- Italy Won't Bow To Powerful Elites In Favor Of Open Borders, Insists Meloni
Italy Won’t Bow To Powerful Elites In Favor Of Open Borders, Insists Meloni
Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,
A defiant Giorgia Meloni offered a staunch defense of her government’s handling of the migrant crisis in the Chamber of Deputies this week…
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told political opponents she will not bow to the political pressure exerted by powerful elites in favor of open borders.
Speaking during Question Time in the Chamber of Deputies, Meloni responded to questions related to her government’s handling of the ever-increasing migratory pressure in the Mediterranean following government data published this week that revealed more than 20,000 people have now reached the country so far this year.
“As long as there are departures on boats in bad condition, navigating in bad weather conditions, there will be loss of life,” she told parliamentary colleagues.
“We need to invest in legal routes, and that is exactly the job the government is doing. Our conscience is clear. I hope that whoever attacks the government but does not say a word about smugglers can say the same,” she added.
She offered a staunch defense of the country’s coastguard, which came under considerable scrutiny from Italy’s left-wing press in the aftermath of the migrant boat tragedy in the Ionian Sea, which cost several dozen lives.
The Italian premier expressed her amazement that “for political ends, we end up questioning the honor and the work of people who risk their lives every day to save human lives and the honor of Italy.”
On the wider migratory issue gripping the nation, Meloni highlighted that “for several months we have been witnessing a migratory pressure that has few precedents toward Europe and Italy,” and despite calls from humanitarian lobbyists and political opponents, she “has no intention of bowing to the many powerful pressures of those who would like a vision without national borders.”
She reiterated her desire to “firmly combat illegal traffickers and manage immigration in a regular way” through government decree and subsequent legislation. However, she warned that Italy cannot be expected to handle the crisis alone and called for “a framework of responsibility that must also involve the other European states.”
The conservative administration in Rome has been busy tackling the issue facing Italy and wider Europe since its electoral success in September, with Meloni recently introducing legislation to pass tougher sentences on convicted people smugglers. Those found guilty of the offense could soon face up to 30 years in prison should their negligent actions or failure to act result in the death of vulnerable migrants.
Meloni also issued several government decrees that she aims to pass to stifle the operations of humanitarian search-and-rescue vessels operating in the Mediterranean. The decrees, which have caused outrage among the Italian left and European NGOs, call on vessels operating in the area to return to land immediately after a rescue, rather than remaining at sea and effectively becoming a magnet for other prospective migrants encouraged to attempt the perilous journey.
This perspective was supported by a recent report by Italy’s intelligence services, which claimed the presence of NGO vessels in the Mediterranean is fueling the migrant crisis.
The report accused NGOs of providing “a logistical advantage for the criminal organizations that manage migrant trafficking, allowing them to adapt their modus operandi according to the possibility of reducing the quality of the vessels used, correspondingly increasing illicit profits, and exposing the people on board to a more concrete risk of shipwreck.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/17/2023 – 02:00 - Feds' Foreign-Corruption Double Standard: They Protected Bidens While Bearing Down On Trumpworld
Feds’ Foreign-Corruption Double Standard: They Protected Bidens While Bearing Down On Trumpworld
Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Wire,
At the same time that Department of Justice officials were using spying and corruption statutes to aggressively pursue Donald Trump’s allies based on what turned out to be rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same laws to investigate evidence of wrongdoing involving Biden family members and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners, DOJ documents and federal court records reveal.
In 2016-2017, the evidence shows, the FBI raided the offices and intercepted the communications of Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, a Chinese national agents suspected of espionage even as he was negotiating business deals with former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and brother James.
DOJ later used information obtained from the searches and wiretaps – which included conversations with the current President’s son and brother – to convict Ho of bribery and money laundering, as part of a separate corruption case involving United Nations officials. But it declined to tap into its trove of evidence – including “over 100,000 emails” – to explore the connections between Ho and the Bidens, who received millions of dollars from Ho and a Chinese intelligence front and discussed sharing office space.
At Ho’s 2018 trial, prosecutors hid Hunter’s connection to Ho, redacting his name from court exhibits (see sidebar) while describing Ho as “the person who flies around the world paying bribes to advance the interest of the oil company [CEFC China Energy],” according to hearing transcripts.
A federal database shows the Bidens failed to register as foreign agents while engaged in activities on behalf of CEFC, a state-owned entity suspected of being a front for Chinese intelligence. Federal anti-spying laws require anyone acting as a lobbyist for a foreign power to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The DOJ did not prosecute either Biden family member for potential violations of FARA for representing the interests of the Chinese.
This stands in stark contrast to the DOJ’s aggressive pursuit of alleged FARA violations involving no fewer than six Trump campaign officials. In August of 2016, shortly after receiving a tip that a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had allegedly been told that the Russians might have dirt on Hillary Clinton, the bureau opened FARA investigations into Papadopoulos and three other Trump associates with no clear ties to Papadopoulos: national security adviser Michael Flynn; campaign manager Paul Manafort; and campaign adviser Carter Page. The FBI subsequently investigated Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates; and Trump’s Mideast adviser Walid Phares under the same statute.
As RCI has previously reported, the FBI used FARA as the basis for a wide-ranging probe that included tailing them, staking out their homes, digging through their trash, and using confidential sources to secretly record them. Only one of the six was convicted for FARA-related violations, and none was charged with any espionage or conspiracy crimes involving Russia.
“It’s 100% a double standard, and it’s absolutely corrupt to the core,” former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker told RCI. “And meanwhile, [current FBI Director] Chris Wray fiddles.”
Other veterans of the bureau say the Obama and Biden administrations have politicized and weaponized FARA.
“Starting in 2016, the Obama-Biden administration used FARA and the criminal justice system as tools to attack and eliminate the opposition,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello, adding that many of the same officials are “back in charge and making sure those tools won’t be turned on themselves.”
An FBI spokeswoman said the agency had no comment on why it did not apply the foreign lobbying law equally. The Justice Department did not return requests for comment.
Ho and Hunter: A Lucrative Relationship
Court records and other documents show that Hunter Biden met with Ho’s boss Ye Jianming in February 2017 in Miami, where the CEFC chief offered him up to $30 million for “introductions alone,” according to emails. Ye – who had connections to both China’s Communist Party in China and its armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army – sealed the deal with a lucrative gift to Hunter: a 3.16-carat diamond worth an estimated $80,000. (Hunter never returned the large gem.)
Not long after their private dinner, CEFC began wiring millions of dollars from China to pass-through companies set up by Hunter Biden. Over the next 14 months, Hunter and Jimmy Biden (as the latter is known to family and friends) ultimately received almost $6 million from CEFC entities, according to congressional investigators, including $1 million from Ho. At the time, the FBI was tracking Ho’s and CEFC’s “bank and wire transfer records,” according to DOJ records, which indicates agents were aware of the China-based payments to the Bidens.
As Hunter was meeting Ye that February, DOJ records show, the FBI renewed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting Ho. Former FBI officials say agents had a clear window into how the Chinese were attempting to cultivate the Bidens.
When Hunter formally structured the CEFC deal in May 2017, text messages found on his abandoned laptop reveal, he was worried about running afoul of two federal laws: the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – which Ho was convicted of violating – and FARA.
“We don’t want to have to register as foreign agents,” Hunter texted another partner in the deal, and suggested they set up a U.S. shell company towork around it.
In the end, Hunter never registered with the Justice Department, according to a search of the FARA database. Nor did uncle Jimmy. They also did not report their activities for CEFC or any of the almost $6 million in wire payments they received, as required by law.
The texts indicate Hunter was familiar with the requirements of the law. Violations carry a maximum punishment of five years in prison.
Hunter and his attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment. Attempts to reach James Biden were unsuccessful.
Also that May, the uncle sent his nephew a list of “key domestic contacts” they could exploit to advance the interests of their Chinese partners. Then-California Sen. Kamala Harris and then-California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom were among the powerful Democrats listed.
China has sought to influence powerful officials, particularly to gain access to U.S. energy markets, which are heavily regulated. CEFC is the capitalist arm of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” to spread China’s influence around the world while gobbling up oil and gas rights.
In an August 2017 email to another Ye lieutenant, Hunter guaranteed his family would follow through on the introductions as long as the money kept flowing: “The Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman [Ye] wants from this partnership.”
And the China-based funds flowed and flowed into Biden bank accounts. The CEFC contract guaranteed Hunter $150,000 a month, with another $65,000 a month for Jimmy Biden. The vast majority of Americans do not make $150,000 in a year.
The payments, earmarked as “consulting fees,” raised so many red flags at Wells Fargo and other banks that processed the funds that they notified the Treasury Department they had concerns about possible money laundering and other financial crimes. Treasury, in turn, generated some 150 Suspicious Activity Reports related to the financial transactions.
The Biden administration has refused to turn over the Treasury reports to Congress, despite repeated requests for them. Congressional investigatorsare trying to determine if any of the “large wire transfers” enriched the president, either directly or through gifts-in-kind.
Early on, Joe Biden appeared from emails to be cut in on a future CEFC deal, which is at odds with his repeated denials about being involved in – or even knowing anything about – his son’s business dealings.
In a May 2017 meeting at a Beverly Hills hotel, Biden discussed the CEFC venture with Hunter’s business associate Tony Bobulinski, according to Bobulinski, who said they spoke for more than an hour. An email that same month described the “big guy” getting a 10% cut. Bobulinski has confirmed Joe Biden was the “big guy.” An October 2017 email, moreover, identifies the former vice president as a participant in a call about CEFC’s plans to purchase U.S. natural gas.
‘Take Whatever Money You Can Take’
It’s not clear what the Chinese got for all their money, which didn’t appear to correspond with any actual billing for consulting work.
