We Didn’t Care That A Vaxxed Brett Kavanaugh Caught COVID, Because COVID Is No Longer News

by Eddie Scarry for The Federalist

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh reportedly tested positive for COVID, raising the very important question: WHO CARES?!

It apparently has to be said that testing positive for COVID is not in itself newsworthy. In particular if the person has received a vaccine, which Kavanaugh purportedly has.

As of Friday, he hasn’t been hospitalized. He’s not even showing any symptoms, according to a spokeswoman for the court. So, again, who cares?

Wishing him the best, but positive cases shouldn’t be of any particular interest to anyone.

Honestly, unless Dr. Fauci dies of COVID, the entire pandemic is no longer a story. Mentions of it should be relegated to news briefs: “The U.S. is averaging 100,000 positive COVID cases per day. The vast majority, close to 98 percent, will resolve themselves without incident, especially if they’ve received at least one dose of a vaccine. In other news, Britney Spears used her first moments free to post some tasteful nudes on Instagram…”

This has been the case for a very long time. The totals of deaths and new infections are meaningless anymore. The numbers will of course only go up but what matters is that 1) there are three highly effective vaccines available and free for anyone who wants them and 2) health care providers are much more adept at treating the severely ill.

Medicine is getting better every day. The same day that Kavanaugh’s infection was made public, pharmaceutical giant Merck announced that it has manufactured a drug that can reduce hospitalization and death of COVID by half.

We know that the new coronavirus is a highly contagious airborne pathogen. It spreads and — though I know I’m not supposed to say this – there’s no stopping it. We also know that 98 percent of people recover from infection. That number is perhaps even higher when you account for people who didn’t realize they caught the bug and thus never tested for it. After a year and a half of knowing this, there’s no reason to be alarmed or even intrigued by those facts.

LeBron James got a shot? Good for him. Is Demi Lovato a man yet?

But of course the media need to act like every new infection, every death, and every famous person with an opinion on vaccination is a headline. If they acted otherwise, Ron DeSantis would have a clear path to the White House. If they stopped hyping up the virus, people might actually start enjoying themselves. They can’t let that happen without a fight. There’s more government welfare they’d like to see distributed.

The pandemic is no longer interesting. It hasn’t been for months. Get well, Kavanaugh. I hope Fauci stays alive, too. But if he doesn’t, that’s when I’ll want to read more about the virus.

X22, Red Pill news, and more-Oct 4th

 

Crazy day of news, folks!! Here's tonight's news:

Our Woke National Icons by Victor Davis Hanson

Milley, Fauci, and Biden are soulless men who 

reveal the bankruptcy of our ruling class.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

As we watch events unfold in 2021, obvious questions about the fitness of our national leaders present themselves. Who are these new woke national icons and how did they come to lord it over the rest of us? Here are some observations by way of preliminary explanation.

The Strategist

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley conceded to Congress last week that he has been an anonymous source to controversial “inside” progressive muckrakers detailing the supposed dysfunctions of the prior administration. He strangely characterizes such anonymous, self-serving, behind-the-scenes leaking as some sort of public-service transparency. Evidently, it is now a part of the chairman’s duties to serve the media.

Among the many “background” quotes that Milley provided to meet his journalistic obligations were his various comparisons of his commander-in-chief to Nazis—a violation of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He reportedly offered further allegations to journalists that news outlets like the Epoch Times and Newsmax were “terrorist” organizations. When pressed on such details the usually punctilious Milley shrugs, in the fashion of James Comey’s under-oath testimonies, that he does “not recall” such specifics.  Such is the honor of the nation’s most visible military officer.

Although by statute Milley lacks operational command, he admittedly has intervened in the operational protocols concerning the use of nuclear weapons. At one point, after a conversation with, and on the apparent prompting of, HouseSpeaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), he redirected normal decision-making channels concerning the potential use of nuclear weapons through his own person. That is forbidden by law—despite what his beltway apologists have pleaded.

