THERE IS NO GREATER DANGER TO
AMERICA THAN JOE BIDEN!
Too Big To Trust
REVIEW: 'American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence' by Gerard Baker
If you're a working opinion journalist in America, you've probably spent some time in the past few years toying with a book idea about our national crisis. The atmospherics of the moment all but demand it. What was once quaintly thought of as the news cycle has become a continuous blur of despond. Political problems crossbreed with cultural ailments and split opinions along lines so fresh and inconsistent that the terms left and right lose shades of meaning with each new debate. Wild claims disseminate via digital firehose and service competing ideological camps that no longer share a base reality.
And that's before we get to the significant failings of our recent elected officials, the scandals of our billion-dollar corporations, the prejudices of our legacy media, or the lies proffered by our public and private institutions. In other words, before we can even approach our real-world challenges, Americans are faced with an impenetrable fog of interests and biases that all but precludes thoughtful contemplation.
It's no wonder we've lost trust in just about everything. According to all major polls, American trust is nosediving across the board. We don't trust government, media, education, big business, technology, or one another. And this isn't merely unpleasant background noise. Mistrust and distrust are active players in the political and cultural life of the country, shaping our days as surely as any lawmaker, lobbying group, or media behemoth.
We could really use a grand theory right about now—something ingeniously simple to capture how we got here and point us toward clear solutions. But as Gerard Baker argues in the traumatically brilliant American Breakdown, the origins of our national trust crisis are complex and compounded, and it won't be resolved in one stroke.
Baker, editor at large at the Wall Street Journal, contends that the problem began with the United States' objectively poor performance on a number of fronts. "It's not that Americans have suddenly, for no reason, started distrusting institutions that merit trust," he writes. "It is that the institutions themselves have become untrustworthy." Here Baker wisely resists the low-hanging fruit of Trump-age resentment as an explanation in itself. "To focus on the most extreme and hateful manifestations of public disillusionment is to miss the underlying cause," he writes. "It is the guided leadership of the last twenty years rather than the response to it that explains America's current plight."
The evidence is compelling. As Baker notes, long before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, the United States entered a long and dispiriting foreign war on the strength of bad intelligence, a collapse of the American financial system halved the average net worth of middle-class households, the increasing flow of illegal immigrants was serially ignored, Big Tech grew rich by trading in customers' personal data, and social mobility began to stall. As Baker puts it: "To suggest that [Trump] is the architect of collapsing faith in America would be to assign him the kind of power and influence only he thinks he really wields."
After Trump was elected, he pounded away on the entrenched political establishment as the source of these mishaps. And then the establishment did its best to prove him right with a new batch of bungling and flat-out deception: the false charge of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential election, the now hyper-partisan media's daily catastrophizing about conservatives, and the mistakes and misdirection of public health officials responding to the COVID pandemic. "Leading figures in public health across the country," writes Baker, "essentially inverted the scientific method," starting with answers and culling data to match. Americans noticed.
Baker adds to this run of failure the emergence of two complementary trends that were foisted on the public at the height of our national doubt: First, the rise of an "overclass that has more in common with its counterparts in London, Paris, or Singapore than it does with its compatriots in Louisville, Peoria, or Scranton." This is the Davos crowd, the influencers, institutionalists, and billionaires who disdain national identity and embrace climate change as religion. Baker's portrayal of the Davos set is peerless and one of the book's crowning delights. Consider his summary of Davos Speak: "Wander into a Davos session and you will catch stakeholders dialoguing and mainstreaming multifaceted metrics in a cross-platform environment before actioning toward implementation mode. It's English, Jim, but not as we know it."