At one point a CEFC aide simply told Hunter in a laptop email: “[T]ake whatever money you can take. Take as much as possible … to spend for your own benefit.” The Bidens did virtually no “legitimate” work for CEFC, according to congressional investigators, who question whether CEFC sought out Hunter as part of anintelligence-gathering operation aimed at his father.
Hunter appeared to know he was accepting tainted money that might compromise national security. In an audio recording found on his laptop, he described his Chinese partner Ho as “the fucking spy chief of China.”
In November 2017, two FBI agents arrested Ho at JFK International Airport in New York.
After seizing his Huawei cell phone and iPad from his luggage, law enforcement records show, they charged him with attempting to bribe former U.N. officials and African government officials with wire payments and even boxes of cash to secure lucrative oil rights in African countries.
Ho’s first call from jail was to James Biden, law enforcement records show. The call was made less than 10 minutes after agents read Ho his Miranda rights.
The Bidens’ Chinese benefactor-turned-inmate had hoped James and his nephew would use their political clout to spring him. Hunter quickly put in some calls to the FBI on his behalf, according to an email exchange he had that day with New York defense attorney Edward Kim, who represented Ho throughout his trial.
A retainer agreement found on Hunter’s laptop shows that Ho had paid Hunter $1 million for “Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation,” even though Hunter is not licensed to practice law in New York. Kim was Ho’s real attorney, not Biden. The Bidens had some powerful FBI friends, including former FBI Director Louis Freeh (who, records show, got a seat on the Beau Biden Foundation board after giving Joe Biden’s grandchildren $100,000). But they weren’t able to help Ho, who stayed locked behind bars at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan.
Agents subsequently raided the D.C.-area office of Ho, located about 10 minutes from Hunter Biden’s own office, which also has not been previously reported.
However, agents never searched Biden’s office, to which his Chinese partners had key access, and prosecutors never indicted Biden – despite evidently knowing the president’s son failed to register as a foreign agent representing the interests of the Chinese government agents in Washington in exchange for several million dollars.
The DOJ records reveal the FBI seized a massive trove of CEFC evidence, including “more than 100,000” emails, from searches of Ho’s phone, computers and offices in Manhattan and Arlington, Va., including emails citing Hunter Biden. No fewer than five of Ho’s email accounts – both business and personal – were targeted for FISA collection, according to the DOJ records reviewed by RCI.
FISA surveillance is sweeping, and former FBI officials say it would have included phone conversations between Ho and CEFC and Hunter Biden – as well as his uncle, who was also a partner in the joint venture with the Chinese and also communicated with Ho.
“FISAs include everything,” Swecker said, “so it definitely included his emails and texts [with the Bidens].”
He said the bureau could have used the evidence to investigate the Bidens at the time, but backed off. He added that even though the FBI maintains the FISA-collected material in a classified database, he doubts investigators will use it now to go after the Bidens.
“FISA material cannot be used in a criminal proceeding unless you get a special court order,” Swecker said. “I suspect the FBI would not even try to do that now given their hands-off conduct on this case in the past.”
Even if Wray were to launch a probe now, it might be too late. Most federal felonies have a five-year statute of limitation.
Swecker, who served as a prosecutor before joining the FBI, said FARA violation cases against the Bidens would have been a slam dunk. He noted that CEFC was a foreign principal as defined by the FARA statute. And he said the Bidens’ consulting work for CEFC benefitted the Chinese government, making them potential agents of that government. He added that Ho and his CEFC bosses were no doubt targeting future presidential candidate Joe Biden, while Hunter and Jimmy Biden were peddling influence with the Chinese to generate millions for the Biden family.
“It’s strange how there was no curiosity [at Justice] whatsoever about foreign influence on a potential president of the United States, especially from this country’s greatest threat – China,” Swecker said.
Stranger still is that DOJ prosecutors knew the Bidens’ partner was a dangerous Chinese agent with “powerful” military and political ties, including to the leadership of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
In court filings, federal prosecutors noted Ho previously served as a Chinese government minister where he helped Hong Kong transition from British to Chinese state rule. They introduced recordings from prison, translated from Chinese, where Ho can be overheard directing Chinese allies to ask “the upper level” of the CCCP to “get involved” in his case.
“He has powerful connections in mainland China,” then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a nine-page memo arguing for his continued detention. “It is difficult to overstate how well-connected Ho is.”
While the defense portrayed the portly, bespectacled Ho as a harmless academic running a “think tank” promoting international economic development, the China Energy Fund Committee, prosecutors accused Ho of not only doling out bribes but trafficking arms, including grenade launchers and anti-tank missiles.
After serving out his term, Ho was immediately deported back to China.
Charlie McGonigal
One explanation for the FBI’s and DOJ’s lack of interest in prosecuting the Bidens in the Ho case may be the role played by former FBI official Charles “Charlie” McGonigal.
FBI sources say McGonigal oversaw the initial espionage probe of Ho, including the FISA coverage of his communications, as head of the FBI’s counterintelligence wing of the New York field office, where the investigation was opened.
McGonigal was recently arrested for allegedly taking bribes from an Albanian-American connected to CEFC, according to court records. He allegedly received $225,000 in cash from former Albanian intelligence official-turned-New Jersey businessman Agron Neza. Neza introduced McGonigal to Dorian Ducka, who worked as an adviser to CEFC and was trying to secure oil-drilling licenses in Albania for the Chinese. Ducka was close to CEFC chairman Ye, who dropped off the expensive diamond “gift” for Hunter Biden at his Miami hotel room. Ducka appears in emails found on Hunter’s laptop discussing CEFC business prospects.
Prosecutors say McGonigal first met with Neza in August 2017 – the same month the Bidens were ramping up their deal with CEFC. The nextmonth he met with Ducka. During this time, McGonigal was overseeing the CEFC-Ho counterespionage case.
In an interview, former FBI counterintelligence attorney Mark Wauck said McGonigal may have pulled punches in the counterespionage probe of the Bidens and their Chinese bagmen because he himself was potentially compromised by the Chinese.
“Keeping the PRC angle in mind is important, once you realize this guy was for sale,” Wauck told RCI, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
It’s not immediately known if McGonigal was one of the FBI agents Hunter reached out to in 2017 after Ho called from jail pleading for help from his Biden payees. But the two men may have had a personal connection through their daughters.
According to emails stored on Hunter’s laptop, McGonigal’s wife Pamela and Hunter both received dozens of messages related to private lacrosse clinics in 2014 and 2015, when McGonigal was working out of the FBI’s Baltimore field office. Their daughters played at lacrosse training facilities in the Maryland-D.C. area.
McGonigal was a protege of former FBI director James Comey, who signed off on FISA spy warrants targeting Trump’s presidential campaign and was directly involved in the Russiagate investigation of the former president. In a May 2017 national security forum, McGonigal sang the praises of his erstwhile boss, who had just been summarily dismissed by Trump.
“Director Comey was probably one of the most loved leaders that we’ve had,” McGonigal said. “I think many of us who were nominated for leadership positions by him will forever hold him in esteem.”
McGonigal worked on national security cases with top DOJ official David Laufman, an Obama appointee based in Washington who made the decisions in 2017 to pursue Trump and his associates over possible FARA violations, while leaving the Bidens untouched. An Obama donor, Laufman stepped down as the chief of Justice’s National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section in February 2018.
The feds also had evidence of possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act from the many suspicious financial transactions between the Chinese and the Bidens. But investigators focused instead on Chinese attempts to corrupt former African officials and their families – even thoughbribing the family of an American vice president constituted a potentially far bigger scandal.
Swecker noted that counterespionage officials at the FBI and DOJ gathered far more evidence concerning the Bidens’ troubling connections to China than they ever did concerning Trump and his advisers’ alleged ties to Russia. In fact, much of the foundation for alleged Trump-Russia“collusion” turned out to be fabricated by two FBI informants who also happened to work for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
In the same 2016-2017 period the FBI had Ho under FISA surveillance, it was secretly monitoring former Trump campaign adviser Page as an alleged Russian agent through a series of FISA warrants – half of which were later invalidated by the spy court. The FISAs were based on false rumors from political opposition research contained in a dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign.
Unlike Ho, Page was never accused of criminal wrongdoing or convicted of a crime.
Subpoenaing Hunter and Jimmy Biden
Another Trump-tied counterespionage target in the FBI’s Russiagate crusade was retired Lt. Gen. Flynn, who served in the White House asTrump’s national security adviser before resigning less than a month after taking office as a result of what he called a politically motivated vendetta by the FBI and DOJ. In 2016, the FBI opened an investigation of Flynn based on possible FARA violations. Though the case was later dropped, prosecutors charged him with making false statements. DOJ eventually had to dismiss those charges, as well.
This month Flynn filed a $50 million lawsuit claiming “malicious prosecution” by Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, and his counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, along with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his lead prosecutor Brandon Van Grack, an Obama donor.
The 51-page complaint filed in federal court in Tampa claims their goal was to sabotage Trump and prevent Flynn from blowing the whistle on the FBI’s illegitimately predicated Russiagate probe as Trump’s national security adviser, where he would have had access to intelligence across theagencies. Then-Vice President Biden is named in the scheme.
In a phone interview, Flynn told RealClearInvestigations the specter of his exposing the FBI’s and DOJ’s cover-up of the Bidens’ Chinese connection was “another reason for getting me out of the way.”
As former Defense Intelligence Agency director, he said he posed a direct threat to corrupt actors in the intelligence community: “There was never a national security adviser with my type of background in that key role.”
In their probe of Biden foreign influence-peddling, congressional investigators are zeroing in on the CEFC connection.
Last month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent letters to Hunter Biden and his uncle Jimmy seeking all of their communications with Ho and other CEFC principals.
