“Is it okay to have a conspiracy to get rid of Trump?” host Bill Maker asked guests Rob Reiner and Sen. Amy Klobuchar on his HBO show on Friday. This exchange got considerable online attention. Most of that attention focused on Reiner’s shockingly ignorant disavowal of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Overlooked were the knee-jerk comments by both Reiner and Klobuchar on the subject of January 6. Rather than answer Maher’s question about the suppression of the laptop story, Reiner reflexively retreated to the safe space of January 6. “You know what is not justified,” said Reiner. “Using armed violence to try to kill people in the Capitol.”
A privileged child of Hollywood, Reiner broke through as Archie Bunker’s son-in-law, the aptly named “Meathead,” on the 1970’s TV comedy “All in the Family.” He has since gone on to a successful career as a director. His ignorance—and latent fascism—surprised no one who has been exposed to the proud inanity of Tinsel Town over the years.
Klobuchar has no such excuse. Although more politic than Reiner on the subject of free speech, Klobuchar seemed even more dangerously misinformed than Reiner on January 6. “We are dealing with a man who used to be the president right now who literally tried to lead an armed insurrection,” said Klobuchar, employing four distinct falsehoods to make her off-topic point.
There was no insurrection. Those who entered the Capitol did not have guns. Yes, Trump could be accused of leading a protest, but not a riot, let alone an insurrection. And were Trump to have led this insurrection “literally,” he would have been waving a flag in the front lines and encouraging the armed patriots behind him to storm the Capitol.
Dismayed by the failure of the courts to charge any of the protestors with “insurrection” the media have grasped at every proverbial straw within reach. When eleven members of the Oath Keepers were charged with “seditious conspiracy” a year after the riot, the zealots trumpeted their vindication across the fruited plain. Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, no Trump fan, quickly rained on their noisy parade.
“The charging of a relatively small number of extremists in this large protest belies rather than supports the broader allegations of an actual insurrection,” wrote Turley. “This remains a protest that became a riot.” More than six months after the incident, an informed FBI source was telling Reuters, “Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases. Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”
To any fair minded observer, the incident at Capitol Hill was much closer to the on-air graphic—“fiery but largely peaceful protest”—that CNN used to euphemize scenes of a burning Kenosha. The difference between the Kenosha and Capitol Hill riots is that the rioters in Washington set no fires and destroyed about $50 million less property. Then, too, Kenosha was just one of scores of BLM-Antifa riots that summer that left as many as 30 people dead and caused some $2 billion in damage.
The media have used the phrase “armed” as recklessly as they have used the term “insurrection.” Knowing the kind of people who showed up at the protest, I would suspect that the majority, perhaps the great majority, own guns. Many, I am sure, live in states with constitutional carry or concealed carry laws and are used to going about their business armed. That said, almost all of the protestors honored D.C.’s restrictive gun laws.
In June 2022, Newsweek ran a fact check on whether the alleged insurrectionists were armed. Here is what they found:
Lonnie Coffman, 72, was sentenced to four years in prison for having loaded guns, ammunition and Molotov cocktail ingredients in his truck parked a half-mile from the Capitol. He also carried a loaded handgun as he “walked around the area.”
Guy Reffitt, 49. was convicted for being “unlawfully present on Capitol grounds” in possession of a firearm.
Christopher Alberts was indicted for carrying a handgun “on Capitol grounds.”
Off-duty DEA agent Mark Sami Ibrahim, 32, was indicted by a grand jury for bringing a firearm “on the grounds” of the Capitol.
Newsweek cites an earlier op-ed in its own publication by two individuals affiliated with an organization called “Everytown for Gun Safety.” The two claim that there were at least twelve individuals “tied to the events of January 6 “who were arrested in Washington, D.C., and charged with firearms offenses.” True to form, they do not name these individuals and cite only a few examples.
The Newsweek columnists insist January 6 was an “armed insurrection,” but they identify not a single person who brought a weapon into the Capitol Building that day, let alone fired it. On January 6, only one bullet was fired either in the building or on the grounds, and that bullet came from the gun of Capitol Police Sgt. Michael Byrd. Byrd shot and killed an unarmed female protestor whose death had less objective justification than even George Floyd’s. Say her name, Ashli Babbitt.
It should be noted too that the events of January 6 followed the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Had the FBI gone public with the laptop when the Bureau first seized it, Biden would not have been his party’s nominee. Had the media and Big Tech—at the FBI’s urging—not buried the evidence contained in that laptop weeks before the election, America would likely have been spared a Biden presidency.