These mainstreaming multifaceted muckety-mucks often find common cause with another emergent class that also speaks its own language: the radical ideologues of the campus left. What the globally minded Davos folks share with the identitarians and intersectionalists is a messianic disregard for the average American's well-being and, in some cases, a hostility toward his real concerns. Most important, the two elite forces pushed our culture and institutions in bizarre and damaging directions that do real harm to ordinary people. In something like ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) investing, we see clearly how the two groups merge to shortchange everyday Americans in the name of globally minded heroism. ESG-guided funds invest your hard-earned money only in companies that meet certain environmental and social criteria, but they generally underperform funds that are still stuck on the crazy idea that making money for shareholders is paramount. "Not only are [Americans] forced to watch as their corporate overlords use their powerful positions to pursue ideological goals many do not approve of," Baker writes, "but they are actually paying for the privilege of it."
Baker astutely dismantles a slew of ailing institutions, devoting a chapter each to politics, corporate America, news media, science, education, and technology. Each is a gem packed with insight and wit. Noting, for example, in his chapter on education that a recent survey showed 80 percent of Harvard faculty identified as "liberal" or "very liberal," 1 percent identified as "conservative," and zero said they were "very conservative," Baker observes inarguably, "These are North Korean levels of political conformity."
But the book's great strength is in resisting causal reductionism and daring to approach the trust fiasco in its combined magnitude. No single factor can begin to explain it. In his chapter on social trust, Baker considers the three main causes of mistrust cited in scholarly literature: corruption, economic inequality, and racial diversity. They all appear to play some role in our present crisis, but none dispositively. After all, as Baker points out, Transparency International still ranks the United States as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. And from 2011 to 2021, "on an income basis, the United States actually became a slightly more equal society, and yet, levels of social trust have continued to decline." Similarly, polls have shown a gargantuan shift away from bigotry in this country over the last half century, yet "Americans of all races seem to have become markedly more pessimistic about racial harmony in the very recent past."
Baker knows the problem is more massive than any individual grievance. Indeed, he writes movingly about the challenge of massiveness itself. "The vast scale of the institutions may be justified in terms of economies of scale, or by the larger purpose they are serving, but dealing with these Brobdingnagian entities induces a sense of smallness in us," he says. It's an underappreciated point, and it applies to our interaction with businesses, universities, and government. They've become, in some sense, too big to trust.
Baker is modest and uncharacteristically vague about offering solutions. But this is apt, as nothing elicits mistrust as surely as confidently proposed fixes. And grasping the size of our dilemma, he surely understands that the best we can hope at the moment is a good wish list. He'd like media companies and universities to be more ideologically diverse in their hiring. He suggests more transparency from technology platforms, more accountability from big business, and so on.
If there's good news here, it's that opinion writers can stop worrying about their possible books on the great American crack-up. Gerard Baker has beaten them to it with a definitive account of our complicated and uncertain times.
American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence
by Gerard Baker
Twelve, 288 pp., $30
Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of Commentary.
Stick a Fork in Biden – He’s Done!
President Joe Biden has become a joke, confabulating tall tales about his past political exploits, shaking hands with phantoms, not shaking hands with world leaders, getting lost on stage, and frequently falling. These are all clear signs of his physical and mental decline, obvious to all but his most partisan enablers and sycophants.
He has announced his candidacy for reelection, but that is as credible as Jack Nicklaus announcing a run for the US Open next spring. The only question is how Joe exits the presidency and campaign, whether voluntary or by his handlers making him an offer he can’t refuse.
The latest polls should be a bucket of cold water on Biden’s aspirations and the hopes and dreams of his enablers. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll suggests the turkey in the oven is done, ready for carving. Mind you, any political poll is merely a snapshot in time, the sentiments of voters, or whoever was surveyed, in late September 2023, more than a year from the next election.
YouTube screen grab
The headline says it all, “Trump edges out Biden 51-42 in head-to-head matchup.” The normally Biden-worshiping ABC News doesn’t hold back.
President Joe Biden's job approval rating is 19 points underwater, his ratings for handling the economy and immigration are at career lows. A record number of Americans say they've become worse off under his presidency, three-quarters say he's too old for another term and Donald Trump is looking better in retrospect -- all severe challenges for Biden in his reelection campaign ahead.
