Responding to the news that Attorney General Merrick Garland will be called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee Sept. 20, as two IRS whistleblowers are alleging that the Department of Justice interfered in the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, Lara Trump told Newsmax on Wednesday that there’s no question that President Joe Biden’s son received special treatment.
“There’s no doubt that Hunter Biden received special treatment,” she said while appearing on “John Bachman Now.” “Anyone in America can very clearly see that, and you have to ask yourself, ‘Why would that happen here?’ I mean, think about the fact that Merrick Garland almost became a Supreme Court justice. Imagine him making decisions on the Supreme Court bench. That would be terrifying.”
Lara Trump, a senior adviser for former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign and the host of “The Right View Podcast,” said that Americans need the truth, and need clarity about the Hunter Biden probe.
“We need equal application of the law,” she said. “I sure hope that we get a lot of answers to a lot of questions that I think we all still have. Think about what it takes to come forward as a whistleblower. Think about what these people are putting on the line, especially Gary Shapley by putting his name out there.”
Shapley, the IRS supervisory agent who helped oversee the investigation of Hunter Biden, told CBS News earlier this week that, dating back to the Trump administration, he was repeatedly prevented from taking steps he would have considered routine in other cases. Shapley said the five-year investigation uncovered conduct that he says could have resulted in additional charges.
“Based on my experience, if this was a small business owner or any other non-connected individual, they would have been charged with felony counts,” Shapley said.
Shapley told CBS News that Hunter Biden wrote off as business expenses the money he paid for “prostitutes, sex club memberships, travel for the prostitutes, hotel rooms for purported drug dealers, no show employees.”
Shapley also said his efforts to explore money trails that involved “dad” or “the big guy” were blocked by a senior prosecutor working for David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware (who was appointed by President Trump).
“I would say that they limited certain investigative leads that could have potentially provided information on the president of the United States,” Shapley said.
Speaking about the whistleblowers, Lara Trump said: “These are people who are saying, ‘We love this country enough to see that this sort of thing does not happen. This is not how our country is supposed to function.’ So when you have all of these folks saying, ‘Here’s what we saw, and here’s our testimony to back it up,’ and we gain nothing from coming forward to talk about this, I think it raises a lot of red flags. I think that’s why a lot of people have really started to pay attention to this. As they should, and as we all should, as American citizens.”
The conversation turned to CNN and the audio recording of a 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, where former President Trump purportedly discusses holding secret documents he allegedly did not declassify.
“Well, look, none of this is surprising. I think we all know where these leaks are coming from,” Lara Trump said. “It seems to be on purpose to distract from a very obvious problem that the Biden family has right now. All the information that is coming out about Hunter Biden, about Joe Biden, about their connections to money they received from, you know, entities all around the world from Ukraine, from China. These are very problematic for the Democrat Party, for the Biden family, and for our entire government, and so they want to distract people.”
Trump continued: “The goal is clear: to damage Donald Trump and prevent people from wanting to vote for him in 2024. I think people see this, and they say, ‘Really, this is where you want us to obsess and focus, when we have real national security implications happening right now with the Biden family that you guys don’t want us to talk about?'”
Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss told the House Judiciary Committee he had “been granted ultimate authority” over prosecutorial decisions related to the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden in a June 7, 2023, letter obtained by The Federalist. However, Weiss’s letter to Congress — and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s earlier testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss had “full authority” to charge Hunter Biden — directly conflicts with statements Weiss made to senior members of the team investigating the Biden son.
So, either Weiss lied to his top investigators, or Weiss and Garland deceived Congress. There’s no other way around it.
Something Doesn’t Add Up
The House Ways and Means Committee’s release of IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley’s testimony and related exhibits last week created a serious conflict.
Shapley, the IRS whistleblower who came forward earlier this year with claims of political bias and breaches of protocols in a high-profile investigation, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee during a closed-door session on May 26, 2023. The House’s release of the transcript of Shapley’s testimony provided the first official confirmation that Hunter Biden was the subject of the investigation.
During his hours-long testimony, Shapley told congressional investigators that a meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, with Weiss and senior-level managers from the IRS, FBI, and U.S. attorney’s office, was his “red-line” meeting. According to the whistleblower, Weiss was present for the meeting and surprised the team by stating, “I am not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”
Shapley said Weiss further explained that the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, would not allow Weiss to charge Hunter Biden in the D.C. district, where certain of the alleged crimes needed to be filed based on Hunter Biden’s residency during the relevant time. Shapley noted, “Weiss stated that he subsequently asked for special counsel authority from Main DOJ at that time and was denied that authority.” “Instead,” Shapley recounted, Weiss “was told to follow the process, which was known to send U.S. Attorney Weiss through another President Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney,” that one in California, the second locale relevant to the proposed criminal charges.
Without the cooperation of Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys, Shapley explained, Weiss made clear he could not bring charges outside the Delaware district. Consequently, the statute of limitations on felony tax charges against the president’s son for the 2014 and 2015 tax years expired.
The IRS whistleblower then shared with the House committee an email thread Shapley initiated following the meeting with Weiss. In his email on Oct. 7, 2022, Shapley summarized the substance of the meeting: “Weiss stated that he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed” (bold in original). Shapley then commented that he “believe[s] this to be a huge problem—inconsistent with DOJ public position and Merrick Garland testimony.”
The email then recounted that Weiss said he had gone to the U.S. attorney in D.C. “in early summer to request charge there,” but the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney “said they could not charge in his district.” Weiss then said he “requested Special counsel authority when it was sent to D.C.,” but “Main DOJ” denied the request.
The special agent in charge of the FBI D.C. field office, Darrell J. Waldon, who had been present during the Oct. 7 meeting, responded to the email summary, stating: “Thanks Gary. You covered it all.”
Merrick Garland’s Denial
During a Friday press conference, Garland contradicted Shapley’s testimony, stating: “As I said at the outset, Mr. Weiss was appointed by President Trump as the U.S. Attorney in Delaware and assigned this matter during the previous administration and would be permitted to continue his investigation and to make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.”
This statement tracks with Garland’s earlier unequivocal testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 1, 2023, when Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley asked for clarification on whether Weiss had authority to bring charges outside the Delaware district.
“The U.S. Attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary,” the attorney general replied, stressing that he would ensure Weiss would be able to do that.
Garland reiterated that point when Grassley inquired whether Weiss had “independent charging authority over certain criminal allegations against the President’s son outside the district of Delaware.”
“He would have to bring the case in another district,” Garland replied, but added, “But as I said, I promised to ensure that he is able to carry out his investigation and that he be able to run it and if he needs to bring it in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that.”
Garland’s March 1 testimony directly conflicted with what Weiss had told investigators during the meeting on Oct. 7, 2022. And as the email Shapley sent after that meeting indicates, Shapley believed Weiss’s statement that he lacked the authority to file charges against Hunter Biden in another district also conflicted with what Garland had previously told Congress.
Before Grassley quizzed the attorney general on Weiss’s authority, Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty had asked Garland during an April 26, 2022, Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science hearing whether Garland had been briefed on the Hunter Biden investigation. In response, the attorney general stated, “Hunter Biden’s investigation … is being run by and supervised by the United States attorney for the District of Delaware.”
“He is supervising the investigation,” and “he is in charge of that investigation,” Garland continued, stressing “there will not be interference of any political or improper kind.”
Shapley’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee counters Garland’s claims that there would be no political or improper interference. But more significantly, the whistleblower’s testimony and the email he provided the House cannot be reconciled with Garland’s clarifying testimony to Grassley on March 1, 2023. During that hearing, Garland expressly stated that “the U.S. attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.”
The Weiss Letter
However, it is not merely the veracity of Garland’s Senate testimony that is in question now. On June 7, 2023, Weiss wrote to the House Judiciary Committee to corroborate Garland’s testimony. In that letter, obtained by The Federalist, Weiss stated:
I want to make clear that, as the Attorney General has stated, I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations.
In signing that letter and dispatching it to the House Judiciary Committee, Weiss has entangled himself in what appears to be Garland’s lie to Congress — that is, unless Weiss had instead deceived the senior-level officials responsible for the Hunter Biden investigation when he told them last Oct. 7 that he was not the “deciding person” on whether charges are filed.
But why would Weiss mislead the senior leadership responsible for the Hunter Biden investigation?
On this point, Shapley has “no insight,” his lawyers noted on Friday, adding: “That Mr. Weiss made these statements is easily corroborated.” Then the whistleblower’s attorneys listed the names of three individuals who, in addition to Shapley and Weiss, had attended the meeting on Oct. 7, 2022: Baltimore FBI Special Agent in Charge Tom Sobocinski and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ryeshia Holley and IRS Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon.
If these individuals confirm the whistleblower’s account — as seems likely given Waldon had previously said, “you covered it all,” in response to Shapley’s email summary of the meeting — Weiss will have some explaining to do. He’ll have to explain his statements during the meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, and the genesis of the June 7, 2023, letter Weiss sent the House Judiciary Committee.
Sources familiar with the letter have suggested it reads as if drafted by someone connected to the Department of Justice’s Office of Legislative Affairs, telling The Federalist a U.S. attorney would be unlikely to know about the so-called Linder letter referenced in a footnote. That possibility raises the further question of whether the DOJ and Garland induced or pressured Weiss to sign the letter.
It is important to remember that Weiss dispatched the letter to the House Judiciary Committee before the Ways and Means Committee released the whistleblower’s testimony, meaning the DOJ and the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office would not have known Shapley had the Oct. 7, 2022, email to corroborate his oral testimony.
The House Judiciary Committee seems similarly concerned about the possibility the Department of Justice and/or Garland pushed Weiss to help mislead Congress, writing to the Delaware U.S. attorney last Thursday about the “unusual nature” of Weiss’s June 7 letter. That letter, which The Federalist has reviewed, asks the Delaware U.S. attorney to provide “a list of individuals who drafted or assisted in drafting” the June 7 letter. The oversight committee also asked Weiss “who instructed you to sign and send your June 7 letter to the Committee,” and for details on any conversations Weiss had with Garland or others at the DOJ.
These details suggest we have passed the cover-up stage of the Hunter Biden scandal and have now entered the cover-up of the cover-up phase. But unlike the typical case, it cannot be said that the cover-up is worse than the crime — because selling your country out to the Chinese communists with your vice president father is about as bad as it gets.
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.
Everyone was assured by Democrats and our always helpful media that the sticky sweet plea deal for Joe Biden’s lowlife son Hunter was proof positive that “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!!!1!1!”
ABC “The View’s” Sunny Hostin: “It shows no one is above the law, which is important, not even the president’s son.”
Obama 2012 deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter: “[I]t shows that no one is above the law and what taking responsibility looks like.”
Washington Post: “The sitting president’s son being held accountable for underpaying his taxes illustrates that no one is above the law in the U.S. system.”
And now look: overwhelming evidence that actually, no, Hunter Biden apparently is above the law. And that’s not just when he’s high on crack.
The House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday released the transcript of an interview with high-level IRS investigating agent Gary Shapley who testified that the Justice Department, under both presidents Trump and Biden, “provided preferential treatment, slow-walked the investigation, did nothing to avoid obvious conflicts of interest in this investigation” into Hunter’s shady, questionable as hell business dealings. Included in Shapley’s exhaustively detailed testimony was a 2017 text message uncovered in the years-long investigation from Hunter to a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,”Hunter wrote. It’s not clear what transaction he was referring to, but like the nasty little weenie that he is, he used his daddy’s status as a high-profile political figure to threaten the communist. “[I]f I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
Hunter mentions “my father” more frequently than David French gets off to Ukraine.
Throughout Shapley’s testimony, he names lawyers and officials within the IRS and FBI who admitted there was enough evidence to trigger more intensive investigations into Hunter (search warrants), which would, in turn, likely lead to criminal prosecutions (tax fraud), but that time and time again, they declined to pursue the matter.
“[W]hatever the motivations, at every stage decisions were made that had the effect of benefiting the subject of the investigation,” Shapley said, referring to Hunter. “These decisions included slow-walking investigative steps, not allowing enforcement actions to be executed, limiting investigators’ line of questioning for witnesses, misleading investigators on charging authority, delaying any and all actions months before [the 2020 election] to ensure the investigation did not go overt well before policy memorandum mandated the pause.”
He said his supervisors repeatedly deferred to the Justice Department regarding the investigation’s progress and that the DOJ consistently denied advancements and even tipped off Hunter’s lawyers as to what information the government knew, giving him a chance to conceal more incriminating material or concoct some feasible defense.
The New York Times reacted to this explosive testimony by noting that“Taken at face value, the message would undercut President Biden’s longstanding claims that he had nothing to do with his son’s international business deals.”
But that’s only if you take it at “face value,” folks!
The president knew what his son was doing. He was complicit and probably profited from it. The only reason we don’t know for sure is because, according to Shapley’s testimony, FBI agents deliberately avoided asking witnesses about it. On the one occasion that an agent did ask Hunter associate Rob Walker about Joe Biden, Walker said he believed Hunter had orchestrated a business meeting wherein his dad made a quick appearance for the purposes of bolstering the chances of “making a deal work out.”
“And, inexplicably,” Shapley said, after Walker confirmed this, “the FBI agent changed the subject.”
“The law” isn’t applied by artificial intelligence. It’s applied by people. And those people make decisions based on their predispositions. If those predispositions are to protect the ones who in turn protect the people applying the law, then it’s not equal justice. This is otherwise known as “The Way Washington Works.” If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re not, expect the FBI, the IRS, and every other federal agency to bear down until your last breath.
Hunter Biden’s attorney is responding to testimony from an IRS whistleblower who claims that the agency obtained a WhatsApp message in which the president’s son invoked his father’s name.
IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley Jr., who oversaw the agency’s investigation into Hunter Biden, claims the agency obtained a message from WhatsApp dated July 30, 2017, from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, CEO of Harvest Fund Management, where the president’s son claimed that he was with his father in an attempt to pressure Zhao to fulfill a commitment.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” Hunter Biden allegedly wrote.
Christopher Clark, an attorney for Hunter Biden, said in a statement to Fox News Digital that the claims are very misleading.
President Biden has snapped at reporters who have asked him about alleged corruption involving him and his son, Hunter Biden. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
“Biased and politically-motivated, selective leaks have plagued this matter for years. They are not only irresponsible, they are illegal. A close examination of the document released publicly yesterday by a very biased individual raises serious questions over whether it is what he claims it to be. It is dangerously misleading to make any conclusions or inferences based on this document,” Clark said. “The DOJ investigation covered a period which was a time of turmoil and addiction for my client.”
Clark also said that “[a]ny verifiable words or actions of my client in the midst of a horrible addiction are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in his family.”
Hunter Biden appears at a state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted by President Biden and first lady Jill Biden at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“An extensive, five-year long investigation conducted by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) concluded this week, which resulted in my client taking responsibility for two instances of misdemeanor failure to file tax payments, as well as a firearm charge, which will be subject to a pretrial diversion agreement. As his attorney through this entire matter, I can say that any suggestion the investigation was not thorough, or cut corners, or cut my client any slack, is preposterous and deeply irresponsible,” he added.
“And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction,” the alleged WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden said.
“I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father,” he said.
Hunter Biden appears at a state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted by President Biden and first lady Jill Biden at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Mark Lytle, an attorney for Shapley, told Fox News on Friday that his client “wanted to just bring this out to the public as a whistleblower in a protective fashion so that everybody could judge it.” Lytle also noted that according to Shapley, the WhatsApp messages were obtained through a search warrant.
“It’s important to note that this WhatsApp message did not come from the laptop or any nefarious source. Gary Shapley testified that they did a search warrant. They got a hold of Hunter Biden’s iCloud account and they did a search warrant to Apple, to the Apple Cloud, where they accessed Hunter Biden’s WhatsApp messages, Imessages and other information. And so this is credible. This comes from a credible source, and it’s information that’s very relevant to the dealings with the Chinese energy company and the income that Hunter Biden received,” Lytle said.
In response to the whistleblower allegations, Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office, told Fox News that the president wasn’t involved with his son in business.
World Food Program USA Board Chairman Hunter Biden, left, and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden attend the World Food Program USA’s Annual McGovern-Dole Leadership Award Ceremony at Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., on April 12, 2016. (Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)
“As we have said many times before, the President was not in business with his son. As we have also said many times before, the Justice Department makes decisions in its criminal investigations independently, and in this case, the White House has not been involved. As the President has said, he loves his son and is proud of him accepting responsibility for his actions and is proud of what he is doing to rebuild his life,” Sams said.
Fox News’ Brianna Herlihy and Jon Street contributed to this report.
Adam Sabes is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Adam.Sabes@fox.com and on Twitter @asabes10.
Image Source: Tucker Carlson Twitter video screenshot
Tucker Carlson released another scathing episode of his Twitter show and took aim straight at Hunter Biden after he agreed to a plea deal and got a slap on the wrist.
The president’s son reportedly agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and will receive probation and have to pay the taxes he owes. He will also enter into a diversion program over charges related to lying on a federal form when applying for a gun license.
“As in most of the developing world, it’s safer to be the president’s son than his opponent,” wrote Carlson in the description of his latest Twitter episode.
“This morning Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to pretty much nothing. Biden pled to two misdemeanor tax evasion charges then entered a diversion on a federal gun charge. That’s it. As far as Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is concerned Hunter Biden is done,” said Carlson on the show.
“There was no pre-dawn raid carried out live simultaneously on CNN, there was no perp walk, no handcuffs, no press conference. Above all there was no felony. Hunter Biden who broke federal gun laws can still carry a gun. It’s like it all never happened,” he added.
“In fact the Justice Department just baptized Hunter Biden. A lifetime of sins washed away in an instant,” Carlson said. “It was a secular miracle!”
He went on to emphasize that Hunter Biden got special treatment because he’s a son of President Joe Biden and mocked the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Carlson left Fox News in April and began publishing his own version of his very popular show on Twitter. He received tens of millions of views while Fox News has struggled to fill his time slot and has suffered in ratings without him.
He later accused Fox News of fraud and breach of contract over the circumstances surrounding his exit from the cable news network.
Hunter Biden is expected in federal court in the next few days over the plea deal.
Here’s the video from Tucker Carlson:
Ep. 5 As in most of the developing world, it's safer to be the president's son than his opponent. pic.twitter.com/AtRRaxYSjs
The corporate media has added a new face to their exhaustive list of “threats to Democracy.” “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a threat to your health — and our democracy,” reads the headline of a recent Los Angeles Times column. According to disgraced L.A. Times journalist Michael Hiltzik, there are many “dangers” posed by RFK Jr. conducting a lawful and democratic campaign for president.
