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Authored by Pete Hoekstra via The Gatestone Institute,

Recently, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines announced the creation of a new office within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI): The Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC). It would encompass "election threat work, essentially looking at foreign influence and interference in elections, but it also deals with disinformation more generally." Legislation creating the center was passed by Congress and signed into law in 2022.

Although its work nominally deals with disinformation targeting U.S. elections and public opinion within the United States, there are at least two questions that need to be asked: First, is this office essential or duplicative of other ongoing efforts? Second, is this even appropriate work in which the federal government should be engaged?

In the last few years, as disinformation and countering disinformation have become the staples of political and public policy discourse, a cottage industry has grown up within the federal government around these topics. Support in Congress means the money grab is on, with federal agencies vying to secure funds for the hot new topic to grow their bureaucracy, influence and power.

Other agencies already involved in disinformation are numerous. The State Department has the Global Engagement Center (GEC) that combats foreign disinformation through promoting U.S. interests and messaging. The GEC does its own assessments of foreign operations and shares its analyses with partners throughout the government, thereby creating an American disinformation distribution center.

The FBI, in 2017, created its own Foreign Influence Task Force. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the most active of all government agencies that jumped on this bandwagon. The DHS has, or had, a Countering Foreign Influence Task Force, a Foreign Influence and Interference Branch, Countering Foreign Influence Subcommittee, and a heavily criticized, ridiculed and now disbanded "Disinformation Governance Board."

Not to be left out, the Pentagon also established an Influence and Perception Management Office responsible for coordinating the multiple counter-disinformation efforts conducted by the military.

The bottom line is that there are multiple groups and agencies already focused on disinformation, but has anyone thought through how these agencies coordinate and enhance the mission, or are they duplicative and overlap? Are they effective and efficient or a waste of taxpayer dollars? Is the threat of a new Orwellian "Ministry of Truth" as big as it is toxic? There are many questions that need to be answered -- above all, is this function for the federal government even appropriate?

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's center has as its motto, "Exposing deception in defense of liberty." That is a noble goal. How has the federal government been fulfilling this role as it has expanded its disinformation apparatus?

The U.S. Intelligence Community, spanning eighteen different agencies across the federal government, has some of the most effective disinformation capabilities of any organization on the planet. Think about the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon. The CIA historically has participated in the undermining of foreign governments. The State Department, through its Global Engagement Center, has, as part of its mission, fighting foreign propaganda by promoting an American agenda. The Pentagon spends tremendous amounts of resources trying to deceive those who might be trying to ascertain its plans, intentions and capabilities. The American government is extremely capable at generating its own disinformation.

Disappointingly, Americans have seen this capability firsthand. Some U.S. intelligence leaders have used their status to aggressively plant disinformation to undermine presidents and influence elections. Some of these individuals are still on the government payroll, while others leveraged their titles and previous experience to deliberately deceive the people they are supposed be serving but instead repeatedly betray: their own citizens.

Consider Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey, who used their positions to undermine incoming President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017 by leaking and hyping to the media information based on a deceptive briefing they provided to Trump to begin framing him for supposedly colluding with Russia in the disruptive, two-year pretend-investigation known inside the FBI as "Crossfire Hurricane" and outside it as "the Russia Hoax."

As the Durham Report states:

"[A]t the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials."

The report goes on to assert that during the fake Trump investigation, the FBI and DOJ had failed to practice "strict fidelity to the law." The FISA court chastised the FBI for fabrications it made in the Russia probe. The "Russia Hoax," it turned out -- as its perpetrators reportedly knew all along -- had been organized and funded by Trump's presidential election opponent Hillary Clinton -- evidently to deflect attention from her extensive destruction of classified material (here and here) -- as well as the Democratic National Committee; fraudulently prosecuted by the FBI, and laundered by the Perkins Coie law firm.

In the case of Hunter Biden's infamous laptop that first exposed massive influence peddling, Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter falsely suggesting the Biden laptop story "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morrell testified before Congress that Antony Blinken, current Secretary of State, played a key role in originating the letter and getting the signatories. Reports also include the allegation that a current CIA employee assisted in promoting the letter.

The ODNI met with social media companies prior to the 2020 election to inform them about potential disinformation by Russia and other nations. The ODNI, however, is a gatherer of foreign intelligence, not an arbiter of truth in U.S. presidential elections.

Other recent allegations about potentially malign activities by our government abound. The FBI incidentally collected data without a warrant on U.S. citizens 3.4 million times in 2021. Thirty percent of the times the FBI did so, it acted in error or roughly one million times. Remember, this is all work performed by government employees who are tasked with keeping our country safe, yet these are the "mistakes" we keep seeing.

The evidence appears to be overwhelming. The broad expansion of the federal government's reach into disinformation has been knee-jerk and uncoordinated. It seems even more evident that Congress has apparently not delineated the parameters within which the intelligence and law enforcement community should operate. When Congress has set lines, the Intelligence Community and law enforcement have been more than willing to overstep their bounds and stretch their legal authorities.

It is time to hold those responsible accountable. It is time to streamline the process and eliminate the duplication, redundancy, and waste that has sprouted up to become the federal disinformation bureaucracy. Crucially, given the federal government's repeatedly demonstrated disregard for the law, it is time to consider whether it should even be engaged in this effort. It should not. The American government, based on the First Amendment, should not be anywhere near regulating protected speech. The American government should not be deciding what speech should be regulated and what speech should not.

Authored by Lloyd Billingsley via American Greatness,

Back in 1986, members of the Reagan cabinet said they were willing to take drug tests to set an example for federal workers and the public. That caught the attention of Jay Leno, who recommended IQ tests instead. Better still, Wayne Allyn Root now contends, would be lie detector tests, an idea that “threatens the power structure of the entire American political system and U.S. government.” 

Politicians have sold us out, Root believes, and to save the nation we must demand that politicians and government officials face off with the polygraph. Root’s questions include:

• Are you now, or have you ever been on China’s payroll? Or the CCP payroll?

• Are you now, or have you ever been on the payroll of the Mexican drug cartels?

• Are any of your family members or friends on any of these foreign payrolls?

• Do you have an offshore bank account? Does anyone in your family accept payoffs in an offshore account?

• Do you accept illegal campaign contributions from any foreign interests?

• Are you on the payroll of any Big Pharma company or vaccine manufacturer? Do you have family members or friends on the Big Pharma payroll or receiving stock or stock options from Big Pharma?

• Are you being blackmailed, or have you ever been blackmailed?

• Have you given government contracts to spouses, family members or friends?

• Have you passed inside information on public companies to family or friends, and shared in the profits?

• Are you 100 percent loyal to the interests of America and your constituents?

Examiners could also ask:

• Have you ever employed a Chinese spy on your staff for 20 years?

• Have you ever demanded that Facebook or Twitter take down a post?

• Did you ever falsely claim to have served in Vietnam?

And so on.

Root believes “we’d have to replace virtually the entire House, Senate, every federal judge and every government bureaucrat.” That may be a stretch but the test itself is on solid ground.  

Candidates for the Border Patrol are required to undergo polygraph tests. The FBI has used polygraph tests since 1935 and ramped them up in the wake of FBI spy Robert Hanssen, who eluded the agency for at least 15 years. The CIA uses polygraph tests in the hiring process and for security clearances. A polygraph examiner for the CIA conducts two sessions per day in an “unrelenting job” that can require duty abroad.

Politicians make laws, spend the people’s money, deal with foreign adversaries and swear to uphold the Constitution. So it’s entirely reasonable that politicians face the polygraph, and current conditions also make a case for DNA tests, which don’t lie. Consider, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Her claim to be a Cherokee was the basis for her career, from law school to Harvard—which proclaimed Warren a “woman of color”—to the U.S. Senate. As a DNA test before her first run for office would have shown, Warren is not a Cherokee. Despite the blatant falsehood, Warren failed to resign, remained in the Senate, and ran for president.

San Diego Democrat Ammar Campa-Najjar, a two-time candidate for Congress, is the grandson of Muhammad Abu Youssef al-Najjar, mastermind of the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics that claimed the lives of 11 Israeli athletes. Ammar’s father, Yaser al-Najjar, was also a fugitive but Ammar claims he moved to the United States and married a Mexican woman.

Candidate Ammar, who also lived in Gaza, has billed himself as a “Palestinian Mexican” and “Latino Arab American.” A DNA test would clear it up but the candidate has not volunteered.  Ammar recently lost a race for mayor of Chula Vista and former California Senate boss Kevin de Leon recently survived a recall effort on the Los Angeles city council.

Back in 2017, de Leon suddenly claimed his father Andres was a Chinese cook born in Guatemala, where his mother Carmen Osorio was also born. A DNA test would have revealed the truth, but no such test took place.

Questions about origins must also include the president David Garrow chronicled in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. Back around 2008, the Hillary Clinton campaign floated a rumor that the former Barry Soetoro had been born abroad, and was therefore not eligible to be president. That turned out to be false, and the “birthers” were wrong. The real question was the identity of the father.

The poet “Frank” in Dreams from My Father turns out to be Frank Marshall Davis, an African American Communist who dedicated most of his life to an all-white Soviet dictatorship. Garrow raised the issue and revealed that Dreams from My Father was a work of “historical fiction” and the author a “composite character.”

The Kenya section borrows heavily from I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights, by Italian writer Kuki Gallmann. The written materials of the Kenyan Barack Obama, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and covering the years 1958-1964, make not a single mention of a white American wife and Hawaiian-born son.

Malik Obama, son of the Kenyan, wondered if the president could be “a fraud and a con,” and in 2015 Malik said he was willing to take a DNA test. So far no response from the composite character, the most powerful man in the world for eight years, aiming to fundamentally transform the United States of America.

“If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan,” said the composite character president in 2009, and on many other occasions.

“Read my lips, no new taxes,” said George H. W. Bush in 1988. No need for a polygraph to detect those lies. And as some folks might remember: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration,” said the president of the United States in 1976.

That one is hard to top. Maybe Jay Leno was on to something.

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

Instead of proper rule of law we are living with that Orwellian alternative, Our Rule of Law - an arbitrary enforcement of the laws and use of the coercive power of the state...

Like some other commentators, I have in recent years several times quoted a famous exchange from Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Recent developments in the Biden family money laundering scheme, the implosion of a boutique underwater expedition to the Titanic, and a possible coup in Russia prompt me to wheel it out once again.

“‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’”

It fits the long-running drama over Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell, I think.

Miranda Devine broke news of that scandal in the New York Post in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. It languished in the doldrums of official nonrecognition for years as the regime went into overdrive to keep people, especially voters, from paying any attention to it. 

Gradually, however, the truth leaked out. First, the authenticity of the laptop was acknowledged. Turns out it was not “Russian disinformation,” as those 51 intelligence experts insisted. Nope, it belonged to Hunter all right. At first, the public was titillated by all the sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll that pervaded that digital trove. Gradually, very gradually, however, the publicly important stuff—the money angle with news of foreign payments apparently to dear-old-dad from various foreigners—began leaking out. 

Then suddenly, just this last week, the House Ways and Means Committee began dropping bombs.

Material from an IRS whistleblower—no, two IRS whistleblowers—got fed into the mix and we got such Hunter Biden classics as this WhatsApp message from July 2017 addressed to Henry Zhao, a member of the Chinese Communist Party and, wouldn’t you know it, a business partner of Hunter’s: 

I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment [the commitment being millions of the crispest] made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight, And, Z, fi [sic] get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.

I enjoyed reading that over the morning coffee while gazing at the accompanying photograph of Hunter all got up in black tie for a big to-do at the White House the other day. That was right after he, miraculously, managed to wangle the plea bargain of the century. He failed to report millions in income, yet the prosecutor agreed to reduce felony charges to misdemeanors and, essentially, to forget about the fact that Hunter lied on his application for a firearm, a felony. Nice work, Hunter!

There are some people who insist that we are still in the he-said she-said phase of this drama. It’s happened before. 

Remember, years ago, when FBI lovebirds Lisa Page and Peter Strzok had their little back and forth a few days after the Trump-Russia hoax got started? Page cooed to Strzok: “Trump should go f himself.” Strzok responded, “F Trump.” Two days later, Page texted, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok replied, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” “We” being not just Peter and Lisa but also the FBI. Somehow, that got diluted and interpreted out of relevance, though, and the fact that the premier police power of the country interfered in a presidential election got swept under the proverbial rug.

It might happen this time, too. We have credible allegations galore, not only of Hunter’s lawbreaking, but his father’s. According to the whistleblower testimony that the House Ways and Means Committee just released, the Justice Department tipped off Hunter Biden about a plan to search his storage unit, thus allowing him to clean it out before the feds arrived. The Justice Department also declined to execute a search warrant of Joe Biden’s guest house when Hunter was living there. They hid allegations about foreign bribery from the IRS lawyers overseeing an investigation of Hunter’s finances and lost or “slow walked” other aspects of the government’s investigation into his tangled affairs for some five years.

Preferential treatment? Assuredly not! At least not according to our American Gothic Attorney General Merrick Garland. After this latest spate of revelations dropped into the news cycle and seemed to be getting traction, even in the legacy media, Garland held a press conference in which he said, in essence, if you criticize the Justice Department you are betraying “democracy.” 

It was an extraordinary performance. But here we are. Nancy Pelosi and others kept going on about Our Democracy™ when what they meant was “our oligarchy.” More recently, Joe Biden has been nattering on about “our children,” as if children belonged to the government. Now we have the attorney general of the United States insisting that the Justice Department dispenses justice impartially even though grandmothers with cancer who happened to traipse through the Capitol on January 6 are tossed into jail while Hunter Biden skates. The two-tier deployment of justice in this country is patent for all to see, but what are you going to believe, your lying eyes or the pronunciamentos of this gray-on-gray bureaucrat from hell? 

Yes, Nancy Pelosi was happy to substitute Our Democracy™ for democracy plain and simple. Now we have Merrick Garland attempting the same thing with the rule of law. That went out with the advent of predawn raids by the FBI on opponents of the regime. Instead we are living with that Orwellian alternative Our Rule of Law™, which is to say their arbitrary enforcement of the laws and use of the coercive power of the state. 

The end, as Hemingway’s character observed, came gradually at first. We’ve moved on now to the “suddenly” part. It’s not, I fancy, unlike what happened aboard that swank, if ultimately unseaworthy submersible, the part described in headlines everywhere as a “catastrophic implosion.” Descent by PlayStation was gradual until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

At Parliament Hill in London Saturday, there was a demonstration on behalf of jailed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Present was the famed rendering of Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden made by sculptor Davide Domino. The statue includes an empty chair for the next whistleblower. I had the honor of standing on that chair to give a short address:

I have a confession to make. Once. like a lot of journalists, I didn’t like Julian Assange. It wasn’t just that Wikileaks was breaking one huge story after another. He had fab hair. He wore skinny jeans. He even modeled at fashion week!

What can I say? I was jealous. We’re in London, so I can quote Shakespeare, can’t I?

Beware the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Jealousy, that monster, impairs one’s thinking. It impaired mine. I didn’t have a reason to dislike Assange. So I invented one. I decided I didn’t like the concept of “radical transparency.” I thought: “You can’t just dump all of those secrets on the public. That’s irresponsible!”

I was so brainwashed that I forgot, as many people do, that secrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.

I’m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we’re building skyscrapers and huge new complexes to store our secrets, because we don’t have room to keep them all as is!

Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote:

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.

When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.

In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.

Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.

The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”

What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified.

What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.

My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.

If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.

But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.

If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.

Don’t let that happen.

Free Julian Assange.

Submitted by Gun Owners of America,

The Hunter Biden laptop story has finally resulted in criminal charges for the President's son. Hunter Biden made a deal with federal prosecutors, pleading guilty to two tax-related misdemeanors and resolved his felony gun charge. 

Hunter's gun charge being resolved is a fancy legalese word for that charge being subject to a pre-trial diversion. This is a plea agreement that not only allows for a criminal defendant to maintain a clean record but avoid jail time as well, provided that they complete pre-trial probation requirements set by the judge. 

This means that Hunter Biden can still legally own a gun. 

Hunter Biden just skirted 10+ years of federal prison with a cozy plea deal of two years probation for his “gun crimes” from his father’s Justice Department. ??°°Meanwhile, @DonaldJTrumpJr was FORCED to register his firearms to avoid Biden’s tyrannical pistol ban.

This is the… pic.twitter.com/IWZcRLladj

— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) June 20, 2023

The firearms charge that Hunter Biden faced resulted from a 2018 incident in which Hunter's girlfriend tossed his revolver into the trash. This incident corresponded to later interviews in which Hunter detailed being addicted to drugs around the same time. This caused speculation that he broke federal law when buying the firearm.

For those unfamiliar with complex federal firearms law, when buying a firearm from an FFL or firearms dealer, you must complete Form 4473, also known as a firearms transaction record. This record is then used to file a NICS check, also known as a background check, with the FBI. 

On Form 4473, there is a question about whether the purchaser of the firearm is addicted to any drugs. Answering yes on the form automatically denies the firearm purchase, so for Hunter Biden to have been able to purchase his gun, he would have had to lie on the form.

Now you might be thinking that this isn't a serious crime and that surely other people have been let off the hook as well. 

Exhibit A: Hunter Biden lied on this Form 4473, there’s literally video evidence that he lied on this Form 4473 and nothing has happened to him. pic.twitter.com/EqVL6rMggN

— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) July 11, 2022

That's where you'd be wrong. Rapper Kodak Black was charged with the same crime of falsifying information on federal forms to buy four firearms at a Miami gun shop in May of 2019. He was sentenced to more than three years in prison stemming from that charge. 

And Kodak Black isn't the only one being convicted. In April 2023, a woman in Iowa was sentenced to a year in prison for lying about her address and drug use on Form 4473. 

Even more egregious is that just last week, a woman in Virginia was charged with making a false statement on her 4473 because she had previously used marijuana. Important to note Virginia legalized recreational marijuana use two years ago. The Biden DOJ is sending the American people a clear message: "Rules for thee, not for me."  

In addition, Form 4473 has been weaponized by the Biden DOJ & ATF through regulatory policy to create an illegal backdoor firearms registry. We at Gun Owners of America have covered this at length, and you can read our in-depth report here.

All of this serves as a reminder that Form 4473s and background checks on firearms are unconstitutional in the first place. 

Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

House Republicans stated that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have intercepted an increasing number of foreign nationals from countries not in South or Central America, including Russia, and several high-value targets from China.

In a June 21 Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Threats Posed to the Homeland by Nation-State Actors in Latin America, held by the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence, concerns were raised by several lawmakers regarding the potential dangers posed to the United States by an unsecured border.

During the hearing, Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) voiced his alarm and shared significant information regarding encounters with foreign nationals from various countries of concern.

“I am concerned that the chaos of the Southwest border could be taken advantage of by anti-U.S. regimes—not just can, but has been,” Pfluger said.

“Meanwhile, the PRC and our foreign adversaries are expanding their spheres of influence in Latin America, right in our backyard. … There are clear implications for U.S. Homeland Security.”

Pfluger highlighted the growing migration crisis resulting from the administration’s policy decisions, leading to significant increases in encounters at the Southwest border. Of particular concern were the encounters involving individuals from what he referenced as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia.

He pointed out that several sheriff’s offices had reported apprehending multiple high-value targets from China, who were subsequently taken into custody by the FBI and cited data from the CBP showing increase in fiscal year 2023 encounters with nationals from various continents by border patrol along the Southwest border.

“In the first seven months of fiscal year 2023, over 9,711 PRC nationals were encountered by U.S. border patrol along our Southwest border exponentially more than the previous three years,” Pfluger said, warning that the “chaos of the Southwest border could be taken advantage of by anti-U.S. regimes.”

The lawmaker went on to emphasize that the expanding influence of China and other foreign adversaries in Latin America posed clear implications for U.S. homeland security. The chairman further stressed the urgent need to address the security challenges associated with nation-state actors in the region.

In his opening statement, Pfluger underscored China’s economic and security ties with Latin American countries like Brazil and Venezuela. He highlighted the substantial financial support provided by China, with loans amounting to approximately $137 billion offered to the region.

Venezuela emerged as the primary beneficiary, receiving roughly $60 billion in loans, which could be seen as problematic, considering China’s military and security partnerships, including the sale of $615 million worth of weapons to Venezuela between 2009 and 2019.

Concerns About Russian Nationals

The encounters with Russian citizens also experienced a sharp rise with the trend continuing for first seven months of fiscal year 2023.

According to information cited by the lawmakers, in 2021 CBP reported just 4,103 encounters of Russian citizens along our Southwest border. However, that number jumped to 21,763 in fiscal year 2022 and it’s over 33,000 for the first seven months of fiscal year 2023.

Read more here...

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

I’ve warned repeatedly about the dangers that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) pose to personal liberties.

I’ve warned how they would allow governments to monitor every transaction you make, which basically means a surveillance state.

This facilitates the creation of a social credit system that allows governments to punish those who engage in unapproved activity such as buying guns, donating money to the wrong political party, buying unapproved literature, etc.

The government will even know your physical whereabouts at the point of purchase.

People could be denied employment opportunities, educational opportunities, access to banking systems, even the ability to travel.

I’ve also said that China is well along the way to establishing a social credit system. Well, if you have any doubt that China’s social credit score is real, consider this:

Millions of Chinese have been denied the ability to travel by plane or train because their social credit scores are too low.

It CAN Happen Here

If you think nothing like that could ever happen here, you might want to reconsider.

Think of all the draconian policies that were imposed on Americans during COVID. Think of the lockdowns, the censorship, vaccine mandates, etc.

Before the pandemic, you probably wouldn’t have thought that any of this was possible. But it all happened. When you think of it in that light, you begin to understand that some type of social credit system in the U.S. really isn’t that far-fetched.

It might not be as extreme as China’s system. It’ll all be made to sound very benign, even necessary, to support “our democracy” against MAGA types, white supremacists, climate deniers and domestic terrorists.

As Ronald Reagan said, “If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.”

But this system would operate on the same principles as the Chinese system. Consider this hypothetical case…

Welcome to the 15-Minute City

Greenies want to mandate “15-minute cities” where you can walk everywhere in town within 15 minutes, which means you won’t need your car to visit a doctor, dry cleaner, grocery store, pharmacy or any of the other locations we routinely visit for errands and necessities.

That may sound attractive if you chose it voluntarily. But that’s not what the greenies have in mind. They want 15-minute cities as a Trojan horse to eliminate automobiles entirely and force you to ride bicycles or use public transportation. In the end, you’ll need a permit to fly to another city.

The permits will be rationed and you’ll have to put yourself on a waiting list until your turn. You can pay for your ticket with the new central bank digital currency, assuming your social credit score is high enough and you didn’t vote for the wrong candidate in the last election.

In this vision, citizens will be confined to small towns or cities for extended periods. Travel will be tightly restricted. Appliances will be downsized with no consumer choice allowed. Taxes will be imposed on targeted activities to discourage use.

Education will be turned to indoctrination to raise a generation who believe in the climate lies needed to gain support for these measures (that kind of indoctrination has been underway for some years).

It’s coercive, restrictive and arrogant. It’s a world where the elites control everything and you do as you’re told. It’s a world based on lies and fear.

Again, if you think that’s just being paranoid, I refer you once more to what happened during the pandemic.

The Censorship-Industrial Complex

We know that the government has engaged in censorship designed to shut down unapproved viewpoints.

Thanks to Elon Musk opening up the Twitter Files to the public, we now know just how rotten and corrupt the White House, FBI and Twitter under Jack Dorsey were in terms of influencing the 2020 election, crushing voices that said the vaccines weren’t really safe and effective (they aren’t) and saying that Russia is winning in Ukraine (they are).

Twitter created a separate portal for FBI goons to target individual Americans and to deplatform them from using Twitter. (Facebook and Google were even worse but they are still under the same control. So we don’t have the internal files we do for Twitter.)

It’s an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment for the U.S. government to engage in any censorship of this kind.

Instead, the FBI and White House used Twitter as a kind of private-sector hatchet man to cut off anyone who dissented from the government agenda.

Even that may be unconstitutional because Twitter is acting as a proxy for the government in this instance. The courts will ultimately decide that issue, but for now, we know that both the government and Twitter were engaged in rank censorship of everyday American voices.

It can’t get any worse, right? Guess again. We’re now learning that the Twitter-FBI censorship activities went far beyond silencing critics of government policy.

Combine a Social Credit System With a Police State

The FBI also took orders from Ukraine. It turns out the Ukrainian secret security service sent lists of reporters and other U.S. citizens who were not supporting the Zelenskyy regime running the Ukrainian war effort.

The FBI was told to forward the list to Twitter, deactivate the anti-Ukraine accounts and hand over user data to the Ukrainian secret police. I’m active on Twitter and I’m opposed to the war, so for all I know my name was on the list. I don’t care. I’ve always written what I want, and I’m not intimidated by the FBI or the Ukrainian secret police.

Still, many accounts were censored on this basis. No one is surprised to learn Ukraine is a police state. Americans are still learning just how much of a police state the U.S. has become.

Now throw a social credit system into the mix. Just think of the ways the government can punish dissenters.

This is the Brave New World that we’re facing. And it’s all facilitated by central bank digital currencies, which enable the type of surveillance state that’s always been the dream of tyrants.

They’ll just say it’s being done in the name of democracy. Don’t fall for it.

Is this future inevitable? No, it isn’t. But it’s coming sooner than you expect unless citizens join hands, reassert the truth and push the elites back into a corner where they belong.

You might not be able to fight back easily in the world of CBDCs, but as I always say, there is one nondigital, nonhackable, nontraceable form of money you can still get your hands on.

It’s called gold. Get some while you still can.

Authored by Jim Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“In the wake of the Hunter Biden sweetheart plea deal, calling D.C. a swamp is an insult to swamps and frankly to all wetlands in general. We need to redefine the Clean Water Act to include all Biden adjacent areas.” 

-Margot Cleveland, Lawyer and legal analyst

“I’m proud of my son” — Joe Biden

I hope you agree this has been an instructive week for our republic, sinking to the bottom as fast as the Titan submersible on its way to consort with its grandmama, the HMS Titanic.

Here’s what I learned, for instance, from Special Counsel John Durham’s visit to the House Judiciary Committee: When asked why he did not seek grand jury testimony from the primary culprits in the Russia Collusion hoax — Comey, McCabe, and Strzok — he told the room it would have been “unproductive” because they habitually claimed to “not recall” anything when testifying in Congress.

That’s an interesting legal theory.

If it is so, we must suppose that any witness in a criminal inquiry may decline testifying on the grounds of claiming a defective memory. I’m not a lawyer, of course, but is it not the case that witnesses can be prompted to recall events when presented with evidence? E.g., “…here is your smartphone text of July 29 saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll stop him [Trump].’ What means did you have in mind to accomplish that, Mr. Strzok?”

In the four-year lead-up to his personal appearance in the House, many of us were fooled into thinking Mr. Durham was a serious dude. (I sure was.) Turns out the ferocious facial hair masked a rather timorous persona. Mr. Durham apparently did not dare test the boundaries of the narrow lane laid out in the scoping directives set forth by then Attorney General Barr. Mr. D. did find a line of criminal conduct between Lawfare artist Michal Sussmann, the Fusion GPS disinfo company, the DC law firm Perkins Coie, and candidate Hillary MyTurn in the creation and marketing of the Steele Dossier — yet he never called Hillary to do any ‘splainin about it (or anything else she did in 2016). Weird, a little bit.

While his omissions and missteps were spotlighted by the Republican members, Mr. Durham was mugged, kicked to the curb, stomped, and peed-on by the committee Democrats, who still labor to prop-up the dead-letter Russia Collusion fraud against all evidence and reason. As usual, the lead attack dog on that was Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA). He was rewarded the next day with a censure vote for seven years of shameless lying about said fraud, and stripped of his seat on the House Intel Committee, which he used, as then-chairman, to launch Trump Impeachment #1 in 2019 with fake “whistleblower” (and CIA goblin) Eric Ciaramella, whom Mr. Schiff naturally lied about never meeting prior to the proceeding.

We are treated in these twilight months of the “Joe Biden” regime to a cavalcade of revelations laying out the degeneracy of a federal justice system at war with the American people and its shady machinations in service to the Biden family global bribery operation. Late Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), released the affidavit of IRS supervisory special agent Gary Shapley from testimony given in closed session May 26. It disclosed a concerted program by the DOJ to impede, obstruct, delay, divert, and bury a massive tax evasion and fraud case against Hunter Biden, involving millions of dollars garnered from foreign persons and entities for no discernible services performed in return.

"I am alleging, with evidence…” Mr. Shapley testified under oath, “…whatever the motivations, at every stage decisions were made that had the effect of benefiting the subject of the investigation. These decisions included slow-walking investigative steps, not allowing enforcement actions to be executed, limiting investigators’ line of questioning for witnesses, misleading investigators on charging authority, delaying any and all actions months before [the 2020] elections to ensure the investigation did not go overt well before policy memorandum mandated the pause.”

Hunter Biden was code-named “Sportsman” as the case opened in 2018. Red flags in bank transfer records of Hunter B and associates involving millions of dollars triggered the IRS inquiry. It wasn’t until a year later that Hunter’s laptop turned up, crammed with deal memos of bribes paid along with vivid documentary evidence of sex and drug crimes. The FBI verified its authenticity in November of 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud ID.

By the way, note that this was the exact same time that the House Intel Committee under chairman Adam Schiff commenced its impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. AG William Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray therefore knew then that Hunter’s laptop existed and that it contained evidence of suspicious money transactions with Russia, China, and most particularly Ukraine — since Mr. Trump’s impeachment case was based on a telephone query he made to Ukrainian President, Zelensky, regarding the Biden family’s operations there. Neither Mr. Barr nor Mr. Wray alerted Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the evidence contained in the laptop — which would have provided exculpatory proof of a reasonable motive for Mr. Trump’s phone call. How was that not an obstruction of justice?

Mr. Shapley’s testimony is just one thread in the much larger tapestry of Biden family corruption now achieving clarity. Rep. James Comer’s Oversight Committee continues on its deep dive into the Biden family bank transfer records — with its evidence of money laundering through Biden shell company cut-outs — and the direct voice recording evidence of  “Joe Biden” discussing his family’s financial arrangements with Petro Poroshenko, then-president of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019, plus other damning evidence connected to a “trusted” (and well-paid) FBI human confidential source in the much fought over FD-1023 document recently surrended to the Oversight Committee.

In short, the tide is going out even as the sun sets on “Joe Biden” as President. He and his handlers may believe they enjoy the protection of a compliant news media, but even that has its limits. Impeachment is coming, even if not as fast as Rep. Lauren Boebert wants it to, and if and when it does, there will be no ignoring the stark presentation of hard evidence — no matter how much MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid snorts and cackles.

Meanwhile, please understand that “Joe Biden” is only pretending to run for reelection and his party is pretending along with him just for the present desperate moment.

Before long, their whole reeking, creaking edifice of lies and bad faith will come crashing down. Joe Biden will have to resign or the nation will be treated to the spectacle, this time, of a trial in the senate for real cause, bribery and treason, not just fake animus.

And then, not even Gavin Newsom will be able to save the Democratic Party in its present alignment and foul habits. If it survives at all, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will have to rebuild it from the ground up and expel the demons infesting it.

*  *  *

Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rurtherford Institute,

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.

This is what passes for the government’s perverse idea of being tough on crime.

For example, undercover FBI agents pretending to be associated with ISIS have been accused of seeking out online and befriending a 16-year-old with brain development issues, persuading him to secretly send them small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and then the moment Mateo Ventura, turned 18, arresting him for providing financial support to an Islamic terrorist group.

If convicted, the teenager could spend up to 10 years in prison.

Yet as The Intercept explains, “the only ‘terrorist’ he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old… This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement… the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.”

In another incident, the FBI used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.

These are Machiavellian tactics with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings, but it is especially dangerous for anyone whose views could in any way be characterized as anti-government.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

For instance, it was reported that the FBI had been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.  

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists.

To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers.

To go after thieves, they become thieves.

For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the  safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy. 

This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.

Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In a stunning development reported by The Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.

The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms. It is, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the source of the threats to our freedoms.

It has not  been a good day for the Congressman from California.

First he was 'owned' by John Durham, while the democrat attempted a character assassination, and now the House of Representatives voted to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on June 21, a week after an initial resolution to do so was tabled.

The tally was 213-209. Six voted “present.”

Adam Schiff is officially the 26th member of Congress to be censured in American history!

The Democrats are a classy bunch. They kept interrupting McCarthy as he tried to read the resolution.

How these people can defend Schiff is beyond me… pic.twitter.com/kzk3wPV7M1

— Jane Public (@JanePublic55) June 21, 2023

Democrats cheered "Adam, Adam, Adam" in deferrence to his 'sacrifice'? Who knows...

House Democrats go berserk, interrupting Speaker McCarthy numerous times as he attempts to read the resolution censure to Rep. Schiff, chanting "Shame!"

McCarthy fed up reminds Democrats, "I have all night." pic.twitter.com/81uPBCOY94

— Mona Salama ? (@ByMonaSalama) June 21, 2023

The resolution, introduced by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), blasts Schiff for allegedly perpetuating misinformation against former President Donald Trump.

#WATCH | Rep. Anna Paulina Luna @repluna about Rep. Adam Schiff censure bill: pic.twitter.com/O78sl0091f

— VOZ (@Voz_US) June 21, 2023

With the passing of the resolution, Schiff has been referred to the House Ethics Committee for investigation.

As Jackson Richman reports via The Epoch Times, the resolution was privileged and therefore triggered a House vote. In last week’s vote, 20 Republicans joined 205 Democrats to table the initial resolution.

The revised resolution was similar to the initial one, with the notable difference being that it did not have a $16 million fine for Schiff should he be held accountable by the House Ethics Committee for his alleged “falsehoods, misrepresentations, and abuses of sensitive information.”

The new resolution, like the tabled one, condemns Schiff, who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for perpetuating the notion there was collusion between former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. That was debunked by special counsel Robert Mueller in 2019, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz later the same year, and special counsel John Durham in May. The $16 million fine is half of the taxpayer cost of the Mueller probe.

