90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, February 16, 2023

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1996

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.

Visage à trois #1297

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

The Other McCain has: Rule 5 Sunday: Christina Ricci
Proof Positive has: Best Of Web Link Around
The Woodsterman has: Rule 5 Woodsterman Style
EBL has: Rule 5 And FMJRA
The Right Way has: Rule 5 Saturday LinkORama
The Pirate's Cove has: Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup

Hunter Biden Asked Father's Top White House Aide To Help Serbian Businessman Campaign for UN Chief

First son's ties to former Serbian foreign minister Vuk Jeremic have caught the attention of the House Oversight Committee

Hunter Biden enlisted then-vice president Joe Biden's national security adviser to help with a Serbian business partner’s campaign to become secretary general of the United Nations, a scheme that is now drawing scrutiny from the House Oversight Committee as it attempts to piece together Hunter Biden's web of foreign business dealings.

Hunter Biden arranged a meeting in July 2016 for Vuk Jeremic and Colin Kahl, a Pentagon official who served as then-vice president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop show. Jeremic, an energy executive and former Serbian foreign affairs minister, was at the time looking for American support in an upcoming vote for secretary general. Jeremic recounted that Kahl, who is now undersecretary of defense for policy and an amateur DJ, "promised" to find out more about the election.

While Jeremic’s bid for the top United Nations post was unsuccessful, his ties to Hunter Biden could shed light on the troubled presidential son’s foreign business dealings. Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) inquired about the link in a letter to Biden on Friday as part of their sprawling probe into the Biden family’s activities in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere.

The Republican inquiry could pull back the curtain on Biden’s efforts to leverage his political connections for profit. "Vuk Jeremic has been connected to Hunter Biden’s business dealings and likely holds key information," an aide to Comer told the Washington Free Beacon.

Hunter Biden first met Jeremic in 2014, when Jeremic was a director at the Mexican state-owned energy firm Pemex and Biden was on the board at Burisma Holdings, a scandal-plagued Ukrainian energy firm. Emails show they were involved in discussions for a partnership between the two companies.

On Dec. 1, 2015, Jeremic approached Biden and his associate Eric Schwerin about a meeting with Ye Jianming, the then-chairman of CEFC China Energy, a Chinese energy conglomerate with suspected ties to Chinese intelligence.

"I am confident that many interesting projects may come out of that in the future," wrote Jeremic, who was a consultant for CEFC at the time. Biden would enter a lucrative joint business venture with CEFC in 2017.

In their letter Friday, Republicans asked Biden for records related to Jeremic and CEFC executives. They are seeking details of CEFC’s $5 million consulting deal with Biden, and another $1 million that Biden received to represent Patrick Ho, a CEFC executive who was charged with attempting to bribe two African officials on behalf of CEFC for oil rights during the...

The Global Disinformation Index doesn’t seek to prevent disinformation. It exists to censor accurate information.

To reduce disinformation, we need to remove the financial incentive to create it,” the Global Disinformation Index declares on its mission page. But as the Washington Examiner exposed last week, the self-appointed arbiter of truth doesn’t seek to silence the legacy corporate outlets that repeatedly peddled false stories. Rather, it demands the widespread censorship of conservative webpages that got those stories correct by branding the right-leaning sites the “riskiest” ones when it comes to “disinformation.”

It is not conservative new outlets that are “risky,” however. And it isn’t even “disinformation” that’s risky: Disinformation — whatever that means — can be countered with the truth. What is risky is the growing belief that experts can both dictate what is deceptive and declare that such speech should be censored.

A simple graphic from the GDI’s summary of its “Disinformation Risk in the United States Online Media Market,” crystalizes the implications of the censorship approach pushed by GDI by establishing that if the outlets GDI seeks to silence were muted, the public would remain ignorant about important questions of national security, government malfeasance, corruption, and major policy matters.

Compare, for instance, the first two media outlets GDI identifies as the “least risky sites” and “riskiest sites” — NPR and the New York Post, respectively — and their coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The New York Post not only broke the story but provided a detailed analysis of material recovered from the abandoned MacBook that implicated then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal.