Hiltzik writes that Kennedy’s candidacy “will increase the political credibility of anti-vax claptrap,” and “could cut into the vote in 2024 for a responsible Democrat,” allowing “Trump or a Trump clone” to take office and deploy “thuggish attacks on diversity, inclusion and voting rights that have become the alpha and omega of GOP politics.”
Ah yes, curbing racist, culturally Marxist “diversity and inclusion” policies and enacting measures to protect the integrity of American elections is a serious threat to America. Do not be fooled. The media attacks on RFK Jr. have nothing to do with vaccine acceptance.
As I wrote Tuesday, asking questions, whether they be about vaccines or literally anything else, is a defining feature of a free society. RFK Jr. has every right to discuss vaccines, particularly when the medical establishment thinks they are above debate.
However, Hiltzik and his colleagues in the propaganda press aren’t really afraid of vaccine “misinformation.” The corporate media is primarily drumming up hysteria around RFK Jr.’s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast because, as Hiltzik wrote, they perceive him as a threat to Biden’s 2024 presidential bid. In other words, RFK Jr.’s legitimate presidential campaign is a “threat to democracy” because it could help the opposition party win the upcoming presidential election and, ironically, throttle Democrats’ plan to erode the liberties prescribed in the Constitution.
The Media Is the Real Threat
Using the phrase “threat to democracy” as a way of protecting Democrats ahead of a presidential election is a media tradition at this point. Recall how the press promulgated the FBI-contrived Russia-collusion hoax, claiming former President Donald Trump was a “threat to democracy” in order to interfere in the 2016 election and discredit the Trump presidency after he was elected. Today, the media is still trying to thwart a Trump presidency by praising Biden for prosecuting his most probable 2024 opponent in, of course, the name of “democracy.”
Ahead of the 2020 election, the media again interfered in a presidential election when they claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” and a “threat to democracy” The laptop contained damning evidence that Hunter was engaging in sketchy foreign business dealings and that his father, presumably referred to as “the big guy,” was part of it.
Fast forward to today, congressional Republicans have uncovered significant evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden and Hunter received multimillion-dollar payouts from a Ukrainian Burisma executive in exchange for influence over American foreign policy. If the allegations are true, they mean the sitting president of the United States sold out America and may still be compromised by foreign nationals.
Yet the institution so preoccupied with preserving democracy has done nothing to cover the Biden bribery scandal. Instead, the media has been obsessing over the deeply flawed Trump indictment and parroting White House talking points that Hunter was “held accountable” this week after he was charged with tax and firearm offenses.
Hunter was not “held accountable.” He received an excessively lenient plea deal for crimes many Americans are thrown behind bars for committing. More importantly, none of the charges have anything to do with the bribery scandal — rather, they appear to be a transparent ploy by the Department of Justice to cosplay as fair actors and distract the American people from the real Biden crimes.
The media could have done their job in 2020 and reported — or at the very least not lied about — the Hunter Biden laptop. Then maybe we wouldn’t have a president who appears to be compromised by foreign nationals and American adversaries. But the media didn’t want to report on it because they didn’t want Biden to lose in 2020.
For the propaganda press, “democracy” no longer means a form of government. It means the suppression of anything that threatens the left’s agenda or their candidates. Just a few examples of what the media considered a “threat to democracy” include Trump, half of the U.S. population, Ron DeSantis, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, lawfully conducted elections, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, poll watchers, Elon Musk, parents at school board meetings, pro-lifers, our bicameral legislature, free speech, and democracy itself.
Supposed “threat to democracy” are used by the left to actively call for the censorship of those who are willingto speak the truth. The legacy press encouraged Big Tech to censor the New York Post when the Hunter Biden laptop scandal broke, and they encouraged Big Tech to censor Joe Rogan’s RFK Jr. podcast.
The media feel justified in launching full-on assaults against the First Amendment because they’re entitled, believing they should be the sole arbiters of truth. In order to maintain a monopoly on information, they call for the annihilation of smaller media outlets or even random social media users who dare challenge their carefully curated narratives — all in the name of protecting “democracy.”
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
That lofty ideal chiseled on the pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court was blown to shreds with the indefensible plea deal for Hunter Biden that allows him to skate on severe criminal charges that would have landed anyone else in America behind bars. The preferential treatment for the president’s son makes a mockery of the law. We knew it was coming. The government’s investigation had stretched for more than five long years. By itself, that was absurd. The evidence against Hunter was clear and convincing.
He evaded taxes on millions of dollars that he pocketed from overseas sources — part of his elaborate influence-peddling schemes that leveraged access to his powerful father. He obviously lied on a gun form and broke the law when he purchased a firearm.
Hunter Biden and his father President Joe Biden. Hunter’s new plea agreement still won’t protect him from investigation by the House of Representatives. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)
But President Joe Biden and his consigliere at the Justice Department, Attorney General Merrick Garland, have rewritten the criminal codes with a special exemption. A Biden can defy the law with impunity. Everyone else must abide.
There is no justifying this demolition of justice. Unequal application of the statutes is now the law of the land. Our legal system is as corrupt as the Bidens. They made it so.
The privileged plea also calls into question the integrity of David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware, who negotiated a slap on the wrist instead of pursuing other, more serious, felony charges. In a public statement he insisted that his investigation into further acts of potential wrongdoing continues. There is reason to be skeptical. His announcement of an ongoing probe smacks of a charade designed to prevent him from answering uncomfortable questions by a congressional committee that is digging deep into Biden family corruption.
Whistleblowers warned that Garland’s DOJ, the FBI, and the IRS were running a protection racket for the Bidens by exerting undue influence and political favoritism to cover up brazen criminality. Tuesday’s plea fortifies their credibility. Hunter Biden’s laptop alone is a treasure trove of incriminating evidence that implicates his father as complicit in secret deals to profit from his public office. The sheer magnitude of the schemes is staggering. Who knew that selling out your country could be so lucrative?
The House Oversight Committee may be the last refuge for anything resembling justice. It cannot prosecute, but it can expose. In the last five months committee members have combed through many of the 170 Suspicious Activity Reports, wire transfers and banking transactions showing that nine members of the Biden family received an astonishing amount of money from America’s adversaries.
Hunter Biden exits at the Independence County Courthouse in Batesville, Arkansas on Monday, May 1, 2023. Biden, who is with attorney Abbe Lowell, was ordered to appear in court regarding the paternity case of his unacknowledged 4-year-old-daughter. (Mega for Fox News Digital)
The payments were disguised through a complex web of shell companies and limited liability corporations that appear to have no legitimate business purpose other than to serve as receptacles for hiding cash, according to Chairman James Comer, R-KY. In Washington, where influence-peddling and graft are endemic, the Bidens have taken them to dizzying heights. It is no coincidence that the money sources came from the very countries over which Joe Biden exerted control in foreign policy decisions as vice president.
What was being bought? More to the point, what were the Bidens selling? In the process, did they sacrifice America’s national security to get rich? Did they conspire with malign foreign actors to betray our nation for self-enrichment?
One answer may be found in the mining of an unclassified FBI document that allegedly depicts a “criminal scheme” involving the Bidens and a top executive at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that was paying millions of dollars to Hunter to sit on its board.
A trusted and “highly credible” confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI reported that the elder Biden accepted $5 million in exchange for “policy decisions” benefiting the company, while Hunter banked another $5 million. The money, according to the CHS, was secreted in a multitude of hidden accounts. This seems to be the same suspected “pay-to-play” scheme reflected in Joe Biden’s famous on-camera brag that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer aid to Ukraine unless the prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired. Within hours, Viktor Shokin was canned, and his investigation vanished overnight. Mission accomplished.
The Ukraine caper is similar to other Biden grifts in roughly a dozen foreign countries where Hunter negotiated “deals” that were dependent on his father, even setting up meetings between the vice president and overseas clients that are documented in his laptop and other records. The younger Biden never registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as the law demands, which makes his transactions illegal. Others who have failed to do so have been criminally prosecuted, but not the president’s son. Hunter’s laptop alone is a treasure trove of incriminating evidence that implicates his father as complicit in secret deals to profit from his public office. The sheer magnitude of the schemes is staggering. Who knew that selling out your country could be so lucrative?
Nor have any charges been leveled under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It is a crime for a public officeholder to confer a benefit to a foreign actor in exchange for personal financial gain. But given the partisan interference by our government institutions for the benefit of the Bidens, don’t expect that charges will ever be brought. The fix is in.
Where the Department of Justice refuses to act, Congress must. It has the backing of the American people who recognize corruption when they see it. A recent Harvard Harris poll found that 63% of voters believe that Hunter Biden engaged in illegal influence peddling, and a majority think Joe Biden was involved.
In an upcoming election where the incumbent president’s DOJ is prosecuting his likely opponent on dubious charges while simultaneously protecting Biden, it is imperative that any evidence of criminality be exposed for all to see. The money trail uncovered so far is a damning indictment of corruption at the highest level of government — the current occupant of the White House.
Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. His upcoming book, “The Trial of the Century,” about the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” will be released on May 30, 2023. It is available now for pre-order online at the Simon & Schuster website. Gregg is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His follow-up book was also a New York Times bestseller, “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History.” Jarrett’s book, “The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents,” will be published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins on September 19, 2023.
Sen. Ron Johnson to Newsmax: Hunter Plea Deal Attempt to Keep Truth From Public
By Brian Freeman | Tuesday, 20 June 2023 02:46 PM EDT
The Hunter Biden plea deal for failing to pay federal income tax and illegally possessing a weapon is highly suspicious and appears to be an attempt to keep the truth from the American public, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Tuesday.
“The timing is more than interesting — just as we find out about a credible source claiming a $5 million to $10 million bribery scheme and [Hunter’s business associate] Devon Archer poised to testify before the House committee,” Johnson told “National Report.”
“Is this the Justice Department’s attempt to try and seal this all up and keep the truth from the American public? This is what I fear.”……………..
To hear President Joe Biden’s supporters tell it, Hunter Biden was finally held accountable Tuesday, and the long national nightmare of him facing any scrutiny at all can finally end.
This accountability for the president’s son, however, was little more than a chiding for offenses that have virtually nothing to do with the serious allegations the Department of Justice should actually be pursuing — like giving a speeding ticket to “the getaway driver after a bank robbery,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley remarked.
Over the past two weeks alone, congressional Republicans have revealed a paid, “highly credible” FBI informant’s report that $10 million was paid in bribes to Hunter and his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, by Ukrainian oligarch and Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.
Zlochevsky called the then-vice president “the big guy,” a nickname also used in the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt China dealings. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed the existence of two audio recordings Zlochevsky reportedly made of Joe Biden (and another 15 he made of Hunter) discussing their dealings, which Zlochevsky reportedly kept as a sort of “insurance policy” that he’d get what he was paying for.
What was he paying for? Emails from the chairman of Burisma (revealed three years ago) show “the ultimate purpose” of “the deliverables” was “to close down for any cases/pursuits against [Burisma’s president] in Ukraine.” That case was indeed closed down, when Vice President Biden pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor pursuing Burisma.
Congressional investigators also revealed that Hunter helped Burisma executives open an account for their transactions at Satabank,……….
President Joe Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice is so desperate to distract from Republicans’ exposé of the Biden family bribery scandal that it finally brought a handful of weak charges against Hunter Biden for his tax and gun crimes.
Under the guise of serving equal justice, the DOJ announced on Tuesday that it would charge the president’s youngest son with two federal misdemeanor counts for failing to pay his taxes and one federal felony charge for possessing a gun while being an illegal drug user and addict.
Hunter’s lawyers are scrambling to declare “the five-year investigation” into their client as “resolved.” Corporate media like NBC News, similarly, claimed the DOJ’s “resolution suggests that prosecutors did not find cause to file charges related to Hunter Biden’s dealings with foreign entities or other wrongdoing.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Just like when it strategically timed its political arrest of a Republican congressman to coincide with a GOP press conference detailing evidence of Biden corruption, the DOJ is working overtime to ensure that Hunter serves as a distraction from the bigger Biden problem.
Since at least 2021 when Politico exposed records and receipts, the public has known that Hunter, who has an extensive and public history of illicit drug use, appeared to lie about this drug use on the Firearms Transaction Record he filled out during a revolver purchase in 2018.
Government officials such as local police, the Secret Service, FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, likely knew about the lie earlier than 2021 since the .38 revolver soon became the center of a missing gun investigation, in which the Secret Service reportedly tried to interfere on behalf of the Biden family.
Similarly, most of the preliminary federal investigation into Hunter’s 2017 and 2018 financial wrongdoings was completed by 2020.
Yet, U.S. Attorney David Weiss delayed bringing charges against Hunter because, as Politico described, “the investigation would become a months-long campaign issue” that would hurt Biden’s presidential chances. It wasn’t until Republicans’ increasingly evidenced probe into the Biden bribery scheme, which the Biden administration continues to hamper, that Weiss finally decided to target the president’s son.
What a breathtaking and damaging act of misdirection. After five years of investigation into a host of criminal acts by Hunter Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) finally brought charges against the president’s wayward son. But while the DOJ hopes the public focuses on words like “charges” and “guilty” to form an image of accountability for all, it’s letting Hunter walk away with the kind of slap on the wrist most defendants can only dream about from inside a prison cell.
In the same breath in which DOJ announced it was filing charges against Hunter Biden, it also stated that the case had already been resolved. Hunter will plead guilty to and serve probation for two tax fraud misdemeanors while a felony firearm possession charge will disappear after he completes pretrial diversion. It’s a resolution that if the defendant’s last name weren’t Biden would sound almost too good to be true.
The feds are notoriously tough on firearms. Nationally, for example, 94.2 percent of federal firearms convictions in 2022 involved some prison time, and the median sentence was 39 months.
Of course, Hunter won’t even have to end up with a conviction. This is an even rarer event. In 2021, fewer than 1 percent of cases filed by U.S. attorneys in federal court resulted in the kind of pretrial diversion offered to Hunter.
It’s that disparity between Hunter’s case and everybody else’s that’s the true problem, not necessarily the sentence itself. After all, the law in question, which prohibits individuals suffering from an illegal drug addiction from possessing a firearm, likely violates the Second Amendment. Plus, diversion programs across the country have improved public safety at lower cost to taxpayers than prison alternatives.
But that’s clearly not how things are shaking out in practice at DOJ, and President Biden has expressed an ongoing willingness to harshly punish firearms offenses. His DOJ is defending this law in court, and he signed a law in 2021 to increase maximum penalties from 10 years to 15 years in prison. Apparently, President Biden does not believe offenders should be treated with kid gloves — at least when it’s not his kid.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Tuesday that investigations into alleged influence-peddling schemes by President Joe Biden and his family will not be deterred after Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, reached a plea deal with the Department of Justice on tax-related charges to avoid jail time on a gun offense.
“This does nothing to our investigation,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday, according to The Hill. “It actually should enhance our investigation because the DOJ should not be able to withhold any information now saying that there’s a pending investigation. They should be able to provide [House Oversight Committee] Chairman [James] Comer with any information that he requires.”
As part of the agreement, Hunter Biden, 53, will plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses and admit to illegally possessing a weapon after his 2018 purchase of a handgun. As part of that admission, he would enter a diversion program, and if he meets the conditions of the program, the gun charge would be removed from his record.
Christopher Clark, Hunter Biden’s attorney, said he considers the case against his client to be resolved, The Hill reported. But the Delaware office of U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, said the investigation is still ongoing.
McCarthy said he hopes that is not a ploy by the DOJ to withhold information and avoid complying with House Republicans.
“How can Hunter Biden plead guilty, no jail time, and the DOJ say there’s still an investigation, try to withhold information to the House?” McCarthy said. “That’s unacceptable and will not stand.”
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer of Kentucky dropped a bombshell subpoena last month demanding the FBI hand over a document alleging a bribery scheme between President Joe Biden and a “foreign national.”
On May 3, the pair of GOP lawmakers requested congressional access to an unclassified FD-1023 form, a document used by the bureau to catalog information from a confidential human source. The FBI record suggests President Biden took a foreign bribe during his time in the Obama administration.
After more than a month-long back-and-forth between agency leadership and Capitol Hill wherein House Republicans even prepared contempt proceedings for FBI Director Christopher Wray, members of Congress were finally able to review the document Thursday. Here’s everything we know about the record in question.
Confidential Human Source Is ‘Highly Credible’
The confidential human source (CHS) behind the FD-1023 is reportedly a “highly credible” informant with an agency tenure stretching back more than a decade. According to Fox News, the whistleblower informant has collaborated “in multiple investigative matters” with the FBI since the Obama administration, with consistent reviews for credibility.
“The confidential human source who provided information about then Vice President Biden being involved in a criminal bribery scheme is a trusted, highly credible informant who has been used by the FBI for over 10 years and has been paid over six figures,” Chairman Comer told reporters last week.
Contrary to MSNBC’s claim that “All roads lead to [Rudy] Giuliani” in the sourcing for the document, individuals familiar with the investigation told The Federalist the FD-1023 document came independent of information provided by the former New York City mayor.
Allegations Date Back to 2017
In addition to researching the cache of incriminating intelligence on the Biden family Giuliani sent to the FBI, agents searched the FBI’s databases and discovered a related FD-1023 from 2017. That prompted agents to re-interview the CHS and uncover details about the Burisma bribery scandal, resulting in the FD-1023 dated June 30, 2020.
Bidens Allegedly Took $10 Million From Burisma Executive
Grassley spoke in a Monday floor speech about the “foreign national” who allegedly bribed the Biden family, and who has since been identified by people familiar with the matter as Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma. The Ukrainian energy firm showered Hunter Biden in excess compensation on its corporate board while his father served as the “public face” of White House policy towards Ukraine.
The CHS summarized earlier meetings with Zlochevsky in the FD-1023, claiming the Bidens “coerced” the foreign businessman to pay the multimillion-dollar bribes. Zlochevsky had been trying to shut down government investigations into his Ukrainian energy firm. The energy tycoon allegedly paid $5 million to then-Vice President Joe Biden, referred to as the “Big Guy” by Zlochevsky in the FD-1023, and $5 million to Hunter.
According to a report from Grassley and Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in September 2020, Zlochevsky had separately paid a $7 million bribe to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to shut down another probe.
In 2018, Biden bragged about his lead role in the termination of Ukraine’s top prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
Grassley: There Are Tapes
While the DOJ appeared to try to drown out coverage of the Biden bribery scheme with the unprecedented indictment of former President Donald Trump, Grassley reinjected the White House scandal into the news by disclosing the existence of audio recordings on Monday.
“According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses 15 audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden,” Grassley said. Another two recordings are reportedly calls between Zlochevsky and then-Vice President Biden, for 17 recordings in “total.”
