Friday, June 18, 2021

THE BIDEN BOYS BRIBES SUCKERS - ALWAYS A CLASS ACT - Hunter’s Dip into the Art World Connected to ‘Weed Slut’ Lingerie Entrepreneur Zoe Kestan

 LAWYERS: A PROTECTED CRIMINAL CLASS LIKE COPS

Hunter’s Dip into the Art World Connected to ‘Weed Slut’ Lingerie Entrepreneur Zoe Kestan

hunter-biden-zoe-kestan-instagram
Hunter Biden, weed_slut_420/Instagram
7:34

Hunter Biden’s connections to the New York art scene reportedly go through lingerie entrepreneur Zoe Kestan, otherwise known as @weed_slut_420 on Instagram.

President Joe Biden’s 51-year-old scandal-plagued son is venturing into the art world, with Soho art dealer Georges Bergès, who reportedly has some ties to China, holding a private viewing for Hunter’s artwork in Los Angeles, followed by an art exhibition in New York in the fall. Hunter has reportedly been working on his art full time, and his pieces, Bergès told Artnet, will “range from $75,000 for works on paper to $500,000 for large-scale paintings.”

Hunter’s gateway into the art world appears to be connected to Zoe Kestan, “the lingerie entrepreneur who is better known by her Instagram handle @weed_slut_420,” as Artnet reported last year:

For a period in 2018, Biden could be seen stopping by art openings and parties on the Lower East Side, and attended a runway show for the hip downtown fashion brand Lou Dallas. Sources said that many of his art-world connections came through his relationship with Zoe Kestan, the lingerie entrepreneur who is better known by her Instagram handle @weed_slut_420. In addition to modeling her wares on her account, where she has nearly 75,000 followers, Kestan is also an artist whose Polaroid snapshots have appeared in group shows with Bernadette Van-Huy, Danny McDonald, and Sam Pulitzer. She has also appeared on the controversial podcast Red Scare, hosted by art critic Anna Khachiyan and actress Dasha Nekrasova, and modeled in runway shows during London Fashion Week. (Reps for Kestan and Biden didn’t get back to us.)

There’s also some concrete leftover evidence of Hunter’s brief wade into the water of downtown art studios and gallery openings. Sources say that, being circulated around the downtown gallery hub of Dimes Square like samizdat, are images of oil paintings of Hunter Biden—that is, images of paintings of all of Biden with nothing left to the imagination—made by another local artist who has asked dealers to not reveal her identity. We’ve yet to get a hold of the depictions of Hunter in the buff or a lead on that painter’s identity, but rest assured: we will keep you posted.

However, Hunter’s new venture has sparked growing concerns about the potential for pay-for-play corruption in light of the fact that the buyers will remain anonymous, and the shadowy nature of the art world is a notorious avenue for money laundering. Last year, a bipartisan report by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that “secrecy, anonymity, and a lack of regulation create an environment ripe for laundering money and evading sanctions” in the art world.

“Given the intrinsic secrecy of the art industry,  it is clear that change is needed in this multi-billion dollar industry,” the report determined.

Hunter Biden’s past money-making ventures —  specifically his international business dealings with Ukraine and China at a time when his then-vice president father was the point-person for U.S. foreign policy with those countries — furthers these concerns, according to Breitbart News senior contributor and Profiles in Corruption author Peter Schweizer.

“Hunter Biden was repeatedly hired and given deals by foreign entities that he was clearly not qualified for in the hopes of getting favors from his father,” Schweizer, president of Government Accountability Institute (GAI), told Breitbart News. “It is not a stretch to believe that foreign entities will pay for or commission his works of art at inflated prices to do the same.”

As with every artist, sales are always confidential to protect the privacy of the collector,” the Townsend Group, an agency representing Bergès, told Fox Business.

“Pricing fine art in his experiences as a Gallerist is based on the demand of the work as well and the intrinsic value of it,” the statement continued. “His feeling is that within each piece – as with every artist, sales are always confidential to protect the privacy of the collector, this is standard practice for transactions in galleries as well as auction houses.”

Adding to that is the suspicion by some that Hunter’s art will be sold at inflated prices merely because of his name.

Acevedo told the New York Post: “Anybody who buys it would be guaranteed instant profit.”

“He’s the president’s son. Everybody would want a piece of that. The provenance is impeccable,” he added, noting Hunter’s pieces would typically sell in the $25,000 to $100,000 range.

Art consultant Martin Galindo also told the Post that he expects Hunter’s work to do “well in the market because this industry is very much about, what’s a simple way to put this — it’s like clout.”

The suspicion of Hunter using his family name for power and influence spans years, as detailed by Breitbart News:

One of the most well-known examples of this centers around Hunter’s involvement on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian oligarch-owned oil and gas company, which paid him tens of thousands of dollars per month despite his lack of experience in the energy sector or Ukraine in general. At the time, Hunter’s then-vice president father was the point-person negotiating U.S. policy with Ukraine. After leaving office, Joe Biden later bragged about how he threatened to withhold U.S. assistance to Ukraine unless Ukrainian officials fired a prosecutor who had launched a corruption investigation into the company that had hired Hunter.

Hunter also came under criticism for his lucrative business dealings with state-owned entities in China, as Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer has reported in detail.

“In China, [Hunter] travels with his father in December [2013] aboard Air Force Two. While his father is meeting with Chinese officials, Hunter Biden is doing we don’t know what. But the evidence becomes clear because ten days after they return to Washington, his small boutique investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, gets a $1 billion deal,” Schweizer explained during a 2019 appearance with Sean Hannity.

“That’s $1 billion with a ‘B,’ later expanded to $1.5 billion. And that deal is with the Chinese government,” he emphasized. “It’s a deal that nobody else has in China. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, nobody.”

Hunter told Artnet that painting, for him, is about bringing forth  “the universal truth.”

“The universal truth is that everything is connected and that there’s something that goes far beyond what is our five senses and that connects us all,” he said. “The thing that really fascinates me is the connection between the macro and the micro, and how these patterns repeat themselves over and over.”

Earlier this month, Hunter came under fire after text messages revealed he used the n-word multiple times in conversations with his white attorney. However, such conversations could give a glimpse into Hunter’s supposed search for universal truth, as he asked his attorney, George Mesires, where to find “unconditional love.” Mesires mentioned God, Hunter’s late-brother Beau, and Hunter’s children, but Hunter responded sharply, calling Mesires the n-word and dismissing God as “just a fictional character from the imagination of the collective frightened” before joking about his penis.

SO, HOW MUCH WILL GO INTO THE POCKET OF THE 'BIG GUY' LAWYER JOE BIDEN???

Buyers of Hunter Biden’s artwork, which will be featured in an exhibition in New York later this year, will remain anonymous, furthering concerns of the potential for Biden family corruption, as the problem of money laundering in the art world remains an issue of concern.

Buyers of Hunter Biden’s Art Will Remain Anonymous, Sparking Pay-for-Play Concerns

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Screengrab/ABC News
4:54

Buyers of Hunter Biden’s artwork, which will be featured in an exhibition in New York later this year, will remain anonymous, furthering concerns of the potential for Biden family corruption, as the problem of money laundering in the art world remains an issue of concern.

Georges Bergès, a Soho art dealer who reportedly has some ties to China, is working with the 51-year-old Biden and is expected to hold a private viewing for Hunter in Los Angeles, followed by an exhibition in New York this fall. Biden’s art is expected to sell for $75,000 to half a million dollars, according to Artnet, and the sales will remain confidential.

“As with every artist, sales are always confidential to protect the privacy of the collector,” the Townsend Group, an agency representing Bergès, told Fox Business.

“Pricing fine art in his experiences as a Gallerist is based on the demand of the work as well and the intrinsic value of it,” the group continued. “His feeling is that within each piece – as with every artist, sales are always confidential to protect the privacy of the collector, this is standard practice for transactions in galleries as well as auction houses.”

However, some already doubt the assertion that the price points for his work will truly be based on the demand or traditional value.

Alex Acevedo, owner of the Alexander Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, told the New York Post that anybody who buys Hunter’s art “would be guaranteed instant profit” and admitted Hunter’s art will sell significantly over its actual value due to the weight of his family name alone.

“He’s the president’s son. Everybody would want a piece of that. The provenance is impeccable,” he said, suggesting the Biden family name will stand as a major factor, prompting further concerns for the potential of corruption.

Members of what Breitbart News senior contributor and Profiles in Corruption author Peter Schweizer identified as the “Biden Five” have been accused of trading on the Biden family name.

Hunter, specifically, has remained in the spotlight after years of endeavors in the world of international finance where he has been criticized for engaging in business ventures with countries at a time when his then-vice president father was negotiating U.S. foreign policy with those countries. His work on the board of the Ukrainian oligarch-owned energy company Burisma remains one of the primary examples of alleged corruption, as Breitbart News reported:

One of the most well-known examples of this centers around Hunter’s involvement on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian oligarch-owned oil and gas company, which paid him tens of thousands of dollars per month despite his lack of experience in the energy sector or Ukraine in general. At the time, Hunter’s then-vice president father was the point-person negotiating U.S. policy with Ukraine. After leaving office, Joe Biden later bragged about how he threatened to withhold U.S. assistance to Ukraine unless Ukrainian officials fired a prosecutor who had launched a corruption investigation into the company that had hired Hunter.

Hunter also came under criticism for his lucrative business dealings with state-owned entities in China, as Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer has reported in detail.

“In China, [Hunter] travels with his father in December [2013] aboard Air Force Two. While his father is meeting with Chinese officials, Hunter Biden is doing we don’t know what. But the evidence becomes clear because ten days after they return to Washington, his small boutique investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, gets a $1 billion deal,” the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) president explained during a 2019 appearance with Sean Hannity.

“Hunter Biden was repeatedly hired and given deals by foreign entities that he was clearly not qualified for in the hopes of getting favors from his father,” Schweizer told Breitbart News, expressing the belief that Hunter’s venture into the art world could serve as another suspected pay-for-play scheme for the Biden family. “It is not a stretch to believe that foreign entities will pay for or commission his works of art at inflated prices to do the same.”

Art consultant Martin Galindo also appeared to confirm the suspicion that Hunter’s name will inflate the price point, telling the Post that Hunter’s work will do “well in the market because this industry is very much about, what’s a simple way to put this — it’s like clout.”

The news follows last year’s report by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which found that “secrecy, anonymity, and a lack of regulation create an environment ripe for laundering money and evading sanctions” in the art world.

“Given the intrinsic secrecy of the art industry,  it is clear that change is needed in this multi-billion dollar industry,” the report determined.

WELL, THERE ARE DIFFERENT WAYS OF PASSING ALONG BRIBES. LET US SEE HOW MANY 'COLLECTORS' WANT TO GET IN GOOD WITH DADDY 'BIG GUY' JOE!

