FIRST LADY: Barron Also Tested Positive for COVID, Showed No Symptoms

Editor 1
-
0
FIRST LADY: Barron Also Tested Positive for COVID, Showed No Symptoms

(Headline USA) After months of enduring attacks from left-wing critics who claimed he had misled the public with an overly rosy picture of the coronavirus, President Donald Trump put his money where his mouth is.

Trump has advocated vociferously for schools to reopen, citing statistics that show little risk of children transmitting or suffering serious adverse consequences from the virus without underlying risk or vulnerability factors.

Supporting Trump’s assertions, while recounting her own experience after contracting the virus on Wednesday, First Lady Melania Trump said that the Trumps’ teenage son Barron had tested positive but showed no symptoms.

Barron tested positive for the coronavirus not long after his parents, she revealed in a lengthy note on the White House’s official website.

As for herself, the First Lady said she had been hit with a “roller coaster” of symptoms that she treated naturally with vitamins and healthy food.

Mrs. Trump said she is now negative and hopes to resume her duties soon.

Barron has since tested negative again, she said.

“Barron’s fine,” the president told reporters as he departed the White House for a campaign trip to Iowa.

Mrs. Trump shared that after she and her husband first received their positive results, “naturally, my mind went immediately to our son.” She said she was relieved when he tested negative at first, but kept thinking about what would happen in the days to come.

“My fear came true when he was tested again and it came up positive,” she wrote in a statement released to social media.

She said she was “glad the three of us went through this at the same time so we could take care of one another and spend time together.”

President Trump has called his bout with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, a “ blessing in disguise.”

He was hospitalized for three days and treated with various therapies and drugs, including steroids, supplemental oxygen and an experimental antibody treatment, but he appeared to recover quickly and resume his rigorous work and campaign schedule.

Mrs. Trump did not explain why Barron’s positive diagnosis was not made public earlier, but she has fiercely protected the ninth-grader’s privacy.

As for her own trials with the disease, the first lady said she was “fortunate” to have had minimal symptoms, “though they hit me all at once and it seemed to be a roller coaster of symptoms in the days after.”

She described body aches, a cough and headaches and said she felt extremely tired most of the time.

To treat it, “I chose to go a more natural route in terms of medicine, opting more for vitamins and healthy food,” she said.

The first lady praised the care provided by Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, and his team, and said it was an “unfamiliar feeling” to be the patient.

“It was me being taken care of now, and getting first-hand experience with all that COVID-19 can do,” she said.

Mrs. Trump acknowledged her family was “fortunate” to have received “the kind of care that we did.” She added, “If you are sick, or if you have a loved one who is sick — I am thinking of you and will be thinking of you every day.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Democrat Mayor of Anchorage Resigns Amid Tawdry Sex Scandal

Editor 1
-
0
Democrat Mayor of Anchorage Resigns Amid Tawdry Sex Scandal

(Headline USA) A stunning tale of inappropriate behavior between the top elected Democrat in Alaska and a television anchor culminated in a joint police-FBI investigation, the arrest of the journalist and the resignation of Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz.

Berkowitz submitted his resignation to the Anchorage Assembly on Tuesday night, just days after he vehemently denied allegations by YourAlaskaLink anchor Maria Athens that he had posted nude photos of himself on an underage website.

The mayor’s resignation followed Berkowitz’s jaw-dropping admission Monday that he was involved in an inappropriate sexting — he called it “messaging” — relationship with Athens, the anchor of a combined Fox/ABC station in Anchorage.

She says their relationship started in 2016, and declined to say whether it ever became sexual in nature.

“My resignation results from unacceptable personal conduct that has compromised my ability to perform my duties with the focus and trust that is required,” Berkowitz wrote.

“I apologize to the people of Anchorage for a major lapse in judgment I made several years ago when I had a consensual, inappropriate messaging relationship with reporter Maria Athens. I’m embarrassed and ashamed for the hurt I’ve caused my family and our community. I take responsibility for my actions,” Berkowitz added.

The five days that roiled Alaska’s largest city began Friday morning, when Athens allegedly placed a profanity- and racist-laden phone call to Berkowitz.