Grassley said Zlochevsky kept the tapes “as a sort of insurance policy,” and noted that the form also suggested “then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden.”
House Republicans who reviewed the document also say Hunter Biden pressed Burisma to purchase an American oil company. In 2016, the Ukrainian firm ultimately took over a Canadian firm’s shares to buy into a joint venture with the American company Cub Energy.
AG Barr Referred Investigation To Delaware
Shortly after FBI Director Wray allowed members of the House Oversight Committee access to the FD-1023, Democrat Ranking Member Jamie Raskin sought to dismiss Republican allegations of corruption with a statement. An investigation into Biden bribery, Raskin said, had previously been shut down under Attorney General Bill Barr during the Trump administration.
“In August 2020, Attorney General Barr and his hand-picked U.S. Attorney signed off on closing the assessment,” Raskin said.
In an exclusive interview with The Federalist, however, the former attorney general debunked Raskin’s assertion.
“On the contrary,” Barr said, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
The Bidens allegedly “coerced” a foreign national to pay them $10 million in bribes, according to individuals familiar with the investigation into the FBI’s handling of the FD-1023 confidential human source report. What, if anything, agents did to investigate these explosive claims remains unknown, however, with sources telling The Federalist the FBI continues to stonewall.
On Monday, Sen. Chuck Grassley revealed a foreign national — identified by individuals with knowledge of the matter as Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky — allegedly possessed 17 recordings implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal. While 15 of the audio recordings consisted of phone calls between Zlochevsky and Hunter Biden, two were of calls the Ukrainian had with then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to the FD-1023.
The Federalist has now learned the FD-1023 reported the CHS saying the Bidens “coerced” Zlochevsky to pay the bribes. Sources familiar with the investigation also explained the context of Zlochevsky’s statements, and that context further bolsters the CHS’s reporting.
In the FD-1023 from June 30, 2020, the confidential human source summarized earlier meetings he had with Zlochevsky. According to the CHS, in the 2015-2016 timeframe, the CHS, who was providing advice to Zlochevsky, told the Burisma owner to stay away from the Bidens. Then, after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential contest, the CHS asked Zlochevsky if he was upset Trump won.
Zlochevsky allegedly told the CHS he was dismayed by Trump’s victory, fearing an investigation would reveal his payments to the Biden family, which included a $5 million payment to Hunter Biden and a $5 million payment to Joe Biden. According to the CHS, the Burisma executive bemoaned the situation, claiming the Bidens had “coerced” him into paying the bribes.
The CHS responded that he hoped Zlochevsky had taken precautions to protect himself. Zlochevsky then allegedly detailed the steps he had taken to avoid detection, stressing he had never paid the “Big Guy” directly and that it would take some 10 years to unravel the various money trails. It was only then that Zlochevsky mentioned the audio recordings he had made of the conversations he had with Hunter and Joe Biden, according to the CHS.
The broader context of this conversation adds to the plausibility of Zlochevsky’s claims that he possessed recordings implicating the Bidens. And we already know from Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer that the FBI considered the CHS, who relayed Zlochevsky’s claims to the FBI, a “highly credible” source.
Further, according to individuals familiar with the investigation, the FBI admitted the CHS’s intel was unrelated to the information Rudy Giuliani had provided the Western District of Pennsylvania’s U.S. attorney’s office — the office then-Attorney General William Barr had tasked with reviewing any new information related to Ukraine.
Sources told The Federalist that investigators out of the Pittsburgh office, in addition to reviewing Giuliani’s information, searched internal FBI databases and came across an earlier FD-1023 related to the CHS. That earlier FD-1023 then led to agents questioning the CHS on June 30, 2020, uncovering the details concerning Burisma’s alleged bribery of the Bidens.
What the FBI did to investigate the allegations is unknown, with sources telling The Federalist the bureau refused to either confirm or deny that the DOJ under Barr sent the FD-1023 to Delaware for further investigation. On the contrary, the FBI allowed Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, to falsely represent to Americans that Barr and Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady had closed the investigation. Raskin’s deceit, tolerated by the FBI, forced Barr to publicly correct the record.
The FBI is also refusing to provide any information on what, if any, steps it took to investigate the detailed claims contained in the FD-1023. But sources familiar with investigative procedures maintain there was insufficient time between the June 30, 2020, interview of the CHS and the FBI headquarters’ closing of an assessment related to the FD-1023 in August 2020 to properly probe the matter. “They couldn’t have done much,” one source said.
There is also no independent confirmation from Delaware indicating any investigative steps were taken regarding the FD-1023. Agents in Delaware “could have sat on it,” according to one individual familiar with the investigation.
While the FBI’s efforts to unwind the pay-to-play scheme seem to have been nonexistent, banking records released in May by the House Oversight Committee show congressional investigators are unraveling the complex web behind the Biden family business. Those records provide concrete evidence of a pattern of public corruption involving foreign nationals, with Joe Biden at the helm. There are still more banking records to review, along with the many details recently discovered when the whistleblower came forward with the FD-1023.
Apparently, Zlochevsky wasn’t far from the mark when he said it would take 10 years to unravel the complex payment path that led to Joe Biden.
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.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, made a stunning claim Monday that a Burisma executive who allegedly paid $5 million in a Biden bribery scheme maintained audio recordings of calls with the family as an “insurance policy.” On “Fox & Friends First” Tuesday, former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker discussed the “explosive” developments days after the FBI turned over a document to Congress that allegedly detailed a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden.
MATT WHITAKER:This is explosive. There’s so many issues surrounding this, but remember what my home state senator, Chuck Grassley, said. This was redacted from the document they looked at, the 1023 that Chris Wray finally provided to the House and the Senate. This information, that there were recordings of the president of United States talking to a foreign national about bribes, was redacted from that 1023. That’s extraordinary in and of itself. Now, the contents, if true, I mean, obviously this is a cataclysmic event because you just don’t have these types of recordings usually available. And… it will prove essentially what Joe Biden knew and what his scheme was to abuse his power as vice president.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IO). (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Monday that the Burisma executive who allegedly paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden kept 17 audio recordings of his conversations with them, citing the FBI FD-1023 form that the bureau briefed congressional lawmakers on.
Grassley revealed from the Senate floor Monday what was said to be a redacted reference in the FBI-generated FD-1023 form alleging a criminal bribery scheme between then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national that involved influence over U.S. policy decisions.
Fox News Digital exclusively reported on the contents of the form last week. The FD-1023 form, dated June 30, 2020, is the FBI’s interview with a “highly credible” confidential source who detailed multiple meetings and conversations he or she had with a top Burisma executive over the course of several years, starting in 2015. Fox News Digital has not seen the form, which is redacted, but it was described by several sources who are aware of its contents.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
Photo by Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that a Ukrainian energy company executive involved in the alleged Biden bribery scheme had secret audio recordings of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. Grassley, who is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday that the Burisma executive had a total of 17 secret recordings, and two of them are with Joe Biden, who was vice president under former President Barack Obama at the time. The other 15 recordings were of conversations with Hunter Biden.
Grassley made the claims in a speech on the floor of the Senate.
Republicans have been trying to build a case to prove that the Biden family has sold political favors as part of a criminal corruption scheme. He also said that the Burisma executive made the recordings as a kind of “insurance policy” in case the official got into a “tight spot.”
Grassley highlighted the apparent double standard between treatment of the Biden family by the Justice Department and that of former President Donald Trump.
“Based on the facts known to the Congress and the public, it’s clear that the Justice Department, the FBI, haven’t nearly had the same laser-focus on the Biden family,” said Grassley on the Senate floor.
“Special counsel Jack Smith has used a recording against former President Trump,” he added. “Well, what is U.S. Attorney Weiss doing with respect to these alleged Joe and Hunter Biden recordings that are apparently relevant to the high stakes bribery scheme?”
Trump has been indicted for charges related to his withholding of documents at Mar-a-Lago from his time as president.
Here’s more on the Biden corruption allegations:
James Comer: The Biden family had 20 shell companies www.youtube.com
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After a confidential human source claimed then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions, FBI agents used what’s called an FD-1023 form to record the allegation. Now FBI Director Christopher Wray is defying a May 3 congressional subpoena to provide this form. On Tuesday, in response to Wray’s refusal to hand over the documents, Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer announced the House will move to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress.
It isn’t that announcement — or even the other explosive ones released over the past year by Comer’s Senate colleague, Chuck Grassley — that prove the most telling, however. Rather, it is the combination of all the details, big and small, that suggests the scandal set to unfold over the coming weeks will be bigger than anyone imagined.
The Dirt Is in the Details
Take recent big news from whistleblower disclosures revealing that the Justice Department and the FBI have the unclassified FD-1023 form spelling out Biden’s alleged criminal behavior. Then combine that with other known information to discover the bigger picture.
For instance, in response to Wray’s failure to comply with the subpoena, Grassley, who had previously noted the FD-1023 form was five or six pages long, indicated that the confidential human source (CHS) was “an apparent trusted FBI source.” This is huge because Grassley wouldn’t make that claim unless the whistleblower had. That means the source is not some random guy walking in off the street, but rather an existing “trusted” CHS, which is why the FBI used the FD-1023 form.
In response to Wray’s stonewalling, Comer likewise revealed some significant details, clarifying late last week that the CHS reporting document was dated June 30, 2020, and referenced“the amount of money the foreign national allegedly paid to receive the desired policy outcome” as “five million.” These details could only have come from a whistleblower with deep knowledge of the investigation, meaning the whistleblower’s characterization of the CHS as “trusted” carries more weight. Likewise, the whistleblower’s claim that the FD-1023 “includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose,” is more credible given the whistleblower’s knowledge of other details.
Comer’s reference to “five million” is also intriguing. In a letter to Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley had previously revealed a promise by a Chinese communist government-connected enterprise to funnel $5 million to “Hunter and James Biden to compensate them for work done while Joe Biden was vice president.” Records released by Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., also confirmed a $5 million payment to James and Hunter Biden from another Chinese-connected business.
The date of the FD-1023 form, June 30, 2020, also proves significant when read in conjunction with Grassley’s letter to Wray in July 2022. In that letter, Grassley said the whistleblower had claimed that “the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” but “that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters (‘FBI HQ’) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
The whistleblower further alleged that in September 2020, the FBI HQ team that handled the Auten assessment, after concluding the reporting was disinformation, placed the information in a restricted access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s information could access.
Several points merit mention here: First, Auten is the same agent responsible for some of the shenanigans in Crossfire Hurricane. Second, Grassley’s letter indicates Auten did not open the “assessment” on Hunter Biden or other members of the Biden family. The senator’s correspondence actually suggests the assessment may have been opened on the CHS.
Here’s the relevant language:
The basis for how the FBI HQ team selected the specific information for inclusion in Auten’s assessment is unknown, but in more than one instance the focus of the FBI HQ team’s attention involved derogatory information about Hunter Biden.
The whistleblower also reportedly told Grassley that FBI HQ later closed sources after branding their info as disinformation. Given the timing of the assessment (August 2020) and the date of the CHS report (June 2020), it seems likely the FBI used the CHS report as part of the “assessment” and that the “assessment” was of the CHS.
This leads to the next significant point: According to the whistleblower, Auten’s assessment led to the “improper discrediting” of the verified and verifiable derogatory information about Hunter Biden. Worse, based on several hints dropped by Grassley over the last year, FBI headquarters conducted little to no investigation on the CHS and other derogatory info before labeling it “disinformation.”
The timing of the CHS report in June 2020 also proves conveniently coincidental to the decision by Democrat Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Rep. Adam Schiff to send a letter just two weeks later, on July 13, 2020, to the FBI claiming Congress was being subjected to a foreign disinformation campaign. On July 16, 2020, the then-ranking members of two congressional committees asked the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — the same one that handled the “assessment” that branded the Hunter Biden intel as disinformation — to give the committees a defensive briefing. News of that “Russian disinformation” briefing soon leaked to the press.
What About a Recording?
Grassley’s correspondence and statements over the last year hint at one more possibility: The FBI had at least one recording that implicated members of the Biden family in a criminal enterprise and buried that evidence. Specifically, in one letter to the bureau, Grassley said other FBI records “shed light on Hunter Biden’s business and financial relationship with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky,” and those “documents include specific details about conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden.” Grassley had previously requested interview summary forms that referenced Zlochevsky, and in seeking FBI records, the senator’s letter made clear that “records” included “recorded or graphic material,” including “recordings of verbal communications.” This possibility fits with the whistleblower’s description of “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” that FBI HQ shut down in October 2020 “in furtherance of Mr. Auten’s assessment,” even though, according to the whistleblower, the intel could have been verified by use of search warrants.
A follow-up question Grassley asked Wray further suggests the possibility of recorded conversations implicating the Bidens: “Does the Justice Department have a specific policy regarding the use of materials and information related to U.S. citizens who reside in the United States provided by foreign governments, including the fruits of surveillance carried out by a foreign state’s intelligence service?”
Whether these possibilities pan out remains to be seen, but what should be clear to all now is that the whistleblower knows where the evidence is buried — and Grassley and Comer have brought their shovels.
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.
IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley will appear before the House Ways and Means Committee later Friday morning to submit to questioning from both Democrats and Republicans.
Missing, however, will be any members of the Senate Finance Committee, which refused to conduct a joint interview with the House oversight committee. While Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, held the power to authorize Senate representatives to attend the transcribed interview of the whistleblower.
Smith inexplicablyignored Shapley’s statement that he “would welcome” the participation of designated Senate staffers in the House hearing. Thus, the House hearing will proceed, but not on a bicameral basis.
According to a person familiar with the proceedings, the House Ways and Means Committee will convene at 9:30 a.m., with Shapley appearing for questioning with his two lawyers, Mark Lytle from Nixon Peabody and Tristan Leavitt of Empower Oversight. The closed-door questioning is expected to last all day.
While the Ways and Means Committee will question Shapley in a closed session, the public can guess the content of much of his testimony given the high-profile nature of the case against Hunter Biden. In fact, neither Shapley nor his attorneys have ever publicly confirmed that Hunter Biden is the target of the Internal Revenue Service investigation, yet it is uniformly agreed that the whistleblower’s testimony concerns the handling of the tax probe into the president’s son.
Shapley, a 14-year veteran at the IRS, provided some insight into his likely testimony when he sat for an exclusive interview with CBS News on Wednesday. During that interview, Shapley explained that he was first assigned to the investigation in January 2020. “When I took control of this particular investigation, I immediately saw deviations from the normal process,” Shapley told CBS News. “It was way outside the norm of what I’ve experienced in the past,” the whistleblower stressed.
Shapley further claimed during the interview that “there were multiple steps that were slow-walked — were just completely not done — at the direction of the Department of Justice.” That statement coincides with the information contained in an earlier letter sent by the whistleblower’s lawyers to the oversight committees. That letter maintained that the whistleblower has detailed “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
“People directly familiar with the case” provided more particulars to Shapley’s claims, asserting that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” The unnamed sources also stressed that the improper politicization of the case came from the Justice Department and FBI headquarters.
When read together, these details raise a huge red flag because they mean the interference from the DOJ and FBI headquarters began under the Trump administration. So, who in the Trump administration was responsible for slow-walking the Hunter Biden investigation? What investigative steps were not taken?
In a letter from Shapley’s legal team to the congressional oversight committees, he spoke of irregularities beginning in the summer of 2020 in both the DOJ Tax Division and an unnamed U.S. attorney’s office, which CNN would later report is the office of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden since 2018.
Another detail from Shapley’s CBS News interview that foreshadows the content of his Friday testimony concerns his explanation of the “red line” meeting that convinced the IRS supervisory special agent his oath of office required him to come forward. According to Shapley, while he had been noticing deviations in the investigative process for a couple of years, he just couldn’t “fathom that DOJ might be acting unethically.” Then came an October 2022 meeting he had with federal prosecutors, after which Shapley told CBS News, “It just got to that point where that switch was turned on, and I just couldn’t silence my conscience anymore.”
While the CBS News interview did not air further details about the meeting, a letter from Shapley’s legal team described a “charged meetings on October 7, 2022,” during which the U.S. attorney — reportedly Weiss — “became aware that both the IRS and the FBI had longstanding concerns about the handling of the case” and that those concerns had been communicated up the chain of command. Then, after an Oct. 17, 2022, meeting at which Shapley continued to raise concerns, he and his investigative team were excluded from future meetings on the case.
Shapley seems poised to name names on Friday, and his attorney has told Just the News that “he’ll be able to talk about these meetings that he attended, that were with both agents and prosecutors.” Shapley summarized those meetings and distributed his notes to the IRS and other agents, his lawyer explained, and along with his emails, these documents will corroborate his story.
The whistleblower can also identify other IRS agents who participated in the meetings and can confirm his testimony. The DOJ’s decision earlier this month to remove Shapley’s entire investigative team from the Hunter Biden investigation may backfire, serving as a catalyst to loosen the other agents’ lips.
But in the meantime, it will be Shapley doing the talking. And while Americans won’t know at once what the IRS supervisory special agent has to say, the House Ways and Means Committee has the authority to submit the information obtained from Sharpley to both the Senate and the House of Representatives, thereby making the testimony public.
Democrats used that statutory carveout to release Trump’s tax information publicly, and Republicans should follow their lead — and soon.
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 spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., falsely claimed the Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower had “backed out” of an agreement to meet with the Senate Finance Committee next week, the whistleblower’s attorneys told The Federalist.
“It’s disappointing Senator Wyden’s staff is playing partisan games by releasing inaccurate information,” said the legal team representing the whistleblower, who was identified as Gary Shapley during a CBS interview Wednesday. “As emails show, our client didn’t ‘back out’ of anything because there was never anything to back out of.”
On Wednesday, CNN reported the Senate Finance Committee’s claims, quoting Wyden’s spokesman, Ryan Carey, saying, “Committee staff on both sides agreed with counsel to meet directly with the whistleblower next week, however the whistleblower has since backed out of that agreement and declined an attempt to reschedule.” Carey added that “Chairman Wyden’s staff stand ready to arrange a meeting on terms that comply with laws protecting taxpayer data and ensure a fair and rigorous investigation.”
CNN later updated the article to include a detailed denial of the staffer’s claim by Shapley’s legal team.
Emails obtained by The Federalist between Shapley’s lawyers and Wyden’s staff confirm the whistleblower’s version of events.
On Friday, May 19, 2023, Mark Lytle, Shapley’s Nixon Peabody lawyer, arranged for a conference call between the whistleblower’s legal team and Wyden’s office to discuss logistics for their client to sit for a transcribed deposition. The next email in the thread came from a Wyden staffer the day after Lytle and his co-counsel Tristan Leavitt, the president of Empower Oversight, had dispatched their May 22 letter to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Finance Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, as well as Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office.
