Evidence continues to pile up that Democrats stole four states through brazen election fraud in a small number of urban counties. Here’s my attempt to wrangle this fire hose of information into some coherent form:
A few days earlier, Giuliani said that the Trump campaign may have sufficient evidence to change the election results in the state of Pennsylvania.
He told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that lawsuits being filed by Trump’s reelection campaign might show that as many as 900,000 invalid ballots were cast in the battleground state.
According to an unofficial vote count from the Pennsylvania Department of State, Biden has received 3.35 million votes to Trump’s 3.31 million votes. Percentage-wise, Biden has 49.7 percent, compared to Trump’s 49.1 percent.
“I think we have enough to change Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania election was a disaster,” Giuliani said, responding to a question from the host about whether the evidence is enough to change the fate of the presidential election.
“We have people that observed people being pushed out of the polling place. We have people who were suggested to vote the other way and shown how to do it. I’m giving you the big picture,” he said.
While mail-in ballots were being counted, GOP Pittsburgh observers were “kept out of the room or kept away from the room” for a period of 24 hours, Giuliani alleged.
“Even though we went to court and we were allowed to move six feet closer, the Democrat machine people moved the counting place six feet further away. This is documented on videotape. There are upwards of 50 witnesses,” he continued.
“If the local elections officials in the city of Philadelphia are so confident that they have enough valid votes to beat President Donald Trump, and assign the 20 electoral college votes of Pennsylvania to Vice President Joe Biden. If they were that confident, why are they resisting an authorized court order to allow for people to observe the ballot as they’re supposed to legally be able to do?” DeVore responded to a question from correspondent Jan Jekielek.
Snip.
“By the way, this is a common thing throughout the entire country, that you’re supposed to have people from both sides observing the physical process of counting the votes to make sure that it’s done honestly and legally,” DeVore added, “it really potentially puts into doubt the results that came out of Philadelphia.”
DeVore pointed out that only a few months ago, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted a Philadelphia election official on charges of bribery and election tampering.
“When you have a race or a state like Pennsylvania, where you have this unprecedentedly large number of mail-in ballots that have been requested, then the question becomes what sort of safeguards are we using to ensure that the votes are valid and have been legally cast?” DeVore spoke about the integrity of the mail-in ballots.
DeVore went on to say that one of the safeguards—the requirement to have a matching signature on the outside of the envelope—was obliterated in Pennsylvania.
There were 3,684,726 registered voters in Wisconsin going into Election day. The total votes recorded in Wisconsin were 3,240,549. That would give Wisconsin a turnout of 88%. [UPDATE: The current vote total is 3,297,420, which would yield a turnout of over 89%. However, Wisconsin permits same-day registration, so the number of such registrations would bring that percentage down somewhat.] According to Ballotpedia, no American state in the period 2002-2018 has ever achieved a turnout rate of 80% or higher. [UPDATE: These are turnout numbers expressed as percentage of eligible voters, not registered voters, so the percentages are not directly comparable.] For purposes of comparison, in 2016 Wisconsin had a 67 percent turnout rate. [UPDATE: Wisconsin tabulates turnout as a percentage of the estimated voting-age population, so these numbers would be lower than the percentages of registered voters.] If you are credulous, you can believe that 21% more Wisconsinites voted this year, compared with the red-hot election of four years ago, and 248,000 more Wisconsinites turned out to vote for the charismatic Joe Biden this year than voted for Hillary Clinton four years ago. I think those numbers are almost certainly false, the result of ballot manipulation.
“Michigan Election Fraud: Evidence of Wolverine State Chicanery During America’s 2020 Presidential Election.”
On Election Night when America went to bed, President Trump had a commanding lead in virtually every swing state, as well as Virginia, which no one expected him to win.
However, when America woke up the next day, we found that he’d lost these leads, largely on the basis of mail-in ballots found in the middle of the night and out from under the watchful eye of legal election monitors.
What’s more, these massive caches of votes – almost all of which were for former Vice President Biden – came via large dumps primarily from the five aforementioned cities in states predominantly run by Democratic governors.
When one looks at the statistical likelihood of the reported turnout, the numbers are so improbable they’re more at home in a one-party state like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or North Korea.
What’s more, Biden’s victory does not square with the results of the Republican Party nationally: Republicans won 28 of 29 competitive House seats and Democrats were unable to flip a single state legislature. Joe Biden secured a scant three of the so-called “Bellwether Districts” that almost always choose the winner, one of which was in Delaware. Judicial Watch found 353 counties in 29 different states who had higher than 100 percent turnout.
Anecdotally, swing states tend to follow Florida in terms of swinging left or right. This is particularly true in Michigan, which has voted in lockstep with Florida since 1968. Nearly three dozen states had counting machines connected to the Internet during the election, which is inherently insecure. Joe Biden’s lead among mail-in ballots was massive in two states — Michigan and Pennsylvania — while it was in the single digits in most states.
Snip.
Michigan might take the dubious honor of having the most corrupt elections in America in 2020. As of November 9, the FBI has opened up two investigations into voter fraud in the state. Affidavits have been filed alleging a scheme to backdate mail-in ballots. It is the land of massive vote dumps that go 100 percent for Joe Biden (which the controlled media has attempted to retcon as a “glitch” or “clerical error”), of thousands of dead people voting, of United States Postal Service officials coercing postal employees into backdating the postmark on ballots. And, of course, remember that this is the state that was shut down by executive fiat by Gretchen Whitmer, who eventually had her executive overreach invalidated by the state Supreme Court.
A single computer “glitch” awarded 6,000 votes to Biden and the Democrats that were supposed to go to President Trump and other Republican candidates. With 47 Michigan counties using this software, similar glitches might yield a discrepancy of hundreds of thousands of ballots — or even more. Perhaps this “glitch” was one of the more innocuous ones. Another glitch returned a Republican incumbent to office after he “lost” to his Democratic challenger.
We use “glitch” in quotes because these types of things seem to be a running pattern in the state and appear to always benefit the Democrat candidate. One other, and far more important, example of this was the “glitch” that awarded 138,000-plus votes to Joe Biden. It was one of these monolithic vote dumps we keep talking about.
Over 138,000 votes tabulated and not a single one of them went for the President (or, for that matter, Jo Jorgensen or Howie Hawkins or Kanye West), a statistical impossibility. It was later corrected when hordes of Internet denizens found the vote dump and wondered how it was possible, even under the basic laws of statistics.
This is hardly the only example of “mistakes” benefitting Biden or suspicious reported totals in the State of Michigan. Take, for example, Antrim County, where President Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016 but had now swung back to Biden by 29 points. County officials vowed to investigate what they called “skewed” results.
Even prior to the 2020 election back in October, city officials in Muskegon found that there were registration irregularities.
A suit has been filed in the state of Michigan based on a sworn affidavit from a Michigan poll worker — not an observer. Among other things, this suit alleges that poll workers processed ballots with missing signatures, coached voters on who to vote for (Joe Biden), and were instructed to backdate ballots.
How deep is the rabbit hole of “computer error” in Michigan? Sidney Powell, counsel for one General Michael Flynn, appeared on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business News program and explained that she believes that programs like HAMMER or SCORECARD were used to change as much as 3 percent of the result. While this is merely speculation at this point, it is worth noting that Steve Bannon also floated this possibility on his show, War Room.
“Administrative policies in Wisconsin election put tens of thousands of votes in question. From allowing clerks to fix spoiled ballots to permitting voters to escape ID rules, Wisconsin election officials have taken actions that were not authorized by legislature.”
Records reviewed by Just the News show that an executive branch agency called the Wisconsin Elections Commission:
permits local county election clerks to cure spoiled ballots by filling in missing addresses for witnesses even though state law invalidates any ballot without a witness address.
exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules in 2020 by allowing them to claim the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to be “indefinitely confined.”
failed this year to purge 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls as required by law.
The Great Lakes Justice Law Center is filing a new election crimes lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court. The Lansing area law firm is representing two Detroit area residents in the action. The suit charges Wayne County elections officials knowingly allowed and supported illegal activities surrounding the Tuesday general election. The suit in Wayne County Circuit Court is asking for an entirely new election to be staged for the county.
Lead attorney David Kallman says numerous witnesses are filing swarm affidavits under oath supporting the claims in the lawsuit. The suit spells out a number of alleged election crimes. Many of them surround the use of absentee or mail-in ballots.
They include:
-Validating ballots the name showing on the ballot did not appear in the official voter database.
-Election workers were ordered to not verify voters’ signatures on absentee ballots, to backdate absentee ballots, and to process invalid ballots.
-The suit claims election workers processed ballots that appeared after the election deadline and falsely reported those ballots had been received prior to the election evening deadline.
-And the suit claims many of the invalid ballots won’t be hard to pinpoint, saying election workers in Wayne County altered already illegal ballots by inserting a birthdate of 1/1/1900.
Attorney Kallman says the lawsuit asks the Circuit court to immediately void the uncertified election results in Wayne County and order a new and fully monitored election at the earliest possible date. “This type of widespread fraud in the counting and processing of voter ballots cannot be allowed to stand. Michigan citizens are entitled to know that their elections are conducted in a fair and legal manner and that every legal vote is properly counted. Such rampant fraud cannot be undone. We ask the Court to enjoin the certification of this fraudulent election, void the election, and order a new vote in Wayne County.”
Defendants systematically processed and counted ballots from voters whose name failed to appear in either the Qualified Voter File (QVF) or in the supplemental sheets. When a voter’s name could not be found, the election worker assigned the ballot to a random name already in the QVF to a person who had not voted. Defendants instructed election workers to not verify signatures on absentee ballots, to backdate absentee ballots, and to process such ballots regardless of their validity. After election officials announced the last absentee ballots had been received, another batch of unsecured and unsealed ballots, without envelopes, arrived in trays at the TCF Center. There were tens of thousands of these absentee ballots, and apparently every ballot was counted and attributed only to Democratic candidates. Defendants instructed election workers to process ballots that appeared after the election deadline and to falsely report that those ballots had been received prior to November 3, 2020 deadline.
Defendants systematically used false information to process ballots, such as using incorrect or false birthdays. Many times, the election workers inserted new names into the QVF after the election and recorded these new voters as having a birthdate of 1/1/1900.
On a daily basis leading up to the election, City of Detroit election workers and employees coached voters to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrat party. These workers and employees encouraged voters to do a straight Democrat ballot. These election workers and employees went over to the voting booths with voters in order to watch them vote and coach them for whom to vote.
Unsecured ballots arrived at the TCF Center loading garage, not in sealed ballot boxes, without any chain of custody, and without envelopes.
Defendant election officials and workers refused to record challenges to their processes and removed challengers from the site if they politely voiced a challenge. After poll challengers started discovering the fraud taking place at the TCF Center, Defendant election officials and workers locked credentialed challengers out of the counting room so they could not observe the process, during which time tens of thousands of ballots were processed.
Defendant election officials and workers allowed ballots to be duplicated by hand without allowing poll challengers to check if the duplication was accurate. In fact, election officials and workers repeatedly obstructed poll challengers from observing. Defendants permitted thousands of ballots to be filled out by hand and duplicated on site without oversight from poll challengers.
Unfortunately, Wayne County circuit judge Timothy Kenny refused to issue an injunction. Great Lakes Justice Center is appealing.
Democrats are stealing the election in Michigan and Pennsylvania. This bothered the heck out of many people because it seems as if nothing can be done to stop them. In Michigan, people born before the Civil War voted. In Philadelphia, Democrats ignored a court order to let Republicans observe the voting. Those are just two of the many irregularities.
Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, told NBC his state’s Supreme Court “went rogue and decided to violate the U.S. Constitution, ignore Pennsylvania law, and just rewrite the law themselves.
“In Pennsylvania, unfortunately, it’s been a little bit complicated by a Pennsylvania Supreme Court that went rogue and decided to violate the U.S. constitution, ignore Pennsylvania law, and just rewrite the law themselves.
“They have no authority to do that. And they extended the period of time over which ballots can arrive beyond the deadline. That’s outrageous, frankly.”
Some people are banking on state legislatures overturning election. Perhaps they can.
Forget recounts. The same people who counted the votes the first time will count them again.
Biden declared victory on Saturday night.
Big mistake.
Democrats took the bait. Now President Trump can go to the Supreme Court and have the elections in Michigan and Pennsylvania declared invalid. Without those Electoral College votes, Biden fails to reach 270 and the election gets thrown into the House.
Other states also may be invalidated. The Supreme Court will decide, and I believe President Trump has 5 votes and Chief Justice John McCain Roberts has only 4.
Ignoring a federal judge’s order is never a good idea when you are stealing an election.
Georgia:
No one disputes that Fulton County elections officials falsely announced that the counting of ballots would stop at 10:30 p.m. No one disputes that Fulton County elected officials unlawfully resumed the counting of ballots after our observers left the center.
In Michigan, for example, there was a difference of just 7,131 votes between Trump and GOP candidate John James, yet the difference between Joe Biden and Democratic candidate Gary Peters was a staggering 69,093.
In Georgia, there was an 818 vote difference between Trump and the GOP Senator, vs. a 95,000 difference between Biden and the Democratic candidate for Senator.
MIT’s Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai conducts an in-depth statistical analysis of election anomalies and
I haven’t watched all of it yet. Dr. Ayyadurai says that the Secretary of State of Massachusetts got Twitter to kick him off the platform for 21 days until he was able to get a judge to issue an injunction over election fraud allegations.
A thread about Dominion and Smartmatic:
2/ Dominion Voting Systems oversees ballot counting in several hotly contested states where suspicious activity has been alleged.
There's another election software company called Smartmatic whose US chairman is Peter Neffenger, a member of Biden's transition team.
— Murphy "Smartmatic is linked to Dominion" Fowles (@FowlesMurphy) November 16, 2020
4/ Well, as you can see from all the tweets I made previously, there are numerous connections. Let's go through them.
Dominion purchased a company called Sequoia from Smartmatic, including election software that may still be licensed to Smartmatic today.
— Murphy "Smartmatic is linked to Dominion" Fowles (@FowlesMurphy) November 16, 2020
6/ It's also been revealed by Joe Oltmann (recently banned by Twitter but now on Parler) that Dominion executive Coomer is a hot-headed Antifa supporter who had written to other Antifa supporters that he would stop Trump from being elected along with comments like **ck the USA.
— Murphy "Smartmatic is linked to Dominion" Fowles (@FowlesMurphy) November 16, 2020
7/ When Morales was with Smartmatic he worked on Venezuela's problematic 2014 election. Smartmatic was originally founded by 3 Venezuelans whose first big contract was for Hugo Chavez.
— Murphy "Smartmatic is linked to Dominion" Fowles (@FowlesMurphy) November 16, 2020
Haven’t analyzed this statement to see if it’s true, but it wouldn’t shock me:
The #DominionVotingSystems that "glitched" in favor of Joe Biden (used in 29 states), partnered up with Clinton Global Initiative AND had on staff former employees of both Clinton Growth Initiative and Clinton Cash Cow TENEO.
Yeah, I think Trump lost fair and square,” he said last Wednesday. “He just got beat by the Biden campaign — that’s all there is to it.”
But then something happened that changed his mind: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Fox News, CNN, and more giant corporations keep screaming at him via notifications, messages, and broadcasts that there was no election fraud. Now, he’s starting to think maybe there is something fishy going on.
“You know what, screw it,” he said as another notification popped up on his Facebook feed telling him how safe and secure the elections are. “I’m all-in on the conspiracy theories. If the shadiest, slimiest people in the world really, really want me to believe the election wasn’t stolen, then I’m going full-on Alex Jones, baby. Woooo!!!”
