Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president the authority to pardon offenses against the United States, a power intended to provide fairness and avoid prosecutorial abuses. Alexander Hamilton envisioned this clemency as a tool to “restore the tranquility of the commonwealth.” But in the hands of Joe Biden, the pardon power looks less like a tool for justice and more like a sledgehammer wielded to shield a crumbling empire of corruption.
Biden’s recent pardon of his son Hunter has spotlighted the blatant hypocrisy of the Left’s use of clemency. After years of moral grandstanding, claiming the high road on justice and accountability, Democrats are now orchestrating mass pardons to shield themselves from the fallout of their own malfeasance.
Pardons as Preemptive Damage Control
During Trump’s presidency, Democrats practically dared him to issue preemptive pardons for his family, projecting their own propensity for guilt on the former president. When Trump pardoned Jared Kushner’s father, the media spun it as though he had pardoned Kushner himself. That narrative stuck, fueling the perception of Trump as corrupt, even as his actual record on pardons tells a different story.
Trump, notably, did not pardon his children or any close associates preemptively or otherwise. Why? Because they weren’t guilty of anything. Contrast that with Biden, whose pardons aren’t just reactive—they’re preemptive damage control for an administration rife with misconduct.
Leaks suggest Biden is for a laundry list of allies, including Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, and members of the January 6th Committee. These aren’t minor players; they are key figures in the systemic abuse of power targeting Donald Trump and his supporters. The January 6th Committee alone violated so many laws it could be a semester-long case study at any law school.
Then there’s Fauci. A pardon for Fauci essentially extends to the entire health bureaucracy—NIH, FDA, CDC—that oversaw the disastrous COVID-19 policies. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, suppression of dissent, and the mishandling of public trust—it’s no wonder Biden would want to sweep this under the rug.
A Record-Breaking Abuse of Power
Historically, presidents have used pardons sparingly, often to right specific wrongs. Franklin D. Roosevelt holds the record with 2,819 pardons and 3,796 total acts of clemency, largely for people convicted under Prohibition laws. Barack Obama granted 1,927 acts of clemency, including a controversial commutation for Chelsea Manning.
But Biden’s pardon spree could make FDR’s record look modest. Biden’s administration isn’t dealing with isolated cases of injustice—it’s mopping up the collateral damage from years of systemic corruption.
Consider the scope:
The FBI: With over 37,000 employees, including 10,000 special agents, the agency’s involvement in targeting Trump and MAGA supporters is well-documented.
The CIA and NSA: These agencies, with a combined workforce exceeding 50,000, played their parts in surveillance and misinformation campaigns.
IRS and FISA Courts: From targeting conservative groups to enabling dubious investigations, their roles can’t be ignored.
Biden’s pardons could easily extend to thousands of individuals across these institutions, creating a tsunami of public outrage. This isn’t about restoring tranquility; it’s about cementing a legacy of corruption while protecting a broken system.
Democrats: Masters of Projection
The hypocrisy is staggering. Democrats who lambasted Trump for imagined abuses of power are now actively orchestrating the largest clemency cover-up in history. When Joy Reid and Adam Schiff criticized the idea of preemptive pardons, they framed it as an admission of guilt. Yet here we are, watching Biden prepare to issue blanket pardons to his political allies without a shred of irony.
Biden is now considering preemptive pardons, including one for Adam Schiff.
That makes this clip one of the best ever. 🤣
December, 2020. Joy Reid and Adam Schiff discuss family member and preemptive pardons. 🤪 pic.twitter.com/9oorNUFT79
Hunter Biden’s pardon set the tone: a sweeping, decade-long absolution for crimes ranging from tax evasion to illegal firearm possession. The message? Rules are for the little people.
Trump: A Study in Contrast
Trump’s approach to pardons highlights the glaring differences between the two administrations. While Biden’s pardons shield the guilty, Trumps were measured and purposeful. Trump used his clemency power to address specific injustices, such as Alice Johnson’s over-sentencing or the persecution of Michael Flynn. More importantly, Trump didn’t shield himself or his family. His restraint underscores the integrity of his administration compared to the flagrant abuses we’re witnessing now.
Rebuilding Trust in Justice
Biden’s pardon spree will leave a lasting stain on America’s institutions. But it also presents an opportunity for renewal. When Trump returns to office, he will face the monumental task of rebuilding trust in law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This starts with accountability. Anyone receiving a Biden pardon should be immediately dismissed from public service. A pardon may erase legal culpability, but it doesn’t absolve moral or professional failure. The system must be purged of those who abused their positions for political gain.
Restoring faith in justice won’t be easy, but it’s essential. Americans need to believe that no one—not even the president—is above the law.
The Firestorm to Come
Biden’s mass pardons will ignite a firestorm in the American psyche. The fallout will resonate for decades, exposing the depth of corruption in our government. But it also serves as a rallying cry for reform.
The Left’s strategy of weaponizing clemency to protect their own has backfired. Instead of tranquility, they’ve sown chaos. And as the dust settles, what America will see is the scattered carcasses of Democrats who participated in this farce.
Justice must prevail, not as an act of revenge, but as a restoration of the principles that made this nation great.
A.F. Branco – RINOs and Democrats are Kavanaughing the Trump nomination for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, with a lot of anonymous accusations right out of their dirty playbook. The military complex swamp monsters are terrified of this guy.
“Bullsh*t. 100 Percent Bullsh*t. Actually… Horsesh*t.” – Will Cain DESTROYS NBC’s Latest Bogus Anonymous Hit Piece on Pete Hegseth
NBC News, known for its many Trump conspiracies and fake news reports, published a disgusting hit piece against Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary. The knives have been out for Pete since his nomination since he is not a member of the military-industrial complex and does not believe in blowing trillions of dollars on losing war war after war and surrendering to 8th-century barbarians. Hegseth scares the hell out of the Deep State so they are trying… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The Democrats find themselves in a mess of their own making—and what a glorious mess it is. They’ve managed to redefine political self-sabotage, creating a masterpiece of ineptitude that would make even the most bumbling bureaucrat blush. Let’s recap their genius strategy: after Biden’s stumble-filled tenure, they thought the solution was to parachute in Kamala Harris—the candidate nobody wanted. The woman who polled at a whopping one percent in her own party’s primary now carried the banner of “saving democracy.” Irony, thy name is the Democratic Party.
A Billion-Dollar Blunder
Kamala’s campaign wasn’t just a train wreck; it was a bullet train flying off the tracks at full speed. In a compressed timeline, she burned through $1.5 billion. Imagine the fiscal irresponsibility she could achieve with a full campaign cycle. Her penchant for turning campaign funds into Monopoly money is well-documented, but this time she truly outdid herself.
And for what? To lose spectacularly while leaving the Democratic coffers emptier than Hunter Biden’s alibi folder. The MSN article sheds light on this debacle, and it’s a doozy. It turns out that instead of crafting a message to connect with actual voters, the Democrats treated Harris’ campaign like a giant piggy bank for their wealthy consultants, donors, and advisors. Everyone was taking their skim, and Kamala was the unwitting ATM.
The Elite Bubble and the Working-Class Void
Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ senior advisor, hit the nail on the head when he described the Democrats’ elite bubble. This is a party that loves to talk about the working class but wouldn’t dare let them anywhere near the decision-making table. Instead, they hand the reins to billionaire donors like Reid Hoffman and corporate types like Tony West, Harris’ brother-in-law and Uber’s chief legal officer. Because nothing says “fighting for the little guy” like having billionaires whispering sweet nothings in your campaign’s ear.
Hoffman, Cuban, and their ilk didn’t just fund the campaign—they steered it. According to reports, they watered down policies that might have resonated with actual voters, like a billionaire tax. Their advice? Tone it down. Don’t rock the yacht.
The result? A candidate with no coherent ideological framework, propped up by charisma alone, and a campaign that hemorrhaged money while alienating the very base it claimed to champion.
The Fallout: A Democratic Winter Is Coming
Let’s not sugarcoat it: Kamala’s campaign was a disaster for the Democrats, and the ramifications will echo for years. Their donors are disillusioned, their coffers are depleted, and their credibility is in tatters. The party of “fiscal responsibility for thee but not for me” now faces the grim reality that even its wealthiest backers are questioning their investments. After all, why pour billions into a party that can’t manage a basic campaign, let alone a country? MSN wrote:
According to Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt however, the problems with the Democratic Party’s structure and the way it runs campaigns go beyond just media consultants and the party’s love of paid ads. The core issue, as Shakir puts it, is that the party-political operations are a closed loop with well-off consultants, politicians and donors all taking advice from each other with little outside input.
“We have a working-class problem in the Democratic Party and when you have wealthy consultants talking to wealthy donors who are all living in an elite bubble, it can become detached from what messages will resonate with people who aren’t in the elite bubble,” Shakir said. “You can be a good person with good character trying to do the right thing to try and help Kamala Harris win but when you are surrounded by monied interests you have to figure out how you don’t become bubblized.”
(…)
Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn’t intend to let them direct policy.
Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.
The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.
In Tobias’ opinion, the Democratic Party needs to put forth candidates who either outright turn down business executives with divergent interests from working-class Americans or candidates who will at least force them into a position where they are not influencing policy or the campaign. He says the seats at the table currently occupied by people like West, Cuban and Hoffman should instead be occupied by people that, at the very least, represent popular constituencies, like the president of the AFL-CIO.
The MSN article rightly points out the Democrats’ need to reconnect with their working-class roots. But Democrats haven’t cared about the working class since unions stopped being their ATM. Until they stop treating billionaires as political demigods and start listening to the people they claim to represent, their woes will only deepen.
Trump: The Wild Card
And then there’s Trump. Like a hawk circling a wounded rabbit, he’s watching the Democrats flail with glee. If Trump performs as expected in his second act, the Democrats are staring down not just one or two lost election cycles, but potentially four. A political winter is coming, and the Democrats are woefully unprepared.
They can’t rely on their old tricks anymore. Trump’s ability to expose their hypocrisy—like their claims of defending democracy while coronating Harris—has resonated. The contrast between Trump’s America-first policies and the Democrats’ donor-first priorities couldn’t be starker. And voters are noticing.
Lessons in Leadership (or Lack Thereof)
In the end, Kamala Harris put Democrats in a major pickle for two reasons: (1) she lost, and (2) she spent money like a crackhead who hit the Power Ball.
If there’s one takeaway from this fiasco, it’s that leadership matters. The Democrats bet the farm on Kamala Harris, and it backfired spectacularly. They didn’t just lose; they exposed themselves as a party more interested in appeasing elites than addressing the concerns of everyday Americans.
As Trump gears up for what promises to be a scorched-earth campaign, the Democrats have their work cut out for them. But if their strategy involves more coronations, more billion-dollar blunders, and more catering to the billionaire class, they might want to stock up on blankets. It’s going to be a long, cold winter in the wilderness of irrelevance.
Below is my column in The Hill on the Biden pardon and how it might not prove as complete a protection for Hunter Biden — or Joe Biden — as the President had hoped. Ironically, the greatest protection for President Biden in continuing investigations in the influence-peddling scandal could prove that very case that he has denounced that recognized presidential immunity for matters that arise during a presidency. Nevertheless, the action confirms the suspicion that Hunter’s bizarre criminal defense strategy may have been based on the assumption that he had a pocket pardon as insurance against any losses in court.
Here is the column:
The most shocking aspect of President Biden pardoning his own son, Hunter, may be that it was not in the least shocking, given the history of the Biden family. This abuse of the pardon power was widely anticipated even by his allies as the president repeatedly denied that he would ever do such a thing as he ran for reelection. Indeed, it may be the single most premeditated unethical act in political history.
However, it may not achieve what President Biden most hopes for: a clean slate for his son and himself in this massive corruption scandal.
Roughly two years ago, I wrote about how Biden might suddenly withdraw from the presidential race in 2024 and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act,” I wrote.
I further noted: “Everyone in Washington would win — except, of course, the public: The Bidens would keep alleged millions in influence-peddling profits; Hunter would not even have to pay his full taxes; members of Congress and the media could avoid taking responsibility for burying the reports of corruption.”
I wrote about the pardon option repeatedly because none of Hunter’s bizarre (and ultimately unsuccessful) criminal defenses made sense unless he felt confident that his father would pardon him in the end. Hunter’s taunting Congress with open contempt of a subpoena and his ridiculous defenses in court were not the actions of someone who feared consequences from these investigations. They were the actions of someone with a pocket pardon.
NBC is reporting that Hunter’s pardon was being discussed in the White House for a long time, even as Biden and his staff were steadfastly denying that he would issue a pardon. As with his years of denying knowledge of Hunter’s business dealings and meeting his clients, Biden simply lied over and over again to the public.
The eventual pardon restored what was a sweetheart deal reached with Special Counsel David Weiss that would have given Hunter immunity to the immediate charges and any unnamed criminal charges. It collapsed in court when Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed shock at such a deal and asked the prosecutor if he had ever seen such a deal offered to any other defendant. He admitted that he had not.
Now, President Biden has recreated an even more sweeping immunity grant through his own powers by pardoning his son not only for the crimes of which he was convicted, but of any crimes committed between Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. Think on that. It would cover anything from perjury to murder.
Now it makes sense why Hunter seemed to be engaged in what I described as a “game of chicken with himself.” As a criminal defense attorney, I noted that wild moves in and outside of the courts would make sense only if he knew that his dad would cover him in the end if everything went poorly — even as the president was assuring the public that he would never do such a thing.
In a final show of contempt for the American people, President Biden waited until a Sunday before an international trip to commit this unethical act. He brushed over his past lies by saying that “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word.” What he actually said, over and over again, was that he would never pardon his son.
For many in the media who helped bury this scandal and showed no interest in pursuing the influence-peddling operation of the Biden family, the pardon was met with uncomfortable shrugs. It is a measure of what you can call “Biden ethics.” In the curious world of Joe Biden, a lie that no one believes is treated the same as the truth. It is likely to work. There may be little interest in pursuing this corruption scandal with so much to get done in the new administration. However, it is not the absolute “get-out-of-jail-free” card that President Biden would like.
Hunter could still be called to testify before Congress or with investigators on the influence-peddling efforts. If he lies, it will be a new crime for which this pardon would not bar prosecution. He would no longer be able to count on a pocket pardon as an insurance policy.
Short of such continued investigation, the Bidens will have achieved something that would have made John Gotti blush. They were able to pull in millions of alleged influence-peddling proceeds. Hunter was showered with gifts and benefits, from a diamond to a luxury sports car. Various Biden family members reportedly received money from the operation. President Biden was himself accused of knowledge and possible benefits from the influence peddling. He will also be protected by this official act.
This is why I once wrote that the Bidens are the GOATs of influence peddling. While influence peddling is the most common form of corruption in Washington, this city has never seen the likes of the Bidens. The only thing greater than their appetite was their sheer audacity.
In this statement on the pardon before fleeing the jurisdiction for a foreign trip, President Biden notably stated that “in trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me.” Indeed, this corruption scandal is as much about the president as it is about his son. And, as the president previously declared, “No one f—- with a Biden.”
Contrary to what corporate media want you to believe, President Donald Trump’s decision to name Kashyap “Kash” Patel as his choice to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray is a good one — perhaps one of the best he could have made.
When Trump announced over Thanksgiving weekend that Patel was his pick to “bring back Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity to the FBI,” journos lost their minds. Some outlets framed Trump’s choice as frowned upon by the president’s aides and Republican legislators. Others publishedlists of bureaucrats who they claimed could fall prey to “Patel’s crosshairs.”for partisan reasons. Those did not compare to the hordes of corporate media coverage dedicated to tarnishing Patel and quashing his nomination.
Even before the election, the Associated Press painted Patel as a conspiracy theorist while noting how he was “poised to help lead a Trump administration.” Shortly after Trump made it official, MSNBC claimed that “Kash Patel could be Trump’s most dangerous pick yet.” The New York Times took it further by besmirching the pick as “concretely dangerous.”
In the NYT article lead, the author deems Patel “supremely unqualified to direct the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.” He warns that if Patel takes over, his “directorship would probably corrupt and bend the institution for decades, even if he served only a few years.”
“He wants to bend and break the bureau and weaponize it against those he sees as his political enemies and domestic critics,” the article continues, without mentioning how the FBI under Christopher Wray has done exactly that.
These descriptions of Patel suggest Trump pulled a random guy off the street to weaponize the agency on his behalf. In reality, Patel is familiar with both the bureaucracy and intelligence agencies, having worked as a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor, the U.S. Secretary of Defense’s chief of staff, a U.S. National Security Council official, and principal deputy to the acting Director of National Intelligence. Most importantly, Patel had a front-row seat to the deep state’s ploy, aided heavily by the propaganda press, to overthrow Trump when he served as a senior aide to former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes. Patel and Nunes’ efforts to blow open the Russia collusion hoax made them victims of the DOJ’s spying and targets of a years-long corporate media smear campaign. Patel even sued multiple outlets and reporters, including the NYT, for smearing him as a criminal who acted as a “Ukraine Back Channel” for the Trump White House.
The problem with the NYT article and every other outlet fearmongering about Patel’s nomination is they refuse to acknowledge that the FBI is already corrupt to its core and weaponized beyond belief. Polling indicates that more than half of the nation, 63 percent, want to see the FBI reformed or “shut down” and “rebuilt from scratch.”
Naming another deep-state swamp creature like Wray to run the FBI would guarantee that would never happen. Nominating someone like Patel, who promises to make ridding our constitutional Republic of the people trying to destroy it priority number one, however, puts the Trump administration in a much better position to accomplish those goals.
As Patel noted in his 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference speech, he saw firsthand how the “government gangsters” in the DOJ, DOD, and FBI are “crippling” the nation by weaponizing themselves against Americans. He told The Federalist last year, after corporate media accused him of trying to “target journalists for prosecution,” that a second Trump administration would have no choice but to address the corruption swiftly and effectively.
“We’ve been saying the DOJ and FBI need [to] be fixed. We’ve been saying prosecutors and judges shouldn’t weaponize justice. We’ve been saying you shouldn’t leak information for media to rig political elections and curry favor with the American electorate. We’ve been saying it the whole time and we’ve been saying anyone that breaks the law in doing those things … should be prosecuted, whether it’s government officials, civilians, and the media,” Patel said. “Our position has never changed. We’ve been saying to use and restore the Constitution, to follow and enforce the rule of law, not to violate it. That’s what they do.”
The only reason the propaganda press oppose Patel as Trump’s FBI pick is because he is a threat to their ability to continue colluding with the deep state to advance their partisan agenda. Every new article or TV segment corporate media outlets devote to complaining and criticizing Patel’s nomination proves to the Trump team that he is the perfect man for the job.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – When it comes to possible nominees for FBI Director, Kash is king. He’s behind Trump and MAGA 100 percent, and he’s familiar with how Washington works and how deceitful the swamp creatures can be. The FBI needs an overhaul, and he’s just the guy who can do it.
Kash Patel Releases Statement on FBI Nomination, Vows to “Return the FBI to Its Rightful Mission: Protecting the American People”
By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – Dec 01, 2024
Trump’s FBI Director nominee, Kash Patel, pledged to “restore integrity, accountability, and equal justice to our justice system” in a statement Saturday night after he was tapped to lead the FBI under President Trump. The Gateway Pundit reported earlier that Trump announced Patel’s nomination for FBI director. Trump said in a Truth Social post Saturday evening, “This FBI will end the growing crime epidemic in America, dismantle the migrant criminal gangs, and stop the evil scourge of human and drug trafficking across the Border.” This is incredible news. Kash Patel has been one of the leading voices against the Deep State’s weaponization of government, corruption, and conspiracies, including Russiagate, the… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Jack Smith, the controversial special counsel tasked with investigating former President Donald Trump’s attempts to challenge the 2020 election, has officially stepped down. His resignation comes just weeks before President-elect Trump is set to take office, sparking heated debates over the legitimacy of the cases brought against Trump and their broader implications for justice in America.
Conservative commentator Mark Levin, host of LevinTV, was quick to weigh in, calling Smith’s resignation both predictable and overdue. Levin minced no words in his criticism, declaring that Smith’s departure underscores the collapse of the legal efforts aimed at Trump. “You know why? It’s simple. He’s an unconstitutional prosecutor. Donald Trump’s going to fire his ass,” Levin said.
Levin argued that the cases against Trump were doomed from the start, pointing to internal Department of Justice (DOJ) memos and procedural violations. He highlighted the dismissal of one of Smith’s cases in Florida as a clear sign of their instability.
“These cases collapse,” Levin continued. “They should never have been brought. The case in Florida was rightly thrown out. That’s why they were in such a rush—to get these cases prosecuted and Trump imprisoned before the election.”
Levin accused the DOJ and Smith of pursuing Trump with the sole intent of derailing his political career. He claimed this approach not only violated DOJ policies but also undermined the integrity of the judicial system.
“They did everything possible to affect the election and to destroy Donald Trump’s life,” Levin asserted.
The commentator called on the incoming administration to take decisive action against those responsible for the cases. “It’s my position that the new attorney general needs to dig into this and find out who exactly was responsible for it,” Levin said. “These people need to be held accountable.”
Smith’s cases focused primarily on Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, actions Levin described as entirely lawful and historically common.
“A candidate has every right to try and challenge an election, which means to overturn it,” Levin argued. “That’s exactly what’s going on in Pennsylvania today at the behest of Chuck Schumer with their slip-and-fall lawyer, Marc Elias.”
Levin highlighted past instances where election challenges were not only permitted but celebrated by political leaders. He cited Al Gore’s legal battle in Florida during the 2000 presidential race and efforts in Minnesota that ultimately handed Al Franken a Senate seat.
“There’s nothing criminal about challenging an election,” Levin said. “This is the first time it’s been criminalized. Encouraging a state legislature or a board of elections to act has never been treated as a crime before.”
Smith’s resignation has fueled speculation about its timing, particularly given Trump’s imminent return to power. Critics argue that Smith’s exit may be an attempt to avoid the embarrassment of being fired by the incoming administration or to shield himself from further scrutiny. Supporters of Trump see this as vindication of their belief that the legal cases against him were politically motivated and lacked substance. Levin emphasized that the abrupt nature of Smith’s departure only reinforces this narrative.
“This was never about justice,” Levin said. “It was about weaponizing the justice system against a political opponent. And now it’s falling apart.”
Smith’s resignation is part of a larger debate over the role of the justice system in political matters. Critics argue that targeting Trump for challenging the 2020 election has set a dangerous precedent, effectively criminalizing actions that were previously considered routine aspects of political contests. As Smith steps aside, attention shifts to how Trump’s incoming administration will handle the fallout. Levin and others are urging Trump’s attorney general to launch investigations into the motivations and conduct behind Smith’s cases, with some calling for accountability measures to restore public trust in the justice system.
For Trump, Smith’s resignation marks a significant victory, further energizing his supporters and reinforcing his narrative of political persecution. Yet it also raises questions about how his administration will navigate the legal and political challenges that remain.
The stage is set for a dramatic showdown as Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, with Smith’s resignation serving as a powerful symbol of the broader battles yet to come.
Four years ago, Democrats and their pals in corporate media began painting then-President Donald Trump and Republicans who questioned the results of the troubled 2020 election as “election deniers.” Now, Democrats are doing all they can — including breaking election law — to challenge GOP victories in Iowa and Pennsylvania despite “insurmountable” odds. Even The Washington Post, part of the left’s corporate media public-relations team, sees the writing on the wall for Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn. The entrenched incumbent lost to Republican challenger Dave McCormick by some 24,000 votes in a swing state election that helped Republicans take back the Senate with a comfortable majority. The Associated Press and other news outlets called the race for McCormick. But Casey and his party of election integrity deniers, led by Democrat political ambulance chaser Marc Elias (Hillary Clinton’s Russian dossier peddler), refuse to concede. Instead, Casey’s campaign has sought an expensive recount, and has no compunction about grinding election law under foot to tally enough votes to hold the seat.
‘Tipping the Scales’
“Sen. Casey just refuses to accept the fact that he’s lost this election, so he is costing taxpayers well over a million dollars” for a statewide recount, Linda Kerns, 2024 Pennsylvania Election Integrity Counsel for the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, told The Federalist late last week on the “Simon Conway Show” in Des Moines.
If Sleepy Senator Bob Casey had put as much energy, resources, attention, & firepower into the needs of Pennsylvanians over the last 2 decades as he is putting into fighting the outcome of this election, maybe he would have gotten more votes. Congrats @DaveMcCormickPA.
The Democrat senator and his attorneys are pushing for invalid provisional and mail-in ballots not correctly signed or properly dated to be counted, contrary to a Pennsylvania court ruling. Democrats on some county boards dismissed the law and the court ruling in agreeing to accept suspect and invalid ballots.
“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, said Thursday.
“People violate laws anytime they want,” she added. “So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.” It was a troubling statement from a public official, and another in countless examples of why Democrats got their clocks cleaned in this month’s election. Voters have had more than enough of leftist-led lawlessness over the past four years.
Even the Dem-friendly Washington Post editorial board can smell the desperation. The election lawlessness, too, now seems a bridge too far for the left-leaning WaPo board.
