What Happened Today: July 20, 2023
IRS whistleblowers talk to Congress; Making eggs from skin; Caroline Ellison uncensored
The Big Story
At a raucous hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, two IRS whistleblowers involved in an investigation into the family business operated by relatives of Joe Biden when he was vice president said the Department of Justice failed to fully investigate possible crimes related to millions paid by various foreign entities seeking political favors from Biden. “What were the Bidens selling? Nothing but influence and access to the Biden network. This is an influence-peddling scheme to enrich the Bidens,” said Congressman James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee. “We need to know whether Joe Biden is compromised by these schemes and if our national security is threatened.”
According to IRS Special Agent Joseph Ziegler, his investigation showed that the Biden family received $17.3 million from Romanian, Chinese, and Ukrainian firms, including $8.3 million for Joe Biden’s son Hunter, though it’s not clear what services were rendered by Hunter or any of the Bidens in exchange for the payments.
Ranking Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland suggested the whole hearing was merely a partisan stunt. “America needs to understand … the only political interference at play here is coming from Donald Trump and my Republican colleagues.”
In The Back Pages: Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes—or Joe Biden’s Big Mouth
The Rest
→ On Tuesday, a federal report revealed that the death of an 8-year-old migrant girl in U.S. Border Patrol custody was preventable. The girl, Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez, born in Panama, had a preexisting heart condition as well as sickle cell anemia, and she became ill with flu-like symptoms a few days after crossing the U.S. border and being taken to a “tent-holding facility” in Donna, Texas. After being transferred to another station in Harlingen, Texas, Anadith was seen nine times by medical staff but was not taken to a local hospital in spite of her mother’s pleas. Investigators found that Anadith’s medical treatment was negligent, and an anonymous official speaking to CBS News said, “It is my clinical opinion that were she treated differently that she would be alive today.”
→ Credit scores are crashing as the COVID-19 pandemic stimulus money dries up, according to Synchrony Financial CFO Brian Wenzel. “What we are seeing is people who are doing significant score migration—a 680 or a 690 going to a 620,” he told Bloomberg. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have all seen similar trends with their customer accounts.
→ The FBI raided famed wine importer and retailer Sherry-Lehmann on Tuesday as part of an ongoing multi-organization criminal investigation. Apparently, the New York stalwart that introduced brands like Dom Pérignon and Pétrus to the U.S. market after World War II has failed to deliver more than $1 million of prepaid wine to clients, owes $2.7 million in unpaid taxes, and allegedly sold clients’ stored wine to other clients, robbing Peter to souse Paul, as it were. Sherry-Lehmann’s owners did not respond to request for comment from Bloomberg but have said in a court filing that the delivery delays were due to tariffs and that the wines would be delivered this year.
→ Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne is stepping down amid allegations of scientific flaws in his past research. In spite of an internal university review panel dismissing the most serious claims of scientific fraud, five papers on which Tessier-Lavigne was listed as the primary author contained significant errors caused by the subpar research practices of researchers working under him in his lab. Tablet contributor Dr. Vinay Prasad of University of California at San Francisco said on Twitter that while Tessier-Lavigne made mistakes, his biggest error was “Not defending freedom of debate during COVID.”
→ Graphic of the Day:
This is the process by which researchers believe they may be able to create human eggs out of skin cell tissue, even from males. The process of turning a skin cell into a viable egg has already been successfully tried in mice, in a process called in vitro gametogenesis. The same process can also make sperm out of a skin cell, so in theory, a female could give her genetic material to become sperm, or a male could give his to become an egg, vastly changing the nature of reproductive biology as we know it. While California start-up Conception says it will be producing viable eggs within the next two years, many of the scientists who’ve been pursuing this technology say that it could be decades before it will be ready for use among humans. This is all completely insane.
Read more!
→ The Tour de France ends on Sunday and the winner is all but assured. Dane Jonas Vingegaard has pulled decisively ahead of his next closest rival, two-time winner Tadej Pogacar, after an amazing time trial on Tuesday and alpine climb on Wednesday. His lead is now 7 minutes and 35 seconds. Pogacar, 25, said of the battle on Wednesday, “I’m dead.” Barring a divine resurrection, or freak accident on the course, Vingegaard will take victory on Sunday in France.
→ Quote of the Day:
Now that it’s actually happening it just feels great to get it over with.
That’s Caroline Ellison, former head of FTX trading arm, Alameda Research, in a message to her on again, off again boyfriend and literal partner in crime, Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of now-defunct crypto firm FTX, during the month of November when their fraudulent, desperate attempts to save their business blew up. Ellison’s private communications and diary entries are being reviewed as part of the impending case against Bankman-Fried, and some have been made available to The New York Times. “Running Alameda doesn’t feel like something I’m that comparatively advantaged at or well suited to do,” Ellison conceded in her notes. She is now cooperating in the case against her former paramour.
