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Joey Boy is upset that X is now allowing Conservative and real doctors to post facts.

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Joey Boy is upset that X is now allowing Conservative and real doctors to post facts.John Hardwood interviewed Biden and as usual Joe told one falsehood after another. But what I found interesting was his bull about X since Musk bought them.

Before Musk when it was Twitter, one lie after another from the cultists on the left was allowed to go unchallenged.

After the purchase, more Conservatives were able to voice their opinion and use facts instead of MSM talking points.

We also got shown the proof where real doctors were shadow banned or outright banned. Plus Musk revealed how the Biden administration cabinet members were asking for Conservative thought to be deleted. Biden is now upset because those on the left are finally getting the truth.

https://twitter.com/i/statu…

https://twitter.com/vijaya/…
https://www.propublica.org/…

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Commentary Economy Education Elections Free Speech Links from other news sources. Media Woke MSM Opinion Politics Reprints from others. Social Venues-Twitter WOKE

Elon Musk fires X ‘election integrity’ team for undermining election integrity

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Elon Musk fires X ‘election integrity’ team for undermining election integrity

“Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

By

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Elon Musk announced on Wednesday that he has cut the Electoral Integrity team at X (formerly Twitter) in half, including the newly brought on board head of the group, Aaron Rodericks.

When the news was reported, Musk replied “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

A person familiar with the circumstances, said that four people had been released, which constitutes the whole of the election integrity unit in Dublin.

In an August blog post, X said that there were positions available on the “threat disruption” team, and that they company was “currently expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats.”

In a post concerning election integrity, the platform posted that “You may not use X’s services for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes, such as posting or sharing content that may suppress participation, mislead people about when, where, or how to participate in a civic process, or lead to offline violence during an election. Any attempt to undermine the integrity of civic participation undermines our core tenets of freedom of expression and as a result, we will apply labels to violative posts informing users that the content is misleading.”

The post clarified what that meant, however, and noted further that “Not all false or untrue information about politics or civic processes constitutes manipulation or interference. In the absence of other policy violations, the following are generally not in violation of this policy: inaccurate statements about an elected or appointed official, candidate, or political party; organic content that is polarizing, biased, hyperpartisan, or contains controversial viewpoints expressed about elections or politics; discussion of public polling information; voting and audience participation for competitions, game shows, or other entertainment purposes; using X pseudonymously or as a parody, commentary, or fan account to discuss elections or politics.”

This comes after Musk named a new CEO in the spring, Linda Yaccarino, who had been with NBC. She had stated that X would expand trust and safety teams, along with election integrity units.

Trust in the platform’s ability to police itself took a severe downturn after the publication of the Twitter Files, which revealed intensive bias within Twitter management toward Democrats and the left, and that government agencies had been interfering by insisting on policing speech on the site.

Some of the meddling Twitter undertook during the 2020 presidential election included suppressing negative information about Joe Biden and his involvement with his son’s business dealings. Voters polled after the fact said that had they known about these concerns, they would not have voted for Biden in that hotly contested election.

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NYT Pushes the White Oppressor Myth.

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NYT Pushes the White Oppressor Myth.

The propaganda is endless!

Here’s an odd sentence in today’s New York Times:

“Mr. Erwin was born in 1942 in Tyler, Texas, where the Black community lived on the north side of town, the whites lived on the south side and Black people did not cross Front Street after sundown.”

“And Black people did not cross Front Street after sundown”??? But whites felt free to stroll around the black part of town any time of day?

It’s the incessant myth of WHITE PEOPLE PREYING ON BLACKS!

In case you’re wondering, even in the 1940s, the black murder rate was many, many times higher than the white murder rate:

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Clinton Impeachment Revisionism Liberals can’t tell the truth about ANYTHING.

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Clinton Impeachment Revisionism Liberals can’t tell the truth about ANYTHING.

With talk of impeaching President Biden in the air, the media’s fake history this week is:  Voters punished Republicans for even thinking about impeaching President Bill Clinton!

Even the casual news consumer will hear this lie at least 20 times this week.

