THE REASON WE ENDED UP WITH TRUMPER IS BECAUSE VOTERS KNEW HILLARY WAS EVEN WORSE, AND EVEN MORE CORRUPT IF THAT'S POSSIBLE!
Kellyanne Conway: Jared Kushner ‘Benefitted in the Billions’ from Trump Presidency
Fox News contributor and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said Thursday on FNC’s “The Story” that former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner “benefitted in the billions” from the Trump presidency.
The panel was discussing the House Oversight Committee press release stating that relatives of President Joe Biden received $1.3 million between 2015 and 2017 from an associate with ties to China.
Anchor Martha MacCallum said, “You know, there’s obviously comparisons. There was a lot of discussion during the Trump White House years that there was collusion with Russia. There were massive investigations, millions of dollars spent, and always the question, you know, what are they getting in return? So, do you have the same question for the Biden family when you look at this money transaction? What was China getting in return? Is that something Americans must know?”
Fox News contributor Juan Williams said, “Well, we haven’t established Congresswoman Mace when asked did you establish a connection going to Beau Biden’s widow and the Chinese. She said we’ll continue investigating. She can’t say there’s any tie, and I can’t say there’s any tie.”
He continued, “When you mention what’s going on with the Trump administration, Jamie Raskin is on to this as well, the congressman from Maryland on the committee, he said, why aren’t we investigating the Trump accounting firms? Why don’t you look into things like Jared Kushner getting $2 billion directly from the Saudis after former President Trump bragged about protecting the Saudi prince?”
Martha MacCallum said, “Kellyanne, is that a fair question about Jared Kushner?”
Conway said, “Well, Jared, of course, is the only person I think who has benefitted in the billions – with a ‘B’ – from the Trump presidency. That’s for sure. But look, I think whataboutism isn’t going to work here.”
She added, “This happened when Joe Biden was the sitting vice president.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Prosecutors Signal Criminal Charges for Trump Are Likely
The former president was told that he could appear before a Manhattan grand jury next week if he wishes to testify, a strong indication that an indictment could soon follow.
5 MIN READ
The Manhattan district attorney’s office recently signaled to Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that he could face criminal charges for his role in the payment of hush money to a porn star, the strongest indication yet that prosecutors are nearing an indictment of the former president, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
The prosecutors offered Mr. Trump the chance to testify next week before the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the potential case, the people said. Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close; it would be unusual for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, to notify a potential defendant without ultimately seeking charges against him.
In New York, potential defendants have the right to answer questions in the grand jury before they are indicted, but they rarely testify, and Mr. Trump is likely to decline the offer. His lawyers could also meet privately with the prosecutors in hopes of fending off criminal charges.
Any case would mark the first indictment of a former American president, and could upend the 2024 presidential race. It would also elevate Mr. Bragg to the national stage, though not without risk.
Mr. Trump has faced an array of criminal investigations and special counsel inquiries over the years but has never been charged with a crime, underscoring the gravity of Mr. Bragg’s inquiry.
Mr. Bragg could become the first prosecutor to charge Mr. Trump, but he might not be the last.
In Georgia, the Fulton County District Attorney is investigating whether Mr. Trump interfered in the 2020 election, and at the federal level, a special counsel is scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election results, as well as his handling of classified documents.
The Manhattan inquiry, which has spanned nearly five years, centers on a $130,000 payment to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign. The payment was made by Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, who was later reimbursed by Mr. Trump from the White House. Mr. Cohen is expected to testify in front of the grand jury, but has not yet done so.
The district attorney’s office has already questioned at least six other people before the grand jury, according to several other people with knowledge of the inquiry.
Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors have not finished the grand jury presentation and he could still decide against seeking an indictment.
Mr. Trump has previously said that the prosecutors are engaged in a “witch hunt” against him that began before he became president, and has called Mr. Bragg, a Democrat who is Black, a politically motivated “racist.”
A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment.
Even if Mr. Trump is indicted, convicting him or sending him to prison will be challenging. The case against the former president hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws, all amounting to a low-level felony. If Mr. Trump were ultimately convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers are also sure to attack Mr. Cohen, who in 2018 pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money.
The $130,000 payout came during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Ms. Daniels’s representatives contacted the National Enquirer to offer exclusive rights to her story about an affair with Mr. Trump. David Pecker, the tabloid’s publisher and a longtime ally of Mr. Trump, had agreed to look out for potentially damaging stories about him during the 2016 campaign, and at one point even agreed to buy the story of another woman’s affair with Mr. Trump and never publish it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”
But Mr. Pecker didn’t bite at Ms. Daniels’s story. Instead, he and the tabloid’s top editor, Dylan Howard, helped broker a separate deal between Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels’s lawyer. Mr. Trump later reimbursed Mr. Cohen through monthly checks.
In the federal case against Mr. Cohen, prosecutors said that Mr. Trump’s company “falsely accounted” for the monthly payments as legal expenses and that company records cited a retainer agreement with Mr. Cohen. Although Mr. Cohen was a lawyer, and became Mr. Trump’s personal attorney after he took office, there was no such retainer agreement and the reimbursement was unrelated to any legal services Mr. Cohen performed.
In New York, falsifying business records can amount to a crime, albeit a misdemeanor. To elevate the crime to a felony charge, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors must show that Mr. Trump’s “intent to defraud” included an intent to commit or conceal a second crime.
In this case, that second crime could be a violation of New York State election law. While hush money is not inherently illegal, the prosecutors could argue that the $130,000 payout effectively became an improper donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign, under the theory that because the money silenced Ms. Daniels, it benefited his candidacy.
Combining the criminal charge with a violation of state election law would be a novel legal theory for any criminal case, let alone one against the former president, raising the possibility that a judge or appellate court could throw it out or reduce the felony charge to a misdemeanor.
This is not the first Manhattan grand jury to hear evidence about Mr. Trump. Before leaving office at the end of 2021, Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had directed prosecutors to begin presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury. That potential case focused on the former president’s business practices, in particular whether he fraudulently inflated his net worth by billions of dollars in order to secure favorable terms on loans and other benefits.
