AMERICA HAS NEVER HAD A GREATER TRAITOR THAN GAMER LAWYER JOE BIDEN.
McDowell: This pretty much sums up the Biden presidency
The Pentagon leaks and the US media
The response of the US media to a series of leaked Pentagon documents revealing US involvement in the Ukraine war raises far-reaching issues of democratic rights.
On Thursday, the New York Times publicly identified the individual who allegedly leaked Pentagon documents exposing US government lies about the Ukraine war, leading to his arrest.
The Times, working with the state-funded propaganda clearinghouse Bellingcat, publicly revealed the identity of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guard member. Teixeira was arrested just hours later.
There are indications that Teixeira holds repulsive fascist and antisemitic views. But Teixeira’s motivations do not change the fact that the documents he released caught the US government red-handed in systematically lying to the public in waging an undeclared war against Russia in Ukraine.
The documents showed that, contrary to false claims by the Biden administration, NATO troops are on the ground in Ukraine, NATO is directly involved in the war, and the Ukrainian military is in a far worse position than presented by news reports.
These documents have exposed not only the US government, but the New York Times and Washington Post, as liars.
In turn, the major US media outlets have responded by upholding, in principle, the right of the US government to lie to the public.
On Thursday, the Washington Post published an editorial headlined, “The Discord leaks show our nation’s secrets at risk.”
Nowhere in the editorial is there any criticism of the Biden administration for having lied to the American public. Instead, the editorial upholds government secrecy, and vowed to assist the government to keep the public from knowing what the government wishes to keep secret.
The editorial declared, “Keeping secrets is essential to a functioning government.”
In making this statement the Post, owned by the oligarch Jeff Bezos, has declared war on a fundamental precepts of democratic rule.
In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson asserted, “The diffusion of information and the arraignment of all abuses at the bar of public reason, I deem [one of] the essential principles of our government.” This is because, as Jefferson later explained, “Though [the people] may acquiesce, they cannot approve what they do not understand.”
In verbal deference to this principle, in order to give the United States’ entry into World War I a democratic veneer, the first of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points declared, “There shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
The “state secrets” exposed by the documents were secrets not from Russia, but from the American people.
The documents show that the government is fundamentally misleading the public about a foreign policy that threatens nuclear war and the destruction of human civilization.
By upholding the principle of “state secrets” with regard to US conduct in the Ukraine war, the Post upholds the right of the government to lie to the public with total impunity.
This takes the complicity of the US media in the crimes of US imperialism to an entirely new level: it has become an active co-partner with the government in preventing the development of an informed public opinion that could place restraints on the preparation, conduct and escalation of war.
In other words, the creation of a police state in America would not require a change in policy, much less a change in personnel, at the Washington Post.
The editorial did not explain the strange contrast between this sweeping assertion of government power over the public with the slogan on its masthead “democracy dies in darkness.”
A “national secret” is in fact a secret kept by one part of the “nation” from another. One part of the “nation”—the government and the financial oligarchy whose affairs they manage—is fully in on the secret. But the great mass of the population is only allowed to hear lies.
The fact that a 21-year-old National Guard airman had access to these supposedly highly secret and sensitive documents points to how widespread knowledge of US involvement in Ukraine is within the state, military, and media. In fact, the Washington Post has publicly admitted to having viewed hundreds of documents from the leak that the public has no access to.
The crime, in other words, is to inform the broader public about the lies of the US government. It is for this crime that Chelsea Manning spent seven years in prison, and for which Julian Assange is imprisoned to this day.
The US media, and the Times in particular, have long collaborated with the US government in promoting and justifying the crimes of US imperialism. But for the Times to publicly take actions that led directly to the arrest of a source of information vital to the public interest marks a milestone in the degeneration of the American press into an appendage of the state.
Anyone with information exposing criminal wrongdoing by the government cannot go to the New York Times, Washington Post, or other major US media outlet for fear of simply being handed over to the police or FBI. Conversely, the actions of the New York Times endangers all American journalists, who will now be accused of being nothing more than government spies.
Over 50 years ago, the New York Times and the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, exposing a systematic conspiracy by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations to wage an aggressive war in Vietnam, involving widespread war crimes by US troops, while misleading the public about the aims and extent of the war.
