More Biden Crime Family evidence surfaces, another mysterious Chinese bio-lab (this one much closer to home than Wuhan), more blue city real estate disaster, and Tim Scott screws up. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden vehemently denied ever talking business with his son, “or with anyone else” in the run-up to the 2020 election. In fact, Biden even fat-shamed an Iowa voter who approached the subject during the Democratic primaries. On the debate stage with Donald Trump, the former vice president peddled conspiracies of Russian interference when emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed otherwise.
On Sunday night, the New York Post reported on anticipated testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. The 48-year-old who went golfing with the Bidens in 2014 is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee how Hunter Biden put his father in contact with foreign businessmen and potential investors at least 24 times. According to the Post, such meetings were either in person or by speakerphone, with Hunter Biden often dialing in Joe.
Beyond those meetings, there are more than 180 other episodes where the president interacted with his son’s business partners, contrary to his campaign claims of “absolute” separation.
As the evidence for at least an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden mounts, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and co-host Ben Ferguson discussed the latest bombshell – 170 suspicious activity reports (SARs) from six banks over the past few years – on their podcast with House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY).
As Townhall reports, these SARs are submitted and sent to the Treasury Department when banks “have a strong suspicion” that a crime has been committed, so as to protect the bank.
As Comer emphasized, these are submitted “very seldom.”
If someone were to have two, the chairman explained, it would be hard for that person to open up a bank account.
Submitting an SAR, Comer added, also is “inviting the regulators to come in and regulate,” which is the last thing banks want.
The full transcript from Devon Archer’s sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee from Monday, July 31, has been released. During that testimony, Archer told Rep. Dan Goldman that Hunter Biden had been placed on the board of directors for Ukrainian energy company Burisma in order to “legally” intimidate people.
During that question period, Goldman asked Archer “So based on everything you saw, heard, and observed, did you have any knowledge of Joe Biden having any involvement with Burisma?”
Archer said that while he did not have “direct” knowledge, it was his view that Burisma would not last were in not for Joe Biden’s involvement. “My only thought is that I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it. That’s my, like, only honest opinion,” Archer said. He went on to say that the company was able to survive for as long as it did because Hunter was on the board.
“Just because of the brand,” Archer said. The “brand” refers to the Biden name. Speaking with The Post Millennial, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the brand was not only Biden, but the vice presidency during Biden’s tenure.
“How does that have an impact?” Goldman asked.
“Well, the capabilities to navigate D.C.,” Archer said, “that they were able to, you know, basically be in the news cycle. And I think that preserved them from a, you know, from a longevity standpoint. That’s like my honest—that’s what I—tht’s like how I think holistically.”
“But how would that work?” Goldman asked.
“Because people would be intimidated to mess with them,” Archer replied.
“In what way?” Goldman pressed.
“Legally,” Archer said.
Archer also spoke about the meetings during which Joe Biden would call in, or be called. “He put him on speakerphone, again, occasionally. Specifics, like, you know, dinner—you know, dinners occasionally.” Archer was asked to describe the dinners, and said “I remember a dinner in Paris with a French energy company that was—we were speaking to an advisor, and then—we were speaking to. And it was really a Rosemont Seneca Advisors type of—a Rosemont Seneca Advisors kind of a pitch, at the end of the day. And there was a talk, and he said that we’re at this—you know, we’re at this restaurant in Paris, and he put him on the speaker. So that did happen. There were other people there.”
That dinner, specifically, was attended by “myself; Hunter; Eric Schwerin; and then the executives from the French energy company,” Archer said.
Another was in “Beijing, at, you know, some restaurant,” Archer said, “—or Chengdu or something like I don’t remember the—I don’t remember specifics. This was just—it was not—t was like a, you know—especially with the time zone difference, there was—you know, there were meetings where his dad would call and he would be talking to him or put him on speaker. I’m not going to—you know, that’s—that happened.”
Archer said that the conversation at that dinner, with Jonathan Li, was primarily niceties. But it was his contention that getting the vice president on the phone, showing off that kind of access, was what those calls were all about. Archer testified that Hunter Biden would say things like “Hey, guys, my dad’s on the phone.”
Another call, which Archer revealed during questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan, took place in Dubai. During this impromptu meeting, Hunter Biden was contacted by Burisma’s CEO Zlochevsky, who said “We’re under pressure. We need to go—we want to talk to Hunter.” Hunter called DC, and Archer was “not in the earshot” of that call.
