Foreign Election Interference On Display

A lot of powerful people have a lot invested in the Ukraine-Russian war. The military-industrial complex in America is selling weapons faster than they can make them. That is probably the most successful sector of the economy under President Biden. No wonder the President does not want the war to end. How much money is being laundered through Ukraine and kicked back to Zelensky, Biden and members of Congress?

In October 2023, Breitbart reported that America was blocking peace in Ukraine:

Schröder’s (Gerhard Schröder, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005) criticism was not limited to the Biden administration, with the ex-chancellor saying that both French President Emmanuel Macron and his successor as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz need to do more to lobby for the cause of peace, saying that the war is “not just an American matter but above all a European matter.”

He argued that rather than trying to come up with solutions to end the war, Western leaders seem to be more interested in the question of how to supply Ukraine with more weapons, which the former German chancellor said has been to the “delight of the American and German arms industries.”

“Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer to talk to Russia?” Schröder questioned. “The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone is sitting in trenches. How many more people have to die? It’s a bit like the Middle East. Who are the victims on one side and on the other? Poor people who lose their children. None of the people who matter are moving.”

On Monday, Townhall reported:

Greg Price shared a photo of Zelensky touring an ammunition factory, as well as a screenshot of part of an interview that the foreign leader did with The New Yorker

Zelensky and the interviewer were talking about Trump, and comments he’s made about the war in Ukraine, but then Vance also came up. “Apart from Trump’s own reluctance to talk about Ukrainian victory, he has chosen J. D. Vance as his Vice-Presidential candidate,” the interviewer said, which prompted Zelensky to claim Vance “is too radical.” He even cut the interviewer off to continue to take issue with Vance.

Beyond the screenshotted portion, Zelensky also went after to Vance for engaging in what he called “sloganeering.” 

“For us, these are dangerous signals, coming as they do from a potential Vice-President,” Zelensky said as part of his response to another question, “What does it mean for Ukraine that people with such ideas and slogans are rising to power?”

Zelensky was flying around the country at taxpayer expense into a swing state. This is foreign election interference. I wish we had some Republicans with spines.

This Shouldn’t Even Be Constitutional

On Monday, The Federalist posted an article about the Ukraine spending bill that just passed the Senate. Hopefully it will die in the House of Representatives–it protects everyone’s border but America’s!

The article reports:

A Ukraine aid supplemental negotiated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate GOP leadership includes a provision setting the stage for a potential third impeachment of Donald Trump, according to Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.

“The supplemental represents an attempt by the foreign policy blob/deep state to stop President Trump from pursuing his desired policy, and if he does so anyways, to provide grounds to impeach him and undermine his administration,” Vance wrote in a letter sent to congressional Republicans on Monday. “All Republicans should oppose its passage.”

Vance’s letter is in reference to a $95 billion aid package advanced by the Senate on Sunday, which includes funding for (mostly) Ukraine, as well as Israel and Taiwan. Noticeably, the measure — which was supported by 18 Republicans — does not address the ongoing invasion at the U.S. southern border.

Just as Congress is not supposed to pass laws that limit or control the actions of future Congresses, Congress should not be allowed to pass a law that limits the foreign policy of a future President. 

The article notes:

“If President Trump were to withdraw from or pause financial support for the war in Ukraine in order to bring the conflict to a peaceful conclusion, ‘over the objections of career experts,’” as Democrats claimed in their 2019 impeachment of Trump, “it would amount to the same fake violation of budget law from the first impeachment, under markedly similar facts and circumstances,” Vance wrote. An anonymous U.S. official told The Washington Post last month that the Biden administration is hoping to provide “’future-proof’ aid for Ukraine against the possibility that former president Donald Trump wins his reelection bid.”

In recent days, the Senate has proposed a horrible border bill followed up by a horrible foreign aid bill. Neither bill did anything significant to help with American border security. If this continues, we need a new Senate.

The Military-Industrial Complex Comes Roaring Back

One aspect of the Trump administration that has not been widely reported on is the fact that no new foreign wars were started during his Presidency. Generally the world was more peaceful than it is now. Defense contractors did not receive massive contracts in order to earn massive profits during the Trump administration. That may be one of many reasons why President Trump is so totally disliked by the Washington elites.

On Sunday, The Daily Caller reported the following:

  • Congress has placed massive orders for weapons and equipment amid war in Ukraine and fears of aggression from other U.S. rivals, intensifying pressure on the defense industry to meet those orders.
  • Business is booming for contractors today, but they will have to manage some ongoing obstacles to production if they are to meet demand, experts told the DCNF.
  • “Congress has been leaning in this direction for several years, and it is the mood of the Washington consensus right now to throw money at defense,” Eugene Gholz, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and a former senior Pentagon official, told the DCNF. 

The article continues:

Congress authorized a massive increase in spending on weapons and ammunition in 2023, signaling a willingness to continue providing defense contractors the funding they need to deliver on future Pentagon orders, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Department Of Defense (DOD) would receive a 9% boost in defense spending, with some of the largest increases occurring in weapons budgets, in 2023 as part of Congress’ yearly funding bill, which allocates a total of $858 billion for defense. Concern that the U.S. lacks the capacity to both support Ukraine and deter China from attacking Taiwan have intensified as the U.S. continues to send billions in aid to Kyiv, but contractors will have to negotiate production challenges in order to supply what Congress and the White House believe they need, experts explained to the DCNF.

