Antisemite of the Week:
semite that utilizes social media and participates in dangerous pro-Palestinian rallies to spread her hatred towards Jews, Israel, and America. She advocates for the destruction of the world's only Jewish state, pushes the antisemitic BDS movement, and expresses support for violence.
In a since-deleted slew of deranged antisemitic and violent threats, Fatima Mohammed stated: "May every Zionist burn in the hottest pit in hell" and compared the Jewish state to Nazis. According to a Pew study, more than 90% of the world’s Jews identify as Zionists. Also, Mohammed's now deleted Instagram account bio shockingly read "Always remember, death to Israel."
Additional antisemitic tirades of Fatima Mousa Mohammed include:
In response to the 2021 violence involving Hamas and Palestinian terrorists launching over 4,000 rockets against Israel, Mohammed tweeted, "May Allah destroy Israel."
In the summer of 2021, Fatima tweeted, "I pray upon the death of the USA…having an American flag in your bio/location is adjacent to having the Israeli to me you are all t£rr0r1sts to me.
In May 2022, Fatima Mohammed tweeted, "Quick make dua [pray] for the fall of Zionism and the destruction of Israel."
Fatima Mohammed often serves as a speaker for various events arranged by the radical group Within Our Lifetime (WOL). WOL, an extremist and militant group founded by 2020 “Antisemite of the Year” Nerdeen Kiswani, often serves as ground zero for assaults on Jews.
Mohammed began studying at CUNY Law School in 2021 and it wasn’t long before she began pushing BDS and attacking Zionism. In March 2022, during a WOL rally, she demanded all Zionist professors be removed from CUNY. During the same rally, she falsely claimed Israel was responsible for American police brutality and compared racial tensions in the U.S. to the Israel/Palestine conflict, stating: "The same forces incarcerating Black people in this country, are the same forces that are killing Palestinians."
Also at that rally, 'Antisemite of the Week' Sadaah Masoud assaulted a Jewish man named Matt Greenman. Moments before Masoud's violent attack on Greenman, Fatima shouted, "and the last reminder of today is: greater empires have crumbled beneath our feet! Israel… you will crumble too! It’s a matter of time!... by the glory to the resistance, it will happen!” Masoud is now serving 18 months in prison for attacking Greenman.
In 2023, Mohammed was elected to give the CUNY Law graduating class’s commencement speech. In her remarks, Mohammed promoted violence, spread hatred of Israel and the police, paid tribute to Hamas financiers, and demonstrated solidarity with the BDS movement. Her words garnered harsh criticism from around the country from Jewish organizations, U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle, as well as prominent CUNY alums.
The following are frightening highlights from her speech:
Fatima Mohammed stated, "In this moment of celebrating who we are, I want to celebrate CUNY Law as one of the few, if not the only, law school to make a public statement defending the right of its students to organize and speak out against Israeli settler colonialism."
She advocated for Hamas terrorists (Holy Land Five) who were indicted for transferring large funds to Hamas in the name of humanitarian aid.
Fatima concluded in her speech at the sounds of applause from the audience that the "joy, excitement, and rage that fills this auditorium will fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world." She further rallied the crowd by declaring a revolution will come.
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, boycotting Israeli goods, and drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis are deemed antisemitic by the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
Stop Anti=semitism and Jewish students at CUNY need YOUR help! Please email CUNY's Board of Trustees and demand CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodríguez is removed for his ongoing failures to adequately fight Jew-hatred at CUNY.
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What I have posted above and below did not occur without decades of organized effort. I submit, like an acorn that grows into a large oak, "whitey hatred" smoldered and then exploded but began in a very benign manner.
I call it the curbside explosion. In other words, progressive radicals selected something socially acceptable, ie. making it easier for those in wheel chairs to get up what had been a standard high curb. From there, it turned into an attack on minimum wage, which was never intended to pay to feed an entire family.
Once the radical progressives gained momentum they began to attack everything in our society. Their intent is to bring our society down by ending law and order. Obama told us he wanted to transform America and we bought his dangerous nonsense and acts of guile.
