Joe Biden Campaign Announces Another Day off the Trail
At 9:52 a.m. on Monday, the Joe Biden campaign announced the candidate would not be making any public appearances for the day.
Biden campaign has called a lid at 9:52am.
— Pat Ward (@WardDPatrick) September 28, 2020
“Biden campaign has called a lid at 9:52 a.m.,” Fox News producer Pat Ward wrote on Twitter.
On Saturday, the campaign called another lid, the 10th time in the next-to-last month before Election Day.
Tracking Biden Campaign Lid Calls for the month of September. (Date, time & what the pool reporters of the day wrote)
Total so far → 10 lid calls
This week alone from 9/19-9/26 → 4 pic.twitter.com/R4zBcrd5dn— Mona Salama (@MonaSalama_) September 26, 2020
Biden’s frequency for being off the trail in the waning weeks of the campaign has seeped into the consciousness of the media and now it is becoming news.
Mona Salama noted Biden called four such “lids” last week alone. With the one called on Monday, whether will likely be another called on Tuesday as Biden prepares for the first presidential debate with Donald Trump.
Joe Biden called a lid on the day earlier this morning. No events, no questions. Less than 6 weeks before the election, the Democratic nominee is working at a 50% clip, calling a lid 7 of the past 14 days and 11 of the past 26 this month. Is this a preview of a Biden presidency?
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) September 26, 2020
“Less than 6 weeks before the election, the Democratic nominee is working at a 50% clip, calling a lid 7 of the past 14 days and 11 of the past 26 this month,” The Hill‘s Joe Concha wrote on Twitter.
During a rally in Pennsylvania last week, President Trump turned Biden’s lid frequency into an issue:
President @realDonaldTrump rips Joe Biden for calling a lid early this morning: "Lid means he's not going to be anywhere today. I'm working my ass off. I'm in Ohio, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin." pic.twitter.com/iDTuIOQRLN
— Team Trump (Text VOTE to 88022) (@TeamTrump) September 23, 2020
“I’m working my ass off. I’m in Ohio, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin,” Trump told the crowd in Moon Township.
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on Saturdays. Listen to segments on YouTube or download full podcast episodes. Follow him on Twitter, like him on Facebook, and follow him on Parler.
Helping Joe to Prep for the Presidential Debate
So he doesn’t sound as lost as usual.
Mr. Vice President, I’m here to help you prepare for the presidential debates -- not an easy assignment, given your propensity to be you.
First the basics: Your name is Joe Biden and you’re running for president of the United States. Your opponent, the incumbent, is Donald Trump. Please don’t say that you’ll “beat Joe Biden” – it sounds like you’re either hopelessly muddled or into self-flagellation.
You have a problem with math. Avoid it, if possible. If you must use statistics, remember 150 million people did not die of “gun violence” since 2007 (it’s really about 40,000 a year, and 60% of those are suicides).
And 120 million did not die from COVID-19 in the United States. At the time you uttered this absurdity in June, it was 119,000. Today, it’s 200,000. Two hundred and seventy million would amount to the demise of roughly 80% of the population, and that’s before Medicaid-for-All.
Regarding the riots that are tearing America apart, you’re doing a great job of saying nothing while sounding serious; keep it up. Your cliched statement that “all violence is wrong,” without mentioning specifics (Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Democrat mayors who sympathize with the mob, the murders of cops in the course of the mayhem, etc.) should satisfy the hoi polloi without offending your party’s politburo.
But you’ve taken it a step further with the allegation that the president has failed to control his right-wing “militia.” Yup, it’s disgraceful -- all of those guys marching around with White Power signs in the midst of the burning and looting.
Another of your classic lines, “Do I look like a socialist?” and “I beat the socialists” (in the primaries) sounds good as long as it's accepted at face value. Who looks like a socialist – a guy with a beard in a cheap suit? If you beat the socialists, why are they all supporting your campaign – Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren and even the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party?
Let’s hope most voters won’t ask: Does a guy who says he wants to pile on taxes during an economic downturn, destroy domestic energy production, kill innovation and do another shutdown if unspecified scientists tell him to, look like a socialist? Gee, he sure doesn’t look like John D. Rockefeller.
Keep hammering away at Trump’s alleged responsibility for the coronavirus. "He didn’t take it seriously." "He failed to act promptly." "He didn’t listen to the scientists." "He 'lied' to the American people."
It’s best to stick to bloviating. You don’t want voters to dwell on the fact that the president shut down travel to China almost immediately, while leaders of your party urged tourists to come to Chinatown in New York and San Francisco, and called Trump a racist.
