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Robert Kennedy Jr: Power, Corruption, Freedom, & The Chronic Disease Epidemic Within America
Democrat States Urge Judge to Let Biden Administration Continue Social Media Censorship-by-Proxy
New York Attorney General Letitia James and 20 other attorneys general have filed an amicus brief (pdf) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, urging a judge to reverse a lower court decision and allow Biden administration officials to continue to instruct social media companies on impermissible content.
“An open dialogue between government officials and social media companies is critical to keeping Americans safe,” stated Ms. James.
The attorneys general say that states have taken actions similar to federal agencies, and are backing the Biden administration in their appeal.
“Amici States, too, routinely engage with social-media companies on content moderation, including to exchange recommendations on best practices and to report specific content that violates the platforms’ own terms and services,” the brief reads.
The historic case began with the massive amounts of COVID-19-related information that flooded social media during the pandemic.
Posts ranging from calls to open public schools and discussions on the science of natural immunity to posts making fun of public officials were targeted for removal and retaliation by government officials. Within the 20,000 pages of documents are several colorful exchanges between companies like Facebook and Twitter and government officials.
Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri sued the Biden administration on behalf of several private individuals, and the judge found they had “produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
On July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction. He had previously refused to dismiss the case, ruling that “censorship was encouraged—perhaps even mandated—by the Biden Administration and several key governmental departments.”
More than 50 officials across a dozen agencies were involved.
The Biden administration quickly appealed the temporary block, writing that the “Government faces irreparable harm with each day the injunction remains in effect.” Judge Doughty rejected the request, but a three-judge panel for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans issued a ruling that effectively negated the temporary block.
Now the 21 Democrat attorneys are backing the Biden administration, arguing that Judge Doughty “sets a dangerous precedent” that undermines the government’s ability to “keep Americans safe and secure online.”
‘Unique Perspective’
The attorneys argue that their states have a “unique perspective on the nature and importance of such information-sharing and dialogue” because their governments’ experiences in communicating with social media companies on “child safety, consumer protection, and election integrity is mutually beneficial.”
The brief cites cases like a 2022 Buffalo, New York, shooting where law enforcement was able to identify the shooter through Twitch videos and Discord posts, and how Twitter took down links to a livestream of the shooting after user reports.
It also cites a 2008 agreement where MySpace and Facebook agreed to adopt best practices to protect children from online predators. This resulted in Facebook later announcing it would stop the development of “Instagram Kids” pending input from parents, experts, and lawmakers.
But the injunction does not prevent such usage.
The temporary block issued on July 4 did not prohibit all government correspondence with social media companies. It specifically prohibited meeting or contacting by phone, email, or text message or “engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech,” or flagging content for removal.
Meanwhile, it allowed agencies to continue to work with social media companies when it came to posts about criminal activities, national security threats, or criminal efforts to affect elections.
The amicus brief argues that the federal agencies’ actions were “recommendatory and non-coercive,” but Judge Doughty found that not to be the case.
He found that the documents compiled showed that the effort to pull down posts and deplatform users was constant. Messages revealed that federal employees wielded great power over the social media companies, often responding to apologies and deference with even more demands.
A February 2021 exchange between Twitter and the White House detailed how Twitter had been so “bombarded” with requests from federal agents that it wanted to work out a more streamlined process to receive them. Mr. Flaherty had suggested regular, bi-weekly meetings with YouTube to cooperate even after the platform had “reduced watch time by 70% on borderline content, which is impressive” (pdf).
‘Election Integrity’
What began with COVID-19 quickly grew to encompass online posts about the 2020 elections.
The Missouri and Louisiana case against the Biden administration argued that conservatives were targeted by the Biden administration, and Judge Doughty’s memo noted that “opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President [Joe] Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed.”
The 21 attorneys argue government takedown of posts that questioned the election results was just.
Massachusetts used Twitter’s “report” function for posts containing “false or misleading information about the electoral process” and Connecticut hired a specialist to “identify, report and combat election misinformation online and in social media.”
Russel Weaver, professor of law and distinguished university scholar at the University of Louisville, wrote a handbook on free speech and changing technology nearly a decade ago, which is in the process of being updated to its third edition. He recently authored two papers on the topic of disinformation and free speech that have been submitted for journal publication. Just because something is disinformation, it doesn’t make it illegal, he says.