“Democrats would surely protest if a Republican commissioner made the same statement [as Ellis-Marseglia] to justify tipping the scales for their party’s Senate nominee — and they would be right,” the editorial board wrote in a piece headlined, “Democrats thumb their nose at the rule of law in Pennsylvania.” “Elections need rules, established in advance of the voting, and those rules must be applied equally and consistently.”
The same newspaper, of course, joined a chorus of accomplice media outlets chiding swing state Republican Senate candidates, Eric Hovde in Wisconsin and Kari Lake in Arizona, for not conceding closely contested elections. The conservatives have raised election integrity questions, but neither has asked election officials and courts to break the law to reverse their opponents’ election leads.
“Four years ago, many Republicans embraced Trump’s brand of denialism when he stoked far-fetched theories to try to undo his loss of the presidency. Now, they are largely staying silent amid scattered false claims of rigged elections in downballot races — and they’re calling on Sen. Bob Casey (D) to concede that he narrowly lost in Pennsylvania,” a team of leftist Washington Post reporters concluded in the piece — published a day before the editorial — that served as a defense of Casey’s recount call and a knock-on Republicans mulling their own legal options.
In Pennsylvania the math doesn’t look good for Casey, but he’s counting on the recount and a stack of invalid votes.
“But even if Sen. Casey wins on these, there’s still not enough for him to win this election so he’s just desperately hanging on,” Kerns said.
‘The Election Deniers are the Democrats’
It’s a similar situation in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, where Democrat Christina Bohannan’s campaign on Thursday sought a recount of the votes in an election in which incumbent Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks won by less than 1,000 votes. The purple district saw Miller-Meeks win her first term in 2020 by a final recount tally of just six votes.
Bohannan’s path to victory appears unlikely, too, but the campaign said in a statement that a recount will ensure “that every voter is heard” and that they have “full trust in this process and will accept the results regardless of the outcome.” The Associated Press has yet to call the race.
Miller-Meeks said the vote count, as it stands, is “insurmountable” and that the districtwide recount is an unnecessary expense to taxpayers.
“In Iowa, all of the legal ballots have been counted, all of the provisional ballots and the military ballots have been counted. The counties have certified their election results, and we remain ahead. We gained votes on election night,” the congresswoman told The Federalist Friday on the “Simon Conway Show” on NewsRadio 1040 WHO in Des Moines. “So, it’s an insurmountable lead. But, yes, my concern is after the recount when we’re still ahead, which we will be, I’m very confident of that, they’re going to continue to deny the election and they may go on to do a contest and try to get ballots admitted that were illegal ballots.”
Republicans have already secured enough victories to hold the House, but Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to stave off defeat and a wider GOP majority in a handful of races yet to be called. Those include Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, two House races in California, and one each in Alaska and Ohio.
Miller-Meeks said the tables have turned in the “election denier” narrative.
“We’ve heard for four years how Republicans were a threat to democracy; they were going to overturn democracy. But really what is happening is that the election deniers, the people who are trying to thwart the rule of law, trying to thwart what a state constitution allows when it comes to elections, are the Democrats,” the Republican congresswoman said.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Below is my column in The Hill on the growing distemper on the left after the loss of both houses and the White House in this election. In Pennsylvania, the politics of despair has stripped away all principle and pretense. There is a concerted effort to reelect Sen. Bob Casey by any means necessary. Even the Washington Post is now criticizing the effort.
Here is the column:
“People violate laws any time they want.”
Those words, shrugging off an alleged unlawful move last week, did not come from some Chicago gangbanger or Washington car thief. Those words of wisdom came from Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They came in response to the fact that the Democratic majority on the election commission had decided to ignore a binding state Supreme Court ruling in an attempt to engineer the election of Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.). Rather than prompting a degree of introspection, the loss of both houses of Congress and the White House has had a curious effect on many Democrats, dropping any pretense of protecting democracy over partisanship.
Despite polls showing that the public trusted former president Donald Trump more than Vice President Harris in combatting threats to democracy, Democrats made “saving democracy” the thrust of this election.
The polls reflected a certain common sense of the public when harangued with predictions from President Biden, Harris and a host of politicians and pundits that this would likely be our last election. Few believed that after over two centuries as the most stable and successful democracy in history, all three branches would collapse in unison and embrace dictatorship. Even fewer believed the predictions of the rounding up of homosexuals, journalists and political critics for camps in what some described as an American Third Reich.
American voters are not chumps and what they saw were strikingly anti-democratic positions from those claiming to be the defenders of democracy, including:
• Seeking to strip Trump from ballots under an unfounded theory rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court.
• Fighting to block opponents of Biden from ballots in the primary and general elections.
• Suing to keep Robert F. Kennedy on ballots after his withdrawal in swing states, in order to confuse voters and reduce the vote for Trump.
• Calling for blocking dozens of incumbent GOP officials and legislators from ballots as “insurrectionists.”
• “Protecting democracy” through the most extensive censorship in history and the blacklisting of opponents.
• Engaging in open and raw lawfare in the prosecutions of Trump in places like New York.
Each of these efforts ultimately failed to stop Trump and was opposed by a majority of voters even before the election. So now, Democrats are dropping the pretense for open partisanship. That was evident in Bucks County, when a motion arose to reject a challenge to count provisional ballots, including undated or invalidly dated mail ballots.
It should have been easy. To its credit, the majority-Democratic Pennsylvania Supreme Court had already refused a Democratic push to change the rules shortly before the election and to ignore the plain language of the election laws. In ordering the rejection of ballots without dates, Justice Kevin Doughtery (joined by Chief Justice Debra Todd) wrote a concurrence declaring “This Court will neither impose nor countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election.’ We said those carefully chosen words only weeks ago. Yet they apparently were not heard in the Commonwealth Court, the very court where the bulk of election litigation unfolds.”
It is apparently still not being heard. In the Bucks County hearing, Marseglia spoke as she and Democratic Board chairman Robert Harvie, Jr., dismissed the earlier rulings in order to accept ballots without required signatures or mandatory dates. She declared that she would not second the motion to enforce the rulings “mostly because I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”
That was a lot of words to say that she does not really seem to care if this is lawful. For his part, Casey has shown the same abandon as he clings to his Senate seat at any cost. That cost, in this case, was an alliance with Marc Elias, the controversial Democratic lawyer at the center of the infamous Steele Dossier scandal. Elias has been sanctioned in court and criticized for his work to flip elections. He is known for baselessly blaming voting machine errors for electing Republicans and pushing gerrymandering plans rejected by the courts as anti-democratic.
Casey is unlikely to change the result without counting defective or challenged ballots. Fortunately, law and precedent “does matter in this country.” There are still officials who can transcend their political preferences to maintain the rule of law.After the last presidential election, many Trump appointees ruled against the former president, and many Democratic judges rejected the effort to strip Trump from ballots.
That does not mean that Democrats who value the weaponization of law will not continue to embrace lawfare warriors like New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).
Others will use the rage of these times as a license to ignore legal and ethical obligations altogether. They are arguably the saddest manifestation of our political discord. They are people who have not just lost faith in our system but in themselves. They have become untethered from any defining principle for their own conduct. This election has left them adrift in a sea of moral and legal relativism, with only their rage as a following wind. They cling to that rage as reason vanishes like a distant shore.
For the rest of us, there is work to be done as a nation committed to the rule of law. We cannot win at any cost when that cost is the very thing that defines us.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., pictured leaving the Senate chamber July 25, didn’t want noncitizens to vote when he was Virginia’s governor. (Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images)
In 2006, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine signed a bipartisan bill requiring the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles to provide a list of noncitizens’ names to the state’s Board of Elections for removal from the voter rolls.
Now, less than a month before Election Day, the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department is suing in hopes of restoring 6,303 noncitizens to Virginia’s voter rolls who were removed in August. Subsequent Virginia governors since Kaine, both Republican and Democrat, have overseen the removal of noncitizen voters from the rolls.
In August, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, signed an executive order to do so, in part relying on the 2006 law drafted by then-state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli.
“It passed without much controversy, about 2-1 in the Legislature, and then Tim [Kaine] signed it when he presented himself as a centrist,” Cuccinelli, a Republican who was elected as Virginia’s attorney general in 2009, told The Daily Signal.
“This is pure political timing,” Cuccinelli said of the Biden-Harris administration’s legal action. “These are literally people who self-identified as noncitizens.”
“If the purpose was to generate news, that’s what the DOJ has done,” he said. “They want noncitizens, both legal and illegal, to vote.”
Kaine, who signed the 2006 bill into law, went on to become a U.S. senator representing Virginia as well as Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate in 2016. The Daily Signal sought comment from Kaine’s Senate office as well as his reelection campaign.
Kaine’s campaign referred to a July interview with WJLA-TV (Channel 7), in which a reporter asked: “Should non-U.S. citizens vote in American elections?”
Kaine replied: “No. Voting should be reserved for U.S. citizens.”
The campaign also noted that a Kaine campaign spokesperson told WJLA on Wednesday:
Sen. Kaine believes that noncitizens should not vote in state or federal elections, and that’s why he signed legislation as governor to guard against it. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote and the good news is that there is no evidence that noncitizens have voted or are voting in Virginia.
And just as we want to block noncitizens from voting, we need to keep eligible voters from being purged from voting rolls, particularly just weeks from an election. Sen. Kaine is focused on making sure that every eligible Virginian has the opportunity to vote in this critical election.
The matter likely won’t be resolved in court by Election Day, Cuccinelli said, now the national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative. However, he said, the Justice Department’s lawsuit seems to be intended as a warning for other states not to clean up voter rolls.
The lawsuit alleges that Virginia’s removal of noncitizens from voter rolls violates the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “motor voter law,” because the removal comes fewer than 90 days before an election. DOJ’s action follows a federal lawsuit filed by the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the League of Women Voters of Virginia in which those organizations make the same arguments.
“These liberal groups sued Virginia and then a few weeks later the Justice Department files the same lawsuit,” Katie Gorka, chair of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Republican Committee, told The Daily Signal.
“This shows they are nervous about Virginia,” Gorka said of leading Democrats. “It used to be a solidly blue state and now has moved to the middle and is a toss-up.”
“They are going for the optics and this is going to backfire. Americans overwhelmingly believe that only Americans should vote,” she said.
The plaintiffs in the private lawsuit in Virginia are represented by Campaign Legal Center, Protect Democracy, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Advancement Project.
Three organizations involved in the litigation—the League of Women Voters, the Advancement Project, and Campaign Legal Center—participated in a White House conference in 2021. That meeting was about implementing President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which directed federal agencies, including the Justice Department, to partner with private interest groups to boost voter registration and turnout.
As The Daily Signal previously reported, the Justice Department last month brought a similar lawsuit against Alabama for removing noncitizens from that state’s voter registration rolls. A similar lawsuit was brought against Alabama by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left organization known for labeling mainstream center-right organizations as “hate groups” similar to neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC also was represented at the White House conference on Biden’s election executive order.
The Justice Department has invoked “presidential privilege” to prevent release of its strategic plan for implementing Biden’s order of March 7, 2021.
Still, Cuccinelli said, he thinks “for sure” the Virginia litigation is tied to the president’s order.
“They are hiding communications all over the place,” the former Virginia attorney general said. “There is no way to treat these as privileged. It is pure collusion and weaponization of government through these outside groups.”
The Daily Signal sought comment from both of the private litigants in the Virginia case: the League of Women Voters and the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights. Neither responded. The Justice Department filed the lawsuit Oct. 11 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
“As the National Voter Registration Act mandates, officials across the country should take heed of the law’s crystal clear and unequivocal restrictions on systematic list maintenance efforts that fall within 90 days of an election,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“By canceling voter registrations within 90 days of Election Day, Virginia places qualified voters in jeopardy of being removed from the rolls and creates the risk of confusion for the electorate,” Clarke said in the public statement. “Congress adopted the National Voter Registration Act’s quiet period restriction to prevent error-prone, eleventh-hour efforts that all too often disenfranchise qualified voters.”
“Vote here” signage is stored at a warehouse at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center ahead of the 2024 elections in Phoenix on June 3, 2024. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
Jason Hopkins is a reporter covering immigration issues for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—America First Legal on Thursday announced a lawsuit against Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes for refusing to hand over the names of over 200,000 registered voters who have allegedly not provided proof of citizenship.
Fontes is breaking the law by refusing to comply with a records request that demands the names of roughly 218,000 individuals who are registered to vote but did not provide proof of citizenship, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit comes just weeks before Election Day, with former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remaining in a dead heat in the state.
“America First Legal continues to lead the fight for election integrity,” Stephen Miller, America First Legal president and former senior adviser in the Trump administration, said in a press release. “We are suing the state of Arizona for refusing to provide the list of 218,000 voters who failed or refused to establish citizenship.”
“It is absolutely imperative that we stop the dire threat of illegal alien voting, which is the gravest form of foreign election interference,” Miller continued.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer identified in September a glitch in the voter roll system that marked more than 97,000 registered voters as having provided documentary proof of citizenship—which is required under Arizona law—even though these individuals had not done so. Richer filed an emergency petition in the Arizona Supreme Court on Sept. 17 in order to prevent these voter registrants from participating in local and state elections.
Fontes announced Monday that his office had discovered an additional “set of approximately 120,000 Arizonans who may be affected by a data coding oversight within [the Arizona Department of Transportation’s] Motor Vehicle Division and Arizona registration databases.”
The recent disclosure puts the total number of registered voters in the state who allegedly did not provide proof of citizenship up to roughly 218,000. The 2020 presidential election in Arizona was decided by a margin of less than 11,000 votes.
Immediately after Richer’s lawsuit, America First Legal filed a public records request asking the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office to hand over the list of all individuals who had unlawfully registered to vote, according to a press release from the organization. Fontes denied the request, alleging that disclosure of the names would lead to their harassment and that compiling the list would be too burdensome for staff.
America First Legal argues that Arizona’s public records request laws require Fontes to produce this type of information when requested.
“There have been major failures in the administration of just about every general election in Arizona from 2016 until now,” stated James Rogers, America First Legal senior counsel. “And every time anyone expresses concern, how does Secretary Fontes react? Victim blaming.”
“That is not what Arizonans expect from their elected leaders. The law requires Secretary Fontes to produce these records, and AFL will work to hold him accountable until he does,” Rogers continued.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, also known as “EZAZ.org.”
Fontes did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams. The most serious charges may be the foreign campaign contributions. However, the indictment is not nearly as overwhelming as suggested by the government. That may be why they are openly threatening Adams associates to cooperate or face ruin.
Here is the column:
The federal five-count indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams is on its face a damning document of alleged public corruption. The government is alleging that Turkish officials saw Adams as a rising star in the Democratic Party and started to groom him for influence.
However, once beyond the details of the opulent rooms and flight upgrades, there may be less here than meets the eye in some of these charges. The campaign-contribution violations raise serious problems for Adams in the alleged solicitation of unlawful foreign contributions. Yet the counts must be read with caution. We have not seen the specific defenses to the allegations of using “straw men” to funnel unlawful contributions and the alleged favors bestowed on contributors. Indictments are one-sided and highly slanted interpretations of the facts by prosecutors to secure a conviction.
For example, many of the gifts from Turkish sources were realized in the form of upgrades on flights to business class or expensive hotel suites. It is not clear what Adams knew of the logistics for such travel or their inclusion in annual reports. Despite their public personas, many populist politicians tend to be a pampered class who expect to be feted in the best quarters as they speak as the “voice of the people.”
That was captured most vividly by NYC Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sashaying at the Met Gala in a designer dress reading “tax the rich.” It was a scene with a crushing irony. The dress itself was worth more than some people make in a year, and it was just “loaned” to AOC despite being made specifically for her. She also did not pay for her ticket, which would cost $35,000.
It triggered an ethics investigation and allegations of ethical violations. In one night, Ocasio-Cortez flaunted roughly half of the value of the alleged Adams gifts as she paraded as a social warrior among the social elite. The truly hilarious aspect was that it was the elite who were thrilled by the demonstration and subsidized it.
The Adams allegations would constitute a fairly crude form of corruption by today’s standards. For the Biden family, it looks like small potatoes. Adams lacked a Hunter and the type of labyrinth of accounts maintained by the Bidens to funnel millions from foreign sources.
One of the most discussed allegations concerns a high-rise building built by Turkish friends in Manhattan to serve as their new consulate. The Turks wanted the building opened before the arrival of the Turkish president in 2021, strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The problem is that, according to prosecutors, New York Fire Department officials found an array of dangerous defects in the building and believed that it was a fire risk. They refused to allow the building to open until it met those standards. The government alleges that Turkish officials immediately dialed up their well-groomed ally, Adams, and told him that it was “his turn” to support Turkey. Adams intervened and prosecutors say that FDNY officials were afraid for their jobs.
Once again, however, Adams has defenses. He can argue that New York is the home of the United Nations and a large population of diplomats and international organizations. This was a foreign country seeking to open a consulate and he intervened to avoid an embarrassing diplomatic tiff.
Suggesting that a push to cut short fire inspections may be difficult to maintain under a bribery theory. That was the type of expansive case that government attorney Jack Smith used against former Virginia Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell and it failed spectacularly before the Supreme Court. There are other reasons besides flight upgrades why Adams might have facilitated a speed up of building approvals.
In the end, this is a Bob Menendez-lite indictment. Failing to publicly list how you moved from economy to business class on flights is hardly the stuff of “All the King’s Men.” It is more like “All the King’s Upgrades.” The biggest problem for Adams is that the US Attorney’s Office went public with a threat for all of those who do not cooperate and pledged that more will be “held accountable.” In other words, the indictment amplified the tune in a game of musical chairs. Anyone close to Adams may want to sit down before the music stops. That means that Adams can expect close associates to be testifying against him with the enthusiasm of those threatened with ruin by federal prosecutors.
If Eric Adams is convicted, it will be at the hands of his associates. The jury will not be particularly sympathetic with a politician snaring the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis Istanbul. Prosecutors love to play on such opulence like their use of Paul Manafort’s $15,000 Ostrich coat.
Combined with former friends and associates, it may be enough for the ultimate upgrade for Adams from business class to a federal cellblock.
New York Mayor Eric Adams speaks at a press conference Thursday before appearing in court after his indictment. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
Did New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and former police captain, accept foreign bribes and foreign campaign contributions? That’s the key issue in the federal indictment of New York’s mayor just handed down by a federal grand jury led by Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The indictment charges Adams with five felonies under federal law that could result in his spending a long time in prison, including wire fraud, solicitation and receipt of campaign contributions from a foreign national, and outright bribery.
The indictment claims that when Adams became Brooklyn borough president in 2014, he “sought and accepted … valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel” from “wealthy foreign businesspeople including at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him.”
In 2018, when Adams made public his plan to run for mayor, the indictment alleges that he “not only accepted but sought illegal campaign contributions to his 2021 mayoral campaign, as well as other things of value, from foreign nationals.” As Adams’ “prominence and power grew” and it became clear that he was going to become mayor of the Big Apple, those “foreign-national benefactors sought to cash in on the corrupt relationship,” the indictment alleges. It claims that Adams agreed, “providing favorable treatment” and “granting requests” from them.
The indictment describes an elaborate scheme to hide illegal foreign campaign contributions as well as corporate donations and individual donations exceeding the legal limits.
“Overseas contributors” used “straw donors,” U.S. nationals who falsely claimed they were making the donations that actually were from foreign nationals. Businesses evaded a ban on corporate contributions by using their employees to make those contributions, reimbursing the employees through corporate accounts. And “wealthy individuals” also used straw donors to evade laws “restricting the amount any one person can donate to a candidate,” the indictment says.
Adams also is accused of defrauding the City of New York through its public funding program for political campaigns. The city has a program that “matches small-dollar contributions from individual city residents with up to eight times their amount in public funds.”
The indictment claims that Adams applied for matching funds for the straw donor contributions he received; despite knowing they were fraudulent donations. The result? Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign received $10 million in public funds that he shouldn’t have gotten.
The indictment says that the same Turkish government official who funneled illegal campaign contributions to Adams, referred to in the indictment as a “senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment,” also arranged “free or discounted travel on Turkey’s national airline.”
The official also arranged “free rooms at opulent hotels, free meals at high-end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment” for Adams “and his companions” in Turkey, the indictment says.
Adams’ passport must have quite a number of U.S. Customs stamps in it, since the “free or discounted” travel apparently included trips to “France, China, Sri Lanka, India, Hungary, and Turkey itself.”
To illustrate the “opulent hotels,” the indictment contains photos of some of the hotels Adams stayed in, including two photos of the Bentley Suite bedroom and bathroom at the St. Regis Hotel in Istanbul. Adams paid less than $600 for a suite that normally costs $7,000 for two nights, the indictment alleges.
An essential part of the government’s prosecution is the claim that Adams not only knew about all of this, but that he “and others working at his direction, repeatedly took steps to shield his solicitation and acceptance of these benefits from public scrutiny.” Those efforts, the indictment alleges, included not disclosing the travel benefits he received on the city’s required annual financial disclosure form as well as creating “fake paper trails, falsely suggesting he had paid” for the travel benefits his generous overseas benefactor financed.
The mayor also was apparently diligent in deleting “messages with others involved in his misconduct” to destroy evidence, although the indictment is replete with email and text messages captured by government investigators.
Part of the quid pro quo for all of these benefits, according to the indictment, was the Turkish official telling Adams that he had to override the New York Fire Department in order “to facilitate the opening of a new Turkish consular building” without a fire inspection “in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey’s president.”
“Adams did as instruct,” the indictment says, and the responsible fire official “was told that he would lose his job if he failed to acquiesce.” The building was allowed to open. If the scheme had not worked, the indictment alleges, the “building would have failed an FDNY inspection.”
The indictment also alleges that Adams successfully intervened on behalf of others who illegally funneled money to him, such as a businessman who wanted help with the city’s “Department of Buildings.”
The five criminal counts against Adams allege violations of 18 U.S.C. §1342 and §1343; 52 U.S.C. §30121 and §30109; and 18 U.S.C. §2 and §666. These federal statutes cover conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, federal program bribery, soliciting and receiving campaign donations from foreign nationals, and plain, old-fashioned bribery.
If you’re wondering how a federal prosecutor has jurisdiction over campaign contributions being made to a local mayoral campaign, it is because 52 U.S.C. §30121 bans all political contributions by foreigners in federal, state, and local elections.
Congress has the constitutional authority for this because of its power over foreign aliens and immigration, which includes the ability to keep them out of all of our elections, not just federal elections.
In the final paragraph of the indictment, the government asks for forfeiture by Adams of “all property, real and personal, that constitutes or is derived from proceeds traceable to the commission” of his misdeeds. That means that in addition to long jail time, Adams—if convicted—could be on the hook for millions of dollars in criminal forfeiture and civil penalties.
No one should doubt that these are very serious, very substantial charges, although Adams is presumed to be innocent until he is found guilty or decides to plead guilty. But all of the information in the indictment seems to indicate that federal prosecutors and agents conducted an in-depth, thorough investigation.
If Adams decides to fight the charges instead of trying to negotiate a plea deal with the government, we may be looking at a very long, very expensive process before the case is resolved.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a visit to Minnesota on March 14, 2024. Behind her is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whom she recently named as her vice-presidential running mate. | Public Domain/Office of Governor Walz & Lt. Governor Flanagan
House Republicans are demanding answers from Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, regarding a $250 million COVID-19 fraud scheme, viewed as one of the worst relief scams during the pandemic.
Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina issued a subpoena Wednesday to Walz’s administration and officials within the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Office of Inspector General. Foxx also sent a letter to Minnesota Commissioner of Education Willie Jett requesting documents explaining the agency’s response to the $250 million fraud scheme. The subpoena concerns an investigation that goes back to 2022 regarding a $250 million fraud scheme by a Minnesota-based nonprofit called Feeding Our Future. The program was intended to help feed hungry children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Feeding Our Future reportedly created fake attendance rosters with the names and ages of nonexistent children and falsified invoices to create a facade of providing food to the pretend children.
“As the chief executive and the highest-ranking official in the state of Minnesota, you are responsible for the MDE and its administration of FCNPs,” the subpoena cover letter stated. “Statements in the press by you and your representatives indicate that you and other executive officers were involved, or had knowledge of, MDE’s administration of the FCNP and responsibilities and actions regarding the massive fraud.”
In a Tuesday press release, the committee stated that it proceeded with the subpoena after failing to receive a response from Walz. The committee sent the governor copies of letters it sent to MDE last November and in June requesting information about handling the fraud.
“The documents we have received to date indicate the actions taken by you and other executive officers were insufficient to address the massive fraud,” the cover letter stated.
“The Committee has been unable to obtain substantive responsive materials in the many voluntary requests made in this matter,” the letter continued.
“The Committee must now compel the production of responsive documents that will show the extent of the actions taken by you and your administration relating to MDE’s administration of the FCNP and the extent of your responsibilities and actions addressing the massive fraud that resulted in the abuse of taxpayer dollars intended for hungry children.”
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota, at least 70 defendants have been charged in connection with the scheme. Eighteen of them have pleaded guilty, and a federal jury convicted five defendants in June for their roles in the fraud scheme.
Walz’s office did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.