Truth:
There is more proof of election fraud than there is of anthropogenic climate change. Pass it on.
1. Recounts >Georgia has a recount >Pennsylvania has a recount >Nevada has a recount >Wisconsin has a recount >Michigan has a recount >Arizona has a recount
2. Fraud lawsuits – there will be many >Limestone County already had 1 arrest >Pennsylvania has a UPS worker agreeing to testify in court that the supervisors were backdating
Each one of these is going to be used to eat up time. The Federal Election Commission chair has already stated that he believes voter fraud took place, specifically citing that the refusal to allow republicans back in to observe and counting anyway is a violation of law.
In both Michigan and Wisconsin, several vote dumps occurred at approximately 4am on Wednesday morning, which showed that Joe Biden received almost 100 percent of the votes. President Trump was leading by hundreds of thousands of votes in both states as America went to sleep, and turnout in the state of Wisconsin seems to be particularly impossible.
With absentee ballots, former vice-president Joe Biden was also up 60 points in Pennsylvania and almost 40 points in Michigan According to the New York Times. Comparably, Biden was only up single digits in absentee voting in most other battleground states. Wisconsin has not yet been reported.
Elections officials in Michigan and Wisconsin could not explain Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s sudden and dramatic vote tally increase that occurred in both states Wednesday morning.
When asked at a Wednesday press conference how this occurred, Michigan Department of State spokesperson Aneta Kiersnowski told reporters “We cannot speculate as to why the results lean one way or another.”
This is particularly concerning considering republicans led in mail-in ballots requested and mail-in and in-person ballots returned leading up to and at the start of election day.
According to NBC News on election day before the polls opened, In Michigan, Republicans led 41% to 39% in Mail-in Ballots requested. Republicans also led 42% to 39% with Mail-in and in-person ballots returned.
In Wisconsin on election day before the polls opened, Republicans led Mail-in Ballots requested 43% to 35%, and Mail-in and early in-person ballots returned 43% to 35%. Almost ALL of the ballots found, while most in the country were sleeping, after they officials stated they would stop counting, were for Joe Biden.
Even if Democrats make their presidential fraud stick, it came at a high price:
But even if Trump does lose, it may be a blessing in disguise for Republicans.
The result has crushed Democratic expectations of a clean sweep. It wasn’t a landslide win against an unpopular president, as we had been told so confidently for months.
If Biden wins, it will be by the narrowest margin.
And all the hundreds of millions spent on retaking the Senate came to nothing, with the Republicans looking to hold onto their lead. The top targets, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham, survived easily.
The fatal miscalculations of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in cynically refusing to negotiate on the latest stimulus bill have cost the Democrats dearly in the House, where they have gone backward by at least six seats. They did not manage to get rid of a single Republican. So much for the blue wave.
The failure means that in 2022, the House is more likely to revert to Republican control, setting up a lame-duck presidency.
The Democrats won’t be able to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College or make DC and Puerto Rico states. They will struggle to impose the Green New Deal.
Unfortunately, nothing can be done to stop a President Biden-Harris repeat of the geopolitical errors of the Obama presidency, such as appeasing China and Iran’s mullahs and signing onto the Paris climate accord.
But a President Biden in cognitive decline will sooner or later be replaced by his unpopular, untested vice president, Kamala Harris.
Saddled with a recession and policies that will only exacerbate economic decline, the next four years will hobble Democrats.
Oh, not the sheep on the streets. They fell for it, just like they fell for “two million dead from covid.” But the higher-ups, they’re scared.
Years ago, during the ’04 election, a friend told me the Democrats always get louder and more triumphalist when they’re losing. I’ve observed this is true, since then.
So, step down from the ledge. Go take a shower. Have some real food. Eat a vegetable. Ease up on the coffee. Go for a walk.
And don’t fall for the blue smokescreen
“In Apparent Glitch, Voting Machines Hunt Down And Murder Trump Supporters.” “This is just a small, routine error, and we are looking into it,” said one official. “There’s nothing to be concerned about. These kinds of small mistakes happen from time to time, and it will be corrected soon.”
In 2016, Donald Trump got a lower share of the white vote than the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and white turnout was stagnant as compared to 2012. Trump was able to win nonetheless because he got a higher share of Black and Hispanic voters than his predecessor — up roughly 3 percentage points with African Americans and 2 percentage points with Hispanics — helping tilt pivotal races in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania toward Trump.
That is, it was minorities, not whites, who proved more decisive for Trump’s victory.
Going into Election Day in 2020, Trump seems poised to do even better with minority voters. His gains in the polling have been highly consistent and broad-based among Blacks and Hispanics — with male voters and female voters, the young and the old, educated and uneducated. Overall, Trump is polling about 10 percentage points higher with African Americans than he did in 2016, and 14 percentage points higher with Hispanics.
It may be that many minority voters simply do not view some of his controversial comments and policies as racist. Too often, scholars try to test whether something is racist by looking exclusively at whether the rhetoric or proposals they disagree with resonate with whites. They frequently don’t even bother to test whether they might appeal to minorities, as well.
Yet when they do, the results tend to be surprising. For instance, one recent study presented white, Black and Hispanic voters with messages the researchers considered to be racial “dog whistles,” or coded language that signals commitment to white supremacy. It turned out that the messages resonated just as strongly with Blacks as they did with whites. Hispanics responded even more warmly to the rhetoric about crime and immigration than other racial groups.
It seems that everyone in the country except polling companies expect a big Trump victory today:
🚨 DK Election Pool Alert: With over 350K entries, a majority of people in every state besides Colorado predict that @realdonaldtrump will be the winner of tomorrow’s election. pic.twitter.com/zUF0uZZtwK
In South Carolina, Jaime Harrison is this year’s Beto O’Rourke. “Harrison has raised, and spent, more than any other Senate candidate in U.S. history — ‘as of Oct. 14, Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison had raised more than $108 million and spent more than $105 million in his quest to unseat U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham’ with another $13 million in outside spending hitting Graham.” And he’s still behind Graham in the polls.
Also, I intend to be live-blogging/live-tweeting election returns starting about 7 PM tonight. Tune in for what promises to be a host of ridiculous typos.
Federal investigators obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against one of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business associates, suggesting that the executive was suspected of acting as a covert agent of a foreign government.
Prosecutors revealed the existence of at least one FISA warrant against Chi Ping Patrick Ho, known as Patrick Ho, in a Feb. 8, 2018 court filing obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Ho was charged on Dec. 18, 2017 with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering related to CEFC China Energy contracts in Uganda and Chad. Ho had been an executive at the multi-billion dollar Chinese energy company prior to his arrest.
Hunter Biden was part of a business consortium that sought a partnership with CEFC in May 2017. A Senate report released last month said that an affiliate of CEFC wired $5 million to Biden’s law firm from August 2017 through August 2018.
In addition to his partnership with CEFC, Hunter Biden also represented Ho during his legal battle.
According to a report from The New Yorker last year, CEFC’s chairman, Ye Jianming, raised concerns with Biden in summer 2017 about a possible investigation into Ho.
“Hunter Biden’s business group shopped Joe Biden’s influence in Colombia in an investment pitch to Chinese energy firm.” Who had Colombia on their Hunter Biden Corruption Index Bingo card?
In 2017, Hunter Biden and a group of business partners seeking a $10 million investment deal with a Chinese energy firm touted Joe Biden’s friendly relations with Colombia’s president in their sales proposal, which suggested a series of oil investments in the South American country, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Hunter Biden and four other businessmen, including his uncle James Biden, highlighted the former vice president’s positive relationship with Juan Manuel Santos in a May 15, 2017 investment outline for CEFC China Energy, a Chinese energy conglomerate.
The Biden consortium, which would be called SinoHawk, sought a $10 million seed investment from CEFC China Energy, with a goal of eventually securing billions of dollars in investments in the U.S. and around the world.
The report is part of a trove of records held by Tony Bobulinski, a California-based businessman who was part of the consortium with Hunter Biden, James Biden, and two other partners.
Undisputed is the fact that Hunter and other members of the Biden family have been involved in numerous complex, and sometimes controversial, multi-national, multi-million dollar deals involving Ukraine, Russia, China, Luxembourg, and the UK. Numerous observers have stated they believe the Bidens’ main qualification to conduct such business is simply that they are connected to a powerful political figure who has influence over policies and practices that can impact the businesses: Joe Biden.
Summary of crooked dealings snipped.
Still, there’s one nagging point that I haven’t seen considered. It’s the nature of the Biden family business ventures juxtaposed against Joe Biden’s position on oil and fossil fuels.
Biden has repeatedly taken strong positions against fossil fuels— oil, coal and natural gas. He has made it clear he wants to “transition” away from them in the U.S. But as he’s advanced this position, his family members have been making money on deals that expand fossil fuel companies and ventures in foreign countries.
For example, While Hunter Biden was getting himself a job on the board of Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma; Vice President Joe Biden was coincidentally put in charge of Ukraine policy. The same day the White House announced the vice president would handle Ukraine policy and make a visit there the following week, Hunter allegedly wrote to a business partner, “This could be the break we have been waiting for.” They inked a highly-compensated gig with Burisma in Ukraine.
During Joe Biden’s first visit to the country in his new position just days later, he spoke of how Ukraine could make the right decisions and become “energy independent”— less reliant on other countries and more secure from a national security standpoint. Energy independence in this context implied good things for Ukrainian fossil fuel companies like Burisma to which Hunter was hitched. There was no bigger oil and gas company in Ukraine than Burisma.
The point is, while Joe Biden has been pushing to end US the oil industry, his family has been cutting billion dollars in deals, profiting off of the oil industry in competing countries such as Ukraine and China. In fact, eliminating fossil fuel in the US while supporting it in other nations could be seen as putting America at a competitive and national security disadvantage.
3. Biden, on the other hand, said a bunch of dumb things. He repeated a plagiarized phrase about there being no blue states or red states, only United States—and then went on to urinate on red states anyway. He admitted under his presidency, a long, dark winter was ahead. His best zinger of the night—linking Trump to the Proud Boys (which we already learned was Iranian disinformation from the start)—was utterly muffed when he called them the Poor Boys. This provoked laughter as many Americans googled to figure out what sandwiches had to do with Trump. We could go on an on, but there were a number of stumbles by Biden that showed why Obama never gave him much to do.
4. Biden said nothing good. Yeah, he had a pretty good riff on a bonehead question about Black Americans being pulled over, but Trump jujitsued that by twisting the question from sounding like “why are Blacks so often mistaken to be criminals” to “here’s what Black Americans have achieved over the last four years.” Everything else was either rehearsed or repeated talking points and a lot of bluster and blather that, at best, sounded like Trump’s vain boasting. And from what we’re reading today, many voters were put off by his blatant fear mongering about everyone dying from COVID.
So you might be mistaken into thinking that this was the end of it. And for Trump, it pretty much was. He was wrapping up, for the most part, when the moderator (who wasn’t bad, really—she asked a lot uncomfortable questions of both candidates) asked Trump why so many Black Americans were suffering living near oil fields. Instead of taking the bait, Trump said that these Americans were living there because they were working there, under his economy. A nice answer, and Trump knew it. He pretty much started putting his coat on and turning off the lights when Biden was asked to respond.
And did Biden respond. He announced that he would seek to end the oil industry. Trump wheeled around and asked him to repeat that. Biden did, and announced he would—as president—end America’s use of fossil fuels. Trump was handed gold, and he made sure Americans recognized this as big news, especially folks living in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Oklahoma.
Biden had a definite look of panic on his face as Trump named those states. Even he realized he just gave Trump 83 electoral votes, mumbling something about “on public lands” and “subsidies,” but Trump drowned out his babbling by reminding voters in those states what Biden just announced. There would be no walking that back, even with the media’s certain (and ultimately proven) covering for him on Friday. It was said, and at this point, if polls in other states stay where they are, those 83 votes will put Trump over.
Bear in mind, this doesn’t affect just four states. Shutting down oil and fossil fuels in this country will put nearly one million Americans out of their current jobs, in the form of drilling, mining, trucking, piping, distribution, distillation, manufacture, plasticization, and more. The Depression here will crush world markets that depend on us. Did Biden mean for all this? Probably not, but he reassured America that Biden, after 47 years in government, has literally no understanding of how the economy works.
Want to view Joe Biden’s entire Pennsylvania speech? Me neither, but here it is. Even includes time markers for the bloopers. But it’s weird to hear a guy both yelling and suffering from a case of mush-mouth at the same time.
Early voting shows Republicans are waiting in line to vote. The pollsters say a far higher percentage of Republicans support President Trump than in 2016. If this is true then how can he be behind by 17 points in Wisconsin as ABC claimed its poll said?
Republican registrations are up.
People didn’t register in 2020 to vote against President Trump.
Thomson was right when he wrote, “In 2020, we have the most stable race in decades.”
Everyone decided months ago whether they will vote for President Trump. This election is a referendum on him, plain and simple.
The election is about enthusiasm. The election is about getting your people to vote. President Trump has held huge rallies night after night for weeks.
Biden draws flies to his rare rallies. But they are socially distanced flies. His rallies are short made-for-TV events designed to let TV outlets pretend to be fair. They show the best of his short presentation, then show the worst moment in an hourlong speech by President Trump.
The Republican Party has an army of 2 million volunteers to get out the vote.
Democrats have a phone bank.
The pollsters should have adjusted to the new reality.
Whether a person wants President Trump or Biden is nice to know.
But what counts are the actual votes. A 10-point gap in enthusiasm trumps a 7-point lead in the polls. When the enthusiasm gap became obvious this summer, pollsters should have adjusted. They didn’t.
And really they learned nothing from 2016. They view it as an anomaly, and cling to the false notion that they got the national vote right.
Still more poll warning signs for Biden: 41% in Iowa:
I’ve been covering American politics for a long time and I can’t remember a number that so dramatically altered the political community’s perception of a presidential campaign as that number did, last night, at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
The source of the number was The Iowa Poll, which has been the gold standard for statewide polling in the United States for decades. The number itself was the percentage of likely voters in Iowa supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy for president.
President Trump’s number was 48%, which put him ahead in the “horse race” by 7 percentage points. There was nothing really remarkable about that, in context. Mr. Trump won the state in 2016 by (roughly) nine percentage points.
What was remarkable was Biden’s 41%. What made it doubly disconcerting was the way The Des Moines Register (accurately) described the poll results:
“Republican President Donald Trump has taken over the lead in Iowa as Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden has faded…”
Faded! Could there be a more terrible word in the last week of a presidential campaign? Off the record, Democratic elected officials and campaign operatives and financial backers have been saying throughout the campaign that their biggest fear regarding the eventual outcome was Biden himself. They saw him as an especially weak candidate and worried that he wasn’t “a closer;” even if he was ahead going into the last week, victory could slip from his grasp.
Up until last night, Democratic elected officials and political operatives saw the presidential race standing at somewhere between a narrow Biden win and a “blue wave.” In their “blue wave” scenario, the Democrats would win both the presidency and a Senate majority and the Trump-McConnell nightmare would finally come to an end.
That was the other piece of bad news in last night’s Iowa Poll release. It showed that Republican Sen. Joni Ernst had pulled ahead of her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield. Her lead (46%-to-42%) was within the margin of error, but it wasn’t Ms. Ernst’s lead that Democrats were focused on. It was the “faded” support for Ms. Greenfield, which almost exactly tracked the “faded” support for Joe Biden.