After Hunter and his legal team missed the Feb. 22 deadline to turn over the documents, Comer threatened to issue subpoenas to compel them to comply with the order. Now he says he will give Hunter’s camp more time to respond, so if his committee has to subpoena the documents, it will have a better chance of winning in court by showing a “good-faith effort” to obtain them through cooperation.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, a senior Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has launched a parallel investigation of the Bidens’ dealings with CEFC. In letters to DOJ, he’s complained about the uneven enforcement of the FARA statute when it comes to the Biden family. He said both Hunter and his uncle should have registered as foreign agents of the China-backed energy conglomerate.
“Hunter and James Biden, based on family name and political influence, were agents of CEFC,” he said in a statement, “as both had planned roles with CEFC which would ultimately benefit the communist Chinese government.”
Grassley argued that CEFC intended to alter U.S. policy and public opinion through the Bidens, and the Chinese government would have been the principal beneficiary of those actions.
“The [FARA] law must be followed and enforced without regard to party, power or position,” Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy asserted in an interview.
* * *
Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 23:45 - Former Australian PM Savages 'Rubbish' AUKUS Deal With US: "Worst Deal In History"
Former Australian PM Savages ‘Rubbish’ AUKUS Deal With US: “Worst Deal In History”
Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who is among the country’s most well-known and influential political thinkers, has shocked the establishment by coming out with a blistering attack on Australia’s AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal with the United States and the United Kingdom. He blasted it as the “worst international decision” by a Labor government since the conscription order of World War I.
He said in written statement on the occasion of addressing the National Press Club on Wednesday that the submarine deal is fundamentally about “US strategic hegemony in Asia” and that Australia has now unwisely hitched its wagon to Washington. Keating wrote in the rare critique that “China has committed, in the eyes of the United States, the great sin of internationalism. And what is that sin? To develop an economy as big as the United States.”
“The Americans will never condone or accept a state as large as them. That’s what China presents. They would have preferred that [China] – 20 per cent of humanity – remained in poverty forever. But the fact that China is now an industrial economy larger than the United States … it is not in the playbook.”
Via Reuters That’s when he concluded that ultimately, “This is what [Aukus] is about, the maintenance of the US strategic hegemony in Asia.”
In reference to the deal announced and confirmed by President Joe Biden on Monday in San Diego while standing beside his Australian and British counterparts, Keating wrote, “For $360 billion, we’re going to get eight submarines. It must be the worst deal in all history.”
He took direct aim at the current Australian PM and other top officials, writing the following:
“This week, Anthony Albanese screwed into place the last shackle in the long chain the United States has laid out to contain China.”
“No mealy-mouthed talk of ‘stabilisation’ in our China relationship or resort to softer or polite language will disguise from the Chinese the extent and intent of our commitment to United States’s strategic hegemony in East Asia with all its deadly portents.”
“History will be the judge of this project in the end. But I want my name clearly recorded among those who say it is a mistake. Who believes that, despite its enormous cost, it does not offer a solution to the challenge of great power competition in the region or to the security of the Australian people and its continent.”
Australians who don’t want a war with China are still unclear about how to respond to this deluge of mass media war propaganda our country is being smashed with, and Keating showed exactly how to respond. He provided a solid model for us all.https://t.co/noXxKehvpB
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 16, 2023
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Keating emphasized that Australian sovereignty must comes first, but Washington is aiming to become the “primary strategic power in Asia” despite having “no land in the metropolitan zone of Asia” given that it’s some 10,000km away.
English-language media in some instances was quick to suggest he’s playing into Chinese and Russian propaganda while not dealing with his actual arguments. Anthony Albanese also said the former PM has “diminished” himself. “It is unfortunate that Mr Keating chose such a very strong personal statement against people. I don’t think that that does anything other than diminish him, frankly,” the prime minister said. “We’ll continue to do what we need to do to defend our nation,” he added, but without addressing how the government hopes to pay for the massive decades-long nuclear submarine program.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 23:25 - "I’m Telling You, He Did It": Seymour Hersh Blames Biden For Nord Stream Attack
“I’m Telling You, He Did It”: Seymour Hersh Blames Biden For Nord Stream Attack
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that Joe Biden made the decision to blow up Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines because he saw being a war president as giving him a better chance at re-election.
Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc / Contributor via Getty Images Last month, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation.
According to Hersh’s sources, the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy.
One source told Hersh that the plotters knew the covert operation was an “act of war,” with some in the CIA and State Department warning, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”
Last week, the New York Times reported that a “pro-Ukrainian group” had sabotaged the pipelines, using a team with as few as six people involved in the mission, contradicting previous assumptions that only a state would have had the resources to carry out the operation.
According to Hersh, referring to Biden, “He did it. He did it, I’m telling you, he did it,” adding, “The Biden game is to wait it out and never say yes.”
The journalist claimed that Biden wanted to escalate the conflict in order to position himself as a war president.
“I think Biden also saw beating up Russia as a ticket. Jack Kennedy is a classic example – presidents always did well politically in wars,” he said.
Hersh claimed that Biden made the decision in January 2022 to “see if we can find a way to blow… those pipelines, and put [the Russians] back in the dark ages.”
The Pulitzer-Prize winner went on to savage the legacy media for completely failing to follow up on his report that the U.S. was responsible for the attack, which took out three of the four pipelines.
Meanwhile, China has reacted with skepticism towards the explanation that a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible for the blasts.
During a press briefing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called for “an objective, impartial and professional investigation” into the bombing.
“We have noted that some Western media have been mysteriously quiet after Hersh reported that the US was behind the Nord Stream blast. But now these media are unusually simultaneous in making their voice heard. How would the US account for such abnormality? Is there anything hidden behind the scene?” Wang asked.
New reports also reveal that a German spy ship was in the area where the attack occurred at the time of the blasts on September 26.
According to a report by German magazine Der Spiegel, the CIA warned Berlin about a potential attack on gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea weeks before it happened.
As we highlighted yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin branded claims that the Nord Stream pipeline attack was the work of pro-Ukrainian activists “nonsense,” arguing the blasts must have been carried out by a state power.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 23:05 - NASA Unveils Next-Gen Spacesuit For Upcoming Moon Mission
NASA Unveils Next-Gen Spacesuit For Upcoming Moon Mission
NASA and the Houston-based aerospace company Axiom Space revealed next-generation spacesuits that astronauts would wear on the Artemis III moon mission.
Compared to the inflexible Apollo suits that astronauts were equipped with over 50 years, the new suits are designed to be more flexible, said Russell Ralston, deputy program manager at Axiom Space.
“Axiom Space’s Artemis III spacesuit will be ready to meet the complex challenges of the lunar south pole and help grow our understanding of the Moon in order to enable a long-term presence there,” Michael T. Suffredini, Axiom Space president and CEO, wrote in a press release.
The new Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit was on full display at Space Center Houston’s Moon 2 Mars Festival on Wednesday. A “full fleet” of training spacesuits will be delivered to NASA by late this summer.
Axiom Space just unveiled a prototype of the spacesuit NASA astronauts will wear when walking on the #moon. pic.twitter.com/Dg6pzOnTEi
— Andrea Leinfelder (@a_leinfelder) March 15, 2023
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Here’s a better view of the spacesuit.
The moon mission is slated for launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop the Space Launch System in 2025 with four astronauts. And, of course, NASA went ‘woke’ by recently saying the “crew will be selected from among the most diverse astronaut in history.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 22:45 - US Says China Preparing For War It Doesn't Want To Fight
US Says China Preparing For War It Doesn’t Want To Fight
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official assesses that China’s growing pessimism over its relationship with the US is making Beijing prepare for a future war it would rather not fight, Voice of America reported Wednesday.
“China doesn’t want to start a fight with us over Taiwan,” Doug Wade, the head of the DIA’s China Mission Group, said at a virtual event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.
Via AP “They will if they have to … they haven’t ruled it out,” Wade added. China’s official position is that it seeks “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan but doesn’t rule out using force.
While China is reluctant to start a war, Washington’s increasing support for Taipei has led to Beijing putting more military pressure on Taiwan. The US’s overall military buildup in the Asia Pacific is also naturally making China think they have to prepare for a future conflict.
The US has shown no interest in backing off, and US military officials are openly discussing their plans for a future war with China. Wade warned that the two powers are entering an “increasingly confrontational period,” which he expects to play out across all domains.
“It’ll manifest itself pretty much across the spectrum – every warfighting domain in every sphere of diplomatic, informational, economic, commercial,” Wade said.
Chinese officials have been calling for better relations with the US but have also stepped up their warnings about where the two powers are heading.
Chinese President Xi Jinping appointed his “war cabinet” in October; he is implementing the largest military buildup since the Second World War; he has been trying to sanctions-proof his regime; and he is mobilizing the civilian population for war. https://t.co/aImFV9jUwL
— Gatestone Institute (@GatestoneInst) March 12, 2023
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“If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there surely will be conflict and confrontation,” Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang told reporters earlier this month.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 22:25 - CME CEO Terry Duffy Says Employees Too Scared To Return To Office Due To Chicago's Crime Surge
CME CEO Terry Duffy Says Employees Too Scared To Return To Office Due To Chicago’s Crime Surge
The incredible crime fighting skills of Lori Lightfoot have already driven Ken Griffin out of Chicago, as we noted last year. Now, it looks like CME Group Inc.’s Terry Duffy could be next.
Duffy had already been outspoken to Chicago’s mayor about fighting crime – and, according to Bloomberg, that was before his wife was carjacked.
Duffy told the ICE House Podcast this week: “Three o’clock in the afternoon, my wife got carjacked right in the city of Chicago and it’s absolutely insane what’s going on here. Ninety percent of the carjackings in Chicago are done by juveniles. So the juveniles go in and they come right back out literally an hour later.”
The CME head grew up on the Southwest side of Chicago, the report notes, and currently works from a skyscraper downtown. But he says that crime in the city is inciting fear amongst his employees, who no longer want to return to the workplace.
