save or destroy the rule of law?

I had a Chicken Salad Sandwich on Croissant and chips for lunch, did some computer work, and had a 2hr snooze on the LR couch. Showers and massive t-storms blew by to the south of us, and gave us 396 drops, but I slept thru it. Temps dropped from 94° to 73°, and the hellish thunder and lightening woke me up quickly, after only 1½hrs napping. The t-storms came thru in massive waves, from 3-7p, each worse than the previous, but we needed the rain. So, no complaints.

By 7:30p, the rain had passed, I had some dinner and watched the news, Jesse Watters, and old episodes of Motor Trend's "Iron Resurrection", until 11. Lights out. Tomorrow starts a new week here in the "Journal", and with only a big landscaping presentation to Mt Rose Cemetery on Wednesday morning, and Wellspan Lab blood work on Thursday morning, the rest of the week is clear. Good on me.

The Biggest Missed Story of the 21st Century.

Here it is: the biggest missed story of this century is the incredible dumbing down of the American public, to the point where a cripplingly large portion of the adult population is no longer willing or able to exercise independent critical thinking in order to take decisive action on a wide range of issues that shape the direction of our economy, culture, and personal freedoms.  Indeed, too lazy and unmotivated to analyze readily available, credible data, far too many people have ceded their personal independence to government dictates — dictates clearly designed to increase government control over the population, rather than having been put in place for the genuine good of the people.

Let's look at some examples:

Masks

When COVID first hit, we were told to "mask up."  The COVID particle was smaller than the weave opening in non-professional masks, yet people went dutifully along anyway, unwilling to look at things logically.  Then we were told to double-mask.  Then it was the plastic face shield over a mask.  Nothing sums up the dumbing down of America better than the image of a person driving alone in his car, all masked up.

The COVID vaccines were — and remain — experimental.  First we were told that if you take the vax, you can't get COVID.  That was wrong.  Then we were told that if you take the vax and a booster, you can't get or transmit COVID.  That was wrong.  Then we were told that if you get double-boosted, you'll be protected from all future variants.  That was wrong.  Then we were assured that the inexplicably high number of adverse reactions to the vaccine was totally coincidental, despite earlier vaccines having been pulled from the market for having only a fraction of the adverse reactions of the COVID vaccines.  Yet when people were told "no entry unless vaccinated," they went along.

2020 Election Fraud

• More votes cast and counted than there were registered voters in the district.  No possibility of fraud there.
• Ballot-stuffing in drop boxes caught on camera during the wee hours of the night.  No possibility of fraud there.
• Late ballots coming in in a statistically impossible 90+% manner for one candidate.  No possibility of fraud there.
• Republican poll observers being kicked out and then an overwhelmingly high proportion of votes suddenly materializing for the Democrat candidate.  No possibility of fraud there.
• Mail-in voting procedures being widely implemented because of "COVID concerns," but there were no verifiable chain-of-custody procedures in place and no mechanism to confirm voter signature authenticity.  No possibility of fraud there.
• Voting machines proven to be connected to the internet, despite vehement protests to the contrary.  No possibility of fraud there.

How can any reasonably intelligent person not question these things?  You may still believe that the 2020 election results were valid, but simply raising logical questions does not make someone a criminal.

Those humorous "man in the street" interviews are fun, and granted, only the most outlandish ones make the cut onto the TV segment.  Still, answers like "1924" when asked, "What year did the Civil War begin?"  and "Hmmm...Spain?" when asked, "Whom did we win our independence from?" are emblematic of the widespread, deep-rooted "couldn't care less" attitude about knowing about the United States that's evidenced by so many adults today, especially Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z.

This wasn't always true.  In WWII, whether from Massachusetts or Kansas, Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, Red Sox fan or Cardinals fan, American G.I.s were fiercely loyal to one another and their country.  It mattered.

In the 1950s, the vast majority of ordinary Americans knew all about the "arms race" with the Soviets and knew exactly where the public fallout shelters were in case of attack.

The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was followed by everyone, eyes and ears glued to the television for hours on end.  We as a country pulled for JFK to find a way out.  We didn't say it was the Democrats' or Republicans' fault.  The country stood as one, calm, concerned, and informed.

