Intelligence agencies: China is top threat to U.S. global influence
WASHINGTON — A 27-page report released ahead of testimony by the president's top intelligence officials identifies China as the biggest threat to U.S. global influence.
The annual threat assessment report, which summarizes the best assessments of intelligence analysts from across the 18 different agencies within the intelligence community, “focuses on the most direct, serious threats to the United States during the next year,” looking at everything from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and climate change to cyberattacks and technological competitiveness.
Senior intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, are expected to answer questions about the report this week in front of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Those hearings were temporarily suspended under President Donald Trump after intelligence officials testified about facts that contradicted Trump’s public statements, angering him and leading him to fire his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats.
In contrast, President Biden has told his senior intelligence officials he expects them to speak truthfully, regardless of how those assessments affect his political goals.
According to the new assessment, released Tuesday morning, Beijing will continue its push to “undercut” Washington’s global influence, despite the intelligence officials’ prediction that Chinese leaders may “seek tactical opportunities to reduce tensions with Washington when such opportunities suit their interests.”
While senior Biden officials, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have already met with their Chinese counterparts in Alaska, and climate envoy John Kerry plans to travel to China to address climate change, Beijing has not hesitated to engage in public saber-rattling when confronted with U.S. challenges.
In the near term, intelligence officials expect China to continue to try to establish global influence through “vaccine diplomacy,” as well as touting its success in responding to the pandemic, though public news reporting indicates Chinese vaccines are far less successful than U.S.-made versions.
Intelligence officials also expect Beijing to continue to ratchet up tensions with its neighbors in India, “intimidate rival claimants” in the South China Sea, increase military activity around Taiwan and cooperate with Russia in areas such as the economy and defense. According to the assessment, China will also “continue the most rapid expansion and platform diversification of its nuclear arsenal,” ignoring attempts at international arms control treaties.
In the realm of technology, space and digital espionage and attacks, the intelligence community expects Beijing to remain a top competitor, perhaps even surpassing the U.S. Perhaps most troublingly, beyond Beijing’s use of technology for surveillance and espionage, the intelligence community determined that Beijing “can launch cyber-attacks that, at minimum, can cause temporary disruptions to critical infrastructure within the United States.”
The intelligence community also says Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang would continue to provoke and threaten Washington, each posing unique and evolving threats.
As for Moscow, the community assessed that Russian officials will continue to attempt to “undermine U.S. influence” through ongoing influence and cyber operations, though the analysts concluded Moscow likely “does not want a direct conflict with U.S. forces.”
Among the threats Russia poses are its ongoing “military modernization” efforts, information warfare, involvement in Syria and Ukraine, expanding and stockpiling its nuclear and other weapons, and continuing to target critical infrastructure through cyber operations, including “underwater cables and industrial control systems” in both the U.S. and allied countries.
The report warns that in the coming year, Iran may take risks and escalate tensions, depending on its own assessments of U.S. willingness to respond to attacks and concessions it believes the U.S. might negotiate away in exchange for its return to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran nuclear deal. “Iran remains committed to countering US pressure, although Tehran is also wary of becoming involved in a full-blown conflict,” the report says.
The report says Iran may not “currently” be undertaking key nuclear weapons development projects, but it is possible that it will continue to ratchet up those activities, particularly “if Tehran does not receive sanctions relief.”
Presciently, the report predicts that Iranian officials would consider options including “further enriching uranium up to 60 percent.” The report’s release coincided with an announcement made Tuesday by Iran’s deputy foreign minister, just days after an Israeli-linked attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz, that the country would be starting 60 percent enrichment of uranium.
The analysts also concluded that Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, has not changed his view that nuclear weapons are the “ultimate deterrent against foreign intervention,” a long-held conclusion that Trump refused to accept, due to his confidence in his diplomatic outreach with Pyongyang.