He said after challenging Lori Lightfoot on crime, she responded by saying the homicide rate was falling. “I said, ‘don’t go there. Please don’t go there.’ One is too many,” Duffy responded.
Lightfoot did not make it to a runoff after placing third in the city’s recent election for mayor. That’s likely due to the fact that crime was up 41% last year and has been up 33% since 2019, Bloomberg reports.
“It was a tough time growing up in Chicago,” Duffy said, lamenting some optimism that the city could eventually get better and that the problem is wider spread than just Chicago. “So yes, we we’ve been on our back foot a few times… But I think we try to move forward and hopefully we can do it again.”
Others aren’t as optimistic. Recall, last year we noted that Citadel’s Griffin said “Chicago is like Afghanistan, on a good day, and that’s a problem.” He also said that he saw “25 bullet shots in the glass window of the retail space” in the building he lives in.
“It just tells you, like, how deep crime runs in this city. There is nowhere, where you can feel safe today walking home at 9:30 at night and you worry about your kids coming to and from school.”
“Chicago will continue to be important to the future of Citadel, as many of our colleagues have deep ties to Illinois,” Griffin wrote, before explaining that the ties will not be that deep. “Over the past year, however, many of our Chicago teams have asked to relocate to Miami, New York and our other offices around the world,” he concluded.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 22:05 - Jacob Chansley's Lawyers Confront DOJ's Claim It Didn't Suppress Jan. 6 Evidence
Jacob Chansley’s Lawyers Confront DOJ’s Claim It Didn’t Suppress Jan. 6 Evidence
Authored by Gary Bai via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) latest objection to allegations that it suppressed evidence in its prosecution of Jan. 6 defendant Jacob Chansley flies in the face of the Sixth Amendment, current and former attorneys of Chansley told The Epoch Times in separate interviews this week.
“They are hiding. They affirmatively are electing not to disclose [exculpatory evidence],” Albert Watkins, Jacob Chansley’s former attorney that negotiated the navy veteran’s 41-month sentencing agreement in 2021, told The Epoch Times on Tuesday, referring to the DOJ.
“They’re doing so in a fashion which, in my opinion, gives rise to an inescapable conclusion that the Department of Justice has done more damage to our democracy by how it has treated Jan. 6 defendants than anything that had occurred on January 6.”
Jacob Chansley is seen outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Brent Stirton/Getty Images) Watkins was reacting to the DOJ’s Sunday court filing on another Jan. 6 defendant’s case, in which the government confronted, for the first time in court, the newly surfaced surveillance tapes of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach aired by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show.
Among these tapes was a clip showing Chansley, unarmed, walking along with several Capitol Police officers who did not attempt to remove him from the Capitol building, which Carlson said showed that Chansley was less violent on Jan. 6 than described by the government.
Despite the video records of the navy veteran’s behaviour, Chansley’s current and former lawyers argued that the government violated Chansley’s rights by suppressing this evidence during his trial, in response to the DOJ’s claims to the contrary on Sunday.
The answer to this debate is important because it shines a light on the government’s prosecutorial conduct in handling Jan. 6 cases, many of which have ended with swift sentencing.
Chansley is currently serving a 41-month sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty to an obstruction charge in September 2021.
Government Shared All Evidence: DOJ
In a filing on Sunday, the DOJ said it provided the tapes to Chansley’s attorney during the discovery phase of Chansley’s trial in 2021, therefore satisfying the requirement of producing exculpatory evidence, or evidence favoring the defendant, to the defense counsel.
The filing was in response to a motion to dismiss filed by the attorneys of Dominic Pezzola, a Jan. 6 defendant currently on trial, which alleged that the tapes shown on Tucker Carlson show the government “withheld” evidence in prosecuting participants of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
Attorney Steven Metcalf (2nd L), representing defendant Dominic Pezzola for his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach, arrives at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse on Dec. 19, 2022. (Win McNamee/Getty Images) “The CCTV footage is core evidence in nearly every January 6 case, and it was produced en masse, labeled by camera number and by time, to all defense counsel in all cases,” the DOJ wrote in its filing.
The department cited Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 case in which the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must make available to the defense counsel exculpatory evidence. As a part of that requirement, the DOJ cited Brady’s text establishing that a Brady violation requires the material in question to be “something that is being ‘suppress[ed] by the prosecution.’”
“Pezzola’s Brady claim therefore fails at the threshold, because nothing has been suppressed,” the DOJ wrote, basing it on the claim that it had provided Watkins with the “necessary tools” to identify relevant CCTV evidence notwithstanding the voluminous discovery.
“Accordingly, the volume of discovery does not excuse defense counsel from making reasonable efforts to ascertain whether an item has been produced, let alone before filing inaccurate and inflammatory allegations of discovery failures,” the DOJ wrote.
DOJ Suppressed Evidence: Chansley’s Lawyers
Chansley’s lawyers disagreed with the DOJ’s claims, saying that the bar for suppression is lower than what the government claims it to be.
“Suppression … is not the nefarious burying of evidence,” Bill Shipley, Jacob Chansley’s current counsel, said in an interview with The Epoch Times on Monday. “It just means it wasn’t brought to light by the government. The government knew what was there and did not illuminate the fact that it was there.”
Shipley says that the government may have violated Brady because they did not identify the tapes and their nature as potentially exculpatory evidence during Chansley’s trial. Making them available without making sure the defendant knows of the existence of the tapes may constitute suppression, according to Shipley.
“Suppression simply means it went undiscovered by the defendant beyond a point at which it could be made use of,” Shipley, who was a federal prosecutor for 21 years, said. “If the government produced thousands of hours of video and said, ‘There’s a minute of evidence that’s favorable to Jacob Chansley—good luck,’ that production is not an effective Brady disclosure.”
The tapes are relevant for reasons beyond proving Chansley’s innocence or guilt, Shipley told The Epoch Times, noting that they are important to answering the question of whether Chansley’s sentence was fair under due process considerations.
“The question is: were Jacob Chansley’s rights to due process and effective assistance of counsel violated? Were the procedural requirements complied with such that the process and outcome of his case was a fair proceeding?” Shipley challenged.
“They’re clearly the kinds of videos that, had Judge [Royce Lamberth] seen them at sentencing, he might have concluded that Mr. Chansey is not the personification of evil in the way the government has made him out to be,” the attorney added. Judge Royce Lamberth presided over Chansley’s trial.
“That might have caused Judge Lambert to think that maybe 41 months was too much time to give him, taking into consideration all of his conduct, as opposed to just the precise conduct the government gave,” Shipley said.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 21:45 - DeSantis Charms GOP By Condemning 'Leaks' And 'Palace Intrigue'
DeSantis Charms GOP By Condemning ‘Leaks’ And ‘Palace Intrigue’
Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Wire,
On its face, there wasn’t anything unusual about the email that landed last week in the press office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Background interview request from the Washington Post,” read the subject line that summarized the industry-standard process whereby information is shared with reporters under pre-negotiated terms, usually anonymity. When sanctioned by a politician or their team, it is called “going on background” to shape and broaden a story with additional facts and contexts but without direct attribution. When not sanctioned, well, then that is just called leaking.
Either way, Jeremy Redfern wasn’t interested. The DeSantis spokesman wrote back one word: “No.”
A screenshot of the exchange went viral with the consensus in more conservative corners of Twitter being that a liberal rag, albeit the beltway paper of record, had just been owned. The score in their minds? DeSantis: 1, WaPo: 0.
The little episode does underscore a larger, still emerging theme of the expected DeSantis presidential campaign. It isn’t just that the team that didn’t leak in Florida wouldn’t leak in the White House. The implication is that DeSantis would not obsess over what is written about him in news outlets most of his constituents don’t read, because such an obsession is counterproductive to conservative goals. In this way, DeSantis may prove to be the anti-chaos candidate.
DeSantis has hinted at all of this during a recent book tour, a closely watched exercise that seems to be a dress rehearsal for a White House run. “There’s no drama in our administration,” he said on stage in Iowa next to Gov. Kim Reynolds. “There’s no palace intrigue.” The juxtaposition with the frontrunner in the GOP primary, former President Donald Trump, was implicit and obvious.
“We made very clear to the people working in the administration, you’re not going to be leaking,” DeSantis said, recalling how he told his staff early on that if they had “any other agenda” than “doing business of the people of Florida” then they might as well “pack your bags right now.”
With a unified team onboard with that mission, DeSantis continued, “We roll out, and we execute, and we do things, and we get things done. And in the process, we beat the left day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.”
Republicans have made the media their foil for decades now. Newt Gingrich won over South Carolina voters during the 2012 Republican primary when the former House speaker slammed a CNN debate moderator over what he considered “despicable” questioning, arguing that the “destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country.” Gingrich would lose the nomination but leave behind a blueprint that Trump would embody. Conservatives loved how he hated the “fake news.” But few were aware of the strange symbiosis that enveloped his administration.
Trump gave as good as he got during press conferences, but his team was set against itself at times, and often consumed by the media at the expense of the administration’s mission. His son-in-law, a senior advisor in the last White House, said as much. The war between Jared Kushner and Steven Bannon was infamous in the West Wing and well-documented in the papers. Albeit almost always “on background.”
When Bannon was eventually fired, Kushner later wrote in his autobiography, another senior aide came to him joking that he had “a plan to split up Steve Bannon’s extensive workload. Hope [Hicks], you leak to Jonathan Swan at Axios. Jared, you call Mike Bender from the Wall Street Journal. I’ll call Jeremy Peters from the New York Times, and … we’re done.”
Careers were catapulted and journalism prizes won on the ability to get the president’s inner circle to text back by deadline. Even when the headlines would be negative, Trump often called reporters directly. He still does. “I love being with her,” Trump said of Maggie Haberman during one of his multiple interviews with the star New York Times reporter. As president, he blasted her publicly as “a third-rate reporter.” After leaving the White House, he called her “my psychiatrist.”
