Perfect Timing: Mich. Gov. Whitmer Warns of Coming COVID Spike; New Lockdowns Likely?

Editor 1
-
0
Perfect Timing: Mich. Gov. Whitmer Warns of Coming COVID Spike; New Lockdowns Likely?

(Headline USA) Just in time for Election Day, Michigan’s Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer claimed Wednesday that her state has more confirmed cases of the coronavirus than ever.

She noted a sharp increase since the state Supreme Court rebuffed her sweeping lockdown orders earlier this month, declaring the authoritarian measures unconstitutional.

The number of COVID-19 cases had been gradually rising for months prior to the Oct. 2 ruling, from a seven-day average of 119 in June up to 1,818—nearly double.

But despite the misleading efforts by left-wing media to hype cases, the recovery rate has continued to rise, and the risk of serious health impacts or death have remained low.

Virus-related hospitalizations, roughly 1,000, are double what they were a month ago but about a quarter of the April peak.

After facing considerable backlash, Whitmer had previously loosened economic restrictions and allowed schools to reopen.

But she and other Democrat governors in battleground states have continued to hint at the prospect of politically motivated relapses leading to further lockdowns that could cast the Nov. 3 election into turmoil.

It is unclear whether Whitmer would attempt to close polling places altogether or if she would have the authority to do so.

“These numbers are moving in the wrong direction,” she said during a news conference in which she did not indicate whether another lockdown may be necessary.

“We are in a dangerous moment where there’s the possibility of it just becoming community spread that becomes out of control,” she continued. “We’re seeing that in a lot of our neighboring states. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Also Wednesday, a chiropractor in western Michigan challenged the state’s face covering rule, saying Whitmer’s health department has no authority to make it mandatory.

It is one of the first lawsuits since the Whitmer administration issued new orders following the defeat at the high court.

The suit, filed in the Court of Claims, claims the health agency can regulate gatherings under state law but cannot order masks, which are widely promoted as a way to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Semlow Peak Performance Chiropractic in Grand Haven. The Ottawa County health department told the clinic that it must follow the state order.

“We live in a representative republic and are not ruled by one person,” owner Kirk Semlow said. “My business is not a health threat to anyone, and we take appropriate precautions in providing our services to patients.”

Patients are told that masks are optional, though most wear them, attorney David Kallman said.

“It’s the principle of it,” Kallman said. “They just can’t take a statute, which gives a narrow scope of authority, and apply it in 15 other different ways. Go to the Legislature and get a law passed that says people need to wear masks.”

Whitmer’s political appointees in the health department have continued to flout the legal implications, claiming that their “emergency” authority superceded that of the courts and the legislature.

Spokeswoman Lynn Sutfin said the health department is confident that the order is lawful.

Whitmer urged the Republican-led Legislature, which challenged her former executive orders in court after she extended a state of emergency without their input, to “recognize the science and the importance” of the restrictions.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

New ‘Borat’ Movie Seeks to Humiliate Giuliani w/ Staged Bedroom Scene

Editor 1
-
0
New ‘Borat’ Movie Seeks to Humiliate Giuliani w/ Staged Bedroom Scene

(Headline USA) As Rudy Giuliani leads the way in exposing the REAL misdeeds of the Biden family—including possible evidence of pedophilia on Hunter Biden‘s abandoned laptop—a Hollywood film aims to take the air out of the former New York City mayor’s allegations.

Giuliani—who has served recently as President Donald Trump’s personal attorney and point-man on the Bidens’ Burisma scandal—was reportedly set up to be humiliated in a boudoir scene for Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat sequel, which is due for release on Friday via Amazon.

The scene is said to depict Giuliani flirting with an actress playing a young woman pretending to be a television journalist.

It includes a moment when he is seen lying on a bed with his shirt untucked and his hand down his pants with the young woman nearby.

Left-wing New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who profiled Baron Cohen ahead of the the film’s release, tweeted Wednesday about the scene: “It’s even wilder than it sounds. Beyond cringe.”

The ambush—which occurred in a New York hotel room in July—resulted in Giuliani calling police afterward, but there is no indication an investigation was launched.

Giuliani went to the hotel room thinking he was being interviewed about the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response. The young woman is flirtatious with him and invites him to the bedroom, which is rigged with hidden cameras.

Giuliani, who finalized his divorce from his wife of 15 years last December, then asks for the woman’s phone number and address. He lies back on the bed and has his hands in his pants.

The hotel room scene ends when Baron Cohen, who had been disguised as part of the crew, bursts into the room in an outlandish outfit screaming that the young woman is 15 years old.

Up to that point, there is no indication she is underage.

The character, Borat’s daughter, is played by actress Maria Bakalova, who is listed as 24 years old on the Internet Movie Database site, IMDb.com.

Giuliani had no immediate comment. He spoke to the New York Post’s Page Six column about the incident in July, but did not mention the bedroom aspect of the encounter.

Although the release of the Borat film was announced in late September, the timing seemed more than a bit coincidental amid a flurry of real-world October surprises.

On Tuesday, Giuliani confirmed that he had reported to Delaware police the existence of child pornography among Hunter Biden’s recovered hard-drive files, which were delivered to him by a computer technician after Hunter abandoned the computer at his shop.

Among the images, many reportedly show Hunter cavorting naked with a topless 14-year-old who is related to him.

Evidence suggests based on text conversations between Hunter and his father, Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, that the girl may have been his niece, the daughter of Hunter’s late brother, Beau. Hunter was in a relationship with the girl’s mother, Beau’s widow, from 2017 to 2019.

Trolling those close to President Donald Trump is a central theme of the new Borat film, a sequel to the 2006 mockumentary that saw Baron Cohen’s character travel the United States, espousing sexist, racist and anti-Semitic views, and eliciting similar responses from unwitting subjects.

For Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Baron Cohen returns as his alter-ego from Kazakhstan in a plot that involves trying to give his daughter as a gift to Vice President Mike Pence.

The closest Borat gets is the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he shouts to Pence that he’s brought a woman for him.

Dressed in a Donald Trump costume and with Borat’s daughter, played by Bakalova, slung over his shoulder, Baron Cohen is swiftly escorted out by security.

Baron Cohen has made a history of poking fun at conservative figures.

For his 2018 Showtime series “Who Is America,” the British comedian got former Vice President Dick Cheney to sign a waterboarding kit.

A sketch with former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore involved the comedian administering a “pedophile test.” Moore has sued over the encounter.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Left Uses Foreign Actors’ Amateur E-mail Spoof to Smear Proud Boys

Editor 1
-
0
Left Uses Foreign Actors’ Amateur E-mail Spoof to Smear Proud Boys

(Headlines USA) As Democrats find themselves yet again in hysterics over claims of Russian disinformation and alleged election-meddling, some appeared to be taken in by a crude example of it.

Threatening emails, claiming to come from a mostly peaceful right-wing protest group that President Donald Trump has previously been reluctant to denounce, were likely the result of foreign interference.