In their May 22 letter, the whistleblower’s legal team summarized their version of what had transpired. They also noted that they had informed the Senate Finance Committee’s staff that Shapley would testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, May 26, and reiterated their preference for a single joint interview or, at minimum, an interview the previous day, May 25.
“Unfortunately, the Finance Committee would not commit to a date consecutive to the House interview as an accommodation to our client’s concerns, as the staff had previously offered,” the letter stressed. Wyden’s staffers also refused to commit to an interview the Tuesday after the long Memorial Day weekend. The Senate Finance Committee’s political game-playing prompted the whistleblower’s attorneys to move forward with the House interview.
It was only then that Wyden’s office attempted to commit to an interview with the whistleblower before the Senate Finance Committee. In doing so, the staffer sent an email that both ignored Shapley’s letter and misrepresented the prior communications, the whistleblower’s legal team confirmed. The email communications back up those claims, with the whistleblower’s legal team writing that during their Friday call, Wyden’s office “would not commit to *either* Thursday or the following Tuesday after the holiday.”
“We asked you to reconsider Thursday and you offered to check on logistics for Tuesday, expressing doubt that you could get a court reporter,” the email continued. “We did not hear from you over the weekend or Monday, and thus sent the letter articulating our position and the reasons for it.”
In response, Wyden’s staffer did not dispute that sequence of events, but instead wrote that since Tuesday was represented as a “‘distant third’ option, it was an option”: “In line with that agreement, Tuesday the 30th is the date the Committee is available to meet. Please let us know how you’d like to proceed by the end of the day.”
That final email confirms there was no agreement between the Senate Finance Committee and the whistleblower, as Wyden’s spokesman had told CNN, but only continued efforts to reach an agreement.
The Federalist requested clarification from Daniel Goshorn, the Wyden staffer on the email exchanges, asking whether the senator’s spokesman had misspoken when he said there was an “agreement” for Shapley to testify. The Federalist also asked whether Wyden’s office on Friday had been unwilling to commit to either a Thursday or a Tuesday interview. Finally, The Federalist queried Wyden’s office on why they won’t agree to a joint interview.
Goshorn did not respond with a comment by press time.
However, no matter the reason Wyden and the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee have for refusing to conduct a joint interview with the House, that may be their only option at this point. The whistleblower is poised to appear on Friday before the Ways and Means Committee and indicated an unwillingness to testify again later before the Senate.
Rep. Jason Smith, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, shouldn’t leave the decision up to Wyden, though, because the Senate Democrat has proven himself to be putting politics above the public interest. Smith should sidestep the political posturing and, as I explained on Tuesday, use Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code to open the House Ways and Means’ interview of the whistleblower to the relevant Democrat and Republican members from both the House and Senate.
If Smith refuses to do so, that will be as inexplicable as Wyden refusing to participate in a joint hearing — leaving one to wonder if the House Republican is playing politics as well.
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.
The Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee is playing politics with the Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower, a letter sent Monday to the heads of the congressional oversight committees charges. But besides outing the partisan gamesmanship of the Senate committee, the whistleblower’s attorneys signal a solution to House Republicans: Use Section 6103(f)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code to sidestep Senate Democrats’ efforts to thwart the IRS whistleblower.
According to Monday’s letter, obtained by The Federalist, while attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) supervisory special agent have been working diligently for the last month to arrange for their client to testify on a bipartisan, bicameral basis to the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, “the Senate Finance Committee leadership has been unwilling to even consider a joint interview.” Nonetheless, the whistleblower remained committed to working with the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee since it had indicated a willingness to coordinate scheduling to allow the whistleblower to testify on two consecutive days.
But then, after scheduling their client’s private testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee for Friday, May 26, the Senate Finance Committee refused to commit to interviewing the whistleblower the prior day to allow the questioning to take place on two consecutive days. Thus, on Monday, the whistleblower’s attorneys declared, in essence, enough is enough, in their dispatch to the Senate and House: “Our client intends to appear on Friday, May 26th for the scheduled testimony agreed to by the House Ways and Means Committee,” the letter declared, then stressing that the whistleblower is unlikely to agree to testify separately before the Senate on another date.
Significantly, the letter from the IRS supervisory special agent’s attorneys added that their “client would welcome appropriately designated Senate staff to join and participate” in the House hearing. This invitation is huge because Section 6103(f)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code authorizes the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee to “designate or appoint” an agent to receive confidential tax information.
Because Republicans control the House Ways and Means Committee, its chair, Jason Smith, could designate Senate staffers to “join and participate” in the whistleblower’s House-transcribed interview. If Smith is wise, he will take the hint and designate as agents under Section 6103(f)(4) multiple Senate staffers for both Democrat and Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee.
This would allow the whistleblower to achieve what he wanted: to be questioned on a bipartisan and bicameral basis. Additionally, by designating multiple Senate staffers, not merely staffers for the chair and ranking member, the House Ways and Means Committee can ensure Sen. Chuck Grassley’s top investigator participates in the transcribed interview — something Democrat Ron Wyden, the Senate Finance Committee chair, was blocking.
As the Washington Examiner reported Monday, the IRS whistleblower had included Grassley in his various correspondence to the committees because the Iowa senator is co-chair of the Whistleblower Protection Caucus and is “more trusted than any other public official by whistleblowers.” Grassley and his investigators are also “subject matter experts on both whistleblower protections and the Biden family business controversies,” as well as “very familiar with the specific statutes protecting sensitive tax information.”
Yet Wyden, who also serves as a co-chair with Grassley on the Whistleblower Protection Caucus, has refused to allow Grassley to participate in the Senate’s probe of the whistleblower’s claims.
But now, unless the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee quickly reverses course and agrees to a joint — or, at minimum, consecutive — interview of the whistleblower, it won’t be Wyden deciding anything. It will be the Republican House Ways and Means chair.
Whether the whistleblower’s Monday letter jolts Wyden and his fellow Democrats into action remains to be seen. Either way, Smith should designate Senate staffers, including Grassley’s lead investigator, as agents for the House Ways and Means Committee to ensure the fullest exposure possible for the IRS whistleblower’s testimony.
That move might also teach Democrats not to play political games with whistleblowers who go to great lengths to ensure bipartisanship — as was done in mid-April when the IRS whistleblower’s attorneys first reached out to both Republican and Democrat leaders with their client’s offer to provide testimony of detailed “examples of preferential treatment” “improperly infecting decisions and protocols” applied during the investigation of a “high-profile,” “politically connected” individual. Unnamed sources later identified the IRS target as Hunter Biden and claimed that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.”
The whistleblower’s bipartisan pledge was then put into action when his attorneys, Tristan Leavitt of Empower Oversight and Mark Lytle of Nixon Peabody, LLP, worked with both the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee and the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee to be designated the respective committee’s agents with authority to inspect Hunter Biden’s tax returns and related information under Section 6103(f)(4).
After learning the extent of their client’s evidence concerning the alleged misconduct involved in the Hunter Biden investigation, Leavitt and Peabody on May 5, 2023, provided separate “proffers” to both the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees. In those proffers, the attorneys summarized the substance of their client’s disclosures, paving the way for the client to testify before both committees.
But while the whistleblower remains committed to bipartisanship, Monday’s letter to the committees’ chairs and ranking members, as well as the heads of the Judiciary Committees and Grassley, exposed the delays and other disconcerting tactics undertaken by the Democrat-led Senate Finance Committee. And while the whistleblower lacks the power to force the Senate Democrats to play fair, as his attorneys highlighted in their letter, Chairman Smith of the House Ways and Means Committee is not so constrained.
Let’s hope Smith takes the hint.
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.
The same FBI field office covering the Hunter Biden investigation lost Russian Igor Danchenko “in plain sight,” John Durham’s special counsel report revealed. Yet when Danchenko’s FBI handler pulled details of that prior espionage investigation mere days after Danchenko was opened as a confidential human source (CHS), the agent failed to document Danchenko’s suspicious history or alert the Crossfire Hurricane team to the fact that Danchenko could be a Russian spy. These facts and more add to the already outrageous details disclosed during Durham’s failed prosecution of Danchenko — such as that the FBI paid Danchenko hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fraud he helped perpetrate on the country.
While Durham failed to convict Danchenko of lying to the FBI, the October 2022 trial of the man who served as Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source exposed extensive malfeasance by both the Crossfire Hurricane team and later Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff. Among other things, the evidence and court filings revealed that agents opened Danchenko as a CHS even though the FBI had previously launched an espionage investigation into the Russian. However, the special counsel’s report added more details, greatly expanding the scandal.
For instance, after noting the previously reported fact that Danchenko had been the subject of an FBI counterespionage investigation from 2009 to 2011, Durham detailed the basis for the launch of that probe. As Durham explained, a researcher from the Brookings Institution — the D.C. think tank at which Danchenko worked at the time — informed a government contact that Danchenko had commented he “had access to people who would be willing to pay money for classified information.”
The FBI later interviewed the Brookings Institution researcher who repeated Danchenko’s apparent espionage outreach. Durham also revealed that a second Brookings employee stated he had harbored suspicions that Danchenko was connected to Russian intelligence because, notwithstanding the fact that Danchenko held multiple advanced degrees, he stayed at Brookings in a low-level research assistance position.
“The implicit assumption,” Durham concluded, was “that Brookings unwittingly provided Danchenko access to information of high value to the Russians.”
The information provided by the Brookings employees led the FBI’s Baltimore field office to launch a preliminary espionage investigation into Danchenko, with agents later converting the probe into a full investigation. While Durham did not stress the point here, the FBI’s decision to originally launch only a preliminary investigation against Danchenko furthers the special counsel’s conclusion that the immediate opening of a full investigation into the Trump campaign was unjustified and contrary to how the FBI handled other investigations.
The special counsel did, however, highlight several more aspects of the initial investigation into Danchenko, such as that agents interviewed several people at Georgetown University who knew Danchenko. One individual questioned by the FBI explained she had recently interned at an intelligence agency and that afterward, Danchenko quizzed her on her “knowledge of a specific Russian military matter.” The former intelligence agency intern also revealed that Danchenko claimed his Russian passport listed him as GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence service.
These additional details make the decision by the Crossfire Hurricane team to hire Danchenko as a CHS even more troubling.
Durham’s report also found disquieting what Danchenko’s handler, FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson, told investigators. According to Durham, the special counsel’s office determined that Helson became aware of the investigation into Danchenko shortly after he opened Danchenko as a source. Yet Helson failed to update the CHS paperwork. Here, Durham noted that data showed Helson had conducted a “Sentinel” search, querying the counterespionage case file on Danchenko. But when confronted with that fact in an interview by the special counsel’s team, Helson claimed he had no recollection as to why he had searched Danchenko’s case file.
Durham dinged Helson on several other facts related to Danchenko, suggesting the special counsel didn’t believe Helson’s version of events. But either way, Durham explained, “Helson and the Counterintelligence Division missed another opportunity to make any needed course corrections to Crossfire Hurricane and the use of Danchenko as a CHS.”
Besides his scathing summary of the FBI’s use of Danchenko as a CHS, Durham also revealed several new aspects of the initial botched investigation of Danchenko that was headed out of the FBI’s Baltimore field office. While Durham had revealed during Danchenko’s trial that the FBI had mistakenly closed out its investigation against Danchenko, wrongly believing he had left the country, Monday’s report showed how bush league that mistake was: All it took was for the special counsel’s office to review the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Person Encounter List for Igor Danchenko to determine he had not departed the U.S. on a one-way ticket to London, as the Baltimore field office believed.
But that was not the only mistake. According to Durham, in 2012, after the FBI had closed out the investigation into Danchenko, another FBI agent informed the Baltimore field office that Danchenko may not have left the United States as had been believed. Yet the investigation into Danchenko was never reopened. And when interviewed by Durham, the Baltimore field office agent admitted that “certainly a lot more investigation” of Danchenko should have occurred.
Given that the FBI’s Baltimore field office covers the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office — the office conducting the investigation into Hunter Biden — one can’t help but wonder what investigative steps were botched by agents in that case.
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.
If Republicans had a spine or a brain — only one is required for this task — they would relentlessly pursue President Joe Biden for his long-standing cash-for-influence scheme, both during and beyond the 2024 presidential election.
During a May 10 press conference, the House Oversight Committee confirmed that since at least 2009, Joe Biden and his family received a minimum of $10 million from foreign entities. As The Federalist reported, this money entered the Bidens’ coffers through a complicated scheme of layered transactions deposited into multiple bank accounts.
Biden could make this entire story go away if he had a good reason for why his family received $10 million from foreign entities. Surely, if they weren’t corrupt, if this money came from non-sketchy and actually legitimate means, he could explain where this money came from and what services or goods his family exchanged to attain it. But this isn’t the case, as we continue to learn, so he cannot explain away the money.
Why did the Bidens receive this comically large sum of money? Well, no one really knows. But it probably has something to do with the fact that their last names are “Biden” and their family patriarch, the incumbent president, is one of the longest-serving federal officials in American history and has been able to avoid any meaningful public scrutiny for much of his career. As such, it increasingly appears the Bidens used their family’s political and corporate connections to engage in an elaborate foreign influence peddling scheme.
But as was the case with Hunter Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where he was handsomely paid despite having zero energy sector experience, the corporate media continues to downplay the first family’s blatantly corrupt business dealings. “House Republicans ramp up claims Biden family received money from foreign contacts,” reads one headline from NPR. “Comer releases Biden family probe update without showing link to president,” declares one from Politico. CNN whitewashed the Biden family’s corruption by writing, “The latest report does not show any payments made directly to Joe Biden, either as vice president or after leaving office.”
And regardless of whether or not “the big guy” who benefited from the foreign business ventures of Biden family members is the current president, there remain glaring ethical and political issues about influence peddling — which House Republicans are continuing to pursue as they prepare to introduce legislation banning influence peddling — and a slew of potential legal issues arising from tax negligence.
Considering the federal government, for at least the short and medium terms, simply will not touch the Biden family, this rules out most legitimate risks of prosecution they might face, even if House Republicans federally criminalize influence peddling. This means that, realistically, the only way to hold them accountable is through utilizing political mechanisms. As such, the GOP should make the Bidens’ foreign benefactors central to their 2024 campaign messaging.
It’s obvious to everyone with functioning eyes and ears that Joe Biden is neurologically compromised, and it’s obvious to everyone paying attention that he and his family are financially compromised, as well.
Until there is a prosecutorial path forward, the GOP must proceed with political means and fill the airwaves in 2024 battleground states with messages amplifying how Joe Biden and his family sold out the country to enrich themselves.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.
Corrupt corporate media outlets love scandal but when it comes to questions about whether President Joe Biden sold out the U.S. to enrich his family, they deliberately turn a blind eye.
There are plenty of questions ripe for the asking about the Biden family’s dealings with people tied to some of the nation’s biggest foreign adversaries. Republicans have spent months searching for answers, but every piece of evidence of corruption they uncover simply raises more questions. Meanwhile, press outlets that usually busy themselves with aiding Democrat investigations of this nature either deny the evidence or remain silent altogether.
Here are nine questions the corporate media should ask POTUS about his latest scandal but likely won’t.
1. What Exactly Is the Biden Family Business?
Perhaps the biggest question the American people deserve to know an answer to is: What exactly does the Biden family do to warrant massive payments from foreign nationals? Outside of spending decades influencing U.S. domestic and foreign policy, nobody seems to know.
“We know what [Trump’s] businesses were. I’m not saying whether I agreed with what he did or not but I actually know what these businesses are. What are the Biden businesses?” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer asked during a press conference this week.
2. Why Did Your Unqualified Grandchild Get Paid?
Joe Biden’s son Hunter receiving checks from foreign energy moguls makes some sense if you overlook his suspect rise to fame in the international energy sector. Why at least one of Biden’s grandkids, some nieces or nephews, and even an ex-daughter-in-law are all on the receiving end of funds from foreign nationals is unexplainable.
Despite having no formal experience or education that would qualify them to receive payments from foreign energy companies or “legal fees,” bank records show that at least nine people, between Biden family members and their lovers, spent decades getting rich on at least $10 million from people associated with some of the United States’ biggest foreign adversaries.
3. How Many More Bidens Received Money from Foreign Nationals?
If Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle profited off of deals she claimed to have “my head buried in the sand” about, it’s more than fair to ask the president just how many more members of the Biden circle benefitted from these international deals.
4. Why Dilute Payments from Foreign Nationals?
Payments to the Bidens were diced up and transferred to a spread of Biden associates before hitting the family’s bank accounts. These transactions often occurred within weeks of significant political action by the then-vice president in the country of the transactions’ origins.
“It’s very hard to come up with any legitimate business reason to conduct transactions in this type of complex way,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong noted during a recent Oversight Committee presser. “Why would separate payments go to Hunter Biden’s business and to himself individually? Why would Walker transfer money from his business account to his personal account before distributing the money? Why are other Biden family members receiving any of these payments?”
These are fair questions, based not on speculation but on the pure facts outlined in the Biden family bank records. If the Bidens’ multimillion-dollar “business” is legitimate, the president shouldn’t have a problem answering basic questions about the complexity of transactions from Chinese, Romanian, and other companies.
5. How Many More Biden Bank Accounts and Shell Companies Are There?
Republican investigators say they’ve looked into four of at least 12 apparently Biden-linked bank accounts and have discovered “a web” of more than 20 companies that were “formed during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.” The question of how many more are out there has yet to be determined but could be helped with clarification from the president.
6. Why Did You Repeatedly Lie about Your Knowledge of Hunter’s Dealings?
During a presidential debate in October 2020, Biden told the nation that neither he nor any of his family members profited from overseas business deals with companies connected to communist China.
That is completely false. It’s also evident that Biden knew about his family’s dealings.
In fact, visitor logs show that Hunter’s associates visited the White House more than 80 times while the elder Biden was vice president. During some of these meetings, several of Hunter’s closest assistants and business partners met with Biden and Biden aides and even attended VP briefings. Vice President Biden also welcomed Hunter on several official trips on Air Force Two, which Hunter appeared to use to secure deals that would enrich his family.
Why would the president go to great lengths to lie over and over and over about it?
7. Should Presidents’ Families Make Money off of People Associated with Our Top Foreign Enemy?
Biden’s approval with Americans is already low. His proximity to the national security threat his family transactions pose only serves to further hurt that low trust.
8. Have You Instructed the DOJ to Avoid Taking Action against You and Your Family?
Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C. both apparently blocked the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden, according to one IRS whistleblower. The Department of Justice also gave potentially false statements about information on the Bidens’ business in China. And the FBI, which falls under the DOJ’s authority, has refused to turn over records that allegedly implicate Biden in a bribery scheme, despite a congressional subpoena. What’s stopping the DOJ from continuing to do what’s politically favorable for the president and his family by ignoring the issue at hand? Certainly not Biden.