The voicemail, a copy of which was obtained by The Alaska Landmine online blog, started with the caller announcing herself as Athens and rattling off her various network affiliations.

The caller claimed to have learned from sources that Berkowitz had been posting nude photos on an underage website, and that she planned to report this on that evening’s news.

The caller threatened to kill Berkowitz, who is Jewish, and his wife, in a diatribe laced with racist insults.

“You either turn yourself in, kill yourself or do what you need to do,” the voicemail says.

“I can’t believe I am such a good person and thought I loved you,” the caller continued. “I don’t even hate you. I will pray for your Zionist f—–g ass. … And I’m putting this on the news tonight. Bye. Have a great Friday!”

The caller also predicted she would win an Emmy for her reporting.

Later Friday, Athens taped a tease for the story and posted it to her Facebook page, prompting this denial from the mayor’s office: “The slanderous allegations from Your Alaska Link reporter Maria Athens are categorically false and appear to be the product of someone who is hostile and unwell.”

The same afternoon, Athens then posted what she claims to be a photo of Berkowitz’s nude backside as proof of her allegations.

Here is what happened later that day, according to the district attorney’s charging documents:

Athens and the station’s manager, who is described as her boyfriend in the documents, got into an argument while driving in Anchorage. He made her get out of the car and told her she was barred from returning to the station.

Athens nevertheless went back to the television studio and attacked him. When police arrived, she hit an officer trying to arrest her and was placed in full restraints after she tried to kick out the back window of the police cruiser with her high heels.

Athens was charged with assault, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct, and released after posting bail.

Anchorage police and the FBI investigated the allegations and the death threat, but an FBI statement released Tuesday said it found “no immediate evidence to support a violation of federal law; however, the FBI Anchorage Field Office continues to monitor the situation.”

Athens told the Anchorage Daily News she and Berkowitz began communicating in 2016 on the messaging platform WhatsApp.

“When he slided into my texts, he was so smooth with his little witty slogans and pictures,” Athens told the newspaper. She has not returned messages left by The Associated Press.

Athens, a graduate of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, said she was feeling isolated in Alaska. “He gave me attention when I was lonely.” She declined to say whether the texting relationship ever became physical.

Athens said she deleted the messages from her phone, which she said is now in the hands of law enforcement.

She also declined to elaborate on her assertion that Berkowitz was involved in illegal activities, saying it was based on what sources told her. She did not say who the sources were.

Messages left with Berkowitz through his office and with station management were not returned to the AP. Berkowitz’s resignation is effective Oct. 23.

According to the city charter, Felix Rivera, chairman of the Anchorage Assembly, will serve as acting mayor until a special election is held if the assembly doesn’t choose to reorganize. If Rivera does become mayor, he will hold a trio of distinctions: the city’s first openly gay mayor, the first Latino and at age 31, likely the youngest. Birth information for one man who served in the 1930s was not available.

Berkowitz was elected to his second three-year term as mayor in 2018. The officially non-partisan position is limited to two terms.

Berkowitz, a native of San Francisco, is also a lawyer and Anchorage businessman. He served as a Democrat in the Alaska House of Representative from 1997 to 2006, serving the last two years as minority leader.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Dems Continue to Infuse Politics into Day 3 of Barrett’s Confirmation Hearing

Editor 1
-
0
Dems Continue to Infuse Politics into Day 3 of Barrett’s Confirmation Hearing

(Headline USA) Over and over, Amy Coney Barrett said she’d be her own judge if confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court seems inevitable, as even some Senate Democrats acknowledged in Senate hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The 48-year-old judge once again refused to indulge Democrats’ leading questions about left-wing conspiracy theories concerning Trump’s plans to push back the date of next month’s election, preventing voter intimidation and upholding the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Despite their claims, Trump and his supporters have frequently noted that Democrats seem intent on doing the very things they are panic-mongering about.

They have sought several court cases, for example, to extend ballot deadlines well beyond election day, and failed 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton has encouraged this year’s hopeful, former Vice President Joe Biden, not to concede “under any circumstances.”

Trump has expressed an urgency to have the open court seat filled in the event that Biden’s team of celebrity leftist lawyers seeks to drag out the final outcome and challenge it through a never-ending stream of court cases.