ABC News:
“If the inquiry does lead to an impeachment vote, history suggests it won't necessarily be helpful for the impeachers. House Republicans lost five seats in the 1998 election a few weeks before impeaching President Bill Clinton. Democrats made those surprising gains even though the party that controls the White House usually struggles in midterm elections.”
CNBC:
“Politically unpopular impeachment hearings have hurt the party before. Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterm elections following the impeachment proceedings into then-president Bill Clinton.”
The Financial Times: 
“Rather than being damaged by the impeachment proceedings against him in late 1998, Clinton is widely seen to have benefited politically, including with a better than expected performance in that year’s midterm election.”
Reuters:
“Following the Republican-backed impeachment probe into Clinton, a Democrat, Republicans lost House seats in the 1998 midterm elections.”
MSNBC: 
“None of the scandals from Obama’s time in office ever hit the impeachment threshold, not when there were enough senior GOP members around who knew that impeaching Clinton hadn’t worked out for them politically.”

 

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

That was pure White House spin, from a man willing to defend himself by smearing Thomas Jefferson.  (See above.)

Let’s play back the tape.

Since President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the average midterm loss for the president’s party has been 27 house seats.  But in 1994, Clinton lost an astounding 54 House seats – ushering in a Republican Congress for the first time in 40 years.  Districts that had not voted for a Republican congressman since 1950 went Republican. The GOP was bound to lose some of those seats in the next few cycles.

Merely to maintain the historical average, Democrats should have gained at least two dozen House seats in 1998.  In fact, they gained only five — and not a single senate seat.  Indeed, the 1998 election was the first time in 70 years Republicans had won majorities in the House three elections in a row.

Peculiarly, Clinton’s flacks had spent the weeks before the election predicting Armageddon for the Democrats. So when they picked up a paltry five seats — instead of the two dozen predicted by history — they bellowed that they’d won a moral victory! (That’s when Republicans learned about the game of low expectations.)

Although Democrats had fallen 21 seats short of the historical average for midterm elections, they claimed the people had spoken: Voters just adored Clinton for getting oral sex from a White House intern, then committing multiple felonies!

This defies common sense.  It also defies the exit polls.  As Paul West wrote in the Baltimore Sun, “Only about one in five voters listed moral and ethical values as their chief concern in deciding whom to support in House races. Those voters favored Republican candidates by a 6-to-1 margin.” Thus, the Democrats’ 21-seat shortfall.

But Clinton defenders had beaten their own low expectations, and used that little theatrical performance to announce, as George Stephanopoulos did, that impeachment was “over.”  (It wasn’t.)

And that’s the lie the media has been repeating ever since.

Noticeably, the Democrats’ fairy tale about the 1998 election didn’t help Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore.  Thanks to Clinton, he became the first incumbent president or vice president in a hundred years to lose a presidential election in peacetime and a good economy. (Mind you, that was before we knew Gore was a deranged conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is in serious peril from cow flatulence.)

Ronald Reagan was so popular he not only won a 49-state landslide re-election for himself, but he also won a symbolic third term for his boob of a vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush (who immediately blew it by breaking his own “no new taxes” pledge).

What was the mystery factor to explain Gore’s historic loss?

The media may have lied to the public about Clinton’s vaunted popularity, but Gore’s pollsters got paid not to lie to him. And they told him the truth: His association with Clinton was killing him.

After the election, Gore pollster, the inestimable Stanley Greenberg, told Vanity Fair magazine that if Clinton had helped, he would have “had Bill Clinton carry Al Gore around on his back.” (This was when one man could still actually carry Al Gore on his back.) But his research showed that whenever Clinton was mentioned, Gore’s numbers took a nosedive.

Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, also blamed Clinton for Gore’s loss, saying polls showed that voters who cared about character voted for Bush.

Poor Gore had done everything he could to distance himself from Clinton.  He publicly denounced Clinton’s sexual exploits with the intern. He refused to be seen with Clinton on the campaign trail.  He chose Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate — the guy who famously became the first Democrat to denounce Clinton’s behavior with Lewinsky on the Senate floor. Also, there was Gore’s huge, embarrassing smooch with his wife on stage at the Democratic National Convention.

But when voters looked at Gore they just couldn’t forget the purple-faced lecher.

And that’s the true story of how the Clinton impeachment helped Republicans hold the House through seven election cycles and defeat an incumbent vice president.

That doesn’t mean the GOP should impeach Biden (except for violating federal immigration law). But the Clinton impeachment is anything but a cautionary tale for Republicans. Unlike the Democrats, our side doesn’t impeach presidents for nonsense.

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McCarthy grills reporter until she ‘admits’ GOP has evidence of Biden wrongdoing.

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McCarthy grills reporter until she ‘admits’ GOP has evidence of Biden wrongdoing.