→ Things got ugly on Wednesday at the Hungarian Grand Prix tennis tournament after a ball struck by Chinese player Zhang Shuai was called out against her Hungarian opponent, Kiara Toth. After Shuai complained, asking for a match supervisor to come review the call—on clay courts the ball marks can be reviewed manually—Toth used her shoe to rub out the mark near the line. Shuai then broke down and resigned from the match after winning that game, suffering a panic attack. That led Australian tennis pro Ajla Tomljanović to write on Twitter, “Absolutely disgusting behavior. Shuai is a better person than a lot of us for shaking the ref and that girl’s hand. But then again it’s Shuai we are talking about, ofc she did.” The Hungarian tournament supported its countrywoman, claiming, “The Chinese are manipulating the world with a manipulative video.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Nancy Isabelle by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The lost final chapter of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ‘Enemies: A Love Story’
First Resorts by Jenna Weissman Joselit
The history of the Jewish Catskills before the Borscht Belt was born
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, October 2020
Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes—or Joe Biden’s Big Mouth
In an ugly display of Big Tech’s monopoly power, Twitter and Facebook censor the White House, U.S. senators, and the ‘New York Post’ for saying things that were reported in ‘The New York Times’ five years ago—and that the Democratic candidate has publicly boasted about
By Lee Smith
The move by Facebook and Twitter to censor a New York Post story about Joe Biden was Silicon Valley’s version of an October surprise. Since publication of a story last week alleging that Hunter Biden was introducing foreign business colleagues to his father, Twitter has kept locked the account of the 200-year-old newspaper until it deletes its tweets about its Biden reporting. By removing the story from news feeds, locking the accounts of the Trump campaign and White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, and prohibiting editors of the newspaper from sharing the piece even from their own accounts—actions taken without evidence anything in the story was false—the tech oligarchy signaled it was throwing its weight behind what it believes to be the coming Democratic order in Washington.
It also provided Americans with an authentically shocking snapshot of the type of “managed” society that we now inhabit. In the new American system, large Silicon Valley corporations use their government-sanctioned and immensely profitable monopoly status to routinely censor information and libel anyone they please at the behest of unelected partisan verticals that have colonized large segments of the federal bureaucracy and security agencies. As each corrupted interest rubber stamps each other’s actions, power is removed from public hands and public view.
The idea that the Post story about Hunter Biden’s apparent bribery, and cocaine and sexual habits, was some form of dangerous “Russian disinformation” was teed up nearly a year ago by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the press, and cybersecurity professionals. According to Biden aides and other surrogates, any implication that the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate—who took his son to Beijing for business meetings on his vice presidential airplane—was aware of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine was necessarily part of an evil Russian scheme to interfere in an American election, again. It was on that basis that the social media giants justified their actions, while a practiced political and intelligence infrastructure surfaced to protect its favored candidate.
Facebook and Twitter had at first blocked the Post’s Hunter Biden story because, they claimed, the emails it is sourced from may have been stolen or hacked. They were not. They come from a hard drive left at a computer repair shop in Delaware. The owner gave the hard drive to the FBI in December. He also provided a copy to a representative of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani. It appears the Delaware man did not entirely trust FBI Director Christopher Wray, who has been sitting on mountains of documents exposing the bureau’s role in the anti-Trump operation designed to tilt the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton since he was confirmed in 2017.
Wray has now shown he’s not simply protecting the FBI’s reputation but is assisting a campaign against the president. As the hard drive was handed over, Trump was being impeached for allegedly strong-arming the Ukrainians into investigating Biden family corruption in Ukraine. Thus, the FBI held on to information that would have been useful in the president’s defense, evidence suggesting it would indeed be important to know what the Bidens were really up to in Ukraine. Instead, at around the same time the FBI began briefing congressional leadership on a potential plot to disseminate Russian disinformation regarding the Bidens and Ukraine through a pro-Russian Ukrainian parliamentarian. In other words, the FBI was preemptively clearing the Democratic candidate and teeing up the media response to Biden-Ukraine information already in its possession.
In January, according to a New York Times report, the Ukrainian company, Burisma, that employed Hunter Biden had been “hacked” by Russian military intelligence. However, this assessment was made only by a private cyber-security firm founded by a former employee of CrowdStrike, the one-time Hillary Clinton campaign contractor that claimed, without evidence, that Russian military intelligence had hacked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016. In other words, the same network that pushed the Russia collusion conspiracy theory—the FBI, the media, and DNC operatives—set the same machinery in motion to pre-emptively clear the Democratic candidate in the event the Biden-Ukraine information surfaced: It would be dismissed as “Russian disinformation.”
Thus, when Republican Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley released a report in September based on U.S. Treasury Department information detailing Hunter Biden’s financial relationship with foreign officials—primarily Ukrainians, Chinese, and Russians, including the wife of the mayor of Moscow who wired him $3.5 million from her personal bank account—the media’s claims that it was all based on Russian disinformation had already been validated by the FBI and others.