In June, the nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor released a special report criticizing the MDE’s oversight of Feeding Our Future, which “created opportunities for fraud.”
During a news conference in June, Walz commented on the report that what happened with the program was not “malfeasance.”
“There’s not a single state employee that was implicated in doing anything that was illegal. They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should’ve,” Walz said.
The case regarding the COVID-19 fraud scheme is not the first of the Democratic governor’s controversies to garner media attention following Walz’s selection as Vice President Harris’ running mate. In 1995, Walz was arrested for driving under the influence in Dawes County, Nebraska. According to a state trooper’s report about the incident, Walz had been driving at 96 miles per hour, nearly double the speed limit.
From 2004 until 2019, the responsibility to enforce law and order in San Francisco fell to District Attorney Kamala Harris and her protégé George Gascon. The result? By any estimation, it has been an ignominious disaster. Even as you drive from the airport to downtown in this once great city, the sight that greets you off the highway is streets with empty storefronts — like broken teeth, jagged and sad.
In the Tenderloin District it gets worse, far worse, and it isn’t getting any better, in fact, much the opposite. The last time I was in the City by the Bay was in 2021, and I struggled then to describe the craven brutality of the homelessness and drug addiction. Let me try again.
Next week, at her convention, the hand-picked Democratic nominee — whom nobody voted for — will try to convince us that her record of failure is not her record of failure. But the chaotic streets of San Francisco tell a different story. ((AP Photo/Patrick Semansky))
Just off Union Square, I wandered down to the nice coffee house where I spent my mornings three years ago. It’s gone now. Boarded up. Out in front, addicts assembled under the amused eyes of security guards who seem to think this is normal. Just up the block, the smell hit me first. It didn’t last time, but now, a fetid stench of human degradation that New Yorkers know only from an unfortunate subway car choice, simply hangs in the air. You can’t even smell the weed.
A person lies on the street in San Francisco in August 2024.
Dogs abound, barking in the midst of this misery. At least they know something is amiss. In tents, the poor forgotten of this city languish, selling drugs, not joints, not a bag of weed, but life-threatening heroin and fentanyl right out in the open. The scale of human tragedy is laid bare by the proximity of wealth to squalor, of healthy and beautiful minds and bodies to squandered lives doped out and laid out beneath signs for Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany & Co.
The well-heeled set headed for the Apple Store seem to pretend it isn’t happening. But to an outsider, it is as clear as the summer sun. You can’t buy beef jerky here. You can try, but at the Walgreens near my upscale hotel, the dehydrated travelers treat is behind lock and key. The customer service button might as well be connected to some remote outpost in Antarctica. After 5 minutes you just leave.
Open air drug dealing in San Francisco in August 2024.
During COVID, I used the analogy of pointillist painting to describe the ever-encroaching rules. It’s just a mask, it’s just six feet, it’s just remote learning, each was a point on a canvas, but when you stepped back, you saw a picture of a prison. So, too, in San Francisco, the little horrors add up to a city of nightmares.
Anyone from any city in the northeast of our great country will say after five minutes that San Francisco is a dystopian disaster, but many of the people here, like frogs slowly boiling, think it’s normal. Is this what Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the architects of this misery, has in mind for all of us?
Next week, at her convention, the hand-picked Democratic nominee — whom nobody voted for — will try to convince us that her record of failure is not her record of failure. But the chaotic streets of San Francisco tell a different story. This is real. It is horrible. And no amount of well-off liberals posting photos next to the Golden Gate Bridge can truly hide the depravity of it all. And yeah, maybe the cops and the spaghetti strainer of a District Attorney’s office wrought by Harris keep their wealthy enclaves safe, but everyone else is in dire straits.
One of the finest street clocks in all of America is in San Francisco. It also is broken.
No matter how big your britches get, you can’t hide from your hometown. There, people know you, they know your story, and the story of Kamala Harris and San Francisco is a warning bell that America needs to hear.
Not far from the Tenderloin I found a curious object; one of the finest street clocks in all America. At one point, it was insured by Lloyd’s of London. You can view its gears and workings. It is a beautiful clock, reminiscent of the one that graces New York’s Grand Central. It also doesn’t work. The face of this storied clock is set to the advertiser’s time of 10:10, and twice a day it is right as the saying goes. But why is it broken? How much would it cost to make this piece of history tick again? Why isn’t anyone doing it?
These are all questions for the presumptive Democratic nominee, who takes no questions. But she cannot hide from San Francisco. This is her legacy. And like the broken clock, it just flat out doesn’t work.
Kamala Harris hasn’t been the presumptive Democrat nominee for even a week, and already the press is desperately trying to insist perfectly valid criticisms of her are illegitimate. If you think the media were complicit in attempting and failing to hide Joe Biden’s senility, the attempt to retcon her political career into something that resembles respectable and competent is even more brazen.
“She was never the border czar.”
“She was never considered the most liberal senator.”
“She was never a DEI hire.”
“She doesn’t owe her political career to her powerful boyfriend.”
The dishonesty surrounding all of these issues is worth highlighting, but let’s focus on that last point involving Harris’ relationship with California’s powerful political boss Wille Brown, for no other reason than The New York Times has provided a terrific example of how the lies are coming in hot.
The Times’ “On Politics” newsletter Wednesday — think of it as political talking points for affluent wine moms, a.k.a. the Democrats’ base — was dedicated to combatting “the sexist and racist rumors that have followed Harris for years” with “the facts behind several conspiracy theories and misleading claims about Harris that have spread widely in recent days.”
Nearly the whole thing is an orgiastic recitation of errant nonsense, starting with the fact that the Times is quoting disgraced “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz to make the case that Harris is the victim of a disproportionate amount of online attacks. (Harris’ competitor in the presidential race was shot in the head less than two weeks ago, and, unsurprisingly, there’s been a dearth of media handwringing about the rhetorical climate that may have enabled an actual assassination attempt. That’s because an honest discussion about hateful rhetoric would involve asking basic questions such as, “Why did The New York Times win a Pulitzer for stories based on the false premise that Donald Trump stole an election by treasonously colluding with Russia?”)
But I digress. Again, the real lowlight of the Times article is its discussion of Kamala Harris’ relationship with Willie Brown. One of my favorite things “fact checkers” do is introduce a proposition as false and then try to confirm that falsity by desperately spinning a bunch of inconvenient facts that confirm the proposition is actually true. The entire section on Harris and Willie Brown is a textbook example:
The sexist insinuations point in part to her brief relationship in the 1990s with Willie Brown, who was 60 and the speaker of the California Assembly when Harris was 29 and rising in the Bay Area legal scene. He appointed Harris to two well-paid state board positions and introduced her to his political connections.
When she was campaigning to be San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003, her opponents repeatedly commented on her link to Brown — references that she told The New York Times in 2019 were “frustrating” and “designed to degrade, frankly, the conversation about why we needed a new D.A.”
During the 2003 race, which she won, she told SF Weekly that there was nothing improper about benefiting from her ties to Brown, although she described the relationship as an “albatross hanging around my neck.” She said she “brought a level of life knowledge and common sense” to the board roles, adding that “whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work.”
She said that she had “no doubt that I am independent of him” and that “I do not owe him a thing.”
Just so we’re clear, The New York Times is confirming Harris did in fact have a relationship with Willie Brown, who was 31 years older (and, for what it’s worth, still married at the time). Harris herself admits her career benefited significantly from said relationship. Other Democrats shared the perception she did not earn her positions. And Harris, a lawyer who initially failed the bar exam, can only say that she “brought a level of life knowledge and common sense” rather than actual qualifications to the jobs Brown appointed her to. But it’s a sexist insinuation to insist these facts are rather unflattering to Kamala!
And this is just what The New York Times is admitting. In actuality, the details are far worse than the Times is letting on. Peter Schweizer, an investigative journalist who has worked with The New York Times in the past, details quite a bit on the corrupt nature of the Harris/Brown relationship in his book, Profiles in Corruption, which has been out for four and a half years. And the facts as he lays them out are damning.
Brown, who was repeatedly investigated by the FBI for corruption, was far more involved in Harris’ career ascent than appointing her to two board positions. He was a kingmaker in California, and he was heavily involved in helping Harris get elected as San Francisco district attorney. Brown didn’t do this entirely out of the goodness of his heart. Harris was working for the previous district attorney, Terence Hallinan, and quit when she got passed over for the No. 2 position in the DA’s office.
Hallinan found himself as the subject of criticism from other city officials, but others suggested the controversy was manufactured. “This whole thing is about Kamala Harris,” a source close to Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Cross one of Willie’s friends and there will be hell to pay.” Eventually, Harris ran for DA with Brown’s powerful backing — a former Brown aide managed her campaign, and Brown played a key role in her fundraising, which was incredibly successful. After starting the race polling a distant third, she won the election.
Once in office, Harris then dropped or pled out corruption charges against friends of Willie Brown that Hallinan had been pursuing. There were a number of Brown’s friends let off the hook, but most notably this included a sweetheart plea deal for a notorious city contractor caught defrauding the city by using inferior recycled concrete in sensitive projects such as parking garages and the Bay Bridge. This compromised the structural integrity of those projects and endangered lives. But Harris dropped all the fraud charges and accepted a guilty plea on a single count involving an environmental violation.
“Harris’ office had no explanation for why it dropped the concrete case,” reported the Chronicle. A better explanation is that the contractor in question was generous with campaign donations and had previously been popped for making an illegal $2,000 donation to, yup, Willie Brown.
Anyway, there’s a lot more alarming reporting in Schweizer’s book that’s worth revisiting, and it’s not a stretch to say Kamala Harris has engaged in outright corruption in her career. Suffice to say, when The New York Times takes Kamala Harris at her word that her relationship with Willie Brown was not “improper,” they’re erasing the functional difference between lying and profound ignorance. And when she’s credulously quoted saying, “I do not owe him a thing,” it’s journalistic malpractice to believe her.
To say that Kamala Harris had an affair with a man more than twice her age, leveraged his fundraising prowess and connections to launch her political career, and once in office did his corrupt bidding isn’t sexist. It’s well-grounded in fact.
But facts aren’t something The New York Times is much interested in. Kamala Harris’ late entry into the presidential race means they don’t have much time to use what’s left of their institutional clout to try to dishonestly sway a presidential race.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Below is my column in USA Today on why the opponents of President Joe Biden should make free speech the focus of this election. With the Supreme Court taking an off ramp in Murthy v. Missouri on Internet censorship, the free speech community is left, for now, with the political process to protect free speech. It is a potentially unifying issue for many Americans who are alarmed by the current anti-free speech movement. I have previously written that the Biden Administration has chilling analogies to the Adams Administration in the weaponization of the legal system and the crackdown on free speech. What should most concern Biden is the possibility of another aspect of history repeating itself: a defeat like the one in 1800.
The 2024 election is looking strikingly similar to the election of 1800 and, if so, it does not bode well for Biden. In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” released last week, I discuss our long struggle with free speech as a nation. It is an unvarnished history with powerful stories of our heroes and villains in the struggle to define what Justice Louis Brandeis called our “indispensable right.”
One of the greatest villains in that history was President John Adams, who used the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest his political opponents – including journalists, members of Congress and others. Many of those prosecuted by the Adams administration were Jeffersonians. In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson ran on the issue and defeated Adams.
Government efforts to limit free speech are Orwellian
We are now seeing what is arguably the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in our history. President Joe Biden is, in my view, the most anti-free speech president since Adams. Under his administration, we have seen a massive censorship system funded and directed by the government.A federal judge described the system as “Orwellian” in its scope and impact.
Biden has repeatedly called for greater censorship and accused social media companies of “killing people” by not silencing more dissenting voices. Other Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have pushed for restrictions on “unacceptable” speech. The Biden administration seeks to censor even true statements as disinformation.
For example, I testified before Congress last year on how Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
The left has picked up the cudgels of censorship and blacklisting once used against them. During the McCarthy period, liberals were called “communist sympathizers.” Now, conservative justices are called“insurrectionist sympathizers.”
Candidates should call out Biden on censorship
In this election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, Donald Trump and Cornel West should talk about the threats against free speech at every debate and stump speech. They will have to overcome a news media that has been complicit in the attacks on free speech, but these candidates can break through by raising it as a key issue dividing Biden from the rest of the field.
So far, the anti-free speech movement has flourished largely in the echo chambers of academia and the media. It is time for the public to render its judgment.
As discussed in my book, we are hardwired for free speech. It is in our DNA. Despite these periods of crackdowns on free speech, we have always rejected those who wanted to regulate the views of others. Jefferson called the Federalists “the reign of the witches.” (Ironically, Jefferson would himself prosecute critics, though not to the same extent as Adams).
Attacks on free speech have returned with a vengeance before another presidential election. After fighting in the courts and in the public to expand censorship, Biden should now have to defend it with the voters. Let’s have at it, as we did in 1800.
Free speech is again on the ballot. It is time for the public to decide.
President Joe Biden announced an executive order (EO) Tuesday that awards amnesty to illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens. And while he dubbed his overreach as keeping “families together,” it is nothing more than another step in Democrats’ plan to expand their future electorate.
The EO makes it easier for illegal immigrants who married U.S. citizens — and their children — to apply for lawful permanent residence status without leaving the country, and after that, U.S. citizenship. An approximate 500,000 illegal immigrants who married a U.S. citizen will benefit from this order along with 50,000 children, according to the White House.
Without providing any explanation as to how, Biden claims this will “strengthen” the U.S. economy. Notably, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows foreign-born workers gained 637,000 jobs year-over-year while native-born workers lost roughly 299,000. The BLS acknowledges foreign-born workers likely include illegal immigrants. As economist E.J. Antoni recently explained to The Federalist, the drain illegal migrants place on the economy offsets their production value.
By federal law, “non-citizens, including permanent legal residents,” are not allowed to “vote in federal, state, and most local elections,” according to USA.gov. But lawful permanent residents are “eligible to become a U.S. citizen after five years of becoming a lawful permanent resident, or three years if you are married to a U.S. citizen,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Unless there are specific carveouts in Biden’s executive order prohibiting individuals who came into this country illegally before receiving amnesty from registering to vote, then Biden just gifted Democrats with hundreds of thousands of potential future voters.
Former President Donald Trump warned that under Biden’s election-year order, “a deluge of illegals will be given immediate green cards and put on the fast track to rapid citizenship so they can vote.”
“Couple this with [Biden’s] previous voter registration EO and it is clear that Biden is attempting to win the upcoming election, not by winning over legitimate American voters, but by attempting to legitimize illegal immigrants,” said Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen. “He won’t stop with this EO. He will keep attempting to dilute the power of the vote of legal Americans.”
Of course, Biden and Democrats, as my colleague Shawn Fleetwood explained, “want Americans to believe they aren’t interested in handing out U.S. citizenship and voting rights to foreign nationals like it’s candy on Halloween.” Yet their actions, including this EO, suggest otherwise.
In fact, Biden’s EO sends the same message that a trio of Democratic witnesses sent during a Senate Judiciary Hearing in March. Not a single Democrat witness could resolutely say they believe only citizens should be able to vote in a federal election. And it’s the same message being sent by Democrats nationwide who oppose legislation to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections. As of right now, anyone registering to vote in federal elections must simply check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. Individuals — legal or not — can simply lie on their registration forms. In other words, our elections hinge on the honor system. It’s a loophole Republicans are working to close via the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would amend current law to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Democrats have insisted the SAVE Act is unreasonable and unnecessary since, according to federal law, it’s illegal to vote in an election if you’re not a U.S. citizen. It’s also illegal to bum-rush border agents and break into the country.
Only one state, Arizona, requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in state elections. As a result of the federal government’s attempt to weaken Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship law, individuals who cannot prove their citizenship can register as federal-only voters.
During the 2020 election in Arizona, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, according to AZ Free News. Biden won that state by 10,457 votes.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
FIRST ON FOX: Hunter Biden informed his business associates in late 2013 that a top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader allegedly asked him to travel to China to talk about future “business opportunities,” according to an email obtained and verified by Fox News Digital.
In December 2013, Biden accompanied his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, on a six-day trip around Asia that included China, South Korea and Japan. While in Beijing, Biden introduced his father to one of his Chinese business associates, who was accompanied by another associate, in the lobby of the hotel they were staying in.
During the China leg of the trip, Biden attended multiple events with his dad, including a lunch that featured some of the most powerful CCP leaders in China. On Dec. 5, Jonathan Li, the business associate who Vice President Biden was introduced to, emailed Biden asking him how his China trip was going, prompting Biden to email later that day that everything “went very well.”
“Do you know former Governor of Hong Kong- C.H. Troung (sp?),” Hunter asked. “He wants me to come to HK to visit to discuss business opportunities. He sat next to Dad at lunch w/ Premiere and implied we knew each other- but I don’t remember him.”
Tung Chee-hwa, vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. (YouTube/Screenshot)
“Very good, I can go with you to find out what he can do for us,” Li said to Hunter.
“Troung” refers to C.H. Tung, a former governor of Hong Kong and billionaire who served as the vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) between 2005 and 2023, a former business associate of Biden confirmed to Fox News Digital. The CPPCC is the “key mechanism for multi-party cooperation and political consultation” under the leadership of the CCP, according to the CPPCC website.
In December 2013, Hunter Biden asked his business associates whether they knew C.H. Tung, or Tung Chee-hwa, a former governor of Hong Kong and billionaire who served as the vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. (Fox News)
Fox News Digital could not confirm whether Biden took Tung up on his alleged offer to visit Hong Kong to discuss “business opportunities.”
Biden’s email about Tung would not be the last time that his name was mentioned in his emails. In July 2014, James Bulger, who goes by “Jimmy,” and served as the chairman of Boston-based Thornton Group LLC — a firm that joined forces with Hunter’s now-defunct Rosemont Seneca to launch its joint-venture with Chinese investment firm Bohai Capital to create BHR Partners— emailed Biden about introducing their Chinese business associates to Tung.
In July 2014, Hunter Biden said he would be “happy” to help introduce BHR CEO Jonathan Li and BHR committee person Andy Lu to “Mr. Tung,” who refers to Tung Chee-hwa, the vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference at the time. (Fox News)
In the July 2014 email, Bulger asked Biden to introduce Li and Andy Lu, who was a BHR committee member, to “Mr. Tung” to discuss “BHR investment targets” and “fundraising,” alleging Biden sat next to Tung at a 2013 dinner welcoming Vice President Biden to Beijing, according to previous Fox News Digital reporting.
“It is my understanding that during the trip to Beijing that you made with your father, President Xi hosted a welcome dinner,” Bulger wrote. “[A]t that dinner, you were seated right next to Mr Tung, therefore J and Andy believe it would be very helpful if you could please send a brief email to Mr Tung laying out that you are a partner and Board Member of BHR and that You would be grateful to Mr Tung if he could meet your local partners to discuss the Fund.”
Corporate media organizations spent years dismissing negative information pertaining to Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, right. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)
“Please let me know if you can introduce these two to Mr Tung by email it is very important to our BHR initiative [sic] at this moment,” Bulger stressed.
Biden responded that he was “happy” to fulfill the request but said he could not recall the names of the gentlemen who sat next to him at the dinner.
“Happy to do this,” he wrote, “but I have no email address for Mr. Tung and he very well may have sat next to me, but I don’t recall the two gentlemen’s names to my left and right. Regardless, I would suggest the team draft an email in Mandarin and English for my approval ASAP.”
“Let me reach out to Lin and J will revert ASAP,” Bulger replied later that day.
Multiple inquiries from Fox News Digital to Biden’s lawyer, Bulger, Li, Lu and Tung previously went unreturned about whether Biden ended up introducing Tung to his associates.
In addition to the 2013 dinner in Beijing, Tung was on the “expected attendees” guest list for at least two state dinners at the White House during the Obama-Biden administration. Tung’s bio on the Obama administration archives website for the January 2011 dinner says he was “Vice Chairman, CPPCC, former Hong Kong Chief Executive.”
In another press release for the September 2015 state dinner, Tung’s bio lists him as “Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, shakes hands with then-Vice President Joe Biden inside the Great Hall of the People on Dec. 4, 2013 in Beijing. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
According to a 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government agency, the CPPCC is a “central part” of China’s United Front system, which works to “co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
According to a 2021 report by The Diplomat, the CPPCC is “designed to liaise with non-Communist Party members – and ultimately see them work with the CCP to advance its interests.” While serving as vice chairman of the CPPCC, Tung also founded the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) in 2008.
Tung has many powerful contacts in Washington, D.C., including President Biden’s top climate diplomat, John Podesta. Fox News Digital previously reported that Podesta referred to Tung as his “friend” and took several phone calls from him between 2015 and 2016 while serving as the chairman for Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign.
In May 2013, Tung and Podesta spoke at a luncheon hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which included Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai.
“For the last four years though, Center for American Progress and China-U.S. Exchange Foundation have co-hosted a US.-China track II dialogue and we continue to host these dialogues on an annual basis,” Podesta said. “I have the highest regard for C.H. Tung’s tireless efforts to bring our two nations closer together. He is always looking ahead to anticipate emerging challenges in the U.S.-China relations and to figure out what he can do to make those challenges more manageable.”
John Podesta, founder and director of the Center for American Progress, speaks at The Center for American Progress CAP 2019 Ideas Conference in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 2019. (Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Fox News Digital also previously reported on Tung being instrumental in CUSEF’s targeting of Historically Black Colleges and Universities by visiting the office of a Black public relations consultant’s office across the street from the White House in 2009 to learn more about Black Americans.
“In 2009, the former chief executive of Hong Kong visited me in my office with his staff from the China-United States Exchange Foundation, and they wanted to know how we got a Black president,” Julia Wilson told the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff students during a 2017 presentation. “They were saying, ‘We don’t know anything about Black people. So can you write us a white paper and share it with us. How did Black people get enough power to vote a Black man into office?’ So they really needed an overview of our history. Who are we? Who are African Americans?”
Tung’s organization would go on to pay out over $1M to Wilson’s firm, Wilson Global Communications, between 2017 and December 2023.
Biden’s attorney, Li, and the White House did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
Cameron Cawthorne is a politics editor for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Cameron.Cawthorne@Fox.com and on Twitter: @cam_cawthorne
Below is my column in the New York Post on the meltdown of Michael Cohen on the stand in the Manhattan trial of former President Donald Trump. In a trial careening out of control, Judge Juan Merchan seemed to be furiously working to just get the matter to the jury as fast as possible. Judge Merchan seems in open denial of the legal farce playing out in his courtroom. He is only the latest person pulled into the vortex of the swirling corruption around Michael Cohen.
Here is the column:
The completion of the testimony of Michael Cohen left the prosecution of Donald Trump, like its star witness, in tatters. In the final day of cross-examination, Cohen admitted to committing larceny in stealing tens of thousands of dollars from his client. Even more notably, he admitted to the larceny on the stand — after the statute of limitations had passed. There will be no dead felony zapped back into life against Cohen, as it was for Trump. Cohen clearly has found a home for his unique skill as a convicted, disbarred serial perjurer.
It was not the first time that prosecutors looked the other way as Cohen admitted to major criminal conduct: In a prior hearing, Cohen admitted under oath that he lied in a previous case where he pleaded guilty to lying. If that is a bit confusing, it was just another day in the life of Michael Cohen, who appears only willing to tell the truth if he has no other alternative. The result is truly otherworldly. You have a disbarred lawyer not only casually discussing lies and uncharged crimes, but prosecutors who proceeded to get him to remind the jury that he is not facing any further criminal charges.
If any one of those jurors had stolen tens of thousands of dollars, they would be given a fast trip to the hoosegow. Yet Cohen then matter-of-factly said he plans to run for Congress due to his “name recognition” — the ultimate proof that it does not matter whether you are famous or infamous, so long as they spell your name right.
As a legislator, Cohen would have the unique ability to say he will not be corrupted by Congress — because he came to Congress corrupted. While most members wait to take office to commit felonies, Rep. Cohen would show up with a self-affirming criminal record. He could then take one of the few oaths that he has not previously violated as the Honorable Rep. Michael Cohen.
Prior witnesses testified that Trump’s payments to Cohen were designated as “legal expenses” not by Trump but by his accounting staff. Moreover, Cohen admitted that he worked for Trump for years in his murky capacity as a fixer. References to payments as a retainer were approved by Allen Weisselberg, a retired executive with the Trump Organization. The “legal expense” label was a natural characterization for a lawyer who was paid monthly and was on-call as Trump’s personal counsel.
In any other district, this case would never have been allowed in trial. It certainly now should be facing a directed verdict by the court. Indeed, with any other defendant, a New York jury would be giving a Bronx cheer in derision. Even CNN hosts and experts have admitted that this case would never have been brought against another defendant or in another district. That is what Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is counting on.
The biggest problem facing the defense is not the evidence, but the judge: Judge Juan Merchan seems to be channeling George Patton’s warning, “May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won’t.”
Merchan has not given any indication that he is seriously considering a directed verdict, which he should clearly grant before this goes to the jury. Merchan’s rulings have largely favored the prosecution, including some rulings that left some of us mystified. Judge Merchan continues to allow the jury to hear references to campaign-finance violations that do not exist.