By Andrew Mark Miller Fox News

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy set social media ablaze on Thursday after he pushed back against a reporter’s assertion that he launched an impeachment inquiry “without evidence.”

“AP reported that McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry was launched ‘without evidence,’” GOP operative Arthur Schwartz posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday. “Here’s McCarthy forcing an AP reporter to admit that there was lots of evidence to support an impeachment inquiry.”

In the clip, Associated Press reporter Farnoush Amiri asked McCarthy about fellow Republicans who have said that the investigation into President Biden has yet to show an impeachable offense at this point. “Is that an assessment you share?” Amiri asked.

“You know, an impeachment inquiry is not an impeachment,” McCarthy responded, “What an impeachment inquiry is to do is to get answers to questions. Are you concerned about all the stuff that was recently learned?”

McCarthy then went through a list of instances that many have characterized as possible evidence of wrongdoing from the president.

“Do you believe the president lied to the American public when he said he’d never talked to his son about his business dealings?” McCarthy asked “Yes or no?”

“I can’t answer that,” Amiri replied.

“Do you believe when they said the president went on conference calls? Do you believe that happened?” McCarthy asked. “That’s what the testimony says,” Amiri answered.

Do you believe the president went to Cafe Milano and had dinner with the clients of Hunter Biden, who believes he got those clients because he was selling the brand?” “That’s what the testimony said,” Amiri answered.

“Do you believe Hunter Biden, when you saw the video of him driving the Porsche, that he got $143,000 to buy that Porsche the next day? Do you believe that $3 million from the Russian oligarch that was transferred to the shell companies that the Bidens controlled after the dinner from Cafe Milano took place?” McCarthy asked.

McCarthy then asked Amiri again if she believed the president lied, to which she responded, “But is lying an impeachable offense?”

“All I’m saying is I would like to know the answer to these questions,” McCarthy said. “The American public would like to know.”

The clip was immediately picked up by conservatives on social media who slammed the narrative from many on the left who have claimed there is no evidence of wrongdoing related to President Biden and his family.

“This is what happens when reporters follow the White House’s commands to engage as activists with the Republican inquiry instead of as journalists impartially seeking facts,” GOP strategist Matt Whitlock responded on X.

“It’s on days like today where we see what the left wing foundations that bankroll the Associated Press get for their money,” former Ted Cruz spokesperson Steve Guest posted online.

“’Is lying an impeachable offense,’” The Spectator Editor Stephen L. Miller posted on X. “Oh you sweet summer child…”

In a statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesperson for the AP said, “The Associated Press stands by reporter Farnoush Amiri, an established and respected journalist covering the U.S. Congress.”

McCarthy officially gave the go ahead for an impeachment inquiry on Tuesday after saying that House Republicans have “uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct.”

“Today, I am directing our House committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden,” McCarthy announced in a statement at the Capitol. “This logical next step will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public.”

 

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Biden Cartel Censorship Commentary Corruption Faked news Government Overreach How sick is this? Links from other news sources. MSM Politics

White Progressives are at it again. They’re asking social media to lie for them again.

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White Progressives are at it again. They’re asking social media to lie for them again. The folks in the White House are again calling on their friends in Social media to attack the House Impeachment Inquiry.

Since Wednesday morning the MSM AND THE LEFT WING TALKING HEADS started the personal attacks and lies. Where were they when the fake January 6th commission based on lies and fake news impeached a President? This from CNN Business.

The letter was sent to executives helming the nation’s largest news organizations, including CNN, The New York Times, Fox News, the Associated Press, CBS News, and others, a White House official familiar with the matter said.

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Inside the Blue Bubble Noam Dworman clashes with Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, and the results aren’t pretty.

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Inside the Blue Bubble Noam Dworman clashes with Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, and the results aren’t pretty.

Last week Noam Dworman of Comedy Cellar USA, on his Live at the Table podcast, interviewed Washington Post columnist Philip Bump. It was a debate, with Bump invited because he’s “most associated with pouring cold water on the Hunter Biden story,” as Noam put it.

The show went viral as Bump, semi-reprising the performance of Russiagate champion and Guardian reporter Luke Harding walking on an interview with Aaron Mate, left abruptly after conceding Hunter’s line, “unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary” was evidence. To be fair the show had run long, but Bump insisted earlier that there was “no evidence” of wrongdoing on Joe Biden’s part, so it wasn’t a timely exit — not that I’m unfamiliar with interviews that go sideways.

