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Posts tagged ‘FBI CORRRUPTION’

Democrats Have Become the Party of Authoritarianism. They Only Understand Power


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/27/democrats-have-become-the-party-of-authoritarianism-they-only-understand-power/

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Perhaps you saw the news last week that two women in their 70s, Jean Marshall and Joan Bell, are each facing up to 11 years in federal prison for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic in 2020. Federal prosecutors charged the pair for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which Biden’s Justice Department has been aggressively enforcing against pro-life activists, convicting 26 people last year alone.

You might have also seen, a few weeks earlier, that a 42-year-old North Dakota man who ran over and killed an 18-year-old kid for being a Republican was sentenced to just five years in prison on a manslaughter charge, and with credit for time already served on house arrest, will spend only about four years behind bars.

Seeing these two things, maybe you wondered how it could be that two grandmothers might well spend twice as many years in prison for the nonviolent offence of sitting in front of an abortion clinic as a man who intentionally killed another man for his political beliefs. Maybe you thought, as @politicalmath put it on X (formerly Twitter), that the left needs “to start looking at this situation and admitting that this is not justice. They need to shake themselves awake and realize that their team is utilizing the justice system for political punishment and that this is destabilizing our entire culture.”

You might have thought the same thing recently about the Trump indictments. The hypocrisy is after all outrageous. Questioning an election is okay if Hillary Clinton and Democrats do it (as they did in 2016, 2004, and 2000) but it’s a “criminal conspiracy” if Trump and Republicans do it.

Or consider the draconian prison sentences for Jan. 6 rioters (22 years in one case) compared to the leniency shown to Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters, one of whom was sentenced to just 10 years despite setting a deadly fire in a Minneapolis pawn shop during the 2020 George Floyd riots — and this only after federal prosecutors invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and asked the judge to show leniency.

Or again consider the role of Biden’s Justice Department and FBI in protecting Hunter Biden and the president from congressional investigations that are, as of this writing, still uncovering damning evidence of corruption connected to Hunter’s overseas business schemes. Just this week we learned that two payments totaling more than a quarter-million dollars were wired to Hunter Biden from China, and the beneficiary address listed on the wires was Joe Biden’s home address in Delaware. (At the time the wires were sent, Hunter was living in California.) 

Surely, you might be thinking, not even the most rabid partisans on the left can think that this is justice, or that this will end well for the country. Surely they see the danger of supporting a politicized federal law enforcement bureaucracy that criminalizes the opposition and uses the justice system as a weapon. Even if they don’t denounce it publicly, certainly they’re talking amongst themselves about how terrible this is and how to stop it. Right?

Wrong. To think this way is to misunderstand Democrats and the left completely. No, they’re not worried about any of this. No, they don’t want it to stop, they want it to continue and intensify. They don’t want justice, they want power. 

You don’t have to take my word for it. Increasingly, Democrats will readily admit as much. For example, nearly half of them don’t believe in freedom of speech. A recent RealClear Opinion Research poll found that while solid majorities of Republicans (74 percent) and Independents (61 percent) believe speech should be legal “under any circumstances,” only 55 percent of Democrats agreed.

The same survey found that a third of Democrats think Americans “have too much freedom,” and a majority of them “approve of the government censoring social media content under the rubric of protecting national security.” Worse, about three-quarters of surveyed Democrats think the government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” posts on social media, and they are far more likely than Republicans or Independents to support censorship of political views.

That’s just one survey of course, but it captures a growing trend of authoritarianism on the left. We see it in polls, on college campuses and corporate boardrooms, on social media, and in how the left wields the power of the institutions it has captured, like the FBI and DOJ.

When you see these glaring disparities in how opponents of the Biden regime are treated by the Justice Department and the courts, when you see how corporate media cover the Trump indictments versus how they refuse to cover the Biden corruption scandal, when you see them calling for government censorship of “misinformation” on social media, understand that they are never going to take a step back and consider whether all of this is justice or injustice.

Despite the outdated moniker of “social justice warrior,” leftist Democrats aren’t interested in real justice. They’re interested in gaining and using power. Once they have it, they’ll use it against their enemies. Appealing to their desire for civil comity is futile. They have no use for comity so long as they have power.

This is to say, they won’t stop this until what they are doing to their enemies is in turn done to them. You don’t like left-wing district attorneys indicting the Republican frontrunner ahead of election season? Better find some GOP state attorneys general to indict Hunter and Joe Biden.

You don’t like Attorney General Merrick Garland using the Justice Department to protect a corrupt Biden administration? Better impeach him along with Biden. Don’t like a woke U.S. military funding abortions and gender surgeries on the defense secretary’s say-so? Better do as Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has done and use all available leverage to stop them. 

Power is the only language the left understands. So, if Americans on the right want to be anything more than a managed opposition — and let’s be honest, plenty of elected Republicans are happy to be exactly that — they had better figure out how to wield the limited power they do have. And they had better hurry. 

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.

