Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Newsmax on Monday that the New York Court of Appeals should “unanimously” reverse the $355 million judgment levied against former President Donald Trump on Friday in the New York civil fraud trial brought by Attorney General Letitia James.
“Oh, my goodness, I can’t imagine if the Court of Appeals is anywhere near a straight court — that’s the highest court in New York — that this wouldn’t be reversed unanimously,” Giuliani said during an appearance on “Wake Up America.” “We’ve seen some Democrat courts now turn on their distortion of the Constitution. … [Judge Arthur] Engoron, for example, went so far that, I think, to reclaim its honor, the New York court system is going to have to reverse that case. The man acted like a … I don’t know what he acted like. He didn’t act like a judge, let’s put it that way.”
“Also, the number bears no relationship to reality,” he continued. “When you put a judgment against someone, there’s got to be some reality to it, to be upheld on appeal.
“Where did the number come from? Nobody lost money. Nobody had any claims against him. In fact, you might argue he should get money because he made money for the banks. So, maybe they didn’t pay him the right amount. He made up that number, literally pulled it out of his … you know.”
Trump will reportedly appeal the $355 million fine imposed by Engoron in New York’s civil fraud trial by challenging his definition of fraud. He was ordered to pay the massive fine after Engoron, a Democrat, found the Republican former president, The Trump Organization, top executives, and his adult sons liable for fraud.
Giuliani also commented on the election interference case against Trump in Georgia and whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will remain on the case after it was discovered she hired a special prosecutor with whom she was having an improper relationship.
“Not if Georgia wants to have a slim hope of being thought of as a state that has a fair justice system,” he said. “I know Wade. I spent five hours with him in the grand jury and walked away long before this incident saying what the heck did she hire him for? He doesn’t know what he’s doing. And that was not particularly adversarial.”
“He couldn’t ask a question that made any sense; his people had to help him out,” he continued. “So, my lawyer, Bob Costello, and I kept wondering, What’s this guy doing here? We didn’t think about what happened, but we both thought this is weird. In this important case they’ve got a guy that’s kind of … He didn’t seem comfortable even in a grand jury.”
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On Friday, a jury in Washington, D.C., issued a significant judgment against former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a defamation case brought forward by two 2020 Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss.
CNN reported that the unanimous verdict included damages for each of the plaintiffs who had accused Giuliani of falsely accusing them of aiding to steal the election from then-President Donald Trump. The lawsuit revealed that both Freeman and Moss experienced immense harassment, racist attacks, and death threats as a result of being falsely accused. This resulted in their need to flee their homes, resign from their positions as election workers, and fear using their real names.
The jury awarded them more than $148 million in damages.
Following the verdict, the former mayor had to also cover the attorney fees of both plaintiffs. He subsequently gave a statement to reporters.
“Possibly will move for a new trial, certainly will appeal,” Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, said. “The absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding where I’ve not been allowed to offer one single piece of evidence in defense, of which I have a lot.
“So I am quite confident when this case gets before a fair tribunal, it will be reversed so quickly. That will make your head spin. And the absurd number that just came in will help that, actually,” he added.
“Why did you think it was unfair?” one reporter asked.
“I cannot go into the details. I didn’t testify because the judge made it clear that if I made any mistake or did anything wrong, she was considering contempt,” Giuliani responded. “And this judge does have a reputation for putting people in jail. And I thought, honestly, it wouldn’t do any good.
“Do you still believe what you said about these two women in the wake of the 2020 elections?” another reporter asked.
“I have no doubt. I have no doubt that my comments were made,and they were supportable and are supportable today,” Giuliani added.
“I just did not have an opportunity to present the evidence that we offered,” he said.
“Did you notice we were not allowed to put in one piece of evidence in defense? Do you also realize that liability is not based on any trial? My ability is based on her disagreement with me on discovery, which is absurd. Get it? Because I believe the judge was threatening me with the strong possibility that I’d be held in contempt or that I’d even be put in jail,” he said.
“So, it didn’t seem like it was going to do much to persuade anybody, and it could give her what she seemed to be threatening. Do you believe the women’s testimony? All right. That’s all I have to say,” he added.
“Do you have regrets about some of the comments that the women received?” a reporter then asked.
“Well, of course the comments they received, I had nothing to do with those comments, [they] are abominable. They’re deplorable,” Giuliani insisted.
This $148 million verdict against Giuliani is just one among numerous lawsuits awaiting resolution over “false claims” associated with the 2020 election, Mediaite reported on Friday.
Emails obtained by the Heritage Foundation following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, and shared exclusively with The Federalist, reveal that lies leaked to The New York Times about the origins of damning evidence implicating Hunter and Joe Biden in a bribery scandal were fed to Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
As I previously detailed, The New York Times reported those lies in its Dec. 11, 2020, article, “Material from Giuliani Spurred a Separate Justice Depart. Pursuit of Hunter Biden” — just a week after Americans first learned of the investigation of the now-president’s son. The Times’ reporting was “replete with falsehoods and deceptive narratives,” but “Americans just didn’t know it at the time.”
However, earlier this year, thanks to “whistleblower revelations and statements by former Attorney General William Barr,” the country learned that the Times’ claims — that evidence implicating the Bidens was derived from Giuliani — were false. Rather, a separate investigation had uncovered reporting from a “highly credible” FBI confidential human source (CHS) implicating Hunter and Joe Biden in a bribery scandal.
Now the FOIA-produced emails reveal even more: The FBI lies, laundered through The New York Times, were fed directly to Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
The Emails
The never-before-seen emails provided late last week by the Department of Justice to the Heritage Foundation and its Oversight Project director, Mike Howell, in response to a court order, included an email thread revealing how the Times story landed in Weiss’s lap.
“Ladies, here you have attached the NYT’s story ‘Material from Giuliani Spurred a Separate Justice Depart. Pursuit of Hunter Biden’ which posted a bit ago. Link here,” a Dec. 11, 2020, 6:44 p.m. email from the FBI Office of Public Affairs’ National Press Office read.
The names of the two email recipients were redacted. But the “(PG) (FBI)” and “(BA) (FBI)” coding suggests the National Press Office had forwarded the Times’ article, which spun evidence obtained by the Pittsburgh office as originating from Giuliani disinformation, to the Pittsburgh FBI office and the Baltimore FBI office — which provided support for the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office.
Within two hours of the FBI’s National Press Office sharing the false narrative about evidence of Biden family corruption, the link had been forwarded to a variety of Baltimore FBI agents, from there to Weiss’s top deputies Lesley Wolf and Shawn Weede, and further on by Weede to fellow Assistant U.S. Attorney Shannon Hanson and Weiss. Weiss himself then forwarded the Times article to another member of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, whose name was redacted in the FOIA-provided documents.
Given the sweetheart deal Weiss’s top Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf later tried to gift to Hunter Biden, this latest revelation raises the question of whether (and, if so, when) Weiss’s staff informed him of the CHS’s reporting that Burisma paid $5 million each in bribes to both Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
These questions are now more important than ever because the just-released emails show Weiss’s staff sharing with him The New York Times’ false reporting that portrayed evidence coming from the Pittsburgh FBI office as sourced solely to Rudy Giuliani. But that’s not true — not by a long shot. At a minimum, Wolf and others in the Delaware office knew that — but Weiss might not have.
The Background
As The Federalist previously reported, contrary to the Times’ reporting, in the run-up to the 2020 election, then-Attorney General William Barr directed the Western District of Pennsylvania to serve as an intake office for any evidence related to Ukraine. U.S. Attorney Scott Brady was then charged with screening the evidence to ensure disinformation did not reach the other offices handling investigations related to Hunter Biden or Ukraine.
While some of the evidence Brady’s team screened came from Giuliani, agents also independently discovered a separate line of intel originating from a “highly credible” CHS who had worked under the Obama administration. Agents interviewed that CHS in late June 2020 and memorialized the CHS’s reporting in an FD-1023 form.
Americans would later learn the contents of that FD-1023 when a whistleblower informed Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office of its existence. Then, after FBI Director Christopher Wray dragged his feet in responding to congressional inquiries, Grassley released a minimally redacted copy of the unclassified document to the public.
The unredacted portions of the FD-1023 confirmed Giuliani had nothing to do with the sourcing of the intel. On the contrary, according to the form, the longtime CHS had personally conversed with Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and the company’s CFO Vadim Pojarskii.
The FD-1023 memorialized explosive reporting from the CHS, including the following:
Pojarskii claimed Hunter Biden was paid to serve on Burisma’s board of directors to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma, but Zlochevsky told the CHS that “Hunter will take care of all of those issues through his dad.”
Zlochevsky told the CHS he had been coerced to pay bribes of $5 million each to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
After Trump’s election in 2016, Zlochevsky expressed dissatisfaction with Trump’s victory, but then told the CHS that “Shokin had already been fired, and no investigation was currently going on.”
Zlochevsky told the CHS he had 17 recordings of the Bidens but had never paid Joe Biden directly.
The “Big Guy” moniker was used to refer to Joe Biden — a significant detail because the CHS interview predated the public release of material contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop, including information that established the “Big Guy” was one of Joe Biden’s nicknames.
Burisma discussed purchasing a U.S.-based oil and gas company for approximately $20-$30 million.
When news first broke of the FD-1023 and its damning indictment of the Bidens, Democrats and their paramours in the press tried to bury the story with a one-two punch. First, they framed the evidence as originating from Giuliani and part of a foreign disinformation operation. Grassley’s release of the actual FD-1023 destroyed that narrative.
Second, they falsely represented to the American public that Brady had already investigated the FD-1023 and closed the investigation as meritless. But as The Federalist first reported, that claim was blatantly false.
“It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” Barr told The Federalist after Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin falsely claimed that “the former attorney general and his ‘handpicked prosecutor’ had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe.”
