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Biden White House Hounded Facebook to Censor Tucker Carlson, New Emails Show


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 10, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/10/biden-white-house-hounded-facebook-to-censor-tucker-carlson-new-emails-show/

Tucker Carlson giving a speech at Turning Point USA event
The Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to newly released White House emails.

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President Joe Biden’s administration actively pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to internal White House communication records obtained by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.

In an email dated April 14, 2021, then-senior adviser to the president’s Covid response team, Andrew Slavitt, voiced dissatisfaction to a Facebook official that a video of Carlson questioning the left’s universal demand that people get the Covid jab was “Number one” on the platform, to which said official responded that they’d look into the matter. Later that same day, the Facebook representative informed the White House that while the “Tucker Carlson video does not qualify for removal under [Facebook’s] policies,” the company would label the clip with “a pointer to more authoritative COVID information” and work to limit its reach on the platform.

Facebook’s efforts did not meet the administration’s demands for greater censorship, however. In response to the representative, White House Director of Digital Strategy Robert Flaherty questioned how Carlson’s video didn’t violate Facebook’s existing policies and pressured the company to turn over information on the efficacy of its censorship practices.

“How was this not violative? The second half of the segment is raising conspiracy theories about the government hiding that all vaccines aren’t effective,” Flaherty claimed. “Moreover, you say reduced and demoted. What does that mean? There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many? How effective is that?”

“Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection,” Flaherty added in an apparent reference to the platform’s handling of claims pertaining to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and subsequent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But the Biden White House’s habit of using Big Tech to silence dissenting voices on Covid-related information didn’t just stop at Carlson. A separate batch of emails released by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general reveals a concentrated endeavor between the administration and Facebook to reduce the “virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” even if such posts contained factually accurate information.

“As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation,” a Facebook representative told Slavitt in a March 21, 2021, email. “This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level … but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking. We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”

In addition to Facebook, Twitter was also a major player in the collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech to further squash free speech online. In an email dated August 11, 2022, Flaherty admonished Twitter for allowing posts contradicting White House claims to circulate on the platform, writing that “if your product is appending misinformation to our tweets[,] that seems like a pretty fundamental issue.”

Flaherty separately accused Twitter in a December 2021 email of “Total Calvinball” and “bending over backwards” to tolerate disfavored speech after the company refused to comply with demands from the administration to censor a video.

“This case is about the Biden Administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with social media companies [to] suppress speech it disagrees with,” said Missouri AG Andrew Bailey in a statement. “I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek to indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”

The bombshell emails come as a result of an investigation launched last year by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and then-Missouri AG and now-U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt to uncover collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech companies to censor Covid-related posts they deemed misinformation. In addition to obtaining communication records unveiling such corruption, the investigation has scored numerous legal wins allowing Louisiana and Missouri to depose high-ranking administration officials such as Anthony Fauci under oath about their role in these efforts.

According to a transcript of Fauci’s November testimony, the man claiming to “represent science” somehow couldn’t recall relevant information about his role in the federal government’s disastrous Covid response “at least 174 times.” The deposition ranged from topics such as Fauci’s bid to smear authors of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” to his role in attempting to “discredit any theory” that Covid resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves 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

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The End of Title 42 Caps the Worst Year for Illegal Immigration in U.S. History


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | DECEMBER 14, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/14/the-end-of-title-42-caps-the-worst-year-for-illegal-immigration-in-u-s-history/

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The Biden administration has no plan for what to do beginning next week when it loses the ability to quickly expel illegal immigrants.

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As the year winds down, the border is about to break wide open. In less than a week, the Biden administration’s last remaining tool to control illegal immigration, left over from the Trump administration, will be taken away.

Title 42, the public-health order invoked by President Trump during the pandemic that allowed immigration officials to quickly expel most migrants caught crossing the border illegally, will end on Dec. 21 by order of a federal judge. Once Title 42 is gone, federal agencies at the border will have no choice but to process and release nearly every illegal border-crosser. It will represent a full return to the Obama-era “catch-and-release” policy. Border Patrol estimates they could see as many as 14,000 arrests per day in the coming weeks, which would totally overwhelm the border.