Should the cases extend past Jan. 20, some fear that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would attempt to declare herself the president.

Nonetheless, Barrett was careful in two long days of Senate testimony not to take on the president who nominated her nor to speculate on hypothetical situations that might present themselves before the court—which she repeatedly told Democrat senators would be a violation of the judicial cannon of ethics.

She also refused to express her view on whether the president can pardon himself.

“It’s not one that I can offer a view,” she said in response to a question Wednesday from Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont.

When it came to major issues that are likely to come before the court, including abortion and health care, she reiterated that she would keep an open mind and said neither Trump nor anyone else in the White House had tried to influence her views.

“No one has elicited from me any commitment in a case,” she said.

A longstanding rule—first codified by then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., during the confirmation of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, whom Barrett would replace on the court—has stipulated that senators would not expect potential justices to answer politically motivated questions about their policy positions.

But Democrats scuttled the rule, seeing an opportunity to score garbage political points with weeks until the Nov. 3 election, even if they could not thwart Barrett’s confirmation.

Ignoring the principle behind Barrett’s reluctance, they continued to bait her and claimed that she wouldn’t engage on topics that seemed easy to swat away, including that only Congress can change the date that the election takes place.

In response to their go-to attack, Barrett said she is not on a “mission to destroy the Affordable Care Act,” though she has been critical of the two Supreme Court decisions that preserved key parts of the Obama-era health care law.

Barrett is the most open opponent of abortion nominated to the Supreme Court in decades, and Democrats fear that her ascension could be a tipping point that threatens abortion rights.

But Republican senators embraced her stance, proudly stating that she was, in Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham’s words, an “unashamedly pro-life” conservative who is making history as a role model for other women.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said there “is nothing wrong with confirming a devout pro-life Christian.”

Barrett refused to say whether Roe v. Wade‘s 1973 legalization of abortion was correctly decided, though she signed an open letter seven years ago that called the decision “infamous.”

In an exchange with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Barrett resisted the invitation to explicitly endorse or reject the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s comments about perpetuating “racial entitlement” in a key voting rights case.

“When I said that Justice Scalia’s philosophy is mine, too, I certainly didn’t mean to say that every sentence that came out of Justice Scalia’s mouth or every sentence that he wrote is one that I would agree with,” Barrett said.

She called the Voting Rights Act a “triumph in the civil rights movement,” without discussing the specifics of the earlier challenge to it. The court will hear another challenge to the law early next year.

All in all, the hearing stood in stark contrast with the drama-filled, disruptive outbursts that accompanied the 2018 confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But one of the prominent Democrats who treated Kavanaugh’s hearing in a particularly disrespectful manner was back at it with Barrett.

One of the more dramatic moments came late Wednesday as California Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, attempted to grill Barrett on whether racial discrimination in voting and climate change were legitimate concerns.

Harris asked if she agreed with Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote in a 2013 voting rights case that “voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that.”

Barrett said she would “not comment on what any justice said in an opinion.”

Asked whether “climate change is happening,” Barrett said she wouldn’t engage because it is “a very contentious matter of public debate.” Barrett did, however, say she believes the novel coronavirus is infectious and smoking causes cancer.

Barrett also testified she has not spoken to Trump or his team about election cases, and declined to commit to recusing herself from any post-election cases.

She did describe what the role of the court would be if it were asked to intervene. “Certainly the court would not see itself — and would not be — electing the president. It would be applying laws that are designed to protect the election and protect the right to vote,” Barrett said.

In 2000, the court’s decision in Bush v. Gore brought a Florida recount to a halt, effectively deciding the election in George W. Bush’s favor. Barrett was on Bush’s legal team in 2000, in a minor role.

Underscoring the Republicans’ confidence, Graham set an initial committee vote on the nomination for Thursday morning, the last day of hearings, which would allow final approval by the full Senate by the end of the month.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

UPDATED: Biden Campaign Denies Former VP Met w/ Burisma Official & Knew About Hunter’s Deals

Ben Sellers
-
0
UPDATED: Biden Campaign Denies Former VP Met w/ Burisma Official & Knew About Hunter’s Deals

UPDATE VIA FOX NEWS: Fox News reported this afternoon that “the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is investigating newly released emails that reveal that Hunter Biden introduced his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings in 2015 at Hunter’s request.”