For Democrats, last night’s Iowa Poll was the worst possible news at the worst possible moment. It foretold close results in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It undermined the Biden campaign’s momentum and morale. And it fracked Democrats’ self-confidence.
Senior officials on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign are increasingly worried about insufficient Black and Latino voter turnout in key states like Florida and Pennsylvania with only four days until the election, according to people familiar with the matter.
Despite record early-vote turnout around the country, there are warning signs for Biden. In Arizona, two-thirds of Latino registered voters have not yet cast a ballot. In Florida, half of Latino and Black registered voters have not yet voted but more than half of White voters have cast ballots, according to data from Catalist, a Democratic data firm. In Pennsylvania, nearly 75% of registered Black voters have not yet voted, the data shows.
The firm’s analysis of early vote numbers also show a surge of non-college educated White voters, who largely back President Donald Trump, compared to voters of color, who overwhelmingly support Biden.
The situation is particularly stark in Florida where Republicans currently have a 9.4% turnout advantage in Miami-Dade County, a place where analysts say Biden will need a significant margin of victory to carry the state.
Jim Geraghty on which states to watch and why. Pennsylvania (especially Bucks County), Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
Heaven knows Biden has a long history of making gaffes. And maybe some of his bungling can be attributed to him just being a natural-born blooper machine. But all of it? Unlikely. The volume of slip-ups is too much.
Just as disturbing as the constant misstatements are his appearances in public and on video outside of the debates. He looks to be in a hard decline. His facial expressions are dull and empty. He seems to drift, get lost in his thoughts. Or simply has no thoughts and blanks out. He forgets where he is. Staffers feed him words when he can’t come up with them.
People who have raised at least $100,000 for the Biden campaign. Notable names (excluding Democratic senators, reps and governors) include Lisa Blue Baron, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, megalawyer Christopher Boies, Pete Buttigieg, Vanessa Getty, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and investment guru Andrew Tobias.
Trump was big on the national stage long before he was president. Why would he go away after the election is over? He’ll still have tens of millions of (probably angry) followers, deep pockets and a huge megaphone.
There has already been some talk of Trump starting his own television network to rival Fox News, and/or his own social media platform — the latter made more plausible by the heavy censorious hands of those running Twitter and Facebook — and I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat. Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me? He’ll probably hold campaign-style rallies around the country starting right after the election.
And the deep toxicity of national politics, which grew worse after the 2016 election but which has been brewing at least since the turn of the millennium, is not going to go away. In fact, a lot of what we’re hearing from Biden supporters suggests that it will get worse under a Biden administration.
Democrats are already calling for a Biden administration to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices until Democrats have a majority, to pack the Senate by admitting Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states, and even to establish a “truth and reconciliation commission” in which Republicans will be dragged in front of the public and forced to confess the error of their ways. And, of course, abolishing the Electoral College. None of that is normal.
Man attends Trump rally, is shocked to find happy people:
It is only “baffling” if one first reduces conservatives to pro-life freedom-lovers and then decides human life and freedom are dispensable. Freedom and life, however, are not abstract, and they are not simply a means to accomplish earthly goals or gain temporal wealth. Freedom and life are part of our Imago Dei. They are gifts from God that we are to steward, and we use them in myriad ways to advance God’s kingdom.
So is it “baffling” that a Christian would think God-given sex distinctions are important? Is it baffling that a believer would want to protect his family against the racially charged attacks of a violent mob? Is it baffling that a Christian would desire that his children learn truth, rather than government-sanctioned doctrine — not walking in the counsel of the ungodly? It is baffling that a Christian would desire for men to keep the hard-earned fruits of their labor, giving charitably to the poor and needy? Is it baffling that a believer would value the biblical family structure over the state? Of course, it’s not.
Furthermore, if Piper believes this immoral gangrene that spreads throughout our country is a result of one unregenerate man instead of the result of the wickedness in the hearts of every sinful citizen, he is a fool.
Biden goes full tranny pander, demanding religions bow to to Democratic Party’s transgender mandates. “Religion should not be used as a license to discriminate.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Kamala Harris has a habit of launching into peals of laughter when she is asked questions, even serious ones. It’s likely a nervous tic, and it’s possible that she doesn’t even realize that she does it.
In the world of gambling, this is called a tell. An unconscious and often uncontrollable behavior that serves as a clue to others that a player is bluffing or lying.
Harris was interviewed on 60 Minutes this weekend, and when she was asked if her view on certain issues was progressive or socialist, she launched into a laugh.
In 2016, Trump lost Minnesota by about 45,000 votes. This year, he is clearly making an attempt to close the gap there and pull off a win that would sting Democrats for years to come.
The left didn’t do itself any favors by burning down Minneapolis this summer, and Trump was also helped by gaining the endorsements of multiple mayors in the state’s ‘Iron Range’ region
Snip.
Trump’s campaign has booked more than $1.2 million in TV advertising in Minnesota in the final week of the campaign—more than it spent there in the preceding three weeks combined, according to Advertising Analytics, which tracks campaigns’ ad spending. Vice President Mike Pence held a rally in northern Minnesota on Monday, the latest in a series of visits to the state by Trump and top surrogates. Overall, the Trump campaign has deployed 60 staffers in Minnesota, a level of Republican intensity surpassing that of any race in memory, both parties say.
“Like many in our region, we have voted for Democrats over many decades. We have watched as our constituents’ jobs left not only the Iron Range, but our country. By putting tariffs on our products and supporting bad trade deals, politicians like Joe Biden did nothing to help the working class. We lost thousands of jobs, and generations of young people have left the Iron Range in order to provide for their families with good-paying jobs elsewhere. Today, we don’t recognize the Democratic Party. It has been moved so far to the left it can no longer claim to be advocates of the working class. The hard-working Minnesotans that built their lives and supported their families here on the Range have been abandoned by radical Democrats. We didn’t choose to leave the Democratic Party, the party left us,” the letter, signed by Virginia Mayor Larry Cuffe, Chisholm Mayor John Champa, Ely Mayor Chuck Novak, Two Harbors Mayor Chris Swanson, Eveleth Mayor Robert Vlaisavljevich and Babbitt Mayor Andrea Zupancich, states.
"Joe Biden and I are about to work to get rid of that tax cut," Kamala Harris tells Hispanic Americans. pic.twitter.com/BT9sTqsDfK
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) October 30, 2020
“Ex-husband of Joe Biden’s wife claim two had an affair that split marriage.” He claims both worked on Joe Biden’s campaign in 1972. Really, would it shock anyone to find yet another chapter of Joe Biden’s autobiography was fiction?
Eight days out from election day! The Crooked Joe revelations from Hunter’s laptop are coming so fast and heavy that I’m hard-pressed to corral them all! It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
That the 50-year-old Hunter has been trading on his Democratic father’s political influence his entire adult life raises legal questions about possible influence-peddling, government watchdogs and former federal investigators say. In addition, the more than two-decades-long pattern of nepotism casts fresh doubt on Joe Biden’s recent statements that he “never discussed” business with his son, and that his activities posed “no conflicts of interest.”
Snip.
1996-1998: MBNA Corp.
Fresh out of college, credit-card giant MBNA put him on its payroll as “senior vice president” earning more than $100,000 a year, plus an undisclosed signing bonus. Delaware-based MBNA at the time was Biden’s largest donor and lobbying the Delaware senator for bankruptcy reforms that would make it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy and write off credit-card debt.
Fresh out of college I was working retail sales jobs while sharing an apartment and writing in my spare time.
Besides a job for Hunter, bank executives and employees gave generously to Joe Biden’s campaigns – $214,000 total, federal records show – and one top executive even bought Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home for more than $200,000 above the market value, real estate records show. The exec paid top dollar – $1.2 million – for the old house even though it lacked central air conditioning. MBNA also flew Biden and his wife to events and covered their travel costs, disclosure forms show.
Sen. Biden eventually came through for MBNA by sponsoring and whipping votes in the Senate to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act.
When NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Biden during the 2008 presidential campaign whether it was wrong “for someone like you in the middle of all this to have your son collecting money from this big credit-card company while you were on the (Senate) floor protecting its interests,” Biden gave an answer he would repeat many times in the future: “Absolutely not,” he snapped, arguing it was completely appropriate and that Hunter deserved the position and generous salary because he graduated from Yale.
Remember, people who graduated from Yale are automatically better than deplorables who graduated from a non-Ivy college, no matter how much cocaine they snort.
1998-2001: Commerce Department
Hunter also capitalized on the family name in 1998 when he joined President Clinton’s agency. In spite of having no experience in the dot-com industry, he was appointed “executive director of e-commerce policy coordination,” pulling down another six-figure salary plus bonuses.
He landed the job after his father’s longtime campaign manager and lawyer William Oldaker called then-Commerce Secretary William Daley, who’d also worked on Biden’s campaigns, and put in a good word for his son, according to public records.
2001-2009: Oldaker, Biden & Belair
After Republican President George W. Bush took over the Commerce Department, Hunter left the government and joined Oldaker to open a lobbying shop in Washington, just blocks from Congress, where he gained access to exclusive business and political deals.
Federal disclosure forms show Hunter Biden and his firm billed millions of dollars while lobbying on behalf of a host of hospitals and private colleges and universities, among other clients. In a 2006 disclosure statement submitted to the Senate, Hunter said his clients were “seeking federal appropriations dollars.”
Hunter won the contract to represent St. Joseph’s University from an old Biden family friend who worked in government relations at the university and proposed he solicit earmarks for one of its programs in Philadelphia. The friend, Robert Skomorucha, remarked in a press interview that Hunter had “a very strong last name that really paid off in terms of our lobbying efforts.”
“A really strong last name.” There’s the problem with the swamp in a nutshell.,
These clients, like MBNA, also favored bankruptcy reforms to make it harder for patients and students to discharge debt in bankruptcy filings. At the same time Hunter was operating as a Beltway lobbyist, he was receiving “consulting payments” from his old employer MBNA, which was still courting his father over the bankruptcy reforms.
In 2007, Hunter also dined with a private prison lobbyist who had business before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Joe Biden chaired, according to published reports. Senate rules bar members or their staff from having contact with family members who are lobbyists seeking to influence legislation.
Hunter’s lawyer-lobbyist firm was embroiled in a conflict-of-interest controversy in 2006 when it was criticized for representing a lobbyist under investigation by the House ethics committee. The lobbyist was still taking payments from his old K street firm while working as a top aide on the House Appropriations Committee. Hunter at the time was lobbying that same committee for earmarks for his clients.
William Oldaker did not just make Hunter a rich lobbyist. Oldaker also secured a $1 million loan for him through a bank he co-founded, WashingtonFirst, that Hunter sought for an investment scheme, which later went sour.
Joe Biden deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign and political action committee donations at WashingtonFirst, while funneling hundreds of thousands in campaign and PAC expenditures to Oldaker, Biden & Belair. Joe Biden’s payments to Hunter’s lobbying firm, including more than $143,000 in 2007 alone, were listed as “legal services” in Federal Election Commission filings.
Oldaker did not respond to a request for comment left at his office.
But wait! Hunter had three other sinecures while working at Oldaker, Biden & Belair:
2003-2005: National Group LLP
While serving as a partner at Oldaker, Biden & Belair, Hunter also registered as a lobbyist for National Group, a lobbying-only subsidiary which shared offices with OB&B and specialized in targeted spending items inserted into legislation known as “earmarks.”
Hunter represented his father’s alma mater, the University of Delaware, and other Biden constituents and submitted requests to Biden’s office for earmarks benefiting these clients in appropriations bills.
2006-2007: Paradigm Companies LLC
In 2005, when Joe Biden was thinking about making another run at the White House, after a 1987 bid that ended in plagiarism charges, his lobbyist son was looking for a new line of work too.
In early 2006, Wall Street executive and Biden family friend Anthony Lotito said, Biden’s younger brother, Jim, phoned him on behalf of the senator. He said Biden wanted his youngest son – whom he still called “Honey” – to get out of the lobbying business to avoid allegations of conflicts of interest that might dog Biden’s presidential bid.
“Biden was concerned with the impact that Hunter’s lobbying activities might have on his expected campaign [and asked his brother to] seek Lotito’s assistance in finding employment for Hunter in a non-lobbying capacity,” according to a January 2007 complaint that Lotito filed in New York state court against Hunter over alleged breach of contract in a related venture. (Jim and Hunter Biden denied such a phone call took place as described.)
Lotito told the court he agreed to help Hunter as a favor to the senator, who had served on the powerful banking committee. He figured “the financial community might be a good starting place in which to seek out employment on Hunter’s behalf,” the court documents state. But he quickly found that Wall Street had “no interest” in hiring Biden.
So the Bidens hatched a scheme to buy a hedge fund, “whereby Hunter would then assume a senior executive position with the company.” And Lotito helped broker the deal. Despite having no Wall Street experience, Biden was appointed interim CEO and president of the Paradigm investment fund and given a $1.2 million salary, according to SEC filings. Lotito joined the enterprise as a partner, and agreed to shepherd Hunter, still in his mid-thirties, through his new role in high-finance.
“Given Hunter Biden’s inexperience in the securities industry,” the complaint states, it was agreed that Lotito would maintain an office at the new holding company’s New York headquarters “in order to assist Biden in discharging his duties as president.”
After the venture failed, Lotito sued the Bidens for fraud. The Bidens countersued and the two parties settled in 2008.
2006-2009: Amtrak
During this same period, Hunter was appointed vice chairman of the taxpayer-subsidized rail line, thanks to the sponsorship of powerful Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, a political ally of his father.
After that Rosemont Seneca Partners shows up, and we start to see the Hunter jobs BattleSwarm readers are already familiar with. Read the whole thing.
Hunter Biden is partnered with the Chinese state. Entire investment partnership is Chinese state money from social security fund to China Development Bank. It is actually a subsidiary of the Bank of China. This is not remotely anything less than a Chinese state funded play.
Though the entire size of the fund cannot be reconstructed, the Taiwanese cofounder who is now detained in China, reports it to be NOT $1-1.5 billion but $6.5 billion. This would make Hunters stake worth at a minimum at least $50 million if he was to sell it.
Disturbingly, everyone on the Chinese side are clearly linked with influence and intelligence organizations. China uses very innocuous sounding organization names to hide PLA, United Front, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs influence/intelligence operations. This report cannot say Hunter was the target of such an operation or that China even targeted him. However, based upon the clear pattern of individuals and organizations surrounding him it is an entirely reasonable conclusion.
Finally, the believed Godfather in arranging everything is a gentleman named Yang Jiechi. He is currently the CCP Director of Foreign Affairs leading strategist for America, Politburo member one of the most powerful men in China, and Xi confidant. Why does this matter?
He met regularly with Joe Biden during his stint as Chinese ambassador the US when Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Later he was Minister of Foreign Affairs when the investment partnership was made official in 2013. Importantly, the Taiwanese national listed MOFA institutions as the key clients in helping to arrange everything. Yang would clearly have known the importance of Hunter Biden and undoubtedly would have been informed of any dealings. Given that he is now the point person in China for dealing with the US this raises major concerns about a Biden administration dealing impartially with an individual in this capacity. These are documented facts from Chinese corporate records like IPO prospectuses and media. They raise very valid concerns about Biden linkages to China.
Snip.
Joe Biden’s compromising partnership with the Communist Party of China runs via Yang Jiechi (CPC’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission). YANG met frequently with BIDEN during his tenure at the Chinese embassy in Washington.
Hunter Biden’s 2013 Bohai Harvest Rosemont investment partnership was set-up by Ministry of Foreign Affairs institutions who are tasked with garnering influence with foreign leaders during YANG’s tenure as Foreign Minister.
