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Posts tagged ‘Ukraine’

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


Branco Cartoon – Anti-Trump Authoritarian

A.F. Branco | on August 19, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/branco-cartoon-anti-trump-authoritarian/

Newsom The Authoritarian
A Political Caroon by A.F. Branco 2025

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Newsom calls Trump an authoritarian for trying to interfere with his own authoritarian policies.

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Newsom Warns “Trump Will Be Running for a Third Term” — Says He Received ‘Trump 2028’ Hat in the Mail (VIDEO)

By Jim Hoft – The Gateway Pundit – Aug 14, 2025

California’s far-left Governor Gavin Newsom is back in front of the cameras and back in full meltdown mode.
On Thursday, the Democrat governor held a press conference in Downtown Los Angeles to hype the Democrats’ latest “redistricting effort,” but the event quickly devolved into an unhinged tirade aimed squarely at President Donald Trump.
Newsom accused Trump of plotting to “rig the system” and vowed to push forward with a Democrat power grab disguised as redistricting reform.
The governor even went so far as to claim his scheme would “end Trump’s presidency.”… READ MORE

Branco Cartoon – Attack the Peacemaker

A.F. Branco | on August 20, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/branco-cartoon-attack-of-the-peacemaker/

Dems attack Trumps Peace Efforts
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – No matter what Trump does, the Democrats and the legacy media work overtime to put a negative spin on it.

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WATCH: Karoline Leavitt SHREDS Leftist Media and “Clueless Pundits” for Dishonest Coverage of Trump’s Russia-Ukraine Negotiations, “Actively Rooting Against the President”

By Jordan Conradson – The Gatewaypundit – Aug 19, 2025

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a scathing rebuke of the media on Tuesday during a press briefing after President Trump brought the world to the verge of solving the years-long war between Russia and Ukraine.
As The Gateway Pundit reported, President Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven European Leaders to negotiate a peace agreement after meeting with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday.
During the meeting, Trump revealed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a deal that would involve security guarantees for Ukraine, which Ukraine has made as one of its central demands to end the war… READ MORE

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.

Trump Orders Positioning of Nuclear Submarines Against Russia


By Sam Barron    |   Friday, 01 August 2025 01:58 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/world/globaltalk/donald-trump-russia-medvedev/2025/08/01/id/1220981/

President Donald Trump announced Friday he is ordering two nuclear submarines to be positioned near Russia after “provocative statements” from former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

“Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social page. “Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

After Trump on Monday said he was reducing a deadline for Russia to agree to a Ukraine peace settlement from 50 days to 10 or 12 days, Medvedev wrote on X that Trump was playing “the ultimatum game” and that such an approach could lead to war.

Alert: Trump Reacts as BRICS Moves Closer to Eliminating the U.S. Dollar… See Here

Medvedev said in a post on the Telegram platform Thursday cautioned Trump to keep in mind “his favorite films about the ‘walking dead,'” and referred to the Soviet Union’s system for launching a last-ditch, automatic nuclear strike. It was not clear whether his comment referred to the apocalyptic American TV show “The Walking Dead.”

The Pentagon typically doesn’t announce the deployment of nuclear submarines because they are often on secret missions surveilling Russian and Chinese submarines, Politico reported.

Trump did not say whether he is positioning submarines that are capable of launching nuclear strikes.

Sam Barron 

Sam Barron has almost two decades of experience covering a wide range of topics including politics, crime and business.

Trump: Ukraine-Russia Fight Is Biden’s War, Not Mine


By Sam Barron    |   Monday, 14 April 2025 12:13 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/donald-trump-ukraine-russia/2025/04/14/id/1206837/

President Donald Trump pointed out Monday on his Truth Social account that the war between Russia and Ukraine began during President Joe Biden’s administration.

“The war between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening,” Trump wrote, adding that he “had nothing to do with this war” but is working “diligently to get the death and destruction to stop.”

“If the 2020 presidential election was not rigged, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible war would never have happened,” he continued. “President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to stop, and fast. So sad!”

On 60 Minutes Sunday, Zelenskyy called on Trump to support Ukraine.

“President Trump, being a strong president of a strong country, must be on Ukraine’s side,” Zelenskyy said. “I think it is wrong that America wants to be neutral.”

Zelenskyy also warned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ultimate goal could result in a World War.

“If we do not stand firm, he [Putin] will advance further,” Zelenskyy told CBS News. “It is not just idle speculation; the threat is real. Putin’s ultimate goal is to revive the Russian empire and reclaim territories currently under NATO protection. Considering all of this, I believe it could escalate into a world war. There won’t be a safe place, there won’t be a safe place for [anyone].”

Sam Barron 

Sam Barron has almost two decades of experience covering a wide range of topics including politics, crime and business.

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© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – New War Hawks

A.F. Branco | on March 5, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-new-war-hawks/

Old Hippy War Hawks
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – We thought the old Hippies of the ’60s hated war and were pro-peace. I guess that only applied when we were fighting communists. They are now fighting against Trump’s peace initiatives for Ukraine.

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White House Announces No More Blank Checks to Ukraine Without Peace Deal (VIDEO)

By Jim Hoft – The Gateway Pundit – Mar 1, 2025

President Donald J. Trump sent a clear message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week: America First is back, and the days of endless handouts with no gratitude are over.
What was supposed to be a historic signing of a minerals deal—an economic framework that would have bolstered Ukraine’s war-torn economy while recouping billions of American taxpayer dollars—turned into a diplomatic disaster, thanks to Zelenskyy’s combative attitude and refusal to recognize the new reality in Washington. READ MORE

BRANCO TOON STORE

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Daily Grind

A.F. Branco | on March 4, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-daily-grind/

01 MeatGrinder DT 1080
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Zelensky would like to see U.S. troops in Ukraine but is unwilling to move toward peace. Trump is seeking a path to peace and is reluctant to throw American troops into the meatgrinder that has killed nearly 2 million Ukrainian and Russian people.

“America Will Not Put Up with It For Much Longer!” – President Trump Puts Zelensky on Notice After His Latest Insane Statement on War with Russia

By Cristina Laila – The Gateway Pundit – Mar 3, 2025

President Trump responded to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest statement on his war with Russia.
Zelensky does not want peace with Russia and President Trump has absolutely had it.
Trump responded to Zelensky’s claim the end of war with Russia is ‘very, very far away.’
“This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelenskyy, and America will not put up with it for much longer! It is what I was saying, this guy doesn’t want there to be Peace as long as he has America’s backing and, Europe, in the meeting they had with Zelenskyy, stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the U.S. – Probably not a great statement to have been made in terms of a show of strength against Russia. What are they thinking?” Trump said on Truth… READ MORE

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

BREAKING: Secretary of State Marco Rubio Ends U.S. Support for Ukraine’s Power Grid


By: Erica Carlin | March 3, 2025

Read more at https://libertyonenews.com/breaking-secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-ends-u-s-support-for-ukraines-power-grid/

Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, recently joined President Donald Trump in a critical Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The discussions were tense and unapologetically direct, with President Trump making it abundantly clear that America’s foreign policy is shifting away from the reckless, endless spending that defined the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine.

The meeting, originally intended to focus on Ukraine’s failing power grid and Washington’s role in its restoration, ended with Trump decisively canceling a planned joint press conference with Zelensky, signaling a major shift in U.S.-Ukraine relations.

In a bold and necessary move, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced an end to U.S. support for Ukraine’s power grid, cutting off taxpayer-funded aid that has funneled billions into a foreign war with little accountability.

The decision effectively halts a USAID initiative that had been pouring American resources into rebuilding Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, even as millions of Americans struggle with rising costs at home. For years, Ukraine’s energy grid has been a target of Russian attacks, but rather than finding long-term solutions, Zelensky’s government has relied on endless American handouts, expecting the U.S. to foot the bill for Ukraine’s survival.

According to NBC News, USAID is dramatically reducing its presence in Ukraine, with the State Department officially ending a multi-million-dollar program that has propped up Ukraine’s crumbling energy grid. The decision has sent shockwaves through the D.C. establishment, particularly among those who have grown comfortable using Ukraine as a slush fund for special interests.

The reality on the ground in Ukraine remains dire, with widespread power outages plunging regions into darkness as Russia continues to target its energy infrastructure. Yet rather than seeking diplomatic resolutions, Zelensky arrived in Washington demanding more financial aid, falsely claiming that without further U.S. funding, Ukraine’s ability to defend itself would collapse.

Trump wasn’t having it. The meeting quickly turned heated as Zelensky pushed for an agreement that would give Ukraine access to lucrative rare earth mineral rights, a move that raised serious red flags within the administration. President Trump, a master negotiator, saw right through the ploy and firmly rejected Zelensky’s demands.

“You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump bluntly told Zelensky, emphasizing that Ukraine is in no position to make demands. The President made it clear that American lives, resources, and priorities come first, warning that Zelensky’s refusal to consider a negotiated settlement was gambling with the lives of millions.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an outspoken advocate for America First foreign policy, echoed Trump’s frustrations, calling out Zelensky’s arrogance and unwillingness to accept political reality. Vice President J.D. Vance also took Zelensky to task, questioning his audacity to come to the White House and lecture the administration. The meeting ended abruptly, with Zelensky escorted out of the White House after failing to secure any new commitments from the Trump administration.

The implications of this meeting are enormous. The era of blank checks to Ukraine is officially over. For years, Washington’s corrupt foreign policy elites have funneled tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into Ukraine, enriching defense contractors and globalist interests while ignoring America’s own pressing needs. Trump’s decisive action signals a long-overdue course correction, prioritizing the American people over foreign wars and geopolitical quagmires.

While critics of the move lament the withdrawal of U.S. support, arguing that it could embolden Russia, Trump’s stance is based on realism, not fantasy. Unlike the weak Biden administration, which recklessly escalated tensions with Russia while neglecting U.S. borders and energy independence, Trump is seeking a path forward that prioritizes peace and stability over endless conflict.

This shift in U.S.-Ukraine relations is already shaking up the global power structure. European leaders, who for years have relied on American taxpayers to fund their geopolitical ambitions, are now being forced to reassess their own commitments. The message from Washington is clear: the United States will no longer be the world’s ATM.

Trump’s decisive rejection of Zelensky’s demands and his America First foreign policy represent a seismic shift from the corrupt globalist status quo.

The Ukraine war, once used as an excuse to funnel billions into the military-industrial complex, is now under scrutiny, and Washington elites are panicking as Trump restores sanity to foreign policy.

As the world watches, one thing is certain: Trump is back, and he’s putting America first—exactly as he promised.

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Erica Carlin

Erica Carlin is an independent journalist, opinion writer and contributor to several news and opinion sources. She is based in Georgia.

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


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Crazy Times

A.F. Branco | on March 2, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-crazy-times-2/

Walz’s Nazi Paranoia
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Walz is demonstrating acute paranoia saying Nazis and Fascist are taking over the U.S.. A communist Saul Alinsky tactic accusing a majority of American voters of being Nazis, or has he completely lost it?

CAUGHT ON TAPE: Walz says country stolen ‘by fascists and Nazis’ at nurses event

By Jenna Gloeb – AlphaNews – Feb 26, 2025

Walz’s statement adds to a recent pattern of deploying Nazi-related accusations against his political opponents
Gov. Tim Walz said the country is being stolen “by fascists and Nazis,” according to a recording obtained by Alpha News.
Sen. Nate Wesenberg, R-Little Falls, provided the recording to Alpha News and said the remarks were made during the Minnesota Nurses Association’s (MNA) Day on the Hill Tuesday—an event to spotlight healthcare issues during Minnesota’s 2025 legislative session.
“I see the pundits on TV [saying] ‘what’s wrong with the Democratic Party?’ What’s wrong is our country is being stole by fascists and Nazis,” Walz appears to say, per the recording…. READ MORE

A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Hand That Feeds

A.F. Branco | on March 3, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/__trashed/

Zelensky Biting The Hand For Peace
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Zelensky is biting the hand trying to feed him peace on a silver platter. He was disrespectful to both President Trump and VP Vance in the oval office as though he doesn’t want peace but a continued bloody war.

WH Press Sec Says Cameras in Oval Office Showed The World What President Trump Deals with in Negotiations “Behind The Scenes” – Reveals Zelensky has “Continually Denied” Reality in Private Discussions

By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – Mar 2, 2025

“The American people and the world were able to see what the President and his team has seen behind the scenes in negotiating with President Zelensky’s team,” she said, indicating that Zelensky’s behavior and unwillingness to make peace has been an ongoing struggle in the effort to end the war.
“They have continually denied the pragmatic reality of where their country stands today.”
What was already a done deal and a public signing of an agreement went haywire when Zelensky, who couldn’t even bother to wear a suit, repeatedly rolled his eyes, interrupted the President, refused to agree to a ceasefire, then started attacking the President and Vice President. Ukraine had previously agreed to Trump’s requested mineral rights deal with the US to compensate Americans for the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money Joe Biden gave them over the last four years, but the agreement was not officialized Friday. READ MORE

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

Report: US, Ukraine Reach Mineral Rights, Security Deal


By Michael Katz    |   Tuesday, 25 February 2025 04:32 PM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/us-ukraine-mineral-rights/2025/02/25/id/1200441/

The Trump administration and Ukraine reportedly have reached a deal on mineral rights that could pave the way to a long-term security commitment to the war-torn nation in exchange for helping the U.S. recoup the billions of dollars in humanitarian and military aid it provided since Russia’s invasion three years ago.

Ukrainian officials said they are now ready to sign the agreement on jointly developing the nation’s mineral resources, including oil and natural gas, after the U.S. dropped demands for $500 billion in potential revenue from mining the resources, The Financial Times reported Tuesday.

Asked about a report that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was coming to the White House on Friday, President Donald Trump said this in remarks at the White House on Tuesday afternoon: “I hear that he’s coming on Friday, certainly it’s okay with me if he’d like to.”
“We’re saying look… we want to get that money back.”

During his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House on Monday, Trump indicated the deal was close to be completed and that Zelenskyy could visit Washington, D.C., this week or next to sign the deal.

Trump addressed the issue in a post on Truth Social on Monday after a virtual meeting involving the Group of Seven nations, writing in part, “I emphasized the importance of the vital ‘Critical Minerals and Rare-Earths Deal’ between the United States and Ukraine, which we hope will be signed very soon!’

“This deal, which is an ‘Economic Partnership,’ will ensure the American people recoup the Tens of Billions of Dollars and Military Equipment sent to Ukraine, while also helping Ukraine’s economy grow as this Brutal and Savage War comes to an end.”

The draft agreement, according to Axios, called for the establishment of a “Reconstruction Investment Fund” that will be co-managed by the U.S. and Ukraine. Axios reported Monday that the draft agreement it viewed was the most recent version, but it could still be amended. The agreement stipulated the fund will be designed to invest in projects in Ukraine and attract investments to increase development, including in areas like mining and ports. But it also suggests the U.S. will recoup some of its expenditures related to “defending, reconstructing, and returning Ukraine” to its pre-war gross domestic product.

Tensions between the U.S. and Ukraine have escalated in recent weeks, with Zelenskyy expressing frustration over the U.S. negotiating with Russia first on a deal to end the war, and Trump calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” for cancelling elections and blaming Kyiv for starting the war.

Newsmax reached out to the White House for comment.

Michael Katz 

Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.

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After Media Try To Provoke Trump-Rubio Rift, Sec. Of State Nominee Pledges Loyalty To America First


By: Jordan Boyd | January 15, 2025

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2025/01/15/after-media-try-to-provoke-trump-rubio-rift-sec-of-state-nominee-pledges-loyalty-to-america-first/

Marco Rubio at his confirmation hearing
Rubio plans to follow through on President Trump’s promises to secure the homeland and re-stabilize the globe.

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Jordan Boyd

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President Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State Sen. Marco Rubio doubled down on his commitment to the America First foreign policy agenda during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, despite a corporate media effort to cause a rift between him and the incoming president.

Politico published a piece one day before the hearing attempting to kiss Rubio’s role as Secretary of State goodbye before it even begins. In the gossip column masquerading as an article, Politico’s Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Nahal Toosi uses the alleged analysis of a dozen unnamed “current and former U.S. and foreign officials” to claim that Rubio won’t last as Trump’s Secretary of State because “the odds are high that the two will differ on policy.” Toosi also invokes Trump and Rubio’s history as presidential primary rivals in 2016 as a potential problem for the pair’s ability to strategize effectively.

The only way Rubio will survive leading the State Department, the author insists, “may be to take the punches from his internal rivals, suffer through whatever insults Trump lobs at him, stick to the lanes that are open, and simply let the State Department fade into irrelevance.”

While it’s true that Rubio and Trump ran against each other and that the former used to take more of an interventionist and neocon approach to foreign policy than he does now, a lot has changed politically and globally in the last decade. The ongoing transformation of the Republican party from an arm of the establishment to a party of and for the people, paired with the rapid rise of China’s hegemony, has pushed Trump and Rubio’s visions for the globe much closer together than they were nearly 10 years ago. Both care deeply about projecting U.S. strength to the world while keeping American tax dollars from funding endless wars.

Rubio spokesman Dan Holler told Politico that Rubio is far more focused on executing Trump’s “ambitious foreign policy agenda that will put Americans first and correct the failures of the past four years” than devoting time to corporate media’s “silly games or gossip.” Rubio confirmed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday that his new job will center on putting America first.

“Under President Trump, the top priority of the United States Department of State will be the United States,” Rubio said in his opening statement. “The direction he has given for the conduct of our foreign policy is clear. Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, every policy we pursue, must be justified by the answer to one of three questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Or does it make America more prosperous?”

On Rubio’s agenda is executing Trump’s vision to curb China’s global influence, end the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars, and address the vast problems exacerbating the U.S. border invasion.

In our very own hemisphere, narcoterrorists and dictators, and despots take advantage of open borders to drive mass migration, to traffic in women and children, and to flood our communities with deadly fentanyl and violent criminals,” Rubio said.

The biggest foreign threat facing the U.S. today, he told senators, is the Communist Party of China, “the most potent and dangerous, near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.”

“We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into the global order, and they took advantage of all of its benefits. And they ignored all of its obligations and responsibilities. Instead, they have repressed, and lied, and cheated, and hacked, and stolen their way into global superpower status. And they have done so at our expense and at the expense of the people of their own country,” Rubio said.

When it comes to Eastern Europe, Rubio says he echoes Trump’s desire for “people to stop dying” and for the U.S. to stop funding a conflict with no end in sight — especially when its own border is compromised.

“I think it should be the official position of the United States that this war should be brought to an end,” Rubio said. “My differences with the Biden administration throughout this process, is that they never clearly delineated what the end goal of the conflict was — what exactly were we funding? What exactly were we putting money towards? On many occasions, it sounded like however much it takes, for however long it takes — that is not a realistic or prudent position.”

Corporate media outlets, anonymous foreign policy officials, and America’s adversaries alike are trying to drive a stake between Rubio and the man who named him to be the face of the nation’s foreign relations with hopes of hampering their effectiveness. Yet, Politico’s own pages admit that Trump and Rubio have successfully worked together to secure their foreign policy goals before.

Rubio’s public commitment to following through on Trump’s promises to secure the homeland and restabilize the globe suggests that, if he is confirmed, productivity is the priority, not pretend personal strife.


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

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Robbin’ the Hood

A.F. BRANCO | on April 23, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-robbin-the-hood/

Uniparty Stealing From the Poor
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2024

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Uniparty stealing billions of tax dollars that could be spent on our own poor in this country and giving it to Ukraine to promote an endless war with Russia.

Billions of dollars in foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan – What about US?

By Kelly McCarthy – April 23, 2024

Reuters is reporting:

Billions of dollars in foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan should easily win approval in the U.S. Senate this week, after the House of Representatives abruptly ended a months-long stalemate and approved the assistance in a rare Saturday session.The Senate on Tuesday will take up the package of four bills passed by the House, one providing $61 billion for Ukraine, a second with $26 billion for Israel, a third with $8.12 billion “to counter communist China” in the Indo-Pacific and a fourth that includes a potential ban on the social media app TikTok, measures for the transfer of seized Russian assets to Ukraine and new sanctions on Iran. READ MORE…

The Final Sellout? Uniparty Devils Sending $95 Billion to Corrupt Foreign Governments – $300 Million Goes for Ukraine Border Security but ZERO DOLLARS for Our Own Border Security

By Jim Hoft – April 22, 2024

Guest post by Leo Hohmann

The House voted on Saturday to betray America and American interests. As sellouts go, this was a big one, even by Washington Uniparty standards, as these members of Congress basically flipped their collective middle finger at America’s working poor and its increasingly struggling middle class.
These globalist sycophants, led by the globalist Speaker Mike Johnson, passed three separate foreign-aid bills that will provide funding to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, transferring a total of $95 billion from the U.S. Treasury directly to foreign governments. The massive foreign-aid package now heads to the Senate, where it will be rubber-stamped and signed by Joe Biden. READ MORE…

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

$113.4B vs. $37.8B: Congress Spent 3 Times as Much on Ukraine as on Customs and Border Protection


By: Terence Jeffrey @TerryJeffrey / February 21, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/21/113-6-billion-congress-appropriated-3-times-much-response-ukraine-spent-customs-border-protection/

Congress approved approximately $113.4 billion in spending related to the Ukraine conflict, while the government spent only $37.82 billion on Customs and Border Protection. (Photo: Luis Diaz Devesa/Moment/Getty Images)

From February 2022 to December 2023, Congress appropriated about three times as much money for its response to the conflict in Ukraine as the federal government spent on Customs and Border Protection. Congress approved approximately $113.4 billion in spending related to Ukraine conflict during that period, while the government spent only $37.82 billion on Customs and Border Protection.

“The U.S. Congress appropriated approximately $113.4 billion in supplemental appropriations for the U.S. response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine between February 2022 and December 2023, making the United States the largest single donor of assistance to Ukraine response,” said a report published Feb. 15 by the inspectors general for the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“This funding,” said the report, “supports security assistance for NATO and other partner nations; support for an enhanced U.S. military presence and activity in Europe; and the replenishment of U.S. military stocks transferred to the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF).”

“The funding,” it said, “also supports security, economic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and other countries affected by the war; support for the operations of U.S. government agencies involved in Ukraine response.”

What impact did this massive U.S. investment have on the course of the conflict?

“While the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) succeeded in recovering more than half of the territory that Russian forces had seized at the start of the conflict, the front line of the war in Ukraine has not moved significantly since the gains made in the fall 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive,” said the IG report.

“During the [last] quarter [of 2023], Russian forces continued to occupy most of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea oblasts,” said the report. “This lack of substantial progress on both sides belies the heavy fighting and high casualty rates during 2023.”

From February through September 2022, the U.S. government spent $12.063 billion on Customs and Border Protection, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. In all of fiscal 2023, which ended last Sept. 30, it spent $20.032 billion; and, in October through December, it spent $5.727 billion.

That means that from February 2022, when Russia started its all-out war against Ukraine, until December 2023, the U.S. government spent a total of $37.822 billion on Customs and Border Protection. That equals just 33.35% of the $113.4 billion that, according to the inspectors general, Congress approved “in supplemental appropriations for the U.S. response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine” during that same period.

So, what happened at the U.S. border during this period?

As this column has noted before, the number of individuals on the terrorist watchlist that the Border Patrol encountered trying to sneak across our southern border has steadily increased in recent years—rising from 15 in fiscal 2021 to 169 in fiscal 2023. So far in this fiscal year, there have been 58.

Which poses a greater security threat to the American people: Terrorists coming across our southern border or a war between Russia and Ukraine?

In 1793, when France declared war against Britain and the Netherlands, President George Washington saw no reason to involve the United States in that conflict. As this column has noted before, he promptly issued a Neutrality Proclamation.

“[T]he duty and interest of the United States require, that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers,” Washington declared.

He never backed down from this position. In his Farewell Address, Washington reiterated the principle of his Neutrality Proclamation.

“Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other,” Washington said. “Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.”

“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation,” said Washington. “Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

“Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course,” he said.

“Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation?” Washington said. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?”