In 1969, the Apollo 11 lunar landing was hailed as a unified American triumph, without any thought of conservatives vs. liberals.

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, the majority of American adults completely understood the significance, having lived with the Wall as a defining element of foreign relations for most of their adult lives.

But in recent decades, especially after 9/11/2001, the Democrats have made a conscious, concerted effort to divide the country along political and demographic lines for the express purpose of seizing ever-greater power over the electorate.  In addition to convincing various groups that they are suddenly victims as a result of Republican policies, Democrats have willingly attempted to make sure that as wide a swath as possible of their potential voting base remains uninformed.  Hence the phenomenal, almost criminal, misinformation and outright lies fed to the public about things such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.  These COVID treatments could've stopped the pandemic in its tracks had they been widely disseminated early on.

Instead, we got highly regarded doctors being banned from Facebook, hospitals succumbing to liberal government pressure and refusing to prescribe these treatments and liberal cable news commentators referring derisively to ivermectin as a "horse de-wormer" — all in service to one overriding fact:

Great portions of the American public will not seek out the truth if it's the slightest bit inconvenient.  These same people are only too willing to accept liberal government lies and being told what to do.  A frighteningly high percentage of potential Democrat voters are far more interested in their own personal comfort and convenience and far less interested in doing any kind of hard mental analysis of complicated issues.

The Democrats know this.  They know that if they tell their voting base to keep their mask on while in line at Starbucks, they will.  They have no interest in weave opening versus particle size.  They just want their Grande Iced Caramel Macchiato, and don't bother me with anything else.

There's a funny Facebook meme that's been making the rounds.  It goes something like, "Not saying the current generation is dumb, but your grandfather's car owner's manual had a section in it describing how to adjust the valves.  Today's cars owner's manuals tell you not to drink the battery fluid."

The high proportion of self-absorbed, convenience-obsessed, unintellectually curious adults in America is the biggest story of the 21st century.  This is what is driving the direction of the country and shaping our culture.

© 9.01.2023 by Steve Feinstein, "American Thinker".

The Must-See 12-Minute Documentary on the Transgender Movement: How Transgenderism Conquered America.

Transgender ideology is not going away. Understand the movement and how to respond by checking out this brand new documentary.

Transgenderism was a fringe idea just a few years ago. Now it is a booming industry.

It has been tempting — for Christians especially — to ignore the movement in hopes it will fade away like other fads. Transgenderism was a fringe idea just a few years ago. Now it is a booming industry.

Yet the ideology has only grown in strength, and now asserts itself in children’s classrooms, public libraries, sporting codes, TV, movies and politics.

A brand-new, 12-minute documentary has been released that explains transgenderism in clear terms and accounts for its wild popularity in Western nations.

How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life is the latest film by Christopher Rufo, a writer, political activist, investigative reporter, and contributing editor of City Journal.

Rufo’s previous documentaries have featured on PBS, Netflix, and international television. In prior years, the Daily Declaration has highlighted Rufo’s incisive commentary on Critical Race Theory and the poverty, homelessness, addiction and crime plaguing America.

How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life is possibly Rufo’s best film yet.

The Transgender Empire

Rufo begins his commentary by declaring, “the transgender movement has conquered American life”. He lays out his case:

Activist teachers have converted classrooms into propaganda. Influencers are driving billions of social media impressions. And doctors are cutting up kids in the name of ‘gender-affirming care’.

The story goes deeper than you might imagine, featuring rage-filled intellectuals, a trans billionaire benefactor, and large-scale medical experiments in a Detroit ghetto.

“This is the story of the transgender empire,” he summarises — “how it came into being and how it hopes to change the face of American society forever.

The Origins of Transgenderism

As with the same-sex marriage debate of yesteryear, the way many people encounter transgenderism today is through human stories. It is understandable that people feel sympathy when hearing about the experiences of people who identify as LGBT.

However, Christopher Rufo warns that behind the human face of transgenderism is a political ideology that was carefully designed to desecrate the traditional Western way of life. He explains:

In the late 1980s, a group of writers, including Judith Butler, Gail Rubin, Sandy Stone and Susan Stryker established the disciplines of queer theory and transgender studies. They argued that gender was a social construct, used to oppress racial and sexual minorities. They denounced the categories of man and woman as a false binary that upholds a system of heteronormativity, the “white-male-heterosexual power structure”.

