“In an interview with The Washington Post’s “fact checker,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper contends that Politico misled the public about a letter he and 50 other former intel officials signed during the 2020 presidential campaign warning that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story could be Russian deception. “There was message distortion,” Clapper tells The Washington Post. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”
It was not clear, at all. The purpose of the letter, apparent then as it is now, was to discredit the Post’s scoop and provide Democrats and the media with ammunition to reject it. Of course intel officials couldn’t definitively say that Hunter’s emails, which implicated Joe Biden as a business partner, were concocted by Putin’s spooks. They had no access to the laptop. The purpose was to enlist former intel chiefs to cast doubt on the story. A perfunctory CYA paragraph doesn’t change anything.
The laptop lie began, as is often the case, with Adam Schiff, the California congressman who used the intelligence committee as a partisan disinfo clearinghouse. As soon as the story broke, Schiff claimed that “we know” — a phrase he used numerous times — that the emails had been planted by the Kremlin. By then, though, everyone understood the congressman was an irredeemable liar. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, issued a statement stressing that, actually, there was no evidence to back Schiff’s claims.
That’s when Natasha Bertrand, the dependable Dem dupe who had passed along so many other fake stories for the intel establishment, “reported” in Politico that more than 50 former senior intelligence officials had signed a letter asserting that the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The most notable signees were Clapper, a man who ran a domestic surveillance program and then lied about it to Congress, and former CIA director John Brennan, a man who once oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a Senate staffer, and then also lied about it to the American people.
The letter worked exactly as intended. “Look,” Biden said during the last 2020 presidential debate when asked about the laptop, “there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan.” On “60 Minutes,” Biden called the story “disinformation from the Russians.” Clapper tells the Washington Post that he had absolutely no idea how the former vice president had framed the contents of the letter — which is, to be generous, implausible nonsense.
If Clapper’s letter was merely a good-faith warning, then why didn’t any of the other signees push back against Biden’s contention during their numerous television appearances? Did none of them watch the presidential debates? Why didn’t Clapper send a follow-up statement clarifying his position after the Politico headline purportedly “distorted” the letter? Did he not see the piece until now — just as Republicans are about to investigate? Why did Clapper never raise any other yellow flags regarding the dozens of fantastical scoops about Russian collusion that dominated the news during the Trump years? (To be fair, it’s probably difficult to warn people about disinformation when you’re also spreading it.)
All the Post’s pedantic “fact check” does is offer the signees, and itself, cover. The Washington Post excuses the media’s (ongoing) suppression of the Hunter Biden story by arguing that the “leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta,” which “may have contributed to Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016,” made journalists extra cautious about relaying uncorroborated information. That contention is gravely undercut by the hundreds of pieces and columns the Post ran based on the Democratic oppo research that contained what was almost surely Russian disinformation. Any skeptical journalist would have also immediately identified the letter, and the Bertrand piece, as a nakedly partisan attempt to undermine the legitimacy of a story.
Indeed, the New York Post’s Hunter story had far more substantiation than any of the histrionic Russia-collusion pieces that the public was subjected to during the Trump years. The Post detailed how it came into possession of its evidence. It interviewed the owner of the Delaware computer shop where Hunter had abandoned his laptop. It provided Hunter’s signature on a receipt. The Post had on-the-record sources with intimate knowledge of Hunter’s business dealings. They had on-the-record interviews with people who claimed to have interactions with the presidential candidate — incidents we now know Biden had lied about for years. And later, the emails were authenticated by forensic specialists at other outlets, as well.”
——-
He’s a fraud who now grifts on the Never Trump media train.
As I’ve long pointed out, it is actually true the letter by the 50 former IC officials never directly called the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian disinfo” — although their letter directly argued Russia was involved, and some signatories individually called the laptop Russian disinfo.
Anyway here is an email I sent to James Clapper’s representatives in ***April 2021*** asking him about these exact issues. I never got a response back.🤷♂️https://t.co/RvxMkK3lHrpic.twitter.com/FGG2TZb04u
“Special Counsel John Durham, leading a multi-year probe of how U.S. intelligence officials conducted the Russia investigation, has yet to issue his final report. But according to the New York Times, Durham has already come up empty.
Durham’s team, the Times declared in a widely circulated Jan. 26 article, has gone “unsuccessfully down one path after another” and ultimately “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.” The three bylined reporters, Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner, base their conclusion on a “monthslong review,” including interviews “with more than a dozen current and former officials.”
Yet a review of the trio’s reporting shows that the Times is still engaging in the same journalistic behavior that has made the paper a reliable disseminator of discredited innuendo about a conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia. By omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts, the Times article does not set the record straight. Instead, it attempts to write off the Durham probe before its findings have been released, and whitewashes Russiagate’s key actors in the FBI and Clinton campaign long after they have been exposed.
The article fits into a larger pattern of malfeasance in the Times’ Russiagate coverage, which RCI has documented and the Columbia Journalism Review recently highlighted at length. RCI found, among other shortcomings, a failure to correct clear errors, the use of misleading language to minimize and sanitize the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and the refusal to acknowledge broader missteps, especially those involving anonymous sources who turned out to be deceitful. The Times’ failures are especially consequential because of the newspaper’s unique role in framing broader news narratives. That its Russiagate reporting shared journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, underscores a media dysfunction that extends beyond this single influential organization.
The Times’ attempt to cast doubt on the Durham probe has sparked a backlash that the newspaper has actively promoted. The Times’ Savage followed up on his co-bylined Jan. 26 story by reporting that House Democrats Ted Lieu and Daniel Goldman, “citing ‘alarming’ disclosures” in a recent New York Times article,” are demanding a Justice Department investigation into Durham’s inquiry. Savage also noted that Richard Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has floated the possibility of “oversight hearings.” This week, the Times published an op-ed from Neal Katyal, an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, which argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland can “discipline and fire” Durham if the special counsel fails to provide an “adequate” explanation for the Times’ “recent revelations.” Katyal also urged Garland to consider “refusing to make the [Durham] report public.”
The Italian Job
The paper’s headline-grabbing takeaway is that the Durham inquiry, rather than “uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged” by Trump, instead opened a criminal investigation “into suspicious financial dealings related to” the former president himself. The matter is said to have emerged during a trip by Durham and the attorney general who appointed him, William Barr, to Italy, where local officials “offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.” According to the Times, “[t]he extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.”