What would Washington think about a Congress that invested more in a conflict between Russia and Ukraine than it invested in securing our own border?

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Government-Backed Censors Who Rigged The 2020 Election Are Now Stealing 2024


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/20/government-backed-censors-who-rigged-the-2020-election-are-now-stealing-2024/

Mike Benz and Tucker Carlson talk censorship in the past and 2024 election

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If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become. 

Most importantly, Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, explains how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, under the pretext of countering “misinformation,” rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online. The 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the “two most censored events in human history.” And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship-industrial complex.

The problem here is profound, with deep historical roots that go back to the aftermath of World War II and the creation of the CIA along with a host of U.S.-funded international institutions. But for our purposes, it suffices to understand the problem in its two most recent stages: the period from 1991 to 2014, and from 2014 to the present.

At the outset of internet privatization in 1991, free speech online was seen as an instrument of statecraft. At that time, says Benz, internet free speech was championed by the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments as a way to support dissident groups around the world in their efforts to overthrow authoritarian or disfavored regimes. It allowed the U.S. to conduct what Benz calls “insta-regime change operations,” in service of the State Department’s foreign policy agenda. 

The plan worked really well. Among other things, free speech on the internet allowed U.S.-backed groups to assert control over state-run media in foreign countries, making it much easier to overthrow governments. The high-water mark of this way of deploying free speech online, Benz explains, was the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, when governments the Obama administration considered problematic — Egypt, Tunisia, Libya — all began falling in so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions. During that time, the State Department worked closely with these social media companies to keep them up and running in those countries, to be used as tools for protesters and dissident groups that were trying to circumvent state censorship.  

But all of that changed in 2014 after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych and there was an unexpected pro-Russia counter-coup in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Later that same year, says Benz, when the people of Crimea voted to be annexed into the Russian Federation, “that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO.”

Thereafter, NATO, the CIA, and the State Department, together with the intelligence agencies of our European allies, did an about-face on internet free speech. They began instead to engage in what amounted to hybrid or information warfare to censor what they saw as Russian propaganda online. These efforts quickly spread beyond Ukraine and Eastern Europe to include the censorship of populist groups on the right that were emerging across the EU as a response to the Syrian migrant crisis.

By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016, explains Benz, NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot; the problem was spreading west from Central and Eastern Europe, and it had to be stopped. If it wasn’t, then Brexit might trigger the collapse of the entire EU, along with NATO and the entire constellation of supranational institutions that relied on NATO. The entire postwar architecture of institutions might come crashing down, all because the hearts and minds of the people were being swayed. So went the thinking, anyway. As far as the national security establishment was concerned, citizens were being swayed by Russian and far-right propaganda, and we can’t have that.

Under these circumstances, free speech was the last thing that could be allowed to flourish online. Censorship became the order of the day. As Carlson put it, these NATO and EU leaders identified their new enemy as democracy within their own countries — their own voters, in other words: “They feared that their people, the citizens of their own countries, would get their way. And they went to war against that.”

And then Trump was elected. From that moment — and indeed, as we know from the Russia-collusion hoax, even before Trump was elected in November 2016 — the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments, which had done so much to censor and weaponize the internet overseas, turned their attention to American citizens.

Initially, their predicate for domestic surveillance was Crossfire Hurricane, the fatuous notion that Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign and that Trump was a Russian asset. Once that collapsed, they needed another excuse to spy on and censor Americans who held disfavored opinions or who spread “misinformation,” to put it in the parlance of the censorship-industrial complex. To do that, they had to get around the prohibition against the CIA operating on American soil.

Since they couldn’t very well get away with openly spying on and censoring American citizens, they decided to house the bulk of their censorship operations inside the Department of Homeland Security, specifically in a part of DHS tasked with reducing and eliminating threats to U.S. critical physical and cyber infrastructure. Hence “domestic misinformation” — which is really just a term for opinions and information that the national security state doesn’t like or that run counter to State Department policy — was classified as an attack on “critical cognitive infrastructure,” and could therefore be censored. What it amounted to was an end-run around the First Amendment.

But even DHS couldn’t do this directly, so it outsourced online censorship operations to third parties like the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which consisted of four separate organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and a firm called Graphika. These private-sector “partners” did the nitty-gritty work of mapping out entire online networks of people who helped spread certain disfavored opinions, or what the censors called “false narratives.” Essentially they were deputized to censor Americans on behalf of the government. 

It should come as no surprise that the people behind the EIP censorship network are leftists who hate Donald Trump, despise his supporters, and love censorship. For example, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos is the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He has compared “over half of the Republicans in Congress” to ISIS, called for Newsmax and OANN to be kicked off the air, and said, “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.” His views are typical among the managers of the censorship industry.

These managers and their partners inside the U.S. government went about their task with gusto, including a seven-month pre-censorship campaign ahead of the 2020 election. Any content challenging public faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes was flagged for violating new rules about “delegitimizing elections.” The censors, along with the government, had strong-armed the social media companies into adopting these rules, as documented in great detail last year with the release of the “Twitter Files.” 

Indeed, the “Twitter Files” exposed a massive effort by the federal government to deputize Twitter and other social media companies to do what it could not, at least not legally. But in some ways, the “Twitter Files” just revealed the tip of the censorship iceberg.

We at The Federalist were caught up in all this during the 2020 election. As detailed in a recent lawsuit filed in December by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, the State Department illegally used a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” to censor Americans.

The State Department, through grants and product development assistance to private entities like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, was “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” according to the lawsuit.

In our case, it meant the federal government was using cutouts like NewsGuard to throttle our reporting and commentary on the 2020 election and its chaotic aftermath. Both the GDI and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) developed censorship tools that included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says. The State Department then gave these tools to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn to target disfavored media outlets, including The Federalist.

Through these and other methods, during the 2020 election cycle and the Covid pandemic, the government-backed censorship-industrial complex throttled millions of online posts, suppressing traffic to news sites, and undermined revenue streams for a host of outlets and influencers with disfavored or dissident views.

But this isn’t a thing of the past. All of the censorship infrastructure described above is still intact, still functioning, and is firing on all cylinders right now ahead of the 2024 election. If anything, the censorship-industrial complex is more robust than it was four years ago. Just last week, Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg boasted on CNBC that he currently has some 40,000 employees, which is nearly 60 percent of Meta’s entire workforce, tasked with censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Clegg also claimed Meta has spent about $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, on its censorship efforts — or what he euphemistically called “election integrity.”

What does that mean in practice? We don’t have to guess. Remember that Facebook infamously censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 at the behest of the FBI. With 40,000 employees now charged with censoring “hate speech” and ensuring “election integrity,” we can be fairly certain that if another Hunter Biden laptop story comes along this election cycle, it too will be quashed by the censors.

Why exactly is our government doing this? It’s not merely a partisan preference for ensuring Democrats stay in power, but something deeper and more insidious. To circle back to Carlson’s interview with Benz, it’s because the national security state has come to regard “democracy” not as the will of the people expressed through elections, but as the constellation of government agencies, government-backed institutions, corporations, media outlets, and nonprofit groups. Protecting democracy, in this view, means protecting these institutions from the people they were putatively meant to serve.

As Benz says at one point in the interview, “The relationship between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland has broken down, and that has played itself out in the story of the censorship industry.”

All of this seems rather complex and dense, at least in the details of how it works. But at root it’s very simple: Those who have power don’t want to be held accountable by the unwashed masses, by “populism,” and certainly not by the results of free and fair elections. They will not tolerate anyone, not even a duly elected president, going against the “interagency consensus” — that famous phrase of Alexander Vindman’s from the first Trump impeachment. They don’t think the people have that right, and they intend to use every tool they have to protect their power and privilege.

The stark truth is that if we don’t defeat and dismantle this censorship-industrial complex, it means the end of our republic and the rise of tyrannical military rule in the United States.

If you think that’s an overstatement, go watch the entire Benz interview and consider it in the context of what we have all seen play out in America over the past half-decade or so. There is no language alarmist enough to convey the gravity of what’s happening here. This is a hybrid war being fought mostly online but with real-world consequences that are every day becoming more obvious. We have to win the war to save our country, but we can’t even fight if we don’t know what’s happening, or how, or why.

About 15 minutes into the interview, I was again reminded of something I once heard the late, great Angelo Codevilla say in a lecture. He said our response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it took a “law enforcement” approach to terrorism that required the creation of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus to detect and stop terrorist attacks. Once the terrorist threat subsided, Codevilla explained, this surveillance apparatus would be turned on the American people and destroy the republic it was supposedly designed to protect.

That lecture was in 2013. Codevilla was right. It’s all happened exactly as he said it would. What happens next is up to us.


John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Biden: House GOP ‘Walking Away’ From Russian Threat


By Charlie McCarthy    |   Monday, 19 February 2024 02:43 PM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/joe-biden-house-gop/2024/02/19/id/1154161/

President Joe Biden on Monday accused House Republicans of “walking away from the threat of Russia.”

While walking gingerly in the cold from Marine One and across the White House lawn with first lady Jill Biden, Biden briefly stopped to answer a couple of reporters’ questions, as seen on C-SPAN. After saying he’d be willing to meet with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Biden then was asked whether he would “go as far as to say that Alexei Navalny’s blood is on the hands of House Republicans right now?”

Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in prison Friday, Russia’s prison agency said. Biden later blamed Putin for Navalny’s death and warned there could be consequences, saying he was “not surprised” but “outraged” by the opposition leader’s passing.

Conservative lawmakers have refused to support aid to Ukraine until Biden and Democrats agree to stricter border security measures to deal with the migrant crisis.

The president on Monday said the GOP is “making a big mistake” regarding Russia.

“The way they’re walking away from the threat of Russia, the way they’re walking away from NATO, the way they’re walking away from meeting our obligations, it’s just shocking. I mean, they’re wild. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Biden said.

The reporter followed up to ask whether Navalny’s death might nudge the House Republicans to take up Ukraine aid.

“I hope so, but I’m not sure anything’s going to change,” he said.

Another reporter asked whether the president was looking into imposing sanctions against Russia following Navalny’s death.

“We already have sanctions but we are considering additional sanctions, yes,” he said before turning and walking toward the White House.

The Democrat-led Senate on Tuesday passed a $95.34 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Taiwan. A $66.3 billion bipartisan House bill to fund military aid to those countries and tighten border security was unveiled Friday.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Charlie McCarthy 

Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.

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


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Devil In Disguise

A.F. BRANCO | on February 18, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-devil-in-desguise/

Equal Rights Amendment – Cartoon
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2024

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ERA would create a ‘blank check’ to discriminate against people of faith, expert warns.

ERA would create ‘blank check’ to discriminate against people of faith, expert warns. The proposed amendment does not include any protections against religious discrimination.

By  Luke Sprinkel February 16, 2024

The Minnesota Queer Caucus held a press conference Thursday to reaffirm their support for the so-called “Equal Rights Amendment” (ERA). Attempting to enshrine abortion and gender identity into Minnesota’s constitution, the ERA is a major priority for the Democratic majorities in Minnesota’s state legislature.

“We are going to pass the most inclusive, comprehensive ERA off the floor that we can this year,” said Rep. Leigh Finke, a transgender legislator and chair of the Queer Caucus. READ MORE…

A.F. Branco Cartoon – While America Burns

A.F. BRANCO | on February 19, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-while-america-burns/

Border vs Ukraine Ergency
A Political Cartoon by A.F Branco 2024

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Washington D.C. seems to be more concerned with Ukraine’s borders than the millions invading their own U.S. borders from countries around the world with military-age men, crime, Fentanyl killing our kids, human trafficking, and Terrorism threats. Nor are they troubled by the $33 trillion debt that has grown out of control.

Biden Border Crisis: Military-Age Syrian Men Illegally Cross Into San Diego (VIDEO)

By David GreysonFeb. 18, 2024

Three Syrian men were encountered by Griff Jenkins of Fox News at the southern border. The invasion of illegals has spiked in Jacumba (east San Diego County) since Texas has locked up the border.

“Where are you from?” Griff Jenkins asked. “From Syria,” the illegal said. Syria is a country known for its ties to terrorism yet military-age men from this region are pouring over the border on Joe Biden’s open border invitation. San Diego County has seen an increase of illegals coming through the southern border. TGP previously reported that in one week’s time illegals from 73 different countries were reported in San Diego. READ MORE.

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

Senate Ukraine Supplemental Fails to Put American Interests First


Rob Bluey @RobertBluey / February 13, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/13/senate-ukraine-supplemental-fails-to-put-american-interests-first/

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives at the U.S. Capitol to meet with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Dec. 12, 2023. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, a group of conservative senators ran out of procedural options for debating a $95 billion funding bill for Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific. In the middle of the night, Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Mike Lee, R-Utah, Rand Paul, R-Ky., Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., Rick Scott, R-Fla., and JD Vance, R-Ohio, articulated their opposition.

When they ran out of options, the tandem of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., moved swiftly to pass the bill on a vote of 70 to 29. That included 22 Republicans who voted for foreign aid without addressing America’s own border crisis.

The measure now moves to the House of Representatives, where Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has pledged to hold the line at the urging of conservatives.

National security expert Elbridge Colby, co-founder and principal at the Marathon Initiative, spoke with The Daily Signal about what’s playing out on Capitol Hill and why he thinks this legislation misses the mark. He also explained how the United States should be prioritizing its national security. The conversation has been edited for length.

Elbridge Colby, co-founder and principal at the Marathon Initiative, spoke at Heritage for the release of the 2024 Index of U.S. Military Strength on Jan. 24. (Photo: Erin Granzow/The Heritage Foundation)

Rob Bluey: Let’s start by talking about the current debate that’s taking place in Congress. What’s your perspective on the supplemental?

Bridge Colby: Americans are increasingly, and with very good reason, worried about issues like rising the rising debt, the border, the failed wars, and military interventions.

What we should be doing is having a foreign policy that concretely puts Americans interests first. It’s important to have alliances and to have an international view.

If we look at the world in that perspective and say, “What’s the biggest threat to Americans interests?” It’s the People’s Republic of China, because it’s 10 times the GDP of Russia, and Asia, where China is located, is by far more important. It’s going to be almost half of global GDP. We can’t allow China to dominate Asia. Ostensibly, that is not only the Trump administration position but also the Biden administration’s position.

When I look at the supplemental, it’s totally out of whack. We’re sending $61 billion to Ukraine, and we’re spending a couple billion extra on the Indo-Pacific when very respected institutions like Heritage and the RAND Corp. have assessed that we’re behind militarily. We should be focusing on China.

At the same time, I personally do think that Russia remains a threat. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an evil act. Obviously there’s a lot of nuance there, but that’s fundamentally the reality. I support the Ukrainians, but we live in the world of reality—just like a family making its financial plan or a business making its financial plan.

We can’t solve all the world’s problems and we have big ones ourselves. And the biggest one is China. What do we do about that? First and foremost, we move our foreign policy alliance structure from a dependency structure to a partnership structure, where we expect our allies to actually step up and meet their obligations.

This is something President Trump talked a lot about, rightly. Even President Obama talked about it. The Europeans ignored us. The reality is the Europeans can and actually are now doing a lot more for Ukraine, but they have not yet met their spending commitments.

It’s difficult, but you know what? It’s difficult for Americans. We spend over 3% of GDP on defense. We have huge influx across the border. We’re not securing the border—a lot of fentanyl, etc. We have problems, so that’s the way I look at the supplemental.

Bluey: Why doesn’t the Biden administration put more of an emphasis on China? And why do you consider it such a threat? 

Colby: I actually look at it more from just how powerful China is. In fact, I communicate this to the Chinese directly whenever I have the chance. The reason that I’m so worried about China is not because I dislike China—if anything to the contrary, it’s because I have so much respect for China.

They have, according to the Office of Naval Intelligence, over 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. They have the world’s largest industrial base. People talk about the arsenal of democracy, but that arsenal left and went to China, unfortunately. These people are not making toy cars anymore. They’re operating at the forefront of technology in a lot of areas.

I’m looking for a balance of power. People often say, balance of power and realism, that’s un-American. Actually, to the contrary, I reject that. Why? The fundamental idea of the American system is the separation of powers. Nobody should be trusted with too much power, and that’s the logic I take toward China. I’m saying we need a coalition. I don’t trust them just on face value when they say they don’t have expansive intent.

I don’t think there’s so much debate anymore that China is a massive challenge for the United States. The biggest problem is just walking the walk in the sense that in order to deal with something that is really on a different order of magnitude than we’ve dealt with in a really long time.

If you just look at the size of China’s economy, it’s the biggest threat the United States has dealt with since the 19th century. We were much larger than the Soviet Union. The United States alone was larger than all three major Axis states.

A lot of the politicians, especially on the establishment side, are from a different era. It’s very hard to let go of the idea of this sort of “indispensable nation,” as Madeleine Albright put it. That’s almost like an intoxicating mentality for a lot of people, both Democrats and traditional Republican types. They feel like they are somehow morally on a perch or something. They’re not really capable of grappling with how much has changed.

Bluey: There are some who are making the case that the money that we’re spending in the supplemental will be a deterrent for China, specifically because they draw the connection to Ukraine. Why doesn’t that argument hold up?

Colby: It’s so convoluted it could only be a Washington rationalization.

There’s one variant that says China is going to be deterred by what we do in Ukraine. Well, just apply common sense. Here’s the thought experiment that I apply on that one: If China actually thought the future of Taiwan was going to be settled in Ukraine, it would intervene directly in the war.

Instead, it’s not doing that at all. Instead, it’s sitting back, getting us to spend more money and weapons and political capital in Europe, distracting us, tying us down in Europe and the Middle East. Meanwhile, building up its own strength. As Napoleon put it, if you want to take Vienna, take Vienna.

The other argument that you often hear is we’re going to spend a bunch of money on Ukraine and that’s going to help our defense industrial base. But that also doesn’t make sense. Why don’t you just spend the money on weapons to deal with the Chinese to deter them directly? Because you can’t use a weapon again, usually. You can’t use a missile again—it’s going to blow up. You can’t use oil. Aircraft get worn out, artillery, ammunition, etc.

I do support increased investment in the defense industrial base coupled with reforms to make it more equitable and accessible. But if we’re giving money to Ukraine, that’s not the same. And especially because a lot of these weapons will take years and years to replace.

Bluey: You talked about how the Europeans need to step up and do more, particularly in their own backyard. Former President Donald Trump has been critical of NATO. Your thoughts on his criticism and if it’s justified?

Colby: President Trump was absolutely right to urge the Europeans—and put real pressure on them—to increase their defense spending when he was president and so forth.

We’ve been trying to be as polite and nice as possible for many years and they ignored us. So I think at this point, if you actually think the situation is as grave as the Europeans and many of the neoconservatives say, then you should make it clear to the Europeans that this has to happen.

Now, my personal view is the United States should come to NATO’s aid if NATO is attacked. However, I also have said this publicly, and I’ve said this to the Europeans for many years, we should only provide that level of support that is consistent with maintaining deterrence in the Pacific.

There’s going to be a limit. This is true of a Republican administration and a Democrat administration. There has got to be a limit to how much we can provide to Europe because we don’t have what’s called a two-war force. A two-war force basically says the American military can fight two large conflicts at the same time.

We don’t have that, not because we don’t want to, but because we’re dealing with a superpower in China that we haven’t focused on. When I was in the Trump administration, we shifted to say we’ve got to get the big thing right. You’ve got to take care of your case of acute heart disease before you address your arthritis.

The Biden administration actually adopted that same fundamental approach. Their strategy is pretty much the same. But the problem is the Chinese have been moving like gangbusters, so we haven’t solved the problem. What happens if Russia moves into the Baltics? We should deter them and encourage them not to. We’re going to give them what we can, but not things that we also need to defend ourselves and our forces and our allies in the first island chain. Why? Not because we like Asia more than Europe, but because Asia is more important and China’s a bigger threat.

We can’t get that wrong. The solution to this is not to just wallow and criticize each other, but for the Europeans to step up. They’re totally capable of doing this. They have far larger economy than Russia. And by the way, they did this during the Cold War. They were all spending a ton more on defense.

Bluey: Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Vladimir Putin. What was the biggest headline coming out of that interview? And how much stock do we take in some of the things Putin said and what should we disregard as propaganda? 

Colby: Let me be clear, I think Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was an evil act. Ukraine has a legitimate just cause to self-defense. On the other hand, the world is not a morality play.

The administration itself has said that this war is going to end through negotiations. So I think the biggest thing that came out, at least that I could see, was that Putin at least ostensibly said that he was open to negotiations. Now he may be disingenuous or lying, but then I think it’s incumbent upon the administration.

This relates back to the supplemental. What’s the plan for ending this war? Because I think for a long time there’s been a kind of fantastical, magical thinking sort of idea to the end of this war that like, not only that the Ukrainians are going take back all of their territory, which looks unfortunately improbable, but more that the Russians are going be fundamentally changed.

Didn’t we learn from Iraq that you can’t fundamentally change a culture? And by the way, Russia is not Iraq, right? Russia’s got thousands of nuclear weapons. It’s one of the major powers of the world.

I agreed with Tucker’s reaction to Putin’s long disquisition on the history, “Well, yeah, a lot of countries have historical disputes.” That doesn’t mean it’s OK to use military force. I think a lot of it was Russian propaganda or spinning or whatever. I don’t think it was very effective, at least in changing a lot of minds in the United States.

There’s no court of right and wrong here. Putin is never going to be dragged in front of the International Criminal Court.

So how is this war going to end? It could just go on and maybe stalemate at some point. Or it’s going to end through some kind of negotiations. Obviously, it’s best for the Ukrainians to negotiate from a position of strength. We may sadly have missed that opportunity, but I think in any case, if the Europeans step up and support the Ukrainians more, they’ll be able to negotiate from a position of strength.

The Biden administration’s position has been very strange because privately, when they leak to the press and so forth, they’ll say this war is going to end through negotiations, but they actually never have the fortitude to publicly present that case.

Bluey: Can you share with us about the Marathon Initiative that you founded?

Colby: You can follow me at @ElbridgeColby on X, and I’ve got a book, “The Strategy of Denial,” which came out a few years ago, though I think it’s actually more current now.

My partner and I started the Marathon Initiative a few years ago as a nonprofit 501(c)(3). In the foreign policy space, we say, “We’re living in an era of great power rivalry. There are no easy answers. Let’s go without fear or favor to where the right strategies are.”

That’s what we wanted do—create a think tank in the sense it was originally conceived of in the national security space, which was to think hard about the toughest problems, produce books enable people like me to be able to take a more unorthodox or reformist or even heretical approach that reflects reality.

My concern is whether it’s happening fast enough. Because I don’t think we have so much time, given China and so forth.

Joe Biden’s Classified Docs Provide More Evidence Hunter’s Pay-To-Play Was A Family Affair


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 12, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/12/joe-bidens-classified-docs-provide-more-evidence-hunters-pay-to-play-was-a-family-affair/

Joe Biden

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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The special counsel report on Joe Biden’s unauthorized removal and disclosure of classified documents exposed much more than our president’s mental deficits and the breadth of his irresponsible handling of top-secret and classified information. The report revealed a close nexus between Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and his father’s responsibilities and access to intel during the elder’s term as vice president.

On Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur released the results of his investigation into the president stemming from the discovery of top-secret and classified documents at Biden’s D.C.-based Penn Biden Center, his private Delaware home, and the University of Delaware. While the specific details in the recovered documents remain unknown, the nearly 400-page report provided an extensive enough summary of the materials to confirm an overlap in the timing and topics of Joe Biden’s vice presidency and Hunter Biden’s “business” enterprises.

Ukraine Overlap

Appendix A of the report provided a table summary of the documents recovered. Many of the top-secret and classified documents concerned Ukraine during the time frame when Hunter Biden acted as an intermediary between Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and the vice president. Recall that Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee that in early March 2014, he met Zlochevsky while in Moscow. And soon after, he and Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, receiving $83,000 per month.

The following month, Hunter Biden sent Archer an email dated April 13, 2014 — one week before Joe Biden would travel to Ukraine and meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Referring to “my guys upcoming travels,” Hunter then elaborated on “22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s ‘destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk,’” according to the New York Post.