Rufo adds that the aim of these writers was to reduce traditional views of gender to dust. “The most visceral, dramatic way to achieve this,” he narrates, “is transgenderism” — “If a man can become woman, if a woman can become man, they believed, the entire structure of creation could be toppled”.

Susan Stryker’s contribution is especially noteworthy:

Susan Stryker is one of the founding theorists of the trans movement. In her best-known essay on ‘Performing Transgender Rage’, Stryker argues that the transexual body is a technological construction that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” she wrote. “And this body is destined to channel its rage and revenge against the naturalized heterosexual order, against traditional family values, and against the hegemonic oppression of nature itself.”

Thus, according to Rufo, the transgender movement is inherently political. It uses “the construction of personal identity to advance a collective political vision”.

Moreover, transgenderism and Marxism are closely intertwined. Rufo highlights the work of Rosa Lee who saw trans people as “the new vanguard of the proletariat” who will help “abolish heteronormativity in the same way that orthodox Marxism promised to abolish capitalism”.

In short, argues Rufo, “All of society must be reorganised to affirm their identities and more importantly, their politics.”

© 7.23.2023 by Ben Terangi, "PatriotandLiberty".

The Whole Idea Behind Homeless Advocacy Is To Not Solve The Problem.

Perhaps it is a little early for another update here on the “homelessness” situation in San Francisco. (My last update was about six months ago in March 2023.). But there is a good reason for an update now: At least a few people seem finally to be catching on that the basic idea behind “homelessness” advocacy is to exploit an issue that brings forth great human empathy to generate vast taxpayer funds and then to not solve the problem. The spending continues and increases without limit. There is way too much money — for advocates — in “homelessness” for the problem ever to get solved, or even to decrease materially.

Two recent pieces from Bay Area writers commenting on the situation are: Sanjana Friedman at Pirate Wires, August 17, “San Francisco's Homeless Ticking Time Bomb”; and Susan Dyer Reynolds in the Marina Times August edition, “Fraudenbach: How the Coalition on Homelessness is holding San Francisco hostage.”

From the intro to Friedman’s piece:

The hardest thing you’ll ever have to comprehend in terms of San Francisco’s government is the city’s leaders aren’t incompetent. This is what they want. . . . Once acquainted with the basic facts of the crisis, including the incredible sum of money dedicated to solving the problem, the average San Franciscan concludes the city must be run by morons. . . . Even with supportive services, the numbers don’t add up. This is because the average person assumes the small cabal of activists who run the city’s bloated homeless industrial complex want to temporarily shelter and rehabilitate the homeless. They do not.

So, what do they want?

The goal of San Francisco’s activist government is to provide every person who moves to the city with a free, one-bedroom apartment for the rest of their life.

Needless to say, that goal is completely impossible to achieve.

My March 2023 post recounted the story of the big 2018 referendum, where San Francisco voters approved a payroll tax on city businesses to raise an additional $300 million per year to address the homelessness crisis, and to finally solve it once and for all. The $300 million got added to prior spending of about $285 million, close to doubling prior city spending on the homelessness issue. Note that these figures only include spending on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), and do not include other amounts of government spending on the homeless individuals, including cash grants, welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and much more.

Friedman has the latest numbers on homelessness headcount and spending put out by the city, which as she states “don’t add up.” The number of “homeless” in the city is given as 7,800, of which 4,400 sleep in the streets and 3,400 in shelters. (These numbers are based on a survey taken in 2022, which is more recent than the 2021 data used in my March post.). In a city of just over 800,000 people, this is just shy of 1% of the population. Spending this year for HSH is said to be $672 million. If spent on the 7,800 identified as homeless, that would come to more than $86,000 per head — a fantastic sum, given that none of the money actually goes to the supposed beneficiaries in cash. Rather, all of it is spent on the Homeless Industrial Complex to provide shelters and “services.” (The homeless people get cash and in kind benefits from other programs outside of this budget.)