And the government may not do indirectly what it may not do directly.
If social media companies routinely do the government’s bidding, one can argue that “this constitutes ‘state action,'” he told The Epoch Times. “So, rather than the private companies being treated as ‘private,’ they should be treated as “state actors” and therefore subject to the First Amendment.”
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JOE BIDEN COULD NOT HAVE PERPETRATED HIS CRIMES WITHOUT FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE. WHAT DID THEY GET FROM JOE? ENDLESS FLOODS OF INDIAN TECH WORKERS AND NO ANTI-TRUST.
VIDEO:
WHAT TO DO WITH BIDEN?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSEN
everyone will be WIPED out in 1 week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8ZWnJShcW4
Biden is, and has always been, a pathological liar of the worst kind, the kind who lies to boost his own ego no matter how easy it is to prove his dishonesty PATRICIA McCARTHY
HOW CORRUPT IS OUR GOV THAT THIS COULD HAVE GONE FOR SO MAN YEARS??
Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo 7/23/23 | BREAKING FOX NEWS July 23, 2023
The Biden Crime Family Comes Undone
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-crime-family-comes-undone-daniel-greenfield/
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The Biden family is notorious for being the crookedest clan not only in Delaware, but in D.C.
The Worst President in the Last 100 Years" - Victor Davis Hanson
The Democrats exploited the Covid-19 pandemic to unconstitutionally manipulate state voting laws, expand and abuse mail-in voting, and orchestrate unfettered ballot harvesting in order to place in office perhaps the most incompetent, corrupt, and bribable president in American history. They cannot feign ignorance as virtually every Washington insider knew Biden was an unprincipled buffoon since his early days in the Senate.
How Mark Zuckerberg and Woke Big Tech Weasels Invaded American Schools
Facebook CEO and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has successfully continued his quest to mine data, but this time, via schools. Zuckerberg partnered with leftist elites to get into schools by convincing educators they needed big tech to make children go woke, according to a new book.
Author Kenny Xu explains in his new book School of Woke how big tech, big money, and left-wing political elites have played a role in getting Critical Race Theory established in schools across the country, according to a report by New York Post.
Critical Race Theory is a woke academic movement that teaches children the United States is fundamentally racist, and that they must view every social interaction and person in terms of race in order to be “antiracist.”
Mark Zuckerberg Meta Selfie (Facebook)
In his book, Xu explains how Alexander “Xan” Tanner — a Zuckerberg acolyte, and the husband of Merrick Garland’s daughter — co-founded Panorama Education, which bill itself as a software company, but is actually an educational technology company whose lead business model is data, specifically data about children.
Tanner had teamed up with his fellow Yale graduates Aaron Feuer and David Carel, to create a student-surveying platform focused on the concept of “social-emotional learning,”
Xu explains in his book:
There’s nothing technologically savvy about Tanner’s product, which could have been created on SurveyMonkey. But strangely, Zuckerberg chose Tanner out of many potential investment opportunities and elected to fund him. Tanner ended up raising more than $16 million personally from the tech billionaire and $76 million from others by using Zuckerberg’s name between the years 2017 and 2021, as Forbes reported.
Zuckerberg had a very intense interest in “fixing” public schools, and his $1 billion Startup: Education fund, which he established in 2012, was actively looking to invest in educational do-gooders like Tanner. The fund was made to “[improve] education for the nation’s most underserved children.” Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, believed that they could “solve” education in America by leveraging what he knew best — the power of big business.
Once Tanner took the job, Zuckerberg assigned him his first task:
Zuckerberg asked him to tackle what had previously been an intractable problem: how to persuade America’s public-school boards to give the fund access to private data about their children. After all, the last time Zuckerberg spent big money on education — in a widely publicized takeover of the Newark, NJ, public schools, in 2012 — he watched his $200 million disappear into a black hole of mismanagement and graft.
After years of pitching and trying to persuade school boards to adopt his Zuckerberg‑backed surveying product, Tanner discovered that the way to get his foot in the door was to go woke.
He targeted the most progressive school districts in the country, and ended up convincing schools that they needed data on “racism” in order to help children with their “social-emotional health.”
