General J. P. Sears tells you all about the new US army (up to the 5.20 mark):

Is America in decline?

Don Feder, writing at Front Page, thinks it is:

The 20^th century – the American century.  America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the Greatest Generation, we won a World War fought over most of Europe, Asia and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed.

It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia, and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world.

We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and COVID.  We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA, the blueprint  of life.

America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked well nowhere in the world. We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year.

Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution.

The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers.

In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble  nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency.

We can’t defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds.

We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.

The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5^th graders could pass a generation ago.

Crime rates soar and we blame the 2^nd. Amendment and slash police budgets.

Our culture is certifiably insane. We have men who marry men. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they’re inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.”.

We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year.

Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $28-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality.

Our “entertainment” is sadistic, nihilistic and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.

Patriotism is called insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified.

A man in [police uniform] blue gets less respect than a man in a dress.

We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in.

How meekly most submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks and hand sanitizers) shows the death of the American spirit.

How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity?

• • Fighting endless wars they can’t or won’t win
  • Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay
  • Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde
  • Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule
  • Allowing indoctrination of the young
  • Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy
  • Losing national identity
  • Indulging indolence

In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease.

Is the entire Western world declining?

Is any country rising in power, militarily strong, stabilizing or increasing its fertility rate, self-sufficient in energy production, enjoying a rising standard of living, gaining from foreign trade, maintaining high standards of education, continually innovating?

Or is human life everywhere getting worse?

Two giants of our civilization, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, prescribed Christianity – specifically Russian Orthodox Christianity – as The Solution to the moral maladies of the human race.

The moral malady Dostoyevsky wrote against in his novel The Possessed (also translated as The Devils or The Demons) was the mood of anarchist rebellion, underlain by nihilist despair, that was spreading through Russia in his time. His last novel The Brothers Karamazov implicitly prescribes Orthodox Christianity as the great alternative to existential despair and universal moral turpitude.

Russia ignored Dostoyevsky’s prescription – the Orthodox Christian way to national salvation – so it was not tested (yet again). Rather, the rebellious mood, infecting Russian society high and low, fomented vicious acts of terrorism, harbingers of the revolution that would condemn the country to seventy-three years of Communism.

Solzhenitsyn was one of the millions of victims of the Communist regime.

He wrote this at the end of his story Matryona’s House, indicating what moral failings he most despises and implicitly prescribing his preferred alternative:

She [Matryona] made no effort to get things round her. She didn’t struggle and strain to buy things and then care for them more than life itself.

She didn’t go all out after fine clothes. Clothes, that beautify what is ugly and evil.

She was misunderstood and abandoned even by her husband. She had lost her husband, but not her sociable ways. She was a stranger to her sisters and sisters-in-law, a ridiculous creature who stupidly worked for others without pay. She didn’t accumulate property against the day she died. [Only] a dirty-white goat, a gammy-legged cat, some rubber plants. …

We had all lived  side by side with her and never understood that she was that righteous one without whom, as the proverb says, no village can stand.

Nor any city.

Nor our whole land.

Solzhenitsyn is praising Matryona, a poor, humble, kind, cheerful, self-sacrificing person, as an exemplar of the most virtuous, most praiseworthy person possible or imaginable. An indispensable type who justifies the existence of the human species. Rare, but a model for all of us. That is, “in the eyes of God” – he intimates. The “proverb” he mentions is an obvious euphemism for the Christian message. Repeatedly in his works he blames the wretchedness of Russia on Russians “forgetting God”.

And all his works excoriate Socialism and Russia’s Socialist regime. “Socialist” or “Communist” – the regime used the terms interchangeably.

He does not seem to notice that the type he holds up as a model and the virtues he praises, are the very type and the very virtues that Communism holds to be the highest and the best, and that Communist regimes require and demand. 

The Matryonas of our world are the models of both the perfect Christian and the perfect Communist.