Corruption Concerns Mount as Hunter Biden’s Artwork to Go on Sale for Up to Half a Million Dollars Per Painting

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Hunter Biden
5:55

President Joe Biden’s scandal-plagued son

 Hunter Biden is reportedly now engaged as a

 “full-time artist” and is working with Soho art

 dealer Georges Bergès to hold an exhibition in

 New York in the coming months, with prices

 for Hunter’s art work ranging from $75,000 to

 $500,000, according to Artnet.

Amid years of scandal, the 51-year-old Hunter Biden is apparently now “laying low” in his Los Angeles home while working on his artwork. Bergès, his dealer, plans to host a “private viewing for Biden in Los Angeles this fall, followed by an exhibition in New York.” Bergès told Artnet that prices for Hunter’s work will “range from $75,000 for works on paper to $500,000 for large-scale paintings.”

“I don’t paint from emotion or feeling, which I think are both very ephemeral,” Biden said of his work. “For me, painting is much more about kind of trying to bring forth what is, I think, the universal truth.”

According to the New York Post, Bergès has some ties to China. The art dealer reportedly “regularly features works by Chinese artists and told a Chinese network that he was keen to open other art galleries in Beijing and Shanghai in 2015.”

Bergès has lavished praise on China’s role in the art world. In 2014, Bergès told the Chinese state-owned media outlet China Daily, “The questions that I always had was how’s China changing the world in terms of art and culture.”

Hunter Biden’s newfound venture does little to distract from the ongoing concerns that he could perhaps be trading on his family name, as he and other members of the Biden family have been accused of doing in the past.

Hunter’s entry into the art world follows years of his endeavors in the world of international finance where he has been criticized for engaging in business ventures with countries at a time when his then-vice president father was negotiating U.S. foreign policy with those countries. One of the most well-known examples of this centers around Hunter’s involvement on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian oligarch-owned oil and gas company, which paid him tens of thousands of dollars per month despite his lack of experience in the energy sector or Ukraine in general. At the time, Hunter’s then-vice president father was the point-person negotiating U.S. policy with Ukraine. After leaving office, Joe Biden later bragged about how he threatened to withhold U.S. assistance to Ukraine unless Ukrainian officials fired a prosecutor who had launched a corruption investigation into the company that had hired Hunter.

Hunter also came under criticism for his lucrative business dealings with state-owned entities in China, as Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer has reported in detail.

“In China, [Hunter] travels with his father in December [2013] aboard Air Force Two. While his father is meeting with Chinese officials, Hunter Biden is doing we don’t know what. But the evidence becomes clear because ten days after they return to Washington, his small boutique investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, gets a $1 billion deal,” the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) president explained during a 2019 appearance with Sean Hannity.

“That’s $1 billion with a ‘B,’ later expanded to $1.5 billion. And that deal is with the Chinese government,” he explained. “It’s a deal that nobody else has in China. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, nobody.”

Schweizer suspects Hunter’s latest venture could potentially be another form of pay-for-play for the Biden family.

“Hunter Biden was repeatedly hired and given deals by foreign entities that he was clearly not qualified for in the hopes of getting favors from his father,” Schweizer told Breitbart News. “It is not a stretch to believe that foreign entities will pay for or commission his works of art at inflated prices to do the same.”

Money laundering in the art world has been identified as an issue, as detailed by a bipartisan Senate investigation last year:

The Senate report details how a pair of Russian oligarchs with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly seized on the secrecy of the art industry to evade sanctions by making more than $18 million in high-value art purchases.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” investigators for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations told reporters on a call. The art world is considered to be the largest legal unregulated industry in the United States, according to the Senate investigation.

The Rotenberg example and many other investigation details highlight the fact that, unlike selling stock or making routine bank transfers, art sales through auction houses are not subject to anti-money laundering provisions in the Bank Secrecy Act. When art is sold, according to the report, sellers are not required to confirm the identity of the buyer nor to make sure the artwork isn’t being used to launder dirty money.

“Secrecy, anonymity, and a lack of regulation create an environment ripe for laundering money and evading sanctions,” the Senate report found.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden, explaining his art, told Artnet, “The universal truth is that everything is connected and that there’s something that goes far beyond what is our five senses and that connects us all.”

“The thing that really fascinates me is the connection between the macro and the micro, and how these patterns repeat themselves over and over,” he added, explaining that art is “not a tool that I use to be able to, in any way, cope.” Rather, Biden said it “comes from a much deeper place.”

Bergès has praised Hunter’s work, as it holds an “authenticity” that he “personally” loves.

“A lot of the issues that are thrown at Hunter is what makes him produce really great work,” the art dealer said.

Daily Mail: Laptop Reveals Hunter Biden Used N-Word Multiple Times in Text Messages

Hunter Biden walks to Marine One on the Ellipse outside the White House May 22, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
2:43

Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, used the n-word multiple times in text messages with his white attorney, according to an explosive Tuesday report.

The Daily Mail reports:

The president’s son joked in a January 2019 text to corporate attorney George Mesires about a ‘big penis’, and said to the lawyer: ‘I only love you because you’re black’ and ‘true dat n***a’.

In another text a month earlier he wrote to the Chicago lawyer saying: ‘how much money do I owe you. Becaause (sic) n***a you better not be charging me Hennessy rates.’

Mesires replied: ‘That made me snarf my coffee.’

Hunter added: ‘That’s what im saying ni…’, cutting off the racial slur mid-word, then texted a picture to Mesires.

In addition to the text messages, Hunter’s laptop is said to contain a meme depicting his father and former President Barack Obama, which included a racist slur.

The meme is a photo of Biden hugging Obama with the following caption:

‘Obama: Gonna miss you, man

‘Joe: Can I say it? Just this once?

‘Obama: *sigh* go ahead

‘Joe: You my n***a, Barack’

Hunter’s laptop, which he reportedly abandoned at a Delaware shop in April 2019, created a firestorm of controversy for his father during the 2020 election. Emails on the laptop’s hard drive are said to have shown that then-Vice President Biden held a meeting with a high-ranking official at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy giant which Hunter Biden previously served as a board member. Yet, the president has denied any involvement in his son’s business dealings, despite the clear evidentiary contradictions.

Neither Biden nor Mesires have issued a statement regarding the purported text messages.

The Daily Mail‘s report comes as Biden has made social justice a larger focus of his presidency. Last week, Biden delivered a speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, during which roughly 300 black people were killed by white people in Oklahoma.

Biden vowed to combat racism in the U.S. by enacting police reform on the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death last month, meeting with the Floyd family at the White House.

“We have to act,” the president said in a statement after meeting with the Floyd family. “We face an inflection point. The battle for the soul of America has been a constant push and pull between the American ideal that we’re all created equal and the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart. At our best, the American ideal wins out.”

Hunter Biden’s Father Says Ukraine Too Corrupt to Join NATO

US President Joe Biden speaks about the May jobs report on June 4, 2021, at the Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Convention Center. - The US economy added 559,000 jobs in May and the unemployment rate dipped to 5.8 percent, the Labor Department said on June 4, 2021, as Covid-19 vaccines helped …
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
6:30

President Joe Biden dismissed the possibility of an early entry for Ukraine into NATO on Monday, claiming the nation has to “clean up corruption” for the military alliance to trust it.

Biden himself, and his son Hunter, have been the focus of years of investigation into the younger Biden’s affiliations with Ukrainian oligarchs, particularly his hiring by the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma that leaked emails appeared to indicate was directly the result of those oligarchs seeking influence with then-Vice President Biden.

Burisma hired Hunter Biden in 2014 — an extremely tumultuous time for Ukraine as Russia invaded and colonized Crimea and aided separatists with launching a still-ongoing war in its eastern Donbass region. Anti-Russian protests resulted in the nation having three presidents that year: the incumbent Viktor Yanukovych, interim President Oleksandr Turchynov, and successor Petro Poroshenko, who became president on a vow to take a hard line against Russia. Ukrainians removed Poroshenko from power in 2019, replacing him with sitcom star Volodymyr Zelensky in response to mounting corruption allegations against Poroshenko.

Zelensky, the current incumbent, baffled the world Monday with a post on Twitter claiming that NATO had agreed to accept Ukraine as a member.

“NATO leaders confirmed that [Ukraine] will become a member of the Alliance,” the president alleged. Leaders at the ongoing NATO summit, confronted by the message, appeared confused.

The post prompted a reporter to ask Biden for a “clear ‘yes’ or ‘no'” on Ukrainian entry into NATO.

“It depends on whether they meet the criteria. The fact is they still have to clean up corruption,” Biden replied. “The fact is they have to meet other criteria to get into the Action Plan.”

“They have to convince, and it’s not easy,” he continued. “I made a speech, years ago, to the Rada saying that — that Ukraine had an opportunity to do something that’s never occurred in the history of Ukraine: actually generate a democratically elected and not corrupt — led by oligarchies in any of the regions — nation.”

Elsewhere in the same press conference, Biden went on to praise Russian leader Vladimir Putin, responsible for the colonization of Crimea and fueling the Donbass war, as “bright” and “tough” and refused to repeat his description of Putin as a “killer” made in an interview in March.

Biden is set to meet with Putin on Wednesday and rejected a request from Zelensky for an in-person meeting with him prior to engaging Putin. Zelensky has previously described himself as “confused” and “disappointed” by Biden’s Russia policy.

Zelensky nonetheless appeared to receive the message on Tuesday, starting the day by vetoing a bill that would have allowed Ukrainian lawmakers to avoid disclosing their relatives’ financial assets, allowing them to hide their wealth. Zelensky addressed the danger of oligarchs and corrupt business interests influencing the country in a speech later that day.

“The oligarchs influenced decision-making in parliament, the appointment of ministers and heads of state-owned enterprises, and entire sectors of the economy,” Zelensky said. “Parties, the media, civil servants at all levels, judges, law enforcement, and the supervisory boards of state-owned enterprises must all function without the influence of oligarchs’ capital.”

The elimination of oligarchs’ influence in Ukraine is at the heart of the plot of the comedy show that elevated Zelensky to the presidency, Servant of the People. In the sitcom, Zelensky, a middle-class schoolteacher, becomes president after a video of him ranting about how corrupt the country has become goes viral on social media and the faceless oligarchs who typically choose who the president decide not to tamper with the election results for once and allow Zelensky’s character to win. In real life, Zelensky named his political party after the TV show.

Reporters during the press conference Monday did not ask Biden about his personal experiences with Ukrainian oligarchs. Concerns began mounting about Hunter Biden’s ties to Kyiv since he became a board member of Burisma in 2014, but the Obama administration never clarified questions about the apparent conflict of interest that the hiring created. A year later, a Senate investigation warned Biden that the conflict of interest had generated corruption concerns; no evidence exists that either Biden heeded the warning.

Hunter Biden reportedly made “as much as $50,000 a month” in his Burisma gig — despite no prior experience in the energy sector, according to the New York Times. President Barack Obama had tasked Joe Biden with running Ukraine policy at the time.

The issue did not directly surface for years, but in 2018, Biden made a bizarre public comment boasting that he had pressured then-President Poroshenko to fire his top prosecutor.