“On the contrary,” Barr told The Federalist, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
More Questions
Now we reach the crux of the matter: Who in Delaware knew of the FD-1023’s existence, its sourcing to a “highly credible confidential human source,” and that, as The Federalist previously reported, several details contained in the FD-1023 had already been corroborated prior to the handoff to Delaware? The Pittsburgh office had briefed the Delaware office on the document and its conclusion that it “bore indicia of credibility.”
A source familiar with the Pittsburgh brief of the Delaware office confirmed to The Federalist that in addition to agents from the Pittsburgh and Baltimore FBI field offices, Lesley Wolf attended the briefing on the FD-1023 and was informed of those details. Weiss, however, was not present for the briefing. Nor, as we previously learned, were the IRS agents-turned-whistleblowers included in the briefing.
The Federalist has also learned from a source with knowledge of the matter that the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office kept the Hunter Biden laptop secret from the Pennsylvania-based U.S. attorney’s office, which surely limited the investigators’ ability to assess the credibility of the evidence it was screening for disinformation.
Nonetheless, through its independent investigation of the CHS’s reporting, Pittsburgh corroborated several details of the FD-1023 and briefed Wolf on those details, telling her they believed the CHS’s information warranted further investigation.
But did Wolf tell that to Weiss? Did anyone tell that to Weiss? Or did Weiss’s team, after sharing The New York Times’ false narrative that Brady was on a political witch hunt of the Bidens and demanding an investigation into Giuliani disinformation, remain mum? Or did Weiss know about the FD-1023 and do nothing?
The emails don’t answer those questions, but they do confirm that Weiss and his top deputies were fed the Times story. Which leads to a final question: Which FBI agent(s) fed the Times the lies?
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.
Rudy Giuliani surrendered to authorities in Georgia on Wednesday on charges alleging he acted as former President Donald Trump’s chief co-conspirator in a plot to subvert the 2020 election. The former New York City mayor, celebrated as “America’s mayor” for his leadership after 9/11, is charged with Trump and 17 other people under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. His bond has been set at $150,000, second only to Trump’.s $200,000.
Jail records showed he was booked Wednesday afternoon.
Giuliani, 79, is accused of spearheading Trump’s efforts to compel state lawmakers in Georgia and other closely contested states to ignore the will of voters and illegally appoint Electoral College electors favorable to Trump. Georgia was one of several key states Trump lost by slim margins, prompting the Republican and his allies to proclaim, without evidence, that the election was rigged in favor of his Democratic rival Joe Biden. Giuliani is charged with making false statements and soliciting false testimony, conspiring to create phony paperwork, and asking state lawmakers to violate their oath of office to appoint an alternate slate of pro-Trump electors.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has said that, if convicted, Giuliani will be sentenced to prison.
Giuliani has denied wrongdoing, arguing he had a right to raise questions about what he believed to be election fraud. He has called the indictment “an affront to American democracy” and an “out and out assault on the First Amendment.”
“I’m feeling very, very good about it because I feel like I am defending the rights of all Americans, as I did so many times as a United States attorney,” Giuliani told reporters as he left his apartment in New York on Wednesday, adding that he is “fighting for justice” and has been since he first started representing Trump.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler’s testimony Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee about the political interference in the Biden investigation proved so unimpeachable that Democrats resorted to a shotgun attack on everything except the facts. Here are the top six themes the left hammered during the hearing.
1. Orange Man — and His Family And Associates — Bad
Wednesday’s hearing began promptly at 1:00 with opening statements by Republican Chair James Comer and Democrat Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. From the get-go Raskin set one theme Democrats would continue to peddle over the course of the next six hours: Donald Trump is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad man.
Trump was impeached and is under indictment. His daughter was under investigation, and her husband sold out to the Saudis. Trump’s cronies — Manafort, Stone, Flynn, and Cohen — committed crimes, and Trump pardoned them. On and on they went, pointing to Trump to turn the focus from the whistleblowers’ testimony: that the evidence indicates Hunter Biden committed felonies and now-President Joe Biden may have been complicit in the illegality. Democrats likewise used this misdirection to avoid confronting the overwhelming evidence that the DOJ and FBI interfered in the investigation and protected the Biden family.
2. How Dare Republicans Say ‘Two-Tier Justice System’
A second prevalent tactic on display during Wednesday’s hearing was Democrats feigning outrage over Republicans’ complaints of a “two-tier justice system.”
According to Democrats on the committee, that phrase belongs to the civil rights movement and may only be invoked to condemn systemic racism. Some representatives ran so hard with this theme that they spent their allocated time highlighting decades-old hate crimes rather than asking the IRS whistleblowers questions concerning their testimony.
One representative even quizzed Shapley on his knowledge of the racial disparity seen in the prosecution of tax cases. Shapley said he was unaware of the statistic. The Democrat lawmaker then cited the relative percentages for the IRS agent, while remaining oblivious to the fact that Shapley was complaining of favoritism bestowed on the white, privileged Hunter Biden.
3. Never Mind the Whistleblowers, Let’s Talk About Rudy and the Arms Dealer
Democrats also sought to distract from the whistleblowers’ testimony by framing the evidence detailed by the two experienced and well-credentialed IRS agents as flowing from Rudy Giuliani. But as Ziegler testified, he launched the investigation into Hunter Biden after evidence implicating him was discovered pursuant to a separate criminal investigation. None of the evidence Ziegler and Shapley developed came from Giuliani.
Nor did the allegations that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million in bribes from Burisma, as reported by an FBI confidential human source and summarized in the FD-1023, come from Giuliani. The IRS agents never saw the FD-1023 in any event.
House Democrats likewise attempted to minimize the whistleblowers’ testimony by pretending that, beside Giuliani, the only evidence of misconduct came from a witness charged with being an arms dealer, namely Gal Luft. Whether Luft has credible evidence of Biden-family corruption, however, has nothing to do with Ziegler and Shapley’s claims.
4. Merely a Misunderstanding
In their less hysterical moments, the Democrats offered a gentler spin, framing the House’s hearing as much ado about a misunderstanding. It also came down to the whistleblowers not grasping the difference between a special counsel and a special attorney, several Biden apologists suggested.
But as Shapley made clear, he had documented U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s statement — that the DOJ had denied Weiss special counsel authority — soon after Weiss made that representation, and thus while Shapley’s memory was clear. In any event, according to Shapley, Weiss had also said during that meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, that he was not the final decision maker on whether to bring charges against Hunter Biden. That fact makes the distinction between a special counsel and a special attorney irrelevant.
Raskin also suggested Shapley was confused about Weiss’s authority, claiming the Delaware U.S. Attorney made clear in his letters to Congress he had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden.
Both whistleblowers decimated that line of argument by highlighting what Weiss actually said, which was that he lacked charging authority outside of Delaware. In fact, if anything, Raskin hurt his cause by highlighting the contradictions between Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s statements, establishing the necessity for both DOJ bigwigs to testify before Congress to resolve the inconsistencies.
5. Just a Difference of Opinion
A related theme Democrats peddled during Wednesday’s hearing centered on prosecutorial discretion. The left side of the aisle painted the whistleblowers’ testimony as merely a professional disagreement between the IRS agents and Weiss.
But there was no disagreement in opinion, Shapley and Ziegler stressed: Both the IRS and Weiss agreed that Hunter Biden should be charged with multiple felony counts. Weiss, however, lacked the ability to bring charges in D.C., and it was the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney there, as well as in California, that kept the Delaware U.S. attorney from filing criminal felony charges against the president’s son.
Further, that the D.C. and California U.S. attorneys thwarted efforts to bring felony charges against Hunter Biden proved especially rich given the Democrats continued references throughout the hearing to Weiss being Trump’s “hand-picked U.S. attorney.” Beyond the obvious point that being a Trump appointee establishes nothing, under the Democrats’ standard, the involvement of the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys removes this case from the “difference of opinion” scenario.
6. There’s No Evidence, I Tell You, No Evidence
A sixth narrative Democrats pushed during the Oversight hearing was that there’s no evidence of misconduct or favoritism. But to paraphrase Shapley’s line, just repeating the same lie multiple times doesn’t make it true. And to say there’s no evidence of misconduct or favoritism is a whopper of a lie.
The evidence of misconduct by the Bidens exists in the form of texts, emails, chat messages, bank records, suspicious activity reports, the FD-1023 report, and statements made by former business partners such as Tony Bobulinski. The public record is also replete with evidence of DOJ and FBI favoritism, including the extensive testimony of these two whistleblowers, parts of which a third whistleblower has already corroborated.
The Democrats may not like the evidence or want to talk about it, but to say none exists is about as believable as the Secret Service’s claim that they cannot determine whose cocaine was recovered in the White House.
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.
Stop leaking to the media, peddling false narratives, and obstructing congressional oversight into the FBI’s handling of allegations that President Joe Biden was part of a criminal bribery scheme, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told FBI Director Christopher Wray in a floor speech Tuesday.
“Quit playing games,” Grassley said. “The Justice Department and FBI no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt,” he added, pointing to the FBI and Department of Justice’s track record of deception from the Russia-collusion hoax to the present.
Wray “made one excuse after another to not produce” the document detailing the bribery allegation against Biden, Grassley said, even refusing to admit it existed until Grassley revealed to him that he’d already seen a copy. The existence of the explosive allegation, which reportedly describes a Ukrainian energy concern seeking to pay then-Vice President Biden $5 million in return for a policy decision during his time as Ukrainian point man for the Obama administration, was revealed to Grassley by multiple FBI whistleblowers.
The continued practice of leaking false narratives to friendly media outlets instead of complying with constitutional oversight requests particularly bothered Grassley, he said. Everyone knows the “FBI has a penchant for leaking classified information to the media and producing documents to the media,” Grassley said.
