"Considering that Brennan and Comey are still free and Obama and Hillary are still smiling, they've been remarkably successful."
Obama National Security Officials Susan Rice, James Comey, John Brennan Back Joe Biden
4:35
Former President Barack Obama’s national security leaders came out this week right before Super Tuesday to announce their support for former colleague Joe Biden, in apparent hopes to tip the scales against his non-establishment competitor, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Their endorsement signals that the national security establishment that has been excoriated by both President Trump and Bernie Sanders for supporting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and military intervention elsewhere, will also back Biden.
Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, tweeted:
I’m proud to endorse @JoeBiden for President,” along with a picture of them hugging. “No one is better prepared and more trusted by our allies to repair the incalculable damage Trump has done to our int’l standing and national security.
Rice became embroiled in the Benghazi scandal, after she claimed in TV interviews that an anti-Islam video sparked the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack against a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Her claim was later proven not to be true. Rice was also a proponent of the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, which allowed for the Islamic State to move in and solidify a foothold.
I worked very closely with @JoeBiden for 8 years. He is smart, strategic and more experienced than any candidate in the field. No one is better prepared and more trusted by our allies to repair the incalculable damage Trump has done to our int'l standing and national security.
John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, also came out the same day to back Biden.
“Joe Biden is one of the most honest, decent, practical, & experienced individuals with whom I have ever worked. If nominated & elected, he is capable of unifying our country & restoring America’s standing around the world,” he tweeted.
Brennan, as CIA director, was heavily involved in the Obama administration’s efforts to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign. He testified to the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017 that in late July 2016 he started a “fusion cell” of officials from the CIA, National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate Russian interference.
He also testified he gave the FBI leads on “contacts and interactions between Russian officials [and] U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign,” and that the information” served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether “collusion” occurred.
The years-long, multi-million dollar FBI investigation later headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion or coordination. Even after the Mueller investigation ended, he continued to assert that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
Joe Biden is one of the most honest, decent, practical, & experienced individuals with whom I have ever worked. If nominated & elected, he is capable of unifying our country & restoring America’s standing around the world. nytimes.com/2020/03/02/us/…
James Comey, Obama’s FBI director and another lead figure in the FBI’s Russian collusion investigation, also came out of the woodwork this week to back Biden on Super Tuesday, although a day after Rice and Brennan.
He tweeted: “Voted in first Dem primary to support party dedicated to restoring values in WH. I agree with @amyklobuchar: We need candidate who cares about all Americans and will restore decency, dignity to the office. There is a reason Trump fears @joebiden and roots for Bernie. #Biden2020.”
Trump fired Comey in May 2017 after he refused to say publicly what he had been telling the president privately: that Trump was not personally under investigation for colluding with Russia. Comey then leaked memos he wrote of his private conversations to a friend who leaked them to the New York Times in order to prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
The FBI’s handling of the investigation of the Trump campaign, under Comey, is being investigated by the Justice Department and Attorney General John Durham. The DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz earlier this year came out with a damning report on the FBI’s handling of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign volunteer, Carter Page.
Voted in first Dem primary to support party dedicated to restoring values in WH. I agree with @amyklobuchar: We need candidate who cares about all Americans and will restore decency, dignity to the office. There is a reason Trump fears @joebiden and roots for Bernie. #Biden2020
Comey is not a popular figure among establishment Democrats because of his announcement the FBI was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails just weeks before the 2016 presidential election.
An adviser for the Biden campaign, Andrew Bates, actually rejected Comey’s endorsement.
“Yes, customer service? I just received a package that I very much did not order. How can I return it, free of charge?” he tweeted.