After gutting any use of a legal expert to testify on the absence of any such violations, the judge allowed the jury to hear Michael Cohen state that the payments to Stormy Daniels were clearly campaign violations. All that Merchan would offer is a weak instruction telling jurors not to take such statements as proof of a violation.
The alleged campaign-finance violations allowed Cohen to try to implicate Trump. However, it is doubtful that Trump could have been convicted on such a charge in any other venue.
It is precisely what the Justice Department tried and failed to do with John Edwards, a Democratic candidate. After that unmitigated failure, the Justice Department dropped this theory of hush money as a campaign contribution. Indeed, after reviewing the Trump payments, not only did the Justice Department decline any charges but the Federal Election Commission did not even seek a civil fine.
On Monday, Judge Merchan’s orders became even more inexplicable when Cohen’s former attorney Robert Costello took the stand. Merchan immediately started to sustain a flurry of prosecutors’ objections as Costello basically accused Cohen of multiple acts of perjury. At one point, Costello — one of the most experienced lawyers in New York and a former prosecutor — exclaimed that one of the judge’s rulings was “ridiculous.” The judge chastised Costello and even challenged him: “Are you staring me down?”
In fact, it was hard not to stare. What is happening in the courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan is anything but ordinary.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
As South Carolina law enforcement investigates allegations a state agency is handing out voter registration forms to foreign nationals, an agency official tells The Federalist that federal law has tied the state’s hands.
Section 7 requires each state to designate voter registration agencies, including all state offices providing public assistance, unemployment compensation, or disability services; state or local government offices; federal and nongovernmental offices; and armed forces recruitment offices.
“SCDHHS does not believe the state Medicaid agency should have a role in voter registration. However, absent the legal authority to make this change, SCDHHS remains required by federal law to provide voter registration application forms with each Medicaid application,” Leieritz said in a statement Monday to The Federalist.
‘That’s Insane’
South Carolina state Rep. Adam Morgan has been pushing for answers after a refugee reported receiving a packet of information, including voter registration forms, at the Health and Human Services office. Morgan did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment, but he did speak about the issue last week on FrankSpeech.
“The refugee was actually confused. They were like, ‘Am I supposed to fill this out?’ They asked a relative, and the relative is a citizen who said, ‘No, you can’t fill this out. You’re not a citizen.’ [The refugee] said, ‘Why are they giving this out to noncitizens?’ And we were, like, “Exactly! That’s insane,” Morgan told The Absolute Truth with Emerald Robinson.
Why is the SC Medicaid office insisting on giving voter registration forms to non-citizens?
Listen to what SC Freedom Caucus Chairman @RepAdamMorgan found out is going on even in his Republican-lead state.
— The Absolute Truth with @EmeraldRobinson (@AbsoluteWithE) April 30, 2024
Morgan said the refugee mailed the forms back to the Medicaid office advising that the government agency shouldn’t be giving voter registration information to people who are not eligible to vote. The office sent the refugee even more information in response, Morgan claims.
“It’s just infuriating that the government is actually sending these forms out and literally confusing people who may not be trying to do wrong, or opening the door wide open for somebody to do wrong and get people who are not citizens to vote in the election,” said the president of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus and a Republican candidate for a U.S. House seat.
On, Wednesday, the Freedom Caucus sent Gov. Henry McMaster a letter expressing its “grave concern with this breach of election integrity.” They asked that the state inspector general’s office launch an immediate investigation and that the governor order state agencies to “cease and desist distributing voter registration and voter declination forms to non-citizens.”
McMaster, a Republican, quickly responded, saying he has asked the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division to immediately contact Morgan to “provide SLED with any and all evidence, documents and information that you possess in order to evaluate the authenticity of your allegation of illegalities.”
“SLED has received the Governor’s letter to Representative Adam Morgan and will review the allegations provided,” the Law Enforcement Division told The Federalist in an email Monday.
‘Overreaching Federal Requirements’
Leieritz, the spokesman for the state health department, said the agency is aware of reports circulating on social media about the refugee receiving voter registration forms. He said the department does not process or submit voter registration forms for Medicaid applicants or members. That is the domain of the South Carolina Election Commission.
“SCDHHS is investigating what has been reported on social media,” the spokesman said, adding that the agency believes the 30-year-old National Voter Registration Act needs to be amended “to repeal these overreaching federal requirements.”
“South Carolina’s citizens would be better served by a state Medicaid agency that is able to focus singularly on efficiently operating the state’s Healthy Connections Medicaid program,” Leieritz said.
Morgan and the Freedom Caucus are proposing adding a provision in the state budget prohibiting state money from funding the distribution of voter registration information to foreign nationals at South Carolina agencies.
“But isn’t it insane that we have to do that,” the lawmaker told Robinson. “It’s crazy to me that we are at a place in America where we have government employees and government agencies who are willing to actively give out voter registration forms to noncitizens. And if it’s happening in South Carolina, you’d better believe it’s happening all over especially the swing states.”
It is, via federal executive fiat.
‘Bidenbucks’
Beyond the NVRA, President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14019 commands federal agencies to do what some legal experts say the executive branch does not have the legal authority to do: expand voter registration and turnout — using White House “approved” third-party organizations connected to Democrats. The sweeping initiative has been billed “Bidenbucks,” since it uses federal dollars. Think of Executive Order 14019 as Zuckbucks on steroids, using your money.
On the swing state front, the Michigan Department of State earlier this year signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Small Business Administration “to promote civic engagement and voter registration in Michigan.” The agreement, according to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and SBA Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman, is a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” for the federal agency. It is expected to run through Jan. 1, 2036. Such constitutionally suspect “agreements” between the Biden administration and left-led state executive branches are part of Biden’s unprecedented executive order.
‘Non-issues’ Becoming ‘Major Issues’
The South Carolina State Election Commission (SEC) last week said it had received several questions and concerns about foreign nationals registering to vote in defiance of basic election integrity protections.
“The SEC is actively auditing voter data through the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program database to ensure that only U.S. citizens are included on the active list of registered voters. Regardless of the method of registration, no voter may be registered in South Carolina without signing an oath swearing that they are a citizen of the United States,” the agency states on its website. “The auditing process ensures that any bad actors are removed from voter rolls and held accountable through state and federal election law statutes.”
The elections regulator said it has not received any “specific information that non-U.S. citizens are fraudulently being registered to vote” in South Carolina.
“The SEC will not allow fraudulent voter registration to happen on our watch,” said Howie Knapp, executive director of the SEC. “Should we receive or discover information that non-U.S. citizens are being registered to vote in our state, we will immediately report to our law enforcement partners for investigation and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.”
South Carolina is looking to join a growing list of states passing resolutions for constitutional amendments barring foreign nationals, including illegal immigrants, from voting in local elections.
“Many said this was a non-issue. Then we discovered state agencies sending voter registration forms to non-citizens. These ‘non-issues’ keep turning out to be major issues,” Morgan recently tweeted on his X account.
🚨Constitutional Amendment passes prohibiting non-citizens from voting in elections at any level in SC.
Many said this was a non-issue. Then we discovered state agencies sending voter registration forms to non-citizens.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted federal prosecutors tampered with evidence in his criminal case alleging former President Donald Trump mishandled classified documents.
According to a Friday court filing, prosecutors said documents the FBI seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence are no longer in the same order in which they found them, and some are mislabeled and may even be misplaced. A government “filter team” that dealt with the boxes once the FBI took them “was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box,” the special counsel’s office wrote in the filing.
Later the filing says, of early inventories and scanned records of the seized document boxes, “Because these inventories and scans were created close in time to the seizure of the documents, they are the best evidence available of the order the documents were in when seized. That said, there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” A footnote on this last sentence says: “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.”
The filing also suggests the Department of Justice and FBI may have lost and mislabeled some of the documents. When the agencies first took the documents at Mar-a-Lago, government employees used many blank sheets of paper as substitutes and cover papers for what they decided might be classified documents.
After the FBI brought the document boxes to Washington DC, federal employees and contractors began replacing these “handwritten sheets” with proper classified document covers. At that point, the filing says, “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.” This indicates the special counsel’s office disclosed it isn’t sure whether some it lost or mislabeled some of the allegedly classified documents it seized in the Trump raid.
In response, Trump’s defense team filed a motion to dismiss the case over prosecutorial misconduct.
Setting aside the FBI high-tailed it out of southern FLA to conduct the investigation within the confines of the corrupt Washington FBI field office, Smith admits DOJ cannot be sure every place holder corresponds with the correct document. pic.twitter.com/Fxy8MZp2qs
Smith charged Trump last June with 37 criminal counts related to the former president’s handling of classified documents. In July, Smith added three more counts against Trump as Democrats strategize to retain the presidency by imprisoning their chief political opponent in an unprecedented lawfare campaign. New evidence shows the Democrat White House worked closely with the DOJ and National Archives and Records Administration in crafting the documents case against Trump.
The classified documents case is Trump’s largest election-year court battle, as nearly half of the 88 total charges against him currently are related to the records. Federal prosecutors confiscated 33 boxes of documents from the hostile raid on Trump’s home in August 2022, according to Fox News. The Department of Justice has spent more than $23 million in taxpayer dollars for Smith to investigate Trump.
In April, Federalist Elections Correspondent Brianna Lyman outlined three major revelations to emerge from the classified documents case to date, including deep state pressure to move forward with Trump’s prosecution and White House involvement.
“President Biden also retained classified documents after leaving the vice presidency,” Lyman reported. “Yet he was not charged because prosecutors say they believed he would ‘present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’”
The Department of Energy allegedly revoked the former president’s security clearance retroactively once Trump was indicted.
In February, journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported the FBI raid may have been orchestrated to cover up the intelligence state’s role in the Russia hoax. The article posted on Shellenberger’s news website, Public, outlined how intelligence officials fretted over the presence of a classified “binder” in Trump’s possession that former CIA Director Gina Haspel was careful to protect for years.
“Transgressions [the feds might have wanted to cover up] range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian ‘influence activities,’” Public reported.
The binder was “Trump’s insurance policy,” according to an unnamed source cited as “knowledgeable about the case.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
After being strung up on charges by President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), a 71-year-old great-grandmother may be thrown in jail because she walked around the Capitol for a few minutes on Jan. 6, 2021. Rebecca Lavrenz was convicted on four counts Thursday after just three days of jury deliberation for entering the Capitol on J6. Lavrenz entered the building through an open door around 2:43 p.m., according to the official statement of facts.
Lavrenz told The American Spectator‘s Jack Cashill that she “felt that if those doors [on the east side of the building] opened I was supposed to go through.” Lavrenz exited the Capitol around 2:53 p.m., just 10 minutes after entering, having briefly spoken to at least one Capitol Police Officer before leaving, according to the statement of facts.
Two FBI agents showed up on April 19, 2021, to Lavrenz’s home in Colorado. Lavrenz told the agents she was in the middle of baking a cake for her son and asked if they could return at a different time, according to The American Spectator. The agents returned one week later for a “consensual interview,” according to the statement of facts.
After months of investigation, agents reportedly told Lavrenz she should be grateful the weaponized agency would only charge the self-described “praying great-grandmother” with four misdemeanor charges for entering a building her tax dollars pay for.
“Glad?” Lavrenz reportedly said. “I shouldn’t be charged with anything.”
Lavrenz was charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a capitol; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol, according to the criminal complaint. According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, Lavrenz could face up to a year in prison and fines of over $200,000, not including legal fees.
“My country is treating me like a criminal because I believe that they stole my rightful president,” Lavrenz said in an emotional video posted to social media. “And just standing up for my country makes me a criminal and it’s not right, it feels so weird to be here.”
JUST IN: 'Praying grandma' Rebecca Lavrenz has reportedly been found guilty by a DC jury after she briefly entered the Capitol on J6.
Glad to see our 'justice system' going after some "hard-hitting criminals."
Stewart Parks, who was sentenced to eight months in prison after being convicted of the same charges as Lavrenz along with theft of government property after he picked up a metal detector wand and walked around with it for a period of time, said on “The Vicki McKenna Show” that the Biden administration is trying to send a message that the so-called wrong kind of political protests won’t be tolerated.
“If you think about it, my house was raided and I was arrested on June 2, 2021, so I’ve been on a form of probation since that day,” Parks said. “I could have had four or five years if they had done it consecutively. These punishments are just way too harsh for a crime that wasn’t committed.”
The left has tried to portray Jan. 6 as a “violent insurrection” despite video footage and witness testimony contradicting the narrative. Tapes from the Capitol on Jan. 6 released by Speaker Mike Johnson after being withheld by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi show dozens of peaceful demonstrators walking through the Capitol as officers escort them or stand by, seemingly unconcerned.
Jan 6 defendants have long argued that the initial entrants were peaceably escorted into the building by Capitol Police, and therefore had no reasonable expectation that their conduct was unlawful
A left-leaning initiative to turn out the youth vote suggested that the Federal Work-Study Program pay for college students to engage in election-related work, something the Biden administration later did. Pictured: Vice President Kamala Harris meets Feb. 27 with voting activists in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Documents reveal an organization backed by Obama White House alumni such as Valerie Jarrett and bankrolled by liberal dark money donors advocated using tax dollars to pay college students to get out the vote in the 2024 election, doing so before the Biden administration announced the same policy.
The Daily Signal obtained the documents through a public records request in which it sought documents from the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to President Joe Biden’s controversial executive order to promote voting.
In January, an activist with ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a project of the liberal group Civic Nation, contacted officials with the state of Wisconsin and its capital city, Madison, about a need to allow money from the Federal Work-Study Program to pay for students to engage in election-related work. By late February, the U.S. Department of Education and Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the Biden administration was doing exactly that.
A new Wall Street Journal poll of voters in battleground states found former President Donald Trump tied with Biden in a two-way race in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by only about 20,000 votes of over 3.2 million cast.
In a Jan. 18 email, Ryan Drysdale, director of impact and state networks for the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, sent an email to Bonnie Chang, voter outreach coordinator in the Madison city clerk’s office, about U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s plans to revise how taxpayer money may be used.
“Lastly, as you may be aware, the secretary has been working on clarification about Federal Work-Study being eligible for supporting student workers with local election officials and feels confident another letter will come from the WH/Dept of Ed with guidelines,” Drysdale wrote to Chang, referring to the White House and the Department of Education.
The Federal Work-Study Program, funded by the Department of Education, provides financial aid to eligible undergraduate and graduate students at colleges and universities. The youth vote helped stop an anticipated “red wave” for Republican candidates in 2022. It once was perceived as a core Democrat constituency, which is one reason the Biden administration has tried repeatedly to “forgive” student loan debt.
ALL IN asserted that the youth vote was the deciding factor in 2022 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The initiative announced that 394 colleges and universities across 44 states and the District of Columbia were part of its first program recognizing “Most Engaged Campuses for College Student Voting.”
“I was invited to join a meeting with the secretary, the UW-Superior campus team and surrounding local election officials who are exploring both internship and FWS opportunities,” Drysdale wrote to Madison’s Chang, referring to Cardona, the University of Wisconsin in Superior, Wisconsin, and the Federal Work-Study Program.
“There was a lot of excitement even without the FWS component,” he wrote. “They hope to use UWS [University of Wisconsin-Superior] as a case study for other [Wisconsin] institutions and local election officials to learn from. Happy to share more on a quick call if that would be helpful. There’s a big interest from partners and funders about FWS and these types of opportunities so we’ll be following these developments in WI.”
On Jan. 19, Chang forwarded Drysdale’s email about the Federal Work-Study Program, or FWS, to Madison City Attorney Michael Haas. She noted that University of Wisconsin-Madison officials said that “it’s in the federal language that FWS students are not able to work at the polls on Election Day nor engage in GOTV/voter engagement spaces.” GOTV is a reference to “get out the vote.”
That same day, Haas wrote to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe.
“If I understand correctly, there is a request to change the FWS rules regarding work as election inspectors, but I don’t think that has happened yet,” Haas said of Federal Work-Study rules. “In any event, the secretary of state is trying to help make it happen.”
The Wisconsin Secretary of State’s Office, which oversees elections in the state, didn’t reply to inquiries from The Daily Signal by publication time.
Amanda Hollowell, When We All Vote’s national organizing director, was among activists who met Feb. 27 at a White House event with the vice president to talk about turning out voters.
“We have been doing work to promote voter participation for students. And, for example, we have—under the Federal Work-Study Program—[we] now allow students to get paid, through federal work-study, to register people and to be nonpartisan poll workers,” Harris told the gathering at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“As we know, this is important for a number of reasons,” she said. “One, to engage our young leaders in this process and activate them in terms of their ability to—to strengthen our communities. But also, this is the work that we need to do, knowing that so many poll workers have left this work for a variety of reasons that we will also discuss.”
The city of Madison played no role in pushing for a clarification of U.S. Education Department policy on allowing the program to pay students for election work, the city attorney told The Daily Signal.
“City of Madison officials did not lobby the Biden administration to change FWS rules. We have not been involved in that issue except for receiving the email from Ryan Drysdale so I do not [know] details about the FWS regulations or how they changed as they do not affect the city’s operations,” Haas said. “The city of Madison hires a number of UW-Madison students as poll workers and pays them in the same way as other poll workers with city funds.”
The Daily Signal sought comment from ALL IN’s Drysdale and the press contact for Civic Nation. Neither responded. The Education Department referred The Daily Signal to a “Dear Colleague letter” to college administrators, dated Feb. 26, from Nasser H. Paydar, assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education.
In part, the letter says: “The department is today clarifying that FWS funds may be used for employment by a federal, state, local, or tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group.”
The documents released to The Daily Signal by the Wisconsin Elections Commission also showed consultation between state officials and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency within the Commerce Department. NIST was putting together its strategic plan to comply with Biden’s executive order on getting out the vote, which it later made public.
The institute is one of at least four federal agencies to make such a strategic plan public. The Justice Department, however, has claimed presidential privilege to prevent public release of its own plan for complying with Biden’s order.
U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell attends a press conference in Washington, D.C., on March 20, 2024. The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday left interest rates unchanged at a 22-year high of 5.25% to 5.5% as recent consumer data indicates continued inflation pressures. (Photo: Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty Images)
In 1913, Woodrow Wilson and his progressives promised that the Federal Reserve would avert both depressions and inflation, while preventing the wealthy from controlling America’s financial markets at the expense of the poor.
More than a century later, it’s clear that was all a lie, and the Fed has helped create a permanent American underclass.
The Fed was designed to transfer wealth from the American people to the government, mostly through the hidden tax of inflation. But this process has prevented countless American families from being able to save and get ahead, because their savings are constantly losing value.
For two decades, the Fed kept interest rates artificially low to help finance massive government spending. When that spending reached unprecedented heights in 2020, the Fed intervened more drastically than ever, creating trillions of dollars and devaluing the currency.
Thus began an unparalleled transfer of wealth that continues to this day, and which has driven a wedge between different groups of Americans.
The painful inflation of the last three years has increased prices throughout the economy, distorting the signals that prices are supposed to convey to buyers and sellers. For example, the cost to own a median-price home today has doubled since January 2021, but it’s still the same house.
This phenomenon represents the monetization of housing, where a dwelling becomes a much better store of value than the currency, even if the real value of the house hasn’t improved.
Likewise, Americans’ earnings have increased substantially over the last three years, but not in the most meaningful sense — that is, what they can buy. Instead, the opposite has happened, and today’s larger incomes buy less.
What would have been a decent salary in 2019 is no longer enough to even get by in many places, and it’s certainly not enough to ever fulfill the American dream of homeownership.
A family earning the median household income can afford a median-price home in only a handful of major metropolitan areas in the entire country. In many cities, the cost to own a median price home exceeds the take-home pay from the median household income. Even if you didn’t spend a dime on other necessities such as food, you still wouldn’t have enough for your mortgage payment.
It’s truly a condemnation of the status quo when even those with seemingly high incomes cannot afford a typical house.
Worse, as prices continue marching upward, people can save less, making it harder to accrue a sufficient down payment. Even by the time a family reaches their goal, home prices have increased again, and they’re back on the hamster wheel, trying to save for an even larger down payment.
Meanwhile, inflation is steadily, though silently, taxing away the real value of the family’s savings as they sit in the bank.
This has left countless Americans as perpetual renters, with almost an entire generation of young people giving up on having the standard of living that their parents had. An artificial chasm has been constructed between those who already own capital, like housing, and the remaining Americans who can only borrow such assets, as they do by renting.
Similarly, many of those struggling to afford sharply increased rents are going deeply into debt to keep a roof over their head while those who locked in a mortgage with a fixed interest rate before both home prices and interest rates exploded have shielded themselves from one of the largest drivers behind the cost-of-living increases of the last three years.
Many homeowners could not afford to buy their same home today. The monthly mortgage payment on a median-price home has doubled since January 2021. Thus, even if two families have identical incomes, the one that bought a home three years ago has a nearly insurmountable advantage over the other family trying to do so today.
The Fed‘s monetary manipulations have financed trillions of dollars in federal budget deficits, but they’ve also created a permanent American underclass, something antithetical to the Founders’ vision for the country.
Class mobility is at the heart of the American dream, and the Fed has turned it into a nightmare.
After Joe Biden was declared mentally incompetent by the Special Prosecutor in the classified documents case, I asked myself a simple question: “Who is competent in this case?”
In other words, somebody had to do Biden’s dirty work, if Joey Demento wasn’t giving the orders.
Consider what happened to Trump satellites when Democrats wrongly targeted him for Russian collusion. Paul Manafort, George Pappadopoulos, General Mike Flynn and others were investigated and railroaded. But in the case of Joe Biden’s obvious crime of possessing classified materials as a Senator and VP, we have nobody being examined.
Further, Biden has definite ties to the Chinese, the Ukrainians, and many nefarious characters who benefitted from the closeness to the Bidens. Hunter Biden gave us all the evidence we need of this, as he left one laptop at a repair shop, and another may be in the hands of Russian pimps.
So, who was involved with Joe Biden’s criminal carelessness? I asked this question of the handling of the classified documents:
What Biden most often says he does not recall is who packed his documents or other personal items when he left the vice presidency in 2009 and in the aftermath. Could it have been Hunter’s Chinese assistant? Biden admits that chain of custody for the classified materials is unknown to him. He doesn’t recall reading them, then removing them from wherever he got them.
“My problem was I never knew where any of the documents or boxes were specifically coming from or who packed them,” Biden said, telling Hur he relied on staff to do that instead.
I suggest the congressional committee find out who had access to these documents. Who did pack them? Apparently, I’m not the only one who wondered this. Nick Arama of Red State wrote:
One of the things that has been most shameful about Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal was how he said he didn’t have any idea how the docs got all over his house and in his offices. He has tried to blame his staff, including during his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur’s team.
That’s just ridiculous as an excuse — the documents were all over his house and his offices, even his garage. Not to mention that he had material from when he was in the Senate. So this has been going on for decades. Plus, he had notes with some of the classified documents, and he told his ghostwriter about the classified documents in 2017. The common element there is Joe Biden. Not some staffer. But it’s typical Joe Biden who never wants to take responsibility for anything he does wrong and there were all kinds of problems with his actions here.
It turns out that within 24 hours of the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report, Joe Biden promoted two of the aides whose names came up in regard to the classified documents. What a coincidence.
Two aides who helped in the movement and potential cover-up of this crime were promoted?
Aramas continues,
According to the House Oversight Committee, longtime Biden aide and director of Oval Office operations Annie Tomasini visited the Penn Biden Center “to take inventory of President Biden’s documents and materials” in March 2021. Classified documents were found there in Biden’s officer in November 2022.
Then, aide Kathy Chung told Congress that Richard Ruffner, another staffer, was involved, along with other people, in the transportation of the undiscovered classified materials from the General Services Administration facility.
Tomasini was promoted to deputy White House Chief of Staff on Feb. 8, and Richard Ruffner was promoted into Tomasini’s old job as director of Oval Office operations.
The plot thickens
The House Oversight Committee has been trying to get Tomasini in for a transcribed interview since November, but the White House has failed to cooperate. That should say a lot right there. What doesn’t the White House want her to say? They don’t cooperate, and then, on top of that, Biden gives her a promotion?
“The Department of Justice has failed to deliver accountability for President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and now Biden aides involved in the scandal are getting promotions,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky) told The Post.
“We’ve requested to interview Annie Tomasini about President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents but the White House is blocking her testimony and instead has promoted her to a senior role. The American people expect consequences for mishandling of classified information, not rewards,” he continued.
When dealing with the corruption of the Biden White House, little surprise me anymore.
These people claim to want transparency, then continually do the opposite. One can only imagine what we would learn if Biden actually allowed true investigations into these things.
We might learn the truth. That Biden is mentally incapable of running his family, much less the country. We most certainly would learn that in his dementia Joe Biden assigned his crackhead son to run their criminal organization. And we would be able to track down every illicit dime they collected from the Chinese, Ukrainians, Romanians, and so on.
I suspect we might understand how the Chinese flew a spy balloon across America with no recourse. Or why they weren’t made to compensate America for release of Covid, and the resulting aftermath.
Many questions would be answered if we could get to the real truth. But too many Leftists get rich and powerful off the spreading of lies and protecting those who tell them.