Violent protests by the left would have inevitably followed Trump’s 2020 election. The Meathead crowd seems to have forgotten January 2017. The subhead of an NBC story is refreshingly specific: “217 people were arrested and six police officers suffered minor injuries after some protesters set fires and smashed windows in the nation’s capital.” Having seen that previous summer how the left behaves when triggered, the authorities would have been well prepared for any assault on the Capitol following a second Trump victory.
By contrast, Trump supporters had no history of violence or rioting. January 6 was different only around the edges. Other than Byrd, no one tried “to kill people in the Capitol.” The media have insisted that bear spray and captured police shields are weapons too, but “armed” in America means guns, and Reiner and Klobuchar know it. Only in the left’s fevered imagination does anyone launch an insurrection with flagpoles and Trump signs.
Indeed it is, and Virginians may find themselves surprised to find out that Democrats did just that. Governor Glenn Youngkin declared that change to be a “ludicrous” outsourcing of Virginia’s self-governance to California, and vowed last night to Tucker Carlson to reverse it.
“What Virginians and Americans are worried about is inflation, and schools, a solid education, parents being listened to and safety in their communities,” Youngkin argued, not forcing themselves to comply with regulations pushed by Gavin Newsom and the extreme-progressive California legislature (via Townhall):
“We’re going to go to work and stop this because Virginians should be making decisions for Virginians,” Youngkin said, claiming that most residents were not aware of what Northam signed.
“Little did they know that they had signed legislation and tied Virginia to decisions that will be made in California, so not only did they pick a state that has demonstrated it has no idea how to run itself, but they abdicated their responsibility to serve Virginians,” he added.
Given that only 2 percent of cars sold in the commonwealth last year were electric, Youngkin said it’s “just ridiculous” to believe the state will phase new gas cars out completely by 2035.
“What Virginians and Americans are worried about is inflation, and schools, a solid education, parents being listened to and safety in their communities,” he continued. “Yet, here we have this Virginia legislature under Democrat rule last year forget that they work for Virginians and tie them to California. So this is a chance to reestablish Virginians making decisions for Virginians based on leaders they elect.”
First off, is Youngkin correct? It certainly seems so. In February 2021, the Democrat-controlled legislature passed HB1965, which added a provision to Virginia’s authorizing statute for its State Air Pollution Control Board that allows that agency to synchronize state policy by “enter[ing] into agreements with, other states to administer the requirements of any regulations adopted pursuant to this section.” If the APCD did indeed synch its policies to California, then they did cede Virginia’s ability to set its policies directly on its own.
It’s bad enough that the Democrats’ own Virginia establishment tried dictating terms to parents, for example, when it came to their children’s education. Youngkin won a surprise victory in last year’s elections based on the populist revolt against radical ideological indoctrination. But outsourcing those diktats — and to California? Republicans will have a field day with this in Virginia, and Democrats deserve everything they get over it.
And this will only enhance Youngkin’s stature inside Virginia, where it has already soared after less than a year on the job. Not only do a majority of blue-state Virginia voters approve of his job performance, a new Roanoke poll shows that they like Youngkin personally too:
Governor Glenn Youngkin’s approval rating has increased slightly to 55% (from 53% in May) while disapproval remains at 35%. That slight increase comes from Republican sentiment, as approval among his own party is now at 86%, up from 75% in June. Approval for President Biden has increased slightly as well, up to 39% from an all-time low Roanoke College Poll rating of 37% in June.
For the first time in our poll, a majority (51%) of Virginias have a favorable view of Governor Youngkin, while 37% continue to have an unfavorable view. Again, that increase comes mostly from Republican feelings, but his rating is up slightly among Democrats and Independents as well.
Youngkin has quietly built up a formidable political position in an unlikely state. How has he managed it? Mainly by threading a needle between the populist promises he made in 2021 and the necessity of hewing to the center on other issues. Youngkin quickly took abortion off the table, for instance, in the same manner that Ron DeSantis did in Florida — seizing the center position of abortion access prior to viability for adults with significant restrictions rather than an outright ban. Neither man will win much praise from absolutists on either side of the issue, but it bolstered the credibility of both while protecting fellow Republicans from attacks, plus it took the wind out of the sails of Democrats hoping to use abortion as a midterm game-changer.
