Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
ABC Fails to Fact-Check Hunter Biden’s Claim of ‘Not One Cent’ from Chinese Govt. Deal
During the sit-down interview, ABC’s Amy Robach set up the segment about Hunter’s China deal with the background on President Trump’s desire to look into Hunter’s shady $1.5 billion — with a “B” — deal with the Chinese bank (starts at around 5:03)::
ROBACH: Also on Trump’s list of accusations against Hunter Biden: that Hunter flew on Air Force Two with his father during an official government trip to China in 2013, leveraging that connection for financial gain in an investment deal with Chinese businessman Jonathan Li.
What Robach’s question omitted is that the deal was not just with an individual businessman but with the Bank of China — a subsidiary of the Chinese government itself.
She then asks Hunter directly:
ROBACH: The president has repeatedly said you have received $1.5 billion, despite no experience and for no apparent reason. Obviously fact checkers have said that that is not true.
HUNTER: This literally has no basis in fact in any way.
ROBACH: Have you received any money from that business dealing?
HUNTER: No.
ROBACH: At all?
HUNTER: Not one cent.
ROBACH: Definitely not 1.5 billion.
HUNTER: It’s crazy. They feel as though they have the license to go out and say whatever they want.
Hunter is then allowed to trash Trump and his family as liars while Robach, who has just lauded fact checkers and their fact checking, says nothing about the fact that — and this is important — according to her own network’s reporting, and Hunter’s own attorney, Hunter has a ten percent stake in BHR, the company that made that mammoth $1.5 billion China deal.
Just a few months ago, ABC aired an in-depth report on Hunter’s shady business dealings that included this nugget (starts at about the 2:00 minute mark):
This video shows Chinese diplomats greeting Vice President Biden as he arrives in Beijing in December of 2013. Right by his side? His son Hunter. Less than two weeks later, Hunter’s firm had new business, creating an investment fund in China, involving the government controlled Bank of China, with reports they hopes to raise $1.5 billion. Hunter still plays a role in the fund. His lawyer says his stake is worth about half a million dollars.
Where was Robach’s followup question? Where was her oh-so-vital fact checking? Why did she let him get away with saying “not one cent” when her own network reported just a few months ago that he had equity in the firm that made a massive $1.5 billion deal?
Obviously, Hunter is playing a semantic game with that “not one cent” comment. Hunter’s attorney appears to do the same in a statement he released just two days ago, on...
China Silenced Its Critics by Buying Off America’s Elites
China procures political compliance among American elites — including those within academia, entertainment, media, politics, and think tanks — through development of financial relationships, explained Robert Spalding, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept, in a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Rick Manning.
Spalding recalled how Chinese political influence blocked a transparency initiative he was developing as a joint enterprise to examine and uncover the single-party state’s degree of control over large American corporations.
“I reached out to a think tank — a major think tank — to run a program to essentially provide information so people can see all of the influence that the Chinese Communist Party had on corporate America, and we worked on this project for a year — scoping it out, trying to figure out how [many] resources this would take, how much money, how many people — and the think tank had basically agreed to do the study. It was actually going to be more than a study. It was going to be a continuing effort to portray the kind of influence that the Communist Party had over U.S. corporations, and provide that [information and data] in a way that could be accessible to the public, like a transparency initiative.”
LISTEN:
Spalding continued, “After about a year, I had also recruited some funders for this, and so when it got down to the very end — at the very end — the think tank basically decided not to pursue the project, and quite frankly, it was because many of their donors had relationships with the Chinese Community Party. It was not just think tanks. It was also law firms that I reached out to, very high-end top law firms in New York and in DC that essentially said, ‘We can’t help. We talked to our partners, and we don’t want to anger our Chinese clients,’ and so it was pervasive. I already knew that corporations had been influenced, and that’s why I wanted to...