It was only 5 days after that call that Joe Biden “has a trip to the Ukraine, and he makes a statement: ‘It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.” That was in 2015, and Biden withheld $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine until such time as the prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired.
Bill Stevenson, who was married to Jill Biden between 1970 and 1975, told Newsmax last week that the president’s brother, Frankie Biden, tried to intimidate him during his divorce with Jill, and claimed the family threatened him with repercussions.
“Frankie Biden of the Biden crime family comes up to me and he goes, “Give her the house or you’re going to have serious problems,”” Stevenson said. “I looked at Frankie and I said, “Are you threatening me?” and needless to say, about two months later, my brother and I were indicted for that tax charge for $8,200.”
When asked to clarify whether he thinks Joe Biden was behind the tax charge, Stevenson told host Greg Kelly: “I not only think it, but I know it,” adding that he “could not believe the power of Joe Biden and the Department of Justice. I couldn’t believe it.”
Kelly also noted the parallels between Stevenson’s case and Hunter Biden’s ongoing tax troubles – noting that Hunter was hit with just two misdemeanor counts for $2.2 million in unpaid taxes, while Stevenson and his brother were slapped with two felonies for just over $8,000 in unpaid taxes.
This is a weird, disturbing story: Mysterious Chinese bio-lab discovered in Reedley, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley.
Court documents detail the horrors and dangerous nature of an illegal lab found in Reedley, California, exposed several months ago by a city code enforcement officer. What was found inside prompted the fire chief to send a letter to city officials describing it as a “potential disaster for the city.”
An investigation into the warehouse was prompted by a simple garden hose that was illegally attached and coming out of a wall in the back of the building.
“Frankly, we knew that should not have been there and when she went to investigate, she found that there was activity or operation or something happening within that building,” said Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba.
The city then obtained a search warrant to look inside what should have been an ordinary warehouse. Inside, they found thousands of vials, many of which contained bio-hazardous materials like human blood, and other unknown substances.
“There was over 800 different chemicals on site in different bottles of different acids. Unfortunately, a lot of these are being categorized under ‘unknown chemicals,’” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado. “A lot of these labels have been removed from bottles so there was only so much testing we could do [on] those chemicals.”
Health officials also discovered nearly 1,000 lab mice, 200 of which were dead.
Prado said the warehouse occupants claimed they were “doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support [and develop] the COVID test kits that they had on-site.”
According to court documents, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested what they could and determined that at least 20 potentially infectious viral, bacterial, and parasitic agents were present, including E. coli, malaria, and the virus that causes COVID-19.
“Scientists Call for Full Retraction of Nature’s Proximal Origin Paper, as Fraud Accusations Mount.” Their response was simplicity itself: They lied.
A growing number of people, including prominent scientists, are calling for a full retraction of a high-profile study published in the journal Nature in March 2020 that explored the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.
Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but likely.
“[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.
Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28, 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.
” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.
“We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.
The rap on Tim Scott is that he is too nice to be a modern Republican, but that’s wrong – he’s too weak to be a modern Republican. The man consistently defaults to submission to the woke left, but the times call for a warrior and his brand is soft surrender. Yeah, it would be nice to live in an era where we have the luxury of a president who dodged the draft in the culture wars, but we do not live in that time. Tim Scott needs to stay right where he is, an affable but unaccomplished senator firmly within the tradition of the political puffballs that South Carolina’s GOP inexplicably turns out. Let him be nice somewhere where his alleged niceness won’t shaft us again.
It could have been different, but that would require a different man than Tim Scott. There are moments that define a candidate, moments where they have a choice and the choice they make makes or breaks them. Kamala Harris decided to take what is essentially a footnote within the Florida history standards and contort it into some sort of lie about how Ron DeSantis loves slavery. It’s one of those issues where the claim is so facially ludicrous that you have to wonder if Kamala is stupid or cynical – and come to the conclusion that she is probably both. But she went with it and DeSantis pushed back and we were moving on when someone in the regime media asked Tim Scott about it.
This was his decision point. It was an opportunity to show who he is. And Tim Scott whiffed.
