A health-care executive who claims Jim Biden defrauded him was interviewed multiple times by the lawyer Joe Biden just nominated to serve as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. According to two sources, while the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office is aware of the allegations, that office is not investigating the potential fraud, leaving the matter solely in the hands of the conflicted-future U.S. attorney.
On Monday, President Biden named Eric Olshan, currently an assistant U.S. attorney in the Pittsburgh office, to fill the vacancy left open when former U.S. Attorney Cindy Chung was confirmed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
As I previously reported, Chung, whom President Biden had nominated to the federal appellate court, had been overseeing the criminal investigation into the bankrupt health-care business Americore—a business Jim Biden allegedly siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from to finance repairs for his beach house. Jim Biden is the current U.S. president’s brother.
Now, President Biden seeks to replace Chung with Olshan, raising serious concerns about a potential conflict of interest given Olshan’s involvement in the investigation of the Jim Biden-connected business, Americore.
Olshan had previously served as the lead investigator in the criminal case against Daniel Hurt. Hurt pleaded guilty to soliciting and obtaining kickbacks from the rural Pennsylvania hospital Ellwood City Medical Center, or “ECMC,” which Americore owned. ECMC had allegedly received some $25 million in fraudulent Medicare reimbursements.
According to an affidavit signed under oath by ECMC’s former CEO, Grant White, the president’s brother directed White to loan him (Jim Biden) approximately $400,000 to repay a past-due personal loan secured by Jim Biden’s Florida beach house. Jim Biden allegedly later pulled additional funds from ECMC, totaling about $250,000, but he would only repay about $25,000 to the medical center. ECMC would later go bankrupt and close, prompting a federal investigation.
To date, no charges have been filed related to Jim Biden’s alleged misappropriation of funds from Americore. Nor has anything come from the additional accusations made by Michael Frey, the president and CEO of the Tennessee-based Diverse Medical Management, against Jim Biden and his business partners.
Frey claims Jim Biden represented himself as a “principal” for Americore—even providing him a business card—and then entered into a scheme to defraud him. According to Frey, Jim Biden and his business partners promised to provide capital to implement Frey’s business model for rejuvenating failing rural hospitals.
But after Frey worked with various medical groups to put the plan in action, Jim Biden and his partners reneged on their agreement, he says. That left Frey holding the bag, forcing him to cover costs of about $1 million until he could unwind the various deals that had been put into motion.
The Tennessee business executive sued Jim Biden and the others allegedly involved in the scheme, before entering into a confidential settlement agreement with the defendants. The defendants breached the deal, however, according to Frey.
Frey plans to enforce the settlement agreement but told The Federalist he first intends to retrieve copies of the thousands of text and email messages exchanged by the parties, hoping those documents will assist in his efforts. Frey says the text and email messages will confirm his allegations against Jim Biden and the others involved in the deal.
Frey’s accusations against Jim Biden are particularly concerning because Frey discussed his allegations and evidence with an FBI agent from the Pittsburgh field office, as well as with Olshan.
“I spoke with Olshan both before and after Joe Biden became president,” Frey told The Federalist. They last spoke about six to eight months ago, Frey noted, adding that Olshan stated his office would reach back out to Frey. To date, however, he has heard nothing more.
Frey also told The Federalist he has never spoken with anyone from the Delaware or Baltimore offices. This proves significant because the U.S. attorney for Delaware, David C. Weiss, is handling the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and the documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop implicate Jim Biden in some of those deals.
Further, Weiss’s status as a holdover from the Trump administration has given Attorney General Merrick Garland the only cover he has from claims that a conflict of interest necessitates the appointment of a special counsel. But according to Frey, he has never spoken with anyone from the Delaware office. Nor has anyone from the Baltimore FBI field office—the FBI office covering Delaware-related investigations—contacted Frey, he says.
A person familiar with the Delaware investigation confirmed for The Federalist that while the U.S. attorney’s office there is familiar with Jim Biden and his wife Sara’s connections to the Americore case, the Delaware office is not investigating the matter. Rather, the investigation into Frey’s accusations was being handled out of the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Frey also told The Federalist that members of the House Oversight Committee have asked him to testify before Congress and he is open to doing so. “Somebody has to stop them from ruining people’s lives,” Frey said, referring to Jim Biden and his partners. “What they did to the $12-an-hour employees at these hospitals is a travesty.”
Whether Jim Biden and his partners hold any criminal responsibility related to Americore’s raiding of rural hospitals is unclear. What is clear, however, is that with Joe Biden appointing Olshan to serve as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the entire Americore investigative record should be turned over to the Delaware U.S. attorney, stat.
The Federalist asked Olshan whether he would recuse from the investigation and refer the matter to the Delaware office now that Joe Biden has nominated him to serve as the next U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania. Olshan did not respond to the inquiry.
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.
While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.
While the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s coverage of the Global Disinformation Index have revealed an expansive Censorship Complex that seeks to silence Americans for money, politics, ideology, and power, much still needs to be unraveled.
A search of government contracts and grants for the eight fiscal years from 2016 through today for the keywords “misinformation” or “disinformation” reveals 538 federal government grants and 36 contracts were awarded to a wide range of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations.
Mapping out the connections among the various award recipients, the government, and the pro-censorship left will require more work. But this simple snapshot confirms taxpayers’ money is funding the expansion of the Censorship Complex, as the prior eight fiscal years, from 2008 to 2015, reveal the federal government awarded only two federal contracts and seven federal grants for “disinformation” or “misinformation” research.
Likewise, an initial investigation into the nonprofits and academic institutions mentioned in the “Twitter Files” reveals government grants, donations from other liberal nonprofits, and money from leftist billionaires funded the expansion of the Censorship Complex. Research also shows the non-governmental organizations pushing the disinformation narrative are uniformly directed and run by former government employees, left-wing media types, and left-leaning or anti-Trump individuals.
Alliance Securing Democracy
Of the think tanks identified in Twitter communications, Alliance Securing Democracy (ASD) might be the most notorious thanks to Matt Taibbi’s exposé on ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard.
Devised by former FBI agent Clint Watts and launched in August of 2017, Hamilton 68 proclaimed its digital dashboard an aid to “help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin.” Based on some 644 accounts that Hamilton 68 claimed it had “selected for their relationship to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns,” ASD maintained its dashboard allowed users to track online Russian influence.
The problem is, as Taibbi wrote: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”
Apparently unbeknownst to ASD, Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and found “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” The entire methodology was flawed.
Yet ASD played a key role in the push to censor speech as supposed “disinformation,” with the dashboard serving as “the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years” by “virtually every major news organization.” In addition to the media spreading disinformation about disinformation, Watts testified before Congress, telling senators that the Hamilton 68 dashboard provided the means for the U.S. government “to have an understanding of what Russia is doing in social media.”
Watts further revealed in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, that he “tried to provide to the U.S. government directly through multiple agencies” the Hamilton 68 information, telling the lawmakers they should “want to equip our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Defense with just an understanding … of what Russian active measures are doing around the world.”
Whether any of those “multiple agencies” relied on the inaccurate information included on the Hamilton 68 dashboard is unclear.
Members of the House and Senate did rely on Hamilton 68, however. As I reported earlier this month: “Rep. Adam Schiff and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse, among others, not only pushed the unfounded claims that Russian bots were behind the trending hashtags, but they also demanded that Twitter and other tech companies investigate and stop such supposed interference.” Democrats pushed this false narrative even when Twitter executives warned staffers that the Russian-interference story didn’t stand.
In addition to Watts, the ASD advisory council includes a cornucopia of former government bigwigs from Democrat administrations: Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration; Michael Morell, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama; John Podesta, former chair of Hillary for America and an official in the Clinton and Obama White Houses; and Jake Sullivan, former deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key adviser for both Clinton and Obama during their general elections.
Laura Thornton, who previously worked at the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit loosely affiliated with the Democrat Party, currently oversees ASD. And Rachael Dean Wilson serves as the managing director for ASD. Wilson previously worked for the late Sen. John McCain for six years, serving as his communications director and adviser to his 2016 re-election campaign.
German Marshall Fund
According to its website, ASD is a project of the German Marshall Fund, which “is heavily funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.” The fund has also received grants from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The ASD likewise receives financing from left-leaning foundations, such as the Craigslist founder’s Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
The Election Integrity Partnership
Another prominent organization the “Twitter Files” revealed as pushing for censorship — including multiple censorship requests flowing through that group to the tech giant — is the Election Integrity Partnership, which is run out of Stanford’s Internet Observatory.
Stanford’s Internet Observatory launched on June 6, 2019, to “focus on the misuse of social media,” and within two years, the project grew from an initial team of three to a full-time team of 10 assisted by some 76 student research assistants. In 2020, Stanford announced the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership, which “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
As a private institution, Stanford University is not funded directly with tax dollars, but it receives millions in government grants. Private grants also flow into the California university and directly fund the Election Integrity Partnership, including money from the same foundations that funded the nonprofit behind Hamilton 68, such as money from the Craigslist and eBay founders.
Atlantic Council Project
Further research on the other members of the Election Integrity Partnership reveals the Atlantic Council receives donations and federal grants, including from Facebook, Google, and the U.S. Department of State. And as will be shown shortly, the Atlantic Council is also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
Graphika
Another member of the Election Integrity Partnership, Graphika, describes itself as a “network analysis company that examines how ideas and influence spread online.” Graphika’s chief innovation officer, Camille Francois “leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment.” Francois was previously the principal researcher at Google’s Jigsaw unit.
According to CNBC, one of Francois’ first projects at Graphika was a “secretive” assignment for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Working with a team of researchers from Oxford University, Graphika analyzed data provided by social media firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess Russia’s exploitation of “the tools and platform of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to impact U.S. users” and influence elections.
As a private organization, Graphika’s funding details remain obscure, but in congressional testimony, Dr. Vlad Barash he “oversee[s] our work with DARPA and with our colleagues from leading academic institutions on developing and applying cutting edge methods and algorithms for detecting the manipulation of 21st Century networked communications.”
According to government data, Graphika — also known as Octant Data, LLC and Morningside Analytics — received numerous Department of Defense contracts. Additionally, Graphika received a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.”
Graphika received a second nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping.” The organization had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Center for Internet Security
The “Twitter Files” also made mention of the Center for Internet Security. In 2018, that nonprofit launched the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which “it claims supports the cybersecurity needs of election offices.” As part of those efforts, the Center for Internet Security crafted a one-page document for election officials, with directions for reporting misinformation or disinformation to the EI-ISAC. The federal U.S. Elections Commission would link to the CIS flyer on its government webpage.
The CIS flyer directed election workers to submit supposed “misinformation or disinformation” to the EI-ISAC, stating it would then “forward it to our partners at The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).” CISA would then “submit it to the relevant social media platform(s) for review,” including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Nextdoor, and Snapchat.
CIS further said it would share reports of misinformation or disinformation with the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University. And from the “Twitter Files,” we see examples of the Election Integrity Partnership providing the Twitter team CIS’s reports of misinformation or disinformation, prompting the censorship of speech.
The Center for Internet Security is heavily funded by government grants. According to Influence Watch, the nonprofit “provides cyber-security consulting services to local, state, and federal governments,” and has been awarded $115 million in federal grants by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense since 2010. It has received $3.6 million in cybersecurity contracts from numerous federal agencies, according to its webpage, and a $290,000 grant from the eBay founder’s left-leaning Democracy Fund.
The president and CEO of the Center for Internet Security is another former high-level government adviser, John Gilligan. Gilligan “previously served in senior advisory positions in intelligence and security for the United States Airforce, Department of Energy, and White House Cyber Security Commission under the Obama administration.”
Clemson University
Other emails released as part of the “Twitter Files” reveal Clemson University’s role in the push for censorship at Twitter. And as was the case with Hamilton 68’s dashboard, Twitter’s team had concerns about Clemson’s disinformation research.
In one email, Twitter noted that Clemson’s center had asked the tech company to review its “findings regarding the latest list of accounts.” Internal communications show the Twitter team noting that while they saw “some inauthentic behaviors,” they “were unable to attribute the accounts to the IRA,” the Russian “troll” farm.
After noting that Twitter had already shared information with Clemson researchers, the tech giant’s head of safety, Yoel Roth, sent another email. “There is nothing new we’ll learn here, analytically,” Roth said. “We’re not going to attribute these accounts to Russia … absent some solid technical intel (which Clemson have not ever been able to provide).”
Defending Democracy Together
Clemson’s research was used by another group joining the “disinformation” trend, Defending Democracy Together (DDT). In 2018, DDT launched the RussiaTweets.com project to supposedly provide “the evidence of Russian interference in American politics.”
This evidence, according to DDT, came from a list of tweets “compiled and published by Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren,” which purportedly all came from the Russian troll factory, Internet Research Agency (IRA). Both Linvill and Warren hail from Clemson University, raising the question of whether it was the list they provided to Defending Democracy Together that Twitter executives “were unable to attribute” to the IRA.
Defending Democracy Together was founded in 2018, and its leadership consists of Never Trumpers, William “Bill” Kristol, Mona Charen, and Charlie Sykes, as well as DDT’s co-founder and director Sarah Longwell, who has promoted advertisements “to advocate against the policies of the Trump administration and to weaken public support for the Trump presidency.”
Funding for DDT, according to Influence Watch, includes money from left-wing mega-donor and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar through Democracy Fund Voice and from the Hopewell Fund, which is “part of a $600 million network of left-wing funding nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C.” Additionally, OpenSecretsreported that DDT was “the biggest ‘dark money’ spender of 2020,” with DDT spending “$15.4 million in ‘dark money’ during the 2020 election cycle on supporting presidential candidate Joe Biden and opposing former President Donald Trump for reelection.”
The University of Buffalo, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University are likewise involved in the disinformation project, with a Clemson News release revealing that faculty at those universities, along with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, launched a project titled “Disinformation Range to Improve User Awareness and Resilience to Online Disinformation.” The government, through a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is supporting those efforts.
The Aspen Institute
The Aspen Institute is also entwined in the Censorship Complex, having hosted in the fall of 2020 “a series of off-the-record briefings to help prepare every major US newsroom and tech platform for potential hack-and-leak operations and a contested post-election environment.” One of the briefings involved a tabletop exercise facilitated by Aspen’s Garrett Graff that posed a hack-and-leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth attended that event just two weeks before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And soon after that story broke, Graff and his Aspen Institute colleague Vivian Schiller took to Twitter to frame the story as “crap” and “nonsense.” Schiller’s former jobs include CEO at NPR, head of news at Twitter, general manager at The New York Times, and chief digital officer at NBC News.
Soon after Graff and Schiller pushed the Hunter Biden story as misinformation, Twitter blocked the Post’s story and froze the conservative outlet’s account, even though internal communications revealed the Post had not violated Twitter’s terms of service. Despite its extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference, Twitter didn’t ask the bureau if the scandal was Russian disinformation. Instead, Twitter representatives testified to Congress that the company “relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.”
After the Post broke the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, several left-leaning “journalists” spent the day speaking of “misinformation,” while uniformly ignoring the substance of the story. One must wonder how many of those so-called journalists had attended Aspen’s training session.
Since then, Aspen has expanded its focus on disinformation and misinformation, launching a “Commission on Information Disorder” to develop what the institute calls “actionable public-private responses to the disinformation crisis.”
The Global Disinformation Index
Another nonprofit, the Global Disinformation Index, has already begun pushing an “actionable response to the disinformation crisis,” by pressuring advertisers to dump news outlets based on GDI’s view of their “disinformation risk.” However, as the Washington Examiner revealed in Gabe Kaminsky’s investigative series, the GDI’s December 2022 report, prepared in partnership with the University of Texas-Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab, brands only conservative outlets as the top “riskiest.” Conversely, the “least risky” outlets all lean left, other than The Wall Street Journal, and are also the same outlets that got the most significant news stories of the last decade wrong.
Like the “disinformation” nonprofits named in the “Twitter Files,” GDI has received federal grants and is connected to other left-leaning nonprofits and individuals seeking to censor speech. Its advisers likewise hew left, such as “journalist” Anne Applebaum, who said Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings were not interesting, and Finn Heinrich of the leftist George Soros’ Open Society group.
The composition of GDI’s “advisory panel” is also noteworthy because the same individuals guiding GDI’s mission to starve conservative sites of advertising dollars are connected to three of the organizations behind the Election Integrity Partnership’s push for censorship at Twitter. That fact would be difficult to discover today, though, as GDI scrubbed its “advisory panel” section of its homepage after the blacklist scandal broke.
According to the archived GDI homepage, advisory panel members include Ben Nimmo, the global lead at Meta; Franziska Roesner, a University of Washington professor; and Camille Francois of Niantic. Nimmo was a founding member of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and a senior fellow for that lab. He was also “the first director of investigations at Graphika.” Francois also serves as the chair of Graphika’s advisory board and is identified on Graphika’s webpage as its chief innovation officer. Roesner is a faculty member at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Together then, three of the four organizations that partnered with Stanford to run the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed Twitter to censor speech in advance of the 2020 election, were also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
Global Engagement Center
A strong connection also exists between GDI and the U.S. government through an arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, which has also made several appearances in the “Twitter Files.”
The Global Engagement Center, which proclaims itself “a data-driven body leading U.S. interagency efforts in proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda,” awarded the Global Disinformation Index a $100,000 grant as part of the U.S-Paris Tech Challenge. The State Department sponsored that “Tech Challenge” in “collaboration” with, among others, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Park Advisors, and Disinfo Cloud. According to a State Department spokesman, the Global Engagement Center began funding Disinfo Cloud in 2018 and also awarded approximately $300,000 to Park Advisors to manage Disinfo Coud to fight “disinformation, terrorism, violent extremism, hate speech.”
The “Twitter Files” revealed that, in addition to funding private organizations pushing for censorship, the State Department’s Global Disinformation Center attempted to insert itself into Twitter’s review and censorship process. When those efforts failed, the Global Disinformation Center pressed its unsupported claims of disinformation to the media.
Additional research is needed to understand the full scope of the Global Engagement Center’s role in the Censorship Complex, but what little is known now suggests the State Department provides load-bearing support for the project. A recent report from the Foundation for Freedom Online also exposes the National Science Foundation as a key funder in “the science of censorship.”
While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.
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.
Unlike the military-industrial complex, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you on every topic.
The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a “Disinformation Board,” but a more insidious “Censorship Complex” already exists and is growing at an alarming speed.
This Censorship Complex is bigger than banned Twitter accounts or Democrats’ propensity for groupthink. Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation — and thus the country and the world.
Americans grasped a thread of this reality with the release of the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s reporting on the Global Disinformation Index, which revealed the coordinated censorship of speech by government officials, nonprofits, and the media. Yet Americans have no idea of the breadth and depth of the “Censorship Complex” — and how much it threatens the fabric of this country.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” via the new sweeping military-industrial complex. Its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [was] felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” Replace “military-industrial” with “censorship,” and you arrive at the reality Americans face today.
Origins of the Censorship Complex
Even with the rise of independent news outlets, until about 2016 the left-leaning corporate media controlled the flow of information. Then Donald Trump entered the political arena and used social media to speak directly to Americans. Despite the Russia hoax and the media’s all-out assault, Trump won, proving the strategic use of social media could prevail against a unified corporate press. The left was terrified.
Of course, Democrats and the media couldn’t admit their previous control over information converted to electoral victories and that for their own self-preservation, they needed to suppress other voices. So instead, the left began pushing the narrative that “disinformation” — including Russian disinformation — from alternative news outlets and social media companies handed Trump the election.
The New York Times first pushed the “disinformation” narrative using the “fake news” moniker after the 2016 election. “The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national soul-searching, with liberals across the country asking how a nation of millions could be marching to such a suspect drumbeat. Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion,” the Times wrote, bemoaning the public’s reliance on Facebook.
“Narrowly defined, ‘fake news’ means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites,” the Times wrote, feigning objectivity. But its conclusion? “Fake and hyperpartisan news from the right has been more conspicuous than from the left.”
Two days later, Hillary Clinton repeated the narrative-building phrase, condemning what she called “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.” But then, as if to remind Democrats and the legacy press that he had wrestled control of the narrative from them, Trump branded left-wing outlets “fake news” — and just like that, the catchphrase belonged to him.
Disinformation Is Scarier if It’s Russian
That didn’t deter the left in its mission to destroy alternative channels of communication, however. The media abandoned its “fake news” framing for the “disinformation” buzzword. “Misinformation” and “mal-information” were soon added to the vernacular, with the Department of Homeland Security even defining the terms.
But silencing conservatives would require more than merely labeling their speech as disinformation, so the various elements of the Censorship Complex deployed what they called “the added element of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, with Clinton amplifying this message and blaming the spread of social media misinformation for her loss.
Priming the public to connect “disinformation” with Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election allowed the Censorship Complex to frame demands for censorship as patriotic: a fight against foreign influence to save democracy!
The Censorship Complex Expands
The Censorship Complex’s push to silence speech under the guise of preventing disinformation and election interference hit its stride in 2017, when FBI Director Christopher Wray launched the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) purportedly “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.”
The “most widely reported” foreign influence operations these days, Wray said, “are attempts by adversaries — hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States — to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” Wray’s statement perfectly echoed the claims Clinton and Democrats had peddled ad nauseam in the press, and it foreshadowed how the Censorship Complex would soon mature.
The launch of the FITF in 2017 brought together numerous representatives from the deep state. The FBI’s Counterintelligence, Cyber, Criminal, and Counterterrorism Divisions worked closely with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, as well as “state and local enforcement partners and election officials.”
Significantly, the FITF viewed “strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing,” as crucial to combatting foreign disinformation. That perspective led to the FBI’s hand-in-glove relationship with Twitter, which included monthly and then weekly meetings with the tech giant, some of which CIA representatives attended. This symbiotic relationship also led to the censorship of important — and true — political speech, such as the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, which exposed the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandal right before a critical presidential election.
State Department Renovates Its Wing
In 2011, by executive order, the Department of State established the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to support government agencies’ communications “targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.” While renamed the Global Engagement Center in 2016, the center’s counterterrorism mission remained largely unchanged. But then at the end of that year, Congress expanded the Global Engagement Center’s authority, directing it “to address other foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation activities.” And with language straight out of the Russia hoax playbook, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further refined the Global Engagement Center’s mission:
The purpose of the Center shall be to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.
