Government Corruption Helps the Bidens and Hurts Trump

For the Deep State’s permanent bureaucracy, 

Trump was never president

by Christopher Roach for American Greatness

The media frequently invokes Trump’s appointment of officials to dismiss the possibility of bias. The media have invoked this defense for FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is responsible for the FBI’s raid of Trump’s home to obtain classified documents, and for David Weiss, the Delaware U.S. Attorney, who gave kid-glove treatment to the first son, Hunter Biden.

Invoking the provenance of Trump’s persecutors is meant to deflect and confuse. Regardless of who appointed these people to their current positions, these are career government workers, i.e., the managerial class. They have shown themselves to be particularly hostile to Trump and other Republicans, who might dare to interfere with business as usual.

This problem was partly unavoidable. When Trump took office, there was not a deep bench of experienced people ready to serve him. Many Republicans who worked in the George W. Bush administration were part of the NeverTrump caucus. Résumés from thousands of outsider applicants, who applied to work for the administration during the transition, were apparently lost and buried. And, even in the best of times, most appointees are chosen from a list of qualified insiders. Some are more ideological than others, but very few are loyal, strictly speaking.

Christopher Wray was a former federal prosecutor in private practice when Trump appointed him.  Perhaps he was a registered Republican, but his first loyalty was neither to the President, nor the Congress, but rather to the FBI. Since his nomination and appointment, he has lied, dissembled, and stonewalled the Republican Congress to protect the FBI from real consequences for its numerous criminal acts over the last six years.

Weiss has a similar pedigree. He has worked either for the government or BigLaw firm Duane Morris since the beginning of his career in the 1980s. Biden was either a U.S. Senator or Vice President during Weiss’s tenure with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Delaware; Biden undoubtedly had some influence over who could obtain important positions due to the Senate oversight role and the “blue slip” process.

Weiss rejoined the U.S. attorney’s office in 2007 and continued serving during the Obama administration. Based on his résumé and experience, he certainly appears to be more-than-minimally qualified to be the Delaware U.S. Attorney, but he is a cipher as far as his political views. Maybe the source of the problem is elsewhere; Attorney General Merrick Garland has reportedly interfered with Weiss’s work. But, whether neutral or a Biden superfan, the media invoke Weiss’s appointment by Trump as if he were recently seen flying a MAGA flag off his boat.

Weiss is at least partly responsible for the peculiar Hunter Biden proceedings, which blew up this week.  Biden appeared to be getting a sweetheart deal. He would plead guilty to misdemeanor tax crimes and receive a diversion program for his gun and drug charges. The diversion would shield him from prosecution, but the scope of immunity for collateral offenses under the diversion agreement was not incorporated into formal admissions for the guilty plea, which the judge had authority to accept or reject.

The government—that is, Weiss and the DOJ—admitted a deal like this has never been done before. It’s never been done because it is prohibited. 

The judge, to her credit, called the whole thing out. She instead asked questions forcing the government and the defendants’ counsel to disagree, which exposed the unorthodox nature of the proposal.

Hunter Biden’s lawyers took the position that nothing from the past could now be prosecuted—a pretty important requirement when your client lives a life of crime. The government, on the other hand, said investigations and prosecutions for Foreign Agent Registration Act violations could still happen, the uncertainty of which would allow the DOJ to keep a lot more hidden from persistent congressional investigators. When it was all over, the deal was off, each side went back to their corners, Hunter pled not guilty, and they’re supposed to provide a status report in 30 days.

The Hunter Biden saga has revealed a lot about the Deep State and how it protects its allies. First, 51 intelligence officials came together to suppress the N.Y. Post report on Hunter’s laptop on the eve of the 2020 election, suggesting it was some kind of Russian disinformation. This claim could not be easily reconciled with the hundreds of personal photos and text messages on the laptop. So, as Plan B, Biden’s defenders dismissed concerns over Hunter’s laptop as partisan and prurient, the second iteration of the Clinton sex scandals, with the GOP again cast as a bunch of censorious prudes.

