The Trump Classified Document Circus Is About to Get a New Shot of Life

The Trump Classified Document Circus Is About to Get a New Shot of Life

Matt Vespa | 

    

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Remember the Mar-a-Lago raid last summer? The FBI deployed agents to ransack the home of Donald Trump, searching for classified materials that the National Archives alleged were never returned. The allegations from the initial raid were ludicrous, with The Washington Post alleging that nuclear secrets were strewn across dining room tables. A lengthy email chain between Trump’s lawyers and the National Archives showed they were trying to cooperate. These materials were not in an unsecured location; the president’s home has full-time Secret Service protection. Also, they had staff with security clearances to handle the materials. The legal argument for the raid has been questioned, and it should, given how the FBI has run amok during the Trump presidency.   

And before the liberal media gets excited over the latest about the unconstitutional Trump raid, have they forgotten that Joe Biden is also at the center of a classified document scandal of his own making? There are notable differences: government officials didn’t know how many classified materials were left exposed, the number of locations was unknown, and state secrets were on Joe Biden’s coffee table. Okay, may be a stretch, but they were found inside his Delaware residence. Did staff with the proper clearance handle these materials? It’s unknown since the special counsel is taking Biden’s personal attorneys’ word about what transpired as gospel.  Unlike Trump’s special counsel investigation looking into the classified document issue, there have been allegations that Biden’s special counsel is slow-walking or perhaps sabotaging the probe. 

The update on the Trump raid is that there’s an allegation that the former president’s aides moved boxes of files before the FBI arrived on the scene. This will surely energize the media who haven’t been given much to defend Biden or the Democrats during these debt ceiling negotiations. That’s probably because Joe doesn’t talk to the press, he runs away from them. And given the latest on those discussions, I have a feeling he hasn’t been talking to congressional leadership much either (via WaPo):

Two of Donald Trump’s employees moved boxes of papers the day before FBI agents and a prosecutor visited the former president’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents in response to a subpoena — timing that investigators have come to view as suspicious and an indication of possible obstruction, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump and his aides also allegedly carried out a “dress rehearsal” for moving sensitive papers even before his office received the May 2022 subpoena, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive ongoing investigation. 

Prosecutors in addition have gathered evidence indicating that Trump at times kept classified documents in his office in a place where they were visible and sometimes showed them to others, these people said. 

Taken together, the new details of the classified-documents investigation suggest a greater breadth and specificity to the instances of possible obstruction found by the FBI and Justice Department than has been previously reported. It also broadens the timeline of possible obstruction episodes that investigators are examining — a period stretching from events at Mar-a-Lago before the subpoena to the period after the FBI raid there on Aug. 8. 

Okay, I’m sorry, they might have moved documents from one room to another in preparation for the agents’ arrival? Were these files destroyed? Of course, the article doesn’t delve into that, only that someone might have moved some boxes on the property, and there were dress rehearsals on how to move sensitive materials, which doesn’t sound all that unorthodox. It’s better than Joe Biden and his crew neglecting protocol and carelessly leaving state secrets at multiple locations. 

I’m sure, like the other Trump ‘bombshells’ in the past, this will be a nothingburger, but the media will make it seem like the former president was going to sell nuclear secrets to the Iranians.

https://townhall.com//tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/05/25/wapo-trump-aides-moved-boxes-of-docs-before-fbi-arrived-at-former-presidents-home-n2623729?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=15803c7fc8c68b6fd1f0a5e7f4b59fc49df45d48335d4339ad60f7b0a0c7404d&recip=28668535

Pseudoscientific COVID Rituals Still Going Strong in Blue Jurisdictions

Pseudoscientific COVID Rituals Still Going Strong in Blue Jurisdictions

BY BEN BARTEE 

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Imagine, in 2023 — after all we’ve learned about natural immunity, the so-called vaccines’ total inefficacy in preventing transmission, and the futility of masking (not to mention its harmful effects on cognition and its social costs) — still insisting on quasi-religious COVID-19 rites.

Via The Washington Free Beacon:

“The Washington, D.C., bar will require all applicants to wear masks when they sit for the city’s 12-hour bar exam in July, according to test instructions reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

“At this time applicants will be required to wear a mask fully covering their mouth and nose during the exam,” the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which administers the test, told registered test-takers in a Thursday memo. “Any additional COVID-19 safety and health procedures will be announced closer to the exam.”