Instead of complying with congressional requests, including a subpoena for the document, the FBI and its associates began leaking to Democrat media, in some cases to the exact same media figures they had worked with to spread the false Russia-collusion narrative. Grassley mentioned a May 18 article in The New York Times, likely the one by Adam Goldman, in which the noted Russia-collusion hoaxer wrote a glowing profile of Timothy Thibault that appeared to be sourced to Thibault and the FBI. The profile attempted to discredit decorated FBI agents who opposed his political handling of sensitive investigations.
Thibault was one of the FBI agents who reportedly shut down legitimate investigations into the Biden family business and spoke openly of his animus toward President Trump and former Attorney General Bill Barr. He was reportedly forced out of the bureau last year after questions about his conduct became public. Brian Auten is another FBI official under scrutiny, reportedly for pushing Trump-Russia collusion and inappropriately discrediting Hunter Biden stories.
Other examples of FBI leaks abound. CNN’s Evan Perez was used to push the FBI’s spin on the document Grassley seeks. He famously joined with Jake Tapper and Jim Sciutto to launder the Steele dossier to the American public on Jan. 12, 2017.
To mislead investigators, anonymous sources peddled to Perez the idea that the document was related to allegations supplied by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Republican operative.
“The document has origins in a tranche of documents that Rudy Giuliani provided to the Justice Department in 2020, people briefed on the matter said,” Perez asserted without evidence. It turns out it’s not true. Not only is the document, which details information from a longtime trusted confidential human source, unrelated to the information Giuliani brought to the FBI, it includes information from a previous interview of the source in 2017, three years before the Giuliani inquiry.
Jamie Raskin Is the New Adam Schiff
Still, the unsubstantiated story was enough for Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to spread the falsehood even further. Raskin is the ranking Democrat on the House’s Oversight Committee, which is investigating FBI mishandling of investigations into the Biden family business. He serves a similar role to the one Adam Schiff played when Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was attempting to unravel the FBI’s Russia-collusion hoax. Schiff’s office was known for misleading leaks to CNN and other Democrat media outfits. He also falsely claimed for years to have evidence of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., is the House member overseeing the attempt to get information from Wray’s FBI. After threatening to hold Wray in contempt, the FBI director had a staffer brief Raskin and Comer on the document.
FBI briefings, leaks to friendly media outlets, and official statements include a frustrating mixture of unsubstantiated insinuations that the documented allegation was legitimately “closed,” contrary to whistleblower claims, were coupled with a refusal to answer questions about the documented allegation or its closing because it is part of an ongoing, “open” investigation. Grassley referenced the Kafka-esque situation in his jeremiad against Wray’s game-playing.
In any case, following his briefing, Raskin came out and claimed his FBI briefing showed him, “[i]n August 2020, Attorney General Barr and his hand-picked U.S. Attorney signed off on closing the assessment, having found no evidence to corroborate Mr. Giuliani’s allegations.”
First off, that’s not true in any way. Not only were these allegations not Giuliani’s, but Barr himself has also stated on the record to The Federalist that the investigation of the allegation was not closed and was in fact sent to the Delaware U.S. attorney for further investigation.
But the lie from Raskin was credulously reported by the Post for further dissemination to left-wing audiences.
Washington Post Joins the FBI Info Op
The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for its role in pushing the information operation the FBI and other malign actors orchestrated against President Donald Trump, in which he was falsely accused of being a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The widespread information operation was so effective that it led to the appointment of a damaging special counsel, the derailing of the Trump administration’s effectiveness, and a large majority of Democrats still believing the falsehood even years after it has been soundly and repeatedly debunked. One of the reporters who shared in the prize was Devlin Barrett, who reportedly spent time with Wray last week.
Along with Perry Stein and Jacqueline Alemany, Barrett helped the FBI and other Democrat operatives attempt a cover-up of the dispute with Congress. They claimed the FBI and Department of Justice, under the guidance of Barr, “reviewed allegations from a confidential informant about Joe Biden and his family, and they determined there were no grounds for further investigative steps,” according to Raskin and “other people familiar with the investigation.”
We already know Raskin’s claims are false. Whether the “other people” mentioned include Wray or other anonymous FBI officials is unclear. What is clear is that the spin is deceptive.
The media and other Democrats ignored the claim that a documented allegation existed. Once Wray finally admitted the document did, in fact, exist, the spin machine worked to say it had been investigated and found lacking. The issue is that Grassley and Comer are not as willing to believe the FBI’s unsubstantiated claims as The Washington “Democracy Dies In Darkness” Post’s operatives are.
Not only do they have whistleblowers telling them in detail that the investigation was not handled properly, but journalistic common sense says the same.
We know that the document, which has repeatedly been described by those who have seen it as “detailed,” was dated June 30, 2020. We also are told that Auten closed the investigation in early August 2020. To believe that the details of a complicated criminal enterprise allegation were fully and legitimately investigated and closed by the FBI in four weeks is almost impossible. It’s particularly difficult to believe given that the FBI is apparently leaking false narratives and refusing to substantiate the implausible claim with anything other than a request that they be trusted to tell the truth.
For comparison, the completely idiotic claim that Carter Page was a Russian spy was investigated for years, including securing four invasive warrants to spy on the individual, using extensive electronic surveillance, deploying human sources against Page, and more. Literally no one believes that the detailed claim from a highly trusted confidential human source who had specifics that matched up with verified Biden shell companies was fully investigated and put to bed in a matter of four weeks. Not even Devlin Barrett believes that, even if he pretends to.
No More FBI Lies
The Russia-collusion hoax perpetrated against the American people by the FBI, Democrats, and the media was remarkably effective. But because it was evil and false, the FBI, Democrats, and the media will have a much more difficult time running the operation with the same level of effectiveness again.
Still, Republicans on the Hill must be much savvier this time around, refusing to go along with the FBI’s misleading leaks for even a moment before they demand full compliance with congressional oversight. The good news is that any patience that Grassley and Comer seemed to have for Wray’s game-playing has already run out.
“It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
Former Attorney General Barr went on the record with The Federalist following statements Raskin made to the press Monday afternoon. Soon after attending a closed-door meeting with House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and the FBI — at which lawmakers reviewed the FD-1023 form summarizing a CHS’s detailed allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions — Raskin spoke to the media.
“What I learned,” Raskin claimed, “was that Attorney General Barr named Scott Brady, who was the U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania, to head up a group of prosecutors who would look into all the allegations related to Ukraine.”
“After Rudy Giuliani surfaced these allegations,” Raskin continued, Brady’s team looked into the FD-1023 and “in August determined that there was no grounds to escalate from an initial assessment to a preliminary investigation,” and so “they called an end to the investigation.”
The Maryland Democrat then reiterated his claim that this was “under Attorney General William Barr and his handpicked prosecutor Mr. Brady, who was a Trump appointee.” “They were the ones who decided” there were no further grounds for investigation, Raskin’s claimed, adding: “If there is a complaint, it is with Attorney General William Barr, the Trump Justice Department, and the team that the Trump administration appointed to look into it.”
Raskin would then double down on his claim that it was Barr and Brady who closed down the investigation, issuing a press release saying that in August 2020, Barr and his “hand-picked U.S. Attorney” signed off on closing an assessment into the FD-1023 form that memorialized the CHS’s claims.
But that’s just not true, according to the former attorney general. Instead, the confidential human source’s claims detailed in the FD-1023 were sent to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office for further investigation, according to Barr. That, however, was just one of Raskin’s deceptions: The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee also falsely suggested the CHS’s allegations were related to the investigation of information Rudy Giuliani had unearthed of the Biden family corruption in Ukraine.
Not so, according to an individual familiar with the investigation who told The Federalist that the CHS and the FD-1023 summary of his statement were both “unrelated to Rudy Giuliani” and “not derived” from any information Giuliani provided. This corroborates the House Oversight Committee’s representation that the June 30, 2020, FD-1023 “stands on its own” and was not part of the documents Giuliani provided the FBI in January 2020.
In fact, according to the House Oversight Committee, the FD-1023 in question “contains information from the FBI’s confidential human source dating back to another FD-1023 generated in 2017,” which completely removes Giuliani from the mix.
Raskin’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Two Huge Scandals
These new revelations prove significant for two reasons. First, there’s the underlying scandal of the FBI’s alleged failure to investigate the FD-1023 and FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten’s opening of an assessment in August 2020 to discredit that information, which “caused investigative activity to cease.”
Knowing that the FD-1023 originated in Brady’s Western District of Pennsylvania proves explosive because Grassley’s whistleblower alleged that in September 2020, FBI headquarters placed the information contained in Auten’s assessment in a restricted-access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s info could access. How then could the FBI agents in Delaware further investigate the allegations?
And those allegations, further detailed by Comer on Tuesday, are shocking. “A trusted confidential human source obtained information from a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Biden,” Comer told The Federalist. So, the CHS didn’t just pass on information from some random third party: He spoke directly with the individual who claimed to have bribed Biden. FBI headquarters branding that information as “disinformation” without undertaking an appropriate investigation is outrageous — especially since the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office was directed to further investigate the FD-1023.
The way all this is unfolding sounds more and more like something you would expect to come out of communist Russia, Cuba or China. Such cover-ups are totalitarian in origan, and practiced by the same.
The second scandal is equally as large because it reaches the top of the FBI: Director Christopher Wray.
Wray may well have been in the dark about FBI headquarters falsely labeling the FD-1023 as misinformation and secreting it away from other agents. But framing the intel from the “highly credible” longtime FBI CHS as coming from Giuliani reeks of a cover-up. And suggesting that Barr and Brady closed down an investigation into the FD-1023 when it was instead sent to Delaware for further investigation is a cover-up.