The cable news network also published an official response from the Biden campaign about the allegations, from spokesman Andrew Bates:

Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.

The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials.

Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: A smoking gun implicating Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden in the Hunter Biden—Burisma scandal on Wednesday offered hope that the corrupt dealings could produce some measure of legal or political accountability.

The New York Post reported that it had obtained a trove of emails from Hunter’s old laptop, including one that directly disproved Joe Biden’s claim that he never discussed foreign business deals with his son.

On April 17, 2015, a year after Hunter joined the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to thank Hunter for providing access to his father—then the vice president—during a trip to Washington, DC.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote in the email. “It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

The email surfaced as part of a massive data cache recovered from a water-damaged MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 but never recovered or paid for, according to the business owner.

Also included among the shocking contents was a raunchy, 12-minute video that showed Hunter smoking crack and engaging in sex acts with an unidentified woman, as well as other sexually explicit images, Fox News reported.

Although the store owner could not positively identify Hunter, the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named in honor of Hunter’s late brother.

The whistleblower alerted the FBI after the Burisma scandal broke, and they seized the laptop in December 2019, but not before he copied the hard drive.

He reportedly provided the copy it to Robert Costello, a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani, who was offering legal counsel to President Donald Trump and investigating the Burisma scandal.

In the wake of the bombshell, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which recently released a damning report on the Biden family’s foreign business dealings, said it was following up on the discoveries after the repairman approached them last month.

“Although we consider those communications to be confidential, because the individual in this instance spoke with the media about his contact with the committee, we can confirm receipt of his email complaint,” a spokesperson for committee chair Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., told the Post. “We have been in contact with the whistleblower and are in the process of attempting to validate the information he provided.”

Some of the emails used Hunter’s official first name, Robert, and other code words that seem intended to obscure the shady subject matter.

Among those was one in which Hunter appeared to leverage his connection with the White House to boost his pay at Burisma.

While some accounts differ, his “consulting” fees during his five-year stint with Burisma are reported to have been close to a million dollars a year.

Hunter resigned the position in April 2019 after it was revealed that Giuliani was investigating—and the same month that Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president.

Shortly before joining Burisma’s board, in an April 13, 2014 email to his longtime business partner Devon Archer—who was already on the board—Hunter made multiple references to his father as “my guy” while discussing an anticipated visit to Ukraine.

“The contract should begin now—not after the upcoming visit of my guy,” he wrote.

“That should include a retainer in the range of 25k p/m w/ additional fees where appropriate for more in depth work,” he added. “… Complete separate from our respective deals re board participation.”

The new revelation also comes a week after reports that Archer—himself a former top aide to Obama Secretary of State John Kerry—faced a reinstated conviction over a fraud charge in a separate scheme to bilk a Native American tribe out of proceeds from a $60 million bond sale.

Most importantly, though, Hunter’s laptop could potentially implicate his father in precisely the sort of quid pro quo dealings during the Obama administration that House Democrats sought to impeach President Donald Trump for—ironically as he called on the Ukrainian president to investigate the Biden–Burisma scandal.

Roughly a year after his DC meeting with Pozharskyi, Joe Biden—the top official overseeing the US State Department’s so-called anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine following a 2014 color revolution—forced the firing of the country’s top prosecutor, who had recently reopened a corruption probe into Burisma.

As a newly disclosed memo revealed last month, the energy company had bribed prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin‘s predecessor into allowing the probe to go dormant shortly after Hunter joined the Burisma board.

But when Shokin conducted a series of raids on Burisma properties in the spring of 2016, the company ramped up its lobbying efforts to the US State Department.

Shortly thereafter, Biden delivered an ultimatum to then-President Petro Poroshenko: fire Shokin or lose a billion-dollar US bond guarantee.

Biden bragged during a 2017 panel discussion about his coercive strong-arming of the former Soviet satellite.

“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 recounted in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

But as recently as the presidential debate last month, he claimed—without evidence—that the accusations surrounding the Burisma scandal had been “discredited.”

