What Happened Today: April 17, 2023
Who knew the truth about Hunter?; 327 repeatedly rob New York retail; King Charles is not poor
The Big Story
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) revealed on a podcast last Thursday that he has new evidence to suggest that the Biden campaign was actively involved in the letter circulated by former intelligence agency brass prior to the 2020 election that falsely claimed that reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptops was connected to Russian disinformation. Many have said the letter could have swung the election in Biden’s favor. Jordan promised to release what he knows sometime in April, and he also said that two of the key witnesses interviewed were former CIA director Mike Morrell and a former adviser to former director John Brennan, Nick Shapiro. According to Jordan, both men were instrumental in using the letter to quickly change the narrative on what both the Bidens and the FBI, which first took possession of the laptops in 2019, knew all along to be an authentic story.
Meanwhile, after the indictment of former president Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business records, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said that he’s heard from local district attorneys in Republican states who are exploring ways to go after President Biden in a similar fashion, perhaps due to his business dealings with overseas partners, some of which were revealed in Hunter’s laptop data. That suggests a new era of tit-for-tat political prosecutions might have already begun. The Oversight Committee told the Washington Examiner that it has “subpoenaed and obtained financial records related to the Biden family’s influence peddling. These documents solidify our understanding of several areas of concern and have opened new avenues of investigation about the Biden family’s business schemes.” While Jordan says he doesn’t support this kind of political persecution, after the Trump indictment “crossed that line,” “I think that now has become the rules of the game.”
Listen to the podcast with Jordan, here: https://art19.com/shows/john-solomon-reports/episodes/616de531-cb55-467a-82c3-e5bb0a4db2de
In The Back Pages: The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop
The Rest
→ While violent crime has been on a downtrend in New York City, petty crime is up, a lot: 53% over the past three years. The NYPD is now saying a review of last year’s arrests shows that one-third of all shoplifting arrests made in NYC in 2022 are attributable to just 327 people who were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times. The National Retail Foundation reports that 37% of all inventory shrinkage in 2021 was due to theft, and the NYC-based retail coalition Collective Action to Protect Our Stores estimates that its 5,000 small businesses from around NYC and New York State have lost a combined $300 million in revenue due to the increase in crime. If recidivism is a huge driver here, it doesn’t appear that bail laws will be changed anytime soon, as state Democrats rejected Gov. Kathy Hochul’s March proposal to re-introduce bail for smaller crimes.
→ Quote of the Day:
The NYT worked feverishly to find the identity of the guy leaking TS docs on Discord. Ironically, if the same guy had leaked to the NYT, we’d be working feverishly to conceal it.
That’s New York Times military reporter David Philipps, pointing out his employers’ hypocrisy in the handling of recent Department of Defense leaker Jack Teixeira. Philipps later deleted the tweet, saying that it “lacked nuance” and that he promised “much more nuance coming soon.” Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden NSA story in 2013, has been harshly critical of how The New York Times and The Washington Post have handled Teixiera, accusing them of helping the government hunt down the leaker while simultaneously publishing and contextualizing the leaked material, giving credence to its import. He tweeted, in agreement with Philipps, “Each time these news outlets publish reporting on these docs—as we did—it’s an implicit admission that they are newsworthy, that the public should know about them. That’s what makes it so repellent that media corporations are the ones who hunted him down on behalf of FBI.”
→ Graph of the Day:
If you want to understand the crisis in domestic military manufacturing in one chart, Matt Stoller shared this one from an April 2023 DoD contract finance study report. It shows how it isn’t in the economic interest of the big five defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics—to produce war matériel because nearly their entire operations are subsidized by the government, allowing them to produce very little and remain profitable. Amazingly, in the DoD report, issued last Wednesday, members of the defense industry complained that they couldn’t spend more money on research and development due to “insufficient profitability”—although their margins and cash flow have been increasing over the past two decades and they were able to greatly increase stock dividends.