“The more the FBI leak and coverup machine spins for President Biden, the worse the bureau looks,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told The Federalist upon learning of Barr’s statement. “Enough is enough. It’s past time for the FBI to come clean and show their work if they have any hope of salvaging their own credibility.”
Comer went further, telling The Federalist, “The FBI is attempting a coverup, and Democrats are doing their bidding by lying to the American people.”
“The FBI must produce this record to the House Oversight Committee’s custody,” Comer continued, and “if not, we will take action on Thursday to hold Director Wray in contempt of Congress.”
Given Barr’s statement, that should be the least of Wray’s concerns.
Mollie Hemingway contributed to this report.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents.
Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Blinken and Morell reportedly “discussed possible Russian involvement in the spreading of information related to Hunter Biden.” According to Morell, Blinken’s outreach “set in motion” what led to the public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed the laptop as Russian disinformation.
This revelation is huge — but it’s only a start to understanding the scope of the plot to interfere in the 2020 election by framing the laptop exposing Biden family corruption as foreign disinformation.
The First Clue
The first hint that Blinken’s outreach to Morell was a single spoke in the wheel of the Biden campaign’s deception came from a follow-up email Blinken sent Morell on Oct. 17, 2020. In it, Blinken shared a USA Today article that reported “the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a ‘disinformation campaign.’” The very bottom of Blinken’s email contained the signature block of Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, suggesting Bates had sent the article to Blinken for him to forward to Morell.
Blinken forwarding an article claiming the FBI was investigating the laptop as a potential “disinformation campaign” is hugely significant because we know the FBI was doing no such thing. The FBI knew both that the laptop was authentic and that John Paul Mac Isaac had possession of the hard drive, just as the New York Post had reported, albeit without identifying the computer-store owner by name.
The USA Today article nonetheless furthered the narrative that Morell and the other former intelligence officials would soon parrot in their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” — that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
For those who lived through the Russia-collusion hoax, it was the USA Today article and the presidential campaign’s use of Russia to deflect attention from the Biden scandal that bore the “classic earmarks” of an information operation — one that mimicked Hillary Clinton’s ploy four years prior. Given the similarities between the two Russia hoaxes, it seemed likely the Biden campaign worked with the press to push the Russian-disinformation narrative.
USA Today Didn’t Start the Falsehood
Sure enough, the legacy press began pushing the narrative days before Blinken emailed Morell the article on Oct. 17.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post broke the first laptop story, Politico ran an article, co-authored by Russia-hoaxer extraordinaire “Fusion Natasha” Bertrand, raising questions about the authenticity of said laptop. “This is a Russian disinformation operation. I’m very comfortable saying that,” Bertrand quoted former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter.
At the time, Carpenter also ran the Penn Biden Center — the same place a cache of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president and senator were discovered in a closet.
Politico also quoted Bates, whose signature block would later appear on Blinken’s email to Morell. Bates spun the scandal as one about Rudy Giuliani, who had provided a copy of the hard drive to the Post, and Giuliani’s supposed connection “to Russian intelligence.”
Intel Community Helped Peddle Russia Hoax 2.0
As was the case with the Russia-collusion hoax, the Biden campaign received an assist from the intelligence community. On Oct. 14, 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence analysts “had picked up Russian chatter that stolen Burisma emails” would be released as an “October surprise.”
Burisma, of course, was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden nearly $1 million to sit on its board during his father’s final year as vice president.
The chief concern of the intelligence analysts, the Times reported, “was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy.”
Lying Leakers Advance the Narrative
The next day, another foundational Russia-collusion hoaxer, Ken Dilanian, published an “exclusive” at NBC. Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Dilanian claimed that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” Dilanian also quoted Bates, who again focused on Giuliani and his alleged connection to Russia.
The Washington Post also embraced the narrative on Oct. 15, reporting, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.” Based on “four former officials,” The Washington Post reported that Giuliani had interacted with people tied to Russian intel.
More Lies Leaked to USA Today
This brings us to USA Today’s Oct. 16, 2020, article, “FBI Probing Whether Emails in New York Post Story About Hunter Biden Are Tied to Russian Disinformation.”
“Federal authorities are investigating whether a Russian influence operation was behind the disclosure of emails purporting to document the Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden,” USA Today opened its article, citing “a person briefed on the matter” and immediately bringing up Giuliani.
According to USA Today, that person “confirmed the FBI’s involvement but did not elaborate on the scope of the bureau’s review.”
The next day, Oct. 17, USA Today followed up with the article, “A Tabloid Got a Trove of Data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is Probing a Possible Disinformation Campaign.”
It began by saying the New York Post portrayed the laptop contents as a “smoking gun.” “Enter the FBI,” USA Today interjected, reporting that “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia” and claiming there are many questions about the laptop data’s authenticity.
“Experts say the story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign,” it continued, using language strikingly similar to what the former intel officials would use days later.
Blinken Uses Reporting to Prod Morell
It is unclear which of the two USA Today pieces Blinken forwarded to Morell because both articles included the FBI investigation claims. It seems likely, however, that Blinken sent Morrel the second article because USA Today’s Oct. 17 coverage included a quote from supposed “experts” who said the New York Post “story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.”
That language tracked near-perfectly the wording used by the 51 former intelligence officials in their infamous Oct. 19 statement, which claimed the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That’s Not All
Morell’s contact with Blinken reportedly went beyond the phone call and email. According to CNN, following his conversation with Blinken, “Morell had conversations with other former intelligence community officials, which is what led to the letter,” and then Morell “circled back to the Biden campaign to let them know that the letter efforts were underway.”
In testimony to House oversight investigators, Morell told how Biden’s campaign helped strategize releasing the statement, according to a letter Reps. Jim Jordan and Michael Turner sent to Blinken last week. Specifically, “Morell testified that he sent an email telling Nick Shapiro, former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director of the CIA John Brennan, that the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.” Shapiro was another signatory of the statement.
Politico, however, eventually first broke the story and published the statement, under the headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.”
Mission Accomplished
In his testimony to House investigators, Morell “explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election,” Jordan and Turner wrote. In fact, according to attorney Mark Zaid, who represents several of the signatories, “when the draft [statement] was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign.”
Both parts of the ploy worked. When the final presidential debate arrived on Oct. 22, 2020, and then-President Trump confronted Biden with the details revealed in Hunter’s “laptop from hell,” Biden responded by telling the American public:
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
Biden Campaign Thanks Morell for the Assist
Morell testified that after the debate he received a call from Jeremy Bash, who was one of the 51 signatories of the statement. Bash asked Morell if he had a minute to talk to Steve Ricchetti, head of the Biden campaign. Bash testified that he said “yes,” Bash got Ricchetti on the line, and the Biden campaign representative thanked Morell “for putting the statement out.”
More Than Dirty Politics
Morell’s testimony revealed Blinken and the Biden campaign’s role in prompting the bunk statement from the former intel officials. But the contemporaneous media reporting exposes a larger scandal: Representatives of our government helped promote that narrative by falsely telling media outlets the FBI was investigating whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian-disinformation campaign.
The FBI’s role in assisting the Biden campaign’s plot transforms this case from one about dirty politics to a scandal involving government interference in the 2020 election. Accordingly, the House oversight committees need to determine which members of the FBI or intelligence agencies were responsible for the false media leak and whether anyone working on behalf of the Biden campaign collaborated with those government actors.
The committees thus need to gather evidence and question not merely Blinken, but every signatory of the statement, especially Bash; members of the Biden campaign, such as Bates and Ricchetti; and Biden advisers, including Carpenter.
While Blinken provides an entry point to unraveling the Russian-disinformation hoax, there is much more to learn.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
If it were in fact a ‘lie’ to charge that an election had been unfair, even stolen, we’re going to need a few more special committees just for Hillary Clinton.
So the slam-dunk argument congressional Democrats have so far made during their obscenely boring Jan. 6 hearings is that Donald Trump not only lied about voter fraud in the 2020 election but that he knew he lied. How can we as a nation look at ourselves in the mirror ever again after that shock revelation?
Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin, who sits on the Jan. 6 committee, summarized the conclusion on Sunday. “I think we can prove to any reasonable, open-minded person that Donald Trump absolutely knew because he was surrounded by lawyers,” he said on CNN.
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Trump must have been willfully dishonest when he said over and over again that he lost the election because it was rigged and fixed to ensure his defeat. After all, his lawyers had told him it was a lie!
The only problem with that open-and-shut case, to the extent that it’s supposed to mean anything to anyone, is that it ignores the lawyers and aides who were telling Trump the opposite, plus the all-too-likely possibility that Trump simply didn’t believe anyone who was telling him he had lost.
None of this is new. Trump White House assistant Peter Navarro was telling the president he had won the election, even publishing a three-part report making the case that the race was stolen. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was telling him he had won. Plenty of others inside and outside the administration were also arguing that state election laws had been illegally altered by lower courts, giving Democrats an unfair advantage.
It was supposedly “devastating testimony” (at least according to CNN’s Jake Tapper) by former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday (previously recorded) when he recalled telling Trump in person that the Justice Department was unable to substantiate any widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. That story is three months old. Barr recounted it first in the Wall Street Journal during which he said he told the president he found no evidence of fraud and that the president was resistant: “There is a mountain of evidence,” Trump said, according to Barr.
But people told Trump he lost! So he knew he was lying!
That’s not how lying works. The Justice Department swears at this very moment that “white supremacy” is our greatest domestic threat. I say it’s not and I can tell you why I disagree. That doesn’t make me a liar. And if it were in fact a “lie” to charge that an election had been unfair, even stolen, we’re going to need a few more special committees just for Hillary Clinton.
A subsequent point Democrats are aiming for is that Trump had also stated even before the election that his loss could only occur if Democrats cheated, thus he must have had a diabolical plan all along. But guess who made the same assertion? Democrats!