Together, the State Department and the many intelligence agencies behind the FITF worked not just with Twitter but with the array of tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, pushing for censorship of supposed mis-, dis-, and mal-information. But the deep state was not alone. The “disinformation” contagion also reached the Hill, nonprofits, think tanks, and academic institutions with both politics and a desire to suckle at the federal teat driving a frenzied expansion of the project. Together these groups pushed for even more silencing of their opponents, and the Censorship Complex boomed.
The danger Eisenhower warned the country of in 1961 is mild in comparison to the threat of the Censorship Complex. Unlike the military-industrial complex that reached only one function of the federal government, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you and your fellow Americans on every topic.
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.
One of House Republicans’ first steps after regaining the majority was to launch an investigation into President Joe Biden’s role in the Biden family’s lucrative pay-to-play business. Corporate media, however, are trying to distract from the first family’s scandals by conflating them with the conduct of the Trump family.
The Washington Post published an article last week, during the height of buzz about the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation, pointing the corruption finger at former President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
“An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict,” the article alleges.
Within days of the report’s publication, corporate media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and even Rolling Stone featured anti-Trump information on their pages and networks. The point of amplifying the report is twofold. First, it gives the media and their Democrat allies more ammo against Trump’s third presidential run. The Washington Post is clear about that:
Now, with Trump running for president again, some national security experts and two former White House officials say they have concerns that Trump and Kushner used their offices to set themselves up to profit from their relationship with the Saudis after the administration ended.
Second, reports about the Trumps give anyone looking to escape conversations about the Biden family’s well-documented history of enriching their bank accounts with funds from foreign oligarchs an excuse to pivot to their favorite scapegoat.
Already, leftist commentators are claiming the Biden family “deserves grace,” while the Trumps deserve investigation. Despite countless real reports and ongoing federal investigations into the Biden family’s affairs, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan even bizarrely asserted there is “no real evidence” that the Biden family business leveraged Joe Biden’s status for personal profit.
The Political Enemy Playbook
Even before Trump’s White House tenure, the corporate media did everything in their power to make him look like a corrupt politician who was sold out to foreign governments. When they weren’t amplifying the Russia hoax, a fake scandal created and paid for by Democrats, the propaganda press scrutinized Trump’s tweets, twisted his words, and tried to undermine his presidency with lies that won Pulitzers.
They also aided Democrats in orchestrating two sham impeachments against Trump, whom they claimed was guilty of treason. These political attacks were sustained with plenty of negative press coverage of Trump’s sons, daughters, and son-in-law.
Where was the media’s outrage about White House familial corruption when Hunter exploited his father’s political reputation to strike business deals with oligarchs in Ukraine and China and then likely gave a cut to his dad? Joe Biden and his youngest son are the epitomal of the scandal and corruption Democrats and the corrupt corporate media desperately want Trump and his family to be.
There are literal receipts of the Biden family conducting shady business dealings overseas and profiting from relationships with sworn enemies, yet publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times worked overtime to downplay and mischaracterize the findings to save the Biden patriarch from criticism and losing the 2020 election.
They didn’t want the public to know that when Biden was vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine relations, Hunter received a whopping $50,000 per month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company he had no qualifications to be on. They didn’t want the public to hear that Hunter also raked in millions from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, and they certainly didn’t want Americans to discover that just two weeks after he traveled to communist China on his dad’s Air Force Two jet, Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.
“Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.”
Why COBALT? It’s one of the primary components of EV batteries.
No, for the media, there was no politically advantageous reason to expose that “an arm of the Chinese government” funneled money directly to a company managed by Hunter to compensate him for offering legal representation to the vice-chairman and secretary-general of Chinese energy company CEFC, Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping, the “spy chief of China.” And there was certainly no good reason for them to communicate that Ho, who was arrested, charged, and later convicted for using millions of dollars to “bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC,” made a phone call to James Biden, Joe’s brother.
Instead of covering bombshell stories about the questionable actions of a tight-knit family whose patriarch is in charge of the U.S. government, the propaganda press is still hyper-fixated on the Trumps.
When they aren’t going after the former first family, the media are amplifying the current president’s excuses and shilling for his son, who admitted through his lawyers that the infamous laptop exposing the Biden family’s foreign dealings was his. This investigation, they have claimed over and over and over and over and over, is a politically motivated one. But it’s not.
It’s About Joe, Stupid
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has repeatedly declared Republican investigators are interested in Joe Biden’s “knowledge of and role in his family’s foreign business deals to assess whether he has compromised national security,” not Hunter.
“Evidence obtained in our investigation reveals the Biden family business model is built on Joe Biden’s political career and connections. Biden family members attempted to sell access around the world, including individuals who were connected to the Chinese Communist Party, to enrich themselves to the detriment of American interests,” Comer said in a statement last week. “If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making, this is a threat to national security.”
Despite the corporate media’s attempts to distract from, stifle, and smear Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family business by going after Trump again, the GOP can’t give up. Unlike when Democrats rallied their partisan network to falsely paint Trump as a Russian asset, this legitimate and evidence-based investigation is essential to determining whether U.S. national security is compromised from top to bottom because of Biden.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-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 Twitter @jordanboydtx.
When the New York Post dropped its bombshell reporting on documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, Twitter did not reach out to the FBI to ask whether the reporting was Russian disinformation — despite extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference. Instead, according to testimony at Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.
The House Oversight Committee, now in the hands of Republicans, questioned four former Twitter executives on their decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., pushed Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to explain the timing of Twitter’s decision to censor the New York Post story.
Biggs noted that in an 8:51 a.m. email on Oct. 14, 2020, Roth had taken the position that the laptop “isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy.” But then, by 10:12, Roth emailed his colleagues with Twitter’s decision to censor the story, stating that “the key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak operation.”
What cybersecurity experts had Roth consulted between 9 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, the morning the Post story broke, Biggs asked the former Twitter executive.
Roth responded that the experts were ones the Twitter heads were following on the platform. “We were following discussions about this as they unfolded on Twitter,” Roth explained. “Cybersecurity experts were tweeting about this incident and sharing their perspectives, and that informed some of Twitter’s judgment here.”
Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., was incredulous: “After 2016, you set up all these teams to deal with Russian interference, foreign interference, having regular meetings with the FBI, you have connections with all of these different government agencies, and you didn’t reach out to them once?”
“That’s right,” Roth said, noting he didn’t think it would be appropriate.
Instead, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed national security experts.
Who those experts were, Roth didn’t say, but here we have another strange coincidence: In his testimony on Wednesday, Roth told the committee that a few weeks before the Post story dropped, he had participated in an exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute, with other media outlets and social media companies, that posed a hack and leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden. Roth testified that Garrett Graff facilitated that event.
And at 8:23 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, after the Post story broke, Graff tweeted his playbook for how the media should react to “this Biden-Burisma crap.”
Graff followed about some 10 minutes later, tweeting, “Also, what a TOTAL coincidence that this fake Hunter Biden scandal drops the literal day after it becomes clear that both of Bill Barr’s other intended October surprises—the Durham investigation and the unmasking investigation—have fallen apart??!”
Not long after Graff began pushing the “fake” Hunter Biden scandal narrative, Vivian Schiller joined in, calling the Hunter Biden story “nonsense” and claiming Graff’s exercise was “to test readiness of some MSM.”
And who is Schiller? According to Graff, Schiller “designed and ran” the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise that Roth participated in. She was also the former head of news at Twitter, in addition to previously being the CEO of NPR, among other gigs.
In addition to Graff and Schiller, CNN’s consultant and so-called national-security expert weighed in at 8:23 a.m., questioning the “amplifying” of the New York Post’s story, stressing that “amplification is the key to disinformation.”
Natasha Bertrand also tweeted an early morning “warning” that a Russian agent had been “teasing misleading or edited Biden material for nearly a year.”
Bertrand, also known as Fusion Natasha for falling for Fusion GPS’s Steele dossier and Alfa Bank hoax, was joined in pushing the disinformation narrative by The Washington Post’s alleged fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
By 8:30 a.m., Kessler had shared The Washington Post’s policy “regarding hacked or leaked materials,” and told Twitter users to “be careful what is in your social media feeds.”
Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn followed with a 9:07 tweet declaring that the “whole story” was predicated on “false Fox/Giuliani talking points” and pronouncing the Post as advancing “disinformation.”
Twitter’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story was bad enough before, but to think the executives may have relied on so-called experts like these raises the outrage another octave.
Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker likewise indicated in an email that he had “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails in another way (i.e., that there is no metadata pertaining to them that has been released and the formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications.)” Baker, however, did not say whether he had spoken with the “cybersecurity folks,” and given that when pushed by the committee he hid behind attorney-client privilege, getting any more answers from Baker seems unlikely.
Beyond learning that Twitter executives opted to rely on the tweets of so-called experts over asking the FBI if the laptop was fake, Wednesday’s hearing consisted mainly of grandstanding — some on both sides of the aisle — and Democrats attempting to make the hearing about Trump when they weren’t complaining that the entire session was a waste of time. One additional salient fact came out, however, in addition to a review of the basics of Twitter’s censorship efforts.
Specifically, Roth clarified for the House committee that the FBI had not previously warned that an expected “hack-and-leak” operation was rumored to likely involve Hunter Biden. Rather, according to Roth’s testimony, the rumor that the hack-and-leak operation would target the Biden son came from another tech company.
Roth claimed in his Wednesday testimony that his Dec. 21, 2020, statement to the Federal Election Commission was being misinterpreted. In that statement, Roth had attested that “since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.” His signed declaration then noted that the “expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
According to Roth, he should have worded his statement differently because it was not the FBI that had raised Hunter Biden as a potential subject of the hack and leak, but a peer company. One would think, however, that Roth would have clarified this point to his lawyer some two-plus years ago when Twitter’s Covington & Burling attorney represented to the FEC in a cover letter that accompanied Roth’s statement that “reports from the law enforcement agencies even suggested there were rumors that such a hack-and-leak operation would be related to Hunter Biden.”
Clearly, the former Twitter executives seek to separate themselves from the FBI, but “The Twitter Files” make that next to impossible to accomplish. And, really, being beholden to the so-called experts tweeting out warnings of supposed Russian disinformation would hardly be an improvement.
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.
First Son Hunter Biden seeming admittance that the laptop at the center of a federal investigation belongs to him late Wednesday in a letter from his lawyers prompted widespread criticism of mainstream media organizations that dismissed it as unreliable and even Russian disinformation.
“Hunter Biden admits infamous laptop is his. Not Russian disinformation, not a ‘plant’ as his father and 51 dishonest former intel officials pretended,” journalist Miranda Devine, who authored the book “Laptop from Hell,” tweeted, referring to the 51 intelligence experts who signed a letter casting doubt on the scandal in 2020.
“So Hunter Biden is now admitting, after three years, that everything on the laptop is real? Bold strategy. Especially after Democrats & their media allies spent years arguing Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation,” Outkick founder Clay Travis wrote.
First Son Hunter Biden finally admitted the infamous, scandalous laptop belongs to him late Wednesday in a letter from lawyers seeking a criminal probe. (CBS Sunday Morning)
Writer Kelly Jane Torrance asked, “How many people and publications is it that owe the @NYPost an apology?”
Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote letters to the Justice Department and the Delaware attorney general on Wednesday calling for investigations into Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and John Mac Isaac, who owns the computer repair shop where Biden is said to have left his laptop. Biden’s lawyers also sent cease and desist letters to others who obtained and disseminated the laptop’s contents.
Lowell argued in the letters that Mac Isaac and the others had no right to inspect the contents of Biden’s computer, much less make copies of it to share with the media. He told Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich on Thursday, however, that the letters requesting the investigation were not an admission that the laptop belonged to his client.
🚨NEW: attorney for Hunter Biden tells me letters requesting investigation into the laptop repair store owner, Rudy Guiliani, and others, are NOT an acknowledgment that the laptop is, in fact, Hunter's: pic.twitter.com/RPbksqNR0v
CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post and NPR did not immediately respond when asked if any corrections or statements would be issued in the wake of Hunter Biden’s apparent admission. Those outlets have all verified the laptop’s legitimacy to some degree in their own reporting in the years since 2020.
The laptop saga began in October 2020, when the New York Post reported about a 2015 email from a Ukrainian energy executive to Hunter Biden, thanking him for introducing him to his father, that it obtained from the hard drive of Biden’s laptop. Joe Biden was vice-president at the time of the message, and his son then enjoyed a lucrative position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, raising concerns of attempted influence-peddling with his powerful father.
The laptop’s content included a peek into Biden’s overseas business dealings, as well as more sordid material like homemade sex tapes and videos showing him using illegal drugs.
The laptop was widely dismissed by print and television outlets, especially The New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC and CNN, and in an astonishing display of coordination, Twitter and Facebook blocked or limited sharing of the New York Post’s article about Biden; Twitter even locked the New York Post out of its account for weeks.
Then-CNN host Brian Stelter hypothesized the emails could be “made up” and the story was simply the “right-wing media machine” in action. “60 Minutes” host Lesley Stahl told then-President Trump in 2020 that the laptop couldn’t be “verified,” and NPR announced it wouldn’t “waste our time” on “stories that are not really stories.”
The Washington Post eventually did a stunning about-face in its coverage of the laptop, but didn’t inform readers of the truth until well after President Biden had occupied the White House.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ paper largely kept its readers in the dark as to the seriousness of the Hunter Biden scandal.
The Post first addressed the Biden controversy on Oct. 14, 2020, the day the New York Post broke its story, using a variation of the “Republicans pounce” trope to frame the story, running the headline, “Three weeks before Election Day, Trump allies go after Hunter — and Joe — Biden.”
Right out of the gate, the report expressed heavy skepticism towards the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s emails and sowed doubt in the GOP sources who first obtained the laptop. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler also authored a skeptical “explainer” of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the paper published multiple opinion pieces urging readers to dismiss the controversy altogether.
The New York Times and The Washington Post both eventually verified Hunter Biden’s laptop after big tech dismissed the New York Post’s bombshell reporting during the 2020 presidential election. (Getty images | New York Post)
In March 2022 the Post finally authenticated thousands of emails from the laptop in a lengthy report about Hunter Biden’s “multimillion-dollar” financial ties to the Chinese energy company CEFC China Energy.
Much like the Post, the New York Times also confirmed the authenticity of the laptop in March 2022, well after the Gray Lady reported on it skeptically during the 2020 campaign. Politico, NBC News and CNN also eventually verified the laptop.
The New York Post covered the news Thursday with a front-page story headlined, “It’s mine.”
There is not enough criticism in the world to go around regarding how the Biden campaign and their corrupt allies in the media responded to the Hunter Biden laptop news in October 2020. pic.twitter.com/ep3RRXT4pl
Hunter Biden authorized John Paul Mac Isaac to access his laptop data. Then he failed to retrieve the laptop. At that point it became abandoned property. & free game. https://t.co/MvrSOpf7Tw
Right before the election America’s top intel veterans (e.g., 5 former CIA Directors) published a letter that Hunter’s laptop was Russian. The media repeated the absurdity as fact. Joe cited the absurdity in the debates to silence the matter. Hunter now admits the laptop was his.
An upcoming hearing for the House Oversight Committee will focus on Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s original story. Other House investigations are expected to focus on Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Those investigations are likely to rely heavily on the contents of the laptop.
High-priced attorneys for Hunter Biden dispatched letters on Wednesday to the Delaware attorney general and the Department of Justice pushing them to launch investigations into a slew of individuals who had shared information allegedly retrieved from the laptop abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. But yesterday’s transparent attempt to sic top state and federal law enforcement officials on those exposing the Biden family pay-to-play scandal is already backfiring, with Biden’s clarifying the letters are not an admission that the laptop was Hunter’s.
In two detailed, 14-page letters penned by Winston & Strawn attorney Abbe David Lowell, the Hunter Biden attorney requested the attorney general of Delaware and the Department of Justice investigate whether John Paul Mac Isaac, Robert Costello, Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Bannon, Jack Maxey, Garrett Ziegler, and Yaacov Apelbaum committed state or federal crimes. “There is considerable reason to believe” those individuals violated various laws “in accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden’s personal computer data,” Hunter’s attorney opened his Wednesday missive.
The lengthy letters then detail each of the individuals’ purported actions that Lowell claims provide “considerable reason to believe” they committed various state or federal crimes, which the Winston & Strawn attorney then identifies and analyzes.
Starting with John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware repair shop where the laptop was left for repairs, Lowell asserts, “Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to gaining access to our client’s personal computer data in Delaware without Mr. Biden’s consent.”
“Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to copying that data without Mr. Biden’s consent, and Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to distributing copies of that data from his place in Delaware,” the letter to the Delaware AG continues.
Given that Mac Isaac has maintained from day one that the “computer data” he copied was contained on a laptop abandoned at his repair shop by an individual he believed was Hunter Biden, yesterday’s letters to the Delaware attorney general and the DOJ appeared as an apparent admission by Hunter that yes, the laptop was his.
But when asked whether Hunter “now acknowledge[s] he or someone on his behalf dropped off his laptop for repairs at Mac Isaac’s store,” Lowell told The Federalist, “These letters do not confirm Mac Isaac’s or others’ versions of a so-called laptop. They address their conduct of seeking, manipulating and disseminating what they allege to be Mr. Biden’s personal data, wherever they claim to have gotten it.”
In an exclusive interview with The Federalist, Mac Isaac’s attorney Brian Della Rocca seemed flabbergasted by the continued obfuscating by Hunter Biden’s legal team. “Is Hunter denying that he was in Delaware in April of 2019 then? To this day, he has not denied being in Wilmington at that time,” he said. “Nor has he ever denied dropping off the laptop with John Paul. Is he denying doing so now?”
“John Paul has not, nor will he ever manipulate the data on Hunter’s hard drive. That is just not who he is,” Della Rocca told The Federalist. And it would be easy to confirm the authenticity of the data, Della Rocca explained, stressing that “the data on the drive he has can be compared to the laptop, which is in the possession of the FBI, to show he has not made any changes to the information.”
Della Rocca also condemned the letters’ attempt to suggest Mac Isaac lied to law enforcement officials.
“Mr. Mac Isaac has insisted that he did not make a bit-by-bit copy or clone of the hard drive,” page eight of the Biden attorney’s letter maintained, continuing:
Nor could he make such a copy because the hard drive was soldered to the laptop’s mother board, and he could not stay logged into the waterlogged laptop long enough to copy the entirety of the hard drive because the waterlogged laptop would periodically turn off. Instead, Mr. Mac Isaac chose what he wanted to access and copy from Mr. Biden’s personal data that Mr. Mac Isaac unlawfully obtained. Thus, any representation by Mr. Mac Isaac to law enforcement that what was in his possession was the entire hard drive would have been a knowing false statement. Moreover, the absence of a true clone of the hard drive created the opportunity for mischief—namely, the addition of files to this “hard drive,” the manipulation of files on this “hard drive,” and the destruction of files from this “hard drive.”
Mac Isaac’s attorney told The Federalist this passage represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the process for retrieving data from a damaged MacBook Pro 13. “Due to the damaged condition and poor stability of the MacBook, John Paul had to manually recover the user data,” Mac Isaac’s attorney explained. “John Paul was able to recover the entire contents (220GB) [of] the folder named, RobertHunter.”
“Per Hunter’s request, no attempt to recover the remaining system files or applications was made because they did not include personal data,” Mac Isaac’s lawyer stressed. Della Rocca added that “the only law enforcement agency to which John Paul has provided a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the FBI,” and that the FBI also took custody of the laptop at the same time, making it possible for the FBI to compare what Mac Isaac recovered from the “RobertHunter” folder on the original laptop. “There would be no difference,” Mac Isaac’s attorney emphasized.
The accusation that Mac Isaac accessed Hunter Biden’s personal data without his consent is also “absolutely false,” Della Rocca told The Federalist.
While Della Rocca did not elaborate, the signed repair contract stated that if the laptop was not retrieved within 90 days of “notification of completed service,” it would be treated as “abandoned.” Hunter Biden’s attorney did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiry on whether it was his position that Hunter Biden had “not abandoned the property under the repair contract,” with the Winston & Strawn attorney instead stressing the letters do not confirm Mac Isaac’s “versions of a so-called laptop.”
The repair contract further provided that the owner of the equipment agreed to hold Mac Isaac “harmless for any damage or loss of property.”
Yet, here we are, with “another privileged person hiring yet another high-priced attorney to redirect attention away from his own unlawful actions,” Della Rocca scoffed. “This is entirely a P.R. move,” he added, telling The Federalist he first saw the lengthy letters from Hunter’s attorney when CBS contacted him for comment.
The public relations move, however, is already backfiring, with the general public interpreting the letter as an implicit acknowledgment that the laptop from hell was Hunter Biden’s. And things may only get worse, if the FBI is forced to confirm that, yes, the damning documents publicly circulating are authentic copies of the material contained in the MacBook’s “RobertHunter” folder.
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.
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 Donald Trump.
Long before classified and potentially compromising documents were discovered in President Joe Biden’s “think tank” office and Wilmington home and garage, the Democrat’s actions posed a threat to U.S. national security. The discovery of even more top secret documents dating back to Biden’s time as vice president and senator sparked widespread concerns that the current president hid material that put U.S. national security at risk, potentially for decades.
Republicans worried — and even partisan hacks such as Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff conceded — that Biden’s harboring of classified documents in high-traffic, unsecured areas could have put Americans or the U.S. government at risk.
“Is it possible that national security was jeopardized here as many, including you, raised that possibility with the Mar-a-Lago documents?” ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked.
“I don’t think we can exclude the possibility without knowing more of the facts,” the disgraced former chair of the House Intelligence Committee replied.
It seems logical to investigate Biden’s recent scandal to ensure he didn’t compromise any sensitive material. But the truth is, he opened up the U.S. to a myriad of national security crises, abuses, and disasters long before news broke of his document scandal. Since taking office, Biden, who is charged with ensuring the national security of the U.S., has put Americans and their security at risk countless times.