Taking the wrong side in the social justice war is disqualifying. Scott has gone from being maybe my third favorite candidate in the field and a strong Veepstakes possibility to being behind Doug Bergrum and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis…
Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.
People are moving out of Oakland in droves. They are afraid to venture out of their homes to go to work, shop, or dine in Oakland and this is destroying economic activity. Businesses, small and large, struggle and close, tax revenues vanish, and we are creating the notorious doom-loop where life in our city continues to spiral downward. As economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities.
We are in crisis and elected leaders must declare a state of emergency and bring resources together from the city, the county, and the state to end the crisis. We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too…
There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.
Speaking of blue city retail apocalypses: “Field Office, a Trophy Complex Unable to Find Tenants, Defaults on $73.8 Million Loan. Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property stopped making payments.”
The owners of Field Office, a 290,375-square-foot office complex near the Willamette River, have defaulted on their $73.8 million loan after being unable to find enough tenants, becoming the latest office owners to throw in the towel on Portland’s struggling office market.
Field Office is owned by New York investment bank Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property Co., a Dallas-based real estate firm with operations in Portland. The pair bought Field Office from local developer Project^ and National Real Estate Advisors, an investment firm based in Washington, D.C., for $118 million in April 2019, according to public records.
Funny how letting antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioters and crime run rampant through your downtown destroys property values. #ThisIsYourCityOnSocialJustice
Black Florida State University professor who published numerous studies on “systemic racism” is fired for just making shit up. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
You’re a Texas republican congressman who’s also an ER doctor and you try to assist a teenage girl having a medical emergency? That’s a handcuffing.
A former employee of a large food service corporation is suing the company in federal court after it fired her for refusing to participate in a program that discriminates against white male employees.
Courtney Rogers worked for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Compass Group USA Inc. from her home office in San Diego, California.
The company had more than 280,000 employees and $20.1 billion in revenue in 2019, according to its LinkedIn profile.
“Back in 2018, NBA megastar LeBron James opened his I Promise School in Akron, Ohio with the noble goal of transforming the lives of at-risk students and parents in his hometown. But it appears that the school has some major challenges five years into its existence. According to a report from the Akron Beacon Journal, the I Promise School’s fall class of eighth graders has has not seen a single student pass the state’s math test in five years – since the group was in the third grade.”
Big Medicare fraud ring busted in Houston. How big? $142 million big.
The Office of the Attorney General’s (OAG) Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) has made a series of arrests and seized assets related to a fraud case in Houston.
Lily Tran Daniel, Kenneth Reynolds, and Lillian Thai were all arrested on suspicion of their “involvement in a major healthcare fraud scheme” associated with ApolloMDx, a genetic testing company.
According to a release from the OAG, AplloMDx had involvement in a $142 million healthcare fraud scheme where they would offer illegal kickbacks in order to purchase recipient information form marketers and orders for genetic testing from doctors.
The statement from the OAG details how ApolloMDx would make alterations on the dates of service on testing orders, making it appear that they collected multiple DNA samples on different dates, so they could bill for multiple dates of service to increase their Medicare reimbursement on genetic testing claims.
Since the inception of the national Medicare Fraud Strike Force to crack down on Medicare fraud in 2007, Texas has been at the center of many investigations, including what was at the time the country’s largest-ever Medicare fraud takedown in Dallas.
Medicare and Medicaid are two U.S. government programs that were created in the 1960s to provide low-income citizens with a rudimentary form of health insurance coverage. While Medicare covers persons age 65 and older, Medicaid was established for persons under 65 years and those over that age who had exhausted their Medicare benefits. It is also funded jointly by the federal and state governments.
The Texas MFCU worked in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Inspector General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the ApolloMDx case. The prosecution will be carried out by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Health Care Fraud Strike Force. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas is assisting with forfeiture.
In addition to uncovering the fraud scheme, the MFCU seized sports cars, a sailboat, and three properties for a total of $7.1 million, funded by the illegal proceeds accrued from the ApolloMDx operation.
Texas and the federal government jointly finance and administer Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which comes to a total of over $40 billion.
The more money that flows through public welfare systems, the more susceptible to fraud they are. And it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that all the additional money flooding the system has made it that much easier for people to commit fraud.
As far as I can tell, that’s because the trial hasn’t happened yet, despite the original raid happening in January of 2019. The most recent activity was the judge refusing to dismiss the charges, and another court limiting the mere presence of Goines in a case as a possible cause for appeal to a ten year stretch starting in 2008.