Durham testified on June 20 at a closed-door hearing before the House Intelligence Committee and also gave evidence in a public hearing today in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

Additionally, the new resolution did not state that “Schiff used his position and access to sensitive information to instigate a fraudulently based investigation, which he then used to amass political gain and fundraising dollars.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave credence on June 15 to the 20 House Republicans that joined Democrats in tabling the initial resolution.

“I think everybody knows my thoughts of Adam Schiff,” McCarthy told The Epoch Times.

“That’s why I removed him from [the House Intelligence Committee]. … You have a number of members on principle that sat and argued for the last four years with President [Donald] Trump that you had to have due process and voted that way. And I think a number of them believe that they should [have] gone to [the House Ethics Committee] first.”

Ahead of the vote on the revised resolution, Schiff appeared defiant on the House floor.

“To my Republican colleagues who introduced this resolution, I thank you. You honor me with your enmity. You flatter me with this falsehood,” he said.

“You who are the authors of the Big Lie about the last election must condemn the truth-tellers and I stand proudly before you. Your words tell me I have been effective in the defense of our democracy and I am grateful,” continued Schiff. “And yet this false and defamatory resolution comes at a considerable cost to the country and to the Congress.”

Following the vote on the revised censure resolution, McCarthy, who has expressed contempt toward his fellow Californian, called Schiff to the well of the House floor that is below the dais where the clerks and speaker preside.

“Will the gentleman from California present himself in the well? By its adoption of House Resolution 521, the House has resolved that Representative Adam Schiff be censured,” said McCarthy.

“That Representative Adam Schiff forthwith present himself in the well of the House for the pronouncement of censure,” said McCarthy after Schiff went to the well.

“That Representative Adam Schiff be censured with the public reading of this resolution by the Speaker.”

With a strike of the gavel, McCarthy concluded the censure.

In interviews on June 20 with The Epoch Times, Republicans were in favor while Democrats expressed opposition to the censure resolution.

“This guy’s for however many years been walking out of classified briefings and saying to the press, ‘I heard that President Trump, I was told that President Trump did this, this, this, this or this,'” said Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), referring to Schiff.

“So one, if members of Congress had to fill out an SF-86, like every other normal American to get a security clearance, he would have his denied, revoked, whatever, in about 10 seconds.”

An SF-86 is the application to obtain a security clearance.

“And so I think that’s well worth censuring, given that it’s a direct violation of his duties to keep it simply on that,” said Mast.

“So I could say a lot about the guy. None of it nice.”

Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) said Schiff “lied to the American people … for years. He was extremely destructive, and I believe that he needs to be held accountable.”

But Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) remarked that the censure would be “in-kind contributions” to Schiff’s 2024 Senate campaign to succeed retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

Also coming to her fellow Californian’s defense, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), said Schiff “has done good work honorably” and that “the effort to try and change a policy dispute into some kind of sanction is unprecedented and unwise.”

Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) stated simply, “I believe that good behavior should be rewarded and bad behavior should be censured.”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“Team Brandon has also made the USA utterly toxic to 80% of humanity. Sort of what they accused Trump of doing but they actually did it! LOL. They are the gift that keeps on giving.”

- Jacob Dreizin

Strange doings at a strange time in a strange land. Videos of widespread military vehicle maneuvers around our nation popped up on the Web at mid-weekend while the American citizenry went about its holiday weekend business (including Father’s Day revels and “Juneteenth” celebration mass shootings): Scenes of armored personnel carriers rolling down Walnut Street in downtown Philly; B2 bomber wings over Minnesota; Tank columns galumphing along an Idaho highway… leading to widespread suspicions that something untoward is up. Durned if I know what it is.

Tanks on highway, Great Falls, Idaho

Among things one can know: The “Joe Biden” presidency is whirling around the drain in plain sight, and with it, likely, the Globalist hopes and dreams of making everybody eat bugs while they take away everything you own. Last week, audiotapes surfaced of the main parties to the Ukraine grift (Biden and Poroshenko) working things out in 2016 over the phone in “JB’s” final days as vice-president. Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee has got its mitts on Biden family bank records galore detailing the abstruse money-laundering activities that were run through obscure European banks and innumerable Biden shell companies. Well, sonofabitch…!

It’s getting hard even for Democrats to ignore the accumulating evidence of the Biden family’s global grift operation, and “JB’s” obvious advancing mental deterioration, provoking moves that should lead to his ejection from office. Last week, their captive mainstream news media broadcast a cavalcade of embarrassing public idiocies committed by the Commander in Chief — declaring “God save the Queen” incongruously at the end of a Gun Safety Summit in Connecticut; groping actress Eva Longoria’s boobs after a White House movie screening; cracking a weird joke about the “Philadelphia girl” in his bed (Dr. Jill Biden); being introduced at an I-95 bridge collapse event by brain-damaged PA Senator John Fetterman who tossed up a word salad about the federal “delegadation” aiming to fix “infructure,” while dressed-up looking like Uncle Fester out of The Addams Family. The indignity of it all was really something to behold.

You understand, “Joe Biden’s” reelection campaign is another rank hoax, yet another trip laid on the American public by a desperate, degenerate Democratic Party that doesn’t know what to do next with public opinion souring on it. There’s no way this gibbering near-corpse can run again. He can’t even perform as a puppet anymore. He’s a broke-down engine pulling a train of failure, perfidy, and treason five miles long behind him. The Ukraine war project he presides over looks more and more like an effort to conceal and cover-up his family’s bribery schemes by laying waste to the pitiful chump of a foreign land that went along with the grift — and which, anyway, is winding up as yet another American military humiliation with the Russians finishing off what’s left of Ukraine’s army in the failed “spring offensive.”

Do you suppose that all these military vehicle movements around the country in recent days signal a constitutional crisis in the offing, necessitating martial law? Let me lay it out: Absolutely no one believes that Vice-president Kamala Harris is up to the job of stepping-in when “Joe Biden” gets bum-rushed out of the White House. Nor, I’m sure, are they willing to force her to resign hastily without a substitute vice-president (say, Gavin Newsom) in place — a cumbersome process that requires approval by both the House and Senate. But if Harris were flat-out forced to resign, then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would automatically become president.

Mr. McCarthy is, arguably, just another houseboy of the now-heinous administrative state (or deep state, or permanent bureaucracy, or blob, as it’s sometimes called). But he is not a Democrat, and is subject to the fractious pressures in the Republican Party, and could plausibly be induced to fire-and-replace post-haste the whole honking host of seditious rogues running the executive agencies — from AG Merrick Garland, to FBI Director Chris Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, Treasury Secretary Yellen… every last one of them — which could even lead to prosecutions of these scoundrels.

Any way you cut it, it looks like the sudden catastrophic downfall of the Democratic Party, an existential crisis that would amount ineluctably to one possible outcome: nominate Bobby Kennedy, Jr. or die. But then, what would Mr. Kennedy do about all the remaining bad actors in the Party of Chaos? My guess is that almost all of them down to the rank-and-file would snap out of the mass formation psychosis they’ve been locked in for seven years and completely flip, denouncing the tyrannical madness that their deposed leadership inflicted on our country. They might even believe it never happened, or that they were not responsible for it, like the whole thing was no more than a bad dream.

Or maybe, what we’re seeing in all these military movements is the prelude to a real live military coup d’état? Just sayin’...

*  *  *

Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

Authored by Lawrence Wilson  via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Ballot harvesting. Stuffing ballot boxes. Tampering with voting equipment. Stealing ballots. Censoring candidates. These were some of the concerns raised, notably by former President Donald Trump, in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

As we approach 2024, how great a concern is election security for the 2024 presidential candidates? The Epoch Times submitted questions to major candidates in both parties to find out.

The questions centered on three concerns: Did election tampering affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election? What should be done to ensure a fair election in 2024? Will you accept the outcome of the 2024 contest?

Former Ambassador Nikki Haley responded directly to our questions. Representatives of former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis referred us to their previously published views on the matter.

No response was received from the campaigns of Republican candidates Trump, Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, or Democrat candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The views of Trump, Scott, Ramaswamy, and Biden were available through media interviews and public statements.

Here’s what they said.

Impact of Fraud in 2020

Trump made broad claims of election interference immediately after the 2020 election and stands by them.

“That was a rigged election, and it’s a shame that we had to go through it. It’s very bad for our country. All over the world, they looked at it, and they saw exactly what everyone else saw,” Trump said in a May 11 town hall-style meeting on CNN.

Trump claimed election interference causes a difference of 16 percentage points in the outcome of the election.

The former president cited censorship on Twitter and “millions of votes” caught on camera in cases of “stuffing ballot boxes.” He referred to alleged evidence from government cameras as proof.

DeSantis acknowledged some election tampering in a May 26 interview on MSN but said much of the fault lies with Trump.

The Florida governor said that the COVID-19 state of emergency contributed to the use of ballot collection, also called ballot harvesting, which is the collection of absentee ballots from voters by a third party for delivery to a ballot drop box.

While legal in many states, critics claim it is an opportunity for fraud.

“Of course, I think that that’s wrong,” DeSantis said. “But if I were the candidate, I would have gone in and combated that, either had our people doing the same ballot harvesting or been more aggressive to try to head that off in terms of some of the legal challenges.”

DeSantis also said the government colluded with tech companies to censor negative information about Biden, which he called “election interference.”

“It’s totally unfair, but I’ll also point out that was Donald Trump’s FBI and Donald Trump’s DHS that was doing that. He didn’t have control over his own agencies,” DeSantis said. “If someone in my government were doing that, they would have been fired the next day.”

Pence called the 2020 contest “an election marked by significant voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law” in a March 2021 article for Heritage Foundation.

“I share the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of the 2020 election,” Pence wrote.

Yet Pence famously refused to decertify the election results in the Senate.

“But once states had certified those elections, once the courts had reviewed them, once the Congress had considered any objections, I knew my duty was clear,” he said in a June 7 town hall-style event on CNN

Haley, Scott, and Ramaswamy have said they believe some election tampering did occur but that it did not change the outcome of the race.

There was fraud in the 2020 election, but no court or state legislature found that it was enough to change the outcome,” Haley told The Epoch Times.

Scott said there was evidence of minor irregularities and even fraud, but he saw no evidence of a rigged election. “Thus far, no justice, judge or fact finder has found evidence indicating the election results in those states should be overturned,” Scott said in a statement issued on Jan. 5, 2021.

Ramaswamy said much the same in a May 19 interview on NPR.

“I have a lot of issues with the suppression of information by social media companies and internet companies that led up to that election,” Ramaswamy said.

“But in the technical sense of, you know, do I think that there was large-scale ballot fraud or whatever that changed the election outcome based on how the votes were counted? I have seen no evidence of that.”

Corrective Actions

Biden has obviously accepted the results of the 2020 election. However, he has voiced concerns about possible election interference in 2024. His concern centers on the enactment of laws aimed at voter suppression.

“The Georgia Republican Party, the state legislature has now given itself the power to make it easier for partisan actors—their cronies—to remove local election officials,” Biden said at Atlanta University in January 2022.

Biden stated concern that laws preventing voting by mail or ballot drop boxes would keep many from having their votes counted.

Some 80 bills were introduced in 23 states this year that would place new limits on voting by mail and obtaining absentee ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Read more here...

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClear Wire,

Here’s why we should doubt the widespread claim that Donald Trump was hoarding the nation’s most sensitive nuclear and military secrets in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom: If he had, that highly classified material would have been leaked by now.

The New York Times and Washington Post would be quoting highly placed current and former officials familiar with the investigation who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the investigation – but who were eager to show the danger Trump presents by revealing the secrets he held.

I suspect we have only the vague, yet frightening descriptions of the seized documents from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 37-count indictment, because a more detailed accounting might show they are more innocuous than apocalyptic. I could be wrong about that, but this much we know: Since Trump burst on the scene in 2015 the leaking of classified information has been the weapon of choice for his opponents at the highest reaches of government.

The Russiagate conspiracy hoax was fueled by leaks, especially from House Intelligence Committee Democrats and highly placed FBI officials; the Department of Justice’s inspector general referred former FBI Director James B. Comey for criminal investigation over leaks connected to the probe.

Trump is not the only target. One leaker gave ProPublica the confidential tax information of thousands of wealthy Americans – a gross violation of the privacy of ordinary citizens. Another gave Politico a highly confidential, though technically not classified, draft of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, prompting the incessant, illegal harassment of conservative justices, and a plan to murder Justice Bret Kavanaugh.

One of the more duplicitous performances in the theater of D.C. politics is given each time current FBI Director Christopher Wray and his minions gravely tell Congress they cannot answer questions because they involve “ongoing investigations.” The truth is that they much prefer leaking cherry-picked pieces of information, behind the cloak of anonymity, to advance their narrative.

Unlike Trump, leakers do not just possess secret material, they helped spread it far and wide. And, unlike the former president, they are almost never brought to justice. The Intercept reported that the Trump administration referred at least 344 allegations involving the leaking of classified information to the Department of Justice but that “very few referrals typically end up identifying suspects.”

None of this exonerates the former president. The special counsel appears to make a strong case that he violated the law. But the guns-blazing effort to hold him accountable cannot be separated from the fact that the rule of law in America is increasingly becoming a situational tool, invoked only at the convenience of the powers that be.

Consider the argument regarding classified documents, now widely embraced by mainstream news outlets that want to get Trump but give a pass to President Joe Biden. For decades, the possession of such information outside the area authorized for individuals to view it – a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF – was considered a crime. We don’t know how Biden ended up with such material from his days as a senator and vice president, but it was illegally removed. We also don’t know whether Biden reviewed these documents, though it is hard to believe he never saw them and even more unlikely that as they were moved and dispersed to several locations in the years since that nobody saw the classified markings and asked “the big guy” about them.

Biden’s supporters, however, are arguing that there’s “no there there” even if he took, viewed, and intentionally held the documents. All of that is now fine and dandy because he returned them when they were discovered. During a recent interview with GOP presidential hopeful Francis Suarez, ABC News presenter George Stephanopoulos, for example, declared that “there’s a very big difference between those two cases. President Biden turned them over himself. Had Donald Trump turned over all those documents, he wouldn’t have been charged.”

One wonders how this new standard might be applied to other crimes. Will bank robbers go free if they agree to return the money? I guess we’ll find out when Hunter Biden is (or is not) charged for income tax evasion: He apparently has paid back taxes.

This is not the only example of how Biden’s supporters are moving the goalposts to protect him. It is now beyond dispute that the president’s son and his brother Jim were running a multi-million-dollar influence peddling scheme, which hinged on the potential favors Biden could provide their business partners who just happened to be in countries, including Ukraine, China, and Romania, where Biden was deeply involved in policymaking while serving as vice president.

Despite the president’s insistent denials, evidence shows that he was not only aware of but met with people involved in these deals – the payments of which were often channeled through a series of shell companies and funneled, in some cases, to at least nine of his family members including his young grandchildren. It remains unclear to this day what services the Bidens were providing these entities other than access to Joe.

This is textbook political corruption. But now, his defenders insist, this is a problem for Biden only if it can be proved that he directly received money from the deals or that he specifically changed a policy in a quid pro quo for the payments to his family members.

Even if we accept that Biden never took any action in exchange for the money – that his famous boast that he forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating the corrupt gas company paying his son $83,000 a month was not a signal that he had delivered on a promise but that he was carrying out official policy – there is no doubt that his family was offering the promise of influence.

Donald Trump may get what he deserves, but America cannot endure as a great nation if the rule of law does not apply to all. To all. Fairness to all. Justice to all. That is the hallmark of our great democracy, which is built on the people’s trust in our institutions. That trust is eroding as our leaders brazenly weaponize our legal system. Benjamin Franklin warned that our founders had given us “A republic, if you can keep it.” We are losing it day by day.

J. Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist. He previously worked as a book review editor and book columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing won several national honors. Zane has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University.

Tucker Carlson savaged the Biden family on Tuesday, hours after it was announced that Hunter Biden would receive a slap on the wrist - and would only be required to plead guilty to simple tax crimes and a gun charge, despite what many would say is obvious evidence that he's been acting as a foreign agent.

Carlson noted how none of the charges have to do with influence peddling - including Hunter's alleged role as an international bag man for the Biden family (alleged, of course), which included a $10 million payment from Burisma to Hunter and Joe Biden, according to an FBI source.

"Investigators had 'identified payments to Biden family members from foreign companies, while Joe Biden served as Vice President and after he left public office.'"

"So actually there was something there. It was a scandal," Carlson said. "Racketeering, money laundering, wire fraud. Those are some of the crimes the Bidens seem to have committed."

Watch:

Ep. 5 As in most of the developing world, it's safer to be the president's son than his opponent. pic.twitter.com/AtRRaxYSjs

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 20, 2023

"Donald Trump had an idea, ‘they’ll hit Hunter with something small to make their strike on me look fair.’ Trump wrote that about two weeks ago," said Carlson. "And it turned out, those were prescient words. This morning, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to pretty much nothing. Biden pleaded to two misdemeanor tax evasion charges and then entered a diversion on a federal gun charge. That’s it. As far as Merrick Garland’s justice department is concerned, Hunter Biden is done. There was no pre-dawn raid carried live simultaneously on CNN, there was no perp walk, no handcuffs, no press conference."

"Above all, there was no felony. Hunter Biden who broke federal gun laws can still carry a gun. It’s like it all never happened," Carlson continued.

According to the Washington Post, Hunter, 53, is expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018, for a combined tax liability of roughly $1.2 million. He'll also admit to illegally possessing a weapon after his 2018 purchase of a handgun - which will likely result in a 'diversion program' which would result in the removal of the gun charge if all of the program's conditions are met.

Of course - this reeks of a containment strategy to avoid implicating the sitting President, as the feds apparently haven't been looking into ill-gotten gains from a massive international influence-peddling operation while his dad was VP, for which there is ample evidence.

Tucker gets it. Biden has weaponized the DOJ the same way 3rd world Dictators do, to target his political opposition and protect his corrupt family. https://t.co/bHjl34KO28

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) June 20, 2023

 

The US Government has been purchasing troves of information on American citizens from 3rd party data providers, according to Wired, which cites privacy advocates who say this constitutes a "nightmare scenario."

The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago. 

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans' lives are described soberly and at length by the director's own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. -Wired

"This report reveals what we feared most," according to attorney Sean Vitka of the Demand Progress nonprofit. "Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have."

The government has been using 'craven interpretations of aging laws' to bypass privacy rights, as prosecutors have increasingly ignored limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance.

"I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble," according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

During a March 8 hearing, Wyden pressed Haines to release the panel's report - after Haines said it should "absolutely" be read by the public. On Friday, that's exactly what happened after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released it amid a battle with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) over various related documents.

"This report makes it clear that the government continues to think it can buy its way out of constitutional protections using taxpayers’ own money," said EPIC law fellow, Chris Baumohl. "Congress must tackle the government’s data broker pipeline this year, before it considers any reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," he said (referring to the ongoing political fight over the so-called “crown jewel” of US surveillance, per Wired).

The ODNI's own panel of advisers makes clear that the government’s static interpretations of what constitutes “publicly available information” poses a significant threat to the public. The advisers decry existing policies that automatically conflate, in the first place, being able to buy information with it being considered “public.” The information being commercially sold about Americans today is “more revealing, available on more people (in bulk), less possible to avoid, and less well understood” than that which is traditionally thought of as being “publicly available.”

Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device's location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge's sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.” -Wired

What's more, the report notes that it's relatively easy to "deanonymize and identify individuals" based on data that was originally been anonymized prior to its commercial sale. According to the report, the data can do things like "identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records," posing serious civil liberty concerns over how "large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations."

The report goes on to say that in times past, access to sensitive information about a person was part of a "targeted" and "predicated" investigation. That's no longer the case.

"Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, [commercially available information] includes information on nearly everyone," it reads, adding that both the "volume and sensitivity" of information available for the government to purchase has exploded in recent years thanks to "location-tracking and other features of smartphones" as well as the "advertising-based monetization model" that underpins much of the internet.

According to the ODNI, this data "in the wrong hands" could be used against Americans "facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming" - all offenses that have been committed by intelligence agencies and the White House in the past.

"The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation," reads the report.

Read the report below:

Authored by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag via Public (emphasis ours),

After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, significant new evidence has emerged that strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.

More than three years after the pandemic’s outbreak, many around the world had given up on learning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the highly infectious respiratory virus that has killed millions, and the response to which shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.

Public officials in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly suggested that uncovering the pandemic’s origin may not be possible. “We may never know,” said Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who oversaw pandemic response for two administrations.

Now, answers increasingly look within reach. Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.

As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.

When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”

“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19. Shi is known as “the bat woman of China,” and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV. “He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him.”

Hu and Yu researched the novel lineage of SARS-like viruses from which SARS-CoV-2 hails, and in 2019 coauthored a paper with Shi Zhengli that described SARS-like lineages they had studied over the years.

Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing who raised questions starting in early 2020 about a possible research-related pandemic origin, said, “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else. That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”

Sources tell Public and Racket that other news organizations are chasing aspects of this story. On Saturday, The Times of London quoted an anonymous U.S. State Department investigator saying, “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation, and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Public and Racket are the first publications to reveal the names of the three sick WIV workers and place them directly in the lab that collected and experimented with SARS-like viruses poised for human emergence.

Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.

A bill signed by President Biden earlier this year specifically called for the release of the names and roles of the sick researchers at the WIV, their symptoms and date of symptom onset, and whether these researchers had been involved with or exposed to coronavirus research.

On Dec. 29, 2017, two years before the pandemic began, Chinese state-run television aired a video that includes a scene of Ben Hu watching a lab worker handle specimens. Neither are wearing protective gear. The same video shows WIV scientists hunting for bat viruses with little protective gear. “If they were worried about being infected in the field, they would need full body suits with no gaps” to be safe, said Chan. “That’s the only way.”

The WIV research with live SARS-like viruses was performed at too low of a safety level, “BSL-2,” explains Chan, “When we now know that the pandemic virus is even capable of escaping from a BSL-3 lab and infecting fully vaccinated young lab workers.”

While scientists justify such research as necessary for developing vaccines, President Barack Obama banned federal funding for gain-of-function research of concern in 2014, because experts had come to the consensus that it was too dangerous. However, the National Institute of Health and NIAID headed by Francis Collins and Fauci, and a major U.S. government grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, deemed their work on SARS-like viruses as not falling under the gain-of-function research of concern definitions and funded this project in China and Southeast Asia.

In March 2018, the WIV, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the University of North Carolina applied for a $14 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency DARPA to engineer “furin cleavage sites” into SARS-like coronaviruses to study how this affected their ability to grow and cause disease.

Scientists say the key piece of the COVID-19 virus, which made it so transmissible compared to its closest relatives, was its unique furin cleavage site.

DARPA rejected the grant, but it now appears the WIV went forward with the research anyway. The Times of London reported that US collaborators of the WIV had come forward and said the Wuhan scientists had put furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses in 2019.

Hu co-authored multiple papers on coronavirus research, including a 2017 paper on chimeric bat coronaviruses with Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, which was funded in part by the NIH and the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT Program. Data privately shared with the NIH revealed that these chimeric SARS-like viruses grew far more quickly and caused more severe disease in humanized mice in the lab.

When the WIV put out their first paper about the pandemic virus, they failed to point out the novel furin cleavage site despite having had plans to and allegedly putting such gain-of-function features into SARS-like viruses in their lab. “It’s as if these scientists proposed putting horns on horses, but when a unicorn shows up in their city a year later they write a paper describing every part of it except its horn,” said Chan.

Public sent emails and made phone calls to the NIH, WIV, EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak, Hu, and Shi over the last several days and did not hear back.

It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public. “You would expect the country of origin to be defensive,” said Chan, “but you wouldn’t expect a country receiving the virus to be withholding key evidence.”

On January 15, 2021, five days before President Joe Biden took office, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet that pointed to the likelihood of a lab leak as the cause of a pandemic.

Already, the State Department in 2021 suspected that the WIV had lied to the public. “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. That raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students by SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”

In February of this year, the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told a reporter that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

The Times of London reported that State Department investigators “found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.” As previously reported in Vanity Fair, some of the information State Department investigators found in 2021 was “sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed.”

“Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.”

Identifying the first COVID-19 case as a Wuhan Institute scientist overseeing gain-of-function research has significant ramifications for investigators in search of a motive for a cover-up.

Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China.

Publications ranging from the Washington Post to the Intercept to the Wall Street Journal have uncovered suggestive details, including the fact that the NIH awarded funding for at least 18 gain-of-function research projects between 2012 and 2020, and NIH scientists in 2016 expressing concern about supposedly paused hybrid “chimera” virus research.

Had the information come out earlier, governments may have responded to the pandemic differently. After Public shared the information with Chan, she said, “I feel vindicated, but I’m frustrated. If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen, there are so many things you could have done differently. This whole pandemic could have been reshaped.”

Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Monday dropped yet another bombshell in the recent spate of Biden corruption headlines - that the foreign national who allegedly bribed then-VP Joe Biden kept seventeen secret recordings of both Hunter and Joe Biden as an 'insurance' policy.

According to the Washington Examiner, that foreign national is Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

Two of the recordings are allegedly between Joe Biden

"The 1023 produced to that House Committee redacted reference that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them. Seventeen total recordings," Grassley said during a speech on the Senate floor.

"These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot. The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden," he continued. "More than that, the FBI made Congress review a redacted unclassified document in a classified facility. That goes to show you the disrespect the FBI has for Congress."

Watch:

Sen. @ChuckGrassley: “The foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe & Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversation[s], 17 such recordings. According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses 15 audio recordings of phone calls between him & Hunter Biden [and]… pic.twitter.com/HCcuqV7SUW

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 12, 2023

So the FBI covered up the claim that Burisma's owner had secret recordings between he and the Bidens as an 'insurance policy,' according to Grassley.

More via the Examiner;

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware is handling the ongoing federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden. It is allegedly up to U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump-appointed holdover, to decide whether to indict the president’s son. In February 2021, Joe Biden asked all Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys appointed by Trump for their resignations, with Weiss a rare exception.

“What is U.S. Attorney Weiss doing with respect to these alleged Joe and Hunter Biden recordings that are apparently relevant to the high-stakes bribery scheme?” Grassley asked Monday.

Sources previously told the Washington Examiner that the Burisma owner discussed an alleged bribe of $5 million to Joe Biden and of $5 million to Hunter Biden, according to the paid FBI informant who said he heard this from Zlochevsky. The sources said Zlochevsky said he believed it would be difficult to unravel the alleged bribery scheme for at least 10 years because of the number of bank accounts involved.

Zlochevsky’s alleged reference to Joe Biden as the “big guy” appears independent of the apparent reference to the now-president as the “big guy” by a Hunter Biden business associate during negotiations with Chinese intelligence-linked businessmen. The China-related reference occurred in a May 2017 email not made public until October 2020.

And as Just the News notes;

The FD-1023 includes allegations from a confidential human source that the head of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board in order to use his father's influence to stifle an investigation from then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin into the firm. Shokin was removed from his post in 2016 and the FD-1023 indicates that two Biden family members received $5 million each for their trouble.

Also on Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed Hunter Biden's former business partner, Devin Archer, demanding he sit for a deposition this week according to CBS News.

In a letter to Archer's attorney, Comer wrote that Archer had "played a significant role in the Biden family's business deals abroad, including but not limited to China, Russia, and Ukraine."

"Additionally, while undertaking these ventures with the Biden family, your client met with then-Vice President Biden on multiple occasions, including in the White House," he continued.

Archer's potential testimony to the GOP House Oversight Committee is a significant milestone in the congressional probe. Archer served alongside Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma, a Ukraine energy company, beginning in 2014. During this period, then-Vice President Joe Biden was deeply involved in Ukraine policy, an era when his opponents say the energy firm was involved in corruption.

An independent forensic review of Hunter Biden's laptop data by CBS News confirmed hundreds of communications between Hunter Biden and Archer, specifically, emails that suggest working meals were arranged before or after Burisma board meetings.  Archer is widely believed to have facilitated Hunter Biden's entry onto Burisma's board. -CBS News

Meanwhile, and we're sure it's unrelated, Biden had to cancel meetings today to take care of a sudden 'root canal.'

Joe Rogan didn't hold back during a recent podcast, calling President Joe Biden a 'cunt' for a career full of lies and international corruption. Rogan also condemned the establishment for holding former President Trump to a different standard.

Rogan was replying to guest Theo Von, who suggested that the president's handlers are to more blame for the sad, decrepit, national embarrassment Biden projects.

"It’s not cool to old people to do that to them," said Von, to which Rogan agreed - but argued that Biden is lucid enough to understand what's going on.

"He kind of does, and he’s kind of a cunt ... He's always been a cunt, though. You go back and listen to that guy lying about his education record and lying about his accomplishments and — like, he’s always been a problem."

"All the f------g stuff with his son and the ties to Ukraine and China and the money. The family, they got paid millions of dollars and everyone was trying to obscure it because, ‘Well, better than Trump. Better than Trump,’" Rogan told comedian Theo Von, adding that he "can't take it anymore."

"If that guy was a Republican, they would be up his ass with a microscope."

"I mean, it’s wild stuff, man. They even got the FBI involved in telling Twitter to censor the information about the laptop. It’s crazy," Rogan continued, adding: "The media is overwhelmingly left-leaning, and if you have a left-leaning politician or a left-wing Democratic politician, and then you have this media that essentially works to support that person."

Watch:

JOE ROGAN SPEAKING TRUTH!!! pic.twitter.com/TzOHrj9jtm

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) June 7, 2023

As we noted last week (via Summit News), Rogan also went off on companies for pushing transgender clothing.

“People are going ‘ENOUGH, ENOUGH.’ Stop shoving this down everybody’s throat. When I go to Target I don’t want to see like fucking tuck pants, like they’re designed to help you tuck your dick…That’s not normal, I don’t want that right in front of everybody. It’s weird," said Rogan.

“Target lost billions of dollars because they tried to have this pride selection. They had all these like pride children’s shirts,” Rogan emphasised, adding “this Bud Light thing with Dylan Mulvaney, they’ve lost $20+ billion.”

Rogan continued, “Can you imagine you’re just gonna send a fucking can to a confused person that ‘Day 365 of womanhood’ and you send that person a fucking can with their face on it and your company loses $20 billion?”

As usual, @joerogan is spot on when discussing how @Target and @budlight have now lost billions of dollars for choosing to shove woke products down everyone’s throats like it’s normal ????

Sound Up ???? pic.twitter.com/09wObmCB19

— ?????? KC ?????? (@KCPayTreeIt) June 7, 2023

 

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute,

The Democrats and Donald Trump reminds me of a bad horror movie, where the hapless protagonists only make the monster stronger with each attempt to eliminate it. So goes the Democrats’ endless attempts to finally rid America of the “scourge” of Donald Trump.

Thanks to the Durham Report we now know they started even before Trump was elected president.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign – with the full knowledge of the candidate and the sitting president, Barack Obama – cooked up a “dirty trick” to portray Trump as an agent of Russia in their effort to deny Trump the White House.

When that didn’t work they weaponized the FBI, CIA and the rest of the “deep state” to undermine and hobble his presidency.

They spied on Trump and his campaign staff using false information manufactured by the FBI.

When that didn’t work they impeached him under the false charge that he sought foreign assistance for his 2020 re-election bid.

This time a spy, in the person of NSC staffer Alexander Vindman, was sent to listen in on Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian president Zelensky and then make all manner of false charges against Trump based on it.

Democrats were furious that Trump was less than enthusiastic about their plans to use Ukraine as a proxy to go to war with Russia. Vindman, though an active-duty US military officer, was of Ukrainian background and was loyal to the country of his origin rather than the country of his citizenship. He also openly defied the military chain-of-command and his commander-in-chief. Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for their “Project Ukraine” infuriated Vindman and he sought his revenge against the US President.

When that didn’t work they impeached Trump again over the false charge that he led an “insurrection” against the US government on January 6, 2021. The more surveillance video we see of this “insurrection,” the more it looks like a false-flag operation cooked up perhaps by Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Washington swamp to finally be rid of Trump. Hundreds of political prisoners have been held in solitary confinement on false accusations that they tried to overthrow the US government.

When that didn’t work and Trump’s re-election numbers looked more and more favorable while Biden’s approval rating continued to linger in the political basement, the Democrats have now indicted him over some classified documents apparently discovered in his residence in Florida.

The boxes and boxes of classified documents discovered at multiple Biden locations have disappeared into the memory hole with the help of the media. Nothing to see here.

Suddenly Donald Trump, who polling suggests would obliterate Joe Biden in a fair US election, faces 100 years in prison!

Where else would you see the head of one political party arrest his main political opponent on cooked up charges? A banana republic!

For those of us who love this country, it is truly shocking to see this abuse of power. But there’s one thing these dirty tricksters never seem to understand: the more false evidence and false charges they cook up against Trump, the stronger Trump becomes.

With these outrageous and continuous attacks on Trump, the Democratic Party (and plenty of Republicans) has lost all credibility.

When this plan fails, and it will, I am afraid to think what they might try next.

The Finance website Insider Monkey used the latest homicide data to find which US cities have the highest number of murders so far this year. It is no surprise that many of the most dangerous metros are run by Democrats. 

Insider Monkey compiled a list of 30 US cities using the FBI's Quarterly Uniform Crime Report and police department data. For simplicity reasons, we're only concentrating on half of the list -- so 1-15. 

And what we discovered is that metros between 1-15 were all controlled by Democrats. Not shocking whatsoever, considering their social justice reform policies are backfiring and turning many metro areas into crime-ridden hellholes. 

Here are the top five most murderous cities so far this year: 

1. Chicago, Illinois: Murders in 2023: 166

2. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Murders in 2023: 165

3. Phoenix, Arizona: Murders in 2023: 137

4. Dallas, Texas: Murders in 2023: 126

5. Baltimore, Maryland: Murders in 2023: 112

And the rest... 