In other words, the selective release of salacious material from the laptop was part of the coverup. While it did reveal Hunter’s low character, the shocking photos tended to eclipse the more important evidence that he acted as the bag man for illegal family business in Ukraine and China. Remember “10% for the Big Guy” and “My Chairman.”

While his dad was Vice-President, Hunter Biden lobbied for foreign companies affiliated with foreign governments, received a lot of money from them in spite of his lack of qualifications, did not pay taxes on this money, and, once he was on the IRS’s radar, the DOJ stopped agents from following up on investigative leads.

Fittingly, Trump’s first impeachment was not for corruption, but rather for asking for an investigation into the Biden family’s corruption, which now appears confirmed by slow-leaking evidence from Delaware, documents obtained by congressional investigators, and a second look at information we already knew, like Joe Biden bragging about getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired.

None of this has anything to do with relative culpability. It’s about power. For the Deep State’s permanent bureaucracy, Trump was never president. They showed no respect to him, and they were scared of him and what he represents. His impeachment and the current prosecutions have nothing to do with any crime or guilt. Biden, on the other hand, is a guy who plays ball and generally serves the interest of the permanent bureaucracy; no crime, whether by him or his son, is too big to forgive.

Fundamentally, Trump represents the American people’s “no confidence” vote, a rejection of a corrupt ruling class and their managerial enforcers. That’s why both state and federal actors are pursuing multiple prosecutions of him, all for trumped-up reasons involving behavior that has been done openly and without punishment by his predecessors.

It appears the government and Hunter Biden’s defense team, while technically opponents, acted in cahoots to force this sweetheart deal through, and the only thing that stopped them was a sharp judge.  This is a strong testament to the value of separation of powers, as judicial power flows from life tenure, the inherent boundaries of written laws, and, in this instance, the provisions of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which give the judge discretion to approve or reject a plea deal.

This deal was a fraud on the court and the American people. We know Hunter Biden has committed serious crimes for which he is not being punished, and we know what has been revealed to date is the tip of the iceberg. Hunter is a man with no apparent talents, who got everything in life for selling access to his father. Joe Biden, in turn, got everything he had in life for being a morally empty tool for others willing to reward him.

If our president went so far as to sell foreigners favors from his office through his son, he deserves nothing less than impeachment.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- August 1st

 

Remember when I said that the only way I'd ever post a single 'picket line' photo is if 'you know who' was in 1?

Well, maybe I'll get that exception tomorrow. Because I just heard that a big event is taking place outside Paramount Pictures tomorrow morning and various NCIS franchise cast members will be there. (Casting director for the first 2 shows confirmed it on his IG)

Maybe I'll finally get that proof of life that I've been wanting all year. Or I'll be disappointed, like I always am. Who really kows.

President Donald Trump Op-Ed, “There Must Be a Reckoning”

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

President Donald J Trump has distilled the issues, events and consequences into an op-ed published in Newsweek [Article Here].  As President Trump notes toward the end of his discussion, “there must be a reckoning.”

“The report by Special Counsel John Durham makes clear beyond a shred of doubt that the Russia Hoax was the most atrocious weaponization of our government in American history. It was a crime like no other.

Seven years ago, I ran for office taking on all the most corrupt forces and entrenched interests in our nation’s capital. My agenda was an existential threat to a Washington establishment that got rich and powerful bleeding America dry.

I vowed to stop mass illegal immigration, terminate globalist trade deals, end the sellout of our country to Communist China, stand up to the permanent bureaucracy and the corporate media, and break the neocon addiction to endless foreign wars.

In response, an unelected cabal in the senior ranks of our government, in concert with their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, and their allies in the media, launched the de-facto coup attempt known as the Russia Hoax.