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Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Wasn’t Supposed to Protect Him, It Was Supposed to Protect Joe


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 27, 2023

Rad more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/27/hunter-bidens-plea-deal-wasnt-supposed-to-protect-him-it-was-supposed-to-protect-joe/

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The twists and turns of Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal have been hard to follow, but it’s been clear from the outset that, like his business ventures in Ukraine, the deal was thoroughly corrupt. It’s now clear that the agreement was never meant primarily to shield Hunter from future prosecution, but to protect President Joe Biden.

In a Delaware federal court on Wednesday, Hunter’s lawyers ended up rejecting a plea deal once it became clear the deal would not confer broad immunity on the president’s son. Although the language of the plea deal has not been released, it was supposed to have Hunter plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, as well as enter a pretrial diversion agreement for illegal possession of a firearm. The deal fell apart, however, once the federal judge overseeing the case, Maryellen Noreika, started asking questions. Here’s how The New York Times reported it:

The hearing appeared to be going smoothly before Judge Noreika questioned whether the agreement meant that Mr. Biden would be immune from prosecution for other possible crimes — including violations related to representing foreign governments — in perpetuity. When a top prosecutor in the case said it would not, Chris Clark, Mr. Biden’s lead lawyer, initially hesitated and then said the government’s position would make the agreement “null and void.”

After a recess during which the lawyers for both sides scrambled to hash out an agreement, Judge Noreika, who earlier had said she felt she was being asked to “rubber stamp” the agreement, said she could not accept the plea deal. Hunter Biden then pled not guilty to the tax charges and the hearing was over. 

What to make of this? The most obvious explanation is that Hunter’s lawyers know what most Americans know: He was involved in complex foreign bribery schemes that implicate his father, President Biden. They were hoping to strike a plea agreement with the Justice Department that would protect him from future prosecution related to corrupt foreign business deals in Ukraine and China that involved trading on his family name, but once it became clear that the judge was not going to sign off on such an agreement, they backed out of the deal.

Why would they want such a deal in the first place? Maybe because they know the Republicans in Congress continue to amass evidence that Joe Biden and his son took millions in bribe money from Ukrainian oligarchs for protection against prosecution. Hunter’s plea deal, in other words, wasn’t meant to shield Hunter from future prosecution, it was meant to protect Joe. A plea agreement granting Hunter broad immunity would make it harder to dig into his murky overseas business deals — deals which increasingly appear to have involved his father. 

As we have detailed here in recent days, the Biden bribery scheme in Ukraine is shaping up to be the great political scandal in American history. If it’s true, it would mean the end of Biden’s presidency, either by impeachment and conviction or by abandonment by the Democrat Party establishment ahead of the 2024 election. 

Consider what’s come out just recently. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last week released an unclassified FBI document detailing reports from a “highly credible” informant who says the founder and CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, bragged about paying the Bidens $10 million to make the oil and gas company’s legal problems disappear. Specifically, Zlochevsky wanted Ukrainian authorities to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma.

And of course, that’s just what happened — after then-Vice President Joe Biden, by his own admission, threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired.

This same informant says top Burisma executives admitted that the only reason they hired Hunter to sit on their board (for a jaw-dropping $83,000 a month) was “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”

The FBI, for its part, tried to hide this document from IRS investigators and Congress, and the corporate media have done their best to ignore the story altogether. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. Indeed, the story keeps growing. As Margot Cleveland reported in these pages earlier this week, the Pittsburgh FBI office told the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office it had corroborated multiple aspects of the informant’s claims, including travel records confirming the informant had indeed traveled to the locales detailed in the document during the relevant time period.

We also know the FBI and Justice Department not only prevented a pair of IRS whistleblowers from learning of the document but also kept hidden portions of the materials found on Hunter’s laptop. That’s no small thing. One of those whistleblowers suggested the FBI informant’s claims could corroborate other evidence the IRS special agents had gathered during their investigation.

As this story develops, it’s becoming obvious that the point of the FBI and DOJ’s obstruction is to protect the president and suppress further evidence of the Biden bribery scheme. That’s why a special counsel won’t cut it. The deep state isn’t going to get to the bottom of this, and the corporate press is going to keep aggressively ignoring it. If the federal courtroom circus on Wednesday demonstrated anything, it’s that we’re going to need an impeachment inquiry to find out the truth about President Biden’s corruption.

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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Whistleblowers Expose FBI’s Corruption And Ongoing Persecution Of Political Opponents In Damning New Testimony


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD| MAY 18, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/18/whistleblowers-expose-fbis-corruption-and-ongoing-persecution-of-political-opponents-in-damning-new-testimony/

FBI Whistleblower Friend testifying before the House Judiciary Committee

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In an explosive House committee hearing on Thursday, several whistleblowers accused the FBI of engaging in a bevy of highly corrupt and partisan activity, including manipulation of statistics, targeting political opponents, and retaliating against whistleblowers seeking to expose the agency’s corruption. The revelations come days after a report from U.S. Attorney John Durham revealed the FBI had no evidence then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with the Russians when it launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the former president’s 2016 campaign.