6. Houston, Texas: Murders in 2023: 109

7. Los Angeles, California: Murders in 2023: 102

8. New York City, New York: Murders in 2023: 100

9. Indianapolis, Indiana: Murders in 2023: 96

10. Kansas City, Missouri: Murders in 2023: 96

11. Detroit, Michigan: Murders in 2023: 89

12. Washington, DC: Murders in 2023: 89

13. Louisville, Kentucky: Murders in 2023: 89

14. Memphis, Tennessee: Murders in 2023: 81

15. St. Louis, Missouri: Murders in 2023: 65

The best thing law-abiding Americans can do if they're fed up with out-of-control crime spurred by Democrats' failed social justice reforms is to issue recall votes. That's exactly what San Francisco residents did with Soros-backed District Attorney Chesa Boudin last year. People can take it one step further and boycott these cities. 

Authored by Victoria Taft via PJ Media,

A leaked video shows that at least one Washington, D.C., cop – and likely more – acted on January 6 as apparent agent provocateurs, dressing as protesters, scaling scaffolding outside the Capitol Building, and urging protesters toward the iconic building. See the video below.

Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) says the authenticated GoPro video raises the question of why police officers, who were identified as intelligence officers, were working to stir up the crowd of protesters instead of working to stop an assault on the Capitol.

At one point in the video, the unidentified police officer equipped with the camera said to another he thought the idea was to get people inside the Capitol Building and trap them inside. The observation by the undercover officer leads one to conclude that there was intelligence about a plan to attack the Capitol and the apparent response by the police was to let them do it and take pictures.

When another alleged officer on the video saw people climbing the scaffolding, he told the officer with the GoPro, “That’s dangerous. Somebody’s going to get shot.” A third alleged officer said, “They’re not going to shoot anybody.” Yet, they encouraged and participated in the dangerous activity.

As the group of officers worked their way through the crowd and to the scaffolding, they joined in with the protesters’ chants, “Whose house? Our house!”

Loudermilk told the “Just the News, No Noise TV” show, “We know that it is one of their officers and at one point he is encouraging, and it appears he’s encouraging. He’s definitely helping people climb the scaffolding, and he’s telling them ‘go, go, go.'”

Naturally, the congressman wondered, “Why is an officer encouraging people to climb the scaffolding and go into the Capitol?” Further, he asked, “Why did the MPD Metropolitan Police support department decide to put undercover officers in the crowd? Was there intelligence that they had that was or was not passed on to the Capitol Police, and what did the Capitol police do with that evidence, if they got it?”

The Capitol Police were offered National Guard help by the Trump administration, which had been disturbed by intelligence reports of possible trouble. Those in charge of the Capitol Police, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, turned down the request for a military presence. The outside of the Capitol Building was not hardened, and the numbers of Capitol Police were not plussed-up to deny entry.

Just the News reported that a recent January 6 court case involving William and Michael Pope revealed the existence of the video. A defendant wanted a copy of the video, and federal prosecutors were concerned about it being out of their control, according to a court document  describing its contents:

The specific footage, GoPro video recorded by an MPD Police Officer who was stationed at the Capitol in an evidence-gathering capacity, captures the officer shouting words to the effect of “Go! Go! Go!” (MPD-005-000035 at time stamp 2:37), “Go! Go! Go!” (MPD-005-000035 at time stamp 7:23), and “Keeping going! Keep going!” (MPD-005-000035 at time stamp 8:16) apparently to the individuals in front of him on the balustrade of the U.S. Capitol’s northwest staircase around 2:15 p.m. At other times in these videos, the officer and the two other plain clothes officers with him appear to join the crowd around them in various chants, to include “drain the swamp,” “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”, and “whose house? Our house!”

Among the other ironies seen in this video is the warning to the officers by a person identified as a protester to be careful because Antifa provocateurs were among the crowd.

Though Antifa types were seen in the crowd and on video following the January 6 riot, media, cops, and eventually the embarrassing January 6 Committee tried to tamp down any talk about the Leftist mob playing any kind of role. Truth is, if Antifa hadn’t been there, it might have been a first, considering that a violent left-wing mob and their allies in BLM closed roads, rioted, and set the historical “President’s Church” on fire only months before in D.C.

Federal prosecutors argued that the video wasn’t germane to the Popes’ cases. They fretted that “while the videos are not relevant in this case, it is possible that the videos may be relevant in another case—either for the prosecution or for the defense.” They further argued, “Allowing these videos to be utilized in the manner in which the defendant now seeks may jeopardize the rights and safety of others who have been or may later be charged for their conduct on that day.” Try not to laugh.

The American people have the right to know if their police, institutions, and politicians are leveling with them about January 6. This video and the effort to keep it from the public sure seem shady. They expect us to trust them. Sadly, after watching these charlatans on the executive floors of the FBI and DOJ, it’s clear we can’t trust these people anymore.

The congressman has sent a letter to law enforcement asking for more information about police in the J6 crowd on that day in 2021.

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Wire,

The custodian of Joe Biden’s vice presidential records, a key witness in his classified documents probe, was caught up in another documents scandal while working at the Commerce Department during the Clinton administration, court records reveal.

Longtime Biden aide and gatekeeper Kathy S. Chung, who has been interviewed by federal prosecutors and congressional investigators in the Biden case, was part of a team sanctioned for withholding and even destroying key documents in the federal case that sought sensitive records from a central figure in the so-called Chinagate fundraising investigation of the late 1990s, RealClearInvestigations has learned exclusively.

A special prosecutor is now investigating whether Biden unlawfully handled top secret materials in early 2017, when he tasked Chung with removing boxes containing classified documents from the White House and storing them at various private offices in D.C., including the Chinatown neighborhood. Some of the highly sensitive papers also ended up at his home in Wilmington, Del.

Noting that Chung came into Biden’s orbit through working with the president’s son, Hunter, during the 1990s, congressional investigators want to know if the Biden family dealings in China have anything to do with the stockpiling of classified documents. They note that the mishandling of White House papers took place during the 14-month period in 2017-2018 when the Chinese were wiring almost $6 million in payments to Hunter and his uncle Jimmy Biden without providing any known legitimate services. They have expressed concern that the payments, which were flagged by the U.S. Treasury Department, were part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering operation. 

Chung is central to the Justice Department’s investigation of Biden’s breach of classified documents. 

On Jan. 4, federal agents interviewed Chung while working with an investigative team led by U.S. Attorney John Lausch, who was tasked to conduct a preliminary probe of the security breach. Alarmed by what his investigators reported back to him about Chung's role in the possible illegal removal and retention of state secrets, Lausch urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel. The following day Garland complied, naming veteran federal prosecutor Robert K. Hur to take over the criminal case as special counsel. Hur's office reportedly has obtained more than 100 pages of documents from Chung, including emails and text messages.

While Donald Trump and Mike Pence are also under investigation for removing classified documents from the White House and storing them at their private residences, GOP congressional investigators say comparisons to Trump and Pence miss the point. In interviews with RCI, they insisted that Biden's document scandal is potentially more serious than just mishandling state secrets. They suspect it could mushroom into a counterespionage case involving China and national security, though the White House dismisses such speculation as “baseless.”

Chung’s lawyer Bill Taylor did not return a request for comment. But in an earlier statement, he scolded Republicans for “suggesting someone is a traitor without any evidence."

Chung’s dual role – as an aide to Joe Biden when he was vice president and a friend of Hunter Biden, who emails show received sensitive information from Chung from his father’s office – further highlights the murky ethics that exist between the Biden family’s public service and business interests.

Hunter Biden and Chung have a long history dating back to their days working together at the Commerce Department during Bill Clinton’s presidency. It was there that Chung – a longtime Democrat working in the federal bureaucracy – became a witness in a case involving convicted Chinagate fundraiser Jian-Nan “John" Huang, who was a top Commerce official.

In 1993, President Clinton named Huang, a China-born banker friend from Little Rock, deputy assistant secretary of international economic affairs at Commerce, where he was responsible for Asian trade matters. Within a month, Huang was given a top secret security clearance and received twice-weekly intelligence briefings by CIA analysts. At the same time, it was later revealed, he was meeting regularly with Chinese diplomats and other officials tied to Beijing.

Watchdog group Judicial Watch sought documents concerning Huang’s access to trade secrets and his trips to China. Chung was one of the administrators responsible for producing such documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

But the department was sanctioned for withholding and even destroying key documents in the federal case ‒ Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Commerce, et al ‒ in which Huang was listed as the lead defendant. After U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled Commerce's search “grossly inadequate” and “unlawful,” Chung and her superiors were ordered to conduct another search. Still, Chung came up short in producing Huang-related documents from the computer of her boss, Melissa Moss, in the Office of Business Liaison, according to her sworn declaration in the case, a copy of which was obtained by RCI. A Clinton appointee like Hunter Biden, Moss worked with Huang on controversial Asian and other foreign trade junkets for Democrat donors. She came to Commerce from the Democratic National Committee, where she had served as finance director.

“In performing this search, I was assisted by an employee of the Computer Help Desk who informed me that some documents could not be opened,” Chung told the court in the 1999 affidavit, which was never uploaded to PACER, the electronic federal court records system. (After several requests to the court, Leayrohn King, a records clerk for the U.S. District Court for D.C., provided RCI a copy of Chung's declaration and commented that it was odd that it was missing from PACER. The court has since made it available in the online docket system.)

Chung, who now works as a top aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, was not directly accused of wrongdoing. But lawyers for Judicial Watch complained her department was covering up for Huang, whom they suspected was trading government secrets and access to China.

While Chung remained at the Commerce Department, Huang left to work for the Clinton reelection effort. He raised almost $3 million for the DNC and Clinton in 1996, half of which was later found illegal or improper and returned because the donations came from foreign sources, many of them tied to Beijing.

The Justice Department, through a specially appointed task force, investigated Huang as a possible “agent of influence” for China. In 1999, Huang pleaded guilty to a felony violation of campaign finance laws for arranging illegal foreign donations. Even though the felony charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, he was sentenced to one year of probation and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation of several co-conspirators.

After Hunter Biden left the Commerce Department in 2001, where he served as executive director of e-commerce policy, he joined a K Street law firm founded by William Oldaker, a major political donor of his father. Records obtained by RCI show lawyers for Oldaker, Biden & Belair LLP represented another boss of Chung at the Commerce Department in the ongoing FOIA case, which wasn’t settled until 2004.

A decade later, Hunter recommended his father hire Chung as his personal assistant in the Office of Vice President, according to emails found on his abandoned laptop. Starting in July 2012, Chung was responsible for overseeing then-Vice President Biden’s office affairs, including handling his briefing books and scheduling his travel abroad. She handled the details for Hunter Biden's controversial 2013 trip to Beijing with the vice president, during which Hunter met with Chinese investment partners and arranged for his father to shake one of their hands. Emails show Chung also invited Hunter to attend a 2015 lunch with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the State Department.

In January 2017, as Biden moved out of the White House, Chung helped pack 13 boxes with files from his office cabinets and store them at a transition office nearby, according to a partial transcript of Chung’s recent deposition taken behind closed doors at the Capitol. Around July 2017, Chung reloaded the boxes in her car and moved them to a private office that she leased in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, before they ended up early the next year at the China-funded Penn Biden Center in D.C., according to the transcript.

The boxes turned out to contain dozens of highly classified documents, including ones so secret they could only be viewed in a Sensitive Compartment Information Facility, or SCIF. Yet they were found last year in an unlocked storage room at the center that required no key to access. (The White House initially claimed, falsely, they were stored in a “locked closet.”) Prosecutors are investigating the chain of custody of those loosely stored intelligence papers to determine whether any were copied or passed through foreign hands.

Chung, who held a Top Secret security clearance and had experience handling and identifying classified documents, told congressional investigators she was unaware the boxes contained classified material – even though some of the file folders in the boxes were emblazoned with cover sheets stating they contained secret government documents. She insisted she never noticed any classified papers or saw any classified markings, even though she unpacked the boxes when she relocated them to the center and then re-packed them last summer at the request of Biden’s lawyers.

At least 20 highly classified papers marked at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level were found at the center, which the FBI searched earlier this year. The materials reportedly covered Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom, among other foreign countries. 

Chung helped Biden research his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” It’s not known if Biden or Chung referenced any of the materials from the boxes for his book, which was published in November 2017 and revealed insider accounts of Biden’s various roles in U.S. foreign policy, including Ukraine. Biden listed Chung first among people he acknowledged for their contributions: “Thank you for all of this, and more, to Kathy Chung.”

Overlapping Scandals?

Hunter first made contact with Chinese executives with CEFC China Energy, a suspected front for Chinese intelligence, in 2015. Emails found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop show a CEFC adviser arranged a private Washington dinner in December 2015 with Hunter and then-CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming, who reportedly has ties to the Chinese military. 

In an email Chung sent to Hunter Biden that same year, she included a list of personal cell phone numbers for high-profile Washington officials, including then-White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and several Cabinet secretaries, as well as Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and a number of powerful senators and members of Congress. 

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer speculated that Hunter may have been trying to "prove his worth to these people that were paying these enormous sums of money to him,” in part by “showing them he had cell numbers for powerful individuals.”

Chung continued her dealings with Hunter Biden after she left the White House. On Feb. 2, 2017, shortly after Chung packed up Biden’s White House files, Hunter emailed Chung to ask her to “come work with me ... so that I can make everyone money.” The next year, messages found on Hunter’s laptop show Chung sent Biden family members a link to an encrypted messaging app called Signal and urged them to install it on their electronic devices.

Later in February 2017, Hunter received an $80,000 diamond from Ye, who left the rare gem with a thank-you note at Hunter's hotel room after they met in Miami. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Hunter admitted taking the expensive stone, though he says he doubts it was meant as a bribe.

Comer said he is investigating whether the Bidens' Chinese partners “had access to the classified documents found.” He noted that Hunter Biden, in 2017, planned to share office space in D.C. with another one of his Chinese partners, Gongwen “Kevin" Dong, who was the CEFC money man who signed off on the wire payments to the Bidens.

“This level of access and opportunity raises questions about who had access to the classified documents,” Comer said.

In November 2017, another Biden partner from China ‒ CEFC’s Patrick Ho ‒ was arrested by FBI agents on charges of bribery and money laundering. According to federal documents obtained by RCI, the FBI raided CEFC's D.C.-area offices shortly after Ho’s arrest and searched them for evidence. The FBI had been "electronically monitoring” Ho as a suspected Chinese spy under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap warrant, the documents further reveal.

Within months of learning his Chinese partner had been arrested, property records show Hunter terminated the lease on his own D.C. office and closed the facility, where he'd made keys for both Dong and his father, Joe Biden, according to emails found on his abandoned laptop. That same month – February 2018 – the former vice president opened a D.C. office for the China-funded Penn Biden Center, where Hunter maintained access.

It’s not known if any White House records were stored at Hunter's Georgetown office or transferred from there to the Penn Biden Center about four miles away. The center is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, which has received several million dollars from anonymous Chinese sources since opening the center. But Hunter's  arrangement with his Chinese benefactors clearly raised counterintelligence alarms at the FBI, which began monitoring their communications. For whatever reason, the Bidens were never prosecuted as unregistered foreign agents and their own offices were never raided. Biden’s unauthorized removal and storage of classified intelligence went unnoticed – until after the 2022 congressional elections.

Chung, who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign, was grilled on Capitol Hill about her access to and handling of classified information in April. She gave sworn testimony to the House Oversight Committee for roughly four hours behind closed doors.

Comer suggested earlier this year in a Fox News interview that his investigators were looking into possible ties between Chung and the Chinese Communist Party. Fox host Maria Bartiromo asked if Chung was "reporting back to the CCP about any of” the former vice president’s documents, and Comer replied, “We’re looking into that.”

Added Comer, "We’re looking into at least three different people that Hunter Biden was directly involved with that have very close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Ties to Chinese Communists 

Comer noted that when Chung was in the White House, she fed Hunter Biden sensitive information on U.S. political leaders that he said Beijing would covet. In her April 4 interview with House Oversight investigators, Chung denied having a relationship with the CCP, according to excerpts of her testimony released by Democrats earlier this month.

Chung also insisted she never shared classified information with anyone who wasn't cleared to read it, which ostensibly would include Hunter Biden. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight panel, said Comer was spreading falsehoods based on a “bigoted conspiracy theory.” 

House investigators want to know what the Chinese got for the massive payments they wired to President Biden’s son, brother, and several other family members. Were they using their contacts with the Bidens to gather U.S. intelligence? Were any White House records stored at Hunter’s Georgetown office, where his Chinese partners had access?

In a recent letter to Hunter Biden, Comer requested, under threat of subpoena, that the president’s son provide any documents in his possession designated “classified” government property, along with any communications with Dong, Ho, Ye, and other CEFC officials. Separately, he has asked the University of Pennsylvania for a list of people who had keycard access to the Penn Biden Center. He also requested administrators turn over the visitor logs for the center.

“It is imperative to understand whether any Biden family members or associates gained access to the classified documents while stored at the Penn Biden Center,” Comer said.

According to emails found on Hunter’s laptop, Joe Biden was a silent partner in the CEFC deal that netted his son and brother millions. The documents show Hunter claiming that 10% of the Chinese payments were set aside for “the big guy.” Former partner Tony Bobulinski has confirmed that “the big guy” was Joe Biden.

CEFC is the capitalist arm of Chinese President Xi’s “Belt and Road Initiative” to spread China’s influence around the world while gobbling up oil and gas rights. China has sought to influence powerful officials, particularly to gain access to U.S. energy markets, which are heavily regulated.

Among the classified documents Biden reportedly had removed from the West Wing are sensitive compartmented briefings about Iran, where Beijing has been injecting billions of dollars in direct foreign investment to extract cheap oil.

“It would be reasonable to suspect that Ye and his associates intended to use their contacts with Jim [Biden] and Hunter to gather intelligence” about such critical foreign countries, said Ben Schreckinger, author of “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power.”

Bobulinski says the Chinese weren’t looking to make a “healthy” return on investment, but rather were partnering with the Bidens "as a political or influence investment.” He noted the CEFC partners were Chinese intelligence and understood the value of the Biden name.

In a May 2017 email, Jimmy Biden provided Hunter, Bobulinski, and other partners a list of friendly American political contacts whom they could exploit to advance the proposed joint venture with their Chinese partners. Among the “key domestic contacts” were Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York; then-Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo; former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe; and then-Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who would go on to become Biden’s vice president.

Republicans have slammed Biden for being soft on China. When Beijing flew a giant spy balloon across the continental U.S. and collected highly sensitive data from U.S. military sites, Biden did not order Defense Secretary Austin to shoot down the spycraft for several days, and only after public outcry.

In July 2021, Biden named his trusted aide Chung a top assistant to Austin, where she has access to sensitive Pentagon information. The Pentagon and White House declined to answer questions about the level of Chung’s access to classified military intelligence and the extent of her role in handling such material.

Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The FBI is warning the public that criminals are taking social media photos and videos to create deepfakes in sextortion schemes.

The agency issued the warning in a public service announcement on June 6, drawing attention to how malicious actors take advantage of image and video editing tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to create deepfakes, which are fake media created from otherwise benign content.

“The FBI continues to receive reports from victims, including minor children and non-consenting adults, whose photos or videos were altered into explicit content,” the agency said in the alert. “The photos or videos are then publicly circulated on social media or pornographic websites, for the purpose of harassing victims or sextortion schemes.”

The agency noted that it has observed an increase in the number of victims reporting sextortion as of April this year, with fake media being created using “content posted on their social media sites or web postings, provided to the malicious actor upon request, or captured during video chats.”

Typically, malicious actors have two different demands, according to the FBI. They either want victims to provide money or gift cards in exchange for not sharing the fake images or photos with their family members or social media friends, or have victims provide real sexually-themed images or videos of themselves.

As a result, the FBI urges the public to “exercise caution” when posting photos and videos of themselves online, including social media and dating apps.

“Although seemingly innocuous when posted or shared, the images and videos can provide malicious actors an abundant supply of content to exploit for criminal activity,” the agency said.

“Advancements in content creation technology and accessible personal images online present new opportunities for malicious actors to find and target victims,” the agency added. “This leaves them vulnerable to embarrassment, harassment, extortion, financial loss, or continued long-term re-victimization.”

The FBI shared a list of recommendations, including asking parents to monitor their children’s online activities and run frequent online searches of their children’s information to know what is publicly available.

“Consider using reverse image search engines to locate any photos or videos that have circulated on the internet without your knowledge,” a recommendation says.

Other recommendations include implementing privacy settings on social media accounts, and exercising caution when accepting friend requests and engaging in video chats.

Warnings

In recent years, U.S. authorities have been issuing warnings about deepfake technology.

In June 2022, the FBI issued a warning about the increasing number of complaints reporting the use of deepfake videos during interviews for remote job positions to gain access to sensitive data.

“The remote work or work-from-home positions identified in these reports include information technology and computer programming, database, and software-related job functions. Notably, some reported positions include access to customer PII [personally identifiable information], financial data, corporate IT databases and/or proprietary information,” the agency said in an announcement.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a consumer alert in March, alerting the public that criminals have been using deepfake audios to trick victims into believing their loved ones have been kidnapped.

“A scammer could use AI to clone the voice of your loved one. All he needs is a short audio clip of your family member’s voice—which he could get from content posted online—and a voice-cloning program,” the commission wrote. “When the scammer calls you, he’ll sound just like your loved one.”

In such a situation, the FTC asks people to hang up, particularly if the caller wants to be paid via wire transfer, cryptocurrency, or a gift card.

“Don’t trust the voice. Call the person who supposedly contacted you and verify the story. Use a phone number you know is theirs. If you can’t reach your loved one, try to get in touch with them through another family member or their friends,” the commission said.

Legislation

In May, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill to make sharing sexualized non-consensual deepfakes illegal.

The legislation, known as the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act (H.R.3106), would ban the non-consensual disclosure of digitally altered intimate images and make sharing these images a criminal offense.

“The spread of A.I.-generated and altered images can cause irrevocable emotional, financial, and reputational harm—and unfortunately, women are disproportionately impacted,” Morelle said in a statement accompanying the bill’s introduction.

“As artificial intelligence continues to evolve and permeate our society, it’s critical that we take proactive steps to combat the spread of disinformation and protect individuals from compromising situations online,” he added. “I’m proud to have introduced this legislation that takes common-sense steps to protect their privacy, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to pass it into law.”

Fran Drescher, president of SAG-AFTRA, applauded the legislation.

“This bill will help curb an incredibly destructive practice that strikes at the heart of personal privacy, safety and autonomy. Sexual abuse, whether occurring physically or digitally, should never be excused or permitted as ‘personal expression,’ and it should never be tolerated,” he said in a statement.

Drescher added: “Deepfakes are violations, objectification and exploitation, and must be made illegal and punishable by law. This bill is a powerful step to ensure that this technology is not used to cause harm.”

Someone has leaked the contents of the stonewalled FBI document, form FD-1023, which alleges that President Joe Biden was paid $5 million by an executive of Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where his son Hunter sat on the board.

This, according to a confidential human source, who told this to the FBI during a June 2020 interview, according to Fox News.

The form, dated June 30, 2020, is from a "highly credible" confidential human source who had detailed multiple meetings and conversations they had with a top Burisma executive over the course of several years, beginning in 2015. The CHS had been working with the FBI as a regular, reliable source of information since 2010, and has been paid approximately $200,000 by the bureau.

The Burisma executive sought the advice of the confidential source, a business professional, on gaining U.S. oil rights and getting involved with a U.S. oil company, the sources familiar with the documdnt said. The Burisma executive was speaking with the confidential source to "get advice on the best way to go forward" in 2015 and 2016.

According to the FD-1023 form, the confidential human source said the Burisma executive discussed Hunter’s role on the board. The confidential human source questioned why the Burisma executive needed his or her advice in acquiring access to U.S. oil if he had Hunter Biden on the board. The Burisma executive answered by referring to Hunter Biden as "dumb." -Fox News

According to the Burisma executive, the company had to "pay the Bidens" because Ukraine's lead prosecutor, Victor Shokin, was investigating Burisma.

According to the CHS, he suggested that the Burisma executive "pay the Bidens $50,000 each," to which the Burisma executive replied "not $50,000," it is "$5 million."

"$5 million for one Biden, $5 million for the other Biden," the executive reportedly said.

The $5 million payments appeared to reference some sort of "retainer" Burisma intended to pay the Bidens in order to 'clean up' several issues - including the investigation led by Shokin. Another source told Fox it was a "pay-to-play" scheme.

The CHS believes that the $5 million payment to Joe Biden and $5 million to Hunter happened, as the Burisma executive said he "paid" the Bidens is a way "through so many different bank accounts" that investigators would not be able to "unravel this for at least 10 years."

The document also makes reference to 'the Big Guy,' thought (and as seen on Hunter's laptop) to be a reference to Joe Biden.

According to the Burisma executive, they "didn't pay the Big Guy directly." Meanwhile, sources tell Fox that the Burisma executive appears to be at a "very, very high level" of the company, with one source suggesting it could be the president, Mykola Zlochevsky - though the executive's name is redacted in the document.

Biden notably bragged on camera about a quid-pro-quo arrangement to have Shokin fired.

"I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in,' I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money," Biden said in 2018 at a Council for Foreign Relations event, recalling a conversation with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

"Well, son of a bitch, he got fired," he continued. "And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."

Of course we would be remiss if we didn't note that this is exactly what Trump was impeached for asking about, after a 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy - who Trump asked to launch investigations into the Biden family, particularly Hunter's dealings with Burisma, and Joe Biden's involvement in Shokin's ouster.

The confidential source, according to the sources familiar with the FD-1023 form, told the Burisma executive he should "get away" from the Bidens and said the executive should "not want to be involved" with them.

A source familiar with the document told Fox News Digital that the confidential human source goes on to detail a later conversation with the Burisma executive following the 2016 presidential election. The confidential source asked the Burisma executive if he was "upset" that Donald Trump won.

The source said the Burisma executive told the confidential source that he was "an oracle," referring to his or her advice to "get away" from the Bidens due to fears of potential investigations into their dealings. -Fox News

The revelations came to pass after a whistleblower approached GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) to let them know that the FBI was in possession of the FD-1023.

During a Thursday joint press conference with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, President Joe Biden called allegations by the House Oversight Committee of his involvement in an international bribery scheme are a "bunch of malarkey."

The comments mark the first time Biden has publicly commented on on GOP claims that he was directly involved in such a scheme, the Daily Caller reports, nothing that Republicans on the Committee have obtained access to an FBI document earlier in the day after threatening FBI Director Chris Wray with contempt for stonewalling on the material.

https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1666883364911972386?s=20Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sits on the committee, told the Daily Caller that the information in the document “implicates Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scheme bribery scheme to get a prosecutor fired that was investigating Burisma where Hunter Biden sat on the board.”

The FBI initially didn’t want to show the committee members the FD-1023 document in fears of exposing the identity of the source who made the allegations against Biden. Greene said committee members were not allowed to take notes and that the FBI informant is “extremely credible.” -Daily Caller

After NY Post journalist Steven Nelson asked Biden on Thursday for his response to the allegations, Biden replied:

"Where’s the money? I’m joking," adding "It's a bunch of malarkey."

The document in question is part of a larger House Oversight investigation including Hunter Biden and his connections to foreign prostitutes, Greene told the Caller last month.

The House Oversight Committee published a report on May 10 alleging that the Biden family received $10 million from foreign assets in Romania and China while Joe Biden was vice president.

The White House has previously criticized the Republican investigation into the Biden family. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said he had not read the report, but that he had “no” national security concerns about it. -Daily Caller

At another point in the Q&A, Biden claimed he has never directed the DOJ to charge anyone with anything.

pic.twitter.com/1HUHgNULPH

— Swig ???? (@OldRowSwig) June 8, 2023

Not a joke...

Authored by Kash Patel via RealClear Wire,

The elite set of individuals that sit atop our federal agencies have completely weaponized our entire government apparatus. It is no longer a one-off “mistake,” but rather the intentional creation of a two-tier system of justice that has gone unchecked. The resulting impact is a death knell for American faith in all three branches of government. 

Allow me to preface with one important factor: This is not an indictment of the men and women who are our “boots on the ground.” They remember every day why they signed up to serve. They investigate real crimes, protect the public from acts of terror, and root out rampant corruption. These men and women across the country serving in all agencies remain heroes and are equally as frustrated with the leadership at the top of our federal government.   

The two-tier system of justice is not Democrats vs. Republicans. It is anyone who is part of the administrative state and the D.C. beltway versus those who seek to destroy this political demon of the deep state. It is government gangsters against everyone else.

When it comes to the U.S. government, there are no coincidences. Anything that masquerades as such is a strategic move to protect the upper echelons from ceding power to the proletariat they once rose from. Whether it’s Russiagate, Impeachment #1, Impeachment #2, Jan. 6 Committee, Hunter’s laptop, classified docs, or an intel letter from 51 of our highest “servants,” they layered this two-tier system of justice by doing the same thing at each level – breaking the law. Illegal surveillance, unlawful congressional overreach, and judicial hustling have joined forces, and the result is a destruction of justice. 

Case in point: Christopher Wray, a stunning example when it comes to the dual standard of justice and hypocrisy. Wray violated a congressional subpoena. By doing so, the director of the FBI has continuously broken the law and simultaneously destroyed the leadership reputation of the FBI. The days of justice and accountability within our federal government are fleeting, at best. What if you violated a congressional subpoena, what are the ramifications? No need to wonder, just ask Steven Bannon and Peter Navarro. Don’t count on this DOJ to police its own, especially when the narrative being put forth by the document in question nukes the radical left’s pyramid of Jenga justice.

Yesterday, he had one final out, and showed his true lack of institutional control, or better yet its hijacking. He told Chairman Comer to pound sand, so now Congress must hold the line. Ransack these agencies and departments, and hold those who exploit the two-tier system of justice accountable – every single one of them. For starters, take their money, take their fancy government toys, and take Wray’s government-funded G5 jet. You must produce these critical documents and show them to the world, then do it again and again. 

Congress’ oversight authority is the last bulwark against the total erosion of justice. When you have leadership at DOJ, FBI, and the intelligence community all bending the knee to radical agendas to feed their own egos for the sole purpose of maintaining power, someone must answer the call. Some in Congress have shown exceptional leadership with their steadfast approach to exposing criminality and government corruption. They must stay the course and utilize Congress’ budgeting process to bring our agencies back into the fold. The only thing these corrupt leaders yield to is money, our taxpayer dollars. And so now, it must be taken, in part. No overcorrection, just enough to remind them they serve the American people, and to restore respect for each coordinate branch of government.

I’d sum it up, but Sen. Chuck Grassley’s recent assessment of Director Wray that he is treating Congress like “second-class citizens” resonates impactfully enough. Will it shake loose congressional hammers, or will we continue to live in two-tier systems of justice? America’s constitutional mandate to return to a single system of justice is at stake.

Kash Patel is an attorney and author and served as the chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller in the Trump administration.

Authored by Aaron Maté via RealClear Wire,

Special Counsel John Durham’s final report faults the FBI for opening the Trump-Russia collusion investigation on baseless grounds and relying on Hillary Clinton-funded material to pursue it, all while ignoring a warning that Clinton was plotting to frame Trump as a Russian asset. Yet Durham does not address the Clinton campaign’s equally central tie to Russiagate’s other foundational allegation: that Russia interfered in the 2016 election by hacking Democratic party servers and releasing the material through Wikileaks to help elect Trump.

Durham’s silence on the Clinton team’s role in generating this unproven claim comes despite his unearthing of evidence that newly calls it into question.

Material obtained by Durham’s team shows that the Clinton campaign and its contractor, the cyber-firm CrowdStrike, stonewalled the FBI’s requests for critical data about the alleged Russian hack. Two key Clinton associates who were integral to the Russian hacking claim also appear to have perjured themselves before Congress.

RealClearInvestigations has pieced together these overlooked revelations through court documents connected to Durham’s probe, particularly his unsuccessful prosecution of Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann on a separate perjury charge.

In April 2016, Sussmann hired CrowdStrike to investigate the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). In mid-June just as Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS were producing their first Clinton-funded dossier report alleging a Trump-Russia conspiracy Clinton-funded CrowdStrike came forward to publicly accuse Russia of hacking the Democrats’ computer networks. Sussmann, who worked closely with the firm, lobbied the FBI to endorse the allegation. The FBI initially declined, but reversed course months later despite failing to examine the DNC/DCCC servers. Instead, much like its use of Steele’s dossier for surveillance warrants and investigative leads when it came to collusion, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics and redacted reports.

The FBI’s dependency on CrowdStrike – and, indeed, the entire basis for the Russiagate probe was further called into question when it emerged that the firm’s president had admitted under oath that it “did not have concrete evidence” of Russian hacking. Shawn Henry, a former close FBI colleague of Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey, made the disclosure to Congress in December 2017. Yet his testimony was kept secret throughout the entirety of the FBI’s Comey- and Mueller-overseen Russia probes, and only became public in May 2020.

Exhibits released by Durham in Sussmann’s case expose a new problem for CrowdStrike and its client the Clinton campaign: In recounting their roles in the FBI’s Russian hacking probe in congressional testimony, Sussmann and Henry gave identical false statements.

FBI Officials Contradicted

When they appeared before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, both Sussmann and Henry claimed that the FBI did not try to conduct its own independent, onsite investigation of the Democratic Party servers. The pair’s account contradicted FBI officials, including Comey, who have said that they requested access but were denied.

Asked directly if the FBI sought access to the servers, Sussmann replied: “No, they did not.” He then added a caveat: “Excuse me, not to my knowledge.” The FBI, Sussmann added, “would have” had access “if they wanted it ... But it wasn't something that they were interested in at the time.”

CrowdStrike’s Henry also told the committee that he was “not aware” of the FBI ever asking for access to the servers or being denied it. Asked directly if he was ever told that the FBI  “required access to the servers,” Henry said: “I have no recollection of them saying that to me or anybody on my team, no.”

