Biden's grinding millstone: Half of Americans worry about paying their credit card bills
Joe Biden had a grand old time hailing his presidential performance, telling Congress what a great job he was doing for the economy at his State of the Union address this past week, knowing the media would lap it up.
Two years ago, our economy was reeling. As I stand here tonight, we have created a record 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.
...said Joe, driving his point further with:
As my Dad used to say, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say, “Honey — it’s going to be OK,” and mean it.
So, let’s look at the results. Unemployment rate at 3.4%, a 50-year low. Near record low unemployment for Black and Hispanic workers. We’ve already created 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years. Where is it written that America can’t lead the world in manufacturing again? For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs. Now, thanks to all we’ve done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.
Inflation has been a global problem because of the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and Putin’s war that disrupted energy and food supplies. But we’re better positioned than any country on Earth. We have more to do, but here at home, inflation is coming down. Here at home, gas prices are down $1.50 a gallon since their peak. Food inflation is coming down. Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months while take home pay has gone up.
Additionally, over the last two years, a record 10 million Americans applied to start a new small business. Every time somebody starts a small business, it’s an act of hope. And the Vice President will continue her work to ensure more small businesses can access capital and the historic laws we enacted.
This is vomit-inducing, given the lies emitted against the consumer sense of unease about the economy now, with 63% of Americans believing we are in a recession right now, according to a TIPP poll.
But naturally, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan found a lot to like about it, even hailing the speech as 'Trumpian':
It was the most effective of his presidency and for interesting reasons. Its first purpose was to demonstrate to his party that he’s in charge and formidable. He did that. The second, in my read, was to present himself in a new way to voters, especially those in the middle, and especially old Democratic constituencies. I think he did himself some good there.
Some are saying they heard a lot of Bernie Sanders in the speech. I don’t think that’s the headline. The first hour, which contained the parts Mr. Biden’s people wanted the audience to pay attention to, was Trumpian. There was little in it Donald Trump wouldn’t have been happy to say.
Which is unintentionally ironic. After all, doesn't she hate Trump?
There were also the flipper-beating seals at CBS News, a whole table of them, finding one way after another to praise Biden and his speech right after it was done. I cannot find the YouTube of it, perhaps because it was so repellent the network decided not to put it up, but I certainly saw it on television after Biden left the stage. CBS's website has this sort of coverage now to give you the flavor:
Washington — President Biden took a victory lap Tuesday to celebrate Democrats' legislative accomplishments while pledging to find common ground with Republicans in his second State of the Union address, speaking before a divided Congress for the first time since the GOP took control of the House.
They just can't stop praising him, can they?
Now the hard facts are in about Joe and his economic performance, and it's not a pretty picture.
According to a brand new IBD/TIPP poll:
Nearly one in two Americans is concerned about making on-time credit card payments, an IBD/TIPP Poll of 1,358 Americans nationwide completed early this month showed. 49% expressed concern about making timely credit card payments.
The online survey was conducted from February 1 to 3.
The survey’s credibility interval (CI) is +/- 2.8 percentage points, meaning the study is accurate to within ± 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Americans been surveyed.
The survey asked respondents, “As a result of the current economic conditions, how concerned are you about the following? Making on-time credit card payments?” The results read as follows:
- 25% were very concerned,
- 24% were somewhat concerned,
- 17% were not very concerned,
- 17% were not at all concerned, and
- 2% were not sure,
- 15% not applicable
This is ugly stuff, a sign of an economy in distress, with huge numbers of consumers worried about going under.
It also follows from other economic bad news, this one from the Wall Street Journal four days ago:
Squeezed by higher prices and short on cash, more Americans are tapping their 401(k)s for financial emergencies.
A record 2.8% of the five million people in 401(k) plans run by Vanguard Group tapped their retirement savings in 2022 to cope with hardships such as medical bills, eviction or foreclosure, the company said. That is up from 2.1% in 2021 and a prepandemic average of about 2%.
This one's from Fox Business three days ago:
Amid high inflation and rising interest rates, credit card balances increased to $931 billion in the final quarter of 2022, according to the latest Credit Industry Insights report by TransUnion.
Additionally, credit card originations hit a new record. The number of new credit cards opened spiked by 21.6 million in the third quarter, representing a 7.4% year-over-year increase. Now, more than 202 million consumers have access to credit cards."Bankcard balances and originations continue to climb as consumers seek ways to cope with inflation, and this is particularly the case among Gen Z consumers, who have seen growth of 19% in originations YoY and 64% in balances over the same period," Paul Siegfried, the senior vice president and credit card business leader at TransUnion, said in a statement.