Trump: ABC News Airing Fake Syria Bombing Video is a ‘Real Disgrace’
President Donald Trump on Monday evening hammered ABC News for airing a video that purportedly showed a recent Turkish military operation against Kurdish civilians in northern Syria, which actually appears to have been filmed at a Kentucky gun range in 2017.
“A big scandal at @ABC News. They got caught using really gruesome FAKE footage of the Turks bombing in Syria. A real disgrace,” the president wrote on Twitter. Tomorrow they will ask softball questions to Sleepy Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, like why did Ukraine & China pay you millions when you knew nothing? Payoff?”
A big scandal at @ABC News. They got caught using really gruesome FAKE footage of the Turks bombing in Syria. A real disgrace. Tomorrow they will ask softball questions to Sleepy Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, like why did Ukraine & China pay you millions when you knew nothing? Payoff?
44.3K people are talking about this
The video, which ABC News reported was of an attack on the border town of Tal Abyad, was broadcasted Sunday on World News Tonight and on Monday’s edition of Good Morning America. Yet, a comparative analysis by a technology news site found the footage was filmed at Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky. “[I]t’s clear that the videos are the same,” Gizmodo concluded.
ABC News anchor Tom Llamas aired the footage on Sunday, claiming that it showed “the situation rapidly spiraling out of control in northern Syria.”
“One week since President Trump ordered U.S. forces out of that region, effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against [ISIS],” the anchor framed the purported video.
“This video right here appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town,” he added. “The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS. Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies.”
After several social media users raised concerns about the video, ABC News released a statement with a correction and apology for the embarrassing...
The Deep State Plot Against Trump
As a nation we marveled at Dr. Martin Luther King’s moral reasoning; it helped overcome a deep sense of inertia among the largely conservative civil rights establishment that favored incrementalism rather than rebellion.
King countered that the system of oppression was so entrenched in American society that no legal action would effectively challenge its injustice. As a result, he adopted a radical new strategy—nonviolent disobedience.
His reasoning was based, not in man’s law, but a higher one: “Just as it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends,” he said in his letter from a Birmingham jail, “it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”
President Donald Trump, facing a similar historical arc, is signaling just that.
Impeachment furor has reached a feverish pitch in both the news media and on Capitol Hill. Several congressional inquiries, mostly stemming from the Democratic Party, into Trump have gathered momentum.
Many of the so-called “revelations” and “allegations” used as justification for these inquiries have emerged from anonymous sources and so-called whistleblowers within the administration and the intelligence community.
The timing seems a tad suspicious.
This latest controversy comes on the heels of Trump’s firing former national security adviser John Bolton and Trump’s holding firm in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Syria.
On the other hand, Trump’s personal peccadilloes and petty offenses seem to be just that—a petty justification for removing the president by the extreme measure of impeachment.
The likely reason for such unified rancor is perhaps that Trump’s foreign policy “infractions” have riled an especially entrenched set of interests within America’s military and its intelligence communities. It is telling, perhaps, that the mainstream media, which constantly hounded President George W. Bush’s administration over its wars, seems to take particular umbrage at Trump’s efforts to extract America from that very trap.
The fever pitch over Trump’s unorthodoxy has reached such a crescendo that normally staid, middle-of-the-road Republicans, including Rudy Giuliani and former House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, have taken to defending our president by casually evoking the darkly conspiratorial “deep state.”
No one knows who the members of this “deep state” shadow organization are for sure, and no one is naming names. Regardless, it seems to hound the president at every turn.
Doesn’t this lament seem somewhat incongruous coming from a political party that controls half of Congress, the White House, and has appointed a majority of the Supreme Court? How is it that the president’s camp can wield such potent levers of political power and at the same time consider itself besieged by shadowy players?
The answer is more banal than nefarious. The “deep state” is hiding in plain sight. It is not a clandestine group, rather it’s is a prevailing attitude.
Many of our citizens and our institutions have adopted incrementalism as a lingua franca. The same inertia that caused civil rights leaders oppose to King’s radical new approach to leading social change also opposes Trump’s efforts to almost singlehandedly transform the...
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