January 23, 2025
|
|
First, let’s start with some especially welcome news: President Trump’s outstanding choice for CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday and sworn in late that same day. Ratcliffe has previously served as a Texas congressman and was Director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term. He’s one of the most solid, knowledgeable and trustworthy people Trump could have picked for this critical position.
One would think Ratcliffe would’ve been given a harder time over his nomination to run the CIA, as there must be members of the established intel community who REALLY don’t want him around, but there he is, right where he should be. Now, let’s hope those who oppose him are on their way out.
Ratcliffe was confirmed by a decisive vote of 74-25 and was sworn in by Vice President J. D. Vance.
There’s more: Trump had said he’d release the files on the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations that, after so many decades, still have been held back. On Thursday, the newly-inaugurated President Trump signed an Executive Order --- one of four biggies that he signed on what we’d describe as an exhilarating day --- calling for the director of national intelligence (presumed to be Tulsi Gabbard) and the attorney general (presumed to be Pam Bondi) to present a plan to him within 15 days for the “full and complete release” of the remaining JFK assassination records and, within 45 days, the remaining RFK and King records.
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” President Trump says in the order. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”
Hear, hear! This order supersedes an EO from Biden that had continued to withhold some of the last remaining files on the JFK assassination, and it goes on to state that Biden’s action was “not consistent with the public interest, and the release of these records is long overdue.” (Perhaps the previous President was just too mentally compromised even to know what he was signing, but we’ll set aside that possibility for now.)
Not that this has been reported, at least that we’ve seen, but it’s easy to hypothesize that Trump’s transparency on this was one of the conditions for RFK Jr. (who is also JFK’s nephew) coming aboard for Trump with his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign and, pending Senate confirmation, heading the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services. As he wrote on the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination, “The 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Act mandated the release of all records related to the JFK assassination by 2017. Trump refused to do it. Biden refused to do it. What is so embarrassing that they’re afraid to show the public 60 years later?”
He wrote this at the same time he launched a petition to get those records released. Well, it’s taken a while, and there was speculation at the time about the foot-dragging, but Trump is back and is finally making good on that promise, along with many others.
According to the National Archives, about 99 percent of the relevant (“responsive”) documents about the assassination had been released as of 2023. This really does make one curious about what’s in that last 1 percent. But don’t assume that this last release of documents is going to solve all the mysteries. Who knows what has managed to survive all this time --- and what hasn’t?
President Trump is also more than ready for the full account of the Hunter Biden laptop --- as in, the media suppression of it --- to come out, as this was probably the most consequential piece of 2020 election interference of all. According to the DAILY CALLER, two reporters have accused the news outlet POLITICO of suppressing negative stories about Joe and Hunter Biden and the infamous laptop during the 2020 presidential election. The brief Tara Palmeri video included at this link is a must-see…
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2025/01/23/former-politico-reporters-stories-biden-family/
As the DAILY CALLER reminds us in this report, Twitter locked multiple accounts, including those of the NEW YORK POST and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. As they tell us, “Documents released to Michael Shellenberger by Elon Musk show that the FBI contacted Twitter about the potential for leaks involving Hunter Biden prior to the NEW YORK POST’s report.” Recall from the “Twitter Files” that Twitter was deluged by calls from the FBI to delete posts, and that the FBI even ponied-up to give their staff a little something “extra” for all their overtime. (On his first day, Trump signed another Executive Order banning this kind of indirect government censorship.)
AXIOS reporter Marc Caputo said he went to his then-POLITICO editor and said, “Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop.” And he was told from the higher-ups: don’t talk, don’t write, don’t tweet about the laptop. The only thing they were allowed to write about the laptop was the “piece that called it disinformation.”
Caputo apparently tried hard to report on this and other Biden stories. As for the laptop story, “I spent three months on it,” he said, “I went to the laptop shop [John Paul Mac Isaac’s computer store, where an apparently inebriated Hunter left the laptop and months later had still failed to retrieve it], and I did all of the reporting in Delaware...but, yeah...it had to be 100 percent nailed down. I had everything, you know, the police reports...But I do wonder if it could have, if it would have been published a little quicker if it was a different type of story.”
Gosh, ya think?
Caputo had other potential damaging stories about the Bidens that were killed by his editors, such as the one about the tax lien on Hunter Biden from when he was working for Burisma. (This story was, Caputo said, given to him by a Democratic rival for the presidential nomination in 2019, part of his “oppo research,” but was not printed.)
Palmeri told Caputo, “We just get called, like, ‘the terrible mainstream media.’ It’s like, you don’t understand the process there,” with Caputo responding, “Well, you also don’t understand the dumb decisions of cowardly editors that are made above us.”
POLITICO disputes this characterization, calling Caputo’s recollections “BS” and saying they were “the first to confirm that Hunter Biden’s laptop contained genuine material and to report on the gun incident that led to his conviction.” Ah, but never mind, because POLITICO also claims to have provided readers with what they call a “nuanced understanding” of the business dealings of Hunter and his family. Caution: Whenever you hear the word “nuanced,” prepare to be gaslighted.
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2025/01/23/former-politico-reporters-stories-biden-family/
Another promise for Trump to keep is probably going to come indirectly through his nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi. As the House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said this week, they’ve got enough evidence to nail the Bidens for a variety of crimes: violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), money laundering, and (thanks to testimony from IRS whistleblowers) tax evasion. Allegedly, they didn’t pay taxes on the tens of millions of dollars they took from foreign sources.
But what about the pardons given to them by family “rainmaker” Joe the Big Guy on his way out the door of the White House?
Comer said that “the list of laws that they have broken goes on and on and on,” adding that he believes these broad, pre-emptive pardons “could be tested.” The fact that they ARE so broad tells us, he said, that “they did more than evade taxes.”
He also reiterates what we’ve been saying, that if any pardoned Biden family members are called to testify about their dealings before congressional committees, they will have to testify, as the Fifth Amendment won’t apply since they can’t incriminate themselves. And their pardons will not shield them from new charges, such as perjury or contempt of Congress.
Comer thinks the Biden family members likely negotiated “future deals” for themselves (including Joe?) in order to help convince Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 campaign. That might be something covered under the pardons, but we still need to know about that. We would add that Joe himself is not pardoned, a point that President Trump happened to mention out loud.
Peter Schweizer, who has been following the Biden money trail for years, speculated about this on Mark Levin’s radio show earlier this week, saying of Hunter and the rest of the Bidens, “I am absolutely convinced that some exit deals were signed, that the Bidens got money from Democrat donors to go away.” Joe Biden was so set on staying in the race, one sure has to wonder what he might have gotten for dropping out.
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.