For migrants, there is now every incentive to do just that. Word of Title 42’s demise has almost certainly reached migrants in Mexico already, who now know that if they cross the Rio Grande, they will be allowed to remain in the United States, with work authorization, for years while they await the outcome of an asylum hearing.

Biden, who repealed or severely curtailed nearly every one of Trump’s border policies upon taking office in January 2021, has no plan for what to do now. Axios reported this week on a vague plan circulating among Biden officials for a temporary (five-month) moratorium on asylum, but the plan hasn’t been approved. It’s unclear how it would even be implemented with less than a week to go before Title 42 ends.

But even if the feds do impose a temporary halt to asylum, it’s too late. Thousands of migrants are crossing into the El Paso sector every day now, many of them having been bussed into Ciudad Juárez by the Mexican government. They are coming from large caravans that, having heard of the impending end of Title 42, formed for precisely this purpose.

Many of them are from Nicaragua, which means they can’t be deported to Nicaragua (the U.S. has no deportation agreement with the authoritarian dictatorship of Nicaragua’s president-for-life Daniel Ortega), and they can’t be expelled to Mexico, which refuses to take back Nicaraguans. So, the U.S. is just letting them in, giving them a court date for an asylum hearing years from now, and releasing them. Never mind that many of these migrants, by their own admission to reporters, are economic migrants who have no valid asylum claims.

Back in August, my colleague Emily Jashinsky and I reported on the migrant encampments and shelters in the Mexican border towns of Matamoros and Reynosa across the Rio Grande from Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, respectively. Most of those migrants were Haitian, although they had been living in various South American countries for years, with legal status. They came to the border for a chance to get into the U.S. and pursue what one of them told us was “the American dream, a dream for all Haitian people.”

The reason so many had been waiting in Mexican shelters was that they feared being deported back to Haiti, where they hadn’t lived in many years, or because they had already tried to cross and been expelled back to Mexico under Title 42. They could not afford to pay the cartels for multiple river crossings, and so they were waiting, they told us, for U.S. policy to change.

Their wait is almost over. Once the threat of expulsion under Title 42 is gone, there will be little to hold them back. The border will become a chaotic, ungovernable disaster. We will likely see the appearance of tent-like refugee camps on the U.S. side of the border, as we saw in Del Rio, Texas, in the fall of 2021. To put the figure of 14,000 arrests per day into context, three years ago, during the 2019 border surge, President Obama’s DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson, said that 1,000 apprehensions a day “overwhelms” the system and that he “cannot imagine” what 4,000 arrests per day would look like.

2022 was the worst year for illegal immigration in U.S. history. 2023 will be worse yet. As long as the Biden administration maintains its open-border policies, illegal immigration will increase, the cartels that profit from migrant smuggling will get rich, and the border will descend into chaos.

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. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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EXCLUSIVE: Investigation Reveals White House Press Corps Is 12 To 1 Democrat


REPORTED BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JULY 06, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/06/exclusive-investigation-reveals-white-house-press-corps-12-to-1-democrat/

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‘No matter how you cut it, the White House briefing room does not look, sound, or register to vote like America,’ Fleischer wrote.

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Research for a new book out next week reveals an implicit bias present throughout the White House press corps: Reporters attending in-person briefings rank 12:1 Democrat to Republican.

In “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias: Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong―And Just Doesn’t Care,” Fox News Contributor and former Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer unearths the political affiliations of those present at a White House briefing on June 7, 2021.

“Every seat was filled for the first time in over a year as the social distancing rules resulting from the COVID pandemic were relaxed,” Fleischer wrote in an excerpt shared exclusively with The Federalist. “By a ratio of 12:1, the seats were occupied by Democrats!”

Fleischer drew upon research solicited by the D.C.-based investigative firm Delve, which combed through publicly available data.

“I guess the good news is that the ratio wasn’t 24:0, like it was during my encounters with students at Columbia Journalism School. It was only 12:1,” Fleischer wrote. “No matter how you cut it, the White House briefing room does not look, sound, or register to vote like America.”