New documents leaked from Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia revealed that Panorama had signed a five-year $2.4 million deal with FCPS to conduct surveys asking students about how they are being targeted due to their race and gender.
Panorama even asked questions like “Some people describe themselves as transgender when their sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about their gender. Are you transgender?”
Breitbart News will continue to report on Big Tech’s efforts to turn schoolchildren into woke zombies.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
The Democrats’ Dilemma: How to Convince Joe Biden to Drop out of the Race
As the 2024 presidential election is beginning to cast a growing shadow over the American political landscape, many in the party establishment are quietly looking into replacing Joe Biden as the Democrat Party nominee. But who will they choose to replace Biden and how are they going to force him to either resign or drop out of the race without creating political turmoil for the party?
Biden’s physical and mental incapacity is becoming increasingly pronounced and the Republican House, with the assistance of numerous whistleblowers, is revealing evermore damning evidence of potential criminality by both Joe and his son, Hunter. The pressure to either force him to resign or drop his candidacy and remain in office is accelerating as the Democrats become increasingly fearful of losing the presidency in 2024.
Finding someone to replace Biden is perhaps the least of their problems. While a number of names have been bandied about, an exceedingly flawed Gavin Newsom appears to be the current front-runner. However, there is another potential candidate that sets many Democrat hearts aflutter: Gretchen Whitmer, the 51-year-old, well-spoken and telegenic Governor of Michigan.
On July 6, 2023, Politico Magazine published a fawning article extolling Governor Whitmer. Within the article, Whitmer claimed she has no interest in running for president, however:
A subsequent announcement, however, made it clear she’s willing to try. Whitmer is creating a federal PAC, called “Fight Like Hell,” to boost Biden and congressional candidates next year….
This step could also allow her to assume the role of a leading candidate for the 2024 Democrat nomination, replacing Joe Biden.
Jonathan Martin, the author of the Politico article also reveals that many backstage conversations have been taking place with Whitmer. He further exposes the Democrats’ increasingly shaky strategy of Biden easily winning again in 2024.
These backstage conversations have taken place as Biden’s approval ratings show little sign of improvement and increasingly appear impervious to external events, for good or ill. Of course, Democrats are betting that the most significant external event of all—Republicans renominating a candidate with more baggage than O’Hare [Airport] at Thanksgiving—will tip the election again to Biden.
Yet even their assumedly strong odds in such a rematch have not soothed Democrats.
The angst now percolating among the Democrat hierarchy is also reflected among the rank-and- file Democrat voters, as over 50% are saying they do not want Biden to run for the nomination.
If the Democrat establishment succeeds in getting Biden to resign or drop out of the race and the choice is between Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, Whitmer would, in all likelihood, be the preferred nominee as she will be a formidable presidential candidate pitted against Donald Trump. But finding a new candidate to replace Joe Biden is the easy part, getting him to resign or drop out of the race without triggering a political firestorm may prove to be far more difficult.
The Democrats exploited the Covid-19 pandemic to unconstitutionally manipulate state voting laws, expand and abuse mail-in voting, and orchestrate unfettered ballot harvesting in order to place in office perhaps the most incompetent, corrupt, and bribable president in American history. They cannot feign ignorance as virtually every Washington insider knew Biden was an unprincipled buffoon since his early days in the Senate.
By foisting this reprobate on America, they also, per the Constitution, granted him the unlimited power to grant pre-emptive pardons to whomever he chooses. Joe, in order to protect himself and his family, will, at some point, exercise his presidential prerogative to issue these pardons.
Coupled with the unthinkable specter of Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election, the power to pardon also serves as a potential extortion tool in the hands of an unscrupulous Joe Biden in his dealings with Democrat party elites.
The revelations emanating from the House of Representative and multiple whistleblowers of Joe and Hunter Biden’s alleged criminality have been devastating. A July 12, 2023 poll reveals 56% of Americans (and 40% of Democrats) believe Biden likely took bribes from sources tied to various foreign governments. There is little likelihood these polls, coupled with many that are now showing Trump beating Biden, will change as more potential criminality is being exposed and the White House remains unable to offer any viable explanations.
With this evolving political disaster for the Democrats, they will, of necessity, have to either force Joe Biden out of the White House as soon as possible or induce him to drop out of the race and remain in office.