The Trump cabinet didn’t just jockey for position in the press. Internal divisions were so extreme that officials would gauge their standing with the president by recent headlines or Fox News hits. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even made a joke of the dysfunction, promising that he would stay on in the administration “until he tweets me out of office.”
Trump was a bellicose president, and his base adored him for it. Some of his closest advisors still worried that an obsession with settling scores left him off balance. For instance, during the job interview for attorney general, Bill Barr reported that he told Trump that “the problem with immediately counterpunching … is that you are letting your opponents pick the time and place of the fight.” Trump, Barr later wrote in his memoir, didn’t seem to take the advice. But DeSantis has.
The governor can be as pugnacious as the former president, and YouTube is full of clips from DeSantis fans and from the press chronicling his blow-for-blow battles with reporters. He has catapulted himself into the national conversation, in large part, through those fights with the media that he has labeled “the liberal elite’s Praetorian Guard.”
But the same reporters who enjoyed unprecedented access to Trump, possibly the most accessible president in modern history, have had a hard time getting ahold of DeSantis outside of his regular news conferences, leaving the New York Times to ask “Can Ron DeSantis Avoid Meeting the Press?”
“The old way of looking at it is: ‘I have to do every media hit that I possibly can, from as broad a political spectrum as I can, to reach as many people as possible,’” Nick Iarossi, a longtime DeSantis supporter and a lobbyist in Tallahassee, told the Times. “The new way of looking at it is: ‘I really don’t need to do that anymore. I can control how I want to message to voters through the mediums I choose.’”
DeSantis has followed an aggressive but more calculated blueprint, becoming a conservative media darling through frequent appearances on Fox News with Tucker Carlson and the Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro. It has been enough to bring him alongside Trump in the RealClearPolitics Average even though he has not yet declared. Trump remains the clear front runner with a 14.4-point advantage.
Mick Mulvaney doesn’t see much unique in the current DeSantis approach. He knows both men well. Mulvaney was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus with DeSantis before leaving Congress to join the Trump administration, first as director of the Office of Management and Budget and later as his second-to-last chief of staff. If the boast about avoiding “palace intrigue” and the admonishment not to leak become campaign promises, Mulvaney doesn’t see a clear competitive advantage. “I expect all of the challengers,” he told RCP, “to use a variation on the ‘Trump policies without the Trump baggage’ message.”
Disdain for the press has indeed become a feature of the right. According to Gallup, just 14% of Republicans say they have “a great deal or fair amount of confidence” in the media. Gripes among conservatives have turned from occasional complaints to the outright belief that a biased press is an enemy to their way of life.
Candidates see that, and they will say they don’t trust elite media, Tucker Carlson told the 2022 Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, last year. But figuring out who is play fighting with the press versus those who will shun them altogether, the Fox News host added, was critical to earning their vote. “You need to be really wary of candidates who care what the New York Times thinks. You really, really do,” he said. “And if you say that to Republican voters, they are like, ‘The New York Times is Communist! I don’t even read it!’ Really? Because your leaders do. And they really care. They really, really care.”
DeSantis was happy to blast the press in Iowa last week. Like many Republicans, he has shown a willingness to punch back. Unlike some others though, he has a demonstrated ability to ignore their calls. “Don’t think that they’re coming to you in good faith,” he said in one broadside against the press. “They’re coming to you to be able to advance their agenda, and if you’re somebody that’s standing for our values, like Kim and me stand for, you are an impediment to their agenda.”
“So don’t play into it. Just speak the truth. Do your thing,” he continued before counseling that conservatives should “not give them the satisfaction that they are some type of neutral gatekeepers because they are not.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 21:05 - White House Responds To Poland Sending Jets To Ukraine
White House Responds To Poland Sending Jets To Ukraine
The Biden administration has responded to Poland’s Thursday announcement that it will be transferring about a dozen or more MiG-29 jets to Ukraine. As we reported earlier, President Andrzej Duda’s move was no doubt calculated in hopes of tilting the momentum of the political debate in Washington in favor of supplying planes.
National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby said Thursday afternoon in response to Warsaw’s decision, “It doesn’t change our calculus, with respect to F-16s.”
He added in the press briefing: “It’s not on the table right now. And an announcement by another nation to provide fighter aircraft does not affect, and does not change, our own sovereign decision-making.”
President Biden had just a month ago said that F-16s were off the table “for now” as pressure began growing within Congress to approve the jets.
However, new fighters could take years to send, while older jets would likely take around a year or more – given also military officials have indicated at least that amount of time to train Ukrainian pilots on the American-made systems.
Thursday’s announcement makes Poland the first NATO country to fulfil Zelensky’s repeat requests for fighter jets since the war began. Given Ukraine already operates the Soviet-made planes, it’s expected they’ll be in use right away against Russia.
President Duda specified that an initial four MiG-29s will be delivered “within the next few days” and that the rest would come after they go through servicing and maintenance.
The Associated Press notes that the total to be transferred could be more than a dozen: “The Polish word he used to describe their number can mean between 11 and 19,” according to the report.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 20:45 - Biden DOJ Stands Accused Of Hiding This Evidence Of Biden-China Corruption: Sperry
Biden DOJ Stands Accused Of Hiding This Evidence Of Biden-China Corruption: Sperry
Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Wire,
The Justice Department is not disclosing to the public or Congress links between President Biden’s son Hunter and brother James and a corrupt Chinese government agent who doled out millions of dollars in bribes. It has scrubbed the connections from court documents and is suggesting it doesn’t have evidence clearly in its possession.
In addition, the department appears to be trying to silence another disreputable partner from coming forward to tell what he knows about the Bidens’ Chinese connection.In 2016, FBI counterespionage agents began collecting voluminous evidence against Chinese national Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, who was suspected of paying off officials and their families around the world in exchange for oil rights for a China-based energy conglomerate he represented which has ties to Chinese military intelligence.
From emails, text messages, phone calls, bank records, and other evidence gathered from wiretaps and searches of Ho’s offices in D.C. and New York, investigators discovered that Hunter Biden and his uncle James were targets of Ho and CEFC China Energy, which had struck up a business partnership with the Bidens. The deal, sealed in 2017, netted the Bidens almost $6 million for unspecified work, at least $1 million of which was paid directly by Ho.
DOJ prosecutors were able to indict and convict Ho in 2018 under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for his role in a bribery scheme aimed at former United Nations and African officials. Though the evidence also potentially implicated the Bidens, who failed to register as foreign agents of CEFC, prosecutors did not pursue charges against them.
Republican congressional leaders investigating Biden influence-peddling say the DOJ is actively covering up the illicit connection. Here’s how:
Failing to Turn Over Surveillance Evidence
Despite Senate Judiciary Committee requests, DOJ refuses to turn over Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act materials the FBI used to spy on Ho in 2016 and 2017. DOJ claims the FISA information may not even exist.
“Unfortunately, we are not in a position to confirm the existence of the information that is sought if it exists in the department’s possession,” then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joseph Gaeta told GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Judiciary in a letter.
But the FISA applications and material do exist — according to a sworn acknowledgement by former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, who prosecuted the Ho case.
In Feb. 8, 2018, he notified Ho’s defense team and the court of his “intent to use Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act information” in the case, including “information derived from electronic surveillance pursuant to FISA.”
A former Democratic congressional staffer, Gaeta recently left DOJ to take a top job at Democracy Forward, a Democratic Party shop formed in 2016 to bring legal challenges to Donald Trump. It is chaired by former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias, who commissioned the discredited Steele dossier that fabricated ties between Trump and Russia.
If Hunter Biden and his uncle were mentioned in the FISA wiretap materials, it’s a closely guarded secret.
The affidavits to “electronically monitor” Ho and his contacts remain classified and under seal, along with the FISA material collected from the wiretaps – including “foreign intelligence,” according to court documents. Ho’s defense team had access to the FISAs as part of discovery, but when they tried to introduce information from them as evidence, the court ruled it “classified” and “inadmissible.”
Redacting Hunter Biden’s Name
During Ho’s 2018 trial in New York, federal prosecutors strained to keep secret his partnership with the Biden family.
In at least one court exhibit, Hunter Biden’s name was redacted from an email that agents obtained from Ho. One of the prosecutors in the case asked the judge to keep jurors in the dark about Ho’s powerful American connection, because he said DOJ did not want to “introduce a political dimension to this case,” records show.
Emails the feds seized from Ho during their investigation show one of his CEFC advisers tried to arrange a private Washington dinner in December 2015 with their boss, CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming, and someone whose name was redacted by DOJ prosecutors. (Although the name wasn’t made public during the trial, in an email to a mutual business associate found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, however, Ho’s adviser had invited “Hunter” to attend the dinner.)
Further explaining his reason for censoring the name, DOJ prosecutor Daniel Richenthal told the judge “the name of that individual could introduce a political dimension to this case that we don’t think is worth dealing with.” Ho’s lawyers argued the redaction was unnecessary.
In May 2018, federal prosecutors reached out to Hunter from the Southern District of New York, which handled the Ho case, information found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop reveals. It’s not clear what they discussed. Richenthal is a Democrat who has given money to the DNC.
DOJ also redacted sections of transcripts of audio recordings captured from Ho’s phone conversations from the New York prison where he was incarcerated.
More than a dozen filings and hearing transcripts from the Ho case remain under seal, locked in a court “vault,” according to the docket. Ho’s connection to the Bidens went unmentioned in DOJ press releases about the case.
Suppressing a Tipster’s Leads
The Justice Department allegedly has suppressed leads provided investigators years ago on the Bidens related to CEFC by a former CEFC consultant close to both Ho and Hunter Biden.
DOJ is seeking the extradition of the tipster Gal Luft, a former senior adviser to CEFC China Energy who was arrested last month in Cyprus for charges tied to the illegal export of arms to China.