More interestingly, though, Milley took it upon himself to call up the major military leaders of Communist China, and to apprise them that (in his opinion) the United States was in crisis (“messy”). No worries, though: the freelancing Milley assured the People’s Liberation Army heads that they should not worry about any preemptive attack or aggression, since Milley himself apparently was in de facto charge of such strategic decision-making and would warn them in advance if his country seemed dangerously aggressive. Thus far in the imbroglio, the Pentagon and the retired military apparently seem comfortable with such a radically new role for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Milley ignored that Trump was the first president in memory who did not initiate a major new military engagement. And when pressed under oath, Milley himself later confessed that he did not think Trump was likely to start a war against anyone—which raises the question of why he even made such a peremptory call to our adversaries? Much of what Milley has testified to under oath before Congress is flatly contradicted by transcripts of his phone call with Pelosi, is in utter conflict with statements made by President Biden and the State Department and cannot be reconciled with his own frequent prior disclosures to journalists.

In sum, America’s highest-ranking honorific military officer has violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice, has violated the law concerning his own advisory role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and has either serially not told the truth, or assumes that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, several journalists (and various earlier incarnations of himself) are all not telling the truth.

Milley has set a new precedent for the leadership of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: it is now permissible to be overtly political, to leak confidential conversations to progressive book-writing journalists, to freelance and warn likely enemies if and when the U.S. military might take action against them, and to pick and choose when to exercise (illegally) operational command, and when (legally) to refrain, or at least to remain “only” an advisor, when culpability for a disaster, like the one in Afghanistan, is determined.

Historians will later ponder why this officer has not resigned and what his continued tenure says about the status of the current U.S. military.

The Health Wizard

Our pandemic czar, Anthony Fauci, early on in the COVID-19 crisis praised the efforts of China to work with the world in containing the virus. Yet the Chinese did not disclose accurate information about the nature, origins, and spread of the virus. Indeed, Beijing had locked down the ground-zero Wuhan metropolis from all internal travel, while allowing its possibly infectious residents to fly freely to the United States and Europe.

China then criticized Western travel bans as xenophobic and warped the World Health Organization to the point that its director initially assured the United States that COVID-19 was not a global threat and would be contained.

Fauci himself insisted that the virus’s most likely origins were natural, to be found in animals sold in a Wuhan “wet” market. He also still cannot quite concede that the “science” favors the idea that naturally acquired COVID-19 immunity is comparable or superior to the protection provided by vaccinations. And thus, Fauci cannot adequately explain why someone with antibodies from a prior infection must be vaccinated—other than the assumption of his past use of the “noble lie,” or the idea that grandees must sometimes not tell the truth in a public-spirited effort to prevent ignorant American citizens from doing something not approved by our elites—such as some with natural antibodies not wishing to be vaccinated after recovering from COVID-19.

Fauci has dismissed increasing scientific objections that the virus bore evidence of being engineered, that there were dissident reports from Chinese sources that the virus most likely was released, if accidentally, from the Wuhan top-security virology research lab, and that the Chinese military and government went to great efforts to silence any Chinese scientist or medical professional who connected the Wuhan creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the nearby government lab.

Fauci adamantly denied under congressional oath that he had funded any “gain-of-function” viral research in Wuhan. Yet he admitted that his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, along with the National Institute of Health, had given several hundred thousand dollars for Wuhan virology research, apparently much of it focused on alterations of viruses (in grantese: “further altering the mutant viruses”) to discover levels of infectiousness and transmissibility. And he had routed much of such aid to the Chinese Wuhan lab through the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization run by Dr. Peter Daszak.

Daszak himself headed a “global” medical investigation that strangely enough found no human role in the outbreak of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus. Yet he was later recused from his investigatory leadership, apparently due to failure to disclose his own conflicts of interest in Chinese-Western viral research. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

In the end, we are left with the fact that the controversial, media-obsessed, and highly visible Dr. Anthony Fauci praised Chinese cooperation in containing the virus. He has admitted that a federal agency under his direction had channeled viral research grants to the likely source of the outbreak in a Wuhan virology lab. And yet he has denied the lab itself was either engaged in gain-of-function research or received U.S. dollars to pursue such research, although much of the scientific community now disagrees with his flat-out definition that American subsidized research at Wuhan could not possibly be seen as artificially enhancing the lethality or transmissibility of natural viruses.

The Moral Leader

In the past week, Joe Biden did what he now seems to do every week: He told a series of untruths that the media simply ignored or reported as true. Within the space of a few days, he lied when he said his own border patrol agents whipped illegal aliens trying to enter the United States illegally. He lied when he said only 4 million had been vaccinated when he entered office—although that was not quite as bold a lie as when he earlier entered office claiming that no one had been vaccinated (it was 17 million actually). And he lied about “trillionaires” (none exist) not paying their fair share.