“I’m desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of [Kyiv] in terms of corruption,” Biden said during remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations that year. “I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.”

“I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. … If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” Biden said, laughing. Legal and government documents surfacing during the 2020 presidential election indicated that the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, was leading an investigation into Burisma at the time. Biden’s team has insisted that Shokin was corrupt and impeding the kinds of investigations in question.

The 2020 election cycle also yielded the discovery of emails on an abandoned laptop, presumably belonging to Hunter Biden, that indicated his hiring on Burisma’s part was a clear attempt by the company to gain access to the vice president. According to the New York Post, which broke the story, one email listed expected “deliverables” to Burisma including “meetings/communications resulting in high-ranking US officials in Ukraine (US Ambassador) and in US publicly or in private communication/comment expressing their ‘positive opinion’ [of Burisma].”

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.


Is Hunter now laundering cash for House Biden through the unregulated art market? One wonders who's buying those overpriced paintings. The public certainly has a right to know.

Hunter Biden's amazing, extraordinary, sublime, unprecedented art talent has his paintings selling for $500,000 a pop

When news came out about crackhead Hunter Biden suddenly taking up yet another career as a full-time "artist," all I could think of at the time was that this was a cleverly disguised means of taking bribes.  Sell a painting at an inflated price, pocket the cash from the special interest, then return the political favor through the Big Guy.  No one would be able to prove a thing.

Now that some of the prices of Biden's pieces are coming out, let's just say the suspicion grows.

According to Breitbart News:

President Joe Biden's scandal-plagued son Hunter Biden is reportedly now engaged as a "full-time artist" and is working with Soho art dealer Georges Bergès to hold an exhibition in New York in the coming months, with prices for Hunter's artwork ranging from $75,000 to $500,000, according to Artnet.

Amid years of scandal, the 51-year-old Hunter Biden is apparently now "laying low" in his Los Angeles home while working on his artwork. Bergès, his dealer, plans to host a "private viewing for Biden in Los Angeles this fall, followed by an exhibition in New York." Bergès told Artnet that prices for Hunter's work will "range from $75,000 for works on paper to $500,000 for large-scale paintings."

Seriously, $500,000 for a Hunter Biden painting?  That he does with a blowpipe?  Something he taught himself?  Something he's been working at for around one or two years, following his various careers in the military, finance, writing, and serving as old dad's bagboy on his travels?  Following his wasted life of drugs, hookers, strippers, cocaine, and sleazy Hollywood hotel parties and flophouses, as described in his $2-million-advance memoirs, which brought in around $10,000 in sales? 

How many other artists have that kind of success straight out the gate after a crackhead life with prices like those?

Beginning artists, without Biden's political connections, in fact, sell artwork for maybe $1,000 a pop, $2,000 tops, according to ArtBusiness, a leading website about the industry.

In a piece titled "How any artist can price their art for sale," the way it's done is like this:

For those of you who have little or no sales experience, who haven't sold much art, a good starting point for you is to price your work based on time, labor, and cost of materials. Pay yourself a reasonable hourly wage, add the cost of materials and make that your asking price. For example, if materials cost $50, you take 20 hours to make the art, and you pay yourself $20 an hour to make it, then you price the art at $450 ($20 X 20 hours + $50 cost of materials). Don't forget the comparables, though. If you use this formula and your art turns out to be more expensive than what other artists in your area charge for similar art, you may have to rethink your pricing, pay yourself a little less per hour perhaps.

This is how normal people do it.  There's more about that:

To begin with, be objective about your art and your experience. In order for your prices to make sense, you have to fairly, honestly and objectively evaluate how your art measures up to other art that's out there. In order to make valid comparisons, you need a good ballpark idea how the quality of your art and the extent of your accomplishments stack up against those of other artists, particularly the ones who you'll be comparing yourself to. In other words, don't exaggerate your stature. If you've been making art for three years, for example, don't compare yourself to artists who've been making it for twenty. Being honest like this is not necessarily easy and it's not necessarily pleasant, but it's essential if you want to make it as an artist.

Base your pricing on facts, not feelings. Don't confuse your own personal opinion of your art, or what you think the art world should be like, or how you think it should respond to your art, with how things actually are. If you find yourself saying stuff like "People don't understand my work" or "People don't appreciate me" or "I'm just as good as Vincent Picasso even though he's famous and I'm not" or "Sooner or later I'll find the perfect dealer or collector or whatever and live happily ever after," you may be making some errors in judgment. If you're not quite sure where you stand, invite a few people to look at your art and tell you what they think —  preferably professionals who know something about art — not your best friends or biggest fans, but ones who'll be honest and direct. Encourage them to be truthful because that's what you need. And don't get defensive; doing this will help you. When you're objective about your art, you maximize your chances of succeeding as an artist.

Does Hunter's art merit that $500,000 selling price over what his competitors are selling, or is something funny going on?

Even among his political competitors, such as former President George W. Bush, there's no evidence that he's money-laundering.  I couldn't find a single price for one of his mediocre yet obviously worked-on paintings.  Bush himself seems to monetize his hobby by selling spinoffs for $29.95 a pop, in picture books and prints, an obviously more transparent and less lucrative game.

Breitbart points out that the Bergès gallery has some pretty rich Chinese clients, citing the New York Post:

According to the New York Post, Bergès has some ties to China. The art dealer reportedly "regularly features works by Chinese artists and told a Chinese network that he was keen to open other art galleries in Beijing and Shanghai in 2015."

Bergès has lavished praise on China's role in the art world. In 2014, Bergès told the Chinese state-owned media outlet China Daily, "The questions that I always had was how's China changing the world in terms of art and culture."

What's more, the art industry is probably the most unregulated industry in America (which, as an aside, is likely why paintings and sculpture are among New York City's top exports):

Money laundering in the art world has been identified as an issue, as detailed by a bipartisan Senate investigation last year:

The Senate report details how a pair of Russian oligarchs with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly seized on the secrecy of the art industry to evade sanctions by making more than $18 million in high-value art purchases.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," investigators for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations told reporters on a call. The art world is considered to be the largest legal unregulated industry in the United States, according to the Senate investigation. ...

The Rotenberg example and many other investigation details highlight the fact that, unlike selling stock or making routine bank transfers, art sales through auction houses are not subject to anti-money laundering provisions in the Bank Secrecy Act. When art is sold, according to the report, sellers are not required to confirm the identity of the buyer nor to make sure the artwork isn't being used to launder dirty money.

Peter Schweizer, a veteran corruption-hunter, who has written numerous books on Washington's power elites, smells a rat:

"Hunter Biden was repeatedly hired and given deals by foreign entities that he was clearly not qualified for in the hopes of getting favors from his father," Schweizer told Breitbart News. "It is not a stretch to believe that foreign entities will pay for or commission his works of art at inflated prices to do the same."

Everyone else should, too.  How could someone with that little talent be raking in $500,000 for his art pieces at his first gallery show, while everyone else with real art training gets just pennies?  With a guy who's got China buyers?  For those who know real working artists, the Hunter bonanza sticks out. 

And a lot of the art-world praise has been faint, according to the New York Post:

Art consultant Martin Galindo told The Post that while he's "not a fan" of the work by Hunter that he's seen, "I'm very positive that he's gonna do well in the market because this industry is very much about, what's a simple way to put this — it's like clout."

Referring to a psychedelic blue and pinkish ink work by Hunter that resembles bacteria under a microscope, Galindo said, "Oh, my God, that looks like COVID.

"Honestly, I mean, from an aesthetic perspective, I don't like it. But I'm sure he's gonna do really well," the art consultant said.

Meanwhile, a 67-year-old art collector on the Upper East Side called Hunter's work "nice."

"They're different,'' she said of some of his pieces.

Still, the woman, who only gave her first name, Jill, said, "I think a lot of people can do that.

Where's Joe Biden to rein his inson in this obvious racket? It's reasonable to suspect that Joe's doing the political favors, laundered through art sales, on Hunter's behalf, given old Joe's past actions on behalf of son Hunter. These include Biden's call to fire a Ukraine prosecutor who was investigating Hunter's cash cow, Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where the sudden "energy expert" somehow found himself with a board seat.

Is Hunter now laundering cash for House Biden through the unregulated art market? One wonders who's buying those overpriced paintings. The public certainly has a right to know.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of cropped images by Gage Skidmore, via FlickrCC BY-SA 2.0Acaben, via Wikimedia CommonsCC BY-SA 2.0PxFuel public domain, and SKopp via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

WELL, THERE ARE DIFFERENT WAYS OF PASSING ALONG BRIBES. LET US SEE HOW MANY 'COLLECTORS' WANT TO GET IN GOOD WITH DADDY 'BIG GUY' JOE!

Corruption Concerns Mount as Hunter Biden’s Artwork to Go on Sale for Up to Half a Million Dollars Per Painting

hunter-biden-painting
Hunter Biden
5:55

President Joe Biden’s scandal-plagued son

 Hunter Biden is reportedly now engaged as a

 “full-time artist” and is working with Soho art

 dealer Georges Bergès to hold an exhibition in

 New York in the coming months, with prices

 for Hunter’s art work ranging from $75,000 to

 $500,000, according to Artnet.

Amid years of scandal, the 51-year-old Hunter Biden is apparently now “laying low” in his Los Angeles home while working on his artwork. Bergès, his dealer, plans to host a “private viewing for Biden in Los Angeles this fall, followed by an exhibition in New York.” Bergès told Artnet that prices for Hunter’s work will “range from $75,000 for works on paper to $500,000 for large-scale paintings.”

“I don’t paint from emotion or feeling, which I think are both very ephemeral,” Biden said of his work. “For me, painting is much more about kind of trying to bring forth what is, I think, the universal truth.”

According to the New York Post, Bergès has some ties to China. The art dealer reportedly “regularly features works by Chinese artists and told a Chinese network that he was keen to open other art galleries in Beijing and Shanghai in 2015.”

Bergès has lavished praise on China’s role in the art world. In 2014, Bergès told the Chinese state-owned media outlet China Daily, “The questions that I always had was how’s China changing the world in terms of art and culture.”

Hunter Biden’s newfound venture does little to distract from the ongoing concerns that he could perhaps be trading on his family name, as he and other members of the Biden family have been accused of doing in the past.

Hunter’s entry into the art world follows years of his endeavors in the world of international finance where he has been criticized for engaging in business ventures with countries at a time when his then-vice president father was negotiating U.S. foreign policy with those countries. One of the most well-known examples of this centers around Hunter’s involvement on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian oligarch-owned oil and gas company, which paid him tens of thousands of dollars per month despite his lack of experience in the energy sector or Ukraine in general. At the time, Hunter’s then-vice president father was the point-person negotiating U.S. policy with Ukraine. After leaving office, Joe Biden later bragged about how he threatened to withhold U.S. assistance to Ukraine unless Ukrainian officials fired a prosecutor who had launched a corruption investigation into the company that had hired Hunter.

Hunter also came under criticism for his lucrative business dealings with state-owned entities in China, as Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer has reported in detail.