Youngkin may in fact be doing the same thing DeSantis is, in a quieter fashion — laying out a case for the 2024 presidential nomination. Given his performance thus far, it may be a case for Republican primary voters to take seriously.
If you’re a prospective law student, do you want to pay $74,000 a year to attend Cornell University’s Law School whose faculty members publish what looks like a false accusation of murder and can’t seem to do better than play “woke pigeon chess” in the court of public opinion, or $25,400 a year for in-state tuition at the State University of New York in Buffalo? SUNY’s web page says, “Our students graduate to work at the same law firms and earn the same starting salaries as those who attend pricey private law schools.” The difference comes to almost $150,000 over three years and, from where I sit, I don’t see what an attorney gets from Cornell for that kind of money.
Law professor William Jacobson reports, “There’s an effort to get me fired at Cornell for criticizing the Black Lives Matter Movement” and, from what I have seen, Jacobson’s criticisms are accurate. Dean Eduardo Peñalver nonetheless used a Cornell web page to say, “In light of this deep and rich tradition of walking the walk of racial justice, in no uncertain terms, recent blog posts of Professor William Jacobson, casting broad and categorical aspersions on the goals of those protesting for justice for Black Americans, do not reflect the values of Cornell Law School as I have articulated them.”
Is This What Cornell’s Law School Supports?
We must ask Dean Peñalver, along with President Martha Pollack and Cornell’s Board of Trustees who seem to be okay with his use of a Cornell web page to disparage another faculty member in this manner, whether the “values of Cornell Law School” include support for a movement that:
Denies the right of Israel to exist as exemplified by Patrisse Cullors in her capacity as BLM’s leader and features chants such as “Israel, we know you, you murder children too.” Here, meanwhile, is another BLM leader proclaiming “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” which is a call for the eradication of Israel. He also makes a reference to “armed resistance” toward the end of the video. “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” (Cullors said “imperialist” rather than “racist”) is anti-Semitic by definition.
Condones or even encourages unlawful behavior that results in justifiable deadly force against Black people and also Kyle Rittenhouse’s Caucasian assailants, as well as looting that leaves people of all races with life-ruining felony records. “Looting = reparations” is again from a BLM organizer as opposed to somebody who does not represent the organization.
Is alleged credibly to have misused 501(c)(3) tax exempt resources to influence the 2020 Presidential election, and the Republican Party is squandering an opportunity to use this talking point before November.
The Zionist Organization of America writes, and this is how Professor Jacobson comes across to me as well, “We must continue to combat the evils of anti-Black racism — while calling out organizations that incite hatred against Jews and Israel.” We can walk the walk of racial justice outside the company of Israel-haters just as we don’t need to line up with Nazis to oppose animal abuse. The ZOA web page cites also, by the way, “the extreme Jew-hatred, Israel-bashing and antisemitic violence perpetrated by the Marxist ‘Movement for Black Lives’ (M4BL) organization, and the organizations that comprise and are intertwined with M4BL, including the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization and ‘Dream Defenders.'”
“Slander is Spoken, in Print it’s Libel”
Here, meanwhile, is a letter signed by twenty-one Cornell Law School faculty members that says Breonna Taylor was murdered. (The letter does stipulate that they are speaking as individuals rather than on behalf of the school.) What happened to Taylor, and also the police officer who was wounded in the same incident, should never be allowed to happen to anybody again but the officer who shot her was not charged with much less convicted of murder. A false public accusation of a felony like murder is libel per se but we have twenty-one Cornell Law School faculty who signed onto a statement of exactly this nature as did Democrat Left lawyers Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. Warren and Harris libeled an identifiable police officer by tweeting that Michael Brown was murdered. As Jonah Jameson put it in Spider-Man, “Slander is spoken, in print it’s libel” and, if twenty-one Cornell Law faculty set an example that it’s okay to do this, law school applicants really need to ask what they get for the school’s pricey tuition.
Woke Pigeon Chess Doesn’t Work
Prospective attorneys also need to know that “woke pigeon chess” in which the pigeon knocks over the pieces, says his or her opponent’s values don’t reflect the institution’s values (or implies the opponent is a racist) and then claims to have won will not play well in front of an impartial judge or jury. A good attorney should be able to argue either side of a case, and Daniel Webster is reputed to have even gotten a man out of a contract with the Devil via jury nullification.
