democratic officials, and the party’s media apparatus are circling the wagons to protect Biden. What we’re watching isn’t a coup but a coverup.

Press reports show that at the beginning of November 2022, Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in his office at a Washington think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania that bears his name: the Penn Biden Center. This account is improbable. If Biden’s legal team, rather than his administrative staff, typically sorted through his papers, it’s likely they would have previously identified the classified records in question.

There were at least two other opportunities for Biden’s aides to find the papers among his belongings. The first came when his staff packed his boxes as he left the Office of the Vice President in January 2017. It isn’t yet known where the documents were kept between then and when they were moved to the Penn Biden Center when it opened in 2018. The move would have given his staff another chance to find the classified documents. Hence, it seems likely that it was an outside source that alerted either the Biden team, the National Archives, or the Department of Justice to the fact that the president was improperly holding classified documents.

In a press conference on Jan. 12, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that on Nov. 9, 2022, he asked the FBI to assess whether those records had been mishandled. On Nov. 14, 2022, he asked the U.S. attorney in Chicago, John Lausch, to conduct an initial investigation.

Administration officials and Biden loyalists in federal law enforcement knew they had a problem. Mishandling classified documents was the basis of a broad Democratic Party campaign against Biden’s possible 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump.

The FBI raided Trump’s Florida home in August 2022 to seize classified documents, and rumors circulated that indictments were in the offing. Eventually, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump. Biden even chastised his predecessor for mishandling classified documents in a September 2022 media interview. And now, here was Biden as culpable as the man they hoped to destroy with the same instrument—classified documents.

The Biden team moved to attenuate the potential fallout with a leak to the press. A Nov. 14, 2022, Washington Post article citing “people familiar with the matter” explained that “FBI interviews with witnesses so far, they said, also do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property.”

That is, contrary to the public outcry that Trump had taken the documents for illicit purposes—he was selling U.S. nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia, one journalist claimed without evidence or reason—there was nothing sinister at play. Rather, he was simply motivated by ego.

The Nov. 14, 2022, article was evidence that the Biden circle was walking back its scorched-earth campaign against Trump on classified papers. Nearly three months later, it’s clear why—to reframe the context for when news of Biden’s own problems with classified documents went public.

When the story broke last week in administration-friendly media outlets, Democratic lawmakers not only rallied around the president but also compared his response favorably to Trump’s. Unlike Trump’s team that argued with the institution tasked to keep U.S. records, Biden’s lawyers, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) intimated, “appear to have taken immediate and proper action to notify the National Archives.”

Dozens of media publications, from The New York Times to Vox, have published explainers showing why what Trump did is much worse than what Biden did.

Trump had more documents, the argument runs; Biden’s lawyers were more forthright; and so forth. The fact is that no one on the Democratic side has broken with the president or even so much as hinted that he did something wrong. This isn’t what an internal coup looks like.

The special counsel appointed to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents identifies as a Republican but he appears to be a Never Trump Republican. Robert Hur is a protégé of Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general under Trump who reportedly offered to wear a wire to spy on the previous president.

Rosenstein furthered the anti-Trump cause by withholding documents from the investigation led by former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) into alleged FBI crimes and abuses committed during the bureau’s Trump–Russia probe. He also allegedly threatened to subpoena Nunes’s staffers, including Kash Patel. A winter 2018 chain of emails (pdf) between Department of Justice officials shows that Hur was part of the law enforcement team tasked to stonewall Nunes’s investigation.

Former congressional investigators say that Hur’s appointment as special counsel is intended not to uncover potential crimes committed by the president but rather to give the appearance of a genuine investigation and thereby bury the issue once and for all. And thus, actions taken by the Biden administration and the responses of Democratic officials and the media show that what’s unfolding at present isn’t a coup, but a coverup.

Read more here...

Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Documents revealed by Twitter’s new owner, tech billionaire Elon Musk, show the social media company intertwined with a government-private censorship apparatus.

Twitter suppressed or removed content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company was under government pressure to purge such content and its purveyors from the platform, though most of the time it was cooperating with the censorship requests willingly, the documents indicate.

INFOGRAPHIC (Click on image to enlarge or Click Here to download)

Musk took over Twitter in October, taking the company private. He then fired around half of the staff and much of the upper management, vowing to take Twitter in a new direction. The “#TwitterFiles” releases have been part of his promised focus on transparency for the company.

He allowed several independent journalists to submit search queries that were then used by Twitter staff to search through the company’s internal documents, sometimes under the condition that the resulting stories would be first published on the platform itself.

The two journalists primarily responsible for the releases have been journalists Matt Taibbi, a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, and Bari Weiss, a former editor at both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both are liberals who have expressed disillusionment with the more extreme currents of progressivism and neoliberalism.

Others involved in the releases have been independent journalists Lee Fang and David Zweig, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, as well as author and environmentalist Michael Shellenberger.

The journalists have only released a fraction of the documents they reviewed. They’ve also redacted the names of employees involved, other than some high-level executives.

The documents show that the FBI and other state, local, and federal agencies have been scrutinizing the political speech of Americans on a significant scale, and trying to get lawful speech suppressed or removed online. Many conservative and traditionally liberal commentators have deemed that a violation of the First Amendment.

Twitter, a major hub of political speech, has been among the main targets of censorship. Many news stories have broken on Twitter in recent years and a significant portion of the nation’s political debate takes place on the platform, as it allows an efficient way for direct and public interaction between all on the platform, from the most prominent to the least.

Twitter resisted some censorship requests, but there was little sign the company did so as a matter of principle. Rather, executives sometimes couldn’t find a policy they could use as a justification. Prior Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was under pressure from his lieutenants to expand the policies to allow more thorough censorship, the documents show.

“The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that (by just reducing prevalence overall),” said Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, which governs content policy, in a 2021 internal message published by Weiss.

“We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations—especially for other policy domains.”

In many cases, Twitter leaders de facto allowed the government to silence its critics on the platform.

Many censorship requests came in with an imperious attitude, particularly those from the Biden White House, but also some from the office of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who at the time headed the powerful House Intelligence Committee.

Around November 2020, Schiff’s office sent a list of dema to Twitter, including for the removal of “any and all content” about the committee’s staff and suspend “many” accounts including that of Paul Sperry, a journalist with RealClearInvestigations.

Schiff’s office accused Sperry of harassment and promoting “false QAnon conspiracies.”

Sperry rejected the allegation, asking Schiff to show evidence for his claims and announced he was considering legal action.

Schiff’s demands were apparently a response to Sperry’s articles that speculated on the identity of the White House whistleblower that alleged a “quid pro quo” between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Sperry reported, using anonymous sources, that the whistleblower was likely then-CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, who was overheard talking in the White House with Sean Misko, a holdover staffer from the Obama administration. Misko later joined Schiff’s committee.

Twitter rejected Schiff’s demands, save for reviewing “again” Sperry’s account activity. Sperry’s account was suspended months later. Taibbi said he wasn’t able to find out why.

Under Pressure

The many censorship requests Twitter received via the FBI were phrased as merely bringing information to its attention, leaving it up to the company to decide what to do with them. But Twitter executives clearly felt compelled to accommodate these requests, even in cases where they internally struggled to justify doing so, the documents show.

The government pressure took several forms. The FBI would follow up on its requests and if they weren’t fulfilled, Twitter had to explain itself to the bureau. If Twitter’s position on an issue differed from the one expected by the government, company executives would be questioned and made aware that the bureau, and even the broader intelligence community, wasn’t happy. That would send the executives into triage mode, rushing to salvage the relationship, which it apparently considered essential.

Corporate media served as another pressure point. If Twitter wouldn’t do what it was told fast enough, the media would be provided with information portraying Twitter as ignoring some problem of paramount importance, such as possible foreign influence operations on its platform.

One censorship request, for instance, targeted an account allegedly run by Russian intelligence, though Twitter wasn’t given any evidence of it.

“Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I’ve generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,” said one Twitter executive that previously worked for the CIA, according to Taibbi.

“Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution and reporting on it.”

The internal email suggests that Twitter, despite having no concrete evidence to back it, wouldn’t dare to disobey the request because of the media fallout of the government publicly labeling the account as run by Russian intelligence.

Congress was perhaps the heaviest sword of Damocles hanging over Twitter’s head. Lawmakers could not only spur negative media coverage, but also tie up the company in hearings and investigations, or even introduce legislation that could hurt Twitter’s bottom line.

For instance, just as Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) was pushing Twitter to produce more evidence of Russian influence operations on its platform in 2017, he also teamed up with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) to propose a bill that would have required extensive disclosures of online political advertising.

In the meantime, Twitter managers were convinced that lawmakers were leaking information Twitter provided them and seeding negative news stories, even as the company was trying to placate them with increasingly stringent actions toward actual and alleged Russia-linked accounts.

Even though the FBI was officially only alerting Twitter to activities of malign foreign actors, many of the censorship requests were simply lists of accounts with little to no evidence of malign foreign links. At times, Twitter tried to ask for more information, noting that it couldn’t find any evidence on its end, but often it simply complied. It was impossible for Twitter to do its due diligence on each request—there were simply too many, according to Taibbi.

One request revealed by Taibbi claimed that “the attached email accounts” were created “possibly for use in influence operations, social media collection, or social engineering.”

“Without further explanation, Twitter would be forwarded an excel doc,” Taibbi said.

Censorship requests were lopsided against the political right. Some researchers said that the right was much more involved in spreading misinformation, but the documents indicate that the censorship wasn’t so much a matter of a right-left dichotomy, but rather a pro- and anti-establishment one. Even some left-leaning accounts were targeted if they strayed too far from the official government narrative.

Moreover, the right didn’t appear too keen on demanding censorship to begin with. Taibbi couldn’t find a single censorship request from the Trump campaign, Trump White House, or even any Republican, though he was told there were some.

On the other hand, there seemed to be no appetite across the board for targeting misinformation coming from the establishment itself

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

Twitter’s suppression of the 2020 New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden, son of then-candidate Joe Biden, was dissected in the Twitter release in particular detail. Apparently, some Twitter executives, particularly Roth, head of Trust and Safety, were regularly invited to meetings with the FBI and other intelligence agencies to receive briefings on the online activities of foreign regimes. In the several months prior to the 2020 election, Roth had been conditioned to expect a “hack-and-leak” Russian operation, possibly in October and involving Hunter Biden.

The FBI alleged there was some evidence of Russian influence operation related to Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine. But the bureau was also aware that Hunter Biden left his laptop with a trove of explosive information in a New York repair shop and that a copy of it was handed to Trump’s then-lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The FBI picked up the laptop from the repair shop in December 2019 and had Giuliani under surveillance in August 2020, when the repairman gave him the copy. As the FBI knew, the laptop information was neither hacked, nor a figment of a Russian plot.

When the Post broke the story, Twitter executives were left with no doubt it was exactly what the FBI had been warning about.

“This feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation,” Roth commented in an internal email, despite acknowledging he had no evidence for such a claim, save for “questionable origins” of the laptop, which was apparently abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair shop.

Roth noted that the story didn’t actually violate any Twitter rules. Nevertheless, it was marked “unsafe” and blocked on Twitter under its policy against hacked materials, despite there being no evidence the materials were hacked.

Twitter’s then-Deputy General Counsel James Baker backed the censorship move, saying it was “reasonable” to “assume” the Hunter Biden information was hacked.

Baker was FBI General Counsel until May 2018. He joined Twitter in June 2020. At the FBI, Baker was closely involved in the Russia investigation scandal where the FBI embroiled the Trump campaign and later the Trump administration in exhaustive investigations based on paper-thin and fabricated allegations that Trump colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election. The allegations were produced by operatives funded by the campaign of Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The FBI was in fact aware of no intelligence suggesting a “hack-and-leak” operation ahead of the 2020 election, as testified in November 2022 by Elvis Chan, head of the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office, which was responsible for communications with Twitter and other tech companies with headquarters in its jurisdiction.

Twitter itself found very little Russian activity ahead of the 2020 election, Shellenberger reported, citing internal communications.

Shadowbanning

Twitter has long denied the practice of shadowbanning—suppressing the reach of an account without informing the user. The denial, however, specifically defined shadowbanning as making the person’s content invisible to others. What people have been complaining about is that Twitter would suppress how many people see their content without making it invisible altogether—Twitter has been doing that a lot, the internal materials show.

One Twitter engineer told Weiss: “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”

Among those whose accounts were surreptitiously throttled was Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford University professor of medicine and one of the early critics of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Others included Dan Bongino, conservative podcaster and former Secret Service agent, and Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, the country’s largest conservative youth group.

COVID-19

Twitter has extensively suppressed information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Anything about the origin of the virus, its treatment, the vaccines developed for it, and public policies to mitigate its spread had to align with the official position of the federal government, as promulgated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Zweig said he “found countless instances of tweets labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.”

Twitter user @KelleyKga, a self-described fact-checker, criticized a tweet that falsely claimed that COVID-19 was the leading cause of death by disease in children. @KelleyKga pointed out that such a claim would require cherry-picking data, backing his argument with data from the CDC. His criticism, however, was labeled as “misleading” and suppressed. On the other hand, the tweet that contained the false claim was not suppressed.

All physician Euzebiusz Jamrozik did was write on Twitter an accurate summarization of study results on COVID-19 vaccine side effects. The tweet was labeled “misleading” and suppressed.

Sometimes, it appears, Twitter suppressed the information on its own, but many of the COVID-19-related requests came from the government and even directly from the Biden White House, internal files show.

In one email, White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty accused Twitter of “bending over backwards” to resist one of his censorship requests, calling it “total Calvinball”—a game where rules are made up along the way. The email wasn’t part of the Twitter files. It came out during an ongoing lawsuit against the Biden administration filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.

Another White House staffer wanted Twitter to censor a tweet by Robert Kennedy, Jr., a long-time critic of vaccination. The staffer mused whether Twitter could “get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.”

“And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre that would be great,” he said in the Jan. 23, 2021, email.

The administration wasn’t always trying to get such content removed. People who merely expressed “hesitancy” about the vaccines were supposed to only have their content suppressed from reaching any significant audience, the documents indicate.

The Biden administration had a lot at stake as the vaccine rollout was one of its first and most high-profile tasks. There were other stakeholders as well.

Several censorship requests came from Scott Gottlieb, board member and head of the regulatory and compliance committee at Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that made the most popular COVID-19 vaccine and raked in tens of billions of dollars on sales of it over the past two years.

Gottlieb sent Twitter at least three requests. One targeted a doctor who argued on the platform that naturally acquired immunity to COVID-19 is superior to vaccination. Twitter suppressed the tweet, even though the doctor was correct.

Another request targeted author Justin Hart, who argued on Twitter against school closures, pointing out that COVID-19 fatalities among children are extremely rare. Gottlieb sent the request shortly before Pfizer received approval for the use of its vaccine on children. Twitter didn’t comply with the request.

Yet another request targeted former NY Times reporter Berenson. Gottlieb claimed that Berenson’s criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of COVID-19 response in the Biden administration, was causing threats of physical violence toward Fauci. Twitter suspended Berenson’s account shortly after.