I know Noam and my name got dragged into this somewhat absurdly (Bump said I had “an agenda,” as Noam brought up tapes between Petro Poroshenko and Joe Biden I’d referenced), but didn’t want to say anything. Then a subsequent show also went sideways, for much the same reason. More on that in a moment. Back to Bump v. Dworman:

Many exchanges in the podcast stand out, not in a good way. Bump repeatedly tells Noam his problem is that he’s not accepting his, Bump’s, versions of things. At about the 56-minute mark, Bump chides Noam for bringing up things that have been “debunked.” When Noam asks, “What’s been debunked?” Bump says, “I’ve written about this!” He adds, “It’s been debunked in the sense that I’ve already addressed this, and presented the counter-arguments to it.”

At about 1:05 in the video above, Noam brings up “the issue of the press. The press actually bothers me more than Joe Biden…” To which Bump interjects [emphasis mine]: “But you don’t listen to the press. I’m sitting here and telling you you’re wrong about these things and you don’t listen.” About five minutes later Noam again brings up media, and Bump says, “But again, you’re attacking the press, because you refuse to listen to what we’re saying.”

Nearly an hour into the show Bump began complaining he’d been set up, and I know what he was thinking, having of course also been in the position of being invited to an interview with someone who perhaps wants to make an ass of you. I actually don’t think that’s Noam’s game, but even if it were, the answer isn’t to keep repeating, “How can we talk when you keep insisting I get down from this high horse I’m on?”

Bump acts like he and his paper haven’t gotten all sorts of things wrong in recent years, implicitly rejecting the notion that people like Noam have reason to question anything “already addressed” by papers like the Post. If you need an explanation for declining ratings and circulation of mainstream press outlets, this vibe is it.

The other episode involved professor and frequent media commentator Dan Drezner, who laughs hysterically and at great length the instant it registers that Noam plans on countering a claim that Trump was a bad president. It’s at about the 52-minute mark:

Drezner is doing what Bump did, albeit with more humor: gagging in disbelief when a mainstream piety sent up the flagpole isn’t instantly saluted.

I think a lot of people in the world I once inhabited, in center-left media and academia, don’t realize they’ve slipped into a deeply unattractive habit of substituting checklists of unquestioned assumptions for thought. In the blue bubble Trump’s limitless evil is an idea with such awesome gravitational pull that it makes nuanced discussion about almost anything impossible. It’s why no one in media could suggest even the possibility he hadn’t colluded with Russia. He’s become an anti-God, of a faith that requires constant worship. When do we get to go back to being atheists?

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Weaponization of Social Media. Google Censors Campaign Websites of Republicans, RFK Jr.

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Weaponization of Social Media. Google Censors Campaign Websites of Republicans, RFK Jr. What’s it tell you when President Joe Biden’s campaign website, of course, showed up as the second search result along with a Democratic Party challenger Marianne Williamson’s campaign website, which came up as the fifth result. But not one Republican website just before the debate last week?

This from The Media Research Center (MRC), which monitors bias in media and tech companies, discovered the biased search results when conducting searches on Google for “presidential campaign websites.”

And forget about trying to find Robert Kennedy Jr.

US 2024 Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy, Jr. (R), speaks during an address to the New Hampshire Senate at the State House in Concord, New Hampshire, on June 1, 2023. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)

US 2024 Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy, Jr. (R), speaks during an address to the New Hampshire Senate at the State House in Concord, New Hampshire, on June 1, 2023. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)

Notably, 2024 Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., did not appear in Google’s search results even though he is, at present, the biggest threat to President Joe Biden’s nomination.

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Inside the Collapse of Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal.

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Inside the Collapse of Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal.

There were signs, subtle but unmistakable, that Hunter Biden’s high-stakes plea agreement with federal prosecutors might be on shaky ground hours before it went public in June, according to emails sent by his legal team to the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware.

When one of Mr. Biden’s lawyers sent over the draft of the statement they intended to share with the news media, a top deputy to David C. Weiss, who had overseen the inquiry since 2018, asked to remove two words describing the status of the investigation, according to interviews and internal correspondence on the deal obtained by The New York Times. “Concluded” and “conclusion” should be replaced with the weaker “resolved,” the deputy said.

Six weeks later, the federal judge presiding over a hearing on the agreement would expose even deeper divisions and the deal imploded, prompting Mr. Weiss to seek appointment as special counsel with the freedom to expand the inquiry and bring new charges.