The Democrat establishment’s reluctance to compel a dangerously incapacitated and compromised Joe Biden to resign is the product of both the buffoonish incompetence of his VP successor, Kamala Harris, and of Biden’s pardon power. If the Democrats and the legacy media succeed in forcing Biden to resign, he will issue pardons for himself and Hunter et al on his way out the door. Thus, creating a potential political firestorm as the bulk of the citizenry would be incensed over this egregious self-dealing. Resulting in the Democrat Party and its down-ballot candidates being negatively impacted in the 2024 election.
Additionally, a Biden resignation would thrust an extraordinarily unpopular Kamala Harris, who is losing to Trump by double digits in every poll, back into the presidential sweepstakes creating potentially more problems for the Democrats among minorities if she is forced off the 2024 ticket.
Thus, the Democrat elites would prefer any arrangement which allows Biden to drop out of the race and remain in office. Their ideal arrangement would be to give Biden whatever he wants if he agrees to wait until after Election Day November 5, 2024 to issue pre-emptive pardons. After which the Party elites could feign outrage at his actions.
Their anticipation would be that once Joe is out of the race, he will no longer be the center of attention in the campaign. The Democrats and the legacy media would then focus on manipulating the electorate into ignoring the allegations of Biden family criminality by making certain the American people fixate on Trump’s specious legal predicaments and the Democrats’ shiny new candidate running for president.
While this cabal is losing faith in Biden’s chances in 2024, they are still convinced that regardless of the circumstances surrounding Biden, almost anyone they nominate, but in particular Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer, could win as long as Donald Trump, entangled in their treacherous web of indictments and trials, is the Republican nominee.
There is, however, a high-stakes risk in the strategy of convincing Joe Biden to drop out of the race and remain in office. Can the Democrats and the legacy media keep a lid on the ongoing revelations about alleged bribes and fraud for the next 15 months without exposing their duplicity, thus, infuriating the bulk of the electorate?
An ever-increasing percentage of the citizenry is becoming aware of the potential criminality of Joe Biden and the cover-up by the Democrats and the legacy media. If the Republicans do not waver and continue to aggressively investigate and open an impeachment inquiry as well as expose Biden’s Democrat enablers, it is highly unlikely that this cabal will be able to control the narrative for an extended period of time.
After premeditatively foisting Joe Biden on the American people, it is a supreme irony that the Democrat party elites and the legacy media are now being hoisted on their own petard.
Photo credit: Twitter video screen grab (cropped).
How Investigative Journalists Have Become Cover-Up Promoters
After the highly touted, shamelessly self-promoted Washington Post "investigative" Watergate journalism, thousands of aspiring young people sought to become, like the legendary Woodward and Bernstein, fearless speakers of truth to power, uncovering corruption and cover-up without fear or favor. But fifty years later, these supposed investigative journalists have become the corrupt actors whom they promised to expose. Have our vaunted good guys become dirty cops? It sure looks like it.
While this evolution from clean to corrupt has been proceeding apace for fifty years, there is no better incarnation of this perverse role change than the recent journalism concerning ostensible Biden family corruption.
There is much room for legitimate, good-faith debate about the strength of evidence against Hunter Biden and, separately, his father Joe. But the debate is properly about the unseemly activities of Hunter and the practiced neglect of same, at the least, by his father. Whatever the strength of evidence, all of it is ugly, worrisome, problematic. There is no way to sugarcoat this: there is a noisome stench emanating from Bidenville that cries out for further investigation.
This tableau of potential Biden family corruption amounts to a test of the bona fides of modern "investigative" journalists. Will they investigate facts in a dispassionate way, or will they act as partisan publicity agents covering up wrongdoing, perhaps treason?
What results has this test thus far returned?
To decide this question, let's first recapitulate the evidence that seems to be uncontroverted, even if not publicized in detail by these supposed watchdogs.
In the throes of the "Maidan Revolution," by late 2014, Ukraine had been turned upside-down. To tamp down endemic corruption, which portended the country's demise, the United States took a firm anti-corruption stance, which it could enforce as the main player in granting foreign aid.
Vice President Joe Biden then volunteered to be the Obama administration point man for the troubled country. Before he flew to Ukraine, he had a multi-hour White House meeting with Devon Archer, his son's partner in apparent influence-peddling.