Gottlieb sent his requests to the same Twitter official who served as a contact person for censorship requests coming from the White House.

Trump Deplatforming

Trump was particularly effective on Twitter. His soundbites, honed over decades of dealing with the New York press, played well on the brevity-oriented Twitter, earning the president some 90 million followers and lending him the power to bypass media filters and instantly grab national attention. Trump’s Twitter presidency, however, brewed scorn in the beltway, especially among the foreign policy crowd that was used to diplomatic subtlety.

Twitter’s removal of Trump a few days after the Jan. 6, 2021, protest and riot at the U.S. Capitol appears to be one of those instances where Twitter executives acted on their own, breaking the platform’s content policies in suppressing the voice of a sitting American president, internal documents indicate.

Twitter suspended Trump’s account on Jan. 8, 2021, after the president made two posts.

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” said one of Trump’s tweets.

“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” read the other.

Twitter moderators and supervisors agreed that the Tweets didn’t violate any rules.

“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer. “It’s pretty clear he’s saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday.”

Higher executives, under pressure from their many anti-Trump employees, wouldn’t accept that conclusion and continued to push for construing Trump’s comments as malicious.

“The biggest question is whether a tweet line the one this morning from Trump, which isn’t a rule violation on its face, is being used as coded incitement to further violence,” Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, argued in an internal message.

Another Twitter moderation team quickly furnished Gadde’s argument with a narrative. Trump was a “leader of a violent extremist group who is glorifying the group and its recent actions,” the team concluded, according to internal messages.

Undermining the Nunes Memo

In January 2018, then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) submitted his memo detailing FBI surveillance abuses in pursuit of the Trump-Russia investigation. The memo was correct on virtually all points of substance, as later confirmed by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

The memo was dismissed by the corporate media as a “joke,” but gained significant traction on social media nonetheless. Legacy media and several lawmakers then came out claiming the memo was boosted online by accounts linked to Russian influence operations.

However, Twitter found no evidence of Russian influence behind the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag.

The claims were all sourced to the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a group set up in 2017 under the German Marshall Fund, a think tank funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.

The ASD is closely linked to the U.S. foreign policy and national security establishment. It was headed at the time by Laura Rosenberger, a former Clinton campaign adviser who held various roles at the State Department and the National Security Council. Its Advisory Council includes former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, former CIA head Michael Morell, and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Mike Chertoff.

Twitter officials were at a loss as to how the ASD came to its conclusions.

“We investigated, found that engagement was overwhelmingly organic and driven by strong VIT [Very Important Tweeters] engagement (including Wikileaks, [Donald Trump, Jr., Rep. Steve King, and others),” Trust and Safety head Roth wrote in an internal message.

In fact, the “dashboard” ASD used to make its claims had already been reverse-engineered by Twitter—a fact Roth didn’t want to disclose to the media.

Twitter tried debunking the story behind the scenes without giving out such details, but to no avail. Initially, reporters ran with the story without even reaching out to Twitter, Roth wrote.

The initial letter on the matter from Schiff and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee at the time, also came out before giving Twitter a chance to respond, internal messages say.

Twitter tried to stop Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) from piling on with his own letter, but again failed.

“Blumenthal isn’t always looking for real and nuanced solutions. He wants to get credit for pushing us further. And he may move on only when the press moves on,” commented Carlos Monje, Twitter’s then-Public Policy director, in an internal message. Formerly a Department of Transportation official, Monje returned to the department under the Biden administration.

In the end, Twitter never publicly challenged the Russia narrative.

Aiding Pentagon Psyops

In 2017, a Pentagon official asked Twitter to “whitelist” several accounts the Defense Department was using to spread its message in the Middle East. Twitter obliged, giving the accounts similar privileges it was reserving for verified accounts.

Later, however, the Pentagon removed any apparent connections between the accounts and the U.S. government, making them de facto surreptitious. Even though the accounts should have been removed under Twitter’s inauthentic activity policy, the company left them up for several years, independent journalist Fang reported.

Federal ‘Belly button’ of Investigation

The FBI served as a conduit for other government agencies to pass information to Twitter and ask for favors, according to Taibbi.

In one exchange, FBI cyber head Chan explained that the bureau would funnel to Twitter communications from the U.S. intelligence community (USIC), but other election-related communications would come from the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,” Chan said. “CISA will know what’s going on in each state.”

He then asked if Twitter would like to communicate with CISA separately or if it would prefer to “rely on the FBI to be the belly button of the [U.S. government].”

Twitter executives were surprised to learn that the FBI had agents specifically dedicated to searching Twitter and flagging content policy violations.

Since 2017, Twitter has employed at least 15 former FBI agents, further entangling the agency with the platform. The practice is so common, there was an internal discussion group at Twitter for former agents.

The FBI responded to the Twitter files disclosures in a statement that labeled the reporting “misinformation” spread by “conspiracy theorists and others … with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Department of Homeland Censorship

The DHS has managed to shoehorn speech policing into its mandate to protect critical infrastructure. In January 2017, shortly before leaving the White House, President Barack Obama designated elections as critical infrastructure. The DHS’s CISA then made it its job not only to protect elections from hackers, but also from misinformation and disinformation.

Read more here...

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former President Donald Trump spoke out after the White House said there are no visitor logs for President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, where multiple classified documents were discovered.

“The White House just announced that there are no LOGS or information of any kind on visitors to the Wilmington house and flimsy, unlocked, and unsecured, but now very famous, garage. Maybe they are smarter than we think!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Jan. 16.

“This is one of seemingly many places where HIGHLY CLASSIFIED documents are stored (in a big pile on the damp floor).”

A “small number” of classified materials were discovered on three separate occasions in Biden’s Wilmington house in December and January, in the garage and a room adjacent to it, White House lawyer Richard Sauber said last week.

Another stash of documents, which Sauber also described as a “small number,” was found in early November at the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which once served as Biden’s office. The documents date back to the Obama administration when Biden was the vice president. The total number of documents uncovered from both sites remains unclear.

Sauber has said the documents were “inadvertently placed” at the locations.

The White House spokesman Ian Sams on Monday said that it wasn’t standard practice to keep visitor logs of the president’s personal residence, after Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, demanded the information over the weekend, citing national security concerns.

“Like every president across decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,” said Ian Sams, spokesperson for the White House counsel, in a statement to the media. “But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitors logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration ended them.”

Trump on Monday sought to draw a distinction between Biden’s handling of the files with his case regarding classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago resort, which was subject to an unprecedented FBI raid last August. Agents at the time took about 100 documents marked as classified or top secret and 11,000 others marked as non-classified. Both cases are currently being investigated by separate special counsels. Trump has maintained that he declassified all the materials before he left office.

Unlike Biden’s garage, Trump claimed, “Mar-a-Lago is a highly secured facility, with Security Cameras all over the place, and watched over by staff & our great Secret Service.”

“I have INFO on everyone!” Trump said.

The White House has faced scrutiny for not disclosing the initial discovery of the documents on Nov. 2, with critics saying it was a deliberate attempt to cover up news that would have negatively affected the Democrats during the midterms that took place a few days later. The White House confirmed the initial discovery on Jan. 9, only after the development was first reported by media outlets.

Read more here...

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Shadows are falling / And I’ve been here all day / It’s too hot to sleep / And time is running away / Feel like my soul / has turned into steel /I’ve still got the scars / That the sun didn’t heal / There’s not even room enough / To be anywhere / Lord it’s not dark yet, / but it’s getting there

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet

Lights! Action! Reset!

The World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Davos Freak Show is back in business on Monday.

The mainstream media of the collective West, in unison, will be spinning non-stop, for a week, all the “news” that are fit to print to extol new declinations of The Great Reset, re-baptized The Great Narrative, but actually framed as a benign offer by “stakeholder capitalism”. These are the main planks of the shady platform of a shady NGO registered in Cologny, a tony Geneva suburb.

The list of Davos attendees was duly leaked. Proverbially, it’s an Anglo-American Exceptionalist fun fest, complete with intel honchos such as the US Director of National Intelligence, Avril “Madam Torture” Haines; the head of MI6 Richard Moore; and FBI director Christopher Wray.

Remixed Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopedias could be written about the Davos pathology – where a hefty list of multibillionaires, heads of state and corporate darlings (owned by BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and co.) “engage” in selling Demented Dystopia packages to the unsuspecting masses.

But let’s cut to the chase and focus on a few panels next week – which could easily be mistaken for Straight to Hell sessions.

The Tuesday, January 17 list is particularly engaging. It features a “De-Globalization or Re-Globalization?” panel with speakers Ian Bremmer, Adam Tooze, Niall Ferguson, Péter Szijjártó and Ngaire Woods. Three Atlanticists/Exceptionalists stand out, especially the ultra-toxic Ferguson.

After “In Defense of Europe”, featuring a bunch of nullities including Poland’s Andrjez Duda, attendees will be greeted with a Special Season in Hell (sorry, Rimbaud) featuring none other than EC dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen, known by a vast majority of Germans as Ursula von der Leichen (“Ursula of Cadavers”) in a tag team with WEF mastermind, Third Reich emulator Klaus “Nosferatu” Schwab.

Rumors are that Lucifer, in his privileged underground abode, is green with envy.

There’s also “Ukraine: What Next?” with another bunch of nullities, and “War in Europe: Year 2” featuring Moldova woke chick Maia Sandu and Finnish party girl Sanna Marin.

In the War Criminal section, pride of place goes to “A Conversation with Henry Kissinger: Historical Perspectives on War”, where Dr. K. will sell all his trademark Divide and Rule permutations. Added sulphur will be provided by Thucydides strangler Graham Allison.

In his Special Address, “Liver Sausage” Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be side by side with Nosferatu, hoping he won’t be – literally – grilled.

Then, on Wednesday, January 18, comes the apotheosis: “Restoring Security and Peace” with speakers Fareed Zakaria – the US establishment’s pet brown man; NATO’s Jens “War is Peace” Stoltenberg; Andrzej Duda – again; and Canadian warmonger Chrystia Freeland – widely rumored to become the next NATO Secretary-General.

And it gets juicier: the coke comedian posing as warlord may join via zoom from Kiev.

The notion that this panel is entitled to emit judgments about “peace” deserves nothing less than its own Nobel Peace Prize.

How to monetize the whole world

Cynics of all persuasions may be excused for lamenting Mr. Zircon – currently on oceanic patrol encompassing the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and of course “Mare Nostrum” Mediterranean – won’t be presenting his business card at Davos.

Analyst Peter Koenig has developed a convincing thesis that the WEF, the WHO and NATO may be running some sort of sophisticated death cult. The Great Reset does mingle merrily with NATO’s agenda as agent provocateur, financer and weaponizer of the proxy Empire vs. Russia war in black hole Ukraine. NAKO – an acronym for North Atlantic Killing Organization – would be more appropriate in this case.

As Koenig summarizes it, “NATO enters any territory where the ‘conventional’ media lie-machine, and social engineering are failing or not completing their people-ordaining goals fast enough.”

In parallel, very few people are aware that on June 13, 2019 in New York, a secret deal was clinched between the UN, the WEF, an array of oligarch-weaponized NGOs – with the WHO in the front line – and last but not least, the world’s top corporations, which are all owned by an interlinked maze with Vanguard and BlackRock at the center.

The practical result of the deal is the UN Agenda 2030.

Virtually every government in the NATOstan area and the “Western Hemisphere” (US establishment definition) has been hijacked by Agenda 2030 – which translates, essentially, as hoarding, privatizing and financializing all the earth’s assets, under the pretext of “protecting” them.

Translation: the marketization and monetization of the entire natural world (see, for instance, here, here and here.)

Davos superstar shills such as insufferable bore Niall Ferguson are just well rewarded vassals: western intellectuals of the Harvard, Yale and Princeton mould that would never dare bite the hand that feeds them.

Ferguson just wrote a column on Bloomberg titled “All is Not Quiet on the Eastern Front” – basically to peddle the risk of WWIII, on behalf of his masters, blaming of course “China as the arsenal of autocracy”.

Among serial high-handed inanities, this one stands out. Ferguson writes, “There are two obvious problems with US strategy (…) The first is that if algorithmic weapons systems are the equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons, Putin may eventually be driven to using the latter, as he clearly lacks the former.”

Cluelessness here is a euphemism. Ferguson clearly has no idea “algorithmic weapons” mean; if he’s referring to electronic warfare, the US may have been able to maintain superiority for a while in Ukraine, but that’s over.

Well, that’s typical Ferguson – who wrote a whole Rothschild hagiography just like his column, drinking from the Rothschild archives that appeared to have been sanitized as he knows next to nothing meaningful about their history.

Ferguson has “deduced” that Russia is weak and China is strong. Nonsense. Both are strong – and Russia is more advanced technologically than China in their advanced offensive and defensive missile development, and can beat the US in a nuclear war as Russian air space is sealed by layered defenses such as the S-400 all the way to the already tested S-500s and designed S-600s.

As far as semiconductor chips, the advantage that Taiwan has in chip manufacture is in mass production of the most advanced chips; but China and Russia can fabricate the chips necessary for military use, though not engage in mass commercial production. The US has an important advantage here commercially with Taiwan, but that’s not a military advantage.

Ferguson gives away his game when he carps about the need to “deter a nascent Axis-like combination of Russia, Iran and China from risking simultaneous conflict in three theaters: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.”

Here we have trademark Atlanticist demonization of the top three vectors of Eurasia integration mixed with a toxic cocktail of ignorance and arrogance: it’s NATO that is stoking “conflict” in Eastern Europe; and it’s the Empire that is being expelled from the “Far East” (oh, that’s so colonial) and soon from the Middle East (actually West Asia).

An AMGOT tale

Nobody with an IQ over room temperature will expect Davos next week to discuss any aspect of the NATO vs. Eurasia existential war seriously – not to mention propose diplomacy. So I’ll leave you with yet another typical tawdry story about how the Empire – who rules over Davos – deals in practice with its vassals.

While in Sicily earlier this year I learned that an ultra high-value Pentagon asset had landed in Rome, in haste, as part of an unscheduled visit. A few days later the reason for the visit was printed in La Repubblica, one of the papers of the toxic Agnelli clan.

That was a Mafia scam: a face-to-face “suggestion” for the Meloni government to imperatively provide Kiev, as soon as possible, with the costly anti-Samp-T missile system, developed by an European consortium, Eurosam, uniting MBDA Italy, MBDA France and Thales.

Italy possesses only 5 batteries of this system, not exactly brilliant against ballistic missiles but efficient against cruise missiles.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had already called Palazzo Chigi to announce the “offer you can’t refuse”. Apparently that was not enough, thus the hasty envoy trip. Rome will have to toe the line. Or else. After all, never forget the terminology employed by US generals to designate Sicily, and Italy as a whole: AMGOT.

American government occupied territory.

Have fun with the Davos freak show.

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

With each new release of the “Twitter Files” we learn more and more about the deep corruption in Washington. We sensed during Covid that something was really wrong – for example the bizarre denial of natural immunity. But thanks to Elon Musk’s decision to open the books, our worst fears have been proven true. Each new release seems to show something even more criminal inside America’s rotten ruling class.

