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It’s Looking Ever More Likely That Jan. 6 Was A Fedsurrection

BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

Author Auguste Meyrat profile

AUGUSTE MEYRAT

VISIT ON TWITTER@MEYRATAUGUSTE

Few incidents in recent history are as poorly understood as the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Ever since it happened, the Biden administration and the corporate media have pushed the narrative that this was an insurrection by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and destroy American democracy. They have compared this event to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and even the Civil War. Accordingly, the Department of Justice has spared no expense to bring in each and every offender (there are now more than a thousand of them awaiting trial) and indict and convict their ringleader Trump.

However, several cracks in this story have started to appear. In last week’s hearing with the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted his ignorance on whether there were federal agents in the crowds on Jan. 6. In a closed-door session with the same committee, Steven D’Antuono, former assistant director-in-charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, allegedly conceded that he lost count of the number of confidential human sources who joined the protest.

One of those informants was almost certainly Ray Epps, a man who was caught on camera urging other protesters to storm the Capitol. While Garland and D’Antuono played dumb in their testimony, Epps was finally charged with a mere misdemeanor despite his prominent role in provoking the riot. This stood in stark contrast to Enrique Torrio, someone who wasn’t even in Washington, D.C., that day who was sentenced to 22 years in prison just a few weeks earlier, or the hundreds of other protesters with similar sentences.

Added to this is the incoherent response of the Capitol Police. On one hand, they were happily ushering certain protesters into the building, even giving some of them a tour, including “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley. On the other hand, they used excessive force against other protesters, hitting them with rubber bullets and tear gas and beating them down with riot sticks— and in the case of Ashli Babbit, shooting them dead at point-blank range.

The implications of these reports are massive. Altogether, they strongly suggest that the federal government deliberately egged on a riot to silence any discussions about the 2020 election, crush Trump’s populist movement, and cast Trump as a dangerous tyrant. Along with the police, at least “a handful,” but probably more like dozens of (or possibly many more) informants and undercover agents from various government agencies were in the crowd goading otherwise innocent Americans to become violent and breach the Capitol. And now, these protesters are being denied due process rights and sentenced by psychopath judges to ridiculously long prison sentences in kangaroo courts.

[READ: J6 Prosecutor Charged In Road Rage Stabbing Incident]

In other words, much like the plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been labeled a “Fednapping plot” since the whole scheme was directed by FBI agents entrapping unsuspecting civilians, the Jan. 6 Capitol attack can fairly be considered a “Fedsurrection” for the same reason. How would events have unfolded if government agencies had not inserted themselves in the protest? Or if certain high-level politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually allowed extra security instead of denying it multiple times?

It’s not hard to see why journalists and writers avoid entertaining this possibility. Beyond exposing the unfathomable depths of government corruption, the story itself is so vast and hopelessly complicated that no one can find an end to it. Julie Kelly, the premier expert of the Jan. 6 riot, has devoted a whole book and hundreds of articles (and now a Substack) to the event and is still going strong detailing the innumerable injustices being inflicted on the protesters. Although a few other journalists have joined in the effort to investigate Jan. 6, almost everyone else has understandably distanced themselves from the story — it’s just too much.

Added to this is the preference of many Americans, both on the left and right, to believe a narrative that reinforces a certain classist prejudice. Somehow, it makes perfect sense to them that a raucous crowd of uneducated rednecks would storm the Capitol in the hopes of making their cult-leader Donald Trump a supreme dictator of the country. Sure, these same people were unarmed and the great majority of them had no criminal record. And true, it’s unclear how walking around a building and waving flags would overturn the election, let alone impose an antidemocratic Trumpocracy. One might even say this story makes about as much sense as Trump being a Russian agent who stole the election with some Facebook ads. Then again, many people continue to believe this hoax despite all evidence to the contrary.

However one feels about it, the Jan. 6 riot happened and the prosecutions continue to happen. For any American who still believes in the system it is well past time to come to terms with this reality for a few reasons. First, there are hundreds of innocent Americans wasting away in prison (also known as the “DC Gulag”) who are subjected to terrible living conditions, all because they dared to speak against the regime.

Second, the federal agencies and departments responsible for putting those people there have faced no scrutiny or any check on their power — on the contrary, most politicians seem happy giving them more money.

Third, the Biden administration is still using the narrative of Jan. 6 to shut down his political opponents. Fourth, because most news media and Big Tech platforms are allowed to gaslight people on this issue, there is nothing to stop them from doing the same for every other matter.

Beyond this, all Americans should worry about the tyranny at work and what this means for the country. If the government can stoke a riot to target dissidents and fabricate a bogeyman (e.g., MAGA Republicans, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, etc.) to distract the population, then no American citizen is truly free. They have no choice except to parrot the party line, submit to an oppressive government, and desperately hope that the leviathan takes care of them.