The deal’s collapse — chronicled in over 200 pages of confidential correspondence between Mr. Weiss’s office and Mr. Biden’s legal team, and interviews with those close to Mr. Biden, lawyers involved in the case and Justice Department officials — came after intense negotiations that started with the prospect that Mr. Biden would not be charged at all and now could end in his possible indictment and trial.

Earlier this year, The Times found, Mr. Weiss appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.

Now, the I.R.S. agents and their Republican allies say they believe the evidence they brought forward, at the precise time they did, played a role in influencing the outcome, a claim senior law enforcement officials dispute. While Mr. Biden’s legal team agrees that the I.R.S. agents affected the deal, his lawyers have contended to the Justice Department that by disclosing details about the investigation to Congress, they broke the law and should be prosecuted.

“It appears that if it weren’t for the courageous actions of these whistle-blowers, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Hunter Biden would never have been charged at all,” a team of lawyers for one of the I.R.S. agents said in a statement, adding that the initial agreement reflected preferential treatment.

A spokesman for Mr. Weiss had no comment. He is legally barred from discussing an open investigation, and a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the situation pushed back on the idea that Mr. Weiss had been influenced by outside pressures, and ascribed any shifts to the typical ebb and flow of negotiations.

The documents and interviews also show that the relationship between Mr. Biden’s legal team and Mr. Weiss’s office reached a breaking point at a crucial moment after one of his top deputies — who had become a target of the I.R.S. agents and Republican allies — left the team for reasons that remain unclear.

ImageThe Internal Revenue Service building in Washington.
Two I.R.S. officials accused the Justice Department of hamstringing their investigation of Hunter Biden.Credit…Hailey Sadler for The New York Times

Above all, this inside chronicle of the agreement vividly illustrates the difficulty of the task facing Justice Department officials like Mr. Weiss, who have been called upon to investigate prominent figures at a time of extreme polarization, when the nation’s political and criminal justice systems are intertwining in treacherous and unpredictable ways.

No one supervising a comparable inquiry in recent years — like those who oversaw the investigations into Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump — managed to smoothly unwind their investigations when they chose not to indict their targets.

Precisely what happens next is unclear. Mr. Biden’s top lawyer has quit, and accused prosecutors of reneging on their commitments. And Republicans, who waged an all-out war to discredit the deal, are seeking to maximize the political damage to President Biden, seeing it as a counter to the four criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, their party’s presidential front-runner.

Mr. Weiss had a few reasons to ask Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to appoint him special counsel. The status could grant him greater authority to pursue leads around the country, and could provide him with added leverage in a revamped deal with Mr. Biden. But he was also motivated by a requirement to produce a report that would allow him to answer critics, according to people with knowledge of the situation — an accounting that could become public before the 2024 election.

David C. Weiss speaking into microphones and wearing a suit. The seal of the Justice Department hangs behind him.
David C. Weiss was appointed special counsel after the implosion of an agreement that would have spared the president’s son prison time.Credit…Suchat Pederson/The News Journal, via Associated Press

In January, Christopher J. Clark, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, arrived in Wilmington, Del., to push Mr. Weiss to end the investigation into the president’s troubled son that had, at that point, dragged on for more than four years.

Mr. Clark began by telling Mr. Weiss that his legacy would be defined by how he handled this decision.

If his host somehow missed the message, Mr. Clark followed up with an even more dramatic gesture, reading a quote from a Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials: Prosecutors could always find “a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone” but should never succumb to pressure from the powerful.

That first face-to-face interaction, between a fiery white-collar defense lawyer who has represented Elon Musk and a late-career federal prosecutor known for keeping his gray-haired head down, set into motion months of intense negotiations that led to an agreement that appeared to end Mr. Biden’s tax and firearms violations, only to derail over the extent of his immunity from future prosecution.

Mr. Biden’s foreign business ventures, especially when his father was vice president and later when he was addicted to crack cocaine, had long raised ethical and legal concerns. In 2018, Mr. Weiss was quietly assigned the Hunter Biden investigation and then kept on by Justice Department officials in the Biden administration to complete the job.

Mr. Weiss cast a wide net from the start, examining a range of Mr. Biden’s business dealings, his finances and personal conduct. But the inquiry eventually narrowed.

By late 2022, Mr. Weiss — who relied on the work of I.R.S. investigators, the F.B.I. and lawyers in the Justice Department’s tax division — had found some evidence but determined that he did not have sufficient grounds to indict Mr. Biden for major felonies, according to several people familiar with the situation.

Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.)

But in January, the two sides hunkered down on the business at hand. Mr. Clark first tried to undermine the gun case, arguing that the charge was likely unconstitutional and citing recent legal challenges after the Supreme Court’s decision last year expanding gun rights.

Then he took on the tax case, laying out with slides how Mr. Trump’s longtime confidant, Roger J. Stone Jr., had failed to pay his taxes for several more years than Mr. Biden but had been allowed to deal with it civilly and had faced no criminal punishment. Mr. Weiss seemed noncommittal.

If he chose not to charge, members of Mr. Biden’s legal team believed Mr. Weiss still wanted something from Mr. Biden — like an agreement to never own a gun again — to show there was some accountability after his long-running inquiry. Mr. Clark would have to wait awhile to find out.

President Biden and his son, Hunter, departing Air Force One.
When Republicans took over the House in 2022, they had pledged to conduct investigations into the younger Mr. Biden.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

Four months later, on Monday, May 15, a familiar figure reached out to Mr. Clark: Lesley Wolf, a top Weiss deputy with whom Mr. Clark had developed a rapport over the previous two years. In a conference call with the Biden legal team, she acknowledged Mr. Clark’s core demand: that his client never be asked to plead guilty to anything.

She then made a proposition — a deal in which Mr. Biden would not plead guilty, but would agree to what is known as a deferred prosecution agreement.

Such a deal allows a person charged with a crime to avoid entering a formal plea if he or she agrees to abide by a series of conditions, like enrolling in drug treatment or anti-violence programs, relinquishing ownership of weapons or forgoing alcohol.

The agreements, widely used to avoid clogging courts and jails with low-level offenders, have legal teeth. If the terms are violated, a person can be charged with the original crimes.

Mr. Clark — knowing Mr. Biden wanted to bring an end to the investigation that had hovered over him, his family and the Biden White House — was amenable. He told Ms. Wolf he would draft language for such an agreement, an opening bid that would kick off final talks.

By Thursday, Mr. Clark and his legal team sent Ms. Wolf their version of an agreement. It made no mention of a guilty plea, but included a promise that Mr. Biden would never again possess a gun and a pledge that he would pay his taxes.

Ms. Wolf suggested additions, including a demand for a statement of facts, a detailed and unflattering narrative of an individual’s conduct that had been investigated.

The parties then turned to the most important provision of all, an issue that would ultimately unravel the deal: Mr. Clark’s sweeping request for immunity not only for all potential crimes investigated by Mr. Weiss, but also for “any other federal crimes relating to matters investigated by the United States” he might have ever committed.

Ms. Wolf appears to have discarded Mr. Clark’s language. Mr. Clark pushed back in a call with Mr. Weiss and the language was replaced with a narrower promise not to prosecute for any of the offenses “encompassed” in the statement of facts.

The end seemed in sight. When the basic outline was hashed out, Mr. Clark asked Ms. Wolf if she was serious about finalizing the agreement — if so, he would fly out to California to explain the terms to his nervous client. Take the trip, she said.

Mr. Clark ran all of this by Mr. Biden in a meeting at his Malibu house — in a garage where he works on his paintings. He approved the plan.

That Friday, Mr. Clark asked Ms. Wolf if he should stay in California to finalize the deal in Mr. Biden’s presence over the weekend.

No, she replied, it would take her a few more days.

Mr. Clark, believing that they were on the brink of a deal, flew back to New York.

Gary Shapley wearing a dark suit and yellow tie, sitting at a table to testify.
Gary Shapley, a veteran I.R.S. investigator, tried to pursue what he believed could be a major break in the Biden investigation.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

But on Capitol Hill, the efforts to upend a resolution were gaining momentum.

While Mr. Weiss concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge Mr. Biden with major crimes, not all his colleagues shared that opinion. The perception that Mr. Biden was being treated too softly spurred resistance among some investigators who believed that his office had blocked them from following all leads.

Few were more frustrated than Gary Shapley. A veteran I.R.S. investigator, he had worked major cases and helped take on big bankers. But every time he said he tried to pursue what he believed could be a major break in the Biden investigation, he felt stymied.

When investigators went to interview Hunter Biden, they were told they couldn’t approach the house. An attempt to serve a search warrant on Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s guesthouse? Denied. The request to search a storage unit belonging to Hunter Biden? Derailed.