This one from Motley Fool just now:
If you have a 401(k) plan through your job, your goal should be to max out your contributions or get as close to maxing out as possible.
...
Unfortunately, recent data from Bank of America shows that 401(k) contribution rates shrunk in 2022. As of this past December, the average contribution rate across all participants was 6.4%, down from 6.6% in December 2021.
I wasn't able to locate good figures on how payday lenders, or "market cash advance" financial companies are doing, but based on this data above, you can take a guess.
It doesn't take a genius to see that inflation -- and taxes -- are behind this sudden delving into savings and credit lines, loading up the middle class with debt, and grinding it down, ultimately hearkening to an era of reduced consumer spending, a flagship indicator of recession.
I just paid nearly eight bucks for 18 eggs at Walmart; got the receipt, left the sticker.
Image: Monica Showalter
Biden has not only inflicted fresh and unsustainable inflation on the American people based on his grotesque expansion of public spending, he's also raised taxes on Americans making less than $20,000 a year, putting many into a bottomless pit on their finances. The Federal Reserve's hike in interest rates which is done to squeeze the inflation out of the system is nowhere near done, given the excess money still rolling around in the system, driving prices higher.
Biden can blame Putin all he likes for inflation, but the Fed's rate hikes tell the story.
Even as those rate hikes act to kill inflation, they harm consumers, too, with higher credit card interest rates and mortage rate hikes so high many first-time homebuyers are now shut out of the market.
All of this, piling up, piling up is bound to wear voters down -- with delayed car repairs, skipped vacations, skipped dental care, a putting off of getting the kids' braces, delayed medical and veterinary appointments, house repairs going undone, an end to meals out, and a sense that it's never going to get better.
Inflation and taxes have become a grinding millstone for the middle class, courtesy of Joe Biden.
And where have we heard that before?
Sure enough, from Biden's spiritual mentor, V.I Lenin, who reputedly declared:
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
Are you better off than you were two years ago? Only the Bidenite political class and its allies can answer that with a hearty 'yes.' Biden's SOTU speech was an insulting mess of lies, done to cover up his record and preserve his political hide.
Image: Monica Showalter
Biden in 1995: ‘When I Argued That We Should Freeze Federal Spending, I Meant Social Security as Well. I Meant Medicare and Medicaid’
(CNSNews.com) – President Joe Biden has been accusing Republicans of trying to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it was Biden who proposed that very thing back in 1995 when he was a senator debating the Balanced Budget Amendment.
In a speech on the Senate floor on Jan. 31, 1995, then-Sen. Biden said that Congress should be honest with the American people about how much something will cost, and how Congress intends to balance the budget.
Whatever happened to the old conservative discipline about paying for what you spend? Paying for what you spend. I thought that meant that if we spend, then we ought to tell people how much it will cost to spend. If they do not want Members to spend, then we should not spend. But if they want to spend, we should be honest, must tell them what it will cost.
Which brings me to the argument raised by some that before passing this amendment we should tell the American people how we intend to balance the budget. There are those who claim that this is just a sham on the part of the opponents of the balanced budget amendment. Well, I am not an opponent of that amendment, but I want to tell Members it does not seem to be unrealistic for someone to lay out in broad details at least how it will work.
Those people say, ‘‘Wait a minute; if you are for the balanced budget amendment, you ought to say how to balance it.’’ Most people who are against the balanced budget amendment are not saying that we have to balance the budget; they are saying that our budget should be somewhere around 19 percent of GNP, that we should not put ourselves in the position where we are out of whack.
They argue, like many economists, that balancing the budget in and of itself is not a sacred undertaking and could be counterproductive. It seems to me that we should tell the American people.
He then said that he wanted to go on the record and wanted to remind everyone what he did at home which would cost him politically.
Biden said at the time that he argued for freezing federal spending and that he meant Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
I look at the polls out there. For example, I want to go on record, and I am up for reelection this year, and I will remind everybody what I did at home, which will cost me politically.
When I argued that we should freeze Federal spending, I meant Social Security as well. I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the Government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.
