90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, March 19, 2022

SPIES WHO LIE

51 'intelligence' experts refuse to apologize for discrediting true Hunter Biden story

The 51 former “intelligence” officials who cast doubt on The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories in a public letter really were just desperate to get Joe Biden elected president.

They are the supposed nonpartisan group of top spies looking out for the best interest of the nation.

But the 51 former “intelligence” officials who cast doubt on The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories in a public letter really were just desperate to get Joe Biden elected president. And more than a year later, even after their Deep State sabotage has been shown again and again to be a lie, they refuse to own up to how they undermined an election.

The officials, including CNN pundit and professional fabricator James Clapper — a man who was nearly charged for perjury for lying to Congress — signed a letter saying that the laptop “has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

What proof did they have? By their own admission, none. “We do not know if the emails . . . are genuine or not,” the letter said. They’re just “suspicious.” Why? Because they hurt Biden’s campaign, that’s evidence enough.

Keep in mind this was written Oct. 19, 2020, five days after The Post published its first story. Neither Joe Biden nor Hunter Biden had denied the story, they simply deflected questions. Didn’t these security experts think that if this was disinformation, the Biden campaign would have yelled to the heavens that the story was false?

Meanwhile, though the letter was advertised as being signed by people who worked “for presidents of both political parties,” a majority of the officials were Democrats.

Politico picked up the letter and ran the false headline “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” That headline is still online today, even though the letter clearly says they don’t know if it’s Russian disinformation.

That headline was tweeted out by legions of Democrats, including current White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, as proof that it was all a con. That tweet also is still up despite being proven false.

Thus pure speculation by a group of biased officials became gospel among the media. This was “fake news,” and could be safely ignored.

Keep in mind that Twitter already had banned The New York Post a few days before. The rationale was that this was “hacked materials,” even though it wasn’t — and Twitter had no evidence to think it was. A Facebook official, meanwhile, said it wasn’t going to allow the sharing of The Post’s story until it was “fact checked” by a third party — a check that never happened.

Thus, Big Tech, former government officials, and the media conspired together to bury a story.

No, not just bury — create a false narrative that flipped the script to make Joe Biden the victim of a conspiracy.

51 former “intelligence” officials, Big Tech and the liberal media are all guilty of attempting to silence The Post’s Hunter Biden story.OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images

In short, they peddled online disinformation to sway an election.

No one actually proved The Post’s reporting was wrong. Media outlets showed up at the doorstep of the computer repairman who had gotten the laptop, and he confirmed it. People who exchanged e-mails with Hunter Biden attested to their accuracy in the days and weeks that followed.

Only after the election was safely over did Hunter tacitly admit the laptop was his. Last year, a Politico reporter confirmed that the laptop’s materials were real. And now, the coup de grace: The Times said it’s “authenticated” material from the laptop.

There have been no consequences. Twitter and Facebook still censor information based on political bias, and Congress takes no action. Many of the letter signers continue to be used as “experts” by the media. Clapper, for instance, spent years on CNN calling Donald Trump a “Russian asset,” a lie invented and fed by...

After The New York Times finally got around to confirming the Hunter Biden laptop story this week (as covered by Katie here), there are a lot of Democrats (including Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki) and mainstream media outlets finding their faces covered in egg.

Nearly every piece on the topic from mainstream outlets focused on amplifying the debunked assertion that the story was merely Russian disinformation. Some outlets, including taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, went a step further by mocking the now-100 percent chance that the laptop from hell was real. And they bragged about the cover they provided for Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and Democrats just before the 2020 election in their "news"letter (news in scare quotes before it wasn't news, it was pro-Biden propaganda).

"Why haven't you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post's Hunter Biden story?" NPR tweeted in October 2020. The obvious answer: Because NPR was going along with the Democrat-approved narrative that there was no there, there.

Let's take a walk down memory lane to see just how certain NPR wanted to sound that their hero, Joe Biden, had zero baggage and definitely had nothing to do with his shady son's questionable business dealings:

There are many, many red flags in that New York Post investigation. NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik detailed most of them here. Intelligence officials warn that Russia has been working overtime to keep the story of Hunter Biden in the spotlight. Even if Russia can’t be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect. And if that story could be verified, the NY Post did no forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their report have not been altered.

Ah, the "many, many red flags" / "seems suspect" explanation. Pretty rich for NPR — which again botched a story and reported literally fake news about the Supreme Court's COVID protocol in order to attack conservative justices. Undermining The New York Post for not conducting forensic work while also going to print with stories about SCOTUS that are unsourced and uncorroborated is...peak NPR.

Back to NPR's explanation for not covering Hunter Biden's laptop:

But the biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the Post story is that the assertions don’t amount to much.

“We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told me. “And quite frankly, that's where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”

The handful of stories that NPR has produced about the NY Post investigation have been limited to how Facebook and Twitter are restricting distribution of the story or how families of those seeking treatment for addiction are impacted by the portrayal of Hunter Biden's struggle.

"Don't amount to much?" Really? Really. What part of "ten percent for the big guy" aka Joe Biden the now-President of the United States — not to mention the rest of...

Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,

Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.

If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.

Please Leave Silently Into The Night......

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Girls With Guns

Nearly 25% of all deaths of children attributed to Covid have now been removed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The new numbers for children were in addition to the deletion of tens of thousands of deaths all deaths. It’s an interesting admission because doctors and others that had made the claim of inflated minor deaths were previously considered to be spreading “false information.” Individuals who made the claims were banned from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms and derided in the news media. The CDC action vindicates those individuals.