Among the material recovered from President Biden’s unauthorized storage locales were several top-secret and otherwise classified or confidential documents discussing Ukraine. One undated document discussed issues related to Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Another, dated Sept. 17, 2014, consisted of a “Memorandum for the Vice President from staff members, with subject ‘U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine.’” Also dated Sept. 17, 2014, was an “event memo” from a vice-presidential national security staffer, titled, “Lunch with Ukrainian President Poroshenko,” which was scheduled for the following day.

The overlap between Joe Biden’s Ukraine-related work and Hunter Biden’s Burisma profiteering became more pronounced in 2015. On Dec. 2, 2015, the lobbying firm Blue Star Group, which Hunter Biden had arranged to work with Burisma, wrote to Burisma that it had “participated in a conference call today with senior Obama Administration officials ahead of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine next week.” The memorandum provided a summary of the conference call, telling Burisma that “Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden’s Special Advisor for Europe and Russia, and Dr. Colin Kahl, the Vice President’s National Security Advisor, presented the agenda for the trip and answered questions about current U.S. policy toward Ukraine.” 

Two days after receiving this memorandum, Burisma executives Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharskyi, on Dec. 4, 2015, pushed Hunter Biden to call his father. The Burisma executives, according to Archer, expressed concern over the pressure they were under from Ukrainian investigators.

Shokin’s Firing

During Biden’s visit to Ukraine the following week, the vice president threatened to withhold U.S. loan guarantees from the country unless the Ukrainian president fired the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. Shokin was later fired, and Biden bragged about his role in the termination.

Last week, the special counsel reported recovering documents classified as “secret,” dated circa Dec. 12, 2015, “setting forth the purpose and talking points for a call with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk.” A transcript of the call between Biden and Yatsenyuk was attached, with a handwritten post-it note showing the then-VP had directed his executive assistant: “Get copy of the conversation from Sit Rm for my Records please.” 

That transcript, labeled “CONFIDENTIAL” and “EYES ONLY DO NOT COPY,” according to the special counsel, included “pleasantries” exchanged between the two, “and the Prime Minister heaped praise upon Mr. Biden for his December 9, 2015 speech to Ukraine’s parliament.” 

In that speech, Biden told Ukrainian lawmakers, “[I]t’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”

A Change in U.S. Policy

Biden continues to maintain that his demands to Ukraine to fire the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, represented U.S. policy. But that policy seemed to have made a sharp turn from just months earlier. For instance, according to the House Oversight Committee, in “June 11, 2015, then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland wrote Prosecutor General Shokin, applauding his office’s progress in anti-corruption efforts.”

Then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt would likewise publicly state in September 2015, “[W]e want to work with Prosecutor General Shokin so the [Prosecutor General Office] is leading the fight against corruption.” That same month, “the Interagency Policy Committee asserted Prosecutor General Shokin had made sufficient progress in combating corruption to warrant a third guarantee of a $1 billion loan,” according to House Oversight Chair James Comer.

As part of its impeachment inquiry, the House Oversight Committee has been seeking records to establish how American policy shifted from supporting Shokin to demanding his firing. And now that Special Counsel Hur’s investigation into Biden has ended, Comer is demanding “unfettered access to these documents to determine if President Biden’s retention of sensitive materials were used to help the Bidens’ influence peddling.” As Comer stressed, in addition to the Ukraine-related documents, top-secret and classified documents connected to China — another key source of Hunter Biden’s millions — were recovered.

Comer had previously asked Hur whether any of the classified records “were related to the countries that his family conducted business with,” but the special counsel’s office refused to provide details on the seized material. Comer told The Federalist that “[w]hile the Justice Department has closed its investigation, the Oversight Committee’s investigation continues.”

More to Probe 

“Important questions remain about the extent of Joe Biden retaining sensitive materials related to specific countries involving his family’s influence peddling schemes that brought in millions for the Bidens,” Comer told The Federalist. “We will continue to provide the transparency and accountability owed to the American people.”

The key here, however, is not whether Joe Biden retained the documents to further Hunter Biden’s selling of access, but whether he shared details he had learned from his position as vice president with Hunter. Given the thousands of emails VP Biden exchanged using pseudonyms, the fact that he had no problem sharing classified information with his ghost writer, and that he has lied repeatedly about his involvement with Hunter Biden’s business affairs, it isn’t a stretch to believe he shared confidential information with his son to advance Hunter’s pay-to-play scheme.

But the special counsel’s report makes one more thing clear: Joe Biden will never face a jury — not because he is innocent, but because he lacks the mental competence. Attorney General Merrick Garland apparently concurred in that assessment, as he approved Hur’s report. So surely then, Garland, as a member of the Cabinet, is discussing with his fellow cabinet members, the need to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment… Right?


Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

House Republicans Seek Access to Biden’s Classified Documents


By Fran Beyer    |   Friday, 09 February 2024 02:52 PM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/joe-biden-hunter-biden-ukraine/2024/02/09/id/1153001/

House Republicans on Friday demanded access to classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s home amid the Oversight panel’s probe of the Biden family. In a social media post by the GOP-majority House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, chaired by Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the panel demanded the Department of Justice Department provide Congress with access “to Joe Biden’s stashed classified documents to determine if they were used to help the Bidens’ influence peddling schemes.”

The move follows Comer’s request that “Special Counsel Robert Hur provide our committee with information about whether President Biden retained classified materials related to specific countries involving his family’s foreign business schemes that brought in millions for the Biden family,” the panel wrote — and that the DOJ “refused to provide this information under the guise of ‘an ongoing investigation.'”

The committee said that since the probe is now over “and the Special Counsel’s report reveals Joe Biden kept classified materials related to Ukraine and China, two countries where the Bidens made millions,” the DOJ “must provide Congress with unfettered access to these documents.”

Hur released his report to the public on Thursday, but didn’t recommend criminal charges against Biden for mishandling and retaining classified documents — and stated he wouldn’t bring charges against Biden even if he were not in the Oval Office. 

The records included classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and other countries, among other records related to national security and foreign policy, which Hur said implicated “sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”

They also included documents related to Ukraine and China.

Hunter Biden joined the board of Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings in June 2014 and also had joint business ventures with Chinese energy firms.

According to the full special counsel report, a “VP Personal” file folder contained a telephone call sheet from Dec. 12, 2015, talking points for a call with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, and a handwritten note attached addressed to Biden’s executive assistant that states: “Get copy of this conversation from Sit Rm for my Records please.” The note is signed “Joe.” That document was marked as “Secret.”

Attached to that document was another, dated Dec. 11, 2015. The report describes that document as “a transcript documenting the substance of a Dec. 11, 2015 call between Mr. Biden and Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk.” The document is marked “CONFIDENTIAL” and “EYES ONLY DO NOT COPY.”

Biden gave a speech on Dec. 9, 2015 in which he discussed corruption in Ukraine. 

“And it’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption,” Biden said in the speech. “The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”

At the time, Burisma Holdings was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Several months later, in March 2016, Biden successfully pressured Ukraine to remove Shokin. At the time Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, and Hunter Biden had a highly lucrative role on the board.

Biden, at the time, threatened to withhold $1 billion of critical U.S. aid if Shokin was not fired.

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Senate Border Bill Is Nothing but a Democrat Propaganda Op


BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | FEBRUARY 06, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/06/senate-border-bill-is-nothing-but-a-democrat-propaganda-op/

Biden walking along the border

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After the much-anticipated “bipartisan” Ukraine and border bill finally dropped on Sunday, it took little time to confirm that all 370 pages are worse than intelligent observers predicted. The $118 billion boondoggle is dead on arrival in the House. For Democrats and their accomplice media, however, the legislation and House Republicans’ response to it are going exactly as planned.

Not only did national disgrace Sen. Mitch McConnell (feat. useful idiot James Lankford) work tirelessly with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on this bill to keep America’s borders open, give out amnesty Oprah-style, and write more blank checks to Ukraine and Hamas sympathizers in the Middle East, they also helped the corrupt corporate media run a propaganda operation against House Republicans and the rest of the GOP. Worse, they’re deliberately running it during an election year to boost Joe Biden on the border issue — which the near-dead incumbent has aided and abetted, and voters say is top of mind next to Bidenomics.

The Republican-majority House predictably isn’t going for the bill. Why would they? It would allow nearly 2 million illegal aliens into the country in one year — as long as the numbers stay below 5,000 entries per day for seven consecutive days, or below 8,500 border encounters in a single day — before triggering “emergency authority” for the Department of Homeland Security and closing the border. Even then there are exceptions.

Worse, if Biden decides it’s in the “national interest” to beckon some more Democrat representation padding and likely future voters across the Rio Grande, he can unilaterally suspend the border closure for 45 days per year. There’s more where that came from.

If GOP members of Congress had taken the bait, Democrats would have come out on top, having

convinced their political foes not only to continue funding a no-win forever war in Eastern Europe but also to keep letting illegal aliens into the country virtually unrestricted. Bonus: A codified open border could hamstring “the fixer” Donald Trump if he wins the general election later this year, zapping his political power to rehabilitate U.S. security and sovereignty.

Yet even without the House conceding to the bill, Democrats win anyway. Now Biden and his accomplice media can simply blame Republicans for not solving the crisis this administration caused. That’s exactly what’s happening, starting with Biden pointing fingers at Republicans:

Working with my administration, the United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement. Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border?

Biden’s media lapdogs dutifully advanced the narrative, which they’d already been spinning before the text of the bill was even released.

“GOP Blames Biden for Border Crisis That GOP Refuses to Solve,” blared one Daily Beast headline. “Republicans are yelling about a crisis at the border. But they’re also unwilling to do anything to address it for fear that it’d give Joe Biden a political win,” the subheading continued, taking its talking points straight from the president and Senate Democrats like Chris Murphy.

“Why Republicans Don’t Want To Solve the Border Problem — But do want to make deals to cut taxes,” read another headline in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer by Jonathan Chait.

“Republicans Who Screamed About A Crisis On The Border Now Oppose A Plan To Fix It,” said HuffPost, claiming Republicans oppose the border bill not because it’s nightmarish but because they want to hurt Biden. “Border Patrol Supports ‘Strong’ Immigration Deal. Republicans Don’t Care,” wrote Rolling Stone.

Vanity Fair claimed, “Republicans Don’t Want to Lose Their Favorite 2024 Talking Point,” with Bloomberg opting for a simple, “House Republicans Don’t Want to Fix the Border.”

Cable television has been as bad. A host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” said the “bipartisan border deal is doomed to fail … because Republicans have turned on it.” The “Today” show framed the gridlock as Republicans “threaten[ing] to block the border bill they negotiated,” as if McConnell and his sidekick colluding with Democrats behind closed doors amounts to a good-faith bipartisan negotiation.

This run-of-the-mill propaganda is to be expected from the corporate media, but it’s just so brazen considering Republicans’ efforts to secure the border earlier in Biden’s term and Democrats’ subsequent refusal to cooperate.

We’re all old enough to remember less than a year ago when the House passed a stronger border bill that would have restarted Trump-era border wall construction, required aliens to remain in Mexico while waiting out their usually fraudulent asylum claims, restricted asylum eligibility to legal ports of entry, enacted harsher punishments for overstaying expired visas, kept Title 42-esque “expulsion authority” in place, and supplied border authorities with additional grant funding. Senate Democrats wouldn’t lift a finger.

But sure. It’s Republicans “playing politics.”


Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Senator Mike Lee Op-ed: Schumer And McConnell Want Senators to Pass Their $106B Border Bill Without Reading It? Hell No


BY: Senator MIKE LEE, (R-UT) | FEBRUARY 02, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/02/schumer-and-mcconnell-want-senators-to-pass-their-106b-border-bill-without-reading-it-hell-no/

Joe Biden meets with Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and others

Yesterday, a reporter standing outside the Senate chamber told me that after four months of secrecy, The Firm™️ plans to release the text of the $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package — possibly as soon as today. Wasting no time, she then asked, “If you get the bill by tomorrow, will you be ready to vote on it by Tuesday?”

The words “hell no” escaped my mouth before I could stop them. Those are strong words where I come from. (Sorry, Mom.)

The reporter immediately understood that my frustration was not directed at her. Rather, it was directed at the Law Firm of Schumer & McConnell (The Firm™️), which is perpetually trying to normalize a corrupt approach to legislating, in which The Firm™️:

  1. Spends months drafting legislation in complete secrecy
  2. Aggressively markets that legislation based not on its details and practical implications (good and bad), but only on its broadest, least-controversial objectives
  3. Lets members see bill text for the first time only a few days (sometimes a few hours) before an arbitrary deadline imposed by The Firm™️ itself, always with a contrived sense of urgency
  4. Forces a vote on the legislation on or before that deadline, denying senators any real opportunity to read, digest, and debate the measure on its merits, much less introduce, consider, and vote on amendments to fix any perceived problems with the bill or otherwise improve it.

Whenever The Firm™️ engages in this practice, it largely excludes nearly every senator from the constitutionally prescribed process in which all senators are supposed to participate. By so doing, The Firm™️ effectively disenfranchises hundreds of millions of Americans — at least for purposes relevant to the legislation at hand — and that’s tragic. It’s also un-American, uncivil, uncollegial, and really uncool.

So why does The Firm™️ do it?

Every time The Firm™️ utilizes this approach and the bill passes — and it nearly always does — The Firm™️ becomes more powerful.

The high success rate is largely attributable to the fact that The Firm™️ has become very adept at (a) enlisting the help of the (freakishly cooperative) corporate media, (b) exerting peer pressure in a way that makes what you experienced in middle school look mild by comparison, and (c) rewarding those who consistently vote with The Firm™️ with various privileges that The Firm™️ is uniquely capable of offering, such as committee assignments, help with campaign fundraising, and a whole host of other widely coveted things that The Firm™️ is free to distribute in any manner it pleases.

It’s through this process that The Firm™️ passes most major spending legislation. And it’s through this process that The Firm™️ likely intends to pass the still-secret, $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package, which The Firm™️ has spent four months negotiating with the luxury of obsessing over every sentence, word, period, and comma.

I still don’t know exactly what’s in this bill, although I have serious concerns with it based on the few details The Firm™️ has been willing to share. But under no circumstances should this bill — which would fund military operations in three distant parts of the world and make massive, permanent changes to immigration law — be passed next week.

Nor should it be passed until we have had adequate time to read the bill, discuss it with constituents, debate it, offer amendments, and vote on those amendments.

There’s no universe in which those things will happen by next week.

Depending on how long it is and the complexity of its provisions, the minimum period of time we should devote to this bill after it’s released should be measured in weeks or months, not days or hours.


Mike Lee is a U.S. Senator from Utah and author of “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document.”

Hugh Hewitt Op-ed: Morning Glory: No Border Wall, no deal on Israel and Ukraine


Hugh Hewitt  By Hugh Hewitt Fox News | Published January 18, 2024 5:00am EST

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/no-border-wall-no-deal-israel-ukraine

“Ninety-one percent of Republicans support the building of the wall…” 

That’s the policy and political reality behind the about-to-emerge “immigration compromise” negotiated between President Biden, Senate Democrats and a handful of Republican Senators. But it is the reality the Senate Republicans are about to ignore and not merely ignore, but actually demonstrate contempt for, and for the party that elected them.

The “supplemental” bill about to emerge promises to be a complete disaster for the GOP. One for the books. There is still time for Leader McConnell to lead a retrograde movement away from the fiasco.

McConnell has pulled off many miracles before. He’s the best legislative leader the GOP has had in my lifetime. He saved the Constitution with his refusal to allow hearings on the Supreme Court vacancy following the death of Justice Scalia. McConnell preserved the First Amendment through litigation over decades. He’s put together crucial Senate majorities only to see lesser political talents destroy them with party nominees he told everyone could not win.

McConnell got former President Trump elected because of the Leader’s “no hearings on any nominee” stance which made Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees the key to the upset win in 2016 by the former president. McConnell will work with Trump again for the good of the Republic. McConnell’s two best pieces of advice —”First, you have to win” and “You can start too late but never start too early”— are worth the cost of his brilliant memoir “The Long Game.

Will McConnell save the GOP once more?

Video

We need to get Israel aid. We need to get Ukraine aid. We need to secure the southern border. These are all pressing national security needs. They are of equal importance to America.

If we send the wrong sort of aid to Israel or Ukraine it will not help them win. If we don’t build the 900 miles of fence where it is needed on the 2000 miles of southern border, Americans will continue to die from fentynal, more millions will walk across “UN encountered,” along with the 8 million who have been “encountered” in the three years of the Biden Border Era. The Wall isn’t one of five things that need doing. It is the first thing that must be done if the other things that need to be done are going to work.

REPUBLICANS ACCELERATE PROBE INTO BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S ACTIONS TO HOUSE MIGRANTS ON FEDERAL LANDS

The Wall is a necessary but not sufficient national security measure. To repeat: It is the first thing that must be done. Other things are useful —more Border Patrol, more return flights, more detention facilities, more Administrative Law Judges and changes to the actual asylum and refugee law. All of it.

But none of it matters without the Wall. The Wall is the “signal” amid the noise. It actually gets the message to the endless column of millions trudging north. That message is “Closed save by appointment.”

Officials at the southern border with Mexico
National Guard agents place a barbed wire wall on the banks of the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, on the border with Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico, on March 8, 2023.  (HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

This is not a hardliner position. It is the moderate position. Most “moderates” on immigration reform including me are people who want to care for the stranger when they get here. Most of us are aware that only a small percentage of the millions crossing illegally are undoubtedly dangerous, but they are dangerous indeed, and those who engage in human smuggling are depraved while possible terrorists should be understood as 10/7 types. We moderates are also concerned with innocents caught up in this river of misery that has to be damed before those on this side of the order can’t be helped.

If Democrats say “No” to the Wall, then it is no, and the GOP walks away from the talks, explains why, and campaigns on the Wall.

All three of the remaining possible GOP presidential nominees want the Wall. The Senate candidates the GOP needs to win the 2024 elections and thus the 2025 majority all want the Wall. Only a handful of Senators and their staffs have persuaded themselves that the Wall isn’t necessary. Wake up. It is necessary, and the 91 percent aren’t wrong. They are your bosses.

The supplemental without the Wall is far, far worse than a dead end. It’s a cliff. We won’t climb back up to a moment of clarity like this for decades, if ever. And the House GOP should never approve it anyway, and I doubt incumbent GOP senators who support it will in turn find themselves supported by 90 percent of the Party. Who is selling this? On what grounds?

Please, Senate GOP, the momentum of a terrible ride is no reason to stay on the runaway train. Get off. Now. Walk away.

Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his forty years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Ye Olde Switcharoo

A.F. BRANCO | on January 5, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-ye-olde-switcharoo/

Border Ukraine Money
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2024

Democrats are promising more money for the border but we all know it’s so they can process more illegals, not to stop the flow, and they want it tied to more Ukraine money.

Republicans in the Senate Suddenly Take Strong Stand on the Border and Illegal Immigration in Exchange for Funding Ukraine

By Kristinn Taylor Dec. 5, 2023 3:00 pm

Days after new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) again put the Biden administration and the Senate on notice that he would only consider funding for Ukraine if strict border and immigration reforms in H.R 2 were enacted, Republicans in the Senate have suddenly taken a hardline stand on the border and immigration in negotiations with Democrats on funding for Ukraine to defend itself from the ongoing… READ MORE…

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Rep. Spartz to Newsmax: GOP ‘Will Hold the Ground on Border Security’


By Theodore Bunker    |   Friday, 15 December 2023 02:33 PM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/victoria-spartz-newsmax-republicans/2023/12/15/id/1146110/

Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., told Newsmax on Friday that Republicans must make it clear that they “will hold the ground on border security” when it comes to passing additional aid for Ukraine. Spartz, the first native Ukrainian to serve in U.S. Congress, told “Newsline” in an interview that there’s “no doubt” that negotiations on a deal on border security and Ukraine aid haven’t progressed as far as some would hope.

She said that Republicans must ensure that “Democrats understand … that we will hold the ground on border security because if we don’t protect our country there is no hope for anyone else in the world.”

Spartz went on to accuse President Joe Biden of “slow-walking aid to Ukraine” and allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin “to advance that far and fortify … which costs a lot of money and a lot of lives for Ukrainians.”

She continued, “I think we need to be tougher, but we have to have … [an] agreement on border security and [Biden] needs to understand we will hold the ground.”

The congresswoman said Biden is “getting better” when it comes to policies for asylum seekers, “but he’s not willing to … tighten the parole that he’s been abusing.”
 

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Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.

Why Joe Biden’s Poll Numbers Are Even Worse for Democrats Than They Think


BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 16, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/16/why-joe-bidens-poll-numbers-are-even-worse-for-democrats-than-they-think/

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Democrats have one huge, unavoidable problem. And his name is Joe Biden.

According to recent polls, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump would beat Biden if the 2024 election were held today. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday shows Biden with 46 percent and Trump with 48 percent among registered voters, still within the margin of error and too close to call. However, a new Fox News poll, also out Wednesday, shows that in a head-to-head, the former president would prevail with 50 percent to Biden’s 46 — a number Trump has never garnered in a Fox poll going back to October 2015.

Do these numbers and thin margins mean anything? Maybe not. We are still a year from the election. And if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that polls are traditionally garbage and are used far more often as tools to shape public opinion than to reflect it. But there are deeper and far more meaningful insights to mine from the survey, and they don’t spell good things for the Democrat Party.

For instance, it’s worth noting that not only does Biden appear to be losing generally to Trump, but the incumbent is losing his own dependable voters to his rival. Polls show Biden is hemorrhaging black, Hispanic, suburban, and young voters — all demographics that reliably vote Democrat. It could have something to do with how Biden has handled major crises he’s either caused or exacerbated. According to Quinnipiac, voters disapprove of his response to the Hamas attack and subsequent fallout (54 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval), his economy (59 to 37 percent), his foreign policy (61 to 34 percent), his border crisis (65 to 26 percent), and his response to the Russia-Ukraine war (49 to 47 percent).

The implications are simple. Voters are confronting a rare moment in U.S. history in which they can actually compare what it’s like to live under the leadership, or lack thereof, of the two major presidential candidates. Do they want Bidenomics or the affordable grocery and gas prices of the Trump era? Do they want war in the Middle East — or Eastern Europe or the South China Sea — or peace? Do they want an open border or national security? The Trump-Biden decision is an increasingly easy calculation for voters to make.

So, Democrats are stuck. And they did this to themselves, largely by closing off the possibility of a primary and instead committing to dragging Joe’s corpse across the finish line.

And yes, that really is the strategy. It’s not that Biden is a strong candidate by any measure, save for maybe his incumbency, but again, even that’s in doubt after his disastrous first term. He’s a demonstrably weak candidate, especially compared to Trump — another reality easily extrapolated from the polls.

On the Republican side — which, in contrast to Democrats, is still choosing to slog through primary election theatrics — the second-tier candidates are a notable governor and former governor, both beloved by their states and beyond. And Trump is still leading them by some 50 points. He’s got 48 points on Ron DeSantis and 51 on Nikki Haley. If prominent leftist governors such as Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer were to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, there’s no way he’d have that kind of lead.

This week there have been murmurs of a potential challenger — just maybe not who you would have expected. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on Capitol Hill hobnobbing with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday and refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he’ll run for president. This after he divulged last week that the parties did approach him last year. And you can see the twinkle in Democrats’ eyes at the thought of dumping weak, old Biden for his antithesis. Here’s Schumer flirting with The Rock on X after their meeting, posting cutesy little lyrics from one of the actor’s Disney roles.

But while Democrats might view The Rock as an exit strategy, they still have a monumental problem to overcome: Voters aren’t just fed up with Biden, they’re fed up with Democrat policies both foreign and domestic.