I know that Flu Manchu lockdowns delayed a lot of trials all around the country, but four and a half years is an inordinately long time for a murder trial to be pending, as you start to run into due process concerns. Four years was around the time that all the charges in the Waco biker shootout case were dismissed. And that was a much more complex case with hundred of defendants and mountains of prosecutorial pigheadedness.
The Democrats running Houston’s criminal justice system today claim to care deeply about stopping police misconduct, but don’t seem capable of dispensing justice in anything like a timely manner to the one glaring redball of police misconduct they already have in their laps.
Your various CSI-type shows display modern police forensic labs as clean, gleaming, orderly high-tech cathedrals to science. The reality is seldom as glamorous, with cramped offices and significant backlogs being the norm. Around the country, various forensic labs have gotten so far behind that serious criminal cases have been dismissed due to lack of evidence.
Houston previously had a problem with it’s forensics department, so the Houston Forensic Science Center was created in 2012. And now they’re having big problems too.
Houston Police Officers’ Union President Douglas Griffith called for the resignation of the head of the city’s forensic science center this week over a significant backlog in testing evidence that has led to dismissal of criminal cases for a lack of probable cause.
“It’s either gross mismanagement or incompetence,” Griffith said during a press conference Wednesday.
Sharing photos of suspected marijuana seized by police at Houston’s Hobby Airport, Griffith said that 38 potential drug smuggling cases, involving 40 to 70 pounds of marijuana each, were dismissed on lack of probable cause because the city’s lab had not returned confirmatory tests.
Created by the city in 2012 after a scandal-ridden inhouse facility lost accreditation, the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC) is independent from the police department but funded by the city and governed by a board appointed by Mayor Sylvester Turner. Peter Stout, who holds a PhD in toxicology, has served as head since 2015.
Griffith explained to The Texan that according to HFSC’s own website, it takes 306 days to process a sexual assault kit and 215 days to process firearms or ballistics testing.
“But in an email sent by Dr. Stout to me, as well as city council, the district attorney, and defense attorney Murray Newman, he said if we want a rush case done today, it would not be done until 2025,” said Griffith. “So, there’s a discrepancy between what’s on the website and what’s in the email.”
In an email sent on July 17 to city, police, and criminal justice officials, Stout wrote, “It will be a really rude awakening to ask for a priority on July 31st for a trial on August 15th and find that your spot in line will be March 2025 behind the 66 other homicide cases already on the list.”
“That’s a year and nine months to test a weapon used in a homicide,” warned Griffith.
Stout’s email also warns recipients that “a priority request is just that, a request not a guarantee,” and that his office may reject or accept requests.
The city has set the HFSC 2024 budget at $28.5 million but added additional funds of nearly $5 million over the past year. Despite the extra funding, HFSC limits the number of DNA testing samples to 10 per case at a time, so investigators or prosecutors must wait for the first 10 samples to be returned before submitting a separate set.
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg told The Texan that delays in toxicology testing are leading to dismissal of gun crimes.
Ogg’s name should be familiar to readers as being a Soros-backed DA.
“Drugs are the first things we find and serve as the reason for the search that then locates a gun,” said Ogg. “But we are losing gun cases when judges dismiss a case for lack of probable cause because we don’t have those toxicology reports back.”
Noting that firearms testing results had recently increased from a 14 month wait to 20 months, Ogg also expressed concern about delayed evidence in relation to a new Texas law authored by Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) prioritizing violent cases.
“The emphasis now will be on prosecuting child sexual assaults, which require lab testing, and gun violence and homicide cases. I am just very concerned that as the cases are being called to trial the labs will not have completed their work and the evidence will not have been disclosed,” said Ogg. “Then those cases will stand at risk, possibly allowing a dangerous suspect to be released to the streets.”
Harris County has been plagued by a criminal case backlog since Hurricane Harvey flooded courtrooms in 2017. The situation only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic that brought the court system to a grinding halt.
With additional funding and extra court judges managing an emergency docket, earlier this year Ogg announced the case backlog had been reduced by 21 percent but that there were still about 114,000 backlogged cases.
That the crime lab is still having unacceptable backlog problems a decade after the last crime lab had similar problems is hardly a credit to the Democrats who have controlled Houston’s government since 1982.