Under the standards now championed by the Times and the Post, not only Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, but the Times editors, journalists and publishers who printed them, would be liable to prosecution.
On Tuesday, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby called on the US media to stop publishing information contained in the documents, declaring, “It has no business … on the front pages of newspapers, or on television. It is not intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there.”
While the White House may wish the public to have no knowledge of its lies and crimes, and the mainstream media may oblige this request, the rise of the internet has made it impossible for the state to control public discourse.
In 2017, former Obama administration official Samantha Power lamented the waning of control by media corporations of the public discourse. She wrote, “During the Cold War, most Americans received their news and information via mediated platforms. Reporters and editors serving in the role of professional gatekeepers had almost full control over what appeared in the media.” The fact that “two-thirds of Americans are getting at least some of their news through social media” is, she wrote, dangerous.
This is why, when Julian Assange was seized from the Ecuadorian embassy, the Washington Post cheered the Trump administration’s arrest of the principled journalist, declaring in an editorial that “Mr. Assange is not a free-press hero,” and that he is “overdue for personal accountability.”
The contents of the leaked Pentagon documents point to the vital role played by the World Socialist Web Site. While the lies of the Times and the Post were exposed by the documents, the WSWS’s reporting has been confirmed. This is because, while the Times and Post sought to delude and lie to the working class, the WSWS fought to inform the public about the immense dangers posed by the escalation of the war.
The rallying by the media in defense of government lies is a desperate effort on the part of the financial oligarchy to head off a rising tide of social opposition. They believe that through the combination of lies and propaganda, they will be able to embroil the world in a war that will create the conditions for outlawing strikes and protests and guaranteeing the profits of the financial oligarchy.
But as Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” What the oligarchy most fears—the building of an international, socialist movement of the working class against imperialist war—is on the agenda.
May Day 2023 will be a vital step in the building of this movement. On Sunday, April 30, the International Committee of the Fourth International, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and the World Socialist Web Site will hold an online global May Day rally to mobilize workers and young people around the world against the war in Ukraine. We urge all of those who seek to oppose the war to register today.
Everything You Need to Know About the Alleged Pentagon Leaks
The FBI arrested alleged Pentagon leaker Jack Douglas Teixeira on Thursday, closing the first chapter of an ongoing story that still has many questions to answer – including whether the classified documents Teixeira posted online are accurate or not and how he came to possess them.
Here are the known facts of the case, as of Friday.
Who is the “leaker?” The suspect in custody is Jack Douglas Teixeira, a 21-year-old resident of North Dighton, Massachusetts. Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Thursday he was detained as part of “an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information.”
FBI agents arrested Teixeira without incident at his mother’s home. The FBI said its agents were heavily armed because they had reason to believe Teixeira owned multiple weapons.
“Since late last week the FBI has aggressively pursued investigative leads, and today’s arrest exemplifies our continued commitment to identifying, pursuing, and holding accountable those who betray our country’s trust and put our national security at risk,” the FBI said after the arrest.
Teixeira is an Airman First Class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, which is located at Joint Base Cape Cod in the eastern Massachusetts town of Bourne, about 50 miles from where the Teixeira family lives. His stepfather retired after serving in the same unit.
The 102nd Intelligence Wing is tasked with providing “worldwide precision intelligence and command and control along with trained and experienced airmen for expeditionary combat support and homeland security.” Among other duties, its personnel process data from reconnaissance planes and drones.
According to the BBC, Teixeira enlisted in 2019 and currently holds the position of Cyber Transport Systems journeyman, which means he works on the Air Force global communications network. He was on active duty at the time he allegedly exposed classified materials and may be punished more harshly as a result. He will probably face at least ten years in prison.
Teixeira would have needed to pass a background check to take the job, since it involves accessing classified information, although most observers of the case are puzzled about how Teixeira managed to obtain documents that were classified at such a high level.
The UK Daily Mail on Friday quoted a sworn statement from an FBI agent that said Teixeira “had held a top secret security clearance since 2021, and that he also maintained sensitive compartmented access to other highly classified programs.”
The suspect’s mother has worked for veterans’ non-profit organizations and posts family photos each year on Veterans Day. His stepfather is retired with 34 years of military service. Teixeira’s mother proudly charted her son’s progress in the Air National Guard with Facebook posts. When he graduated from tech school in June 2021, she posted a photo of a patriotic balloon tied to the family mailbox to welcome him home.
