Long Time Champion DEM SLEAZE BAG, ADAM SCHIFF IN ACTION!

How Democrat Adam Schiff abused his power to demand I be kicked off Twitter simply due to a personal vendetta

By Paul Sperry at the New York Post:

January 6, 2023 7:12pm 

James Sperry returned home from a vacation to find an email from journalist Taibbi alleging that Adam Schiff’s staff had pushed for Sperry’s account on Twitter to be banned.Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage

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Back from holiday vacation, I found an interesting email waiting for me in my inbox from Matt Taibbi, the independent journo Elon Musk tasked with reviewing and releasing internal Twitter documents about decisions to censor content and ban users from the platform.

“Paul,” Taibbi wrote, “just found a crazy email on Twitter — did you know Adam Schiff’s staff . . . asked Twitter to have you banned?”

I was gobsmacked. This would explain why Twitter could never give me a reason for suspending my account, even though I had broken none of its rules.

Schiff, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, made his “request” to ban me through his staff in a November 2020 memo to Twitter. Three months later, in early February 2021, I was kicked off the platform.

Why would a congressional leader sworn to protect the Constitution and First Amendment want to muzzle a veteran journalist? Like authoritarians everywhere, Schiff did not like critical reporting. The man who vowed to “protect our Democracy” from Donald Trump wanted to censor a free press.

In articles for RealClearInvestigations, I outed his anonymous “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of President Trump. It was Eric Ciaramella, a Democrat who had worked in the Trump White House as an Obama holdover. I also exposed Ciaramella’s prior relationship with one of Schiff’s top staffers on the impeachment committee, Sean Misko.

The request for the journalist’s page to be banned reportedly came from a 2020 memo.

My reporting cast fresh doubts on Schiff’s claims that the 2019 impeachment process happened organically. The New York Times had already busted Schiff lying about prior contacts with the whistleblower. Initially, Schiff publicly stated his office never spoke with the whistleblower before he filed his complaint against President Trump, when in fact a Schiff staffer had huddled with him, something Schiff’s spokesman Patrick Boland was forced to admit after the Times broke the story. (The staffer was never identified.) The prior contacts led to suspicions Schiff’s office helped the whistleblower craft his complaint as part of a partisan operation.

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In the censorship demands Schiff’s office sent Twitter, Misko and the “impeachment inquiry” are mentioned. It’s not clear if Ciaramella is, too, since some names are blacked out. Schiff demanded Twitter “remove any and all content”’ related to them.

Unlike in other cases where Twitter did censor accounts, officials there originally argued that “this isn’t feasible.”

At the time, Twitter was about the only media outlet where the names of Schiff’s impeachment operatives were circulating. The Washington press corps had conspired to protect the so-called whistleblower and cover up his identity. The Washington Post even scolded me for identifying him, claiming I was putting his life in danger. But this was a bluff. I was told by his family, as well as impeachment investigators, that he had received no credible threats.

In his list of demands, Schiff tried to justify banning me by claiming I was promoting “false QAnon conspiracies,” which I have never done and I challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks.

Schiff knew better. He knew “QAnon” was a trigger for Twitter censors, who were suppressing QAnon posts. Yet even Twitter’s liberal gatekeepers appeared skeptical of Schiff’s claims: “If it is related to QAnon it should already be deamplified.” (Emphasis in original.)

Schiff knows something about promoting false conspiracies. In 2017, he took to the microphone in a televised House Intelligence Committee hearing and read into the congressional record a screed of wild conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia from the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier.

He trumpeted them as if they were fact. But they were false — every one of them — as Special Counsel John Durham has proven in court documents, expanding on what Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz found in his earlier report.

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We now know most of the preposterous rumors Schiff dramatically read into the public record came from a source who was invented by the dossier’s authors. In his hyping of the dossier, Schiff smeared and defamed not only Trump, but also Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign adviser, whom Schiff falsely painted as a Russian agent.