The Times’ extraordinary claim is not supported by its own reporting. Not only has Durham “never filed charges,” the Times admits, it also “remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took,” and “what he learned.” The Times then claims that this criminal inquiry fueled a “garbled echo” of news reports making the “erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation” opened by Durham targeted U.S. officials, rather than Trump himself. But the Times’ suggestive claims have instead fueled a garbled echo of erroneous assumptions that Durham’s inquiry led to a “Criminal Investigation Into Trump Himself,” as a Daily Beast “bombshell” headline put it.
Barr rejected the Times’ reporting in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. The Italy tip, Barr said, “was not directly about Trump” and only became a part of Durham’s inquiry because “it did have a relationship to the Russiagate stuff.” Ultimately, Barr says, “it turned out to be a complete non-issue.”
By embellishing the circumstances surrounding the Italy matter, the Times gave its audience the opposite impression. And rather than grapple with Barr’s comments, Savage spun them as a vindication. Barr “confirmed that there was an investigation involving Trump that Durham, uh, handled,” the Timesman told MSNBC. “So that’s interesting. We didn’t have anyone on the record confirming that before, and so that was nice of him.”
Savage did not respond to RCI’s request for comment, nor did the other two reporters on the Jan. 26 article. A Times spokesperson said the newspaper “stands behind this story and the reporting it contains.”
—-
Plenty more lies from the NYT. Click the link and read on.
REPORTER: "We have seen bookshelves in schools emptied—"
DESANTIS: "Actually, you know, that video, that was a fake narrative…There is longstanding Florida law that prohibits an adult from giving a school child pornography. Don't we think that's inappropriate?" pic.twitter.com/n7d8Aj9D7P
“The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its investigation into the origins of the covid pandemic.
The organization cited ongoing challenges over attempts to get information from Chinese sources.
“Their hands are really tied,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, told the scientific journal Nature. Without access to China, researchers said it may be impossible to understand how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people.
The next phase of the investigation was intended as a follow-up to research conducted in January 2021 by an international team of experts convened by the WHO in Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. The team released a report in March outlining four possible scenarios, with the most likely pointing to the virus spreading from bats to people. But the follow-up trip to further analyze evidence has been scrapped.
“There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO, told Nature. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins.” The Chinese ministry of foreign affairs did not respond to the journal’s requests for comment.
WHO recommended a deeper probe into whether a lab accident may be to blame for releasing the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is the cause of the covid pandemic after backlash abounded from their original report, which read as if the Chinese crafted it.
That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins, and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.”
Add the National Archives to the list of broken federal agencies.
“Closing In on the Classified Cover-up
A major Biden ally is also a top donor to the National Archives. Could private equity billionaire David Rubenstein hold the key to the White House documents scandal?”
“At the center of the Biden document cover-up is the question of who blocked the National Archives and Records Administration from informing the U.S. public about the classified records found in the president’s office in early November. The archives’ general counsel told members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability that he couldn’t divulge that information, but GOP House leadership concluded that only Attorney General Merrick Garland or Biden himself could have given those orders.
But there’s a third powerful name in play, this one from outside of the government: David Rubenstein. Co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm the Carlyle Group, Rubenstein is one of the archives’ most generous patrons. In 2013, the David M. Rubenstein Gallery at the National Archives was completed at a cost of $13.5 million. Rubenstein is also a major Biden ally. He has regularly hosted the Biden family at his Nantucket estate for Thanksgiving—in 2022, 2021, and 2014.
According to the chairman of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee James Comer, the archives’ “inconsistent treatment of recovering classified records held by former President Trump and President Biden raises questions about political bias at the agency.” And, indeed, under recently retired chief archivist David Ferreiro, the archives gladly joined forces with the Department of Justice-led anti-Trump campaign. As Trump’s lawyers were negotiating last winter with archives officials over which documents constituted presidential records and which were personal, Ferreiro, his tenure winding down, struck his final blow for the resistance: He referred the former president to the DOJ for a criminal investigation that led to the FBI’s August raid of Trump’s Florida home.
For Americans wondering why, in contrast to its partisan activism last summer, the National Archives has suddenly gone silent during the Biden affair, Rubenstein’s patronage may offer a clue. A spokesperson for Rubenstein said he played no role in this matter and a spokesperson from the National Archives responded that they have no comment.
Indeed, Biden’s friend Rubenstein appears to exercise considerable influence over the staffing of senior personnel at the agency. Before Ferreiro was appointed by Barack Obama in 2009 to lead the National Archives, he was the university librarian and vice provost for library affairs at Duke University from 1996 to 2004, at the same time that Rubenstein was chair of the Duke Board of Trustees. The nominee to replace Ferreiro at the archives, Colleen Shogan, is also affiliated with Rubenstein. She is currently the director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Center.
The National Archives is supposed to be above the political fray, an institution dedicated to preserving historical records. And indeed history is one of Rubenstein’s passions. According to one profile focused on his funding of Washington, D.C., monuments and institutions, “Rubenstein has shaped the cultural landscape of the nation’s capital perhaps more than any other private citizen in the past century.” It seems that Rubenstein’s historical mission is to turn U.S. institutions into platforms to promote contemporary progressive ideas. He donated $20 million to refurbish parts of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home in a makeover that recasts the founding father’s legacy as an object lesson in systemic racism. Ibram X. Kendi’s titles are available for purchase at the David M. Rubenstein Visitor Center, and the permanent David M. Rubenstein exhibit at the National Archives, “Records of Rights,” focuses on America’s disenfranchisement and mistreatment of minorities.
Like other top Biden allies, Rubenstein has long been bullish on the Chinese Communist Party. “China has a very bright economic outlook,” Rubenstein told a Davos audience in 2022. “We will continue to invest there.” A 2019 Wall Street Journal report showed that Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group helped Beijing evade U.S. export controls to purchase satellites that help network People’s Liberation Army troops, boost CCP propaganda broadcasts, and allow Chinese authorities to put down protests in Xinjiang, where the party has detained more than a million Muslims, mostly from the Turkic-speaking Uyghur population, in forced labor and reeducation camps.
Last week, the FBI conducted another inspection of one of Biden’s residences, this time a seaside home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in an unsuccessful search for more classified documents. The president’s lawyers are at pains to emphasize that in contrast to the former president, whom Biden targeted for holding classified documents, the current commander-in-chief is cooperating with federal investigators. Despite the fact that both Biden and Donald Trump are under investigation for the same thing, it’s true that the two cases are different.
