Good Analysis From Victor Davis Hanson

On Friday, Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at Townhall about the media’s handling of recent scandals.

The conclusion of the article is most telling:

The 2020 Biden campaign and an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop.

Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use, and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.

The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and, by extension, Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign.

No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic, and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.

Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump.

For the last eight years, discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed.

However, there are some things mentioned in the article that are even more disturbing:

Had journalists just been honest and independent, then-candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election. The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.

Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.

Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.

They again discounted Hunter’s laptop, explicitly demonstrating that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father, Joe –variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.

Part of being a representative republic is having educated voters. Right now the media is doing everything it can to avoid educating voters on the scandals surrounding the Biden family. Unless you have cultivated a group of alternative news sources, you are an uninformed or misinformed voter. If uninformed or misinformed voters make up the majority of the electorate, our republic will not survive.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm

This might be a red herring or it might explain a lot. I suspect we will find out in the next few weeks.

On August 8th, The Daily Caller reported the following:

‘Smoking Gun’: Biden Admin Sued For Not Releasing Docs Declassified By Trump On Russia Collusion Investigation

Might it be that those are the documents the FBI hoped to find?

The article reports:

A watchdog is suing President Joe Biden’s Justice Department (DOJ) for not releasing records related to the FBI’s defunct probe into ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government — even though the former president declassified the records.

Judicial Watch is suing the DOJ to obtain the records, as well as communications between DOJ officials and government employees on the declassification of the records. The lawsuit, which was filed on Aug. 1, comes after the conservative watchdog submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in February.

“The Obama-Biden Administration and Deep State spying on Trump and his associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said in a statement Monday. “And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an absolute right to see!”

Trump issued a memo on Jan. 19, 2021 declassifying materials in a binder that the DOJ gave to the White House in December 2020 on the “Crossfire Hurricane” probe. However, the binder’s materials never saw the light of day after the DOJ sought to issue redactions over privacy concerns, as detailed in a memo on Jan. 21, 2021 authored by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who told the DOJ he would return the records.

The article concludes:

“Well, you know, the swamp is pretty deep,” said Meadows in a July interview on the records. “But when we look at this, this particular president was all about draining the swamp. When he was running, that was more of a campaign slogan. When he got there, he realized that not only was the swamp very deep, but they would fight back.”

Judicial Watch is asking the DOJ to pay its attorneys’ fees and other litigation records while also producing the records in relation to its FOIA request.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the FBI. A spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond.

The swamp is deep and wide, and there are still some real questions about who actually is a member of the swamp although pretending not to be.

One Perspective On Fake News

‘Fake news’ was the expression used by Democrats whenever someone outside the mainstream media reported something that was true (that might damage the Democrat image). Now, as The New York Times admits that the Hunter Biden laptop was real, many Americans are beginning to wonder exactly who is disseminating fake news. On Saturday, John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted his evaluation of our current media situation.

The article reminds us of the history of the laptop and reporting on it:

Some observers consider the New York Times’ belated admission that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine to be a big deal. I don’t. For one thing, the Times hasn’t acknowledged, and won’t report on, the specific information on the laptop that told the story of Joe Biden’s corruption.

Moreover, there was never any doubt about the genuineness of the laptop and the data it contained. The owner of the repair shop had a receipt with Hunter Biden’s signature on it, the laptop contained a large number of self-validating videos and photos of Hunter in various compromising situations, and the authenticity of emails on the laptop was confirmed by the presence of the same emails in other accounts. The idea that the laptop was “Russian disinformation” was a desperate and absurd invention intended to fool those who paid no attention, and those who wanted to be fooled.

The laptop saga was really a continuation of the Russia collusion hoax. As in the larger case of the collusion hoax, those who perpetrated the “Russian disinformation” fraud are unrepentant. The Times now implicitly admits that it was wrong to ignore or impugn the evidence of the laptop, but has it issued any corrections to, or retractions of, its reporting? No. Has it launched an investigation into how it could have been “fooled”? Of course not.