Somebody has to tell me in here how we are going to do this hard work without dealing with any of those sacred cows, some deserving more protection than others. I am not quite sure how you get from here to there. I am sure that we should tell the American people straight up that such an amendment is going to require some big changes.
The Balanced Budget Amendment will not end our deficit in one fell swoop, nor will it cause our Nation to turn its back overnight on those who depend on us.
Joe Biden Tried to Sunset Social Security, All Other Federal Programs as a Senator
Joe Biden introduced legislation that would sunset all federal programs, including social security, every four years when he was a freshman United States senator in 1975.
On Tuesday night at the State of the Union, Biden stated that “some Republicans” wish to “sunset” social security and Medicare, leading to significant pushback from GOP lawmakers on the House floor while millions watched.
C-SPANHouse Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has said on several occasions that Republicans in the House – where the framework to a debt ceiling resolution will be formed – are not seeking to slash the programs as part of their desired cuts to offset the $31.7 trillion debt ceiling reached last month. He shook his head in disagreement when Biden made the claims from the rostrum.
On Thursday, Biden spoke at the University of Tampa in Florida and noted that Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) “Rescue America” policy plan included a proposal to sunset all federal legislation every five years.
“If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” the plan adds.
Biden said that maybe Scott had “changed his mind, maybe he’s seen the Lord – but he wanted to… sunset social security and Medicare every five years.”
But Biden made an even more aggressive proposal when he represented Delaware in the United States Senate, seeking “to sunset all federal programs, including social security and Medicare,” every four years, Fox News reported, when he introduced S. 2067 on July 19, 1975. Biden’s central argument for reviewing all programs was the rapid increase of the federal budget.
“It is not just the size of our budget that is staggering, but even more the rate at which it is increasing,” Biden said at the time. “We cannot long continue such growth rates in expenditures.”
“In brief, this bill limits to 4 years the length of any spending authorization for a program,” he added. “Furthermore, it requires that each committee make a detailed study of the program before renewing it for another 4-year period.”
He then echoed a very similar sentiment to Scott’s.
“The examination is not just of the increased cost of the program, but of the worthiness of the entire program,” said then-Sen. Biden.
Scott issued a statement after the president spoke in Florida Thursday and challenged him to a debate on the matter.
“Joe Biden spent 20 years trying to slash Social Security and Medicare. Does he really think Americans are stupid enough to believe anything he said today?” the senator wondered. “The President should accept my invitation to debate him on this issue. Floridians deserve to know the truth about Biden’s war on Social Security and Medicare.”
While Republicans desire cuts to federal spending outside of social security and Medicare, according to McCarthy, Biden has floated tax hikes as a way to offset the debt ceiling. However, his posturing that he would not negotiate with the GOP over cuts seems to have changed following the State of the Union standoff.
Biden said Thursday that McCarthy “has been reasonable in terms of discussion with me so far,” before expressing his openness to negotiating the upcoming budget proposals.
“I said, ‘Look, why don’t we just – I think it’s the first week of March – why don’t we just lay out our budgets, you put yours down, I put mine down, and our people sit and compare them. Decide where we can make a compromise if we can make a compromise,” the president recalled.
The University of Pennsylvania announced it would create the Biden Center in 2017, the same year then-Vice President Biden left the White House. Most of the anonymous donations were given to the Biden Center after the university announced the Penn Biden Center, the Post reported.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, some of the funds were given by Shanghai real estate developer Xu Xeuqing, who reportedly has no immediate connection to the university. In 2011, Xu faced corruption allegations in China but was never charged with a crime. An expert on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the American Foreign Policy Council, Michael Sobolik, told the Beacon that Xu’s non-prosecution suggests he has a close relationship to the CCP.
Biden’s Sellout to China
Softness on the CCP in the State of the Union Address.
President Joe Biden is selling out the United States of America to the Chinese Communist regime. During his long rambling State of the Union address, Biden wasted a rare opportunity before an audience of millions of Americans to stand up to America’s number one adversary and the enemy of freedom everywhere. He ignored China’s serial acts of aggression, while lashing out at Republicans and at American corporations.
President Biden is under the illusion that the United States is merely in “competition with China.” China is not just a competitor, a label that could also be used to describe our close allies in Western Europe and Asia who compete with the United States in global markets. First and foremost, China is our enemy.
China’s leaders have exploited President Biden’s weakness, which they observed when he recklessly withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and left Americans, Afghan allies, and a trove of sophisticated military equipment behind. The Chinese are also reaping the benefits from the huge payments that Chinese individuals and businesses have made to the Biden family enterprise.