Such people are valued by their fellows wherever they occur. Who would not value, who does not want someone in their family, or their neighborhood, or at least on their speed-dial, who will always help, always give whatever she’s asked for, even all that she has, including her life? Such people are useful among us. But are they models for us? Should all human beings be Matryonas? Would such a race build monuments of thought and skill and beauty, discover what the universe is made of, provide the drama and the laughter that we cannot do without? Is the Dostoyevsky-Solzehnitsyn-Christian-Communist way the best way to go or not?

Another Russian, Ayn Rand, protests most emphatically that the Matryona virtues are not virtuous at all. Her model is the man or woman who says (in Atlas Shrugged):

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

Ayn Rand had no children. Parents can feel that their child is worth living for; can love the child’s life more than their own. And others too can hold another life more precious than their own. But in general, Ayn Rand’s anti-Christian anti-Communist message – that living first for ourselves and only in that condition contributing to our society – is a triumphant affirmation of the individual’s moral right to self-esteem and all the choices of freedom.

Jillian Becker   June 17, 2021

Is the FBI organizing acts of subversion in order to have Trump supporters blamed for them?

There are reasons to believe it.

One of our readers complained recently that everything we post is gloomy. He asked, couldn’t we post something to make readers smile?

We could.

Here’s Dave Allen:

On our Facebook page – from which we were recently suspended for two months – we were constantly asked to give “just one example” of election fraud to support our contention that the Democrats cheated their way to victory in the November 2020 election.

There were many, we presented a lot of them, but none was accepted as proof by our critics.

Here is one more – but they won’t see it. At least, not on our Facebook page. We don’t plan to go back there except to direct our ten-thousand-plus followers to another discussion site which – fortune favoring us – we will soon have up and running.

The Western Journal reports:

Suzi Voyles is no stranger to elections.

And after monitoring voting in Atlanta-area Fulton County, Georgia, for two decades, Voyles said that the highly contentious 2020 election proved to be unlike any other.

Voyles testified that as she thumbed through a stack of mail-in ballots last November, strangely “pristine” ballots printed on stock paper different from the others seized her attention.

What did these ballots have in common?

Voyles testified that each ballot contained uniformly filled-in ovals, and every one presented an identical crescent-shaped “void” inside them — indicating the ballots weren’t filled in with pencil or pen, but rather by toner ink.

“Every single ballot was absolutely identical and they appeared to be printed with some sort of marking device,” Voyles said. “And the fact that there was a little eclipse in an oval that was void in exactly the same spot in all these ballots, we didn’t see any differentiation — even when it came to the Senate candidates or when it came to some of the referendums on the back.”

“Everything was precisely the same. I’ve never seen that before in 20 years,” Voyles said. She added that these suspicious ballots had no creases or folds indicative of other mail-in ballots extracted from envelopes.

Voyles wasn’t alone in her testimony.

According to RealClear Investigations, at least three other Fulton County poll workers reported that they encountered the same enigma in other stacks of absentee ballots and have joined Voyles in “swearing under penalty of perjury that [the ballots] looked fake.”

Eight months later, we see the same suspicion resurging in the Republican stronghold that unexpectedly flipped blue for the first time since 1992.

Using affidavits to convince a state judge to warrant a closer inspection of ballots for potential illicit election activity, election integrity advocates assert that Biden’s late surge of 12,000 votes was manufactured — and for good reason.

“We have what is almost surely major absentee-ballot fraud in Fulton County involving 10,000 to 20,000 probably false ballots,” Garland Favorito, poll watcher and a lead petitioner in the case against fraudulent ballots, told RealClear Investigations.

“We have confirmed that there are five pallets of shrink-wrapped ballots in a county warehouse,” he added, reiterating his claim.

As questions surrounding the legitimacy of the 2020 election outcome continued in Georgia, as well as other states, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ordered on May 21 that 147,000 ballots be unsealed and asked that officials guard the warehouse containing these ballots until an inspection date could be set, according to the report.

Unfortunately, the warehouse’s security was breached only eight days later.

According to Favorito, “The front door was [found] unlocked and wide open in violation of the court order.”

County officials did confirm that security motion detectors were triggered shortly after deputies left the premises, but said the room containing the ballots was never breached or compromised. [!]

Still, Favorito — and likely many others — would not be convinced and Favorito seeks to obtain security footage to supplement the investigation, the report states.