HUNTER has a direct line to the Politburo, according to SOURCE A, a senior finance professional in China.
Michael Lin, a Taiwanese national now detained in China, brokered the BHR partnership and partners with MOFA foreign influence organizations.
LIN is a POI for his work on behalf of China, as confirmed by SOURCE B and SOURCE C (at two separate national intelligence agencies).
BHR is a state managed operation. Leading shareholder in BHR is a Bank of China which lists BHR as a subsidiary and BHR’s partners are SOEs that funnel revenue/assets to BHR.
HUNTER continues to hold 10% in BHR. He visited China in 2010 and met with major Chinese government financial companies that would later back BHR.
HUNTER’s BHR stake (purchased for $400,000) is now likely be worth approx. $50 million (fees and capital appreciation based on BHR’s $6.5 billion AUM as stated by Michael Lin).
HUNTER also did business with Chinese tycoons linked with the Chinese military and against the interests of US national security.
BIDEN’s foreign policy stance towards China (formerly hawkish), turned positive despite China’s country’s rising geopolitical assertiveness.
Wonder why elected Democrats are so loyal to the “Biden is as pure as the driven snow” narrative? They’re all in it together. “Report: Hunter Biden, Associates Wanted to Bring in Gov. Cuomo, Sen. Schumer for Chinese Deals.”
Fox News released an email containing a list of “domestic contacts/projects,” which includes Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, for Hunter Biden and his associates to lure into Chinese deals.
The New York Post has more details on these contacts with explanations on why they should bring in people like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. Uncle Jim Biden also wanted to know about any foreign friends they could drag into the deals.
Fox News said the email with the list of contacts is not connected to Hunter’s laptop.
Jim Biden sent the list of contacts to those in the May 13 email, which was all about a Chinese venture with now-defunct CEFC China Energy Co.
Biden’s list named “Harris, D-Calif.; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; former Virginia Gov. Terry McCauliffe.”
From The New York Post:
A May 15, 2017, memo naming potential contacts was sent by Joe Biden’s brother Jim to his nephew and three other men who all formed a limited liability company to partner with another firm on “global and/or domestic” projects involving “infrastructure, energy, financial services and other strategic sectors,” the documents show.
The other company was backed by a since-vanished Chinese energy tycoon and was to “be primarily responsible for arranging financing and execution” of the projects, according to the documents released by Tony Bobulinksi, who was CEO of the joint venture.
The memo, titled “Key domestic contacts for phase one target projects,” noted that Cuomo “is moving forward with major infrastructure projects such as the long-stalled Tappan Zee Bridge replacement and the much-needed redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport.”
“His administration has invested nearly $4 billion through the Regional Council and Upstate Revitalization initiatives to jumpstart the economy and support local priorities for development,” it added.
Secret Service logs obtained earlier this year by Senate investigators include dates and locations matching those discussed in the emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The alignment of the dates in the emails and the Secret Service protective detail logs is significant because the authenticity of the emails, first published by the New York Post last week, is the subject of heated debate. The FBI, which purportedly obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop in December last year, has not yet officially confirmed that it is in possession of the device and whether the emails are genuine.
In one alleged email, written after midnight on April 13, 2014, Hunter Biden wrote to Devon Archer, his business partner, that he will be traveling to Houston the next day. Secret Service logs obtained by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs show a trip by Biden on April 13-14, 2014.
In another alleged email, Vadim Pozharskyi, a top executive from Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, wrote to Biden and Archer on May 12, 2014: “Following our talks during the visit to the Como Lake and our further discussions, I would like to bring the following situation to your attention.” While the email doesn’t cite a date for the trip, Secret Service logs include a travel entry for Biden on April 3-6, 2014.
In another alleged email, Archer wrote on May 12, 2014, that he is with Biden in Doha, Qatar. Secret Service records include a trip by Biden to Doha, Qatar, on May 11-14, 2014.
Related: Did the Secret Service hide Hunter Biden documents from congress? “If Hunter Biden was receiving Secret Service protection after the date the Secret Service represented to the senators the detail had ended, it implies the Secret Service may have withheld relevant documents about its travels with Hunter Biden from the senators.”
Now we learn that Biden has secretly been playing footsie with China.
The statement Wednesday night asserting that the former vice president was a willing and eager participant in a family scheme to make millions of dollars by partnering with a shady Chinese Communist firm is a singular event in a presidential race already overflowing with drama and intrigue.
The dynamite assertion, believable because it aligns with earlier information we know to be true, came in a statement by Tony Bobulinski, who describes himself as a former partner of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Joe’s brother Jim in the China scheme. Bobulinski unloads his bill of accusations in blunt but precise language and detail.
He confirms that he was one of the recipients of the May 13, 2017, email published by The Post eight days ago. That email, from another partner in the group, laid out cash and equity positions and mysteriously included a 10 percent set-aside for “the big guy.”
Sources have said the “big guy” was Joe Biden. In a matter-of-fact manner, Bobulinski states that the “email is genuine” and that the former vice president and the man leading in the 2020 race is indeed “the big guy.”
Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president.
At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.
These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.”
Worth mentioning again: The Bidens even grifted off cancer research:
A few days before the 2016 presidential election, outgoing Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, announced the formation of the Biden Foundation. “The Biden Foundation is an educational foundation dedicated to exploring the ways that everyone—no matter their income level, race, gender, age, or sexuality—can expect to be treated with dignity and to receive a fair shot at achieving the American Dream,” read the nonprofit’s press release dated November 5, 2016.
In the span of several weeks, the nonprofit quickly was seeded with millions of dollars in donations. A year-end disclosure report for 2016 showed $3.4 million in contributions; the group spent a few hundred thousand on expenses but awarded no grants that first year.
The practice of spending most of its money on salaries and expenses while directing little or nothing toward the Biden Foundation’s stated mission followed a pattern. During its brief three-year history, the Biden Foundation raised nearly $10 million but less than ten percent was awarded to other charities—and half of that meager sum was donated to another Biden-run nonprofit.
Although the Biden Foundation pledged to focus on the couple’s pet projects, a very small portion of the Bidens’ largess directly benefited any of those causes. Instead, the charity appears to have funded the Bidens’ pre-primary campaigning for president—most of the charity’s activities involved public speeches by Joe and Jill—while reaching out to key constituencies such as military families and gay rights activists.
Snip.
But despite all the spin, the Biden Foundation only gave two grants totalling a little more than $400,000 to the YMCA that year. It would mark the nonprofit’s only direct donation to the initiative.
In fact, even though the Biden Foundation raised $3.2 million in 2018, it donated just $55,000 more to three other nonprofits. The Military Child Education Coalition, a charity based in Texas that assists the families of U.S. servicemen, received a paltry $20,000 from the fund.
Politically connected lawyers, however, fared much better. Perkins Coie, best known for acting as the pass-through between Fusion GPS and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 to produce the infamous Steele dossier, was paid more than $230,000.
Aside from a handful of minor grants, the Biden Foundation made only one other major contribution in its three-year history; the charity donated $495,323 to the Biden Cancer Initiative, a separate nonprofit created in 2017, two years after Beau Biden died of brain cancer. In 2017 and 2018, the Biden Cancer Initiative raised another $4.8 million in donations; it did not award any grants. Instead, the nonprofit spent $3 million on the salaries and benefits of a four-person staff.
It appears that the Hunter Biden’s hard drive is the real McCoy. Neither Joe nor Hunter Biden deny it. It’s clear from the emails and other files on the drive that Hunter Biden was the family bag man and that Ukrainians were paying him for access to his father while Joe Biden was Vice President. It also appears that individuals—and possibly governments—from other countries were paying for similar access.
The Democrats impeached Donald Trump for asking the President of the Ukraine to pursue an investigation related to the bribery verified by the evidence on Hunter’s hard drive.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The Bidens acted as they did believing that they had an airtight level of protection. As the bribes rolled in, it seems they became increasingly arrogant. Hunter Biden’s arrogance compounded with his addictions and other character defects led him to be careless. He never should have let someone who wasn’t fully vetted to have access to any of his electronic devices, but he did.
Saying the United States should transition away from fossil fuels is a popular idea on the left. It’s not workable in real life, however. Millions of people depend on fossil fuels not only to heat and light their homes, but for their jobs.
During the final debate last night, Joe Biden said the United States should transition away from the oil industry. This was red meat for his base and the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, but it won’t play with millions of voters who live in the real world.
It’s easy to say you support the idea of abandoning fossil fuels, but if you want to know how that works out, look no further than California, where their green energy policy has led to rolling blackouts.
You can tell Biden’s comments were damaging, because the media has already moved to the ‘conservatives pounce’ stage of the issue.
While Joe Biden has been busy speaking out of both sides of his mouth about what his position on fracking would be, if elected, another revelation has come to light: regardless of his position on fracking, his $2 trillion clean energy plan could be devastating to natural gas.
As Bloomberg points out in a recent article, natural gas is not only a crucial part of the nation’s energy supply, but it directly effects votes in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where Biden is seeking to turn the state that leaned Trump in 2016.
Biden’s energy plan could speed up natural gas becoming “economically and environmentally untenable within the power sector,” Bloomberg notes. Biden’s plan for a carbon neutral grid would all but assure natural gas is phased out in favor of renewable energy.
Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, put it bluntly: “Decarbonization isn’t a debate — it’s a fossil-fuel death sentence. It means a resource is going off the grid. That is the inevitable implication.”
The time and resources President Trump’s campaign has been pouring into the battleground state of Michigan appear to be paying off, according to two new polls.
Zia Poll surveyed “2851 likely voters and newly registered voters who have never voted in an election” and found Trump leading Joe Biden, 49 percent to 45 percent, for a four-point lead.
The poll found 85 percent of Trump supporters were “very excited” about their candidate, while only 70 percent of Biden supporters are so.
Regarding the economy, 55 percent of respondents said Trump would provide a “better” one. Forty-five percent of those surveyed said Biden would.
Respondents “were almost evenly split” about whether Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) or Trump better handled the coronavirus pandemic response.
The poll also found Biden with a “slight” lead among black and Hispanic voters.
Painter Communications analyzed the poll and told Breitbart News Biden had the support of 46.8 percent of black respondents, while Trump was at 45.7 percent, a difference of just 1.1 percent.
To put that in perspective, Trump won Michigan by a mere 11,000 votes in 2016 while Hillary Clinton racked up almost 300,000 more votes in urban Wayne County. Any significant defection of black voters to Trump probably puts Michigan out of reach for Biden.
This seems part of a trend: “President Trump’s Approval with Black Voters Soars to 46% After Debate.”
Still more on that theme:
Morning Reader Data Points:
National Daily Black Likely Voter Job Approval For @POTUS – October 19-23, 2020
If Biden blows it in the sunbelt and Iowa, it will come down once again to the rust belt battlegrounds: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Remember: if Biden loses all of the above-mentioned states that he wants to flip from red to blue (which is quite possible) – then he has to sweep the Great Lakes battlegrounds. Not 2 of 3. 3 of 3.
Right now (as of 10/20), those three states are looking pretty good for Biden, especially Michigan and even Wisconsin, which once seemed like it might be the hardest of the three to get back in the blue column where it resided from 1988 to 2012. Somewhat surprisingly, Pennsylvania is still a dogfight for Biden despite nearly 50 years in politics in neighboring Delaware and multiple visits to the Keystone State this year:
So, remembering that Biden might need to sweep all three of those, my main cautionary note is to look at the Real Clear Politics polling averages for those states way back on October 19, 2016:
Pennsylvania: Clinton +6.2
Wisconsin: Clinton +7
Michigan: Clinton +11.6
As you can see, Joe Biden is doing worse in those state polls than Hillary was. And she, of course, lost them all.
Glenn Greenwald points out the “obvious to anyone who isn’t a Biden partisan”: Biden refuses to say whether the emails are authentic or not, and members of the Democrat-loving press refuse to ask him.
This is key: it’s stunning Biden hasn’t even had to say if the emails are authentic.
But there’s a resaon: journalists don’t want him to answer that because then they’ll lose their key excuse for not covering it (“not verified”) & their main defense of Biden (“disinformation”). https://t.co/t0H9E1lcpt
How Biden’s tax-and-spend proposals will damage the economy. “Experts project that the policy agenda would, by 2030, lead to 4.9 million fewer jobs and the economy shrinking by $2.6 trillion. So, too, the study projects that consumption would be $1.5 trillion lower in 2030 and families would see a $6,500 drop in median household income compared to a neutral scenario.”
Complete with sky-high taxes:
difference between President Trump and Biden in taxes.
I’ve seen serious addiction up close. The kind of addiction that first leads to absences, then to sudden re-appearances to beg for forgiveness — and money. The kind of addiction that destroys relationships through lies, through theft, through neglect, and worse.
When addiction reaches that stage, there are usually only two possible outcomes: The addict either hits bottom and cleans up their act, or they die.
There is no doubt in my mind, having seen such behavior from much too close, that Hunter is on that path.
The only way to help a fellow human being — in this case, a sole surviving son — is to stop enabling them.
It isn’t easy, cutting a parent or a child off from everything but your love. But it’s either that or they die.
Joe Biden, having stood over the graves of two of his children, let — or forced? — his remaining son to become his bagman.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going easy on Hunter: I believe he belongs in prison every bit as much as he belongs in a 12-step program.
The millions Hunter has raked in on his own and his father’s behalf have made them rich while enabling his addictions.
A father with any kind of concern for his child’s welfare would have cut Hunter off from “family business,” as they say in The Godfather, and stuck him in rehab.
Instead, Père Biden seems content to watch Hunter commit slow-motion suicide, so long as the easy money keeps coming in.
For those of you who always wanted to see Hunter Biden smoke crack naked while being serviced by a prostitute, the videos are out there.
“AMERICA IS A RACIST COUNTRY AND IT’S TIME FOR A RECKONING!”
Everything we see on television, right down to the riots and “burning down of our cities,” is staged for the media’s social engineering. Antifa and BLM are nothing but props rolled out by the media and left when and how they choose. They can set their movements ablaze or send them all home to their shame closets with the flip of a social switch. Obviously the damage these mobs do is real. The damage to property and brutality against people — the death — it’s obviously all very, very real. But it’s also anecdotal and not nearly as pervasive as the media wants people to believe. It’s not actually what’s real in America and it’s not what people are thinking about or focused on or worried about in their every day lives. And honest people know that. Honest people know the media are working hard to stoke racial tensions and division, and to make us believe our nation is fraught with division and detriment.
It’s not. And the vast majority of honest observers, even those who don’t watch politics real closely, know that.
Yes, whoever made that ad, sure had the “broader audience in mind.” I can picture clever fellows laughing at their own work, comparing it to a “South Park” parody, and joking about how dumb Americans are.
Watching that ad, a few seconds in, Meade said “Tegridy Farms,” and toward the end, I said, “This is for the dumb people” and “Actually, this is very effective.” I could feel the emotion they were trying to put over. Joe will bring us together — no reason why and don’t you worry your head about what he’ll actually do while you’re in a hypnotic fog of phony-baloney togetherness.
I’m looking for the right “Tegridy Farms” ad to convey Meade’s point. There’s this, but as Meade said, “It doesn’t have enough of that voice — you know, like that guy… that guy in ‘The Big Lebowski.'” I say: “Sam Elliott! You do realize the voice in the Biden ad isSam Elliott.” Meade thought it was just some guy doing his damnedest to sound like Sam Elliott. No, that’s actually Sam Elliott. You might think Sam Elliott is such an extreme that he’d be reserved for the comic exaggeration of the voice of a narrator…
And then she links to the South Park Tegridy ad, which gives me an excuse to embed it here (NSFW because, you know, South Park):
Our media is refusing to even consider whether laptop emails are genuine or not. “Is there any basis for these claims of fraud and disinformation? None, so far.”