But Mr. Bragg, soon after taking office last year, grew concerned about the strength of that case and halted the presentation, prompting two senior prosecutors leading the investigation to resign.
Still, the portion of the investigation concerned with Mr. Trump’s net worth is continuing, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Defendants rarely choose to testify before a grand jury and it is highly unlikely that Mr. Trump would do so. As a potential defendant, he would have to waive immunity, meaning that his testimony could be used against him if he were charged. Although he could have a lawyer present in the grand jury to advise him, the lawyer would be prohibited from speaking to the jurors, and there would be few limits on the questions prosecutors could ask the former president.
In recent years, Mr. Trump has been wary of answering questions under oath, given the legal intrigue swirling around him. When the New York attorney general deposed him last year in a civil case, Mr. Trump refused to provide any information, availing himself of his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions more than 400 times over the course of four hours. If he testifies about the hush money to this grand jury, he will not have that option.
Maggie Haberman and Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.
William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer on the Metro desk, where he covers political and municipal corruption, courts, terrorism and law enforcement. He was a part of the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. @WRashbaum • Facebook
Ben Protess is an investigative reporter covering the federal government, law enforcement and various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies. @benprotess
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney's office, state criminal courts in Manhattan and New York City's jails. @jonesieman
Trump posts then deletes item threatening ‘death and destruction’ if indicted, showing him holding baseball bat with Bragg’s head nearby
Coming off the best week he’s had in a long time, playing Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for a chump by predicting his arrest last week, dominating the news and raising legitimate questions about the weakness of the case, Donald Trump has shot himself in the foot. In the process, he has damaged the conservative cause debunking the phony "insurrection" narrative.
At least, he realized it, and deleted a Truth Social posting in which he had a picture of himself holding a baseball bat next to a picture of the corpulent DA.
(source)
My friend and colleague Andrea Widburg notes that the picture automatically appeared when Trump used a National File article containing it.
The National File chose to juxtapose the image of Trump holding a bat in 2017 with a picture of Alvin Bragg. That editorial decision makes it seem as if Trump is swinging the bat in Bragg’s direction.
What’s important to emphasize is that the photo comes from The National File and appeared automatically in Trump’s “truth” sharing the article about Bragg’s unpopularity and lack of mandate....
I am afraid that when you have to explain, you are losing. Trump owns Truth Social, and can be expected to understand how images appear. I don't know how long it took him to delete the post, but it appears that it was not immediate, when he discovered that he had inadvertently posted a quesitonable image.
He must have thought that he was trolling his opponents, hoping to goad them into hysteria so extreme that it would alienate people. And, to adopt the language featured by the MSM, “critics pounced” with some citing the infamous scene in The Untouchables movie version, written by David Mamet, in which Al Capone bloodily beats to death an associate who has displeased him with a baseball bat to the head, and others a scene of similar baseball bat mayhem from the movie The Warriors.
Equally counter-productive was his threat of “death and destruction.” Evidence that was suppressed by the Jan. 6 Committee is coming out that has been raising serious questions about the “insurrection” narrative put out by the Dems. Now, by invoking what looks like a threat of lethal mayhem, Trump has damaged the re-assessment process.
I generally look for Trump’s reasoning in taking actions that outrage his critics. Often, he is talking right past them, and often targets people that his critics disregard, at their own peril. But I don’t see this post on Truth Social as accomplishing anything for Trump, and harming himself with people that might be persuaded to support him. Worst of all, he has reinforced the “insurrection” narrative.
Settling With Kushner Companies Was Hard. Getting Money to Former Tenants May Be Harder.
A decade ago, Jasmine Cox was living with her young son in the Cove Village rental complex in Essex, Maryland, just east of Baltimore, when she started experiencing a plague of problems. The bedroom ceiling started leaking one day, then maggots started coming out of the living room carpet, and then raw sewage started flowing out of the kitchen sink, she said. She stopped cooking to keep food away from the sink. With so much black mold around, her son started needing an inhaler. When she moved out soon afterward, the landlord, Westminster Management, sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs.
The experience haunted her for years. So she was hit with a welter of emotions when she recently received a letter at her new home from the Maryland attorney general, alerting her that she could apply for restitution from Westminster, the property management arm of Kushner Companies, the family real estate company of Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a former senior adviser to the president. She has started going through old SD cards and photo-storage apps to find pictures of the apartment woes to submit with the claims form that accompanied the letter. “We were living in a biohazard,” she said. “I’m just glad something has come about to compensate people, to clear things up.”
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The letter and claims form are part of a massive, highly unusual effort on the part of the attorney general’s office: trying to alert some 30,000 people who lived in Westminster Management’s 17 Baltimore-area complexes during the past decade that they may be eligible for restitution. In 2017, the office launched an investigation of the company following a report co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine on the company’s aggressive pursuit of current and former tenants over allegations of unpaid rent and poor upkeep of many of the units, which New Jersey-based Kushner Companies started buying in 2012 and has mostly sold off in recent years.
Last September, the office’s Consumer Protection Division announced a settlement with Westminster: a $3.25 million fine and the promise of uncapped restitution to tenants of the complexes who could show that they had suffered serious maintenance troubles that Westminster was slow to address. Under the settlement, Westminster would also automatically reimburse tenants and former tenants for excessive fees they had been charged over the years in addition to their rent.
Now comes the hardest part: finding the tens of thousands of people who resided at the Westminster Management properties to let them know about their chance at restitution, a task made all the more challenging by the high levels of transience at the complexes. Just 8,700 of the 30,000 people who were mailed claims forms by a claims administrator since mid-December are still living at the complexes.
“Some people won’t be reachable,” acknowledged then-Attorney General Brian Frosh in an interview with The Baltimore Banner when the settlement was announced in September. “Some people will say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t take days off work again to go do this, I mean what am I going to get out of it?’” He guessed that fewer than half of eligible tenants will participate in the process.