Now we are where we are. We have allowed radicals to intimidate us into silence. Their efforts have even spread to sexualization of innocent children and into our military structure. The class room and barracks are no longer safe for their intended purpose. Riots to reverse this onslaught have begun taking place and it will spread.
Even the Catholic Church is under attack in connection with the sport of baseball though it began with the NFL.
WOE IS US!
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The Strange Pandemic of ‘White’ Disparagement
All of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad.
Victor Davis Hanson
One of the tenets of the early civil rights movement some 65 years ago was ending racial stereotyping.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. called for emphasizing the “content of our character” over “the color of our skin,” the subtext was “stop judging people as a faceless collective on the basis of their superficial appearance and instead look to them as individuals with unique characters.”
It is tragic that King’s plea for an integrated, assimilated society, in which race became incidental, not essential to our personas, has mostly been abandoned by the Left in favor of racial stereotyping, collective guilting, and scapegoating by race and gender.
Indeed, many of the old Confederate pathologies—fixation on racial essence, obsession with genealogy, nullification of federal laws, states’ rights, and segregated spaces and ceremonies—are now rehabilitated by woke activists.
In that larger landscape, the collective adjective and noun “white” now has also been redefined and mainstreamed as a pejorative to the point of banality.
“White” followed by a string of subsequent oppressive nouns—“rage,” “supremacy,” “privilege”—has become a twitch on campus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion deans and provosts cannot write a memo, issue a communique, or sign a directive without a reference to “white” something or other.
Like the mysterious omnipresence of transgenderism in popular culture, all of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad—a pet-rock or hula-hoop-like collective madness.
Yet such an addiction remains bizarre in a variety of ways. Millions in the present are now to be libeled as oppressors by the contemporary self-described oppressed—supposedly for what some whites who are mostly now dead once did to now mostly dead others.
Yet what does “white” really mean anymore? Is it an adjective or noun indicating color? Culture? Race? Ethnicity? Is white defined as three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter paleness? Is it an overarching state of mind that encompasses both “Duck Dynasty” and “The West Wing”?
Certainly, in a multiracial, intermarried nation, with 50 million residents not even born in America, the term is a construct that can mean almost anything and thus nothing much at all.
Hispanics are often lumped in with other “marginalized” peoples as part of the vast diversity coalition. Yet most Latinos are indistinguishable from Italian-, Arab-, Greek- or Portuguese-Americans, who, in turn, are all usually considered part of the “white” majority. Does a mere accent mark or trilled “R” transmogrify a blue-eyed Argentinian-American into the preferred nonwhite, diversity collective?
In our crazy racially categorized society, had George Zimmerman just adopted his maternal surname Mesa and Hispanicized George to Jorge, then a “Jorge Mesa” might not have been so easily demonized as what the New York Times slurred as a “white” Hispanic following his deadly confrontation with Trayvon Martin in 2012.
The controversial City University of New York firebrand and graduation speaker Fatima Mousa Mohammed recently railed against capitalism, Zionism, Israel—and, of course, “white supremacy.” Yet she herself is whiter than white. She is now an elite with a law degree. Is she then a beneficiary of “white privilege”? Or do her radical politics trump skin color and earn her exemption?
Is a snarly, divisive Joe Biden, barking at the moon about “ultra-MAGA” and “semi-fascist” white monsters, then, not a purveyor and beneficiary of white supremacy by virtue of his woke politics?
I know a lot of white mechanics, forklift drivers, and assembly workers. I have never heard one employ one of Biden’s racial putdowns like “boy” or “junkie.” Do they enjoy white privilege in some way the Biden family consortium does not—despite Joe’s past fulsome praise of iconic segregationists or his Corn-Pop fables of black youth petting his golden hairs on his sun-tanned white legs, or Hunter’s taboos about dating Asian women?
“The View’s” Sonny Hostin has created a mini-career in imaging all the ways in which she can smear “white” women as demonic (“White women, in particular, want to protect this patriarchy”) as she thinks up new Hitlerian gas metaphors of dehumanization, such as white women resembling “roaches voting for Raid.”