Every four years, I assume that our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press have stooped as low as they can possibly stoop. Then another election rolls around and they prove me wrong. It happens every time. I don’t know what I expected.
The NY Post‘s story about Hunter Biden’s allegedly abandoned laptop has forced journalists and other Democrats to cast aside their thin veil of impartiality. Wherever the evidence may lead, they can’t allow themselves to follow. Because if they do, it might bring about four more years of Bad Orange Man.
I already wrote in my candidate and I don’t care who wins on November 3. I’ve resigned myself to the result either way. But these @$$holes sure haven’t. They’re doing everything they can to drag Joe’s decrepit old carcass across the finish line, and they’re shouting down or silencing anybody who doesn’t like it. I’ve had my differences with Trump supporters over the years, but they’re not the ones censoring me, locking me out of my social media accounts, and trying to shut me up.
Here’s a Never Trumper who has come to the reluctant conclusion that she has to vote for Trump after all. “The reason I am feeling pushed towards Trump, and at such a late date, and despite my strong inclinations otherwise, is that I no longer feel this is a Kang v. Kodos scenario. From the right, I continue to see the usual callous indifference to the lives of ordinary people, but it’s just indifference. The message I am getting from the left is that I am a target they mean to destroy.” The last sentence is true, but it was no less true four years ago. She trots out the litany of Social justice Warrior targeting, Democratic hostility to religion, rioting and looting, and gross media bias. All true, but all (save the scale of the looting and changes wrought by the Wuhan coronavirus) were all true four years ago. “I am feeling pushed towards voting for Trump because on so many different levels it seems that my inalienable rights and my personal well-being are actively targeted by the ruling powers among the left.” True. What took you so damn long to realize it? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
What should disqualify Biden: He says that America has never lived up to it’s ideas. Those portions of western Europe not currently speaking German or Russian might disagree…
Thread that suggests Biden is sufering from Parkinson’s disease. I would take a diagnosis made from videos like this with several grains of salt, though if you want to research it the website is here.
Over the past two months, I took it upon myself to travel flyover country and the north, spanning Kentucky, Ohio, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas and North Dakota. Throughout my journey I spoke with residents and business owners about the election, who they’re voting for and where they see things going in the 2020 election. What came of two conversations in particular will bring a little bit of perspective to those polls.
The first conversation that stood out to me was at a barbershop in Excelsior, Minnesota — a town with the population of about 2,500 about 30 minutes outside of Minneapolis. While getting my hair cut, I struck up a conversation with the barber and patrons. Of the residents there, three had been polled about the presidential election, and the barber said that both he and his wife had received separate phone calls. All — every one of them — told me that they told the pollster that they were voting for Joe Biden, when they are voting for Mr. Trump. Why would they do this? According to all of them, for the safety of their family.
Each person in the barbershop stated that they knew the George Floyd riots were caused by the left and each said they were afraid that if they said that they were Trump voters, violence or being canceled could happen to them. The barbershop owner in particular stated that he was, “well aware of cancel culture …” and worried he would be slammed on online ratings, and people would try to destroy his decades-old business based on his support of the president — so he lied to protect his livelihood.
The second conversation that stood out to me was with my Uber driver just outside of Dallas, Texas. My driver was an immigrant from Nigeria to America nearly 20 years ago and an immigrant from New York City to a suburb of Dallas just last month. I asked the father of four what he thought about the election and he said that, where he once was a Democrat, he would never vote Democratic again because of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s shutting down of the state and city. He used his stimulus money and extra unemployment from the federal government to uproot his family and move across the country for “… half the rent, no state income tax, and the ability to work.”
Bring it!
Hey @joerogan you interested in getting a look at Hunter's laptop?
Hunter Biden revelations continue to explode, Kazakhstan joins China and Ukraine in the Biden Payola Sweepstakes, inside Biden’s Malarkey Factory, and the revolving door between social media giants and Team Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Just two more BidenWatchs until election day!
If you haven’t been following last week’s Hunter Biden revelations, click here and here.
Hunter Biden is facing fresh questions over business dealing in yet another nation — Kazakhstan.
Between 2012 and 2014 — when his father Joe Biden served as Vice President — Hunter Biden worked as a go-between to Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh oligarch with close ties to the country’s longtime kleptocratic leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, The Daily Mail reported.
The British tabloid said they obtained emails from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing Hunter making contact with Rakishev and attempting to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington DC and a Nevada mining company.
Through his connections, emails show Hunter Biden successfully engineered a $1 million investment from Rakishev to filmmaker Alexandra Forbes Kerry — the daughter of ex-Sen. and former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, the report said.
Hunter Biden also traveled to the country’s capital of Astana for business talks.
Rakishev, however, repeatedly ran into problems finding western business partners due to the murky origins of his wealth. The respected International Finance Corp. pulled out a planned deal with him over “liabilities” stemming from his connections to the country’s rulers.
As in other nations like Ukraine and China where Hunter plied his trade, Joe Biden may not have been far behind. The Mail published a photo they obtained from the “Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery” showing Hunter Biden with his beaming father alongside Rakishev.
Has another Hunter Biden laptop been seized in Ukraine? “A Ukrainian lawmaker has claimed a second laptop belonging to Hunter Biden’s business contacts in the country has been seized by law enforcement there. Andrii Derkach posted to Facebook on Friday to say there is a ‘second laptop’ involving evidence of corruption and connected to the Bidens.” As with all foreign sources, some caution is probably in order.
“Has the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop material for ten months?”
A whistleblower says that many months ago, he provided the FBI contents of a laptop computer once used by Hunter Biden.
That’s according to a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray sent today by Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). The letter states that an unnamed whistleblower contacted Sen. Johnson’s committee on September 24, a day after the committee released its investigation into alleged Biden conflicts of interest.
The whistleblower reported he had turned over the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop December 9, 2019 in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by the FBI from the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. Delaware is the Bidens’ home state.
In the letter today, Sen. Johnson says that he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the FBI about facts alleged by the whistleblower but the FBI stonewalled. That despite the fact that Johnson says several of their questions were not related to confidential information regarding “the possible existence of an ongoing grand jury investigation.”
More from Rudy Giuliani on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Including the fact that Biden’s lawyer tried to get the laptop back after the story broke. Plus: “It’s got him [Hunter Biden] there with crack pipes, it’s got him there doing an imitation of Anthony Weiner about 50 times.” Also:
He went on to say that there would be more communications that would describe how Joe Biden was being compensated.
“In fact, he was getting a large portion of this money,” Giuliani said, adding that the information would explain how Joe Biden, who has never made that much money as a politician, “has two or three luxurious homes.”
“Because he didn’t pay for anything, Hunter did,” he explained.
“This is a long term bribery scheme that started low level in Delaware with his brother James—selling his office,” Giuliani told Crowder.
“When they got to the big time, they shook down Iraq for … I think about 500 million, Ukraine for about 20 [million], China—I don’t know—30, 40 million?” he said.
Giuliani added that he almost forgot Russia. “The 3.5 million from the mayor’s wife,” who he noted is a good friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “That woman is a close ally of Putin,” Giuliani said, pointing out the irony of the president being accused of colluding with Russia, when “Biden actually got paid by Russia!”
Here’s a New York Times piece that attempts to debunk the Hunter Biden story by taking every Team Biden pronouncement at face value, but which nonetheless provides an awful lot of damning context for his China dealings:
The $1.5 billion figure to which Mr. Trump referred on Thursday appears to be the amount of money that a Shanghai-based private-equity company, BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Co., aimed to raise in 2014. The company, which says its biggest shareholder is the state-controlled Bank of China, pools money and invests in companies, many of which are also state owned.
Hunter Biden has been a member of the board of BHR since it was formed in late 2013. In October 2017, after his father had left the vice presidency, he bought 10 percent of the firm, investing the equivalent of $420,000.
But his lawyer, George Mesires, said on Thursday that he has never been paid for his role on the board, and has not profited financially since he began as a part-owner.
“He has not been compensated for being on the board of directors, nor has he received any return on his investment to date,” Mr. Mesires said. Although BHR has been involved in a number of business deals, he said, “there have been no distributions to the shareholders since Hunter has been an equity owner.”
Translation: “Sure, he’s part owner of a company with several Communist Chinese officials, but you have top trust us when we say he hasn’t made any money off the deal!”
With his latest attacks on the Bidens, Mr. Trump is “desperately clutching for conspiracy theories that have been debunked and dismissed by independent, credible news organizations,” Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement.
Still, the fact that Chinese state-owned firms were interested in linking arms with Hunter Biden while his father was vice president fits a long pattern of companies owned by or closely tied to foreign governments courting the families of high-ranking American officials. In 2002, for example, when George W. Bush was president, his brother Neil won a $400,000 consulting contract to advise a Chinese semiconductor company co-founded by the son of the man who was then China’s president.
“Almost any senior name that I start researching, I run into practices like this. It is extraordinarily widespread,” Sarah Chayes, the author of the book “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,” said in an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday. “How did we all convince ourselves that this isn’t corrupt?”
Asked if there was any conflict of interest, Mr. Mesires, said: “Hunter has been repeatedly clear on this point. Hunter has not and does not discuss his business interests with his father.”
A spokesman for the Biden campaign also said that the former vice president never discussed the China venture with his son.
The only known connection between the elder Mr. Biden and BHR came in early December 2013 in Beijing. Mr. Biden, who had traveled to China on official business as vice president, met and shook hands with his son’s business associate, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the hotel where the American delegation was staying, according to an account in The New Yorker. The magazine said Hunter Biden had arranged the encounter with Mr. Li, who was headed for a post as BHR’s chief executive.
Hunter Biden went along to Beijing, too, because his young daughter had been invited and needed to be chaperoned, according to Mr. Mesires. He said that his client and Mr. Li met for coffee on the trip but that it was only a social chat. “He conducted no business there,” the lawyer said.
Several days after the trip, BHR won a business license from the Chinese government. Mr. Mesires said that the registration paperwork had already been submitted and that the timing of the approval was purely coincidental. Hunter Biden was not involved in the firm’s registration, and its approval “was not related in any way, shape or form to Hunter’s visit,” he said.
To raise funds, BHR teamed up with some of China’s leading state-owned financial companies, including its biggest indirect shareholder, Bank of China, as well as China Development Bank and the country’s social security fund, according BHR’s website. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 that the firm was seeking to raise $1.5 billion.
That figure was then cited by Peter Schweizer, a conservative author, in a 2018 book detailing the China business ties of some prominent American political families. Mr. Schweizer was also the author of the 2015 book “Clinton Cash.”
Until October 2017, well after his father had stepped down from the vice presidency, Hunter Biden had no equity stake in BHR, Mr. Mesires said. He said Mr. Biden bought a stake in the firm in the name of a company named Skaneateles L.L.C. for the equivalent of about $420,000. That gave him about 10 percent of the company’s registered capital of 30 million renminbi, China’s currency. Skaneateles is the New York hometown of Hunter Biden’s mother, who died in 1972.
BHR has invested in a number of state-owned Chinese companies, including a subsidiary of the oil refiner Sinopec and China General Nuclear Power Group. The business focus of some of them is at odds with American policy.
For example, the company invested in Face++, a division of the Chinese company Megvii, which specializes in facial recognition technology that is promoted for use by China’s police, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. BHR also invested alongside AVIC, a major state-owned aerospace and defense company that builds fighter jets for the Chinese military.
“Nothing to see here, folks! But that Ukrainian phonecall was an impeachable offense!”
“In 2015, Hunter Biden’s Bohai Harvest joined forces with Chinese military contractor AVIC to buy American parts manufacturer Henniges,” Schweizer explains in the documentary. Henniges produces dual-use technology, which can be used for commercial and military purposes. The deal required Obama administration approval, and the Obama administration did approve it.
AVIC, a company notorious for stealing U.S. military technology, bought 51 percent of Henniges while Bohai Harvest bought the other 49 percent.
2. Military surveillance tech used on the Uyghurs
“Hunter’s firm, Bohai Harvest, also invested in military surveillance technology that the Chinese government would use to monitor and control the population in their own country,” Schweizer says.
The company, FACE++, developed technology the Chinese Communist Party used to identify potential terrorists, which helped result in the detention of over 1 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
Interestingly, nothing comes up when using “Hunter Biden cocaine ass” as the Twitter image search terms, but do come up if you remove “ass.” So: The usual twitter incompetence extends to their censorship as well…
Testy:
I asked Joe Biden: What is your response to the NYPost story about your son, sir?
He called it a “smear campaign” and then went after me. “I know you’d ask it. I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.” pic.twitter.com/Eo6VD4TqxD
More of that all-in-the-family Biden corruption: “Biden’s son-in-law advises campaign on pandemic while investing in Covid-19 startups.” That’s Howard Krein for those of you playing along on the home game…
It’s no secret the totalitarian governments of China and Iran favor Joe Biden in the presidential election.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would like nothing more than to go back to the status quo ante, the pre-Trump world when American politicians convinced themselves (or pretended to) China would turn democratic if we gave them favorable trade terms and shut up about their monstrous repressive policies, including the hundreds of thousands—or is it millions—languishing in “reeducation” camps while the rest of their population becomes subject to the pervasive Orwellian surveillance of the “social credit“ system.
Then there’s the little matter of the as yet still mysterious provenance of the novel coronavirus, appropriately called the CCP virus hereabouts, that has wreaked such havoc across the globe. When we will know the truth about what really happened in the Wuhan virology lab? Would a Biden administration even want to know?
And, yes, as most of us realize, there’s considerably more, but it was all okay in the view of Democrats like Biden and Sen. Dianne Feinstein—she of the Chinese chauffeur who, mirabile dictu, was suddenly exposed as a spy after twenty years of service to her—as long as there was money to be made.
And there was, a lot, as Hunter Biden, not to mention Feinstein’s husband and Michael Bloomberg, can attest.
Hunter’s father had to revise his initial praise of China, pooh-poohing the idea they might be an enemy, when things started to get a little obvious and handlers whispered in his ear this was not exactly the road to the White House.
So it’s hard to feel reassured about how Joe would behave toward the communist regime once in office. There’s a great deal more reason, actual evidence of deals, to believe the Chinese have “special leverage” with Biden than there ever was that the Russians had something on Trump.
And politicians like Biden and Feinstein are far from alone in their fealty to Beijing. They have plenty of support among American progressives. As is well known, many of our universities, from Harvard on down, have been bribed with huge sums by the CCP to regard them favorably, even have had spies on the faculty, with Confucius Institutes, essentially communist propaganda arms, installed on many campuses.
Would a President Biden fight this network of corruption that actually justifies and teaches totalitarianism to our youth? Does he even think or know about it?
We know Trump would because he already has. He does it.
You know that whole “Biden Landslide” narrative the media is trying to sell? You shouldn’t be buying.
Early voting data in battleground states shows Trump outpacing national polls giving Biden an edge
The Republican Party is keeping pace in mail-in and early voting in three key swing states despite polls showing early voting should clearly favor Joe Biden.
Data out of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio indicates that registered Republicans are returning ballots at about the same rate as registered Democrats in the battleground states.