By the end of January, 281 claims had been filed. “It’s a little lower than we expected,” said Attorney General Anthony Brown, who took office last month.
The attorney general’s office is contacting tenants to confirm that they’ve received the claims form, according to spokesperson Aleithea Warmack. Any money left over from the initial $800,000 slice of the settlement set aside for tenant restitution will go to a fund to pay for attorneys for people facing eviction, according to recent legislation. If the restitution exceeds $800,000, the company will have to pay that amount on top of the $3.25 million penalty.
Among those the state and Westminster have so far failed to reach is Andre Willingham, a longtime resident of Dutch Village, a complex on the northern edge of Baltimore. The 58-year-old, who is on disability from injuries sustained from years working as a restaurant cook, has lived at the complex with his family for nine years, but he said he had not received anything in the mail.
If he had received it, he said, he would have filed a claim, listing the problems he experienced in the family’s two-bedroom unit, for which they pay $1,100 in rent: rodents, a broken toilet, no heat. But he worried about the fact that he did not have documentation of the problems. “It’s a sad thing they’re just coming out with it,” he said.
Separate from the restitution process for maintenance problems, which requires submitting a claim by Dec. 19, many tenants will be receiving reimbursements for fees they were improperly charged by Westminster. This will not require them to send in claims forms; the company is required to compile a list of eligible tenants by May and send them payments by August.
Those claims alone will likely total several hundred thousand or even a million dollars, Brown estimated. The attorney general’s office will follow up in early 2024 to confirm that payments were successfully deposited or, if not, to make sure former tenants who are owed money are located. Current and former tenants will also have a second opportunity to seek damages for the improper fees in a class-action lawsuit that won a successful appeal last month.
The claims process for maintenance-related issues is somewhat more cumbersome — and the first stage relies on Westminster. The company will make an initial determination of how much compensation claimants are owed. If the tenants are not satisfied, they can elect to have their case heard in court or remotely by retired state Judge Nathan Braverman, who was retained by the attorney general’s office as a special master in the cases, according to Brown. “The rules of evidence are relaxed,” Brown said, adding, “You don’t have to prove any amount of damages — it’s presumed that you suffered damages.”
It’s an approach that he believes his office is the first in the country to implement. “We really think that it’s novel, and we think it can be an effective way to really get recovery for these aggrieved renters.”
But how many current and former tenants will actually take advantage of this process remains an open question, and one that will have a big impact on how much money Westminster is actually required to pay out.
For one tenant, the process has so far proved disappointing. Bonita Barrett, a retired grocery worker, contended for years with a slew of maintenance problems in her unit at Dutch Village, including leaks, mold, and a lack of heat. She was excited to receive the letter and claims form, and checked off most of the 10 upkeep problems listed as eligible for compensation before mailing it off. “They was thieves,” she said. “I hope we get what we deserve.”
But last week, Barrett got a call from a New Jersey number in response to her claims form. The woman on the line told her that she was eligible for $200 in compensation, which Barrett found insultingly inadequate for everything she had dealt with over the years. “$200? That’s nothing compared to what I went through,” she said. “You’re just going to offer us something to say you’re doing something. They’re just trying to give us the cheapest amount they can.” (In response to questions, Kushner Companies Chief Operating Officer Peter Febo wrote: “Westminster takes the Consent Order seriously and continues to comply with it in all respects. The mechanics and details of the claims process were agreed to between the Consumer Protection Division and Westminster.”)
Barrett said the woman told her that she could not qualify for a larger sum because she did not have evidence of the extent of the problems; the woman noted that Westminster’s records showed 16 completed work orders for her unit. But, Barrett said, that didn’t address how long it often took to complete that work.
On the call, the Westminster representative told Barrett that if she was unsatisfied with the $200 settlement, she could appeal to the special master. But that struck Barrett as unappealing. Wasn’t the purpose of this extended process to keep tenants from having to fight Kushner Companies again? The attorney general’s office had designed the appeal process to be as consumer-friendly as possible, but that’s not the impression she got from the call.
“She said you can go to court, but how long would that take? That could take as long as they did here,” she said. “It took them long enough to get to where we are now.”
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE LINKS
Trumpoholics Anonymous
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjkb311hVMA
Tucker: This is an abuse of power
Victorious Democrats would also end congressional investigations into the Hillary-Deep State-DNC-Russian-Clinton Foundation collusion and corruption. All the players in these massive, sordid affairs will be deemed “too big to jail” – and too closely tied to the Democratic Party to be investigated further.
Bill Clinton’s Corrupt Love Affair With Putin
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/bill-clintons-corrupt-love-affair-putin-daniel-greenfield/
Hillary Clinton's Russia collusion IOU: The answers she owes America
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446736-hillary-clintons-russia-collusion-iou-the-answers-she-owes-america
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION
During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before America’s most powerful political woman.
Judicial Watch: Only Crimes in Russia Scandal Are from ‘Obama Gang’
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE DICTATOR
Barack Obama’s Russia Connection
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/06/barack-obamas-russian-connection-who.html
If Obama was a fully recruited agent of Moscow, tasked with giving Russia a significant military advantage over the United States, and economically weakening and socially dividing the nation, how would he have conducted his presidency (or his post-presidency) any differently? TREVOR LOUDON
We are all victims of the Obama cabal’s collusion with Russia – President Trump’s voters and all Americans who believe in our free and fair election
Fast-forward to today's still vocal Obama gang. Why no
indictments? Mum's the word. Can anyone hold to the
faith in American justice? Those who support the rule of
law feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. It's
coming — oh, wait, it's coming...oh, wait...
GORDON WYSON
Democrats Allow Communists to Infiltrate Their Party Across the Nation
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/06/obamas-lackey-judge-blakey-hands-obomb.html
“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing.”
“Professor Paul Kengor has extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.”
We are all victims of the Obama cabal’s collusion with Russia – President Trump’s voters and all Americans who believe in our free and fair election process.
