[ZERO] In the legend of Pandora’s box, the star-crossed Pandora releases a slew of evils upon the world. Notably, the only thing that she was able to trap in the box or jar was something that is likely to be at a premium in Washington this week: hope.
The likely Republican takeover of the House could yield a slew of investigations in the months to come. Washington is famous for managing scandals. Indeed, it is a virtual artform in the Beltway. However, there is one investigation that comes the closest to Pandora’s box for the Washington establishment. A serious investigation into the Hunter Biden scandal could put the political and media elite into an existential crisis.
Here are the "usual suspects" who could find themselves under a microscope for the first time as a result of a full investigation into Hunter Biden.
THE BIDENS
The Biden family has long been associated with influence peddling to the degree that they could add an access key to their family crest. While they may be more aggressive than most families, influence peddling has long been a cottage industry in Washington. For decades, I have written about this loophole in bribery laws. It is illegal to give a member of Congress or a president even $100 to gain influence. However, you can literally give millions to their spouses or children in the forms of windfall contracts or cozy jobs.
President Joe Biden has faced repeated questions about influence peddling involving his family. (Getty Images)
James Biden has been remarkably (even refreshingly) open about marketing his access to his brother. Former Americore executive Tom Pritchard and others allege the Biden openly referenced his access to his brother and his family name in his pitch for clients. James has faced a wide array of litigation over allegedly fraudulent activities as well as a personal loan acquired through Americore before it went into bankruptcy.
Hunter worked with his uncle but also branched off on his own in the family business. While his father recently emphasized that his son was a hopeless addict, that defense stands in glaring contradiction to the fact that he maintained a multimillion-dollar influence-peddling scheme. The question is why foreign figures (including some associated with foreign intelligence) rushed to him international money transfers and complex deals worth millions from Moscow to Kyiv to Beijing.
However, the Biden most concerned may be the president himself. Joe Biden has repeatedly denied knowledge of Hunter Biden’s business entanglements despite numerous emails and pictures showing him meeting with Hunter associates. That includes at least 19 visits to the White House by Hunter’s partner, Eric Schwerin, alone between 2009 and 2015.
While emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop make repeated reference to his father as a possible recipient of funds derived from influence peddling. Indeed, in one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar that the Bidens wanted to avoid such references: "Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid."
In discussing these deals, Joe Biden is referenced with code names such as "Celtic" or "the big guy." In one, "the big guy" is discussed as possibly receiving a 10% cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm. There are also references to Hunter paying off the bills of his father from shared accounts. From his board memberships to venture deals to legal fees to his art deals, Hunter Biden is a tour de force of alleged corrupt practices used in Washington. Indeed, while his skills as a painter and a lawyer have been questioned, Hunter’s remarkable skills at influence peddling could soon be the focus of Washington.
[France24] More than 150 gangs are active in Haiti, where they impose their law on a powerless state. Most of them are located in the capital Port-au-Prince, which they largely control. Massacres, stray bullets, kidnappings: everyday Haitians are the first victims of their violence. FRANCE 24's Observers investigated their abuses in this special programme: "Haiti: in the grip of the gangs".
"My whole life went up in smoke," said Jean Simson Desanclos, a human rights defender who lost both his daughters and his wife on August 20.
They were on their way to a university in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince when members of the 400 Mawozo attacked them. "The gang members wanted to kidnap them. They resisted, and the gang members opened fire on them," Desanclos continued.
The tragedy touched many Haitians, who shared tributes to the young women and their mother on social media. The day after they were killed, Prime Minister Ariel Henry took to Twitter to reaffirm his "determination [...] to fight this crime wave".
But reactions like Henry’s, from the highest level of government, are rare. Haitian authorities have been accused of remaining passive, even when gangs commit massacres on a large scale. From April 24 to May 6, in the Plain of the Cul-de-Sac, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, and then from July 7 to 17, in the commune of Cité-Soleil, clashes between gangs left hundreds dead. According to the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), a Haitian organisation, the authorities remained "silent" and the police adopted "a non-interventionist posture".
[ET via ZERO] After a U.S. judge ordered the FBI to produce the information, the bureau said that it should not be required to hand it over because of exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And if the bureau still had to produce the information, government lawyers said it should have 66 years because it needs to review the information and redact certain information.
Ty Clevenger, the attorney representing Brian Huddleston, the Texas man who sued the FBI over the information, disagreed.
He told the judge in the new filing that the FBI failed to brief on the exemptions it is now claiming following the judge rejecting an attempt to shield the information because of privacy concerns for Rich’s relatives. That failure means the FBI cannot now rely on the exemptions, Clevenger said.