This reinforces the question that Trump and Republicans should be constantly asking, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Clearly the answer is no.
The Washington Post claims this is an outlier but acknowledges, “Biden is broadly unpopular and doubts about his suitability for a second term are extensive.” In their hearts they believe Biden is beloved and trouncing Trump in the polls, just as they believe Ukraine is winning the war despite loads of evidence to the contrary.
The Washington Examiner ran this headline, “Biden poll freakout” reflecting Democrats having seizures over the poll results.
This is not some Qanon MAGA poll, as it was commissioned by two left-wing news organizations, ABC News and the Washington Post. Of those polled, 50 percent voted for Biden in 2020, only 46 percent for Trump, meaning this poll oversampled Biden supporters.
When in doubt about the diagnosis, get a second opinion.
Rasmussen Reports’ Daily Presidential Tracking Poll confirms. On September 22, Biden’s total approval sits at 45 percent compared to Trump at 52 percent. Looking at negatives instead, 45 percent strongly disapprove of Biden’s performance versus only 25 percent strongly disapproving of Trump’s performance, a 20-point difference.
NBC News, another Democrat party superPAC, has similar dismal news for the donkey party. In their poll, “Three-quarters of voters say they’re concerned about President Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness.”
They also note,
The warning signs for Biden beyond his age — including an all-time high disapproval of his job performance, fewer than 4 in 10 voters approving of his handling of the economy and lagging interest in the election among key parts of the Democratic base.
There is also bad news for the GOP establishment, “The poll also shows Trump expanding his national lead in the Republican presidential nominating contest to more than 40 points over his nearest competition.”
Lastly there is the HarrisX poll from mid-September showing Trump with a 5 point lead over Biden (46-41) and even more concerning to Democrats, an 8 point Trump lead among independents (42-34).
Say it ain’t so Joe. Why is lunch bucket Joe, the Scranton Kid, sinking faster than the Titanic? Start with “It’s the economy stupid” as the Bill Clinton campaign reminded a few decades ago.
That reminder came from James Carville, architect of Clinton’s campaign. Today he sees the current Biden campaign clearly, speaking recently on a Bill Maher podcast, “People need to ‘wake the f-ck up’ when it comes to the 2024 election because President Joe Biden would lose to former President Donald Trump if the election were held this year.”
Everything costs more – gas, food, homes, mortgages, cars, and other necessities. Crime is rising to the point that major American cities are becoming unlivable hellholes, dystopian movie sets rather than the America many of us grew up in. Young men from all over the world are pouring into the country by the thousands each and every day, sent to a city near you, enjoying life on your dime, free to steal, rape, or murder with little repercussion.
Our national debt is over $33 trillion, growing by $5 billion a day, with interest payments costing taxpayers almost $2 billion each day. We are close to entering a hot war with Russia, nukes and all, and a new world order is forming, with the United States on the outside looking in.
Our military is more concerned with gender pronouns and male officers wearing dresses than combat and weapon readiness. Fentanyl is killing our youth and all the government can say is get yet another COVID booster shot.
And Biden family corruption is clear as Rep James Comer presented bank records showing wire transfers from Beijing to Joe Biden’s home in Delaware. In the 2020 presidential debates, Biden told Trump, "I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.” Oh really?
So, what are Democrats to do? In the ABC News survey, when asked who besides Biden they would like the Democrat party to nominate, “just someone else” was the clear winner with 20 percent, the other prospects in single digits. Given the choice of nominating Biden or someone else, “someone else” beat Biden 62 to 33 percent.
Get ready for Trump versus “someone else” next year.
Losing to Trump is unthinkable which is why Democrats’ politicized and weaponized FBI, DOJ, and legal system are attempting to send Trump to prison for the next thousand years. Trump is a force of nature with tremendous support of the people, and most of the Republican party.