By openly pursuing a policy of escalation in the U.S.-funded proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Biden and his administration have significantly increased the threat of nuclear war. A conflict that only ends on Ukraine’s terms and might result in a radioactive third world war compromises Americans’ safety and tax dollars.
It also leaves countries like Taiwan vulnerable to communist China’s hegemonic operations. While China stockpiled hundreds of nuclear warheads and prepared to expand its influence, Biden was further emboldening his country’s No. 1 foreign threat. First, he did business with the Chinese gas giant with ties to his son. Then Biden pushed the Saudis into an amicable relationship with the Eastern communist government.
Speaking of the Middle East, it was Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal that sent tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into U.S. cities without proper screening, vetting, and inspection. This lapse in security resulted in two known security risks and dozens more evacuees tainted by “derogatory information” entering the country unmonitored. Domestically, Biden and the same agency that failed to vet Afghan refugees jeopardized U.S. national security by escorting in the worst illegal immigration influx in recorded U.S. history and then doing nothing to fix it. Under Biden’s watch, more than 100 potential terrorists and hundreds more criminals crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.
Even dating back to his time as vice president, Biden sacrificed national security for profit by keeping his son Hunter Biden close. Hunter didn’t just exchange access to his father for cash to fund the family’s lavish lifestyle, he was paid by oligarchs and businessmen in countries that have a vested interest in meddling with U.S. affairs. That’s likely why the inexperienced Hunter was handed a lucrative position at a prominent Ukrainian energy company at the same time his father took the lead on Ukraine policy for the Obama administration.
At one point, Biden used a non-government email to share official White House business with Hunter, a civilian who shouldn’t have had access to sensitive material. Republican senators’ attempts to investigate the emails and the role they may have played in enriching the Biden family business were ignored.
Biden’s willingness to share delicate information with his son, whose own documents stored on an abandoned laptop likely pose a serious threat to the national security of the United States, is more than problematic. Combine that with Biden’s knowledge of and involvement in Hunter’s business with foreign oligarchs, and you have a long list of foreign entanglements and finances that could severely hamper the elder Biden’s ability to put American interests first.
If early reports are correct in noting that some of the recovered Biden documents included “US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom,” Biden’s information cache does warrant investigation and transparency. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is the first time Biden has sacrificed U.S. national security to protect his personal interests, preserve the Biden family business, and advance his radical agenda.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
So now CNN wants to look into The Big Guy? This is the beginning of the end for Biden and “the Biden name”.
Things are heating up for the Bidens. What you will note is how the Democrats begin distancing themselves as a Party from the Bidens, and start to leave Joe and Hunter swinging in the wind. Watch for the small signs.
Just recently CNN actually mentioned that Joe Biden lied about not knowing any of Hunter’s foreign business partners.
Soon, Biden’s blind eye will be declared a bona fide lie. Things will only get worse from there. Democrats will pretend to be outraged by these “new revelations”, and game on.
For now, one has to speculate at what made CNN finally jump ship like rats fleeing the Titanic. It seems unlikely that the Network decided to join in some journalistic integrity. But there are plenty of other ideas. Perhaps Obama finally gave the kill order for his old bro.
CNN Handlers gave the directive….Ruin his career….We can't have him run in '24…. Republican led House is going to dig up DIRT. . Drive it home to all viewers…..all 10 of them….ratings down the drain. .
Are we supposed to congratulate CNN for finally telling the truth, albeit in the face of way too much proof to remain in denial? Or do we just welcome them to the show?
Either way, Biden’s name will never ring quite the same!
“I Give You My Word, As a Biden!”
I’m pretty sure that catch phrase started with Biden’s first big lie, which coincidentally was told on Biden’s first day in Congress. That’s when Biden’s first wife was killed in a tragic accident, most likely a form of vehicular homicide and suicide. It’s quite believable that Mrs. Biden turned into traffic on purpose in an effort to kill herself and her children. Her newborn daughter was also a casualty of the accident.
The lie wasn’t centered around Mrs. Biden’s postpartum depression. In fact, it was glossed over because Joe Biden blamed the other driver, claiming his wife and daughter were murdered by a drunk driver! Boy, did that lie gain traction over the years. So much so that it ruined the life of the truck driver. He spent decades trying to clear his name, fighting off death threats, and being publicly crucified. To this day, his daughter speaks out in defense of her father. But I digress.
Here’s what CNN says about Biden’s word:
For years, as Joe Biden has sought to assure the American public he deserves their trust, he’s relied upon a go-to phrase meant to underscore his credibility: “I give you my word as a Biden.”
But that’s not the only way the Biden family name has been used. The president’s brothers have invoked it in their private business pursuits over the years to suggest access to power and influence, according to a CNN review of court documents, emails and video recordings as well as interviews with former business acquaintances.
A year after Biden was elected, for example, his youngest brother, Frank, boasted in a speech to medical professionals gathered in Boston of the “bully pulpit” he was afforded due to “my brother Joey,” and vowed to help attendees “get federal dollars.” Just three months ago, Frank Biden was an invited keynote speaker at a medical conference in Venice, Italy, where he gave advice to a group lobbying the federal government – a trip he acknowledged he did not pay for but declined to say who did.
Biden’s son, Hunter, meanwhile, has bluntly acknowledged in a memoir that his last name was a “coveted credential” helping him land a lucrative and controversial gig as a board member for a Ukrainian energy company when Joe Biden was vice president. That company, Burisma, “considered my last name gold,” Hunter Biden wrote.
With Republicans taking charge of the House of Representatives this month, the Biden name and what it stands for are expected to be at the center of a wide-ranging oversight inquiry into alleged influence peddling and potential conflicts of interest, even as the GOP has turned its immediate attention to Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The partisan probe is likely to delve deeply into the contents of a laptop computer that Hunter Biden purportedly discarded at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019. A digital copy of the laptop’s hard drive has been broadly shared among right-wing operatives and was provided to CNN by Jack Maxey, a former co-host of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show. It appears to contain a massive trove of information detailing, among other things, how Hunter Biden worked to put his business associates in the same room as his famous father. Hunter Biden has not confirmed or denied that the laptop was his.
At least one email from the laptop – cited in a November report released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee – shows Hunter Biden acknowledging that his family lineage was one of his major selling points. As he discussed a Chinese business deal in September 2011, Hunter Biden told a colleague that a potential business partner’s apparent fondness for him “has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name.”
Of course, Hunter is exactly right about that.
The Biden last name is the underlying tie between all of this corruption. But for some reason, CNN still wouldn’t give Republicans the satisfaction of acknowledgement. Instead, they continued to promote this narrative that Republicans don’t have all the facts.
When it comes to modern politics, I think it’s fair to say that 90% of fact is fiction, and 90% of fiction is actually fact. Think about it, what are some of the facts, according to the left? Global warming, the ‘advantages’ of green energy, the idea that babies aren’t living beings before they are born… we could go on. But the point is, leftists do not present these ideas as opinions, but rather as hard core truths.
On the flip side, how many Republican “conspiracy theories” have panned out to be the facts? The vaccine is dangerous. The virus is benign without underlying factors. The pandemic was a scam. Hunter’s laptop links the Big Guy to China. Again, the list goes on. Which makes it no surprise that CNN still tried to paint Republicans as out of touch.
CNN adds:
Republicans have suggested that Biden’s son and brothers illegally used their family connections for profit but have so far offered scant evidence to support that claim. Joe Biden has repeatedly said he never discussed his son or brothers’ business dealings with them.
“The President has pledged to restore ethics to the White House and has established the most rigorous ethics guidelines of any administration in history, consistent with his commitment to ensure government works for the American people,” said Ian Sams, a White House spokesperson. “Unlike in the previous administration, no family member has or will serve in the administration or be involved in government decision making.”
Hmmm. Funny. I’ve yet to see an email from Don Jr. working out the terms of selling his father to China. And trust me, if it existed, Democrats would have presented it by now.
President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who is facing wide-ranging probes into his business dealings, once noted that he and other family members “quarantined” at his father’s home, where classified documents were recently found.
In his memoir published in April 2021, the president’s son said he and other close family members spent election night on Nov. 3, 2020, at the Wilmington, Delaware, home. Hunter Biden wrote that he, his children, his wife Melissa Cohen, and his half-sister Ashley Biden and her husband Howard Krein watched coverage of the presidential election together as votes were counted.
“You would have loved the scene on election night, too, even though the night would’ve driven you nuts, not least because the vote counting dragged on for days,” Hunter Biden wrote in the memoir.
“Yet one of the benefits of waiting so long for the race to be called was that we all waited it out together, at Mom and Dad’s house — Melissa and the baby, my girls, Natalie and Hunter, Ashley and Howard,” he continued in the passage. “More than waiting together, we were also quarantined together. There was no escaping one another.”
President Biden with his son Hunter Biden after attending Mass on Johns Island, South Carolina, on Aug. 13, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
In addition to the revelation that Hunter Biden quarantined at the home during the 2020 presidential election, additional evidence has surfaced showing he has spent time at the home on numerous other occasions. Hunter Biden was notably seen traveling with his father from the White House to Delaware on Dec. 16, 2022, just four days prior to the search of the residence that yielded the classified documents. According to the White House, the president’s attorneys searched the Wilmington home and found the documents on Dec. 20.
Hunter Biden also spent time in Wilmington on at least five other instances since his father took office, according to various media reports of his whereabouts. For example, on March 26, 2021, Daily Mail reporter Rob Crilly tweeted footage of Hunter Biden traveling with the president to Wilmington.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday that it had obtained photos placing Hunter Biden at the Delaware home on July 30, 2017, shortly after his father departed the White House with documents from his tenure. The pictures showed Hunter Biden driving in his father’s 1967 Corvette Stingray, which the president told reporters was parked next to where the classified documents had been found last month.
President Biden and his son Hunter Biden celebrate at an election rally in Wilmington, Delaware, after it was announced that he had won the presidential election on Nov. 7, 2020. (Reuters/Jim Bourg)
The White House first revealed last week that a series of classified documents, including some marked “top-secret,” dating back to Biden’s time as vice president had been discovered at the Penn Biden Center. Later in the week, the White House acknowledged a second batch of classified documents was found in the garage of the president’s Wilmington residence.
“As the President said, he takes classified information and materials seriously, and as we have said, we have cooperated from the moment we informed the [National] Archives that a small number of documents were found, and we will continue to cooperate,” the president’s lawyer Richard Sauber said Thursday in a statement.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” he added.
Hunter Biden, Melissa Cohen and Baby Beau with POTUS on trip to Wilmington today pic.twitter.com/MhwEiZAY79
Then, on Saturday, Sauber disclosed that yet another batch of five documents were discovered at the home despite earlier assurances from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre that the search had been completed.
Republicans, meanwhile, have zeroed in on whether Hunter Biden had access to the classified information — which included intelligence regarding Ukraine, Iran and the U.K. — in the aftermath of the discovery of the documents in the president’s home. Hunter Biden is currently under federal investigation and faces congressional inquiries regarding his business dealings.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed career prosecutor Robert Hur to serve as a special counsel to investigate the president’s handling of classified documents.
Fox News’ Pat Ward contributed to this report.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
To this day, President Joe Biden denies his long history of involvement in the lucrative Biden family business, but the corrupt corporate media are finally admitting the president’s participation in the financial dealings spearheaded by his son Hunter Biden.
The New York Times published an article this week claiming, “a close look at [Hunter’s] story shows that it differs in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans,” who, with their newfound majority in the House, are investigating the Biden family’s “deliberate, repeated deception of the American people, abuse of the executive branch for personal gain, [and] use of government power to obstruct the investigation.”
The article merely acknowledges what conservative media outlets have reported for years about Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s overseas business dealings. Yes, then-Vice President Biden, who was tasked with “overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine,” met with Hunter’s “main point of contact” at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a charity dinner event, the NYT confessed, but waved off Biden’s visit with Pozharskyi as the U.S. leader’s attempt “to spend time” with his addict son.
Followers of the unraveling Biden family corruption story have already known for over a year and a half that Pozharskyi confirmed this interaction in an email thanking Hunter for “giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together.”
Biden, The New York Times conceded in a paragraph buried deep in the article, also met with Hunter’s Chinese business partners. He even authored an optimistic note to Devon Archer, arguably Hunter’s closest associate, on White House letterhead to congratulate him on snuggling up to China’s then-head Hu Jintao.
The Times also reported that Biden “met regularly with Eric Schwerin, his son’s business manager,” and even handed over management of the then-VP’s personal finances. Schwerin, the Times admitted, would occasionally “pay a bill for Vice President Biden out of one of his son’s accounts and then assure that he was repaid.” Biden’s ties to Schwerin are no surprise considering that he reportedly rubbed shoulders with more than a dozen of Hunter’s business associates, sometimes in the West Wing of the White House. Yet The New York Times argues that the 2010 emails evidencing the existence of these shared accounts and entanglement of finances shouldn’t matter because anonymous sources reportedly close to the Biden family said Hunter and his dad never “had joint bank accounts or direct access to each others’ money.”
Over and over and over and over and over, Biden and his White House denied not just wrongdoing, but an association of any kind with Hunter’s money-making schemes. Apparently at the behest of the FBI, the regime’s allies in the corporate media have long accepted and helped amplify Biden’s lies, forming a bogus “fact-checking” and election-meddling apparatus for tech giants to censor anyone who exposed Biden family corruption.
Now, as mountainsof evidence point to Biden’s deep ties to activity that’s at best unethical and possibly illegal, the Times, even in admitting Biden’s involvement, is once more writing off Hunter as “a man battling with personal demons against the background of family tragedy,” with his dad merely getting caught in the crossfire. In predictable spin, the NYT instead tries to make the story about Republicans, whom it says merely “intend to intensify their scrutiny of Hunter Biden in a bid to inflict damage on his father as he prepares for his likely 2024 re-election bid.”
An inquiry into the Bidens, however, is long overdue and an unsurprising development given the GOP’s newly acquired majority in the lower chamber. House Republicans’ investigation seeks to finally expose how the president’s proximity to his son’s twisted and likely illicit bargaining may have compromised the security of the United States. After all, Hunter didn’t just exchange access to his father, the then-second-highest executive officer in the United States, for cash to fund the family’s lavish lifestyle. He was paid off by oligarchs and businessmen in countries with a vested interest in meddling with U.S. affairs.
The New York Times’ attempt to write that off as “complex” is just further evidence of its allegiance to the Biden administration instead of the truth.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.
How the Russian Bots Story Followed the Playbook
In 2016, then-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook launched the conspiracy theory that then-candidate Trump was in cahoots with Russia and colluding together to steal the 2016 election. One dossier full of bunk allegations commissioned by the Clinton campaign later, the entire media establishment, in tandem with a politicized intelligence community, was running with the Russia collusion hoax.
One of the many conspiracy theories thrown at the wall was that Russia was influencing U.S. voters via social media, including through armies of “bot” accounts. As my colleague Joy Pullmann has noted, U.S. intelligence agencies propelled that claim with an “intelligence community assessment” on Jan. 6, 2017, “signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms.”
Regime media ran with it the same narrative before and after that assessment that turned out to be false:
The Washington Post: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 2016.
Politico Magazine: “How Russia Wins an Election” (spoiler: “the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system,” the piece says), December 2016.
NPR: “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” April 2017.
New York Times: “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” September 2017.
Mother Jones: “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election — Including Many Likely From Russia,” October 2017.
The “Twitter Files” revealed just weeks ago that media pressure on this story, combined with threats from elected Democrats, were successful in getting Twitter to obey U.S. intelligence agency requests for information suppression, even though Twitter executives couldn’t find any evidence of coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns on their platform.
31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture.
In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”
Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” pic.twitter.com/Jc94kEg2KR
Hilariously, Tim Starks, the same writer who wrote WaPo’s admission this week that Russian bots had “little influence” on the election, had written a 2019 piece for Politico titled “Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed.”
While media outlets were running cover for the story, they slapped “fact” “checks” on those who challenged the narrative, including the U.S. president. And (you guessed it) they cited the intel community’s Jan. 6, 2017 report as evidence — the same one now called into question by The Washington Post’s latest admission.
Those allegations, along with several other now-debunked claims about Trump-Russia collusion, were the basis for a special counsel investigation and a presidential impeachment, all part of a narrative aimed at kneecapping Trump’s time in office. The Mueller investigation even indicted a Russian bot farm for election interference.
Only now — after Trump has been successfully hounded out of the White House, now that almost half of likely voters have been convinced that Russia probably “changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” and everyone else has forgotten about the story — does The Washington Post come around to admitting that those troublesome Russian bots didn’t really do much after all.
5 Other Times Corporate Media Followed the Same Strategy
The Twitter bots story was just one of many instances of regime media running with the same strategy. They do it almost daily, but here are just five of the most egregious examples in recent memory.
Covid: From masks to lockdowns to vaccines, we were hounded by media bullhorns for years about the untouchable efficacy of every recommendation the “experts” tossed our way. Those who resisted, in person or on social media, were vilified and censored. Workers lost jobs, kids fell behind in school, non-Covid medical patients were denied potentially life-saving treatments and surgeries, neighbors shunned each other, and people were forced to get experimental injections they didn’t want.
Only after the reigning narrative had been used to quash its intended targets for two years did its messengers admit the truths the rest of us had been saying from the beginning.
Inflation: Despite the obvious pitfalls of Covid-era decisions to shut down the entire nation’s economy and then hand out free money to everyone screwed over by government lockdowns, regime media insisted that inflation wasn’t happening under the newly minted Biden administration. CNBC told us to “Ignore ‘hysterical people’ — inflation is not here to stay, economist says.”
“Inflation isn’t a real danger,” insisted WaPo. “The Inflation Scare Doesn’t Match Reality,” said Forbes. The New York Times offered “179 Reasons You Probably Don’t Need to Panic About Inflation.”
Now that we’re undoubtedly experiencing the worst inflation in four decades, the talking point has changed to “actually, inflation is good.”
The Steele dossier: After British agent Christopher Steele was hired by the Clinton campaign’s opposition research firm to write now-debunked rumors about Trump in what became known as the Steele dossier, Steele shopped the story out to media outlets, which ran with the hoax. The New York Times even got a Pulitzer for it. The information in the dossier, which corporate media coverage helped legitimize, was used by the Obama FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Journalists who questioned the concocted narrative were called conspiracy theorists.
After the damage to the Trump campaign (and eventually, the Trump administration) was done, corporate media admitted, in a laughable understatement, that the “Arrest of Steele dossier source forces some news outlets to reexamine their coverage.”
Irreversible surgeries for gender dysphoria: Corporate media helped fuel the epidemic of sexual confusion giving rise to disfiguring surgeries and hormone “treatments” for people, including children, with gender dysphoria. Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post pounced on anyone who challenged the dogma that pumping teenagers with off-label hormones and dicing up their genitalia was a totally safe and normal thing to be celebrated. People like The Federalist’s own John Daniel Davidson are still locked out of their social media accounts for telling the truth about the transgender craze.
Sandwiched between op-eds decrying critics of transgenderism, The Times allows no one but itself to wonder, belatedly: “Is There a Cost?“
Hunter Biden laptop: When the New York Post published damning revelations about the Biden family’s overseas business dealings shortly before the 2020 presidential election, legacy outlets smeared the story as “disinformation” and a Russian info op.
“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” parroted Politico. CBS’s Lesley Stahl called the laptop “discredited.” NPR told readers, “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” The Post and others who shared the story had their social media accounts frozen or their posts taken down.
A year and a half later, The New York Times quietly admitted — in the 24th paragraph of an article about Hunter Biden’s taxes — that “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop … [was] authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” By then, the 2020 election was safely in Joe Biden’s hands.
Don’t think those six instances are the only times regime media have run the same playbook. By now, it’s their standard practice.
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.
When the bureau’s own former general counsel calls the FBI’s conduct ‘odd,’ it’s clear who’s discrediting the agency: It isn’t conspiracy theorists — it’s the FBI.
Emails released on Saturday as part of the latest dump of the “Twitter Files” reveal that the week before the 2020 presidential election, the FBI field office investigating Hunter Biden sent multiple censorship requests to Twitter — so many in fact, a top attorney for the tech giant found it “odd.” This blockbuster detail from the weekend came mere days after the FBI issued a statement framing coverage of the “Twitter Files” as “misinformation” being peddled by “conspiracy theorists.”
The FBI has “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille stressed in a Nov. 3, 2020, email to Jim Baker, the then-deputy general counsel for Twitter. “This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” Cardille continued, before telling Baker to let her know if he had any other questions.”
Less than an hour later, Baker responded to Cardille, noting it was “odd” that the FBI is “searching for violations of our policies.”
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi published these emails as part of a 50-something Christmas Eve “Twitter Files” thread that he remarked showed “the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
The entire thread is newsworthy, but that FBI agents in both the Baltimore field office and at FBI headquarters were running keyword searches for supposed Twitter violations proves hugely significant because both offices were involved in the Hunter Biden investigation.
While the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office is — and was at the time of the 2020 election — handling the investigation into Hunter Biden, reportedly for potential money laundering and tax crimes, there is no separate Delaware FBI field office. Rather, the Baltimore FBI field office covers all of Delaware for the bureau and thus supported (and continues to support) the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office in its investigation of Hunter Biden.
We also know from multiple FBI whistleblowers that FBI headquarters entangled itself in the Hunter Biden probe: In July 2022, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, announced that “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” had claimed that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.”
“The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.
Given the involvement of both Baltimore FBI and FBI headquarters in the investigation of Hunter Biden — and the latter’s attempt to shut down the probe — the revelation that “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ” were “doing keyword searches for violations,” suggests the FBI undertook a full-court press to interfere in the 2020 election.
Previously released “Twitter Files” and statements from Twitter and Facebook established the FBI lied to the tech giants, representing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation and prompting the censorship of the Biden-family scandal mere weeks before the 2020 election. Internal Twitter communications also revealed that the night before the New York Post published emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, “the FBI used a private communications channel to send 10 documents to a top Twitter executive.”
The “Twitter Files” also exposed “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary of the FBI,” as Taibbi explained in an earlier thread. The “Twitter Files” Taibbi previously reported showed that from “January 2020 to November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth.” Those communications indicated “agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.”
