President Joe Biden's son Hunter is "refusing to provide the records" on his lucrative foreign business dealings to the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) said that Hunter Biden's records, as well as documents about the business dealings of business associates James Biden and Eric Schwerin, would "shed light on influence-peddling by the first family," the Post reported. The requests include all business "schedules, contact lists, and financial records" since 2009, when Joe Biden first became vice president.
Hunter Biden's attorney snubbed Comer's requests, calling the Oversight Committee's investigation "baseless." In response, the committee is "likely to subpoena the Bidens for the documents," the Post reported.
Hunter, who is under multiple investigations for tax evasion and his foreign ties, had access to the car near which his father improperly stored top-secret government documents, the Washington Free Beacon reported. At the same time, the scandal-plagued first son was handling deals with the shady Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings and the Chinese government-linked conglomerate CEFC China Energy.
An email from Biden's abandoned laptop said the "big guy" would receive 10 percent of the profit from the CEFC deal. The email's author has identified Joe Biden as the "big guy," the Post reported.
"Biden family members attempted to sell access around the world, including individuals who were connected to the Chinese Communist Party," Comer said. "If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision-making, this is a threat to national security."
Representatives for Schwerin, Hunter
Biden, and James Biden did not respond to
the Post's requests for comment.
Mercedes-Benz plans to integrate China’s TikTok into the dashboards of certain models, drawing the ire of people who consider the Chinese-owned social media app nothing more than a surveillance tool.
The Washington Post reports that TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app, has been making headlines recently after U.S. lawmakers began strictly enforcing restrictions on the app’s use. Some have begun advocating for the app to be banned entirely in response to growing worries about the threats it poses to national security. But even as TikTok looks to broaden its appeal to new demographics, conservatives and others that care about national security and the mental health of teenagers are working to ban the app from this country entirely.
(Photo by Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Shou Zi Chew, chief executive officer of TikTok Inc., during an interview at the TikTok office in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. (Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg/Getty)
Despite controversy over the Chinese app, companies are eager to collaborate with the platform, including Mercedes-Benz. The new E-class sedan from the German automaker, which will enable users to download third-party apps directly to the center display, such as TikTok, Zoom, and the game “Angry Birds,” was recently unveiled. Through the partnership, passengers will have access to mobile apps on a separate screen that will be hidden from the driver while the car is moving.
The partnership is part of a larger initiative by Mercedes to improve the driving experience for its customers and to remain competitive in a sector that is becoming more and more dominated by technological innovation. The company is looking to adopt new technologies that can make driving more pleasurable and engaging as it aims to broaden its reach to new demographics. The collaboration allows TikTok to connect with new users and keep working to grow beyond its current user base.
However, there are national security concerns with any collaboration involving TikTok, especially in light of recent legislative actions in the United States. Congress approved a ban on the app for federal government devices in December, and about two dozen states followed suit. Critics claim that the app could be used to spread propaganda and other types of false information and that it threatens the privacy of American users.
Mercedes views the partnership as a way to embrace new technologies that can make driving more engaging and enjoyable while staying ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing sector. It presents TikTok with a chance to reach new users and further its efforts to appeal to older demographics — and perhaps the ability to spy on westerners in a new way.
Read more at the Washington Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
America’s China Dependency Syndrome
https://cms.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/americas-china-dependency-syndrome-lloyd-billingsley
The deal would impose no review of human rights and impose no conditions for democratic reforms, supervised multi-party elections and such. All that, and more, is already a done deal with China, like the USSR a one-party Communist dictatorship that never produced a single product the United States needs. This has come about, in large part, due to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco Democrat.
LLOYD BILLINGSLEY
As Ben Weingarten noted in the Federalist in 2018, Sen. Feinstein’s ties to China are “way deeper” than any Chinese spy in her office. Feinstein maintained a “strictly apologist line” on China’s human rights atrocities, and Feinstein’s husband has “profited handsomely” during her career in the Senate. Sen. Feinstein “served as a key intermediary between China and the U.S. government, while serving on committees whose work would be of keen interest to the PRC.” For two decades and three election cycles, Feinstein harbored a Chinese spy who fed “political intelligence” to Beijing’s Communist regime. Since that article, the dossier has grown longer.