As Hunter and Archer thereafter maneuvered to pitch potential Ukrainian clients, Hunter sent a lengthy memorandum one such client, the energy company Burisma, which sounded suspiciously, with jargon, as if it had come directly from a classified analysis of U.S. policy on oil and gas exploration in and around Ukraine.
Soon, Attorney General Eric Holder, along with U.K. officials, heralded the London seizure of $23 million in Burisma funds directed to Cyprus for the personal benefit of a Burisma owner and apparent embezzler, Mykola Zlochevsky. After British officials attached the funds, all that was needed was certification by a Ukraine prosecutor that the gain was ill-gotten, in which case the Court would return the money to Ukraine.
But, oddly, no Ukraine official, to the British magistrate's stated frustration, ever claimed the money, which was reluctantly forwarded to Cyprus, for the benefit of Hunter's new client.
Another Hunter client, Igor Kolomoisky, carried out massive thefts with no apparent pushback. After $1.8 billion in foreign aid was sent to Kolomoisky's large, prominent PrivatBank to help stabilize the Ukrainian banking system, PrivatBank immediately lent that money to shell companies through deposits to PrivatBank's branch in Cyprus, secured by nonexistent contracts — monies never again seen. All in all, PrivatBank was looted for $5 billion under Joe Biden's nose, all of which had to be reflated through foreign aid.
When President Trump later called on new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden corruption, this was not an empty, partisan request, notwithstanding the president's awkward coloration of it. But Trump likely did not realize that President Zelensky's major benefactor was Igor Kolomoisky, in hindsight rendering Trump's initiative blackly comical, however appropriate. (Kolomoisky, in spite of looting his country's major bank, and stealing foreign aid, did not flee the country until late 2016, as Vice President Biden was leaving office, to return only after Zelensky was elected.)
In early 2016, after prosecutor Viktor Shokin, spurred by U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, raided Zlochevsky's home in an anti-Burisma investigation, Joe Biden famously had him fired — strong circumstantial evidence of the vice president's corruption. A recently unearthed FD-1023 report of a credible informant confirms that Hunter Biden and his father were each promised five million dollars for getting Shokin fired. While the cover-up spin is that Shokin was a shakedown artist, in fact, after he was fired, the strong cases against Burisma were settled for a paltry $7 million.
Shifting to China, it is well established that (a) Hunter had a strong relationship with the globally corrupt Chinese energy arm CEFC, on record as a company that bribed foreign officials, and (b) was given ten-percent ownership in the lucrative multibillion-dollar Bohai Harvest Fund, which invested funds from the Bank of China.
When Hunter wrote an email threatening a CEFC official who was late in paying him, he warned that his father was sitting next to him. Whether Joe Biden was in fact sitting next to Hunter, the CEFC official was certainly under the impression that Joe was in on the deal, failing which his presence would be a meaningless threat.
Now, as specific evidence emerges fleshing out this obvious influence-peddling scheme, the only question is the degree to which Joe Biden willingly participated since, after all, Hunter's clients were purchasing that participation. But in any case, aren't these issues that investigative journalists should be tackling?
Let's hark back to Watergate. Richard Nixon was forced out of office by powerful journalism — not because he was guilty of the underlying criminal burglary, but because he enabled and participated in the cover-up. His most palpable crime was importuning the CIA to call the FBI off, briefly, its "Mexican money trail" investigation — a minor cover-up, but criminal, nonetheless.
Showing stronger culpability, the emerging evidence from credible whistleblowers verifies that the Biden administration, through its Justice Department, fixed the prosecution of Hunter, refusing indictments both in D.C. and Los Angeles, allowing statutes of limitation to expire, and refusing proper investigative steps recommended by IRS agents.
Given all the above, there is plenty of grist for the mill of our vaunted investigative journalists — you know, those same sleuths who breathlessly seized on every morsel suggesting that Donald Trump may have spoken to people with Russian accents.
A few examples of the accumulated evidence should suffice. In addition to two credible, experienced whistleblowing IRS agents, and the FD-1023 informant's report, Gal Luft, an American-Israeli think-tank director, in 2019 in Brussels had personally provided DOJ lawyers and FBI agents with specific facts detailing corruption by China of both Bidens.