Maybe Dean Peñalver and/or the faculty members in question, along with Cornell’s Black Law Student Association (BLSA) could have come up with a similarly compelling argument on BLM’s behalf that most people would have respected even if they didn’t agree with it. Here’s how I would handle it even though I can’t imagine a conceivable defense for BLM Global Network itself. I would point out that other people not associated with BLM Global Network have used the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in the context of improving police-community relations, law enforcement professionals have shown solidarity with these initiatives which also have my support, and it is important to keep this difference in mind.
The Lowes home improvement store uses the phrase “Let’s build something together” and Americans of all races and ethnicities can come together to do exactly that, and stand together against injustice to anybody for whatever reason, without the need to involve something like Black Lives Matter Global Network, Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, or any other race hustlers whether Black or Caucasian.
Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way. He or she is remaining anonymous due to the likely prospect of being subjected to “cancel culture” for exposing the Big Lie behind Black Lives Matter.
Just how desperate is Joe Biden to change the narrative in the midterms? In a cycle with inflation at 40-year highs and where American households have had their real disposable personal income shrink for five straight quarters, Biden went to Wilkes-Barre, PA yesterday and talked about … an assault-weapons ban. And just to make sure that he remained coherent, he sarcastically recommended that “right-wing” Americans buy F-15s instead:
Bear in mind, as many did on Twitter, that this is the head of the same administration that has prosecuted rioters (and others) from the January 6 debacle on the basis of it being an “insurrection,” none of whom were armed with “assault weapons,” let alone cannons or F-15s. You don’t need an F-15 for Biden’s DoJ to make that assumption, apparently.
This desperate attempt to otherize Democrats’ opposition with the broadest brush possible was notable for what it eclipsed. According to the White House transcript of the speech as delivered, Joe Biden mentioned the word “gun” 25 times, “assault weapons” three times, and even “cannon” once in his oft-repeated, oft-debunked argument for gun control. “Weapons” gets nine separate mentions, too.
But what didn’t Biden mention in his speech?
“Inflation” – zero mentions
“Economy” – zero mentions
“Income” – zero mentions
“Mortgage” – zero mentions
“Debt” – zero mentions
“Prices” – zero mentions
Joe Biden literally spent 45 minutes on a stage without addressing the main issue on voters’ minds in this election cycle. He never once addressed the economy, not even to promote his flim-flam “Inflation Reduction Act.” He spent nearly all of his time on gun control, a tertiary issue at best for voters in this cycle.
Biden did mention the border once in the speech, which should have been an opening to discuss immigration and the border crisis, which is a strong secondary issue. But even then, the only context for the border was this attempt to tie it back to gun control:
You know what the Mexicans are — Mexico, which has real problems, causing us real problems — you know what their biggest complaint is? Can’t we stop gun — gun trafficking across the southern border into Mexico.
Say — can’t we stop human trafficking across the southern border into the US? Perhaps if Biden took border security seriously, we could solve both problems. This is a breathtakingly nonsensical complaint to make while border states are experiencing unprecedented waves of human trafficking across a border that Biden refuses to visit, let alone secure. He also mentioned fentanyl three times, including a mention of the “deadly fentanyl trafficking that’s poisoning communities across this country,” without bothering to note that the Biden border crisis is a major reason why that trafficking exists in the first place.
Biden also spent some time on crime, which is a major concern for voters in this cycle. “Crime” got eight mentions, including this rather risible claim:
Really? Biden’s been in office for eighteen months; Democrats run almost all of America’s major urban centers. Democrats in and out of the Beltway spent a full year flogging the “defund the police” movement. Did that show anyone what “works” in fighting crime, or did it instead show us the sheer idiocy of forcing law enforcement into retreat? Biden might want to go on offense on crime, but the past two years of rioting — and yes, insurrections — in major cities, followed by rapidly escalating crime rates, tells voters a much different story.
This speech by Biden may have him fired up, but he’s as incoherent as ever otherwise. What’s more, Biden and his team are hiding on the biggest issue of the midterms — the economy. They don’t have an economic message. They’re lost and in over their heads. The only strategy left is to obfuscate, but voters will want real answers and real accountability for this economic debacle Biden and Democrats have created. And if Biden and Democrats won’t talk about it, voters will pay attention to candidates who do.
Zuckerberg’s admission reveals a deeper scandal: It was the FBI and not social media that stole the election from Donald Trump.