The requirement comes on the heels of a German study that found masks expose users to toxic levels of carbon dioxide, which can cause “difficulty concentrating,” “reduced cognitive performance, impaired decision-making and reduced speed of cognitive solutions.

The D.C. bar is supposedly directed by the most high-minded, rational, well-educated members of society. Yet somehow they overlooked, or willfully ignored, the fact that their fascistic masking policies don’t actually produce any legitimate public health good.

Related: Three Years of COVID Democrat Tyranny That We Should Never Forget

I recently got into a thing with some Zero COVID cult members on Twitter who were beside themselves over, of all things, Taylor Swift having a concert where not all attendees were forced to mask.

To buttress my point, I was forced to resort to quoting Slate which in turn quoted a study from the Cochrane Review that just totally annihilated the masking story: “The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.”

If you don’t quote Slate or The Atlantic or Buzzfeed to them, they won’t even consider the material.

Via Slate:

Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference,” the review authors concluded of their work comparing masking with non-masking to prevent influenza or SARS‐CoV‐2. What’s more, even for health care workers providing routine care, “there were no clear differences” between medical or surgical masks versus N95s.

But as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The review doesn’t show that masks definitely do not reduce the spread of COVID—only that studies to date have not proven that they do.

See that little rhetorical trick the Slate people did there? They obviously have to soften the devastating blow to their readers’ cherished masking narrative or else risk too much blowback. So they try to couch the study’s finding by saying that it didn’t prove masking works, but it didn’t prove masking definitely doesn’t work!

Of course, this is unscientific nonsense. The burden of proof is always on the one making the claim, not the one challenging it. You can’t prove Walter White isn’t a Martian baking meth on Mars and the whole Breaking Bad series was actually inspired by true events.

Ironically, I’m pretty sure there’s probably some logic puzzle along these lines on the Bar Exam — or, if not, then definitely the LSAT — that all of these Washington Bar lawyers must’ve passed to get their licenses.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/23/pseudoscientific-covid-rituals-still-going-strong-in-blue-jurisdictions-n1697477

Oh, So That's Who Americans Will Blame for a Debt Default

Oh, So That's Who Americans Will Blame for a Debt Default

Spencer Brown | 

    

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

President Joe Biden has been seemingly unable to catch a break as he and the White House scramble to show competence and strength amid debt ceiling negotiations with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) who has outmaneuvered Democrats at what seems to be every turn. This week, amid contradictory and increasingly desperate White House press briefings, more bad news for Biden emerged in the form of a new poll showing more Americans would blame Biden for a default than they would McCarthy or congressional Republicans. 

The survey, conducted and released by Fox News with direction from Beacon Research and Shaw and Company Research showed how Biden has lost the messaging battle on the debt limit. 

When it comes to Biden's initial position that no spending cuts be included in a bill increasing the debt ceiling — one that saw the president waste more than two months refusing to engage in talks with Speaker McCarthy — Americans overwhelmingly stand against Biden. 

According to the Fox News Poll, 57 percent of Americans say the debt limit should only be increased if spending cuts are included. Just 27 percent said the debt ceiling should be lifted without additional requirements and 13 percent said the debt limit should not be increased and the U.S. should default on its debt. 

If, in fact, the United States defaults on its debt before a deal can be reached to raise the debt ceiling — bearing in mind that House Republicans already passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling and avoid default — more Americans would blame President Biden than Republicans in Congress by a margin of 47 percent to 44 percent. Eight percent of Americans said they would blame both if a default takes place. 

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Notably, the lay of the land in this debt ceiling fight is markedly different from a previous fight. In 2011, a Fox News survey asking Americans whether they'd blame then-President Obama or congressional Republicans for a default, 47 percent said they'd blame the GOP while 32 percent said Obama would bear the blame. 

That means President Biden and the White House — despite having the mainstream media, most big tech companies, and most of America's cultural institutions on their side — has managed to lose the narrative advantage they hoped to have on the debt ceiling issue. It's gotten so desperate inside the West Wing that Biden aides have been whining about the mainstream media's alleged failure to "frame" the debt limit situation in a way that benefits the president. 