Lacking the sophistication typically ascribed to Kremlin operations, they may actually have been the product of anti-Trump operatives, possibly from Iran or other Middle Eastern states opposed to his support for Israel.

Democratic voters in at least four battleground states including Florida and Pennsylvania received the emails, falsely purporting to be from the right-wing Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for President Donald Trump.

The voter-intimidation operation apparently used email addresses obtained from state voter registration lists, which include party affiliation and can include email addresses.

Those addresses were then used in an apparently widespread targeted spamming operation. The senders claimed they would know which candidate the recipient was voting for in the Nov. 3 election, for which early voting is ongoing.

Federal officials have long warned about the possibility of this type of operation, as such registration lists are not difficult to obtain.

“These emails are meant to intimidate and undermine American voters’ confidence in our elections,” Christopher Krebs, the top election security official at the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Tuesday night after reports of the emails first surfaced.

He urged voters not to fall for “sensational and unverified claims,” reminding them that ballot secrecy is guaranteed by law in all states. “The last line of defense in election security is you – the American voter.”

A spokesperson at FBI headquarters did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

Asked about the emails during an online forum on Wednesday, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said she lacked specific information.

“I am aware that they were sent to voters in multiple swing states and we are working closely with the attorney general on these types of things and others,” she said.

The emails were sent by a group — its identity unknown — that put considerable time and effort into identifying vulnerable internet servers in several countries including Estonia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates which they hijacked to send the emails, said security researcher John Scott-Railton, who examined dozens. Voters in Arizona and Alaska also received them, he said.

The Associated Press obtained one of the emails from a Florida voter.

Scott-Railton, of the Citizen Lab online civil-rights project at the University of Toronto, said the Proud Boys email address that the spammers placed in the email’s sender field was “a flag of convenience.”

The true addresses of origin — not readily visible but listed in email headers — were the hijacked servers. The email reviewed by the AP originated from a business in Estonia.

And while the operation was not terribly sophisticated, it may still have been backed by a nation-state. There are documented cases in which Russian agents have sent threatening mail, including to U.S. military spouses.

Ukraine has also been hit by email hoaxes suspected to be the work of the Kremlin. Intelligence services like to use such techniques because they don’t bear the stamp of government, thus providing deniability.

“We’ve definitely seen state actors impersonate political figures and factions in the past. It wouldn’t be unheard of for them to do that in this case,” said John Hultquist, director of threat intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm FireEye.

None of the Russian military hackers indicted by U.S. prosecutors for interfering in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf have been brought to justice.

“To me this is a canary case. And what it shows is that somebody with obvious malicious intent can get messages that leverage voter registration data in front of the eyeballs of a large number of Americans,” said Scott-Railton.

The emails clearly penetrated the spam filters of email providers, he said, though some were likely blocked.

Microsoft and Google, major email providers with top-notch security researchers and tools, did not immediately comment on how many of the spoofed mails may have been sent and what intelligence they may have about the sender’s identity.

“The real question is just how well did this operation cover its tracks,” said Scott-Railton, who worries that the operation might have been a dry run. “Is someone testing a capability that they intend to use on a much larger scale in the future?”

He urged the U.S. government and its allies to be as transparent as possible about what they know about the operation as soon as possible to assure the public that it does not endanger election security.

A Proud Boys Miami-based chairman did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

President Trump was criticized by left-wing media for refusing to condemn the group after debate moderator Chris Wallace ambushed him with a leading question.

Wallace stopped short of pressing Democrat Joe Biden to do the same with legitimate leftist terrorism threats like Antifa.

But despite his sarcastic dismissal of the question during the debate, Trump ultimately took the bait in denouncing the Proud Boys and all forms of right-wing extremism.

Daniel Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School and an expert on voting rights, said he’s afraid we could see more of the type of voter suppression that the intimidation emails attempt — trying to scare people into not voting at all.

“Tensions are as high as I’ve seen them,” he said. “What we’re seeing here is at least the potential for some of the most shameful tactics from our nation’s past.”

RON JOHNSON: Biden Admin Would Be ‘Greatest Threat to Our Freedom in My Lifetime’

Editor 1
-
0
RON JOHNSON: Biden Admin Would Be ‘Greatest Threat to Our Freedom in My Lifetime’

(Headline USA) Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., urged members of the state chamber of commerce in battleground Wisconsin on Wednesday to vote for President Donald Trump, saying he has been praying for a victory and “the other side is not in love with this country.”

Johnson delivered a sobering assessment of what a win by Democrat Joe Biden would mean during a virtual meeting of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.

Johnson warned that anarchists and rioters were “going to dictate to you what you think and how you have to act” should radical leftists gain control under a Biden administration.

“This is the greatest threat to our freedom in my lifetime, which is why I am … not being particularly uplifting,” Johnson said.

“I’m telling you this so that you all use your positions, your position of influence every minute of your time between now and the election to get everybody to come out and vote,” he added.

Johnson said he understands that people in Wisconsin “are not real nuts about a New York street fighter” like Trump.

Democrats have sought to make the election a referendum on Trump’s personality rather than his policies, while couching serious ethical and policy concerns about Biden under his perceived empathy and gregariousness.

Trump has ruffled some feathers by being candid to a fault and bringing newfound transparency in his effort to drain the Washington, DC, swamp.

Johnson acknowledged that even conservatives might not be thrilled with the president’s sometimes crass and abrasive rhetoric, even if it has been an effective counterpunch by turning the Left’s own tactics against it.

“We don’t like his tweets,” Johnson said. “We don’t like the way he behaves. But he actually believes in this country. He thinks it’s great. He knows it’s great. He wakes up every day trying to make it better, OK? The other side is not in love with this country.”

Polls have shown Biden with a narrow lead in Wisconsin, a state Trump won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016. Similar polling in the last election suggested a sizeable lead for Hillary Clinton, which led her to ignore the state entirely.

Johnson, who is not on the ballot this year, said that if Democrats take majority control of the Senate, “They will never relinquish power. And that is not an overstatement.”

Johnson, who tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this month but said he had no symptoms, told the state’s business leaders on Wednesday that he thinks fears about getting sick or dying from COVID-19 are overblown.

Johnson said said he thinks wearing masks is a good idea, but he opposes mandates.

“We have unfortunately been snookered into this mass hysteria that isn’t even close to the real risk,” Johnson said. “And so we’ve shut down our economy. We’ve had this economic devastation.”

Amid reports surging COVID-19 cases in Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has ordered new capacity limits on bars, restaurants and other businesses. He also imposed a statewide mask mandate.

Other Democrats governors in battleground states appeared to be following suit, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer hyping a supposed resurgence on Wednesday, just in time for an Election Day lockdown.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

FBI Director Wray Tries to Dodge Political Landmines Amid Renewed Scrutiny

Editor 1
-
0
FBI Director Wray Tries to Dodge Political Landmines Amid Renewed Scrutiny

(Headline USA) Less than four years into his 10-year term, FBI Director Christopher Wray’s future in the job is decidedly uncertain heading into the presidential election.