These earlier threads, however, all focused on either communications coming from the San Francisco FBI field office or discussed the monthly and then weekly meetings between Twitter and the federal government’s Foreign Influence Task Force, or FITF. As Taibbi noted, the FBI greatly expanded the number of agents assigned to the FITF following the 2016 election, with the task force swelling to 80 agents.”
With FBI San Francisco and the FITF already liaisoning with Twitter, why then would the Baltimore field office and FBI headquarters have any involvement in communicating with Twitter? And as Saturday’s emails reveal, those officers were not merely passing on information they received, they were, according to a Twitter legal executive, running “keyword” searches — something even Baker, who was previously general counsel for the FBI, found “odd.”
And the Baltimore field office and FBI headquarters conducted these “keyword” searches and shared the results with Twitter for one reason only: to prompt Twitter to censor the speech the week before the 2020 presidential election.
“Odd” doesn’t even begin to capture the situation — which, given the connection between those two FBI offices and the Hunter Biden investigation, suggests a new wing to the Big Tech scandal: one in which FBI agents proactively sought out people and speech to censor for the benefit their politician of choice.
Ironically, the Wednesday before Taibbi broke this latest news, the FBI issued a statement claiming that “the correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. … It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
When the bureau’s own former general counsel calls the FBI’s conduct “odd,” it’s pretty clear who is discrediting the agency: It isn’t conspiracy theorists — it’s the FBI.
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.
New materials released Monday as part of the ‘Twitter Files’ suggest the FBI was extensively involved in crafting the Russian disinformation narrative to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The night before the New York Post published emails recovered from an abandoned Hunter Biden laptop that established Joe Biden’s connections with his son’s business dealings, the FBI used a private communications channel to send 10 documents to a top Twitter executive. While those documents and others remain cloistered at Twitter headquarters — likely because they are designated as classified — additional materials released Monday as part of the “Twitter Files,” part seven, suggest the FBI was extensively involved in crafting the Russian disinformation narrative to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Latest
“Heads up,” FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan opened an Oct. 13, 2020 late-evening email to Yoel Roth, the then-head of site integrity for Twitter. Chan’s email alerted him to a “Teleporter link” that would allow Roth to download 10 documents. “It is not spam!” Chan stressed, asking Roth to confirm receipt of the link. Two minutes later, at 6:24 p.m., California time, Roth acknowledged he had received the message and downloaded the files.
Chan’s Oct. 13, 2020, email was one of several internal communications published Monday by Michael Shellenberger in his thread on part seven of the “Twitter Files.” While the email contained no further details about the content of the 10 documents provided to the top Twitter executive, that Chan sent the email the evening before the New York Post’s story on the Hunter Biden laptop hit and mere hours after a lawyer for the Biden son had contacted John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the computer repair store where Hunter had abandoned his laptop, proves suggestive.
That the email came after normal business hours, via the private one-way communications channel used by the FBI, and included an alert to Roth to watch for the communication all also indicate that the message and the attached 10 documents concerned a matter of urgency. And what could be more urgent than the laptop October surprise?
By 9-something in the morning of Oct. 14, 2020, Jim Baker, the now-former deputy general counsel of Twitter, had already “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails,” as he told Roth and 11 other colleagues in an email. “The formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications,” Baker explained. Another email also showed Baker had arranged a phone conversation with Matthew Perry in the FBI’s Office of General Counsel for that same day.
For his part, by 10:00 a.m., Roth wrote some 15-plus colleagues that they had decided to block the Post’s Hunter Biden story as hacked material, explaining that a “key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak that learned from the 2016 Wikileaks approach and our policy changes.”
“The suggestion from experts — which rings true,” Roth continued, “is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware (and was coincidentally reviewed in a very invasive way by someone who coincidentally then handed the materials to Rudy Giuliani).”
Those “reliable cybersecurity folks” and “experts monitoring election security and disinformation,” of which Baker and Roth spoke, might not have been connected to the FBI, or the documents Chan sent the prior evening. But if they are, which seems possible — if not likely — the evidence implicating the FBI in lying to interfere in the 2020 election just multiplied exponentially.
Prior to Monday’s “Twitter Files” dump, Roth acknowledged in a statement to the Federal Election Commission that “since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.” “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” Roth said. Roth further explained that from those meetings he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg likewise confirmed during an interview with Joe Rogan that the tech giant’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story stemmed from the FBI basically telling his team, “Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert.” “[W]e thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election” Zuckerberg recalled the FBI warning his tech company, adding that the agency told them, “We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that so just be vigilant.”
“So, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020,” Zuckerberg noted, “Facebook treated the story as potentially misinformation, important misinformation for five to seven days while the tech giant’s team could determine whether it was false.”
Of course, the Hunter Biden laptop story was not false and was not part of a “hack-and-leak” operation, and the FBI knew it, having seized the laptop from Mac Isaac in December of 2019. Thus, these statements from Roth and Zuckerberg establish the FBI lied to the tech giants, prompting them to censor the New York Post’s reporting and thereby interfere in the election.
Roth and Zuckerberg’s statements should be enough to cement the FBI’s peddling of false intel to interfere in a presidential election as one of our nation’s worst political scandals. But if the FBI’s Oct. 13, 2020 Teleporter message and documents provide further concrete evidence that the FBI fed Twitter the opinion of supposed experts that the laptop was hacked or fake, it will be difficult for even the propaganda press to keep ignoring the story.
It’s Classified
Unfortunately, Shellenberger references neither the underlying Teleporter message from Oct. 13, 2020, nor the content of the 10 documents. Matt Taibbi — who in his coverage of part six of the “Twitter Files” on Friday also referenced a Chan email from Oct. 16, 2020, directing two high-level Twitter executives to monitor their Teleporter messages for two important documents — likewise did not make any mention of the content of the Teleporter message or the two important documents attached. Why is that?
Another email released in Shellenberger’s thread on Monday provides a clue.
On July 15, 2020, Chan wrote to Roth and another individual at Twitter whose identity was redacted. In that email, Chan proposed “30 days out from the election,” providing Twitter temporary clearances, with Roth and his colleague picking who would receive clearances. And by Sept. 15, 2020, the FBI was adamant that “no impediments to information sharing exist,” including of classified information.
Given that Taibbi and Shellenberger make no mention of the content of the Teleporter messages and attachments and given that Teleporter served as a one-way communications system from the FBI, it seems likely the FBI used Teleporter to transmit classified materials to the select Twitter employees provided temporary security clearance. That possibility would also account for the cryptic way Baker and Roth describe the supposed experts’ view of the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop to other Twitter employees who likely lacked clearance.
So, once again, it appears the FBI will hide behind classification markings, just as it did to mask its malfeasance in obtaining four FISA surveillance warrants for Carter Page. But Republicans now hold the majority in the House, meaning there is a chance for the country to learn what Elon Musk can’t tell us.
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.
Two months after the FBI subpoenaed the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, the Drug Enforcement Administration searched the office of Hunter’s one-time psychiatrist Keith Ablow and seized a second laptop Hunter had left with him. The timing of the DEA raid and the fact that criminal charges were never filed against Ablow, coupled with whistleblowers’ claims that the FBI buried evidence against Hunter Biden, raises the question of whether the search was a pretext to recover Hunter’s laptop and protect the Biden family.
While the DEA’s recovery of the second Hunter Biden laptop escaped scrutiny over the last nearly three years, a Washington Post article from Saturday brings that laptop into focus — and with it questions about the DEA’s seizure of the laptop and agents’ decision to return it to Hunter.
Back in the News
In a weekend article titled “Some Hunter Biden Allies Making Plans to go After His Accusers,” The Washington Post reported that Hunter and his closest advisers are plotting an offensive for when Republicans assume control of the House of Representatives in January. The strategy sessions to counter what Biden associates frame as “an expected onslaught of investigations by House Republicans” began last September, according to the Post, with a meeting at the California home of Hunter Biden’s friend and lawyer Kevin Morris.
Morris, already famous in the entertainment industry as an attorney for the co-creators of “South Park,” gained notoriety when the New York Post reported that Morris “footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million.” In addition to Morris, David Brock, a liberal activist, reportedly joined in the September 2022 strategy session. “At one point, Hunter Biden himself happened to call into the meeting, connecting briefly by video to add his own thoughts,” according to the Post.
While not detailing Hunter’s purported thoughts, The Washington Post reported that Morris suggested “it was crucial” “for Hunter Biden’s camp to be more aggressive.” According to Saturday’s article, Morris then described during the September meeting at his California home the “defamation lawsuits the team could pursue against the presidential son’s critics, including Fox News, Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani.” Morris also reportedly “outlined extensive research on two potential witnesses against Hunter Biden — a spurned business partner named Tony Bobulinski and a computer repairman named John Paul Mac Isaac.”
Brock provided more insight, telling the Post: “They feel that there is a whole counternarrative missing because of the whole Hunter-hater narrative out there.” “What we really got into was more the meat of it, the meat of what a response would look like,” Brock said of the September meeting. To aid the efforts, Brock planned to start a new group — since launched — named Facts First USA, which Brock described as a “SWAT team” designed to “ensure that the media and public do not accept the false narratives that flows from congressional investigations.”
More recently, according to the Post, “Brock’s group, Facts First, is engaging with Hunter Biden and those in his immediate circle.” Brock is reportedly “reviewing research that Morris has conducted on Biden’s adversaries, including Bobulinski and Mac Isaac.”
According to The Washington Post, Morris and others are also focused on whether the data claimed to be recovered from the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at the Delaware computer repair store, “was improperly obtained and distributed,” with Hunter and his allies suggesting that the materials released by Giuliani and others may not have originated from the laptop Hunter abandoned at the repair shop. Instead, the help-Hunter crew posits that the information may have been improperly taken from a laptop Hunter left with Ablow, whom the Post frames as “close to Republican activist Roger Stone.” The Post then reported that “Morris has been overseeing a forensic analysis of that laptop to determine if it was the basis of the hard drives that were later distributed by Trump allies.”
Morris began floating a similar tangled conspiracy theory in May 2022, with CBS News reporting, “Morris and his team have been circulating provocative slides that tease a coming counter-narrative to political attacks against the president’s son.” The slides describe a “contextualized theory” positing that “there was no laptop dropped off with Mac Isaac, just a laptop which Hunter abandoned on Feb. 1, 2019, at the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow.”
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine also lighted the conspiracy theory Morris floated in May, writing: “Morris alleges in his scrawled mind map, and in conversations with confidants, that Trump ally Roger Stone and his lawyer, Tyler Nixon, masterminded a plot with Ablow and Mac Isaac to create ‘clones’ of the laptop left in Newburyport to damage Joe before the 2020 election.” Morris pushed the theory based on Stone writing a foreword for Ablow’s 2020 book, “Trump Your Life,” and Ablow’s appearances on Fox News.
But as Devine detailed in her article, the material contained on the MacBook abandoned at Mac Isaac’s business included material created after Hunter had left the laptop with Ablow: “The biggest problem with Morris’ conspiracy theory of the ‘Ablow clones’ is that there are authentic videos and other material unique to the Mac Isaac laptop that were created after Hunter left his second laptop at Ablow’s office.”
Ablow has also dismissed the counternarrative as “a work of fiction,” stating: “I never looked at any laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, much less shared any laptop belonging to Mr. Biden with anyone, ever.” “I wouldn’t know how to access a password-protected laptop if my life depended on it,” Ablow added. Stone reportedly said the theory is “insane conjecture bordering on defamation.” Mac Isaac described it at the time as a “loose effort to muddy the waters.”
In response to Morris’s most recent push, as captured in Saturday’s Washington Post article, Mac Isaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, told The Federalist, “As we have always said, Hunter Biden knows it is his laptop. That is why neither he nor his father have ever actually denied that it is his.” “The night before the story broke,” Della Rocca added, “Hunter’s attorney reached out to John Paul to ask about whether he still had Hunter’s laptop.” What Morris is doing now, Mac Isaac’s attorney claims, is “nothing more than trying to create more of a stir so the story will be worth more in Hollywood.”
Beneath the Surface
Whether crafting a Hollywood story or an offensive strategy to protect Hunter Biden, what Morris and Hunter’s other confidants fail to realize, however, is that by pushing the theory that the material recovered from the Delaware laptop originated from the laptop left with Ablow, they are resurrecting a story that received little scrutiny at the time: the DEA’s raid of Ablow’s office. And since Morris first pushed this conspiracy theory in May 2022, “highly credible whistleblowers” have come forward and accused the Department of Justice and FBI “of burying ‘verified and verifiable’ dirt on President Biden’s troubled son Hunter by incorrectly dismissing the intelligence as “disinformation.”
So, the question arises: Was the DEA’s raid of Ablow’s office a pretext to recover Hunter’s second laptop? And relatedly: Did the DEA return the laptop to Hunter without securing the evidence first for the criminal investigation against the now-president’s son?
While most Americans now know of the infamous laptop Hunter reportedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, shortly after the New York Post broke the news that material recovered from the laptop implicated Joe Biden in Hunter’s shady business dealings, NBC News reported on Oct. 30, 2020: “[A]ccording to two people familiar with the matter, a different Hunter Biden laptop landed in the custody of the DEA in February when they executed a search warrant on the Massachusetts office of a psychiatrist accused of professional misconduct,” the psychiatrist being Ablow.
The February 2020 raid on the office of Hunter’s one-time Massachusetts-based psychiatrist Ablow received only passing mention at the time, with local outlets reporting that the DEA claimed the execution of the search warrant was part of an “ongoing investigation.” Coverage at the time also highlighted the revocation of Ablow’s medical license for alleged “inappropriate sexual activity with patients and illegally giving prescriptions to employees.”
There was no mention of the recovery of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden at the time, or at any time until two unnamed sources told NBC News of that detail on Oct. 30, 2020. Since then, Ablow confirmed that Hunter left his laptop at a bungalow attached to Ablow’s office in 2019, where the Biden son was reportedly staying for intravenous ketamine treatments for his addiction in December 2018 and January 2019.
Ablow reportedly “made repeated efforts to persuade Hunter Biden to retrieve his computer,” with Ablow even contacting Hunter’s attorney to arrange for its return.” However, the second laptop reportedly remained in a safe in Ablow’s basement for a year, and the DEA raided the psychiatrist on Feb. 13, 2020, then returned the computer to Hunter’s lawyer George Mesires.
Red Flags
The timing of the raid and the return of the computer to Hunter’s lawyer raises several red flags, especially since federal charges were never brought against Ablow. First, the Feb. 13, 2020, DEA raid occurred some nine months after the Massachusetts Board of Medicine suspended Ablow’s medical license on May 15, 2019, for purportedly diverting “controlled substances from patients,” among other things. One would think the DEA would act more promptly to execute a search warrant to prevent the destruction of evidence.
Second, the DEA only executed the search warrant after the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena in mid-December of 2019 to seize the first Hunter Biden laptop from the Delaware store owner, raising the question of whether the real goal was to ensure there were no more Biden laptops floating about before the 2020 presidential election.
Third, even if there was nothing pretextual or nefarious about the raid on Ablow’s office, that the DEA returned the laptop to Hunter’s lawyer raises other concerns because at the time, and still to this day, Hunter Biden was under investigation. In fact, it was that investigation that served as the basis for the FBI to subpoena the laptop from the Delaware repair store. Given the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden, why would the DEA return the laptop to his attorney?
Given the FBI whistleblowers’ claims that government agents buried incriminating evidence against Hunter Biden, the House oversight committees should pose these questions to the DEA to ensure that federal agency was not also acting as a protect-Biden front. And we can thank Morris and The Washington Post for reminding us of the DEA’s seizure of that second Hunter laptop — something that at the time seemed straightforward but, given the developments over the last six months, now smells suspect.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that NBC News, not CBS News, first reported on the DEA’s recovery of a second laptop.
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.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired Jim Baker, the company’s deputy general counsel, on Tuesday after an “unconvincing” explanation of the terminated employee’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
On Sunday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi posted a link to an article from attorney Jonathan Turley published in the New York Post which connected Baker’s work at Twitter with his prior operations peddling the Russia hoax at the Department of Justice. In 2016, Baker was the Clinton campaign’s “go-to, speed-dial contact” to plant false claims about Kremlin collusion and the Trump White House effort. Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann picked Baker to give junk intelligence about a purported connection between President Donald Trump and the Russian Alfa Bank.
“He was effectively forced out due to his role and reportedly found himself under criminal investigation. He became a defender of the Russian investigations despite findings of biased and even criminal conduct,” Turley wrote. “After leaving the FBI, Twitter seemed eager to hire Baker as deputy general counsel.”
The first batch of “Twitter Files” out on Friday revealed how Baker went on to play an instrumental role in suppressing blockbuster stories from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Biden family business ventures — stories containing emails that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in the dealings.
“Baker soon weighed in with the same signature bias that characterized the Russian investigations,” Turley wrote. Internal documents made public last week show Baker pressed colleagues at Twitter for more information that Biden’s emails had been hacked.
“Caution is warranted,” Baker wrote, despite there never being evidence the emails were illegally hacked.
Musk responded to Taibbi’s post on Tuesday with the announcement that Baker had been fired.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk wrote.
“Was he asked to explain himself?” inquired a user.
“Yes. His explanation was …unconvincing,” Musk replied.
In a “Twitter Files Supplemental” thread, Taibbi explained that last week’s delay in publishing the first round of files was due to Baker reviewing them without new Twitter leadership knowing.
“Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of ‘Twitter Files’ — without knowledge of new management,” Taibbi wrote.
The post suggests Baker was running interference behind Musk’s back to minimize the fallout over the reveal of Twitter’s behind-the-scenes operations to elect Joe Biden in 2020.
While general counsel at the FBI, Baker was central to the agency’s deep-state operations to undermine Trump as an agent of the Russian government. According to former FBI Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson in her testimony before House lawmakers in 2018, Baker “personally reviewed and made edits to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]” warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The ex-FBI counsel would later defend the agency’s conduct, telling Yahoo News that officials took “seriously” the uncorroborated dossier commissioned by the DNC that alleged collusion, but “we didn’t necessarily take it literally.”
The agency’s legal chief, however, took it seriously enough to sign off on warrants to spy on political opponents. At least two of the warrant applications to conduct government surveillance on Page were declared illegal by a federal judge.
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.
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 Donald Trump.
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The Associated Press revised a story about the Hunter Biden scandal after constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley spotlighted the “whopper of a claim” within it.
On Saturday, the AP wrote about House Republicans and their plan to investigate President Joe Biden for potentially being involved in his son’s business dealings despite his denials. Buried deep within the story was a paragraph absolving the president of any wrongdoing. The AP reported:
Joe Biden has said he’s never spoken to his son about his foreign business, and nothing the Republicans have put forth suggests otherwise. And there are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president.
Turley quickly called out the “breathtaking but telling” claim.
“[T]he Bidens have succeeded in a Houdini-like trick in making this elephant of a scandal disappear from the public stage,” Turley wrote on his website. “They did so by enlisting the media in the illusion. However, this level of audience participation in the trick truly defies belief.”
He then detailed the circumstantial evidence that appears to contradict Biden’s claims about not being involved in Hunter’s business dealings, including voice messages, emails, and claims from Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden.
The AP later deleted its suggestion that Republicans have failed to produce evidence backing their suspicions.
“Joe Biden has said he’s never spoken to his son about his foreign business, and there are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president,” the AP story now reads.
According to Turley, the edit — which the AP does not disclose in an editor’s note — “creates a new problem.”
“Rather than simply stating the fact, AP seems to struggle to shield the President. There is every indication that ‘the federal investigation involves the president.’ Not only is the President discussed in key emails under investigation, but the grand jury heard testimony that the ‘Big Guy’ is Joe Biden,” he explained, adding a link to this story.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A top FBI agent who resigned after accusations he worked to undermine the probe into Hunter Biden’s laptop and business dealings also allegedly pressured bureau employees to pad domestic terror data, drawing accusations of politicizing the agency from Republicans.
Timothy Thibault, the FBI’s former assistant special agent in charge who resigned Friday after Republican allegations of his political bias in connection to the Biden laptop investigation, was allegedly one of the agents trying to get FBI employees to bolster Domestic Violent Extremism (DVE) case counts to satisfy “performance metrics,” whistleblowers alleged in July, Breitbart News reported. Thibault and other bureau agents were allegedly pushing FBI employees to reclassify cases to involve DVE even if they do not meet the criteria, the outlet reported.
DVE defines a person “without direction or inspiration from a foreign terrorist group or other foreign power who seeks to further political or social goals wholly or in part through unlawful acts of force or violence,” according to the FBI. The allegation that Thibault was one of the FBI agent’s pressuring others to bolster DVE cases was made to Breitbart by Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan.
“These whistleblower allegations that the FBI is padding its domestic violent extremist data cheapens actual examples of violent extremism,” said Jordan in the letter. “This information also reinforces our concerns—about which we have written to you several times—regarding the FBI’s politicization under your leadership.”
Thibault was allegedly escorted out of the FBI building Friday, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News. The former agent was allegedly part of a widespread effort within the bureau to discredit and downplay “negative Hunter Biden information” and label it “disinformation,” Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley told Wray in July, citing whistleblowers.
Grassley accused Thibault in July of “improper conduct” in connection to the Hunter Biden probe after whistleblowers allegedly told the senator Thibault sought to shut the probe down. The investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings is still being run by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware.
But while the FBI and DOJ have busied themselves with targeting Trump and his aides, colluding with the National School Boards Association to silence concerned parents, concocting entrapment schemes masquerading as plots to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and chasing down election integrity supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, plenty of real criminals and security threats have gotten away scot-free. That’s no accident.
Here is everyone who Democrats and their bureaucrat buddies have deemed “above the law” and unworthy of proper investigation and prosecution.
The president’s son isn’t just a walking liability for the Biden family name, he’s a glaring national security threat with a long, infamous history of using illicit drugs, engaging in possibly criminal sexual escapades with foreign women, and selling access to his dad under the guise of doing business with foreign oligarchs.
Hillary Clinton and her staff mishandled highly classified information, which resulted in at least 91 security violations. The FBI, of course, never raided Clinton’s house over her rogue server despite the crimes committed to cover it up. Instead, as Sen. Chuck Grassley put it, the FBI “inexplicably agreed to destroy [Clinton staffers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson’s] laptops knowing that the contents were the subject of Congressional subpoenas and preservation letters.”