In the latest release, thanks to the excellent reporting of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, we see outgoing Chair of the House Intelligence Community, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), continuously pressuring Twitter to validate his fantasies of “Russian bots” manipulating US politics.

The short version of what Taibbi reported comes from around the time then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was about to release his Committee’s findings about the FBI misuse of the FISA Court to spy on the Trump presidential campaign. The FBI, it turns out, relied exclusively on the widely-discredited “Steele Dossier” – paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign – as justification to spy on the Trump campaign.

When pressure grew to release the Nunes findings, Twitter exploded with users demanding that Congress “release the memo.”

That’s where then-ranking Member Schiff and his staff began relentlessly pressuring Twitter to show that the accounts demanding the release of the memo were actually Russian agents, out to help their supposed favorite, Donald Trump. Schiff was not alone. Fellow “Russiagate” hoaxers like Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) also pressured Twitter to find Russians behind the demand to release Nunes’ findings.

Over and over, Twitter – which was hardly sympathetic to Trump – told Schiff and his colleagues there was simply no evidence of Russian involvement. As much as some Twitter employees may have liked to report the opposite, to their credit they refused to participate in the scam.

Even after Twitter had informed Schiff and his fellow hoaxers that there was no Russian involvement, Sen. Blumenthal released a statement he knew was not true:

“We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans.”

Again, this was right after he had been informed by Twitter employees - who were by-and-large strongly opposed to Trump - that there was just no evidence to back up such a statement.

We are moving closer and closer to a nuclear showdown with Russia over Ukraine. For political gain the Democrats – and plenty of Republicans – have been pushing the “Russiagate” hoax and in so doing have fertilized the ground for the obsessive Russia hatred prevalent in the US today.

I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say that if US/Russia relations had not been poisoned by the lie of “Russiagate” for pure political gain, we would not be anywhere near our current state of near-direct conflict with the largest nuclear power on earth, Russia.

It is shocking that Schiff and his "Russiagate" allies would potentially sacrifice millions of dead Americans to defeat Trump and other political enemies.

Let’s not forget: Rep. Jim Trafficant was expelled from Congress for asking his staffers to wash his boat.

Shouldn’t there be at least equal punishment for Senators and Members who are lying us into World War III?

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the New York Post on the curious use of lawyers by President Joe Biden in the classified document controversy. There was a clear decision made to rely on his own counsel rather than the FBI or security officers after the discovery of highly classified documents in a closet in a private office. The decision clearly brings greater control and protection for the President, but it can itself be viewed as additional evidence of gross mishandling of classified material. In the movie “All The President’s Men,” Woodward chastises his colleague Bernstein that “I don’t mind what you did; I mind how you did it.” President Biden may face the same objection in his decision to use counsel to search for classified material.

Here is the column:

The discovery of a fourth set of classified documents, at the Biden residence in Delaware, has further undermined the White House’s virtual mantra that the president “takes classified documents very seriously.”

Putting aside the repeated movement of highly classified documents over six years, one curious element has emerged in this scandal: the use of private counsel.

Not only did President Joe Biden enlist lawyers to clear out his private Washington office; he then used them — rather than security officers or the FBI — to search for additional classified documents.

The initial use of lawyers is notable. While it seems a fairly pricey moving crew, Biden could argue a trove of documents might require a judgment on where they should be sent and whether they belong to Biden, the Penn Biden Center or the government.

But why was a legal team sent in six years after Biden took the documents on leaving as vice president? Were the lawyers specifically selected because they had clearances, an acknowledgment there might be classified material unlawfully housed in the office?

After the fourth batch of documents was discovered this week (the third found in Delaware), Richard Sauber, referred to as the “special counsel to the president,” stressed that he has a clearance. Sauber admits the lawyers who found the first batch at the residence didn’t have clearances but says he found the later documents.

It remains unclear which lawyers were involved in which discoveries, whether they had clearances and (if so) at what level.

In fact, it seems to suggest Biden continued to use uncleared lawyers after his team found highly classified documents Nov. 2 in the Penn Biden office closet in Washington.

That itself could be viewed as gross mishandling of classified information.

It’s strange Biden did not use security officers or the FBI to conduct further searches. The president has a host of people who regularly handle classified material. So why use the lawyers?

The answer appears the same as in the case of Hillary Clinton’s emails: control. Using private counsel allows Biden to raise attorney-client privilege. Trump also used counsel, but eventually the FBI raided his home to search and remove not just classified material but documents found in boxes with that material.

While that attorney-client privilege can be overcome under a “crime/fraud exception,” it adds a level of initial protection. It also allowed Biden to control the discovery and initial record of the discovery of classified information.

The key to any investigation will be the chain of custody extending back to the documents’ removal in 2017 when Biden left office. How these documents appeared in their discovered locations is known only to his lawyers. It’s a link in the chain of custody that Biden effectively controls.

With Mar-a-Lago, the FBI was criticized for staging documents to be shown in the storage room. The photos were then leaked to an eager media. There will be no staged photos of documents alongside Time magazine covers for Biden.

Nor were documents he housed with classified documents removed. Indeed, it’s not clear if the FBI will know what documents were stored in the same boxes.

What was potentially lost is significant. Classified documents are generally supposed to be in folders with a thick, colored border and large printed classification warnings. Were some of those folders observable before they were moved? If so, anyone could tell a pile contained classified material, including the president and passersby.

Likewise, the initial discovery could show the context of surrounding material. The FBI at Mar-a-Lago carefully photographed that context and its search. Here, we’re relying on counsel to have kept such a record when most lawyers would be reluctant to do so given the risk to their client.

The key is that unlike FBI agents, these lawyers are not acting on behalf of the public interest but for the president’s personal interests.

If there are criminal charges, the key witnesses will be lawyers representing the president as an individual. They are more likely to minimize incriminating or embarrassing elements.

And they are themselves under scrutiny. Since they may not have had sufficient clearances to do this work, it is in their interest to downplay any expectations or warnings of additional classified material scattered around Biden’s home or office.

Concern over the use of lawyers has only grown with time. Biden not only continued to have his lawyers search after the first discovery, but did so for months through subsequent discoveries.

After finding highly classified material in Biden’s garage Dec. 20, private counsel — not the FBI — found another document in an adjacent room Jan 11. Sauber found more classified documents the next day.

Those last two findings followed White House assurances that the “thorough” search was “completed.” It obviously wasn’t thorough enough.

They raised another question. It would seem unlikely a document with a proper classified cover could be missed. The folder has thick red or yellow borders running around the edges and large black classifications like “TOP SECRET” emblazoned across the top. If that was missed, the earlier searches were clearly negligent.

Alternatively, and more concerning, the internal documents might have been removed from the folders and stored without cover. That would indicate someone removed and reviewed them — an act showing knowledge of the classified status. If they were removed at Biden’s residence, he would be the chief suspect in such use.

It would utterly destroy the “inadvertence” defense.

Congressional Republicans are crying foul over the double standard applied to President Biden's mishandling of classified materials vs. the treatment former President Trump received.

To review, President Biden's lawyers - who didn't have clearance to view classified documents, allegedly stumbled upon a cache of them at his old office at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2, 2022, the day before midterm elections. After waiting nearly two months, more documents were found on December 20, January 9 and January 12 - the date on which AG Merrick Garland finally appointed a special counsel to investigate.

Trump, on the other hand, who has a potential constitutional argument that he could have declassified the documents recovered from his locked safe at his highly surveilled Mar-a-Lago residence, was treated to a raid by Biden's DOJ

"Where’s the raid of Biden’s garage?" asked House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA).

There’s always a double standard. @FBI, where’s the raid of Biden’s garage?

— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) January 12, 2023

"Now, we learn that Biden kept additional classified materials at his home in Delaware in his GARAGE. Yet there was no raid. No ransacking of Biden’s home. Nothing,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw tweeted, trying to get back in MAGA's good graces.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) called the situation "another faux pas by the Biden administration," by "treating law differently based upon your political beliefs."

"That’s why we had to provide a new entity from our Church-style [committee] to look after the weaponization of what’s gone on that you want an equal playing of the law to all Americans."

McCarthy also pointed out the fact that officials have not released any photos of the documents recovered from Biden’s office and home. The Justice Department included a photo of materials retrieved from Trump’s residence in a court filing that was made public. -The Hill

"More classified documents Biden took from the Obama White House have been found at Biden’s Delaware house next to his Corvette. Biden assures the public it’s OK because his garage is locked… So, when’s the FBI raid?" said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) in a Thursday tweet.

Trump was also 'raided' by the media, so to speak.

.@jheil: "Despite the possible political ramifications ... the right decision on that is going to be you can’t let this go ... you can’t let it go without accountability.” pic.twitter.com/AvBqqQ0Rtx

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 16, 2023

.@MilesTaylorUSA: "This is a big national security concern ... It is very likely the ex president will be indicted. After the indictment ... I worry that if the Republicans will retake the House and Senate, they will try to find a way to give the ex-president amnesty." pic.twitter.com/Rc1TLaQ8uI

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 16, 2023

And crickets over Biden aside from scant cardboard reporting on the matter.

In fact, CNN's Jake Tapper is earning his paycheck carrying water for the regime:

CNN asks Comer, who's trying to make a big deal out of Biden's handling of classified documents, to explain a clip of him saying last November that investigating Trump's mishandling of classified docs is "not a priority" for him pic.twitter.com/jaGSbnC4Ew

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 15, 2023

Meanwhile, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has sent letters to the National Archives and the White House Counsel's office requesting documents and communications pertaining to the classified materials, along with a request for information about the documents themselves and who may have been able to access them.

And Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), the top GOP member of the House Intelligence Committee, sent AG Garland and DNI Avril Haines a request for a classified briefing about the documents.

Authored by Pete Hoekstra via The Gatestone Institute,

Over the last few years, there has been much written about the destruction of American democracy. Frequently the threat has been of alleged interference in U.S. elections by Russia, China or other state actors. Government agencies, the name of election integrity, were assigned to identify and disrupt these foreign intrusions. As more and more information is revealed about these agencies, it seems that America's Intelligence Community participated in these activities domestically, and in a way that poses a grave threat to both election integrity and American democracy.

Just last week it was revealed that the FBI again withheld pertinent information from the American public, for past two months, until after the November 8, 2022 federal election. As with the Bureau's reported cover-up of evidence influence-peddling reportedly found on Hunter Biden's laptop, agents knew, since November 2, 2022, about at least some of the three sets of classified material that illegally found their way into the garage and library of President Joe Biden and into the Penn Biden Center think tank at the University of Pennsylvania -- to which anonymous members of the Chinese Communist Party have donated $54.6 million.

Their existence only became known this week, after the newly elected Republican-majority House of Representatives announced that it would hold hearings on "how the [Justice] department handled investigations into classified materials found at former President Donald Trump's Florida home and those found at President Joe Biden's office in a Washington think tank bearing his name and his Delaware home..."

In addition, the recent release of the "Twitter Files" has raised at least two major concerns regarding actions by the Intelligence Community. The first is that the wall of separation between the Intelligence Community and the U.S. media has not only sprung a leak, it has totally collapsed. The report that officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) met weekly with Twitter executives to coordinate information is totally inappropriate. Would officials from the ODNI review, affirm or label certain sets of information as false? When ODNI was created, no one intended its officials to have a role in these types of discussions.

It also appears that intelligence officials in recent years have politically weaponized intelligence. The combination of a politically weaponized Intelligence Community, operating hand-in-hand with organizations that are the main gateways for information to millions of Americans, poses a serious threat to American democracy and the integrity of our elections.

Let us just briefly look at the steep slope of lying, deceit and corruption that has seeped into the leadership of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

First, there are not enough words to praise our Intelligence Community and the men and women who risk their lives to keep America safe. These are the rank-and-file professionals that form the core of the Intelligence Community. Most are dedicated to the mission of gathering the necessary information to protect our nation. Their leaders have a responsibility to serve these individuals. Too often, however, as the current array of whistleblowers indicates, those leaders have let these individuals down.

Imagine their reaction in 2013 when, in response to a question from Senator Ron Wyden to then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper about whether the National Security Agency (NSA) collects "any type of data on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans," Clapper answered, "No sir, not wittingly." Clapper, who had been given the question the previous day, was asked after the hearing if he wanted to amend the answer, and declined. It was shortly thereafter that a massive NSA program containing millions of pieces of Americans' data was revealed. Clapper was caught in a huge lie -- to U.S. Senator Wyden and the American people.

On January 12, 2017, CNN reported that President-elect Donald Trump had been briefed by DNI Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers. The topic: "Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Donald Trump." It was intended to inform the President-elect that these allegations "are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress, and other government officials in Washington." The briefing also touched on other major allegations they claimed were "circulating."

Having this false information -- some of which the FBI actually altered -- in the public domain was evidently intended to damage Trump. The Russian "hoax" allegations would haunt and damage the Trump presidency for almost two years. Clapper himself stated:

"I express my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press ... they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security."

Clapper also released a statement that neither he nor anyone else in the Intelligence Community were responsible for the leaks. How did this highly classified information, then, get into the public domain?

A House Republican investigation provides the answer. Clapper denied leaking the dossier but admitted to discussing the dossier with CNN correspondent Jake Tapper and perhaps other journalists in early January 2017. Later in 2017, Clapper would go on to join CNN as a "national security" contributor and CNN would receive an award for its reporting at the White House Correspondents' dinner.

Today we know that the "Russia hoax" was a lie. After a 22-month investigation, no evidence of collusion between any element of the Trump campaign and Russia was uncovered. The supposedly compromising evidence had never existed; the information in the "Steele dossier" was false -- and the FBI had known it was from the start. The entire fabrication had been an attempt to attack and politically weaken Trump.

In October 2020, shortly before the elections 51 former intelligence professionals had even signed a joint letter stating that the Hunter Biden laptop had "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." They stated that their national security experience made them "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case." They went on:

"If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we strongly believe that Americans need to be aware of this."

The New York Times raised questions about the authenticity of the materials found on the laptop. Bill Evanina, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director, had indicated in August that Russia was trying to denigrate the Biden campaign. All these manufactured "facts" were apparently intended to create circumstances where reasonable people would have to conclude that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

Signatories of the 2020 letter included Clapper, Brennan, Michael Hayden, Jeremy Bash and David Buckley. Clapper and Brennan are familiar names. They were involved in the January 2017 briefing to President Donald Trump on the fake Steele dossier. Jeremy Bash and David Buckley are worth mentioning because they continue to play significant roles in domestic and national security areas in the U.S. government. Buckley was the majority staff director on the House Select Committee investigating January 6th. Bash has been named to co-chair a government commission to review the war in Afghanistan.

The fraudulent efforts by the U.S. government, Clapper, Brennan and the 49 others -- along with Hillary Clinton, her campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee and the suppression of the media and social media (here and here) -- to influence the public unfortunately met with some success. For almost two years, the authenticity of the material found on Hunter Biden's laptop was questioned. Today, its authenticity has been verified; the information is real and damning. As summarized by the New York Post:

"Yes that letter from the Dirty 51 had all the classic earmarks of a disinformation operation, all right – one designed to ensure Joe Biden won the presidency. And it was essentially a CIA operation, considering 43 of the 51 signatories were former CIA."

