Biden seems to have scattered documents here and there, like breadcrumbs

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest:

Back when everyone was talking about the MAL raid on Trump, Biden asked, “How that could possibly happen, how one anyone could be that irresponsible?” Who knew he had so much personal knowledge of exactly how someone can be that irresponsible, and more? Then again, Biden has long felt impervious to any consequences for his own violations.

Bets are now being taken on the next location where Biden left some classified material. Here’s what the Babylon Bee has to say:

The White House is on edge this morning after investigators revealed a fourth stash of classified documents from Biden’s tenure as Vice President was found deep in his colon.

“This morning a routine colonoscopy revealed hundreds, possibly thousands of partially chewed top-secret documents crammed in the President’s digestive tract,” said White House physician Kevin O’Connor. “It seems many of them were eaten, while hundreds of others were inserted rectally by an unknown party or Biden himself. We have handed over all partially-digested documents to the Special Counsel in charge of the investigation. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need a shower.”

It seems that Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would prefer a magic wand to a shower. When asked at what point Biden might address the classified documents issue, she replied:

Don’t have — again, that’s a — that is — that is something that I can’t — I don’t have a magic wand here. I don’t know when that’s going to happen.

Nor does it make much difference when it happens or even if it happens. I can’t think of any effective explanation Biden could offer. Trump’s defense – that as president he himself had declassified the documents – is not available to Biden, unless he were a time traveler.

The newest Twitter files release

The New Neo Posted on by

Here it is, from Matt Taibbi. It’s about the tale that Russian bots influenced the 2016 election, which appears to have been an actual disinformation campaign by the Democrats, who tried to convince Twitter to spread the word. Even the leftists at Twitter weren’t too keen on doing so.

Some commentary by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

Part 14 of the Twitterfiles was released today in a Twitter thread by Matt Taibi. It concerns former Representative Devon Nunes, and claims that Nunes’ 2017-2018 attempt to expose federal surveillance of the Trump campaign was aided and abetted by Russian bots on Twitter. Much of the fight was over a memorandum Nunes prepared using classified material spelling out the details. There was an effort to get the Nunes memo released to the public…

Taibbi reveals that the claim that Russian bots were boosting the movement to #ReleaseTheMemo was false, it was known by Twitter to be false, Twitter told media and Democrat politicians there was no evidence to support it, but the smear campaign against Nunes and Trump based on supposed Russian bots continued…

Russiagate, invented by the Clinton campaign, was a massive fraudulent interference not only in our elections, but in our political process, and the media, federal government, and Democrat politicians were perpetrators.

You can find much more at both Taibbi’s Twitter thread and at the Legal Insurrection link. Another good article (although I haven’t read the whole thing yet) appears to be this from Tablet, entitled “How the FBI Hacked Twitter” and written by Lee Smith.

Only trouble is – it may only be the right who’s reading any of this.

[NOTE: I wrote a great many posts about the Nunes memo at the time. The memo was accurate, and Schiff released a competing memo that was an utter lie, but in Orwellian fashion the Democrats and MSM pounded on the message that the reverse was the case. It wasn’t until Horowitz’s report came out that Nunes was utterly vindicated; here’s my post on that, with links.]

Biden’s classified documents are Trump’s doing!

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, this is satire, via the Babylon Bee:

After multiple caches of highly classified government documents were found in different locations belonging to President Joe Biden, the United States Department of Justice acted swiftly to indict former President Donald Trump for the alleged crime.

“This is a serious violation of federal regulations,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press briefing announcing the indictment. “We will take all measures available to the Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for President Biden being found in possession of these documents.”

But as so often happens, life imitates art, because quite a few people are insinuating that Republicans planted the documents:

“The View” co-host [“Wile E. Coyote”] Joy Behar said Thursday that she didn’t know a luckier person than former President Donald Trump and said President Biden’s classified documents appeared just as “we were this close” to getting Trump.

“I’ve never seen a luckier person than Donald Trump,” Behar declared. “Just as we’re this close to getting him, somehow these documents appear,” appearing to suggest they were planted…

Hostin asked Goldberg whether it felt like “the Republicans were behind it” and whether it felt like opposition research.