The left-wing media has largely been complicit in Biden’s attempts to cover up the scandal and stonewall the public.

On the handful of occasions when he was asked about the Burisma dealings, Biden has become belligerent with reporters.

After “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie pressed him on it in February, Biden reiterated his false claim that there was ‘no evidence’ of wrongdoing.

“It’s a good thing that no one’s found anything wrong with his dealing with Ukraine except they say it sets a bad image,” Biden insisted.

“…You’re saying things you do not know what you’re talking about,” he continued, when asked whether it was wrong for Hunter to leverage his connections to obtain the board seat. “No one has said that—who said that?”

Cuomo Blames GOP, NYPost for Fueling Scandal over His COVID Nursing-Home Massacre

Contributing Author
-
0
Cuomo Blames GOP, NYPost for Fueling Scandal over His COVID Nursing-Home Massacre

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo blamed Republicans and the New York Post for the controversy surrounding his deadly policy of forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients.

In his new memoir, American Crisis, Cuomo acknowledged the impact the coronavirus outbreak has had on his state’s nursing homes, but he denied that his March 25 order that exposed healthy senior citizens to contagious patients had anything to do with it.

“By early spring, Republicans needed an offense to distract from the narrative of their botched federal response—and they needed it badly,” Cuomo wrote. “So they decided to attack Democratic governors and blame them for nursing homes.”

Cuomo then accused Michael Godwin, a columnist for the New York Post, of participating in an “orchestrated strategy” to undermine his coronavirus response after Godwin published a column criticizing his nursing home policy.

“On April 25, conservative columnist Michael Goodwin published a piece in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post aimed at New York with the headline, ‘State lacked common sense in nursing homes’ coronavirus approach,’” wrote Cuomo. “It was an orchestrated strategy and a Fox News drumbeat.”

As Cuomo was quick to observe, he was not the only blue-state leader responsible for implementing the disastrous policy.

“It wasn’t just me,” he said.

“Phil Murphy in New Jersey, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Gavin Newsom in California and Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania were all in the Republican crosshairs on nursing homes,” he continued. “As the states with the most deaths were Democratic states, the Trump forces saw us as an easy target.”

Nonetheless, Cuomo—who has regularly deflected blame for New York’s problem onto President Donald Trump— failed to make the connection between those states’ leadership shortcomings and their astronomical mortality rates during the pandemic’s peak.

Cuomo has faced criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for refusing to disclose information about his nursing home policy and how many lives it cost.

In May, he partially reversed the order without saying why.

He admitted in the memoir that he should have been more forthright about the policy, although he continued to deny any wrongdoing.

Cuomo said his critics “needed to add a conspiracy, which was that they [elderly victims] died because of a bad state policy that ‘mandated and directed’ that the nursing homes accept COVID-positive people, and these COVID-positive people were the cause of the spread of the disease in the nursing homes,” he continued.

“It was a lie,” he claimed without evidence.

WATCH: Pelosi Has Total Meltdown w/ CNN’s Wolf Blitzer When Grilled about COVID Relief

Contributing Author
-
0
WATCH: Pelosi Has Total Meltdown w/ CNN’s Wolf Blitzer When Grilled about COVID Relief

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had a meltdown on CNN after anchor Wolf Blitzer called her out for holding a much-needed coronavirus aid package hostage.

Blitzer asked Pelosi why she was unwilling to negotiate with the White House on the package when President Donald Trump has made it clear that he is willing to do whatever it takes to reach a deal.

He then pointed out that some of her Democratic colleagues, such as Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., have been urging her to pass the relief bill and put aside politics.

“Seventy-eight million can’t afford normal expenses. Forty million are at risk of eviction. Eight million small businesses might close forever,” Khanna said.

“Dems can’t wait for the perfect deal,” he added. “We have a moral obligation to get folks relief, now.”

Pelosi then blasted the notoriously left-leaning Blitzer for criticizing her, calling him a “Republican apologist.”

“Honest to God, you really—I can’t get over it because Andrew Yang, he’s lovely, Ro Khanna, he’s lovely—they are not negotiating this situation, they have no idea of the particulars,” Pelosi said.