There’s no denying Democrats have become the party of mass illegal immigration. Every town is a border town, and even urbanites are done with the Democrat policies overrunning their cities with aliens who suck resources dry. Speaking of cities, left-wing policies have destroyed them, from Portland and Seattle to Washington, D.C. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have caused violence in these places to skyrocket, with carjackings up more than 100 percent since last year and violent crime up 40 percent in our nation’s capitol. In fact, just this week D.C.’s disaster of a mayor declared a state of emergency because youth violent crime has gotten so bad. Meanwhile, Democrats have also become the party of inflation, war, no-limits abortion, transing kids, weaponizing the federal government, terrorist sympathizing, and every other anti-America policy position you can imagine.

That takes a strong leader to overcome. Sure, The Rock does a magnificent job at the role he plays in every movie, but he’s not that leader. And besides, would today’s Democrat Party really vote for a candidate who’s a Joe Rogan bro and friends with Trump supporters?

So, Democrats are left to lie with sleepy Joe in the bed they made for themselves. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.


Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Senate Democrats Block GOP Bid to Aid Israel, Not Ukraine


Tuesday, 07 November 2023 03:16 PM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/senate-democrats-republican/2023/11/07/id/1141339/

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a Republican effort to win quick approval for a bill providing emergency aid to Israel that passed the House of Representatives last week, but that provides no assistance for Ukraine’s war against Russia.

Republican Senator Roger Marshall said: “Time is of the essence and it’s imperative that the Senate not delay delivering this crucial aid to Israel another day,” he said.

Democrats objected, stressing the importance of providing aid to Ukraine as well as Israel, in addition to humanitarian aid, border security funding and money to push back against China in the Indo-Pacific that was in a $106 billion funding request President Joe Biden sent to Congress last month. They also accused House Republicans of playing politics with the crisis in Israel, delaying aid for the Jewish State by tying support to cutting funding for the Internal Revenue Service, a favorite target for Republicans, rather than writing a bipartisan bill.

The House bill would provide $14.3 billion for Israel as it responds to a deadly Oct. 7 attack by Islamist Hamas militants, but also cut the same amount of money from the IRS. The funds would include $4 billion for procurement of Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling defense systems to counter short-range rocket threats as well as some transfers of equipment from U.S. stocks.

“Our allies in Ukraine can no more afford a delay than our allies in Israel,” said Senator Patty Murray, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The House vote was largely along party lines. Democrats called the proposed IRS cuts a politically motivated “poison pill” that would increase the U.S. budget deficit by cutting back on tax collection. They also said it was essential to continue to support Ukraine.

To become law, legislation must pass the Democratic-controlled Senate as well as the Republican-majority House, and be signed into law by Biden, a Democrat. The White House had said Biden would veto the House bill.

Senate leaders are writing their own supplemental funding bill and hope to introduce it as soon as this week.

© 2023 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.

House GOP Unveils Israel Aid Bill That Would Take Back Funds from Biden’s Massive IRS Funding Surge to Pay for it


By: ARJUN SINGH, CONTRIBUTOR | October 30, 20236:55 PM ET

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/house-gop-unveils-israel-aid-bill-that-would-take-back-funds-from-bidens-massive-irs-funding-surge-to-pay-for-it-2666101733.html/

House GOP Leadership Hold News Conference On Fiscal Year 2023 Appropriations
Getty Images/Anna Moneymaker

The House Republican Conference has drafted a bill that would provide military aid to Israel funded by redistributed funds from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

On Oct. 19, President Joe Biden delivered a speech from the Oval Office calling on Americans to support his administration’s proposed legislation that sends $100 billion of military aid to both Ukraine in its war against Russia and Israel in its conflict against Hamas, with some money being appropriated for border security and immigration processing. Amid widespread opposition among Republicans regarding aid to Ukraine, the House Republican Conference unveiled a bill that would allocate $14.3 billion for military aid only to Israel, offsetting the cost with repurposed funds from a portion of the $80 billion to the IRS enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act. (RELATED: ‘The Worst Thing For Israel’: House Republicans Quickly Dismiss Biden’s Latest Aid Package For Israel And Ukraine)

The bill, known as the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, calls for the spending of money to procure weapons, ammunition and missiles, according to its text. It also allocates $1.2 billion to support Israel’s efforts to develop a laser-based missile defense system against rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza, known as the “Iron Dome” program, which is also a priority that the administration’s proposed legislation would fund.

Text of Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2023 by Daily Caller News Foundation on Scribd

The bill was reportedly introduced by Republican Rep. Kay Granger of Texas’ 12th District, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, according to the New York Post. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Republican Sens. Roger Marshall of Kansas and J.D. Vance of Ohio.

The bill would also allocate $100 million to increase security for U.S. diplomatic missions in Israel and the surrounding region that have faced threats following the United States’ declaration of support for Israel after the attacks. It would further allocate $5o million to evacuate U.S. citizens from the country during hostilities.

The demand for a single bill regarding Israel, aid to which enjoys bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress, has been a refrain of Republican members of Congress since Biden announced his package. However, the reduction of funds from the IRS, which has been a target of House Republicans during the 118th Congress, is likely to be opposed by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The White House and the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Biden Administration: War Is Very Good For Business


BY: JOHN LUCAS | OCTOBER 30, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/biden-administration-war-is-very-good-for-business-2666096121.html/

Joe Biden getting help from Antony Blinken

Has a single member of the White House staff ever held a dying American soldier in his arms as he bled out, calling for his mother? Have any of them ever loaded the blood-soaked bodies of his wounded and killed onto a medivac helicopter and then endured sleepless nights thinking about the visits their families are about to get and the ensuing destruction of their lives and dreams? 

These were the first questions that popped into my mind when I saw the report from Politico that the Biden administration is promoting the war in Ukraine because it is good for American business. I think the members of the administration could not have experienced these things because, if they had, and if they had one ounce of humanity in them, they could not possibly have promoted war on the “it’s good for business” rationale.

Apparently, multiple White House aides have been involved in this abomination because Politico is quite specific:

The White House has been quietly urging lawmakers in both parties to sell the war efforts abroad as a potential economic boom at home.

Aides have been distributing talking points to Democrats and Republicans who have been supportive of continued efforts to fund Ukraine’s resistance to make the case that doing so is good for American jobs, according to five White House aides and lawmakers familiar with the effort and granted anonymity to speak freely.

The Biden administration is fearful that it cannot sell its most recent aid package on the merits and on national security grounds, because “The talking points are an implicit recognition that the administration has work to do in selling its $106 billion foreign aid supplemental request — and that talking about it squarely under the umbrella of national security interests hasn’t done the trick,” Politico states.

The reprehensibility of these comments cannot be overstated. Biden’s administration is peopled with a number of “elites” who probably are familiar, at least in a theoretical, intellectual sense, with John Stuart Mill’s dictum, “War is an ugly thing.” But, hey, if it’s good for business, particularly in electoral swing states, let’s go for it.

I am old enough to remember how the left tarred George Bush, Dick Cheney, and others in the GOP with the argument that they wanted war because it was good for their supporters in big business. I never put any stock in these arguments because I thought no American could be so evil as to support war as a sop to big business. The Biden administration has changed my mind.

My contempt and revulsion for these people knows no bounds.


John Lucas is a retired attorney who has tried and argued a variety of cases, including before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man, later graduating from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger who fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader. He is married with five children. He and his wife now live in Virginia. John also is published at johnalucas6.substack.com.

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Joe Biden Isn’t ‘Managing’ Or Confronting Problems. Joe Biden is the Problem.


BY: EDDIE SCARRY | OCTOBER 30, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/30/joe-biden-isnt-managing-or-confronting-problems-joe-biden-is-the-problem/

Biden frowning

There’s a simple pattern that the media follow when covering each new crisis that pops up during Joe Biden’s catastrophic presidency: A calamity occurs either domestically or abroad, and rather than examining the cause, the media instantly frame Biden as a hero at battle.

Hyperinflation? “A glaring liability that looms” (The New York Times).

War in Ukraine? “Joe Biden Marshals U.S. Allies Against Russia” (Newsweek).

Obscene gas prices? “Biden’s frustration with soaring prices” (Washington Post).

War in Israel? “Why this Israel-Gaza conflict is so complicated for Biden” (CNN).

Folks! He’s frustrated, folks. It’s complicated for Biden, folks.

The New York Times’ David French offered up that same spa treatment for the president this week under the headline “Joe Biden knows what he’s doing.” In the piece, French implored his readers to “consider” all it is that Biden “confronts”: a war in Ukraine, another one in the Middle East, plus the ever-present threat from China. “And keep in mind,” he said, “Biden is managing these conflicts all while trying to make sure that the nation emerges from a pandemic with inflation in retreat and its economy intact.”

Folks! Keep it in mind, folks. Biden is trying, folks. He’s managing lots of complicated problems, folks. It’s frustrating to the president, too, folks.

Honestly, I felt the same way under President Trump when he was confronted by two hot wars, record inflation, and impossible energy prices. He did the best he could to manage the challenges he faced — the struggles he endured.

Wait, that’s not right. There were neither wars nor inflation during Trump’s term. The U.S. was energy independent, and gas was cheap precisely because he flooded the market with oil for the taking. My mistake!

Actually, now that I think about it, I recall that despite a remarkable period of global calm and even a historic peace deal reached between Israel and the Arab world, the Trump era was marked by nonstop hysterics from the media about our supposedly shaken allies and emboldened foes. (i.e., Trump demanded that Western Europe live up to his part of the NATO bargain and made it known that the U.S. cannot solve all of the world’s problems, especially when large parts of the world don’t see them as such.)

But back to Biden. He’s not confronting or managing a series of events that happened to him. He and his party actively created them. Or, at minimum, they created an environment that anyone could have predicted would lead to them.

Russia has long insisted that NATO stop expanding along its border. The second Biden got into office, he pushed for Ukraine’s membership. Israel had its country under relative control for years right up until Biden’s team gifted Iran, the Jewish state’s greatest threat, $6 billion worth of goodies. We were energy independent until Biden said we couldn’t be. The economy was working itself out until Biden and his party thought it would be a good idea to pump hundreds of billions of dollars more into Covid-era welfare (“childcare” and “living assistance”). And let’s not start on the electric vehicle scheme, wherein car companies grabbed another round of multi-billion-dollar taxpayer funds, courtesy of Biden, for a product that barely works (and for which manufacturers are now rolling back their production of).

Biden isn’t a knight of the kingdom off to slay a dragon. He’s a dunce screwing up everything. He doesn’t get to turn the economy and international stability into ruins and then get credit for saying he takes it all very seriously.

He’s not “struggling” or “managing,” and it’s not “complicated.” Biden is the struggle. He is the thing to manage. He is the complication.


Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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7 Ways DOJ Obstructed The U.S. Attorney Investigating Biden Family Corruption


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | OCTOBER 27, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/27/7-ways-doj-obstructed-the-u-s-attorney-investigating-biden-family-corruption/

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The Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney charged with screening evidence of Ukrainian corruption before the 2020 election testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Monday about the bureaucratic obstruction his team faced. The roadblocks detailed by former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady over the course of the six-hour hearing were so outrageous that at one point a lawyer for the minority party asked whether he was speaking in hyperbole. He wasn’t.

The situation Brady faced was also much worse than the media have reported to date, as the full transcript of the interview, reviewed by The Federalist, establishes. Here are the seven most shocking details revealed during Monday’s hearing.

1. FBI Drags Its Feet While Tying Brady’s Hands

Monday’s closed-door hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the DOJ and FBI’s handling of the probe into Biden family corruption, opened with Brady explaining that in early January 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr tapped him to vet evidence related to Ukrainian corruption. While he immediately moved to open a matter in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Brady testified that he didn’t believe the FBI opened its assessment until late March. Part of the problem, Brady explained, was that the FBI maintained it had to operate under the framework of the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) and that there was no procedure for handling a vetting assignment such as Barr assigned to the Pittsburgh office.

So, as Brady explained, he had a discussion with the Pittsburgh FBI agents about “how, in their administrative process, it should be characterized.”

“I said, ‘Well let’s all sit together around a table and talk this out; could you please share with me your DIOG,’” Brady testified, explaining the DIOG “is the FBI’s bible for their processes and procedures.” 

The local FBI agents told Brady that someone from FBI headquarters directed the local agents not to share the DIOG with the U.S. attorney’s office. Brady’s response, as he relayed to the committee, perfectly crystalized the madness: “I’m a presidentially appointed United States attorney. We’re on the same team, part of the Department of Justice. What do you mean you can’t share your DIOG with me?”

“That’s what we were told, so we can’t, sir,” the local Pittsburgh FBI team replied, in his telling.

And they never did share the DIOG with him, the former federal prosecutor testified, explaining he instead resorted to finding an older redacted version online, and then referenced those standards when discussing with the FBI team how to open the investigation. 

2. 17 Approvals Needed — and That’s Not Hyperbole

The FBI eventually opted to open an “assessment” for the material on Ukraine provided by the Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney’s office. Under the DIOG, an “assessment” could only last for 30 days, after which it would need to be reauthorized. That meant every 30 days, the Pittsburgh FBI office needed to re-up the assessment, which normally wouldn’t be an issue, Brady testified, because a special agent’s immediate supervisor, a supervisory special agent (SSA) at the local field office could reauthorize an assessment.

But not in the case of the Ukrainian corruption vetting.

“In this case,” Brady testified, “it required 17 different people, including mostly at the headquarters level to sign off on it before the assessment could be extended.” Consequently, Brady explained, at times the FBI agents “had to go pens down sometimes for 2 or 3 weeks at a time … because they were still waiting on, again, on someone within the 17-chain signoff to approve.” 

The ridiculousness of a 17-person approval was clear to even the Democrat attorney questioning Brady. After noting he had made reference to “17 layers of approval,” she asked: “Was that an actual number, or was that just hyperbole? Were there 17 boxes to check?”

“So it was our understanding, related by someone on the FBI team in Pittsburgh, that that was an actual number, that there were 17 approvals that were required to extend the assessment an additional 30 days.”

3. FBI Headquarters Had To Sign-Off on Everything.

Not only did more than a dozen individuals need to approve the renewal of the assessment, including many out of FBI headquarters, but Brady testified that FBI headquarters was required to “signoff for any investigative steps that FBI Pittsburgh was asked to take by” the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office. 

Brady reiterated this point, testifying: “It was my understanding that they could not take any steps absent the approval, the review and approval of FBI headquarters, not just the leadership of FBI Pittsburgh.” And later, when asked to elaborate on challenges with the FBI, Brady noted: “It was my understanding that FBI headquarters had to sign off on every assignment, no matter how small or routine, before they could take action.”

This level of signoff by headquarters was not normal, Brady confirmed, noting that in his experience, even in a sensitive investigation, the investigation is usually contained within the field office, with an SSA approving requests, or maybe an assistant special agent in charge or on occasion even the special agent in charge. But never in his career had Brady seen anything like this. 

4. FBI Reluctance in Investigating

The former U.S. attorney’s testimony also made clear the FBI was reluctant to assist their investigation. 

“It was a challenging working relationship,” Brady noted, saying he believed “there was reluctance on the part of the FBI to really do any tasking related to our assignment … and looking into allegations of Ukrainian corruption broadly and then specifically anything that intersected with Hunter Biden and his role in Burisma.” 

When pushed on where the problems originated, Brady said, “It was somewhere at FBI headquarters,” but he “had no visibility into where that choke point was.” But it was somewhere below the deputy director and principal assistant deputy attorney general because whenever the FBI refused to cooperate, forcing Brady to elevate the issue to FBI headquarters or the DOJ, the issues were resolved by the various high-level officials. 

Unbeknownst to Brady, that also proved to be the case when it came to his office briefing the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office on the results of his assessment. Brady testified that he had been trying for some time to arrange a briefing with the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, only to learn later that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf had not wanted to take the briefing. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley recently revealed that the meeting only came about after Main Justice ordered Delaware to meet with Brady’s team to be briefed on the results of their vetting. 

5. FBI Headquarters Tells Pittsburgh Agents to Play Coy

    “Reluctance” appears to be an understatement, though, as Brady further testified that a member of the Pittsburgh FBI team relayed that FBI headquarters had directed them “not to affirmatively share information” but rather “only to share information with [Pittsburgh] if we asked them a direct question relating to that information…” 

    That “is not typically how the investigative process goes,” Brady added.

    That the FBI agents had directions only to share information with the U.S. attorney’s office if asked a direct question seems to explain Brady’s later testimony. The former U.S. attorney later testified that when the Washington field office discovered an older FD-1023 report that included a discreet statement mentioning Hunter Biden’s service on the Burisma Board, the Pittsburgh office requested to see the FD-1023. Apparently, relying on the FBI to convey relevant information to the prosecutors was not an option. In this case, that FD-1023 led to the confidential human source providing extensive additional information about the Bidens’ involvement and alleged bribe-taking from Burisma, so it is a good thing Pittsburgh asked to see the actual document.

    When it came to the Hunter Biden laptop, however, Brady and his team of prosecutors didn’t know what they didn’t know, so they never asked whether the FBI had seized any of Hunter Biden’s electronic devices. With “don’t ask, don’t tell” being Delaware’s protect-Biden policy, the Delaware office opted against informing the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office of the existence of the laptop. Rather, Brady testified that he first learned of the laptop’s existence when the New York Post broke the story in mid-October. 

    6. Delaware Refuses to Play Nice 

    Not only did Brady testify about the challenges of working with the FBI, but he also faced issues with the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office. 

    “[I]t was regularly a challenge to interact with the investigative team from Delaware,” Brady testified. “There was no information sharing” or “very limited” information sharing, from Delaware. In fact, “at one point, the communication between our offices was so constricted that we had to provide written questions to the investigative team in Delaware, almost in the form of interrogatories, and receive written answers back,” Brady testified. 

    “This was very unusual,” Brady continued, noting that “typical U.S. attorney to U.S. attorney office communications, even on sensitive matters, is fairly clear and transparent.” “We’re all professionals,” Brady explained.

    Yet, with Delaware, the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office had to resort to submitting a list of written questions to U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s team, which the Delaware prosecutors then responded to in writing, much as interrogatories are served on opposing parties in litigation.

    Jim Jordan, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, asked Brady if he had ever seen anything like this during his time as an assistant U.S. attorney or U.S. attorney. 

    “Not where an office had to submit written interrogatories to another office for permission,” Brady said.

    7. Lying About Brady

    Another challenge he faced, Brady explained, was false representations being made to senior FBI leadership about what the U.S. attorney’s team was or wasn’t doing. “There was information that was being shared up that chain at the FBI that was incorrect,” Brady explained, and it rose all the way up to AG Barr. 

    Brady noted that while they resolved the issue, it presented an unnecessary challenge to handling the vetting process. 

    Of course, some of the same people likely used that same tactic by lying about the Pittsburgh vetting process to the press. And more recently, Democrats such as Jamie Raskin resorted to peddling falsehoods, such as that Barr’s handpicked prosecutor, Brady, had closed the assessment into the FD-1023. 

    During his Monday testimony, Brady also confirmed that Barr had accurately described the true scenario — that the FD-1023 had been passed on to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office for further investigation — and that Raskin was lying, at I reported here in The Federalist. 

    But what else could a Biden apologist do but lie — after whistleblowers exposed the DOJ and FBI’s obstruction and the evidence of the president’s corruption? 


    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.

    USA Today/Suffolk Poll: Two-Thirds Want Quick Speaker Decision


    By Charles Kim    |   Monday, 23 October 2023 02:22 PM EDT

    Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/politics/poll-speaker-congress/2023/10/23/id/1139321/

    A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll determined that 2 out of 3 U.S. voters want Congress to quickly elect a new speaker of the House to prevent a government shutdown and provide aid to Israel and Ukraine. According to the survey, 67.1% of voters want a new speaker elected “as soon as possible” to ensure immediate funding needs are met, with 24.7% saying they didn’t care. Another 8.2% said they were undecided on the issue. According to Suffolk University, the poll was conducted with 1,000 registered voters in the United States from Oct. 17-20 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

    “We got to have a speaker, [but] I don’t think we’re going to have anybody soon,” George Ramge, 72, of San Diego, a building contractor and political independent told USA Today in the survey. “There’s a lot of Hollywood politicians out there getting their time on TV, and I don’t think they’re really serving the people’s purpose.”

    Maryland Democrat Carl Hickey, 85, agreed with Ramge.

    “They need to be functioning, and that’s the only way they’re going to function,” the retired Methodist minister said in the report.

    Despite political differences, large majorities favored a quick resolution to the speaker dilemma with 86% of Democrats, 57% of Republicans and 59% of independents saying they want a speaker elected quickly.

    “How often do you see Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree on anything in D.C.?” said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center. “Look at every demographic: gender, geography, age, race, education level, income, political philosophy, even those who trust CNN vs. Fox News. They are all speaking the same seven words in unison: ‘Elect a speaker and do your job.’ “

    Former Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was voted out of the seat earlier this month 216-210 with all Democrats joining eight Republicans to oust him. Potential successors House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, could not gather the 217-vote majority required to win the position during several rounds of balloting, the report said.

    The poll also found 61% of voters want Congress to reach a deal and not cause the government to shut down after a Nov. 17 deadline.

    “I mean, don’t we live in a bipartisan world?” said Desiree Whitney, 64, of Boerne, Texas, an independent who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. “Why should it stop, you know, at our government, or does it begin there? I mean, it’s all about negotiations.”

    Charles Kim | editorial.kim@newsmax.com

    Charles Kim, a Newsmax general assignment writer, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years in reporting on news and politics.

    Is It Too Much To Ask That Congress Clothe Our Marines Instead Of Financing Ukraine’s Forever War?


    BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | OCTOBER 03, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/03/is-it-too-much-to-ask-that-congress-clothe-our-marines-instead-of-financing-ukraines-forever-war/

    Marines in Hawaii

    Now that Congress has funded the federal government for the next month and a half, the White House and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are hard at work looking for ways to pour more U.S. taxpayer money into Ukraine’s forever war with Russia.

    During a White House press briefing on Monday, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fretted that the administration is running out of the money needed to bankroll its continuing proxy war with Moscow. Government officials estimate there is approximately $6 billion remaining in military funds for Ukraine.

    “It is enough to — for us to meet the — meet Ukraine’s urgent battlefield needs for a bit — for a bit longer,” Jean-Pierre told reporters.

    Even though a majority of Americans oppose continued U.S. funding for Ukraine, congressional Democrats spent a significant portion of this past weekend’s spending fight arguing that more aid be shipped to the Eastern European nation. It was thanks to House Republicans and a handful of GOP senators that Congress ultimately approved a 45-day continuing resolution devoid of such funding.

    Of course, this hasn’t stopped President Joe Biden or congressional leadership from professing their support for shipping more U.S. tax dollars to Ukraine. While discussing the spending fight, Biden suggested he’d reached an agreement with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to continue funding the conflict. Despite pushing back on the president’s insinuation that a deal had been made, McCarthy did proclaim to reporters on Monday that he’s “always supported arming Ukraine” and “believe[s] Ukraine is very important.”

    Congress and the Biden administration committed more than $113 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars to Ukraine in 2022, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

    But while Washington overzealously focuses on Ukraine’s military, concerns affecting America’s own armed forces have gone by the wayside. On Thursday, the U.S. Marine Corps announced it is lowering its uniform standards to compensate for a shortage of camouflage attire typically worn by service members. According to Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, local battalions are “authorized” to wear alternate attire contrary to Marine regulations to “mitigate” an ongoing manufacturing shortfall that’s left service members struggling to acquire woodland-patterned “cammies.”

    “What we cannot have is a situation where a Marine is wearing unserviceable cammies, because that looks bad for the Corps, and we can’t have a situation where that Marine is being given a hard time about those unserviceable cammies. We’re going to get this fixed, Marines, but it’s going to take a little patience,” Smith said, adding that the problem won’t be fixed until the fall of 2024.

    According to the Marine Corps Times, service members normally receive “three sets of woodland cammies and two sets of desert cammies.” Due to the ongoing shortage, however, the service has been providing Marines “two woodland sets and one desert set.” Meanwhile, new enlistees have reportedly been forced to undergo “entry-level training in flame-resistant organizational gear,” which are “typically reserved for deployments,” to compensate for the shortages.


    Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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    Despite Growing Opposition And Serious Problems At Home, Democrats Make Ukraine Funding Their Top Priority


    BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | OCTOBER 02, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/02/despite-growing-opposition-and-serious-problems-at-home-democrats-make-ukraine-funding-their-top-priority/

    Chuck Schumer

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    Congress averted a government shutdown this weekend, agreeing to 45 days of funding to give members time to pass appropriations bills for the full year. Incredibly, Democrats seemed prepared to shut down the government over their desire for increases in Ukraine war funding. Republicans, by contrast, bucked Senate leader Mitch McConnell to keep the government open without such funding.

    While shutdown battles have become common, this one had absurd moments. Democrats tried to delay votes with everything from “magic minutes,” which allow party leaders to speak at length, to Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman pulling a fire alarm in the middle of a vote, forcing the evacuation of a House office building.

    With hundreds of Jan. 6 protesters facing excessive sentences, which Department of Justice prosecutors say is because they attempted to delay or obstruct an official congressional proceeding, some Americans began demanding the elected member of Congress be held to the same excruciating standard. Bowman, a former school principal, later claimed he didn’t understand how fire alarms work.

    Even after the House passed the bill, Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado further delayed the eventual passage by placing a hold on the bill. The procedural delays were partly a result of efforts to force a shutdown that could be blamed on Republicans. Conventional wisdom in Washington is that Republicans get blamed for government shutdowns regardless of who is responsible.

    Democrats Willing to Shut Down over Ukraine

    However, Democrats’ delays were also about a demand for additional Ukraine funding. Some Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also want U.S. taxpayers to finance even more of the war against Russia, which has descended into an expensive quagmire.

    “Despite nine months of bloody fighting, less than 500 square miles of territory have changed hands since the start of the year. A prolonged stalemate could weaken Western support for Ukraine,” reported The New York Times last week.

    That’s exactly what has happened. Congress has approved around $113 billion in four rounds of funding. Many polls show significantly weakening support for additional funding. In fact, some 55 percent of Americans oppose additional funding, according to a poll from the left-wing media outlet CNN. That percentage goes up to 71 percent for Republicans. Additional funding for Ukraine is supported by 62 percent of Democrats, according to the poll. Incidentally, CNN joined other corporate media in suppressing discussion of these numbers during the weekend shutdown battle, which hinged on Ukraine funding.

    “The press never even mentions that Ukraine war funding has become incredibly unpopular with actual Republican voters and an increasing number of independents,” one social media analyst noted. “It’s always framed on every network like some fringe position when it’s actually the majority of Americans.”

    Democrats are enthusiastically adopting the Bush-era foreign policy of supporting lengthy U.S.-led wars with a tenuous or even deleterious effect on national security. These wars tend to have very little strategy other than avoiding quick resolution. Such long wars enable years or even decades of financing of the defense industry, which some Ukraine war supporters point to as a benefit for Americans. Democrats are even adopting the Bush-era claim that such wars need to be fought to advance “democracy.”

    Partisan Divide On The Issue Rears Head

    On Friday night, the lack of additional funding for Ukraine caused Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., to object to Sen. Ron Johnson’s, R-Wis., request on the Senate floor to pass a clean two-week funding extension.

    “The Dems are about to shut down the government over Ukraine. I actually can’t believe it, but here we are,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, said in a social media post.

    The Senate then pushed a bill that would give an additional $6 billion to fund the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy dismissed it out of hand and said the House would propose something instead. A few days prior, House Republicans were able to strip $300 million in Ukraine funding from a bill that was being debated.

    Back in the Senate, McConnell failed to get fellow Republicans to sign onto his plan to force Ukraine funding instead of allowing House Republicans to work on a funding bill without it. Punchbowl’s John Bresnahan and Andrew Desiderio had perhaps the most intriguing reporting of the weekend with this vignette:

    Senate sources said it was the first time they could remember that Republican senators didn’t seem to fear repercussions for disagreeing with McConnell, particularly on a prominent issue on which he’d staked out a clear position. It was unclear whether senators overruled McConnell because his mental and physical weakness has left him vulnerable or simply because they recognize how strongly Republican voters feel about funding an expensive war without a clear strategy for success.

    House Democrats dug in, passing around a one-page sheet lambasting McCarthy for his continuing resolution, almost all of which focused on Democrats’ desire for U.S. taxpayers to finance the Ukraine war.

    The Senate prepared to hotline, or fast track, their vote on the House bill that did not include war funding. That’s when Bennett held it up over the Ukraine issue.

    The pressure for funding could not have been more intense. “Senior administration officials” pressured McConnell, saying that Ukraine could not be sustained without funding in this weekend’s bill.

    “It’s rumored that Pentagon officials are on their way over to the Capitol to lobby for Schumer-McConnell. The Military Industrial Complex™️ doesn’t like to lose,” wrote Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, on Saturday.

    Russia-collusion hoaxer Michael McFaul trotted out the same type of argument that has been used to bully Americans to stay in drawn-out wars for decades. “If the US pulls back on our support from Ukraine now, we radically diminish our credibility to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan,” he said.

    Ukraine War Enthusiasts Pressure McCarthy

    The Ukraine war enthusiasts only allowed the stopgap funding measure to proceed on the grounds they’d soon get a vote on whether to send another major aid package to Ukraine.

    “We will not stop fighting for more economic and security assistance for Ukraine,” Schumer said.

    “We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment,” President Biden said in his announcement on the funding measure. He said he’d made a deal with McCarthy to vote on additional funding.

    House Democrats said, “When the House returns, we expect Speaker McCarthy to advance a bill to the House Floor for an up-or-down vote that supports Ukraine, consistent with his commitment to making sure that Vladimir Putin, Russia and authoritarianism are defeated. We must stand with the Ukrainian people until victory is won.”

    Nearly every Democrat and a fair number of Republicans want to continue funding the Ukraine war, despite the results of previous rounds of funding. They’ll likely succeed, but the vote will be harder.

    Conservative Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., will be on guard. “When I said I’d do everything I could to stop the US government from being held hostage to Ukraine, I meant it. We cannot continue to put the needs of other countries above our own. We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy. I’m grateful to all Members of Congress who stood with me, but the battle to fund our government isn’t over yet — the forever-war crowd will return,” he wrote.

    Democrats’ campaign strategy of emphasizing Ukraine war funding at a time of economic distress for many Americans will be interesting to watch.


    Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

    28 Republicans Reject Biden Administration’s Demands to Fund Indefinite Proxy War in Ukraine


    BY: JORDAN BOYD | SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/21/republicans-say-no-to-funding-indefinite-war-in-ukraine/

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    Twenty-eight Republicans publicly vowed on Thursday to oppose the use of billions of American tax dollars to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The rejection, sent in a letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young, is a direct response to the Biden administration’s recent demand that Congress send $24 billion more in American taxpayer-funded resources to Volodymyr Zelensky in an attempt to curb Vladimir Putin and his regime.

    Sen. J.D. Vance, who spearheaded the letter, said Congress should not keep funding “an indefinite conflict” without more fact-based information about the war.

    “Yesterday at a classified briefing over Ukraine, it became clear that America is being asked to fund an indefinite conflict with unlimited resources,” Vance wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Enough is enough. To these and future requests, my colleagues and I say: NO.”

    More than half of the nation says Congress should stop financing Ukraine, a country plagued by corruption. Yet, President Joe Biden, his cabinet members, and even establishment Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have repeatedly pledged to support the war “for as long as it takes.”

    Retiring Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley reportedly received a “standing ovation” on Wednesday after he also swore that “the United States will continue to provide support to Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

    “My tenure may be ending but the mission for this group continues until the end state of a free and sovereign Ukraine is attained,” Milley said.

    “These statements imply an open-ended commitment to supporting the war in Ukraine of an indeterminate nature, based on a strategy that is unclear, to achieve a goal yet to be articulated to the public or the Congress,” the signees wrote.

    The statements also lack any transparency about how the nation’s previous aid was used.

    In their letter, the Republicans note the whopping $114 billion total often used to measure U.S. funding for Ukraine “does not reflect the full picture, which includes transferred and reprogrammed funds.” They add that in all five of its “supplemental requests” for Ukraine funding to Congress, the Biden administration “requested additional authority to transfer and reprogram funds.”

    “The vast majority of Congress remains unaware of how much the United States has spent to date in total on this conflict, information which is necessary for Congress to prudently exercise its appropriations power,” the Republicans warn.

    The ignorance is not due to a lack of curiosity from the Republicans behind the letter, who have made multiple inquiries over the last two years demanding more information. In January, Vance and three dozen other Republicans in Congress signed a letter to Young demanding a “full accounting” of U.S. aid to Ukraine. Their requests went largely unaddressed.

    “It is difficult to envision a benign explanation for this lack of clarity,” the Republicans state.

    As prime examples of the executive branch’s reckless Ukraine spending spree, the GOPers highlighted the Department of Defense’s recent $6.2 billion Ukraine aid accounting error and the Biden administration’s $5 billion request for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a number which exceeded 15 times what Congress allotted in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

    “The American people deserve to know what their money has gone to. How is the counteroffensive going? Are the Ukrainians any closer to victory than they were 6 months ago? What is our strategy, and what is the president’s exit plan? What does the administration define
    as victory in Ukraine?” the GOPers ask.

    To grant another round of Ukraine funding requests by the Biden administration without “answers to these questions,” the GOP members declared, would be “an absurd abdication of congressional responsibility.”

    The 28 Republicans pledge to keep their purse strings closed until the Biden administration explains its funding frenzy to Congress and taxpayers.


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

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


    A.F. Branco Cartoon – School House Rock

    A.F. BRANCO | on September 3, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-school-house-rock/

    Walz appointee suggests officers who want law fixed are ‘super excited about choking children.

    Walt and the SRO

    Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Bad Hand

    A.F. BRANCO  on September 4, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-bad-hand/

    Biden has blood on his hand. The disaster in Afghanistan, Openborders, and Ukraine, to name a few.

    Biden’s Bloody hands

    Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

    DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

    To9day’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Make War, Not Love

    A.F. BRANCO | on August 25, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-make-war-not-love/

    Many of the people waving the Ukraine flag in support are the same people who hate the American flag.

    Ukraine Flag vs American
    Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco

    DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

    Op-ed: Nikki Haley Is Hillary 2.0


    BY: EDDIE SCARRY | AUGUST 18, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/18/nikki-haley-is-hillary-2-0/

    Nikki Haley

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    Of all the terrible things about Nikki Haley — her enthusiasm for more foreign war funding, her deference to corporate cultural assault — the cringe-worthy attempts to hype her status as a woman (A mom! A wife!) and Indian (“I’m a minority first!,” “I’m as diverse as it gets!”) are the least offensive. But it’s still really, really bad.

    Her whole campaign is Hillary 2.0.

    Haley currently polls nationally at less than 5 percent, and it’s the same in early Republican primary states Iowa and New Hampshire, so there aren’t a ton of reasons to spend time thinking about her. But it’s truly awe-inspiring that there exist Republicans who still believe there’s anything to gain from the party’s voters by rubbing their faces in identity politics rot.

    When have Republicans ever showed any appetite for it? They haven’t. They don’t care. It’s only interesting to the extent that ethnic minorities and women who run for office as Republicans are contrary to the racist media’s preferred narrative. Outside of that, it’s meaningless and has no bearing on a voter’s decision to trust any given candidate with power.

    Haley has already disqualified herself for the nomination by cheering on more war between Ukraine and Russia, stupidly undermining the only Republican senator trying to uphold the law that abortions not be funded with taxpayer money, and ceding authority to corporations that promote gross left-wing social causes.

    It’s only a bonus that she thinks there’s something novel or compelling about being a nonwhite woman. In an interview with Politico published Thursday, Haley was asked about the first GOP presidential debate next week. “The fellas are going to do what the fellas are gonna do,” she said.

    See? Because she’s not one of the fellas. She’s a woman! She’s unique! It’s cool!

    At the Iowa State Fair last weekend, Haley walked around in a shirt that said, “UNDERESTIMATE ME — THAT’LL BE FUN.”

    Get it? She’s a woman! And she’s in the primary up against nothing but men! And she’s a minority! Whoa! Brave!

    Also at the fair, she responded to one question by declaring herself “a minority first,” which proved she’s “as diverse as it gets.” (For good measure, she threw in that “minorities are smart.”)

    Haley continues to desperately milk the teat of Don Lemon having said on CNN a whole six months ago that she “isn’t in her prime.” At this moment, her campaign’s merchandise store — yes, Nikki Haley swag actually exists — features six items with reference to the “in her prime” remark. A personal favorite is the set of drink can koozies that say, “Past my prime? Hold my beer.”

    You go, lady candidate!

    Some other fun products include a “women for Nikki” shirt; a T-shirt that says, “If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman” (with the word “woman” in italics); and multiple other items that say, “Sometimes it takes a woman” (a paraphrase of Hillary Clinton’s 2019 bleat, “It often takes a woman…”).

    It’s as if Haley is running an experiment to see how hard she can make Republicans wince. During her campaign launch, she said in her speech, “I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”

    Is Nikki Haley a woman, yes or no? Yes or no. Look at me. SAY IT.

    An unofficial slogan of the Haley campaign is some variation of, “Send a bad-ss woman to the White House.”

    July 3: “It’s time to send a bad-ss Republican woman to the White House.”

    June 30: “We need to send a bad-ss Republican woman to this White House.”

    June 4: “It’s time to put a bad-ss woman in the White House.”

    Hey, now, SHE’s a firecracker! You don’t wanna mess with HER!

    Motherhood, marriage, and heritage don’t overwhelm Republican voters because none of it is impressive. Those qualities are either basic human goals or matters of pure luck of the draw. But if Nikki Haley wants to run as Hillary Clinton 2.0, she’s doing just fine. The outcome will be the same.


    Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

    Op-ed: Biden’s Misguided Priorities: Ukraine, Illegal Aliens vs. Hawaii


    Armstrong Williams @Arightside / August 17, 2023

    Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/08/17/bidens-misguided-priorities-ukraine-illegal-aliens-vs-hawaii/

    This isn’t a scene from wartorn Ukraine after an attack by Russian forces. It’s the result of the wildfire in Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui, seen here on Monday. (Photo: Yang Pingjun/Xinhua/Getty Images)

    Hawaii, once a symbol of nature’s grace, now lies devastated, a chilling semblance of a war zone. At least 100 lives have been lost to the flames of a devastating wildfire, with hundreds of homes obliterated and families shattered.

    But in the face of this profound tragedy, President Joe Biden has responded with a suggestion that borders on the absurd. If you thought his disregard for the American people had reached its lowest point, think again. While the embers of destruction still glow in Hawaii, Biden has made a jarring proposal to Congress: Provide an additional $24 billion in aid to Ukraine.

    Underneath America’s leadership, a perpetually angry and misguided segment of left-wing Americans has eroded our nation’s priorities. They argue that America should always be second to the needs of others. But this is not the America that the majority yearn for. It’s the America that those who resent our nation’s principles desire.

    Our nation stands at a crossroads, grappling with a complex web of challenges that stretch far beyond typical crime and poverty. Among those challenges are the haunting problems of human trafficking and the trafficking of drugs and firearms. Yet, the threats we face are not limited to these insidious enterprises. Thousands of Americans fall victim to criminals every year through crimes such as carjackings and robberies.

    When will the American people receive the attention and care that Ukraine gets? When will the homeless veterans, who once fought bravely for their nation only to be left in the cold, the needy families struggling to make ends meet, single mothers laboring to provide for their children, and the helpless, poor families waiting for a glimmer of hope receive the same level of commitment and assistance that Biden offers to a foreign nation?

    The concern doesn’t end at Ukraine. We can cast our eyes to our own cities, like New York City, now facing a migrant crisis unparalleled in its history. It’s reminiscent of the European migration crisis of 2015, when open borders led to more than 1 million migrants entering the European Union. New York’s far-left City Council and state politicians are now grappling with the aftermath of such policies. Tens of thousands of migrants are now dispersed across New York’s cities, burdening communities large and small with both actual and unrealized fears.

    Will those who feign righteousness, those who boldly fly the Ukrainian flag outside their homes, who offer to take migrants into their homes, who march in protests in support of Ukraine and who decry the Right for simply asking that we take care of our own first also fly the flag of Hawaii?

    Of course they won’t, and we all know why. It’s because there’s a prevailing yet misguided doctrine that America is so powerful and mighty that when its own people are harmed, we can conveniently ignore them, treating them as though they are privileged and unworthy of attention.

    Pay no mind to the stark contrast between images of overindulgence and peaceful streets in many Ukrainian cities under threat of conflict and the devastation on the ground in Hawaii. This selective empathy is obvious. It’s hypocrisy at its finest, and it clearly shows that those who stand for righteousness falter when their own countrymen are in need.

    While my heart aches for the Ukrainians affected by this war, and I vehemently believe in halting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, America cannot turn a blind eye to its internal struggles. America’s families are faced with choosing which meals to skip, struggling to pay rent, or managing unexpected expenses.

    I ask you, Joe Biden, when will these families receive the same assistance you provide to everyone else?

    So, what shall we do for the displaced people from Hawaii? Will we abandon them? No. We must treat them better than we treat everyone else, for any expense spared is a blot on our national honor.

    I urge our government to welcome displaced Hawaiians with more than just open arms. They deserve five-star hotel accommodations, luxurious meals, free health care and child care. Why? Because that’s how we should treat Americans. And yet, it’s how we’re currently treating the migrants.

    “America First” has been wrongly maligned due to the Left’s deliberate misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the principle. It’s about preserving a nation’s dignity, offering help and utilizing resources wisely, without exhausting them.

    The American people’s welfare must not be sacrificed for Ukraine or for the migrants crossing our borders. Perhaps time will tell whether we will be able to provide them assistance. But, until that day comes, America must first care for its own.

    COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM

    COMMENTARY BY

    Armstrong Williams@Arightside

    Armstrong Williams is a columnist for The Daily Signal and host of “The Armstrong Williams Show,” a nationally syndicated TV program.

    Top House Republican rips ‘damning picture’ of Biden with Hunter-linked adviser on 2015 Ukraine trip


    By Jessica Chasmar | Fox News | Published August 10, 2023 1:04pm EDT

    Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/top-house-republican-rips-damning-picture-biden-hunter-linked-adviser-2015-ukraine-trip

    FIRST ON FOX: House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., is blasting a “damning photo” showing then-Vice President Joe Biden with his Hunter Biden-linked current adviser aboard an Air Force Two flight during his infamous 2015 trip to Ukraine.

    Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s current special presidential coordinator, was apparently in communication with Hunter and Hunter’s associates at Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings when the first son was serving on the firm’s board, according to emails previously reported by Fox News Digital.

    A photo taken by White House photographer David Lienemann shows Biden being briefed by Hochstein aboard Air Force Two on his way to meet Ukrainian leaders in Kiev on Dec. 6, 2015, when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid if they did not fire their top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.

    “This damning picture of then Vice President Joe Biden on Air Force Two en route to Ukraine talking with Amos Hochstein is just further evidence that Biden and senior officials in the Biden Administration not only knew of Hunter Biden’s corrupt foreign business dealings, but also that Joe Biden was intimately involved while Vice President,” Stefanik told Fox News Digital in a statement.

    Biden and Hochstein
    This photo taken by White House photographer David Lienemann shows Vice President Joe Biden being briefed by Amos Hochstein, right, aboard Air Force Two on his way to Ukraine on Dec. 6, 2015. (White House photographer David Lienemann)

    TIMELINE OF BIDEN ADVISER’S COMMUNICATIONS WITH HUNTER, MEETINGS WITH VP ABOUT BURISMA RAISES QUESTIONS

    “At the time of this photo, Hochstein was in communication with Hunter Biden and Burisma where Hunter served on the board,” she continued. “We also know that this photo was taken on Air Force Two ahead of Joe Biden’s now infamous meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, where Biden threatened to have aid withheld if a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma was not fired.”

    “All evidence points directly to Joe Biden being deeply compromised. House Republicans will leave no stone unturned in our investigations into Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling scheme,” Stefanik added.

    Joe Biden, Amos Hochstein, Hunter Biden
    President Biden, Amos Hochstein and Hunter Biden (Getty Images)

    Hochstein, who served as special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs under the Obama-Biden administration, was tapped as Biden’s special coordinator for global infrastructure and energy security in August 2021, and he was made special presidential coordinator to Biden in February 2022.

    BIDEN’S NARRATIVE ON NEVER DISCUSSING BUSINESS DEALS WITH HUNTER CONTINUES TO CRUMBLE

    Fox News Digital reported in June that in the summer of 2014, shortly after joining the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, Hunter and his associates at Burisma and his now-defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners discussed speaking with Hochstein for contacts who could help navigate a new tax in Ukraine on private energy companies.

    On July 31, 2014, top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi expressed frustration in an email to the group that the Ukrainian parliament had “voted in favor of the package of laws, among which is a draft law on raising the tax for private gas producers.” 

    Amos Hochstein, senior energy security adviser for the US Department of State
    Amos Hochstein, senior energy security adviser for the U.S. Department of State, listens as President Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Oct. 19, 2022. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    Minutes later, Heather King, who did crisis communications for Burisma at the time and was in frequent communication with Hunter, said she was concerned by the news.

    “This news is very concerning,” she wrote. “I assume you will be sending an email to the State Dept today about this? We will also get you connected with the US Embassy contact so you can hopefully meet with the guy Hochstein recommended as soon as possible.” 

    Nearly two months later, on Sept. 24, 2014, Pozharskyi emailed another communications consultant, Georgette Spanjich, and copied King, Burisma lobbyist David Leiter and Burisma board member Devon Archer, writing that “Ukrainian authorities are still pushing for further legislative initiatives which are going to cause even more damage to the gas industry.”

    Amos Hochstein interview
    Amos Hochstein, special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, is interviewed in Houston on Aug. 15, 2016. (James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

    “I am genuinely looking forward to your ideas on how we could influence this process,” Pozharskyi wrote. “Please, note that I am going to share this information with the US embassy here in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the States.”

    On Nov. 13, 2014, seven weeks after Pozharskyi said he would forward Burisma’s response to the Ukrainian tax hike to Hochstein’s office, Hochstein attended a meeting at Biden’s Naval Observatory residence, according to White House visitor logs. The next day, Eric Schwerin, the then-president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, sent Hunter a link, without comment, to Hochstein’s biography on the State Department’s website.

    Hochstein’s biography
    Eric Schwerin sent Hunter Biden a link to Amos Hochstein’s biography on the State Department’s website. (Fox News)

    Three days later, on Nov. 17, 2014, Hochstein met with Kathy Chung, according to the White House visitor logs. Chung was Biden’s executive assistant at the time and now serves as the Pentagon’s deputy director of protocol. A few days later, Hunter asked Schwerin to send Hochstein’s contact information to Archer, Hunter’s fellow Burisma board member and a co-founder of Rosemont Seneca Partners.

    A couple of weeks later, on Dec. 11, 2014, Hochstein met with Biden and Chung in two separate meetings and later attended a holiday party at Biden’s residence that same day. Four days later, Hochstein attended a “meeting” at the vice president’s residence, according to White House visitor logs. 

    HOUSE GOP RELEASE BANK RECORDS ON HUNTER BIDEN PAYMENTS FROM RUSSIAN, KAZAKH OLIGARCHS, TOTAL CLEARS $20 MILLION

    Four months later, on April 16, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing of the White House, the visitor logs show. That meeting took place the same day that Hunter introduced his father to Burisma executive Pozharskyi and other business associates from Kazakhstan and Russia during a dinner at Café Milano in Washington, D.C., Fox News Digital previously reported. It is unclear whether Burisma or Pozharskyi’s visit to Washington, D.C., was mentioned during that meeting.

    Vice President Joseph Biden and Amos Hochstein
    Then-Vice President Joe Biden and Amos J. Hochstein, special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, talk during the Caribbean Energy Security Summit at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 26, 2015. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

    The day after the dinner, Hunter received an email from Pozharskyi that read, “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”

    BIDEN’S CLAIM TO HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF HUNTER’S BUSINESS DEALINGS IS BECOMING HARDER TO MAINTAIN

    Two months later, on June 17, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden twice, according to the visitor logs. He met with Biden again the next month in the West Wing on July 13, 2015, and with Chung again months later on Nov. 2, 2015.

