Former President Donald Trump speaks after arriving for his civil business fraud trial in New York State Supreme Court in New York City on Dec. 7, 2023. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Pool via Getty Images)
Visits: 25
Yes, Virginia the former President is entitled to the DOJ documents. Smith’s team is arguing that the information requested wouldn’t help the defense team and it’s only a fishing expedition. I ask, how would the prosecution know what the defense team needs? We have this from NTD.
As part of these efforts, defense counsel has requested great amounts of material from the prosecution, arguing that, by law, prosecutors must turn over any potentially exculpatory evidence to the criminal defendant. In recent court filings, the defense submitted email exchanges in arguing that the Department of Justice has refused multiple requests for evidence.
Thus, documents belonging to the FBI, U.S. Attorney’s office, DOJ, the special counsel’s office at large, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and Congressional committees are not discoverable, they argued.
Whistleblowers vindicated. What was the most damaging revelation? Remember when the clown Congressman Raskin said that he believed Hunter and the whistleblowers were disgruntled Republicans( or something along those lines)? The Washington Examinar.
Now Hunter Biden has been indicted on tax charges, and the indictment is a complete vindication of the IRS whistleblowers. The indictment largely follows the lines that Shapley and Ziegler set out. It says Hunter Biden avoided paying at least $1.4 million in taxes he owed from 2016 to 2019, when he was receiving large amounts of money from Ukraine, Romania, and China. The indictment alleges that Biden “subverted the payroll and tax withholding process” of his company and then withdrew millions from the company without paying taxes on it.
Well these indictments are just the tip of the Iceberg. What I found most revealing is that they also saw the trail was leading to Joe Biden. The higher ups stopped the investigation into Biden.
In closing, again from the Examinar.
Capitol Hill Democrats sought to dismiss the whistleblowers’ allegations. Investigators are often gung-ho, they said, while Justice Department prosecutors have to measure carefully whether a criminal case is warranted. And in this case, Democrats maintained, no charges were warranted against Hunter Biden.
Hard core criminal?
Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP, Pool
Visits: 7
Slap on the wrist for Hunter. When do the real charges come down? Hunter Biden was hit with a 9-count indictment filed in California: Tax evasion, failure to file/pay taxes, and false/fraudulent tax return.
Hunter Biden hit with 9 new charges - filed in CA. Includes:
Evasion of Taxes Failure to File/Pay Taxes False/Fraudulent Tax Return
Indictment details a "four-year scheme" to avoid his $1.4+ million tax obligations and to file false returns. pic.twitter.com/W4W3teGyky
So where’s the charges for his acting as a foreign agent? He had crimes comitted that happened in 2016 and 2017. Plus his collusion with Russia, China, and the Ukraine.
More proof that masks don’t work. Especially on children. How many times do we have to show proof? I guess some folks will never believe and they will continue to follow the Faucci school of lies.
A new systematic review by Sandlund et alpublished in BMJ’s Archives of Diseases in Childhood shows that public health officials were wrong to mandate masks for children due to an absence of high quality evidence.
Here’s just a bit of that report.
Results We screened 597 studies and included 22 in the final analysis. There were no randomised controlled trials in children assessing the benefits of mask wearing to reduce SARS-CoV-2 infection or transmission. The six observational studies reporting an association between child masking and lower infection rate or antibody seropositivity had critical (n=5) or serious (n=1) risk of bias; all six were potentially confounded by important differences between masked and unmasked groups and two were shown to have non-significant results when reanalysed. Sixteen other observational studies found no association between mask wearing and infection or transmission.
Conclusions Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence. The current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.
Willis began her investigation into Trump in February 2021. Yet, she waited until the 2024 election season was in full swing to charge the former president and current leading GOP candidate.
A menorah lighting was scheduled for the 2nd Sundays Art and Music Festival on Dec. 10. Each month from March to December, the community event hosts artisans, street performers and food vendors, and Jewish leaders were told that the board was not comfortable allowing the lighting at the festival.
…
Dec. 7 marks the first night of Hanukkah. According to a statement from the United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula, the lighting was going to be held by a local rabbi and had nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas war. The statement says Jewish leaders were told the event would appear to choose sides in the conflict, and organizers would reschedule the celebration if it were held under a “ceasefire” banner.
In a statement, the United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula said:
The Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula is shocked and alarmed at LoveLight Placemaking’s decision to cancel a menorah lighting scheduled for the Second Sundays Art and Music Festival on Dec 10 in Williamsburg – claiming it did not want to appear to choose sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict. To be clear, the menorah lighting, which was to be led by a local community rabbi, had nothing to do with Israel or the conflict.
Yet, appallingly, the event organizer claimed that a Chanukah celebration would send a message that the festival was “supporting the killing/bombing of thousands of men, women, and children,” — and even went a step further, by offering to reinstate the event if it was done under a banner calling for a ceasefire.
We should be very clear: it is antisemitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s policies and actions, and to require a political litmus test for Jews’ participation in community events that have nothing to do with Israel. Those standards would never be applied to another community.
Since October 7th, we have repeatedly seen cases of Jewish people and institutions – including synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses – being targeted, sometimes violently, by those opposed to Israel or its actions. At a time of well-documented, rising antisemitism, the singling out and targeting of Jews is dangerous and harmful, serving to further exclude and alienate our community.