Yes, customer service? I just received a package that I very much did not order. How can I return it, free of charge? twitter.com/Comey/status/1…
The Democratic Party Is Wounded and Dangerous
Beware the wounded animal. In pain and desperation, it will do violent things. It seems to me no coincidence that Joe Biden's big win on Super Tuesday was followed by Democratic senator Chuck Schumer threatening conservative members of the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Joe Biden is hardly Lancelot to President Trump's dragon. The Democrats and the Deep State needed a first-class warrior; instead, their best option is a walking advertisement for Alzheimer's awareness. In his best days, Joe Biden was the political equivalent of Jack McCall, shooting his adversaries in the back. When he wasn't using his position of power for financial gain or stealing other people's words, he was helping his family line their own pockets. Today, he's a disoriented and stumbling shell of an unimportant political hack who looks on in confusion while his wife does his fighting for him. If you've ever wondered what happens to the shriveled soul of a lifetime liar and Democratic swindler, just cast your eyes upon Old Joe. He's a walking, talking effigy of Democratic corruption and amorality. He's what the Democratic Party usually keeps far off the main stage for the back-alley entertainment; now he's the main event, but no amount of stick-prodding by Donna Brazile or Tom Perez is going to turn Joe Biden into Fred Astaire. He's a freak-show carnival attraction at best, amazing onlookers by his ability to occasionally jumble audible words together into a sentence. The Democrats needed a man who could command a movement; all they got was a man who can barely control his own.
I'm not saying President Trump's re-election is in the bag. Far from it. We've never seen such an array of villains acting in concert to take down an American president. The Democratic Party has most of the permanent bureaucratic Deep State (as well as stealthy anti-Trump Republicans), Wall Street, Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, cosmopolitan Europe, global warming doomsayers, the Middle East's worst terrorists, and domestic Antifa terrorists here at home all actively working to dislodge President Trump from the White House. In the past, the chiefs of our intelligence agencies and clandestine services retired into relative obscurity, cognizant that duty commanded their silent withdrawal into the pages of history. After orchestrating a coup against the American president, however, it is not unusual to see the former heads of Obama's CIA, FBI, and NSC all tirelessly justifying their criminal acts on cable news each night. The corporate news media and institutional government have spent years trying to gin up enough hysteria in the nation that mock beheadings of the president and ritual re-enactments of his assassination during summer theater might lead the American people to clamor for the real thing.
So, no, the 2020 election will not be over until all the votes have been counted on November 3, and it becomes clear that we have successfully preserved Western civilization for at least a little while longer from this most recent manifestation of Vienna's bloody 1683 siege. All I am saying is that Joe Biden was never meant to be the establishment's champion for resurrecting their oligarchic power. They wanted a formidable presidential nominee, someone who could check all the right identity politics boxes while stringing words together that were substantively meaningless while singularly inspiring. Instead, they're settling for a politician past his expiration date who sounds less crème de la crème and more soused in crème de menthe. The Democratic Party may depend on dead voters to win elections, but running dead candidates is another thing altogether.
So just because the cable news anchors and Carville clones are all high-fiving each other and cheering for managing to narrowly prevent a communist disciple of Stalin and Castro from sewing up the Democratic nomination for president by the beginning of March, don't forget how disappointed they are at heart. If Biden goes on to clinch the nomination, the Democratic Party will have managed to take all the aloof, plain, manila-folder blandness of John Kerry and combine it with the alertness and energy of a nursing home after pill rounds. This is the one whom the commentariat is celebrating right now, the guy Obama and the gang blocked from running in 2016 because they felt him not quite up for the challenge when he was four years younger. The vice president during the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, the wordsmith who marveled at Obama for being strangely "articulate" for a black guy, and the obtrusive shoulder-rubber whose chief political instinct was to sniff the hair of the wives and daughters of White House officials and visiting dignitaries. Imagine being in such dire straits because the previous Democratic president so hollowed out the party's future by losing over a thousand elected officials across the country during his time in office that the last, great hope to beat President Trump this year is just hoping to make it to bed each afternoon before saying something so inappropriate or illogical or ridiculous that Red Bernie becomes the Democrat's Dear Leader by default. For every minute of his few wakeful hours, his handlers have to be on constant guard against the possibility that a voice in Biden's head will scream, "Oh, look, a young child with wonderful-smelling hair." "Comeback Joe"? More like "Come back, Joe!"