Read More: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-military-industrial-stock-buyback
→ In the most L.A. article of recent memory, the Los Angeles Times answered some of its readers’ burning pot-related questions, such as: Can you smoke weed at the Hollywood Bowl? Where can I meet boomer stoners? Is there an LGBTQ spot to get my ganja? What if my dog eats my marijuana plant? Speaking from personal experience, some of us at The Scroll understand that you may not technically be allowed to smoke weed at the Hollywood Bowl, but that as you unpack your charcuterie and cheese and a bottle of wine from Tabula Rasa or K&L, you will inevitably be hit with the skunky, robust, gleeful aroma of the green stuff. Every time. Oh, yeah, and while dogs are way more sensitive to cannabis than humans, they should be okay if they eat your weed plant—but if they get into your edibles, head for the vet.
→ Biopharma heavyweights Moderna and Merck have announced positive results from a mid-stage trial of their melanoma vaccine for patients with stage three or four cancer. At the 18-month mark after surgery, with a combined therapy of the vaccine and a Merck immunotherapy drug, 78% of patients in the trial were alive and cancer-free, while 62% of those who received only the immunotherapy were alive and cancer-free. The concept of cancer vaccines has been a medical holy grail for decades but has not yet been successful. That might be changing with the advent of mRNA technology. However, the cancer treatment requires nine vaccine doses over a 27-week period; in 2017, Moderna was on the verge of collapse because it couldn’t figure out how to make the lipid nanoparticle delivery system safe enough to use in repeated doses. In the current trial, no “life-threatening” events were reported.
→ Number of the Day: $745 million
That’s King Charles’ personal net worth, according to a new analysis by The Sunday Times. That hefty sum includes two major properties at Sandringham and Balmoral, worth about $300 million and $250 million, respectively, which he inherited from his mother, Queen Elizabeth. Due to British law, he did not pay inheritance tax on them, though apparently he did elect to pay income tax on the $260 million he received from the Duchy of Cornwall—which he managed between 2012 and 2022—even though he wasn’t required to. The British royals’ Crown Estate is worth more than $19 billion but isn’t technically the king’s money. Charles is set to be officially crowned on May 6 at Westminster Abbey. While nearly every prominent British pop star has turned down his invitation to perform, we think that given his net worth, he’ll be able to drown his sorrows in the very best champagne.
→ About a year after Moody’s upgraded Israel’s credit outlook to positive, the company has reversed course and downgraded it to stable due to the recent gridlock and protests over the Likud-led coalition’s attempt to reform Israel’s judiciary. In a tsk-tsk bit of prognosticating, Moody’s called it a “deterioration of Israel’s governance” and blamed “the manner in which the government has attempted to implement a wide-ranging reform without seeking broad consensus points.” However, the current credit rating of Israel remains a strong A1, and Moody’s wrote it “assume[s] continued robust growth in the medium term.” Opposition leadership was incensed at the change, with former finance minister and current head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party Avigdor Lieberman saying, “Just in April last year, when I was finance minister, Moody’s raised Israel’s outlook to positive, and I responsibly left the current government with a growing economy and a budget surplus of about NIS 10 billion. And here, after three months, we are on the verge of economic collapse.”
→ Song of the Day:
Radiohead guitarist and Phantom Thread composer Jonny Greenwood has made a new album with Israeli rocker Dudu Tassa, called Jarak Qaribak, which translates to “Your Neighbor Is Your Friend.” The album has a variety of artists on it, each of whom sing about a country other than their own. Greenwood—whose wife, Sharona Katan, is Israeli—has worked with Tassa before. Radiohead has come under fire for performing in Tel Aviv in the past but has gone ahead with it anyway, unlike many of its contemporaries.