In Trump’s case, Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel because the White House wants to charge the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination. The job of the special counsel assigned to the Biden affair is, it seems, to bury it. That’s why the Justice Department is ignoring the demands of Republican-led congressional oversight committees that want to know the substance of the Biden documents. Since those records are now part of an ongoing investigation, it’s unlikely the American public will see them anytime soon, or ever. And yet the scandal continues to grow.
Thanks to the stonewalling from government officials, the public still knows very little about the nature of the original misdeed, but current and former Republican officials say the National Archives may be the origin point of the Biden affair. While the administration’s official account holds that the Biden documents were packed up and shipped to his homes and office when he left the vice presidency, congressional sources believe that he may have retrieved them from the archives after he left office. Those sources call this the “Berger scenario,” after Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, who was caught leaving the archives with classified documents in 2003. One recent press account shows that Biden visited the archives in early 2017. “When he was writing a book after leaving the Vice Presidency,” according to The Washington Post, “he made the trip to the National Archives to review relevant documents.”
Republicans are angry that yet another Biden scandal was hidden from U.S. voters before an election, but there were signs something was brewing shortly after the classified documents were first identified by Biden’s lawyers at his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., just before the midterms. According to the Biden team’s account, the White House notified the archives on Nov. 2 and the archives told the DOJ two days later. Less than two weeks after that, a Nov. 14 article in The Washington Post explained that, according to “people familiar” with the Trump investigation, officials believed that Trump’s decision to hold on to documents after leaving office was motivated by ego, not profit. He just wanted to keep mementoes he’d collected during his time as leader of the free world.
It was a remarkable reversal after three months of media hysteria that reached a fever pitch when broadcast celebrities accused Trump of selling nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia, a crime for which, suggested historian Michael Beschloss and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, he should be executed. But never mind, what Trump had done wasn’t actually all that bad—because, as the U.S. public would soon learn, Biden had done the same.
And when the news did drop, party operatives brushed it off. The real problem, according to Biden boosters, is that the government classifies way too much material. That’s true, but it’s to be expected in the galactic capital of ass-covering, where long tenure is typically evidence of talent to escape accountability. Of course the federal government will avail its hirelings of every possible instrument to hide their screw-ups from those who pay their salaries—that is, the American public.”
“Brent Eldridge had heard that prices for natural gas were high this winter, but nothing prepared him for how bad it could be.
When he opened the envelope from Long Beach’s utility department, he couldn’t believe the total: $907.13, nearly eight times higher than his bill at the same time last year.
“It made me want to puke,” said Eldridge, 48, a pastor.
Household budgets in the Golden State, already stretched thin as prices soar for everything from rent to eggs, are being pummeled by monster gas bills.
Southern California Gas Co. and Pacific Gas & Electric began warning customers in January that they would see higher bills after the wholesale price of natural gas hit record highs. But reality didn’t sink in for many customers until their bills started arriving later in the month.
SoCalGas said the average bill in January for its 21.8 million customers was about $300, more than twice the average of January 2022 — and homeowners with pools or many rooms to heat have reported being charged north of $2,000. PG&E has projected that bills in central and Northern California will be 32% higher this winter.
Both utilities say they don’t profit from higher bills because the cost of buying the gas is passed on to consumers, with no markup.
The sky-high numbers have spurred wrangling at kitchen tables across California, as families pick apart whether they ran the heater too much or took too many hot showers. Others have indignantly observed that the shocking bills followed a month of monastic living with the thermostat turned down and extra blankets on the bed.
Energy costs are a “crisis” that are walloping households already squeezed by inflation and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, who called an emergency meeting of the City Council this month to approve extra assistance for customers who can’t pay.
Bills have soared “to levels that we haven’t seen in the last 20 years,” Richardson said. “We know families are struggling to make ends meet.”
Wholesale prices for natural gas in the West were 300% higher in December than they were in January 2022. Since December, prices have plummeted, but customers won’t see that reflected in their bills until late February or early March.
SoCalGas’ customer service lines have received more than 1 million calls this year, an increase of 15%, said Gillian Wright, a senior vice president and chief customer officer.”
“As the months and years go by, we continue to learn more and more about the government’s handling of the pandemic response. And the more we learn, the uglier the picture becomes. I’m not just talking about the federal government here, either. State and municipal government leaders were drinking deeply from the cup of executive authority during a declared state of emergency as well. Today’s story has elements of both and it even involves the Federal Bureau of Investigation, potentially adding another dark mark to the FBI’s record. It’s being alleged that the municipal government of New York City sent the fingerprints of public school teachers who were fired after refusing to take the COVID injections to the Bureau. They further assigned a “problem code” to the teachers’ records, impeding their ability to find new work elsewhere. This sounds like something that would happen in China or Russia, but it was reportedly taking place right here in America. (Free Beacon)
New York City sent the fingerprints of unvaccinated public school teachers to the FBI, the educators allege in a lawsuit against the city government.
The city also flagged the teachers, whom the city fired for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, with a “problem code” that can affect their ability to get another job, Fox News reported.
“Fingerprints are sent with that flag to the FBI and the New York Criminal Justice Services, so it impacts their ongoing ability to get employment at other places,” said John Bursch, a lawyer representing the teachers in their suit against the city.
For years on end, we have covered stories about how it’s almost impossible to get a teacher fired in New York City, even when they were accused of sexual contact with the children. (That’s still happening, by the way.) The unions are too powerful and the politicians fear their reprisal. But along came the COVID vaccine mandates and suddenly they could fire teachers at the drop of a hat. So let’s put this in perspective. You can diddle a 15-year-old girl and keep your job. But if you refuse the jab, you’re going to be hounded to the ends of the earth.
Much as we saw in the military, New York City fired nearly 2,000 people for refusing to take the experimental “vaccines.” That number includes the teachers who were dismissed by the city’s Department of Education. They approved almost none of the applications for waivers based on religious or medical reasons.
The Mayor has now lifted the vaccine mandate for city workers, but the ones who were fired are not being automatically given their jobs back. Nor are they receiving back pay. They have to apply for a job if they want one and do so with a “problem code” on their record. Some of the dismissed teachers have reported being rejected for jobs, even in other states.
That brings us back to the question of what the FBI had to do with these situations. What “crime” were the teachers accused of committing? They refused to follow a municipal policy and lost their jobs as a result. How in the world does that constitute a federal crime? And what is the FBI doing with their records, including their fingerprints?
This just sounds like yet another example of the Bureau being weaponized against anyone and everyone who failed to toe the Biden line and comply with federal dictates. You’re not allowed to question The Narrative, and if you do, G-men will be unleashed upon you and your ability to have a career and earn a living for yourself may be endangered. I’m still no fan of the teachers’ unions in general, but in this instance, I’ll be taking their side. These people were hosed by their own government at multiple levels and the “rules” they broke turned out to be unscientific nonsense and potentially even physically dangerous for some.”
