A lot of congressional Republicans see a political slam dunk in thrusting their focus into the thick of anti-Israel protests raging at Ivy League campuses across the country, but to the protesters, there’s only one thing to say: This is what disappointment feels like. Get used to it.
Participants in the protests are demanding a range of things, from a simple “cease fire” in Gaza to something resembling more of what you might call a “final solution” in Israel. Republicans and Fox News are taking a special interest in the affair because of course all of the protesters are Democrat voters, and some of them are proudly allowing their anti-Jew flag to fly.
That makes things a little uncomfortable for the White House and Democrats in Congress, but so far, Joe Biden and Co. are managing to tolerate it. That’s because, with a giddy assist from Republicans, Democrats are within a baby’s breath of passing a nearly $100 billion foreign welfare package, about a quarter of which will go to Israel to continue its war campaign. Included in that portion is some “humanitarian aid” for Palestinians. (Enjoy!)
What’s not included in that handsome giveaway is anything of note that would directly improve the life of a single American on U.S. soil. There was nothing related to the collapse of the Southern border, nothing to address crime, and nothing to bring down the cost of groceries or the price of gas.
So, the anti-Israel faction of the Democrat Party feels put out by Washington? Don’t we all.
What they all need to understand is that the leaders they elected don’t care. Elected Democrats don’t share their interests. Likewise, elected Republicans just showed their priorities aren’t in sync with the desires of their voters, either.
I know it stings. Nobody likes rejection. But here we all are, as far corners of the world are taken care of by our tax dollars amid massive federal deficits and debt. Everyone here is fine, right?
Ultimately, what the protesters want is stupid anyway. After what happened on Oct. 7, Israel isn’t going to relent until it’s ready, just as any proud nation would do. That’s not to say Israelis should wage their battle at our expense, but that wasn’t my call. It was Washington’s. And Washington cares just as much about the preferences of anti-Israel activists as they do every other average American’s.
Get comfortable. Things aren’t going to change for a while.
In opening statements on Monday, Manhattan prosecutors sought to convince a jury that former President Donald Trump “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the Russia-collusion hoax — the real criminal scheme that was orchestrated to meddle in that election — walk free.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg claims Trump broke the law after he classified payments made by his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pornographer Stormy Daniels, as “legal fees” rather than campaign expenditures. (It is not illegal to purchase negative press about oneself, and Trump likely would have run afoul of campaign finance laws if he had classified such an expense, which benefitted him personally rather than just his campaign, as a campaign payment.)
Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, who formerly held a top post in President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, alleged Monday during opening statements that “this was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior.”
“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo continued, according to PBS News. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”
Manhattan prosecutors seek to put Trump in jail for up to four years. Meanwhile, the operatives who invented a hoax accusing Trump of being a Russian asset in 2016, commissioned a dossier of fake oppo research, and shopped it to the FBI — which then used the shoddy “research” as a basis to illegally spy on the Trump campaign — have received a light tap on the wrist, if any punishment at all.
Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer who commissioned the discredited dossier, received no punishment. The DNC and the Clinton campaign — which together provided funds for oppo research firm Fusion GPS to hire former British spy Christopher Steele, who put his name on the so-called “Steele dossier” — were fined $105,000 and $8,000, respectively, for labeling the payments as “legal and compliance consulting” and “legal services.” Clinton herself, who personally approved the decision to leak the false accusations to the press, was still suggesting the 2016 election was “stolen” from her as recently as 2022 and has never received any repercussions for the Russia hoax.
Russian national Igor Danchenko, the “primary sub-source” whose testimony Steele relied on in creating the dossier, “fed Steele false information about the Trump campaign, which a Clinton booster had invented.” Danchenko was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI about a 2016 phone call he claimed he received from an anonymous person who he thought was Sergei Millian. Danchenko claimed the anonymous caller revealed a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Russians. These claims were added to the Steele dossier.
Evidence presented to the jury, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland noted at the time, indicated that “Danchenko did not know Millian and had not received any telephone calls during the relevant time frame that might fit the description of the call Danchenko claimed he received.”
Nevertheless, a jury in a deep-blue Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. acquitted Danchenko in 2022.
Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also acquitted, despite evidence suggesting he lied to then FBI-General Counsel James Baker in 2016. Sussman “presented Baker with data and whitepapers that supposedly showed the existence of a secret communications network between the Russian-based Alfa Bank and the Trump organization,” Cleveland explained. “According to the indictment [from Special Counsel John Durham], Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe when he met with Baker, but falsely told his friend that he was coming on his own behalf to help the FBI.”
The only person who received any sentence was former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to forging an email to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Clinesmith, according to Federalist CEO Sean Davis’ reporting on Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s findings, “altered an email from a separate U.S. federal agency, believed to be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to falsely state that [Trump campaign affiliate Carter] Page had never worked with the CIA to investigate suspected Russia agents operating within the U.S.”
“In fact,” Davis wrote, “as Clinesmith was told by the operative, Page had worked with the CIA previously, as well as with the FBI.”
Clinesmith was sentenced to 400 hours of community service and one year of probation.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
President Joe Biden has an antisemitism problem. It is large and growing larger. It is his problem, and he can’t shed responsibility for it. In a nutshell: The people who work for him are not doing their jobs to stop discrimination against Jews in America. Anyone with eyes and ears can see and hear what has been happening in America for six months, and a climax of sorts was reached this weekend at Columbia and Yale Universities. Police have taken some action against the violent protesters at the New Haven and Upper West Side campuses of the two schools, but how did it reach this point? Why have the Biden Departments of Education and Justice been MIA?
The problem manifests immediately on the landing page of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights where any visitor finds this notice right off the bat: “The majority of OCR staff are working remotely because of the pandemic.”
Huh? The pandemic is long gone everywhere except the DOE. Everyone in the federal government should be at their desk and answering their phones or at least making it through a few emails a day. That would not be enough though. There should be task forces of DOE and DOJ personnel dispatched to every campus where these outages are occurring. Take the pictures. Make the first-hand reports. Become witnesses, not desk jockeys.
Even folks “working remotely” from the vast Department building at 400 Maryland Avenue SW in D.C. ought to be able to do the easy stuff of answering emails. The portion of the website titled “Race, Color, or National Origin Discrimination” includes what should be known to every DOE-OCR employee: “Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”
There is an online form for filing a complaint about unlawful discrimination —but it hardly seems necessary when every news organization and social media platform has produced coverage of the antisemitic harassment at Columbia and Yale and before that at Harvard, the University of Michigan etc.
Nevertheless, the organization “Campus Reform” has stepped up to wake up DOE-OCR by filing complaint after complaint about the rolling waves of anti-Semitism on American campuses.
Campus Reform bills itself as “America’s leading site for college news.” It also brands itself as a “conservative watchdog to the nation’s higher education system,” one which “exposes liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.” Maybe that’s why the Biden administration seems to be ignoring its emails: Complaints from conservatives don’t count.
“Our team of professional journalists works alongside student activists and student journalists to report on the conduct and misconduct of campus administrators, faculty, and students,” the organization adds. “Campus Reform holds itself to rigorous journalism standards and strives to present each story with accuracy, objectivity, and public accountability.”
Good for them and they have indeed been relentless in cataloging many of the antisemitic incidents and filing the complaints required by the Department of Education. To what end?
Dr. Zachary Marschall is the editor-in-chief of Campus Reform and in January he opined that the “beginning of the end is here for unaccountable, radical campus indoctrination.” Nearly three months later, however, the hatred is metastasizing, not abating, and not for lack of notice.
Marshall and his team have filed scores of complaints against the highest profile offenders like Princeton. But nothing has happened. No funds have been cut off; no civil rights actions filed in federal court by DOE-OCR in conjunction with the Division of Civil Rights at the Department of Justice. Why not? It’s certainly not for “lack of notice.” The answer has to be in either the incompetence or the ideology of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, or both.
The StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice has brought a private suit against MIT for the antisemitism there, but DOJ has not joined it. Finding any DOJ suit against any college or university for antisemitic acts since Oct. 7 is impossible. They aren’t in that business. Like the DOE-OCR, the feds at Justice have taken a vacation from enforcing civil rights laws when Jews are the victims.
In sharp contrast, the State Department appears set to sanction units in the Israeli Defense Forces that somebody at State believes are committing war crimes of some sort. Astonishing but true: Team Biden can find defendants to accuse of bad acts inside of Israel but can’t muster any response to our civil rights meltdown in the U.S.
At what point do American supporters of Israel and especially American Jews realize that the Democrat Party has reverted to the policies of the State Department throughout 1940 to 1944 —the era of Breckinridge Long? Don’t recognize the name? Read this.
Too harsh to compare the bureaucrats of today with Long? Maybe it would have been in October or even early November. But there has been six months of growing antisemitism in the U.S. generally and creeping anti-Israel policies inside the Biden administration specifically. It will be up to voters to punish this disgusting abdication of enforcement of the country’s civil rights laws coupled with a turn against our ally Israel.
Let’s hope no student has to be killed before DOE and DOJ acts.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Brett Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/TV show today.
President Joe Biden has been long accused of false stories that have ranged from an invented arrest with Nelson Mandela to a zombie-like train conductor. Some are more serious like lying about influence peddling by his family or constitutional norms. However, as a military history nut, one new story stood out this week. President Biden suggested that his uncle Ambrose “Bozey” Finnegan may have been eaten by cannibals in World War II. What is striking about this story is the specificity of the key facts … and the fact that they are entirely false (other than his uncle dying near New Guinea).
During a stop in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, Biden told the story of how Bozey may have been consumed by the natives of New Guinea.
“He was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid. He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones, and he got shot down in New Guinea. They never found the body because there used to be, there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”
The account appears in the official transcript of Biden’s remarks. He added “They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane.” It is not clear when that search occurred and where the additional plane parts were found given that it crashed in the ocean. However, it suggests that he later (as senator, Vice President or President) followed up on the story with the military in locating confirming wreckage).
The alternative would be to rely on a witness. Yes, there was a survivor who gave a detailed account, including how Finnegan and the others remained in the plane as it sank.
The more glaring problem is that Bozey was not flying a plane and was not shot down. It was not a single engine plane but a Douglas A-20 Havoc with two Pratt & Whitney R-985 Wasp Junior 9-cylinder radial engines. He was not the pilot but a passenger on a plane. (Indeed, he was not referenced in the official report as a pilot but a staffer at the Headquarters of the Fifth Air Force). The plane had mechanical problems and crashed near New Guinea. He did not disappear in a sea of cannibals but the actual sea when he and other passengers failed to get out of the wreckage.
“On May 14, 1944, an A-20 havoc (serial number 42-86768), with a crew of three and one passenger, departed Momote Airfield, Los Negros Island, for a courier flight to Nadzab Airfield, New Guinea. For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
That was not the only false claim made by the President in his remarks. However, the fake story led me to look into whether there were any accounts of pilots being eaten by cannibals. Surprisingly, there are accounts of Japanese troops engaging in such cannibalism.
One of the documented stories of Japanese cannibalism involved another president. George H.W. Bush was a combat pilot in World War II and survived being shot down over the Pacific during a raid on the island of Chichi Jima in September of 1944. He was not alone. Nine other airmen went down, but only Bush was able to evade capture because he bailed out over the sea. Nevertheless, he only survived because other pilots gave covering fire as he paddled away in a life raft.
The other eight were not so lucky. James Bradley’s book Flyboys: A Story of True Couragedetails the tragedy that unfolded. They were beaten and tortured and eventually beheaded. Major Sueo Matoba then had their flesh prepared for an officers’ feast and a party in his quarters. Also Captain Shizuo Yoshii hosted a similar feast and both General Yoshio Tachibana and and Rear Admiral Kunizo Mori, the army and navy commanders of the island, reportedly partook in the meals. The four airmen used for the meals were Marve Mershon, Floyd Hall, Jimmy Dye, and Warren Earl Vaughn.
As is often the case, the White House simply refused to address the false claim and made it sound like reporters were denigrating the service of his uncle by asking about the cannibal story. White House spokesman Andrew Bates declared “President Biden is proud of his uncle’s service in uniform” and emphasized that Finnegan ”lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”
Flyers reportedly posted around a Resource Center Matamoros facility in Mexico encouraged illegal immigrants — who are not eligible to vote in the United States — to vote for President Joe Biden in November, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. One of the organizations operating out of the Resource Center Matamoros (RCM) has ties to Biden’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose articles of impeachment the U.S. House of Representatives delivered to the Senate Tuesday afternoon.
The flyers, which the Oversight Project posted photos of on X, read “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” The Heritage Foundation said the flyers were first discovered by Muckraker but also confirmed to The Federalist that their own team had obtained a copy of one of the flyers “inside the RCM office.”
“The flyer in the X thread is a direct scan of the one our folks obtained on-site inside the RCM office,” a Heritage Foundation representative said. “The flyers were also posted all over the camp in the port-a-potties.”
Nevertheless, others have raised questions about the flyer, including Fox News’ Bill Melugin.
“I am extremely skeptical of this. The flier appears to be a word for word Google Translate copy & paste of a portion of the NGO’s English website, with ‘vote for Biden’ randomly added in at the end, when it does not appear on the site,” Melugin posted on X. “The translation is bad, then you have ‘bienvenidos’ spelled wrong and ‘todos con Biden’ added onto the flier with a Biden logo.”
Another social media user associated with a left-wing immigration group claimed to have spoken with the executive director of RCM and said the posters were “Totally fake” and “Made up by two posers.”
It is unclear whether RCM authorized the posting of the flyers, but the Heritage Foundation told The Federalist that because they found flyers in the RCM office, they have “every reason to believe” the flyer is from the organization. The Federalist reached out to RCM for more information but did not receive a response.
The flyers “appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA,” according to the Oversight Project.
These flyers were discovered by @realmuckraker throughout the Resource Center Matamoras (RCM) location including on the walls of port-a-potties
They also appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA pic.twitter.com/hvlkwOI5Xs
RCM says it is “a humanitarian organization that provides a safe space where refugees at the southern Texas-Mexico border can access legal and social support services.” Its “6-unit office complex” hosts the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which provides “legal assistance and assistance with obtaining formal documents for job search and integration into the city of Matamoros as [migrants] wait to access the asylum process in the US.”
RCM founder and executive director Gaby Zavala previously worked with La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE)– a left-wing organization that is partnered with the Open Society Institute, as pointed out by the Oversight Project. The Open Society Institute is funded by left-wing billionaire and mega-donor George Soros.
RCM also worked alongside Team Brownsville, a left-wing organization, and Angry Tias and Abeulas, which aims to help illegal immigrants cross the border, according to the Oversight Project.
RCM has significant ties to Soros-funded non-profits operating in the United States, including Save the Children, Team Brownsville Texas, and Angry Tias and Abuelas pic.twitter.com/cydCAM4PdE
Mayorkas — whose disastrous handling of the invasion at the southern border earned him impeachment by the House — was formerly on the board of HIAS and in his current role with the Biden administration has met with members of both Angry Tias and Abuelas as well as LUPE, according to Judicial Watch.
While illegal immigrants and other noncitizens are prohibited from voting in federal elections, federal voter registration forms simply require each individual to check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. The lack of any requirement that new voters show documentary proof of citizenship prompted former President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday to announce Republican legislation that would demand such documentation from new registrants.
The federal government currently prohibits states from requiring potential voters to provide such proof to register to vote in federal elections. States may require proof of citizenship to register for statewide elections, as Arizona does. But even in Arizona, a voter who attempts to register to vote with the state form but fails to provide proof of citizenship must then be registered to vote on a federal-only form.
During the 2020 presidential election, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, AZ Free News reported. President Joe Biden won the state by 10,457 votes.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
If a belligerent state launched 186 explosive drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 surface-to-surface missiles from three fronts against civilian targets within the United States, would Joe Biden call it a “win”? Would the president tell us that the best thing we can do now is show “restraint”? What if that same terror state’s proxy armies had recently helped murder, rape, and kidnap more than 1,000 American men, women, and children? What if this terror state were trying to obtain nuclear weapons so it could continue to agitate without any consequences?
This is what Joe Biden and the Barack Obama acolytes, Iranian dupes, and Israel antagonists he’s surrounded himself with demand of Jewish State. And by “Iranian dupes,” I don’t only mean the Jake Sullivans and Antony Blinkens of the world, who worked to elevate the mullahs over Sunni allies and the Israelis, or even a Hamas-bestie like Rob Malley or Israel-hater like Maher Bitar. I mean assets of the Islamic State who promised the Iranian government to help out in any way possible.
Their worldview is a cancer that’s metastasized within the Democratic Party. To these people, Israel will always be the villain. And if the Iranian regime’s murder of more than 600 American servicemen couldn’t cool that bromance, 1,300 dead Jews certainly aren’t going to do the trick.
To begin with, Jared Kushner’s Middle East policy efforts were, by every measure, more successful than not only Obama’s efforts but the decades of Brookings Institute-endorsed failures the region has endured. The Trump administration undercut Palestinian terror efforts, stifled Iranian ambitions, and created space for the Gulf States and Israel to enhance ties.
Biden immediately reversed those gains, reverting to Obama-era Iranian boosterism. We’re now experiencing the consequences of pacifying Islamic ideologues. Obama might have sent the mullahs pallets of cash in the middle of the night, but the Biden administration openly subsidized the Revolutionary Guard with a $6 billion ransom payment, at least $25 billion in sanction relief, including $10 billion via a waiver, and so on.
Let’s also remember that one of Biden’s first foreign policy decisions was to overturn Trump-era policy by releasing millions to Gaza that would be sifted off by Hamas, releasing funding to Hamas-allied UNRWA, and removing the Iranian-backed Houthis from the terror list.
But to truly comprehend how demented our foreign policy has become, consider this: Iran reportedly informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, and the U.S. told Iran through Ankara that the attack should be “within certain limits.” This is a longtime ally of the United States we’re talking about — and a foe that’s murdered and kidnapped Americans for decades.
It should be mind-boggling that Biden likely knew Iran was moving forward with its attack but still gave his goofy and impotent “don’t” when asked about it by the press.
Indeed, the Biden administration’s position seems to be that Israeli military and defense forces exist to allow Iran to have a hissy fit and save face. The Iranian attack is only “symbolic” because it failed. According to officials, the attack, indiscriminately aimed at civilian centers, was designed to cause “mass casualties.”
Just because you shoot at someone, and miss doesn’t mean you’re not trying to kill them. Yes, the Iranians were embarrassed. But they almost surely view this as a win. And they also crossed a red line by firing on Israel from their own territory. Yet Israel is apparently the only nation on Earth that is permitted to fully defend itself only if its enemies succeed.
Then again, virtually every conflict against Israel unfurls the same way: Its enemies threaten or attack the country. Israel responds and heads for a victory. Only then does the world demand “restraint.” Finally, the antagonists demand Israel rewind history to a more convenient spot. (Modern Democrats demand that Israel show restraint before it even has a chance to respond. That’s a new twist.)
Those, for instance, who contend that Israel started the conflict when it hit a “diplomatic mission” in Syria last week are engaged in restarting the historical clock when it suits them. There are no Iranian diplomatic missions in Syria. There are buildings where IRGC terror leaders coordinate attacks on civilians — against Arabs as well as Jews. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the “general” Israel killed last week, helped plan the barbarism of Oct 7.
Recall that the United States atomized Qasem Soleimani at a neutral nation’s airport. Though, of course, Obamaites protested that killing as well.
Now, it is something of a cliché to contend that Israel must be right 100 percent of the time while its enemies only need to be right once. It also happens to be true. The lo-fi Hamas attack last year was a devastating failure for the Jewish state and its leadership. Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a dense population area, relies on deterrence and preemption.
Democrats blamed their strawman, Benjamin Netanyahu, not Hamas or Iran, for trying to “drag” the world into war. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, perhaps the wrongest person ever to tread on this planet, theorized that the prime minister wanted “a war to shore up his own crumbling political base.”
Meanwhile, Axois reports that Netanyahu was reluctant to strike back while his cabinet wanted to move immediately. Anyone who’s paid five minutes of attention to Israeli politics knows that Netanyahu is frustratingly cautious. The “war hawk” perception of him is a myth, created by the left because of the prime minister’s open opposition to Obama’s mullah bootlicking.
We have no idea what Israel will do. Maybe caution is the best policy. The notion that the Jewish state simply lashes out in revenge and doesn’t rationally consider all its options is preposterous. Whatever happens, it should be Israel’s terms, not Iran’s.
President Joe Biden campaigned in swing-state Wisconsin on Monday to sell his latest student loan bailout program, a multibillion-dollar election-year bribe that delivers a shaky middle finger to the Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, the Democrat’s friends in the accomplice media regurgitated White House talking points on Biden’s Plan B loan- and interest-forgiveness initiative without mentioning the cost to federal debt-burdened U.S. taxpayers.
Under the proposal, debt would be canceled for people already eligible for certain federal student loan forgiveness programs. It would also cancel debt for anyone who began repaying their undergraduate loans more than 20 years ago, or graduate loans more than 25 years ago…
According to a press release, the plan would eliminate all accrued interest for 23 million people and cancel out debt for 4 million people.
The federally subsidized public radio outlet didn’t bother with details like the price tag to taxpayers. Neither did the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in its promotional piece for Biden’s new bailout. At least The New York Times, while performing its role of Biden administration water carrier, acknowledged, “Officials did not say how much the new plan would cost in coming years, but critics have said it could increase inflation and add to the federal debt by billions of dollars.”
How could it not? The New York Post estimated Biden’s latest bribe could rival his last failed student debt forgiveness program, a $400 billion-plus unconstitutional behemoth.
Who is going to pay to shrink student loan debt for 23 million borrowers? The complete bailout of 4 million Americans? Debt buyouts of $5,000 or better for 10 million college loan debt holders (More than $50 billion on that account alone)?
Taxpayers. Taxpayers with student loan debt. Taxpayers without student loan debt. Taxpayers of all kinds, particularly future taxpayers. Because unless Biden and Congress suddenly wake up and begin wholesale cutting government programs to deal with a $34.6 trillion U.S. debt — and rapidly rising — this borrower forgiveness plan will be borne by today’s consumers and future generations.
“We’re giving people a chance to make it,” Biden told an assemblage of liberals gathered in a gymnasium at Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin’s capital city. The Democrat will need to roll up huge vote totals again in the big-government city and left-heavy Dane County if he wants to win Wisconsin, a critical battleground he won by a razor-thin margin in 2020.
“Today, too many Americans — especially young people — are saddled with unsustainable debts in exchange for college,” Biden said in a 15-minute mumbling speech as a historic solar eclipse darkened wide swaths of the nation’s skies. An ominous sign?
‘Presidential Do-Over’
You didn’t need special glasses to see that Biden’s bailout, coming less than seven months before the presidential election, is designed to help bailout the octogenarian’s slumping poll numbers. The most recent RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Biden and former President Donald Trump in a dead heat nationally. But Trump leads Biden in six of the seven swing states, which have a significant say over who will occupy the White House next year, according to a Wall Street Journal poll. Biden leads only in Wisconsin, by 3 percentage points, according to the poll. Trump leads by as much as 8 points in North Carolina, and as few as 2 points in Michigan.
“Biden wants to use your tax dollars to buy votes because more and more young people are supporting President Trump,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement. He called Biden’s trip to Wisconsin the Bankrupting American Tour.
“Biden’s student loan bailout for the wealthy was already struck down by the Supreme Court and his policies are driving historic inflation,” Whatley added.
Indeed. Biden’s previous $400 billion student debt bailout order aimed at 43 million borrowers was released in the summer of 2022, months before the midterm elections. The Supreme Court struck down his executive fiat, declaring it an unconstitutional overreach of the executive branch. Biden has since dabbled around the edges, waving his presidential pen to knock out smaller amounts of outstanding student loan payments.
The Times called it a “presidential do-over.” That’s not a thing. At least it doesn’t appear to be a legal thing.
Last month, Kansas led 11 states in a lawsuit against Biden’s so-called SAVE Plan, which has canceled loans for more than 150,000 borrowers, according to the White House. The states charge that the president has again overstepped his authority and defied the Supreme Court.
The Job Creators Network Foundation sued the Biden administration over its debt cancellation initiative struck down by the high court. The lawsuit, filed in Texas federal court, blocked the bailout at the district level and halted the application process, “allowing the legal challenge to go to the Supreme Court,” according to the conservative advocacy organization.
‘A Blank Check’
Elaine Parker, president of the Job Creators Network, said Biden’s latest bailout suffers from the same fundamental problems. It illegally bypasses Congress and does nothing to hold the nation’s colleges and universities accountable for making much of the existing mess through exorbitant higher education costs.
“In fact, every time this administration forgives more loans, it’s a blank check to these universities telling them to keep raising their tuition like they have been and overcharging these students,” Parker told me Monday afternoon on “The Vicki McKenna Show.”
“The Biden administration is lawlessly ignoring the Supreme Court and Congress by launching another massive student loan bailout program… He is acting as a King, not a president,” – @Elaine_Parkerhttps://t.co/dI20l0P6Ic
— Job Creators Network (@JobCreatorsUSA) April 8, 2024
Biden’s boss, President Barack Obama, drove the massive federal takeover of the student loan program that has proved so costly. Former U.S. Rep. John J. Faso laid out the Obama-inflicted wound in September 2022. The New York Republican noted that Obama promoted the federal takeover of student lending as part of the bill that brought us Obamacare — the Affordable Care Act — in 2010. Another example of why you don’t pull a Pelosi and pass a bill “so you can find out what’s in it.”
“At that time, Obama proclaimed that by cutting out the ‘middleman’, taxpayers would save $68 billion. Banks would no longer underwrite student loans and the federal government would directly lend to students,” Faso wrote. “Every one of Obama’s promises turned out to be untrue. The program didn’t save any money. Loan defaults increased. Colleges accelerated increases in tuitions and fees and student debt skyrocketed. Today’s student loan mess was caused largely by Obama’s failed program.”
As he pitched his new attempted end-around of the Supreme Court ruling, Biden surely hoped the student loan debt-laden “folks” in swing-state Wisconsin would repay his taxpayer-funded generosity with their votes in November. The White says the new program could take effect “early this fall,” or not long before the election, the New York Post reported. Impeccable timing.
As Parker noted, Congress passed bipartisan legislation last year blocking Biden’s student loan bailouts by executive fiat. Biden vetoed it. She said other reforms are stuck in the Senate.
“Senate Democrats do not want to take it up and discuss anything remotely close to solutions because they are in an election year and their goal is to buy these votes,” she said.
Listen to the full interview with Elaine Parker of the Job Creators Network Foundation.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
During a recent segment on “Saturday Night Live,” Michael Che joked President Joe Biden, like the Baltimore bridge that collapsed, “is no longer connecting with black communities.” But for the Biden campaign, it’s not funny. In fact, the president’s low approval ratings and apparent inability to inspire enthusiasm among black voters could mean a repeat of 2016 for Democrats, if the enthusiasm gap is wide enough to outweigh Democrats’ ballot trafficking operations.
A poll surveying Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin conducted by the Wall Street Journal found that Biden is winning about 68 percent of black voters in those swing states — a low number, by historical comparison. During the 2020 election, Biden received 91 percent of the black vote nationwide, according to the WSJ.
The WSJ poll, which was conducted March 17-24 and included 600 voters in each state, isn’t the first to suggest black voters may be growing dissatisfied with the Biden administration. In November, a New York Times and Siena College poll found 22 percent of black voters in six key swing states would choose Trump over Biden. A December poll from the University of Chicago found 63 percent of black Americans would vote for Biden while 20 percent said they would vote for “someone else” besides Trump or Biden. Seventeen percent said they would choose Trump.
Lifelong Chicago Democrat explains her flip to voting for Trump. Clips like this should scare the crap out of Democrats. 🔥pic.twitter.com/oDFFiDLKgA
An NBC News poll also found that while black voters may still overwhelmingly favor Biden when compared to Trump, “the margin shrank” when it came to those under the age of 34. Biden’s support went from 73 percent among black voters of all ages to 60 percent amongst those under 34. Meanwhile, Trump went from 17 percent to 28 percent respectively, according to the poll. The demographic is key for Biden, who won “89% of Black voters under 29 and 78% of those 30 to 44,” according to the poll.
‘Overall Lack of Enthusiasm’
“It doesn’t seem like any choice is really a good choice at all,” 30-year-old Detroit native Kaja Braziel told NPR. Braziel, who voted for former President Barack Obama, said she’s upset Biden “hasn’t done more” to pay for her student loans and is not sure she will even head to the polls come November.
“It feels more so like you’re caught between the devil you know and the devil you don’t. And at this point in time, it feels like both the devils that we know. And I’m not comfortable with either of them,” Braziel said.
Ka’Marr Coleman-Byrd, 27, is a tax consultant who voted for Biden in 2020 but said as of now he has not made up his mind about the 2024 election.
“Growing up, I feel like I voted Democrat just because it just seemed like the thing to do,” Coleman-Byrd told NPR. “I’d say now … I’m sort of more into politics and seeing exactly what both parties present, so it’s not just like a blind vote in a sense.”
Then there is 31-year-old CJ Sampson, who told NPR that while he considers himself to be liberal, Biden does not inspire confidence. He said when comparing whether life was better under Trump or Biden, “it’s kind of a mixture of both.”
Team Trump appears eager to capitalize on the shift among voters. Trump received 6 percent of the black vote in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020, according to a Pew Research analysis. Now the former president is encouraging Republicans in key states like Michigan to reach out to black voters in Detroit and other areas, in the hopes of drawing them away from Biden, according to The Associated Press.
“This is part of Donald Trump’s path to victory,” CEO of Democrat firm HIT Strategies Terrance Woodbury told The Washington Post. “There’s about 32 percent of the Black electorate that’s just cynical, frustrated, closest to the pain, and that voter doesn’t like Democrats or Republicans. They feel like they’ve been failed by both sides and they’ve been failed by a system. And that’s a part of Donald Trump’s ‘the system is broken’ message that appeals to them.”
For Trump, the goal isn’t about “winning” the black vote so much as it is chipping away at Biden’s base.
“Nobody thinks we are going to win the Black vote,” an anonymous Trump adviser told the Post. “But if you get 10 percent or more, the election is over.”
Democrat strategist Doug Schoen contends that “overall lack of enthusiasm” is the biggest issue for Biden.
“I tend to think that black voters will probably come back to Biden in bigger numbers than they are now but that there’s an enthusiasm gap and turnout will be an issue for Biden,” Schoen told The Federalist.
Biden does not have much leeway. In 2020, he won states like Georgia and Arizona by less than 15,000 votes. Voters who decide to choose Trump over Biden — or even the couch over Biden — present a roadblock to the incumbent.
A 2016 Repeat?
If enough voters choose to stay home, Biden could run into the same problem Hillary Clinton did in 2016 when she lost by thin margins after millions of voters either sat the race out or voted for her opponent.
The Washington Post reviewed data from 33 states and Washington D.C. and found at least 1.75 million people who went to the polls in 2016 did not vote for a presidential candidate.
A separate review from Pew Research found that out of the “tens of millions of registered voters” who did not vote at all in 2016, 25 percent said their “dislike” of the candidate drove their decision. When broken down by race, 19 percent of black voters who did not vote cited issues with the candidates.
Clinton’s team misjudged their chances in Wisconsin, for example, where the NYT noted “Clinton had assumed she would win.” Trump ended up winning the state, which saw its lowest voter turnout in 16 years, by just 27,000 votes. (Trump lost the state in 2020 by less than 21,000 votes.)
Wisconsin’s District 15, which was 84 percent black during the 2016 election, saw the state’s biggest turnout decline in 2016 compared to 2012, according to the NYT. Several voters told the Times they were upset about the candidate choices — a common sentiment heard this go-around as well.
Since 2016, of course, Democrats have come a long way in institutionalizing their ballot trafficking operations, which make voter enthusiasm less of a gold standard. Even if enthusiasm for Biden remains dismal, Democrats will do their best to counteract it by harvesting ballots for voters who aren’t motivated enough to get themselves to the polls.
Biden Courts Anti-Israel Radicals
As Biden faces polling drops among black voters, he is also struggling among anti-Israel radicals. In Michigan’s majority-Arab Dearborn, “uncommitted” beat Biden during the state’s presidential primary. Statewide, more than 100,000 voters chose “uncommitted” in the primary, according to the NYT.
Schoen told The Federalist that Biden appears more concerned about losing the progressive wing of his party rather than black voters.
“I think Biden’s worried about progressives,” he said. “He’s worried about the left undermining him, he’s worried about Arab-Americans in states like Michigan and that I think explains in large part his movement … to a policy now that is going to condition military aid for Israel.”
“I’m more confident that black voters will come home [in November] than progressives and I think that’s what Biden thinks as well,” Schoen added. But will taking black voters for granted only give them more reason to be disillusioned with Biden?
Democrats in general seem less enthusiastic about Biden than they were in 2020. A Gallup poll found 42 percent of Democrats say they are less enthusiastic about voting than normal compared to 35 percent of Republicans. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released in January found 44 percent of Trump supporters scored their enthusiasm for Trump as a 10. Just 18 percent of Biden supporters said the same for the Democrat president.
It’s little wonder Democrats have tried to keep the election from being a referendum on the unpopular incumbent president. The campaign strategy appears to be fearmongering about “threats to democracy” and waging lawfare against Trump, instead of touting Biden’s uninspiring record.
Schoen said Biden needs to address Americans’ concerns about illegal immigration and inflation. Asked whether Biden’s messaging about alleged “threats to democracy” would increase voter turnout and appeal to dissatisfied voters, Schoen told The Federalist: “You can’t eat ‘threat to democracy.’”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Below is my column in The Hill on the recent disruptions of events featuring leading Democrats from President Joe Biden to Rep. Jamie Raskin. After years of supporting the censoring and blacklisting of others, these politicians are now being targeted by the very anti-free speech movement that they once fostered. Hillary Clinton last week became the latest Democrat targeted by protesters in a visit to her alma mater, Wellesley College.
Here is the column:
You are “killing people,” President Biden told social media companies a couple of years ago. He sought to shame executives into censoring more Americans. Biden has lashed out at disinformation by anti-vaxxers, “election deniers” and others. This month, those words were thrown back at Biden himself as a “genocide denier” by protesters who have labeled him “Genocide Joe” over his support for Israel.
After years of supporting censorship and blacklisting of people with opposing views, politicians and academics are finding themselves the subjects of the very anti-free speech tactics that they helped foster.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), for example, has been a leading figure in Congress opposing efforts to curtail massive censorship programs coordinated by the Biden administration. While opposing the investigation into past federal censorship efforts, Raskin continues to push social media companies to increase the censorship and silencing of Americans. Last December, Raskin sent a letter on behalf of other Democrats on the powerful House Oversight Committee demanding even more censorship, not only on election fraud, COVID or climate change, but also on abortion.
“We are troubled by the rapid spread of abortion misinformation and disinformation on your company’s social media platform,” he wrote, “and the threat this development poses to safe abortion access in the United States.”
When journalists and even other members testified in favor of free speech, Democrats attacked them as “Putin lovers” and fellow travelers supporting “insurrectionists.” Last week, however, the left turned on Raskin. He was giving a lecture titled“Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.”According to the Maryland Reporter, the protesters accused Raskin of being “complicit in genocide.” After efforts to resume his remarks, University of Maryland President Darryll Pines finally ended the event early.
Pines then pulled a Raskin. While mildly criticizing the students for their lack of “civility,” he defended their disruption of Raskin’s remarks as if a heckler’s veto were free speech. “What you saw play out actually was democracy and free speech and academic freedom,” he said. “From our perspective as a university, these are the difficult conversations that we should be having.”
There was, of course, no real conversation because this was not the exercise but the denial of free speech. The protesters were engaging in “deplatforming,” which is common on our campuses, where students and faculty organize to prevent others from hearing opposing views.
So, after years of Raskin encouraging the censorship of others, the mob finally came for him. The yawning response of the university was not unlike his own past response to journalists, professors and dissents who have come before his committee.
The only “difficult” aspect of this conversation is for university figures like Pines who are called upon to defend the free speech rights of speakers or faculty. They need to show the courage and principle required to uphold the free speech commitment of higher education, even at the risk of being targeted themselves. That includes the sanctioning of students who prevent others from hearing opposing views in classrooms and event forums. These students have every right to protest outside such spaces, but higher education is premised on the free exchange of ideas. There is really no further “conversation” needed, just a letter of suspension or expulsion for those who deprive others of their rights.
Deplatforming is the rage on our campuses. Universities often use it to cancel events for conservatives or controversial speakers. Often officials will sit idly by, refusing to remove protesters or deter disruptions. And that can lead to self-help measures by others.
Last week, Walter Isaacson, former CEO of CNN and the Aspen Institute, was accused of assaulting a Tulane student protester, Rory MacDonald, during an event held off campus. Isaacson, 72, who teaches at Tulane, was attending the university-sponsored event and had had enough when MacDonald became the eighth protester to stop the event. He stood up and shoved MacDonald into the hall.
MacDonald insisted that he and his fellow protesters were merely “peacefully interrupting” the event to stop others from speaking. He displayed slight scratch marks and is quoted as expressing a fear of returning to campus after the incident. Protests have been held on campus to have Isaacson fired.
I have long criticized the growing anti-free speech movement in higher education. Yet these students have been taught for years that “speech is violence” and harmful. They have also been told by figures such as Pines that silencing others is an act of free speech. Academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. In one instance, former CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek insisted that disrupting a speech on free speech is itself free speech.
Even schools that purportedly forbid such interruptions rarely punish students who engage in them. For example, students disrupted a Northwestern class due to a guest speaker from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (after the class had heard from an undocumented immigrant). The university let the protesters into the room after they promised not to disrupt the class. They proceeded to stop the class and then gave interviews to the media proudly disclosing their names and celebrating the cancellation. Northwestern did nothing beyond express “disappointment.”
At Stanford, law students prevented a federal judge from speaking. When the judge asked for law school officials present to intervene, former Stanford DEI Dean Tirien Steinbach stepped forward and attacked the conservative judge for triggering the students by sharing his views. After a national outcry, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Law School Dean Jenny Martinez issued a joint apology that notably did not include punishment for a single student.
These schools are enablers of the anti-free speech movement as much as figures like Raskin.
For years, academics supported such mobs or remained silent as their colleagues were cancelled or fired. Now they are suddenly discovering the value of free speech as the mob comes for them.
Censorship and blacklisting create an insatiable appetite. While Democrats fostered such efforts to silence conservatives and dissenters on vaccines, climate change, abortion, transgenderism and other issues, they now find themselves pursued by the very mobs that they once led. Just two years ago, Biden was celebrated for denouncing social media executives as “killers” for allowing free speech. Now he, Raskin, and others are accused of killing others with “Zionist disinformation.”
It is an epiphany that often comes too late. During the French Revolution, journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan remarked that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
After being strung up on charges by President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), a 71-year-old great-grandmother may be thrown in jail because she walked around the Capitol for a few minutes on Jan. 6, 2021. Rebecca Lavrenz was convicted on four counts Thursday after just three days of jury deliberation for entering the Capitol on J6. Lavrenz entered the building through an open door around 2:43 p.m., according to the official statement of facts.
Lavrenz told The American Spectator‘s Jack Cashill that she “felt that if those doors [on the east side of the building] opened I was supposed to go through.” Lavrenz exited the Capitol around 2:53 p.m., just 10 minutes after entering, having briefly spoken to at least one Capitol Police Officer before leaving, according to the statement of facts.
Two FBI agents showed up on April 19, 2021, to Lavrenz’s home in Colorado. Lavrenz told the agents she was in the middle of baking a cake for her son and asked if they could return at a different time, according to The American Spectator. The agents returned one week later for a “consensual interview,” according to the statement of facts.
After months of investigation, agents reportedly told Lavrenz she should be grateful the weaponized agency would only charge the self-described “praying great-grandmother” with four misdemeanor charges for entering a building her tax dollars pay for.
“Glad?” Lavrenz reportedly said. “I shouldn’t be charged with anything.”
Lavrenz was charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a capitol; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol, according to the criminal complaint. According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, Lavrenz could face up to a year in prison and fines of over $200,000, not including legal fees.
“My country is treating me like a criminal because I believe that they stole my rightful president,” Lavrenz said in an emotional video posted to social media. “And just standing up for my country makes me a criminal and it’s not right, it feels so weird to be here.”
JUST IN: 'Praying grandma' Rebecca Lavrenz has reportedly been found guilty by a DC jury after she briefly entered the Capitol on J6.
Glad to see our 'justice system' going after some "hard-hitting criminals."
Stewart Parks, who was sentenced to eight months in prison after being convicted of the same charges as Lavrenz along with theft of government property after he picked up a metal detector wand and walked around with it for a period of time, said on “The Vicki McKenna Show” that the Biden administration is trying to send a message that the so-called wrong kind of political protests won’t be tolerated.
“If you think about it, my house was raided and I was arrested on June 2, 2021, so I’ve been on a form of probation since that day,” Parks said. “I could have had four or five years if they had done it consecutively. These punishments are just way too harsh for a crime that wasn’t committed.”
The left has tried to portray Jan. 6 as a “violent insurrection” despite video footage and witness testimony contradicting the narrative. Tapes from the Capitol on Jan. 6 released by Speaker Mike Johnson after being withheld by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi show dozens of peaceful demonstrators walking through the Capitol as officers escort them or stand by, seemingly unconcerned.
Jan 6 defendants have long argued that the initial entrants were peaceably escorted into the building by Capitol Police, and therefore had no reasonable expectation that their conduct was unlawful
Why are those controlling President Biden using him to advance so much of a destructive agenda that it will likely end America as we know it?
If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day?
What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves?
Here are 11 now familiar steps to civilizational destruction:
1. Wipe out a 2,000-mile border.
Allow 10 million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal immigration laws. Let in toxic drugs that kill 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support to those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as racists and xenophobes.
2. Run up $35 trillion in national debt.
Keep adding $1 trillion to it each 100 days. Defame anyone wishing to cut wild spending as cruel and inhumane.
3. Appease or subsidize enemies like Iran and China.
Demonize allies like Israel. Allow terrorists to attack Americans without adequate response. See Islam as either similar or superior to Christianity. Make amends to leftist governments for supposedly past toxic American international behavior. Follow the lead of international agencies like the U.N., ICC and WHO to atone for past American neocolonial and imperialist behavior. Recede to second-tier international status, befitting American decline.
4. In a multiracial democracy, redefine identity only as one’s tribal affiliation.
Ensure each identity group rivals the other for victimhood and the state spoils it confers. Reboot all political issues by race and sex oppressors and oppressed. Destroy all meritocratic standards of admission, retention, promotion and commendation.
5. Recalibrate violent crime as understandable, cry-of-the-heart expressions of social justice.
Ensure no bail and same-day release for arrested, repeat violent felons. Empathize with the violent killer and rapist; ignore their victims, especially if they are slain police officers.
6. Emasculate the military by using non-meritocratic standards of race, gender, and sexual orientation to determine promotion and commendation.
Deliberately impugn as racists and insurrectionists the largest demographic in the military who in recent wars died at twice their numbers in the population — so that they leave or never join the military. Encourage retired high officers to slander their commander-in-chief. Cut the defense budget. Stop producing sufficient weapons, but leave billions of dollars’ worth of arms to terrorists.
7. Reinvent the justice system to indict, bankrupt, convict, jail and eliminate political opponents.
Use ballot removal, impeachment, civil suits, and state and federal indictments rather than elections to defeat an opponent. Mob the homes of non-compliant Supreme Court justices, and attack them personally by name.
Members of the Supreme Court, from left: Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas; Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.; and Associate Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh pose in the Justices Conference Room prior to the formal investiture ceremony of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30, 2022. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)
8. Encourage the fusion of the bureaucratic state with the electronic media to form a powerful force for political audit, surveillance, censorship and coercion.
Marry the FBI to Silicon Valley and hire its contractors to warp the news and hound supposed enemies of the people.
9. Make war on affordable gasoline and natural gas.
Substitute inefficient, unreliable and expensive wind and solar power, even as energy prices nearly bankrupt the middle class.
10. Marry late, but preferably not at all.
Consider males toxic, especially boys. Have no children, or as few as possible. Otherwise, assure children they are entitled, and must be sheltered. Raise them to have grievances against past generations and current norms.
11. Turn world-class universities into indoctrination centers.
Suspend the Bill of Rights on campuses. Train youth to graduate despising their own culture and civilization. Recruit foreign students from hostile nations to subsidize campus commissar bloat. Replace the curriculum with therapeutic propaganda. Ban the SAT/ACT and do not evaluate comparative high school GPAs. Ensure merit does not select the student body. Charge tuition higher than the rate of inflation. Bill the government when students default on their loans.
1. They are delusional and think their socialist and globalist agendas are working and will save us.
2. They are raging nihilists who do not like the U.S. and deliberately want it destroyed as a service to the world. A ruined U.S. is preferable to a strong America.
3. They are Jacobin revolutionaries who are intentionally erasing the old United States as a prerequisite for creating an entirely new America that will arise from the ashes with no trace or even memory of its past.
4. They have no agenda. They are aimless fools and utter incompetents. These bunglers just wing it day-to-day, in response to what their radical media, academic and political masters dictate is necessary for them to retain power. They have no idea of the damage they are doing.
5. A bit of 1-3, but probably not 4.
There is cause for hope among this nihilist remaking of America: the people are fed up and will demand an accounting in the fall.
Editor’s note: This op-ed is adapted from a tweet by the author.
EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — President Joe Biden plans to visit Baltimore this week following the devastating collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. While the loss of life and devastation of crucial infrastructure certainly warrants a presidential visit, one can’t help but wonder why Biden lacked similar urgency when it came to East Palestine, Ohio.
In February 2023, 38 cars — several containing hazardous materials, notably vinyl chloride monomer — on a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in the heart of East Palestine. Fearing these tankers might explode, representatives from Norfolk Southern, along with individuals from the village fire department and Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, opted to “vent and burn” the vinyl chloride. The burn released hazardous chemicals into the community’s air, waterways, and soil. Village residents experienced a slew of concerning health symptoms as a result of the now-unbreathable air and toxified environment. Thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, and local employers had no other option but to close their doors.
This past September, more than eight months after the derailment, President Biden issued an executive order mobilizing federal agencies to oversee cleanup efforts, monitor environmental and public health consequences, and provide additional resources to members of the affected communities. Biden also called for Norfolk Southern to be held accountable for any wrongdoing it may have committed during the incident. Village residents remain unconvinced, however, that any of this will have a positive effect.
We are now a little over a year removed from the incident. While signs of progress bring cautious optimism for the village’s prospects, numerous questions and concerns remain. Chief among these is how the community continues to cope with the circumstances thrust upon it and, crucially, what preventative measures are being implemented to prevent a similar tragedy from recurring.
“We’re still on the path to recovery,” East Palestine Village Manager Chad Edwards told The Federalist. “Some people are still reporting symptoms from the chemicals, but it’s not a large number, which doesn’t make it any less concerning.”
The village draws its drinking water from an aquifer, so there was never any major concern about contamination, but air quality remains an area of focus. “It’s very important the people who were here at the time of the derailment aren’t forgotten about in 20 years,” Edwards said, continuing the conversation about health effects. “What I’m hearing from the experts at the EPA is that we don’t know if there will be long-term side effects from the air quality.”
But there are people in the village who are currently facing serious medical issues related to pollution from the controlled burn. Residents still experience health issues from airborne pollution, some people still have physical reactions when they enter homes exposed to chemicals from the burn, and the nearby Beavercreek Watershed has an abundance of signage warning people to “keep out.”
Chris Albright, an East Palestine resident, began experiencing “really bad headaches” about two weeks after village residents were allowed to move back into their homes following the controlled burn. “Anytime I got close to home, I would just get a horrible headache, and I never get headaches,” he told The Federalist.
Alongside these headaches, Albright was experiencing random bouts of vomiting and persistent fatigue. Ultimately, his physicians determined he was suffering from rapid-onset congestive heart failure. The chemicals released by the burn are believed to have greatly exacerbated Albright’s condition and contributed to his deteriorating health.
“I’m not an obese guy; I’m very active,” said Albright, who has little faith in the “experts” from the government upon whom the community relies for information about air quality. “Because of this, I’ve been unable to work. I actually lost my health benefits at the end of [2023].”
Despite having a “Family Resource Center” in the village, Norfolk Southern, the entity responsible for the burn, has not provided Albright any assistance beyond hotel reimbursement. “I have not heard a word from Norfolk Southern,” he said. “I’ve never had anybody reach out and never received any correspondence other than how to get reimbursed for our hotel when we had to leave our house [because of the burn].”
When speaking with The Federalist, Village Manager Edwards noted that Norfolk Southern was “revamping” the community’s park, a project estimated to cost around $25 million. “I think they’ve done above and beyond what they’ve really had to do,” he said.
Experiences like Albright’s, life-altering circumstances with no assistance, inspired community members to act.
Chris Neifer, the superintendent of East Palestine City Schools, told The Federalist that shortly after the derailment and controlled burn, school leadership delivered various products to people throughout the village, set up community game nights, and “different things to keep kids’ minds off of not having to deal with the adult problems.”
“We had determined as a team that we were not going to be victims of this,” Neifer said.
Jami Wallace, a lifelong resident of East Palestine who said she has 47 family members living within one mile of the train derailment sight, turned to community organizing when she was told by a toxicologist that her family could become exposed to contaminated creek water through a basement leak. Structuring the East Palestine Unity Council (EPUC) after her union, Wallace created the organization so people invested in the community could raise awareness of specific issues they continue to struggle with and fill in the gaps where the government falls short.
The EPUC is a self-declared “oversight board” committed to ensuring “the right of the people to maintain clean air, water, and soil” that aims to represent “all members of the [East Paletine] community[] and surrounding areas affected by the derailment.”
Documents viewed by The Federalist that were sent to the Biden administration by the Government Accountability Project on behalf of the EPUC further detail village residents’ grievances. According to these organizations’ substantiated claims, the EPA refused to test residents’ property for contamination, only tested the polluted area for a small amount of “more than 100 other dangerous compounds that were formed by the burning,” misled the public about the levels of harmful chemicals in the area, and more.
The organization has already met with several federal officials, including members of the Biden administration. However, perhaps the village’s most committed advocate in government remains Ohio’s junior U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, who visited the area almost immediately after the incident occurred and championed bipartisan rail safety legislation.
During a full committee hearing on the National Transporation Safety Board’s (NTSB) Investigations Report last month, Vance got NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy to state on the record that the controlled burn was entirely unnecessary and that Norfolk Southern contractors lacked sufficient evidence justifying the operation.
During Vance and Homendy’s exchange, it was further established, based on previous reports, that following derailment, the vinyl polymers were decreasing in temperature (thus reducing the risk of an uncontrolled explosion); Norfolk Southern was not of the mentality that a chemical reaction resulting in an explosion was imminent, and on-site representatives of the company were properly informed that a controlled burn lacked sufficient scientific basis; and Norfolk Southern representatives disregarded available data and contradicted this expert feedback.
Norfolk Southern, in turn, relayed inaccurate information to the governor of Ohio, who was one of the people responsible for authorizing the controlled burn. Had the company’s representatives relayed accurate information, this whole ordeal could have been avoided. In March 2023, the state of Ohio and the Department of Justice filed separate suits against Norfolk Southern.
“The fallout from this highly preventable incident may continue for years to come, and there’s still so much we don’t know about the long-term effects on our air, water and soil,” Ohio AG Dave Yost told The Washington Post.
Norfolk Southern did not respond to The Federalist’s multiple requests for comment.
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.
Crooked Joe Biden gives the ol’ Truman saying “the buck stops here” a completely different meaning. Not only is Biden totally corrupt, but also his minions in the DOJ and FBI that protect him while going after President Trump for frivolous charges that they know Biden has actually committed.
Hunter Biden’s Business Associates Hang Joe and Hunter Out to Dry! Biden Corruption is Real! (VIDEO)
By Grant Stinchfield – March 20, 2024
Biden family business associates testified before Congress today, and they did not hold back. It’s all part of the Biden Impeachment proceedings. The witnesses provided direct evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in the influence-peddling scheme. From text messages to conference calls, Joe Biden used his position of power to line his pockets.
The Biden associates laid out dates, times, and personal meetings that they insist prove Joe Biden is “The Big Guy.” … READ MORE...
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 Trump.
With a cross of ash on his forehead, Catholic Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, leads the recession of the Mass on Ash Wednesday at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on Feb. 22, 2023. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., said in an interview over the weekend that President Joe Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” which parts of Catholicism he will adhere to. Gregory appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday with the female Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, where he discussed the Catholic president’s open support for issues such as abortion that are in direct contradiction with Catholic Church teaching.
Biden, who describes himself—and has been described by establishment media—as a “devout Catholic,” is open about frequently attending weekly Mass. But the president heads the most pro-abortion administration in United States history; promotes transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, even for children; and celebrates transgender ideology.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a crime against human life, that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” and “close the sexual act to the gift of life.”
Although Gregory said that Biden is “very sincere about his faith,” the cardinal added that Biden “picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts.”
“There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a ‘cafeteria Catholic,’ [in which] you choose that which is attractive and dismiss that which is challenging,” Gregory explained.
DC’s @WashArchbishop Wilton Gregory: Joe Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” what parts of Catholicism to actually adhere to or ignore (like abortion). pic.twitter.com/i0Cbs226Uf
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 1, 2024
Gregory continued: “I would say there are things, especially in terms of the life issues, there are things that he chooses to ignore.”
“The issues of life begin at the very beginning. And they conclude at natural death,” the cardinal said. “And you can’t pick and choose. You’re either one who respects life in all of its dimensions, or you have to step aside and say, ‘I’m not pro-life.’”
The Archdiocese of Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal. But the cardinal’s remarks drew praise from Catholics on social media, among them The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who described Gregory’s comments as “marvelous.”
Good to see some faithful moral leadership from the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington, especially at a time when the seat of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington is vacant. https://t.co/QqHcI7pKWf
Gregory sparked a backlash in November 2020 when he said in an interview with a leftist Jesuit outlet, America Magazine, that he would not deny Communion to Biden at Mass.
“The kind of relationship that I hope we will have is a conversational relationship, where we can discover areas where we can cooperate that reflect the social teachings of the church, knowing full well that there are some areas where we won’t agree,” Gregory told America Magazine at the time.
His stance drew criticism from traditional Catholics, who argued that Biden’s open embrace of unrestricted abortion constituted a grave scandal.
In September 2021, however, the cardinal offered a rare rebuke of Biden’s denial that life begins at conception, telling the president: “The Catholic Church teaches, and has taught, that human life begins at conception, so the president is not demonstrating Catholic teaching.”
He added: “Our church has not changed its position on the immorality of abortion. I don’t see how we could, because we believe that every human life is sacred.”
The White House would not address Gregory’s most recent remarks. Instead, White House deputy press Secretary Andrew Bates mocked The Daily Signal, the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, saying, “We refer The Heritage Foundation to the Office of Public Engagement. You have reached the press office.”
While millions of Christians throughout the world celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ this weekend, the Biden administration was busy hawking the demonic ideology of transgenderism.
On Good Friday, President Joe Biden, who claims to be a “devout Catholic,” issued a proclamation declaring March 31, 2024 — the same day as Easter Sunday — to be the “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Because, as everyone knows, we don’t have enough faux holidays commemorating the rainbow mob, right?
“Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans: You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong. You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back,” Biden wrote.
Like clockwork, White House officials and prominent Democrat politicians celebrated the declaration. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul took her LGBT obsession a step further by issuing her own proclamation dubbing March 31 a “Transgender Day of Visibility” and illuminating 13 state landmarks in so-called “trans colors” in recognition of the made-up holiday.
Biden’s declaration came the same day it was revealed that children were prohibited from submitting Easter egg designs with “religious symbols” for the administration’s 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” event. According to the guidelines, submissions “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”
An Anti-Christian Pattern
Make no mistake. The White House was sending a message to faithful Christians across America this Holy Week: Your beliefs are no longer welcomed here.
During his presidency, Biden has effectively declared war on Christianity. From prosecuting peaceful pro-lifers protesting outside abortion facilities to infiltrating and surveilling Catholic churches, he and his administration have gone to extreme lengths to persecute Americans who worship God instead of government.
Recall when a trans-identifying shooter murdered innocent Christians, including children, at a Nashville Christian school last year. It wasn’t the victims’ families or their Christian faith the White House and Democrats uplifted after the horrific attack, but the (reportedly anti-white) shooter and “transgender community.” In the weeks following the shooting, Democrats across America’s conquered institutions — from legacy media figures to “Saturday Night Live” — rushed to paint trans-identifying individuals as the victims of transphobic Republicans Why? Because transgenderism is one of the main tenets of Democrats’ pagan faith, meaning any narratives and facts undermining it must be stamped out.
The same worldview underlies the Biden administration’s “Transgender Day of Visibility” stunt, leading the neo-pagans to dismiss and desecrate the holiest day of the Christian calendar.
That’s because Christianity is antithetical to the pagan religion of leftism, which has all its own dogmas, sacraments, rituals, and judgments.
Child sacrifice is sacred.
Antiracism is a creed.
Wrong-sex hormones and mutilative surgeries are the way to (your) truth and life,
and neopronouns are regular recitations.
Faithful leftists give to the poor by giving to the state.
Affirmations of sin are daily expressions of self-worship.
“Pride” is a spiritual celebration.
And wrongthink is confessed through struggle sessions and punished through cancel culture.
The only religious element the left’s neo-paganism doesn’t offer is grace or hope. And unlike Christians, who worship a God who explicitly claims to be the Truth and thus defines it, leftism disregards the idea of objective truth altogether. That’s why, for example, Democrats insist people can change their sex by simple declaration.
Democrats Embrace Paganism
Without objective truth, however, there is no shared understanding of “right” and “wrong,” leading to the justification of immoral behaviors and actions. We see this with the normalization of pedophilia with terms like “minor-attracted persons.”
Or consider Democrats’ defense of surgically and chemically mutilating healthy bodies beyond repair. Similar to how they justify killing unwanted preborn children — and not only justify but celebrate with campaigns like “shout your abortion” — leftists employ subjective arguments like “my body, my choice.” They contend it’s good and compassionate for people to reject their God-given physical embodiment and remake themselves into their own image. Notice the left’s warped religious appeals — and implications.
My colleague John Daniel Davidson further examines these phenomena in his new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. According to Davidson, America’s devolution stems from its embrace of modern secularist ideals and simultaneous abdication of Christianity. He writes:
[T]he radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine.
The modern Democrat Party champions all the pagan impulses of leftism. Its members regularly disregard objective truth and morality, all while touting their pain-inducing policies as “kind” and “compassionate” — and there’s no tolerance for beliefs that reject their paganism.
Christians must confront and defeat this unholy takeover of American society. Otherwise, they risk sacrificing what’s left of the country to the evil forces seeking to destroy it.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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
House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer has sent a seven-page letter (below) to invite President Joe Biden to testify in the Republican impeachment inquiry. The letter is the latest, and best, reduction of the glaring contradictions in the President’s past statements on his family’s well-documented influence peddling operation. President Biden is not expected to testify. However, the media should be interested in his answering the questions presented by the Committee. It is now clear that the President lied during his campaign and during his presidency on his lack of knowledge of his son’s business activities as well as his denial of any money gained from China. Yet, the White House responded, again, with mockery — a sense of impunity that only exists due to an enabling media.
Chairman Comer reduces the past testimony and evidence acquired by the Committee in the corruption scandal. In the last hearing, Democratic members simply refused to acknowledge that evidence. There was a bizarre disconnect as members mocked the witnesses for not supplying evidence of the President’s knowledge or involvement. They then did so and the members declared that there was no evidence.
Various members also misrepresented my earlier testimony during the hearing on the basis for the impeachment inquiry. Members like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) stated that I joined other witnesses in stating there was nothing that could remotely be impeachable in these allegations. That is demonstrably untrue. My testimony stated the opposite. I refused to pre-judge the evidence, but stated that there was ample basis for the inquiry and laid out various impeachable offenses that could be brought if ultimately supported by evidence. I also discussed those potential offenses in columns. The purpose of the hearing was not to declare an impeachment on the first day of the inquiry. Unlike the two prior impeachments by many of these same Democratic members, this impeachment inquiry sought to create a record of evidence and testimony to support any action that the House might take.
Now, the Committee has laid out the considerable evidence showing that the President had lied, knowingly and repeatedly.
Interspersed with specific evidentiary findings, the Committee presents ten questions that the President should be able to answer directly and unequivocally:
Have you met, spoken to, or otherwise interacted with Jonathan Li of Bohai Industrial Fund and/or Bohai Harvest Rosemont?
Have you met, spoken to, or otherwise interacted with Ye Jianming of CEFC?
Have you met, spoken to, or otherwise interacted with Henry Zhao of the Harvest Fund?
Have you met, spoken to, or otherwise interacted with Vadym Pozharskyi of Burisma Holdings?
Have you met, spoken to, or otherwise interacted with Mykola Zlochevsky of Burisma Holdings?
Have you met, spoken to, or otherwise interacted with Kenes Rakishev of Novatus Holding?
Have you met, spoken to, or otherwise interacted with Yelena Baturina?
Have you met, spoken to, or otherwise interacted with Yuriy Luzhkov?
Did you ever ask your brother James Biden about the source of the funds he used to pay or repay you?
Did Eric Schwerin have insight into all your bank accounts until December 2017?
In response, the White House Counsel’s office again responded with mockery and taunting. I have previously discussed (including in my testimony in the Biden hearing) how the role of the White House staff in these denials can raise serious questions under the impeachment inquiry.
That has not deterred White House Counsel spokesperson Ian Sams, who has been previously accused of misrepresenting facts and engaging in heavy-handed treatment of the media. Sams responded to the letter:
“LOL. Comer knows 20+ witnesses have testified that POTUS did nothing wrong. He knows that the hundreds of thousands of pages of records he’s received have refuted his false allegations. This is a sad stunt at the end of a dead impeachment. Call it a day, pal.”
The involvement of a member of the White House Counsel’s staff issuing such a disrespectful and taunting message would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Yet, the media has enabled such denial and deflection by showing no interest in the answers to any of these questions. It is part of the genius of the Biden management of this scandal. The White House quickly got reporters to buy into the illusion, making any later recognition impossible for these reporters. It is Houdini’s disappearing elephant trick applied to politics.
Even if most of the media refuses to demand answers, the public has a right to hear directly from the President on these specific questions. President Biden can still deny all of this countervailing evidence and “say it ain’t so,” but he should say something.
Leftists bragged about how they “fortified” the 2020 election against Trump. Now the same “democracy is at stake” shills are flaunting their plans for 2024, and they sound awfully familiar.
Democrats are already sowing seeds of distrust — and perhaps projection — with an unnamed source whispering to Rolling Stone that Biden “has been worried … that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election.”
“Biden and his inner circle have been drawing up meticulous plans and creating a large legal network focused on wargaming a close election finish,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, citing undisclosed Democratic operatives who fret about a contested 2024 election. “Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, ‘all-hell-breaks-loose’ scenarios.”
Biden’s legal team is reportedly “preparing legal strategies for scenarios involving recounts that would make, in the words of one Biden official, ‘make Florida in 2000 look like child’s play.’”
Biden’s team has partnered with a “vast network of liberal attorneys and legal groups” that have already drafted pleadings and motions for any kind of election-related fight. Biden’s team is also reportedly working with local law firms to “actively monitor what is happening on the ground” in key swing states like Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania — all of which Biden narrowly won just four years ago, and all of which saw their elections plagued by chaos, scandal, and a lack of transparency in 2020.
A representative for the Democratic National Committee told Rolling Stone the party has also set aside “tens of millions of dollars in a robust voter protection program to safeguard the rights of voters.”
Rolling Stone all but dismisses the possibility that Trump could defeat Biden outright in 2024 — making the bizarre claim that winning would be “almost irrelevant” to the Trump team’s goals — and instead treats a razor-thin Biden victory as the assumed scenario. Noticeably absent from the article is a discussion of what happens if Trump wins narrowly. Would Biden graciously concede? Rolling Stone appears to be telegraphing that he has no plans to.
Campaign Strategy: Bidenbucks and Lawfare
The Biden administration has been working overtime to tilt the balance of the electorate since taking office. One way they’ve done this is by funneling taxpayer dollars into initiatives meant to increase voter turnout — specifically voters who will likely vote blue.
Soon after taking office, Biden issued Executive Order 14019, which directs federal agencies to use taxpayer funds to interfere in elections, including by voter outreach targeted at likely-Democrat voters. The Department of Education, for example, recently released a “toolkit” that gives guidance to K-12 institutions recommending schools “determine if [their] state allows pre-registration for individuals under 18 years old and, if so, identify opportunities for high school students to do so.”
Meanwhile the Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Service began collaborating with left-wing groups like the ACLU and Demos to register new voters, according to a report from The Daily Signal. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood has noted, “voter registration efforts are almost always a partisan venture.”
Perhaps the cherry on top is Democrats’ use of lawfare to weaponize the justice system against Trump.
Both Trump and Biden have been accused of mishandling classified documents. The former, who can make an argument for having presidential power to declassify documents, has been dragged into court by the Biden Justice Department, which has the goal of putting him in prison at worst and draining his campaign of time and money at best. The latter, who apparently mishandled classified documents while senator and vice president, was allowed to skate after a special counsel declined to prosecute because “It would be difficult to convince a jury” to convict the memory-challenged Biden of “a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Déjà Vu All Over Again
Rolling Stone’s glowing feature of the “superstructure” Biden is amassing to control the 2024 election aftermath should sound familiar. During the months leading up to the 2020 election, corporate media, Democrat lawmakers, and left-wing operatives conspired to influence the election, as Time Magazine’s national political correspondent Molly Ball glowingly acknowledged afterward.
There’s every reason to expect the same, and more, in 2024.
Ball acknowledged that when Trump pointed out the 2020 election was rife with election integrity issues, he “was right” that “there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes.” She described the collusion as “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” But, as my colleague Joy Pullmann pointed out, Trump was lambasted for raising these exact same points. A smear campaign continues to this day by Democrats who seek to use the nonsense pejorative of “election denier” to forestall Trump’s ability to call out their election rigging.
As Ball approvingly noted, members of the “conspiracy” “got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding” — e.g., hundreds of millions of dollars from billionaire Mark Zuckerberg that were funneled into election offices by left-wing groups. They “recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time,” Ball bragged.
But the mass mail-in balloting scheme was rife with risks that even the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) acknowledged. CISA warned of “major challenges” associated with mail-in voting including the “process of mailing and returning ballots,” “high numbers of improperly completed ballots,” and “the shortage of personnel to process ballots in a prompt manner.”
Then there was Big Tech actively working to stifle negative coverage of Biden, most infamously by censoring the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before Election Day. One study found some Democrat voters in key swing states would not have voted for Biden had they had access to the story alleging Biden’s involvement with his son’s corrupt business dealings.
Ball seemed to applaud this effort, writing how the conspiracy “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”
Meanwhile Big Tech companies like Meta — the parent company of Facebook — are discussing ways to “protect” the electoral system by manipulating algorithms, newsfeeds, and recommendations to users. In 2020, Facebook throttled circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In addition to peddling lies about Trump and blacking out the bombshell evidence implicating Biden that was discovered on his son’s laptop, corporate media also played a role by being a conduit for Democrat operatives’ narrative that election results should not be expected on election night. Privately, Biden’s operatives had polling data suggesting mainstream polls were not reflecting Trump’s true support amongst voters — indicating that Trump would be decisively winning on Election Day. A top “conspiracy” leader reportedly warned “everyone he knew that polls were underestimating Trump’s support,” Ball explained.
The unnamed individual reportedly went to corporate media networks and got them to push the narrative that election results should be expected to be delayed, which conveniently laid the groundwork for a “surge” of mail-in ballots counted late at night and after Election Day to push Biden over the edge.
“Election night began with many Democrats despairing,” Ball wrote. “Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call.”
But Ball said the “conspiracy” leader was unphased about the nail-biter results: “he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.”
As Pullmann wrote, “Amazing projection skills, right?”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
We’ve heard a lot about bloodbaths recently, as the Left tried to reinforce the “insurrection” narrative. That backfired on them, as almost all their attempts have to paint Trump supporters as extremists.
But the real bloodbaths happen with Leftists. Those happening and those yet to come.
As for the bloodbaths that are happening, one would think Leftists would examine their policies and see the carnage. However, they refuse to see the bodies rotting on life’s battlefield.
For example, Leftists paint Americans who want to protect children as “extremists” who ignore a woman’s right to choose. But look at the bloodbath of million dead babies a year in their wake. Children mostly killed because of Democrat policies. These people empower Planned Parenthood to kill babies. And worse, they openly wage war against Black babies in such disproportionate numbers, I can’t imagine how Blacks Leftists don’t shout “Racists!” at the organization.
Remember the bloodbath in Afghanistan, where 13 Marines died due to Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal. What do you think those 13 families define as a bloodbath?
Next, Joe Biden’s open border policy that allows for an invasion of America comes with its tolls.
55,000 deaths a year and counting from Fentanyl overdoses. But that’s not the only drug Biden is ignoring. Bidenflation has caused many Americans to rely on mind-soothing drugs. They need to forget their realities, and rely on illegal drugs to do so. That same reality has created the highest suicide rate in two decades. How many people have we lost to the bloodbath created by drug overdoses? People who have lost hope in the American Dream.
Does anybody think the Democrats want to address the bloodbaths that happen daily in every major city across this country? What’s the body count every weekend in Chicago? Baltimore? St. Louis? And who’s responsible?
The horror, the bloodbaths of Blacks killing other Blacks in unbelievable numbers. And then there are other violent crimes, crimes that Biden claims are dropping.
Biden’s astonishing claim about reducing crime shows us all we need to know. He rules from the ivory tower, and he wouldn’t dare live his lie and reside without protection in one of America’s Democrat-controlled hell holes. If he did, he would witness first-hand the daily bloodbaths Leftist Democrats inflict on this country and each other daily.
Still, perhaps Biden’s biggest bloodbath centers around his Draconian covid restrictions and forced vaccinations.
We will never get the real numbers; numbers that drove some of the drug overdoses and suicides mentioned earlier. All because Democrats wanted to provide mail-in ballots to fake constituents. How many people had to die in for the sake of this ruse?
Democrats who mention bloodbaths represent their party well: total hypocrites. Their body counts rival any world war or the deaths by genocidal despots. I’ve said this many times on my radio show that Leftist Democrats are the most dangerous people in the world.
Ironically, Democrats try to paint Donald Trump as a despot, while Joe Biden behaves like one. But, America knows who creates the real bloodbaths. And it’s time conservatives stand up and fight for this country as if we were fighting a revolution. Because we are.
Two groups are running a “misleading, unsolicited mass mailing of pre-filled voter registration forms targeting Alabama mailboxes,” according to an alert from Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen. In his warning, Allen says his office has “officially discouraged” the mailer, which is in no way affiliated with the state.
“On two occasions, this Office was contacted on behalf of Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information regarding a mailer they planned to send to Alabama citizens,” Allen said in the alert. “In response, I strongly discouraged the group’s plan to mass mail our citizens.”
According to activist tracker InfluenceWatch, the Voter Participation Center (VPC) was launched in 2003 as Women’s Voices Women Vote, before expanding its mission and changing its name nearly a decade later.
“The group initially focused on registering the strongly Democratic-leaning voting bloc of single women to vote; today, the group organizes registration of numerous Democratic-leaning voting populations,” InfluenceWatch reports.
Founded with help from former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff John Podesta, the leftist nonprofit has been heavily scrutinized for trying to “register animals, dead people, infants and felons to vote,” according to a 2012 Judicial Watch probe. The center has ties to Big Labor, including the AFL-CIO.
The VPC’s “questionable tactics to undermine the electoral process have caused concerns in several states, including New Mexico, Florida, Wisconsin and Virginia,” the Judicial Watch investigative report states. “VPC forms are deceiving and appear to be official when they are not, according to a news report that links a picture of the mailer. The VPC has also defended the famously corrupt Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) during its various scandals.”
The Voter Participation Center and its partner nonprofit, the Center for Voter Information, were at it again in the 2020 presidential election, to the concern of election officials in several states. As left-leaning Propublica reported at the time, the Democrat-tied groups conducted a “massive campaign to register voters and promote mail-in voting.”
“The nonprofits aim to send 340 million pieces of mail this election cycle, with a focus on two dozen key states. The groups describe themselves as nonpartisan, but they were founded by a former Democratic operative, and the organization has spent at least $47,142 this cycle to promote former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential bid and $40,065 supporting other Democrats, according to public filings,” Propublica reported on Oct. 23, 2020, just 11 days before the election.
Propublica’s figures were a drop in the bucket. Tax filings subsequently reviewed by the Hill found the Voter Participation Center spent more than $100 million, a sevenfold increase from what the organization spent on the 2016 presidential election.
Like other leftist groups, the center used the cover of Covid to defend its get-out-the-vote efforts targeting Democrats.
“At a time when in-person voter contact was sidelined for health and safety reasons, the Voter Participation Center really stood up and did the work that was needed to help register voters, to help voters learn about and sign up to vote by mail, and to educate voters on early voting in person, voting by mail and how to vote safely on election day,” Tom Lopach, the group’s CEO, told the Hill at the time. Lopach, as the publication noted, is a longtime Democrat operative who previously served as “executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and a former chief of staff” to Democrat Sen. Jon Tester.
Allen said his office has in previous elections cycles received complaints from Alabama residents about “incorrect pre-filled voter registration forms” much like the ones from the Voter Participation Center.
“This type of targeted, partisan interference by out-of-state, third-party organizations is unnecessary, confusing, and counterproductive,” the secretary of state said.
“Alabama citizens can rest assured that the Alabama Secretary of State’s office and local election officials are well-equipped to handle voter registration in Alabama,” Allen added. “Trusted voter registration and election information can be found on the Secretary of State’s official website.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
In case you need a respite from the butt-kicking of life under Joe Biden, Joe Biden rides to the rescue. According to Biden and his media minions, America is “safer and more prosperous” under his rule.
Yes, Der Fuhrer issued an edict: you will admit that you are better off, or you will die. In other words, accept the lies. And Team Biden does what it does best. Lies. Biden lies about everything, and he’s created an ecosystem of liars. Biden’s team lied about the 2020 Presidential Election, and then they tried to cover their lie with J6 nonsense. They lie on weather, calling it climate change, then milking taxpayers for billions. And what about the support of Ukraine. Lies built to cover up the corruption between the Biden family and that crooked government. Biden’s lies have consequences. Especially his current lie about crime.
Before I go into the numbers, I would ask you, “Do you feel that America is safer under Biden?”
I offer nothing official, but I feel confident that the majority of Americans believe crime has worsened under Biden.
NYC residents certainly don’t think there is less crime. That was reflected in the results of a new poll, reported on by the NY Post. Only 30% said they were happy with the quality of life in the city, the poll – run by The Citizens Budget Commission – also revealed. Additionally, the poll also found merely 37% of New Yorkers now rate public safety in their local area as excellent or good. This marks a significant decline from six years prior, when 50% of residents felt positively about their neighborhood’s safety.
“People are fed up with the quality of life. There’s a general sense of lawlessness. You go into the CVS and there’s shoplifting. People’s cars get vandalized.”
The survey of 6,600 households revealed half feel unsafe using the subway by day, a stark drop from 2017. It also highlighted significant declines in satisfaction with public education, government services, and cleanliness.
Dissatisfaction grew regarding traffic, safety for cyclists and pedestrians, and subway services. Higher income Manhattan residents and white individuals reported higher satisfaction with city life, although overall contentment with life quality in NYC fell. Yet, 50% were pleased with their neighborhood quality. This dissatisfaction coincides with rising major crime rates from 2017 to 2023, per NYPD data.
Tom Grech, the president and CEO of Queens Chamber of Commerce simply added: “In general, it’s pretty ugly out there. There’s a free for all mentality over there the last couple of years. There’s a little sense of things spiraling out of control. We’ve got to get back to basics.”
So what people are experiencing the crime wave, when you have Joe Biden to provide bogus statistics that the media actually uses?
Watch MSNBC’s Chris Hayes present Biden’s crime stats with all the believability of Tommy Flanagan:
.@chrislhayes on new FBI data showing a massive drop in U.S. crime:
“It is indisputable that the country is getting both safer and more prosperous in the last four years under President Biden.” pic.twitter.com/ktiWeR2mBw
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) March 22, 2024
Hayes said that under Biden, America had the largest one year decline in murder ever recorded. Indisputable. Thus, Safer and more prosperous under Biden.
As Tommy Flanagan would say, “Yea…that’s the ticket!”
I like how Hayes sneaked in “more prosperous”, while discussing safety. “More prosperous” continues the lie that inflation is good for Americans.
Going back to the discussion of crime, I read this from another source:
There goes that pesky public again. Believing reality over manipulated data.
Crime in the US fell significantly in 2023, according to new FBI data, with a 13% decline in murder and drops in reported violent crime and reported property offenses.
Both robbery and aggravated assault dropped by 5% from 2022, the FBI data shows, while all violent crime declined by 6%.
However, the statistics are based on figures collected from only 79% of law enforcement agencies in the US. Experts have previously warned that data can be “patchy” given inconsistency in reporting by the local agencies who supply the numbers. And the new stats are unaudited as the FBI is not scheduled to release its official figures and analysis concerning crime in 2023 until this upcoming October.
(…)
The figures released on Tuesday are based on data collected from 15,199 of 19,152 law enforcement agencies, the FBI said. Experts previously told the Guardian that the FBI’s findings should be viewed with caution given the incomplete information.
Why issues a “patchy” report? Because the FBI and media know that when they release the real numbers later that show there was no drop in violent crime, few will remember the lie.
The obviously erroneous numbers represent a campaign ploy by Biden. He wants to be known as the man who wiped out crime. You know. Like he saved us from Covid and simultaneously cured cancer.
The public perception is very different. Gallup, for example, has surveyed Americans every fall for years about crime. Last year’s survey found that by 56%-28%, Americans said crime had increased in their area.
I have seen first-hand the escalation of crime in the suburb where I live. The Gilbert Goons have been in the news for weeks, and there is much more happening in an area deemed, “the safest city in Arizona”.
Crime is a major problem, and it’s escalating. But leave it to Biden to try to soft-shoe things, instead of really addressing the problem. Thankfully, Trump will soon be back to actually start solving problems again and not manipulating statistics.
After Joe Biden was declared mentally incompetent by the Special Prosecutor in the classified documents case, I asked myself a simple question: “Who is competent in this case?”
In other words, somebody had to do Biden’s dirty work, if Joey Demento wasn’t giving the orders.
Consider what happened to Trump satellites when Democrats wrongly targeted him for Russian collusion. Paul Manafort, George Pappadopoulos, General Mike Flynn and others were investigated and railroaded. But in the case of Joe Biden’s obvious crime of possessing classified materials as a Senator and VP, we have nobody being examined.
Further, Biden has definite ties to the Chinese, the Ukrainians, and many nefarious characters who benefitted from the closeness to the Bidens. Hunter Biden gave us all the evidence we need of this, as he left one laptop at a repair shop, and another may be in the hands of Russian pimps.
So, who was involved with Joe Biden’s criminal carelessness? I asked this question of the handling of the classified documents:
What Biden most often says he does not recall is who packed his documents or other personal items when he left the vice presidency in 2009 and in the aftermath. Could it have been Hunter’s Chinese assistant? Biden admits that chain of custody for the classified materials is unknown to him. He doesn’t recall reading them, then removing them from wherever he got them.
“My problem was I never knew where any of the documents or boxes were specifically coming from or who packed them,” Biden said, telling Hur he relied on staff to do that instead.
I suggest the congressional committee find out who had access to these documents. Who did pack them? Apparently, I’m not the only one who wondered this. Nick Arama of Red State wrote:
One of the things that has been most shameful about Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal was how he said he didn’t have any idea how the docs got all over his house and in his offices. He has tried to blame his staff, including during his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur’s team.
That’s just ridiculous as an excuse — the documents were all over his house and his offices, even his garage. Not to mention that he had material from when he was in the Senate. So this has been going on for decades. Plus, he had notes with some of the classified documents, and he told his ghostwriter about the classified documents in 2017. The common element there is Joe Biden. Not some staffer. But it’s typical Joe Biden who never wants to take responsibility for anything he does wrong and there were all kinds of problems with his actions here.
It turns out that within 24 hours of the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report, Joe Biden promoted two of the aides whose names came up in regard to the classified documents. What a coincidence.
Two aides who helped in the movement and potential cover-up of this crime were promoted?
Aramas continues,
According to the House Oversight Committee, longtime Biden aide and director of Oval Office operations Annie Tomasini visited the Penn Biden Center “to take inventory of President Biden’s documents and materials” in March 2021. Classified documents were found there in Biden’s officer in November 2022.
Then, aide Kathy Chung told Congress that Richard Ruffner, another staffer, was involved, along with other people, in the transportation of the undiscovered classified materials from the General Services Administration facility.
Tomasini was promoted to deputy White House Chief of Staff on Feb. 8, and Richard Ruffner was promoted into Tomasini’s old job as director of Oval Office operations.
The plot thickens
The House Oversight Committee has been trying to get Tomasini in for a transcribed interview since November, but the White House has failed to cooperate. That should say a lot right there. What doesn’t the White House want her to say? They don’t cooperate, and then, on top of that, Biden gives her a promotion?
“The Department of Justice has failed to deliver accountability for President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and now Biden aides involved in the scandal are getting promotions,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky) told The Post.
“We’ve requested to interview Annie Tomasini about President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents but the White House is blocking her testimony and instead has promoted her to a senior role. The American people expect consequences for mishandling of classified information, not rewards,” he continued.
When dealing with the corruption of the Biden White House, little surprise me anymore.
These people claim to want transparency, then continually do the opposite. One can only imagine what we would learn if Biden actually allowed true investigations into these things.
We might learn the truth. That Biden is mentally incapable of running his family, much less the country. We most certainly would learn that in his dementia Joe Biden assigned his crackhead son to run their criminal organization. And we would be able to track down every illicit dime they collected from the Chinese, Ukrainians, Romanians, and so on.
I suspect we might understand how the Chinese flew a spy balloon across America with no recourse. Or why they weren’t made to compensate America for release of Covid, and the resulting aftermath.
Many questions would be answered if we could get to the real truth. But too many Leftists get rich and powerful off the spreading of lies and protecting those who tell them.
House Republicans heard explosive testimony from President Joe Biden’s family business partners Wednesday in a public hearing that confirmed the president’s personal involvement in global schemes to sell influence over American government.
Tony Bobulinski, a former family business partner turned whistleblower who told lawmakers President Biden was the “brand” sold to foreign governments, doubled down on accusations of corruption with sworn testimony in public.
“I want to be crystal clear: from my direct personal experience and what I have subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” Bobulinski told lawmakers. “His family’s foreign influence peddling operation — from China to Ukraine and elsewhere — sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.”
Lawmakers featured Bobulinski alongside Jason Galanis after closed-door depositions with the two witnesses. Devon Archer, another former business partner, and Hunter Biden also sat for closed-door depositions with House committees, but turned down congressional invites to testify in public.
His attorneys previously demanded a public hearing in exchange for Hunter Biden’s cooperation with congressional subpoenas. Then Biden attorney Abbe Lowell suddenly demanded lawmakers hold a public hearing to probe the business practices of his former client, Jared Kushner, potentially violating legal ethics rules. If House Republicans held a public hearing with Kushner, Lowell wrote in a letter last week, “Mr. Biden would consider an invitation for that event.”
House Republicans are probing whether to draw up articles of impeachment against President Biden for selling the use of his political positions to foreign oligarchs. House investigators have discovered more than 20 shell companies established by the Biden family to funnel tens of millions of dollars from corporate leaders from adversarial nations. Witnesses testified Wednesday that President Biden was at the center of the family’s efforts to rake in foreign profits.
🚨 🚨🚨
Witnesses CONFIRM Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling 👇 pic.twitter.com/gjlioRavAD
“The Bidens sell Joe Biden. That is their business,” said James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee at the beginning of the hearing on “Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office.”
"The Bidens don't sell a product or service or a set of skills. The Bidens sell Joe Biden. That is their business."
Testifying from prison, Galanis said the Bidens aimed to make “billions, not millions” from selling political favors to oligarchs in China and Russia. Galanis is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence for securities fraud, which Galanis told lawmakers last month also involved Archer and Hunter Biden.
Biden business associate Jason Galanis, from incarceration, testifies to Oversight Committee about Joe Biden's direct involvement in building an empire of "billions not millions" from work with a Russian oligarch and a Chinese Communist Party linked firm. pic.twitter.com/BBuVrpAxsm
Democrats spent Wednesday’s hearing attempting to obstruct the impeachment proceedings with repeated interruptions to insist Republicans have no proof of influence peddling claims they have “exonerated” the president. Their handpicked witness Lev Parnas, also a convicted criminal, even went so far as to claim he “found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine.”
House Oversight Committee hearing goes off the rails when Hunter Biden's former business partner Tony Bobulinski calls out Reps. Jamie Raskin and Dan Goldman for lying on behalf of the Biden Crime Family. pic.twitter.com/Xny4VTbhVc
“I found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine … The only information ever pushed on the Bidens in Ukraine has come from one source and one source only: Russia and Russian agents.”
On the contrary, House and Senate investigators have uncovered bank receipts, White House visitor logs, testimonies from Biden business partners, text messages, and other documents indicating the Biden family sold their patriarch’s name and position to foreign oligarchs including several in Ukraine. Yet Democrats pressed forward with a stunt campaign to delay, disrupt, and dismiss the hearing. When members heard about text messages about the Biden family business on Bobulinski’s cracked Blackberry phone, Democrats, led by Raskin, introduced a motion to subpoena the device.
Bobulinski previously offered to show the text messages to members who wanted to see them, so Jordan quickly countered with a motion to table. Comer agreed but was forced to wait for a clerk to record a formal vote before proceeding.
To Democrats’ dismay, members’ recorded votes tallied up in favor of tabling.
Bobulinski hearing grinds to a halt when Jamie Raskin threatens to subpoena for his Blackberry pic.twitter.com/wG7c2fCrm1
After the minutes-long delay, Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia asked Bobulinski whether he would turn over his phone to the committee.
“I’m willing to sit in a room with the chairman and the ranking member with my phone and their staff and we can go through each and every text message,” Bobulinski said.
New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez later asked Bobulinski whether he witnessed the president commit a crime, to which Bobulinski answered with an emphatic “Yes.”
“What crime?” Cortez pressed.
“Well, how much time do I have to go through?” Bobulinski answered.
AOC: "Did you witness the president [Joe Biden] commit a crime? "
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour.
You wouldn’t know it from White House press releases, but Americans are paying roughly 45 percent more at the pump now than before President Joe Biden first took office. Anyone looking to take a quick weekend getaway or spring break outing in the coming days will pay an average of $3.51 per gallon to gas up their vehicles. Roadtrippers and commuters in states such as California are the hardest hit, paying upwards of $4.93 per gallon. Even notoriously cheap states for gas such as Texas still have Americans shelling out far more than $3 per gallon.
“Gas price inflation is back,” CNN, one of the few corporate media publications mentioning the price surge, noted at the beginning of its latest article on fuel. The Daily Mail repeated the same phrase in a recent headline.
One might think that Biden, who is already lagging in presidential polls for the upcoming election, would do everything in his power to fix the problem because his campaign team knows Americans vote with their pocketbooks. Yet the Biden administration has adopted rhetoric about a so-called “dip” in the cost of unleaded from 2022 records to claim that inflation isn’t as bad or as Democrat-inflicted as it is.
This week, as the cost to fill a car climbs daily, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre went so far as to brag that the “actions that [Biden] took led to lowering gas prices.”
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: "The president has done everything that he can to deal with oil! Obviously, the actions that he took led to lowering gas prices."
FACT: Gas prices are up over last week, last month, and last year — and up 46% since Biden took office. pic.twitter.com/W3iyD6hNNl
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: "Prices fell over the last year! … Wages are rising faster than prices!"
Under Biden, overall prices have are up 18.6%, food prices are up 21.2%, gas prices are up ~42%, and real average weekly earnings are DOWN by 4.2%. pic.twitter.com/B1wSM4trIy
The White House, with the help of corporate media, has long touted “cooling” prices to flood the airwaves with propaganda seeking to obscure the nation’s dire economic conditions. Yet, as with every other category of inflation, gas costs have never technically stopped climbing since Biden’s entrance in 2021. Even when the price of unleaded varied slightly from the record high that plagued Biden’s first few presidential years thanks to his unfriendly oil and gas policies, the cost of filling up a car has remained steadily high.
The White House will do its best to cover up its role in the inflation crisis wreaking havoc on the country, but will stop short of enacting a real solution. The administration won’t lift any of its policies exacerbating high gas prices because jarring costs at the pump don’t necessary conflict with the administration’s goals.
The Biden administration openly desires to use chronically high gas prices to usher in electric vehicles and weather-dependent energy.
The average gas price has now increased by 46% under Joe Biden.
Here is Pete Buttigieg bragging that high gas prices are pushing Americans towards electric vehicles.
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.
One of the big takeaways from the newly released transcript of Joe Biden’s two-day interview with Robert Hur is that the special counsel was being exceedingly generous when describing the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Much of the conversation with Hur is littered with barely incoherent answers and spiraling word salads. Though, the reader is occasionally entertained by Biden’s blowhard-y non-sequiturs. We learn about Biden’s Corvette — twice. We learn that the president is a frustrated architect but an excellent archer. Biden jokes that there might be risqué pictures of Dr. First Lady Jill Biden.
Then again, the fact that the entire two-day interview isn’t a giant nonsensical rant is not as impressive as his defenders might believe. The president is, indeed, completely coherent at times. And those are the times he’s probably lying.
When Hur released his report last month, for example, it noted that Biden couldn’t recall the year his son died. This is not the kind of event that typically slips a healthy person’s mind — not even one who is constantly trying to emotionally manipulate the public with misleading claims about the cause of his son’s death.
Recall that Biden feigned great anger about this interaction. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” he barked at reporters when the report was released. “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself: It wasn’t any of their damn business.”
The transcript shows that it was Biden who brought up his late son Beau, not Hur. The president claimed he believed Beau had died in 2017 or 2018 when he had tragically died of brain cancer in 2015.
Who knows? Maybe Biden forgot what he said? Reading the full context of his answer, and considering the president’s lifelong fabulism, it is not entirely out of the question that the president purposely floated the wrong date to try and justify his pilfering of classified documents. Either way, it’s bad.
Here is the key interaction:
MR. HUR: So, during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot, or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, um .. . I , I, I, I, I don’ t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?
MR. HUR: Yes, sir.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the President. I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for President. And, and so what was happening, though – what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th –
MS. COTTON: 2015.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May of 2015.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: It was 2015.
By the way, just as Beau did not die in Iraq, Joe was never “at Penn,” not in any real way. The outgoing vice president was bequeathed an honorary professor position at the school, which the Philadelphia Inquirer noted in 2019 was “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.”
More importantly, Biden also contradicted himself when speaking about the documents themselves.
When Hur asked the president about the classified papers in his possession, the president contended that he “had no purpose for them, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to keep clearly classified documents.” But Hur, in his prepared testimony for Congress, says: “We also identified other recorded conversations during which Mr. Biden read classified information aloud to his ghostwriter.”
So, the documents did have a very specific purpose. Those files were used, according to Amtrak Joe, to help earn $8 million writing a book after leaving the Obama administration. Yet, when the Hur report was released, the left wing did what they always do when confronted with bad news: they feigned a meltdown. They smeared the messenger. They concoct conspiracy theories. They denied reality. They’re doing the same right now.
The media continues to frame Hur’s findings as an exoneration of Biden to head off the (correct) perception that there is a stark, selective prosecution when it comes to the hoarding of classified documents. Donald Trump, yes. Biden and Hillary Clinton, no.
In The New York Times, Charlie Savage begins the paper’s story on the leaked transcripts by misleading readers with the contention that Hur had found “insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden.” This is not true. Hur’s report concluded that Biden came off as too feeble-minded to be convicted by a jury for his decades-long mishandling of classified information. According to the special counsel, the president had “willfully retained classified information.” And he had done it for years before winning the presidency.
During today’s hearing Democrats falsely used the word “exoneration” a number of times. Hur noted that the word “does not appear anywhere in my report, and that is not my conclusion.”
So, the fact remains that there are two ways to look at the Hur report. Either the president lacks the mental acuity to be charged for breaking the law, or he should be charged for breaking the law. Pick one.
Special counsel Robert K. Hur prepares to testify Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington. Hur investigated President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and published a report with contentious conclusions about Biden’s manner and memory. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
President Joe Biden provided information deemed “not credible” to federal prosecutors during an investigation that determined he knowingly retained and shared classified documents, special counsel Robert Hur told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Hur released his report in February, concluding that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after his vice presidency ended in early 2009. However, the special counsel opted not to bring charges, writing that a jury would be unlikely to convict because of Biden’s “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
During the hearing, which went into recess at 1:52 p.m., the committee’s Democrats repeatedly brought up former President Donald Trump’s own classified documents case. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., ranking member of the committee, noted that Trump was charged with trying to obstruct the investigation into classified documents stored at his Florida estate.
“At any point in your investigation, do you have any reason to believe that President Biden lied to you?” Nadler asked, then seemed to be surprised by the answer he got from Hur.
The special counsel named by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, referred to the Feb. 8 report from his office.
“I do address in my report one response the president gave to a question we posed to him that we deemed to be not credible,” Hur said.
Nadler moved on to talking more about Trump.
But other committee members talked significantly about Biden’s sharing information with the ghostwriter of his 2017 book “Promise Me, Dad,” which the report said Biden was getting up to $8 million to produce for the publisher.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said there were “8 million reasons” why Biden might have knowingly violated the law on classified information.
“It wasn’t just the money, it wasn’t just $8 million,” Jordan said. “It was also his ego. Pride and money is why he knowingly violated the rules.”
Jordan read aloud from Hur’s report: “President Biden had strong motivations to ignore the proper procedures for safeguarding the classified information in his new book.”
“That’s a key word. We’re getting a motive now,” Jordan said, later adding: “Why did he have strong motivations? Because he decided months before leaving office to write a book.”
Later in the hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., asked more about the matter, reading aloud from the transcript in which a federal prosecutor questions Biden.
“Mr. President, why did you share classified information with your ghostwriter?” the lawyer on the special counsel’s team asks.
The president answers: “I did not share classified information. … I guarantee I did not.”
“That’s not true, is it, Mr. Hur?” Gaetz asked.
“That is inconsistent with the evidence of the findings in my report,” Hur responded.
Gaetz followed by asking: “It’s a lie is what regular people would say, right?”
Hur smiled, but didn’t answer directly.
Gaetz read again from the transcript, quoting Biden as saying: “All the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were locked or able to be locked.”
“That wasn’t true either, was it?” Gaetz said.
Hur replied: “That was inconsistent with the findings of our investigation.”
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House GOP leadership members say President Joe Biden’s proposed 2025 fiscal year budget “is a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline.”
Biden on Monday unveiled a $7.3 trillion spending wish list that is as much an election-year pitch to voters — one that slams Republicans and former President Donald Trump by name — as it is a policy proposal.
“The price tag of President Biden’s proposed budget is yet another glaring reminder of this Administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility,” Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., and Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., said in a joint statement.
“Biden’s budget doesn’t just miss the mark — it is a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline.”
It has been widely reported Biden wants to raise $5.5 trillion in tax on corporations and high earners during the next decade, the 2025 budget showed. That would help cut the federal deficit and pay for new programs to assist those who make less cope with high housing and child care costs, according to The Associated Press.
“While hardworking Americans struggle with crushing inflation and mounting national debt, the President would increase their pain to spend trillions of additional taxpayer dollars to advance his left-wing agenda,” the GOP leaders said in their statement.
They added that the House Republican Conference has “taken action to steer our nation back to a path of fiscal sanity.”
“Our efforts to rein in the runaway spending spree from last year’s budget have already yielded results, lowering projected deficits by $2.6 trillion over the next decade,” they said in the statement.
“The House’s budget plan for the next fiscal year, preceding the President’s proposal, reflects the values of hardworking Americans who know that in tough economic times, fiscal discipline is non-negotiable. House Republicans understand the American people expect and deserve nothing less from their government.”
Although Biden released his proposed 2025 budget, Congress has yet to pass full funding for federal agencies for the current fiscal year. House Republicans on Thursday issued a plan that aims to balance the federal budget within a decade by cutting $14 trillion in federal spending, including green energy subsides and student loan forgiveness, while reducing taxes. The White House, though, called that plan unworkable.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which provides independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process, released a Feb. 7 report that offered a budget and economic outlook for 2024 to 2034. In CBO’s projections, federal budget deficits total $20 trillion over the 2025–2034 period and federal debt held by the public reaches 116 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
By Brian Freeman | Monday, 11 March 2024 12:49 PM EDT
The illegal immigration problem can’t be solved without defining it, making it frustrating that President Joe Biden retracted the “illegal” label of the man who was charged in the murder of nursing student Laken Riley, Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Newsmax on Monday.
“Its ridiculous that President Biden is not willing to define this problem, and by not defining it, he is not going to come up with solutions,” Judd said on “Wake Up America,” adding that is “what really frustrates every single one of us.”
Judd reiterated that Biden “is not going to come up with a solution to the problem by watering down what this problem actually is.”
Instead, by walking back his comments, Biden is “inviting so many people to cross our borders illegally,” Judd said.
Judd, who has endorsed former President Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election, said that when Biden came into office, he reversed 97 of Trump’s policies on the border, explaining that is why the nation has had a surge in illegal crossings.
Still, Judd said his organization backed a recent bipartisan Senate immigration bill that Trump and Republicans sabotaged.
Judd said that the compromise proposal would have been “absolutely better than what we currently have” by, for example, removing the backed-up judiciary from the process and raising the credible fear standard, which would have severely reduced the number of migrants able to use that argument to stay in the country.
He stressed that his organization wanted to see it to go to the floor for debate and amendment in order to get rid of the bad items that were in the proposal.
Judd, however, blamed Biden for “weaponizing” his group’s backing for the bill by failing to give the “proper context for our support at the time.”
He stressed that this is one of the reasons that the public should have “zero confidence” in the Biden administration.
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
Biden’s State of the Union address, filled with lies and gaslighting, was no surprise to people paying attention. How many people will ignore the truth right in front of them and buy into his political rhetoric? In truth, Biden and the Democrats are the real threat to our Constitutional Republic that oversees our democracy.
President Trump RIPS Old Joe at SOTU: He Looks So Angry when He’s Talking, Which Is a Trait of People Who Know They Are “Losing It”
By Jim Hoft March 7, 2024
play-by-playcomment tonight during Joe Biden’s SOTU Address. TGP’s Jordan Conradson is posting Trump’s comments tonight here. Trump called out the angry old man speaking tonight.
President Trump: He looks so angry when he’s talking, which is a trait of people who know they are “losing it.” The anger and shouting is not helpful to bringing our Country back together! Read More
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 Trump.
President Joe Biden won most of the delegates up for grabs in the Democrat presidential primaries on Super Tuesday, but the sizable number of votes cast against him in favor of an “uncommitted” option confirm how much sway the loudest, most radical wings of the party have.
Anti-Israel Democrats launched a campaign to vote “uncommitted” or “no preference” (casting a vote for no candidate) out of frustration that Biden’s position toward Israel is insufficiently supportive of Hamas-run Gaza. After gaining traction in Michigan last week, the protest vote — which seeks to use “uncommitted” Democrat votes to call for Biden to oppose Israel’s military response following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks — won close to 19 percent of Democrat primary voters in Minnesota and 12.7 percent in North Carolina, according to the Associated Press. The campaign pulled single-digit percentages of voters in states including Alabama, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Tennessee.
“Democrats are really frustrated,” said Jaylani Hussein, co-chair of Uncommitted Vote Minnesota, on ABC News. “Now it’s starting to cost him immensely.”
“The policy of this war is untenable and it will have consequences, not only for down-ballots but hopefully also in the upcoming election,” he added. “We understand the consequences of leaving the party that we voted for, or the president that we voted for.”
Groups like Abandon Biden, formed by Muslim Americans calling Israel’s response against Hamas a “genocide,” and Our Revolution, which sprung up from Bernie Sanders’ failed 2016 presidential campaign, are supporting the effort. Last Tuesday, “uncommitted” won more than 13 percent of Michigan Democrats.
“The ‘Vote Uncommitted’ movement is growing, and voters continue to make themselves heard,” Our Revolution Director Joseph Geevarghese wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday. “There is no unconditional support for President Biden, not without an unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.”
The Democratic Socialists of America endorsed the “uncommitted” effort March 3. The group is planning phone banks in support and posted Tuesday night that they have “big pushes coming up in WA, WI and beyond.”
Vice President Kamala Harris called for a ceasefire Sunday, but this was apparently not enough to win over the anti-Israel groups. Meanwhile Democrat and known antisemite Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minnesota where the movement gained the most, has been attacking Biden’s policy on the conflict.
Biden’s unpopularity Super Tuesday went even beyond the mainland. He lost the primary in American Samoa to self-described entrepreneur Jason Palmer, who won with 56 percent, according to CNN.
“We are not supporting Donald Trump,” Hussein said. “As far as the consequences of having President Trump, that’s a reality that we’re willing to accept.”
Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He serves as associate editor for the school paper, The Collegian, served as editorial assistant for Christopher Rufo, and has bylines in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller.
“You have my answer under oath and under the penalty of perjury,” Hunter Biden declared a half-dozen times during closed-door questioning by the joint House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Wednesday, a transcript of which was released Thursday. His protestations of truth-telling lacked conviction, though, because the facts and logic proclaimed a different reality.
Here are the highlights of Hunter Biden’s most unbelievable testimony.
1. It’s All a MAGA-Orchestrated Conspiracy Theory
Hunter Biden opened by claiming the committees had “hunted” him as part of a “partisan political pursuit” of his father.
“You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies,” he continued before claiming the only basis for the claims of Biden family corruption came from criminals, fugitives, or other liars.
But no matter how many times Hunter evoked the name of Alexander Smirnov — the recently indicted FBI confidential human source who allegedly lied about Burisma paying the Bidens bribes, as memorialized in the FD-1023 — bank records and the testimony of Biden-friendly witnesses negate Hunter’s claims of a conspiracy theory.
There are only so many coincidences the American public will buy before realizing they’re being sold a bag of malarkey. Evidence of large deposits to Hunter Biden-connected businesses from foreigners in Joe Biden’s wake leaves Hunter’s claim of a conspiracy unbelievable.
2. I Called Upon the Wrong Guy
Probably the most incredible area of Hunter’s testimony was his explanation for a text he sent to Raymond Zhao, asking him to have the director of CEFC call him. “I’m sitting here with my father,” Hunter texted Zhao, “and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. I’m very concerned that the chairman has either changed his mind or broken our deal without telling me or that he’s unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept.”
“Tell the director I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” Hunter continued, adding that “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 direction. All too often people mistake kindness for weakness, and all too often I’m standing over the top of them saying, I warned you.”
“I will call you on WhatsApp,” Zhao replied.
This text exchange was incredibly damning because the players involved were connected to the communist Chinese energy company CEFC, which later transferred $5 million in capital to a company Hunter Biden created only a few days after the above text exchange.
But don’t worry, Hunter assured the committee. His text went to the wrong guy because he was “so out of his mind” from his addiction, he had accidentally sent the threat to “Henry Zhao,” who was not connected to CEFC.
“And I, like an idiot, directed it towards Henry Zhao who had no involvement, who had no understanding or even remotely knew what the hell I was even Godd-mn talking about. Excuse my language,” Hunter told the committee.
First, given the quick response to Hunter’s text from CEFC, it is unbelievable that the text didn’t go to the CEFC-connected Zhao. Second, even if Hunter basically drunk-dialed the wrong mark, that doesn’t exonerate him or his father — the latter of whom, the evidence establishes, helped Hunter by showcasing his accessibility to his son’s business partners.
In short, the text shows Hunter intended to shakedown CEFC, and the $5 million suggests he succeeded.
3. Burisma Wanted Me to Call My… Teen Daughters?
A close second for the most outrageous storyline concerned the call to D.C. that Hunter Biden’s business partner and friend Devon Archer claims Hunter made at the request of Burisma executives.
Archer, a Biden-friendly witness, had previously testified to the House Judiciary Committee that in early December 2015, after a Burisma board meeting, the founder of the Ukrainian energy company had asked Hunter to call D.C. because of pressure being placed on the company. In a follow-up question, Archer confirmed the Burisma request was for “help from the United States Government to deal with the pressure they were under from their prosecutor, and that entailed the freezing of assets at the London bank and other things that were going on in Ukraine.”
According to Hunter’s friend and former business partner, Hunter stepped away with the Burisma executives to make the call to D.C. But when asked about the call on Wednesday, Hunter testified, “I never would have called, and never did my father on behalf of Burisma.”
So, whom did he call?
Hunter didn’t remember but suggested it was his wife or his high school-aged daughters.
Sure, Jan.
4. The Big Guy = The Big Lie?
Revisiting Archer’s testimony from last year added another improbability to Hunter Biden’s testimony — this one concerning “the big guy” moniker.
When questioned about the reference to 10 percent being “held by H for the big guy,” Hunter claimed not to know what that meant. And when questioned by Democrats on the committee about Joe Biden’s nicknames, Hunter denied his family referred to Joe as “the big guy.”
Tony Bobulinski, however, testified previously that “the big guy” was Joe Biden’s nickname. And while Hunter Biden claimed Bobulinski was a liar and not to be believed, Archer also used that nickname in an apparent reference to Joe Biden in his testimony, saying Burisma wasn’t “specific, you know, can the big guy help? It was — it’s always this amorphous, can we get help in D.C.?”
5. ‘My Chairman’ is Absolutely, Positively Not Daddy
Also ringing hollow was Hunter Biden’s assertion that “my chairman” was not his father. House investigators asked Hunter about a text he had sent to Bobulinski, in which he said, “In light of the fact that we are at an impasse of sorts, and both James’ lawyers and my chairman gave an emphatic no — I think we should all meet in Romania on Tuesday next week.”
Hunter went on to say that “my chairman” was Chairman Ye of the Chinese company CEFC. Hunter then testified that he didn’t ever refer to his father as “my chairman,” calling the suggestion “laughable.”
The Republican committee members confronted Hunter with a text his business partner Rob Walker had sent to Bobulinski that said, “When he said his chairman, he was talking about his dad.”
Hunter sought to negate Walker’s testimony by claiming it was merely one “third party that was talking with another third party” who was “making a judgment about what I was talking about.”
Hunter then reverted to, “[Y]ou have my answer under oath that I did not refer and never have referred to my father as chairman.”
His “under oath” guarantee isn’t very assuring, however, given that Hunter had earlier stressed his long-standing relationship with Rob Walker — the third party who identified “my chairman” as Joe Biden.” “Rob Walker has known me since 1998,” Hunter testified. In fact, Hunter claimed Walker would have told their other business partners they were “way out of bounds” if Walker knew they were suggesting getting Joe Biden involved in their business deals.
So it sure seems like Walker would know whether Hunter would refer to his father as “my chairman.”
6. The Laptop Was a Plant
While many of Hunter’s explanations were unbelievable, his claims about the laptop the FBI seized from a Delaware repair shop were surreal.
When asked about his laptop from hell, Hunter claimed first not to remember dropping one off at a repair store in 2019. Then, when asked if he ever dropped off a laptop at a repair shop, Hunter spoke of dropping one off at a place three blocks from his D.C. office and at an Apple store in Georgetown. When pushed on whether he had ever left a laptop for repair in Delaware, Hunter replied that “the largest Apple store in America is at the Christiana Mall,” and that if he were “to drop off a laptop” — not that he “ever remember[ed] doing that, but if [he] was going to drop off a laptop” — he “would have gone to the Apple store, which was 7 minutes from [his] parents’ home there.”
In other words, Hunter is claiming he wouldn’t have dropped his laptop off at Mac Isaac’s store to suggest he didn’t. This outrageous assertion is part of a conspiracy theory that suggests the laptop abandoned at the Delaware repair shop was a plant.
Hunter also pushed another false narrative by suggesting much of the evidence recovered from the laptop was fake.
“Many different things” on the laptop were “either fabricated, hacked, stolen, or manipulated.” “100 percent,” Hunter testified on Wednesday.
Of course, when it came to identifying which ones, Hunter insisted, “I can’t go through them all right now.”
7. My Resume Is Real — And It’s Spectacular
Throughout the transcribed interview, Hunter also attempted to deflect questions about his lucrative service on Burisma’s board of directors by touting his resume. But when pushed on what he actually did for Burisma for a million-dollar paycheck, Hunter’s explanation of attending board meetings and “providing the best advice that I could give” convinced no one.
That was especially true given that the one thing Hunter should have been giving advice about — Burisma’s various legal problems — the president’s son claimed to know nothing about. Specifically, according to his Wednesday testimony, he did not know Burisma was under investigation in the U.K. for money laundering and had $23 million of assets frozen until “it became public.”
One would think a board member bearing the impressive resume of Hunter Biden and charged with overseeing corporate governance would know about an investigation and frozen assets before “it became public.”
8. That’s Not My Money… Until It Is My Money
Another eyebrow-raising refrain from Hunter Biden concerned payments into accounts held in the name of Rosemont Seneca Bohai and Rosemont Seneca Thornton. Those entities were Devon Archer’s, and as such, the money deposited into those accounts from foreigners wasn’t Hunter’s, the president’s son suggested.
“I have no authority over those accounts, and I have no view inside of it,” he testified.
Never mind that Archer transferred large sums from those accounts to Hunter Biden-connected accounts or, in one case, used the $142,300 a Kazakhstani oligarch deposited into the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account to pay for a car for Hunter Biden. While Hunter tried to downplay the shifting of funds from one business to another, at the end of the day, it was all unbelievable.
The totality of Hunter Biden’s testimony also rendered his opening line unbelievable. That line—“I did not involve my father in my business” — seems false at every angle.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. 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. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Why did President Joe Biden reverse former President Donald Trump’s order excluding noncitizens from being counted in the census, while simultaneously issuing a slew of executive orders decimating the integrity of our southern border? While illegal immigrants cannot vote in elections (despite Democrats’ best efforts), the left is using their illegal presence to rig elections by shifting the political landscape through apportionment.
Both congressional and electoral college apportionment is derived from the number of residents in a particular area. Trump signed a memo in July of 2020 that barred illegal immigrants from being counted in the census, which is used to apportion representation in Washington. Biden, however, reversed the policy and ordered the census to include illegal immigrants and other noncitizens.
This means that American citizens aren’t receiving balanced representation in their government.
States can pick up — or lose — a congressional seat depending on the size of their population, despite the fact that some of that population may not even be allowed to vote. Millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom are in large, left-leaning cities, dilute the voting power of American citizens who may live in a mildly populated area composed of legal residents.
Democrat New York Rep. Yvette Clark said during a 2021 hearing that her district “can absorb a significant number of these migrants” because “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.”
NY Congresswoman Clarke (D) saying the quiet part out loud about the border:
Clark’s resurfaced clip prompted Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and others to introduce the “Equal Representation Act” which would mandate only legal citizens are counted for congressional districts and the Electoral College map.
Sanctuary Cities
So-called “sanctuary cities,” which promise not to enforce immigration laws and often guarantee lodging to illegal residents, have long blurred the lines of law, bucking federal immigration policy and then begging taxpayers to foot the bill. But despite the drain on government resources — and sometimes violence — these policies invite, these cities and left-leaning states have reason to incentivize illegal immigrants because it helps them adjust for apportionment.
As residents flee blue states like California and New York for more family-friendly and taxpayer-friendly states like Florida and Texas, Democrats need to recoup their population losses. Illegal immigrants inflate the census data, which in turn could help Democrats retain their power.
Constitutionally Suspect
The framers likely would not support Biden’s position that illegal immigrants deserve to be counted in apportionment to determine representation.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment stipulated that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.”
But “whole number of persons” was likely not intended to encompass those illegally residing in the states.
Prior to the ratification of the Constitution, most northern states advocated for no slaves to be counted in the apportionment proceedings so that slaveholding states, some of which had slave populations as high as 43 percent of their total residents, would not have an unfair amount of representation compared to their actual voting weight.
The three-fifths compromise also lessened the incentive for slaveholding states to import more slaves in order to expand their population and increase their representation.
No ‘Colorable Constitutional Claim’
Lower courts had blocked Trump’s memorandum from taking effect after 23 states challenged the memo, saying it violated the Constitution and federal census statutes. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on the question nor answered whether the word “persons” encompasses illegal immigrants for the purpose of apportionment. But the high court has previously ruled in Mathews v. Diaz, a case regarding the Social Security Act, that while illegal immigrants are entitled to due process protections under the Fifth and 14th Amendments, they are not entitled to the benefits of citizenship. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the unanimous court:
Neither the overnight visitor, the unfriendly agent of a hostile foreign power, the resident diplomat, nor the illegal entrant, can advance even a colorable constitutional claim to a share in the bounty that a conscientious sovereign makes available to its own citizens and some of its guests.
If voting, which is a benefit exclusively for citizens, is off-limits to illegal immigrants, it would be hard to imagine that illegal immigrants should be empowered to dilute the weight of a vote by artificially expanding the population and increasing the representational advantage of one area while taking it away from another area that is populated by legal residents. And yet, thanks to Democrats, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
There are three walls in the area around McAllen, Texas. Colloquially, they are referred to as “the George W. Bush wall,” “the Donald Trump wall” and the “Greg Abbott wall.” Like so much of what happens at our southern border, the walls make little sense. For one thing, both sides of the wall, in all three cases, are United States land. In other words, if you’re a migrant, and you’ve reached the wall, you’re already on American soil. For another, the walls are all incomplete, with gaps that make them easy to breach. You can simply follow the wall, see where it ends and walk around it.