"Having failed to raise an issue or brief it in a motion for summary judgment, the movant may not then salvage the issue by raising it in a motion for reconsideration," he said, citing previous court cases. "In other words, the movant does not get a Mulligan on reconsideration, which is exactly what the FBI seeks here."
The bureau says that FOIA exemption 7(D)-3, which enables shielding identifying information of law enforcement personnel, and information provided by the personnel, enables it to keep withholding Rich’s laptop information from Huddleston.
"In short, the compact disc containing the images of Seth Rich’s personal computer were provided to the FBI by a local law enforcement agency under implied assurances of confidentiality, and thus the FBI properly withheld the compact disc in its entirety pursuant to Exemption 7(D)-3," government lawyers told the court.
Another exemption, 7(E)-6, lets the agency keep the information secret, the lawyers said. That exemption enables the withholding of information that would reveal methods law enforcement uses in investigations.
Clevenger, though, said that neither exemption applies.
The first doesn’t because the FBI has never provided evidence that the source of the information was given assurance of confidentiality, he said. The second doesn’t because the bureau claims it never reviewed the laptop information.
#3
So the 'laptop' bottom line is, we may never be privy to the sordid details of the Epstein-Hunter connection ?
I nominate Wiki-Leaks Julian Assange and Seth Rich (posthumously) for the Literary Award, 'Scandalous Cartel Money Laundering, Narcotics, Sex Trafficking and Gun Running stories never told' category.
[TK News] A Florida FBI agent blows the whistle on a Bureau that's stopped worrying about making cases, shifting resources to a vast new mission: domestic spying without predicate. Part one of a series.
Part one of a series.
Late on an October morning in a quiet neighborhood near Daytona Beach, Florida. FBI agent Steve Friend sits in his kitchen, fidgeting. He’s a wiry, energetic man, built like a marathoner, not muscled up but exuding fitness, not a sitter. This is not a person meant for desk work, much less staying home all day. But as a whistleblower whose name has been all over media after a complaint about statistical manipulation and other problems in the January 6th investigations, this will be his lot for a while.
By that morning, the first rush of news stories about Friend’s case already passed. CNN and MSNBC demonized him, Fox hailed him as a hero, but the furor was beginning to die down. What a whistleblower talks about in this inevitable moment will say a lot about his or her motivation. Looking out a window into the stillness of his suburban neighborhood, Friend shook his head.
"I love my job," he said, sighing. "I was living my best life as an FBI agent. I was coming home every day, and my kids were my biggest fan club. Like, ’Daddy, did you put the bad guy in jail?’ And I thought, ’Man, this is it.’"
It’s not the tone of a disgruntled malcontent, but someone who made a reluctant journey to whistleblower status, beginning with a whirlwind series of events that brought him and his family out of the Midwest to north Florida less than two years ago. He worked a child pornography detail before being transferred to the assignment that would upend his life: investigating J6. The FBI not only took Friend off vital work chasing child predators to pursue questionable investigations of people maybe connected with the Capitol riots (often in some misdemeanor fashion), they used dubious bureaucratic methods he felt put him in an impossible spot.
Essentially, the FBI made Friend a supervisory agent in cases actually being run by the Washington field office, a trick replicated across the country that made domestic terrorism numbers appear to balloon overnight. Instead of one investigation run out of Washington, the Bureau now had hundreds of "terrorism" cases "opening" in every field office in the country. As a way to manipulate statistics, it was ingenious, but Friend could see it was also trouble.
As a member of a dying breed of agent raised to focus on making cases and securing convictions, Friend knew putting him nominally in charge of a case he wasn’t really running was a gift to any good defense attorney, should a J6 case ever get to trial.
"They’re gonna see my name as being the case agent, yet not a single document has my name as doing any work," Friend says. "Now a defense lawyer can say, ’Hey, the case agent for this case didn’t perform any work.’ Labeling the case this way would be a big hit to our prosecution."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
11/12/2022 7:48 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Just finished Thom Nicholson's 15 Months in SOG: A Warrior's Tour
"When we cross the border: no ID, and it's kiss yourself good-bye if Charlie gets ahold of you."
In Vietnam, the Military Assistance Command's Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) fielded small recon teams in areas infested with VC and NVA. Because SOG operations suffered extraordinary casualties, they required extraordinary soldiers. So when Capt. Thom Nicholson arrived at Command and Control North (CCN) in Da Nang, SOG's northernmost base camp, he knew he was going to be working with the cream of the crop.
As commander of Company B, CCN's Raider Company, Nicholson commanded four platoons, comprising nearly two hundred men, in some of the war's most deadly missions, including ready-reaction missions for patrols in contact with the enemy, patrol extractions under fire, and top-secret expeditions "over the fence" into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Colonel Nicholson spares no one, including himself, as he provides a rare glimpse into the workings of one of the military's most carefully concealed reconnaissance campaigns.
