RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/pompeo-slams-bidens-shut-down-of-lab-leak-probe-they-havent-lifted-a-finger/

EXCLUSIVE: The former secretary of state fires back amid reports that the Biden State Department cut short a coronavirus-origin investigation he once led.

F ormer secretary of state Mike Pompeo blasted the Biden administration’s efforts to date to get to the bottom of the coronavirus pandemic’s origins, amid reports that the current State Department had ended an inquiry from his watch concerning the possibility of the so-called lab-leak theory.

“They haven’t lifted a finger, as I understand it,” he told National Review in an interview on Wednesday, regarding the U.S. government’s efforts to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin. “They haven’t even raised it with Xi Jinping, and I don’t know that it was raised when National-Security Adviser Sullivan and Secretary Blinken were in Anchorage. I don’t know that they laid down their demands, nor do I know if they told them in the case that you don’t comply with these demands, here are the costs we’re going to impose on you.”

The former secretary of state’s comments came amid an extraordinary about-face concerning the lab-leak theory of COVID’s origins by major media outlets, Democratic officials, and others who previously had dismissed it. This culminated in an announcement by President Biden on Wednesday afternoon calling for the intelligence community to further investigate and report back within 90 days, noting that community has “‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question.” This followed acknowledgement of the plausibility of the lab theory in recent days by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and a number of other key officials.

The Biden administration has never denied the findings of a January 15 fact sheet issued by the Trump administration claiming that researchers at a Wuhan lab came down with respiratory illnesses in 2019 and that the facility hosted military research. Officials have, however, kept a cool distance from these revelations, and some even alleged that the Trump administration had, in issuing the fact sheet, “put spin on the ball.”

With support for investigating the plausibility of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology now growing, Pompeo suggested it was strange that others had not joined him in raising this possibility in the past. Specifically, he said that top Democratic officials likely had access to the intelligence on which he based his May 2020 claim that a lab-leak origin was supported by “enormous evidence.”

https://nypost.com/2021/05/26/enough-of-faucis-lies-devine/

Dr. Anthony Fauci was absolutely adamant that the National Institutes of Health has never funded dangerous research on bat viruses in the Chinese lab suspected of being the source of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was questioned by Republican Sen. Rand Paul two weeks ago. 

“Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund ‘gain of function’ research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci said in the fiery Senate hearing on May 11. 

He couldn’t have been more certain. 

Until he wasn’t certain a few hours later. 

That very afternoon, Fauci admitted to “a very minor collaboration as part of a subcontract of a grant we had a collaboration with some Chinese scientists,” during an appearance at Poynter.org’s “festival of fact checking.” 

It’s like being a little bit pregnant. The NIH either funded so-called gain-of-function research to juice up bat coronaviruses in China, or it didn’t. Turns out it did. And it did it by exploiting a loophole in an Obama-administration ban on the Frankenstein research put in place in 2014. 

Fauci’s defensive answer at the Poynter event this month was in response to a mild-enough question about the coronavirus: “Are you still confident that it developed naturally.” 

Rattled by the morning’s confrontation with Sen. Paul, Fauci for the first time admitted he was not at all confident the virus had ­developed naturally and maybe, just maybe, it could have come from a lab leak. But he still tried to have the last word against Paul. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9622767/Emails-reveal-Joe-Biden-DID-meet-Hunters-business-partners-VP.html

Joe Biden met with his son’s Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakhstani business associates while vice president, emails show.

Hunter Biden wrote to a friend before the 2015 Washington DC dinner that it was ‘ostensibly to discuss food security’, but was in fact an opportunity to introduce his potential clients and partners to his powerful father.

The shocking communications appear to fly in the face of the president’s claim that he had no knowledge of his son’s business activities.

Yet the White House has remained silent over the revelations – and has failed to respond to every request for comment about illegal activity and scandalous behavior evidenced on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, obtained and exclusively verified by DailyMail.com.

A guest list Hunter prepared for the dinner at the private ‘Garden Room’ at Georgetown’s Café Milano included corrupt, late former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkovhis wife Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina, and a Mexican ambassador.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-virus-lab-theorys-new-credibility-11622066808?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden on Wednesday ordered U.S. intelligence to dig deeper into the origins of Covid-19, a reversal after he reportedly ordered a State Department investigative unit shut down. Mr. Biden is trying to cover for his embarrassing closure of the investigation because the dam has finally broken on the evidence that the virus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The shame is that it took so long because the suspicious facts have been apparent from the start.**

In January 2020, international media began reporting about a virus spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan. “The coronavirus could result in a global pandemic,” said Sen. Tom Cotton on Jan. 30, 2020. “I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

The world would learn more about Covid-19—and the WIV. But it was always reasonable to ask if the virus came from a nearby lab that handled dangerous viruses. On Feb. 6, 2020, Botao Xiao of the South China University of Technology posted a paper concluding the virus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” But the Chinese government strictly controls research into Covid-19’s origins, and the molecular biomechanics researcher withdrew his publication.

The Communist Party then went on offense, with Beijing’s ambassador to the U.S. declaring that lab-leak theories were “absolutely crazy” and could “fan up racial discrimination, xenophobia.” After Mr. Cotton responded by calling on China to “open up now to competent international scientists,” the media chose denial: “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” (Washington Post) and “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins” ( New York Times ).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cities-reverse-defunding-the-police-amid-rising-crime-11622066307?mod=hp_lead_pos5

One year after the movement to “defund” law enforcement began to upend municipal budgets, many American cities are restoring money to their police departments or proposing to spend more.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would reinstate $92 million for a new precinct after scrapping the project last summer. The mayor of Baltimore, who led efforts as a city councilman to cut the police budget by $22 million last year, recently proposed a $27 million increase.

After attacks on Asian-Americans and a rise in homicides in Oakland, Calif., city lawmakers in April restored $3.3 million of the $29 million in police cuts, and the mayor is now proposing to increase the department’s budget by $24 million. Los Angeles’s mayor has proposed an increase of about $50 million after the city cut $150 million from its police department last year.

In the nation’s 20 largest local law-enforcement agencies, city and county leaders want funding increases for nine of the 12 departments where next year’s budgets already have been proposed. The increases range from 1% to nearly 6%.

Many U.S. cities are led by Democrats who supported protesters’ calls to defund the police—a term that activists have used in different ways, including to push for simply shrinking the size of police forces but also shifting resources from law enforcement to social services. The demonstrations, led by Black Lives Matter and allied groups, followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last year.