My colleague Peter Schweizer’s runaway bestseller, Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, first revealed that the Biden family received some $31 million from the highest levels of Chinese intelligence at the same time Hunter was paying the vice president’s bills. Schweizer believes that there is a slam dunk case to indict Hunter Biden.
VIDEO
Watters: I guarantee you Satan went to law school
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Ln2aXLqWw
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
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 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.
Hunter has reportedly sold five paintings worth $75,000 each to an anonymous buyer. Hunter’s art dealer, Georges Bergès, has previously boasted he had strong ties to businessmen in Communist China, which has concerned many due to the Biden family’s business ventures abroad.
“We are 95% sure that that artwork went to China,” Comer said. “We don’t know where exactly that went to in China, but we’re going to try to find out when we get subpoena power.”
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
Biden family business dealings with China is a ‘national security issue’: Schweizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hew-Pm1d-0
Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win tells the story of how Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband Richard Blum was part owner of a Chinese firm that allegedly sold computers with spyware chips to the U.S. military. The military has never been able to calculate how much sensitive data these computers allowed China to steal.
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs
Kevin McCarthy Pledges Subpoenas for 51 Intel Agents in Wake of Hunter Biden ‘Twitter Files’
71
PAM KEY
11 Dec 20220
2:26
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said Saturday on FNC’s “One Nation” that he will bring the 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was Russia collusion to testify at a congressional hearing.
Host Brian Kilmeade asked, “We saw the revelations coming out of Twitter as Elon Musk is unmasking the corruption that existed there and the denials that they testified about. So for you personally you have another move you want to make. Not only do we want to hear from the former executives of Twitter and the other entities, but you have something else you want to say.”
McCarthy said, Yeah, I do. This is egregious what we are finding. They should not have section 230 to start out with, but we also have to go further. What did Facebook and Google do as well because they became an arm of the Democratic Party and an arm of government.”
He continued, “Those 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong — was Russia collusion — many of them have a security clearance. We are going to bring them before committee. I’m going to have them have a hearing. Why did they sign it? Why did they lie to the American public? A Clapper, a Brennan? Why did you use the reputation that America was able to give to you more information, but use it for a political purpose and lie to the American public?”
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’ 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 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
China's Spying Goes Far Beyond Balloons
“I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference.” ― Greta Garbo
On February 2, Americans were treated to the spectacle of a giant balloon floating over Montana wilderness that would go on to traverse the entire length of the United States. Of Chinese origin, this giant balloon was loaded with what appeared to be potential reconnaissance or communications equipment. Depending on what side of the political aisle observers were on, there was one of two responses from the public: First, shoot it down. We don’t appreciate foreign adversaries using espionage tools or potential weapons overhead. Second, Biden did the right thing by ensuring it was over open waters before dispatching it. It’s normal, they flew over during the Trump administration as well.
For myself, I fall squarely into the shoot-it-down camp. There is something intrusive about a foreign object the width of several school buses entering my personal space that demands a decisive response. Given the sparse population of Montana, it seemed the appropriate time to dispatch it while above remote territory with the least risk to bystanders below. The concern wasn’t so much that China was gathering intelligence from above as some other potential for a weaponized payload like explosives, bioweapons, or an electromagnetic pulse device. The Chinese have no shortage of satellites or technology required to spy on Americans. Most Americans have willingly adopted Chinese manufactured and even branded surveillance technology into their homes, myself included.
I consider myself an early technology adopter. I was an alpha tester of Amazon’s first Echo home speaker device. An entire global library of music on-demand? Yes, please! What would follow is a connected home of lights, switches, thermostats, sprinkler controllers, alarm systems, cameras, etc. The convenient control over one’s home that technology allows is fantastic. But it has come at a cost.
During my foray into writing, one of the first articles I penned concerned the Faustian bargain we enter into when we trade privacy for convenience. The crux of this dilemma is that the parties we enter into these agreements with have ulterior motives.