The next year, Schiff would be caught lying about the so-called Nunes Memo exposing FBI abuse of the FISA wiretap process to spy on Page. Schiff claimed then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes misled the public when he said the FBI heavily relied on the debunked dossier to swear out the warrants. In his own memo, Schiff, as ranking member, insisted the FBI’s warrants were based on other evidence and were above-board.

In 2019, the scathing Horowitz Report proved it was Nunes who was telling the truth. Schiff, who had access to the same classified FISA information as Nunes, knew better.

This is the real spreader of falsehoods. Nonetheless, Twitter promised Schiff they would “review” my account — “again,” which suggests this wasn’t the first time Schiff had tried to silence me. Or the last. Were there other communications? Phone calls? Texts?

Months after Schiff lobbied Twitter to ban me and remove all the impeachment-related content from its platform, his communications director and chief of staff — Patrick Boland — tried to intimidate my editors at RCI into retracting the impeachment stories I broke a year earlier.

Schiff had called for different key words and topics, including QAnon, to be “deamplified.”MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

In his emails, Boland invoked “the events of January 6,” warning our stories could “result in actual violence” if they remained online. Over time, Boland’s demands became more and more strident. But my editors refused to give in to the bullying.

It wasn’t about “safety.” It was about wanting to avoid any scrutiny for their actions.

After joining Twitter in June 2016, I tweeted more than 20,100 tweets and I amassed more than 340,000 followers — all without any problems, without any suspensions. Until Schiff exercised his vendetta against me.

He appears to have secretly interfered with my ability to do my job for almost two years. Calling Twitter “social media” is a misnomer. In many ways, Twitter is simply the media now. As a working journalist, you need Twitter to do your job. News is broken there. Corporations and government post their press releases there. Key information and data are archived there.

If a powerful government official prevented me from promoting my stories, including my New York Post columns, on the nation’s digital town square, how is that not state censorship?

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, now battling for the speakership, has vowed to block Schiff from serving as the intelligence panel’s top Democrat. But Schiff has bigger ambitions. He is said to be planning a run at the Senate, where he could arguably have more power and influence to silence free speech.

Sperry is a senior reporter for RealClearInvestigations.com, a New York Post columnist and a bestselling author. Follow him and his work on his (now-restored) Twitter account @paulsperry_

“Hamlin’s injury is due to xxx.”

January 7, 2023

The Differential Diagnosis On Damar Hamlin’s Broken Heart

By Ted Noel, M.D. at American Thinker:

Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin makes a tackle, gets up, and immediately falls down. Every commentator immediately declares that Hamlin’s medical emergency is due to “commotio cordis.” Or so it seems. Any discussion of the possibility of the COVID vaccine’s involvement is “lies.”

I serve as a medical information resource to an Orlando political talk show called “The American Adversaries.” So, when this very public medical event happened, I became Chris Hart’s on-air guest. His co-host is Mike McBath, a former Detroit Lions player who is still actively involved in player issues. While doing my homework, I found lots of doctors making diagnoses. It did not matter whether the vocalist was in the front or the back row, he was singing in unison with the choir. This raises a serious question for these doctors. “Didn’t your medical school make you take a class on ‘differential diagnosis’?”

Let me ‘splain this for you. If you have high blood pressure, your doctor should do a good history, an examination, and some tests before he decides on the proper treatment for your blood pressure. Do you have:

• Morbid obesity
• Family history of hypertension
• Periodic sweating and fast heartbeat
• Or (many more)?

The point of all this is to make certain that the doctor is tackling the actual problem causing the high blood pressure. If he doesn’t, you’ll get a treatment that, at best, won’t help and, at worst, might be dangerous. Most of us are familiar with this in the epidemic of diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Lots of bright kids are getting (mal)treated with medications when their only problem is that they’re bored in school. The proper treatment for them is more challenging school work, not medications.