“In China, [Hunter] travels with his father in December [2013] aboard Air Force Two. While his father is meeting with Chinese officials, Hunter Biden is doing we don’t know what. But the evidence becomes clear because ten days after they return to Washington, his small boutique investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, gets a $1 billion deal,” the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) president explained during a 2019 appearance with Sean Hannity.

“That’s $1 billion with a ‘B,’ later expanded to $1.5 billion. And that deal is with the Chinese government,” he explained. “It’s a deal that nobody else has in China. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, nobody.”

Schweizer suspects Hunter’s latest venture could potentially be another form of pay-for-play for the Biden family.

“Hunter Biden was repeatedly hired and given deals by foreign entities that he was clearly not qualified for in the hopes of getting favors from his father,” Schweizer told Breitbart News. “It is not a stretch to believe that foreign entities will pay for or commission his works of art at inflated prices to do the same.”

Money laundering in the art world has been identified as an issue, as detailed by a bipartisan Senate investigation last year:

The Senate report details how a pair of Russian oligarchs with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly seized on the secrecy of the art industry to evade sanctions by making more than $18 million in high-value art purchases.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” investigators for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations told reporters on a call. The art world is considered to be the largest legal unregulated industry in the United States, according to the Senate investigation.

The Rotenberg example and many other investigation details highlight the fact that, unlike selling stock or making routine bank transfers, art sales through auction houses are not subject to anti-money laundering provisions in the Bank Secrecy Act. When art is sold, according to the report, sellers are not required to confirm the identity of the buyer nor to make sure the artwork isn’t being used to launder dirty money.

“Secrecy, anonymity, and a lack of regulation create an environment ripe for laundering money and evading sanctions,” the Senate report found.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden, explaining his art, told Artnet, “The universal truth is that everything is connected and that there’s something that goes far beyond what is our five senses and that connects us all.”

“The thing that really fascinates me is the connection between the macro and the micro, and how these patterns repeat themselves over and over,” he added, explaining that art is “not a tool that I use to be able to, in any way, cope.” Rather, Biden said it “comes from a much deeper place.”

Bergès has praised Hunter’s work, as it holds an “authenticity” that he “personally” loves.

“A lot of the issues that are thrown at Hunter is what makes him produce really great work,” the art dealer said.

Daily Mail: Laptop Reveals Hunter Biden Used N-Word Multiple Times in Text Messages

Hunter Biden walks to Marine One on the Ellipse outside the White House May 22, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
2:43

Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, used the n-word multiple times in text messages with his white attorney, according to an explosive Tuesday report.

The Daily Mail reports:

The president’s son joked in a January 2019 text to corporate attorney George Mesires about a ‘big penis’, and said to the lawyer: ‘I only love you because you’re black’ and ‘true dat n***a’.

In another text a month earlier he wrote to the Chicago lawyer saying: ‘how much money do I owe you. Becaause (sic) n***a you better not be charging me Hennessy rates.’

Mesires replied: ‘That made me snarf my coffee.’

Hunter added: ‘That’s what im saying ni…’, cutting off the racial slur mid-word, then texted a picture to Mesires.

In addition to the text messages, Hunter’s laptop is said to contain a meme depicting his father and former President Barack Obama, which included a racist slur.

The meme is a photo of Biden hugging Obama with the following caption:

‘Obama: Gonna miss you, man

‘Joe: Can I say it? Just this once?

‘Obama: *sigh* go ahead

‘Joe: You my n***a, Barack’

Hunter’s laptop, which he reportedly abandoned at a Delaware shop in April 2019, created a firestorm of controversy for his father during the 2020 election. Emails on the laptop’s hard drive are said to have shown that then-Vice President Biden held a meeting with a high-ranking official at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy giant which Hunter Biden previously served as a board member. Yet, the president has denied any involvement in his son’s business dealings, despite the clear evidentiary contradictions.

Neither Biden nor Mesires have issued a statement regarding the purported text messages.

The Daily Mail‘s report comes as Biden has made social justice a larger focus of his presidency. Last week, Biden delivered a speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, during which roughly 300 black people were killed by white people in Oklahoma.

Biden vowed to combat racism in the U.S. by enacting police reform on the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death last month, meeting with the Floyd family at the White House.

“We have to act,” the president said in a statement after meeting with the Floyd family. “We face an inflection point. The battle for the soul of America has been a constant push and pull between the American ideal that we’re all created equal and the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart. At our best, the American ideal wins out.”


 

Report: Emails Show Ex-FBI Chief Gave $100,000 to Joe Biden’s Grandkid Trust, Seeking ‘Future Work’

WENDELL HUSEBØ

Former FBI director Louis Freeh reportedly gave $100,000 to a trust for President Joe Biden’s grandchildren, seeking “some very good and profitable matters” with Biden, according to emails obtained by the New York Post.

The emails reportedly emanate from Hunter Biden’s water-damaged laptop and apparently show the gifts were made in April 2016, before Hunter Biden received an email from Freeh that he “would be delighted to do future work with you.”

The alleged emails show Freeh wrote on July 8, 2016, “I also spoke to Dad a few weeks ago and would like to explore with him some future work options. I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun, and rewarding.”

The emails also show Freeh wrote Hunter on March 12, 2017, saying he saw Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, walking back from church, noting, “I would still like to persuade him to associate with me and FSS—as we have some very good and profitable matters which he could enhance with minimal time.”

The New York Post reports the “initials FSS are an apparent reference to the law firm of Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan, where Freeh, a former federal judge, was a partner at the time.”

One month later, more purported emails show Freeh wrote Hunter again. “As you know, our family foundation made a $100K contribution to Hallie’s children’s trust last year,” said Freeh in reference to “the gift he’d made to the trust for the children of Hunter’s late brother, Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, and Beau’s wife, Hallie, with whom Hunter later had an affair.”

The same email shows that Freeh said he made an accounting error via an improper “foundation gift” that would be remedied by “a new $100k gift” upon being reimbursed by the foundation the $100,000.

Hunter Biden reportedly responded the same day, “Thanks so much and of course no burden at all. Speak to you soon.”

The FBI directory provides Freeh’s background:

Director Freeh served as an FBI special agent from 1975 to 1981 in the New York City Field Office and at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 1981, he joined the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant United States Attorney. Subsequently, he held positions there as chief of the Organized Crime Unit, Deputy United States Attorney, and Associate United States Attorney.

During this time, Director Freeh was the lead prosecutor in the “Pizza Connection” case, the largest and most complex investigation ever undertaken at the time by the United States government.

Former FBI Director Freeh gave $100k to a trust for VP Biden’s grandkids in 2016 while exploring ‘future work options’

By Thomas Lifson

Take it from the New York Times and Washington Post: nothing to see here, move along. Definitely not a bribe.

Emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop reveal that while Joe Biden was vice president, a trust for his grandchildren – the children of his late son Beau Biden – received a hundred thousand dollars from a foundation controlled by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who was a lawyer for 3 corrupt foreign businessmen, later convicted and imprisoned. In the emails it is revealed that Freeh actually met with the sitting VP in 2016 "to explore with him some future work options," in addition to courting his son Hunter for collaboration.

 

Louis Freeh in 2020

photo credit: Ott Heinapuu (cropped) public domain

Both the New York Post and the UK Daily Mail have published excerpts from the letters, though as of this writing, neither the Washington Post nor New York Times appear to have found the gift and emails worth mentioning.

The UKDM writes:

The 71-year-old, who served as FBI director under Bill Clinton and George Bush, ran a consultancy firm with highly controversial clients including a now-jailed Malaysian prime minister who stole billions of dollars from his country, a Romanian real estate tycoon convicted of bribery, and a French-Israeli diamond magnate later convicted of bribery and a $145 million property graft.

Freeh, a former judge, emailed Joe's son Hunter Biden in 2016, revealing he had spoken with the Vice President and proposed that they work together on private ventures once Biden left office.

In July that year, in an email marked 'confidential and privileged', Freeh wrote to Hunter that he 'would be delighted to do future work with you.'

'I also spoke to Dad a few weeks ago and would like to explore with him some future work options,' Freeh said. 'I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun and rewarding.'

Freeh brought up the idea again a month later – and mentioned that he was working for the then-Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who was in the midst of a scandal over one of the world's biggest financial frauds, and was later sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2020.

'I would like to talk with you and Dad about working together next year,' Freeh wrote to Hunter.

One letter seems to indicate that’s the gift was to be refunded and re-donated so as to be able to qualify for tax-deductible status – meaning taxpayers subsidize the gift that weas made in the context of seeking business arrangements, as the NYP summarizes:

“As you know, our family foundation made a $100K contribution to Hallie’s children’s trust last year,” Freeh wrote on April 24, 2017.

But Freeh said that his accountants “now advise that since the grant did not go to a 501(c) organization, it was not a proper foundation gift” and that he planned to fix the situation by making “a new $100k gift” and having the trust “reimburse the foundation by paying it $100k.”

 

(source)

 Clarice Feldman advises me that she can find nothing in the federal government’s policies regarding gifts to its employees that would require disclosure of a gift to grandchildren. Public Citizen’s review of rules for gifts to the president and vice president indicates in point ten:

Gifts to the President and Vice President. Both offices may accept any gift on his own behalf or on behalf of any family member, provided that such acceptance does not violate conflict of interest or anti-bribery laws, or the Constitution of the United States.

Was there any conflict of interest or bribery? I would guess that a quid pro quo would have to be proven to make a charge of bribery stick. AS for conflict of interest, again, I can’t see any specifics that would be involved.

What about gift taxes? Anything over $14,000 a year is subject to federal gift taxes. But did this gift qualify for tax exempt status after it was re-gifted? If not, the gift could have been structured to pay out $14,000 per year and avoid those taxes.   

It appears that the relationship that was cemented with this six figure gift flourished, at least to the extent that Freeh joined the board of directors of the Beau Biden Foundation.

The entire situation reminds me of the old saying about DC that the problem about what’s going on is not so much what’s illegal, as what is perfectly legal.

EXCLUSIVE: Hunter Biden was hired by a Romanian real estate tycoon to overturn his bribery conviction through a massive propaganda campaign with help from VP Joe's government connections and former FBI director Louis Freeh


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9646127/Hunter-Biden-hired-Romanian-tycoon-help-overturn-bribery-conviction.html

 

· Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu was convicted in his home country in 2016 of bribery

· He bribed a university official to buy a 550-acre plot of government-owned land for a drastically reduced price

· Popoviciu hired Hunter Biden that year as part of an influence campaign to persuade anti-corruption prosecutors to cut a deal or drop the case

· DailyMail.com can now reveal the extensive propaganda and persuasion campaign planned for the Romanian criminal

· Hunter brought in political heavyweight Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI, to use his US law enforcement contacts for Popoviciu's advantage 

· Hunter's involvement included meeting with U.S. officials and plotting a media blitz in favor of the foreign tycoon, all while his father was Vice President 

· Despite the planned influence and media campaign, Hunter and his colleagues' attempts failed and Popoviciu was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2016

By JOSH BOSWELL FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 12:08 EDT, 7 June 2021 | UPDATED: 14:01 EDT, 7 June 2021

· 

Hunter Biden and a former FBI director were hired by a Romanian tycoon later convicted of bribery - and represented him in meetings with top U.S. officials - emails from Hunter's laptop show.

Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu was convicted in his home country in 2016 of bribing a university official to buy a 550-acre plot of government-owned land for a drastically reduced price.

Popoviciu hired Hunter earlier that year as part of an influence campaign to persuade anti-corruption prosecutors to cut a deal or drop the case.

The hiring was revealed in 2019, but DailyMail.com can now reveal the extensive propaganda and persuasion campaign planned by Hunter for the Romanian criminal, all while Hunter's father was Vice President.

Emails on Hunter's abandoned laptop reveal how Joe Biden's son and his colleagues leveraged their US government connections and plotted a propaganda campaign for the grafting Romanian tycoon.

The arrangement raises more questions about Hunter's dodgy business deals that threatened to compromised his father  - the vice president. 

 

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Hunter Biden was hired by a Romanian tycoon later convicted of bribery - and represented him in meetings with top U.S. officials – emails from Hunter's laptop show

 

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Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu was convicted in his home country in 2016 of bribing a university official to buy a 550-acre plot of government-owned land for a drastically reduced price

 

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Emails show Hunter brought in political heavyweight and family friend Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI, to use his U.S. law enforcement contacts for Popoviciu's advantage, and was offered a referral fee as a result

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), anyone advocating for foreign entities to US government officials, or acting as a publicist for a foreign entity in the US, must add themselves to a Department of Justice public register.

 

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· 

Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI and close family friend of the Bidens 

However, an exception applies for attorneys representing a client in a foreign court case, who are not required to register under FARA.

Emails show Hunter's colleagues, partners in law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, Christopher Boies and Michael Gottlieb, seeking to set up meetings with the US Ambassador to Romania, after discussing among themselves whether he would intervene in Popoviciu's case.

Hunter brought in political heavyweight and family friend Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI, to use his US law enforcement contacts for Popoviciu's advantage, and was offered a referral fee as a result.

Hunter and his colleagues also discussed a media campaign, including to major U.S. publication the Wall Street Journal, to support their client who was later found guilty of bribery.

None of them were required to register for this work under FARA, due to various exemptions including those for lawyers of foreign defendants.

Popoviciu was first mentioned in Hunter's emails in September 2015. At the time Hunter worked at law firm Boies Schiller Flexner. 

Firm partner Chris Boies wrote to Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer with the subject line 'Popoviciu', and the message: 'Let's discuss when convenient… One of my partners is best friends with the newly appointed Ambassador to Romania.'

The property tycoon didn't appear again in Hunter's inbox until May 2016, when he was on the brink of a bribery conviction in a Romanian court.

Hunter and his colleagues scrambled into action, with then-Boies Schiller attorney Michael Gottlieb even seeking the help of then-US Ambassador to Romania Hans Klemm in a last-ditch effort to stop the corruption conviction.

'I have reached out to Klemm and asked him to help us broker the meeting [with Romanian anti-corruption prosecutors],' Gottlieb wrote to Hunter on May 17, 2016.

'We should put together a persuasive deck with all the procedural and substantive defects in the indictment / case against Gabs, and we should also probably put together the start of what would be a press strategy. And we'll want to line up the big names to bring over.'

A legal source involved in the discussions told DailyMail.com that they never went through with the planned action. 

'All of the ideas discussed in this email, including the preparation of a deck and press plan, were never implemented or executed,'  the source, who was a member of Popoviciu's legal team, said.

'All of this was being discussed as part of a potential strategy, which depended entirely on scheduling a meeting with the Romanian Government on the case. But that meeting was never scheduled, and never happened, because the Romanian Government declined.'

 

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Hunter and his colleagues scrambled into action, with then-Boies Schiller attorney Michael Gottlieb even seeking the help of then-US Ambassador to Romania Hans Klemm in a last-ditch effort to stop the corruption conviction. 'I have reached out to Klemm and asked him to help us broker the meeting [with Romanian anti-corruption prosecutors],' Gottlieb wrote to Hunter on May 17, 2016

 

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Hunter and his colleagues also discussed a media campaign, including to major US publication the Wall Street Journal, to support their client, who was later convicted of bribery

 

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· 

The following week Gottlieb wrote an email to Hunter saying that he had spoken to the US ambassador – but was reluctant to describe his conversation in an email. 'Hans called me to discuss a development that is best relayed over phone. Can we connect either tonight or first thing tomorrow? Bottom line is that we should proceed with requesting the meeting,' he wrote

Gottlieb complained to his colleagues about a Politico article praising Romanian prosecutors for cracking down on corruption.

'This kind of article is likely to make our efforts with the USEMB [the US embassy] an uphill battle, and why I expect HK [Klemm] has had little interest in taking any kind of public position,' Gottlieb wrote.

Hunter weighed in, suggesting they enlist the help of Biden family friend and former FBI director Louis Freeh.

'Agreed Michael. Is now the time to begin to assemble a more high profile team that can speak to the injustice here,' Hunter wrote. 'Who do we have at the firm that can speak with authority about anti-corruption. Mike I was going to reach out to Judge Freeh and if you can think of others of that stature I think now is the time to read them into the situation and see if they are willing to help. Ambassador Gittenstein mentioned names like former US Atty Patrick Fitzgerald.'

The following week Gottlieb wrote an email to Hunter saying that he had spoken to the US ambassador – but was reluctant to describe his conversation in an email.

'Hans called me to discuss a development that is best relayed over phone. Can we connect either tonight or first thing tomorrow? Bottom line is that we should proceed with requesting the meeting,' he wrote.

In a March 24, 2016 email titled 'Re Meet with H. Klemm', Hunter wrote to Gottlieb: 'Where are we meeting?'  

A source involved in the meeting told DailyMail.com that Hunter did join Gottlieb and the U.S. ambassador in at least one meeting.

The source on Popoviciu's legal team told DailyMail.com that 'at no point did we ever ask the U.S. Ambassador (or anyone else at the Embassy) to make any statement about the case, or to intervene in any way.'

The lawyer said the U.S. team explained to Popoviciu's foreign representatives 'the reality that the U.S. Embassy, and U.S. Ambassador, would not intervene with the Romanian Government regarding a pending anti-corruption prosecution.'

'The legal team was always attentive to limiting any ''ask'' to the U.S. Embassy to be the making of an introduction to the relevant Romanian Government officials, or the provision of advice about Romanian law or protocol,' the lawyer said. 

Boies Schiller Flexner declined to comment. Gottlieb, who has since left the firm, also declined to comment.

The overtures to American diplomats ultimately failed to prevent Popoviciu's conviction. But on June 18 Hunter emailed Freeh for help, saying he had become 'very close to the client personally' and claiming the tycoon was 'being very badly treated by a suspect Romanian justice system.'

Days later the ex-FBI director had signed a retainer with Popoviciu and described in an email a plan to 'intervene with the special Romanian anti-corruption prosecutor' and even launch a propaganda campaign in the US.

'They were talking about us doing a report and then 'going to the WSJ.' I said this would most likely just inflame the prosecutor and make things worse for the client,' Freeh wrote.

'We suggested doing a 'report' (perhaps being retained by a business partner or investor (client owns a $.5B real estate development in Bucharest), and then using that report to establish a dialogue with the prosecutor-resulting in some possible deal or remediated outcome.'

 

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Emails show Hunter's fellow partners in law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, Christopher Boies (right) and Michael Gottlieb (left), seeking to set up meetings with the U.S. Ambassador to Romania, after discussing among themselves whether he would intervene in Popoviciu's case

Freeh did not respond to requests for comment, and it is unclear whether anyone on his team spoke to the Wall Street Journal about the case. No favorable articles about Popoviciu appeared in the paper during that time.

But the former FBI director did quickly bring his extensive law enforcement contacts to bear to help the tycoon.

Flaunting his international connections, he wrote to Hunter on June 21: 'I will see my good friend, Ron Noble [the former secretary general of international police organization Interpol], in NY on Thursday and most likely he knows this DNA [Romanian anti-corruption office] chief prosecutor, Laura Codruta Kobesi, very well.

'Let me talk to him and see what the possibilities may be to meet with her and to initiate a dialogue which would remediate the situation. I want to make sure I can add some value to this equation before proceeding.'

Freeh then began to approach US government officials about the case.

He emailed Hunter on July 8 that he had spoken with the head of the FBI's criminal division about the case – and offered to pay Hunter a referral fee for involving him.

'I wanted to thank you again for referring Gabriel to us and we have finalized an attorney letter of engagement with him,' Freeh wrote to the then-Vice President's son on July 8, 2016, two weeks after Popoviciu was sentenced to nine years in prison. 'I will meet him in Paris Sunday and then we'll deploy to Bucharest and get to work.

'FYI, I have had conversations with the head of the FBI's Criminal Division and there is a sincere Bureau interest in meeting and debriefing Gabriel on other matters he may be willing to discuss. FBIHQ will relay its interest to the Legat [legal attaché] in Bucharest, with whom we'll meet next week.

'There is the 'timing' issue about when to make contact with DNA and SRI [Romanian intelligence service], which we'll strategize about with Gabriel next week. We have fortunately been able to enlist for our team a former FBI Legat in Bucharest--she's Romanian-American--who is a fluent speaker with excellent SRI contacts. We may also try to see the Ambassador.'

In the email, Freeh also offered to give a referral payment to Hunter for getting him the job with Popoviciu.

'I would also like to make a small payment to you for this referral-and for your continuing work on this matter,' Freeh wrote. 'This is a standard practice. It's strictly your call as I don't know your relationship with the client. We would just need your bank information in order to make a remittance.'

Despite the extensive planned influence and media campaign, Hunter and his colleagues' attempts failed. On June 23, 2016 Popoviciu was sentenced to nine years in prison.

But when police showed up to his Romanian home, they reportedly found the real estate mogul had fled. He was later arrested in London in August 2017.

 

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Flaunting his international connections two days before the conviction, Freeh wrote to Hunter on June 21: 'I will see my good friend, Ron Noble [the former secretary general of international police organization Interpol], in NY on Thursday and most likely he knows this DNA [Romanian anti-corruption office] chief prosecutor, Laura Codruta Kobesi, very well'

 

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Freeh signed a retainer with Popoviciu and described in an email a plan to 'intervene with the special Romanian anti-corruption prosecutor' and even launch a propaganda campaign in the US

 

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Despite the planned influence and media campaign, Hunter and his colleagues' attempts failed and Popoviciu was sentenced to nine years prison on June 23, 2016

In a press release following the sentencing, Freeh claimed the verdict was 'not supported by either the facts or the law' and that there were 'numerous factual and legal deficiencies in the case against Mr. Popoviciu.'

Freeh did not respond to requests for comment. 

