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Did Biden’s Ghostwriter Admit He Obstructed the Investigation of Joe Biden?Matt Margolis

Posted By on June 14th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/06/13/bidens-ghostwriter-admits-he-obstructed-investigation-of-joe-biden-n4929885

Joe Biden avoided facing charges of mishandling classified information because Special Counsel Robert Hur determined that a jury would see him as an “elderly man with a poor memory” who lacked the “mental state of willfulness.” However, there was an unresolved issue regarding Biden’s ghostwriter, to whom Biden disclosed classified information while working on his memoir.

According to the Hur report, “after learning of the special counsel’s appointment in this matter, Mr. Biden’s ghostwriter deleted audio recordings he had created of his discussions with Mr. Biden during the writing of Mr. Biden’s 2017 memoir”; however, Hur decided not to charge him with obstruction of justice.

Joe Biden’s ghostwriter has now admitted that he deleted those recordings from his interviews with Joe Biden partly so Hur’s team could not use them in the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.

According to a transcript released by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer wouldn’t tell the FBI how much the investigation influenced his decision to delete the recordings.

“The outside observer is going to look at this and say, Mark Zwonitzer, President Biden’s friend, ghostwriter, collaborator learned of the special counsel’s investigation, saw this was happening and then deleted all these audio recordings,” the agent said. “I just need the truth on this one … That was part of your motivation, at least something you were aware of when you did this?”

“I’m not going to say how much of the percentage it was of my motivation,” Zwonitzer replied, adding, “I was aware that there was an investigation.” He went on to note that he was “very concerned” about being hacked by those who would then spread the audio all over the internet, but said that was mainly because there was “a lot of personal stuff and emotional stuff about Beau,” Biden’s late son. He said out of an abundance of caution, he “took the audio files subfolder from both the G drive and [his] laptop, and slid them into the trash.”

Zwonitzer noted that deleting audio files was standard practice, and not just something he did in Biden’s case, saying, “I generally save transcripts but I haven’t over the years ever saved audios.” He went on to admit he deleted the files after becoming aware of the investigation, and that after doing so, he didn’t tell anyone, nor did nobody reach out to him asking about it.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Denouncing Israel for Rescuing its Hostages Only one nation in the world is expected to “negotiate” for the lives of its citizens. by Joseph Klein

Posted By on June 14th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/denouncing-israel-for-rescuing-its-hostages/

On June 8th, Israeli forces conducted a daring rescue of four hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. The terrorists hid their captives inside two homes smack in the middle of a civilian neighborhood inhabited by Palestinian families.

Firefights ensued as Hamas fighters shot at the rescuers and the rescued hostages. A leader of the rescue mission lost his life trying to save the innocent Israeli civilians. Scores of Gazans caught in the crossfire were killed but it is unknown how many were civilian bystanders as opposed to the terrorists trying to stop the rescue. The Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry’s claim that at least 274 Palestinians died during the rescue operation exaggerates, as usual, the Palestinian death toll to score propaganda points meant to sway the international community and liberal media further against Israel.

From the United Nations to anti-Israel media outlets, Israel is blamed for the loss of Palestinian civilian lives during the rescue operation. Israel’s critics claim that the deaths could have been avoided if the Jewish state had only stuck to negotiating with Hamas and made more concessions to secure the release of the hostages.

However, it was Hamas’ decision to seize the hostages in the first place and then imprison them in residential buildings and in tunnels constructed under civilian neighborhoods. Some of the hostages were reported to have died in captivity. The four hostages who were rescued lived every day in captivity in fear for their lives. Instead of allowing these four hostages (out of the more than one hundred hostages still in captivity) to go free unharmed, Hamas used heavy fire including rocket-propelled grenades to stop their escape. Fortunately, the terrorists failed and the rescued hostages are reunited with their families and friends.