Given what I know of how the how the defund the police racket tried to work in Austin, I have to wonder if funding for essential services (like a competent [police crime lab) have been siphoned off to “social justice” causes in Houston as well…
The Hunter Biden scandals refuse to go away, California continues to hemorrhage taxpayers, Texas teachers behaving very badly, more Flu Manchu heart attacks, and a golden new parking aid. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal collapsed. Here’s former federal prosecutor Will Scharf discussing how the DoJ’s trickery backfired:
Typically, if the Government is offering to a defendant that it will either drop charges or decline to bring new charges in return for the defendant’s guilty plea, the plea is structured under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(c)(1)(A). An agreement not to prosecute Hunter for FARA violations or other crimes in return for his pleading guilty to the tax misdemeanors, for example, would usually be a (c)(1)(A) plea. This is open, transparent, subject to judicial approval, etc.
In Hunter’s case, according to what folks in the courtroom have told me, Hunter’s plea was structured under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(c)(1)(B), which is usually just a plea in return for a joint sentencing recommendation only, and contained no information on its face about other potential charges, and contained no clear agreement by DOJ to forego prosecution of other charges.
Instead, DOJ and Hunter’s lawyers effectively hid that part of the agreement in what was publicly described as a pretrial diversion agreement relating to a § 922(g)(3) gun charge against Hunter for being a drug user in possession of a firearm.
That pretrial diversion agreement as written was actually MUCH broader than just the gun charge. If Hunter were to complete probation, the pretrial diversion agreement prevented DOJ from ever bringing charges against Hunter for any crimes relating to the offense conduct discussed in the plea agreement, which was purposely written to include his foreign influence peddling operations in China and elsewhere.
So they put the facts in the plea agreement, but put their non-prosecution agreement in the pretrial diversion agreement, effectively hiding the full scope of what DOJ was offering and Hunter was obtaining through these proceedings. Hunter’s upside from this deal was vast immunity from further prosecution if he finished a couple years of probation, and the public wouldn’t be any the wiser because none of this was clearly stated on the face of the plea agreement, as would normally be the case.
Judge Noreika smelled a rat. She understood that the lawyers were trying to paint her into a corner and hide the ball. Instead, she backed DOJ and Hunter’s lawyers into a corner by pulling all the details out into the open and then indicating that she wasn’t going to approve a deal as broad as what she had discovered.
DOJ, attempting to save face and save its case, then stated on the record that the investigation into Hunter was ongoing and that Hunter remained susceptible to prosecution under FARA. Hunter’s lawyers exploded. They clearly believed that FARA was covered under the deal, because as written, the pretrial diversion agreement language was broad enough to cover it. They blew up the deal, Hunter pled not guilty, and that’s the current state of play.
And so here we are. Hunter’s lawyers and DOJ are going to go off and try to pull together a new set of agreements, likely narrower, to satisfy Judge Noreika. Fortunately, I doubt if FARA or any charges related to Hunter’s foreign influence peddling will be included, which leaves open the possibility of further investigations leading to further prosecutions.
More on how Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal blew up.
The Hunter Biden defense and the Biden Justice Department hid the sweeping immunity term, shielding Hunter from all future prosecution, in a “diversion agreement” related to the gun offense on which Hunter was not pleading guilty and is anticipated not to be prosecuted. (See here, p. 7, para. 15.) The “diversion agreement” is separate from the plea agreement to the misdemeanor tax charges (see here) — i.e., the only charges to which Hunter actually planned to plead guilty. The plea agreement is where one would ordinarily find the all-important immunity term (since the immunity is given by the government in exchange for the guilty plea). Both the diversion agreement and the plea agreement incorporate an outrageous statement of facts (which is appended to the tax plea agreement, linked above). This fictitious presentation, which appears to have been drafted by Hunter’s lawyers, is nevertheless endorsed by the Biden Justice Department, even though it is utterly inconsistent with the prosecutors’ face-saving protestations, under pointed questioning Wednesday by Judge Maryellen Noreika, that they are conducting a continuing investigation in which Hunter is a subject and could be charged.
It could not be more obvious that, if the government were truly conducting a continuing investigation, prosecutors would never in a million years give one of the main subjects of that investigation a plea to minor tax charges — with the promise of a recommendation of no imprisonment — in the middle of that investigation.