In a bizarre twist, the former FBI director then enlisted the help of Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani – who had criticized Hunter for his dealings with allegedly corrupt Eastern Europeans.

After his commission Giuliani wrote a letter to Romanian president Klaus Iohannis criticizing the anticorruption prosecutions and calling for an amnesty for recent convicts – including Popoviciu.

Federal agents raided Giuliani's New York City home and office in April, seizing his electronics, as part of their investigation into whether the former mayor broke FARA rules by lobbying the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs.

The attorney and former New York mayor denies wrongdoing and claimed to Fox News this week that 'they are trying to frame me'.

The Giuliani investigation grew out of a federal investigation of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who worked on gathering information about the Bidens during the election.

The two Soviet-born men were charged with federal campaign finance violations.

The two, who pleaded not guilty, were arrested at an airport outside Washington carrying one-way tickets to Europe. That investigation is on-going and faced some delays due to the COVID pandemic.

Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello blamed the investigation on 'Trump derangement syndrome' and claimed that even though his client had copies of Hunter's laptop hard drive in his apartment, agents ignored them during their search.

'Keep in mind that the agents could not read the physical hard drives without plugging them in, but they took Mr. Giuliani's word that the hard drives were copies of Hunter Biden's hard drive and did not contain anything pertaining to Mr. Giuliani,' Costello said in a statement.

Now Klein, who was donating to the abuser, will head up Biden’s program to protect women. Except of course those women who might decide to come forward and accuse her boss. 

                                                          DANIEL GREENFIELD


Joe Biden, the very definition of an empty suit

 By Patricia McCarthy

Joe Biden has always been an empty suit, for all of his 39 years in Congress, then eight as vice president.

He demeaned himself at the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 where he revealed his inner cruel nature.  How he was ever elected again after that does not speak well for his constituents.   He is a lifelong prevaricator, plagiarist and groper of female children.  He has apparently sexually assaulted an adult woman as well.  And we’ve all heard the stories of how he liked to swim nude in the presence of female secret security agents when he was VP.  In short, the guy is a jerk, a poseur.  He is also, and has always been a racist of the worst kind, the type who believes it is justified.  

Throughout his years in Congress, he has seen to it that both his primary and extended family members have become rich by less than above-board means.  His son Hunter is a case in point.  The list of events showing Hunter’s unethical path to wealth is legion.  If a son of Trump’s had been as corrupt as Hunter, we would never hear the end of it. And as Robert Gates has commented, “Joe Biden has been wrong on every foreign policy issue for forty years.”  

And yet, with all this baggage, this is the man the Democratic Party has chosen as their presidential candidate to defeat President Trump!  They’ve chosen very poorly as time will most certainly reveal. 

This campaign season, for all the hysterical vitriol displayed by the left, is nothing if not amusing as well.  Reading and watching the panicked leftists who fear a Biden-Trump debate so much they are advising they be cancelled is entertaining for they seem to think we don’t see through their oh-so-disingenuous arguments.  They know as well as those on the right do that Biden is failing fast.  That his rapacious wife has not called a halt to his campaign is proof that she does not love the man;  she sees him as the avenue to her own exalted place in the power structure of D.C. She is a sort of comic book Lady Macbeth. 

As the days pass and we see the short glimpses of Biden in his lovely patioed basement, we see a man lost in the fog of dementia, who loses his train of thought in the middle of sentences.  He often has no idea where he is or to whom he is speaking.  He is quick to anger if asked a question he does not like or cannot answer.  He has so far acquitted himself as a man perhaps the least qualified, tempermentally and intellectually, to be president.   He has embraced Bernie Sanders’ socialist platform as his own, balked at condemning the BLM and Antifa violence that has razed numerous democrat-run cities throughout the nation.  He is wobbly on defunding the police which means he is afraid to speak out against the demands of the rioters.  He is a coward.  

He has even announced he will not attend the Democrat convention in Milwaukee.  Any bets on whether or not he will debate the president?  Chances are he will bow out of that commitment as well.  His handlers are surely acutely aware of his obvious limitations by now.  Even a high-tech ear piece would not help Joe.  Directions and corrections in his ear would only confuse him further. 

What is the Democrat party to do?  Well, everything they are doing.  They have an orchestrated strategy that is being implemented daily.  Every leftist appearing on television and writing at the NYT, WaPo, and throughout the online media are doing everything in their power to convince  the American people that the U.S. is irredeemably racist, a despicable lie.  

They drone on and on about how Trump has handled the covid pandemic poorly, another an outright lie.  He has been on top of it from the outset.  (Would Biden have banned flights from China?  Not a chance; he’s owned by China.)

They are spreading the fear that Trump will refuse to leave the White House if he loses, a ridiculous notion even from them.  They are working hard to convince every American that the coming election will not be legitimate.  

Mail-in-voting is one way to ensure that.  They plan on votes not being counted by Jan. 20 so that Morticia Pelosi can be named temporary president.  Can any of us imagine that nightmare?  That two months would give them time to cheat/fix the results to their satisfaction or even to replace Biden, if he were to be declared the winner, based on the 25th Amendment. 

The Democrats are up to no  good, of that we can all be certain.  They have never accepted Trump’s 2016 victory and, as a result, have behaved poorly ever since, wholly without class or grace.  All the divisiveness has come from their refusal to acknowledge their candidate lost.  The pathetic Carl Bernstein, forever trying to relive his role in Watergate, is demanding the Republicans remove Trump from office now!  What does that tell us?  That even Carl knows Biden cannot win.  The question is, will Biden remain the candidate until November 3rd?  We shall see.  If he chooses  Heels-up Kamala Harris as his running mate and Trump airs the clip of her accusing Biden of being a racist, theirs will be an ever-imploding exercise in futility.  That would be a self-inflicted wound but fascinating – and grim in all its ramifications.  

The Democrat party has devolved into a gang of thugs, as the hearing with Attorney General Bill Barr proved beyond a reasonable doubt.  There is not one with the courage to speak up and admit that the party is broken into bits of dross, illegitimate due to their embrace of socialism.  Everything they support is in opposition to the Constitution: illegal immigration, open borders, anti-law enforcement, anti-military, pro-violence in our streets, hatred of both the First and Second Amendments.  They are prepared to lie, cheat and steal to gain power and implement their plan to destroy the middle class and turn the U.S. into Venezuela.  

And they believe that Joe Biden is going to take them where they want to go!  It is not only Joe Biden who is an empty suit.  The Democratic Party has relinquished any and all legitimacy it once had.  Why and for what?  Because their criminally corrupt candidate lost in 2016, a D.C. outsider won, and they have been in the throes of an enraged tantrum ever since. How else would they have ended up with empty-suit Biden as their candidate?  Karma?

“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

 

Exec of #MeToo Group That Covered for

Biden’s Sex Abuse Heads His Gender Policy

Council

Believe all women… except those who accuse powerful Democrats.

Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

When Hollywood wanted to divert attention from its sexual abuse of women, it created Time’s Up and staffed it with political hacks from the Obama administration.

Time’s Up was built as a rival to the decentralized social media #MeToo movement. Replacing social media outrage driven by random people with a formal organization funded by Hollywood capital and controlled by the Democrat non-profit sector could prevent another Weinstein mess.

Despite being backed by Hollywood millionaires, the organization’s legal defense fund launched what became the largest fundraiser on GoFundMe: totaling almost $25 million. But critics pointed out that Time’s Up’s money was mostly going to salaries, rather than to victims.

There was even more outrage when Time’s Up Now co-sponsored a retreat at a spa filled with agents from CAA: a powerful talent agency backing Time’s Up which had been accused of covering up Weinstein's crimes. Rose McGowan, a key #MeToo figure, tweeted, “Times Up A vile PR stunt, a front for evil CAA & other human traffickers like Weinstein.”

In 2019, Lisa Borders, the CEO of Time's Up, was forced to resign when her son, a formerly homeless yoga instructor, was accused of groping one of his clients during a "healing" session. Borders explained that she was resigning because she wanted to defend her son, but still got paid $591,000 for half a year’s work as part of a “severance agreement” with the group.

Borders was replaced by Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, who spent 2020 tanking what was left of the little credibility that the Obama/Hollywood front group still had.

Oprah Winfrey had helped launch #TimesUp with a Golden Globes speech declaring, “Their time is up” and she also hosted an interview with Time’s Up leaders on CBS: whose former CEO, Les Moonves, had been TV’s own version of Harvey Weinstein. The Time's Up celebs that Oprah interviewed, Shonda Rimes, and Natalie Portman, had not been assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. Or anyone. (McGowan also rightly blasted Portman's theatrics.)

But when a documentary about the women alleging that they had been raped by Russell Simmons, a celebrity hip-hop producer who was also a pal of racist Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, was close to release, Oprah Winfrey pulled out, under pressure from Simmons.

Time’s Up not only joined Oprah in refusing to support the victims, but allegedly started a whispering campaign to sabotage the documentary. A Hollywood Reporter investigation tied together Tina Chen and the role of former Obama consoligere Valerie Jarrett, and noted that, “$2.9 million of Time's Up gross receipts in 2018 came from three undisclosed donors.”

But the complete collapse of Time’s Up came when Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexual assault. Reade had initially reached out to people at Time's Up only to be told that the organization legally couldn't support her because Biden was a political candidate. President Trump was also a political candidate, but that hadn’t stopped Time’s Up from attacking him.

The same organization that recently put out a statement by Tina Tchen headlined, “Donald Trump Must Be Removed From Office”, claimed that it couldn’t speak out against Biden for legal reasons. The legal reasons were a joke, but the political ones were there for everyone to see.

Tchen managed to praise Biden for having the right response to the allegations. This wasn’t surprising as Time’s Up was populated by former Obama people, and in a glaring conflict of interest, its public relations were being handled by Biden advisor Anita Dunn. Beyond being Biden’s “decision-making authority”, Dunn had also provided advice to Harvey Weinstein.

“I actually cried a little because I felt really betrayed,” Reade had said. “They never told me that their public relations was run by Anita Dunn. I found out in real-time reading Ryan’s article. I gave them so much personal information and they say they didn’t give it to Biden. But come on. They said they had firewalls or something.”

Time’s Up said lots of things. But then it did very different things.

The Chief Strategy and Policy Officer for Time’s Up, Jennifer Klein, maxed out her donations to Biden. Klein, a former Obama and Clinton vet, has now been appointed by Biden as the co-chair of Biden’s new White House Gender Policy Council, alongside Julissa Reynoso, Jill Biden’s Chief of Staff, an Obama ambassador, and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow.

The White House Gender Policy Council is tasked in Biden’s executive order with, among a multitude of other things, combatting “sexual harassment”. The Council is expected to throw out policies by former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that protected the due process rights of students who had been accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses.

Had Biden faced the same lack of due process as the average college student, he would have been immediately found guilty. But Time’s Up insisted that there was no organization that existed to try Biden. Instead it would be up to the voters to pass judgement on his “character”. That was a convenient rationalization for refusing to stand with the women accusing Biden.