The Democrats and the Deep State have spent the last four years constructing the greatest wag-the-dog spectacle America's ever seen in an attempt to cover up the malfeasance and criminality of the last administration, while preventing the current one from achieving too many victories. Considering that Brennan and Comey are still free and Obama and Hillary are still smiling, they've been remarkably successful. But the Mueller obfuscation and Schiff circus are behind us, the dance music of delay is dying down, and the Democrats' and Deep State's ability to keep pushing back their day of reckoning is coming to an end. If they don't win in 2020, they cannot keep justice at bay, regardless of how stacked in their favor it has always been in the past. And standing in the gap as their last-ditch prospect to save them from President Trump's re-election and spare them from long delayed judgment is none other than Corn Pop's archenemy. The one "reasonable" Democrat in the race who has already burnished his "moderate" credentials by fully embracing Bernie's Green New Deal, Warren's Medicare for All, and Beto's door-to-door gun confiscation. Nothing says "electable centrist Democrat" like "D'oh!" Biden's full tilt toward Marxist socialism. No wonder Chuck Schumer sounds like some injured animal in the forest, lashing out at tree branches all around him. That's what small, weak, dying creatures do when they know the end is near.
Democrats are watching the
speeding train head to the washed out bridge
It would take a heart of stone not to
laugh at the Democrats' current dilemma. The party of racial diversity
has only white candidates. The party of youth has only old candidates.
The party's top candidate is an angry, spit-flecked, wild-maned old man
who has been a Marxist his entire life, has never held a real job in the
private sector, is now hypocritically reveling in the life of a millionaire and
can't stop himself from praising grotesque dictators.
And here's the biggest laugh of all: the
Democrat party's only hope is a confused old man whose corruption is
oozing into the open only because the Democrats wagered everything on
impeaching President Trump.
It's very likely that, if the Democrats
hadn't been bound and determined to impeach Trump, Gropey Biden's dirty
dealings in Ukraine on behalf of his cocaine-snorting, alcohol-chugging,
widow-shtupping, stripper-impregnating, deadbeat-dad son would have stayed in
the shadows. However, by choosing Trump's phone call to Ukraine's
President Zelensky as the impeachment bridge to die on, the Democrats
practically hired a blimp to circle the Super Bowl stadium while trailing a
sign saying, "Our preferred candidate for president is corrupt."
The latest assault on Biden's weak claim
that he did nothing wrong comes out of Ukraine. According to John Solomon:
A Ukrainian
court has ordered an investigation into whether Joe Biden violated any laws
when he forced the March 2016 firing of the country's chief prosecutor.
The ruling
could revive scrutiny of Hunter Biden's lucrative relationship with an energy
firm in that corruption-plagued country just as the former vice president's
campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is surging after a lackluster
start.
Former
Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who has long alleged he was fired because he
would not stop investigating the Burisma Holdings firm that employed Hunter
Biden, secured the ruling last month. Ukrainian officials confirmed the
State Bureau of Investigation has since complied and initiated the probe.
[snip]
The ruling
does not mention Biden by name, but court filings by Shokin's lawyers that led
to the decision show that the former prosecutor had alleged "the
commission of a criminal offense against him by Joseph Biden, a citizen of the
United States of America, in Ukraine and abroad: interference in the activities
of a law enforcement officer."
Joe Biden has been in politics since 1972.
Behind the good-guy persona is a self-centered, vicious, corrupt man.
It would take a longer blog post than this to detail all the things that
stand against him, but here's a short list:
- He invented "borking," when
he joined with Teddy Kennedy to malign in the crudest, most vicious
fashion one of America's leading jurists, Robert Bork.
- For decades, he has smeared the reputation of the man who drove the truck involved in the
accident that killed Biden's wife and daughter.
- He lied about his academic record.
- He's plagiarized on at least two occasions, with the second act of plagiarism destroying his first presidential run.
- He gropes children.
- He has consistently embarrassed female Secret Service agents by swimming naked in front of them.
- He's enriched his entire family to the tune of
billions of dollars in suspect business deals with Ukraine, China, Costa Rica, Iraq,
Kazakhstan, and Russia, all countries in Biden's portfolio as vice
president.
And note, please, that the above list has
nothing to do with Biden's political stands, which, while hewing left, are all
over the board, drifting with the political winds. His only consistent
position has been to hate the Second Amendment. He's just another leftist
who prefers to govern over disarmed subjects.
It will be interesting, to say the least,
to see what comes out of Ukraine as the campaign progresses, especially if the
Democrats succeed in wresting a primary victory out of Bernie the Red's
clutches and bestowing it on Biden.
Think Obama Administration Wasn't Corrupt?