President Donald Trump has been escalating his rhetoric against Wray, angry over his public statements on issues like Antifa, voting fraud and Russian election interference.

Trump has maintained an uneasy relationship with the agency with since the Obama intelligence officials used the notorious Steele dossier to collude with Hillary Clinton in an effort to delegitimize his candidacy and early presidency.

Now, amid questions over whether the FBI sought to suppress damning evidence of the Biden family’s corruption, even as House Democrats impeached the president for requesting an investigation into it, the agency—and its director—are again facing tough questions.

Trump has declined to give Wray a public vote of confidence, and his eldest son tweeted last week that Wray is working to “protect corrupt Democrats.”

With Washington abuzz about his possible dismissal, Wray and the FBI have engaged in a delicate balancing act as they address hot-button issues.

He has sought to defend the FBI’s independence and its integrity even as it puts him at odds with Trump and his allies.

Yet the bureau claims it has also tried to avoid confrontations where possible, making clear that it is striving to be responsive to Republican lawmakers on politically charged investigations.

The actions appear crafted with an eye toward helping Wray retain his job and preserving stability at an agency that has been riven by turbulence in the last four years and that is also determined to avoid becoming entangled in presidential politics as it did in 2016.

“My assumption is the way he has tried to thread the needle over the last several months is to not do anything to get himself fired while at the same time being as honest as he can possibly be with Congress and the American people,” said Gregory Brower, a former FBI official who served as the bureau’s director of congressional affairs until 2018.

The latest example came Tuesday over the publication of emails purportedly from Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

Asked by a Trump ally in the Senate to weigh in on their authenticity, the FBI replied with an understated letter that did not dispute the national intelligence director’s conclusion that the laptop on which they were found was not related to Russian disinformation, but did not address broader issues about its authenticity. It cited Justice Department policy in declining to confirm or deny investigations.

Even as Wray has angered Trump by contradicting him on some issues, the FBI has eagerly highlighted his cooperation on others critical for Republicans.

That includes pointing out his compliance with document demands from congressional Republicans in the discredited Russia investigation, and the FBI’s cooperation with a prosecutor whose investigation into the origins of that probe led to charges against a former FBI lawyer for altering an email.

Both of those cases directly involved FBI misconduct, putting the agency in an uncomfortable position should it have opted to decline investigations into its own corruption.

FBI spokesman Brian Hale said in a statement that it’s important for Americans “to know that we have been transparent and cooperative with congressional oversight inquiries and Department of Justice reviews.”

He said the FBI is committed to providing information about the “important work being performed by our 37,000 employees located in 56 field offices across the country and stationed all over the world.”

Wray’s future is seen as uncertain because Trump has already fired one FBI director and has repeatedly lashed out at Wray.

He said last week that Wray is “not doing a very good job” if he won’t acknowledge the possibility of rampant voter fraud, which Wray and other officials and experts have disputed as being a widespread problem.

It’s unclear if Trump would fire Wray after the election. If he wins, he could seek an FBI director more in line with his outlook.

If Trump loses, though, Republican lawmakers may encourage him to keep Wray on board rather than leave Biden with a vacancy to fill himself who would be even worse.

Biden has not said if he would replace Wray. But presidents have generally respected the 10-year terms of FBI directors, a tenure designed to ensure the bureau’s political independence.

It’s hardly unusual for tension to exist between a president and FBI director.

But former  FBI Director James Comey found himself in a precarious position as Trump took office with his campaign under investigation for its ties to Russia—and evidence that high-ranking officials on his watch had been engaged in overtly partisan activity directed at interfering with the election themselves.

Comey was fired in 2017, an action that became central to the special counsel’s investigation into whether Trump sought to obstruct the Russia probe.

The probe ultimately validated Trump’s assertions that his campaign had not worked with the Kremlin, although an ongoing counter-investigation suggests that the FBI may have used Russian agents itself in an effort to support the Clinton campaign.

Wray has approached his position in a non-flashy manner, preaching what one former senior FBI official described as a “head down, tackle hard” ethic. He has maintained the support of the rank and file, said Brian O’Hare, president of the FBI Agents Association.

“The director has consistently stressed the need to do the right thing in the right way across the entire bureau. I see the director doing just that. He’s doing the right things in the right way,” O’Hare said.

There’s no question Wray has broken with the president, including in 2018 over the declassification of information related to the surveillance of former campaign aide Carter Page.

He more recently drew Trump’s ire over congressional testimony that stressed the election interference threat from Russia at a time when Trump is focusing on China.

He also described the domestic terrorism collective Antifa as an “ideology” rather than an organization, contradicting Trump, and feeding into the narrative promoted by Democrats like Biden and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, who have sought to downplay the group responsible for violence in major cities as a “myth.”

In public comments, though, Wray readily acknowledges the “unacceptable” mistakes he says the FBI has made, noting that officials responsible have been fired or have retired, and points to the more than 40 corrective actions he has instituted to prevent surveillance problems from recurring.

Even when discussing Antifa, he has acknowledged the violence associated with the ideology and has said the FBI has investigations into people who identify with it.

Wray, meanwhile, has presided over a leadership shakeup at the bureau, though whether that turnover has happened fast enough for Republicans is unclear, especially given accelerating demands for the declassification of documents that GOP lawmakers want to release to undercut the Russia probe.

“There’s always been a unanimity of position between the FBI director, the attorney general and the White House, and they’ve always been able to jointly push back on Congress,” Brower said. “If the White House isn’t willing to push back on the Congress when it needs to push back, then Congress holds all the cards.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Cuomo Loosens Restrictions on Jewish Communities After Being Taken to Court

Contributing Author
-
0
Cuomo Loosens Restrictions on Jewish Communities After Being Taken to Court

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo agreed to allow Jewish schools in Far Rockaway reopen after several Orthodox Jewish families sued Cuomo for illegally discriminating against the school.

Cuomo said in a press conference on Wednesday that several Jewish neighborhoods he had placed under stringent lockdown orders could begin to reopen, declaring that they had shown “real progress” over the past week.

But Chana Lebovits, the mother of two students who attend an Orthodox Jewish school for girls, argued that Cuomo would not have relaxed his restrictions had she and her husband, Yitzchok, not sued him and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

In their lawsuit, the Lebovits’s alleged that Cuomo and de Blasio illegally discriminated against their daughters’ private school by forcing it to shut down despite the fact that the school had not had a single COVID-19 case.

Cuomo and de Blasio admitted much in a conversation with a group of rabbis, when Cuomo told them that his policy was not tailored to the community’s specific numbers.

“This is a fear-driven response, you know,” Cuomo told the rabbis. “This is not a policy being written by a scalpel; this is a policy being cut by a hatchet. It’s just very blunt.”

But by forcing private religious schools to keep their doors closed, Cuomo was “stripping parents of their right to direct the religious education and upbringing of their children,” according to Becket Law, a conservative nonprofit representing the Lebovits’s.