The last thing the Clintons wanted was democracy and an end to the corruption.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Bill Clinton, once the youngest governor in the country, now only four years younger than Biden, came out of the shadows with a defensive op-ed, titled, “I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path”.
While the Clintons, like Obama, fashionably embraced Putin-bashing when it served their agenda of inventing a Russia scandal as a pretext for discrediting the 2016 presidential election and spying on their Republican political opponents, Bill’s history tells a very different story.
In My Life, his 2004 memoir, Bill Clinton praises Putin and uses him to attack Republicans.
After his first meeting with Putin, Bill Clinton wrote that he came away believing “Yeltsin had picked a successor who had the skills and capacity for hard work necessary to manage Russia’s turbulent political and economic life" and the "toughness to defend Russia’s interests". He called Putin's appointment, which helped end democracy in Russia, a "wise and shrewd move".
After Putin was elected, Bill Clinton recollects that he "hung up the phone thinking he was tough enough to hold Russia together." Soon Clinton is using Putin to bash Republicans, sneering that "even the Russian Duma was more progressive on arms control than the U.S. Senate" and supporting Putin's refusal to hold off on the anti-ballistic missile treaty because "Republicans had been enamored of missile defense since the Reagan era, and many of them wouldn’t hesitate to abrogate the ABM Treaty in order to deploy it." Putin good, Republicans bad.
Why was Bill Clinton flattering Putin in his autobiography?
The memoir was published in 2004. In 2005, Bill Clinton and uranium tycoon Frank Giustra visited Kazakhstan and cut a deal for the company that would become Uranium One to buy into the country's state-owned uranium mines. Clinton foundations picked up over $100 million while Uranium One gobbled up uranium assets to eventually resell to Russia.
The deal that allowed Russia's state-owned Rosatom to buy Uranium One was lubricated by millions more in donations to the Clinton Foundation and a $500,000 speaking fee from a Russian investment bank for Bill Clinton during which the former president met with Putin.
This was Clinton’s actual corrupt vision for Russia. The Russiagate dirty tricks operation came out of a network of business interests plugged into the Kremlin. The executive at the heart of Russiagate was a Clinton aide who “frequently interacted with senior Russian Federation leadership" and “set up meetings with senior Russian government officials” The dossier was touted by a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch close to Putin who had also employed both Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS: the tools for the attack on the 2016 election.
While we’ve heard about this often enough in the context of domestic corruption, the Clintons and their inner and outer circles were enthusiastic participants in the corruption of Russia.
Putin was not an unfortunate detour from democracy, as Bill Clinton insists, but exactly the sort of man to perpetuate the corrupt system that the Clintons and their special interests wanted.
The last thing the Clintons wanted for Russia was democracy and an end to the corruption.
Bill Clinton complains that Putin “could have used Russia’s prodigious skills in information technology to create a competitor for Silicon Valley and build a strong, diversified economy. Instead he decided to monopolize and weaponize those abilities to promote authoritarianism at home and wreak havoc abroad, including by interfering in the politics of Europe and the U.S.”
The Clintons didn’t want a strong, diversified economy for America, let alone Russia.
And it was the Clintons who got Putin involved in interfering in American politics. The millions funneled into Clinton foundations helped maintain staff and cultivate donors for Hillary’s presidential campaigns. And then Clintonworld figures used their Kremlin links to manufacture Russiagate and create the false narrative that Bill Clinton is still trying to keep alive.
In his op-ed, Bill Clinton touts the role of former Defense Secretary William Cohen. He neglects to mention that the Cohen Group, aside from its notorious ties to China, has boasted of "decades of experience working with officials in Moscow", and "building relationships with government decision makers". Two years ago, Cohen was claiming that "President Putin is going to try and step in and be the peacemaker here” between America and Iran.
Bill Clinton defends former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Once again her Albright Stonebridge Group promised to advise clients how to do business in Russia by enlisting politically connected former Russian government officials. This is typical of Clintonworld.
Under Bill Clinton and his wife, Putin's regime became wealthier and more powerful as donors moved money into Russia and into the various Clinton enterprises including from a Putin-linked billionaire who was sanctioned under Trump and has been sanctioned now yet again.
The Clintons were complicit in enabling the dumping of cheap Russian uranium in America, thereby destroying our domestic mining industry and funding Russia’s military industries.
Bill and Hillary Clinton did not try to “democratize” Russia, rather political and business interests in both countries joined forces to cash in while corrupting both America and Russia. Democracy had made it difficult for foreign companies to pursue business interests in Russia. With Putin in power, surrounded by his ‘siloviki’, it was easy to know who to bribe in order to make a deal.
And the Clintons, with their connections, were a conduit for donors looking to make a deal.
The problems only began when Putin, unsatisfied with controlling Russia’s economy, and those of a few allied former republics, began to expand his sphere of economic influence by force.
Even at this late date, Bill Clinton is pretending that he was a benevolent public servant who was only thinking of what would be best for America, Russia, and the world, not the Clintons.
The ugly truth is that the Clintons led the way in corrupting and making the world less democratic. The fall of the Soviet Union had opened up opportunities to change the world that the Clintons transmuted into corrupt deals with oligarchies that swiftly became tyrannies. The springtime of the world that millions of Americans had struggled and fought for during the Cold War instead became an opportunity for our political class to score a few million here and there.
Not only didn’t Russia and China become more democratic, but America came to resemble them. The corrupt entanglements of Hunter and James Biden, like those of the families of John Kerry, Harry Reid, Neil Bush, and other political class players sold out democracy for corruption.
Hunter Biden with his prostitutes, Chinese billionaires, and crack habit is just the latest incarnation of the Clinton model in which our oligarchs and theirs do dirty deals together.
And the world is a worse place for it.
"Before I left Moscow, Putin hosted a small dinner in the Kremlin with a jazz concert afterward," Bill Clinton recalled in My Life. "John Podesta, who loved jazz as much as I did, agreed with me that we had never heard a finer live performance."