Towson University tenured Professor Richard Vatz, who specializes in political persuasion and rhetoric, told The Federalist that Fleischer’s discovery “echoes findings over many decades.”

“In major media survey after major media survey [1962-1996, journalists of ‘national media,’ ‘Washington Press Corps,’ etc., were found to be overwhelmingly liberal, and in poll after poll they voted for Democrats,” Vatz said.

Vatz cited a 1982 survey from the State University of California at Los Angeles which polled 1,000 journalists across 50 daily newspapers and found that only 25 percent of those interviewed voted for then-President Ronald Reagan. More than a decade later, a 1995 joint study from the University of Colorado’s Media Studies Center and Cornell University’s Roper Center surveyed “Washington-based bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents” and found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Only 7 percent reported voting for George H.W. Bush, and 2 percent for Ross Perot. Half identified as Democrats, and only 4 percent Republican.

“America would be well served to have a robust press corps representing different outlets, considerations, and, most of all, questions for the president on down,” Curtis Houck, the managing editor of Newsbusters at the Media Research Center told The Federalist. “Having watched press briefings for the last six years, it’s no surprise that the White House press corps tilt left as, along with a built-in geographical bias living in a far-left city, they have zero perspective or belief that their mindset might be wrong and/or self-serving.”

Steve Krakauer, another media critic and author of the Fourth Watch newsletter, also told The Federalist that the media’s geographic bias embedded in the Acela Corridor is a key variable when evaluating press corps perspectives.

“On the face of it, political affiliations of these reporters don’t necessarily connect to problems with their coverage, or invalidate their coverage,” Krakauer said, while conceding the media has leaned left for decades. Krakauer argued, however, that the media’s left-wing bent has grown far worse over the past seven to eight years driven primarily by geographic bias and a visceral reaction to Donald Trump. The press, Krakauer said, has begun to allow personal perspectives to infect their reporting with the belief that, “well, there’s a higher mission here. Now we have to save democracy.”

“It’s changed not because affiliations have changed in that room but because of how they’ve allowed their biases and their points of view to seep into their coverage in ways that never did nearly as much in Ari’s time,” Krakauer said.

Vatz said the partisan makeup of the White House press corps unfairly skews what the media offers nationwide attention.

“The effect on media coverage is that certain topics in major media do not even get covered if they rebound to Republican advantage, and when pro-conservative-interest topics do get covered, they are spun negatively,” Vatz told The Federalist.

Vatz highlighted the corporate coverage of last week’s “star witness” before the House Committee on Jan. 6 who made a series of uncorroborated allegations related to Trump’s conduct the day of the Capitol riot. Trump, former White House aid Cassidy Hutchinson claimed based on third-hand hearsay, attempted to hijack the presidential limousine and drive himself to the Capitol by assaulting a Secret Service agent.

“ABC Evening News did not even mention,” Vatz said, “that the Secret Service had indicated that President Trump did not grab the steering wheel and lunge at agents in ‘The Beast,’” after agents told reporters they were prepared to go under oath refuting Hutchinson’s claims.

Vatz’s analysis was backed up by a report from Houck at the Media Research Center. Analyzing network coverage the morning after Hutchinson testified, Houck found, “ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, and NBC’s Today spent four minutes and 42 seconds on Hutchinson’s claim, but only two minutes and 33 seconds on the pushback from her colleagues and the Secret Service, including offers from the latter to have the agents involved testify under oath that none of that was true.”

While Trump dealt with a hostile press corps that turned daily coronavirus press conferences into sparring matches over whether the term “Chinese coronavirus” was racist, President Joe Biden has enjoyed far friendlier treatment. Biden’s rare press conferences have been full of soft-ball questions from pre-selected reporters who’ve given the White House little grief for keeping the president away from the media. Data from the American Presidency Project show Biden is one of the least accessible presidents in modern American history, having conducted only 16 total press conferences since taking office last year, including nine alone and seven as joint affairs.