Collate Biden’s accounts of the advice he says he got from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the defense secretary with what the latter two swore to under oath, and either Biden or his military advisors or both are simply not telling the truth.

Biden says that as vice president and as a candidate for president, he never knew of, much less participated in, or profited from, his son Hunter’s various multimillion-dollar shakedowns of foreign governments.

Hunter’s schemes included Ukraine (the Burisma rip-off) and China (his “real estate” partnership bankrolled by $1.5 billion in Chinese investment money). Despite earlier promises, Hunter apparently still has not disposed of his 10-percent stake in an investment company related to the Chinese Communist government that has ties to companies sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Most recently the younger Biden dreamed up a fraudulent art con to hock his paintings to anonymous buyers, who are more interested in buying his father’s clout than investing in Hunter’s lack of artistic ability. Hunter, remember, has no business talent to speak of, other than his name and leveraging his father’s influence on behalf of foreign interests. But he does have a long history of serial drug use, reckless, anti-social behavior, and general unethical conduct.

Joe Biden, remember, flew on Air Force Two with Hunter, just two weeks before the huge deal with Hunter’s Chinese partners was announced. The statement by Joe Biden that he knew nothing of Hunter’s quid pro quo imbroglios is belied by his son’s trips with him on government flights, by photos of Joe Biden with Hunter’s foreign associates, by references in emails to Joe’s cut, and by testimony from Hunter’s own associate Tony Bobulinski that Biden was fully involved in and knowledgeable of his son’s grifting

Indeed, from his son’s own emails, we know that Joe Biden was referred to by Hunter’s grifting associates as “the Big Guy,” with a reference to a 10 percent cut (e.g., “10 held by H for the big guy?”). So, from Hunter’s own associate we hear that Joe received monies for the use of his name and position to leverage foreign connections. We also know from Joe’s own braggadocio that he leveraged Ukraine officials to stop investigating the very firm that his son was so assiduously milking for money. And we know that Joe has used Hunter’s profits for his own personal expenses. In sum, without Joe Biden’s complicity, the Bidens’ corrupt empire would never have existed.

None of this apparently matters. Few worry over Joe Biden’s inability to tell the truth, his reliance on the fusion media to disguise his serial mendacity, his overt refusal to be questioned regularly by the press, and his disastrous and unpopular policies concerning Afghanistan, the border, inflation and deficits, and reduced oil and gas development.

Why?

In a strange way, Biden’s cognitive dysfunction and age-related befuddlement serve as prophylactics. The understood contextualization of his serial fantasies and lies goes something like, “Well, you might lie too, or get confused, if you were 78, given a president’s schedule and past serious brain operations.”

Or perhaps a cruder form of apologetics is intended: “Damned right he lies constantly and of course he seems addled. So, what exactly are you going to do about it—replace him with Kamala Harris?”

How do these people continue to exercise such power and influence? There are at least four likely reasons:

1) D.C. Deference Culture. As creatures of government and Washington, they, and legions like them, understand that there are zero consequences for not telling the truth. When trapped in “misstatements” and “I don’t recall” fibs, they tend to resort to an argument from authority, whether that be leveraged by the initials following their name, their titles, or their ribbons and medallions. They have enjoyed life-long impressive government remuneration and their obsequious fealty understandably seems to be first toward the permanent beltway corporate, media, and government class that protects and abets them.

2) Careerism. They understand America’s academic, cultural, and corporate institutions—the media, Wall Street, academia, Silicon Valley, the federal bureaucracy, Hollywood, and now professional sports—are monopolized by leftists. And so, they make the necessary adjustments to ingratiate themselves with such centers of power, often virtue signaling their anger against the supposedly Neanderthal and deplorable Right.

Thus, Hollywood’s heartthrob Fauci’s constant sermonizing about the unvaccinated (that carefully avoids any allusion to the least vaccinated of all demographics, African Americans, and illegal aliens). Thus, Milley mounts a crusade not against the Taliban, but against “white rage.” Thus, Joe Biden’s invective against “chumps,” “dregs,” the “fat,” and “lying dog-faced pony soldier(s).”