Even when no charges are dropped against you, you are still the thing they accused you of…
— CryptoPokerPlayer.Cult Pronouns CULT/Meng (@JamesWi41139448) February 15, 2023
DOJ has just done incalculable damage to its credibility in the last several years. “The Justice Department has ended its investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz without bringing charges” https://t.co/krFX3svzIx
The fumes from these chemicals can kill humans and animals. Local wildlife is dead. Water is contaminated. An entire city of people may never be able to return home again in #EastPalestine Ohio that appears to have just been Chernobyled in this train derailment.
So it seems that the residents of East Palestine, OH aren’t believing a word of what the government is telling them. After the last 3 years why would anyone, anywhere, for any reason, believe anything the government says? #EastPalestine
The line to get into the East Palestine town hall tonight stretches for a half mile. THOUSANDS of people are PISSED and none of them trust what the government is telling them.
But at least they know what pronouns their teacher prefers….
Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 #Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools. Not 1 single student. Education data from @ISBEnews
HUGE: 101 Page Whistleblower Document Reveals The Biden Pentagon Suppressed Concerns About COVID Shot Side Effects And Many Soldiers Suffered Horrifying Injuries As A Result https://t.co/iR5uArcFzX
Adults ages 25-44 are dying of heart attacks at a 30% higher rate than ever before. So why are so few willing to ask if the covid shot is potentially to blame? Debate, discuss, that’s how science works: pic.twitter.com/qB4PWw4t6D
Today the DOJ announced there is no evidence @mattgaetz is a sex trafficker so where does he go to get his apology from Mike Pence's former Chief of Staff @marctshort for saying on CNN in July that he would be "in prison for sex trafficking by 2024." pic.twitter.com/B1rGDroSqO
“This is going to set some heads on fire. One day after a group of NY Times contributors and celebrities sent a letter to the Times complaining about their coverage of trans issues, the paper has published an opinion piece titled “In Defense of J.K. Rowling.” The piece is written by Pamela Paul and does what almost no one involved in attacking Rowling has been willing to do: Look at the facts.
In 2020, The Leaky Cauldron, one of the biggest “Harry Potter” fan sites, claimed that Rowling had endorsed “harmful and disproven beliefs about what it means to be a transgender person,” letting members know it would avoid featuring quotes from and photos of the author.
Other critics have advocated that bookstores pull her books from the shelves, and some bookstores have done so. She has also been subjected to verbal abuse, doxxing and threats of sexual and other physical violence, including death threats…
This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.
So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.
The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.
Pamela Paul concludes, “nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.” All of this is the subject of a new podcast being launched next week by The Free Press. The podcast is based on nine hours of interviews with Rowling, her most lengthy discussion of her views on this topic.”
—
The rage mob in the media and Dem PACs then go all apoplectic on JK and those who dare defend her for the rest of the piece.
There’s tons of hate, but none of it is coming from Rowling.
“On Monday, I dropped a report that revealed the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s embarrassing scandal surrounding its former star counterintelligence agent Charles McGonigal, who’s been indicted on corruption-related federal charges, is much worse than the Department of Justice and the media have admitted.
While McGonigal was still serving as a senior FBI official in 2017 he became a partner of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and his ruling Socialist Party. In that capacity, McGonigal is believed to have extorted wealthy Albanians in a sort of protection racket where the bureau bigwig promised to protect the oligarchs from U.S. sanctions in exchange for big bribes. McGonigal’s haul from this was on the order of $32 million (which was presumably shared with his partners). I also reported that McGonigal shook down Shefqet Kastrati, Albania’s top oil magnate, for 12 million euros, nearly $15 million, in 2017.
Kastrati’s representatives subsequently contacted the Washington Examiner to adamantly deny that allegation. But although the FBI’s embarrassing scandal was ignored by much of the U.S. media, it ignited a firestorm in Albania. There, McGonigal’s apparent mafia-like antics in collusion with the government in Tirana have been front-page news.
Accusations continue to mount that McGonigal was shaking down rich Balkan businesspeople, employing his FBI affiliation in the furtherance of his con. Albanian media also reported that McGonigal, in collusion with Rama and his associates, shook down Kastrati for as much as 15 million euros to keep the oil magnate in the good graces of the Department of State in Washington. This included the involvement of Agron Neza, the former Albanian intelligence operative and McGonigal partner who accompanied the FBI man on trips to Albania and was reportedly “a regular visitor to Kastrati’s office” and an intermediary who “passed bags of money” to McGonigal.
There are also reports that Rama allies, such as Tirana mayor Erion Veliaj, paid McGonigal some 8 million euros to have a political rival, Ylli Ndroqi, declared non grata by Washington. A frequent critic of the Rama government, Ndroqi had his media empire seized by the ruling socialists in 2020 amid allegations of drug trafficking and money laundering — which are the same things the Rama government is widely alleged to be involved in.
The scam was audacious: “[McGonigal] had access to the original files used in the blacklist of Russians from the U.S., they took them and changed the names with Albanian names … the FBI guy in Tirana, his partners, had papers that looked legit, the FBI logo, that they would present to businessmen around town who might be suspected of doing things that could get into blacklist from us. They would then set up a meeting with the FBI guy, usually in Vienna, where the frightened businessmen would be encouraged to pay the partners 1 to 5 million.”
“Governor Mike DeWine dropped a truth bomb a few hours ago: he has been in contact with FEMA every day since the disaster in East Palestine unfolded, and the Biden Administration is refusing assistance.
Refusing assistance!
Perhaps this is why Mayor Pete has refused to go to the site of the disaster, and why he has been joking on TV while one of the largest environmental disasters in recent history has been ongoing.”
The DeWine Administration has been in daily contact w/ FEMA to discuss the need for federal support, but FEMA continues to advise that Ohio is not eligible for assistance at this time. I will continue working with FEMA to determine what assistance can be provided.
The Mayor of East Palestine DID decide to take questions at the “open house” last night. Resident: Where’s Pete Buttigieg? Where’s he at? Mayor: I don’t know. Your guess is as good as me. Yesterday was the first time I heard anything from the White House. @LucasFoxNewspic.twitter.com/TXuKFPg9Cx
It's been nearly two weeks since a train loaded with toxic chemicals derailed and burst into a raging inferno, and frustrated residents of East Palestine, Ohio, are demanding answers. @billweircnn explains what to know. https://t.co/AqZ2eFMyeapic.twitter.com/WcgZkD5Ile
Wandering Views 
I think it’s getting hard for him to keep all the lies he’s told straight.