Further, labeling it Russian disinformation serves to shift attention to those providing the information, putting them, instead of the Bidens, under suspicion. For instance, a Washington Post story from last week reports that U.S. intelligence agencies incidentally collected Giuliani’s communications while he was in contact with various Ukrainian figures in his efforts to defend his client, Trump. If the Washington Post story is true, it represents yet another felony leak of classified intelligence in a four-year-long series of leaks designed to destabilize the Trump White House.
To be clear, the charges against Hunter Biden are not Russian disinformation. The potentially dangerous ramifications of his work on behalf of an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian former official was first reported by The New York Times nearly five years ago. Joe Biden’s efforts to protect a foreign company employing his son that was under investigation by a foreign power were first reported by none other than Joe Biden when he boasted about it in front of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Indeed, the facts of the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine are all matters of public record. Shortly after protesters forced Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to flee Kyiv in February 2014, Vice President Biden was there on the ground. As the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, he was meeting with government officials, including the next president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, telling them they had to do more to root out corruption. In May, Hunter Biden was named to the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian oligarch who’d served in the government of the previous, now exiled, president.
In August 2014, the Ukrainians opened an investigation of Burisma, and in January 2015 the owner of Burisma was put on Ukraine’s most wanted list. Those should have been signals for Hunter Biden to extricate himself from Burisma. Instead, the vice president of the United States began pushing President Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor, Victor Shokin, who was investigating the company that was paying his son more than $50,000 a month.
The 2020 Democratic candidate had previously claimed that he never spoke with Hunter about his foreign business. The New York Post article indicates that Biden’s claim is false.
The 49-year-old Hunter’s well-documented problems made him an obvious target for foreign intelligence services. Drawing money from a foreign company under investigation in a notoriously corrupt country made the son of the vice president of the United States a threat to compromise U.S. national security. At least two State Department officials raised their concerns with the Biden team (one went directly to Joe and Hunter Biden) and were ignored.
Ukrainian President Poroshenko naturally saw the Burisma investigation as leverage to be used against his political rivals. Sometimes he turned the heat up on his adversaries, and at other times he laid off. In September 2015, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt upbraided the Ukrainians for not doing more to bring Burisma owner Zlochevsky to justice.
Biden media surrogates claim that the former vice president was part of this Obama administration-led international effort to oust the prosecutor for not doing enough to root out corruption. But the notion that Biden was demanding the Kyiv government investigate the company paying his son more than $50,000 a month for doing nothing is absurd. What Biden meant by corruption was different from what the State Department meant. State wanted a new prosecutor because he wasn’t investigating Burisma; Biden wanted Shokin fired because he was investigating the company that employed his son.
It was allegedly the Hillary Clinton campaign that first brought the divide between the State Department and the vice president over Burisma to light. According to a former senior intelligence official in the Obama administration, Clinton deputies were behind the Dec. 9, 2015, New York Times story about Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, “Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch.”
The article reads:
The credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.
The Times even included Ambassador Pyatt’s demands that Ukraine go after the Burisma owner. “In his speech,” the Times reported, “the ambassador did not mention Hunter Biden’s connection to Burisma.”
The purpose of the Times piece, says the former Obama official, was to ensure that Biden didn’t change his mind about entering the 2016 race. And so the Clinton campaign fired a shot across his bow to show him they could make life uncomfortable for him. The Times dropped the story just as the vice president was in Kyiv to demand the government root out corruption.
Biden didn’t flinch. The day the story published, he made his first public demand that the Ukrainians fire the prosecutor tasked to the Burisma case.
Contrary to the claim of Biden surrogates that there was no open investigation of Burisma when the vice president demanded Shokin’s firing, the Ukrainian prosecutor seized the Burisma owner’s property on Feb. 2, 2016. The investigation was too valuable for the Ukrainian president to just shut it down.
Biden called Poroshenko repeatedly, on Feb. 11, Feb. 12, Feb. 18, and Feb. 19— to talk about “corruption.” Poroshenko eventually relented. During the call on the 18th, Biden “commended” his decision to replace the prosecutor looking into Burisma.
Biden later garbled the story of how he got Shokin canned when he related it to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018. He boasted that he got Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor on the spot during a March 2016 visit, or else he’d leave without giving Kyiv a $1 billion loan guarantee the administration had promised. In fact, Biden had been riding the Ukrainians for months to get them to terminate Shokin. But the basic facts in Biden’s account were correct—he used American taxpayer dollars as leverage to get a foreign government to call off the investigation of a company that was currently employing his son.
In other words, it’s not “the Russians” who were responsible for the allegations about Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s seedy business in Ukraine—it’s Joe and Hunter Biden.
Lee Smith as always was 100% on the mark on the Biden Crime Family
Lee Smith is a journalistic genius, even among the many stellar writers at Tablet.