John Podesta's brother, Tony and his Podesta Group, went on to work for a Putin puppet and were shut down when they were caught up in a Russiagate investigation. Tony Podesta has since been paid $1 million to lobby the Biden administration by China's Huawei which is now also playing a major role in Putin’s Russia.
It’s a hell of a live performance. And they’ve got a hell of a band.
The coming Trump arrest is a very dangerous power play
My mom used a pressure cooker that was the terror of the household. It bounced around all over the counter and, unless the heat was applied and the pressure released with incredible care, it was like having a bomb in the kitchen. When I look at what the Democrats are doing in America, I am reminded of that pressure cooker. Their latest scheme is to Trump’s arrest even as they announce that they are doubling down on persecuting the almost entirely peaceful J6 protesters who unwittingly trespassed in the Capitol. The first action builds pressure; the second denies Americans their constitutional safety valve. I fear that this cannot end well.
Let’s think about the chronology just to make sure we understand what’s going on:
The Tea Party emerged in 2009. Even though its rallies were peaceful and always left the rally locations immaculate, Democrats in and out of the media described Tea Partiers as dangerous, racist, wild-eyed activists. The template was in place.
Trump mulled the idea of running for president, and leftists were initially excited because they foresaw an easy Hillary victory against him.
Trump became the primary candidate, the crowds turning out for him were unprecedented, and Hillary was revealed to have violated multiple national security laws, only to limp into the election thanks to a James Comey “fix.”
Trump won, and Democrats had a massive, very public, complete mental breakdown.
Shortly before Trump entered office, high-level Democrats (Hillary? Obama?) instituted what came to be the Russia collusion hoax.
These ordinary Americans at a Tea Party protest in 2009 are the same ones the Democrats targeted on J6 and are targeting now. Photo by a1mega. CC BY 2.0.
Despite the Russia collusion hoax, the Ukraine phone call hoax, a failed impeachment, and myriad other faux scandals, Trump looked like a shoo-in for reelection. The economy was booming, China was being constrained, illegal immigration was diminishing, peace was blossoming in the Middle East, and there were no new wars or concentration camps. Something needed to be done. Enter COVID.
Democrats use COVID to shut down the economy, close schools, censor speech, and institute mail-in balloting that, in many states, was illegal according to their own constitutions. Most significantly, they use the self-inflicted death of a felon with major heart disease who’d taken fatal levels of illegal drugs as an excuse to launch the BLM revolution. And it was a revolution, designed to overthrow the government through hysterical racial division and attacks on America’s infrastructure: cities burned, and activists targeted the White House, law enforcement, and the federal judiciary. (Remember the Portland federal courthouse siege?)
The election results are ludicrous. A hugely successful president who managed rallies with tens of thousands of people despite COVID and who had caused significant numbers of minorities to cross to his side lost to a corrupt, demented, racist, and very stupid puppet who campaigned from his basement, in an election riddled with manifest problems, everything from mail-in voting (with all the evidence and envelopes immediately and illegally destroyed), to counting stoppages in the middle of the night.
Trump asks people to protest, clearly meaning a peaceful, First Amendment protest, something he emphasized several times on January 6. Cheerful, non-violent people head to the Capitol to make their voices heard. Unbeknownst to them, they’ve been set up. Despite warnings about potential violence, Nancy Pelosi refuses more security and keeps the Capitol Police in the dark. Operatives tell Trump supporters to enter the Capitol, remove the “no trespassing” signs, and force entry into the building.
Two weeks ago, by showing that the QANON shaman narrative was a lie, Tucker Carlson busted the cornerstone of the J6 narrative. Remember, as the law has said for over 300 years, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (“False in one thing, false in everything.”)
Then, two things just happened simultaneously, one of which you know and one of which you may not know:
You already know that Trump announced last week that he’s about to be arrested—on a charge Manhattan DA Bragg must know is invalid—and he asks people to protest:
What you may not know is that at roughly the same time, the DOJ warned the D.C. federal court that, despite already charging more than 1,000 people for unwittingly entering the Capitol on J6 (thanks to those unindicted operatives), it still plans to indict more than 1,000 other people on J6 charges.
Democrats have created a situation in which Trump supporters will inevitably protest (egged on by Trump himself), and they’re making it plain that they will destroy anyone who protests this time around. Conservatives are about to be caught in an incredibly dangerous pincer move.
The fact is that what’s happening is deserving of protest. What we’re seeing is that, to those in power, there are two legal systems in America. Democrats have demanded the de-incarceration of violent criminals, defunded the police, refused to arrest or charge the BLM and Antifa activists who caused billions of dollars of damage and dozens of deaths, stopped enforcing our border laws, and given a pass to everyone from Hillary Clinton to the Biden family for corruption and national security violations. Meanwhile, they’re suddenly all about “law and order” when it comes to entrapping and destroying the common people who, by exercising their First Amendment rights, stand between Democrats and total political power.
This is creating a dangerously volatile situation that Democrats only think they can control. When legal, unarmed, only marginally violent protests are turned into the “most dangerous insurrection since the civil war,” the Democrats have effectively closed a safety valve available only in free societies. Now, they’re making it plain that they intend to increase the pressure while still keeping the valve closed. Unless conservatives thread this needle with incredible wisdom, I’m afraid that the pressure in America may build to uncontrollable levels.
President Biden is more worried about Russians crossing their border with Ukraine than he is about the Russians crossing our border with Mexico.
The problem with America’s porous southern border and an unfinished wall to serve as a deterrent is the inability to know who has entered into the United States. Other than wanting to get into America without following the legal process, we know nothing about the countless illegals who are already here, including rough estimates that are close to accurate.
Border Patrol drone video of unknown illegals crossing the border
Most people who cross illegally may be decent and simply want to take care of their families as best they can. Then there are those unknown from all over the world who are not decent and have no honorable intentions. Without a means to identify people coming across the border illegally, there may very well be war criminals and other bad actors hiding from their own people.
Several outlets have reported Russians being found at the southern border. Not a small number, but thousands with no way to know how many Russians are in America illegally. The cartels deliver anyone who will pay without question.