Henry and Sussmann’s accounts are not only at direct odds with the FBI, but with their own emails that Durham obtained.

In October 2016, these emails show, the FBI directly asked Sussmann if the bureau could come onsite to inspect and copy the servers. Sussmann relayed that request to Henry and other CrowdStrike executives – who promptly stonewalled it.

In an October 13, 2016 exchange, Elvis Chan, a special agent in the FBI’s San Francisco office, asked Sussmann if the “DNC/DCCC would be amenable to letting FBI computer forensics personnel onsite to conduct the imaging” of the servers. “In theory, sure,” Sussmann replied, adding that he would “put you directly in touch with CrowdStrike.”

Contradicting what he would tell Congress the following year, Sussmann informed Henry and others at CrowdStrike that the FBI is “asking whether FBI computer forensics personnel can come ‘onsite’ to conduct the imaging.” Sussmann added that he was “connecting CrowdStrike and the Bureau to discuss directly on this email chain.”

In response, CrowdStrike executive Justin Weissert did not address the FBI’s request for onsite access. Weissert instead introduced a new proposal: CrowdStrike would send the FBI a copy of the firm’s imaging of the servers.

“As we just discussed under a separate email thread, CrowdStrike wants to assist with this effort and, given the nature of the past activities and our commitment to supporting our friends at the FBI, we’re going to move ahead with providing the information at no additional expense to anyone,” Weissert wrote.

Rather than remind CrowdStrike that he had asked if FBI cyber experts could come “onsite to conduct the imaging,” Chan accepted the offer and provided a mailing address. “FBI San Francisco greatly appreciates your help,” he wrote.

Given that Sussmann personally received the FBI’s request and relayed it to CrowdStrike, his erroneous recollection is especially suspect.

Asked about their false statements to Congress, Sussmann and Henry did not respond to RCI’s questions by the time of publication. CrowdStrike also did not respond to a request for comment. 

A Missed Opportunity

In failing to address this episode, Durham missed an opportunity to press Sussmann and Henry on why they denied the FBI access to the DNC servers – and whether their false statements to Congress amounted to a criminal offense. By contrast, the Mueller team aggressively prosecuted four Trump associates for alleged false statements, including two cases – Roger Stone and Michael Cohen – for perjury before Congress.

The Durham materials also reveal that the FBI’s failure to examine the DNC servers was not its only rebuffed request. Emails obtained by Durham show that CrowdStrike and the Clinton campaign ignored what the FBI listed as its number one “Priority Requests”: “Un-redacted copies of CrowdStrike reports” on both the DNC and DCCC “incidents.” That request, also made to Sussmann, came in a September 30, 2016, email from FBI Special Agent E. Adrian Hawkins.

The FBI never got what it wanted. In a May 2019 court filing, the Justice Department disclosed that the U.S. government “does not possess” CrowdStrike's unredacted originals, and that Sussmann only provided “three draft reports” in redacted form.

In Senate testimony, James Trainor, then-assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, recalled that he was "frustrated" with the CrowdStrike report he received in late August 2016 and "doubted its completeness" because Sussmann had “scrubbed” it. According to Trainor, the DNC's cooperation in the hacking probe was "moderate" overall and "slow and laborious in many respects.”

CrowdStrike’s redacted reports were provided to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, but have not been publicly released. The FBI has denied RCI’s Freedom of Information Act requests for the CrowdStrike reports, releasing only the documents’ cover pages.

Changing the FBI's Messaging

Other emails released by Durham in Sussmann’s case show that the Clinton lawyer personally reviewed and edited an FBI public statement on the alleged hack of the DNC.

On July 29, 2016 – just one week after WikiLeaks released a trove of embarrassing Democratic Party emails – the FBI drafted a press release on what it called “a possible cyber intrusion involving the DCCC.” Trainor contacted Sussmann for input.

“A draft response is provided below,” Trainor wrote. “Wanted to get your thoughts on this prior to sending out.”

In response, Sussmann took exception with the FBI’s mention of a “possible” hack. This qualifier, he noted, contradicted the Clinton campaign’s messaging on a Russian intrusion.

“The draft you sent says only that the FBI is aware of media reports; it does not say that the FBI is aware of the intrusion that the DCCC reported,” Sussmann wrote. “Indeed, it refers only to a ‘possible’ cyber intrusion and in that way undermines what the DCCC said in its statement (or at least calls into question what the DCCC said).”

Accordingly, Sussmann suggested new language that removed the FBI’s caveat of a “possible” hack. Trainor accepted the Clinton lawyer’s edit. “I am fine with the below suggestions,” he wrote.

The FBI’s failure to obtain both direct access to the DNC servers and unredacted copies of the CrowdStrike reports further calls into question U.S. intelligence officials’ claim that Russia hacked the DNC.

On October 7, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a joint statement claiming, for the first time, that the “U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails” from the Democratic Party. Jeh Johnson, who then served as DHS secretary, later testified that President Obama “approved the statement” and “wanted us to make [it].”

Yet as Durham’s Sussmann-FBI emails confirm, this Obama-approved claim was released one week before CrowdStrike denied the FBI’s request for an “onsite” inspection. This timing means that when the intelligence community made its first public attribution of Russian hacking, it had not only failed to inspect the servers, but had not even received CrowdStrike’s copies of them.

When the FBI and DHS released a more detailed report two months later, the document described the alleged Russian hacking effort as "likely leading to the exfiltration of information" from Democratic Party networks. (Emphasis added.)

The Mueller probe, having also relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics, failed to add any more certainty. Mueller’s final report of April 2019 likewise stated that Russian intelligence "appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments" from Democratic Party servers. (Emphasis added.)

Read in retrospect, these qualifiers – "likely" and "appear" signaled that U.S. intelligence lacked concrete evidence for their Russian hacking claims, given that CrowdStrike and the Clinton campaign had denied the FBI full access to the digital crime scene. The material emerging from Durham’s probe newly confirms this significant evidentiary hole.

Durham’s decision to ignore the FBI’s deference to Clinton-funded CrowdStrike is all the more striking given his criticism of the FBI’s extensive use of Clinton-funded sources in its hunt for collusion.

The FBI, the Durham report notes, relied on a “significant quantity of materials ... that originated with and/or were funded by the Clinton campaign or affiliated persons.” Accordingly, Durham concluded, the FBI should have considered whether the Clinton camp was feeding it false claims as “part of a political effort to smear a political opponent” and exploit “the federal government's law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support” of that goal.

For unexplained reasons, Durham did not apply this critique to the FBI’s reliance on Clinton-funded sources to probe the theft of Democratic Party emails. As a result, seven years to the month after CrowdStrike triggered the Russiagate saga, the U.S. public remains in the dark about whether the Russian hacking allegation was yet one more deception funded by the Clinton campaign and parroted by the FBI.

Aaron Maté has provided extensive coverage of corruption within federal intelligence agencies as a contributor to RealClearInvestigations. He is also a contributor to The Nation, and his work has appeared in Democracy Now!, Vice, Al Jazeera, Toronto Star, The Intercept, and Le Monde Diplomatique. Maté is the host of the news show Pushback with Aaron Maté.

Authored by Julie Kelly via American Greatness,

Epps' unusual defenders make less and less sense...

He is one of the most consequential—and complicated—individuals involved in the events of January 6.

Ryan Samsel, then a 37-year-old Pennsylvania barber, drove to Washington on the morning of January 6, 2021 with his girlfriend to watch Donald Trump’s speech. Unable to hear the president, they walked east towards Capitol Hill where a large group, including members of the Proud Boys, had assembled.

Samsel soon found himself on the front lines of a protest the national media and Joe Biden immediately branded an “insurrection.” Video shows Samsel approaching a weak line of Capitol police officers and bike racks positioned on the west side of Capitol grounds shortly before 1 p.m., the time Congress convened a joint session to debate the results of the 2020 Electoral College vote certification.

Wearing a white hoodie underneath a jean jacket and a red “Make America Great Again” cap, Samsel appears to engage one of the officers guarding the large outdoor area that leads to the building.

Interactions between protesters and police got heated. The officer in front of Samsel shoved a bike rack with an “Area Closed” sign into a few protesters, including Samsel, who grabbed the fence. He then proceeded to remove his jacket and turn his hat backwards as if spoiling for a fight.

At that point, someone can be heard behind Samsel yelling, “hey, hey, hey!” A large man, also donning a red cap, grabbed Samsel’s right shoulder and pulled him away from the officer. The man spoke directly to Samsel then cupped his hand to whisper in his ear. Samsel immediately returned to the barricades, where a shoving match ensued. The racks and police were overrun—the individual who spoke to Samsel remained right behind him.

That man was Ray Epps.

It would become a pivotal moment in the events of January 6. In fact, a snapshot of Epps whispering to Samsel remains on the Twitter page of the Washington field office of the FBI in a collage of photos of those “who committed violence” at the Capitol.

What Epps—the still-uncharged agitator who first became a subject of public scrutiny after a 2021 exposé in Revolver News—said to Samsel in that iconic exchange has been the subject of speculation for more than two years.

The New York Times reported Epps told the FBI tip line he attempted to de-escalate the situation between Samsel and police. Epps gave the same story to the January 6 Select Committee. “OK, you know, that’s not why we’re here,” Epps told the committee about his interaction with Samsel. “You’ve got to be peaceful, [I] pulled him back and told him, it’s not what we’re about.”

Samsel’s initial FBI interview, according to Times reporter Alan Feuer, provided a similar account. “Samsel said much the same thing, telling investigators that a man he did not know came up to him at the barricades and suggested he relax, according to a recording of the interview obtained by The New York Times,” Feuer wrote in May 2022. “‘He came up to me and he said, ‘Dude’—his entire words were, ‘Relax, the cops are doing their job.’”

But in a phone conversation with American Greatness last week, Samsel disputed Epps’ testimony and contradicted what he reportedly told the FBI a few weeks after the Capitol protest.

“[Epps] said to me, ‘Don’t pull. I’ve got people. We have to push through.’”

Arrested on January 30, 2021, Samsel has been behind bars ever since. Prosecutors argued Samsel’s history—unlike most January 6 defendants, Samsel has a criminal record that includes assaults against women—justified pretrial detention. (The government also maintains Samsel was on parole on January 6. Samsel told me he was on probation.)

Samsel is in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, a treacherous facility that houses “extremely dangerous, violent, or escape-prone inmates.” (One defense lawyer described it to me as “one of the worst of the worst.”)

Considering his record and public silence on the matter for the past few years, Samsel’s new claims about what Epps said to him warrant some skepticism. But a closer look at the court docket shows how the Justice Department is intentionally delaying Samsel’s trial, presumably to prevent the public from learning more about Epps’ involvement at that crucial juncture and his movements before, on, and after January 6. “[Prosecutors] are protecting him like crazy,” Samsel said of Epps.

Samsel’s case file seems to support that view. Prosecutors did not indict Samsel until seven months after his arrest, a violation of federal law, which requires the government to file charges within 30 days of an arrest. Samsel said during that time the government tried to coerce him into saying Epps did not instigate any misconduct and that Joseph Biggs, a Proud Boys leader recently convicted of seditious conspiracy, was carrying a gun. (He was not.)

Biden’s Justice Department finally charged Samsel in August 2021 on seven counts including assault of a police officer, civil disorder, and obstruction of an official proceeding, the most common felony associated with the January 6 prosecution. According to Samsel, he’s been transported to 16 different prisons; he was viciously attacked by guards in the D.C. gulag, sustaining injuries that still require medical attention.

His trial date has been moved numerous times as the Justice Department added codefendants and new charges to his case, a tried-and-true delay tactic. And two days before both sides were expected to file a schedule in preparation for an April 24 trial, U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves filed a fourth superseding indictment against Samsel, forcing another postponement.

Samsel’s new trial date is October 23—which means he will have been behind bars for nearly three years before he has an opportunity to defend himself before a jury. (Judge Jia M. Cobb, a Biden appointee, is overseeing Samsel’s case.)

While Samsel now faces 12 charges and has languished in jail for more than 28 months, Epps remains a free man even though Graves’ office could easily indict Epps on many of the charges filed against Samsel, who, like Epps, never entered the building.

Why isn’t Epps charged with the obstruction felony since he was among the first set of protesters that eventually forced Congress to suspend the joint session? Why is Epps not charged with impeding law enforcement and civil disorder? He, like Samsel, crossed police barricades and remained on restricted grounds for at least 90 minutes as officers fought with the crowd. (Samsel tended to one of the officers pushed down by the protesters as Epps ran past her.)

Further, Epps was wearing military garb including a tactical vest and backpack, garb prosecutors cite as evidence of preplanning for violence.

And what about Epps’ text boasting to his nephew at 2:12 p.m. on January 6 that “I was in the front with a few others. I also orchestrated it.” He told the January 6 committee that he “helped get people there.” 

Individuals have been charged and convicted for conspiracy based on less. Why does Epps continue to evade prosecution?

Not only is Epps seemingly protected by the Justice Department—after Epps showed up in yet another video in the Proud Boys trial, a prosecutor told jurors accusations that Epps worked at the behest of the government are “fantasies”—he is defended by the same news media and politicians insisting anyone involved in the events of January 6 is a criminal.

None other than former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) recently brushed off questions as to why Epps hasn’t been charged. Cheney, vice chairman of the now-defunct January 6 committee, referred to claims Epps was a federal asset as a “conspiracy theory,” a favorite descriptor of those oddly eager to exonerate one of the most outspoken “insurrectionists.”

For now, Samsel remains in the ruthless grip of Joe Biden’s Justice Department. (He has a GiveSendGo account to raise money for his defense.) So why is he speaking up now in seeming contradiction to what he told federal authorities shortly after his arrest? “I don’t want to look back in 10 years and say I was a coward,” he told me.

Samsel is neither a coward nor a hero for now—but he is a human pawn in the Biden regime’s ongoing retaliation against Americans who protested the rigged 2020 presidential election on January 6. And while government agencies come under increased scrutiny as to the role of undercover officers and informants on January 6, Epps’ unlikely set of defenders make less and less sense.

If Samsel gets the chance to take the stand and testify under oath, and before the American people, as to what Epps said to him that fateful afternoon, he might unravel one of the biggest mysteries of January 6. Which appears to be precisely what the Justice Department is desperate to prevent.

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClear Wire,

Some years ago Kenneth Anger wrote a book called “Hollywood Babylon” to expose the dark secrets of the nation’s debauched film capital. It’s about time for an ambitious insider with a strong stomach for deceit and hypocrisy to write a tome called “D.C. Babylon.” One whole chapter could be dedicated to the modern FBI and its labyrinth of corruption and calumny.

Or perhaps it will take more than one chapter considering the record of the FBI under the direction of James Comey and Christopher Wray. Both men oversaw blatant exercises in election interference on behalf of Democrats, and then either lied about it or pretended it never happened. It’s almost as though they consider themselves to be above the law.

The refusal of FBI Director Wray last week to honor a congressional subpoena and turn over an unclassified document to the House Oversight Committee should therefore come as no surprise to anyone, even more so since the document in question could potentially end the presidency of Joe Biden.

The FD-1023 form submitted by a confidential informant contains allegations that Biden, while vice president, accepted bribes from a foreign national in exchange for favorable policy decisions. You would think that the FBI, which spent years chasing down imaginary pee tapes involving President Trump, would have a few minutes to confer with Congress about allegations that the sitting president had engaged in potentially treasonous behavior.

But no.

Since that 1023 form would redound significantly against the incumbent Democrat president’s re-election chances, it would be entirely out of character for the FBI to cooperate with the Republican-led investigation. Remember, this is the same FBI that sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for nearly an entire year prior to the 2020 election, knowing full well that it contained evidence of wrongdoing. Just as the FBI under Wray protected Joe Biden’s son then, it now is working diligently to protect Joe Biden himself as we enter the 2024 election cycle.

No surprise. After all, as Special Counsel John Durham’s report documented, the FBI under the direction of Comey used its police powers to damage the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016, and then worked to cripple his presidency by giving weight to Democrat lies and leaking stories damaging to Trump and his family and friends.

In other words, the modern FBI, under the direction of first Comey and now Wray, is a political weapon aimed at Republicans in the service of Democrats.

Hopefully, that is becoming plainly apparent to the majority of Americans. Maybe it is. A Rasmussen Reports poll last month showed that 69% of U.S. voters consider the influence-peddling scandal a serious problem for Biden, and more than 50% consider it “very serious.”

This latest standoff between Wray and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer exposes just how wide the gap is between the views of the American people and the Washington, D.C. elites. In D.C. Babylon, a corrupt FBI is merely business as usual, while for the rest of us, it is the poster child for a two-tiered system of justice. No one can honestly claim that Democrats receive the same level of scrutiny as Republicans by either the Department of Justice or the FBI.

On the issue of double standards, a couple of points have not been adequately raised about the significance of Wray’s refusal to honor the congressional subpoena.

First of all, we need to ask why Wray is not being vilified by the mainstream media in the same way that former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were when they refused to honor subpoenas from the sham House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.

In those cases, both men have faced not just contempt of Congress citations, but criminal prosecution. Bannon, the architect of Trump’s 2016 victory, has already been convicted of criminal contempt and faces four months in prison pending his appeal. Navarro has not yet been tried, but you can bet that the same heavily Democratic jury base in Washington, D.C. will be happy to send Navarro to prison until they can get their hands on their main target, Donald Trump.

So what is the difference between Bannon and Chris Wray? They both refused to cooperate with a congressional subpoena, but even if Wray is held in contempt by the House, there is no chance he will be prosecuted by the Biden Justice Department, any more than Attorney General Eric Holder was by the Obama Justice Department. Two tiers. Double standard. Call it what you want.

Secondly, we also should weigh Wray’s authoritarian rejection of congressional subpoena power against the current case being put together against Trump by special prosecutor Jack Smith in the Mar-a-Lago documents scandal. If Clark proceeds with an obstruction case against Trump because he didn’t act quickly enough in responding to the federal subpoena for classified documents, we have every right to ask why Wray gets to explicitly reject his subpoena, but Trump’s home was raided by the FBI while his lawyers were still in the process of negotiating with the Department of Justice.

But there’s no need to ask when everyone already knows the answer. Election interference, anyone?

The Biden DOJ is refusing to release over 8,000 hours of US Capitol security footage from January 6, 2001 spanning noon to 8pm, leaving criminal defendants unable to use over 60% of the footage turned over to the FBI, according to a federal court filing.

In the June 1 filing, Topeka, KS resident William A. Pope told US District Judge Rudolph Contreras that the DOJ has given Jan. 6 defendants less than 6,000 hours of footage from 650 cameras.

Pope is defending himself against eight federal charges following his presence on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, and has been attempting to obtain said footage and other evidence that could be exculpatory in his case.

Pope said that after getting access to U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) closed-circuit television video through a House GOP committee, he discovered some security cameras were missing footage from 2–6 p.m. on Jan. 6.

The system held by Congress includes as much as 462,000 hours of security video from more than 1,700 cameras from Dec. 27, 2020, through Jan. 7, 2021, he said.

The cameras are located throughout the Capitol Building interior, the Capitol Visitor Center, Senate and House office buildings, Capitol tunnels and subways, on the grounds outside, affixed to building exteriors and along various streets near the Capitol. -Epoch Times

In his filing, Pope has asked Contreras to compel the Biden DOJ to provide an inventory of USCP cameras and CCTV footage. 

"This is an issue because the government has previously withheld highly relevant CCTV cameras from discovery, only to announce later that they had suddenly discovered more cameras in their possession," wrote Pope.

The Capitol Police, meanwhile, said via general counsel Thomas DiBiase, that the USCP has turned over "more than 14,000 hours) of CCTV footage to the FBI for the period in question.

According to Pope, "If the government does not even know what they have, the government is likely denying hundreds of January 6 defendants important exculpatory evidence," adding "This would be like the government sending an innocent man to death row because they were too lazy to test for the DNA that would exonerate him.

"This potential for depriving citizens of their liberties without due process makes it even more crucial for this court to compel the government to inventory all Capitol Police CCTV in their possession, and to produce it in discovery," Pope continued.

In a filing opposing Pope's demand, Assistant US Attorney Kelly E. Moran wrote; "It is unclear to the government how disclosing more discovery to criminal defendants than the government was required by law to provide constitutes a potential Brady [exculpatory evidence] violation," adding "The government does not have a ‘full inventory’ of ‘all Capitol Police CCTV they have possessed,’ and the defendant provides no support for his claim that the government should be compelled to create such an inventory."

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in The Hill on the increasing justification of violence by the left on our campuses by declaring speech itself “violence.” It is part of the license of our age of rage for many who want to silence opposing viewpoints. There is, however, a way to end this anti-free speech movement sweeping through higher education.

Here is the column:

“Silence is violence.”

When those words became a popular mantra years ago on college campuses, I wrote that the anti-free speech movement was moving toward compelled speech while declaring dissenting views to be harmful.

Today, it isn’t just silence that is considered violence on college campuses. It is also speech, as both faculty and students are actively shutting down opposing views on subjects ranging from abortion to climate change to transgender issues.

Recently, many people were shocked by a videotape of Hunter College professor Shellyne Rodríguez trashing a pro-life student display in New York. Most were focused on her profanity and vandalism, but there were familiar phrases that appeared in her diatribe to the clearly shocked students.

Before trashing the table, she told the students, “You’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”

The videotape revealed one other thing. At Hunter College, and at other colleges, it seems that trashing a pro-life student display and abusing pro-life students is not considered a firing offense. Hunter College refused to fire Rodríguez.

The PSC Graduate Center, the labor organization of graduate and professional schools at the City University of New York, supported that decision and said Rodríguez was “justified” in trashing the display, which the organization described as “dangerously false propaganda” and “disinformation.”

Rodríguez later put a machete to the neck of a reporter, threatened to chop him up and then chased a news crew down a street with the machete in hand. Somewhere between the machete to the neck and chasing the reporters down the street, Hunter College finally decided that Rodríguez had to go.

Rodríguez denounced the school for having “capitulated” to “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.” She explained that her firing was just a continuation of “attacks on women, trans people, black people, Latinx people, migrants, and beyond.”

The redefinition of opposing views as “violence” is a favorite excuse for violent groups like antifa, which continue to physically assault speakers with pro-life and other disfavored views.  As explained by Rutgers Professor Mark Bray in his “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” the group believes that “‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”

As one antifa member explained, free speech is a “nonargument…you have the right to speak but you also have the right to be shut up.”

When people criticized antifa for its violent philosophy, MSNBC’s Joy Reid responded to the critics that “you might be the fascist.”

Faculty members have followed this sense of license to silence others. Former CUNY law dean Mary Lu Bilek even insisted that disrupting a speech on free speech was free speech. (Hunter is part of the CUNY system.)

The same week as the Rodríguez attack at the State University of New York at Albany, sociology professor Renee Overdyke shut down a pro-life display and then allegedly resisted arrest.

Just last week, the Pride Office website at the University of Colorado (Boulder) declared that misgendering people can be considered an “act of violence.”

This week, University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers declared that some of those boycotting the store Target over its line of Pride Month clothing were engaging in “literal terrorism.” (He insists that he was referring to those confronting Target employees.)

Faculty have also justified attacks on pro-life figures. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, feminist studies associate professor Mireille Miller-Young physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display. 

She pleaded guilty to criminal assault, but the university refused to fire her. Instead, some faculty and students defended her, including claiming that pro-life displays constitute terrorism. The University of Oregon later honored Miller-Young as a model for women advocates.

Likewise, at Fresno State University, public health professor Dr. Gregory Thatcher recruited students to destroy pro-life messages.

Other faculty have called for or countenanced violence against Republicans and conservatives. Professors have shouted down speakers, destroyed property, participated in riots and verbally attacked students.

University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis defended the murder of a conservative protester and said he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. He was later elevated to the position of director of graduate studies of history.

As faculty commit or support violence, students are assured that others are the violent ones. Recently, at the University of Texas at Austin, Professor Kirsten Bradbury tested her students on psychology by asking them “which sociodemographic group is most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others in a pattern of behavior that includes violence, deceit, irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse?” Of course, the answer was wealthy white men.

The lesson took with students. A recent poll shows that 41 percent of college students now believe violence is justified to fight hate speech. At Cornell, a conservative speaker was shouted down, met with the common mantra that “your words are violence.” At Case Western, the student newspaper editorialized against university recognition of a pro-life group because its pro-life views are “inherently violent” and “a danger to the student body.” At Wellesley, student editors declared that it was time to shut down conservative speakers and that “hostility may be warranted.” They added, “The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.”

Those views did not spontaneously appear in the minds of these students. At one time, tolerance for free speech was the very touchstone of higher education and a common article of faith for students. These students are the product of years of being told that free speech is dangerous and harmful if left unregulated. From elementary school to college, they were taught that they did not have to be “triggered” by the speech of others.

We are still (thankfully) drawing the line at machete attacks. But it is the underlying views of Rodríguez that are the true threat, and they are being replicated throughout the country. We are raising a generation of censors and speech-phobics.

If we want to stop or reverse this trend, Congress must act. I have proposed legislation that would deny federal funding to schools that do not protect core free speech principles. We are funding schools that are taking a machete to the defining right of our democracy.

It is akin to the recent resolution of the case of an antifa member who took an axe to Sen. John Hoeven’s (R-N.D.) office in Fargo. Thomas “Tas” Alexander Starks, 31, was given probation…and his axe back.

We may not be able to deter people from speaking through machetes and axes, but we can at least stop subsidizing the hardware.

Via Scheerpost.com,

This article is from Seymour Hersh’s Substack, subscribe to it here.

What was not said in the Durham Report?

The first thing to understand about John Durham is that he was a fearless prosecutor who went after organized crime and put in prison retired and active FBI agents who protected the mob for money or other enticements. One of the agents he stopped had enabled James “Whitey” Bulger Jr., once one of America’s most wanted men, the Winter Hill Gang boss who evaded arrest for sixteen years.

In his forty-five years as a state and federal prosecutor in Connecticut and Virginia, Durham worked often and closely with FBI agents, especially on cases that involved violations of federal racketeering statutes.

Durham also handled two inquiries into the CIA’s conduct in the War on Terror, and he did so without angering his superiors in the executive branch. In one case he was asked to investigate the alleged destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations, the so-called torture tapes. His final report on the matter remains secret, and he recommended that no charges be filed. He was later asked to lead a Justice Department inquiry into the legality of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” that resulted in the death of two detainees. In that case, he was told that officers who were given and obeyed what were determined to be illegal orders—there were many of those after 9/11—could not be prosecuted. No charges were filed.

Durham’s 306-page report was made public on May 15, and it pleased no one with its focus on the obvious. The journalist Susan Schmidt, whose byline was a must-read when she was a reporter for the Washington Post, pointed out on Racket News that Durham said the FBI would have done less damage to its reputation if it had scrutinized the questionable actions of the Clinton campaign in 2016: the Feds “might at least have cast a critical eye on the phony evidence they were gathering.”

Schmidt was highlighting a moment in Durham’s report where he hints at the real story: Russiagate was a fraud initiated by the Clinton campaign and abetted by political reporters in Washington and senior FBI officials who chose to look the other way. Durham writes: “In late July 2016, US intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” 

He continues: “this intelligence—taken at face value—was arguably highly relevant and exculpatory because it could be read in fuller context, and in combination with other facts, to suggest that materials such as the Steele Dossier reports and the Alfa Bank allegations . . . were part of a political effort to smear a political opponent and to use the resources of the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a political objective.” 

Durham goes on to cite many instances of public statements and private communications of Clinton campaign staffers that were “consistent with the substance of the purported plan.” He finds evidence to suggest that “at least some officials within the campaign were seeking information about the FBI’s response to the DNC hack, which would be consistent with, and a means of furthering, the purported plan.” He adds that “the campaign’s funding of the Steele Reports and Alfa Bank allegations . . . provide some additional support for the credibility to the information set forth in the Clinton Plan intelligence.” 

However, his report focuses on who knew about the Clinton Plan intelligence and when they knew of it, while “the details of the Clinton Plan intelligence,” “facts that heightened the potential relevance of this intelligence to” Durham’s inquiry, and his team’s “efforts to verify or refute the key claims found in this intelligence” are confined to a Classified Appendix.  

It became evident to some members of Durham’s staff that the real story was not about whether or not Trump had pee parties in a Moscow hotel room—one of the headline-producing allegations in the Steele Dossier that consumed the Washington press corps in the aftermath of Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. The issue was whether the Clinton campaign, in its constant leaking of false accusations and false data, had crossed a line. 

I was told that there was tension and frustration overDurham’s initial lack of interest, or reluctance, to go beyond his investigative mandate and look closely at the possibility that some senior FBI officials had openly joined ranks with the Clinton campaign, with its drumbeat of spurious allegations, because, in some cases, of a shared belief in the importance of a Clinton victory in the fall election. Another factor, I was told, was the possibility of promotions—even to high-level Justice Department offices—in a potential Clinton administration. 

Durham, to his credit, did follow the leads that came to his office, but he left them in secrecy—perhaps in the Classified Appendix or perhaps completely off the record. He was seen by some as being mandated only to investigate FBI management shortcomings and believed the public needed a full accounting of the FBI bungling. It was not clear whether Durham, had he decided to expand the parameters of his inquiry to include the implications of the intelligence about the Clinton campaign, would have been allowed to do so. As Durham himself writes, “any attempted prosecution premised on the Clinton Plan intelligence would face what in all likelihood would be insurmountable classification issues given the highly sensitive nature of the information itself.”

The issue with Durham may be that he was the wrong man in what could never be the right job. He had made his reputation with the help of others in the FBI and Justice Department. They had provided him with much of the evidence he used in his Mafia investigations—undercover agents, access to information, wiretaps and extra manpower for manpower for analysis and surveillance. He had made and kept friendships current over the years. But there are no shoulders to lean on when one is investigating colleagues in Washington.

It was not clear to some who worked with him whether Durham understood the ease with which the FBI could game the FISA process and get their way with the special court; nor that he understood the extent to which the serious operators in the intelligence community thought themselves to be above the law. I will never forget a lunch I had in a Chinese restaurant down the highway from the CIA headquarters with a bunch of covert operators from the Middle East. They were making fun of what they depicted as bumbling FBI gumshoes—this was just after 9/11—and I angrily asked one of them how he could mock the FBI when they all had to work together to solve the crime. His answer: “Sy, the FBI? The FBI? They catch bank robbers. And we rob banks. And the NSA? You expect me to work with guys who carry protractors in their shirt pockets and are always looking down at their brown shoes?” 

In the end, and to Durham’s credit, he stuck to his guns and said what he thought about those who wished him to expand his inquiry deeper into the actions of the Clinton campaign in this footnote:

“To be clear, this Office did not and does not view the potential existence of a political plan by one campaign to spread negative claims about its opponent as illegal or criminal in any respect.”

He added, however, that for a campaign to “knowingly provide false information to the government” would be another matter.

How to distinguish the two is the crux of the issue. In his failure—if that’s the right word for it—to get the whole story, Durham resembles one of the blind men in the ancient Hindu parable about a group of blind men inspecting an elephant. Each of the inspectors describes a small part. The elephant is the campaign to link Trump to Russia. The mainstream press, running with the later discredited Russiagate narrative, portrays Trump as a puppet of Putin or even as a double agent of Moscow dating back to the Soviet era. And Durham sees himself merely as the lawyer who was ordered to investigate FBI managerial shortcomings. The public only sees parts of the picture. 

There is more to know.

*  *  *

This article is from Seymour Hersh’s Substack, subscribe to it here.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“I’m sick and tired of hearing Democrats whining about Joe Biden’s age. The man knows how to govern. Just shut up and vote to save Democracy.”

- Rob Reiner, Hollywood savant

Perhaps you’re aware that the World Health Organization (WHO) is cooking up a plan to impose its will over all the sovereign nations on this planet in the event of future pandemics.

That means, for instance, that the WHO would issue orders to the USA about lockdowns, vaccines, and vaccine passports and we US citizens supposedly would be compelled to follow them.

Why the “Joe Biden” regime would go along with this globalist fuckery is one of the abiding mysteries of our time - except that they go along with everything else that the cabal of Geneva cooks up, such as attacks on farmers, and on oil production, and on relations between men and women, and on personal privacy, and on economic liberty throughout Western Civ, as if they’re working overtime to kill it off. And all of us with it.

I think they are working overtime at that because the sore-beset citizens of Western Civ are onto their game, and getting restless about it. So, the Geneva cabal is in a race against time before the center pole of their circus tent collapses and the nations of the world are compelled to follow the zeitgeist in the direction of de-centralizing, foiling all their grand plans.

The “Joe Biden” regime is pretending to ignore the reality that this WHO deal is actually a treaty that would require ratification by a two-thirds vote in the senate, an unlikely outcome. In any case, handing over authority to the WHO — in effect, to its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — to push around American citizens like a giant herd of cattle would be patently unlawful.

That center pole of the circus tent is the wobbling global economy. It’s barely holding up the canvas over the three rings of the circus. In the center ring, the death-defying spectacle of the Biden Family crime case is playing out before a huge audience (us). This week, a gun went off at the FBI and smoke is curling out of the barrel. FBI Director Christopher Wray was forced to verify that he’s been sitting on an incriminating document for three years from a “trusted” confidential human source, i.e., an informant, stating that the Biden Family received a $5-million bribe from a foreign entity when “JB” was vice-president.

That’s only one bribe of many others, of course, as documented in the Hunter Biden laptop, and it must be obvious it represents treasonous behavior that will demand resignation or impeachment. As this spools out in the weeks and months ahead, do you think Americans will be in the mood to accept further insults such as “Joe Biden” surrendering our national sovereignty to the WHO?

Anyway, you must ask yourself: why on earth should I trust the WHO about anything? Did they not participate in laying a trip on the world with Covid-19? How did those lockdowns work out? Do you think they destroyed enough businesses and ruined enough households? How’s the vaccination program doing? Effective? Safe? Yeah, maybe not so much. Maybe killing a lot of people, wrecking immune systems, sterilizing reproductive organs, causing gross disabilities, shattering lives.