The health agency quietly made the change on its data tracker website on March 15.

“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” the CDC asserts on the site.

The CDC, belatedly, now acknowledges on its website that the data is not complete.

The inflated statistics are often cited by doctors and others when pushing for COVID-19 vaccination, including figures who believe virtually all children should be vaccinated. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, cited the tracker’s death total in November 2021 while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5- to 11-years-old.

Before the change, the CDC listed 1,755 children as dying from COVID-19 along with approximately 851,000 others, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has been tracking the updates.

The update saw the CDC cut 416 deaths among children and over 71,000 elsewhere, arriving at a total of just under 780,000.

The agency declined to provide a comment to news outlets and puts all of the agency’s data into question. Since the beginning of the pandemic, critics have accused the CDC of including deaths in their stats that were not specifically from Covid. For example, according to the CDC, a death from a vehicular accident was attributed to Covid if the autopsy revealed the deceased had Covid at the time.

Statiticians critized that type of Covid reporting saying bad data was driving bad Covid mitigation efforts across the nation, including lockdowns, masking mandates and even Congressional spending.

The CDC was forced to readjust its death count in August 2021 “after the identification of a data discrepancy.”

“The update is an improvement, but it’s at least the third correction to this data, and still does not solve the issue. It just highlights that people have been using a flawed source of data when discussing kids and COVID,” Krohnert says.

Some journalists and doctors have been citing the tracker data while others use a tally that is managed by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has been described by the agency as more reliable.

The NCHS tally, which is compiled from death certificates, currently lists 921 deaths involving COVID-19 among children and some 966,000 deaths involving COVID-19 among other age groups.

The deaths in the tally include people who died with COVID-19 and people who died from COVID-19, a CDC spokesperson in January. COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause, or the primary death cause, on about 90 percent of death certificates at the time.

Some of the deaths listed by the CDC appear unrelated to COVID-19. For instance, deaths from drowning as a cause of death; several others were listed as being from a gun discharge, according to a review of the death codes.

For now, the update on the tracker was described as “great news” by Dr. Alasdair Munro, a clinical research fellow for pediatric infectious diseases at University Hospital Southampton, given that nearly a quarter of the pediatric COVID-19 deaths had vanished.

But Munro, writing on social media, called it “slightly worrying that this data was being used widely in the US to guide or advocate for...

Visage à trois #125

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #300

Will the Next J6 Trial Expose Another Justice Department Lie?

Lies related to the whereabouts of Vice President Kamala Harris and former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6 are coming to the fore.

Federal prosecutors last week scored a big victory after a Washington, D.C., jury took less than three hours to find Guy Reffitt, the first January 6 defendant to stand trial, guilty on all counts.

The Justice Department’s winning streak might be short-lived, however. Prosecutors will have a tougher task with the trial starting Monday for Couy Griffin, the “Cowboys for Trump” leader arrested for his minor and nonviolent involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6.

Griffin was the subject of my very first article over a year ago on the Justice Department’s abusive prosecution of January 6 protesters in which, coincidentally, I asked the rhetorical question, “Where is the outrage over America’s political prisoners?” as official Washington was in a tizzy over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imprisonment of his country’s star dissident.

After the government charged Griffin on January 19, 2021 with two low-level trespassing misdemeanors, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin asked the court to keep Griffin detained pending trial. Sherwin, recall, bragged about a “shock and awe campaign” of January 6 arrests prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Relying mostly on remarks Griffin made during and after the protest, Sherwin claimed that the New Mexico county commissioner, who never entered the Capitol, was a danger to the community. “[The] defendant is an inflammatory provocateur and fabulist who engages in racist invective and propounds baseless conspiracy theories, including that Communist China stole the 2020 Presidential Election,” Sherwin’s office wrote in a motion seeking Griffin’s imprisonment. “He denies the lawful election of the president and as [sic] stated repeatedly that Biden will never be president.”

Sherwin concluded Griffin is a racist because he publicly objected to playing the black national anthem at professional football games and suggested that the players “go back to Africa and form your little football teams over in Africa.”

A federal magistrate judge agreed. Calling the nation’s capital a “war zone” on January 6, Judge Zia Faruqui claimed Griffin’s comments were not protected under the First Amendment and signaled his defiance of the entire U.S. government. “[Griffin] won’t listen to those conditions [of release] because he may ultimately decide that those conditions are part of a flawed system that he must go by any means to overthrow and disrupt,” Faruqui said during a February 2, 2021 detention hearing. (The chief judge ordered Griffin’s conditional release a few days later.)

Faruqui also told Griffin’s defense lawyers during the hearing that “there is no doubt in my mind, in fact, in anyone’s mind, that there was a person protected by the Secret Service who was in that building, which is the Vice President of the United States of America.”

Those words might come back to bite the good judge.

The whereabouts of both Kamala Harris and Mike Pence are the basis for thousands of criminal charges related to January 6, including the two charges against Griffin. As Secret Service protectees, the Justice Department alleges under 18 U.S. Code, section 1752, their presence inside the Capitol during the four-hour disturbance rendered the building and surrounding grounds a “restricted” area closed to the public. Nearly every one of the nearly 800 Americans charged in the massive Capitol breach probe faces at least one 1752 count.

But the Justice Department recently was forced to admit that Harris was not in the building for most of the day on January 6. Harris, who was still a member of the U.S. Senate, had in fact left the Capitol in the late morning and inexplicably went to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, the same building where a pipe bomb allegedly was...