One final example of the Intelligence Community involving itself in domestic politics comes from the recent release of the "Twitter Files." According to tweet #20 of the third tranche released:

"This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence."

Tweet #17 states: "executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content."

Finally, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million reportedly to "handle requests from the bureau."

We now know what happened. Twitter suppressed discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story and suppressed conservative messaging, while at the same time it appears the FBI, DHS and the ODNI had literally had set up shop at Twitter.

The American people should be outraged. This level of collaboration between federal law enforcement and a private sector company on controlling speech is terrifying. Having our Intelligence Community, which is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence collection, involved is even more terrifying.

DNI James Clapper lying to the American people in 2013 about government surveillance of them, the promoting of the Russian hoax theory in 2017 by CIA Director Brennan, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey and others, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by 51 former intelligence professionals, and the close working arrangement between the FBI, DHS and the ODNI in 2020-2022 raises a staggering series of questions:

• Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted?

• Have those federal government agencies literally weaponized law enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.?

• Has more than one solitary person -- former FBI attorney Kevin Clinemith, for altering an email -- been held accountable for these egregious abuses of power?

• Why wasn't there a more powerful response from the Intelligence Community and the law enforcement community about the disinformation from the 51 former intelligence professionals?

• Who authorized the cozy relationship between law enforcement, the intelligence community with Twitter?

• Who in these government agencies reviewed and approved of the output and decisions coming from these joint efforts?

• Were political appointees in the review loop?

• Who has the records, notes and decisions that emanated from these groups?

It is clear that our law enforcement community needs to be investigated, but most importantly we need to investigate how our Intelligence Community has evolved from having literally a non-existent relationship with speech in America to being inside the room determining what speech is allowed.

There also needs to be a significant investigation by an outside, non-government group to understand how far this massive government overreach into free speech and election manipulation went.

Clearly the government has been influencing what we get to see and hear. It needs to stop -- now -- before our democracy is destroyed.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest,” the main character’s search for his true name comes to a head when he finally demands “would you kindly inform me who I am?” In an astonishing filing this week, Hunter Biden answered that question for his four-year-old daughter Navy Joan and effectively declared “you are no Biden.”

Hunter Biden’s disgraceful treatment of his daughter has long been on display in Arkansas where he long denied being her father, fought paternity, and was threatened with contempt of court over his failure to supply needed documents. After DNA testing was forced by a court, Hunter was found to be the father but he continued to resist efforts to force him to pay child support and supply financial records.

Recently, Lunden Roberts sought to have a surname change for her daughter to Biden. Even after his long and abusive treatment of his daughter in court, Hunter Biden’s opposition is breathtaking.  He opposes his daughter using his name and says that, if she does, she will never have a “peaceful existence.”

Of course, Biden did not feel that way with his other four children. They are all true Bidens and living peaceful existences. It is only Navy Joan who he does not want to bear the family name.

Hunter’s concern for Navy Joan’s peaceful existence is a bit odd since he has reportedly never even seen his daughter after fighting for years to deny his paternal status and child support.

While living in a luxurious mansion in Malibu, Hunter continued to fight his obligations under child support and requested in September 2022 to have the payments lowered, bemoaning how his “financial circumstances” were difficult for him.  The public pays more for his security in his mansion than he does in monthly support for his daughter.

Hunter is asking Circuit Court Judge Holly Meyer to deny Navy Joan the ability to use her father’s surname and claiming that it is in her best interest. The filing is so self-serving and transparently dishonest that it does what was once thought impossible: reach a new low for Hunter. All of his reported selfies having sex and doing drugs with prostitutes were shocking. His attacks on his former sister-in-law, Hallie Biden, widow of the deceased brother (with whom Hunter later had a romantic relationship), were appalling. However, the craven effort to deny this child his name reaches a level of cad that stands unrivaled.

The position of Hunter in court has been disgraceful, but the media has largely ignored the matter. It has also ignored the utter lack of support from President Joe Biden and the First Lady, who tellingly omitted a stocking for Navy Joan as one of their grandchildren. (The dog and cat did receive stockings). There is no record that Joe or Jill Biden have ever sought to meet, let alone embrace, their grandchild. The President has, however, sought to deny the child security protection (despite his son’s concern for her “peaceful existence”).

Joe Biden has long campaigned against “deadbeat Dads” but when a Fox reporter asked about Hunter’s refusal to pay child support, President Biden snapped at him and refused to answer the question on the “personal matter.” (The media also ignored Hunter’s deadbeat dad record in fawning interviews about this “bravery” in writing a book on his life).

The obvious effort of the Biden family in this filing is to preserve distance from this child. The legal standard for a name change in Arkansas has been based on the “best interests of the child,” not the political interest of the father and his family. Indeed, historically, Arkansas courts followed a presumption in favor of a child have the surname of its father.

More recently, the Arkansas Supreme Court in Huffman v. Fisher laid out various factors to balance including (1) the child’s preference; (2) the effect on the child’s relationship with each parent; (3) the length of time that the child has borne the prior surname; (4) the community respect for the rivaling surnames; (5) the social difficulties that could arise from the adoption of the new surname; and (6) the presence of any parental misconduct or neglect.

The petition is based on the best interest of the child.  Roberts’ lawyer claims that the Biden name is “now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute, and politically powerful.” The “financially acute” part did jump out for many of us who have followed Hunter Biden’s scandals for years.  The Bidens have certainly made themselves wealthy during Joe Biden’s time in office. However, they are synonymous not with financial acuity but influence peddling. While influence peddling has long been the leading industry in Washington, the Bidens have long taken it to levels unimagined by other powerful families with millions in windfall payments from foreign sources, including some connected to foreign intelligence operations.

Nevertheless, the child is clearly better off with the Biden surname, particularly in establishing the very connection that Hunter, Joe, and Jill Biden seem committed to conceal or ignore.  Navy Joan is the grandchild of the 47th President of the United States. That alone makes the change beneficial. Navy Joan will be able to benefit from the cache of that connection in applying to college, seeking employment, and other pursuits. It also establishes (despite the efforts of the Bidens) that she is part of the family’s legacy.

Joe Biden often talks about his Irish roots and his family tree. The familial legacy also includes Navy Joan. Those are her relatives even if they refuse to recognize or embrace her.

There is no real doubt about the best interests of his child in his filing.  For their part, the Bidens have made it clear what is in their best interest. It is not this child. The court should make fast work of this petition and change Navy Joan’s surname to Biden. That will not make the family more loving or supportive or accepting. She will have to eventually deal emotionally with this latest effort to conceal her true identity.

Yet, she is a Biden and could easily prove the best of the lot.

Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.com,

So Los Angeles has a new mayor -- the far-left Karen Bass, and it hasn't taken long for changes to kick in, letting the police know she doesn't have their back.

Latest news is this diktat from above, as reported by Fox News:

The Los Angeles Police Department banned the Thin Blue Line flag from public areas within police departments this week over a complaint that the flag represented "violent, extremist views."

LAPD Chief Michel Moore defended the controversial move in an email sent to Fox News Digital, saying, "Yesterday, we received a community complaint of the presence of a Blue Line Flag" with "the view that it symbolized support for violent extremist views, such as those represented by the Proud Boys and others." 

"I directed to have the item taken down from the public lobby. The U.S. flag should be proudly displayed in our lobbies whenever possible. Memorials for our fallen are also authorized in all public spaces," he said. 

The banned flag looks like this:

Where'd I take that photo? At a party full of LAPD cops, celebrating the birthday at the home of one of their own. The photo doesn't include the cops, but there were a lot of them. 

It was at this party that I learned how much that flag means to these officers, all of whom were black or Hispanic, none of whom were white. This flag is a big deal to them, an emblem of their hard job, an expression of the dangers and death they face, and a rallying point for their reasonable interests.

They want to ban this? Because of one wokester complaint, a complaint from someone who undoubtedly doesn't want any cops whatsoever, a cop-hater, and they are out there, as that's been the party line in the anti-cop wokester-activist community for several years now.

The excuses from headquarters were really pathetic:

Moore explained that a flag displayed in one station's lobby spurred a complaint and he added, "It’s unfortunate that extremist groups have hijacked the use of the ‘Thin Blue Line flag’ to symbolize their undemocratic, racist, and bigoted views." 

The LAPD chief ordered all flags with the symbol to be removed from public areas. Moore said officers still can display the flag "their workspace, locker door, or personal vehicle." 

While Moore said he viewed the flag as symbolizing "the honor, valor, dedication, and sacrifice of law enforcement to protect our communities," he said others had undermined the flag with their "racist, bigoted and oppressive values."

Really? Let's hear some names, which naturally, Moore and his ilk didn't give.

This has about as much credibility as the Pentagon's hunt for extremists (read: Trump supporters) in the military's ranks, or the FBI's hunt for domestic terrorists among the parents attending school board meetings.

And while we are at it, let's look at the diversity composition of the LAPD these days since policing is so synonymous with white supremacy and that flag the LAPD brass hates so much.

According to Wikipedia:

As of 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department had 10,008 officers sworn in. Of these, 81% (8,158) were male and 19% (1,850) female. The racial/ethnic breakdown:[50]

• 48.8% or 4,882 was Hispanic/Latino (of any race)

• 30.9% or 3,090 was non-Hispanic White

• 9.62% or 962 was African American

• 7.66% or 766 was Asian

• 2.46% or 246 was Filipino American

• remaining were Indian and Other Ethnicities.

The claim that flag was white supremacist, accompanied by the dog biscuit thrown to the cops, that they can still display the flags on their personal cars and lockers, pretty well pegs any cop who has such stickers as a white supremacist. After all, if they're going to peg a symbol as white supremacist, why are they allowing it on lockers and cars? Do they allow Klan or White Aryan Brotherhood symbols on cars and lockers of cops, too?

Don't think so.

The concession given is because they know how alienated the cops are by this decision. According to Fox News, a union representing 9,900 Los Angeles police officers fire back with this statement:

"It is difficult to express the level of utter disgust and disappointment with Chief Moore’s politically pandering directive to remove Thin Blue Line flags and memorials for fallen officers from all public areas within our police stations. This direction came as a result of complaints from anti-police, criminal apologists, and activists who hold too much sway over our city leaders and, unfortunately, our Chief," the Board of directors for the Los Angeles Police Protective League wrote in a statement.

The union said they "vehemently" opposed "this disrespectful and defeatist kowtowing by our department leadership to groups that praise the killing of police officers and outright call for violence against those of us in uniform. We have directly expressed our outrage to the Chief."

Note that word "vehemently." 

We pretty well can tell what the sentiment in the not-so-white ranks is regarding this ban on the only public emblem the cops even have -- and which without, they are all alone out there, no rallying symbol for their lives and welfare.

With the police brass playing politics, as they say, it's pretty obvious that the "politics" here is the politics of the new mayor, Karen Bass, who's a wokester fanatic so leftwing she was rejected by the Biden team for the vice presidency, which handed the slot of the giggly and less competent Kamala Harris instead. Obviously, they've been read the Riot Act by Bass, and are looking to save their skins. The bad part here is that the line officers have been sent a message -- that politicians and the police brass don't have their backs now. Already thousands of officers, including many at that very party, have retired, or retired at their desks.

This flag message sends the message in the already crime-plagued city, one of the country's worst, that it's time to quit and move someplace where they want the blue in place and are willing to support the blue.

You know it's bad when...

No lessor liar than Rep. Adam Schiff (R-Calif.), the now former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, admitted this morning that it's possible national security was jeopardized after President Joe Biden's lawyers confirmed classified documents were found in various locations.

"I don't think we can exclude the possibility without knowing more of the facts," the California Democrat said of the Biden documents when pressed by "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl about any national security risks.

"We have asked for an assessment in the intelligence community of the Mar-a-Lago documents," Schiff said.

"I think we ought to get that same assessment of the documents found in the think tank as well as the home of President Biden. I'd like to know what these documents were. I'd like to know what the [intelligence community's] assessment is, whether there was any risk of exposure and what the harm would be and whether any mitigation needs to be done."

Of course, Schiff was quick to get back on track with the narrative, as echoing the media and most other Democrats, the Russia collusion hoaxer asserted that Biden’s and Trump’s cases are different because Biden, he said, is cooperating.

“The Biden approach was very different in the sense that it looks that it was inadvertent that these documents were at these locations,” Schiff said.

“There was no effort to hold onto them, no effort to conceal them, no effort to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation.”

Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff says he's "going to reserve judgment" on the Biden classified document scandal because it was probably "inadvertent" that Biden left classified documents lying around his office, garage, and home.#Democrat #Schiff #ClassifiedDocuments

via @RNCresearch pic.twitter.com/kq8k0f0pVU

— TRUTH PUKE (@TruthPuke) January 15, 2023

It’s worth noting, however, that the National Archives had confirmed last year that Trump’s lawyers were cooperating with the agency before the FBI raided his Florida residence in August.

Authored by Abir Ballan via The Brownstone Institute,

Trust the Authorities, trust the Experts, and trust the Science, we were told.

Public health messaging during the Covid-19 pandemic was only credible if it originated from government health authorities, the World Health Organization, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as scientists who parroted their lines with little critical thinking. 

In the name of ‘protecting’ the public, the authorities have gone to great lengths, as described in the recently released Twitter Files (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) that document collusion between the FBI and social media platforms, to create an illusion of consensus about the appropriate response to Covid-19. 

They suppressed ‘the truth,’ even when emanating from highly credible scientists, undermining scientific debate and preventing the correction of scientific errors. In fact, an entire bureaucracy of censorship has been created, ostensibly to deal with so-called MDM— misinformation (false information resulting from human error with no intention of harm); disinformation (information intended to mislead and manipulate); malinformation (accurate information intended to harm). 

From fact-checkers like NewsGuard, to the European Commission’s Digital Services Act, the UK Online Safety Bill and the BBC Trusted News Initiative, as well as Big Tech and social media, all eyes are on the public to curtail their ‘mis-/dis-information.’ 

“Whether it’s a threat to our health or a threat to our democracy, there is a human cost to disinformation.” — Tim Davie, Director-General of the BBC

But is it possible that ‘trusted’ institutions could pose a far bigger threat to society by disseminating false information?

Although the problem of spreading false information is usually conceived of as emanating from the public, during the Covid-19 pandemic, governments, corporations, supranational organisations and even scientific journals and  academic institutions have contributed to a false narrative. 

Falsehoods such as ‘Lockdowns save lives’ and ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’ have far-reaching costs in livelihoods and lives. Institutional false information during the pandemic was rampant. Below is just a sample by way of illustration.

The health authorities falsely convinced the public that the Covid-19 vaccines stop infection and transmission when the manufacturers never even tested these outcomes. The CDC changed its definition of vaccination to be more ‘inclusive’ of the novel mRNA technology vaccines. Instead of the vaccines being expected to produce immunity, now it was good enough to produce protection. 