Neighbors told the BBC that Jack Teixeira was a “good kid, not a troublemaker,” had a “good head on his shoulders,” and was enthusiastic about joining the military.
What did he allegedly do? Teixeira is allegedly a video game enthusiast who created a group called “Thug Shaker Central” on a video, voice, and text platform called Discord during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020.
Gamers commonly use Discord to talk to each other while playing games, but it also offers chat groups and forums, where photos and videos can be shared along with typed messages. It is very easy to install and use – it can even be run within a web browser without installing any software – and basic accounts are free.
According to friends interviewed by the Washington Post, Teixeira created Thug Shaker Central under the user name “OG,” one of several accounts he maintained, to discuss his interests in guns, Catholicism, libertarian politics, and games. As with many people, his outspoken persona online was reportedly very different from the modest way he conducted himself in person.
Teixeira’s Discord group was fairly small, accepting new members by invitation only. It had about 30 members at its peak, including a number of teenage boys, who enjoyed telling politically incorrect jokes – the name of the group was borrowed from a gay pornography video – and egging each other on to greater heights of verbal transgression. Some frankly racist comments were made in the forum. The Washington Post summarized the bulk of the content posted by the group as “memes, offensive jokes, and idle chitchat.”
Some of them created fictitious identities for themselves, including a member living in Kentucky who pretended he was a Russian naval officer, a ruse that apparently prompted early suspicions that Teixeira’s group was created or infiltrated by foreign intelligence agents. The members who spoke to the Washington Post insisted they were just a rowdy crew of young people looking for online companionship during the lockdowns. A great deal of steam was blown off, but in addition to the trash talk, some members conducted serious discussions of the Ukraine war and prayed together online.
Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Teixeira began posting what he described as classified material on the forum. At first, he retyped what he claimed to have seen on these documents, but later he included photographic images of the originals. According to other group members, he switched to photos of the documents when he grew frustrated with the amount of work needed to retype them, and the inability of other members to understand military and intelligence jargon.
Teixeira is accused of ultimately leaking over a hundred purportedly classified documents, many of them pertaining to the Ukraine war. According to reports, he often presented these documents as evidence that every government involved in the conflict is lying to its citizens about the progress of the war. He also allegedly posted materials related to other news stories discussed in the Thug Shaker Central forum, including foreign interference in U.S. elections, U.S. interference in foreign governments, and the Chinese spy balloon saga.
Why did he allegedly post classified documents? Teixeira’s friends told reporters he does not view himself as a “whistleblower” in the vein of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who claimed his exposure of classified materials was conducted to defend privacy rights and expose government surveillance overreach.
Instead, Teixeira evidently posted these documents because he wanted to impress and educate other members of his Discord group, especially the younger members, who he viewed as proteges. The poster identified in reports as Teixeira escalated his activities when he did not think the others were paying enough attention to his opinions and the material he was exposing.
“He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” a teenage member of Thug Shaker Central told the Washington Post.
“He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them,” another said of the shared documents.
One of his friends said Teixeira saw his Discord forum as a means of “keeping kids informed about real-world issues.”
The leaker swore other group members to secrecy about the materials he was posting – a promise they kept with surprising fidelity, all things considered. Some of them told the media it took them a while to accept that he was posting genuine classified material, instead of fabrications he boastfully invented to make himself look important.
Several group members have told the media their forum was thick with “irony” and sarcasm, so it was difficult to tell exactly where Teixeira was coming from. He appears to have crafted a persona as a fiery libertarian individualist, an “anti-war Christian” who distrusted the U.S. government and had serious qualms about its Ukraine policy.
One forum member said Teixeira came to regret joining the military because he concluded it was “run by the elite politicians” and threatened to “kick [his] ass if I thought about joining.”
How did he get caught? The code of silence on Thug Shaker Central held remarkably firm until last month, at which time some of the members began sharing “OG’s” posts and classified documents in other Discord groups, apparently because they wanted to impress other users or win arguments with them.
This brought the alleged document leak to the attention of the media, generating a few big headline news stories and sparking an intense media manhunt for the original leaker. Open-source investigation website Bellingcat reported on Sunday that the New York Times (NYT) began digging into the story after five documents related to the Ukraine invasion were shared in Russian channels on the messaging platform Telegram.