The terrorists acted with callous indifference to the lives of the Palestinian people residing in the civilian neighborhood from which the four hostages had to be rescued. Moreover, many Palestinian civilians themselves are not so innocent. As Robert Spencer noted in his June 11th Frontpage article, “it is clear that a good many of those ‘civilians’ played an active role in the holding of the hostages.” Indeed, one such “civilian” killed during the rescue operation was a so-called “journalist” for the Palestine Chronicle and Al Jazeera who supported Hamas and housed three of the rescued hostages.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Two-Front Crisis John Podhoretz 

Posted By on June 14th, 2024

 https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/israel-two-front-crisis/?vgo_ee=

Joe Biden did something extraordinarily beneficial at the beginning of the Israel-Gaza war: He moved two aircraft carriers  to the Mediterranean and parked them right off the shores of Lebanon. The purpose was unmistakable. America was telling Hezbollah to keep quiet and stay out of it while Israel went to war with Hamas down south. It didn’t quite work, since intermittent rocketry still led Israel to evacuate much of its northernmost population. But it worked well enough.

Something happened quietly a few months ago. The carriers left. The USS Gerald Ford returned to Norfolk. The USS Eisenhower was redeployed to the Red Sea to deal with the shipping crisis. And guess what? Without American deterrence, Hezbollah has been emboldened, the more so as time has gone on.

Another 70,000 Israelis have been newly evacuated from the North as bombardments from Lebanon have become extraordinarily savage. The town of Kiryat Shmoneh is on fire. A Druze village was unmercifully attacked. Israel is wracked with uncertainty. It cannot allow Hezbollah’s depradations to continue. It must respond. It must restore deterrence by raising the cost to Hezbollah of its actions. But it’s still got Rafah to finish. And it’s still trying to navigate the weird situation of the past two weeks, in which an “Israeli proposal” for a ceasefire and hostage release created a new sense of urgency for negotiations with Hamas—a proposal offered and re-offered that Hamas has, by my count, now rejected five different times.

Joe Biden made this all public with his strange speech “accepting” Israel’s proposal to which he then doodled a conclusion on top that said “end of war end of war” like Annette Funicello in a beach party movie writing “Mrs Frankie Avalon” over and over on her chemistry notebook. For nearly two weeks now, America has said the ball is in Hamas’ court because the Israeli proposal is so good (while Biden and others say Bibi wants to keep the war going because he’s mean or something). Hamas has replied, in effect, “well, if it’s in our court, we’re keeping the ball. Drop dead.” And still the Bidenites keep on, insisting if Hamas wants a good future for the Palestinian people it will accept the deal. What does Hamas have to do to convince these supposed experts that it has no interest in a “good future for the Palestinian people”—that what it wants are dead Jews and a crippled Israel on its way to destruction?

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Attempts to Attack Israel Must Be Confronted by Con Coughlin

Posted By on June 13th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20702/iran-attacks-israel

Netanyahu’s resolve in the face of so many challenges, from splits in his own war cabinet over the conduct of the war in Gaza to incessant pressure from Washington to agree to a ceasefire, has prompted comparisons with British wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill, with Andrew Roberts labelling the Israeli PM “The Winston Churchill of the Middle East.”

There is massive evidence that the Biden administration would like to see Netanyahu removed and that someone more “compliant” to the wishes of the US replace him – a new Israeli prime minister who would not object to Hamas continuing to rule the Gaza Strip after the fighting ends, and rebuild its military to be able to attack Israel again as it has vowed to do. The US would also doubtless like an Israeli prime minister would gladly accept a Palestinian state supervised by Qatar, which has a regrettable but endless track record of promoting and sponsoring terrorists. The Biden administration would apparently like an Israeli prime minister who would agree that a nuclear-armed Iran is exactly what the Middle East needs at this time, and, to that end, has been begging European officials not to object to Iran’s nuclear program.

If the Israelis are smart, they will keep Netanyahu. He has shown time and again that he can stand up to immense pressure from whoever is trying to insert a knife in Israel’s back – whether the Obama administration proposing an Iranian nuclear bomb in 2015, or Senator Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden’s unsubtle efforts to try to get him ousted.