Think Again
Obama Scandal: Former President
Obama and his political supporters have repeatedly stated that his
administration was scandal-free, unlike administrations before and
after. "We're probably the first administration in modern history
that hasn't had a major scandal in the White House," Obama himself said. A
new book puts the lie to that statement.not load M3U8:
Never mind that the left-leaning big media
basically ignored major scandals during the Obama years, ranging from the IRS
targeting scandal and the VA's deadly waiting lists for veterans to Hillary
Clinton's illegal use of an unsecured, hackable home-brew server for her
official duties as secretary of state and the Fast and Furious gunwalking
program.
These and others were epic scandals that the
media simply ignored or downplayed.
The media have contrasted Obama's supposed
honesty and forthrightness with President Trump's supposed venality and
political unscrupulousness, as embodied in the year-and-a-half long
Russia-Trump scandal investigation that shows few signs of letting up.
GN UP NOW!
But now comes Peter Schweizer's new book,
"Secret
Empires: How Our Politicians Hide Corruption and Enrich Their Families and
Friends," which shows that the Obama administration and its cronies
were up to their necks in questionable business deals and may even have
intentionally distorted public policy to accommodate their own profit-making.
The book claims "Obama and his
administration would deem industries either destructive to the environment or
exploitative for the financial and professional gain of his friends, including
industries such as coal mining, offshore drilling, cash advance companies, and
for-profit colleges," wrote Katelyn Caralle of the Washington
Examiner.
Schweizer's book, based on extensive research,
says that Obama acted to regulate certain industries in such a way that the
regulations lowered the value of some of the companies, wrote
Katelyn Caralle of the Washington Examiner. These actions let two
family friends to profit handsomely on deals through their own investment firm.
Here's how it worked: Obama buddies Marty Nesbitt
and Harreld Kirkpatrick III formed a private equity investment firm called
Vistria, right around the time Obama was re-elected in 2012.
Nothing wrong with that, except, as Schweizer
notes in his book, "A curious pattern began to emerge. Obama and his administration
would attack industries with government power, which led to substantially lower
valuations for these companies. Nesbitt and Vistria, or others close to Obama,
could then acquire those assets for pennies on the dollar."
As an example, Schweizer cites the case of
for-profit higher education schools like University of Phoenix, ITT Technical
Institute, and DeVry University. In 2013, Obama blamed the schools for taking
advantage of students by saddling them with massive amounts of student debt, ruining
their credit and making a profit on it. He ordered the Federal Trade
Commission to go after them.
In the case of the University of Phoenix, its
parent Apollo Education Group was suspended after a Federal Trade Commission
investigation in 2015. The following year, three companies, including Vistria,
swooped in to buy what remained of Apollo at a price 90% below its share price
before the investigation.
As Vistria's education investment portfolio
bulged, a number of Obama Education Department officials, including Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan, ended up taking high-level jobs with Vistria.
That's just one example. There are others.
Schweizer noted in his book, for instance, that
both Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry were deeply involved
in trade and security talks with China even as that
country began its aggressive campaign to expand its military and physical
presence in the South China Sea. Contrary to standard diplomatic practice,
however, both played "good cop," not seriously confronting China on
its misbehavior.
Remember, Biden and Kerry were close friends
from their years spent together in the Senate. So there was little surprise
when Biden's son, Hunter, and Kerry's stepson, Christopher Heinz, one of the
heirs to the Heinz ketchup fortune, went into business together in 2009.
They created a number of equity and real estate
investment firms allied to Rosemont Capital, "the alternative investment
fund of the Heinz Family Office."
So far so good. Except, "Over the next
seven years, as both Joe Biden and John Kerry negotiated sensitive and
high-stakes deals with foreign governments, Rosemont entities secured a series
of exclusive deals with those same foreign governments."
In December
of 2013, for instance, Biden traveled to China for talks. He brought Hunter
Biden along. While there, the senior Biden soft-pedaled China's clear
aggression, and played up the bilateral trade partnership. Ten days after the
trip concluded, China's central bank, the Bank of China, set up a $1 billion
investment joint venture called Bohai Harvest RST. For the record, the
"RS" referred to Biden's son's firm, Rosemont Seneca.
But months
later, in July 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to China, also for
talks. Kerry talked little of China's clear aggression, but did conspicuously
note that "China and the United States represent the greatest economic
alliance trading partnership in the history of humankind."
He should
know. In the ensuing months, Chinese government-linked firms took major stakes
in several of the firms owned or controlled by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz,
and provided them with massive funding totaling billions of dollars. Nor
is this the only scandal involving John Kerry.