Their goal was to prevent my election, and failing that, to throw me out of office or sabotage my presidency, undercut my agenda in Congress, block my domestic reforms, and interfere with my foreign policy.

For nearly three years, they carried out a massive disinformation campaign and lawless persecution based on the monstrous lie that I was a traitor to my country.

These Deep State plotters spied on my campaign. They forged false evidence to get illegal surveillance warrants and smear innocent people through leaks to the media. They offered $1 million for a fictitious dossier written by a foreign spy to try to frame me with treason. They shattered countless lives.

The Durham Report proves that the key figures involved knew from the start that the Russia Collusion conspiracy theory was a lie. The FBI launched their witch hunt without a scrap of legitimate evidence—and when they came upon exonerating information time after time, they covered it up and kept the hoax going forward.

The sickness was driven from the very top. FBI Director James Comey constantly pressured agents for more surveillance and warrants, demanding to know over and over “Where is the FISA, where is the FISA?”

Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in on it, too. They were briefed in August 2016 on reports that Clinton planned to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian Security Services.”

They knew the truth, yet they put our country through hell.

As savage and cruel as the Russia Hoax was for me, my family, my staff, and so many innocent bystanders, the real victims were the American People.

The destruction this hoax caused to America is almost incalculable. It subverted our democracy, it threatened our security, and it endangered our freedom.

At a critical moment when we should have been reducing tensions with Russia, the Russia Hoax stoked mass hysteria that helped drive Russia straight into the arms of China.

Instead of having a better relationship with Russia as I worked to build, we now have a proxy war with Russia, fueled in part by the lingering fumes of Russiagate delirium. Ukraine has been utterly devastated. Untold numbers of people have been killed. And we could very well end up in World War III.

As the Twitter Files have proven, the Radical Left establishment also used the Russia Hoax to attack freedom of speech. They built a sprawling domestic censorship regime under the guise of combatting so-called “Russian disinformation”—which they quickly defined to include any content they did not like.

The intelligence community, the media, and the Silicon Valley tech companies then deployed this very pretext, “Russian disinformation,” to censor the Biden corruption scandal in 2020—censorship orchestrated, as we now know, by the Biden campaign.

In one poll last year, 79 percent of Americans following the story about Hunter Biden’s sordid laptop said truthful coverage of that wrongly censored story would have changed the outcome of the election. Our country is now paying a very steep price.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, the Russia Hoax normalized the weaponization of law enforcement against the Left’s political enemies. The Radical Democrats and their media partners now cheer as Biden’s DOJ demands the FBI investigate parents at school board meetings, deploys heavily armed teams to arrest pro-life activists, and pursues an all-out persecution of Joe Biden’s leading opponent for the presidency.

These corrupted agencies have interfered in every election since 2016—and they are interfering in the 2024 election before our very eyes.

There must be a reckoning. Accountability now lies in the hands of the voters. The Durham Report has made the stakes abundantly clear, and now the choice is ours: either the Deep State destroys America, or we destroy the Deep State.”

~ President Donald J Trump

The Biden Presidency Is Unsustainable ~ VDH

The Harris Dilemma

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Imagine if Gavin Newsom was currently Vice President amid the final meltdown of the Biden family consortium.

Does anyone doubt that Biden would then either be forced to resign by Democratic politicos (for reasons in addition to his escalating dementia), or would be impeached and perhaps abdicate Nixon-style?

The presence of the now predictable mediocrity of Kamala Harris and the impossibility, given her race and gender, of removing her, for now is about all that keeps a cognitively declining Biden still in office. The Left fears what she could do as president to the Democratic Party; conservatives are terrified of what she could do to the country.

Joe Biden’s bewilderment exempts his embarrassments from accountability in the way that Hunter Biden’s addictions excuse his past serial criminality. But the passes granted to both father and son would be now unsustainable with a viable Vice President in waiting.

Indeed, the Harris problem explains some of current Democratic strategy.