Over the last 16 years, Google has interfered in American elections 41 times, according to a March report from watchdog group Media Research Center.
MRC Free Speech America researchers recently released a new report titled “41 Times Google Has Interfered in U.S. Elections Since 2008,” which revealed instances when the technology giant allegedly boosted left-leaning candidates and censored opponents. MRC founder and President Brent Bozell stated, “Google’s massive and deliberate efforts to interfere in U.S. elections for the past 16 years is unacceptable and the biggest threat to American democracy today.”
The watchdog group noted that Google’s “impact has surged dramatically,” claiming the company’s interference has continued to ramp up over the years.
“In every case, Google harmed the candidates — regardless of party — who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice,” the report’s executive summary read. “From the mouths of Google executives, the tech giant let slip what was never meant to be made public: That Google uses its ‘great strength and resources and reach’ to advance its leftist values.”
MRC alleged that Google helped then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) secure a win over then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) in the 2008 primary race by censoring blog writers who supported Clinton. The tech giant propelled Obama to victory again in 2012 against then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R).
“In 2016, Google pushed Clinton, using its algorithm to exclude potentially damaging autofill results while not doing the same for then-candidates Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders,” the report found.
The watchdog group also stated that Google censored former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) by disabling her Ads account. Google denied the claim, saying that its automated system detected unusual spending activity and that the issue was resolved within six hours, the New York Post reported.
MRC accused the tech company of suppressing media stories critical of President Joe Biden and blocking Republican fundraising emails.
“In 2022, Google buried most Republican campaign websites for the 12 competitive Senate races (10 of 12 did not make the top 6 search results and 7 did not even make the first page of search results). Also, 61 percent of the stories included on the Google News homepage linked to leftist news media outlets,” the report added.
So far this year, MRC discovered that Google has buried the search results for Biden’s top opponents, including Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
According to the watchdog organization, the tech giant is “making good on its 2016 promise never to let conservatives win again.”
MRC is encouraging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to open an investigation into Google based on the report’s findings. The organization claims the company violated the American public’s constitutional rights. The organization also called on citizens to stop using Google products and opt for other alternatives.
Google denies the claims made in MRC’s report.
“There is absolutely nothing new here — just a recycled list of baseless, inaccurate complaints that have been debunked by third parties and many that failed in the courts,” a company spokesperson told the Post.
“Politicians on the left have a long history of making similar claims, too,” the spokesperson continued. “We have a clear business incentive to keep everyone using our products, so we have no desire to make them biased or inaccurate and have safeguards in place to ensure this.”
“Numerous conservatives have been particularly successful in using our platforms to spread their message to a wide audience,” the Google representative added.
House Republicans heard explosive testimony from President Joe Biden’s family business partners Wednesday in a public hearing that confirmed the president’s personal involvement in global schemes to sell influence over American government.
Tony Bobulinski, a former family business partner turned whistleblower who told lawmakers President Biden was the “brand” sold to foreign governments, doubled down on accusations of corruption with sworn testimony in public.
“I want to be crystal clear: from my direct personal experience and what I have subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” Bobulinski told lawmakers. “His family’s foreign influence peddling operation — from China to Ukraine and elsewhere — sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.”
Lawmakers featured Bobulinski alongside Jason Galanis after closed-door depositions with the two witnesses. Devon Archer, another former business partner, and Hunter Biden also sat for closed-door depositions with House committees, but turned down congressional invites to testify in public.
His attorneys previously demanded a public hearing in exchange for Hunter Biden’s cooperation with congressional subpoenas. Then Biden attorney Abbe Lowell suddenly demanded lawmakers hold a public hearing to probe the business practices of his former client, Jared Kushner, potentially violating legal ethics rules. If House Republicans held a public hearing with Kushner, Lowell wrote in a letter last week, “Mr. Biden would consider an invitation for that event.”
House Republicans are probing whether to draw up articles of impeachment against President Biden for selling the use of his political positions to foreign oligarchs. House investigators have discovered more than 20 shell companies established by the Biden family to funnel tens of millions of dollars from corporate leaders from adversarial nations. Witnesses testified Wednesday that President Biden was at the center of the family’s efforts to rake in foreign profits.
🚨 🚨🚨
Witnesses CONFIRM Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling 👇 pic.twitter.com/gjlioRavAD
“The Bidens sell Joe Biden. That is their business,” said James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee at the beginning of the hearing on “Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office.”
"The Bidens don't sell a product or service or a set of skills. The Bidens sell Joe Biden. That is their business."
Testifying from prison, Galanis said the Bidens aimed to make “billions, not millions” from selling political favors to oligarchs in China and Russia. Galanis is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence for securities fraud, which Galanis told lawmakers last month also involved Archer and Hunter Biden.
Biden business associate Jason Galanis, from incarceration, testifies to Oversight Committee about Joe Biden's direct involvement in building an empire of "billions not millions" from work with a Russian oligarch and a Chinese Communist Party linked firm. pic.twitter.com/BBuVrpAxsm
Democrats spent Wednesday’s hearing attempting to obstruct the impeachment proceedings with repeated interruptions to insist Republicans have no proof of influence peddling claims they have “exonerated” the president. Their handpicked witness Lev Parnas, also a convicted criminal, even went so far as to claim he “found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine.”
House Oversight Committee hearing goes off the rails when Hunter Biden's former business partner Tony Bobulinski calls out Reps. Jamie Raskin and Dan Goldman for lying on behalf of the Biden Crime Family. pic.twitter.com/Xny4VTbhVc
“I found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine … The only information ever pushed on the Bidens in Ukraine has come from one source and one source only: Russia and Russian agents.”
On the contrary, House and Senate investigators have uncovered bank receipts, White House visitor logs, testimonies from Biden business partners, text messages, and other documents indicating the Biden family sold their patriarch’s name and position to foreign oligarchs including several in Ukraine. Yet Democrats pressed forward with a stunt campaign to delay, disrupt, and dismiss the hearing. When members heard about text messages about the Biden family business on Bobulinski’s cracked Blackberry phone, Democrats, led by Raskin, introduced a motion to subpoena the device.
Bobulinski previously offered to show the text messages to members who wanted to see them, so Jordan quickly countered with a motion to table. Comer agreed but was forced to wait for a clerk to record a formal vote before proceeding.
To Democrats’ dismay, members’ recorded votes tallied up in favor of tabling.
Bobulinski hearing grinds to a halt when Jamie Raskin threatens to subpoena for his Blackberry pic.twitter.com/wG7c2fCrm1
After the minutes-long delay, Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia asked Bobulinski whether he would turn over his phone to the committee.
“I’m willing to sit in a room with the chairman and the ranking member with my phone and their staff and we can go through each and every text message,” Bobulinski said.
New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez later asked Bobulinski whether he witnessed the president commit a crime, to which Bobulinski answered with an emphatic “Yes.”
“What crime?” Cortez pressed.
“Well, how much time do I have to go through?” Bobulinski answered.
AOC: "Did you witness the president [Joe Biden] commit a crime? "
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour.
Below is my column in Fox.com on the superseding indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), who faces new charges after the cooperation of a former associate. The new charges only magnified the striking similarities between the corruption scandals involving Menendez and Hunter Biden. The timing could not be more interesting given filings the same week by Hunter Biden claiming selective prosecution.
Here is the column:
Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., was in court this week for another superseding indictment brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Rather than the four original counts, he now faces 18 counts with his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, and alleged co-conspirators Wael Hana and Fred Daibes.
What is most notable is not the proliferation of counts but the lack of comparative charges in the pending case against Hunter Biden. Some of us have long raised concerns over the striking similarity in the alleged conduct in both cases, but the absence of similar charges against the president’s son. That contrast just got even greater.
The allegations in the two cases draw obvious comparisons.
Menendez is accused of accepting a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz as part of the corrupt practices. In Hunter’s case, it was a $142,000 Fisker sports car. For Menendez, there were gold bars worth up to $120,000. For Biden, there was the diamond allegedly worth $80,000. Underlying both cases are core allegations of influence peddling and corruption. However, the Justice Department threw the book at Menendez while minimizing the charges against Biden. That includes charging Menendez as an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Many of us have said for years that the treatment of Hunter under FARA departs significantly from the treatment of various Trump figures like former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort as well as Menendez.
Now, there is a new layer of troubling comparisons to be drawn in the two cases.
The superseding indictment incorporates new charges after the plea and cooperation of Menendez’s former co-defendant and businessman Jose Uribe.
Uribe appears to have supplied the basis for some of the new charges, including a telling account with Nadine Menendez. She allegedly asked Uribe what he would say to law enforcement about the payments used for a Mercedes-Benz convertible and Uribe said that he could say that the payment were a “loan.” Nadine Menendez responded that “sounded good.”
The loan discussion hit a familiar cord with those of us who have written about the Biden corruption scandal. The Bidens have repeatedly referred to payment from foreign sources as “loans.” That most notoriously included millions given by his counsel Kevin Morris. In some cases, foreign money was received by President Joe Biden’s brother James and then immediately sent to the president’s personal account marked as a loan repayment. James admitted that the $40,000 was coming from the Chinese.
The Justice Department in the Menendez case dismissed the claim of loans as merely a transparent effort to hide influence peddling. That includes not just the convertible payment but more than $23,000 that one businessman made toward the senator’s wife’s mortgage.
Menendez and Biden share the array of luxury gifts, cars, and loans. However, the most important common denominator was the underlying corruption. Both cases are classic examples of influence peddling, which has long been a cottage industry in Washington, D.C. What they do not share is the same level of prosecution or press support. Menendez is a pariah in Washington and Hunter is the president’s son.
Menendez is blamed by many inside the Beltway not for being corrupt but for being open about it. The fact that others have been prosecuted for conduct similar to his own has not stopped Hunter from claiming victim status. He has told courts that even the few charges brought against him are evidence of selective prosecution.
In the most recent filing, Special Counsel David Weiss dismissed many of Hunter’s claims as “patently false” and noted that Hunter Biden virtually flaunted his violations and engaged in obvious efforts to evade taxes and hide his crimes. Weiss further noted that other defendants did not write “a memoir in which they made countless statements proving their crimes and drawing further attention to their criminal conduct.” It was a devastating take-down of Hunter’s claims, but it did not address the conspicuous omission of charges brought against Menendez, including FARA charges.
It also does not address the fact that the Justice Department not only allowed the statute of limitations to run on major crimes but sought to finalize an obscene plea agreement with no jail time for Hunter. It only fell apart when a judge decided to ask a couple of cursory questions of the prosecutor, who admitted that he had never seen an agreement this generous for a defendant. Weiss noted in his filing that they filed new charges only after Hunter’s legal counsel refused to change the agreement and insisted that it remained fully enforceable.
As Hunter continues to claim to be the victim of selective prosecution in various courts, judges need only to look over the Menendez case to see the truth of the matter. Hunter is not the victim of selective prosecution but the beneficiary of special treatment in the legal system.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.
Does your children’s school take tips on hate from the Southern Poverty Law Center? The SPLC frames all responses to the border crisis as rooted in hate. (Photo: Getty Images)
When concerned mom Nicole Solas requested all emails from her Rhode Island school district to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the request turned up more than 8,000 pages of communications, and the district told her it would cost $6,629.25 for it to process the SPLC documents.
A brief refresher: The SPLC began as a civil rights nonprofit but has morphed into a far-left fundraising machine and smear factory. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” it weaponized its history of suing KKK groups into bankruptcy to smear its political and ideological opponents, placing mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.
Solas, a Rhode Island mother, had briefly enrolled her daughter in kindergarten in the South Kingstown School District. She withdrew her daughter after the school district sued her on account of Solas’ multiple public records requests to reveal whether the district taught kids the principles of critical race theory, a lens that teaches kids to view white people as oppressors and black people as oppressed.
Solas told The Daily Signal that she requested “emails sent by [South Kingstown School District] employees” to “weed out spam emails automatically sent by SPLC to schools.”
There are 8,859 pages of emails sent by my school district to Southern Poverty Law Center, who thinks moms are "hate groups."
— Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union (@Nicoletta0602) March 1, 2024
The SPLC runs an education program long known as “Teaching Tolerance.” In 2021, after the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, the SPLC apparently decided that “tolerance” wasn’t woke enough, so it rebranded the program to “Learning for Justice.” The program has advocated for lessons that inculcate critical race theory, transgender identity, and pornographic books in schools. Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty, to its “hate map,” in part demonizing those groups for opposing sexually explicit books in school libraries.
The SPLC has bragged that it sent “over 400,000 educators” the “Teaching Tolerance” magazine, “reaching nearly every school in the country.” This language disappeared from the website, however, as more Americans look critically at the SPLC.
The SPLC hides its radical agenda behind benign-sounding initiatives such as celebrating diversity and inclusion. Many on the Left have adopted its rhetoric.
The SPLC’s “hate map” has caused real-world harm. In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council for a mass shooting using the “hate map.” He told the FBI he aimed to kill everyone in the building, but the building manager prevented the slaughter, in the process sustaining bullet wounds. The shooter pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Early in the 2000s, the SPLC began branding some activist groups that opposed illegal immigration “anti-immigrant hate groups” and putting them on the “hate map.” The SPLC maintains that hatred drives the movement calling for the enforcement of immigration laws, even as the Biden administration sets new records for the number of illegal aliens encountered at the southern border.
In the past two weeks, the SPLC has demonized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for attempting to close the border when the Biden administration refuses to do so. Abbott is attempting to enforce federal laws that Biden will not enforce, yet the SPLC claims Abbott is seeking to establish “state supremacy over the border.” The SPLC noted Abbott’s attempts to install razor wire between Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, and the southern border, the Biden administration’s decision to cut the wire, and the Supreme Court ruling allowing the Biden administration access.
“This is part of Abbott’s broader anti-immigrant agenda, which includes an attempt to stop a supposed ‘invasion’ of Texas by migrants,” SPLC’s Caleb Kieffer and Rachel Goldwasser wrote. “Claims of ‘invasion’ have become a trope among right-wing lawmakers and the hard right despite dangerous similarities to the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”
The SPLC did not acknowledge that border agents encountered a record 3.2 million illegal aliens in fiscal year 2023 (a number larger than the combined populations of Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont), nor that Democratic mayors are requesting help to deal with the large numbers of aliens in the country. This isn’t a “great replacement conspiracy theory”; it is a blatantly obvious fact that millions of illegals are taking root in the U.S., and the SPLC’s move to dismiss critics as racist in the face of that fact should set off alarm bells across America. PLEASE SEE https://wordpress.com/post/whatdidyousay.org/88628
The SPLC also demonized the effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for failing to enforce immigration law and prevent mass hordes of aliens from entering the country. In an article focused on a militia group’s efforts to take border enforcement into its own hands, Goldwasser claims the militia’s action represents “a product of the anti-immigrant environment produced by the xenophobic posturing of hate groups and politicians, and the controversial impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latinx and immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.”
Goldwasser suggested that Mayorkas faces an impeachment effort not because he has failed to enforce immigration law and prevent the border crisis, but because he is the first Latino to head the Department of Homeland Security. She used “Latinx,” a transgender neologism, in order to avoid the clear masculine ending in Spanish for “Latino.”
The SPLC did not reserve all its vitriol for Republicans, however. Kieffer and Goldwasser noted that President Joe Biden has supported a Senate bill that included minor border security measures and changes to the asylum process in exchange for funding to Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion.
“The bill worried immigration advocates, who viewed it as being extremely harsh and out of step for the needs of border communities,” they wrote. “The Senate relief package debacle shows the same anti-immigrant animus undergirding impeachment of Mayorkas and the standoff in Eagle Pass.”
It seems the SPLC’s partisan attacks against pro-enforcement groups have so unmoored the organization from reality that it is unwilling to accept the blatantly obvious truth. Recent polls have showed former President Donald Trump, who currently leads in the Republican presidential nominating proces, ahead of Biden in key swing states. Americans give Biden poor marks on the border, which helps explain the president’s belated support for some immigration restrictions. Biden knows he has to make up ground on this issue, and he’s furiously working to make it seem like the border crisis is Republicans’ fault.
Yet the SPLC hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s so focused on branding as “hateful” anyone who dares to speak the plain truth about the border crisis that it turns against Biden, the very president the SPLC brags about influencing and with whom SPLC leaders have met at least six times personally.
The SPLC’s radical agenda of critical race theory, transgender lessons, and apparent hatred for the very idea of national borders has no place in America’s classrooms. Solas is right to demand answers from her Rhode Island school district, and parents across the country should be on the lookout for the SPLC’s influence in schools.
Democrats’ targeting of political opponents entered its next phase Friday, when the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker over covering the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.
“This is the most humiliated I’ve ever been in my life,” Baker told independent reporter Breanna Morello following his release. My arrest “is for things I said. … That’s what they’re after; they’re [trying] to suppress our speech.”
Just caught up with journalist Steve Baker just moments after being released from federal custody.@TPC4USA details what he’s had to endure at the hands of the corrupt DOJ.
As The Federalist reported, federal authorities informed Baker and his legal team on Tuesday of a signed warrant for his arrest and instructed him to self-surrender for “alleged J6 crimes” in Dallas, Texas, on Friday morning. Baker has been at the forefront of reporting on the more questionable aspects of the Jan. 6 demonstrations.
While told he was being charged with “non-violent misdemeanors,” federal authorities declined to disclose to Baker or his lawyers what specific crimes underlie the arrest. According to Blaze News, the feds refused to reveal the charges ahead of Friday’s arrest because “they believe[d] Baker [would] post them on social media.” The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals accused of a crime a right to “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”
After being transported to the courthouse on Friday morning in shackles, Baker was charged on four counts related to reporting on the Jan. 6 demonstrations: Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; Disorderly conduct in a capitol building; and Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building.
Blaze Media Investigative Journalist @TPC4USA has now been taken into FBI custody for his J6 reporting
While egregious, Baker’s arrest is sadly unsurprising. The Marxists running Biden’s Democrat administration have gone to extreme lengths to weaponize the powers of government to target and prosecute their political opponents.
Former President Donald Trump is facing 91 indictments from Democrat prosecutors across four different venues, two of which involve charges from the Biden DOJ. These efforts coincide with Democrat attempts to kick Trump — Biden’s primary political opponent — off the ballot ahead of the 2024 election.
The Biden regime has also targeted faithful Christians. Not only have federal authorities infiltrated Catholic churches to surveil Christians attending Latin Mass, they’ve also imprisoned pro-life Christians who peacefully protested outside of an abortion clinic.
Don’t forget the federal government’s censorship-industrial complex. This heavily funded system is strategically designed to censor and silence dissenting voices online — even if the information these users share is true.
.@TPC4USA's first interview since being taken in by federal authorities with @SteveDeaceShow: "All of this is about the suppression of speech and teaching those of us on the Right side of the political spectrum what we can and cannot say and what is allowed." pic.twitter.com/kl12Ol7zPN
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, speaks to the media as he leaves a closed-door House Republican meeting at the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 20, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, hinted Wednesday that the Department of Justice is operating under a double standard after it moved to indict an FBI informant who allegedly provided false evidence of corruption involving President Joe Biden, while letting the author of the debunked Steele dossier off the hook.
Special counsel David Weiss indicted Alexander Smirnov—who told the FBI in 2020 about alleged corruption involving Ukrainian energy company Burisma, Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden—on one count of making a false statement and on one count of creating a false and fictitious record.
Jordan appeared to suggest this as a double standard because Christopher Steele, a former operative of the Secret Intelligence Service, never got charged for the discredited Steele dossier, which was used to try and remove former President Donald Trump from office.
“I don’t believe that David Weiss had even approached the FBI, looked at this—this issue with this confidential human source,” Jordan said in an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo. “I’m not sure he had done that until he’s named special counsel. You know, they—they’ve had this investigation going for four and a half, five years. So we’ll have to see how that—that all shakes out.”
Smirnov told the FBI that Burisma executives had talked about paying millions of dollars to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden to guarantee the elder Biden would employ his political clout to safeguard the company’s interests. James Biden, the president’s younger brother, laughed off a suggestion that the Biden family’s Chinese business dealings could harm its reputation, citing “plausible deniability,” according to the transcript of a closed-door testimony released Friday. James Biden is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Feb. 21 about the family’s alleged influence-peddling scheme.
“What I do know is, again, with Christopher Steele, who gives false information about President Trump to the FBI, he continues to get paid,” Jordan added. “With this Smirnov guy, he gives false information to the FBI about the Biden’s and he gets indicted. Doesn’t seem to me to be the—the same standard. But again, we’ll have to wait and see.”
The FBI offered in October 2016 to pay Steele $1 million for proof to back up claims made in his dossier about then-candidate Trump’s 2016 campaign, FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified, according to CNN. Steele failed to “prove the allegations” and never received the $1 million.
If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become.
Most importantly, Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, explains how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, under the pretext of countering “misinformation,” rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online. The 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the “two most censored events in human history.” And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship-industrial complex.
The problem here is profound, with deep historical roots that go back to the aftermath of World War II and the creation of the CIA along with a host of U.S.-funded international institutions. But for our purposes, it suffices to understand the problem in its two most recent stages: the period from 1991 to 2014, and from 2014 to the present.
At the outset of internet privatization in 1991, free speech online was seen as an instrument of statecraft. At that time, says Benz, internet free speech was championed by the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments as a way to support dissident groups around the world in their efforts to overthrow authoritarian or disfavored regimes. It allowed the U.S. to conduct what Benz calls “insta-regime change operations,” in service of the State Department’s foreign policy agenda.
The plan worked really well. Among other things, free speech on the internet allowed U.S.-backed groups to assert control over state-run media in foreign countries, making it much easier to overthrow governments. The high-water mark of this way of deploying free speech online, Benz explains, was the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, when governments the Obama administration considered problematic — Egypt, Tunisia, Libya — all began falling in so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions. During that time, the State Department worked closely with these social media companies to keep them up and running in those countries, to be used as tools for protesters and dissident groups that were trying to circumvent state censorship.
But all of that changed in 2014 after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych and there was an unexpected pro-Russia counter-coup in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Later that same year, says Benz, when the people of Crimea voted to be annexed into the Russian Federation, “that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO.”
Thereafter, NATO, the CIA, and the State Department, together with the intelligence agencies of our European allies, did an about-face on internet free speech. They began instead to engage in what amounted to hybrid or information warfare to censor what they saw as Russian propaganda online. These efforts quickly spread beyond Ukraine and Eastern Europe to include the censorship of populist groups on the right that were emerging across the EU as a response to the Syrian migrant crisis.
By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016, explains Benz, NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot; the problem was spreading west from Central and Eastern Europe, and it had to be stopped. If it wasn’t, then Brexit might trigger the collapse of the entire EU, along with NATO and the entire constellation of supranational institutions that relied on NATO. The entire postwar architecture of institutions might come crashing down, all because the hearts and minds of the people were being swayed. So went the thinking, anyway. As far as the national security establishment was concerned, citizens were being swayed by Russian and far-right propaganda, and we can’t have that.
Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy." pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T
Under these circumstances, free speech was the last thing that could be allowed to flourish online. Censorship became the order of the day. As Carlson put it, these NATO and EU leaders identified their new enemy as democracy within their own countries — their own voters, in other words: “They feared that their people, the citizens of their own countries, would get their way. And they went to war against that.”
And then Trump was elected. From that moment — and indeed, as we know from the Russia-collusion hoax, even before Trump was elected in November 2016 — the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments, which had done so much to censor and weaponize the internet overseas, turned their attention to American citizens.
Initially, their predicate for domestic surveillance was Crossfire Hurricane, the fatuous notion that Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign and that Trump was a Russian asset. Once that collapsed, they needed another excuse to spy on and censor Americans who held disfavored opinions or who spread “misinformation,” to put it in the parlance of the censorship-industrial complex. To do that, they had to get around the prohibition against the CIA operating on American soil.
Since they couldn’t very well get away with openly spying on and censoring American citizens, they decided to house the bulk of their censorship operations inside the Department of Homeland Security, specifically in a part of DHS tasked with reducing and eliminating threats to U.S. critical physical and cyber infrastructure. Hence “domestic misinformation” — which is really just a term for opinions and information that the national security state doesn’t like or that run counter to State Department policy — was classified as an attack on “critical cognitive infrastructure,” and could therefore be censored. What it amounted to was an end-run around the First Amendment.
But even DHS couldn’t do this directly, so it outsourced online censorship operations to third parties like the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which consisted of four separate organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and a firm called Graphika. These private-sector “partners” did the nitty-gritty work of mapping out entire online networks of people who helped spread certain disfavored opinions, or what the censors called “false narratives.” Essentially they were deputized to censor Americans on behalf of the government.
It should come as no surprise that the people behind the EIP censorship network are leftists who hate Donald Trump, despise his supporters, and love censorship. For example, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos is the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He has compared “over half of the Republicans in Congress” to ISIS, called for Newsmax and OANN to be kicked off the air, and said, “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.” His views are typical among the managers of the censorship industry.
These managers and their partners inside the U.S. government went about their task with gusto, including a seven-month pre-censorship campaign ahead of the 2020 election. Any content challenging public faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes was flagged for violating new rules about “delegitimizing elections.” The censors, along with the government, had strong-armed the social media companies into adopting these rules, as documented in great detail last year with the release of the “Twitter Files.”