Most recently, President Biden allowed China’s Communist regime to maneuver a huge spy balloon over the United States for days without interference before the balloon was finally shot down off the South Carolina coast. The 200 feet tall balloon, equipped with surveillance cameras, had hovered over sensitive military sites before being taken down. China’s spymasters no doubt relished the opportunity to scoop up invaluable intelligence, thanks to the president’s dithering. President Biden glossed over this embarrassing incident in his State of the Union address.
The balloon fiasco was only the latest example of President Biden’s dereliction of duty as commander in chief in failing to stop China from transgressing U.S. sovereignty and harming the American people. Here are some examples of this disturbing pattern:
Fentanyl’s Deadly Toll – As if the coronavirus that originated in China, which killed more than a million Americans, was not bad enough, the Chinese regime has turned the synthetic fentanyl drug into a weapon of mass destruction against the United States.
President Biden’s open border policies have given the Chinese carte blanche, through their Mexican cartel associates, to spread the fentanyl poison throughout the United States. The Chinese regime is responsible for supplying the precursor chemicals the Mexican cartels use to produce U.S.-consumed fentanyl, which is now killing more Americans aged 18-49 than any other cause of death.
The amount of fentanyl entering the U.S., with materials sourced from China, has turned into a tsunami since President Biden took office. Since July 2022, according to a Washington Post report last month, U.S. authorities have seized more fentanyl per month than they did during the entire year of 2018. “Even so,” the report added, “the feds guess they’re netting just 5 to 10 percent of the fentanyl coming in from Mexico. Maybe less.”
There were approximately 71,000 fentanyl deaths in the U.S. in 2021. At least 75,000 Americans are estimated to have died from a fentanyl overdose in 2022.
Fentanyl, like the coronavirus epidemic, originated in China. Yet neither fentanyl nor the coronavirus origins were on the list of topics released by the White House that President Biden discussed with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their face-to-face meeting last November.
“Tens of thousands of Americans die from fentanyl poisoning every year, but @JoeBiden refused to press Xi Jinping on China’s role in this deadly crisis when they met face-to- face,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody tweeted at the time. “Why won’t Biden fight to save American lives?”
The most likely answer is that President Biden does not want to do anything that would offend the Chinese regime to the point of potentially derailing his family enterprise’s gravy train from China.
China’s Trojan Horse on Campuses – China has deployed its Confucius Institutes on U.S. campuses as fronts for spreading propaganda, recruiting so-called “influence agents,” and engaging in cyber espionage and intellectual property theft.
“That the Confucius Institutes are instruments of propaganda was confirmed by Li Changchun, the head of propaganda for the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” according to a Heritage Foundation commentary, “who boasted that the Institutes were ‘an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup.’”
Former President Donald Trump sought to clip their wings by proposing that American colleges and universities must disclose their financial ties with Confucius Institutes. The Biden administration did not think that such transparency was necessary. It withdrew the Trump administration’s financial disclosure proposal, which is no surprise considering that President Biden has a personal financial stake in shrouding the amount of funding channeled from China to U.S. colleges and universities.
Between the end of his service as vice president and the beginning of his presidential campaign, the University of Pennsylvania reportedly paid Joe Biden $900,000 in compensation for visiting the campus only about nine times as a “professor.” The university was already receiving millions of dollars from China, but Chinese donations and contracts spiked after the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement opened in 2018. The Penn Biden Center was one of the locations where classified documents from the days of the Obama-Biden administration were found.
TikTok Surveillance and Brainwashing – TikTok, the widely popular social media app that has many young people hooked, is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The Chinese Communist regime has the ultimate authority in ordering Chinese companies to hand over information that the government says it needs for security and intelligence purposes. There is nothing to stop the Chinese regime from seizing data shared by users in the United States with TikTok as part of the government’s surveillance program. And the app provides a readily available channel to brainwash impressionable teens and young adults with Chinese government propaganda.
As FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last November, TikTok poses “national security concerns.”
Nevertheless, President Biden signed an executive order revoking former President Trump’s order to ban the TikTok app in the United States unless TikTok’s Chinese parent found a U.S. buyer for TikTok, eliminating the ability of the Chinese to gather and store American users’ data to spy on them.