Some of Teixeira’s docs were also posted on the notoriously rambunctious 4chan system, where one poster employed a classified document to win a petty argument with the message, “Source this dick, at least my piece of paper is more credible than hearsay.”
Bellingcat found another exposure of classified material in a March 4 Discord feud between players of the Minecraft computer game that concluded with one of them saying, “Here, have some leaked documents.” The accompanying images were of ten documents concerning the Ukraine war, some of them visibly stamped “Top Secret.”
These heated comments from 4chan and Discord users perfectly capture the overall tenor of the most embarrassing national security breach since Edward Snowden.
Bellingcat also found documents posted on a Discord channel dedicated to a Filipino YouTube celebrity. The investigators considered these “bizarre” venues for such potentially explosive disclosures, so they kept looking for the original source of the documents and eventually found the Thug Shaker Central group. It then took the Washington Post about a week to hunt Teixeira down.
According to the Associated Press (AP), Teixeira knew he was in trouble after the NYT story on his documents was published last week. He then held a video conference call with other Thug Shaker Central members to apologize for the consequences that might fall on them.
“Basically what he said was, ‘I’m sorry, guys, I prayed every single day that this wouldn’t happen.’ I prayed, and I prayed, and now it’s only up to God what happens next,’” another group member told the AP.
How did he get so much sensitive information? This is perhaps the biggest lingering question of the Teixeira story. If the documents are not all fakes, then how did a young, low-ranking member of the Air National Guard get access to them?
Bellingcat noted that once Teixeira began sharing images of the classified material, they appeared to be photos of hard-copy documents, not scans or computer-generated images. Some of the photos appear to have been digitally manipulated when they were passed along by other users, especially the Russians on Telegram, but it was not clear if any of the original copies posted by Teixeira are manipulations or fakes.
“When asked how such a young service member could have had access to highly sensitive documents, the Pentagon spokesman, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, said it was the nature of the military to trust its very young service members with high and sometimes grave levels of responsibility, including high levels of security clearance,” the AP reported on Thursday.
“We entrust our members with a lot of responsibility at a very early age. Think about a young combat platoon sergeant, and the responsibility and trust that we put into those individuals to lead troops into combat,” Ryder said.
“National security is our foremost priority and any attempt to undermine it compromises our values and degrades trust among our members, the public, allies and partners,” said the National Guard.
The NYT described Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as “struggling” to explain how his department did not know about the leaks until they spread across the Internet and caught the attention of reporters.
“Well, they were somewhere in the web. And where exactly and who had access at that point, we don’t know. We simply don’t know at this point,” Austin said. The NYT archly observed that even more classified documents were being discovered online by media outlets while Austin was speaking.
According to the NYT, the Joint Chiefs of Staff acted last Friday to implement “procedures to limit the distribution of highly sensitive briefing documents and restrict attendance at meetings where briefing books containing paper copies of the documents were available.”
In 2015, then-Vice President Biden approved an official statement about Hunter’s Burisma board position, emails retrieved by America First Legal from the National Archives show.
“VP signed off on this — will give this quote to reporters in my name shortly,” then Vice-President Joe Biden’s Communications Director Kate Bedingfield told Hunter’s business partner Eric Schwerin.
An additional trove reveals Bedingfield reassured Schwerin in 2015 that a damaging story from Bloomberg reporter Margaret Talev about the family’s business dealings in Ukraine would be quashed unless “editors hold a gun to her head.”
VIDEO EXPOSES IT ALL
He LOSES it on LIVE tv and then SHOCKS everyone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IunDrpg4Z58
HOW MANY OF THESE ARE PARASITE GAMER LAWYERS?...............EVERY SINGLE ONE BUT PELOSI AND TRUMP.
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE VIDEO OF THE CRIME FAMILIES
The Blame Game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1ZS2svPOWI
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the
Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) and
the Obama (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) book and television
deals. Then there is the Biden family (THE CHINESE - BIDEN -
PENN INSTITUTE) (FOUR GAMER LAWYERS - JOE,
HUNTER, JAMES & FRANK) corruption, followed closely
behind by similar abuses of power and office by the
Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders families, as Peter
Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in
Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of
government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA
HARRIS AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE
BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER).