Back in August 2020, CNN hosted a segment with fire-breathing liberal Ana Navarro, Democrat Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, and Democrat former Sen. Barbara Boxer of California. Here’s what each of them said in the span of five minutes:
“The only way he feels now he can win this against the Biden-Harris ticket is to straight out steal it, and he’s doing it in plain sight, and we cannot let it happen.”— Boxer
“This man is not going to win fairly. So why are we supporting crooked activity?”— Clyburn (Yes, the James Clyburn who is credited with having “saved” Biden’s campaign.)
“[H]e’s going to find every single way he can to steal this election, to rig this election in his favor.”— Navarro
Is it only worth an investigation when Republicans do it or…?
I get that Democrats are trying to make a broader case that Trump’s election claims were part of a conspiracy that ultimately led to the riot in the Capitol in 2021, but if reaching that point first requires that they ignore the gaping holes in the fundamental assertion that Trump purposefully lied to the public, the committee hearings are basically just re-runs of Lawrence O’Donnell’s programming of the past year.
And we haven’t even gotten started on the role that the pandemic hysteria and Black Lives Matter violence, intentionally instigated and exacerbated by Democrats, played in the lead-up to Jan. 6. I’m sure the committee will use at least one day to get into that. Surely!
Democrats, through their media, are using race to tear America apart for political gain and power.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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.
Rudy Giuliani said there are two ways the Trump legal team is getting a “major censorship” of its widespread voter fraud allegations. He told Newsmax on Friday that the Trump camp is equally focused on presenting evidence to state legislatures as it is on court hearings, but it is facing an uphill battle because of judges who won’t hear the cases and media that won’t air its presentations.
“We’ve got a lot of evidence. We don’t have a lot of time,” Giuliani said. “The public has only a small idea of the kind of evidence that we have.”
The Trump legal team, led by Giuliani, and its allies have endured dozens of losses, and they are turning to presentations of witnesses to state legislatures in places such as Arizona and Michigan. The team had one such event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, this week, and the Trump team said a judge in Nevada will allow Republicans to present their findings at a hearing on Dec. 3.
As it stands now, President-elect Joe Biden has 306 Electoral College votes, and President Trump has 232. More than one state would have to flip for Trump to emerge as the winner. Time is running out as states are certifying their votes ahead of an Electoral College meeting in mid-December.
A federal appeals court in Philadelphia on Friday rejected Trump’s latest bid to challenge the 2020 election results. However, Giuliani insisted that because the team got its presentation before GOP lawmakers, “in essence, we accomplished the purpose of that case.” He added that the Supreme Court “can now take a look at it.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed off on the certification of Biden as the winner of the state and its 20 electoral votes on Tuesday, but a Pennsylvania appeals court judge ordered state officials on Wednesday not to take any more steps toward certification as part of a separate lawsuit brought by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly and others trying to invalidate all mail-in ballots, which were mostly cast by Democrats. Wolf’s administration asked the state Supreme Court to intervene.
In addition, dozens of GOP state lawmakers proposed a resolution on Friday disputing the 2020 election results.
The former New York City mayor also remarked on how media outlets gave coverage to Trump calling into the Pennsylvania presentation, but Giuliani claimed that if there were witnesses against Trump, “every single one of those witnesses would be on for days like they did during the phony impeachment hearings.”
Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani holds a ballot envelope as he speaks during a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC, on November 19, 2020. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer, blasted members of the establishment media during a Thursday press conference, contending that they are failing to do their job by “falsely” reporting a lack of evidence in Trump’s election disputes in key swing states.
“There are many more affidavits here. I’d like to read them all to you, but I don’t have the time. You should have had the time and energy to go look for them,” Giuliani said, telling the reporters in the room that it is, quite literally, their job.
“It’s your job to read these things and not falsely report that there’s no evidence. Do you know how many affidavits we have in the Michigan case? Two hundred twenty affidavits. They’re not all public, but eight of them are,” Giuliani continued before laying out the claims made by four affiants alone.
They reported an incident that “under any other circumstances would have been on the front page of all your newspapers if it didn’t involve the hatred that you have, the irritation — pathological hatred — that you have for the president,” Giuliani said.
The former New York City mayor detailed their claims of a truck pulling up to the Detroit Center in the dead of the night, which they say was filled with ballots in garbage cans, paper bags, and cardboard boxes.
“The people thought [the truck] was food, so they all ran to the truck. It wasn’t food. It was thousands and thousands of ballots, and the ballots were in garbage cans, they were in paper bags, they were in cardboard boxes, and they were taken into the center,” he said.
Giuliani said the ballots were put on tables. At the time, “they thought all the Republican inspectors had left,” but two remained, as well as an employee of Dominion.
The affiants claimed that “every ballot that they could see, everything they could hear, these were ballots for Biden.”
“When they saw a ballot, these were ballots only for Biden, meaning there was no down ticket. Just Biden. Many of them didn’t have anything on the outer envelope because these ballots were produced very quickly, very swiftly,” he explained.
Giuliani added that those ballots are expected to be “a minimum of 60,000, maximum of 100,000” and said many of them were “triple-counted.”
“I didn’t see that. I don’t know that, but for the fact that three American citizens are willing to swear to it, and we’re not going to let them go to court and do that?” he asked:
We’re going to let this election go by when there are in this case 60 witnesses that can prove what I’m saying to you and other acts of fraud in Michigan? I mean, what’s happened in this country if we’re going to let that happen? What happened to this country if we’re going to cover that up? We let Al Gore carry on an election dispute longer than this one has been going on for one state.
The issue expands far beyond Michigan, he added.
“This happened in Pennsylvania. This happened in Michigan. Michigan probably, right now, if I count up the affidavits, just one case alone … the case we dismissed today because that case was attempting to get the Wayne County Board of Supervisors to decertify,” he said.
“Well, they did. They decertified. That case has 100 affidavits,” he said. Those allege the improper counting of ballots, people voting three and four times, as well as changing and backdating ballots “to the point of at least 300,000 illegitimate ballots that we can specifically identify.”
On Wednesday, two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in Michigan rescinded their votes to certify the election results, alleging harassment and bullying.
“The margin in Michigan was 146,121, and these ballots were all cast basically in Detroit, that Biden won 80-20. So you see a change as a result in the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County, so it’s a very significant case,” Giuliani added.
Rudy Giuliani (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)
Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers representing President Donald Trump’s campaign outlined their case Thursday that the Nov. 3 presidential election was so deeply flawed in several key states that the results should be overturned in the president’s favor.
Giuliani said there was a pattern to the alleged irregularities in key states that suggested, he said, a “plan from a centralized place” to commit voter fraud in cities controlled by Democrats.
He said widespread adoption of vote-by-mail had allowed Democrats to take big-city corruption practices nationwide. “They picked the places where they could get away with it.”
Here are the key allegations the lawyers presented:
1. Observers were allegedly prevented from watching mail-in ballots being opened. Giuliani said that many mail-in ballots were opened without observers being able to check that they were properly signed, a key protection against fraud. Those votes, he said, were “null and void,” especially where the envelopes had been discarded, making recounts useless.
2. Allegedly unequal application of the law in Democratic counties. In Pennsylvania, whose state supreme court created new, relaxed voting rules before the election, Giuliani alleged that absentee voters in Democratic counties were allowed to “cure” defects in their ballots, while voters in Republican counties, which obeyed the state law as written, were not.
3. Voters allegedly arrived at the polls to discover other people had voted for them. Giuliani said that many provisional ballots cast in Pittsburgh were submitted by people who showed up to vote in person, only to be told that they had voted already. He alleged that Democrats had filled out absentee ballots for other people, hoping they would not show up.
4. Election officials were allegedly told not to look for defects in ballots, and to backdate ballots. Giuliani cited an affidavit from an official who swore she was told not to exclude absentee ballots for defects, and to backdate ballots so they would not appear to have been received after Election Day, to avoid a Supreme Court order to sequester those ballots.
5. Ballots casting votes for Joe Biden and no other candidates were allegedly run several times through machines. Giuliani said that there were 60 witnesses in Michigan who would attest to ballots being “produced” quickly and counted twice or thrice. He said that a minimum of 60,000 ballots, and a maximum of 100,000 ballots, were allegedly affected.
6. Absentee ballots were accepted in Wisconsin without being applied for first. Giuliani noted that Wisconsin state law was stricter regarding absentee ballots than most other states are, yet alleged that 60,000 absentee ballots were counted in the Milwaukee area, and 40,000 in the Madison area, without having been applied for properly by the voters who cast them.
7. There were allegedly “overvotes,” with some precincts allegedly recording more voters than residents, among other problems. Giuliani said there was an unusually large number of overvotes in precincts in Michigan and in Wisconsin, which he alleged was the reason that Republicans on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers had refused to certify the results there this week. He also alleged that there were some out-of-state voters in Georgia, and people who had cast votes twice there.
8. Voting machines and software are allegedly owned by companies with ties to the Venezuelan regime and to left-wing donor George Soros. Sidney Powell argued that U.S. votes were being counted overseas, and that Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic software were controlled by foreign interests, manipulating algorithms to change the results. Powell noted specifically that Smartmatic’s owners included two Venezuelan nationals, whom she alleged had ties to the regime of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. The legal team alleged that there were statistical anomalies, such as huge batches of votes for Biden, that could not be explained except as manipulation — which, they alleged, happened in the wee hours of the morning as vote-counting had stalled. (The companies have disputed these allegations vigorously.)
9. The Constitution provides a process for electing a president if the vote is corrupted. Jenna Ellis argued that the media, had usurped the power to declare the winner of the election. She made the point, citing Federalist No. 68, that the constitutional process of selecting a president had procedural safeguards against corruption and foreign influence.
