Next stop prison?
Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden leave Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Johns Island, S.C., after attending a Mass, Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022. Biden is in Kiawah Island with his family on vacation. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
FBI Deputy Director Admits Redacting Mention of Joe and Hunter Biden Recordings in Document Shown to Congress.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate admitted during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday that the FBI redacted any mention of audio recordings of Joe and Hunter Biden in a document shown last week to Republican lawmakers in which an FBI informant alleged the Bidens were involved in a bribery scheme around 2015 and 2016.
Under grilling from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Abbate confirmed: “What I will tell you with respect to the document, the document was redacted to protect the source.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Monday revealed that the document, which was a transcript of an FBI interview with an informant, contained references to 17 alleged audio recordings — 15 with Hunter Biden and two with then-Vice President Joe Biden. However, Grassley said, when the document was made available to the House Oversight Committee last week under pressure from Republicans, the references to the audio recordings had been deleted.
Grassley pointed out that the document is an unclassified document and should not be redacted, let alone need to be viewed in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which the FBI made lawmakers do.
Abbate had at first tried to skirt the question, with Blackburn asking him several times to explain why the information was redacted.
After he finally responded, she told him.
I think it would be helpful when you came before us, if you were willing to answer the questions, it would help to remove the perception that the American people have — they see you do it everyday — and that is politicizing the FBI and using it against the American people who don’t happen to be named Biden, Clinton, or one of the elites.
Abbate also denied that the FBI was politicized, which Blackburn disagreed with.
“There are two very clear standards of justice in this country. We see it every single day. The American people see this every single day. They look at you and see a politicized entity that is weaponizing an agency of the federal government against the American people,” she told him.
After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, significant new evidence has emerged that strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.
More than three years after the pandemic’s outbreak, many around the world had given up on learning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the highly infectious respiratory virus that has killed millions, and the response to which shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.
Public officials in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly suggested that uncovering the pandemic’s origin may not be possible. “We may never know,” said Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who oversaw pandemic response for two administrations.
Now, answers increasingly look within reach. Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.
As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.
When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”
“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19. Shi is known as “the bat woman of China,” and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV. “He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him.”
Hu and Yu researched the novel lineage of SARS-like viruses from which SARS-CoV-2 hails, and in 2019 coauthored a paper with Shi Zhengli that described SARS-like lineages they had studied over the years.
Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing who raised questions starting in early 2020 about a possible research-related pandemic origin, said, “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else. That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”
Sources tell Public and Racket that other news organizations are chasing aspects of this story. On Saturday, The Times of London quoted an anonymous U.S. State Department investigator saying, “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation, and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Public and Racket are the first publications to reveal the names of the three sick WIV workers and place them directly in the lab that collected and experimented with SARS-like viruses poised for human emergence.
Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.
A bill signed by President Biden earlier this year specifically called for the release of the names and roles of the sick researchers at the WIV, their symptoms and date of symptom onset, and whether these researchers had been involved with or exposed to coronavirus research.
On Dec. 29, 2017, two years before the pandemic began, Chinese state-run television aired a video that includes a scene of Ben Hu watching a lab worker handle specimens. Neither are wearing protective gear. The same video shows WIV scientists hunting for bat viruses with little protective gear. “If they were worried about being infected in the field, they would need full body suits with no gaps” to be safe, said Chan. “That’s the only way.”
The WIV research with live SARS-like viruses was performed at too low of a safety level, “BSL-2,” explains Chan, “When we now know that the pandemic virus is even capable of escaping from a BSL-3 lab and infecting fully vaccinated young lab workers.”
While scientists justify such research as necessary for developing vaccines, President Barack Obama banned federal funding for gain-of-function research of concern in 2014, because experts had come to the consensus that it was too dangerous. However, the National Institute of Health and NIAID headed by Francis Collins and Fauci, and a major U.S. government grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, deemed their work on SARS-like viruses as not falling under the gain-of-function research of concern definitions and funded this project in China and Southeast Asia.
In March 2018, the WIV, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the University of North Carolina applied for a $14 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency DARPA to engineer “furin cleavage sites” into SARS-like coronaviruses to study how this affected their ability to grow and cause disease.
Scientists say the key piece of the COVID-19 virus, which made it so transmissible compared to its closest relatives, was its unique furin cleavage site.
DARPA rejected the grant, but it now appears the WIV went forward with the research anyway. The Times of London reported that US collaborators of the WIV had come forward and said the Wuhan scientists had put furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses in 2019.