Zelensky and his Generals may have embezzled $400M from U.S. aid
Just yesterday, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, made a bombshell revelation again on Substack about the war in Ukraine.
We know that the US Government appropriated more than $112bn of taxpayers' funds for the war in Ukraine in 2022 alone. Perhaps a lot more has been unofficially dispatched.
Last May, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) demanded that accountability measures be included to ensure that the funds are spent appropriately. It is stunning that such an obvious provision needed to be demanded; one would have assumed that they would be built in. The appalling record of corruption in the US under Biden and in Ukraine makes oversight essential.
If the lawmakers really cared for the welfare of the Ukrainian people, they would have unanimously sided with Senator Paul to ensure that the fund reached the proper destinations. Instead, Paul received little support among lawmakers from either party. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed Paul as a “tiny percentage” of “isolationist” Senate Republicans.”
Consequently, D.C. has purposefully excluded any tracking of the billions dispatched to Ukraine.
Zelensky modestly accepts enthusiastic support from Congress (YouTube screengrab)
This meant taxpayers' funds could be spent wherever they desired, and citizens will never know about this possible criminal wastage of their funds.
We are learning how this lack of accountability is being exploited.
Seymour Hersh has claimed that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has been using these US taxpayers’ funds to pay for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia.
Transportation usually occurs in armored vehicles for which fuel consumption is high. It remains unclear how much the Zelensky government is paying per gallon for fuel. In the past, the Pentagon paid nearly $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from Pakistani ports, via truck or parachute drop, into Afghanistan during the decades-long war in that country.
An unnamed US intelligence official made a shocking revelation to Hersh that Zelensky has been procuring fuel from none other than Russia, the very country it claims to be fighting on the ground.
Why Russia?
Because the fuel is cheaper, and it enables Zelensky and his officials to skim the remaining untold amount earmarked for diesel fuel payments.
Perhaps the sale occurs via a third party?
In also means that Ukrainian officials could be funding their adversaries in the war.
Hersh revealed an estimate by analysts from the CIA that placed the embezzled funds at around $400 million. Another expert compared the level of corruption in Kyiv to approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from Ukraine.”
Hersh revealed that Ukrainian government ministries in Kyiv are setting up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks.
Many of those companies are thought to be based in Poland, Czechia, the Persian Gulf, and Israel. An expert in international trade told Hersh that he “wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the Cayman Islands and Panama" where lots of Americans are involved.
The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky during a meeting last January in Kyiv with CIA Director William Burns who presented Zelensky with a list of “thirty-five generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government.”
Zelensky responded ten days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious officials on the list and doing little else. They were probably dismissed not for their corruption but for making a vulgar display of their loot. An intelligence official told Hersh “The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kyiv in their new Mercedes….”
It was also reported that top generals and government officials in Kyiv were furious at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed. Burns told Zelensky it was because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money that was going to the generals.”
This isn’t just corruption but a competition of corruption.
But it shouldn't be a surprise; even prior to the war corruption and cronyism were widespread and systemic in Ukraine. Shady malefactors such as the Bidens traveled to Ukraine to strike shady deals with dubious oligarchs in Ukraine to enrich themselves. They knew corrupt Ukrainian officials merely look the other way in exchange for inducements.
Zelensky, despite no background in politics, won the presidential election in 2019 from a campaign that was allegedly bankrolled by one of Ukraine’s richest — and most corrupt — oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky's record was so appalling that even the US Government banned him from entry into the country, citing “significant corruption” and his using his “influence and power for his personal benefit” as reasons.
Upon being elected, Zelensky passed ‘tough’ anti-oligarch laws, which on the surface seemed like an anti-corruption move, but in reality, the laws were used to target both Zelensky’s and Kolomoisky’s challengers and adversaries.
There is more bad news apart from the corruption. Hersh also claimed that the US government blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. Hersh quoted an unnamed intelligence official who said that the sabotage of the pipelines and lack of strategic planning about Ukrainian conflict had caused a mounting rift between the White House and the intelligence community. The official claimed that the White House lacks clarity on its policy in Ukraine while the Pentagon is somewhat optimistically preparing for an end to the conflict.
A recent trove of leaked classified documents revealed a lack of unity among US allies fighting the Ukraine war. Also that 14 American troops have been secretly deployed to Ukraine and are direct combatants in the war, contrary to claims made by US officials.