This corrupt episode happened because this case is not a legitimate case — it’s a sham. In legitimate prosecutions, the defendant and the Justice Department are adversaries, with defense lawyers looking out for the defendant’s interest and the prosecutors vindicating the public interest in seeing that lawbreakers are held to account. The Hunter Biden case, to the contrary, is a travesty, in which the defense and the prosecution are on the same side.
That is why the prosecutors have never filed an indictment that lays out the case against Hunter in exacting, painful detail — the way the Justice Department typically does. To do that would be politically devastating for the president, who is implicated in his son’s conduct. Plus, if prosecutors fully describe the serious charges that appear to be supported by evidence already known, it would become politically impossible to settle the case on two trivial tax misdemeanors with no jail time, in addition to disappearing a gun felony carrying a potential ten-year prison sentence.
That is why the plea agreement could not be a normal plea agreement. The point of an agreement is to outline in detail the full extent of the immunity the defendant is getting in exchange for his plea. Because the Hunter Biden defense and the Biden Justice Department are on the same side, the collective objective was to give Hunter as much immunity as possible, with as little said as possible about why he needs it.
Biden family business associate and President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s “best friend in business” has canceled his scheduled appearance on Monday to give testimony before the House Oversight Committee for a third time. Well, something seems to really have this guy spooked, wouldn’t you say? Why in the world would this guy cancel not once, not twice, but thrice, er, I mean three times? It doesn’t take someone with an IQ north of 180 to see this.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, spoke with Fox News and stated that Devon Archer canceled the deposition he was scheduled to participate in before the committee. Archer is currently under a subpoena from the committee but has now backed out three times, according to Breitbart News.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has dropped campaign finance charges against alleged ‘crypto scammer’ Sam Bankman-Fried, who was accused of misusing customer deposits and who made $90 million in campaign contributions to around 300 predominantly left-wing political candidates or action committees (PACs).
Prosecutors argued the United States “mishandled” the process of extraditing Bankman-Fried from the Bahamas, writing a letter stating, “In keeping with its treaty obligations to the Bahamas, the government does not intend to proceed to trial on the campaign contributions count.”
Bankman-Fried, who had a net worth of around $26.5 billion at his peak, ranked behind only George Soros in donations to the Democrats last year.
Two Texas teachers accused in separate sex crimes against children were arrested on the same day and each charged with sexually assaulting a child and trafficking a child for sex.
Red Oak ISD teacher and coach Gershon Caston, 38, was arrested Thursday and charged with three first-degree felonies:
Aggravated sexual assault of a child
Trafficking a child to engage in sexual conduct
Compelling prostitution by a minor
Snip.
Former Nacogdoches ISD teacher Annaleigh Andrews, 24, was also arrested Thursday and charged with a dozen felonies:
Three counts of trafficking a child to engage in sexual
Three counts of sexual assault of a child
Three counts of improper relationship between student and educator
Three counts of enticing a child with intent to commit a felony
Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked a measure that would have stopped the Biden administration from discriminating against Jewish-made Israeli products.
The Democratic members of the Senate Commerce Committee rejected a measure from Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) that would have blocked the Federal Trade Commission from penalizing products produced by Israelis living in contested territories, including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.
Speaking of unexpected heart attacks, LeBron James’ 18-year old son Bronny James suffered cardiac arrest during a basketball workout. He survived. You know, I never remember hearing about young athletes having heart attacks pre-Flu Manchu vaccines…
I suspect this Peter Zeihan video might count as trolling my readers: “Why Fiat Currencies Will Always Beat Gold.” I think it’s broadly true in the cases he articulates, but doesn’t take into account the possibility of hyperinflation and/or widespread social unrest.
Despite the camping ban repeal, sprawling camps of drug-addicted transients lured here by departed mayor Steve Adler and the hard left Austin City Council continue to dot the landscape in and around Austin.
Indeed, the problem remains so large that one Austinite has created a Google map to track homeless camps. If you live in or near Austin, click on that to see how big the problem is, and how many camps are near you.
Liberal policies have led to a shocking explosion in homeless camps across the state capital, with around 168 different homeless camps across the city and 10,000 people living on the streets, sources tell The Post.
The sheer amount of people living on the street, 10,000 according to the City of Austin’s own count, now makes up 1% of the entire population in the greater Austin area.