Hu co-authored multiple papers on coronavirus research, including a 2017 paper on chimeric bat coronaviruses with Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, which was funded in part by the NIH and the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT Program. Data privately shared with the NIH revealed that these chimeric SARS-like viruses grew far more quickly and caused more severe disease in humanized mice in the lab.
When the WIV put out their first paper about the pandemic virus, they failed to point out the novel furin cleavage site despite having had plans to and allegedly putting such gain-of-function features into SARS-like viruses in their lab. “It’s as if these scientists proposed putting horns on horses, but when a unicorn shows up in their city a year later they write a paper describing every part of it except its horn,” said Chan.
Public sent emails and made phone calls to the NIH, WIV, EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak, Hu, and Shi over the last several days and did not hear back.
It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public. “You would expect the country of origin to be defensive,” said Chan, “but you wouldn’t expect a country receiving the virus to be withholding key evidence.”
On January 15, 2021, five days before President Joe Biden took office, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet that pointed to the likelihood of a lab leak as the cause of a pandemic.
Already, the State Department in 2021 suspected that the WIV had lied to the public. “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. That raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students by SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”
In February of this year, the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told a reporter that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
The Times of London reported that State Department investigators “found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.” As previously reported in Vanity Fair,some of the information State Department investigators found in 2021 was “sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed.”
“Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.”
After years of official claims to the contrary, strong new evidence suggests the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a Chinese lab. According to multiple sources, the researchers who led gain-of-function research, which increases infectiousness, were the first to be infected. pic.twitter.com/f5irBa3zZ5
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 13, 2023
Looking. The Tucker Tweeter Articles here on Looking at today’s world. I’ve decided to post Tucker’s Tweeter articles here. So you will have to play the tweets if you want to know what he has to say.
Tucker isn’t someone that I agree with on some topics, but even where we disagree he does use facts to back up his point of view.
I woke up this morning to the news that a section of I-95 in Philadelphia had collapsed Sunday morning. Within a few moments, I saw a tweet saying, in essence, “No, folks, this was not ‘climate change.’” My tweet, in response, was, “Please, for the love of God, tell me that the #I95Collapse hasn’t been blamed on #ClimateChange.”
So far, I have not seen any indication that it has, but would it be such a stretch? How many absurd things are blamed on climate change each week? Each time you hear one, you think, Can people really be this gullible and programmable? And, of course, the answer is a tragic yes.
Perhaps descent into questions over whether there really was a truck underneath the collapsed section will forestall any descent into a climate-change debate. Either way, I can, without even trying especially hard, think of several ways that people can (and may yet still) find a way to drag climate change into this:
Climate change has caused Pennsylvania to be especially dry, which made the fire burn hotter.
Climate change has caused increased precipitation in Pennsylvania in recent years, causing more frost heave, weakening the section of highway.
Climate change has caused an increase in storm activity, which has battered our nation’s roads. It’s a miracle all our highways haven’t collapsed yet!
Not enough money has been spent on study of how climate change impacts freeway infrastructure.
Climate change has caused erratic weather, which has increased tectonic stress, thus causing micro-quakes along fault lines, further stressing overpass pylons.
If we really cared about climate change, we wouldn’t have trucks full of ‘petroleum products’ driving around everywhere!
So much money is being spent to save us from the ravages of climate change that there isn’t enough left over to repair our nation’s infrastructure.
You can play the game at home with your family. Bonus points for the first person who comes up with absurd things like, If only Republicans had not stood in the way of the Green New Deal, we’d all be driving flying solar cars, and would not even need highways at all. (Absurd until you realize that someone out there is actually going to say something just like this. Probably AOC, at some point.)
This is not actually a game, however.
I recall the first time I truly realized just how crazy people were getting—when I heard the 2005 tsunami being blamed on “changes in deep ocean currents caused by global warming.” It does not matter if a “scientist” says something like this, either. Scientists cannot be trusted any more than the average Twitter user can. Especially not at this point, when there is so much funding and mainstream ‘respect’ to be had by saying the ‘correct’ things about climate change.
Back in 2005, I thought it was all quite silly. Now it appears that climate change is going to be the crowbar used to take our money, take our stoves, and concentrate us into 15-minute camps. Which means that every gullible rube, virtue-signaler, and Matrix-addled narrative-repeater out there is pushing us that much further down the road to serfdom every time they robotically repeat this kind of programmatic nonsense.
Over half counties want to leave the left coast liberal idiots.
Views: 38
Here’s a solution for Oregon residents suffering from bad government in their state — just leave. And take much of Oregon with you.