In Michigan as of Wednesday, just over 1 million ballots have been returned, 40% from registered Democrats, with the same from registered Republicans. In Wisconsin, 40% of the 711,855 returned ballots have been from Democrats, while 38% have come from Republicans. The GOP actually leads in Ohio, with 45% of 475,259 early ballot returns coming from Republicans, compared to 43% from registered Democrats. The preliminary data matches up with the requests by party affiliation for mail-in ballots.
The data contradicts national polls showing Biden supporters overwhelmingly plan to vote by mail or early in person. According to a Pew Research poll released Friday, 55% of voters who plan to cast their ballot in person before Election Day support Biden, compared to 40% who support President Trump.
For a few weeks now, there has been a massive divide between what the polls say and what you can see happening on the ground. Every poll shows Biden leading, yet public support for Trump remains huge and enthusiastic.
One other thing that’s not showing up in the polls and that’s favoring Trump is voter registration.
Note that this is net new fraud, on top of whatever was done in 2016. And this is the best case scenario – there’s no margin of error at all for Team Biden here, and so it really needs to be 500,000.
Plus that many again to keep Trump from flipping Blue states.
To talk about a Biden-Harris administration let’s first talk about the Obama-Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch administration.
Back in 2015 and 2016, when Holder and Lynch were President Obama’s Attorney Generals, my frack company was beset with an IRS audit, an International Fuel Tax (“IFTA”) audit and a Department of Labor investigation. Not to be excluded, I was also personally audited by the IRS. Fortunately, me and my company cleared the IRS audits without penalty (other than paying our accountant). The Department of Labor audit got us for something less than $250, based on some arcane back of the book calculation on arbitrarily given bonuses. But the IFTA audit did some damage with a $40,000 paperwork related fine even though all our taxes were paid at the pump. All three agencies and all four audits were federal, and all came at roughly the same time. When I asked the Department of Labor attorney how she even found our little basement office, she kept mum.
There was no point in her answering – we both knew why she was there.
Her 18,000-employee strong department, like the IRS and IFTA, had been weaponized to undermine the oil and gas industry. AGs Holder and Lynch, likely with President Obama’s blessing, were picking and choosing and me and my industry got picked.
Snip.
Now, we have Vice President Biden saying he supports fracking when he swings through natural gas rich Pennsylvania, but we all know that is just politicking. His previous anti-fracking statements, all of them inconveniently caught on imperishable video tape, suggest some double speak here.
So where does Joe Biden truthfully stand on fracking?
That depends on who he’s talking to. In the old days they called it “waffling” and it was a disqualifier. Not so any longer. If there is any sort of pushback, the 2020 method is to simply just deny that you have multiple positions on the same subject. When no one pushes back, why not?
They call Joe a fair-minded moderate, a congenial and thoughtful friend to both sides of an argument. I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. A moderate doesn’t choose a San Francisco prosecutor with an anti-fossil fuel record as a running mate. A moderate also wouldn’t choose socialist New York Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to co-chair his climate task force.
During the recent Harris-Pence debate, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez Tweeted “Fracking is bad, actually”. So, I guess we at least know where she stands, a breath of fresh air given the chicanery of the Biden-Harris oil and gas platform. Now rumors of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as a Biden administration Attorney General are being reported. True or not, it knocks the wind out of the rest of that moderate argument. Remember, Governor Cuomo was the guy who ordered his own state regulators to study the health and safety of fracking. When their study qualified fracking as environmentally safe, Mr. Cuomo outlawed it anyways. So much for open minded moderation, Mr. Biden. These aren’t “across the aisle” sorts of people that Biden’s handlers would want you to believe are open minded to US Energy Policy. Moderates simply don’t choose vehemently anti oil and gas lightning rods as successors, advisors and top cops.
In a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, 59% of respondents didn’t think Joe Biden would serve-out a full four-year term due to health-related issues. That would leave us with Senator Harris as president. And where exactly would that leave us? I would argue, uncertain at best. When President Trump won the 2016 presidential election, the oil and gas industry immediately turned on after a punishing two-year downturn. Oil and gas prices didn’t rise as a result of his victory, but business confidence did. Operators teed up new drills and completions and service companies like mine were immediately called back to work. We finally had an administration that was supportive of extraction rather than vaguely duplicitous about it. Four years later, having a new Commander and Chief who is well known as anti-fracking isn’t going to do much for industry confidence. Investment will dwindle, jobs will be lost and the environment will suffer. Natural gas power plants are the reason for the considerable drop in CO2 emissions in US air over the last decade. Fueling these plants is the gas from fractured horizontal shale. Stop fracking and natural gas stops flowing—right away.
Should a Biden presidency prevail in the upcoming elections, my own experience tells me that our oil and gas industry will be facing regulatory headwinds that will far exceed the blow back I personally faced during President Obama’s time in office.
First, Biden did not merely “support” the 1994 law; he wrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law’s penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden’s long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.
Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress—every minor crime bill—has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden,” he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.
“Things have changed drastically” since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that “the Black Caucus voted” for the crime bill, and “every black mayor supported it.” In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden’s leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.
“The crime bill itself did not have mandatory sentences except for two things,” Biden said. He mentioned the law’s “three strikes and you’re out” provision, which required a life sentence for anyone convicted of a violent crime after committing two other felonies, one of which can be a drug offense. He said he “voted against” that provision, which is not exactly true. While he did express concern that the provision was not focused narrowly enough on serious violent crimes, he voted for it as part of the broader bill.
In any case, Biden did not just go along with the crime bill’s punitive provisions; he crowed about them. Like a crass car salesman hawking a new model with more of everything, he touted “70 additional enhancements of penalties” and “60 new death penalties—brand new—60.” He denounced as “poppycock” the notion, which would later be defensively deployed by Bill Clinton and Biden himself, that “somehow the Republicans tried to make the crime bill tougher.” Biden bragged that he had conferred with “the cops” instead of some namby-pamby “liberal confab” while writing the bill.
As for “what the states did locally,” the law was designed to increase incarceration. It provided $10 billion in subsidies for state prison construction, contingent on passage of “truth in sentencing” laws that limited or abolished parole. “What I was against was giving states more money for prison systems,” Biden said last night. But that is simply not true. As FactCheck.org noted last year, “Biden did support $6 billion in funding for state prison construction, but not the $10 billion that was part of the final bill.”
For all that people bitch about, that crime bill, incarcerating repeat offenders, and the “broken window policing” embracing by many big cities did help bring crime rates down. But the drug war incarcerated millions of users without putting a dent in the drug trade.
Trump first lamented the horrific treatment of George Floyd, calling it “a terrible thing to watch.” He noted Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) proposal, the JUSTICE Act. “He came up with a bill that should have been approved. It was great,” the president noted. “And the Democrats just wouldn’t go for it.”
Indeed, Senate Democrats pre-emptively blasted the bill before Republicans had finished drafting it. Minutes after Scott, a black Republican senator, revealed the bill, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it a “token” effort. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) went so far as accusing Republicans of “trying to get away with murder, the murder of George Floyd,” because the JUSTICE Act’s provisions against chokeholds did not go far enough, in her view.
Trump went on to repeat his rather grandiose claim, “I have done more for the African American community than any president. With the exception of Abraham Lincoln.”
Yet the president mentioned specific accomplishments. “Criminal justice reform, prison reform, historically Black colleges and universities — I got them funded. They were on a year-to-year basis. … I got them 10-year funding and financing, and more than they even asked for,” Trump explained.
The president also mentioned opportunity zones, his program to help black entrepreneurs. He claimed that President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Biden “never even tried” to do criminal justice reform. While Obama did suggest reform measures, he did not get them passed through Congress and signed into law, as Trump did.
Joe Biden’s campaign has quietly built a multimillion-dollar operation over the past two months that’s largely designed to combat misinformation online, aiming to rebut President Trump while bracing for any information warfare that could take place in the aftermath of the election.
The effort, internally called the “Malarkey Factory,” consists of dozens of people around the country monitoring what information is gaining traction digitally, whether it’s resonating with swing voters and, if so, how to fight back. The three most salient attacks the Malarkey Factory has confronted so far are claims that Biden is a socialist, that he is “creepy” and that he is “sleepy” or senile.
In preparation for misinformation spreading as voters head to the polls, especially a stretch around Election Day when Facebook will not let campaigns buy new ads, the campaign has partnered with dozens of Facebook pages associated with liberal individuals or groups that have large followings. The campaign has also enlisted 5,000 surrogates with big social media platforms who can pump out campaign messages.
The Malarkey Factory has already been at work. When Trump began attacking Biden as a socialist, for example, the Biden campaign saw that it was affecting Hispanic voters in Florida. So it developed counter-messaging that showed a different image of Biden, with him speaking of his love for America and being endorsed by former president Barack Obama, and the campaign blasted the messaging to Latinos in the state.
Hunter’s name appears once, China and Ukraine not at all. One wonders if Post writer Matt Viser is himself an employee, given how fervently the piece regurgitates Biden campaign talking points…
Here are some of the other areas of concern, especially when we consider the role she plays at Facebook should be filled by someone who is politically unbiased:
Senior Policy Advisor to Ambassador Samantha Power
Director for Russia at the National Security Council
Chief of Staff for the Office of European and NATO Policy
Professor at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University
Field organizer for Obama for America in Wisconsin
Worked for the President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Distinguished Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship recipient
Caveat: I’m not familiar with noqreport.com, but there seems to be some supporting information out there.
More social media honchos walking through the revolving door to team Biden: Twitter public policy director Carlos Monje is joining Biden’s “transition team.” 1. Why does Twitter even have a “public policy director? (Don’t answer that: Obviously to help Democrats.) 2. Seems like he’s counting his chickens before they’re hatched, doesn’t it?
Most households would face a tax increase under the Biden-Harris tax plan. In fact, as the chart shows, unless your household income is less than $45,600, there is more than a 90 percent chance that the Biden-Harris plan, if enacted, will raise your taxes. In the exact middle of the household income distribution, over 95 percent of households can expect a tax increase if the Biden-Harris plan becomes law. Overall, 82.6 percent of American households can expect a tax increase.
But you won’t just be taking home less money thanks to taxes, you’ll be taking home less money period. “A new study on Biden’s tax, health-care, energy and regulation proposals predicts $6,500 less in median household income by 2030.”
Evidently Joe Biden has seen his own shadow and will not be showing his face until Thursday:
CBS's Ed O'Keefe on Face The Nation: "[Joe Biden] will not be seen again after today until Thursday night."
REMINDER: Joe Biden and his campaign have not disputed the authenticity of the bombshell emails which detail the extensive corruption of the Biden family. pic.twitter.com/obMn3QRxKS
I think this very short flowchart is worth highlighting:
I'm amazed that the Media is so focused on Ukraine. There's plenty of story in China, but that one impacts both Joe Biden and John Kerry. Probably 100% legal, but let's not pretend that it's not happening. pic.twitter.com/cYJAU4PJtg
Supposedly Kamala Harris has tested positive for the Wuhan coronavirus, and so won’t be traveling anymore. Which is a lot more palatable to the press than saying she’s come down with the Dontwannatalkaboutmyrunningmatesobviouscorruptionproblemsvirus.
Biden refuses to reveal his position on court-packing, but he still wants to take your guns and hike your taxes until your eyeballs bleed, plus more on the enthusiasm gap, fracking flip-flops, and we’re all going to be millionaires (the Weimer Republic kind). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
“Hey Joe, are you gonna pack the courts?” “Not telling!”
As the Senate moves forward on the president’s Supreme Court pick, both former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, continue to deflect when asked if they would try to add more justices to the nation’s highest court, a practice known as court packing.
Biden and his party face increasing pressure because of the frustration of many progressives at the Republican effort to rush through a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime liberal icon, with Amy Coney Barrett just before the Nov. 3 election. Because the addition of Barrett is expected to create a conservative majority on the high court some have called for adding more justices.
The question of adding seats to the Supreme Court also hinges on the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans currently hold a slim 53 to 47 majority. If Democrats are able to wrest control of the GOP, maintain control of the U.S. House and Biden wins the presidency, the party would need to pass legislation expanding the court beyond its current limit of nine justices.
Lord knows progressive frustration is a just a swell reason to overthrow centuries of tradition.
“According to an analysis from Real Clear Politics, Biden holds a 4.4 percentage point lead over the president in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona,” she explains. “However, Democrat Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 4.8 points in these swing states this time in 2016—a slightly greater advantage than the one Biden currently has.”
Biden’s leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two states Trump won, are also smaller than Clinton’s leads at this time four years ago. “The Real Clear Politics average shows that Biden is ahead with a 6.3 lead in Pennsylvania and a 6.2 advantage in Michigan. Comparably, Clinton was leading in these two states by 9.2 points and 9.6 points, respectively, this time in 2016.”
Similarly, polls for Wisconsin and North Carolina show Biden with a smaller lead than they did for Hillary Clinton back in 2016.
The only outliers to this trend are Florida and Arizona. Biden’s lead in Florida is at 3.5, compared to Hillary’s 3.2 point lead in 2016. Biden also leads in Arizona by 3.4 points, compared to Trump’s 0.7 point advantage in 2016.
NBC News featured several "undecided" voters at Monday's Biden Town Hall that had previously been featured as Biden supporters on MSNBC:pic.twitter.com/61ZRXmcktT
Asked about President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which most economists agree are largely responsible for the resurrection of the U.S. economy following the slow-growth Obama-Biden years, Harris said: “On Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill.”
Never mind that a President Biden will have no such power to “repeal” anything. That’s Congress’ job, and if Biden isn’t blessed with having both branches of Congress firmly in far-left Democratic hands, “repealing” the tax cuts won’t happen.
But then Harris went on to say Biden wouldn’t raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000. Say what? By “repealing” Trump’s tax cuts, he would be doing just that.
The truth is, Biden has played games with his tax plans all along. But the actual tax plans he has revealed would be nothing short of disastrous for working men and women, and the economy as a whole. Those plans plainly show that 77-year-old Biden, a lifelong politician, understands nothing about the private economy. That is, apart from it being a great source of graft for him and his family.
A report out just this week from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that taxes would rise about $4.3 trillion over the next decade under Biden’s plans, while taxes under Trump would actually decline by $1.7 trillion over that period.
At least, you say, that $4.3 trillion in added taxes under Biden would cut the deficit more than Trump’s plans, right? Wrong.
The CRFB notes that its projections show a 10-year rise in federal deficits of $8.3 trillion for Biden, versus $6.9 trillion for Trump.
Enthusiasm for Trump among his voters “is historically high,” said Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll. “We saw that very early in the cycle, in his primary vote totals,” when the president drew unusually large voter turnout in uncontested races.
“Meanwhile, Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low — so low that the Democrats run the risk of replaying 2016,” Baris said.
Just 46 percent of Biden voters in a recent Pew poll said that they strongly support him, compared to 66 percent of Trump’s base.
Rank-and-file Dems are sounding the alarm.
“I look out over my Biden sign in my front yard and I see a sea of Trump flags and yard signs,” Pennsylvania voter Susan Connors told Biden worriedly at a CNN-sponsored town hall Sept. 17.
Experienced political hands have a saying: “Yard signs don’t vote.” And research appears to bear that out — a 2016 study found that political signage increases vote share by a mere 1.7 percentage points, on average.
Biden holds a 10-point lead in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, a commanding position with Election Day less than four weeks away. But the exuberant signs and displays of Trump passion may actually point to a yawning enthusiasm gap that could make a big difference on Election Day — just as they did in 2016.
Four years ago, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found a 13-point enthusiasm gap in Trump’s favor, a result echoed by other surveys, The Hill reported.