→ On April 6, the second night of Passover, Yale University hosted French-Algerian activist Houria Bouteldja to speak on “France and Whiteness.” Previously, Bouteldja seemed to identify with Jew-killer Mohammed Merah—who murdered three children and a rabbi—saying, “Mohammed Merah is me,” and has blamed European Jews for the Holocaust because of their own complicity or tolerance of European subjugation of non-white peoples in the colonial era. She has also unabashedly accused all white people of being essentially, irreparably evil and has accused the Jews of pandering to their own white oppressors.
→ Here’s a shout-out to the production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, currently playing at Chicago’s famed Goodman Theatre. The show is the final production that artistic director and Broadway regular Robert Falls programmed before he left his post, and the last of Chekhov’s masterpieces he had yet to direct. Chekhov is notoriously difficult to capture. In a way, it’s the very essence of theater itself: Every moment in a Chekhov play reflects so profoundly the mystery of being alive that it can never really happen the same way twice. In order to capture that magic, you have to have an ensemble of truly great actors (check) who really trust each other (check) who are there for the humble reward of doing the work (check) and are willing to make total asses of themselves (check.) It was especially moving to see unsung national treasure Francis Guinan in the pivotal, tragic role of Firs, the geriatric butler who makes the play unbearably beautiful. Watching Guinan work, in this and in anything, is like watching a master woodworker at his lathe. If you’re in Chicago, treat yourself to something worth standing up for at curtain call. Through April 30th. -CF
TODAY IN TABLET:
Missing but Wanted: Children by Michael Lind
Partisan explanations for why birth rates are falling miss the true sources of a cross-cultural trend, and the possible solutions
‘The Holocaust and Genocide Don’t Start With Bombs, They Start With Words’ by Abigail Pogrebin
A roundtable discussion with Holocaust survivors about the rise of antisemitism in America, the importance of education, and who will pass on the lessons of the Shoah when the last survivors are gone
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, July 2022
The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop
How a country’s political corruption, institutional decay, and moral decline can be summed up in one sad family saga
By Lee Smith
The recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the 50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop suggests there was much more at stake.
The U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.
But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.
When Trump started asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S. interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him president.
There is so much data on Hunter Biden’s laptop that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of images and information that have come from it since the New York Post started sourcing stories to the personal computer in October 2020. The most recent release includes 80,000 images that a Switzerland-based cyber expert recovered from deleted iPad and iPhone accounts backed up on the laptop.
There are more pictures, texts, and emails about the younger Biden’s business deals, drug use, sex life, and family relations. Hunter referred to his stepmother, first lady Jill Biden, as a “vindictive moron.” There’s a contact nicknamed “Pedo Peter,” which appears to refer to his father: Joe Biden often used the alias “Peter Henderson,” the name of a character in a Tom Clancy novel, when he traveled.
“I saw about two dozen images of young girls in suggestive poses and then stopped looking,” says Jack Maxey, a former co-host of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” and the source of the laptop data later authenticated by The Washington Post and Daily Mail. “That’s why I keep asking for some sheriff somewhere to get involved and do this the right way,” Maxey told me in a phone call. “It has to be done under lawful conditions.”
It was Maxey who got The Washington Post to admit that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop is genuine. In June 2021, Maxey brought the paper a copy of the hard drive from the computer that Biden left with a Delaware repairman in April 2019. The repairman has said he offered the laptop to the FBI in July of that year and heard nothing back until five months later when the bureau confiscated it from him. That was December 2019, when U.S. spy services were using congressional allies to impeach Donald Trump for asking questions about the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine, which are described on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
In September 2020, the repairman gave a copy of the hard drive to Rudolph Giuliani’s lawyer. The former New York City mayor had been investigating the Bidens’ work in Ukraine for nearly two years at that point after receiving a tip from a former federal prosecutor. Giuliani helped disseminate copies of the hard drive, one of which Maxey took to The Washington Post.