In continuing bad news for Biden as he looks toward 2024, Fox News' poll also found that 44 percent of Americans view the president as "corrupt," 53 percent say he "doesn't care" about Americans, and 57 percent say he is not "honest and trustworthy." When it comes to his job in general, 59 percent of Americans say Biden lacks the "judgment to serve as president effectively" and 60 percent believe Biden does not have "the mental soundness" to be commander in chief. 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2023/05/25/more-americans-will-blame-biden-for-a-default-poll-n2623702?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=28668535

Satan’s Coalition

Satan’s Coalition

Scott Hogenson

AP Photo/John Hanna

I’ve spent enough time working in politics to know the value of coalitions. Assembling and working with a collection of interest groups sharing common goals is an effective way to demonstrate support of and consensus for any particular policy position. This voluntary association which defines coalitions demonstrates unity of purpose and it can be really powerful. 

So what does it say about a group’s common goals and unity of purpose when its coalition includes Satan? It’s a fair question now that we’ve had a look at which companies Target stores have teamed up with to promote the discount retailer’s PRIDE collection of clothing and accessories.

Target now sells items from the London-based company Abprallen, which has established a niche for itself in the Satan-themed products retail sector. While Target is not selling Abprallen’s Satan stuff in its stores, the partnership provides a glimpse into the composition of the coalition supporting and promoting transgender ideology. This is not speculation or hyperbole.  When someone says about transgenderism, “Satan loves you and respects who you are,” as the British company did on Instagram, it’s pretty unambiguous. 

Take a moment to unpack this: You’re part of a movement with a defined goal. You want to widely promote it and generate support for it, so you gather together as many like minded people and organizations as possible. Apparently, someone involved with the transgender movement thinks adding Satan to the coalition is a good idea. Absurd as this sounds, I can understand the practical application of doing so. 

The social contagion of transgenderism mostly involves younger people so its recruits are primarily adolescents, who are at a stage of life almost universally defined by rebellion. If a movement wishes to deceive youngsters into believing something that is patently false and supported by nothing in genetics, anatomy, physiology or endocrinology, appealing to adolescent rebellion is a good way to do that. After all, what is more rebellious than Satan? 

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There is a tactical purpose to including Satan in this coalition, but there’s also a strategic aspect to it. For most people, their introduction to Satan comes from the book of Genesis and the episode in which the Devil tempts Eve into committing original sin. The shorthand version is that the snake convinced Eve to disobey God by eating an apple. But there was much more to Satan’s temptation than simply enticing Eve to be disobedient. 

Adam and Eve were allowed to eat anything they wanted in the Garden of Eden with the exception of fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In tempting Eve, Satan said to her, “God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.” It worked. When confronted about this by God, Eve explained, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

That is the strategic goal of the larger totalitarian movement of which transgender ideology is a prime component - deceiving people into believing they can become like God. The best way to destroy God is to make everyone think they can be God. Marxism and every variant of it hates God. People believing in Him have faced persecution and death for more than a century in communist regimes, which do this because God competes with the state for the loyalty of the people, and this is not to be tolerated. 

Transgender ideology is a powerful means of deceiving people into believing they can be like God. Few things are more godlike than deciding to change one’s sex by declaration. Humanity is made in the image of God so destroying that truth on a personal whim represents enormous individual power while defying scripture. For the militant Left, it’s a win-win. 

If a movement wants to engage in widespread, unspeakable deceit, and seeks to assemble a group of people and organizations to achieve that, it makes perfect sense to invite Satan into its coalition. This is precisely what we are seeing right now.  

We’re witnessing an astonishing level of evil today. To have Satan in a coalition speaks volumes about it but that evil is exponentially amplified when it aims for children. Exploiting confused youngsters to lure them into transgender ideology, and then emotionally blackmailing their parents into going along with the lie, is the most despicable degeneracy of our time. 