Of course, in over three years neither the WHO nor the US medical authorities showed the slightest interest in helping to figure out how the Covid-19 virus was made in a lab, and exactly how it got loose in the world. Lately, Dr. Ghebreyesus has warned the world about much worse future pandemics supposedly coming down at us. Oh? Really? What does he know that we don’t? That possibly new efforts to concoct chimeric diseases are ongoing in labs around the world? (You know that dozens of such labs were discovered in Ukraine as the war got underway there in 2022.) What’s Dr. Ghebreyesus doing to stop that?

If US orgs and citizens are involved in this “research,” why doesn’t the WHO alert our government leaders so they can stop it? (Would they? I’m not so sure.) And, who is behind it this time? The Eco-Health Alliance again, like with Covid-19? By the way, that outfit got another whopping grant last fall from the NIH to “study” bat viruses — right after the NIH terminated a previous grant on account of The Eco-Health Alliance failing to turn over notebooks and other records.

No, you cannot trust the WHO about anything. The “trust horizon” (a concept introduced by the great Nicole Foss, late of The Automatic Earth dot com) is shrinking. You can no longer trust any distant authorities. You also cannot trust the US federal government (especially the executive branch behind “Joe Biden”). And notice: the trust horizon is shrinking just as the world is de-centralizing. This, you see, is the main contradiction behind all the Globalists’ twisted ambitions to control everything, including you. They are working against the current tide of human history which is pushing everything toward down-scaling, re-localization, and re-assertion of the sovereign individual person.

That trend will become increasingly evident as things organized at the giant scale start to implode — giant retail chains, medical behemoths, hedge funds, big banks, you name it. The world no longer has the mojo for globalism. There’s reason to wonder these days whether the USA has the mojo to remain a unified national polity of states. Our federal government is not only financially bankrupt beyond any coherent reckoning, it is also morally bankrupt, and it has decided to make war against its own people. None of this is satisfactory and none of this is working. It’s time to figure out who and what you can trust and act accordingly.

Rather than face a potential contempt of Congress vote in the GOP-controlled House, the FBI has agreed to hand over a subpoenaed document from the Biden family investigation which a whistleblower says contains allegations that Joe Biden, when he was VP, engaged in a bribery scheme to change US policy in return for $5 million to his family businesses.

Once the existence of the document was made known, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) demanded to see it, followed by a subpoena from House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY).

FBI Director Christopher Wray indicated as recently as Wednesday that he wouldn't turn over the document, but would allow lawmakers to come to the FBI and read it in person. According to Just the News, however, a deal was struck late Thursday for the FBI to bring the document to the Capitol.

"Chairman Comer will receive a briefing from the FBI and review the document on Monday," his committee told JTN. "Chairman Comer has been clear that anything short of producing the FD-1023 form to the House Oversight Committee is not compliance with his subpoena. This unclassified record contains pages of details that need to be investigated further by the House Oversight Committee."

The FBI told Just the News that it wanted to accommodate Congress, while maintaining sensitive confidential human source information which is often recorded in memos before it can be corroborated. In other words, according to the FBI 'it might be fake news!'

"Director Wray offered to provide the Committee’s Chairman and Ranking Member an opportunity to review information responsive to the subpoena in a secure manner to accommodate the committee, while protecting the confidentiality and safety of sources and important investigative sensitivities," said the bureau. "The FBI has continually demonstrated its commitment to working with the Committee to accommodate its request, from scheduling briefings and calls to now allowing the Chair to review information in person. The FBI remains committed to cooperating with the Committee in good faith."

The bureau also cautioned that FD-1023 forms  are “used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting by a confidential human source. Documenting the information does not validate it, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information verified by the FBI. -Just the News

"Revealing unverified or possibly incomplete information could harm investigations, prejudice prosecutions or judicial proceedings, unfairly violate privacy or reputations, create misimpressions in the public, or potentially identify individuals who provide information to law enforcement, placing their physical safety at risk," the agency statement continued.

They didn't seem to mind creating 'misimpressions in the public' when they launched the Trump-Russia investigation despite knowing that the Steele Dossier was a complete fabrication.

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Wire,

Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with Brian Auten told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow. 

But Danchenko had not left the U.S., court documents show. He was living in the Washington area. In fact, he had been arrested in Maryland in 2013 by federal Park Police for being drunk and disorderly, something the FBI analyst could have easily discovered by searching federal law enforcement databases. Clueless, the FBI closed its espionage case on Danchenko. 
 
Auten would quickly rise to become the FBI’s top Russian analyst. In 2016 and 2017, he failed to properly vet the Steele dossier, a collection of salacious allegations created for Hillary Clinton’s campaign which sought to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, before clearing it as the central piece of evidence used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. 

Working out of headquarters as a supervisor, Auten knew Danchenko helped Christopher Steele compile the dossier while living in the area. But instead of contacting the Baltimore agents, Auten secretly groomed him as an informant, arranging payments of $220,000 to target Donald Trump and his former aide Page.  

One result: Danchenko, the suspected Russian spy, falsely accused Page, a former U.S. Navy office who had previously helped the FBI, of being a Russian spy in the dossier. 

Auten also never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the FBI’s longstanding concerns about Danchenko.  

Like the Baltimore agents, investigators at FBI headquarters relied on Auten to build their counterintelligence cases on Page and three other Trump advisers. Auten provided the reports and memos they used to establish probable cause in each case. Auten also supported investigators working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. 
 
Auten’s conduct was first singled out for rebuke by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who in 2019 issued a report detailing how Auten cut corners in the dossier verification process. Horowitz referred Auten to the FBI for discipline, which does not appear to have been administered.

His earlier and deeper connections to Danchenko have only been more recently revealed in the report issued by Special Counsel John Durham. His findings suggest that if Auten had done his job over a decade ago, chances are the now-discredited dossier never would have been created and used by the FBI to eavesdrop on Page and help launch the Russiagate probe. It’s likely that Danchenko, the main source of the dossier’s allegations, would have been deported years earlier and flagged in the system, according to the recently released Durham Report. 

The embattled analyst was recommended for suspension from the bureau last year, and his case has been under disciplinary review for several months. Contacted by RealClearInvestigations, an FBI spokeswoman declined to say if Auten has been suspended. “In keeping with our usual practice,” she said, “we have no comment on personnel matters.” 

According to the Durham Report, Danchenko came onto the radar of agents working out of the Baltimore field office in 2010 after two former Brookings colleagues entering the government told the FBI that he had solicited classified information.  

The agents subsequently opened an espionage case after discovering Danchenko had previous contacts with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers.  
 
“In particular, the FBI learned that in September 2006, Danchenko informed one Russian intelligence officer that he had an interest in entering the Russian diplomatic service,” the report stated. “Four days later, the intelligence officer contacted Danchenko and informed him that they could meet that day to work ‘on the documents and then think about future plans.’” 
 
The next month, Danchenko contacted the intelligence officer “so the documents can be placed in [the following day’s] diplomatic mail pouch,” according to the report. 
 
In addition, Danchenko had been identified as an associate of two other espionage suspects, Durham learned from a review of his case file. 

In July 2010, the FBI initiated a request to obtain a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on Danchenko. Auten helped research Danchenko and provided information for wiretap applications. However, the investigation was soon closed after the FBI incorrectly concluded Danchenko had left the country in September 2010. Danchenko and his wife continued to reside openly in the Washington area. 

But the probe wasn’t completely dead. In 2012, Auten exchanged emails with one of the Baltimore agents in which they speculated whether Danchenko had actually left the country. Then in 2013, the U.S. Park Police arrested Danchenko in Greenbelt, Md., on drunk-and-disorderly charges, court records first obtained by RCI show.  
 
Danchenko’s case was visible in the federal law enforcement database and prosecuted by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who years later, as acting attorney general, would sign one of the 2017 applications to renew a wiretap targeting Page and authorize an expansion of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. 
 
The Russian-born Danchenko, who was living in the U.S. on a work visa, was released from jail on the condition he undergo drug testing and “participate in a program of substance abuse therapy and counseling,” as well as “mental health counseling,” the records show. His lawyer asked the court to postpone his trial and let him travel to Moscow “as a condition of his employment.” The Russian trips were granted without objection from Rosenstein. Danchenko ended up several months later entering into a plea agreement and paying fines. 
 
Despite the flurry of legal records generated on Danchenko in the federal system, it is not clear why the FBI failed to take note of his presence in the country. What the record does show is that the bureau did not reopen the espionage case against him. 
 
Danchenko reappeared on Auten’s radar in late 2016 as he and the FBI were using the Steele dossier he helped create on Trump to seek warrants to spy on Page. 

Auten identified his old espionage target in December 2016 as the “primary subsource” of the document. Instead of wiretapping Danchenko, the FBI recruited him as an informant and paid him $220,000 to help the bureau continue wiretapping the former Trump aide. FBI headquarters proposed paying Danchenko an additional $300,000 even as Durham was actively investigating him as the “linchpin to the uncorroborated allegations contained in the Steele Reports.” After asking officials at FBI headquarters about the bureau’s relationship with Danchenko, Durham determined that they were unable to justify keeping him open as a confidential source, “much less making hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to him.” 
 
After examining FBI documents, Durham discovered that Auten interviewed Danchenko over three days in January 2017 as part of a plan to recruit him as a paid informant, despite the unresolved counterespionage investigation. Working with then-DOJ official David Laufman, the FBI offered immunity from prosecution to the longtime spy suspect and invited his lawyer to sit with him during the interviews. 

“If this recruitment was successful, the FBI planned to mine Danchenko for information that was corroborative of the damaging allegations about President-elect Trump in the Steele Reports,” Durham said in his report. 
 
Auten confessed to Durham that Danchenko “was not able to provide any corroborative evidence related to any substantive allegation contained in the Steele Reports and critically was unable to corroborate any of the FBI’s assertions contained in the Carter Page FISA applications,” according to the Durham report (emphasis in the original). 
 
Danchenko was kept on the FBI payroll for more than three years. 
 
In internal FBI documents, Danchenko’s handling agent Kevin Helson incorrectly stated that there was no “derogatory” information associated with Danchenko and that he had not been a prior subject of an FBI investigation. 
 
“This was clearly not true as there had previously been the unresolved Baltimore FBI counterespionage investigation of Danchenko that was only closed because it was believed he had left the country and returned to Russia,” Durham pointed out. 
 
Agent Helson later learned that the informant he was assigned to handle had been investigated as a suspected spy. However, Auten advised Helson that the espionage case against Danchenko was “interesting, but was not a significant” matter, according to the Durham report. 
 
“Notably,” the report added, “Auten did not inform Helson that he had previously assisted in the Baltimore investigation.” 

 A Suspected Kremlin Agent 'Hiding in Plain Sight'

The Baltimore agents were shocked to learn from Durham’s office that Danchenko had been signed up as a confidential FBI source. One of them interviewed by Durham’s investigators believed Danchenko was a Kremlin agent “hiding in plain sight” in the U.S., while frequently traveling overseas to be debriefed by Russian intelligence. The other Baltimore agent said the counterintelligence case on Danchenko remained unresolved and, in her opinion, “certainly a lot more investigation” should have been conducted on Danchenko. 
 
“It is extremely concerning that the FBI failed to deal with the prior unresolved counterespionage case on Danchenko,” Durham concluded in his report. 
 
“Given Danchenko’s known contacts with Russian intelligence officers and his documented prior pitch [to colleagues at Democratic think tank Brookings] for classified information, the Crossfire Hurricane team’s failure to properly consider and address the espionage case prior to opening Danchenko as a CHS [confidential human source] is difficult to explain, particularly given their awareness that Danchenko was the linchpin to the uncorroborated allegations contained in the Steele Reports,” the special prosecutor added. Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the FBI’s Russia investigation. 
 
In an RCI interview, Danchenko’s lawyer denied his client ever spied for the Russian government. He said Danchenko feared Russian President Vladimir Putin and was concerned for his personal safety. However, Durham examined immigration records which revealed that Danchenko lived in the U.S. but traveled frequently to Russia, casting doubts about his security concerns. 
 
Yet in sworn affidavits to obtain the FISA warrants targeting Page, FBI agents led judges on the secret surveillance court to believe Danchenko was “Russian-based” – and therefore presumably more credible as a source of the allegations that Page was a Russian agent. By 2017, Auten knew the “Russian-based” claim was untrue. Even so, he let case agents slip it into two FISA renewal requests targeting Page. And so the “Russian-based” fraud lived on through 2017. 
 
Auten assured the court that Danchenko was “truthful and cooperative,” never telling the judges about unresolved questions that made him a suspected Russian agent.  

And Auten’s imprimatur carried great weight. In Durham’s telling, Auten was known internally as one of the “Triumvirate of Control” in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, along with senior counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and intelligence section chief Jonathan Moffa. Some case agents working under them believed the surveillance of Page was a “dry hole,” but the “triumvirate” insisted they continue secretly intercepting his emails, text messages, and other communications, according to Durham. 

On Sept. 19, 2016, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team formally received a dossier report alleging that Page had held secret meetings with sanctioned Kremlin officials in Moscow earlier that summer in which they allegedly discussed lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia. That same day, an anxious Auten urged department lawyers to consider including the dossier report as part of the initial FISA application targeting Page. 

In an email to attorneys, Auten forwarded an excerpt from the dossier report and asked, “Does this put us at least *that* much closer to a full FISA on [Page]?”  
 
The attorneys thought it was a “close call” when they first discussed a FISA targeting Page in early August, but the dossier report in September “pushed it over” the line in terms of establishing probable cause. 
 
Except that the dossier allegation about secret Kremlin meetings was bunk. Auten knew there were serious doubts about it yet withheld those concerns from FISA judges. 
 
On Oct. 17, 2016, Auten received an email alerting him to a conversation an informant covertly recorded with Page that day in which Page “outright denied” meeting with the Russian officials or even knowing them. 
 
“Nevertheless,” Durham noted, “Page’s exculpatory statements were not included in the initial FISA application signed just four days later.” 
 
Before the application was submitted, Auten also was aware that the dossier was being funded and promoted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

On Sept. 2, 2016, CIA personnel briefed Auten at FBI headquarters about credible foreign intelligence they received about the Clinton campaign’s machinations. Yet Auten took no steps to analyze the intelligence and how it might impact the Trump campaign investigation and surveillance requests. Nor did he inform the FISA court about it. Asked why he failed to disclose the “Clinton plan” intelligence, Auten told Durham’s office that it was “just one data point.” 
 
As the FBI made requests to renew its spy warrants throughout 2017, Auten continued to gloss over major holes in the dossier. He even pressured agents and analysts to back off looking into a questionable source of key allegations, according to the Durham report. It turns out that source, Charles Dolan, was also tied to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. 
 
Agent Helson told Durham that Auten told him to “hold off” on interviewing Dolan, who was never interviewed. 

Auten also told a female FBI analyst working for Mueller “to cease all research and analysis related to Dolan,” according to the Durham report. She wrote a memo in September 2017 documenting Dolan’s ties to the dossier, but said that “Auten had made edits to her memorandum, some of which removed information regarding Dolan.” She said she was frustrated by the censorship and wondered if there was “a political motive” behind it. The analyst told Durham she prepared a contemporaneous timeline in case she was ever questioned about her role in the Mueller investigation. 
 
Perhaps most concerning was Auten’s reluctance to corroborate even the existence of a ghost-like source Danchenko claimed had provided him a stream of bombshell allegations that were essential to the FBI’s case for probable cause against Page. The alleged source, Belarus-born businessman and Trump booster named Sergei Millian, actually had no connection of any kind to Danchenko. There is no evidence the two men ever met or spoke. Yet Danchenko attributed to Millian the dossier’s core allegation: that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.” This claim, which Durham found to be completely conjured up by Danchenko, formed the backbone of all four of the FBI’s applications to the FISA court to spy on Trump. 
 
Auten knew there were serious problems with the attribution. While debriefing Danchenko in January 2017, Danchenko was dodgy about his supposed conversations with Millian. Still, Auten made no effort to validate Millian as a source. He never examined either Danchenko’s or Millian’s phone records, for starters. 
 
Durham did pull the call records, however, and easily determined that Danchenko never actually spoke with Millian. He also learned from Danchenko’s email records that he fabricated his conversations with Millian, which means he also made up the dossier allegation that Carter Page masterminded the Democratic National Committee email leak, a claim the FBI also vouchsafed to the FISA court to attain the Page wiretaps. 
 
“Nevertheless, the information allegedly provided by Millian remained in the Page FISA applications,” Durham stated in his report.  
 
Auten told Durham that he did, however, check with the FBI’s partners at the CIA to see if they had anything on file to corroborate Danchenko’s reporting in the dossier. 

“They received no corroborating information back,” Durham said. 
 
Durham interviewed a career counterintelligence analyst at Langley who said the dossier was transparent fiction. “Indeed, after the dossier was leaked and became public,” Durham relayed in his report, “that [CIA] expert’s reaction was to ask the FBI, ‘You didn’t use that, right?’” 

For several years, Auten moonlighted teaching law enforcement, intelligence, and surveillance courses at Patrick Henry College in North Virginia. He was removed from the Patrick Henry website soon after RealClearInvestigations published a July 2020 story first identifying him as the anonymous “Supervisory Intelligence Analyst” singled out in 2019 by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz for cutting corners verifying the dossier. 
 
Auten also is no longer listed as a member of the college’s Strategic Intelligence Board of Advisors. Patrick Henry’s communications director did not reply to requests for an explanation for Auten’s removal from the website. But a faculty spokesman confirmed over the phone that he is no longer teaching there. 

He is, however, apparently, still employed by the FBI. Auten’s most recent activities that have come to light? Possibly using false information to undermine allegations of criminal activity on the part of Hunter Biden. According to a July 25, 2022, letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Auten’s “scheme” entailed using deceptive and derogatory information to derail the FBI’s investigation. 

“First, it’s been alleged that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” Grassley wrote. “It is further alleged that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by an FBI Headquarters (“FBI HQ”) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

- George Orwell

Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.

To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, the charge levied against Stewart Rhodes who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for being the driving force behind the January 6 Capitol riots, one doesn’t have to engage in violence against the government, vandalize government property, or even trespass on property that the government has declared off-limits to the general public.

To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, one need only foment a revolution.

This is not about whether Rhodes deserves such a hefty sentence.

This is about the long-term ramifications of empowering the government to wage war on individuals whose political ideas and expression challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is about criminalizing political expression in thoughts, words and deeds.

This is about how the government has used the events of Jan. 6 in order to justify further power grabs and acquire more authoritarian emergency powers.    

This was never about so-called threats to democracy.

In fact, the history of this nation is populated by individuals whose rhetoric was aimed at fomenting civil unrest and revolution.

Indeed, by the government’s own definition, America’s founders were seditious conspirators based on the heavily charged rhetoric they used to birth the nation.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been charged for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

“When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.”

Had America’s founders feared revolutionary words and ideas, there would have been no First Amendment, which protects the right to political expression, even if that expression is anti-government.

No matter what one’s political persuasion might be, every American has a First Amendment right to protest government programs or policies with which they might disagree.

The right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom.

Every individual has a right to speak truth to power—and foment change—using every nonviolent means available.

Unfortunately, the government is increasingly losing its tolerance for anyone whose political views could be perceived as critical or “anti-government.”

All of us are in danger.

In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

You see, the government doesn’t care if you or someone you know has a legitimate grievance. It doesn’t care if your criticisms are well-founded. And it certainly doesn’t care if you have a First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

What the government cares about is whether what you’re thinking or speaking or sharing or consuming as information has the potential to challenge its stranglehold on power.

Why else would the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies be investing in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?

Why else would the Biden Administration be likening those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists?

Why else would the government be waging war against those who engage in thought crimes?

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.

For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to one FBI report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”

In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State.

Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

And then at the other end of the spectrum there are those such as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, for example, who blow the whistle on government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.

In true Orwellian fashion, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.

Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.

This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.

This is also why the government fears a citizenry that thinks for itself: because a citizenry that thinks for itself is a citizenry that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, which translates to government transparency and accountability.

After all, we’re citizens, not subjects.

For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:

When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.

This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.

The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.

A little over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.

As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

Fast forward to the present day, and we’re witnessing yet another showdown, this time between Assange and the Deep State, which pits the people’s right to know about government misconduct against the might of the military industrial complex.

Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.

Following the current trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, watched all the time, and rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

We’re almost at that point now.

Eventually, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we will all be seditious conspirators in the eyes of the government.

We would do better to be conspirators for the Constitution starting right now.

Authored by J.B.Shurk via The Gatestone Institute,

If legacy news corporations fail to report that large majorities of the American public now view their journalistic product as straight-up propaganda, does that make it any less true?

According to a survey by Rasmussen Reports, 59% of likely voters in the United States view the corporate news media as "truly the enemy of the people." This is a majority view, held regardless of race: "58% of whites, 51% of black voters, and 68% of other minorities" — all agree that the mainstream media has become their "enemy."

This scorching indictment of the Fourth Estate piggybacks similar polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official "truth."

Drawing attention to the divergence between the public's perceived reality and the news media's prevailing "narratives," independent journalist Glenn Greenwald dissected the Harvard-Harris poll to highlight just how differently some of the most important issues of the last few years have been understood. While corporate news fixated on purported Trump-Russia collusion since 2016, majorities of Americans now see this story "as a hoax and a fraud."

While the news media hid behind the Intelligence Community's claims that Hunter Biden's potentially incriminating laptop (allegedly containing evidence of his family's influence-peddling) was a product of "Russian disinformation" and consequently enforced an information blackout on the explosive story during the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election, strong majorities of Americans currently believe the laptop's contents are "real." In other words, Americans have correctly concluded that journalists and spies advanced a "fraud" on voters as part of an effort to censor a damaging story and "help Biden win." Nevertheless, The New York Times and The Washington Post have yet to return the Pulitzer Prizes they received for reporting totally discredited "fake news."

Similarly, majorities of Americans suspect that President Joe Biden has used the powers of his various offices to profit from influence-peddling schemes and that the FBI has intentionally refrained from investigating any possible Biden crimes. Huge majorities of Americans, in fact, seem not at all surprised to learn that the FBI has been caught abusing its own powers to influence elections, and are strongly convinced that "sweeping reform" is needed. Likewise, large majorities of Americans have "serious doubts about Biden's mental fitness to be president" and suspect that others behind the scenes are "puppeteers" running the nation.

Few, if any, of these poll results have been widely reported. In a seemingly-authoritarian disconnect with the American people, corporate news media continue to ignore the public's majority opinion and instead "relentlessly advocate" those viewpoints that Americans "reject." When journalists fail to investigate facts and deliberately distort stories so that they fit snugly within preconceived worldviews, reporters act as propagandists.

Constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley recently asked, "Do we have a de facto state media?" In answering his own question, he notes that the news blackout surrounding congressional investigations into Biden family members who have allegedly received more than ten million dollars in suspicious payments from foreign entities "fits the past standards used to denounce Russian propaganda patterns and practices." After Republican members of Congress traced funds to nine Biden family members "from corrupt figures in Romania, China, and other countries," Turley writes, "The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined 'Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.'"

Excoriating the news media's penchant for mindlessly embracing stories that hurt former President Donald Trump while simultaneously ignoring stories that might damage President Biden, Turley concludes:

"Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story."

Americans now evidently view the major sources for their news and information as part of a larger political machine pushing particular points of view, unconstrained by any ethical obligation to report facts objectively or dispassionately seek truth. That Americans now see the news media in their country as serving a similar role as Pravda did for the Soviet Union's Communist Party is a significant departure from the country's historic embrace of free speech and traditional fondness for a skeptical, adversarial press.

Rather than taking a step back to consider the implications such a shift in public perception will have for America's future stability, some officials appear even more committed to expanding government control over what can be said and debated online. After the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the wake of public backlash over First Amendment concerns, halted its efforts to construct an official "disinformation governance board" last year, the question remained whether other government attempts to silence or shape online information would rear their head. The wait for that answer did not take long.

The government apparently took the public's censorship concerns so seriously that it quietly moved on from the collapse of its plans for a "disinformation governance board" within the DHS and proceeded within the space of a month to create a new "disinformation" office known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which now operates from within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although ostensibly geared toward countering information warfare arising from "foreign" threats, one of its principal objectives is to monitor and control "public opinion and behaviors."

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi concludes of the government's resurrected Ministry of Truth:

"It's the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from Congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets."

If it were not jarring enough to learn that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has picked up the government's speech police baton right where the DHS set it down, there is ample evidence to suggest that officials are eager to go much further in the near future. Democrat Senator Michael Bennet has already proposed a bill that would create a Federal Digital Platform Commission with "the authority to promulgate rules, impose civil penalties, hold hearings, conduct investigations, and support research."

Filled with "disinformation" specialists empowered to create "enforceable behavioral codes" for online communication — and generously paid for by the Biden Administration with taxpayers' money — the special commission would also "designate 'systemically important digital platforms' subject to extra oversight, reporting, and regulation" requirements. Effectively, a small number of unelected commissioners would have de facto power to monitor and police online communication.

Should any particular website or platform run afoul of the government's First Amendment Star Chamber, it would immediately place itself within the commission's crosshairs for greater oversight, regulation, and punishment.

Will this new creation become an American KGB, Stasi or CCP — empowered to target half the population for disagreeing with current government policies, promoting "wrongthink," or merely going to church? Will a small secretive body decide which Americans are actually "domestic terrorists" in the making? US Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone after traditional Catholics who attend Latin mass, but why would government suspicions end with the Latin language? When small commissions exist to decide which Americans are the "enemy," there is no telling who will be designated as a "threat" and punished next.

It is not difficult to see the dangers that lie ahead. Now that the government has fully inserted itself into the news and information industry, the criminalization of free speech is a very real threat. This has always been a chief complaint against international institutions such as the World Economic Forum that spend a great deal of time, power, and money promoting the thoughts and opinions of an insular cabal of global leaders, while showing negligible respect for the personal rights and liberties of the billions of ordinary citizens they claim to represent.

WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab has gone so far as to hire hundreds of thousands of "information warriors" whose mission is to "control the Internet" by "policing social media," eliminating dissent, disrupting the public square, and "covertly seed[ing] support" for the WEF's "Great Reset." If Schwab's online army were not execrable enough, advocates for free speech must also gird themselves for the repercussions of Elon Musk's appointment of Linda Yaccarino, reportedly a "neo-liberal wokeist" with strong WEF affiliations, as the new CEO of Twitter.

Throughout much of the West, unfortunately, free speech has been only weakly protected when those with power find its defense inconvenient or messages a nuisance. It is therefore of little surprise to learn that French authorities are now prosecuting government protesters for "flipping-off" President Emmanuel Macron. It does not seem particularly astonishing that a German man has been sentenced to three years in prison for engaging in "pro-Russian" political speech regarding the war in Ukraine. It also no longer appears shocking to read that UK Technology and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan reportedly seeks to imprison social media executives who fail to censor online speech that the government might subjectively adjudge "harmful." Sadly, as Ireland continues to find new ways to punish citizens for expressing certain points of view, its movement toward criminalizing not just speech but also "hateful" thoughts should have been predictable.

From an American's perspective, these overseas encroachments against free speech — especially within the borders of closely-allied lands — have seemed sinister yet entirely foreign. Now, however, what was once observed from some distance has made its way home; it feels as if a faraway communist enemy has finally stormed America's beaches and come ashore in force.

Not a day seems to go by without some new battlefront opening up in the war on free speech and free thought. The Richard Stengel of the Council on Foreign Relations has been increasingly vocal about the importance of journalists and think tanks to act as "primary provocateurs" and "propagandists" who "have to" manipulate the American population and shape the public's perception of world events. Senator Rand Paul has alleged that the DHS uses at least 12 separate programs to "track what Americans say online," as well as to engage in social media censorship.

As part of its efforts to silence dissenting arguments, the Biden administration is pursuing a policy that would make it unlawful to use data and datasets that reflect accurate information yet lead to "discriminatory outcomes" for "protected classes." In other words, if the data is perceived to be "racist," it must be expunged. At the same time, the Department of Justice has indicted four radical black leftists for having somehow "weaponized" their free speech rights in support of Russian "disinformation." So, objective datasets can be deemed "discriminatory" against minorities, while actual discrimination against minorities' free speech is excused when that speech contradicts official government policy.

Meanwhile, the DHS has been exposed for paying tens of millions of dollars to third-party "anti-terrorism" programs that have not so coincidentally equated Christians, Republicans, and philosophical conservatives to Germany's Nazi Party. Similarly, California Governor Gavin Newsom has set up a Soviet-style "snitch line" that encourages neighbors to report on each other's public or private displays of "hate."

Finally, ABC News proudly admits that it has censored parts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s interviews because some of his answers include "false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines." Essentially, the corporate news media have deemed Kennedy's viewpoints unworthy of being transmitted and heard, even though the 2024 presidential candidate is running a strong second behind Joe Biden in the Democrat primary, with around 20% support from the electorate.

Taken all together, it is clear that not only has the war on free speech come to America, but also that it is clobbering Americans in a relentless campaign of "shock and awe." And why not? In a litigation battle presently being waged over the federal government's extensive censorship programs, the Biden administration has defended its inherent authority to control Americans' thoughts as an instrumental component of "government infrastructure." What Americans think and believe is openly referred to as part of the nation's "cognitive infrastructure" — as if the Matrix movies were simply reflecting real life.

Today, America's mainstream news corporations are already viewed as processing plants that manufacture political propaganda. That is an unbelievably searing indictment of a once-vibrant free press in the United States. It is also, unfortunately, only the first heavy shoe to drop in the war against free speech. Many Chinese-Americans who survived the Cultural Revolution look around the country today and see similarities everywhere. During that totalitarian "reign of terror," everything a person did was monitored, including what was said while asleep.

In an America now plagued with the stench of official "snitch lines," censorship of certain presidential candidates, widespread online surveillance, a resurrected "disinformation governance board," and increasingly frequent criminal prosecutions targeting Americans who exercise their free speech, the question is not whether what we inaudibly think or say in our sleep will someday be used against us, but rather how soon that day will come unless we stop it. After all, with smartphones, smart TVs, "smart" appliances, video-recording doorbells, and the rise of artificial intelligence, somebody, somewhere is always listening.

At least five Targets in multiple states received bomb threats Friday over company executives pulling the Pride collection section because of mounting boycotts, leading to multiple stores being evacuated as police and the FBI searched for explosive devices.

"Target is full of [redacted] cowards who turned their back on the LGBT community and decided to cater to homophobic right wing, redneck, bigots, who protested and vandalized their store," reads a threatening email sent to several Target locations in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, Cleveland 19 News reports.

"We won't stand idly by as the far right continues to hunt us down. We are sending you a message, we placed a bomb in the following Targets. We will continue to bomb your Targets until you stop cowering and bring back your LBGT merchandise. "

One shopper told 19 News, "I know a lot of people around here are not a fan of LGBT that kind of stuff me personally I mean it's whatever. I never thought someone would go as far as a bomb threat." 

In Utah, local media outlet KUTV said, "Bomb threats were made to Target stores in Layton, Salt Lake, Taylorsville, and Provo." 

On Thursday, one day before the bomb threat was made, we reported a Fox News insider confirmed Target stores across the South and rural America removed controversial LGBT-themed products ahead of June Pride month to avoid further backlash. Some products ranged from "tuck-friendly" swimsuits for transgender people to gender-fluid coffee mugs. The insider said the reasoning behind such an abrupt move is "to avoid the kind of backlash Bud Light has received in recent weeks."

As we noted last week...

Corporations have freedom of speech under the First Amendment but have to understand if their political ideologies don't align with customers, then the people also have freedom of speech to voice their opinion. That's why corporations should probably stay out of identity politics or risk pissing off both sides, because what Target did by moving pride products to the back and scaling down the section will likely spark outrage in the trans community. 

And the Target bomb threat comes after California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a diehard progressive, tweeted, "CEO of Target Brian Cornell selling out the LGBTQ+ community to extremists is a real profile in courage."

"This isn't just a couple of stores in the South. There is a systematic attack on the gay community happening across the country," Newsom said. 

CEO of Target Brian Cornell selling out the LGBTQ+ community to extremists is a real profile in courage.

This isn’t just a couple stores in the South. There is a systematic attack on the gay community happening across the country.

Wake up America.

This doesn’t stop here.… https://t.co/1vRgukaT0g

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) May 24, 2023

Did Newsom's tweet incite the radical left's attack on Target? 

And congrats to Target's executives who have managed to anger conservatives and progressives. 

Authored by Newt Gingrich via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The conspiracy between a corrupt set of bureaucracies (including the Justice Department, the IRS, and the intelligence community) and an equally corrupt and enabling elite media is astonishing. The Durham Report is just one more confirmation of the devastating level of dishonesty and manipulation which have characterized the last few years.

Some analysts believe the open corruption can be traced back to Lois Lerner and the IRS scandal, in which she clearly stonewalled conservative organizations from getting tax status. When she was found to be in contempt of Congress, the Obama Justice Department spent two years ignoring the congressional contempt charge and then decided not to prosecute her.

As Congressman Jim Jordan said at the time, U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen was “us[ing] his power as a political weapon to undermine the rule of law.” Jordan went on “Mr. Machen … unilaterally decided to ignore the will of the House of Representatives. He and the Justice Department have given Lois Lerner cover for her failure to account for her actions at the IRS.”

The signal had been sent that protecting the left would itself be protected.

This lesson was reinforced in the cover up about the terrorist attack at Benghazi. The Obama administration was worried that the killing of an American ambassador—despite his consistent appeals to the State Department for more security—would hurt the president’s reelection campaign. So, the administration adopted a strategy of simply lying to the American people.

This began the week of the attack when the administration did everything it could to avoid responsibility for a terrorist killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens. In fact, the Obama White House immediately sent former United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice on five network shows to blame an American-made anti-Muslim video for causing the supposed unrest. It was exactly what Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick had warned against in her famous “Blame America First” description of liberals. We now know that the entire story was a falsehood, and no one in Benghazi was motivated by a film they had never seen.