Unfortunately, the only way of seeing all the hostages released is by military pressure.

To prevail against determined terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel and its allies need to rally support for Netanyahu, rather than constantly criticize him.

For only by defeating these deadly Iran-backed terrorist groups can there be any realistic chance of peace.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on June 13th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20701/america-enemies-home-abroad

Who are these people who love America so much, who are so grateful for the freedoms they can have only in America, that they cannot wait to take them away?

In addition to the Axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, which is trying every day to take America down and replace it with their tyrannies, threats from within America appear graver than ever — to our freedom of speech, equal justice under the law, to our children whom we are failing to educate, except to hate America, to our underfunded military and most of all to our internal national security.

The Biden administration, which should be protecting Americans, has instead been putting them at risk – both through allowing an estimated ten million unvetted strangers in through our southern border, including an estimated 1.7 million “gotaways,” about whom nothing at all is known, including how many there are, except that they apparently do not want to be identified.

Meanwhile, more than 85,000 unaccompanied children have been “lost.” They are missing, perhaps subjected to sex trafficking and other forms of slavery, and no one in an administration supposedly so concerned about “humanitarian values” knows who they are, where they are, or has expressed any interest in finding out. Meanwhile, around 45,000 people have flooded in from Communist China – many of whom are groups of men of military age, whose exit visas have presumably been granted by China not for the purpose of a vacation at Disney World.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified earlier his year that “the Chinese Communist Party is working diligently inside the gates to undermine everything it is that we stand for.” Meanwhile, China has been sending spy balloons over America’s most sensitive military sites, and buying up US farmland, often near US military bases.

All these events have been funded, spearheaded and encouraged by the current administration, which has seemingly evaded any effort to slow it down or stop it. Who are these American who are letting the enemy inside the gates?

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why was this anti-Semitic maniac given a slap on the wrist? A knife-wielding man who terrorised a kosher supermarket has been spared jail. The justice system is broken. Georgia Gilholy

Posted By on June 13th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/13/why-was-this-anti-semitic-maniac-given-a-slap-on-the-wrist/

‘Are you okay?’ Those were the words a friend texted me on a drizzly day this January. My safety had not come to their mind by chance, but because a knife-wielding man was on the rampage at a kosher supermarket down the street from my flat in Golders Green, north-west London.

The attacker, later identified as 34-year-old Gabriel Abdullah, demanded that staff at Kay’s kosher supermarket tell him whether the shop’s owners supported ‘Israel or Palestine’. He then returned with a knife. He was valiantly rebuffed by staff with a broom and a shopping trolley until the Shomrim, a Jewish neighbourhood watch force, arrived. Thankfully, no one was injured and Abdullah was arrested by police.

Over the next few months, I was puzzled by the near-total media silence on the incident. Would the press be as apparently indifferent if a far-right white nationalist had attacked a halal butcher’s? Such double standards are now so obvious that they require scant discussion here.

Abdullah has since been charged and sentenced. Incredibly, he has only been convicted of affray and possession of a weapon. This week, GB News, and thus far no one else, reported he had been handed down two suspended sentences at Harrow Crown Court – one for 18 months and a second for 12 months. Both are suspended for two years. He will also be made to attend ‘rehabilitation activities’. Despite threatening the lives of innocent people for being Jewish or for working at a Jewish business, Abdullah has been spared prison.

Unfortunately, this is hardly surprising. There is a lengthy list of violent criminals and terrorists known to the authorities who either spent all of five minutes inside a cell or avoided jail completely. In some cases, they have then gone on to commit horrendous crimes. Take the example of Ali Harbi Ali, the Islamist extremist who murdered Conservative MP David Amess in 2021. Ali had been referred to Prevent, the government’s deradicalisation initiative, seven years before he brutally stabbed Amess. But after a single meeting, Ali was not checked on again.