Just as hypertension and bored kids need proper diagnoses, the Damar Hamlin incident cries out for the same. And all those doctors making armchair diagnoses should slow down until they see all of Hamlin’s chart. In particular, they should stop claiming that anyone who implicates the clot shot is spreading misinformation. I haven’t seen Hamlin’s chart, so I can’t say for certain what caused his cardiac arrest, but I can be responsible and explain what may have happened. Notice that I said “may,” not “did.”

There are at least four possibilities that must be in the differential for Hamlin’s arrest.

1.    Commotio cordis

2.    Sudden death following COVID vaccination

3.    Adrenaline-induced lethal arrhythmia following chronic COVID vaccination-induced myocarditis

4.    Chronic underlying structural or electrophysiological cardiac pathology manifesting at that moment.

It’s crucially important to understand that those four don’t include all the “rare birds” listed by Dr. McCullough. Further, all of them would look exactly the same during the seconds from contact to collapse. All of them would stop his heart from pumping at the same moment. From the time his heart stopped until he passed out would be on the order of ten to fifteen seconds. That’s simply because your brain and body haven’t used up the oxygen the bloodstream already delivered.

Anyone who has watched a hunting show knows that an elk or moose can run hundreds of yards before collapsing, even after its heart has been destroyed by the bullet.

Ditto for Damar Hamlin. He made the tackle, stood up, and fell over when his brain and muscles exhausted the oxygen they already had.

We can wipe one of those choices off the list right away. Top-line professional athletes get really serious cardiac exams before their team signs the final contract. So, Hamlin is virtually certain no to have had any big-time anatomic or electrical problems with his heart before he joined the Buffalo Bills.

Commotio cordis (Latin for “commotion of the heart”) happens when a small dense object impacts the sternum (breast bone), creating an electrical impulse at exactly the wrong moment in the cardiac cycle. This “R on T” phenomenon puts the heart into ventricular fibrillation, a rhythm that doesn’t pump any blood. This is the “diagnosis” being shouted everywhere in the internet. But nobody claiming “This is it!” has a clue. There just isn’t any public medical data on Hamlin’s event. All we have is the Monday Night Football video and a clock.

Commotio cordis is most common in teenagers, whose chest walls are more flexible than adults. But even there, it’s rare, with only twenty or so cases in the US each year. Common missiles are softballs, hockey pucks, and similar small items. They strike the sternum, in the center of the chest, very close to the heart.

In Hamlin’s case, a frame-by-frame inspection of the event shows that the runner’s right shoulder pad struck Hamlin on the right side of his chest. This pad is designed to reduce impact forces, so it’s very unlikely that it would have generated any appreciable shock.

In fact, multiple knowledgeable observers, including Mike McBath, have commented that there was nothing unusual about the tackle. Hamlin was throwing the runner to Hamlin’s left as the runner tried to escape around Hamlin’s right. The runner’s helmet never impacted Hamlin’s chest.

This doesn’t mean that commotio cordis has been completely ruled out. It just makes it much less likely. And there are two other possibilities we must consider. The first is that Hamlin was in that short window for myocarditis and sudden death after the mRNA COVID shot. With no information to confirm this, we must put that in the “question mark” box.

A closely related possibility is chronic myocarditis from the COVID shot. This creates a susceptibility to adrenaline, leading to bad heart rhythms. In fact, it appears that all sudden death incidents, both after COVID and COVID shots, are directly due to surges of adrenaline.

Once again, Mike McBath confirms that during a game, at the moment of intense activity like making a tackle, personal adrenaline peaks. If Hamlin had this sort of subclinical chronic injury from the mRNA shot, the moment of the tackle could easily have set off a lethal event.

The events after Hamlin’s collapse also point us to the “vaccine,” which we know he had taken because he is not one of the two Bills who did not get the full original course. He was defibrillated very quickly, and this should have been able to convert him to a stable rhythm. But it took nine minutes to get a stable heart rhythm re-established. This suggests more serious underlying pathology, as we’d expect with a vaccine injury.

The careful reader will notice that I have not said, “Hamlin’s injury is due to xxx.” I just don’t have that information. The multitude of commentators voting for commotio cordis could be right.