Giuliani said that the campaign believed that enough votes were flawed — more than double the margins between Biden and Trump in key states — that the president had a path to victory.
Giuliani presented evidence in the form of sworn affidavits, citing two and noting that the campaign had many more from private individuals.
He noted that several lawsuits that had been dismissed had been filed by private individuals, not the campaign directly. He said lawsuits might be filed in Arizona, and that the campaign was also examining irregularities in New Mexico and Virginia, though he said he did not think there were enough disputed votes in the latter.
Giuliani also took on the media, arguing that they had provided misleading information and condoned threats against Trump’s legal team.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
A teen being given a citation for merely driving in her car. Hiking trails closed. Church congregants for Easter services having their license plate numbers taken down by the police so that they can be told to be in quarantine for 14 days no matter what kind of social distancing was being practiced. That’s where we are now, and former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik isn’t particularly happy about it.
In a tweet Thursday, Kerik blasted officials who are using the coronavirus outbreak as a pretext to clamp down on freedoms that wouldn’t necessarily affect the spread of the virus.
“Yesterday, governors/mayors shut down walking trails,” Kerik tweeted.
”Some police have been ordered to arrest people for walking outside their homes. The government is considering a #coronavirus surveillance system.
“WTF! Americans better start paying attention and getting vocal! #Constitution.”
He went on to criticize New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, for his decision to stop construction projects.
“Today @GovMurphy stopped all non-essential construction,” he tweeted.
“Construction is a profession in which many will not be able to receive government assistance.
“Instead of mandating by order that they wear protective equipment and follow CDC directives, this will destroy them/families.”
Murphy had announced the halt to construction the day before Kerik’s tweet.
“We must continue to work together to flatten the curve of new COVID-19 cases in New Jersey,” Murphy said in a statement.
“By ceasing all non-essential construction projects and imposing additional mitigation requirements on essential businesses, we are furthering our aggressive efforts to enforce social distancing and limiting our public interactions to only the most essential in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”
In the executive order, Murphy also limited the number of customers who could be in an essential retail outlet at any given point in time and required those outlets to mark 6-foot increments on the floor in order to indicate how to socially distance, among many, many other things.
Park systems, meanwhile, have been shutting down across the country.
Here’s part of Oregon’s explication for closing its state park system late last month: “A single person walking on a trail is fine. There are a few million people in the west who are thinking the same thing, and then next thing you know, people are parking alongside roads to get into a park. That’s bad for you, it harms other people, and it puts stress on local groceries and health care systems.
It’s not just the hiking trails that have been shut down. The status of churches varies from state to state, with some listing them as an essential service and others shutting them entirely. Kentucky is one of the states in the latter category — and it managed to make a show of it this weekend when police took down the license plate numbers of the 50 people worshipping in the Maryville Baptist Church and put quarantine notices on their car, according to USA Today.
Newly elected Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, has engaged in a high-profile battle with a handful of churches that are still holding in-person services. In a move that absolutely won’t escalate the situation, state police threatened “further enforcement measures” for individuals receiving the quarantine notices if they decide not to quarantine.
At least there was some good news in this department last Wednesday, though: A 19-year-old Pennsylvania woman who was cited for “going for a drive”will have the ticket dropped, according to the York Dispatch. Anita Shaffer became one of the most prominent victims of over-officiousness in the time of coronavirus when Pennsylvania State Police hit her with a $200 ticket because she needed to get out of the house. She was the first person ticketed under Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s stay-at-home order. A few days later, officialdom decided it was probably best not to pursue the case.
Beside the fact that the troopers cited her under the wrong statute, York County District Attorney Dave Sunday felt that ticketing Shaffer didn’t serve “the interests of justice.”
“Ironically, if Ms. Shaffer had lied to the [trooper] and stated that she was driving to obtain food, medicine, or to a path to engage in outside exercise, Ms. Shaffer could not have received a citation for violating the stay at home order because no facts would exist to support its issuance,” Sunday wrote in his request to have the charges dropped. A district court judge granted the request.
I suppose kudos are in order to Mr. Sunday, a man who can probably figure out how to be six feet away from someone on a hiking trail. Alas, we live in a time when the government can’t trust us to hike or shop or drive correctly.
Mind you, this isn’t to say that all of this is smart.
No matter how much social distancing you practice and how much closer you feel to God when you go to church, you’re significantly better off if you decide to just go online. That said, the freedom of assembly and the freedom of religion are both enshrined under the First Amendment, so I wish Kentucky good luck defending that quarantine in court.
Kerik, by the way, isn’t exactly a wild-eyed libertarian. This was the top cop in New York City under Rudy Giuliani and during 9/11. That’s not the kind of resume that leads one to flights of anarchist fancy. He’s bringing up a very real concern that our rights have taken a backseat to trying to beat this disease. In some respects, that’s understandable. However, we’re about to be met with very sticky constitutional issues, including contact tracing and coronavirus “passports” to prove someone has antibodies and can re-enter society.
If the Constitution takes a backseat here, there’s the inevitable slippery slope: It can take a backseat anywhere. The fear is understandable, but fear cannot be allowed to set our rights afire.
Following are some images that, hopefully, will get you active in the fight for freedom. – Jerry Broussard
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.
Trump Attorney Rudy Giuliani joined Jesse Watters on Saturday night to discuss President Trump’s acquittal. Rudy also revealed information on the January 2016 meeting in the Obama White House organized by the anti-Trump CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
Records show Obama and his Deep State actors in the White House pressured the Ukraine to provide dirt on candidate Trump and his team in early 2016. Highly respected investigative reporter John Solomon called the 11 AM January 19, 2016 meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building “one of the earliest documented efforts to build the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative and one of the first to involve the Obama administration’s intervention.”
Suspected Schiff whistleblower Eric Ciaramella chaired that meeting, which was also attended by his frequent collaborator Liz Zentos. The meeting was ostensibly arranged by the Obama administration for anti-corruption training and coordination, but it didn’t take long for the Ukrainian participants, during the meetings and afterward, “to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations: one that touched Vice President Joe Biden’s family and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump.”
The Obama Department of Justice officials were interested in reopening a closed 2014 FBI investigation that “focused heavily on GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort, whose firm long had been tied to Trump through his partner and Trump pal, Roger Stone.”
Nazar Kholodnytskyy, then Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor and a meeting attendee, said he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election, when the “black ledger,” key evidence against Manafort, who had joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016 and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016, was suddenly released to the media in May 2016.
According to Andriy Telizhenko, then a political officer at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington DC and a meeting attendee, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over(it is believed that the FBI attended the January 19, 2016 meeting). Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, was under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter as both a board member and a consultant.
All of the above suggests that the Obama Administration used U.S. government personnel in an attempt to enlist a foreign nation to provide negative information about political opponents and to quash investigation of political allies.
And when the Ukrainians did not agree, it appears that the U.S. government pressured the Ukrainian government to replace obstinate Ukrainian officials with more compliant ones.
On Saturday night Rudy Giuliani told Jesse Watters that he has three witnesses who claim in January 2016 members of Obama’s NSC violated the law Mueller was investigating Trump of violating. The Obama officials asked foreigners for dirty information on an American citizen who was going to be involved in a political campaign.
The Gateway Pundit previously reported on the attendees at Ciaramella’s meeting
Rudy says he has a memo and there is no doubt who was at the meeting. Rudy also claims he has a money laundering evidence that involves Hunter Biden.
Rudy also claims he has a money laundering evidence that involves Hunter Biden.
Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney for President Trump, threatened Thursday to go public with information that would expose corruption by 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
“Everything I tried to tell the press last March is now coming out, and more. I will now start to reveal the evidence directly to you, the People,” the former New York mayor tweeted.“The Biden Family Enterprise made millions by selling public office. Then when Joe was Obama’s Point Man, they ALL made millions.”
Giuliani’s claim that he could reveal evidence detrimental to the former vice president follows his offer to testify in Trump’s impeachment trial taking place in the Senate.
Viktor Shokin / LightRocket via Getty Images
“I would love to see a trial. I’d love to be a witness – because I’m a potential witness in the trial – and explain to everyone the corruption that I found in Ukraine, that far out-surpasses any that I’ve ever seen before, involving Joe Biden and a lot of other Democrats,” he said Sunday morning on “The Cats Roundtable” with radio host John Catsimatidis on AM 970.
Giuliani, who is at the center of the impeachment trial for his work on behalf of Trump in Ukraine, has alleged that Biden pressured Ukrainian officials to fire a top prosecutor by withholding millions in guaranteed loans.
He claims that Biden took the action against Viktor Shokin because he was going to investigate Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian company that employed Biden’s son Hunter on its board.
Joe Biden, during a campaign stop in Iowa on Wednesday, defended Hunter, saying “no one has suggested my son did anything wrong.”
“There’s nobody that’s indicated there’s a single solitary thing that he did that was inappropriate, wrong … or anything other than the appearance. It looked bad that he was there,” Biden said, according to the Washington Post. “He acknowledges that he in fact made a mistake going on the board.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, who is playing a lead role among House Democrats presenting the case against Trump, said Trump has been trying to pin corruption on the Bidens, noting that the president called for Ukraine and China to launch investigations into them. Schiff used as one example Trump’s comments from Oct. 3.
“They should investigate the Bidens. Because how does a company that’s newly formed and all these companies, if you look — and by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens. Because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine,” Trump told reporters on the White House’s South Lawn.
The impeachment trial centers on a July 25 phone call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation into the Bidens that would personally benefit Trump politically.
The New York Times building is seen on September 6, 2018 in New York. – A furious Donald Trump called September 5, 2018 for the unmasking of an anonymous senior official who wrote in the New York Times that top members of his administration were undermining the president to curb …ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty
The New York Times on Wednesday published what would have been a major story on White House National Security Council (NSC) aide Kash Patel—if only it had been true.