3) China. As good globalists, they have a surreal, if not dangerously familiar, relationship with their communist Chinese counterparts, whether in the highest echelons of the People’s Liberation Army, the military-affiliated researchers at the Wuhan lab, or the government-controlled companies that have invested in the Biden family’s various grifts.

4) The Shadow of Trump. All three of these careerists came to greater prominence as progressive anti-Trump mascots, as part of their acquiring woke insurance.

Once Milley apologized to the nation for appearing next to Trump, it was but a short devolution to assuring Michelle Obama that he too was delighted that Trump lost the election or making sure that Washington insider journalists knew that he too considered Trump a Hitlerian figure. That was a wise career move for Milley, since legions of Washington grandees and reporters are now lining up in his defense. And likely greater rewards await Milley upon retirement: what the public sees as embarrassing behavior, corporate defense contractors likely will welcome as properly positioned assets.

Likewise, it did not take Fauci too long to see he would be damaged goods if he continued as an advisor to the hated Trump Administration. So in back channels, he made his own odium known and began appearing exclusively on left-wing television to erase the earlier stain of appearing next to Trump in his supposedly nonpartisan role as COVID-19 advisor.

Again, that hedge was smart. As a result, the now angelic St. Fauci became a veritable deity on the Left—in the manner it had once briefly canonized a Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Robert Mueller, before inevitably turning on both as disappointments.

Finally, Joe Biden had little to recommend him as president, as his past two failed campaigns, and his early dismal 2020 effort attested. But once Biden rebooted himself as having no ideas or policies other than hating Trump and being the only “centrist” leftist who could beat him, he too was consecrated.

All his racist slurs and looney statements were forgiven—at least as long as he seems to offer some utility before abdicating to Kamala Harris.

⸸

Habitual Liar Joe Biden Confronts the Winds of Truth

 Habitual Liar Joe Biden Confronts the Winds of Truth

Shmuel Klatzkin for The American Spectator

Coherence dissolves when truth breaks down.

In the way that the last president was enamored of hyperbole and name-calling, the current president is enamored of outright lies. The $3.5 trillion “infrastructure” bill won’t cost anything; the generals all agreed with his assessment of Afghanistan; no American will be left behind; the exit from Afghanistan was a great triumph; as well as the many false assertions he has made about his own life that cross into the bizarre.

Lying by American politicians is not something new. It was said by White House reporters of that day that when Lyndon Johnson lied, he gave it away by a motion of his body. No, it wasn’t pulling his ear that indicated a lie was to follow, nor was it the blink of his eyes. The telltale sign, they said, was when his jaws moved.

But there is a major difference between LBJ’s ’60s and now. The institutions of home and of faith were still overwhelmingly strong back then. There was a robust consensus of what was decent civil behavior that covered the vast majority of Americans, whether conservative, moderate, or liberal. When the government’s lies began to be exposed during the grind of war and social upheaval, there was a powerful wave of revulsion that would sweep Johnson out of office, radicalize the Democrats, and see the end of the era of consensus, civility, and shared national purpose that had seemed so powerful after our victory over fascism in World War II.

Lying shows the contempt or the fear a politician has of his constituents. Contempt, because he believes his audience is gullible enough to believe him; and fear because he believes that he could not have the power and influence he wants honestly.

So many of the fundamentals of Western democracy are based on the biblical tradition. Ancient nations had their priesthoods and god-rulers, whose power was all the evidence needed that they were divine and their power legitimate. Knowledge was tightly controlled. Hieroglyphics and pictographs could only be mastered by an elite few. Literacy and knowledge were dangerous, for if everyone could know truth, the elites would lose their monopoly and wealth and influence would have to be worked for much harder.

Along came the Bible. God spoke to an entire nation at Sinai and instructed that the divine knowledge should be everyone’s. Each parent in each family was instructed to teach their children and to talk about God’s wisdom and instruction “while sitting in your home, while walking along your way, when you lie down and when you rise up.” Each human is created in the divine image, and the seal of God is truth.

The explosion of knowledge and of freedom in modern times has made the world immensely more complicated than the world our grandparents knew. Yet for liberty to be for all and not just the few, the commitment to knowledge and truth for all is of first importance.