Many people . . . said that the sheer volume of Trump signs they saw in 2016 — and the scarcity of Hillary Clinton signs — was their first clue that the polling was wrong and that Trump would have more success than the pundits had predicted,” Daniel Allott writes in “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Nation” (Republic Books), out Oct. 20.
It’s deja vu all over again… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A federal appeals court has reinstated a fraud conviction of Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, Devon Archer, reversing a decision by an Obama-appointed judge (and wife of Mueller special counsel lawyer) to vacate Archer’s conviction and grant him a new trial.
Archer and several of his business partners were indicted on March 26, 2018 in a $60 million bond scheme which defrauded Native Americans. Hunter was not implicated in the fraud, however Archer and the other partners repeatedly name-dropped the former Vice President’s son.
Following a trial which lasted nearly one-month, Archer was found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud. After requesting that the district court set aside the jury’s verdict, Judge Ronnie Abrams – the wife of Mueller special counsel attorney Greg Andres (who himself was a Deputy Assistant AG in the Obama DOJ, according to RedState) – granted Archer’s wish. What’s more, Abrams was Hunter Biden’s classmate at Yale Law school.
In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel said that Abrams made a mistake by prioritizing her own theory above that of the jury’s, and that her assessment undercut the significance of the proof in its totality.
Mike Pence dominated in that debate. He was calm and cool. Rock-solid. Kamala Harris’s body language and voice reflected her nervousness—a stark contrast to her previous debate performances during the Democratic primary when she was still in the race. But neither her body language, her failure to answer questions, nor her constant reliance on fake stories as lines of attack were the key tell that she lost.
The liberal media conceded Pence’s victory by describing Pence’s debate performance. And their go-to explanation was to attack the vice president by accusing him of “mansplaining.”
“China Censors Mike Pence’s Debate Comments On China But Freely Broadcasts Kamala Harris’s.” “‘China censored Pence’s comments on China,’ Canada’s Globe and Mail Beijing Correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe reported. ‘Signal returned when Harris began talking again.'”
Of all the people they know — including RINOs and squishes and NeverTrumpers who voted against Trump in 2016 — many of the NeverTrumpers are now reluctant Trump voters, and many of 2016’s reluctant Trump voters are now enthusiastic Trump voters.
On the other hand, they don’t know anyone who has moved from voting for Trump in 2016 to voting for Biden.
One friend tells me that the suburban well-to-do Wine Moms and Squish Sisters he knows are now fully on the MAGA train.
Everyone they know who’s moved on The Trump Question (and Trump seems to be the only issue in 2020) has moved in favor of Trump.
They also note that the “Shy Trumper” effect — where Trump supporters won’t admit to pollsters they still support Trump — is still strong, based on their own experience.
One relates that he did not tell his own children that he voted for Trump, due to social pressure and the idea that he didn’t want to “normalize” Trump’s bad behavior to his children.
If you can’t tell your own kids you voted for Trump, you’re not going to tell a pollster.
And this person works in conservative politics, too!
If even people in the conservative movement can’t admit they’re Trump supporters — well good luck getting Wendy Wine Mom to admit that on the phone.
A friend of mine was a hardcore NeverTrumper in 2016 but now is a crawl-over-broken-glass Trump Voter. No, he doesn’t really like Trump, but unlike Jonah Goldberg and Steve Schmidt, he recognizes the profound threat the left poses to what is left of America.
He has kept in touch with his NeverTrump pals. Media types. The types who annoy you on Twitter.
And while he won’t Name Names, he tells me that many of the NeverTrumpers I hate are now “red pilled” Trump voters.
They just won’t admit it publicly.
Snip.
If there were a lot of Trump defectors, the media would be profiling them and lionizing them and promoting them 24-7.
But I haven’t seen a single story about Trump 2016-Biden 2020 defectors.
The media hasn’t found any — despite the fact that by announcing that you’re now a full-on Democrat Liberal, you gain employment opportunities and social prestige.
So if the media can’t find any of these people… do they even exist?
YouTuber Liberal Hivemind says that Biden is losing voters every day:
“Those blacks, always working menial jobs before they hop back on a city bus and head home to their housing projects. Anyway, I’m Joe Biden. Vote for me cause Donald Trump is racist.” https://t.co/MHaxeYNcB7
chronicled many times over the last three years when Democratic senators questioned judicial nominees about their faith, suggesting in various forms that a candidate’s Catholic or Christian beliefs might render them unfit to serve on the bench.
Several of those questions were posed by Harris herself, focusing especially on Catholic candidates. In late 2018, for instance, Harris grilled Brian Buescher, nominated to be a federal district judge in Nebraska, about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization with more than 2 million members worldwide who conduct charitable work. Here’s one of Harris’s written questions to Buescher:
Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?
She went on to ask whether Buescher was “aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization” and whether he had “ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women’s reproductive rights.”
Harris posed these and other similar questions to Paul Matey and Peter Phipps, Catholic nominees who, like Buescher, are members of the Knights. Among the questions she posed to Matey based on his involvement in the Knights were:
* Do you agree with Mr. Anderson’s description of abortion as “the killing of the innocent on a massive scale”?
* Do you agree with Mr. Anderson that legal abortion in the United States has “resulted in more than 40 million deaths”?
* Do you believe that a fetus is entitled to any protection under the U.S. Constitution?
Race snapshot:
Campaign snapshot for Sunday:
– Trump is fully recovered (it seems)
– None of the 34 allegedly infected at White House seem to be in medical danger, including Chris Christie
A Biden Campaign operative in Texas is attempting to rig the 2020 election with the help of others in a massive ballot harvesting scheme, according to two private investigators who testified under oath that they have “video evidence, documentation and witnesses” to prove it. With the help of mass mail-in ballots, the illegal ballot harvesting operation could harvest 700,000 ballots, one Harris County Democrat operative allegedly bragged.
The investigators—a former FBI agent and former police officer—claim that Biden’s Texas Political Director Dallas Jones and his cohorts have been “hoarding mail-in and absentee ballots” and ordering operatives to them fill out for people in Harris County illegally, “including dead people, homeless people, and nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election,” Patrick Howley of the National File reported.
While law enforcement agencies are reportedly investigating these potential crimes, nothing will be done about it until “well after the November 3, 2020 election” the former FBI agent said.
Dallas Jones was appointed the Biden campaign’s Texas Political Director in late August.
Texas’ largest county has been approving voter registrations even when people say they’re not citizens, according to a lawsuit announced Monday that found some of those people managed to cast ballots, too.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation says it uncovered dozens of examples of people who registered in Harris County over the last two decades, either admitted they weren’t citizens or left the box blank, yet were registered anyway. They were removed from the rolls after they later stated, again, that they weren’t, in fact, citizens.
Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday announced the arrest of a Democratic county commissioner and three associates in Gregg County in East Texas on charges of election fraud in a 2018 election.
In an announcement with potential significance for the November elections when voting by mail is expected to increase significantly because of the threat of COVID-19, Paxton said Gregg County Commissioner Shannon Brown, Marlena Jackson, Charlie Burns and DeWayne Ward orchestrated a vote-harvesting scheme to help win Brown win the Democratic primary two years ago.
The big voting fraud case from outside Texas is from Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis, where a Somali-American connected to Ilhan Omar was caught on video bragging about his car full of illegally harvest ballots:
A “ballot broker” boasts about keeping hundreds of absentee ballots in his car trunk. He brags about them being filled in by people other than the voters. Often, money changes hands. Witnesses tie the rampant fraud to the campaign chairman of a prominent member of the radical “squad” in the U.S. House. Loose election laws allow people to come from out of state, vote, and then leave again.
Plus stories of forcing the elderly to hand over their ballots and carrying around a bag of money to pay for ballots.
They even caught an on-camera exchange of money for ballots, which is a clear violation of federal law:
Speaking of voting fraud, Democratic judges have decided to implement ex-post facto voting law changes to allow mail-in ballots to be received seven days after the election and still be counted, including those missing postmarks and non-matching signatures, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Democrats panic (some more), Slow Joe slowjoes some more, Rand Paul asks DOJ to look into Hunter’s sleaze, and inside Biden’s vast haberdashery collection. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
The first Biden-Trump debate is scheduled for Tuesday. We’ll see if it actually happens.
First, there are indications that Trump’s base of support — whites without college degrees — is more energized and committed to voting this year than key Democratic constituencies. And there is also evidence that polling does not reflect this.
Second, Latinos, who are key to the outcome in several crucial states — Arizona and Florida, for example — have shown less support for Biden than for past Democratic nominees. Many Hispanic voters seem resistant to any campaign that defines them broadly as “people of color.”
Third, absentee voting is expected to be higher among Democrats than Republicans, subjecting their ballots to a greater risk of rejection, a fate more common to mailed-in votes than to in-person voting.
Fourth, the generic Democratic-Republican vote (“Would you be more willing to vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress?”) through early July favored Democrats by more than 10 points, but has since narrowed to 6 points.
Fifth, the debates will test Biden’s ability to withstand three 90-minute battles against an opponent known for brutal personal attacks.
Details further down:
A Democratic strategist — who requested anonymity because his employer does not want him publicly identified talking about the election — analyzed the implications of the most recent voter registration trends for me.
In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he said, overall
registration is up by 6 points through August compared to the 2016 cycle, but net Democratic registrations are down by 38 percent. That’s about 150,000 fewer additional Democrats than were added in 2016.
In addition, he continued, registration among whites without college degrees
is up by 46 percent while registration by people of color is up by only 4 percent. That gap is made more stark when you realize that over the last four years, the WNC (white non-college) population has increased by only 1 percent in those states, while the number of people of color increased by 13 percent.
The pattern was more pronounced in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than it was in Michigan.
On its own, increased registration among non-college whites would have only a negligible effect on total state voting, my source pointed out, but
it becomes troubling if it reflects greater interest more generally for these voters in those states. And there are good reasons to believe that if that is the case, those additionally energized voters are very underrepresented in surveys now.
On weakness of Biden support Hispanic voters:
While Democrats have struggled for years with non-college whites, another set of problems for Biden and the party has begun to emerge this year in what many liberals had been counting on as a key constituency: the steadily growing Hispanic electorate.
As Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Tory Gavito, a human rights lawyer who is president of Way to Win and the founder of the Texas Future Project, wrote on these pages on Sept. 18:
According to recent polls from Quinnipiac and Monmouth, 38 percent of registered Hispanic voters in 10 battleground states may be ambivalent about even voting. At least so far, this large group of Latinos seemingly perceives little reason to choose Mr. Biden over President Trump.
Why? López and Gavito offer an explanation based on 15 focus groups and a national survey:
Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.
In fact, the authors continued, the majority of Hispanics
rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.
Another data point they found “even more sobering”: López and Gavito asked
eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”
As they expected, “almost three out of five white respondents judged that message convincing.”
More disconcerting to López and Gavito, both liberals, was that “exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.”
Poll after poll has shown that Hispanic Americans don’t want MS-13 and other criminal aliens in their community, but Democrats have pointedly ignored that in favor of pushing their “OMG, separated families!” and “racist dog whistle” talking points and pandering to hard left open borders activists.
You have to get much further down before any mention of the Antia/#BlackLivesMatter riots. Completely missing from this piece: The words “Hunter Biden,” “Burisma” and “China”…
In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove?
Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”?
Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.”
Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself.
The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire.
But reality has outdone art with the Biden campaign. The concoction is holistic, from the mundane construction of a fantasy, on-the-go candidate to the supposed middle-of-the road old Joe Biden from Scranton radiating an aura of kindness and moderation in times of plague, panic, and protest.
For six months, Biden has run a Zoom campaign on the pretext of mandatory quarantines—our current version of a 19th-century, stationary presidential candidate, who campaigned by spitting out wit and wisdom while immovable on his front porch.
Biden has conducted no free-wheeling, unscripted press conferences. He will not do extended one-on-one interviews with a disinterested journalist. He rarely will even try Trump-like cameo appearances on CNN or MSNBC to answer unscripted questions from supporters. His press events instead are Orwellian, requiring a media mass suspension of disbelief.
The questions are canned. They are submitted in advance by “journalists,” whether formally or via electronic chatter. The inquiries are obsequious—seldom a word about Hunter Biden, China, Biden’s troubling racist remarks, his handsy past, his scary cognitive lapses, or his “contract” with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Instead the softball, known-in-advance inquiries are in spirit carried over from the Obama years, phrased in the manner of “Were you outraged enough by Trump’s outrage?”
Biden’s Oz functionaries seemingly are always experimenting with all sorts of screen props. The trick is to discover how best their challenged candidate can square the circle of completing sentences and remaining semi-coherent, while not giving away the game that his illusionists are feeding him answers to synthetic questions.
When asked point-blank on Fox News by Brett Baier whether Biden used a stealth teleprompter, his national press flak, T.J. Ducklo would not answer with a simple yes or no. Instead, he went on the attack, with the fossilized accusation that right-wing Fox News asks too many partisan questions.
So we were left with a de facto “yes”: Biden does read off a stealthy teleprompter when answering canned press questions—and gives the impression he does not.
But Biden, like the mirage of the Wizard of Oz, nonetheless can’t always keep the curtain closed.
When he strains to see the teleprompter that sits just behind, and thus out of sight of, his camera lens, he slips and mutters “bring it closer”—reminding any who watch, except the media that helps collude in these orchestrations, that the question asked is not a serious one, but a prompt to facilitate the proper nonspontaneous response.
Snip.
Sometimes the effort is scary. When old photos reappear in a CNN puff piece about a younger Biden holding his young son at a long-ago Washington Redskins game, the team logo—the now-politically incorrect Redskins logo—is airbrushed from his son’s stocking cap. And then presto, legions of “disinterested” “fact-checkers” in the media emerge to confess that Biden, not CNN, supplied the doctored image.
But, in turn, the Biden campaign assures the press that the doctoring was only for “copyright” reasons, as if candidates routinely photoshop out all the cap logos they wear. The impression is that Biden is terrified that his new leftist friends in the Ministry of Truth are combing his past and ordering embarrassing moments to go down the memory hole.
As a general rule, the Soviet-style apologia for the media-Biden fusion—usually outsourced to a now utterly corrupt left-wing institution called “fact-checking”—only solidifies the fact that the media and the Biden campaign are indistinguishable.
In Soviet times, one easily just assumed the opposite from Moscow’s party-line efforts and, presto, stumbled onto the truth. In the case of Biden’s optics and press conferences and appearances, we easily deduce that the downside of scripting and programming a compliant candidate far outweighs the existential risk of turning Biden loose to answer questions like a normal human being.
True, even before his cognitive decline, Biden was known in Washington as someone whose incoherent and impromptu loquaciousness usually embarrassed his friends more than hurt his enemies—in addition to his long history of plagiarism and inflating his thin résumés with false data about his past.
But with the onset of his cognitive decline, Biden’s own once-feeble social antennae are now more or less unplugged most of the day.
The result is that he has a creepy propensity to blurt out patently racist tropes as if the old inner Biden who talked of Obama as “clean” and the first “articulate” black presidential candidate, and pandered to his working-class Democratic supporters with references to the inner-city “jungle,” is now free of his harnesses, bits, and halters.
For some time, Biden unchained has shouted about “you ain’t black,” and, earlier, his Corn Pop series of inflated tales as Biden, the white knight, equipped with a chain no less, protecting the inner city from itself.
Biden showed his tough-guy mettle with putdowns of a transitorily noncompliant black journalist and sneered that he is comparable to a “junkie” and drug addict. To a liberated Biden, blacks just don’t think independently like Latinos.