    According to a Senate Republican report on Hunter’s business dealings released in December 2020, testimony and public records show that Hochstein in October 2015 raised concerns with both Biden and Hunter that Hunter’s position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine. 

    Amos Hochstein and Abdulaziz bin Salman al-Saud
    Senior adviser for energy security Amos Hochstein and Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman al-Saud speak after signing bilateral agreements during an investment agreement signing ceremony in the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah on July 15, 2022. (Amer Hilabi/AFP via Getty Images)

    Victoria Nuland, who was serving as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs in 2015, testified to Congress in 2020 that Hochstein had another conversation about Hunter’s position on Burisma’s board with Biden on the way to Ukraine in 2015, according to the Senate report, during the same plane ride shown in the photograph criticized by Stefanik.

    During Hochstein’s testimony in the 2020 report, he recounted that he spoke with Biden about Burisma in the West Wing of the White House in October 2015. According to visitor logs, he visited the White House three times in October 2015, with two of the visits occurring in the West Wing and the other on the second floor of the West Wing.

    ‘MONEY GUY’: THIS HUNTER BIDEN BUSINESS PARTNER COULD BLOW THE LID OFF BIDEN FAMILY’S BUSINESS DEALINGS

    “We were starting to think about a trip to Ukraine, and I wanted to make sure that he [Vice President Biden] was aware that there was an increase in chatter on media outlets close to Russians and corrupt oligarchs-owned media outlets about undermining his message — to try to undermine his [Vice President Biden’s] message and including Hunter Biden being part of the board of Burisma,” Hochstein told Congress, according to the report.

    According to Hochstein, Biden told Hunter about the meeting, prompting Hunter to request a meeting with Hochstein, according to the 2020 Senate Republican report.

    “You are all set to meet with Amos on Friday at 4pm for coffee,” Joan Mayer emailed Hunter on Nov. 3, 2015, referring to their Nov. 6 meeting. She later emailed Hunter to let him know the Nov. 6 meeting with Hochstein at a Starbucks in Georgetown had been moved to 3 p.m. Hochstein met with Biden in the White House Situation Room the day before on Nov. 5, 2015, the visitor logs say.

    Hochstein meeting
    Joan Mayer emailed Hunter Biden to let him know the Nov. 6 meeting with Amos Hochstein at a Starbucks in Georgetown had been moved to 3 p.m. (Fox News)

    “Well, he [Hunter] asked me for a meeting,” Hochstein said in his testimony. “I think he wanted to know my views on Burisma and [Mykola] Zlochevsky. And so I shared with him that the Russians were using his name in order to sow disinformation — attempt to sow disinformation among Ukrainians.”

    The report said Hochstein “did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board,” citing an earlier article by the New Yorker.

    About a week later, on Nov. 12, 2016, Mayer let Hunter know that he missed a call from Hochstein, adding, “Please call back today if possible.” Hochstein met with Vice President Biden again in the White House Situation Room less than two weeks later, on Nov. 23, 2015.

    Missed call
    On Nov. 12, 2016, Joan Mayer let Hunter Biden know that he missed a call from Amos Hochstein, adding, “Please call back today if possible.” (Fox News)

    On Dec. 11, 2015, two days after they returned from Ukraine, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing.

    Biden visited Ukraine from Dec. 7-9, 2015. Three months after the visit, Shokin was fired, and Biden would later use it to boast about his foreign policy skills.

    Shokin was investigating Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder and then-president of Burisma Holdings, where Hunter served as a board member from April 2014 to April 2019. Biden’s defenders have said that Shokin was fired not because he was pursuing corruption too aggressively, but rather because he was too lax.

    On Dec. 17, 2015, less than a week after his meeting with Biden, Hochstein attended a holiday party at the vice president’s Naval Observatory residence, where Hunter was also in attendance.

    Hochstein visited Biden at least another six times in 2016, including the day after Shokin was fired on March 29, 2016.

    The Obama administration had pushed for Shokin’s firing, and Biden boasted on camera in 2018 that when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

    “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden said in 2018, according to a transcript of his remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a b—-. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

    The White House and the State Department did not respond to Fox News Digital requests for comment.

    Jessica Chasmar is a digital writer on the politics team for Fox News and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to Jessica.Chasmar@fox.com.

    Evidence Of Biden Burisma Corruption Is Overwhelming


    BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | AUGUST 01, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/01/evidence-of-biden-burisma-corruption-is-overwhelming/

    Joe Biden talking on the phone

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    A key associate of Hunter Biden reluctantly admitted details about how the Biden family business was run — and those details are shocking.

    Devon Archer, a longtime business partner and close friend of Hunter Biden’s, told congressional investigators Monday that at a meeting in Dubai on Dec. 4, 2015, top executives of Ukrainian energy concern Burisma asked Hunter Biden and himself for help from D.C. At the time of the meeting, Hunter Biden’s dad, Joe Biden, was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president as well as his point person on Ukraine. Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, a Burisma executive, wanted to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired as he was investigating the company for corruption, Archer told members of Congress.

    Hunter Biden put Zlochevsky and Pozharski on a call with “D.C.,” Archer said, noting he was not part of the phone call so couldn’t possibly know who exactly was on the other end of the line. Joe Biden did meet and speak more than 20 times with various business associates who were paying for access to the Biden family, Archer admitted.

    In this case, Burisma was paying Archer and Hunter Biden as much as $83,000 a month to serve on the Ukrainian energy concern’s board, despite the fact that neither man had relevant experience or expertise for the job outside of their frequent meetings and contact with the then-vice president. The two were hired the same month that the U.K. had opened an investigation into company officials. The money was well spent.

    A mere five days after the Dubai meeting and phone call, Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech to the Ukrainian Rada, its parliament in Kyiv, attempting to lay the groundwork for firing Shokin.

    It took just a few short months before Shokin was fired. Joe Biden bragged in a public speech in January 2018 that he was personally responsible for getting that firing accomplished so quickly. In fact, he claimed he had bullied the Ukrainian government into firing the investigator by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee unless he got what he wanted. Seriously:

    And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t. So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired.

    What an amazing series of events that led to Joe Biden personally fulfilling what Burisma was paying Hunter Biden to accomplish. What are the odds?

    Not the Weather

    After Archer’s transcribed interview, Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York who previously ran some of the Russia-collusion hoax as a congressional staffer, ran to the cameras to cushion the blow of the explosive new information.

    For years, the corporate press and other Democrats had uncritically accepted Biden’s preposterous claim that he had never spoken with his son or his son’s business partners about the Biden family business. Even when Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski described — in detail, on the record, and with supporting evidence — how Joe Biden served as the “chairman” of the family business, the media largely ignored the explosive claims. With Archer echoing Bobulinski’s claims, and further noting that the business wouldn’t have worked without Joe Biden’s “brand,” Goldman and others like him had to concede that Biden did in fact speak with Hunter’s business associates. In fact, they had to admit he spoke with them frequently. However, Goldman claimed, they were only talking about the weather.

    While no one actually thinks Joe Biden has a secret interest in meteorology that he only shares with corrupt foreign oligarchs who happen to be in business with his son, the claim is ridiculous for another reason.

    As conservative broadcaster Larry O’Connor wrote, “Understand this: Hunter getting Joe on speakerphone WAS THE DELIVERABLE. It literally doesn’t matter what was discussed. Showing that he could get the Vice President of the United States on the phone was all Hunter had to show his clients to seal the deal. He was selling ACCESS not policy. Getting The Big Guy to pick up the phone demonstrated his ability to deliver that access. Case closed. Impeach.”

    Otherwise, why would Joe Biden get on the phone with his business associates at all? Why would Barack Obama’s point man in Ukraine be talking to Ukrainian officials under suspicion of massive corruption who were paying large sums of money to his son? What was the point, exactly, if not as chairman of the family business?

    We know Burisma was paying Biden family members for help getting powerful people in D.C. to get investigators off its back. We know Biden was the top official in D.C. related to Ukraine. Five days after Burisma made the request, Biden was laying the groundwork for the firing. And he has publicly bragged about getting the prosecutor fired.

    n 2019, President Donald Trump was impeached for raising the issue of a potential corruption scandal involving Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Burisma. At that time, scores of corporate media and other Democrat activists asserted without evidence that Shokin was not investigating Burisma and that it was a lie to suggest otherwise. For instance, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post wrote in 2019, “Trump has falsely claimed that Biden in 2015 pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, because he was investigating Ukraine’s largest private gas company, Burisma, which had added Biden’s son, Hunter, to its board in 2014. There are two big problems with this claim: One, Shokin was not investigating Burisma or Hunter Biden, and two, Shokin’s ouster was considered a diplomatic victory.”

    Since that false “fact” “check,” investigators in the House and Senate have shown that the Biden family business involves oligarchs and other powerful figures from Russia, Romania, China, and even France and other countries. Joe Biden reportedly met and spoke with his son’s employers from across the globe. The corporate press and other Democrats will fight disclosure about the Biden family business every step of the way, but Archer’s transcribed interview shows how important it is to reveal the truth of that business to the American people.


    Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

    Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Wasn’t Supposed to Protect Him, It Was Supposed to Protect Joe


    BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 27, 2023

    Rad more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/27/hunter-bidens-plea-deal-wasnt-supposed-to-protect-him-it-was-supposed-to-protect-joe/

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    The twists and turns of Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal have been hard to follow, but it’s been clear from the outset that, like his business ventures in Ukraine, the deal was thoroughly corrupt. It’s now clear that the agreement was never meant primarily to shield Hunter from future prosecution, but to protect President Joe Biden.

    In a Delaware federal court on Wednesday, Hunter’s lawyers ended up rejecting a plea deal once it became clear the deal would not confer broad immunity on the president’s son. Although the language of the plea deal has not been released, it was supposed to have Hunter plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, as well as enter a pretrial diversion agreement for illegal possession of a firearm. The deal fell apart, however, once the federal judge overseeing the case, Maryellen Noreika, started asking questions. Here’s how The New York Times reported it:

    The hearing appeared to be going smoothly before Judge Noreika questioned whether the agreement meant that Mr. Biden would be immune from prosecution for other possible crimes — including violations related to representing foreign governments — in perpetuity. When a top prosecutor in the case said it would not, Chris Clark, Mr. Biden’s lead lawyer, initially hesitated and then said the government’s position would make the agreement “null and void.”

    After a recess during which the lawyers for both sides scrambled to hash out an agreement, Judge Noreika, who earlier had said she felt she was being asked to “rubber stamp” the agreement, said she could not accept the plea deal. Hunter Biden then pled not guilty to the tax charges and the hearing was over. 

    What to make of this? The most obvious explanation is that Hunter’s lawyers know what most Americans know: He was involved in complex foreign bribery schemes that implicate his father, President Biden. They were hoping to strike a plea agreement with the Justice Department that would protect him from future prosecution related to corrupt foreign business deals in Ukraine and China that involved trading on his family name, but once it became clear that the judge was not going to sign off on such an agreement, they backed out of the deal.

    Why would they want such a deal in the first place? Maybe because they know the Republicans in Congress continue to amass evidence that Joe Biden and his son took millions in bribe money from Ukrainian oligarchs for protection against prosecution. Hunter’s plea deal, in other words, wasn’t meant to shield Hunter from future prosecution, it was meant to protect Joe. A plea agreement granting Hunter broad immunity would make it harder to dig into his murky overseas business deals — deals which increasingly appear to have involved his father. 

    As we have detailed here in recent days, the Biden bribery scheme in Ukraine is shaping up to be the great political scandal in American history. If it’s true, it would mean the end of Biden’s presidency, either by impeachment and conviction or by abandonment by the Democrat Party establishment ahead of the 2024 election. 

    Consider what’s come out just recently. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last week released an unclassified FBI document detailing reports from a “highly credible” informant who says the founder and CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, bragged about paying the Bidens $10 million to make the oil and gas company’s legal problems disappear. Specifically, Zlochevsky wanted Ukrainian authorities to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma.

    And of course, that’s just what happened — after then-Vice President Joe Biden, by his own admission, threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired.

    This same informant says top Burisma executives admitted that the only reason they hired Hunter to sit on their board (for a jaw-dropping $83,000 a month) was “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”

    The FBI, for its part, tried to hide this document from IRS investigators and Congress, and the corporate media have done their best to ignore the story altogether. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. Indeed, the story keeps growing. As Margot Cleveland reported in these pages earlier this week, the Pittsburgh FBI office told the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office it had corroborated multiple aspects of the informant’s claims, including travel records confirming the informant had indeed traveled to the locales detailed in the document during the relevant time period.

    We also know the FBI and Justice Department not only prevented a pair of IRS whistleblowers from learning of the document but also kept hidden portions of the materials found on Hunter’s laptop. That’s no small thing. One of those whistleblowers suggested the FBI informant’s claims could corroborate other evidence the IRS special agents had gathered during their investigation.

    As this story develops, it’s becoming obvious that the point of the FBI and DOJ’s obstruction is to protect the president and suppress further evidence of the Biden bribery scheme. That’s why a special counsel won’t cut it. The deep state isn’t going to get to the bottom of this, and the corporate press is going to keep aggressively ignoring it. If the federal courtroom circus on Wednesday demonstrated anything, it’s that we’re going to need an impeachment inquiry to find out the truth about President Biden’s corruption.


    John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

    Hunter Biden’s friend to tell Congress then-VP Joe joined dozens of son’s business meetings via phone: report


    By Lawrence Richard | Fox News | Published July 24, 2023 12:45pm EDT

    Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-bidens-friend-tell-congress-then-vp-joe-joined-dozens-sons-business-meetings-phone-report

    Devon Archer, a former best friend and business associate of Hunter Biden in Ukraine, is expected to testify under oath to Congress this week that President Biden met with dozens of Hunter’s business associates while he was serving as vice president between 2009 and 2017.

    Fox News Digital has confirmed that Archer has been subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee and could testify as early as Thursday, July 27. The expected testimony could cast further doubt on President Biden’s repeated claims that he had no knowledge of his son’s foreign business dealings or of having any influence on them.

    Miranda Devine, a New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor, reported Monday that Archer, 48, is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee about meetings he witnessed attended by both Bidens — Hunter and Joe — either in person or via telephone. During the meetings, Hunter would specifically introduce his father to foreign business partners or prospective investors, Archer is expected to testify.

    The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Archer to speak as House Republicans continue to investigate whether the Bidens used the influence then-Vice President Biden had in the White House to elicit these deals and other alleged Biden family corruption. The committee told Fox News it believes the president communicated in some form with Hunter Biden’s business associates. 

    TIMELINE OF BIDEN ADVISER’S COMMUNICATIONS WITH HUNTER, MEETINGS WITH VP ABOUT BURISMA RAISES QUESTIONS

    Hunter Biden gets off plane with president
    President Biden has snapped at reporters who have asked him about alleged corruption involving him and his son, Hunter Biden. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

    “We are looking forward very much to hearing from Devon Archer about all the times he has witnessed Joe Biden meeting with Hunter Biden’s overseas business partners when he was vice president, including on speakerphone,” the committee said in a statement.

    The committee invited Archer to testify as he was sentenced last year to one year in prison for his role in a $60 million bond fraud involving various clients. At least three previously planned dispositions were canceled by Archer for personal reasons.

    “Joe Biden lied to the American people when he said he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings,” committee chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement on Monday. “Evidence continues to be revealed that Joe Biden was very much involved in his family’s corrupt influence peddling schemes and he likely benefited financially. This includes deals with a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch and a CCP-linked energy company that generated millions for the Bidens and undermined American interests.”

    Comer added, “It certainly appears that Joe Biden and his family put themselves first and Americans last, but corporate media and the Justice Department continue to cover up for the Bidens. The Oversight Committee will continue to follow the facts to provide the transparency and accountability that the American people demand and deserve. We look forward to speaking soon with Devon Archer about Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s business affairs.”

    Devine, also the author of “Laptop from Hell,” reported Archer is expected to testify on specific examples of the elder Biden getting involved in his son’s business deals, including an evening meeting in Dubai on Friday, Dec. 4, 2015, which ultimately saw Hunter Biden meeting with Ukrainian energy company Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky and calling his dad during their conversation. At the time, Burisma was paying Hunter $83,000 a month to serve as a director, Devine reported.

    GOP RIPS HUNTER’S ‘SWEETHEART’ PLEA DEAL ON TAX AND GUN CRIMES, ZERO IN ON JOE BIDEN

    According to Devine, Archer, who was also a director, is expected to testify that the call between Joe, Hunter and Hunter’s business partners came after he and Hunter had dinner with the Burisma board at the Burj Al Arab Hotel. Archer and Hunter reportedly left the meeting and traveled to the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach when Vadym Pozharskyi, a senior Burisma executive, called them and said Zlochevsky needed to urgently speak with Hunter. The two Ukrainians then reportedly joined Hunter and Archer at the Four Seasons, where Pozharskyi specifically asked Hunter, “Can you ring your dad?”

    According to Devine, Archer is expected to testify that Hunter called his father, who was in Washington, D.C., at the time, and introduced the Ukrainians by their first names. Then the younger Biden emphasized that the Burisma executives “need our support.” Then-Vice President Biden acknowledged the Ukrainians, as he did in other calls with Hunter’s business partners, but kept the conversation brief, Archer is expected to testify.

    Joe Biden
    President Biden gives remarks on AI in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on July 21, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

    Devine reported that committee members are likely to ask Archer about the context surrounding that meeting as three days after that conversation, on Dec. 9, 2015, then-Vice President Biden, who was former President Obama’s point man for Ukrainian issues, flew to Kyiv to address the Ukrainian parliament. At the time, Zlochevsky was being investigated by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin for corruption and, just two months later, Shokin seized four of Zlochevsky’s houses in Kyiv, two plots of land and a Rolls-Royce, Devine reported.

    A month after the seizure, then-Vice President Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired. Then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko promptly fired Shokin.

    OBAMA-ERA EMAILS REVEAL HUNTER’S EXTENSIVE TIES TO NEARLY A DOZEN SENIOR-LEVEL BIDEN ADMIN AIDES

    Biden later bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations during an event in January 2018, saying, “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, he got fired.”

    Members of the House Oversight Committee are expected to ask Archer about the timing of the firing as Shokin was also investigating Burisma at the time.

    The New York Post previously reported an email sent on Nov. 2, 2015 that shows Pozharskyi was ratcheting up pressure on Hunter and Archer to use their influence to “close down” Shokin’s investigation into Burisma.

    President Biden has repeatedly defended the firing as pointing back to Poroshenko, who said Shokin was corrupt and was slow walking efforts to clear corruption in the prosecutor’s office. Biden and the U.S. were also not the only entities advocating for Shokin to be removed. According to a Congressional Research Service report published in Jan. 2017, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde threatened to withhold $40 billion unless Ukraine undertook “a substantial new effort” to clear corruption in the government. The CRS report said Shokin submitted his resignation in February 2016 and was subsequently removed.

    Viktor Shokin
    Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma before he resigned in Feb. 2016. (GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)

    However, Just last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released an FBI document describing an allegation that Zlochevsky told an FBI informant he paid a $10 million bribe to Joe and Hunter Biden in 2016 “to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired.” The FBI document, known as an FD-1023, shows Zlochevsky calling Joe Biden “the big guy.” Archer is expected to testify the “big guy” was a title other people in Biden’s circle used to refer to the elder Biden.

    According to Devine, Hunter Biden’s former business partner in Los Angeles, Tony Bobulinski, also met with Hunter and Joe. In an email sent to Hunter, Bobulinski refers to then-Vice President Biden as “the big guy.”

    Archer also is expected to tell the committee about other instances — as many as two dozen times in Archer’s presence — where Hunter called his father and put him on speaker to impress prospective investors, Devine reported.

    REPUBLICAN CALLS TO IMPEACH BIDEN GROW FOLLOWING RELEASE OF FBI DOCUMENT DETAILING BRIBERY ALLEGATIONS

    His testimony is expected to include information about dinners Hunter organized, so his father could meet his foreign business partners, Devine wrote. A Fox News Digital review found that Biden personally met with several of Hunter’s business associates from the U.S., Mexico, Ukraine, China and Kazakhstan over the course of his vice presidency. Joe Biden met with two of Hunter’s since-dissolved investment fund partners, former Colombia President Andrés Pastrana Arango and Eric Schwerin, at the Naval Observatory — the official residence of the vice president — on March 2, 2012, the New York Post reported.

    Biden, Poroshenko
    Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, right, hosted then-Vice President Joe Biden for official talks in Kyiv, Ukraine, Jan. 16, 2017. (Vitaliy Holovin/Corbis via Getty images)

    According to emails reviewed by Fox News Digital, the elder Biden also met with two of Hunter’s Mexican business associates, Miguel Aleman Velasco and Miguel Aleman Magnani, when they visited the West Wing on Feb. 26, 2014. Joe and Hunter Biden also gave Velasco and Magnani a tour of the White House Brady Press Briefing room.

    Emails reviewed by Fox News Digital, also showed Hunter arranged a video conference with his father and Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire with whom Hunter was seeking to do business with at the time, on Oct. 30, 2015.

    Joe, Hunter, and Hunter’s business partner Jeff Cooper hosted another meeting at the Naval Observatory, located at Number One Observatory Circle in Washington D.C., for Slim, Velasco and Magnani on Nov. 19, 2015. At the time, Hunter and Cooper were interested in investing in a Mexican energy company with the business executives, the Daily Mail reported.

    SEAN HANNITY: THIS IS THE SINGLE BIGGEST ABUSE OF POWER SCANDAL IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY

    In February 2016, Hunter and Cooper flew on Air Force 2 to Mexico City, where Hunter wrote an email to Magnani that he would be personally attending a meeting between Joe and then-Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. In the same email, Hunter said Magnani had not spoken to him “for months” despite Hunter delivering “on every single thing you’ve ever asked,” which included bringing guests to meet his father.

    “I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration and then you go completely silent,” Hunter wrote in the email. “I don’t know what it is that I did but I’d like to know why I’ve delivered on every single thing you’ve ever asked – and you make me feel like I’ve done something to offend you.”

    Hunter, Joe Biden
    Hunter Biden’s business associates thanked him for introducing them to his father Vice President Joe Biden in emails found on the younger Biden’s laptop. (Kris Connor/WireImage)

    Joe Biden also attended a dinner with Hunter’s business associates from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia at the Georgetown restaurant Café Milano in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 2015, emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop show. One such email from Hunter to Archer shared a guest list for the dinner, which included Burisma’s Pozharskyi, late Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and his wife, Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina, who was in business with Hunter’s Rosemont firm. It is not clear if these individuals ultimately attended the dinner.

    The day after the 2015 meeting, Pozharskyi emailed Hunter thanking him for introducing him to his father.

    Devine reported that Archer is expected to answer questions from the committee about these Café Milano meetings.

    A close associate of Archer’s said he believes it is his “civic duty” to testify before the committee, Devine reported.

    According to Devine, the associate said Archer has “nothing to hide, no revenge to enact nor anyone to protect other than his family and he feels he has been handcuffed by the absurdly bogus [fraud] case into remaining silent. In a forum where he has immunity he can at least start to speak truth.”

    Fox News’ Gillian Turner, Chad Pergram and Jessica Chasmar contributed to this report. 

    Explosive FD-1023 Exposes More Biden Bribery Dirt — And Teases Damning Evidence to Come


    BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 20, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/20/explosive-fd-1023-exposes-more-biden-bribery-dirt-and-teases-damning-evidence-to-come/

    Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Jill Biden

    Author Margot Cleveland profile

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    Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, just released a minimally redacted copy of the FBI’s FD-1023 detailing a confidential human source’s reporting of a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and the Ukrainian business Burisma. According to the FD-1023 summary, Burisma’s owner specifically referenced the firing of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin — the same man Biden bragged about Ukraine firing after his threat to withhold aid from the country while he was vice president.