4. Everyone Involved in Benghazi
Speaking of Clinton, why wasn’t she or any other Obama-era bureaucrat who was responsible for abandoning four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, where they were murdered by terrorists, punished for trying to cover up the fatal scandal?
5. Illegal Border Crossers
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has apprehended roughly 3.5 million illegal border crossers since Biden assumed office, but those migrants are rarely punished for violating the law.
Instead of addressing how the compromised border is fostering an environment ripe for trafficking and other crimes, the Biden administration along with the FBI and DOJ have brushed off concerns about illegal immigration. Apparently, it is more important to go after American citizens than prosecute potentially dangerous foreign ones.
6. Gavin Newsom and Every Other Dem Who Partied While Americans Suffered Lockdowns
Dozens of Democrats including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pelosi, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio were caught violating their own Covid-19 lockdown rules. If Democrats cared about rule of law so much, why did these politicians escape accountability?
7. Summer of Rage Rioters
During the summer of 2020, rioters looted, burned, and destroyed more than $2 billion worth of private and federal property. Some of those who were caught were bailed out by Kamala Harris and her allies and let off the hook by the federal government. The rioters who weren’t caught can live comfortably knowing that the DOJ is too busy trying to track down potential J6 offenders to prosecute them.
It took 44 days after attacks on dozens of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations began for the FBI to tell The Federalist that it would investigate the firebombings. Two months after the agency reportedly started its search into the criminal activity, neither the FBI nor DOJ has announced charges against the vandals, including a mysterious anarchist-connected group called Jane’s Revenge, which took responsibility for some of the destruction.
10. Everyone Else Who Threatened SCOTUS over Dobbs
Shortly after a leak revealed that the Supreme Court planned to strike down Roe v. Wade, leftists called for violence against the Republican-nominated justices. While the Biden administration and DOJ stood idly by, some even said the court should burn to the ground. It took until a man was caught attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of Garland’s former colleagues, for the DOJ to respond to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s questions about whether the agency planned to prosecute anyone touting the “ongoing, coordinated campaign of intimidation against the majority of the justices on the Supreme Court.” Even then, nothing came of the DOJ’s words.
11. The Pelosi Family
Suspected insider trading deserves at least a second glance by federal investigators, but it looks like, so far, Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul have gotten away with conveniently timing their stock purchases and sales to massively grow their wealth.
12. Almost Everyone on Jeffrey Epstein’s Client List
Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were both convicted of trafficking children for sex, but the list of their clients is still reportedly harbored by the DOJ, something lamented by many including Elon Musk. Of those names that have surfaced from Epstein’s “little black book,” few have been prosecuted and convicted for their involvement in the sex-trafficking ring.
13. Marc Elias and Election Law-Breakers
Marc Elias has repeatedly tried to undermine U.S. elections, something the FBI loves to spy on Americans for. Elias has such a reputation for meddling and manipulating elections that even a federal judge reprimanded him for it. Unlike Douglass Mackey, who was charged by the DOJ for posting a meme encouraging Hillary voters to “text” their votes, however, Elias has not faced any charges or unannounced raids.
14. Mark Milley
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, undermined Trump by having secret conversations with known U.S. enemy communist China. In those covert calls, Milley promised to warn China if the U.S. ever decided to attack. Talk about a national security threat that deserves some attention from federal law enforcement.
15. Eric Swalwell
Speaking of communist China, Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell canoodling with a known spy for the nation’s No. 1 enemy seems like a pretty serious offense. Instead of a member of the House Intelligence Committee facing consequences for giving foreign spies access to key U.S. government offices and information, Swalwell is still comfortably rage-tweeting about Trump and MAGA supporters and appearing as a guest on corrupt corporate media programs.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder misled Congress during its investigation of the Obama-era “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal, which used taxpayer dollars to put guns into the hands of Mexican drug lords. Holder was held in contempt, but that’s pretty much the only punishment he received for intentionally dodging subpoenas and hiding documents from congressional oversight.
18. Susan Rice
President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked members of the Trump transition team and then lied about it. Unmasking may be a legitimate and legal process for those with the authority, but covering up an attempt to target the political enemies of the regime is an abuse of power that deserves examination.
Instead, it was yet another action U.S. intelligence agencies exploited to justify spying on American citizens.
19. All the Russia Hoaxers
There were plenty of people in the DOJ and FBI who broke the law when they lied on official documents and to other officials to advance the Russia-collusion hoax. Yet, FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in early August that so far, none of the FBI agents involved in the SpyGate scandal against Trump have faced serious consequences.
Similarly, despite lying about why he was supplying information about a supposed link between Trump and the Russia-based Alfa Bank to the FBI, former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann was acquitted and let go without consequence.
20. Themselves
The same people who control the enforcement of the law, who love lording “no one is above the law” over Americans, are the ones who think they are above any semblance of oversight or law or constitutionality.
That’s why the FBI has skirted any of Congress’s attempts at oversight even though it has a long history of botched and politicized investigations, sometimes authorized on falsified information.
Instead of investigating and prosecuting real crimes, the FBI and DOJ have chosen to shame Americans who have called out the corruption and politicization that clearly drives their agencies’ actions. That’s a deliberate decision, but also a disastrous one.
Rule of law is one thing that sets the United States apart as a bastion of freedom, but when the government fails to uphold it properly, as the list details, the nation is in crisis and on the verge of falling apart.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The criminal indictment and imprisonment of former heads of state by ruling regimes in other countries is more common than most Americans probably realize. Today, former presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, and Costa Rica are all imprisoned — and that’s just in Central and South America.
The world is replete with corrupt leaders who criminalize the opposition and politicize domestic law enforcement. That’s why, for example, Daniel Ortega has been president of Nicaragua since 2007. When you jail your political opponents and potential rivals, as Ortega did with gusto ahead of Nicaragua’s 2021 presidential election, it’s easy to stay in office. One of the salient features of these so-called “developing countries” is that they have not developed a way to transfer power peacefully. Brute force, not free and fair elections, is how rulers of the Third World seize and retain power.
Soon, the United States might join their ranks. On Monday evening, dozens of FBI agents raided the Florida home of former President Donald Trump. The absurd pretext for the raid was a dispute over documents with the National Archives — a circumstance by no means unique to the Trump administration and one that no serious person believes could ever justify such a raid. (As my colleague David Harsanyi pointed out on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton and her staff committed numerous felonies by using a private email server to send classified and even top-secret information and then destroyed all evidence related to the illegal server. Yet there was never an FBI raid or even a single charge filed against anyone. Just the opposite, in fact: Clinton’s staff was given immunity.)
Everyone in America knows the real reason for the FBI raid: to tarnish Trump as unfit for office and to intimidate and dissuade him from running again in 2024. Nothing like this has ever happened in American history. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was exactly right to compare the FBI raid to the kind of thing you see in Ortega’s Nicaragua. It’s what ruling regimes do to rob the people of their voice and avoid the consequences of elections.
Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent
Because one day what goes around is going to come around
As bad as the raid was, though, it’s only the most recent incident in a larger pattern of corruption, not only in the Justice Department but across the federal government, designed to keep Trump out of office and away from the levers of power.
On Monday, before news broke of the FBI raid, The New Yorker published a remarkable piece about Gen. Mark Milley and other top Pentagon officials during Trump’s presidency. The article, an excerpt of a forthcoming book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser titled “The Divider,” is meant to show what a hero Milley was to stand up to Trump, especially after the 2020 election (no doubt thanks to Milley obviously being the unnamed source for the conversations the article recounts). But what it unintentionally reveals is a U.S. military establishment that simply refused to follow the orders of a duly elected commander-in-chief and worked behind the scenes to thwart Trump’s entire foreign policy agenda, and, in Milley, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who came within a stone’s throw of staging a military coup in Washington. Milley and other top-ranking generals undermined Trump not because he asked them to do anything illegal but because he asked them to do things they opposed, like withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan and take a hard line on Iran.
Withdrawing U.S. troops from these places and pushing back against Iran is, of course, one of the things Trump campaigned on in 2016. Many of Trump’s voters, disillusioned with unending and seemingly pointless foreign conflicts, were ready for a radical shift in U.S. foreign policy. But Milley, whom zero Americans voted for, disagreed. He thought he knew better. Thus, we are told about how in December 2020, Milley met privately with then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to personally urge him to back off with Trump” and not strike Iran’s ballistic missile sites, which Trump wanted to do in response to Tehran’s breakout nuclear capabilities. This was around the same time Milley was making phone calls to a Chinese general to reassure Beijing that Trump wasn’t about to start a war — and that if Trump did plan to attack, Milley would personally warn his Chinese counterparts ahead of time.
The left and the Never Trump crowd think that doesn’t count as treason because they think Trump was never a legitimate president. They think we needed people like Milley to undermine him until he was out of office and the “adults” were in charge again. Under the circumstances, almost anything was justified, goes the thinking.
The same twisted logic is at work in this FBI raid against Trump. In addition to corrupt Democrat lawyers like Marc Elias admitting on Twitter that the real purpose of the raid is to rig the 2024 election by disqualifying Trump from running, you have Never Trumpers like David French peddling the laughably naive line that “no president is above the law” and that no one should assume the FBI is abusing its power. Even South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said Americans should not jump to conclusions but let the DOJ investigation “play out.”
But of course the FBI is abusing its power, as is Attorney General Merrick Garland. The idea that the FBI and Garland’s DOJ deserve the presumption of integrity and impartiality is only possible if you have been blissfully unaware of the events of the past six years in American politics.
The FBI fabricated evidence and then repeatedly submitted it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain an illegal warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. The FBI’s top officials then illegally leaked to the press and later lied about it. They used this illegal surveillance as a pretext for the years-long Mueller investigation. All of it was designed to remove Trump from office or, failing that, fatally weaken his administration. None of it had anything to do with the rule of law.
Nor did the FBI’s decision to quash an investigation into Hunter Biden’s criminal activities and overseas business dealings ahead of the 2020 election, even though much of the information driving the investigation was verified or easily verifiable. And neither does this FBI raid. This is about one thing and one thing only: holding onto power by any means necessary. There is nothing particularly subtle or nuanced about it. If you want to know where it leads, check out Nicaragua.
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.
This scandal is no longer just about the Biden family; it’s about every member of the law enforcement and intelligence communities who put our country at risk by failing to do their jobs.
FBI whistleblowers claim that agents opened a sham investigation into Hunter Biden to brand reliable and verifiable derogatory evidence as “disinformation,” according to an explosive news release issued yesterday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
If true, beyond exposing the FBI’s role in running cover for the Biden family, the whistleblowers’ claims prove significant for a second reason: By failing to thoroughly vet the evidence in its possession related to Hunter Biden — which included the hard drive for the MacBook Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop — the intelligence community ignored a momentous national security threat, namely that the Russians potentially possessed a second Hunter Biden laptop.
Late Monday, Grassley issued a news release citing “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” who raised “the alarm about tampering by senior FBI and Justice Department officials in politically sensitive investigations,” including “investigative activity involving derogatory information on Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities.” According to the Iowa Republican, the whistleblowers alleged that Washington Field Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy “Thibault and other FBI officials sought to falsely portray as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.”
The news release added that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.
The Iowa senator claimed that “Thibault also reportedly ordered the closure of a stream of information related to Hunter Biden and sought to improperly mark the matter within FBI systems in a way that would prevent it from being re-opened in the future.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly claimed that reporting from the stream was at risk of disinformation,” but the whistleblowers told Grassley, “that all of the information obtained through that stream was already verified or verifiable.”
The FBI whistleblowers’ charges, if accurate, are devastating and mean that at a time that Hunter Biden was already reportedly under investigation by the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, rather than work with the agents already investigating then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, FBI headquarters initiated its own “assessment.” Then, according to the whistleblowers, agents improperly shut down sources, falsely framed evidence as disinformation, and hid the reasoning for that determination from other FBI agents behind restricted areas.
The press release also suggests that the FBI’s “assessment” served to frame the investigation Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., were conducting into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealing as tainted by Russian disinformation. As part of that investigation, in May 2020, “Senate Republicans issued a subpoena seeking documents from the younger Biden and asked for information related to more than two dozen entities, including Burisma,” which was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter nearly $1 million a year to sit on its board.
With the Trump-Biden presidential contest in full force, Grassley and Johnson’s investigation into Hunter prompted pushback from Democrats, with Democrat members of the Gang of Eight sending a letter and classified addendum in July 2020 to FBI Director Christopher Wray “specifically citing the Johnson-Grassley probe into Hunter Biden as reason for an urgent briefing for Congress about foreign ‘disinformation.’”
The following month, Democrat Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote Grassley and Johnson and requested that members of the Senate Homeland Security and Finance committees, which they chaired, “receive a briefing from the FBI’s foreign influence task force related to their ongoing Biden investigations.”
According to an August 5, 2020, Washington Post article, “the Democrats have requested the member briefing for months, and the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies have previously briefed committee staff on possible foreign disinformation.” The FBI later briefed both Grassley and Johnson on August 6, 2020, but according to the senators, that briefing was both “unsolicited and unnecessary” and failed to provide any new information to the senators or any specific allegations that they had received “disinformation” as part of their Hunter Biden investigation.
Given that FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, according to whistleblowers, opened his assessment into Hunter in August, the whistleblowers’ allegations raise serious questions concerning whether Democrats pressured the FBI into launching an investigation into Hunter as a pretext to provide the desired “disinformation briefing.”
Further, in April of 2021, someone leaked the fact that the FBI had briefed Grassley and Johnson on August 6, 2020, with the Washington Post running a story painting the senators as reckless in their investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings by suggesting they “ignored FBI warnings and thus may have been manipulated by the Kremlin.” As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, it seems possible that “the FBI set up two Members of Congress for political attack under the guise of a ‘defensive briefing.’”
The whistleblowers’ accusations then, when coupled with the media coverage, suggest that an agent from FBI headquarters opened an assessment to provide cover to Hunter Biden, to eliminate source trails for the investigation into then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, and to taint the legitimate inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. That scandal, however, represents but half the issue because the whistleblowers’ statements, if true, suggest the assessment of Hunter was a sham. And as a sham, the agents would not vet the evidence available to them, which would have included the MacBook laptop Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware.
The FBI seized that laptop in December of 2019, after being alerted to its existence in October. At that time, FBI agents were reportedly told that in addition to pornography, the computer had information “dealing with foreign interests, a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, [and] lots of foreign money.”
What the FBI did after seizing the laptop in December of 2019 is unknown. However, given that the FBI was reportedly told it contained “a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, [and] lots of foreign money,” any legitimate investigation would have involved reviewing the laptop for information relevant to Grassley and Johnson’s investigations. And had the FBI reviewed the laptop, agents would have discovered a video recording capturing Hunter Biden saying that in 2018, another laptop went missing when he was “partying in Las Vegas,” and that Hunter believed it was stolen by a group of Russians.
The video then showed a prostitute asking Hunter if he worried the Russian thieves would try to “blackmail” him. “Yeah, in some way, yeah,” Hunter replied, noting his father is “running for president,” and that “I talk about it all the time.” Hunter had also noted that the computer had “tons” of compromising videos on it.
But it was not just the compromising videos of Hunter of concern, but the financial information likely on that laptop that could implicate his father in the pay-to-play scandal. If that information were in the hands of “the Russians,” as Hunter believed, the national security risk was huge and demanded the intelligence community conduct a defensive briefing of Joe Biden.
Instead, it appears from the whistleblowers’ comments that a non-investigation took place, with legitimate sources and evidence falsely categorized as disinformation, and then rather than provide Biden a defensive briefing, the senators received one.
This scandal is no longer just about the Biden family; it is about every member of the law enforcement and intelligence communities who put our country at risk by failing to do their jobs.
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.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, Reuters revealed that more than 5 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves were sent overseas as part of President Joe Biden’s latest release initiated in March. Some of that oil went to India, some to the Netherlands, and some was sent to China where the president’s son has engaged in years of potentially criminal business activity embroiling the Biden White House in scandal since the 2020 campaign.
On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon published new details about the Chinese oil shipments from the U.S. emergency reserves that Biden promised were tapped to “ease the pain that families are feeling” in the United States from high energy prices.
“The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would ‘support American consumers’ and combat ‘Putin’s price hike,’” the Beacon’s Collin Anderson reported. “Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government.”
Sinopec is also tied to Hunter Biden, whose private equity firm, BHR Partners, bought a $1.7 billion stake in the company seven years ago.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer told the New York Times in November that the president’s son, “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly, in either BHR or Skaneateles.”
According to the Washington Examiner, however, Hunter Biden remained listed as a part-owner of the firm as late as March.
“Business records from China’s National Credit Information Publicity System accessed Tuesday continue to identify Skaneateles as a 10% owner in BHR, and Washington, D.C., business records continue to list Biden as the only beneficial owner of Skaneateles,” the paper reported. “The White House has routinely deflected questions about Biden’s business dealings to his attorneys, who have remained largely mum.”
“It’s possible that China’s business registry hasn’t yet been updated to reflect a potential transfer or sale of Skaneateles’s 10% stake in BHR to another party,” the Examiner added.
Meanwhile, Biden’s Energy Department has refused compliance with requests under the Freedom of Information Act probing the administration’s improper use of the nation’s strategic oil reserves maintained for emergencies. Last week, the Functional Government Initiative, a nonprofit government watchdog, filed a lawsuit to compel records concerning administration officials’ decision to tap the oil reserves in the absence of a sudden disruption in supply such as a hurricane or cyberattack.
By the end of Biden’s latest release from the emergency stockpile, the president will have depleted 260 million barrels from the nation’s reserves. In May, the Department of Energy announced efforts to replenish only 60 million barrels of what’s been released, despite an authorized storage capacity of 714 million barrels. The Energy Information Administration reported that just more than 492,000 barrels remained in storage on July 1, exactly one month into the six-month hurricane season.
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.
As the drama around Hunter Biden continues to unfold, it has come to light that he has been under federal surveillance for ties with Chinese figures, according to a recent report. Paul Sperry, a reporter for Real Clear Investigations, tweeted U.S. counterintelligence officials told him about Biden coming under surveillance and looking into his contacts and deals in China.
DEVELOPING: US counterintelligence officials tell me Hunter Biden has come under federal surveillance amid growing concerns his partnerships with CCP-tied figures–notably Che Feng, aka "Super Chairman"–could "compromise" the president or help Beijing gather US intel thru Hunter
DEVELOPING: US counterespionage officials investigating alleged contacts between Hunter Biden and members of CFIUS during Chinese takeover of US firm making automotive parts w/ dual-use technologies. CFIUS approved the sensitive 2015 deal, which had national security implications
This is not the first time that the issue of Hunter Biden and his connections to China have made headlines. Former President Donald Trump actually claimed that the Biden family had suspicious ties to China in 2019, Reuters reported.
Trump particularly accused Hunter Biden of using his position of influence to secure the financial backing of China for his investments. But at the time Trump provided little evidence of his claims about Biden, and many dismissed it. But since the contents of Biden’s laptop have been discovered by the New York Post, the connection between Biden and China has some real evidence behind it now. It has become clearer that the Biden family has strong ties to China and Chinese business and have profited from the connection.
“The Biden family has done five deals in China totaling some $31 million arranged by individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence — some reaching the very top of China’s spy agency,” the New York Post reported in January.
“Indeed, every known deal that the Biden family enjoyed with Beijing was reached courtesy of individuals with spy ties. And Joe Biden personally benefited from his family’s foreign deals,” the Post continued.
These deals have been going on for years it appears. When President Joe Biden was vice president under Barack Obama, Hunter Biden tagged along with him on a trip to China in 2013. While the older Biden was working on the tensions in the South China Sea, Hunter Biden paid a visit to Jonathan Li, a Chinese financier who ran the private-equity fund Bohai Capital, the New York Post reported.
“Ten days later the Chinese business license for Bohai Harvest — a new company which would invest Chinese cash in projects outside the country that Hunter Biden had been trying to launch for more than a year — was approved by Chinese officials,” the New York Post reported.
As more and more of these connections between Hunter Biden and China have been examined, there seem to be clear indication that the Biden family has immensely profited from their business deals in China.
Hunter Biden’s laptop continues to provide evidence of the connections in China that have helped along the way.
“Hunter Biden’s hard drive contained an enviable lineup of contacts for top US officials tasked with overseeing the US-China relationship, and at least 10 senior Google executives — raising new questions about the extent to which Joe Biden’s well-connected son could have leveraged his connections for personal profit,” the New York Post reported.
But now it has landed Hunter Biden in a tough spot as the security concerns surrounding his connections and business practices are raising questions.
Abby Liebing is a Hillsdale College graduate with a degree in history. She has written for various outlets and enjoys covering foreign policy issues and culture.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to answer Fox News reporter Peter Doocy’s question about certain “alleged materials” on the president’s son’s now-infamous laptop. According to a Daily Mail report last week, a 2018 voicemail was discovered on a cellphone backup on Hunter Biden’s laptop that reveals that Joe Biden knew about his son’s dubious business dealings in China. The president has repeatedly denied that he ever spoke with Hunter about any of his overseas business dealings.
EXCLUSIVE: Voicemail from Joe Biden to Hunter proves president DID speak about his son's Chinese business dealings https://t.co/8WBBKEHvoW
“Why is there a voicemail of the president talking to his son about his overseas business dealings if the president has said he’s never spoken to his son about his overseas business dealings?” Doocy asked Jean-Pierre.
“Well, first I will say that what the president said stands. So, if that’s what the president said, that is what stands,” Jean-Pierre responded. “And secondly … from this podium, I’m not going to talk about alleged materials from the laptop.”
DOOCY: "Why is there a voicemail of the president talking to his son about his overseas business dealings…?"
KJP: "I am not going to talk about alleged materials from the laptop."
Philip Wegmann from RealClearNews wasn’t about to let Jean-Pierre off the hook.
.@PhilipWegmann: "You seemed to dismiss Peter's question about his conversation with his son Hunter Biden…how is that silence consistent with the president's promise to always level with the American public?"