We also don’t want them thinking about the president’s successful crash production of face masks and ventilators, praised by the Democrat Governor of New York. Equally uncomfortable are questions about why deep-blue New Jersey and New York have the most COVID-19 deaths in the nation or why Governor Dumbo stuck coronavirus patients in nursing homes with the most vulnerable population.
Another subject to avoid is your record.
These problems that you say we urgently need to solve: what did you do about them during your 36 years in the Senate and 8 years as Vice President? And why did your running mate practically call you a racist during one of the Democrat debates?
Remember, your son Hunter did nothing wrong. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. What’s suspicious about Burisma paying the then-vice president’s son $50,000 a month (through a U.S. company) from 2014 to 2019, even though he knew nothing about energy?
Whatever happens, don’t be intimidated by the president, even though he’s smarter than you, faster on his feet than you, and has a more impressive résumé. Okay, be intimidated.
Finally, when the markets crashed in 1929, Franklin D. Roosevelt did not go on television to reassure the American people.
That was Teddy Roosevelt.
Joe Biden Exploited S-Corporation Loophole to Avoid Payroll Tax
The establishment media is all aflutter Monday after a New York Times story over the weekend about incumbent GOP President Donald Trump’s tax records, but it turns out Democrat candidate former Vice President Joe Biden used a series of tax code loopholes to avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes over the years.
Back in August, the Wall Street Journal’s Chris Jacobs exposed how the Biden family structured what is called an “S-Corp” to avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes.
“How the Bidens Dodged the Payroll Tax,” was Jacobs’ headline on Aug. 10.
In it, the Journal details how the Bidens set up an S-Corporation to avoid paying more than half a million dollars in taxes they would have otherwise owed.
“Joe Biden responded to President Trump’s partial suspension of payroll-tax collections with a statement calling it the ‘first shot in a new, reckless war on Social Security,’” Jacobs wrote. He continued: “‘Our seniors and millions of Americans with disabilities are under enough stress without Trump putting their hard-earned Social Security benefits in doubt.’ Mr. Biden’s objections might be more persuasive had he and his wife, Jill, not gone out of their way to avoid funding seniors’ entitlement benefits. According to their tax returns, in 2017 and 2018 the Bidens and his wife Jill avoided payroll taxes on nearly $13.3 million in income from book royalties and speaking fees. They did so by classifying the income as S-corporation profits rather than taxable wages.”
Jacobs continued in his expose by noting the corporation the Bidens established to avoid paying the payroll taxes on millions of dollars in income amounts to more than half a million dollars in taxes that Joe and Jill Biden did not pay.
“According to the Urban Institute, a couple featuring one high earner and one average earner, retiring this year, will have paid a total of $209,000 in Medicare taxes during their working lives,” Jacobs wrote. “The Bidens avoided paying nearly twice that much in Medicare taxes during two years. The maximum payroll tax affected by Mr. Trump’s suspension is $1,984—less than 1/250th of the amount the Bidens avoided in 2017-18. The Bidens didn’t avoid any Social Security tax, which applied only to the first $127,200 of income in 2017 and $128,400 in 2018. But they would under Mr. Biden’s tax plan, which would impose the 12.4% Social Security tax on income over $400,000; the same loophole he used in 2017-18 would shield him from his own tax. And how can Mr. Biden claim to protect Medicare and ObamaCare when he avoided more than $500,000 in taxes that fund the two programs? The media have largely ignored the Bidens’ accounting legerdemain, fixating on Mr. Trump’s tax returns instead. But at least the president isn’t looking to raise taxes on everyone else.”
The Wall Street Journal is hardly the only outlet to illustrate how the Bidens used this tax code loophole of creating an S-Corporation to save themselves from paying hundreds of thousands—perhaps now millions—of dollars in taxes over the years.
CNBC’s Darla Mercado in 2019 wrote about it explaining to her readers how they can use the same loopholes Biden did to avoid paying their taxes.
“The former vice president and 2020 presidential contender and his wife Jill Biden reported about $10 million in income in 2017 from a pair of S-corporations, CelticCapri and Giacoppa,” Mercado wrote in CNBC. “The two entities were paid for the couple’s book deals and speaking gigs. That mean any amounts the Bidens received as a distribution wasn’t subject to the 15.3% combined Social Security and Medicare tax. Here’s how it works. S-corporations pay their employee shareholders in two ways: wages and distributions.The S-corps reported another $3.2 million in income in 2018.”
