Hunter Biden is a lot of things, but it looks like we can add “deadbeat father” to that list.
Not only is the president’s son fighting tooth and nail in the court system to lower the amount of child support he will have to remit to Lunden Roberts, a former Washington D.C.-based exotic dancer with whom Hunter Biden had a child, but he’s also exhausting all possible legal maneuver to prevent the child from bearing the family surname.
According to the New York Post, Hunter Biden told an Arkansas court that his 4-year-old daughter, Navy Joan Roberts, would be robbed of “peaceful existence” if she were to take the Biden family name. That’s an interesting angle. It’s almost as if he’s admitting that the Biden name brings trouble.
He’s never even met his daughter.
But as a December New York Post report noted, Hunter Biden hasn’t even met his young daughter yet, and it was only in 2020 that he was finally forced to admit that he fathered the girl after DNA tests confirmed it. President Joe Biden, the young girl’s grandfather, also remains estranged.
Hunter Biden’s attorneys doubled down, arguing that the girl should have the power to make that decision on her own once “the disparagement of the Biden name is not at its height.”
Roberts, however, had a contrasting view of the Biden surname.
In late December, Roberts argued to Circuit Court Judge Holly Meyer that her daughter should be afforded the right to carry the prestigious last name, saying it would benefit the young girl because the last name is “now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute and politically powerful.”
Why doesn’t Hunter Biden want to let the child have his last name, given that he’s the father? Anyone even remotely familiar with political optics can answer that question quickly. It’s an elitist PR issue, plain and simple.
The Biden family, as corrupt and shady as they come across, presumably can’t fathom the thought of a child born out of wedlock to a former D.C. stripper sharing the same last name.
Hunter Biden’s excuses to the court as to why he doesn’t believe the child deserves to carry the family name are weak, at best, and sound more like a sneaky way of complying with the wishes of others in his family who won’t tolerate young Navy Joan taking the Biden name, as it would ultimately draw negative media attention that the Biden’s can’t afford at the moment.
But the strategy seems to have backfired spectacularly because now the headlines read as though Hunter Biden is a candidate for “worst father of the decade.”
Among many others, Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University Jonathan Turley tore into Hunter Biden’s attempts to block his daughter from taking his name.
“It is awful to think of this child learning that her father fought recognition of paternity, fought child support, and then fought her using his name. Fortunately, she has the law on her side and, despite her father’s disgraceful efforts, she is a Biden,” Turley tweeted.
It is awful to think of this child learning that her father fought recognition of paternity, fought child support, and then fought her using his name. Fortunately, she has the law on her side and, despite her father’s disgraceful efforts, she is a Biden.https://t.co/wYCVfq30KA
“What a thoroughly rotten thing to do to a child. Just consider that Hunter had all the privileges of life. He wants to deny all of those privileges to his own child and fought to avoid his responsibility every step of the way,” one Twitter user wrote.
What a thoroughly rotten thing to do to a child. Just consider that Hunter had all the privileges of life. He wants to deny all of those privileges to his own child and fought to avoid his responsibility every step of the way.
If Hunter Biden wants to avoid further scandal and negative press, this is one issue he should probably let go of as soon as possible. Not attempting to weasel out of child support payments would also be an excellent first step.
McCabe asking the DOJ to ignore House Investigation. CNN Photo
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CNN’s Andrew McCabe Says DOJ Should NOT Cooperate With GOP Biden Classified Docs Probe: ‘Take A Very Hard Line Against That’
Former FBI Deputy Director and CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Andrew McCabe said the Justice Department should not cooperate with the House GOP’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s classified documents case.
Friday afternoon, Ohio Republican Congressman and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordanannounced an investigation into President Joe Biden’s classified documents issue with a letter that also offered a defense of ex-President Donald Trump. and attacked the Justice Department’s conduct in Trump’s case.
On Friday night’s edition of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, anchor Anderson Cooper asked McCabe what impact Jordan’s probe would have and McCabe emphatically urged the DoJ not to cooperate with it:
COOPER: Chairman Jim Jordan announced this House Judiciary Committee investigation, into the DOJ actions, related to the President’s handling of the classified documents, today. How much does that impact the DOJ ongoing investigation?
MCCABE: Well, I think that DOJ will likely – I certainly would advise them, if they were willing to listen to my advice, I would advise them to take a very hard line against that.
There is a clear precedent here of not sharing information, from an ongoing criminal investigation, with Congress. And I think the DOJ is in a very strong position, to resist, on those grounds.