Country club Republicans still hold out hope for Ron DeSantis, polling at 15 percent in the ABC News poll, or Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, or Tim Scott, all in single digits in their audition for Trump’s VP spot.
The easy path for Biden is to resign due to health reasons and to spend more time with the family. Does that mean more foreign influence peddling with son Hunter or showers with daughter Ashley? He could pardon his entire corrupt family on the way out and live out his days on a Delaware beach eating ice cream.
The harder path involves impeachment, which the Republicans threaten, but like most other campaign promises, often forget about. Even if they impeach him, Senate conviction is unlikely, as Republicans like Senator Mitt Romney claim to have not seen any evidence of Biden wrongdoing and Democrat senators will never help reach the required two-thirds supermajority.
Better to let the Democrats do the dirty work via the 25th Amendment, although Joe would likely resign before enduring that indignity. Joe recently received the latest COVID booster, and the annual flu vaccine and he could be one of many who suffer disability or mortality after such injections, stepping down for health reasons.
Clearly the Democrats are on the ropes. They can try their election cheating and rigging again, but the Trump campaign will likely be ready for that and already have counter measures in place.
Or is it time for a Democrat change of batter? Names like Gavin Newsom, Michelle Obama, and Gretchen Whitmer have been bandied about. Sleepy Joe is on the ropes and another Trump term is unthinkable for Democrats and the bipartisan ruling class. As Trump would say, “Let’s see what happens.”
Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer.
Follow me on Twitter @retinaldoctor
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Biden’s Booby Trap For a Republican President
Protecting bureaucracy instead of democracy.
The Biden administration is setting a booby trap in case a Republican wins the presidency in 2024.
Last Friday, the White House unveiled a proposed rule that would make it even harder than in the past for an incoming Republican president to wrestle control of the left-leaning federal bureaucracy and actually implement the conservative policies promised to voters.
Of the 2.2 million federal civil workers, only 4,000 are presidential appointees. The rest stay in their jobs, from one administration to the next, protected by rules that make it nearly impossible to discipline or replace them.
They overwhelmingly favor the Left. A staggering 95% of unionized federal employees who donate to political candidates give to Democrats, according to Open Secrets. Only a tiny 5% support Republicans.
Some federal workers in high positions slow-walk or even derail a Republican president’s agenda — and get away with it.
Why bother to vote if the left-leaning deep state stays in charge no matter who wins the presidency?
GOP candidates Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis are vowing to conquer this obstructionism.
Everett Kelley, union president of the American Federation of Government Employees, claims GOP contenders want to “politicize routine government work.” Nonsense. We’re not talking about mail carriers. It’s time to make lawyers, PhDs and other top-level career bureaucrats implement the president’s agenda, not their own.
After Trump won in 2016, they went to town neutralizing him on almost every policy front, explains James Sherk, special assistant to the White House Domestic Policy Council under Trump.
Career lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division flat out refused to challenge Yale University’s discrimination against Asian American applicants. Trump had to recruit lawyers from other divisions. After Joe Biden became president, the DOJ dropped the case. But the same career lawyers who refused to sue Yale made the losing argument in support of affirmative action before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Career health officials like Dr. Deborah Birx circumvented Trump’s instructions to moderate COVID lockdowns. Environmental Protection Agency lawyers pursued cases against fossil fuel producers and withheld the information from Trump appointees.
Trump mandated in a 2020 executive order that new federal buildings be designed to please the public, which prefers classical designs. Instead, General Services Administration architects chose modern designs they like. Trump mentioned as an example the San Francisco Federal Building, the ugliest edifice in the city.
It goes on, including weaponization of the FBI against the president himself.
In October 2020, Trump issued an executive order that federal workers who make policy should be reclassified as at-will employees who can be terminated.
But before it could be implemented, Biden became president. He canceled it immediately, knowing the bureaucrats were on his side.
The rule announced Friday would slow a president’s ability to reinstate Trump’s order. Democrats in Congress are going further, pushing to eliminate the president’s authority to reclassify jobs altogether.