But Friedman goes on to say that more than half (56%) of the budget of HSH does not go to the current homeless population, but rather to provide something called “permanent supportive housing” (PSH) to some 9,000 people who were previously homeless. That would be approximately $3500 per month for each of these people. Friedman describes the deal they get:

[T]here are no PSH-wide income maximum or minimum cutoffs, and no PSH-wide requirement that the tenant show progress in becoming financially independent, such as by working an ever-increasing number of hours, or even regularly looking for a job. If you're hopelessly addicted to drugs, SF will essentially enable your addiction in perpetuity, or for as long as you want.

If the remaining 44% of the $672 million is dedicated to the 7,800 currently on the streets or in shelters, that would come to about $3200 per month for each of them, the majority of whom live on the streets. Again, that $3200 is only for “homelessness” services, and does not include food, clothing, medical care, or anything else, all of which are provided by other government handouts.

Anyway, some 9,000 got the PSH apartments, and promptly another 7,800 turned up for the next round.

And, from Reynolds’s piece:

San Francisco’s homeless advocates believe money is the answer, with organizations coaching new arrivals to say they’re “from San Francisco” while helping them navigate the system. The “nonprofits” themselves complete what has become a billion-dollar industry chasing its own tail, with 59 providers receiving $240.6 million in fiscal year 2019–20, according to the latest audit by the city’s budget and legislative analyst.

Money may not be the answer to the homelessness problem, which never improves no matter how much is spent. However, it is clearly the answer for the advocates, who are pocketing money by the hundreds of millions. Remember, of that $240.6 million mentioned in Reynolds’s piece, exactly zero goes to the homeless individuals. All of it goes to the service providers. (The other $400+ million of the HSH budget also does not go to the homeless people, but rather to the government workers.)

Reynolds’s piece culminates with this quote from ex-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown: “[The homelessness problem] is not designed to be solved. It is designed to be perpetuated. It is to treat the problem, not solve it.”

He sure got that one right. There is way too much money in homelessness for the problem ever to be solved.

© 9.03.2023 by Francis Menton, "Manhattan Contyrarian".

Pandemic Pandemonium.

In the latter part of 2023 Americans have come to a much better understanding of the medical failures behind the COVID pandemic responses. Whether these measures were political failures remains to be seen. To consider that question, we would have to know whether any of the responsible officials had ulterior agendas behind, or in addition to, protecting public health.

More than a few analysts have speculated that the most constitutionally dubious pandemic measures were pretexts to solidify and embolden an emerging authoritarianism on the part of global elites. Such concerns are not evidence of paranoia. This May, the Rockefeller Foundation announced a new multi-million-dollar partnership with the World Health Organization’s Berlin-based Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. The funding is intended to enhance international coordination for treating climate change as a public health crisis.

Even putting the most benign interpretation on this “coordination,” such efforts reveal a widening chasm between how the international ruling class and the American people understand the very idea of “public health.” Implicated in that amorphous term are questions about risk and safety, consent, individual rights, the distinction between the public and the private, and even the relationship between the body and the soul—all of which raise profound moral and political questions.

Although we continue to learn disturbing new facts about what happened in the the wake of the COVID outbreak, many of us are even more alarmed and perplexed when we inquire, often unsuccessfully, into why many key decisions were made, by whom, and for what immediate and ultimate purposes. The most onerous pandemic impositions have, for now, been set aside, but there is little assurance that lockdowns might not return in response to another virus, or for entirely different reasons that the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, might recommend. This seems all the more possible given that there has been virtually no public reckoning over what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in May called “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

We have barely begun to understand the full depth of what has happened to the United States and the world in the past three years—although we do know that some influential figures have been quite open about treating the pandemic as an opportunity not to be wasted. In an act of amazing foresight and felicitous timing, Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum, managed to publish a book in July 2020 titled COVID: The Great Reset. What this reset means is a question to which we will return below.

Who Is Responsible?