In 2022, to both forestall and impeach Luft's testimony, Biden's Department of Justice issued a sealed indictment of Luft as an unregistered foreign agent violating FARA.
When the Luft indictment was recently unsealed, not coincidentally as Luft came forward with an incriminating video, did our watchdog media scream "cover-up" and "witness intimidation"? Not exactly.
Former White House spokesman Jen Psaki wondered aloud to Democrat congressman Jamie Raskin whether Republican James Comer had been "co-opted by a foreign agent." Unsurprisingly, Raskin eagerly agreed.
The Democrat-leaning Raw Story article, "Theater of the absurd': Raskin compares GOP's Hunter Biden quest to 'Inspector Clouseau" by Brandon Gage, went farther. Rather than viewing the Luft indictment as proof of a Biden retaliatory cover-up, its pundit saw that the indictment "damaged the credibility" of the case against Biden.
To Arthur Delaney of the HuffPost, the indictment of Luft for FARA violations demonstrated how weak any FARA claimwould have been against Hunter Biden. The reasoning? Unlike Luft, Hunter did virtually nothing for his pay! How can we say he's a foreign agent if he got his money without providing any apparent services? Thus, according to investigator Delaney, there is a large "hole" in the case against Hunter Biden. We are not making this up.
Now that it is to some degree probable that the Bidens were bribed to fire Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokin, wouldn't our watchdog media perk up and at least begin an investigation? Well, no. Rather, ace investigators for the New York Times Adam Entous and Michael S. Schmidt summarized the growing evidence in a way that would make a criminal defense lawyer blush:
Despite their years of efforts-including Mr. Trump's attempts to muscle Ukraine into helping him sully the Bidens, an escapade that led to his first impeachment-Republicans have yet to demonstrate that the senior Mr. Biden was involved in his son's business deals or took any action to benefit him or his foreign partners.
Here is the take on the specific report of a credible informant that both Bidens were bribed to fire Shokin, as seen by Delaney and the HuffPost:
Republicans have dubiously claimed that the Burisma connection prompted then–Vice President to push for the ouster of Ukraine's prosecutor in 2016 in order to protect thecompany.
What is not noted by the Times or the HuffPost is the evidence that such a claim would be "dubiously" made or that the Shokin firing did not benefit Hunter's business partners.
How does the New York Times, per Glenn Thrush, depict Luft's explosive video testimony?
In a video published by the New York Post last week, Mr. Luft claimed — without offeringevidence — that he had informed the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation officials of wrongdoing by the Biden family, prompting what he cast as his persecution.
When Mr. Thrush notes that Mr. Luft does so "without offering evidence," it may shock him to learn that when a witness offers his own observations of an event, this is what lawyers and judges call "evidence." Indeed, Luft was offering eyewitness testimony, which constitutes strong direct evidence.
This deception is not an isolated misstatement. Riddled throughout reports of the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, and other outlets is the frequent assertion that there is "no evidence" of corruption against either Biden. Kara Scannell of CNN Politics gives the typical conclusion: "But there's no evidence Joe Biden abused his office to enrich his family."
But here is just one piece of evidence for these journalists to chew on. On his laptop from hell, Hunter self-pityingly confides to his daughter that she need not share her income with her father as Hunter himself must. To be sure, Hunter may at the time have been under the influence of some substance. But nonetheless, this is direct evidence against Joe Biden — an admission by a co-conspirator properly in evidence against his co-conspirator father.
Common sense tells us that corrupt actors do not pay millions for influence without proof of delivery of the influence sought. The millions going to Joe's relatives through a middleman cutout, Rob Walker, laundered through numerous shell companies, is itself evidence of corruption.
What conclusions can be drawn about the state of modern, major media investigative journalists? We can safely conclude that these "journalists" see their role as at a minimum aiders and abettors of corrupt partisan cover-ups. But going farther, they seemingly vie, like slippery criminal defense counsel, to create false cover stories behind which corrupt politicians can hide and defraud the public.
So, if some wish to assess the lasting impact of Watergate journalism, they should consult our allegedly most trusted news sources, such as the New York Times. But not for the investigations they do, but for those they choose not to do. And in doing so, please keep in mind the dominant trope of Watergate: it's not the crime; it's the cover-up.
John D. O'Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O'Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today's Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.
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