The New York Times announced, “Biden Administration Aims to Trump-Proof the Federal Work Force.”
Ramaswamy vows to go further than Trump, eliminating half or more of civil service positions. “Speaking as a CEO, if somebody works for you and you can’t fire them, they don’t work for you,” he said in a speech on Sept. 12.
New York Magazine facetiously claims holding employees accountable is a threat to good government, and warns that a Republican victory will mean “a new class of federal appointees charged with a partisan agenda.”
Democrats and their media allies falsely romanticize civil service, claiming it protects “merit” over patronage.
Merit was the intention when the civil service was created in 1883 by the Pendleton Act. But merit is largely gone. Scramble those five letters and what you’ve got is the “timer” system. Federal workers get bigger salaries and fatter benefits than private-sector workers doing comparable jobs. And they almost never lose their job, no matter how derelict they are. They put in their time and skate to a gold-plated retirement package.
It’s a gravy train, paid for by John Q Public. That’s sickening enough. But it’s even worse when these civil “servants” put their own leftist leanings ahead of the president and public they’re paid to serve.
Bravo to the GOP candidates pledging to take on the deep state — replete with deadbeats and lefties — and return government to the people. It’s a worthy fight.
Shame on Biden for protecting bureaucracy instead of democracy.
Not in America.
eunuch (JOE BIDEN FOR CHINA)
a castrated man, especially one formerly employed by rulers in the Middle East and Asia as a harem guard or palace official.
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. PAM KEY
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Biden’s National Security Adviser: One of the ‘True Friends for the Chinese People’
Our conflicts of interest are Communist China’s gain.
[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
After the latest round of Chinese attacks on America, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Malta.
The two men could not be more different.
Wang Yi, one of the public faces of Chinese’s hyper-aggressive style of ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’, is a 69-year-old member of China’s Communist politburo while Sullivan was a Hillary Clinton hanger-on who got lucky enough to be advising Biden on foreign policy after Hillary left.
While Wang Yi made his name by aggressively barraging enemy nations, Sullivan made his through appeasement most notably on Iran. After his shameful record on Iran under Obama, Sullivan went so far as to propose lifting sanctions on Iran under Biden on an interim basis.
But Sullivan’s serial meetings with Wang are where he really shines. At a meeting in Anchorage, Alaska in 2021, Sullivan unctuously welcomed Wang with a completely inappropriate recitation of the economic triumphs of the Biden administration while the Chinese diplomat responded by calling Sullivan one of the “true friends for the Chinese people” before blasting the United States. After China’s spy balloon penetrated the United States in order to surveil Air Force installations, Sullivan and Wang met in Vienna. Now there’s yet another meeting.
But there is an interesting ‘lost years’ period in Sullivan’s life during the Trump era.
After Hillary lost, Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff at the State Department and the chief foreign policy advisor on her campaign, had to look for a new line of work.
And he found one “consulting” at Macro Advisory Partners.
Co-founded by Nader Mousavizadeh, an Iranian from Europe, who worked as a special assistant to the notoriously corrupt former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the former UN employee brought along Laila Manji, another UN veteran who had also worked for Annan.
Sir John Sawers, the former chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) joined Macro Advisory Partners and acts as its chair and general partner. David Claydon, its former co-founder and CEO, was an adviser to Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
Macro scored a coup by bringing on board not only Biden’s future national security adviser, but also Bill Burns, Biden’s somewhat unexpected choice for CIA Director. Also on board was Denis McDonough, Obama’s former national security adviser, currently acting as Biden’s VA Secretary.
The decision by future and former top United States security officials and diplomats to join an organization that has been described as being headed by former foreign spy chiefs was dubious.
Even more dubious was that Nader Mousavizadeh, its Iranian co-founder, had vocally used his platform to oppose conflict with China. Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column, the sort of nonsense read by the cognoscenti, included long quotes from Mousavizadeh on China in which the Macro boss argued against viewing China as promoting the “global spread of authoritarianism” and warned that fighting back would only make China more nationalistic.