It seems that criminals are no longer treated as responsible individuals and given their due punishments. The few who are sent to jail find themselves inside semi-lawless enclaves awash with drugs, disorder and radicalisation.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Antisemitic Vandals Deface Homes of Brooklyn Museum’s Jewish Director, Board Members By David Zimmermann

Posted By on June 13th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/antisemitic-vandals-deface-homes-of-brooklyn-museums-jewish-director-board-members/

The homes of the Brooklyn Museum’s Jewish director and board members were defaced Tuesday night by antisemitic vandals, who left a banner at the director’s house that called her a “WHITE SUPREMACIST ZIONIST.”

Social-media posts show the front of Anne Pasternak’s home spray-painted red, with the antisemitic sign in the foreground claiming she “funds genocide” — an apparent reference to the operations Israel is carrying out to eradicate Hamas in Gaza. The words, “Blood on your hands,” could be seen on Pasternak’s front sidewalk as well.

“We are deeply troubled by these horrible acts,” a spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum told National Review. The museum spokesperson said a police report was filed.

In New York, vandalism is punishable by possible jail time and significant fines, depending on the cost of the damaged property.

Local officials on both sides of the political aisle responded to the incident Wednesday morning, condemning the late-night vandalism.

Lincoln Restler, a Democratic member of the New York City Council, said it was “disgusting” and “despicable.” Restler added that he already spoke with Brooklyn Museum board members, staff, and the NYPD, which is currently investigating the crime. The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.

Joseph Borelli, the Republican minority leader of the New York City Council, also issued a statement on social media: “Wow. More Kristallnacht behavior from Hamasniks in NYC in 2024. There is no ‘both sides.’ Just savagery. It doesn’t matter how woke the @brooklynmuseum goes, nothing satisfies the bloodlust of the anti-Jew left. Looking forward to the city council’s upcoming debate on this.”

The Brooklyn Museum has been the target of antisemitic demonstrations as recently as last week, when anti-Israel protesters raised a Hamas flag and chanted, “We don’t want no Zionists here.”

In late May, one of the art museum’s outdoor sculptures were vandalized with graffiti. Among the derogatory phrases spray-painted on the yellow OY/YO Statue were “Ur museum kills kids in Palestine!” and “F*** ur bulls**t museum Gaza will be free.”

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Eight Suspected Terrorists Highlight Biden’s Recklessness on Vetting Illegal Aliens Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on June 13th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/eight-suspected-terrorists-highlight-bidens-recklessness-on-vetting-illegal-aliens/

Biden has returned us to September 10. That’s not apt to end well.

Haley’s report on the government’s apprehension of eight Tajiks who are suspected jihadists tied to the Islamic State (ISIS, evidently the Afghan franchise our intel agencies label “ISIS-K,” for “Islamic State – Kohrasan Province”) is important reading. It also illustrates the September 10-level threat environment we’ve returned to, courtesy of President Biden’s heedlessness.

The Biden administration wants our praise for its purported diligence in locking up potential terrorists. We’re not supposed to notice it was the Biden administration that knowingly let these potential terrorists in — and if you think that just eight of them have bored into our country, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you (as soon as we can clear out the Hamas and Hezbollah flags).

In a jaw-dropping X post, Fox News’s Bill Melugin explains that the government let the Tajiks in because its crack — or better, crackpot — vetting process “flagged nothing.” A U.S. official elaborated, “Sometimes there’s just no information on individuals, it’s quite common where there’s just nothing. You don’t have anything, there’s no criminal convictions, there’s no threat information.”

Understand, untold tens of thousands of illegal aliens are crossing our borders from countries hostile to the United States. It’s not just that the regimes in these countries do not have reliable databases and would not share them with our government if they did. In many of these countries — very much including those with sharia-supremacist cultures that are innately hostile to Western mores — actions that would violate our laws are perfectly legal. That is, the background facts that would make such people threats would never show up in any database from which our government would plead to be given information.

