90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, March 19, 2020

The Media’s Appalling Fixation on Trump’s Use of ‘Chinese Virus’

America is in a state of lockdown, the stock market is plummeting, and countless people around the world could get sick and die as the result of a deadly pandemic, but still many in the American press will use their time to give cover to the People’s Republic of China.

At a press conference Wednesday, President Donald Trump was asked why he used the phrase “Chinese virus” to describe the new coronavirus disease, known as COVID-19.

Cecilia Vega of ABC News asked: “Why do you keep calling this the Chinese virus, there are reports of dozens of incidents of bias against Chinese Americans in this country. Your own aide, [HHS] Secretary [Alex] Azar, says he does not use this term. He says ethnicity does not cause the virus. Why do you keep using this? A lot of people think it’s racist.”

Other reporters asked essentially the same question.

“Because it comes from China,” Trump responded to Vega. “It’s not racist at all. No, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.”

Trump doubled down, explaining that he chose to use the “Chinese virus” phrase to push back on the idea, spread by Chinese officials, that the virus was started by the U.S. military.

Again, in this time of crisis, our esteemed press is asking the questions most on the minds of the American people, right?

Just unbelievable. What’s worse than the knee-jerk speech-policing in such a serious time is how it’s clearly being used for the purposes of China’s propaganda.

Trump is right about his rhetoric. The virus originated in Wuhan, China, and it’s appropriate to label it by where it came from, as we do with many other viruses.

Just a few months ago, most American media outlets had no problem identifying COVID-19 with China, unless they think they were peddling racism and xenophobia as many now claim.

What changed?

As Trump noted, Chinese officials and various state-backed media outlets have stepped up their campaign to lay this disaster at the feet of the United States.

They are using the idea that calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” “China coronavirus,” “Wuhan virus,” or anything else that may direct attention toward their government’s misbehavior is racist and must be silenced.

It’s a message that’s well-tailored to suck in the social justice warrior journalists and left-wing commentariat to carry out the...

The Mystery Deepens Over The Pre-Dawn Police Killing Of Duncan Lemp

Cops are giving curiously muddled messages as to why this 21-year-old Marylander was shot while he was sleeping.

Five days after shooting 21-year-old Duncan Lemp in a predawn raid, the Montgomery County, Maryland, Police Department announced Tuesday that the killing was immaculate.

Under pressure by media criticism, the police department issued a detailed statement this afternoon purportedly exonerating itself. But that statement—the third revision of their official account of the fatal raid—is contradicted by multiple eyewitnesses.

Police now say that the raid was spurred by “an anonymous tip at the beginning of the year, indicating that Lemp was in possession of firearms.” A response from the Lemp family, delivered by their lawyer, Rene Sandler, noted, “Using a three-month old ‘anonymous’ tip, the police sought and obtained a no-knock search warrant on March 11, 2020 at 2:38 p.m.”

The police department states that the warrant “was served in the early morning hours, consistent with Montgomery County Department of Police practice.” So an anonymous tip is all it takes for a SWAT team to launch violent predawn assaults on Montgomery County homes? The press statement declared, “The officers entering the residence announced themselves as police and that they were serving a search warrant.” Why did they obtain a no-knock warrant if they intended to enter the residence and announce themselves?

According to the statement from the family, the raid began when “SWAT officers initiated gunfire and flash bangs through Duncan Lemp’s bedroom window in the front of the house.” According to the police, “Upon making contact with Lemp, officers identified themselves as the police and gave him multiple orders to show his hands.” The press release reads almost as if Lemp died from an overwhelming sense of guilt, rather than being shot perhaps multiple times by police. It also doesn’t specify whether they’d shot or otherwise wounded Lemp before “making contact” and issuing commands. According to Lemp’s pregnant girlfriend, who was in bed with him at the time of the police attack, “police never made verbal commands upon either her or Duncan until after Duncan was shot and lay bleeding on the floor.”

The press release declares: “Upon entrance by officers into Lemp’s bedroom, Lemp was found to be in possession of a rifle and was located directly in front of the interior bedroom entrance door.” Was he “found to be in possession” as he lay on the floor bleeding? And was it Lemp or the rifle that was directly in “front of the interior bedroom entrance door”?

