2/3 Choices. Ackman Challenges. Judicial Watch Investigates. 60th Day. Patriots.

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Biden has two choices. He can be Biden and eventually stab Israel in the back or he can be a moral mensch and stick to his verbal commitment.  Based on what I am seeing/hearing  he is inching towards being Biden because getting re-elected trumps integrity.

Actually, Biden has another choice. He can quit lying about his relationship with his son and Hunter's bribery payment shenanigans.

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Congress, in most instances, seems to be reactive and seldom in front regarding important issues.  Today Congress is catching up regarding anti-Semitism on university campuses and they are to be congratulated.  It would have been nice if the current occupant of the Oval Office had been in front but Biden has been napping actually as well as figuratively since taking office.

 

Will The Department of Education act honorably?

And:

The Potemkin Presidency of Joe Biden - COMMENTARY

By Frank Miele

Have you heard about Joe Biden’s historic presidency? Or about the historic accomplishments of Joe Biden’s first term?

I have. Repeatedly. Of course, I force myself to watch “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, Jake Tapper on CNN, and Jonathan Karl on ABC, so I’m well-informed about the thinking of left-wing elites and their game plan for keeping Donald Trump out of office. Apparently, part of the plan is to convince the American public that Joe Biden has been a great president, mostly when you weren’t looking.

In a sense, this is the political equivalent of the recent cleanup of San Francisco by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to make the dangerous and dirty city look better for the arrival of the Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping. I’m not sure who Newsom thought he was fooling. The residents surely know that the city is an open sewer, and a two-week makeover wasn’t going to change that. Xi Jinping himself was also not fooled. He probably reads the papers or has someone else read them for him, and he probably got a chuckle out of the governor’s groveling.

But Newsom apparently didn’t care that he was fooling no one. It’s politics, after all. No one has any expectation that there is any honesty or legitimacy to anything a politician does. They simply do what is convenient and then deny having done it if it turns out wrong.

In a sense, Newsom turned San Francisco into a real-life Potemkin city. According to Britannica, a Potemkin village, in its original meaning, referred to “any of a number of fake villages designed [by her lover Grigory Potemkin] to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great.”

Legend has it that Potemkin arranged for fake pasteboard villages – complete with waving, happy peasants who had been moved in from central Russia, herds of farm animals, and fireworks – to be set up along the river. As Catherine’s boat arrived she was greeted by throngs of grateful subjects; when her boat had passed, the “towns” were quickly dismantled and moved, along with the livestock and throngs of peasants, to a location farther downriver to await her sailing by.

Historians now think that Potemkin never really pulled off this stunt, probably because he worried that Catherine would get wise. Nonetheless, the term has come to be used to describe an elaborate façade that is intended to mislead people into believing a fantasy instead of harsh reality.

So, back to Biden.

Vox magazine in April said that Biden’s presidency had “an exceptionally productive first few years.” The Atlantic magazine likewise declared the first two years of Biden’s presidency as “among the most productive of any president in the past half century.” Jonathan Lemire of Politico said on “Morning Joe” that “Joe Biden’s first years in office were extraordinarily successful.”

Those glowing media assessments, and many more like them, are the foundation of the Potemkin presidency of Joe Biden. I read them eagerly to find out just why Biden is supposed to be such a great leader, and I have come up with the following list:

– Congress passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included massive spending for COVID-19 relief, just when the COVID pandemic was ending.

– Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included massive spending, perhaps as much as $1 trillion, for so-called clean energy and health care, on the premise that pouring more money into the economy will somehow magically reduce inflation.

– Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included $1.2 trillion in spending for so-called infrastructure, but which turned out to be funding not so much for roads and bridges but for left-wing agenda items like green energy and climate change.

If these really are accomplishments, the credit should go to Congress, not Biden, but they aren’t accomplishments at all. Not for everyday people. These bills all had the same ultimate purpose: spending money to benefit Democratic donors, not Democrat voters, and certainly not the vast range of the American citizenry. So far, the Biden administration has increased the national debt by approximately $5 trillion, with no end in sight, thus fueling an inflationary spiral that has taken its toll on the rest of us.

Not convinced of Biden’s success yet? Vox points out that among Biden’s other accomplishments, “he’s used executive action in an attempt to cancel student debt, pardoned thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession, and appointed a new wave of judges at a rapid pace.” Notice that the Supreme Court rejected his unconstitutional executive order on student debt (although he’s trying again), and only the most rabid supporters of drug abuse would consider his pardon of a few thousand drug users to be a major accomplishment. Gotta give him credit for the judicial appointments, but let’s remember that those judges never would have been approved without the help of Republican senators, so maybe it’s their turncoat accomplishment, not his.

And let’s not forget Biden’s masterful exit from Afghanistan. But Joe is the only one who thinks it was masterful. Because of his incompetence, 13 U.S. service members lost their lives, the Chinese gained a world-class air force base at Bagram, and the Afghans became the owners of $87 billion worth of the world’s best munitions – ours.

But perhaps the most illusory accomplishment of the Biden presidency is “securing the border.” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeated that claim for three years now, despite the fact that our lying eyes have watched hours of video of illegal immigrants crossing the border and being flown or bused to cities across the country. According to the New York Post in September, “a jaw-dropping 3.8 million people have entered the United States through its borders since President Joe Biden took office in 2021.”

Unbelievably, Biden was getting away with this scam of a “secure border” until hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants started congregating in Democrat-run cities, which house them for free in hotels, provide food and health care, and generally treat them like welcome visitors instead of lawbreakers.

Yet despite all this, the national media is selling the idea that Biden is the best president since Reagan. Then why is he trailing Donald Trump by approximately 2 points in the RealClearPolitics Average of polls for the November 2024 general election? Why is Biden’s approval rating hovering around 40% despite the Potemkin presidency being sold to the American public?

If you want an explanation for why the media thinks that Joe Biden is a great president and the rest of us think he is an addlepated place keeper, consider this assessment from Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for the Guardian newspaper:

The bigger story … is that his has been a truly consequential presidency, even a transformational one. In less than three years, he has built a record that should unify U.S. progressives, including those on the radical left, and devised an economic model to inspire social democratic parties the world over.

Whoa! Finally, a Democrat lackey journalist telling the truth! The reason Americans aren’t that into Joe Biden is because he’s governing as a radical leftist instead of as the principled moderate he claimed to be in 2020. His record “should unify U.S. progressives,” which means about 5-10% of the population, and meanwhile, it should alienate mainstream voters who just want to pay less for eggs, gasoline, and housing.

That’s because voters don’t care about legislative victories; they care about their own families. And despite the best efforts of the left-wing media, American voters will see through the Potemkin presidency of Joe Biden just as surely as Xi Jinping saw through Gavin Newsom’s Disneyland version of San Francisco.

That’s why I’m confident Joe Biden is going to be a one-term president.

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His newest book, “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends,” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Gettr @HeartlandDiary.

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Bill Ackman

Dear President Gay,

Since my letter to you of November 4th to which you did not reply or even acknowledge, I have received substantial feedback and input from senior members of the Harvard faculty about a number of the issues I raised in my letter concerning free speech, antisemitism, and the impact of the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (OEDIB) at Harvard. I thought to share this feedback with you now as it may inform your testimony and potential questions you may receive from the Congress on Tuesday.

Free Speech at Harvard

In several of your communications since October 7th, you have emphasized Harvard’s commitment to free speech as the reason why the university has continued to permit eliminationist and threatening language on campus – i.e., calls for Intifada (suicide bombings, knifings, etc. of Israeli civilians) and the elimination of the state of Israel “From the River to the Sea.” You explained your tolerance for these protests on October 13th: “[O]ur university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”

In my letter to you, however, I noted that In The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Free Speech Rankings, Harvard has consistently finished in the bottom quartile in each of the past four years. I note that Harvard’s ranking has deteriorated each year, receiving its lowest free speech ranking ever for the 2023 academic year, last out of 254 universities with a rating of 0.00, the only university with an “abysmal” speech climate.