Instead, the Biden administration has been trying to negotiate unspecified governance and security safeguards while leaving the Chinese parent corporate ownership structure intact. The Biden administration is eager to require that the U.S. company Meta, Facebook’s parent company, sell its photo-sharing app Instagram and its messaging service WhatsApp. But it is perfectly willing to take a much laxer approach in dealing with the Chinese company ByteDance’s relationship with TikTok’s U.S. operations.
“Anything short of a complete separation” of TikTok from ByteDance “will likely leave significant national security issues regarding operations, data and algorithms unresolved,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said.
Some state and local governments have banned government employees from using the TikTok app on their work devices. The app has also been banned on federal devices. However, this is a drop in the bucket.
There is increasing support in Congress for a ban on the provision of the TikTok app from all devices in the United States. An alternative would be to require that TikTok’s Chinese parent divest TikTok’s U.S. operations completely, including giving up all source code and other related tangible and intangible assets used for delivering services to users in the United States as well as for gathering and storing data from these users.
President Biden did not call out TikTok by name in his State of the Union address, let alone press for its ban in the United States or the immediate complete divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese parent. Instead, he engaged in generalities about the risks presented by social media and Big Tech. The president called for Congress to pass legislation that would “stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on kids and teenagers online, ban targeted advertising to children, and impose stricter limits on the personal data these companies collect on all of us.”
TikTok is the equivalent of a ticking time bomb, but President Biden would rather waste time playing around with heavily regulating U.S. technology companies.
Chinese Purchases of Land on U.S. Soil – China has been buying up American farmland, including near U.S. military bases. “Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland jumped more than 20-fold in a decade from $81 million in 2010 to nearly $1.9 billion in 2021,” Fox Business reported. Experts have warned about the national security implications of such purchases.
President Biden could have included a recommendation in his State of the Union address that Congress pass remedial legislation, which would have received broad bipartisan support. Such legislation would prohibit the purchase of land within a specified distance from any U.S. military or other U.S. government facility by any governmental or non-governmental entity designated as a “foreign adversary.” It would put into law and expand the executive order authority currently granted to the Secretary of Commerce to make such designations for certain purposes. The countries on the Secretary’s list of foreign adversaries are China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela’s Maduro regime.
Alas, President Biden remained silent in his State of the Union address on the alarming rise in Chinese purchases of land on U.S. soil that jeopardize national security.
Sale of Oil to China – During the height of the energy crisis last year, the Biden administration authorized the sale of nearly a million barrels of oil to the trading affiliate of the Chinese state-owned China Petrochemical Corporation, known as Sinopec. The oil that ended up in China was taken from the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). It just so happens that Sinopec had previous ties to a private equity firm co-owned by none other than Hunter Biden.
“With Biden supplying global oil markets with U.S. oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, he is depleting our oil reserves and hurting U.S. national security, while China is adding to its national reserves by buying SPR oil from Biden’s Department of Energy and by also buying cheap oil from Russia,” the Institute for Energy Research concluded.
Americans paying high gas prices at the pump were hurt by the Biden administration’s shenanigans, but at least Hunter Biden’s former partners at the Chinese state-owned energy company were happy.
President Biden is soft on China. He had very little to say in his State of the Union address about the Communist regime, which he thinks is just a competitor rather than the most dangerous enemy of the United States. His family has profited from business dealings with China, with the “big guy” getting his ten percent cut. And the American people are paying a steep price as a result.
Joseph Klein
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer, and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, The United Nations & Radical Islam.
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Report: Hunter Sells About a Dozen Paintings for Under $500,000 Each
Hunter Biden, who is under investigation for tax fraud, has reportedly sold a total of about 12 paintings to anonymous buyers during his father’s term as president of the United States.
While the average yearly wage of an American artist is $73,013, Hunter has reportedly raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars as a novice painter.
Hunter Biden with his artwork. (ABC News/screenshot)
Previous reports indicated Hunter sold five paintings for $375,000 each in 2021. But according to a new estimate by a gallerist, Hunter’s has now sold about 12 paintings for less than his asking price of $500,000, Washington Post reported.
It is unclear how much money Hunter has made from his art, but estimates show he has earned at least five times more than the average American artist — all while being a novice.
Adam Thompson, a prominent artist from Miami, told Breitbart News he believes Hunter’s artwork is “not bad” for a novice, “but it’s not $500,000 good.”