MARGOT CLEVELAND
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s admission last week that the FBI pushed the social media giant to censor Russian misinformation — and thus the Hunter Biden laptop story, as that’s how the agency and Democrats characterized it — shortly before the November 2020 election is but a breadcrumb of a bigger scandal: the widespread interference by the FBI in the 2020 presidential election with the potential that the bureau coordinated its efforts with the Biden campaign.
When asked during a Thursday podcast with Joe Rogan how Facebook handles controversial news, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, Zuckerberg stopped his host to provide a backdrop to Facebook’s decision to decrease distribution of the scandal.
“The FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, [saying,] ‘Hey just so you know, you should be on high alert,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. According to Zuckerberg, the bureau told Facebook that “we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election” and that “we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that so just be vigilant.”
As Zuckerberg told “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast audience, “Hey, look, if the FBI — which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement — they come to us and tell us we need to be on guard about something, I want to take that seriously.” So, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on October 14, 2020, Facebook treated the story as “potentially misinformation, important misinformation” for five to seven days while the tech giant’s team could determine whether it was false.
During that time, Facebook decreased its distribution of the story by making the story rank lower in the news feed. “You could still share it, you could still consume it,” Zuckerberg explained, but “fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.” And while he would not quantify the impact, the Facebook founder said the decreased distribution was “meaningful.”
In a follow-up, Rogan asked if the FBI had specifically said “to be on guard about that story,” meaning the laptop story. After originally responding, “no,” Zuckerberg corrected himself, saying, “I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern.”
Whether the FBI identified the Hunter Biden laptop story as the about-to-drop Russian misinformation, however, is irrelevant because the warning the bureau provided Facebook proved specific enough for the Big Tech company to censor distribution of the New York Post’s story. And, contrary to fake intel the FBI provided Facebook’s team, the laptop was not Russian disinformation but a true and devastating story showing Joe Biden had lied to the American public when he claimed in September of 2019 that he had never discussed his son’s foreign business dealings. Information on the laptop further implicated the Democrat presidential candidate in a pay-to-play scandal involving Russia, Ukraine, and China.
The implications flowing from Zuckerberg’s revelation are huge and raise a litany of questions that demand answers.
We Need Answers
First, it is implausible to believe Facebook is the only Big Tech company contacted by the FBI with a warning about Russian disinformation and the bureau’s expectation being that tech executives would then censor the Biden scandal. Rather, it is only reasonable to believe the FBI issued similar false warnings to Twitter and other outlets.
And while Facebook only limited distribution, Twitter completely censored the story, preventing it from being shared at all on the platform. Twitter also temporarily locked Trump’s campaign account to prevent the then-president from sharing the laptop story and suspended the New York Post’s account.
Did the FBI’s warning prompt Twitter’s censorship as it had Facebook’s? What other Big Tech companies did the FBI contact to paint the Hunter Biden laptop story as misinformation? What network and cable news outlets received a similar message? What about print and legacy media companies? Who within the FBI issued the warnings? With whose knowledge? With whose authorization? Or by whose directive?
A second component to the scandal concerns the FBI’s interactions (or lack thereof) with the Biden campaign. According to John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware laptop repair shop where Hunter Biden abandoned his laptop in mid-2019, the former’s father approached the FBI on October 8, 2019, on his behalf to alert the FBI to the laptop’s existence. During that meeting, Isaac’s father claimed he told the agent there was pornography on the laptop as well as information about “dealing with foreign interests, a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, lots of foreign money.”
Isaac’s father left the local FBI office believing the bureau was uninterested in the laptop, but then two months later, in December of 2019, two federal agents appeared at Isaac’s Wilmington repair store with a subpoena and seized the laptop. Isaac had previously made a copy of the hard drive, however, and later provided the copy to Rudy Giuliani who, in turn, gave a copy to the New York Post, prompting the stories the FBI then tried to censor by falsely flagging it as Russian disinformation.
What the FBI did with the laptop after taking possession of it remains unknown, although FBI whistleblowers now claim that “local FBI leadership told employees ‘you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop.’” Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson revealed the whistleblowers’ claims in a letter he sent to the inspector general of the Department of Justice last week. That letter further stated that the “whistleblowers allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election — potentially a year after the FBI obtained the laptop in December 2019.”
If, as the whistleblowers allege, the FBI did not review the content of Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election, that constitutes yet another scandal because from what Isaac’s father conveyed to the agent in October of 2019, the laptop represented a national security threat.