When the media wishes to attack black conservatives like Larry Elder, it now can call them “white supremacists.” When it wishes to warp the news for its woke agendas, it assures us that a Latino mass-murderer was a “white supremacist” and then, in Pavlovian fashion, academics follow with essays assuring us that their “research” proves Hispanics too can be white supremacists.
The creation of false racial identities is an accurate touchstone of perceived collective racialized privilege. “Passing” for white in the racist days of Jim Crow reflected a means of escaping racist segregation and discrimination for blacks.
Now the increasing trend of whites seeking to pass for nonwhites—Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, Rachel Dolezal—reflects a self-interested and careerist assessment that nonwhite status is advantageous.
In college admissions, are applicants more likely to massage a non-white or white identity for perceived advantage? Is the racist ossified “one-drop rule” or “one-sixteenth” genealogy now rebooted as helpful proof of proving white or nonwhite heritage?
Then we come to the absurdity of lumping together 330 million diverse Americans, with ancestries that are often quite antithetical—Serbians and Albanians, Turks and Armenians, Israelis and Syrians, Germans and French. Are all these ancient antagonists reduced now to white automatons of a sinister collective borg?
Arrive as an immigrant from Hungary or Estonia, and—presto!—you are culpable for creating supposed monsters of the past like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, whose statues must be toppled or defaced? Arrive the same day from Oaxaca and you are somehow exempt from such reparatory burdens?
Immigration, at least, is immune from the academic perversion of research, and simply reflects realities on the ground. Millions of immigrants instinctively vote with their feet. We are told the U.S. current population is 67 percent to 70 percent “white” while yearly immigrants, legal and illegal, may total upwards of 90 percent nonwhite.
But how is this paradox possible? Given the loud global warnings about “white rage” and “white supremacy,” why would millions of nonwhites risk their lives to reach a country where they would be assured of being subservient to “white privilege”?
Can it instead be true that they simply do not believe what media and political elites tell them, given they have learned from prior immigrants that far from being at risk, they will have opportunities impossible in their native countries?
Do not new arrivals risk their lives to enter the United States because they rightly assume that a so-called white majority country strangely, unlike their own tribal homelands in China or Mexico, does not fixate on race but instead encourages those who do not look like the majority to join their commonwealth—in a way the Mexican Constitution, for example, traditionally did not?
Class apparently now means nothing. Does the white mechanic in Provo supposedly think like the Pelosi family—as a fellow “white” person?
Are Barack Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” and Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “Ultra-MAGAs,” “dregs,” and “chumps” all of the same mentality? Do they share the same values as those embraced by Hunter Biden, Jane Fonda, and Adam Schiff, by virtue of some mystical bonds of whiteness?
Where are the data to support the charge of imperious whiteness? Do so-called raging whites commit hate crimes in numbers greater than their demographics?
In fact, they are underrepresented.
Do purported whites hunt down people of color as if we are all living in 1920s rural Mississippi?
In fact, in relatively rare interracial violent crime, whites are up to 10 times more likely to be victims of black- or Hispanic-perpetrated violence than agents themselves of interracial assault.
Do white supremacists send poor people of color abroad, as often argued, to die in rich white men’s wars?
In fact, white males died in Iraq and Afghanistan at twice their numbers in the general population. Is that asymmetry proof of what Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin pontificated about in fixating on white privilege?
How do we adjudicate or define “proportionate representation”? What is disproportionate?
Would it be the more than 70 percent of African Americans in many professional sports at six times their percentages of the population? Or perhaps the current admission statistics of the incoming class at Stanford University, where the university boasts that just 22 percent of its 2026 class is so-called white?
Is it white privilege, rage, or supremacy that explains why seven of the current 25 cabinet and cabinet-level secretaries of the U.S. government are heterosexual white males? Does white privilege reveal why Asian Americans, on average, enjoy an annual median household income some $25,000 higher than their white counterparts?
Are whites, by virtue of their supposed privileged caste, immune from suicide? In fact, the so-called white suicide rate is more than double the rate of blacks and Hispanics.
Do supremacy and privilege explain why two-thirds of the annual opioid overdose deaths are among whites?
Perhaps to substantiate the boilerplate of “white supremacy” and “white rage,” we might look to efforts at retro-segregation?
