RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/09/22/how_russiagate_became_a_story_of_old_friends_indeed_795476.html

The indictment of Washington attorney Michael Sussman — accused of lying to the FBI in order to smear Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign — reveals the ace up the sleeve of high-powered Democrats. It’s a card they played time and again to advance the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory: friends in high places.

They used friends in law enforcement to launch secret investigations; they used friends in the federal government to broaden those investigations; and they used friends in the media to spread the word about Trump and his organization being under investigation.

Michael Sussmann: Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy, but for him it was.

CSPAN

James Baker of the FBI: Sussmann came to him “based on a preexisting relationship.”

RCP

The Russia fiasco metastasized in large part because those involved in advancing the false allegations had important connections. They used friendships with powerful federal officials to encourage investigations against team Trump. Those targeted by Sussmann and others were unabashed outsiders, and as such lacked the sort of connections the insiders exploited so adroitly.

Sussmann was a partner at the Washington law firm Perkins Coie in 2016, which represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. But, according to the indictment handed down by Special Counsel John Durham last week, when he met with the FBI’s general counsel, James Baker, to allege that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians, Sussmann claimed he was representing another client. The indictment alleges this was false.

Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy. But for Sussmann it was.

President Joe Biden’s address to the United Nations on Tuesday drew criticism from Republicans for failing to adequately address adversaries, including Russia and China. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed Biden for failing to identify China as an enemy, and warned that the world sees the commander-in-chief as laughable.

“I think a lot of the world sees Joe Biden and just laughs at the statements he made yesterday. You just mentioned or played a clip there, he said we don’t seek a new Cold War. Well, of course we don’t seek a new Cold War. We would rather have peace with all nations. But when China is waging a Cold War against the United States, we don’t have a choice whether we’re in it or not. We only have a choice to win or to lose. But beyond that, he didn’t even mention China’s name,” Cotton said during an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday. “It’s like he was scared to mention China’s name. Now, I know the White House is doing damage control today, saying that was by design. Let me give you a contrast. In 2014, after Russia invaded Crimea, Barack Obama, who’s no one’s idea of a chest-beating American nationalist, used Russia’s name more than 10 times in his United Nations speech. So I think Xi Jinping and China’s communist leaders in Beijing are laughing today at Joe Biden. And that’s a dangerous thing for China not to take the American president seriously.”

Rather than confronting adversaries, Biden spent much of his speech addressing climate change.

https://www.city-journal.org/bidens-politicized-vaccine-booster-plan

Both before and after the 2020 election, Joe Biden complained that President Donald Trump had politicized the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden insisted that he, in contrast with Trump, would “follow the science” and listen to the experts at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. And yet, President Biden has pushed vaccine booster shots for all adults despite opposition from the very agencies he touted as sentinels of science. Now an outside advisory panel to the FDA has overwhelmingly rejected the Biden plan, opting to recommend boosters only for a high-risk subset of those who have received the vaccine.

The administration announced plans for vaccine boosters beginning September 20 before any vaccine maker had even applied for booster approval. The first application, and thus far the only completed application ready for consideration, came from Pfizer on August 25, one week after the booster announcement. It seeks booster authorization for ages 16 and up. Pfizer’s supporting evidence was thin. Its application reported increased immune responses to the original viral variant following boosters in 317 subjects aged 18 to 55 and 12 subjects ages 65 to 85. Evidence on activity against the Delta variant that currently predominates was limited to just 11 subjects aged 18 to 55 and 12 subjects aged 65 to 85. No increase in severe adverse events related to boosters was found in the 329 subjects. Pfizer extrapolated safety and effectiveness for 16-17-year-olds from the adult data even though young males have the highest risk of heart inflammation (pericarditis/myocarditis) reported after initial vaccinations.

Politico reports that several CDC officials disagreed with the Biden administration’s booster plans, announced in mid-August. Many felt that the timetable was too rushed to allow the agency to complete studies and review vaccine manufacturer data that would justify the shots before the September 20 start date.

Two top FDA vaccine regulators, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause, announced their retirements shortly after the announcement in a move that many interpreted as a protest against the plan. Both joined with 16 other authors in a recently published Lancet article that concludes the booster policy is not supported by current evidence. They argue that vaccine efficacy remains high and that the unvaccinated remain the major drivers of transmission. Going ahead with boosters now, before adequate data and analysis are available, risks vaccine side effects that could undermine confidence in vaccines and undercut efforts to increase primary vaccinations. Moreover, they suggest that new vaccines, crafted against currently circulating variants, would likely be better boosters than administering additional doses of the original.

Other reports suggest widespread dissatisfaction among FDA staff and outside vaccine advisers who feel that White House political officials steered the announcement and cut key, career FDA employees out of the decision-making. Members of the CDC’s independent vaccine-advisory panel— the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—voiced frustration that the administration announced a plan before scientists had an opportunity to review the data and approve boosters.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17762/controlling-biden-presidency

To answer the question of who is controlling the Biden presidency, we should consider the Biden administration’s disastrous policy decisions. “Cui bono?” – Who benefits?

Why would Biden abandon Bagram Air Force Base? It is key to all of Southwest Asia – just 400 miles to China and 500 miles to Iran. It is a vitally important geopolitical, military and intelligence platform with consequences and “reach” that involve far more than just Afghan regional matters. Who, specifically, made the recommendation to just walk away from Bagram – and then who gave the order?

If we suggest that there is a combination or passing alliance of these various interests and groups, each seeking to advance their own agenda behind the official, hollow, front of “President Joe Biden” – then we run the risk of being branded conspiracy theorists. That is both dishonest and unfortunate, because asking questions of, and seeking accountability from, elected officials is not “crazy.” Interest groups do, in fact, lobby presidential advisors, White House staff, and even members of the president’s family.

