RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-biden-defense-5914ec5e?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Just like everyone else, President Joe Biden deserves the presumption of innocence when it comes to the latest allegations related to his family’s prolific collection of cash from foreign oligarchs. But given the highly consequential falsehoods he and his allies have told about lucrative Biden family engagements for which the family appeared manifestly unqualified, healthy skepticism is in order. And now there’s another highly dubious claim coming from Mr. Biden’s defenders.

As for the latest twist in the story of the Bidens and overseas oligarchs, the Journal’s William McGurn wrote last week:

“House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer subpoenaed a Federal Bureau of Investigation form he says outlines details of a $5 million bribe allegedly paid to Joe Biden while he was vice president. Until last week, the FBI wouldn’t even concede the document existed… But after Mr. Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley told [FBI Director Christopher Wray] in a phone call last Wednesday that they’d already seen the document, pretending it doesn’t exist was no longer an option. Now that the FBI says there’s an investigation, there is a campaign to discredit the charges before the public can see them.
The first salvo came from CNN last Wednesday. Quoting “people briefed on the matter,” the network said the document had its “origins in a tranche of documents that Rudy Giuliani provided to the Justice Department in 2020.” This is what Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, is relying on to say the charges have been looked into and there’s nothing there.
Remember when the New York Post on Oct. 14, 2020, first published some of the incriminating emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop? The paper’s reporting was not only ignored but also suppressed—with the active assistance of the FBI. In its original story, the Post reported that “Hunter Biden’s lawyer refused to comment on the specifics but instead attacked Giuliani.” Some things never change.”

They sure don’t. Mr. McGurn had more on the allegations contained in an FBI form called an FD-1023, used to record information from a confidential human source:

After Monday’s meeting with the FBI, Mr. Raskin emerged to say that Trump-appointed officials including Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney Scott Brady assessed the allegations against Mr. Biden and agreed not to take the investigation any further. But he didn’t say precisely which allegations were assessed—and especially if they were based on the specific information on that FD-1023 from that trusted source. Mr. Comer said the FBI told him the information in the FD-1023 is being used in an ongoing investigation and hasn’t been disproved.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/10/can-trump-clean-the-augean-stables-on-the-potomac/

There is a reason that, since before the time of the emperor Tiberius, treason trials have been a favorite tool of totalitarians. Such proceedings allow them to get rid of nearly anyone they dislike. Successfully brand someone a “traitor,” an “enemy of the state,” and, bang, into the oubliette they go.

I think the treason trial is the appropriate heuristic for what is happening, and what has been happening to Donald Trump ever since 2015 when he descended the escalator.

The charge that Trump was “Putin’s poodle,” a “Russian asset,” etc., during the Russia collusion hoax was a sort of treason trial. And remember how elaborate it all was, a veritable glass onion, thanks in large part to Hillary Clinton, whose campaign concocted, paid for, and disseminated the infamous fantasy “dossier” fabricated by former MI6 spook Christopher Steele. And it was Hillary, remember, who first broadcast the charge that servers in Trump Tower were secretly communicating with Russia’s Alfa Bank. The Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services—all were in on that game.

Trump’s two impeachments were episodes in the long-running treason trial, as was Liz Cheney’s January 6 show trial, as are the still unfolding series of indictments that have dogged his footsteps with increasing ferocity as the 2024 election looms and Trump’s poll numbers stubbornly refuse to recede.

A lot of legal hermeneutical ingenuity has been lavished on the current criminal indictment, a 37-count blockbuster revolving around charges that Trump mishandled classified documents he had stuffed away at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach. I think those analyses are mostly beside the point, so much wasted foolscap. The indictment, which histrionically relies heavily on the 1917 Espionage Act, is, when looked at with a sufficiently jaundiced eye, an amusing performance. Macbeth would have said it was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

 https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/12/biden-bribe-scheme-is-a-three-part-scandal-saga/

The recent and credible bribe allegations against the president could reveal the truth about the ties between the Biden family and the FBI.

FBI Director Christopher Wray narrowly avoided contempt of Congress proceedings last week over his refusal to provide the House Oversight Committee with an unclassified document memorializing a trusted informant’s allegation that then-Vice President Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian energy oligarch Burisma.

Dramatic as the near-rebuke may have appeared, and as explosive as the contents of the FBI’s concealed FD-1023 form seem to be, the trio of apparent scandals this saga touches on transcends its immediate significance.

Influence Peddling

The first scandal — hiding in plain sight for years yet never fully exposed, let alone prosecuted — concerns the Biden family’s potentially criminal, national security-imperiling, public trust-eroding influence peddling. The reality of this influence peddling makes the stunning allegation of a Joe Biden bribe seem infinitely more plausible than it might otherwise appear.