On January 30 of this year, Business Insider had an article by Sarah Al-Arshani, The US southern border saw a growing number of migrants from Russia, Ukraine, and other distant countries last month, stated:
“In December, over 2,000 Russians and 300 Ukrainians made their way to the border. Axios reported most of them had either arrived or were found at a legal port of entry in San Diego, California.”
Over 2000 Russian at a single port of entry who were caught, compared to how many at other points in last December alone who made it into the United States. There are several unverified stories about Russian saboteurs who were already in Ukraine before Russia invaded, which is certainly in line with Putin’s history.
The Russians who are currently in the United States illegally are an unknown threat. Not just the potential added ranks to the Russian mob, one of the most brutal organized criminal organizations in the world, if not the worst, but Russian saboteurs as well.
Ukraine has been invaded, again. Under another Democratic president who will do nothing, just like Obama with Crimea. If sanctions worked, there would have been no invasion a second time and Crimea would have returned to Ukraine. What are new sanctions going to do to Putin? Same thing as the old. Absolutely nothing.
If there are enough saboteurs in place and the Russian Mob supplying weapons, we could be very busy fighting an enemy from within and without. An attack on American power grids would be devastating to the country and easy target with the right military hardware in place.
That is just one of numerous potential targets that could easily be attacked by Russian saboteurs that are most likely already in the United States. Motivated individuals have carried out devastating attacks against America in the past through military or terroristic actions and will do so in the future.
Considering the weakness of Biden, God help all Americans if it happens during his presidency.
Top State Official Sounded Alarm About ‘Conflict of Interest’ Linked to Hunter Biden’s Work in Ukraine
The Obama administration allowed former Vice
President Joe Biden’s son Hunter to continue
working for Ukrainian company Burisma, even
after learning that the firm and its owner were
corrupt, top U.S. State Department official
George Kent testified, according to transcripts
released Thursday.
Hunter served on Burisma’s board of directors from 2014 until April of this year.
In 2014, the U.S. spent hundreds of thousands in American taxpayer funds on assisting an investigation into corrupt activities linked to Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky, Kent revealed.
During his closed-door deposition on October 15, Kent told House impeachment investigators that he raised concerns about Biden’s lucrative position in 2015.
According to the transcripts, Kent, a deputy assistant secretary charged with overseeing U.S. policy towards Ukraine, testified:
The first time I was in Ukraine as acting deputy chief of mission in the period of mid-January to mid-February 2015, subsequent to me going into the deputy prosecutor general on February 3rd and demanding who took the bribe and how much was it to shut the case against Zlochevsky I became aware that Hunter Biden was on the board. I did not know that at the time.
And when I was on a call with somebody on the vice president’s staff and I cannot recall who it was, just briefing on what was happening into Ukraine I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest.
The United States spent “roughly half a million dollars” in support of a Zlochevsky-linked investigation in 2014 — the year Burisma hired Hunter, Kent revealed.
Kent indicated that then-VP Biden’s staff dismissed his concerns about Hunter’s work in Ukraine.
“The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son Beau Biden was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth to deal with family related issues at that time,” he testified.
“That was the end of that conversation” about Hunter Biden’s conflict of interest in Ukraine, Kent later added.
Kent said he first visited the U.S. embassy in Ukraine in mid-January 2015. He indicated that he soon learned Burisma was corrupt.
“Burisma had a reputation for being, first of all, one of the largest private producers of natural gas in Ukraine but also had a reputation for not being the sort of corporate, cleanest member of the business community,” the top State official said.
He testified that he was so concerned about Burisma’s reputation that he put the breaks on coordinated activity between the company and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
House Democrats pursuing the impeachment probe have accused Trump of abusing his power by pressuring his Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July 25 call to investigate corruption allegations against the Bidens, allegedly in exchange for aid.
Trump, Zelensky, and some impeachment probe witnesses, including Kent, have denied the claim. Other witnesses, however, have presumed that a quid pro quo took place in which Trump leveraged U.S. aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.
Kent testified that he had no “direct knowledge” of the alleged link between America’s security assistance to Ukraine and the Eastern European country opening of new investigations.
He also told investigators that it is appropriate for the Trump administration to “look at the level of corruption” in foreign countries like Ukraine when determining whether to provide or withhold aid.
The former vice president threatened to withhold aid himself to Ukraine to force the Eastern European country to fire its top prosecutor in 2016, who had investigated the owner of Burisma for possible corruption.
Until recently, Hunter served on the board of Burisma for up to $83,000 per month despite having no background in energy. His position prompted allegations of corruption.
Hunter admitted to ABC News last weekend that his father’s political position helped him secure the lucrative appointment to Burisma’s board of directors.
Based on Kent’s testimony, Trump had reason to be concerned about corruption linked to Hunter Biden’s position.
Fast-forward to today's still vocal Obama gang. Why no
indictments? Mum's the word. Can anyone hold to the
faith in American justice? Those who support the rule of
law feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. It's
coming — oh, wait, it's coming...oh, wait...
GORDON WYSON
Judicial Watch: Only Crimes in Russia Scandal Are from ‘Obama Gang’
Will We Ever Prosecute?
Imagine that the local cops know that a gang member, named William, broke into the pawn shop and stole guns, jewelry, and money. William's fingerprints, film image, and DNA add to the hard evidence log. The owner knows it; the prosecutor knows it; William's gang associates know it. But he is not arrested. Nearby shopkeepers and neighborhood mothers are asking why he is walking the street. No one explains it; mum's the word. Could it be there is a grand plan to take out the gang's leaders? No one knows; mum's the word. Shopkeepers and residents are about to give up and start moving away from the area, and no one asks them to stay the course.
Fast-forward to today's still vocal Obama gang. Why no indictments? Mum's the word. Can anyone hold to the faith in American justice? Those who support the rule of law feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. It's coming — oh, wait, it's coming...oh, wait...