The FBI and the intelligence community cannot possibly defend the country from threats if it blinds itself to what those threats are. Nor could the intelligence community properly provide Joe Biden with a defensive briefing if agents remained ignorant of the content of the laptop. And as I previously reported, that content included the revelation by Hunter Biden that he believed Russians had stolen a second laptop with material that put him at risk for blackmail. So if the whistleblowers’ claims prove true, the FBI and the intelligence community put the election of Joe Biden above America’s national security.
Either way, the FBI lied to Facebook and presumptively Twitter and many other media outlets. If the FBI had analyzed the laptop, it knew it was not Russian disinformation; if agents had not yet assessed the material, it had no basis to claim it was Russian disinformation.
What Did the Big Guy Know?
The question remains, though: What did the FBI tell Joe Biden about the laptop?
While it would be completely inappropriate for the FBI to bury the laptop and withhold a defensive briefing from the Democrat presidential candidate, it is possible the FBI took that tack to provide Biden with plausible deniability. But once the FBI knew the story was about to break, what did the bureau do, besides lying to Big Tech companies that the story represented Russian disinformation?
And we know from the Post’s October 14, 2020, story on the Hunter Biden laptop that the FBI had foreknowledge of the Post’s plan to run the story, as did Hunter Biden and the Biden campaign. “The FBI referred questions about its seizure of the laptop and hard drive to the Delaware US Attorney’s Office, where a spokesperson said, ‘My office can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation,’” the Post reported. The Post added that “Hunter Biden’s lawyer refused to comment on the specifics but instead attacked Giuliani,” and “the Joe Biden campaign did not return requests for comment.”
After the Post reached out to the FBI and Biden for comment on the story, did the FBI tell Biden how it came to possess Hunter’s laptop and that it appeared legitimate? Or did agents lie to Biden?
Here, a comment Biden made in crosstalk during his October 22, 2020, presidential debate with Trump in Nashville proves intriguing.
After Biden intoned that the election was about the character of the country, Trump countered, “If this stuff is true about Russia, Ukraine, China, other countries, a wreck — if this is true, then he’s a corrupt politician. So don’t give me the stuff about how you’re this innocent baby. Joe, they’re calling you a corrupt politician.”
“It’s the laptop from hell, the laptop from hell,” Trump continued.
Biden initially countered by pointing to the “50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan.” “Four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage,” Biden claimed.
“You mean, the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” Trump barked.
At this point, the crosstalk escalated, but Biden could be heard saying, “That’s exactly what — that’s exactly what I was told.”
Was Biden lying? Or did someone tell Biden that the laptop was Russian disinformation? Did the FBI and intelligence community lie to the Democrat candidate about the authenticity of the laptop, rather than provide Joe Biden with a proper defensive briefing? If so, who lied? Who knew of the lie? Who approved the lie or directed it?
And what about Hunter? Did Biden ask his son about the laptop? What did Hunter say? Did Biden know the FBI was lying about it being disinformation and just go along with that narrative?
These questions barely scratch the surface, with more serious questions concerning whether the FBI plotted with the Biden campaign to push the Russian disinformation narrative and to seek censorship of the story. And before writing that off as a crazy conspiracy theory, remember that it was Zuckerberg — the Zuck Bucks king — who revealed that the FBI had approached him and warned that the about-to-be dumped story was Russian disinformation. So we know the FBI holds responsibility for pushing the disinformation canard to Big Tech, we just don’t know whether agents coordinated the plan with the Biden campaign.
A review of contemporaneous reporting also reveals that the intelligence community pushed the Russia disinformation narrative through leaks to the New York Times and Washington Post.
The same day the story broke, in reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop article published by the Post, the New York Times reported that “some security experts expressed skepticism about the provenance and authenticity of the emails,” citing “United States intelligence analysts.”
According to the Times, American intelligence analysts had contacted Burisma — the Ukrainian energy company at which Hunter served a lucrative gig on the board of directors — to learn more about a purported hack of Burisma by “the same Russian GRU unit that was one of two groups that hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016.” The Times reported that the intelligence analysts “had picked up chatter that stolen Burisma emails would be leaked in the form of an ‘October surprise.’”
Citing its American intelligence sources, the Times then claimed that “among their chief concerns … was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy — as Russian hackers did when they dumped real emails alongside forgeries ahead of the 2017 French elections — a slight twist on Russia’s 2016 playbook when they siphoned leaked D.N.C. emails through fake personas on Twitter and WikiLeaks.”