Indeed, the “Twitter Files” exposed a massive effort by the federal government to deputize Twitter and other social media companies to do what it could not, at least not legally. But in some ways, the “Twitter Files” just revealed the tip of the censorship iceberg.
We at The Federalist were caught up in all this during the 2020 election. As detailed in a recent lawsuit filed in December by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, the State Department illegally used a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” to censor Americans.
The State Department, through grants and product development assistance to private entities like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, was “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” according to the lawsuit.
In our case, it meant the federal government was using cutouts like NewsGuard to throttle our reporting and commentary on the 2020 election and its chaotic aftermath. Both the GDI and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) developed censorship tools that included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says. The State Department then gave these tools to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn to target disfavored media outlets, including The Federalist.
Through these and other methods, during the 2020 election cycle and the Covid pandemic, the government-backed censorship-industrial complex throttled millions of online posts, suppressing traffic to news sites, and undermined revenue streams for a host of outlets and influencers with disfavored or dissident views.
But this isn’t a thing of the past. All of the censorship infrastructure described above is still intact, still functioning, and is firing on all cylinders right now ahead of the 2024 election. If anything, the censorship-industrial complex is more robust than it was four years ago. Just last week, Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg boasted on CNBC that he currently has some 40,000 employees, which is nearly 60 percent of Meta’s entire workforce, tasked with censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Clegg also claimed Meta has spent about $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, on its censorship efforts — or what he euphemistically called “election integrity.”
What does that mean in practice? We don’t have to guess. Remember that Facebook infamously censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 at the behest of the FBI. With 40,000 employees now charged with censoring “hate speech” and ensuring “election integrity,” we can be fairly certain that if another Hunter Biden laptop story comes along this election cycle, it too will be quashed by the censors.
Why exactly is our government doing this? It’s not merely a partisan preference for ensuring Democrats stay in power, but something deeper and more insidious. To circle back to Carlson’s interview with Benz, it’s because the national security state has come to regard “democracy” not as the will of the people expressed through elections, but as the constellation of government agencies, government-backed institutions, corporations, media outlets, and nonprofit groups. Protecting democracy, in this view, means protecting these institutions from the people they were putatively meant to serve.
As Benz says at one point in the interview, “The relationship between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland has broken down, and that has played itself out in the story of the censorship industry.”
All of this seems rather complex and dense, at least in the details of how it works. But at root it’s very simple: Those who have power don’t want to be held accountable by the unwashed masses, by “populism,” and certainly not by the results of free and fair elections. They will not tolerate anyone, not even a duly elected president, going against the “interagency consensus” — that famous phrase of Alexander Vindman’s from the first Trump impeachment. They don’t think the people have that right, and they intend to use every tool they have to protect their power and privilege.
The stark truth is that if we don’t defeat and dismantle this censorship-industrial complex, it means the end of our republic and the rise of tyrannical military rule in the United States.
If you think that’s an overstatement, go watch the entire Benz interview and consider it in the context of what we have all seen play out in America over the past half-decade or so. There is no language alarmist enough to convey the gravity of what’s happening here. This is a hybrid war being fought mostly online but with real-world consequences that are every day becoming more obvious. We have to win the war to save our country, but we can’t even fight if we don’t know what’s happening, or how, or why.
About 15 minutes into the interview, I was again reminded of something I once heard the late, great Angelo Codevilla say in a lecture. He said our response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it took a “law enforcement” approach to terrorism that required the creation of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus to detect and stop terrorist attacks. Once the terrorist threat subsided, Codevilla explained, this surveillance apparatus would be turned on the American people and destroy the republic it was supposedly designed to protect.
That lecture was in 2013. Codevilla was right. It’s all happened exactly as he said it would. What happens next is up to us.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
In response to reports that Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison, your rulers in Washington want you to be angry.
Your corrupt government, which is at this very moment working to put your Christian neighbors in prison for protesting abortion, wants you to be very angry at a foreign leader nearly 6,000 miles away so you won’t pay attention to what your leaders are doing to you in your own backyard.
Your government, which wants to disarm you and prevent you from defending yourself, wants you angry at a leader who has no power over you whatsoever. The government that censors you and lies to you about viruses it helped create wants your focus elsewhere. The government that sold your economy off to China and then destroyed the value of your currency wants you mad at someone else.
The government that banned you from going to church and then tried to fire you for not taking its worthless “vaccine” wants to whip you into a frenzy over literally anything else other than what it’s doing to you right now.
The government that opened your borders to invasion and looked the other way as violent crime enveloped your cities wants you to believe that crime on another continent is the only crime you should care about. And that the borders of a country half a world away are the only borders worth protecting.
America’s government would never treat its citizens like foreign tyrants do, you’re supposed to keep comfortably believing. It would never imprison an individual whose life and knowledge suddenly became a huge liability to the regime. And it would definitely never kill him in prison, wipe the video cameras that recorded his death, then claim he committed suicide.
And the American government would certainly never try to ban its chief political opponent from the ballot, try to bankrupt him with frivolous lawsuits, or attempt to imprison him to prevent him from winning an election. The American government would never tap attorneys appointed by the president’s hand-picked lawyers to absolve the president of a whole host of crimes committed by the president and his family.
On top of that, the American government would never imprison thousands of political dissidents for protesting against the regime’s history of rigging elections or refer to them as a bunch of filthy kulak wrecker insurrectionists. And you better believe the American government would never ally with corrupt oligarchs who owe their fortunes to monopolies protected by the government to censor the government’s political opponents to prevent them from talking about the corruption of the family running the government.
They’re manipulating you, gaslighting you, and trying to emotionally blackmail you into going along with their nonsense because those things are only supposed to happen in other countries. Stop letting them get away with it.
Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
Tony Bobulinski, former business partner of Hunter Biden, is testifying before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees Tuesday, alleging the Biden family peddled President Joe Biden’s influence to China and Ukraine — all with the “enabler” Joe Biden’s knowledge and blessing.
“It is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” Bobulinski said in his opening statement obtained by Newsmax before the closed-door testimony under oath. “His family’s foreign influence peddling operation — from China to Ukraine and elsewhere — sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.
“Joe Biden was more than a participant in and beneficiary of his family’s business; he was an enabler, despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability.”
The testimony is being taken under subpoena in the House GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry, and Bobulinski laments the U.S. government and complicit media has ignored his “extensive evidence” and allegations for years — even to the point of suppression — he said in his opening statement.
“For nearly four years, I have tried to tell the American people the truth about serious corruption at the very top of their government,” his statement read. “In return, I have been falsely accused of being a purveyor of ‘Russian disinformation’ and a political surrogate.
“My continuous efforts to inform the American people of the facts have been actively suppressed by both the United States government and the so-called ‘mainstream’ media.”
The Biden family was unconstitutionally peddling foreign influence on Biden’s name and the power of his higher office, Bobulinski said.
“The only reason any of these international business transactions took place — with tens of millions of dollars flowing directly to the Biden family — was because Joe Biden was in high office,” Bobulinski said. “The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period.”
Among the allegations of bribery are the ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the China Energy Company (CEFC), where the Bidens “successfully sought to infiltrate and compromise Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House,” according to Bobulinski.
The operation began in 2015 and continued until March 2018, when CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming “was detained for corruption in China, never to be seen again,” Bobulinski added.
“It is also not a coincidence that CEFC used the Biden family’s weakest link, Hunter Biden, and the promise of large sums of money to the tune of tens of millions of dollars initially, and eventually the profits from investing billions of dollars in the United States and around the world,” Bobulinski said.
Bobulinski bulleted four “critically important facts” in his opening statement.
1. “Joe Biden was aware of the CEFC transaction, enabled it and had a constitutional responsibility and obligation to the American people to shut it down before it began.”
2. “Joe Biden’s immediate family members were enriched to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from some of our most dangerous adversaries, including the Chinese Communist Party and players from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Kazakhstan, and other foreign nations and entities.”
3. “Joe Biden’s status as the head of the family served an enforcement role — for example, when Hunter stated deliberately that his father Joe was sitting right next to him while demanding immediate payment of the $10 million CEFC had committed to the Biden family, as well as when Hunter demanded CEFC circumvent SinoHawk Holdings.”
4. “United States law enforcement appears to have been singularly unwilling to speak with me or to hear the facts we will be discussing today. I have never been contacted to provide testimony nor asked to speak with anyone connected with Joe Biden’s administration, including his Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, or local law enforcement. That includes U.S. Attorney David Weiss for the District of Delaware or any of the several grand juries I now know were convened after my name became publicly known.”
Bobulinski noted he is a U.S. Navy veteran upholding the highest standards of truth and devotion to the U.S. and not a partisan operative — as has been alleged. Also, he is nonpartisan, despite admittedly having donated to Democrat political campaigns in the past.
“I implore each and every one of you to remove your partisan hats today and focus on one party: the United States of America,” his statement concluded. “I hope your focus will be on a thorough and extensive investigation and exposure of all of the facts and evidence — and on answering the question of how we as a country allowed the White House to be infiltrated by our most existential adversary, the Chinese Communist Party.
“I also hope you will hold the complicit parties, including Joe Biden, accountable for their actions, as well as enact new laws that prevent this kind of deep corruption from ever happening again.”
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
Hunter Biden’s “Sugar Bro,” Kevin Morris, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Wednesday. A readout of Morris’ testimony, when considered in tandem with the testimony provided last week by Hunter Biden’s gallerist, suggests Hunter was setting up another front for the family influence-peddling racket when the plan collapsed due to public scrutiny.
On Thursday, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer issued a statement following the committee’s transcribed interview of Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris. In his press release, Comer revealed that Hollywood producer Lanette Phillips introduced Morris to Hunter Biden during a campaign event at her Los Angeles home for Joe Biden in the winter of 2019. One week later, Phillips called Morris to discuss what Morris apparently framed as an “entertainment” issue. Morris later visited Hunter at his home in L.A., according to the press release.
According to Comer, Morris testified he began providing money to Hunter Biden in January 2020. Then on Feb. 7, 2020, Morris emailed Hunter’s advisers and tax accountants, writing, “We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in.” Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden filed his long-overdue 2017 and 2018 tax returns, although he didn’t pay his hefty tax bill at the time. Around Oct. 18, 2021, Morris paid some $2 million in overdue taxes for the president’s son.
In addition to paying Hunter’s taxes, Morris also paid for many of his living expenses and bought 13 of Hunter Biden’s paintings — two from before Hunter retained a gallerist and 11 after, with Morris paying $875,000 for the set purchased from the gallerist.
The Gallerist
That gallerist, George Berges, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last Tuesday concerning his knowledge of Hunter Biden’s profiteering from his newfound career as a painter. Berges, the owner of the Soho-based George Berges Gallery, told the committee that he served as the “gallerist” for Hunter Biden beginning in December 2020. As Hunter’s gallerist, Berges acted as the exclusive agent, selling Hunter’s paintings. In that role, Berges had firsthand knowledge of the money flowing into Hunter’s bank account from his newest business venture.
Berges’ testimony pales in comparison to some earlier witnesses who revealed details of Hunter Biden’s dealing with Burisma and Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business dealings. Yet, when studied in its entirety, the gallery owner’s testimony paints a picture of an attempt to launch a new enterprise to provide cover for a continuation of the Biden family’s pay-to-play scheme. Morris’ testimony this week adds further definition.
First, we have the gallerist’s testimony that Lanette Phillips also introduced him to Hunter in 2019, telling Berges that Hunter was an artist. Next, there is the fact that in December 2020, Hunter and Berges executed a contract appointing the gallery owner as his exclusive representative, with Berges receiving a commission of 40 percent on sales. That contract, Berges testified, included a provision that required the gallerist to disclose to Hunter the identity of the purchasers of his paintings.
As Berges explained, that was not a typical contract term; he had never included a similar clause in any of his other contracts. “Normally, the gallerist does not let the artist know who the collectors are,” Berges confirmed, adding that of the 15 or so artists he currently works with, none ask to know who purchased their artwork. Berges elaborated, stating, “It’s my collector base,” and you don’t want “your artists to circumvent you if they know your collectors.”
While the contract required Berges to tell Hunter the names of the purchasers, Berges explained during the interview that he never did, and because Hunter didn’t push for their identities, his instinct was not to share the information. Nonetheless, Hunter learned the names of several of the purchasers — for instance, Elizabeth Naftali.
Again, Lanette, the same Hollywood producer and Biden-booster who introduced Hunter to Morris and Berges, introduced Berges to Naftali. Naftali purchased two of Hunter’s paintings, the first in February 2021, shortly after his father’s inauguration. She later purchased another painting, spending a total of $94,000 for the pair.
During the committees’ questioning of Berges, they noted that on July 1, 2022, President Biden appointed Naftali to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. A committee lawyer added that while Joe Biden was vice president he had also arranged for Hunter Biden’s then-business partner Eric Schwerin to be appointed to the same board.
In addition to Naftali, Hunter Biden also knew the identity of Morris, who on Jan. 19, 2023, purchased, in the name of his LLC, Kuliaky Art, 11 paintings for $875,000. Berges explained that Morris had seen the paintings at Hunter’s exhibit in California in October 2021 and then negotiated the January 2023 sale with him by telephone.
Berges further explained that Morris did not pay the galley for the paintings, but instead paid Berges his 40 percent commission and then paid Hunter (or reduced his loan balance) separately.
Comer notes in his readout from the interview of Morris that it was only after he purchased those paintings from Hunter that he scored a visit to the White House. But there is a bigger smoke cloud surrounding those purchases than Joe Biden welcoming his son’s benefactor to the White House.
Something Doesn’t Add Up
Why would Morris purchase paintings from Berges at all? As Berges testified, the reason gallerists don’t share the names of their buyers with the artists is so they aren’t cut out of the deal. Morris, however, likely didn’t want to ruin Hunter’s relationship with Berges, Berges reasoned. But that doesn’t explain why Morris wouldn’t have purchased art from Hunter before he had a gallerist.
Here we run into an interesting detail: Morris testified he had purchased two pieces of art from Hunter Biden before he had a gallerist. Why then wait for Hunter to enter a contract with Berges before purchasing more art? And why wait until January 2023, when he saw the art during an October 2021 exhibit? (It is also noteworthy that Berges got the impression from Hunter that he had never sold any artwork before retaining him as a gallerist.)
Morris’ $875,000 represented a huge chunk of Hunter Biden’s total sales of $1.5 million. In fact, Morris’ purchase represented such an “outlier,” as Berges put it, that the Soho gallery owner hasn’t renewed his contract with Hunter and is considering dropping him as a client.
“I look at the totality,” Berges explained. “If I look at the whole picture of this artist objectively, I would say, okay, this is great that we got someone to do a major acquisition, but let’s look at the general response and what the value is.”
“It’s not that impressive,” he concluded.
Morris negotiating with Berges over the price of the pictures, however, sidesteps questions of whether he overpaid for the art to make a then-taxable gift to Hunter Biden. Morris’ purchase also creates the impression that his friend’s art is worth the high price Berges was asking, even though “the general response,” without Morris, was “not that impressive.”
One must wonder, though, if the lack of interest in Hunter’s high-priced paintings stemmed from the spotlight on what appeared to be the latest pay-to-play scam scaring off the target audience for the artist: those seeking favors or access to the now-president.
A Plan Foiled?
Without media coverage, it was a perfect plan: Hunter Biden reemerges as an artist and sends those he or his family want to shake down to Soho to buy his paintings from a gallerist who has independently set the prices of the paintings. Berges’ testimony indicates he is truly independent, for while he explained he has become friends with Hunter, much to his chagrin, he was forced to acknowledge donating multiple times to President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. Berges even hinted that he had voted for Trump and not his client’s father in 2020.
Hunter, in fact, even ensured he could learn the identity of the purchaser to confirm the transaction, although it soon became clear that wasn’t necessary; the buyer could just tell him or show him the artwork. But then the press got ahold of the story and, unlike the laptop scandal, this time they didn’t bury it. By the summer of 2021, the White House was forced to do damage control, claiming it was working on a deal with Hunter’s gallerist to ensure the identity of purchasers of his paintings remained anonymous.
Berges testified he was surprised to hear that from the White House since he had never spoken with anyone there about his contract with Hunter Biden. Nonetheless, at Hunter’s request, Berges removed the disclosure requirement and replaced it with a provision prohibiting the gallery owner from disclosing the identity of the purchasers. They then entered a new contract on Sept. 1, 2021.
Other than Morris’ large purchase last January, there seems to be little demand now for the paintings — leaving one to wonder if, without his target audience, Hunter’s art is as worthless as his board member skills.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files on Monday revealed photos that appear to show girls or young women on his private island in 2006 – as well as his longtime madam and accomplice who denied being present during that period. The documents were previously sealed or redacted as part of a 2015 lawsuit between Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell, the disgraced financier’s longtime girlfriend and madam who is now a convicted sex trafficker.
The photos were part of a filing about Epstein accuser Sarah Ransome, who was not part of the proceedings but laid out the inner workings of Epstein’s “massage network” and testified that the victims referred to Maxwell as “Mamma bear.” Giuffre’s lawyers said the photos “unequivocally” establish Maxwell’s presence on Epstein’s island during a time where she testified under oath she was “hardly around.”
Young females pictured at Jeffrey Epstein’s Little St. James Island in a 2006 photo included in court documents. (SDNY)
“Ms. Ransome’s testimony proves that what little Defendant did say during her deposition was far from the truth,” Giuffre’s lawyers wrote.
Ransome also claimed that all of the girls who were taken to Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Little St. James, were provided Victoria’s Secret bikinis and nightwear by the host. Some of Ransome’s deposition had already been made public in previous unsealed files, but with names redacted.
Maxwell’s side claimed the accusers were lying about their allegations against her in the hopes that the lawsuit would provide them a “lottery ticket.”
Other filings show lawyers for Alan Dershowitz, an intervenor in the case and former attorney for Epstein, attacked Ransome’s credibility. After learning that Rasome’s deposition would be unsealed, Dershowitz’s lawyers asked the court to disclose a series of her emails that they argued show she “is not credible.” In them, she made unsubstantiated claims about former President Bill Clinton and the billionaire Richard Branson.
In statements that were later retracted, she claimed Clinton, Branson and the British Prince Andrew, who settled a separate lawsuit with Giuffre in 2022, were all filmed having sex with her friend by Epstein himself.
“Sex tapes were in fact filmed on each separate occasion by Jeffery (sic),” she claimed.
An evidence photo shows Jeffrey Epstein alongside a male friend on Little St. James Island in 2006. The documents pertaining to a 2017 civil lawsuit from Epstein-accuser Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell have been made public by a federal judge. (SDNY)
“The Emails are a necessary antidote to Ms. Ransome’s deposition misstatements because they demonstrate she manifestly lacks credibility,” Dershowitz’s lawyers wrote. In addition to accusations against Clinton and Branson, the emails described Hillary Clinton as “that evil b—-” and hurled more unsubstantiated sexual accusations at former President Donald Trump.
These baseless accusations have been fully retracted because they are simply false and have no merit.— Trump spokesman Steven Cheung
None of them have been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein’s crimes.
In one of the emails to a news reporter, however, Ransome said she wanted to retract the allegations and “walk away from this.”
“These baseless accusations have been fully retracted because they are simply false and have no merit,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said Monday.
A spokesperson for Virgin Group, the holding company Branson founded, pointed to a 2019 New Yorker interview in which Ransome said she “invented” the claims about sex tapes but did not mention the British billionaire by name.
“We can confirm that Sarah Ransome’s claims are baseless and unfounded,” the spokesperson said.
In a New Yorker report published in 2019, Ransome admitted that she had ‘invented’ the tapes. We can confirm that Sarah Ransome’s claims are baseless and unfounded.— Virgin Group spokesperson
An evidence photo shows defendant Ghislaine Maxwell alongside Jean-Luc Brunel on Jeffrey Epstein’s Little St. James Island in 2006. Brunel, like Epstein, died in jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. (SDNY)
Maxwell and Giuffre reached a settlement in the case in 2017. The new filings show that afterward, Maxwell’s lawyers sought a court order telling Giuffre’s side to return confidential documents that had been turned over in the discovery process.
The term “massage” within Epstein’s orbit was a code word for sex, according to Ransome, and the many girls he employed as masseuses were trafficking victims.
An evidence photo shows defendant Ghislaine Maxwell on Jeffrey Epstein’s Little St. James Island in 2006. The documents pertaining to a 2017 civil lawsuit from Epstein-accuser Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell have been made public by a federal judge. (SDNY)
“That’s like a key word for sex,” she said, according to a transcript of her deposition. “So as soon as you stop having sex with Jeffrey and his friends and his girls, you’re out, because otherwise there’s no reason for you to be associated with Jeffrey, because you’re just there to have sex with him…”
She also said she witnessed Epstein having sex with the model turned pilot Nadia Marcinkova on his plane in plain view.
Evidence photo released in the court documents pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell. (SDNY)
Ransome, who in 2022 told the New York Post likened to time with Epstein to a “dungeon of sexual hell,” claimed Maxwell would bully girls who did not comply with Epstein’s sexual demands and that the traffickers broke their promise to pay for her college education at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ordered the documents’ unsealing in December but gave each of the John and Jane Does two weeks to appeal. Lawyers for Giuffre posted the first 191 unsealed files last week out of an estimated 240, and another 17 late Monday morning.
An evidence photo shows various girls smiling for a picture on Jeffrey Epstein’s Little St. James Island in 2006. The documents pertaining to a 2017 civil lawsuit from Epstein-accuser Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell have been made public by a federal judge. (SDNY)
Giuffre’s lawyers unsealed documents in batches of dozens at a time, beginning Wednesday.
Epstein had many high-profile connections, including former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, foreign prime ministers and Britain’s Prince Andrew, as well as Hollywood stars, leading academics, people in the modeling and fashion industries and other public figures.
An evidence photo shows non-party Sarah Ransome on Jeffrey Epstein’s Little St. James Island in 2006. The documents pertaining to a 2017 civil lawsuit from Epstein-accuser Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell have been made public by a federal judge. (SDNY)
Some of the names were previously known through other means despite having been withheld from the public’s eye in the lawsuit.
Nadia Marcinkova, former alleged accomplice of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. She has reinvented herself as Nadia Marcinko and become a private pilot. Epstein accuser Sarah Ransome said in a deposition that she and Epstein had sex in plain view on his private plane. (Tim Stewart News)
Many of the names belong to people who have not been accused of wrongdoing, including Clinton and Trump.
Some names will remain sealed for various reasons, including names of some of Epstein’s underage victims and at least one person who the judge said had been falsely identified. The judge is also expected to decide on whether to release the identities of two Does in the lawsuit who have requested to remain unnamed.
Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein smile in this undated photograph. This photo was one of many unearthed during Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial in the Southern District of New York, where she was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for working with Epstein to sexually abuse minors. (U.S. Department of Justice/Mega)
In a separate criminal case, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for sex trafficking Epstein’s victims. She is appealing that conviction and has declined to comment on the document dump.
Epstein died in federal custody in 2019. A Justice Department investigation accused the U.S. Bureau of Prisons of negligence in allowing him to commit suicide behind bars, depriving “his numerous victims, many of whom were underage girls at the time of the alleged crimes, of their ability to seek justice through the criminal justice process.”
Maxwell has said she believes he was killed.
Michael Ruiz is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to michael.ruiz@fox.com and on Twitter: @mikerreports
Ray Epps, in the red Trump hat, center, gestures to a line of law enforcement officers, as people gather on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
A member of Congress investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, protest at the U.S. Capitol estimates the FBI had 200 undercover assets both inside and outside the building.
“We believe that there were easily 200 FBI undercover assets operating in the crowd, outside the Capitol, embedded into groups that entered the Capitol or provoked entry of the Capitol,” Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., said.
Higgins appeared on the Tucker Carlson Network for an interview that aired Saturday, the third anniversary of the day now commonly known as J6. He’s among the few elected Republicans still questioning the official media narrative about the day’s events.
“Given the scope of the operation and the number of doors where entry was allowed or even encouraged—and the number of people that were actually outside the Capitol and that entered—we believe 200 [is a] conservative number,” Higgins said of his estimate.
Carlson reacted with alarm.
“It’s shocking what you’re saying and confirms everyone’s worst suspicions about this,” Carlson told Higgins. “It’s clearly true.”
Based on the evidence he’s reviewed, Higgins said FBI assets worked with the local Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police. The assets were dressed as supporters of then-President Donald Trump inside the Capitol, “because those were the guys that knew their way around the Capitol.”
Ep. 61 This the smartest, best informed account of what actually happened on January 6th. pic.twitter.com/U9yCWRVJSd
FBI Director Christopher Wray has refused to answer questions about undercover FBI assets on Jan. 6, telling Higgins at a congressional hearing, “You should not read anything into my decision not to share information on confidential human sources.”
In remarks about the Jan. 6 anniversary, Attorney General Merrick Garland boasted Friday that more than 1,250 individuals have been charged for their involvement, with more than 890 convicted.