The temptations of elitism are tremendous. We respect the specialized knowledge that has brought us the wondrous comforts and opportunities of our current life. In the memory of our grandparents, the knowledge and the means to create and operate most of the things they used in their lives was common to all. Today, we all use and depend on things we cannot make ourselves and cannot fix and we have little practical, detailed knowledge of what makes them work. This applies even to things such as the foods we eat and the clothes we wear, let alone the more obviously highly crafted things we depend on such as jet planes, automobiles, flat-screen TVs, and iPhones.

When trust breaks down in our complicated world, there is no limit to how thoroughly coherence can dissolve. Doubts are healthy in a robustly truthful society, for truth itself acknowledges its need for our critical thought and self-examination. Doubt thus valued and esteemed is redemptive, saving us from cant and unreflective foolishness.

But when deceit is the norm, doubt itself becomes the greatest fashioner of untruths, for it masquerades as the sole truth, proclaiming without proof that nothing is proven and nothing is to be believed except itself.

In ancient Israel, when it was at its best, power was widely diffused. The people had to proclaim the king, and the power of the divine constitution lay in the homes and hearts of the families of the nation. The people recognized as well the authority of the teachers and the priests, and then there were the prophets, whose story outlasted the stories of almost all the kings.

The story of the nation was not the property of the king and his state, or of the elites, but was held by all the people alike. They held the check of truth. And when the kingdoms went down in flames and the state’s outward power dissolved, the truth that brought coherence to peoples’ lives was untouched and bore them through catastrophe after catastrophe undaunted. The power of this story has spread and has taken hold wherever societies value liberty and refuse to allow powerful people to monopolize liberty or truth.

One can feel a change in the wind. Lies had seemed triumphant, casting down our hopes in the Year of the Plague. The lie masters of Beijing have seemed to escape responsibility for the virus they let spread, for the crushing of Hong Kong, and for the enslavement of their Muslim millions. FISA fraud has gone unpunished, the multiple felonies of Hunter Biden and Joe’s complicity in them, dragging with them the honor and prestige of our great nation. Massive suppression of expression, on a scale that Joe McCarthy never imagined, have become the American rule, and American academia is not just silent but often complicit.

And yet — and yet. Truth doesn’t die and those who know even a little bit of it know that. When we live for truth, we know it will outlast our mortal span, and so we live our life in a different way. And this is beyond the comprehensions of elites who build their power on suppression of truth and on active lying.

Neither we nor they will know how the truth will burst forth from its confines. We who love truth find comfort in that, and it invests our every effort with undying meaning. Those who fear truth are ever more terrified as they realize that no power they could ever get will forever hold truth down.

About 800 years ago, the great rabbi, philosopher, physician, and jurist Moses Maimonides wrote: “Accept the truth, wherever it may be found.” This is the motto on the flag that can unite all of us who are devoted to the truths upon which freedom depends. We will follow the truth wherever it goes as it seeks its own freedom and self-expression and triumph. Its triumph will be all of ours.

Impeach Him!

Joe Biden abused the power of his office through enabling bribery 

and other high crimes and misdemeanors. He has to go.

by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch for American Greatness

The weakling Republican Party needs to get some cojones and step up now to prepare for the impeachment of Joseph Robinette (yes, that is his middle name) Biden. 

The GOP should make the clear case for impeachment a central piece of their congressional election plan for 2022. We already have a House resolution; now we need a sizable majority in the House of Representatives and Senate to convict and remove him. The time is ripe. The need is urgent. 

If the weak-kneed Republican leadership will not do it, they should be replaced. The Paul Ryanesque House Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is certainly not up to the job, never defended Trump, and has so many skeletons in his closet—from rumored extra-marital affairs to bunking with turncoat RINO pollster, Frank Luntz—that he is an unacceptable Speaker of the House come 2022. Replace him now with someone like Steve Scalise (R-La.), who has a backbone, has taken one for the team, and is a patriot and populist of the first order. Why wait? He would impeach Biden.

On the Senate side, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), of cocaine fame, has literally been in bed with the Chinese for years and is precisely the kind of Grand Old Establishment Republican who stands in the way of draining the swamp. He personifies that cesspool of K Street interest group politics, lobbying, and patronage. If he won’t step down, replace him, too. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) would be a good choice and is a reliable conservative.

The resolution to impeach sets forth an article of impeachment stating, in his former role as vice president, and now as president, Biden abused the power of that office through enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors by allowing his son, Hunter Biden, to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept benefits from foreign nationals in exchange for favors.