Are privileged whites insisting on white-only college graduations? Perhaps they are demanding set-aside spaces on campuses, where they feel “safer” and can enjoy racial affinities and solidarity by excluding others? In fact, there are racially segregated spaces on campuses, but they tend to exclude whites.
Perhaps the Left means white supremacy is a euphemism for a return to segregated housing and redlined neighborhoods. In fact, there are racially segregated dorms on campuses, the so-called “theme houses,” but again these were demanded by nonwhites.
We are told that it is not safe for the diverse to be around white people, given their supposed violent proclivities. But that certainly seems not to be the case for our elites. The Obamas often lecture the country on housing discrimination and the historic efforts of whites to self-congregate and exclude. But the ex-president owns four expensive homes, in Kalorama D.C., Martha’s Vineyard, Hawaii, and Chicago. Yet he is least likely to reside in his richly diverse Chicago neighborhood and apparently feels more at home with the mostly white neighbors of his other three estates.
Indeed, some of the most severe critics of “white privilege” and “white rage” are themselves ensconced in white neighborhoods, such as the Duchess of Sussex or LeBron James. When Oprah Winfrey damns white supremacy in graduation speeches, is her subtext a snarl at her fellow billionaire neighbors in Montecito?
So what is going on with the contemporary fixation on white, white, white?
Why are there so many Duke Lacrosse, Covington kids, Tawana Brawley, and Jussie Smollett cases, as if the dearth of white oppressors and the multitude of would-be oppressed requires the fabrication of so-called white hate crimes?
Why does Joe Biden lecture the country on its supposedly greatest terrorist threat of “white supremacy”—this from the most racialist president of the modern era, who sets himself up as the judge of who is and who “ain’t black”?
This rebooted white collective stereotype seems to be the obsession of two general groups. One cadre is the elite professional, left-wing whites. By any definition of income and status, its members are quite blessed and privileged. For them, voicing the new white pejorative is a sort of psychological mechanism that excuses their own guilt-ridden privilege, by fobbing purported toxic “whiteness” onto an amorphous “semi-fascist” other, while virtue signaling they are not like “them.”
“Them,” of course, are those who live and work in places like East Palestine, Ohio, and who have zero privilege but, by the Obama-Clinton-Biden standards, are culturally and socially deplorable.
Such “white rage” and “white supremacist” mantras are also careerist cues that signal, as with party membership of the old Soviet nomenklatura, that they are correct and now audited for raises, promotions, and rewards.
The second group is composed of the wealthy, left-wing minority elites in politics, media, entertainment, sports, and government service. For the Al Sharptons and “squad” members of the world, damning “white, white, white” bogeymen alleviates them of any painful analysis of inequality, such as the role of endemic illegitimacy and absent fathers in nearly ensuring a lack of parity. It is hard work to buck the teachers’ unions and set up K-12 charter schools in the inner city that focus on math, science, and languages to ensure parity. But it is easy and cheap—and far more lucrative—to blast the SAT test as “racist” and demand reparative admissions to Yale or Harvard.
For the racialist careerist, the less racism there is to find, all the more essential it is to root it out somehow, somewhere. So, here arrives a new genre of manufactured hate crimes, whose logic is “even if it did not happen, it reminds us that it could have happened.”
The dearth of actual racism also demands a new set of adjectives that serve as something like sophisticated detectors to discover otherwise invisible natural gas fumes. The adjective “systemic” means only the select can now spot racism. Like air, it is everywhere but invisible and thus requires battalions of diversity, equity, and inclusion inspectors to use their training to expose it in the common atmosphere.
“Microaggressions” exist as a tacit admission there are no aggressions as we commonly define them. No matter—there are still hints that there might be some racial aggression, once experts redefine words and gestures to ferret out micro-racists in our midst.
Where does this all lead?
We are wasting trillions of dollars in capital, labor, and time in tribal cannibalism as our friends abroad watch in horror, and our enemies savor our decline into collective suicide—while we sink into debt, our cities turn medieval, our border disappears, our criminal justice system collapses, and our military chases its tail.