“The Governor shouldn’t have needed a lawsuit to tell him that shutting down Jewish schools was wrong. This was the worst kind of unscientific and harmful scapegoating, as the Governor himself knew that schools weren’t a problem,” Mark Rienzi, president of Becket, said in a statement.

“If Governor Cuomo wants respect, he has to give respect,” Rienzi said. “Reopening the schools in Far Rockaway is a start, but elected officials have a lot of work to do to repair the pain and division they have caused.”

At least three other Jewish organizations have filed lawsuits against Cuomo for his discriminatory policies.

GIULIANI: Hunter Biden’s Files Appear to Show Nudity in Presence of 14-Year-Old Relative

Ben Sellers
-
0
GIULIANI: Hunter Biden’s Files Appear to Show Nudity in Presence of 14-Year-Old Relative

Details emerging about the sexually explicit images found on the recovered hard drive of Hunter Biden‘s abandoned laptop include allegations that one of several underage girls posing nude may have been a 14-year-old relative.

According to Red State, the girl—whose name was redacted—was also mentioned in a text exchange between Hunter and his father, current Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, recounting a conversation that Hallie Biden had with Hunter’s therapist.

Hallie—the widow of Hunter’s deceased brother, Beau—later entered into a relationship with Hunter that is believed to have lasted from 2017 to 2019. She and Beau had two children, including a daughter, Natalie, who was born in 2004.

“She [Hallie] told my therapist that I was sexually inappropriate with [redacted] when she says that I face time naked with her and the reason I can’t have her out to see me is because I’ll walk around naked smoking crack [talking to] girls on face time,” Hunter reportedly wrote his father.

“When she was pressed she said that [redacted] never said anything like that but the bottom line is that I create and caused a very unsafe environment for the kids,” he continued.

Altogether, there were “numerous pictures of underage girls” on the laptop, said Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor who is now President Donald Trump’s point man on Hunter Biden’s many scandals.

About a third of the sexually-explicit images found on the hard drive contained the same girl, believed to be Hunter Biden’s relative, and some showed her posing suggestively with Hunter, Giuliani said.

“We’re very uncomfortable with the fact that these underage girls weren’t protected,” he said, noting that it law-enforcement had a legal obligation to pursue it.

Giuliani confirmed that he had filed a report on Monday with police in Wilmington, Delaware, the Bidens’ home town, according to Just the News investigative reporters John Solomon and Lee Smith.

“I told them other details about what appears to be an inappropriate sexual relationship,” Giuliani said. “They told me it would be investigated.”

Joining Giuliani in the meeting with the New Castle County Police Department was former New York Police Department commissioner Bernard Kerik, who confirmed that the laptop material also “raises serious questions as to Joe Biden‘s national security vulnerability.”

However, hours later, Delaware’s Department of Justice—an organization once led by Beau Biden as the state’s attorney general—announced that it was refusing to investigate due to “credibility issues,” according to the Daily Beast.

The state’s current attorney general, Kathy Jennings, was a protege of Beau’s, noted Just the News.

“In light of ongoing questions about the credibility of these claims and multiple reports that the FBI is investigating their veracity, law enforcement is referring this matter to the FBI,” the state DOJ said.

The FBI, likewise, has faced harsh criticism since last week’s public disclosure of the laptop.

Several of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have questioned whether the agency was aware of the hard drive’s contents and had engaged in a cover-up operation while Trump was being impeached by House Democrats for requesting that Ukraine investigate Hunter’s Burisma scandal.

Hunter’s involvement with the Burisma board proved to be one of the many shocking foreign dealings confirmed by the trove of emails, some of which now appeared to be publicly available in a Dropbox file.

The Burisma emails implicate Joe Biden, who allegedly met with a representative of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company while he was supposed to be overseeing the Obama administration’s anti-corruption efforts in the former Soviet satellite.

Contrary to what the email evidence suggests, Biden has long denied that he ever discussed Hunter’s foreign business deals with him.

Other emails suggest that “the big guy” was designated to receive a 10 percent equity stake in a Chinese investment company that was paying Hunter at least 10 times what Burisma paid him.

Although Biden, while in public office, was ineligible to receive kickbacks from foreign governments, Hunter was in charge of holding the money for him, according to emails.

Nonetheless, as America undergoes a law-and-order crisis in the face of ongoing race riots and anarchist-driven protests that Joe Biden has refused to condemn, evidence that he knowingly allowed his son to engage in an inappropriate relationship with his granddaughter may pose the biggest political problem yet for the former vice president.

Not surprisingly, the left-leaning media and pro-Biden social media sites have tried to suppress the story using unprecedented censorship efforts.

Twitter, Google and Facebook created their own crisis last week by blocking or slowing the spread of the material following the New York Post‘s original articles.

Although those attempts backfired, effectively doubling the level of coverage, the organizations remain mute about how they may be suppressing conservative content in the wake of the potentially campaign-ending concerns.

The account for the New York Post remained blocked on Wednesday, a week since the story broke, after the paper refused to remove its original tweet.

The top executives of the three Silicon Valley companies were expected to appear on Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain themselves amid calls to repeal the Section 230 free-speech protections they currently enjoy under the Communications Decency Act.

Also on Thursday, as Trump and Biden prepared to meet for their second and final debate,  the president planned to “pummel” his opponent with the corruption allegations, Just the News reported.

The strategy is seen as a bit of a gambit since recent media polls have not indicated that the issue is a pressing one among voters.

However, Trump is counting on the fact that the media suppression of the scandal is more to blame than voter disinterest.

“The mainstream media polls—they’re not asking these questions at all, they’re not acknowledging that this ever happened,” said Trump pollster John McLaughlin.

“I mean yesterday, Joe Biden was out someplace getting a milkshake, and they asked him what flavor he was getting,” McLaughlin continued. “They didn’t ask him about, you know, ‘Did you take a cut from this Chinese money that Hunter Biden got according to these emails?’ They won’t even acknowledge that the hard drive, that’s clearly Hunter Biden’s, that he signed a receipt for this now out there, is a factor.”

As to whether voters will buy Joe Biden’s attempt to dismiss it as a personal matter with no bearing on his personal ethics and leadership capability, Giuliani begged to differ.

He pointed to the text exchanges about Hunter’s alleged incestuous child sexual-abuse that he had recently given over to authorities.

“There are many texts which I gave to them that point out that family was concerned about the safety of the child,” Giuliani said.

“I will tell you, the evidence I gave them states it was reported to Joe Biden,” he continued. “What did he do about it?”

Hunter Biden Has Been Living Off Joe’s Politicking Since He Graduated in 1996

Associate Editor
-
0
Hunter Biden Has Been Living Off Joe’s Politicking Since He Graduated in 1996

(Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations) Hunter Biden profited from his father’s political connections long before he struck questionable deals in countries where Joe Biden was undertaking diplomatic missions as vice president.

In fact, virtually all the jobs listed on his resume going back to his first position out of college, which paid a six-figure salary, came courtesy of the former six-term senator’s donors, lobbyists and allies, a RealClearInvestigations examination has found.