But the information we have lines up better with a vaccine injury. Finally, I do not have high hopes for complete recovery. A nine-minute resuscitation is likely to lead to severe brain injury from lack of oxygen. But his early recovery of language function does point toward a better outcome than most.

The NFL should mandate that all its players and staff be examined for vaccine-induced cardiac injury. It would be a great service to them and to America.

Ted Noel MD is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media as DoctorTed and @vidzette. 

Our Mess IN BIDEN’S WASHINGTON!

JANUARY 7, 2023 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at PowerLine:

ALL IS PROCEEDING AS FORESEEN

In my facetious new year’s predictions I foresaw that Kevin McCarthy would find a way to win election as Speaker of the House in January. I added that by February he would begin to wonder why he wanted the job so badly. I’m thinking he began the wondering last week, so might have missed on that one.

I did not foresee that a fight might break out over the Speaker election. The New York Post reports that Alabama’s Rep. Mike Rogers had to be restrained from going after Matt Gaetz when Gaetz voted “present” on the fourteenth ballot. That’s the sprit! More on Rogers here. Gaetz was restrained by Rep. Richard Hudson. More on Hudson here.

As the election proceedings continued I couldn’t get enough of Matt Gaetz. Through those 15 ballots that ultimately delivered the Speakership to McCarthy with a last-minute assist from Gaetz, I wondered whom Gaetz might nominate next. Why not Gaetz himself? Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for me, Matt Gaetz.

I did foresee that evidence of President Biden’s age-related physical and mental decline would continue to mount. The evidence permeated Biden’s January 5 remarks on his “parole program” to stem illegal immigration. He barely comprehends the text he is reading: “That’s not just human smuggling at the border. We’re focused on cracking down on drug smuggling, which is a serious and deadly promise — or, excuse me, a pro- — problem. And I made a promise we would try this.”

I did not foresee that Biden would pretend to address the national security crisis he has created in the dissolution of our southern border. George Fishman explains what that’s all about in the New York Post column Biden tries to pull the old end run with his latest immigration plan.” Fishman explores the history and legal issues in the parole program before making this definitive point:

Biden’s parole scheme conveys huge benefits to him. If aliens enter the United States on parole, they won’t be apprehended and won’t be counted in the Biden administration’s now massive border numbers. In fact, Biden will be able to crow about bringing the border under “control,” simply by pretending the border doesn’t exist….

With much more pretending and blaming to come in 2023.

Knowing Your President Better!

 JANUARY 6, 2023 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

BORDERING ON NULLITY

President Biden let it be known first thing yesterday morning that he would visit El Paso this coming Sunday. The visit is notable for two reasons. First, it’s a rare weekend when Biden will not be on vacation. He has spent 40 percent of his term in office so far on vacation. At age 80, the guy needs his r & r.

Second, for “El Paso” read “the border.” For the first time in his political life Biden will visit the border. This can mean only one thing. Biden is preparing to announce his candidacy for a second term in office.

This raises the question whether he will be fit for a second term. We can answer that question definitively in the negative insofar as he is not fit for his present term. Moreover, his faculties are declining. He’s not getting shaper with age.

On Biden’s first day in office as president he undid approximately everything President Trump had done to achieve control of our border. During his campaign for the Democratic nomination he made it clear that he would open the border and he has made good on his promise.

Biden has dissolved our southern border. The official statistics reflect 4,000,000 illegal crossings in fiscal years 2021 and 2022. The first of those two years set a record that was broken by the second of the years. Nearly 5,000,000 illegal aliens have entered the United States since Biden took office.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly assured us that the border is secure. He has established himself as the Baghdad Bob of the Biden administration. He ought to be run out of town on a rail, but it should be noted that he has faithfully executed administration policy.

Biden followed up word of his weekend trip to El Paso with a late morning speech pretending that he will do something to stem the tide of illegal immigration. The White House has posted the transcript of his remarks here. The AP account of his remarks is here.