The police claim to be vindicated because they found five firearms in the house and because they asserted today that Lemp had a “criminal history as a juvenile” that “prohibited [him] from legally possessing or purchasing firearms in the State of Maryland until the age of 30.” Do the police have a right to kill anyone who possesses a firearm in violation of any statute on the books? If so, that’s bad news for the tens of thousands of Maryland gun owners who are federal felons because they use marijuana or other illicit drugs.

The police department has offered a sham of transparency. They refused to answer any of my questions last Friday. I sent another set of questions to them this morning prior to the latest revision of their story, among them:

Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December

Laboratories were told not to release any information and to hand over or destroy samples

Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.

A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.

The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak.

Censors have been rapidly deleting the report from the Chinese internet.

Caixin reported that several genomics companies sequenced the coronavirus by December 27 from samples from patients who had fallen sick in Wuhan.

There was a striking similarity between the new virus and the Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) coronavirus that killed nearly 800 people in 2002-3. But the news was shared with only a small group of medics and party officials.

Subterfuge

The laboratory findings were relayed to officials in Beijing at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The information should have alerted national health chiefs to a looming crisis, but on January 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own gagging orders. Laboratories were told not to release any information and to hand over or destroy the samples.

When a CDC team was sent to Wuhan on January 8, it was deliberately not informed that medical staff had already been infected by patients — a clear confirmation that the disease was...

While it may not be the government’s business to inquire whether a political party is paying for propaganda, it sure the heck is its business to ensure the CIA and FBI aren’t.

It’s long been known that Stefan Halper served as a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI. Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, while not identifying Halper by name, added many details concerning his extensive role in spying on the Trump campaign: Halper secretly recorded several conversations with Trump campaign advisors Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and, more troublingly, the FBI tasked Halper to tape an extensive conversation with Sam Clovis—a co-chair of the Trump presidential campaign.

Publicly available information on government contracts also reveal that Halper received hundreds of thousands of dollars for four projects he completed for the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessments. As part of his oversight responsibilities as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley has raised concerns about the merits of those contracts and further questioned whether Halper “used any taxpayer money in his attempt to recruit Trump campaign officials as sources.”

Grassley has yet to receive answers to his questions. And it remains unknown which Trump campaign officials Halper “attempt[ed] to recruit as sources,” as the IG report—or at least the unredacted portions of that report—make no mention of such efforts.

Something Grassley hasn’t probed, however, but merits further investigation is whether Halper received further funding from the Department of Defense “off-the-books” or through some pass-through conduits. Publicly available information suggests Halper had done so in the past.

Specifically, a syllabus for the intelligence seminar at the University of Cambridge where Halper taught alongside the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, listed Halper as leading a discussion of “The Afghan End Game.” And the summary of Halper’s scheduled October 7, 2011, seminar presentation noted that he had “recently completed a major survey of Allied end game options in Afghanistan for the then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.”

But a search for contracts awarded to Halper revealed only the four contracts Grassley inquired about, and the oldest contract awarded Halper had a start date of May 2012. A search of all available fiscal years, which dated back to 2008, revealed no hits for Halper in 2011 or earlier—the time period a contract would have been issued for his research project on Afghanistan. These facts suggest not all of Halper’s work for our government was captured in the contracting databases.

Of course, one wouldn’t expect the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to disclose its agents and sources publicly. But that didn’t stop “people familiar with the matter” from leaking to the Washington Post that “the professor”—easily identified as Halper from the details included in the Post’s article—had served as a source for both the FBI and the CIA.

Halper’s past relationship with the CIA highlights yet another possible task master for the 76-year-old during the 2016 election and raises the question of whether Halper was working for the CIA or another intelligence agency before the FBI brought him on as a CHS in early August 2016. The IG report’s conclusion that the FBI had not used any confidential human sources prior to the launch of Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, indicates Halper had another boss before then, because Halper first engaged with Page at a small dinner gathering at Magdalene College in Cambridge on July 10, 2016.

But additional facts raise still another possibility: that Halper was working with the Clinton campaign at this time: