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What Congress Should Ask The FBI Agent Involved In Censoring Hunter Biden Laptop Story


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/20/what-congress-should-ask-the-fbi-agent-involved-in-censoring-hunter-biden-laptop-story/

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On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Elvis Chan, the lead FBI agent involved in mass social media censorship, to appear for a September 21, 2023 deposition. Last week’s subpoena followed Chan’s failure to appear for a scheduled voluntary interview to face questioning about the federal government’s role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story in the month before the 2020 election.

While that scandal is much bigger than Chan, he is first in line to untangling the truth about how the government interfered in the 2020 election by running an info op to convince voters the Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Given Chan’s testimony in the civil lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, as well as since-uncovered documents from Facebook, the importance of questioning Chan cannot be overstated.

What Chan Said

In Missouri v. Biden, the plaintiffs sued the Biden administration and numerous agencies and government officials, including the FBI and Chan. They alleged the federal defendants violated the First Amendment by, among other things, coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech].” After filing suit, the plaintiffs filed a motion for a preliminary injunction and then obtained an order allowing for expedited discovery.

Since then, the district court has entered a preliminary injunction barring several federal agencies from coercing tech giants into censoring speech. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed the injunction but upheld many of the lower court’s legal conclusions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the Biden administration’s motion for a stay of the injunction.

What matters to the House’s subpoena of Chan is what the expedited discovery in Missouri v. Biden uncovered. It included the plaintiffs’ deposition of Chan. In his deposition, Chan testified he was one of the “primary” FBI agents who communicated with social media companies about so-called “disinformation.”

Specifically, “During the 2020 election cycle, Chan coordinated meetings between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and at least seven of the major tech giants, including Meta/Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Yahoo!/Verizon Media, and Microsoft/LinkedIn,” with meetings occurring weekly as the election neared. 

In questioning Chan, the plaintiffs’ attorneys pushed him on several points related to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop, forcing Chan to acknowledge the FBI regularly raised the possibility of “hack and dump” operations with senior officials at the various tech companies. Those discussions included the FBI warning of a potential hack-and-leak occurring in advance of the 2020 election, much like the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack and WikiLeaks release of internal emails. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs also quizzed Chan on the identity of the government officials who discussed “hack-and-dump Russian operations” with the tech giants. Chan identified Section Chief Laura Dehmlow, along with four FBI officials who attended Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) meetings. Chan named Brady Olson, William Cone, Judy Chock, and Luke Giannini as some of the individuals who had discussed the supposedly impending hack-and-leak operation. Chan claimed not to recall, though, whether anyone within the FBI suggested he raise the possibility of Russian hack-and-dump operations with the tech giants.

That Chan and others warned big tech of the potential for a pre-election hack-and-dump operation is huge. As Chan also testified, the government had no specific intelligence suggesting there were plans for such an operation. Nonetheless, the warnings prompted Twitter and Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story following The New York Post’s story breaking.

FBI Played Social Media Companies

While the government had no reason to believe a hack-and-leak operation was in the works, several of the FBI agents involved in warning the social media companies knew Hunter Biden had abandoned his laptop at a computer repair store and that the material on the laptop was genuine. That includes Chan, Demhlow, and at least three other individuals connected to the FBI’s FITF.

Chan did not reveal these details in his Missouri v. Biden deposition. Instead, Dehmlow informed the House of these facts during her deposition. Among other things, Dehmlow testified that soon after The New York Post broke the Biden laptop story, somebody from Twitter asked the FBI whether the laptop was real. An analyst in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division confirmed, “Yes, it was.’” An FBI lawyer on the call then immediately interjected, “No further comment.”

Dehmlow further testified that several individuals on the FBI’s FITF knew the laptop was real, including then-FITF Section Chief Brad Benavides and the unit chief. Dehmlow then confirmed that after the call with Twitter, the FBI had internal deliberations about the laptop and that later when Facebook asked about the authenticity of the laptop, Dehmlow responded, “No comment.”

During his deposition in the Missouri v. Biden case, Chan confirmed Dehmlow’s representation that in response to the Facebook inquiry, she had replied, “No comment.” Chan, however, then claimed he was not aware of any other inquiries from social media companies concerning the Hunter Biden laptop.

Was Chan Telling the Truth?

Last month, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan revealed his committee had obtained internal documents from Facebook that call into question Chan’s testimony. “I spoke with SSA Elvis Chan (FBI San Francisco) on 15 October 2020, as a follow up to the call with the Foreign Influence Task Force on 14 October,” one Facebook document read, contradicting Chan’s claim that he knew of no other inquiries from social media companies.

“I asked SSA Chan whether there was any update or change. . . as to whether the FBI saw any evidence suggesting foreign sponsorship or direction of the leak of information related to Hunter Biden as published in the New York Post story,” Facebook’s memorandum continued. According to Facebook’s internal document, Chan stated “that he was up to speed on the current state of the matter within the FBI and that there was no current evidence to suggest any foreign connection or direction of the leak.” Chan further assured Facebook “that the FBI would be in contact if any additional information on this was developed through further investigation.”

Chan’s claim to Facebook that he was “up to speed on the current state of the matter” also seemingly conflicted with Chan’s testimony in the Missouri v. Biden case that he had “no internal knowledge of that investigation,” and “that it was brought up after the news story had broke.” It is also difficult to reconcile Chan’s claim — that the laptop was only brought up after the Post ran the story — with Dehmlow’s testimony that several individuals on the FITF knew the laptop was real, including an FBI analyst.

What the House Should Ask Chan

The House should explore these inconsistencies with Chan and further quiz him on both Dehmlow’s testimony and the Facebook documents. Chan should also be quizzed on with whom else he discussed the potential for a hack-and-leak operation.

We know from Chan’s Missouri v. Biden deposition that he had served as the supervisor for the Russia-adept cyber squad that investigated the DNC server hack before the San Francisco office handed it to FBI headquarters. Chan testified in that deposition that he would have discussed national security cyber-investigations involving Russian matters with Sean Newell, a deputy chief at the DOJ National Security Division who had also worked on the DNC hack. Chan should be pushed further on whether Newell or anyone else who worked on the DNC hack had raised the issue of a 2020 hack-and-release repeat.

If so, the question then becomes whether they knew of the existence and authenticity of the Biden laptop. That question proves significant because it appears the hack-and-leak narrative was peddled to the social media companies to prime them to censor the laptop story. So, knowing who knew the laptop story was accurate but still fed the hack-and-leak hysteria will point to the players responsible for interfering in the 2020 election by silencing the truthful reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Chan may refuse to testify, however, even pursuant to a subpoena, or the Department of Justice may direct Chan not to submit to congressional questioning, forcing Republicans to enforce the subpoena in court. We’ll know tomorrow if either scenario plays out or if Chan comes clean with what he knows.

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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Academic Whose Work Was Cited As Proof Of ‘Systemic Racism’ Is Fired For Falsifying Research


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/13/academic-whose-work-was-cited-as-proof-of-systemic-racism-is-fired-for-falsifying-research/

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A Florida State University professor whose work was foundational to perpetuating the false narrative that there is widespread “systemic racism” infecting American society has been fired for falsifying data in his academic research on the subject.

In a recently resurfaced report from last month, the New York Post revealed that Eric Stewart, an FSU criminology professor, had been fired by the university “on account of ‘extreme negligence’ in his research,” as well as “incompetence” and producing “false results” in his nearly 20 years of work.

“I do not see how you can teach our students to be ethical researchers or how the results of future research projects conducted by you could be deemed as trustworthy,” FSU Provost James Clark wrote in a July 13 letter formally notifying Stewart of his firing.

According to the Post, Stewart has had six studies published in major academic journals between 2003 and 2019 that were “fully retracted,” including a 2019 study claiming the historical legacy of lynchings “made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives.”

Stewart’s retracted research also included claims that racial disparities in criminal sentencing are racially motivated. In a 2015 study, for instance, Stewart suggested Americans supported tougher sentencing for Hispanics because they feared an increase in the U.S. Latino population and Latinos’ potential economic success.

Other retracted studies include a 2018 analysis which “suggested that white Americans view black and Latino people as ‘criminal threats,’ and suggested that perceived threat could lead to ‘state-sponsored social control,’” the Post added.

Clark indicated in his letter that Stewart’s other published works are “in doubt.”

Rather than own up to his actions, Stewart has since attempted to play the victim card and attacked Justin Pickett, a former FSU graduate student who reported Stewart for his unethical conduct. Following the launch of the investigation into his work in 2020, Stewart, who is black, claimed that by raising concerns about his faulty research, Pickett had “essentially lynched [him] and [his] academic character.”

In addition to his $190,000 annual salary at FSU, Stewart’s projects received millions in research grants from major groups and government agencies. According to the Post, the National Institute of Mental Health — which falls under the National Institute of Health — reportedly gave Stewart $3.2 million to research “how African Americans transition into adulthood.”

Stewart also reportedly received funds from the National Science Foundation, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, and the National Institute of Justice, a subsidiary of the Department of Justice.

The discovery of Stewart’s falsified research and his subsequent firing is significant to understanding the left’s ongoing war on American police officers. As noted by Wilfred Reilly, an associate professor at Kentucky State University, Stewart is “[p]robably THE academic [figure] responsible” for the debunked narrative that so-called “systemic racism” plagues U.S. police departments throughout the country.

According to Google Scholar, for instance, Stewart’s questionable — and in several cases, categorically false — works have garnered more than 8,500 citations by other researchers. Stewart’s “research” has been used as a pretext by other academics, regime-approved media, and Democrat politicians to smear America’s on-the-ground law enforcement officers as inherently “racist” towards non-white Americans.

“The point [of this story] is that one of the [main] guys who built up the entire narrative of ‘wokeness’ just made it up,” Reilly told The Federalist. “Throughout the entire kind of racial reckoning, one of the things that I and others … have noticed is that these stories [about police brutality against black Americans] keep collapsing. The narrative of police genocide of African Americans turned out … to be complete nonsense.”

Reilly also referenced research conducted by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, whose analyses of publicly available data have debunked leftists’ narrative that there is an epidemic of police killing unarmed black Americans. In a USA Today article published a few months after George Floyd’s death, for instance, Mac Donald noted how even data from The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings dispels such claims and predicted that “[r]educing police resources will ultimately result in poorer service to the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas.”

Mac Donald’s forecast ultimately came true. While the rise of Black Lives Matter and Democrat-generated attacks on police began under the Obama administration, it was Floyd’s death that ushered in a new era of the left’s war on America’s police. Democrat politicos and their legacy media allies quickly hijacked Floyd’s death to normalize street violence committed by their communist foot soldiers. The left’s perpetuation of the false “systemic racism in policing” narrative and their subsequent actions not only killed people such as David Dorn, but countless others who suffered because their Democrat-run cities defunded local law enforcement.

Following Floyd’s death and the anti-police back it launched, there was a significant spike in overall murders, especially affecting black victims. According to Reilly, such statistics don’t interest groups like Black Lives Matter because “a focus on things that might actually correlate with a high loss of black life … [is] not what the movement was about.”

BLM “was about using outlier conflict between blacks and whites to get money,” Reilly said. “The whole idea was to take these very isolated, white cop or white vigilantes on black male cases and present them as normal. They did that for a while. It turned out not to be real and they’ve pulled back from the scene, now as the owners of some nice properties. And now we’re left to clean up the mess.”

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

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‘Facebook Files’ Part 4 Show FBI’s Censorship Liaison May Have Perjured Himself


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | AUGUST 07, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/07/facebook-files-part-4-show-fbis-censorship-liaison-may-have-perjured-himself/

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Part four of the “Facebook Files” published by Rep. Jim Jordan on Monday shows a top FBI agent who was coordinating censorship strategy with Silicon Valley tech companies may have committed perjury in November testimony.

FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who serves as the bureau’s “main conduit between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and Big Tech,” according to Jordan, was deposed last fall as a central player in the government censorship case Missouri v. Biden. Chan testified that he was only aware of one meeting between Facebook employees and the FBI about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, but internal Facebook documents show him participating in an additional “secret follow-up call.”

In his November deposition, Chan admitted to an Oct. 14, 2020 meeting with officials at Facebook related to the first Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post. The Post revealed emails from the laptop that indicated then-candidate Joe Biden had been lying when he claimed to have never spoken about Hunter’s business with him “or with anyone else.”

At the Oct. 14 meeting, Laura Dehmlow, the FBI’s section chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, offered “no comment” when Facebook asked whether the laptop was real, Jordan explained. Facebook quickly announced it was “reducing” the “distribution” of the story until the platform completed a third-party fact check.

Dehmlow told House lawmakers in July that in a meeting with Twitter earlier on Oct. 14, someone from the FBI had acknowledged the laptop’s authenticity before other officials at the bureau switched their answer to “no comment.” That became the FBI’s official response when other companies such as Facebook asked whether the laptop was real, even though the agency had confirmed the laptop’s authenticity as early as November 2019, according to IRS whistleblowers.

In November, Chan recalled Dehmlow’s response at the Oct. 14 meeting where Dehmlow offered Facebook no comment on the legitimacy of the laptop. Chan told lawmakers that was his only meeting on the matter with the social media company. Internal records from the company made public by GOP House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, however, reveal another apparent meeting between Chan and Facebook employees.

One employee recalled having an Oct. 15 discussion with Chan as a “follow up” to the meeting with the Foreign Influence Task Force on Oct. 14. The employee asked Chan for any updates or changes on the legitimacy status of Hunter Biden’s laptop. While Chan testified in his deposition that he had “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s investigation into the infamous laptop, records from Facebook reveal Chan told employees he “was up to speed on the current state of the matter within the FBI.”

Previous installments of the “Facebook Files” exposed corporate-government collusion between Facebook and Biden White House officials collaborating to censor information about Covid-19, including content that was “true.” Records show the Biden administration pressured Facebook to take down “humorous or satirical content that suggests the vaccine isn’t safe,” among other claims about side effects even if they were “true.”

[READ: ‘Facebook Files’ 2.0 Reveal White House Pressured Facebook To Censor ‘True’ Content]

In July, Chief Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana delivered a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, prohibiting administration officials from collaborating with tech titans to censor dissenting speech on social media platforms. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals later issued a stay on the injunction, with oral argument scheduled to take place Thursday, leaving federal officials free to continue working with tech companies to censor Americans online in the meantime.

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.

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


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 26, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/26/biden-family-scandals-are-so-much-bigger-than-hunters-hookers-and-burisma-bribery/

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

Saturated in Scandal

1. The Many (Uncharged) Crimes of Hunter Biden

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

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

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

2. Joe Biden’s Business Lie

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

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

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

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

Moving the goalposts won’t erase the lie. 

3. Joe Biden’s Corruption

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

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

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

Cover-Ups

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

4. FBI’s Interference in the 2020 Election

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

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

5. Intelligence Agencies’ Interference in the 2020 Election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. DOJ and FBI’s Handling of Biden Investigations

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

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

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

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

Cover-Ups of the Cover-Ups

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

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

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

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

9. Democrats Lying to Protect Joe Biden 

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

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

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

10. Press Acting as Biden-Run Media

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

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

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Feds Started A Dangerous Game With Hunter Biden’s Laptop, But GOP Lawmakers Can Finish It


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 11, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/11/feds-started-a-dangerous-game-with-hunter-bidens-laptop-but-gop-lawmakers-can-finish-it/

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The interim report of the House Intelligence Committee and Weaponization Subcommittee released Wednesday established extensive coordination between the Biden campaign and those behind the statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials that painted the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation. More explosive, however, is the fact, first reported on Tuesday by The Federalist, that a Central Intelligence Agency employee solicited a former CIA officer to sign the statement. 

Yet there is still much more to unravel to expose the breadth and depth of the info op painting the infamous laptop as Russian disinformation and the government actors involved. Here are five threads that will lead to the truth.

Subpoena All 51 Signatories

As its title stated, the House’s report focused on “How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.” While the October 2020 letter signed by the former intelligence officials is only part of the scandal, it’s a solid entry point to learning the identity of many of those involved. 

The report already established Secretary of State Antony Blinken — then a senior adviser to the Biden campaign — contacted Obama’s CIA acting director, Mike Morell, to discuss the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Morell also testified that speaking with Blinken spurred him to craft the letter in question so Biden could reference it during his final debate against then-President Trump. 

The House report highlighted several other plays involved in gathering signatories for the letter and revealed that at least one CIA employee solicited an individual to sign the letter. 

The House stressed its investigation is continuing but that neither Blinken nor the CIA have yet to provide documents requested by the committees relating to both the statement and the interactions between its signatories and the CIA. The committees also reportedly scheduled interviews with former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. 

But it is not merely Brennan and Clapper who should be interviewed. While they are two of the most prominent former intelligence officials to have signed the letter, every signatory should be questioned and asked to provide relevant communications. If they refuse, subpoenas should be served and enforced.

Specifically, Brennan, Clapper, and other signatories should be asked to identify anyone they communicated with, or tried to, about the laptop or the letter to reveal the identity of the “nine additional former IC officers” who were unnamed but represented as supporting the letter’s conclusions.

Those 60 people should be asked about everyone with whom they spoke or attempted to speak about the laptop or the letter at any time, including those connected to: 1) the Biden family, 2) the Biden campaign, 3) elected officials, 4) the Democrat Party, 5) politicians opposed to Trump, 6) the media, 7) current government officials, 8) other signatories, 9) foreign governments, and 10) anyone else. All related communications should be obtained.

Based on those findings, any individuals not previously known should be added to the list of those to be questioned and subpoenaed. Those names will likely include many members or allies of the Biden campaign. We already know former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter and Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, were involved in pushing the “Russian disinformation” narrative.

Additionally, from Morell’s testimony to House investigators, we know the head of Biden’s campaign, Steve Ricchetti, was involved, given that he arranged to personally thank Morell for the letter. Morell also said Jeremy Bash, whom Morell knew through Beacon Global Strategies, arranged Morell’s conversation with Ricchetti, raising the possibility that Beacon Global Strategies played a role in the plot. 

These individuals should be further questioned on their roles related to the letter: Did they draft any language? Propose revisions to the language? We know some of this already from the House report, but there’s more to probe.

Furthermore, all of the signatories should be asked: Had they read the New York Post articles? Did they know of the existence of the laptop or the FBI’s seizure of it? Why did they supposedly believe it was Russian disinformation? Did they have any doubts? Did they watch the final Trump-Biden debate and, if so, did they believe Biden had accurately described their letter? What about Politico’s infamous “Russian disinfo” article? Did they believe Biden or Politico had misrepresented their letter? If so, to whom, if anyone, did they express their concerns? If not, why not? 

Probe FBI’s Involvement

The aforementioned strategy is a good starting point, but because members of the Biden campaign and others involved outside the government may not know — or be honest — about who inside the government participated in the election-interference scheme, investigators should simultaneously work from the FBI out.

Congressional oversight committees should start by interviewing and obtaining all relevant documents, voluntarily or by subpoena, from the FBI agents with knowledge of the laptop. They should begin with those who first learned of its existence when the father of John Paul Mac Isaac — the owner of the computer repair store where Hunter had abandoned his laptop — contacted the agency. 

According to Mac Isaac, in October 2019, his father, a retired Air Force colonel, reported the laptop to FBI agents in the Albuquerque, New Mexico field office. Mac Isaac’s father spoke with an agent, telling him that his son had “the laptop of the son of a presidential candidate” and that it “has a lot of bad stuff on it, and he needs your help.” 

Mac Isaac’s father also told the agent the hard drive contained pornographic material and content that was “geopolitically sensitive,” including “dealing with foreign interests, a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, lots of foreign money.” And while Mac Isaac’s father offered the FBI a copy of the laptop, the agent instead asked to review the repair contract.

After reviewing it, the agent reportedly “consulted with a regional legal officer,” then told Mac Isaac’s father they should “lawyer up” and not “talk to anyone about this.” The agent then directed the repairman’s father to the door. 

An agent later reportedly contacted Mac Isaac’s father, who provided the agent with his son’s contact information. Then, “on December 9, 2019, the FBI served a subpoena on John Paul for the computer, the hard drive, and all related paperwork,” which Mac Isaac provided. 

Mac Isaac would later claim one of the two FBI agents who retrieved the laptop from his Delaware store suggested he keep quiet. According to Mac Isaac, as the agents were leaving, he quipped, “Hey, lads, I’ll remember to change your names when I write the book.”

At that point, Mac Isaac claimed, “Agent DeMeo paused and turned to face me,” replying: “It is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”

After seizing the laptop, the “local FBI leadership told employees, ‘You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop,’” according to multiple whistleblowers. The whistleblowers further alleged that “the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election — potentially a year after” retrieving it.

These details give congressional investigators ample leads to uncover who in the FBI knew about the Hunter Biden laptop, beginning in Albuquerque and then moving to the FBI’s Baltimore field office, which holds jurisdiction over Delaware-based investigations.

The agents involved should be questioned to learn what they knew, what they did, and with whom they spoke, including whether they communicated with any member of the Biden family, campaign, or media. Investigators should also obtain the various FBI reports, the subpoena, the warrant used to obtain the subpoena, the chain of custody for the laptop and other seized material, and all written or electronic communications. 

Focusing on the FBI is especially important because the day after the Post broke the laptop story, Russia-collusion hoaxer Ken Dilanian, ran an “exclusive” at NBC, reporting that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” The next day, USA Today similarly reported the FBI’s supposed involvement in investigating whether a Russian influence operation was at play. On Oct. 17, 2020, USA Today reiterated that the “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia.”

However, the FBI was not investigating whether the laptop was related to a “foreign intelligence operation,” but instead was investigating Hunter Biden. This FBI leak nonetheless furthered the “Russia disinformation” narrative. In fact, Blinken went on to share one of the USA Today articles with Morell. Then Morell referenced the nonexistent FBI investigation as a justification for the letter, as a text included in the House report shows. 

Specifically, Morell texted Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA acting chief of operations, saying, “I’m thinking of writing something that says the FBI is investigating whether there is Russia involvement in this thing and that makes sense because it has the feel of a Russian op.” Morell asked Polymeropoulos if he wanted to help with the effort, leading the duo to draft the initial version of the statement together.

Questioning the FBI agents with knowledge of the laptop and obtaining relevant communications would help establish who was behind the leak and whether anyone from the FBI communicated with the Biden campaign, the CIA, or any of the letter’s signatories. Likewise, this line of inquiry would establish if anyone with knowledge of the laptop cautioned social media companies — or suggested other FBI agents warn Big Tech — to expect a “hack-and-leak” operation.

Probe DEA’s Involvement

A third line of inquiry requires looking to the Drug Enforcement Administration and its role in executing a search warrant on the Massachusetts office of Hunter Biden’s former psychiatrist Keith Ablow. 

On Oct. 30, 2020, NBC News first reported that during a February 2020 DEA raid on Ablow’s office, agents reportedly recovered a second laptop belonging to Hunter Biden from a safe in Ablow’s basement. The DEA then returned the computer to Hunter’s lawyer George Mesires.

For a year, Ablow had reportedly “made repeated efforts to persuade Hunter Biden to retrieve his computer.” But then the DEA raided Ablow’s office just a few months after the FBI had seized Hunter’s other laptop from Mac Isaac. 

The DEA agents involved should be asked whether they knew Ablow possessed the laptop and whether that fact motivated the execution of the search warrant. Did the DEA agents speak with any FBI agents? Did the DEA know of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s investigation into Hunter? Did agents review the laptop before returning it? If not, why not? If so, what information did they discover, and why was the laptop not retained as evidence? 

This line of inquiry may prove a dead end, or it could reveal more election interferers.

Dig Into Biden Briefings

Next, investigators should review the intelligence briefings provide to Biden since October 2019 when the FBI first learned of the laptop’s existence. Given the incriminating evidence contained on it, the intelligence briefings should have alerted Joe Biden to the national security risk.

If the briefings included details about the laptop, the individuals involved should be questioned and documents subpoenaed to learn who knew what and did what with the information. But if the briefings did not mention the laptop, investigators should ask those responsible for putting together the briefings about their knowledge of the laptop and their explanation for omitting mention of it. 

Investigate the Giuliani Investigators

A fifth line of inquiry should look to those behind the investigation of Rudy Giuliani. 

The New York Post’s Miranda Devine previously reported: “[T]he FBI spied on the former mayor’s cloud for two years from May, 2019, a month after he began working as then president Donald Trump’s personal attorney. … So the FBI had access to all Giuliani’s emails and iMessages for two years,” meaning it’s possible the FBI saw Bob Costello’s Aug. 27, 2020, email to Giuliani “telling him of Mac Isaac’s ‘amazing discovery.’”

In that email, Costello wrote: “I am arranging to get a complete copy of the hard drive as it contains lots of materials beyond the Ukraine stuff according to the owner. … The five emails he sent show that Hunter was directly involved in orchestrating his father Joe Biden’s intervention to stop the Ukrainian investigation of Burisma.” The email continued: “I believe that we are on the verge of a game changing production of indisputable evidence of the corruption we have long suspected involving the Biden’s and Ukraine — but there is more.”

The joint committees’ investigation should run down the possibility that those investigating Giuliani had access to his emails and learned of the laptop before the Post’s stories. If so, with whom did the agents share that knowledge? Again, interviews and documents are necessary to determine if any of these FBI agents were responsible for the leaks or communicated with the Biden campaign or Big Tech.

Wednesday’s report provides crucial details about the info ops run on Americans, but there is much more left to investigate to uncover all of the players who helped interfere in the 2020 election.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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White House Blocks New York Post Reporter From Rare Biden Event


By: Alana Goodman | May 8, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/white-house-blocks-new-york-post-reporter-from-rare-biden-event-2659980941.html/

The White House blocked the New York Post from covering a Monday public event with President Joe Biden, according to the paper, a sign the president’s team is increasingly sensitive to coverage of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and could be cracking down on media access after the launch of his reelection campaign.

The Post, which first revealed the existence of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, said the White House rejected its request to attend Biden’s press event discussing airline policies with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The decision comes as federal prosecutors are wrapping up a tax investigation into Hunter Biden, which could result in criminal charges in the coming days.

Photos from the event show there were about 20 empty media seats, undermining the explanation from the White House press office for the decision to block the Post.

“We are unable to accommodate your credential request to attend the Investing in Airline Accountability Remarks on 5/8,” the White House press office told the Post. “The remarks will be live-streamed and can be viewed at WH.gov. Thank you for understanding. We will let you know if a credential becomes available.”

Biden—who has held the fewest press availabilities of any president in two decades—in February blew up at a Post reporter after the reporter asked during a similar media event about the first family’s financial dealings with China. “Give me a break, man,” Biden said, ignoring the question. “You can come to my office and ask a question when you have more polite people with you.”

Steven Nelson, the Post reporter who was denied access, told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s staff are “setting an anti-press freedom precedent by prescreening journalists allowed to attend large indoor events. These spaces were open to all reporters on White House grounds in the past.”

He noted that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre promised last July to end a much-criticized COVID-era screening process that gave Biden’s press office control over which reporters were allowed to attend presidential remarks. Reporters accused the White House of arbitrarily enforcing the policy, saying it was “done without any transparent process into how reporters are selected to cover these events” in a letter last June.

“The White House Correspondents’ Association also has called on the administration to restore large indoor spaces to their historical status as open to all,” added Nelson. “If the Biden White House continues to discriminate against large outlets such as the New York Post, future administrations can do the same to other newspapers. It should end now.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House Correspondents’ Association also did not respond to a request for comment.

Update 5:34 p.m.: This piece has been updated since publication.

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How House Weaponization Committee Republicans Can Get The Most From Their ‘Twitter Files’ Witnesses


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 08, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/08/how-the-house-weaponization-committee-can-get-the-most-from-its-twitter-files-witnesses/

Jim Jordan in committee hearing
Most committee hearings flounder because politicians waste time grandstanding, but lawmakers shouldn’t squander the chance to ask insightful questions of the ‘Twitter Files’ witnesses.

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Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify on Thursday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Little they say will be new, yet because corporate media have refused to cover the story, many Americans remain ignorant about the massive scandals Taibbi, Shellenberger, and the other independent journalists have revealed over the last three months in the “Twitter Files.”

Here’s what the House committee must do to break the cone of silence. 

Introduce Taibbi and Shellenberger to Americans

Most Americans know little about Taibbi and Shellenberger, allowing the left to execute its go-to play when faced with inconvenient facts: call the messengers members of a right-wing conspiracy. The House’s weaponization committee should thus ensure the public knows neither Taibbi nor Shellenberger can be written off as conservative conspirators, much less “ultra MAGA.”

Hopefully, the two witnesses for the majority party will ensure their opening statements detail their non-conservative “credentials” — something Taibbi has attempted to do on Twitter, writing: “I’m pro-choice and didn’t vote for Trump,” and noting he is an independent.

Taibbi’s work covering politics for Rolling Stone and his “incisive, bilious takedowns of Wall Street,” as well as past appearances on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, and his work with Keith Olbermann, are the non-conservative credentials Americans need to hear. 

Shellenberger’s biography likewise confirms he is no right-winger or Trump surrogate. Time Magazine named him “Hero of the Environment.” “In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction policies,” his webpage reads — details helpful to highlight for the listening public.

If Taibbi and Shellenberger’s prepared testimony omits these and other details, Chair Jim Jordan should open the hearing by asking the witnesses to share with the country their political and policy perspectives and then push them on why all Americans should care about the “Twitter Files.” 

Here, the committee and its witnesses need to remind Americans of the importance of free speech and that the silencing of speech harms the country, even when it is not the government acting as the censor. (In fact, I would argue it is precisely because our country has lost a sense of the importance of free speech that the government successfully outsourced censorship to Twitter.)

Guide Them So They Tell a Coherent Story

Next, the questioning will begin. Unfortunately, here’s where most committee hearings flounder because politicians prefer to pontificate than pose insightful questions to their witnesses. But in the case of the “Twitter Files,” Republicans can do both because the witnesses have already provided detailed answers to much of what the country needs to know in the nearly 20 installments they published over the last several months. 

Thus the goal of the committee should be to provide a platform that allows the witnesses to tell the story of the scandals uncovered. Ideally, then, committee members will lead the witnesses through their testimony as if each question represents the opening paragraph of a chapter, with Taibbi and Shellenberger given the floor to provide the details.

Start at the Beginning, the Best Place to Start

Committee members will all want to focus on the most shocking discoveries, such as the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the government’s demands to silence unapproved Covid messages. But those events merely represent symptoms of the diseased state of free speech Taibbi and Shellenberger uncovered, and the latter represents the real threat to our country.

Democrats, independents, and apolitical Americans will also be inclined to immediately write off the hearings as political theater if Republicans immediately flip to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Covid messaging. Both are important parts of the story, but Americans first need to understand the context.

Begin there: After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he provided Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other independent journalists access to internal communications. What communications were accessible? What types of emails did the journalists review? How many? What else remains to explore?

Buckets of Scandals

The story will quickly progress from there, but how? 

While the committee could walk Taibbi and Shellenberger through each of their individual “Twitter Files” reports, the better approach would be to bucket the scandals because each thread the journalists wrote included details that overlapped with earlier (and later) revelations.

Remember: The scandals are not merely the “events,” such as the blocking of the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rather, they go back to first principles — in this case, the value of free speech.

Twitter’s Huge Censorship Toolbox

Moving next to what Taibbi called Twitter’s “huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” the House committee should ask the witnesses to expand on those tools, which include “Search Blacklist,” “Trends Blacklist,” “Do Not Amplify” settings, limits on hashtag searches, and more. 

What were those tools? How often were they used and why? Did complaints from the government or other organizations ever prompt Twitter to use those visibility filters? Were official government accounts ever subjected to the filters? If so, why? 

Twitter-Government Coordination

The natural next chapter will focus on any coordination between Twitter and the government. Again, the “Twitter Files” exposed the breadth and depth of government interaction with the tech giant — from FBI offices all over the country contacting Twitter about problematic accounts to, as Taibbi wrote, Twitter “taking requests from every conceivable government agency, from state officials in Wyoming, Georgia, Minnesota, Connecticut, California, and others to the NSA, FBI, DHS, DOD, DOJ, and many others.” 

Internal communications also showed the CIA — referred to under the euphemism “Other Government Agencies” in the emails — working closely with Twitter as well. Other emails showed Twitter allowed the Department of Defense to run covert propaganda operations, “whitelisting” Pentagon accounts to prevent the covert accounts from being banned. The multi-agency Global Engagement Center, housed in the Department of State, also played a large part in the government’s efforts to prompt the censorship of speech. 

Both the Biden and Trump administrations reached out to Twitter as well, seeking the removal of various posts, as did other individual politicians, such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

To keep the conversation coherent, the committee should catalog the various government agencies, centers, and individuals revealed in the “Twitter Files” and ask the witnesses how these government-connected individuals or organizations communicated with Twitter, how they pressured Twitter, the types of requests they made, and their success. 

The “Twitter Files” detailed censorship requests numbering in the tens of thousands from the government. Asking the witnesses to expand on those requests and how individual Americans responded when they learned they were supposedly Russian bots or Indian trolls will make the scandal more personal.

Non-Governmental Organizations

Questioning should then proceed to the non-governmental organizations connected to Twitter’s censorship efforts. Again, the committee should first provide a quick synopsis of the revelations from the “Twitter Files,” highlighting the involvement of various nonprofits and academic institutions in the “disinformation” project, including the Election Integrity Partnership, Alliance Securing Democracy (which hosted the Hamilton 68 platform), the Atlantic Council’s Center for Internet Security, and Clemson University. 

What role did these organizations play? Have you reviewed all of the communications related to these groups? Were there other non-governmental organizations communicating with Twitter? How much influence did these groups have? 

Disinformation About Disinformation 

The story should continue next with testimony about the validity of the various disinformation claims peddled to Twitter. Internal communications showed Twitter insiders knew the Hamilton 68 dashboard’s methodology was flawed. Other emails indicated Twitter experts found the claims of Russian disinformation coming from Clemson, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and the Global Engagement Center questionable. 

Highlighting these facts and then asking the witnesses to elaborate on the revelations, organization by organization, will advance the story for the public. 

Funding Sources

Next up should be the funding of those organizations, which came from government grants and often the same few private organizations. Here the Committee should ask Taibbi the status of his research on the financing of these organizations — something the journalist indicated last month he is delving into.

Taibbi also suggested the Global Engagement Center’s funding should be looked at in the next budget. Why? What should the House know before it makes future budget decisions?

Connecting the Censorship Complex Dots

After these details have been discussed, the committee should connect the dots as Taibbi did when he wrote: “What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.” 

Read that quote — and other powerful ones from either the emails or the journalists covering the story — to the witnesses. Hopefully, staffers already have the best quotes blown up and ready for tomorrow.

Can you explain what you mean, here, Mr. Taibbi? What “state agencies”? What NGOs? Mr. Shellenberger, do you agree? What governmental or non-governmental players did you see involved? 

What Was the Media’s Role?

Asking the witnesses about the media’s involvement will then close the circle on the big picture, which is ironic given the press’s role in circular reporting — something even Twitter recognized. Hamilton 68 or the Global Engagement Center would announce Russian disinformation and peddle it to the press, Twitter, and politicians. Then when Twitter’s review found the accounts not concerning, politicians would rely on the press’s coverage to bolster the claims of disinformation and pressure Twitter to respond. And even when Twitter told the reporters (and politicians) the disinformation methodologies were lacking, the media persisted in regurgitating claims of Russian disinformation.

Can you explain how the press responded when Twitter told reporters to be cautious of the Hamilton 68 database? What precisely did Twitter say? Did you find similar warnings to the media about the Global Engagement Center’s data?

Specific Instances of Censorship 

Then the committee should focus on specific instances of censorship, with the Hunter Biden laptop story and Covid debates deserving top billing. 

While Republicans care most about the censorship of the laptop story, this committee hearing is not the place to put the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandals on trial. Rather, Americans need to understand four key takeaways: The laptop was real, the FBI knew it was real, the FBI’s warnings to Twitter and other tech giants prompted censorship of the Post’s reporting, and the legacy media were complicit in silencing the story. Having the witnesses explain why Twitter censored the story with the goal of conveying those points will be key.

However, highlighting the censorship of Covid debates offers a better opportunity to cross the political divide of the country and to convince Americans that the hand-in-glove relationship between media and government threatens everyone’s speech. Stressing that both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to censor Covid-related speech will also bolster that point.

The committee should start by summarizing the various Covid topics considered verboten — the virus’ origins, vaccines, natural immunity, masking, school closings — and then stress that the science now indicates the speech silenced was correct. Highlighting specific tweets that were blocked and medical professionals who were axed from the platform, while asking the witnesses to explain how this happened, will show the public the real-world implications of a Censorship Complex governing debate in America.

Where Do We Go from Here?

The committee should close by giving Taibbi and Shellenberger the floor, asking: “Where do we go from here?” 

The “Twitter Files” revealed that the government and its allies did not limit their efforts to Twitter but pushed censorship at other platforms, and also that a new “cottage industry” in disinformation has already launched. How do Americans know they are hearing the truth? How do we know the government is not manipulating or censoring the truth? 

Furthermore, if the same Censorship Complex that limits speech on social media succeeds in canceling alternative news outlets, and if the legacy media won’t provide a check on the government, how do we preserve our constitutional republic? 

That last question is not for tomorrow’s witnesses, however. It is for every American.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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    Twitter Execs Testify That Their Election-Meddling Decisions Were Even Flimsier Than Previously Claimed


    BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 09, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/09/twitter-execs-testify-that-their-election-meddling-decisions-were-even-flimsier-than-previously-claimed/

    Twitter executives sit behind table at House hearing
    Twitter executives being beholden to so-called experts’ tweets is hardly better than doing the FBI’s bidding.

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    When the New York Post dropped its bombshell reporting on documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, Twitter did not reach out to the FBI to ask whether the reporting was Russian disinformation — despite extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference. Instead, according to testimony at Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.

    The House Oversight Committee, now in the hands of Republicans, questioned four former Twitter executives on their decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., pushed Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to explain the timing of Twitter’s decision to censor the New York Post story. 

    Biggs noted that in an 8:51 a.m. email on Oct. 14, 2020, Roth had taken the position that the laptop “isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy.” But then, by 10:12, Roth emailed his colleagues with Twitter’s decision to censor the story, stating that “the key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak operation.”

    What cybersecurity experts had Roth consulted between 9 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, the morning the Post story broke, Biggs asked the former Twitter executive. 

    Roth responded that the experts were ones the Twitter heads were following on the platform. “We were following discussions about this as they unfolded on Twitter,” Roth explained. “Cybersecurity experts were tweeting about this incident and sharing their perspectives, and that informed some of Twitter’s judgment here.”

    Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., was incredulous: “After 2016, you set up all these teams to deal with Russian interference, foreign interference, having regular meetings with the FBI, you have connections with all of these different government agencies, and you didn’t reach out to them once?”

    “That’s right,” Roth said, noting he didn’t think it would be appropriate. 

    Instead, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed national security experts. 

    Who those experts were, Roth didn’t say, but here we have another strange coincidence: In his testimony on Wednesday, Roth told the committee that a few weeks before the Post story dropped, he had participated in an exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute, with other media outlets and social media companies, that posed a hack and leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden. Roth testified that Garrett Graff facilitated that event.

    And at 8:23 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, after the Post story broke, Graff tweeted his playbook for how the media should react to “this Biden-Burisma crap.”

    Graff followed about some 10 minutes later, tweeting, “Also, what a TOTAL coincidence that this fake Hunter Biden scandal drops the literal day after it becomes clear that both of Bill Barr’s other intended October surprises—the Durham investigation and the unmasking investigation—have fallen apart??!” 

    Not long after Graff began pushing the “fake” Hunter Biden scandal narrative, Vivian Schiller joined in, calling the Hunter Biden story “nonsense” and claiming Graff’s exercise was “to test readiness of some MSM.” 

    And who is Schiller? According to Graff, Schiller “designed and ran” the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise that Roth participated in. She was also the former head of news at Twitter, in addition to previously being the CEO of NPR, among other gigs.

    In addition to Graff and Schiller, CNN’s consultant and so-called national-security expert weighed in at 8:23 a.m., questioning the “amplifying” of the New York Post’s story, stressing that “amplification is the key to disinformation.”

    Natasha Bertrand also tweeted an early morning “warning” that a Russian agent had been “teasing misleading or edited Biden material for nearly a year.”  

    Bertrand, also known as Fusion Natasha for falling for Fusion GPS’s Steele dossier and Alfa Bank hoax, was joined in pushing the disinformation narrative by The Washington Post’s alleged fact-checker Glenn Kessler. 

    By 8:30 a.m., Kessler had shared The Washington Post’s policy “regarding hacked or leaked materials,” and told Twitter users to “be careful what is in your social media feeds.”

    Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn followed with a 9:07 tweet declaring that the “whole story” was predicated on “false Fox/Giuliani talking points” and pronouncing the Post as advancing “disinformation.”  

    Twitter’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story was bad enough before, but to think the executives may have relied on so-called experts like these raises the outrage another octave. 

    Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker likewise indicated in an email that he had “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails in another way (i.e., that there is no metadata pertaining to them that has been released and the formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications.)” Baker, however, did not say whether he had spoken with the “cybersecurity folks,” and given that when pushed by the committee he hid behind attorney-client privilege, getting any more answers from Baker seems unlikely. 

    Beyond learning that Twitter executives opted to rely on the tweets of so-called experts over asking the FBI if the laptop was fake, Wednesday’s hearing consisted mainly of grandstanding — some on both sides of the aisle — and Democrats attempting to make the hearing about Trump when they weren’t complaining that the entire session was a waste of time. One additional salient fact came out, however, in addition to a review of the basics of Twitter’s censorship efforts.

    Specifically, Roth clarified for the House committee that the FBI had not previously warned that an expected “hack-and-leak” operation was rumored to likely involve Hunter Biden. Rather, according to Roth’s testimony, the rumor that the hack-and-leak operation would target the Biden son came from another tech company.

    Roth claimed in his Wednesday testimony that his Dec. 21, 2020, statement to the Federal Election Commission was being misinterpreted. In that statement, Roth had attested that “since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.” His signed declaration then noted that the “expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” 

    According to Roth, he should have worded his statement differently because it was not the FBI that had raised Hunter Biden as a potential subject of the hack and leak, but a peer company. One would think, however, that Roth would have clarified this point to his lawyer some two-plus years ago when Twitter’s Covington & Burling attorney represented to the FEC in a cover letter that accompanied Roth’s statement that “reports from the law enforcement agencies even suggested there were rumors that such a hack-and-leak operation would be related to Hunter Biden.”

    Clearly, the former Twitter executives seek to separate themselves from the FBI, but “The Twitter Files” make that next to impossible to accomplish. And, really, being beholden to the so-called experts tweeting out warnings of supposed Russian disinformation would hardly be an improvement.

    Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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    Thousands of ‘Ballot Mules’ Delivered Tens of Thousands of Votes for Biden? NY Post Publishes Devastating Claims


    Reported By Jack Davis | April 25, 2022

    Read more at https://www.westernjournal.com/thousands-ballot-mules-delivered-tens-thousands-votes-biden-ny-post-publishes-devastating-claims/

    A new report that analyzed the forthcoming movie from conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza warns that based on the 2020 election, Democrats have a “cunning plan” for the future.

    After previewing the documentary “2,000 Mules,” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine wrote that “pesky evidence is starting to emerge of systematic schemes to subvert the electoral process — which must not be allowed to happen again if we are to restore faith in elections.”

    Devine called the movie — which debuts next month — “the most compelling evidence to date” concerning the race between then-President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden and said research conducted by the election integrity group True the Vote reveals what appears to be “suspicious ballot harvesting.”

    The Western Journal reached out to the Biden White House for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

    The research Devine cited relied on sophisticated tracking and surveillance video to reach its conclusions.

    True the Vote acquired 3 trillion geo-location signals from cellphones that were near ballot drop boxes and election nonprofits in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 3, 2020 vote.

    “Then they went searching for ‘mules,’ operatives who picked up ballots from election NGOs — such as Stacey Abrams’ outfit, ‘Fair Fight Action’ — and then carried them to different drop boxes, depositing between three to 10 ballots in each box before moving to the next,” Devine wrote.

    Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, said she chose the term “mule” for the people involved in the operation because “it felt a lot like a cartel, it felt like trafficking … This is in its essence ballot trafficking … You have the collectors. You have the stash houses, which are the nonprofits. And then you have the mules that are doing the drops.”

    Devine wrote that the network included individuals in battleground states who collected ballots from organizations that were ostensibly out to help everybody vote and then put them in drop boxes, a few at a time.

    “The extent of the operation is jaw-dropping,” she said.

    “When a mule is matched with video, you can see the scheme come to life,” she wrote.

    Devine noted one snippet from the film.

    “A car pulls up at a drop box after midnight. A man gets out, looks around surreptitiously, approaches the box, stuffs in a handful of ballots and hightails it out of there. Then he goes to the next box, again and again,” she wrote.

    D’Souza said the efforts of the mules could have swung the election based on his contention that at least 380,000 potentially fraudulent votes were tracked by the project.

    “Shockingly, even this narrow way of looking at just our 2,000 mules in these swing states gives Trump the win with 279 electoral votes to Biden’s 259,” he said.

    Devine said that’s hard to prove. “There is no way to scrutinize those ballots now and see if they are fraudulent but if we must have drop boxes at election time, they need to be secure and under 24/7 surveillance,” she said.

    She said Republicans cannot spend all of their time on the 2020 election because it “makes them look like sore losers.”

    However, she also noted an interview with Trump in which he compared the election to a diamond theft at Tiffany’s.

    “There’s no getting the diamonds back now. But we can stop the store being robbed again,” Devine wrote.

    Jack Davis

    Contributor, News

    Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.

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    The New York Times Doesn’t Care If You Know That Big Tech Helped Rig Joe Biden’s Election


    REPORTED BY: JOY PULLMANN | MARCH 21, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/21/the-new-york-times-doesnt-care-if-you-know-that-big-tech-helped-rig-joe-bidens-election/

    Joe biden and hunter biden

    On March 17, 2022, The New York Times stated it had verified the authenticity of a laptop and its data as belonging to the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This was the same laptop holding information that Twitter, Facebook, and other corporate media immediately suppressed when The New York Post, a right-leaning competitor of The New York Times, reported on it three weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

    If they had known about one of the Biden family scandals, such as the Hunter Biden laptop information, 17 percent of Joe Biden’s voters wouldn’t have voted for him, found a 2020 post-election poll. This means big tech’s suppression of this story likely made enough difference to tip Joe Biden into his low-margin win in the Electoral College.

    Back in October 2020, Twitter and Facebook immediately responded to The New York Post’s publication of information from Hunter Biden’s laptop by effectively banning it from their platforms that effectively monopolize public discussion. Twitter punished the Post for reporting the repeatedly authenticated laptop information by suspending its account for two weeks.

    “What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post’s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate,” commented independent investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald.

    Major National Security Implications

    That laptop provides evidence Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden’s pay-for-play schemes with foreign oligarchs, an obvious national security risk. Some of these corrupt deals involved Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country that is currently petitioning the Biden administration to engage militarily with Russia on their behalf.

    Russia also has blackmail material on Hunter Biden, according to videos from his laptop, and the FBI knew about this as early as 2019, according to Federalist reporting: “This explosive revelation establishes that either Joe Biden lied to the American public, or the intelligence community lied to him,” wrote Federalist Senior Contributor Margot Cleveland in 2021.

    Other Hunter Biden business deals involved China, the United States’ top security threat. Texts between business partners indicate Joe Biden was financially involved in Hunter Biden’s China deals, contrary to Joe Biden’s public claims.

    China also has blackmail material on Hunter Biden and possibly on Joe Biden. All of this means major conflicts of interest for the president’s foreign policy at a time of significant global instability. It also was deliberately hidden from the voting public by collusion between big tech companies and the Democrat Party.

    Hiding Democrats’ Dangerous Scandals

    The same presidential administration that benefitted from Big Tech hiding damning true information is openly colluding with Big Tech to maintain and expand these information operations. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in July 2021, “We’re flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Soon after, Psaki confirmed, “We’re in regular touch with social media platforms…about areas where we have concern.” You might call it a public-private partnership.

    Democrats have demanded that the Biden administration create a task force to suppress “misinformation” and “disinformation.” What did corporate media and big tech call the laptop information they suppressed in 2020, only for The New York Times to confirm in 2022? That’s right: “Disinformation.” In fact, as Greenwald notes, intelligence operatives immediately enacted a real disinformation campaign against the New York Post reporting in 2020, pushing the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop was “disinformation.”

    That’s called projection, and you should assume that’s one of the things going on every time the media runs some wild news cycle—such as accusing the Republican president of treasonous collusion with Russia when it’s actually the Democrat presidential candidate who did that.

    Reinforcing the Power Hierarchy

    This New York Times article, after all the lies and manipulations about the Hunter Biden laptop, is also a chilling public affirmation that the ruling class believes Americans are helpless to choose their own government. They’re even bold enough to confirm their power openly.

    Just like requiring only the hired help and those under the thumb of government agencies to wear masks while their masters wine and dine mask-free, The New York Times openly revealing that corporate media including itself, Twitter, and Facebook lied and got away with it is a hierarchy flex. It’s a display of their power. They are saying, “We can lie to Americans and get away with it.”

    They’re also flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say. Again, Covid is another clear example, as when Trump advisors such as Scott Atlas faced vicious media smears for pointing out facts that The New York Times finally acknowledged months later, such as that kids don’t need to wear masks and it’s perfectly safe for them to go to school. In the intervening time, children needlessly suffered, but The New York Times doesn’t care. They owned the rubes, and that matters more to them than truth or children’s suffering.

    People this corrupt don’t deserve to have media platforms, control of the presidency, or any power of any kind. At the very least, those who use their power this cynically should be respected by absolutely no one.

    Big Tech Is a Threat to Democracy

    Big Tech is also clearly manipulating public discourse for highly partisan ends. Social media has become what the “big three” cable news networks were decades ago: falsely “nonpartisan” manipulators of elections. Like ABC, CBS, and NBC, Twitter and Facebook’s ability to control culture and politics through brain drips feeding lies into millions of Americans’ minds needs to end, yesterday. This is not a pissing contest. It’s about our continued existence as a nation.

    Greenwald notes the corporate press and big tech “all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump.” That’s not a democracy, no matter how many slogans about that word propaganda outlets put out. It’s tyranny.

    When elections are an elaborate charade and their outcomes are openly manipulated by giant special interests, we don’t have self-government, self-determination, democracy, constitutional government, representation, or any of the above. For those of us who love these things because we believe they are our God-given and precious rights and responsibilities, this is a dark reality to behold.

    One might call this world the left wants to live in Chinese communism with American characteristics. Well, I don’t want to live in that world, and neither do at least 74 million other Americans. We’re not going to keep being abused by our own government quietly. And we’re not going to believe these liars, no matter what they say.

    The top names on everyone’s mind when they hear the word “disinformation” ought to be The New York Times, Twitter, Facebook, The Atlantic, and all their corrupt, self-congratulating Aspen Institute friends. That’s something we can all work to help our neighbors see.

    Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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    After Throttling The Hunter Biden Laptop Story With ‘Hacked’ And ‘Russian Disinformation’ Lies, Propaganda Press Quietly Admit It Was Completely Legit


    REPORTED BY: JORDAN BOYD | MARCH 17, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/17/after-throttling-the-hunter-biden-laptop-story-with-hacked-and-russian-disinformation-lies-propaganda-press-quietly-admit-it-was-completely-legit/

    Hunter Biden laptop

    Big Tech, the corrupt corporate media, and Democrats throttled the completely legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story one month before the November 2020 election by lying that the reporting was Russian disinformation.

    Now a year and a half after a mere mention of the story got you nuked from the internet by power-hungry tech oligarchs, and with Joe Biden safely in office, the propaganda press is quietly admitting what conservative media immediately verified: that the story was legitimate all along. The president’s son did abandon his laptop, which contained a treasure trove of damning and compromising information about Hunter Biden’s sketchy foreign business dealings and their connection to the now-president.

    On Wednesday, The New York Times stealthily admitted, in an understated article focused on a federal investigation into Hunter’s taxes, that the laptop story was legitimate and that he was under scrutiny for shady relationships with Chinese and Ukrainian energy companies, which might have violated “foreign lobbying and money laundering rules.” The quiet confession that the laptop was real and not “Russian disinformation,” as many Joe Biden advocates claimed without evidence at the time, was buried in the article nearly 25 paragraphs down.

    The New York Post first reported in October 2020 that a “Smoking-gun email” discovered on an abandoned laptop demonstrated “how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” The news was devastating enough to hurt Joe Biden’s chances to topple former President Donald Trump, so the corrupt elites who control our nation’s streams of information banded together to brand the story as misinformation that deserved to be censored and suppressed.

    Shortly after the Post broke the news, Politico rushed to publish a letter signed by dozens of former intelligence heads from the CIA, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and more smearing the laptop story as “Russian disinformation.” These so-called “experts” admitted that they had never seen the laptop nor that they had any evidence to suggest that their “Russia, Russia, Russia” theory was accurate, but the letter quickly became the basis for the left to wage a censorship war on anyone and everyone who amplified the Hunter corruption narrative.

    Even when current intelligence leaders confirmed that there was never any evidence that the Hunter laptop story was disinformation, Democrats kept spreading the lies to destroy their ideological opponents.

    https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1504460231727886337?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1504460231727886337%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthefederalist.com%2F2022%2F03%2F17%2Fafter-throttling-the-hunter-biden-laptop-story-with-hacked-and-russian-disinformation-lies-propaganda-press-quietly-admit-it-was-completely-legit%2F

    The New York Times was among many of the deliberately dishonest media outlets (and eager Russia collusion hoaxers) who intentionally downplayed the findings on the laptop and mischaracterized them to save the elder Biden from criticism. Some media companies such as NPR, which eagerly relied on the debunked Steele dossier to push anti-Trump coverage, declined to give the story any coverage at all because they said it “doesn’t amount to much.”

    Big Tech also censored the New York Post’s reporting and prevented the story from being circulated on its platforms using phony policies. Twitter claimed the reporting violated its “hacked materials policy,” which it has since refused to enforce, and banned the New York Post from tweeting until it took the article post down.

    Facebook also reduced distribution of the bombshell article because the Democrat operatives who staff the Silicon Valley giant claimed the story needed to be “fact-checked,” which even the company has admitted is just a bogus excuse for censorship.

    The same people who knowingly bought into and spread the Russia collusion hoax colluded to deplatform and discredit their political and ideological enemies in the run-up to a highly-contested election. They were successful in their endeavors, with Biden ultimately ousting Trump from office, which is why they can now safely pretend they never lied about and throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.

    That story of deep familial corruption had the potential to change Americans’ votes in the 2020 election. That’s why Big Tech, the corrupt press, and Democrat blue checkmarks deemed themselves the gatekeepers of information for Americans and made the calculated decision to meddle in the election through censorship and suppression.

    Despite the New York Times quietly now admitting the legitimacy of the laptop, don’t expect an apology from them or any other corporate media outlets, pundits, Democrats, or Big Tech. They have demonstrated over and over that their missteps are no good-faith journalistic “errors” warranting a “correction” or follow-up story a year and a half later. They will do whatever it takes to empower themselves and their political allies.

    Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordangdavidson.

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    Mollie Hemingway: When People Claim The Election Was Rigged, They Include Big Tech And Big Media


    DECEMBER 11, 2020 By 

    Mollie Hemingway: When People Claim The Election Was Rigged, They Include Big Tech And Big Media

    Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway said on Fox News Thursday that allegations of a rigged election include big tech and big media conspiring to elect Joe Biden in addition to charges of voter fraud.

    “We hear about the rigging of the election,” Hemingway said, “but partly what they mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.”

    Hemingway continued, pointing out that when major revelations about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, began to surface implicating the former vice president in corrupt and potentially criminal overseas business activity, the stories were suppressed online by Silicon Valley tech giants and delegitimized by legacy media.

    “When the New York Post broke the story about these emails,” Hemingway said, referencing the paper’s reporting from an abandoned Delaware laptop expanding the web of Biden’s scandals, “even though they were verified and people who were recipients of these emails verified they were real, the media suppressed that story.”

    In October, the New York Post published a series of exposes revealing that Joe Biden stood to rake in millions from Chinese communist leaders, lied repeatedly when denying conversations about his son’s business, and leveraged his high-powered position to benefit the family. A Biden family business partner-turned whistleblower even came forward to corroborate details of the New York Post’s reporting.

    The Post’s journalism that made Democrats look bad got the nation’s oldest paper locked out of its Twitter account for two weeks after the platform blocked users from sharing its blockbuster reporting.

    Hemingway also pointed out that this week’s news that Hunter Biden is under a federal investigation had already been reported, revealed days before the election.

    “We actually also knew that there was an FBI investigation into Hunter Biden before the election except that the media suppressed it,” Hemingway said, depriving the American people of being fully informed when casting their ballots to hand over the country to Joe Biden.

    “This meddling on the part of big media and big tech, which banned people from even talking about this on Facebook and Twitter, is a very serious problem and a huge threat to the republic,” Hemingway said.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

    Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
    Photo Grabien screengrab

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    Daily Beast: Isn’t It Odd That The Hunter Biden Money-Laundering Probe Went “Largely Unnoticed” Until Now?


    Reported by ED MORRISSEY | Posted at 11:15 am on December 10, 2020

    Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/daily-beast-isnt-it-odd-that-the-hunter-biden-money-laundering-probe-went-largely-unnoticed-until-now-2649440096.html/

    “Largely unnoticed,” purposely ignored, or actively suppressed? The Daily Beast’s reporting team on Hunter Biden’s legal woes sound somewhat surprised that the FBI’s money-laundering probe didn’t get noticed before the election:

    The Justice Department’s announcement on Wednesday that it was investigating Hunter Biden, for what he deemed to be “tax affairs,” took root several years ago with a much broader inquiry that included possible money laundering, according to a report by CNN.

    That inquiry reportedly fizzled, leading instead to a probe on tax matters that is now being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware. But evidence of the larger probe was apparent in the markings on a series of documents that were made public—but went largely unnoticed—in the days leading up to the November election, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.

    The word “unnoticed” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Not only did it get noticed, it got reported by Sinclair TV’s James Rosen a few days before the election. A large number of online outlets — mostly conservative — picked up on Rosen’s report about the FBI’s criminal probe of Hunter Biden, including us. Rosen reported that Tony Bobulinski had cooperated in the probe, and that its focus was money laundering:

    A U.S. Justice Department official has confirmed to Sinclair Broadcast Group that a 2019 FBI investigation into Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, is still active.

    The 2019 criminal investigation looks into Hunter and his associates on allegations of money-laundering.

    Sinclair investigative reporter James Rosen spoke with a central witness in these allegations, who suggested that former vice president Joe Biden knew more than he has acknowledged about his son’s overseas dealings.

    That witness was Bobulinski, who went public about Hunter’s business dealings after the Biden campaign tried sloughing him off as a malcontent business partner. Rosen himself addressed this last night:

     

    This didn’t go “largely unnoticed.” It was widely noticed, everywhere except in the mainstream media. Why? It started with the New York Post exposé of Hunter’s laptop, which Biden’s team claimed was Russian disinformation and social media platforms actively suppressed:

    MacIsaac also said he copied the contents of one of the laptops for Giuliani. And, sure enough, those contents quickly made their way to conservative media personalities and outlets. Giuliani and others, including Steve Bannon, appeared on network television, stirring conspiracy theories and pushing unsubstantiated claims about Hunter’s overseas business dealings.

    One of the main outlets pushing emails and pictures from the hard drive was the New York Post. And for one of its stories, the paper published what appeared to be federal law enforcement documents given to MacIsaac in return for his handing over the Biden laptops.

    One of those documents—from the FBI— included a case number that had the code associated with an ongoing federal money laundering investigation in Delaware, according to several law enforcement officials who reviewed the document. Another document—one with a grand jury subpoena number—appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office.

    Gee — you mean if media outlets had actually checked the details, they might have found a real story about corruption around Joe Biden? As in, acting like real journalistic organizations and speaking truth to power? The deuce you say. The excuse in this article for failing to report on this — even with Rosen’s report already made public — was that law enforcement wouldn’t comment and the Biden team stonewalled the Daily Beast. But the documents themselves apparently left that very big clue two months ago that they’re reporting …. now.

    [Update: That’s too harsh in regard to the Daily Beast, actually. They did try to follow up. That puts them head and shoulders above other media outlets … like, for instance …]

    As Glenn Greenwald says — memories …

    It’s not just media outlets that should get the heat, either. Twitter and Facebook actively suppressed the New York Post article — and the New York Post itself — for days. Democrats called it Russian disinformation, and both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey nearly twisted their ankles in a rush to suppress it. Now, and only after Hunter Biden issued a press release acknowledging the accuracy of Rosen’s reporting, have all of these “institutions” suddenly cured their myopia.

    The clear conclusion is that the national media didn’t want to report anything detrimental to Joe Biden, no matter how accurate it might have been. Now that the election is over, they’ll tell their readers and viewers that the story went “largely unnoticed” [see update above as to TDB, which did at least notice it] as a passive-voice dodge to avoid responsibility for their active decision to ignore and in some cases suppress it. It’s an utter disgrace.

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    Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco


    A.F. Branco Cartoon – RIP Freedom of Speech

    A.F. BRANCO | on

    Social media and the mainstream media working hard to smother the Biden corruption scandal.

    Social Media Killing Free SpeechPolitical cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.

    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Let Them Eat COVID

    A.F. BRANCO | on

    Pelosi is holding back COVID relief in fear if it pasted it might give Trump a win before the election.

    Pelosi Holding COVID Relief HostagePolitical cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
    Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 –  $5.00 –  $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 –  it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

    A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

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    Report: Facebook Hires Chinese Nationals to Censor Platform


    Reported by LUCAS NOLAN | 

    Read more at https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/10/21/report-facebook-hires-chinese-nationals-to-censor-platform/

    Chinese President Xi Jinping, centre, talks with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, right, as Lu Wei, left, China’s Internet czar, looks on at Microsoft’s main campus in 2015 / TED S. WARREN/AFP

    A recent report from the New York Post claims that Facebook has hired Chinese nationals who are “working on censorship,” at the company. China famously employs the “Great Chinese Firewall” to block many websites within the communist country, including Facebook.

    The New York Post reports that a Facebook Insider told the publication that at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” are employed at Facebook. The insider told the Post: “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”

    The insider provided the Post with an internal directory of the team that does much of the censorship work at Facebook. According to the Post, the job is referred to as “Hate-Speech Engineering” and most of its members are based out of Facebook’s Seattle offices. Many of those working there have Ph.D.s, and their work involves machine learning and AI.

    At Facebook, this mainly pertains to teaching the Facebook algorithm to manage what content shows up in users’ newsfeeds. The Facebook insider states that this means making sure certain content “shows up dead-last.” The insider used New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari as an example of an average Facebook user, stating: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”

    Facebook engineers reportedly test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to determine an optimal outcome and remove what top executives refer to as “borderline content.” The insider stated: “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag. Content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”

    The Post notes that the employees on Facebook’s Hate-Speech Engineering team earned their degrees from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, Jilin University in northeast China, and Nanjing University in eastern China. Another engineer reportedly worked for Huawei, a company that has been labeled a security threat by the U.S. and Sweden.

    The idea of one of America’s most powerful companies using Chinese censorship experts is troubling for reasons beyond the obvious. The Chinese nationals could be in a position to spy on both the company and its users. The National Security blog Lawfare notes that Chinese intelligence law allows the country to deputized any of its citizens into doing intelligence work such as acquiring data. Lawfare writes:

    Article Seven stipulates that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to law.” Article 14, in turn, grants intelligence agencies authority to insist on this support: “state intelligence work organs, when legally carrying forth intelligence work, may demand that concerned organs, organizations, or citizens provide needed support, assistance, and cooperation.” Organizations and citizens must also protect the secrecy of “any state intelligence work secrets of which they are aware.” These clauses appear to limit the obligations on individuals to Chinese citizens, but they do not stipulate that only Chinese “organizations” are subject to these requirements.

    A Facebook spokesperson denied that these employees influence the site’s broad policies, stating: “We are a stronger company because our employees come from all over the world. Our standards and policies are public, including about our third-party fact-checking program, and designed to apply equally to content across the political spectrum. With over 35,000 people working on safety and security issues at Facebook, the insinuation that these employees have an outsized influence on our broader policies or technology is absurd.”

    Read more about Facebook’s recent censorship scandals at Breitbart News here.

    Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

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    Shocking Fox News Impeachment Poll Debunked by New York Post


    Posted By Paul Duke | 

    Donald Trump’s last few weeks in office have been quite eventful, to say the least, as House Democrats continue on their push to possibly impeach the 45th President of these United States.

    He has weathered this storm before, or at least something fairly similar in the form of Robert Mueller’s “Russia Gate” conspiracy theory.  This time, during the newly christened “Ukraine Gate” scandal, Trump has a much simpler story to massage, free from the nuanced nonsense of Mueller’s probe.

    Still, the mainstream media has done a fairly stout job of pinning trouble on Trump during this go-round, even coercing an ugly, impeachment-favoring poll out of Fox News – the shock of which was touted ad nauseam over the weekend in an effort to snowball its results  into something tangible for the liberal left.

    The poll itself is coming under some scrutiny, however.

    The New York Post released an analysis Saturday, which found Fox News had “mispresented” their poll, suggesting a majority of Americans supported impeachment of President Donald Trump.

    Fox News released a poll this week which found that 51 percent of registered voters want President Trump impeached and removed from office, while 4 percent want Trump impeached but want him to stay in office, and 40 percent of voters oppose impeachment. The Fox News poll found that supposedly showed a double-digit increase in the number of voters who wanted Trump impeached and removed from office.

    But is that really the case?

    However, according to a New York Post analysis, Fox News misrepresented Americans’ alleged support for impeachment.

    Braun Research, the pollster firm that conducted the survey, noted that 48 percent of its respondents were Democrats; however, the Post revealed that the “actual breakdown” based on party affiliation is 31 percent Democrat, 29 percent Republican, and 38 percent independent.

    The Post noted that, when weighting the poll for party affiliation, would have revealed that only 44.9 percent of Americans, or less than a majority, back impeachment of President Trump. Forty-four percent of Americans oppose impeachment, according to the Post‘s analysis.

    As President Trump would say:  “FAKE NEWS!”.

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    Anti-Oprah Presidential Campaign Having Field Day With Their New Slogan


    Reported By Randy DeSoto | January 10, 2018 at 5:58am

    https://rumble.com/embed/u77uw.v1lemn/?rel=5

    The New York Post splashed the word “NOPRAH!” over its front page on Monday in response to the presidential buzz following Oprah Winfrey’s highly publicized speech at the Golden Globes the previous night.

    Post columnist Maureen Callahan sought to interject some reality into the elation some have professed at the prospect of a Winfrey presidency.

    In her piece, “What does Oprah represent? Fake science, hucksters and greed,” Callahan first noted some of the accolades Oprah received from Hollywood stars.

    “I’m on the bus with Oprah,” ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel said.

    “I want her to run for president,” Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep added.

    Even NBC tweeted a pictured of Oprah with the caption, “Nothing but respect for OUR future president,” which it has since deleted.

    Winfrey’s longtime partner Stedman Graham told the Los Angeles Times Sunday night following the Globes, “She would absolutely do it,” when asked about a presidential run.

    Callhan’s response is to all the clamor is, “She should absolutely not.”

    “Yes, Winfrey is a singular presence in the culture,” Callahan conceded. “She is entirely self-made and a decades-long mover in television, film, publishing and philanthropy. As of 2017, she was one of only two women on Forbes’s Black Female Billionaires list. There is much to admire.”

    “But none of this makes her fit to be leader of the free world,” the writer added. “And just because the precedent has been set with Donald Trump — to horrible effect — doesn’t mean the Democrats should run a charismatic celebrity with zero credentials. Not Tom Hanks, not The Rock, not Oprah Winfrey.”

    Callahan went on to offer other reasons Americans should think before getting on the Winfrey train. She particularly highlighted Winfrey’s endorsement of books like 2006’s “The Secret” and New Age gurus including Eckhart Tolle, who preached about vacuous beliefs like “The Power of Now.”

    The Washington Post reported while the American public does not know too much about her political views, Winfrey has made some of them known.

    She endorsed both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for president. Winfrey also stated that her faith teaches her that God makes people gay, so she supports LGBT rights.

    “The God I serve doesn’t care whether you’re tall or short, or whether you were born black or Asian or gay,” Winfrey said of Ellen DeGeneres in 1997. “And so that’s just a difference of belief. And I don’t expect to change your belief today.”

    “I believe God created Ellen,” she added. “I believe God did that. Ellen says she’s gay. I believe God created her gay. … I support her right to be who she thinks she is.”

    Winfrey also supports increased gun control measures, as she stated in 2013 during a commencement address at Harvard University.

    “We understand that the vast majority of people in this country believe in stronger background checks because they realize that we can uphold the Second Amendment and also reduce the violence that is robbing us of our children,” she said. “They don’t have to be incompatible.”