In some ways, this outcome has already materialized, putting the country in a precarious position. It will only become worse until Americans of all political stripes (not just conservatives) speak up for the Jan. 6 protesters. What’s happening to them is not just wrong, but egregious. Whatever one thinks about what they were protesting, it cannot be denied that they have given up everything for their cause. The least we can do is give them our sympathy and uncover the truth about what happened.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.

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Biden Family Scandals Are So Much Bigger Than Hunter’s Hookers And Burisma Bribery

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 26, 2023

Joe Biden at his desk talking on the phone in black and white

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

When the New York Post broke the news that documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, the corporate media — to the extent they didn’t frame the story as Russian disinformation — pretended the reporting solely concerned Hunter Biden’s personal life. The scandal, however, was never about Hunter’s sordid sex life and history of drug abuse. Rather, it concerned Joe Biden’s abuse of power as vice president for financial gain. But now it reaches much further — including 10 distinct scandals.

Saturated in Scandal

1. The Many (Uncharged) Crimes of Hunter Biden

While the current scandals swirling around the laptop are unrelated to Hunter Biden’s sex life or drug abuse, the president’s son features in the first scandal: Evidence indicates Hunter Biden committed numerous crimes, including felonies. Evidence suggests Hunter Biden acted as an unregistered foreign agent for, at a minimum, Ukraine and China in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting suggests Hunter also accepted bribes from Burisma or alternatively helped extort $10 million from the Ukrainian oil and gas company for himself and his father.

IRS whistleblowers and federal prosecutors also believed the evidence supported multiple felony tax counts. Lying on a federal firearm application is a serious felony as well.

The evidence that the president’s son likely engaged in extensive criminal conduct for over a decade is a huge scandal, but it also bred a separate scandal: the DOJ and FBI’s efforts to protect him, No. 7 below.

2. Joe Biden’s Business Lie

Hunter Biden’s laptop also exposed the reality that Joe Biden lied to the American public, dating back to September 2019. During a campaign stop, the then-Democrat presidential candidate snapped at Fox News’ Peter Doocy, claiming: “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1175486006348460032?s=20

More than two years later, after The Washington Post and New York Times belatedly confirmed the authenticity of the emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, Doocy asked then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether “President Biden still maintains he never discussed overseas business deals with his son Hunter,” to which Psaki replied, “Yes.”

While Biden and his team stuck with that lie for two-plus years, his current press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is attempting to snuff out that scandal by reframing Biden’s denial. “I’ve been asked this question a million times. The answer is not going to change. The answer remains the same: The president was never in business with his son,” Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

Moving the goalposts won’t erase the lie.

3. Joe Biden’s Corruption

The much more serious scandal, however, concerns extensive evidence of Joe Biden’s widespread corruption. Bank and corporate records, suspicious activity reports, emails and text messages recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, travel records, reporting from a “highly credible” CHS, and testimony and expected testimony from Hunter Biden’s business partners indicate that Joe Biden, while vice president, exchanged political favors for payments to his family members — with a cut of the cash coming to the “Big Guy.”

People and/or organizations from Romania, Ukraine, Russia, and China, among others, all paid Biden-related business entities millions of dollars, with evidence indicating the now-president received a cut of the bribes. The evidence indicates that in exchange, the individuals received access to the then-vice president. In the case of Ukraine, Biden forced the firing of the prosecutor general who was investigating Burisma, the company where Hunter held a board seat and which allegedly paid Joe and Hunter Biden each $5 million in bribes.

The evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption is bad enough, but the scandal deepens when one considers the president has supplied Ukraine with cluster bombs and billions in American tax dollars.

Cover-Ups

While the first three scandals involve misconduct and likely criminality by Hunter and Joe Biden, there are at least twice as many distinct scandals that flow from cover-up efforts to protect the Bidens.

4. FBI’s Interference in the 2020 Election

By December 2019, the FBI had authenticated the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. Yet, knowing the laptop was real and contained spectacularly damaging details implicating Joe Biden in corruption, the FBI spent the months leading up to the November 2020 election grooming tech giants to believe a “hack-and-leak operation” was imminent. The FBI also pushed social media companies to change their terms of service to prohibit the posting of so-called hacked materials.

These combined efforts prompted social media companies to censor the New York Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 blockbuster article, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad.” After the story broke and after initially confirming its authenticity to Twitter, the FBI refused to comment on whether the material had been hacked or was Russian disinformation, leading to its continued widespread censorship. Not only did the FBI improperly protect Joe Biden and prompt the censorship of true political speech, it interfered in the 2020 election and likely handed Biden the White House.

5. Intelligence Agencies’ Interference in the 2020 Election

Former and current members of intelligence agencies soon joined the FBI in interfering in the 2020 election. The House Intelligence and Weaponization Committees previously detailed evidence of that interference in their report titled, “How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.”

That report established that the infamous October 2020 letter, which was signed by 51 former intelligence officials and falsely framed the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, was concocted by Biden-campaign officials, including now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who served as a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. Then-candidate Joe Biden would cite that letter in his final debate with Donald Trump to lie to the American people (again), telling the country the laptop was Russian disinformation.