Trust in the media, meanwhile, has collapsed to a new low, according to Gallup. In its latest survey findings on institutional trust released on Tuesday, Gallup reported that just 16 percent of Americans trust “newspapers” with a 30-point gap between Republicans and Democrats. Thirty-five percent of Democrats said they maintained a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, which is still a three percent drop from last year, while only 5 percent of Republicans said the same.

“As to what could make the field of reporters more diverse, it is very simple,” Vatz told The Federalist. “Pressure the president of each news organization to insist on disinterest coverage — there is some evidence that this is beginning at CNN, for example, but it could happen at the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere as well.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. 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.

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Biden State Dept. increases number of Americans left behind in Afghanistan


Reported By Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor| Monday, October 25, 2021

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/biden-state-dept-200-americans-still-left-behind-in-afghanistan.html/

Taliban
Taliban fighters atop vehicles with Taliban flags parade along a road to celebrate after the US pulled all its troops out of Afghanistan, in Kandahar on September 1, 2021 following the Talibans military takeover of the country. | JAVED TANVEER/AFP via Getty Images

The Biden administration, which had been saying for weeks that the number of Americans still left behind in Afghanistan and urgently want to be evacuated was about 100, has now increased the number to about 200. State Department spokesman Ned Price said last week that while the U.S. airlifted out dozens of people in the past couple days, more people had come forward in recent weeks expressing a desire to leave and the number is somewhere between 100 and 200, The Washington Times reported.

Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, criticized the Biden administration.

“For weeks, their official number was ‘about a hundred’ and it magically never changed — as Americans slowly got out the total number never went down. Now they say more than 300 Americans are still in Afghanistan,” Sasse was quoted as saying.

The number quoted by Sasse includes Americans who, according to the State Department, haven’t said they want to leave. Price, however, claimed that the “proven ability” of the U.S. in airlifting people out is behind the higher number of people wanting to flee.

Following the drawing down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban quickly seized control of much of the country, taking the capital Kabul in August and forcing the government to flee. Afghanistan’s interim government includes more than a dozen leaders who are designated terrorists and ex-Guantanamo detainees.

Meanwhile, Aman Khalili, an Afghan interpreter who helped rescue Biden in 2008, when he was a senator, after a helicopter he and other senators were riding on had to make an emergency landing in Afghanistan, was able to escape earlier this month. U.S. veterans worked with former Afghan soldiers and Pakistani allies to help Khalili cross the border into Pakistan with his family, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“Aman helped keep me and other Americans safe while we were fighting in Afghanistan, and we wanted to return the favor,” said Brian Genthe, a combat veteran, was quoted as saying. “He’s a blessing.”

Last month, the Taliban declared they will carry out executions and other brutal punishments, including amputations, under Islamic Sharia law as part of their rule in Afghanistan.

“Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security,” Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, a member of the Taliban’s interim government and chief enforcer of the group’s strict interpretation of Sharia law, told The Associated Press. “Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments. No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”

Turabi, who is under U.N. sanctions, also said the new government may consider carrying out such punishments in public. The Taliban have banned all demonstrations and have violently cracked down on protests, including beating women and killing demonstrators. The Taliban are arresting, and in some instances executing, people they perceive as their enemies, Christian missionary David Eubank, a former U.S. Army Special Forces and Ranger officer, said in an earlier interview with CBN News. Eubank also said recent photos and video suggest they’re killing as many as 30 to 40 people at a time.

“They [the Taliban] are hunting down people right now, trying to get all the names of anyone they perceive as an enemy,” Eubank said, adding that the enemies include “people who work with the U.S. government, people who are with other governments, people who work with nongovernmental organizations they don’t agree with.”

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Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Message To Concerned Parents Is Clear: Shut Up Or Else


Reported By John Daniel Davidson | OCTOBER 22, 2021

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/22/attorney-general-merrick-garlands-message-to-concerned-parents-is-clear-shut-up-or-else/

What do you call it when the country’s largest school board association secretly coordinates with the Biden White House before issuing a formal request that the administration use the FBI to investigate dissenting parents as potential “domestic terrorists,” and then, five days later, the Justice Department issues a memorandum to the FBI to do just that?