Who knows what comes of that resistance? Maybe DOJ leadership starts getting subpoenaed. And ultimately, that fight will end up in the courts. And that could drag things out. That’s going to be an additional distraction to DOJ. But it shouldn’t disrupt the actual conduct of the investigation. So, that’s a – it’ll be a separate but related set of stressors that DOJ has to deal with.
COOPER: And, right now, I mean, you have a sitting President, you have a former President, who has already declared a candidacy, both under investigation, by separate Special Counsels, appointed by the Attorney General. This seems pretty unprecedented, no?
MCCABE: It’s absolutely unprecedented. I can’t think of another situation, even remotely like it.
I think it was a very astute move, by the Attorney General, to appoint a Special Counsel, in the Biden inquiry. I think it’s essential that these inquiries are treated exactly the same, at their inception, given the same sort of resources, and attention, and priority and, of course, special counsels.
But, at this point, Anderson, they become entirely different, and totally independent. The facts are very different. The way their respective teams are treating their interactions, with DOJ, will be very different. And they could come to very different results.
By Zachary Stieber for Epoch Times January 9, 2023Updated: January 10, 2023
A Pfizer board member who used to head the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lobbied Twitter to take action against a post accurately pointing out that natural immunity is superior to COVID-19 vaccination, according to an email released on Jan. 9.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb wrote on Aug. 27, 2021, to Twitter executive Todd O’Boyle to request Twitter take action against a post from Dr. Brett Giroir, another former FDA commissioner.
“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive. Here he draws a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn’t been peer reviewed. But this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage,” Gottlieb wrote.
Giroir had written that it was clear natural immunity, or post-infection immunity, “is superior to vaccine immunity, by ALOT.” He said there was no scientific justification to require proof of COVID-19 vaccination if a person had natural immunity. “If no previous infection? Get vaccinated!” he also wrote.
Giroir pointed to what was at the time a preprint study from Israeli researchers that found, after analyzing health records, that natural immunity provided better protection than vaccination. The study was later published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases following peer review.
Researchers said the data “demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.” BNT162b2 is the trade name for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, which is the main shot used in Israel.
Gottlieb’s email triggered messages on Jira, Twitter’s internal messaging system, according to journalist Alex Berenson, who was granted access to Twitter’s internal files by CEO Elon Musk.
“Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,” O’Boyle wrote.
A Twitter analyst who reviewed the post determined it did not violate any misinformation rules but Twitter still put a tag on it, claiming to all users who viewed it that it was “misleading” and directing them to a link that would show “why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.” The tag prevented people from replying to, sharing, or liking Giroir’s post.
Gottlieb later defended his actions, saying he targeted posts that he thought included “false and inflammatory” information. Giroir said “my tweet was accurate then, and it remains so now” and that Twitter never responded to him.
Another Message
Gottlieb later messaged O’Boyle again, flagging a post from Justin Hart, a critic of lockdowns and a skeptic of COVID-19 vaccines, Berenson reported.
Gottlieb took issue with Hart writing that “sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of <>0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling.”
COVID-19 poses little mortality risk to young, healthy people, studies and data show.
Gottlieb did not detail why he wanted to censor Hart, but the objection came shortly before the U.S. government authorized and recommended Pfizer’s vaccine for children aged 5 to 11.
O’Boyle sent the request to Twitter analysts, failing for a second time to disclose Gottlieb’s ties to Pfizer. The complaint did not trigger any action.
“Our team of ragtag analysts, activists, moms and dads have been going after Scott since April 2020 when he repeatedly advocated for school closures and lockdowns. He doesn’t like people pushing back on the narrative,” Hart told The Epoch Times in a Twitter message.
Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.
Tried to Get Journalist Banned
Gottlieb also tried to get Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who now authors a Substack, banned from Twitter, a message released in 2022 showed.
The message showed that Gottlieb forwarded a blog post from Berenson to a Twitter worker, writing that Berenson calling Dr. Anthony Fauci arrogant was an example of why Fauci, at the time the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, needed a security detail.
Four days later, and a day after Gottlieb met with Twitter workers, Twitter banned Berenson for allegedly violating its rules on COVID-19 misinformation.
Gottlieb defended his actions.
“I’ve raised concerns around social media broadly,” Gottlieb said during an appearance on CNBC. “And I’ve done it around the threats that are being made on these platforms, and the inability of these platforms to police direct threats, physical threats about people, that’s my concerns around social media, and what’s going on in that ecosystem.”
“I am very concerned with physical threats being made against people’s safety and the people who gin up those threats against individuals,” he also said.
Berenson responded that he’d never threatened Fauci or Gottlieb and referred to Gottlieb’s comments.
In the post that triggered Gottlieb’s email, Berenson criticized Fauci for saying that “attacks on me are attacks on science” and how he handled the U.S. pandemic response.