When then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before Congress, she dismissed the whole question of responsibility for the failure to protect Stevens. She even failed to be honest about his murder famously saying: “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”

The leftists in the national bureaucracies learned a big lesson from Lerner and Clinton. Whatever you need to do to defeat the right or protect the left is OK. You can get away with it. There is no responsibility for your actions if you are protecting the corrupt system.

That lesson was publicly driven home in late June 2016, when former President Bill Clinton walked uninvited onto the airplane of Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix airport. The FBI was investigating the former president’s wife (and Democratic presidential candidate) for a variety of charges including deleting more than 33,000 government emails and having staff destroy computer hard drives with a hammer.

It is hard to imagine anything more inappropriate than a former president visiting an attorney general while his wife (and presidential candidate) was being actively investigated by the FBI.

As then-candidate Donald Trump described in a tweet “Take a look at what happened w/ Bill Clinton. The system is totally rigged. Does anybody really believe that meeting was just a coincidence?”

We now know from the Durham Report—and the reports from Chairman James Comer and the House Oversight Committee—that candidate and then-President Trump has been consistently smeared and defamed by corrupt elements of the Washington bureaucracy on a scale which makes Watergate look trivial.

At the same time, the corrupt system was working overtime to protect Joe Biden and his family. The stunning dual nature of the corruption makes the present moment so dangerous for the future of the rule of law—and the entire constitutional process which has protected American freedom for more than 200 years.

As deeply and persuasively corrupt as the bureaucracy has become, the other great decay since Watergate has been the corruption of the elite media.

The New York Post, Fox News, and a few others have attempted some sense of honest coverage. Smaller conservative publications, podcasts, and social media have called out the big media systems for being active allies of the corrupt bureaucracy. Still, when needed, the elite corporate media have eagerly smeared President Trump and enthusiastically lied to protect the Bidens.

There are no Bob Woodwards or Carl Bernsteins courageously working to uncover the truth and get it published. (Indeed, Woodward has reinvented himself into a chief Trump smear-monger.)

There are no courageous editors like Ben Bradley backing up the reporters.

There are no fearless publishers like Katharine Graham willing to risk lawsuits and withstand the anger of the government.

Today, there is only a corrupt media protecting a corrupt establishment. The challenge to the American people to get at the truth is far more difficult than it was when Richard Nixon was under attack.

The establishment rot threatens our survival as a free people, and it is increasingly difficult to uproot. Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins when we need them most?

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“One of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.”

- Howard Zinn, historian

Power corrupts. We know this.

In fact, we know this from experience learned the hard way at the hands of our own government.

So why is anyone surprised to learn that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state’s vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times in order to target American citizens?

This is how the government operates, after all.

First, they seek out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis—in this case, warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism—and then they use those powers against the American people.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

This is par for the course for the FBI, whose modus operandi has historically been to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.

In 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.

That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s ongoing spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics meted out to dissidents on both the right and the left.

Yet while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.

Indeed, the FBI’s love affair with totalitarianism can be traced back to the Nazi police state.

As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.

Since then, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and used them repeatedly against American citizens.

With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.

These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.

Consider the extent to which the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and generally act as a law unto themselves resemble those of their Nazi cousins, the Gestapo.

Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast investigatory powers, and vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of the state.

Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.

Much like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs, the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’ most intimate details (and allow local police to do so, as well).

Much like the Gestapo’s ability to profile based on race and religion, and its assumption of guilt by association, the FBI’s approach to pre-crime allows it to profile Americans based on a broad range of characteristics including race and religion.

Much like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a domestic terrorist.

Much like the Gestapo infiltrated communities in order to spy on the German citizenry, the FBI routinely infiltrates political and religious groups, as well as businesses.

Just as the Gestapo united and militarized Germany’s police forces into a national police force, America’s police forces have largely been federalized and turned into a national police force.

Just as the Gestapo carried out entrapment operations, the FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.

Just as the Gestapo’s secret files on political leaders were used to intimidate and coerce, the FBI’s attempts to target and spy on anyone suspected of “anti-government” sentiment have been similarly abused.

The Gestapo became the terror of the Third Reich by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”

Likewise, as countless documents make clear, the FBI has had no qualms about using its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians, spy on celebrities and high-ranking government officials, and intimidate and attempt to discredit dissidents of all stripes.

In fact, borrowing heavily from the Gestapo, between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents. As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity          .”

Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.

The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, denounced the government’s abuses:

“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”

The report continued:

“Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”

Whether 50 years ago or in the present day, the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.

The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to rein in the Federal Bureau of Intimidation’s war on political freedom.

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Kentucky Republican Representative James Comer charged Monday that the FBI’s refusal to turn over documents relating to Joe Biden’s alleged illegal dealings with a foreign national betrays the fact that the Bureau has no respect for anyone in Congress.

Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, made the comments during an appearance on Jesse Watters’ show, noting that lawmakers may have to “hold [the FBI’s] budget hostage until they get new leadership at the FBI or they produce the documents that we want.”

“The FBI refused to turn over the form 1023. We had another meeting where they were very patronizing. I’ve asked for a phone call with Director Wray. We expect to get this document,” Comer urged.

He continued, “Speaker McCarthy had a phone call with Director Wray. He demanded that they turn over this document. This is a very crucial piece of our investigation. And the reason that I think it’s very credible is this claim was made years before anyone knew about these different shell companies. And knew exactly what the Biden family did in countries like Romania and China to get money.”

“What we’re going to have to do in this House is demand that the Senators get our backs, like they are doing as we speak with these debt ceiling negotiations,” Comer asserted, adding “it’s not just this form 1023. We also want to know what classified documents Joe Biden had in his possession because that’s an important part of our investigation.”

Comer further noted that Republicans may attempt to entice the apparent whistleblower within the FBI to go public.

He said “we need to take extreme measures on trying to get this whistleblower to come forward publicly and say what exactly is in this document. Remember this form 1023 is not classified. It’s not a classified document. So this is something that shouldn’t be that hard for the chairman of the house oversight committee to obtain.”

Watters noted “I think the American people’s patience is running out on this cover-up,” adding “we’re getting to the point where I think we need to do a little bit more than demand a phone call with the FBI director.”

Watch:

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Authored by Frank Miele via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The inventors of artificial intelligence went before Congress last week and warned that without government supervision, the emerging technology could be employed by the unscrupulous to mislead people and spread falsehoods.

It’s frightening, but not without precedent.

If you want to know what it would look like if an AI were programmed to be relentless, ruthless, and amoral in service to a political agenda, you don’t have to look far.

Just consider the mainstream media. They have tailored their so-called news coverage to focus entirely on attacking conservatives and covering up for Democrats. Anyone who challenges their narrative is accused of lying or peddling “conspiracy theories.” Any facts that disprove their assumptions are either ignored entirely or summarily dismissed as Republican “talking points.”

And then remember this: Thanks to the First Amendment, the dangerous lies of the media cannot be subject to government supervision or control. It’s entirely up to us to sniff out and reject the falsehoods, but if you are a trusting soul who can’t imagine a world where you are intentionally kept in the dark about fundamental truths, then you will always be living an illusion.

A perfect metaphor for this state of blissful ignorance was unveiled recently on the Apple TV+ show “Silo,” which tells the story of a few thousand people who have been living underground in a massive silo for generations. Their only contact with the outside world is a video link to a camera placed on the surface, which shows a forlorn landscape littered with the bodies of those few daring people who had exited the silo after growing sick of being virtual prisoners. The video of the bleak and deadly surface plays nonstop in public places to remind the residents of the silo that there is nothing for them on the outside.

In our metaphoric analysis, that video represents the relentlessly negative and destructive narrative of the mainstream media, played over and over for an unwitting population. There is little reason for the average person to doubt what he or she has been told so convincingly by so many seemingly sincere talking heads. But what happens if the public gets a glimpse of reality?

Just such an occurrence happened in a recent episode of “Silo” when the main generator for the silo was turned off in order to accomplish needed repairs. In the brief moment between the power going down and the backup generator kicking in, the Hiroshima-like deathscape on the video screen was replaced by a halcyon sunlit pasture of green grass and trees. Blink and you missed it. And if you are one of the characters who lives in the silo, you keep your mouth shut. No one so far has admitted what they saw or asked questions about it. That’s what happens when you are fed an endless diet of lies. The truth looks like an unappetizing worm.

But sooner or later, as the Bard tells us, the truth will out, or in this case the worm will turn.

That transformation for the mainstream media began on May 10, when Donald Trump climbed out of the silo and showed millions of CNN viewers that the lies they’ve been told for years were absurd and dangerous, starting with the notion that the 45th president himself is absurd and dangerous. Town hall moderator Kaitlan Collins did her best to lock down Trump with questions intended to humiliate or mock him. But what she did not count on was that having an audience full of real people from the free state of New Hampshire would make her questions look as fake as that dead planet on “Silo.”

From the moment the crowd of 300 or so Republican and independent voters gave Trump a standing ovation as he was introduced, it was obvious that Collins was in for a long night. So was the television audience of 3.3 million presumably mostly liberal CNN viewers who have been fed a steady drumbeat of anti-Trump propaganda for more than six years. Collins did her best to unsettle Trump by bringing up topics such as the legitimacy of the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 riots, and the many legal cases brought against him by Democratic district attorneys or funded by Democratic donors. But in every single instance, Trump was prepared to answer by rejecting and refuting the left-leaning assumptions implicit in the questions. And the audience kept applauding. They even cheered when Trump called Collins a “nasty person” because she didn’t listen to his answers, or dismissed them because they didn’t agree with her own preconceptions.

It was no doubt maddening to the usual suspects at CNN, as was made obvious by the fact that they cut short the scheduled 90-minute town hall by nearly 20 minutes and then proceeded to devote nearly two hours to re-establishing the official CNN narrative: Trump is absurd and dangerous, and can’t be trusted no matter how much those crazy people from New Hampshire seemed to like and respect him!

Jake Tapper started the commentary by saying “Mr. Trump’s first lie was told just seconds into the night with his false familiar claim that the 2020 election was ‘a rigged election,’ and the falsehoods kept coming fast and furious about the Jan. 6 insurrection, about the threats to Vice President Pence, about Pence’s ability to overturn the election, about Covid, about the economy and more.”

In other words, the picture you just saw where Trump was witty, charming, in full command of the facts and unwilling to be pushed around by a junior reporter was not what you saw at all. To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

Suddenly, we were back safe and sound in the universe where Trump is a troublesome oaf, and where all the so-called smart people agree that the walls are once again closing in on the mega-villain known as the MAGA Prince. It didn’t require evidence to say so, just a concert of voices in agreement that nothing we had seen with our own eyes was real. I call it the Deep Fake of mainstream media – mouths moving but the words coming out of them are untethered from reality. Just an anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, anti-conservative agenda that can be twisted around any and every news story.

Perhaps the best (or worst) example of this can be found on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” which provides the most-one sided panel of talking heads this side of Rachel Maddow. The episode on the morning after Trump’s invasion of CNN was more proof that the former president had terrified the mainstream media mob. Which means they could only do one thing in response – lie.

In that regard it was similar to almost any day on “Morning Joe,” but host Joe Scarborough reserved his greatest vitriol for this episode. Right out of the gate, he and his producers tried to imply that Trump was delusional about Jan. 6 by matching his words about the massive rally he held that day with pictures of the riot a few hours later at the U.S. Capitol. So when Trump said that his supporters were at the rally “with love in their heart,” Scarborough and his team conflated that with pictures of rioters at the Capitol, even though they had nothing to do with each other. It was a bit of propaganda worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi filmmaker. Four hours of that kind of distortion was too much to watch, but I made it through 90 minutes and came to the conclusion that Scarborough and his guests were tools of a self-serving narrative to the same degree as a ChatGPT deep fake, and both were equally soulless.

Coincidentally, CNN superstar Anderson Cooper unwittingly took up the silo metaphor himself the day after the town hall when he responded to outraged CNN viewers who could not believe that their beloved left-wing network had veered from their usual Deep Fake script and allowed Trump an opportunity to demonstrate that his brand of conservatism has a strong following that cannot be easily dismissed.

“You have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watch this network again,” Cooper said on his show. “But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?”

Based on the heated reaction to Cooper’s remarks, yes, most CNN viewers want to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that front-running candidate Trump doesn’t exist. So much easier to listen to the fake narrative that paints the former president as the most hated man on the planet than to consider, as Cooper reminded his viewers, that “the man you were so disturbed to see and hear from last night, that man is the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president. And that audience that upset you, that’s a sampling of about half the country. They are your family members, your neighbors, and they are voting. And many said they’re voting for him.”

Of course, it’s not just television media that promotes a fake narrative about Trump and his supporters. Consider this tweet by the New York Times on Tuesday after the release of the Durham Report, which confirmed that the FBI had no legitimate evidence against Donald Trump when it launched its Russia collusion probe:

“John Durham's report on the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign’s work with Russia, which produced no startling revelations, is being viewed by some conservatives as lending credence to their conspiracy theories about the U.S. agency.”

Say what? “No startling revelations” implies that the New York Times already knew that there was no legitimacy to the allegations against Trump. But if that’s the case, then why hasn’t the Times returned the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting it shared with the Washington Post in 2018? Both of those esteemed newspapers promoted the Democrat-originated lie that Trump was a Russian asset and they did absolutely nothing to uncover the truth about how the FBI was co-opted by the Biden administration as a campaign asset for Hillary Clinton.

And even more outrageously, the New York Times (the nation’s putative paper of record) twisted the damning facts of the Durham Report into a Republican fever dream that could apparently be dismissed as one more “conspiracy theory.” Hey, Mainstream Media! It’s not a conspiracy theory any more if it’s proven to be true – then, it’s a conspiracy fact. Durham concluded that the FBI persecuted the 45th president of the United States without any credible evidence, and no amount of willful denial will change that devastating charge.

Not sure if reality will win out against the phony mainstream narrative in the long run, but my hope rests with 300 New Hampshire voters who thumbed their collective nose at CNN on national TV and said in no uncertain terms that they don’t want to live in the Fake News silo any more. What educated person does?

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

Are you the type of person who works hard, saves money, and invests with the intent of accumulating lasting wealth?

If so, you’ve likely noticed that things don’t quite add up between what you’re regularly told about how the economy and financial markets work and what you actually experience.  We think there’s more to this than just dollars and cents.

The central feature of economics is prices.  How they are determined and how people respond to them.  This process establishes how prices adapt to meet the supply and demand pressures of the market.

Through experience, buyers can determine what’s a good deal or not.  And they adjust their behavior accordingly.  Similarly, through testing, sellers determine the optimal price of their products; a price where profit margin is best supported by sales.

For example, when airfares are cheap, a father may spring for long distance plane tickets so his family can vacation somewhere exotic.  When plane tickets are expensive, he may opt for a road trip and tent camping at a national park.

Both experiences will create lasting family memories.  Prices, nonetheless, are a critical determinant in the decision.

In fact, prices, and how people respond to them, are factored into nearly all free exchanges for fulfilling wants and needs.  You may already have an ample supply of socks.  But a ‘buy one get one free’ sale may incentivize you to buy more.

Your old beater car may work just fine.  Still, you may want a new car that has all the latest digital integrations.

But how badly do you want it?  Bad enough to sign-up for a $1,000 per month car payment?  At that price, you’ll miss out on a lot of steak dinners.

The point is prices and incentives matter.  Moreover, changes in conditions that raise or lower prices, such as interest rates or regulations, will influence behavior.

This is an important insight.  And it is one that is not lost on government policy makers.  By influencing prices, they can influence behavior.

Corrupting Prices

To be perfectly frank, prices are corrupted by governments for the purpose of extracting capital from the economy and rearranging society in strange and unnatural ways.  In California, for instance, Assembly Bill No. 205, which was approved by Governor Newsom in 2022, requires power companies to charge customers a base fee that escalates by income bracket.

A recent proposal, would forcibly compel high income earners to pay a base fee that’s over 400 percent more than low income earners.  This is in addition to the actual use rate.

Is it fair and just to penalize people with high incomes?  Does the government know how to spend money better than the people who earned it?

Sacramento thinks so.  As does Washington through its execution of federal income tax policies.

The process of corrupting prices also accrues power to the central planners and decision makers.  This power, and the wealth it affords them, has proven to be quite intoxicating.  Too much is never enough.

What’s more, bankrupt, failing governments can only hold onto power by tightening their grip on those they dominate – including you.  Compulsory diktats over how your time is directed and how your money is spent are acts of desperation.  Yet they must go on.

Massive taxes, endless fees, tax incentive credits, and outright currency debasement and money supply inflation, all work to extract capital from private individuals and direct it back to Washington.  And right now, in the later stage of decadence, this appropriative coercion must increase.

You see, at this point, there’s no way to reverse the gross corruption that has already occurred.  Any potential means to do so are soon coopted by the central authority and turned against the population.

Tools of Control

Consider digital technology advancements.  These should be liberating.  And in many ways, they are.  But what the last 20 years of the digital age has shown is something that’s profoundly sinister.

Digital advancements, in practice, have given governments – including the U.S. government – powerful tools of control.  Edward Snowden blew the whistle a decade ago on the massive surveillance apparatus that was being erected to spy on people.  Instead of being hailed a hero, Snowden was rewarded with espionage charges and exiled to Russia.

Since then, the use of digital tools to spy on and control the political process has run completely amok.  Each innovation – from social media to cryptocurrencies to artificial intelligence – is swiftly penetrated by the FBI, CIA, IRS, Homeland Security, and the Federal Reserve.

The new digital innovations are then used to punish certain baskets of deplorables, rig elections, and stymie honest debate for the purpose of locking people down, pumping them full of bogus vaccines, and locking the doors to their churches.

A preponderance of evidence has shown that these are not merely conspiracy theories.  Rather, they’re real, genuine, bona fide conspiracies.  And they’re being perpetrated by powerful actors to destroy your freedoms, confiscate your wealth, and rule your life.

Bat to human spread of coronavirus.  Hunter Bidens laptop.  Russiagate.  These episodes were all based on lies that were perpetuated through the collusion of media with unelected bureaucrats, sitting in corrupt government agencies, to swing power in their favor.

Revelations included in the recently released Durham report confirm what everyone already knew, in spite of all the lies from Rachel Maddow and Adam Shiff.  That Russiagate was a complete fabrication by the FBI and the Clintons.

How Corruption Makes You Poor

The findings of the Durham report, for any honest observer, really aren’t all that shocking.  Political corruption in America has been normalized.

Like opaque medical billing charges, it’s merely a facet of everyday life.  You can get worked up over it.  You can complain.  But it won’t do any good.

The IRS, for example, has long proven itself to be an agency of dubious actors.  If you recall, the IRS singled out conservative groups in 2013, including the Tea Party, and subjected them to expensive and needless audits.

Lois Lerner, who was then the director of the IRS division that oversaw tax-exempt groups, ultimately apologized for making mistakes and exercising poor judgment.  President Obama also demanded the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Steven T. Miller, and called the agency’s actions “intolerable and inexcusable.”

Yet if there was really justice to be had the IRS would be scrapped and the agency’s workers would be sent home without pay.  The impenetrable tax code would be replaced with a simple across the board flat tax, which eliminates all deductions, loopholes, and chicanery.  But that would remove the politics, lobbying, and swindling opportunities behind it, which is the tax code’s very point.

Given these abuses by the IRS, for partisan purposes, it shouldn’t be a surprise that other government agencies are abusing their powers for political objectives.

What to make of it?

Banana republics of all stripes have several common denominators:

They have a corrupt political class, including both ‘elected’ officials and unelected agency bureaucrats, who lie, cheat, and steal to consolidate power and concentrate wealth.  

They have a corrupt debt-based currency, run massive deficits, and resort to the printing press to scam the populace.

All public restrooms are corrupted with carved graffiti and missing toilet seats.  In good time, as a nation’s corruption spreads and becomes more pervasive it bleeds all private wealth from its citizens.

Lastly, you know utopia’s been reached when the powerless majority are all equally poor.

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Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound?

I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce?

Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth. 

We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton. 

We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign. 

We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.  

What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.

Still, Durham’s bulletin is useful as a marker of the futility in which we labor. André Gide touched on this point when he reminded us that “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” Over the past five or six years, virtually everything that Durham said in his report had already been said. But because no one was listening, it is necessary to start again and say it once more. 

In this spirit, I am going to say again some things I have said elsewhere, beginning with what has become my ritual invocation of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics. That’s time enough, as T. S. Eliot said in another context, “for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

Until the night of March 5, 2023, I suspected that “The Donald Trump Show,” which has been such blockbuster entertainment, might have entered its final season. That’s still possible, of course. The people clamoring for its cancellation are many and vociferous. Moreover, they have another concession with which they propose to entertain us: “The Ron DeSantis Deliverance.” Someday, I’d like to see that show myself.

I wonder, though, about the most profitable time to air it. 2024? Perhaps. But I think the jury is still out on that. We’ll know more after DeSantis finally announces what he has already made clear, namely that he, too, is running for the presidency in 2024. He will, if the past is any guide, get a bump in the polls. But at the moment, anyway, I am inclined to think that 2024 belongs to the Donald. Why? There are many reasons.

One vivid reason was vouchsafed us during the final hours of the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) program in National Harbor, Maryland, in March. It was then that Trump addressed the crowd. C-SPAN described the speech as “remarks.” To me, the word “remarks” suggests something brief and casual. Trump’s performance was long and, for Trump, well-prepared.

As usual with the former president, the talk was peppered with digressions and offhand observations. But he was clearly following a script. Chris Christie, formerly an ally, sighed that the room was only half full (was it?) and that Trump was “not what he used to be.” Opinions about that vary. I thought the talk bristled with rhetorical electricity. And in terms of substance, it was one of the most forthright and powerful political speeches I’ve heard. 

Earlier that day, Trump had won the CPAC straw poll with 62 percent of the vote. DeSantis was the runner-up with 20 percent. As of May 19, with a half a dozen Republican candidates in the field, Trump leads by 42 points. Is that significant? I don’t know. It’s early days. DeSantis hasn’t even officially declared yet, A week is a long time, etc., etc.

But right now, as of May 20, I would say this about the 2024 race on the Republican side: There are two plausible candidates: Trump and DeSantis.

DeSantis has the blessing of the donor class and Conservatism, Inc. He’s a great governor and would probably make an effective president.

Trump has the unwavering support of the MAGA millions and most allotropes of the dissident Right. There’s plenty of exasperation about Trump, not least among those who worked with him in his first term. He’s a difficult, demanding, and mercurial person. But his CPAC speech (and, more recently, his performance at a CNN “townhall” with Kaitlan Collins) demonstrated why he’s beloved by his supporters and feared and hated by his opponents.

Trump said many bold and controversial things in the course of his speech.

I’ll concentrate on two themes.

The first—it was the thing that really set heads spinning—revolved around the word “retribution.” 

“In 2016,” he said, “I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” 

And just in case you missed that last bit, he repeated it. “I am your retribution.”

The pundits love-hated that, just as they were appalled by this promise: “I will totally obliterate the deep state.” I think he meant it, too. “I will fire the unelected bureaucrats and shadow forces who have weaponized our justice system. . . . I will put the people back in charge of this country again.”

’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Could he actually do it? That’s a very good question. His track record during his first term was impressive but not dispositive, partly because he was surrounded by the swamp and its denizens. Really, he didn’t know any better. He came to office as an outsider, a naïf. He actually thought that Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson were on his side. Imagine that. 

He has been disabused of those sentiments, though who exactly he can rely on as allies remains an open question. Personnel will once again be a critical problem for Trump were he to reoccupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Here’s a bit of unsolicited advice that I have for the former president should he be elected again: Stay out of Washington as much as you can. Stop the newspapers. Have your mail forwarded.

Washington really is a swamp and it will consume you. And here are a few particular bits of advice: 

1) Have the inauguration in Mar-a-Lago.

2) Govern from Florida as much as you can. 

3) If you decide to indulge in the theater of the State of the Union Address as it has evolved, deliver it from, say, Kansas. 

4) Disband the FBI. We should never have allowed a national police force to come into being. 

Move the bits of the government you can’t actually destroy to other parts of the country.

Do these things instantly—the day you take office. The deep state will howl. The bureaucrats will oppose you. The lawyers will sue you. Do it anyway. Act first, deal with the consequences later. 

Conduct metaphorical dawn-raids on their people and institutions just as they weaponized the Justice Department against you and your supporters. That would not only be the retribution you seek, it would also be reciprocity. Speed and thoroughness will be of the essence. If you hesitate, if you are half-hearted, you will be lost.

These are points I have made before. The focus should be on eclipsing Washington, D.C. as the seat of government. It has long been obvious to candid observers that there is something deeply dysfunctional about that overwhelmingly Democratic, welfare-addicted city. It is a partisan sinkhole. Jefferson wanted the capital moved from New York to Washington in part to bring it closer to the South, but also to place it somewhere that was officially neutral. There is nothing neutral about Washington today. The city has some impressive architecture and urban vistas. They should be preserved and staffed as tourist attractions. But the reins of power should be relocated.

The more I think about our situation, the more I believe the only hope for the republic is to downgrade the place of Washington in our public life. The business of Washington is to make government bigger—forever. That is not what the people, who pay for it, want. Legitimacy is draining out of our governing institutions at an alarming rate. Stanching that debilitating flow requires that we redirect our attention away from the greedy puppet show in Washington to the true source of legitimacy, which is with the people.

Trump is one of the few people with the temerity to attempt such a thing. Perhaps he can appease some of his critics by proposing we rename Washington to George Floyd City. I would be OK with that. In any event, the actual government of the country should be moved to some neutral ground, out of the overwhelmingly corrupt cesspool that is Washington.

The other bit of Trump’s CPAC speech that I want to mention concerns NATO. Trump did not, as some commenters asserted, “muse about Russia blowing up the NATO headquarters.” Rather, he talked about the folly of NATO spending billions to construct a huge headquarters for itself. Would they not have been better advised to construct a hardened bunker? After all, Trump pointed out, Russia could destroy the shiny new headquarters with a single missile.

Bill Kristol, seizing on the idea that Trump was musing about blowing up NATO headquarters, took to Twitter to make “the most obvious point: This man cannot be our next president.” Kristol was also aghast at Trump’s call for an “all-European NATO, with the United States as an ally but not a member.” “One of the problems with the involvement of the United States in NATO,” he said, “is that it dilutes the nationalist impulse.” Can you believe that? He actually praised “the nationalist impulse.” How Hitlerian can you get?

Unfortunately for Bill Kristol, though, those last observations come not from Trump (though he would probably agree with them) but from someone else named Kristol: Irving Kristol, Bill’s father, who in 1983 wrote an essay called “What’s Wrong With NATO?” After the Soviet Union fell, Irving Kristol went on to express doubts about the future role for NATO in European politics altogether.

If that seems surprising, it’s only because you have failed to appreciate just how long a week in politics can be.

Via PaulCraigRoberts.org, (emphasis ours)

Against the backdrop of the United States’ recognition of the investigation against Donald Trump as politically motivated, structural and ideological controversies, and concerns that the American economy will enter a recession, the GEOFOR editorial board asked Paul Craig Roberts, Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy (USA), a PhD in Economics and US Undersecretary of Treasury in the Reagan administration, to share his views on America’s future.

GEOFOR: Special Counsel John Durham “acquitted” Donald Trump on the so-called “Russiagate”, writing in his report that the FBI investigation was politically motivated. How will this news affect the Democrats’ fight against Trump?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Special Counsel’s vindication of Donald Trump and denunciation of the FBI for conducting a politically motivated investigation devoid of any evidence should collapse the equally fraudulent Biden regime investigation of Trump on fake documents charges and the New York state prosecution of Trump on alleged expense misreporting charges. It has been clear for a long time that the list of fake charges against Trump, supported by the media, are propaganda to prevent Trump again running for President and to teach all future potential presidential candidates that they will be destroyed if they attempt to represent the people instead of the unelected ruling oligarchy.

However, the Democrat Party and the presstitutes that service them have no respect whatsoever for truth. Facts simply do not matter to them. This is true also of American Universities, law associations, medical associations, the CIA, FBI, NSA, the State Department, the regulatory agencies such as NIH, CDC, FDA, the large corporations, and many establishment Republican members of the House and Senate who serve the economic interests that pay them, not truth. It is also the case with a high percentage of Democrat voters who have been conditioned by propaganda to hate Trump. To Democrats what matters is not facts, but getting Trump. Truth is not permitted to prevent the destruction of Trump.

Consequently, the US is moving toward a fatal split in the society from which recovery is impossible. Trump represents ordinary Americans who prefer peace to the neoconservatives’ wars, who want their jobs back that the greed-driven capitalist global corporations sent to China and Asia, who want their children properly educated instead of indoctrinated with sexual perversion, Satanism, and told that they are racists. In contrast, the Democrats are increasingly Woke–people who believe that truth is an oppressive tool of white supremacy, that Christian morality is tyrannical and discriminatory against pedophiles and other sexual perverts, and that, as “President” Biden himself has said, white people are the greatest threat to America. See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/15/us-navy-enlists-drag-queen-for-digital-ambassador-role-to-attract-more-recruits-2/

Now that official investigations by the House Republicans have brought the utter corruption of Biden and his son to light (see: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/16/bank-records-show-biden-family-received-10-million-in-payments-from-china-foreign-interests-house-oversight/ ), the Democrats, the dangerous and corrupt military/security complex, and the complicit whore American media, are desperate. They all stand as being exposed. So, rather than apologize for their mistreatment of Trump and his supporters–1,000 of whom the Democrats have illegally imprisoned–they will likely strike out while they still control the Executive Branch, the US Senate, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and federal agencies such as the IRS that have been armed and militarized.

Alternatively, the corrupt and threatened Democrats might cause war between the US and Russia, or Iran, or China in the hopes that a war will unify even Trump supporters, especially the super-patriots among them, around the “President” against “foreign enemies.”

GEOFOR: Recently there were reports that former Vice President Mike Pence seriously intends to compete with Donald Trump in the presidential race of 2024. How do you assess his chances and why did he decide to take such a step?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: Mike Pence has no chance whatsoever of prevailing over Donald Trump. Pence is running as a service to the ruling establishment. Spence is a pretend Christian Evangelical. Evangelicals don’t oppose Armageddon, because they believe they will be wafted up to Heaven, while those still on earth get consumed in fire. The Ruling American Oligarchy hopes that Spence will draw off the Christian Evangelicals from the Trump vote, thus reducing Trump’s margin of victory so that the Democrats can again steal the presidential election. As evangelicals are not very astute, the Democrats might succeed in derailing Trump and the American people. Pence, of course, would not become president.

GEOFOR: We can’t help but ask about the migration problem. After the abolition of Section 42, analysts predict a new influx of refugees from Mexico and Latin America. What will such problems lead to and will they affect the election of the head of the White House next year?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Biden regime is spending billions of dollars “to defend Ukraine’s borders,” but won’t spend one penny to defend America’s borders. The Democrats want the Hispanic and Black immigrants, who they will give the vote, because the immigrant-invaders water down the white majority population and destroy the ethnic basis of the US. Instead of a unified nation, there is a Tower of Babel.

As the Democrats control the major cities in most states and thereby the election rules and vote counting, It doesn’t matter how people vote. As Stalin said, the only thing that matters is who counts the vote. Only a total fool would expect Democrats to count votes that gave victory to Republicans.

GEOFOR: Passions around the American public debt, inflation, jobs and the possible new collapses of American banks are only growing. Tell us, please, what awaits the American economy in the foreseeable future? After all, the recession in the United States will have an impact on the whole world one way or another…

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The United States, despite my best efforts and the efforts of others for decades, has been destroyed by its ruling elites for the sake of short-term profits and short-term growth in power over the people. By offshoring its manufacturing jobs, the global corporations destroyed the American middle class and the ladders to upward mobility that had made America the “opportunity society.” Today many former American manufacturing and industrial cities look like the remains of bombed cities.

As US corporations produce the goods abroad that they market to Americans, the goods enter the US as imports. Thus, offshoring production for the home market worsens the trade deficit.

The trade deficit has to be financed. This is no problem for the US as long as the dollar is in demand as the reserve currency by all countries in order to pay for their international transactions, and countries with trade surpluses keep their monetary surpluses in US Treasury bonds, thus financing both the US trade and budget deficits. Washington in an act of incredible stupidity has driven a dagger through the heart of the US dollar as world reserve currency, thus ending Washington’s ability to pay its bills by printing money. The dagger was the Biden regime’s Russian and other sanctions and the seizure of Russia’s central bank deposits. This finally convinced the rest of the world that holding dollar balances exposed a country to the risk of expropriation or control by Washington.

The consequence is that the world is moving away from the use of the dollar, instead settling their trade balances in their own or other currencies. Therefore, the demand for dollars is declining, but the supply is rising because of the US trade and budget deficits.

Sooner or later the US dollar’s exchange value will fall, setting off high inflation in the US that is outside the control of the central bank. American living standards will fall, and the US will begin to look like India in 1900.The hatred of white people that Democrats have taught to blacks and immigrant-invaders will result in internal war. The only question is whether white Americans will have been so indoctrinated with their guilt that they are unable to defend themselves.

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

The FBI abused its surveillance powers while spying on suspects in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol and Black Lives Matter protesters, a federal court said in a newly unsealed ruling.

FBI agents flaunted standards the agency developed for the Section 702 program, which enables spying on Americans and others, more than 278,000 times, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in the 2022 ruling, which was made public for the first time on May 19.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act enables agencies like the FBI to collect information like emails without warrants from foreigners, even if they’re in the United States, and bars intentionally targeting Americans.

The FBI developed its own standard for Section 702 searches, stating that queries “must be reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information, as defined by FISA, or evidence of a crime, unless otherwise specifically excepted.”

But FBI agents have been violating the standard, the court has found, with the newest ruling disclosing hundreds of thousands of abusive searches in addition to those already known.

The abusive searches include multiple improper queries targeting suspected or confirmed Jan. 6 suspects.