“They have no idea of what the language is here,” she continued. “I don’t know why you’re always an apologist—and many of your colleagues, apologists for the Republican position. Ro Khanna, that’s nice. That isn’t what we’re going to do.”

When Blitzer asked Pelosi what was wrong with Trump’s $1.8 trillion proposal, Pelosi said she wasn’t willing to make “the wrong the enemy of the right.”

She then claimed that Blitzer has no idea what he’s talking about.

“Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs,” Pelosi said sarcastically.

“You evidently do not respect the chairmen of the committees who wrote this bill, and I wish you would respect the knowledge that goes into meeting the needs of the American people,” she said.

“But again, you’ve been defending the administration all this time with no knowledge of the difference between our two bills,” she continued, “and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that to you in person.”

Sen. Hawley Sends Scathing Letter to Zuckerberg over Facebook’s Attempt to Bury Biden’s Burisma Scandal

Ben Sellers
-
0
Sen. Hawley Sends Scathing Letter to Zuckerberg over Facebook’s Attempt to Bury Biden’s Burisma Scandal

What appeared to be indisputable “smoking gun” evidence linking Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter to a major scandal long denied by left-wing media did little to sway tech companies like Facebook amid their aggressive, anti-conservative censorship campaign.

The New York Post revealed it had obtained, courtesy of Rudy Giuliani, a trove of damning emails and other data from Hunter Biden’s old laptop that offered evidence of Joe Biden meeting with Burisma representatives, among other things.

The hard-drive data—given to Giuliani by a computer-repair technician in Delaware—also included raunchy photos of Hunter engaging in sex acts with an unidentified woman while smoking crack.

However, Facebook quickly moved to “reduce the distribution” of the story on its platform while the news underwent a fact-check by its demonstrably biased third-party auditors

In response, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., one of Big Tech’s biggest critics in Congress, warned the social-media giant that he planned to investigate its biased efforts to sway the upcoming election by allowing Biden to sow disinformation about his corrupt foreign business dealings.

“The seemingly selective nature of this public intervention suggests partiality on the part of Facebook,” Hawley wrote in a letter Wednesday addressed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“And your efforts to suppress the distribution of content revealing potentially unethical activity by a candidate for president raises a number of additional questions, to which I expect responses immediately.”

Hawley called out Facebook for its rush to denounce the news as false while lacking any justification apart from its desire to protect Biden.

“If you have evidence that this news story contains ‘disinformation’ or have otherwise determined that there are inaccuracies with the reporting, will you disclose them to the public so that they can assess your findings?” Hawley demanded.

Barring such evidence, he said, the presumption that a fact-check was warranted appeared itself to be a deceptive valuation of the article’s credibility.

He also questioned whether the Biden campaign had pressured Facebook into removing the content.

Facebook’s increasingly dictatorial censorship already has raised considerable alarms during the final months of the election season.

It has actively sought to de-platform conservative groups and has engaged in shadow-banning and filtering of information that it deems—without evidence—to be false or overly controversial.

However, a number of the topics that it has “fact-checked“—such a the corrupt World Health Organization’s ever-evolving policies regarding masks and lockdowns in the coronavirus pandemic—have subsequently been validated.

Consequently, Facebook’s insinuations that the information is invalid have, in fact, promoted their own manner of disinformation, although neither the company nor other Biden-backing media allies have sought to correct the record in equal measure.

Biden has frequently relied upon claims of “no evidence” or “discredited” reports to avoid offering any sort of substantive response to the valid voter concerns.

As Hawley noted, the campaign donations from Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies—including Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube—have offered clear evidence of their own leftist leanings.

Even so, the platforms have long sought autonomy and legal protections by claiming that they are impartial conduits for user content rather than active curators of such content.

President Donald Trump has threatened to hold the companies accountable under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

However, it appears unlikely that he will be able to deter them from their concerted effort to sway the election outcome.

In addition to Facebook’s censorship of the Burisma bombshell, Google’s news division also appeared to be trying to suppress it.

A search by Headline USA on Wednesday turned up no articles about the Post report and generally displayed only positive stories about Biden’s campaign.