The old-fashioned word for it is corruption — corruption of our institutions, the rule of law, the administration of justice, the separation of powers. It is also an egregious abuse of power on the part of the Biden administration, which apparently has no qualms about calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland when the president’s political allies need a little muscle.

In a contentious congressional hearing on Thursday, Garland confirmed that the basis of his Oct. 4 memorandum, which directed the FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices to launch a task force to combat what Garland called a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” was a letter that the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent to the White House on Sept. 29.

That is, Garland’s evidence that there’s a “disturbing spike” in these kinds of threats is the NSBA letter itself, which was produced after weeks of collaboration with Biden’s White House. This is the same letter in which the NSBA urged the Biden administration to use tools like the Patriot Act to target parents who show up at school board meetings to complain about mask mandates and critical race theory curricula, as if they were “domestic terrorists.”

Incredibly, the news about NSBA’s collusion with the White House broke while Garland was testifying Thursday. During his testimony, Garland insisted that, the NSBA letter notwithstanding, he “can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children,” nor any circumstance in which those instances “would be labeled as domestic terrorism.”

We are left to understand then, that the role Garland envisions for the DOJ in all of this is — what? His memo cites no instances of violence or threats of violence against school board members, and Garland himself admitted before Congress that the basis of his memo was the NSBA letter.

But the vast majority of incidents cited in the NSBA letter didn’t involve attacks or threats of any kind. A few cases involved local law enforcement, but nothing cited in the letter comes close to “domestic terrorism” or anything that would justify the involvement of the FBI or the DOJ. For the most part, the letter cited cases in which parents disrupted school board meetings by protesting, often because they were not given an opportunity to speak out on issues that directly affect the education of their children.

The letter of course didn’t cite instances where school board members have threatened parents, Like this one:

To be clear, the DOJ has no role whatsoever in policing the interactions of parents and local school boards. Whatever happens at those meetings, however contentious they might get, they are entirely under the purview of local and state authorities. For Garland to even suggest that federal prosecutors might get involved is itself a scandal and an egregious abuse of power.

That’s what this is really all about. Set aside the details of the machinations between the Biden White House and the NSBA and the DOJ. What it comes down to is a coordinated effort by the left — including the most powerful law enforcement official in the country, the attorney general — to intimidate parents into silence.

Want to show up and speak out at your local school board meeting? Maybe hold a protest sign in the parking lot? Well then, you might just get a knock on your door from the FBI. Better think twice about that.

These are parents who have every right, by God and the U.S. Constitution, strenuously to voice their opposition to mask mandates, critical race theory, transgender ideology, and all the other nonsense that woke school boards and teachers are trying to foist on their kids. In fact they have a duty to do so.

But instead of listening to the concerns of such parents, the top brass at the NSBA decided to call in a political favor to the White House, which in turn let loose the Justice Department. Through it all, the corporate media executed a PR campaign on behalf of Biden and the school boards.

And why are they trying to intimidate parents into silence? Because when all’s said and done, the leftist ideologues who sit on school boards, work in the White House, and push paper for Garland’s Justice Department don’t want parents to have a say in how public schools are run and what children are taught. As far as they’re concerned, your children don’t belong to you, and their education is not your concern.

The message from the left is clear: comply, stay quiet, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll leave you alone. For now.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

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REPORT: British Military Rescuing ‘Anyone Left Behind’ in Afghanistan After Biden’s Withdrawal


posted by Hannity Staff – 10.18.21

Read more at https://hannity.com/media-room/report-british-military-rescuing-anyone-left-behind-in-afghanistan-after-bidens-withdrawal/

A new report from Emily Miller now reveals the British Military is rescuing “anyone left behind” in Afghanistan following Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from the region.

“The British are saving their comrades in arms from Afghanistan. Pres. Biden won’t even rescue American citizens left behind. The Royal Air Force (RAF) this week started flying combat interpreters to safety. Biden refuses to use the assets of the U.S. military. Instead, he tasked the State Department to use diplomacy s to convince the Taliban to let people leave. Biden’s policy has been a total failure,” writes Miller.