One document reviewed by RCI reveals that a Biden associate admitted “finding employment” for Hunter Biden specifically as a special favor to his father, then a Senate leader running for president. He secured a $1.2 million gig on Wall Street for his young son, even though it was understood he had no experience in high finance.

Many of his generous patrons, in turn, ended up with legislation and policies favorable to their businesses or investments, an RCI review of lobbying records and legislative actions taken by the elder Biden confirms.

That the 50-year-old Hunter has been trading on his Democratic father’s political influence his entire adult life raises legal questions about possible influence-peddling, government watchdogs and former federal investigators say.

In addition, the more than two-decades-long pattern of nepotism casts fresh doubt on Joe Biden’s recent statements that he “never discussed” business with his son, and that his activities posed “no conflicts of interest.”

No fewer than three committees in the Republican-controlled Senate have opened probes into potential Biden family conflicts. Investigators are also poring over Treasury Department records that have flagged suspicious activities involving Hunter’s banking transactions and business deals that may be connected to his father’s political influence.

U.S. ethics rules require all government officials to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in taking official actions. The Bidens have denied any wrongdoing.

While most of the attention on Hunter has focused on his dealings in Ukraine and China when his father was in the White House, he also cashed in on cushy jobs and sweetheart deals throughout his dad’s long Senate career, records reveal.

“Hunter Biden’s Ukraine-China connections are just one element of the Biden corruption story,” said Tom Fitton, president of the Washington-based watchdog group Judicial Watch, who contends Biden used both the Office of the Vice President and the Senate to advance his son’s personal interests.

In each case, Hunter Biden appeared under-qualified for the positions he obtained. All the while, he was a chronic abuser of alcohol and drugs, including crack cocaine, and has cycled in and out of no fewer than six drug-rehab treatment programs, according to published reports.

He’s also been the subject of at least two drug-related investigations by police, one in 1988 and another in 2016,  according to federal records and reports. A third drug investigation resulted in his discharge from the U.S. Navy Reserve in 2014.

This comprehensive account of Hunter Biden’s “unique career trajectory,” as one former family friend gently put it, was pieced together through interviews with more than a dozen people, several of whom insisted on anonymity to describe private conversations, and after an in-depth examination of public records, including Securities and Exchange Commission filings, court papers, campaign filings, federal lobbying disclosures, and congressional documents.

Hunter Biden’s resume begins 24 years ago. Here is a rundown of the plum positions he has managed to land since 1996, thanks to his politically connected father and his boosters:

1996-1998: MBNA Corp.

Fresh out of college, credit-card giant MBNA put him on its payroll as “senior vice president” earning more than $100,000 a year, plus an undisclosed signing bonus. Delaware-based MBNA at the time was Biden’s largest donor and lobbying the Delaware senator for bankruptcy reforms that would make it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy and write off credit-card debt.

Besides a job for Hunter, bank executives and employees gave generously to Joe Biden’s campaigns – $214,000 total, federal records show – and one top executive even bought Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home for more than $200,000 above the market value, real estate records show. The exec paid top dollar – $1.2 million – for the old house even though it lacked central air conditioning. MBNA also flew Biden and his wife to events and covered their travel costs, disclosure forms show.

Sen. Biden eventually came through for MBNA by sponsoring and whipping votes in the Senate to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act.

When NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Biden during the 2008 presidential campaign whether it was wrong “for someone like you in the middle of all this to have your son collecting money from this big credit-card company while you were on the (Senate) floor protecting its interests,” Biden gave an answer he would repeat many times in the future: “Absolutely not,” he snapped, arguing it was completely appropriate and that Hunter deserved the position and generous salary because he graduated from Yale.

1998-2001: Commerce Department

Hunter also capitalized on the family name in 1998 when he joined President Clinton’s agency. In spite of having no experience in the dot-com industry, he was appointed “executive director of e-commerce policy coordination,” pulling down another six-figure salary plus bonuses.

He landed the job after his father’s longtime campaign manager and lawyer William Oldaker called then-Commerce Secretary William Daley, who’d also worked on Biden’s campaigns, and put in a good word for his son, according to public records.

2001-2009: Oldaker, Biden & Belair

After Republican President George W. Bush took over the Commerce Department, Hunter left the government and joined Oldaker to open a lobbying shop in Washington, just blocks from Congress, where he gained access to exclusive business and political deals.

Federal disclosure forms show Hunter Biden and his firm billed millions of dollars while lobbying on behalf of a host of hospitals and private colleges and universities, among other clients. In a 2006 disclosure statement submitted to the Senate, Hunter said his clients were “seeking federal appropriations dollars.”

Hunter won the contract to represent St. Joseph’s University from an old Biden family friend who worked in government relations at the university and proposed he solicit earmarks for one of its programs in Philadelphia. The friend, Robert Skomorucha, remarked in a press interview that Hunter had “a very strong last name that really paid off in terms of our lobbying efforts.”

These clients, like MBNA, also favored bankruptcy reforms to make it harder for patients and students to discharge debt in bankruptcy filings. At the same time Hunter was operating as a Beltway lobbyist, he was receiving “consulting payments” from his old employer MBNA, which was still courting his father over the bankruptcy reforms.

In 2007, Hunter also dined with a private prison lobbyist who had business before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Joe Biden chaired, according to published reports. Senate rules bar members or their staff from having contact with family members who are lobbyists seeking to influence legislation.

Hunter’s lawyer-lobbyist firm was embroiled in a conflict-of-interest controversy in 2006 when it was criticized for representing a lobbyist under investigation by the House ethics committee. The lobbyist was still taking payments from his old K street firm while working as a top aide on the House Appropriations Committee. Hunter at the time was lobbying that same committee for earmarks for his clients.

William Oldaker did not just make Hunter a rich lobbyist. Oldaker also secured a $1 million loan for him through a bank he co-founded, WashingtonFirst, that Hunter sought for an investment scheme, which later went sour.

Joe Biden deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign and political action committee donations at WashingtonFirst, while funneling hundreds of thousands in campaign and PAC expenditures to Oldaker, Biden & Belair. Joe Biden’s payments to Hunter’s lobbying firm, including more than $143,000 in 2007 alone, were listed as “legal services” in Federal Election Commission filings.

Oldaker did not respond to a request for comment left at his office.

2003-2005: National Group LLP 

While serving as a partner at Oldaker, Biden & Belair, Hunter also registered as a lobbyist for National Group, a lobbying-only subsidiary which shared offices with OB&B  and specialized in targeted spending items inserted into legislation known as “earmarks.”

Hunter represented his father’s alma mater, the University of Delaware, and other Biden constituents and submitted requests to Biden’s office for earmarks benefiting these clients in appropriations bills.

2006-2007: Paradigm Companies LLC

In 2005, when Joe Biden was thinking about making another run at the White House, after a 1987 bid that ended in plagiarism charges, his lobbyist son was looking for a new line of work too.