“James Clapper Can’t Stop Lying”
https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/14/james-clapper-cant-stop-lying/
“In an interview with The Washington Post’s “fact checker,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper contends that Politico misled the public about a letter he and 50 other former intel officials signed during the 2020 presidential campaign warning that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story could be Russian deception. “There was message distortion,” Clapper tells The Washington Post. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”
It was not clear, at all. The purpose of the letter, apparent then as it is now, was to discredit the Post’s scoop and provide Democrats and the media with ammunition to reject it. Of course intel officials couldn’t definitively say that Hunter’s emails, which implicated Joe Biden as a business partner, were concocted by Putin’s spooks. They had no access to the laptop. The purpose was to enlist former intel chiefs to cast doubt on the story. A perfunctory CYA paragraph doesn’t change anything.
The laptop lie began, as is often the case, with Adam Schiff, the California congressman who used the intelligence committee as a partisan disinfo clearinghouse. As soon as the story broke, Schiff claimed that “we know” — a phrase he used numerous times — that the emails had been planted by the Kremlin. By then, though, everyone understood the congressman was an irredeemable liar. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, issued a statement stressing that, actually, there was no evidence to back Schiff’s claims.
That’s when Natasha Bertrand, the dependable Dem dupe who had passed along so many other fake stories for the intel establishment, “reported” in Politico that more than 50 former senior intelligence officials had signed a letter asserting that the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The most notable signees were Clapper, a man who ran a domestic surveillance program and then lied about it to Congress, and former CIA director John Brennan, a man who once oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a Senate staffer, and then also lied about it to the American people.
The letter worked exactly as intended. “Look,” Biden said during the last 2020 presidential debate when asked about the laptop, “there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan.” On “60 Minutes,” Biden called the story “disinformation from the Russians.” Clapper tells the Washington Post that he had absolutely no idea how the former vice president had framed the contents of the letter — which is, to be generous, implausible nonsense.
If Clapper’s letter was merely a good-faith warning, then why didn’t any of the other signees push back against Biden’s contention during their numerous television appearances? Did none of them watch the presidential debates? Why didn’t Clapper send a follow-up statement clarifying his position after the Politico headline purportedly “distorted” the letter? Did he not see the piece until now — just as Republicans are about to investigate? Why did Clapper never raise any other yellow flags regarding the dozens of fantastical scoops about Russian collusion that dominated the news during the Trump years? (To be fair, it’s probably difficult to warn people about disinformation when you’re also spreading it.)
All the Post’s pedantic “fact check” does is offer the signees, and itself, cover. The Washington Post excuses the media’s (ongoing) suppression of the Hunter Biden story by arguing that the “leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta,” which “may have contributed to Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016,” made journalists extra cautious about relaying uncorroborated information. That contention is gravely undercut by the hundreds of pieces and columns the Post ran based on the Democratic oppo research that contained what was almost surely Russian disinformation. Any skeptical journalist would have also immediately identified the letter, and the Bertrand piece, as a nakedly partisan attempt to undermine the legitimacy of a story.
Indeed, the New York Post’s Hunter story had far more substantiation than any of the histrionic Russia-collusion pieces that the public was subjected to during the Trump years. The Post detailed how it came into possession of its evidence. It interviewed the owner of the Delaware computer shop where Hunter had abandoned his laptop. It provided Hunter’s signature on a receipt. The Post had on-the-record sources with intimate knowledge of Hunter’s business dealings. They had on-the-record interviews with people who claimed to have interactions with the presidential candidate — incidents we now know Biden had lied about for years. And later, the emails were authenticated by forensic specialists at other outlets, as well.”
——-
He’s a fraud who now grifts on the Never Trump media train.
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Of course, because being in the media means never having to admit you lied. So they just keep doing it.
“Unchastened by Russiagate, the NY Times Doubles Down in Its Special Counsel Coverage”
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/02/15/unchastened_by_its_russiagate_embarrassment_the_ny_times_doubles_down_in_its_special_counsel_coverage_881457.html
“Special Counsel John Durham, leading a multi-year probe of how U.S. intelligence officials conducted the Russia investigation, has yet to issue his final report. But according to the New York Times, Durham has already come up empty.
Durham’s team, the Times declared in a widely circulated Jan. 26 article, has gone “unsuccessfully down one path after another” and ultimately “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.” The three bylined reporters, Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner, base their conclusion on a “monthslong review,” including interviews “with more than a dozen current and former officials.”
Yet a review of the trio’s reporting shows that the Times is still engaging in the same journalistic behavior that has made the paper a reliable disseminator of discredited innuendo about a conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia. By omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts, the Times article does not set the record straight. Instead, it attempts to write off the Durham probe before its findings have been released, and whitewashes Russiagate’s key actors in the FBI and Clinton campaign long after they have been exposed.
The article fits into a larger pattern of malfeasance in the Times’ Russiagate coverage, which RCI has documented and the Columbia Journalism Review recently highlighted at length. RCI found, among other shortcomings, a failure to correct clear errors, the use of misleading language to minimize and sanitize the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and the refusal to acknowledge broader missteps, especially those involving anonymous sources who turned out to be deceitful. The Times’ failures are especially consequential because of the newspaper’s unique role in framing broader news narratives. That its Russiagate reporting shared journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, underscores a media dysfunction that extends beyond this single influential organization.
The Times’ attempt to cast doubt on the Durham probe has sparked a backlash that the newspaper has actively promoted. The Times’ Savage followed up on his co-bylined Jan. 26 story by reporting that House Democrats Ted Lieu and Daniel Goldman, “citing ‘alarming’ disclosures” in a recent New York Times article,” are demanding a Justice Department investigation into Durham’s inquiry. Savage also noted that Richard Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has floated the possibility of “oversight hearings.” This week, the Times published an op-ed from Neal Katyal, an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, which argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland can “discipline and fire” Durham if the special counsel fails to provide an “adequate” explanation for the Times’ “recent revelations.” Katyal also urged Garland to consider “refusing to make the [Durham] report public.”
The Italian Job
The paper’s headline-grabbing takeaway is that the Durham inquiry, rather than “uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged” by Trump, instead opened a criminal investigation “into suspicious financial dealings related to” the former president himself. The matter is said to have emerged during a trip by Durham and the attorney general who appointed him, William Barr, to Italy, where local officials “offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.” According to the Times, “[t]he extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.”