Backroom leaks and growing insider rumors of Biden dementia confirm the portrait of an often befuddled president whom the public by now knows all too well.

The aimless House Democrats’ “how-dare-you-even-consider-an-impeachment inquiry” furor, coupled with their half-hearted efforts, along with the media, to refute the actual charges of corruption of the Biden family, suggest that he will not run for reelection—but also not be impeached much less convicted or removed under the 25^th Amendment.

So the Harris dilemma explains a lot: finding a way to keep her out of current power until Biden somehow finishes his first term, and thus letting the Democratic 2024 primary candidates organically abort her presidential aspirations.

There are a few problems, however, with this strategy.

One, can Joe Biden finish his first term?

That would require his staff to shorten his already truncated workday for the next 18 months to about 2-3 hours of work per day.

He would have to be kept away from photo-ops with young (especially female) children, lest he turkey-gobbles the cheek of another victim to a worldwide audience.

He can no longer read off a teleprompter without slurring his words, losing his place, or going off extemporaneously on to topics such as “Vladimir” Zelenskyy, the “Iraq” war in Ukraine, or relief over the curing of cancer.

He cannot hold half-hour press conferences given his incoherence and his angry prevarications. He still insists incredulously that he never discussed the Biden family business with Hunter, although we may soon see transcripts, recordings, and affidavits that he was in fact intimately involved in and profited from it. 

The Strange Case of Hunter in the White House

Hunter is toxic and capable of leaving behind incriminating evidence or engaging in surreal behavior anywhere and anytime. Why would a former crack cocaine addict be brought into the White House, after which a bag of cocaine was for the first time in presidential history found abandoned in the West Wing?

(Partial answer: why and how would an addict leave an incriminating crackpipe in a rental car, simply abandon a laptop at a repair shop with evidence of his own felonious behavior on it, or allow his illegally registered handgun to turn up in a dumpster near a school)?

An outside, disinterested observer who read the contents of the laptop and Hunter’s wounded-fawn protestations about his unappreciated role in enriching his father and uncle, or digested his unhinged recent career as a quid-pro-quo, paint-by-the-numbers artiste, selling high-priced junk in exchange for presidential flavors, would conclude that the Bidens are apprehensive of the unpredictable Hunter. Keep your friends close, but your explosive son even closer.

Of course, they fear Hunter’s recklessness, addictions, and greed—but more perhaps his ability to take down the entire Biden clan should they distance themselves too far from him or leak that the family’s corrupt schemes were birthed by the fall-guy Hunter alone.

Aside from Joe’s cognitive decline and Hunter’s volatility, no one believes anymore Joe Biden’s patent lies that he never discussed with Hunter his lucrative grifting career. Already, the untruth has transmogrified into he never did business with Hunter—and soon perhaps he never profited from the business he did and discussed with Hunter.

No matter, by year’s end there will be witnesses and hard data showing that Joe himself discussed pay-for-play schemes with foreign entities, of the sort he long ago boasted with previous impunity before a Council of Foreign Relations event.

This is no Whitewater, Trooper-gate, or Stormy Daniels scandal, but bribery of the sort explicitly outlined by the Constitution for removal from office: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Selling influence to foreign-government related enterprises is, of course, not just bribery but perhaps treason as well. And it involves other “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” among them tax fraud on unreported foreign income.

Moreover, it is arguable that the Biden shake-down consortium has altered the very nature of U.S. foreign policy. We will never know the full effect of the false Russian disinformation/laptop narrative, following the fake Russian collusion hoax, on Kremlin thinking. Nor can we explain why Joe Biden once urged Putin to lay off hacking humanitarian U.S. targets, or suggested that a minor invasion of Ukraine would not elicit a U.S. response, or offered to airlift Zelenskyy out of Kyiv in the first days of the war.