Without doubt, a criminal cabal is an extraordinarily complex organization, and understanding who did what, why, when, and how is a challenge to the mental faculties of anyone. But, what happens if the full scope of activities is never clear? Does everyone get off? Does complexity confer immunity?
In engineering, there is no perfect answer to anything, so changes are made incrementally, addressing the problems as they are recognized. Each step brings a clearer view of remaining problems, which are then addressed, each in its turn. The completed project is still flawed, but the solution is practical and productive.
So it should be with a grandiose scheme like the Russia Hoax. The ringleaders don't have to be handled with kid gloves. They don't even have to be handled at all. Just start with the low-hanging fruit, and get as far as possible.
Those old enough to remember My Lai, Vietnam, know that Lt. Calley and Cpt. Medina were not alone in their actions. However, their prosecution forever changed the game of passing the buck on war crimes.
So, too, can rabid prosecution of bit players in the Russian Hoax forever change the landscape in plots involving treason. Those who would participate at the lower levels must know they are subject to prosecution, so they remain circumspect in such a re-enactment of the coup attempt. This would be the Achilles heel of another cabal — those who are intimidated by the prospect of prison. Those who realize they don't have sufficient rank to escape punishment will be loath to participate in such a scheme. Without them, there will be no operational viability to an unlawful coup.
Admittedly, there are always problems in pursuing a criminal case. It must be so under our Constitution, but it cannot be impossible!
Prosecutors don't get all the information, but at a certain point, for each criminal, evidence accumulates that there is a real and provable crime. It may not include every transgression of that person, nor is it the magic revelation, untangling the Gordian knot of the conspirators. It is a simple criminal act. It is what it appears, and it need not be put in the context of the big picture — it is as plain as the nose on your face.
That stage is the stimulus for a prosecutor. It is the time to move. If the DOJ acts, many of the sins can never be prosecuted, because the prosecution of their lesser crimes may foreclose pursuit of other crimes under double jeopardy protection. However, failure to move puts evidence and witnesses at risk of being lost. This point has passed for so many of the coup conspirators that it seems there will be no justice for many of them, like Lois Lerner.
Why?
A full recounting of all that is already known would be tedious, and to expound on the criminal conduct yet again seems shrill. It is not necessary to understand the intertwining of all the crimes before simply bringing the charges that are facially obvious. But the deferral of prosecution, for whatever reason it is done, allows many of the cabal to walk free when they shouldn't. In fact, the indication is that they are continuing the very conduct for which they should be prosecuted.
Why has McCabe not been charged with lying to the FBI, lying under oath? Nothing more is needed to start the dominos falling. Who will step forward to exonerate him? No one can, and no one will. That omission — of a vigorously supported defense — will send a message to the others in the coup conspiracy.
Why has Samantha Power not been indicted for violating national security requirements in unmasking or transferring her unmasking authority to others? It doesn't pass the smell test that she is too important to be prosecuted.
Why is Huma Abedin strolling around, free as a bird? She forwarded classified emails to Anthony Weiner's laptop. What else is needed to demonstrate a crime?
Did Strzok do anything? Did Page? Which one lied to Congress? Their contradictory accounts mean at least one is a perjurer. Sure, there is more "there" there, but it isn't necessary to keelhaul them; just send them to jail, and send others a message.
Listing all the cabal members, who are quite obviously criminal, is not easy — in fact, it is not doable. It need not be the aim. A public that finds this whole thing partisan or tedious will not be easily impressed if a 2,000-count indictment naming 43 people is suddenly dropped. Bringing along the public is certainly part of sending the message for future conspirators. It probably is better done gradually.
Removing the context and simply prosecuting crimes is the method to educate both today's and tomorrow's citizens.
Selecting single actors, and naming obvious crimes, will have a chance to convince even skeptical partisans that something is wrong. The lack of support from other participants will indeed remove most doubt.
The full scope of what has gone on will never be known, but the lessons for future participants in such a scheme is essential. The next time, the prosecution will be more severe, more certain, and more expedient. Protecting the Constitution is more important than perfect justice. Some miscreants will escape, but they will never sleep well again. The lesson must be taught.
A DOJ that fails to move loses its credibility and its honor. The foundation of the Republic is placed at risk. Without the rule of law, what do we have?
At some point, deferral of prosecution is dereliction or abetting. Has it reached that point?
Gordon Wysong is an engineer and entrepreneur who has served as a county commissioner in Cobb County, Ga.
Victorious Democrats would also end congressional investigations into the Hillary-Deep State-DNC-Russian-Clinton Foundation collusion and corruption. All the players in these massive, sordid affairs will be deemed “too big to jail” – and too closely tied to the Democratic Party to be investigated further. Paul Driessen
Hillary Clinton's Russia collusion IOU: The answers she owes America
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446736-hillary-clintons-russia-collusion-iou-the-answers-she-owes-america
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION
During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before America’s most powerful political woman.
The pattern of political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the State Department even tried to execute a special agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of “pay-to-play” policy.
Still, the money continued to flow by the millions of dollars, from foreigners and Americans alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in need of its help.
It’s time for the American public to call in their own IOU on political transparency.
The reason? Never before — until 2016 — had the apparatus of a U.S. presidential candidate managed to sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival nominee during an election, and by using a foreign-fed, uncorroborated political opposition research document.
But Clinton’s campaign, in concert with the Democratic Party and through their shared law firm, funded Christopher Steele’s unverified dossierwhich, it turns out, falsely portrayed Republican Donald Trump as a treasonous asset colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin to hijack the U.S. election.
Steele went to the FBI to get an investigation started and then leaked the existence of the investigation, with the hope of sinking Trump’s presidential aspirations.
On its face, it is arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history and one of the most overt intrusions of a foreigner into a U.S. election.
It appears the Clinton machine knew that what it was doing was controversial. That’s why it did backflips to disguise the operation from Congress and the public, and in its Federal Election Commission (FEC) spending reports.
Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) used the law firm of Perkins Coie to hire Glenn Simpson’s research firm, Fusion GPS, which then hired Steele — several layers that obfuscated transparency, kept the operation off the campaign’s public FEC reports and gave the Clintons plausible deniability.