The Times’ extraordinary claim is not supported by its own reporting. Not only has Durham “never filed charges,” the Times admits, it also “remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took,” and “what he learned.” The Times then claims that this criminal inquiry fueled a “garbled echo” of news reports making the “erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation” opened by Durham targeted U.S. officials, rather than Trump himself. But the Times’ suggestive claims have instead fueled a garbled echo of erroneous assumptions that Durham’s inquiry led to a “Criminal Investigation Into Trump Himself,” as a Daily Beast “bombshell” headline put it.
Barr rejected the Times’ reporting in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. The Italy tip, Barr said, “was not directly about Trump” and only became a part of Durham’s inquiry because “it did have a relationship to the Russiagate stuff.” Ultimately, Barr says, “it turned out to be a complete non-issue.”
By embellishing the circumstances surrounding the Italy matter, the Times gave its audience the opposite impression. And rather than grapple with Barr’s comments, Savage spun them as a vindication. Barr “confirmed that there was an investigation involving Trump that Durham, uh, handled,” the Timesman told MSNBC. “So that’s interesting. We didn’t have anyone on the record confirming that before, and so that was nice of him.”
Savage did not respond to RCI’s request for comment, nor did the other two reporters on the Jan. 26 article. A Times spokesperson said the newspaper “stands behind this story and the reporting it contains.”
—-
Plenty more lies from the NYT. Click the link and read on.
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She should learn to code because she sucks at reporting. She doesn’t seek truth, only confrontation.
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Of course, mustn’t dig too deeply now….
“WHO Quietly Drops Second Phase of Probe Into Covid Origins”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/02/who-quietly-drops-second-phase-of-probe-into-covid-origins/
“The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its investigation into the origins of the covid pandemic.
The organization cited ongoing challenges over attempts to get information from Chinese sources.
“Their hands are really tied,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, told the scientific journal Nature. Without access to China, researchers said it may be impossible to understand how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people.
The next phase of the investigation was intended as a follow-up to research conducted in January 2021 by an international team of experts convened by the WHO in Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. The team released a report in March outlining four possible scenarios, with the most likely pointing to the virus spreading from bats to people. But the follow-up trip to further analyze evidence has been scrapped.
“There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO, told Nature. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins.” The Chinese ministry of foreign affairs did not respond to the journal’s requests for comment.
WHO recommended a deeper probe into whether a lab accident may be to blame for releasing the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is the cause of the covid pandemic after backlash abounded from their original report, which read as if the Chinese crafted it.
That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins, and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.”
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Add the National Archives to the list of broken federal agencies.
“Closing In on the Classified Cover-up
A major Biden ally is also a top donor to the National Archives. Could private equity billionaire David Rubenstein hold the key to the White House documents scandal?”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/closing-in-classified-document-coverup
“At the center of the Biden document cover-up is the question of who blocked the National Archives and Records Administration from informing the U.S. public about the classified records found in the president’s office in early November. The archives’ general counsel told members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability that he couldn’t divulge that information, but GOP House leadership concluded that only Attorney General Merrick Garland or Biden himself could have given those orders.
But there’s a third powerful name in play, this one from outside of the government: David Rubenstein. Co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm the Carlyle Group, Rubenstein is one of the archives’ most generous patrons. In 2013, the David M. Rubenstein Gallery at the National Archives was completed at a cost of $13.5 million. Rubenstein is also a major Biden ally. He has regularly hosted the Biden family at his Nantucket estate for Thanksgiving—in 2022, 2021, and 2014.
According to the chairman of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee James Comer, the archives’ “inconsistent treatment of recovering classified records held by former President Trump and President Biden raises questions about political bias at the agency.” And, indeed, under recently retired chief archivist David Ferreiro, the archives gladly joined forces with the Department of Justice-led anti-Trump campaign. As Trump’s lawyers were negotiating last winter with archives officials over which documents constituted presidential records and which were personal, Ferreiro, his tenure winding down, struck his final blow for the resistance: He referred the former president to the DOJ for a criminal investigation that led to the FBI’s August raid of Trump’s Florida home.
For Americans wondering why, in contrast to its partisan activism last summer, the National Archives has suddenly gone silent during the Biden affair, Rubenstein’s patronage may offer a clue. A spokesperson for Rubenstein said he played no role in this matter and a spokesperson from the National Archives responded that they have no comment.
Indeed, Biden’s friend Rubenstein appears to exercise considerable influence over the staffing of senior personnel at the agency. Before Ferreiro was appointed by Barack Obama in 2009 to lead the National Archives, he was the university librarian and vice provost for library affairs at Duke University from 1996 to 2004, at the same time that Rubenstein was chair of the Duke Board of Trustees. The nominee to replace Ferreiro at the archives, Colleen Shogan, is also affiliated with Rubenstein. She is currently the director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Center.
The National Archives is supposed to be above the political fray, an institution dedicated to preserving historical records. And indeed history is one of Rubenstein’s passions. According to one profile focused on his funding of Washington, D.C., monuments and institutions, “Rubenstein has shaped the cultural landscape of the nation’s capital perhaps more than any other private citizen in the past century.” It seems that Rubenstein’s historical mission is to turn U.S. institutions into platforms to promote contemporary progressive ideas. He donated $20 million to refurbish parts of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home in a makeover that recasts the founding father’s legacy as an object lesson in systemic racism. Ibram X. Kendi’s titles are available for purchase at the David M. Rubenstein Visitor Center, and the permanent David M. Rubenstein exhibit at the National Archives, “Records of Rights,” focuses on America’s disenfranchisement and mistreatment of minorities.
Like other top Biden allies, Rubenstein has long been bullish on the Chinese Communist Party. “China has a very bright economic outlook,” Rubenstein told a Davos audience in 2022. “We will continue to invest there.” A 2019 Wall Street Journal report showed that Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group helped Beijing evade U.S. export controls to purchase satellites that help network People’s Liberation Army troops, boost CCP propaganda broadcasts, and allow Chinese authorities to put down protests in Xinjiang, where the party has detained more than a million Muslims, mostly from the Turkic-speaking Uyghur population, in forced labor and reeducation camps.
Last week, the FBI conducted another inspection of one of Biden’s residences, this time a seaside home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in an unsuccessful search for more classified documents. The president’s lawyers are at pains to emphasize that in contrast to the former president, whom Biden targeted for holding classified documents, the current commander-in-chief is cooperating with federal investigators. Despite the fact that both Biden and Donald Trump are under investigation for the same thing, it’s true that the two cases are different.