Berenson was reinstated to Twitter in 2022 as part of a settlement of a lawsuit he brought against the company. Berenson obtained Gottlieb’s email about Fauci’s post during discovery. Before the settlement agreement, a judge had concluded that Berenson plausibly alleged Twitter failed to abide by a policy of five strikes before banning the journalist.
Reaction on ET:
Jack−
Thousands of people LOST THEIR JOBS or were coerced into getting the jab after they’d recovered from CV19 because of people like Gottlieb trying to keep the truth about natural immunity from reaching mainstream news. Some of those people who were coerced into getting it subsequently had debilitating effects from the job, in some cases lifelong or even life-ending, again because of people like Gottlieb. I have had people bar me from their homes and literally shrink away from me when they heard that I, a completely healthy person who was far safer to be around than those who had been vaccinated, hadn’t received the shot. Again, because of Gottlieb. People like him literally are creating hell on earth by their ambitions. And there are still a lot of people out there to this day, particularly some of the elderly or people that only get their news from one source, that remain shrouded in ignorance, that don’t realize their fear of the unvaccinated is based on lies. But they still fear and shun those with natural immunity.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters Monday night that the handling of the discovery of classified documents by President Joe Biden’s lawyers that were taken from the White House six years ago is a display of a “two-tier” system of justice.
On Monday, Fox News confirmed that a batch of records from Biden’s time as vice president, including a “small number of documents with classified markings,” were discovered at the Penn Biden Center by the president’s personal attorneys on Nov. 2, according to Richard Saubel, special counsel to the White House.
The attorneys found the documents in a locked closet while preparing to vacate office space at the center, which the president used from mid-2017 until he began the 2020 campaign.
Comer told reporters that the handling of these documents is a stark contrast to the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida last year in search of classified documents taken after Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., says the committee will investigate the Biden classified documents. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“Is the White House going to be raided tonight?” Comer asked. “Are they going to raid the Biden center? I don’t know.”
“This is further concern that there’s a two-tier justice system within the DOJ with how they treat Republicans vs. Democrats … certainly how they treat the former president vs. the current president,” Comer added.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky. (Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images/File)
A political ploy.
Comer said that after the Mar-a-Lago raid, according to the research his office conducted, they found that “every president had accidentally packed documents that may or may not be considered classified.”
“But they weren’t raided,” he added.
Local law enforcement officers are seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Comer said the Oversight Committee plans to send a letter to the National Archives, and depending on where the investigation leads, would be open to holding a hearing on the matter.
“President Biden has stated that taking classified documents from the White House is ‘irresponsible,'” Comer said in a statement. “Under the Biden Administration, the Department of Justice and National Archives have made compliance with the Presidential Records Act a top priority.”
“We expect the same treatment for President Biden, who has apparently inappropriately maintained classified documents in an insecure setting for several years,” Comer added.
The FBI raided Trump’s Florida residence over the summer.
Machine-gun toting agents posted up at Mar-a-Lago while the FBI rummaged through Trump’s home looking for classified documents.
The Washington Post recently reported (after the midterms) that the DOJ believes Trump took his White House records to Mar-a-Lago as ‘mementos.’
WaPo reported that Trump never intended to sell or use the documents as leverage. Of course, we have known this the entire time and WaPo is finally admitting the FBI raid was all a political ploy.
Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned a U.S. attorney to review the roughly ten classified documents that were found in an old office of President Joe Biden, CBS News reported on Monday.
The classified documents are from Biden’s vice-presidential office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, which is within close proximity to Capitol Hill.
The classified documents were found by Biden’s personal attorneys just days before the midterms on November 2, according to Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber.
Sauber said the White House “is cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice Justice regarding the discovery of what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records.”
Once Biden’s attorneys found the documents, they notified the National Archives, who reportedly referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), leading to Garland’s appointment of U.S. Attorney John Lausch to investigate how the classified documents ended up in Biden’s old office.
The President periodically used this space from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 campaign. On the day of this discovery, November 2, 2022, the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives. The Archives took possession of the materials the following morning.
The discovery of these documents was made by the President’s attorneys. The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives. Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives.
The classified documents were reportedly in a folder that was in a box with other unclassified materials.
It should be noted that Biden’s ‘think tank’ center at the University of Pennsylvania is now located in D.C. and received $millions in donations from CHINA.
NOTE: The AP is a leftist organization. I will mark some more obvious leftist blather in the body of the story. —TPR
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is heading to the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday, his first trip there as president after two years of hounding by Republicans who have hammered him as soft on border security while the number of migrants crossing spirals.