The authorities also repeated the mantra (at 16:55) of ‘safe and effective’ throughout the pandemic despite emerging evidence of vaccine harm. The FDA refused the full release of documents they had reviewed in 108 days when granting the vaccines emergency use authorisation. Then in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, it attempted to delay their release for up to 75 years. These documents presented evidence of vaccine adverse events. It’s important to note that between 50 and 96 percent of the funding of drug regulatory agencies around the world comes from Big Pharma in the form of grants or user fees. Can we disregard that it’s difficult to bite the hand that feeds you?

The vaccine manufacturers claimed high levels of vaccine efficacy in terms of relative risk reduction (between 67 and 95 percent). They failed, however, to share with the public the more reliable measure of absolute risk reduction that was only around 1 percent, thereby exaggerating the expected benefit of these vaccines. 

They also claimed “no serious safety concerns observed” despite their own post-authorisation safety report revealing multiple serious adverse events, some lethal. The manufacturers also failed to publicly address the immune suppression during the two weeks post-vaccination and the rapidly waning vaccine effectiveness that turns negative at 6 months or the increased risk of infection with each additional booster. Lack of transparency about this vital information denied people their right to informed consent. 

They also claimed that natural immunity is not protective enough and that hybrid immunity (a combination of natural immunity and vaccination) is required. This false information was necessary to sell remaining stocks of their products in the face of mounting breakthrough cases (infection despite vaccination). 

In reality, although natural immunity may not completely prevent future infection with SARS-CoV-2, it is however effective in preventing severe symptoms and deaths. Thus vaccination post-natural infection is not needed. 

The WHO also participated in falsely informing the public. It disregarded its own pre-pandemic plans, and denied that lockdowns and masks are ineffective at saving lives and have a net harm on public health. It also promoted mass vaccination in contradiction to the public health principle of ‘interventions based on individual needs.’ 

It also went as far as excluding natural immunity from its definition of herd immunity and claimed that only vaccines can help reach this end point. This was later reversed under pressure from the scientific community. Again, at least 20 percent of the WHO’s funding comes from Big Pharma and philanthropists invested in pharmaceuticals. Is this a case of he who pays the piper calls the tune? 

The Lancet, a respectable medical journal, published a paper claiming that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — a repurposed drug used for the treatment of Covid-19 —  was associated with a slight increased risk of death. This led the FDA to ban the use of HCQ to treat Covid-19 patients and the NIH to halt the clinical trials on HCQ as a potential Covid-19 treatment. These were drastic measures taken on the basis of a study that was later retracted due to the emergence of evidence showing that the data used was false. 

In another instance, the medical journal Current Problems in Cardiology retracted —without any justification— a paper showing an increased risk of myocarditis in young people following the Covid-19 vaccines, after it was peer-reviewed and published. The authors advocated for the precautionary principle in the vaccination of young people and called for more pharmacovigilance studies to assess the safety of the vaccines. Erasing such findings from the medical literature not only prevents science from taking its natural course, but it also gatekeeps important information from the public.

A similar story took place with Ivermectin, another drug used for the treatment of Covdi-19, this time potentially implicating academia. Andrew Hill stated (at 5:15) that the conclusion of his paper on Ivermectin was influenced by Unitaid which is, coincidentally, the main funder of a new research centre at Hill’s workplace —the University of Liverpool. His meta-analysis showed that Ivermectin reduced mortality with Covid-19 by 75 percent. Instead of supporting Ivermectin use as a Covid-19 treatment, he concluded that further studies were needed.

The suppression of potentially life-saving treatments was instrumental for the emergency use authorization of the Covid-19 vaccines as the absence of a treatment for the disease is a condition for EUA (p.3).

Many media outlets are also guilty of sharing false information. This was in the form of biased reporting, or by accepting to be a platform for public relations (PR) campaigns. PR is an innocuous word for propaganda or the art of sharing information to influence public opinion in the service of special interest groups. 

The danger of PR is that it passes for independent journalistic opinion to the untrained eye. PR campaigns aim to sensationalise scientific findings, possibly to increase consumer uptake of a given therapeutic, increase funding for similar research, or to increase stock prices. The pharmaceutical companies spent $6.88 billion on TV advertisements in 2021 in the US alone. Is it possible that this funding influenced media reporting during the Covid-19 pandemic? 

Lack of integrity and conflicts of interest have led to an unprecedented institutional false information pandemic. It is up to the public to determine whether the above are instances of mis- or dis-information. 

Public trust in the Media has seen its biggest drop over the last five years. Many are also waking up to the widespread institutional false information. The public can no longer trust ‘authoritative’ institutions that were expected to look after their interests. This lesson was learned at great cost. Many lives were lost due to the suppression of early treatment and an unsound vaccination policy; businesses ruined; jobs destroyed; educational achievement regressed; poverty aggravated; and both physical and mental health outcomes worsened. A preventable mass disaster. 

We have a choice: either we continue to passively accept institutional false information or we resist. What are the checks and balances that we must put in place to reduce conflicts of interest in public health and research institutions? How can we decentralise the media and academic journals in order to reduce the influence of pharmaceutical advertising on their editorial policy?

As individuals, how can we improve our media literacy to become more critical consumers of information? There is nothing that dispels false narratives better than personal inquiry and critical thinking. So the next time conflicted institutions cry woeful wolf or vicious variant or catastrophic climate, we need to think twice.

Authored by Roger Stone via Stone Cold Truth with Roger Stone,

A stunning, long-overlooked Nixon Watergate-era tape shows Richard Nixon warning CIA Director Richard Helms that he knows of CIA involvement in the murder of John F. Kennedy- “I know who shot John.” 

This shocking new tape depicts Nixon increasingly besieged by Watergate but unaware that at least four of the Watergate burglars were still on the CIA payroll at the time of the break-in, and that the CIA had thus infiltrated the burglary team. Recently declassified documents reveal that Watergate Special Prosecutor Nick Akerman was aware of both the CIA’s advance knowledge and involvement in the break-in — but said and did nothing.

Senator Howard Baker, the Republican Leader on the Senate Watergate Committee and his counsel Fred Thompson himself, a future U.S. Senator from Tennessee, like Baker, stumbled on the CIA's deep advanced knowledge and direct involvement in the Watergate break-in. Baker and Thompson both knew that at least four of the Watergate burglars were on the CIA payroll at the time of the break-in and that through CREEP Security Director James McCord, had infiltrated the burglary team. Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin stoutly refused to allow Baker and the Committee Republicans including Edward J. Gurney of Florida the right to publish a Minority Report which noted this stunning information regarding the CIA.

Nixon deeply distrusted the CIA because he knew that President Eisenhower had ordered the agency to give top secret briefings to both Nixon and Kennedy after both were the certain nominees of their parties. Nixon was sore that Kennedy utilized the information in their debates, attacking Nixon for being "soft" on communist Cuba, knowing full well that Nixon had chaired a working group as Vice President overseeing preparations for the "Bay of Pigs" invasion. Nixon, of course, could not reveal this upcoming attempt to topple Castro in the details.

White House Domestic Policy Chief John Ehrlichman wrote that when he served as the White House Legal Counsel, Nixon ordered him to request that the CIA hand over all documents pertaining to John Kennedy's murder. Nixon was furious when Richard Helms, the CIA Director, refused his presidential order to hand them over.

This stunning new Watergate-era tape captures an increasingly besieged Nixon desperately seeking to mobilize the CIA in his defense by threatening to expose their greatest secrets. Nixon also knew that Congressman Gerald Ford, as a member of the Warren Commission, had, at the explicit direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, altered the official autopsy diagram for President John F. Kennedy; moving the marking from a bullet in his upper back to his neck in order to accommodate the single-bullet theory and to conceal the fact that Kennedy had been hit with more than the reported three shots.

Nixon was acutely aware of Ford's act of treachery in concealing the truth about Kennedy's murder and the CIA's involvement in it.

White House Chief of Staff General Alexander Haig told me in an interview that "Nixon had Ford by the balls."

The five-star General said, "Nixon had me tell Ford that is he (Nixon) was going down, he was taking everybody with him."

Subscribe to Stone Cold Truth here...

A nonprofit organization headed by an FBI analyst-turned-Democrat operative & vociferous Russiagater, Daniel Jones, has funded both Fusion GPS - the firm that laundered Hillary Clinton's funding of the infamous 'Steele Dossier' - and a study which found an increase in "climate change misinformation" on Twitter since Elon Musk bought the company.

Jones, a former staffer for Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein (of 'Chinese spy driver' fame), founded 'Advanced Democracy,' through which he shared a study with USA Today which claims that instances of "climate fraud," "climate hoax," and "climate scam" jumped over 300% in 2022.

As the Daily Caller notes, however, Advance Democracy has also funded groups pushing now-debunked claims involving the 2016 US election, as well as a group which pushed a disinformation campaign in the 2017 Alabama special Senate election.

The non-profit in 2020 paid $140,000 to Bean LLC, the parent company of Fusion GPS, for “research consulting” services. Fusion GPS was hired by Perkins Coie, a Democrat-linked law firm retained by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to conduct opposition research on the Trump campaign between April 2016 and October 2016; Fusion GPS commissioned Christopher Steele to produce a now-discredited opposition research report on the Trump campaign, according to public tax filings.

Many of the Steele dossier’s allegations have been subsequently debunked and proven false.

Advance Democracy has previously funded Fusion’s parent company to the tune of $6,051,251 as of 2020, according to the Washington Examiner’s review of earlier tax filings.

Additionally, Advance Democracy paid $540,000 to the research firm Yonder, according to public tax filings; Yonder was previously known as New Knowledge, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan reportedly participated in a disinformation operation during the 2017 Alabama special Senate election between Doug Jones and Roy Moore, ostensibly to study how Russian disinformation campaigns during the 2016 election operated, according to The New York Times. -Daily Caller

"We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet," read an internal report, according to the NY Times.

Jones' group has also provided reports on 'online misinformation and disinformation' to sites such as Politico and The Washington Post to push narratives involving election misinformation and 'threats to democracy.'

Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A House Oversight Committee veteran said the delay in publicizing President Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents from his time as vice president amounts to election interference.

“The documents were allegedly discovered on Nov. 2. The midterms are on Nov. 8. To me, this is election interference by omission,” Mike Howell said in a Jan. 11 interview with The Epoch Times.

“Does anyone think if this had been President Trump or any other Republican, the news wouldn’t have been leaked immediately for political gain? We needn’t wonder—just look at all the affirmative updates, releases, and leaks in the Trump case,” he said in a Jan. 10 statement.

Howell was an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump. He previously worked as a lawyer on the House Oversight Committee as well as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

He now leads the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Heritage Oversight is, in Howell’s words, “suing the Biden administration aggressively” over Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

“We’re gathering as much as we can and hoping that Congress makes use of it,” he said, noting that FOIA lawsuits are just one of the organization’s tactics.

Notably, Heritage Oversight obtained an email to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that shows that he knew Haitian migrants weren’t whipped by Border Patrol agents at Del Rio, Texas, by Sept. 24, 2021.

Yet during a press conference that same day, Mayorkas offered no clarification on the whipping allegations, instead saying that the images “painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation’s ongoing battle against systemic racism.”

FOIA Requests Filed

“He [Mayorkas] chose to ignore the information to preserve the far-left narrative on this whole incident,” Howell said in a 2022 Heritage Foundation interview.

Heritage Oversight filed FOIA requests with the Department of Justice and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) regarding the classified materials found at the Penn Biden Center.

“Why was this information not made public prior [to] the election? It likely would have had substantial electoral salience,” Howell wrote in his FOIA request to the Department of Justice.

Democrats have frequently accused Republicans of election interference, citing everything from voter I.D. laws to state-level election integrity legislation.

Now, Republicans are zeroing in on the apparently coordinated suppression of stories prior to national elections in an election interference narrative of their own.

The Penn Biden Center incident, which could have broken before the 2022 midterm election, comes just two years after the Hunter Biden laptop story was shut down in the run-up to the 2020 election.

“People need to be aware that our elections, when things like this happen, are not free and fair,” Howell said.

Comes Alongside House Oversight Requests

Heritage Oversight’s FOIA requests come as the House Oversight Committee, now under Republican control, launches its own investigation into the Biden documents.

In a Jan. 10 letter to White House counsel Stuart Delery, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote that the committee he now leads is “concerned that President Biden has compromised sources and methods with his own mishandling of classified documents.”

“The committee expects President Biden will receive equal treatment under the law given that he maintained classified documents in his unsecured office for several years with access to an unknown number of people,” the letter reads.

Howell thinks Heritage Oversight’s FOIA requests will complement the House Oversight Committee’s accommodation process.

“The accommodation process” refers to constitutionally sound negotiations between different branches of government, particularly when the legislative branch seeks information from the executive branch.

The House Judiciary Committee has described the accommodation process as “the bedrock of congressional investigative activity.”

“Now, the Biden administration is forced to deal with document requests from two different angles in two different legal proceedings,” Howell said.

He foresees a long, tough fight to get answers.

“This is going to be the most obstructive administration in history,” Howell said.

He expects obstructionism from NARA, recently in the headlines over its referral to the Justice Department regarding documents at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago—the basis for a subsequent search warrant served by the FBI.

Read more here...

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

The new Republican-majority House voted Tuesday afternoon to create a select subcommittee to investigate the “weaponization of the government” by federal law enforcement agencies under Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration.

The special panel would have various functions, including the authority to have subpoena power to receive information on intelligence-related activity that’s typically only shared with the House Intelligence Committee.

It would also have the authority to probe the federal government’s expansive role in investigations on U.S. citizens, including in ongoing criminal investigations. The panel would also have the power to probe how federal agencies communicate with private companies to collect information on Americans, according to the text of the resolution.

The resolution to create the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” passed on a straight party-line vote of 221-211.

The panel is part of the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is also expected to chair it. It would comprise 15 members—nine Republicans and six Democrats—to be appointed by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who chairs the House Rules Committee, said the new panel is modeled on the Church Committee, a U.S. Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated U.S. intelligence agencies. That committee “uncovered and exposed a wide variety of abuses, including many [abuses] directed against American citizens,” Cole told fellow lawmakers on the House floor on Tuesday.

“Similar to the situation that confronted America in the 1970s, in recent years we have witnessed abuses of the civil liberties of American citizens committed by the executive branch,” Cole said, adding that such violations are “often for political purposes.”

He said the newly-created panel “will be tasked with studying and reporting on the executive branch’s authority to collect information on or otherwise investigate citizens of the United States.”

“The American people deserve to have confidence in their government,” Cole said. “They deserve to know that the broad powers granted to the federal government through the FBI, to the Department of Homeland Security, and to the intelligence agencies, are not being abused.”

“They deserve to know that the executive branch is not positioning itself as the final arbiter of what constitutes truth,” he continued. “And they deserve to know that they will not be labeled a domestic terrorist for advocating for their children in front of a school board.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (D-Ohio) nominates House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for Speaker of the House of the 118th Congress during a speech in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 3, 2023 in Washington. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

‘This is About the First Amendment’

Democrats have raised concerns about a provision that authorizes the committee to probe “ongoing criminal investigations,” which are generally outside the purview of congressional oversight.

“This is a violation of separation of powers, and it’s also very dangerous,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.