In Trump’s case, Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel because the White House wants to charge the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination. The job of the special counsel assigned to the Biden affair is, it seems, to bury it. That’s why the Justice Department is ignoring the demands of Republican-led congressional oversight committees that want to know the substance of the Biden documents. Since those records are now part of an ongoing investigation, it’s unlikely the American public will see them anytime soon, or ever. And yet the scandal continues to grow.
Thanks to the stonewalling from government officials, the public still knows very little about the nature of the original misdeed, but current and former Republican officials say the National Archives may be the origin point of the Biden affair. While the administration’s official account holds that the Biden documents were packed up and shipped to his homes and office when he left the vice presidency, congressional sources believe that he may have retrieved them from the archives after he left office. Those sources call this the “Berger scenario,” after Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, who was caught leaving the archives with classified documents in 2003. One recent press account shows that Biden visited the archives in early 2017. “When he was writing a book after leaving the Vice Presidency,” according to The Washington Post, “he made the trip to the National Archives to review relevant documents.”
Republicans are angry that yet another Biden scandal was hidden from U.S. voters before an election, but there were signs something was brewing shortly after the classified documents were first identified by Biden’s lawyers at his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., just before the midterms. According to the Biden team’s account, the White House notified the archives on Nov. 2 and the archives told the DOJ two days later. Less than two weeks after that, a Nov. 14 article in The Washington Post explained that, according to “people familiar” with the Trump investigation, officials believed that Trump’s decision to hold on to documents after leaving office was motivated by ego, not profit. He just wanted to keep mementoes he’d collected during his time as leader of the free world.
It was a remarkable reversal after three months of media hysteria that reached a fever pitch when broadcast celebrities accused Trump of selling nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia, a crime for which, suggested historian Michael Beschloss and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, he should be executed. But never mind, what Trump had done wasn’t actually all that bad—because, as the U.S. public would soon learn, Biden had done the same.
And when the news did drop, party operatives brushed it off. The real problem, according to Biden boosters, is that the government classifies way too much material. That’s true, but it’s to be expected in the galactic capital of ass-covering, where long tenure is typically evidence of talent to escape accountability. Of course the federal government will avail its hirelings of every possible instrument to hide their screw-ups from those who pay their salaries—that is, the American public.”
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Keep voting Democrat, it’s working so well for you.
“The gas bill is $907.13? Sticker shock for Californians as prices soar”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-gas-bill-is-90713-sticker-shock-for-californians-as-prices-soar/ar-AA17whLL
“Brent Eldridge had heard that prices for natural gas were high this winter, but nothing prepared him for how bad it could be.
When he opened the envelope from Long Beach’s utility department, he couldn’t believe the total: $907.13, nearly eight times higher than his bill at the same time last year.
“It made me want to puke,” said Eldridge, 48, a pastor.
Household budgets in the Golden State, already stretched thin as prices soar for everything from rent to eggs, are being pummeled by monster gas bills.
Southern California Gas Co. and Pacific Gas & Electric began warning customers in January that they would see higher bills after the wholesale price of natural gas hit record highs. But reality didn’t sink in for many customers until their bills started arriving later in the month.
SoCalGas said the average bill in January for its 21.8 million customers was about $300, more than twice the average of January 2022 — and homeowners with pools or many rooms to heat have reported being charged north of $2,000. PG&E has projected that bills in central and Northern California will be 32% higher this winter.
Both utilities say they don’t profit from higher bills because the cost of buying the gas is passed on to consumers, with no markup.
The sky-high numbers have spurred wrangling at kitchen tables across California, as families pick apart whether they ran the heater too much or took too many hot showers. Others have indignantly observed that the shocking bills followed a month of monastic living with the thermostat turned down and extra blankets on the bed.
Energy costs are a “crisis” that are walloping households already squeezed by inflation and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, who called an emergency meeting of the City Council this month to approve extra assistance for customers who can’t pay.
Bills have soared “to levels that we haven’t seen in the last 20 years,” Richardson said. “We know families are struggling to make ends meet.”
Wholesale prices for natural gas in the West were 300% higher in December than they were in January 2022. Since December, prices have plummeted, but customers won’t see that reflected in their bills until late February or early March.
SoCalGas’ customer service lines have received more than 1 million calls this year, an increase of 15%, said Gillian Wright, a senior vice president and chief customer officer.”
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Of course they did. That’s what communists do, they “other” their opponents and criminalize dissent.
And the FBI is their KGB.
“Seriously? NYC sent fingerprints of unvaxxed teachers to FBI”
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/02/15/seriously-nyc-sent-fingerprints-of-unvaxxed-teachers-to-fbi-n530912
“As the months and years go by, we continue to learn more and more about the government’s handling of the pandemic response. And the more we learn, the uglier the picture becomes. I’m not just talking about the federal government here, either. State and municipal government leaders were drinking deeply from the cup of executive authority during a declared state of emergency as well. Today’s story has elements of both and it even involves the Federal Bureau of Investigation, potentially adding another dark mark to the FBI’s record. It’s being alleged that the municipal government of New York City sent the fingerprints of public school teachers who were fired after refusing to take the COVID injections to the Bureau. They further assigned a “problem code” to the teachers’ records, impeding their ability to find new work elsewhere. This sounds like something that would happen in China or Russia, but it was reportedly taking place right here in America. (Free Beacon)
New York City sent the fingerprints of unvaccinated public school teachers to the FBI, the educators allege in a lawsuit against the city government.
The city also flagged the teachers, whom the city fired for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, with a “problem code” that can affect their ability to get another job, Fox News reported.
“Fingerprints are sent with that flag to the FBI and the New York Criminal Justice Services, so it impacts their ongoing ability to get employment at other places,” said John Bursch, a lawyer representing the teachers in their suit against the city.
For years on end, we have covered stories about how it’s almost impossible to get a teacher fired in New York City, even when they were accused of sexual contact with the children. (That’s still happening, by the way.) The unions are too powerful and the politicians fear their reprisal. But along came the COVID vaccine mandates and suddenly they could fire teachers at the drop of a hat. So let’s put this in perspective. You can diddle a 15-year-old girl and keep your job. But if you refuse the jab, you’re going to be hounded to the ends of the earth.
Much as we saw in the military, New York City fired nearly 2,000 people for refusing to take the experimental “vaccines.” That number includes the teachers who were dismissed by the city’s Department of Education. They approved almost none of the applications for waivers based on religious or medical reasons.