“It did originally, but not now, because one of the things he’s saying is that, you know, some of the locations where the docs may have been shipped in the transition may have gotten taken and put,” Goldberg responded.

I can’t really follow that last sentence of Whoopi’s, but no matter.

Also, when Biden’s Corvette angle to the story first broke, I initially assumed that of course this was The Babylon Bee. I had to check the story several times to convince myself it wasn’t.

What’s going on here? A great many people, and certainly many people on the right, assume that the Democrats have finally decided that it’s Biden’s time to go. That makes perfect sense in some ways; for example, the timing is very close to the two-year mark after which Kamala Harris would be allowed to run for two more terms rather than just one. Then again, those same behind-the-scene Democrats plotting against Joe know Harris is a weaker candidate than some of the alternative choices such as Newsom, but he’s not in the line of succession and Kamala is. So in 2024 they’d have the task of getting rid of her, which means this two-terms-for-Kamala thing doesn’t make sense as a motive. Of course, it could be Harris’ forces who are behind it, but I just don’t give them that much credit. However, it’s the case that Biden has said he’s thinking of running in 2024 and that could be disaster for the Party, and various groups would have the motive to take him out before that and make a 2024 run unlikely because he’d be tainted goods (not that that ever hurt him before).

What argues against this theory is that I still don’t see why they would choose a method to discredit Biden that helps Trump in his defense to his own classified papers problem. That in particular makes no sense to me. Is it just that they think they can successfully spin it in a way to convince the public that this is much less nefarious than whatever it was Trump is supposed to have done? That is so absurd, and the Corvette image so graphic, that it just seems unlikely to me that anyone but the Democratic base will buy it. That’s my stumbling block with the entire theory. Surely there are other things they can hold against Biden that aren’t so Trump-friendly.

One possibility is that the Democrats knew that the Republican House was bound to discover the papers in some sort of investigation – although I can’t figure out how – and they wanted to “get ahead of the story” in time-honored fashion. I believe that Garland’s appointment of a special counsel in charge of this may preclude the House Republicans going into it full bore, although I’m not completely certain of that.

Still another phenomenon that argues for the idea that the Democrats have decided that Biden’s got to go is the uncharacteristically harsh behavior of the White House press corps yesterday. What could account for that, except that the word has gone out the Joe is now fair game?

I struggle to make sense of the contradictions.

[NOTE: And even if you think that the Democrats are confident they can fix the 2024 presidential election in their favor no matter who the candidate might be, if the gap is too large it becomes more and more difficult. Plus, if fraud can get anyone over the finish line, then why remove Joe at all? He’s no more embarrassing now than he’s been for a long time – at least, he wasn’t till this papers-in-the-garage thing happened.]

[ADDENDUM: It suddenly occurs to me that maybe the Democrats want to get Trump off the hook for the MAL papers because they’ve decided they want to run against him in 2024 because they think he’s easier to beat than some of the alternatives. That didn’t work very well for them in 2016, though.]

Jordan Peterson talks to Chloe Cole

The New Neo Posted on by

I know this is a very long video. But it’s really quite extraordinary. The subject is transitioning and detransitioning from the viewpoint of someone who went through the process as a minor. It’s well worth listening to some or all of it. I tend to listen to videos when I’m doing something else, like housework, and I usually double the speed setting so it takes half as long to hear the whole thing.

Here it is:

The IRS funding vote

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been are a lot of things happening in the House recently – so many that I missed this on Monday, the day it occurred. Of course, it won’t be passed by the Senate, and even if it were passed Biden would veto it:

The House voted to repeal billions of dollars of Internal Revenue Service funding that Democrats approved last year, an issue that is likely to crop up repeatedly this year.

In the first vote on legislation with Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the helm, the chamber passed a bill on Monday night that would rescind most of the $80 billion President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act approved to bolster the agency’s faltering audit program. The legislation passed 221-210 on a party-line vote.

So what? Well, it’s another promise kept, for starters. Most of the rest of the article is little more than propaganda and spin of the mean old nasty Republicans pounce variety. But this is why the passage of this bill might matter, at least a little:

The new majority is going to bring “accountability on spending in every federal agency,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said on Tuesday. “If there’s waste fraud and abuse in any federal agency it’s got to be rooted out…and it started with the IRS bill last night.”