After sending my letter, I reached out to the faculty to reconcile your free speech absolutist commitment with Harvard having the lowest free speech ranking of any university. The faculty had a lot to say on this issue, as well as on antisemitism and the OEDIB. Notably, they were willing to share their views so long as I committed to keep their identities confidential. I have quoted their remarks below:

On Free Speech

“Years ago, Harvard stopped being a place where all perspectives were welcome.”

“Harvard is a place where loud, hate-filled protests appear to be encouraged, but where faculty and students can’t share points of view that are inconsistent with the accepted narrative on campus.”

“Harvard became a place where if you toed the party line, there was applause. If you disagree, you are drowned out. The gatekeepers of speech continue to further narrow what they deem acceptable speech.”

“The primary problem with speech at Harvard is that if you say the wrong thing, you will be cancelled, which leads to self-censorship. The result is what you actually think is not what you say.”

“Saying anything that doesn’t highlight the importance of slavery and colonialism as animating forces of history is not acceptable speech. Lived experience and ideology become the dominant forces of conversation. All of the courses follow the same playbook ideology. Ideology poses as coursework.”

On Antisemitism, Support for Hamas, and the Protests Against Israel

When I asked members of the faculty about the causes behind the Israeli/Gaza protests and the tolerance for antisemitism on campus, they explained:

“Whiteness at Harvard is deemed fundamentally oppressive. Indigenous peoples are presented as in need of justice and reparations. Jews are presented as white people. It is therefore ok to hate Israel and Jews as they are deemed to be oppressors.”

I asked: “Why are the protests only about Israel versus other conflicts in the Middle East and around the globe where Palestinians and other civilians were killed?”

“Israel is the rare case where we have a hot conflict between people that are deemed ‘white’ versus people of color.”

The Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (ODEIB)

“The primary animating force of the ODEIB is racism-colonialism and the denial of indigenous rights. The ODEIB is a home for people who are perceived to have been victimized.”

“The ODEIB was meant to include Asians, but it does not. It is focused on communities that experienced colonialism.”

“Recency matters. India is not included because they got autonomy 70 years ago.”

“The ODEIB is at the service of black students, to a lesser extent brown students, and to a lesser extent LGBTQ students.”

“It’s about whiteness versus people of color.”

“The DEI framework prioritizes people on the oppressed side of the narrative.”

Hiring Practices at Harvard

One topic which emerged when I spoke to the faculty was the issue of hiring at Harvard, an issue about which the faculty clearly has a lot of consternation.

When I asked why Harvard’s faculty has shifted sharply leftward in recent years, they explained:

“Each department decides whom they want, and the university can accept or reject the candidate. Left-leaning faculty appoint other left-wing faculty because they get to decide whom to hire and promote. It’s a bit like the Twitter algorithm which continues to feed you the points of view you want to hear. Eventually, each department reaches the tipping point.

One senior member of the faculty shared that it is made abundantly clear that they cannot hire new faculty members unless they meet ODEIB requirements. That is, the candidate has to be a woman, person of color, or have LGBTQ+ status. Straight white males are “off the table.” Asians and those of South Asian (i.e., India) heritage are similarly disadvantaged in the process as they are deemed successful, overachieving minorities.

A number of the faculty bemoaned that in many cases they cannot hire the substantially more qualified person if he is a white or Asian straight male as the proposed candidate “has to be a woman or BIPOC person.”  I was told that behind closed doors, it is common to hear: “I clearly don’t think this is the strongest candidate, but we can see where the train is headed. I therefore have no choice but to vote for the [lesser-qualified candidate.]”

It is made clear to the faculty that Harvard’s discriminatory approach to hiring should never be acknowledged or written about in an email. One professor said that he has been continually amazed that no one has brought a lawsuit as these practices are clearly illegal.