The leak also revealed that the Ukrainian army, contrary to media reports, may be on the verge of losing the war due to the death of combatants, depletion of weaponry, and failure of air defenses. Other reports revealed that the Ukrainian conflict had attracted over 20 thousand foreign fighters from all over the world. These unvetted ‘fighters’ could pilfer the advanced weaponry for other use or sell them in the black market to nefarious forces.
The president of Nigeria revealed that weapons from Ukraine are ending up in Nigeria, and Finnish media reported that criminal organizations could be trafficking weapons from Ukraine to the US or various EU nations.
It appears that exceptionally inept and the exceedingly crooked people are running this show; hence the outcome will be nothing short of a disaster. This chaos and corruption would never have occurred if the US had independent government watchdog agencies and an objective questioning news media. Alas, those who should have functioned as watchdogs have become tail-wagging lapdogs who are willing to surrender in return for a figurative cookie.
This could be a scandal of epic proportions -- billions are being directed to a losing war and millions are ending up in the pockets of corrupt Ukrainian officials and possibly even US officials. The duration of this war is directly proportional to the amounts that can be embezzled.
The risk is that we are being led into World War III which will end with the extinction of the human race.
Victor Davis Hanson: Biden is the most dangerously radical President in US history
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdkca09EHRI&t=772s
James Comer to Provide ‘Concerning’ Update on Biden Family Business Probe
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) announced Wednesday he will provide an official update in the coming weeks on the Biden family business investigation upon completion of reviewing the family’s suspicious activity reports (SARs) held at the Treasury Department.
Over the years, U.S. banks have flagged over 150 SARs from Hunter and James Biden that included “large” amounts of money flagged for further review. SARs “often contain evidence of potential criminal activities, such as money laundering and fraud,” according to a 2020 Senate report.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) is seen in front of a newspaper page with a photograph of Hunter Biden and his father President Joe Biden during the Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media hearing with former Twitter employees before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability at the Rayburn House Office Building on Wednesday February 08, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“Over the past 2 weeks, @GOPoversight has combed through Biden family bank records & suspicious activity reports filed against Hunter Biden. We also continue to gather info from whistleblowers,” Comer posted on Twitter. “It doesn’t look good for @POTUS. I will update the American people soon.”
Speaking on Fox News, Comer said the SARs have been “valuable” to his probe. Comer is investigating the Biden family for nine violations, including wire fraud and money laundering.
“We are probably going to have a press conference within the next two week to update the American people on what all we found,” Comer said. “It’s very concerning”:
In March, Comer revealed from the SARs that the Biden family received a collective $1.3 million cut in 2017 from a Biden family business associate, who was sent a $3 million wire transfer from CEFC China Energy Co. Hunter has confirmed the $1.3 million CEFC payout.
Comer believes the Biden family members received the $1.3 million payout in return for favors from Joe Biden.
“That’s not true,” Joe Biden denied the existence of the payout.
The Biden family had previously negotiated a deal with CEFC from which Joe Biden (Big Guy) would receive a ten percent equity stake in the joint venture with Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. In 2017, Hunter earned a $1 million legal retainer from the company’s chairman, Ye Jianming. Hunter also received a large diamond from Ye worth an estimated $80,000 in February 2017.
RELATED: CNN’s Burnett: Biden Family Payment Evidence ‘Doesn’t Look Good’:
Comer has additionally uncovered that a top Biden family business associate received $179,836.86 on November 5, 2015, while Joe Biden was vice president, a previously unreported sum. Although the amount appears to be insignificant to the $31 million received by the business during Joe Biden’s reign as vice president, the new finding builds upon the previous reporting in 2022 by Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer.
The SARs are also likely to provide a money trail from Hunter and James Biden to a Ukrainian energy company. In April 2014, Hunter joined the board of Burisma, just two years before Joe Biden stated he forced the firing of prosecutor Viktor Shokin investigating Burisma. Despite Hunter’s lack of experience in Ukraine or the energy sector, he was paid $83,000 per month by the energy company or $1 million per year — just weeks after his father was announced “point person” on U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine.
WATCH: White House Spox DODGES Question About Chinese Payments to Biden Family: “I’m Just Not Going to Even Respond”:
The White House / YouTubeComer’s investigation has also encompassed subpoenaing four major U.S. banks and one individual. The subpoenaed banks are Bank of America, Cathay Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and HSBC USA N.A.