9. How Many Media Outlets Have You Asked to Defend You amid the Investigation?
Comer asked Democrats this week “Do you want to continue covering up the Bidens’ influence-peddling schemes when the evidence is being placed right in front of you?”
The same can be asked of the corrupt corporate media which, since before the 2020 election, offered the president and his family not scrutiny but defense. From the moment House Republicans officially launched an investigation into Biden’s corruption, the press inaccurately asserted there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” In addition to repeatedly taking the White House’s assertions of innocence at face value, the press tried to distract from the Biden family’s scandals by conflating that corruption with the Trump family’s conduct and blacked out coverage of Comer’s ongoing supply of evidence.
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.
The interim report of the House Intelligence Committee and Weaponization Subcommittee released Wednesday established extensive coordination between the Biden campaign and those behind the statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials that painted the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation. More explosive, however, is the fact, first reported on Tuesday by The Federalist, that a Central Intelligence Agency employee solicited a former CIA officer to sign the statement.
Yet there is still much more to unravel to expose the breadth and depth of the info op painting the infamous laptop as Russian disinformation and the government actors involved. Here are five threads that will lead to the truth.
Subpoena All 51 Signatories
As its title stated, the House’s report focused on “How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.” While the October 2020 letter signed by the former intelligence officials is only part of the scandal, it’s a solid entry point to learning the identity of many of those involved.
The report already established Secretary of State Antony Blinken — then a senior adviser to the Biden campaign — contacted Obama’s CIA acting director, Mike Morell, to discuss the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Morell also testified that speaking with Blinken spurred him to craft the letter in question so Biden could reference it during his final debate against then-President Trump.
The House report highlighted several other plays involved in gathering signatories for the letter and revealed that at least one CIA employee solicited an individual to sign the letter.
The House stressed its investigation is continuing but that neither Blinken nor the CIA have yet to provide documents requested by the committees relating to both the statement and the interactions between its signatories and the CIA. The committees also reportedly scheduled interviews with former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
But it is not merely Brennan and Clapper who should be interviewed. While they are two of the most prominent former intelligence officials to have signed the letter, every signatory should be questioned and asked to provide relevant communications. If they refuse, subpoenas should be served and enforced.
Specifically, Brennan, Clapper, and other signatories should be asked to identify anyone they communicated with, or tried to, about the laptop or the letter to reveal the identity of the “nine additional former IC officers” who were unnamed but represented as supporting the letter’s conclusions.
Those 60 people should be asked about everyone with whom they spoke or attempted to speak about the laptop or the letter at any time,including those connected to: 1) the Biden family, 2) the Biden campaign, 3) elected officials, 4) the Democrat Party, 5) politicians opposed to Trump, 6) the media, 7) current government officials, 8) other signatories, 9) foreign governments, and 10) anyone else. All related communications should be obtained.
Based on those findings, any individuals not previously known should be added to the list of those to be questioned and subpoenaed. Those names will likely include many members or allies of the Biden campaign. We already know former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter and Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, were involved in pushing the “Russian disinformation” narrative.
Additionally, from Morell’s testimony to House investigators, we know the head of Biden’s campaign, Steve Ricchetti, was involved, given that he arranged to personally thank Morell for the letter. Morell also said Jeremy Bash, whom Morell knew through Beacon Global Strategies, arranged Morell’s conversation with Ricchetti, raising the possibility that Beacon Global Strategies played a role in the plot.
These individuals should be further questioned on their roles related to the letter: Did they draft any language? Propose revisions to the language? We know some of this already from the House report, but there’s more to probe.
Furthermore, all of the signatories should be asked: Had they read the New York Post articles? Did they know of the existence of the laptop or the FBI’s seizure of it? Why did they supposedly believe it was Russian disinformation? Did they have any doubts? Did they watch the final Trump-Biden debate and, if so, did they believe Biden had accurately described their letter? What about Politico’s infamous “Russian disinfo” article? Did they believe Biden or Politico had misrepresented their letter? If so, to whom, if anyone, did they express their concerns? If not, why not?
Probe FBI’s Involvement
The aforementioned strategy is a good starting point, but because members of the Biden campaign and others involved outside the government may not know — or be honest — about who inside the government participated in the election-interference scheme, investigators should simultaneously work from the FBI out.
Congressional oversight committees should start by interviewing and obtaining all relevant documents, voluntarily or by subpoena, from the FBI agents with knowledge of the laptop. They should begin with those who first learned of its existence when the father of John Paul Mac Isaac — the owner of the computer repair store where Hunter had abandoned his laptop — contacted the agency.
According to Mac Isaac, in October 2019, his father, a retired Air Force colonel, reported the laptop to FBI agents in the Albuquerque, New Mexico field office. Mac Isaac’s father spoke with an agent, telling him that his son had “the laptop of the son of a presidential candidate” and that it “has a lot of bad stuff on it, and he needs your help.”
Mac Isaac’s father also told the agent the hard drive contained pornographic material and content that was “geopolitically sensitive,” including “dealing with foreign interests, a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, lots of foreign money.” And while Mac Isaac’s father offered the FBI a copy of the laptop, the agent instead asked to review the repair contract.
After reviewing it, the agent reportedly “consulted with a regional legal officer,” then told Mac Isaac’s father they should “lawyer up” and not “talk to anyone about this.” The agent then directed the repairman’s father to the door.
An agent later reportedly contacted Mac Isaac’s father, who provided the agent with his son’s contact information. Then, “on December 9, 2019, the FBI served a subpoena on John Paul for the computer, the hard drive, and all related paperwork,” which Mac Isaac provided.
Mac Isaac would later claim one of the two FBI agents who retrieved the laptop from his Delaware store suggested he keep quiet. According to Mac Isaac, as the agents were leaving, he quipped, “Hey, lads, I’ll remember to change your names when I write the book.”
At that point, Mac Isaac claimed, “Agent DeMeo paused and turned to face me,” replying: “It is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”
After seizing the laptop, the “local FBI leadership told employees, ‘You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop,’” according to multiple whistleblowers. The whistleblowers further alleged that “the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election — potentially a year after” retrieving it.
These details give congressional investigators ample leads to uncover who in the FBI knew about the Hunter Biden laptop, beginning in Albuquerque and then moving to the FBI’s Baltimore field office, which holds jurisdiction over Delaware-based investigations.
The agents involved should be questioned to learn what they knew, what they did, and with whom they spoke, including whether they communicated with any member of the Biden family, campaign, or media. Investigators should also obtain the various FBI reports, the subpoena, the warrant used to obtain the subpoena, the chain of custody for the laptop and other seized material, and all written or electronic communications.
Focusing on the FBI is especially important because the day after the Post broke the laptop story, Russia-collusion hoaxer Ken Dilanian, ran an “exclusive” at NBC, reporting that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” The next day, USA Today similarly reported the FBI’s supposed involvement in investigating whether a Russian influence operation was at play. On Oct. 17, 2020, USA Today reiterated that the “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia.”
However, the FBI was not investigating whether the laptop was related to a “foreign intelligence operation,” but instead was investigating Hunter Biden. This FBI leak nonetheless furthered the “Russia disinformation” narrative. In fact, Blinken went on to share one of the USA Today articles with Morell. Then Morell referenced the nonexistent FBI investigation as a justification for the letter, as a text included in the House report shows.
Specifically, Morell texted Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA acting chief of operations, saying, “I’m thinking of writing something that says the FBI is investigating whether there is Russia involvement in this thing and that makes sense because it has the feel of a Russian op.” Morell asked Polymeropoulos if he wanted to help with the effort, leading the duo to draft the initial version of the statement together.
Questioning the FBI agents with knowledge of the laptop and obtaining relevant communications would help establish who was behind the leak and whether anyone from the FBI communicated with the Biden campaign, the CIA, or any of the letter’s signatories. Likewise, this line of inquiry would establish if anyone with knowledge of the laptop cautioned social media companies — or suggested other FBI agents warn Big Tech — to expect a “hack-and-leak” operation.
Probe DEA’s Involvement
A third line of inquiry requires looking to the Drug Enforcement Administration and its role in executing a search warrant on the Massachusetts office of Hunter Biden’s former psychiatrist Keith Ablow.
On Oct. 30, 2020, NBC News first reported that during a February 2020 DEA raid on Ablow’s office, agents reportedly recovered a second laptop belonging to Hunter Biden from a safe in Ablow’s basement. The DEA then returned the computer to Hunter’s lawyer George Mesires.
For a year, Ablow had reportedly “made repeated efforts to persuade Hunter Biden to retrieve his computer.” But then the DEA raided Ablow’s office just a few months after the FBI had seized Hunter’s other laptop from Mac Isaac.
The DEA agents involved should be asked whether they knew Ablow possessed the laptop and whether that fact motivated the execution of the search warrant. Did the DEA agents speak with any FBI agents? Did the DEA know of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s investigation into Hunter? Did agents review the laptop before returning it? If not, why not? If so, what information did they discover, and why was the laptop not retained as evidence?
This line of inquiry may prove a dead end, or it could reveal more election interferers.
Dig Into Biden Briefings
Next, investigators should review the intelligence briefings provide to Biden since October 2019 when the FBI first learned of the laptop’s existence. Given the incriminating evidence contained on it, the intelligence briefings should have alerted Joe Biden to the national security risk.
If the briefings included details about the laptop, the individuals involved should be questioned and documents subpoenaed to learn who knew what and did what with the information. But if the briefings did not mention the laptop, investigators should ask those responsible for putting together the briefings about their knowledge of the laptop and their explanation for omitting mention of it.
Investigate the Giuliani Investigators
A fifth line of inquiry should look to those behind the investigation of Rudy Giuliani.
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine previously reported: “[T]he FBI spied on the former mayor’s cloud for two years from May, 2019, a month after he began working as then president Donald Trump’s personal attorney. … So the FBI had access to all Giuliani’s emails and iMessages for two years,” meaning it’s possible the FBI saw Bob Costello’s Aug. 27, 2020, email to Giuliani “telling him of Mac Isaac’s ‘amazing discovery.’”
In that email, Costello wrote: “I am arranging to get a complete copy of the hard drive as it contains lots of materials beyond the Ukraine stuff according to the owner. … The five emails he sent show that Hunter was directly involved in orchestrating his father Joe Biden’s intervention to stop the Ukrainian investigation of Burisma.” The email continued: “I believe that we are on the verge of a game changing production of indisputable evidence of the corruption we have long suspected involving the Biden’s and Ukraine — but there is more.”
The joint committees’ investigation should run down the possibility that those investigating Giuliani had access to his emails and learned of the laptop before the Post’s stories. If so, with whom did the agents share that knowledge? Again, interviews and documents are necessary to determine if any of these FBI agents were responsible for the leaks or communicated with the Biden campaign or Big Tech.
Wednesday’s report provides crucial details about the info ops run on Americans, but there is much more left to investigate to uncover all of the players who helped interfere in the 2020 election.
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 Presiden Trump.
President Joe Biden and his family are at the center of an influence-peddling scheme in which they traded the patriarch’s decades of time in political offices to line their own pockets and then tried to cover up their profiteering with a myriad of complicated transactions and accounts, the House Oversight Committee confirmed during a press conference on Wednesday.
With the help of whistleblowers and congressional subpoenas, Republicans are confidently reporting that the Bidens received at least $10 million worth of diluted payments from foreign companies during and after the president’s time in the Obama White House.
These payments were diced up and transferred to a spread of Biden bank accounts within weeks of significant political action by the then-vice president in the country of the transactions’ origins.
“These complicated and seemingly unnecessary financial transactions appear to be a concerted effort to conceal the source and total amount received from the foreign companies,” the Oversight Committee’s latest memo warns.
At least nine Biden family members including the president’s son Hunter Biden, his brother James Biden, James’s wife, Hunter’s ex-girlfriend who is also his brother Beau Biden’s widow, Hunter’s ex-wife, Hunter’s current wife, and at least one grandchild and a couple of nieces and/or nephews profited from the funneling of funds.
“That’s odd,” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said. “Most people with grandchildren, who work hard everyday, doesn’t get a wire from a foreign national or anything like that.”
The latest round of records, obtained by the Oversight Committee from four of the Bidens’ 12 apparent banks, detail yet another round of these payments — this time from China and Romania to the Bidens.
One $3 million payment came from the company of Gabriel Popoviciu, who is the subject of a criminal corruption probe in Romania, to the accounts of Biden family associate Rob Walker mere weeks after Biden, then-vice president, welcomed Romanian leaders to the White House to discuss “anti-corruption efforts” and just more than a year after Biden lectured in Romania about the threat corruption poses to national security. Those transactions were quickly funneled to Owasco (one of Hunter’s 15 companies), a Biden associate’s company, one of Hunter’s personal bank accounts, Hallie Biden, and “an unknown Biden bank account.”
The Romanian payments, the Oversight Committee alleges, further prove that the Bidens’ influence peddling operation was in full swing while Biden facilitated foreign policy discussions, especially in Eastern Europe, during the Obama administration.
The newest Romanian payment dilution strongly resembles how the Bidens appeared to use their more than a dozen companies to coordinate with Chinese nationals suspected of close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and “engage in financial deception.”
“The purpose of all these companies being created is to conceal money that the Biden family has been gaining because Joe Biden has been sitting at the upper echelon of our politics for almost five decades. That is the entire purpose here,” Rep. Byron Donalds explained on Wednesday.
These companies receiving funds from foreign nationals, the Republican asserted, serve no legitimate purpose other than enriching the president, his family, and his business associates.
“Joe Biden has no business, except his position in politics,” Donalds concluded.
“If it looks complicated and sounds complicated, it was intentionally made to be complicated so you could not follow the money,” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace added during her talking time. “What we’re trying to do today is show you how to follow the money.”
During a presidential debate in October 2020, Biden told the nation that neither he nor any of his family members profited from overseas business deals with companies connected to communist China.
“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China. I have not had—The only guy who made money from China is this guy [Donald Trump]. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China,” Biden said.
COMER: “President Biden has claimed since the 2020 election that his family has not received money from China. That was a lie in 2020 — and he continues to lie to the American people now.”
Despite the fact that the Oversight Committee has repeatedly proven Biden’s denials wrong with bank records detailing millions of dollars worth of transactions from foreign shell companies to the president’s family, the White House refuses to do anything but double down on the lie.
“House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is loudly and proudly broadcasting a press conference today to continue his long pattern of making absurd claims that President Biden has made governing decisions not in the interest of America, but of the Chinese Communist Party, using baseless claims, personal attacks, and innuendo to try to score political points,” White House spokesman Ian Sams told Fox News, after smearing the committee’s latest memo as an “absurd innuendo [that] ignores reality.”
The Oversight Committee once again rejected these claims on Wednesday and refuted them with hard evidence that several Biden family members, including Hunter, James, Hallie, an unknown “Biden,” and companies linked to the family “collectively received $1.3 million in payments” from Walker, whose company was paid millions by Chinese firm State Energy HK Limited, implicating the family in selling political favors to China.
The Biden family received the money via several bank transfers within six months of the vice president departing the Obama White House. Comer said in April that his committee still did not know who the unnamed Biden was in the China transaction because the Biden family holds so many bank accounts and LLCs.
“The Biden family needs to answer for this and the DOJ needs to get off its ass and investigate. We’ve done the work for them so that they can’t screw it up. Now, if these allegations, any of these allegations are proven true then someone with the last name Biden needs to be charged, prosecuted, and maybe spend a little time in prison,” Mace said at the conclusion of her remarks.
Last week, Republicans Sen. Chuck Grassley and Comer subpoenaed the FBI over a document they say alleges a criminal scheme between now-President Joe Biden and a “foreign national” during his years in the Obama White House.
The Oversight Committee led by Comer, who previously warned it “doesn’t look good for POTUS,” promised to continue investigating whether Biden sold out the American people to the nation’s foreign enemies to line family’s pockets.
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.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., on Wednesday outlined what he called a “pattern of influence peddling” by President Joe Biden’s family, revealing information the committee obtained showing that the “family, their associates, and their companies received over $10 million from foreign nationals and their companies.”
“Some of that money came from a Chinese company and went to Hunter Biden’s company,” Comer said in a press conference, referring to the president’s son. “Other transfers occurred with money from foreign entities to the Biden family, with many of the wire payments occurring while Joe Biden was vice president and leading the United States’ efforts in these countries.”
Comer noted that the committee has had subpoena power for just four months, and has made “astonishing progress” in uncovering information on Biden family members.
While much of the information centered around connections with China, other countries were also involved, Comer said.
“First instance, Vice President Biden was lecturing Romania on anti-corruption policies,” said Comer. “In reality, he was a walking billboard for his son and family to collect money. Hunter Biden and his associates capitalized on a lucrative financial relationship with the Romanian nationals who were under investigation for and later convicted of corruption in Romania. The Bidens received over $1 million for the deal.”
Comer added that 16 of 17 payments to an associate’s account that “funneled” the money occurred while Biden was the vice president, and “the money stops flowing from the Romanian nationals” soon after Biden left the vice presidency.
The committee also provided information on the Biden family’s relationship with China, posting its outlines on its Twitter account during the press conference. In one chart, the trail of the money is shown coming from Chinese President Xi Jinping and heading through several levels and accounts before eventually reaching payments to Hunter Biden, the president’s brother and his wife, James and Sara Biden, to Hallie Biden, the wife of the president’s late son, Beau, and to an “unnamed Biden.”
Comer said the committee is particularly concerned with Ye Jianming, former chair of the Shanghai-based CEFC China Energy conglomerate, who “had close ties to the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party and operated a multibillion-dollar energy company with access to large sums of money.”
“The Bidens’ foreign entanglements are breathtaking and raise serious questions about why foreign actors targeted the Biden family, what they expected in return, and whether our national security is threatened,” Comer said in a media statement posted to the House Oversight Committee’s website, in which the new findings are outlined.
“We will continue to pursue additional bank records to follow the money trail and inform legislative solutions to prevent this type of corruption. Americans deserve answers, transparency, and accountability.”
Meanwhile, Comer said the president has claimed since 2020 that his family never received money from China.
“That was a lie in 2020, and he continues to lie to the American people now,” said Comer. “The Bidens have received millions of dollars from China. It is inconceivable that the president did not know it.”
Comer added that he subpoenaed the FBI a week ago for a document a whistleblower says shows that Biden, as vice president, received payment in a pay-for-play scheme, but that document has not yet been turned over.