Still, all of the contention brewing in the Peach State appears to reaffirm many suspicions that have arisen since Nov. 3 — and may validate Voyle’s bombshell claims.

We can’t allow our officials to ignore their obligation to ensure fair, ethical elections for all Americans.

If we do, we have surrendered the most integral aspect of our republic.

“Biden” – which is to say, the oligarchy using Joe Biden as its figurehead – is bringing Muslim extremists and terrorist supporters to investigate the US military for “extremism”!

“Extremism” to “Biden” is a synonym for patriotism.

We take the following information from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page.

Muslims who support Hamas have been chosen as “partners” in  the Biden administration’s Countering Extremism Working Group (CEWG). 

The list includes these:

Hina Shamsi, a Pakistani residing in the US, was an outspoken defender of the Holy Land Foundation which provided material support to Hamas, the terrorist organization dedicated to Jihad that holds Gaza under its murderous governance. She also campaigned for the release of the Islamic terrorists held at Gantanamo Bay.

Faiza Patel, another Pakistani, wrote against designating the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization. In fact, Hamas is its offshoot. Patel claims that American laws against imposing Sharia (Islamic law) in the US are “Islamophobic”.

Yet another Pakistani, Manar Waheed, is active in the traitorous American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The CEO of a subversive Islamic organization called Emgage, Wael Alzayat.  

An attorney on the staff of the Hamas-supporting American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Iman Boukadou.

There are also persons from the Left-extremist Southern Poverty Law Center, including its former associate Heidi Beirich.

Greenfield comments:

American military personnel are being put at the mercy of advocates for their worst enemies. 

Multiple “partners” for Biden’s Countering Extremism Working Group have appeared at events for CAIR, ICNA, and other terror-linked organizations. Some have appeared at events featuring advocates for Islamic terrorism, sharia, and violence against non-Muslims.

They are the extremists that Americans should be concerned about.

The Biden oligarchy wants a military that will be unwilling to fight against Islam or Communism (Iran or China).

An armed citizenry is urgently necessary.

The Democratic Party wanted and fought for slavery, secession, and segregation.

Why, in the name of common sense, doesn’t every Republican candidate for office, every Republican in office, and every Republican voter constantly tell this to the electorate, until the rotten reputation that the Democrats have earned, sticks to their party irremovably? Wouldn’t that be a good way to destroy it?

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch summarizes the horrible history of the Democratic Party so well, we quote his article almost in full:

The Democratic Party was founded in 1828 by the backers of General Andrew Jackson, a Southerner and ardent racist who owned slaves and thought nothing wrong with the practice. Jackson, who became the 8th president, earned his fortune in a cotton industry based entirely on slaveholding. 

“Old Hickory” as his troops called him, was one tough son of a bitch. Compromise was not in his lexicon. Aside from his attitudinal superiority over blacks, Jackson is also famous for the “Trail of Tears” which forced Native Americans off their ancestral lands. These are the seminal beginning roots of the Democratic Party tradition in America.

Leading up to the Civil War, the Democratic Party had only one platform: Keeping slavery and the plantation economy intact.

In an attempt to settle sectional conflicts about the expansion of slavery, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The Act stated that the residents of those states, rather than the federal government, would determine the legality of slavery in those territories. The Republican Party was created largely in response to the Act; their 1856 platform of “free labor, free land, free men” aimed to protect poor white farmers and laborers from competition with slave labor. In response, the Democratic Party took a position of non-interference with the institution of slavery, which they favored and defended.

The Democratic Party was founded in a racism that was intended to support the interests of the ruling class and its party grandees as its first political principle. It was the core tenant of their political philosophy, public policy, and actions for the better part of a century.

The Democrats controlled the South and fought the Civil War as “Confederates,” to protect and preserve slavery and their way of life. The Confederacy never had political parties because they were all Democrats. All of the governors, generals, and leaders of the South in its war of secession were, in fact, Democrats.

The Republican Party was formed to abolish slavery and maintain the Union. In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose the “tyranny” of President Andrew Jackson, had shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.