The House Oversight Committee’s recent review of thousands of records from subpoenas to four banks — which preceded its pursuit of the FD-1023 — shows that “Biden family members and business associates created a web of over 20 companies,” the majority of which were formed during Biden’s vice presidency. Through this web, “the Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received over $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies” [emphasis original] during and after the then-vice president’s tenure.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/whos_destroying_civic_norms_again_trump.html

It’s hard to believe how many high-ranking government officials have been serving time behind bars these last couple decades.  Bill Clinton got caught selling military secrets and influence to communist China in return for campaign contributions.  Hillary Clinton got caught storing top-secret materials on an unsecured email server in a bathroom closet.  Lois Lerner got caught using the IRS as a weapon for targeting conservatives and influencing the 2012 election.  Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents concerning the Obama administration’s transnational gunrunning racket.  Barack Obama, Jim Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper were all thrown in the clink for spying on a political opponent’s campaign and then covering up their illegal activities by framing the victim as a covert Russian agent.

The saddest thing was watching Dementia Joe Biden stumble out of the White House in cuffs, as remaining federal agents finally arrested him for decades of corruption involving quid-pro-quo schemes that enriched his family by selling the powers of his various offices to the highest foreign bidders.  

Oh, right — none of that happened, because the Deep State and those in bed with the Deep State protect their own.  At this point, anybody not being attacked or politically persecuted should be presumed as secretly working for some shady enterprise hostile to the best interest of the United States.

Yet somehow special counsel Jack Smith has the temerity to stand before the American people, announce the federal government’s continuing crusade to keep President Trump from office, and shamelessly declare, “We have one set of laws in this country.”  Right.  What he really means is, “The Deep State controls America, and if you mess with those gangsters, we’ll lock you up and throw away the key.”  Jack Smith — like Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, so many inspectors general who ignore crimes under their purview, and too many partisan political operatives posing as judges — is just another thug enforcer sent out to protect the ruling regime.  Well done, Jack!  Collect your thirty pieces of silver and career advancement as your reward!

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/11/the-pandemic-of-nuclear-trash-talk/

After the world escaped a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, it has been generally understood that nuclear-armed nations did not publicly threaten their rivals and enemies with thermonuclear weapons.

Of course, there were occasional lunatic exceptions to the rule. Since 2006, when the unhinged North Korean regime acquired nuclear weapons, the world has periodically dismissed the zany threats from the Kim dynasty. Kim Jong Un has sporadically warned he might strike Japan, South Korea, and the United States—usually in an outrageous and outlandish fashion.

Kim finally was warned of the consequences of his brinkmanship rhetoric, most famously by Donald Trump in 2018. He reminded Kim that the American nuclear button was bigger than North Korea’s—an eerie counter-warning that for a time led to the cooling of North Korean rhetoric.

Pakistan went nuclear in 1998. From time to time, its prime ministers have warned India that in any confrontation, what Pakistan lacked in numbers and arms would be made up by the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. But again, Pakistan’s threats, like those of Kim Jong Un’s, were dismissed as the rantings of the insecure and blustering, who were otherwise deterred by much larger nuclear arsenals.

But the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine opened a new chapter in nuclear trash-talking. The Ukrainian war has proved dangerously unique in a variety of ways. True, there have been prior large land wars involving nuclear powers. The first Gulf War of 1991 saw Britain, France, and the United States combine to help crush Iraq without mention of nuclear arms. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 without such threats. Neither did China mention a nuclear option in 1979, despite a less-than-successful short invasion of Vietnam. Nor did Great Britain, in its 1982 retaking of the Falkland Islands, talk of the bomb, although recently declassified documents revealed that the Royal Navy carried 31 nuclear weapons on its expeditionary fleet—presumably depth charges, bombs, and missiles—to the chagrin of the current Argentine government.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/06/seeing-our-adversaries-with-clear-eyes
Middle-aged men finish their work for the day, overseeing exterminations at Auschwitz, and retire to the comfort of their homes, wives, and children. Young female telephone, telegraph, and radio operators who send and receive messages about who shall live and who shall die take a break to relax in the sun.

It was all part of life in and around history’s largest killing factory, as showcased in a set of jarring photos that are housed at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and that come to life in a moving new play, “Here There Are Blueberries” – which premiered in La Jolla and just passed through the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington.

The photos and play call to mind “the banality of evil,” the phrase that philosopher Hannah Arendt coined in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her book about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She concluded that Eichmann, who helped spearhead Hitler’s “final solution,” was less a monster than a normal person, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” He was a former day laborer who could perform the evilest of deeds with nary a moral concern, a cog in a machine of ordinary people, living otherwise ordinary lives, in a country renowned for its advanced culture.

We see Auschwitz’s worker bees, but we also see top Nazi leaders – including Rudolf Hoss, who was most responsible for building Auschwitz and was its longest-serving commandant, and Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who performed the vilest of medical experiments on its prisoners.

Thus, the play offers lessons not just about the multifaceted drives of average people, but about those of individual leaders.

The play centers around 116 pictures and captions in an album that was assembled in meticulous fashion by Karl Hocker, a top aide to Auschwitz’s last commandant, Richard Baer.

https://victorhanson.com

We can calibrate the decline in the quality of American life by comparisons to both societies of the past and contemporary civilization elsewhere. And the result is not encouraging for Americans. 

I believe I may have visited 80 percent of the so-called first world countries in Europe and the Middle East, and in most of the major capitals and large cities—Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Nicosia, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw, etc., as well as the first-, second-, and third-world non-European cities of Algiers, Amman, Ankara, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kuwait City, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Tripoli.