The first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is happening on Tuesday night. Democrats are playing it cool, but there is real concern about how Biden will perform.
In a format like this, Biden is on his own. There is no campaign handler who can suddenly step in and shut down the event by saying “OK, thanks so much everyone.”
Sean Sullivan and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post wrote this rather revealing story:
Trump readies a debate onslaught — and Biden allies worry
President Trump is gearing up to launch blistering personal attacks on Joe Biden and his family in the first presidential debate on Tuesday, while Biden is bracing for an onslaught and worried allies are warning the Democratic nominee not to lose his temper and lash out, according to people with knowledge of the strategies in both camps.
Trump has told associates he wants to talk specifically about his opponent’s son Hunter Biden and mused that the debates are when “people will finally realize Biden is just not there,” according to one adviser. The president is so eager to lay into his rival that he has called aides to test out various attacks, focusing on attacks that cast Biden as a longtime Washington insider with a limited record of accomplishment, said another adviser, who like many interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe private talks.
Biden and his advisers are anticipating a venomous barrage, according to a person with knowledge of their thinking, and they are preparing to counter with an affirmative case for a Biden presidency. The Democrat wants to stay focused on how he would address the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s economic problems, which he blames Trump for worsening.
The prospect of a cage match between a president for whom no subject is off-limits and a challenger who can be openly emotional is making some Biden advisers nervous. They see a fine line between Biden’s passion and empathy, which can appeal to voters, and the raw anger that sometimes gets him in trouble and could undercut his pitch as a calming alternative to a president who thrives on chaos.
Two quick reactions. First of all, Joe Biden is “a longtime Washington insider with a limited record of accomplishment.” Second, why shouldn’t Trump go after Biden’s family? Hasn’t Trump’s family been fair game for Democrats and the media over the last four years?
In another sign of the left’s utter panic, Nancy Pelosi is doubling down on her suggestion that Biden shouldn’t even bother debating Trump. Funny, she didn’t feel that way about Obama in 2008 or 2012. What changed?
I think we all know the answer to that: The number of synapses still firing in Biden’s head.
The Biden campaign has “called a lid” (i.e., said Biden is not campaigning any more that day and reporters can go home) before noon nine times in September. Biden must have more lids than Charles Nelson Reilly.
Biden is accomplishing the rare feat of making Hillary look like a workaholic in comparison…
Presumably, Biden is so exhausted from his rigorous morning routine of plug and denture maintenance that he only has energy enough to campaign fewer than two out of every three days.
To his credit, Biden did manage to campaign for six days in a row during the first week of September. But since then, he’s ditched his own presidential campaign eight out of the last 18 days.
That’s not a good look for a man who is supposed to have energy enough to hold the most demanding office in the world.
I had a conversation with Bill Whittle on this same topic earlier this week, and Bill reminded me of his newly minted Whittle’s Law: When they let the optics look this bad, it’s because the alternative optics would look even worse.
In other words, the former veep or his handlers have made the conscious decision that it’s safer for Tired Joe Biden to stay tucked away every other day or so than to have him campaign in the traditional, vigorous manner.
What could possibly look worse than a presidential candidate who isn’t up to the job of campaigning?
Well, this:
Watch as Biden struggles to find his words until he’s able to latch on to the teleprompter.
This is after he took off all of yesterday and half of today. He read for 15 minutes before exiting, taking no questions. pic.twitter.com/tecd25WSZv
The final stretch of a presidential campaign is typically a nonstop mix of travel, caffeine and adrenaline. But as the worst pandemic in a century bears down on the United States, Joe Biden is taking a lower key approach.
Since his Aug. 11 selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, Biden has had 22 days where he either didn’t make public appearances, held only virtual fundraisers or ventured from his Delaware home solely for church, according to an Associated Press analysis of his schedules. He made 12 visits outside of Delaware during that period, including Friday when he went to Washington and paid respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
During the same time, President Donald Trump had 24 trips that took him to 17 different states, not counting a personal visit to New York to see his ailing brother in the hospital or weekend golf outings. He was hitting Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the nation’s capital on Friday alone.
Biden’s aides insist his approach is intentional, showcasing his respect for public health guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus and presenting a responsible contrast with Trump, who has resumed large-scale campaign rallies — sometimes over the objections of local officials. Still, some Democrats say it’s critical that Biden infuse his campaign with more energy.
Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said not traveling because of the pandemic was a “pretty lame excuse.”
“I thought he had his own plane,” Hinojosa said. “He doesn’t have to sit with one space between another person on a commercial airline like I would.”
When the Texas Democratic Party says you’re “lame,” maybe you have a problem…
Liberals who think that Kamala Harris is going to walk over Mike Pence in a debate are warned to lower their expectations. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Slow Joe Reloaded:
With no teleprompter Joe Biden is definitely struggling. This is a progressive disease. If you vote for #JoeBiden, #KamalaHarris will be President of the United States by next summer. pic.twitter.com/e5dxGh9JiH
Greetings regular readers! I’m so glad you survived yesterday’s tragic mass die-off! Plus Biden campaign troubles, fundraising updates, the “Harris Administration,” and the Burisma report looms. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Biden says 200 million people will die from the Wuhan coronavirus by the time he finishes his speech.
One of the lessons of 2016 was that the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had all kinds of internal reports of problems, signs of insufficient support and enthusiasm in key states, and ominous indicators that they were nowhere nearly as strong and effective as most of the coverage suggested.
The problem was that only a few reporters knew about those, and the ones that did had pledged to keep what they were seeing and hearing secret until after the election for their campaign narrative books. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, “over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly.” Florida Democratic political consultants warned the campaign they were in danger of losing the Sunshine State. Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. The Service Employees International Union wanted to send more volunteers to Michigan and the Clinton campaign told them to keep their people to Iowa instead.
If you had really good Democratic Party or liberal activist-group sources, you heard these portentous stories that look like really key indicators in hindsight. If you didn’t, you were dependent upon the polls and the dominant narrative in the media that the Clinton campaign was an experienced, well-oiled machine while the Trump campaign was a bunch of amateur stumblebums constantly beset by infighting.
Fast-forward to today, and it feels like these kinds of, “hey, the Democratic nominee’s campaign may not be as strong as it looks” stories are leaking out into the general news coverage much more frequently.
Earlier this week, the New York Times wondered aloud about Democratic strength in Nevada:
Nevada’s Democratic political machine was held up as a model for other states where neither party has consistently dominated. But it was a machine built for another era.
Its success relied on hundreds of people knocking on thousands of doors for face-to-face conversations with voters. Now, there are fewer than half as many people canvassing for Democratic voters as there were in September 2016. And some Democratic strategists warn that Nevada could be in 2020 what Wisconsin was in 2016 — a state that the Democrats assume is safely in their column but that slips away.
The Washington Post reported that Latino Democrats are worried about Biden having lackluster numbers among this demographic:
Top Latino Democrats are voicing growing concern about Joe Biden’s campaign, warning that lackluster efforts to win the support of their community could have devastating consequences in the November election.
Recent polls showing President Trump’s inroads with Latinos have set off a fresh round of frustration and finger-pointing among Democrats, confirming problems some say have simmered for months. Many Latino activists and officials said Biden is now playing catch-up, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida, where he will campaign Tuesday — the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month — for the first time as the presidential nominee. Reaching out to Latino voters will be a key focus on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the trip. Biden’s campaign said he will be in Tampa and Kissimmee, two areas with large Puerto Rican populations.
Plus concerns about the campaigns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“I can’t even find a sign,” [Don] Sabbe says outside a Kroger’s in Sterling Heights, where surrounding cars fly massive Donald Trump flags that say “No More Bullsh-t” and fellow shoppers wear Trump T-shirts for their weekend grocery runs. “I’m looking for one of those storefronts. I’m looking for a campaign office for Biden. And I’m not finding one.”
The reason Sabbe can’t find a dedicated Biden campaign field office is because there aren’t any around here. Not in Macomb County, the swing region where Sabbe lives. It’s not even clear Biden has opened any new dedicated field offices in the state; because of the pandemic, they’ve moved their field organizing effort online. The Biden campaign in Michigan refused to confirm the location of any physical field offices despite repeated requests; they say they have “supply centers” for handing out signs, but would not confirm those locations. The campaign also declined to say how many of their Michigan staff were physically located here. Biden’s field operation in this all-important state is being run through the Michigan Democratic Party’s One Campaign, which is also not doing physical canvassing or events at the moment. When I ask Biden campaign staffers and Democratic Party officials how many people they have on the ground in Michigan, one reply stuck out: “What do you mean by ‘on the ground?’”
Among all Wisconsin voters, 56 percent say Biden hasn’t done enough to denounce the rioting versus just 31 percent who say he has. (Even among Democrats, 28 percent think he hasn’t done enough.) The numbers are similar in Minnesota at 54/35. Biden has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want to defund the police and he’s made several on-camera statements condemning the violence over the past few weeks, but that message isn’t getting through. And it’s helping to keep Trump close.
Democrats are concerned that a groundswell of support for President Trump outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities may be enough to win him the state over 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Biden, the former two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, visited carpenter apprentices and other union workers near Duluth on Friday, his first trip to Minnesota in more than 1,000 days, according to the Trump campaign.
Yet, despite his team releasing scant details about his itinerary, even to the local press, Republicans outnumbered Democrats at Hermantown’s Jerry Alander Carpenter Training Center, worrying those who are opposed to Trump clinching a second term on Nov. 3.
The Republican National Committee and the Minnesota GOP organized roughly 300 people to line Miller Trunk Highway for Biden’s stop. Democrats had less than half that number and told the Washington Examiner they didn’t know one another. Some, though, had traveled more than two hours from Minneapolis to see their party’s standard-bearer.
Tommy Moe, a retired miner from Virginia, Minnesota, predicted that the presidential race in his state would be close again after 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 1.5 percentage points (or 45,000 ballots). Moe, 65, based his prediction on the number of union workers he knew who felt “an affinity” for Trump because of the China trade deal and his unorthodox approach to politics.
“We didn’t have a very good turnout,” he said. “If the Democrats don’t get their act together and start getting as fired up as the Republican side is … we need a turnout. Democrats win if they turn out.”
“I focus on early primaries and the way the candidates perform in those early contests,” Norpoth said in the press release. “It’s a very good predictor, and a leading indicator of what’s going to happen in November.”
The professor said he was unsurprised at the model’s prediction this year, citing Trump’s performance in the primaries earlier in the winter.
“When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes … I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict,” he said in the release.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, pulled down only 8.4% in New Hampshire, Norpoth said, a number that is “unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president,” he stated.
Enjoy some “Oh God, how I hate Trump, but Democrats are insane” hand-wringing from American Enterprise Institute wonk Danielle Pletka:
[Three paragraphs of pro-forma #OrangeManBad snipped]
I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.
I fear the grip of Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores that increasingly permeate my daily newspapers, my children’s curriculums and my local government. I fear the virtue-signaling bullies who increasingly try to dominate or silence public discourse — and encourage my children to think that their being White is intrinsically evil, that America’s founding is akin to original sin. I fear the growing self-censorship that guides many people’s every utterance, and the leftist vigilantes who view every personal choice — from recipes to hairdos — through their twisted prisms of politics and culture. An entirely Democratic-run Washington, urged on by progressives’ media allies, would no doubt only accelerate these trends.
Nor do Biden’s national-security positions reassure me. While he promises a welcome change in style and a renewed respect for U.S. alliances, Biden would, like Trump, pull our troops from the Middle East and South Asia. Worse yet, he would slash defense spending and likely renew the Obama administration’s misbegotten love affair with Iran’s tyrants. Then there is the Democratic Party’s hostility to the state of Israel. Biden supporters will clamor that the candidate’s history is very pro-Israel, but as president would he be strong enough to stand up to the new Democratic Party’s less-than-ardent support for the Jewish state?
To which I can only reply: What the hell took you so long to figure this out? (And then, to prove the extent of her Beltway Blinders, she turns out a paragraph on “execrable gun-toting racists.”)
“The former vice president’s campaign reported on Sunday that it and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) began September with $466 million in the bank – roughly $141 million more than the cash on hand for the president and the Republican National Committee (RNC).” Snip. “The infusion of cash allowed the Biden campaign to vastly outspend Trump’s team to run TV ads in August and September.” Big ad spends and no ground game? Sounds like Team Biden is trying to rerun the Jeb! strategy…
Republicans are preparing to release a report in a matter of days on their investigation focused on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, a move they hope will put fresh scrutiny on the Democratic nominee just weeks from the election.
The controversial probe, spearheaded by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is focused broadly on Obama-era policy and Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.
The GOP report, which is set to be released this week, is expected to argue that Hunter Biden’s work impacted Obama-era Ukraine policy and created a conflict of interest given then-Vice President Joe Biden’s work in the area.
Trump, Biden claims, “could not rally a single one of America’s closest allies” to support the extension of the [arms] embargo. What he neglects to mention is that the expiration date on the embargo was set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration and described by Biden as “a policy that was working to keep America safe.” That policy was, per Biden, discarded by Trump in favor of one “that has worsened the threat.” So which is it: Did the Obama-Biden Iran policy keep America safe? Or is the best argument against the Trump administration that they have failed to successfully roll back Obama-era policies?
Snip.
He fails entirely, in his op-ed ostensibly addressing the Iranian threat, to come even close to describing the full extent of how its regime has targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East, committed grievous human-rights violations against its own people, and funded terrorist organizations and plots around the globe. His failure to reckon fully with the evil of Ayatollah Khamenei seems indicative of not only his less serious estimation of the Iranian threat, but also the fact that he has made his peace with the current regime staying in power over the long term. He makes this belief explicit when he calls “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’” strategy “a boon to the regime in Iran.” He again avoids explaining how, probably because this claim is untrue by every available metric.
Maximum pressure has effectively choked the Iranian economy. The JCPOA had helped Iran achieve GDP growth rates of 12.5 percent in 2016 and 3.7 percent in 2017. In 2018 — the same year the U.S. exited the deal — Iran’s economy contracted by 5.4 percent. 2019 was even worse, at -7.6 percent. Notably, this economic disaster has led to Iranians flooding into the streets many times over the last two years to protest not only pocketbook issues, but the regime’s restriction of basic freedoms. While Biden may be content to leave the ayatollahs in power, the Iranian people appear to be far less willing. Furthermore, Iran’s regional position has been undermined by the Trump administration’s successful efforts to strengthen Israel’s relationships with Arab nations, including the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
Instead of backing maximum pressure, Biden supports what he calls a “smart way to be tough on Iran.” Ignoring Iran’s flagrant violations of the JCPOA even before the U.S.’s withdrawal, the sunset provisions on the agreement, and Israel’s discovery of documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program, Biden falsely asserts that the JCPOA had “verifiably block[ed] Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.”
College professors give seven times as much to Biden as Trump. That’s quite shocking. I would have expected the ratio to be more like 20-1 or 50-1. Biden must have remarkably poor fundraisers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
” Democrats’ new strategy for winning the White House: Threaten riots if they lose.” The public doesn’t seem so hoit on the idea…
“CNN Forum Throws Nothing But Softballs and Pathetic Biden Strikes Out Anyway.” “A real low point came when the declining Biden couldn’t remember what to call the place where the mail goes.”
Segregation, what a blast from the past! I remember when I was already a full-grown man in the year 1960 and me and the boys would gather outside the soda shop to make sure only the white folks got in. Maybe those jeans and that jacket I wore are back in style again too. Jill? Where’s that trunk with all my old clothes?”