They have also claimed that Republicans could use its broad new authority to disrupt ongoing investigations into the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, for which the FBI conducted a raid on his Florida property in August 2022.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) derided the panel on the House floor late Tuesday, calling it “nothing more than a deranged ploy by the MAGA extremists who have hijacked the party and want to use taxpayer money to push their far-right conspiracy nonsense.”

Jordan argued against that assertion on the House floor.

“A ploy? It’s not a ploy when the Department of Justice treats parents as terrorists—moms and dads simply showing up at a school board meeting to advocate for their son or daughter,” Jordan said. “It’s not a ploy when the FBI pays Twitter $3 million to censor American citizens.”

“It’s not a ploy when the Department of Homeland Security tries to set up a ‘disinformation governance board’ because we all know that the department of homeland security can tell what’s good speech and what is bad speech,” he continued. “You got to be kidding me. I’ll tell you what—dozens of whistleblowers have come talked to Republican staff on the Judiciary Committee doesn’t think this is a ploy. That’s why they talked to us. They know how serious this is.”

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee in November 2022 released a 1,000-page report (pdf) titled “FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the Politicization of the FBI and Justice Department.” Citing multiple examples and whistleblower disclosures, the report outlined how the Justice Department and the FBI abused their authorities to target conservatives for political purposes.

Jordan continued: “This [committee] is about the First amendment. Something you guys [Democrats] used to care about. I would hope we could get bipartisan agreement on protecting the First Amendment—the five rights we enjoy as Americans under the First Amendment: Your right to practice your faith, assemble, right to petition the government, freedom of press, freedom of speech. Every single one’s been attacked in the last two years.”

“The government was telling people they couldn’t go to church a few years ago,” he noted. “Your right to assemble, petition the government—the Democrats kept the Capitol closed, a citizen couldn’t come to your Capitol that you pay for to redress your grievances because Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t let you in!”

“Freedom of the press—I just told you what the head of the intel committee tried to do to a journalist,” he continued. “The most important right we have, though, is your right to talk. Because if you can’t talk, you can’t practice your faith. You can’t share your faith. You can’t petition your government. The right to speak is the most important, and that’s what they [the federal government agencies] are going after.”

Following the Monday passage of the House rules package, the next order of business will be "populating" the chamber's committees.

And after Democrats weaponized Nancy Pelosi's gavel over the last two years - booting GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar off committees over QAnon wrongthink and posting memes - Republicans are set to return the favor, with McCarthy expected to boot Reps. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar from their committees.

Democrats are expected to name Schiff and Swalwell to the Intelligence Committee, and place Omar on Foreign Affairs, according to Punchbowl News, citing multiple Democratic leadership sources.

"Swalwell can’t get a security clearance in the private sector. I’m not going to give him a government security clearance," newly minted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told Punchbowl. "Schiff has lied too many times to the American public. He should not be on Intel."

"I made all [three] cases before. It’s not like it’s anything new… Remember, this is what Nancy Pelosi, this is the type of Congress she wanted to have," McCarthy added.

Swalwell notably banged an alleged Chinese spy who helped him fundraise in 2014. After an FBI briefing on the woman, the top Democrat said he cut all ties with the woman - Christine Fang, also known as Fang Fang.

In 2020 when the news broke, McCarthy called for Swalwell to be "removed from Congress."

.@GOPLeader Kevin McCarthy on China planting a spy in Congress: @RepSwalwell should be "removed from Congress" [via @IngrahamAngle] pic.twitter.com/2m9c5tojcJ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 9, 2020

Schiff, of course, vehemently peddled the Russiagate hoax and played a large role in both impeachments of former President Trump (and claimed there was 'more than circumstantial' evidence that Trump colluded with Russia).

When asked about losing his seat, Schiff told Punchbowl that McCarthy "will adhere to the wishes of Marjorie Taylor Greene."

And the Somali-born Omar has made anti-Semitic comments and probably married her brother in an immigration scam, according to the Daily Mail.

More via Punchbowl News:

Also: Texas GOP Rep. Jodey Arrington is the new Budget Committee chair. Arrington beat Reps. Buddy Carter (Ga.) and Lloyd Smucker (Pa.) to win the gavel in just his fourth term in the House.

Recap: Missouri Rep. Jason Smith is the new chair of the Ways and Means Committee. He beat Reps. Vern Buchanan (Fla.) and Adrian Smith (Neb.). North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx won another term as chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee. Check out our full coverage in Monday’s Midday and PM editions.

Isn't this fun?

In a report that should come as a surprise to no one (especially after the TWITTER FILES drops), Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 US election via Twitter were a dismal failure that reached relatively few users, and had "no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior," according to the Washington Post, citing a study published Monday from the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics.

"My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped," said report co-author Josh Tucker, who co-directs the NYU center. "Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump," he added.

"And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes."

Key findings via the Post:

WaPo's caveat here is that Russian influence ops on other platforms may have been more successful.

The study, published this morning in Nature Communications — an offshoot of the science journal Nature magazine — is years in the making. That’s due to the amount of time needed to acquire data from Twitter, conduct the study, carry out surveys and run it through the peer review process, Tucker said.

And Twitter is easier to get data from than Facebook, given that posts are public, among other reasons, he said. Thus, the focus on Twitter, despite its smaller user base.

Plus, there were some fundamental differences with observing how people absorbed information on Twitter versus Facebook, Tucker said. “One of the super interesting things we were able to do in this paper is show that lots of what people were exposed to here was not because they were following the accounts of these Russian trolls, but because they follow people who retweeted tweets that came from these Russian trolls, and that’s easier on Twitter, where almost everything is open,” Tucker said. -WaPo

Except that we know Russian influence campaigns on Facebook in 2016 totaled roughly $100,000.

So yeah, all of that was a lie.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the Hill on the new rules that came out of the negotiations leading to the election of Kevin McCarthy as the 55th Speaker of the United States. As noted below, I did not support the standoff and I do not support some of the changes that came out of the negotiations. Some of these changes were already in the works with McCarthy’s support. Moreover, some of these changes will make it more challenging for the Speaker by returning to prior rules allowing greater opportunity for amendments and floor fights. However, the holdouts were right that things have to change in Congress, particularly in allowing greater deliberation and debate over legislation. Some of these changes could achieve that worthy goal.

Here is the column:

The ascendance of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the 55th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives may have come with all of the spontaneity of a shotgun wedding — but it finally came. McCarthy deserved better than a tortuous three-day floor fight but, then again, he is now second in line to the presidency.

Many of us have great sympathy for McCarthy, who looked like a guy caught in a feedback loop stepping on the same rake over and over again. (For the record, I opposed the floor fight, given the overwhelming support for McCarthy.) However, as is often the case in Washington, the narrative opposing these holdouts allowed for little recognition of what they achieved in McCarthy’s concessions. Indeed, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank ran a column titled “McCarthy’s fate is irrelevant. The terrorists have already won.”

Moreover, many in the media were honest about what they consider his greatest shortcoming: “Kevin McCarthy is no Nancy Pelosi.”

Some of us sincerely hope so.

While Pelosi (D-Calif.) remains the ideal of many in the media, she tolerated little public debate or dissent. She thrilled her base with such infamous performative acts as tearing up a State of the Union Address of then-President Trump. As an all-powerful speaker, she oversaw a series of party-line votes with little opportunity for amendments or even to read some bills.

Many Republicans did not want the Pelosi model of an all-powerful speaker. For these members, the agreement with McCarthy is a type of Magna Carta.

The original Magna Carta, of course, was honored primarily in the breach by King John, who immediately asked the pope to annul it. Yet it was an impressive statement of rights.

No one is seriously suggesting that the GOP agreement is the new Magna Carta, but it is meant to redefine legislative rights — and it could have tangible improvements for the House.

I have worked in the House in various roles since I was a House leadership page in the 1970s and, much later, represented the House in litigation. I’ve watched the body become less transparent, less deliberative, with every passing year.

The Framers saw the House as a powerful forum to address factions in society, a legislative crucible where different interests could be expressed and resolved in majoritarian compromise. The legislative process can inform citizens while exposing legislative proposals to public scrutiny. But that process has been largely replaced with a series of robotic, preordained votes.

Some of these concessions may change that status quo. There are provisions I do not support — yet, we should acknowledge that these changes could also improve the process to allow greater dissent and debate.

Many in the media counter that such changes reduce the speaker’s power, as if the status quo under Pelosi was the optimal legislative model. Yet some changes would empower rank-and-file members to allow for greater diversity of views — not necessarily a bad thing.

Restoring the ‘Vacate the Chair’ rule

Nancy Pelosi consolidated her power by eliminating a rule that allowed any member to make a motion to vacate the chair, a type of legislative no-confidence vote. Pelosi eliminated the one-member rule and, instead, required a majority of either party to make such a motion. Some Republicans wanted that check on the speaker to be reinstated.

Notably, what has unnerved so many in Washington is that this speakership debate was not just largely public but also unscripted. It was an actual deliberation, conducted in front of the American people. While repellent to many, it just might be something that voters could get accustomed to.

Restoring legislative review and deliberation

The GOP holdouts sought to end massive spending bills moved forward with little time to read the legislation. They want a minimum 72-hour review period and a reduction of massive omnibus bills, to allow members and the public to better understand what is being passed.

The concessions reportedly include “open rules” on all major rules bills, such as appropriations, to allow lawmakers to offer amendments on the floor. It would restore an amendment process that was gutted in recent sessions, benefiting Democrats and Republicans alike.

They would reinstate “Calendar Wednesday,” which permits committee chairs “to bring reported bills directly to the House floor for consideration under an open amendment process, and reform the process by ensuring the same 72-hour notice that is required on all other measures is provided.”

For years, some of us have called for smaller bills and more deliberation. Massive bills are a way to hide personal perks and pork projects under fraudulent packaging like the “Inflation Reduction Act” that had little to do with inflation. The omnibus bill recently pushed through the House and Senate is an example of this abusive, opaque process. It was a collection of 7,200 earmarks and pork projects, including tens of millions for libraries for the papers of a couple retiring senators; five senators grabbed half a billion dollars for their favorite colleges. You had to swallow it whole or kill any spending bill.

Reinstate budget and tax procedures

Members want to restore the ability to reduce runaway spending and control increasing budgets and taxes. While one can disagree with some of the provisions, these members are clearly serious about gaining control over the budget. They would reinstate the “three-fifths supermajority in the House to approve any increases in tax rates” and require the Congressional Budget Office to analyze bills’ impacts on inflation.

They also would restore the “cut-as-you-go” (CUTGO) rule, which requires spending increases to be offset by equal or greater cuts in mandatory spending.

They would repeal the “Gephardt Rule,” which treats the debt limit as increased upon passage of a budget resolution. That rule allows members to avoid public debate over increasing a national debt that now stands at over $31 trillion. And they would restore the “Holman Rule” from 1876, permitting members to make targeted cuts impacting federal agency functions and salaries.

These are measures designed to control federal spending — a shock to a system that has abandoned any semblance of fiscal responsibility under both parties.

Committee reforms

Rebelling members pushed for a committee to investigate the FBI and its continuing scandals. I previously called for the creation of a new “Church Committee,” which will be established under Speaker McCarthy.

They also demand commitment to oversight in areas long ignored by Democrats, including the threats posed by China. The House Ethics Committee would have a new process allowing complaints from the public.

All of this challenges a status quo which seems inviolate to many in the media.

Yes, there are demands in the concessions that some of us do not favor. However, we should be honest about the status quo: Today’s legislative system is a mockery of the deliberative process, characterized by runaway spending, blind voting and perfunctory debates. You can dislike or denounce the holdouts while still admitting they have a point — Congress has got to change.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the Hill on the recent disclosure of efforts by Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) to pressure Twitter to censor critics, including a columnist. This effort occurred shortly after Schiff’s office objected to one of my columns accusing him of pressuring social media companies to censor those with opposing views. While publicly denying that he supports censorship, Schiff was secretly pressuring Twitter to censor an array of critics.

Here is the column:

“We don’t do this.”

That response from Twitter to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is a singular indictment, coming at the height of Twitter’s censorship operations. Apparently, there were some things that even Twitter’s censors refused to do.

One of those things was silencing critics of Schiff and his House committee.

In the latest tranche of “Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter balked at Schiff’s demand that Twitter suspend an array of posters or label their content as “misinformation” and “reduce the visibility” of them. Among those who Schiff secretly tried to censor was New York Post columnist Paul Sperry.

Sperry drew Schiff’s ire by writing about a conversation allegedly overheard by one of his sources. Sperry’s article, which appeared in RealClearInvestigations, cited two sources as overhearing two White House staffers discussing how to remove newly-elected President Trump from office. The article raised the possibility of bias on the part of an alleged key player in launching the first Trump impeachment, CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. The sources reportedly said that Ciaramella was in a conversation with Sean Misko, a holdover from the Obama administration who later joined Schiff’s staff. The conversation — in Sperry’s words — showed that “just days after [Trump] was sworn in they were already trying to get rid of him.”

Rather than simply refute the allegation, Schiff wanted Sperry and other critics silenced. His office reportedly laid out steps to cleanse Twitter of their criticism, including an instruction to “remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content.”

The date of Schiff’s non-public letter in November 2020 is notable: Earlier that year, I wrote a column for The Hill criticizing Schiff for pushing for censorship of misinformation in a letter that he sent to social media companies. His office promptly objected to the very suggestion that Schiff supported censorship.

We now know Schiff was actively seeking to censor specific critics on social media. These likely were viewed as more than “requests” since Schiff was sending public letters threatening possible legislative action against these same companies. He wanted his critics silenced on social media. After all, criticizing his investigations or staff must, by definition, be misinformation — right?

His office seems to have indicated they knew Twitter was using shadow-banning or other techniques to suppress certain disfavored writers. In the letter, his staff asked Twitter to “label and reduce the visibility of any content.”

Twitter, however, drew the line with Schiff; one of its employees simply wrote, “no, this isn’t feasible/we don’t do this.”

The “this” referred to in this case was raw political censorship. And even a company that maintained one of the largest censorship programs in history could not bring itself to do what Schiff was demanding — but the demand itself is telling.

Not only does it show how dishonest some politicians have been in denying censorship while secretly demanding it, it also shows the insatiable appetite created by censorship. The article in question, written by Sperry, is a good example. Sperry has denied ever supporting QAnon conspiracy theories, as Schiff’s office charged. Yet even if Sperry’s account about Schiff’s staffer was wildly untrue, that should make it easier to rebut publicly.

The move by Schiff to ban Sperry and others on Twitter — and to remove content — is highly ironic. Schiff has been criticized repeatedly for promoting “misinformation” and for relying on unidentified “sources” for his claims of Trump’s criminality. For example, Schiff pushed the false claim that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation; he also was criticized for pushing false narratives of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election.

Nevertheless, I would equally oppose any effort to ban Schiff from social media, although that is hardly likely given the demonstrated political bias of past censorship efforts.

As for Sperry, he was later permanently suspended by Twitter, which I also criticized.