The subpoenaed individual is the Biden family’s CEFC partner, Mervyn Yan. As a former CEFC official, Yan was an integral member of the Chinese energy conglomerate with strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Yan appears to be one of the few top CEFC officials who has not been detained or arrested.
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 to even have a ten 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.
Ex-White House Aide: FBI Ignored Joe Biden’s Role in Ukraine Business Dealings
The FBI has ignored President Joe Biden’s role in the family’s foreign influence-peddling “conspiracy” in Ukraine, according to former Obama White House stenographer Mike McCormick.
McCormick, who told the New York Post he has relevant information implicating Joe Biden in the family’s business affairs in Ukraine, submitted a tip to the FBI in February.
McCormick said he never heard back from the FBI — the same law enforcement agency which allegedly “shut down” the investigation into Hunter’s abandoned “Laptop from Hell.”
The US would specifically offer “technical assistance relating to a regulatory framework, and also the technology that would be required to extract unconventional gas resources; and Ukraine has meaningful reserves of unconventional gas according to the latest estimates,” McCormick recounted Sullivan’s statement to reporters on the flight.
In December 2014, Congress approved a $50 million package for Ukraine’s energy sector, including the natural gas industry. The package was supported by the Obama administration. Joe Biden served as the “point person” on U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine during the Obama administration.
In 2015, then-Vice President Biden approved an official statement about Hunter’s Burisma board position, emails retrieved by America First Legal from the National Archives show.
“VP signed off on this — will give this quote to reporters in my name shortly,” then Vice-President Joe Biden’s Communications Director Kate Bedingfield told Hunter’s business partner Eric Schwerin.
An additional trove reveals Bedingfield reassured Schwerin in 2015 that a damaging story from Bloomberg reporter Margaret Talev about the family’s business dealings in Ukraine would be quashed unless “editors hold a gun to her head.”
A third trove released from the Archives showed Hunter advised the Office of Vice President Biden in 2014 on how to handle media inquiries regarding his position on the board of Burisma, a potential violation of federal law due to Hunter failing to register as a foreign agent.
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.
DHS UNDER BIDEN IS DEPT OF OPEN BORDERS AND CHEAP LABOR
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), on Thursday, slammed Biden’s plan to open Obamacare and Medicaid rolls to illegal aliens, calling it “an insult to American citizenship.”
“Rewarding illegal immigration will bring more illegal immigration,” Cotton said.
Exclusive – Speaker Kevin McCarthy: Designate Cartels as Terrorist Groups, Time to ‘Embed Some Military’ on Border to Fight Them
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told Breitbart News that it is time to “embed some military” on the U.S. border with Mexico to fight the Mexican drug cartels.
McCarthy’s comments came during an exclusive long-form video interview taped last month in the ceremonial U.S. House Speaker’s office just off the House floor. The interview, the latest installment in the Breitbart News On the Hill video series, touched on many topics including immigration and the border, but also confronting the Chinese Communist Party, the debt ceiling, and McCarthy’s decision to release January 6 surveillance tapes earlier this year.
Asked about the incident which happened just before this interview where four Americans were kidnapped by cartels in Mexico, McCarthy noted that “two were murdered” and “it wasn’t far from the border.”
McCarthy then affirmed he believes the Mexican drug cartels should be formally designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
“I think you have to designate them,” McCarthy said when asked if the U.S. should designate the cartels as terrorist groups.
“We do not have operational control of our border,” McCarthy added. “For anyone in America that’s been down there — I want to give credit to Gov. Abbott. It shouldn’t be his job to secure the border. But he has to put effort into it. You look what has gone on. These cartels are making billions of dollars human trafficking, right? But they’re using weapons. They’re shooting. We’ve watched in broad daylight what they would do with not respect for life or for Americans.”
What’s more, asked about a proposal from former President Donald Trump to use the U.S. military to combat the cartels, McCarthy endorsed the idea broadly that the United States should “embed some military” so as to use Pentagon technology to fight the cartels.