While global terrorism was consistently listed as a top threat in intelligence assessments following the 9/11 attacks and al-Qaida’s global growth, the intelligence community assesses that groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaida now have degraded capabilities based on ongoing U.S. and allied counterterrorism operations.
The intelligence community noted that domestic violent extremists within the U.S. as well as similar groups in Europe, from white nationalists to neo-Nazis, present “an elevated threat to the United States” that has “ebbed and flowed for decades but has increased since 2015.”
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know
what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially
when Beijing had already shelled out millions of
dollars to Biden family members — including
millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is
on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The
conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be
trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on
this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
With Biden in the White House, President Trump predicted, China would “own the United States.” There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the Bidens are an “organized crime family.”
LLOYD BILLIONGSLEY
IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs
China Sticks it to a Prostrate America
Joe Biden puts the Communist regime in a triumphal mood.
Last month in Anchorage, Chinese diplomats Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi subjected Biden’s secretary of state Anthony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan to lengthy verbal barrage. For all its fury, China’s triumphalist rhetoric was only the sequel to an even deeper humiliation.
In February, China subjected U.S. diplomats in the PRC to “anal swab tests.” In this routine, a Chinese doctor sticks a swab two inches into the rectum and rotates it several times, an invasive procedure to say the least. Chinese Dr. Li Tongzeng claims the anal swab is a more effective test for Covid-19, but UCLA microbiology professor Omai Garner says the respiratory test is the “gold standard.”
Dr. Gary Procop, director of molecular microbiology, virology, mycology and parasitology at the Cleveland Clinic, told Healthline that “at least one early study supports respiratory specimens as superior to the other end of the alimentary canal.” The American diplomats duly lodged a protest with China’s foreign ministry, which claimed the tests were done in error and later denied that China ever “asked” the U.S. diplomats to undergo the anal swab in the first place.
In similar style, the Chinese regime claims that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had nothing to do with the spread of Covid-19, even though the WIV received shipments of deadly viruses stolen from a lab in Canada. These included the Nipah virus, transmittable from animals to humans and also able to jump between humans.
The WIV conducts dangerous gain of function research, once banned in the United States, which makes viruses more deadly and transmittable. Even so, the United States funded the WIV through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
For China the pandemic checked every box: facilitating voter fraud, wrecking the U.S. economy, and subjecting the American people to a regime of white coat supremacy under Fauci, uncritical of China and positively worshipful of WHO boss Tedros. China now deploys the pandemic literally to ream out American diplomats with a humiliating anal test. What followed at Anchorage was essentially a sack dance and a taunt.
“So let me say here that, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. The U.S. side was not even qualified to say such things even 20 years or 30 years back, because this is not the way to deal with the Chinese people.”
That was China’s Wang Yi to Blinken and Sullivan in Anchorage. For his part, Yang Jiechi told the Americans that China was “firmly opposed to U.S. interference in China's internal affairs,” and “we hope that the United States will do better on human rights.” The United States, Yang Jiechi added, “has United States-style democracy. And China has Chinese-style democracy.”
Joe Biden echoed that claim in a February 17 interview with Anderson Cooper, citing “different norms that each country and they — their leaders — are expected to follow.” And Biden agrees with Xi Jinping that “there must be a united, tightly controlled China.”
In his March 25 press conference, Biden said “We are going to hold China accountable to follow the rules, whether it relates to the South China Sea or the North China Sea, or their agreement made on Taiwan, or a whole range of other things.” China has no reason to take Biden seriously.
Joe Biden is on record that the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks” and “not competition for us.” Biden’s financial entanglements with China through son Hunter are shunned as Russian disinformation and off limits to investigation by journalists and the FBI. The Democrat-media axis repeats Chinese propaganda that the United States is an intrinsically racist nation, and so are America’s democratic allies.
According to the People’s Daily, official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada form an “axis of white supremacy”
that has formed “a US-centered, racist, and mafia-styled community, willfully and arrogantly provoking China and trying to consolidate their hegemony as all gangsters do.”
