KYIV — President Biden paid a visit to Ukraine to reaffirm America’s unwavering commitment to the country’s democracy, sovereignty, and military-industrial complex while also picking up a few things Hunter asked about, including his paycheck.
The Babylon Bee has acquired a recording of the exchange between Biden and his adolescent son, Hunter, just before the trip:
HUNTER: Yo, Pops, how’s it hangin’?
BIG GUY: Eh? What now? Which kid are you?
HUNTER: Hilarious, Dad. Hey, can you pick up my paycheck while you’re in Kyiv? I’m swamped this week. *SNORT* Big art show coming up. *SNORT*
BIG GUY: Sure thing, Herman.
HUNTER: Thanks, Dad, you’re the best. Also, I have a package waiting for me there. Could you pick that up too?
BIG GUY: Squirrel wizard.
HUNTER: K, cool. Brown paper package. Guy named Borysko the Blade has it.
BIG GUY: Baboonsky the Bard. Got it.
HUNTER: Just go to the address written in your notebook —
BIG GUY: Yum
HUNTER: Stop eating it; you need that address.
BIG GUY: Papa hungry. NURSE!
HUNTER: One more thing I need you to pick up. A busload of, um, ladies of the night.
BIG GUY: Janitorial staff?
HUNTER: No, bawdy tarts.
BIG GUY: Fruit snacks?
HUNTER: Forbidden women. Brazen hussies.
BIG GUY: Oh, town girls? Gotcha. Atta boy, son. Smartest guy I know.
At publishing time, Air Force One’s return flight had been delayed while President Biden waited for Zelensky to sign his son’s paycheck.
One of the 51 intelligence veterans who signed a letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop story could be part of a Russian disinformation operation said they knew the contents of the device were genuine at the time.
The letter, which came out in the days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, was used to dismiss the laptop and its provenance. Many of the contents of which have since been analyzed and shown to be authentic.
In a new interview more than two years later, Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, told The Australian, “all of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible.”
The signees, which included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, warned in the letter that the October 2020 arrival of reporting about the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Going further than what the letter said, Politico used a headline that said the former intelligence officials were claiming the story was “Russian disinfo.”
A subsequent poll of Biden voters in critical swing states commissioned by the Media Research Center found that 45.1% said they were “unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son, Hunter,” while awareness of the scandal would have led 9.4% of voters to abandon Biden as their preferred candidate.
Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA
The bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop from the New York Post was censored after the FBI had repeatedly warned Twitter executives about foreign election interference campaigns, according to the seventh installment of the Twitter Files released Monday.
Previous editions of the project, revealed by independent journalists based on emails and other internal company documents provided by Twitter CEO Elon Musk, have shown that federal law enforcement policed content on the platform and asked executives to remove certain posts. Even before the New York Post released the now-infamous October 2020 article, which included evidence that Hunter Biden introduced his father to a Ukrainian businessman, FBI officials pressured Twitter management to censor the story.
Indeed, there existed “an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community” aimed at “senior executives at news and social media companies” to discredit “leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published,” according to independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.
The FBI also paid Twitter more than $3.4 million for their “legal process response,” apparently referencing the time Twitter executives spent coordinating with the agency.
FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to former Twitter Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth on the evening of October 13, hours before the New York Post article would be released. Chan urged Roth that the documents were “not spam” and asked him to “confirm receipt.” Two minutes later, Roth replied: “Received and downloaded – thanks!”
Beyond the communications on October 13, Shellenberger pointed to legal testimony from Roth and recent comments from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They indicated that FBI officials had spent months priming Twitter and Facebook leadership to expect “hack-and-leak operations” from state actors ahead of the 2020 election, even though Chan had admitted that no new intelligence had prompted them to reach such a conclusion. Twitter executives repeatedly “reported very little Russian activity” of concern in the months before the election in emails to the FBI, according to Shellenberger, and told multiple news outlets that negligible election interference had been occurring through Russian accounts.
Nevertheless, the FBI worked relentlessly to influence journalists and social media executives.
Ever known someone who’s always moving from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, but always running into the same problems because the real source of their discontentment sits between their ears? Maybe that’s humanity in general in our visions for the future.