As usual, Biden stood before a teleprompter in the Roosevelt Room and struggled to read the text as it scrolled before him. Biden opened his remarks by blaming Republicans for the crisis that Mayorkas has declared not to exist. Further into his remarks Biden announced “one significant step we’re taking[.]” He observed: “Over the summer, we saw a huge spike in the number of Venezuelans traveling through — through Mexico and attempting to enter the United States without going through our legal processes. They res- — we responded by using and ensuring that there are two safe and lawful ways for someone leaving the country to come to America. And that was one of the reasons you — you were proposing.” I found the meaning not entirely clear.

He then described the administration’s response to the flood of Venezuelans:

First, if they’re seeking asylum, they can use an app on their cell phone called CBP One — O-N-E — CBP One — O-N-E. That’s to spell it out, not the number “1.” To schedule an appointment at a port of entry and make their asylum claim there without crossing the border unlawfully and have a decision determined by an asylum officer, do they qualify.

Second, in October, we worked with the Mexican government to launch a new parole program. There’s another program called the — you all know it, but the public may not — called the “parole program” that immediately showed results by reducing the number of people crossing the border unlawfully. The way this parole program works: One must have a lawful sponsor here in the United States who agrees to sponsor you to get here.

Then, that person has to go — undergo rigorous background checks and apply from outside the United States and not cross the border illegally in the meantime.

If they apply and their application is approved, they can use the same app, the CBP One app, to present at a port of entry and be able to work in the United States legally for two years. That’s the process.

But if their application is denied or if they attempt to cross into the United States unlawfully, they will be returned back to Mexico and will not be eligible for this program after that.

Biden’s plan to “stiffen enforcement,” as he put it, is to extend this program to those seeking emigration from Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti. “We anticipate this action is going to substantially reduce the number of people attempting — attempting to cross our southwest border without going through a legal process.”

And that’s not all: “In fact, today I’m announcing that Mexico has agreed to allow up to re- — to return up to 30,000 persons per month who try, get caught, and get sent back from those four countries who are apprehended while attempting to unlawfully cross the border — the southwest border.”

For some reason 30,000 is the magic number. Biden’s plan provides that the United States will accept 30,000 immigrants per month from the four nations for two years and offer the ability to work legally, as long as they meet the conditions set forth. By my calculation, that will increase legal immigration by 360,000 per year. Even the AP story pauses to note that this is “a huge number.”

In the news stories I don’t find anyone in the world of immigration enforcement seconding Biden’s plan. What are the prospects that it will cut the flow of illegal immigrants rather than exacerbate the problem?

This is ludicrous:

Most people would much rather stay in the country they are if they can feed their families, be safe, send their kids to school, and have opportunity.

It’s not like people — you’ve heard me say it before: It’s not like people are sitting around a table in — somewhere in Central America and saying, “I got a great idea. Let’s sell everything we have. Let’s give it to a coyote, a smuggler. They’ll take us on a harrowing journey for thousands of miles to get to the United States, then we’re going to illegally cross the border. They’re going to drop us in a desert. And we’re — in a place where we don’t speak the language. Won’t that be fun?” I’m not being facetious.

Note the correction of his reference to “President Harris” as he continued:

Well, [Vice] President Harris led this effort — led this effort to make things better in the countries from which they are leaving. And thanks to her leadership, she’s been able to generate more than $3.2 billion from the private sector to create jobs and opportunities in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to help people stay in their own countries — home countries where it’ll be safer and they have some opportunities.

By contrast with the reference to “President Harris,” the White House has let this stand uncorrected in the transcript: “[S]ince August of last year, Customs and Border Patrol have seized more than 20,000 pounds of deadly fentanyl. That’s enough to kill — kill as many as 1,000 people in this country. Twenty thousand pounds of fentanyl. It’s a killer. It’s a flat killer.” It’s a killer, indeed, when you demonstrate that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I should add that Biden’s “plan” was decried by the advocates of illegal immigration, although it seems to me highly likely to exacerbate the crisis that it allegedly addresses. There is no app for that hitch in the fix, or “fix.”