At Anchorage, according to China’s Global Times, the PRC team delivered “vigorous counterblows to condescending U.S. representatives,” accompanied by cartoons of a shattered Statue of Liberty with her head in her hands. By all indications, the regime is in full triumphal mode.
With Joe Biden signing off on China’s “norms,” the Communist regime can do whatever it wants with the Uighurs, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and the USA is fair game. China is a big promoter of vaccine passports, as Matthew Vadum explains, cover for data-driven authoritarianism that will “wash away what remains of the rule of law and the Constitution, and annihilate the American way of life.” With no apology to the late Jean-Francois Revel, this is how democracies perish.
To paraphrase Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, this is what happens when the United States grants special privileges to a genocidal Communist dictatorship, demanding no democratic reforms or concessions in return. This is what happens when the addled Joe Biden and his handlers call the shots.
Biden Admin Gives Valuable Defense Contract to China Collaborator
Jack Beyrer • April 13, 2021 6:40 pmThe Biden administration awarded a lucrative defense contract to a Singaporean company that works with Chinese military firms.
On April 6, Singapore-based ST Engineering won a contract alongside defense contractor BAE Systems to build a prototype military ground vehicle for use in Arctic environments. One of ST Engineering's direct subsidiaries does business with the Chinese military industry, ultimately providing maritime and satellite technology to Chinese authorities. The use of a defense company that collaborates with China raises concerns about industrial espionage and could expose vulnerabilities in the Pentagon, one expert on military acquisition said.
Mark Vandroff, a former Navy officer and member of the Trump administration's National Security Council, told the Washington Free Beacon the contract could pose an "attractive" way for Beijing to gain inside knowledge on valuable national security technology.
"My big worry is from a cyber and counterintelligence perspective," Vandroff said. "I would worry not only that any collaboration gets back to China, but that [it] also becomes an attractive cyber pathway for [People's Republic of China] exploitation."
ST Engineering oversees iDirect, a technology company servicing the Pentagon while developing technology for China. iDirect is a major partner in satellite communications with PetroChina, the Beijing-backed energy company with ties to the Chinese military. Satellite systems also designed by iDirect are equipped by China for maritime law enforcement. In 2018, ST Engineering also worked with the Chinese car company BYD Auto to develop AI forklifts, and again in 2019 for autonomous buses, technologies that could have defense applications.
The company's direct cooperation with Chinese firms has raised concerns on Capitol Hill about ST Engineering's successful Pentagon contract bid. Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said the federal government is "lagging behind geopolitical reality" of China's threat to American interests. The Defense Department should be wary of getting involved with firms that also profit from their relationship with the Chinese regime.
"Since 2015, the Pentagon has officially recognized China as a serious threat to our national security. The federal government needs to quit lagging behind geopolitical reality and ignoring its own national security strategy," Banks said. "We need to start treating China like the existential threat it plainly is. The United States shouldn't be funding Chinese military companies in any way."
Pentagon spokesman John Supple told the Washington Free Beacon that ST Engineering's contract is now under review.
"We are aware of the claims, and the [Department of Defense] is reviewing the matter," Supple said.
ST Engineering did not respond to a request for comment.
ST Engineering's operations and Chinese ties have also been linked to pervasive human rights abuses. The company has a partnership with Jiangsu Huatong Power Heavy Industry Co., a construction company with an office in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. Jiangsu is primarily focused on infrastructure construction, a common task for companies involved in the Uyghur genocide in western China. In July 2020, the Trump administration sanctioned fellow construction group Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary organization responsible for serious human rights abuses in the region.