Finally, he reached out to Mark Lytle, a former federal prosecutor, and the men eventually connected with former Republican staff members who had worked for Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and had knowledge of federal whistle-blower protections.

Mr. Shapley had been raising concerns internally since at least the fall of 2022, but that winter, he took his allegations to the Justice Department’s watchdog, lodging a complaint in February.

By April, Mr. Shapley offered to share insider details with House Republican committee investigators, including his claim that Mr. Weiss had told him that federal prosecutors in Washington and California had refused to bring tax charges against Mr. Biden. His most startling allegation: Mr. Weiss had been so frustrated that he had considered asking Mr. Garland to appoint him as special counsel in late 2022. (Mr. Weiss and Mr. Garland have both denied that account.)

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland walking into a room, with a person carrying papers preceding him.
“I am committed to making as much of his report public as possible,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has minimized contact with Mr. Weiss in hopes of insulating himself from the investigation into the president’s son.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Mr. Shapley requested special protections to bypass legal restrictions on discussing ongoing federal investigations.

It all began to explode into public view on May 15 — the same day Ms. Wolf contacted Mr. Clark — when it was reported that the investigative team that had worked on the case, including Mr. Shapley, had been removed. The next day the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee fired off a letter to the I.R.S. commissioner demanding an explanation.

Around that time, lawyers for a second tax investigator sent a letter to the I.R.S. commissioner, claiming the team of investigators on the case had been removed after expressing concerns about political interference from the Justice Department.

The letter was quickly made public. The agents’ claims were the breakthrough House Republicans had long been seeking.

The I.R.S. investigators had given Congress something genuinely new: summaries of WhatsApp messages that appeared to show Hunter Biden involved in a shakedown in which he had invoked his father, firsthand testimony from people who had reviewed Mr. Biden’s finances and the credibility of their long careers at the tax agency.

On May 24, CBS aired an interview with one of the agents. Two days later, he testified behind closed doors before the House Ways and Means Committee, creating buzz on Capitol Hill. The second man testified on June 1. Three weeks later, the committee voted to publicly release transcripts of the testimony, leading to even more news coverage.

Mr. Biden wearing a dark suit at a gala event.
Mr. Weiss was quietly assigned to investigate Hunter Biden in 2018, and was kept on by the Biden administration.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

As the testimony from the I.R.S. agents took hold, Mr. Biden’s legal team felt the ground shift beneath them. The U.S. attorney’s office suddenly went quiet.

Early in the negotiations, Ms. Wolf included what seemed like a boilerplate disclaimer in an email, that her team “had not discussed or obtained approval” from her superiors for the terms of the final agreement.

On Tuesday, May 23, after four days of silence, Ms. Wolf delivered unwelcome news. Mr. Weiss had revised what he wanted in the deal, now demanding that Mr. Biden plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes. It crossed a red line for Mr. Clark.

Erupting in anger, Mr. Clark accused Ms. Wolf of misleading him. He renounced the possibility of any deal, but after consulting with Mr. Biden, reversed course and told Ms. Wolf that Mr. Biden was willing to go along.

Mr. Clark then went to Wilmington to meet the prosecutors, where they hammered out the details of the deal.

By the middle of June, both sides were prepared to announce a deal.

Under the agreement, Mr. Biden would plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and avert prosecution on the gun charge by enrolling in a diversion program.

Mr. Biden’s legal team was eager to issue a statement claiming that the agreement represented the conclusion of the government’s investigation. That Monday, June 19, Mr. Clark sent a draft to Shannon Hanson, another Weiss deputy, which clearly stated the investigation was over.

“I can confirm that the five-year long, extensive federal investigation into my client, Hunter Biden, has been concluded through agreements with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware,” it read.

“With the conclusion of this investigation, he looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward,” it continued.

Ms. Hanson suggested the edit from “has been concluded” to “resolved,” and she also asked Mr. Clark to strike the phrase “With the conclusion of this investigation.”

But hours after the agreement was announced, confusion set in. In a news release, Mr. Weiss’s office said that the investigation was “ongoing,” taking Mr. Biden and officials at Justice Department headquarters by surprise.

It was at this critical juncture that Ms. Wolf began to take a significantly reduced role, although it is unclear whether that had anything to do with the Biden case.

In their testimony, the I.R.S. whistle-blowers claimed that Ms. Wolf — who had made a couple of campaign donations to Democrats — had discouraged them from pursuing lines of inquiry that could lead to the elder Mr. Biden.