The New York Times was never ‘fooled.’ What they were was part of a campaign to elect Joe Biden.

The article concludes:

The New York Times expresses no regret because it doesn’t regret what it did. The Times isn’t a newspaper, it is a mouthpiece. Its purpose was obvious. It was the same purpose that animated many other news outlets, Twitter, and the 51 lying spies: they were trying to get Joe Biden elected president.

That effort succeeded. Lying about the laptop was just one of many corners they cut to achieve their desired objective, but poll data suggest that it was one of the most important. If voters had realized how demonstrably corrupt Joe Biden is–no one has ever bribed Hunter Biden–polls suggest that Donald Trump would have been re-elected. Liberal news outlets are proud of the fact that they acted together to prevent that awful possibility. If it took some lies to accomplish the mission, so what?

Thus, I attribute little significance to the New York Times’ casual acknowledgement that it blew the Hunter laptop story–really, it blew the 2020 election, if you think the Times is trying to report objectively on the news. But of course no one thinks that. For the Times, Twitter, and countless other liberal institutions, their lies about Joe Biden and Donald Trump accomplished the intended mission. There will be no apologies, no regrets–only, behind the scenes, discreet high fives.

The lies about the laptop achieved their purpose. Anything said now is moot.

The Swamp Is Deep

The Washington swamp is deep. I am not sure if America is capable of cleaning it out. On Tuesday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article that illustrates how difficult it is to fight corruption in Washington.

The article reports:

Emphasis mine:

“#Durham filing reveals his team learned for first time, this month, the Office of the Inspector General had TWO cellphones for former FBI General Counsel who is central witness in Sussmann case, “the Government has been working diligently to review their contents.””

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) has known about the Durham probe of Michael Sussmann for how long?  And specifically, the criminal case against Sussmann revolved around the central witness, the point of contact with former FBI General Counsel, Jim Baker.  Yet the OIG said nothing to John Durham about their possession of Baker’s phones until this month?

Think about what that tells us?

TechnoFog has more details about the latest court filing SEE HERE.  He also notes the issue of the Durham team only recently being notified by the OIG in January:

…”There is also a curious paragraph discussing the fact that Durham, in January 2022 – learned from the DOJ Inspector General that they possessed “two FBI cellphones of the former FBI General Counsel to whom the defendant made his alleged false statement, along with forensic reports analyzing those cellphones.” Durham’s team is going through those cell phones now to analyze their contents.

And there will be more, with Durham stating, “the Government expects to receive additional information and documents in the coming weeks that may be relevant to the charged conduct.”

The article also notes:

The OIG is the internal watchdog, the internal police of the federal police apparatus. The guys who are supposed to be holding the justice system to account are the same guys who are keeping the justice system from accountability.

Chew on that for a few minutes while you contemplate all the previous OIG reports that resulted in exactly nothing, despite – or actually as a feature of their carefully worded content.

Yes, that would put the main office in charge of official justice obfuscation and damage control squarely in the hands of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Does that make all those OIG reports shade a slightly different, perhaps darker color grey?

Factually, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always a complete ruse perpetrated upon the American people, with the intended objective to stop candidate Trump, then hamstring President Trump, then cover up what they were doing to accomplish those goals, and then finally destroy the Trump presidency. Y’all know the story, I am not repeating it.

However, all of these tentacles of intrigue and rabbit hole exploration can get so intentionally complex that people lose sight of the bigger picture. The current question should be ‘why didn’t the DOJ-OIG inform Durham of the evidence they carried’?

Unfortunately, when you start asking those types of questions, you start to get too close to the heart of the issue. The entire apparatus of the U.S. Dept of Justice and the FBI are corrupt. As to the bigger question: will the Durham probe finally outline all the evidence to prove all the years of deception and fraud perpetrated by the massive aligned system of corrupt government? My short and painful answer is, NO.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It does not paint an encouraging picture. Elections are the way to drain the swamp, but we need well-educated voters who will share what they know about the swamp in drain the swamp.