One faculty member explained that it is not just the administration that has been putting forth these requirements, but that external organizations like The Chronicle of Higher Education (TCHE) do “investigative reporting” where they do racial and gender audits of university departments. TCHE publicly scolds university departments that don’t meet their diversity requirements further reinforcing Harvard’s requirement for ODEIB-preferred candidates.

On all of the above issues, I know you will not rely on my survey of the faculty. I therefore encourage you to commission a highly credible, third-party firm to do an anonymous survey of the Harvard faculty. I am confident it will confirm and reinforce all that I have outlined above.

Discrimination at Harvard Is Not Limited to Antisemitism

The problems at Harvard are clearly not just about Jews and Israel. It is abundantly clear that straight white males are discriminated against in recruitment and advancement at Harvard. That is also apparently true to a somewhat lesser extent for men who are Asians or of Indian origin. The ODEIB is an important culprit in this discrimination on campus as it sees the world in a framework of oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressor class includes white males, Asians, Jews and other people perceived to be successful and powerful.

While Harvard claims that it is committed to free expression, in practice free expression appears to only happen “behind closed doors” or among faculty and students speaking anonymously.

Conservative voices are squelched and often outright cancelled on campus. Tyler J. VanderWeele and Carole K. Hooven are two recent examples.

In March of this year, Mr. VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology, a practicing Catholic, was effectively excommunicated from Harvard (saved only by his tenure) when it was discovered he had signed an amicus brief in 2015 which affirmed his view that the definition of marriage was between a man and a woman, and when he surfaced his pro-life views. See: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Earlier this year, Ms. Hooven, an evolutionary biologist was cancelled and eventually forced to resign because she stated that one’s sex was biological and binary on Fox and Friends. See: link.springer.com/article/10.100…

I am saddened that the Harvard I love has lost its way. I am embarrassed for not having been aware and previously taken the time to investigate these issues until antisemitism exploded on campus. I should have paid more attention as it did not take a forensic analysis to surface and better understand these issues.

Discrimination at Harvard is not just illegal, but it is extremely damaging to our nation’s competitiveness, which is critically important in a world with growing geopolitical conflict and turmoil. Harvard should be an institution for our best and brightest, taught by our best and brightest who are in search of Veritas and excellence. Russia, China, and our other competitor nations are not selecting their scientific and educational leaders using Harvard’s diversity, equity and inclusion metrics.

President Gay, beginning with your testimony to Congress on Tuesday, you can begin to address the antisemitism that has exploded on campus during your presidency, the seeds for which began years before you became President. But as I hope you recognize, the issues at Harvard are much more expansive than antisemitism. Antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine for other discriminatory practices at Harvard.

As President you have both the opportunity and the responsibility for addressing these critically important issues. It won’t be easy for you as I have been told that your recent “pivot on antisemitism” is already making the radical left wing of the faculty highly skeptical of you.

When 34 Harvard student organizations came out in support of Hamas’ barbaric terrorism, it was a wake up call for me. I hope that having to face the Congress on Tuesday will be a wake-up call for you.

Sincerely,

William A. Ackman, A.B. 1988, MBA 1992

Cc: Ms. Penny Pritzker, Chairman

and The Harvard Corporation Board

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Judicial Watch investigates:
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Judicial Watch: DC Government Spends $270,000 To Repaint ‘Black Lives Matter’ on Street Near White House

“DC crime is out of control but local leaders continue to waste $270,000 in tax money promoting the extremist Black Lives Matter movement in the heart of Washington, DC, that is racist, anti-police, anti-American, and often violent,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

READ MORE

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Soros-Tied Facebook Censorship Board Considers Suppressing Anti-Immigration Speech

A few years after Facebook (now Meta) launched a censorship board to decide which posts get blocked an update on the panel, which is currently inviting public opinion on whether to suppress anti-immigration speech, is in order. The original board—as well as new members—is stacked with leftists, including a close friend of leftwing billionaire George Soros who served on the board of directors of his Open Society Foundations (OSF). This is important because the oversight board, as it is officially known, determines which posts get blocked from the world’s most popular social networking website which has an estimated 3 billion users.