In one instance, an analyst searched for information on 13 people suspected of being involved in the Capitol breach. The analyst “said she ran the queries to determine whether these individuals had foreign ties,” but the Department of Justice’s National Security Division (NSD) “concluded the queries were not reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime,” the newly unsealed ruling states.

In another case, widespread searches that in total consisted of more than 23,000 separate queries looked for information on presumed Americans to see whether the people were “being used by a group” involved in the breach.

“The queries were run against unminimized Section 702 information to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence related to the query terms used,” the court said. “NSD assessed there was no specific factual basis to believe the queries were reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime from Section 702 information.”

Other Improper Searches

The new ruling, released by the Office of Director of National Intelligence, also revealed that FBI personnel improperly surveilled a congressional campaign.

An analyst conducted a so-called batch query, or a widespread query, for over 19,000 donors to the campaign. The analyst claimed the campaign was “a target of foreign influence,” but NSD officials found sufficient evidence for queries for just eight of the people who were queried.

In another instance, a batch query was conducted on 133 people who were arrested “in connection with civil unrest and protests between approximately May 30, and June 18, 2020,” the time period during which people, primarily Black Lives Matter members and supporters, were protesting and rioting over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“The query was run to determine whether the FBI had ‘any counter-terrorism derogatory information on the arrestees,’ but without ‘any specific potential connections to terrorist related activity’ known to those who conducted the queries,'” the court found. NSD said the queries violated the FBI standards, but the FBI disagreed, claiming there was a “reasonable basis to believe these queries ‘would return foreign intelligence” due to citations that were redacted.

Additional 2020 violations included queries using variations of “political activist groups involved in organized protests;” 697 queries using identifiers on scheduled visits to a place or person that were redacted in the ruling; searches for at least 790 defense contractors that the FBI was considering requesting cooperation from; and at least 330 queries conducted using identifiers of employees of a company whose name was redacted, with the FBI claiming it might recruit the employees as sources.

Multiple queries were run without obtaining an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, another violation of the law.

Read more here...

Authored by Tom Wyatt via Racket News,

The San Diego Convention Center was packed with the defense industry elite. Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, and a myriad of other arms industry salesmen, hungry to peddle their wares. WEST Conference 2023 is billed as the “premier naval conference and exposition on the West Coast.” A collective of military leaders and titans of the defense industry, intermingled in incestuous harmony.

It was a world with which I was well acquainted. After all, I had spent the past fifteen years in the Navy as a Special Warfare Boat Operator, using tools and weapons built by these very defense companies. My call to service came unexpectedly at the tail end of my high school senior year. I left for bootcamp on Valentine’s Day, 2007, and immediately entered the world of Naval Special Warfare upon completion. While the rest of my graduating class received tutelage at universities around the country, mine came by way of the military elite. Over a decade and a half, I received an education in Special Reconnaissance, Unconventional Warfare and tradecraft.

Many of the friends and former colleagues I met along the way now worked for these defense contractors, and perhaps, in another life, I’d be a participant in this conference. As it turned out, I was there as a spectator only.

I watched as a sea of suits and lanyards moved in waves throughout the lobby outside the convention floor. Thousands of exhibitors and participants waited in line to get their credentials, exchanging cards and networking as they sized up the competition. As I surveyed the crowd, I noticed something familiar in the attendees’ faces. There was a look of out-of-place discomfort. Tattoos peeking out of cuffs and collars of the business attire their bodies seemed to be rejecting. It was the look of the defense industry’s freshman class, those who had just made the leap from serving in the armed forces to being arms proliferators.

The conference embodied the idea of the military industrial complex’s self-licking ice cream cone structure. There was no discernible line between merchandiser and consumer, just a single organism supporting itself.

In 2021, the Revolving Door Project released a report titled “The Military-Industrial-Think Tank Complex: Conflict of Interest at the Center for a New American Security,” that trained a troubling spotlight on one of the most prominent defense-minded think tanks. 

According to its website, the Center for a New American Society (CNAS) “is an independent, bipartisan, nonprofit organization that develops strong, pragmatic, and principled national security and defense policies.” The defense industry-funded group claims to “elevate the national security debate” by providing innovative research to policymakers and experts in the field. But given the whiff of defense industry influence around the organization, its high-level engagement with Washington’s most powerful figures raises numerous red flags. 

A major point of concern presented by the Revolving Door Project, was, ironically CNAS’ own revolving door. According to the report, there are “16 CNAS alumni who have been selected for foreign policy and national security policy-making positions in the Biden administration.” Among them: Avril Haines, a former CNAS Board of Directors member who became Biden’s Director of National Intelligence in 2021, and Colin Kahl, the current Undersecretary of Defense Policy, a former CNAS Senior Fellow. 

The report also includes instances of the think tank pushing agendas that directly benefit its membership, such as the collusion between CNAS and the United Arab Emirates to promote relaxed restrictions for exporting US drones. Not surprisingly, CNAS board member Neal Blue’s company, General Atomic, had an existing contract worth nearly $200 million with the UAE for drone production. The report reads:

CNAS receives large contributions directly from defense contractors, foreign governments, and the US government; publishes research and press material that frequently supports the interests of its sponsors without proper disclosure; and even gives its financial sponsors an official oversight role in helping to shape the organization’s research.

WEST 2023 offered yet another venue for private companies to seek out such connections, pushing an agenda that “supports the interests” of the defense industry–a kind of speed dating for the military industrial complex. And while the familiar mechanisms of war, like drones and submarines, were on display, the spotlight was on weapons of the information space.

Panel after panel featured cybersecurity and electronic warfare experts giving discussions on information operations, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. The conference seemed to embody the new horizon for the defense industry: Information Warfare. 

Counter-Terrorism to Great Power Competition

“In hindsight, we should’ve never taken our eye off the Great Power Competition,” the counter-disinformation expert said, referring to the historical focus on traditional preparation for conflict against countries like China and Russia. Her mastery of the subject was honed over a decade through the study of forensic psychology and counter-extremism strategies. She had worked across the public and private sectors, countering the dangerous narratives of violent extremists.

At the end of World War II, the power that had previously been distributed across multiple nations was now consolidated by the US and Soviet Union. American foreign policy entered the era of Great Power Competition (GPC), a contest for global dominance and influence pitting the two former allies in a Highlander-style deathmatch to see who prevailed as the one true superpower. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US focused on maintaining this strategic edge, until a decade later when the towers fell. 

After 9/11, the US reoriented its foreign policy around a new acronym: GWOT (Global War on Terror). The Spy vs. Spy tactics of the Cold War were obsolete now that the deadly effects of adversarial narratives had been demonstrated. While propaganda used by the Soviet Union (and the US, for that matter) was aimed at deceiving, disrupting and undermining the adversary, terrorist organizations focused their messaging campaigns on radicalization, targeting at-risk Muslim communities into armies of holy warriors. 

The seemingly archaic, global network of radical Islamists tapped into the far-reaching technology of the world wide web to spread their message and indoctrinate would-be jihadists. To combat this ideological plague, the US began crafting counter-messaging tools and methodologies, giving birth to what would become an updated version of a counter-disinformation industry that had existed as far back as 1942, when Voice of America began broadcasting counter-narratives into Nazi Germany. These efforts ranged from a “whac-a-mole” style process of detecting and eliminating terrorist propaganda to enlisting moderate Muslim leaders to push a counter-message.

It’s no revelation that you can’t carpet bomb an ideology, so while the concept of fighting extremist narratives online to tamp down on global terrorism seems logical on its face, according to the industry expert I interviewed, “In practice, it’s not very effective.” 

This sentiment was affirmed by another expert in countering extremist narratives, Caroline Moreno, who formerly ran the counter-terrorism training program at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA. “Counter messaging, when it comes from the US government, loses its credibility,” said Moreno. 

It is understandable, in an unfamiliar world of ideology-based violence and radicalization, that some trial and error would occur along the path to understanding such a complex adversary. Tactics, of course, are developed over time and situationally based. Before 9/11, the military was focused on the most logical adversary, a conventional state actor, but had to adapt to the irregular warfare landscape of counter-terrorism operations.

The operators and ground-pounders on the frontlines get a real-world education in the necessary fluidity of such tactics, but the military monolith is often slow to adopt lessons gleaned from battle. To further complicate the matter, there are always plenty of defense industry opportunists promoting their tactics as dogma, such as the failed “hearts and minds” approach to counterinsurgency, further setting back any notion of catching up with the current threat, and the shift from the war on terror to the GPC has only exacerbated this strategic buffering. 

The shift from counter-terrorism to GPC occurred long before the official end of the GWOT. Although some within the defense and intelligence communities saw the writing on the wall for some time, the declared pivot came in 2018 with the new National Defense Strategy, issued by then Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

“Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia,” the guidance reads,” are the principal priorities for the Department [of Defense].”

The Pentagon, in other words, was announcing plans to take us back to a Cold War mindset. In a space-race type fashion, we would need to outfox the competition in arms, technology and influence in order to maintain our world power monopoly. Unfortunately, our drawdown in the Middle East and the swan song of the war on terror would mean a natural decrease in the defense budget, hampering any lofty dreams of competition.

Unless, of course, the new threat required a level of spending generally associated with kinetic warfare. A little thing like the absence of active armed conflict shouldn’t stop the growth of the defense industry. And in that spirit, the Pentagon’s budget reached its highest level last year, a whopping $816 billion. 

A Brief PRIMER on Information Operations

During my final six years of service, in a move that seemed to parallel the national defense strategy, I shifted from Counter-Terrorism focused special boat operations to conducting sensitive intelligence activities aimed at the Great Power Competition. Our task was to clandestinely prepare the battlespace, establishing an operational environment that would give us an advantage in the event of a hot war, but more importantly, shaping the environment so that our adversary couldn’t do the same. Our best tool in this endeavor was Information Operations.

A Joint Chiefs of Staff publication on Information Operations, Joint Publication 3-13, reads:

Information Operations (IO) are described as the integrated employment of electronic warfare (EW), computer network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC), in concert with specific supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.

I’d left this world behind when I found myself at WEST 2023. Now a mere observer of the military industrial complex, I picked up a copy of Signal to orient myself to the occasion. Signal is the official magazine of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, or AFCEA, one of WEST 2023’s many sponsors. In fact, the conference had so many sponsors that it developed a funder caste system, segregating the donors into categories such as Premier, Platinum, Gold and Silver. 

Amongst defense heavyweights Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, was a lesser-known company down in the silver category named Primer. Primer is one of the many artificial intelligence and machine learning-focused companies orbiting the defense industry. Aside from AT&T, the silver sponsors blended together in an indistinguishable list of obscure defense contractors, and perhaps Primer would’ve remained obscure, too, had the company not acquired Yonder, an Austin, Texas-based “information integrity” company.

Primer had already entered the disinformation space, in 2020, when it won a Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, contract with the Air Force and Special Operation Command, SOCOM, to develop the first machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation. This evolution into the disinformation world was fully realized with its 2022 acquisition of Yonder, an “information integrity” company focused on detecting and disrupting disinformation campaigns online.

Yonder, originally New Knowledge, rose to prominence when they co-authored a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian influence campaigns leading up to the 2016 Presidential election. Ironically, New Knowledge’s own foray into election meddling would make them a household name. During the 2017 Alabama Senate race, New Knowledge’s CEO, Jonathon Morgan, created a fake Facebook page and Twitter “botnet” with the intent of persuading votes for the Democratic candidate. 

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” said an internal document from Morgan’s project. 

In another bit of controversy, New Knowledge, in the wake of the alleged Russian election meddling of 2016, helped develop a disinformation dashboard with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, or ASD. The dashboard, named Hamilton 68, acted as a repository for supposed Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operatives, with access limited to a select few. This was ASD’s golden tablet, and only journalists and academics could wield the seer stone. 

Unfortunately for all involved, including the media who treated the information as gospel, the dashboard proved most successful at identifying overzealous conservatives from middle America. This legacy, and all its implications, came part and parcel with Yonder’s acquisition.

In Primer’s catalog of machine learning products, Yonder is billed as a tool capable of identifying bad actors and narrative manipulation — Primer’s very own weapon against Information Operations. 

Disinformation, propaganda, active measures — whatever you call it, the name of the game is Information Operations, or IO. In a war where battles are left of boom–where the strategy is to manipulate the information landscape to gain a competitive advantage over your adversary–a cat-and-mouse-like game develops.  But with the advent of the internet, and its compounding stores of information, the task of determining what is real and what is fake is too much to ask of us mere mortals. Thus the need for a Yonder-style solution.

“I’m not a fan of the term disinformation,” the counter-disinformation expert said. 

The statement came as a bit of throat clearing for the industry expert, as she digressed into a brief indictment of the trade she very much believes in.

“It’s been politicized. Even though disinformation has a distinct definition, it’s now being used as a label for any unwelcome information that someone doesn’t like, even when that information is true.” 

A new industry has developed out of the great disinformation scare. A mishmash of government, academic and private industry experts, come together to identify what is true, and what isn’t. Or at least their idea of what they would like to be true and not true. 

Most, if not all, countries dabble in information manipulation, not to mention non-state tricksters and deception artists, so it makes sense that you would need a cross-functional team of experts for such an undertaking. And given the implications of an information governing body, a kind of truth authority, you would damn well expect that all parties involved would be aboveboard.  

But…

“Any industry has hucksters,” the expert said.

The term huckster, perhaps because of its old world feel, brought to mind a scene from the Clint Eastwood film The Outlaw Josey Wales:

The camera pans across a dusty frontier town as a carpetbagging salesman in a white suit holds the attention of a crowd, proselytizing about his magic elixir.

“What’s in it?” a man from the crowd asks.

“Ehh…I don’t know, various things. I’m only the salesman,” the man in the white suit replies.

He looks the salesman up and down.

“You drink it,” the man says as he walks off.

The man in white looks shaken by the question. He recomposes himself before returning to the crowd.

“Well, what can you expect from a non-believer?”

Enter the New Snake Oil Salesman

“You can charge more if you call it information operations,” said one veteran, working in commercial Information Operations. He asked that I not reveal the company he works for but needless to say, it is one of the many government contracted companies peddling AI driven counter-disinformation products.

His voice was flat with a dry, matter of fact delivery. There was no surprise in this revelation, not for him at least.

“And the higher the clearance level [of the project], the more money.”

The second part was less surprising. Anyone familiar with government contracts will share my lack of shock. It has been my experience that government contracts are reliably unreliable. The only thing you can count on is a cronyistic leveraging of relationships within the Department of Defense (DOD). 

One former Primer employee referred to this as the “kabuki theater”: A vague request from the government, limited by over-classification and reluctance to “give too much away,” followed by a lavish set of promises from the contract winner, despite not having the specificity to deliver a quality product. These hollow requests make it impossible for the company to even know if they can deliver their empty promises. 

“We need a machine learning tool, capable of dissecting media posts to identify and catalog state sponsored disinformation,” a DOD contracting officer might say to a Primer account executive. 

“What systems will this work on?” the account executive asks.

“Classified ones.”

“Can we have access to them? It will help us.”

“Nope, classified.”

“Can we at least...”

“Nope. Here’s $10 million, good luck!”

The end result is just what you’d expect: an overly expensive useless doodad. Any oversight from the requesting agency is unlikely to catch this before it’s too late, given they rarely have the technical expertise to know what they are asking for in the first place. 

“I don’t even use my company’s products,” the IO expert said, “I don’t find any of it useful.”

Even though his work is in information operations, he says it is more akin to public relations than traditional IO, just layered in secrecy for effect. This was not the first time I’d heard the comparison to the PR/ marketing world. As a matter of fact, the counter-disinformation expert suggested that many of the tools marketed to counter disinformation are simply recycled marketing products. Companies use social listening software, designed to analyze consumer wants by monitoring their online behavior, and marketing tools to construct the perfect narrative to sell their product. So to detect “bad” narratives, one only has to reverse engineer the process.

“Marketers use these types of social listening tools to understand who their target audience is, how to best reach them, and how best to craft a viral message. Analysts can use them to understand how state-sponsored messages traverse across the internet, hopping from platform to platform, and if they’re resonating with target audiences,” the counter-disinformation expert said.

So what? Many popular products were originally meant for some other use. Viagra was supposed to lower blood pressure, now it just redirects it. What’s the problem in finding a secondary use for a product that already exists? Nothing, provided you don’t make outlandish claims about the “new” product.

“With Yonder, you can slice through streams of social media to gain contextual intelligence on narratives – including their authenticity and likely trajectory of amplification…Understanding the intent, affiliations, and influence of adversarial networks provides you with critical insight into emerging topics and events before they go viral.”

Other companies in the counter-disinformation industry, like Graphika, Two Six Technologies and PeakMetrics, make similar claims using comparable marketing terminology for their AI driven products. It turns out, however, that regardless of the efficacy of these tools, the Defense Department is not equipped to handle them.

“The tech solutions aren’t all that great,” the IO expert said. “The DOD isn’t advanced enough, doesn’t have the infrastructure to keep up with the contracted solutions”. The bureaucracy of DOD acquisitions leaves the military in a perpetual state of obsolescence, always behind the powercurve of technology and innovation of their defense industry counterparts.  

“The US is doing a shit job at [countering] disinformation,” the IO expert said, in another bit of optimistic revelation.

One problem is the lack of organization in the effort. While government agencies like the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) claim to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation,” the reality is a scattered series of efforts across the government and private entities. This resulting chaos is exacerbated by the fact that the GEC is largely staffed by Foreign Service Officers and contractors, who typically don’t have a background or deep understanding of IO or disinformation.

There are, of course, actual IO professionals in the space, both on the government and private side of things. These subject matter experts are a hot commodity in the task saturated world of the counter-disinformation industry, but that doesn’t mean that any IO hack can make the grade. To ensure they get the very elite, the industry has stringent requirements: X number of years as an IO expert, an active Top Secret security clearance, SCIF (sensitive compartmentalized information facility) access, and, of course, the ever-important connections to the right people. What you end up with is a small pool of the same industry experts, playing a game of musical chairs from place to place, ensuring the same entrenched mindset manifests across all aspects of the industry.

A Collective Paranoia

The military is a paranoid organization. If you need proof, look no further than the posters plastered all over military installations.

“Loose lips…might sink ships,” reads one poster.

“He’s Watching You,” reads another. 

The paranoia, however, is justifiable in many instances. Being the most powerful military inspires competition, and competition can be ugly. Espionage, sabotage and propaganda are always on the menu of adversary tactics to deceive and compromise.

The modern disinformation scare has, no doubt, exacerbated this paranoia. Healthy suspicion, the kind that keeps the evildoers at bay, sometimes turns toxic, resulting in operational paralysis and rampant mistrust, setting off a chain of reactionary measures run amuck. Since the military is reactive by nature, only really employed when there is a tangible threat, our tactics to disrupt the flow of disinformation are inherently reactive as well. 

It is due to this failed strategy that the counter-disinformation expert recommends a more proactive approach to countering, or more appropriately, preventing the fallout from potential disinformation campaigns. Her recommendations: media literacy and civic engagement. 

A more critical media consumer, although hard to imagine at the moment, isn’t a bridge too far, yet the civic engagement angle seems to be. As skeptical as people are of the media, it pales in comparison to the distrust many Americans have for the government. But rather than entertain ideas of how to rebuild that trust, and possibly embolden local leaders and everyday citizens to take ownership of their relationship with the information they ingest and propagate, Washington seems content with deflecting the blame onto a third party.  But for any of it to work, the two recommendations would need to be approached in tandem.

“The majority of actions in the ‘proactive’ realm revolve around making people aware of the potential for misleading/manipulated information and encouraging them to engage critically with the content they consume,” the expert explains.

To support her claim, she directs attention to Taiwan, who reportedly receives more fake news than any other country. Rather than succumb to the overwhelming disinformation campaign, or use artificial intelligence to detect and dismantle it, Taiwan employs the counter-disinformation experts’ proactive strategy.

To achieve this, Taiwan partners with Non-Government Organizations, or NGOs, to promote early age media literacy, which the Ministry of Education has incorporated into its teaching guidelines, along with creating fact checking tools for messaging apps and social media. It is hard to know whether these tools are any more successful than the myriad of ones offered by the burgeoning counter-disinformation industry, but Taiwan’s proactive measures signal a move in a better direction. 

Perhaps initiatives like this, employed in the US and globally, can put an end to the counter-disinformation industry. It is, after all, beginning to show cracks. The recent dismantling of the Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation subcommittee, the murky remnants of the Department of Homeland Security’s failed Disinformation Governance Board, indicates a possible sea change. No doubt a more malevolent entity will take its place, but maybe, just maybe, this represents a retreat from the manic steps towards an Orwellian nightmare.

Authored by Anders Corr via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The United States and South Korea are getting tougher on technology leaks. The two countries have extensive tech industries to protect. Most important is their technological lead, along with the Netherlands, in small and powerful computer chips used for economic and military applications around the world.

Countries that steal these technologies include China, Russia, and Iran. As U.S. adversaries, they could use them against us and our allies.

On May 16, the Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed five related cases investigated by its new “Disruptive Technology Strike Force.”

Two of them, both in California, include the alleged theft of source code by Chinese nationals for delivery to competitors in China.

On May 5, a senior technology engineer was arrested for alleged theft of “metrology software which is used in ‘smart’ automotive manufacturing equipment,” the DOJ said in a press release. The tech could help China build nuclear submarines and military aircraft.

The other case is of a Chinese national and former Apple engineer who allegedly stole “thousands of documents containing the source code for software and hardware pertaining to Apple’s autonomous vehicle technology,” according to the DOJ.

He escaped back to China the same night in 2018 that FBI agents searched his home and discovered the documents. It is unclear why the FBI did not immediately arrest the suspect and why it has taken this long to bring charges.

A third case, in New York, involved a sanctioned “Chinese procurement network established to provide Iran with materials used in weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and ballistic missiles,” the DOJ said. The defendant is a Chinese national who allegedly used a front company to try and provide Iran with isostatic graphite, used in the rocket nozzles and reentry vehicle nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles. He is at large in China.

French officials arrested a Greek national in a fourth case for alleged links to Russian intelligence and acquiring 10 different types of controlled technology for illegal export to Russia.

“As alleged, while ostensibly operating as a defense contractor for NATO and other ally countries, the defendant and his Aratos Group were double-dealing, helping to fuel Russia’s war effort and their development of next-generation weapons,” according to U.S. Attorney Breon Peace.

The Aratos Group operates defense and technology companies in Greece and the Netherlands, which, as NATO countries, can import some controlled U.S. tech. Since 2017, Aratos has allegedly smuggled tech to Russia that can be “used in military applications, including quantum cryptography and nuclear weapons testing, as well as tactical battlefield equipment” by Russian nuclear and quantum research facilities and intelligence services, according to the DOJ.

Two other Russian nationals were arrested in Arizona in a fifth case for allegedly lying and using front companies and foreign bank accounts to attempt to ship export-controlled aircraft parts to sanctioned Russian commercial airlines.

As the United States has increased the pressure on economic spies, those from China have gone elsewhere to get similar technologies. In South Korea, for example, confirmed leaks of core technologies increased from 3 in 2017 to 10 in 2021, according to the Financial Times. In the first quarter of 2023, there have already been three such leaks from large automotive, display, and semiconductor companies. Headhunters from China operate front companies and lurk outside South Korean chip fabs in an attempt to poach talent. On offer are salaries three-to-four times prior incomes.

Read more here...

Authored by Thomas Neuberger via "God's Spies" Substack,

Which non-foreign 'adversaries' do elites have in mind when they promote domestic censorship and news blockades?

I want to put three thoughts in front of you, drop three stones in the slipstream of your mind. Perhaps you’ll see the ripples as they cross, note their interaction, hear what their crossing says.

The future this article previews isn’t new, just newly forgot.

Domestic ‘Terror’ from the Activist Left

First, from ace investigator Lee Fang (parts of this piece are subscriber-only):

DHS and FBI Depict Vegan Activists as Potential Domestic Terrorists

Imagine a young woman named Jane who recently adopted a vegan lifestyle after learning about factory farming in college. She discusses animal welfare and begins attending protests.

For most, Jane’s experiences sound remarkably benign.

But for the Department of Homeland Security, the young woman is following a "path of potential radicalization," according to new documents released through a public records request.

The scenario was one of several depicted in a violence prevention workshop from the DHS Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, a division of the agency that works to counter domestic terrorism.

Jane's supposed path towards violence — as featured in the DHS workshop — is composed of little more than everyday experiences that many Americans take as they embrace activism.

In the workshop scenario, Jane reacts with anger when discussing animal cruelty and mentions that she joined a group that has "a reputation for holding controversial protests." She had not only become "an animal lover," but had become "militant about food and animal rights, and other issues like testing."

Note the “workshop.” This is a report of a DHS workshop on domestic terrorism, where new threats may come from, and what to do. The source doc is here; you can probably guess the rest of what it says. If not, Fang lays it out.

Here’s the cover portion of the document and summary-first remarks:

Fang’s report includes the FBI component in defining the animal-rights “threat” to internal security:

Can you see where this is headed? If you do, you’re not alone.

The ‘Foreign-Domestic Switcheroo’

The second stone drops here. Does what you read above touch what's below?

Through a complicated set of leaks (described here), we find “that the Aspen Institute hosted a ‘Hack-and-Dump Working Group’ exercise in the summer of 2020 titled, ‘Burisma Leak,’ which predicted with uncanny accuracy an upcoming derogatory story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden's lost laptop.”

Here’s a link to the Aspen Institute document in question. In it we find the following. First, from the Executive Summary (emphasis mine):

Once a promise of free expression and the democratization of information, the Web and its many channels are now polluted with mis- and dis-information, bots, abuse, lies, and conspiracies - sometimes planned by adversarial actors from home and aboard.

Then, from the section about dealing with “Reporting and Promoting Hack-and-Dumps”:

As we countdown to election day, the risk of a major hack and dump of documents aimed at undermining a candidate or party grows more acute. How can news organizations put provenance front and center? What happens when fabricated documents are released alongside genuine (stolen) content? How can social feeds avoid serving as promoters of foreign or other adversarial entities? Aspen Digital is convening Platform Trust and Safety leaders, cybersecurity reporters, journalism ethicists and First Amendment attorneys to develop and adopt new norms guidelines for publication and coverage of hacked documents.

Note that the Aspen Institute is not just a think tank. It’s where the elites' 2020 discussion over moderation of hacked content was happening.

Now consider what “promoters of foreign or other adversarial entities” means? The only other adversarial entity that isn’t foreign is … domestic. Can you trust, given what’s above, that this designation — “other adversarial entities” — is reserved just for Proud Boy types?

About this, Matt Taibbi writes (emphasis mine):

First of all, this notion that there may be fabrications mixed in with real content is a suggestion that pops up somewhere in nearly every one of these leak stories, even if all the material proves to be real (old friend Malcolm Nance did the job in 2016 in suggesting the Podesta leaks were “riddled with forgeries”). More importantly however, that last line is a great example of what former cybersecurity official and Foundation for Freedom Online head Mike Benz calls the “foreign-domestic switcheroo.”

It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets. You can see the subtlety: the original Stanford piece tries to stick to railing against “disinformation” and information from “foreign adversaries,” but the later paper circulated by Aspen slips in, ever so slightly, a new category of dubious source: “foreign or other adversarial entities.”

These rhetorical devices are essential. It would be preposterous to form (as Stanford did) an “Information Warfare Working Group” if readers knew the “war” being contemplated was against domestic voices. … But if you start by focusing on Russians and only later mention as an afterthought “other adversarial entities,” you can frame things however you want, from espionage to warfare. As reader O’Neill correctly pointed out, “they are now getting close to being explicit about the fact that their motivation for suppressing news is to fight domestic political adversaries.”

You don’t have to be a lover of these sources to hate what’s you’ve just found out. And I think it’s reasonable to fear, even if you fear Trump more than God herself, what our security agencies do with domestic power.

Regime Change

The last stone dropped in the pond is the oldest one. Before most of you were born, the halls of power fully understood that our security agencies, birthed in the Soviet threat, were fully capable — even tasked with the job — of making sure the global world was a safe American playground.

The list of American-led coups in other countries is long as your leg and both arms. Start here to see most of it. Do these agencies act domestically as they do abroad? The FBI sure does. But what about the CIA and the rest of the alphabet community?

Here’s what Robert Kennedy, the man who was murdered on his way to the 1968 nomination, thought of the murder that felled his brother Jack in 1963 (via The Hill, emphasis mine):

[Robert] Kennedy Jr. said the first call his father, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, made after learning his uncle had been shot was to a CIA desk officer.

“My father said to him, ‘Did your people do this?’” Kennedy Jr. told Fox News’s “Hannity” on Monday. 

“His next call was to [Enrique Ruiz-Williams], who was one of the Cuban Bay of Pigs leaders who had remained very, very close to our family and to my father,” he continued. “My father asked him the same question.”

Kennedy Jr. said his father then called John McCone, the head of the CIA, and asked him to come to the family’s house.

“When I came home [from] Sidwell Friends School, my father was walking in the yard with John McCone, and my father was posing the same question to him, ‘Was it our people who did this to my brother?’” he said. “It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother.”

The Hill later tags this story as a “conspiracy theory,” no doubt to distance itself from both charge and source. But the underlying report is nonetheless true, or RFK Jr. is lying.

Ripples In the Pond

What do these data points sum to? I’ll leave it to you. If you love the FBI as some today do, would you love them still if they thought their remit included squelching you and your kind, not just Trump and his, using control of media as their tool?

As I’ve said before, it’s appropriate to fear what a Trump, or worse, a DeSantis — who unlike Trump, who loves adoration and cash, truly loves power — would do if power were given them.

Is it therefore not also appropriate to fear these agencies?

After all, their goals won’t always align with what’s broadly called “the left.” Their goals have never aligned with ours in the past. And unlike Republicans, who are only halfway to their goal, these agencies have power now, and practice using it.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“Raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated.”

Those words from the Durham Report summed up one of the most damning investigations in the Justice Department’s history.

In the 305-page report released Monday, special counsel John Durham concluded that the Trump-Russia investigation was launched without a required minimal level of evidence and shattered a host of departmental standards. Let that sink in: The Justice Department — as well as the media that covered it — effectively shut down a duly elected presidency, based on what turned out to be a politically engineered hoax.

That would make anyone angry. Really angry. Trump-level angry.

The fact is, in this instance, Donald Trump was correct when he said he was the target of a political hitjob funded by the Clinton campaign and maintained by virtually every media outlet. There is a word for that: disinformation.

Democrats such as former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff of California have pushed for censorship by claiming that disinformation is a threat to democracy.

Well, this is that threat — the real one. This actually left an administration mired in a faux scandal for years, with high-ranking officials paraded before grand juries and their guilt then proclaimed nightly on cable news shows.

Even after the Mueller investigation found insufficient evidence of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, Rep. Schiff assured the public in March 2018, that “I can certainly say with confidence that there is significant evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia” and he repeatedly promised to reveal it in his committee.

He never did, of course. Instead, he regularly criticized Durham’s investigation and called for it to end, to prevent this report from ever being released.

Others on the intelligence committee, like Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), also insisted there was clear evidence of collusion. No less a figure than Obama’s former national intelligence director James Clapper suggested Trump was a Russian “asset.”

For its part, most of the media portrayed the now-infamous Steele dossier — the original basis for the collusion claims — as true, and the New York Times and Washington Post received Pulitzer Prizes for a story that not only has been debunked but shown to be the product of Hillary’s Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The Durham report is everything that the FBI investigation was not. It is dispassionate, detached and detailed. It exposes the origin of the collusion effort in the Clinton campaign, which hid its funding in legal fees. (The campaign was later fined by the Federal Election Commission for that concealment.) A few reporters did ask about a possible connection to the campaign, but Clinton campaign officials lied and denied it.

There was little need for concealment, however, when there was so little interest in investigating the story, either by key FBI figures or by the media.

American intelligence discredited the Steele dossier early on as likely Russian disinformation; the credibility of specific sources for the dossier was shredded. Yet then-FBI Director James Comey opened the most extensive investigation ever into an American president based on that tawdry, tattered record.

The lack of supporting evidence did not matter.

Instead, Comey clearly relished the dossier’s more salacious details. For example, in a 2018 interview, he declared: “Honestly, I never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013.”

The “pee tape” story was repeated endlessly by the media and by Comey. Durham, however, eventually showed that the source of the story was a Clinton associate.

For Comey, though, it appeared to be one of those stories that was just too good to fully check. Nor did he appear concerned that, before the Clinton campaign pushed the dossier to the media and the FBI, then-CIA Director John Brennan had briefed President Obama and his national security team on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie candidate Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

According to Durham, Comey — who later wrote and sold a book on “ethical leadership” — led the FBI to use “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” to effectively tie up a duly elected president for three years.

Durham reports that FBI personnel admitted they disregarded standards for surveillance despite “acknowledging — both then and in hindsight — that they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly [working for a foreign power].”

In the end, it is not a crime to be unethical or incompetent, so no charges will be filed as a result of the report. Durham clearly hopes that the belated transparency provided by his report will produce greater future accountability. That may be the only naive aspect of his findings.

Of course, the FBI promptly issued a statement that it has — once more — reformed itself in light of its failures. But who really believes this is unlikely to occur again?

Indeed, the same pattern and figures reemerged in 2020, when another false narrative was created to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Some of the officials involved in the false Russia collusion conspiracy were signatories on the letter by 51 former intelligence officials claiming that the laptop story was likely “Russian disinformation.” And the media again pushed that version before the 2020 election — only to admit, two years later, that the laptop was authentic all along.

Conspicuously missing in the aftermath of Durham’s report is the one thing that would establish a clear commitment to reform: an apology. Clinton, Comey, members of Congress and others could apologize to the American people — and, yes, even to Trump.

That, of course, will never happen. Attorney General Merrick Garland, in releasing a report that concluded this investigation never should have occurred, made no statement whatsoever.