In early 2006, Wall Street executive and Biden family friend Anthony Lotito said, Biden’s younger brother, Jim, phoned him on behalf of the senator. He said Biden wanted his youngest son – whom he still called “Honey” – to get out of the lobbying business to avoid allegations of conflicts of interest that might dog Biden’s presidential bid.

“Biden was concerned with the impact that Hunter’s lobbying activities might have on his expected campaign [and asked his brother to] seek Lotito’s assistance in finding employment for Hunter in a non-lobbying capacity,” according to a January 2007 complaint that Lotito filed in New York state court against Hunter over alleged breach of contract in a related venture. (Jim and Hunter Biden denied such a phone call took place as described.)

Lotito told the court he agreed to help Hunter as a favor to the senator, who had served on the powerful banking committee. He figured “the financial community might be a good starting place in which to seek out employment on Hunter’s behalf,” the court documents state. But he quickly found that Wall Street had “no interest” in hiring Biden.

So the Bidens hatched a scheme to buy a hedge fund, “whereby Hunter would then assume a senior executive position with the company.” And Lotito helped broker the deal. Despite having no Wall Street experience, Biden was appointed interim CEO and president of the Paradigm investment fund and given a $1.2 million salary, according to SEC filings. Lotito joined the enterprise as a partner, and agreed to shepherd Hunter, still in his mid-thirties, through his new role in high-finance.

“Given Hunter Biden’s inexperience in the securities industry,” the complaint states, it was agreed that Lotito would maintain an office at the new holding company’s New York headquarters “in order to assist Biden in discharging his duties as president.”

After the venture failed, Lotito sued the Bidens for fraud. The Bidens countersued and the two parties settled in 2008.

2006-2009: Amtrak

During this same period, Hunter was appointed vice chairman of the taxpayer-subsidized rail line, thanks to the sponsorship of powerful Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, a political ally of his father.

In a 2006 statement submitted to the Senate during his confirmation, Hunter asserted that he was qualified for the Amtrak board because “as a frequent commuter and Amtrak customer for over 30 years, I have literally logged thousands of miles on Amtrak.”

Amtrak officials and employees have been big supporters of Joe Biden — for example donating a total of $44,490 to Biden this year (vs. $12,413 to President Trump), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Amtrak even named a train station after him in Wilmington. In return, Biden has supported taxpayer subsidies for the government railroad throughout his political career.

In his testimony, Hunter denied his Amtrak appointment pushed conflict-of-interest boundaries.

2009- : Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC

Hunter co-founded the investment firm five months after his father moved into the White House and incorporated it in his father’s home state of Delaware, which has strict corporate secrecy rules.

At the time, Obama had tapped Vice President Biden to oversee the recovery from the financial crisis. Three weeks after Rosemont was incorporated, Hunter and his partners set up a subsidiary called Rosemont TALF and got $24 million in loans from the federal program known as the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. TALF was designed to help bail out banks and auto lenders hit by the crisis.

Within months, Rosemont had secured a total of $130 million from the program. Some of the government cash was then funneled into an investment fund incorporated in the Cayman Islands, SEC records show. Such offshore accounts are commonly used to evade taxes.

The move raised ethical flags with government watchdogs who suspected the bailout cash was used to benefit a well-connected insider.

Other records reveal that another subsidiary created years later – Rosemont Realty – touted to its investors that board adviser Hunter was politically connected. It highlighted in a company prospectus that he was the “son of Vice President Biden.”

2009-2012: Eudora Global

On his resume, Hunter also lists himself as “founder” of yet another investment firm. But Eudora’s articles of incorporation show it was actually set up by a major Biden donor, Jeffrey Cooper, who put Hunter on his board after his father became vice president.

A self-described “friend of the Biden family,” Cooper also happened to run one of the largest asbestos-litigation firms in the country — SimmonsCooper LLC — and had courted Biden to make it easier to file asbestos lawsuits by defeating tort reforms. As a leader on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden had blocked reform of asbestos litigation every time bills reached the Senate floor.

Cooper’s law firm, which directly lobbied the Delaware senator’s office to kill such bills, donated more than $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns over the years, as well as his Unite Our States PAC, FEC records show. In fact, SimmonsCooper was one of Biden’s biggest donors during his failed 2007-2008 run for president, pumping $53,000 into his campaign.

The firm also put up $1 million in investment capital to help his son buy out the Paradigm hedge fund as part of the arrangement brokered by another Biden family friend, Lotito, to find non-lobbying work for Hunter.. Thanks in large part to Biden’s effort to kill bills reining in asbestos trial lawyers, SimmonsCooper has hauled in more than $1 billion for alleged asbestos victims.

Attempts to reach Cooper for comment were unsuccessful.

2009-2016: Boies Schiller Flexner LLP

When Joe Biden became Vice President, Hunter landed a high-paying, no-show job at the New York-based law firm, a Democrat shop long tied to the Clintons. Another major Biden donor, the firm gave him the title “of counsel.”

Boies Schiller brought Hunter aboard in 2009 after the Bidens hired the firm to defend Hunter against charges he defrauded partners in the Paradigm investment venture. Boies Schiller managed to get the case dismissed.

In 2014, a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch, who was under investigation and looking to repair his reputation to attract Western investors, started sending large payments to Boies to support Hunter for unspecified work. It’s unclear what Hunter did for the oligarch, who ran the gas giant Burisma, but $283,000 showed up at the same time his father was tapped by Obama to play a central role in overseeing U.S. energy policy in Ukraine.

Boies Schiller has pumped more than $50,000 into Biden’s campaigns, Federal Election Commission records show.

2013-2019: BHR Partners

After Obama named Biden his point man on China policy, Rosemont Seneca set up a joint venture worth $1 billion with the Bank of China called BHR – and Hunter was named vice-chairman and director of the new concern.

Following in the shadow of his father’s political trajectory, Hunter’s new venture won the first-of-its-kind investment deal with the Chinese government at the same time Biden was jetting to Beijing to meet with top communist leaders. Secret Service records reveal Hunter flew to China on Air Force Two with his father while brokering the December 2013 deal. He arranged for one of his Chinese partners to shake hands with the vice president. BHR was registered 12 days later. Beijing OK’d a business license shortly afterward.

“No one else had such an arrangement in China,” said Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute.

Hunter resigned from the board of the Beijing-backed equity firm earlier this year as his father faced growing criticism on the campaign trail over what critics called a glaring conflict of interest. He did not, however, divest his 10% equity stake in the Chinese fund, which is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Schweizer, whose books include “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elites,” said Biden went “soft” on the Chinese communists so his son could “cash in” on China business deals. Biden insists he did not discuss the venture with his son before, during or after his official visit to Beijing. But others see obvious hypocrisy at play in the Biden family’s self-dealing in notoriously corrupt China.

“Biden was one of the most vocal champions of anti-corruption efforts in the Obama administration. So when this same Biden takes his son with him to China aboard Air Force Two, and within days Hunter joins the board of an investment advisory firm with stakes in China, it does not matter what father and son discussed,” said Sarah Chayes, author of “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens National Security.” “Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice.”