For the Classical Greek philosophers, genuine knowledge depends on knowing a thing’s cause or causes. In ancient Greek, the word for cause, aitia, also means responsibility. To understand the why is to understand who or what is responsible. With regard to the pandemic measures, however, this is not so easy to ascertain. There is, to be sure, plenty of generalized blame to go around. But, perhaps not by accident, it is exceedingly difficult to disentangle the relationships and interconnected decision-making of the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the medical establishment (including its licensing boards and official journals), the pharmaceutical companies, as well as governors, Congress, and the president—not to mention the media, which certainly played a massive role in spreading false or inaccurate information.

Anthony Fauci, who headed the NIH’s Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, has disavowed responsibility for any number of things he finds inconvenient, taking refuge behind the claim that the agency he directed may only issue “guidance.” State and local officials, however, showed no lack of zeal in harassing, bankrupting, and even jailing noncompliant citizens, claiming that they were only acting on what they understood to be “orders” from the federal bureaucracies.

Scott Atlas, who witnessed and participated in some of the federal decision-making, writes in A Plague Upon Our House about the almost pathological evasion of responsibility at all levels of the pandemic response: “Accountability remains absent from government leaders, public health officials, and scientists in failing to admit errors about lockdowns; some even distort their records and portray disastrous death tallies as ‘successes.’”

Atlas’s book offers a blow-by-blow recounting of his frustrating role as an advisor to President Donald Trump during the second half of 2020. An accomplished radiologist and medical researcher, Atlas wanted decisions to be informed by the best available data. While he blames Trump partly for being too driven by the polls, he is especially dismayed by Trump’s excessive deference to expert authority.

The president, Atlas writes, “let [White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah] Birx and Fauci tell governors to prolong the lockdowns and school closures and continue the severe restrictions on businesses—strategies that failed to stop the elderly from dying, failed to stop the cases, and destroyed families and sacrificed children. They had convinced him to do exactly the opposite of what he would naturally do in any other circumstance,” and so he disregarded “his own common sense” and allowed.

The WAR is coming, soon.

© 9.02.2023 by Glenn Elmers, "Thomas Klingenstein".

What Will America Be Like Under Biden’s Digital Dollar? Look At Communist China.

President Joe Biden issued a sweeping executive order last year on Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which “places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.”

The Biden administration and its corporate media echo chamber want Americans to focus only on CBDC’s many benefits. But experiences in China, a nation that launched a digital currency in 2020, have shown that a CBDC considerably expands government power at the expense of individual freedom.

China’s digital currency, e-CNY, differs significantly from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. For instance, neither central banks nor governments have the power to program or manage Bitcoin. The total amount of Bitcoin was capped at 21 million by its mysterious creator. Such a finite supply gives Bitcoin its anti-inflation property. While Bitcoin transactions are transparent for all to see, users remain anonymous. 

China’s central bank, however, controls the supply of its digital yuan and can dictate when and how people spend it. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Chinese digital yuan is programmable, and “Beijing has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend it quickly, for times when the economy needs a jump start.”

Users of the digital yuan do not have the benefit of anonymity, so they are traceable, and the government knows precisely when each person spends money and what they spend it on. The digital yuan gives China’s authoritarian regime another powerful surveillance tool to control the Chinese people. 

China’s?intrusive social credit system already monitors 1.4 billion Chinese people, and it subjects their behaviors to various rewards and punishments. Beijing has a broad definition of “bad behavior,” ranging from running a red light to being critical of the Chinese government’s policies. Even before the digital yuan’s issuance, those Chinese citizens who received lower social credit scores due to “bad behaviors”?struggled?to live an everyday life. Many couldn’t travel because they were unable to buy plane or train tickets, some were denied school or employment opportunities, and some pet owners even had their pets confiscated.?

The digital yuan has enabled the Chinese government to reprimand human rights activists, religious practitioners, and government critics in new and terrifying ways: by instantly deducting fines from their bank accounts, confiscating their wealth, or banishing them from China’s digital payment system completely. Knowing they won’t be able to survive for a day in a cashless society is frightening enough to silence most dissenting voices.

A young Chinese woman’s viral video demonstrates what life in China was like when shut out of the nation’s digital payment system — what she called a “global social monetary control information system.” No matter how much paper currency she was willing to pay in a cashless city like Shanghai, she couldn’t buy anything, not even a pork bun. Frustrated and hungry, she complained, “How horrible China has become.”