A 13th Oregon county will be voting on a citizens’ resolution to escape Oregon liberalism and join the state of Idaho, KTVZ reported.
Voters in Crook County, Oregon, will participate in advisory balloting next May, joining a dozen other counties in the state which have already approved starting the steps to attach eastern Oregon to Idaho.
It’s part of the Greater Idaho movement, whose website states the current Oregon-Idaho line, set 163 years ago, “is now outdated.”
“It makes no sense in its current location because it doesn’t match the location of the cultural divide in Oregon,” according to the website. “The Oregon/Washington line was updated in 1958. It’s time to move other state lines.”
Ultimately, any new change in the state line would require approval by both Oregon and Idaho legislatures and by Congress.
Wednesday, Crook County voters approved allowing the electorate to conduct an advisory vote in May 2024. The advisory vote would be “to determine voter attitudes of whether your Crook County elected officials should inform state and federal officials that the people of Crook County support continued negotiations regarding a potential relocation of the Oregon-Idaho border to include Crook County,” according to a ballot summary reported by KTVZ.
Also on Wednesday, the Wallowa County Clerk ruled that results on the Greater Idaho question on the ballot in that county were too close to require a recount, so the measure was deemed passed.
Instead of county commissioners, some Oregon counties are overseen by a “county court” which consists of a judge and a pair of county commissioners. Seth Crawford is county judge of Crook County and he said the boundary vote is “100 percent” advisory.
Crawford said he has always wanted “to have people weigh in” on the boundary question.
The Greater Idaho website lists a half dozen reasons to join Idaho, including Oregon’s 1) violation of American values by the state’s western majority; 2) lack of law and order plus infringement on the right to self-defense; 3) high taxes; 4) mismanagement of forests; 5) higher regulation, unemployment, and cost of living, and 6) lack of rural representation.
With eastern Oregon moving to Idaho, it would improve things for western Oregon, the Greater Idaho website says.
The substantial western Oregon income tax revenue would remain without the state having to continue to subsidize the east; legislative gridlock would be reduced; both remaining Oregon and Greater Idaho would have increased self-determination, and, with the change of only one-half electoral vote, the number of seats in the U.S. House and Senate would not change.
It’s a long shot for Greater Idaho. But, as their website points out, border realignment has been done before.
And elsewhere, rural areas of Illinois, New York and Colorado are hosting movements to carve out entirely new states removed from influences of large urban areas, according to The Center Square, a publication aimed at covering state governments.
Given its distance from the state capital of Lansing and southern Michigan urban areas, the idea of the sparsely-populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan dividing into its own state of Superior has long been kicked around.
And if Democrats get greater control of Congress, there is little doubt they will seek to retain that power by granting statehood to the District of Columbia and possibly Puerto Rico.
The week ahead. Stories making the news. Check out the headlines below. If you wish to comment on these or anything else that you feel is headline news.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Trump will surrender to authorities. Former President Donald Trump will be arraigned for the second time in 2023—this time in a Miami courthouse—on Tuesday. That afternoon, a judge will read the 37 counts Trump has been charged with relating to his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left the White House. Trump has called on supporters to rally around the courthouse on Tuesday afternoon.
A Fed pause? At its meeting this week, the Federal Reserve is expected to do something it hasn’t done in the last 15 months: not raise interest rates. Chair Jerome Powell has suggested it might be time to take a breather as the gargantuan series of rate hikes filters through the economy.
Sports calendar: The Denver Nuggets and Las Vegas Golden Knights are each one win away from clinching their respective championship. Plus, the US Open for golf will tee off on Thursday—it’s the first major since the PGA Tour and LIV agreed to link up (but it’ll be hard to top the drama of this weekend’s golf tournament.)
Everything else…
Bonnaroo starts on Wednesday.
All the TikTokers are about to get one-upped, because the real Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City hits select theaters on Friday.
A wartime act that the special prosecutor is using against former President Trump.
Date:1917
Annotation: America declarated war with Germany in April 1917. Two months later, the U.S. Congress passed the Espionage Act, which defined espionage during wartime.
The Act was amended in May 1918.
In his war message to Congress, President Wilson had warned that the war would require a redefinition of national loyalty. There were “millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us,” he said. “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression.”
In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. The piece of legislation gave postal officials the authority to ban newspapers and magazines from the mails and threatened individuals convicted of obstructing the draft with $10,000 fines and 20 years in jail.
Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a federal offense to use “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the Constitution, the government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these acts.
Denver City Council Member Who Wanted to Tax White Owned Businesses and Give Money to Minority Owned Businesses Loses Reelection in Blowout.