We know from history the ultimate destination of tribal chauvinism, and it is not pretty. Once a society retribalizes, it descends into a Hobbesian war of all against all. Everyone eventually seeks out or manufactures a tribal identity for self-protection. Tribalism operates on the principles of proliferation: if a neighboring nation goes nuclear, then everyone in the neighborhood must too.
Unless some passengers on our runaway train force our engineers to hit the brakes, we are headed over the cliff into Yugoslavia.
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Thomas Sowell, a brilliant black economist and one of America's most articulate professors, is as clear minded as ever/
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He's still alive at 92 (b. Jun 30, 1930 in Gastonia, NC), but retired. Sowell grew up in Harlem, served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard, Masters from Columbia, PhD Economics University of Chicago, economist, social theorist, philosopher, author, Senior Fellow Hoover Institution, Stanford University, National Humanities Medal, and Francis Boyer award.
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Unitl it occurs, only words.
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Gallant: We will bomb Hezbollah into the stone age
The defense minister was visiting the North within the framework of the two-week-long “Firm Hand” military exercise.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaks at the Herzliya Conference on May 22, 2023 (photo credit: AVSHALOM SASSONI/FLASH90)
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday threatened to bomb Hezbollah and Lebanon "into the stone age," if the terror group "makes a mistake" and "starts a war against Israel."
During a visit to the IDF’s Northern Command, he said, “I hear our enemies boasting about weapons they are developing. For any such development, we have an even better response - by air, by sea and on land and through other means of attack and defense."
The defense minister was visiting the North within the framework of the two-week-long “Firm Hand” military exercise. During the visit, Minister Gallant held a situation assessment together with senior IDF officials.
Gallant reassured Israel's citizens that his visit and updates from the drill confirmed "that our troops are excellent.”
"We will know how to defend the citizens of Israel and how to strike our enemies with a decisive blow, heaven forbid, they initiate a war with us," he stated.
The defense minister's threat comes after a series of threats and counter threats between Israel and Hezbollah in May.
IDF Chief-of-Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and IDF Intelligence Chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva had warned Hezbollah in May of a conflagration if it pushed Israel too far. More specifically, they had said that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah might get overconfident and misread Jerusalem’s situation and think he can gamble against it.Halevi said Hezbollah “thinks it understands how we think which can lead it to dare and challenge us in scenarios where we won’t go to war” in response.
This came one day after Haliva said that Nasrallah might miscalculate his understanding of Israel and accidentally drag both sides into a larger conflict.
Haliva referenced Hezbollah’s recent daring in carrying out a bombing at Megiddo inside Israel.
Some had viewed that Hezbollah move as showing it was ready to pressure the Jewish state more than in the past.In early April, Hezbollah also allowed certain Palestinian terror groups to fire rockets on Israel from areas it controls.All of this was in the context that generally, since the Syrian civil war mostly ended, Hezbollah has tried a variety of ways to show it is still in conflict with Israel.
The Jerusalem Post has witnessed that Nasrallah has increased the presence of Hezbollah operatives close to the Metullah border with Israel, even if in civilian clothes. Nasrallah has done this quietly, by erecting numerous new observation towers under the guise of the “Green without Borders” organization.
Hezbollah has initiated several clashes with IDF soldiers
Besides these quieter, but consistent moves, Hezbollah has also initiated several clashes with IDF soldiers along the border who were working on completing the fence or marking the border.
“You are not the ones threatening war, it is us who do so,” Nasrallah emphasized in his May speech. “And any such war will include all of Israel’s borders.” He further said that “any wrong action in Palestine, Syria or Iran could lead to a major war.”
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Smack on.
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By John Bolton
Iran is steadily eviscerating the political and economic constraints the U.S. has marshalled against it. Tehran’s unprecedented coordination with the Beijing-Moscow axis has converged with President Biden’s apparent disdain for key Middle East allies, his obsession with reviving the 2015 nuclear deal and his lax sanctions enforcement. We now face geostrategic realignment and instability in the region as well as more terrorism and nuclear proliferation around the world.