Anyone who assumes the U.S. and other democracies will not abuse CBDCs like China has done is delusional. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed how quickly democratically elected governments in the West expanded their powers and intruded on citizens’ economic and political freedom in the name of public health.

The most notorious example was when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked?the Emergencies Act to crack down on truckers who protested peacefully against the government’s vaccine mandate. Without a court order, he froze bank accounts and suspended vehicle insurance for anyone linked to the protests. 

Before pushing for the digital dollar, the Biden administration had already looked for other ways to track Americans’ personal finances. It proposed to compel U.S. financial institutions to report all transactions from accounts holding more than $600 to the IRS, hoping to catch so-called “tax cheats” to help pay for the administration’s massive spending increases on left-wing causes, such as climate change.

Many critics warned that such a move would invade Americans’ privacy and put more personal financial data at risk. After much public outcry, the Biden administration backed down and recommended raising the threshold to accounts with more than $10,000 in annual transactions.? 

The digital dollar is Biden and his Democrat allies’ renewed and barely disguised effort to track American transactions and collect financial data. Given how often foreign adversaries have hacked various government agencies’ databases, Americans already have little faith in the U.S. government’s ability to protect Americans’ privacy. Why should we be coerced to hand over even more personal financial data to the government by using a CBDC?

Another troubling aspect of the digital dollar is that, once implemented, government officials can hardly resist the temptation to impose politically or ideologically driven limitations on spending. Biden’s executive order gave the game away by stating that a U.S. CBDC must ensure “financial inclusion and equity” and monitor or mitigate “climate change and pollution.”  

Based on the Biden administration’s?track record, it is likely to use the digital dollar to enforce a version of communist China’s social credit system. The administration will?divert?government resources to advance left-wing causes, such as climate change, without congressional oversight, while restricting government payments in areas such as oil and gas production or firearm manufacturing and trading. No wonder Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Biden’s digital currency proposal “a wolf coming as a wolf.”?

Early this year, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced legislation to “prohibit the Federal Reserve from developing a direct-to-consumer central bank digital currency which could be used as a financial surveillance tool by the federal government.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a co-sponsor of the bill, said:?”The American people ought to be able to spend their money how they choose without the possibility that every transaction could be tracked by the government. Policy this impactful should be made by Congress, not government bureaucrats.”  

Two months later,?Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., introduced his own bill to?close the Federal Reserve’s CBDC pilot program loophole.?Unfortunately, unless the GOP wins back the White House next year, none of these bills are likely to become laws.?

Meanwhile, the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve continue to make progress in their quest for the digital dollar. In July, the Federal Reserve launched FedNow, allowing businesses and individuals to “send and receive instant payments in real-time, around the clock, every day of the year.” Some experts warned that FedNow could “lay the groundwork for the infrastructure needed for a potential central bank digital currency in the U.S.”  

The Biden administration has placed “the highest urgency” on the development of the digital dollar, so all Americans who cherish liberty and want to protect their privacy must clearly, loudly voice their opposition to a CBDC. Public resistance may be our only way to prevent the U.S. from becoming a digital dystopia like communist China.

© 9.06.2023by Helen Raleigh, "The Federalist".

Biden Bribery Breadcrumbs Leave Only One Possible Conclusion: Deep-State Partisans Buried The Evidence.

The Federalist’s blockbuster exclusive on Tuesday revealed U.S. Attorney David Weiss was spoonfed The New York Times’ false narrative that the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney had pushed the Delaware office to investigate Rudy Giuliani’s claims of Biden family corruption. That revelation adds new texture to the IRS whistleblowers’ earlier testimony. More importantly, it suggests a select few DOJ and FBI agents buried the FD-1023 sent to Delaware for further investigation — a report memorializing a “highly credible” FBI confidential human source’s claims that Burisma paid $5 million bribes each to Hunter and Joe Biden.

On Dec. 11, 2020, The New York Times ran an article titled, “Material from Giuliani Spurred a Separate Justice Depart. Pursuit of Hunter Biden.” As I previously detailed, the Times’ reporting was “replete with falsehoods and deceptive narratives,” and sought to paint the “then-U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Scott Brady, whom Barr had tasked with screening any new material related to Ukraine,” as a partisan hack out to get the Bidens. The article falsely represented Brady as pushing the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office to investigate the Bidens based on material provided by Rudy Giuliani.