“Since the Jan. 6 attack, the Justice Department has engaged in what has become one of the largest and most complex and resource-intensive investigations in our history,” Garland said. “Our work continues.”
President Joe Biden used the anniversary of Jan. 6 to attack Trump in his first campaign speech of 2024.
“It was on that day that we nearly lost America, lost it all,” Biden said Friday at a speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
Carlson opened his interview with Higgins by criticizing “professional liars” who have presented a one-sided narrative about what happened on that day. Higgins, who worked in law enforcement before his election to Congress, has led the charge after being frustrated by the official congressional committee that investigated Jan. 6, which was stacked with anti-Trump lawmakers. Ever since Republicans reclaimed control of the House in 2023, members like Higgins have pressed for answers.
For example, as a member of Congress familiar with the U.S. Capitol, Higgins said it’s unfathomable to believe that everyday Americans in Washington, D.C., would know how to navigate the building without help.
“There’s no way they can come in some random door that gets opened and then get their way directly to Statuary [Hall] or the House chamber or the Senate chamber. It’s just not possible,” Higgins explained. “The FBI assets that were dressed as Trump supporters that were inside the Capitol were there, I believe, and evidence indicates that they were there to specifically wave in the Trump supporters that had gathered outside the Capitol.”
Tucker Carlson said Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., is “one of the only” members of Congress asking tough questions about what really happened on Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo: Tucker Carlson Network)
Higgins told Carlson these undercover assets guided protesters “directly to the areas where the FBI, the DOJ, and the Deep State actors” would later be able to implicate them for arrest and prosecution.
When pressed on who could have orchestrated such a massive operation, Higgins put the blame on not on a single person but rather a combination of anti-Trump actors working in cahoots with Democrats.
“It’s a complex web of FBI assets across the country that can be activated. So, if you have authority at some of the highest levels in the FBI, it doesn’t take much,” Higgins said. He added that those who planned it were “the faction within the FBI and within our intelligence services that would coordinate with the most extreme liberal factions within the Democrat Party that were desperate to keep Trump out of office.”
Higgins identified the 200 undercover assets as confidential informants, registered informants, nonregistered informants, and voluntary informants. Ultimately, Higgins said, they had a goal of tarnishing not just Trump’s reputation but also the people associated with the Make America Great Again movement.
“Their objective was to destroy the entire MAGA movement,” Higgins said, “to forever stain the patriotic fervor that was associated with the America First MAGA movement that had won in 2016 and we believe won again in 2020.”
Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., talks with Micki Witthoeft, mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by Capitol Police on J6. Higgins met her during a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 12, 2023. (Photo: Tom Williams/Getty Images)
Higgins called the FBI’s involvement “conspiratorial corruption,” and said it predated Jan. 6 for many months when FBI assets were engaged in online forums of Americans who questioned COVID-19 restrictions and the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
“I’m following the evidence, and to my horror, it implicates our FBI at the highest level,” Higgins told Carlson. “A conspiracy within our government at the highest level to set the stage for a compromised election cycle in 2020. And then the actions that took place on J4, 5, and 6, and then the criminal investigation, arrest, and prosecution of Americans that they were able to entrap.”
Higgins, who was first elected in 2016 to represent southwestern Louisiana, is now pressing House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to release more information, beyond just video footage, about Jan. 6. He said the only true way to uncover what really happened is for the American people to have access.
“He has a responsibility to fully release that data,” Higgins said of Johnson. “And then the American people will see for themselves what some of us have already learned, to our horror, to be true.”
Hunter Biden is facing intense backlash after holding a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday in which he refused to sit for a deposition before Congress, and declared his father, President Biden, was never “financially involved” in his business dealings. Calls to hold Hunter in contempt of Congress began almost immediately following the end of the press conference, while other critics pointed to the claims concerning his father’s relationship to his business dealings as “goalpost shifting.”
“They belittled my recovery, and they have tried to dehumanize me, all to embarrass my father, who has devoted his entire life to public service,” Hunter said. “For six years I have been a target of the unrelenting Trump attack team. ‘Where’s Hunter?’ Well, here’s my answer. I am here.”
He added that “my father was not financially involved in my business,” saying the elder Biden was not involved in his dealings with Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, or his Chinese investments and others in the United States.
A recent column from New York Times columnist Frank Bruni claimed that the media and Biden allies ignoring the Hunter Biden scandal and other Biden administration corruption are being “dishonest” and “dangerous.” (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
“We have moved from Joe Biden saying he never discussed business with Hunter to a new argument of Joe Biden wasn’t financially involved at all with Hunter’s business & most media haven’t covered the changing stories. Hold Hunter in contempt & impeach Joe,” OutKick founder and Fox News contributor Clay Travis wrote on X.
We have moved from Joe Biden saying he never discussed business with Hunter to a new argument of Joe Biden wasn’t financially involved at all with Hunter’s business & most media haven’t covered the changing stories. Hold Hunter in contempt & impeach Joe: pic.twitter.com/Mpnmohweld
Hunter Biden refuses to comply with @JamesComer's subpoena to be deposed behind closed doors and demands a public hearing so he can tell sob stories on TV.
Reminder that Don Jr. testified behind closed doors for over 40 hours about the Russia hoax.
“Hunter Biden refuses to comply with [Rep. James Comer’s, R-Ky.] subpoena to be deposed behind closed doors and demands a public hearing so he can tell sob stories on TV. Reminder that Don Jr. testified behind closed doors for over 40 hours about the Russia hoax. Hold him in contempt!” conservative commentator Greg Price wrote.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee quickly reacted on social media, pushing back against Hunter’s “stunt.” Reps. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., both echoed those calls to hold Hunter in contempt, accusing him of mocking Congress with a “stunt” and calling his refusal an “obstruction of justice.”
“Hunter Biden, this ain’t Burger King. You can’t Have It Your Way when it comes to congressional subpoenas. Quit the stunts, make your way to the deposition room, and let’s talk,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., wrote.
Donalds also responded to Hunter’s claim he was being targeted by “MAGA Republicans,” declaring, “‘MAGA Republicans’ did not impugn Hunter Biden’s character. Hunter Biden did that to himself.”
“What’s Hunter Biden so afraid of?” wrote Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C.
“This is one HELL of a new qualifier from Hunter Biden. Hunter now says, “My father was not financially involved in my business” FLASHBACK: Joe Biden used to say he has never talked about business with his family. This is a major shift from the Bidens,” GOP communications strategist Steve Guest wrote.
So we've gone from Joe Biden claiming he never even discussed business with Hunter to Hunter claiming Joe was never *financially* involved in his business.
Big goalpost shifting and lots of lies from the Bidens.
Abigail Jackson, the communications director for Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., echoed Guest, noting that “we’ve gone from Joe Biden claiming he never even discussed business with Hunter to Hunter claiming Joe was never *financially* involved in his business. Big goalpost shifting and lots of lies from the Bidens.”
Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, is seen after making a statement during a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol about testifying publicly to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Wednesday. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“First, Joe Biden had no knowledge, then he had no involvement, and now he has no ‘financial’ involvement. Time to explain ‘10 held by H for the big guy,’ the reported bank records showing a money trail to Joe Biden, and Hunter’s messages saying Joe Biden financially benefited,” Republican National Committee strategic communications director Tommy Pigott wrote.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
Brandon Gillespie is an associate editor at Fox News. Follow him on X at @BGillespieAL
This is at least the third example of a direct payment to Joe Biden that stems from a family-owned business entity. The difference is that these monthly payments came directly from a Biden company. Pictured: Biden departs Ireland’s Dublin Airport on Air Force One on Aoril 14 with his sister Valerie and son Hunter. (Photo: Julien Behal/Irish Government/Getty Images)
A Hunter Biden business entity tied to China made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden in the months leading up to the former vice president’s announcement that he would run for president in 2020, according to newly released subpoenaed bank records from the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. The monthly payments came from Owasco PC, which Hunter Biden set up as a business entity.
Biden, the president’s 53-year-old son, is under federal investigation for using Owasco PC’s corporate account to commit alleged tax crimes. Owasco PC has links to Chinese energy company CEFC, where the younger Biden was a partner. This is at least the third example of a direct payment to Joe Biden that stems from a family-owned business entity. What appears to be different here is that the payments came directly from a Biden company. Two previous payments appeared to filter indirectly through the president’s younger brother, James Biden.
House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., noted in a video statement that the president previously claimed there was an “absolute wall” between his official government duties and his family’s business; claimed his family didn’t receive money from China; and claimed he didn’t talk to his son about his business dealings.
On each, Comer said, “This was a lie.”
🚨BREAKING🚨
Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden. The bank records don't lie.
Owasco PC received payments from Chinese-state linked companies & other shady entities. Joe Biden knew & benefitted from his family's business schemes. pic.twitter.com/MfvtA4yEZU
“Now, Hunter Biden’s legal team and the White House’s media allies claim Hunter’s corporate entities never made payments directly to Joe Biden,” Comer said. “We can officially add this latest talking point to the list of lies.”
“Today, the House Oversight Committee is releasing subpoenaed bank records that show Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” the Kentucky Republican said.
“This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world,” Comer added.
The oversight panel is one of three House committees leading an impeachment inquiry into the senior Biden’s activities for evidence of influence peddling. The committee subpoenaed the financial records of Hunter Biden and of James Biden in September.
The House-obtained records show that Hunter Biden’s business account, Owasco PC, received payments from companies linked to Communist China and from other foreign nationals and companies.
Records released by the committee show one monthly payment in September 2018 for $1,380. Also that year, James Biden wrote two separate checks to Joe Biden for $200,000 and $40,000, respectively. The checks were marked as “loan repayments,” but Comer’s committee has tied the payments directly to Biden family business transactions.
An FBI confidential informant said in a formal document that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden and another $5 million to Hunter Biden in 2016 when Biden was still Barack Obama’s vice president.
While he was vice president, Biden met with or communicated with several of his son’s business partners, records show.
More footage from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, further contradicts the left-wing narrative that the day’s events constituted a “violent insurrection” wherein democracy itself was placed in jeopardy at the hands of virulent demonstrators.
Last week, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana began releasing tapes containing more than 40,000 hours of footage from the Capitol, which were buried for three years while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and lawmakers on the partisan Jan. 6 Committee worked to dramatize the riot with prime-time show trials.
“When I ran for Speaker, I promised to make accessible to the American people the 44,000 hours of video from Capitol Hill security taken on January 6, 2021. Truth and transparency are critical,” Johnson said in a statement. “This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”
With a bulk of the footage made available by Friday, the rest of the tapes will be made public on a rolling basis. Cameras captured demonstrators peacefully marching through the halls of the Capitol while police officers stood by.
Jan 6 defendants have long argued that the initial entrants were peaceably escorted into the building by Capitol Police, and therefore had no reasonable expectation that their conduct was unlawful
In another clip, a Capitol police officer is seen removing restraints on one demonstrator after walking him down a hallway out of sight from the crowd — before another officer bizarrely congratulates him with a fist bump.
I don’t think Capitol Police would take restraints off of a protester, FIST BUMP him, and then let him go if this were an actual “insurrection”
The footage corroborates what was shared by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in March before his abrupt exit from the network. Johnson’s Republican predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, gave Carlson’s producers access to the footage that had been kept under seal by the Democrat majority.
“That video,” Carlson said, “tells a very different story about what happened on Jan. 6.”
The tapes aired by Carlson showed Jacob Chansley, the infamous “QAnon Shaman,” being escorted by police around the complex; revealed deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick “healthy and vigorous” after allegedly being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher; and unearthed new contradictions in Ray Epps’ testimony. The tapes also exposed outright fabrications by the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, which was established by House Speaker Pelosi ostensibly to probe the Capitol turmoil while concealing her own failures.
Democrat Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chaired the partisan Select Committee, bizarrely conceded that over the course of the panel’s two-year investigation, lawmakers never reviewed the blockbuster footage that was later published by Fox News.
“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, meanwhile, who was vice chair of the Select Committee before an overwhelming primary defeat by Rep. Harriet Hageman, tried to downplay Friday’s release by resharing some of the panel’s carefully selected footage of the mob.
“Here’s some January 6th video for you,” she wrote on X, previously known as Twitter.
Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, whom Cheney’s Soviet-style committee sought to frame as a collaborator in an apparent insurrection, pushed back on Cheney’s narrative.
“Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times. You made sure we saw that — and nothing else,” Lee wrote on X. “It’s the other stuff — what you deliberately hid from us — that we find so upsetting.”
Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times.
You made sure we saw that—and nothing else.
It’s the other stuff—what you deliberately hid from us—that we find so upsetting.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
In the United States, global financial speculator George Soros has been the single-biggest financier of overtly political causes for decades. In 2022, he poured $178.8 million into federal campaigns, making him by far the biggest campaign contributor in that cycle. Then there are his hidden and comingled political contributions — a vast web of dark money — that are intentionally designed to influence elections and avoid public scrutiny.
According to OpenSecrets.org, a research organization that tracks money in politics (coincidentally funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations), Soros Fund Management was by far the largest single political contributor going into the 2022 midterm elections. The fund ranked first out of 31,955 contributor organizations with a known war chest of approximately $180 million. Not a single dollar went to a Republican candidate.
The political research group noted that organizations like Soros Fund Management cannot legally contribute directly to candidates or party committees. Instead, the fund funneled cash to political affiliates, the largest being an entity innocuously titled Democracy PAC II. The super PAC’s Federal Election Commission filing lists Michael Vachon as its treasurer. Vachon has served on boards of left-wing organizations tied to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, such as NYC Partners, Democracy Alliance, and Catalist. George Soros’ son, Alexander, runs the super PAC.
Notably, the first iteration of Democracy PAC funneled more than $80 million to Democratic groups and candidates in the 2020 election cycle. In a statement to Politico, Soros said the massive spend was necessary for “strengthening the infrastructure of American democracy: voting rights and civic participation, civil rights and liberties, and the rule of law.” Incidentally, the Soros-linked America Coming Together political action committee was slapped with what was, at the time, the third-largest fine in the Federal Election Commission’s history following the unsuccessful bid to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004 and install Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in the White House.
The group’s $137 million election effort spanned 90 offices in 17 states and employed more than 25,000 neighborhood canvassers and election staff. The FEC unanimously approved a $775,000 fine for using unregulated “soft money” to elect Democrats. The penalty was a pittance of accountability compared to the amount spent, though America Coming Together shuttered operations in 2005.
Soros had also given millions to the leftist MoveOn.org Voter Fund, which the FEC fined $150,000, to run television ads attacking President Bush. The progressive megadonor was an early supporter of Barack Obama. In 2004, he held a fundraiser in New York City for the community organizer from Chicago and his successful U.S. Senate bid in Illinois. Soros — the so-called “smart money” in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary — would go on to back Obama over Hillary Clinton.
Ironically, Soros would later say that Obama (whose 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, suggested was the most anti-American president in the nation’s history) was his “greatest disappointment.” Not because Obama’s leftward lurch didn’t go far enough, but because Obama, in Soros’ view, stabbed him in the back, politically, and left him to operate outside the inner White House circle.
In 2016, Soros threw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump by pouring millions into her presidential election run. FEC filings in the summer of 2016 showed Soros had committed or personally donated more than $25 million — mostly for her benefit.
Upon Trump’s election, the Soros mission turned to getting rid of the 45th duly elected president of the United States. How that jibed with any honest notion of democracy is anyone’s guess.
Framing President Trump as a Russian agent guilty of colluding with Vladimir Putin to cheat Hillary Clinton out of the White House was always a Clinton campaign smear. The associated Steele dossier, named for the former British intelligence officer and Fusion GPS opposition research operative Christopher Steele, was laundered through the law firm Perkins Coie.
According to The Washington Post, Perkins Coie represented “the national Democratic Party, its governors, almost all of its members of Congress, and its campaign and fundraising apparatus.” The firm’s “Democratic superlawyer,” Marc Elias, was the Clinton campaign’s general counsel. Elias was not only involved in the Steele dossier fiasco, which the FBI used to obtain a surveillance warrant to spy on the Trump campaign — and led to subsequent FISA warrant renewals to spy on the Trump presidency — but Elias was simultaneously paid by George Soros to knock down election integrity laws in swing states.
Flash-forward to the 2019 impeachment of President Trump, and Soros surfaced again through his Open Society Foundations’ ties to Ukraine and the so-called whistleblower at the center of the controversy, identified by independent media reports as Eric Ciaramella. Breitbart journalist Aaron Klein found that Ciaramella was reportedly receiving email communications from a top director at Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Klein also noted that the Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity was fueling the impeachment narrative that President Trump acted improperly with respect to the purported temporary withholding of military aid to Ukraine in exchange for evidence of former Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged corruption.
Corporate media outlets with a collective loathing for President Trump used the Soros-backed group’s assertions to substantiate Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment effort. Trump was indeed impeached and acquitted by the Senate. Just as in previous elections, Soros reportedly told a group at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the 2020 election would determine the “fate of the world.” He said Trump was “a con man and a narcissist, who wants the world to revolve around him.” Previously at the World Economic Forum, Soros claimed Trump was “doing the work of ISIS.”
Soros spent $52 million in the 2020 presidential election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. But there is no way to know how much money and influence originated from the billionaire activist, whether directly or indirectly via his Open Society Foundations.
One thing is certain: The 2020 presidential election, amid unprecedented Covid-era election changes and summer riots destabilizing dozens of American cities and the nation’s capital, was unlike any in American history. Soros-backed prosecutors are already swaying the 2024 presidential election via lawfare. Soros grant recipients are attempting to remove the leading opposition candidate from the ballot.
And George and Alex Soros are only just getting started.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been working to destroy the United States from within for DECADES, this is their secret written plan exposed. pic.twitter.com/2bodbC4vcg
An American mom whose child is being held hostage in Gaza by Palestinian terrorists delivered the most caustic speech. It hurts but you need to put yourself through it.pic.twitter.com/NqWWSiHKAB
I’ve never in my life been in such a huge crowd. The #MarchForIsrael rally today was incredible. Singing. Dancing. Prayers. Inspiration. There was no violence. No vandalism. No destruction. Just a real, raw, peaceful, gathering. #BringThemHome ❤️🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/CiL36UDpZ2
🔥🚨HIDDEN HISTORY: On December 1, 1963 Malcolm X gave a speech called “God’s Judgement of White America.” where he identified the ‘White Liberal’ as the most ‘dangerous’ and ‘deceitful’ thing in the Western Hemisphere.
The chair of the House Oversight Committee issued a slew of subpoenas on Wednesday, including to Hunter Biden and James Biden. Additional subpoenas, as well as requests for transcribed interviews, were served on other Biden family members and business associates. These investigative steps are solid, but the House committees charged with the Joe Biden impeachment inquiry need to issue subpoenas for the witnesses and documents Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, not-so-subtly suggested late last month.
“I’ve obtained the names of 25 DOJ and FBI personnel to interview at a future date,” Grassley wrote in a late-October letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray concerning the latest details the Iowa senator uncovered related to obstruction of the Biden-family corruption investigation. While the House Oversight Committee is understandably focused on unraveling the extent of foreign influence-peddling, the House should not ignore the second half of the scandal: the DOJ, FBI, and now the Biden administration’s cover-up of the scandal and their cover-up of the cover-up.
Grassley has been focused on that aspect of the scandal for several years, raising concerns “about political considerations infecting the decision-making process at the Justice Department and FBI.” Having heard from several whistleblowers about the scope of the obstruction, Grassley has said that if their allegations are true, it would establish the DOJ and FBI have been “institutionally corrupted to their very core.”
The House has followed several leads Grassley developed. The most significant was related to the FD-1023 summary of a “highly credible” confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting that Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes, which Grassley released earlier this year.
More recently, Grassley revealed that the Foreign Influence Task Force used an assessment opened by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten to mine FBI field offices for derogatory information related to the Bidens. The FBI then falsely branded the derogatory information as Russian disinformation, closing out the sources. That revelation was but one of many contained in the seven-page letter the Iowa senator penned to the AG and FBI director on Oct. 24, noting he had a list of some 20-plus agents to interview.
The House committees charged with overseeing the impeachment inquiry need to dissect that letter for leads relevant to the investigation into Biden-family corruption and also to unravel the DOJ and FBI’s corruption.
Foreign Influence Task Force
Among other things, that letter revealed the complicity of the Foreign Influence Task Force in falsely branding the reporting of confidential human sources from several different field offices as Russian disinformation. As Grassley noted, it was also the Foreign Influence Task Force that “improperly briefed” him and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., about their investigation into the Biden family. That briefing served solely as a precursor to a media leak to spin the Republican senators’ investigation as contaminated by foreign disinformation.
Every member of the Foreign Influence Task Force should be questioned by the House, and every communication between the Foreign Influence Task Force, Brian Auten, and the various FBI offices involved in wrongly closing out sources should be subpoenaed. The House should likewise subpoena the materials made part of that assessment and especially any sources or reporting closed out as Russian disinformation.
FBI Field Offices
Here, Grassley helpfully highlighted in his letter several relevant field offices. In noting that the FBI tried to improperly shut down the FD-1023, Grassley emphasized that the claim that the CHS’s bribery report was Russian disinformation was “highly suspect and is contradicted by other documents my office has been told exist within the Foreign Influence Task Force, FBI Seattle Field Office, FBI Baltimore Field Office, and FBI HQ holdings.”
The House should focus its investigative efforts there first. The FBI Seattle field office is a new thread to pull, as it has not been previously raised as relevant to the Biden investigation. A review of the underlying FD-1023 also suggests the Cleveland FBI field office merits attention, as the CHS who reported on the alleged bribes to the Bidens noted that he was introduced to the Burisma executives by Alexander Ostapenko. And the FD-1023 included a notation that the CHS’s reporting on Ostapenko was maintained at the Cleveland field office.
In seeking materials from these field offices and the Foreign Influence Task Force, the House should ask for all records using the terms “Russian disinformation” or “foreign disinformation” from January 2019 to the present. Why? Because that is what Grassley asked the AG and FBI director to provide. And when the Iowa Republican asks for something, he usually knows precisely what the DOJ has secreted away.
DOJ and FBI Documents
Likewise, the House should seek the other documents Grassley identified in his October 2023 letter because the Republican-led House can follow up with subpoenas if the DOJ refuses to comply, whereas Grassley can’t. In total, the Iowa senator named 15 different categories of materials he sought from the DOJ and FBI, and the House should mirror those requests.
Of particular importance are the communications between the U.S. attorneys’ offices for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the Eastern District of New York relating to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, and the FD-1023, as the Eastern District of New York had apparently concluded the FD-1023 did not match any known Russian disinformation. Subpoenaing FBI reports dating to Jan. 1, 2014, and referencing Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden, or Joe Biden will likely also turn up relevant information.
Naming Names
In addition to subpoenaing these witnesses and the related documents, Grassley’s letter provides the names of several other individuals deserving of questioning. Significantly, the letter indicates that the individuals named had knowledge of Joe Biden’s potential complicity in his son’s money-laundering scheme. But Grassley also named individuals from FBI headquarters, the Washington field office, the Baltimore field office, Delaware FBI agents, and FBI management personnel.
Finally, the House should take note of Grassley’s repeated references to Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault and the various documents he requested that connect to Thibault. Those references should give House investigators pause because Grassley’s apparent focus on Thibault strikes an odd note given the tune Thibault played in his transcribed interview: that he was new to the job and was only on the periphery of decisions to close out sources.
Why then, would Grassley seek “[a]ll records derived from reporting on derogatory information linked to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, and their foreign business relationships that was overseen under the approval, guidance, and purview of ASAC Thibault from January 1, 2020, to his last day at the FBI”? And why would Grassley ask for a copy of “[a]ll opened and closed cases initiated by the Washington Field Office under the purview of ASAC Thibault that were ordered closed by ASAC Thibault and/or denied for opening by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and/or the United States Attorney Offices in the District of Columbia and Eastern District of Virginia”?
Grassley may not be able to force the DOJ and FBI to provide answers or those documents, but the House can — and it should, stat.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Joe Biden received $40,000 from Chinese communists, funneled through his son and brother and their businesses, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer revealed Wednesday morning.
“Where’s the money?,” President Joe Biden quipped over the summer when asked by a reporter to comment on the House’s investigation into the bribery scandal swirling around his family. Comer continues to answer that question for the country, with a press release and video detailing the House Oversight Committee’s latest discovery from subpoenaed bank records that establish Joe Biden directly profited from his family’s influence-peddling.
A 12-page memorandum from the Oversight Committee’s staff to the majority members of the committee, which The Federalist has reviewed, details the latest development Comer summarized in his video and press release. The bottom line is a $40,000 check from Sara and James Biden’s personal checking account written to Joe Biden on Sept. 3, 2017, claiming to represent a “loan repayment.” But following that money upstream reveals it originated from the Chinese “business” partners Hunter Biden had threatened a little over a month earlier in a WhatsApp message.
Hunter Biden had sent that WhatsApp message on July 30, 2017, to Raymond Zhao, an associate of CEFC, the Chinese energy giant Hunter and James Biden began courting in 2016, while Joe Biden was vice president. After Joe Biden left office at the end of the Obama administration, according to one of Hunter Biden’s business partners, the Chinese communist-connected CEFC sent them a $3 million wire in March of 2017 as a “thank you” for the Bidens’ assistance in furthering their business interests.