Schiff is unlikely to be deterred by the release of these communications. He recently sent a letter to Facebook, warning it not to relax its censorship efforts. His letter, written with Reps. André Carson (D-Ind.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), reminded Facebook that some lawmakers are watching the company “as part of our ongoing oversight efforts” — and suggested they may be forced to exercise that oversight into any move by Facebook to “alter or rollback certain misinformation policies.”

Schiff’s actions embody the slippery slope of censorship. By labeling his critics as QAnon supporters or purveyors of “misinformation,” he sought to have allies in social media “disappear” critics like Sperry — yet he found that even those allies could not stomach his demands. Given Twitter’s censorship of even satirical sites, it was akin to being turned down by a Kanye West podcast as being too extreme.

With the disclosure of apparent FBI involvement in Twitter’s censorship program, the release of the Schiff files is another rare insight into how government officials attempted to enlist social media companies for censorship by surrogate or proxy. That is precisely why many in the media, political and business establishments have mobilized against Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter who has released these compromising files.

In a recent tweet, Schiff chastised Musk and demanded more answers from the Twitter CEO. While insisting that “I don’t support censorship,” Schiff asked Musk if he would “commit to providing the public with actual answers and data, not just tweets?” Well, Musk just did precisely that.

The “actual answer” is that Schiff has long sought to silence his critics, and Musk has exposed the underbelly of censorship — which is where we found Adam Schiff.

After four grueling days and 15 votes, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is finally Speaker of the House - but not without having made a pile of concessions to a group of hard-line Republicans who think he'll be too accommodating to uniparty interests.

The last vote came after a dramatic scene, where during the 14th vote Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threw a wrench in the gears - voting 'present,' which left McCarthy just one vote short of victory.

McCarthy - who clearly thought he had a deal, stormed up to Gaetz and exchanged words, during which a visibly angry Rep. Mike Rodgers bolted towards Gaetz and had to be muzzled and restrained.

Kevin McCarthy approaches Gaetz and Boebert because he needed 216 votes to win. pic.twitter.com/o6VBsbwVVV

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) January 7, 2023

Rodgers lunged at Gaetz? pic.twitter.com/THHpZA4XjQ

— Elizabeth Wachsberg (@EWachsberg) January 7, 2023

During the final, 15th ballot, enough holdouts voted 'present' to bring the total required number of votes low enough for McCarthy to finally win around midnight.

Here's what McCarthy had to give up for the votes, according to The Epoch Times' Roger L. Simon, who interviewed first-year Congressman Andrew Ogles (R-TN), who has yet to be sworn in;

I spoke with Ogles by phone the night of Jan. 6, 2023, before the roll call vote during which, it was said, two of the remaining rejectionists who couldn’t accept McCarthy personally would absent themselves so that the magic number would be lowered and the new Speaker could go over the top.

Apropos, Ogles informed me that what many had guessed was true. His absence from voting in a previous round was also planned. He waited to see that all was going according to plan before stepping forward to flip his vote to McCarthy after the initial round.  

For Ogles, the basis of all the negotiations was to establish the rules of the game in Congress that had been altered over the years beyond recognition. As he pointed out, the rules of a game almost always determine the winner.

He shared with me a list of some of what has been roughly negotiated to date. The devil, as always, is in the details.

1. As has been reported, it will only take a single congressperson, acting in what is known as a Jeffersonian Motion, to move to remove the Speaker if he or she goes back on their word or policy agenda.

2. A “Church” style committee will be convened to look into the weaponization of the FBI and other government organizations (presumably the CIA, the subject of the original Church Committee) against the American people.

3. Term limits will be put up for a vote.

4. Bills presented to Congress will be single subject, not omnibus with all the attendant earmarks, and there will be a 72-hour minimum period to read them.

5. The Texas Border Plan will be put before Congress. From The Hill: “The four-pronged plan aims to ‘Complete Physical Border Infrastructure,’ ‘Fix Border Enforcement Policies,’ ‘Enforce our Laws in the Interior’ and ‘Target Cartels & Criminal Organizations.'”

6. COVID mandates will be ended as will all funding for them, including so-called “emergency funding.”

7. Budget bills would stop the endless increases in the debt ceiling and hold the Senate accountable for the same.

*  *  *

"It’s safe to say that we believe there ought to be specific, concrete limits on spending attached to a debt ceiling increase," said Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) on Thursday.

"There will be no clean debt ceiling increase, that’s for sure," said Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), another anti-McCarthy lawmaker who was convinced to switch his vote due to the concessions.

No word from Ogles on committee assignments or agreements, however there are discussions on positions for members of the Freedom Caucus.

Also no word on whether the House will hold a different kind of Jan. 6 investigation, unless it's going to be part of the new "Church" committee.

Meanwhile, The Hill notes that chairmanships on subcommittees are still going to need to be earned.

Another major concern for centrist Republicans throughout the week’s marathon negotiations was the conservatives’ push to win more subcommittee gavels for themselves — an idea that infuriated those already in line for those seats.

Bacon had called it “a non-starter,” particularly among the more moderate Republicans who have worked their way up the ladder into those seats. 

“If you’re talking about chairmanships and things like that, they’re gonna have to still earn it,” Bacon said. “I call it affirmative action for [the] smallest of the caucuses to put them in leadership roles when they’ve not earned it. We believe in a merit-based system on the GOP side.”

Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), who has served in the House since 2013, also highlighted the “seniority process” for chairmanships.

“Everybody has to work their way through the seniority process and earn positions on both committees and gavels and things of that nature,” she said. -The Hill

"These concessions have been agreed to by our conference, and ultimately I believe it’s going to lead to a more people-driven legislative process," said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). "It’s about restoring more power and decision making to the members."

Democrat Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland says McCarthy gave up too much.

"I think he gave away much more than I wish he’d given," he said, adding "I think it does give to a small, willful faction of his caucus, a negative faction of his caucus, a faction of his caucus that has been almost uniformly obstructionist, more authority than they ought to have."

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness (emphasis ours),

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal? 

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared? 

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees? 

When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures? 

What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?  

When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan?  Who planned it and why?

What happened to the once trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie with impunity under oath?

Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?

How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob of us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.

Authored by Judith Bergman via the Gatestone Institute,

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said that former President Donald Trump’s team is making significant changes to his Mar-a-Lago’s vetting process following his meeting with rapper Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.

Greene told reporters Tuesday that “Trump had no idea [Fuentes] was even coming” and described the incident as “unfortunate.” Over the weekend, Trump confirmed on Truth Social that West, also known as Ye, and Fuentes met with him at his Florida resort.

Following last week’s dinner, Trump is now making “big changes over who can come in and the vetting process, which I think is smart,” Greene said, according to The Hill. “Any former president should have that in place.”

Greene told reporters that she spoke with the former president and talked to his staff about the incident and changes to the vetting process. Alleged anonymous sources within Trump’s campaign also told The Associated Press that his team is putting new protocols in place to ensure that those who meet with him are fully vetted and approved.

A Trump spokesperson has not returned an Epoch Times request comment. Neither Trump nor his campaign have publicly commented on Greene’s statement to reporters Tuesday.

While news outlets and the Department of Justice have described (pdf) Fuentes as a “white nationalist,” he’s denied that label. In a statement, Fuentes said Sunday that “I reject all labels other than Christian American.”

Earlier this year, Greene appeared at a Fuentes event and spoke, although she later distanced herself from Fuentes. When speaking to reporters, the Georgia Republican said that she doesn’t regret her message to those in the audience.

“I don’t regret talking to the kids that were there because I don’t understand why they follow him. But would I have gone to his event? No,” Greene said Tuesday, adding, “I don’t want to have anything to do with him.” Greene then wondered who is funding Fuentes and whether West is paying him.

Trump Post

Over the weekend, Trump explained that he wanted to “help” West, whom he described as “a seriously troubled man,” coming more than a week after he announced he’s embarking on a third bid for the White House in 2024.

Amid a surge of reports and critical statements made by Republicans, Trump added Saturday that “Fake News went CRAZY!” over the meeting. On Tuesday, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) both denounced Fuentes and West during an event with reporters.

“So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice,’” Trump wrote on Saturday.

West showed up at his resort “with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win,” Trump’s post said. He added that “our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”

During an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Trump stated again that he had “never heard of” Fuentes. “I had no idea what his views were and they weren’t expressed at the table in our very quick dinner, or it wouldn’t have been accepted,” he added.

Since then, the former president has not commented on subsequent reports about the meeting, including anonymously sourced articles alleging that former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos was seeking revenge against Trump.

Read more here...

Authored by Conrad Black via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Nov. 8 midterm elections were a watershed in modern American history. The implications of choosing a president whom the public strongly disapproves of and is generally a failure, over a controversial but undoubtedly capable and successful ex-president, are very serious.

That the Democrats and their lock-step allies in the national media succeeded in putting across the colossal smear that former President Donald Trump is a supporter of violence and a threat to the constitutional system could be interpreted as a long step toward the national suicide that Abraham Lincoln foresaw is the only way in which the American project could perish.

Former CIA Director John Brennan called Trump a traitor; former National Intelligence Director James Clapper declared as a matter of settled fact that Trump was a Russian intelligence asset. The corruption of the FBI and the intelligence agencies in the dissemination of the infamous Steele dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign as authentic intelligence revealing Trump as completely unsuited to public office and the profound dishonesty of former FBI Director James Comey in white-washing Clinton’s alleged destruction of subpoenaed evidence and his recourse to surveillance granted in response to false affidavits while attempting to destroy the Trump presidency have escaped legal retribution by the somnambulant Durham investigation, and there will be no retribution for any of it.

Yet, Trump is the tainted protagonist. The Russian collusion hoax was the most monstrous defamation ever inflicted on a U.S. president. The spurious impeachment of him, for an innocuous telephone call to the president of Ukraine about the commercial activities of the Biden family in his country—now notorious but probably a matter of political suppression of the normal working of American justice—was in the same category of misuse of the political system for the lowest and most destructive partisan ends.

It’s obvious that the potentially millions of harvested ballots that couldn’t be verified in the 2020 presidential election could easily have provided the 50,000 vote switchover needed in Pennsylvania and two other states to flip that election to Trump in the Electoral College. The dishonesty of the universal media stone wall that 2020 was a pristine presidential election is compounded by the judiciary’s abdication of its coequal role in government and reassertion of its refusal to consider overturning the apparent presidential election result.

Democratic strategists deserve a near-perfect score for tactical judgment: They rounded up a big majority among young voters by hammering the abortion issue, emphasizing the reduction in marijuana penalties, and championing student loan forgiveness. This and the malicious and unctuous pressing of the safety of democracy as a euphemism for the defamatory nonsense that Trump was a menace to the Constitution turned the minds of an adequate number of voters to produce a dangerously perverse result. They have pretty well given up the former slanders that Trump is a racist, homophobe, and misogynist.

Tabulating all of the votes cast for all offices contested last week, the Republicans outpolled the Democrats all over. The Democrats only took what they needed. Politics is a notoriously unjust occupation; Trump is objectively perhaps among the 10 most successful holders of that office. But he did great harm to himself by his lack of public relations judgment, and this fact in the hands of the political and social media monopoly of his enemies working with the strategists and saboteurs in the Democratic leadership have unfortunately won the match.

But even the voters who rendered such an ambiguous result on Nov. 8 have betrayed a concern that the incompetence of the Biden administration, with the duplicity of the Democratic congressional leaders, can’t go on indefinitely. But they’ve demonstrated that Trump isn’t the man to stop them and to tear the government apart and repopulate it with people with clean hands.

There’s still an important place for Trump to complete the task that he commenced of transporting the Republican Party from the country clubs to the championship of the disadvantaged and working and middle class of America, and to cleaning out the bipartisan infestation of placemen and decayed servitors of the federal political and administrative state. But the former president is far from blameless in his own misfortunes. He warned of the dangers of ballot harvesting in 2020 but was completely inadequate in taking preventive measures or even following up efficiently to challenge the vulnerable points. Instead, we had the well-intended but completely ineffectual efforts of Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell. In order to make his case plausibly, he absolutely had to avoid precisely the sort of outrage that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021. But the fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser paid no attention to Trump’s warnings that matters could get out of hand and his offer of 20,000 National Guardsmen indicates the Democrats’ role was a good deal less innocent than they pretend.

But Trump knew what desperate and sleazy people he was dealing with, and he doesn’t have a credible excuse for being so reckless. This condemned him to having to continue to emphasize the 2020 election irregularities in order to justify his calling forth such a huge and discontented crowd at the Washington Elipse on Jan. 6, 2021. Of course, he no more sought an insurrection than Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) did.

The only way to complete Trump’s work and root out and politically exterminate those who have corrupted the intelligence and justice arms of the federal government and have dragooned the contemptible but still insidiously influential national political media in full metal jacket Trump-hate, is for Trump to identify and support the successor whom he favors as Republican presidential candidate.

He shouldn’t go back to his 2016 playbook and insult all the other prominent Republicans. He has exchanged enough fire with his Republican enemies, contemptible though many of them are, and did well to win the first round and come so close in the second. The third round last week was an acute disappointment, and the Republican Party doesn’t need, and the American public doesn’t wish for, an internecine war on the scale that would rage if Trump sought another presidential nomination. But another candidate plausibly pledged to the enactment of the Trump program and supported by Trump but not stigmatized by him, could lead the desperately needed national political purgation.

Read more here...

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday he cannot “be sure” whether Facebook is sending the agency user information without being compelled to do so, an act that would violate the law.

Wray’s remark in response to a question from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) comes after Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a report (pdf) in early November in which a whistleblower suggested that the FBI has a “special relationship” with Facebook “in which it accepts private user information without any consent or legal process.”

The move is part of a program “likely codenamed ‘Operation Bronze Griffin,'” said the report. It alleges that the types of user content that Facebook provides the FBI “have a partisan focus, tending only to concern users from one side of the political spectrum,” and that there is a pro-Democrat bias within the FBI.

On Thursday, Paul asked Wray at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the report’s allegations, “Is Facebook or any other social media company supplying private messages or data on American users that is not compelled by the government or the FBI?”

“Not compelled, in other words, not in response to legal process?” Wray queried.

“No warrant, no subpoena, they’re just supplying you information on their users?” Paul said.

“I don’t believe so,” Wray responded. “But I can’t sit here and be sure about that as I as I sit here.”

Paul told Wray that if Facebook is supplying the FBI with user information, it would be against the law—the Stored Communications Act, part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986—which “prohibits providers from sharing electronic communications with any person or entity, unless it’s compelled.”

“This was done to protect the privacy of people, so we could feel like we can send an email or direct message to people without having that information given over,” Paul said.

The Meta logo, and Facebook’s logo on a smartphone screen. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)

“It’s a very specific question,” the senator told Wray. “Will you get with your team of lawyers and give us a specific answer? Because this is the law, if you’re doing it, then we need to go to court to prevent you from receiving this information.”

“Well, I can tell you that I’m quite confident we’re following the law but I will also follow up with you to make sure that we get you more information, more detailed information,” Wray said.

The senator followed up with another question: “Is the FBI obtaining anonymous social media data, and then using technical methods to pierce the anonymous nature of the data? … Are you purchasing what is said to be anonymous data through the marketplace, and then piercing the anonymous nature to attach individual names to that data?”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) speaks during a hearing on in Washington, on April 26, 2022. (Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images)

“So the manner in which we use—we usually use the term commercial data—is probably longer than I could explain here,” the FBI chief responded.