Matthew Perdie / Breitbart News, Jack Knudsen / Breitbart News , Zenny Phuong / Breitbart NewsMatthew Perdie / Breitbart News, Jack Knudsen / Breitbart News , Zenny Phuong / Breitbart News“I’ve met with the border agents many times. I think we’re going to have to embed some military to allow that technology to help secure it,” McCarthy said.
While McCarthy did not specifically back a measure from Reps. Michael Waltz (R-FL) and Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) that would authorize the use of military force to fight the cartels in this interview, their proposal would implement the spirit of what he was saying here.
Waltz, in a separate interview with Breitbart News at the House GOP conference retreat in Orlando, Florida, noted that his and Crenshaw’s Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the cartels would free up U.S. military assets at the Pentagon like space assets including satellites as well as cyber assets to target and disrupt cartel operations.
“It essentially authorizes military resources,” Waltz said in that interview. “So, space assets for targeting. Your Border Patrol — our law enforcement and border entities don’t have their own space assets. The military does. Offensive cyber — as opposed to just defending our networks here at home, but actually getting inside somebody else’s networks and start disrupting their money, their logistics, their ability to communicate. That all sits inside the Defense Department. So, this would authorize the use — this would authorize the use of military force, but I think it’s more accurate to call it resources.”
Trump, for his part, in January released a policy video in which he explained that if elected president again he would treat the cartels just like the United States treated ISIS under his administration.
“Biden’s open border policies are a deadly betrayal of our nation,” Trump said then. “When I am president, it will be the policy of the United States to take down the cartels, just as we took down ISIS and the ISIS caliphate, and just as — unlike the situation we’re in today, we had a very, very strong border, the strongest border, in fact, in the history of our country, and drugs were at a low of 45 years. There’s been nothing like what we did, just two years ago.”
Waltz said his plan is gaining steam among House GOP colleagues and that he and other supporters have discussed with Democrats both in the House and Senate on how to proceed in passing measures, including this one, that would help the U.S. crack down on the cartels. While no Democrats have yet publicly endorsed the idea, Waltz predicted that some in the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate would come on board eventually, especially as the cartels increase their brutality and violence in cases such as the incident where two of the four Americans they kidnapped were killed.
The fact that the U.S. House Speaker is now publicly endorsing the idea as well seems to make it more likely that eventually Congress — or at least the GOP-controlled U.S. House — could act on this front, even if Democrat President Joe Biden is sluggish or non-responsive to public outcry for action against the multibillion-dollar international criminal enterprises.
Mexican leaders have expressed outrage at the idea that American officials would take such a drastic step. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressed his clear opposition to the idea and even threatened to interfere in U.S. elections to help Democrats and oppose Republicans should the GOP succeed in championing such a proposal.
DHS Chief Mayorkas: Obamacare for DACA Illegal Aliens Now, Amnesty Next
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is applauding President Joe Biden’s move to open the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
On Thursday, Biden announced that DACA illegal aliens will soon be eligible to secure taxpayer-subsidized healthcare benefits through Obamacare and Medicaid. In 2009, then-President Obama promised that Obamacare would not be open to illegal aliens.
Mayorkas said DHS “is committed to doing everything in our power to preserve and fortify DACA,” calling on Congress to next work on an amnesty plan that gives green cards and, eventually, naturalized American citizenship to DACA illegal aliens.
“We support President Biden’s efforts to expand health coverage to DACA recipients,” Mayorkas said in a statement:
I am proud to have put the DACA program in place as Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2012. Over the past 11 years, DACA has provided over 800,000 young people with security in the only country many of them have ever known where they make significant contributions to their communities. We stand ready to work with Congress to provide permanent protection for DREAMers. [Emphasis added]
In February, Breitbart News reported that Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reintroduced their “DREAM Act” legislation to give green cards to about two million illegal aliens enrolled and eligible for DACA.
As Breitbart News reported in 2017, a DACA amnesty would open a surge of chain migration — where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. — ranging from 10 million to 19 million foreign nationals.
A prior Breitbart News analysis found that a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers some $115 billion by opening Obamacare rolls to newly legalized illegal aliens. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that such an amnesty would cost taxpayers $26 billion.
That same CBO report suggested that about 1-in-5 DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least 1-in-7 would go on Medicaid.
To date, more than a million illegal aliens have been enrolled in DACA, at one time or another, which shields them from arrest and deportation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. DACA was first implemented by the Obama administration in 2012 while Mayorkas headed the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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