“Chinese nationals affiliated with the Bidens created limited liability companies in the United States and then in a short period of time transferred their interest to a Chinese company that sent money to the Bidens,” said Comer. “This is not normal. Hunter Biden and his associates courted business in countries that correlated directly with Joe Biden’s work as vice president. This is also not normal. It is not ethical. And this is why we need legislative solutions.”
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee is crafting legislative solutions to strengthen reporting requirements related to certain foreign transactions involving senior elected officials, and evaluating the Bank Secrecy Act and money laundering laws, Comer said.
Comer said that with the information released Wednesday, the committee is moving its investigation into a new phase, and that he will issue a new round of subpoenas to banks for specific-targeted information.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., also speaking during the press appearance, explained in further detail some of the information the committee uncovered, including how the Bidens used an associate, Rob Walker, “to bring in millions of dollars” from China and Romania through Walker’s limited liability company, Robinson Walker LLC. Biggs said the company paid the Biden family members more than $2 million after foreign money hit his account.
“For example, on March 1, 2017, only two months after Joe Biden left office, Robinson Walker received a $3 million wire from State Energy HK,” said Biggs. “The next day, one-third of that money, $1,065,000, went to the bank account in Abu Dhabi of the company, EIG, which was controlled by James Gilead, another Biden associate.
“Over the next three months, Robinson Walker LLC sent 16 incremental payments to over five different Biden accounts totaling $1,065,692.”
White House spokesman Ian Sams, in a memo provided to Fox News Digital early Wednesday, accused Comer of “loudly and proudly broadcasting a press conference today to continue his long pattern of making absurd claims that President Biden has made governing decisions not in the interest of America, but of the Chinese Communist Party, using baseless claims, personal attacks, and innuendo to try to score political points.”
Comer told Newsmax’s “The Record with Greta Van Susteren” Tuesday night: “What we have is something no one else has ever been able to produce.”
“We have bank records, we have evidence that shows that the Biden family was involved in this extensive influence peddling thing,” he said. “It wasn’t just the president’s son — it was the entire family, so this is of the utmost concern to our committee.
“We’re concerned about our national security and we’re wondering whether or not this president is compromised because of the millions of dollars his family’s received from our adversaries around the world.”
Sams said the press conference shows that the investigation is running into problems and that the investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings has yet to result in an indictment. Sams also claimed House Republicans, not the Bidens, are guilty of boosting China’s interests, saying they have “taken positions that benefit the PRC and its leaders, and worked to erode America’s ability to compete with China,” including denying legislation that would help finance semiconductor plants in the United States.
“Instead of floating evidence-free innuendo, and making absurd attacks on the President and his family to try to score political points, Chairman Comer and House Oversight Republicans should answer the question: Why have you repeatedly sided with PRC interests over American workers and the American economy, instead of joining President Biden to put in place a strong agenda to create more American jobs and make us more competitive with China?” Sams wrote.
Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last week subpoenaed a document from the FBI and Justice Department that a whistleblower says describes a pay-for-play scheme involving Biden, when he was vice president and a foreign national.
Democrats on the committee are also pushing back on Comer’s claims.
“There’s a lot of innuendo and a lot of gossip taking place and much of it is recycled from prior claims,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, told Politico.
Wednesday’s press conference won’t be the end of Comer’s investigation, as he also is reportedly planning to reveal his next actions, likely including more third-party financial records.
The White House blocked the New York Post from covering a Monday public event with President Joe Biden, according to the paper, a sign the president’s team is increasingly sensitive to coverage of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and could be cracking down on media access after the launch of his reelection campaign.
The Post, which first revealed the existence of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, said the White House rejected its request to attend Biden’s press event discussing airline policies with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The decision comes as federal prosecutors are wrapping up a tax investigation into Hunter Biden, which could result in criminal charges in the coming days.
Photos from the event show there were about 20 empty media seats, undermining the explanation from the White House press office for the decision to block the Post.
“We are unable to accommodate your credential request to attend the Investing in Airline Accountability Remarks on 5/8,” the White House press office told the Post. “The remarks will be live-streamed and can be viewed at WH.gov. Thank you for understanding. We will let you know if a credential becomes available.”
Biden—who has held the fewest press availabilities of any president in two decades—in February blew up at a Post reporter after the reporter asked during a similar media event about the first family’s financial dealings with China. “Give me a break, man,” Biden said, ignoring the question. “You can come to my office and ask a question when you have more polite people with you.”
Steven Nelson, the Post reporter who was denied access, told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s staff are “setting an anti-press freedom precedent by prescreening journalists allowed to attend large indoor events. These spaces were open to all reporters on White House grounds in the past.”
He noted that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre promised last July to end a much-criticized COVID-era screening process that gave Biden’s press office control over which reporters were allowed to attend presidential remarks. Reporters accused the White House of arbitrarily enforcing the policy, saying it was “done without any transparent process into how reporters are selected to cover these events” in a letter last June.
“The White House Correspondents’ Association also has called on the administration to restore large indoor spaces to their historical status as open to all,” added Nelson. “If the Biden White House continues to discriminate against large outlets such as the New York Post, future administrations can do the same to other newspapers. It should end now.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House Correspondents’ Association also did not respond to a request for comment.
Update 5:34 p.m.: This piece has been updated since publication.
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley is demanding transparency from an agency with no interest in transparency.
On Thursday, the Iowa lawmaker went to the Senate floor to demand FBI compliance with a congressional subpoena compelling documents related to a criminal scheme involving the president and a “foreign national.” Grassley joined House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer in issuing the subpoena Wednesday.
“We believe the FBI possesses an unclassified internal document that includes very serious and detailed allegations implicating the current President of the United States,” Grassley wrote. “What we don’t know is what, if anything, the FBI has done to verify these claims or investigate further. The FBI’s recent history of botching politically charged investigations demands close congressional oversight.”
In his Thursday floor speech, Grassley spoke about his tenure conducting constitutional oversight of federal law enforcement agencies.
“In many of those floor speeches, I’ve discussed legally protected and unclassified whistleblower disclosures made to my office relating to the Hunter Biden criminal investigation,” Grassley said. “Those disclosures have a very common theme: the Justice Department and FBI have allowed political infection to take root within each agency’s decision-making process. Such an infection is an existential threat to any government agency.”
The latest whistleblower cited in Republican lawmakers’ demands to the FBI on Wednesday alleges President Biden engaged in bribery while serving in the Obama administration.
“The allegations my office has received are very precise, very direct, and very consistent. Accordingly, they’re highly credible,” Grassley said Thursday. “Not once – let me emphasize that again – not once has the Justice Department or FBI substantively disputed the whistleblower allegations that I’ve made public.”
“Simply put, did the Justice Department and FBI treat this information like they would if we, the people, were implicated, or did they sweep it under the rug to protect then-candidate Biden and President Biden now?” Grassley added. “If the Justice Department and FBI have any hope of redeeming their once-trusted position with the American people, Attorney General Garland and Director Wray must answer. Their credibility is on the line.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Evidence is mounting that both the Biden campaign and the federal governmentinterfered in the 2020 election by running an info op to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Missouri and Louisiana have unearthed some of the most damning evidence in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration, but a close analysis of the court filings suggests the FBI is not being forthright in identifying the players involved.
As part of the lawsuit Missouri and Louisiana’s attorneys general initiated, the states obtained limited initial discovery. Among other things, the plaintiffs obtained a list of government officials who communicated with Twitter about so-called content moderation and the deposition testimony of Elvis Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco Cyber Branch.
In his deposition, Chan testified that he is one of the “primary” FBI agents who communicates with social media companies about so-called disinformation. During the 2020 election cycle, Chan coordinated meetings between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and at least seven of the major tech giants, including Meta/Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Yahoo!/Verizon Media, and Microsoft/LinkedIn. Those meetings occurred at first quarterly and then monthly and weekly as the election neared.
In questioning Chan, attorneys representing Missouri and Louisiana pushed him on several points related to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop. The lawyers succeeded in eliciting testimony from Chan that the FBI regularly raised the possibility of “hack and dump” operations with senior officials at the various tech companies. Those discussions included the FBI warning the companies of a potential hack-and-leak occurring shortly before the 2020 election, like the Democratic National Committee hack and WikiLeaks that occurred in 2016.
The plaintiffs also quizzed Chan on the names of any government officials who discussed “hack-and-dump Russian operations” with the tech giants. Chan mentioned Section Chief Laura Dehmlow, “among others.” But Chan then danced around who those others were, saying he couldn’t recollect. Chan eventually identified four FBI officials that attended Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) meetings at which the FBI discussed the risk of hack-and-leak operations. These officials were Brady Olson, William Cone, Judy Chock, and Luke Giannini.
Regarding whether anyone within the FBI suggested Chan should raise the possibility of Russian hack-and-dump operations with the tech giants in 2020, Chan repeatedly said he could “not recall,” but at one point acknowledged, “They may have, but I don’t recollect at this time.”
The plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden claim Chan’s “I do not recall,” is not credible. They say it is “facially implausible that Chan does not recall whether other federal officials discussed warning platforms about ‘hack-and-leak’ operations during 2020, especially after the fiasco of censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Furthermore, the plaintiffs added, “the only aspect of [Chan’s] internal discussions with the FBI about hack-and-leak operations that he does not recall is whether someone from the FBI suggested or directed him to raise the issue with social-media platforms.”
Uncovering whether someone — and if so, who — directed Chan or other FBI agents to warn tech companies about a potential hack-and-leak operation is necessary to unravel the extent of the government’s info ops. Did FBI agents with knowledge of either the Hunter Biden laptop or the existence of damaging communications possessed by other governments, such as Ukraine or China, prompt Chan and others to warn of an impending hack-and-leak to protect the Biden family from any fallout?
Chan also appeared less than forthcoming when questioned about whether he had discussed the 2020 election with any of the people involved in the DNC hack. Here, an unnoticed tidbit from Chan’s deposition proves interesting: Chan testified that he served as the supervisor for the Russian cyber squad that investigated the DNC server before the San Francisco office handed it off to FBI headquarters.
When asked whether “subsequent to the 2016 investigation of the hack of the DNC server,” he had “any communications with anyone involved in that investigation about the possibility that a hack-and-leak operation” could happen prior to the 2020 election, Chan initially provided a misleading response, saying he did “not remember discussing the potential for a 2020 election with any of the FBI personnel because they had moved on to different roles.”
Catching Chan’s narrowing of the question from “anyone” to “FBI personnel,” the plaintiffs’ attorney quickly queried, “and people outside the FBI?” Chan then noted he would have discussed national security cyber investigations involving Russian matters with Sean Newell, a deputy chief at the DOJ National Security Division who also worked on the DNC hack. But Chan refused to say whether Newell or anyone else who worked on the DNC hack had raised the issue of a 2020 hack-and-release repeat.
Chan’s reticence raises red flags. But piecing together two exhibits filed in the Missouri v. Biden case reveals a thread to pull to start getting some answers.
Exhibit 23 used during Chan’s deposition includes a series of emails related to the DNC hack that were filed in the special counsel’s criminal prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. In addition to Chan and Newell, the emails include names of about another dozen government agents.
When those names are cross-checked against the names of the federal officials with whom Twitter “had meetings or discussions” about so-called content moderation issues — a list Twitter provided the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden in response to a third-party subpoena — two names overlap: Chan and Jonathan Sills.
Sills, an attorney with the FBI’s Office of General Counsel, appeared in several emails in which Sussmann and the FBI discussed logistical details for conveying a copy of the DNC server data to the FBI. Given Sills was only added to the email threads when they discussed whether the FBI would pay CrowdStrike to make a copy of the data, it seems unlikely Sills had a broader involvement in the DNC hack-and-release investigation.
But why then was Sills communicating with Twitter about so-called content moderation issues? Was it about payments to Twitter? Or something else?
Recall we still don’t know the identities of the “folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” as then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille complained 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 noted.
Remember also that the FBI’s Baltimore field office provided coverage to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office out of which the Hunter Biden investigation was being run — to the extent FBI headquarters allowed.
When reached by phone in his D.C. office, Sills told The Federalist he was not authorized to comment on the matter, which is unfortunate because the people who can comment seem not to recollect the most pertinent points. A follow-up email to Sills went unanswered.
Eventually, though, these threads will all be pulled when discovery occurs in Missouri v. Biden. While some will lead nowhere, as the initial discovery proves, there is much to learn about the government’s involvement in the Hunter Biden info ops and its role in censoring speech on social media.
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.
You would think with all the money Hunter and the Bidens made from selling influence to China, they could afford child support for his daughter Navy Joan.
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 Presiden
Following revelations that he allegedly lied under oath to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is facing calls from Senate Republicans to turn over communication records related to Hunter Biden and his shady business engagements.
On Monday, Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to Blinken demanding that he turn over any and all records “referring or relating to Hunter Biden, his business dealings, or his family’s business dealings” by May 15. The request comes as part of Senate Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business ventures.
In the letter, Johnson and Grassley document a series of emails revealing how Blinken seemingly lied under oath about his prior communications with Hunter. While testifying before Congress on Dec. 22, 2020, Blinken was asked if he had any means of correspondence —including phone calls, emails, or texts — with Hunter Biden during his time as President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, to which Blinken replied, “No.”
Emails from Hunter’s laptop, however, appear to contradict Blinken’s December 2020 testimony. As documented in the Johnson-Grassley letter, Hunter emailed Blinken at his personal email address on May 22, 2015, asking if the then-deputy secretary of state was available to meet.
“I know you are impossibly busy but would like to get your advice on a couple of things,” Hunter wrote, to which Blinken replied, “Absolutely.”
Blinken sent another email to Hunter a few months later on July 22, indicating the two met in person.
“Great to… see you and catch up,” Blinken wrote. “You will love this: after you left, Marjorie, the wonderful african american woman who sits in my outer office (and used to be Colin Powell’s assistant) said to me :’He sure is pleasant on the eyes.’ Tell you wife.”
The Johnson-Grassley letter also raises questions regarding Blinken’s knowledge of Hunter’s role as a Burisma Holdings board member. Burisma Holdings is a Ukrainian gas company that paid Hunter $50,000 a month despite the president’s son having no prior energy experience. Joe Biden has claimed that while vice president, he threatened to withdraw U.S. aid if then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “didn’t fire state prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time.”
Despite Blinken claiming to have no knowledge of Hunter’s Burisma ties during his December 2020 testimony, emails from Hunter’s laptop reveal that Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, “corresponded directly with Hunter Biden (from her personal email address) in an apparent attempt to connect [Blinken] with representatives of Burisma’s U.S. lobbying firm, Blue Star Strategies.”
In what appears to be an email chain dated July 14, 2016, Hunter informed Ryan that “S” and “K” — who appear to be Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, Blue Star Strategies’ Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer — told him “they called the State Department and left a message.” In her email to Hunter, Ryan appeared to reference Blinken, writing “He didn’t get the msg” and “He said if we can get him their numbers he can call them late afternoon DC time tmrw.”
While this specific email exchange doesn’t name Blinken, Johnson and Grassley noted that State Department documents obtained during their inquiry “make it clear that [Blinken was] concurrently trying to connect with representatives from Blue Star Strategies.”
“It seems highly unlikely that you had no idea of Hunter Biden’s association with Burisma while your wife was apparently coordinating with Hunter Biden to potentially connect you with Burisma’s U.S. representatives,” Johnson and Grassley wrote. “Because your testimony is inaccurate, Congress and the public must rely on your records as the source for information about your dealings with Hunter Biden.”
These revelations follow testimony from an ex-CIA official, who claimed that Blinken, during his time as a Biden campaign adviser, was the catalyst for the creation of a debunked letter from former intelligence officials that falsely claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The House Ways and Means Committee granted two attorneys representing the Internal Revenue Service whistleblower authority to inspect Hunter Biden’s tax returns and related information. This development promises to accelerate the unraveling of the Justice Department’s Biden family protection racket.
Understanding why requires a fuller understanding of IRS privacy law, so here’s your “lawsplainer.”
A Look at the Law
Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that federal tax returns and “return information” “shall be confidential” and makes it illegal for an IRS “officer or employee” to disclose such tax information. In fact, many view Section 6103’s confidentiality mandate as even precluding a government employee from revealing the existence of an investigation into a taxpayer. However, because in December of 2020, Hunter Biden publicly acknowledged the existence of an investigation into his tax matters after federal prosecutors subpoenaed his business records, the public has long known of the investigation into the president’s son.
Several exceptions to the confidentiality provisions of Section 6103 exist, though. Relevant here is the statutory exception authorizing whistleblowers to disclose confidential information to the House Committee on Ways and Means or the Senate Committee on Finance. That exception guarantees whistleblower protection to government agents who reveal confidential information concerning tax issues to either of those committees.
But because the Section 6103 exception does not also allow a whistleblower the right to disclose the information to his attorney, the whistleblower would be forced to face the committees without the benefit of legal counsel. Further, because Section 6103 defines “return information” broadly to include the nature and sources of income, data collected by the IRS, and “any background file document” or “written determination” prepared by the IRS, the whistleblower also could not legally discuss with his attorney many aspects of an investigation to prepare to testify before the congressional committees.
This backdrop explains the purpose of the letter Mark Lytle, one of the lawyers representing the IRS whistleblower, sent to the chairs and ranking members of several congressional committees. In that letter, Lytle conveyed his client’s offer to share information establishing that politics improperly infected the criminal investigation of a “high-profile, controversial subject” — again, widely believed to be Hunter Biden because of the Biden son’s confirmation in 2020 of an ongoing federal investigation into his tax matters.
The letter stressed that because of tax privacy laws, the IRS whistleblower, “out of an abundance of caution,” had “refrained from sharing certain information” with Lytle while seeking his legal advice. Lytle then explained that lacking a full understanding of the situation made it “challenging” for him “to make fully informed judgments about how to best proceed.”
Lytle closed his letter by asking the committees to work with him so his client could share the “information with Congress legally and with the fully informed advice of counsel,” adding: “With the appropriate legal protections and in the appropriate setting, I would be happy to meet with you and provide a more detailed proffer of the testimony my client could provide to Congress.”
Again, to grasp the significance of both this language and last week’s development, it is imperative to understand Section 6103.
The Workaround
As explained above, while Section 6103 authorized the whistleblower to share confidential taxpayer information with two specific committees, he or she could not give that information to Lytle or any other attorney. Section 6103(f)(4), however, provides an important workaround by allowing the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Finance Committee to “designate or appoint” an “agent” to inspect the tax returns and return information.
In other words, the committees could appoint the whistleblower’s attorneys as their “agents,” which would allow the whistleblower to discuss freely and fully the tax information with his lawyers. In turn, the whistleblower’s lawyers could brief the committees on those details, albeit in a closed session, which is precisely what Lytle suggested when he wrote that “with the appropriate legal protections and in the appropriate setting,” he would “provide a more detailed proffer of the testimony my client could provide to Congress.”