People have recently been pushing back against this movement and the pushback can work. The Marxist-oriented Black Lives Matter Global Network is hurtling toward bankruptcy so it’s not like totalitarian movements are unstoppable. If we try hard enough, we can relegate transgender ideology to the ash heap of history too. 

https://townhall.com/columnists/scotthogenson/2023/05/25/satans-coalition-n2623654?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=15803c7fc8c68b6fd1f0a5e7f4b59fc49df45d48335d4339ad60f7b0a0c7404d&recip=28668535

Latest Developments in the Hunter Biden Tax Probe Does Not Look Good for AG Garland

Latest Developments in the Hunter Biden Tax Probe Does Not Look Good for AG Garland

Matt Vespa 

    

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Suppose there is one case that should be a slam dunk for an indictment. In that case, it’s the tax evasion investigation into Hunter Biden and all the cash he’s accumulated with Joe Biden from shady government access deals. The US attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, was reportedly nearing a decision on whether to charge the crackhead son of the president—and these developments were happening despite reports that the US attorney’s office lacked the manpower and resources to comb through the mountains of evidence. 

Now, to further kneecap this probe into Hunter, the entire IRS task force looking into the matter was dissolved this month. This action occurred when the Durham report was released that exposed the FBI for greenlighting a Russian collusion investigation without solid evidence. It created a little media frenzy, but it was the perfect cover to pull this action, which did not escape the House Oversight Committee under Rep. James Comer (R-KY): 

 "On the same day that the Durham Report exposed how the federal government weaponized its power to advance the Russia collusion hoax, we now have learned that the federal government once again may be abusing its power to retaliate against a whistleblower who alleges the Biden Administration is obstructing justice by blocking efforts to charge Hunter Biden for federal violations," Comer said in a statement on Tuesday that noted the somewhat interesting timing of the alleged axing of an entire team that's spent years investigating Hunter Biden's tax filings. 

Spencer wrote about a second whistleblower coming forward yesterday, a member of the task force that was dissolved. Both whistleblowers allege that their investigations into the Biden family were slow-walked, with the intention for the entire matter to be swept under the rug. The second whistleblower was interviewed by CBS News, where he alleged pervasive interference from the Biden DOJ in the case, which contradicts sworn testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland that no such actions were happening under his watch with this investigation (via CBS News): 

A whistleblower from inside the Internal Revenue Service has spoken publicly for the first time about a highly sensitive political probe he has supervised, which CBS News has determined is the ongoing probe into the finances of President Biden's son Hunter Biden. 

He said he became so concerned about prosecutors' handling of "a high profile, controversial" investigation that he felt duty-bound to sound alarms. 

"There were multiple steps that were slow-walked — were just completely not done — at the direction of the Department of Justice," said Gary Shapley, a 14-year veteran of the agency, who spoke exclusively to CBS News chief investigative correspondent Jim Axelrod on Tuesday. "When I took control of this particular investigation, I immediately saw deviations from the normal process. It was way outside the norm of what I've experienced in the past." 

[…] 

Six months ago, a leak from the FBI revealed that agents there believed they had provided prosecutors with enough evidence to support criminal tax charges. No such charges have been brought as of this publication. 

Shapley told CBS News he became increasingly concerned about measures being taken that he said appeared to shield the target of the investigation — which CBS News independently confirmed is Hunter Biden. 

"Each and every time, it seemed to always benefit the subject," Shapley said. "It just got to that point where that switch was turned on. And I just couldn't silence my conscience anymore." 

Shapley is a supervisory special agent with the IRS's criminal investigations department, currently overseeing a team of 12 agents who specialize in international tax and financial crimes. Previously, he was an officer with the National Security Agency's Office of the Inspector General. He was assigned to a "sensitive" investigation in January 2020, and within months, he said he grew concerned about how the Justice Department was handling the investigation.

[…] 

The existence of a whistleblower inside the Hunter Biden probe became known last month after one of Shapley's attorneys, Mark Lytle, wrote to Congress seeking legal protections for his client, who was maintaining his anonymity at the time. Without those protections, Shapley said he can't share anything about a taxpayer investigation—including the identity of the subject— without breaking tax secrecy laws.

Shapley is scheduled to appear before members of the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, but his testimony will not be open to the public.

Here’s the portion of Garland’s testimony, where Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in March asked whether there was DOJ interference in this probe. Garland said the investigation was “not restricted” by his department. That appears to be a lie, sir.

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H/T RedState