Michael Parenti has said that “Poor countries are not ‘under-developed’, they are over-exploited.” The west tends to look down on the rest of the world for reasons that either directly or indirectly relate to the poverty in those nations, which is silly because that poverty comes largely from western theft and exploitation. It’s like mugging someone and then scorning them for their empty wallet.
If you boil it right down and get real about it, most of the pride in western civilization is ultimately pride in being better at killing and stealing than other people. We’re still morally at the level of invading and plundering nations while claiming it’s justified because we are stronger than them, it’s just procedurally a few clicks removed from doing that directly.
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Here’s a good example of how empire managers try to make China’s government look like a weird alien invader who must be removed by constantly bleating “Chinese Communist Party” and “CCP” instead of just saying “China”, “Beijing”, or “the Chinese government” like they do with other countries:
Constantly repeating the word “Communist” evokes cold war fears from the past in older people, and saying “CCP” rather than the correct CPC (Communist Party of China) is designed to remind people of “CCCP”, Russia’s abbreviation for the USSR. The goal is to mentally uncouple the nation’s government from the nation in the minds of the public, so that removing it looks like an intervention to remove a strange outside force which doesn’t belong there instead of the obscenely intrusive imperialist agenda that it is.
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Attempts to address the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story censorship shenanigans will never gain sufficient traction, because the entire liberal political/media class believes any and all actions to hurt Trump’s re-election odds were justified. They would have supported a lot worse. As far as US liberals are concerned, “unethical things were done to hurt Trump’s re-election bid” is a moot point, because they would have supported far more unethical things to hurt Trump’s re-election; arguing about its morality will therefore never mean anything to them.
After 2016 a consensus was formed among liberal US media that they should have actively worked to manipulate the public into voting for Hillary Clinton, rather than reporting on her numerous scandals at the time. Killing the laptop story was the manifestation of that consensus.
The Hunter Biden laptop story will therefore never move from a partisan talking point into a nonpartisan discussion about political censorship and journalistic ethics. It is firmly locked in to the former category. They all universally believe that they did the right thing. Where the moral imperative to defeat Trump is viewed as superseding any other possible concern, nobody who does not share that view will have any inroad to talk about those other concerns. They will always be dismissed by those who viewed helping to defeat Trump as a sacred duty. It’s an intractable quasi-religious belief based on their own certainty of the superiority of their worldview.
The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story is therefore doomed to remain another Republican partisan issue that never goes anywhere like Benghazi or Monica Lewinsky, even though its far-reaching implications for media and tech mean it really shouldn’t be categorized as such.
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One of the most under-discussed topics in the world right now is how governments are incrementally normalizing the use of police robots that can kill you and acting like it’s no big deal.
“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,’” Taibbi continued. “They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk released information through journalist Matt Taibbi Friday afternoon showing that Twitter was working in conjunction with then-Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s team, removing tweets that team Biden wanted deleted.
Musk said that he decided to release the information because it was “necessary to restore public trust” in the platform after it censored the New York Post’s bombshell report about Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Musk quote retweeted Taibbi’s multi-tweet thread on Twitter, writing: “Here we go!!”
Taibbi began by explaining that the company was “slowly forced to add … tools for controlling speech [that] were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.”
“Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly,” Taibbi said. “By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’”
What they did do, Zuckerberg said, was downgrade posts about the Hunter Biden laptop so that fewer people would see them. When Rogan asked for specific numbers, Zuckerberg said he didn’t know them off the top of his head but conceded that the downgrading was significant.
(1) Although the Big Tech platforms don’t exactly seem like they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into suppressing unpopular opinions, we keep learning about ways the federal government has been pressuring them to do so.
We found out quite recently that the federal government pressured Twitter to drop Alex Berenson, for example.
The latest case came just the other day, when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Rogan asked him about the Hunter Biden laptop story, and we found out that the FBI had approached Facebook cautioning it against allowing the free dissemination of what it of course called Russian propaganda.
Zuckerberg said:
“The FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that there is about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant.
“So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that.”