Bear in mind, we are talking here about illegal aliens, not Americans. Illegal aliens do not have an array of constitutional rights to be asserted against our government. The American people created the central government by the Constitution in large part to protect us from threats outside our borders. The Constitution, then, is not supposed to be a weapon to be used by those outside threats against our government, thus leaving us defenseless — that’s a total perversion. Aliens who have no right to be in this country, and whose first act is to violate our laws, do not have a presumption of innocence. It is common sense that they should be presumed hostile.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Leftist Media Can’t Hide Their Racism Against Black Republicans The left despises successful black Republicans, not only because they win elections but because they refute the lie that America is a “systemically racist” and evil country. By David Keltz

Posted By on June 13th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/13/leftist-media-cant-hide-their-racism-against-black-republicans/

n the eyes of the leftist media, the only thing worse than being a black Republican is being a black Republican who chooses to run for office.

Just look at their despicable treatment of recent presidential candidates, including the late Herman Cain, Dr. Ben Carson, Larry Elder, and Senator Tim Scott.

When Cain ran for the presidency in 2012, the media peddled unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment, just as they did to Justice Clarence Thomas—another one of their favorite targets—and Brett Kavanaugh for that matter.

When Dr. Ben Carson, who happens to have been one of the world’s top neurosurgeons and a God-fearing Christian, ran for president in 2016, his faith was routinely mocked, and his biography—particularly his upbringing—was questioned by the media in ways that Barack Obama’s never was—even though it turns out Obama’s supposed memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” was almost entirely a work of fiction.

Typically, the leftist media has no problem covering a white Republican who they consider a threat to their power because they can gleefully, without a shred of evidence, call him or her a “white supremacist” or a neo-nazi.

One might think a black Republican would be harder to label in such a farcical way.

But apparently for Larry Elder, the affable radio host, that was no longer the case. When Elder decided to run for Governor of California in 2021 in a recall election to unseat the wildly unpopular pro-lockdown policies of Gavin Newsom, the Los Angeles Times disgracefully referred to him as “the Black face of white supremacy.”

Evidently, so long as a mostly white newsroom dispatches a person of color to slander a fellow minority, it’s fair game.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The West Is Sick of the New Woke Jihadism The more violent campuses and streets become, the more clueless the mobs seem about the cascading public antipathy to what they do and what they represent. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 13th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/13/the-west-is-sick-of-the-new-woke-jihadism/

What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting policemen really protesting?

What are the students at Stanford University vandalizing the president’s office really demonstrating against?

What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about?

Occupations?

They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus. No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of a once-independent Tibet or the threatened absorption of an autonomous Taiwan.

Refugees?

None of these mobs are agitating on behalf of the nearly 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed since 1947 from the major capitals of the Middle East. Some 200,000 Cypriots displaced by Turks earn not a murmur. Nor does the ethnic cleansing of 99% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ancient Armenian population just last year.

Civilian casualties?

The global protestors are not furious over the 1 million Uighurs brutalized by the communist Chinese government. Neither are they concerned about the Turkish government’s indiscriminate war against the Kurds or its serial threats to attack Armenians and Greeks.

The new woke jihadi movement is instead focused only on Israel and “Palestine.” It is oblivious to the modern gruesome Muslim-on-Muslim exterminations of Bashar el-Assad and Saddam Hussein, the Black September massacres of Palestinians by Jordanian forces, and the 1982 erasure of thousands in Hama, Syria.

So woke jihadism is not an ecumenical concern for the oppressed, the occupied, the collateral damage of war, or the fate of refugees. Instead, it is a romanticized and repackaged anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic jihadism that supports the murder of civilians, mass rape, torture, and hostage-taking.

But what makes it now so insidious is its new tripartite constituency.

First, the old romantic pro-Palestine cause was rebooted in the West by millions of Arab and Muslim immigrants who have flocked to Europe and the U.S. in the last half-century.