READ MORE

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Judicial Watch: Lawsuit Uncovers 2016 Joe Biden Email Showing Hunter Biden Copied on Ukraine President Information

Judicial Watch announced recently it received five pages of records from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that show then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter received a May 26, 2016, email detailing a scheduled “8:45 am prep for a 9 am phone call with Pres Poroshenko,” who was the president of Ukraine. Joe Biden’s email address is the alias robert.l.peters@pci.gov, Hunter Biden’s email account is disclosed as hbiden@rosemontseneca.com. (Hunter Biden was on the board of the controversial Ukrainian firm Burisma at the time.)

READ MORE

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Here's What Rush Limbaugh Said About Ron DeSantis on His Final Show

By MATT MARGOLIS 

One thing that has really bugged me about the attacks on Ron DeSantis, be it from Donald Trump or, say, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), are claims that he was all about the COVID-19 lockdowns. Well, there's someone who wants to say something about that.

During a campaign event in Iowa, Casey DeSantis, the first lady of Florida and the wife of Gov. Ron DeSantis, spoke of how her husband approached COVID and all the flak he got for it at the time.

"I particularly remember when COVID happened because the entire world descended upon this guy to get him to bend the knee, to back down, to lock down the state, to lock kids out of school, to prevent families from being with their loved ones at the final moment of their lives, not allowing people to be able to go out and work and put food on the table for their families," Mrs. DeSantis said. 

She continued:

And the media came after him. People in Washington came after him. Republicans in Washington came after him. The left came after him. And I watched from behind the scenes every day, month after month. This wasn't just one news cycle, where they came after him and they moved on to the next thing — it was every day for months. They were attacking him with some of the most nastiest things you could ever possibly imagine. 

And I saw him, day after day, get up, go downstairs, get a cup of coffee, put on the full armor of God and the shield of faith, study the facts, the evidence and go out and fight. And he fought for what was right. And that is just a precursor of what you're gonna get when you see him as president of the United States—he will never stop fighting for you, he will always put you ahead of any of his own interests. Because that at the end of the day is what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to represent the people who put you in office and there are too many people who have forgotten that. 

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Israel’s 60th Day of War

By Sherwin Pomerantz

On the 60th day ot the war here casualties continue to grow with three new soldiers reported killed in battle overnight Monday.  There certainly does not appear to be a realistic end in sight for this war and people here are preparing to support our troops for some time to come.

The Israel Defense Forces continued to expand its activities against Hamas in Gaza over the past 24 hours, reporting this morning that troops were conducting operations in the Jabalia area.  Israeli forces were targeting Hamas strongholds and destroying terror infrastructure after completing the encirclement of the Jabalia camp (rn.b. really a neighborhood, even though it is called a refugee camp) in the north of the Strip, according to the IDF. The IDF and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) conducted a targeted raid on a Hamas Internal Security Force command and control center in Jabalia, locating observation and control materials, weapons and maps.

On Monday, troops struck buildings used by Hamas’s elite “Nukhba” unit, which led the Oct. 7th massacre in southern Israel. Soldiers also killed Hamas terrorists and destroyed rockets found in the garden of a private residence in the northern Strip.  The Israeli Navy also struck “dozens” of terror targets, including compounds from which terrorists fired mortar shells at Israeli forces.

Serious activity continues to ramp up in Southern Gaza with tanks and heavy artillery being used to ferret out pockets of Hamas activity in the search for the Hamas leadership believed to be hiding there.  Rocket fire from Gaza into Israel continues unabated with sirens going off today in areas around Tel Aviv as well.   On the northern border, cross border skirmishes continue to escalate each day.

Israel is considering a plan to pump seawater into Hamas’s tunnel system underneath the Gaza Strip, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, citing U.S. officials as the source.  The Israel Defense Forces has assembled five large seawater pumps capable of transferring thousands of cubic meters of water per hour from the Mediterranean Sea into the tunnels, according to the report.  The infrastructure was completed in the middle of November. They are located roughly one mile north of the Al-Shati Camp along northern Gaza’s coastline.