So how did the campaign of this loon turn out? She wanted a special tax on white owned businesses. Then give that money to Minority owned businesses. Well she got beat. And beaten badly.
In her concession speech she claimed her crazy statements helped other candidates. That makes no sense. Somehow her craziness was a help to others but a hinderance to her?
SMH
Denver City Council member Candi CdeBaca, who is running for re-election, says white owned businesses should be taxed extra and redistributed to black owned businesses. pic.twitter.com/s9JhSdAmtj
Climate change didn’t cause Canada’s wildfires. Lightning has been starting forest fires for millennia.
Is the hazy stuff out there smoke billowing down from Québec, or hot air emitted from smoggy-brained politicians and journalists? Chuck Schumer told the Senate on Wednesday that the smoke drifting over the Eastern Seaboard was caused by climate change. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said it showed the urgency of going greener faster. Proof of carbon pollution, lectured the Canadian minister of the environment. A stark reminder of climate change, intoned Biden.
Every news organization and weather app out there suddenly became experts on a new hazard — not smoke or fire, well-known phenomenons that have been extensively documented throughout history — but a new threat, both more nebulous and more ominous: “air quality.” Electronic devices and weather stations began making unsolicited “air quality” reports. The New York Post made melodramatic comparisons with the aftermath of 9/11. Other outlets published analyses of the health risks of smoky air for pets and those in vulnerable states of health. The CBC, Canada’s state broadcaster/doomsayer, assured everyone who would listen that “air quality warnings are likely to become more common with climate change.” Climate change? Or social change — to be imposed via radical environmental policy? And what’s next, “air quality” sirens that urge you to duck for cover when a diesel vehicle rolls by?
The fires in Québec and Ontario are real — especially for those forced to evacuate their homes. So too is the unpleasantness of smoke blowing across eastern Canada and the United States. And just as real, unfortunately, is the propensity of politicians and their media cheerleaders to capitalize on human suffering in order to move society in their preferred direction: in this case, the fool’s gold of net-zero emissions.
But Canadian wildfires aren’t caused by emissions. Wildfires are as normal as thunderstorms. They form part of the natural life cycle of North American forests. While of course some fires are caused by human carelessness or arson, most of the fires currently ravaging Québec and northeastern Ontario are believed to be caused by lightning. Hate to shock the climate zealots, but lightning has been starting forest fires since long before the Romans began using fossil fuels to heat their baths in early Britain.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee rebuked the claims of its Democrat members on Saturday, who said the House GOP is “wasting” taxpayer money on investigating the “conspiracy” of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in a $5 million bribery scheme.
“Democrats are lying again about the FBI-generated Biden bribery record,” the GOP-led Oversight Committee tweeted in response to a tweet from the Democrat side of the committee.
The Oversight Committee Democrats tweeted, “In 2020, a sitting Republican Senator confirmed that AG [Attorney General Bill] Barr had begun an assessment—headed by U.S. Attorney [Scott] Brady—to investigate the corruption allegations pushed by [Rudy] Giuliani.”
The thread continued: “Now, Committee Republicans want to revive Giuliani’s conspiracy theories by using the tips he shared with DOJ [Department of Justice] to attack the FBI, damage President Biden, and boost the twice-impeached, twice-indicted former President’s poll numbers.”
The thread from the Democrats shows a video of ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., saying the House GOP is looking into an FBI FD-1023 form “where a confidential human source quoted an oligarch from Ukraine who said that there was corruption with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.”
“That was checked out by the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Scott Brady, who was appointed in 2020 by Donald Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, to head up a task force of lawyers and investigators to check out this tip and Rudy Giuliani’s allegations that Joe Biden has been involved in corruption in Ukraine. And that assessment of this tip came back empty-handed,” Raskin said.
But Barr told told the New York Post, “Mr. Raskin seems confused about the limited scope of Mr. Brady’s review.
“The Pittsburgh office was simply adding evidence to ensure that it was not disinformation before passing it on to one of the already existing investigations underway in the department,” Barr added.
“He [Brady] was not authorized to open his own investigation. In other words, he was assessing the credibility of the evidence, not investigating its ultimate merits,” said the former attorney general. The information Brady collected was passed on to Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
The GOP-led Oversight Committee tweet continued: “The FBI’s 6/30/20 FD-1023 record stands on its own and contains information from a trusted confidential human source who had conversations with the foreign national who claimed to have bribed Biden.
“This record is being used in an ongoing investigation. Former AG Barr and the FBI have confirmed multiple times.”
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Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