It is scandalous that scores of former intelligence officials would use their prior positions and reputations to deceive Americans in a way that likely affected the 2020 election. That any of those individuals retained security clearances adds to the scandal, as does the role of the Biden campaign and the involvement of at least one CIA employee in soliciting signatories for the statement.

6. Intel Agencies’ Failure to Protect America Against Foreign Influence

Not only did intelligence agencies interfere in the 2020 election, but in their efforts to protect Joe Biden, they likely also failed to provide necessary defensive briefings, putting Americans at risk.

To protect our country, intelligence officials must have frank discussions with leaders (and candidates) about the risks of foreign malign influence. Given how hard the FBI and intelligence agencies tried to bury the news of the laptop, it seems likely they omitted any reference to the laptop and details contained on it in briefings to then-President Trump, then-candidate Biden, and the Biden campaign.

To date, this scandal has been overlooked and merits further inquiry to determine whether the intelligence apparatus fulfilled its duty to the country or omitted inconvenient facts in briefings to protect Joe Biden. Of particular concern is whether intelligence agencies assessed and warned about the risk that the Russians had stolen a second Hunter Biden laptop that contain materials the Biden son believed rendered him susceptible to blackmail.

7. DOJ and FBI’s Handling of Biden Investigations

When it comes to how the DOJ and FBI handled investigations into Biden family corruption, the evidence of potential misconduct is overwhelming.

Broadly, this scandal includes conflicts of interest between Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys — including the Pennsylvania U.S. attorney handling an investigation into the Jim Biden-connected company Americorp, and the California and D.C. U.S. attorneys who reportedly refused to bring felony charges against Hunter Biden. Likewise, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s conflict of interest proves scandalous given the numerous efforts by the DOJ and FBI headquarters to interfere in the investigations.

Beyond conflicts of interest, the IRS whistleblowers and another whistleblower who’s provided information to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have revealed numerous instances of DOJ and FBI procedural violations, the burying of evidence such as the FD-1023, the false labeling of derogatory evidence as disinformation, and limits on the investigative steps agents could take. Consequently, the DOJ charged Hunter Biden only with misdemeanors and one firearm felony that could be dropped, and to date it appears no investigation has occurred into Joe Biden or his brother, Jim Biden, on allegations of bribery and money laundering.

While Democrats counter the growing evidence of corruption by wrongly claiming it has not been corroborated, that fact does not vindicate the Bidens: It implicates the DOJ and FBI in a separate scandal.

Cover-Ups of the Cover-Ups

8. DOJ and FBI’s Cover-Up of Failure to Investigate Bidens

Once whistleblowers began exposing the Biden administration’s interference in the family’s pay-to-play investigation, the DOJ and FBI began to cover-up the cover-up. We saw this most clearly when Garland professed that there was no political interference in U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s investigation into Hunter Biden. Garland stressed that, as a Trump holdover, Americans could trust Weiss’s independence.

Garland’s testimony cannot be squared with the extensive interference coming from FBI headquarters and the limitations the DOJ placed on investigative techniques. When Grassley pushed on the point, Garland maintained that Weiss had ultimate charging authority. According to an IRS whistleblower, however, Weiss said otherwise, claiming he wasn’t the ultimate decision-maker.

Here, the cover-up of the cover-up began in earnest, with Garland and Weiss writing a series of letters and making public statements that attempted to obscure the ultimate question of whether Weiss had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden and whether DOJ or FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation. This scandal has yet to be unraveled. But on Monday, the DOJ sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee offering up Weiss to testify — indicating Biden’s Justice Department might be preparing to throw Weiss under the bus.

9. Democrats Lying to Protect Joe Biden

Many Democrats are also wrapped up in lying to protect Joe Biden. Some of these lies predate the election when they spun the laptop as Russian disinformation. But more recently, we saw Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin lying to the American public about the FD-1023 form. Had former Attorney General William Barr not gone on the record to correct Raskin’s falsehood, the public would have been none the wiser.

Seeking to protect Joe Biden from damning bribery claims, Raskin falsely claimed that Trump appointees Barr and U.S. Attorney Scott Brady had reviewed the CHS’s reporting contained in a June 2020 FD-1023 form and closed out the investigation. Raskin also portrayed the CHS’s reporting as connected to Rudy Giuliani.

But as The Federalist first reported, Barr unequivocally said that Raskin’s claim was “not true.” The investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.” “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.” Likewise, Barr explained the CHS’s reporting was unrelated to Giuliani.

10. Press Acting as Biden-Run Media

When the Post broke the laptop story, the legacy media either silenced it or framed it as Russian disinformation. Even two years later, after belatedly authenticating the material recovered from Hunter Biden’s computer, the corporate media refused to cover the implications — that the emails, documents, and texts indicated Joe Biden was involved in a massive corruption scandal. The corrupt press still refuses to cover the news fairly, opting instead to brand the evidence as a conspiracy theory.

The media’s refusal to seek and report the truth proves the most dire of all the scandals because without a free press checking government corruption, the corruption will only grow.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—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. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.