President Biden and migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. (Getty Images)
I didn’t know any of this when I landed in McAllen, Texas, a few days ago. A safe, bustling city, McAllen sits in the Rio Grande Valley on the American border with Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of migrants come through the city each year.
I was invited on this trip to the border by Americans for Prosperity, “a libertarian conservative political advocacy group.” I have no affiliation with this group other than joining them on this trip. “Is this… a pro-open borders trip?” conservative friends half-joked.
Despite being founded during the “Tea Party” era, AFP has a reputation for having a softer stance on immigration than most groups in the conservative world. As my own opinions on immigration policies are fairly stringent, I was actually interested to hear the argument for open borders, one that even the left has stopped making.
But that didn’t happen. If AFP had been somewhat lenient on illegal immigration in the past, it didn’t come through during this trip at all. The speakers all stressed the severe problems that are caused by allowing masses of unvetted people to enter the country unchecked.
We learned that during the Obama administration his Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, had proclaimed it a real problem when 1,000 people crossed every day and that 3,000 would be a crisis. Yuma Sector’s Retired Chief Border Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem told the group, “Now those numbers would be a vacation for us.”
They brought in Chalmers Carr, a farmer and owner of Titan Farms in South Carolina. “Oh, here we go,” I thought to myself. I imagined Mr. Carr would be making an argument that he needed these illegal immigrants to work his farm. I was wrong. In fact, Carr does not employ any seasonal workers who don’t have a specific work visa.
Migrants who crossed the Rio Grande and entered the U.S. from Mexico are lined up for processing by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Sept. 23, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Carr said the migrants entering illegally largely don’t want to work in agriculture anymore. He told us about the Biden administration assault on the H-2 visa process that allows Carr to legally hire seasonal workers from other countries. In a nod to labor groups, the Biden administration has made the process of hiring workers extremely difficult and expensive. They’ve raised the fees on these visas to offset the funding of asylum cases.
I spoke with Chief Clem after the trip and asked him what Americans need to most understand about the border. He stressed, “We’re letting in everybody who crosses into the country and many of them don’t meet basic tenets for asylum.”
He told me that the old system would weed out people who very obviously didn’t have a reasonable case but DHS policy now is to give every single person an asylum hearing before a judge. That can sometimes take years and since we don’t have the capacity to hold people, we’re letting people out into the country and hoping they come back for their court date. It’s unsustainable.
Clem told me if the people crossing the border “saw a judge within 7-14 days after detainment, that would go a long way toward fixing the problems and would be consistent with the way the system is designed.” Most would be found ineligible for asylum and it would act as a “deterrent to people making the dangerous journey with cartels.”
A few days before I arrived at the border, Axios reported, “Biden has considered an executive order that would dramatically stanch the record flow of migrants into the Southwest. This could even happen in the two weeks before the address, allowing Biden to say he took action while Republicans just talk.”
The fact that an executive order was possible the whole time to fix this issue, but Biden has been waiting for the most politically opportune moment while the country buckles under this problem, is unacceptable. It is not pro-immigrant to allow people into our country unchecked. We have strained every resource and Biden could end it all with a pen stroke.
My border trip ended with a visit to Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley Humanitarian Respite Center. An old bar had been repurposed as a mini pharmacy for toiletries and other goods. Signs in English, Spanish and Russian instructed that no medicine could be prescribed here.
On mats on the floor, adults lounged, scrolling on their phones while a dance troop entertained the kids in another room. The migrants stay here 24-48 hours before their families arrange passage for them. If they don’t have family in the United States, they are assisted by other non-governmental agencies.
Perhaps this was the part of the trip meant to pull at the heartstrings but it served as a reminder that if you break the law to come into the United States, there will be a network there to assist you in your journey. For a refugee like me, whose family came to this country legally and with great difficulty, it’s galling to see people so blatantly disregard our laws and be rewarded with easy passage.
On my flight home, there were a few obvious migrant families and several Haitian single men. The men were very well-dressed, in designer clothing and sneakers. Where were they going and what will they be doing? How have we allowed a system that does not specifically answer this question?
In December and January, U.S. Customs and Border Protections had 478,188 encounters at our southern border. Much of the media sells us an image of food delivery men and agriculture workers coming here to do the jobs Americans won’t. Nearly half a million people in two months couldn’t all have become Uber Eats delivery drivers. It turns out they are not working in agriculture. How is this mass of people being absorbed into American life?
A story last week about the northern border, and how it’s growing as a crossing point for migrants who have discovered it’s even easier to get in from Canada than Mexico, contained this tidbit from a resident of a small Vermont town being impacted:
“The Border Patrol actually told us, ‘You guys might want to put a pistol in your backpack’ because nine out of 10 of them are just here for a better life, but there’s that one guy that’s got a rap sheet.”
The CPB puts the total of nationwide encounters for 2023 at 3,201,144. Someone ask the Biden administration to do the math.
A New Gallup poll finds a record-high number of Americans believe illegal immigration is a “critical threat” to the nation’s vital interests. Voters are clearly blaming President Joe Biden and his band of leftists for the invasion the nation has endured over the past three years.
The latest survey of more than 1,000 adults nationwide, conducted Feb. 1-20, shows 55 percent of U.S. respondents believe that “large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally” is a “critical threat” to the nation — up 8 percentage points from last year’s poll. The significant majority of Americans deeply concerned about illegal immigration surpasses the previous high of 50 percent recorded in 2004, according to Gallup.
“Significantly more Americans name immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S. (28%) than did a month ago (20%),” the famed national pollster notes. “Immigration has now passed the government as the most often cited problem, after the two issues tied for the top position the past two months.”
Concern over the illegal immigration crisis is at the highest level in the 40-plus years Gallup has been tracking the issue.
The poll finds congressional job approval, long in the basement, dipped to just 12 percent. It’s the lowest approval rating for the legislative body since November 2015, when it hit 11 percent, and just a few points above its rock bottom of 9 percent in November 2013.
Gallup conducted the poll as a ludicrous border “reform” bill, which was really just a Trojan horse for more Ukraine funding and would have codified the continuing illegal immigration threat, faltered in the U.S. Senate. The deal, puppeteered in large part by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have faced a near-certain death in the Republican-controlled House.
Biden’s job performance on immigration has sunk to 28 percent, a personal low for the Democrat, according to the new Gallup poll. That’s down from a CBS poll last month that found just 32 percent of respondents approved of Biden’s handling of border security, an all-time low at that time. The latest monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, released on Monday, records a 35 percent approval rating for Biden on immigration, his lowest rating on any issue in that survey.
“While many Americans regard the economy, generally, or inflation, specifically, as the most important problem facing the U.S., far more name immigration,” Gallup notes in an overview of the poll. “Immigration now sits alone at the top of the most important problem list, something it has done only occasionally in Gallup’s trend and not since 2019.”
Biden’s Border Debacle Hitting Home
Not even the coddling accomplice media can cover for the addled president and the disasters his immigration policies have wrought. The let-‘em-all-in left certainly can’t hide from the stark numbers.
In fiscal year 2020, the last full year of President Donald Trump’s tenure, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded about 400,000 encounters of illegal aliens attempting to enter the southwest United States. Three years later, on Biden’s watch, agents encountered 2.4 million illegal immigrants at the border with Mexico, 3.2 million nationwide.
Facing abysmal poll numbers and a real threat to his reelection chances, Biden audaciously told 30 of the nation’s governors last week that his hands are tied on cleaning up the mess he’s made. In a bald-faced lie for the ages, the president barked at a White House meeting that he’s not to blame for the border debacle and that the governors need to “show a little spine” and urge their members of Congress to pass the “bipartisan security bill” that recently went down in flames.
Half of the nation’s governors are standing with Texas in its right to defend itself against the invasion of illegal immigrants attempting to flood the Lone Star State. The Biden administration has fought against Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to “fill the dangerous gaps created by the Biden Administration’s refusal to secure the border,” according to the governor’s office.
“Every individual who is apprehended or arrested and every ounce of drugs seized would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and the nation due to President Joe Biden’s open border policies,” stated an Abbott press release issued after the governor welcomed 13 of his fellow Republican governors to Eagle Pass, a border town overtaken by illegal aliens.
Biden’s helpless act isn’t playing well with Americans. Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said the president has had the authority to tighten security at the southwest border since he took office at noon, Jan. 20, 2021 — if nothing else, by leaving things alone.
“The law is not only clear that he not only can enforce immigration laws, he is required to enforce them and he simply has been ignoring them,” the immigration reform activist told me last week on the “Simon Conway Show” on WHO in Des Moines.
In fact, Biden has signed an array of executive orders — early and often — reversing Trump’s work on securing the border. One of his first acts as president was killing construction of his predecessor’s border wall. Biden brought back catch-and-release and ended the remain-in-Mexico policy, among other executive actions that have effectively erased the United States’ southwest border.
“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden said at the time.
The results have been devastating, well beyond the border. Americans from the largest cities dealing with the massive influx of illegal aliens to small towns confronting rising crime and a fatal fentanyl epidemic are on the frontlines of Biden’s war on the border.
Last week, 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student Laken Hope Riley was assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered. An illegal immigrant from Venezuela has been arrested in connection with the crime, according to law enforcement, and is reportedly “expected to be charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, hindering a 911 call and concealing the death of another.” As my Federalist colleague Jordan Boyd writes, corporate media are trying to cover up that inconvenient truth, but Americans know the deadly consequences of Biden’s open border policies. The latest poll numbers confirm it.
Organizations like the Job Creators Network want to make sure Americans don’t forget who is responsible for the border invasion. JCN recently put up a billboard in New York City’s Times Square featuring a video of NYPD officers being beaten by a group of illegal immigrants. The billboard’s message to the president — and the country: “Hey Joe! If cops aren’t safe because of your open borders, nobody is.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
By Jewish News Syndicate Staff | Tuesday, 27 February 2024 07:43 AM EST
Senior Israeli officials said on Tuesday that they were unaware of any basis for U.S. President Joe Biden’s remarks on Monday that a hostage-for-cease-fire agreement in Gaza is imminent. During an unannounced visit to Van Leeuwen Ice Cream in Manhattan, near Rockefeller Plaza, Biden was asked about when a cease-fire in Gaza might start.
“I hope by the end of the weekend,” Biden said, per the pool report.
“My national security adviser tells me that we’re close. We’re close. We’re not done yet,” Biden said. “My hope is by next Monday, we’ll have a cease-fire.”
Ynet quoted the senior Israeli officials as saying on Tuesday morning that they do not understand “what the American president’s optimism is based on.”
The Hamas terrorist group also weighed in on Biden’s comments, with a source telling Reuters that the statement was premature and did not align with the situation on the ground. “There are still big gaps that need to be bridged before there is a cease-fire,” he said.
A spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that there has been no breakthrough in the negotiations that can be announced, while expressing that Doha is “optimistic” that a deal can be reached, even though Hamas and Israel don’t agree on any of the main issues. He added that Qatar has no intention of responding to Biden’s comments.
Reuters reported on Tuesday morning on the details of the proposal discussed at the Paris summit last weekend and submitted to Hamas for review. Citing a senior official privy to the details of the talks, the news agency reported that the proposal focuses on the first phase of the agreement, would last for 40 days and include the release of 10 Palestinian security prisoners for every Israeli hostage, which is seven more Palestinian terrorists freed per Israeli captive compared to the previous deal last November — 40 Israeli hostages in total for 400 Palestinian security prisoners in the first stage. Further, the Israeli captives include women, abductees aged 19 and under, adults aged 50 and over and sick captives.
Both sides will cease fire for 40 days and the IDF patrol flights over Gaza will stop for 8 hours a day. After the first phase, the IDF will gradually begin to withdraw its forces from dense areas of the Strip. Additionally, displaced Palestinians will gradually be allowed to return to the northern Gaza Strip, except for men of enlistment age for Hamas.
With regard to humanitarian aid, the proposal reportedly includes a commitment to bring in 500 aid trucks every day and to supply 200,000 tents and 60,000 trailers. Also, Gazans will be allowed to rehabilitate bakeries and hospitals.
According to The New York Times, the 40 captives to be released in the first phase in exchange for 15 Palestinian prisoners convicted of terror offenses would include five IDF soldiers and 35 civilians, including seven women who Israel believes should have been freed in the November deal. To release the seven women, Israel offered to release 21 Palestinian prisoners under the previous deal.Republished with permission from Jewish News Syndicate.
President Joe Biden has a youth problem. Weeks after the Democrat incumbent was found too senile to face federal charges for mishandling classified documents, a new survey shows Biden losing ground with younger voters.
An Axios-Generation Lab survey out Monday found Biden barely winning voters aged 18 to 24, by 52 percent to 48 percent. According to Pew Research Center, Biden carried 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points in 2020.
“We don’t know enough yet,” Neil O’Brian, a political scientist at the University of Oregon, told Axios. “But this idea that young people are gonna keep populating into the Democratic Party? There are some question marks around that.”
A survey from The New York Times in December found Trump winning among 18- to 29-year-olds, by 49 percent to 43 percent for Biden. The declining support among young voters comes as Biden tries to cultivate youth turnout with billions in student debt bailouts despite inflation and high interest rates pushing homeownership out of reach. Earlier this month, a CNBC survey of more than 1,000 Americans aged 18 to 34 conducted with Generation Lab found 41 percent think the economy is “poor” and 67 percent are living with family or roommates instead of their own home.
At 81, Biden is already the oldest president to ever hold office. Biden would be 82 by the time of a second inauguration. Trump, on the other hand, will be 78. The November contest will give Americans the unique opportunity to choose between two presidents who’ve already served four years in the White House.
Biden is also losing support among Latino voters. In December, a CNBC poll found Trump winning by five points this historically reliable voting bloc for Democrats. Biden won the majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, according to Pew. First Lady Jill Biden didn’t help her husband’s case for their support two years ago when she compared Hispanics to “breakfast tacos.”
Jill Biden just said Hispanics are as “unique” as tacos.
This isn’t Veep. Which White House speechwriter just won a bet for getting the First Lady to say something like this?pic.twitter.com/DXfJgYz0g5
The statement provoked a condemnation from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
“We are not tacos,” the group said in a statement. “NAHJ encourages [First Lady Jill Biden] & her communications team to take time to better understand the complexities of our people & communities.”
Biden is even losing support among black voters. A Gallup poll released this month found the president’s 47-point lead “is the smallest Gallup has recorded in its polling, dating back to 1999.” Trump is on track to win nearly 1 in 5 black voters, according to Gallup.
The same Gallup poll based on interviews in 2023 found Democrats’ support among 18- to 29-year-olds at its lowest since 2005.
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.
Former President Trump blasted Democrat border security and law enforcement policies for the murder of Georgia student Laken Riley at the hands of an illegal immigrant, vowing that “when” elected, he will “immediately seal the border” and begin the “largest deportation operation of illegal criminals in American history.”
Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student from Augusta University, was found dead on the University of Georgia campus Thursday after her roommate reported to authorities that she had not returned home from her morning run.
The University of Georgia Police Department arrested Jose Antonio Ibarra and charged him with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, hindering a 911 call and concealing the death of another, UGA Police Chief Jeffrey L. Clark said during a news briefing Friday evening.
Former President Trump (Spencer Platt)
The suspect is not a U.S. citizen. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Sunday confirmed that the Venezuelan national entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and had previously been arrested in New York City.
“Crooked Joe Biden’s Border INVASION is destroying our country and killing our citizens!” Trump, the 2024 GOP frontrunner, said Monday in a post on his TRUTH Social. “The horrible murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the University of Georgia should have NEVER happened!”
Murder suspect Jose Ibarra lived within a five-minute walk of the approximate scene where he allegedly murdered 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley on Feb. 22. (Mark Sims for Fox News Digital/Laken Riley/Jose Ibarra)
Trump said that “the monster who took her life illegally entered our Country in 2022… and then was released AGAIN by Radical Democrats in New York after injuring a CHILD!!”
“When I am your President, we will immediately Seal the Border, Stop the Invasion, and on Day One, we will begin the largest deportation operation of illegal CRIMINALS in American History!” Trump said.
He added: “May God Bless Laken Riley and her family!!! Our prayers are with you!”
Fox News had previously reported that Ibarra had crossed into the U.S. illegally near El Paso in September 2022 and was paroled into the U.S.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, ICE confirmed he had been encountered by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Sept. 8, 2022, after entering near El Paso and was “paroled and released for further processing.”
A memorial for Laken Riley is seen along Lake Herrick on the University of Georgia campus in Athens on Feb. 24, 2024. (Mark Sims for Fox News Digital)
ICE also confirmed that Ibarra had been arrested by the New York Police Department a year later, on Sept. 14, 2023, and “charged with acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17 and a motor vehicle license violation.”
When ICE learns that what it believes to be a removable illegal immigrant has been arrested on criminal charges, the agency will normally lodge a detainer – a request asking local law enforcement to keep the suspect in custody until they can be transferred to ICE and put into deportation proceedings.
In this case, however, ICE’s statement says Ibarra was released before a detainer could be issued. NYC is also a “sanctuary city,” which generally restricts law enforcement from complying with ICE detainers.
Ibarra appeared in court on Saturday morning, when Clarke County Magistrate Judge Donarell Green denied his bond “for today.” Two translators were present. Ibarra nodded when spoken to.
Ibarra’s brother, Diego, was charged Friday with possessing a fraudulent green card and is being held in state custody. The federal arrest affidavit for Diego Ibarra says that in September 2023, Athens-Clarke County Police charged him with drunken driving and driving without a license. He was later arrested for shoplifting and later skipped court.
In its statement, ICE said its Enforcement and Removal Operations office in Atlanta “encountered Ibarra pursuant to his arrest by the University of Georgia Police Department and being charged with murder and other crimes. ERO Atlanta lodged a detainer.”
Clark said “the evidence is robust” against Ibarra.
Fox News’ Michael Ruiz, Bill Melugin and Haley Chi-Sing contributed to this report.
Brooke Singman is a political correspondent and reporter for Fox News Digital, Fox News Channel and FOX Business.
Former President Donald Trump lashed out at the Biden administration’s border policies, writing on Truth Social on Monday that they are responsible for the recent murder of a University of Georgia student by an illegal migrant.
“Crooked Joe Biden’s Border invasion is destroying our country and killing our citizens,” Trump wrote. “The horrible murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the University of Georgia should have never happened. The monster who took her life illegally entered our country in 2022 … and then was released again by Radical Democrats in New York after injuring a child.”
Trump vowed that “when I am your president, we will immediately seal the border, stop the invasion, and on Day One, we will begin the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals in American history.”
The former president also said in another post that the Biden administration is considered a joke by many nations around the world.
Trump explained that “vicious gangs and gang members are pouring into our country from South America, and from all over the world. They are being forced out of their countries, in particular Venezuela and Mexico, and deposited” into the U.S. and then these other countries “refuse to take these criminals back.”
The former president emphasized that “this is a country destroying event,” the fact that foreign countries are sending “us their worst – gang members, murderers, drug dealers, human traffickers, terrorists, their mentally ill, and … sick people, who need large scale medical help.”
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
Former President Donald Trump charged the incumbent administration of targeting Christians Thursday night with a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention.
“Remember, every communist regime throughout history has tried to stamp out churches, just like every fascist regime has tried to co-opt them and control them. And in America, the radical left is trying to do both,” Trump said in Nashville. “They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags.”
President Joe Biden, himself, is the second Catholic to hold the Oval Office. The far-left administration, however, has pioneered avenues of religious persecution against political opponents, primarily through the Department of Justice (DOJ).
1. Investigating Catholics as Terrorists
The FBI, under the Biden administration, infiltrated traditional Catholic parishes to investigate “white supremacy.”
In January last year, a leaked memo from the Bureau’s offices in Richmond, Virginia revealed the federal intelligence agency targeted “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” as “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” (RMVE). The FBI rescinded the memo once public discovery made headlines. But a new memo in August obtained by House Republicans shows the FBI’s surveillance of Catholics involved multiple field offices across the country.
“The document assesses with ‘high confidence’ the FBI can mitigate the threat of Radical-Traditionalist Catholics by recruiting sources within the Catholic Church,” reported former special agent-turned-whistleblower Kyle Seraphin.
The FBI rescinded the memo once public discovery made headlines. But a new memo in August obtained by House Republicans shows the FBI’s surveillance of Catholics included multiple field offices across the country.
2. Pro-Lifers Prosecuted for Prayer
The Department of Justice indicted 22 pro-life activists in 2022 while neglecting to go after pro-abortion extremists who firebombed pregnancy centers, according to a Federalist review. Among them include Paul Vaughn, one of a handful who was convicted for the crime of praying at an abortion facility in Tennessee. If his appeal fails, Vaughn, a father of 11, faces 11 years in prison and fines of up to $260,000.
The DOJ claims the pro-life activists “aided and abetted by one another, used force and physical obstruction to injure, intimidate and interfere with employees of the clinic and a patient who was seeking reproductive health services” when they spent most of their time praying.
An internal memo published in May last year revealed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used federal funds to launch a smear campaign against dissident groups, including Christian organizations.
Dan Schneider, the vice president of the Media Research Center’s Free Speech America, reported on the DHS operations in Fox News. According to the memo, the DHS funneled “$40 million taxpayer dollars away from bona fide anti-terrorism programs and into a weaponized operation deceptively known as the Targeted Violence & Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP).”
Groups investigated under the federal program include the Christian Broadcasting Network, founded by Pat Robertson in 1960.
4. Repeal of ‘Conscience’ Rule
In 2019, Trump issued the “conscience” rule to protect health care workers from administering treatments violating practitioners’ moral convictions on procedures such as abortion. Politico reported in the spring of 2022 that Biden was preparing to dismantle the Republican-era regulation. The final rule came last month rescinding protections.
“Some doctors, nurses, and hospitals, for example, object for religious or moral reasons to providing or referring for abortions or assisted suicide, among other procedures. Respecting such objections honors liberty and human dignity,” said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But, the agency added, “patients also have rights and health needs, sometimes urgent ones. The Department will continue to respect the balance Congress struck, work to ensure individuals understand their conscience rights, and enforce the law.”
5. Biden Admin Targets Largest Christian University
Last year, the Department of Education levied a nearly $38 million fine against Grand Canyon University, claiming the school engaged in deceptive advertising campaigns. The department said the school “lied to more than 7,500 former and current students about the cost of its doctoral programs over several years.”
The university appealed the record fine in November.
“I have spoken to thousands of students, parents, employees, alumni and community stakeholders in Arizona and they all tell me the same thing: We need to fight this tyranny from federal government agencies not only to stand up for ourselves but to ensure this type of ideological government overreach and weaponization of federal agencies does not happen to others,” Grand Canyon University President Brian Mueller said in a statement. “American people are losing confidence in the federal government to be fair and objective in their operations and there are clearly no checks and balances to prevent this type of behavior from the Department of Education, which is out of control and continues to broaden its authority and selective enforcement powers.”
Mueller told The Federalist one month prior that the federal government’s efforts to target the university were “obviously political.”
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.
Voters in a few months are supposed to cast a ballot for their preferred presidential candidate. Meanwhile, we just watched one of our major political parties attempt to literally bankrupt the likely nominee of the other and seize his property. Whatever you want to say of America anymore, it can’t possibly be called free, and our elections aren’t anything close to fair.
A Democrat judge linked up with a Democrat district attorney in New York last week, ruling that Donald Trump, who earned more votes in 2020 than any sitting president in history, pay the city about half a billion dollars in penalties and fines, plus forego his right to conduct business or borrow money in the entire state. The pretext for the obscenity is that Trump in his years as a real estate developer routinely defrauded lenders by inflating the value of his assets, a hideous crime that resulted in his victims’ insolvency and buried by insurmountable debt.
Wait, that’s not right. Let me check my notes. Sorry, what actually happened is that the banks who took the risk of financing Trump’s ventures raked in fistfulls of profits and continued chasing him to continue their lucrative partnerships. In other words, the parties “wronged” by Trump got richer.
With each passing day, nearly $100,000 in interest is tacked onto the sentence and the D.A., Letitia “peek-a-boo” James (as Trump calls her for hilarious yet unknown reasons), has gone so far as to threaten state seizure of the former president’s marquee real estate properties should he fail to pay the sum. Trump’s legal team has promised to appeal. But to do that, they would have to secure a bond that’s even higher than amount he’s been ordered to pay.
This is a former president. This is a former president who exponentially increased his support for reelection in 2020, earning 7 million more votes than any sitting president before. This is a former president running for a non-consecutive second term and who has all but in name locked up the Republican nomination. This is a former president whose polling numbers currently show him likely to defeat the sitting one in virtually every swing state that will decide the election.
They’re taking his money — potentially all of the cash he has on hand — revoking his right to participate in an entire state’s economy and threatening to snatch his private property. That’s just in New York. Elsewhere, Democrats are trying to keep his name off the ballot or, if that doesn’t work, put him in prison.
Trump did business in New York for decades. This isn’t a coincidence or a matter of karma catching up. James campaigned for her job promising to pursue the former president, explicitly because he became president.
If becoming president means potentially seeing your whole life’s work confiscated by the political opposition, then elections aren’t fair. This country isn’t free.
Joe Biden has the greatest mental acuity of any president in the history of the United States — at least that’s what the White House wants you to believe. Throughout the past week, regime-approved media and administration officials have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to gaslight Americans into believing Biden is as “sharp” and “vigorous” as he’s ever been, despite incident after incident showing he’s in mental decline. These laughable claims come in response to the release of the Hur report, which found that Biden mishandled classified documents but concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter” because the president “would likely present himself to the jury … as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” federal prosecutors claimed.
Despite the White House’s attempted spin, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that Biden’s mental faculties are rapidly waning. Recent polling has shown the vast majority of Americans (76 percent) have “major or moderate concerns” about the president’s overall physical and mental fitness.
While corporate media will never admit it, Biden can barely answer basic questions, let alone complete a sentence. So, to bring a little humor to your day, The Federalist has compiled a list of 30 questions likely to stump America’s befuddled commander-in-chief.
1. What day is it today?
2. What are the names of your grandchildren? (And how many do you have…?)
3. When is your birthday?
4. What is a woman?
5. Who’s the president of France?
6. What year is it?
7. When were you first elected to the Senate?
8. What are the main ingredients in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
9. What is aluminum foil made out of?
10. How many fingers are on your left hand?
11. What year did you fight Corn Pop?
12. What color is the White House?
13. What is the shape of the Oval Office?
14. What NFL team just won the Super Bowl?
15. What’s the opposite of up?
16. What numbered day in July does the Fourth of July fall on?
17. What’s the name of your vice president?
18. Why do Christians celebrate Easter?
19. Where do babies come from?
20. What does 5+5 equal?
21. What state were you born in?
22. What’s the difference between “effect” and “affect”?
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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
President Joe Biden on Monday accused House Republicans of “walking away from the threat of Russia.”
While walking gingerly in the cold from Marine One and across the White House lawn with first lady Jill Biden, Biden briefly stopped to answer a couple of reporters’ questions, as seen on C-SPAN. After saying he’d be willing to meet with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Biden then was asked whether he would “go as far as to say that Alexei Navalny’s blood is on the hands of House Republicans right now?”
Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in prison Friday, Russia’s prison agency said. Biden later blamed Putin for Navalny’s death and warned there could be consequences, saying he was “not surprised” but “outraged” by the opposition leader’s passing.
Conservative lawmakers have refused to support aid to Ukraine until Biden and Democrats agree to stricter border security measures to deal with the migrant crisis.
The president on Monday said the GOP is “making a big mistake” regarding Russia.
“The way they’re walking away from the threat of Russia, the way they’re walking away from NATO, the way they’re walking away from meeting our obligations, it’s just shocking. I mean, they’re wild. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Biden said.
The reporter followed up to ask whether Navalny’s death might nudge the House Republicans to take up Ukraine aid.
“I hope so, but I’m not sure anything’s going to change,” he said.
Another reporter asked whether the president was looking into imposing sanctions against Russia following Navalny’s death.
“We already have sanctions but we are considering additional sanctions, yes,” he said before turning and walking toward the White House.
The Democrat-led Senate on Tuesday passed a $95.34 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Taiwan. A $66.3 billion bipartisan House bill to fund military aid to those countries and tighten border security was unveiled Friday.
On Thursday, Special Counsel David Weiss unsealed an indictment charging a longtime confidential human source (CHS) with making false statements. But it wasn’t Christopher Steele, the CHS who threw the country into turmoil for four years by peddling the fraudulent Steele dossier. Former CHS Stefan Halper, who helped further the Russia-collusion hoax, also wasn’t the subject of the indictment. Nor was CHS Rodney Joffe, who sought to destroy the Trump presidency with the Alfa Bank hoax.
No, it was the CHS who, on June 26, 2020, told his handler that the owner of Burisma claimed he had paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes in exchange for protection from being investigated by the Ukrainian prosecutor.
Thursday’s indictment revealed the name of that CHS for the first time — Alexander Smirnov — and alleged that Smirnov’s aforementioned statements, which were memorialized in an FD-1023 report, were false.
False Statements Allegations
Since news first broke of the existence of that FD-1023 last summer, House Republicans championed the CHS’s reporting as further evidence of Biden family corruption, while Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley focused on the Department of Justice’s apparent failure to investigate the veracity of the FD-1023 as part of their probe into Hunter Biden’s business affairs.
Weiss’s indictment presents a powerful case that Smirnov lied on June 26, 2020, when the CHS told his handler he’d had conversations with Burisma executives in 2015 and 2016: An investigation by Weiss’s team concluded Smirnov did not meet the Burisma executives until March 1, 2017, meaning the earlier conversations could not have occurred. The indictment references introductory emails that established the alleged accurate timing of events, as well as travel records of other individuals, which contradict Smirnov’s claims. That evidence, the special counsel’s office concluded, was sufficient to charge Smirnov with making false statements and creating a false record.
If Smirnov lied to his handler in June 2020 about his conversations with Burisma executives, the indictment is well deserved. Not only did Smirnov’s alleged lies violate the federal criminal statute that prohibits false statements, but they also proved especially damaging to society as a whole by interfering in the House’s impeachment inquiry.
The harm here is not merely that investigators wasted time chasing apparently false leads, or that Hunter and Joe Biden suffered from Smirnov’s allegedly false accusations, but also that Smirnov’s lies may overshadow the other unrelated — and substantial — evidence implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal, rendering it more difficult to obtain justice.
What About Other CHS Lies?
Smirnov, however, is but one CHS whose alleged lies have created havoc for our country.
Consider the lies peddled in the Steele dossier to our FBI. CHS Christopher Steele represented his sourcing as trusted, reliable, and well-placed when it was none of those things. That dossier led to the DOJ obtaining four unconstitutional surveillance warrants against an innocent American, resulted in our government spending millions investigating a hoax, and impaired the functioning of the Trump administration. Yet even after Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham referred the matter to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation, Steele reaped no consequences for the lies he sowed.
Then there was CHS Stefan Halper who, according to an electronic communication, told the FBI the Russian-born Svetlana Lokhova had “latched” onto Michael Flynn at a Cambridge academic gathering and then, after the dinner, “surprised everyone and got into [Flynn’s] cab and joined [Flynn] on the train ride to London.” Halper, however, never attended the dinner, so he could not have witnessed any of the happenings, and the supposed cab ride was completely fictional.
The FBI’s summary of his debriefing also memorialized Halper claiming Trump volunteer Carter Page asked Halper during a July 18, 2016, meeting whether he “would want to join the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser.” In an exclusive interview with The Federalist in 2020, however, Page, “unequivocally denied asking Halper ‘to be a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign.’”
Add to those two sources Rodney Joffe, the CHS who helped concoct the Alfa Bank hoax. That fairytale went that the Trump organization had a secret communication channel with Putin operating through the Russian-based Alfa Bank. Joffe peddled that tale to the FBI and, with the help of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, pushed the CIA to investigate this second Russia hoax just as the Trump presidency was beginning.
While the double standard is infuriating, assuming the allegations against Smirnov are true, charges are eminently justified. Also justified? Impeaching David Weiss.
Thursday’s indictment established that no one in U.S. Attorney Weiss’s office investigated Smirnov’s serious claims against Hunter and Joe Biden until after Grassley released a copy of the FD-1023 on July 20, 2023. It would be over a month later before FBI investigators would speak with Smirnov’s handler about the FD-1023. And, according to the indictment, it was not until Sept. 27, 2023, that the FBI interviewed Smirnov. That timeline confirms the incompetence of Weiss in handling the investigation into Hunter Biden because in October 2020, Weiss’s Delaware office received “a substantive briefing” concerning the FD-1023 from the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, then-Attorney General William Barr tasked then-Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady with screening evidence related to Ukraine. Last year, Brady testified before the House Judiciary Committee about that screening process, including how his team handled the FD-1023.
Brady explained the Pittsburgh FBI office sought to corroborate anything they could from the FD-1023, but he noted that his office lacked the authority to use a grand jury for the screening process. Brady’s team nonetheless succeeded in obtaining travel records of the CHS and “interfaced with the CHS’s handler about certain statements relating to travel and meetings to see if they were consistent with his or her understanding.”
What they were able to identify, Brady testified, was consistent with the CHS’s representations in the FD-1023. Additionally, the CHS was a longtime source for the FBI and considered “highly reliable” — something the indictment confirms given his length of service and the government authorizing Smirnov to commit crimes while operating as a CHS.
Brady further testified that his office had vetted the FD-1023 and the CHS “against known sources of Russian disinformation.” To conduct that analysis, his team worked with the Eastern District of New York. “It was found that it was not sourced from Russian disinformation,” Brady told the House Judiciary Committee.
Then when his team finished screening the FD-1023 and other evidence related to Ukraine, a Pittsburgh assistant U.S. attorney briefed Weiss’s office on the evidence, explaining how they had screened it, and noting they concluded it had “some indicia of credibility” and should be investigated further.
Thursday’s indictment of Smirnov suggests the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office sat on the FD-1023 for nearly three years, until after Grassley released a copy to the public. Instead, Weiss’s office offered Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea agreement, which fell apart only because the federal judge assigned to the case inquired into the strange arrangement that appeared to give Hunter Biden blanket immunity in a pretrial diversion agreement — something she had never seen before.
Special Counsel Weiss clearly knows how bad this looks because, in the indictment, he tried to spin the assessment into the FD-1023 as being closed out by the Pittsburgh FBI office, implying that is why his office did not conduct any further investigative steps.
“By August 2020, FBI Pittsburgh concluded that all reasonable steps had been completed regarding the Defendant’s allegations and that their assessment, 58A-PG-3250958, should be closed,” Weiss wrote. “On August 12, 2020, FBI Pittsburgh was informed that the then-FBI Deputy Director and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States concurred that it should be closed.”
However, as former Attorney General Barr has made clear numerous times, the Pittsburgh office was merely charged with screening the evidence, and the investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.”
“On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
No further investigation occurred, however. That alone should justify Weiss’s removal — and not merely for what he failed to do, but also because the country can’t trust that his special counsel team will follow all the leads, including the ones we don’t know about.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—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. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
President Joe Biden’s policies arguably strengthened Iran’s proxies in the Middle East, including the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Pictured: Thousands of Houthi supporters, holding Yemeni and Palestinian flags, gather Feb. 9 at Sebin Square to stage a solidarity demonstration with Palestinians and protest in Sanaa, Yemen, against Israel’s efforts to eradicate the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip. (Photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Anadolu/Getty Images)
Not only has the president empowered Iran by relaxing former President Donald Trump’s sanctions on the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism, but he has also empowered Iran’s proxies through various geopolitical moves that make war more likely. Biden is not alone; previous administrations have directed funds to ostensible U.S. allies in the region, funds that likely contribute to the proxies’ forces.
Biden’s relaxation of Trump-era sanctions netted Tehran at least $77 billion, some of which Iran directs to proxies across the region. Yet the president’s other policies also emboldened Iran’s proxies, who have attacked Israel, U.S. forces, and global shipping since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel.
“We have enabled and fed our enemies and constricted our friends,” Rob Greenway, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told The Daily Signal. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
Greenway, who orchestrated Trump’s sanctions against Tehran, warned that Biden’s policies have “strategically appeased Iran.”
Benham Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow focused on Iran at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told The Daily Signal that Iran has propped up proxies that represent “a state within a state,” exploiting instability in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen to “benefit from the largesse of U.S. policy.”
Taleblu notes that this poses a “philosophical problem” for America, which funds Iraq and Lebanon, even though it cannot prevent those governments from funneling that money to Iran’s proxies in their countries. Iran excels at “indigenizing the capabilities” of its allies by partnering with groups that have already arisen in another country.
Neither the White House nor the State Department provided comments for this article.
1. The Houthis
The Iran-backed Houthi movement, a Shiite militant group in Yemen, adopted the slogan “God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” The Houthis took control of Sanaa, Yemen’s capital city, in 2014, pushing the country’s then-president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, to the east. Hadi and his successor, Rashad Muhammad al-Alimi, enjoy support from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
During the Trump administration, the U.S. provided billions of dollars worth of arms to the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis in Yemen. Trump vetoed a bill to block this funding in 2019. Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, designated the Houthis a terrorist group in 2021.
Under Biden, however, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reversed the terrorist designation in a move the administration framed as intended to “alleviate or at least not worsen the suffering of the Yemeni civilians who live under Houthi control.”
In February 2021, Biden announced: “We are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”
The Houthis have repeatedly fired on international commercial shipping since mid-November, mostly targeting vessels with commercial ties to the U.S., Britain, or Israel. These attacks have prompted many companies to reroute ships to avoid the Red Sea, which offers a quicker, more direct route for global trade; the companies take the longer, more expensive route around Africa.
Since Jan. 11, U.S. and British planes have carried out retaliatory strikes across Yemen to respond to the Houthi attacks.
Greenway, the Heritage expert, warned that “Yemen aid is also invariably being diverted to the Houthis.”
He said the terrorists “create the humanitarian crisis, demand aid, and divert aid,” in a vicious spiral.
Last month, the Biden administration moved to redesignate the Houthis as a terrorist group, though it stopped short of the harsher designation Pompeo had used. Trump’s secretary of state had put the Houthis on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list, which bars members’ entry into the U.S. and enables the freezing of any Houthi assets in the U.S., among other things.
Blinken, by contrast, announced on Jan. 17 that the State Department would consider the Houthis a “specially designated global terrorist group” after a 30-day delay in which the U.S. would try to facilitate “humanitarian assistance” to Yemenis.
Edem Wosornu, the United Nations’ aid operations director, warned Wednesday against designating the Houthis as a terrorist group, saying the move may harm “Yemen’s already fragile economy.”
Rich Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who previously directed a Trump White House program to counter Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, called Blinken’s forthcoming sanctions on the Houthis “toothless,” noting that they include “five broad general exemptions.”
Goldberg mentioned Saudi Arabia’s truce with Iran last year, which he said involved the Saudis “basically buying off the Houthis and the Iranians in exchange for the Houthis stopping drone strikes.”
Goldberg told The Daily Signal that the Biden administration sent Saudi Arabia many signals that it wouldn’t back Riyadh when facing Iran’s provocations.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman “decided there is no U.S. support, the U.S. is pumping money into threats attacking Saudi Arabia, so they need to cut their own deal with the Iranians to protect themselves,” Goldberg said.
The Saudis are pouring an “unknown amount” of money into Yemen, he said.
Ben Taleblu, the other senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, warned that the Houthis have “some of the most damning” missile capabilities of any Iran proxies. He noted that the Houthis launched the medium-range Burkan-3 ballistic missile for the first time in 2019.
2. UNRWA and Hamas
Biden restored funding that may have directly contributed to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, when Hamas terrorists brutally massacred at least 1,200 Israelis, including raping women and murdering babies, and taking hundreds hostage.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East portrays itself as an aid organization, but the Israel Defense Forces provided evidence that 12 UNRWA employees took part in the Oct. 7 massacre. The U.S., Germany, Britain, and seven other countries cut off UNRWA aid after the revelations surfaced late last month.
Israel revealed Sunday that Hamas operated a tunnel right underneath UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City. UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini insisted that the U.N. agency “did not know what is under its headquarters.” He said the agency left its headquarters Oct. 12, five days after Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel.
In 2014, however, part of the parking lot at the UNRWA headquarters began to sink, likely because of a Hamas tunnel underneath, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“No one talked about what was causing the collapse,” a former UNRWA official said, according to the Journal. “But everyone knew.”
U.N. Watch’s Hillel Neuer revealed what he claimed to be a chat group with 3,000 UNRWA teachers celebrating the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Neuer testified that U.N. leaders “could not possibly have been shocked that UNRWA employees are implicated in terrorism,” because his organization sent them reports in 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2021.
In 2018, the State Department under Trump announced that the U.S. would stop contributing to UNRWA, noting that the U.S. had shouldered a “very disproportionate share” of the burden and criticizing the U.N. relief agency’s “business model and fiscal practices” as “simply unsustainable.”
In 2021, the Biden administration announced plans to provide $235 million to UNRWA, restoring part of the approximately $360 million that the U.N. agency would have expected if the U.S. had not cut off funding in 2018.
It remains unclear how much of this money went to Hamas or to UNRWA employees who may have helped Hamas on Oct. 7.
“Hezbollah is a threat 10 times larger than Hamas, with long-range capabilities, precision-guided munitions, [unmanned aerial vehicles], and the ability to inflict far more damage on Israel than we’ve seen Hamas do even on Oct. 7,” Goldberg, the senior adviser at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told The Daily Signal.
Hezbollah started a war on July 12, 2006, when militants captured two members of an Israel Defense Forces patrol inside Israel and killed the other three. Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel as a diversion. After Israel responded with rockets, a ground invasion, and a blockade, the United Nations negotiated a cease-fire.
The United Nations approved, and both Israel and Lebanon agreed to, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which, among other things, requires Hezbollah to disarm and withdraw its forces north of the Litani River. That river is about 19 miles north of Israel’s border with Lebanon.
The U.S. has spent billions of dollars over decades funding both the Lebanese Armed Forces and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, a “temporary” U.N. peacekeeping body established in 1978. Resolution 1701 states that the U.N.’s Lebanon force must disarm Hezbollah south of the Litani River, yet to this day, Hezbollah has armed forces south of that river.
“The return on investment is quite negative for the U.S. taxpayer in Lebanon these last two decades,” Goldberg said. “The threat has metastasized to such a degree that Israel is almost deterred from action in a full-scale attack on Hezbollah, and potentially deterred from action against Iran and its nuclear program.”
According to leaks following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, Biden warned Israel against launching a preemptive strike against Hezbollah. “Now we see Hezbollah’s ramped up,” Goldberg noted.
Since Oct. 7, Hezbollah has attacked Israeli outposts along the Lebanese border and launched rockets into Israel. The Jewish state has evacuated tens of thousands of civilians from Israeli villages and towns near the border with Lebanon, fearing an Oct. 7-style attack from the north. Israel has demanded that Hezbollah abide by the terms of Resolution 1701.
A Biden envoy, Amos Hochstein, has been negotiating in the region. According to Axios’ Barak Ravid, earlier this month Hochstein presented a peace proposal to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The proposal wouldn’t require Hezbollah to move its forces north of the Litani River but only 5 to 6 miles from the Israeli border, with the Lebanese Armed Forces filling in.
Hezbollah has already moved most of its elite Radwan force north of this line. Israel would have to pull forces away from the border and move its jets out of Lebanese airspace. Western powers also would send money to Lebanon to sweeten the deal for Hezbollah.
Goldberg denounced the plan as a “bag of magic beans.” He noted that the plan doesn’t explain how fighters who live in southern Lebanese towns would be forced to leave, or how Israel could verify that missiles had been moved from under schools, homes, and hospitals in southern Lebanon.
“Who would ensure Hezbollah can’t come in to attack Israel?” Goldberg asked. “It will be the LAF and UNIFIL. That’s ludicrous after 17 years of teaching us that they will not do anything to stop Hezbollah.”
He was referring to the Lebanese Armed Forces and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has “taken effective political control of the country,” so the LAF does not represent any sort of check on Hezbollah, Goldberg said.
“In exchange for giving Israel no sense of security, there reportedly will also be a massive bailout of the Lebanese economy, and an Israeli commitment to negotiate giving up territory on the Lebanese border,” he said. “It’s completely insane.”
Israel needs the ability “to give residents of evacuated communities enough confidence to return to their homes” and to “prevent an Oct. 7-type invasion,” Goldberg argued, and this proposed deal doesn’t come close to meeting those goals.
The U.S. has generously funded the Lebanese army for years, with a slight, unexplained pause during the Trump administration.
“A lot of the money we give to the government of Lebanon goes to Hezbollah,” warned Greenway, director of Heritage’s Center for National Defense.
Goldberg noted that Congress knew the UNIFIL funding wasn’t deterring Hezbollah and yet continued to approve it, anyway.
“Going back to 2007, every year members of Congress wrote letters about the enforcement of [Resolution] 1701,” Goldberg said, specifying that many lawmakers demanded answers from the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Biden. “It has been a bipartisan failure for years.”
Goldberg noted that the Trump administration attempted to “start enforcing congressionally mandated Hezbollah sanctions” and that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the Justice Department reopened investigations into the terrorist group that were closed during the Obama administration.
“You haven’t heard anything on cracking down on Hezbollah since Joe Biden took office,” Goldberg said.
Hezbollah released videos in July 2023 showing how the terrorist group prepared for a multipoint invasion to kill and capture Israelis in Israel, Goldberg noted, adding that these videos “look like Oct. 7, only they’re set in Northern Israel, not on the Gaza border.”
“Hamas executed a plan that Hezbollah created,” he said.
4. Iran-Backed Militias in Iraq
The U.S. launched airstrikes on Feb. 2 targeting al Hashd al Shabi, an Iran-linked militia and part of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, following a Jan. 28 drone attack on the military base Tower 22 in Jordan that killed three American service members.