The article states that, by such conduct, Biden 

• endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government;
• threatened the integrity of the democratic system;
• interfered with the peaceful transition of power; 
• imperiled a coordinate branch of government; and 
• demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office.

The article also states that this conduct warrants immediate impeachment, trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

Needless to say, a case for impeachment could be made on several other avenues of willful misconduct and high crimes, such as disobeying U.S. law and opening the southern border to illegal immigrants without concern to the health or safety of Americans, disobeying the Supreme Court and installing an illegal moratorium on evictions, or challenging the illegal and stolen election by use of fraudulent means. But it is best to focus on just one count and slam dunk that case.

Again, according to the U.S. Constitution, the grounds for impeaching a president are very straightforward. The Constitution provides that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” (Article I, section 2) and “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments . . . The president, vice president, and all civil officers of the United States are subject to impeachment.”

Here then is the overwhelming evidence in the case for impeachment against Joe Biden.

December 2013: Hunter Biden joined his father on Air Force Two on a trip to China, where his father met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Hunter arranged for Chinese Vice Premier Li Yuanchao to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li have what both parties describe as a social meeting.

December 2013: “Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China,” author and investigator Peter Schweizer says. “The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. In short, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president.”

April 2014: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings. Alan Apter, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who was chairman of Burisma, said at the time, “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.” Biden’s primary duty is to attend board meetings and energy forums in Europe once or twice a year, and he is paid $50,000 per month.

May 2014: At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney responds to a question about Hunter Biden’s joining the board and the appearance of a potential conflict of interest:

I would refer you to the vice president’s office. I saw those reports. You know, Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice president or president. But I would refer you to the vice president’s office.

The same day, at a State Department press briefing, AP reporter Matt Lee asked, “Does this building diplomatically have any concerns about potential perceptions of conflict or/cronyism—which is what you’ve often accused the Russians of doing?”

“No, he’s a private citizen,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki replied.

May 2014: The U.K.-based Guardian newspaper blasts Biden’s new position, “Somebody needs to get involved in Ukraine’s corporate governance, and it might as well be a clutch of rich, well-connected American dudes with weird first names.” 

The appointment of the vice president’s son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst. No matter how qualified Biden is, it ties into the idea that U.S. foreign policy is self-interested, and that’s a narrative Vladimir Putin has pushed during Ukraine’s crisis with references to Iraq and Libya.

Late in 2015: Chris Heinz ends his relationship with Rosemont Seneca, the company co-founded by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer in 2009.

December 2015: Writing in the New York Times, James Risen says of the vice president’s trip to Ukraine:

The credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.

December 2015: A New York Times editorial praises Biden’s message to the Ukrainian government but notes:

The credibility of Mr. Biden’s message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices. A spokesman for the son, Hunter Biden, argues that he joined the board of Burisma to strengthen its corporate governance. That may be so. But Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.

A few days later, Risen wrote at The Intercept that Biden’s message on the trip was being completely misinterpreted:

The then–vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase—not lessen—the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.

December 2016: Hunter Biden and his wife, Kathleen, file for divorce. The divorce becomes official April 14, 2017. At some time when Biden is “in the middle of the divorce,” he meets the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming. As CNN described, “at its height, Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.”

January 2017: Joe Biden’s second term as vice president ends.

May 2017: Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming and Hunter Biden meet privately at a hotel in Miami. Biden says he offered to use his contacts to help “identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company CEFC China Energy, in liquified natural gas projects in the United States.” After the dinner, Ye sends a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room with a card thanking him for the meeting. During the divorce proceedings, Hunter Biden and his ex-wife Kathleen dispute the value of the diamond; he says it is worth $10,000, she contends it is worth $80,000.

Biden denied that the diamond could be considered a bribe. “What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office,” Hunter told The New Yorker he gave the diamond to his associates and doesn’t know what happened to it.

Also during the divorce proceedings, Kathleen “requested that Hunter’s access to their joint assets be limited because the couple had a double mortgage and owed more than $300,000 in back taxes.”

Summer 2017: Hunter Biden negotiated a deal for Ye’s company CEFC to invest in a liquefied-natural-gas project in Louisiana. Ye tells Biden that he’s worried about federal authorities’ looking into one of his business associates, Patrick Ho. Hunter agrees to represent Ho as his lawyer.