Gun-Rights Advocates File FEC Complaint Against Facebook, Kamala Harris for Suppressing Facts

Contributing Author
-
0
Gun-Rights Advocates File FEC Complaint Against Facebook, Kamala Harris for Suppressing Facts

A pro-gun group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Facebook, AFP Fact Check and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., for violating election law by suppressing information about Harris’s views.

After the Gun Owners of America shared articles about Harris’s anti-gun record, Facebook allowed AFP, a foreign media outlet sponsored by the French government, to “fact check” the articles and label them “false.”

AFP insisted that Harris is not anti-gun, even though the articles in question cited an amicus brief in which Harris advocated for various gun-control policies that would restrict an individual’s right to bear arms.

The amicus brief, which Harris signed as a district attorney in San Francisco, was filed with the Supreme Court in the D.C. v. Heller case—a landmark case affirming an individual’s constitutional right to bear arms that has been invoked regularly in the recent confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

The DAs, however, argued in their brief that states were allowed to restrict firearm sales because the Second Amendment only guaranteed gun rights to militias, not private citizens.

“[T]he Second Amendment does not apply to legislation passed by state or local governments, and the restrictions bear a reasonable relationship to protecting public safety and thus do not violate a personal constitutional right,” they claimed.

During the Democrat primaries in her own short-lived run for president, Harris advocated for federally-mandated red-flag laws, universal background checks and raising the minimum age for gun purchases.

She also said she would ban states from having stand-your-ground laws, and would use executive action to do it if Congress chosen to act.

Despite these facts, AFP claimed criticism of Harris’s record on gun ownership was unfounded. Facebook endorsed the AFP’s fact check, going so far as to ban GOA’s Virginia director, John Crump, for sharing one of the articles AFP deemed problematic.

That effectively constituted foreign election interference, the GOA complaint stated.

By allowing AFP to censor information, Facebook “recruited an agent of a European government to control which messages about U.S. elections may be heard, and which should be suppressed,” it said.

Through this fact-checking program, AFP can “censor, diminish, or even remove opposing views that are posted on Facebook, and to superimpose AFP’s own version of the alleged ‘truth’ in its place,” it continued.

GOA also asked the FEC to investigate whether Facebook is inadvertently allowing a foreign entity to financially assist a U.S. election due to the fact that thousands of Facebook employees—some of whom could be connected to AFP—have donated to Harris and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign.

“[Facebook’s] employees have used corporate time and resources to target and remove political speech critical of their favored candidate, because such speech has been deemed harmful to that candidate, all for the purpose of influencing the 2020 Presidential Election,” it said.

If the FEC doesn’t act, Congress should take action to crack down on Big Tech censorship, Crump said in a statement.

“The social media platforms try to play both sides of the fence,” he said.

“When someone posts something illegal, the company claims that they are just a ‘platform,’ so they are protected from civil and criminal penalties,” he continued. “When they want to remove opinions they don’t like, Facebook claims that they moderate content like a publisher. It is time they either allow free speech or the government should strip Facebook of their Digital Millennium Copyright Act protections.”

Calif. Secretary of State Illegally Awarded Pro-Biden Firm $35M to ‘Micro-Target’ Voters

Joshua Paladino
-
0
Calif. Secretary of State Illegally Awarded Pro-Biden Firm $35M to ‘Micro-Target’ Voters

California’s Secretary of State awarded a $35 million “Get Out the Vote” no-bid contract to a “Team Biden” firm, a situation that appears to violate federal election law, according to Fox News.

Tucker Carlson Tonight accessed the contract between the state of California and SKDKnickerbocker—whose managing director, Anita Dunn, is a senior aide for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

In the contract for the Vote Save California initiative, SKDK said that the project would have to overcome a range of “challenges” that included suppressing “fear and misinformation with facts” about mail-in voting.

“The President and his allies, including those in certain corners of the media, continually repeat false claims that voting by mail is uniquely susceptible to fraud,” SKDK said in the proposal. “It’s not, and we need to make that clear.”

SKDK even mentioned President Donald Trump by name.

“Viral messaging is already circulating that ballots need to be returned far before Election Day because of issues in the U.S. Postal Service, and President Trump himself recently tweeted that the election should be delayed as vote-by-mail can’t be trusted (which was debunked by other users on the platform),” the firm said. “Who knows what the next claim will be?”