“The UK military is rescuing hundreds of its Afghan combat interpreters, according to an exclusive report in The Telegraph. They plan to spend several weeks rescuing the Afghans who worked side-by-side with British military during the 20-year war,” she adds.

“It’s shameful that these men who are loyal to the United States are hiding from the Taliban, while those who worked with British forces are flying to safety. Biden has to take action and use military flights to rescue people,” concludes the journalist.

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Lawmakers from both parties ‘angrily stormed out’ of classified Afghanistan briefing after Biden admin refused to answer ‘basic’ questions: report


Reported by PHIL SHIVER | September 23, 2021

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/lawmakers-storm-out-of-biden-admin-afghanistan-briefing/

Multiple lawmakers from both parties “angrily stormed out” of a classified briefing on Afghanistan this week after Biden administration officials failed to answer simple questions about its ongoing evacuation efforts, CNN reported. Citing three anonymous sources, the network said that both Republican and Democratic members of Congress “grew frustrated” after officials from the State Department, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and Office of the Director of National Security “failed to answer their basic questions.”

The walkout reportedly occurred during a Wednesday morning briefing for members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Though CNN did not specify the exact questioning, the report seemed to note the frustration revolved around the administration’s failure to offer precise information regarding the number of American citizens who still remain in Afghanistan following the U.S. military’s official withdrawal last month.

A day after the last U.S. plane departed Afghanistan on Aug. 30, President Biden said in a speech to the American public that “about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave.” Since then, the administration has continued to say that roughly 100 Americans still remain in the now Taliban-controlled country.

But some lawmakers said “they do not understand that accounting, given the department has said that they evacuated more than 75 Americans from Afghanistan through evacuation efforts in the last few weeks,” CNN reported.

In any case, the administration has apparently been vague and imprecise with its information both in public addresses and in private meetings with lawmakers.

Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, confirmed to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday that “everybody walked out” of the intelligence briefing earlier that day. He added that either the administration is “not being transparent” or officials don’t “know the answer to that question” regarding the number of Americans still stranded.

“The fact is, I believe there’s still hundreds of Americans still left behind enemy lines. The majority of the interpreters that you and I talked about for so long did not get out,” McCaul said. “And now we’re getting reports of executions, beheadings of their families and themselves, horrific stories.”

“I don’t think they know all the answers, quite honestly,” he declared of the administration.

In response to a request for comment, a State Department spokesperson told CNN that “as a general matter, we do not comment on communications with Congress, especially those conducted in a classified setting.”

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Wallace B. Henley Op-ed: Who is sitting in the gates with Biden?


Commentary By Wallace B. Henley, Exclusive Columnist| Wednesday, September 01, 2021

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/who-is-sitting-in-the-gates-with-biden.html/

One gets the disconcerting sensation that leadership is absent from the gates of the nation.

“I’m not supposed to take any questions,” said the president recently at FEMA headquarters as he was briefed on actions to help those slammed by Hurricane Ida.

Wallace Henley
Wallace Henley, former Senior Associate Pastor of 2nd Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. | Photo by Scott Belin

A Fox News writer noted, “President Joe Biden has repeatedly implied that his handlers set the rules and determine when and where he’s allowed to take questions from the press, leading observers to ponder who is actually calling the shots behind the scenes.”[1]

And who is telling the president which reporters to call on at press conferences?

White House staffs often suffer the delusion that the voters elected them.

It is the way of hubris, and there is hardly a greater bastion of hubris than the White House. Every time presidents forget this, they vacate their seat in the gates and give it to the bureaucracy.

However, it takes a strong president to tell the gate-usurpers to get out of the way.

A wise leader will give due consideration to the advice of his or her staff. But a foolish leader loses functional leadership when he or she becomes a sycophant of aides, assistants, counselors, cabinet officers, functionaries, and all the other animals who inhabit the zoo of big agencies — the White House being the biggest animal house of all.