But CEFC had committed to investing another $10 million, which an email recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop indicated would be used to form a joint venture. CEFC’s founder and chairman, Ye Jianming, was to hold 50 percent interest in the company, and Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, and some of their business associates would hold the other 50 percent. That email noted Hunter Biden would own a 10 percent interest in the holding company for “the big guy,” a moniker used for Joe Biden.
However, as of the end of July 2017, the $10 million cash infusion had yet to materialize, prompting Hunter Biden to text Zhao on WhatsApp, telling him to “Please have the director call me- not James or Tony or Jim- have him call me tonight,” with the “director” being an apparent reference to the executive director of CEFC, and James and Tony being business partners, along with Jim Biden. The text continued:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. I am very concerned that the Chairman has either changed his mind and broken our deal without telling me or that he is unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand. And now means tonight. And Z if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang (sic) 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. All too often people mistake kindness for weakness — and all too often I am standing over top of them saying I warned you. From this moment until whenever he reaches me. It I [sic] 9:45 AM here and i assume 9:45 PM there so his night is running out.
The Oversight Committee memorandum then detailed how in a WhatsApp message on July 31, 2017, Zhao responded, “CEFC is willing to cooperate with the family.” Hunter later followed up with a text to another CEFC associate, Gongwen Dong, stating, “The Biden’s [sic] are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnershipn [sic]. Please let’s not quibble over peanuts.”
The money soon began flowing, with Hunter Biden first opening a bank account on Aug. 3, 2017, for a new company, Hudson West III, which would serve as the joint venture between Hunter Biden and CEFC’s Gongwen Dong. Hunter Biden’s business, Owasco P.C., owned 50 percent of Hudson West III, and Dong’s company, Hudson West V, owned the other 50 percent.
On Aug. 8, 2017, financial records show Hunter Biden’s new business venture with CEFC received a $5 million wire from the CEFC-connected business Northern International Capital. That same day, Hunter Biden transferred $400,000 out of Hudson West III and into his corporation, Owasco P.C. From those funds, Hunter purchased a Porsche and transferred funds to other of his personal or business accounts.
Then on Aug. 14, 2017, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 from his Owasco account to the Lion Hall Group — the company owned by James and Sara Biden. Two weeks later, Sara Biden “signed a withdrawal ticket for $50,000 from the Lion Hall Group bank account,” and on the same day deposited that $50,000 into her and James’ joint personal checking account. Soon after, on Sept. 3, 2017, Sara Biden signed the $40,000 check payable to Joe Biden.
The House Oversight staff memorandum provides a clear narrative of these transactions and copies of the relevant bank records. The memorandum also added this graphic to further crystalize the money trail:
Significantly, the House memorandum also established that the $40,000 used to supposedly repay a loan to Joe Biden came solely from funds the communist China-connected CEFC paid to Hunter Biden to “cooperate with the family.” The House Oversight staff’s memorandum made that point clear by detailing, in addition to the flow of funds from CEFC to Joe Biden, the balances in the various accounts prior to the receipt of those funds.
For instance, before Sara Biden transferred $50,000 into their personal checking account from which they paid Joe Biden $40,000, their balance was $46.88. And before Hunter Biden transferred the $150,000 into the Lion Hall Group bank account, that account showed a balance of $1,964.62.
So, whether James and Sara Biden actually owed Joe Biden $40,000 is irrelevant because the money they used to repay the supposed loan came from the Chinese company that Hunter and James groomed to serve as the family cash cow during Joe Biden’s vice presidency. And CEFC only provided that capital after Hunter Biden — saying he and his father were sitting there trying to understand why the promised $10 million hadn’t yet materialized — threatened their Chinese counterparts.
It’s also interesting to note that the $40,000 Joe “the Big Guy” Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC.
With Wednesday’s release of a copy of the $40,000 check paid to Joe Biden, Comer has provided two examples of the now-president directly benefitting from his son and brother’s selling of his political influence. Earlier this month, Comer released evidence establishing James Biden paid Joe $200,000 in funds the president’s brother obtained from the since-bankrupted Americore.
Wednesday’s news, however, proves even more scandalous because the funds originated from individuals connected to the Chinese Communist Party who first partnered with Hunter and James Biden while Joe Biden was vice president — and the payment followed Hunter Biden’s threatening text message, which invoked his father’s name (and presence) and warned of his wrath.
But to Joe Biden apologists, this will likely remain “no evidence” of corruption.
This article has been updated since publication.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said his panel has uncovered evidence that Joe Biden, in 2018, received a “$200,000 direct payment” from his brother James Biden and sister-in-law Sara Biden, and is demanding the president answer questions about “financial arrangements” with members of his family.
Comer, R-Ky., has been leading an investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings since January and whether President Biden was involved in those ventures or “personally benefited” from them.
Comer, in a video posted to “X,” formerly known as Twitter, detailing his committee’s latest findings. Comer said the check was written by James Biden to President Biden as a “loan repayment,” but questioned the timing.
“Bank records obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability have revealed a $200,000 direct payment from James and Sara Biden to Joe Biden in the form of a personal check,” Comer states.
Comer explains that in 2018, James Biden “received $600,000 in loans from Americore —a financially distressed and failing rural hospital operator.”
Chairman James Comer, R-Ky. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“According to bankruptcy court documents, James Biden received these loans based upon representations that his last name Biden, could open doors; and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections,” Comer said.
“On March 1, 2018, Americore wired a $200,000 loan into James and Sara Biden’s personal bank account—not their business bank account,” he continued. “And then, on the very same day, James Biden wrote a $200,000 check from this same personal bank account to Joe Biden.”
Comer said James Biden “wrote this check to Joe Biden as a ‘loan repayment.’”
“Americore—a distressed company—loaned money to James Biden who then sent it to Joe Biden,” Comer said.
But Comer said even if the payment was “a personal loan repayment, it’s still troubling that Joe Biden’s ability to be paid back by his brother depended on the success of his family’s shady financial dealings.”
James Biden headshot, brother of US President Joe Biden (AP)
“Some immediate questions President Biden must answer for the American people: Does he have documents proving he lent such a large sum of money to his brother and what were the terms of such financial arrangement?” Comer asked. “Did he have similar financial arrangements with other family members that led them to make similar large payments to him?”
Comer also demanded Biden answer whether he knew that the same day he received the $200,000 check, “James Biden had just received a loan for the exact same amount from business dealings with a company that was in financial distress and failing.”
U.S. President Joe Biden boards Air Force One for travel to Alabama from Delaware Air National Guard Base in New Castle, Delaware, U.S. March 5, 2023. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)
“The House Oversight Committee will soon announce our next investigative actions and continue to follow the money,” he said. “The bank records don’t end here. There is more to come.”
Comer’s findings come amid his months-long investigation. Comer, alongside House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., is leading the House impeachment inquiry against Biden.
So far, during his committee’s investigation, Comer said he has found that Biden family members, their business associates and their “related companies” received “significant payments from individuals and companies in China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Romania.”
Comer said the House Oversight Committee has learned throughout its investigation that the Biden family and their business associates brought in more than $24 million between 2014 and 2019 by “selling Joe Biden as ‘the brand’ around the world.”
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
As the Biden family’s corruption scandals tumble out into the open, corporate media badly want you to think the only story here is about Hunter Biden, a struggling drug addict who may have made some unwise decisions while grieving the loss of his brother. The more evidence — from whistleblower testimony to documentation — of President Joe Biden’s involvement arises, the more frantically they shout “no evidence!” and insist the elder Biden was only involved to the extent that he loves his son and talks with his wealthy foreign friends about the weather.
But setting aside the evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in the access-for-sale scheme — of which there is an abundance — there’s another central figure in the operation. The participation of James Biden, Hunter’s uncle and Joe’s brother, shows just how much of a family affair the scandal is, with Joe Biden, the family’s “only asset,” at the top.
So what exactly do we know about James Biden’s involvement?
Payments from CCP-Linked Energy Firm
Chinese energy company CEFC, a state-backed firm that is “effectively an arm of the Chinese Government,” paid the Biden family and their associates millions — presumably for “access” to Joe Biden — funneling the cash through Robinson Walker LLC, an account run by Biden family associate Rob Walker. After receiving a $3 million payout from CEFC, Robinson Walker LLC wired two $50,000 payments to an account belonging to James Biden on April 3, 2017, another $120,000 on April 20, $125,000 on April 24, and $15,000 on May 18, bringing James Biden’s total receipt from CEFC in that exchange to $360,000.
Later, James also received money via his consulting firm, Lion Hall Group. “Between Aug. 14, 2017 and Aug. 3, 2018, [Hunter Biden’s company] Owasco sent 20 wires totaling $1,398,999 to the Lion Hall Group, a consulting firm that lists James Biden and his wife, Sara Biden, on the bank account,” Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley reported in 2020. The transfers started days after CEFC wired millions to Hudson West III, a joint venture between Hunter Biden and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming, which began sending money to Owasco. After the transaction into the Lion Hall Group account was flagged “for potential criminal financial activity,” the bank “submitted the account for closure.”
In August 2017, around the time those payments started, James Biden was made a manager at Hudson West III, to be paid $65,000 a month.
Hudson West III also sent a total of $76,746 directly to Lion Hall Group in 2018.
On top of that, James, his wife Sara, and Hunter went on a $101,291 spending spree with credit cards opened by Hunter and Kevin Dong, who “served as ‘Chairman Ye[’s] CEFC emissary’ in the United States.” The three Bidens purchased “extravagant items, including airline tickets and multiple items at Apple Inc. stores, pharmacies, hotels and restaurants.”
Two years later, The Washington Post confirmed Johnson and Grassley’s discoveries, admitting “the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle.”
On Thursday, House investigators subpoenaed bank records for both Hunter and James Biden after additional records revealed “the Bidens and their associates have received over $20 million in payments from foreign entities.”
Meetings and Communication with Hunter Biden’s Foreign Associates
Documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee last week show dozens of WhatsApp communications involving James Biden, including direct communications between Hunter and James, as well as group messages between Hunter, James, and associates like Tony Bobulinski, Rob Walker, and James Gilliar, and group messages between Hunter, James, Kevin Dong, and Mervyn Yan, whom IRS investigators described as one of the “U.S. managers for CEFC related to the Hudson West entities” along with Dong.
On Aug. 27, 2017, Hunter Biden discussed a luncheon with Kevin Dong, telling him that James would be bringing Joe Biden along for an appearance. “My uncle will be here with his BROTHER who would like to say hello to the Chairman,” Hunter wrote.
On Sept. 27, 2017, James Biden messaged Hunter, Yan, and Dong that a meeting between them was “set” at “The Carlyle Hotel Madison Ave at 76th.” “We will meet you in the room, I’m here … Hunter will be arriving shortly,” James wrote. The following day, he sent details for a meeting at a Ritz Carlton in Atlanta to the same group.
In an interview with IRS investigators, James Biden admitted to attending a luncheon in Romania with Hunter, Walker, and Gilliar — a luncheon which James “understood … to be a side deal.”
He also told the IRS he had met with Chairman Ye Jianming of CEFC “once,” along with “the Director” (presumably CEFC Director Bo Zhang), in New York City at Hunter Biden’s request. James even showed Ye’s wife around the city, taking her to private schools where she might enroll her children, he told investigators.
Furthermore, when Patrick Ho — whom Hunter had described as the “spy chief of China” — was arrested by the DOJ for “his role in a multi-year, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC,” James Biden was his first call. (James claims to believe Ho was actually looking for Hunter.)
James’ Role in the ’10 Held By H for the Big Guy’ Email
In October 2020, the New York Post published a May 2017 email that was sent to Hunter Biden discussing “remuneration packages” that included a provision of “10 held by H for the big guy?” — whom involved parties have confirmed is Joe Biden.
The email described a “provisional agreement” splitting up “equity” in an unnamed venture, with numbers indicating percentages. Twenty percent each would go to people identified as H, RW, JG, and TB — abbreviations that correspond, the Post noted, to the names in the email thread: Hunter, Rob Walker, James Gilliar, and Tony Bobulinski. In addition to the “10 held by Hunter for the big guy,” another 10 would go to “Jim,” which almost certainly referred to James Biden.
James and Hunter Discuss Money, ‘Protecting Dad,’ and Getting ‘Help’ From Joe
Despite telling the IRS “that he recalled not being involved with anything beyond 2017,” James Biden sent a message to Hunter in February 2018 that he was “in a near panic” because “we got nothing in Feb! … Did K [likely Kevin Dong] cut us off in Feb? I thought you had said that $ were wired into your account , 82.5 was on its way. We can’t find any record that was sent. Did I miss something?”
James continued to frantically try to reach Hunter for answers, texting weeks later that “I also have something at stake as well.”
In March 2018, Hunter asked James to let him know in writing if James “no longer [wished] to be involved” and expressed regret that “you’ve been drawn into something purely for the purpose of protecting Dad”:
If YOU NO LONGER [W]ISH TO BE INVOLVED IN THIS VENTURE REGARDLESS of how tangentially I need it in writing. Because [as] you have pointed out over and over again- you cannot be my uncle or my protector and counsel if you don’t have all the information. … we can talk later but you’ve been drawn into something purely for the purpose of protecting Dad- and I know any of the BS money is mine ultimately- Well you’ve done your job and he f-cking but only is true to form but even more so why be so horribly angry over nothing g but being duped. You both ha[v]e said it’s bigger than me a family …
“I am no dupe for anyone. If you see me as an agent for my brother, there is something seriously wrong,” James Biden responded later, before continuing to talk business.
Nearly a year later, after Hunter Biden sent James a message on Dec. 29, 2018, complaining that “I can’t pay alimony w/o Dad or tuitions or for food and gas,” James wrote back, “This can work, you need a safe harbor. I can work with you father alone!! We as usual just need several months of his help for this to work.”
A History of Financial Wheeling-and-Dealing
Unrelated to his role in international influence-peddling, James Biden is “under ongoing investigation by federal authorities in Western Pennsylvania over a series of hospital deals struck under Americore Health,” a scandal The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway reported on in 2020. Americore’s former CEO Grant White accused James Biden of fraud and racketeering, in documents prepared for a lawsuit that was eventually settled.
James also has a history of leveraging the Biden name to get private loans, and even left-wing outlet ProPublica admitted that “on occasion, as Jim pursued opportunities, Joe met with his potential clients or partners, at Jim’s request.”
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on the legal travails of Blaze Media contributor Steve Baker and his reporting surrounding the events of January 6, 2021.
I’ve been under federal investigation for the better part of two years. Last Wednesday morning, my attorney spoke with FBI Special Agent Craig Noyes, one of the lead investigators in my case. He confirmed that the Department of Justice is continuing its probe into my journalistic activities on January 6, 2021.
Like many other reporters and photojournalists — both independents and those working directly for established media companies — I followed the story that day where it went. And it happened to be inside the Capitol Building. Depending on who is doing the counting, between 100 and 200 journalists were either already inside the Capitol, covering the event from restricted grounds, or followed the crowd inside.
The left-wing Sedition Hunters compiled a rather impressive spreadsheet of all types of journalists, with designations of “Interior (Breach),” “Interior (Press Corps),” and “Restricted Grounds” assigned to 160 different “confirmed” journalists, and an additional spreadsheet tab listing 45 “unconfirmed” reporters and videographers.
When I first looked up the Sedition Hunters’ spreadsheet over a year ago, I wasn’t listed. So I contacted them and asked to be added. They didn’t respond to me directly. Instead, they blocked me from their Twitter page. A more recent search shows they added my name, along with my Locals blog link, my Twitter handle, and my Rumble page, with the “Interior (Breach)” designation under the “confirmed” tab.
(My journalistic activities on January 6 took place before I became a Blaze Media contributor.)
I made no effort to hide what I was doing on January 6. I did two different interviews that same day with WUSA, a CBS News affiliate in Washington, D.C. I also uploaded a short YouTube video commentary later that same evening.
Upon returning to my home in Raleigh, North Carolina, I socked myself away for five days, doing a frame-by-frame analysis of my own videos. I then wrote and published on January 13, 2021, a 9,500-word opus to my blog detailing what I experienced that day, titled, “What I Saw on January 6th in Washington, D.C.”
That piece, and a February 24, 2021, follow-up, “Who was ‘Up the Chain’ on January 6?” has been viewed and read by hundreds of thousands of readers on my blog and various social media pages.
I always expected that I would be contacted by the FBI at some point, at the very least to acquire my videos for the bureau’s investigations. I did no violence or property destruction on January 6, and I certainly did not interfere with the election certification, as I didn’t enter the Capitol Building until well after both the Senate and House of Representatives had been evacuated.
Several months passed. Finally, around 10 a.m. on Thursday, July 22, 2021, I received a call from someone who introduced himself as FBI Special Agent Gerrit Doss.
My immediate response: “What took you so long?”
Doss told me he knew I was scheduled to speak at a Libertarian Party meet-up in Leesburg, Virginia, the next evening and asked if I might have time earlier in the afternoon to meet with a couple of agents. (Thus tipping me to the fact that the FBI had been watching me and tracking my activities.)
I politely informed Doss that I would be in Leesburg earlier in the day. Unfortunately, my attorney would not be with me, so I would be unable to speak with him.
“Oh, oh … I understand,” Doss replied. “Is there a good time when you can meet with us, along with your attorney?”
I asked the agent for his contact number and told him I’d have my attorney reach out to him as soon as possible.
Through my attorney, we agreed to a voluntary meeting at the FBI’s Cary, North Carolina, office on August 5, 2021. Upon arrival at the FBI office that morning, Agents Doss and Craig Noyes greeted us and informed my attorney and me that they “may not” be able to conduct an interview that day after all. They invited us to have a seat in the lobby and said that they would return “in about 10 minutes.”
Doss and Noyes re-emerged from behind closed doors about 30 minutes later to let us know that they couldn’t conduct the interview without “special permission” because of my “press” status.
According to the Code of Federal Regulations, a federal investigative agency must first secure “authorization by a United States Attorney or Assistant Attorney General” before conducting an interview with a member of the media.
My lawyer and the U.S. attorney’s office then negotiated a proffer agreement for my voluntary interview, which said in effect that nothing I said in the interview could be used against me should I be charged with a crime unless I perjured myself. Keep that in mind.
The FBI was quite accommodating of my travel and work schedule, and my attorney and I ultimately reappeared at the Cary, N.C., FBI office for that interview with Doss and Noyes on October 18, 2021.
The interview lasted for exactly two hours and began with both agents thanking me for not doing violence against law enforcement on January 6. The only really contentious moment in an otherwise cordial meeting was my request to record the interview for my own benefit, which the agents rejected. With my agreement, we proceeded.
At the conclusion of the interview, we volunteered to turn over my videos from January 6. Again, I had nothing to hide. My attorney even asked that in exchange for the videos, I might receive immunity from prosecution. (No such luck.)
Under the circumstances, it’s never a good feeling when you see your attorney’s name pop up on caller ID. On November 17, I got the call I had been dreading.
“I’ve got bad news,” he told me. “I just received an email from Assistant U.S. Attorney Anita Eve, which says you can expect to be ‘charged within the week.’”
“With what?” I asked.
“Well, that’s the weird part,” my attorney continued. “According to the criminal statutes she sent — 18 USC 1952 (a)(1)-(2) and 40 USC 5104 (e)(2)(d) and (g) — you’re being charged with interstate racketeering and property damage.”
“What?!”
To the first charge, the only thing we could surmise is that during the FBI interview, I had been asked how much money I had made from the licensing of my January 6 videos. Several of my video clips had been used in January 6 documentaries produced by HBO and the New York Times, as well as by news services all over the world.
Was the federal government really trying to claim that I had traveled from Raleigh, N.C., to Washington, D.C., with the foreknowledge of a criminal event and conspired with others to profit from it?
All I could do was laugh.
As to the second charge, I’d informed the agents during the interview that at one point while inside the Capitol, I stood on a bench to get above the crowd to get a better camera angle on the crowd’s activities. Agent Noyes asked, “You stood on a bench?” He then feverishly wrote something on his notepad.
According to federal law, “A person may not step or climb on, remove, or in any way injure any statue, seat, wall, fountain, or other erection or architectural feature, or any tree, shrub, plant, or turf, in the [Capitol] Grounds.”
Good grief. I’d damaged nothing! But, yes, I stood on a bench.
Anita Eve’s notification arrived on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving week in 2021. I was on the road, traveling for the holiday. My attorney and I immediately went on offense. On Monday morning of Thanksgiving week, we sent out over 200 copies of a press release notifying media organizations large and small that an independent journalist was being prosecuted for his coverage of January 6.
Right away, I began receiving interview requests from radio hosts, podcasters, and print journalists. At 1:47 p.m. that day, my attorney received an email from Eve, with an attached copy of the press release.
“I’m not thrilled with this press release that was forwarded to me today,” she wrote.
My attorney responded: “Mr. Baker is obviously feeling threatened by the charges and is using his First Amendment right to garner support. … Are you suggesting that he refrain from making further statements? … He has nothing to hide. But he does have a right to speak truthfully about his experiences and share his opinions. … It’s not fair to ask him to be silent while he endures federal prosecution.”
In that same email, my attorney again offered that I would voluntarily provide the government with my videos from January 6.
“I have absolutely no objection to Mr. Baker exercising his First Amendment rights,” Eve answered. “He can continue that as often as he so desires. My concern is what impact this will have with the Judge who gets assigned to his case. Also, I may make use of his commentary at some future proceeding.”
An assistant U.S. attorney looking for notches in her career-advancement gun belt is concerned about what a judge may think about my actions? I wasn’t buying it.
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I received a message from a dear friend telling me that Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) wanted me to call him. He’d been forwarded my press release. So I did.
“Hello, this is Ron,” a man answered.
“Is this Senator Johnson?” I asked.
“This is Ron.”
And so it went. Without pretense of any kind, here was a U.S. senator from a state where I was not a constituent, and to whom I’d never made a campaign contribution, asking how he could help me. After about a 15-minute chat, Senator Johnson gave me the phone number of his chief January 6 investigator, with whom I had a rather lengthy call the next week.
The government’s prosecutor and FBI agents then went silent. Despite the assistant U.S. attorney warning that I would be “charged within the week,” we didn’t hear from her office again until 20 months later.
In part two of this series, Baker explains what happened next and the current status of the federal investigation into his January 6 reporting.
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Jack Smith Resigns as Special Counsel Amid Controversy Over Trump Cases
| American Patriot
Read more at https://libertyonenews.com/jack-smith-resigns-as-special-counsel-amid-controversy-over-trump-cases/
Jack Smith, the controversial special counsel tasked with investigating former President Donald Trump’s attempts to challenge the 2020 election, has officially stepped down. His resignation comes just weeks before President-elect Trump is set to take office, sparking heated debates over the legitimacy of the cases brought against Trump and their broader implications for justice in America.
Conservative commentator Mark Levin, host of LevinTV, was quick to weigh in, calling Smith’s resignation both predictable and overdue. Levin minced no words in his criticism, declaring that Smith’s departure underscores the collapse of the legal efforts aimed at Trump. “You know why? It’s simple. He’s an unconstitutional prosecutor. Donald Trump’s going to fire his ass,” Levin said.
Levin argued that the cases against Trump were doomed from the start, pointing to internal Department of Justice (DOJ) memos and procedural violations. He highlighted the dismissal of one of Smith’s cases in Florida as a clear sign of their instability.
Levin accused the DOJ and Smith of pursuing Trump with the sole intent of derailing his political career. He claimed this approach not only violated DOJ policies but also undermined the integrity of the judicial system.
Smith’s cases focused primarily on Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, actions Levin described as entirely lawful and historically common.
Levin highlighted past instances where election challenges were not only permitted but celebrated by political leaders. He cited Al Gore’s legal battle in Florida during the 2000 presidential race and efforts in Minnesota that ultimately handed Al Franken a Senate seat.
Smith’s resignation has fueled speculation about its timing, particularly given Trump’s imminent return to power. Critics argue that Smith’s exit may be an attempt to avoid the embarrassment of being fired by the incoming administration or to shield himself from further scrutiny. Supporters of Trump see this as vindication of their belief that the legal cases against him were politically motivated and lacked substance. Levin emphasized that the abrupt nature of Smith’s departure only reinforces this narrative.
Smith’s resignation is part of a larger debate over the role of the justice system in political matters. Critics argue that targeting Trump for challenging the 2020 election has set a dangerous precedent, effectively criminalizing actions that were previously considered routine aspects of political contests. As Smith steps aside, attention shifts to how Trump’s incoming administration will handle the fallout. Levin and others are urging Trump’s attorney general to launch investigations into the motivations and conduct behind Smith’s cases, with some calling for accountability measures to restore public trust in the justice system.
For Trump, Smith’s resignation marks a significant victory, further energizing his supporters and reinforcing his narrative of political persecution. Yet it also raises questions about how his administration will navigate the legal and political challenges that remain.
The stage is set for a dramatic showdown as Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, with Smith’s resignation serving as a powerful symbol of the broader battles yet to come.
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