Heritage’s Greenway explained that the government of Iraq “owns” the Popular Mobilization Forces, but Iran effectively controls them. The U.S. has supplied $10 billion or more each year to Baghdad on semimonthly cargo flights carrying massive pallets of cash, drawn from Iraqi oil sales proceeds deposited at the Federal Reserve, The Wall Street Journal reported. It remains unclear how much of this money goes to Iran-backed militias.
Greenway warned that the Popular Mobilization Forces—an umbrella organization of about 67 diverse militias—are often “bigger than the army, and most groups are under Iran specifically and are designated terrorist groups.”
He also argued that when the U.S. allows Iraq to send money to Iran in exchange for natural gas, these electricity payments constitute a form of money laundering. (The State Department in November extended a waiver allowing Iran to sell electricity to Iraq and use the money to purchase goods overseas.)
As of 2022, Iraq was the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, producing 4.61 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Yet Iraq imports electricity from its eastern neighbor.
“A major oil producer importing electricity? It’s the stupidest thing in the world,” Greenway previously told The Daily Signal. “Iraq deliberately decides they need electricity and it won’t bring in countries to improve its electric grid.”
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella term for pro-Iran Shiite Islamist insurgents in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the Jan. 28 attack on the military base. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is an ally of the Popular Mobilization Forces.
Taleblu, the expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, explained that the Iran-backed militias in Iraq started the Islamic Resistance in Iraq as an “umbrella group designed to further hinder attribution” for attacks.
When Islamic Resistance in Iraq takes responsibility for attacks like the one Jan. 28, it prevents the U.S. and allies from identifying which specific militia carried out the attack, Taleblu said. He described the resistance group as a “proxy for the proxies” of Iran.
For his part, Goldberg noted that the Trump administration attempted to start “squeezing Baghdad to stop financing these militias using U.S. cash.” But its efforts largely failed, he said, due to opposition from within the Defense Department, which sees the militias as allies against the Islamic State terrorist group.
Biden’s Vision for Iran
Why does Biden seem intent on helping Iran? Goldberg attributed the Biden administration’s policy to a balance-of-powers mentality that sees U.S. intervention as the major threat to Middle East peace.
“There is a worldview that in order to create an equilibrium in the Middle East that avoids conflict, you have to empower Iran to be an equal of the Sunnis and Israel,” he said. “Once they have a mutually assured destruction going on, the U.S. can pull out of the Middle East.”
“It’s a completely extremist, nonserious, ideologically fringe worldview, driven by the belief that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not an enemy but an enemy we have created,” Goldberg said.
If Biden wants to avoid a wider war in the Middle East, he needs to take action to deter Iran’s proxies. Unfortunately, the president’s policies seem to have done the opposite so far, perhaps even by design.
The uptick in Chinese nationals illegally crossing the southern border proves the record-breaking number of foreigners walking into our nation and being shipped by border agents to American cities with little to no vetting is no longer a crisis but a full-fledged invasion.
The Biden administration’s long-held talking point is that the current border crisis is fueled by a surge of struggling migrants from unstable Latin American countries. Chinese migrants, however, not natural disaster victims in Central America, have become the fastest-growing people group to take advantage of the lapsed southern U.S. border.
Border Patrol agents in San Diego alone recorded encounters with 269 Chinese nationals on Monday, Fox News’s Bill Melugin reports. Since the 2024 fiscal year began, Customs and Border Protection clocked more than 20,000 Chinese nationals illegally crossing into the U.S. via the southern border. Some of them crossed with the help of the Chinese Communist Party-linked app TikTok.
The 2024 number is already dangerously close to the 24,000 Chinese border crossers who were apprehended in the 2023 fiscal year and up significantly from the 450 Chinese arrests border agents made during President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
A large amount of the illegal crossings in San Diego sector happen in Jacumba where there is a small gap in the wall that illegal immigrants pour through every day. (We shot this a couple weeks ago). Inexplicably, the Biden admin has made no effort to fill or fix this small gap. pic.twitter.com/wqQRI917VU
In January alone, border agents encountered 176,205 illegal border crossers. That number may be a significant drop compared to recent record-breaking months, but it still exceeds 23 of the last 24 Janauries on record.
Border Patrol chiefs in several high-traffic sectors have warned that the overwhelming number of foreign illegal border crossers entering the U.S. puts our nation at risk because “information can be hidden” and “their agendas, their ideologies, the reason for them coming could be missed.” Gloria Chavez, chief patrol agent for Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol, complained to the House Homeland Security Committee last year that the influx of specifically Chinese migrants has slowed her agents’ interview process to seven hours to ensure some level of vetting.
Even then, CBP does not turn them away. Instead, busloads of Chinese nationals are dropped off in the heart of the U.S. and told to appear for an immigration court date that is often set years in advance.
“My Committee has been informed that some of these Chinese nationals have even been found to be affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and those are just the ones we’ve been able to vet,” Chairman Mark Green noted. “As the CCP works to undermine and infiltrate our institutions and even military installations, Secretary Mayorkas has made it clear to the entire world that our borders are open. This is simply unsustainable, and the national security risks are massive.”
America’s number one foreign enemy isn’t just sending spies through gaps in the abandoned border wall. It’s also actively fueling the death and destruction at the open southern border. Communist China has long taken advantage of Biden’s lax policies to poison hundreds of thousands of Americans with one of the most potent, lucrative, and lethal drugs on the black market.
One gram of fentanyl alone, about the size of a pack of table sugar, can kill approximately 500 people. Yet, in 2023, CBP seized 27,000 pounds of fentanyl, nearly twice as much as they seized in 2022. Since Biden was elected, CBP has reported record-breaking fentanyl seizures nearly every month, marking an 800 percent jump since 2019.
Cartels do most of the fentanyl smuggling, but their operations are directly sustained by investors linked to the Chinese Communist Party, who fund thousands of illegal marijuana-growing and selling operations in Mexico and the U.S. They produce the precursor chemicals required to make fentanyl in Asia and then ship them to packaging facilities close to the southern American border.
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.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., while not commenting directly on calls from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner’s call for President Joe Biden to declassify information about a “serious national security threat” Wednesday, told Newsmax that the foreign policy status of the U.S. under Biden has been “real slippery.”
“These things are not isolated incidents,” Donalds said on Newsmax’s“Newsline.” “When you leave Afghanistan the way that Joe Biden left, the disastrous withdrawal, it demonstrates to our enemies that America is not as strong as it used to be.”
Donalds noted that the situations in Israel and Ukraine, “are not isolated incidents. This is what happens when you have weak leadership in the White House.”
The world has taken note of Biden’s weaknesses and is pushing to see what it can get away with doing, he added.
“There’s this constant debate in our politics right now between isolationism and being a neo-con,” Donalds said. “I am neither. What I’m for is prudent national security and a strong America. … We need sound leadership in the White House and the United States doesn’t have it today.”
Donalds also on Wednesday discussed the House vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and called on the Senate to hold a full trial before lawmakers vote, rather than to call a quick vote to end the matter.
Donalds also commented on reports concerning Biden’s mental fitness for office, following a damaging report by special counsel Robert Hur that discussed the president’s age and memory capabilities.
The White House says Biden is getting a physical, but it does not include a cognitive test, and Donalds said he does not agree with that.
“The American people deserve to know if Joe Biden has the mental capabilities to serve as commander in chief,” he said. “It’s that simple. If he does not, then it is incumbent upon Vice President [Kamala] Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment and have the Cabinet vote on whether he should be removed from office.”
Tony Bobulinski, former business partner of Hunter Biden, is testifying before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees Tuesday, alleging the Biden family peddled President Joe Biden’s influence to China and Ukraine — all with the “enabler” Joe Biden’s knowledge and blessing.
“It is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” Bobulinski said in his opening statement obtained by Newsmax before the closed-door testimony under oath. “His family’s foreign influence peddling operation — from China to Ukraine and elsewhere — sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.
“Joe Biden was more than a participant in and beneficiary of his family’s business; he was an enabler, despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability.”
The testimony is being taken under subpoena in the House GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry, and Bobulinski laments the U.S. government and complicit media has ignored his “extensive evidence” and allegations for years — even to the point of suppression — he said in his opening statement.
“For nearly four years, I have tried to tell the American people the truth about serious corruption at the very top of their government,” his statement read. “In return, I have been falsely accused of being a purveyor of ‘Russian disinformation’ and a political surrogate.
“My continuous efforts to inform the American people of the facts have been actively suppressed by both the United States government and the so-called ‘mainstream’ media.”
The Biden family was unconstitutionally peddling foreign influence on Biden’s name and the power of his higher office, Bobulinski said.
“The only reason any of these international business transactions took place — with tens of millions of dollars flowing directly to the Biden family — was because Joe Biden was in high office,” Bobulinski said. “The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period.”
Among the allegations of bribery are the ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the China Energy Company (CEFC), where the Bidens “successfully sought to infiltrate and compromise Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House,” according to Bobulinski.
The operation began in 2015 and continued until March 2018, when CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming “was detained for corruption in China, never to be seen again,” Bobulinski added.
“It is also not a coincidence that CEFC used the Biden family’s weakest link, Hunter Biden, and the promise of large sums of money to the tune of tens of millions of dollars initially, and eventually the profits from investing billions of dollars in the United States and around the world,” Bobulinski said.
Bobulinski bulleted four “critically important facts” in his opening statement.
1. “Joe Biden was aware of the CEFC transaction, enabled it and had a constitutional responsibility and obligation to the American people to shut it down before it began.”
2. “Joe Biden’s immediate family members were enriched to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from some of our most dangerous adversaries, including the Chinese Communist Party and players from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Kazakhstan, and other foreign nations and entities.”
3. “Joe Biden’s status as the head of the family served an enforcement role — for example, when Hunter stated deliberately that his father Joe was sitting right next to him while demanding immediate payment of the $10 million CEFC had committed to the Biden family, as well as when Hunter demanded CEFC circumvent SinoHawk Holdings.”
4. “United States law enforcement appears to have been singularly unwilling to speak with me or to hear the facts we will be discussing today. I have never been contacted to provide testimony nor asked to speak with anyone connected with Joe Biden’s administration, including his Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, or local law enforcement. That includes U.S. Attorney David Weiss for the District of Delaware or any of the several grand juries I now know were convened after my name became publicly known.”
Bobulinski noted he is a U.S. Navy veteran upholding the highest standards of truth and devotion to the U.S. and not a partisan operative — as has been alleged. Also, he is nonpartisan, despite admittedly having donated to Democrat political campaigns in the past.
“I implore each and every one of you to remove your partisan hats today and focus on one party: the United States of America,” his statement concluded. “I hope your focus will be on a thorough and extensive investigation and exposure of all of the facts and evidence — and on answering the question of how we as a country allowed the White House to be infiltrated by our most existential adversary, the Chinese Communist Party.
“I also hope you will hold the complicit parties, including Joe Biden, accountable for their actions, as well as enact new laws that prevent this kind of deep corruption from ever happening again.”
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
The special counsel report on Joe Biden’s unauthorized removal and disclosure of classified documents exposed much more than our president’s mentaldeficits and the breadth of his irresponsible handling of top-secret and classified information. The report revealed a close nexus between Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and his father’s responsibilities and access to intel during the elder’s term as vice president.
On Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur released the results of his investigation into the president stemming from the discovery of top-secret and classified documents at Biden’s D.C.-based Penn Biden Center, his private Delaware home, and the University of Delaware. While the specific details in the recovered documents remain unknown, the nearly 400-page report provided an extensive enough summary of the materials to confirm an overlap in the timing and topics of Joe Biden’s vice presidency and Hunter Biden’s “business” enterprises.
Ukraine Overlap
Appendix A of the report provided a table summary of the documents recovered. Many of the top-secret and classified documents concerned Ukraine during the time frame when Hunter Biden acted as an intermediary between Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and the vice president. Recall that Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee that in early March 2014, he met Zlochevsky while in Moscow. And soon after, he and Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, receiving $83,000 per month.
The following month, Hunter Biden sent Archer an email dated April 13, 2014 — one week before Joe Biden would travel to Ukraine and meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Referring to “my guys upcoming travels,” Hunter then elaborated on “22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s ‘destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk,’” according to the New York Post.
Among the material recovered from President Biden’s unauthorized storage locales were several top-secret and otherwise classified or confidential documents discussing Ukraine. One undated document discussed issues related to Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Another, dated Sept. 17, 2014, consisted of a “Memorandum for the Vice President from staff members, with subject ‘U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine.’” Also dated Sept. 17, 2014, was an “event memo” from a vice-presidential national security staffer, titled, “Lunch with Ukrainian President Poroshenko,” which was scheduled for the following day.
The overlap between Joe Biden’s Ukraine-related work and Hunter Biden’s Burisma profiteering became more pronounced in 2015. On Dec. 2, 2015, the lobbying firm Blue Star Group, which Hunter Biden had arranged to work with Burisma, wrote to Burisma that it had “participated in a conference call today with senior Obama Administration officials ahead of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine next week.” The memorandum provided a summary of the conference call, telling Burisma that “Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden’s Special Advisor for Europe and Russia, and Dr. Colin Kahl, the Vice President’s National Security Advisor, presented the agenda for the trip and answered questions about current U.S. policy toward Ukraine.”
Two days after receiving this memorandum, Burisma executives Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharskyi, on Dec. 4, 2015, pushed Hunter Biden to call his father. The Burisma executives, according to Archer, expressed concern over the pressure they were under from Ukrainian investigators.
Shokin’s Firing
During Biden’s visit to Ukraine the following week, the vice president threatened to withhold U.S. loan guarantees from the country unless the Ukrainian president fired the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. Shokin was later fired, and Biden bragged about his role in the termination.
Last week, the special counsel reported recovering documents classified as “secret,” dated circa Dec. 12, 2015, “setting forth the purpose and talking points for a call with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk.” A transcript of the call between Biden and Yatsenyuk was attached, with a handwritten post-it note showing the then-VP had directed his executive assistant: “Get copy of the conversation from Sit Rm for my Records please.”
That transcript, labeled “CONFIDENTIAL” and “EYES ONLY DO NOT COPY,” according to the special counsel, included “pleasantries” exchanged between the two, “and the Prime Minister heaped praise upon Mr. Biden for his December 9, 2015 speech to Ukraine’s parliament.”
In that speech, Biden told Ukrainian lawmakers, “[I]t’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”
A Change in U.S. Policy
Biden continues to maintain that his demands to Ukraine to fire the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, represented U.S. policy. But that policy seemed to have made a sharp turn from just months earlier. For instance, according to the House Oversight Committee, in “June 11, 2015, then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland wrote Prosecutor General Shokin, applauding his office’s progress in anti-corruption efforts.”
Then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt would likewise publicly state in September 2015, “[W]e want to work with Prosecutor General Shokin so the [Prosecutor General Office] is leading the fight against corruption.” That same month, “the Interagency Policy Committee asserted Prosecutor General Shokin had made sufficient progress in combating corruption to warrant a third guarantee of a $1 billion loan,” according to House Oversight Chair James Comer.
As part of its impeachment inquiry, the House Oversight Committee has been seeking records to establish how American policy shifted from supporting Shokin to demanding his firing. And now that Special Counsel Hur’s investigation into Biden has ended, Comer is demanding“unfettered access to these documents to determine if President Biden’s retention of sensitive materials were used to help the Bidens’ influence peddling.” As Comer stressed, in addition to the Ukraine-related documents, top-secret and classified documents connected to China — another key source of Hunter Biden’s millions — were recovered.
Comer had previously asked Hur whether any of the classified records “were related to the countries that his family conducted business with,” but the special counsel’s office refused to provide details on the seized material. Comer told The Federalist that “[w]hile the Justice Department has closed its investigation, the Oversight Committee’s investigation continues.”
More to Probe
“Important questions remain about the extent of Joe Biden retaining sensitive materials related to specific countries involving his family’s influence peddling schemes that brought in millions for the Bidens,” Comer told The Federalist. “We will continue to provide the transparency and accountability owed to the American people.”
The key here, however, is not whether Joe Biden retained the documents to further Hunter Biden’s selling of access, but whether he shared details he had learned from his position as vice president with Hunter. Given the thousands of emails VP Biden exchanged using pseudonyms, the fact that he had no problem sharing classified information with his ghost writer, and that he has lied repeatedly about his involvement with Hunter Biden’s business affairs, it isn’t a stretch to believe he shared confidential information with his son to advance Hunter’s pay-to-play scheme.
But the special counsel’s report makes one more thing clear: Joe Biden will never face a jury — not because he is innocent, but because he lacks the mental competence. Attorney General Merrick Garland apparently concurred in that assessment, as he approved Hur’s report. So surely then, Garland, as a member of the Cabinet, is discussing with his fellow cabinet members, the need to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment… Right?
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—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. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
President Joe Biden’s political rhetoric aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues, but it also is failing to move Israel on ceasing its war on Hamas in Gaza. Despite being an ally locked in war, Biden has been reportedly unkind to his Israeli counterpart, calling Netanyahu an “a**hole” behind closed doors — all while claiming publicly he close, sources told NBC News.
A week after reports saying Biden privately considers Netanyahu a “bad f**king guy,” sources say Netanyahu is “giving him hell.” Late last week, Biden denounced the Israeli war operations in Gaza as “over the top.”
Notably, there has been no reports of Biden cursing out Hamas terrorists or the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror Iran, anonymously or otherwise.
This all comes as the Biden administration continues to press a two-state solution, giving Gaza a Palestinian state after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, while Netanyahu has continued to press forward, vowing “total victory” over Hamas.
Netanyahu is Biden’s “primary obstacle” to keeping Israel from the prime minister’s secondary war objective of eradicating Hamas, officials told NBC.
But, since Israel’s war on Hamas began, Netanyahu has been steadfast in achieving three objectives:
Return all of the 250 hostages taken by Hamas terrorists as human shields and leverage for a Palestinian state, as Israeli officials told Newsmax
Eradicate the Hamas terrorist network and leadership, including worldwide
Demilitarize and deradicalize the anti-Israeli Palestinian population in Gaza
Only after those three objectives are met can there be peace in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, according to Netanyahu, who is also called “Bibi.”
But Biden remains undaunted on Israel’s war objectives, instead facing pressure in the U.S. to get nearly $10 billion in funding for Gaza and far-left agitators calling for sanctions on Israel for its strikes against Hamas.
“He did say, ‘Bibi started off great, but he’s been a pain in my ass lately’ or ‘he’s been killing me lately’ — one of those things,” a source told NBC News. “He goes, ‘But, he’s doing a disservice … of late.'”
Biden’s inability to stop Israel has been a point of contention in private conversations with two-state advocates and campaign officials, sources told NBC.
“He just feels like this is enough,” one source said. “It has to stop.”
The rejection of the Israeli prime minister over political and policy differences could be construed as anti-Israel, so Biden administration officials have tried to tamp down talk of a personal rift.
“The president has been clear where he disagrees with Prime Minister Netanyahu, but this is a decadeslong relationship that is respectful in public and in private,” a National Security Council spokesman wrote in a statement, according to NBC News.
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
Thursday’s bombshell report by Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that “President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” And though the material concerned “issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” and presented “serious risks to national security,” Hur recommended against charging Biden in his 380-plus-page report, saying it would be “difficult to convince a jury” to convict such “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur’s damning assessment of Biden’s degenerative mental state launched a media frenzy concerning his fitness for office, prompting the president to angrily condemn the report for including what he called “extraneous” matters in a hastily arranged press conference Thursday evening.
Coming on the heels of Biden claiming he had recently conversed with two long-dead foreign leaders, Hur’s conclusion that the president suffered from a “significantly limited” memory as early as 2017 should lead the country — and the Cabinet — to consider Biden’s fitness for president. But the focus on the passages related to Biden’s mental infirmities has distracted from another huge takeaway from the report: the vast amount of top-secret and classified material Biden had removed, stored in unsecured locations, and communicated to the ghostwriter of his memoirs.
Following the FBI’s surprise raid on Mar-a-Lago, headlines blared that former President Trump had retained “more than 300 classified documents” after leaving the White House. In contrast, when news broke that Biden’s attorneys had alerted the National Archives to the discovery of classified documents in a closet at a Washington, D.C., think tank, the accomplice media repeated claims by Biden’s attorney that “’a small number of documents with classified markings’ were discovered as Biden’s personal attorneys were clearing out the offices of the Penn Biden Center.”
A Biden lawyer would later report finding a few additional classified documents at the President’s Delaware home, prompting the FBI to conduct a 12-plus-hour search of the residence. After the search, Biden’s attorney issued a statement acknowledging the “DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials.” The DOJ also seized “for further view personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years,” Biden’s personal attorney announced at the time.
We now know, though, that the “six items” and the “personally handwritten notes” consisted of hundreds of top secret or classified documents, including notebooks filled with Joe Biden’s summary of classified briefings. A quick count from the special counsel’s appendix reveals the government recovered more than 300 pages of top-secret and classified documents. The FBI also seized a hard drive, but the appendix lacks any details on its contents.
The top-secret and classified documents, as well as many others marked confidential, were discovered at the Penn Biden Center, the University of Delaware, and Biden’s Delaware home, including in his garage. According to the special counsel report, the material included notes from classified briefings that discussed “U.S. intelligence sources, methods … capabilities,” and activities, as well as the activities of foreign intelligence services. Other notes discussed “U.S. military programs and capabilities, foreign military programs and capabilities,” and “plans and capabilities of foreign terrorist organizations.”
The quantity and significance of the recovered material far exceed what Biden’s lawyers and their media accomplices had led Americans to believe — that it was but a few documents inadvertently retained. The special counsel’s report also reveals that Biden knew about at least some of the classified documents as early as 2017, when he told the ghostwriter of his book about discovering them.
Yet when asked about Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Biden asked rhetorically how “anyone could be that irresponsible.”
“What data was in there that may compromise sources and methods?” Biden added about the materials Trump retained.
Hur also tried to distinguish Trump’s situation from Biden’s, noting that Trump retained the documents after being asked for them to be returned and then allegedly had them moved. According to Hur’s report, though, Biden knew he had the classified documents as early as 2017 and didn’t try to return them.
Further, as the House Oversight Committee revealed last year, the then-White House Counsel Dana Remus had tasked Joe Biden’s former vice-presidential assistant, Kathy Chung, with retrieving boxes from the Penn Biden Center as early as May 2022. That was a full six months before Biden’s attorney would acknowledge the discovery of the classified documents.
James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told The Federalist that this fact and the House’s investigation “unravel the White House’s and President Biden’s personal attorney’s narrative of events.” And even though “Joe Biden willfully retained classified documents for years in unsecure locations and intentionally disclosed them,” he “faces no consequences for his actions.”
“Americans expect equal justice under the law and are dismayed the Justice Department continues to allow Joe Biden to live above it,” Comer added.
This is all true. But there may well be something Americans expect even more and something they refuse to allow Biden to deprive them of — a mentally cognizant commander in chief.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—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. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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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
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
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
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
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