Absent visible American resolve against Tehran’s nuclear program, the odds are increasing that, as Benjamin Netanyahu has always reserved as a last resort, Israel will act on its own. The White House response—suggesting closer U.S.-Israeli military cooperation—induces the queasy feeling that Mr. Biden is simply trying to get inside Israel’s decision-making loop to prevent an attack on Iran, not to aid it.
The alternative to force remains overthrowing the ayatollahs. Since Mahsa Amini’s murder in September 2022, opposition protests and renewed economic discontent have risen to potentially regime-threatening levels. Mr. Biden’s administration, however, has supported the dissidents with little but rhetoric. At a minimum, Washington must focus on the internal instability likely to unfold in Iran when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 84, dies. The moment could arrive unexpectedly, providing Iran’s citizens an opportunity to topple the regime and end its international barbarity.
During Mr. Biden’s term, America’s resistance to Iran’s proliferation and terrorism has become ineffective. The president couldn’t have more thoroughly alarmed and alienated the Gulf Arab states and Israel if he had planned it. The White House convinced regional allies that Mr. Biden was effectively abandoning them and empowering their enemies by ignoring concerns about the failed nuclear deal and the effect of ending sanctions. He also crusaded against hydrocarbon fuels—the heart of Gulf Arab economies—and denounced Saudi Arabia as a pariah for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Hard reality hasn’t led Mr. Biden to recalibrate. Against all evidence, his administration still seeks to resuscitate the Iran deal. Never mind that even a “partial” agreement—perhaps involving Iranian-held hostages—could unfreeze billions of dollars, helping keep the mullahs in power and funding their continued terrorism and pursuit of nuclear weapons. Apparently forgetting that money is fungible, Mr. Biden’s negotiators blithely propose to let Iran use unfrozen assets only for overdue United Nations assessments or Covid vaccines purchases.
Confident that it is close to breaking free of Washington’s pressure, Iran has continued disrupting Persian Gulf oil shipments. The United Arab Emirates and others pressed unsuccessfully for more-assertive U.S. responses to Iranian ship seizures and other aggressive steps. In frustration, two months ago the U.A.E. pulled back from the Gulf’s American-led Combined Maritime Forces command. Friendly Arab states are taking such steps to hedge against an unreliable White House. Washington urgently needs diplomacy to keep the gaps between America and its Gulf allies from widening before it is too late for the oil producers to reverse course.
Coordinating with Russia, Iran is preparing increased attacks against U.S. troops in Syria. Tehran hopes to force their final withdrawal and collapse the anti-ISIS coalition, thereby enabling Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad to regain control over more Syrian territory. At the same time, acts of terrorism against Tehran’s opponents outside Iran continue. Ironically, as Washington’s focus on terrorism diminishes, the European Union parliament has recommended that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps be deemed a terrorist organization, catching up to the Trump administration’s 2019 designation.
Iran’s nuclear-weapons program continues to thwart International Atomic Energy Agency efforts to monitor its activities. Critical assets in Iran’s programs remain off-limits to the IAEA, as they always have been.
Even worse for the long term, China’s diplomatic initiatives to exploit fissures between Washington and key Middle Eastern capitals are succeeding with worldwide implications. Mr. Biden was caught flat-footed by the agreement China and Oman brokered for Saudi Arabia and Iran to resume full diplomatic relations. Trying to play down its significance, an unnamed administration official, whose only sagacity was in remaining anonymous, said, “Ultimately, this is a good thing.” Only in Beijing, unfortunately. The U.A.E. and others are also now more open to Russia and China.
These tectonic developments augur impending strategic failure for America and its key allies. Instead of trying to second-guess and undercut a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program, the White House should prepare for what happens after Ayatollah Khamenei is called to his maker. Waiting for the ayatollah’s end before we begin planning could forfeit the opportunity. Iran has only had two supreme leaders. This is our chance to make sure there isn’t a third.
Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.
In an interview with 'Global View' columnist Walter Russell Mead, the Prime Minister of Israel pointed to developments in Iran, then queried what might happen should it become the first nuclear power run by radical Islam. The answer, he says, is to "expand the circle of peace." Images: Reuters/AP/AFP via Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
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Whoop de do!:
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The House Oversight Committee seeks an FBI document alleging Joe Biden took a bribe, and the effort to discredit the claim is already under way.