In contrast, NPR declared on Twitter it was not covering the Hunter Biden story because “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’s failure to initially cover the story caused the government-funded outlet to remain ignorant of the basic facts, prompting NPR to later falsely report that the documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop had been “discredited by U.S. intelligence.” NPR later issued a correction on that disinformation.

In general, the outlets on the left — both politically and in GDI’s graphic — either ignored the Biden family scandal or spun the story as representing Russian disinformation, with The Washington Post’s so-called fact-checker even framing the New York Post’s breaking news inaccurately as “hacked or leaked material.” The “riskiest sites,” in contrast, reported the story and dug deeper for corroborating information.

In addition to the corporate legacy outlets limiting their reporting on the materials contained on the abandoned laptop that suggested Joe Biden profited from Hunter’s foreign business ventures, Twitter censored the story, and Facebook limited visibility of the scandal. Such censorship had serious consequences: Half of the respondents who were surveyed after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, revealed the details behind the efforts to block the New York Post story said they would have voted differently had they known the revelations about...

Visage à trois #1296

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #955

Did a Government Intel Asset Plant Key Evidence in Proud Boys Case?

We should be suspicious of weird coincidences.

It’s week five of the Justice Department’s most high-profile—and high-stakes—criminal trial related to the events of January 6, 2021. Five members of the Proud Boys face the rare “seditious conspiracy” charge. Guilty verdicts—almost certain given the government’s near-perfect conviction rate for January 6 defendants—would build legal momentum for a similar indictment against Donald Trump. (The trial is so crucial that Matthew Graves, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia responsible for prosecuting every January 6 case, has shown up in the courtroom on at least three occasions.)

Trump is a major figure in this trial, an unindicted coconspirator of sorts. Last week, Judge Timothy Kelly allowed prosecutors to play a clip of Trump’s extemporaneous comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark uttered during a presidential debate in September 2020 more than three months before the Capitol protest. The Justice Department wants to portray the comment as a call to arms, tying the alleged “militia” group to the former president.

The clip is just another thin reed of evidence in the government’s landmark domestic terrorism case. In fact, much of the “evidence” amounts to nothing more than worthless trinkets, braggadocious group chats, and otherwise protected political speech.

It now appears that one key piece of evidence was not the work of any defendant in this case but rather written by a one-time government intelligence asset with unusual ties to both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, another group involved in January 6.

A document titled “1776 Returns” is cited by the government to indicate the group had an advanced plan to “attack” the Capitol. In two separate criminal indictments, prosecutors explained how the document ended up in the hands of Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys: “On December 30, 2020 [an unnamed] individual sent Tarrio a document—[that] set forth a plan to occupy a few ‘crucial buildings’ in Washington, D.C. on January 6, including House and Senate buildings around the Capitol, with ‘as many people as possible’ to ‘show our politicians We the People are in charge.’”

Calling the document a “high-level summary,” a prosecutor last week combed through each page of “1776 Returns” with an expert witness even though the government conceded there was no proof Tarrio opened the file or shared it with others.

“The plan, essentially, is to have individuals inside these buildings, either cause a distraction, or—pull fire alarms in other parts of the city to distract law enforcement so that a crowd can then rush the buildings and occupy the interior so they can demand a new election,” FBI Agent Peter Dubrowski told the jury.

In other words, an “insurrection!”

But a bombshell motion filed over the weekend debunks the Justice Department’s suggestion that the document was a product, or at least a roadmap, used to guide the group’s conduct on January 6. The filing suggests that the handling of “1776 Returns,” like so much of January 6, was yet another sting operation.

“It appears that the government itself is the author of the most incriminating and damning document in this case, which was mysteriously sent at government request to Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio immediately prior to January 6 in order to frame or implicate Tarrio in a government created scheme to storm buildings around the Capitol,” wrote Roger Roots, attorney for Dominic Pezzola, in the motion seeking a mistrial. “As such, [the document] and the government’s efforts to frame or smear defendants with it, constitutes outrageous government conduct.”

Turns out, the person responsible for preparing the document is a man named...