So, we’re going to be the most transparent administration in history, but we won’t answer questions from the podium and the president won’t take questions at all. Ok.
— Welcome to the USSA @AggieMike on Truth (@M_McMullenAggie) July 6, 2022
Hey I’m not here to answer tough questions about shading dealings and shipping off our strategic fuel supply to other countries! I’m just here to make small talk! Certainly y’all know this by now. 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.
“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,”he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”
You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”
“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.”
And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, “even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Their aim, they insisted, wasn’t to rig the election but to “fortify” it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.
“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”
The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Biden’s laptop threatened to derail his father’s candidacy and undo the organized left’s hard work.
The New York Post’s exclusive story dropped like a grenade less than a month before Election Day, providing “smoking-gun emails” showing that the younger Biden introduced his father “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The emails, the Post explained, were obtained from a computer dropped off and apparently forgotten at a repair shop in Delaware. Under the terms of the repair agreement, the store’s owner took possession of the laptop when it was deemed to be abandoned. Twitter and Facebook, though, determined without any evidence that the emails were actually “hacked materials” and thus distributed in violation of their terms of use agreements.
Facebook quickly acted to limit the reach of the story, while Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking the Post’s account and preventing other users from sharing its story or even pictures from it. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Joe Biden presidential campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s, and the younger Biden’s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with documents that confirmed the Post’s reporting, which seemed to uncover an international bribery scheme.
It didn’t matter. Once 50 obviously partisan intelligence officials issued an evidence-free statement calling the laptop materials “Russian disinformation,” it was determined that they would be censored in both legacy and social media.
Of course, more than a year after Biden was safely elected, both The New York Times and Washington Post confirmed that the laptop was genuine, but the censorship did its job: A Media Research Center poll of swing state voters confirmed that 16 percent of Biden supporters would have changed their votes had they heard of the laptop story, including 4 percent who would have switched their vote to Trump. This obviously would have swung the entire election to Trump, but that would have been an unacceptable result for the leftist cabal intent on “fortifying” democracy by stacking the deck against him. In light of the Media Research Center’s findings, social media censorship was very possibly the most effective way they did it. And naturally they had to brag about it in Time.
“Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote,” Ball reported. “Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.”
She ultimately concluded that engaging with this supposedly “toxic content” or trying to debunk it was ineffective, so “the solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.”
This research armed liberal activists to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to far more aggressively and creatively enforce their rules, prompting a crackdown on “disinformation” that was in fact completely accurate. Because it was harmful to the effort to “save democracy” and defeat the “autocratic” Trump, it was censored.
“Democracy won in the end,” Ball concluded. “The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.”
This reveals the real threat of Musk’s Twitter takeover: If it is no longer possible to suppress factual information in the name of rescuing democracy from its alleged enemies, then those enemies (read: Republicans) might start winning more elections. And that is simply unacceptable.
Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.
A longtime and close business partner of Hunter Biden made numerous trips to the White House while Joe Biden served as vice president, according to a new report. Eric Schwerin – president of the Rosemont Seneca investment fund firm – met with then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2010, according to visitor logs from the White House of former President Barack Obama.
Rosemont Seneca was founded in 2009 by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz – stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, and Devon Archer – an American businessman who was classmates with Heinz at Yale University. Rosemont Seneca has conducted extensive business in China.
The New York Post reported, “Eric Schwerin met with Vice President Biden on November 17, 2010, in the West Wing, when he was the president of the since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners.”
The report added, “The logs also reveal that Schwerin met with various close aides of both Joe and Jill Biden at key moments in Hunter’s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China.”
“Emails from Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop show a series of exchanges between Hunter and his associates in Rosemont Seneca’s joint venture with Chinese investment firms Bohai Capital and BHR,”Fox News reported. “In February 2017, Schwerin emailed the CEO of BHR, Jonathan Li. Previously, Li sent Hunter his son’s resume with a list of colleges he planned to apply to,” adding, “It is unclear if Li’s son was admitted to Brown University or, if so, whether he attended.”
The New York Post report claim that Schwerin “made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015.”
According to Obama White House archives, a press release from March 10, 2015, stated that Obama appointed Eric D. Schwerin as a member of the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The U.S. Commission for the Preservation of American Heritage names Schwerin as a past member, who was sworn in on Feb. 1, 2017. The Obama administration noted that Eric D. Schwerin is “Founding Partner and Managing Director at Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC, positions he has held since 2008.” Records also show that Rosemont Seneca founders Archer and Heinz visited the White House in 2009 and 2011 for a “holiday reception” and “group tour” respectively.
Of the situation involving a top Hunter Biden business partner, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, “Not everyone gets to meet the vice president of the United States in the White House. The press should be asking why Hunter Biden’s business associates — like Eric Schwerin — had that privilege and were given access to the Obama White House. This is additional evidence that Joe Biden lied when he said he never discussed Hunter’s foreign business dealings. It’s well past time for the corporate media to demand the truth from Joe Biden. The corruption of Biden Inc. must be exposed.”
If outfits like the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” along with Big Tech’s faceless “fact-checkers,” ever get a total monopoly on dictating reality, the result will be a 24/7 mix of falsehoods with the occasional limited hangout to cover up their lies. The icing on this fake cake is the use of conferences about disinformation, such as the recent stunt at the University of Chicago that served as cover for justifying political censorship. There former President Obama presented the perfect picture of psychological projection: a panel of propagandists accusing others of wrongthink.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, for example, sought to censor the reality of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by announcing she didn’t find it “interesting.” See how that works? Truth depends upon how our elites personally feel about what should be true. But it gets much worse, because political censorship creates deep dysfunction in society. In fact, the surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.
Censorship causes disinformation. It’s the grandaddy of disinformation, not a solution to it. The sooner everyone recognizes this obvious fact, the better off we’ll be. Whenever a self-anointed elite sets up a Ministry of Truth, the link between censorship and disinformation becomes clear. Before long, they invent reality and punish anyone who expresses a different viewpoint.
So, it’s no small irony that those who claim to be protecting “democracy” from disinformation are the biggest promoters of disinformation and greatest destroyers of real democracy. Their dependence on censorship obstructs the circulation of facts. It prevents any worthwhile exchange of ideas.
Unchecked Censorship Isolates People
Consider what happens if a society is only permitted one propagandistic narrative while all other ideas and information are silenced. People start self-censoring to avoid social rejection. The result is a form of imposed mental isolation. Severely isolated people tend to lose touch with reality. The resulting conformity also perpetuates the censorship. This is unnatural and dangerous because human beings depend on others to verify what’s real. People weren’t able to verify reality in Nazi Germany, during Joseph Stalin’s Reign of Terror, or during Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution. All were societies in the grip of mass hysteria because of ruthless censorship to protect a narrative.
As psychiatrist Joost Meerloo noted in his book “The Rape of the Mind,” no matter how well-meaning political censorship might be, it creates dangerous conformity of thought: “the presence of minority ideas, acceptable or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the creeping growth of conformist majority thinking.”
The only way we can strengthen ourselves against such contagion is through real freedom of speech that allows fully open discussion and debate. However, if we’re confined by Big Tech to a relentless echo chamber and punished for expressing different thoughts, we’ll just keep getting more and more disinformation. In fact, we are now drowning in the distortions produced by “fact-checkers.” Take, for example, narratives that promote the gender confusion and sexualization of children. Public school teachers routinely post TikTok videos of themselves spewing forth their gender confusion. And if someone calls out Disney for its open grooming of children, Twitter suspends them.
If we never push back against such absurdities, we ultimately end up in a state of mass delusion, each of us a cell in a deluded hive mind, obedient to commands about what to say, how to act, and what to think. To get an idea of what that looks like in a population, check out this clip from North Korea:
Censorship-Invoked Social Contagion Is Real
One of the most telling incidents of censorship over the past year was YouTube and Twitter’s take-down of virologist and vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone, claiming he was “spreading misinformation”—i.e., spreading a second opinion—about Covid vaccines and treatments. But big tech saw an even bigger threat in Malone’s discussion of Mattias Desmet’s study of Mass Formation Psychosis (MFP) on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. This is a big reason Spotify was under pressure to de-platform Rogan entirely. Open discussion of such things would erode the illusions big media and big tech so doggedly prop up.
Malone explained how a propaganda-saturated population can end up in a state of mass hypnosis that renders people incapable of seeing reality. He described Desmet’s theory about how social isolation, a high level of discontent, and a strong sense of free-floating anxiety are keys to the development of this psychosis.
The anxiety is so painful that it causes people to cling, trancelike, to any narrative that seems to offer stability. Once all other views are censored, people become so invested in the narrative that they cannot consider any alternative views. They will even mob anyone who endangers the narrative. This phenomenon was prevalent in the German population under Nazism. Their obedience to the propaganda rendered them incapable of understanding any opposing narrative.
Mass psychosis should not sound farfetched. There’s nothing new about it. Hundreds of instances of mass hysteria are documented. In the 19th century, Scottish journalist Charles MacKay wrote up a whole catalog of them. In 2015 medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew co-authored a compendium of popular delusions or “mass sociogenic illness.”
Most past incidents of mass hysteria have been confined to geographic regions, such as the witch trials in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. But with the internet accessible and addictive in the 2020s, the possibility of mass delusion on a global scale is upon us. Censorship—in the name of protecting “democracy” from disinformation—is the key to creating it.
Propagandists Guard Their Illusions Like Magicians
By definition, propaganda aims to psychologically affect people and change their attitudes. So, our social survival depends upon becoming aware of such phenomena. Building self-awareness about our vulnerability to crowd psychology would serve as a sort of psychological vaccine. Of course, elites do not want us even entertaining the possibility that we can be manipulated or vulnerable to social and psychological pressures. Propagandists are illusionists by nature. If their illusion falls apart, then the game is over for them. This is why they depend so heavily on the slur “conspiracy theorist” to distract us from the truth and from their use of censorship to cut us off from other ideas.
The late Nobel laureate Doris Lessing spoke against the dangers of social conformity and censorship in 1986. She noted there was a great body of knowledge that was continuing to be built about the laws of crowd psychology and social contagion. It was odd that we weren’t applying this knowledge to improve our lives. Lessing concluded that no government in the world would willingly help its citizens resist group pressures and learn to think independently. We have to do it ourselves. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and it sure looks like the keepers of this secret knowledge use it as a means of social control.
No sane person would want to live inside the boxes that the censors who claim to be fighting disinformation are building around us. If we want to escape this Twilight Zone existence, we must destroy that canard and insist on real freedom of speech everywhere.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.
Recent emails unearthed by the U.K. Daily Mail and the National Pulse reveal that during the last decade, Hunter Biden seemed to have a keen interest in pathogen research in Ukraine and using it as a tool for geopolitical affairs in that country. It just so happens to be that a pathogen connected to gain-of-function research destroyed the world, and then the next “big current thing” on the geopolitical stage was none other than Ukraine. Shouldn’t the American people get some answers as to why our government was so heavily involved – via the vice president’s son – in both pathogen research and Ukraine and to make sure Ukraine is not Wuhan 2.0?
Earlier this month, I detailed the known connections between biotech firm Metabiota Inc., responsible for the pathogen research in Ukraine, the DOD, and EcoHealth Alliance, along with the Wuhan lab most likely responsible for the leak of SARS-CoV-2. I also noted that Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), a subsidiary of the Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz-founded Rosemont Capital, gave Metabiota, a company accused of dangerous lab protocols during the African Ebola pandemic, its first infusion of cash a decade ago. Now, new emails from Hunter’s laptop demonstrate that his involvement in Metabiota and pathogen research in Ukraine was much deeper than just an initial investment.
On April 4, 2014, Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri wrote an email to the younger Biden outlining how they could “assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia’” with their joint venture, according to an email from Hunter’s laptop obtained by the U.K. Daily Mail. That is quite a curious goal for a company that supposedly does scientific research and analysis about emerging pandemics.
The outlet also posted another email dated April 8, 2014, from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi referring to a “science project” Hunter had pitched to him involving Burisma and Metabiota in Ukraine. “Please find few initial points to be discussed for the purposes of analyzing the potential of this as you called, ‘Science Ukraine’ project,” Pozharskyi wrote. Hunter sits on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company owned by corrupt billionaire Mikolay Zlochevsky, who fled to Monaco after he was put under investigation.
Hunter’s dad, as vice president, was in charge of our foreign policy with Ukraine in 2014 when all of this was occurring and when the U.S. government was backing the color revolution that led to the ouster of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych. It was at this time that the Defense Department began funding the Metabiota operations in Ukraine.
After receiving 18.4 million from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) between February 2014 and November 2016, with $307,091 earmarked for “Ukraine research projects,” “Metabiota has worked in Ukraine for Black & Veatch, a US defense contractor with deep ties to military intelligence agencies, which built secure labs in Ukraine that analyzed killer diseases and bioweapons,” according to the Daily Mail.
“It raises the question, what is the real purpose of this venture? It’s very odd,” said former senior CIA officer Sam Faddis in an interview with the Daily Mail. “His father was the Vice President of the United States and in charge of relations with Ukraine. So why was Hunter not only on the board of a suspect Ukrainian gas firm, but also hooked them up with a company working on bioweapons research?”
Biden was so involved in Metabiota that one email written that same month in 2014 reveals that he and his business partner Eric Schwerin discussed subletting their office space to the San-Francisco-based biotech firm.
So, what exactly were they working on? Last week, the National Pulse reported that a feature in the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine’s 2016 AnnualReportrecounts an October 2016 meeting involving U.S. military officials and their Ukrainian counterparts together with Black & Veatch and Metabiota staff to discuss the lab work. The discussion centered around “existing frameworks, regulatory coordination, and ongoing cooperative projects in research, surveillance and diagnostics of a number of dangerous zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza, leptospirosis, Crimea Congo hemorrhagic fever, and brucellosis.”
The National Pulse cites a 2019 paper authored by researchers from Metabiota and three Ukraine-based institutes and funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency sharing how they isolated a form of African swine flu using a pig from Ukraine in 2016. They also detail their research on Anthrax in animals in Ukraine.
Well, where else have we heard of Metabiota partners working on gain-of-function research of pathogens that typically are in animals? Oh yes, EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan. In the past, Metabiota has worked with EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The zoonotic projects being described in Ukraine sound awfully similar to the gain-of-function work EcoHealth was involved with in Wuhan. In Feb. 2016, EcoHealth’s founder, Peter Daszak, explained the company’s zoonotic pathogen work as follows:
So as an example, first of all, we are only looking at viral families that include those that have gone into people from animals. So, we narrow it down straight away. Then when you get a sequence of a virus and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS, we found other Corona viruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So, we sequenced the spike protein, the protein that attaches to cells. Then we, well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work, you create the pseudo-particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses [to see if they] bind to human cells. And each step you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people. So, you narrow down the field, you reduce the cost and you end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers. (C-Span, 1:16:22.)
Sure sounds a lot like the coronavirus that actually broke out several years ago and destroyed the world as we know it. Less than a month later, Ralph Baric, the UNC Chapel Hill biologist who spearheaded the gain-of-function projects for Daszak, co-authored a paper warning with certitude of the emergence of this disease. “The results indicate that viruses using WIV1-CoV spike are poised to emerge in human populations due to efficient replication in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures,”concluded the authors.
How did they know? And doesn’t anyone have a concern that the same players were up to no good in Ukraine, especially given Hunter Biden’s ethical problems and the fact that his dad, the vice president and now the president, was overseeing Ukrainian affairs during that time?
Recently, the National Pulse found, based on EcoHealth’s 990 filings and analysis by ProPublica, that the company’s investment income surged by 342% in the year of the pandemic. EcoHealth received millions of dollars from Fauci’s NIAD to work on “killer” viruses with the Wuhan Institute, creating “chimeric” viruses that spread in humans at rates “equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
Now consider the fact that Metabiota’s CEO, Nathan Wolfe, penned an article in Time on Aug. 1, 2014, detailing his opinion on the Ebola outbreak in Africa and then literally predicted coronavirus as the next outbreak:
While Ebola virus won’t be the next global Andromeda strain, there are viruses out there that could be. Coronaviruses (like SARS) and influenza viruses (like the H1N1 virus of 1918) for example, show that some viruses truly can spread around the world in ways that will blindside and impact our entire planet. It is notable that a novel coronavirus, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and a novel influenzavirus, the H7N9 virus, receive very little attention from the international media. Perhaps as importantly, there are millions of still unidentified viruses in animal reservoirs, among which, almost certainly is a virus that we’d have no capacity to understand, or stop were it to suddenly emerge today.
If we didn’t have a pandemic likely created by similar research – possibly by the same players – killing millions globally and injuring tens of millions of others, I wouldn’t be too concerned with these research projects in Ukraine. But given what has occurred, why is there zero concern from the media or the politicians about what we have been doing in Ukraine and elsewhere? And how does it shape our entire geopolitical worldview on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict? Inquiring minds would like to know.
Left-wing media (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, etc.) are avoiding the elephants in the room, like the Hunter Biden laptop and all the Joe Biden corruptions and disasters.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
A majority of likely voters believe the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents is “important,” according to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll that also found nearly half believe that efforts to discredit the story impacted the 2020 presidential election.
On Thursday, a Rasmussen poll found that 66% of “likely U.S. voters” said they believe the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was “important,” including 48% who said they think the story is “very important.” By contrast, 31% of respondents believed the story was not important, including 15% who said they believed it was “not at all important.”
Additionally, Rasmussen found that nearly half of the respondents (48%) said they think that “if the media had fully reported the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, it’s unlikely Joe Biden would have been elected president.”
For their report, Rasmussen drew from a poll conducted on March 21-22 of 1,000 likely U.S. voters, with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
In October 2020, shortly before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published a story that reported Hunter Biden had his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, meet with an executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma shortly before the elder Biden pressured officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. To back up its story, the New York Post referenced emails they reviewed that came from the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had been dropped off at a shop in Delaware and later seized by the FBI. A copy of the data was provided by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The laptop also reportedly included embarrassing images and videos of Hunter Biden, as well as details of questionable business dealings Hunter had with communist China.
Many major media outlets gave little to no attention to the story, claiming among other things that they found the source for the emails to be suspect.
National Public Radio’s Kelly McBride argued in a newsletter back in 2020 that there were “many, many red flags in that New York Post investigation” and that the claims of the story “don’t amount to much.”
“Intelligence officials warn that Russia has been working overtime to keep the story of Hunter Biden in the spotlight. Even if Russia can’t be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect,” wrote McBride.
“And if that story could be verified, the NY Post did no forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their report have not been altered.”
Social media giants like Twitter and Facebook censored posts about the Hunter Biden laptop story in advance of the election, with Twitter going as far as to take down the New York Post’s account for 16 days, claiming that they do not allow hacked material to be tweeted.
“These responses, though they came in a fast-moving and confusing situation, were heavy-handed and arguably ill-judged,” acknowledged Vox in a recent report. “It’s also fair to be skeptical of whether social media companies would have responded so strongly if a Trump family member had been the victim of a suspected hack that October.”
Groups like the conservative fact-checking website NewsBusters argued that mainstream media outlets devoted far too little time to the controversy surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop. Although left-leaning news media largely ignored the story in 2020, more conservative outlets like Fox News devoted considerable time to the story in advance of the election.
Media Matters, a liberal fact-check website, argued at the time that Fox’s focus on the Biden laptop was part of “a massive smear campaign in the final weeks before Election Day.”
“That effort, led by the New York Post and amplified by Fox’s megaphone, has sought to bury Joe Biden with a blizzard of dubious and bad-faith allegations related to his son Hunter Biden’s business interests,” stated Media Matters in October 2020.
Last week, the New York Times ran a piece about ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, saying that the emails from the laptop were likely valid.
On Friday, The Daily Mail reported that emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop show he helped an infectious disease research company pursue projects in Ukraine. Those emails confirm portions of charges Russia made the previous day that an investment group run by the now-president’s son had funded a company conducting research at biological laboratories in Ukraine. While these developments add another scandal to the long list of Biden family dirty laundry, the more urgent concern for the country should be the continuing threat to our national security posed by a compromised President Biden and the possibility that Russia has access to the catalog of compromising material contained on Hunter’s laptop.
Mere weeks before then-President Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off in the November 2020 presidential election, The New York Post published emails obtained from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware. Those emails revealed that during the elder Biden’s time as Barack Obama’s vice president, Hunter engaged in a pay-to-play scandal, trading off his father’s position to strike deals with players in Ukraine and China. The venture was a family one, with Joe “the Big Guy” Biden listed in one email as set to receive a 10 percent cut of one pending deal and Hunter telling his daughter in another message that “pop” took half of his earnings.
Even after a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s confirmed the authenticity of the emails, the supposed standard-bearers of journalism buried the scandal and social media outlets censored both the story and The New York Post. Worse still, “more than 50 former senior intelligence officials”signed a letter framing the Hunter Biden emails as Russian disinformation. Among others, former CIA directors or acting directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Gen. Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin, and Michael Morell signed the letter. In doing so they gave then-candidate Joe Biden cover to lie to the American public, which he did when Trump confronted him about the scandal during a presidential debate.
Are you saying the “laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” Trump asked Biden.
“That’s exactly what [I] was told,” Biden countered. “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” Biden professed to the American public before they went to the polls and elected Biden our commander in chief.
But even The New York Times has finally admitted the laptop was real and the emails were legitimate. Initially, that admission proved significant because it likewise legitimizes the scandals spawned from the documents recovered from Hunter’s abandoned laptop. However, the trajectory of the scandal changed Friday with The Daily Mail’s exclusive.
“Emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons,” The Daily Mail announced last week. The article continued: “[Biden] also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a ‘science project’ involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine. And although Metabiota is ostensibly a medical data company, its vice president emailed Hunter in 2014 describing how they could ‘assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia’– an unusual goal for a biotech firm.”
The Daily Mail added more details about Metabiota and Hunter Biden’s role in brokering relationships for the research company in Ukraine. Included throughout the article were copies of the emails ostensibly obtained from Hunter’s laptop that confirmed The Daily Mail’s reporting. The article also added details shedding light on Hunter’s “business” dealings in Ukraine during the time his father served as vice president and America’s point person on issues related to that country. Friday’s exclusive is not the first time The Daily Mail has published never-before-seen material from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Last August, the outlet published“unearthed footage” of Hunter Biden telling a prostitute that, in the summer of 2018, another laptop went missing and he believed Russia had stolen it. At the time, Hunter also expressed concern that the laptop might prove fodder for blackmail since it contained compromising material.