Nor can we explain why China was never held accountable by Biden after new information entailed the role of the Wuhan lab in birthing the Covid virus, or for sending a spy balloon across the continental U.S. with impunity. Meanwhile, the administration’s crazy talk of partnering with a supposedly non-bellicose China seems unhinged.

Finally, given the first Trump impeachment, what is the Left now going to say to House Republicans—“You cannot in this country impeach a president merely for threatening to cancel foreign aid unless Ukraine fired a prosecutor looking into his high-ranking family’s illegal influence selling?”

Equality Under the Law?

The Democrats in their Trump derangement fits so lowered the bar for impeachment and special prosecutions, that not impeaching or removing Biden under the Left’s own new standards seems almost ridiculous.

If Trump earned hysteria about 25^th-amendment removal (to the point of taking and acing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment) for a halting gait on an occasion descending a ramp, how could a non-compos-mentis and chronically falling Biden not be so examined?

Moreover, Trump was impeached for 1) asking a foreign leader to examine the corruption of the Biden family with Ukraine while he put a hold on approved foreign aid to Ukraine; 2) and at the time, it was possible that Joe Biden couldhave been Trump’s likely future 2020 opponent.

But in contrast note that Biden 1) issued an ultimatum that a Ukraine prosecutor would either be summarily fired, or aid would be ended. And he was fired!; and 2) Biden was only a possible general-election presidential rival when Trump called Zelensky; Trump is currently the front-runner against a putative Biden candidacy in 2024.

Biden has also done far more than ask Ukraine to ensure a political opponent was not guilty of corruption, but rather sicced a special DOJ prosecutor on Trump for taking out classified papers in the manner that Joe Biden himself did years earlier, without the prerogative as a senator or vice president of declassifying such papers.

Harris Paradoxes

The open disregard for Kamala Harris is not just a Republican phenomenon. Her dismal popularity reflects that such disappointment in her is bipartisan. And now the likely machinations mentioned to keep her out of the presidency are undoing all the racial and gender pandering that explain her otherwise inexplicable appointment in the first place. At some point the Democratic identity-politics base is going to pressure the party’s hierarchy to back off and back Harris or face charges of racism.

In an odd way, the Left’s tolerance of Biden’s own cognitive impairment also strengthens Harris’s case, especially among her diversity base. Kamala utters incomprehensible sentences; Joe cannot finish them. Kamala’s public declamations are kindergarten stuff; Joe’s are more nursery school level. In theory, Kamala can be coached and improve; Joe’s declines are at a geometric rate that is irreversible.

So if someone so cognitively challenged is currently President with the full assent of the Democratic Party, for what reasons does it turn its animus on a Vice President who is still relatively young and hale?

How odd that the Left knows that both the current President and Vice President should not be in either job after 2024; and yet its own prior pandering and rank politicking have made both almost impossible to remove. And how odder that the extra-legal measures the Left took to emasculate the Trump presidency are now the low standards by which an utterly corrupt Biden can be investigated, indicted, impeached, or forced to resign.

Democrats Headed Towards Panic Mode Over Black Voter Turnout in 2024

Becky Noble reporting for RedState 

For over 50 years, Democrats have had one voting bloc that could always be counted on to deliver votes. Black voters have been the one constant, especially in America’s large Democrat-run cities. But as the number of black Republicans has grown, and the Democrat Party has thrown all its eggs into the transgender and climate change baskets, there is starting to be a bit of nervousness as to whether those that make up that traditionally reliable voting bloc will show up in numbers that they did in 2020 for Joe Biden in 2024. And much of that nervousness is showing up in key battleground states like Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Even though Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms, black voter turnout dropped by ten percent. And in those key battleground states, the emphasis is on black men. W. Mondale Robinson is the founder of the Black Male Voter Project. In an interview with the Washington Post, Robinson stated, “Black men are your second-most stable base overwhelmingly, and yet you can’t reach them in a way that makes your work easier.” He added that black men are “sporadic or non-voters,” and that the Democrat Party needs to focus more on black men rather than suburban white women, who tend to be labeled as swing voters but voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Democrats appear to be concerned about getting out the vote among black men more so than black women, as long as Vice President Kamala Harris is on the ticket with Biden.