With the successful introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories, the Whigs disintegrated. When Lincoln, the first Republican president, was elected with a split vote in 1860, it took only three weeks for the states of the South, all Democratic, to secede from the Union and start the Civil War, the bloodiest tragedy in all of American history.

After the surrender of the Confederates, the Democrats were implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor, was a staunch supporter of slavery and the Southern Confederacy during America’s Civil War. On the night of April 14, 1865, three days after the war ended, he entered Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., and shot Lincoln. The assassin shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis! [Ever thus to tyrants!] The South is avenged,” as he jumped onto the stage and fled on horseback. Booth was funded  and supported by the Democratic Party and the Confederacy, and his known plan was to reignite the Civil War and keep slavery.

The turbulent era of Reconstruction (1865-77) following the Civil War saw an effort to reintegrate Southern states and four million newly freed black people into the United States. The Democrats had a different plan for Reconstruction  based on a reversion to their supremacist racist policies and ideology. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson (a Democrat from Tennessee) in 1866, new southern state legislatures passed highly restrictive and harsh “Black Codes” to control the labor and behavior of formerly enslaved people and other African Americans.

Outrage in the North over these racist measures eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 by Republicans, newly enfranchised black people gained an active voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces—primarily the Ku Klux Klan—would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in a South that was still totally Democrat controlled.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, six Confederate veterans, all Democrats, gathered in Pulaski, Tennessee, to create the Ku Klux Klan (Greek for circle), a vigilante group mobilizing a campaign of violence and terror against the progress of Reconstruction and the Republicans. As the group gained members from all strata of Southern white society, they used violent intimidation to prevent black people—and any white people who supported Reconstruction (namely, Republicans)—from voting and holding political office.

All of the members of the Klan were Democrats; participation in the Democratic Party was explicitly mandated by the Klan, and the linkage between that political party and its extremist, violent terrorist wing is well documented.

In an effort to maintain white hegemonic control of government, the Klan, joined by other white Southerners in the Democratic Party, engaged in a violent campaign of deadly voter intimidation during the 1868 presidential election. From Arkansas to Georgia, thousands of black people were killed. Similar campaigns of lynchings, tar-and-featherings, rapes and other violent attacks on those challenging white supremacy became a hallmark of the Klan for decades. Again, this was informally sanctioned by the Democratic Party.

Jim Crow [laws] … originated with Democrats and included these abhorrent practices. These laws enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. (Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine that mocked black people. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for all African Americans and a designation for their  segregated life.)

From the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures, totally controlled by the Democrats, passed laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons of color” in public transportation and schools. Segregation was extended to parks, cemeteries, theaters, and restaurants in an attempt to prevent any contact whatsoever between blacks and whites as equals. Although the U.S. Constitution forbade racial discrimination, every state of the former Confederacy, all with Democratic governors and state legislatures, moved to disenfranchise blacks by imposing biased reading requirements, stringent property qualifications, and complex poll taxes. Jim Crow laws were a Democratic invention and lasted until the 1960s.

Democratic leaders like the late Senator Robert “Sheets” Byrd (D-W.Va.), were high-ranking officials in the KKK. Byrd was himself a grand cyclops of the KKK. He actively recruited hundreds of members and bragged about it. He held political office as a Democratic leader for five decades and was the longest serving Democrat in Congress. In December 1944, Byrd wrote to segregationist Democrat Mississippi Senator Bilbo:

I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side . . .  Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

During the Civil Rights Movement Democrats did everything in their power to forestall the rights of minorities and continue the subjugation of black voters.

When all of their efforts to enslave blacks, keep them enslaved, and then keep them from voting failed, the Democrats came up with a new strategy: If black people are going to vote, they might as well vote for Democrats. As President Lyndon Johnson was heard to have said about the Civil Rights Act, “I’ll have them n—–s voting Democrat for 200 years.”

So now the Democratic Party prospers on the votes of the very people it has spent much of its history oppressing. And the names of those oppressors are well known.

Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor was an American politician and dedicated member of the Democratic Party who served as Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, for more than two decades. He strongly opposed the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and was famous for his racist rhetoric and use of police dogs against protestors. He came to typify the Democratic attitude against equality and the 13th Amendment.