What distinguishes the emails contained in last week’s Daily Mail article from those published last year is that the most recent release came the day after Russia’s State Duma speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin accused President Biden with being “involved in the creation of bio laboratories in Ukraine,” with Volodin claiming that “an investment fund run by his son Hunter Biden funded research and the implementation of the United States’ military biological program.”
Soon after Volodin made the charge on Thursday, the Telegraph called Russia’s accusation of Hunter Biden funding Ukrainian biological laboratories an “unsubstantiated claim” “designed to build on negative coverage about [the] president’s son in Right-wing US media.” But with Friday’s release of previously undisclosed emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Russia’s claim, at least concerning Hunter Biden’s connection to Ukrainian biological laboratories, appears accurate.
While none of the emails released on Friday support Russia’s claim that the Ukrainian labs were used to research or create bioweapons, propaganda need only hold a sliver of truth to serve its purpose. And the cache of emails contained on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop provides Putin and his comrades enough evidence to seemingly confirm the Russian government’s earlier claim that Hunter Biden helped implement a bioweapon program in Ukraine. This false framing also provides Russia ammunition to justify its attack on its neighbor to the west.
Russia’s ability to point to the Hunter Biden emails as confirmation of its claims of a biolab in Ukraine raises a serious question with huge national security implications: How did Russia know the day before The Daily Mail’s exclusive that the Hunter Biden’s investment fund, Rosemont Seneca, had invested in Metabiota and been involved in Metabiota’s operations in Ukraine? The timing of events last week suggests Russia has access to the same emails as The Daily Mail or that Vladimir Putin’s agents might well have obtained access to Hunter Biden’s first laptop—the one the president’s son believed Russians had stolen in 2018. In either case, the Biden family corruption documented on the laptops has gone from a potential national security risk to a real one—and in the midst of a war launched by Russia on a country bordering North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies.
Together, the Biden family, the intelligence agencies, and the corrupt media—social and legacy—hold full responsibility for the danger Americans now face. Biden knew full well how compromised his family was, and that there were two laptops, not one, with evidence of the corruption floating about. Yet Biden lied to the American public, with an assist from the former high-level members of the intelligence community who signed the letter suggesting the laptop scandal represented Russian disinformation.
Then there is the FBI which, by December 2019, had access to the abandoned laptop and thereby also knew that Hunter believed Russians had stolen his laptop in summer 2018. To date, there has been no indication that the FBI provided Joe Biden a defensive briefing on the national security risk posed by those laptops. Or if FBI agents did brief Biden on the risks in a timely manner, that means he nonetheless lied to the American public and ran for president knowing the propaganda at Putin’s fingertips.
Even when coupled with the complicity of former members of the intelligence community, all of Joe Biden’s lies would mean nothing if the media had done its job and reported the story when it still matter. It’s too late now, however: Biden is our commander in chief and Putin potentially holds a cache of compromising information perfect for propaganda purposes.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. 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.
It is painfully obvious, as was predictable, that Joe Biden’s presidency is a dumpster fire. As demonstrated by the party’s destructive callousness towards children, the elderly, and the poor during their Covid lockdown frenzy, Democrats care about none of these real-world results of their policies. But they do care about polling, and Joe Biden’s is abysmal.
According to even heavily politicized polls, Biden is at least performing as badly as Donald Trump. Biden is between the third- and fifth-most ratings-underwater president ever in American history at this point in his first term.
Biden of course also has the advantage of a wildly favorable press and social media monopoly while Trump had the strong headwind of a wildly negative one. That factor obscured for a great many of American voters actions that easily demonstrated long before his election that Biden was unfit for the presidency.
Now that he’s president, however, and very publicly bungling essentially every major issue all the way up to U.S. national security, Biden’s weakness and incompetence have been impossible for the corrupt media to entirely cover up. Biden’s appalling withdrawal from Afghanistan may have been the first major blow to public confidence in his governing ability, and it’s been followed by blow after blow: the repercussions of ending U.S. energy independence, historic inflation caused by massive government spending, aggression by America’s foreign foes, a tacitly open border with human trafficking of historic proportions, not to mention fueling America’s legalized mass killings of unborn infants and forcing schools to inflict gender dysphoria on the children in their care.
So yes, the polls look bad. That’s why Democrat officials suddenly switched away from their Covid mania, lifting mask mandates in blue states, ending the daily falsified “body counts” on TVs and newspapers, and jumping immediately into European war hysteria. But that’s not been enough to turn those polls around. Historic indicators presently suggest a “red wave” in the upcoming midterms.
That brings us to The New York Times’s recent “limited hangout“: its highly suspicious, very late acknowledgment that, hey, that laptop containing evidence that Joe Biden is just as corrupt as his son Hunter Biden told Russian prostitutes — that laptop is real, and so is its data. Yes, the United States’s top foreign adversaries likely have blackmail material on the U.S. president, and likely paid him some very big bribes.
Oh, and yes Twitter and Facebook did use their global communications monopolies to rig the election for Joe Biden by hiding this information (and who knows what else).
Why would The New York Times do this — and Facebook and Twitter not ban this information release just like they did before? Well, one explanation is hierarchy reinforcement. As I wrote Monday, like forcing their “minions” to wear face masks, the ridiculously belated laptop confirmation also equals the ruling class “flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say.”
There’s another explanation, though. It’s that Joe Biden is no longer useful to the ruling class. After being used to win an election, he’s now making it impossible for them to credibly foist on Americans the idea that his party could win another one with him on their masthead. The donkey is showing through the lion skin, and so they need a new donkey.
So while it seems utterly legitimate to insist on accountability such as appointing a special counsel to investigate the Biden family’s apparent corruption, that also could relieve the Democrat Party of their greatest liability. They’d probably deeply appreciate that, in fact. Biden got the ruling class what they wanted, and they don’t need him any more. Getting rid of him now would in fact be highly convenient for maintaining their power.
There’s only one problem with that. Kamala isn’t at all going well for them either.
Enjoy that bed you made for yourselves, Democrats. I hope it’s at least as uncomfortable as that bed you’ve made for all the Americans whose long-term outlook is more suffering, thanks to Democrats’ criminal prioritization of power for themselves above all else.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Last week, The New York Times quietly acknowledged that the emails recovered from the MacBook Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer store were authentic. The admission came nearly a year-and-a-half late, after the corrupt media — legacy and social — buried the scandal the New York Post broke just weeks before the November election.
Merely admitting the laptop is legitimate is not enough. Rather, by concurring in the authenticity of the laptop and the emails, the supposed standard-bearers of journalism have also implicitly acknowledged the validity of the scandals spawn by the porn-filled MacBook. And notwithstanding the salacious source of the documentary evidence of the scandals, the scandals are not about Hunter Biden: They are about now-President Biden.
Here are the eight Joe Biden scandals deserving further coverage.
1. Pay-to-Play in Ukraine
The most obvious scandal bared by the emails and text messages contained on Hunter’s laptop concerns the influence profiteering Joe Biden apparently participated in during his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, with Ukraine featuring heavily in the pay-to-play scheme.
The New York Times, in its likely “get ahead of the story,” coverage from last week, touched on the Ukrainian angle by noting Hunter’s connection to Burisma and then quoting emails recovered from the laptop indicating the younger Biden leveraged his dad’s position — then as vice president. But the Times’ surface coverage of the Burisma scandal doesn’t nearly suffice.
Surface it was: The Times made no mention of Hunter’s appointment to Burisma Holdings Board of Directors at a reported salary of $50,000 per month during his dad’s time as vice president. Hunter Biden had no experience in energy. So, a deep-dive on the entire Biden-Burisma connection is a first step.
2. China Gets in the Game
Ukraine is but a patch on the influence-peddling undertaken by Hunter on behalf of “the big guy,” as the younger Biden referred to his dad. China also played a large role in the family enterprise, as demonstrated by, again, passing coverage in November 2021. Then, the Times reported, in brief, that Hunter Biden’s joint global equity firm, the Bohai Harvest Equity Investment Fund, had helped coordinate the purchase by a Chinese mining company of the world’s largest cobalt source in the Congo.
That deal gave China control over a huge chunk of the world’s known cobalt supplies — an ingredient necessary to make electric car batteries. And the role of Hunter Biden’s company, Bohai, in the transaction again connects directly to Joe Biden, as Hunter reportedly launched that new joint enterprise with Chinese business partners less than two weeks after he traveled to China on Air Force Two with his then-vice president father.
In exploring this scandal, the press needs to push beyond the emails recovered from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, and do what Tucker Carlson did when the pay-to-play scandal first surfaced: talk to Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. Bobulinski provides further proof that this scandal reaches the top of the Biden family.
3. Moscow, Kazakhstan, and More
While Ukraine and China likely hold the most significant revelations, once those threads are pulled, investigators should move on to Moscow, which according to a Senate report, holds another possible scandal. That report documents that Hunter also received a combined $3.5 million from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, a Kazakhstan investor, and several other individuals. After all, there is no reason to think that a person willing to let his son sell access to the vice president of the United States would close the money train to just a few countries.
4. Ukraine’s Firing of the Prosecutor Investigating Burisma
With the elite media now deigning coverage of Hunter’s laptop appropriate, the public knows the Burisma scandal was real and threatened to be spectacularly devastating to the elder Biden. That makes questions concerning then-Vice President Joe Biden’s demands that Ukraine fire the state prosecutor who was reportedly investigating Burisma ripe to revisit.
I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours.’ If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a b-tch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
While the Obama administration attempted to spin Biden’s push for the firing of Shokin, by claiming the international community had demanded Ukraine terminate the state prosecutor, a State Department official contradicted that claim during congressional testimony. George Kent, who worked on issues related to Ukraine at the State Department, reportedly told lawmakers it was the Obama administration that “spearheaded the efforts to have Shokin removed from his position as the top federal prosecutor in Ukraine.”
Biden needs to answer questions anew over his threats to withhold money from Ukraine unless the country removed the state prosecutor responsible for investigating Burisma. Democrats have impeached a president for less.
5. Obama-Biden Administration Ignoring Conflicts of Interest
Biden also needs to answer questions about his decision to ignore the clear conflicts of interest involved with him negotiating with the same countries Hunter was shaking down. Of course, since “the big guy” was in on the scam, bowing out over conflicts of interest is the lesser of the evils, but it is still worth investigating to assess how Biden handled the concerns raised by the Obama administration’s State Department.
Here, the testimony of the State Department official charged with issues related to Ukraine again proves significant. Kent told lawmakers that after learning Hunter sat on the board of Burisma, he raised concerns with the vice president’s office about the relationship.
“I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest,” Kent testified before House members in October of 2019. “The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son Beau was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time … That was the end of that conversation.”
The question for now-President Biden, then, is whether anyone in his office raised concerns about the clear conflicts-of-interest with him personally, and if so, why did Biden ignore the problem?
6. The Intelligence Community’s Briefing of Biden
Another scandal reaching President Biden concerns his interactions with the intelligence community after the FBI, and presumably the CIA and other such agencies, learned in December of 2019, that Hunter Biden believed Russians had stolen Hunter’s laptop, rendering the Bidens susceptible to blackmail.
Here, it is important to understand that there are two separate Hunter Biden laptops at issue. The most-discussed laptop was actually the second laptop. That laptop was the one Hunter had abandoned at the Delaware repair shop. Then, after the repair shop owner discovered concerning material on the MacBook, the store owner handed it to the FBI in December of 2019. The owner of the repair shop, however, had first made a copy of the hard drive, which resulted in The New York Post’s coverage in October 2020.
But there was another laptop — one Hunter believed Russians had stolen from him when he was binging on drugs with prostitutes in the summer of 2018 in Las Vegas. While the public did not learn about the existence of this earlier laptop until August of 2021, the FBI knew about it as early as December 2019, when they took possession of the second laptop Hunter had left at the repair store.
Among other material contained on the second laptop was a video of Biden recounting the circumstances of his first laptop disappearing with some Russians. Significantly, on that video Hunter Biden said his first laptop contained a ton of material leaving him susceptible to blackmail, since his father was “running for president” and Hunter talked “about it all the time.”
It is inconceivable that the FBI and the intelligence communities did not brief Biden on this discovery and the risk of blackmail, given that former FBI Director James Comey briefed Trump on the fake Steele dossier. On second thought, that is the initial question reporters should ask the president: “Did the FBI brief you, Mr. President, on the fact that Hunter believed Russians had stolen a laptop containing compromising information?”
From there, an inquiring press should investigate to ensure that Joe Biden did not direct the intelligence community to bury this national security risk to protect himself or his son.
7. Possible Collusion to Interfere in the 2020 Election
An honest press should also investigate whether now-President Biden or anyone connected to his then-presidential campaign pressured reporters, media outlets, or companies such as Twitter and Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden story. And what about the “fifty former intelligence officials” who publicly declared the laptop resembled a Russian disinformation campaign—something clearly untrue? Did Biden or his campaign coordinate with those individuals, several of whom had endorsed the Democratic candidate, in the release of the letter?
Given that polls show that 17 percent of Joe Biden voters would not have voted for him in 2020, if they had known about the Biden family scandals, the collective burying of the laptop scandal represents the most significant interference in elections ever seen in our country. So, “Did Biden or his campaign have anything to do with the decision to kill the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter’s MacBook?” And “What about the ‘fifty former intelligence officials?’”
From there the follow-ups flow quickly: “Who was involved in the push to silence the story and who were the executives or ‘journalists’ who bowed to the demands?” “Who coordinated with the intelligence officials?” “Were any threats or promises made?” “What were they?” “What did Joe Biden know?” “What about other Democrats and the Democratic National Committee?”
8. Joe Biden Is a ‘Lying Dog-Faced Pony Soldier’
The final Joe Biden scandal the press should push President Biden to answer concerns his lies to the American public. While there are too many to count, two merit further questioning.
First, the media should demand Biden answer for lying to the country when he seethed, “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period.” The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Biden not only knew of the family business deals but was part of them.
The second bold-faced fabrication from Biden came during his pre-election debate with Trump, when Trump raised “the laptop from hell.” When Trump asked Biden if he was saying the “laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” the then-Democratic candidate replied, “That’s exactly what [I] was told.”
Unlikely. Biden also countered with this doozy, which again raises the question of whether Biden had a role in the intelligence officials’ statement:
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
We can now add The New York Times to Giuliani. It remains to be seen, though, whether the Old Grey Lady and the other legacy outlets will report on the further scandals the laptop revealed—the ones that reach the president of the United States.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. 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.
On March 17, 2022, The New York Times stated it had verified the authenticity of a laptop and its data as belonging to the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This was the same laptop holding information that Twitter, Facebook, and other corporate media immediately suppressed when The New York Post, a right-leaning competitor of The New York Times, reported on it three weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
If they had known about one of the Biden family scandals, such as the Hunter Biden laptop information, 17 percent of Joe Biden’s voters wouldn’t have voted for him, found a 2020 post-election poll. This means big tech’s suppression of this story likely made enough difference to tip Joe Biden into his low-margin win in the Electoral College.
Back in October 2020, Twitter and Facebook immediately responded to The New York Post’s publication of information from Hunter Biden’s laptop by effectively banning it from their platforms that effectively monopolize public discussion. Twitter punished the Post for reporting the repeatedly authenticated laptop information by suspending its account for two weeks.
“What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post’s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate,”commented independent investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald.
Major National Security Implications
That laptop provides evidence Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden’s pay-for-play schemes with foreign oligarchs, an obvious national security risk. Some of these corrupt deals involved Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country that is currently petitioning the Biden administration to engage militarily with Russia on their behalf.
Russia also has blackmail material on Hunter Biden, according to videos from his laptop, and the FBI knew about this as early as 2019, according to Federalist reporting: “This explosive revelation establishes that either Joe Biden lied to the American public, or the intelligence community lied to him,”wrote Federalist Senior Contributor Margot Cleveland in 2021.
Other Hunter Biden business deals involved China, the United States’ top security threat. Texts between business partners indicate Joe Biden was financially involved in Hunter Biden’s China deals, contrary to Joe Biden’s public claims.
China also has blackmail material on Hunter Biden and possibly on Joe Biden. All of this means major conflicts of interest for the president’s foreign policy at a time of significant global instability. It also was deliberately hidden from the voting public by collusion between big tech companies and the Democrat Party.
Hiding Democrats’ Dangerous Scandals
The same presidential administration that benefitted from Big Tech hiding damning true information is openly colluding with Big Tech to maintain and expand these information operations. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in July 2021, “We’re flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Soon after, Psaki confirmed, “We’re in regular touch with social media platforms…about areas where we have concern.” You might call it a public-private partnership.
Democrats have demanded that the Biden administration create a task force to suppress “misinformation” and “disinformation.” What did corporate media and big tech call the laptop information they suppressed in 2020, only for The New York Times to confirm in 2022? That’s right: “Disinformation.” In fact, as Greenwald notes, intelligence operatives immediately enacted a real disinformation campaign against the New York Post reporting in 2020, pushing the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop was “disinformation.”
That’s called projection, and you should assume that’s one of the things going on every time the media runs some wild news cycle—such as accusing the Republican president of treasonous collusion with Russia when it’s actually the Democrat presidential candidate who did that.
Reinforcing the Power Hierarchy
This New York Times article, after all the lies and manipulations about the Hunter Biden laptop, is also a chilling public affirmation that the ruling class believes Americans are helpless to choose their own government. They’re even bold enough to confirm their power openly.
Just like requiring only the hired help and those under the thumb of government agencies to wear masks while their masters wine and dine mask-free, The New York Times openly revealing that corporate media including itself, Twitter, and Facebook lied and got away with it is a hierarchy flex. It’s a display of their power. They are saying, “We can lie to Americans and get away with it.”
They’re also flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say. Again, Covid is another clear example, as when Trump advisors such as Scott Atlas faced vicious media smears for pointing out facts that The New York Times finally acknowledged months later, such as that kids don’t need to wear masks and it’s perfectly safe for them to go to school. In the intervening time, children needlessly suffered, but The New York Times doesn’t care. They owned the rubes, and that matters more to them than truth or children’s suffering.
People this corrupt don’t deserve to have media platforms, control of the presidency, or any power of any kind. At the very least, those who use their power this cynically should be respected by absolutely no one.
Big Tech Is a Threat to Democracy
Big Tech is also clearly manipulating public discourse for highly partisan ends. Social media has become what the “big three” cable news networks were decades ago: falsely “nonpartisan” manipulators of elections. Like ABC, CBS, and NBC, Twitter and Facebook’s ability to control culture and politics through brain drips feeding lies into millions of Americans’ minds needs to end, yesterday. This is not a pissing contest. It’s about our continued existence as a nation.
Greenwald notes the corporate press and big tech “all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump.” That’s not a democracy, no matter how many slogans about that word propaganda outlets put out. It’s tyranny.
When elections are an elaborate charade and their outcomes are openly manipulated by giant special interests, we don’t have self-government, self-determination, democracy, constitutional government, representation, or any of the above. For those of us who love these things because we believe they are our God-given and precious rights and responsibilities, this is a dark reality to behold.
One might call this world the left wants to live in Chinese communism with American characteristics. Well, I don’t want to live in that world, and neither do at least 74 million other Americans. We’re not going to keep being abused by our own government quietly. And we’re not going to believe these liars, no matter what they say.
The top names on everyone’s mind when they hear the word “disinformation” ought to be The New York Times, Twitter, Facebook, The Atlantic, and all their corrupt, self-congratulating Aspen Institute friends. That’s something we can all work to help our neighbors see.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Big Tech, the corrupt corporate media, and Democrats throttled the completely legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story one month before the November 2020 election by lying that the reporting was Russian disinformation.
Now a year and a half after a mere mention of the story got you nuked from the internet by power-hungry tech oligarchs, and with Joe Biden safely in office, the propaganda press is quietly admitting what conservative media immediately verified: that the story was legitimate all along. The president’s son did abandon his laptop, which contained a treasure trove of damning and compromising information about Hunter Biden’s sketchy foreign business dealings and their connection to the now-president.
On Wednesday, The New York Times stealthily admitted, in an understated article focused on a federal investigation into Hunter’s taxes, that the laptop story was legitimate and that he was under scrutiny for shady relationships with Chinese and Ukrainian energy companies, which might have violated “foreign lobbying and money laundering rules.” The quiet confession that the laptop was real and not “Russian disinformation,” as many Joe Biden advocates claimed without evidence at the time, was buried in the article nearly 25 paragraphs down.
When Hunter disclosed the investigation he downplayed it as something about his taxes. It's way more than that
The New York Post first reported in October 2020 that a “Smoking-gun email” discovered on an abandoned laptop demonstrated “how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”The news was devastating enough to hurt Joe Biden’s chances to topple former President Donald Trump, so the corrupt elites who control our nation’s streams of information banded together to brand the story as misinformation that deserved to be censored and suppressed.
Shortly after the Post broke the news, Politico rushed to publish a letter signed by dozens of former intelligence heads from the CIA, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and more smearing the laptop story as “Russian disinformation.” These so-called “experts” admitted that they had never seen the laptop nor that they had any evidence to suggest that their “Russia, Russia, Russia” theory was accurate, but the letter quickly became the basis for the left to wage a censorship war on anyone and everyone who amplified the Hunter corruption narrative.
Even when current intelligence leaders confirmed that there was never any evidence that the Hunter laptop story was disinformation, Democrats kept spreading the lies to destroy their ideological opponents.
Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say https://t.co/zRdHxTxVsl
When your job title in the HR Department of your corporation reads "journalist," but all you really want to be is a partisan spokesman for the DNC: pic.twitter.com/OCEfsLDxf1
The New York Times was among many of the deliberately dishonest media outlets (and eager Russia collusion hoaxers) who intentionally downplayed the findings on the laptop and mischaracterized them to save the elder Biden from criticism. Some media companies such as NPR, which eagerly relied on the debunked Steele dossier to push anti-Trump coverage, declined to give the story any coverage at all because they said it “doesn’t amount to much.”