Army officials picked the firm to develop crucial military equipment as competition with China and Russia in the Arctic heats up. China hopes to Ascend to "polar great power" status by 2030. A strategy document Declassified by the Army in March highlighted China's incursion into the Arctic as a "central problem" for U.S. national security. The Department of the Army did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Huge Debts:’ Millions in Earnings Failed to Satiate Hunter Biden’s Hunger for Crack, Prostitutes, Luxury Cars
Hunter Biden owes massive credit card debt after living like a high roller with access to millions of dollars linked to business dealings overseas that proved insufficient to satisfy his ravenous appetite for drugs, prostitutes, and luxury cars, the Daily Mail reported Friday.
The Daily Mail published a bombshell report surrounding the potentially incriminating contents of a laptop purportedly owned by Hunter that was dropped off at a Delaware repair shop and eventually given to the FBI.
On Friday, the Daily Mail unveiled contents of the laptop that go well beyond the emails first reported by the New York Post in October 2020 detailing Hunter’s lucrative overseas business deals that helped him lead a drug-addled lifestyle, with prostitutes, and luxurious rides.
Ultimately, his lifestyle left him broke, unable to support his drug and prostitute habit and support his family.
The Daily Mail summarized its long bombshell report, noting:
- Hunter Biden’s wild spending left him with huge debts to credit card companies and desperate to avoid jail for unpaid taxes, DailyMail.com can reveal
- Pictures, documents, emails and texts obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter’s laptop reveal he spent thousands of dollars on strippers and prostitutes
- Biden even threatened to take $20,000 out of his daughter’s education savings account
- Pictures found on the laptop show what appears to be thousands of dollars worth of crack bagged up on a scale, and Hunter naked and in bed with women
- The numerous expenses left him strapped for cash when it came to supporting his new family
- In an April 2017 email, [Hunter’s company] Rosemont Seneca Vice President wrote to Hunter detailing how he faced total bills of $476,231.60, including $60,467 on three credit cards and $320,417.85 in unpaid federal taxes
In 2019, the FBI seized the laptop in connection to a money-laundering scheme. Last December, Hunter and his then-president-elect father admitted that the U.S. Attorney in Delaware was investigating the younger Biden over his federal taxes.
Hunter reportedly made between $50,000 and $100,000 monthly working for corruption-linked Ukrainian gas conglomerate Burisma between 2014 and 2019, helping him fill his coffers with at least $6,070,150 from 2013 to 2016, the Daily Mail found.
Nevertheless, the news outlet noted, “Leaked emails reveal how Hunter Biden was desperate to avoid jail for unpaid taxes – after blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on luxury cars, prostitutes, drugs, and designer clothing.”
According to the documents obtained by the Daily Mail, Hunter kept a 2014 Porsche, an Audi, a 2018 Ford Raptor Truck, an $80,000 boat, a Range Rover, Land Rover, BMW, and Chevrolet Truck.
He also spent thousands of dollars on strippers – including one who had his child – suspected prostitutes, and massive amounts of crack.
Hunter told an Arkansas judge he could not pay child support for the child he fathered with stripper Lunden Roberts, even as he rented a $12,000 per month home in Hollywood and was driving a Porsche Panamera at the time.
Ultimately, he settled the case with Roberts out of court after the judge ordered him to produce his financial records.
The Daily Mail noted:
The bombshell cache of 103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails, more than 2,000 photos, and dozens of videos from Hunter’s laptop and authenticated by experts retained by DailyMail.com are packed with revelations conveniently missing from his newly published memoir, Beautiful Things.
The pictures, documents, emails, and texts reveal that despite reporting more than $6 million of income from 2013 to 2016, Hunter’s bacchanalian expenses left him with huge debts to credit card companies and the tax man.
Some of the pictures show Hunter half nude, with only a bathrobe on like the late Hugh Hefner from the Playboy mansion, only instead of a cigar, Hunter is reportedly shown smoking what appears to be a crack pipe.
Other pictures found on his laptop show what appears to be thousands of dollars worth of crack on a Cheech and Chong branded scale and Hunter naked and in bed with likely prostitutes.
Like most drug addicts, Hunter sunk low, threatening to take money from his daughter’s education savings account.