As part of a deal to win over members of his caucus to secure his new position, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has agreed to only bring up fiscal 2024 spending bills that could cut non-defense agency funding by more than 20%. Scalise confirmed Republicans will also use the upcoming need to raise the nation’s debt ceiling as leverage to bring about spending cuts.

“We have to sit down and say, ‘Why are we hitting the limit?’” the majority leader said. “Before we hit that limit, shouldn’t we have an honest conversation about how to start living within our means?” He added Republicans would push to “put mechanisms in place” to “control the spending problem.”

Republicans left the door open to providing some resources for IRS to boost customer service…

So far, things seem to be proceeding as well as could be hoped, considering the thinness of the GOP majority. It’s instructive to remember that even had the Republicans won the Senate as well, without a veto-proof GOP majority Biden would have successfully vetoed just about every bill they might have passed.

Now Biden gets his very own special counsel

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess the second classified documents announcement – that some were found in Biden’s garage near his Corvette – was a bridge too far, even for Garland, and he felt he had to give at least the appearance of parity with his reaction to Trump:

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate President Biden’s handling of classified documents dating back to the Obama administration on Thursday.

Garland tapped Robert Hur, a former United States Attorney, to handle the investigation. The Justice Department escalated to a special counsel investigation from a mere review on Thursday after a second stash of classified documents was found inside the garage of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home. The first documents were found inside the Washington offices of the Penn Biden Center think tank.

No FBI raids, of course.

I predict all of this will go away regarding any consequences for Biden. It does at least somewhat take the winds out of the “prosecute Trump for the MAL documents” sails, though. My guess is that their case against Trump regarding the documents at MAL already wasn’t bearing much fruit, although never underestimate the ability of a determined prosecutor to charge and convict a ham sandwich. In the case of Garland and Biden, however, there is the opposite goal – to exonerate him. Hur has a pretty low profile, and so far I haven’t been able to detect what his attitude is towards Biden.

Biden doesn’t even have the possible defense available to Trump, which is that as president he had declassified the papers in question. Biden was VP at the time he took them, not president. Of course, Biden could claim that Obama declassified them, but I doubt Obama wants to be involved. Then again, Biden seems to be claiming “surprise” that the papers were even there and ignorance about what they say (that article also contains the usual MSM spin in an attempt to exonerate him).

And then there’s this:

Biden’s classified papers

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting, and perhaps even true?

The classified memos from the Obama administration, disclosed on Monday, were actually found last November inside the offices Biden used at the Penn-Biden Center, a think tank setup by the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania (Penn).

Long before the documents were found, the Penn-Biden Center was the focus of a watchdog complaint because its parent university had received large sums of money — estimated to be at least $54 million — in the time period around when Biden joined the group. This raised the specter of Chinese donors having helped fund the nearly $1 million in personal pay Biden received from the think tank.

The center, which was announced in 2017 and opened one year later, was set up the same year that Biden’s son Hunter was creating a joint venture with Chinese officials in a company called CEFC to pursue natural gas deals within the United States which would have benefitted the communist nation…

The Biden family drew scrutiny from Congressional investigators for receiving a no-interest, forgivable loan from the Chinese partners, according to emails found on a Hunter Biden laptop, which was seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2019.

The next question is always: will anything come of this? I can’t answer that one, but this is another interesting thing the House did recently:

This controversy comes at an inconvenient time for Democrats, as the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to establish a subcommittee to investigate U.S.-China strategic competition. The final tally was 365-65.

That many Democrats voted for it, too? That certainly caught my eye. What gives? Here’s what the article says:

New Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was credited with spearheading the effort to massage the wording of the proposal so it would be broad enough to garner broad bipartisan support.

I suppose it’s possible this is all happening because the Democrats have decided to dispense with Joe. But I really don’t think so. The first reason is that they still have no one significantly better with whom to replace him (and Harris). The second reason is that they could have gotten rid of him in some other way – for health problems, for example – without bringing up all this potentially scandalous stuff that might reflect poorly on the Democratic Party and also hurt the effort to get Trump for his own supposed storage infractions involving classified material.

NOTE: Apparently the Penn-Biden center documents also contained classified material on Ukraine and Iran.