The speed with which the New York Times spun the Hunter Biden laptop story, and the assist by the unnamed “U.S. intelligence analysts” suggests a coordinated effort by individuals in the intelligence community to protect Biden’s candidacy by framing the New York Post’s coverage as Russian disinformation.
Less than a week after the New York Post broke the laptop story, the Washington Post likewise bolstered the disinformation narrative based on FBI leaks. “What’s more, numerous news outlets have now reported that the FBI is examining whether the material from Hunter Biden (which supposedly includes salacious stuff) is linked to a Russian disinformation effort,” the Washington Post reported on October 20, 2020, adding that “intelligence officials had previously warned that Giuliani is a conduit for such disinformation.”
The FBI and U.S. intelligence analysts’ peddling of the Russia disinformation narrative to the New York Times and Washington Post further expands the deep state’s culpability in interfering in the 2020 election and also leads to more questions.
Who provided the media outlets with leaks to spin the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as Russian disinformation? Who knew of the leaks, and who approved them or directed them? And did the FBI and intelligence community coordinate with the Biden campaign in pushing the Russia disinformation narrative to the legacy media?
How Deep Does the Corruption Go?
Other questions concern what prompted “more than 50 former senior intelligence officials” to sign “on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’” Did the FBI or other members of the intelligence community help coordinate that letter?
Given the FBI took the initiative to prompt Facebook and almost certainly other media outlets to censor the Hunter Biden story, it’s entirely reasonable to think the same deep-state liars would round up former members of the cabal to sign the letter to further the disinformation narrative.
If so, did Joe Biden or his campaign know about the efforts? Or did the Biden campaign merely exploit what the FBI was doing behind the scenes?
And make no mistake, even if Biden’s team did not conspire with the FBI to cause the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, it exploited the FBI’s gratuitous interference in the election, with the Biden campaign pointing to social media’s censorship as proof that the story was disinformation.
“Well, look, I think Twitter’s response to the actual article itself makes clear these reported allegations are false and are not true, and I’m glad to see social media companies to take responsibility to limit misinformation,” campaign press secretary Jamal Brown said shortly after the story broke.
Biden likewise hid behind the spin pushed by the 50-plus former national intelligence agents that framed the laptop as Russian disinformation, as demonstrated by his debate performance highlighted above.
Whether Biden coordinated with those former deep-staters, or they conspired with the FBI, merits investigation as well because, at the end of the day, the burying of the Hunter Biden laptop story cost Trump the election.
As the Washington Times reported earlier this year after the New York Times belatedly acknowledged the authenticity of the laptop: “Trump pollster John McLaughlin found that 4.6% of Biden voters would have changed their minds if they had known about it, easily enough to flip results in key states. Another survey by The Polling Company showed that even more Biden voters in seven swing states — 17% — would have switched their votes if they had been aware of the laptop and other stories.”
Those poll results confirmed what many conservatives had long thought — that by censoring the laptop story and the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandal, Big Tech stole the election from Donald Trump.
But Zuckerberg’s admission on Thursday that Big Tech throttled the story at the behest of the FBI reveals a deeper scandal: It was the FBI and not social media that stole the election from Donald Trump.
The self-appointed “fact checkers” generally fall silent when a Democrat tells a whopper. We are seeing a lot of that in Minnesota these days, with incumbent Governor Tim Walz locked in a tight race with Dr. Scott Jensen. Walz didn’t have a lot of composure to start with–he is an angry, intemperate man–and whatever composure he had seems to be crumbling under pressure. The result is frequent departures from the truth.
On Sunday, Walz was interviewed at the State Fair by a liberal reporter from WCCO television. He unleashed a couple of epic lies. First, he claimed that there had hardly been any school shutdown in Minnesota: “Just to be clear, over 80% of our students missed less than 10 days of in-class learning.”
This assertion is inexplicable. Gov. Walz shut down the entire school system on March 15, 2020. His administration then put in place a complicated matrix using county health data and school district boundaries for schools to reopen in the fall of 2020. Most public schools did not return to in-class learning until the spring of 2021. “Less than 10 days”? That is not true of any public school student in the state. For most, it was a year.
In the same interview, Walz was asked about Minnesota’s skyrocketing crime. Walz came up with a purported statistic that apparently was made up on the spur of the moment:
Minnesota is one of the three states with the lowest crime rates in America. The fact as it stands today is, there are 45 states with higher crime rates than Minnesota.