Hunter’s artwork would likely only be worth only “$4,000-$5,000” if he was not the president’s son, Thompson added. “It’s nowhere near as good as George W. Bush’s art.”
Hunter’s sold paintings to anonymous buyers have raised red flags. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) told Breitbart News in 2022 he is “95 percent sure” the buyers of Hunter’s art are Chinese buyers, potentially implicating President Joe Biden.
“To ask for up to $500,000 is just a blatant payoff,” Thompson explained. “The real problem lies in the people who are buying it at the outrageous prices they’re selling for.”
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) on Monday, January 30, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The art market is known for corruption. A Senate subcommittee report detailed in 2020 how the art market serves as a vehicle for money laundering:
A large number of art sales happen through intermediaries referred to as “art advisors” who can represent both purchasers and sellers. In a typical transaction, a purchaser may not ask who owns the piece of art they are purchasing; the seller may not ask for whom it is being purchased or the origin of the money. And in general an art advisor would be reluctant to reveal the identity of their client for fear of being cut out of the deal and losing the business.
Hunter’s art dealer, Georges Bergès, who has a history of doing business in China, has been called to testify before the House Oversight Committee. The committee seeks transparency on Hunter’s art sales. Bergès has not yet agreed to testify and has hired legal counsel.
In an interview with the Post, Bergès defended Hunter’s art and claimed Hunter could “become one of the most consequential artists in this century.”
“His is a story of perseverance; Hunter’s story reflects what I believe is the beauty of humanity, judged not by the fall, but by having the strength to rise up, by having the character required to change and the courage to do it,” he said.
“Hunter Biden’s art reflects all of that and more. His art gives us hope; it reminds us that tomorrow brings a new day, a new beginning, a new possibility,” he said.
In 2021, Hunter and the White House defended his art scheme as legitimate a venture.
“Fuck ’em… Look, man,” Hunter Biden said on the Nota Bene Podcast. “The value of an artist’s work is, umm, is not necessarily determined by the price. But the price is completely subjective. … It has nothing to do with anything other than, you know, the moment. Like, umm, you know,” Hunter tried to explain. “Taping a banana to the wall. … But, but, but, it means something, and it meant something to someone.”
President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden on Saturday, August 13, 2022, in Kiawah Island with his family on vacation. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from Hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing even to have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
Report: Lawmakers to Get Joe Biden Doc Scandal Briefing Without Access to Classified Materials
Congressional lawmakers will reportedly receive a briefing from Biden administration officials on President Joe Biden’s classified document scandal as soon as this week after weeks of stonewalling.
Despite the administration’s claims of transparency, the briefing would not include direct access to the contents of the classified materials Biden stashed at the Penn Biden Center and his Wilmington residence, according to the Associated Press.
The White House has failed to provide transparency in public or private about the scandal, citing “the ongoing criminal investigations and a separate ‘risk assessment’ of the possible damage to intelligence sources.”
“I have to be really careful,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has repeatedly responded to reporters about the “ongoing investigation.”
Among the classified materials reportedly found among troves of documents is information related to Ukraine, where the Biden family has conducted business dealings.
If the briefing occurs, the “Gang of Eight” would receive the disclosure. The “Gang of Eight” refers to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and of both intelligence committees.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, pauses to speak with reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Nov. 10, 2022. Members of the Senate intelligence committee say they should have access to classified documents that were discovered in the homes of President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have been demanding transparency from the administration for weeks. With no response, they wrote a letter last week to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines for a briefing.
Biden’s classified document scandal has continued to grow. Last week, a leak to the press revealed the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center in mid-November. Biden’s personal attorney only acknowledged the search after it was leaked to the press months after its occurrences.
On February 1, the FBI took an extraordinary step and searched Biden’s second home in Delaware, even though the president claimed no classified documents were there. The FBI’s search unearthed notes from Biden’s time as vice president during the Biden administration. Critics say those notes could relate to information related to the Biden family’s business dealings.
The Department of Justice initially opened an investigation into the scandal on January 12, just after the scandal was leaked to the press on January 9. The initial documents were found by Biden’s personal attorneys on November 2.
At least three reports from establishment media indicate the White House and the Justice Department agreed to hide the scandal from the American public.
White House officials are reportedly suspicious about how Biden’s classified document scandal was leaked to the press after only a select group of White House and DOJ officials knew about the violation.
The White House has failed to provide a reason or cause for the initial search.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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