George Wallace, the fiery Democrat governor of Alabama was infamous for standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block integration in 1963. He attempted to keep his inaugural promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and stop the desegregation of schools and society. He came to personify the Democratic attitude to race relations and later went on to mount a losing run for the presidency.

Dixiecrat Democrats, formed in 1948, were opposed to civil rights, and bolted when Harry Truman took the Democratic nomination. Southern Democrats tried to forestall the signing of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964. If Republicans had not sided with certain Northern Democrats to end the longest filibuster in history by then-Democrat Senator Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.), the Act would not have become law.

People like then-Senator Joe Biden, (D-Del.) from the border slaveholding state, Delaware, below the Mason-Dixon line, got elected on a segregationist banner and opposed integration and school busing throughout the 1970s and 80s. Biden worked closely for years with Democratic Mississippi Senator James Eastland and Democratic Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge, two demonstrably racist Democrats, who opposed civil rights legislation and all integration efforts.

The tortuous history, when actually read and studied, demonstrates one abundantly clear fact; America has long had a racist political party.

They are called Democrats.

Their obsession with race is as intense now as it has ever been.

But there has been a change in the party. Though still predominantly white, the Democrats are now viciously anti-white!

And their favorite term of abuse to fling at others who do not share their obsession, is “Racist!”

They must not be allowed to conceal their anti-black history.

Here are some extracts from Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia entry, showing that with all the many accusations of his being engaged in corrupt dealings, no evidence has ever been found that even a single one of them is true!

According to Adam Entous of The New Yorker, Biden and his father established a relationship in which “Biden wouldn’t ask Hunter about his lobbying clients, and Hunter wouldn’t tell his father about them.”

Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, from 2014 until his term expired in April 2019. Since the early months of 2019, Biden and his father have been the subjects of unevidenced claims of corrupt activities in a Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory pushed by then-U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies, concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s anti-corruption efforts there on behalf of the United States during the time he was vice president. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration”. 

In December 2020, Biden made a public announcement via his attorney that his tax affairs are under federal criminal investigation. The New York Times and CNN, citing sources familiar with the investigation, described the investigation as having started in late 2018 and being related to potential violations of tax and money laundering laws and his business dealings in foreign countries, principally China.The Wall Street Journal reported that Biden had provided legal and consulting services that generated foreign-earned income, citing a Senate Republicans’ report that says millions of dollars in wire transfers from entities linked to Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming were paying for such services.The New York Times reported that according to people familiar with the inquiry, FBI investigators had been unable to establish sufficient evidence for a prosecution of potential money laundering crimes, including after the seizure of a laptop purportedly belonging to Biden, and so the investigation progressed onto tax issues.

From 2013 to 2020, Biden served as a member of the board of the China-based private equity fund BHR Partners, of which he acquired a 10% stake in 2017 at a discount. The founders of BHR Partners included Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Partners investment firm (20% equity), along with US-based Thornton Group LLC (10% equity) and two asset managers registered in China. The Chinese-registered asset managers are the Bank of China (via BOC International Holdings-backed Bohai Industrial Investment Fund Management) and Deutsche Bank-backed Harvest Fund Management. The BHR Partners fund invests Chinese venture capital into tech startups like an early-stage investment in Chinese car hailing app DiDi and cross-border acquisitions, in automotive and mining, such as the purchase of a stake in Democratic Republic of Congo copper and cobalt producer Tenke Fungurume Mining.

In September 2019, while President Trump was accusing Hunter Biden of malfeasance in Ukraine, he also falsely claimed that Biden “walk[ed] out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund” and earned “millions” of dollars from the BHR deal. Trump publicly called upon China to investigate Hunter Biden’s business activities there while his father was vice president. Hunter Biden announced on October 13, 2019 his resignation from the board of directors for BHR Partners, effective at the end of the month, citing “the barrage of false charges” by then-U.S. President Trump. According to his lawyer, Biden had “not received any compensation for being on BHR’s board of directors” nor had he received any return on his equity share in BHR. Biden’s lawyer George Mesires told The Washington Post that BHR Partners had been “capitalized from various sources with a total of 30 million RMB [Chinese Renminbi], or about $4.2 million, not $1.5 billion“.^[31]

Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings owned by Ukrainian oligarch and former politician Mykola Zlochevsky, who was facing a money laundering investigation just after the Ukrainian revolution, in April 2014. Biden was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, while still an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, and a consulting firm in which Biden is a partner was also retained by Burisma.