    After months of pushing the Justice Department and FBI to explain what investigative procedures they had undertaken in response to evidence implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme, Grassley released the unclassified copy of the FD-1023, which documented claims made by the “highly credible” confidential human source (CHS). Grassley had acquired the FD-1023 via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers.

    While some of the information included in the FD-1023 has already been revealed by members of the House who previously reviewed the summary of the CHS’s reporting, the public release provides new explosive details related to the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin. 

    Among the CHS’s conversations with Burisma’s owner Mykola Zlochevsky, one took place shortly after Joe Biden made his first public statement about Shokin “being corrupt.” At the time, according to the CHS, Shokin was investigating Burisma, and Zlochevsky told the CHS that “Hunter will take care of all of those issues through his dad.” 

    Then, following Trump’s election in 2016, the CHS spoke again with Zlochevsky, who expressed dissatisfaction with Trump’s victory but noted that “Shokin had already been fired, and no investigation was currently going on…” Zlochevsky’s statement proves significant because Joe Biden had long claimed he pushed for Shokin’s firing because Shokin was not investigating Burisma — which is the exact opposite of the details summarized in the FD-1023.

    Beyond putting the already known details in black-and-white for the public to read, such as Zlochevsky’s representation that he had 17 recordings of the Bidens and had never paid the “Big Guy” directly, the release of the FD-1023 is significant for another reason: The American public now knows the many details the FBI could have and should have investigated.

    For instance, did Burisma or any other related entity purchase a Texas-based oil and gas company for approximately $20-$30 million during the relevant time period? Were the CHS and his business partner in Kiev in the 2015 and 2016 time period? Did the CHS’s U.S. business partner confirm the details of the meeting? Was the CHS in London during the relevant time in 2019? And did the FBI ever ask the CHS to record his conversations with Zlochevsky or attempt to turn Zlochevsky into an asset? 

    According to the FD-1023 report, in 2019, the CHS had offered to assist Zlochevsky if he wanted to speak to the U.S. government about the Bidens and what Zlochevsky claimed was their coercion of Burisma to pay the bribes. Did anyone ever ask the CHS to contact Zlochevsky? If not, why not?

    The public release of the FD-1023 is significant now for a third reason: It comes on the heels of the IRS whistleblowers’ testimony Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee that suggested the CHS’s reporting corroborates other evidence. 

    During Wednesday’s hours-long hearing, IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler both told lawmakers they had never seen the FD-1023. Significantly, Ziegler then stated: “There’s things that are contained on that document that could further corroborate other information that we might be having an issue corroborating because it could be regarding a foreign official. So, if we have information regarding that in a document or a witness, we can further corroborate later evidence.”

    But because federal law prohibits the discussion of confidential taxpayers’ information, other than through specific procedures, Ziegler did not detail what, if any, information they may have discovered during their investigation into Hunter Biden. Instead, Ziegler said, “if that’s something that we have, we can turn that over to the House Ways and Means Committee.”

    This testimony suggests that the IRS’s investigation likely uncovered evidence the FD-1023 corroborated. With that form now public, both Ziegler and Shapley can study it and assess what documentary material, such as wire transfer reports, they uncovered that is now corroborated. However, that evidence will have to go to the House Ways and Means Committee before it is made public.

    So much for Democrats’ claim that there is no evidence of Joe Biden’s complicity and corruption.


    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.

    Bidens allegedly ‘coerced’ Burisma CEO to pay them millions to help get Ukraine prosecutor fired: FBI form


    The FD-1023 form was released Thursday by Sen. Chuck Grassley

    Brooke Singman

    By Brooke Singman | Fox News | Published July 20, 2023 12:30pm EDT

    Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/grassley-releases-unclassified-fbi-form-containing-details-of-biden-criminal-bribery-scheme-with-burisma-ceo

    Joe Biden and Hunter Biden allegedly “coerced” Burisma CEO Mykola Zlochevsky to pay them millions of dollars in exchange for their help in getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company fired, according to allegations contained in an unclassified FBI document released Thursday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. Grassley said he released the document, which describes an alleged criminal bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a Ukrainian business executive, so that the American people can “read this document for themselves without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats.” 

    Hunter Biden gets off plane with president

    President Biden has snapped at reporters who have asked him about alleged corruption involving him and his son, Hunter Biden. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

    The document in question is an FBI-generated FD-1023 form, which Grassley acquired via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers, according to the senator’s office. 

    EXCLUSIVE: JOE BIDEN ALLEGEDLY PAID $5M BY BURISMA EXECUTIVE AS PART OF A BRIBERY SCHEME, ACCORDING TO FBI DOCUMENT

    That FD-1023 — a confidential human source (CHS) reporting document — reflects the FBI’s interview with a “highly credible” confidential source who detailed multiple meetings and conversations he or she had with a top executive of Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings over the course of several years starting in 2015. Hunter Biden, at the time, sat on the board of Burisma.

    Sen. Chuck Grassley speaks into mircrophone during hearing

    Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wants Americans to “read this document for themselves without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats.” (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    Fox News Digital has reviewed the document, which includes new information, including the identity of the business executive — Burisma CEO  Zlochevsky — and the allegations that he was “coerced” into paying Joe Biden and Hunter Biden millions of dollars to get a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his firm fired. 

    In the form, Zlochevsky tells the source he has “many text messages and ‘recordings’ that show he was coerced to make such payments” to the Bidens.

    https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/07/FD-1023_Senator-Grassley_FINAL.pdf

    Biden has acknowledged that when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin. At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, and at the time, Hunter had a highly lucrative role on the board receiving thousands of dollars per month. The then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion of critical U.S. aid if Shokin was not fired.

    Biden allies maintain the then-vice president pushed for Shokin’s firing due to concerns the Ukrainian prosecutor went easy on corruption, and say that his firing, at the time, was the policy position of the U.S. and international community.

    The unclassified document is dated June 30, 2020, and says the contact with the source was “telephonic.”

    The source reported to the FBI that “in late 2015 or 2016, during the Obama/Biden Administration, CHS was first introduced to officials at Ukraine natural gas business Burisma Holdings through [redacted] Oleksandr Ostapenko.” The form reflects that there is an additional FD-1023 detailing information brought by the source dated Jan. 2, 2018.

    HOUSE GOP DEMAND TRANSCRIBED INTERVIEWS FROM HUNTER BIDEN PROSECUTOR, DOJ, IRS, SECRET SERVICE OFFICIALS

    “CHS and Ostapenko traveled to Ukraine and went to Burisma’s office…the purpose of the meeting was to discuss Burisma’s interest in purchasing a US-based oil and gas business, for purposes of merging it with Burisma for purposes of conducting an IPO in the US,” the form states. “Burisma was willing to purchase a US-based entity for $20-$30 million.”

    The form states that the CHS attended that meeting, as well as Burisma’s CFO Vadim Pojarski and Karina Zlochevsky, the daughter of CEO and founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

    Biden and Zlochevski

    Hunter Biden, left, and Mykola Zlochevsky (Getty Images)

    Fox News Digital has previously reported that Hunter Biden and his business associates had much contact with Pojarskii [Pozharsky] about his role on the board of the company.

    “During the meeting Pojarskii asked CHS whether CHS was aware of Burisma’s Board of Directors. CHS replied ‘no,’ and Pojarski advised the board members included: 1) the former president or prime minister of Poland; and 2) Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

    “Pojarskii said Burisma hired the former president or prime minister of Poland to leverage his contacts in Europe for prospective oil and gas deals,” the form states.

    Burisma said they “hired Hunter Biden ‘to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.’”

    The source asked why Burisma needed his assistance regarding the merger of the U.S.-based company when Biden was on their board, to which Pojarskii replied: “Hunter Biden was not smart, and they wanted to get additional counsel.”

    EXCLUSIVE: PERSON ALLEGING BIDEN CRIMINAL BRIBERY SCHEME IS ‘HIGHLY CREDIBLE’ FBI SOURCE USED SINCE OBAMA ADMIN: SOURCE

    The form jumps to a meeting the source detailed that took place two months later. The source met with Mykola Zlochevsky in Vienna, Austria, outside a coffee shop, along with Ostapenko.

    “CHS recalled this meeting took place around the time Joe Biden made a public statement about (former) Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin being corrupt, and that he should be fired/removed from office,” the form states. “CHS told Zlochevsky that due to Shokin’s investigation into Burisma, which was made public at this time, it would have a substantial negative impact on Burisma’s prospective IPO in the United States.” 

    “Zlochevsky replied something to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry Hunter will take care of those issues through his dad,” the form states, adding that the source “did not ask any further questions about what that specifically meant.” 

    Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden

    Hunter Biden arrives at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2023. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    Zlochevsky went on to say, “Hunter Biden advised Burisma it could raise much more capital if Burisma purchased a larger US-based business that already had a history in the US oil and gas sector.” The source said Zlochevsky mentioned a business in Texas.

    “CHS advised Zlochevsky it would be problematic to raise capital in the US given Shokin’s investigation into Burisma as nobody in the US would invest in a company that was the subject of a criminal investigation,” the form states.

    DOJ KNEW HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP WAS ‘NOT MANIPULATED,’ CONTAINED ‘RELIABLE EVIDENCE’ IN 2019: WHISTLEBLOWER

    “CHS suggested it would be best if Burisma simply litigate the matter in Ukraine, and pay some attorney $50,000,” the form states, but Zlochevsky said Burisma “would likely lose the trial because he could not show that Burisma was innocent.”

    “Zlochevsky also laughed at CHS’s number of $50,000 (not because of the small amounts but because the number contained a ‘5’) and said that ‘it costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden.” 

    “CHS noted that at this time, it was unclear to CHS whether these alleged payments were already made,” the form states.

    Joe Biden's son Hunter's laptop was authenticated by NBC News on May 19

    World Food Program USA Board Chairman Hunter Biden and Vice President Joe Biden. (Paul Morigi/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)

    But the form states that the source told Zlochevsky that “any such payments to the Bidens would complicate matters, and Burisma should hire ‘some normal US oil and gas advisors’ because the Bidens have no experience with the business sector.”

    “Zlochevsky made some comment that although Hunter Biden ‘was stupid, and his [Zlochevsky’s] dog was smarter,’ Zlochevsky needed to keep Hunter Biden [on the board] ‘so everything will be okay,’” the form states.

    The source went on to ask “whether Hunter Biden or Joe Biden told Zlochevsky he should retain Hunter.”

    “Zlochevsky replied: ‘They both did.’”

    The source retired that this was a “mistake,” and that Zlochevsky “should fire Hunter Biden and deal with Shokin’s investigation directly so that the matter” stayed an issue in Ukraine and so that it did not “turn into some international matter,” to which Zlochevsky stressed not to worry and “this thing will go away anyway.”

    “CHS replied that, notwithstanding Shokin’s investigation, it was still a bad decision for Burisma to spend $20-30 million to buy a US business, and that CHS didn’t want to be involved with the Biden matter,” the form states.

    Joe Biden waving with Hunter Biden

    President Biden and his son Hunter Biden. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

    “Zlochevsky responded that he appreciated CHS’s advice, but that ‘it’s too late to change his decision.’”

    “CHS understood this to mean that Zlochevsky had already paid the Bidens, presumably to ‘deal with Shokin,’” the form states.

    “It is remarkable that congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to go after President Biden regardless of the truth, continue to push claims that have been debunked for years and that they themselves have cautioned to take ‘with a grain of salt’ because they could be ‘made up,’” said White House spokesman Ian Sams. “These claims have reportedly been scrutinized by the Trump Justice Department, a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney, and a full impeachment trial of the former President that centered on these very issues, and over and over again, they have been found to lack credibility. It’s clear that congressional Republicans are dead-set on playing shameless, dishonest politics and refuse to let truth get in the way. It is well past time for news organizations to hold them to basic levels of factual accountability for their repeated and increasingly desperate efforts to mislead both the public and the press.”

    The FBI said in a statement that the release of the 1023 risked the safety of a confidential source:

    “Throughout the FBI’s engagements with Congress, we have been guided by our obligation to protect the physical safety of confidential human sources and the integrity of sensitive investigations. We have repeatedly explained to Congress, in correspondence and in briefings, how critical it is to keep this source information confidential. In the face of these significant concerns, the FBI negotiated a resolution with Chairman Comer to provide the information requested in a manner that protects the safety of confidential sources and integrity of investigations.”

    Meanwhile, the form jumps to a “2016/2017 telephone call” the source had with Zlochevsky after the 2016 presidential election. Zlochevsky said he was “not happy Trump won the election.”

    “CHS asked Zlochevsky whether he was concerned about Burisma’s involvement with the Bidens,” the form states. “Zlochevsky stated he didn’t want to pay the Bidens and he was ‘pushed to pay’ them.” 

    The source explained to the FBI agent taking notes of his conversation that the Russian term Zlochevsky used to explain the payments was “poluchili.” The form states that “literally translates to; ‘got it’ or ‘received it’ but is also used in “Russian criminal slang for being ‘forced or coerced to pay.’”

    HUNTER DEMANDED $10M FROM CHINESE ENERGY FIRM BECAUSE ‘BIDENS ARE THE BEST,’ HAVE ‘CONNECTIONS’

    At this point, Shokin had already been fired. Zlochevsky said “nobody would find out about his financial dealings with the Bidens.”

    “CHS then stated, ‘I hope you have some back-up (proof) for your words (namely, that Zlochevsky was ‘forced’ to pay the Bidens).”

    “Zlochevsky replied he has many text messages and ‘recordings’ that show that he was coerced to make such payments,” the form states. “CHS told Zlochevsky he should make certain that he should retain those recordings.”

    The form then jumps to a 2019 telephone call between the source and Ostapenko, in which they discussed “various business matters” unrelated to Burisma.

    “During the call, Zlochevsky asked CHS and/or Ostapenko if they read the recent news reports about the investigations into the Bidens and Burisma, and Zlochevsky jokingly asked if the CHS was an ‘oracle’ (due to CHS’s prior advice that Zlochevsky should not pay the Bidens and instead to hire an attorney to litigate the allegations concerning Shokin’s investigation),” the form states.

    “CHS mentioned Zlochevsky might have difficulty explaining suspicious wire transfers that may evidence any (illicit) payments to the Bidens,” the form states. “Zlochevsky responded he did not send any funds directly to the ‘Big Guy’ (which CHS understood was a reference to Joe Biden).”

    Joe and Hunter Biden

    President Biden and Hunter Biden. (Getty Images)

    The form says CHS asked Zlochevsky how many companies and bank accounts he controlled, to which he responded it would “take them (investigators) 10 years to find the records (i.e. illicit payments to Joe Biden).”

    While the source detailed the conversations with Zlochevsky, he also told the FBI that “it is very common for business men in post-Soviet countries to brag or show-off” and said it is “extremely common for businesses in Russia and Ukraine to make ‘bribe’ payments to various government officials.”

    As for recordings and text messages of conversations with the Bidens, the source said that Zlochevsky said he had “a total of 17 recordings” involving the Bidens; “two of the recordings included Joe Biden, and the remaining 15 recordings only included Hunter Biden.”

    The source said those recordings “evidence Zlochevsky was somehow coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure” Shokin was fired.

    The source said Zlochevsky also had “two documents (which CHS understood to be wire transfer statements, bank records, etc.), that evidence some payment(s) to the Bidens were made, presumably in exchange for Shokin’s firing.” 

    “For the better part of a year, I’ve been pushing the Justice Department and FBI to provide details on its handling of very significant allegations from a trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme,” Grassley said. “While the FBI sought to obfuscate and redact, the American people can now read this document for themselves, without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats, thanks to brave and heroic whistleblowers. What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long?”

    Grassley added: “The Justice Department and FBI have failed to come clean, but Chairman Comer and I intend to find out.” 

    Comer subpoenaed the FBI to turn over the unredacted document to Congress. The FBI did not comply, but instead, made accommodations to allow lawmakers to review the document in a secure setting last month. 

    “The FBI’s Biden Bribery Record tracks closely with the evidence uncovered by the Oversight Committee’s Biden family influence peddling investigation,” House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer said. “In the FBI’s record, the Burisma executive claims that he didn’t pay the ‘big guy’ directly but that he used several bank accounts to conceal the money. That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money.” 

    Comer in front of billboard of New York Post Hunter Biden frontpage

    Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 8, 2023. (Anna Rose Layden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    Comer added: “At our hearing with IRS whistleblowers, they testified that they had never seen or heard of this record during the Biden criminal investigation, despite having potentially corroborating evidence. Given the misconduct and politicization at the Department of Justice, the American people must be able to read this record for themselves. I thank Senator Grassley for providing much needed transparency to the American people.”

    Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.

    Top 3 Things Tucker Carlson Says the Regime Doesn’t Want You Talking About


    BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | JULY 19, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/19/top-3-things-tucker-carlson-says-the-regime-doesnt-want-you-talking-about/

    Tucker Carlson discusses three things

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    “If you want to know what really, really matters, to [the regime], and to you, and to the future of the country, consider the things that you are not allowed to say,” Tucker Carlson told his audience of young people during a Turning Point USA speech on the heels of his interviews with Republican primary candidates in Iowa.

    These unsayable things, Carlson said, are easy to pinpoint because wrong-think seems to be the only “crime” that’s consistently and seriously penalized in contemporary America. Rapists and murderers go unprosecuted in American blue cities. “[B]urning down buildings, impoverishing people, starting totally counterproductive wars we can’t win that kill a lot of our citizens, [and] leaving the border open so 7 million people can walk across” are “never punished.” 

    So what are the three topics Carlson says have been deemed forbidden speech by the media, White House, and virtually every member of the American gentry class? “One of them’s the war in Ukraine, another’s Covid, and, of course, the third is Jan. 6.” 

    War in Ukraine 

    Every uniparty politician, corporate media outlet, and mega-corporation insists that if you don’t “hate” Russia and support America funneling billions of dollars to defend a nation ruled by a corrupt, oligarchical government, you must love Vladimir Putin and oppose “democracy.” 

    “It’s not a criminal act not to hate somebody,” Carlson said. He pointed out that the number of Americans murdered by Russians is in the “range” of “zero.” Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Americans die every year at the hands of Mexican cartels and the drugs they smuggle into our country. Yet the media and our government want us to be more preoccupied with a foreign war than the deaths of American citizens here at home. 

    Carlson explained that so far, America has utterly failed to be a leader in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, encouraging the war instead of facilitating peace. “If you’re the leader, the last thing you do is sow more chaos,” Carlson said. Yet the White House “with the full participation of the Republican Party” has fueled and prolonged a bloody war — and you had better not question it.

    “Foreign policy is the one big thing” that’s not subject to “voter control,” Carlson said. Americans have a right to weigh in on things like the war in Ukraine and tell the federal government: “This is my country and you’re doing this in my name, with my money, and potentially my children.” 

    Washington, however, doesn’t believe in “the public [signing] off on wars … and that’s exactly why they like it,” Carlson added. If you try to question Washington’s lucrative wars, you’re told to “shut up.” And you, “an American citizen who loves your country [and] whose ancestors fought to defend it,” are accused of disloyalty by people who don’t care about America at all.

    Covid

    During and following the years of Covid tyranny, Big Tech companies (often at the behest of the federal government) censored anyone, including doctors and sitting members of Congress, who discussed the numerous civil liberties violations, the highly plausible lab-leak theory, the devastation of lockdowns, failed vaccines, the inefficacy of cloth masks, and vaccine injuries. 

    “Every organization in American life … from your government, to the entire media, [and] in some cases, your church,” told Americans that if you want to be a “good person” you’ll follow the Covid rules, Carlson said. In the case of the Covid shots, you had to pipe down and take it — without really knowing what was in it or what the long-term outlook would be.

    Now we know the staggering number of people who appear to be vaccine injured, as Carlson pointed out. Yet the powers that be continue to gaslight the public anytime someone tries to discuss adverse reactions to any of the Covid shots.

    “This [was] a moral test, and if you want[ed] to pass, you obey[ed],” said Carlson, adding that those who stood against Covid authoritarianism were persecuted and labeled societal “outlaws.” 

    Jan. 6 

    Carlson recalled how shortly after Jan. 6, 2021 people began claiming the demonstration was a “racist insurrection.” At the time, Carlson pointed out it neither had anything to do with race nor involved “armed people try[ing] to overthrow the government,” but he was told, yet again, to “shut up.” He even found himself labeled a “racist insurrectionist.” 

    The people who protested on Jan. 6, were, in Carlson’s words, “grandmas with diabetes and a lot of debt.” Why were these everyday Americans so angry? Well, the American gentry class refused to allow the country to talk honestly about why a massive swath of the populace was so enraged that they took a “bus from Tennessee to go jump up and down in front of the Capitol.” 

    We were never allowed to consider how “Biden won by 81 million votes — 15 million more than Barack Obama, which seems like a lot considering [Biden] didn’t campaign and he can’t talk.” We also weren’t allowed to consider whether electronic voting machines or unmonitored ballot drop boxes were compromised, Carlson added. Those who tried to raise concerns about the 2020 election, which sparked Jan. 6, were “deplatformed,” “debanked,” “bankrupted,” “fired,” and essentially “hounded out of public life in America.”  

    Thought Criminals Are Our ‘North Star’

    Carlson warned of distractions in the news cycle. While we must push back against things like radical transgender theory, stories related to that and other hot-topic issues can also be used by the left to manipulate our priorities, he said. “I don’t think there’s a single Democratic member of Congress who cares at all about trans rights,” Carlson explained, theorizing that many of these daily news stories are “designed to take people like me and send us off into a screaming fit.” 

    Instead, “look around and ask … what are the topics that no one’s even pushing back on?” If you are really interested in truth-seeking and you want to locate “the North Star” in confusing, disordered, post-industrial America, then you need to look for the “thought criminals.” 


    Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

    Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Some Gave Nothing

    A.F. BRANCO | on July 12, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-some-gave-nothing/

    Biden publicly releases classified info that the U.S. and Ukraine are now low on ammunition.

    Ukraine and U.S. Low On Ammo
    Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023

    DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

    Grassley Probes Weiss Deputy’s Role In Obstructing Biden Investigation


    BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 10, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/10/grassley-probes-weiss-deputys-role-in-obstructing-biden-investigation/

    Chuck Grassley

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    A Delaware assistant U.S. attorney was briefed in October 2020 that a confidential human source (CHS) had reported Hunter and Joe Biden each received $5 million in bribes, Sen. Chuck Grassley revealed Sunday in a letter to Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss. A source familiar with that briefing has now confirmed to The Federalist that the Pittsburgh office told the Delaware office the CHS’s reporting appeared credible and merited further investigation. That added detail increases the significance of Grassley’s Sunday letter and his question to Weiss about whether his deputy thwarted the investigation.

    “On October 23, 2020, Justice Department and FBI Special Agents from the Pittsburgh Field Office briefed Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, one of your top prosecutors, and FBI Special Agents from the Baltimore Field Office with respect to the contents of the FBI-generated FD-1023 alleging a criminal bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden,” Grassley’s letter said. “What steps have the Justice Department and FBI taken to investigate the allegations?” the Iowa senator asked before noting his concerns about Wolf’s involvement.

    Grassley then highlighted the numerous ways Wolf appeared to have obstructed the investigation into Hunter Biden’s potentially criminal business activities. “IRS whistleblowers have affirmed that AUSA Wolf prevented investigators from seeking information about Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s criminal business arrangements,” Grassley said, adding that she also “frustrated investigative efforts” by the IRS agents to question Hunter Biden’s business partner, Rob Walker, about Joe Biden.

    Wolf also refused to allow agents to search Joe Biden’s guest house, even though there was “more than enough probable cause,” and she prevented investigators from searching a storage unit used by the now-president’s son, the letter said. In fact, Grassley stressed, Wolf alerted Hunter Biden’s lawyers to the investigators’ interest in the storage unit.

    Given what Grassley called Wolf’s “questionable and obstructive conduct,” he asked Weiss whether Wolf had taken “similar proactive measures to frustrate any investigation into the FD-1023.” Grassley also probed Weiss’s knowledge of the accusations leveled against Wolf and how he has handled them. From Grassley’s questions, he seems to believe Wolf knows whether the DOJ buried evidence that Joe and Hunter Biden received bribes from the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma. 