But that ten percent drop in black voters in 2022 is only part of the story. There are many more polling numbers that should be making the Biden campaign nervous. In an AP-NORC poll from May, just 55 percent of black voters said they would support Biden in 2024. Other numbers in the same poll are not any more encouraging. Biden’s approval rating with black voters is at 58 percent, and only 41 percent said they wanted him to run for reelection. For many of these voters, it’s the economy, stupid. High inflation and not being able to deliver on any student loan debt relief were also cited as reasons black voters were turned off.

So, where are those black voters going? Well, their ultimate destination could be good news for Republicans, especially if former President Donald Trump is the GOP nominee for 2024. In 2016, Trump got just eight percent of the black vote. In 2020, that number jumped significantly to 12 percent. An ABC News/Washington Post poll delivers even more grim news for Joe Biden. Of those polled, 27 percent of black voters said they would “definitely or probably” vote for Donald Trump in 2024. That should cause the alarms to go off for Democrats. Cedric L. Richmond is a senior advisor at the Democrat National Committee. He said of reaching black voters:

We have to meet them where they are and we have to show them why the political process matters and what we have accomplished that benefits them. We will not make the mistake that others made of not drawing all the connections.

Others agreed that touting supposed benefits for black voters by Democrats rather than focusing on any concern over Trump was the way to go. Democrat State Senator from Pennsylvania Sharif Street agreed saying, “Being better than the Republicans is not always enough to get people motivated to vote.” Jay Williams is a GOP strategist in Georgia who seemed optimistic. He said:

My guess is Democrats for the foreseeable future will continue to do well [with black voters], but I think there’s some cultural issues that don’t typically resonate with the black community as a whole and frankly a lot of minority communities. Republicans will be able to peel some folks off based on that, depending on the area. It could be a real wedge issue for us.

The trend toward Republicans among not just black voters, but Hispanic voters as well, has been growing for a while. In August of 2022, Hispanic voters were leaning Democrat by roughly 11 points. By October, just prior to the midterm election, that number had dropped to just five points. In 2022, Rep. Monica de la Cruz (R-TX) was one of a handful of Hispanic Republican women running for office in Texas. She summed up exactly why Hispanics are moving to the Republican Party, and it aligns with what Jay Williams thinks Democrats’ downfall with black voters may be. During her campaign, de la Cruz stated:

Hispanic culture really aligns with pro-life, pro God, and pro country. Those are the values of the Republican party. Democrats have just simply gone too far to the left and towards socialism.

Democrats may have some hard choices to make in 2024.

Tremors Abound as Godzilla Trump Crushes GOP Field in First New York Times Poll of 2024 Campaign Season

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse 

The New York Times has released their first New York Times/Sienna College poll of the 2024 campaign season [POLL DATA HERE]. The results of the poll show President Donald Trump playing the role of Godzilla in stomping the field of Republican playdough candidates.

President Trump leads with 54%, followed by a ridiculously distant Ron DeSantis at 17%, Pence 3%, Haley 3%, Scott 3% and Ramalamadingdong 2%.  The only other candidate to break double digits is ‘I Don’t Know,’ the mysterious dark horse who continues biting pieces off the shrinking Florida governor.

So, who is this great MAGA coalition that fuels Godzilla? The NYT identifies them thusly: “Mr. Trump held decisive advantages across almost every demographic group and region and in every ideological wing of the party, the survey found, as Republican voters waved away concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy. He led by wide margins among men and women, younger and older voters, moderates and conservatives, those who went to college and those who didn’t, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas.”

Yup, apparently the MAGA coalition is everyone.  It’s the great working-class coalition, or what we have previously called “The Monster Vote.”

[SOURCE HERE]