RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-deepen-the-washington-swamp-special-counsel-hearing-corruption-washington-documents-committees-11675288301?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Here’s one way to divide America’s politics. Republicans and conservatives think the Washington Swamp is real. Democrats and progressives don’t believe it exists. This division of belief matters more than the existence of UFOs because whether the Swamp is real looks likely to be an issue in the 2024 presidential election.

President Biden gives his State of the Union speech next week, and no doubt he’ll describe his Washington as a city of bounty and benevolence.

Ron DeSantis disagrees. It was hard not to notice how, in his inaugural speech last month, the Florida governor went out of his way to describe Washington differently—unaccountable, a mockery of the rule of law, dismal, floundering, a binge.

These Swamp thoughts are set in motion by what might seem two unrelated news stories this week. But for those of us who believe, the Swamp covers a lot of damp ground.

The first was about the Justice Department and director of national intelligence telling the Senate Intelligence Committee they wouldn’t talk in detail to the committee about the Trump or Biden classified documents. The reason? It would get in the way of the special counsels appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Come again? The committee’s Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) had it exactly right about this mega-stonewall: “That just cannot stand.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-freedom-is-getting-more-fragile/

In January of 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”  Sixty-six years later, the truth of that observation is all around us. If we don’t reject the politicians and policies that compromise our freedoms, this generation may be the one who will live through that extinction.

The erosion of our freedom is not a paranoid figment of the libertarian imagination. Recently the Cato Institution released its Human Freedom Index for 2022, and found that globally, freedom has declined. The Land of the Free has dropped seven points since last year, and now ranks 23rd of 160 nations.

Politicized and unscientific Covid mitigation protocols account for some of this decline. Such policies furthered the loss of freedom by violating “the rule of law and the freedom of movement, expression, and assembly,” which are among Cato’s criteria for measuring freedom. But here in the U.S. we have seen the degradation of our freedoms long before Covid.

The gross violations of the rule of law, for example, accelerated after the 2016 election. The accusation that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to fix the election was fomented by our intelligence, investigative, and surveillance agencies. The special prosecutor took two years to debunk the charge.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton, who patently violated the laws regulating the handling of classified documents, as well as willfully destroying evidence, was given a pass by FBI Director James Comey weeks before the election, even though Clinton’s violations were much worse than those of General Petraeus and others who were disgraced, prosecuted, and some incarcerated.

Six years later, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound was invaded by a heavily armed battalion of FBI agents, who searched his home and rifled his wife’s underwear drawer, and scattered documents on the floor for a staged photo. Trump ended up in a still ongoing investigation. A few months later, classified documents were found in Joe Biden’s think-tank office and at his home and garage. In his case, there were no raids by armed agents, no leaked staged photos for the media, and no participation by the FBI at all. Biden’s aides and personal lawyers handled the whole show, and there is still an embargo on sharing details with the voters.

Such examples could be multiplied, such as the kid-gloves used by the DOJ and FBI in handling BLM and Antifa rioters and anti-prolife vandals and arsonists, compared to the Stasi thug-tactics employed against the January 6 and prolife protestors.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/31/bidens-china-spy-scandal/

Joe Biden is taking heat for the classified documents he stashed at his home and garage. Though well worthy of attention, as Victor Davis Hanson notes, the documents scandal has overshadowed Biden’s indulgence of Chinese spies, on full display in a recent case. 

“Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have dropped their case against a New York Police Department officer who had been accused of acting as a foreign agent on behalf of the Chinese regime,” The Epoch Times reports.

Baimadajie Angwang, 33, an ethnic Tibetan and naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested in 2020 for acting as an agent of Beijing, for wire fraud, making false statements, and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors charge that Angwang reported on Chinese citizens, cultivated intelligence sources, and connected Chinese officials with senior contacts in the New York Police Department. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York recently filed a motion asking federal Judge Eric R. Komitee, a Trump nominee, to dismiss the indictment due to “additional information.” The Eastern District did not reveal the information or explain its relevance to the case. The move illuminates official Biden policy toward Chinese espionage in the United States. 

“The Justice Department is ending a controversial program, launched under the Trump administration, to hunt down Chinese spies,” CBS News reported last year. President Trump’s “China Initiative” targeted China’s theft of trade secrets and intellectual property. 

As federal prosecutors charged in 2017, MIT professor Gang Chen failed to disclose ties to China and failed to disclose a foreign bank account on a tax document. Prosecutors dropped the case against Chen, but it wasn’t clear what motivated them to act. This was hardly the only proceeding against Chinese agents the Justice Department chose to abandon. 

In 2020, federal officials changed that Chinese national Tang Juan lied about ties to the Chinese military in order to gain access to the University of California at Davis. The FBI found an April 14, 2019 article on a Xi’an, China, healthcare forum that showed Tang in a military uniform bearing the insignia of the Civilian Cadres of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The FBI also found two other articles listing Tang’s employer as the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force Medical University (AFMU), also known as the Fourth Military Medical University (FMMU).