    Former Attorney General William Barr had previously confirmed that the FD-1023 summary of the CHS’s intel had been sent to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office for further investigation, following then-Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady’s conclusion that the reporting was not Russian disinformation. Barr later also said the Delaware office had been briefed on the FD-1023 material. Until now, however, it was unclear who had received that information. 

    Knowing that Wolf and FBI special agents from the Baltimore field office received a briefing on the contents of the FD-1023 allows congressional oversight committees to probe precisely who investigated the CHS’s allegations and how — or if not, why. Did Wolf direct agents to disregard the FD-1023? Did anyone else? If so, why? Who was involved in the decision? Who knew of the decision?

    While we do not know the answers to those questions yet, we do know from the Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers that they were not informed of the FD-1023. As Grassley noted in his letter, the IRS agents were excluded from the meeting with the Pittsburgh field office. We also know from the IRS whistleblowers’ congressional testimony and supplemental statements that they first learned of the FD-1023 when Barr publicly stated the information had been sent to Delaware for further investigation. 

    Who decided to exclude the IRS agents from the meeting? Who decided to keep them in the dark about the FD-1023 and the information contained in it? Was anyone from the Baltimore field office adequately skilled to investigate the CHS’s reporting? As members of the IRS’s International Tax and Financial Crimes group, both the IRS whistleblowers working with the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office were. So why were they cut out of the case? 

    Following the release of Grassley’s letter, a source familiar with the Delaware briefing told The Federalist that in addition to summarizing the contents of the FD-1023, the Pittsburgh office requested the FBI provide FD-1023 access to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office and the agents out of the Baltimore field office working on the case. The Pittsburgh office also told Wolf and the FBI agents present during the briefing that the information contained in the FD-1023 bore indicia of credibility and they recommended it be further investigated.

    But was it investigated? Grassley asked precisely that question to Weiss. 

    The Iowa senator also asked Weiss when he became aware of the October 2020 briefing and why the IRS agents were excluded from that meeting. Grassley further inquired of the Delaware U.S. attorney whether the scope of the “alleged ‘ongoing investigation’ include[s] criminal bribery with respect to the alleged criminal scheme between a foreign national and then-Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden?”

    In posing these questions, Grassley noted that from information provided to his office, “potentially hundreds of Justice Department and FBI officials have had access to the FD-1023 at issue.” This comment proves intriguing because in an earlier letter, Grassley had noted that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten had opened an assessment that FBI headquarters used in September 2020 to falsely label derogatory information about Hunter Biden as disinformation. According to Grassley’s letter, the FBI HQ team then “placed their findings with respect to whether reporting was disinformation in a restricted access sub-file reviewable only by the particular agents responsible for uncovering the specific information.”

    Grassley’s recent comment suggests that contrary to the earlier assumption, it may have been other derogatory information labeled misinformation and not the FD-1023. Or possibly the FD-1023 had been at one time restricted and then made more broadly available. But if it wasn’t the FD-1023 that Auten buried, that means there was even more derogatory information about Hunter Biden that the FBI failed to investigate. What was that information?

    Grassley’s letter may raise more questions than it answers, but it also establishes the senator is nearing the end of the trail that leads to the individuals responsible for deciding to — or not to — investigate the FD-1023 and the allegations that the now-president of the United States accepted a $5 million bribe from a corrupt Ukrainian. 


    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.

    More on the Hunter Biden Cover-up Deal


    Sen. Ron Johnson to Newsmax: Hunter Plea Deal Attempt to Keep Truth From Public

    By Brian Freeman    |   Tuesday, 20 June 2023 02:46 PM EDT

    The Hunter Biden plea deal for failing to pay federal income tax and illegally possessing a weapon is highly suspicious and appears to be an attempt to keep the truth from the American public, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Tuesday.

    “The timing is more than interesting — just as we find out about a credible source claiming a $5 million to $10 million bribery scheme and [Hunter’s business associate] Devon Archer poised to testify before the House committee,” Johnson told “National Report.”

    “Is this the Justice Department’s attempt to try and seal this all up and keep the truth from the American public? This is what I fear.”……………..

    For the rest of the article go to https://www.newsmax.com/us/donald-trump-classified-documents-trial-date/2023/06/20/id/1124171/

    Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Is A Coverup Disguised As Justice

    BY: CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD | JUNE 20, 2023

    Hunter Biden

    To hear President Joe Biden’s supporters tell it, Hunter Biden was finally held accountable Tuesday, and the long national nightmare of him facing any scrutiny at all can finally end.

    This accountability for the president’s son, however, was little more than a chiding for offenses that have virtually nothing to do with the serious allegations the Department of Justice should actually be pursuing — like giving a speeding ticket to “the getaway driver after a bank robbery,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley remarked.

    Over the past two weeks alone, congressional Republicans have revealed a paid, “highly credible” FBI informant’s report that $10 million was paid in bribes to Hunter and his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, by Ukrainian oligarch and Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

    Zlochevsky called the then-vice president “the big guy,” a nickname also used in the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt China dealings. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed the existence of two audio recordings Zlochevsky reportedly made of Joe Biden (and another 15 he made of Hunter) discussing their dealings, which Zlochevsky reportedly kept as a sort of “insurance policy” that he’d get what he was paying for.

    What was he paying for? Emails from the chairman of Burisma (revealed three years ago) show “the ultimate purpose” of “the deliverables” was “to close down for any cases/pursuits against [Burisma’s president] in Ukraine.” That case was indeed closed down, when Vice President Biden pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor pursuing Burisma.

    Congressional investigators also revealed that Hunter helped Burisma executives open an account for their transactions at Satabank,……….

    For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-plea-deal-is-a-coverup-disguised-as-justice/

    Hunter Biden’s Wrist Slap On Gun, Tax Crimes Is A Complete Smokescreen

    BY: JORDAN BOYD | JUNE 20, 2023

    Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Hunter Biden at inauguration in 2021

    President Joe Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice is so desperate to distract from Republicans’ exposé of the Biden family bribery scandal that it finally brought a handful of weak charges against Hunter Biden for his tax and gun crimes.

    Under the guise of serving equal justice, the DOJ announced on Tuesday that it would charge the president’s youngest son with two federal misdemeanor counts for failing to pay his taxes and one federal felony charge for possessing a gun while being an illegal drug user and addict.

    Hunter’s lawyers are scrambling to declare “the five-year investigation” into their client as “resolved.” Corporate media like NBC News, similarly, claimed the DOJ’s “resolution suggests that prosecutors did not find cause to file charges related to Hunter Biden’s dealings with foreign entities or other wrongdoing.”

    Nothing could be further from the truth. Just like when it strategically timed its political arrest of a Republican congressman to coincide with a GOP press conference detailing evidence of Biden corruption, the DOJ is working overtime to ensure that Hunter serves as a distraction from the bigger Biden problem.

    Since at least 2021 when Politico exposed records and receipts, the public has known that Hunter, who has an extensive and public history of illicit drug use, appeared to lie about this drug use on the Firearms Transaction Record he filled out during a revolver purchase in 2018.

    Government officials such as local police, the Secret Service, FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, likely knew about the lie earlier than 2021 since the .38 revolver soon became the center of a missing gun investigation, in which the Secret Service reportedly tried to interfere on behalf of the Biden family.

    Similarly, most of the preliminary federal investigation into Hunter’s 2017 and 2018 financial wrongdoings was completed by 2020.

    Yet, U.S. Attorney David Weiss delayed bringing charges against Hunter because, as Politico described, “the investigation would become a months-long campaign issue” that would hurt Biden’s presidential chances. It wasn’t until Republicans’ increasingly evidenced probe into the Biden bribery scheme, which the Biden administration continues to hamper, that Weiss finally decided to target the president’s son.

    That timing is not a coincidence………….

    For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-wrist-slap-on-gun-tax-crimes-is-a-complete-smokescreen/

    Hunter Biden’s Charges Are Nothing But A Diversion

    BY: BRETT TOLMAN | JUNE 20, 2023

    Hunter Biden

    What a breathtaking and damaging act of misdirection. After five years of investigation into a host of criminal acts by Hunter Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) finally brought charges against the president’s wayward son. But while the DOJ hopes the public focuses on words like “charges” and “guilty” to form an image of accountability for all, it’s letting Hunter walk away with the kind of slap on the wrist most defendants can only dream about from inside a prison cell.

    In the same breath in which DOJ announced it was filing charges against Hunter Biden, it also stated that the case had already been resolved. Hunter will plead guilty to and serve probation for two tax fraud misdemeanors while a felony firearm possession charge will disappear after he completes pretrial diversion. It’s a resolution that if the defendant’s last name weren’t Biden would sound almost too good to be true.

    The feds are notoriously tough on firearms. Nationally, for example, 94.2 percent of federal firearms convictions in 2022 involved some prison time, and the median sentence was 39 months.

    Of course, Hunter won’t even have to end up with a conviction. This is an even rarer event. In 2021, fewer than 1 percent of cases filed by U.S. attorneys in federal court resulted in the kind of pretrial diversion offered to Hunter.

    It’s that disparity between Hunter’s case and everybody else’s that’s the true problem, not necessarily the sentence itself. After all, the law in question, which prohibits individuals suffering from an illegal drug addiction from possessing a firearm, likely violates the Second Amendment. Plus, diversion programs across the country have improved public safety at lower cost to taxpayers than prison alternatives. 

    But that’s clearly not how things are shaking out in practice at DOJ, and President Biden has expressed an ongoing willingness to harshly punish firearms offenses. His DOJ is defending this law in court, and he signed a law in 2021 to increase maximum penalties from 10 years to 15 years in prison. Apparently, President Biden does not believe offenders should be treated with kid gloves — at least when it’s not his kid.

    Indeed, if Hunter’s were a typical case, ………….

    For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-charges-are-nothing-but-a-diversion/

    Everything We Know About The Biden Bribery Scheme From The FBI Document


    BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JUNE 16, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/16/everything-we-know-about-the-biden-bribery-scheme-from-the-fbi-document/

    Joe Biden

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    Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer of Kentucky dropped a bombshell subpoena last month demanding the FBI hand over a document alleging a bribery scheme between President Joe Biden and a “foreign national.”

    On May 3, the pair of GOP lawmakers requested congressional access to an unclassified FD-1023 form, a document used by the bureau to catalog information from a confidential human source. The FBI record suggests President Biden took a foreign bribe during his time in the Obama administration.

    After more than a month-long back-and-forth between agency leadership and Capitol Hill wherein House Republicans even prepared contempt proceedings for FBI Director Christopher Wray, members of Congress were finally able to review the document Thursday. Here’s everything we know about the record in question.

    Confidential Human Source Is ‘Highly Credible’

    The confidential human source (CHS) behind the FD-1023 is reportedly a “highly credible” informant with an agency tenure stretching back more than a decade. According to Fox News, the whistleblower informant has collaborated “in multiple investigative matters” with the FBI since the Obama administration, with consistent reviews for credibility.

    “The confidential human source who provided information about then Vice President Biden being involved in a criminal bribery scheme is a trusted, highly credible informant who has been used by the FBI for over 10 years and has been paid over six figures,” Chairman Comer told reporters last week.

    Contrary to MSNBC’s claim that “All roads lead to [Rudy] Giuliani” in the sourcing for the document, individuals familiar with the investigation told The Federalist the FD-1023 document came independent of information provided by the former New York City mayor.

    Allegations Date Back to 2017

    In addition to researching the cache of incriminating intelligence on the Biden family Giuliani sent to the FBI, agents searched the FBI’s databases and discovered a related FD-1023 from 2017. That prompted agents to re-interview the CHS and uncover details about the Burisma bribery scandal, resulting in the FD-1023 dated June 30, 2020.

    Bidens Allegedly Took $10 Million From Burisma Executive

    Grassley spoke in a Monday floor speech about the “foreign national” who allegedly bribed the Biden family, and who has since been identified by people familiar with the matter as Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma. The Ukrainian energy firm showered Hunter Biden in excess compensation on its corporate board while his father served as the “public face” of White House policy towards Ukraine.

    The CHS summarized earlier meetings with Zlochevsky in the FD-1023, claiming the Bidens “coerced” the foreign businessman to pay the multimillion-dollar bribes. Zlochevsky had been trying to shut down government investigations into his Ukrainian energy firm. The energy tycoon allegedly paid $5 million to then-Vice President Joe Biden, referred to as the “Big Guy” by Zlochevsky in the FD-1023, and $5 million to Hunter.

    According to a report from Grassley and Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in September 2020, Zlochevsky had separately paid a $7 million bribe to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to shut down another probe.

    In 2018, Biden bragged about his lead role in the termination of Ukraine’s top prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.

    Grassley: There Are Tapes

    While the DOJ appeared to try to drown out coverage of the Biden bribery scheme with the unprecedented indictment of former President Donald Trump, Grassley reinjected the White House scandal into the news by disclosing the existence of audio recordings on Monday.

    “According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses 15 audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden,” Grassley said. Another two recordings are reportedly calls between Zlochevsky and then-Vice President Biden, for 17 recordings in “total.”

    Grassley said Zlochevsky kept the tapes “as a sort of insurance policy,” and noted that the form also suggested “then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden.”

    House Republicans who reviewed the document also say Hunter Biden pressed Burisma to purchase an American oil company. In 2016, the Ukrainian firm ultimately took over a Canadian firm’s shares to buy into a joint venture with the American company Cub Energy.

    AG Barr Referred Investigation To Delaware

    Shortly after FBI Director Wray allowed members of the House Oversight Committee access to the FD-1023, Democrat Ranking Member Jamie Raskin sought to dismiss Republican allegations of corruption with a statement. An investigation into Biden bribery, Raskin said, had previously been shut down under Attorney General Bill Barr during the Trump administration.

    “In August 2020, Attorney General Barr and his hand-picked U.S. Attorney signed off on closing the assessment,” Raskin said.

    In an exclusive interview with The Federalist, however, the former attorney general debunked Raskin’s assertion.

    “On the contrary,” Barr said, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”


    Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

    The Bidens ‘Coerced’ Burisma To Pay $10 Million In Bribes, Says Credible FBI Source


    BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JUNE 15, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/15/the-bidens-coerced-burisma-to-pay-10-million-in-bribes-says-credible-fbi-source/

    Joe Biden standing with Ukraine

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    The Bidens allegedly “coerced” a foreign national to pay them $10 million in bribes, according to individuals familiar with the investigation into the FBI’s handling of the FD-1023 confidential human source report. What, if anything, agents did to investigate these explosive claims remains unknown, however, with sources telling The Federalist the FBI continues to stonewall.

    On Monday, Sen. Chuck Grassley revealed a foreign national — identified by individuals with knowledge of the matter as Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky — allegedly possessed 17 recordings implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal. While 15 of the audio recordings consisted of phone calls between Zlochevsky and Hunter Biden, two were of calls the Ukrainian had with then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to the FD-1023.

    The Federalist has now learned the FD-1023 reported the CHS saying the Bidens “coerced” Zlochevsky to pay the bribes. Sources familiar with the investigation also explained the context of Zlochevsky’s statements, and that context further bolsters the CHS’s reporting.

    In the FD-1023 from June 30, 2020, the confidential human source summarized earlier meetings he had with Zlochevsky. According to the CHS, in the 2015-2016 timeframe, the CHS, who was providing advice to Zlochevsky, told the Burisma owner to stay away from the Bidens. Then, after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential contest, the CHS asked Zlochevsky if he was upset Trump won. 

    Zlochevsky allegedly told the CHS he was dismayed by Trump’s victory, fearing an investigation would reveal his payments to the Biden family, which included a $5 million payment to Hunter Biden and a $5 million payment to Joe Biden. According to the CHS, the Burisma executive bemoaned the situation, claiming the Bidens had “coerced” him into paying the bribes. 

    The CHS responded that he hoped Zlochevsky had taken precautions to protect himself. Zlochevsky then allegedly detailed the steps he had taken to avoid detection, stressing he had never paid the “Big Guy” directly and that it would take some 10 years to unravel the various money trails. It was only then that Zlochevsky mentioned the audio recordings he had made of the conversations he had with Hunter and Joe Biden, according to the CHS.

    The broader context of this conversation adds to the plausibility of Zlochevsky’s claims that he possessed recordings implicating the Bidens. And we already know from Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer that the FBI considered the CHS, who relayed Zlochevsky’s claims to the FBI, a “highly credible” source.

    Further, according to individuals familiar with the investigation, the FBI admitted the CHS’s intel was unrelated to the information Rudy Giuliani had provided the Western District of Pennsylvania’s U.S. attorney’s office — the office then-Attorney General William Barr had tasked with reviewing any new information related to Ukraine. 

    Sources told The Federalist that investigators out of the Pittsburgh office, in addition to reviewing Giuliani’s information, searched internal FBI databases and came across an earlier FD-1023 related to the CHS. That earlier FD-1023 then led to agents questioning the CHS on June 30, 2020, uncovering the details concerning Burisma’s alleged bribery of the Bidens. 

    What the FBI did to investigate the allegations is unknown, with sources telling The Federalist the bureau refused to either confirm or deny that the DOJ under Barr sent the FD-1023 to Delaware for further investigation. On the contrary, the FBI allowed Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, to falsely represent to Americans that Barr and Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady had closed the investigation. Raskin’s deceit, tolerated by the FBI, forced Barr to publicly correct the record

    The FBI is also refusing to provide any information on what, if any, steps it took to investigate the detailed claims contained in the FD-1023. But sources familiar with investigative procedures maintain there was insufficient time between the June 30, 2020, interview of the CHS and the FBI headquarters’ closing of an assessment related to the FD-1023 in August 2020 to properly probe the matter. “They couldn’t have done much,” one source said.

    There is also no independent confirmation from Delaware indicating any investigative steps were taken regarding the FD-1023. Agents in Delaware “could have sat on it,” according to one individual familiar with the investigation. 

    While the FBI’s efforts to unwind the pay-to-play scheme seem to have been nonexistent, banking records released in May by the House Oversight Committee show congressional investigators are unraveling the complex web behind the Biden family business. Those records provide concrete evidence of a pattern of public corruption involving foreign nationals, with Joe Biden at the helm. There are still more banking records to review, along with the many details recently discovered when the whistleblower came forward with the FD-1023. 

    Apparently, Zlochevsky wasn’t far from the mark when he said it would take 10 years to unravel the complex payment path that led to Joe Biden.


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

    EXCLUSIVE: Bill Barr Confirms Rep. Jamie Raskin Lied About Biden Family Corruption Investigation


    BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JUNE 07, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/07/exclusive-bill-barr-confirms-rep-jamie-raskin-lied-about-biden-family-corruption-investigation/

    William Barr with Christopher Wray in the background

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    “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.

    How Far Will Corporate Media Go to Cover for And Re-Elect Joe Biden?


    BY: JONATHAN S. TOBIN | APRIL 28, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/28/how-far-will-corporate-media-go-to-cover-for-and-re-elect-joe-biden/

    President Biden Delivers Remarks to State Department Employees
    The president’s press conference cheat sheet raises serious questions about journalistic ethics as well as his declining mental state.

    Author Jonathan S. Tobin profile

    JONATHAN S. TOBIN

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    Like just about anything else that undermines the Democrats’ preferred narratives, the Getty Images photo that revealed that President Joe Biden’s responses to questions at his joint press conference with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol earlier this week were scripted went mostly unreported throughout the corporate press. And, compared to the damage done by the out-of-control spending and woke policies at home and incoherent foreign policy abroad pursued by Biden, perhaps it isn’t earth-shaking that he needs cheat sheets on those rare occasions when his handlers allow him to field live questions from the press.

    We’ve already seen plenty of evidence that the 80-year-old commander-in-chief requires printed cards with detailed instructions to navigate public events. He spent most of the 2020 presidential campaign doing virtual events; the press and public were given little or no access to him. That’s continued since he entered the White House.

    Starting from his first meeting with his first formal press conference in March 2021, he has been carrying such cards with him in such settings. In March 2022, he was caught holding a card with answers to possible questions about the war in Ukraine. And in both a June 2022 event with wind industry executives and then a November 2022 summit in Indonesia, the cameras were able to see the cue cards he carried that told him precisely what to do, with phrases like “You enter,” “You take your seat,” “You thank participants,” and “You depart.” And to the consternation of his handlers, sometimes he reads the stage instructions aloud.

    But this week’s cheat sheet goes beyond the usual embarrassment about an octogenarian president who is unable to perform without a script and often incapable of following the instructions he’s given.

    It’s one thing for the White House staff to tell the president what to do or even to supply him with answers to possible questions that he can’t be relied upon to remember without a script in front of him. It’s quite another when members of the White House press corps are actively colluding in the charade. And that is what the photo of his presser cheat sheet revealed.

    The card labeled “Question #1” in the “Reporter Q & A” showed a picture of Los Angeles Times White House correspondent Courtney Subramanian (followed by the phonetic guide to pronouncing her name) and then the text of a question about semiconductor manufacturing.

    Biden duly called upon Subramanian, who then did ask a question about semiconductors, though not the exact same question that was on his card. In any event, Biden followed the script and gave her the answer to the question he thought he was getting rather than the one she posed.

    It’s generally no secret what questions reporters are liable to ask, since most follow the dictates of the news cycle. And while the tradition of White House pressers has generally called for senior reporters for major outlets to be given priority to ask questions, other presidents have been comfortable enough in public to be able to choose for themselves and to be able to answer without scripts or notes.

    A New Low for the Press

    But the question this incident poses is far more serious than the fact that Biden can’t maneuver through a public event without minute instructions.

    The card shows that Subramanian is submitting her questions in advance of the presser. And it is likely that others who are called upon are required to do the same. That means that even when his staff allows Biden to face the press in live events — and he has held fewer press conferences than any president in the last 30 years — what we are seeing is something along the lines of a Kabuki play and not anything that previous generations would have recognized as an actual opportunity for the press to get real answers about the issues of the day.

    This is appalling not just because it shows Biden is incapable of behaving as all of his predecessors have done and submit regularly to unscripted grilling from an often-adversarial press corps. Given his age and his inability to get through public appearances without all manners of gaffes and evidence of confusion, what the cheat sheets demonstrate is that the corporate media considers itself obligated to assist the White House in a deceitful show aimed at demonstrating Biden is capable of governing, when that is not the case.

    That goes beyond the unwillingness of virtually any member of the current White House press corps other than Fox News’ Peter Doocy to pose tough questions. It means they have abandoned even the pretense that they are there to hold the administration accountable and are instead merely the media auxiliaries of the Democratic Party.

    Even more than just this disinterest in basic journalistic ethics, this kind of cooperation shows the lengths to which some reporters and their bosses are willing to go to cover up Biden’s incapacity to serve.

    Part of a Pattern

    The willingness of the press to go into the tank for Democrats is nothing new.

    Last fall, legacy media journalists covered up the extent of Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s incapacity in the wake of a massive stroke. Their lies were only revealed when, in the sole debate of that race, Fetterman demonstrated that, even with electronic aids, he had trouble comprehending questions and answering them in a coherent fashion. His recent return to the Senate after spending several weeks in a hospital to be treated for severe depression showed that there was little improvement, but even now the corporate media treat any mention of his problems as evidence of bad manners or prejudice against the disabled rather than a justified concern about a senator who cannot fulfill his duties.

    Biden’s announcement of his intention to run for re-election next year puts this problem in clear focus. It’s impossible for citizens to judge whether it is wise to elect a man already clearly in decline to serve until he is 86 when the people whose job it is to tell the truth about the government are reduced to supporting actors in a show aimed at covering up the truth.

    This transcends the longstanding problem of liberal media bias. Like the press’s conniving to spread the Russia-collusion hoax and their assistance in the silencing of the Hunter Biden laptop story, playing along with the Biden show is clear evidence of corruption. It means it is impossible to believe anything that reporters who play this game write or say. It also means that, in the absence of objective medical tests that are made public and which the White House has shown no interest in conducting, no serious person can possibly accept the assurances about Biden’s mental acuity that we are being asked to believe.


    Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.

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