    In June of last year, Winfrey told The Hollywood Reporter, “I will never run for public office.”

    President Donald Trump stated on Tuesday he does not believe Oprah will run in 2020, but if she did it would be “a lot of fun.”

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    Today’s Ann Coulter Letter: Weinstein’s Pimps: Revenge Of The Ugly Girls


    Commentary by Ann Coulter  | Wednesday Oct 18, 2017 5:08 PM

    Liberalism is a sexual assault protection racket. Judging by the last week’s news coverage, EVERYONE in the liberal universe — Hollywood, the fashion industry, the media and Democratic politics — knew about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predations and nearly all of them were covering it up.

    Liberals circle the wagons to protect fellow liberals. All those sacrosanct laws about rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment are the fire ax behind a glass door: “Break in case of conservative.” Weinstein admitted as much by immediately responding to the accusations against him by offering to donate money to fight the National Rifle Association. (That’s not the thing we’re worried about being cocked and loaded, Harvey.)

    According to Ronan Farrow’s comprehensive article in The New Yorker, “(m)ultiple sources” told him how Weinstein bragged that he could use his allies in the press to crush anyone who crossed him.

    Longtime editor Tina Brown — ironically, one of Weinstein’s erstwhile clean-up gals — told Charlie Rose: “What I found really unsettling was how many journalists, frankly, were on his payroll. I mean, you know, Harvey would have everyone on his payroll. All the people at the (New York) Post and people in all the tabloids, people writing stuff, entertainment writers, gossip writers.”

    I knew the gossip pages were written by PR agents, but I didn’t realize they were written by sexual predators, too. I was curious about exactly who was protecting Harvey and, luckily, I have a Nexis account. The full list would take me well over my word limit, so this column will focus on the tabloid most slavishly devoted to protecting Weinstein’s good name: the New York Post.

    Farrow’s sources cited as their proof of how Weinstein could dirty up an accuser the coordinated tabloid attacks on Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez after she reported Weinstein’s assault on her to the police in 2015. According to the detailed, heavily sourced and, apparently, 100 percent accurate account given by Farrow, 22-year-old Gutierrez met Weinstein at a Radio City Music Hall reception. The next day, Weinstein requested that Gutierrez come to his Tribeca office, “as soon as possible,” according to her agent. The moment she walked into his office, Farrow reports, Weinstein “began staring at her breasts, asking if they were real … then lunged at her, groping her breasts and attempting to put a hand up her skirt while she protested.”

    Several things happened next.

    No. 1:

    As she was leaving, Weinstein offered Gutierrez tickets to his show “Finding Neverland” that night, saying he’d be there. But instead of using the tickets, Gutierrez went straight to “the nearest police station.” We know she didn’t attend the show because, when Weinstein called her later to complain that she hadn’t come, she happened to be sitting with Special Victims detectives, who recorded his call.

    This is how the New York Post headlined Gutierrez’s non-attendance at “Finding Neverland”:

    HARVEY ‘GROPE’ GAL’S BIG SHOW

    Attended Weinstein’s Broadway play the day after accusing him (EXCLUSIVE)

    — Mara Siegler, Jamie Schram, Emily Smith and Danika Fears, New York Post, April 1, 2015

    The U.K.’s Daily Mail repeated the claim in its headline — citing the Post as its source: Harvey Weinstein model used the $227 ticket he gave her to see his Broadway show the day AFTER she alleged he groped her … ‘despite knowing he would be at the theater’

    No. 2:

    The next day, Gutierrez wore a police wire to a meeting with Weinstein at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. As she stood intransigently outside his hotel room, Weinstein implored her to come in, promising, “I’m not gonna do anything. I swear on my children.” Thanks to Farrow’s reporting, the taped conversation is now available everywhere.

    Key exchange:

    Gutierrez: Why yesterday you touch my breast?

    Weinstein: Oh, please. I’m sorry. Just come on in. I’m used to that.

    Gutierrez: You’re used to that?

    Weinstein: Yes, come in.

    Gutierrez: No, but I’m not used to that.

    Weinstein: I won’t do it again.

    Here’s the New York Post’s description of the meeting where Weinstein — according to his admission — grabbed Gutierrez’s breast:

    SHE TRIED TO REEL & DEAL (EXCLUSIVE)

    Squeezed Harvey for movie role

    Stalled grope claim during talks

    — Jamie Schram, New York Post, April 3, 2015

    No. 3:

    The police working the case believed they had more than enough evidence to prosecute Weinstein. Farrow quotes a detective who was actually “involved in the operation,” saying: “We had the evidence.” The source added, “It’s a case that made me angrier than I thought possible, and I have been on the force a long time.”

    Another police source recently told The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly that they’ve convicted subway gropers on far less evidence.

    Here is how the New York Post reported the police’s attitude toward the case at the time, quoting not officers “involved in the operation,” but random “law-enforcement sources”:

    “Some law-enforcement sources say her allegations will be difficult to prove, since there were no cameras in Weinstein’s office. …

    “‘There’s no physical evidence. In a nutshell, there’s no corroboration of her story.’”

    — Mara Siegler, Jamie Schram, Emily Smith and Danika Fears, New York Post, April 1, 2015

    No. 4:

    The police sting capturing Weinstein’s admission was soon leaked to the press.

    The U.K.’s Daily Mail came clean, announcing in its headline: “‘There’s no question he did it’: Harvey Weinstein ‘did not deny groping Italian model in phone sting set up by police’”

    Even a radio station in Columbus, Indiana, reported on the police sting.

    Not the New York Post! For the first time that week — the day newspapers around the world were bristling with news about Weinstein’s taped, incriminating comments — the Post had zero Harvey Weinstein news.

    The Post did briefly mention the operation a few days later at the end of a Jamie Schram article, full of sneering about Gutierrez’s alleged attendance at Weinstein’s play after she was groped (she did not attend), and referring to the model’s “ties to disgraced former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.”

    Gutierrez’s “ties” to Berlusconi consisted of her immediately reporting a Berlusconi orgy to the police. She was there, but had not participated.

    No. 5:

    About a week later, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. decided not to prosecute. The International Business Times reports that, soon thereafter, David Boies, an attorney for the Weinstein Company, contributed $10,000 to Vance’s political campaign. Boies and other Weinstein lawyers, including defense attorney Elkan Abramowitz, have donated a total of about $200,000 to Vance’s political campaigns.

    As a police source recently told Daly, “When you say no after a week, it’s not usually over the facts.”

    The New York Post’s headline on D.A. Vance’s decision not to prosecute:

    It’s ‘grope’ fiction:

    DA: No paw rap on Harv as doubts dog model

    — Rebecca Rosenberg and Jamie Schram, New York Post, April 11, 2015

    This story again repeated the false claim that Gutierrez “wasn’t upset enough by the alleged groping to surrender a primo seat for Weinstein’s new Broadway show — which she attended less than a day after the incident.”

    In her interview, Tina Brown explained exactly how Weinstein controlled reporters: “If there was any stirring of a negative story, Harvey would offer them a book contract, a development deal, a consultancy, and they used to succumb. Journalists are often short of money, and they were also very star-struck with the world that Harvey offered, which was movies and Hollywood.”

    So what DID the bitter gossip girls get? Did Mara Siegler, Jamie Schram, Danika Fears or Maria Wiesner end up with phony “consultancies,” “book contracts” or “movie options” with Weinstein’s companies? (Paging the IRS!)

    The only other explanation is that the Weinstein-compliant scandal sheets illustrate the oldest primal urge, one even more basic than the compulsion that drove Weinstein: Ugly girls taking their revenge on pretty girls.

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    Book Claims Hillary Clinton Had Explosive Oval Office Meeting With Obama Over Email Scandal: ‘Call Off Your F***ing Dogs, Barack!’


    waving flagSeptember 23, 2015 / Posted by

    URL of the original posting site: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/09/23/book-claims-hillary-clinton-had-explosive-oval-office-meeting-with-obama-over-email-scandal-call-off-your-fing-dogs-barack

    A new book by Edward Klein claims Hillary Clinton exploded at President Barack Obama during an Oval Office meeting over her emails, telling him to “call off your f**king dogs,” the New York Post reported.

    In this Jan. 25, 2013 file image taken from video and provided by CBS, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speak during "60 Minutes" segment in Washington. (Image source: AP)

    The Post said it obtained an excerpt of the book, “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary,” which is set to publish next Monday and indicates the former secretary of state believed Obama aides were behind leaks that led to multiple investigations of her. But her husband, former President Bill Clinton, reportedly didn’t want her to meet with Obama.

    During the meeting, according to the book, Obama acted as though he didn’t know what Hillary was talking about. “He was almost being deliberately dense,” a Clinton source noted, the Post added. “It really angered her.” This allegedly led to Clinton breaking with White House decorum — calling Obama by his first name — and dropping the F-bomb.

    “What I want for you to do is call off your f**king dogs, Barack!” the book claims Clinton yelled at Obama, citing sources close to Clinton and Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the Post said.

    Apparently, the president was sufficiently shocked by Clinton’s alleged outburst, so he needed a moment to compose himself.

    “There is nothing I can do for you one way or another,” he allegedly responded. “Things have been set in motion, and I can’t and won’t interfere. Your problems are, frankly, of your own making. If you had been honest —”

    The book says Clinton cut off Obama — “There are always haters out there to get the Clintons” — and then later regretted her behavior, but only because of the weakness she showed.

    Nick Merrill, Clinton’s spokesman, told the Post that Klein’s claims are “bulls**t.”

    “Another book? Someone should do a book about Ed,” Merrill told the paper. “They could call it ‘Bulls**t: The Problem With Anything Ed Klein Writes.’”

    “The only true thing about him is his consistent and utter lack of a relationship with the facts,” Merrill continued to the Post. “He has more hair than credibility, and the man is bald. So we’re not going to get down in the gutter with him and his outrageous fabrications.”Partyof Deceit Spin and Lies

    Klein has authored numerous political-insider books and is the former foreign editor of Newsweek, former editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine, and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.

    This story has been updated.

    95b119e45c50cbea1e7a4fbfa33415f3 In God We Trust freedom combo 2

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