But Steele’s first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI’s imagination. So the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr — whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion — to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI.
Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele’s dossier to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the FBI, too.
Then Steele and, separately, longtime Clinton protégé Cody Shearer went to the State Department to get the story out, increasing pressure on the FBI.
In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure — and bad intel — until an investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
To finish the mission, Simpson and Steele leaked the existence of the FBI investigation to the news media to ensure it would hurt Trump politically. Simpson even called the leaks a “hail Mary” that failed.
Trump won, however. And now, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller, we know the Russia-collusion allegations relentlessly peddled by Team Clinton were bogus. But not before the FBI used the Clinton-funded, foreign-created research to get a total of four warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency from October 2016 through the following autumn.
The Clinton team’s dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit job on Trump.
After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it’s time for the house to call in its IOU.
Hillary Clinton owes us answers — lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing many high-profile media interviews.
I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said Friday night on Fox News that it’s time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew it.
Here are 10 essential questions:
1. In January 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a formal investigative request for documents and written answers from your campaign. Do you plan to comply?
2. Please identify each person in your campaign who was involved with, or aware of, hiring Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele.
3. Please identify each person in your campaign, including Perkins Coie lawyers, who were aware that Steele provided information to the FBI or State Department, and when they learned it.
4. Describe any information you and your campaign staff received, or were briefed on, before Election Day that was derived from the work of Simpson, Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr or Perkins Coie and that tried to connect Trump, his campaign or his business empire with Russia.
5. Please describe all contacts your campaign had before Election Day with or about the following individuals: Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, former foreign policy scholar Stefan Halper and Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud.
6. Did you or any senior members of your campaign, including lawyers such as Michael Sussmann, have any contact with the CIA, its former Director John Brennan, current Director Gina Haspel, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe?
7. Describe all contacts your campaign had with Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal concerning Trump, Russia and Ukraine.
8. Describe all contacts you and your campaign had with DNC contractorAlexandra Chalupa, the Ukraine government, the Ukraine Embassy in the United States or the U.S. Embassy in Kiev concerning Trump, Russia or former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
9. Why did your campaign and the Democratic Party make a concerted effort to portray Trump as a Russian asset?
10. Given that investigations by a House committee, a Senate committee and a special prosecutor all have concluded there isn’t evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, do you regret the actions by your campaign and by Steele, Simpson and Sussmann to inject these unfounded allegations into the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and the news media?
Hillary Clinton owes us answers to each of these questions. She should skip the lawyer-speak and answer them with the candor worthy of an elder American stateswoman.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
Victorious Democrats would also end congressional investigations into the Hillary-Deep State-DNC-Russian-Clinton Foundation collusion and corruption. All the players in these massive, sordid affairs will be deemed “too big to jail” – and too closely tied to the Democratic Party to be investigated further.
Hillary Clinton's Russia collusion IOU: The answers she owes America
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446736-hillary-clintons-russia-collusion-iou-the-answers-she-owes-america
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION
During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before America’s most powerful political woman.
Pretending Hunter Biden Is Irrelevant
The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump should begin with an indictment of the media. The alleged crime committed by Trump revolves around his request that the president of Ukraine investigate Hunter Biden's shady business dealings with a corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas company when Joe Biden was vice president.
That investigation might have been unnecessary had the news media chosen to do what they're supposed to do: investigative journalism.
Why would Trump have to ask a foreign official for an investigation into Biden sleaze? Because when politicians have a D next to their name, the idea of the press holding people accountable goes out the window.
It is unfathomable that the American news media would choose not to investigate the activities of the vice president of the United States. Joe Biden used his portfolio of experience running then-President Barack Obama's policies in Ukraine to get his son a "consulting" job for which he was wholly unqualified but that reportedly paid him a cool 50 grand a month. Then Biden bragged in public that he demanded Ukraine's top prosecutor be removed under threat of America pulling its military aid. The whole thing was stained by his son's business connection.
Maybe somehow they all just missed it. Except they didn't. They knew it was happening.
Then-New York Times investigative reporter James Risen published the story of Hunter Biden and the oil company, Burisma Holdings, in December 2015. But The Times buried it by putting it on page A-22. The national media yawned. In their political calculations, Joe Biden wasn't running for president, and since it was Lame Duck season, why make the Obama-Biden White House look bad?
Ever since Trump's asking about Hunter Biden in a phone call to Kiev became a scandal, our Accountability Police have routinely repeated like a dancing line of puppets that there is "no evidence the Bidens did anything wrong."
Democrats and their media friends also play dumb when Republicans insist Hunter Biden should be part of the Senate impeachment trial. On the Sunday network news shows, moderators asked Democrats for their feelings about Biden being a witness in the trial. Their answers needed a laugh track.
On ABC, Sen. Cory Booker told George Stephanopoulos with a straight face, "These assaults on the Biden family are not relevant to what's at issue in this case." On CNN, Sen. Sherrod Brown sounded like he had a low IQ. "I don't know what Hunter Biden has to do with the phone call," he said.
It's not that he doesn't know. It's that he, like Booker, doesn't want to know.
This entire impeachment is about protecting the Biden family from any scrutiny or criticism. So asking questions about the Bidens becomes a scandal and is somehow a massive attempt to despoil the 2020 election. Democracy dies when the Bidens are asked questions?
At least Rep Jerry Nadler tried a slightly different spin on CBS, and it was even more brazen. He insisted, "Hunter Biden has no knowledge of the accusations against the president." How exactly does Nadler know that? Has Hunter Biden been living in a cave for the last few months? Nadler's whopper set up his next statement: "Their asking for Hunter Biden is just more of a smear of Hunter Biden that the president is trying to get the Ukraine to do."
No one can question Hunter Biden on anything. This is not the way the media and the Democrats have treated Donald Trump Jr., or Eric Trump, or Ivanka Trump.
The first lesson of this impeachment charade? The double standards for politicians and their children are breathtaking.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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