Category: Corruption

Why Is ‘Russian Disinformation’ More Trustworthy Than the Liberal Media?

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Last week, Russian officials claimed that Hunter Biden had bankrolled biological research laboratories in Ukraine:

The Russian government on Thursday accused Hunter Biden’s investment fund of helping bankroll the Pentagon’s alleged biolabs in Ukraine.
Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defence Troops, said the investment firm Biden is connected to, Rosemont Seneca, has been implicated in financing the biological program in Ukraine, Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik reported.
“Incoming materials have allowed us to trace the scheme of interaction between U.S. government bodies and Ukraine’s biolabs,” Kirillov said. He added that Rosemont Seneca attracted attention due to an alleged “close relationship” between the fund and key suppliers for “Pentagon biolaboratories around the world.” According to the Ministry of Defense’s information, the fund has at least $2.4 billion in investment capital, Sputnik reported.

This was immediately dismissed by the Daily Beast, among others, as conspiracy theory crazy talk aimed at the QAnon crowd, even before Tucker Carlson picked up the story.

“Tucker Carlton Echoes the Kremlin,” they headlined it, as if the story were self-evidently false. But guess what? Can you guess, huh?

Russia’s assertion that President Biden’s son Hunter was “financing … biological laboratories in Ukraine” was based in truth, according to e-mails reviewed by The Post.
A trove of e-mails on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — the existence of which was exclusively reported by The Post in October 2020 — found that he played a role in helping a California defense contractor analyze killer diseases and bioweapons in Ukraine. . . .
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners [the investment firm founded in 2009 by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and Devon Archer] invested $500,000 in the San Francisco pathogen research company Metabiota and raised millions more through firms that included Goldman Sachs, according to the e-mails found on the computer, which was abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 as Joe Biden ran for president.
Hunter introduced Metabiota to officials at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where he was a board member, for a “science project” involving biolabs in Ukraine, the e-mails show.
A memo from a Metabiota official to the then-vice president’s son in 2014 said the company could “assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia.”
Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri also wrote to Hunter about geopolitical issues involving the company’s research in the former Soviet republic in April 2014, two months after Russia invaded and annexed the Crimea region.
“As promised, I’ve prepared the attached memo, which provides an overview of Metabiota, our engagement in Ukraine, and how we can potentially leverage our team, networks, and concepts to assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia and continued integration into Western society,” her memo read.
Days later, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to Biden about a “as you called ‘Science Ukraine’ project.”
“As I understand the Metabiota was a subcontract to principal contactor of the DoD B&V [engineering firm Black & Veatch],” his e-mail read. “What kind of partnership Metabiota is looking for in Ukraine?”
The US awarded $23.9 million to Metabiota later in 2014, with $307,091 allocated for a “Ukrainian research projects,” government spending records showed.
The younger Biden bragged to investors that his company organized funding for Metabiota and helped it “get new customers” including “government agencies,” according to e-mails.

Well? Is the Daily Beast just going to pretend this isn’t newsworthy? Are the rest of the corporate media going to continue pretending that this is just crazy QAnon stuff and “Russian disinformation”?

Keep in mind that our government funded research in Communist Chinese labs that may have produced the COVID-19 virus. We are told, however, that the research our government was funding in Ukraine was entirely benign, and if we express skepticism about this project (which, oh, by the way, just happened to help make money for Joe Biden’s worthless crack-addicted son) well, our skepticism is proof that we’re a bunch of kooky right-wing conspiracy theorists. Wouldn’t it be nice if our government and our media would tell us the truth once in while, so they could have more credibility than the Kremlin?

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Tax Dollars: ‘Six Porsches, Six BMWs, Two Mercedes-Benzes, a Ferrari, and a Tesla’

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Remember “free” COVID-19 testing? Kind of like the “free” vaccine? All of that “free” stuff was actually funded by taxpayer money, as the federal government ran up trillions of dollars of new deficit spending for the pandemic emergency. Whenever government makes something “free,” it’s always taxpayers footing the bill, and you can trust that well-connected people are getting rich from the transaction:

The owner of a lab that made hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money for running COVID-19 tests has amassed a fleet of luxury cars and at least two private planes, WGLT has learned.
Aaron Rossi of Bloomington is CEO at Reditus Labs in Pekin. Rossi was recently indicted on federal tax fraud charges and faces a lawsuit from a business partner who accuses Rossi of “pillaging” Reditus to fund a “nouveau riche over-the-top lifestyle,” court records show.
Rossi’s vehicle collection certainly points to a spending spree.
There are 28 vehicles registered in Rossi’s name or that of his company, AJR MD Consulting, according to state records obtained by WGLT through the Freedom of Information Act. That includes six Porsches, six BMWs, two Mercedes-Benzes, a Ferrari, and a Tesla, records show. Almost all of them are model years 2020, 2021, or 2022, suggesting they were purchased recently.
Separately, there are 59 other vehicles registered to Reditus Laboratories, which Rossi owns. That includes nine BMWs, a Porsche, and a Tesla. . . .
Public records also show that Rossi or his companies own at least two private planes.
One of those planes is a Beechcraft King Air B200GT, registered to AJR MD Consulting – the same Rossi company that many of the luxury vehicles were registered to, according to FAA records. The second plane is a jet (a Mystere Falcon 900) that’s registered to Pekin-based RLL Aviation LLC, another Rossi company. . . .
Rossi, a 39-year-old entrepreneur who grew up in the Morton and Peoria area, rose to prominence during the pandemic. Rossi quickly became a high-profile businessman in central Illinois — even appearing alongside Gov. JB Pritzker in 2020 — when Reditus won hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts to run COVID-19 tests, including from a testing site in Bloomington.

Keep this in mind if the question ever arises why politicians sought to make COVID-19 vaccine mandatory. Pharmaceutical companies made billions off the “free” vaccine. They make big contributions to politicians, and employ obbyists in Washington. “Follow the money.”

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)




 

A Few Words About ‘Russian Intelligence’

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This is Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB, which is Russia’s foreign intelligence bureau. Beseda is reportedly under house arrest because of the FSB’s failures in connection to the Ukrainian invasion disaster.

Ever since Hillary Clinton’s campaign started promoting the “Russian collusion” narrative in 2016 — first as a way to distract from her email scandal, later as an excuse for why she lost the election, and then as a way to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidency — Americans have been expected to believe that Putin’s spy agencies are so cunning they can get away with almost anything. Perhaps you remember this one:

In an interview clip released [April 2, 2021], Hunter Biden said that the laptop first reported on last fall by the New York Post “could” be his, potentially casting doubt on past comments from President Biden that he thought the laptop was Russian disinformation.
“For real, I don’t know,” Hunter Biden told CBS’ Tracy Smith in response to a question about the origin of the laptop during an interview for “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Smith then asked the younger Biden whether the laptop “could” be his.
“Of course certainly,” he responded. “It, it, there could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.”

That would certainly be remarkable, if a foreign intelligence agency could somehow create “misinformation” about the son of a presidential candidate and leak it out to the New York Post in the middle of a campaign. But does anyone — anyone — at this late date believe that is what happened? No, and the New York Times finally today admitted that the laptop actually was Hunter’s. We have become accustomed to media “fact checkers” labeling every damaging bit of news about Democrats as false, and you’re a conspiracy theorist if you think these “fact checkers” are really just partisan Democrat activists trying to help their friends win elections. However, would it be too much to ask these self-anointed fact-checkers to engage in some retroactive examination of claims made during the 2020 campaign? Like this, for example:

“Joe, they’re calling you a corrupt politician,” Trump said, before Biden replied: “Nobody’s calling me that.”
“They’re calling it ‘the laptop from hell,’” Trump said, exercising less restraint than he exhibited earlier in the night.
“Nobody is saying that,” Biden retorted. “I have to respond to that because there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” he went on. “Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend Rudy Giuliani,” Biden said.
Trump responded by mentioning his own impeachment trial in the House. “You mean the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?”
Biden finished by saying that’s “exactly” what the intelligence community has found.

Well? Where is the legion of media fact-checkers now?