“The danger is that we’re sleepwalking into a generational conflict that is neither necessary nor one that we in the West are prepared for, any more than the Chinese,” Mousavizadeh warned. “If the tariff war now underway culminates with removing Chinese citizens from Western businesses, and U.S. citizens from Chinese companies out of fears of espionage or theft, it will constitute an irreversible step toward generational enmity.”
Friedman, with typical dishonesty, did not mention that one of the big functions of Macro Advisory Partners was helping companies navigate regulations and sanctions when it came to doing business in and around the People’s Republic of China. Aiding in that effort are a list of MAP’s China advisors who include a former deputy national security advisor, the former acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, and the former deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia.
While Jake Sullivan’s ambit at Macro was reportedly focused on U.S. and European companies, one of them included Standard Chartered: a British multinational bank with significant financial interests in China.
When Sullivan joined the Biden administration, his assets were a towering $7.5 million to $27.5 million. Sullivan, whose father had been a University of Minnesota journalism professor, boasted what ABC News described as “a long list of residential and commercial real estate properties scattered throughout Florida and New Hampshire” which made up much of his wealth. The properties included everything from a golf course to land zoned for a church.
Officially, Sullivan had only earned in the low six figures from Macro, nonetheless he was a millionaire. Does Wang Yi have an interest in a Florida golf course? Probably not, but who knows? And when Sullivan meets with Wang, does he think of his time with Macro? Does he consider how much more profitable it would be if we stopped thinking of China as our enemy?
After an initial cover-up of the Chinese spy balloon, the Biden administration was forced to shoot it down to save face with the American public. Now the administration has released a National Intelligence Estimate claiming that the spy balloon had been blown off course and that it had not transmitted any intelligence to the People’s Republic of China. The estimate is as untrustworthy as it is unreliable. In May 2023, Sullivan was already meeting with Wang to move beyond the espionage incident. Since then, the Communist dictatorship has launched multiple hacking attacks, including some aimed directly at the State Department, with no consequences.
In July, Sullivan claimed that the Chinese hackers did not penetrate any classified information and vowed to hold them accountable. As of August, he had no further updates on any plan to hold China accountable. This has been the standard pattern for the Biden administration. China launches an attack, the administration promises to take it seriously and then buries it. In doing so, the People’s Republic of China gets the green light to escalate and do it all over again.
The Biden administration is one long extended conflict of interest so no one bothers to ask whether the national security adviser ought to be a man who worked for a consultancy focused on improving economic relations with China. And yet it’s a question that ought to be asked.
Perhaps American diplomacy could use fewer “true friends for the Chinese people” and more true friends of the American people.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Reader Interactions
Comer: Chinese Businessman Wired Money to Hunter Biden Using Joe Biden’s Home Address
House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle” that President Joe Biden’s son Hunter used his father’s home address when a Chinese businessman with ties to the Chinese Communist Party wired him $250,000.
Anchor Laura Ingraham said, “A wire transfer itself used Joe Biden’s Wilmington address on the forms.”
She asked, “Congressman, what does this mean? What can tell us?”
Comer said, “I can tell you on the wire that Hunter Biden received from the Chinese national the beneficiary address listed was Joe Biden’s home address at a time where I’m pretty certain Hunter Biden was not living in the home of Joe Biden if you go back even further than that. This Jonathan Lee who wired the $260,000 from China to Hunter Biden’s personal account, he is part of the Chinese communist party. He is a huge business person in China with the Chinese backed entity that funds investments ins United States.”
He added, “The one issue in Congress that Republicans and Democrats agree on. We don’t want China taking over industries important to our national security. We don’t want China buying farmland. This is the guy that does that Jonathan Lee is the person who represents China. And if you research it, Joe Biden met with Jonathan Lee.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Hunter Biden Received Payments From China Wired to Father's Address: House Oversight Committee
'In 2020, Joe Biden told Americans that his family never received money from China. We've already proved that to be a lie.'