The story, which relies on leaks from Democrats conducting the “impeachment inquiry” into President Donald Trump of testimony by one witness who had no firsthand knowledge of the allegations she was making, claims Patel had provided President Trump with documents on Ukraine and met with the president about them.
Citing as its sources “people briefed on the matter,” the Times’ Julian Barnes, Adam Goldman, and Nicholas Fandos wrote that Patel was referred to by President Trump as “one of his top Ukraine policy specialists” and that President Trump “wanted to discuss related documents with him.” The Times reporters claimed that Patel’s NSC and White House colleagues “grew alarmed” over all this.
Later in the Times piece, it became clear where exactly this allegation came from—Fiona Hill, a former Trump administration Russia hand, whom the Democrats have been relying on for testimony in the impeachment inquiry. Hill testified earlier this month in the secret room in the basement of the Capitol building from which Democrats have been running their private impeachment proceedings.
Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for Eurasian and Russian affairs, testified to House investigators last week that she believed Mr. Patel was improperly becoming involved in Ukraine policy and was sending information to Mr. Trump, some of the people said. Ms. Hill grew alarmed earlier this year when an aide from the White House executive secretary’s office told her that Mr. Trump wanted to talk to Mr. Patel and identified him as the National Security Council’s ‘Ukraine director,’ a position held by one of Ms. Hill’s deputies. The aide said Mr. Trump wanted to meet with Mr. Patel about documents he had received on Ukraine. Ms. Hill responded by asking who Mr. Patel was. While the aide from the executive secretary’s office did not state explicitly that Mr. Patel sent the Ukraine documents to Mr. Trump, Ms. Hill understood that to be the implication, according to a person familiar with her testimony.
As the Times notes, if true, this would mean there were multiple backchannels for Trump on Ukraine matters—the other being through his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s associates—and it would make it appear as though Trump was up to something by circumventing established channels for such policy, even though the president as the nation’s chief executive officer is well within his rights to do that.
But the problem with the Times story, and its sources that appear to be leaks from Democrats of Hill’s testimony, is that the entire premise is untrue, sources familiar with Patel’s meetings with the president told Breitbart News. Since the Times published its story, Breitbart News has spoken with a dozen sources including current White House officials, then-current-now-former White House officials, congressional officials familiar with the investigation and the meetings Patel had with President Trump, and others in the know about what actually happened and discovered that Patel’s meetings with President Trump had “absolutely nothing,” in the words of one source, to do with Ukraine whatsoever.
One now-former White House official confirmed that President Trump did in fact meet with Patel on a number of occasions, though it’s unclear if these were one-on-one meetings or there were others present.
A source close to House GOP leadership told Breitbart News that Patel’s meetings with the president were focused on domestic national security matters, and that Ukraine did not come up at all.
That source said of the Times story:
This story is complete nonsense. The meeting was arranged at the suggestion of multiple GOP congressmen and senators to discuss domestic national security issues that Kash has specific knowledge and unique expertise in. This meeting had absolutely nothing to do with Ukraine.
A second well-placed source familiar with Patel’s interactions with the president told Breitbart News that the Times story that relies on Hill’s testimony—leaked by Democrats—is “100 percent false.”
“The New York Times story is 100 percent false,”this source familiar with Patel’s interactions with Trump told Breitbart News. “Kash did not discuss Ukraine with Trump in any meeting, nor did he discuss any Ukraine-related documents with him. The Democrats involved in the impeachment interviews were obviously tipped off that Fiona Hill would invent some story like this if asked about Kash, and that’s why they brought up his name to her, then they leaked the exchange to their lackeys at the Times.”
Hill, Breitbart News has learned, was asked a number questions about Patel by the Democrats during her testimony, and a source in the room said her “responses appeared scripted,” suggesting that there was some coordination between Hill or her lawyers and the Democrats on Capitol Hill before her appearance.
Then, as has happened with so much more that has gone on in the secretive U.S. Capitol basement room in which House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) is running the impeachment proceedings away from public view, this information was leaked to the Times and weaponized against the president and his administration—the actual truth and facts be damned.
This episode paints a broader and darker picture of what exactly Schiff and his team are doing in the secretive room and raises bigger questions about why Schiff is not holding these hearings in public.
The system Democrats have set up basically goes as such: They bring witnesses in for testimony and depositions and transcribed interviews for hours on end to a private room known as a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF)–behind closed doors and away from the press and public.
They allow no lawyers for the administration inside to challenge anything, present facts in defense of the president, or hear what’s happening down there. Then, Schiff and his team control the information gathered and collected down there—not allowing the minority sufficient access to it.
After that, Schiff, his team, and other Democrats leak the most damaging information to the media—usually out of context, and without the full story—in order to create a public narrative that the president is in serious trouble.
Then it takes a couple days at least for Republicans to get the full truth out about each of these instances to turn around the narrative and expose each “fact” the Democrats are putting forward as flawed. This latest example saw the Times story on Hill’s testimony as the official public record on this matter, until now, for about a full day.
Technically speaking, Hill did make these claims that the Times reported in her testimony—but the veracity of them was never checked by the Democrats who gathered said testimony then leaked it to the New York Times for publication.
The Times also did not check their veracity, even though the first source who spoke to Breitbart News, the one close to House GOP leadership who confirmed Hill’s claims were false, noted that Hill’s inaccurate claims were reproduced uncritically by the Times based upon Democrat leaks. And the Times, this source said, as an institution was aware of the fact that Hill’s claims were false because a separate White House correspondent at the Times was aware of Patel’s meetings with the president at the time of said meetings well before Hill’s testimony happened and well before Democrats even launched an impeachment inquiry—and that this Times reporter was aware that the content had nothing to do with Ukraine.
“What’s particularly shameful is that at least one New York Times White House reporter was told about this meeting in advance off the record, and knew what this meeting was about—and that it was not about Ukraine—but they printed this fake story anyway,” the source close to House GOP leadership told Breitbart News.
Part of the reason the media and the Democrats wanted to smear Patel and attempt to tie him into the impeachment madness, the second source who was familiar with Patel’s conversations with the president said, is because Patel was critical of exposing the failures of the narrative surrounding the previous attempts by the so-called “deep state” to entangle Trump in a scandal on the Russia narrative.
“The story is a lazy hit piece based entirely on rumors and purported second-hand and third-hand information,”that source told Breitbart News. “Both the Times and the Democrats have a vendetta against Kash because he helped blow up their three-year investment in the Russia hoax.”
In fact, this is evident by the fact that the Times story actually opens with a recounting of Patel’s history as an aide on the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans were in the majority and his role in exposing what has become known as “Spygate.”
Barnes, Goldman, and Fandos wrote to open their article, before they even got into the substance of the new but false allegations that Hill leveled against Patel over meetings with the president:
When Kashyap Patel was an aide to the House Intelligence Committee in the first years of the Trump administration, he played a key role in helping Republicans try to undermine the Russia investigation, writing a memo that accused law enforcement officials of abusing their power. The memo, which consumed Washington for weeks, was widely dismissed as a biased argument of cherry-picked facts. But it galvanized President Trump’s allies and made Mr. Patel a hero among them. After Republicans ceded control of Congress this year, he landed on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council staff.
Later in the story, the Times reporters further explain Patel’s role in exposing the Russia scandal as a hoax designed to harm the president.
“Mr. Patel was previously best known as a lead author of the politically charged memo released early last year accusing the F.B.I. and Justice Department leaders of abusing their power in the early stages of the Russia investigation,”Barnes, Goldman, and Fandos wrote. “Mr. Patel worked at the time as an investigator for the House Intelligence Committee under Representative Devin Nunes of California, who ran the panel when Republicans had control of the chamber. Mr. Patel’s efforts to discredit the Russia investigation made him a minor celebrity in conservative circles but a divisive figure on Capitol Hill.”
Rudy Giuliani appeared with Sean Hannity and he told him that when he met with Andriy Yermak from Ukraine, Yermak had documents, tapes and evidence of money laundering.
If this is true, then there was really no need for the president to urge an investigation into Biden because the evidence has already been gathered. And why didn’t Rudy bring the evidence or at least a copy of the evidence with him? And if that evidence does exist, then maybe we need to bring it here to the United States. I mean Hunter Biden took in close to 2 billion dollars for advising on matters he knows nothing about.
Sean Hannity:You didn’t get involved in this on your own. Did our State Department ask you to go on a mission for them?
Rudy Giuliani:They did. The State Department called me and asked me if I would take a call from Mr. Yermak. I talked to him. He gave me enormously important facts. I conveyed them all to the State Department unlike the media lies. It was fake news. I wasn’t operating on my own. I have to tell you. I knew this back in November… I told you that Biden was involved in very, very horrible corruption. Shocking to me… It’s disgraceful. I mean Spiro Agnew got thrown out of office for $10,000. This guy was collecting millions and billions. He’s negotiating with China? And the kid gets $1.5 billion? I don’t want to pick on the kid. But you give $1.5 billion to a guy who got thrown out of the military for drug addiction, just a couple days before? You give a drug addict $1.5 billion unless you’re trying to bribe his father.
Sean Hannity:No background in private equity. No background in China. No background in Ukraine…
Rudy Giuliani:And a seriously disturbed person… This stinks to high heaven. It’s a disgrace. It will be one of the big American scandals when it’s eventually uncovered… They cash in wherever Joe is made the point man. And Sean I told you this was going to happen. It’s going to get much worse. I guarantee it. There’s plenty more evidence. There are documents, there are tapes, there are a completely money laundered transaction… Money laundering is a federal crime.
Editor’s Note: Fox News reported that the website mentioned by Michael Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, directed users to President Donald Trump’s campaign website. However, it now redirects visitors to a GoFundMe page for President Trump’s border wall.