Now Klein, who was donating to the abuser, will head up Biden’s program to protect women. Except of course those women who might decide to come forward and accuse her boss.

Time’s Up had always existed to silence actual victims on behalf of influential Democrats. It was a partnership between Hollywood and Obama operatives. Rolling executives of Time’s Up into Biden programs just makes the arrangement public.

Klein combined her time at Time’s Up with serving as co-chair of the Women and Families Policy Committee for the campaign of an accused sexual abuser. Now the Biden campaign elevated her campaign role to an administration role. And, in an interview with Ms. Magazine, Tina Tchen touted Klein as “an expert on both domestic and global gender issues”.

“The policy of this administration is that every individual, every student is entitled to a fair education — free of sexual violence — and that all involved have access to a fair process,” Klein argued.

Fair process and due process are not the same thing. A due process protects the rights of the accused while a fair process is in the eye of the beholder. Equity dispenses with due process and replaces it with bias that is only ‘fair’ if you believe that society is fundamentally unfair.

Of course we already know the outcome.

Tina Tchen had already tweeted that due process rules for accused abusers on campus are wrong and the National Women's Law Center, which administers the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, had sued to stop student accusers from being cross-examined after an accusation.

The Biden administration will move to ban cross-examination of campus accusers, but when Reade accused Biden of sexual assault, she was cross-examined and then smeared in the media, while Biden was hardly ever asked about any of the allegations of sexual misconduct.

That’s the ‘fair’ standard of Time’s Up in action.

Accuse a random student and you have the right to be believed without being cross-examined, but if you accuse Biden, you have the right to be cross-examined without ever being believed.

Believe Reade or don’t, Biden’s inappropriate conduct with women has been captured on video. It’s not hard to find photos and video clips of him inappropriately touching women and girls. That might be one reason he chose to rename the White House Council on Women and Girls that Tina Tchen had headed for Obama to the White House Gender Policy Council headed by Klein.

The existence of women and girls is routinely denied by lefties who insist on using euphemisms like “menustrators” (She the People), “chest-feeders” (NHS),  and “people with vaginas” (Planned Parenthood) and by Biden, one of whose first moves was to effectively eliminate women’s sports. Now women have also been erased from the Council on Women and Girls.

MANY PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE BARBARIAN MUSLIM WORLD MAY BE UNAWARE THAT MUSLIMS CUT OUT THE CLITORIS OF LITTLE GIRLS SO THEY DON'T END UP RUNNING AROUND LIKE STRAY BITCHES LOOK FOR A MALE TO SERVICE THEM. FOR REAL! DO A SEARCH.


This should also frighten you because we are following in England's wake.  Biden's illegal and unconstitutional actions to erase the southern border and flood America, not just with illegal aliens from Latin America, but from a variety of countries, many of them Muslim, when combined with the Democrat party's aggressive efforts to create racial schisms in America, means we are also starting down the path to becoming a third-world apartheid country rather than a tolerant, pluralist, constitutional nation. Andrea Widburg


Biden's Support of Religious Freedom for 'All' People

Which means -- for him -- freedom for only one religious group.

 

 6 comments

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

On May 16, President Biden issued a brief video ostensibly dedicated to expressing his support for the religious freedom of “all” people (though in reality dedicated to only one religious group):

All people should be able to practice their faith with dignity, without fear of harassment or violence.  We will defend the right of all, as we stand with you.  That’s why I ended this shameful Muslim travel ban.  And that’s why this administration will speak out for religious freedom for all people, including Uighurs in China and Rohingya in Burma.  We also believe Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live in safety and security and enjoy equal measure of freedom, prosperity, and democracy.  My administration is going to continue to engage Palestinians and Israelis and other regional partners to work toward sustained calm.

It is hypocritical for Biden to claim that he cares about the religious rights of “all” people—when he clearly means only “all Muslims.”  So too is it vexing to note that, unlike those whom he totally ignores—for example, the hundreds of millions of Christians currently being persecuted at the hands of Muslims—those Muslims whom he does mention as deserving protection are not exactly innocent.

Consider the three Muslim peoples he singled out: the Palestinians, the Uighurs in China, and the Rohingya in Burma.  Far from trying to live peaceably with their non-Muslim neighbors, and like other Muslim populations living alongside or under the authority of non-Muslims, all three have been known to engage in hostile, subversive, and terroristic activities.

One need not dwell much on the well-documented scourge of Palestinian terrorism—primarily in the guise of Hamas and Hezbollah—which, as is well known, is the root cause for conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  But consider the other two lesser known Muslim peoples.

The Rohingya of Burma have been committing the same sort of anti-infidel mayhem, violence, terrorism, and rape that one is accustomed to associating with “radical Islam”—though news of it seldom reaches the West.  The main difference is that, unlike, say, the West, Burma has responded with uncompromising ruthlessness—thereby making it the “bad guy” in the media.  Consider the words of popular Buddhist leader Ashin Wirathu, whom the media refer to as the “Burmese bin Laden”: “You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,” says the monk in reference to Muslims: “I call them troublemakers, because they are troublemakers.”

Similarly, Reuters quotes the Chinese government saying that it “destroyed 1,588 violent and terrorist gangs” in Xinjiang, where most Uighurs and other Muslims live, “arrested 12,995 terrorists, seized 2,052 explosive devices, punished 30,645 people for 4,858 illegal religious activities, and confiscated 345,229 copies of illegal religious [jihadi] materials.”  The same report says that 30 Islamic terror attacks occurred between 1990 and 2016, killing 458 and injuring 2,540. 

Critics may argue that China is untrustworthy and essentially fabricating claims of Islamic terrorism to demonize and persecute the Uighurs.  And yet, history and current affairs indicate that wherever and whenever Muslim minorities live amidst non-Muslim majorities, they tend to instigate, agitate, subvert, and resort to terrorism.  Either way, like Burma and unlike the West, no doubt the Chinese have been intolerantly brutal in the crackdown on their Muslim population.

The point here, of course, is not to argue that all Muslims are troublemakers and therefore “deserve” whatever treatment they get; rather, it is to highlight another instance of humanitarian hypocrisy, this time by Joe Biden.  For, while he never mentions the persecution of those minorities who do no wrong, seek to live peaceably with their neighbors, and certainly never resort to terrorism—and yet are persecuted solely on account of their religious identity, as millions of Christians throughout the Muslim world are today—he expresses concern only for Muslims, who are notorious for provoking others into prolonged conflicts.

Incidentally, it’s worth adding that, unlike most of Islam’s persecuted Christians—who are indigenous to the land, often many centuries before Islam invaded it—Muslims in Burma, China, and Israel are not indigenous, but rather the descendants of Muslim conquerors or forced converts, another inconvenient fact that helps shed light on the current conflicts.

The Dirty Secret of Child Marriage

None of the organizations dedicated to combating it dares face why it's so prevalent.

 

 5 comments

It was an emblematic incident: the News Agency of Nigeria reported Wednesday that “the Chief Imam of the Nasrul-lahi-li Fathi Society of Nigeria (NASFAT), Abdul Azeez Onike, says Islam supports underage marriage.” Onike said thus at a press conference launching his new initiative, “Ending Violence Against Women and Girls,” which was “organised by NASFAT with support from UNICEF.” Is UNICEF troubled by Onike’s support for child marriage? Not enough to keep from working with him. This was yet another example of the abject failure of global “human rights” organizations to confront the uncomfortable fact of why child marriage is so common in some areas of the world: because it is sanctioned in Islam.

Onike himself made this clear, insisting “that the Islamic scripture was clear about marriage” and calling for people to refer to Islamic texts “instead of using contemporary standards” to determine whether or not child marriage was an acceptable practice.

If Abdul Azeez Onike said this in the U.S., he would be excoriated as an “Islamophobe.” But in reality, child marriage has abundant attestation in Islamic tradition and law.

Numerous Islamic authorities worldwide attest to this. Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs (Diyanet) said in January 2018 that under Islamic law, girls as young as nine can marry.

Ishaq Akintola, professor of Islamic Eschatology and Director of Muslim Rights Concern, Nigeria, has said: “Islam has no age barrier in marriage and Muslims have no apology for those who refuse to accept this.” An Iraqi expert on Islamic law, Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-‘Ubeidi, agrees, saying: “There is no minimum marriage age for either men or women in Islamic law. The law in many countries permits girls to marry only from the age of 18. This is arbitrary legislation, not Islamic law.”

So does Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, a prominent Muslim cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council: “There is no minimum age for marriage and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.”

Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology has declared flatly: “Islam does not forbid marriage of young children.”

These authorities say these things because hadiths that Muslims consider authentic record that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was six when Muhammad wedded her and nine when he consummated the marriage:

“The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)” (Bukhari 7.62.88).

Another tradition has Aisha herself recount the scene:

The Prophet engaged me when I was a girl of six (years). We went to Medina and stayed at the home of Bani-al-Harith bin Khazraj. Then I got ill and my hair fell down. Later on my hair grew (again) and my mother, Um Ruman, came to me while I was playing in a swing with some of my girl friends. She called me, and I went to her, not knowing what she wanted to do to me. She caught me by the hand and made me stand at the door of the house. I was breathless then, and when my breathing became all right, she took some water and rubbed my face and head with it. Then she took me into the house. There in the house I saw some Ansari women who said, “Best wishes and Allah’s Blessing and a good luck.” Then she entrusted me to them and they prepared me (for the marriage). Unexpectedly Allah’s Apostle came to me in the forenoon and my mother handed me over to him, and at that time I was a girl of nine years of age. (Bukhari 5.58.234).

Muhammad was at this time fifty-four years old.

Marrying young girls was not all that unusual for its time, but because in Islam Muhammad is the supreme example of conduct (cf. Qur’an 33:21), he is considered exemplary in this unto today. And so in April 2011, the Bangladesh Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini declared that those trying to pass a law banning child marriage in that country were putting Muhammad in a bad light: “Banning child marriage will cause challenging the marriage of the holy prophet of Islam, [putting] the moral character of the prophet into controversy and challenge.” He added a threat: “Islam permits child marriage and it will not be tolerated if any ruler will ever try to touch this issue in the name of giving more rights to women.” The Mufti said that 200,000 jihadists were ready to sacrifice their lives for any law restricting child marriage.

Likewise the influential website Islamonline.com in December 2010 justified child marriage by invoking not only Muhammad’s example, but the Qur’an as well:

The Noble Qur’an has also mentioned the waiting period [i.e. for a divorced wife to remarry] for the wife who has not yet menstruated, saying: “And those who no longer expect menstruation among your women, if you doubt, then their period is three months, and [also for] those who have not menstruated” [Qur’an 65:4]. Since this is not negated later, we can take from this verse that it is permissible to have sexual intercourse with a prepubescent girl. The Qur’an is not like the books of jurisprudence which mention what the implications of things are, even if they are prohibited. It is true that the prophet entered into a marriage contract with A’isha when she was six years old, however he did not have sex with her until she was nine years old, according to al-Bukhari.