Thus, that last week the Ways and Means Committee authorized two of the whistleblower’s attorneys to inspect the tax material is huge: It sidestepped a protracted battle over the circumstances under which the whistleblower would testify. It also ensures the House committee can learn, on an expedited basis, the whistleblower’s accusations.
Given that the Republican-controlled House granted the whistleblower’s lawyers authority to access and discuss the tax returns and tax information, authorization by the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee would not be needed. It seems likely, however, that the Finance Committee followed suit to ensure a role in the investigation. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has yet to state whether he granted the whistleblower’s attorneys Section 6103 authority.
What’s Next?
No timetable has been announced for the next steps, but a source familiar with the investigation indicated a proffer by the whistleblower’s attorneys to the House Ways and Means Committee could occur as early as this week, with the whistleblower testifying soon after. The closed-door testimony could then become public, either because the House Committee concludes it is not confidential information under Section 6103 or because it votes to release it publicly, as allowed by statute.
Likely sensing the inevitable public airing of the purported political protection racket that allegedly saw two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys declining to seek a grand jury indictment against the president’s son, lawyers for Hunter Biden reportedly met with federal prosecutors last Wednesday. Whether they were on a fishing expedition or attempting to hurriedly negotiate a plea agreement to short-circuit the scandal is unclear, but cutting a deal is unlikely to cap the fallout for two reasons.
First, it seems likely the statute of limitations will have run on some of the tax claims, in which case the congressional oversight committees will probably seek to understand whether politics resulted in lost opportunities to prosecute potentially more serious crimes. Second, the whistleblower’s claims reach beyond the tax case against Hunter Biden.
Specifically, Lytle’s letter states the whistleblower has detailed “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.” “People directly familiar with the case” provided more texture to this accusation, stating that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” The unnamed sources also stressed the improper politicization of the case came from the Justice Department and FBI headquarters.
The whistleblower’s accusations thus extend far beyond the tax case against Hunter Biden. Although unraveling the scandal will start there, it won’t end there. With the whistleblower’s attorneys now able to coordinate directly with the House Ways and Means Committee, the timeframe for exposing those complicit in covering for the Bidens just shrunk substantially.
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.
Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents.
Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Blinken and Morell reportedly “discussed possible Russian involvement in the spreading of information related to Hunter Biden.” According to Morell, Blinken’s outreach “set in motion” what led to the public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed the laptop as Russian disinformation.
This revelation is huge — but it’s only a start to understanding the scope of the plot to interfere in the 2020 election by framing the laptop exposing Biden family corruption as foreign disinformation.
The First Clue
The first hint that Blinken’s outreach to Morell was a single spoke in the wheel of the Biden campaign’s deception came from a follow-up email Blinken sent Morell on Oct. 17, 2020. In it, Blinken shared a USA Today article that reported “the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a ‘disinformation campaign.’” The very bottom of Blinken’s email contained the signature block of Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, suggesting Bates had sent the article to Blinken for him to forward to Morell.
Blinken forwarding an article claiming the FBI was investigating the laptop as a potential “disinformation campaign” is hugely significant because we know the FBI was doing no such thing. The FBI knew both that the laptop was authentic and that John Paul Mac Isaac had possession of the hard drive, just as the New York Post had reported, albeit without identifying the computer-store owner by name.
The USA Today article nonetheless furthered the narrative that Morell and the other former intelligence officials would soon parrot in their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” — that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
For those who lived through the Russia-collusion hoax, it was the USA Today article and the presidential campaign’s use of Russia to deflect attention from the Biden scandal that bore the “classic earmarks” of an information operation — one that mimicked Hillary Clinton’s ploy four years prior. Given the similarities between the two Russia hoaxes, it seemed likely the Biden campaign worked with the press to push the Russian-disinformation narrative.
USA Today Didn’t Start the Falsehood
Sure enough, the legacy press began pushing the narrative days before Blinken emailed Morell the article on Oct. 17.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post broke the first laptop story, Politico ran an article, co-authored by Russia-hoaxer extraordinaire “Fusion Natasha” Bertrand, raising questions about the authenticity of said laptop. “This is a Russian disinformation operation. I’m very comfortable saying that,” Bertrand quoted former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter.
At the time, Carpenter also ran the Penn Biden Center — the same place a cache of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president and senator were discovered in a closet.
Politico also quoted Bates, whose signature block would later appear on Blinken’s email to Morell. Bates spun the scandal as one about Rudy Giuliani, who had provided a copy of the hard drive to the Post, and Giuliani’s supposed connection “to Russian intelligence.”
Intel Community Helped Peddle Russia Hoax 2.0
As was the case with the Russia-collusion hoax, the Biden campaign received an assist from the intelligence community. On Oct. 14, 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence analysts “had picked up Russian chatter that stolen Burisma emails” would be released as an “October surprise.”
Burisma, of course, was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden nearly $1 million to sit on its board during his father’s final year as vice president.
The chief concern of the intelligence analysts, the Times reported, “was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy.”
Lying Leakers Advance the Narrative
The next day, another foundational Russia-collusion hoaxer, Ken Dilanian, published an “exclusive” at NBC. Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Dilanian claimed that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” Dilanian also quoted Bates, who again focused on Giuliani and his alleged connection to Russia.
The Washington Post also embraced the narrative on Oct. 15, reporting, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.” Based on “four former officials,” The Washington Post reported that Giuliani had interacted with people tied to Russian intel.
More Lies Leaked to USA Today
This brings us to USA Today’s Oct. 16, 2020, article, “FBI Probing Whether Emails in New York Post Story About Hunter Biden Are Tied to Russian Disinformation.”
“Federal authorities are investigating whether a Russian influence operation was behind the disclosure of emails purporting to document the Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden,” USA Today opened its article, citing “a person briefed on the matter” and immediately bringing up Giuliani.
According to USA Today, that person “confirmed the FBI’s involvement but did not elaborate on the scope of the bureau’s review.”
The next day, Oct. 17, USA Today followed up with the article, “A Tabloid Got a Trove of Data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is Probing a Possible Disinformation Campaign.”
It began by saying the New York Post portrayed the laptop contents as a “smoking gun.” “Enter the FBI,” USA Today interjected, reporting that “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia” and claiming there are many questions about the laptop data’s authenticity.
“Experts say the story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign,” it continued, using language strikingly similar to what the former intel officials would use days later.
Blinken Uses Reporting to Prod Morell
It is unclear which of the two USA Today pieces Blinken forwarded to Morell because both articles included the FBI investigation claims. It seems likely, however, that Blinken sent Morrel the second article because USA Today’s Oct. 17 coverage included a quote from supposed “experts” who said the New York Post “story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.”
That language tracked near-perfectly the wording used by the 51 former intelligence officials in their infamous Oct. 19 statement, which claimed the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That’s Not All
Morell’s contact with Blinken reportedly went beyond the phone call and email. According to CNN, following his conversation with Blinken, “Morell had conversations with other former intelligence community officials, which is what led to the letter,” and then Morell “circled back to the Biden campaign to let them know that the letter efforts were underway.”
In testimony to House oversight investigators, Morell told how Biden’s campaign helped strategize releasing the statement, according to a letter Reps. Jim Jordan and Michael Turner sent to Blinken last week. Specifically, “Morell testified that he sent an email telling Nick Shapiro, former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director of the CIA John Brennan, that the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.” Shapiro was another signatory of the statement.
Politico, however, eventually first broke the story and published the statement, under the headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.”
Mission Accomplished
In his testimony to House investigators, Morell “explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election,” Jordan and Turner wrote. In fact, according to attorney Mark Zaid, who represents several of the signatories, “when the draft [statement] was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign.”
Both parts of the ploy worked. When the final presidential debate arrived on Oct. 22, 2020, and then-President Trump confronted Biden with the details revealed in Hunter’s “laptop from hell,” Biden responded by telling the American public:
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.
Biden Campaign Thanks Morell for the Assist
Morell testified that after the debate he received a call from Jeremy Bash, who was one of the 51 signatories of the statement. Bash asked Morell if he had a minute to talk to Steve Ricchetti, head of the Biden campaign. Bash testified that he said “yes,” Bash got Ricchetti on the line, and the Biden campaign representative thanked Morell “for putting the statement out.”
More Than Dirty Politics
Morell’s testimony revealed Blinken and the Biden campaign’s role in prompting the bunk statement from the former intel officials. But the contemporaneous media reporting exposes a larger scandal: Representatives of our government helped promote that narrative by falsely telling media outlets the FBI was investigating whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian-disinformation campaign.
The FBI’s role in assisting the Biden campaign’s plot transforms this case from one about dirty politics to a scandal involving government interference in the 2020 election. Accordingly, the House oversight committees need to determine which members of the FBI or intelligence agencies were responsible for the false media leak and whether anyone working on behalf of the Biden campaign collaborated with those government actors.
The committees thus need to gather evidence and question not merely Blinken, but every signatory of the statement, especially Bash; members of the Biden campaign, such as Bates and Ricchetti; and Biden advisers, including Carpenter.
While Blinken provides an entry point to unraveling the Russian-disinformation hoax, there is much more to learn.
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.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed in a floor speech on Tuesday that material reviewed by his investigative staff supported whistleblower allegations that the FBI falsely labeled evidence of potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family “Russian disinformation.” While Grassley had previously discussed the whistleblower allegations, he now confirmed for the first time that an independent review of the pertinent records supported the accusations.
In response to last week’s announcement by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he planned to offer a resolution denouncing former President Donald Trump’s call to defund the FBI, Grassley excoriated Democrats for remaining silent while the country faced an uptick in violence against law enforcement officers and the radical left pushed to defund the police. The Iowa senator then chastised Democrats for offering a political resolution that ignored the weaponization of the FBI, proceeding then to catalog the DOJ and FBI’s many abuses.
Here, Grassley stressed that protected whistleblower disclosures made“clear that the FBI has within its possession very significant, very impactful, and very voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family.”
“I know the FBI falsely labeled that evidence as Russian disinformation to bury it,” Grassley continued, revealing that his staff had “independently reviewed records” that support the whistleblower allegations.
Tuesday’s comments came some six months after Grassley revealed that the FBI had possession of “a series of documents relating to information on Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and his business and financial associations with Hunter Biden.” According to an October 2022 news release and an accompanying letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley said:
The documents in the FBI’s possession include specific details with respect to conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden. These documents also indicate that Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them.
At the time, Grassley noted it was “unclear whether the FBI followed normal investigative procedure to determine the truth and accuracy of the information or shut down investigative activity based on improper disinformation claims in advance of the 2020 election…” The senator also expressed concern over whether Weiss had independently evaluated the evidence.
Grassley concluded his October 2022 letter by requesting from the DOJ and FBI all records from Jan. 1, 2014, forward “that reference Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden and Joe Biden.” While his letter sought “all records,” Grassley explicitly highlighted several forms including, among others, FD-209a, which is used to record an “asset contract”; FD-794b, which is used to request a payment; FD-1023, which is used for a source report; and FD-1040a, which is used to close a source.
The specific documents requested suggest the whistleblower had claimed the FBI had a source that provided information on the Burisma owner and the Biden family.
While it is unclear whether the DOJ and FBI provided the documents, Grassley’s floor statement on Tuesday shows his office had access to records corroborating the whistleblower claims that the FBI buried evidence derogatory to the Biden family by framing it as Russian disinformation.
This latest revelation follows last week’s news that an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower claimed FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation into Hunter Biden and that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys declined to file tax charges against the president’s son, against the recommendation of career prosecutors.
Yet Garland and Wray remain silent. If it weren’t for Grassley’s various letters and floor statements, Americans would know little about the FBI’s political favoritism and the “get out of jail free card” they seem to be handing out to Hunter Biden at every opportunity.
But now that we know that evidence, likely including a confidential human source, was buried under the guise that it was Russian disinformation, will anything change?
Sadly, for all of Grassley’s efforts to expose the scandal, the last seven years suggest not.
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.
An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower hinted to congressional leaders last week that the FBI improperly blocked aspects of the Hunter Biden investigation and that Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys blocked an indictment against the president’s son on tax charges. The carefully worded letter also indicated Attorney General Merrick Garland had testified inaccurately when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. attorney had the authority to file charges against Hunter Biden in other jurisdictions.
Here are six reasons this whistleblower should terrify those behind the DOJ’s Biden family protection racket.
1. Whistleblower Has Corroborating Evidence
While Wednesday’s letter from the whistleblower’s attorney to the congressional oversight chairs spoke only in cryptic terms, as I detailed on Friday, individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” revealed the whistleblower had accused two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys of refusing “to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.”
The sources also claimed the whistleblower’s disclosures establish that Garland refused Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s request for special counsel protection and that Garland testified inaccurately when he represented to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss had full authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.”
It isn’t merely the seriousness of the whistleblower’s accusations that should shake those sheltering Hunter Biden, however, but the promise of corroborating evidence.
The whistleblower’s attorney, Mark Lytle, reportedly maintains his client can “identify contemporaneous witnesses to corroborate his claims of political interference.” The whistleblower will “be able to talk about these meetings that he attended, that were with both agents and prosecutors … and how he summarized those meetings and put it in writing and distributed those to folks within the IRS and sometimes other agents,” Lytle claims, adding that those contemporaneous memoranda and emails will “end up corroborating his credibility.”
Sources also maintain DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has already begun reviewing documents that purportedly corroborate the whistleblower’s claims. They say he has sought out both IRS and FBI witnesses, indicating several paths exist to confirm the accusations of political bias.
2. IRS Agent Is Nonpartisan and Credentialed
The whistleblower’s apparent nonpartisan pedigree is another reason for participants in the Biden protection racket to be afraid. The whistleblower is “not a political person” and does not have a “political agenda,” Lytle told Fox News last week. He “is a career law enforcement official who hasn’t made any political donations and doesn’t even use social media,” the IRS agent’s attorney told Just the News.
“He is just a guy who likes his job as a law enforcement officer, as an investigator, and he takes it seriously, and he’s dedicated,” Lytle explained, adding, “And when he sees something that is not routine and doesn’t follow the rules, or … something maybe is affected by politics — that’s what made him come forward.”
“My client wrestled with whether or not to come forward,” the whistleblower’s attorney told Fox News. He had “sleepless nights. He decided he could not live with himself if he stayed quiet and said nothing.”
Also strengthening the whistleblower’s claims of a nonpartisan motivation is his insistence that “when he comes forward, this is not to talk to just one party or the other party.” Lytle stressed his client wants both sides of the political aisle to “ask him questions and cross-examine him.”
That Lytle is one of the whistleblower’s attorneys will also negate concerns of partisanship, given the attorney previously represented Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, during the heated Republican-controlled weaponization hearings. Lytle is also “currently defending a former FBI supervisor named Timothy Thibault who has been accused of pro-Biden political bias.” Before retaining Lytle, the whistleblower hired “prominent Democrat lawyer Mark Zaid, who previously represented clients whose allegations about a call with the Ukrainian president led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.”
His dedicated service at the IRS will likewise bolster the whistleblower’s credibility. As an IRS special agent for more than 10 years, the whistleblower reportedly has been “trusted with international investigations,” received several commendations, and taught “other agents how to properly do investigations.” His lengthy experience will strengthen his claims that “protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances” were not followed in the case of the politically connected Hunter Biden.
3. Dual Authorization Was Required
The IRS whistleblower’s claims that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys inappropriately, and for political reasons, “declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden” carry more weight given the dual-authorization procedures required by the DOJ for criminal tax cases.
The Department of Justice Manual provides that the tax division oversees federal criminal tax enforcement. Thus, while a grand jury is empowered to investigate tax crimes, “the Tax Division must first approve and authorize the United States Attorney’s Office’s use of a grand jury to investigate criminal tax violations.” Accordingly, in tax cases, prosecutions generally require two independent assessments that criminal prosecution is appropriate.
In the case of Hunter Biden, both career investigators and career prosecutors in the DOJ tax division signed off on the recommended charges, the whistleblower maintains. That dual approval suggests the evidence underlying the proposed charges was strong. It also pits the two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys, who allegedly declined to seek charges against the president’s son, against the recommendations of two distinct sets of career employees.
4. Criminal Violations Seem Obvious
“Of course, Biden officials are interfering in his son’s case — why else has Hunter skated for five years?”
That title from former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy’s Friday New York Post article capsulizes perfectly another reason those running the Biden family protection racket should be shaking: The political favoritism shown Hunter Biden is obvious.
Who else could lie on a federal firearm form to purchase a handgun — only to lose physical possession of the gun and have it turn up across the street from a school — without getting charged with a federal crime?
As McCarthy wrote, “The gun offenses are so straightforward that they’d take a competent investigator five days, not five years, to wrap into a prosecutable case.” Likewise, “[s]ome of the tax offenses, which stretch back seven years or more, are so undeniable that liens were placed on Hunter’s properties…”
A public that for years has witnessed the president’s son escape any consequence for his clearly criminal conduct will easily nod along to the whistleblower’s claims of political favoritism: The IRS agent’s accusations aren’t just believable — they are self-evident.
5. The Timing Is Suspect
The timing also renders the whistleblower’s claims believable. Recall that in March of 2022, The New York Times began prepping the country for an indictment of Hunter Biden by soft-peddling his criminal conduct. The Times even previewed several potential defenses the president’s son could assert to counter the series of predicted criminal charges.
The Times article was a transparent attempt to get ahead of an anticipated story, namely that a grand jury had indicted Hunter Biden. But a grand jury indictment never dropped. Instead, about six months later, the whistleblower reportedly filed complaints related to the investigation with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General. The whistleblower’s complaints indicated charges had been recommended and approved by the tax division but never materialized because the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys did not seek grand jury indictments as recommended.
The New York Times’ efforts to groom Americans to discount the seriousness of the expected criminal charges wasn’t needed because the DOJ and FBI already had the president’s son covered.
6. The Scandal Reaches the FBI and POTUS
The Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys who allegedly declined to seek grand jury indictments against the president’s son are not the only ones implicated, however. The whistleblower’s allegations reportedly also reach FBI headquarters, although that does not necessarily mean Director Christopher Wray.
The unnamed sources further maintain the whistleblower’s disclosures claim that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” This accusation suggests political corruption beyond the refusal of the DOJ to charge Hunter Biden with tax crimes.
Whether the “specific DOJ employees” refers to individuals working at FBI headquarters or elsewhere with the DOJ is unclear. Either way, the whistleblower’s claim conflicts with Garland’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had left the matter of Hunter Biden to the Delaware “U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI squad working with him.”