Biden is due to spend a few hours in El Paso, Texas, currently the biggest corridor for illegal crossings, due in large part to Nicaraguans fleeing repression, crime and poverty in their country. They are among migrants from four countries who are now subject to quick expulsion under new rules enacted by the Biden administration in the past week that drew strong criticism from immigration advocates.
The president is expected to meet with border officials to discuss migration as well as the increased trafficking of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which are driving skyrocketing numbers of overdoses in the U.S.
Biden will visit the El Paso County Migrant Services Center and meet with nonprofits and religious groups that support migrants arriving to the U.S. It is not clear whether Biden will talk to any migrants.
“The president’s very much looking forward to seeing for himself firsthand what the border security situation looks like,” said John Kirby, White House national security spokesman. “This is something that he wanted to see for himself.”
Joe Biden
Biden’s announcement on border security and his visit to the border are aimed in part at quelling the political noise and blunting the impact of upcoming investigations into immigration promised by House Republicans. But any enduring solution will require action by the sharply divided Congress, where multiple efforts to enact sweeping changes have failed in recent years.
Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas offered faint praise for Biden’s decision to visit the border, and even that was notable in the current political climate.
“He must take the time to learn from some of the experts I rely on the most, including local officials and law enforcement, landowners, nonprofits, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s officers and agents, and folks who make their livelihoods in border communities on the front lines of his crisis,” Cornyn said.
From El Paso, Biden will continue south to Mexico City, where he and the leaders of Mexico and Canada will gather on Monday and Tuesday for a North American leaders summit. Immigration is among the items on the agenda.
The challenge facing the U.S. on its southern border “is something that is not unique to the United States. It’s gripping the hemisphere. And a regional challenge requires a regional solution,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC’s “This Week” before joining Biden on the trip.
In El Paso, where migrants congregate at bus stops and in parks before traveling on, border patrol agents have stepped up security before Biden’s visit.
“I think they’re trying to send a message that they’re going to more consistently check people’s documented status, and if you have not been processed they are going to pick you up,” said Ruben Garcia of the Annunciation House aid group in El Paso.
Migrants and asylum-seekers fleeing violence and persecution have increasingly found that protections in the United States are available primarily to those with money or the savvy to find someone to vouch for them financially.
Jose Natera, a Venezuelan migrant in El Paso who hopes to seek asylum in Canada, said he has no prospects for finding a U.S. sponsor and that he’s now reluctant to seek asylum in the U.S. because he’s afraid of being sent to Mexico.
Mexico “is a terrible country where there is crime, corruption, cartels and even the police persecute you,” he said. “They say that people who think about entering illegally won’t have a chance, but at the same time I don’t have a sponsor. … I came to this country to work. I didn’t come here to play.”
The numbers of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically during Biden’s first two years in office. There were more than 2.38 million stops during the year that ended Sept. 30, the first time the number topped 2 million. The administration has struggled to clamp down on crossings, reluctant to take hard-line measures that would resemble those of the Trump administration.
The policy changes announced this past week are Biden’s biggest move yet to contain illegal border crossings and will turn away tens of thousands of migrants arriving at the border. At the same time, 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela will get the chance to come to the U.S. legally as long as they travel by plane, get a sponsor and pass background checks.
The U.S. will also turn away migrants who do not seek asylum first in a country they traveled through en route to the U.S.
The changes were welcomed by some, particularly leaders in cities where migrants have been massing. But Biden was excoriated by immigrant advocate groups, which accused him of taking measures modeled after those of the former president.
“I do take issue with comparing us to Donald Trump,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, pointing to some of his most maligned policies, including the separation of migrant children from their parents.
“This is not that president,” she said.
For all of his international travel over his 50 years in public service, Biden has not spent much time at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The only visit that the White House could point to was Biden’s drive by the border while he was campaigning for president in 2008. He sent Vice President Kamala Harris to El Paso in 2021, but she was criticized for largely bypassing the action, because El Paso wasn’t the center of crossings that it is now.
President Barack Obama made a 2011 trip to El Paso, where he toured border operations and the Paso Del Norte international bridge, but he was later criticized for not going back as tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossed into the U.S. from Mexico.
Trump, who made hardening immigration a signature issue, traveled to the border several times. During one visit, he crammed into a small border station to inspect cash and drugs confiscated by agents. During a trip to McAllen, Texas, then the center of a growing crisis, he made one of his most often repeated claims, that Mexico would pay to build a border wall.
American taxpayers ended up footing the bill after Mexican leaders flatly rejected the idea.
“NO,” Enrique Peña Nieto, then Mexico’s president, tweeted in May 2018. “Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us).”
___
Associated Press writer Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contributed to this report.