Big Tech also censored the New York Post’s reporting and prevented the story from being circulated on its platforms using phony policies. Twitter claimed the reporting violated its “hacked materials policy,” which it has since refused to enforce, and banned the New York Post from tweeting until it took the article post down.
Facebook also reduced distribution of the bombshell article because the Democrat operatives who staff the Silicon Valley giant claimed the story needed to be “fact-checked,” which even the company has admitted is just a bogus excuse for censorship.
This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review. https://t.co/vf3CBvLmjj
The same people who knowingly bought into and spread the Russia collusion hoax colluded to deplatform and discredit their political and ideological enemies in the run-up to a highly-contested election. They were successful in their endeavors, with Biden ultimately ousting Trump from office, which is why they can now safely pretend they never lied about and throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.
That story of deep familial corruption had the potential to change Americans’ votes in the 2020 election. That’s why Big Tech, the corrupt press, and Democrat blue checkmarks deemed themselves the gatekeepers of information for Americans and made the calculated decision to meddle in the election through censorship and suppression.
Despite the New York Times quietly now admitting the legitimacy of the laptop, don’t expect an apology from them or any other corporate media outlets, pundits, Democrats, or Big Tech. They have demonstrated over and over that their missteps are no good-faith journalistic “errors” warranting a “correction” or follow-up story a year and a half later. They will do whatever it takes to empower themselves and their political allies.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordangdavidson.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Sen. Ron Johnson is not planning his Senate retirement anytime soon. The Wisconsin lawmaker is running for reelection, he announced this week, at which the corrupt media predictably came out, guns blazing.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza, for instance, announced that the “Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist is running for another term,” and The Nation ran an article calling him an “off-the-deep-end” senator.
But while attention-seeking pundits attack Johnson for opinions that don’t conform to the left-wing narrative (opinions held among many Americans outside the Beltway, by the way), his opinions are often proved to be exactly right. There’s quite a long list of “Ron John” statements and actions that, after sending the media into a tizzy and Big Tech giants into a censorship spree, have held up quite well over time. Here are some of them.
Jan. 6
During a February 2021 hearing to examine the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Johnson condemned the violence then went on to read an eyewitness account of the day’s events. Originally published in The Federalist, it detailed the presence of provocateurs in the crowd and confusion among many of the pro-police “MAGA” protesters who didn’t attend the rally to perpetrate violence.
Yet the account Johnson read was entered into the record without objection from lawmakers of either party. And since then, instead of learning more information about Jan. 6 that refutes eyewitness accounts of “provocateurs,” Americans have been treated to political playacting (including literal musical theater) from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sham commission, more hyperventilating from the media, and repeated stonewalling from the FBI on questions about potential provocateurs caught on video, such as Ray Epps.
Johnson was also ahead of the game on the Capitol Police component of Jan. 6, including pushing to correct the media and Capitol Police’s lies about what happened to the late Officer Brian Sicknick.
COVID Shots
Johnson has been a consistent voice for those who don’t feel they have one on Covid shots and the mandates that accompany them. He’s given Americans a forum to discuss their firsthand adverse shot reactions, for which he’s been smeared in the corrupt media as “fundamentally dangerous” and as a peddler of “misinformation.”
In November 2021, YouTube suspended Johnson’s channel for the fifth time for seven days for a video of a panel on vaccine-related injuries, labeling it “Covid misinformation.” Yet we know adverse reactions do occur.
In April 2021, when Johnson questioned forcing every American to get vaccinated and slammed the idea of pushing vaccine mandates on citizens, Anthony Fauci came after him on MSNBC — which other outlets amplified, calling the senator an “idiot anti-vaxxer.”
Fast-forward to 2022, and Johnson has been vindicated: Even with a federal vaccine mandate in place, case numbers are up higher than ever; and even the triple-vaccinated are still contracting and spreading the virus.
Early COVID Treatment
Big Tech has twice censored the sitting U.S. senator by nuking videos discussing early Covid treatments. In February 2021, YouTube removed videos of sworn testimony from Dr. Pierre Kory about early treatments. Then in June, YouTube suspended Johnson’s account for one week for remarks he made about early Covid treatments in Milwaukee.
Shutting down scientific inquiry and debate is inherently anti-science, however, as scientists who dissent from some of the questionable Covid conventional wisdom have pointed out.
“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, has said of this type of censorship. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”
We didn’t have to wait for ground-breaking scientific discovery on this one; we’ve known since the beginning of the pandemic that children are at almost zero risk of dying from coronavirus, and now we know that Covid shots don’t prevent people from contracting nor spreading the virus. Johnson was scientifically spot-on to oppose vaxx mandates for children, given children’s near-zero risk from a bout with Covid versus the potential risks of shot complications.
Hunter Biden
Corporate media ginned up all types of attacks when Johnson, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, dug into the Biden family corruption linked to Hunter Biden.
The New York Times described it using the “Russian disinformation” moniker. Time Magazine smeared him as the Senate’s “one-man Biden prosecutor.” And the Washington Post described Johnson’s investigation as a nakedly partisan ploy to get Donald Trump re-elected.
This was all a distraction from the fact that Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley successfully revealed millions of dollars in questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Johnson triggered the media in July when he mouthed to a Republican group that climate change is “bullsh-t.” The corporate media went berserk, with CNN and Chris Cuomo calling Johnson a climate change “denier.”
The senator has reinforced repeatedly that he doesn’t deny that the climate is changing, but rather that he isn’t an “alarmist” and doesn’t buy Democrats’ apocalyptic predictions.
Big surprise, plenty of data backs this up. The American Enterprise Institute has documented 50 years of failed doomsday predictions by so-called “experts” in the corrupt media and Democrat Party. For instance, ABC claimed in 2008 that Manhattan would be underwater by 2015. In 2011, The Washington Post claimed that cherry blossoms would bloom in winter.
Climate genius Al Gore also predicted in 2008 that five years later the North Pole would be free of ice. And in 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., predicted that Miami would be underwater in a few years. Yet in 2022, Miami is still very much above ground.
Mouthwash
Last month, Johnson noted a number of simple things Americans can do to keep themselves heathy, such as taking Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and zinc, and gargling mouthwash to reduce viral load if they get COVID.
Johnson’s mouthwash claim about viral load is supported by scientific research, however, such as this study. Additionally, Dr. Bruce Davidson, a faculty member of the Georgetown Department of Otolaryngology, conducted a study on the use of antiseptic mouthwash to control coronavirus, published in the American Journal of Medicine, and found that mouthwash can help protect people from Covid-19 pneumonia.
JUST NOW: Ron Johnson, on a Wisconsin tele-town hall, pushes mouthwash as a COVID treatment.
"By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?" pic.twitter.com/V0cdxPYc7K
Even FackCheck.org had to admit, “Johnson is right that mouthwashes ‘may’ reduce the virus’ ability to replicate in people.”
Natural Immunity
On July 14, Johnson claimed natural immunity is “as strong if not stronger than vaccinated immunity,” against which WaPo deployed its fake fact-checkers.
Johnson’s claims, however, come straight out of a pair of studies that confirmed natural immunity is stronger than COVID vaccine-acquired immunity. The pre-print Israeli study found that people with natural immunity could be 13 times less likely to contract the virus than those who were solely vaccinated, contradicting CDC findings.
Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who was a professor at Harvard Medical School for a decade, dissected and compared the CDC study and the Israeli pre-print and explained why the latter is more reliable.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
First lady Jill Biden revealed the 2021 White House Christmas decorations on Monday, and the State Dining Room was adorned with stockings above the mantel. But there was one blatant problem with the decor.
According to Daily Mail reporter Emily Goodin, the stockings were meant to represent the Bidens’ grandchildren, with each one having the name of a different grandchild.
Trees in state dining room decorated with old photos of first families. Stockings on fireplace have names of Biden grandkids pic.twitter.com/pkFjrAPyhy
However, Twitter users quickly noticed a glaring omission from the mantle. Only six stockings hung above the fireplace despite the fact that President Joe Biden has seven grandchildren.
According to Marie Claire, Biden has three granddaughters from his son Hunter: Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy.
He has two more grandchildren from his late son, Beau: Natalie and Robert, who goes by Hunter after his uncle.
So who is Biden’s seventh grandchild? That would be Hunter Biden’s son with adult entertainer Lunden Alexis Roberts. The boy was born in 2018 and Hunter was proven to be the father in 2020, according to Marie Claire.
So that makes a total of seven grandchildren, one more than the number of stockings on the mantle.
Multiple people pointed out the omission on Twitter, including reporter Amber Athey of The Spectator.
Despite this seemingly obvious exclusion, the establishment media refused to report on it. (At The Western Journal, we fight to bring you the news other outlets will not. You can support us in the fight for truth by subscribing.)
Many social media users also speculated that Hunter Biden’s child with Roberts was the one grandchild who was left out.
In the photo above, some letters can be seen on the stockings. The beginnings of the names “Naomi,” “Finnegan” and “Natalie” appear to be written.
Since all the names cannot be seen, it is hard to confirm that Roberts’ child is the one left out. However, that does not make the Biden family look much better.
If the family left out Hunter’s son with Roberts, they were essentially ignoring him because they view him as an embarrassment. If it was a different grandchild who was left out, the family simply forgot one of their grandchildren.
Trees in state dining room decorated with old photos of first families. Stockings on fireplace have names of Biden grandkids pic.twitter.com/pkFjrAPyhy
Grant is a graduate of Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He has five years of writing experience with various outlets and enjoys covering politics and sports.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco coffee table book “Keep America Laughing (at the left)” ORDER HERE
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a trust for the grandchildren of President Joe Biden, according to newly surfaced emails. The financial contribution to Biden’s family allegedly happened in 2016, when Biden was vice president. The ex-FBI director reportedly sent emails to Hunter Biden expressing that Freeh would like to work “with you and dad.”
Freeh said he made a $100,000 donation to a private trust for two of Joe Biden’s grandchildren, according to emails leaked from Hunter Biden’s laptop that were published by the Daily Mail on Thursday night.
“As you know, our family foundation made a $100K contribution to Hallie’s children’s trust last year,” Freeh allegedly wrote to Hunter on April 24, 2017. “My accountants (PWC) now advise that since the grant did not go to a 501(c) organization [a charity], it was not a proper foundation gift. So we’ve been in touch with the IRS and PWC and want to correct the situation as follows: I’ll make a new $100k gift to Haley’s trust, and Hallie’s trust will reimburse the foundation by paying it $100k. Sorry for the extra burden. Best regards and warm regards to Hallie, Dad and Mom.”
The generous “gift” was sent to the two children of Hallie Biden, the widow of Joe’s late son Beau, who later became Hunter’s lover.
“Thanks so much and of course no burden at all. Speak to you soon,” Hunter Biden responded.
The Daily Mail published several communications between Freeh and Hunter dating back to mid-2016.
On July 8, 2016, Freeh allegedly emailed Hunter Biden in an email marked “confidential and privileged,” which said the former FBI director told the then-vice president’s son that he “would be delighted to do future work with you.”
“I also spoke to Dad a few weeks ago and would like to explore with him some future work options,” Freeh reportedly wrote. “I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun and rewarding.”
“Have a great weekend and our love to Mom and Dad,” Freeh allegedly signed off.
Freeh reportedly copied Hunter on an email sent July 21, 2016, in which the ex-FBI director discussed one of his clients, Beny Steinmetz. Hunter replied on Aug. 24, 2016, to see if there was anything he could do to help.
Freeh reportedly replied, “I would like to talk with you and Dad about working together next year. No doubt both he and you have many options and probably some which are more attractive than my small shop,” an apparent nod to his consultancy firm.
“As you know, we have both a law firm and ‘solutions/investigations’ group with a very good brand, DC and DEL (and NYC) offices, and a profitable and interesting global practice (eg., I’m currently representing the Malaysian PM and his family),” Freeh allegedly boasted. “So if it’s something which interests you both, let’s talk about it at some point. I’m very flexible and we could set it up as an equity-share or whatever works best. It would certainly be an honor to work with you both.”
On March 12, 2017, Freeh allegedly sent an email to Hunter requesting his father’s contact information.
“I say [saw] Dad in St Joe’s and the 900a today and he said hi walking back from communion–I didn’t get the chance to return greetings,“ Freeh purportedly said. “If you have his cell and a personal email, I’d like to have his contacts (will protect). I would still like to persuade him to associate with me and FSS —as we have some very good and profitable matters which he could enhance with minimal time.”
The initials FSS are most likely a reference to the law firm of Freeh, Sporkin & Sullivan, where Freeh was a partner at the time along with Stanley Sporkin, who was previously the general counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency and chief enforcement officer at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Hunter replied with Joe’s personal cell, and an email address for Kathy Chung, a staffer from Biden’s vice presidential office who he kept on after leaving the White House,” the Daily Mail reported.
Freeh is a former federal judge and served as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. At the time of the emails, Freeh ran a consulting firm, which represented three wealthy individuals who were all later convicted on corruption charges.
Beny Steinmetz, an Israeli diamond and minerals magnate, was convicted last January of corrupting foreign agents and forging documents by a Geneva court. The billionaire, who was once named the richest person in Israel, was sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly bribing officials to control mines in Africa. Steinmetz is appealing the case.
Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu, who was accused of fraud and corruption, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2017.
Ex-Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak was sentenced to 12 years in jail after he was found guilty on all seven counts in the first of several multimillion-dollar corruption trials, according to the BBC.
Freeh served on the board of the Beau Biden Foundation, a Delaware-based charity to help prevent child abuse. In a 2014 press release, Freeh labeled Joe Biden and Beau Biden as “dear friends.”
Hunter Biden said he does not believe that the Secret Service got involved in a search for his handgun after his sister-in-law and then-girlfriend threw it in a trash can in October 2018. Biden’s comments in a CBS “This Morning” interview on Monday would appear to conflict with text messages he reportedly sent several months after the incident in which he referred to Secret Service involvement in the search for his gun.
“I don’t know whether the Secret Service were, or why they would be. I don’t think that’s true, to my knowledge,” Biden said in an interview with CBS News regarding reports that the Secret Service intervened in the Oct. 23, 2018 incident.
Politico reported last month that Hallie Biden, the sister-in-law to Hunter, reported his gun missing to police in Wilmington, Delaware. Hallie, who was also in a romantic relationship with Hunter at the time, said that she threw his gun in a trash can behind a supermarket after taking it from his vehicle, according to Politico. She reported the firearm missing after she went back to the store to try to retrieve it. Delaware state police, the FBI and Secret Service took part in the search for the gun, according to Politico.
Politico also reported that the owner of a gun store in Delaware said that Secret Service agents requested paperwork regarding the sale of the firearm to Biden. The store owner said that he refused to provide documents to the Secret Service, fearing that the agency would try to cover up the incident, according to Politico. He later sent paperwork to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
The Secret Service and White House said last week that there were no records showing that Secret Service personnel were involved in the investigation, Politico reported. Senate Republicans noted in a letter to the Secret Service last week that the agency was not providing protection to the Biden family at the time of the incident.
But Biden referred to the Secret Service in a text message he reportedly sent several months after the incident.
“She stole the gun out of my trunk lock box and threw it in a garbage can full to the top at Jansens [sic]. Then told me it was my problem to deal with,” Biden wrote in the text message, according to The New York Post, which obtained a trove of Biden’s communications before the 2020 election.
“Then when the police the FBI the secret service came on the scene she said she took it from me because she was scared I would harm myself due to my drug and alcohol problem and our volatile relationship and that she was afraid for the kids,” according to the Post.
Biden was not asked in the CBS interview about his text messages. His attorney did not respond to a request for comment. Biden said that Hallie took the gun out of “concern that I would hurt myself or do something.”
“In the moment we knew that the gun was lost, that Hallie had thrown it into a trashcan and I told her that she can’t do that,” he said.
After the terrifying ransack of the U.S. capitol Wednesday during a Donald Trump “stop the steal” rally, big tech companies are joining leftist elites in the media and government in their effort to squash the Trump movement once and for all. Seizing on the backlash from the riot, they have seamlessly banned President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
What happened at the capitol was an embarrassment for our country. Now, the hypocritical outcries from Democrats, who proudly condoned left-wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters as they terrorized American cities all summer, are ushering in a great reckoning.
The Jan. 6 demonstrators, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, were there to protest legitimate claims of election irregularities and voter fraud. But Google-owned YouTube doesn’t want you to know that. They announced Thursday that they will ban all videos about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The one free speech haven, Parler, Apple is keying up to ban from its app store and bar from iOS devices, claiming content on the website contributed to the capitol unrest. Google has already jumped the gun, banning Parler yesterday.
Every corner of the Trump movement is being publicly purged from the internet. Thursday, Shopify stripped all online stores for President Trump, including the Trump Organization and Trump’s affiliated campaign account.
Anyone who has supported the president is in for it, as well. Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, in a now-deleted tweet said that getting rid of Trump is “the easy part.” The more difficult task will be “cleansing the movement he commands.” Democrats have already created a “Trump Accountability Project,” an enemies list to ban, cancel, or fire anyone who staffed, donated to, endorsed, or supported President Trump and his administration.
Trump subverted the elites who run our country. He took on big pharma and China. He negotiated, renegotiated, and destroyed trade deals in his mission to put America and American workers first. He went to war with critical race theory institutionalized in our schools and in government.
He stood for things that those who run our biggest corporations and hold our highest government positions detest. For virtually his entire presidency, they tried everything to delegitimize his administration, beginning with the now-debunked Russiagate. Trump showed their corruption, and now he will pay.
The man, the administration, and his supporters will likely go down in history books as delusional and dangerous. Why? Because the left has a monopoly on power, so they can control what people see and therefore think.
As the left’s arbiters of “truth,” big tech has been banning users they don’t agree with and suppressing stories like The New York Post’s blockbuster investigation into Hunter Biden‘s laptop and sketchy deals with foreign governments and companies with ties to the Communist Chinese government. With the help of their partisan “independent fact checkers,” big tech and the media made sure average Americans never knew about this before they went to the polls.
Following the riot among Trump supporters in the capitol, Facebook removed President Trump’s video calling for peace and rule of law, claiming it instigated violence. Then Facebook de-platformed him. Trump’s speech didn’t fit the narrative that he was a pro-violence, lawlessness insurrectionist.
This disturbing reality we live in, where one political party now has the power to control the narrative in all aspects of our lives — school, work, social media, and government — might make us feel eerie echoes of living under Chinese Communist Party influence instead of in the United States of America.
Perhaps what’s most troubling, and something that we might not have even considered in the chaos of the last few days, is the long-term impact this will have on American children. Generation Z or Zoomers, aged 13 to 21, may be one of the first generations that is more influenced by what they see and read on social media and the internet than what they hear at the dinner table from mom and dad.
A Business Insider’s poll found that 59 percent of Zoomers listed social media as their top news source. While technology used to serve as a way to make information accessible, a way to have the world at your fingertips with just a quick search, it has become something much different. It is teaching the youngest and most impressionable among us that suppression is normal and personal censorship is an important survival mechanism.
Children are being taught to watch what they say and think, lest they be labeled a racist, white supremacist, homophobe, or xenophobe. Indeed, making a pro-Trump TikTok video can get your college admission rescinded and subject you to intense personal harassment. A three-second insensitive or politically incorrect Snapchat video from 2016 can get you featured in a New York Times article and your college admission rescinded, and subject you to bitter bullying.
For young people today, it’s becoming normal to see political leaders in our country deemed “dangerous” to be ousted from public platforms and ostracized from society. They watch their parents self-censor at work, fearful of backlash from employees or coworkers that could get them fired.
Americans used to support the right of people to hold and express opinions others disagree with. Yet the newest generation believes feelings are more valuable than freedom. Study after study finds that younger people are more supportive of limiting speech than are older generations.
A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison think the government should be able to punish “hate speech.” Of course, “hate speech” is simply the left’s ambiguous term for anything veering from the leftist orthodoxy on issues such as abortion, sex, race, and immigration.
Silicon Valley oligarchs have an agenda. They aren’t platforms, they are publishers, which should nullify the privileges they enjoy under Section 230. Will the Democrats who are now running our government do anything to stop big tech tyranny? Of course not.
This problem is not going away. America’s ethos of free speech and expression is going extinct at the hands of big tech and the leftists controlling media and government.
The U.S. Capitol riots are over, thanks to law enforcement. However, the censorship that followed has created a dangerous precedent.
For young people, their “normal” is beginning to feel increasingly like it’s heading towards life in China. It’s less free and tolerant than the America their parents grew up in. Imagine how much worse things will be when today’s youths are running the country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Evita Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1
An email obtained by NBC News reveals that Hunter Biden declined to report $400,000 in income he received from Ukrainian gas company Burisma on his 2014 tax return. Biden raked in a cozy salary from the oligarch-owned company of up to $50,000 a month despite lacking experience in the energy industry, with many pointing to his association with then-Vice President Joe Biden as the purpose of his employment.
The email from Eric Schwerin, the president of an investment company founded by the younger and troubled Biden in 2009, succinctly reveals that Hunter did not report a whopping $400,000 from Burisma in his 2014 tax return.
“In 2014 you joined the Burisma board and we still need to amend your 2014 returns to reflect the unreported Burisma income,” says the email dated Jan. 16, 2017. Schwerin goes on to reveal Biden had an income of more than $1.2 million in 2014. NBC News claimed that it was unable to “verify” the email, but a Hunter Biden spokesperson declined to dispute its veracity.
Biden’s suspicious dealings with Burisma were largely ignored by the mainstream media, even after files were published from the troubled drug user’s laptop detailing corrupt foreign business dealings. The Biden campaign admitted this week that the Department of Justice is actively investigating Hunter Biden for tax compliance, with federal sources going on to reveal after the admission that Biden is being probed for potential money laundering and corrupt business deals.
It’s very possible that the US Attorney for Delaware is investigating the younger Biden for trying to hide his suspicious Burisma income in 2014, which would’ve proved an embarrassment at the least for the Biden family if it were revealed while Biden was Vice President. The ongoing investigation stands to linger on as a shadow covering the Biden family, if Joe Biden is inaugurated as President.
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