The walls began to close in as his business dealings, described as shady by critics, came under the microscope of conservative media outlets such as Breitbart News. At the same time, the Democrat-allied mainstream outlets ignored Hunter’s overseas deals.
Although his money situation reportedly appeared to substantially improve in 2020, allowing him to pay the District of Columbia a $453,890 tax bill just six days after it was issued, that did not last long.
Hunter was unable to keep his high roller lifestyle and support his family on over a half a million dollar a year salary, and he had to borrow money from one of his companies to keep himself solvent, Eric Schwerin, the president of Hunter’s company Rosemont Seneca, reportedly wrote in an email in January 2017,
“As his finances descended into disarray and his assistants begged him to pay his mounting bills, the President’s son lashed out threatening to cut staff pay, take money from his daughter’s educational savings, and complained about his alimony bills,” the Daily Mail noted, adding:
In October 2018 email from Hunter’s accountant shows that by that year his tax debt had ballooned to an eye-watering $804,000, including $600,000 in personal taxes and $204,000 for one of his businesses that received money from Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
It appears Hunter is not the only Biden with a distorted version of reality.
In the few public comments Joe has made recently amid the fall to rock bottom by his son, his then-president-elect father blamed other people for his son’s downfall.
When announcing the feds were investigating Hunter for failing to pay taxes, Biden said last December he is “deeply proud of his son who has fought through difficult challenges, including personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger.”
Hunter Biden under federal investigation. Statement released short time ago: pic.twitter.com/LZhnwNJWs3
— Byron York (@ByronYork) December 9, 2020
During a softball interview earlier this month, Hunter told CBS News that the laptop “certainly” could be his, but he denied dropping it off at the repair shop.
Letting Hunter Biden Off Is A Message To Us Peasants
Source: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
The fact that the loser spawn of Grandpa Badfinger is thumbing his coke-caked nose at the justice system represents not merely the tacky machinations of a crusty pol protecting the family Fredo. It has a deeper and more cynical purpose – to show us that our overlords are unaccountable and that the law is now merely another implement in the regime’s toolkit of oppression. They are telling us that they and their scumbag progeny can do whatever they want, but that we can’t.
In the short term, this is infuriating. In the long term, it could bring down the system our garbage ruling caste inherited.
They are throwing it in our faces, thinking it’s a good plan to force us to submit. Right now, hundreds of Americans are being prosecuted for trespassing inside their own Capitol building, and eager agents of the American Stasi are salivating at the idea of charging them with “sedition” for doing exactly what hordes of leftist dirtbags did in the past. Of course, none of the leftist dirtbags were shot dead while unarmed by some cop whose name we still don’t know. That’s another message. If you are a petty criminal dying of a self-inflicted fentanyl overdose while you resist arrest, we’ll know the name of the cop unlucky enough to be the guy arresting you when you expired. But cap an unarmed female vet for climbing through a window? Shhhh. That’s a secret.
President Asterisk came out and announced that his administration was going to be cracking down on those terrible gun people even as his Snortunate Son got a pass for lying about his drug addiction on his background check. Think you would catch a break? Maybe if you were in a blue big city – weirdly (okay, not weirdly – by design) the inhabitants of Democrat petri dishes don’t get charged for this kind of gun crime.
It’s more than just helping out a relative or catering to commie voters. It’s a demonstration of power. They can make the rules and break the rules, or break the rules over their enemies’ heads.
You are their enemy. The law is not designed to stop crime or save lives but to create another way to keep you in line, frightened and defenseless.
This dual track justice system is nothing new – it’s been going on for a while. We saw it with Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, whose classified info antics would have sent any of us off for a stretch in the stony lonesome. Not her. She didn’t miss a single goblet of her screw-top Trader Joe’s chardonnay. Those of us who handled classified info understand at a gut level just how appalling this whole thing was. There’s no leeway for people like us, no bending over backwards and then around again into a knot to explain the crimes away when a peasant screws up, even by a simple oversight. But she is special. She did it on purpose, got caught, and all the best and the brightest made sure she skated.