Hunter Biden Received Payments From China Wired to Father's Address: House Oversight Committee
By Catherine Yang
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) subpoenaed and obtained two bank wires revealing that Hunter Biden had received payments from Chinese nationals that were sent to his father, Joe Biden, who was then running for President.
The wire transfers, of upwards of $250,000, were made in July and August 2019 from Beijing, and listed the president's Wilmington, Delaware, home as the beneficiary address in both cases.
"In 2020, Joe Biden told Americans that his family never received money from China. We've already proved that to be a lie earlier this year, and now we know that two wires originating from Beijing listed Joe Biden's Wilmington home as the beneficiary address when he was running for President of the United States," said Mr. Comer in a statement released on X.
Prosecutors Opposed Hunter Biden Charges, FBI Agent Says
9/26/2023
Prosecutors Opposed Hunter Biden Charges, FBI Agent Says
Hunter Biden Received Payments From China Wired to Father's Address: House Oversight Committee
9/26/2023
Hunter Biden Received Payments From China Wired to Father's Address: House Oversight Committee
Both wires were sent to Hunter Biden from Jonathan Li, a Chinese national and CEO of the investment fund BHR.
"When Joe Biden was vice president, he spoke on the phone and had coffee with Jonathan Li in Beijing, and later wrote a college letter of recommendation for his children," Mr. Comer stated.
The New York Post found that soon after leaving his post in the Obama administration, the former vice president had written college recommendation letters for Mr. Li's son and daughter. Emails obtained by Fox News revealed that Mr. Li had reached out to Hunter Biden and his business partners in 2017 asking for advice for his son, who was applying to Brown University, Cornell, and NYU. The then-president of Rosemont Seneca had FedExed Mr. Li's son's resume directly to the the president of Brown. Despite the connections, he was not accepted by the school.
Hunter Biden Files Lawsuit Against IRS, Claiming Violation of Privacy
The New Yorker had in 2019 reported that Mr. Biden introduced Mr. Li to his father in 2013, when the vice president took the trip to China, and that Rosemont Seneca, the company Hunter Biden worked for, had signed a deal with Mr. Li to create BHR.
President Biden has repeatedly denied that he discussed business matters with his son, and declined to comment on the investigation or indictment of Hunter Biden, instead referring reporters to the Department of Justice.
"Joe Biden's abuse of public office for his family's financial gain threatens our national security. What did the Bidens do with this money from Beijing? Americans demand and deserve accountability for President Biden and the First Family's corruption," Mr. Comer stated, adding that the Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees will continue to investigate the Biden family.
Investigation
The Republican-led House committees have been investigating the Biden family's financial dealings, hearing testimonies from whistleblowers and subpoenaing financial records.
A five-year Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation had failed to bring any charges until two IRS whistleblowers testified before the Ways and Means Committee this summer, claiming the DOJ purposely hindered the investigation. The DOJ then brought two tax misdemeanor charges against Hunter Biden, as well as a pretrial agreement for a diversion for a felony gun charge. After that plea bargain fell apart during Mr. Biden's arraignment in Delaware, special counsel David Weiss brought three felony gun charges against Mr. Biden. He has not been charged with any tax crimes thus far.
Mr. Weiss, who had led the investigation since 2018, was not appointed special counsel until this summer. The whistleblowers had claimed Mr. Weiss had no authority to prosecute Mr. Biden in certain jurisdictions, a claim Attorney General Merrick Garland has refuted before Congress.
In 2020, after President Biden was elected into office, Hunter Biden announced that the investigation targeting him, which began in 2018, had to do with his "tax affairs."
The statement came after the New York Post reported data on a laptop allegedly abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware computer repair shop, which contained more than 129,000 emails including correspondence between Mr. Biden and foreign nationals who paid him large sums of money.