The U.S. government is making an intense effort to persuade Israel and Hamas to resume negotiations so they can once again pause hostilities and exchange more prisoners for hostages, according to John F. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator at the White House National Security Council wgo appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press.  “We are still working it really hard, hour by hour, to see if we can get the sides back to the table and see if we can get something moving.  We would like that to happen today. But honestly, I just don’t know.”

In appearances on several Sunday talk shows, Mr. Kirby emphasized that Hamas was to blame for the breakdown in talks, saying that it had not lived up to the terms of its original agreement to begin handing over captives held in Gaza.

He said Hamas had failed to produce a list of women and children who could be released in addition to the 105 hostages who were freed during the original pause in fighting. Among those still held are eight or nine Americans. Osama Hamdan, a representative for Hamas in Lebanon, said on Sunday that negotiations over the hostages would not resume until the Israeli assault stopped.

We are now entering the third month of the longest active war that Israel has ever fought which is testing our capability to engage in combat for an extended period.  We pray that our active duty and reserve troops will continue to maintain their high level of morale and that we will soon see us victorious in the battle against Hamas.

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Thank God for those patriots willing to speak out and reveal the truth.

+Ex-Cop Leaks Audio: Capitol Riot Cover-Up Exposed?

Tarik Johnson, a former U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant, announced last week that he would release audio recordings from the Capitol riot of January 6, which he said proved that the whole incident was “set up” and the proof had been covered.

He wrote last week on X/Twitter: “I spoke with my lawyer and told him my plans as it relates to releasing information about X regarding the J6 setup and the cover-up which followed.” “I wanted to know if there would be any legal consequences if I did.” He said he did not see any, and that if anything arose, we would handle it together. It’s A Go!!!

Johnson added, “I ask everyone to have patience as I am going to do it right. I will make another post before loading the 12-hour run to my website. Also, since I am not tech-savvy, I will have to learn how to upload large audio and document files from my computer. I need some extra time. In the middle of this, I have to go to work and deal with family matters at the same. But you can be sure I will have everything finished by next week. “Hopefully by Wednesday.”

Johnson was so concerned about his safety, that he told his followers the information he was about to release was in the hands of both his attorney and Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch.

Johnson posted the audio on Sunday (Dec 3.)

Here we go… “Episode 1,” he wrote. The mainstream media tells you that J6 is an insurrection. Please tell me whether the actions of Assistant Chief Yogananda Pitman were proper and heroic. Pittman is called Unit 2, and she’s sitting in the USCP Commander Center on a dias where she can listen to radio traffic and has a 360-degree view of the Capitol.

Johnson continued, “She also can see the activities in the Capitol where there are cameras. Chief Steven A Sund, the chief of police in the area, was on the telephone trying to get approval from other agencies for assistance from the National Guard and the National Guard. I was trying to de-escalate the situation, specifically asking Pittman for assistance. My call sign was “405J-John.”

The audio from the J6 police scanner indicates that Pittman was unavailable or uncooperative when Sund attempted to deploy the National Guard. The recording supports criticisms of Capitol Police’s failure to act decisively to protect the Capitol and Members of Congress despite warnings about potential violence. Sund’s claim that the National Guard was denied multiple times before and during the Riot is corroborated by the audio.

Johnson also called the new Capitol Police chief J. Thomas Manger is out for his opposition to the release of the J6 video.

Johnson continued his post on X/Twitter by saying, “We know Pittman is the one who caused the incident on J6, but [Manger] fights Speaker Johnson to release all the video footage. He ensures that all NDAs USCP employees were forced to sign are still in place. And he refuses to let anyone see the LWOP agreement he negotiated for Pittman to get her retirement and to take a job in California where she would make over a quarter-million dollars per year.” “I almost forgot to mention that I’m ensuring USCP whistleblowers are not protected when they report corruption or malfeasance in the Department.”

Johnson called Manger, the “most corrupt political figure in the country,” and said that Manger was “withholding justice from all those who have been wronged by J6” by refusing to release the J6 video.

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