“So you will not answer the question of whether or not you’re attaching names to anonymous data,” Paul said.

“I think it’s a more complicated answer than I can give here.”

Paul also asked whether the FBI has been circumventing the law by using confidential human sources. Wray responded, “I think what we have had situations where we have confidential human sources—not employees of those companies—but who report to us on their own communication.”

Paul responded: “Once again, I’d like to get the answer to be more specific from your team. Not that I don’t believe so. But you are not using human confidential resources within Facebook? So we get back to the idea of whether or not you’re getting information for them outside the warrant process.

“Because the question, the next question is, which you probably won’t answer either, is, are you taking information that you’re getting not through the warrant process, and then going around and coming back and using that as a predicate for getting a warrant to actually get the information you’ve already been given?”

When Wray said he did not understand the question, Paul explained: “Are you getting information [Facebook is] giving to you, they say, oh, ‘somebody says January 6 was great, here’s information on this guy,’ then you’re taking it and then using it as a predicate to say, ‘Well, now let’s go to the court and get a real warrant and get the information we already actually got without a warrant.'”

An FBI logo. (Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

After some back-and-forth, Wray told Paul that one common instance involves the FBI giving Facebook information about foreign accounts, such as Russian intelligence service accounts, and Facebook will “look in their system for those accounts … find other accounts related to those and they provide tips and leads back to us about those.”

A second common instance would be “where a technology company encounters a threat of violence, on their platform on their services, and they provide tips and leads to us and [FBI agents] follow up.”

Paul asked whether the FBI is receiving things that “could be interpreted” as political speech, such as “someone who questions the election … someone who is mad about something that is going on, it’s not saying they’re directly going to commit violence, they’re mad about things.”

“Whistleblowers are saying you are receiving this information from Facebook and others, and that you are going around the Constitution and to come back and try to get warrants for it,” Paul said.

Wray responded, “We investigate violence, not speech.”

According to the House Judiciary Committee report, whistleblowers have said that the FBI “is pressuring agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), but it appears the FBI is also manufacturing DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist and even manipulating its case categorization system to feign a national problem.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to Meta and the Department of Justice for comment.

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

Former White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Scott Atlas sees multiple reasons for an investigation into Dr. Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Such a probe has been discussed as Republicans inch closer to a House majority that would grant them subpoena powers. Some Republican lawmakers have accused Fauci of playing a role in misleading the public about the origins of COVID-19 and supporting pandemic mandates they describe as draconian.

While Atlas, a vocal critic of the NIAID head, is “very skeptical” that an investigation like this could get away from politics or the perception of it being political, he thinks it’s warranted. Fauci’s changing stance on certain COVID-19 policies needs to be put under the spotlight, Atlas recently said on EpochTV’s “Newsmakers.”

“The real, clear public airing of exactly what happened needs to be done,” said Atlas, a senior fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution and contributor to The Epoch Times.

“I personally am very skeptical that a political investigation, no matter who does it, is going to be done without politics, or if it’s going to be perceived as nonpolitical. I don’t trust people in government at all. They don’t deserve to be trusted, to be objective.

“What was the motivation to flip flop multiple times with policy?”

His question was referring to Fauci’s changing stance on pandemic school closures that drew criticism in late 2020.

Scott Atlas (L), a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany arrive ahead of President Donald Trump for a press conference at the White House in Washington on Aug. 12, 2020. (Andrew Harnik/AP Photo, File)

He further questioned if there had been any “cover-up” of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Fauci’s division, citing the awards to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through the New York nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance as an example.

EcoHealth Alliance, which continues to receive millions of dollars in grants from the NIH, was subjected to scrutiny by multiple federal agencies over its partnership with the Wuhan lab. The Office of Investigations of the Department of Health and Human Services in late 2020 briefly opened a probe over alleged “major fraud against the United States.” The probe was closed in January 2021, according to internal documents, which had the reasons for the closure redacted. The allegation states that “the COVID-19 virus was generated in … China with the assistance of an NIH Grant.”

Beginning in 2014, EcoHealth was the recipient of a $3.7 million grant to study bat coronaviruses in China. That grant was renewed through 2019 but suspended in 2020 because of compliance concerns. In August, the NIH ended the funding from the grant for the Wuhan facility after the lab at least twice rejected NIH’s request for lab notebooks and original files from the research.

“We cannot have illegal research being funded outside the country by American science” avoiding or circumventing the rules, Atlas said.

“These leadership positions come with massive responsibility. It’s not a game to be in charge of things. You’re not supposed to use it to circumvent rules. You’re not supposed to set up power, friends in the media to cover for you. No, you need to at least answer the questions in front of the American people.”

By the same token, Atlas also called for the Chinese regime to answer for its coverup of the initial outbreak, as well as its role in possibly causing the pandemic.

Besides a delayed admission of the outbreak’s severity to the world during the pandemic’s early days—behavior that Atlas called “unacceptable”—Beijing had “blocked real investigations” and “destroyed evidence of what happened,” he said.

“Of course they need to be held accountable,” he said.

“It needs to be done, though, by a government and multiple governments that actually have the credibility and ethical focus to do that, and I think that that remains to be seen.”

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican member of the House Oversight Committee, has vowed to summon Fauci in a planned probe of the origins of COVID-19 should the Republicans win the House.

“Why did Dr. Fauci lie for so long about American tax dollars through EcoHealth Alliance going to fund gain-of-function research? Why did he lie about gain-of-function research being done in the Wuhan lab? Why were we even in the Wuhan lab? There are so many questions that the Americans deserve answers to,” Comer recently told the “Capitol Report” program of NTD News, a sister media of The Epoch Times.

“The American people deserve answers and anyone that was involved in any type of cover-up should be held accountable.”

Representatives for NIAID didn’t respond to a query from The Epoch Times by press time.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The FBI should only have 14 days, not 66 years, to produce information from Seth Rich’s laptop computer, a lawyer argued in a new court filing.

After a U.S. judge ordered the FBI to produce the information, the bureau said that it should not be required to hand it over because of exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And if the bureau still had to produce the information, government lawyers said it should have 66 years because it needs to review the information and redact certain information.

Ty Clevenger, the attorney representing Brian Huddleston, the Texas man who sued the FBI over the information, disagreed.

He told the judge in the new filing that the FBI failed to brief on the exemptions it is now claiming following the judge rejecting an attempt to shield the information because of privacy concerns for Rich’s relatives. That failure means the FBI cannot now rely on the exemptions, Clevenger said.

“Having failed to raise an issue or brief it in a motion for summary judgment, the movant may not then salvage the issue by raising it in a motion for reconsideration,” he said, citing previous court cases. “In other words, the movant does not get a Mulligan on reconsideration, which is exactly what the FBI seeks here.”

The bureau says that FOIA exemption 7(D)-3, which enables shielding identifying information of law enforcement personnel, and information provided by the personnel, enables it to keep withholding Rich’s laptop information from Huddleston.

“In short, the compact disc containing the images of Seth Rich’s personal computer were provided to the FBI by a local law enforcement agency under implied assurances of confidentiality, and thus the FBI properly withheld the compact disc in its entirety pursuant to Exemption 7(D)-3,” government lawyers told the court.

Another exemption, 7(E)-6, lets the agency keep the information secret, the lawyers said. That exemption enables the withholding of information that would reveal methods law enforcement uses in investigations.

Clevenger, though, said that neither exemption applies.

The first doesn’t because the FBI has never provided evidence that the source of the information was given assurance of confidentiality, he said. The second doesn’t because the bureau claims it never reviewed the laptop information.

“If this is true, then how could the FBI’s investigative or analytical techniques be compromised by revealing the contents of a laptop that it never investigated or analyzed?” Clevenger told the judge.

Read more here...

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

Part one of a series.

Late on an October morning in a quiet neighborhood near Daytona Beach, Florida. FBI agent Steve Friend sits in his kitchen, fidgeting. He’s a wiry, energetic man, built like a marathoner, not muscled up but exuding fitness, not a sitter. This is not a person meant for desk work, much less staying home all day. But as a whistleblower whose name has been all over media after a complaint about statistical manipulation and other problems in the January 6th investigations, this will be his lot for a while.

By that morning, the first rush of news stories about Friend’s case already passed. CNN and MSNBC demonized him, Fox hailed him as a hero, but the furor was beginning to die down. What a whistleblower talks about in this inevitable moment will say a lot about his or her motivation. Looking out a window into the stillness of his suburban neighborhood, Friend shook his head.

“I love my job,” he said, sighing. “I was living my best life as an FBI agent. I was coming home every day, and my kids were my biggest fan club. Like, ‘Daddy, did you put the bad guy in jail?’ And I thought, ‘Man, this is it.’”

It’s not the tone of a disgruntled malcontent, but someone who made a reluctant journey to whistleblower status, beginning with a whirlwind series of events that brought him and his family out of the Midwest to north Florida less than two years ago. He worked a child pornography detail before being transferred to the assignment that would upend his life: investigating J6. The FBI not only took Friend off vital work chasing child predators to pursue questionable investigations of people maybe connected with the Capitol riots (often in some misdemeanor fashion), they used dubious bureaucratic methods he felt put him in an impossible spot.

Essentially, the FBI made Friend a supervisory agent in cases actually being run by the Washington field office, a trick replicated across the country that made domestic terrorism numbers appear to balloon overnight. Instead of one investigation run out of Washington, the Bureau now had hundreds of “terrorism” cases “opening” in every field office in the country. As a way to manipulate statistics, it was ingenious, but Friend could see it was also trouble.

As a member of a dying breed of agent raised to focus on making cases and securing convictions, Friend knew putting him nominally in charge of a case he wasn’t really running was a gift to any good defense attorney, should a J6 case ever get to trial.

“They’re gonna see my name as being the case agent, yet not a single document has my name as doing any work,” Friend says. “Now a defense lawyer can say, ‘Hey, the case agent for this case didn’t perform any work.’ Labeling the case this way would be a big hit to our prosecution.”

Friend ended up refusing the arrangement, which led to his suspension. He followed procedure, making protected disclosures to superiors and the FBI’s Office of Special Counsel (OSG). He then reported his suspension to Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and whistleblower-whisperer Chuck Grassley of Iowa. They sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, detailing Friend’s procedural objections, including that “agents are being required to perform investigative actions” they “would not otherwise pursue,” at the direction of the Washington Field Office (WFO).

When Friend first complained to his Assistant Special Agents in Charge (ASACs — the FBI is an acronym hell worse than the military), he told them, with regard to J6 suspects: “I’m not a Trump voter. I’m not sympathetic to those people.” The message didn’t get through, however, and leaks from the Bureau have almost universally painted him as an insubordinate MAGA conspiracist.

In fact, most of the press Friend attracted reduced his story to a referendum on the Capitol riots, as if his only complaint was being asked to investigate J6 at all. Big guns were brought out to sell the idea. Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence-turned-talking-head Frank Figliuzzi blasted Friend on MSNBC as a “self-styled FBI whistleblower” (Figliuzzi, a lawyer, should know better: Friend made protected disclosures by the book and is legally a whistleblower), implying he simply didn’t follow “valid” orders, instead “running to Trump-loving Congressmen” to complain.

But Friend’s complaint is only partially about J6. His concerns began in his first days in Quantico, and continued across years of watching the Bureau collect intelligence or open cases for non-operational reasons. Whether they involve J6 or not, a consistent theme of his stories is the FBI using its authority to “disrupt” or intimidate targets as an end in itself, as opposed to collecting evidence with the aim of prosecuting.

One example involved a British doctor who’d been at J6. The suspect was not exactly Pablo Escobar. He did enter the Capitol, but surveillance showed he meekly stayed behind velvet ropes once inside, and under questioning was practically shaking with guilt over having taken a free Capitol tourist brochure as a souvenir. Though he seemed unlikely to be charged, he was booted from his medical practice after being interviewed, and Friend wondered if this even indirectly had been the point.

“I worried about the process being the punishment,” Friend says. “He lost his job. What does he get from us, if we don’t charge him? ‘Hey, you’re clear? The FBI found no wrongdoing, go pick up the pieces’?”

In the incident that led to Friend’s suspension, the FBI wanted to execute a SWAT raid on a subject who’d been communicating with the Bureau through an attorney and almost certainly would have come in voluntarily. Or, Friend thought, he could have been picked up in another, less dangerous way. The FBI however wanted a show.

“We’re gonna hit this house at six o’clock in the morning and throw flash-bangs and knock the door down and drive a Bearcat up on the front lawn,” recalls Friend, who had extensive SWAT experience and even worked the raid of Michigan militia members suspected of plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

He recounts a detail straight out of the movie Idiocracy: the armored Bearcat vehicles the FBI uses in SWAT raids are fitted with special battering-ram-type devices agents call dongers. (No joke. Washington Field Office agents even nickname their Bearcat accessory “DOJ,” for Dong of Justice). Friend describes the lunacy of a federal posse riding into the suburbs to take a door in one of these phallic tanks. “You’re driving down the road with this long extension pole on the front,” he says, laughing. “And I’m thinking, ‘These things were built by the lowest possible bidder.’”

He didn’t laugh so much, however, when he started to get the sense the FBI was opening cases, knocking on doors, and using tactics like SWAT for reasons other than operational necessity.

“I was a little kid and a smart kid in school and I got bullied, bad. That’s one of the reasons I went to law enforcement, and joined the FBI.” He pauses. “My attitude toward the FBI was, ‘You guys are the NFL of police work. You’re supposed to be fighting bullies. I think we might be becoming the bullies here.”

Though he’s been denounced by pundits and Figliuzzi types as an insurrectionist “sympathizer” with nothing legitimate to say, Friend’s complaints in fact track with those of a number of FBI whistleblowers who came before him. Since 9/11, many complain the FBI is hurtling back in time, toward its darkest days under J. Edgar Hoover, when it was a vast, unchecked domestic political spying operation, swinging under a fig leaf of legitimizing law enforcement activity.

The Hoover-era FBI plunged into such infamous excess via snooping programs like COINTELPRO — from trying to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. into suicide to opening intelligence files on as many as 500,000 Americans, including a list of 26,000 “to be rounded up in the event of a national emergency” — that Congress in 1975 was forced to intervene. Led by Idaho Senator Frank Church, a Senate oversight committee uncovered deep rot, finding the FBI secretly went “beyond its law” to “disrupt, discredit and harass groups and individuals.”

The Church hearings led to reforms that checked the Bureau’s worst instincts, for a time. Now the beast is back. The FBI not only is deep into the domestic spying game again, it’s accrued broad new powers, including authority to collect intelligence on Americans virtually without limit.

“I would like to think the point of all the intelligence analysis is to create products that are going to help crack a case,” Friend says. “But they’re not. In some cases, there’s no crime. We’re just intelligence, intelligence, intelligence.”

What does an FBI that stresses intelligence, intelligence, intelligence for its own sake look like, in day-to-day practice? No matter your politics, you’ll probably be shocked.

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