Why?
Again, it’s not merely that she’s connected and she called in some favors. There’s a method to their mendacity. They want us to know that the law is but a weapon to be used against you if you step out of line.
Andrew Cuomo was taking liberties with lib girls (who pretended to be astonished that he acted just like every other lib potentate) when he wasn’t taking thousands of lives of old people killed in COVID hotboxes. He’ll walk. You wouldn’t.
DC teen sociopaths kill a hardworking guy while stealing his car. They got a deal. You wouldn’t.
But a patriot comes to Washington and walks through the Rotunda – lock him up forever!
Yet when some BLM/Antifa pustule tries to set fire to a federal courthouse? Case dismissed – for him, her, or whatever its nonbinary pronoun is this week.
Gee, maybe our intrepid, licensed, registered regime journalists will call out this outrageous corruption. Oh right, no they won’t. In fact, instead of being attracted to this reeking pile of corruption that was just begging for exposure, the media grown-up maggots instead went and started buzzing around Ron DeSantis.
Does anyone imagine that if Don Jr. had been a meth-mouthed pervert who got kicked out of the Navy on his first day for drugs and who had filled out a false background check for a gun that this would not have been the first question to President Trump? Did it even get brought up to *, much less in any of Huffer Biden’s interviews for his new zillion-dollar book, “My Ghostwriter Wrote This So My Loser Family Could Get Yet Another Laundered Pay-Off?”
Surely you jest. I just hope he had the class to buy the swooning reporters dinner first and to wear protection.
So, the prosecutors won’t prosecute and the reporters won’t report, though they’ll all babble endlessly about the importance of our sacred institutions even as they set them aflame. This is unsustainable. What will we citizens do?
First, they’ll vote for harder and harder core right wingers. Self-preservation will require pummelers over policy wonks. Thought Trump was a monster? Get a load of what’s coming. The time of such puff-people as Asa! And Kristi! And Nikki! is ending. We’ll demand Genghis Khan. And we’ll get him.
Then look for us to do the same when we get back in power. Hey, new rules, as well as self-preservation. But do two wrongs make a right? Probably not, but just try explaining how this stuff suddenly stopped being okay when we start doing it back at them. Good luck with that.
And look for citizens on juries to go through jury selection nodding about how they will follow the judge’s instructions and deliberate and all that good stuff and then nullify the hell out of whatever the DoJ puts in front of them. This is why they are so eager to get cases in Democrat enclaves like DC – they are terrified that normal Americans in normal America will refuse to convict.
Now, the bow-tied virgin Fredocon corps will cry about this, and for once they are partially right. A justice system in shambles is not what any of us should want, but it is inevitable when one side tries to use it as its cudgel against the other side. And the reaction of the oppressed is equally inevitable. It’s not a matter of “principle” – perhaps fighting the politicization of justice instead of flaking for transexual story time might have been a better plan – but of human nature. We see the system has no clothes, and we will not compliment its outfit. Instead, we’ll mock its shriveled genitals.
The liberal establishment has succumbed to the temptation to rely on power instead of the law impartially and fairly applied. It further imagines, since our ruling caste is historically illiterate and totally ignorant of human, much less American, nature, that it can flaunt this unfairness and to intimidate us with it. Hitler thought he could bomb the Brits and butcher the Russians into submission. But it just made them madder, and in the end he blew his miserable brains out in a dingy cave.
We will not be bullied into serfdom. If power is the currency, we normal Americans have plenty of cash. Our failed elite would be wise to not encourage a spending spree.
With a sixth Kelly Turnbull conservative action novel The Split coming out next month, catch up with People's Republic and my four other novels about what happens when America splits into red and blue countries, Indian Country, Wildfire, Collapse and Crisis.
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