October 2017: After having an unpaid role on the company’s board since 2013, Hunter Biden acquired a financial stake in Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a 10 percent equity interest that was worth $430,000 as of July 2019, according to Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires. At least half of the firm’s stake is owned by Chinese entities, according to business records.

November 2017: Patrick Ho is arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport on bribery and money-laundering charges. He makes a phone call to James Biden, Joe Biden’s younger brother, and asks Biden for a lawyer. (Hunter Biden has not practiced criminal law.)

March 2018: Ye Jianming, the former boss of CEFC China Energy who gave Hunter the diamond, vanishes from public sight. The Chinese government detained him for questioning, but “no Chinese authority has released any information about him, and he has not been formally charged with any wrongdoing.”

June 2018: Devon Archer, who co-founded Rosemont Seneca Partners with Hunter Biden back in 2009, is convicted of “conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud” for allegedly defrauding investors in sham Native American tribal bonds. A few months later, the conviction is overturned and a new trial is ordered.

November 2018: U.S. prosecutors allege that a nonprofit funded by Ye Jianming—the man who gave Hunter Biden that large diamond, who is still missing and believed detained by the Chinese government—had used its United Nations status to offer millions in bribes to African leaders.

Hunter would later tell The New Yorker that he doesn’t see Ye as a “shady character at all,” and he characterized the outcome as “bad luck.”

March 2019: Patrick Ho, Biden’s former legal client, is sentenced to three years in prison for international bribery and money-laundering offenses. He was convicted of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC China Energy Company Limited.

April 2019: Writing in The Hill, John Solomon quotes Ukrainian former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, telling him that, before he was dismissed, he was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, and that his plans included “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

May 2019: The Intercept reports that Hunter Biden’s investment company in China, known as Bohai Harvest RST, invested in a company called Face++, which develops facial-recognition software. That facial-recognition software is used in an app that “provides [Chinese] law enforcement with easy, daily access to data detailing the religious activity, blood type, and even the amount of electricity used by ethnic minority Muslims living in the western province of Xinjiang.”

May 2019: Yuriy Lutsenko, the current Ukrainian prosecutor general, tells Bloomberg News that neither Hunter Biden nor Burisma was now the focus of an investigation. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws—at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”

May 2019: The New York Times reports, “A lawyer for Hunter Biden said he did not conduct any business related to the China investment fund on that trip” in December 2013.

The paper also reports:

Christopher Heinz argued to Devon Archer, who like Hunter Biden had joined Burisma’s board, that the posts created the appearance of selling influence, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Mr. Archer did not heed the advice. And Mr. Heinz, who was not involved in the China or Ukraine efforts, began decoupling his business interests from those of Mr. Biden and Mr. Archer.

July 2019: Hunter Biden tells The New Yorker in an interview, “I’ve pretty much always lived paycheck to paycheck. I never considered it struggling, but it has always been a high-wire act.”

July 2019: Hunter Biden issues a new statement to the Washington Post about his time on the Burisma Holdings board: “At no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business or my board service.”

Shokin tells the Post via email:

All I can say is that the appointment of Hunter Biden as a member of the Board of Directors of the energy company is rather questionable from the point of view of effectiveness. After all, this person had no work experience either in Ukraine or in the energy sector. . . . The activities of Burisma, the involvement of his son, Hunter Biden, and the [prosecutor general’s office] investigators on his tail, are the only, I emphasize, the only motives for organizing my resignation.

Other anti-corruption activists in Ukraine strongly disagree with Shokin’s assessment of why he was dismissed. Clearly Hunter’s father got him the gig and protected his ass (on live TV no less) once he was hired.

The Verdict

As the timeline and facts amply demonstrate, Joseph Biden and his son Hunter, were involved in high crimes and misdemeanors that amount to bribery. On more than one occasion they used his government office to unduly influence policy and enrich themselves.

If that is not enough, we now have the Biden record of treason in Afghanistan and surrender to the Jihadist Taliban regime while leaving Americans behind, giving the enemy $85 billion in armaments, and killing 13 U.S. service members—all for a photo-op.

We have the goods on Biden, and he needs to go—one way or the other. 

Impeach him.

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