While speaking before the House Judiciary Committee, former FBI special agent Steve Friend said he filed protected whistleblower disclosures in August 2022 over concerns he had regarding investigations assigned to his office over the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. More specifically, Friend was concerned the conduction of these inquiries represented a departure from proper “case management rules established in the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” and that such actions “could have undermined potentially righteous prosecutions and may have been part of an effort to inflate the FBI’s statistics on domestic extremism.”

“I also voiced concerns that the FBI’s use of SWAT and large-scale arrest operations to apprehend suspects who were accused of nonviolent crimes and misdemeanors, represented by counsel, and who pledged to cooperate with the federal authorities in the event of criminal charges created an unnecessary risk to FBI personnel and public safety,” Friend said. “At each level of my chain of command, leadership cautioned that despite my exemplary work performance, whistleblowing placed my otherwise bright future with the FBI at risk.”

Despite purportedly following proper whistleblower protocol, Friend said the FBI quickly retaliated against him by weaponizing the security clearance process to remove him from active duty “within one month” of filing his disclosures. According to Friend, the agency then orchestrated a “campaign of humiliation and intimidation” designed to “punish and pressure [him] to resign,” which included leaking his private medical information to The New York Times, refusing to “furnish [his] training records for several months,” and imposing an “illegal gag order” to prevent him from “communicating with [his] family and attorneys.”

In addition to retaliation, Friend went on to accuse the FBI of weaponizing process crimes and reinterpreting laws in order to “initiate pretextual prosecutions and persecute its political enemies.” He also asserted the agency actively colludes with Big Tech platforms to censor political speech the regime disagrees with, gather intelligence on Americans, and “target citizens for malicious prosecution.”

During his testimony, Garret O’Boyle, a U.S. Army combat veteran and former FBI special agent, chronicled his own experience with the FBI’s disdain for whistleblowers. At some point after filing a whistleblower disclosure over concerns the agency was being used to go after the regime’s political opponents, O’Boyle sought another position within the country, which the FBI approved of. According to O’Boyle, it was only after he had sold his home and moved his family “halfway across the country” did the FBI then suspend him.

“They allowed us to sell my family’s home. They ordered me to report to the new unit when our youngest daughter was only two weeks old. Then, on my first day on the new assignment, they suspended me; rendering my family homeless and refused to release our household goods, including our clothes, for weeks,” O’Boyle said.

[READ: The Durham Report Leaves No Doubt: The FBI Is A Mortal Threat To Democracy]

Marcus Allen, a former Marine and FBI staff operations specialist, also testified about his experience with the FBI’s politicization, particularly its attempts to destroy the lives and careers of those within its ranks with dissenting views. As part of his position, Allen was tasked with providing situational awareness and information regarding the Jan. 6 riot. After submitting information to his superiors and others that questioned “the narrative” of Jan. 6, however, Allen was accused of pushing “conspiratorial views” and “unreliable information.” The FBI subsequently suspended Allen in January 2022 and questioned his allegiance to the United States.

According to Allen, it wasn’t until five months later, after a congressional member “made statements indicating the FBI was conducting a purge of employees with conservative viewpoints,” did the FBI reach out seeking an interview. Much like Friend, Allen claims his security clearance was revoked after he filed his whistleblower complaint.

“It has been more than a year since the FBI took my paycheck from me. My family and I have been surviving on early withdrawals from our retirement accounts while the FBI has ignored my request for approval to obtain outside employment during the review of my security clearance,” Allen said. “We have lost our federal health insurance coverage. There is apparently no end in sight.”

Predictably, House Democrats used Thursday’s hearing to slander the whistleblowers to cover for the FBI’s authoritarianism. In one instance, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., attempted to equate Friend’s calls to “defund the FBI” due to its weaponized behavior with support for defunding law enforcement. The Florida Democrat also accused Friend of using Thursday’s hearing to promote his upcoming book — which Friend never mentioned — and attacked the former agent for his concerns over the FBI’s use of excessive force during certain arrests.

In his prior testimony, Friend detailed a case where the FBI planned to use a SWAT team to carry out an arrest warrant on a Jan. 6 “subject.” According to Friend, he was concerned over the use of such tactics because “the subject of the arrest warrant had been in communication with the FBI at that point and had expressed a willingness to cooperate.”

“[I]n my experience in dealing with subjects of crimes and bringing them into custody, the FBI tends to use the least amount of force necessary to do that safely, and I felt that the use of SWAT … was an unnecessary tool to use for that particular individual,” Friend said. Of course, Wasserman Schultz misconstrued Friend’s testimony to make it sound as if he sympathized with the Jan. 6 subject and other suspected criminals upon whom arrest warrants are issued.

A House Judiciary Committee report containing the whistleblowers’ aforementioned allegations and prior testimony can be found here.

If you did not know these were FBI agents, and only heard their testimony, you might conclude this was testimony of people in communist nations, or Hitler’s Germany. I don’t know about you folks, this is frightenly madding. we’ve got to vote these socialists out as soon as possible.

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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