Take social media, for example. We traded free personal connections online for a seat at the table in our daily lives. Technology corporations performed massive data mining campaigns to paint a picture of your entire life. They know who you are, your family and friends, your interests and hobbies, your jobs and colleagues, and your daily habits from sun up to sun up. They’re even listening while you sleep.
Once these corporations were firmly entrenched in our lives, they began to apply social pressure to engineer society in their twisted mold. From campaigns regarding topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, to election interference like that of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, to silencing political dissent by censorship or steering press coverage in manners favorable to themselves, big tech utilized the monetized data that they controlled against those they’d taken it from.
But I’m different. I have nothing to hide. Right? This is a common retort when debating the merits of privacy with the average American. It’s a good thing they have nothing to hide because they’ve given up any possible place to hide. I started my blog, WithdrawConsent.org, to explore withdrawing consent from a system and society that had abused it. A part of that process was taking back control over my personal information, including what parts of my life I allow the rest of the world into.
A few years ago, I installed a Firewalla on my home network. A Firewalla is an inexpensive home firewall device that is easy to set up and has a minimal footprint on my home network performance without ongoing subscription costs. It allowed me to secure my home network from outside threats and gave me a picture of what was happening with devices inside my home network. What I learned raised some serious red flags.
At some point, my wife found a Shark Robotic vacuum on clearance at the store. Excitedly, she set it up on our home network, and it went to work mapping out its cleaning path. Unfortunately, the Firewalla began to set off alarms at odd times, suggesting that the Shark Vacuum was uploading a data feed to Shenzen, China. Regardless of how innocuous this could be, I find no reason why any home appliance needs to send data it collects in my home to servers in China. I took the Shark vacuum off our network, and we got rid of it. We exchanged it for a different model with no data connection that works only on light detection and ranging, or lidar, to determine its path.
Recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published an article demonstrating how one woman’s Roomba vacuum took pictures of her sitting on the toilet, and they were published on the internet. Sometimes what seems innocuous is quite dangerous. It was for this reason that I took a deeper look at what devices on my home network were uploading data to the internet. I found that the most egregious offenders were smart televisions and speakers. For the televisions, we turned off the wifi and utilize separate devices for streaming. In the case of the smart speakers, the simple solution was to disable the hardware microphone buttons on top. While inconvenient, it completely stopped the data uploads until we want to utilize the speakers.
The elephant in the room on intelligent devices and privacy intrusion is the smartphone. Most of us have them, and most of us make exceptions for the smartphone to maintain communications with family and friends. Though there are solutions to increase privacy, such as choosing a privacy-oriented device like a de-googled phone or installing privacy-focused software, your privacy only goes so far as the vendors whose apps and services you utilize. I will soon be getting rid of my Samsung phone because they consistently solicit me to accept changes to their privacy terms of service and to install their adware to earn money for globalist charities.
When adversarial nations fly unidentified objects over our borders, we’re paralyzed by the threat. Meanwhile, most of us whitewash the daily micro-intrusions we accept at a much more frequent pace. At issue is not the absence or the presence of personal indiscretions. At issue is the incremental nature of our daily concessions until we’re left with no privacy at all.
Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash
Brian Parsons is a paleoconservative columnist in Idaho, a proud husband and father, and saved by Grace. You can follow him at WithdrawConsent.org or find his columns at the American Thinker, in the Idaho State Journal, or in other regional publications. Email | Gab
America’s China Dependency Syndrome Lessons from the USSR. Lloyd Billingsley
Posted By Ruth King on April 28th, 2020
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/americas-china-dependency-syndrome-lloyd-billingsley/
““We cannot outsource our independence,” the president said last Monday. “We cannot be reliant on foreign nations. I’ve been saying this for a long time. If we’ve learned one thing it’s let’s do it here, let’s build it here, let’s make it here.”
“Made in China” has been a familiar label on products for years but it wasn’t until March of 2020 that Americans learned of the perils that might entail. China threatened to impose export controls on pharmaceuticals that would plunge America into “the mighty sea of coronavirus.”