However, Luft maintains he’s “never been an arms dealer” and that the real reason the Biden administration wants to bring him into custody is to silence him from cooperation with congressional investigations into Hunter’s business dealings with CEFC and other Chinese entities.
Luft said he met with FBI and DOJ investigators in 2019 and gave them incriminating information on Hunter, but they did not pursue the leads he gave them. His lawyers recently told DOJ he plans to submit a letter to Congress detailing statements he made in that interview.
“DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim & Hunter Biden,” Luft claimed in a Feb. 18 tweet. He threatened to “name names” of department officials whom he says are trying to cover for the Bidens.
It was also in 2019 that the FBI was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by a Delaware computer repairman several months after the younger Biden abandoned the device there. The laptop contains numerous documents featuring Ho, CEFC Energy Fund and its U.S.-based subsidiary, the China Energy Fund Committee, which Ho ran from D.C. FBI whistleblowers have told Congress that their supervisors in Washington suppressed the laptop evidence and even claimed, falsely, it was Russian “disinformation.”
Withholding Other Non-Laptop Evidence
Congressional investigators say it’s clear from the court proceedings in the Ho case that the FBI and DOJ are sitting on more evidence related to the Bidens’ illicit ties to the Chinese government than what is contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive.
“DOJ likely possesses additional evidence related to CEFC and Hunter Biden given the seizure of Patrick Ho’s iPad and email accounts in November 2017,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said last month.
FBI agents also confiscated a Huawei cell phone from Ho when they arrested him at JFK International Airport that month, DOJ records show.
Suppressing ‘Kevin’ Dong Evidence:
Meanwhile, in the Senate, Grassley believes DOJ may have also electronically monitored Gongwen “Kevin” Dong, another CEFC agent tied to the Bidens. Grassley has demanded DOJ also turn over any FISA materials related to Dong. However, DOJ has stonewalled this request too.
Dong is the CEFC principal who signed a joint venture contract with Hunter Biden and who initiated most of the wire payments to him via pass-through entities in 2017 and 2018. In effect, Dong was the Chinese bagman for the Bidens and the millions in cash they raked in from China.
Throughout the legal proceedings, prosecutors made it plain they believed Ho was a dangerous Chinese agent, but they never breathed a word about his $1 million in payments to Biden’s son and brother.
Hunter Biden first engaged with CEFC in 2015, while his father was vice president. (See main article.)
Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker points out that the CEFC-Biden deal had the hallmarks of a Chinese intelligence operation.
He notes that Hunter Biden was well aware of Ye’s and Ho’s links to Chinese intelligence. In an audio recording found on his laptop, Hunter described Ho as “the fucking spy chief of China.” Hunter’s ex-business associate Tony Bobulinski says their Chinese partners – whom he described as “intelligence” assets – weren’t looking to make a “healthy” return on investment in the CEFC deal, but rather viewed it “as a political or influence investment.” Bobulinski says he has told the FBI in interviews that Joe Biden himself was cut in on the CEFC deal.
Swecker said the FBI and DOJ no doubt suspected the Chinese were targeting the Bidens as part of an influence operation and intelligence-gathering operation. By asking the FISA spy court to authorize surveilling Ho, he said, counterintelligence agents believed the foreign national was working covertly for the Chinese government. Such warrants can only be granted for targets suspected of being an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist group, which means FBI agents were searching for evidence of espionage.
“Hunter’s and Jim’s dealing with CEFC had aroused counterintelligence concerns inside the FBI, “ said Ben Schreckinger, author of “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power.” “The FBI had Hunter under surveillance.”
Neither Biden was accused of wrongdoing in Ho’s criminal bribery and money laundering scheme involving former United Nations and African officials. Hunter and his attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment. Attempts to reach James Biden were unsuccessful.
* * *
Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 20:25 - Target Shutters Downtown Philly Location Citing "Declining Performance"
Target Shutters Downtown Philly Location Citing “Declining Performance”
Not unlike many other corporations with retail locations in cities nationwide, Target is calling it quits on Philadelphia. They follow in the footsteps of Wawa, who we noted last year had enough of Philadelphia’s crime and also picked up and left shop at several locations in Center City.
Target, located just blocks from one Wawa that recently closed, is taking the same action, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal. Its store at 12th and Chestnut streets in Center City will be closing after 7 years of operation.
The 19,000 sq. foot store is going to be closing “due to several years of declining performance”, the report says. The company plans on attempting to relocate its 45 part and full time employees at the store.
Kayla Castañeda, a spokesperson for Target, commented: “The decision to close one of our stores isn’t something we take lightly. It’s an action we take only after multiple years of working to improve performance.”
Target is also going to be closing three other stores, one in its hometown of Minneapolis and two in the Washington, D.C., area, the report continued. The company is also looking to open a massive 22,000 sq. foot store near 37th and Chestnut – basically in the middle of U Penn’s campus – which will help it replace its presence lost in Center City.
The Center City store had just opened in July 2016 as part of an apartment building, and its across the street from a brand new $762 million Jefferson Health facility that is nearing the end of construction. On the south side of the closing Target store, additional commercial and residential buildings are being erected.
But the influx of new buildings onto the block wasn’t enough for the company to want to keep its store open. In addition to Wawa stores that have closed, a Marshalls located at 10th and Market street – just blocks away from Target – also closed earlier this year.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 20:05 - 'An All-Out Assault On The Second Amendment': Gun Rights Groups Respond To Biden’s New Executive Order
‘An All-Out Assault On The Second Amendment’: Gun Rights Groups Respond To Biden’s New Executive Order
Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
U.S. President Joe Biden discusses his efforts to reduce gun violence at The Boys & Girls Club of West San Gabriel Valley, in Monterey Park, Calif. on Mar. 14, 2023. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images) Second Amendment advocates responded quickly to President Joe Biden’s newest executive order designed to advance his gun control agenda and his repeated call for a ban on so-called “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines.
“Crimes are committed by criminals. Until President Biden and his allies decide to go after violent criminals, violence will continue to spiral out of control as it has. The focus of our laws and efforts should be on the criminal element and not on law-abiding Americans,” read a statement from the National Rifle Association.
Biden’s order will require background checks on more than just retail firearms sales, promote the adoption and use of “Red Flag Laws”, make gun dealer inspection reports public, call for stricter enforcement of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and request the Federal Trade Commission issue a report on the marketing of firearms to children by gun makers.
“The executive order ramps up our efforts to hold the gun industry accountable. It’s the only outfit you can’t sue these days,” Biden said while in California on Tuesday.
‘Most Anti-Gun President in US History’
Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights, issued a fiery statement calling on Congress to stand against an unconstitutional attempt at gun registration.
National Rifle Association members listen to speakers during the NRA’s 142 annual Meetings and Exhibits at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on May 4, 2013. (Johnny Hanson/Houston Chronicle via AP, File) “This is an all-out assault on the Second Amendment, and we’re looking into every legislative and legal option to fight back against the most anti-gun president in U.S. history. What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ does Biden not understand?” Brown’s statement reads.
Like the other organizations that responded, Brown said the order wouldn’t reduce crime. Instead, he wrote, it will make law-abiding citizens criminals if they don’t comply with the government’s voluminous regulations.
“The reality is this executive order will do nothing to stop criminals from buying and selling firearms illegally, but it will entrap otherwise law-abiding Americans and put them on the bad side of the ATF. The unconstitutional NICS database should be abolished, not expanded,” Brown wrote.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 19:45 - Helicopter Crashed In Heist At Sacramento Executive Airport
Helicopter Crashed In Heist At Sacramento Executive Airport
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, an individual attempted to start a fleet of helicopters at Sacramento Executive Airport. The person could only start one and crashed while trying to fly away.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Aviation Administration, National Transportation Safety Board, and the Sacramento Police Department are all investigating the incident that occurred around 0500 PST.
Local news KRCA reported that a person managed to start and almost fly away with a Bell 429 heavy-lift helicopter. The person, perhaps inexperienced, crashed the helicopter.
It’s possible that there was another motive:
“If someone wanted to take an aircraft for a joyride, someone who wanted to take an aircraft to do some other criminal activity or damage to other property, terrorism would be at the other end of the scope,” Special Agent in Charge Sean Reagan said.
KRCA tweeted images from the airport of the wreckage.
HAPPENING NOW:
Chopper down at Sac Executive Airport. @SacPolice says someone tried to steal the helicopter but crashed it. Chopper culprit on the loose as FBI, FAA investigate. @kcranews pic.twitter.com/028ipbR294— Michelle Bandur KCRA (@MBandurKCRA) March 15, 2023
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A thief crashed a chopper at Sacramento Executive Airport after breaking into multiple helicopters overnight, police said. Here’s a look at the wreckage.
More >> https://t.co/rdB8K0yWDh pic.twitter.com/mPMGAnUKyJ
— kcranews (@kcranews) March 15, 2023
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Capitol Helicopters, the owner of the Bell 429, released this statement about the incident:
“Sometime early this morning several helicopters operated by our company were vandalized by an individual unknown to us, and one aircraft was severely damaged. All our employees are safe, and we do not believe that anyone was injured in today’s events. This incident is currently under investigation by several state and federal authorities. We are hopeful that the people responsible are located quickly. We have no further information to report at this time. We appreciate the support from all the agencies and individuals involved.”
“This investigation is in its early stages,” Sacramento Police told The Sacramento Bee, “and this information is preliminary as detectives work to learn exactly what occurred.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 19:25 - The Tyrants Are Passing State Laws To Push CBDCs
The Tyrants Are Passing State Laws To Push CBDCs
Authored by Tom Renz via Substack,
Let me open this by apologizing. This article is going to get into the weeds a bit and it is less than exciting. That said, stick with me until the end and I’ll give you a solution you can fight for.