Is it not now self-evident that if (a) everything the New York Post reported about Hunter Biden’s laptop is true, then (b) what Joe Biden said about it being a “Russian plant” was a lie? That is to say (c) Biden is a “corrupt politician” exactly as Trump said during that debate, and (d) if the media had reported the truth at the time, maybe Joe Biden wouldn’t be in the White House now. We can extrapolate beyond that to suppose that if (e) Trump were still president then (f) Putin would not have dared to invade Ukraine, and therefore (g) Sergey Beseda might not be under house arrest now. You might say that “the ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us” has an awful lot to answer for.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 Witch-Hunt Committee Burns Its First Witch

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Today, I watched MSNBC (so you don’t have to) and you would have thought it was the biggest thing since VJ Day, the way they were celebrating the federal grand jury indictment of Steve Bannon:

A federal grand jury on Friday indicted Steve Bannon, a former adviser to former President Donald Trump, on two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to testify.
The Justice Department said Bannon faces one count for refusing to appear for an Oct. 14 deposition and a second count for refusing to provide documents related to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson and ranking member Liz Cheney have accused Bannon of knowing about the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol before it happened. They seek to question him about discussions he had with Trump in the days before the violent insurrection in which radical Trump supporters stormed the Capitol as lawmakers were voting to certify the 2020 election.
If convicted, Bannon faces between 30 days and one year in prison and up to a $1,000 fine.
“Since my first day in office, I have promised Justice Department employees that together we would show the American people by word and deed that the department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law and pursues equal justice under the law,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said. “Today’s charges reflect the department’s steadfast commitment to these principles.”
Bannon is one of multiple Trump associates whom the Jan. 6 committee has subpoenaed, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who was supposed to appear for a deposition Friday.
Earlier this week, the committee also subpoenaed former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany; senior adviser Stephen Miller; Nicholas Luna, Trump’s former personal assistant; Molly Michael, special assistant to the president and oval office operations coordinator; Benjamin Williamson, deputy assistant to the president and senior adviser to Meadows; Christopher Liddell, former White House deputy chief of staff; John McEntee, former White House personnel director; Keith Kellogg, national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence; Cassidy Hutchinson, special assistant for legislative affairs to Trump; and Kenneth Klukowski, former senior counsel to Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark.

We’re back to “The Walls Are Closing In,” you see — party like it’s 2018!

As I said earlier this week, a source with direct knowledge of these subpoenas described it to me as “the fishing expedition from hell” — basically, the Select Committee is demanding every email, text message, etc., in any way related to Jan. 6. But the people being subpoenaed have not been accused of any crime in this matter, because there was no crime except for the 600 or so people charged with storming the Capitol. What, pray tell, do Steve Bannon’s emails have to with that? If the FBI had any reason to believe that Bannon “conspired” with the militia kooks and QAnon crazies who breached the Capitol barricades, don’t you think he would have been charged by now? But wait a minute . . .

There were other people who were much more involved in planning the “Stop the Steal” rally than Bannon, and who have also been subpoenaed by the Committee. Why haven’t they been indicted?

Oh, you’re figuring this out now, aren’t you?

It’s a fucking publicity stunt, and Bannon is the Big Name to help hype up the MSNBC audience and generate New York Times headlines.

The whole agenda here is to keep the “insurrection” in the news until November 2022, the same way they kept “Russian collusion” alive all the way to the 2018 midterms. It’s a hoax of a sham of a farce.




 

Just Say No

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— by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

F*** Joe Biden and his mandates too.

Normally I wait for the evening link dump for things like this, but Bob Zimmermann dropped me an e-mail about the impending FDA hearings & comment period on the notion of giving the jab to kids 5-11. This notion is just absolutely unscientific. We’ve known for a long time that the chances of kids in that age bracket getting the coof and being seriously affected by it are slim and none, so what’s the point? A cynical sod like me might think this is a way for the Democrats to shovel more of your tax dollars to their Big Pharma donors, but you’re all adults, and you can connect your own dots. Let’s saddle up and let the FDA know this is not only a waste of taxpayers’ money but a BAD IDEA. Bob’s got the necessary link in his post, so go over and hit it and let the FDA know what you think. We get a few million people telling them not only no, but hell no, they may actually pay attention for once. 