Disregard the contradiction. This claim is simply insane. But who will fact check it, since Walz is a Democrat? Center of the American Experiment Policy Fellow David Zimmer did:
The statement and the figures are just plain wrong.
Using 2020 FBI data, which represents the latest national data set on crime, Minnesota ranks 27th overall in Part 1 crimes (a combination of significant violent and property crimes), 13th overall in violent crime, and 30th overall in property crimes (ranked lowest to highest).
See the linked post for a chart that shows these data.
As we have noted in our HighcrimeMN campaign, Minnesota rose above the national average in Part 1 crimes in 2020 for the first time in our history.
The FBI classifies serious crimes like murder, rape, robbery, arson etc. as Part 1 crimes. This chart tells the story. Minnesota is now worse than the national average in the rate of per capita serious crime:
Scott Jensen, to his credit, makes great use of these data in his campaign. Hence the need for Walz to lie.
When a politician says something that is grotesquely wrong, as Governor Walz did with respect to both education and crime, it is natural to ask: is there some possible germ of truth that he misconstrued? In this case, is there some crime statistic in which Minnesota ranks third from the top? Or bottom? It turns out there is.
One ranking in which Minnesota ranks #3 lowest in the nation is in the lack of criminals being sent to prison. Our incarceration rate is lower than 47 other states, despite our rapidly rising crime rate.
Minnesota resembles New York and California. All three are failing states that have consciously chosen a pro-criminal ideology that proved catastrophic for normal citizens.
One wonders: what could cause an incumbent governor to spew out obvious lies on critical topics like crime and education? Perhaps that is one for the psychologists. But maybe Tim Walz, like Joe Biden and other Democratic politicians, believes he can say anything, no matter how absurd, without worrying about press scrutiny. If you say it, and no one “fact checks” you, maybe it passes for truth.
Maybe. But in this case, Walz was fact checked on both topics by an American Experiment press release, earlier today, that went to all relevant reporters, and on crime in the linked post. And of course by HighCrimeMN.com. Beyond that, Walz’s lies are so absurd that no one whose children’s education was devastated by Walz’s covid shutdown or who has suffered from the violent crime that has descended on the Twin Cities on Walz’s watch could possibly be fooled.
The shoplifting and subsequent protest of Gibson’s bakery happened way back in 2016. It took years for the Gibson’s defamation case to make its way through the courts but finally in 2019 they won a massive award. The award (initially $44 million later reduced to $25 million) was appealed by Oberlin and in April of this year the school lost that appeal. By that point the full judgment plus the cost of attorneys fees had risen to $31 million.
But Oberlin appealed the case to the Ohio Supreme Court and also asked that it not be forced to pay the Gibson’s Bakery until that appeal was resolved. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed to the latter request earlier this month. However, today it looks like this case might finally be over. The Ohio Supreme Court has refused to consider Oberlin’s appeal.
The Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday said it would not take up an appeal of a $25 million judgment against Oberlin College in a business’ lawsuit claiming it was libeled by the school after a shoplifting incident involving three Black students…
Oberlin College in a statement said officials are disappointed the Supreme Court did not hear the school’s appeal.
“The issues raised by this case have been challenging, not only for the parties involved, but for the entire Oberlin community,” the statement said.
The issues in this case have not been challenging. They have been clear cut from the beginning and despite that, Oberlin has dragged this process out for years. This has gone on so long that two members of the Gibson family have died waiting for this judgment to be paid out: “David Gibson died in November 2019 at age 65. Allyn Gibson died in February. He was 93.” So it’s hard to have sympathy for Oberlin at this point. In my view, the school lied about its involvement in the protests and then came up with dubious legal claims to try to paying for its involvement.
Legal Insurrection, which has had the best coverage of this story for years, got a statement from the Gibson family. It reads in part:
“The jury recognized Oberlin College’s bullying tactics. The students admitted their misconduct, but Oberlin College could never admit that they were wrong. They presumed that they could bring the Gibsons to their knees. The power of truth has enabled the Gibson family to survive Oberlin’s onslaught.”
Legal Insurrection founder William Jacobson notes that while it’s not impossible for Oberlin to appeal this loss to the Supreme Court it’s extremely unlikely SCOTUS would take up a case which the Ohio Supreme Court decline to review. So this is almost certainly over except for the crying in the Oberlin administration building.
The moral of the story here is that falsely accusing someone of (or some institution) of racism can still cost you dearly even if you’re a very woke college used to stuffing the curriculum with such material. Hopefully other colleges are getting the message.
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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