Lanny Davis is not having a good day.
On top of having to convince people his client Michael Cohen is ‘committed’ to the truth, he was apparently also tasked with raising his own paycheck.
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On Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom,” Lanny preached Cohen’s love of everything true. “He’s committed to telling the truth.”
“We’ve actually set up a website with the name ‘truth’ in it, called michaelcohentruth.com, and he’s looking for help from people who want to give donations to help him uh… tell the truth.”
There’s only one problem. Typing michaelcohentruth.com in your browser takes you to a GoFundMe page for President Donald Trump’s border wall.
Lanny did the math. Fox has a huge number of viewers, so it would be a perfect place to promote the website. With possibly millions watching, what could go wrong?
Lanny gave a typical lawyer interview and was a courteous professional. Everybody wants to donate to those guys.
But despite doing everything right, our lovable lawyer failed to take a crucial step: visiting the website you’re planning to promote.
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It’s a deceptively simple concept, one that 7 years at Yale never prepared him for.
Nobody noticed the website despite it being mentioned twice, and it was not corrected in the interview.
Before the questions get a little more aggressive and Lanny gets a little more frustrated, he was able to get one more confusing jab in.
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“When Rudy Giuliani says ‘truth isn’t truth,’ you just heard Donald Trump reverse truth and make it into a falsehood.”
“It’s classic,”Lanny said, shaking his head with a chuckle. “Classic.”
Jared is a husband, dad, and aspiring farmer. He was an infantryman in the Arkansas and Georgia National Guard. If he’s not with his wife and son, then he’s either shooting guns or working on his motorcycle.
Jared is a husband, dad, and aspiring farmer. He was an infantryman in the Arkansas and Georgia National Guard. If he’s not with his wife and son, then he’s either shooting guns or working on his motorcycle.
President Donald Trump is reportedly adding former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to his personal legal team.
A source familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast, Giuliani has been in negotiations with Trump and his team for some time, yet the process has slowed due to recent developments the Trump administration has made in dealing with North Korea and Syria. Giuliani confirmed the news to The Washington Post Thursday afternoon.
“I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller,” he stated.
NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 12: Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks to reporters at Trump Tower, January 12, 2017 in New York City. President-elect Trump continues to hold meetings Trump Tower. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Giuliani was one of the first public figures to endorse Trump during the 2016 campaign. He has been a vociferous defender and was allegedly considered for several positions within the administration, including attorney general.
Recently, Trump considered adding former United States attorney Joe diGenova to his legal team but eventually decided not to over “politics.”
“It was an appearance thing,” diGenova said of the decision. “It was the politics of it, and perfectly understandable concern on their part.”
It’s like Fantasy football for political junkies. The latest matchup is for the Secretary of State position. And people are making their picks.
Newt Gingrich prefers Rudy Giuliani to Mitt Romney as a potential secretary of state, the former House Speaker said on Monday. Gingrich, emerging from a meeting with the president-elect at Trump Tower, told reporters he would support whoever Trump picked, but declared: “I think there are huge advantages to Rudy Giuliani.”
“Frankly, I think that if you want someone who is going to go out and be a very tough negotiator for America and represent American interest in the way that Trump campaigned, I think that probably Rudy is a better pick and has the right temperament,”he elaborated, according to a pool report of his remarks.
Gingrich suggested that it isn’t clear Romney was “willing to be [Trump’s] secretary of state,”and asked whether Romney “would work to make Trump Romney’s version of the presidency.”
“I think they’ve got to talk it through,”he added. Romney is under “active consideration”to be Trump’s top diplomat, according to comments made by Vice President-elect Mike Pence over the weekend…
…As for Giuliani, Gingrich said, “We’re going to need somebody who is a fighter,”because “the world is not going to change just because we show up and say ‘please.’ If that was going to work, Secretary Kerry would be successful.”
Read more: Politico
What do you think?
Reward those who have stayed loyal? Or leave aside the infighting and pick someone whatever he said in the Primaries? (You might remember some of the trash-talk Romney made while being one of the leading #NeverTrumpers. It was ugly.)
On this question, what should take the priority? Building party unity so we can all be on the same page in crushing the Democrat’s ‘transformation’ of America? Or are we making an example of someone who made an ass of himself and the party in the Primaries?
During the first presidential debate of the election year, Donald Trump and moderator-cum second Democrat debater Lester Holt clashed over the police policy of stop and frisk. Siding with Hillary, shill Holt insisted the policy was deemed unconstitutional while Trump disputed that notion. But in fact, Holt is wrong. Stop and frisk is perfectly legal.
One of Trump’s suggestions for how to put a dent in the wildly rising rates of violent crime in America’s Democrat-controlled big cities is to reinstate and expand the stop and frisk policy. Trump said as much during the September 26 debate.
But, as Trump spoke the third debater interrupted him saying it was an illegal policy.
“Stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York, because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men,”so-called “moderator” Holt told Trump.
“No, you’re wrong,”Trump responded. “It went before a judge, who was a very against-police judge. It was taken away from her. And our mayor, our new mayor, refused to go forward with the case. They would have won an appeal. If you look at it, throughout the country, there are many places where it’s allowed.”
So, who is right? Well, all signs point to Trump.
For those unaware, stop and frisk (sometimes called a “Terry stop”) was legitimized by the U.S. Supreme Court way back in 1968 when the court ruled that a police officer could legally frisk a suspect without obtaining a search warrant or first arresting them if the officer had a reasonable suspicion that the suspect was armed or carrying contraband (such as drugs).
But the concept goes back even farther than 1968 and can be found in the English Common Law upon which the American system of justice was based. In any case, it is a concept of very long standing and has already been ruled a legal policing tool.
The trick, though, is in the way stop and frisk is observed and put into use. In practice, the officer needs a “reasonable” cause to perform a stop and search and that is where the whole policy can get political. Should a department indulge the process too much it could result in calls of harassment by members of the community and that is what happened in New York City. Stop and frisk was ended due to political pressure, not really legal pressure.
Holt did have a minor point in that a 2013 lawsuit against the New York Police Department put a halt to stop and frisk by the NYPD saying that its process was flawed. But the lawsuit did not deem the policy of stop and frisk itself to be unconstitutional. Holt was 100% wrong on that.
In the 2013 case, Bill Clinton appointed Judge Shira Scheindlin of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan essentially ruled that New York City’s version of the policy was improper–calling it an example of “indirect racial profiling”–and demanded that the NYPD put a halt to its policy.
After her decision Judge Scheindlin was criticized by an appeals panel saying she had compromised the “appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation” by taking the case to the media instead of remaining properly aloof during the process.
Even after she issued her decision it wasn’t necessarily the end of the case as the city had initially begun to file an appeal of the ruling. The appeal could well have over turned Judge Scheindlin’s obviously liberal political ruling but the appeal was canceled by incoming, self-avowed socialist mayor Bill de Blasio whose decision was arrived via political considerations, not legal ones
So, even the NYPD’s version of stop and frisk never reached its final legal challenge to determine its legality.
But don’t take my word for it. After the debate the policy was immediately defended by one-time New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The former mayor said that stop and frisk helped bring about an 85 percent reduction in crime in the Big Apple and is a perfectly legitimate, legal and constitutional tool used by America’s police departments. Giuliani took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal the day after the debate to side with Trump and asserted the efficacy of the stop and frisk policy.
Rudy insisted that the policy saved black lives.
Over a 20-year use of this policy, spanning the administration of two New York City mayors and four police commissioners, stop and frisk played a material part in reducing homicides in New York City. It helped to change New York City from the crime capital of America to the safest large city in the country. In each of those 20 years, approximately six of 10 murder victims in New York City were African-Americans. In other words, stop and frisk saved many black lives.
Rudy also pointed out that during his tenure the U.S. Department of Justice constantly reviewed the NYPD’s policy and never filed any sanctions or actions against the city.
It wasn’t until the liberal Manhattan judge appointed by a leftist president who wanted to make her mark in social justice before she retired that the policy was s maligned.
Rudy slammed both Hillary Clinton and “moderator” Lester Holt for their attack on Trump during the debate.
“Donald Trump was right. Hillary Clinton was wrong. Lester Holt should apologize for interfering and trying so hard to help Mrs. Clinton support her incorrect statement that stop and frisk is unconstitutional,”he wrote.
But Rudy Giuliani isn’t alone in his contention that stop and frisk is a good policy.
Even FBI Director James Comey noted that stop and frisk is a useful and legal tool for police. Comey recently told the House Judiciary Committee that the policy is perfectly fine when used properly.
Of course, many claim the policy is “racist” because it affects so many black citizens. But a study by the RAND Corp. found that “black pedestrians were stopped at a rate that is 20 to 30 percent lower than their representation in crime-suspect descriptions.”
In any case, the decision on how to or whether to implement stop and frisk is firmly in the political realm because in the legal realm the policy is perfectly constitutional.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Warner Todd Huston
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and BigJournalsim.com along with all Breitbart News sites, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, and many, many others. He has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs across the country to discuss his news stories and current events and has appeared on TV networks such as CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, and various Chicago-based news programs. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” in an appearance from the site of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called the convention “the most anti-police”and “the most anti-law enforcement” he had ever seen.
However, he also said that according to “high-ranking police officers” in Philadelphia, uniformed law enforcement was not allowed on the floor of the convention.
“This is the most anti-police, anti-law enforcement convention I’ve ever seen in my whole life. There was not a uniformed police officer allowed on the convention floor. I was told that by four high-ranking police officers, two of whom I’ve known for a very long time. And then I walked the floor for very long time and I couldn’t find a single officer. Go look at your footage. You find me a uniform. Hillary Clinton didn’t want uniformed police officers on the convention floor.”
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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