Nine months after Maxey sat with Post reporters to explain the contents of the hard drive, the paper reported its own independent authentication of 22,000 emails in March of 2022. These included communications regarding a deal with a Chinese energy company that earned Hunter $5 million, and his work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that paid him $83,333 per month to sit on its board. His father later boasted in public that he’d threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless the central government in Kyiv fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma. At roughly the same time The Washington Post authenticated these emails, The New York Times also verified communications found on Hunter Biden’s computer.
So, have America’s two most prestigious newsprint organizations at last acknowledged that they were wrong to believe former intelligence officials who claimed the New York Post’s October 2020 reporting on the Biden laptop was Russian disinformation? Of course not. They were and remain proud of their role in helping push Trump out of Washington. According to one survey, one out of six Biden voters said that had they known about Hunter’s laptop in time, they wouldn’t have voted for his father.
What concerned the prestige press wasn’t that they’d missed a big story—or that they’d participated in a campaign run by U.S. intelligence services to prevent American voters from learning about the extent of the Bidens’ political and moral corruption. Rather, they were worried that an even bigger story about the Bidens might be coming down the road. Maxey says he called the Post in March to say he was taking the hard drive to Switzerland to meet with a cyber expert named Vincent Kaufmann who told him he thought he could retrieve material deleted from the laptop.
The Times published its story two days after Maxey landed in Zurich, and the Post published its own “investigation” two weeks later, pronouncing some of the emails genuine while claiming it was hard to tell with others. As a longtime platform for U.S. intelligence operations—and owned by the same man, Jeff Bezos, who owns the cloud computing technology that Amazon Web Services uses to store the CIA’s information—the Post wanted to help the White House get ahead of potential problems.
Maxey says that after he saw two dozen images of young girls, he told Kaufmann not to look at any more. “I don’t know how many he looked at,” says Maxey. “He was disturbed by what he saw and that no one would do anything about it. He’s a moral person with an incredible skillset but has no life experience. He’s a 31-year-old guy with a bag of chocolate bars or a Diet Coke in one hand and a computer mouse in the other.” Tablet tried to reach Kaufmann for comment, but did not hear back.
Kaufmann began posting some of the material on 4Chan, the anonymous posting board where the messaging operation QAnon started. Users copied the images and text and seeded it on social media platforms like Twitter. Maxey says he never would have released it. “From day one I told Vincent that we can’t release any of this material.”
Maxey says he also saw information on the laptop that has direct implications for U.S. national security. According to Maxey, this material includes documents relating to Pentagon cyber programs and others regarding former FBI Director Louis Freeh. According to a previously released email on Hunter’s laptop, Freeh worked with him to help a Romanian tycoon evade bribery charges. In April 2016, according to an earlier trove of emails, Freeh deposited $100,000 in a trust fund for two of Joe Biden’s grandchildren.
“Vincent thought the media was covering for the Bidens,” says Maxey. “Which is true. He also thought I was shielding them. He couldn’t understand why nothing was happening. He couldn’t believe people wouldn’t protect children, so he felt he needed to deal with it.” Maxey says that since Kaufmann posted the material online, he’s spoken with “several sheriffs who have reached out to help, and it looks like we can resolve this.”
Outside of the New York Post, Fox News, and the Daily Mail, the press has ignored the latest release, as it did with previous tranches of Hunter’s emails. Still, it seems the Biden administration isn’t taking any chances. The Treasury Department has rebuffed requests from Republican lawmakers to release suspicious activity reports (SARs) related to Hunter Biden that might shed more light on the foreign entanglements outlined in the laptop’s information and his father’s possible involvement.
While Biden said he never spoke with his son about his business abroad, a voicemail from another recently released laptop cache shows the president was being less than forthright. He knew about his son’s business with the Chinese energy firm and one of its top officials, Patrick Ho. After The New York Times published a softball article in December 2018 about Hunter’s work with Ho and other businessmen tied to the Chinese Communist Party, Biden left a message for his son saying, “I think you’re clear.”