For those that are living under a rock (or that have more interesting things to do than follow monetary policy) CBDC stands for Central Bank Digital Currency and it, along with gene therapy jabs, stands as the greatest threat to freedom on the planet. Digital currency is completely trackable and completely controllable.
This means that the government and any corporation with the proper access will be able to know exactly how you spend every digital penny of your money. It also means that the government (or possibly global governments or global corporations) would have the ability to control what you spend your money on. Spend too much on gas they take some of your money for emitting too many greenhouse gases. Want to buy a gun… forget it.
If you think this sounds terrible you are not alone, nearly no one wants this. That means it is quite literally politically impossible to legislate CBDC into existence at the moment. Despite that, the control available to the many tyrants at the WEF, CCP, etc. is too tempting to resist so they are doing everything possible to leverage their control over the crooks like Biden and the many ignorant elected officials in our government to make it a reality. So, the question is, how are they doing it?
If COVID taught us anything it was that an emergency, real or faked, facilitates a lot of things that would never happen otherwise. The tyrants know this and are in the process of creating financial emergencies that will allow them to argue that there is no alternative but to implement CBDCs. The Biden Administration is implementing policy after policy that devalues the American dollar by limiting Americas ability to mine its own resources or produce its own goods while printing endless money. This will (or more likely is) facilitate an economic collapse. Meanwhile, WEF/CCP partner groups like Black Rock and Vanguard are leveraging their positions as major stakeholders in small and midsized banks to force the banks to accept terrible ESG and other risky investments that will, when combined with the inflation/devalued dollar and scarce resources, result in their collapse. This is an obvious thing to anyone that truly understands the inner-workings of banking (I ran a credit union for a number of years, was a compliance expert, and was involved in a number of national-level groups/projects).
Along with the effort to collapse the dollar and our banking system, the tyrants are also pushing legislation that can allow CBDCs to exist legally and without competition. This is being done in a VERY sneaky way because of the massive political opposition to anything CBDC-related. At this point, the major focus is on passing state-level legislation – particularly in a number of key RED states. Bills are being pushed that appear innocuous but are written to create a check-mate situation when CBDCs come into play. That way these red states won’t be able to oppose it.
When it comes to who is behind the push to sneak CBDC legislation on the state level we need look no further than the Uniform Law Commission (the “ULC”… stinking lawyers).
Here’s a link you can follow to see where this crew is pushing state law.
The response from many lawmakers when people are questioning these bills is that it is conspiracy theory to suggest these UCC bills will facilitate CBDC.
Here is a link to one of the authors of the bills telling you it is about CBDC (fast forward to about 46 or 47 minutes in); you should save a copy of this video quickly – I’m guessing it will disappear soon.
You can find additional information here from the South Dakota Freedom Caucus (they did great work shining light on the bill Kristi Noem just vetoed – saving South Dakota).
The ULC is promoting bills that would change the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) to ensure that states have state law that is prepared to deal with CBDC.
These same bills would also ban any current forms of crypto like Bitcoin as a competitor for CBDC. These UCC changes reflect the state law changes to meet the goals laid out by the Fed (here’s an overview) and are fully laid out in this fun document.
Bills promoting these changes are pushing through hard red state such as Missouri (HB1165), Oklahoma (HB2776), Texas (SB2075), and Tennessee (SB479/HB640). They are also in a ton of other states and need to be stopped in all of them.
Let’s take an example from HB1165 in Missouri. I had the pleasure of reading this 103 page bill and can tell you it was physically painful to go through (which is why none of the elected officials will read it – they will just vote based on what the lobbyists or party leadership says). Understand that this is intentional. These CBDC bills are frequently being handed to Republican legislators who are told by leadership to file the bills. Because the bills are so complex and lengthy, most elected officials will not actually read them.
Within HB1165 (not to be confused with HB1169 which requires informed consent and which I support – despite RINO opposition), there are a quite a few changes to Missouri law. These important changes were quite expertly crafted to facilitate CBDC without actually talking about it so Republicans could be fooled into filing the bills even if they did read it. A great example is this new definition of “money” found on page 5:
“‘Money’ means a medium of exchange that is currently authorized or adopted by a domestic or foreign government. The term includes a monetary unit of account established by an intergovernmental organization or by agreement between two or more countries. The term does not include an electronic record that is a medium of exchange recorded and transferable in a system that existed and operated for the medium of exchange before the medium of exchange was authorized or adopted by the government.”
This language means that existing crypto currencies would not be eligible to be considered “money” by banks… a great way to make sure there will be no private competition for CBDC.
All this leads to the question, so what do we do?
The easiest solution is to get a large number of grassroots to promote an amendment that bans CBDC in your state. If you think this is a conspiracy theory or your elected officials tell you it is simply ask him/her to amend their bill to include the following language and see what kind of response they get from the lobbyists or you get from the official:
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Nothing in this bill shall be construed to legalize, authorize, or recognize any sort of digital currency as money in Missouri.
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All banking and financial institutions in Missouri shall be required to recognize at least one physical currency as “money”. This physical currency must be treated as the primary form of money in the state and valued to ensure it is the preferred form of trade within the state. No bank or financial institution shall penalize anyone for the use of physical money in Missouri nor shall they provide any incentives for the use of any digital currency. Physical and digital money must be taxed at equal rates.
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Missouri recognizes the importance of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights and prohibits any currency from being recognized as “money” that can be tracked without knowledge of that tracking and without being able to identify who is responsible for such tracking by the owner of the money. Digital currency may be recognized as money in the state of Missouri only if it can be verified as impossible to track without a warrant by a minimum of three an independent experts.
a. Independent Expert means, for purposes of this section, an individual with the requisite expertise to evaluate the proposed money to meet the requirements of this section. Courts should construe this clause strongly in favor of ensuring high levels of expertise and independence.
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No currency shall be recognized or accepted as money in Missouri if that currency could possibly be controlled in any way remotely. For purposes of this section, controlled includes who or how this currency can be shared with or spent in any way. This prohibition on the control of currency would preserve the Fourth Amendment and should be construed broadly.
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If any other statutes conflict with anything in this section this section controls. If any part of this section is determined to be unconstitutional or conflicting with any other controlling law the rest of this section shall continue to be in force.
While stronger language could be used (and this should be modified for any given state), none of this language would cause a problem unless the real reason for the bill is to promote CBDCs so no one pushing the Republicans to sponsor these bills should object. If they do, that should be all you need to know.
The war on freedom is expanding and we have to stop CBDC, call your state legislature and say hell no to these banking laws that they are pushing. I can’t stress enough how critical this issue is, CBDC means game over! Between that and the COVID vaccines, all they have to do is whip up a new pandemic (they already have them created), and we lose everything.
* * *
Now is the time to purchase gold, please go to BH-PM.com and get yourself set up with my good friend Andrew Sorchini (tell him Tom Renz sent you and you support our freedom fight). We’ve been warning about this for a long time, and the war is here folks, protect yourself and be prepared – https://bh-pm.com/
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 19:05 -
- Pornhub Acquired By Canadian Private Equity Firm 'Ethical Capital Partners'
Pornhub Acquired By Canadian Private Equity Firm ‘Ethical Capital Partners’
The parent company of controversial website Pornhub – which has allowed all sorts of child sexual abuse on the platform despite repeated efforts to remove such content – has been sold to Canadian private equity firm, Ethical Capital Partners, which was formed last year and says it’s focused on technology businesses that “have legal and regulatory complexity and that put a value on transparency and accountability.”
The purchase is ECP’s first transaction. The company is led by “cannabis entrepreneur Rocco Meliambro and criminal lawyer Fady Mansour, who is listed as managing partner. Derek Ogden, a retired chief superintendent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, is also a partner at the firm,” according to Bloomberg.
The move comes amid a lawsuit against the parent company, MindGeek, over sexually explicit videos of minors found on its ‘tube’ sites, the Financial Times reports.
Luxembourg-registered MindGeek has towered over the adult industry since the advent of video streaming. Its most recently published figures show revenues in 2018 reached $460mn while profit margins have at times neared 50 per cent, according to people familiar with the matter.
The identity of MindGeek’s former majority owner Bernd Bergmair — an ex-Goldman Sachs banker who also uses the name Bernard Bergemar — was first revealed by an FT investigation.
Pornhub’s multiple scandals has led to the departure of its top management team, and restricted access to payment platforms Visa and Mastercard – which almost led to the site’s collapse in late 2020 following investigations that identified illegal content on the platform.
According to ECP co-founder and attorney, Solomon Friedman, the lawsuits and criticism of MindGeek ‘stemmed from a misunderstanding’ of how the company is now safeguarding its content – which he says changed after the previous owners departed.
“I want to engage regularly with stakeholders, including the media,” said Friedman, adding that the new owners ‘wanted to exercise transparency.’
While the purchase price, and where the funds came from, have not been disclosed, the current remaining (anonymous) executives will continue running the company.
“At this point we are not identifying the current executives, as there is an unfortunate stigma [attached to the industry],” said Friedman.
According to MindGeek, Mastercard has reinstated access to its subscription sites, however the company’s advertising arm, TrafficJunky, remains cut off following a court ruling that found Visa could be held liable for illegal content.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 18:45 - Trump’s Competitors Seek To Set Themselves Apart Without Scorning MAGA
Trump’s Competitors Seek To Set Themselves Apart Without Scorning MAGA
Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
As more Republicans challenge Donald Trump in the race for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, the former president’s dramatic impact on the GOP is becoming clearer.
(Left) Former President Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a 2024 election campaign event in Columbia, S.C., on Jan. 28, 2023. (Right) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to guests at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas on Nov. 19, 2022. (Logan Cyrus, Scott Olson/Getty Images) Everyone from Nikki Haley to Vivek Ramaswamy has sought to link themselves to “America First,” as they court Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
Those Republican hopefuls face a daunting task. They have to distinguish themselves from Trump and woo many of his fans, all while mounting campaigns that can compete in the general election.