The Mayor has now lifted the vaccine mandate for city workers, but the ones who were fired are not being automatically given their jobs back. Nor are they receiving back pay. They have to apply for a job if they want one and do so with a “problem code” on their record. Some of the dismissed teachers have reported being rejected for jobs, even in other states.
That brings us back to the question of what the FBI had to do with these situations. What “crime” were the teachers accused of committing? They refused to follow a municipal policy and lost their jobs as a result. How in the world does that constitute a federal crime? And what is the FBI doing with their records, including their fingerprints?
This just sounds like yet another example of the Bureau being weaponized against anyone and everyone who failed to toe the Biden line and comply with federal dictates. You’re not allowed to question The Narrative, and if you do, G-men will be unleashed upon you and your ability to have a career and earn a living for yourself may be endangered. I’m still no fan of the teachers’ unions in general, but in this instance, I’ll be taking their side. These people were hosed by their own government at multiple levels and the “rules” they broke turned out to be unscientific nonsense and potentially even physically dangerous for some.”
–
More…
https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/report-nyc-sent-fingerprints-of-unvaxxed-teachers-to-fbi/
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Sure clown….. 🙄
The DoJ and media’s smear attempt was never anything but a smear to silence him. It didn’t work, but they keep trying.
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The govt is lying again.
Don’t worry though, they’ve assigned their top man to the job.
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Make them pay for cleanup of their mess.
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But at least they know what pronouns their teacher prefers….
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Safe and effective, right?
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Don’t look now HRW, but there goes one of your favorite narratives up in smoke. And by the people who would know best.
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Good question…
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꧁🍃 Ɣ 🍃꧂
@V_its_me_
Damar Hamlin is Asked What Reason Doctors Gave Him For His Heart Stopping:
“Umm, that’s something I want to stay away from.”
I hope the hush money from Pfizer was worth it.
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Damar knows if he tells the truth he’ll be cancelled, along with his charity, and his NFL career.
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But the Rage Mob don’t care ’bout no stinkin’ facts!
We exist simply to rage at whatever we’re told to be upset about today.
“NY Times opinion: JK Rowling is not transphobic (Twitter leftists are furious)”
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/02/16/ny-times-opinion-jk-rowling-is-not-transphobic-twitter-leftists-are-furious-n531212
“This is going to set some heads on fire. One day after a group of NY Times contributors and celebrities sent a letter to the Times complaining about their coverage of trans issues, the paper has published an opinion piece titled “In Defense of J.K. Rowling.” The piece is written by Pamela Paul and does what almost no one involved in attacking Rowling has been willing to do: Look at the facts.
In 2020, The Leaky Cauldron, one of the biggest “Harry Potter” fan sites, claimed that Rowling had endorsed “harmful and disproven beliefs about what it means to be a transgender person,” letting members know it would avoid featuring quotes from and photos of the author.
Other critics have advocated that bookstores pull her books from the shelves, and some bookstores have done so. She has also been subjected to verbal abuse, doxxing and threats of sexual and other physical violence, including death threats…
This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.
So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.
The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.
Pamela Paul concludes, “nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.” All of this is the subject of a new podcast being launched next week by The Free Press. The podcast is based on nine hours of interviews with Rowling, her most lengthy discussion of her views on this topic.”
—
The rage mob in the media and Dem PACs then go all apoplectic on JK and those who dare defend her for the rest of the piece.
There’s tons of hate, but none of it is coming from Rowling.
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Hmmmmm…..
Scandals at home, and abroad.
“The FBI’s Balkan scandal keeps spreading”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-fbi-balkan-scandal-keeps-spreading
“On Monday, I dropped a report that revealed the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s embarrassing scandal surrounding its former star counterintelligence agent Charles McGonigal, who’s been indicted on corruption-related federal charges, is much worse than the Department of Justice and the media have admitted.
While McGonigal was still serving as a senior FBI official in 2017 he became a partner of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and his ruling Socialist Party. In that capacity, McGonigal is believed to have extorted wealthy Albanians in a sort of protection racket where the bureau bigwig promised to protect the oligarchs from U.S. sanctions in exchange for big bribes. McGonigal’s haul from this was on the order of $32 million (which was presumably shared with his partners). I also reported that McGonigal shook down Shefqet Kastrati, Albania’s top oil magnate, for 12 million euros, nearly $15 million, in 2017.
Kastrati’s representatives subsequently contacted the Washington Examiner to adamantly deny that allegation. But although the FBI’s embarrassing scandal was ignored by much of the U.S. media, it ignited a firestorm in Albania. There, McGonigal’s apparent mafia-like antics in collusion with the government in Tirana have been front-page news.
Accusations continue to mount that McGonigal was shaking down rich Balkan businesspeople, employing his FBI affiliation in the furtherance of his con. Albanian media also reported that McGonigal, in collusion with Rama and his associates, shook down Kastrati for as much as 15 million euros to keep the oil magnate in the good graces of the Department of State in Washington. This included the involvement of Agron Neza, the former Albanian intelligence operative and McGonigal partner who accompanied the FBI man on trips to Albania and was reportedly “a regular visitor to Kastrati’s office” and an intermediary who “passed bags of money” to McGonigal.
There are also reports that Rama allies, such as Tirana mayor Erion Veliaj, paid McGonigal some 8 million euros to have a political rival, Ylli Ndroqi, declared non grata by Washington. A frequent critic of the Rama government, Ndroqi had his media empire seized by the ruling socialists in 2020 amid allegations of drug trafficking and money laundering — which are the same things the Rama government is widely alleged to be involved in.
The scam was audacious: “[McGonigal] had access to the original files used in the blacklist of Russians from the U.S., they took them and changed the names with Albanian names … the FBI guy in Tirana, his partners, had papers that looked legit, the FBI logo, that they would present to businessmen around town who might be suspected of doing things that could get into blacklist from us. They would then set up a meeting with the FBI guy, usually in Vienna, where the frightened businessmen would be encouraged to pay the partners 1 to 5 million.”
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Impeach him.
“Biden Administration refusing to help in East Palestine disaster!”
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/02/16/biden-administration-refusing-to-help-in-east-palestine-disaster-n531229
“Governor Mike DeWine dropped a truth bomb a few hours ago: he has been in contact with FEMA every day since the disaster in East Palestine unfolded, and the Biden Administration is refusing assistance.
Refusing assistance!
Perhaps this is why Mayor Pete has refused to go to the site of the disaster, and why he has been joking on TV while one of the largest environmental disasters in recent history has been ongoing.”
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