The to do about nothing committee wants to seal their videos and documents for 50 years. So the truth can’t be revealed. We have this from Yahoo News.
Although the House committee investigating the insurrection has released a trove of transcripts and underlying information backing up its report, the vast majority of raw information the panel collected is slated to be sent to the National Archives, where it could be locked away for up to 50 years.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) already named the House Committee on House Administration the custodian of the records. Under current House rules, the committee is obligated to hand over the official records to the House clerk, who transmits them to the National Archives. The rules also prevent the National Archives from releasing committee records for at least 30 years. Sensitive records, such as those from a major investigation, can be held up to 50 years before being made public.
Each Congress sets its own rules, but targeting a single committee’s records for retention rather than submitting them to the National Archives is unusual. The House retains ownership of committee records even when they’ve been transmitted to the National Archives, and can temporarily recall them at any time for official committee use.
What needs to happen when we have the actual hearing on January 6. As you know, the Democrats had their to do about nothing hearing. A left wing love fest that picked seven people who voted for impeachment. Well it actually proved that the left could pick a bunch of biased loons. Nothing else.
Now if the Republicans have a hearing, it should be titled. What really happened and can we please indict the actual criminal? Start off by making an open apology for the last hearing.
Call all the previous committee members plus Pelosi and Schumer. And call the rogue cop and find out why he murdered an unarmed female. I rest my case.
Fidelity - to whom? Bravery - Where? Integrity - Not in years
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If only the Federal Bureau of Instigation could find these MOST WANTED in itself
The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement.“As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.”
Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda.
The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves,” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”
The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The FBI is now, tragically, in a freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.
Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.
Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.
While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember, could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.
Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.
Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.
Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.
While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:
As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.
McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.
Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists.
Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”
Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes.
The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution.
Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.
Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information.
The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year-old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions.
During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed.
Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper.
Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.
The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.
In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.”
Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency:
I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.
When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.
To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”
“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.
What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers?
What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor?
What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence?
What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists?”
The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden Administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption.
Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.
Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI.
There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau.
The three reforms most commonly suggested include: 1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections; 2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or 3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas.
The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes.
The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax.
Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics. ✪
Thanks to Musk, we now know the so called conspiracy theories were actual facts. So everything about the FBI and Twitter working together was true. The shadow banning, banning, exchanging information and Twitter being paid to block people and information.
What was pathetic was the FBI statement saying they only made recommendations. Let’s say that’s all they did. Why would a government agency be making suggestions on who to ban or what information should be allowed?
This from Musk.
“To be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true. Is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true? So far, they’ve all turned out to be true. If not more true than people thought.”
Elon Musk "To be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true." pic.twitter.com/zBDY3AcrRq
On top of the malfunctioning machines and 4-hour-long waiting lines in Maricopa County, we now have this startling confession:
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer testified Wednesday during GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s election challenge trial that the individual polling locations did not tally the total number of votes cast in the midterm elections, a violation of Arizona state law.
One of the allegations in Lake’s lawsuit is that the total number of ballots the county reported in the election increased by nearly 25,000 from Nov. 9, the day after the contest, to Nov. 11.
That number is significant because it exceeds Katie Hobbs’ approximately 17,000-vote margin of victory over Lake.
“They’re not counted at the individual loading locations.”
“On Election Day it would’ve been easy for you to figure out how many ballots you received,” Blehm said to Richer.
He responded, “Well, we had to get them all in and it was quite a process throughout the night.”
Blehm interjected, “You can look at the forms and add the numbers. Correct?”
“They’re not counted at the individual loading locations,” Richer said. “They are counted when they get back to MCTEC and then they are recounted at Runbeck.”
“Does anybody know when those ballots leave the voting centers how many are in the bins?” Blehm asked.
“When the early ballots leave the voting centers, no, they are not counted at the voting centers,” Richer answered.
Blehm followed up, “Nobody knows how many [ballots] are in the bins when they arrive at MCTEC. Correct?”
“Correct,” Richer said.
The 2019 Arizona elections procedures manual, which cites state law, requires an audit at each voting location of the total number of ballots cast. The results must be recorded in an official ballot report.
The audit even requires accounting for the total amount of ballot stock paper on-site. The ballots cast must then be placed in sealed boxes.
According to former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, Maricopa County should have known the total number of ballots on Election Day or certainly by the day after.
Each voting center, he explained, should have reported the exact number of voters and the number of early ballots that were dropped off.
The county must be able to answer the question, “How many ballots are we responsible for?” Bennett said.
“And it should match up with the number of people who signed in on the voting list or envelopes of the people that mailed theirs in or … dropped them off at voting centers on Election Day.”