His map reveals the clandestine encampments have spread to a far greater extent than many taxpaying residents had previously realized — dotting the entire city, including near popular tourist destinations like Zilker Metropolitan Park.
Often hidden from public view in wooded areas, the encampments, banned by voter mandate, have become hotbeds for illegal activity and been the site of two deaths since April.
[Jamie] Hammonds warns that an even bigger public safety threat could be looming as the sites remain largely unregulated by the Democratic city’s leadership.
“A big fire is going to take place, and it’s going to burn up a lot of people. It’s going to happen,” Hammonds predicted.
“I’ve been warning the city about this for over a year.”
In the year and a half that Hammonds has been documenting the camps, he claims to have regularly witnessed people with mental health and drug issues use unsupervised fires for warmth and cooking.
“We have fires in these camps every year, but thank the Lord the fire department has been able to put them out very quickly,” he added.
The homeless sites are often nestled in wooded areas, surrounded by oak trees.
“It gets really hot and really dry in the summer,” the filmmaker explained. “These folks build fires, and these greenbelts, when it gets dry, it’s like a match waiting to go off.
The Homeless Industrial Complex obviously benefits from these sprawling homeless camps (and, indeed, tried to directly financially benefit from cleaning them up before they got caught). They exist because those on the hard left benefit from their existence, no matter how many camps they burn down, piles of trash they leave behind, or how many law-abiding citizens they victimize.
[Travis County Democratic] District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg was arrested and charged with drunken driving Friday night in Northwest Travis County…
According to the arrest affidavit, a witness called 911 just after 10:45pm to report a four-door Lexus wandering into the bike lane and then into oncoming traffic while traveling southbound on FM 620 near Comanche Trail. The car was being driven by Lehmberg, according to the affidavit.
Lehmberg told the deputy that she’d had two vodka drinks earlier in the evening and that she was on a prescription beta-blocking drug. According to the arrest affidavit, there was an opened bottle of vodka in the passenger area of the vehicle within reach.
(Sorry for linking to the Austin Chronicle but a lot of the original stories on the arrest no longer seem online.)
Here’s a pro-trip, boys and girls: If you you find yourself driving around at night (well, any time, but especially at night) while drinking from an open vodka bottle (she evidently had a blood alcohol level of .239), you have a problem, and you should seek professional help and/or check yourself into rehab.
Like, the next day.
Eventually Lehmberg spent 45 days in jail and declined to run for reelection, but wasn’t removed from office.
But the thing I remember most about the Lehmberg case was her in restraints…
Eh, not quite like that
…screaming “Call Greg!” (Dwight even bought me a bumper sticker.) The “Greg” in this case was then Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton, who Lehmberg obviously believed would get the charges dismissed.
Ten or twenty years before, that might have happened, but one big reason it didn’t happen in Lehmberg’s case was dashcam footage. (Another was that Travis County LEOs seemed to hate Lehmberg’s guts.)
Speaking of “Call Greg!”, many of the videos of her arrest I previously linked to seem seem to be dead. (It seems more likely for a book to survive 100 years than an online video to last 10.) So here is sort of a compressed “greatest hits” of Lehmberg at the booking station, including the magic phrase:
Some valuable takeaways still true ten years after the fact:
Being drunk makes you stupid.
Belligerent entitlement and threats don’t make police any more likely to let you off (unless, perhaps, your last name is “Biden”).
No, seriously, shut the fuck up. When arrested, remain silent except to ask for your lawyer.
DWI is expensive, even if you don’t kill anybody. At a defensive driving class many moons ago, the instructor noted that it would be cheaper to hire a limo to drive you to Dallas, stay in a five-star hotel, dine at the city’s most expensive restaurant, down three bottles of their most expensive champagne, and have the limo driver drive you back than it would be to pay the legal fees to successfully fight a DWI in court.
I did a search to see what Lehmberg was up to after leaving office, but I couldn’t find out anything. It’s like she dropped off the face of the earth. Hopefully she got some help for her alcoholism.
Despite a massive deficit in the number of police officers needed to patrol city streets, want to guess how many police Austin’s new budget plans to add?
Austin’s far-left City Council continues to view police as the enemy, continuing it’s defund-the-police bias even after most city’s have abandoned it as madness. Their funding priorities continue to be finding new ways to rake off graft to the hard left.