Of course Hunter was clear: The FBI was watching over him. The bureau knew what he was doing because it had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in 2017 on Ho, who Hunter called the “spy chief of China.”
With the spy warrant, U.S. domestic intelligence services had access to every electronic communication between Ho and his business partner, Joe Biden’s son. Had the FBI wanted, it would have been able to access Joe Biden’s communications as well. The bureau used a FISA warrant on a 2016 Trump campaign adviser to spy on the campaign, Trump’s transition team, and then the White House. While the Justice Department charged and convicted Ho with bribing African officials and money laundering, Hunter Biden, as his father had told him, was in the clear.
Reports like the ones the Treasury Department is now withholding formed the basis of a September 2020 Senate Republican investigation by Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa that documented Hunter Biden’s business with foreign officials and companies. It included his relationship with Burisma in Ukraine; the Chinese energy company, which also gave money to the president’s brother Jim and his wife, Sara; and Elena Baturina, the widow of a former mayor of Moscow, from whom Hunter received $3.5 million.
The FBI tried to shape reception of the GOP Senate report by going to Johnson a month before its release and telling him he was a target of Russian disinformation. “I asked the briefers what specific evidence they had regarding this warning, and they could not provide me anything other than the generalized warning,” Johnson told The Washington Post. “I suspected that the briefing was being given to be used at some future date for the purpose that it is now being used.”
That is, the FBI told Johnson that he was being targeted by the Russians, then leaked their own comments to the press, so that after the senator’s report was published, the bureau’s media partners could dismiss it as Russian disinformation—even though it was sourced to Treasury Department documents. Like clockwork, just days after Johnson’s report came out, The New York Times called it “a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign.”
Giuliani and One America News (OAN) journalists visited Kyiv in December 2019 to pursue the Biden investigation, and came away with a 2016 audiotape of what appears to be Joe Biden telling then-President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko to bury evidence incriminating them both if the newly elected Trump found it. Is the tape real? Who knows? If anonymous U.S. intelligence officials say that information based on Treasury Department documents are lies made in Moscow, what isn’t Russian disinformation? To play it safe, the Biden campaign fed an email query from an OAN reporter to a journalist from The Atlantic to frame OAN’s reporting as—what else?—"Russian disinformation,” a claim The Atlantic then sourced back to three U.S. national security officials.
That’s how the Oct. 19, 2020, letter signed by more than 50 former U.S. spies worked, too. To substantiate their assessment that the laptop was Russian disinformation, former U.S. intelligence officials cited as evidence a Washington Post story published four days earlier, which reported that, according to four former U.S. intelligence officials, U.S. intelligence officials had warned the White House that Giuliani—the man who put the laptop in front of American voters—had been targeted by the Russians. In other words, the letter was pre-validated and primed by some of the former spies who signed the letter.
All this raises an important question: Why, when it comes to the Bidens, is it always the Russians who are passing on disinformation? Does Vladimir Putin hate Joe Biden as single-mindedly as he was said to have loved Donald Trump? Are there no other foreign spy services that try to interfere with our political system?
Of course there are: Chinese intelligence, for one. And yet whenever there’s bad news about Joe and Hunter Biden, it’s only ever fake news generated by the Russians. Russia has been a convenient foil since the 2016 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton and associates and U.S. spy chiefs like Brennan, Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey turned Putin into a one-stop shop for explaining Democratic electoral losses.
But there’s something even more obvious going on here: Calling every report on the Biden family’s corruption “Russian disinformation” is the preemptive countermeasure U.S. intelligence services have deployed on the off chance Moscow really does release whatever it has on the president and his son—including more hard drives, tapes, or records of financial transactions. At this point, after all the claims American spies have made about “Russian disinformation” looking to undermine the Bidens, who’s to say what’s true or not?
Read the rest, here.
What Happened Today: April 17, 2023
In all investigations of criminal conspiracies as Lee Smith you follow the motives and the money that rule is especially true with three RICO enterprise known as the Biden Family