Thus, Durham was left throwing haymakers in an empty political boxing ring — and those who perpetrated this scandal on the nation are left to carry on making money on books, speeches, TV commentary and lectures about political or electoral ethics. The media, meanwhile, is offering little more than a shoulder-shrug and more spin.

So, in the relative silence of media coverage following the report’s release, Durham can contemplate an ultimate Zen-like question: If a 305-page report proves a concerted political hoax but no one is there to read it, does it make a difference?

Remember the Clinton Foundation? Which, took millions in foreign donations when everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 US election, only to see donations plummet by 90% after she lost?

To review:

• FBI Informant Testifies: Moscow Routed Millions To Clinton Foundation In "Russian Uranium Dominance Strategy"
• FBI Informant "Threatened" After Offering Details Linking Clinton Foundation To Russian Bribery Case
• FBI Raids Home Of New Clinton Foundation, Uranium One Whistleblower
• Leaked Memo Exposes Shady Dealings Between Clinton Foundation Donors And Bill's "For-Profit" Activities
• DOJ And Clinton Lawyers Struck Secret Deal To Block FBI Access To Clinton Foundation Emails: Strzok

Now we learn, thanks to the Durham report, that the FBI had three concurrent investigations into the Clinton Foundation, which were shut down during the 2016 election year by top brass.

As attorney and political commentator Techno Fog notes at The Reactionary (emphasis ours);

Durham’s scope included the FBI investigations “directed” at the Hillary Clinton campaign. It seems the purpose of that review was to assess and compare the favorable treatment received by Clinton to the targeting of Trump.

The first investigation involved an FBI tip from a CHS that a foreign government was sending a person “to contribute to Clinton’s anticipated presidential campaign, as a way to gain influence with Clinton should she win the presidency.” (Which country?!) An FBI field office sought a FISA against the foreign contributor and made that request to FBI headquarters, which ignored it for four months due to the fact that they were careful that Clinton was “involved.” According to one FBI Agent, “They were pretty ‘tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next president.” The FISA was approved on the condition that the FBI give defensive briefings to Clinton.

The second Clinton investigation involved the same CHS, who in November 2015 reported to the FBI that another foreign government was looking to contribute to the Clinton campaign “in exchange for the protection of [that country’s] interests should Clinton become President.” That CHS would end up making a $2,700 donation to the Clinton campaign on behalf of a foreign insider, in violation of federal law which bans contributions by foreign nationals. The CHS told their handling FBI agent that “They [the campaign] were okay with it. […] yes they were fully aware from the start” of the contribution being made on behalf of the foreign interest.

Who was the FBI’s confidential human source that caught the Clinton campaign in illegal activity? Thanks to great work by the talented Fool Nelson showing a $2,700 contribution from Patrick Byrne, we have this admission from Byrne himself:

Yep. This is the $18 million bribe to Hillary. https://t.co/0a5i1Xea0G

— Patrick Byrne (@PatrickByrne) May 16, 2023

Somehow, the FBI did not obtain copies of the illegal payment and the CHS’s FBI handlers “could not explain why this apparent illegal contribution was not documented in FBI records.” Instead, the FBI handling agent “told the CHS to stay away from all events relating to Clinton’s campaign.” Later on, the CHS, who had essentially caught a member of the Clinton campaign facilitating illegal contributions, was admonished by the FBI:

“do NOT attend any more campaign events, set up meetings, or anything else relating to [Clinton’s] campaign. We need to keep you completely away from that situation. I don’t know all the details, but it’s for your own protection.”

Durham questioned how the FBI could reconcile giving defensive briefings to the Clinton campaign while denying defensive briefings to the Trump campaign. He compared the FBI and DOJ’s “measured approach” to the Clinton campaign investigation to the speed at which the FBI ran with Crossfire Hurricane. He also contrasted how the FBI made almost “no effort to investigate the possible illegal campaign contribution” to the Clinton campaign “or the Clinton campaign’s purported acceptance of a campaign contribution made by the FBI’s own long-term” source.

The other Clinton investigation Durham reviewed – the investigation into “possible criminal activity involving the Clinton Foundation” – demonstrated, yet again, favorable treatment received by Clinton from FBI leadership. According to Durham, the Clinton Foundation case opening communication:

referred to an intelligence product and corroborating financial reporting that a particular commercial “industry likely engaged a federal public official in a flow of benefits scheme, namely, large monetary contributions were made to a non-profit, under both direct and indirect control of the federal public official, in exchange for favorable government action and/or influence.”

Additionally, the FBI Little Rock and New York Field Offices investigations “included predication based on source reporting that identified foreign governments that had made, or offered to make, contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment from Clinton.”

Despite this evidence, DOJ and FBI leadership essentially sabotaged the Clinton Foundation investigation. The DOJ was “hostile” to the Clinton Foundation presentations from the FBI Field Offices. And at a February 2016 FBI meeting to discuss the Clinton Foundation investigations, Assistant Director Andre McCabe ordered the cases to be closed. He would reconsider that demand following objections. However, any overt investigative steps needed McCabe’s approval. In May 2016, FBI Director Comey would, through an intermediary, demand the New York Field Office “cease and desist” their Clinton Foundation investigation. And in August 2016, as the presidential election approached, the US Attorneys’ offices in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York declined to issue subpoenas to the FBI New York Field Office in support of their Clinton Foundation investigation.

We highly recommend subscribing and reading the entirety of Techno Fog's report, which goes far deeper into Durham's bombshell findings, including; The DNC hack, Crossfire Hurricane, spying on President-Elect Trump, Clinton's plan to smear Trump, and other prosecutorial decisions.

*  *  *

The @FBI claims it has learned from its mistakes and is "reformed". In that case it's time to reopen the probe into the Clinton Foundation which Hillary's operatives inside the FBI shut down pic.twitter.com/moQA5rRNBr

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 17, 2023

Recall that McCabe's wife accepted nearly $700,000 from Clinton ally, then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), to support her run for a state legislative seat.

Meanwhile, a guy who made a meme tricking people into voting for Clinton from home is facing 10 years in prison, while those guilty of actual election interference are not.

Excellent point. Douglas Mackey is going to jail because he sent a meme. The people who attempted to destroy a presidential campaign and, when that failed, attempted a coup against a duly elected president, aren't going to jail. https://t.co/zSq2zsTrCd

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) May 17, 2023

Lastly, click into this thread from RealClear's Benjamin Weingarten, who has dissected more of the Durham report for public consumption.

But maybe the most important and telling takeaway from Durham is that in spite of the obvious hyper-politicization, weaponization, and corruption his report identifies, he and his team -- products of these institutions -- don't call for heads to roll, radical change. If you were… pic.twitter.com/sSgv0w6auV

— Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) May 15, 2023

Authored by Lee Smith via leesmith.locals.com,

Reading through the newly released Durham Report, there’s a lot to absorb and I plan to be filling several reviews in the coming days. But it struck me that the section of the report detailing an aspect of John Brennan’s role in the Clinton campaign and Obama administration’s operation targeting Donald Trump and his aides was most urgent. LS.

The only genuine piece of Russian intelligence that US spy services ever received about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia was intelligence that Russia knew Hillary Clinton backed a 2016 campaign plan to smear Trump as a Russian agent.

According to John Durham’s 300-page report, the information reached the CIA in late July 2016. Brennan told Durham that on August 3 he briefed President Barack Obama at the White House on what the special counsel refers to as the Clinton Plan intelligence. Others in attendance at the meeting were Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey.

Imagine Comey’s reaction when he first heard of the Clinton Plan intelligence, only days after the July 31 start date for the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, code-named Crossfire Hurricane: So, if it’s just a dirty trick staged by the Clinton campaign, I should shut down the Trump-Russia probe, right?   

Right. There is little chance Brennan said anything about the Clinton Plan intelligence in that August 3 meeting. Reading the Durham report, it’s not even clear when Brennan first found out about it or the September 2016 CIA memo referring the Clinton Plan intelligence to the FBI’s counterintelligence division.

Brennan’s handwritten notes memorializing his allegedly briefing Obama on the Clinton Plan and the CIA’s referral letter were both declassified by Trump’s Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe in October 2020. Durham’s report sheds light on how the information and subsequent CIA memo were received, who knew about them, and perhaps more significantly who didn’t.

According to the report, virtually none of the officials interviewed by Durham knew about the Clinton Plan intelligence or the referral memo. Former FBI general counsel James Baker “stated that he had neither seen nor heard of the Clinton Plan intelligence or the resulting Referral Memo prior to his interview” with Durham.

Same with Supervisory Special Agent-1, reportedly FBI agent Joe Pientka. According to the report, when Durham showed Pientka the information, he became “visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been apprised of the Clinton Plan intelligence and had never seen the aforementioned Referral Memo. Supervisory Special Agent-1 expressed a sense of betrayal that no one had informed him of the intelligence.”

The reason so few FBI officials knew of the Clinton Plan information is because it was buried. Otherwise, it would have implicated senior Obama officials — from the president and vice president and his security chiefs — and the Crossfire Hurricane team in an illegal surveillance and propaganda operation targeting a presidential campaign.

But how did the Russians know it started with Hillary Clinton? Did they have spies buried deep inside the Democratic National Committee? Maybe Christopher Steele, British ex-spy and author of the Clinton-funded memos tying Trump to Russia, had been compromised by one of the Russian oligarchs he worked for?

No, you wouldn’t have needed an intelligence service to find out the Clinton campaign was using Moscow as an instrument to smear the GOP candidate. By the end of July, much of the anti-Trump campaign was public.

As I explained in my 2019 book The Plot Against the President, the media piece of Russiagate started in Winter 2016 when pro-Clinton reporters first started calling Trump and his aides Russian agents. With Franklin Foer’s July 4 Slatearticle, “Putin’s Puppet,” the press component of the Russia-collusion narrative was in full swing.

In a July 21 Washington Post column, Anne Applebaum cited Foer’s piece and asserted that “Russia is clearly participating in the Trump campaign.” In an Atlantic article published the same day, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that Trump has chosen “to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian president Vladimir Putin.”

Before the end of July, scores of articles in the Weekly Standard, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the New York Timesand elsewhere made the same case: Donald Trump, according to Times columnist Paul Krugman, was the “Siberian candidate.”

Russiagate reporters typically referenced each other's articles to create an unmistakable echo chamber effect. Media analysts at the Russian foreign ministry or in any Russian embassy couldn’t have missed the frequency with which the US press kept inserting their government into a vague account of the Republican candidate’s uncertain loyalties. Thus, it would not have been hard to figure out who was the beneficiary of this extraordinary amount of newsprint devoted to promoting a storyline labeling Trump a Russian agent.

The Durham report does not disclose how US intelligence agencies found out the Russians were discussing the Clinton Plan. Perhaps it came through the signals intelligence that British agencies and other foreign services reportedly shared with Washington.

On August 22, an FBI cyber-analyst passed the Clinton Plan intelligence on to two members of the Crossfire Hurricane team, including fixer Brian Auten. A 2019 Justice Department report faulted Auten for failing to verify the Clinton-funded Steele dossier tying Trump to Russia. In other words, he cleared the central piece of evidence, now thoroughly discredited, that the FBI used to obtain the warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.

On September 2, a US official briefed Auten and other FBI personnel about the Clinton Plan intelligence. Auten related to Durham that he told the official he wanted to see the CIA’s official referral letter. Completed September 7, the memo was addressed to Comey and FBI counterintelligence official and Crossfire Hurricane point-man Peter Strzok.

According to Durham: “None of the FBI personnel who agreed to be interviewed could specifically recall receiving this Referral Memo, nor did anyone recall the FBI doing anything in response to the Referral Memo.” Auten said that he couldn’t remember if he shared the memo with other members of the Crossfire Hurricane team.

If Brennan was briefed on it at the time, it seems he didn’t share it with anyone — he almost certainly had not spoken of it during the August 3 meeting with Obama and other administration officials. There’s no evidence that Brennan briefed congressional oversight committees on what US agencies had picked up from the Russians on the Clinton Plan. Nor did he say anything about it when he testified before the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017.

Most significantly, it’s not part of the intelligence that was used to produce the January 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election that Obama directed Brennan to finish before Trump came to office. Indeed, the Clinton Plan intelligence would serve as a powerful rebuttal to the ICA’s central conclusion that Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election.

Evidence of Brennan’s hiding the Clinton Plan intelligence and CIA referral letter would strongly suggest that he was a crucial part of the effort to target Trump as a Russian agent.

Perhaps it was rumor of Pientka’s rage after Durham showed him the Clinton Plan intelligence and the referral memo in a July 22, 2020 interview that Brennan moved to protect himself. It was nearly a month later, August 21, when he sat for an eight-hour long interview with Durham. Brennan said that he couldn’t remember when he first received the Clinton Plan intelligence but there was evidence that he didn’t hide it — handwritten notes proving that he told Obama, Biden, Lynch and Comey all about it.

Durham states in his report that he declined to pursue a criminal case related to the Clinton Plan intelligence because it “would face what in all likelihood would be insurmountable classification issues given the highly sensitive nature of the information itself.”

And thus, the section on the Clinton Plan intelligence concludes: the government’s treatment of the information “may have amounted to a significant intelligence failure and a troubling instance in which confirmation bias and a tunnel-vision pursuit of investigative ends may have caused government personnel to fail to appreciate the extent to which uncorroborated reporting funded by an opposing political campaign was intended to influence rather than inform the FBI. It did not, all things considered, however, amount to a provable criminal offense.”

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Wouldn’t it be great if we could hold down a button and reset the world back to the default setting we thought was normal before our present mishigas? Boy, could we do with it!

Neoclassical economic models think we constantly mean-revert anyway, ignoring the role of credit, supply chains, political-economy, and geopolitics. It’s like a Google Maps that only does straight roads, not bends: worth following for long stretches when nothing is happening, but wrong every time we turn left or right. In the real world, sharp bends are all around us.

The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman today warns: ‘Xi Jinping’s Taiwan ambitions threaten China’s rise’, not the first op-ed warning of the risk of war. The same paper reports that shipping groups are increasingly seeking break clauses in contracts with Chinese businesses to make it easier for them to walk away from any deals if sanctions are imposed on China: why the sudden concern, and wouldn’t that imply massively disrupted supply chains? Elsewhere, Iran seized a third oil tanker, and nobody seems to have even noticed. There is also not much coverage of Special Counsel Durham’s report into Russiagate concluding the Department of Justice and FBI "failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.” Will we now reset journalism to the default setting of bipartisan honest-brokers? Right after we dump neoclassical economic models.

US Treasury Secretary Janet “No financial crisis in my lifetime” Yellen is warning there are only days left until the US defaults on its debts, as President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy ceremonially rip the steering wheels out of their cars today in a pre-2024 game of chicken. We can expect things to get worse before they get better, but that we aren’t seeing wholesale selling of Treasuries down the curve, or the US dollar suggests nobody sees this is an existential issue - yet. However, as Yellen failed to take advantage of the lowest rates in history to refinance the public debt to limit pain from the rates re-set higher which the Fed she still speaks as if she runs is inflicting, the question will linger. And note the interest on the US federal debt is set to exceed spending on the Pentagon soon, as military spending is set to be higher for longer. Something is going to be reset. It’s just a question of what.

The Fed’s Bostic just stressed the “longer” in “higher for longer” rates too despite the New York Fed manufacturing survey collapsing to -31.8 from 10.8 prior and vs. -3.9 expected. Dovish Vice-Chair Goolsbee says he is getting “vibes” of a credit squeeze beginning. Yet some think that squeeze is what the Fed wants to see if the lending is frivolous rather than anything productive. Indeed, are the Fed trying to return the US economy to its historical default setting of low inflation, high production, not financialisation, and military strength in depth? The question is then how the liquidity keeps flowing to anything productive when it dries up to anything frivolous. I’ve made that point repeatedly because there isn’t any other policy that works: it’s just a question of how this is done and when. Meanwhile, the market obviously thinks the US default setting is very low inflation, very low rates, and very low domestic production of everything except financial assets (“Who needs HIMARS, we have CDOs!”).

In China, production is not matched by domestic demand outside services, for now: see ‘Recovery on shaky legs?’ from Teeuwe Mevissen, who thinks USD/CNY will test 7 again. Indeed, today’s China data were mostly big misses, with industrial production 5.6% y-o-y vs. 10.9% consensus, 3.6% year-to-date (y-t-d) vs. 4.9%; retail sales 18.4% y-o-y vs. 21.9% consensus, 8.5% y-t-d vs. 8.2% - which doesn’t match the trend of lower imports; fixed asset investment 4.7% y-o-y y-t-d vs. 5.7%, and property investment -6.2% y-o-y y-t-d vs. -5.7%. Overall, this looks deflationary.

Yet the European Commission just raised its Eurozone inflation outlook and warned of “persistent challenges”. CPI is now seen at 5.8% y-o-y in 2023 vs. 5.6% before, and 2.8% for 2024 vs. 2.5% - and that is despite the sharp fall in energy prices. Core inflation is seen much higher than in the last projection, and only declining slowly, remaining above the 2% target in 2023 and 2024. So, “Länger höher”, even as March industrial production data were -1.4% m-o-m.

In the Antipodes, the chatter is the RBNZ may hike Kiwi rates to 6% and the RBA to 4.35%, a message broadly backed by its latest set of minutes, which noted upside risks to sticky services inflation and the fact that strong population growth combined with low rental vacancy rates could see rents jump even higher than the RBA’s own elevated forecasts. So higher rates….which will then be passed on directly to renters by landlords! Meanwhile, headlines are still of properties next to sewer vents going for millions of dollars as multiple families bid to buy themselves protection from an unofficial political-economy default setting of ‘neo-feudalism lite’. As one US presidential candidate flags removing the right to vote for those under 25 unless they perform national service --welcome to ‘Starship Troopers’, where service guarantees citizenship: “Would you like to know more?”-- an Aussie Twitter wag says every Australian should be subject to military service until they buy a home. Which is how thinks used to work once, of course.  

Like I said, it would be great to be able to reset everything – but it just isn’t going to happen. Or at least not in the way that most people expect.

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

“Because he can.” 

That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins - and then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire George Soros - can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and, now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway. 

Because he can.

As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public and demonstrate their power.  

We now know that the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of America’s security apparatus intervened directly in the decision making of Twitter and other social media companies to influence the course of the 2020 election. One part of that intervention had to do with organizing 51 senior former intelligence figures to sign a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

That was a lie. They knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter. They did it because they knew they could get away with it.

The United States is on the verge of being inundated with thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens. Many are from South or Central America. Hundreds are from China, even though they are crossing that notional line we used to be able to call, without irony, our southern border. Why did the Biden Administration decide to enact a real-life Camp of the Saints invasion of the United States?

Because it could. There was no immediate price to pay. 

In her classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes several observations that bear on our current situation. “There is no doubt,” she observes, 

that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it. They were not particularly outraged at the monstrous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty and which announce themselves clearly enough and totalitarian propaganda.

It’s not only the compact between the elite and the underclass that is relevant to our experience in the United States today. There is also the incontinent deployment of the word “democracy,” not as a term describing a specific form of political organization but rather as a cognitively empty but talismanic vocable around which political animus can be nurtured and set to work. The latest variation is Our Democracy^TM, dragged out whenever the process of political demonization needs a boost.

“It has been frequently pointed out,” Arendt notes, “that totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them.” 

The reaction to the January 6, 2021 jamboree at the Capitol—an event egged on and at least in part organized by (alleged) state actors like Ray Epps—is a case in point. As he showed last week in his exchange with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Donald Trump began trying to diffuse the potential for violence at that protest the day before, on January 5, and he continued through the day on January 6. No matter. The script called for him to be the villain of the piece, so the villain he is publicly accounted to be. 

So many things in our social and political life today seem surreal.

The prospect that “misgendering” someone might be against the law—i.e., a tort that did not even exist yesterday is now illegal; the whole phenomenon of so-called “transgenderism,” a revolt against reality if there ever was one; the bizarre obsession with race, involving the demonization of whites and the fabrication of an imaginary sin called “white supremacy,” on the one hand, and the groveling obeisance of phantasmagoric “reparations” to blacks, on the other. You can’t tune into the internet these days without being confronted with scenes of blacks rampaging through fast-food restaurants, school corridors, or shops like Target and Walmart. They smash and steal and smash and what happens to them? Nothing. All this and more is part of what Arendt called totalitarianism’s “experiment against reality.” 

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,” she pointed out,

"totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations."

“The shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings.” That is what our masters are pretending to insulate us from with their fantastic lies about human nature, economic reality, and empirical truth.

The only silver lining in this minatory storm cloud is the fact that such movements, though unconscionably cruel, arbitrary, and destructive, are also astonishingly fragile.

The last word goes to Arendt.

“Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general, and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced.”

Authored by Hans Mahncke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reinstated a grant that had been terminated by President Donald Trump in April 2020. However, a document first obtained by the House Oversight Committee reveals that the NIH’s conditions for reinstatement have not been met.

The grant, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” was originally awarded in 2014 by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Under the terms of the grant, EcoHealth Alliance, a government-funded nonprofit that purportedly engages in research to prevent pandemics, was awarded $3.8 million over five years to assess the spillover potential of bat viruses “using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments in cell culture and humanized mice.” Put in simple terms, NIAID was paying EcoHealth to genetically engineer and manipulate bat viruses in labs.

In May 2016, the grant was suspended after Erik Stemmy, a NIAID program officer, noticed that federal government funds may have been used for prohibited gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. At the time, the Obama administration had put in place a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments. However, for reasons that remain unclear, the suspension was lifted in July 2016. At the time, EcoHealth’s president, Peter Daszak, thanked NIAID in an email for lifting the gain-of-function funding pause.

As part of the conditions of the grant, EcoHealth had to file regular activity reports. However, starting in 2018, EcoHealth stopped submitting these reports. EcoHealth would later blame technical difficulties for their failure to submit. The missing reports comprised the critical 2018–2019 timeframe right before the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan.

Despite EcoHealth’s delinquency in filing the status reports, NIAID did not stop funding the project. It was only after a Freedom of Information Act request for the reports was filed in 2021 that EcoHealth was prompted by NIAID to provide the reports. The reports, which were finally submitted by EcoHealth at least two years too late, in 2021, revealed that the NIAID grant had been used by EcoHealth and the WIV in part to create laboratory-engineered bat viruses. Had this fact been reported in a timely manner, the experiments would likely have been shut down by NIAID.

When the connections between the WIV and NIAID’s grant became known in April 2020, Trump terminated the grant. Trump’s decision caused an outcry among the media and his critics. However, the NIH, which is NIAID’s parent body, appears to have been well aware that Trump’s actions were merited.

On July 8, 2020, Michael Lauer, the NIH’s deputy director for extramural research who was in charge of “ensuring scientific integrity, public accountability, and effective stewardship of the NIH extramural research portfolio,” wrote a letter to EcoHealth, listing seven demands that needed to be fulfilled as a condition for reinstatement of the grant.

NIH Issued 7 Demands

First, EcoHealth needed to provide a sample of the COVID-19 virus which it used to determine the virus’ genetic sequence. The ostensible purpose of this demand was to compare this original sample with other samples in order to assess when it first emerged.

Second, EcoHealth was required to “explain the apparent disappearance of Huang Yanling, a scientist / technician who worked in the WIV lab but whose lab web presence has been deleted.” Huang Yanling has long been thought to be patient zero. Her profile was scrubbed from the WIV’s website shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic in 2019 and she has not been seen since.

Third, EcoHealth was asked to share the “WIV’s responses to the 2018 U.S. Department of State cables regarding safety concerns.” These cables had warned of a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the WIV’s high-level containment laboratories. They also warned that the National Health and Family Planning Commission, a state agency of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had denied a request to conduct coronavirus experiments at biosafety level 4. The actual experiments were carried out in low biosafety level 2 facilities.

Fourth, EcoHealth was required to “disclose and explain out-of-ordinary restrictions on laboratory facilities, as suggested, for example, by diminished cell-phone traffic in October 2019, and the evidence that there may have been roadblocks surrounding the facility from October 14-19, 2019.”

Read more here...

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via PUBLIC substack,

The antidotes of whistle-blowing, sunshine, and defunding are near the poison

For the last half-decade, elites in government and the media have created a culture of self-censorship on race, climate change, and trans issues. In the workplace, in schools and universities, and online, politicians, activists, and journalists instilled in ordinary people a paralyzing fear of saying the wrong thing and finding oneself accused of being a “climate denier,” a “racist,” or a “transphobe.”

It’s now clear that, at this very moment, media elites are seeking to turn this culture of informal self-censorship into formal government censorship. They call their legislation, which would destroy free speech, based centrally on their hatred of the masses, “pro-democracy” and “anti-hate.”

To be sure, Wokeism is a genuine grassroots religion. It demonizes and scapegoats heretics, journalists, and truth-tellers. And it demands sacrifices from ordinary people in the form of more expensive energy, the sterilization of psychiatrically disordered children, and self-censorship.

But it is also a state religion. News media and social media elites took Wokeism from being a marginal cult into being the dominant ideology of every major institution, from NBC and the CDC to the AMA and the CIA.

“Think tanks” and “journalists” behaved as propagandists, leading much of the public to believe that police were wantonly murdering thousands of unarmed black Americans, that climate change threatened human existence, and that surgeons can (and should) “change the sex” of children.

...

Most troubling, they persuaded the leadership of the CIA, FBI, and NATO militaries to join them in using Woke fear-mongering campaigns to demand Internet censorship.

It’s clear now that military and intelligence community elites feared that populist nationalism would undermine their ability to control the news media in the ways they had since World War II. And so they funded think tanks like the Atlantic Council to run Woke campaigns demanding censorship.

Elites used fear-based campaigns in order to demonize, scapegoat, and marginalize the people and institutions in society who opposed their demands to make energy expensive, replace meritocracy with structural racism, control the minds and bodies of children, and be able to engage in wars abroad.

...

Totalitarianism may be inevitable.

Western civilization may be nearing an end. Woke totalitarianism may be replacing Enlightenment liberalism in the same way Christianity replaced the Roman empire. And it may be too late to stop government censorship.

...

Elites have over-reached, in our view, and badly. But we must also make that apparent. As such, the most important thing we can do is shine a light on their demands for censorship since once they are debated openly, they will fail.

...

We can’t resist formal censorship without resisting informal censorship in the workplace, in schools and universities, and online.

*  *  *

Subscribers can read the full note here...

Authored by Chris Menahan via InformationLIberation.com,

Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Saturday questioned why the media misrepresents "the real situation" when it comes to interracial violence "to such an extreme degree."

Odd, why would the media misrepresent the real situation to such an extreme degree?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2023

The media's lies are getting innocent people killed and may be inciting more anti-white violence than ever.

Interracial murders against whites have reached extreme highs in FBI data in states with high black populations.

Throughout the south, about half of murder offenders against non-hispanic whites in 2021 were black or hispanic, an unprecedented fraction for as long as data exist. pic.twitter.com/iUn5uhQZD6

— AnechoicMedia (@AnechoicMedia_) May 5, 2023

If you want to check this yourself you can use the online EZASHR tool to generate racial crosstabs but it's less detailed and only goes up to 2020. But you can still see the interracial share of violence increasing over the past decade.https://t.co/RhQ6H1j5lD

— AnechoicMedia (@AnechoicMedia_) May 5, 2023

!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2023

Interesting

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2023

Interesting

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2023

!!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2023

Interesting

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2023

Whereas Twitter was used in the past to incite anti-white hatred, Twitter under Musk is actually countering hate hoaxes and disinformation, including the media's lies about Jordan Neely.

The significance of Musk's Twitter takeover could be monumental.

The infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter signed by 51 ex-intel officials was pitched to them by its co-author, Mike Morell, as a way to help Joe Biden with a "talking point" during a crucial debate with Trump, the Washington Examiner's Jerry Dunleavy reports.

Morell admitted that now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken "triggered" him to write the October 2020 letter, co-authored by he and former senior CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos, suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop reported by the NY Post was likely Russian disinformation.

The recruitment email from Morell was sent to former intelligence officials and included the laptop letter co-authored by him and former senior CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos as an attachment.

The quoted language from the Morell email, sent on Oct. 18, 2020, was read to the Washington Examiner verbatim and identically by two independent sources who had access to the email.

Morell's email explained that both he and Polymeropoulos believed Russia was involved in the Hunter Biden laptop stories and that Trump likely planned to attack Biden over the laptop revelations in the upcoming debate. -Washington Examiner

"We want to give the VP a talking point to use in response," Morell wrote in the email.

Looks like pitching the Hunter Biden laptop letter as a “talking point” for Joe Biden for the debate with Trump was standard fare for Mike Morell, as here he is doing it in his email to former Obama CIA Director John Brennan too. https://t.co/miY4J3MChx

— Jerry Dunleavy ???? (@JerryDunleavy) May 4, 2023

Morell previously admitted under oath that his involvement in the letter was designed to help Joe Biden "because I wanted him to win the election."

Mark Zaid, an attorney representing Polymeropoulos and several other laptop letter signers (and ex-ABC Senior News producer James Gordon Meek who was indicted on child porn charges, and who bragged about "getting clearances for guys who had child porn issues," and who loves hanging out at Disney World alone), told the media last month that "when the draft was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign."

The letter was ultimately signed by 51 ex-intelligence officials, and published October 19, 2020, days before the Trump-Biden debate, and furthered the disinformation that the laptop was the product of Russian disinformation - a narrative which the Biden campaign picked up on and amplified.

"There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said that this has all the characteristics — four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage," said Joe Biden during the debate.

To which Trump replied: "You mean the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?" Joe Biden replied: "That’s exactly what we’re told."

"Here we go again with Russia," Trump replied.

Last month it was revealed Morell told House investigators he had no intention to write the laptop letter, but admitted his phone call with Blinken, then a top advisor for Biden's 2020 campaign, “triggered" him to do so. Morell said it was his “guess” Blinken called him because the future secretary of state wanted it “out” in public that “the Russians were somehow involved.”

House Republicans wrote that the same day of the Blinken-Morell call, Blinken “also emailed Morell an article” published in USA Today which alleged the FBI was examining whether the laptop was part of a Russian “disinformation campaign.” The article was then cited in the laptop letter.

Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH) also said Morell received a call from then-Biden campaign chairman Steve Ricchetti after the presidential debate to thank him for "putting the statement out." -Washington Examiner

The October 2020 letter made numerous suggestions as to Russian involvement in the laptop reporting, arguing "if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election" and expressing "our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue."

According to the letter's authors, the laptop story "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation," and "our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case."

As Dunleavy notes, "Konstantinos "Gus" Dimitrelos, a cyber forensics expert and former Secret Service agent, conducted an examination of the laptop for the Washington Examiner last year, concluding "there is a 100% certainty that Robert Hunter Biden was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data” and that “the hard drive is authentic.”"

Four out of five members of the Proud Boys were found guilty on Thursday of seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6, 2001 Capitol riot.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, along with Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehul were found guilty of seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, however the jury is currently deadlocked on those two charges for another member, Dominic Pezzola, according to Politico's Kyle Cheney.

There is no "obstruction of Congress" charge. It's "obstruction of an official proceeding." But the proceeding they're charged with obstructing is Congress' Jan. 6 joint session.

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) May 4, 2023

Pezzola was found guilty of robbery, destroying government property and one count of assaulting a law enforcement officer.

As Just the News reports, the jury is still deliberating over whether all Proud Boys are guilty of a separate charge of assaulting or impeding a law enforcement officer.

The jury is also deliberating whether all of the Proud Boys, except Pezzola who was found guilty of it, should be convicted of destroying government property.

Additionally, the jury is deliberating a charge against all five men for allegedly assaulting law enforcement.

Thursday was the sixth day of jury deliberation in the trial of the five men, who each faced nine counts related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, including a charge of seditious conspiracy that was leveled under a Civil War-era law.

According to NBC News, Pezzola faced an additional charge after video footage showed him smashing a window with a Capitol Police shield.

According to Pezzola's attorney, at least 40 undercover informants were involved in the riot - with one FBI informant who joined the group testifying that he understood he was able to break the law in certain circumstances.

Kelly dismissed multiple requests from the defendants to declare a mistrial. For example, last month, Pezzola asked him to declare a mistrial or dismiss the charges against him over allegations of government misconduct. -Just the News

Before the verdict was read, the DOJ urged Judge Timothy Kelly to send jurors back to deliberate on non-unanimous counts. Kelly decided to accept the partial verdict, and asked the jury to continue deliberating on the remaining counts.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he would attempt to shut down the FBI and replace it with another entity if he’s elected president.

During an interview with “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ramaswamy, a businessman, suggested that he does not want to “defund the FBI” after host Chuck Todd suggested it.

“I didn’t say defund the FBI. I said shut down the FBI and replace it with something new,” said Ramaswamy on Sunday. “I think it’s a new apparatus built from scratch that actually respects the law instead of making it up.”

“So you’re going to replace the old FBI with a new FBI?” Todd asked in response. “With a new institution built from scratch to carry out federal law enforcement,” Ramaswamy said, “because the existing FBI, the people who work there, have worked there for so long they’ll be getting in their own way.”

“I personally believe someone who’s running to actually run the executive branch of the government, when you have a bureaucracy whose culture becomes so ossified, every once in a while, you need to turn it over,” he told “Meet the Press.” He added: “We need federal law enforcement, but that institution has, in a bipartisan way, become so, I think ossified in its own norms, in its own corruption, that we need to rebuild it from scratch and have something new take its place.”

When Todd suggested that Ramaswamy wants to “replace the old FBI with a new FBI,” Ramaswamy stated: “The problem is there’s people who have worked there for decades.”

“What I say is, if I’m the U.S. president and I can’t work for the federal government for more than eight years—which I think is a good thing—then none of those bureaucrats reporting in to me should either,” he added. “There’s people who have worked there for decades,” he said.

Republicans in recent years have become increasingly critical of the FBI, accusing the agency of targeting the political opponents of Democrats while not investigating actual criminals. Former President Donald Trump has perhaps been the chief critic of both the FBI and the Department of Justice and said both agencies have engaged in a longstanding witch hunt to politically wound him.

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