RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-whistleblowers-hunter-biden-joseph-ziegler-gary-shapley-merrick-garland-david-weiss-e052e714?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

With each day it’s getting harder to believe Attorney General Merrick Garland’s insistence that there was no interference in the Hunter Biden case. A month ago President Biden’s son was given a deal on tax and gun charges that probably means no prison time. Now comes Wednesday’s testimony by two IRS whistleblowers, who say their attempt to investigate Hunter faced unprecedented meddling.

The two IRS agents are Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. Two months back, each had spoken behind closed doors to the House Ways and Means Committee, but Wednesday was their first in the spotlight and the first time that Mr. Ziegler’s name was released.

They say the Justice Department interfered in their investigation, for example, by tipping off Hunter’s legal team to a planned search and preventing questions related to Joe Biden. They also said the IRS team didn’t have access to Hunter’s laptop and or the FD-1023 document in which an FBI informant alleged that Joe and Hunter each accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian energy giant Burisma.

Some Democrats, such as Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, tried to dismiss this all as normal disagreement between investigators and prosecutors. But Mr. Shapley testified that Justice’s “handling of the Hunter Biden tax investigation was very different from any other case in my 14 years at the IRS.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/the_big_takeaway_from_an_imminent_trump_arrest.html

In an announcement that has sent shockwaves through the nation, former president Donald Trump declared that his arrest is imminent.  This declaration, shocking as it is, should be a cause for concern for anyone who values the principles upon which our nation was built.  As citizens, it is our duty to scrutinize the implications of this ongoing political assault.

In Mr. Trump’s words, this investigation is a “witch hunt,” an attempt to weaponize the law enforcement apparatus against him.  It appears to be an unprecedented attack on a former president, transforming political disagreements into legal battles, an alarming trend that threatens the stability of our constitutional republic.

The legal issues currently surrounding Mr. Trump range from a New York State case involving payments for a nondisclosure agreement to a federal case in Miami related to handling classified documents.  Now he is a target of the special counsel investigation of the January 6 Capitol Free Speech Demonstrations.  This exhaustive pursuit raises questions about the impartiality of our justice system, which should remain free from political biases.

On January 6, a faction of the crowd engaged in illegal activities, leading to a breach of the Capitol by some suspected of being planted provocateurs to discredit the peaceful event.  The justice system responded by indicting over a thousand individuals, with some defendants held for over 800 days before their trials.  Contrast this with the non-arrests or slaps on the wrists of participants of the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots.

Labeling the actions of a few as an “insurrection” and using it to generalize the entire crowd is a blatant attempt to paint conservatives and Trump-supporters as extremists.  Such a narrative deepens divisions and fosters animosity.  These blanket accusations undermine the constitutional rights of millions of Americans and disregard their legitimate concerns over election irregularities.

Ironically, the same voices that dismiss calls for law and order in the face of destructive riots in our cities now cry foul, alleging an insurrection where there was none.  Law enforcement should never be a tool for political gamesmanship, yet we are witnessing its blatant misuse.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/senate_republicans_despise_their_voters.html

Lisa Murkowski is the perfect mascot for Senate Republicans.  She is a Democrat in all but name, an aristocrat who inherited her office, and a beneficiary of rigged elections.  She has more in common with Nancy Pelosi than the average Republican voter, and every time Alaskan Republicans attempt to throw her out of office, Mitch McConnell’s minions manipulate the rules to save her.  

For McConnell, Murkowski is another beholden senator kept securely in his pocket who will vote how he wants on any given day.  That might not be so bad (except for the good people of Alaska, whom she purportedly represents) if McConnell were not also an aristocrat who routinely betrays Republican voters.  However, because his loyalties lie with President Xi, multinational corporations, the World Economic Forum, and his good friend Joe Biden, China Mitch uses the leash around Murkowski’s neck only when he needs help sticking it to the American people.  And oh, how Senate Republicans love to screw over the American people!

I mention this person because she and other backstabbing Senate Republicans (think John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, John Thune, etc.) got together to do their version of Festivus in July, during which they told The Hill how much they absolutely loathe normal Republican voters.  “[O]ur party is becoming known as a group of kind of extremist, populist, over-the-top [people] where no one is taking us seriously anymore,” Murkowski laments.  

Our party?  Alaskan Republicans tried to cashier your rear years ago, and you thumbed your nose at their wishes, ran as a write-in candidate, and got elected by Democrats.  Instead of stripping you of your ranking position on choice committee assignments, Senate Republicans celebrated your “victory” over the actual Republican nominee (and Tea Party favorite, Joe Miller) by preserving your seniority.  Last year, Republicans again tried to be done with you, and McConnell and his boys rigged the election by implementing ranked-choice voting — an incumbent protection racket that also defeated Sarah Palin and sent a Democrat to the House!  Deep-red Alaska can’t represent conservatives’ interests when Senate Republicans work with Chuck Schumer to benefit Barack Obama’s favorite candidates!

That is the absurdity of the Murkowski position.  She and her ilk believe that the Republican Party should be represented by individuals who adore Barack Obama, voted for Hillary Clinton, and consider child-sniffer Joe Biden a close personal friend.  And because she is too daft to grasp the mood of the country and such a product of venal nepotism as to have scant self-awareness, she thinks the riffraff will eventually see things her way.  If they actually had elections in Alaska, Murkowski’s campaign slogan really could be “Let them eat cake,” and nobody would bat an eye.  It is what abused voters expect when Dirty Mitch McConnell’s election-riggers continue to hand out fortune cookies to the natives advising, “You shall be represented by a Democrat in Republican clothing.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/when-investigators-wont-investigate-joe-biden

One of the murkier aspects of congressional Republicans’ investigation of President Biden’s financial history concerns an allegation that Biden, when he was vice president, accepted a $5 million bribe from the corrupt Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The alleged scheme also involved Biden’s son Hunter. Burisma, of course, was the company that for a time paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year to do mostly nothing.

At issue is something called a form FD-1023, an FBI document that is said to “memorialize a confidential human source’s conversations with a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden,” in the words of Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. That FBI confidential human source, Comer continued, was no fly-by-night character. Instead, he was a “trusted” source who has worked with the FBI “for over 10 years” and was paid “over $200,000” for his work during that time. “This is one of our highest-paid, most trusted, most respected, most effective FBI informants in the whole bureau,” Comer told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on June 15.

In other words, it was a serious allegation from a serious source. Yet the FBI, Comer said, “never did one single thing to investigate this.” In a June 28 press release, Comer added, “The FBI has been sitting on allegations for years that Joe Biden solicited and received a bribe while he was vice president of the United States. We have no confidence that the FBI did anything to verify the allegations contained within this record and may have intentionally withheld it during the investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax evasion.”

Here’s the way investigators look at this. Is the bribery allegation true? Who knows? It might be false. It might be a misunderstanding. It might be a political hit job. Or it might be true. In any event, the only way its truth or falsity can be established is by investigation. If you don’t investigate, you’ll never know.

That is why top lawmakers, like Comer and Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, are pressing the FBI to tell them what the bureau did to investigate the source’s story. That has been the one key question they have asked the FBI and Justice Department all along: Did you investigate this? And that is what the FBI and Justice Department have refused to answer.