When the leader hands over his or her place in the gates to the functionaries, the Don Beard maxim becomes true. Don and his wife, Mary Kay, were important players in the founding, with Charles Colson, of Prison Fellowship. Both had served prison time, and both were thoroughly converted followers of Jesus Christ. They served with me in two churches where I was pastor.

Don had seen chaos in prisons he had inhabited, and, when things got wild in any institutional setting, would say, “the inmates are running this place.” Then he would turn serious, pointing out the need for strong leadership to arise and manage the situation.

Sadly, the Biden White House “inmates” seemed to have seized the gates of leadership, and the president has become the sycophant rather than the superior. If this be the case, there is chaos in the gates. Biblical history shows that whatever happens in the gates of leadership, for good and bad, determines what happens in the city, and what happens in the city dictates what happens in the nation.

The gates always are up for grabs. A Darwinian strain constantly runs through places of great power like the White House, in which the survival of the fittest becomes a wrestling match, or a shoving contest to see who can snuggle up closest to the president in the gates.

On top of all the other crises America faces, now comes this threatening issue about who controls the president. Who really sits in the gates of the nation at this precarious moment?

As I noted in a previous column, cities, in antiquity, were to be sanctuaries of order. They were walled off from the chaos outside. Mighty gates maintained the order of the city. But everything depended on who occupied the gates, and what they were willing, or could be bribed and cajoled to allow in. According to Isaiah 14, Lucifer’s aim is to “overthrow cities” to achieve his goal of bringing chaos to the world. That assault works its way incrementally through institutions crucial for the cosmos-order of society — families, churches, schools, businesses, civil governments right up to the White House itself.

To fend off the assault on the gates by hubristic bit-players, a leader must discern the pretentious from the principled advice that should be heeded. That leader must give attention to the character he invites into the gates with him or her because, as Proverbs 29:8 (MSG) puts it, “A gang of cynics can upset a whole city; a group of sages can calm everyone down.”

As a low-level presidential aide in the Nixon White House, I had the privilege of serving under two “sages.” One was Harry S. Dent, who at one point had been in Nixon’s inner circle. However, Harry ultimately found himself banished from that elite group. He later found the reason was because senior people said Harry was “too much of a ‘Boy Scout’.”

After leaving the White House, Harry, an able lawyer, went to Bible College, and became the leader of the Billy Graham Center in North Carolina. Harry was a “sage” and Nixon’s presidency might have been saved had the president insisted Harry was going to sit in the “gates.”

I also worked under the leadership of another great Washington “sage” — Dr. George Shultz. Our team had been charged by the president to help school systems in 11 southern states implement the largest school desegregation in history. Emotions were intense, chaos threatened, violence loomed. I traveled with Shultz in those states as he gave counsel to leaders in government, business, and education. I watched his wise and calm guidance put cooling streams on blistering landscapes. And by the way, school systems in all 11 states were peacefully integrated in the fall of 1970.

Richard Nixon had been smart enough to pull George Schultz into the gates of power with him.

Joe Biden, as any president, must seek good counsel, but because of his issues with aging — whether merely perceived or actual — he does need wise advisors, and he needs to be able to discern the hubristic from the truly humble public servants.

Pray that he will surround himself with “a group of sages.”

[1] Biden repeatedly implies he’s not in charge of when, where he can take questions from the press | Fox News

Wallace B. Henley’s fifty-year career has spanned newspaper journalism, government in both White House and Congress, the church, and academia. He is author or co-author of more than 20 books. He is a teaching pastor at Grace Church, the Woodlands, Texas.

For media inquiries, contact:  ChristianPost@pinkston.co

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White House attacks GOP Govs. Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott: Mitigate dangerous Delta spike or ‘get out of the way’


Reported by SARAH TAYLOR | August 04, 2021

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/white-house-attacks-ron-desantis-greg-abbott-delta-spike/

White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued scathing advice to Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis (Fla.) and Greg Abbott (Texas): Get control of the Delta variant in your states or “get out of the way.” Both of the Republican leaders have been outspoken in their opposition to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s newly updated guidelines recommending universal masking in schools and high-transmission areas.