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The ‘Deep State’ Unmasked: Joe Biden Targeted Trump Aide Gen. Flynn

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Remember when anti-Trump rhetoric was about his supposed violation of “norms”? Remember when Trump’s criticism of hostile media was considered a threat to a free press? Yeah, forget all that:

The director of rapid response for former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign called CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge a “right-wing hack” in a tweet that was later deleted.
Andrew Bates criticized Herridge in the deleted tweet for her exclusive reporting obtaining acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell’s notification to Congress.
The notification contained a list of dozens of former Obama administration officials who reportedly asked for documents that led to the identity of former national security adviser Michael Flynn being “unmasked” from intelligence reports between the 2016 election and President Trump’s inauguration.
A copy of the list, later obtained by The Hill, includes Biden and former White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. . . .
“Attacking the press and attempting to intimidate independent media is a standard part of the authoritarian playbook,” Biden said in a statement earlier this month. “Efforts to undermine public confidence in the integrity of fact-based reporting violate our core American values and threaten our very system of government.”

As recently as May 3, the Biden campaign considered it “authoritarian” to criticize “independent media,” but when the media reports that Biden was part of the Obama administration’s illegal surveillance of their political opponents, suddenly the standards change. You are a “right-wing hack” if you think it was wrong for Biden to exploit the U.S. intelligence apparatus as a weapon against Trump’s incoming administration by “unmasking” Gen. Flynn’s communications.

They think we don’t see this. Democrats think the American people are too stupid to understand what’s happening here. I hope they’re wrong.




 

Is Obama Living in an Alternative Reality?

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“I’m not making this up, you know,” remarks my podcast partner John Hoge, in reaction to this mind-boggling bit of news:

Former President Barack Obama on Friday stated the “rule of law is at risk” in response to the Department of Justice dropping its criminal charges against retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, according to an audio call obtained by Yahoo News.
“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed — about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn,” Obama said during a virtual discussion with members of the Obama Alumni Association. “The fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
During his remarks on Flynn, Obama erroneously said the former White House national security advisor pleaded guilty to perjury. Rather, he was charged for lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during President Trump’s transition period. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 as part of then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into now-debunked collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. In January, the Justice Department changed its sentencing recommendation for Flynn from probation to six months in jail, prompting the former Trump official to withdraw his guilty plea, citing prosecutors breaking their plea agreement.

What’s interesting here is when Obama says that the dropping of the charges against Flynn has been “somewhat downplayed” in the news, which tells me that he must be watching CNN, because if you’re watching Fox News, this story has gotten heavy coverage there. Why would this story be “somewhat downplayed” by whatever media Obama watches?

In court documents, the Justice Department said it dropped the case “after a considered review of all the facts and circumstances of this case, including newly discovered and disclosed information.” . . .
In its filing, the Justice Department said it concluded that Flynn’s interview by the FBI was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and that the interview on Jan. 24, 2017, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

Newly released documents, including FBI agents’ notes, show that they were aware Flynn was the target of a set-up ordered by James Comey.

Is Obama so isolated within a cocoon of friendly media that he actually doesn’t know any of this? We know Obama was prejudiced against Flynn, who in 2014 as head of defense intelligence had contradicted in congressional testimony Obama’s claim to have al-Qaeda “on the run.” But does the president know that other people are aware of this? See, if you’re watching CNN or MSNBC, you’ll never see any information that reflects negatively on Obama (or positively on Republicans), and thus Obama might be completely unaware of what Fox News and other organizations have reported in relation to “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Many millions of other Americans are as clueless as Obama, of course. If all you know is what you get from CNN or MSNBC, for example, you may not even be aware that someone named Mollie Hemingway exists, so you would never read her excellent article showing a timeline of how Obama’s Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting with John Brennan, James Clapper and others, led to the spurious prosecution of Flynn.

There’s a whole lot of information in that article which has never been reported by either CNN or MSNBC, nor by any of the three major broadcast network news divisions. Unless you actively and deliberately seek out information that the liberal media don’t want you to know about, it’s very easy to believe whatever narrative they’re selling you. This is why your liberal friends on Facebook are so smugly confident about their intellectual and moral superiority; they have simply never encountered any information that contradicts their worldview. Because liberals so dominate the journalism industry — to say nothing of their hegemonic control of Hollywood and academia — it requires a lot of effort to become a conservative. But I digress . . .