…The war in Ukraine has severely depleted U.S. and European weapons stockpiles, generating heightened demand to replenish those reserves, while  countries are seeking to grow and modernize their capabilities to guard against the effects of Russia’s war and the increasingly belligerent China and North Korea. White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Dec. 16 the Ukraine crisis had exposed existing vulnerabilities in the defense industrial base that would need to be addressed.

“The diversion of existing stocks of weapons and munitions to Ukraine and pandemic-related supply chain issues has exacerbated a sizeable backlog in the delivery of weapons already approved for sale to Taiwan, undermining the island’s readiness,” the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recently found. The backlog of deliveries to Taiwan has reached $18.7 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

For the second year in a row, the Pentagon has clocked an average 4.3% budget increase year over year after factoring in inflation, compared to 1% for the years from 2015 and 2021, according to an analysis the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments completed for The New York Times and shared with the DCNF. Defense spending is approaching levels not seen since the height of the wars in Iraq and Syria in real dollars.

We cannot afford to finance the war in Ukraine while we have homeless veterans and an undefended southern border in America.

What Difference Did It Make?

We are getting a lot of information right now about the censorship operation that Twitter was operating in order to protect the Biden campaign during the 2020 election. The information is not really surprising to those of us who were paying attention, but some of this is actually news to many Americans. On Saturday, PJ Media posted an article about the probable consequences of Twitter’s censorship.

The article notes:

Let’s begin with the premise that suppressing the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop affected the outcome of the 2020 Election. The Media Research Center (MRC) conducted one of the only polls about how the information on the computer would have affected the way people voted. MRC’s analysis found that full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate. This would have flipped all six of the swing states Biden won to Trump, giving the former President 311 electoral votes.

By that analysis, if not for the fateful decision to censor the laptop story, which Gadde and Baker had a hand in, at least five major things would be different.

The article then goes on to list five of the things that would be different:

First and foremost, it is almost certain there would not be a war in Ukraine right now. President Trump placed sanctions on the Nord 2 pipeline during his term, despite German objections. All Biden had to do was stand up to outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel. After all, the entire purpose of NATO is to protect the European continent from Russian aggression. Letting Germany and other western powers become dependent on Russian energy goes directly against the mission.

When the Biden administration inexplicably lifted the sanctions in May 2021, it green-lit the pipeline that would bypass Ukraine, depriving the former Soviet nation of transit revenues and making it more vulnerable to Russian aggression. Even Ukrainian President Voldymor Zelensky knew it.

…Next, the Ukrainian war led to Russia and China becoming closer allies and leading the BRIC nations. This group includes Brazil and India. Many believe these nations will be dominant suppliers of manufactured goods, services, and raw materials by 2050. There have been reports that BRIC nations and their allies want to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The Biden administration seems content to let this happen without a challenge. As the kleptocrats in our government, led by Joe Biden and Wall Street, lead us into managed decline, you can thank Gadde and Baker.

Third, our European allies would not be facing an energy crisis. The war in Ukraine needlessly destroyed Nord 1, which supplied much of the continent. Additionally, the Biden administration’s not-in-my-backyard energy policy leaves the U.S. unable to meet our own energy needs, let alone help Europe.

…The same NIMBY energy policy also makes the United States less safe. In a 2020 debate, Trump explained in about 10 seconds how U.S. energy independence strengthened our foreign policy. Now, Joe Biden begs some of the worst dictators in the world for oil, and they laugh at him. Biden also drains our strategic petroleum reserves to save Democrats from getting obliterated in the midterms, leaving us less prepared.

The article concludes:

Finally, as you struggle with inflation on food and gas, know that it never needed to happen. When Trump left office, the economy was recovering from the pandemic on a V-shaped trajectory. The American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act blew more money into an economy overheated by pandemic relief. When the new administration allowed even more dollars to chase fewer goods, prices rose. So, when you are rolling your eyes over your grocery bill, thank Gadde and Baker. Their manipulation of Twitter helped Joe Biden do that.

The only constitutional solution to a stolen election is the next election. Please keep that in mind. For those of you that hate President Trump, remember the good he did for the average American. You may not like his style, but he accomplished more in four years than the past five presidents. In the interest of fairness and for the good of the country, he needs to be re-elected in 2024.

The Story Behind The Story

On Monday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article with a rather different viewpoint on the origins and purpose of the current war in Ukraine. It is a long, involved article, so I suggest you follow the link to read the entire article. I will try to provide some  highlights.

The article notes:

Current CIA Director William “Bill” Burns was the former ambassador to Russia and Jordan.  Bill Burns had a 33-year career at the State Department under both Republican and Democratic presidents and speaks fluent Russian. If the people in the background of Joe Biden wanted an intelligence operative to trigger a specific result from Russia, there’s no one more strategically perfect for the job than CIA Director Bill Burns.

The article by Beinart (Peter Beinart on substack {SEE HERE}) is mainly focused on pointing out the irreconcilable nature of Joe Biden implying Ukraine could join NATO, while his own CIA Director has a history of giving serious warnings emphasizing the “brightest of all red lines” about that specific point.

[…]  “Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”

On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” (read more)

The article reports the following:

The CIA Director is crystal clear that Russia would be seriously triggered about any prospect of Ukraine entering NATO.

Yet, in December of 2021, the exact same time when U.S. backchannel intelligence was being shared with China about Russian troop movements on the border with Ukraine, Joe Biden was telling Ukraine that membership in NATO was in their hands.

The war in Ukraine now can be conveniently blamed for economic woes, the high price of gasoline, the empty supermarket shelves, other supply chain problems, etc.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article.