However, as a whistleblower would later confide in Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office had sought the investigation not of Giuliani material, but of separate intel provided by a longtime and “highly credible” confidential human source (CHS) on which agents briefed the Delaware office.

As Grassley explained in a July 2023 letter to Weiss, “[O]n October 23, 2020, Justice Department and FBI Special Agents from the Pittsburgh Field Office briefed Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, one of your top prosecutors, and FBI Special Agents from the Baltimore Field Office with respect to the contents of the FBI-generated FD-1023 alleging a criminal bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden.”

Grassley would later release a minimally redacted copy of the FD-1023, which confirmed the information provided to the Delaware office came not from Giuliani, but from the CHS.

An individual familiar with that Oct. 23 meeting previously confirmed to The Federalist that Weiss was not present for it. That detail gained new significance last week when FOIA documents, obtained by the Heritage Foundation following its lawsuit against the DOJ, revealed that one of Weiss’s top assistant U.S. attorneys forwarded him the Times article portraying the Pittsburgh evidence as originating from Giuliani.

With the Times piece purportedly sourced to “five current and former law enforcement officials and others with knowledge of F.B.I. interactions with the Justice Department,” unless someone told Weiss about the FD-1023 or its contents, Weiss would have had no basis to know the Pittsburgh office had given the Delaware office independent evidence of Biden family corruption. And this was evidence that had already been partially corroborated, as the Pennsylvania-based agents detailed in the briefing on Oct. 23, 2020.

So the key question, as Grassley asked Weiss, is when did he first learn of the FD-1023?

Weiss has yet to answer that question. But IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley’s testimony and supplemental affidavit suggest Wolf and the Baltimore agents briefed by Pittsburgh about the FD-1023 buried that evidence.

During Shapley’s testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS special agent made no mention of the FD-1023. Later, though, after former Attorney General William Barr confirmed to The Federalist that the FD-1023 had been sent to Delaware for further investigation, Shapley submitted a supplemental affidavit.

In it, Shapley said no one provided him, the line IRS agents acting under his supervision, or the FBI agents working with the IRS the FD-1023 or any of the details included in the FD-1023. Shapley further stated that he and other IRS investigators had requested to be included in the briefing from the Pittsburgh office but their requests were denied.

One tidbit from Shapley’s testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee further suggests Wolf and whoever else from the FBI Baltimore field office attended the October briefing buried the FD-1023.

In discussing a Dec. 3, 2020, meeting of the Delaware prosecution team — a meeting Weiss was in and out of — Shapley noted his team wanted to interview one of Hunter Biden’s associates to ask him, among other things, what “Ten held by H for the big guy” referenced.

“But AUSA Wolf interjected and said she did not want to ask about the big guy,” Shapley explained. Then when, as the IRS whistleblower put it, “multiple people in the room spoke up and objected that we had to ask,” Wolf responded, “there’s no specific criminality to that line of questioning.”

While “multiple people in the room” allegedly objected to Wolf’s limits on questioning, none of them apparently challenged Wolf’s claim that there was “no specific criminality.” Nor did anyone present raise the FD-1023 or the CHS.

Surely, they would have, though — if they knew about its existence.

This again raises the question: Who knew of the FD-1023, and when did Weiss learn of its existence?

From Grassley’s whistleblower, it appears Wolf included at least two Baltimore field office agents in the brief. However, from Shapley’s testimony, it appears the Baltimore field agents Wolf allowed to participate in the briefing were not the ones working Hunter’s case — which makes no sense.

That is, unless you are trying to bury the evidence.

© 9.06.2023 by Margot Cleveland, "The Federalist".

Life 1883-1972.

LIFE was an American general-interest magazine that became a pioneer in photojournalism. No one else even comes close to it prolific life. Here's 89 years of that fabled, slick publication, before it became a liberal propaganda machine -- like all the media did -- and its own demise began to happen. Simply type the year in the box and you get all weekly copies for that year, select the week and read what went on in the world. Neat.