2013-2014: U.S. Navy Reserve

He clearly received special treatment in securing the part-time post. Officers had to issue him two waivers – one for his age and one for a previous drug offense.

His vice president father swore him in at the White House in a small, private ceremony.

Barely a year later, authorities booted Hunter from the Navy for cocaine use after he tested positive from a urine test. The reason for his discharge was withheld from the press for several months.

2014-2019: Burisma Holdings

The Ukrainian gas giant added Hunter to its board soon after Obama named his father his point man on Ukraine policy, focusing on energy. The company paid his son as much as $83,000 a month, even though he had no energy experience to bring to the table and was required to attend just one board meeting a year.

At the time, the vice president was steering U.S. aid to Kiev to help develop its gas fields, which stood to benefit Burisma as the holder of permits to develop natural gas in three of Ukraine’s most lucrative fields. Biden promised Ukrainian officials the US would pump more than $1 billion into their energy industry and economy during a visit to Kiev in late April 2014. He urged leaders to increase the country’s gas supply and to rely on Americans to help them. Less than three weeks later, Burisma appointed his son to the board, after already retaining him for undisclosed services through Boies Schiller.

Burisma was run by an oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was under investigation at the time and seeking Western protection from prosecution. In a move observers suspect was intended to send a message to prosecutors, the company sent out a news release in May 2014 claiming, falsely, that Hunter would be in charge of its “legal unit.” Burisma also trumpeted the fact that Hunter was “the son of the current U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden.”

Biden’s office was aware Burisma was under investigation. The administration had tried to partner with the gas company through U.S. aid programs, but the outreach project was blocked over corruption concerns lodged by career diplomats.

In early 2016, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine did not dismiss the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma. “If the prosecutor is not fired,” Biden recalled telling Ukraine’s leader, “you’re not getting the money.”

Biden’s muscling worked: Shokin was sacked in March 2016.

The former vice president says he was carrying out official U.S. policy that sought to remove an ineffective prosecutor. But Shokin had raided the home of Burisma’s owner and seized his property.

In addition, Shokin said that as part of his probe he was making plans to interview Hunter about millions of dollars in fees he and his partners had received from Burisma. He insists he was fired because he refused to close the investigation.

“The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma, and Joe Biden’s son was a member of the board,” Shokin said in a recent sworn affidavit prepared for a European court. “I assume Burisma had the support of Joe Biden because his son was on the board.” He added that the vice president himself had “significant interests” in Burisma.

The prosecutor who replaced Shokin shut down the Burisma probe within 10 months. Burisma’s founder was also taken off a U.S. government visa ban list.

Biden claims he only learned of his son joining the Burisma board from the news media. But there is evidence Biden had been consulted in advance. White House visitor logs show that Biden met with Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer on April 16, 2014. Burisma put Archer on its board shortly thereafter, followed by Hunter the next month. (Both Archer and Hunter maintain Burisma never came up during the private visit in Biden’s office, which lasted late into the night.)

A year after Joe Biden’s meeting with Hunter’s partner in the White House, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi emailed Hunter to thank him for inviting him to Washington and “giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent[sic] some time together.” The Biden campaign asserts it cannot find a meeting with Pozharskyi on the former vice president’s “official schedule,” though it did not deny such a meeting could have taken place. The Ukrainian official mentioned going out for coffee with Hunter on April 17, 2015, which indicated he was physically in D.C. at the time. The April 17 email was first disclosed by the New York Post after obtaining it from a hard drive copied from a laptop of Hunter Biden left at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del. Pozharskyi did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Hunter stepped down from Burisma’s board in April 2019, a month before his father announced his White House bid and after critics made an issue of the conflicts his sinecure posed. He has since kept a very low profile. Unlike Trump’s children, Biden’s son is not out on the trail campaigning for him.

1,850 Boxes Sealed Until After Election

“Hunter Biden had no experience in the field, but he did have a notable connection to the vice president, who publicly has bragged about making clear to the Ukrainians that he alone controlled U.S. aid to the country,” noted Jonathan Turley, a public-interest law professor at George Washington University.

Retired FBI official I.C. Smith, who led public corruption investigations in Washington and Little Rock, Ark., said both father and son should have known joining Burisma was a bad idea, adding that it gives at least the appearance he was leveraging his name for payoffs from shady clients abroad.

“Clearly he’s led a troubled life and would be the sort of person susceptible to becoming engaged in this sort of rather sordid deal,” Smith said of Hunter.

“When he said his father asked if the deal was on the up and up and was assured it was, I would think, given Hunter’s past, the father would have asked more questions,” he added.

Hunter acknowledged in an ABC News interview last year that he lacked experience in both energy and Ukraine, but maintained that Burisma was impressed by other things on his resume.

“Ironically, Hunter highlighted his work at MBNA and his work on the board of Amtrak as evidence of his qualifications for the Burisma gig,” said Fitton of Judicial Watch. “But both the MBNA and Amtrak jobs, under any sensible analysis, were obvious favors for Joe Biden.”

Fitton argued that Biden’s claim he never discussed his son’s jobs and business deals rings hollow against the lengthy record of something-for-nothing nepotism.

“That’s campaign spin,” he said. “Hunter has already admitted to having at least one conversation on the Ukraine issue with Vice President Biden.”

Biden defenders argue that many relatives of politicians are often involved in government and politics. Ivanka Trump and Don Trump Jr., for instance, have cozy relationships with, or financial stakes in, companies that may benefit from those decisions. They also point out that, while they may look bad, there’s nothing illegal about such arrangements.

Fitton isn’t so sure. He said Judicial Watch is demanding Obama administration documents related to Hunter’s Ukraine and China deals, as well as other business arrangements potentially monetizing Biden’s political power.

“We can’t be sure if the arrangements were legal,” he said. “If any payments or jobs were neither ordinary nor customary, there may be legal issues.”

It’s a federal crime to provide a government benefit or favorable change in policy in exchange for something of personal value. At a minimum, argued former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, Biden “had a conflict of interest with the position his son had” on the Burisma board, noting that at the time, Biden was pushing energy policies that favored the gas giant.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Hunter’s foreign employers and partners were seeking to leverage Hunter’s relationship with Joe, either by seeking improper influence or to project access to him,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a liberal watchdog group based in Washington.

While Joe Biden insists “there’s been no indication of any conflict of interest from Ukraine or anywhere else,” Senate investigators are seeking a number of related emails and memos generated during the Obama administration, as well as his 36-year Senate career. That period, spanning from 1973 to 2009, coincides with a large chunk of his son’s resume.

However, Biden has sealed the bulk of the records at the University of Delaware Library, which refuses to release any of his papers until after the election. It maintains more than 1,850 boxes of Biden records, including his speeches, voting records, position papers and notes from confidential interviews he’s conducted with foreign leaders, among other documents. The papers the university is keeping a lid on could shed light on Biden’s thinking behind foreign policies and controversial bills he sponsored.