By William McGurn
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer subpoenaed a Federal Bureau of Investigation form he says outlines details of a $5 million bribe allegedly paid to Joe Biden while he was vice president. Until last week, the FBI wouldn’t even concede the document existed.
Nevertheless this Monday morning an FBI team dispatched by Director Christopher Wray made its way up to Capitol Hill in hopes that Rep. Comer would be satisfied with a look-see. He wasn’t. After the meeting, he said the FBI told him there is a continuing investigation but reiterated that he still plans to hold Mr. Wray in contempt unless he turns over the document.
The response is telling. Mr. Comer, a Kentucky Republican, has been painted as a partisan rube chasing conspiracies. Nobody seems to care that a sitting vice president was accused by a trusted FBI source of taking a bribe. For those who lived through the Hunter Biden laptop saga, it is, as Yogi Berra would say, déjà vu all over again.
But after Mr. Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley told Mr. Wray in a phone call last Wednesday that they’d already seen the document, pretending it doesn’t exist was no longer an option. Now that the FBI says there’s an investigation, there is a campaign to discredit the charges before the public can see them.
The first salvo came from CNN last Wednesday. Quoting “people briefed on the matter,” the network said the document had its “origins in a tranche of documents that Rudy Giuliani provided to the Justice Department in 2020.” This is what Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, is relying on to say the charges have been looked into and there’s nothing there.
Remember when the New York Post on Oct. 14, 2020, first published some of the incriminating emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop? The paper’s reporting was not only ignored but also suppressed—with the active assistance of the FBI. In its original story, the Post reported that “Hunter Biden’s lawyer refused to comment on the specifics but instead attacked Giuliani.” Some things never change.
The laptop deniers had another key assist from 51 former intelligence officials who, days after the Post story appeared, released a letter claiming that the appearance of the Hunter Biden emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” But the disinformation turned out to be the letter, not the laptop.
The document at issue now is a Form FD-1023, which the FBI uses to record information from a confidential human source. Critics are right that any allegations are just that—allegations.
But given the seriousness of the charge, such an allegation would go up the chain to the FBI director himself, and then to the attorney general. If this one didn’t, the question is: Why not? Whatever happened, various FBI or Justice officials were making decisions along the way, and they could also be called to testify under oath before too long.
After Monday’s meeting with the FBI, Mr. Raskin emerged to say that Trump-appointed officials including Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney Scott Brady assessed the allegations against Mr. Biden and agreed not to take the investigation any further. But he didn’t say precisely which allegations were assessed—and especially if they were based on the specific information on that FD-1023 from that trusted source. Mr. Comer said the FBI told him the information in the FD-1023 is being used in an ongoing investigation and hasn’t been disproved.
That’s why Messrs. Comer and Grassley don’t only want the document. They want to know who did what and why—and to let the public know. If the FBI did its job, it would help itself by clearing up the confusion now.
The question now is whether the FBI’s resistance is about protecting sources from exposure, as it claims, or about protecting itself from accountability. Also, whether we have two standards of justice: one for people named Biden or Clinton and one for everyone else.
Special counsel John Durham’s report suggests there certainly were two standards at the FBI under Mr. Wray’s predecessor, James Comey. Mr. Wray has said the abuses were all “the actions of a few who are no longer part of the organization.”
That is a tough sell. For one thing, Americans still wake up to headlines about the FBI labeling Latin Mass Catholics as possible terrorists and others about the bureau working with Twitter and Facebook to censor speech. Mr. Wray’s cavalier treatment of Congress’s legitimate oversight responsibilities is doing nothing to restore trust.
Sen. Grassley has been doing oversight a long time, and isn’t known for going out on a limb. Rep. Comer heads a House committee with subpoena power. They aren’t happy with the FBI. Judging by the contradictory information coming out of Monday’s meeting on Capitol Hill, the FBI hasn’t helped itself with a briefing that raised more questions than it answered.
Review and Outlook: On May 10, 2023, the House GOP Oversight Committee released its report into Biden family business ties, detailing how Hunter and relatives received $10 million from foreign nationals and their companies while Joe was Vice President.
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