Garland’s testimony suggests that whoever instituted those “strictures” acted without the authority to do so. That is bad enough, but the implication is worse: namely that either FBI headquarters or other DOJ employees have kept the president from being incriminated during the multi-year unraveling of Hunter Biden’s complicated “business” ventures.
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.
Did Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C., block the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden?
Accusations levied by an IRS whistleblower on Wednesday suggest the federal prosecutors did just that, contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent congressional testimony and raising an avalanche of questions concerning the independence of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation. Given the severity of the claims, the U.S. attorney should speak up immediately.
A cryptic letter sent to a slew of congressional committee chairs on Wednesday revealed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower’s claims of political interference in the criminal investigation of a high-profile, politically connected individual. While the letter omitted the specific details the whistleblower sought to present to the oversight committees, unnamed sources reportedly confirmed the criminal case concerned Hunter Biden; they also revealed several more scandalous claims.
In attorney Mark Lytle’s letter to the congressional chairs and ranking members, the Nixon Peabody partner explained that his client, “a career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent,” sought to “make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.” After noting that his unnamed client “had been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020,” Lytle broadly identified three disclosures the whistleblower was prepared to make.
First, the whistleblower’s testimony would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee,” the letter said. Second, according to Lytle, the career IRS agent would reveal the “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.” And finally, the letter claimed the whistleblower had detailed evidence of “preferential treatment and politics” that improperly infected “decisions and protocols.”
Individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” put flesh on the barebones allegations summarized by Lytle. Those sources claim Hunter Biden is the “high-profile” individual under investigation and “that at least two Biden DOJ political appointees in U.S. attorneys’ offices have declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.” The sources further claimed career prosecutors in the Department of Justice tax division had cleared the prosecution of Hunter Biden — something generally required in criminal tax cases.
The whistleblower, who had previously filed complaints with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General, decided to inform congressional oversight committees of the claimed political improprieties after hearing Garland’s March 1, 2023, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, sources claim.
During the Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned Garland on the ability of the federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, to pursue criminal charges in a different judicial district, without special counsel authority.
Garland responded that the Delaware U.S. attorney had been advised he has authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.” “If he needs to bring [a case] in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that,” Garland assured.
It was that testimony by Garland, who was reportedly the unnamed “senior political appointee” referenced in Lytle’s letter, that the whistleblower’s disclosures would reportedly contradict. Specifically, sources claim the whistleblower intends to reveal that the Delaware U.S. attorney sought permission to bring tax charges in other districts, but two U.S. attorneys appointed by Biden denied the requests. The whistleblower allegedly also claims that Weiss had asked “to be named a special counsel to have more independent authority in the probe but was turned down.”
Weiss’s supposed need to enlist the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys to move forward with criminal charges seemingly stems from a DOJ policy that criminal tax prosecutions proceed in the judicial district where the defendant lived at the time the pertinent tax returns were filed. And here, Grassley gave a clue of the U.S. attorney offices that allegedly refused to pursue criminal charges when he asked Garland whether the D.C. or California U.S. attorney’s offices had denied a request by Weiss to bring charges against Hunter Biden.
Garland responded that he did not know the answer to that question and did not want to “get into the internal decision-making” of the U.S. attorneys, but that Weiss had been advised he will not be denied anything he needs.
Grassley’s reference to the California and D.C. U.S. attorney’s offices meshes with details of Hunter Biden’s various residences. Before moving to California, the Biden son listed his residence in 2018 as his father’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, but he claimed a D.C. address prior to that. Hunter also rented office space in D.C. for Rosemont Seneca Advisors, one of his many LLCs — another basis for bringing a federal criminal tax case in D.C.
Biden has since moved to California, reportedly living in Hollywood Hills and Venice, establishing connections to the second judicial district Grassley referenced. Both Hollywood Hills and Venice fall in the Central District of California, so The Federalist asked the office of the Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada whether he had rejected recommendations of career prosecutors to charge Hunter Biden. A press representative said they had no comment.
The Federalist also contacted the D.C. U.S. attorney’s press office for comment, and a representative of U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said they neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation.
Whether these two U.S. attorneys prevented the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden is unknown — at least to the public. Weiss, however, knows what happened, and rather than force the whistleblower to suffer through what will surely be months of attempted character assassination, Weiss should clear the record.
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.
EXCLUSIVE: The White House on Thursday dismissed allegations from a whistleblower who claims the Biden administration has mishandled the federal investigation into Hunter Biden, and said President Biden has upheld his commitment to ensure the investigation is “free from any political interference.”
“Since he took office and consistent with his campaign promise that he would restore the independence of the Justice Department when it comes to decision-making in criminal investigations, President Biden has made clear that this matter would be handled independently by the Justice Department, under the leadership of a U.S. Attorney appointed by former President Trump, free from any political interference by the White House,” White House spokesman Ian Sams told Fox News Digital on Thursday.
“He has upheld that commitment,” he added.
The White House comment came after an IRS criminal supervisory agent seeking whistleblower protections said the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled by the Biden administration. The whistleblower is claiming “clear” conflicts of interest, including by giving the president’s son “preferential treatment,” and says politics are “improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, step off Air Force One at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y., on Feb. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation since 2018. The federal investigation into his “tax affairs” began amid the discovery of suspicious activity reports (SARs) regarding funds from “China and other foreign nations.” In 2020, it became known that the FBI had subpoenaed the laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden in the course of an existing money laundering investigation.
Hunter Biden confirmed the investigation into his “tax affairs” in December 2020, after his father was elected president. The investigation is being led by Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
Since taking office, the White House has maintained that the president never spoke to his son about his business dealings, and has continued to say that the president was never involved in them. Officials also say the president has never discussed investigations into members of his family with the Justice Department.
Ahead of his presidency, Biden’s campaign proposed a plan to “prevent the president or White House from improperly interfering in federal investigations and prosecutions.”
President Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrive at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington from a weekend trip to Rehoboth Beach, Del., on July 10, 2022. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
On the first day of his administration, President Biden issued an executive order establishing an administration-wide ethics pledge, which required officials to commit to conduct that “upholds the independence of law enforcement and precludes improper interference with investigative or prosecutorial decisions of the Department of Justice.”
But the IRS whistleblower is alleging the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled.
The whistleblower’s attorney, Mark D. Lytle of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Nixon Peabody LLP, wrote to lawmakers in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to say his client has been overseeing the “ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020 and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
Lytle informed lawmakers that his client has “already made protected disclosures internally at the IRS, through counsel to the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and to the Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General.”
Lytle said the protected disclosures “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” and involve “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.”
Since President Biden took office, the White House has maintained that he never spoke to his son about his business dealings, and has continued to say that the president was never involved in them. (Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)
Lytle also said his client has also detailed examples of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
“My goal is to ensure that my client can properly share his lawfully protected disclosures with congressional committees,” he wrote, offering to meet in person to provide more detail on his client’s testimony.
The letter was sent to top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the Senate Finance Committee, and the House Ways and Means Committee.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, as well as business dealings and ventures involving other members of the Biden family. The committee is investigating whether those business arrangements pose a risk to U.S. national security, and whether President Biden is involved.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
IRS Whistleblower on Hunter Biden Wants Protection
As predicted, Republicans turned up the heat on the Biden Crime Family. So, America and the world will soon learn just how far the tentacles go in the Biden family’s corrupt business.
Remember when Barack Obama’s IRS targeted conservative organizations? Lois Lerner got a wrist slap, and all was well with the Leftist world. Oh the irony.
An IRS special agent involved in the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes is seeking whistleblower protections to provide what are said to be sensitive disclosures about the probe to Congress.
Sensitive disclosures. The same sensitive disclosures the Bidens with help from Fed Chief Janet Yellen fought to conceal, perhaps? But thanks to the Chinese-owned Cathay Bank, the Republicans got a peek under the kimono.
The story continues,
Attorney Mark D. Lytle, a lawyer for the unnamed IRS employee, wrote in a letter Wednesday to a bipartisan group of lawmakers that he represents a “career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent who has been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high profile, controversial subject since early 2020” and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.
While Lytle did not name Biden in the letter obtained by NBC News, a source familiar with the matter who also verified the authenticity of the letter said the investigation in question refers to the federal probe into the finances of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Did not name Biden? How funny is that. Who else could it be that one would ask for whistleblower protection. Certainly not Trump or his kids. If you “drop dime” on the Trump, you get a medal. But if you drop dime on a Democrat, you need witsec.
As for authenticity, MSN isn’t the only source. The letter was previously reported by CBS News and the Wall Street Journal.
What does the IRS agent want to disclose?
Things will get ugly for Hunter Biden and the Biden Syndicate. Because according to Lytle, the IRS special agent is prepared to provide information that would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee”. Let be honest: this testimony will burn more than a “senior political appointee”. I can only imagine the conversation happening with the people involved in the coverups for the Bidens. Which goat will be selected for this suicide mission?
Along with burning at least on Biden appointee, the information provided will reveal failures to handle “clear conflicts of interest” in the case, as well as detail instances of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols.”
FBI Director Chris Wray: Is this thing on?!
We know the DOJ, and specifically the FBI helped the Bidens. But given the potential forensic cavity search this agent may have performed, who knows where this will lead. As one might expect, the Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department and IRS declined to comment.
Stay tuned boys and girls. The dam is about to break.
Whistleblower Disheartened: Hunter Biden Still Pulling Strings
It’s hard to grapple how the Bidens continue to get a hard pass for the MANY scandals they’ve orchestrated. Yet, that’s exactly what happens again and again.
In the months before the 2020 election, news of Hunter Biden’s laptop broke. Of course, leftists and the mainstream media branded the scandal a form of Russian disinformation.
Why would Hunter want to admit his drug binges, orgies with Russian hookers that were sometimes financed by dear old dad, Burisma payments, selling access to the Big Guy, or the many other scandalous behaviors the abandoned laptop unearthed? Taking ownership of one’s own wrongdoing is not a leftist skillset.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green just issued a statement regarding more proof of the unethical and often illegal behaviors the Biden family engaged in. Yet, we haven’t seen a Biden indictment, impeachment, or cancellation.
From Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:
We just finished reviewing the financial records in the treasury. What I saw was over 2000 pages of jaw dropping information. There’s basically an enterprise wrapped around Joe Biden involving not only multiple family members, more than we thought there were, but other people as well. Just a complete conglomerate of Lies. These shell companies where money was passing through from foreign countries. China, Ukraine, but many more countries than just those.
There’s a lot of information the American people deserve to know of the Biden family and the crimes they’ve been involved in. And the Oversight Committee has a much bigger investigation to do than we ever thought was possible.
I just saw evidence of human trafficking that involves prostitutes not only from here in the United States, but foreign countries like Russia and Ukraine. This is unbelievable that a President and a former Vice President, not only his son Hunter Biden, but many more family members extending past Hunter Biden and his immediate family.
We’re going to have to really get to work. This is an investigation that needs to be revealed to the American people. And not only do we have questions about Hunter Biden himself, but this is going to extend into developing a web of corruption, a web of fake companies that’s going to reveal money that came in from many foreign countries and went directly into the personal bank accounts of the Biden family where they have financially benefited directly from Joe Biden’s seats of power. We look forward to investigating, exposing for this for the American people and we’ll see where it goes from there.
The Biden crime family participated in human trafficking by soliciting prostitutes from the United States and abroad in countries like Russia and Ukraine.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 18, 2023
Pulling Strings
Of course, at this point we know what the crimes are. The only question is ‘why aren’t these crimes being prosecuted?’. It’s a disheartening situation, to say the least. Especially if you happen to be the whistleblower who stuck your neck out to hold these crooked leftists accountable.
An IRS Criminal Supervisory Agent seeking whistleblower protection claims the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled by the Biden administration. In a letter dated April 19, 2023, attorney Mark D. Lytle of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Nixon Peabody LLP tells members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate that his client has been overseeing the “ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020 and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
The story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News has since confirmed the story through a source familiar with the investigation that the subject at issue is Hunter Biden.
In Wednesday’s letter, Lytle said his client has already made legally protected disclosures internally at the IRS. The protected disclosures, Lytle notes, “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee.”
Lytle also said his client has information that the investigator failed to mitigate “clear conflicts of interest,” adding that the investigator allegedly allowed preferential treatment and politics to infect decisions and protocols normally followed by law enforcement professionals if the subject was not politically connected.
“My goal is to ensure that my client can properly share his lawfully protected disclosures with congressional committees,” Lytle said in the letter. “Thus, I respectfully request that your committees work with me to facilitate sharing this information with congress legally and with the fully informed advice of counsel.”
Representatives for the first son did not immediately respond to questions regarding the alleged mishandling of the investigation. The president’s son has been under federal investigation since 2018, which is being led by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a prosecutor appointed by former President Donald Trump.
Fox News first reported in December 2020 that Hunter Biden was a subject/target of a grand jury investigation, which was prompted, in part, by Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) regarding suspicious foreign transactions.
He has not been charged with ANY crimes.
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told Fox that efforts by the Biden administration to block efforts to charge Hunter were “deeply concerning.”
“The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has been following the Bidens’ tangled web of complex corporate and financial records. It’s clear from our investigation that Hunter and other members of the Biden family engaged in deceptive, shady business schemes to avoid scrutiny as they made millions from foreign adversaries like China,” he said. “We’ve been wondering all along where the heck the DOJ and the IRS have been. Now it appears the Biden administration may have been working overtime to prevent the Bidens from facing consequences.”
In the House Oversight Committee’s (HOC) latest update on its investigation into the corruption of President Joe Biden, Chairman James Comer announced several former Biden family associates have eagerly agreed to speak with Republicans about how they were “left out to dry” by the Bidens.
“It doesn’t look good for @POTUS,” Comer warned during a Fox News segment on Monday.
I now have access to the Biden family's suspicious activity reports from @USTreasury.
I have also subpoenaed Biden family band records.
And Biden family associates connected to the schemes are talking to @GOPoversight.
Comer said that the HOC is in discussions with four associates who have inside knowledge about the foreign dealings the Bidens made with several of America’s political enemies. This, combined with potential testimony from two other associates who are currently tied up in litigation concerning their roles in Biden family businesses, could give the committee proof that the White House is compromised.
“If you look at everyone who’s ever been in business with Biden, whether it be Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, none of them ended well, none of the businesses ended well. Most of the businesses never got started off the ground,” Comer said. “Any money that was transferred in from China or adversaries around the world ended up in the Bidens’ back pockets.”
Now, Comer said, the HOC also has possession of the Biden family’s “suspicious activity” reports from the Treasury Department and subpoenaed the family’s bank records which will expedite Republicans’ investigation significantly.
The HOC confirmed in March that several Biden family members, including Hunter Biden, James Biden, Hallie Biden, an unknown “Biden,” and companies linked to the family “collectively received $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to Rob Walker, a Biden family associate.” Within six months of Vice President Joe Biden leaving the White House and after several bank transfers, the Bidens received the money.
Comer said the HOC still did not know who the unnamed Biden was in the China transaction because the Biden family holds so many bank accounts and LLCs.
“That right there is a red flag,” Comer said. “That’s one reason they got so many bank violations. If they’re in a legitimate business, why do you have to have so many different LLCs, and why, when China sends you a wire, do you have to send it through one, two, or even three LLCs to launder it before then hits a Biden bank account? This whole thing stinks to high heaven.”
Despite this, Comer said that once the HOC gains access to the LLCs, it can assess the Biden family’s bookkeeping habits.
“It’ll be interesting to see how and if they paid any taxes on this revenue that was coming in from our adversaries around the world,” Comer said. “What all did they write off?”
He also expressed optimism about the speed of the HOC’s investigation thus far.
“This investigation is moving along at a lot faster pace, I think, than most people would have predicted,” Comer said.
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.
America’s two-tiered justice system status was solidified on Thursday after a Manhattan grand jury voted to hit former President Donald Trump with a felony indictment and the threat of imprisonment. Cue the chorus of Democrats and corporate media mouthpieces who spent all of Thursday night on Twitter condescendingly warning: “no one is above the law, not even the former president.”
In addition to suggesting that Trump is not “above the law,” former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed that the former president has the opportunity to “prove innocence” in court. Of course, the law, smugly touted by Pelosi, dictates that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty- not the other way around.
Whether Pelosi’s “innocence” comment was a Freudian slip or a genuine assertion, we may never know. What we do know is that for years, Democrats have operated under the belief that their party members and their partisan allies are above the law.
1. The Criminals Alvin Bragg Refused To Prosecute
While Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was busy searching for ways to indict Trump, violent criminals were taking over New York City streets.
During Bragg’s first year in office, major crime in New York City increased by 22 percent. Since then, the DA has made a career out of reducing charges for armed robbers, freeing cop-beaters, relaxing bail, and letting violent antisemites off.
Bragg’s soft-on-crime policies may have earned him left-wing billionaire financier George Soros’ favor and dollars, but even Democrat-voting New Yorkers know that he’s no stranger to giving better treatment to convicts than law-abiding people like this bodega owner who defended himself against a murderous criminal.
If Democrats truly cared about campaign finance law violations, they would have already prosecuted several members of their party, including Hillary Clinton.
In 2022, the Federal Elections Commission fined Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign for falsely attributing the money that the Democrat used to orchestrate the Russian collusion hoax. If Trump is guilty of intent to conceal a campaign finance crime, a motivated prosecutor might look at the DNC and Clinton campaign’s efforts to hide their involvement in the so-called Steele “dossier” and find they were guilty of the same crime.
In addition to her election meddling, Clinton and her staff mishandled highly classified information, which resulted in at least 91 security violations. Instead of raiding her house and asking the DOJ to prosecute her, 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.”
Clinton also played a central role in the decision to abandon four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, where they were murdered by terrorists.
3. Barack Obama
Before Clinton was forced to pay for her scheming, President Barack Obama faced “one of the largest fees ever levied against a presidential campaign,” $375,000, for “campaign reporting violations.” Instead of facing calls for prison time, Obama received years of protection from the corporate media and fake fact-checkers who repeatedly downplayed his violation as a proportionally small infraction compared to the billion dollars he raised on the campaign trail.
4. Election Law-Breakers Like Marc Elias
Marc Elias has repeatedly tried to undermine U.S. elections. He 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.
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 from places like China.
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.
8. Eric Holder
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.
9. 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 taken by the U.S. intelligence apparatus to justify spying on American citizens.
10. 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.
The same people 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. If Democrats truly valued rule of law, illegal border crossers, Russia hoaxers, Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, pro-abortion vandals, rioters, and the people who run corrupt government agencies like the Department of Justice, the FBI, the NSA, and the Manhattan DA’s office would be the ones standing in court next week, not Trump.
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.
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.
American Family Association
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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