If you’ve wondered why homelessness in California seems so much worse than in other states, Siyamak Khorrami’s interview with El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson for California Insider provides some answers:
Some takeaways:
“According to the latest report, California alone has one third of the U.S homeless population today.”
“What we have is you can be arrested or cited did over and over and over and over again, and there’s no consequences. And it’s just getting worse and worse.”
The same transients sprawling unconscious on city streets in LA and San Francisco are now found in San Diego.
“If you look at the people and look in their eyes, you see a lost [soul], almost like a post-apocalyptic look. It’s not somebody who’s lost their job or lost their housing, it’s someone who is addicted to drugs. In large part have fried their brains. They’re suffering from mental illness.”
“Stanford recently looked at it last year, their school of economics looked at it, and they found were over the last 10 years, most of the United States homelessness dropped by roughly 9%. In the same period here in the state of California, it went up by 43%.”
He says that other blue states aren’t having the same problem California is, but that’s slightly misleading. There are blue cities that are starting to see some of the same problems (Seattle, Portland, Austin) that are starting to have the same problems because they follow the same playbook. But they do touch on Seattle at the end of the interview.
“The most notable, unique difference is our decriminalizing hardcore drug use, and decriminalizing large or low-level property crimes.”
You can’t trust crime statistics, because people have just stopped reporting things. Auto thefts are still reported for insurance purposes. “Vehicle thefts here in the state of California have gone up significantly, so much so that on a per capita basis we are double the State of Florida.”
One Target accurately reporting thefts for a month doubled San Francisco theft statistics.
“Employees that don’t want to come to work and be exposed to that, because of being told don’t contact anyone.”
“Shoppers stop coming to stores. You just had Nordstrom’s in San Francisco close after 35 years. They’re one of their hallmark stores. That is a huge store in San Francisco closed because theft.”
“Every year more people leaving than are coming to the state because of poor public policy decisions.”
“The single dividing line between us and everywhere else in that regard is the legalization of hardcore drug use, or the decriminalization of hardcore drug use.”
“Harm reduction centers” just prevent people from dying on that particular day, and do nothing to keep drug users from gradually killing themselves over months and years. Those non-profits are “simply enabling them to continue to that that addiction and to use those drugs, knowing it will kill them.”
Pierson: HUD, uh, in 2015, 2016 decided…”Hey, we’re a housing entity. Why are we spending 60%, 70% percent of our resources on rehab for people? And so let’s get out of that business and go and do this other one.” I think that happened at a time which was critical in for California, to where we were already going down this housing housing first, or type in harm reduction type philosophy.
Khorrami: Then you exacerbate it by giving the homeless housing, and then you give them, let them use the drugs, and then you’re not really thinking about dealing with their addiction, right?
Pierson: Yeah, it’s absurd.
“We have based all of our policy on the slogan called ‘Housing First.’ What it says is, if you provide them housing and you provide this, provide some services to him, the person will stop using drugs.”
New York (which I personally would not point to as a model, it’s simply less of an obvious failure) has a ratio of one social worker to eight homeless people. California has a ratio of one to thirty-two.
“Compassion isn’t enough.”
“Compassion isn’t letting someone die in a ditch somewhere. Compassion isn’t letting someone lay on the street with a needle in their arm. That’s not compassion.”
“Enough is enough. You’ve tried this grand social experiment over the last eight or ten years. It didn’t work. We need a course correction, and we need to do something about it now.”
Seattle is an extreme example of what’s happening here in California. Everybody, the businesses are fleeing. The people who are living there that can leave are leaving. And it is very similar to what we’re doing, where open rampant hardcore drug use, little or no consequence for property crimes, and they also have a horrendous problem with law enforcement staffing. They simply can’t hire law enforcement officers because, frankly, the way they’ve treated them. It is a handful of really bad policy decisions that created this problem.
No one wants to work at Nordstrom’s because they know their car will be broken into while they work.
One flaw with the interview is that they did not discuss the role of the Homeless Industrial Complex in creating the situation. My working theory is that the appalling decisions we see being made on homelessness and crime are because the hard left is actively benefiting from the situation because it provides myriad ways to rake off graft and fraud. Ditto the lunacy of defunding the police.
Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.
“I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.
That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”
Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.
Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.
Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”
“For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”