Sen. Marco Rubio told reporters the United States was “dangerously reliant” on China for critical goods, including parts for technologies needed to fight COVID-19. Since 2004, Chinese pharmaceutical companies have been supplying 80-90 percent of U.S. antibiotics. Americans might wonder how they landed in such a dependent position, and that invites a comparison with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The world’s first socialist state, established in the world’s largest nation, never produced a single product the West wanted or needed. For all its vast natural resources, the USSR was an economic basket case, and by the mid-1980s in serious trouble.
Suppose that some U.S. senator had then offered a trade deal that ignored the regime’s human rights violations and allowed state-owned Soviet companies to manufacture goods for the American market, all marked “Made In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” These would include vital pharmaceuticals and the deal would allow the use of Soviet steel, and Soviet labor, in major infrastructure projects in the United States.
The deal would impose no review of human rights and impose no conditions for democratic reforms, supervised multi-party elections and such. All that, and more, is already a done deal with China, like the USSR a one-party Communist dictatorship that never produced a single product the United States needs. This has come about, in large part, due to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco Democrat.
On a visit to Shanghai in 2006 Feinstein told James Areddy of the Wall Street Journal, “I’ve been coming to China for 31 years, so I’m not a newcomer.” That would put her first visit in 1975, one year before the death of the Great Helmsman Mao Zedong his own self. Feinstein was then a San Francisco supervisor, and as mayor struck up a sister-city relationship with Shanghai. On the 2006 trip Feinstein spent time with former Shanghai mayor Zhu Rongji, “a good friend.”
Areddy asked about the Tiananmen Square massacre then turning 21. Feinstein said it was a “a great setback for China in the view of the world,” a public-relations problem for China, not a human rights issue. “It was just the PLA (People’s Liberation Army)” and China “learned lessons from it.” Still, Feinstein admitted, “we did not discuss it.”
As Ben Weingarten noted in the Federalist in 2018, Sen. Feinstein’s ties to China are “way deeper” than any Chinese spy in her office. Feinstein maintained a “strictly apologist line” on China’s human rights atrocities, and Feinstein’s husband has “profited handsomely” during her career in the Senate. Sen. Feinstein “served as a key intermediary between China and the U.S. government, while serving on committees whose work would be of keen interest to the PRC.” For two decades and three election cycles, Feinstein harbored a Chinese spy who fed “political intelligence” to Beijing’s Communist regime. Since that article, the dossier has grown longer.
As Rosemarie Ho noted in The Nation, Dianne Feinstein failed to support the democracy protesters in Hong Kong. When the coronavirus hit these shores, Feinstein was uncritical of China and one of the first to cry “racism” against those who pointed out the pandemic’s origin in Wuhan, China.
Ben Weingarten wondered how a motivated and empowered prosecutor would operate if tasked to explore “any links and/or coordination” between the Chinese government, Feinstein and individuals associated with her office. Such an investigation never took place with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the most servile apologist of Communist China since Anna Louise Strong, and certainly the most influential. On the other hand, Donald Trump was thoroughly investigated for “collusion” with Russia, which turned out to be a hoax.
It was the president’s tweet that brought Feinstein’s Chinese spy to public attention. President Trump has access to all U.S. intelligence, a major reason domestic and foreign foes alike are desperately trying to remove him from office. In his April 19 press conference, the president called the upper reaches of the DOJ and FBI “human scum,” and their inattention to Feinstein, Hillary Clinton and other high-profile Democrats confirms that the rot continues.
President Trump is now throwing down with the invisible enemy of coronavirus and making progress despite opposition from Democrats and their media allies. As they parrot Chinese propaganda, the president has already started the decoupling process.
“We cannot outsource our independence,” the president said last Monday. “We cannot be reliant on foreign nations. I’ve been saying this for a long time. If we’ve learned one thing it’s let’s do it here, let’s build it here, let’s make it here.”
As with the USSR, we don’t need China for anything. And as Chuck Berry said, anything you want they got right here in the USA.