In other words, on much of the income Joe and Jill Biden generated through the corporations they established to pay themselves—CelticCapri and Giacoppa are the names of the two so-called S-Corporations—they did not have to pay payroll taxes collected to fund Social Security and Medicare.
Those on the left are not happy with the Bidens over the hypocrisy, either. The Intercept’s Ryan Grim in 2019 noted Biden has used Delaware corporation laws to hide his financial information from the American people.
“The Bidens have used their home state’s financial privacy laws to shield his income from public view, by setting up two tax- and transparency-avoidance vehicles known as S corporations,” Grim wrote. “He and his wife Jill Biden called them CelticCapri Corp. and Giacoppa Corp., respectively, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, have reported more than $13 million in profits the previous two years that weren’t subject to specific disclosure or self-employment taxes. As CNBC has described, money Biden made from book deals and speeches flowed into the S corporations and was then remitted to Biden and his wife as ‘distributions’ rather than salary. When money is funneled through an S corporation, the recipient doesn’t owe Social Security or Medicare taxes on it, nor can the source of revenue be traced. (In addition to the distributions, the Bidens drew relatively small salaries from the S Corporations: under half a million dollars, for which they owed self-employment taxes.)”
What’s more, as Ryan Ellis from the Center for a Free Economy wrote in a Washington Examiner op-ed last year, the last budgets from the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administration called for an end to this loophole allowing S-Corporations to avoid payroll taxes.
That means Barack Obama, the former Democrat president of the United States, does not support what Biden has established in these S-Corporations to avoid payroll tax liability on millions of dollars in income.
Russian Billionaire Who Wired $3.5M to Hunter Biden Got Contract From New Orleans Museum
A German company owned by the Russian billionaire who wired Hunter Biden $3.5 million received a contract to build part of the World War II Museum in New Orleans, according to a fact sheet on the museum’s website.
Elena Baturina, the widow of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, bought German structural membrane manufacturer Hightex in early 2015, according to Russian-language news reports. In April 2017, she announced that Hightex will build part of the Canopy of Peace for the World War II Museum, according to several Russian-language media outlets.
Three years earlier, on Feb. 14, 2014, Baturina sent $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a company co-founded by Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to a report released by Senate Republicans on Sept. 23. The wire was accompanied by a note stating “Consultancy Agreement DD12.02.2014.”
The Canopy of Peace project at the WWII museum has been plagued by delays largely due to issues stemming from a different contractor, according to The New Orleans Advocate. As of August, half of the material from Hightex had yet to be shipped to the project, which was at that point eight months behind schedule. The museum told The Epoch Times in an email that it expects the rest of the material to be onsite by the end of October.
“The museum had no knowledge of any relationship between the Bidens, Devon Archer, and Hightex, and in no way, shape, or form were they a factor in the hiring decision,” the museum said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times.
“Hightex was one of the companies that bid for the project, and the museum hired them because they had the best-qualified proposal for the job. Our vetting of Hightex was relegated to the company’s services and ability to complete the job.”
Joe Biden hosted a fundraiser at the museum during the early stages of his presidential campaign in August 2019.
While there’s no evidence of a link between Baturina’s wire and the contract awarded to the museum, questions about both transactions may emerge because the Senate Republicans discovered Baturina’s payments after they were flagged due to her “reported criminal activity.” Baturina didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment sent to the email of a think tank she founded.
A year after sending $3.5 million to Biden’s company between May 6 and Dec. 8, 2015, Baturina wired more than $241,000 to the company. The money was then forwarded to BAK USA LLC, a Buffalo-based tablet manufacturer that would eventually go bankrupt claiming it was $39 million in debt.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had praised BAK USA when it received a contract from Microsoft in early 2016. Before BAK USA went bankrupt, New York state handed the firm a tax abatement allowing it to operate tax-free for 10 years. The firm has since re-incorporated and appears to be in the same line of business.
Three months after the last wire to BAK USA via Hunter Biden’s firm, Baturina announced that she had purchased $10 million in real estate near the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, according to a press release. She intended to convert the zoning of the assets to accommodate for residential units, a process which requires a lengthy approval process.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) led the effort behind the report released on Sept. 23. The Baturina transactions are a small part of a larger report that also documented links between Hunter Biden and foreign nationals from Ukraine and China.
Hunter Biden accepted a well-paid position on the board of a Ukrainian gas giant while his father served as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. The report found that senior officials raised red flags about Hunter Biden’s role, which the administration repeatedly ignored.
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