If your liberal friends haven’t yet figured out that “Russian collusion” was hoax, why? It’s confirmation bias, of course. Your liberal friends hate Donald Trump — in fact, they hate you for voting for him — and therefore make an active effort to avoid encountering any information that might reflect favorably on Trump. It’s very easy for them to do this, for the reasons I’ve explained, and so their minds would melt down in cognitive dissonance if they watched this 12-minute Tucker Carlson monologue:

 

You should probably share that video on your Facebook page, so that your liberal friends will have one more reason to hate you. Also, you should probably hit my tip jar, for giving you that suggestion.




 

Transcripts Prove Adam Schiff Lied; More Releases Expected From DNI Grenell

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A couple of years ago at CPAC, in the hotel lobby, I was introduced to Richard Grenell who, at the time, was still awaiting confirmation as our ambassador to Germany. Whatever specious pretexts Senate Democrats offered for opposing Grenell, the real reason was that he is “the real deal,” my conservative friends assured me. Grenell “gets it” in terms of the larger geopolitical struggle against “globalism” and, as such, is a threat to the status quo defended by the “Deep State.” My CPAC encounter with Grenell was brief, but the eagerness with which my friends vouched for him made a strong impression, and he has since proven his value to the administration, so much so that President Trump appointed him acting Director of National Intelligence, and wow, is he ever the real deal!

It was Grenell who pushed for the release that made big news Thursday:

Newly released transcripts of interviews from the House Intelligence Committee’s long-running Russia investigation reveal top Obama officials acknowledged that they knew of no “empirical evidence” of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, despite their concerns and suspicions. . . .
The transcripts, which were released by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., revealed top Obama officials were questioned over whether they had or had seen evidence of such collusion, coordination or conspiracy — the issue that drove the FBI’s initial case and later the special counsel probe.
“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified in 2017. “That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, according to the transcript of her interview, was asked about the same issue. Power replied: “I am not in possession of anything — I am not in possession and didn’t read or absorb information that came from out of the intelligence community.” . . .
Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice was asked the same question.
“To the best of my recollection, there wasn’t anything smoking, but there were some things that gave me pause,” she said, according to her transcribed interview, in response to whether she had any evidence of conspiracy. “I don’t recall intelligence that I would consider evidence to that effect that I saw…conspiracy prior to my departure.”
When asked whether she had any evidence of “coordination,” Rice replied: “I don’t recall any intelligence or evidence to that effect.”

And so on down the line. Every single witness in this testimony (which at the time was secret) disavowed having any evidence of “collusion,” and yet Adam Schiff spent three years publicly claiming to be privy to conclusive evidence of this alleged Russian conspiracy. If there was ever any doubt that Schiff was lying, that doubt is now over. As I say, it was acting DNI Richard Grenell who made this happen:

Schiff released the files — approved in late 2018 for release by the committee — after facing pressure earlier this week from Republicans to do so. Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell then notified Schiff that the redaction and declassification process was complete, and that the records were ready to be made public.
“At the bipartisan request of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Intelligence Community reviewed all transcripts for classification and made appropriate redactions. HPSCI voted unanimously in 2018 to publicly release these transcripts, and it is long past time that these are released,” Grenell said in a statement Thursday.

Schiff has been exposed as a dishonest fraud, and there may be even more proof on the way, thanks again to Richard Grenell:

President Trump’s top spy chief reportedly has a “satchel” of documents related to the Russia investigation that could be released as early as Friday.
After the House Intelligence Committee released dozens of witness transcripts from its investigation into Russian election interference on Thursday, Fox News chief White House correspondent Ed Henry reported two sources told him acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell is prepared to unveil additional documents that will show how Chairman Adam Schiff and other investigators “knew for a long time there was no collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin “even though they kept saying they had direct evidence.” . . .
Attorney General William Barr received a separate “satchel” of documents, Henry said in a report Friday evening on Tucker Carlson Tonight as Fox News aired video that a producer took of Grenell personally delivering them to the Justice Department.
Henry noted that his sources would not say precisely what was in the satchel, but they expect the contents could be made public as early as Friday.
The reporter also said that while a senior administration source told Fox News previously that Schiff was in “panic mode” about the House Intelligence Committee witness transcripts, the California Democrat may be “even more panicked” now.
The release of the witness transcripts and related materials came after the Justice Department filed to drop all criminal charges against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Keep an eye on this. The wheel of karma is turning.