90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

All FBI Agents Must Blow Their Whistles Or They’ll Be Complicit In Bureau’s Politicization

What the FBI needs to rehabilitate itself is a cavalcade of whistleblowers exposing the rot within the bureau.

Senator Chuck Grassley’s office confirmed to The Federalist that the multiple FBI whistleblowers charging misconduct related to the Hunter Biden investigation only came forward in the last two months. While the existence of these new whistleblowers proves promising, other FBI agents with knowledge of misconduct or political bias must stop hiding behind the chain of command and start blowing their own whistles.

“Multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions” informed the Iowa Republican senator that “Washington Field Office assistant special agent in charge Timothy Thibault and other FBI officials … ‘falsely portray[ed] as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.’”

The whistleblowers further charged that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” Grassley revealed.

The significance of these developments cannot be overstated, for several reasons. First, the whistleblowers accuse supervisory bureau officials — not merely low-level line agents — with manipulating evidence related to an investigation of the son of the president of the United States. The ongoing investigation also implicates the president and his brother in the pay-to-play scandal of influence-peddling.

That reality alone should shock the core of the bureau, but there is more. The whistleblowers’ charges, when read in light of FBI leaks to the Washington Post, suggest that “FBI Headquarters either improperly withheld information or presented inaccurate information to the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh and possibly also Delaware,” which were tasked with investigating Hunter Biden.

Further, by burying evidence about Hunter Biden, which at the time included the laptop he had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, the FBI agents concealed a dangerous national security risk that both the intelligence community and Joe Biden needed to know, namely that Hunter believed Russians had stolen a...

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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1799

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.

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Girls With Guns

Visage à trois #384

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #565

Lisa Simpson Disease Plagues Scientists

They think they can run the world.

In “They Saved Lisa’s Brain,” Lisa Simpson joins the local Mensa chapter, whose members subsequently decide their intelligence equips them to run Springfield. A live-action version of this Simpsons episode occurs in the pages of Science, which presently lowers its aspirations from explaining the universe to merely running the United States.

“The United States has an insatiable desire for technological advancement but is governed by founding documents that are completely unsuited for science and technology,” Holden Thorp, Science’s editor, writes in an editorial for the publication. “This incongruity has manifested in recent disastrous actions by the US Supreme Court on guns, abortion, and climate.”

He refers obliquely to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Dobbs v. Jackson, and West Virginia v. EPA; the Second Amendment protecting the right to keep and bear arms; the Tenth Amendment preventing the federal government from usurping functions of government not delegated to them, even in penumbras or emanations, by the states; and the Constitution guaranteeing a republican form of governance that necessarily forbids legislation by unelected bureaucrats.

Upon becoming editor in 2019, Thorp, the former chancellor of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill until his 2013 departure following an athlete-cheating scandal, made Science less science and more politics. While the chemistry professor failed at running a government-funded school, he believes other scientists should possess more say in running the government.

In May, for instance, Thorp advised scientists in Science: “Make protest signs. Start marching. Push lawmakers to finally break the partisan gridlock that has made moments of silence a regular observance. The National Rifle Association and its minions must be defeated.”

The corruption of purpose witnessed in Science follows the corruption of purpose witnessed in science. A sort of keeping-up-with-the-Einsteins phenomenon nudges that publication and its competitor Nature toward hot-button political topics and social “science.” In veering from the rigors of the scientific method to the self-flattery of a priori assumptions, the publications undermine science in depicting it as yet another field pushing not truth but ideology. Recent...

The financial behemoth privately fears that regular people have too much leverage.

A BANK OF AMERICA executive stated that “we hope” working Americans will lose leverage in the labor market in a recent private memo obtained by The Intercept. Making predictions for clients about the U.S. economy over the next several years, the memo also noted that changes in the percentage of Americans seeking jobs “should help push up the unemployment rate.”

The memo, a “Mid-year review” from June 17, was written by Ethan Harris, the head of global economics research for the corporation’s investment banking arm, Bank of America Securities. Its specific aspiration: “By the end of next year, we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.”

The memo comes amid a push by the Federal Reserve to “cool down” the economy, informed by much of the same rationale — that high wages are driving inflation. This year, the Fed has increased interest rates for the first time since 2018. Historically, this has often caused recessions, and that is exactly what appears to be happening now: The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product has fallen for the second quarter in a row, indicating that a recession may have already begun.

Parts of the mid-year review, in particular its emphasis on a looming recession, received press coverage at the time of the memo’s release to clients. This is the first publication of the document in full.

What the memo calls “the ratio of job openings to unemployed” is generally calculated the other way around — i.e., the ratio of unemployed people to job openings. The more widely used ratio offers one measurement of the balance of power between workers and employers. The lower this number, the more options unemployed people have when searching for work and the greater opportunities employed people have to switch to jobs with better pay and conditions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this ratio stood at 0.5 as of May, meaning that there were then two job openings per unemployed person.

Bank of America memo4 pages

In 2009 — at the worst moments of the economic calamity that followed the collapse of the housing bubble during the end of the George W. Bush administration — the ratio climbed as high as 6.5, so there were more than six unemployed workers for each open job. It then slowly declined over the next decade, reaching 0.8 in February 2020 before Covid-19 lockdowns began.

This recent, unusual moment of worker leverage made Bank of America quite anxious. The memo expresses distress about “a record tight labor market,” stating that “wage pressures are … going to be hard to reverse. While there may have been some one-off increases in some pockets of the labor market, the upward pressure extends to...