What they did do, Zuckerberg said, was downgrade posts about the Hunter Biden laptop so that fewer people would see them. When Rogan asked for specific numbers, Zuckerberg said he didn’t know them off the top of his head but conceded that the downgrading was significant.
Zuckerberg went on: “We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country — it’s a very, very impressive law enforcement — they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.”
You think there’s the tiniest chance that the FBI is a political organization?
One favorable development has come from all this, at least: the right side of the ideological divide has rapidly shed its superstitious reverence for agencies like the FBI.
(2) On another note: in case you missed episode 2183 of the Tom Woods Show, I had a chance to speak to Mikkel Thorup, an expert on international relocation and expat issues, having visited 100 countries himself and lived in nine, and an expat himself for over 20 years.
I myself am too much of a homebody to leave the U.S., but I know for a fact that more of my readers than ever are considering their international options, whether that’s outright relocation or measures short of that, like second citizenships and the like.
Several FBI whistleblowers say that the agency’s probe into Hunter Biden was internally sabotaged during the 2020 election in order to derail the investigation, after agents wrongfully deemed verified evidence as “disinformation” to ignore.
According to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), agents investigating Hunter “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease,” adding that his office received “a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers” regarding the investigation.
Grassley added that “verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation,” according to the Washington Examiner.
FBI supervisory intelligence agent Brian Auten opened in August 2020 the assessment that was later used by the agency, according to the disclosures. One of the whistleblowers claimed the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Timothy Thibault, shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden in October 2020 despite some of the details being known to be true at the time.
A whistleblower also said Thibault “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting,” according to Grassley, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” The senator said Thibault “ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required” and that FBI officials “subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the disclosures.
The whistleblowers say investigators from FBI headquarters were “in communication with FBI agents responsible for the Hunter Biden information targeted by Mr. Auten’s assessment,” and that their findings on whether the claims were in fact disinformation were placed “in a restricted access sub-file” in September 2020, according to Grassley, who added that the disclosures “appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.“
Grassley summarized the new allegations in a Monday letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The Examiner notes that FBI agent Auten was involved in the Trump-Russia investigation, including interviewing Christopher Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko.
According to Grassley, the “volume and consistency” of the allegations regarding the handling of the Hunter Biden probe “substantiate their credibility.”
The assessment by Auten in August 2020 was opened the same month Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) received a briefing from the FBI “that purportedly related to our Biden investigation and a briefing for which the contents were later leaked in order to paint the investigation in a false light,” Grassley said. The senator said Senate Democrats asked for a briefing in July 2020 “from the very same FBI HQ team that discredited the derogatory Hunter Biden information.”
The FBI inquiry into Hunter Biden reportedly began as a tax investigation, then expanded into a scrutiny of potential money-laundering and foreign lobbying; the DOJ has declined to hand over investigative details. -Washington Examiner
Thibault, the FBI agent who allegedly quashed the Hunter probe, may have violated the Hatch act in 2020 after making posts on social media which were critical of then-president Donald Trump and former AG William Barr.
Also notable – Hunter had the numbers of several FBI agents in his iCloud contacts.
Since Hunter Biden does not appear to know much about oil or gas, he was obviously given his Burisma appointment and lavish pay because the company’s owners believed he could influence – through his father – American policy in ways that were favorable to the company.
Joe Biden would get a cut from Hunter’s takings, a fact which was communicated by Hunter in his emails. In their drive to enrich themselves, the Bidens would enter relationships with some of the shadiest characters around. Burisma, for instance, was co-founded by a well-known corrupt Ukrainian oligarch who is now a fugitive from justice.
Last week the Russian government held a press conference where it aired accusations of breath-taking corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his family.
Unfortunately, this event was no fake news Russian propaganda. The incriminating evidence presented at the event came straight from the hard drive that belonged to Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
As you may know, in 2019 Hunter Biden carelessly abandoned his laptop at a computer repair shop in Delaware. This was an act of astounding recklessness, since the emails, text messages, files, photos, and videos contained on that computer provided an extensive record of greed, corruption, bribery and graft not only on his part but also on the part of his father and other members of their family.