Despite the obvious opposition to Trump, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, described the Vote Save California project as “a nonpartisan effort.”

Yet even today on SKDK’s website, there is featured anti-Trump content under the headline “Black Lives Matter.”

The post falsely states that “Over the last four years, Donald Trump has been telling white Americans they should be afraid of Black [sic] and brown Americans.”

The post continues: “Trump and his enablers are using a heavy dose of fear at their convention to gaslight us…”

Republican Reps. James Comer of Kentucky, Rodney David of Illinois and Jody Hice of Georgia, sent a letter to Patricia Layfield, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s inspector general, asking her to investigate the partisan contract.

“Not only was this shady contract fast-tracked to a blatant pro-Biden consulting firm, new information reveals it likely violates federal law and Democratic operatives are running the contract and targeting specific voters,” said Comer, the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The letter raised many questions about the contract, including whether it had illegally granted sensitive voter information to the partisan Democratic firm or illegally used money from the Help America Vote Act grant, which was included in the CARES Act.

It is illegal to use HAVA grant money to fund get-out-the-vote programs.

“For example, in its proposal, SKD proposes using eight percent of the $35 million budget on mail,” the congressmen noted. “Specifically, the proposal states, ‘a direct mail program can deliver a tailored message to a micro-targeted universe of individuals.'”

Comer joined Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday to talk about the investigation.

“To get out the vote, they’re going to have to micro-target voters,” he said. “In order to do that, they’re going to have to have sensitive voter data from the secretary of state’s office. … We’re not going to let this go.”

Campaign Finance Reports Show Biden Heavily Favored by Wall Street Executives

Joshua Paladino
-
0
Campaign Finance Reports Show Biden Heavily Favored by Wall Street Executives

Wall Street executives are throwing their money behind Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, with the expectation that he will continue his pro-corporate policies despite his socialist talking points, Fox Business reported.

Big banks and corporations support Biden because he is leading in the polls, and they want a seat at the table to discuss regulations with the next occupant of the White House.

“Wall Street always likes to back the winner,” said Charles Myers, chairman of Signum Global Advisors. “If the polls are wrong, some of the smartest people in the country will have gotten their bet completely wrong for the second time in eight years.”

In addition to betting heavily on failed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, the financial industry also gambled on failed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney routing incumbent Barack Obama in 2012.

Wall Street donated $61 million to Romney, compared to $18.7 million for Obama; and $88 million to Clinton, compared to $20.8 million for Trump.

But the real reason that Wall Street backs Biden is that his working-man affectation is a campaign shtick that does not match his 47 years in office fighting for corporate bailouts and carve outs.

Campaign-finance data show that Biden has accepted about $51 million from companies that manage investments and securities, whereas President Donald Trump has taken a mere $10 million, Open Secrets reported.

Individuals at Wall Street banks support Biden, too.

Goldman Sachs executives and employees have contributed $172,809 to Biden’s campaign but only $11,943 to Trump’s campaign.

The money that individuals at Goldman Sachs donated to Trump about matches the amount that they gave to a pro-corporate Democrat who challenged Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez in the primary. The challenger, CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso–Cabrera, lost by 73 percent.

Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in a tweet said that Biden’s high-tax, red-tape regime would do less damage to the market than Trump’s rhetoric.

But top executives who spoke anonymously to Fox Business said they believe that Biden’s campaign promises, which he adopted to appease the Sanders–AOC wing of the Democratic Party, are empty talk.

“They just think Biden is calling for all these tax increases to appease the progressives like Bernie Sanders and AOC,” an executive who has spoken with the Wall Street executives who have donated to Biden.

Biden will govern like an establishment globalist if elected, not a populist progressive, according to the anonymous source.

Even though Trump was in real estate for his entire life before running for president in 2016, real estate investors support Biden by a smaller margin, $20 million compared to $16.7 million.

“The real estate guys are like the Wall Street guys,” the anonymous corporate executive said. “They see Biden winning and they don’t think he will carry through with all his tax increases. I think they’re crazy, but that’s what they’re saying.”

1...3,5263,5273,528...3,826Page 3,527 of 3,826