How are Trump’s competitors trying to set themselves apart from the former president—and how can they do so without alienating his fiercely loyal base?
While it’s early, some patterns are already being established.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to Iowa voters in Des Moines, Iowa, on March 10, 2023. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) DeSantis’s Delicate Dance
While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t yet committed to a primary bid, he’s widely seen as Trump’s most formidable 2024 competitor.
The Florida governor has so far avoided responding to digs directed at him by Trump, although his online supporters, some anonymous, have gone to bat for him.
Paul Ingrassia, a Trump administration veteran and Cornell Law school graduate and lawyer, told The Epoch Times that DeSantis has relied on “digital acolytes” to fight for him because he hasn’t yet entered the race.
“He wants to have these other guys do his dirty work for him while remaining above the fray,” Ingrassia, himself a prominent online Trump supporter, stated in a March 13 interview.
“People in the Trump orbit several months ago decided their best strategy would be to charge hard at former Trump supporters who’ve publicly aligned with DeSantis, in an effort to intimidate us into silence,” David Reaboi, a political consultant and well-known DeSantis advocate, said in a March 14 interview with The Epoch Times.
“This is crucial to their effort because they’re terrified of more people peeling off and abandoning Trump for a far more sane option—one who’s far more likely to succeed on every issue of policy.”
Both men seemed to agree that DeSantis is being pitched as a more competent version of Trump. In addition, DeSantis’s sometimes critical stance on the COVID-19 response could distinguish him from the former president.
Florida’s surgeon general has drawn attention to adverse events linked to the COVID-19 vaccines that were rolled out as a result of Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed.” That elicited a critical reaction from U.S. health authorities.
Ingrassia points out that a large majority of the population has taken at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. He believes DeSantis’s messaging on the issue may not play well with the public at large, even if it resonates with Republican primary voters.
DeSantis, he added, “was just as much of a rule follower during the early months of COVID as anyone.”
“As more time goes on, the vaccine will be an increasing political liability—as will Trump’s outsourcing of COVID to the expert class,” Reaboi said.
“Picking a fight on COVID policy with Ron DeSantis, of all people, is inadvisable.”
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md. on March 3, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) Ramaswamy’s ‘America First 2.0’
Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist, has explicitly pitched his campaign as the next development in Trump-inspired politics.
He calls his platform “America First 2.0.” His priorities include ending affirmative action, splitting from China, and rejecting the push for central bank digital currencies.
“I respect a lot of what President Trump did,” Ramaswamy told The Epoch Times in a Feb. 23 interview. “He acknowledged problems in this country on both sides of the aisle that no one else had acknowledged before him. The question is where we go from here.”
Reaboi said he doesn’t have any stance on Ramaswamy.
“I understand that people do this for name recognition or to fleece some money off of gullible donors, but just about any other use of their money, focus, and time would be better spent in policy activism or building institutions to nurture and support a new cadre of policy professionals,” he said.
Ingrassia believes Ramaswamy would fall short against Trump even if his message reaches “the more educated faction of the GOP.”
“I think he’s in over his head,” Ingrassia said.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at The Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Fla. on Feb. 25, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Pompeo Criticizes ‘Larger-Than-Life Personalities’
Another figure, Mike Pompeo, also is setting himself apart from Trump.
The former secretary of state and CIA director, who has said he’s considering a run, can make a strong case for himself as a longtime critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Democrats and Republicans are starting to unite against the CCP, vindicating concerns of earlier China watchers.
Yet, in a March 3 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Pompeo said America’s “greatest threats are here,” not abroad.
He made what seemed like anti-Trump comments, saying conservatives “should not look for larger-than-life personalities.”
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 18:25 - As Bank Crisis Looms, Biden's Aggressive Focus On Firearms Is Suspicious
As Bank Crisis Looms, Biden’s Aggressive Focus On Firearms Is Suspicious
Joe Biden has always been hostile to constitutional gun rights, but in the past week his administration has gone into an obsessive fervor, calling for more restrictions on sales, banning high capacity magazines and banning “assault weapons.” Is there a reason for his sudden focus on taking effective firearms from Americans despite the multitude of more important issues facing the nation today?
Much of the firearms related discussion in the corporate media has revolved around Biden’s recent executive order calling for individuals in the business of selling guns to be federally licensed and to check the backgrounds of buyers. Under the order, the Attorney General Merrick Garland will “use his discretion” to ensure gun sellers “willfully violating the law” and those unaware of background requirements become compliant.
The order makes little sense considering there are already multiple laws in place that require firearms dealers to commit to background checks before a buyer can purchase any weapon. Of course, many people on the political left are illiterate when it comes to firearms related restrictions, and some actually do naively think that a customer can easily walk into a gun store, grab a pistol or rifle off a shelf, and walk out.
Is Biden’s executive action just a ploy for his ignorant political base as he pretends to implement anti-gun measures while really doing nothing? Or, is something else at play?
The order does not seem to be an effort to prevent private firearms sales or gun show sales, which are legal in some states, though there is talk of “universal background checks” in the future. Executive orders have no constitutional standing in any case, and they certainly have no bearing on state laws, but is Biden seeking to change that?
The unilateral action also outlines steps to promote Red Flag laws, which are an attempt by gun grabbers to institute backdoor confiscation. Red Flag laws, if enforced widely, would allow various state and federal agencies to target individuals designated as “potentially dangerous” or mentally unstable and take their firearms without due process. It is a guilty-until-proven-innocent policy based on hearsay rather than legal evidence.
However, even Biden’s Red Flag efforts are more about lip service than tangible results that will make anti-gun proponents happy. The real threat may be in an underlying attempt to normalize gun related executive orders as a means to sidestep checks and balances entirely, but that would require a national emergency as a rationale.
Enter the ever escalating economic crisis…
Is it merely a coincidence that Biden’s amplification of anti-gun propaganda has been timed almost exactly with the rising threat of a systemic credit collapse within the banking sector? It’s not just SVB and Signature Bank that signal a problem today, it’s also Credit Suisse – A massive bank with over $700 billion in asset exposure. It would appear that a credit crisis is swiftly developing, and as we all know, establishment elites “never let a good crisis go to waste.”
The majority of the Biden Admin’s rhetoric on social media has not been about background checks, but the outright banning of semi-automatic, high capacity rifles (which are involved in less than 3% of all firearms related murders). By extension, Biden has consistently mentioned the need to circumvent Congress to enforce more gun control, and he seems to be test-piloting the notion of executive orders to do it.
It’s time for Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
I led the fight to ban them in 1994, and we can do it again. pic.twitter.com/dBDEYuU8Rp
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 15, 2023
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It is no secret that establishment politicians often ignore handgun related crime in favor of far less used “military-style” rifles, but why? One might suggest that it is the proliferation of these firearms in the hands of the citizenry that has prevented numerous attempts to undermine other constitutional protections. Many believe that Biden’s abandonment of perpetual pandemic lockdowns and vaccine passports was directly related to red state resistance and a large number of armed Americans refusing to comply.
Medical authoritarianism in the name of covid failed partly because of the 2nd Amendment. With the economic crisis comes another possible window to centralize power and degrade the Bill of Rights further, but not if the populace has the capacity to rebel.
Is the establishment realizing they will have to take our guns before they can accomplish any other objectives? And, are they preparing to use a bank crash they know is coming as a rationale or smokescreen for confiscation? With every economic plunge comes an inevitable spike in crime, not to mention public fear. The-powers-that-be might view this as a favorable development in their quest for American disarmament.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 18:05 - Americans Value Truck-Parking Facilities, But Not In Their Backyards
Americans Value Truck-Parking Facilities, But Not In Their Backyards
By Mark Solomon of FreightWaves,
Americans value commercial truck drivers and the service they offer. However, they don’t want drivers parking their rigs anywhere near their homes.
That was a key finding in a 2023 survey of truck parking issues published Tuesday by CloudTrucks, an IT-based provider that supports the commercial truck driving sector. About 56% of the 1,000 American adults surveyed were unfamiliar with the issue. About 21% didn’t realize that many drivers end up sleeping in their vehicles, reflecting a lack of knowledge of the inconvenience and safety risks they encounter on a daily basis without sufficient dedicated parking capacity.
Once these aspects were explained to them, 86% recognized truck parking as an important issue, and 95% supported the building of overnight parking facilities.
However, 80% said they would only support the construction of facilities if they were at least 3 miles from their homes.
About two-thirds of respondents called for more government funding to address the parking shortage, including the building of more truck stops and rest areas. About 43% said they would support relaxed zoning and land use regulations that could pave the way for more parking. Approximately 40% supported giving tax incentives to truck stop operator chains and other private companies to create more parking.
The survey indicated that Americans understand the difficulty of a drivers’ jobs and the value they deliver. The vast majority of respondents thought drivers were overworked. About 58% said that drivers were underpaid, and about 50% said that commercial drivers are safer drivers than the public at-large.
Despite the “’not-in-my-backyard’ feedback, the survey’s findings gave CloudTrucks executives optimism that the public at least understands the problem. Tobenna Arodiogbu, co-founder and CEO of CloudTrucks, said it’s important to ensure the “resources provided to truck drivers are proportional to how much we value their service to our economy.”
The Truck Parking Safety Improvement Act was incorporated into the SHIP IT Act introduced in the House on Jan. 24. The act provides $755 million over four years (fiscal years 2023-26) in grants dedicated specifically for truck parking creation and expansion.
Entities eligible include states, metropolitan planning organizations, local governments, which are allowed to partner with private entities. In addition to building new parking facilities, the act also opens up inspection and weigh stations and park-and-ride locations to truck parking expansion.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 03/16/2023 – 17:45
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