Over the last 40 years, I have had major surgeries in these cities, stayed in “bad areas,” lived for nearly three years abroad, and traveled to their hinterlands. I have been a journalist who visited Iraq twice during the surge of 2006–07, was in Israel during the worst of the suicide bombings, lived in Athens during the 1973 coup and 1974 war in Cyprus, and visited for two weeks Egypt just after the Yom Kippur War. I have seen firsthand the toxic work of dictators like Khadafi, the violence of the PLO, the changes in Erdogan’s Turkey, and the incompetence of socialists in Europe.

And yet, I never saw in the slums of old Cairo or in the worst environs of Brussels and Naples, or amid the poverty of 1970s rural Turkey anything like what I saw in San Francisco this year and last. The undressed on Market Street and near Union Square were routinely smoking dope, injecting drugs, defecating, urinating, and in various states of pre-civilized behavior. The homeless enclaves of Los Angeles are worse. Were these scenes being filmed for The Last of Us?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-nation-two-sets-of-laws/

When Barack Obama announced that he was unilaterally legalizing millions of illegal aliens while further opening the border, he described it as using “discretion about whom to prosecute”.

In the years since, pro-crime prosecutors have virtually dismantled the justice system in some jurisdictions by using their “discretion” not to prosecute thieves, drug dealers and violent criminals. Some prosecutors announced that they wouldn’t prosecute rioters and looters, others that they would stop prosecuting prostitution, public urination or thefts of under $1,000.

In the decade since Obama announced his exercise in prosecutorial discretion, the country has been overrun with criminals and illegal aliens who benefited from that “discretion”.

But prosecutorial discretion, like most leftist policies, works both ways.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg issued a ‘zero day’ memo on taking office that told prosecutors not to seek prison sentences for armed robbers. Bragg then labored to indict former President Trump while bypassing such niceties as the statute of limitations and the actual nature of the crime.

Such prosecutorial discretion has become routine in New York where Attorney General Letita James has championed criminal justice reform while targeting not only Trump, but the NRA. Bragg’s predecessor, DA Cyrus Vance, gave Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein a pass. He announced that he wouldn’t charge former Mayor Bill de Blasio, but pursued Trump. After refusing to charge BLM rioters or prostitutes, he made a point of dragging a woman featured in a viral video into court because she had called the police during a dispute with a black man.

But it’s also become normal at the federal level.

Hillary Clinton and her aides mishandled classified information on a massive scale. The indictment of President Trump contrasts sharply with the treatment of Hillary, not to mention Biden who left classified documents lying around his garbage. The Trump team will argue selective prosecution, but the prosecution will argue that it can charge whom it pleases.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/06/11/tulsi-gabbard-trump-indictment-undermines-democracy-n1702331

“[The] Trump indictment undermines democracy because if a law is going to be enforced, it should be enforced equally and fairly across the board. The selective use of govt institutions and law enforcement to go after political or personal opponents, undermines the very essence of the rule of law, which is the foundation for our democracy,” ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard posted to her Locals account recently.

What Tulsi is touching on with the “selective use of govt institutions and law enforcement” is a phenomenon called anarcho-tyranny, in which politically favored individuals in the in-group are permitted to violate the letter of the law with impunity (a good example being the “mostly peaceful” “Summer of Love” 2020 BLM riots).

Meanwhile, under anarcho-tyranny, a robust enforcement regime is foisted upon members of the out-group (in the modern context consisting mostly of alt-right MAGA “domestic terrorists”). Law enforcement, in short, is entirely politicized.

While both Joe Biden and Mike Pence have admitted to housing classified documents illegally — neither of them even having a theoretical defense, as they were never president (at the time) and therefore have no authority to declassify anything — the DOJ has declined to pursue charges against either man because they are favored members of the ruling class in good standing.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/watch-trump-attorney-turns-tables-obliterates-sniveling-clinton/

Far-left ABC “News” anchor George Stephanopoulos’ attempt to corner Trump attorney Jim Trusty during their interview Friday went horribly wrong and the host went into meltdown mode as reported by the Daily Caller.

As Gateway Pundit readers know, Stephanopoulos is a former Democrat advisor who once served as Bill Clinton’s communications director before entering the media. He has carried water for his favored party since.

Stephanopoulos started his inquisition by trying to get Trusty to agree that Trump committed crimes. Trusty did not fall for the host’s trap, though, and completely turned the tables on him by pointing the actual serious crimes committed by Joe Biden.

Stephanopoulos lost his temper after getting hit with truth bombs. Trusty then finished him off in epic style.

Here is a transcript of the exchange:

Stephanopoulos: Don’t you believe in the principle that no person is above the law?

Trusty: No person is below the law, that’s really the issue here. You’ve got these investigations in Delaware that are 1,000 times more serious by a sitting president who has authorized his DOJ to try to sink the candidacy of his prime opposition while that guy has unsecured documents that he stole out of a skiff dozens of years ago. Look, we’re not talking…

Stephanopoulos (melting down): What are you talking about? “What are you talking about? That is a ridiculous statement!