The Second Sundays Art & Music Festival has been a meaningful and important community event that brings people together under a powerful message of unity, love and light. Excluding Jewish participation from a festival that should welcome everyone undermines its very message. We call on LoveLight Placemaking to reconsider our request to engage in dialogue, educate themselves on the harmfulness of their decision, and reinstate the apolitical Menorah ceremony at the event.
We all know that the main side effects are hospitalization, and sometimes death. The true numbers may never be released, but hopefully people will contimue to tell their story.
Jack Smith request to hide evidence from Trump legal team is denied. Last month Jack Smith’s lawyers asked Judge Cannon to keep documents under seal because it is considered “highly sensitive classified information.”
Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case, on Monday ordered the unsealing of documents filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who had asked that they be kept under wraps because they could reveal his trial strategy.
On Monday, Cannon ordered the unsealing of documents filed by Smith in the case, making them public, adding that she was “mindful of the strong presumption in favor of public access to judicial documents.”
On November 22, Smith asked that the filing be kept under seal because it contained government plans to delete “highly sensitive classified information” from sharable discovery.
Cannon said that Smith had not provided “sufficient justification” for his filing because the motions did not “contain or otherwise reveal classified information.”
Additionally, a Friday court document revealed the response to the initial order of unsealing in which Smith’s team agreed to unseal the documents, as requested by the defense, though prosecutors insisted on some redactions.
“The defendants did not oppose the Government’s request, but reserved the right to challenge them later,” Smith wrote, adding that a full unsealing could disclose classified defense counsel information about how government’s CIPA motion.
“This is the same information that the Government proposed redacting. Because the Court rejected that position and ordered the Government to provide unredacted versions of the two docket entries to defense counsel, there is no justification for keeping them from the public.”
Is the Biden administration just using the weaponization of the DOJ against Republicans? We’ve been hearing about how ehis administration was focusing on Trump and Republican groups, but some say that they’re not the only ones.
In the past 24 months, New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, former California Congressman TJ Cox, former Louisiana Democratic Party chief Karen Carter Peterson and former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum have all been arrested and charged by the DOJ.
For time reasons, I had to cut my actual address a bit short Thursday. This statement, which began with a nod to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is what was entered into the congressional record:
November 30, 2023
Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Exactly one year ago today I had my first look at the documents that came to be known as the Twitter Files. One of the first things Michael, Bari Weiss and I found was this image, showing that Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a “trends blacklist”:
This was not because he was suspected of terrorism or incitement or of being a Russian spy or a bad citizen in any way. Dr. Bhattacharya’s crime was doing a peer-reviewed study that became the 55th-most read scientific paper of all time, which showed the WHO initially overstated Covid-19 infection fatality rates by a factor of 17. This was legitimate scientific opinion and should have been an important part of the public debate, but Bhattacharya and several of his colleagues instead became some of the most suppressed people in America in 2020 and 2021.
That’s because by then, even true speech that undermined confidence in government policies had begun to be considered a form of disinformation, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid.
When Michael and I testified before the good people of this Committee in March we mentioned this classically Orwellian concept of “malinformation” — material that is somehow both true and wrong — as one of many reasons everyone should be concerned about these digital censorship programs.
But there’s a more subtle reason people across the spectrum should care about this issue.
Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.”
The story that came out in the Twitter Files, and for which more evidence surfaced in both the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and this Committee’s Facebook Files releases, speaks directly to Glasser’s concerns.
There’s been a dramatic shift in attitudes about speech, and many politicians now clearly believe the bulk of Americans can’t be trusted to digest information. This mindset imagines that if we see one clip from RT we’ll stop being patriots, that once exposed to hate speech we’ll become bigots ourselves, that if we read even one Donald Trump tweet we’ll become insurrectionists.
Having come to this conclusion, the kind of people who do “anti-disinformation” work have taken upon themselves the paternalistic responsibility to sort out for us what is and is not safe. While they see great danger in allowing anyone else to read controversial material, it’s taken for granted that they’ll be immune to the dangers of speech.
This leads to the one inescapable question about new “anti-disinformation” programs that is never discussed, but must be: who does this work? Stanford’s Election Integrity Project helpfully made a graphic showing the “external stakeholders” in their content review operation. It showed four columns: government, civil society, platforms, media:
One group is conspicuously absent from that list: people. Ordinary people! Whether America continues the informal sub rosa censorship system seen in the Twitter Files or formally adopts something like Europe’s draconian new Digital Services Act, it’s already clear who won’t be involved. There’ll be no dockworkers doing content flagging, no poor people from inner city neighborhoods, no single moms pulling multiple waitressing jobs, no immigrant store owners or Uber drivers, etc. These programs will always feature a tiny, rarefied sliver of affluent professional-class America censoring a huge and ever-expanding pool of everyone else.
Take away the high-fallutin’ talk about “countering hate” and “reducing harm” and “anti-disinformation” is just a bluntly elitist gatekeeping exercise. If you prefer to think in progressive terms, it’s class war. The math is simple. If one small demographic over here has broad control over the speech landscape, and a great big one over there does not, it follows that one group will end up with more political power than the other. Which one is the winner? To paraphrase Glasser, it probably ain’t you.
It isn’t just one side or the other that will lose if these programs are allowed to continue. It’s pretty much everyone, which is why these programs must be defunded before it’s too late.
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