Around this time, Leo Wise — a senior prosecutor who had spent nearly two decades in the Baltimore U.S. attorney’s office — was quietly transferred to the department’s criminal division, then detailed to Delaware to add legal firepower to the relatively small Delaware office.

It was his name, not Ms. Wolf’s, that appeared on the plea deal. And it was Mr. Wise who was responsible for defending the deal, one he had not negotiated, in front of a federal judge who proved to be unforgiving.

Police officers in front of the Delaware District Court. They are wearing dark uniforms.
Hunter Biden’s plea deal fell apart at the courthouse in the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building in Wilmington, Del.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Hunter Biden walked into the Wilmington federal courthouse on July 26, with the expectation that his long legal odyssey was nearing an end.

But there were signs all was not well. Hours earlier, the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means committee had made one final stab at scuttling the agreement, urging the court to consider the whistle-blowers’ testimony.

It turned out to be unnecessary.

Judge Maryellen Noreika,, repeatedly informed the two sides that she would be no “rubber stamp.” She picked apart the deal, exposing substantial disagreements over the extent of the immunity provision.

Mr. Clark said the deal indemnified his client not merely for the tax and gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals. Mr. Wise said it was far narrower — and suggested the government was still considering charges against Mr. Biden under laws regulating foreign lobbying.

The two sides tried to salvage it, Judge Noreika was not convinced, and Mr. Biden silently left the courthouse under a hail of shouted questions.

 

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Former ESPN broadcaster Sage Steele blasts company’s ‘hypocrisy’ days after leaving Steele left the network earlier this week.

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By Ryan Morik Fox News

Former ESPN broadcaster Sage Steele blasts company’s ‘hypocrisy’ days after leaving Steele left the network earlier this week.

Sage Steele has broken her silence about what she says is “hypocrisy” at ESPN. Steele, now a former ESPN employee, was a guest on Megyn Kelly’s YouTube show Thursday, just days after leaving the network.

Steele provided the “life update” on X, formerly Twitter, saying her lawsuit against the company was settled, and she decided to leave so she can “exercise my first amendment rights more freely.

Before Steele spoke, Kelly showed a montage of ESPN broadcasters voicing political opinions on the air.

“All I ever wanted was consistency,” Steele told Kelly. “And if we are allowing my peers to go on social media, much less on our own airwaves, saying things that have nothing to do with sports, that are political … then I should be allowed on my personal time to give my opinion on my experiences personally, without telling others what to do or how to feel being biracial or being forced to take a vaccine.

“I think that’s just what breaks my heart. That there were different rules for me than everyone else.”

Steele reflected on the time she felt forced to apologize after another incident with ESPN brass.

Sage Steele in 2019

ESPN’s Sage Steele also expressed support for Riley Gaines. (Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)

“I did not want to apologize. I fought. I fought, and I begged and I screamed. And I was told that if I want to keep my job, I have to apologize. And I need my job,” she said. “And they knew that.”

However, Steele said, issues continued, and “there were events taken away as I’ve worked years to get.”

“It’s interesting. I think in anything in life, quite often, we say, ‘All right, one more time and it’s over, and I’m done …’ I knew that there was a line somewhere,” she explained.

That line was the Rose Bowl Parade. Steele had covered it previously but not this year.

“I knew that, mentally, I had checked out and was heartbroken again at the hypocrisy of the rules. A rule’s a rule for everybody or nobody. You can’t pick and choose, especially if it’s just one person. It’s just me.”

Sage Steele in Phoenix in February 2023

Sage Steele speaks onstage during The Players Tailgate Hosted By Bobby Flay for Super Bowl LVII Feb. 12, 2023, in Phoenix, Ariz. (Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Bullseye Event Group)

Steele’s lawsuit accused ESPN of selective enforcement of its policy that bars news employees from commenting on politics and social issues.

The suit alleged ESPN “violated Connecticut law and Steele’s rights to free speech based upon a faulty understanding of her comments and a nonexistent, unenforced workplace policy that serves as nothing more than pretext” and claimed the network relied on “inaccurate third-party accounts of Steele’s comments” and “did not immediately review the actual comments or the context in which they were made.”

She joined ESPN in 2007 after starting out at Comcast SportsNet. She became one of the mainstays on “SportsCenter” and made appearances on “NBA Countdown.”

Fox News’ Ryan Gaydos contributed to this report.

 

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