When the New York Post tried to report on the hard drive in October 2020, the America mainstream media and law enforcement authorities refused to acknowledge it or take appropriate action. Rather than commencing an investigation, the establishment falsely claimed that the hard drive was a product of “Russian misinformation.” They did this even though they knew it was real. The staff of the New York Post conducted an extensive, multi-level authentication process to ensure that the hard drive was genuine, and they made the details of this process available to anyone who cared to check.
The establishment, however, banded together and refused to act. Instead of investigating the guilty party, they attacked the messenger and went into overdrive to censor the incriminating information under the cover of the “Russian misinformation” canard. With the collaboration of Big Tech and the legacy media, they managed to suppress the truth and most voters were unaware of the hard drive’s contents. Most of those who managed to hear of it still believed that it was Russian misinformation. That they fell for the establishment’s “Russian misinformation” lie is not so surprising, given the revelations seemed too outrageous to be factual.
Needless to say, it was all true. In the months following the November 2020 election, various individuals and media outlets were gradually forced to admit that the hard drive was, indeed, real. The hyper partisan New York Times and the Washington Post are among the latest to confirm this fact.
But even though the establishment has largely succeeded in keeping this information from the American public, their malfeasance is now coming back to bite us. This is because foreign entities and governments also have Hunter Biden’s hard drive, and they are now using it to point out the obvious corruption of our president and the whole of the Washington establishment. In other words, they will do the job that our media and legal system refused to do when the scandal was first brought up in America.
They will do this before the eyes of the whole world and will bring shame on what the international community now increasingly views as a corrupt American president who leads a corrupt administration.
We got a taste of this last Thursday when the Kremlin used Hunter’s messages to show he apparently facilitated and financially benefited from bioweapons research in Ukraine. And even though the American mainstream media – true to form – refused to report on it, the rest of the world saw the evidence clear and loud. This is the headline from the British MailOnline:
To make matters worse, Hunter did this while his father was vice president of the United States. He thus used his father’s influence to put himself in a position where he could benefit from these kinds of illicit ventures.
“I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump,” John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in a recent post on Twitter.
One of the former CIA officers who signed a letter claiming stories about a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden were disinformation says he helped swing the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump.
“I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump,” John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in a recent post on Twitter.
“I lost the election for Trump? Well then I fell [sic] pretty good about my influence,” he also wrote.
Sipher and 50 other former U.S. intelligence officials signed the letter on Oct. 19, 2020, alleging that the effort to distribute its contents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” despite not knowing whether the laptop was legitimate.
The Post was the first to report on emails on the laptop, which was dropped off at a computer repair store and never picked up by then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, according to the store’s owner.
While the FBI picked up the computer and a hard drive from the owner, the bureau’s apparent inaction in probing the matter prompted him to pass on a copy of the hard drive to a lawyer representing former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who in turn passed it on to the Post.
The Oct. 14, 2020, story about the emails came as some voters were still deciding whether to vote for Biden or Trump. The story was widely questioned by legacy news outlets, suppressed by social media platforms, and claimed to be part of a Russian effort, despite top officials like Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe saying there was no evidence that was the case.
Sipher is one of the few former officials who signed the letter to respond to fresh questions about its contents, after more legacy outlets, including Politico, said they’ve confirmed it is legitimate.
Sipher got into arguments with former acting DNI Richard Grenell and others on Twitter, where he later said his claims of helping Trump lose were sarcasm.
He also write that “the letter didn’t say the laptop was disinformation” but in May 2021 posted a link to the Politico story that did say that.
Nick Shapiro, once a top aide to former CIA Director John Brennan—both Shapiro and Brennan signed the missive—and who provided it to Politico, has not responded to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
Most other signers didn’t respond to requests for comment or declined the requests, the Post reported.
James Clapper, a former DNI, told the paper that he stands by the statement “made AT THE TIME,” adding that, “I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate.”
“The letter explicitly stated that we didn’t know if the emails were genuine, but that we were concerned about Russian disinformation efforts,” added Russ Travers, former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “I spent 25 years as a Soviet/Russian analyst. Given the context of what the Russians were doing at the time (and continue to do—Ukraine being just the latest example), I considered the cautionary warning to be prudent.”
MCViewPoint 