Biden served on the board of Burisma until his term expired in April 2019, receiving compensation of up to $50,000 per month in some months. Because Joe Biden played a major role in U.S. policy towards Ukraine, some Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and Obama administration officials expressed concern that Hunter Biden having joined the board could create the appearance of a conflict of interest and undermine Joe Biden’s anti-corruption work in Ukraine. While serving as vice president, Joe Biden joined other Western leaders in encouraging the government of Ukraine to fire the country’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was widely criticized for blocking corruption investigations. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Shokin in March 2016.

Former President Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed in 2019, without evidence, that Joe Biden had sought the dismissal of Shokin in order to protect his son and Burisma Holdings. Actually, it was the official policy of the United States and the European Union to seek Shokin’s removal.

We do wonder how the European Union came to be perturbed by Shokin’s doings. Is it possible that Joe Biden told them things that caused their uneasiness?

There has also been no evidence produced of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden in Ukraine. The Ukrainian anti-corruption investigation agency stated in September 2019 that its current investigation of Burisma was restricted solely to investigating the period from 2010 to 2012, before Hunter Biden joined Burisma in 2014. Shokin, in May 2019, claimed that he was fired because he had been actively investigating Burisma, but U.S. and Ukrainian officials have stated that the investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time of Shokin’s dismissal. Ukrainian and United States State Department sources note that Shokin was fired for failing to address corruption, including within his office.

In July 2019, Trump ordered the freezing of $391 million in military aid shortly before a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Zelensky to initiate an investigation of the Bidens. Trump falsely told Zelensky that “[Joe] Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of his son; Joe Biden did not stop any prosecution, did not brag about doing so, and there is no evidence his son was ever under investigation. The United States House of Representatives initiated a formal impeachment inquiry on September 24, 2019 against Trump on the grounds that he may have sought to use U.S. foreign aid and the Ukrainian government to damage Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko said in May 2019 that Hunter Biden had not violated Ukrainian law. After Lutsenko was replaced by Ruslan Riaboshapka as prosecutor general, Lutsenko and Riaboshapka said in September and October 2019 respectively that they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

During 2019 and into 2020, Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley investigated Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma, as well as allegations that Democrats colluded with the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2016 election. American intelligence officials briefed senators in late 2019 about Russian efforts to frame Ukraine for 2016 election interference. Johnson said he would release findings in spring 2020, as Democrats would be selecting their 2020 presidential nominee, but instead ramped up the investigation at Trump’s urging in May 2020, after it became clear that Joe Biden would be the nominee.Trump tweeted a press report about the investigations, later stating that he would make allegations of corruption by the Bidens a central theme of his re-election campaign. Johnson decided in March 2020 against issuing a subpoena for former Ukrainian official Andrii Telizhenko, a Giuliani associate who had made appearances on the pro-Trump cable channel One America News, after the FBI briefed him about concerns Telizhenko could be spreading Russian disinformation. The State Department revoked Telizhenko’s visa in October 2020, and CNN reported the American government was considering sanctioning him as a Russian agent. CNN reported that Vladislav Davidzon, the editor of Ukrainian magazine The Odessa Review, told CNN that in 2018 Telizhenko offered him money to lobby Republican senators in support of pro-Russian television stations in Ukraine. When Johnson released the final report on the investigation, it contained no evidence that Joe Biden had pushed for Shokin’s removal in order to benefit Hunter or Burisma.

In June 2020, former Ukrainian prosecutor general Ruslan Riaboshapka stated that an audit of thousands of old case files he had ordered in October 2019 had found no wrongdoing by Hunter Biden. Riaboshapka was described by Zelensky as “100 percent my person” during the July 2019 call in which Trump asked him to investigate Biden.

Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, an associate of Rudy Giuliani with links to Russian intelligence, released in May 2020 alleged snippets of recordings of Joe Biden speaking with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko during the years Hunter Biden worked for Burisma. The recordings, which were not verified as authentic and appeared heavily edited, depicted Biden linking loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general. The recordings did not provide evidence to support the ongoing conspiracy theory that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired to protect his son. Poroshenko denied in June 2020 that Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma.The United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned Derkach in September 2020, stating he “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services”. The Treasury Department added Derkach “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election” including by the release of “edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials”. Close associates of Derkach were also sanctioned by the Treasury Department in January 2021. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that Derkach was among proxies of Russian intelligence who promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about Biden “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration”.

Two Republicans on a Senate investigation committee in 2020 claimed that Russian businessperson Yelena Baturina, the wife of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, wire-transferred $3.5 million in 2014 to an investment firm linked to Hunter Biden. The report cited unspecified confidential documents. The report gives no indication that Hunter Biden personally accepted the funds.Biden’s attorney denied the report, saying Biden had no financial relationship with the woman and no stake in the partnership that received the money, nor did he co-found the partnership. However, Trump’s White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah repeated the claim, and in a press conference President Trump repeatedly claimed that Biden received millions of dollars from the former mayor’s wife. 

With all that lack of evidence, and all accusers turning out to be liars and/or Russian agents, it is hard on the poor man that reports still keep emerging which cast doubt on his innocence.

From the Western Journal:

It’s the [Hunter Biden] laptop that just keeps on giving.

According to a report published Wednesday by the New York Post, emails found on [it] show that now-President Joe Biden’s son brought his father to a dinner with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates in Washington during Biden’s tenure as vice president.

While previous emails found on the laptop had hinted at meetings between some of the shadier associates Hunter Biden picked up during his time on the board of the Ukrainian energy holding company Burisma, the report throws serious doubt on Joe Biden’s claim he had little knowledge of his son’s business dealings in Eastern Europe.

The meeting took place on April 16, 2015, in the so-called “Garden Room” at Cafe Milano, a restaurant described in a 2017 New York Times article as “the Georgetown restaurant where some of the world’s most powerful people go to be noticed but not approached. “

The importance of the date is that it came one day before one of the more controversial emails found on the infamous laptop, where Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for an introduction to the then-vice president.

The guest list prepared by Hunter three weeks before the Café Milano dinner included Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, corrupt former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, who since has died. Baturina wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry. [But] Archer told Hunter that Baturina wouldn’t be attending; “Yelena doesn’t want to steal Yuri’s Thunder, so she’ll be in town to meet with us but doesn’t want to come to dinner,” he wrote in a March 20 email. “That was just her thoughts. We could insist.”

“Obviously save a seat for your guy (and mine if he’s in town),” he added.

In a reply, Hunter said, “I think your guy being there is more trouble than it’s worth – unless you have some other idea.”

“Ok – the reason for the dinner is ostensibly to discuss food security,” Hunter wrote in a March 26 email, according to the Post. “Dad will be there but keep that between us for now. Thanks.”

The reported dinner is yet another complication to the official Joe Biden line: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said in October of 2019.

And yet there are the emails, the golf outing with a Burisma executive in 2014, this dinner and other red flags.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in an Oct. 15 editorial, a Senate report found multiple Obama administration officials knew about Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma and that one official emailed colleagues saying that “the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”

It is not kind to recall that Joe Biden “bragged that he got chief Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who once investigated Burisma, fired as a precondition for international aid in 2016 when the then-vice president was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine”. (The crime of which  President Trump was accused without evidence and for which he was impeached.)

In fact, Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia entry is one long exoneration, explaining away crimes he’s been accused of. His life seems to have consisted of little more than doing things that look unethical or positively criminal. But all of them, you see, can be explained. Every one of them. Explained.

For more about all these unevidenced accusations and others against Joe and Hunter Biden see our posts: The Biden scandal, October 17, 2020 (here), and The Bidens: models of decency, October 27, 2020 (here).

The press and CNN report – or don’t report; Wikipedia asserts; you judge.