A Wednesday report from Yahoo! News detailed Psaki’s Tuesday press briefing from the White House, as COVID-19 case counts in Florida and Texas have risen to the point that they currently account for one-third of all infections across the United States. Psaki, who insisted that the Biden administration has offered assistance to both governors to get the spread under control, appeared to suggest that the states’ leaders have yet to accept the White House’s help.

“But if you aren’t going to help, if you aren’t going to abide by public health guidance, then get out of the way and let people do the right thing to lead in their communities, whether they are teachers, university leaders, or private sector leaders or others who are trying to save lives,” she said Tuesday in response to the questions about the rising confirmed COVID-19 case numbers in both Florida and Texas.

The outlet added, “Asked to clarify what she meant by having the two governors ‘get out of the way,’ Psaki elaborated, ‘That means don’t ban, don’t make it harder for people to put requirements on masks — or asking for vaccination status — into law.”

She added, “Leaders are going to have to choose whether they’re going to follow public health guidelines or they’re going to follow politics.”

Elsewhere in her Tuesday remarks, Psaki said that President Joe Biden would likely speak directly to DeSantis about the state’s rising COVID-19 numbers — but only if they “thought it would make a difference.”

“But I don’t have any expectation or prediction of a call between them,” she hastily added.

In a statement on Psaki’s remarks, the DeSantis administration said:

She might want to brush up on the Constitution and learn more about the role of a state governor. As it turns out, freedom matters. Every day, nearly a thousand Americans relocate to Florida — mostly fleeing from the ever-changing, contradictory COVID restrictions pushed by federal bureaucrats on lockdown states. By contrast, Governor DeSantis keeps up with the latest research and makes data-driven decisions. If he had ‘gotten out of the way’ as Psaki suggested, and let the CDC run our state, many of those lives might have been lost — as we saw with the tragic situation in New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where the age-adjusted death rates are significantly higher than in Florida.

A spokesperson for the Abbott administration in Texas has yet to issue public remark on Psaki’s admonitions.

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White House asks reporters to submit questions ahead of daily press briefings: ‘Not really a free press’


President Joe Biden’s administration apparently does not want to be caught off guard with tough questions by the media during its press briefings. According to the Daily Beast, Biden’s communications department has requested that reporters submit their questions to the White House staff in advance of press secretary Jen Psaki’s daily briefings, presumably to avoid being scrutinized by reporters with difficult questions.

The issue was reportedly discussed during a White House Correspondents Association meeting last Friday. Reporters are allegedly upset over the White House’s request, fearing it plays into the perception of coordination between the West Wing and media.

“That’s not really a free press at all,” one White House reporter said, according to the Daily Beast.

“While it’s a relief to see briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information, the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” the reporter added.

Indeed, WHCA leaders instructed to reporters to either “push back” against the requests or not comply altogether.

In contrast to the Trump administration, which jettisoned daily White House press briefings almost completely, Biden and his communications team promised to restore the daily briefings and have thus far delivered on that promise.

Biden’s administration claimed that asking reporters for their questions ahead of time is not an attempt to dodge questions, but rather to understand the pulse of reporting on any given day.

“Our goal is to make the daily briefing as useful and informative as possible for both reporters and the public,” a spokesperson told the Daily Beast. “Part of meeting that objective means regularly engaging with the reporters who will be in the briefing room to understand how the White House can be most helpful in getting them the information they need. That two-way conversation is an important part of keeping the American people updated about how government is serving them.”

Meanwhile, Eric Schultz, who served as a deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, claimed the Biden communication team’s request is fairly normal, allowing staff adequate time to prepare for the daily briefing.

“This is textbook communications work. The briefing becomes meaningless if the press secretary has to repeatedly punt questions, instead of coming equipped to discuss what journalists are reporting on,” Schultz told the Daily Beast. “In a non-COVID environment, this would happen in casual conversations throughout the day in lower and upper press. One of the few upsides to reporters hovering over your desk all day, is that you get a very quick sense of what they’re working on.”

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