It was a really great news weekend in one respect: if you were looking for insight into how the deep state bureaucracy actually operates --- how they hold on to so much power in DC --- you were in luck, thanks to some excellent commentary from some of our favorite investigative reporters and legal analysts. Let’s start with Peter Schweizer, who’s spent years following the money within political circles, culminating in his latest book, “RED-HANDED: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.” First, we have a breaking story from him on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES with Maria Bartiromo.
After looking into the line of communication between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Hunter’s Chinese business associates when Joe was Vice President, Schweizer can say, from evidence on Hunter’s laptop, that for the VP, those messages didn’t come through the White House phone system or Joe’s personal phone, but through a private phone line paid for ($300/month through AT&T) by Hunter’s business. Considering the money Hunter was raking in, their little investment was well worth the price. This was a “global phone,” meaning it can access someone anywhere in the world.
Schweizer’s team shared the account information with the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, and he hopes that if they haven’t already, they’ll subpoena those phone records. His assumption is that “it will give an indication of how tight the communication was.” For example, he said, “this might have been the connection the Burisma executive might have used in this allegation that he talked to Joe Biden and recorded the conversations.”
As for what sure reads like a shakedown in a WhatsApp message to CEFC executive Henry Zhaow, with Hunter saying that the Vice President was sitting right there, providing extra muscle, Schweizer said that by 2015, when this call took place, Zhaow had already sent a payment of $5 million to Hunter. Messages to Zhaow from Hunter on the laptop concerning that earlier payment refer to it as a deal that is important “to my FAMILY.”
And according to Schweizer, Zhaow made that payment from an account that was part of a company that he co-owned with the family of the Minister of State Security of China --- the individual in charge of the entire vast spy apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. “You see that in every deal that Hunter Biden did in China,” Schweizer said. “These individuals that are sending him money have ties to Chinese intelligence.”
And what were they getting in return? “The product was Joe Biden,” Schweizer concluded.
The segment starts with a clip from Friday in which House Ways & Means Committee Chair Jason Smith of Missouri offers dollars-and-cents details of payments made to the Bidens from around the world, followed by Schweizer and Miranda Devine of the NEW YORK POST.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/
Here is Schweizer’s new commentary at BREITBART NEWS on the whistleblowers’ story about U.S. Attorney David Weiss wanting to bring charges against Hunter and repeatedly being denied. Schweizer makes a great point about the inconsistency of Hunter’s defenders:
“The defense from the Biden team was always ‘this was a legitimate enterprise, as Hunter is a highly trained lawyer and an international businessman.’ Now their position has evolved during the same time period to say, ‘Well, look, Hunter was a drug addict. He didn’t really know what he was doing. He didn’t really know what he was saying.’”
Well, which is it? “The point is,” Schweizer says, “they are flipping and flopping because they know that the noose on this entire enterprise is starting to tighten.”
The first IRS whistleblower, Gary Shapley, gave a statement that on October 2, 2022, David Weiss told six people --- including Shapley; this was firsthand --- that he did not have the authority to charge in other districts and was therefore requesting special counsel status. He names the names of the five other people, something a liar would not be likely to do. As you know, Garland has testified that Weiss had the power to charge in any district.
Jack Posobiec’s book ‘THE ANTIFA: Stories from the Black Block” has a chapter that addresses the endlessly frustrating behavior of FBI Director Christopher Wray. This is a must-read for anyone trying to figure out how the deep state got so powerful. Posobiec has managed to recreate conversations between President Trump and Wray and the ways in which Wray undermined his initiatives, based on interviews with current and former officials of the U.S. government, from the White House, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and US SOCOM (Special Operations Command).
Posobiec paints an indelible picture of the liberal bubble inside which DC liberals dwell, explaining how they simply accept the reporting of THE NEW YORK TIMES and the WASHINGTON POST as gospel and form their policies accordingly. He sees their failure to take action against, for example, Antifa, as the result of “confirmation bias and bureaucratic mismanagement.” We’d like to add that an explanation is not an excuse, and these bureaucrats have to be in almost a psychotic state of denial to believe what they read in the NYT and WaPo. After all --- and Posobiec does talk about this --- it was THEY who actually supplied stories to those same news outlets, later deliberately citing them as evidence in a dishonest strategy known as “circular reporting.”
Even so, this excerpt from Posobiec’s book makes some illuminating points about the psychology of the deep state.
https://humanevents.com/2023/
As for the FBI’s lawfare against Trump, on Sunday Mark Levin interviewed former federal prosecutor and current candidate for Missouri AG Will Scharf, whose analysis we discussed last week. Scharf said there was no legal reason for the “classified documents” case to be brought now. “Prosecutions are never supposed to look political,” he said, let alone BE political. “But the timing of this prosecution, the timing of them rolling out this indictment, just reeks of politics.”
The Presidential Records Act was supposed to give the President five years after he left office to go through the materials he has taken and give back those that he determines are official, as opposed to personal in nature. And his determination concerning that has been ruled by the courts to be essentially unreviewable --- the President gets the last word.
But Special Counsel Jack Smith isn’t giving him a chance to have the last word, and he’s trying to get his various procedural steps done quickly, on a timetable, professing that he’s doing a nice thing for the defense by pushing for a speedy trial. (Never mind that they hadn’t asked for one.) Smith tries to give the impression that this is a simple case, when it isn’t. One profound issue is that of attorney-client privilege, which they breached by questioning Trump’s lawyers --- who subsequently had to remove themselves from the case!
As we’ve said, to prove a charge under the Espionage Act, it’s not supposed to be enough to show that the President had some documents, even classified ones. In Scharf’s words, “They have to show that President Trump KNEW he wasn’t supposed to have those documents,” that they were a particular type called “national defense information” (NDI). “They have to show that he then willfully failed to turn those documents over to a government official that he knew had the right to receive them.” That makes the case “more about President Trump’s state of mind than anything else.”
He says it’s going to be “difficult if not impossible” for Smith to prove this about President Trump. Whether the President had the legal right to declassify those documents or not, he clearly THOUGHT he did. He has said so over and over.
Remember, the special counsel isn’t all that “independent” (years ago, under a different statute, the title was “independent prosecutor” but no longer), and reports to the attorney general, who reports to the President. I suppose that since the ultimate authority is President Biden --- in a supreme conflict of interest --- Smith probably thinks he can do anything to Trump, even violate Trump’s attorney-client privilege. For all we know, he’s getting extra points from “the Big Guy” for that.
Much more in the interview, including their attempts to influence presiding Judge Aileen Cannon’s decisions by attacking her as pro-Trump (she was a Trump appointee). Scharf says this is being done because “they are terrified of litigating [especially in public] some of the very serious legal flaws in the case that they’ve strung together against President Trump.”
https://www.foxnews.com/video/
Impressed with Scharf? Missourians, here he is...
By the way, Levin isn’t the only one making impassioned speeches about what’s happened to the ‘Justice’ Department. Look who’s here --- someone who knows firsthand, retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn.
Finally, law professor Jonathan Turley has one of his best-ever, not-to-be-missed columns: “The Designated Defendant: Was Hunter Biden Always the Fall Guy?” If you’re a fan of old-style detective/courtroom novels and movies, you’ll get this immediately: “In the law,” Turley explains, “the ‘designated defendant’ is often a chump who is given some impressive title, a good salary, and the authority to sign reports or filings for a corporation.” Read the piece; it will ring true --- sad but true about a troubled man who apparently was used by his family to peddle the influence and take the fall if necessary. Hunter said he always wanted to be important, but he probably was hoping it would be in some other way.
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