We must press on – asking questions, examining records, seeking accountability and documenting facts. The truth will prevail.

The question has been asked dozens of different ways, depending on the questioner and the public policy issue. “Who is controlling the Biden presidency?”

One thing appears certain: It is not President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. He gives incoherent, rambling speeches, and often declines to take questions.

A May 2021 powder-puff profile of President Biden in the Washington Post was written as both a hagiography and a politically therapeutic assurance that there’s been a “return to normalcy” in the White House. The article’s author, Ashley Parker, was clearly given extraordinary access to personal details by White House staff and Biden handlers in order to compose her report. The resulting article is an interesting mix of Ms. Parker taking careful dictation from the White House, and her own ambition to pledge allegiance to the larger Biden “family.” In fairness, here is how Ms. Parker describes the sourcing of her article:

“This account of Biden’s daily schedule is based on interviews with seven people familiar with the president’s daily life, most speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose private details.”

There is genuine journalistic value in Ms. Parker’s work – and a mere four (+) months later – given the lightning fast and tumultuous downturn in the Biden presidency, 20/20 hindsight and review of her article may help answer our question: “Who is controlling the Biden presidency?”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/bidens_meeting_with_pm_boris_johnson_is_illuminating.html

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson met Joe Biden at the White House. They had the usual sit-down in the room reserved for heads of state meeting the press. The substance of what they said, as best as I can tell, was pretty meaningless. What was interesting was everything other than the substance. Biden waved his ubiquitous notecards around, revealing how much he needs to be prompted; his staff ensured that no reporters could ask him questions relevant to Americans; both Biden and Boris were masked. It was a theater of the absurd.

Here’s the Daily Mail’s summary:

Joe Biden on Tuesday did not recognize any American reporters for questions during an Oval Office meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his aides cleared out journalists as they tried to query the president.

Biden did attempt to answer one shouted question from a CBS reporter about the crisis on the Southern border but his answer was unclear when White House staff shouted down reporters, covering the president’s attempt to respond as they demanded journalists leave.

‘Violence is not justified,’ Biden appeared to say but the rest of his response was not decipherable.

White House staff even interrupted Johnson as they pushed to get reporters out of the room, shouting over the British prime minister as he and Biden sat in their chairs, watching the chaotic scene unfold as aides ushered journalists out of the Oval Office.

As reporters were ushered out, CBS White House reporter Ed O’Keefe shouted a question to Biden asked about the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border. The administration is facing backlash and criticism following images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback using whips to round up migrants or prevent them from stepping onto American soil.

But White House aides yelled ‘thank you’ and ‘let’s go’ to the press in the room, herding them out as Biden appeared to try and address the issue. Between the shouting of his aides and the president’s wearing a face mask, it was impossible to make out the majority of what Biden said.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/22/wrong-way-biden-is-taking-the-nation-wildly-off-course/

“Or, perhaps more appropriately, Biden is the new “Wrongway Feldman,” the fictional “Gilligan’s Island” pilot who was described as so incompetent that he once bombed his own airfield. We’ll let history decide which one he resembles most.”

If President Joe Biden’s navigating skills were any good, the southern border would be calm, inflation under control, every American safely out of Afghanistan, and COVID defeated. Instead, we are left to wonder how it is that his sense of direction can be so fabulously wrong.

At his first-ever press conference from the White House in March, a reporter asked Biden about the surge at the border, which happened to coincide with his taking office.

“The truth of the matter is, nothing has changed,” Biden, after suggesting that he’d studied the immigration charts, said. “It happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March.

“The reason they’re coming,” he went on, “is that it’s the time they can travel with the least likelihood of dying on the way because of the heat in the desert.”

At the end of April, Biden reassured the nation that he’d flown past the problem. “Well, look, it’s way down now. We’ve now gotten control.”

Right.

http://Jim%20Geraghty%20https:/www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-chinese-cdc-went-dark-on-their-u-s-counterparts/%0d%0d

You already knew that the Chinese government was spectacularly unhelpful and secretive in the pivotal early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. You probably suspected that any book about the pandemic written by former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb was going to be insightful and illuminating.

But you probably didn’t know how Gottlieb could, in a matter of paragraphs, perfectly illustrate the culpability of the Chinese government in how COVID-19 went from a virus spreading around Wuhan to a global plague that has killed, so far, more than 4.7 million people. Page 48 of Gottlieb’s new book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic:

[On] January 1, CDC Director Robert Redfield emailed his Chinese counterpart, Dr. George Fu Gao, a virologist and immunologist who had served as director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2017.  After receiving no response, later that day Redfield called Gao to press for more information. By January 3, the two had talked multiple times about the outbreak. The following day, on January 4, Redfield sent Gao another e-mail, again entreating for more information on the situation in Wuhan and requesting that the U.S. CDC staff be given access to the hot zone.

“I would like to offer CDC technical experts in laboratory and epidemiology of respiratory infectious diseases to assist you and China CDC in identification of this unknown and possibly novel pathogen,” Redfield wrote. Gao was emphatic that there was no person-to-person transmission and no evidence of spread within hospitals. Gao’s working theory was that the virus had been spread by contact with an animal, still unidentified, at the Huanan market. All the early cases seemed to be tied to that market. But Gao had sent Redfield a list of the first twenty-seven cases that the Chinese CDC had identified, and Redfield noticed that among them were three clusters where multiple family members were affected – a husband and wife, or a child and a parent. It seemed implausible that to Redfield that multiple members of three different families had all contracted the virus from one zoonotic exposure. Redfield told Gao he was extremely worried this was evidence of human-to-human transmission, urging Gao to look aggressively through local medical admissions for people with matching respiratory symptoms who didn’t identify the food market as a common point of contact.