A spokeswoman said the library will not release any of Biden’s papers to the public until they are “properly processed and archived.” Until then, “access is only available with Vice President Biden’s express consent,” she said, while declining to answer whether the university would comply if the Senate subpoenaed documents as part of its investigation of the Bidens.

The university houses the Biden Institute, which is part of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.

Through a lawyer, Hunter maintained he and his father dutifully avoided “conflicts of interest” — or even “the appearance of such conflicts.” In every business pursuit, he asserted, they acted “appropriately and in good faith.”

However, in a moment of candor during a recent ABC News interview, Hunter confessed: “I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden,” before adding, “There’s literally nothing my father in some way hasn’t had influence over.”

Still, the elder Biden argues it’s the Trump family who has the nepotism problem. In a recent CBS “60 Minutes” interview, he slammed the president for letting his daughter and son-in-law “sit in on Cabinet meetings.”

“It’s just simply improper because you should make it clear to the American public that everything you’re doing is for them,” he intoned. “For them.”

Clarification: Wednesday, October 21, 2020; 11:50 AM Eastern
An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely in the section about Amtrak to financial support for Joe Biden. Railroad officials and employees have been major contributors, not the company per se.

Correction, Tuesday, October 20, 2020, 12:40 PM Eastern
An earlier version of this article misstated the year when, according to the New York Post, a Burisma executive emailed Hunter Biden thanking him for “giving an opportunity to meet your father.” It was dated April 17, 2015, not 2014…Original Source…

DOJ Covers for Bidens, Big Tech by Indicting Russian Hackers

Associate Editor
-
0
DOJ Covers for Bidens, Big Tech by Indicting Russian Hackers

(Eric Felten, RealClearInvestigations) Why, in the days before an election fraught with political squabbling over Russia and computer hacking, would the Justice Department weigh in on Monday with indictments of six Russian state hackers?

Even the Associated Press admitted that the case is “not related to the November vote.”

The hackers in question are officers in the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate. They are not, we can all agree, friends of America. But the threat they pose is hardly new: One of the GRU officers freshly indicted – Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev — has already been under indictment for years.

He was charged along with a couple of dozen of his colleagues two years ago. Adding a new set of indictments doesn’t bring the Russians closer to justice in a U.S. court, but it does color an election already tinted and tainted by the question of Russian hacking.

The explanations that couldn’t possibly be correct actually illuminate the issue, so let’s start with those:

  • The Russians had to be exposed at this late date in the presidential election because otherwise they would flee and escape the law. This couldn’t possibly be the reason. Consider the Russians’ confreres, indicted as part of the Mueller festivities. There is no reason to think any of them have left Russia or otherwise put themselves at any risk of extradition. If the goal is to capture these bad actors, announcing who they are and what they’ve done will be of no help whatsoever.
  • The Russians posed an imminent threat. Not likely. There’s nothing in the indictment that even hints at a crime in progress. The Russians, for example, are accused of hacking computers at the Winter Olympics in South Korea (2018); defacing Georgian government websites (2018); spear phishing a British defense lab that was gathering evidence of Russia’s use of poisons (2018). They allegedly interfered with French elections in 2017. They supposedly targeted Ukraine’s power grid in 2016 and 2015. None of these deeds happened within the last two years. That doesn’t mean they ought to be ignored. But it does argue there was no reason to take action in the weeks ahead of a national election.

Now let’s consider some answers that could be correct, if one is willing to entertain cynical possibilities:

  • The recommended response to the New York Post’s scoop involving Hunter Biden’s laptop has been to dismiss it as the product of Russian hackery. The story involves a computer and events in Ukraine, thus making it easy for Joe Biden’s defenders to dismiss the damaging emails as made in Moscow. Bring indictments against Russian hackers and you bolster the narrative that to ask questions about Hunter is to be complicit in a Russian plot.
  • Perhaps the FBI and Justice Department are just doing Big Tech a solid. The bureau — and this goes triple for the DoJ — lacks the kind of computer skills necessary to track and trace the tiny binary footprints of the cyber-Bear. You might recall that just a few weeks ago it was revealed a large number of the attorneys and agents working on the Mueller investigation accidentally wiped their government-issued smartphones clean of all data. Not on purpose, of course. That would be illegal. No, it was an accident. Every man Jack of them kept putting in the wrong password until, hours into the process, all their phones achieved doorstop status. Who knew such things could happen? We will take their word for it that they didn’t. But that doesn’t say much for the computer bona-fides of DoJ investigators. How surpassingly odd, then, that fellow prosecutors and agents should be so tech-savvy that they can expose the identities and activities of the neo-Soviets’ crack malware squad. That’s where Big Tech comes in: In a Monday press release, the Department of Justice expressed its gratitude to Google, Cisco, Facebook, and Twitter “for the assistance they provided in this investigation.” Could it be that the indictments were announced now because Facebook and Twitter needed some good press before facing senators on the ugly question of digital censorship?

Whatever the reason – and who knows, perhaps there is a perfectly innocent explanation for it – the Department of Justice ought not to be hyping Russian hacking just ahead of an election. It can only create the impression on all sides that the election lacks legitimacy. As others have noted time and again, that only does the Russians’ work for them.

But it does suggest that this year’s October Surprises may just be reruns. So far, the month has brought us stories of Biden family corruption and suggestions of Russian election tampering…Original Source…

Headline USA Associate Editor contributed to this report.

Facebook Censors, Demonetizes Babylon Bee for Teasing Mazie Hirono

Contributing Author
-
0
Facebook Censors, Demonetizes Babylon Bee for Teasing Mazie Hirono

Facebook demonetized the conservative satirical site Babylon Bee and censored the site’s page over an article mocking Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono’s treatment of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

The article in question ran with the headline, “Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against A Duck To See If She Is A Witch,” which is a take-off of a “Monty Python” sketch.

“After two days of Amy Coney Barrett gracefully and stoically answering questions with perfect recall and no notes, suspicions grew on Capitol Hill that she might be a practitioner of the dark arts,” the Bee’s satirical report began.

“Oh, she’s a witch alright, just look at her!” the Bee fictitiously quoted Hirono. “Just look at the way she’s dressed and how she’s so much prettier and smarter than us! She’s in league with Beelzebub himself, I just know it! We must burn her!”

The image attached to the article was clearly photoshopped to include an image of a duck next to Hirono at the hearing.

But Facebook claimed the article “incites violence,” according to Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, and demanded that the Babylon Bee remove the post from its page.

When the Bee refused, Facebook demonetized their website.

But Dillon said his company would not give into pressure from the social media giant.

“In what universe does a fictional quote as part of an obvious joke constitute a genuine incitement to violence? How does context not come into play here? They’re asking us to edit the article and not speak publicly about internal content reviews,” Dillon added. “We will not be editing the article to get our page’s monetization reinstated.”

1...3,5173,5183,519...3,826Page 3,518 of 3,826