Other countries make Muhammad’s example the basis of their laws regarding the legal marriageable age for girls. Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: “Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed.”

According to Amir Taheri in The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (pp. 90-91), Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl “a divine blessing,” and advised the faithful to give their own daughters away accordingly: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.” When he took power in Iran, he lowered the legal marriageable age of girls to nine, in accord with Muhammad’s example.

Yet despite all this, worldwide organizations dedicated to ending child marriage universally fail to acknowledge its justifications in Islam. The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights never mentions Islam in connection with child marriage. UNICEF doesn’t, either. Nor does the international network Girls Not Brides or the International Women’s Health Coalition. The latter does say: “Child marriage occurs in every region of the world, and is practiced across cultures, religions, and ethnicities,” and while that is true, no religion or culture offers as much justification for child marriage as Islam does.

Until that is acknowledged, the root causes of this problem will never be addressed. And more girls will suffer.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins―Revised and Expanded Edition. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

Turkey Praises—and Seeks to Emulate?—a Mass-Murdering, Pedophilic, Slave-Trader

What a people’s “hero” says about them.

 

 17 comments

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Turning churches into mosques is very much on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s mind these days. Last Friday,  June 4, he “spoke of the Turkish legacy of conquest and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia [into a mosque] during a mosque opening in the city of Zonguldak on Friday.” In his own words, “the re-opening of the Hagia Sophia as a mosque is important, as it is a legacy of conquest.”

Thus, while the West falls all over itself to disavow any “conquest” its ancestors may have engaged in—for example, the “conquest of the Americas” at the hands of the “genocidal” Columbus—here is the president of Turkey praising the violent conquests committed by his Muslim ancestors. The significance of this dichotomy, and what it portends for the future, is in need of acknowledgement. 

As a case study, take Erdoğan’s stance towards Turkey’s greatest jihadis of history—men whose atrocious deeds would shame ISIS. Last summer, while celebrating his decree to transform the Hagia Sophia—which for a millennium had functioned as Eastern Christendom’s greatest basilica—into a mosque, Erdoğan repeatedly saluted Sultan Muhammad al-Fatah (“the Conqueror,” 1432-1481) for violently transforming Christian Constantinople into Islamic Istanbul.

And yet consider: Sultan Muhammad’s sole justification for conquering Constantinople was that Islam demands the subjugation of “infidels,” in this case, Christians. He had no other “grievance” than that. In fact, when he first became sultan, he “swore by the god of their false prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their [the Christians’] friend, and would remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of Constantinople.” Although they believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on his lips while war was in his heart.”

During his siege of Constantinople, he regularly exhorted his Muslim army with jihadi ideology, including by unleashing throngs of preachers crying,

Children of Muhammad, be of good heart, for tomorrow we shall have so many Christians in our hands that we will sell them, two slaves for a ducat, and will have such riches that we will all be of gold, and from the beards of the Greeks we will make leads for our dogs, and their families will be our slaves. So be of good heart and be ready to die cheerfully for the love of our [past and present] Muhammad.

“Recall the promises of our Prophet concerning fallen warriors in the Koran,” the sultan himself exhorted: “the man who dies in combat shall be transported bodily to paradise and shall dine with Muhammad in the presence of women, handsome boys, and virgins.”

The mention of “handsome boys” was not just an accurate reference to the Koran’s promise (e.g., 52:24, 56:17, and 76:19); Muhammad was a notorious pedophile. His enslavement and rape of Jacob Notaras—a handsome 14-year-old nobleman’s son in Constantinople, whom Muhammad forced into becoming his personal catamite until he escaped—was only one of the most infamous. The sultan stabbed to death another Christian boy who “preferred death to infamy.”

After his conquest and desecration of the Hagia Sophia, Muhammad had the “wretched citizens of Constantinople” dragged before his men during evening festivities and “ordered many of them to be hacked to pieces, for the sake of entertainment.” The rest of the city’s population—as many as 45,000—was hauled off in chains to be sold as slaves.

This is the man whom Turkey and its president honor—including by rededicating one of Christendom’s greatest and oldest churches as a victory mosque to him last year. Nor is Muhammad al-Fatah the only terrorist to be honored; as Erdoğan explained in one of his speeches:

The conquest of Istanbul [Constantinople] and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque are among the most glorious chapters of Turkish history.….The resurrection of the Hagia Sophia represents our memory full of heydays in our history, from [the battles of] Badr to Manzikert, from Nicopolis, to Gallipoli [all jihadi victories] … The resurrection of the Hagia Sophia is required by our respect and commitment to all of our ancestors, from Alp Arslan [Islamic victor of Manzikert who opened the way to the conquest of Asia Minor, and massacred or enslaved tens of thousands of Christians], to Muhammad al-Fatah, to Abdulhamid [who massacred as many as 300,000 Armenians in the name of jihad between 1894-1896].  The resurrection of the Hagia Sophia … honors Muhammad al-Fatah’s spirit of conquest… Allah willing, we will continue to walk on this sacred path without pause or hesitation, until we reach our ultimate destination [emphasis added].

The message could not be clearer: jihadi ideology dominates Turkey, at least its leadership. Invading and conquering neighboring peoples—not due to any grievances but because they are non-Muslim—with all the attending atrocities, rapes, destruction, and mass slavery is apparently the ideal, to resume once the sunset of Western power is complete.

Meanwhile, because Americans are used to seeing statues of their own nation’s heroes toppled—for no other reason than that they were white and/or Christian, and therefore inherently evil—the significance of Erdoğan’s words and praise of Muhammad the Conqueror—who as an Asian Muslim is further immune from Western criticism, as that would be “racist”—will remain lost on them.

THE HAGIA SOPHIA WAS BUILT BY BYZINTINE CHRISTIAN SOVEREIGNS EMPEROR JUSTIN AND EMPRESS THEODORA.

MUSLIM INVASION OF SPAIN

 https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-muslim-invasion-of-spain-and-europe.html


The Hagia Sophia: A True 'Center of Knowledge about Islam'

A look at how delusional Turkish leadership has become.

 

 4 comments

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Last summer, Turkish authorities transformed Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom”)—which was originally built, and for a millennium functioned, as one of Christendom’s greatest cathedrals—into a mosque.  On that Friday, July 24, 2020 (which for millions of Eastern Christians is now deemed a “day of mourning”), Muslims met inside the desecrated church, where they were led in prayer by a sword-waving imam, to spasmodic cries of “Allahu Akbar.”

The Turks, beginning with their president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have been presenting this bit of cultural appropriation as their “right.” Imam Ali Erbas, Turkey’s president of Religious Affairs, has gone one further, claiming that “The goal is for all our mosques and especially Hagia Sophia to become centers of knowledge about Islam.”

So be it.  As the anniversary of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and its Hagia Sophia recently passed (May 29, 1453), let us revisit what happened on that day—a day that truly does impart much “knowledge about Islam,” not least because we have primary source documents describing exactly what the Turks did, particularly in and around Hagia Sophia.  (All quoted text in the following narrative was derived from contemporary sources, mostly eyewitnesses; exact references can be found in chapter 7 of Sword and Scimitar.)

Once they had penetrated inside Constantinople, the “enraged Turkish soldiers . . . gave no quarter”:

When they had massacred and there was no longer any resistance, they were intent on pillage and roamed through the town stealing, disrobing, pillaging, killing, raping, taking captive men, women, children, old men, young men, monks, priests, people of all sorts and conditions…  There were virgins who awoke from troubled sleep to find those brigands standing over them with bloody hands and faces full of abject fury…  [The Turks] dragged them, tore them, forced them, dishonored them, raped them at the cross-roads and made them submit to the most terrible outrages… Tender children were brutally snatched from their mothers’ breasts and girls were pitilessly given up to strange and horrible unions, and a thousand other terrible things happened. . .

Because thousands of citizens had fled to and were holed up in Hagia Sophia, the ancient basilica offered an excellent harvest of slaves, once its doors were axed down:

One Turk would look for the captive who seemed the wealthiest, a second would prefer a pretty face among the nuns. . . . Each rapacious Turk was eager to lead his captive to a safe place, and then return to secure a second and a third prize. . . . Then long chains of captives could be seen leaving the church and its shrines, being herded along like cattle or flocks of sheep.

The slavers sometimes fought each other to the death over “any well-formed girl,” even as many of the latter “preferred to cast themselves into the wells and drown rather than fall into the hands of the Turks.”

Having taken possession of the Hagia Sophia—which at the time of its capture had served as a cathedral for a thousand years—the invaders “engaged in every kind of vileness within it, making of it a public brothel.” On “its holy altars” they enacted “perversions with our women, virgins, and children,” including “the Grand Duke’s daughter who was quite beautiful.” She was forced to “lie on the great altar of Hagia Sophia with a crucifix under her head and then raped.”

Next “they paraded the [Hagia Sophia’s main] Crucifix in mocking procession through their camp, beating drums before it, crucifying the Christ again with spitting and blasphemies and curses. They placed a Turkish cap . . . upon His head, and jeeringly cried, ‘Behold the god of the Christians!’”

Practically all other churches in the ancient city suffered the same fate. “The crosses which had been placed on the roofs or the walls of churches were torn down and trampled.” The Eucharist was “thrown to the ground and kicked.” Bibles were stripped of their gold or silver illuminations before being burned. “Icons were without exception given to the flames.” Patriarchal vestments were placed on the haunches of dogs; priestly garments were placed on horses.

“Everywhere there was misfortune, everyone was touched by pain” when Sultan Muhammad finally made his grand entry into the city. “There were lamentations and weeping in every house, screaming in the crossroads, and sorrow in all churches; the groaning of grown men and the shrieking of women accompanied looting, enslavement, separation, and rape.”

The sultan rode to Hagia Sophia, dismounted, and went in, “marveling at the sight” of the grand basilica. After having it cleansed of its crosses, statues, and icons—Muhammad himself knocked over and trampled on its main altar—he ordered a muezzin to ascend the pulpit and sound “their detestable prayers,” wrote a disgruntled Christian. “Then this son of iniquity, this forerunner of Antichrist, mounted upon the Holy Table to utter forth his own prayers,” thereby “turning the Great Church into a heathen shrine for his god and his Mahomet.”

To cap off his triumph, Muhammad had the “wretched citizens of Constantinople” dragged before his men during evening festivities and “ordered many of them to be hacked to pieces, for the sake of entertainment.” The rest of the city’s population—as many as forty-five thousand—were hauled off in chains to be sold into Easter captivity.

Such is the “knowledge about Islam” that the Hagia Sophia’s experiences truly impart.

Setting the record straight concerning the conquest of Constantinople, as this article has done, is doubly important now that Google and “big tech” are, like the Turks, devoted to hiding the truth of this day: before Turkey violently transformed the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, googling the date “May 29”—a day that for centuries before Pearl Harbor “lived in infamy”—produced numerous search results on the Muslim conquest of Constantinople; today very few do.

Note: Quoted excerpts in the above narrative were taken from and are sourced in the author’s Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.

Photo credit: Vassillis

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