As usual, neither scenario proved true. My doubts about a red wave proved accurate. No Red tsunami and no impenetrable Blue wall. There was, however, despite all the wailing on the GOP side, and despite blatant Democratic electoral fraud, a considerable red river that poked through, under, and around the blue wall in several spots, and caused significant erosion of the blue fortress. Didn't cave it or wash it away, but, nevertheless, we should not ignore some big wins.
[Real Clear Politics via Gateway] What, if anything, did the midterms tell us about the country -- other than underwhelming Republicans could still take the House and Senate?
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, American elections radically changed to mail-in and early voting. They did so in a wild variety of state-by-state ways. Add ranked voting and a required majority margin to the mess and the result is that once cherished Election Day balloting becomes increasingly irrelevant.
Election Night also no longer exists. Returns are not counted for days. It is intolerable for a modern democracy to wait and wait for all sorts of different ballots both cast and counted under radically different and sometimes dubious conditions.
The Democrats -- with overwhelming media and money advantages -- have mastered these arts of massive and unprecedented early, mail-in, and absentee voting. Old-fashioned Republicans count on riling up their voters to show up on Election Day. But it is far easier to finesse and control the mail-in ballots than to "get out the vote."
The country is divided in more ways than ever. America's interior just gets redder and the bicoastal corridors bluer.
Exceptional Republican gubernatorial or senatorial candidates like Lee Zeldin, Tudor Dixon, and Tiffany Smiley in blue states like New York, Michigan, or Washington cannot win upsets against even so-so Democratic incumbents -- even during a supposedly bad election cycle for Democrats, laboring under a president with a 40 percent approval rating.
Similarly, media-spawned leftist heartthrobs like Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams can burn through hundreds of millions of dollars. But they still cannot unseat workmanlike Republican incumbents in Texas and Georgia.
Out-of-state immigration has only solidified these red-blue brand polarizations.
Over the last decade, millions of conservatives have fled California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania to Florida and Texas.
The former states got bluer as New York governors like Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul said good riddance to fleeing conservatives -- who were welcomed as refugees to red "free states."
As voters self-select residences on ideological grounds and the deleterious effect of blue-states' governance, the country is gravitating into two antithetical nations. Americans vote not so much for individual personalities as blocs of incompatible parties, causes, and ideologies.
Debates count for little anymore, especially after the disastrous performance of winners Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman and Hochul.
Democrats often limited or avoided them altogether. And the Republican charging and complaining that they did so meant little at all.
Democrats still voted for Democratic candidates, regardless of Fetterman's clear cognitive inability to serve in the Senate and despite President Joe Biden's failures, harm to the middle class, and unpopularity.
Most Republicans are similar party loyalists, but not quite to the same degree -- at least if some feared supporting a hardcore Trump-endorsed candidate might give them grief among family and friends.
Winning or losing means revving up party bases, not running as much on a variety of issues. Biden's vicious attacks on conservatives as semi-fascists and un-American worked. When he recklessly warned that democracy's death was synonymous with Democrats losing, he further inflamed his base.
Biden also goaded young people to vote by temporarily lowering gas prices through draining the strategic petroleum reserve, offering amnesty for marijuana offenses, and canceling half a trillion dollars of student loan debt. He told young women that they would die without unlimited abortions. And most of that mud stuck.
#1
Who can trust an election, that in the grip of the worst inflation in 40 years, economic stagnation, energy crisis and food uncertainty, massive border invasion by millions of un-vetted illegals, crime spiking, governmental sanction racial discrimination against white Americans, massive increases in social programs and the rise of the entire youth-based transgender movement, produces status quo ante? That essentially, aside from peripheral defeats, the Biden/Obama agenda was supported by the people?
This sham is the proof that we are subjects, not citizens, that it is theater, not the will of the people. The slow motion steal in plain sight in Nevada and Arizona is the hubris of a power base that no longer fears the people, for it owns all of the important tools of control and can lie to your face with smug disdain.
There seem to be no more exit ramps from the looming freeway pileup ahead my friends.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[ZERO] In the legend of Pandora’s box, the star-crossed Pandora releases a slew of evils upon the world. Notably, the only thing that she was able to trap in the box or jar was something that is likely to be at a premium in Washington this week: hope.
[France24] More than 150 gangs are active in 
[ET via ZERO] After a U.S. judge ordered the FBI to produce the information, the bureau said that it should not be required to hand it over because of exemptions to the 
Just finished Thom Nicholson's 15 Months in SOG: A Warrior's Tour