The two IRS whistleblowers who testified before Congress earlier this summer also authenticated text messages that Mr. Biden sent demanding payment from a Chinese national while invoking his father's name and office.
A third whistleblower has since stepped forward, repeating claims that the DOJ hindered the progress of the investigation and claims that Mr. Weiss lacked authority to bring charges against Mr. Biden.
Mr. Biden's attorney has stated that his client plans to plead not guilty at the upcoming Oct. 3 arraignment in Delaware.
On Sept. 27, the House Ways and Means Committee will meet to vote on documents protected under IRS Code Section 6103, which prohibits the release of tax documents by IRS employees but has exceptions that allow information to be shared with a state agency that requests it, or for it to be released through a court order.
This may result in the release of additional tax documents related to the panel's investigation into Mr. Biden's tax dealings. It could also address a lawsuit Mr. Biden has brought against whistleblowers who testified before the committee for violating Section 6103.
Court Doc: Hunter Lived in California When Chinese Partners Wired Money to Joe Biden’s Delaware Address
Hunter Biden did not reside with President Joe Biden in Delaware when his Chinese business partners wired money to Joe Biden’s address in 2019, court documents show.
Joe Biden’s address received two wires from BHR Partners associates linked to the CCP in July and August totaling $260,000, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) revealed Tuesday.
The time frame detailed in Hunter Biden’s collapsed plea deal in July with now-special counsel David Weiss says Hunter Biden’s residence was in California when the Chinese partners sent money to Joe Biden’s address. Hunter Biden “remained in California and spent much of the Summer 2019 painting and developing plans for his memoir,” the plea deal states on page 9. In Hunter Biden’s memoir, “Beautiful Things,” the president’s son also noted that he lived in California at the time his Chinese partners wired the money to Delaware.
According to Hunter Biden’s text messages and emails, he shared a bank account with Joe Biden and paid some of his father’s expenses. Hunter Biden also listed Joe Biden’s Delaware house as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019. In addition, Hunter Biden’s driver’s license issued in 2018 lists Joe Biden’s residence.
“This was a documented loan (not a distribution or pay-out) that was wired from a private individual to his new bank account which listed the address on his driver’s license, his parents’ address, because it was his only permanent address at the time,” Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, told CNN. “We expect more occasions where the Republican chairs twist the truth to mislead people to promote their fantasy political agenda.”
The wired money from Beijing, China, to Joe Biden’s address contradicts the president’s false claim that Hunter Biden never made money from China. Joe Biden also falsely claimed he never spoke to his son about business. Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s best friend in business, told the Oversight Committee that Joe Biden spoke with a BHR Partners associate, Jonathan Li, on speakerphone to sell the “Biden brand.”
BHR Partners, the fund Hunter Biden co-founded via a joint venture with Archer and Li, maintains investments worth billions of dollars around the globe. Hunter Biden conveyed his stake to his current lawyer, Kevin Morris, Breitbart News exclusively reported in April. Archer conveyed his stake in BHR Partners to his wife in 2017.
“President Biden has lied to Americans again,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters Tuesday evening. “We now have found today that when President Biden was running for the presidency, when he told the American people that, ‘My family has never received money from China,’ was wrong.”
White House spokesman Ian Sams pushed back on McCarthy’s comment by telling CNN that money wired to Joe Biden’s address is a part of a conspiracy theory, CNN reported:
Extreme House Republicans are pushing out half-baked innuendo and conspiracy theories that yet again show no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden, just more discredited personal attacks on him and his family, in a sad effort to distract from their chaotic inability to govern that is leading us to the brink of a dangerous government shutdown.
Despite the White House’s repeated disinformation, Tuesday’s revelation emerged from the committee’s recent subpoena of financial records related to a specific bank account that received two wires from China linked to BHR Partners associates. “Joe Biden’s abuse of public office for his family’s financial gain threatens our national security. What did the Bidens do with this money from Beijing?” Comer asked.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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