And this
just scratches the surface. The book is a catalog, a virtual roadmap, to the
way corrupt business gets done in Washington — and why Americans are smart to
question why their representative go to Washington as paupers, and return as
millionaires.
We can only
hope that as Biden or Kerry gears up for a challenge to Trump in the 2020
presidential contest, they will receive the same relentless scrutiny that a
Republican with the same record of venality would get. But we won't hold our
breath.
Profile
in Corruption outlines how
Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in
political office.
Joe
Biden Helped Launch Business for Son-in-Law from the Oval Office, Repeatedly
Briefed Investors Privately
Former Vice President Joe Biden went
to great lengths to boost his son-in-law’s health care company while in the
White House, briefing investors on the firm’s merits and even arranging access
to the Oval Office. The bombshell revelations are detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive
Elite — a new book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at
Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.
In June 2011, Biden arranged a
private meeting for two StartUp Health executives with then-President Barack
Obama in the Oval Office. At the time of the meeting, the company had been
around for only a few weeks. It had yet to finalize its business plan, let
alone develop a website.
The meeting was all the more surprising
since StartUp Health was not proposing any new or radical ideas for health
care, at least not to the degree of warranting a meeting with the nation’s
commander-in-chief.
“Their status as a health care
incubator was hardly unique,” Schweizer writes in Profiles in Corruption. “In
fact, there were thirty-one similar companies operating in the state of
California alone, and another eleven in the state of New York.”
As Schweizer outlines, the only
significant factor that set StartUp Health apart from others in its field was
that its chief medical officer, Howard Krein, was engaged to Biden’s daughter,
Ashley. Krein, a head and neck doctor by training, seemed to have become an
integral part of Biden’s inner-circle even before he officially wed into the family in June
2012.
One day after StartUp Health’s
executives met with Obama in the Oval Office, the company got a bigger boost
from the administration when it was featured at a health care tech conference
put on by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). How the company
managed to score HHS attention, while still in the stages of infancy, remains
unclear, but it is likely Biden played a role.
Regardless, the back-to-back events
gave StartUp Health a launch trajectory unavailable to other companies in the
health care field, let alone other industries. Biden’s influence ensured that
StartUp Health set out with “the winds to our backs,” as one of the company’s
co-founders succinctly put it.
The former vice president’s efforts
on his son-in-law’s behalf were not just confined to the company’s launch. As Profiles in Corruption details,
Biden went out of his way to ensure StartUp Health executives were given
unparalleled access to the White House during the Obama presidency. The
company’s leadership, which mostly consisted of Krein’s family and friends,
frequently met with administration officials not only in private but also in
public.
“According to 2011 White House
visitors’ logs, Howard Krein attended the China State Dinner, a White House
Staff barbecue, and President Obama’s Motown event,” Schweizer writes. “His
brother, Steven, had half a dozen other meetings with White House officials.”
Biden’s efforts on behalf of the
company expansively increased during his final year in office, both
internationally and at home.
First, the vice president took Krein
with him on Air Force Two to a conference on regenerative health hosted by Pope
Francis at the Vatican in April 2016.
“Conference attendees included a
who’s who of scientific researchers in medicine from around the world,”
Schweizer notes.
Then in May, Krein was tasked with
introducing his father-in-law at a major health industry data conference hosted
by the Obama administration. The opportunity provided free publicity to the
company as it planned to expand its portfolio.
In October 2016, Biden appeared
alongside StartUp Health’s CEO at the Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Innovation
Summit. During his remarks, Biden praised StartUp Health as an innovator in the
health care market and claimed companies like it would be essential to winning the battle
against cancer.
Apart from arranging access and
touting the company in public, Biden also took steps in the waning days of the
Obama administration to boost investment in StartUp Health. In January 2017,
Biden made one of his final appearances as vice president at a festival hosted
by the company in San Francisco, California. At the event, Biden lauded StartUp
Health’s success to 250 attendees, including members and prospective donors.
Ironically, at the same time he was
working to promote his son-in-law’s business, Biden was also claiming his
children had chosen careers unlikely to make them rich.
“I wish my kids would become
wealthy,” Biden told the International
Association of Fire Fighters in July 2012 while lambasting the economic
policies of then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his
family did just that while he was in political office.
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